Um longo texto sobre os mórmons: suas origens, seus métodos, a fortuna que acumularam etc.
The Mormons Can’t Quit the Stupid… But Are Enough of Us Aware of Who They Really Are?
Against the trends, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is still growing, but maybe not for long.
THE WHOLE LIBERAL - Rusty Reid May 11, 2025
When I was a child, the bully on the block had the last name “Mormon.” I have no idea if his family was part of the LDS Church or not. We didn’t have many, or possibly any, Mormons in our town. We made up for it with smallish enclaves of Christian “Scientists” (probably the greatest oxymoron in the American religious tapestry), holy-rollers, speakers-in-tongues, doomsday prophets and snake wranglers. Little did I know it at the time, but none of these pretty “out-there” sects can compare to theological wackiness of the Mormons.
Now don’t go jumping to conclusions that because I was bullied by a “Mormon” as a child I have harbored a psychological grudge against all Mormons since. Mormons only recently appeared on my radar, and even then it took me awhile to put two and two together when I, at long last learned that the far larger and more famous contingent of Mormons are, and have always been, themselves, bullies.
As an equal opportunity doubter of all religions, but yet a student of how they initially form and later morph, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints will certainly attract your attention. It is surely one of the more intriguing denominations, the major sect with the longest official name, finding room for two “of”s, but one of the shortest histories. That brevity, however, is full and colorful. Mostly in ways that should have, but somehow did not, lead it straight to extinction.
This unusual sect could be thought of as the “all-American” religion, which is close to how it is marketed in the 21st Century. What lovely, friendly, successful people, right? Don’t they just look like “all-Americans?” I mean Donny and Marie? How much more all-American can you get?
It was, indeed, founded by a brash, bombastic, thrill-seeking, P.T. Barnum-style American in America and is all about America, to which the Holy Land, God, Israelites, Jesus and all, are transposed in the Book of Mormon. It also contains all the breadth and bravado of the American imagination, replete with grand scheme, dream of empire, intrigue and upheaval, bravery and betrayal, persecution and resistance, law and prophecy, polygamy and paramilitaries, war and murder, triumph against “evil” and, eventually, world domination, all played out in a flight across young America from New York clear out to the wildest West.
Through thick and thin, trial and tribulation, it has survived to grow into a global religion and is now the fourth largest Christian denomination in the United States. The Church operates 30,000 congregations in over 160 countries, with at least 16 million members all told. An estimated 7 million are in the United States. That’s an impressive collection of the gullible, though it is a drop in the ocean of over two billion Christians in the world. But, get this, while the organization keeps its financials secret, the LDS Church is believed to be the richest religious organization… in the world! The Church of Scientology has $2 Billion in assets. The Church of England has $14 Billion. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is estimated to be worth around $300 Billion!
Now this wealth is stunning, considering that the LDS Church isn’t even in the Top Ten of Christian denominations in size. It’s smaller than the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which has around 22 million members worldwide. Yet the Mormons are richer than the larger three U.S. denominations combined! The Mormon Church based in Salt Lake City, Utah is richer, indeed, than the Vatican, head of the Catholic Church. The Catholic system divides its organization into diocese, which keep most of the money they generate, sending cumulatively only about $50 Million per year to Rome, while the Salt Lake central command brings in an estimated $7 BILLION per year from its far-flung network of directly controlled nodes.
Still, somehow that’s not enough for them to pay for their missionaries, who, believe it or not, must pay for themselves. Surely, there can be no doubt that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the most efficient major religious organization at wringing dough out of its members! It’s a rather interesting question: just how moral is it for a Church with over $100B idling to insist upon regular donations, even from the most financially struggling of its members. Perhaps some members ponder this as they are also donating their time to clean the temples.
The story of this religion begins around 200 years ago smack in the midst of the so-called “Second Great Awakening,” a religious phenomenon mostly in America when a wave of fervor swept across the nation, drawing in legions of new converts. Simultaneously, a raft of new Christian denominations suddenly appeared, all claiming to have received a unique “divine revelation,” determined to “restore the true church,” taking the Bible quite literally, and typically shunning at least some aspects of modernity. The Plymouth Brethren (and “Dispensationalism”), Disciples of Christ, Catholic Apostolic Church, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with many new African American denominations were among these. All of these brand new sects were concocted by one or select few charismatic male figures (with the notable exception of the Seventh Day Adventists, who had four original concoctors, including a female prophetess).
[The Unitarians and Universalists also emerge in this melee of religious shuffling and creative (and profitable) enterprise, opting not to declare their own prophets, add new layers or “restore” anything, but rather to start questioning whether Christianity doesn’t have some serious issues altogether.]
Mormon founder Joseph Smith was definitely one of the most imaginative of these 19th Century religion-builders. While almost every new sect founder of the era stuck somewhat closely to biblical content, Smith launched, literally, into outer space!
He was a financially troubled farmer and practitioner of “folk magic” who got into some legal problems selling his skill as a finder of “lost treasure” that he was not able to actually find but was content to keep the fee. Also a man of visions during this period of excitable religious energy throughout the land, he is subsequently led by an angel named Moroni, who in human form was a pre-Columbian warrior, to a hill conveniently near Smith’s house in western New York where are buried “golden plates,” which Smith is allowed to borrow and deciphers (from “reformed Egyptian”) by way of a transparent “seer stone” carefully positioned at the bottom of his hat. Following the transcription, Smith returned the plates to Moroni, never to be seen again. The “golden plates,” that is. Moroni was later trademarked and can be seen with his trumpet atop many LDS temples.
Written in quasi-Old Testament style, the Book of Mormon depicts the adventures of several immigrant groups from ancient Israel that escaped danger in the Holy Land by skedaddling to America. Jesus, Himself, makes a cameo visit — in the Americas — just days after His resurrection. The book, and religion, only get weirder from there, with the grand finale being that, essentially, everyone ends up Mormon! One way or another.
At any rate, it is notable that many/most Christians (as well as religious scholars) don’t consider the Mormons Christian at all. Indeed, in this religion compared to traditional Christianity, the role Jesus actually plays is closer to the way he is portrayed in… Islam, with Joseph Smith and the “Latter Day Saints” the American version of Muhammad!
The sheer incredulousness of the tale Joseph Smith stitched together, which would eventually produce three brand new “divinely revealed” books to join the Old and New Testaments as holy texts, should have been the end of it all as a religion. Who could believe this stuff? As the Donald Trump saga informs us contemporaneously, the answer is millions!
Yet in retrospect, he should have sent it all out as the clever fiction it clearly is; a dime store serial might have made him rich, and spared him from getting himself and his brother killed. If not his creative tales, would-be customers should have been wary of his full-hearted dive into polygyny, at one point boasting forty wives.
Smith drew devoted followers happy to gullibly imbibe whatever elixir their “prophet” was doling out. The enticing hook of the Bible and Jesus, himself, coming to America worked wonders. Relatively quickly, there were thousands (in fact, 8,000 five years after publishing his book) eager to follow him ever further west as his cult was pushed out of pretty much wherever they landed by more mainstream religionists convinced this was no real “Church of Christ” (which he originally called it) but rather a crazy cult they didn’t want anywhere close to them.
Like many cults, the Mormon “Church of Christ” was not averse to violence. As they moved west they left in their wake the “Missouri Mormon War” followed closely by the “Illinois Mormon War.” Of course, it takes two to tangle, and this period of internecine “Christian” on “Christian” holy conflagration is a telling chapter in the long and pathetic legacy of America as a “Christian nation.” It is noteworthy that in Missouri, the Mormons had so infuriated the rest of the populace that the governor and many other “Christians” determined to “exterminate” them.
After Smith and his brother were assassinated in Illinois (something he somehow failed to foresee in his seer stone), his successor “prophet,” Brigham Young, the Mormon Moses, who bested Smith with 56 wives, led the main band to safety far beyond the limits of civilization, in more ways than one, stopping in 1847 in the foreboding landscape of Utah, where was found, as in the Holy Land, a “dead sea.” It was their new “Zion.” This was, at the time, technically the northernmost part of Mexico. Of course, like many “heroic” American “settlers,” they simply helped themselves, by force of arms, to land other people already resided and depended upon.
It became a territory of the United States a year later. And the Mormons were not pleased, preferring any government overlords to be like the Mexicans, thousands of miles away. Sure enough, soon to come was the 1857–58 “Utah Mormon War,” which was the first to involve actual U.S. troops dispatched to quell the uprising, but not before a paramilitary platoon of Mormons attacked a wagon train of non-Mormon settlers passing through the territory, killing 120 men, women and children… and then blaming it on the Indians.
So the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is certainly unique in many ways, not least in having the most atrocious history of any American religious sect, the only religion in America to have not one, not two, but three wars named for them, the sect most famous for practicing polygyny, and the one owning the most absurdly incredulous origin story (though aren’t they all, really?).
Consider these interesting details.
Ensconced in relative isolation in Utah, polygyny went on until the Church finally “officially” banned it in 1890 in order to, at last, get Utah admitted to the Union as a state, though, of course, “unofficially” it is still going on to this day in peculiar enclaves. Telling, is that it’s still allowed in Mormon Heaven! It’s also the only major sect in America whose sacred texts specifically focus on both Native Americans and Black people in the scheme of things. Smith decreed Native Americans descendants of one of his fictional “children of Israel” clans, who properly lost their land because they sinned against God. But even with Smith’s fascination with Indians, and Moroni as their Native American “angel,” Brigham Young approved their slavery and the Utah Mormons would accrue hundreds of Native slaves, most of them children, and had wars — surprise, surprise — against numerous local tribes. Other tribes Young attempted to enlist as allies… against the United States. In the end, the Mormons mostly pushed the Indians out of their territory. Within fifty years of the Mormon arrival, the Native American population of Utah had plummeted from around 20,000 to under three thousand.
Yet, in the Mormon “tiers of redemption” ascribed for the various races, the wayward Native Americans are the top candidates. Jews are next. Last are Black folk. Smith figured them Cain’s descendants. You know, spawn of the first murderer in the world according to the Bible. Smith was back and forth in his assessment of Black people. In the Book of Mormon, they rebel against God and subsequently are cursed with black skin. In pro-slavery Missouri, Smith was pro-slavery; when he was considered too untrustworthy by actual slavers, he and his followers were kicked out of the state, fleeing to anti-slavery Illinois where he flipped to toeing that ideological stance. In the Book of Mormon, prejudice against people with dark skin is condemned, yet the Church would come to forbid their full membership, the priesthood or other leadership positions. Worst of all, Black families could not be “sealed” in Heaven where you live happily ever after with your loved ones (and get your own planet). The Church was on the wrong side of history regarding interracial marriage, desegregation and Civil Rights, opposing them all. The Church’s official theology presupposed that racial discrimination was God’s will. Not until 1978 did the Church president receive a “revelation from God,” and the ban on full membership and access to the priesthood was lifted for Black members. And so, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints became the last major “Christian” denomination to allow full participation of Black people.
On the other hand, LGBTQ folk who might want to be part of the LDS Church (for what reason I cannot fathom) are still awaiting a president’s “revelation from God.” The Church does not recognize gay, umm, “behavior,” same-sex marriages, nor transgender members. The Church is magnanimous in forgiving LGBTQ thoughts. But don’t you dare go beyond that! Acting upon those thoughts will get you “disciplined.” In cases where you are unrepentant, you’ll be excommunicated. And that’s not fun (more about that in a sec)! It could be that the average Mormon wishes no ill-will toward LGBTQ individuals and would never want to deny them rights, but they will reliably vote for Republican politicians who will.
Women, too, are second-class citizens in the Mormon Church. Certainly they are revered as baby-makers, moms and helpmates at home, and nurses and teachers and assistants in the workplace (if they must, as staying at home is preferred for them), but they cannot be priests or the highest officials. They don’t even get to know their husband’s secret name (though he gets to ask hers… so as to identify her in Mormon Heaven). Utah was one of the first states to allow women the right to vote, which sounds totally incongruous with how they are stripped of authority within the Church and family (but wouldn’t it have been a political power boon to one guy with 56 wives?). In real life women are encouraged, as the Bible does command, to be utterly submissive to their husbands and dutifully focused on their family, not to worry with worldly issues. The overtly patriarchal LDS Church claims to be protecting “traditional gender roles” and “family values” in limiting the roles women can assume within the Church hierarchy, and pushing their women members to “reject the secular value of individuality.” The Church also waged a long campaign against birth control, finally capitulating to the deference of the families involved just a few decades ago. The Church has long attempted to govern what clothing women should wear, only in 2017 announcing that female employees of the Church could wear trousers. And now BYU female students are finally allowed to wear… shorts.
Despite its relentless effort to normalize the LDS brand in modern America, behind the veneer of the happy, smiling, friendly, helpful, well-groomed, seemingly successful Stepford — oops, I mean Mormon — family remains a stern, backwards, punitive religious hierarchy which proffers the most bizarre theology in all of Christendom. And that’s saying a lot, the whole lot being loony-toons. Yet the Mormon religion takes all of the silliness of the Old and New Testaments and adds heaping layers of crazy. As with many other conservative “Christian” sects, the Bible’s strict conformity and punitive law and order is prioritized over the more compassionate common wisdom. The former being much better for controlling the flock.
From a position of pope-like, infallible, “divine authority,” the elders of the LDS Church demand that adherents believe it all fervently, unquestioning. Mormons strenuously push back on doubters, going to great lengths to “prove” the claims of Smith and the Book of Mormon and other works of the religion.
Alas, their archaeological and other “scientific” attempts have fallen far short of convincing non-indoctrinated observers. So the best defense for the Church is to do what all cults do: protect the believers from outside influence as much as possible.
Still, of the major denominations, the LDS Church may be the easiest to get kicked out of. The rules are many, the traps omnipresent, and the clashes with modern culture ever threatening. College girls in tank-tops are breaking the honor code, boys holding hands is verboten, and according to the Church, Starbucks is in league with the Devil. Imagine prickly, puritanical elders banning a drink the entire other world adores (and is actually healthy for you)!
Within the Church, doubting the dogma is grounds for quick expulsion. There are cruel and unusual punishments for those who fail the test. If you are ex-communicated, this can involve “shunning,” which means that no member can have contact with you. This includes your own family: parents, spouse, children. Cancerous growths in the Church are summarily excised. Yeah, this kind of “faith” is behind those adorable, toothy Mormon grins.
Ripping families apart has long been taken for granted as an authoritarian entitlement for Mormon elders, never allowing the thought arise that it might actually be… pure evil.
In the 21st Century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints remains stubbornly retro (i.e. 19th Century), a bastion of conservative “elite” male power, over women in particular, but the entire flock in reality, desiring a clonish, obeying, non-questioning membership, demanding steep tithing (at least 10%, pre-tax gross) for even the poorest members, and “missionary” work, which is effectively every young man and many women, giving over a couple of years of their life to pay to work as a salesperson for the religion. Imagine day after day going around some strange town or village knocking on doors. The success rate can be low, the toll on the mental health of the missionaries often high. While on mission you are allowed to communicate with your family back home twice, per year. There are perks, such as coming home to something of a temporary hero welcome and the Church nudging available mates to marry you and swiftly get that family started. While on mission and, really, at all times, the Church keeps close tabs on how you are doing with your “faith,” and is ready to step right into your life if you, or anyone in your family, waver. Other Mormons, most especially family members and friends, co-workers or fellow students (and certainly your mission “companion”), are commanded to rat you out if you stray. As a member, you really do belong to the Church. It’s a Big Daddy state of affairs.
The LDS Church claims to be “political neutral,” but this is a sham. Not only are its tenets extremely conservative and around 70 percent of American Mormons are Republicans, which, yes, is as historically bizarre as so many Southern conservatives now waving their Confederate flag from within the Party of Lincoln, which laid waste to Old Dixie and also sent the U.S. cavalry to war against Brigham Young’s brigands.
The Church is expert at steering its members toward the conservative Republicans, as well as guiding how they should vote on any particular issue without seemingly violating its own “neutrality” rule.
Most Mormons accept all of this. They don’t know anything different. They think of themselves, first and foremost, as Mormons. It all seems normal to them; they can’t imagine life outside the structure of the Church, and are very protective of it.
The Church’s aggressive, proselytizing, micro-managing (down to your underwear) strategy has worked wonders. Both people and cash have flowed into its clutches. It’s one of the few major Christian denominations that is still growing. Yet the worldwide decline in religious belief has hit even the Mormons. The annual growth rate of the LDS Church spiked over 7 percent in the late 1960s, then declined in the 70’s to around 3 percent, soared over 8 percent in the early 1990s, but since then has been on a consistent downward trajectory, now hovering at just over 1 percent per year growth.
This is wholly unacceptable to the Church, which long ago abandoned its Fortress Zion, anti-United States, isolation in the Salt Lake basin in order to pursue the dream of all sects: social domination. More so than perhaps any other Christian denomination, the Mormons have the authoritarian system, and the money, to give this goal a go! Indeed, as mentioned, their very own sacred texts predict that everyone will eventually become a Mormon.
But the elders know they have problems. That long downslide in growth rate is a result of several gnarly factors.
Even as the popularity of religion as a whole is headed south in many modern nations, including the U.S., so are birthrates. Try as they might to encourage very large families, the LDS Church isn’t pumping out enough baby Mormons to super-charge its growth rate like in the 1990s and prior. As well, despite the Church’s defense shields, secular culture continues to gnaw away at the faith of the faithful, a significant percentage of whom elect to bail. That number seems to be increasing, especially among younger members, particularly young women. The majority of these departures are also more liberal-minded members, which means the Church, despite desperate attempts to “liberalize,” overall continues to get more and more conservative, which means… more and more dangerous.
Always the optimists and opportunists, the Mormon elders are ever seeking novel methods for keeping the religion’s expansion, and the profits, rolling along. Even if those methods are more than a little shady. With a cabal at the top of the hierarchy playing with a vast fortune and dreams of domination, you know they are going to find ways to get in trouble.
Truly, conflict remains a constant in the LDS Church. The Church is still at war with modern culture, but strategically retreating to some degree. In recent decades, under the guise of “continuing revelation” (which essentially acknowledges, “my bad,” to the millions of believers who struggled and sacrificed to adhere to the hoary old rules), the Church has accelerated liberalizing changes to various tenets and practices, rites and rituals. One of those efforts includes the attempt to phase out the very word “Mormon,” surely hoping nearly two centuries of disturbing baggage might disappear with it. No one should buy it.
Though no longer in danger of “extermination” in any particular state, the Church’s innate craziness continues to attract criticism and ridicule, while perennially being on the wrong side of public sentiment and/or morality still invites negative publicity.
Recently, there have been chiding, teasing, blaming secular entertainment offerings such as the hit Broadway musical, “The Book of Mormon,” the horror flick, “The Heretic,” the popular mini-series, “American Primeval,” and “The Secrets of Mormon Wives” (on Disney Plus, for Christ sakes), all of which cut a little too close to the truth for the elders’ comfort. A few years ago, the Church waded into a “compromise” with the State of Utah on gay marriage (you can think it, but not do it, and the religion still won’t allow it even if the secular state does), which ended up satisfying no one. Then it took a big public relations hit when it opposed the legalization of medical marijuana, running against the tide of both popular support and facts (a long tradition). The Internet has not been a net-plus to the Mormons. Its long backslide in growth rate coincides precisely with the advent and growth of the World Wide Web. Truth is ever an opponent to religion, and there are squads of ex-Mormons tormenting the Church through blogs and podcasts. Then, recently, the Mormon Church was fined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for using “shell” companies to hide $32 BILLION of investments that others in the religion knew nothing about. As you can imagine, even within the Church this has shaken indoctrinated perceptions of the “righteousness” and “holiness” of these supposedly divinely-inspired elders. And now: a child abuse scandal.
With these nagging issues and growth rate trending dangerously toward red-lining, the Church elders know they must act boldly to keep their Church on its upward arc toward world domination. It all just has to work. The Book of Mormon declares it will. If there is anything absolutely certain for the believer, it is this.
But now, with the winds of change blowing against them, what can they do to tap in, positively, to secular culture to draw in more members and money, and keep that goal alive? Beyond the fresh-scrubbed, friendly faces and adorable, successful families, what could make Americans, in particular, fall in love with them?
Suddenly comes a gift. From Jesus/God? Perhaps. Something has changed for their benefit in one special field. It’s the Wild West again. In American college sports!
With no rules to stop them, the elders have a dream. They will buy national championships in football and basketball….
The Mormons are going “sportswashing.”
Não se engana.
Resposta errada. Como sempre - falta de critério e contextualização.
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