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The first article of this series was titled “The World’s Most American Religion.” I made this claim because there aren’t many institutions that represent the American experiment quite like the Mormon Church.
TSSC would be just a twinkle in Joseph Smith’s eye if it weren’t for manifest destiny, the brutal colonialist expansion westward as the American government gobbled up territory to build the most powerful empire in history. Their beliefs in doctrine like the Curse of Ham and their concept of male-only priesthoods literally institutionalize racism and define a literal patriarchy. Today, the Church is propped up by massive sugar-fueled corporate endeavors, venture capital and asset management, and an extensive, global network of guilty tithe-paying TBMs. I’d argue all of these are pretty American characteristics of the faith.
Even the leader of the church is called a President. Mormons are historically militant, and Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both notably (and separately) called for Mormons to take up arms against the United States government. I mean, s**t, they believe that the biblical Zion will be built in the Americas and that Jesus visited here after his resurrection.
What’s somehow more American than all of that, is how the Mormon Church uses an empty, remote holy site to house a tacky, overpriced gift shop to squeeze just a little bit more money out of pilgrims who drove untold distances to see such holy places as jails and empty fields. Especially me.
Welcome back to Putting the Moron in Moroni. This week, Joseph proves he did not learn his lesson when he was tarred and feathered in Ohio. F**k Ohio, Joseph and the gang are going back to Missouri. We did not learn our lesson that these religious sites are mostly just empty fields. F**k Kansas City, let’s check out a gift shop next to an empty field in the middle of nowhere.
We’re keeping the Mormon History Retelling chronological, so the Road Trip Gonzo will be a little out of order, but we’re telling a story here, people.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Please sign up for a shift cleaning the temple. We know you don’t have any hobbies and Boy Scouts doesn’t start back up for at least a month. You do what your Temple Recommend, right? It’ll be fun, we can play Apples to Apples after.
It’s April 1, 1832. One week ago, Joseph Smith was dragged out of the house he was staying in by an angry mob in Ohio. No foolin’.
The mob called for Smith’s castration, but the doctor in town refused to comply. They didn’t care too much, because they still covered the prophet in tar and feathers and he was “left for dead” in the street.
These are all events that probably happened. But now, a week later, Joseph and his confederation of crooks were making their way back to Missouri for yet another mission. This second visit to Missouri was less consequential in terms of actual historical events, but had some pivotal moments for Joseph testing what he can get away with via revelation.
On April 26, 1832, Joseph Smith revealed that the Saints had to make their community in Zion (Independence) bigger. This edict tapped some of his most fervent loyalists to stay and grow the frontier colony of Mormons. They had more or less abandoned the mission of converting Native Americans and were squarely focused on building a larger community.
Smith did this by commanding the establishment of the “United Firm,” the first major business venture of the church aside from the publishing of the Book of Mormon. This revelation was primarily focused on the “literary and mercantile” aspects of the church, and specifically in Independence; how can we make and sell more books and other b******t to make the church more money, while pumping up our rookie numbers?
At the same time, more and more of the first TBMs were bought in on the idea of colonizing the area from Zion to the Missouri River, as we learned last week. The idea of missionary work was starting to take hold and Mormons began their longstanding cultural tradition of being extremely annoying.
Like the Bhagwan in Oregon over 100 years later, Mormons effectively aimed to outnumber the non-Mormons of Independence to control the land, politics, and civic life of the region, and there were certainly few enough people to do so. This was, as you may recall from last week, a directive from God.
Most of the correspondence from summer 1832 that’s documented in the Joseph Smith Papers, an apologetic (not that they’re sorry, but that they’re Mormon Apologists) pseudo-historical research project of the LDS Church, boils down to Joseph trying to talk everyone down.
Tension was growing between the Kirtland and Independence congregations; the Missourians were more…fanatical in the frontier religion sense (lots of speaking in tongues, visions, etc.) and the Kirtlanders were pissed that Joseph’s attention was elsewhere when Kirtland should be the main priority. It was almost certainly not clocking to them that Joseph Smith was standing on business (getting a bad rep in Ohio for being a philandering con man).
In September, we get the first-ever account of The First Vision. As you may recall, this was the story where Joseph didn’t know what church to join so he went to the woods by his parents house and asked God. He got on his knees and then Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father, two distinct beings, appeared before him. Or at least this is the version Mormons know.
This 1832 account was much different. He claims to have seen “Deity,” a phrase I’ve never seen outside of the First Vision context in Mormon theology (exmos please educate me). No mention of Heavenly Father, only “God” who is also Jesus Christ but also refers to a father? No mention of two distinct beings. Luckily for Joseph, this version was not published until the late 19th century, well after his timely death.
Joseph wrote in a letter to William Phelps, one of his top guys who moved to Independence, in November that reported about 800 people had joined the Saints in Zion. This letter, like most of the correspondence from the time, tried to assuage concerns from the Missourians, this time because the financial support promised from the Kirtland church had yet to arrive (Joseph also revealed that they were to build a temple in Kirtland).
At the same time, these enterprising Zion-ists were attempting to fulfill God’s revelations to operate a printing press and store to prop up Smith’s Missouri project. This was not their brightest idea.
The Evening and Morning Star was the name of the Mormon-operated newspaper in Independence started in June 1832 and began ruffling the feathers of the “old settlers” of the Independence area.
This was an important step in the creation of Zion and showed that the Missouri delegation was taking Joseph seriously, despite the near constant infighting since the end of 1831. There were leaders teaching their own versions of doctrine, and wherever Joseph wasn’t, Mormon leaders were criticizing him behind his back. Other colonies struggled to align their doctrine with Smith. Between slow transportation and communication, Smith was doing damage control for the better part of 1832 and 1833. Oh yeah and he also took a mission to Canada. I’m sure his local leaders struggling to keep everything afloat really loved that.
Who knew a decentralized cult would have constant struggles for power?
The Star, however, may have gone a bit too far in poking the bear that was the local racists in the area. In their July 16, 1833 edition, they published an editorial with “practical” advice for free “people of color” who are moving to Missouri, which mostly just amounted to “please keep your papers on you.”
We, readers and listeners, are smart enough to know that the Mormons were extremely racist, but to the slaveholding hick settlers of Missouri, they took it as an invitation for Black Mormons to move to the area, or worse, encourage the enslaved people of Jackson County to join the Mormons for an armed revolt against the slaveholding locals.
This was also Ye Olden Days, so mass communication wasn’t really a thing. Messages and letters could take weeks or months to get to Ohio from Missouri and vice versa. Correspondence between the Ohio and Missouri at the time showed great worry from Smith that the tensions could quickly become insurmountable. New doctrine was being created, and a “Book of Commandments” was sent to Missouri to be printed at the press in Independence.
The Ohio church was totally unaware of the scale and speed at which locals would negatively react to the July 16 editorial. On July 20, locals published a response which made racist assumptions that Smith was trying to incite a race war in Jackson County in hopes of padding his numbers or push the locals out of town. This was also a period where Mormon doctrine would continue to radically diverge from mainline Protestantism and later, there would be speculation that Joseph Smith had begun privately practicing polygamy as early as 1832—Brigham Young and his contemporaries would say as much after Smith’s death.
Regardless, the locals’ rebuttal worked, and that same day an angry mob (funny how there’s always an angry mob chasing the Mormons around) destroyed the printing press at the Evening and Morning Star. Remember, the church is Ohio, including Joseph Smith, had no idea.
In Jackson County, things moved really fast. On July 23rd, an angry mob rounded up the church leaders in Independence. The Mormons were compelled to agree to the locals’ demands, which principally kicked the Mormons out of Jackson County. They agreed to have at least 50% of Mormons leave the county by January 1, 1834. The leaders were allowed to continue to wrap up their business, but the message was clear: Stay out of Independence, Lebowski! Stay out of Independence, deadbeat! Keep your ugly f****n' goldbrickin' ass out of my prairie community.
The church in Zion sent the terms of the agreement to Joseph Smith, which he would finally receive in late August. The agreement is extraordinary, but also proves that the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
I’ve gone back and forth on how much of this I want to directly discuss because my God, I’ve read enough primary and secondary sources from the perspective of Mormons (read: Joseph Smith Word Vomit), but it’s soooo nice to read something from their haters, even if they were racist people from Missouri.
We the undersigned citizens of Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand as regards our civil society, in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our County, styling themselves Mormons and intending as we do to rid our society “peacably if we can, forcibly if we must”
Okay, fair enough, locals. I’d say the same thing if a bunch of freaks claiming they can all talk to God showed up in my town expressly to push me out by buying all of the land.
It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics or knaves; for one or the other they undoubtedly are, made their first appearance amongst us and pretending as they did and now do— to hold personal communion and converse, face to face with the most high God, to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven, to heal the sick by the laying on of hands, & in short to perform all the wonderworking miracles wrought by the inspired apostles & prophets of old.
We believed them to be deluded fanatics or weak and designing knaves and that they & their pretensions would soon pass away, but in this we were deceived.
Please do note how more cogent the locals’ agreement is than literally anything Joseph or his uneducated cadre of fanatics would publish.
The acts of a few designing leaders amongst them have thus far succeeded in holding them together as a society and since the arrival of the first of them, they have been daily increasing in numbers & if they had been respectable citizens in society & thus deluded, they would have been entitled to our pity rather than to our contempt & hatred. But from their appearance, from their manners and their conduct since their coming among us, we have every reason to fear that with very few exceptions, they were of the very dregs of that society from which they came, lazy, idle & vicious.
This we conceive is not idle assertion, but a fact susceptible of proof…they brought into our county, little or no property with them, & left less behind them, and we infer that those only yoked themselves to the Mormon Car who had nothing earthly or heavenly to lose by the change, and we fear that if some of the leaders amongst them had paid the forfeit due to crime, instead of being chosen embassadors of the most high, they would have been inmates of solitary cells.
“Those who yoked themselves to the Mormon car” is one of my favorite phrases I’ve read from a primary source while researching for Putting the Moron in Moroni, I am sooooo on board. When are they gonna lose me?
But their conduct here stamps their characters in their true colors. More than a year since, it was ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves and endeavoring to sow dissensions & raise seditions among them.
In a late [Evening and Morning] Star published at Independence, by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free [people of color] from other States to become Mormons and remove and settle among us.
Ohhhhhh…there it is. So it turns out the land-owning, slaveholding, colonizing gentry of Independence, MO might actually also be bad people. Who could have predicted that?
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Joseph was still fixated on building Zion while his buddies were getting kicked out of it.
In August, Smith urged his followers to not sell “one foot” of land and to stick to their guns, even thought he had an incomplete understanding of just how dire the situation was. In a very David Korreshian way, he proclaimed:
“All hell and the combined powers of Earth are Marsheling [sic] their forces to overthrow us.”
By October the Mormons had organized a response. Joseph’s “embassadors” [sic] traveled to Jefferson City and made a plea to the Missouri state government, petitioning for political protections (read: the state militia needs to protect us) as well as financial compensation for the seizing and destruction of property and land.
Governor Daniel Dunklin was not keen to support the Mormons in their suit. He recommended that they go through the court system first. This did not work for the Mormons. They announced their intention to fight the eviction, and hired a big money law firm on October 30. On October 31, an angry mob attacked a Mormon settlement just outside of town. A few days later, another mob captured the Mormon ferry on the Big Blue River. This skirmish was the most consequential; both parties exchanged gunfire, and one Mormon and two locals died. It was only at this point when the Mormons agreed to leave Jackson County and surrendered their arms.
After the Saints were successfully driven from Jackson County, they found short-term refuge in neighboring Clay County. Jackson County locals refused to permit Mormons to return to get their possessions or conduct additional business. This was Not Very Cash Money of Them, in Joseph Smith’s eyes.
In 1834, high on his own supply, Smith organized “Zion’s Camp,” which was a quasi-military operation to try to forcibly take back Mormon property in Jackson County. He was banking on the support of the Missouri government, God knows why, and Missouri obviously refused. They didn’t get anywhere near Independence before realizing the help from Gov. Dunklin was not coming, giving up, and going back to Ohio.
He had already given up on Independence having the first temple (which was more like a fancy church than the rigorous purpose-built facilities Mormons have today), and the actual first one would be raised in Kirtland.
In 1836, the Missouri government determined that Clay County was no longer a suitable home for the Mormon refugees (and migrants). They created a new county, Caldwell County, to serve as a haven for the Mormons. It wasn’t Zion, which undoubtedly pissed Joseph off, but it was a place nonetheless. Mormons settled in a town they called Far West, MO, which would become the largest settlement of Mormons to date, swelling to 4,000 by 1838.
I guess this was kind of a concession for getting kicked out of Jackson County? The town was laid out according to Joseph Smith’s design for Zion (Independence), and like Independence, Joseph Smith revealed in 1837 that a temple was to be built in Far West. Like Independence, that temple would never be built, but we’ll learn more about that next week.
It was also in 1836, back in Kirtland, that Joseph Smith began a relationship with 16-year-old servant, Fanny Alger. The relationship was described by his contemporaries as a “nasty affair.” Emma Smith recalled in a letter that she caught Joseph and Fanny mid-”transaction” in the barn on their farm. It’s important to note that Fanny was effectively adopted by the Smiths and lived with them.
This relationship strained Joseph’s relationship with his most devout followers. There was no doubt that Smith’s activities were immoral, extramarital, and counter to his pious image. This chink in his armor would sour long-time followers, and paired with the Kirtland Safety Society’s failure (next week!), would put the future of Joseph’s church in financial and political jeopardy, not to mention the danger of pissing off thousands of armed frontierspeople across multiple states.
The jury is still out on whether Joseph and Fanny’s affair led to a “plural marriage” or not, but she was effectively the first “plural wife” of Joseph: a woman with whom God had ordained him to have holy sex with. She may not have been “sealed” to Joseph in the way Mormons are familiar with today, but we can be pretty sure Joseph justified his infidelity with a child by saying God told him to, and I guess Mormons are just OK with that. “A Mormon just believes!”
Instead of the Far West Temple Site, we set our GPS to take us to The Country Store, an LDS Church-owned gift shop and book store meant to serve the same function as a truck stop bathroom.
It does have a “historical site” next door, but it’s so insignificant it doesn’t even show up as a point of interest on Google Maps. It was some dude’s cabin.
The Country Store sells Mormon books, art, music, movies, and most importantly, overpriced commemorative souvenirs. I am not ashamed to admit I did purchase a $20 “Adam-ondi-Ahman” commemorative baseball cap in Minnesota Vikings colors. Mind you, we were still a solid 20-30 minute drive from Adam-ondi-Ahman, but when God shows you a souvenir hat for Mormon Garden of Eden, you take out your wallet.
The Country Store isn’t even right next to the Far West temple site, which is the actual historical site with some degree of religious significance. It’s like, a half-mile down the road. I am going to do a ~bonus~ newsletter about what I bought there (and also other Mormon stuff I got on the trip, including loaned items and gifts from my exmo friend), but the actual experience of shopping there was jarring.
Walking in, a family of TBMs who was clearly on a pilgrimage to the various sites in the area (their car had Utah plates) was chatting with the clerk, who was a burly older man who clearly was from Missouri. He talked like an NPC in The Oregon Trail, muttering about the trails and the tough road ahead. It was like LeapFrog Red Dead Redemption 2.
I was pleased that the man was distracted—we were able to avoid him trying to talk to us, for the most part. The family left, and he just sat at the counter with the quiet christian rock radio station playing out of a small boombox.
We spent most of our time combing through the books, particularly on the discount shelf, but again, nothing beats my God Damned Commemorative Adam-ondi-Ahman Baseball Cap. I’d have gotten a hoodie instead, but they were f*****g $60, and it was bad enough to be buying anything, knowing it goes directly into the LDS church’s pockets.
The only plus is that the man working there, with is G-rated old-timey vibes, was astute enough to gather that we were non-Mormons touring the various sites. He clocked that we were on our way to Adam-ondi-Ahman, and let us know the bridge on the main road had been washed out, and provided an alternative route (but he never mentioned that the entire 45-minute drive would be on dirt roads).
I can’t say it enough: do these people never take a f*****g hint? How many natural disasters, burned down temples, washed out bridges, and violent angry mobs do Mormons need to suffer through before they realize that maybe God doesn’t think they’re his chosen people???
But back to my most righteous pilgrimage.
The name “temple site” should immediately raise alarm bells. You might remember the first stop on the road trip was to Temple Lot, an empty lot where the Mormons were supposed to build their first temple, but to this day no such temple exists, at least not by the Utah Mormon church. “Site” and “Lot” mean functionally the same thing: there’s supposed to be a temple here but for…reasons…there isn’t.
The actual site is extraordinarily underwhelming.
The site is basically just another empty field. There’s no remains of Ye Olde Far West Towne where the 4,000 Mormons allegedly lived, just a fenced in field with four cornerstones, all encased in tacky glass boxes. A tasteless three-piece granite monument stands that features Mormon stuff, including the law of tithing, because, oh yeah, Joseph Smith had his revelation that all of his followers owed his church 10% of their income for time immemorial while at Far West in 1838.
The worst part about the monument, though, is that the entrance gate to the temple site is not centered with the monument. They couldn’t even bother to line it up correctly. This was so memorable to my brain, that that night, I had a dream where I was trying to fix things that weren’t lined up simply because they didn’t bother to click the “center” button on the CAD landscape architecture software. Just f*****g unprofessional b******t.
The LDS Church owns the site, but the only physical presence the church has is the gift shop. Like Temple Lot, the Community of Christ is, yet again, a foil of the Utah apostates. Literally across the street from the site is a meeting house/church for the Community of Christ. It’s baffling, again and again, to see that the splinter group that denied Brigham Young takes the religious reverence of these sites seriously, while they’re just roadside attractions to Utahns.
The first thing you notice when you get out of your car is the overwhelming smell of farm country. Just an unavoidable stench of manure everywhere. This was the case at all of these rural sites. A hallmark of Mormon church-run places, that I’ve noticed both in Missouri/Illinois and touring the Washington, DC temple a few years back, is that they will spend a fortune on landscaping, especially beautiful flower beds that look like they were planted mere minutes before you got there. Another expression of their opulent wealth.
These flower beds were present at Far West, Adam-ondi-Ahman, and throughout Nauvoo. Especially at Far West, though, it was obvious these flowers were partially meant to offset or overpower the disgusting stench of America’s productive farmland.
Where the Catholics build immense sanctuaries filled with evocative music, beautiful art, and an instant sense of spiritualism created by burning incense, the Mormons just hope you can’t smell the literal b******t all around you.
Thanks for reading and listening this week. Next week, we figure out why the Mormons had to leave Far West (spoiler: it was treason) and visit the closest place to the Garden of Eden on Earth, Adam-ondi-Ahman, which “““translates””” to “Valley of the Gods” in the (fake) “Adamic” language.
Also, stay tuned, a special bonus “haul” edition of the newsletter is coming where I’ll touch on all of the Mormon paraphernalia that came into my possession during the road trip, both gifts from my exmo friend and purchases feeding money directly to the Mormon machine.
As much as I’d love to sing Broadway show tunes with you after we swing through Swig, I have to admit I can’t be with you. I’m waiting for my returning missionary to sweep me away. He’s so dreamy. Oh, his name? I’ve actually never talked to him. He’s the Bishop’s son.
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