Reddit reviews The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power
We found 9 Reddit comments about The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
That's a topic big enough for a two-volume treatise, but in the context of my comment, here goes:
Leaders in SLC have little interaction with lowly members like me, but listening to their semi-annual talks, the emphasis is overwhelmingly geared toward believing and acting in certain way that outwardly shows devotion, and never being satisfied with your current standing with God, as opposed to being happy with who you are and being assured that the church is place for everyone.
As for the local leaders, for a long time I told myself that as long as I was wanted within my local congregation, it didn't matter what the leaders in SLC wanted. When I began limiting my attendance and participation, local leaders of my congregation did not seek me out socially at all, nor were they at all reassured when I told them that things in my life were going well. They were too caught up on my various "statuses" which are tracked by the church headquarters: whether I was attending all my meetings regularly, whether I was paying tithing, whether I had a temple recommend.
The nail in the coffin was when my most immediate local leader, known as the "Elder's Quorum President", begged me to agree to teach the Elder's Quorum lessons. I told him that I didn't care for the content of the lessons, to which he replied, in an exasperated tone "well will you at least attend? We're down to only about four people each week!"
In other words, he was apparently far less interested in my unorthodox insights, or in my extensive experience as a teacher, than in having just another warm body in attendance. This was evidenced by his unenthusiastic request that I teach lessons contrasted with his impassioned plea for another ass-in-the-seats, so to speak. That was the moment my last lingering interest in formal involvement with the community evaporated.
I experienced similar conversations with my local bishop and his counselors, but the above example was the most obvious one.
I was reading posts in the archives on this sub. I believe it is referenced from The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power by D. Michael Quinn
“Sept 7, 1859 - Salt Lake City clerk records sale of twenty six year old "negro boy" for $800 to William H. Hooper. Until federal law ends slavery in U.S. Territories in 1862, some African-American slaves are paid as tithing, bought, sold and otherwise treated as chattel in Utah.”
Here are the best sources on the history of female ordination in the Brighamite tradition of the Latter Day Saint movement. You'll probably find many references here to journals and other avenues of further research.
I'd also recommend the chapters on the creation and activity of the Nauvoo Female Relief Society in Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, by Avery and Newell. The book covers quite well just how powerful the organization was and how Emma used it as an effective tool against her husband's polygamy. They also cover when the organization stopped, leading to the great mystery in Mormon history of who made the actual decision to stop the Nauvoo RS from meeting. There's no known answer, and the person claimed by various people says more about that person's viewpoint than it does about history.
A very in-depth and fully documented look at the early church can be found in D. Micheal Quinn's Origins and Extensions of Power books.
Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900
The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power
If you haven't studied "anti-Mormon" sources, you can't claim you aren't any of those things, because that's part of it. The constant reminders to only get your information from the church. That is one of the biggest elements of indoctrination, brainwashing, and sheltering.
They're preventing you from doing thorough research and frankly, it's not our job to digest all of for you. The problems with the church are so numerous there is no way anyone is going to be able to lay them all out for you in a comment on a reddit post. Asking us to tell you why we left is not evidence you weren't indoctrinated if you refuse to go do the study yourself.
Most active members have no idea just how much information there is and that no, it is not spun. Here's a little bit of the history on why and how the real history the church is now trying to manage finally came out. There is a couple in Provo who have a Christian ministry basically dedicated to taking down the Mormon church. Around 1990 they published a pamphlet that talked about some serious stuff the vast majority of members didn't know, like Joseph's Smith polygamy. Normally the church wouldn't respond to these things, but they felt the claims were worrisome enough (getting questions from members) they needed to publish a response, so they invited two BYU historians into the archives (you know the ones in the mountain) to study ALL of the historical documents they had and write a refutation debunking the Tanner's claims.
For about two years Michael Quinn and Dan Vogel studied every document and took photos of each one, with the church's blessing. Problem was, not only did what they find back up the Tanner's claims, but the actual history was much worse (things like Polyandry). They did write a rebuttal, but it was rejected by the Q15 and they were told not to publish anything at all, ever. More than twenty years later the essays on lds.org the church finally published to at least be a little bit honest are right out of Vogel and Quinns essays. By being a little bit I mean, if you not only read the essays, but then follow the footnotes, well. It's not good. The Saints book is the same way. It doesn't out and out lie, but talk about out of context and leaving out very important information if it's too faith challenging. It's still not fully honest. Not even remotely. Shouldn't the church have to be as honest as they expect the membership?
Being historians, not publishing and keeping it all a secret didn't sit well with them and they published anyway. In fact, Dan Vogel made all those facsimiles of all those documents, thousands and thousands of them, available to any other scholar wanting to pour through them and publish their own findings. For their trouble they were excommunicated as part of the September Six (google it).
Many (maybe most on church history) of the anti-Mormon books out there directly source these documents and you can even get them yourself. Dan Vogel published all of them in several volumes called, "Early Mormon Documents." The goal was to publish all the source material he and Quinn had collected without editorial comment. I'm not sure how much more objective it can get or how any Mormon can claim the stacks of books that came out of these are not sourced or dishonest.
If you want a summary list of the major issues, and it's a long one, you should download the free pdf version of the CES letter on cesletter.org. Then read the rebuttals over on Fair Mormon. Then read the rebuttals to the rebuttals.
When I left, a nice summary didn't exist, so I had to read books and boy did I read a lot of them. I happened to start with Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, which is well sourced out of the RLDS archives, but I also read Grant Palmer's, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins. Incidentally, he was another BYU professor excommunicated for publishing the irrefutable truth. Keep in mind, these people were active members. They were not trying to tear down the church. They simply felt it was morally wrong to continue to have blatant and significant inaccuracies in teaching manuals, in conference talks, in Seminary, in well......everything.
My reading list (those I can remember at least):
Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith
An Insider's View of Mormon Origins
Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (A Biography)
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith
The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power
Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
If you still think everything other than what is directly published by the church are anti-Mormon lies or tricks, well I can help you there at too. How deep have you gotten into Journal of Discourses? It's almost worse than anything written by an anti-Mormon. So much worse than a couple of troublesome quotes. I also re-read the D&C while reading Teaching of the Prophet Joseph Smith in tandem. It was a lot harder to swallow that way to say the least and both of those are obviously considered faithful study.
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If you want to claim you aren't brainwashed or indoctrinated you have to do the work. Saying "I posted on Reddit and no one convinced me," or the other favorite, "people much smarter than me have already studied all that and say its fine," are not valid arguments. They're lazy cop outs.
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Good luck on your search for truth. I encourage you to study it out from ALL sources, including faithful sources you haven't yet studied.
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edited to add: Forgot one of the most important. In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith
edited edited to add: If you want something a little more biased for the church you can even just read Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. If you're going to read the D&C and Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith at the same time as I did, I recommend at least reading this one first. It's going to be much clearer if you've read at least one of the biographies and Rough Stone Rolling was published by Deseret Book.
This one, this one, and then this one. In fact, read those even if you don't go.
But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you...And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.
(1) They shall sound like they say truth
And through covetousness shall they with afeigned words make merchandise of you
(2) Through covetous behavior (such as building a mall, planting tobacco, becoming governor or mayor, heck crowning yourself king, putting loans on memberships heads, changing a non-profit church into a for-profit corporation, paying off personal lones, etc.) they will turn the members into "Merchandise"
For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness
(3) People who turn the grace of god into lust which might include 14 year old brides, and two sets of 16 year old sisters married two days apart from each other (link is only to one set)
Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.
(4) They'll speak evil of politicians and the government. Luckily the church has NEVER spoken ill about federal marshals, or political leaders.
But these speak evil of those things which they know not
(5) Such as decrying homosexuality or DNA evidence without ever studying it.
Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.
(6) Again they prophesy for money such as Balaam did; and if you sit on the board of directors of 14 private companies as soon as one becomes prophet, one might see that as being similar to Balaam. Gainsaying of Core means that they have influence over the membership but fight actual prophesy.
clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
(7) They will be prophets who don't prophesy (when was the last time a GA prophesied a prediction of the future), seers with no seerstones, revelators who don't reveal. Business men in Prophet's clothing.
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.
There you have it, a clear explanation that the current Brighamite church is apostate, straight from Peter.
Feel free to wrest the scriptures.
Michael Quinn wrote a book about this- "Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power." It's expensive but our library (in SC) had it. Also the recent (fantastic) interview of Christins Jeppsen Clark on Mormon Stories Podcast gets into some details of how excommunications happen, how GAs operate. (Her dad was a close friend of Packer and a GA.)