Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of
dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
—SIGMUND FREUD, THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by
the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate
as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
A n old popular saying from Chicago has it that if you want to maintain your respect for city
aldermen, or your appetite for sausages, you should take care not to be present when the
former are being groomed or the latter are being manufactured. It is the anatomy of man, said
Engels, that is the key to the anatomy of the ape. Thus, if we watch the process of a religion in
its formation, we can make some assumptions about the origins of those religions that were put
together before most people could read. From a wide selection of openly manufactured
sausage religions, I shall pick the Melanesian “cargo cult,” the Pentecostal superstar Marjoe, and
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons.
The thought has surely occurred to many people throughout the ages: what if there is an
afterlife but no god? What if there is a god but no afterlife? As far as I know, the clearest writer
to give expression to this problem was Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterwork Leviathan. I
strongly recommend that you read part III, chapter 38, and part IV, chapter 44, for yourselves,
because Hobbes’s command of both holy scripture and the English language is quite
breathtaking. He also reminds us how perilous it was, and always has been, even to think about
these things. His brisk and ironic throat-clearing is eloquent in itself. Reflecting on the nonsense
story of Adam’s “Fall” (the original instance of someone being created free and then loaded
with impossible-to-obey prohibitions), Hobbes opined—not forgetting fearfully to add that he
did so “with submission nevertheless both in this, and in all questions, whereof the determination
dependeth on the Scriptures”—that if Adam was condemned to death by sinning, his death must
have been postponed, since he contrived to raise a large posterity before actually dying.
Having planted the subversive thought—that forbidding Adam to eat from one tree lest he
die, and from another lest he live forever, is absurd and contradictory—Hobbes was forced to
imagine alternative scriptures and even alternative punishments and alternative eternities. His
point was that people might not obey the rule of men if they were more afraid of divine
retribution than of horrible death in the here and now, but he had acknowledged the process
whereby people are always free to make up a religion that suits or gratifies or flatters them.
Samuel Butler was to adapt this idea in his Erewhon Revisited. In the original Erewhon, Mr. Higgspays a visit to a remote country from which he eventually makes his escape in a balloon.
Returning two decades later, he finds that in his absence he has become a god named the “Sun
Child,” worshipped on the day he ascended into heaven. Two high priests are on hand to
celebrate the ascension, and when Higgs threatens to expose them and reveal himself as a
mere mortal he is told, “You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound
around this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all
become wicked.”
In 1964 there appeared a celebrated documentary movie called Mondo Cane, or “the world
of the dog,” in which the directors captured numerous human cruelties and illusions. This was
the first occasion on which one could see a new religion being assembled, in plain view, on
camera. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands may have been separated for centuries from the
more economically developed world, but when visited by the fatal impact many of them were
shrewd enough to get the point immediately. Here were great vessels with billowing sails,
bearing treasures and weapons and devices that were beyond any compare. Some of the more
untutored islanders did what many people do when confronted with a new phenomenon, and
tried to translate it into a discourse that they could themselves understand (not unlike those
fearful Aztecs who, first seeing mounted Spanish soldiers in Mesoamerica, concluded that they
had a centaur for an enemy). These poor souls decided that the westerners were their long
mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave. That illusion cannot
long have survived the encounter with the colonists, but later it was observed in several places
that the brighter islanders had a better idea. Docks and jetties were built, they noticed, after
which more ships came and unloaded more goods. Acting by analogy and mimesis, the locals
constructed their own jetties and waited for these, too, to attract some ships. Futile as this
proceeding was, it badly retarded the advance of later Christian missionaries. When they made
their appearance, they were asked where the gifts were (and soon came up with some trinkets).
In the twentieth century the “cargo cult” revived in an even more impressive and touching
form. Units of the United States armed forces, arriving in the Pacific to build airfields for the war
on Japan, found that they were the objects of slavish emulation. Local enthusiasts abandoned
their lightly worn Christian observances and devoted all their energies to the construction of
landing strips that might attract loaded airplanes. They made simulated antennae out of
bamboo. They built and lit fires, to simulate the flares that guided the American planes to land.
This still goes on, which is the saddest bit of the Mondo Cane sequence. On the island of Tana,
an American GI was declared to be the redeemer. His name, John Frum, seems to have been an
invention too. But even after the last serviceman flew or sailed away after 1945, the eventual
return of the savior Frum was preached and predicted, and an annual ceremony still bears his
name. On another island named New Britain, adjacent to Papua New Guinea, the cult is even
more strikingly analogous. It has ten commandments (the “Ten Laws”), a trinity that has one
presence in heaven and another on earth, and a ritual system of paying tributes in the hope of
propitiating these authorities. If the ritual is performed with sufficient purity and fervor, so its
adherents believe, then an age of milk and honey will be ushered in. This radiant future, sad to
say, is known as the “Period of the Companies,” and will cause New Britain to flourish and
prosper as if it were a multinational corporation.
Some people may be insulted at even the suggestion of a comparison here, but are not the
holy books of official monotheism absolutely dripping with material yearning and with admirin
—almost mouthwatering—descriptions of Solomon’s wealth, the thriving flocks and herds of the
faithful, the rewards for a good Muslim in paradise, to say nothing of many, many lurid tales of
plunder and spoils? Jesus, it is true, shows no personal interest in gain, but he does speak of
treasure in heaven and even of “mansions” as an inducement to follow him. Is it not further true
that all religions down the ages have shown a keen interest in the amassment of material goodsin the real world?
The thirst for money and worldly comfort is only a subtext of the mind-numbing story of
Marjoe Gortner, the “infant phenomenon” of American evangelical hucksterism. Grotesquely
christened “Marjoe” (a cretinous lumping together of the names Mary and Joseph) by his
parents, young Master Gortner was thrust into the pulpit at the age of four, dressed in a
revolting Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, and told to say that he had been divinely commanded to
preach. If he complained or cried, his mother would hold him under the water tap or press a
cushion on his face, always being careful, as he relates it, to leave no marks. Trained like a seal,
he soon attracted the cameras and by the age of six was officiating at the weddings of grown
ups. His celebrity spread, and many flocked to see the miraculous child. His best guess is that he
raised three million dollars in “contributions,” none of which was earmarked for his education or
his own future. At the age of seventeen he rebelled against his pitiless and cynical parents and
“dropped out” into the early sixties California counterculture.
In the immortal children’s Christmas pantomime Peter Pan, there comes a climactic moment
when the little angel Tinkerbell seems to be dying. The glowing light that represents her on the
stage begins to dim, and there is only one possible way to save the dire situation. An actor steps
up to the front of the house and asks all the children, “Do you believe in fairies?” If they keep
confidently answering “YES!” then the tiny light will start to brighten again. Who can object to
this? One wants not to spoil children’s belief in magic—there will be plenty of time later for
disillusionment—and nobody is waiting at the exit asking them hoarsely to contribute their piggy
banks to the Tinkerbell Salvation Church. The events at which Marjoe was exploited had all the
intellectual content of the Tinkerbell scene, nastily combined with the ethics of Captain Hook.
A decade or so later, Mr. Gortner exacted the best possible revenge for his stolen and empty
childhood, and decided to do the general public a favor in order to make up for his conscious
fraudulence. He invited a film crew to follow him as he ostensibly “returned” to preach the
gospel, and took the trouble to explain how all the tricks are pulled. This is how you induce
motherly women (he was a handsome lad) to part with their savings. This is how you time the
music to create an ecstatic effect. This is when you speak of how Jesus visited you personally.
Here is how you put invisible ink on your forehead, in the shape of a cross, so that it will
suddenly show up when you start perspiring. This is when you really move in for the kill. He
keeps all his promises, telling the film’s director in advance what he can and will do and then
going out into the auditorium to enact it with absolute conviction. People weep and yell, and
collapse in spasms and fits, shrieking their savior’s name. Cynical, coarse, brutish old men and
women wait for the psychological moment to demand money, and start counting it gleefully
before the charade of the “service” is even over. Occasionally one sees the face of a small child,
dragged to the tent and looking wretched and uncomfortable as its parents writhe and moan
and give away their hard-won pay. One knew, of course, that the whole racket of American
evangelism was just that: a heartless con run by the second-string characters from Chaucer’s
“Pardoner’s Tale.” (You saps keep the faith. We’ll just keep the money.) And this is what it must
have been like when indulgences were openly sold in Rome, and when a nail or a splinter from
the Crucifixion could fetch a nice price in any flea market in Christendom. But to see the crime
exposed by someone who is both a victim and a profiteer is nonetheless quite shocking even to
a hardened unbeliever. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The film Marjoe won an
Academy Award in 1972, and has made absolutely no difference at all. The mills of the TV
preachers continue to grind, and the poor continue to finance the rich, just as if the glittering
temples and palaces of Las Vegas had been built by the money of those who won rather than
those who lost.
In his bewitching novel The Child in Time, Ian McEwan gives us a desolate character and
narrator who is reduced by tragedy to a nearinert state in which he vacantly watches a greatdeal of daytime TV. Observing the way in which his fellow creatures allow themselves
volunteer themselves—to be manipulated and humiliated, he coins the phrase for those who
indulge themselves in witnessing the spectacle. It is, he decides, “the democrat’s pornography.”
It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct,
and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient
problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a
standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus
one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of
religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this
stubborn fact.
IF THE FOLLOWERS OF THE PROPHET Muhammad hoped to put an end to any future “revelations”
after the immaculate conception of the Koran, they reckoned without the founder of what is
now one of the world’s fastest-growing faiths. And they did not foresee (how could they,
mammals as they were?) that the prophet of this ridiculous cult would model himself on theirs.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was
founded by a gifted opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized Christian
terms, announced that “I shall be to this generation a new Muhammad” and adopted as his
fighting slogan the words, which he thought he had learned from Islam, “Either the Al-Koran or
the sword.” He was too ignorant to know that if you use the word al you do not need another
definite article, but then he did resemble Muhammad in being able only to make a borrowing
out of other people’s bibles.
In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of
being “a disorderly person and an impostor.” That ought to have been all we ever heard of
Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging
expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or “necromantic” powers. However, within four
years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of
the “Book of Mormon.” He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and
charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in the same hectically pious district that gave
us the Shakers, the previously mentioned William Miller who repeatedly predicted the end of the
world, and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did this local
tendency become that the region became known as the “Burned-Over District,” in honor of the
way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was operating
in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did possess the signs
of an ancient history.
A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable number of
burial mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not
merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver. There were
eight of these sites within twelve miles of the underperforming farm which the Smith family
called home. There were two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in
such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought their magic
sticks and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who
hoped to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith’s cleverness was to be a member
of both groups, and to unite cupidity with half-baked anthropology.
The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and almost
embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No
Man Knows My History was a good-faith attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest
possible interpretation on the relevant “events.”) In brief, Joseph Smith announced that he had
been visited (three times, as is customary) by an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed
him of a book, “written upon gold plates,” which explained the origins of those living on theNorth American continent as well as the truths of the gospel. There were, further, two magic
stones, set in the twin breast-plates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, that would
enable Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings, he brought this
buried apparatus home with him on September 21, 1827, about eighteen months after his
conviction for fraud. He then set about producing a translation.
The resulting “books” turned out to be a record set down by ancient prophets, beginning with
Nephi, son of Lehi, who had fled salem in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many
battles, curses, and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their
numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way? Smith refused to show the
golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean death. But he
encountered a problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and
fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts attest. But he was illiterate, at least in
the sense that while he could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary
to take his inspired dictation. This scribe was at first his wife Emma and then, when more hands
were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah
29, verses 11–12, concerning the repeated injunction to “Read,” Harris mortgaged his farm to
help in the task and moved in with the Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the
kitchen, and Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As
if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates,
or look at the prophet, he would be struck dead.
Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the fecklessness of her
husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages and challenged Smith to reproduce
them, as presumably—given his power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this
appear far too seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks, the ingenious
Smith countered with another revelation. He could not replicate the original, which might be in
the devil’s hands by now and open to a “satanic verses” interpretation. But the all-foreseeing
Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very plates of Nephi, which told
a fairly similar tale. With infinite labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind
the blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the original golden plates
were transported to heaven, where apparently they remain to this day.
Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have been fraudulent
because the work of deception would have been too much for one poor and illiterate man. They
have on their side two useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and
attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a language that is
somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider. However, we know the Koran to be made
up in part of earlier books and stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious
task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken directly
from the Old Testament. These words can mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in
Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then popular work
by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems to
have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words
of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three hundred and fifty
“names” in the book, more than one hundred come straight from the Bible and a hundred more
are as near stolen as makes no difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it as
“chloroform in print,” but I accuse him of hitting too soft a target, since the book does actually
contain “The Book of Ether.”) The words “and it came to pass” can be found at least two
thousand times, which does admittedly have a soporific effect. Quite recent scholarship has
exposed every single other Mormon “document” as at best a scrawny compromise and at worst
a pitiful fake, as Dr. Brodie was obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkablebook in 1973.
Like Muhammad, Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice and often simply to
suit himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when he wanted a new girl and wished to take her
as another wife). As a result, he overreached himself and came to a violent end, having
meanwhile excommunicated almost all the poor men who had been his first disciples and who
had been browbeaten into taking his dictation. Still, this story raises some very absorbing
questions, concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our
eyes.
Professor Daniel Dennett and his supporters have attracted a great deal of criticism for their
“natural science” explanation of religion. Never mind the supernatural, argues Dennett, we may
discard that while accepting that there have always been those for whom “belief in belief” is a
good thing in itself. Phenomena can be explained in biological terms. In primitive times, is it not
possible that those who believed in the shaman’s cure had a better morale as a result, and thus
a slightly but significantly higher chance of actually being cured? “Miracles” and similar
nonsense to one side, not even modern medicine rejects this thought. And it seems possible,
moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in
nothing, however untrue that something may be.
Some of this will always be disputed among anthropologists and other scientists, but what
interests me and always has is this: Do the preachers and prophets also believe, or do they too
just “believe in belief”? Do they ever think to themselves, this is too easy? And do they then
rationalize the trick by saying that either (a) if these wretches weren’t listening to me they’d be
in even worse shape; or (b) that if it doesn’t do them any good then it still can’t be doing them
much harm? Sir James Frazer, in his famous study of religion and magic The Golden Bough,
suggests that the novice witch doctor is better off if he does not share the illusions of the
ignorant congregation. For one thing, if he does take the magic literally he is much more likely
to make a career-ending mistake. Better by far to be a cynic, and to rehearse the conjury, and
to tell himself that everybody is better off in the end. Smith obviously seems like a mere cynic, in
that he was never happier than when using his “revelation” to claim supreme authority, or to
justify the idea that the flock should make over their property to him, or to sleep with every
available woman. There are gurus and cult leaders of that kind born every day. Smith must
certainly have thought it was too easy to get innocent wretches like Martin Harris to believe
everything he told them, especially when they were thirsty for just a glimpse of that
mouthwatering golden trove. But was there a moment when he also believed that he did have a
destiny, and was ready to die to prove it? In other words, was he a huckster all the time, or was
there a pulse inside him somewhere? The study of religion suggests to me that, while it cannot
possibly get along without great fraud and also minor fraud, this remains a fascinating and
somewhat open question.
There were dozens of part-educated, unscrupulous, ambitious, fanatical men like Smith in the
Palmyra, New York, area at that epoch, but only one of them achieved “takeoff.” This is for two
probable reasons. First, and by all accounts, including those of his enemies, Smith had great
natural charm and authority and fluency: what Max Weber called the “charismatic” part of
leadership. Second, there were at that time a great number of people hungry for soil and a new
start in the West, constituting a huge latent force behind the notion of a new leader (let alone a
new holy book) that could augur a “Promised Land.” The wanderings of the Mormons in Missouri
and Illinois and Utah, and the massacres that they both suffered and inflicted on the way, gave
body and sinew to the idea of martyrdom and exile—and to the idea of the “Gentiles,” as they
scornfully called the unbelievers. It is a great historical story and (unlike its origin in a piece of
vulgar fabrication) can be read with respect. It does, however, have two indelible stains. The first
is the sheer obviousness and crudity of its “revelations,” which were opportunistically improvisedby Smith and later by his successors as they went along. And the second is its revoltingly crude
racism. Christian preachers of all kinds had justified slavery until the American Civil War and
even afterwards, on the supposed biblical warrant that of the three sons of Noah (Shem, Ham,
and Japhet), Ham had been cursed and cast into servitude. But Joseph Smith took this nasty
fable even further, fulminating in his “Book of Abraham” that the swarthy races of Egypt had
inherited this very curse. Also, at the made-up battle of “Cumorah,” a site located conveniently
near his own birthplace, the “Nephites”—described as fair-skinned and “handsome” and indeed
“delightsome”—contended against the “Lamanites,” whose descendants were punished with
dark pigment for turning away from god. As the crisis over American slavery mounted, Smith
and his even more dubious disciples preached against the abolitionists in antebellum Missouri.
They solemnly said that there had been a third group in heaven during the ultimate battle
between God and Lucifer. This group, as it was explained, had tried to remain neutral. But after
Lucifer’s defeat they had been forced into the world, compelled “to take bodies in the accursed
lineage of Canaan; and hence the negro or African race.” Thus, when Dr. Brodie first wrote her
book, no black American was allowed to hold even the lowly position of deacon, let alone a
priesthood, in the Mormon Church. Nor were the descendants of Ham admitted to the sacred
rites of the temple.
If anything proves the human manufacture of religion, it is the way that the Mormon elders
resolved this difficulty. Confronted by the plain words of one of their holy books and the
increasing contempt and isolation that it imposed upon them, they did as they had done when
their fondness for polygamy would have brought federal retribution upon god’s own Utah. They
had still another “revelation,” on 8 June 1978, thirteen years after the passage of the Civil Rights
Act, in which it was divinely disclosed to them that black people were human after all.
It must be said for the “Latter-day Saints” (these conceited words were added to Smith’s
original “Church of Jesus Christ” in 1833) that they have squarely faced one of the great
difficulties of revealed religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born
before the exclusive “revelation,” or who died without ever having the opportunity to share in its
wonders. Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after
his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead. There is indeed a fine
passage in Dante’s Inferno where he comes to rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who
had presumably been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In another less
ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet Muhammad is found being disemboweled in
revolting detail.) The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something
very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge
repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages,
and deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful if you want to look up
your own family tree, and as long as you do not object to having your ancestors becoming
Mormons. Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and
are given a certain quota of names of the departed to “pray in” to their church. This
retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish
Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the
records of the Nazi “final solution,” and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be
called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise
seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think
that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most
simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first
invented religion.
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