Arguments Against Mormonism

The most awkward yet unfortunately prevalent of human situations is unrequitedness: friends drift; lovers part; friends don’t even become lovers. One adores the other to little or no reciprocation. Perhaps unknowingly, the fifteen million members the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are in the same predicament: they claim to know the Christian God and his son, yet their doctrine greatly distorts basic tenets of Christianity (Embry).

By Biblical definition, a Christian is anyone who accepts Jesus’ death as payment for their faults. This enables escape from deserved hell and admittance into undeserved heaven. This trade is outlined in the Bible, credited as God’s messages to men. Because its words are inspired from one who is eternal,

However, their defining characteristic and flaw is belief in the words of Joseph Smith as divinely inspired (Embry). Logic reveals the two cannot both be true: Mormonism detracts focus from Christ, the invariable feature of all Christian denominations, through not only its dubious origins but also doctrine on racism, a Heavenly Mother, and even how mankind is to receive salvation. Though a definite religion, which definitely uses the same characters and elements as the original series, evidence abounds that Mormonism should not be considered canon but fanfiction.

Latter-Day Saints hold that in 1823, the angel Moroni led “known conjurer” Joseph Smith to golden plates buried in New York soil (Hitchens). They told of a Jewish family traveling from Jerusalem to North America thousands of years before Jesus’ birth, building temples and traditions (Embry). Perhaps divinely, perhaps conveniently, only Smith could read these records; those who believed him migrated to Utah with additional revelations along the way, all held to be as holy as the Bible (Hitchens; Lyon). It is this claim that shatters the legitimacy of

Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, declared dark skin as a sign of God’s curse in 1863. He considered African-Americans descendants of the first murderer, Cain, and pronounced “death on the spot” for “mix[ing] the seed of Cain” with Mormon “chosen seed” (Stack; Harvey). Church materials portrayed Jesus as white despite his obviously Middle-Eastern heritage, apparent through detailed genealogy, to justify prejudice against black and Native American people (Matt. 1; Bowman). This divinely excused racism perpetuated through the Civil Rights Movement, but the stretching boundaries of Mormonism stretched church leaders to conveniently have a revelation refuting Young’s. In 1978, they excused the statement as from the “white supremacist culture from which Mormonism developed” (Harvey). If Young’s words were from God, they would not need repealment; therefore, the church was either correct in refuting them, suggesting the revelation not divine in the first place, or it acted wrongfully, suggesting that God is a white supremacist. Human conscience, the proof of God’s image in humanity, attests the latter is false. The biblical book of Galatians confirms: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”