LDS Obscurity Explained
The simple reason the LDS church today is so small and so obscure is because the church leaders today are intentionally selling an inferior product which nobody wants to buy. Although the leaders still expect the members to pay 100% as before, the church's content today represents about 5% of the total message and program of the original church of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. That does not sound like much of a bargain. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were meeting the needs of thousands of people who were eagerly interested in making a better life for themselves and understanding a better gospel and set of principles for living. Those two prophets stirred up a great deal of excitement and a great deal of activity. They were "building Zion," which meant changing a worn-out and corrupt society into something new and exciting. They both sacrificed greatly for the church members, certainly convincing those members of the sincerity of their leaders. Creating an ideal society – a "Zion" – on the entire American continent was the original goal.
The
church grew at uneven and sometimes phenomenal rates of up to 4500% at various
times, with perhaps an overall long-term rate of more like 9% or 10%. After
bringing about 80,000 people to Utah from Europe, the church population in 1900
was 283,765.
These
people were gathered to the mountains of the West, a place where they could be
protected from the evils of the greedy east coast politicians and other parts
of the world. They created not just a new society in the world, but a new
state. This is what "building up Zion" looks like. There is certainly
nothing like that going on today as far as projects sponsored by the LDS
church. The church leaders today are perfectly happy to be as obscure as
possible and make no waves anywhere in the world or be in the slightest ideological
or practical conflict with anyone in the world. They want to be friends with
all of the dictators of the world. Being small and obscure and highly
profitable is the way they want to keep it, regardless of whatever they may say
in public that is contrary. They interpret their "keys," not as the
power to promote church growth, but as the power to keep the church small, at a
convenient size for the leaders.
The
World Religions Tree graph shows an obscure LDS church
The
World Religions Tree summarizes the world's 10,000 religions in an appealing
and graphic way. I present this graph as a way of showing how the world views
and categorizes the LDS church of today.
The small area of the
graph which includes the LDS church is shown below. Should it really be
presented at about the same level as the Methodist Church in Ireland or the
African Methodist Episcopal Church or the Czechoslovak Hussite Church? Is that
where it is supposed to be? I think every church member would like to see the world
recognize the LDS church as being more important than just a small obscure
reference on a giant and complicated religion tree. Is it really less important
than the Methodist Church in Ireland or the African Methodist Episcopal Church
or the Czechoslovak Hussite Church?
Attachments:
I am
attaching snapshots from this graph showing where they place the LDS church.
1,
Showing the area of the full graph where they have placed the LDS church.
2. The
expanded view of the placement of the LDS church.
On the
web:
The
World Religions Tree -- full detail
https://000024.org/religions_tree/religions_tree_8.html
A
one-page overview, plus option to navigate to full detail
https://the40foundation.org/world-religions-tree.html
Another
way to access the graph at different levels of detail:
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/explore-the-branches-of-the-world-religions-tree
How
the LDS church was brought low.
This graph demonstrates
how the church began with 100% of its content, but soon was reduced to only 5%
of that original content. Today, the church leaders pretend that 5% is actually
100%, but that is ridiculous, of course. Millions of members and post-members have
sensed this enormous mismatch, and struggled to explain it, but few have been successful
in offering a complete explanation. I hope this explanation helps.
Description
of points on the dilution graph:
1830 Full gospel
restored +100%
1896 Officially (but
secretly) installed priestcraft, started leader salaries -50%
Once priestcraft is officially installed, all other aspects of the gospel
will eventually be analyzed for whether they add income to the church or
increase its expenses. In almost all cases, the idealistic gospel principles
require the expenditure of valuable resources to carry out those works, so that
those principles must be terminated as soon as possible to maximize the net
income of this new priestcraft business unit. And any rationalization for the
changes that comes to mind seems to be good enough for the naïve and lazy
church membership who have been lulled to sleep. 2 Nephi 26:31 "for if they labor for money they shall perish."
1899 Justify
priestcraft, drop charity, add tithing, facilitate all future changes -2%
Lorenzo Snow requested that tithing be paid to the central offices as a
short-term Christian courtesy. Later, in 1964, that requested temporary gift
was turned into a permanent mandatory tax on religious activity.
1910 Declare
disavowal/cancellation of Christ's original gospel -1%
The church leaders today often press the argument that the gospel which
Christ restored almost immediately apostatized so that there is nothing we can
learn from that time about church doctrine and administration. This supposedly
then leaves today's leaders with a clean slate on which they can write anything
they want. Of course, this is not historically accurate. The 2.2 billion
Christians today and the rise of Western civilization are all part of the
massive good effects of Christ's original gospel. Joseph Smith's implementation
of the gospel was intended to be a second-stage booster to take Western
Civilization to new heights, known as Zion or the Millennium.
1923 Drop common
consent, take all property -10%
The members were dispossessed of all ownership in any previously commonly
owned church property, and the option for them to vote on churchwide measures
was ended.
1935 Drop US
constitution, fully abandon charity -10%
The church officially abandoned the last vestiges of New Testament-style
charity by supporting the new "government charity" tax-and-spend
Social Security system without even attempting to implement an explicitly
allowed substitute. In effect, the central church executed a bait-and-switch
strategy and now gets to keep and squander ALL tithing receipts, with no
charity expense demands whatsoever, having outsourced all charity/welfare
responsibilities to civil governments.
1938-1942 Church goes
globalist, abandons freedom -5%
By implication, the church officially removed from the Book of Mormon the
story about Captain Moroni and his constant quest for freedom for church
members, and thus officially declared the end of LDS central support for the US
Constitution. The First Presidency’s 1942 statement on war in effect declares
the central church’s intent to operate above all scriptural and worldly laws.
Also, by implication, the church declares a "United Nations-style"
global kingdom that accepts Satan's goals of centralizing all control, not
Christ’s goals of universal freedom. The church chooses to support all
the tyrants of the earth as possible future supporters of a (Satanist)
one-world government and related state religion (which the LDS religion
business hopes to supply for a nice fee).
1909-1978 Take all money
and power from women's organizations -2%
All property and money and charity initiatives were taken from the women's
organizations, part of thoroughly canceling New Testament-style charity.
1960 Enforce tithing
with recommends -5%
Enforce permanent mandatory tithing with recommends/temple licenses. Make
the local leaders tax collectors for the central offices.
1977 The Gathering and
building up of Zion ended -5%
Canceled Article of Faith 10 concerning building up Zion in America, the
Gathering necessarily being a big part of that process.
2010 Cumulative smaller
debilitating changes -3%
2020 Current status –
only 5% left of the original action-oriented, works-oriented gospel.
-----------------
A 5% remainder does not
give us much to work with, but that is where we are today, apparently by
intentional design.
The
historical setting and significance of the Gospel Dilution graph.
Although I have never
heard or read this in any public church setting, my own researches show me that
1896 was an extremely critical year for the LDS church. It was the year in
which Utah became a state, making it a banner year in the political setting.
However, it was a catastrophic year as far as the LDS church itself because it basically
committed suicide as far as its long-term scriptural mission was concerned.
The
critical decisions were finalized in April 1896. Wilford Woodruff had turned 89
on March 1, 1896. (He was born March 1, 1807 in Avon, Connecticut, USA. He died
just over two years later on September 2, 1898 in San Francisco, California at
the age of 91.) To put it simply, reading through church leadership minutes of
that time, one discovers that Wilford Woodruff wanted to retire and require all
of the members of the Quorum of the Twelve to retire with him. Of course, the private
internal documents of the time do not contain the appropriate set of headlines
which would tell us what was going on without reading and interpreting for
ourselves, but that is the gist of the changes made.
There
were many reasons for the church leaders to feel quite triumphant, since they
had "built Zion" in Utah, quite successfully, and those efforts had
been crowned with statehood, and with that came the promise of greater freedom
and prosperity than they had ever known before. There was some ambiguity on the
part of the Quorum of the Twelve concerning Wilford Woodruff's new proposal. As
part of those minutes, the Twelve had volunteered to take themselves to the four
corners of the earth to continue the expansion of the church worldwide.
However, Wilford Woodruff did not want to talk about such things. He seemed
obsessed with centralizing all power in himself, and one of the elements of
that power would be to have a Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who had become
dutiful yes-men who would not travel and be independent as before, but would
instead stay and reliably approve every one of his pronouncements without
quibble. They would be reduced to nothing more than a local speakers bureau. Obviously,
if the Twelve were scattered across the world, the power of the first
presidency would be very limited, assuming the first presidency had to receive
the approval of the Twelve for any significant changes in doctrine or
procedure. Since using letters could take months or years to request and
receive approval, in those low technology times, the only real solution was to
have the Twelve close by, perhaps less than one block away.
Although
the members of the Twelve had the same opportunity as anyone else to request
welfare assistance from the presiding bishopric, the new arrangement gave the
power of the purse to the president of the church. That meant that he could
dole out retirement and salary monies as he saw fit. Normally, becoming a salary-man
means being very obedient, and that seems to be what he had in mind. We should
note that only 10 of the 12 apostles approved of this new centralized regime.
One apostle had died and had not been replaced. A potential replacement, B. H.
Roberts, was not interested in approving the new regime, so that even though he
was the logical person to choose as a new apostle, he was passed over. Moses
Thatcher was a member of the Twelve who also disapproved of this new regime.
His failure to approve meant that he had to be drummed out of the Twelve Apostles
so that the remaining 10 could vote to approve this new plan
"unanimously."
The
graph shows that beginning in 1896, the church basically collapsed, from its
100% correct and complete gospel content, down to about the 5% content level we
see today. The graph marks the timing of formal changes in policy on numerous
different important issues, but that is somewhat inaccurate. Essentially, every
one of those steps of disintegration had already been outlined and implemented
by Wilford Woodruff without any specific formalities. The formalities
finalizing the steps came later. For example, the policies of the gathering and
of building up Zion on the American continent were formally ended in 1977, but
essentially all efforts in that direction had already ceased in 1896.
This
near-total collapse and retirement of the original LDS church leadership in
1896 has continued unabated until today. We have most of the Scriptures and
some of the words that have come to us from the times of Joseph Smith and Brigham
Young, but we have essentially none of the actions. The LDS church today is
barely a shadow of its former self. It has carefully preserved the name, but has
retained hardly any of its other attributes. In fact, the church today is
working hard to become the latter-day Baptist Church, and that is already a
more accurate title for it than the title it now claims. The 5% Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints would actually be a more accurate title.
More
on the "Zion" theme
I consider it perfectly
fair to hold today's church leaders accountable for every error and difficulty
which the United States has today. The church was restored to create an ideal
society, but it has failed to do so. It has had many major opportunities to
have huge positive effects on our nation's society, but has always failed to
take appropriate action, preferring to glean short-term internal profits from
these negative changes rather than resist them. Two of the biggest items
include the church's failure to defend the responsibility of Christian churches
to provide charity and charitable services to those in need, or, indeed, for
the entire society. Instead, it did nothing in the 1930s while the aggressive
federal government basically took over from religious organizations all of the
religious charitable functions of education, medical assistance, old-age
assistance, etc. This sweeping move by a socialist government rendered
traditional religious communities almost meaningless, since they no longer had
any major effect on society, having been replaced by tax-and-spend "government
charity."
No
one should wonder why religion in the United States has deteriorated to such a
low point. American religion surrendered long ago to Marxist/socialist concepts
of government control of every aspect of society, leaving almost no space for
the vigorous and responsible free exercise of religion, including conducting charitable
operations on a large scale and acting as a powerful brake on the improper
expansion of government. Christian charity can accomplish the same things with
about one third of the resource input, making it a very bad practical choice to
allow governments to control these functions rather than churches. The
oft-heard call for an absolute "separation of church and state" is
utter foolishness at the practical level, even for avowed atheists. To get the
US economy back into a proper balance would require that about $3 trillion were
devoted each year to charitable activities operated according to Christian principles.
If the LDS church does not step up to help promote this level of Christian activity,
who is going to do it?
Another error of gigantic proportions related to the failure of the LDS church to do a single thing to help European Jews escape the mass slaughter which was planned and carried out by the maniacal Nazis and others. Many good Christians constantly risked their lives to save those Jews, but the LDS church did absolutely nothing, not even being willing to assist Jewish LDS church members in escaping the coming Holocaust. The LDS Scriptures call upon the church leaders to bring the gospel to the Jews and to the Gentiles, and what better opportunity to get someone's attention than saving their lives? I do not envy the church leaders from that period having to explain themselves in a heavenly court.
A
"building Zion" brain stretching exercise
Apparently, we have
forgotten so much about the old "building Zion" mindset, that we
can't even imagine that we could do anything useful. So here is a little brain stretching exercise
to get us started in the right direction.
We hear that the LDS Church has at least $100 billion in the bank, with
a total in net assets of perhaps $350 billion saved up in land, buildings, and
cash, out of the perhaps $1 trillion the LDS Church has collected from its
members since it reversed nearly all of its original policies beginning in
1896, turning what was once a truly idealistic religion into nothing more than
a religion business, with the leaders profiting off the members.
Let's
say that we decided that properly educating the next generation of Americans
would be a good idea, emphasizing the importance of religion in all aspects of
life. I am going to do two simple
calculations:
1.
Let's say we allocated $10 billion to building 1,000 new schools, each at a
cost of about $10 million, with the intended plan of providing undergraduate
educational facilities for 5000 students at each one of these 1,000 new
schools. If we could have everything set
up tomorrow, that would mean that we would be teaching about 5 million students
at any one time. We might easily expect
1 million of these students to join the church each year.
5
million students is rather a large portion of the American population, so it
could have a great effect. For reference purposes, the state of Utah only has
about 3.5 million residents, and the entire US has about 342 million. There are
about 20 million people in the United States in the 20-24 college age grouping,
so getting about one fourth of them into the LDS church education program
should have a good effect and should be possible. Incidentally, the Utah 20-24
college age cohort is about 270,000.
As
far as operational costs go, if we assumed a tuition of $5000 for each of the
5000 students at each school, that would yield an operating budget of $25
million per school. With 1000 schools that would be a $25 billion annual cost.
Theoretically, the LDS church could pay the entire cost of this operation, at
least for a few years, using bank accounts or money from mortgaged properties,
but we should be able to have most of those operational costs paid through
student payments, student loans, government grants, etc. There is probably some
very clever way to simulate this situation and come up with a completely
workable budgetary plan.
2.
We could also consider multiplying this project 10 times over on a worldwide
basis so that $100 billion was invested in facilities which would be serving 50
million students at any one time. That could easily lead to an increase of 10
million active members every year.
The
point here is that a few very simple decisions could put the LDS Church in the
position of adding perhaps 10 million enthusiastic members to its church every
year, people who would be excited about the project of building up Zion, which
really means building up the nation and the world. I expect people would be excited to be part
of a well-managed, high-principled, going-concern which showed real promise of
changing the world for the better.
Something
similar might be done in the areas of improving medical services, insurance
services, pension services, etc. I
believe the general rule is that idealistically organized services, many with a
charitable spin, can offer the same level of services for perhaps one third the
price of current services. Certainly,
that has been clearly demonstrated to be true in the area of old age pensions,
and I assume it would be true in every other "social insurance"
category. Not only would the church do
great things in lifting up the entire society, but it would also be saving
people huge amounts of money which they could then devote to raising their own
larger families and increasing their general prosperity.
Whoever is controlling the public presentation of the parameters of the LDS Church today seems to be completely ignorant of current Protestant theology and of historical LDS theology. Rather than having some overriding and guiding cosmic conception of the theology of the eternal gospel, those currently in control of LDS theology seem to consider "theology" to be nothing more than a set of "dial-a-church" or "cafeteria" parameters to be individually and independently manipulated like the features of a new model of a car, subject to radical change from year to year to track the random changes in public taste that can be so fickle. For example, going back 60 years, How big should the Oldsmobile tail-fins be this year to meet the public's preferences for flair and style?
Protestant theology today is basically teaching "easy universal salvation." All people must do is say "I believe in Christ" once in a lifetime and they are saved, avoiding hell and going to heaven. The LDS church now teaches the exact same easy universal salvation, but then, quite illogically, still continues to tack on the two extra and very different and stringent requirements of mandatory tithing and temples and associated temple ordinances. These two additions have some historical significance, but are nonetheless completely inconsistent with easy universal salvation. One can easily predict that the two add-ons will eventually have to be dropped, simply because they are so clearly inconsistent with easy universal salvation. (Maybe they can then turn the hundreds of unused temples into shopping malls or preschools to make use of their large parking lots.)
Without any apparent internal self-awareness, the LDS Church is already teaching an inconsistent mass of confusion on the nature and requirements of salvation. It regularly teaches universal salvation (presumably to the mid-level terrestrial kingdom -- which seems to describe the Protestant heaven) while occasionally mentioning the existence of the higher celestial Kingdom, while simultaneously doing absolutely nothing to meet the much higher "works" requirements of the scripturally-defined celestial kingdom.
This "checklist" approach to defining a religion, completely devoid from any reference to a higher theological conception or theory, indicates that we have businessmen and clerks controlling the content of the taught religion, with no sign of a real scriptorian or church historian or Christian theologian anywhere in sight. We can be sure that Christ himself would not teach such a Mulligan stew of ideas, such a random blend of theological concepts. This seems to put the lie to claims that Christ is the chef directing the cooking up of the current (and ever-changing) gospel recipe.
In summary, one can easily predict that these two inconsistent
and anachronistic relics from the past will eventually be removed from the LDS
catechism, dropped as obviously too burdensome when compared to the other religious
competitors where no such extreme demands are required. If you are trying to sell an equivalent car
at triple the price of your main competitors, one can expect a change in price
to come soon.
Incidentally, we should call ourselves a
cathedral-building people, not a temple-building people. In my opinion, the
correct name of the building should be determined by the doctrinal setting in
which it was conceived and constructed. As Martin Luther pointed out in 1517,
the cathedrals were built using money paid to the central church for
"indulgences." Indulgences consist of money paid to the church to buy
or ensure one's salvation, even though the church has never been authorized to
"sell" salvation in that way. The LDS church is similarly warped
today in its general theology, and in its conception of its own
self-importance. Even though it cannot sell salvation, any more than could the
pope of the Catholic Church, that is what it is doing by requiring people to pay
10% of their annual income to the central church before they are able to attend
the temples to receive sealing ordinances, which ordinances were originally intended
to be free and available locally. Many of these members are often further
greatly disadvantaged by having to travel long distances to attend temples,
where the church has previously provided these important ordinances locally and
could easily do so again.
The
original temples were built under the auspices of the primitive law of Moses. We
should notice that temples were not used or even allowed in earlier millennia
of full-gospel administration. That makes the enormous focus today on building
temples highly suspect for several reasons. The confusion in this area is so
great that I cannot discover the exact policy the heavens meant to give us on
the use of temples today. But I think we can be confident that the hyper-aggressive
building of temples today, as a way of laundering centrally-collected tithing
money into private pockets, is not the correct policy.
For
more detailed information
My
website at FutureMormonism.blogspot.com contains nearly all of my published
work. Probably of greatest interest would be my latest work entitled
The Beginnings Of
A Systematic Theology Of True Christianity
And How The LDS Church Currently Differs
Greatly From It
– a document in progress V1.0
A Second Gospel Constitution and Second
Proclamation to the World
See free electronic 75-page version
or
my older work entitled
Is the Church As True As the Gospel? A
Constitutional Approach
See free electronic 470-page version or go to Amazon for
a paper copy.
