Tag: religion

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Essay

Babylon, We Bid Thee Farewell

Sun, moon, and evening star, as seen from Pangai, Ha'apai. (Image credit: Myself)

This essay appeared in Prodigal Press, a Provo alternative media collective, on November 30, 2023. (Instagram here; forthcoming on prodigalpress.org.)

The first time I saw the stars was in the back of a pickup truck full of shoeboxes, together with a gang of teenage boys with whom I shared maybe fifty words of vocabulary, tops.

I say “first time” because there’s a difference between looking at the stars in suburban Utah and seeing them from a Pacific island with no suburbs to speak of. It’s worth the trip just to exist under the Tongan night sky on a clear day, when the stars are half of everything, and look up. Here, they’re bright: not faint little painted dots on a faded canopy but real twinkling lights, the brightest ones nearly falling out of the brilliant canvas and into your lap. The sky isn’t black. That’s the thing. When you get far enough out of the city, monochrome black becomes celestial patterns of silver and gray stretched out like streamers, and it starts to make sense what they meant when they said God created the heavens and the earth, two halves, one to live on, the other to scatter myths and heroes across.

As for the shoeboxes, Siosefa stopped the truck to pick them up at his wife’s boutique in town. I’m not sure why. Siosefa spoke decent English, but the conversation about the shoeboxes was in lea faka-Tonga, and it came as a surprise when the other boys started throwing the empty cardboard into the bed of the truck on top of me. And as for the boys, none of them were actually Siosefa’s: some were nephews, and most were neighborhood kids whose dads were in prison or who didn’t get enough to eat at home. Siosefa was the neighborhood bishop, and tonight his sacred duty consisted of taking the boys to town so we could eat fried chicken and sprawl out on the steps of the ANZ Bank and ride up and down a hotel elevator for no discernible purpose, except that the boys were having fun and this was preferable to gang activity. The other American researcher rode in the cab, so he was warmer than I was, but he missed the kids and me putting the shoeboxes on our heads and also the stars, how they gestured at meaning in some heavenly language: a colossal Rorschach test of heroes who grew up and ran away from home and fought monsters on tropical islands.

The other important thing is that I’m Episcopalian—which wouldn’t have been important had it not been important to my host family, particularly Siosefa’s father. We’d scarcely finished our first conversation in his upstairs family room when he asked, “You know gospel?” and his eyes caught fire and he explained Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and modern-day prophets. His upper lip, like his weathered fingers and toes, was swollen and curled so that when he spoke in subjects and verbs that did not agree it was as if he were speaking through cotton. But I understood every word, because there was a time when I myself had been a Latter-day Saint missionary who knocked on doors and sat on strangers’ couches to give that same explanation. That time was now two years in the past, nearly a tithe of my life, and as I could hardly explain in verbs like come, play, eat how and why and where my childhood faith had come to fit like a glove with two thumbs and not enough fingers, I told the closest thing to the truth that I could and became Episcopalian for a month.

I did not often see the stars while staying in that proud house: two stories where the neighbors had only one; a cinder-block fence, almost finished, with rebar leaning against it; cavernous windows and doorways without doors; a canopy for the van in the puddled yard full of pigs and chickens. More often I saw glimpses of childhood, like the Ko e Tohi ‘a Molomona on the patriarch’s unmade bed, as shabby and written-in as my father’s; the hyperactive kids that would have made admirable Boy Scouts; and the Del Parson painting of Jesus torn from a magazine and pinned to a stern, yellowed column, whose eyes followed you no matter where you stood in the room, according to Sunday School lore.

It was not merely that these things were there but that they would not leave me alone. One night I took out the ukulele that had filled half my suitcase and played for a rapt audience of boys who gazed at my performance like I was Homer or Harry Styles, even though I’m not much of a singer, and all the songs that sounded happy were just sped-up breakup songs. During intermission the kid who’d been sitting on the arm of my chair brought me the Latter-day Saint hymnal from his grandfather’s bed, opened to the song that got sung every other week in men’s meetings in Morgan, Utah, because it’s the only hymn that doesn’t go higher than a C. I could have said no, I don’t recognize it, but Episcopalian be damned, I was muse for the evening, and the least I could do was play a request that I actually knew. It was my turn to sing in a broken tongue, but the kids carried the tune well enough, and I knew the English translation: “O Babylon, O Babylon, we bid thee farewell. We’re going to the mountains of Ephraim to dwell.”

We soon left that house and its hospitality; two weeks later was the first night I ever slept on concrete. Half our research team spent the night on a fishing boat while the rest of us spent the night in a Latter-day Saint church on a tiny island that only had electricity around sunrise and sunset, slaughtering bugs that got too close to our sleeping bags. Silence, silence, then BANG—the echo of shoe on concrete.

Late that evening, I got talking with Grace on the steps of the outhouse. She’s an anthropologist, like most of our team, but she said she almost picked religious studies. This despite only having been to church once, which between the crucifixion and the chanting had been a frightening experience for a child of an agnostic union. But she’d always been interested in the reasons people believe, and, she said, “I’m honestly really scared of dying.” We chatted for a while about hope and hunger and Harry Potter, and when we stood up to go back into the church, she suddenly froze, her head tilted up to the night sky, and said, “Wow.”

“They’re really something, aren’t they?”

Science has it that they’ve been shining since long before I was a child, and all the light we’re seeing now is light-years and light-years old. But you can’t see all that history—only the feeling of immensity and triviality all at once, and the certainty that there’s some meaning in it. I wondered if one of those stars really was closest to the throne of God. If he were hiding somewhere, it would have to be here, between the stars so dense that they formed rivers and seas and oceans of light. But hearing no voice from the whirlwind, I looked for Orion instead. They say he spends his summers here, hanging upside down by his tail like a monkey.

When I left Tonga, the sky was back to the way it had always been: bleached-out, suburban, secondhand. Orion was face up again. These days, I go to the Latter-day Saint church sometimes and the Episcopalian church sometimes, but in truth, I would rather spend my Sunday mornings back under those vast heavenly lights. There are days when I walk out of church and look up at the daytime sky, and I marvel at how much beauty has always been there, hidden by the garish sun and, at nightfall, the artificial lights of Babylon. ∎

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Random

Dear Jason Kehe: Don’t Be a Bigot

Eric Attica 2023

(Language warning. I typically try to avoid vitriol in my writing. But at the moment, I’m pretty pissed. For two years as a missionary I had no choice but to stand there and take it when people hated me because of the religion and ethnic group I grew up in and belong to. When a high-profile piece comes after one of the kindest writers I’ve had the good fortune of meeting and one of the most gracious and open-minded religious people I’ve been blessed to learn from, I feel compelled to respond. Prejudice of any kind is unacceptable and ought to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Here is my reply to Mr. Jason Kehe’s article in WIRED, which you can find here, if you want to stoop low enough to give it a click.)

Dear Mr. Kehe.

I was stunned and disgusted by the malice and bigotry towards your subject in particular, and Mormons in general, in your recent article entitled “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God”. I had not realized that such prejudice was permitted to be printed before the public eye.

Let me repeat a few of your sentences back to you. If you fail to see the outrageous extent of your biases, try replacing “Mormon” with the name of some other group that you realize it’s not okay to discriminate against—Jews, Black people—insert the slur of your choice.

“Could it be, finally, because he’s a weirdo Mormon?”
“Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be.”
“Post-Kickstarter campaign, [his] company is now 50-some-people/Mormons strong.”
“It’s no secret: Mormonism is the fantasy of religion. ‘The science-fiction edition of Christianity,’ I’ve heard it called.”

If your article had contained the words “he’s a weirdo Jew,” would it have reached publication? To tolerate rhetoric like this is to tolerate ethnic and religious hatred, plain and simple. To use such rhetoric is to promote such hatred.

The remainder of your article is in a like spirit and your criticism reaches far outside the bounds of propriety. You show nothing but contempt for your subject (“depressingly, story-killingly lame”); your reader (“You’re not ready for [Sanderson’s words] just yet”); your ineptitude at your own craft (“This story has an ending, I promise”); and, bafflingly, Hugh Jackman (“I can’t help it. I burst into tears”). Recounting how you insulted Mr. Sanderson’s writing in front of his wife, you say, “recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to.” You “have to”? You expect your reader to sympathize with your, a literary professional’s, inability to find anything nice to say to your gracious host?

No, Mr. Sanderson’s prose is not transcendent. Mr. Sanderson views the novel differently than you do. While you’ve spent your time gatekeeping the medium as a hallowed monument to grammatical sentences in this malicious sink you intend to pass off as journalism, Mr. Sanderson has been celebrating diversity through his novels, “good” prose or otherwise. He doesn’t care about sentence structure. That you see Sanderson’s word choice as a more important issue than not shitting on someone who welcomed you into his home and introduced you to his family is a more damning condemnation of your moral fibre than I could pen here. Sure, “he is no great gift to English prose,” but neither are you any credit to your craft, Mr. Kehe—this article is all about yourself, about how you’re struggling to meet your deadline because you find your subject so insufferably boring, showing not the finest modicum of the imagination that Mr. Sanderson has built his career on, and so you attempt to pull Mr. Sanderson down with you. “I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for?” you write. Your readers deserve better than your public self-pity at your failure to write the article you wanted.

Mr. Sanderson’s kind response to you exhibited a level of decorum that far outweighs your spiteful character. Your hateful excuse for an article has shown you to be nothing less than a petty bully with an inability to express an iota of gratitude for the hospitality shown to you, and a bigot who repays that hospitality with insults on a kind man’s family, friends, and sincere faith. Such behavior ought not to be tolerated from a child, much less from the front page of a major media outlet such as WIRED and a professional such as yourself. I acknowledge your right to express your opinion, Mr. Kehe, and I urge you to exercise it wisely in the future by keeping your mouth shut.

Your obedient servant,

Eric Christensen Attica

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Random

The Tale of John Corrill, Part 3: “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”

Model of Liberty Jail
A model of Liberty Jail, where Joseph Smith and other leaders were incarcerated after the events at Far West. (Credit: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 3.0)

This is the final part of a three-part series on John Corrill and dissent in Mormonism. In the first and second parts, I introduced Corrill, an early Latter-day Saint, and his 1839 history.

The “Betrayal” at Far West

The Danites and dissenters fade into the background as Corrill narrates the unfolding of the conflict. As open conflict begins, Corrill’s narrative balances him between the roles of conscientious objector and silent victim. He opposes the preemptive strikes in Daviess County, does not participate in warfare, and describes an individual conversation with Smith: Corrill asks whether he thinks they can succeed in their warfare. Smith responds that “they would, or die in the attempt.”

Before the end of the conflict, Smith will have told Corrill to “beg like a dog for peace.” (LeSueur, 1987)

As the conflict intensifies, Corrill describes his fear, not only of the Danites, but of the Missourians; Corrill felt that his life was in danger to not one, but both of the armed parties to the conflict. Apparently he was unable to flee as Thomas Marsh and Orson Hyde had (“Minutes and Testimonies”, p. 33), and so he had no choice but to stay:

I knew that they were jealous of me as a dissenter, and that it was of no use for me to say any thing more; in fact I felt it was necessary for me to look out for my own safety…I would have been glad to have left the county with my family, but I could not get away; the decree was passed, and there was no other chance for me and the other dissenters but to pretend to take hold with the rest.

Corrill, 1839, pp. 36–37

And when Far West came under siege, he found himself caught in the crossfire.

I expected we should be exterminated without fail. There lay three thousand men, highly excited and full of vengeance, and it was as much as the officers could do to keep them off from us any how; and they now had authority from the executive to exterminate, with orders to cut off our retreat, and the word Mormons, I thought, included innocent as well as guilty…

Corrill, 1839, p. 42

When it became clear (at least to Smith, if not Lyman Wight) that military victory against the Missourians would be impossible, Smith chose Corrill as one of five representatives to negotiate with them for peace. Perhaps he believed, despite any misgivings about Corrill’s character, that Corrill’s position in the state legislature, political connections, or rhetorical abilities would help secure a peaceful surrender. But the negotiations did not proceed quite as Smith hoped.

Apparently the general had considered George Hinkle, the leader of the representatives, to be the person who represented the Mormons and could formally agree to the terms of surrender. Smith and the other hostages had assumed they would have a chance to negotiate with the general, but when they arrived in the Missourians’ camp, they were immediately taken into custody; “it therefore appeared to Smith and the other hostages that the representatives had lured them into the militia camp, where the surrender terms were then forced upon them.” (LeSueur, 1987) The subsequent disaffection of four of the five representatives (including Corrill) and their testimony against the church at the Richmond hearing cemented the perception in Smith and the others’ minds that Hinkle, Corrill, and the others had betrayed them into the hands of their enemies, where they would have been executed had it not been for General Doniphan’s refusal to carry out the hasty order, and where they suffered mistreatment in Missouri prisons during the following winter months.

This event was the final nail in the coffin of Corrill and Smith’s relationship. Writing from prison in December 1838, Smith lambasts Corrill for his role in the drama at Far West. If Corrill ever read this letter, he must have felt indignant and betrayed himself to have been named in the same breath as the “villain” Sampson Avard:

‘If the light which is in you become darkness, behold, how great is that darkness.’ Look at the dissenters… Look at Mr Hinkle, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Look at his brother John Corrill. Look at the beloved brother Reed Peck, who aided him in leading us, as the Savior was led, into the camp as a lamb prepared for the slaughter… In fine, we have waded through an ocean of tribulation, and mean abuse practiced upon us by the ill-bred and ignorant such as Hinkle, Corrill, and Phelps, Avard, Reed Peck, Cleminson, and various others who are so very ignorant that they cannot appear respectable in any decent and civilized society, and whose eyes are full of adultery and cannot cease from sin.

Smith, 1838; edited for conventions

Corrill ends the historical section of his narrative with the plight of the now-destitute Mormons seeking another place to live and redress for their property. Technically, peace was achieved; none were killed in the siege. But the way in which Smith and his friends were taken into custody drove a wedge between these leaders and the representatives who had agreed to the terms without them.

Dissent and Friendship

Corrill’s ultimate conclusion, which he calls “a few remarks to the church”, begins with his promised explanation of his reasons for leaving it:

I have left you, not because I disbelieve the bible, for I believe in God, the Saviour, and religion the same as ever; but when I retrace our track, and view the doings of the church for six years past, I can see nothing that convinces me that God has been our leader; calculation after calculation has failed, and plan after plan has been overthrown, and our prophet seemed not to know the even till too late. If he said to go up and prosper, still we did not prosper; but have labored and toiled, and waded through trials, difficulties, and temptations, of various kinds, in hope of deliverance. But no deliverance came.

Corrill, 1839, p. 48

The trajectory of Corrill’s exit from Mormonism has been wrapped in moral indignation at vigilante violence and foolish, authoritarian decisions of leaders, but that is not the core of Corrill’s apostasy. He came to reject Mormonism because what he saw and experienced was not what he had believed it to be. This is the same sentiment of one commenter in 2017, who, rejecting what he deemed simplistic explanations for why people cease activity in Mormonism—desire to sin, laziness, offense, and intellectual pride—concludes, “perhaps people leave because they conclude that the One True Church, isn’t.” (Ellis, 2017) Corrill’s leap of faith in becoming a Mormon was that “through every age, God continued to send prophets to the people…[and] if God did these things formerly, why not now? …why not this?” The final straw, stated below in the remainder of his final remarks, was the ultimate failure and humiliation of that prophet at Far West.

The promises failed, and time after time we have been disappointed; and still were commanded, in the most rigid manner, to follow him, which the church did, until many were led into the commission of crime; have been apprehended and broken down by their opponents, and many have been obliged to abandon their country, their families, and all they possessed, and great affliction has been brought upon the whole church. What shall we say to these things? Did not your prophet proclaim in your ears that the day was your own, and you should overcome; when in less than a week you were all made prisoners of war, and you would have been exterminated, had it not been for the exertions and influence of a few dissenters, and the humane and manly spirit of a certain officer?

Corrill, 1839, p. 48

In these lines, Corrill emphasizes the irony of the Mormons’ situation. Smith had proclaimed that they would overcome their enemies, but it was a Missouri general, Alexander Doniphan, who had saved their life, while dissenters like Corrill and Hinkle had pled for, and ultimately secured, peace (albeit under General Lucas’s conditions, hardly helped by the agitation of other dissenters like Thomas Marsh, and at the cost of the freedom of Smith and other leaders). He closes:

But where now may you look for deliverance? You may say, in God; but I say, in the exercise of common sense and that sound reason with which God has endowed you; and my advice is to follow that, in preference to those pretended visions and revelations which have served no better purpose than to increase your trouble, and which would bind you, soul and body, under the most intolerable yoke.

Corrill, 1839, p. 48

By reason Corrill entered the church, and by reason he departed. At least, to Corrill it was just reason. To Smith, it was betrayal and treachery of the highest degree. Smith was the one withering in inhumane imprisonment while Corrill was vindicating himself to his friends and allies. What Corrill never admits in his condemnation of Smith is that the disastrous saga of the “Missouri Mormon War” was at least as catastrophic to Smith as it was to Corrill.

Corrill’s ironic question, “Where now may you look for deliverance,” is familiar to Latter-day Saints in different words, phrased by Smith in a March 1839 letter from prison and now canonized in Doctrine and Covenants, section 121:

O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place? How long shall thy hand be stayed, and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people and of thy servants, and thine ear be penetrated with their cries? Yea, O Lord, how long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions, before thine heart shall be softened toward them, and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them? … Stretch forth thy hand; let thine eye pierce; let thy pavilion be taken up; let thy hiding place no longer be covered; let thine ear be inclined; let thine heart be softened, and thy bowels moved with compassion toward us. Let thine anger be kindled against our enemies; and, in the fury of thine heart, with thy sword avenge us of our wrongs. Remember thy suffering saints, O our God…

Smith, 1839; edited for conventions

Less familiar than these words is the context in which the “response” comes, since it is not excerpted in D&C 121. It is the arrival of letters from Emma Smith, Don Carlos Smith, and Edward Partridge that prompts Joseph Smith to pen this emotional prose:

Those who have not been enclosed in the walls of a prison without cause or provocation can have but a little idea how sweet the voice of a friend is. One token of friendship from any source whatever awakens and calls into action every sympathetic feeling—it brings up in an instant everything that is past—it seizes the present with a vivacity of lightning—it grasps after the future with the fierceness of a tiger—it retrogrades from one thing to another, until finally all enmity, malice, and hatred and past differences, misunderstandings and mismanagements lie slain victims at the feet of hope. And when the heart is sufficiently contrite, then the voice of inspiration steals along and whispers: My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and afflictions shall be but a small moment—and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes. Thy friends do stand by thee, and they shall hail thee again with warm hearts and friendly hands.

Smith, 1839; edited for conventions; emphasis added

To Joseph Smith—and many Mormons, then and now—their church was always more than a church. It was a community: Zion. Membership was friendship. Corrill viewed his dissent and departure as a rational choice, but to Smith, it was the same as backstabbing a friend. Smith’s heaven was a heaven remarkably like earth, where people in their own bodies could laugh and play and live with their families: “And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” (Smith, 1843; edited for conventions; cf. D&C 130:2) More important to Smith than doctrine and organization—neither of which showed constancy during Smith’s presidency—was his ideal of harmony and freedom from the embattlement and persecution that, particularly in Smith’s mind, had dogged the church since its inception. The saving “voice of inspiration” was carried in the hope of letters from friends. This is why the fallout between Smith and dissenters, including Corrill, was so bitter and so irreparable, and why the tension between faithful members and hints of dissent in the contemporary church is as insoluble as ever. Corrill’s apostasy was felt and experienced within the church as that of son against father; student against teacher; Iscariot against Christ. For the early Latter-day Saints, with God’s true kingdom at stake and enemies real and perceived at every turn, there was no room for anything less than a united faithfulness to the prophet—and the pain of shattered trust on both sides of the story of John Corrill and his apostasy is still felt among the latter-day believers and heretics of the twenty-first century. ∎

Works Cited

Note: The format of this list is loosely inspired by MLA style. Since I typically don’t work with historical sources and am more at home with APA, please overlook any issues of style.

Blair & Rives. “Senate Document 189 on the Trial of Joseph Smith”, 1841. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ASenate_Document_189_on_the_Trial_of_Joseph_Smith.djvu. Accessed 28 Feb 2023.

BYU Scripture Citation Index. Brigham Young University, https://scriptures.byu.edu. Accessed 28 Feb 2023.

Corrill, John. A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, The Joseph Smith Papers, 1839, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/john-corrill-a-brief-history-of-the-church-of-christ-of-latter-day-saints-1839. Accessed 14 Feb 2023.

“Elder Oaks Interview Transcript from PBS Documentary.” News Release. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 20 July 2007, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/elder-oaks-interview-transcript-from-pbs-documentary. Accessed 28 Feb 2023.

Ellis, Jonathan. “Review of Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt.” Blog post. 19 Apr 2017, https://medium.com/@jellistx/review-of-planted-belief-and-belonging-in-an-age-of-doubt-644cc5d1cca4. Accessed 28 Feb 2023.

“Joseph Smith Papers: Karen Davidson and John Corrill”. Church of Jesus Christ, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/2011-10-0005-joseph-smith-papers-karen-davidson-and-john-corrill?lang=eng. Accessed 20 Feb 2023.

LeSueur, Stephen. The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, University of Missouri Press, 1987.

“Minutes and Testimonies, 12–29 November 1838” [State of Missouri v. Gates et al. for Treason], The Joseph Smith Papers, 1838. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-and-testimonies-12-29-november-1838-state-of-missouri-v-gates-et-al-for-treason. Accessed 28 Feb 2023.

Oaks, Dallin H. “Reading Church History” (CES Symposium on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History, Aug. 26, 1985), 1985, https://archive.org/details/reading_church_history_1985_oaks. Accessed 14 Feb 2023.

Peterson, Daniel C. “The Book of Mormon and the Descent into Dissent,” Ensign, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Sep 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2020/09/the-book-of-mormon-and-the-descent-into-dissent?lang=eng. Accessed 14 Feb 2023.

Pratt, Parley P. The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt, Law, King, & Law, 1888, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/44896/pg44896-images.html. Accessed 28 Feb 2023.

Smith, Joseph Jr. Journal, March–September 1838, The Joseph Smith Papers, 1838. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-march-september-1838/60. Accessed 17 February 2023.

Smith, Joseph Jr. Letter to the Church in Caldwell County, Missouri, The Joseph Smith Papers, 16 Dec 1838, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-the-church-in-caldwell-county-missouri-16-december-1838/1. Accessed 14 Feb 2023.

Smith, Joseph Jr. Letter to the Church and Edward Partridge, The Joseph Smith Papers, 20 March 1839, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-the-church-and-edward-partridge-20-march-1839/1. Accessed 14 Feb 2023.

Smith, Joseph Jr. Instruction, 2 April 1843, as Reported by Willard Richards, The Joseph Smith Papers, 2 Apr 1843, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/instruction-2-april-1843-as-reported-by-willard-richards/, Accessed 17 Feb 2023.