As Latter-day Saints we grow up as the inheritors of a history of genocide, persecution, and oppression. Everywhere we have went the hounds of Hell have followed at our heels, growling out all manner of hatred, lies, and errors, snapping at our heels in an effort to terrify us out of carrying forth the work of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. The mocking is near universal and bigotry against Latter-day Saints is socially acceptable at all levels. It is nothing new. What is refreshing is the way that intelligent people – that is people who are truly intelligent, not merely people with a role in academia or their faithful parrots – can sometimes, through their position outside looking in, provide insights into the Latter-day Saints that even make us stop and marvel at our beliefs. One such article, written by the witty and influential Roman Catholic essayist, theologian, and fiction writer G. K. Chesterton.
If you don’t know who Chesterton is, I highly suggest you investigate his works. C.S. Lewis said that Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, is “the very best popular defense of the full Christian position” he had ever read. It had, in fact, been a seminal work that converted Lewis from atheism to Christianity. During an intense and violent persecution of the Saints in England in the years 1910-1911 (involving no less a historical figure than Winston Churchill) is was this same G. K. Chesterton who took up his pen in defense of Christianity that also took up his pen to defend the Mormons. While doing so he displays a typical disapproval of polygamy, something to be expected by someone who, like many then and now, did not understand it. What makes this article really worth reading is three-fold. First of all, he clearly recognizes and succinctly explains why the modern conception of tolerance is deeply hypocritical. Secondly, he explains very well why understanding what people believe is essential to understanding what they do and levels insightful criticism at how ignoring this will cause us to completely misunderstand history. Finally, he wisely deduces why polygamy was practiced by the Latter-day Saints purely from knowing a few facts and their history and their true beliefs, demonstrating more understanding of the faith that even many lifelong members of it have.
In terms of transcription, I have added pictures and separated two of his longer paragraphs for readability. Otherwise everything is as it was originally published by Chesterton in his column. I have affixed my own editorial addendum at the end.
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Mormonism
There is inevitably something comic (comic in the broad and vulgar style which all men ought to appreciate in its place) about the panic aroused by the presence of the Mormons and their supposed polygamous campaign in this country. It calls up the absurd image of an enormous omnibus, packed inside with captive English ladies, with an Elder on the box, controlling his horses with the same patriarchal gravity as his wives, and another Elder as conductor calling out “Higher up,” with an exalted and allegorical intonation. And there is something highly fantastic to the ordinary healthy mind in the idea of any precaution being proposed; in the idea of locking the Duchess in the boudoir and the governess in the nursery, lest they should make a dash for Utah, and become the ninety-third Mrs. Abraham Nye, or the hundredth Mrs. Hiram Boke. But these frankly vulgar jokes, like most vulgar jokes, cover a popular prejudice which is but the bristly hide of a living principle. Elder Ward, recently speaking at Nottingham, strongly protested against these rumours, and asserted absolutely that polygamy had never been practised with the consent of the Mormon Church since 1890.
I think it only just that this disclaimer should be circulated; but though it is most probably sincere, I do not find it very soothing. The year 1890 is not very long ago, and a society that could have practised so recently a custom so alien to Christendom must surely have a moral attitude which might be repellent to us in many other respects. Moreover, the phrase about the consent of the Church (if correctly reported) has a little the air of an official repudiating responsibility for unofficial excesses. It sounds almost as if Mr. Abraham Nye might, on his own account, come into church with a hundred and fourteen wives, but people were supposed not to notice them. It might amount to little more than this, that the chief Elder may allow the hundred and fourteen wives to walk down the street like a girls’ school, but he is not officially expected to take off his hat to each of them in turn. Seriously speaking, however, I have little doubt that Elder Ward speaks the substantial truth, and that polygamy is dying, or has died, among the Mormons. My reason for thinking this is simple: it is that polygamy always tends to die out. Even in the East I believe that, counting heads, it is by this time the exception rather than the rule. Like slavery, it is always being started, because of its obvious conveniences. It has only one small inconvenience, which is that it is intolerable.
Our real error in such a case is that we do not know or care about the creed itself, from which a people’s customs, good or bad, will necessarily flow. We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are their consequences. But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem—“Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To which he naturally replies—“But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind your eye.”
About half the history now taught in schools and colleges is made windy and barren by this narrow notion of leaving out the theological theories. The wars and Parliaments of the Puritans made absolutely no sense if we leave out the fact that Calvinism appeared to them to be the absolute metaphysical truth, unanswerable, unreplaceable, and the only thing worth having in the world. The Crusades and dynastic quarrels of the Norman and Angevin Kings make absolutely no sense if we leave out the fact that these men (with all their vices) were enthusiastic for the doctrine, discipline, and endowment of Catholicism. Yet I have read a history of the Puritans by a modern Nonconformist in which the name of Calvin was not even mentioned, which is like writing a history of the Jews without mentioning either Abraham or Moses. And I have never read any popular or educational history of England that gave the slightest hint of the motives in the human mind that covered England with abbeys and Palestine with banners. Historians seem to have completely forgotten the two facts—first, that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as well to discover which ideas. The mediævals did not believe primarily in “chivalry,” but in Catholicism, as producing chivalry among other things. The Puritans did not believe primarily in “righteousness,” but in Calvinism, as producing righteousness among other things.
It was the creed that held the coarse or cunning men of the world at both epochs. William the Conqueror was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier, but he did attach importance to the fact that the Church upheld his enterprise; that Harold had sworn falsely on the bones of saints, and that the banner above his own lances had been blessed by the Pope. Cromwell was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier; but he did attach importance to the fact that he had gained assurance from on high in the Calvinistic scheme; that the Bible seemed to support him—in short, the most important moment in his own life, for him, was not when Charles I [i.e. the First] lost his head, but when Oliver Cromwell did not lose his soul. If you leave these things out of the story, you are leaving out the story itself. If William Rufus was only a red-haired man who liked hunting, why did he force Anselm’s head under a mitre, instead of forcing his head under a headsman’s axe? If John Bunyan only cared for “righteousness,” why was he in terror of being damned, when he knew he was rationally righteous? We shall never make anything of moral and religious movements in history until we begin to look at their theory as well as their practice. For their practice (as in the case of the Mormons) is often so unfamiliar and frantic that it is quite unintelligible without their theory.
I have not the space, even if I had the knowledge, to describe the fundamental theories of Mormonism about the universe. But they are extraordinarily interesting; and a proper understanding of them would certainly enable us to see daylight through the more perplexing or menacing customs of this community; and therefore to judge how far polygamy was in their scheme a permanent and self-renewing principle or (as is quite probable) a personal and unscrupulous accident. The basic Mormon belief is one that comes out of the morning of the earth, from the most primitive and even infantile attitude. Their chief dogma is that God is material, not that He was materialized once, as all Christians believe; nor that He is materialized specially, as all Catholics believe; but that He was materially embodied from all time; that He has a local habitation as well as a name. Under the influence of this barbaric but violently vivid conception, these people crossed a great desert with their guns and oxen, patiently, persistently, and courageously, as if they were following a vast and visible giant who was striding across the plains. In other words, this strange sect, by soaking itself solely in the Hebrew Scriptures, had really managed to reproduce the atmosphere of those Scriptures as they are felt by Hebrews rather than by Christians. A number of dull, earnest, ignorant, black-coated men with chimney-pot hats, chin beards or mutton-chop whiskers, managed to reproduce in their own souls the richness and the peril of an ancient Oriental experience. If we think from this end we may possibly guess how it was that they added polygamy.
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Addendum
Having read Chesterton’s short but insightful article, there are a few thoughts of his which absolutely bear expanding upon.
First, at the dawn of the 20th century, Chesterton saw the future state of Leftist “Progressivism” long before it reached the form it is in now. He hit the nail of the modern hypocrisy of “tolerance” right on its head. Those who proclaimed themselves the most tolerant of others are in reality mass hypocrites who have such a smug sense of superiority over others that they actually imagine they can just diminish, dismiss, and degrade the most deeply held values of others at will and it should be nothing. I saw this very recently in a discussion between two people on the importance of religion. Person A simply could not comprehend why her dismissal of religion as a “small thing” that had no right coming between two people would be so horribly insulting to those who actually hold said religious beliefs. When Person B called Person A on her arrogance and self-righteousness she immediately began to attack Person B as a bully who made himself “feel big” by hurting other people’s feelings. Person A was almost sociopathic in her incapability to understand how total dismissal of the beliefs that Person B finds to be foundational to existence and worth dying in order to protect – his religion – might be offensive, upsetting, and intolerant.
Like the example in Chesterton’s article, her message to Person B was to nevermind his religion and come to the arms of social orthodoxy when for Person B his religion was everything. When this failed Person A could only lash out at Person B, partly because Person A is one of those curious people oh so common these days that believes that if she can reduce herself to the role of “victim” then she will always be right and partly because she could not imagine a form of tolerance that actually allows the real differences that separate people to exist without trying to strip them of their individualities in order to create some milquetoast homogenized culture. The urge to create such a culture where everyone has render themselves so completely harmless and unthreatening that they have destroyed the very essences of their religions, cultures, and societies is the goal of modern Leftism. In an effort to create this society of perfect tolerance everything that draws distinctions between people must be eliminated, which, when you wipe away the justifications and the propaganda, is just the old form of intolerant heretical spirit that drove such organizations as the Inquisition given a new secular form.
Secondly, he understood that you cannot ignore what people actually believe if you seek to understand why they do what they do. As someone who has spent a significant time in the academic side of history, both in study and teaching it, I can tell you most teachers you will encounter have no idea what the people they discussed believed and therefore cannot truly explain to you why they did what they did. Yet if you are to take a culture and looked for what its ideals of mercy, justice, love, art, kindness, service, unity, help, economics, medicine, politics, science, etc. are then you cannot avoid the grand cosmological truths they believe in and which undergirds the ways they even conceptualize these ideas which they then put into action. In other words, you can not ignore their religion. There is no greater way to understand a people or even a person than to understand their/his religion. And you have to do it on the believer’s terms. It is not enough for some other to say So-and-So believes this thing and therefore does that. All too often outsiders will get even basic ideas wrong. Take, for example, the way non-Muslims read verses of the Qur’an to say that Muslims believe it is alright to murder non-Muslims when nothing could be farther from the truth. If you’re going to study a people you have to study what they believe not what others say that those people believe. Doing this correctly will give you tremendous insight into the people and events of history as well as help you recognize some of the most powerful movements of history and why they have taken place.
Finally, on the topic of Mormonism itself. Chesterton displays the same dislike of polygamy that most men his age did. He even well recognizes the way that Elder Nye hedge his bets suggested that polygamy may still have lingered on in some fashion after the 1890 Manifesto, which of course it did. But more insightfully, Chesterton understood why the Latter-day Saints had practiced polygamy. Within their hearts and their experiences, the Latter-day Saints had managed to reproduce in their communities and culture the ancient experience of the Hebrews people in all its richness, peril, and power. In an age of science, growing secularism, and increasing disdain for the power of faith, the Latter-day Saints had been able to recreate the deeply religious and mystical reality of the Old Testament – including modern revelations, modern prophets, modern miracles, modern scriptures, and modern manifestations of God Himself directly to people, even reenacting the ancient drama of the Israelite Exodus in the age of scientism. When this was properly understood it is no shock that the Latter-day Saints had embraced polygamy, so had the ancient Hebrews from Abraham down through Christ. The ancients had done it and just as the Mormons had been able to reproduce the other practices of the ancient Hebrews in an entirely different age and part of the world in terms of the Exodus, so too would they reproduce Israelite polygamy.
This, of course, is the exact explanation that the Lord gave to the Prophet Joseph Smith when the Lord explained the need to restore plural marriage in the modern day. (see D&C 132:28-40) It was the Restoration of All Things in action, the ancient Hebrew religion manifested and restored and lived in the modern age. This of course has always been what has been most transgressive about Mormonism in the eyes of modern people. The idea that God really talks to people, that angels appear in visions, that Satan is real, that Evil (not just evil) exists, that there is something more important and greater than the self and one’s desires, that Priesthood power to perform miracles is real, that there is something more to existence than can be reduced to raw numbers and studied under a microscope, that the so-called Enlightenment may not have really been so enlightened at all in its rejection of mysticism, these things are the foundation of much of Latter-day Saint theology, part of our proclamation of absolute Truth and are anathema to the secular age in which we live. Chesterton saw and understood that the Latter-day Saints are a primordial manifestation of the ancient impulses of religious power that so many today, proclaimed believer or not, simply cannot understand and knew this was why we practiced polygamy. It also explains quite a few other things.
If only our current critics were capable of such great insight.
Source of article from The Uses of Diversity, an online text version of which can be found here.