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.