Under the Banner of the Goddess

In 1979 my sister travelled across the United States with two guys, one of whom was an archeologist. They had an interesting stop in Salt Lake City where they toured a museum focusing on Mormon history. For those unfamiliar, Mormon doctrine holds that ancient Hebrews traveled to the New World and became the Nephites and the Lamanites, the goodies and the baddies among the Native Americans, the baddies having the dark skin that was “the mark of Cain.” Needless to say there is no archeological evidence anywhere in the Americas to support this, that great battles between these two factions had taken place, a fact which my sister’s friend was quick to point out (a waste of breath as it always is when confronted by the iron-clad certainty of religious belief).

Her story of this event was the first time I’d ever heard of the Mormons or, as they prefer to be called, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I went on to read about them (Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer was my first introduction to one of the fundamentalist wings of the LDS Church, one that still practices polygamy, and I have also been following various podcasts here and here over the past year or so).

The story is fascinating to me because Mormons are famously good at documenting their history, raising the question of the veracity of all revealed religion. Their founder, Joseph Smith, supposedly had the Book of Mormon dictated to him by an Angel, or he found buried gold plates which contained the text of the book (which nobody else ever saw), receiving the translation by looking inside a hat. Smith had been a fraudulent treasure seeker in upstate New York before he found religion in the early nineteenth century. (He was also a voracious sexual predator, marrying at least 30 women, some of whom were in their early teens, some of whom were already married to other men.)

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, once said “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion.” The LDS church is a high-demand religion where unless you pay 10% of your income to the church, you are excluded from some of the highest privileges of worship, including access to the LDS temple. The result has been exploding financial growth in a church that now owns about 4% of public land in the United States and whose net worth is over $200 billion, wealth accrued not just from tithes but also from aggressive investment in tech and real estate, somewhat inconsistent with the notion that churches are accorded non-profit designations.

Religious belief is a fundamental human right. It is also true that patriarchal religions have done untold harm across the centuries, inflicting violence in the form of Crusades and other holy wars across the world, torture under the Inquisition, murder especially of women accused of witchcraft for over five hundred years, and the abuse of children on the part of clergy, protected by the very institutions charged with protecting the young.

There is now a vocal ex-mormon presence online, intent on exposing abuses and injustices inflicted on members by the patriarchal authority of old (very old) white men. By all metrics, the LDS church qualifies as a cult by Steven Hassan. Though some of the rules demanded of members seem quaint (no coffee, no alcohol, weird holy underwear), others, such as a virulent anti-gay and anti-trans agenda, are more harmful (gay teen suicides are rife in Utah; the millions of dollars poured into defeating California’s gay marriage initiative in 2008 led many young members to leave the church in droves, a massive miscalculation on the part of the church leadership). I personally have a big problem with any church intent on missionary work especially in developing countries, but Africa is a rich recruiting ground for the LDS church (though how many converts persist in their faith 10 years after their baptism is an interesting question). I also have a revulsion toward the practice of baptisms for the dead, ANY dead, your grandparents, your family who died in the Holocaust.

Curiously, though, LDS doctrine also holds that God has a wife, the Goddess, or Heavenly Mother as she is known to Mormons, a being who has given birth to billions of human spirits. Members are discouraged from praying to her or even from talking about her; it seems that a patriarchal religion that goes so far as to posit a woman of power is so afraid of her that she is made invisible. Mormon women are leaving the church in high numbers. But it doesn’t matter: the church doesn’t need their tithes anymore, not with all that accumulated wealth…