[Dialogue] A Racket becomes a Religion

Sat May 12 17:08:42 EDT 2007

>From  “God is not Great”, Christopher Hitchens 
Mormonism:  A Racket becomes a  Religion 
If the  followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any future  
"revelations" after the immaculate conception of the Koran, they reckoned  
without the founder of what is now one of the world's fastest-growing faiths.  
And they did not foresee (how could they, mammals as they were?) that the  
prophet of this ridiculous cult would model himself on theirs. The Church of  Jesus 
Christ of Latter-day Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was founded by  a 
gifted opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized  
Christian terms, announced that "I shall be to this generation a new Muhammad"  
and adopted as his fighting slogan the words, which he thought he had learned  
from Islam, "Either the Al-Koran or the sword." He was too ignorant to know 
that  if you use the word al you do  not need another definite article, but then 
he did resemble Muhammad in being  able only to make a borrowing out of other 
people's  bibles. 
In March 1826  a court in Bainbridge,  New York, convicted a  
twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." That  ought to have 
been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to  defrauding 
citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to  claiming to 
possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four years he  was back in 
the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the  discoverer of 
the "Book of Mormon." He had two huge local advantages which most  mountebanks 
and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in the same  hectically 
pious district that gave us the Shakers and several other  self-proclaimed 
American prophets. So notorious did this local tendency become  that the region 
became known as the "Burned-Over District," in honor of the way  in which it 
had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was  operating 
in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did 
possess the signs of an ancient  history.  
A vanished and  vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable 
number of burial  mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were 
found to contain  not merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of 
stone, copper, and beaten  silver. There were eight of these sites within twelve 
miles of the  underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There 
were two equally  stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in 
such matters: the  first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought 
their magic sticks  and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in the search for 
lucre, and the second  those who hoped to find the resting place of a lost 
tribe of Israel.  Smith's cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to 
unite cupidity with  half-baked anthropology.  

____________________________________

The actual  story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and almost 
embarrassingly  easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, 
whose 1945 book  No Man Knows My History was a  good-faith attempt by a 
professional historian to put the kindest possible  interpretation on the relevant 
"events.") In brief, Joseph Smith announced that  he had been visited (three 
times, as is customary) by an angel named Moroni. The said angel  informed him of 
a book, "written upon gold plates," which explained the origins  of those 
living on the North American continent as well as the truths of the  gospel. 
There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin breastplates Urim  and 
Thummim of the Old Testament, that would enable Smith himself to translate  the 
aforesaid book. After many wrestlings, he brought this buried apparatus home  
with him on September 21, 1827, about eighteen months after his conviction for  
fraud. He then set about producing a translation.  
The resulting  "books" turned out to be a record set down by ancient 
prophets, beginning with  Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem in  
approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses, and  afflictions 
accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their numerous  progeny. How did 
the books turn out to be this way? Smith refused to show the  golden plates to 
anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean  death. But he 
encountered a problem that will be familiar to students of Islam.  He was 
extremely glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts  attest. 
But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he could read a  
little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary to take his  inspired 
dictation. This scribe was at first his wife Emma and then, when more  hands 
were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith  cite 
the words of Isaiah 29, verses 11–12, concerning the repeated injunction to  
"Read," Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the  
Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and Smith sat  on 
the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As if to 
 make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to 
glimpse  the plates, or look at the prophet, he would be struck  dead. 
Mrs. Harris  was having none of this, and was already furious with the 
fecklessness of her  husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages and 
challenged Smith to  reproduce them, as presumably—given his power of revelation—
he could.  (Determined women like this appear far too seldom in the history of 
religion.)  After a very bad few weeks, the ingenious Smith countered with 
another  revelation. He could not replicate the original, which might be in the 
devil's  hands by now and open to a "satanic verses" interpretation. But the  
all-foreseeing Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the 
very  plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite labor, 
the  translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the blanket as occasion 
 demanded, and when it was completed all the original golden plates were  
transported to heaven, where apparently they remain to this  day. 
Mormon  partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have been 
fraudulent  because the work of deception would have been too much for one poor 
and  illiterate man. They have on their side two useful points: if Muhammad 
was ever  convicted in public of fraud and attempted necromancy we have no 
record of the  fact, and Arabic is a language that is somewhat opaque even to the 
fairly fluent  outsider. However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of 
earlier books and  stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if 
tedious task to  discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of 
Mormon are taken  directly from the Old Testament. These words can mainly be found 
in the chapters  of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith's View  of the Hebrews: 
The Ten  Tribes of Israel in America. This then popular work by a pious  loony, 
claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems  to 
have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place. A  further 
two thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New  Testament. Of 
the three hundred and fifty "names" in the book, more than one  hundred come 
straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as  makes no 
difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it as  "chloroform in 
print," but I accuse him of hitting too soft a target, since the  book does 
actually contain "The Book of Ether.") The words "and it came to pass"  can be found 
at least two thousand times, which does admittedly have a soporific  effect. 
Quite recent scholarship has exposed every single other Mormon  "document" as 
at best a scrawny compromise and at worst a pitiful fake, as Dr.  Brodie was 
obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkable book  in 1973. 
Like Muhammad,  Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice and 
often simply to suit  himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when he wanted a 
new girl and wished to  take her as another wife). As a result, he overreached 
himself and came to a  violent end, having meanwhile excommunicated almost all 
the poor men who had  been his first disciples and who had been browbeaten 
into taking his dictation.  Still, this story raises some very absorbing 
questions, concerning what happens  when a plain racket turns into a serious religion 
before our  eyes. 
It must be  said for the "Latter-day Saints" (these conceited words were 
added to Smith's  original "Church  of Jesus Christ" in 1833)  that they have 
squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed  religion. This is the 
problem of what to do about those who were born before the  exclusive 
"revelation," or who died without ever having the opportunity to share  in its wonders. 
Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus  descended into 
hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or  converted the 
dead. There is indeed a fine passage in Dante's Inferno where he comes to 
rescue the  spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably been boiling 
away for  centuries until he got around to them. (In another less ecumenical 
scene from  the same book, the Prophet Muhammad is found being disemboweled in 
revolting  detail.) The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated 
solution with  something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic 
genealogical  database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the 
names  of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated 
since  records began. This is very useful if you want to look up your own 
family tree,  and as long as you do not object to having your ancestors becoming 
Mormons.  Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations 
meet and  are given a certain quota of names of the departed to "pray in" to 
their church.  This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to 
me, but the  American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered 
that the  Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi "final solution," and 
were  industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a "lost 
tribe": the  murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this 
exercise seemed  in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but 
I  nonetheless think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated 
for  hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a 
problem that  has defied solution ever since man first invented  religion. 

Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
(http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla) 

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