On Religious Persecution and Historical Perspective

History, the old adage tells us, is written by the victors. But that is not the entire truth; nor is it one hundred percent accurate. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C., but most of our accounts of that conflict come from Athenian sources. What matters is good Press skills and the Athenians had that. Over the course of centuries, it doesn't matter that Athens was beaten, what matters is that they kept records and others did not. What this means is that the historical records is always skewed; even when the record keeper is honest. He invariably interprets events as his world view shapes them.

Let us look at an example. In the 1830s Mormon converts began migrating to Jackson County, Missouri, which had been designated in a revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith as the site where Zion would be built. However, within only a few years, the Mormons were expelled en masse from the County and took refuge in northern Missouri where, after only a few years, they were again expelled, this time on pain of death if they stayed, under Governor Lilburn Boggs' justly infamous Extermination Order.

As Mormons tell the story, they were the victims of religious persecution driven because of their beliefs again and again until they were forced to make a dangerous winter flight to Illinois. The government, however, said that the Mormons were a threat to public order, and enemies of the state. What is the truth? Well, both.

When the Mormons began moving to Missouri they did upset the public order. Their more communal lifestyle was at odds with the more independent-minded Missourians. Most Mormons were also anti-slavery (despite what you may have heard about blacks and the Mormon church; they did, at least, oppose slavery). In the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Missouri a slave owning territory even though most of the Louisiana Purchase was Free. Still, the issue was revisited again and again. In the Compromise of 1850 and again in the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, legislators tried again and again to resolve the issue of slavery in the expanding United States. Missouri, though a slave state since the Compromise of 1820, still had agitators demanding Missouri become a Free state.

In the midst of all this, in 1836, the Mormon owned newspaper in Independence Missouri published an editorial advocating abolition. The day after this issue appeared, Mormon leaders were rounded up, tarred and feathered, and the press was destroyed. This incident is famous in Mormon history, but Mormons often forget the role that this editorial played in fomenting this violent act.

Mormons often portray this as the culmination of religious persecution, whereas it could equally be seen as a political riot. The truth is that both viewpoints have some aspect of the truth. Swelling numbers of Mormon immigrants instilled the Missourians with a fear that would lose political influence to these strange, religiously different, anti-slavery (mostly) northerners. Not only that, but Mormons were quickly outnumbering the previous immigrants and threatening to take over all political life. This threat of Mormon domination led to the election day riots in cities like Gallatin.

The Missouri Mormon War figures prominently in LDS history, but scarcely a blip on US history and barely a mention even in Missouri history. Both Mormons and Non-Mormons publicized their side of the story broadly in their day, but the Mormon version has become the more widely told tale today because Mormons have kept up the story long after many others stopped caring. The story is taken up by Anti-Mormons who wish to make it sound as if the Mormons were not the victims of persecution, but rather the justly expelled enemies of the state that Lilburn Boggs declared them to be. They have the Missouri State archives on their side in that battle.

Often, I noticed, Anti-Mormon or other writers will compare this story to examples from their own Faith traditions history to show that these upstart Mormons were trying to make themselves victims instead of criminals to tie into the long tradition of persecution that Christians have faced. What intrigues me here, though, is that is an uneven comparison. They take in insider's viewpoint of the Biblical persecutions and an outsider's perspective on the Mormon persecutions to prove their point.

In fact, Jewish and Roman sources depicted the Christians as enemies of the state who threatened the public order and deserved the violent actions taken against them. They broke up families, disobeyed laws, lived communally in their own areas (early on), and advocated radical social changes that disrupted the traditional values of Roman society. Consider the riots in Ephesus that Luke relates in Acts 19. As Luke tells the story, the craftsmen whose livelihood depended upon making votive statues and decorations for the Greco-Roman gods were worried that Paul's success would diminish business and so they rioted against Paul and the Christians.

This story is a nice parallel. The difficult is, however, that we have only Christian story. Doubtless, the pagan workers would have told a different tale of meddling outsiders upsetting the place, living strange customs so who knows what else they really do. In fact, Roman writers often wrote that Christians were cannibals (think of the Sacrament/Eucharist), drank blood, were atheists (they didn't believe in any of the gods!), who swore secret oaths against the government and practiced incest and all sorts of perverted marital arrangements. They often lived separately and shared all things in common and called one another brother and sister. Romans found this all very disturbing and riots ensued. The only solution was to persecute the Christians who were viewed to be the cause of the disturbances since no such problems had existed before.

What is religious persecution? Those who are prejudice and discriminate and persecute others would almost never say they did so because of prejudice. It is always the victims' fault. Victims are not altogether blameless in these situations. I do not mean that the victims' deserve it, but rather that their being different does, indeed, lead to the persecutions. It is contrafactual and hence weak to argue, but had Mormonism not arisen, likely no mass migration of anti-slavery, communal northerners would have settled a southern state like Missouri thus raising tensions and prompting violence (from both sides). So, in a sense, the Mormons did cause their own persecution.

Jesus was executed, not because He was the sinless Son of God and victim of a massive conspiracy to suppress the Truth, but because Jewish and Roman leaders viewed Him as a threat to public peace and the established order. As far as the Romans were concerned, Jesus was a political rebel who had declared Himself King of the Jews. Neither the Romans nor the Jewish leaders lay awake thinking that needed to prevent the "Truth" from coming out. They likely genuinely believed that they were right, which to my mind is more frightening.

Humanity is often prone to an arrogance of assumption. We assume too quickly. Truth is much larger than any one man's (or woman's) paltry ability to grasp. Its depths recede beyond the farthest horizon we can imagine. Pride is the most human of sins. It may even be the defining characteristic of our species. This extends even to our understanding of events. We forget that real people live on every side of every issue. In the end, the truth lies not in the middle, for that would somehow give every bigot some measure of undeserved dignity, but rather beyond, encompassing all the small-minded assumptions of our kind. James Lowell, an American Poet, wrote, perhaps envisioning this struggle:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

That Peculiar Logic of Darkness

Darkness has a logic all of its own that is shaped to the contours of the boundary between the seen and the unseen. Here, at the liminal extreme of our knowledge, reasons breaks down as if in a moral singularity. Maybe there is some truth after all in my mother's adage that the Holy Ghost goes to bed after midnight. It seems that as one goes away from the Light, the Logic of Darkness takes over bit by bit. It begins with rationalization. As the Poet said:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As to be hated needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

~Alexander Pope, from "Essay on Man"

This is because logic is a tool and not an end of knowledge. It constructs our thoughts as a blue print guides a mason. It is however, no more the edifice than that lined paper is. With logic we can see the ends of thoughts and their relationships with one another, but we cannot know through logic.

Knowledge is a priori and can only be organized. Truth exists in and through itself independent in the universe, though each of us can only grasp a small portion of it. Ultimately, logic is limited in its ability to convince, because the assumptions that our beliefs, independent of any intellectual framework, are deeply held and difficult to change. Argument is so often doomed to failure because people cannot agree on the very epistemology that would permit them to discuss an issue within a shared logical framework. A theist and a secularist fundamentally disagree on what constitutes truth and the source for deriving truth and so can not easily discuss any topic unless one or the other yields to the epistemology of the other. In our society, it is often the theist that must yield to the secularist.

Hence, the logic of Darkness is not really different from the Logic of Light. Rather, the same framework houses very different buildings. The same logic can lead to very different conclusions when different ideas are plugged in. Consider a simple arithmetic formula. 2x=y. The value of y is dependent on the value of x. If x were 2 than y would equal 4, but if x were 450, the y would be 900. So it is with logic. Two conclusions can both be equally valid logically, but completely contradictory. Consider the simple syllogism: All tall men play basketball well; Jon is tall; therefore, Jon plays basketball well. This is logically valid, but utterly false since I play basketball abysmally. The error lies not in the logic, which is correct, but in the assumption that all tall men play basketball well.

Such errors can compound themselves. Joseph Smith once remarked that if a person starts right, it is easy to continue right, but if that first step is wrong, it is all the more difficult to get on the correct path. He was speaking of arguments. It is the fundamentals that matter most. Our conclusions are only as good as the assumptions that go into them.

We read in the Book of Mormon, in chapter 4 of Alma, that the Prophet Alma gave up the Chief judgeship to become a missionary among his people because he was afraid they were going astray. This well educated, erudite man of business and government, however, did not try to argue the people to his side.

And this he did that he himself might go forth among his people, or among the people of Nephi, that he might preach the word of God unto them, to stir them up in remembrance of their duty, and that he might pull down, by the word of God, all the pride and craftiness and all the contentions which were among his people, seeing no way that he might reclaim them save it were in bearing down in pure testimony against them. (Alma 4:19)

Alma saw that only bearing testimony could turn people around. The only people with whom you can discuss things logically are those with whom you share enough common assumptions to make your logic accessible to your interlocutor. Only the meek and humble will listen to someone whose basic assumptions about the truth are at odds with their own. Thus Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing the word of God (Romans 10:14-17) preached by those who are sent. The Doctrine and Covenants tells us, "of tenets thou shalt not talk, but thou shalt declare repentance and faith on the Savior, and remission of sins by baptism, and by fire, yea, even the Holy Ghost. (D&C 19:31). This is not that we should hide our beliefs, but rather it is an acknowledgment that debating doctrine and tenets is a futile spinning of one's wheels.

So, as always, let me end by saying that we should listen more than we speak, and ask more than we answer.

Of Darkness and Light

As far as I am aware, man is the only animal with a conscience. This is not that animals do not feel bad from time to time. Anyone who has every been around a dog knows that they can evince something that resembles shame when you get mad at them. However, like Robert Burns said of that ill-fated mouse whose cozy winter home the Poet's plow so rudely overturned:

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Man is doomed by his intellect to suffer for the pains of the past and fear for the future. That is why, perhaps, so many of the world's mystical traditions encourage their initiates to put the future in God's hand, the past in His mercy and become immersed in the present. So taught the Taoists, the Stoics, the Sufis, the Christian Mystics, and even Jesus Christ Himself. Consider these words:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself ~Matthew 6:34

A few years ago, a heard what was a paradigm shifting sermon for me by Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. It was October of 2000 in the Saturday Afternoon session of General Conference. Elder Oaks spoke on Becoming. He said:

[T]he Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts--what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts--what we have become.

Not long before this I had encountered as a missionary for the Mormon Church an angry minister of another faith who accused me of believing that each good deed somehow got me a certain number of "points" with God and that I need only achieve a particular threshold in order to enter heaven. Having only said, "Hello," to him, I was startled by this brazen declaration and no manner of refutation on my part could dissuade him of his error. However, I though a lot about his words and about the perceptions our words and actions can give to others. I have addressed this topic many times before in this site.

Elder Oaks' talk, however, gave me great clarity. Many more scriptural passages became clearer like Jesus' parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), which Elder Oaks cites. It is not the things we do that matter, but the effect of the things we do on our soul. This is at once comforting and frightening.

On the one hand, it means that where we labor, whether it be as Prophet, Relief Society President, or the guy who vacuums the Church on Saturdays, does not matter at all because the ultimate goal is the effect of our work on our soul. Elder Oaks notes as an example that, "the pure love of Christ" (Moro. 7:47), is not an act but a condition or state of being. Charity is attained through a succession of acts that result in a conversion. Charity is something one becomes. Thus, as Moroni declared, "except men shall have charity they cannot inherit" the place prepared for them in the mansions of the Father (Ether 12:34; emphasis added)." Doing charitable things does not matter nor does the size of the charitable deed; it is that we become charitable beings. Thus repentance makes more sense. We can never truly ameliorate or mitigate the bad effects of our poor choices and sins. Indeed, we may be forced, as Paul with his thorn in the flesh, to suffer for our bad choices all the days of our probationary mortality. However, we can become better in our souls and through the mercy, grace, and charity of God and Our Savior, we can return and be sanctified though this ultimate end may not come for many years even after our mortal deaths.

On the other hand, we learn here that only true repentance that wrenches the very roots of our souls will ever suffice to obtain God's grace and mercy. The Prophet Joseph Smith said that we would all be tried as Abraham and our very heartstrings would be wrenched. The purpose in all this is not to torture us, but to purify our desires. Hence there are scriptures that say we will be judged by the very desires of our hearts.

The one raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness, or good according to his desires of good; and the other to evil according to his desires of evil; for as he has desired to do evil all the day long even so shall he have his reward of evil when the night cometh. (Alma 5:41)

And yet, throughout all the days of our erring mortality, we are all full of darkness and light warring within us. Each of us has different strength and we fall to different temptations according to our desires.

It is overwhelming sometimes. I often feel beset with my failures and weaknesses. In quiet moments when I should feel peace, I hear only the voice of self recrimination. I am convinced that cynics and idealists are really the same class of being, but we cynics, though we hope for perfection and beauty, see too often the failure. We over emphasize the bad perhaps to justify our own failings.

Light and Dark are continually at war within us. The more I ponder this, the less I am inclined to judge any man for his sins. I cannot do it. He is tied to me in the same ultimate endeavor. At stake is the very integrity of an immortal soul. How can I dare to cast one of those aside? C. S. Lewis remarked that when he looked upon suffering souls, he saw gods. The Bible tells us that we are gods (see Psalms 82:1-6). But fallen so far we little resemble what once we were when we walked with Angels for a time. We are as much now like God as a pebble resembles a mountain.

Lately I feel that I have been trying to compensate for what Hemingway called, "the burden of a happy childhood." Through this, I have come to understand the wisdom of what Jesus told the Pharisees who endlessly debated the measuring of tithes and the "deep doctrines" of God's presence in the Burning Bush as if such could possibly affect their souls while they omitted the true "deep things of God" as Paul termed them. Jesus said:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Matthew 23:23)

Mercy, faith, judgment, hope, charity, peace. These are the doctrines upon which it is our duty to meditate. Oh be sure to pay your tithes, as Jesus said. He never advocated neglecting these temporal duties, but rather He cautioned us to look at what underlies the Law. In doing so, the very powers of heaven distill themselves upon our souls.

The Historical Book of Mormon

Six years of studying the profession of History must have some benefit. In an end-of-the-year party held by my undergraduate history department for departing seniors, the Head of the Department, Dr. Norman Jones, remarked that the study of history is primarily learning how to interpret and weigh evidence. It is not, strictly speaking, scientific, though it can and should be supported where possible with science; but nor is it a freewheeling art form where anything goes. History is the challenge to ponder the evidence of the past and weigh its reliability, biases, and utility for telling the story of a people. So, it would seem, I have learned something in all these years about reading texts.

Though we like to call the Book of Mormon scripture, and I believe it is that, it is also a historical text as the Bible is. With that assumption, what does the Book of Mormon tell us. I have often found myself reading the text of the Book of Mormon like I would a primary source for historical research. This has actually increased my faith in the Book of Mormon; for a work of fiction would not carry those subtle, stray artifacts that make a document ring true.

Being the skeptical sort by nature, I have often struggled to understand and accept some aspects of our past and our story as Mormons. However, I believe so strongly in the Book of Mormon that I am drawn to accept even when I don't understand. I feel like Peter after Jesus gave his masterful discourse on the Bread of Heaven (see John 6). When Jesus expounded doctrines and made claims that many of His disciples found difficult to believe, they turned away from Him, but Peter, though he could not understand replied:

Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.

And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.
(John 6:68-69)

So it is with me. I don't understand the former ban on Africans from the Priesthood, nor do I really comprehend polygamy or all the ordinances of the Temple, but the Book of Mormon and the Prophets of this Church have the words of eternal life and that keeps me here. So, in between my travel adventures, I hope to start posting some essays and explorations of the Book of Mormon as a historical text and what I have learned from reading it this way.

My first observation is not some grand truth, except about human nature, but it is a testament to the veracity of the Book of Mormon and a defense against charges that it cannot be historical because the history it presents is too simple.

The Book of Mormon has three main authors and a few minor authors (excluding the lengthy quotations from such persons as Isaiah, Alma, Captain Moroni, and so on): Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni son of Mormon. Jacob could be added to the list as well. In fact, my first evidence comes from Jacob.

In a class I took in college on the History of the Celts, we looked at the identity of these persons and groups and realized that tribal nomenclature is a tricky business. We use the name Celts, from the Greek Keltoi, to describe the peoples of Europe who inhabited vast swaths of land from the Danube to the coast of Ireland until the invasion of the Romans and later the Germanic tribes pushed their culture to near extinction leaving on pockets of Celtic language and traditions in Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The Romans called these same people Gauls. What they called themselves is actually somewhat of a mystery; assuming they had a sense of "Pan-Celtic" consciousness rather than just tribal identities. The same holds for the Germans, who to this day don't call themselves Germans, a name the Romans adopted from a tribe that lived along the Rhine River. Germans call themselves Deutschen, which is related to the words Teutonic, Dutch, and so forth and roughly translates as "people." Greeks, of course, are not Greeks, but Hellenes in their own language and Greece is not Greece, it is Hellas.

How does this touch the Book of Mormon? Many critics of the Book of Mormon have said that since we have no records aside from the Book of Mormon, mentioning peopled called the Nephites and the Lamanites, then the book must be a modern fabrication. However, this critique is built on the false assumption that the names Lamanites and Nephites were in widespread use. The Nephites were soundly destroyed and most of their records destroyed, according to Mormon and Moroni (see Mormon 6:6). It is highly unlikely that the Lamanites called themselves Lamanites as a people. In fact, Jacob drops this highly interesting hint in his book:

Now the people which were not Lamanites were Nephites; nevertheless, they were called Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, Lamanites, Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites. But I, Jacob, shall not hereafter distinguish them by these names, but I shall call them Lamanites that seek to destroy the people of Nephi, and those who are friendly to Nephi I shall call Nephites or the people of Nephi, according to the reigns of the kings.

Jacob 1:13-14

Mormon echoes this statement hundred of years later in 4 Nephi 1:36-37:

And it came to pass that in this year there arose a people who were called the Nephites, and they were true believers in Christ; and among them there were those who were called by the Lamanites—Jacobites, and Josephites, and Zoramites; Therefore the true believers in Christ, and the true worshipers of Christ, (among whom were the three disciples of Jesus who should tarry) were called Nephites, and Jacobites, and Josephites, and Zoramites.

The key passage, highlighted above, shows that Jacob knew there were more complexities than Nephites and Lamanites, but frankly did not care to distinguish at that level of complexity because his purpose was a spiritual one and he did not care to get bogged down with politics.

These sorts of incidental references provide a strong sense of authenticity to the Book of Mormon account. The authors refer almost parenthetically to the world around them with which they are intimately familiar and hence feel no need to elaborate on such obvious givens. Furthermore, we know from these accounts that the Nephite/Lamanite duality is, in some sense, an artificial simplification of a far more complex world full of various tribes. Keep in mind, furthermore, that none of these names should be assumed to have been used by the groups to which they refer, just as one would not find an ancient Greek source referring to "Greeks." An Greek author would talk about Hellenes and a person reading Roman sources alone would not be able to find records of "Greeks" in the land that the Romans called Greece.

This parallel is not, of course, precise, because both Greeks and Romans were highly literate and thus the records speak repeatedly of each other, whereas the Nephites were literate, but most of the Lamanites were not. No records, aside from the Book of Mormon, exist to document the history of Central and South America prior to the Maya and the Aztecs, both of whom came hundreds of years after the demise of the Nephites. The Incas, interestingly, were not literate and left no records; neither did the Olmec, Toltec, Moqui, and many other groups whose names, it should be rememberd, are mostly exonyms, i.e. names applied by outsides. What these groups called themselves, as with the Lamanites, is unknown. The same is true for ancient ruins in Central and South America. For the most part, their names are unknown and the names applied by archaeologists are modern.

There are two things to be gleaned here. First, the writers of the Book of Mormon recognized they were using exonyms and we should not, therefore, be surprised that no other record uses them since these names were not used by anyone else. Secondly, the fact that the Book of Mormon mentions this detail and does so in a very cursory manner, contributes to the veracity of the Book of Mormon as a historical record.