WHETHER A MAN CAN ENTER A SECOND TIME INTO HIS MOTHER’S WOMB
But the Reformed Baptists [Campbellites] held the doctrine … that a man must reform, that repentance was simply a reformation, and the moment that repentance was resolved upon, the candidate was ready for baptism; and so far their notion appeared to be an improvement upon the general idea entertained, and consonant with the Bible view of it, as it was laid down by the Savior and his Apostles. But here they stopped.
FIGURE 38 Arnold Friberg, Abinadi Delivers His Message To Wicked King Noah
The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).
THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY was a time of radical social, political, economic, and religious upheaval and transformation. Widespread concern about the future well-being of the new republic in the new economic reality gave rise to yet another Great Awakening and Protestant reform strategy. Calvinist-Arminian debate heated up, with Arminians winning the day. A theology of works suited the unshakable belief of most Americans in the essential righteousness of the human thirst for greater self-determination—waters springing unto everlasting life.1 How this generation of postrevolutionary Americans should be reared—with loving kindness and even considerable reverence, given their unclouded recollections of the heavenly home—was of great importance to a nation of more and more believers in liberty and equality for all. It was high time that the Deity spare the rod. An up-and-coming generation would not be so disciplined by earthly authority figures, either.
The Calvinist standing order saw the error of its ways. Refusing to fight fire with more hellfire, it hoped to change utter defeat into a shallow victory by incorporating elements of the reigning Arminianism. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and archenemy of Enlightenment rationalism in all forms, had a sudden change of heart on the vexatious matter of the final resting place of infants who die without baptism. He challenged “any objector to show, that they suffer more than they deserve.”2 After all, Calvin taught that some of the elect might be infants who die without baptism, going straight to Heaven anyway. Dwight picked his words carefully. But this would not keep the enemy at bay, and ultimately he gave up any right to call himself a Calvinist with such concessions as: “If we please to be saved, we shall now be saved…. There is nothing which prevents us from being saved, but our own inclination” (sermon 15 [1:253]). Following the Arminian example, he gave believers some of the credit. “No man is pardoned merely because of the Atonement made by Christ,” he would write, “but because of his own acceptance, also, of that atonement” (sermon 17 [2:412]). Though sin came into the world through Adam, in Dwight’s view, it no longer posed any serious threat (sermon 32 [2:5]). His student and sometime secretary Nathaniel W. Taylor also credited the reprobate with nourishing the seed of grace, which “moves upon, softens, and wins a rebel heart to the love of God—an influence under which the sinner, in the free exercise of his own adequate powers, loves, believes, and obeys God his Savior.”3
Meanwhile, Arminians went about their business blissfully unaware that the other side had capitulated. The assault against Calvinism, more often than not, amounted to shadowboxing. A reviewer wrote in a 1822 periodical: “We are often compelled to complain, that the opponents of Calvinism, never fairly attack its doctrines…. We are sometimes disposed to wonder,—if this system of doctrines be really so absurd, and dangerous, and ‘blasphemous’ too, … why it cannot be shown to be so, without resorting to misrepresentation,—and why those who undertake to expose its enormities, are not content sometimes to hold it up, just as it is actually professed and believed.”4 Indeed! Unitarians were the worst offenders, tarring Calvinists, Old and New Divinity Men alike, with the same brush, accusing one and all of unspeakable soteriological and eschatological evils against poor, defenseless children of all peoples. William Ellery Channing’s 1819 Baltimore sermon epitomizes this lack of attention to detail: it excoriated Calvinism in particular and orthodox Protestantism in general. Channing objected to a system that, in his view, “render[ed] certain and infallible the total depravity of every human being from the first moment of his moral agency,” asserting the election of some and the eternal damnation of the rest, including infants.5 The Mormon prophet was no better informed or scrupulous.
Caught in the middle, another Calvinist turned Arminian, New England Revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, was first to capitalize on the confusion. Born in Warren, Connecticut, on August, 29, 1792, he taught school before moving on to practice law under Benjamin Wright of Adams, New York. His study of the Hebraic foundations of the law led him to inquire concerning his immortal soul, and in 1821 the Deity claimed him. Finney straightaway left his fledgling law practice to preach the gospel, obtaining a license from the local Presbyterian church.
Finney’s methods proved objectionable to liberal and conservative, Arminian and Calvinist alike. New School theologians Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton attacked Finney for being undignified, sacrificing clerical decorum simply to win more souls to Christ than the next guy.6 Old School Calvinists did not take kindly to his democratization of Calvinism, fretting that it would undoubtedly undermine social order.7 Finney gave Americans precisely what they seemed to want—more say in spiritual matters than ever before—and his methods were well suited to an increasingly mobile, urbane society.8 William G. McLoughlin explains:
Finney was a child of his age, not an enemy of it. He had little use for Calvinism, and the basic philosophical and social principles underlying his thought were essentially the same as those associated with Jacksonian democracy. Like the Jacksonians, Finney had an ardent faith in progress, in the benevolence of God, and in the dignity and worth of the common man. Like the Jacksonians, he believed that the restrictive clerical and aristocratic traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were out of date…. Finney was no backward-looking fundamentalist exhorter, longing for the good old days of Puritanism…. He was in fact just the opposite of a theocrat—he was a pietist. And that is why he spent his life at odds with the Calvinists of his day…. His mission, as he saw it, was to create a universal Church based upon the fundamentals of the gospel.
(pp. viii–ix)
Finney denounced his erstwhile Presbyterianism and, in his seminal Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), repudiated the Westminster Confession of Faith as an impediment to the dissemination of Christianity (p. ix). His real strength, however, lay not in theology but in the psychology and sociology of religious belief: he was the author of a market-driven and market-driving reinvention of American Christianity.
Unlike Jonathan Edwards, who described his famous Northampton revival as “a marvelous work of God” (p. x), Finney boasted that his was “not a miracle or dependent on a miracle” but the “philosophical result of the right use of constitutional means” (p. xi). His social prayer meetings sometimes lasted the entire night when conversions were not forthcoming. When he preached, would-be converts sat front and center on what came to be called the “anxious bench,” where he could bellow at them nonstop. “Sinners,” Finney writes, “ought to be made to feel that they have something to do, and that is repent…. Religion is something to do, not something to wait for” (pp. 379–380; see also pp. 203–214, 227).
Things did not always go as planned, not even for the indomitable Finney. Conversion no longer depended on an angry God but, according to some, a fickle one. Not all who wanted to be saved got saved—and not for lack of trying. Finney could do no better than admonish sinners to pray “without ceasing.”9 Yet such tenacity might not produce the desired end. The Mormon prophet may have been one such spectacular Finneyite failure, claiming to want to get religion but unable to feel anything (this was the tenor of the opening verses of his official account of the First Vision).10
In 1835, the same year Finney published his Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Alexander Campbell published The Christian System, which proffered an alternative scheme someone like Smith might have found more to his liking. Campbell, a native of Ireland, was born in 1788, the scion of Christian primitivists. His father, Thomas, advocated the restoration of primitive Christianity as the only way to end sectarian rivalry. Once in America (Bethany, West Virginia) young Alexander joined the Baptist Convention, but his ideas proved too controversial. In 1830, the year Smith established the Church of Christ, Campbell broke with the Baptist mainstream and organized a church of his own, the Disciples of Christ, which had an impressive tally of converts its first quarter. The founder of Bethany College, Campbell served as its president until his death in 1866.11 Unlike Finney, the consummate marketing strategist and modernist, Campbell comes off as a backward-looking fundamentalist and eighteenth-century natural philosopher—something of a Puritan, in short. His “system,” however, served many who fell through the Finneyite cracks.
In The Christian System, Campbell defines faith as the effect of belief, good works, and a progressive series of choices that believers make (p. 8). Faith in Christ, he argues, is “the effect of belief. Belief is the cause; and trust, confidence, or faith in Christ, the effect”; repentance is also an “effect of faith” (p. 52). Campbell defines repentance as “sorrow for sins committed … resolution to forsake them … ceasing to do evil … [and] restoring what [one] has unjustly taken away” (pp. 53–54). Adult immersion baptism is the effect of faith and repentance. “Without previous faith in the blood of Christ,” Campbell explains, “and deep and unfeigned repentance before God, neither immersion in water, nor any other action can secure us the blessings of peace and pardon…. To such only as are truly penitent, dare we say, ‘Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling upon the name of the Lord….You are washed, you are justified, you are sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of God’” (p. 58). “Entire change,” he goes on to explain, “consists in four things: a change of views; a change of affections; and change of state; and a change of life” (p. 60). Faith and repentance are consistent with the first two; baptism and the Holy Spirit with the last two; and baptism pertains to the remission of sins (justification), whereas the gift of the Holy Spirit facilitates the perfection of the individual (sanctification). For Campbell, the Evangelical-Finneyite notion that the Holy Spirit saved sinners in their sins was not only morally repugnant but logically incoherent. “The Spirit is not promised to any persons out of Christ,” he writes, “only to them that believe in and obey him. These he actually and powerfully assists in the mighty struggle for eternal life” (pp. 64–65).
Campbell rejected the orthodox Calvinist understanding of original sin that stresses defective will, not mortality, as the effect of the Fall. “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by that one sin,” he writes, “and so death, the wages of sin, has fallen upon all the offspring of Adam” (p. 27). In common with the New Divinity men—Taylor, in particular12—Campbell rejected the orthodox doctrine that the “sin of Adam was the personal offense of all his children.” His ideas also verged on Universalism. The “second Adam” (Jesus Christ), Campbell argues in The Christian System, released all humanity from the grips of physical death. Only those who “actually and voluntarily sin against a dispensation of mercy under which they are placed” suffer spiritual death, whereas both wicked and righteous will come forth in the resurrection.13
Finney, in his Lectures on Systematic Theology, asks the question, no doubt directed at the Campbellite heresy, “What kind of death is intended, where death is denounced against the transgressor, as the penalty of the law of God?”
It is not merely natural death, for—(1) This would, in reality, be no penalty at all. But it would be offering a reward to sin. If natural death is all that is intended, and if persons, as soon as they are naturally dead, have suffered the penalty of the law, and their souls go immediately to heaven, the case stands thus: if your obedience is perfect and perpetual, you shall live in this world forever; but if you sin, you shall die and go immediately to heaven. “This would be hire and salary,” and not punishment…. (3) If natural death be the penalty of God’s law, there is no such thing as forgiveness, but all must actually endure the penalty. (4) If natural death be the penalty, then infants and animals suffer this penalty, as well as the most abandoned transgressors. (5) If natural death be the penalty, and the only penalty, it sustains no proportion whatever to the guilt of sin.14
The penalty of God’s law is not spiritual death, he argues: “(1) Because spiritual death is a state of entire sinfulness. (2) To make a state of entire sinfulness the penalty of the law of God, would be to make the penalty and the breach of the precept identical. (3) It would be making God the author of sin, and would represent him as compelling the sinner to commit one sin as the punishment for another,—as forcing him into a state of total and perpetual rebellion, as the reward of his first transgression” (p. 210). Finney’s real complaint, however, seems to be that Campbell’s “system” rejects the doctrine of original sin from which a cauldron of heresy bubbles.
The Book of Mormon discussion of the fall, original sin, depravity, election, and the new birth is similar to Campbell’s in many respects. Nephi explains:
The Lord God gave unto man, that he should act for himself…. They are free to choose liberty and eternal life … or choose captivity or death, … Adam fell, that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. And the Messiah cometh in the fullness of time, that he might redeem the children of men from the fall. And because that they are redeemed from the fall, they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves, and not to be acted upon save it be by the punishment of the law, and the great and last day, according to the commandments which God hath given.15
This collapses into Universalism, too:
For as death hath passed upon all men there must needs to fulfil the merciful plan of the great Creator, there must needs be a power of resurrection, and the resurrection must needs come unto all man by reason of the fall…. Wherefore, it must needs be an infinite atonement…. Wherefore, the first judgment which came upon man must needs have remained to an endless duration. And if so this flesh must have laid down to rot and to crumble to its mother earth, to rise no more…. O how great the goodness of our God, who prepareth a way for our escape from the grasp of this awful monster; yea, that monster, death and hell, which I call the death of the body, and also the death of the spirit … and the bodies and the spirits of men will be restored one to the other; and it is by the power of the resurrection of the Holy One of Israel … and all men become incorruptible, and immortal.
(pp. 78–83)
The Book of Mormon outlines a four-square gospel predicated upon faith, repentance, and baptism followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Belief is a good work and precedes faith, which precedes repentance, and so forth. Nephi explains:
Wherefore, my beloved brethren, can we follow Jesus, save we shall be willing to keep the commandments of the Father? And the Father saith, Repent ye, repent ye, and be baptized in the name of my beloved Son. And also, the voice of the Son came unto me, saying, He that is baptized in my name, to him will the father give the Holy Ghost…. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I know that if ye shall follow the Son, with full purpose of heart [believe], with full purpose of heart, acting no hypocrisy and no deception before God, but with real intent [faith], repenting of your sins, witnessing unto the Father that ye are willing to take upon you the name of Christ, by baptism; yea, by following your Lord and Savior down into the water, according to his word; behold, then shall ye receive the Holy Ghost; ye then cometh the baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost; and then can ye speak with the tongue of Angels, and shout praises unto the Holy One of Israel.
(pp. 118–119)
The baptism of Alma and Helam, a mutual baptism, illustrates this:
And now it came to pass that Alma took Helam, he being one of the first, and went and stood forth in the water, and cried, saying, O Lord, pour out thy Spirit upon thy servant, that he may do this work with holiness of heart…. And he said: Helam, I baptize thee, having authority from the Almighty God … and may the Spirit of the Lord be poured out upon you; and may he grant you eternal life, through the redemption of Christ…. And after Alma had said these words, both Alma and Helam were buried in the water; and they arose and came forth out of the water rejoicing, being filled with the spirit … yea, and they were baptized … and were filled with the grace of God.
(p. 192)
These and other parallels clearly had some part to play in the conversion of a group of radical Campbellites, led by the breakaway Campbellite minister Sidney Rigdon.16 A genetic relationship is unlikely. After all, other American Protestants with whom neither Smith nor Campbell had any contact before 1830 propound the same four steps as a ladder of sorts to salvation. Brethren (or Dunkers), some of whom also converted to Mormonism, taught that the Holy Spirit came only to those who had faith and repented of their sins. In 1830 Peter Nead of the Brethren, declared: “The terms of the Gospel in order of salvation, are Repentance, Faith and Baptism, and the promise is, the remission of sins, and the reception of the Holy Spirit…. Now these prerequisites [to salvation] are connected,—and what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”17 Not unlike Campbellite and Dunker teaching, the Book of Mormon equates conversion, or the new birth, with baptism. Repentance precedes baptism, and the Holy Spirit follows. Baptism, however, is a witness to one’s Heavenly Father of a willingness to obey the commandments. Faith, repentance, and baptism, the same good work, thus constitute an even faster track to the Holy Spirit than Campbell’s.
Other passages in the Book of Mormon, however, seem to endorse the Finneyite model of Evangelical spiritual new birth, a prebaptismal-encounter-of-the-Holy-Spirit scenario. The conversions of Nephi, Enos, Alma the Younger, and King Lamoni are cases in point.18 “Whosoever should believe that Christ should come,” King Benjamin says, “the same might receive remission of their sins” (an allusion to Peter’s sermon on baptism in Acts 2, perhaps). No mention of baptism here. Those to whom King Benjamin preaches receive “a remission of their sins … having peace of conscience, because of the exceeding faith which they had in Jesus Christ.”19 (This is not the consensus of orthodox Protestantism. The Spirit only convicts, having no cleansing power.) Nephi, Enos, King Benjamin, King Lamoni, and Alma all live before the birth and death of Jesus—before the atonement of Christ—in other words, before baptism is efficacious. The Book of Mormon does not wish to rule out prevenient grace, perhaps, but gives it a certain sanctifying power. Moroni adjures readers at the end of the book “to ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ” if the Book of Mormon is true and he will “manifest the truth of it by the power of the Holy Ghost” (p. 586). Moroni continues: “And again, if ye, by the grace of God are perfect in Christ and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father, unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy without spot” (pp. 587–588).
In fact, the pre-Christian baptismal rites in the Book of Mormon may be an attempt to insulate the text against the Calvinist rejoinder that belief in the necessity of immersion baptism condemns more than its saves, onerous to ailing infants, in particular. Calvin praised baptism for its didactic value—symbolic of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus—but argued that “it is not necessary, as that a person, who is deprived of the opportunity of embracing it, must immediately be considered lost.”20 The new birth as the baptism by fire and the Holy Ghost avoids the problem of not only infants who die without baptism but heathen and pre-Christian Israelites as well. Calvinists and Evangelicals accuse those who insist on an overly literal interpretation and rigid enforcement of the New Testament decree in St. Mark (“He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be damned” [Mark 16:16]) of making God the author of sin. And so the Book of Mormon takes care not to fall into the same trap as Baptists and Catholics, folding Campbell and Finney into a seamless whole.
Another equally compelling interpretation exists that does not rule out the above: the conversion of Nephi and company is consistent with the mystical predilections of frontier Universalists such as Dr. George De Benneville. De Benneville’s experience is almost identical to Lehi’s and Nephi’s, in particular. “My fever increased in such a manner as reduced me almost to a skeleton,” De Benneville writes in his memoir:
While I lay in this weak situation, I was favored through grace with many visions. In one it appeared to me that I was conducted into a fine plain filled with all kinds of fruit trees agreeable both to the sight and smell, loaded with all kinds of the most delicious fruits which came to my mouth and satisfied me as with a river of pleasure. [At the] same time I beheld the inhabitants. They were beautiful beyond expression, clothed in garments as white as snow…. The weakness of my body so increased that I was certain of dying…. I felt myself die and … I was separated from my body…. I was drawn up as in a cloud and behold great wonders where I passed, impossible to be written down.21
Ernest Cassara argues in his book Universalism in America that Universalists were “come-outers” from the lower classes of New England society, subscribing to a pious biblical orientation (pp. 1–44). In De Benneville’s case, however, his epiphany can be seen as Masonic analogue, a thinly veiled Journey of the Freemason in the World.
In fact, many of the aforementioned theological parallels can be explained without citing a single antebellum Evangelical authority. The Campbellite and/or Dunkers system may not be relevant. What is easily mistaken as a fair-minded policy of equal time for the opposing Finneyite side may well be a misreading of veiled Master Mason and Royal Arch raisings for the Evangelical new birth. Nephi’s ostensibly Campbellite sermonizing and Finneyite conversion is less a contradiction than the product of a failure on the part of his modern readers to detect a Masonic pattern in all this.
The Book of Mormon’s rejection of original sin, in fact, can be seen as having nothing whatsoever to do with the New England Theology, Taylorism, or the Campbellites and Dunkers, instead being more Masonic mimesis. The second lecture of the Royal Arch Degree, for example, discusses the thorny question of original sin, defending, as the Book of Mormon does, the innate goodness of human nature despite the stain of sin, lauding the virtues of the very considerable “powers of reasoning, and capacity of improvement and of pleasure” despite the need for “grace [to] guide and assist us in rebuilding a second Temple.”22 Carnes points out that “with this the Royal Arch boldly ventured upon some of the most troublesome currents of Protestant theology: Adam’s fall, it suggested, was not so tragic, nor his moral burden too onerous, for, through reason, man could enjoy life and elevate himself to grace…. By suggesting that redemption could be accomplished through human reason, the Royal Arch contravened the most fundamental tenet of Christianity.”23 The Royal Arch Degree, in addition to praising reason, underscores the necessity of humility and greater deference to the Deity in one’s daily life, evidenced by a longing for more grace in the rapidly changing and impersonal world outside the lodge. This is the Book of Mormon’s position almost to the letter.
All the talk in the Book of Mormon concerning the “new birth” can also be seen as Masonic. Arthur E. Waite explains: “There is one form of Sacramentalism which characterizes the highest Orders of Initiation” and “is easy to miss.”24 All “true initiation” is designed to communicate “by the mediation of symbols, a new life, the pageant of an inward generation. It proclaims, in other words, to every Candidate, that ‘except a man be born again’ he shall not enter—that is, essentially and truly—into the Secret Kingdom of the Rites” (2:331–332). One would assume such a statement to come from a Protestant writer, not a Masonic one. The sacramental life of the Knight Templar, moreover, consists of faith, repentance, baptism, and the “gift” of the Holy Ghost, as well as a memorial Eucharist.25 The redemption of Christ becomes the “Grand Omnific (Last) Word” for all such Christian Masons.
We require neither Finney nor Campbell to account for the Book of Mormon’s unique take on the new birth. Its discussion of death, resurrection, and eternal life in the world to come could easily have nothing to do with Christianity and what Waite calls its “crude dramatic presentation of natural decease, followed by physical resurrection, as this is expected to take place at the last day and for the purposes of a general judgment.”26 Instead of being driven by some morbid Protestant fascination with what comes next, the whole of it can be seen as a discussion of the “mystical life” of the Royal Arch Master Mason and Templar Knight.
The constant companionship of the Holy Ghost in the Book of Mormon seems patterned after the Masonic belief in the regeneration of the Christian Mason by the Holy Spirit. “The Divine Spirit of a man is not one with his soul until after regeneration,” Waite explains, “which is the beginning of that intimate union which constitutes what is called mystically the marriage of the Hierophant…. When regeneration is fully attained, the Divine Spirit alone instructs the Hierophant” (2:334).
Smith may well have baptized ancient Israelites out of ignorance of the niceties of Christian theology, as Campbell thought. But the pre-Christian baptisms in the Book of Mormon could as easily be so-called Masonic Baptisms. From the point of view of orthodox Christian theology, baptism makes no sense, having no force until after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The sacramental curtain for Christianity lifts when Jesus ascends to heaven and not before. Masonry, however, pushes this as far back as the first temple and, in some American and antebellum New York Royal Arch sources, to Adam: insofar as baptism is a generic symbol of death, resurrection, and regeneration, the ritual becomes a celebration of the sacrifice of the Grand Master builder of Solomon’s temple, Hiram Abiff, consummated on the cross.
Interestingly, the ritual of Masonic Baptism goes back to the late eighteenth century, coming to America via the more radical French or mystical branch of esoteric Masonry. The Rite of Masonic Baptism, also known as the Reception of a Louveteau, takes issue with the customary practice in the Roman Catholic faith of infant baptism, baptizing “male children only, and not until they had attained a minimum age of twelve years” (2:38). However, one finds a clear statement in Oliver’s Book of the Lodge in favor of adult baptism as the first of many ritualized events in the life of the catechumen. “He enters into Covenant at the Font,” Oliver writes, “receives the O[rdinance] of B[aptism] and becomes entitled to the white robe … in imitation probably of the Levites.” Oliver goes on to explain that the aspirant is charged with the responsibility to “receive the white and immaculate garment, which thou mayest bring forth without spot before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest have eternal life.”27 Baptism in Masonry has a juvenile application, too, but only for the (male) children of Master Masons, for whom it is designed to secure protection and membership. What is known as the Ritual of Adoption for Children, another type of Masonic Baptism involves the laying of hands on the heads of initiates and the receipt of heavenly and earthy “gifts.”28
FIGURE 39 Symbolic Plate of Adoptive Masonry.
Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 5:438.
Although the Book of Mormon also rejects infant baptism, seeming to mimic the Masonic understanding of juvenile baptism followed by the laying on of hands as the order of confirmation and manner of gaining access to the spiritual gifts, there are important differences. First of all, both boys and girls are baptized and confirmed. The Book of Mormon is not specific about age, though Smith did inquire of the Deity regarding the exact moment of “accountability,” that being eight years of age, all things being equal.29 In fact, at baptism all things are altogether equal when it comes to male and female children.
At the age of twelve, this changes, of course, for only males are ordained. Although this is a sore point for some women in the church, it should be seen not as unequal treatment but more as a division of church labor. Boys attend an exclusively male meeting known simply as Priesthood Meeting, whereas girls will eventually join their mothers in the governance of a female (priesthood) auxiliary (not to be underestimated) known as the Relief Society. Suffice it to say that the early Mormon understanding of priesthood power can be seen as a factor of temple attendance rather than church governance, more or less in keeping with the division of powers in the Scottish Rite or what Pike calls “the three great disciplines of War, the Monarchy and the Priesthood” and “all that the CAMP, the PALACE, and the TEMPLE may symbolize.”30 If this is so, neither priesthood nor Relief Society is an actual priesthood but rather a type of bipartisan court. Smith’s famous Council of Fifty might be said to complete the Scottish triumvirate, as CAMP and thus a political/military adjunct, as Hansen theorizes.31
The Book of Mormon’s chief complaint concerns the practice of infant baptism and the orthodox Catholic and Baptist doctrine that little children who die without baptism must spend eternity in (Catholic) limbo or (Baptist) hell. In fact, this concern for children of both sexes extends to children of all races. One and all are said to be joint heirs with Christ by virtue of their years (or lack thereof).
The mystical journey of the Christian Knight seems in most ways indistinguishable from the born-again experience of the Evangelical Christian. But the essential difference—a matter of gender not theology—is the basis for a powerful rift. Male and female spirituality—Masonic and Evangelical—employ the same language to describe two fundamentally different mystical experiences. The real genius of the Book of Mormon may be how perfectly the two come together, the object of the text to establish common theological ground where men and women, boys and girls, and even believers and any heathen who might be so inclined can worship God and neighbor in spirit and in truth.