The Mormons are aggressive recruiters of a disturbed faith. Don't ever fall victim to their great scam. In The Book of Mormon, history is grossly rewritten. The writer and prophet Joseph Smith, a confabulist who'd previously dabbled in black magic, went to great lengths to appeal to American ideals at the time, including manifest destiny and the racial purity of the white man. Smith's history has a broken sect of Israelites in 600 BC migrating all the way to the Americas, where they established a new colony before anyone else- natives and 16th century explorers alike. They did not find any natives on their journey; rather, Native Americans are merely the offspring of the settlers, and the more nefarious ones at that. The favored settlers were white in color- also a historical inaccuracy, as the Israelites 2,500 years ago probably did not look Caucasian.
This story appeals to so many Americans because it strikes at the heart of our imperialist manifesto as New World pioneers. I don't know how much headway the Mormons have made outside the U.S., but it doesn't seem impressive. That it is largely an American phenomenon suggests that it fails to capture the attention of international cultures, unlike its parent religion Christianity; and Buddhism, which didn't even need missionaries.
The danger in succumbing to such radical beliefs is that it ensconces one in a perspective that is rigid and prejudice. The narrow interpretation offered by Mormonism opens the door to sinful derivatives like polygamy and the hyper-patriarchy of the more fundamentalist sects, some which harvest human rights violators who are "protected" in the name of religion by their state's constitution. Specific criminal Mormon patriarchs who are guilty of statutory rape and incest can be found in Jon Krakauer's arguably "true crime" book Under the Banner of Heaven. It's hard to believe some state laws are defenseless against freedom of religion, particularly when it comes to violation of other basic rights, but some of these patriarchs have gotten away with them because they feel it is their divine right to do so. They are akin to the tyrants of history who felt they had holy mandates to take whatever they wanted, without regard for anyone's feelings. A 13 year old girl who was brought up in a Mormon fundamentalist community has no inkling about the basic civil rights she was given at birth, because they are taught to be subservient to patriarchs their whole childhood. It's no different from a culture we would now view as savage because they sacrificed animals or even people to appease their gods.
I want to state firmly that there is no archaeological evidence for the Mormon version of history. Native Americans migrated from Siberia long before Europeans or anyone in the far-flung Middle East. This was an attractive fantasy for white-centric outcasts who wanted more wives than they could handle, at a time when urban feminism was buried under the sand of new machinery that said progress was the way to heaven. I don't think founding a religion like this would make strides in our own times. There isn't even a new frontier for these deranged opportunists to plunder like they did in Utah and Arizona. Best to stay away from any Mormon recruiter and not even engage. If you must, kindly point out how uncomfortable the distorted history and polygamy makes you feel. Even if they say they aren't fundamentalist, the association is too strong. The stench is too great. It wreaks of dishonesty and sin. That will really grind their gears.
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