Hello!
Do you have a moment to talk about the Church of Jesus Christ… of latter day saints?
Didn’t I already make this joke?
*checking phone* yes I have… well sh- Today we’re going to talk about Mormonism,
a religion that very much marches to its own tune, and given a peek at what kind of explainers
exist on the internet, I’m going to try and buck the trend by not being a jerk to
them.
Let’s find out about the Mormons.
Hey folks, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back.
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Mormons are part of the broader umbrella of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Over the years it has contained over a hundred different sects of the religion, but Mormons
have always been the most populous.
They consider themselves Christians, but some christians would fight you on that.
They’re based out of Salt Lake City Utah, but only about half of Mormons live in the
United States.
The other half live all over the planet.
The story of this religion begins in the early 19th century.
Religion was changing in America.
New Protestant sects were popping up all over the place, and experimenting with radical
new takes on Christianity around the country.
Historians now call this period the second Great Awakening.
This movement made its way to Western New York to a young farmer named Joseph Smith.
He and a small group of friends and family got into the revivalist movements going on
in this period.
According to the Mormons, Smith prayed over what denomination to join and claimed he had
a vision telling him all the churches were wrong.
With this revelation in mind, he began a new religious community.
Over these early years, Joseph Smith claimed he had multiple visits from angels.
They reportedly told him that it was his job to start a new church and to write a book
to establish a correct doctrine for the faith.
Like many movements of the time, it was millennialist, believing that the second coming of Christ
was nigh.
They wanted to establish Zion in the Western United States.
In 1829, this community baptised its first new member.
They branded themselves in 1830 as the Church of Christ.
Over the next decade, they began to see Joseph Smith as a modern-day prophet and became more
and more distinct from other Protestant groups.
This decade was not without its problems.
Increasing tensions led the early Mormons to leave New York and find a new place to
make their own community.
Their first stop was in Kirtland Ohio, where they intended to save up resources to build
a permanent settlement - the Zion they were charged to create - in Jackson County Missouri.
They settled, and by 1838 they had pretty much been kicked out of Missouri by the locals.
The governor of Missouri even issued an extermination order on them.
Their next stop was Commerce Illinois.
They bought this town and renamed it to Nauvoo and actually had a pretty good time for a
while.
About six years into their stay in Illinois, tensions escalated with the local population
to a fever pitch.
A mob attacked the Mormons, forcing their escape, and killing Joseph Smith, causing
a surprise power vacuum.
Enter Brigham Young.
Most Mormons accepted him as Joseph Smith’s successor.
His plan for the Mormons?
He led them further west.
This is where they found Salt Lake City in Utah territory in 1847.
It was here the Mormons established themselves to this day.
So… what is this religion that seemed to offend their neighbours so?
Let’s begin with their holy text.
The Mormons have a newer testament to the Bible called the Book of Mormon.
According to Mormons, Joseph Smith dictated this book from golden plates he found in New
York, translating them with divine help.
He claims that an angel directed him to the texts on golden plates and that he translated
them with the help of special seer stones.
He supposedly translated these documents over a period of just under two years, including
a crisis in 1828, when they lost 116 pages of it and had to start over.
Smith claimed that the angels took away the plates after the translation, and that very
few people were allowed to see them while they were here.
It sounds a little unbelievable, but belief is kinda what religion goes for anyway, so
why give them a special standard of evidence?
The book itself is a claimed story of the indigenous people of the Americas, and their
relationship with God.
I talked about it briefly in this video where I discussed Mormon archaeology, but let’s
flesh it out a bit more here.
The book depicts a migration of Israelites to the Americas beginning in roughly 600 BCE
and arriving in 589 BCE.
The authors belong to a lost people called the Nephites, descendants of Nephi, who was
in turn the son of a biblical prophet Lehi.
According to the book of Mormon, these people were Christians even before there was a Jesus
to be Christian about.
Now, as I mentioned in my video on Mormon Archaeology, pretty much every expert disputes
pretty much every specific claim in the Book of Mormon.
The problem is that it relies on historical mysteries in the early 19th century that are
very much not mysteries anymore.
Again, my suggestion is to be like other religions that conveniently forgot their specific claims
in the pages of the deep past.
Their theology is also quite a bit different.
First of all, their concept of god is fairly different from your vanilla Christians.
They believe in God, who they typically refer to as heavenly father.
The fundamental difference though is that they don’t think he is some nebulous creature
that exists in some obscure place, but that he’s a person.
Like, a real flesh and blood living person, with immortality of course.
They believe his first child was Jesus, and that the rest of his children are…
well…
all of us.
There’s also a heavenly mother, but they’re a little light on her details.
And yes, Mormons believe heaven is not on another plane of existence.
Actually, how do most Christians explain where heaven is?
Either way, they believe that God lives somewhere in space.
Specifically, on another planet called Kolob in a different solar system.
They still believe he made the earth, but that he used ingredients and didn’t just
snap the earth out of nothing.
And here’s the part I think rubs regular Christians the wrong way.
They believe that godhood is achievable and that God himself was at one point a person.
If someone lives a good life, is married, and accepts god in the afterlife, they get
to be gods on their own planet with their families and make little earths of their own.
Also, there’s no hell.
How is this offensive again?
According to some of the later books by Joseph Smith, we all lived as spirits with God at
some point before birth, and that humans make mistakes all the time.
Jesus is special for his atonement, and that he’s the model to the way to godhood yourself.
This good life at the moment is pretty standard conservative Christian fare.
Pretty much all fun is bad, and anyone who doesn’t live like Mike Pence is out of bounds.
They go even further to ban gambling and literally all drugs, including alcohol, tobacco, and
caffeine.
But but but they have something really respectable that most religions could take note of.
They believe in continuous revelation, meaning that rules can, nay must change over time.
They believe God is always in communication with mankind, from the recently passed president
of the church to everyone.
Many encourage people to have their own relationship with the holy ghost and to trust revelation
for their personal guidance in life.
Literally, pray to figure out what to do about how to raise your kids or whatnot.
And this not only involves prayer, but certain rituals called ordinances.
This is kinda like sacraments in the other Christian sects.
This includes things like baptism, priesthood, marriage, and naming children.
They believe salvation requires a few of these, but that they can be performed for the dead,
more on that later.
Mormons also have an active program of missionary work.
Around the world, young men and women go all over to try and make new Mormons.
That usually involves destruction of local cultures, but I said I would try not being
a jerk, and they’re hardly the only people who do it.
And on that note, let’s talk about controversies Mormons have stepped into.
They get a lot of trouble for those ordinances performed on the dead.
They can’t practice it on just anyone but on relatives.
This is why Mormons actually invest a lot in genealogy, including a lot of credit for
ancestry.com.
They believe that the dead are free to accept or reject these ceremonies as their will.
That being said, it didn’t help them from appearing more than a little tone deaf for
posthumously baptising 380,000 holocaust victims.
Also, they have quite a questionable practice of cutting out pretty much anyone who abandons
the church later in life.
It has done a ton of damage to many families and is definitely something they really need
to get one of those continuous revelations about soon.
Lastly, I’m sure you’re either surprised or have already left an angry comment about
my not mentioning polygamy.
Mormons did practice it, and a few still do.
Joseph Smith practised it, and for a number of decades, it was the norm in Salt Lake City.
It caused a lot of pressure with the United States, and to avoid trouble with the federal
government and to help Utah get statehood, they abandoned the practice in 1890.
Since then they have backed monogamy.
That decision caused a lot of internal problems such as the breakaway of Mormon fundamentalists.
The fundamentalists are a sect that rejects the ban on polygamy also rejects the revelation
that banned black people from the clergy.
Yeah, that was a position the Mormon church had to walk back on in the frankly embarrassing
year of 1978.
A few did not follow Brigham Young west and remained in the American Midwest including
the Community of Christ started by one of Joseph Smith’s Widows and his son.
They mostly tried to rekindle their relationship with mainstream Christians.
Lastly, there are also liberal or cultural Mormons.
They have tried to make various splinter groups to liberalise and update the Mormon life for
modern times, or just like Mormon culture but can’t buy the whole planet stuff.
Mormons often get portrayed as kind-hearted, but strange.
For a people who had a literal extermination order against them, they seem to take a lot
in stride.Today, about 18 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t vote for an otherwise
qualified Mormon for president.
That’s even higher than the seven to eight percent for the same question applied to a
black, Hispanic, or female candidate.
Also, this is pretty much unchanged from the late sixties.
That’s not great folks.
But let’s end on a bit of a high note.
They are becoming more mainstream in America.
Despite his binders full of women, dancing horses, and horrible political opinions, Mitt
Romney, a Mormon did run for president, and he wasn’t even the only Mormon in the Republican
running.
So, I guess they’re making some progress.
But hey, that’s the Mormons.
I know many won’t see eye to eye with me politically and many will hate this video,
but that comes with the territory with religion videos.
Either way, if you wanted to know what Mormonism was and didn't want a bunch of sharp-dressed
young people in your house all afternoon, you got your fill.
Heeey everyone.
First of all, I want to thank Taylor Dawe for his help with the research for this video.
It was nice for this video to sit down with a real-life Mormon who didn’t hold back
punches and wasn’t selling the religion to me.
The video is better off because of you mate.
I also wanna direct all of you towards my Twitter account.
If you tweet and you haven’t come across me yet, I’m @TristanPEJ there.
This video was made possible by these wonderful people, as well as the rest of my Patrons
over at Patreon.
I’d especially like to thank Don and Kerry Johnson as well as Kolbeinn Mani for their
generosity.
The theme song is by 12Tone and come back next time for more Step Back.