The Viper on the Hearth, by Terryl L. Givens
The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, by Terryl L. Givens#
On the idea that the dehumanize opponents can be a bad strategy:#
[Peter Hulme:] "Humans beings who eat other human beings have always been placed on the very borders of humanity. They are not regarded as inhuman because if they were animal their behaviour would be natural and could not cause the outrage and fear that `cannibalism' has always provoked." [p. 15]
He notes that in 1537, Pope Paul III issued three bulls that Native Americans "were in fact rational creatures and therefore `human beings'." [p. 15]
The best chapter, in my opinion, is Orthodoxy and Heresy in American Religion.#
On the perennial question.
Harold Bloom is correct in saying Mormonism's hallmark is its deliberate obliviousness to two millennia of Christian tradition. So Mormonism could be considered, in the context of ecclesiastical history, emphatically not Christian. [p. 81]
The insight that something distinctive about Mormonism is the universal access to the divine. In contrast, Elizabeth Johnson writes:
The history of theology is replete with this truth: recall Augustine's insight that if we have understood, then what we have understood is not God; Anselm's argument that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived; Hildegaard's vision of God's glory as Living Light that blinded her sight; Aquinas's working rulethat we can know that God is and what God is not, but not what God is, ... [p. 82]
Whereas, in Mormonism: "The church is reintegrated into the ongoing flow of human history, origins are concrete and proximate, the process of doctrinal formation is laid bare." (p. 83) And quoting Sterling McMurrin on the Mormon world-view, "from the perspective of God there are no miracles." (p. 85)
I found it very interesting when Givens takes a list of "behavioral traits" of destructive cults and compares them to Christ:
It can hardly go unobserved that the New Testament portrays a Christ who preached imminent apocalypse (Matthew 24:15), reproved the scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites (Matthew 23:13), commanded his followers to preach the gospel to all the world (Mark 16:15), commanded the rich young man to give away all that he had (Mark 10:21), proclaimed himself the Messiah (Luke 4:21), exhorted his disciples to fast and pray always (Mark 9:29; Luke 18:1), and so forth. And yet here Christian heresy is defined in those very terms.
...
It is most curious that a "cult's" emulation of early Christian forms is itself taken as prima facie evidence of heresy, rather than as potentially suggestive of authority. [p. 87]
The idea of God in time again:
What Mormonism and similar heresies did challenge---implicitly---was the fantasy that religious belief can circumvent its own historical conceiving: the notion that God spoke to man, but never in an actual moment in time or to a man who was anyone's contemporary; the notion that the canon records Gods word, but God never spoke a precanonical utterance.
... Popular Christian thought seldom encompasses the notion that the Apostles were Christian (that is, disciples of Christ) before there were councils, creeds, or even a New Testament. [p. 89]
The reality of Mormonism is striking:
Smith's unrelenting anthropomorphosizing; the chronological and geographical specificity of his encounters with the divine; his commitment of heavenly revelation to the process of transcription, publication, and marketing; his enactment of prophetic restoration through the medium of legal incorporation---these and related aspects of Smith's work rendered religious allegorizing of his message impossible. The stone cut out of the mountain without hands and seen by Daniel might have been an allegory, but its fulfillment was not: It occurred "one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh" (to the day) when the Kingdom of God was "regularly organized and established agreeable to the laws of our country" (and the state of New York). When God commanded Hosea to take a harlot as a wife, the act presumably symbolized something about spiritual apostasy and devotion (Hosea 1:2). But when God commanded Joseph Smith to have Sidney Gilbert "establish a store, that he [might] sell goods," it was fruitless to search for other levels of moral significance. [p. 90]
Interesting episodes:#
The history of anti-Mormonism has much to distinguish it, both in the intensity and variety of its manifestations and in the uniqueness of its object. In no other case in American history has a governor signed an order for the expulsion or extermination of a segment of his state's own citizenry (Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri in 1838), a state militia forced the evacuation of a city of thousands (Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1847), the United States sent an occupying army against its citizens ("Buchanan's blunder", 1857-58) or dissolved a church as a legal corporation and disenfranchised thousands of its members (Edmunds-Tucker Act, 1887). [p. 41]
During his presidency, [Brigham] Young granted 1,645 divorces. [p. 144]
Givens recounts how after writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe went on to attack Mormonism. (p. 146-147)
Absurd Quotes:#
It is said that an altar of sacrifice was actually built ... in the temple block, upon which human sacrifices were to be made. - Senator Aaron Harrison Cragin, on the U.S. Senate floor, May 18, 1870 [p. 13]
Alexis de Tocqueville's traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, was equally unimpressed. "Nothing," he remarked, "is more unusual than to see a Protestant minister with white hair. The major goal that the American in the ministry pursues is his own welfare and that of his wife and children. When he has materially improved his conditions, his end is achieved; he retires." [p. 47]
"This is an interfaith chapel, not an intercult chapel," [a] minister told the Rocky Mountain News. [p. 80, referring to Vail, Colorado]
"They ain't whites ... They're Mormons." [p. 135, quoting Jack London's Star Rover]
In a refreshingly unscientific version of the ethnicity theme, humorists found distinctive physical commonalities of their own to fill the function of distinctive racial characteristics. Mark Twain, for example, claimed that he had been an advocate of reform in Utah, until he "saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched, ... and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, 'No---the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity ... and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations of the earth should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.'" And Oscar Wilde, in a letter to Mrs. Bernard Beere (April 17, 1882), described the Mormons he encountered on a visit to Utah: "They ... are very, very ugly." [p. 137]
"[T]he one lesson to be learned from the morals of Salt Lake City is that polygamy and immorality are quite incompatible. The man with five wives behaves himself with exemplary propriety. It is the man with only one who spends all his spare hours looking for the five he has not." [p. 149, quoting a non-Mormon visitor]