Under the Banner of Heaven Page 9

  The sun finally skids behind the horizon in an ozone-enhanced blaze of orange. A scrubbed Mormon “elder,” in his early twenties, walks out and leads the audience in a heartfelt prayer. A few seconds after he finishes there is a fanfare of trumpets, and lasers pierce the night sky with shafts of dazzling light. A thrill ripples through the crowd. Great billows of ersatz fog roll across lower Cumorah. Emerging from the mist, 627 actors march onto stage, costumed as a curious ménage of biblical figures and pre-Columbian North Americans, some wearing headgear adorned with towering antlers.

  Suddenly a disembodied voice—a stern baritone that sounds like it could belong to God Himself—thunders from the seventy-five loudspeakers: “This is the true story of a people who were prepared by the Lord to be ready for the coming of the savior, Jesus Christ. He came to them in the Americas, but their story began in the Old World, in Jerusalem . . .” For the next two hours, the rapt audience is treated to a dramatic reenactment of The Book of Mormon.

  The narrative inscribed on the golden plates, translated by Joseph Smith as The Book of Mormon, is the history of an ancient Hebrew tribe, headed by a virtuous man named Lehi. In raising his large brood, Lehi drummed into the heads of his offspring that the most important thing in life is to earn God's love, and the one and only way to do that, he explained, is to obey the Lord's every commandment.

  Lehi and his followers abandoned Jerusalem six hundred years before the birth of Christ, just ahead of the last Babylonian conquest, and journeyed to North America by boat. In the New World, alas, long-simmering family jealousies flared. Lehi had always favored his youngest and most exemplary son, Nephi, so it shouldn't have surprised anybody when the old man bequeathed leadership of the tribe to him.* But this infuriated Nephi's miscreant brother Laman, causing the tribe to split into two rival clans after Lehi's passing: the righteous, fair-skinned Nephites, led by Nephi, and their bitter adversaries, the Lamanites, as the followers of Laman were known. The Lamanites were “an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety,” whose behavior was so annoying to God that He cursed the whole lot of them with dark skin to punish them for their impiety.

  Shortly after the resurrection of Christ, according to The Book of Mormon, Jesus visited North America to share His new gospel with the Nephites and Lamanites and to persuade the two clans to quit squabbling. Heeding His message, for several hundred years they united amicably as Christians and prospered. But then the Lamanites began to backslide into “unbelief and idolatry.” An unbridgeable rift developed between the clans, and they fought each other with escalating violence.

  Tensions continued to build, eventually sparking a full-blown war that culminated, around A.D. 400, with a brutal campaign in which the reprobate Lamanites slaughtered all 230,000 of the Nephites (which explains why Columbus encountered no Caucasians when he landed in the New World in 1492). Facing starvation, the handful of Nephite children clinging to life at war's end were forced to cannibalize the flesh of dead family members, but in the end they, too, succumbed. The victorious Lamanites survived to become the ancestors of the modern American Indians, although eventually these “red sons of Israel” lost all memory of both the Nephites and their Judaic heritage.

  The leader of the Nephites during their final, doomed battles had been a heroic figure of uncommon wisdom named Mormon; the last Nephite to survive the genocidal wrath of the Lamanites was Mormon's son Moroni, whose account of the Nephites' demise makes up the final chapter of The Book of Mormon. This same Moroni would return as an angel fourteen centuries later to deliver the golden plates to Joseph Smith, so that the blood-soaked history of his people could be shared with the world, and thereby effect the salvation of mankind.

  The Book of Mormon has been much derided by non-Mormons since before it was even published. Critics point out that the gold plates, which would presumably prove the book's authenticity, were conveniently returned to Moroni after Joseph completed his translation, and they haven't been seen since. Scholars have observed that no archaeological artifacts with links to the supposedly advanced and widespread Nephite civilization have ever been found in North America or anywhere else.

  As history, moreover, The Book of Mormon is riddled with egregious anachronisms and irreconcilable inconsistencies. For instance, it makes many references to horses and wheeled carts, neither of which existed in the Western Hemisphere during the pre-Columbian era. It inserts such inventions as steel and the seven-day week into ancient history long before such things were in fact invented. Modern DNA analysis has conclusively demonstrated that American Indians are not descendants of any Hebraic race, as the Lamanites were purported to be. Mark Twain famously ridiculed The Book of Mormon's tedious, quasi-biblical prose as “chloroform in print,” observing that the phrase “and it came to pass” is used more than two thousand times.

  But such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

  In any case, like a movie that is panned by New York critics yet goes on to become a huge blockbuster in the hinterlands, the tremendous popularity of The Book of Mormon makes it impossible to dismiss. The sheer quantity of copies in print—at last count over a hundred million—lends the book a certain gravitas, even among cynics. The numbers speak eloquently to the book's power as a sacred symbol and its raw narrative force. The simple truth is, The Book of Mormon tells a story that multitudes have found compelling—and continue to find compelling, as the swarms who flock to the Hill Cumorah Pageant every July attest.

  In early nineteenth-century America, vestiges of a previous civilization—ruins such as the many Indian burial mounds near Joseph's home—were everywhere. The Book of Mormon explained the origins of these ancient tumuli in a way that dovetailed neatly with both Christian scripture and a theory then in wide circulation, which posited that the American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Joseph's book worked both as theology and as a literal history of the New World. To an awful lot of people, the story makes perfect sense.

  Joseph began winning converts almost immediately after he received the plates from Moroni, well before the book was printed and made public. The excitement conveyed by Martin Harris, Joseph's parents and siblings, and others who swore they had actually “seen and hefted” the “golden bible” convinced their friends and associates to become “Mormonites,” as the Latter-day Saints were initially called. When the Mormon Church was formally established in April 1830, it claimed some fifty members. A year later the membership exceeded one thousand, and fresh converts were arriving all the time.

  Suitably awed that God had chosen Joseph to receive the gold plates, converts had no trouble believing his assertion that his new religion was “the only true and living church upon the face of the earth” or that The Book of Mormon was an essential update to both the Old Testament and the New Testament. They were taught that it was an even newer testament, which provided a more accurate and complete account of sacred history.

  Joseph explained that in the first century after the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christian leadership had taken a wrong theological turn and had led the church astray. Calling this blunder the “Great Apostasy,” he divulged that virtually all Christian doctrine that had developed thereafter—Catholic and Protestant alike—was a whopping lie. Fortunately, The Book of Mormon would set the record straight and restore the true Church of Christ.

  There was an appealing simplicity to the book's
central message, which framed existence as an unambiguous struggle between good and evil: “There are two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations.”

  The Book of Mormon appealed, as well, because it was so thoroughly American. Most of its narrative was set on the American continent. In one of the book's most important moments, Jesus Christ pays a special visit to the New World immediately after His resurrection to tell His chosen people—residents of what would become America—the good news. Moroni delivers the golden plates to a quintessentially American prophet—Joseph—who later receives a revelation in which God lets it be known that the Garden of Eden had been located in America. And when it is time for Jesus to return to earth, He assures Joseph, the Son of Man will be making His glorious arrival in that same corner of America.

  But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.

  God, of course, regularly communicated with Joseph as well his followers. The imparting of heavenly truth began with The Book of Mormon, but by no means did it end there. The Lord routinely issued commandments to Joseph, continually revealing sacred principles that needed to be revised or changed outright. Indeed, the notion that each Mormon prophet receives guidance from an ongoing series of revelations was, and remains, one of the religion's crucial tenets. These revelations are compiled in a thin volume titled The Doctrine and Covenants, which in some ways has supplanted The Book of Mormon as the Latter-day Saints' most consequential scriptural text.

  With these revealed scriptures guiding the way, Joseph made his divine mission known: his job was to reinstate the Lord's One True Church and thereby prepare the earth for the Second Coming of Christ, which was surely imminent. Joseph explained to his rapt followers that they were the Lord's Elect—God's own peculiar people, the true sons and daughters of Israel—and every one of them would be called on to play a crucial role in the Last Days before the Millennium drew nigh. They were, Joseph declared, Latter-day Saints.

  SEVEN

  THE STILL SMALL VOICE

  From its inception, the revelatory tradition in Mormonism engendered strife. The doctrine of modern, continuing revelation, begun by Joseph Smith and accepted by most groups claiming descent, leaves social order open to counterclaims that strike at the heart of ecclesiastical order. If one person may speak for God, why may not another? By claiming an ongoing dialogue with divinity, Joseph Smith opened the door to a social force he could barely control.

  RICHARD L. SAUNDERS,

  “THE FRUIT OF THE BRANCH,”

  DIFFERING VISIONS: DISSENTERS IN MORMON HISTORY

  Yea, thus saith the still small voice, which whispereth through and pierceth all things, and often times it maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest, saying:

  And it shall come to pass that I, the Lord God, will send one mighty and strong . . . to set in order the house of God.

  THE DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS, SECTION 85

  The brick farmhouse stands by itself, surrounded by snow-covered fields in a sparsely populated Utah valley. Mist rises off a nearby river in the eight-degree cold. Inside, a tall, blue-eyed man sits at an uncluttered desk, studying a book through wire-rimmed spectacles. As he bends closer to the page to wrest meaning from the lines of type, winter sunlight streams through a nearby window and glints off the top of his shiny pate, which is ringed with a halo of wispy white hair. The man's name is Robert Crossfield, and the volume that so intensely commands his attention is titled The Second Book of Commandments. He wrote and published it himself, under the other name he is known by: the Prophet Onias. Modeled after The Doctrine and Covenants (the collected revelations of Joseph Smith), The Second Book of Commandments is a compilation of 205 revelations Crossfield/Onias has received from the Lord since 1961.

  Crossfield is a Mormon Fundamentalist and a polygamist, but he insists that his belief system amounts to a much kinder, more compassionate brand of faith than the fundamentalism of Rulon Jeffs, Winston Blackmore, or Dan Lafferty—three men with whom he is intimately acquainted. Notably, for instance, Crossfield detests violence. And although he is convinced of the divine righteousness of plural marriage as the principle was revealed to Joseph Smith, he believes it is sinful for a man to coerce a woman to marry him, or even to ask a woman to marry him; in every case the woman must choose the man for the marriage to be legitimate.

  Born in northern Alberta in 1929, Crossfield is the son of a farmer who went broke trying to homestead on the prairie west of Edmonton. As a nineteen-year-old, Robert came down with tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium for nine months. While bedridden, he passed the endless hours by reading whatever the nurses brought around, and one of the books left by his bedside happened to be a copy of The Book of Mormon. The young Robert Crossfield, who was not religious, was moved by boredom to open the book and read it.

  “In the back of The Book of Mormon,” says Crossfield, “it promises that if you read it with a sincere heart, and you ask the Lord if it's true, he'll manifest the truth of it unto you by the gift of the Holy Ghost. Well, the Holy Ghost came to me after I finished it and showed me very strongly that this book was true. So I converted myself to the Mormon Church.” Crossfield became an active and very pious Saint, was married in the Edmonton LDS Temple, and went to work as an accountant to support his growing family.

  Then, in March 1961, while he was toiling over a ledger at McLeod Mercantile in Spruce Grove, Alberta, “the still small voice of the Lord” suddenly came to him, revealing that he had been chosen to serve as God's mouthpiece—that he was a holy prophet of the Lord. And the very first words God uttered to him that day affirmed the correctness of D & C 132 and the principle of plural marriage.

  A few months after God first spoke to him, Crossfield left Spruce Grove to become office manager of a farmer's cooperative in Creston, British Columbia, a small agricultural town immediately north of the Idaho panhandle. Just down the road from Creston, it turned out, was a flock of fundamentalists allied with the UEP polygamists who lived in what was then called Short Creek, Arizona. Like their brethren in the States at that time, the Creston polygamists followed the teachings of Prophet LeRoy Johnson—the humble, much beloved Uncle Roy. Upon his arrival in Creston, Crossfield heard about the “polygs” in the neighborhood and was curious. He began attending their prayer meetings. Right away they struck him as kindred souls.

  Debbie Palmer was six years old when Crossfield appeared in Bountiful. She remembers him as a dour, wraithlike man with a pockmarked face who would show up at her home to have long theological discussions with her father. Crossfield was a mysterious presence, she recalls, who hovered at the fringe of the community: “When I was a young girl, the Prophet Onias—I guess he was still calling himself Robert Crossfield in those days—seemed weird and creepy. My friends and I were terrified we would be forced to marry him as soon as we turned fourteen.” Crossfield made a much better impression on Ray Blackmore, Uncle Roy, Debbie's dad, and the other fundamentalist leaders, who admired his forthrightness and integrity and soon invited him to join their community.

  God continued to speak to Crossfield throughout his tenure in the Creston Valley, as he immersed himself in fundamentalist doctrine. Most of these revelations closely reiterated the teachings of Uncle Roy, confirming that the leaders of the LDS Church had “cut themselves off from the voice of the Lord” and betrayed some of Joseph Smith's most important tenets—including the sacred principle of plural marriage.

  By 1972 Crossfield had received twenty-three significant revelations, which he collected into a single volume titled The First Book of Commandments, paid a few thousand dollars to have print
ed, and distributed to libraries and religious bookstores across Canada and the western United States. But one of these slender tomes happened to find its way into the hands of LDS President Mark E. Peterson in Salt Lake City, “and that was the end of my church membership,” Crossfield explains. “Came right from the top. I was excommunicated from the Mormon Church.” A tight laugh erupts from deep within his chest. “I loved that church. Still do, in fact. It brought me great joy to attend every Sunday, and I kept going to church long after I was excommunicated. But then they eventually told me I couldn't come anymore.”

  Rejection by the mainline church was considered a badge of honor by the Creston fundamentalists, who admired Crossfield for his outspoken views—until God began revealing to Crossfield that Uncle Roy and the other UEP leaders had themselves gone astray and were misinterpreting various important points of sacred doctrine. Not to put too fine a point on it, in 1974 God told Crossfield that Crossfield's version of the One True Church was correct and Uncle Roy's version was wrong.

  Back in March 1962, just a few months after Crossfield began attending prayer meetings with the polygamists in Creston, God had told him, “I will raise up one mighty and strong among you, having the scepter of justice in his hand, who shall grind in pieces all those who would oppose My work, for the prayer of the righteous shall not go unheeded.” This was a direct reference to D&C 85, in which God first told Joseph Smith that he would be sending “one mighty and strong” to “set in order the house of God.”* Although Crossfield never explicitly claimed in public to be the one mighty and strong, several of his published revelations leave little doubt that, privately at least, he believed he might indeed be “the one.”