Via Tom Tomorrow…  Tony Ortega over at The Village Voice blog gives a brief lesson in why Mormon theology assumes the form it does.  Basically, Smith cobbled it together from several fads that were just then sweeping the nation…

One of our favorite authors in the whole world, the late Fawn Brodie*, did the world a service by helping us all understand a really fascinating time in our country’s history — the wild, wild 1820’s.

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Specifically, Brodie points out that three national fads had an especially tight grip on the minds of people in western New York in the early 1820s.

The first one is, Where did all these Indians come from?   After being practically wiped out in the New England states, they were no longer viewed as a threat, and in fact had just then begun to fall victim to a first wave of cheap romanticism.  James Fenimore Cooper, who Mark Twain also mocked scathingly, being a good example.  But more importantly, various men of the cloth had begun wondering where these dark skinned natives had come from, and of far greater importance, why the bible made no mention of them.  Ah…perhaps they are one of the lost tribes of Israel…

The second fad came about from news reports of the strange system of writing found in ancient Egyptian ruins.  The mysterious hieroglyphs.  The Rosetta Stone had been discovered, but it would still be years before someone finally figured out that the hieroglyphs represented vocalizations in the same way that letters of most modern alphabets do.  So there was endless fascinated speculation about what the hieroglyphs said.  Perhaps they held the key to the mysteries of the ancient world…perhaps they contained profound ancient wisdom long lost to us…

The third fad was a preoccupation with the treasure of the first Spanish explorers.  It was known that the Conquistadors had raped the ancient Mayan and Inca civilizations and carted back tons of gold to Spain.  But perhaps they had also buried some of it…somewhere…Hey…maybe right in my own back yard!!!

This third archaeological fad was not only amplified by the other two, it provided fertile ground for flim-flam artists. What better way to romanticize the (more exciting) past than to daydream about Indian gold or Spanish doubloons hidden away somewhere on your back forty? Quick to take advantage of that longing was an army of itinerant scammers: a man would arrive at a farm, claim to be a fortune-teller, and swear that he sensed the presence of buried treasure nearby. Some set the hook by showing the gullible a special "seer stone" that the fortune-teller claimed he could use to zero-in on buried gold. For a substantial fee, he’d dig up what was sure to be a whole cache of treasure that would make the farmer very rich. After being paid that fee, naturally, the fortune-teller would then make himself scarce. Farmers in western New York, in particular, seemed to be susceptible to the scam.

Hey…doesn’t this sound like the M.O. of a certain young man named Smith…

Right…

A man named Joseph Smith — who already had a court record for scamming a farmer in the buried-gold scheme — came forward and claimed that an angel had come to him four years earlier with a revelation.

What did the angel ask Smith to do? Are you ready?

– The angel, Smith said, directed him where to dig up a buried treasure, a set of gold tablets. (See: Fad Number Three, above.)

– The tablets were etched in a strange code that looked remarkably like Egyptian hieroglyphs. (See: Fad Number Two.)

– The angel gave Smith a special pair of seer stones that enabled him to read the hieroglyphs as easily as if he were reading English (a really creative combo of Fad Two and Fad Three).

– And what did the tablets describe? Have you guessed? Yes! It was the answer to the ultimate riddle, Fad Numero Uno: The super-cool, heretofore unknown and like, bizarre actual origin of North America’s Indian tribes!

Can I get an L-D-S!

Pray for future generations that no new religion is born in America in this day and age.  Ortega avers that all this may be why the Mormon church needs a convenient scapegoat…even more so then other American religious right theocrats…

It’s complicated. But anyway, try to understand that if your entire worldview was based on the completely unreliable ravings of an early 19th-century flim-flam artist with a harem fetish, you too might have a burning inferiority about your belief system, and you might manifest that inferiority by picking on the queers, who make an easy target and scare the bejesus out of your typical Mormon.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…look at all those queers trying to get married!!!