Mormon Myths

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If other Christians can do no right in Newell's version of history, Mormons can do no wrong; his story of Mormon persecutions is so relentlessly one-sided that it becomes as tiresome as the ubiquitous corn pone on the westward trek. With the exception of a couple of historical sources and one Wallace Stegner short story, all his citations come from books written by Latter-day Saints for Latter-day Saints. A faultless, God-fearing Joseph Smith is unjustly pursued and murdered by a cruel, fanatical mob.

Scarce mention here of Smith's frighteningly theocratic activities in the last months of his life--encouraging his thousands of followers to vote as a bloc, campaigning for the presidency, instituting the Council of Fifty, leading the largest armed militia in the state of Illinois, and undermining the freedom of the press by destroying the muckraking Nauvoo Expositor. Horrific events for which Mormons were responsible, such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, are entirely absent from Newell's prettified account of LDS history.

These pious omissions are exacerbated by anachronistic claims that the 19th-century church was identical to the 21st century church. For example, Newell observes that in one partaking of the sacrament in 1830, water was substituted for wine. Fair enough, but Newell misleadingly implies that water was used forever after, when in fact the church did not universally adopt water in the sacrament until the 20th century. This is just one instance of Newell's overarching ahistorical insistence that the church is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The most damning omission, however, is polygamy. The references to polygamy, that most famous and hotly contested practice of 19th-century Mormonism, can be counted on one hand. Newell notes that polygamy was "very limited," toeing the current party line of an LDS Church that has recently claimed that plural marriage was practiced by a tiny fraction of the Saints, when many historians place the number at up to 40%. Most tellingly, Newell calls the 1890 revelation that ended (or tried to end) the practice of polygamy "a press release." History has come full circle: Today's expert media spin doctor trivializes the defining feature of six decades of Latter-day Saint history as something that can be dispatched with a press release, not a revelation from God.

Is this book "clean water"? Squeaky-clean. No doctrinal cryptosporidium in sight. Was it bottled in Utah? Oh, yes--and sanitized there, too.