Parental Paradox w/ Jon Sawyer

Rachel Bernstein

IndoctriNation

January 26, 2022

Listen to Parental Paradox w/ Jon Sawyer

Jon Sawyer was raised in two homes influenced by both high-demand religion and secular worldviews. Prior to his parent's divorce at the age of four, his family was involved with both Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Christian Science. Shortly after his parent's divorce, his mother took a secular route, while his father converted to Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. While Jon's father sprinkled elements of TM and Christian Science into his childhood, his dad's newfound evangelical Christian faith fixated on the end of the world, divine healing, speaking in tongues, and the "prosperity gospel." When Jon was fifteen, he converted to Mormonism. From the age of fifteen to thirty-five, Jon was involved with various high-demand religious groups that were associated with both charismatic Christianity and Mormonism. As a teen who was deeply conflicted about his attraction to the same sex, Jon attended the now-defunct Spirit Life Bible College (SLBC)-associated with Roberts Liardon Ministries-in Orange County, CA. While at SLBC, Jon experienced multiple sessions of exorcism and conversion therapies that were aimed at "healing" his sexual identity. When Jon was twenty-six, he became involved with Sovereign Grace Churches: a group that began during the charismatic Jesus Movement of the 1970s and eventually adopted a neo-Calvinist theology that emphasized strict gender roles and courtship practices. Jon separated from organized religion six years ago, at the age of 35. Since that time, Jon has benefited from somatic therapy, completed both a BA and MA in education, and is currently a doctoral student and researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. Partly due to the influence of his experiences with high-demand religious groups, Jon now studies the intersection of education policy and anti-discrimination law.

In this first half of Jon's two-part conversation with Rachel, He shares an intimate portrait of his childhood as he was pulled in the many different and extreme religious directions his divorced parents took. Throughout the conversation, Rachel gives insights into the religious trauma Jon likely experienced as a child by being exposed to graphic demonic imagery. Jon explains how his varied and controlling religious upbringing caused him to internalize homophobia as he examined his own sexuality and place on the LGBTQ spectrum.

Before You Go: Rachel warns about the dangers of parental alienation which often occurs in separated families, explaining how this can be exacerbated within families involved in high control groups and relationships.

You can contact Jon here:
jonesawyer@gmail.com

Find Rachel's book "Now I Know, Kids Talking To Kids About Divorce..." here:
www.amazon.com/Now-I-Know-Rachel…ein/dp/1620867893

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Polygamy foes go door to door in a Utah neighborhood with polygamists to talk 'bigamy reform'

Nate Carlisle
Salt Lake Tribune
September 25, 2019

Eagle Mountain • The salt-and-pepper-haired man who answered the door said he knows some polygamists and has respect for them.

But he also said that he knows there are some people who have had to leave their polygamous homes and that he’d like a system in place for them to report crimes within the households. Before closing the door, the man said one more thing: He complimented Angela Kelly and Melissa Ellis for coming to his neighborhood.

“I’m impressed you came here,” he said. “That’s very difficult.”

Kelly and Ellis are the director and vice president, respectively, of Sound Choices Coalition, a nonprofit whose website says it is “dedicated to raising awareness and working to end the damaging practices associated with polygamous cultures.” On Monday, the two knocked on doors in an Eagle Mountain neighborhood known to have a high number of polygamists from the Apostolic United Brethren.

The pair wanted to talk to the residents about what’s being called “bigamy reform.” Sen. Deidre Henderson, R-Spanish Fork, has been working on a bill that would reduce polygamy to a misdemeanor or less, perhaps making it on par with a traffic ticket. The visit to Eagle Mountain also previews what legislators can expect if they again take up polygamy — a topic that has been debated since before Utah was a state.

When the Legislature last debated and then amended the bigamy statute in 2017, it spurred a gush of personal tales from polygamists who felt criminalizing their life makes them second-class citizens who fear law enforcement — and from people who left polygamy after abuses or bad experiences.

While Kelly and Ellis acknowledge they don’t like Henderson’s proposal, they said they went to Eagle Mountain to hear what residents there think. Kelly, who previously worked on child trafficking and sex abuse issues, and Ellis, who grew up in the polygamous Davis County Cooperative Society, also known as the Kingston Group, walked up to 17 doors in about 90 minutes.

Most people weren’t home, or at least didn’t answer their door. A few other homes had signs saying “No Soliciting,” and Kelly and Ellis turned around as soon as they reached the porch.

But a few people in the neighborhood talked to Kelly and Ellis. One woman in her 30s or 40s answered the door. Kelly explained the rationale behind Henderson’s proposal.

Henderson worries that keeping polygamy as it is, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison — or 15 years if the polygamist is also found to have committed other crimes such as physical abuses or fraud — discourages people in plural families from reporting crimes.

Kelly explained to the woman at the door her concerns with reducing the penalty for polygamy. She argues people in polygamous groups might not know what constitutes fraud, abuse or other crimes, and so there’s no benefit to lessening the offense of polygamy.

“If you want people to come forward on those other crimes,” Kelly said, “you need to educate them on those crimes.”

Kelly invited Ellis to speak about her experiences in a plural family.

“When I left,” Ellis told the woman at the door, “I didn’t even know anything about the laws.”

The woman, who didn’t indicate if she was in a polygamous church, said she didn’t know polygamy was a felony. By the end of her conversation with Kelly and Ellis, she wasn’t sure if lowering the penalty would help or hurt, but she took Kelly’s business card.

Later, Kelly and Ellis stopped at a house where a woman in her 20s or early 30s answered. After a few minutes, an elementary-school-age girl joined the women on the porch.

The woman who answered the door said her family members are in the AUB, and they have been taught to report abuses when they see it. She believes lowering the penalty for polygamy will encourage others to report fraud and abuse without fear that others in the family will be sent to prison, too. The conversation remained cordial. After a few minutes, Kelly and Ellis left.

As they walked back to their car, Kelly called the day a success.

“Anytime we can make a positive interaction with people in polygamy," she said, "it’s a positive.”



https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/09/25/polygamy-foes-go-door/

Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mind Control

Recovering Agency - By Luna Lindsey
"Information about cults and mind control for former Mormons and other victims of spiritual abuse, with an aim toward speeding recovery. Learn to identify harmful and manipulative LDS doctrines, to untangle Mormon totalism from who you really are."

http://recoveringagency.com/

On Amazon

American religious groups vary widely in their views of abortion

DAVID MASCI
Pew research center
January 22, 2018

More than four decades after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide, most Americans (57%) are supportive of legal abortion, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. But a substantial minority (40%) says abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and within some U.S. denominations and religious groups, this figure is much higher.

For instance, most Jehovah’s Witnesses (75%) and Mormons (70%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, according to the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of more than 35,000 Americans in all 50 states. The same holds true for members of some evangelical churches, including the Pentecostal denominations Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) (77%) and Assemblies of God (71%), as well as America’s largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (66%). Indeed, among all those who are part of the evangelical tradition, nearly twice as many say they oppose legal abortion as support it (63% to 33%).

By comparison, only 35% of those who are part of the mainline Protestant tradition say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, with 60% in support of keeping abortion legal. Members of the Episcopal Church (79%) and the United Church of Christ (72%) are especially likely to support legal abortion, while most members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (65%) also take this position.

Unitarian Universalists (90%) and American Jews (83%) in the 2014 survey were much more supportive of legal abortion than the general population. And most people who have no religious affiliation – particularly atheists and agnostics (87% each) – also support abortion rights.

Among those who do identify with a religion, the majority view about abortion among members of a particular group often mirrors that group’s official policy on abortion. This is the case with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) and the Southern Baptist Convention – both churches oppose abortion, as do most members of those churches. And the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Unitarian Universalist Association, and Reform and Conservative Judaism, for example, all support abortion rights, in line with most of their adherents.

There are, however, cases where the views of a church’s members don’t align with its teachings on abortion. For instance, while the Roman Catholic Church is an outspoken critic of abortion, U.S. Catholics were divided on the issue in the 2014 survey, with 48% supportive of legal abortion and 47% opposed.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/22/american-religious-groups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/

Knights of the Crystal Blade founders married each other's underage daughters, Utah affidavit says

John Coltharp charged with sodomy of a child.Aubrey Wieber
Salt Lake Tribune
January 12, 2018

The leaders of a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot called Knights of the Crystal Blade took each other’s daughters as child brides, according to a search warrant that was recently unsealed.

The men, Samuel Shaffer and John Coltharp, were arrested in December and charged with kidnapping after an Amber Alert was issued for Coltharp’s daughters.

Iron County Sheriff’s Office Detective Nathan Houchen detailed an interview with Shaffer in a search warrant affidavit submitted Dec. 11. Shaffer told police that he married Coltharp’s 8-year-old daughter, and that Coltharp married his 7-year-old daughter.

On Monday, Coltharp was charged in Sanpete County with sodomy of a child for a sexual assault that occurred on Aug. 1, according to charging documents. Shaffer, who is being prosecuted in Iron County, has not been charged with additional crimes.

The Sheriff’s Office began investigating Coltharp and Shaffer on Dec. 1, when Coltharp’s ex-wife alerted the office that Coltharp had fled with their four children after losing custody of them in the couple’s divorce.

Spring City police found Coltharp at his home and arrested him on suspicion of custodial interference, but his children were in the care of Shaffer. Coltharp is being held in the Sanpete County jail.

On Dec. 4, police raided a compound about a mile west of Lund, where the men’s Knights of the Crystal blade group had set up shipping containers to form a makeshift residence. Police found Coltharp’s parents, also believed to be members of the group, and his two sons, the affidavit states.

Coltharp’s parents told police that Shaffer had spent the past few nights sleeping in a tent with the four girls and had left with them the night before.

An Amber Alert was issued for Coltharp’s daughters. The four girls were recovered Dec. 5 after Shaffer was found walking a few miles from the compound that night. Two girls were recovered from a “deplorable” single-wide trailer, the affidavit says, and the other two were found in an empty 50-gallon water drum, where they had been housed for 24 hours in subfreezing temperatures.

The girls were taken to an area hospital, and one was flown to Primary Children’s Hospital.

haffer was arrested and charged with two first-degree-felony counts of kidnapping and four second-degree-felony counts of child abuse. Coltharp was charged with first-degree-felony kidnapping and obstruction of justice, a class A misdemeanor.

The men have preliminary hearings Wednesday — Shaffer in Iron County and Coltharp in Sanpete County. Coltharp had an initial hearing on the sodomy charge Wednesday.

According to the affidavit, Spring City Police Chief Clarke Christensen was contacted by an out-of-state man who said he communicated with Shaffer and Coltharp through social media regarding Knights of the Crystal Blade.

The man said he traveled to Utah to “investigate” the religious group, according to the affidavit, was “forcefully” baptized into the church by Shaffer and was promised a child bride.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/01/12/knights-of-the-crystal-blade-leaders-married-each-others-underage-daughters-utah-affidavit-says/

This is Your Brain on God | Michael Ferguson | TEDxSaltLakeCity

Can science give us insights into age-old questions about religion? In this talk, Dr. Michael Ferguson describes the study he and his team conducted on believing Mormons when they reported to "feel the Spirit," a central event in Mormon worship. What they found might surprise both believers and skeptics.

Michael Ferguson is inspired by questions about human brains and the gods they adore. His research program examines the intersections of culture and brain through the lenses of cutting-edge fMRI methods and cognitive neuroscience. Most recently, he is conducting interdisciplinary work with philosophy of mind to analytically describe intelligence. As a graduate student at the University of Utah’s department of bioengineering, he, his committee chair, and co-investigators designed and executed a first-of- its-kind fMRI study, looking at the brain activity of returned missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while the research participants were involved in acts of religious worship and devotion. Michael and his husband were the first same-sex couple legally married in the state of Utah, and they retain a major portion of their heart and love in Salt Lake City. They currently live in upstate New York, the spiritual cradle of their native faith.

https://youtu.be/ocuqguH1OIw

Explaining polygamy and its history in the Mormon Church

Joseph Smith

Joanna Brooks

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University
The Conversation
August 17, 2017

The arrest of polygamist leader Lyle Jeffs, evictions of polygamist families and new studies on crippling genetic disorders among small ultra-orthodox or “fundamentalist” Mormon communities in rural Utah have made headlines this summer.

This spotlight on polygamy is likely to make the majority of Mormons who are nonfundamentalist uncomfortable. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) – the mainstream Mormon Church with 15 million members worldwide – publicly rejected polygamy in 1890. But to this day, mainstream Mormons encounter stereotypes of polygamy.

As a scholar of Mormonism and gender and a Mormon myself, I know that the truth about Mormonism and polygamy is complicated and confusing. For more than 175 years, polygamy and tensions surrounding it have defined what it means to be a Mormon – especially a Mormon man.

Beginning of polygamy

Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, the Mormon movement from its beginnings offered a unique perspective on the religious role of men.

One of the most influential events in the life of Joseph Smith was the death of his 25-year-old brother Alvin in 1823. In 1836, Joseph Smith had a vision of Alvin Smith in heaven. Based on this vision, he developed the Mormon teaching that families could be together in heaven if they underwent religious rites – called “sealings” – in Mormon temples. Any faithful Mormon approved by church leaders could perform these sealings.

Due in part to this powerful role it gave to men in helping to save the people they loved and brought to heaven, Mormonism attracted proportionally more male converts than any other American religious movement of the time.

In the early 1830s, Smith extended this view of the role of men to include polygamy as it was practiced by Old Testament prophets like Abraham. Smith taught that a righteous man could help numerous women and children go to heaven by being “sealed” in plural marriage. Large families multiplied a man’s glory in the afterlife. This teaching was established as doctrine in 1843.

Rumors that polygamy was practiced by a small cadre of LDS Church leaders spurred mob violence against early Mormon settlements in Illinois and Missouri. In the face of this opposition, Smith counseled Mormon men to be “crafty” – contemporary scholars have interpreted this to mean alert, wise and “resourceful” – in their practice of polygamy and use of “sealings.”

After the murder of Joseph Smith in 1845, Mormons migrated to Utah territory in 1847, and there, under the leadership of Brigham Young – who succeeded Joseph Smith – brought the practice of polygamy out of the shadows. LDS leaders announced plural marriage as an official Mormon Church practice in 1852.

Following Young, Mormon theologians heralded polygamy as a core doctrine and as evidence of patriarchal manliness. By the 1880s, an estimated 20-30 percent of Mormon families practiced polygamy.

Polygamy laws, fundamentalist groups

However, after the U.S. Civil War, a growing controversy over polygamy united Americans – in both the North and South. Politicians, preachers and novelists decried it as an evil equal to slavery.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. the United States (1878) that polygamy was an “odious” practice. The court said,

“Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people. At common law, the second marriage was always void, and from the earliest history of England, polygamy has been treated as an offence against society….”

The United States Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887)authorizing the seizure of LDS Church assets and making polygamy a federal offense. Entire families went “underground” to avoid imprisonment. Mormon men were stereotyped as fanatics who exploited innocent converts to satisfy their “sexual degeneracy.” Mobs in the American South in the 1880s attacked Mormon missionaries.

Under pressure, LDS Church President Wilford W. Woodruff announced in 1890 that the Mormon Church would no longer sanction plural marriages in adherence with the law of the United States. Still, such marriages continued to be performed among Mormons in Mexico – some of whom emigrated from Utah to northern Mexico specifically to continue polygamy – or by rogue LDS leaders through the 1920s.

In the 1930s, seven leading Mormon polygamists banded together to form a loose confederation of Mormon fundamentalists to keep polygamy going. Several were excommunicated from the mainstream LDS Church and formed close-knit fundamentalist communities across the West – from Canada to Mexico – that survive to this day.

New depictions of masculinity

While fundamentalist Mormons broke off from the LDS Church in the early 20th century to continue their open practice of polygamy, those who remained members of the LDS Church made a hard turn toward the American mainstream and assimilation.

These mainstream Mormons developed new norms of Mormon manhood that seemed safer to the American public.

Moving away from the stereotype that Mormonism was led by fanatical prophets with multiple wives and long beards, as Mormons assimilated, LDS Church leaders developed a more modern clean-shaven appearance and a bureaucratic, corporate style of managing church affairs.

Between 1890 and 1920, LDS participation in the Boy Scouts (which began in 1911), bans on smoking and alcohol, and conservative sexuality helped to defined this new Mormon manhood. Donny Osmond, Steve Young and Mitt Romney exemplify the modern Mormon norm.

Still, it is my experience as a lifelong Mormon that LDS people with strong cultural and familial ties to the faith commonly believe that polygamy will be a fact of life in heaven. The LDS Church publicly renounced the practice of polygamy in 1890, but it has never renounced polygamy as doctrine, as evidenced in LDS scriptures. It has always permitted and continues to permit men to be married in Mormon temples “for the eternities” to more than one wife.

This tension between private belief and public image makes polygamy a sensitive subject for Mormons even today.

https://theconversation.com/explaining-polygamy-and-its-history-in-the-mormon-church-81384

BRIGHAM YOUNG AND THE DEFENSE OF MORMON POLYGAMY

PETER FEUERHERD

JSTOR Daily

JUNE 1, 2017

Brigham Young, born June 1, 1801 in Vermont, made his mark as the American Moses who led his people, the Church of Latter Day Saints popularly known as Mormons, to the “New Jerusalem” established in Salt Lake City.

Young was the second Mormon leader, elected to his position as president after the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder. The Mormons faced persecution wherever they settled, from upstate New York, to Illinois, to Missouri, only to find security under Young’s leadership in the wide-open territory of Utah, first under Mexican control and then under the authority of the United States.

Young was a central figure in what was perhaps the second most contentious debate, after slavery, to inflame the American public of the nineteenth century. Young, who married as a young man only to be widowed soon after, was a polygamist, taking on dozens of wives (although historians debate how conjugal each relationship was). Young said that polygamy was necessary “so that the noble spirits which are waiting for tabernacles might be brought forth,” a reference to how Mormons view the afterlife. According to historian Charles A. Cannon, the debate over polygamy became central to Mormon identity, particularly after Young publicly espoused the practice in 1852. Opponents used the institution to rebuff efforts to bring Utah into the American union.

The 1856 Republic Party platform condemned both slavery and polygamy. President Grover Cleveland in an address to Congress extolled the values of the American family, with the clear exception of Mormons. (Cleveland himself later scandalized the American public by fathering a child out of wedlock.)

Why the outrage against polygamy? Cannon argues that by offering an alternative to monogamy, Mormons threatened what was seen as the ideal family life of Victorian America. Cannon also argues that in a repressed era, speakers and writers who condemned Mormon polygamy were able to explore otherwise taboo notions about sexuality. Magazine authors argued that sexuality was man’s most wild impulse and that polygamy threatened to indulge insatiable desires.

Despite all the lasciviousness implied by its critics, Mormon polygamy, according to historians, was grounded in traditional principles based on the Old Testament, which provided for men to take multiple wives. Cannon argues that Mormon sexual ethics were actually comparable to other Americans of their time. Mormons prohibited adultery. They also believed, as others did, that male semen should not be wasted in acts not directed to procreation.

Other historians see the Mormon idea of polygamy in the context of the sexual and family life experimentation prevalent in nineteenth-century American life. Some utopian communities loosened traditional marriage bonds. Others, like the Shakers, promoted celibacy. Many Christians believed that the end times were near and that only massive propagation would save the species, which also contributed to the Mormon defense of polygamy.

While its critics argued that polygamy encouraged male sexual excess, its defenders argued the opposite. Mormons believed that sex during pregnancy resulted in sick babies, and argued that it was better for men to have other alternatives than to force themselves upon their monogamous pregnant wives. Mormon leaders argued that men were less inclined to spiritual lives than women, so the supply of available upright husbands was limited. They also said, true to the beliefs of the day, that men were more sexually inclined than women.

Young always wanted polygamy to be part of the wider culture. He called it “one of the best doctrines ever published.” But this was not to be. Twenty years after his death, Utah was admitted into the Union, and in exchange, the Mormon leadership officially abandoned polygamy as an official practice. Today, the Church of Latter Day Saints is a strong proponent of traditional, monogamous, heterosexual marriage.
https://daily.jstor.org/brigham-young-and-the-defense-of-mormon-polygamy/

A timeline of the history of polygamy in Canada.

Times Colonist
THE CANADIAN PRESS
FEBRUARY 3, 2017

CRANBROOK, B.C. - A B.C. Supreme Court judge found two people guilty Friday of taking a girl into the United States for a sexual purpose. Justice Paul Pearlman found that former couple Brandon Blackmore and Gail Blackmore took a 13-year-old girl over the border and days later she was married to Warren Jeffs, the now imprisoned leader of a sect that practises plural marriage.

Here is a timeline of polygamy in Canada:

1890: Wilford Woodruff, president of the Mormon church, ends the religion's long-standing practise of plural marriages, paving the path for Utah to become the 45th American state in 1896. Canada passes legislation outlawing polygamy, with specific language targeting Mormonism.

1947: A religious commune is established in Creston Valley near Lister, B.C., reportedly by three men expelled from a nearby Mormon church for refusing to renounce polygamy.

1985: The settlement in B.C. is named Bountiful — after a locale in the Book of Mormon — when Winston Blackmore becomes its leader. The community is connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, led by Jeffs.

1993: Immigration Canada confirms it is aware of U.S. girls arriving into Bountiful from Utah and Arizona but says it hasn't taken action because of the conflict in legal opinion between the federal and provincial governments.

September 2002: Jeffs excommunicates Blackmore and installs James Oler as the church's leader. Blackmore splits with the fundamentalist church, bringing nearly half of the 1,000-member community with him to start his own religious faction.

2008: A U.S. investigation brings to light documents seized from the fundamentalist Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, revealing that more than two-dozen girls have been ferried across the border between polygamous communities. The records are used to prosecute Jeffs for sexually assaulting underage girls, and also show that at least three girls from Bountiful — two 12-year-olds and one 13-year-old — were allegedly taken to the U.S. and married to the church leader.

August 2011: Jeffs is sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years, with no eligibility for parole for 35 years, for sexual assault.

November 2011: The B.C. Supreme Court upholds Canada's polygamy laws in a reference case, ruling that a section of the Criminal Code banning plural marriages is constitutional. The court's chief justice finds that the harm against women and children outweighs concerns over protecting religious freedom.

January 2015: The B.C. Supreme Court bans the province's polygamous groups from posing as mainstream Mormonism by calling themselves the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has strongly distanced itself from any polygamous offshoots. The ruling also prohibits the use of the words "Latter-day Saints" and "Mormon" and compels Blackmore to change his group's name to the Church of Jesus Christ (Original Doctrine) Inc.

http://www.timescolonist.com/a-timeline-of-the-history-of-polygamy-in-canada-1.9713866

Building Zion: the controversial plan for a Mormon-inspired city in Vermont

A Mormon businessman is buying up land to build master-planned towns from scratch, inspired by church founder Joseph Smith’s idea for a ‘plat of Zion’ – so why does the church oppose it?


How the Mormons are planning a city for 500,000 in Florida


The Guardian
Claire Provost in Sharon, Vermont
January 31, 2017

The roads through rural Vermont wind past rolling forested hills and quaint small towns, including South Royalton – used as the quintessential New England village in the opening sequence of the TV series Gilmore Girls.

A short drive away, the Tunbridge World’s Fair has run almost continuously since 1867, with games, contests for best pig or pumpkin, and displays of old-time printing presses and candle making.

And not far from there, one stop on the area’s low-key tourist trail dotted with maple syrup farms, pottery workshops and picturesque covered bridges, is the birthplace of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church.

The site now hosts a museum, run by the church and staffed by cheerful missionaries. Outside, a giant granite obelisk rises towards the sky. Calming music flows from speakers located high up in the trees. It is a peaceful place, designed to inspire reflection.

But, over the last year, it has also found itself at the centre of a controversy. In front of many houses and shops, signs exclaim: “Save our communities. Stop NewVistas.”

NewVistas is the name of an unusual, indeed, one-of-a-kind project led by a Mormon businessman named David Hall to build new, master-planned towns from scratch – inspired by notes written by Joseph Smith himself in 1833.

Hall says these designs, which described how ideal Mormon settlements should be laid out and were drafted almost 200 years ago, offer answers to modern-day challenges of sustainable living. And to make it happen, he has been buying land – lots of it.

The first goal is to build a NewVista community near Smith’s birthplace in Vermont, which would be home to about 20,000 people. The next step: to build more. Ultimately, Hall’s vision describes a new “city” of connected communities, with a total population of up to one million.

The fantastic story first came to light last spring, thanks to the careful eye and diligent research of a librarian in the small town of Sharon, who uncovered a series of local land purchases that she traced to the businessman and his plans.

Reflecting on that time, Nicole Antal, 30, says she’d found it all hard to believe – particularly the scale.

“This is very big for Vermont,” she says. “Burlington is 40,000 people. Montpellier, the state capital, is 7,000. This is not one guy buying a house and trying something new.”

To date, the NewVistas project is thought to have purchased as many as 1,500 acres in central Vermont – with plans to buy much more. It’s focused on a largely rural area at the intersection of four tiny towns – Royalton, Sharon, Stafford and Tunbridge – which have a combined population of just 6,400.

Nor is the project just buying up vacant lots. It appears to be purchasing whatever it can. Antal says a few properties sold to NewVistas were second homes. But so far acquisitions have been fragmented parcels.

Antal first blogged about the land purchases in March 2016, setting off a flurry of articles in the local media. Soon Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal picked up the story, revelling in its unusual characters, audacious vision and local controversy.

Residents in Vermont, meanwhile, had started to organise in opposition.

“This threat is like nothing we’ve ever seen or could have conjured up ourselves,” says one long-term local resident Jane Huppe, 58, describing it as a “top-down venture” that doesn’t fit with the area’s own ideas for how it should develop.

“It hit us like a ton of bricks,” she adds. Antal agrees, and says it could completely overwhelm existing communities. “Why does he not bring this to where they need massive amounts of housing, instead of disrupting the rural countryside?”

Building Zion

Joseph Smith left central Vermont as a child with his family, moving to rural New York, where he later founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But despite his rural upbringing, Smith outlined a vision for new and compact settlements that would go on to influence the planning of hundreds of American towns.

“This farm boy ... dreamed to build a metropolis that rivalled the large seaport cities he had only heard about,” writes the academic Benjamin Park, in a 2013 paper.

In the 1830s, Smith laid out a detailed plan called the “plat of Zion”. It described new towns, designed to be self-sufficient, ordered by rigid grids, and surrounded by farmland and wilderness.

The plan included ideal sizes of streets, blocks and lots. Roads should be straight and oriented to the points of a compass. Homes, built in uniform stone or brick, should sit within deep individual lots, with front yards and back gardens.

Significantly, the plan lacked designated areas for government buildings and town halls, as well as for markets or commercial districts. Instead, central blocks would be set aside for temples and community buildings.

Once fully occupied, with 15-20,000 inhabitants, the settlement would not be expanded. Instead, others would be built, to “fill up the world in these last days”.

This wasn’t a theoretical plan. Smith hoped to build a new town like this – in Missouri, specifically. In 1831, he said that Independence, in Jackson County, had been revealed as “the land of promise and the place for the City of Zion”.

Unlike other new religious movements in America at the time, which were “warning congregants of the evils rooted in urban cities”, Smith believed that “cities were not to be fled, but sacralised,” writes Park. This reflected key Mormon principles that “focused on establishing a righteous civilisation ... rather than individuals.

“[Zion] was literally the ‘centre place’ for a new civilisation destined to expand as God’s people multiplied. Gathering and city building were not incidental parts of sanctification, but the goal.”

In the summer of 1833, Smith and other church leaders met in Kirtland, Ohio, and drew up specific blueprints for a city of Zion, including designs for specific buildings. Smith sent these to church members in Missouri, who were to“purchase this whole region of country, as soon as time will permit”.

It didn’t happen; early Mormon settlers were driven out of Missouri. And in 1844, Smith was killed, before his city plan could be realised.

His designs survived, however, and were later used as a blueprint for as many as 500 communities in the American West. In the 1990s, the American Planning Association went so far as to recognise the plat of Zion documents for their historical significance and influence.

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Most famously, church leader Brigham Young drew on the plat for the design of Salt Lake City, which was established by Mormon settlers in 1847. The city’s core still reflects this: it features wide streets, oriented north-south, and mammoth blocks focusing on Temple Square, where a church museum also holds the original plat of Zion documents.

The concept of Zion remains key to the Mormon faith. The church explains that it represents the “pure in heart”, but also “a place where the pure in heart live”. It says: “In the latter days a city named Zion will be built [in Missouri] ... to which the tribes of Israel will gather.” In the meantime, members “are counselled to build up Zion wherever they are living”.

Salt Lake City itself was also, of course, heavily influenced by broader trends in American life, such as the completion of the transnational railroad in the 19th century, which brought new visitors and migrants, and later by car culture and sprawl.

In December 2016, a popular architecture and design podcast noted that the city’s design means that addresses “can read like sets of coordinates. ‘300 South 2100 East’, for example, means three blocks south and 21 blocks east of Temple Square.” But, it said, “the most striking thing about Salt Lake’s grid is the scale”:

The streets are so menacing and crossings so long that the city has placed plastic buckets on lampposts which hold flags that pedestrians can carry to the other side while crossing. In present-day Salt Lake City, it’s hard to get around without a car.”

Nevertheless, some experts argue that the plat of Zion was a precursor to intelligent urban planning – and leaves a legacy that could help tackle haphazard developments today.

The NewVistas project

This is of little comfort for those Vermont residents who oppose NewVistas. The Mormon church, too, is apparently displeased: they don’t support the plan.

David Hall, the businessman behind the contemporary and controversial NewVistas project, lives in Provo, Utah. His background is in big energy: he reportedly made his fortune selling sophisticated drilling tools to the oil and gas industry.

In an interview with the Guardian, he says Smith’s city plans remain remarkably relevant for today’s challenges.

“The plat describes a very low footprint, 20,000 people on only three square miles. Everything else was supposed to be wilderness. It’s telling us not to sprawl, which is what we do, we even go into the mountains,” Hall says. “It really makes sense for our time.”

The project’s website says it follows the plat laid out by Smith and that its architectural plans are also “based on the same sizing specifications for early Mormon temples, which were designed to fulfil multiple functions”.

But, Hall says, the goal is to develop “secular, sustainable communities” taking advantage of modern technology, including food production techniques that make it possible for people to live in ever-smaller spaces. It is envisaged for Mormons and non-Mormons alike.

The NewVistas Foundation argues: “Sustainable living in the modern world requires high density urban development,” pointing out that sprawl consumes too much energy and other resources, not just in urban areas but rural as well.

It presents a detailed, wide-ranging plan, including specific designs for three-storey “standard buildings” with apartments, businesses, and some farming and manufacturing, all located in one place.

More futuristic ideas include internal walls and floors that could be moved by robotic systems, so that families could live in small spaces that are easily rearranged. Outside, “walkway-podway” systems (something like elevated sidewalks and an underground tube network) would operate on multiple levels to transport people and goods. New toilets would monitor users’ health.

Not unlike Smith’s original vision, the foundation says the goal is “massive scalability”, so that these communities can be “replicated to encompass all of the earth’s billions of people”. It calls itself nothing less than a new “urban model and economic system for the 21st century”.

Each complete “NewVista” would have as many as one million people, but be composed of 50 similar and carefully designed communities, each with a population of 15,000 to 25,000 and “the capacity to be self-sufficient with respect to basic needs”.

There are also unusual proposals for how these places will be run: “organised according to a private capitalistic economic structure. The community is not a political entity but a productive enterprise, like a company town.”

There is even a suggestion that a NewVista Community Corporation would have control over things like “land use, transportation, and community environment, which are usually matters of government concern”.

Hall predicts that the first NewVistas community could require as much as $3bn (£2.3bn) to build, expecting 20% to come from the first residents and the bulk from other investors – with nothing from the church.

“NewVistas is my own modern interpretation of Joseph Smith’s community documents and I have not ever discussed the ideas with the church and won’t involve them in the future.”

Vermont strikes back

“We didn’t waste any time when this came up,” says Michael Sacca, 61, director of the Alliance for Vermont Communities, a new non-profit organisation formed by local residents in opposition to Hall’s plans – and any other similar large-scale developments in future.

Sitting on the porch outside the house he and his wife built themselves 15 years ago, with the sun setting below the hills around him, he says: “We want to protect our future and our children’s future and the region ... we want to maintain our lifestyle and our communities.”

The NewVistas plans simply don’t fit into local, regional or state visions of how Vermont should develop, Sacca argues, which instead aim to “concentrate development as much as possible in village centres, town centres, leaving rural areas for rural life”.

Sacca also describes the corporate structure envisaged for NewVistas as “Orwellian” and as an experiment designed to “stand on its own as an insulated corporate town”.

Opposition to the project, which would transform the area, has been vibrant and vocal. Sign and stickers are visible on the streets of central Vermont, and petitions are calling for discussion at town meetings in March.

The Alliance is also tracking land purchases. By their count, NewVistas has already acquired an estimated 1,200-1,500 acres of land – with purchases continuing despite the controversy.

The Mormon church is itself, a significant land and real estate developer, with farms, ranches, residential and commercial properties across the US. In Florida, a church-owned property is now set to become the site of a new “city” for as many as half a million people by 2080.

However, it does not seem to be too happy about the NewVistas project either.

In August 2016, a church spokesman said: “This is a private venture and is not associated with The Church ... [which] makes no judgment about the scientific, environmental or social merits of the proposed developments. However, for a variety of reasons, we are not in favour of the proposal.”

The NewVistas website explains that “the community layout” envisaged “follows a city plot pattern created by Joseph Smith in June of 1833”. But it also carries an “Important Note” stating that its model “is not presented as a fulfilment of Joseph Smith’s vision. It is not supported or endorsed by the Church”.

The church in Salt Lake City did not respond to requests for comment or further elaboration of its position.

In Vermont, some of the project’s opponents hope they can use Act 250 – the state’s premier land use law – to stop it. This law was enacted decades ago after new highways and ski resorts lured investors into the state. It requires that developers comply with regional plans, as a way to manage growth and protect the environment.

Hall acknowledges his project has been controversial and many people are against it. But he says he’s drawn to Vermont in particular because of its connection to Joseph Smith, because land is relatively cheap, and because there is too much of what he calls “rural sprawl”.

“There’s lots of rules that keep you from building things, so Vermonters would eventually have to approve it – but not right away,” Hall adds, stressing that nothing is happening overnight and it would take decades to realise his plan.

He says technical components must first be worked out, and he needs to “consolidate land”, which can take generations because “we’ve had this trend of subdividing and sprawl, so the reverse process will take a long time”. The project, he argues, “is very unique, but I have a hard time getting people to really look at it and study it.”

Meanwhile, land is also being bought in his home town of Provo, Utah, where NewVistas is again facing local opposition. Professor emeritus at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School, Warner Woodworth, who lives in Provo, described it as a “takeover”.

“To have someone with money and power enter our area and gradually buy up homes, offering distorted purchase power to grab residences, is troubling. It shakes the peace and violates the sense of continuity and mutual care for one another,” Woodworth wrote in September, arguing that Hall’s plans are also a “far cry from the original” plat of Zion idea:

Hall’s system is corporatist, while Joseph’s was more communal. Hall wants to establish a top-down power structure, whereas Joseph envisioned a bottom-up community of common consent. Hall seeks to control. Joseph sought to liberate. The early Zion plat consisted of large family yards and agriculture. In contrast, Hall plans for tiny urban apartments of 200 square feet in a bare, boring apartment.”

But, he suggested: “It may have been more achievable and acceptable if he had engaged more participants from the beginning. While one may disagree with some of his ideas, it’s the process he uses that becomes the fatal step.”

As for Antal, who first discovered Hall’s project, she is concerned about the impact on her family.

“There are some good ideas [in the NewVistas project] ... Polluting less, creating local agriculture. But I don’t think it applies to Vermont. I think Vermont is doing a pretty good job at being sustainable,” she says. “I don’t like that this is being imposed on us.”

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/building-zion-controversial-plan-mormon-inspired-city-vermont

Book Review: Looking at plural marriage and Mormons from vantage of women

THE BOSTON GLOBE
By M.J. Andersen

GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

JANUARY 06, 2017

On a cold day in 1870, thousands of Mormon women gathered in a Utah meeting hall to defy the US Congress. Astonished journalists listened as the women defended polygamy, which by then adherents openly practiced. Soon afterward, Utah’s Mormon-dominated territorial legislature granted women the right to vote — well in advance of efforts elsewhere.

In “A House Full of Females — Plural Marriage and Women’s rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870,” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich rewinds the tape, seeking to understand how Mormon women arrived at this seemingly paradoxical moment. The result is a book that movingly portrays believers’ early struggles while leaving certain mysteries frustratingly intact.

Ulrich, a Harvard professor and former MacArthur fellow, is a gifted historian whose earlier works forged new paths in women’s studies. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Midwife’s Tale,” she concentrated on the late 18th century diary of one woman. “A House Full of Females” follows various families and individuals and relies on the letters and diaries of multiple writers. Ulrich likens her approach to a patchwork quilt, but while the metaphor is apt, readers may find it hard to keep track of who’s who — and especially of who is married to whom.

Ulrich, a past president of the Mormon History Association, is a descendant of 19th century migrants to Utah, whose own forebears practiced polygamy. She is after fresh insights on how plural marriage arose and was put into practice, but the documents she mines are often maddeningly opaque. The writers may have been naturally reticent about sexual matters. But they surely derived some of their silence from Joseph Smith, the movement’s secretive founder.


Bottom of Form

Regarded by his followers as a prophet, Smith cited dreams and visions as the basis of his new theology. An angel, he asserted, had led him to the buried tablets that became the Book of Mormon. Later dreams produced a raft of doctrines, including plural marriage, which Smith committed to a secret document in 1843.

Hierarchical as well as secretive, Smith had formed an inner circle of male leaders, whom he urged to join him in “sealing” extra wives to themselves. Ulrich demonstrates that at first, the idea repelled his followers. With its gradual adoption, many of the women (including Smith’s legal wife) and even some of the men remained troubled. Writing in 1846 to her husband, who had proposed taking another wife after his return from a mission, Mary Richards objected: “. . . there is no such a thing as happiness known here where a man has more than one” [wife].

Yet with varying degrees of reluctance, many women went along. Some saw plural marriage as a path to economic security or an escape from abusive husbands. Others saw “marrying up” in the hierarchy as the road to greater rewards. The church promised exaltation after death, but Mormon women accepted that it was to come through their husbands. Their chief duty was to become mothers.

In Ulrich’s account, the Female Relief Society emerges as an incubator of women’s power and political agency. Launched with Smith’s approval, it became a means of distributing aid to the poor but also transforming household work such as sewing and weaving into commercial activity. Though not making them equal, the society raised women’s status within the church organization. With men frequently absent on missionary assignments, the women often had to function on their own and did so both singly and cooperatively.

In 1852, after the Mormons had left their Illinois base under pressure from non-Mormon residents and resettled in Utah under Brigham Young, church leaders proclaimed plural marriage as official doctrine. Their open stance both threatened the church’s very existence and became a major obstacle to statehood.

In 1890, after years of fighting federal attempts to extinguish plural marriage, the church finally gave way. Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints condemns the practice, including by unsanctioned fundamentalist sects that occasionally still make headlines.

Joseph Smith’s vision emerged during a period of national religious ferment that included the Second Great Awakening. A plethora of movements rose and fell as Americans sought assurance of salvation. Against this backdrop, Smith’s achievement is all the more striking. Mormonism would not have survived without the pious women it initially gathered together. How they remained so devoted to its patriarchal structure, and its demands for submission, is an enigma that perhaps no one can pierce. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has not explained these resourceful women so much as rendered their belief more miraculous.

A HOUSE FULL OF FEMALES:

Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870

By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Knopf, 512 pp., $35

M.J. Andersen, a former member of the Providence Journal editorial board, is author of the memoir “Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner.”



https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/01/05/looking-plural-marriage-and-mormons-from-vantage-women/ZJlib5lCaheng8waZaGUYI/story.html?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=153d57ac7b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-153d57ac7b-400018169

How Mormon Polygamy In The 19th Century Fueled Women's Activism

NPR
January 17, 2017
Heard on Fresh Air


Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870

by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Hardcover, 484 pages

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich says that for Mormon women living in 19th century Utah, "plural marriages" were empowering in complicated ways.
How Mormon Polygamy In The 19th Century Fueled Women's Activism
TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. What was it like to be a Mormon woman in a polygamist marriage in 19th-century America? That's what historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explores in her new book "A House Full Of Females: Plural Marriage And Women's Rights In Early Mormonism." She says plural marriage, as it was called, could have been described as an experiment in co-operative housekeeping and an incubator of female activism. The founder of the faith, Joseph Smith, took his first Mormon plural wife in 1841. In 1890, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto that led to the end of plural marriage.

Ulrich's book is based on diaries, letters, minutes of meetings and other day-to-day documents written by Mormons during the period. Ulrich won a Pulitzer Prize for her nonfiction book "A Midwife's Tale" which told the story of a midwife and mother in Maine after the Revolutionary War and was based on the midwife's journal. The book was adapted into a PBS film.

Ulrich is a professor at Harvard and past president of the American Historical Association and the Mormon History Association. All eight of her great grandparents and four of her great, great grandparents were Mormons who migrated to Utah before 1860. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, welcome to FRESH AIR.

So I think you're making the argument that for women, plural marriage was both empowering and subordinating. So the subordinating part is, I think, kind of obvious 'cause you're one of several wives of one man. You're sharing that person. You are - the women, I think, are subordinate to the man. But in what sense do you think it might have been empowering for the women?

LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH: I think plural marriage empowered women in very complicated ways, and to put it most simply, it added to the complexity and the adversity they experienced. And we can argue that women who deal with tough things - or a man - develop certain strengths and aptitudes. It also reinforced an already well developed community of women to share work, to share childcare, to share religious faith, to share care in childbirth and in illness, in some sense strengthened bonds that were already very much present in their lives.

GROSS: So who had a say in - who, like - how many women would be in a plural marriage and who the next woman would be? I mean, a lot of what I know is from the HBO series "Big Love," and as well researched as it was...

ULRICH: Yes.

GROSS: I mean, it was about a breakaway fundamentalist compound, so they were - who knows what they were practicing?

ULRICH: Yeah.

GROSS: So you really have to set me straight on this. But, like, did the women already in the marriage have any say in terms of who the next woman to be added to the marriage would be or was it just like a man's choice?

ULRICH: No. It's not a man's choice who he's going to marry in the first place. Latter-day Saints, like other Americans, believed you had to consent to a marriage. So the woman who was a potential wife had to agree, but in a plural marriage, the prior wife had to agree as well. In fact, in the marriage ceremony, she is involved, and there are some very interesting examples.

One of my favorites was a man who's first wife had died, and he was courting a potential new wife. And she said, yes, I'll marry you if you'll marry my sister also - seems very, very strange to us. But the idea that they were going to not be parted from a beloved sister was apparently appealing to this woman.

GROSS: So forgive me for jumping right to sex here, but having read...

ULRICH: OK.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Having read the diaries of Mormon women in plural marriages, what sense did you get of the place of sexuality in the marriage? I mean, the assumption is often - the assumption of outsiders anyways is often that men had plural marriages, so that they'd have more variety sexually in their life.

And, you know, if one woman was pregnant, there'd be another woman to have relations with. And that for the woman, they wouldn't have a man to spend the night with every night. They wouldn't have somebody to have relations with or even just cuddle with or just be in a room with overnight so that the woman was getting short changed and the men were having this kind of, you know, bountiful feast.

And at the same time, I sometimes wonder, gee, were there women who chose plural marriage because they didn't really care to have sexual relations? Were the women in plural marriages because they were really lesbians and could maybe be secretly intimate with other women in the marriages? So you read these diaries - I don't know how forthcoming they are - but did you get any insights into any of that?

ULRICH: 19th-century diarists don't talk about sex.

(LAUGHTER)

ULRICH: Alas, I mean - there was one diary - a man's diary - diary of William Clayton, who was quite expressive about his passionate love for the second wife he was trying to persuade. But they don't talk about who they slept with. So in order to understand sexuality in the 19th century, you have to look in other places, look at the consequences - when were babies born, how many babies were there, and also to look at the kind of advice literature that they read, not necessarily published by Mormons, but by certain very conservative writers in the 19th century.

And sermons - sermons sometimes could be quite explicit. So the 19th-century idea that sexual relations during pregnancy and lactation was a dangerous thing probably impacted a lot of these relationships. Restraining from sex during a wife's pregnancy and during a period when she was nursing a child put a certain kind of pressure on a man, perhaps, to seek another wife. I think some men did seek new wives when their first wife was pregnant. It's also certainly possible - I mean, there are a lot of different kinds of human beings in the 19th century as they are today. Some women prefer not to engage in sexual relations.

I've been really puzzled, for example, about the number of childless women or women with only one child who lived happily together in a community of women, sometimes in the same household helping each other to raise their children. And I think it's quite possible that their intimacy certainly psychologically and emotionally if not physically may have been expressed with other women rather than with men.

GROSS: What was the spiritual justification that Joseph Smith and his early followers used for polygamy?

ULRICH: The spiritual justification was that God said to do it (laughter). And it's about as simple as that.

GROSS: Like he's told Adam and Eve go forth and multiply.

ULRICH: Yes. Go forth and multiply, but even more, I think there's the sense when this emerged - in fact, I know there's a sense, some powerful sense in 1842, not just among Mormons, but among people all over the world that Jesus is coming soon, that the end of the world is coming. And we need to be prepared. And Joseph Smith taught that one of the forms of preparation was to gather all of the faithful, all of those who had embraced the new gospel into families and the part of that process meant creating plural households.

So every righteous woman had a husband, and men were like ancient Abraham households which would become patriarchs and fathers of large families. So a lot of it was about this imminence of the Second Coming of Jesus.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of the new book "A House Full Of Females: Plural Marriage And Women's Rights In Early Mormonism." And it's based on diaries of Mormon women from 1835 to 1870. She's a professor of history at Harvard, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book called "A Midwife's Tale," which was based on an 18th-century journal by a midwife. We'll be right back after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. And her new book, "A House Full Of Females," is about plural marriage and women's rights in early Mormonism. And it's based on 19th-century journals that she had access to. She's also a Pulitzer Prize winner for her book "A Midwife's Tale."

So, you know, in writing about Mormonism in the 1800s, you write about how women in Utah - Utah was a largely, like, Mormon place - women won the right to vote before they did in the rest of the nation, with the exception of Wyoming, which was very sparsely populated. So why did Mormons support suffrage for women?

ULRICH: Mormons supported suffrage for women, I think, as a way of calling the bluff of 19th-century antagonists, who claimed that women were subordinated in Mormonism. And that - in a kind of joking way, a writer in The New York Times said, well, let's give them the vote, and then they can, you know, eliminate polygamy. Well, Mormons thought that was a rather bright idea. Some people have assumed, well, the men just came up with this idea as a kind of political move. But what we know now, through very careful research in the minutes of women's meetings, is that they asked for it.

GROSS: The women asked for it?

ULRICH: The women asked for it. For many of us, we think that the women's rights movement is about seizing power over men who appear to be controlling our lives, right to wages, right to divorce, right to enter any profession we would like. In truth, many Mormon women already had those rights. And when they acted publicly in 1870, when this discussion was going on, they astonished the world by creating a very large meeting to defend polygamy, which one woman expressed as the right to choose my own husband.

Now, I think we have to look at that public demonstration in behalf of polygamy in more than one way. These were women who had suffered the loss of homes, had suffered incredible hardships - through the persecution...

GROSS: Well, they were pioneers, right? I mean, they had...

ULRICH: I think it's more correct to call them refugees. They were pioneers, but their pioneering wasn't chosen. They were driven from homes in Missouri. They were driven from homes in Illinois.

GROSS: Because of polygamy?

ULRICH: Not because of polygamy alone. In Missouri, polygamy was not a factor. In Illinois, it was a factor. But the larger factor is people didn't like communities that banded together and voted alike and cooperated economically.

And they threatened their neighbors politically because they could out-vote them. So there were not a lot of them in numerical terms in the nation or in the world. But there were an awful lot of them in small, early settlements in very unstable frontier communities. And that led to a lot of conflict.

GROSS: So something I found very interesting, you quote a reporter from New Jersey who wrote, what is the use of women's suffrage if it is to be used to bolster up an institution so degrading to the sex and demoralizing to society? And he's referring, there, to plural marriage. But then, two famous suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, support suffrage in Utah and say, you know, polygamy and monogamy, they're both oppressive systems for women.

And Stanton says, the condition of women is slavery today and must be so, so long as they are shut out of the world of work, helpless dependents on man for bread. So I think it's really interesting to see these two suffragists basically say, oh, you think plural marriage is oppressive? Well, look at your own marriage. Your own monogamous marriage is oppressive to women, too.

ULRICH: Yes, absolutely. They're talking about laws. Specific laws, in the 19th century, was oppressive. Many states still followed the common law Doctrine of Coverture, which declared a woman civilly dead once she married. It's not just...

GROSS: So she had no legal rights over her money, her property. She had no ownership over them.

ULRICH: Her money, her - her money, her property - she couldn't sue or take a case to court except under a father or a husband - so dependency. The right to divorce - although divorce laws were greatly liberalized in the 19th century in most parts of the country, it was definitely - you had to prove either adultery - it took a while for physical abuse to be grounds for divorce.

Utah had no fault divorce from the beginning. It was very, very open and pretty common. And particularly, I think that made plural marriage workable. If you didn't like it, you could leave. And there was no real stigma, which is what's interesting. Well, I can't say that. Of course, there must have been. People may have looked down on other people. But people who were high authorities in the church had multiple divorces. Women who were divorced went on to marry somebody higher up in the hierarchy. It's a very different world than we imagine. And so instead of comparing plural marriage in the 19th century to our notions of women's rights today, we need to compare plural marriage, monogamy and then other institutions that really distressed people in the 19th century, like prostitution for example, different kinds of bigamous relationships.

So Mormons would argue, many American men have multiple sexual partners. They're just not responsible. They don't acknowledge them. They don't give them dignity. They don't legitimate their children. So polygamy is a solution to the horrendous licentiousness of other Americans. Seems like a strange argument to us today, but in this era, it made sense to some people.

GROSS: Well, another thing about the early divorce law in Utah - didn't that also make it easier for women in monogamous marriages - and maybe monogamous marriages outside of the Mormon faith - to divorce their husbands and enter into a plural marriage with a Mormon family?

ULRICH: Yes. We think of marriage in the 19th century as a very stable institution supported by laws - strict laws, hard to be divorced, et cetera, et cetera. But the major means of divorce in the 19th century was probably just leaving town.

GROSS: (Laughter).

ULRICH: And men did that more easily than women. But bigamy was pretty common in the 19th century. What's interesting about the Mormons is they sanctified new relationships for women who had fled abusive or alcoholic husbands. A number of these married both monogamously and polygamous among the Latter-day Saints. And they were welcomed into the community and not stigmatized.

One woman said that when Joseph Smith married her, even though she was legally married to somebody in South Carolina - you know, it was a long ways away - it was like receiving golden apples in baskets of silver. That is, she was not an outcast woman. She was a woman who had made her own choice and had left a bad situation, and now she was going to enter a relationship with a man she could admire.

GROSS: So how did polygamy officially end in the Mormon faith?

ULRICH: Polygamy officially ended in 1890, after the Supreme Court had ruled that the laws against polygamy were legal. These are sort of the first federal laws governing marriage, marriage generally being a state issue. And when the church had finally lost its last battle and the federal government threatened to confiscate all the church property, they gave in. And interestingly, one of the main characters in my book had by then become president of the church as an old man. His name was Wilford Woodruff, and he said he had come to the point in his life where he had to act for the survival of the church.

And so he issued what was called a manifesto, saying, we will obey the law of the land. That was in 1890. It took another 20 years or so before that really was solidly in place. There were some plural marriages after 1890, secretly. But plural marriage, even before the manifesto, had already begun to decline. And I think prosecution had its toll. But also a kind of modernization, and younger generations who had not gone through the early suffering and pioneering were less zealous about plural marriage.

GROSS: My guest is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of the new book, "A House Full Of Females" about plural marriage and women's rights in early Mormonism. We'll talk more after a break, and we'll hear from Rachel Bloom, the co-creator and star of the musical comedy TV series, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of the new book "A House Full Of Females," about polygamy and women's rights in early Mormonism. The book covers the years 1853 to 1870. Ulrich is a professor at Harvard and past president of both the American Historical Association and the Mormon History Association. When we left off, we were talking about the end of polygamy, or plural marriage as it was called, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

What do you think it was like for the church to distance itself from one of its founding principles?

ULRICH: That it's an extremely important question, and it's one that historians are beginning to explore a little more depth than in the past. I say in my book which really doesn't deal with the aftermath of polygamy that some women wept, some woman cheered and some probably just didn't know what to make of it. How could something be the word of God in one generation and then because of federal action now it be the word of God that it has to end?

And that felt like probably capitulating to secular authority which accounts for the survival of small polygamous sex that trace their genealogy back to Joseph Smith and to early Utah and continued to perpetuate the practice today. But there are a very, very small number of people in terms of an internationally expanding worldwide church of many, many million members.

GROSS: I think one of the things that people find puzzling about the Mormon faith is that since Joseph Smith lived in the 1800s, in terms of history, it's pretty recent. You know, so like...

ULRICH: Very recent, yes.

GROSS: ...If you're looking at like Moses or Jesus or the Prophet Muhammad, I mean - that's like a long time ago. And so it's easy to look back on those times and things that might not make like scientific or logical sense, it's - you know, what? - it's like from another age. And we don't really have the most accurate documentation of what happened then. People didn't have access to science to explain mysteries or access to psychology to explain vision, so there's a certain element of that that you just say it's so deep in the past, we can never quite comprehend what the origins of these origin stories are.

But, you know, when you're talking about the 1800s and, like, you are, for instance, reading journals contemporaneous with that period, it just becomes, I think, harder for people to find credible the kind of visions that Joseph Smith claims to have had and the kind of, you know, gold plates that have these revelations that Jesus passed on after the resurrection when he was in the Americas. Do you know what I'm saying? So...

ULRICH: I know very much what you're saying, but I would argue that it's precisely because Mormonism is a very new faith, as are a number of others developed in 19th-century America - like Christian Science, for example, or Seventh-day Adventists. But the study of new religions is powerful academically and in terms of scholarship on religion precisely because it allows us to experience the origins of new faith traditions. And that is why what I discovered through approaching my own faith tradition as a historian rather than as a believer was how immensely powerful the human need to care for one another and to turn toward faith in God in order to surmount things that seem inexplicable and even unendurable.

My study of this period doesn't turn me toward abstract questions about the nature of God so much as it turns me toward deeply meaningful questions about how human beings manage to live together in the world and to make reasonable lives out of inscrutable suffering. Those are such contemporary and profound questions.

GROSS: Does the Mormon faith fulfill those functions for you?

ULRICH: Yes. It gives me many, many grounding values in my life, particularly the values of community, of sharing, of not being invested in being important or wealthy in the world. I don't always live up to those values, believe me. I try very hard, and they - and I come back to them constantly. And it also - some of the most profound issues have to do with the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of human beings, the sense of fatherhood and motherhood of God that we're in this together, and we're in this world to, I think - and this is just such a difficult thing to say - but we're in this world to make it better.

That to me is a fundamental revelation that Joseph Smith delivered. And believe me, he didn't always make it better, but the value that he taught and that has been passed on through many generations to those of us who are privileged to have had that faith tradition is, you know - we're supposed to try to improve things in whatever way we can in the world around us.

GROSS: So this might be awkward for me to ask and awkward for you to answer, but as a secular person, I wonder why some of the values that you've mentioned like the importance of sharing, of knowing that you are not the most important thing in the world, of realizing that, you know, material wealth is not important - why do values like those need to be attached to a faith tradition as opposed to being just really...

ULRICH: Oh, they don't.

GROSS: ...Solid secular values.

ULRICH: They don't.

GROSS: Yeah.

ULRICH: But they need to be promulgated and taught, and I think they can be very powerfully communicated through faith tradition of faith community. You know, in my life, I have the biggest opportunities that I have in my life to rub shoulders and to participate and to listen and learn from people who aren't highly educated, affluent people are in my religious community. And that's something that we can seek in many different ways, but in my religious community, there is an assumption that those worldly attainments aren't as important as some of the other things that we try to do as a community. And, for me, it's extremely important.

GROSS: All right. I understand that. So one of the things you're famous for is a phrase that you originated in - I think it was like an academic paper in the 1970s - and the phrase has since shown up on like T-shirts and bumper stickers. I know you're asked about this all the time, but the phrase is well-behaved women seldom make history.

Now, knowing your work, knowing that you write about, quote, "ordinary women" who kept journals, and you're trying to understand what the lives of, like, ordinary women were in their time, I interpret that quote as meaning if you're just looking at history, you won't understand the lives of ordinary women because ordinary women seldom make history. But I suspect that that has been - that quote has been interpreted as ordinary women seldom make history so women don't be ordinary, do something special so you can make history. Don't be ordinary.

ULRICH: Yes (laughter).

GROSS: Right?

ULRICH: Absolutely. Yes. It's been turned upside-down. On the other hand, you know, I was an ordinary girl from Idaho who got involved in the feminist movement and I've been on a collective bargaining team, and my former university, you know - I've done a lot of not very well-behaved things. And so I guess I embrace both sides. I embrace the contradiction of that crazy accidental slogan.

GROSS: (Laughter). Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

ULRICH: Thanks so much, Terry. I love your program.

GROSS: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's new book about plural marriage and women's rights in early Mormonism is called "A House Full Of Females." After we take a short break, we'll hear from Rachel Bloom, the co-creator and star of the musical comedy TV series "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." This is FRESH AIR.

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/17/510246850/how-mormon-polygamy-in-the-19th-century-fueled-womens-activism

CultNEWS101 Articles: 1/13/2016

Evangelicals, Prosperity Gospel, The Family, Scientology, Cult Experts, Buddhist, Rastafari, FLDS, Mormonism, LDS

​Washington Post: ​

Evangelicals should be deeply troubled by Donald Trump’s attempt to mainstream heresy

This opinion piece is by Michael Horton, a theology professor at Westminster Seminary California.

Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration will include Paula White and possibly other members of his inner circle, Darrell Scott, “Apostle” Wayne T. Jackson and Mark Burns. They’re all televangelists who hail from the “prosperity gospel” camp. They advocate a brand of Pentecostal Christianity known as Word of Faith.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/01/03/evangelicals-should-be-deeply-troubled-by-donald-trumps-attempt-to-mainstream-heresy/

​The Daily Beast: ​

My Life Inside ‘The Family’ Cult

We lived in a huge, ten-bedroom chalet in Switzerland which had once been a quaint bed and breakfast. If it weren’t for the Family’s avoidance of even basic upkeep, it would have been like something you’d see on a postcard. Our window boxes were filled with rotting memories of carnations, the roof leaked, and the floors sagged under the weight of all the people they supported. We’d managed to cram nearly seventy of us into this particular home. Its one virtue was that it was close enough to the American military bases in Germany that we could pick up Armed Forces Radio. That was important, because I had a radio.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/08/my-life-inside-the-family-cult.html

​AOL.Com: ​

Scientology lawyer speaks out, slams Leah Remini and her show

Now, a representative for the church is speaking out on camera, accusing Remini of "making a career out of attacking Scientology."

"When people espouse these kinds of lies about an organization like the Church of Scientology, it stirs up a lot of religious hatred and bigotry, and that results in people believing that somehow they have to act it out," Monique Yingling, an attorney for the church, told ABC's Dan Harris.

The interviews with Monique Yingling, an attorney for the church, and Remini air Friday on ABC's 20/20.

http://www.aol.com/article/2017/01/07/scientology-lawyer-slams-leah-remini/21649911/

How to select a cult expert

When you are looking for help — for yourself or for someone else — you run into terms like: ‘cult expert,’ ‘thought reform consultant,’ just ‘consultant,’ ‘lecturer,’ ‘exit counselor,’ ‘intervention specialist,’ ‘cult specialist,’ et cetera.

The media often still refers to ‘cult experts’ as ‘deprogrammers’ — people who ‘deprogram‘ someone who has been ‘programmed’ through ‘brainwashing‘ or ‘mind control.’

Familiarize yourself with the terminology and issues so that you can ask informed questions when interviewing people.

Keep in mind that this in an unregulated field in which some people who have become quite skilled at marketing themselves are the very ones to stay away from

http://www.cultexperts.org/

​The Guardian: ​

Buddha branding is everywhere – but what do Buddhists think?

“It’s hardly surprising that people are trying to sell things attached to the concept of Buddhism,” says Singhamanas, who was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist order in 2012 and now works at the London Buddhist Centre. “It’s the idea that something can give you peace, ease, energy – something mysterious, something holy but not religious.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/jan/08/buddha-branding-buddhists-religion-philosophy-year-anxious

​NY Books: ​

The True Story of Rastafari

For Jamaica’s leaders, Rastafari has been an important aspect of the country’s global brand. Struggling with sky-high unemployment, vast inequality, and extreme poverty (crippling debt burdens from IMF agreements haven’t helped the situation), they have relied on Brand Jamaica—the government’s explicit marketing push, beginning in the 1960s—to attract tourist dollars and foreign investment to the island. The government-backed tourist industry has long encouraged visitors to Come to Jamaica and feel all right; and in 2015, the country decriminalized marijuana—creating a further draw for foreigners seeking an authentic Jamaican experience.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/06/the-true-story-of-rastafari/

KNPR: FLDS Towns Face DOJ Deadline Regarding Lawsuit

A jury concluded 10 months ago that nonbelievers were denied police protection, building permits and water hookups by officials in both towns.

https://knpr.org/headline/2017-01/flds-towns-face-doj-deadline-regarding-lawsuit

Dr. Phil: A Lawyer Convicted of Hypnotizing and Assaulting His Female Clients

An attorney convicted of charges related to hypnotizing several female clients and sexually assaulting them was sentenced to 12 years in prison

http://www.drphil.com/shows/a-a-lawyer-convicted-of-hypnotizing-and-assaulting-his-female-clients/

The Salt Lake Tribune: How much do top Mormon leaders make? Leaked pay stubs may surprise you.

All general authorities earn the same “living allowance,” spokesman says after purported pay stubs show up online.

http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/faith/4800350-155/how-much-do-top-mormon-leaders

The Atlantic: The Fight for Female Priesthood in the Mormon Church

Where We Stand is the story of a controversial group of Mormon feminists fighting for the ordination of women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This 20-minute documentary follows Abby Hansen, a stay-at-home mom turned vocal advocate for Ordain Women.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/511433/female-priesthood-mormon-church/

Lessons learned from Huston Smith’s exploration of religious experience

http://religionnews.com/2017/01/06/lessons-learned-from-huston-smiths-exploration-of-religious-experience/

​

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