Faith and Betrayal Read Online Free PDF

had been swept up by the religious skepticism of the earlier Age of Reason as epitomized by England’s own Thomas Paine (who emigrated to America in 1774). The erudite, like Jean Rio Baker, saw the establishment Church of England as an obstacle to social change and eagerly welcomed an American reform religion in its place. Seen as the gospel of Christianity restored, early Mormonism captivated the minds of some of the more religiously inclined. The doctrines that would later be so contested and seen as so loathsome by the more cerebral converts—polygamy, “blood atonement” (the killing of sinners), priestly theocracy—were not mentioned by these early missionaries. Instead, the missionaries focused on the “good news” of the everlasting Gospel—repentance, baptism, and faith—and made the new religion sound fresh and progressive.

CHAPTER THREE
    These Latter Days
    WHILE PROSELYTIZING EFFORTS abroad were overwhelmingly successful, the Latter-day Saints, as Smith had christened his flock, were met with increasing scorn and derision in the United States. Mormonism had become America’s most controversial, clannish, imperialistic religion. Setting his followers apart, calling all non-Mormons “Gentiles,” claiming to be the leader of God’s chosen people, espousing a collectivism that was anathema to the rollicking capitalism of the day, Smith seemed to encourage and thrive on the condemnation and persecution that greeted his sect. Mormonism’s unabashed devotion to material wealth stood in stark contrast to the asceticism of other denominations, and what seemed to many a too-naked prosperity-as-godliness mentality offended neighbors who belonged to traditional Christian denominations—the Presbyterians and Methodists. Conflicts in Ohio between Mormons and local “Gentiles” erupted into violence, and when the church-owned bank went broke a warrant was issued for Smith’s arrest on charges of fraud. Before Smith could face those allegations, God, he said, revealed to him that the new Zion was not in Ohio after all, but in Far West, Missouri—the site, said Smith, of the original Garden of Eden. Fleeing in the middle of the night, Smith rode his horse eight hundred miles west to the newly designated Promised Land.
    It would not be long before the Mormons alienated Missourians as well, with tensions increasing as thousands of new converts poured into the community and especially as vague rumors of polygamy evolved into hard evidence of ubiquitous plural marriages. The clashes would culminate in what would become known as the “extermination order,” in which Missouri’s governor, Lillburn W. Boggs, claimed that “Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good.” They would move on to yet another so-called Zion in Nauvoo, Illinois.
    Arriving in 1839 at the picturesque town on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, the thirty-three-year-old Smith set out with a grandiose vision to build the country’s wealthiest and most powerful separatist city-state, which he said was ordained by God, a model theocracy to rival Washington. By this time the Mormon militia—Smith’s “Army of God,” with Smith as commander in chief—was nearly one-quarter the size of the U.S. Army. Less than a decade after founding his church, Smith had lured thousands of Europeans to make perilous Atlantic crossings and arduous journeys across one-third of the American continent to Illinois, while also attracting adherents in his own country. Marked by disillusionment with the old faiths and profound yearning for both the temporal security and the eternal salvation offered by Mormonism, poor Americans also were enamored with the promise. Though Smith said there had been earlier divine revelations ordaining polygamy, it would be here, in Nauvoo, where the “Law of Jacob,” as the doctrine of multiple marriage was called, was officially added to the