Proslavery Bible: An Inerrant Moral Guide?

                One of the principle claims (and complaints) of the fundamentalist Christian right is that they possess an inerrant, absolute standard of morality, God’s Word in the Bible,  while they claim that secular humanists are undermining the moral fiber of the United States by a moral relativism which excludes the Bible, God and prayer from the public schools and the 10 commandments and Christmas from the public square.

                Given that all but the most Rushdoony influenced Christian fundamentalists agree with the proposition that slavery is a moral evil, this proposition can be historically tested by an empirical test case.  If racial slavery is a moral evil and the Bible is an inerrant and absolute moral guide, one would expect that slavery would be unambiguously condemned by the Bible.  Yet, just the opposite is shockingly the case.  For almost 2,000 years, Bible-believing Christians interpreted the Bible as supporting slavery.  The most bloody, murderous war (per capita) in U.S. history was commenced by Bible-thumping, Confederate Christians who were absolutely certain that God did not merely wink at slaveholding, HE positively commanded it—because slavery was a divine blessing for blacks and whites alike.

                In fact, Reverend Iveson L. Brookes, S. Carolina, 1850, would say:   “Next to the gift of his Son to redeem the human race, God never displayed in more lofty sublimity his attributes, than in the institution of slavery.”    Ferdinand Jacobs, 1850, in The Committing Our Cause to God would say:  “If the scriptures do not justify slavery, I know not what they do justify.  If we err in maintaining this relation, I know not when we are right—truth then has parted her usual moorings and floated off into an ocean of uncertainty.”  The Confederate Army Religious Newspaper, Messenger April 15, 1864 proclaimed:  “We are fighting not only for our country but our God. . . .  It has become for us a holy war, and each fearful and bloody battle an act of awful and solemn worship.”^[i]  Hundreds, if not thousands, of sermons were preached, religious pamphlets were published, theological tomes (encyclopedic in length) were written, and newspaper articles were written by clerics and politicians alike extolling the Christian virtues of racial slavery.  This religious certainty found its way into official state declarations of why the Confederates left the Union.  For example, the February 2, 1861 Texan statement of causes for seceding stated that slavery was commanded by the “plainest revelations of the Divine Law” and that Confederates must fight to uphold the “revealed will of the Almighty Creator."

                The racist Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney advised fellow slaveholders that the Bible was slavery’s strongest bulwark against abolitionism; that the Bible was diametrically opposed to freedom for slaves: "[W]e must go before the nation with the Bible as the text, and 'Thus saith the Lord' as the answer. . . .  we know that on the Bible argument the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies.  The Bible being bound to stand on our side, they have to come out and array themselves against the Bible and then the whole body of sincere believers at the North will have to array themselves, though unwillingly, on our side.  They will prefer the Bible to abolitionism."^[ii]  

                Reverend Benjamin M. Palmer, eulogized May 1902 aged 84 as the most influential man in New Orleans by “common consent,” characterized the Civil War as a holy crusade, asserting that in the entirety of human history, no war was holier:  “History reads to us of wars which have been baptized as holy; but she enters upon her records none that is holier than this.”  This statement was made in Palmer’s Thanksgiving Day Sermon 1860 in which he advocated secession and war as a Christian duty.  Thousands of reprints were published in newspapers and pamphlets throughout the South.  Palmer’s biblical exposition on the holiness of slavery and the South’s Christian duty to expand slavery was credited by many contemporaries as the decisive argument which convinced Confederate Christians to start a Civil War.

                In his sermon, he went on to identify slavery as a “providential trust,” and said it was the South’s religious duty “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.”  He asserted that God’s providential trust had been under demonic “unrighteous assault through five and twenty years.” He promised that should the South fight to extend slavery, “[t]he particular trust assigned to [them],” they would receive “the pledge of the divine protection.”  In sum, he said, “we [southerners] defend the cause of God and religion” by fighting to extend slavery.  He branded abolitionists as demonic, atheists, and “the throne of iniquity."  Palmer continued:

To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth. In this trust, we are resisting the power which wars against constitutions and laws and compacts, against Sabbaths and sanctuaries, against the family, the State, and the Church; which blasphemously invades the prerogatives of God, and rebukes the Most High.^[iii]

                The Reverend Palmer’s Thanksgiving Sermon of 1860 was echoed by scores of southern evangelical preachers.  For example, on May 16, 1862, J. W. Tucker, a southern Methodist minister, encouraged his congregation to support the war saying, “God’s providence is in this war. . . .  Our cause [slavery] is just, and God will defend the right. . . .  Our cause is sacred.” “Your cause is the cause of God, of Christ, of humanity.  It is a conflict of truth with error—of the Bible with Northern infidelity [emphasis added].”  A Presbyterian minister from Georgia prophesied that because God was on the Confederate side, within twenty years of their divinely ordained victory, abolitionist concepts would “vanish from the world,” and slavery, “stronger than ever in the South would flourish also in many Northern states and foreign countries.”   Far from gradually expiring, slavery was seen as expanding even outside of history into the millennial age according to some Southern divines. ^[iv]  To the very end of the war, southerners like the editor of the Mississippi Messenger would proclaim:  “The character of the war is, with us, essentially and necessarily religious . . . .[emphasis added]”^[v]   William Norris, writing for the trans-Mississippi army, similarly asserted:  “This war is on our part, a war for our Religion. . . .”^[vi]    

                The Confederacy was said to be a covenant people equivalent to the “Hebrew nation” and the “martyr church of Christ.”^[vii]   The wife of S. Carolina Senator Chesnut, Mary Chesnut said:  “Not one doubt is there in our bosoms that we are not the chosen people of God.  And that he is fighting for us.”  A writer for the Richmond Religious Herald of February 25, 1864 could not have agreed more, saying:  “Our enemies make slavery the central question of the war.  But no one at the South doubts the Divine Sanction of slavery.”  Conversely, a writer for the Christian Observer, February 2, 1865 claimed that “[a]ll who love the Lord Jesus Christ must and will oppose this monster heresy [of abolition] even unto death.”^[viii]  An Alabama Methodist preacher told his brother that he had a “deep Christian and inextinguishable hatred toward the demons of the north” and that it was his conviction that “it is doing God service to kill the diabolical wretches on the battlefield.”^[ix]

                Reverend J. Jones on May 26, 1862 at the Presbyterian Church of Rome, Georgia gave a comprehensive sermon entitled, The Southern Soldier’s Duty. He characterized the conflict as a religious and moral one.  The stakes, he exhorted the Confederate troops,  were ”the prosperity of true religion, and the authority of God’s word, all are committed to your keeping.”  Should they fail, true religion and God’s word would suffer. Reverend Lucius Cuthbert, Jr. defined the reasons for secession and war as essentially religious in his sermon entitled, “The Scriptural Grounds for Secession from the Union.” According to Henry Allen Tupper in yet another Thanksgiving Discourse given September 18, 1862 at the Baptist Church, secession “was necessary to salvation, and war to final separation.  Hence, the Lord . . . led providentially and imperceptibly into war. [emphasis added]”^[x]   God designedly led the Confederacy into the Civil War which was “necessary to salvation.”  It was a war of cosmic significance because Southern believers would be contending against atheistic principles on behalf of a “providential trust,” slavery. 

                Most Americans are surprised to learn that the Confederates seceded because the Bible commanded them that they must uphold slavery as a “providential trust.”  However, although already the ten footnotes above are becoming repetitious, they could virtually be continued ad infinitum.   Thus, this is an irrefutable case where the inerrant Word of God was employed with absolute certainty by true believers to prove beyond a doubt that something we believe today to be grossly immoral was lauded as an absolute divine commandment, vital to the continuation of Christian civilization.  This has obvious parallels with the similar assertions by Christian fundamentalists today that the Bible absolutely condemns homosexuality, abortion, and birth-control pills, and that the United States is on a slick and speedy path to perdition because the U.S., God’s chosen people, is fast becoming a nation of moral perverts, just like the slaveholders accused the abolitionists of being.  In a future blog I will examine how a common sense interpretation of Old and New Testament proslavery texts proved Confederates had a firm biblical foundation for their belief that slavery was a “providential trust.”  The same method fundamentalists continue to use for a whole gamut of issues today—from global warming to birth control.

[i] Kurt O. Berends, “Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man,” The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy in Religion and the American Civil War  edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 146 quoting “Address of the Second and Third Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia,” Messenger, April 15, 1864.

[ii] George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010),14.

[iii] Benjamin Morgan Palmer's "Thanksgiving Sermon" November 29, 1860.  http://civilwarcauses.org/palmer.htm has the full text.  While ostensibly claiming that he never mixes politics and religion, Palmer’s sermon is remarkable for its total amalgamation of religion, race, and politics.

[iv] Kurt O. Berends, “Confederate Sacrifice and the ‘Redemption’ of the South,” in Religion and the American South:  Protestants and Others in History and Culture, ed. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina )Press, 2004), 105.  For these and multiple other claims that God supported slavery and the Confederacy see also David B. Chesebrough, ed., “God Ordained This War” Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830-1865. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 345, 222, 195, 226-227, 324, 229-237, 333.  For examples of Confederate claims for God’s miraculous interventions on their behalf, see also page 298, where Reverend Joseph May Atkinson, author of God, the Giver of Victory and Peace.  Raleigh: n.p., 1862, proclaimed that if Confederate eyes could have been opened by angels as of old, they would have seen “an angel, terrible as that which smote the host of Sennacherib, hurling back the multitudinous cohorts of our self-confident invaders, filling their ranks with confusion, dismay, and death.”   On page 314 is a citation of James Elliott’s The Bloodless Victory, Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1861.  In this sermon, Elliott assures his parishioners that the bloodless taking of Fort Sumter as an answer to prayer because:  “The hand of God seems as plainly in it as in the conquest of the Midianites.” In case any young Confederate soldier might feel squeamish about killing, Reverend Stephen Elliott did his best to disabuse them of this notion; he urged them to “strike boldly . . . without any guilt. . . .  The church will sound the trumpets that shall summon you to battle.  For this ministerial endorsement of the war on behalf of slavery see page 315-316. 

[v] Mark O. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 79.

[vi] Kurt O. Berends, “Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man,” The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy in Religion and the American Civil War  edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 144.

[vii] Ibid., 142, 147, 155, 145, 143.  See also page 145 for Reverend Smith’s assertion that the original Union of states stood in direct opposition to the “order of God.”  This contradicts current right-wing evangelical assertions that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

[viii] Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 85, 291, 409.

[ix] George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 68.

[x] David B. Chesebrough, ed., “God Ordained This War” Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830-1865. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 196, 219, 197, 321- 324, 344.

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Intelligent Design of Creationist Lies



            The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board case provided a famous courtroom demonstration of how fundamentalist “Christians” systematically and deliberately lied to try and impose a higher “truth” on the general public.  

                These creationists were so intent on teaching “Intelligent Design” in public schools that they lied multiple times in order to support “The Truth.”  Examples:  1) After swearing they had no idea how a creationist book got into the schools, a cancelled check paying for the books, signed by creationist Bill Buckingham, and channeled through two other creationists was produced; 2) after swearing they weren’t trying to introduce religious dogma into the schools, they were caught on video tapes saying the opposite; 3) after swearing that Intelligent Design was not Creationsism, their own books proved that they’d sloppily done a find and replace edit creating the nonsense word “cdesign proponentsists” by conflating “creationists” with “design proponents.”

                The Dover Area School Board of Pennsylvania, which had been taken over by creationists such as Bill Buckingham, was sued by those objecting to religion parading as science in high-school education.  Bill Buckingham was a school board member, chair of the curriculum committee, and he (along with some other board members) were relentless in insisting that creationism be taught as science.  Paradoxically, while many fundamentalists explicitly claim that they disdain any science as being necessary to support their Sola Scriptura, anti-Darwin stance, foot-soldiers like Buckingham were convinced that a marketing device they labeled the science of  “Intelligent Design” (ID) could get their faith-based religion into the local high-school’s science curriculum.  Given the fact that the Supreme Court prohibited creationism from being taught under the guise of science, they colluded in denyin that it was their religious belief that motivated them to attempt to introduce creationism into public school science.  They denied that ID was creationism.  The trial would show that intelligent design was indeed creationism; that the only difference in the two was a new marketing label.

                Minister Bill Buckingham perjured himself multiple times during the trial.  He denied having any religious intent in promoting ID as science.  Yet he was documented on video-tape with proof to the contrary.  There were contemporaneous multiple local newspaper accounts that he had pushed hard for ID because of his religious presuppositions and concerns.  At trial, he testified that the newspapers got it all wrong.  Eye-witness testimony also indicated that he had mixed religion and science in his advocacy for ID.  Again, everybody but him remembered events incorrectly.  His own parishioners knew he was lying because they knew how much he harped about critical it was to get God back into public school science.  However, in order for ID to masquerade as science,  a legal fiction had to be maintained.  He also lied when he stated that he had no idea how 60 copies of an ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, had arrived at the high-school.  It turned out that their conception had not been so immaculate after all.    “Lawyers for the plaintiffs got hold of the check that had paid for the books and found—lo and behold!—that it had been written by Bill Buckingham, who had raised the money from his congregation one Sunday morning at Harmony Grove Community Church.” “The check was made out to Donald Bonsell, father of school board president Alan Bonsell. . . .  Remember, in his deposition Buckingham had denied any knowledge of where the books had come from.  The money was surreptitiously raised in a church by a member of the board, laundered through the board president, and given to a former board president, himself known for his activism in bringing religion into the schools, who secretly bought the books.  If you were trying to prove a covert religious intent, you couldn’t find a better story than this one to illustrate it.”[i] 

                Alan Bonsell, the school board chairman, lied through his teeth in denying any knowledge of how 60 anonymous copies of the creationist text, Of Pandas and People, arrived at the high-school.[ii]   He very well knew that he had solicited church member donations to purchase the books;  As judge Jones observed:  “They deliberately, in my view, lied.”  Yet, even after being caught red-handed in the lie, these believers in “the Truth” did not repent of their sin. The intellectual father of the Dominist movement,  Reverend R. J. Rushdoony, had justified deliberate deceit, after all.[iii]   They were indignant that a George W. Bush appointed Republican judge should have the audacity to point out that they had lied.  Media shills, like  Bill O’Reilly and Pat Robertson, called the Republican judge “fascist” and “absurd,” respectively.  The threadbare charge of “activist judge” was trotted out, emptying it of any other meaning than a judge whose reasoned, constitutional application of the law some crank disagrees with.  Their hangers-on even sent Judge Jones death-threats for his Dare to be a Daniel integrity.  U.S. Marshalls had to put Jones and his wife under twenty-four hour protection.  The Christians had decided to turn the tables on the lions.  Ben Stein, a Nixon speech-writer and economist, produced a movie critical of Judge Jones entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”  In it he let viewers know that whereas ID led to “Love of God and compassion,” “science leads you to killing people.”   His allies’ death-threats he did not explain.  It was just part of a greater media circus wherein unremitting misinformation is churned out trying to link science and the bogeyman of “secular humanism” to Nazi death camps when there is actually massive proof of Christian anti-Semitism being foundational for Nazi death camps.

                The total lack of honesty honey-combed the ID ranks.   The Discovery Institute was a major player in the game of charades.  They were in league with Bonsell and Minister Bill Buckingham.  They claimed that ID had nothing to do with creationism and the book Of Pandas and People which they had provided the local zealots.   They prevaricated about the relation between creationism and ID because legal precedent had banned creationism from being taught as science; since it was clearly religion and non-science, and since the Supreme Court had established the precedent that religion could not be taught under the guise of science.  The stunning proof of this bold-faced lie was almost miraculous.  The previous creationist version Of Pandas and People was saturated with religious creation terminology.  When the Discovery Institute decided to re-label their book as ID to evade the Supreme Court’s strictures, they used a find and replace software program trying to eliminate creationist finger-prints.  They revisers did such a sloppy job that when they meant to replace “creationists” with “design proponents” they created the chimera “cdesign proponentsists.”[iv]  Judge Jones characterized their shenanigans as “breathtaking inanity,” “a mere re-labelling of creationism.”

                Thus, there is proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that the local foot-soldiers, the local clerical leaders, and the institutional backers and publishers of the ID material all engaged in, not just a dishonest conspiracy to lie to the court and defraud the public, but in a clumsy, third-rate cabal of conning the public.[v]  When this was painfully obvious to both them and their media echo-chambers, they did not retreat an inch from their brazen dishonesty.  Their religious faith gave them the absolute certainty that they were fighting in the Lord’s cause; therefore, any means was justified in achieving their noble end—saving high-school students from evolution and thereby saving America from dastardly secular humanists. 

                A common epistemological debating strategy/tactic that ID practitioners use is to say that “there is no way to achieve objectivity.”  Therefore, empirical evidence which is not consistent with their view of Sola Scriptura can be totally disregarded.  Says Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis:  “You’ve either got on God’s word glasses, or man’s word.”[vi]   Thus, all empirical or scientific facts are merely “man’s word” and have zero probative value if they conflict with “God’s word glasses.”  Knowing that they have God’s Truth, Intelligent Design proponents like Minister Buckingham or the Discovery Institute have no scruples about committing perjury to maintain the truth.  Ironically, while obsessed with a very particular religious view of biology, the whole point of their efforts in this law case and in the entire Intelligent Design project is to deny that their obsession has anything to do with religion.  It’s merely the best Science!

                The extreme contempt for the truth and for facts that the vanguard of the Christian Right exhibit in their crusade to make the United States a Christian Nation is shocking.  Yet those most zealous in telling lies on behalf of the truth make no apologies.  Some of their thought leaders have expressly justified deceit in behalf of a “good cause.”  That good cause is taking “Dominion” over a corrupted, secular society.  Most just unconsciously hold that one need not keep faith with the devil.  Unfortunately, there are multiple, well-documented cases illustrate this disturbing phenomenon.   This phenomenon permeates many other cause célèbre in the culture wars.  I have documented other examples in previous blogs (see those regarding Rick Santorum).  More examples will be forthcoming in future blogs.

                The questions is:  Why do such “Christians” believe they MUST lie to uphold “The Truth?”  Do they lack faith in the truthfulness of their own dogmas?

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[i] Gordy Slack,  The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything : Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA  (Jossey-Bass, 2008), 152-159.  Buckingham’s and Bonsell’s transparent religious ax to grind was also documented by Slack:  At a board’s annual retreat in 2002, Bonsell said his highest priority was “creationism” and his second highest “school prayer.

[ii] Pandas and People’s copyright is held by a Texas religious foundation headed by a minister whose articles of incorporation describe its mission as “proclaiming, publishing, preaching [and] teaching . . . the Christian Gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of the day.”  Yet all the people associated with it would claim that they had no religious mission in promoting the book in high-school science classes; a claim absurd on its face.   On online ad for the book enthusiastically describes its hybrid character in that it 1) “has no Biblical content, yet [2] contains creationists’ interpretations and refutations for evidences [sic] usually found in standard textbooks supporting evolution.”  See Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 89.

[iii] Millionaire Howard Ahmanson bank-rolled both the Chalcedon Foundation of Rushdoony and the Discovery Institute which backed the Buckingham faction on the Dover school board.

[iv] Given their skill and integrity in creating this counterfeit reality, one can only imagine the science that they conjure up as a replacement for well established biology, chemistry, and physics.

[v] The whole cabal reminds me of the utter gullibility of some people’s faith.  I recently received a breathless, ecstatic email from a relative concerning amazing proof of the biblical flood and Bible history in general.  Attached were purported photographs of archaeological specimens of the Nephilim.  Nephilim, for the uninitiated, are said to be the offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" referred to in Genesis 6:4.  Giants, demi-gods, great warriors, mythical mysteries of some sort according to various religiously inclined speculators.  In any case, crudely doctored photographs using a distorted perspective were offered as stunning proof of 21^st century archaeological proof of salvation history.  I have personally received numerous such reflexive acts of joy where persons were so enamored of “concrete proof” of something that disproved secular humanist’s world view that they forwarded the amazing facts to all and sundry on their email address book without taking two seconds to consider the complete absurdity of the hoax which they were perpetuating.  On some occasions when I gently pointed out the hopeless inaccuracy of such tales I got the response:  “It never bother to verify the veracity of such things, I just pass them along.”

[vi] This is the position of Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis as quoted in Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 95-97.

Rich Man: Poor Women- Ann Romney & Work

                   “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”  John 7:24

                 Romney, by his own use of the words, "work" and "dignity of work" has defined these words as something his own wife did not do.

                 Romney insisted in January,

"I wanted to increase the work requirement," said Romney. "I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, 'Well that's heartless.' And I said, 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work."

                Just not if the individual is his wife.  

                Thus, Romney asserts that women who have children 2 years old MUST, by GOVERNMENT DICTATE, abandon their children to the day care of strangers because they are not “working” IN the home.   [Sounds like the BIG GOVERNMENT Socialism that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are warning about, right?]  Thus, President Romney's decree would "increase the work requirement" because he wants "the individuals to have the dignity of work," rather than lazing and loafing around home with the kids.  In fact, Romney’s family values are so strong that he would rather increase the government deficit by spending more government money to compel women back into the  workforce.

                Just not if that woman is his wife.

                Clearly, he did not want his wife to “have the dignity of work.”   Whatever she was doing at home, by Romney’s definition of “dignity” and “work,” it could not have been that.  And now that a Democrat has merely copied his definition of these words, Mitt Romney, housewife Romney, and virtually the entire Republican spin doctor machine are pretending a moral outrage at their own use of the word “work!”

                By any standard of justice, Romney’s own words have condemned him and highlighted his own Pharisaic attitudes.   It highlights the double standard he would apply to poor women.   Like his casual comment that $360,000 was “not very much money” to him,  It again shows how out-of-touch he is with the average woman, even though he understands privileged women quite well.

                Perhaps Mormon Bishop Romney should restudy St. John.  “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” (John 7:24)  Or Matthew 7:1-2:  “Judge not, that you be not judged.  For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”

Source of Polygamy Revelations: Male Libido or Mind of God?

The issue of the role of women in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions, including the polygamy issue with the Jewish patriarchs and the Muslim and Mormon prophets goes back to the fact that all these religions are embedded in a primitive Bedouin-like tribal culture.  This culture viewed women as chattel male-owned property.   This was so deeply embedded in the culture of 2000 B.C.  that it appeared in the 10 commandments.

The commandment in question reads:  "Thou shalt not covet your neighbor's house, wife, male-slave, female-slave, ox, or ass; in sum, any of your neighbor's property." 

Thus, our slaveholding Confederate forefathers justified slaveholding as a divine command.  And just so, this passage of the Bible continues to be the Cornerstone of male-dominated religious philosophies for the sexual politics regarding women.  Of course, there are multiple other Old Testament passages that reinforce the foundation of patriarchy; not the least of which is the simple matter of exclusively male pronouns for the person of God.  Before the women's movement in the 1960s, women were to be seen and not heard from in the churches. 

I recall intense discussions in church Bible study groups over the biblical role of women.  Certain literalists, including some  Phyllis Schlafly-like women, argued passionately that all the male pronouns referring to God in the Bible absolutely proved that God was male.  This crude anthropomorphism was virtually incomprehensible to me.   Yet in a nut-shell it encapsulates the entire more sophisticated apologetics of male patriarchies like the Catholic Church:  Jesus was male, the Apostles were male, Elohim and all the Hebrew pronouns are male, therefore God must be male and there can only be male Catholic priests.  One day I was so exasperated with such literal anthropomorphism that I decided to push its proponents to their philosophy's logical extreme.  I challenged them with the question of how one determined the sex of a human being at birth.  Then I answered my own question:  You look at the child's genitalia and see if the newborn has a penis or a vagina!  Do you think God has either a vagina or a penis?  The suggestion that God might have a vagina was surely the most shocking thought, but I believe that even picturing God the Father with a penis was sufficiently shocking to make my parents sink through their pews in shame.  That's possibly why iconoclastic Christians and Muslims took quite literally the 10 commandment demand forbidding any making of "graven images."  In Christian pictoral art, we've pictured God with secondary sexual characteristics, like male facial hair and testosterone enhanced upper body strength.   This has reinforced our millenial tradition of literally "picturing" or conceiving of God as male.  But can God be male in any normal use of the English language without a penis, two testes, a scrotum, and a prostate?

Thus when I read about Mormon prophets who seem quite convinced that when they speak--Verily, verily--God is speaking, when I hear them extolling the blessings of the everlasting principle of polygamy, I ask myself:  Do they really believe God is speaking through them?  Or are they consciously aware that they are bamboozling "the elect" because they have are unable to control the excess testosterone coursing through their system?  It makes me have a fuller appreciation for the "fertility religions" with their phallic symbols.  I also wonder what the Mormon women were thinking.  Did they believe that God was a ventriloquist speaking through their husbands and commanding them to endorse their husbands' taking multiple younger wives?

We know that Emma Smith did not believe Joseph Smith Jr. was speaking for God when he, Smith, and HE, God dictated Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 commanding Emma to accept Smith's multiple wives under pain of divine destruction.  We know that Orson Pratt, Apostle (of polygamy), who extolled polygamy as "one of the greatest blessings of the last dispensation," had a first wife Sarah M. Pratt who damned polygamy as the "direst curse with which a people or a nation could be afflicted. . . .  It completely demoralizes good men, and makes bad men correspondingly worse.  As for the women--well, God help them!  First wives it renders desperate, or else heart-broken, mean-spirited creatures; and it almost unsexes some of the other women, but not all of them, for plural wives have their sorrows too."   Mary Ann Angell Young, Brigham Young's second wife described the once most favored wife of Young, Emmeline Free Young, finally experiencing "the torments of the damned" once she too was replaced by a younger, newly more favored wife.  Zina D. Jacobs Smith Young, another plural wife of Brigham Young, while espousing the patriarchy's line for public consumption, ("The principle of plural marriage is honorable.  It is a principle of the gods, it is heave born."), described her fellow plural wives "whose hearts are full of hell" and who would love to "tear his [Brigham Young's] eyes out."  Phebe Woodruff, first wife of Prophet-President Wilford Woodruff, who also praised polygamy for public consumption said in private:  "I loathe the unclean thing with all the strength of my nature."  Then she explained that she was forced to "say anything commanded of me" because otherwise she would be "turned out of my home in my old age which I should most assuredly be if I refused to obey counsel."[i]  Thus, we have the testimony of at least three wives of three of the Mormon’s original President-Prophets.   Not only do they use the words “curse,” “torments of the damned,” and “hearts full of hell,”  but they testify to the dictatorial, tyrannical character of these husband prophets who would throw aged, decrepit wives into the streets if they would not publically proclaim the fictitious blessings of “celestial marriages.”  And these are the men whose writings are accepted as the “Word of God,” and whose doctrines must be as slavishly submitted to today as their wives had to submit during the heyday of Mormon polygamy!?!

          When Christians hear of Muslim men who believe that if they become suicide bombers they will be rewarded in the afterlife with the favors of 40 virgins, it does not take them too long to come to the conclusion that the revelation that established this doctrine originated in an overheated, sexually frustrated, alpha male brain and not the mind of God.  So why should Christians, even Mormon Christians, find it difficult to believe that the revelations establishing polygamy in Mormonism have the same origins?

                Men, including myself, are not infrequently accused by the everyday wisdom of women of letting our penises do too much of our thinking for us.  I strongly suspect that the wives of the Mormon prophets I’ve quoted above would agree with that sentiment in regards to their husbands.   I think that they, if given a multiple choice question, rather than choosing the option that when the prophet spoke, God was speaking—they’d opt for the opinion that when the prophet spoke, it was his penis that was doing the talking.

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[i] Again see Van Wagoner’s Mormon Polygamy referenced in the previous blog; particularly chapter nine, “Women in Polygamy.”

Muslims & Mormons: Prophetic Polygamy

      

                One of the common divine revelations shared by both the Muslim and Mormon Prophets was the concept of polygamy.  Yet while to most Mormons today polygamy is like a leprous skeleton they'd rather keep in the closet, Muslims still practice polygamy while Mormons have temporarily suspended the practice.  Yet Mormon prophets repeatedly insisted that polygamy was an everlasting, divine commandment that was essential to Mormon males fulfilling their full divine potential.  So while Muslims are strict monotheists, Mormon males hoped to procreate innumerable divine-human hybrids to populate the stellar universe.  In effect, they were all little gods in the making who hoped to imitate the ascent of God via the pleasures of celestial marriages.  

         Yes, their prophet told them that God was once as they are now and that they could become as God is now--through the "recovery" of polygamous, celestial marriages that Prophet Joseph Smith had rediscovered.  Now this clashes with the orthodox Christian teaching that there are only 3 Gods, or, more conventionally put, a 3 in 1 Triune God.  Nevertheless, Mormons are extremely anxious to be classified as Christians-- as you will easily find on their websites.  Everything is tailored, one might better say camouflaged, to mimic orthodox, traditional Christian concepts. 

                Take for instance the concept of prophet.  They  emphasize certain Christian Bible passages to create the impression that their prophet is essentially the same as all the biblical prophets; they downplay the idea that these prophets can create new, un-orthodox theology at will; they forget to mention that these prophets did so with the concept of polygamy.  They cannot avoid mentioning the fact that the book of Mormon is considered to be equally the "WORD of God," thus making non-sense of the concept of Sola Scriptura, but they don't display the fact that their prophet re-wrote the Bible at will to create his own correct "translation" of the Bible. 

        They don't let you know the amazing fact that their prophet proclaimed:  "I am going to tell you how God came to be God."  Or that he went on to that just as God is a "self-existent being," "Man does exist upon the same principles."  "The first principles of man are self-existent with God."  Their prophet acknowledged that orthodox Christians would account such ideas as "blasphemy."  "But," he insisted, "I am learned, and know more than all the world put together."  Thus, his successor prophet could say with equal divine authority:

“Polygamy is a divine institution.  It has been handed down direct from God.  The United States cannot abolish it.”

President/Prophet/Seer, John Taylor

                One of Mormon's more notorious prophets, Pratt, even speculated that Jesus' relationship with Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene may have been polygamous.    He used the Muslim practice of polygamy as the basis for his over generous estimation  that four-fifths of the world believed in a plurality of wives.  Now with the equivalence that many make between Muslims and terrorism, compounded with the right-wing assertion that President Obama is somehow a Muslim secret agent, Mormons would like to minimize their similarities with the Muslim religion.   Many politically partisan,  right-wing, Christian evangelicals who hint that President Obama is not a "real" Christian or "real" American, especially of the Birther persuasion, could, with greater validity, emphasize the parallels between the Muslim theology regarding women and the Mormon theology regarding women. 

        The United States is engaged in a nation-building effort in Afghanistan which has as one of its components an effort to change the Muslim treatment of women.  A lot of male Muslims feel it is an essential part of their religion to keep their women veiled or completely shuttered behind burkas.  Terrorist Muslims that feel this way have bombed girl's schools because they feel more sexually secure if their women remain uneducated, remaining behind the closed doors of their kitchens and bedrooms.   In other words, both Muslim and Mormon polygamy goes back to deep-seated religious concepts about the proper role of women.  When the U.S. government confiscated Mormon property and withheld statehood until the Mormon prophets received revelations in 1890 and 1904 to suspend the practice of polygamy, this modified the retrograde Mormon practices regarding women.   However, it did not change their underlying religious psychology regarding women.  Mormons practiced polygamy because God said so.  Only men can be have priestly authority in the LDS Mormon church, (as opposed to different practices in the Reformed Mormons), because--God said so: 

           Gordon B. Hinckley, prior President  and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said:

“Women do not hold the priesthood because the Lord has put it that way."

        Interestingly, that could change with a new revelation.   The God who revealed the TRUTH about a segregated white priesthood only was a racist God up until 1978 when he became a non-discriminatory, equal-opportunity God who gave a "Thus saith the Lord" to the 1978 Mormon Prophet-President permitting blacks into the priesthood--if one literally believes that God operates like that.  Therefore, perhaps the current or future Mormon Prophet-President will get a revelation permitting Women to hold the priesthood in the LDS Mormon Church.  Stranger things have happened.

Romney's Testosterone Theocracy and Women



               A Washington Post/ABC News poll of April 2012 showed that women preferred Mr. Obama to Mr. Romney by 19 percentage points.  In my last blog I showed how this gender gap is result of latent suspicion of Mormon polygamy/patriarchy.  Women were religiously coerced into "giving" a pro forma consent.   Women had to pretend to like polygamy as religious penance, duty.  Like European kings enjoyed the divine right of kings, Mormon males enjoyed the priestly divine right of polygamy.  Vestiges of this mentality are still deeply "imbedded" in Mormon patriarchs such as Mitt Romney.  It is as inconceivable to the indoctrinated male Mormon that he must predominate as priest as it would be inconceivable to the Pope to have Catholic priestesses.

                Today the LDS church admits that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy.  In fact, they suggest that he only did so because God commanded him to do it, and he did so with a measure of reticence—somewhat like Abraham reluctantly being willing to kill his son, Isaac.  (They imply that although both murder and polygamy seemed contrary to God’s express will, both Abraham and Joseph Smith obeyed in faith because of God’s direct, personal revelation to them).  But if Mormons practiced polygamy because God commanded it as an “everlasting covenant” that was essential to salvation, why do only a minority of Mormons champion polygamy today?  Because, as I will detail later,  God commanded the opposite via the prophetic successor to Joseph Smith—supposedly.  God commanded polygamy in a 1842 revelation  via prophet Smith; God commanded the opposite in 1890 via prophet Woodruff.

                But there is evidence demonstrating that Smith was secretly practicing polygamy well before his 1842 revelation while publically denying practicing it.  It was not until 1852 that the LDS Church publicly admitted to the practice of plural marriage. This was 8 years after Joseph Smith was murdered. This is why many LDS are surprised to learn that Joseph Smith was ever a participant in plural marriage.

                "The same God that has thus far dictated me and directed me and strengthened me in this work, gave me this revelation and commandment on celestial and plural marriage, and the same God commanded me to obey it. He said to me that unless I accepted it, and introduced it, and practiced it, I, together with my people would be damned and cut off from this time henceforth. We have got to observe it. It is an eternal principle and was given by way of commandment and not by way of instruction." - Prophet Joseph Smith, Contributor, Vol. 5, p. 259

How does a eternal principle only last from 1842 to 1890?  Actually, when one reads the 1890 revelation, one realizes that it is sufficiently ambiguous to allow multiple interpretations.  The historical context proves that the intent was to temporarily put polygamy underground.  The prophets, apostles, and quorum leaders had two goals:  1)  To get back property that the U.S. government had confiscated in an attempt to force Mormons to abandon polygamy; 2) To obtain statehood and then to employ states’ rights and state sovereignty power to be able to continue to practice polygamy without the interference of the national government.

                Below is a direct, extensive quote from the Mormon Scriptures of the 1890 Manifesto from the official Mormon website.  It is given so that readers can absorb the flavor of the actual text for themselves.

“Official Declaration—1

To Whom It May Concern:

 Press dispatches having been sent for political purposes, from Salt Lake City, which have been widely published, to the effect that the Utah Commission, in their recent report to the Secretary of the Interior, allege that plural marriages are still being solemnized and that forty or more such marriages have been contracted in Utah since last June or during the past year, also that in public discourses the leaders of the Church have taught, encouraged and urged the continuance of the practice of polygamy—

                 I, therefore, as President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice, and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.

                 One case has been reported, in which the parties allege that the marriage was performed in the Endowment House, in Salt Lake City, in the Spring of 1889, but I have not been able to learn who performed the ceremony; whatever was done in this matter was without my knowledge. In consequence of this alleged occurrence the Endowment House was, by my instructions, taken down without delay.

                Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.

                 There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.

Wilford Woodruff

President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

                There are two striking observations that stand out from this text.  First, the salutation, “to whom it may concern,” sounds more like an impersonal press release.  Second, the first three paragraphs are merely a denial of various polygamy charges.  (And these denials have all been demonstrated to be falsehoods, an oddity to be included in divine revelations).  Third, Prophet Woodruff merely announces his reluctant intention to submit to anti-polygamy laws (whereas there is later documentation that the Prophet and many of his Apostles did their best to evade); there is no revelatory announcement that polygamy was immoral or that the previous revelations stating that polygamy was a divine command and essential for priests’ salvation and godly ascension were erroneous.   In sum, prophet Woodruff had previously stated that “the doctrine of plural marriage has come to stay for all time,” and his 1890 Manifesto was manifestly interpreted, within and without the Mormon Church, to be “a little bit of harmless dodging to deceive the people of the East [federal authorities].”  Or as Apostle mariner W. Merrill said in his diary:  “I do not believe the Manifesto was a revelation from God but was formulated by Prest. Woodruff and endorsed by His counselors and the Twelve Apostles for expediency.”[i]  The fact that the prophets and apostles of the church sanctified hundreds of celestial marriages after 1890 and another 1904 revelatory Manifesto was needed to discourage continued practice of polygamy amply demonstrate that the 1890 Manifesto could not annul an “eternal and unchangeable law.”  Thus, polygamy is a dormant eternal principle which could be reactivated at any moment by the current Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of the Mormon Church getting a divine revelation to that effect.

                In the larger context of this entire blog, this series on Mormon claims is simply one illustration of the question of how does one methodically evaluate the evidence for a Truth claim.  Why would one believe that Joseph Smith, Jr. got a revelation in 1842 that his wife, Emma Smith, and all Mormon women should concur to their husbands taking multiple sexual partners?  Why should one believe that Prophet Brigham Young got confirmatory revelations?   Namely:  “"The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.”  Why would one believe that Woodruff got a revelation to the opposite effect?

                The authoritative Mormon answer is simply that if you exercise sufficient faith, simply reading Joseph Smith’s, Brigham Young’s and President Woodruff’s with faith will make their divine authenticity self-evident because they are inherently revelatory of their divine origin.

                The official Mormon websites teach that Joseph Smith’s pronouncements on polygamy are the word of God even if the Bible as translated and understood for hundreds of years supported monogamy.  Because anything in the Bible that contradicts Mormon teaching was simply mistranslated.  And even if not, since any of the Mormon prophets from Joseph Smith to Thomas S. Monson, “God’s chosen prophet today,” can divinely reverse, re-translate, or re-interpret any Christian doctrine. Because, proclaims an official Mormon website:  God “continues to send living prophets. Joseph Smith (1805–44) was the first prophet of our time.  Thomas S. Monson is God’s chosen prophet today.”  Their 8^th article of fundamental belief is:  “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.”

                Thus, today’s Mormon “maleotheocracy” with its full complement of testosterone are very literally and practically the voice of God to their people.  Their Fifth Male Prophet/President Lorenzo Snow divinely announced:  “As man is, God once was.  As God is, man may become.”  But actually, they don’t have to wait to become as God is.  When they speak, it’s God speaking—Here and Now!

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[i] For the quotes found in the previous blog and today’s blog see Richard S. Van Wagoner, (son of polygamous ancestors), Mormon Polygamy A History, Second Edition (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989) and Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling’s Mormon America (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).