Post by ๐๐๐จ๐ญ๐ญ on Feb 22, 2024 23:10:41 GMT
Hi curioussoul and Callahan.
I don't think it is Replacement Theology, exactly, unless we are talking about Dispensationalism today, which is not what Mormons are.
The Mormons and the rest of the British Israelism fellow-travellers coming out of the American Second Great Great Awakening movement thought that Anglo-Saxons were the real Israelites and that these new lands were the New Jersusalem. The Mormons posited that the original Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri โ and some of the more mainstream Protestants like Governor Lilburn Boggs actualy issued an Extermination Order. When Joseph Smith was assassinated in an Illinois jail in 1844, successor Brigham Young led the faithful West to Salt Lake City to avoid persecution which became Zion (i.e., where the Saints are). This is why you see the term Zion used a lot in Idaho and Utah, but it has nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. The Mormons barely considered modern Sephardic (Spanish) Jews or Ashkenazi Jews from some Polish ghetto to be historical Hebrews, although they were never hatedful towards them. They just did not consider them to be special in any way. And Jews don't appreciate that.
Identity Christians also consider Anglo-Saxons or Indo-Eureopean Aryans to be the real McCoy. The others are the seed of the devil or something like that. The Rev. Ralph P. Forbes, who moved in Southern American Ku Klux Klan circles believed that, although by the 1960s and Vatican II they were no longer anti-Catholic. I never believed in any of the religious stuff and did not have many conversations about that when I talked to Mr. Forbes.
Some branches of Mormonism did not experience the same hostility from more mainstream Protestants that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did. The so-called "Reorganized LDS Church" did not go West to Utah with Brigham Young. More recently they have changed their name from the RLDS to the Community of Christ, and while they still use the Book of Mormon as one of their Holy scriptures, they have accepted traditionalist Protestant Trinitarian doctrine and were accepted by the World Council of Churches in 2010.
The RLDS never practiced polygamy, for example. My theory is that this was embraced by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young because as an early charismatic faith, women were joining like crazy or were being poached by the new revival on the block. This produced a shortage of male membership in the LDS Church.
In other words, a lot of non-Mormon men did not appreciate it if their wives joined some weird cult and then its leaders "married" them off to faithful men even if this was only for he context of the Spirit World. Joseph Smith had many wives, but since his first wife was opposed to Polygamy, these new wives were not married in reality, and they likely never had sex since he did not have a big brood of children unlike Brigham Young.
Few Mormons actually married multiple women other than a few leaders like Brigham Young. The practice was officially ended in 1890 as part of the negotiations for Utah statehood, and the Church leadership is very vigilant about enforcing the ban.
When the Saints got to Utah, even though many women were joining the church in England and probably leaving their husbands to go West, polygamy was never sustainable by then since the man-shortage quickly ended. I have ancestors that literally crossed the plains on foot in 1846-7 but none were Polygamists.
Anyway, I would agree that mainstream Protestantism today is not as weird as it was in the early 19th century with the exception of the Klan or the modern Dispensationalists. But I am highly doubtful that the Mormons worship Zionist Jews and Israel to the extent that many would expect.
The word "Zion" meant something radically different for early LDS than it did for Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century when Russian Jews started flooding into the country, and into Palestine.
The RLDS, or Church of Christ as it is known today, have a membership of about 250 thousand compared to the mainstream LDS of about 7 million. The RLDS have been accepted by mainstream Protestants, as I said.
The media often talks about the so-called Fundamentalist LDS, or FLDS, which have "rediscovered" Polygamy and behave more like a David Koresh cult or Jim Jones cult without the Kool Aid. Koresh was a Seventh-Day Adventist spinoff, another non-Mormon sect from the 2nd Awakening. The Adventists number about 22 million today, over twice that of mainstream LDS.
I doubt that the FLDS ever numbered more than a few hundred, but journalist media weasels will run TV specials and publish pictures from small towns in Southern Utah on Pioneer Day (July 24th) of women wearing Amish-looking pioneer costumes and boys wearing old-fashioned farmer clothes and straw hats, and then try to play up the cult angle. That would be like posting pictures of schoolkids wearing Tricorn hats on July 4th Independence Day and depicting this as the norm instead of a costume. I have a picture of myself wearing a straw hat at maybe age 4 taken by my Mom on Pioneer Day. My Dad was a nuclear engineer working for E.G. & G. in Las Vegas, Nevada for the nuclear-testing site. Our home was near the airport and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus. It wasn't from some weird commune somewhere.
Callahan makes a good point above, but I am not aware of any Holocaust statement that the Church has ever officially made. I don't swim in those waters any longer, but I remember that not long ago they issued some milquetoast proclamation that "Racism is bad, m'kay." There was nothing really specific about it so mostly harmless. Christians are race-mixing universalists anyway, and so is the รber-Catholic anti-Semite E. Michael Jones, who is against the Holocaust but completely flunks the "Hitler Test." Jones thinks that the Nazis were pagans, which is mostly B.S.
During World War II, the LDS church did NOT issue any statements condemning Nazi Germany (or Japan as far as I know). There were quite a few Mormon converts living in Germany at the time of the war, and the LDS Church encouraged all LDS to support their home countries and to obey the laws of the land.
The LDS have tried to preach the separation of Church and State ever since they reconciled with the government of the USA after the end of the Utah Territorial Wars in 1858. And they also sent a volunteer battalion to help the United States during its war with Mexico because they wanted Utah to be under American hegemony. Today, the LDS Church tries hard not to be partisan, although most of them are Conservative Republicans. Most Mormons that I know despise Mitt Romney, the Republian Senator from Utah and wonder why he is not actually a Democrat.
Interestingly, my grand aunt or cousin was a Mormon named Jean Westwood who was the first female Chair of the Democratic National Committee. She ran the anti-War Presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern in 1972 and said in her published memoirs that it was subverted by extreme Leftists including radical Feminists and Lesbians, almost all of them Jews. I have told that story a few times but these Jewesses never accepted an LDS woman as a Progressive Democrat. She and my Grandmother, who was a Nixon Republican, were very close and both lived in Scottsdale, Arizona not far from me.
During the Cold War, the Mormon Church did speak out strongly against the Communists. But that was probably mostly because the Reds were atheists and actively suppressed Christians and the Christian religion. The LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson was a John Bircher who had previously been Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, although when he was the LDS President he was much more apolitical.
I don't think it is Replacement Theology, exactly, unless we are talking about Dispensationalism today, which is not what Mormons are.
The Mormons and the rest of the British Israelism fellow-travellers coming out of the American Second Great Great Awakening movement thought that Anglo-Saxons were the real Israelites and that these new lands were the New Jersusalem. The Mormons posited that the original Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri โ and some of the more mainstream Protestants like Governor Lilburn Boggs actualy issued an Extermination Order. When Joseph Smith was assassinated in an Illinois jail in 1844, successor Brigham Young led the faithful West to Salt Lake City to avoid persecution which became Zion (i.e., where the Saints are). This is why you see the term Zion used a lot in Idaho and Utah, but it has nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. The Mormons barely considered modern Sephardic (Spanish) Jews or Ashkenazi Jews from some Polish ghetto to be historical Hebrews, although they were never hatedful towards them. They just did not consider them to be special in any way. And Jews don't appreciate that.
Identity Christians also consider Anglo-Saxons or Indo-Eureopean Aryans to be the real McCoy. The others are the seed of the devil or something like that. The Rev. Ralph P. Forbes, who moved in Southern American Ku Klux Klan circles believed that, although by the 1960s and Vatican II they were no longer anti-Catholic. I never believed in any of the religious stuff and did not have many conversations about that when I talked to Mr. Forbes.
Some branches of Mormonism did not experience the same hostility from more mainstream Protestants that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did. The so-called "Reorganized LDS Church" did not go West to Utah with Brigham Young. More recently they have changed their name from the RLDS to the Community of Christ, and while they still use the Book of Mormon as one of their Holy scriptures, they have accepted traditionalist Protestant Trinitarian doctrine and were accepted by the World Council of Churches in 2010.
The RLDS never practiced polygamy, for example. My theory is that this was embraced by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young because as an early charismatic faith, women were joining like crazy or were being poached by the new revival on the block. This produced a shortage of male membership in the LDS Church.
In other words, a lot of non-Mormon men did not appreciate it if their wives joined some weird cult and then its leaders "married" them off to faithful men even if this was only for he context of the Spirit World. Joseph Smith had many wives, but since his first wife was opposed to Polygamy, these new wives were not married in reality, and they likely never had sex since he did not have a big brood of children unlike Brigham Young.
Few Mormons actually married multiple women other than a few leaders like Brigham Young. The practice was officially ended in 1890 as part of the negotiations for Utah statehood, and the Church leadership is very vigilant about enforcing the ban.
When the Saints got to Utah, even though many women were joining the church in England and probably leaving their husbands to go West, polygamy was never sustainable by then since the man-shortage quickly ended. I have ancestors that literally crossed the plains on foot in 1846-7 but none were Polygamists.
Anyway, I would agree that mainstream Protestantism today is not as weird as it was in the early 19th century with the exception of the Klan or the modern Dispensationalists. But I am highly doubtful that the Mormons worship Zionist Jews and Israel to the extent that many would expect.
The word "Zion" meant something radically different for early LDS than it did for Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century when Russian Jews started flooding into the country, and into Palestine.
The RLDS, or Church of Christ as it is known today, have a membership of about 250 thousand compared to the mainstream LDS of about 7 million. The RLDS have been accepted by mainstream Protestants, as I said.
The media often talks about the so-called Fundamentalist LDS, or FLDS, which have "rediscovered" Polygamy and behave more like a David Koresh cult or Jim Jones cult without the Kool Aid. Koresh was a Seventh-Day Adventist spinoff, another non-Mormon sect from the 2nd Awakening. The Adventists number about 22 million today, over twice that of mainstream LDS.
I doubt that the FLDS ever numbered more than a few hundred, but journalist media weasels will run TV specials and publish pictures from small towns in Southern Utah on Pioneer Day (July 24th) of women wearing Amish-looking pioneer costumes and boys wearing old-fashioned farmer clothes and straw hats, and then try to play up the cult angle. That would be like posting pictures of schoolkids wearing Tricorn hats on July 4th Independence Day and depicting this as the norm instead of a costume. I have a picture of myself wearing a straw hat at maybe age 4 taken by my Mom on Pioneer Day. My Dad was a nuclear engineer working for E.G. & G. in Las Vegas, Nevada for the nuclear-testing site. Our home was near the airport and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus. It wasn't from some weird commune somewhere.
Callahan makes a good point above, but I am not aware of any Holocaust statement that the Church has ever officially made. I don't swim in those waters any longer, but I remember that not long ago they issued some milquetoast proclamation that "Racism is bad, m'kay." There was nothing really specific about it so mostly harmless. Christians are race-mixing universalists anyway, and so is the รber-Catholic anti-Semite E. Michael Jones, who is against the Holocaust but completely flunks the "Hitler Test." Jones thinks that the Nazis were pagans, which is mostly B.S.
During World War II, the LDS church did NOT issue any statements condemning Nazi Germany (or Japan as far as I know). There were quite a few Mormon converts living in Germany at the time of the war, and the LDS Church encouraged all LDS to support their home countries and to obey the laws of the land.
The LDS have tried to preach the separation of Church and State ever since they reconciled with the government of the USA after the end of the Utah Territorial Wars in 1858. And they also sent a volunteer battalion to help the United States during its war with Mexico because they wanted Utah to be under American hegemony. Today, the LDS Church tries hard not to be partisan, although most of them are Conservative Republicans. Most Mormons that I know despise Mitt Romney, the Republian Senator from Utah and wonder why he is not actually a Democrat.
Interestingly, my grand aunt or cousin was a Mormon named Jean Westwood who was the first female Chair of the Democratic National Committee. She ran the anti-War Presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern in 1972 and said in her published memoirs that it was subverted by extreme Leftists including radical Feminists and Lesbians, almost all of them Jews. I have told that story a few times but these Jewesses never accepted an LDS woman as a Progressive Democrat. She and my Grandmother, who was a Nixon Republican, were very close and both lived in Scottsdale, Arizona not far from me.
During the Cold War, the Mormon Church did speak out strongly against the Communists. But that was probably mostly because the Reds were atheists and actively suppressed Christians and the Christian religion. The LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson was a John Bircher who had previously been Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, although when he was the LDS President he was much more apolitical.