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The cover story of the latest National Geographic is on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the offshoot of the LDS that has retained – and seems to be focused on – polygamous marriage. The article is available here.

The FLDS made headlines in the spring of 2008, when the police raided one of their compounds in West Texas. The raid resulted in twelve of their male members being arrested for charges stemming from their marriages to underage girls. One of those indicted was the leader of the community, Warren Jeffs, who appears to have been a bit of a megalomaniac:

Jeffs’s diary, also seized during the Texas raid, reveals a man who micromanaged the community’s every decision, from chore assignments and housing arrangements to who married whom and which men were ousted—all directed by revelations Jeffs received as he slept. He claimed that God guided his every action, no matter how small. One diary entry reads: “The Lord directed that I go to the sun tanning salon and get sun tanned more evenly on their suntanning beds.”

One persistent question that pops up is why women would stay in such a community, where they are married to a man with multiple wives and expected to produce children nonstop, when they often have the opportunity to run. Part of it is that they have been raised in the culture and know very little else.

Carolyn Jessop, the plural wife of Merril Jessop who did leave the FLDS, likens entering the outside world to “stepping out onto another planet. I was completely unprepared, because I had absolutely no life skills. Most women in the FLDS don’t even know how to balance a checkbook, let alone apply for a job, so contemplating how you’re going to navigate in the outside world is extremely daunting.”

But the author, Scott Anderson, is able to draw from his interviews and produce a more complicated picture:

It would seem there’s another lure for women to stay: power. The FLDS women I spoke with tended to be far more articulate and confident than the men, most of whom seemed paralyzed by bashfulness. It makes sense when one begins to grasp that women are coveted to “multiply and replenish the earth,” while men are in extraordinary competition to be deemed worthy of marriage by the prophet. One way to be deemed worthy, of course, is to not rock the boat, to keep a low profile. As a result, what has all the trappings of a patriarchal culture, actually has many elements of a matriarchal one.

There are limits to that power, of course, for it is subject to the dictates of the prophet. After hearing Melinda’s stout defense of Jeffs, I ask what she would do if she were reassigned.

“I’m confident that wouldn’t happen,” she replies uneasily.

“But what if it did?” I ask. “Would you obey?”

For the only time during our interview, Melinda grows wary. Sitting back in her chair, she gives her head a quarter turn to stare at me out of the corner of one eye.

I have some Mormon acquaintances that I have had some very lengthy discussions with. The Book of Mormon makes claims that are demonstrably false based on tested empirical evidence (DNA lineage of Native Americans for example). If I were to go after the validity of the Book of Mormon, would these sorts of empirical issues be a good first target, or do they fall under the “science” realm that is too easily shoveled aside with the “just have faith” response? If so, could you perhaps clarify a little on what the best ways to go after a religious book might be? Are we looking for internal contradictions, philosophically problematic statements, wildly magical or unreal stories that are so outlandish we would never believe them today?

What do you think is the best way to convince someone their holy book… isn’t?

We’ve had a couple of posts about the Church of Latter Day Saints, and conversation has naturally turned to the founder, Joseph Smith. He’s a fascinating character, by turns a con man and a sincere prophet. But to understand Joesph Smith requires understanding the world he was born into. That means understanding one of the oddest and most influential regions in American religious history: the Burned Over District.

The Burned Over District is a nickname given by 20th Century historians to western and central New York. It comes from a quote by Charles Finney, the father of American revivalism, who explained in the 1870’s that the region had seen so many revivals in the previous decades that it no longer had any more “fuel” (the unconverted) to “burn” (convert).

Combining the Ingredients

Pullquote: Shakers and Quakers and Swedenborgians, oh my!

From around 1800 until the Civil War the area did see a steady stream of religious revivals, but that’s only a small part of the story. Understand that parts of central and western New York were still the frontier. The Catskills and Adirondacks had kept most colonists pinned to the Hudson for generations, and raids by the French and their Mohawk allies discouraged pioneers. The people who settled in land after the French & Indian war were clearing new ground.

These people were frequently coming from or through the Hudson valley, where Dutch religious tolerance had created an odd blend of religions: Shakers and Quakers and Swedenborgians, oh my! Many of these pioneers were still in an in-between state amid the medieval world and the Enlightenment.  As one historian put it, they were “literate but not learned,” and they possessed many superstitions and beliefs in what we would now label as “occult.”

One of the first arrival in the District was Jemima Wilkinson. A Quaker from Rhode Island, Wilkinson had suffered a severe illness as a young woman, but she revived and declared herself a new being — the “Publick Universal Friend.” She became a prophetess and preached a version of Christianity, leading her followers to the Finger Lakes region of New York during the 1790s. Wilkinson was one of the first female religious leaders in the country, and her “Church of the Publick Universal Friend” may have been the first American born religion.

Wilkinson’s church was not the only communal religious group in the area. The Shakers and the Campbellites also planted outposts in the region, as well as several more obscure groups. This unusual blend of religions, sects and superstitions would be create an “anything goes” approach to religion. People would embrace different pieces of different religions without regard to tradition. Looking back, it seems like every major religious trend in American history had some representative in the district.

Stirring the Pot

Pullquote: Nearly everything that was going on in the District shows up somewhere in Smith’s new religion.

There was apocalypticism: William Miller, now the classic example of the millenarian prophet. He predicted that the world would end in 1844. Hundreds, maybe thousands, gathered at his farm to await the second coming. The collapse of this prophesy is now called the “Great Disappointment.” Both the Seven Day Adventist church and, to a lesser degree, the Jehovah’s Witnesses can be traced back to the attempts to recover from this collapse.

Zionism? There’s Mordecai Noah, a Jewish man who dreamed of founding the new Jewish holy land in the Upstate. He purchased an island in the Niagara River and dubbed it “Ararat.” Some of his followers attempted to float a steamboat full of animals down the newly opened Erie canal —”Noah’s Ark,” of course.

Spiritualism? The Fox sisters in Rochester caused a national sensation with their spirit rappings. Their legacy lives on in the spiritualist community of Lily Dale, NY.

When the Second Great Awakening began, the Burned Over District convulsed. Evangelists swept through the area, holding tent revivals among the farming communites. They were aided by the new Erie Canal, which could bring them from NYC to Buffalo in a few days. Actually, many preachers first came to preach to the canal workers, who tended to be young men from the underclass who needed “guidance” lest they give in to temptation. But they established churches and stayed in the area, adding their fervor to the mix.

Joseph Smith is a true son of the Burned Over District. His family moved to Palmyra, north of the Finger Lakes, when Smith was around 12. It was in this region that Smith had his first vision, found the golden plates and first began his church. Nearly everything that was going on in the District shows up somewhere in Smith’s new religion, from the odd notion that was the natives were the lost tribes of Israel, to the multi-tiered Heaven of the Swedenborgians.

Smith found moderate success in Fayetteville, NY, but was eventually forced to move when a economic downturn destroyed the church finances. Thus begins a long trek, which will eventually cost Smith his life in an Illinois jail. But the Church of Latter-Day Saints would continue, bringing a little bit of the Burned Over District crazy to the rest of the world.

The Mormon fondness for genealogy is well known. Not quite so well known is the reason for that fondness.

Some Mormons practice proxy baptism, also called “temple baptism,” a ritual where a living church member may act as a proxy for a deceased relative during baptism. Supposedly this allows a person, who was never been baptized, the opportunity to accept the baptism and convert within the afterlife. Technically, this is only supposed to be done for relatives of the living member, and hence the interest in genealogy. For some reason, this rule is not always followed.

This has gotten the Church in trouble in the past. In 1994, it was discovered that members of the LDS were posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims and other Jewish dead. As a result of the uproar, the LDS agreed to expunge the names and stop the practice of posthumously baptizing Jews. However, the terms of the agreement was not faithfully followed, and the Jewish Genealogist Bernard I. Kouchel accuses members of the LDS church of continuing the practice. See “A Chronicle of the Mormon/Jewish Controversy.”

Well, someone in the Church has added another name to the list of those baptized by proxy: Stanley Ann Dunham. More commonly known as President Obama’s mother. According to the Provo Daily Herald:

Records on the church’s FamilySearch.org genealogical site show that a Stanley Ann Dunham received proxy rites in the Provo temple on June 4 and June 8 of 2008. The birth and death dates of the person for whom the rites were performed match those of Obama’s mother.

This is not a good PR move for the Mormon Church.

As an atheist, I’m not sure how I feel about all this. On one hand, unless you’re a Mormon, the whole practice is meaningless. If you’re an atheist, the whole idea of the afterlife is fairly silly all by itself. I don’t care much for genealogy (or genealogists, for that matter), but if offering temple baptisms for deceased relatives keeps the Mormons busy and away from my door, I’m all for it.

On the other hand, something in me finds this deeply offensive — my first inclination is to start writing up De-Baptism Certificates for deceased Mormons. Turn about is fair play.

But I’d like to think I’m bigger than that. What about you?

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Do you want to have the kind of fun Sister Dalton is talking about — good, clean, wholesome Latter-Day Saints fun?

Gag. The fakeness is just creepy — and even creepier that the teenage masses are excited about whatever it is they’re babbling about!

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Amazingly, they don’t like it! Who would have thought?