Palmyra
Palmyra, NY. Joseph Smith had his revelations here.
The first theophany he scored was at age fourteen, capable son of a gun. Father and Son, our Gods, stepped forth to him from the depths of being.
The two guys being one in substance and essence has been our trad theology, of course. But in Joe’s plowboy clasp, that subtle dogma had diverged somewhat into two separates. Progress or regress, in terms of our present conundrum with God, what do you think? Well, let’s go on.
The guys confirmed to Joe that none of the existing churches was true, over which dilemma the teen was despairing like another lad over pizza face. Three years later the angel Moroni showed him where in America the book of golden plates from the time before Columbus was buried, just around the shack. When he was 22, another angel put him in contact with the plates and hence we have the Book of Mormon.
Those were so-called founding revelations. Afterward, Joe was still getting offshoots. When Emma, for instance, the first wife, became unmanageable concerning other chicks, Joe at once received the communication that the existing covenant had gotten suspended and from now on a husband could have a pewful of wives. And if she, Emma, wouldn’t cool her stew, He, the Lord, would take care of her: she shall be destroyed (D & C 132:54). Fun stuff, more or less you can find it in any religion’s beginnings, so who is to gloat.
The thing that made me like Mormonism instantly was its withdrawing the exclusive rights to prime epiphany from the far away past and returning it to the folks who here and now have to plow that furrow. This, I must say, was cool. We again were treated seriously. Again we had a living religion, and the hotline to the Maker to boot. One hundred percent American. You can almost behold that sturdier ingredient within the self-selected European character, how it dumps the Old World for the New One, gets into a tiny shell, hits the gales and rollers of the Atlantic full breast, risking body and carry-ons for weeks on, and if upon hitting Plymouth Rock it had to hear that for a prime chatter with G. it was 1700-1800 years too late, what do you think such a sturdier ingredient within the self-selected European character would care to say?
“Bollocks!!”
Damn right, and that it did. That’s how Mormonism was born. That’s why Mormonism has been called the American religion. Conceptually, linguistically, the Book of Mormon was a farmerish reforging of the King James Bible, including the story of Christ appearing on the American continent shortly after the Resurrection. In its main plot, it tells of the Israelites who had immigrated here from the Middle East 600 years before Christ and split into the good ones and the bad ones. The good ones had written the Book of Mormon, buried it, and later perished at the hands of the bad ones. For doing that, God altered the bad ones’ skin color, and hence we’ve gotten the pre-American populace on the continent.
Nice play by Joe Smith here. With his American religion toolkit painting the pre-Columbian Asian migrants to the landmass as theologically repugnant. Blaming their “dark skin” on having turned away from Christ. Making it conscience-friendly for the ethnic Euros to rip away from under them the yummy real estate. A wicked, wicked stroke.
But if we stopped here, we wouldn’t appreciate the whole distress. The Mormon founding fathers distanced themselves from the pre-American peoples also for another, less wicked – wickedless, it can even be said – reason. The original Mormon doctrine barred the members of more genetically distant groups – and as such incapable of building a successful common home – from becoming the Mormon clergy, i.e., leadership. This position enabled the Mormon nation to stay out of the race conflict for far longer, than in the case of the standard American Christian populations, which didn’t have this truth so manifestly theologized.
Now, it is a fact that since 1978 the Salt Lake City vatican has changed its mind (through revelations, no less) on priesthood and race. But all living things unbind and so Mormonism is in our day, and that’s okay. We will still marvel at how at the outset of their journey those rugged American religionists dared to sack the less sober biddings of our constitutive historic Faith, above all in the area of race.
“The skin on them has blackened because they turned away from Christ.”
A childish way of recognizing and protecting the natural order of things, you bet, but there was always the childish in religion and so what if it worked.