The Accidental Terrorist by William Shunn

Author:William Shunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941928547
Publisher: William Shunn

Nothing at our bland, boring Sunday meetings had prepared me for anything like the endowment. Belying the white finery around me, this was something primitive, savage, primordial. This was real Old Testament shit. It seemed too obscene to be enacted in so sacred a place. And what did it really mean? If I should break my oaths, who would show up to enact the penalty? Would I be expected to do it myself? Or was this an example of the torments that would await me in the next life?

It also seemed uncomfortably close to what the Book of Mormon decried as “secret combinations”—murderous cabals bound together by secret signs and blood oaths. “For the Lord worketh not in secret combinations,” the scriptures taught us. But if that was true, then what was this happening all around me?

Some historical perspective is in order, perspective I didn’t have at the time. In September 1826, hooded men burned a printing press in Batavia, New York, and beat the owner severely. The press had just produced proofs of a book exposing the rites and covenants of Freemasonry. Shortly thereafter, the book’s author, William Morgan, was abducted, never again to be seen alive.

Five men, all well-known Masons, were tried for Morgan’s kidnapping and presumed murder in January 1827 at Canandaigua, New York, not far from Joseph Smith’s home. Three of the five were acquitted, while the two others received light jail sentences. Further trials resulted in more acquittals, sparking an anti-Masonic fervor the likes of which the country had never seen.

It was in the midst of this furor that Joseph Smith began work on the Book of Mormon, so it’s no surprise to find evidence of these attitudes in the text. In fact, this was so obvious to readers of the day that one newspaper, in reviewing it, labeled it Joe Smith’s “anti-Masonick Bible.”

It was a different world, however, in 1842. The Morgan affair had long blown over, and Freemasonry was enjoying a resurgence, its members again making inroads in business and politics. The Mormons were experiencing a renaissance of their own. Under Joseph’s leadership in Illinois, they had purchased most of the land on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. There they built a fine city and christened it Nauvoo, from a Hebrew term connoting natural beauty.

Joseph’s emissary to Springfield, John C. Bennett, had won extraordinary powers for the new city in its charters, as state legislators fell over each other to curry favor with the Mormons. (Not only did the Saints comprise a large and powerful new voting bloc, but Illinois was also eager to prove to the nation how much more tolerant it was than Missouri.) Nauvoo’s government was free to enact any laws it wanted, so long as they didn’t contravene the Constitution, and the Nauvoo Legion, a military force nominally part of the state militia, was in effect sanctioned as a private army. Joseph, as its head, had taken to wearing a fancy military coat wherever he went, and preferred being addressed as “General.

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