The Heathen's Guide to World Religions by William Hopper

Author:William Hopper [Hopper, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2011-02-22T06:00:00+00:00

So now the Latter Day Saints are leaderless. For a bit anyway. It didn‘t take long before a man named Brigham Young took the reins and really got things going. This guy was fanatical to the infinite power. (There is a pun in there if you look closely enough.) Brigham was stern and intolerant of anything that even hinted at sin. He was a BIG FAN of both corporal and capital punishment, which he meted out freely.

He also wasn‘t stupid. By this time, he and the Saints had figured out that Illinois was not about to welcome their new religion with open arms. Since there was a lot of unsettled land out there, Brigham lead the whole bunch of them (about ten thousand or so) out of Illinois to a New Promised Land. In what amounted to a sort of new age Exodus, the whole religion hit the road in a wagon train bound for Utah—not because it was wonderful or promising or anything, but because it wasn‘t yet part of the Union. In 1847, Utah was Mexican territory. It was, however, only peripherally monitored by the Mexicans, who didn‘t give a damn if these Latter Day Saints had one or twenty wives. More importantly, Brigham Young could be the unchallenged Law for the Saints. His order would be carried out without question and without United States intervention. No piddling human rights stuff to worry about in Utah. This lasted, oh, about a year.

Unfortunately for Brigham‘s theocratic state, Utah was given up by the Mexicans about the same time his reign was just getting established. This time they weren‘t arrested, though. Instead, Washington recognized Brigham Young and the first governor of the state of Utah. Official statehood didn‘t actually happen until Wilford Woodruff, Brigham‘s successor, held power, but it was effectively a state during Brigham‘s regime. Woodruff was basically economically bullied into giving in on the idea of polygamy. He was given the promise that if he didn‘t give up polygamy the federal government would run the railway through Utah and make sure that Salt Lake City and Kansas City (Utah) became known as two of the greatest pornography, gambling and debauchery centers in America. Giving up polygamy definitely seemed the lesser evil.

The Mormons, as they are called, are seen as nowadays as a stoic bunch of stick-in-the-muds that don‘t do anything fun. No tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, etc.59… You begin to suspect that if belching weren‘t biological, they‘d go to hell for that too. They‘re banned from having any hot liquids, including hot chocolate, coffee, soup, and Neo-Citron. From our point of view, a hundred years later Mormons seem archaic and ―old-school‖. The thing is, it was the exact opposite idea that made them big. The LDS offered the people a religious novelty—a new chapter in a Christian tale that had grown stale. Here in the New World, the people wanted a ―New Story‖, and that‘s what Joseph Smith gave them—a new book for the Bible after a thousand years of waiting.

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