It is clearly evident to anyone who acquaints himself with th[e Mormon] creed that there are no conflicts between the teachings, theology, and dogma of Mormonism and the philosophy and tenets of universal Freemasonry…. It must be readily acknowledged that Mormonism and Freemasonry are so intimately and inextricably interwoven and interrelated that the two can never be dissociated.
—Brother Marvin B. Hogan, Mormonism and Freemasonry
AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, I defended my doctoral dissertation on the Book of Mormon and American culture only a month or two before John Brooke’s award-winning The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 arrived at bookstores and university libraries.1 In hindsight, it was a good thing it came out after my defense, or I might not have graduated until now. Jan Shipps (the external on my committee) was no doubt right to suggest that perhaps I should have availed myself of a manuscript copy of Refiner’s Fire before coming forward with a final draft that seemed to come straight out of it, apparently focusing on early Mormonism as a defense of pristine Masonry.2 In truth, it was a primitive Masonic argument that I brought to the committee in 1994. That said, Masonry was more of a sidebar, the issue of an alleged Mormon-Evangelical nexus—which I hotly dispute—the focus. Having decided against that commanding interpretation of early Mormonism as coming out of Evangelical America rather than coming out against it (no small feat), I would be in a position to turn my attention to Masonry and thus render a final verdict. A direct result of the expert guidance at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels under Roman Catholic philosopher of religion Hugo A. Meynell and American cultural historian Klaus J. Hansen, my postdoctoral foray into the fascinating world of American fraternalism has not forced me to contradict my earlier findings for the Book of Mormon as a dialectical synthesis and early Mormonism as an anti-Evangelical movement. In some important respects, looking at Mormonism through the Book of Mormon and with two eyes (Evangelicalism and Masonry), not one, a stereoscopic view is the hope.
The idea that the Mormon prophet borrowed heavily from Freemasonry is not new.3 But for the most part scholars have suggested that these were innovations introduced into Mormonism at the end of Smith’s career—innovations that led to a number of dramatic departures from an earlier Mormonism codified in the Book of Mormon (from which the religion derived its name). It was these later innovations, in fact, that sparked controversy within the movement, ending in the martyrdom of Joseph and his brother Hyrum. A major schism ensued—Latter-day Saints versus Reorganized Latter Day Saints—with the RLDS holding fast to what they regard as the original, authentic Mormonism as contained in the Book of Mormon and Smith’s earlier revelations, while the LDS under Brigham Young accepted the (Masonic) innovations as Smith’s more mature thinking on the nature and origin of the priesthood, which had been lost and restored to the earth through him. That similarities exist between the LDS temple and the Masonic temple does not bode well for American Masonry, the bastard child in the whole affair, so the Mormon argument goes.4
Mormonism rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of the “burned-over district,” to be sure.5 Evangelical preaching played a role in the emergence of the church that Smith organized in April 1830. Whether he intended to remove himself and his followers so completely from the Christian tradition in the beginning is the question, of course. By the time Young relocated the church beyond the territorial United States to the shores of the Great Salt Lake to begin construction of a new capital city and establish the Kingdom of God in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, Mormonism had moved decidedly outside the pale of American Christianity—for a time, that is, until the Great Republic extended its reach into the Mexican desert (from sea to shining sea). And if the Latter-day Saints had hopes of reenacting the flight for refuge of ancient Israel, their story and their fate resemble that of the armies of Pharaoh: a deep blue sea of liberal democracy crashed down all around them, to their utter shock and dismay.
Mormonism owes its existence, however, not simply to the overwhelmingly female world of the Second Great Awakening (in both a positive and a negative sense, I might add) but also to the equally pervasive yet exclusively male world of Freemasonry. The latter, it seems, was both a positive and negative influence on the young Smith, too. It is hardly a coincidence that the future prophet envisioned the need for a pristine order of holy priesthood to offset the debilitating effects of widespread apostasy—beginning work on a book of scripture to that effect—about the same time (1826–1827) that New York Masons allegedly kidnapped and then executed Captain William Morgan. Morgan had fallen out of favor and let slip a plan to publish a transcription of the Masonic ritual in toto (including the Grand Omnific Word). He paid dearly for this transgression. Not only was Morgan’s book a flagrant disregard of his Masonic oath of secrecy, but it threatened to “expose” Masonry to the general public for mere pennies on the dollar. Probably because Morgan seemed only interested in making money at Masonry’s expense, a select group of New York Masons took the extraordinary (and indeed rather un-Masonic) step of executing him for threatening to break the vow of silence.
The badly decomposed body of Timothy Monroe (his death a coincidence) washed up on the shores of Lake Ontario, but Morgan’s remains were never recovered. New York Masonry held to the story that Morgan had been paid to leave the region and never return. The Mormon prophet’s most controversial biographer, Fawn M. Brodie, thought that “Joseph Smith combined the first syllables of Morgan and Monroe to coin the name Mormon.”6 Brodie, however, assumed that Smith added fuel to the fire. Had Evangelicals bothered to read the Book of Mormon, they could not have been more pleased by its attacks against secret societies as the handiwork of the devil. The Mormon prophet flip-flopped, then, when he became a Master Mason in March 1842, in Nauvoo, Illinois, where a “new” social and religious doctrine would come to fruition. Whether it was purely pragmatic, intended to keep the wolf of mobocracy at bay, a clever attempt to curry political support to make his dreams of empire a reality, or all of these surely begs the question.7 Gone was the Evangelicalism of his youth.
Deciding whether early Mormonism abandoned its original Protestant vision depends entirely on how one interprets the Book of Mormon, and should it prove amenable to a pro-Masonic interpretation, then this is likely to change nearly everything we have come to assume about the Mormon prophet and his milieu.
Did the Mormon prophet’s leadership style not take a turn for the worse by the 1840s, proving the republican axiom that power tends to corrupt, absolute power, absolutely? Admittedly, Nauvoo took on the appearance of an Islamic theocracy, a veritable nation-state with its own private army (though it had a charter from the Illinois State Legislature). There was a little too much military pomp and saber rattling for everyone’s good, suggesting that Smith came to view himself as more of a Napoleon Bonaparte than a George Washington. When a local anti-Mormon newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, attempted to publish an exposé on his latest departure from the Book of Mormon and Christian faith—polygamous union—Smith had the press scattered by decree of the Nauvoo City Council. It was not only the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. He was crowned (for God’s sake!) by a Council of Fifty (a political subset of the faith) as “King of the Kingdom of God and His Laws.” Was this not a violation of the Constitution and the democratic freedoms for which Americans had fought?
In fact, Smith’s alleged un-American activities in Nauvoo (which cost him his life) can perhaps be seen as extreme instances of the exercise of Masonic political power, more or less in keeping with the original republican or patriarchal vision of the founding fathers. That the governor of New York, De Witt Clinton, was coronated in a secret (Masonic) ceremony, too; that Americans at the time were simply mad for medievalism; that it was not uncommon for most “democratic” elections to be decided behind lodge doors, as I will show, and in plenty of time to guarantee a particular outcome; that all of it was utterly democratic for all but the Evangelical minority suggests that in some important respects republicanism would not become democratic until the Civil War decided the matter in favor of a Northern, Evangelical middle-class vision for the future. In truth, America had more self-anointed “kings” at the state and federal level by the 1820s than one would think. This would all change rather dramatically following the Morgan affair as Masonry became for a time a political liability rather than a given. And so whether the Mormon prophet should be seen as a threat to the American way depends entirely on whether the American way was a threat to itself—in short, on whether one ought to take with a grain of salt the history of the Great Republic as imparted by a decidedly victorious Protestantism.
That the story of America seems to credit only Evangelicalism and thus the Great Awakenings for the country’s coming of age is no less problematic or one-sided.8 Carol Berkin, Christopher Miller, Robert Cherny, and James Gormy, in their massive Making America, accuse Masons of influence peddling and thus of being rather un-American.9 Other textbook histories tend to be selective as well.10 Gordon S. Wood admits that the Republican and Masonic traditions embodied the Revolutionary ideals of sociability and cosmopolitanism, that “for thousands of Americans [Masonry] was a major means by which they participated directly in the Enlightenment.” He even points out that Masons set themselves apart from Evangelicals because their latent sectarianism seemed to run counter to a host of democratic ideals. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of American Masonry for the American Revolution,” Wood writes but does not elucidate further.11 J. M. Roberts, in his book The Mythology of the Secret Societies, suggests that “one reason why historians have tended to neglect secret societies is, paradoxically, the very strength of the mythology which grew up around them.”12
The considerable spadework of a group of neofeminist social and cultural historians has begun the important job of correcting this oversight, advancing the discussion of Freemasonry and other secret societies in important ways. Mark C. Carnes, Steven C. Bullock, Scott Abbott, Douglas Smith, Mary Ann Clawson, Lynn Dumenil, and Dorothy Ann Lipson and Paul Goodman are among its pioneers.13 Ironically, Mormonism is barely mentioned. In Carnes’s Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, for example, Smith is credited with perceiving “better than anyone else … that fraternal initiation could serve as a substitute for religious conversion.”14 And yet he does not include Mormonism in his list of American fraternities around the turn of the century, despite a membership around 250,000 and growing (pp. 6–7). Clawson’s Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism ignores Mormonism completely; so, too, do Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order and Dumenil’s Freemasonry and American Culture.15 Only Michael Homer, Harold Bloom, and John Brooke address Mormonism as a full-fledged member of the fraternal/hermetic tradition in any detail and as a contender in the battle for male (and female) allegiance.16 As far as women and Masonry went, Smith’s Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia suggests that continental Masonry gravitated toward the Scottish Rite because, among other things, it included women—albeit aristocratic wives and daughters of Master Masons—with the result that European lodges took on a quasi-feminist appearance.17
Evangelicalism, Mormonism, and Masonry each had a stake in the so-called gender revolution, with early Mormonism in effect occupying the middle ground between (Evangelical) feminism and (Masonic) patriarchy. From the point of view of the burgeoning Evangelical feminism that was gaining momentum as a consequence of the Second Great Awakening, Mormonism was likely to appear to be intractable in its defense of patriarchal values. However, from the vantage point of the Masonic standing order, it seemed perhaps much too amenable to the feminist agenda.18 Mormonism gives fathers veto power at home and in church, yet it also enjoins women to attend the lodge (or temple) as equal and active participants in all the secret rituals of manhood. The plan was far more daring than merely accommodating women—giving wives of Mormon males a lodge and ritual of their own tailored to the specific needs of the weaker sex—it conferred a degree of (ritual) equality that the Masonic mainstream in America at least has yet to make any serious attempts to implement to this day.19
Ironically, feminist critics of the LDS temple (insiders in particular) have not been as careful to note that, while Mormonism is clearly paternalistic (until recently women were required to make an oath to obey their husbands, for example), men and women play an equal role in the ceremony. In fact, the role played by Mormon feminists in the decision to remove blood oaths from the LDS temple ritual, in the hopes that more women (like them) might attend, only confirms the orthodox Masonic argument for the exclusion of women. As one Masonic source diplomatically explains:
Woman is not permitted to participate in our rites and ceremonies, not because we deem her unworthy or unfaithful, or incapable, as has been foolishly supposed, of keeping a secret, but because on our entrance into the Order, we found certain regulations which prescribed that only men capable of enduring the labor, or of fulfilling the duties of Operative Masons, could be admitted. These regulations we have solemnly promised never to alter; nor could they have changed, without an entire disorganization of the whole system of Speculative Freemasonry.
(2:1113)
That the original ceremony made no attempts to shield its female candidates from the gore of manhood suggests that early Mormonism held women in much higher esteem (in the ritual sense, that is) than some in the feminist quarter do now. In some respects, the current feminization of Mormonism could be seen as a giant leap backward.
The Book of Mormon may have been intended for a younger generation of Masons or Masonic hopefuls who longed for greater gender equality at the Lodge in the face of increasing pressure from the Evangelical quarter to give women greater power over the home and access to the public sphere. The male world of Masonry offered no such degree of playful and ritualized male-female interaction and celebration. And so Smith chose to break with Masonic orthodoxy and attempt to find a way to add women to the male (ritual) roster.20 Early Mormonism had a strong appeal to women. In fact, slightly more women than men joined—perhaps in part because, in an important sense, this equal access to the hitherto secret world of manhood (the male private sphere) was empowering. If one cares to investigate it more deeply, the chasm separating patriarchy and feminism some two centuries ago may not have been as deep or wide as many like to believe.
Clearly, the stereotype of the nineteenth-century Mormon woman as slave to husband and church is more fiction than fact. Fanny Stenhouse’s scathing account of life under polygamy, Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism surely belies her thesis that Mormon women (of her social standing at least) only deferred to their husbands on matters of family and church business.21 That Fanny dragged husband and children out of Mormonism and into an Evangelical assembly of her choosing speaks volumes. Indeed, Fanny’s profound unhappiness with Mormonism may have had less to do with her aversion to polygamy and more to do with her husband and his church’s desire that she become an equal participant in hitherto secret male rituals that she could not abide.22 The Endowment, to which Fanny so objected—an adoptive variation based loosely on the Master Mason initiation ritual, among other things—is intended to facilitate greater gender equality, both at the lodge or temple and at home. Here is the problem, for while Mormonism gave men veto power, should the (domestic) occasion call for it, ideally the Mormon home—polygamous and postpolygamous—was to be ruled in the spirit of true bipartisanship; hence revelation after revelation was addressed specifically to men warning them against the evils of “unrighteous dominion.”
Instigating a reform movement within Masonry in the interest of greater equality between the sexes was not Smith’s only interest, for the Book of Mormon suggests that he also had plans for greater racial harmony—a system of interracial concubinage on a large scale, albeit carefully scripted and monitored by the Deity. When the Book of Mormon discusses polygamy as a way “to raise up seed,” the idea of “raising up seed” may have a qualitative connotation. As originally conceived, it surely asked a lot of white (and strictly monogamous) women, but of their understanding, not their participation. As a necessary evil in the divine scheme of things racial, it asked a lot of white men, too: to marry promiscuously outside their race in order that women of color might conceive a whiter and whiter Indian/African bloodline. The racism of it notwithstanding, at a time when most people believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and that chattel slavery was the most African men and women could ever hope for, the early Mormon hope (however flawed and racist) to return red and black to their original color (white) was daring. Moreover, it suggests that the Book of Mormon’s so-called feminist agenda did not discriminate on the basis of race. Seen another way, however, it discriminated against men of color as a matter of course.
If this sounds too unbelievable to be true—or Masonic—one may consider the case of social anthropologist of note and author of League of the Iroquois (1851) Lewis Henry Morgan, who argued along similar lines. He started off as a Mason, too, a defender of Indian polygamy, although with the preservation of native peoples in mind.23 His defense of polygamy is noteworthy all the same, for it holds that descent was through the female, giving impetus to collective ownership of property and, most important, making every man the father of every child. The early Mormon practice of polygamy as an exclusively white affair was (the Book of Mormon notwithstanding) a most sincere form of flattery and undertaken with the same end in mind: to create a sense of community in which men had more than one wife and children more than one mother, ironically. Had Mormonism followed more closely the plan as outlined in the Book of Mormon, instead of representing mere Anglo-Saxon tribalism and a desperate flight from pluralism and quest for refuge, it might have been guilty of something utterly other: the dream of (Masonic) empire.
As important as polygamy might have been, it was not an end in itself but a means to an end: the establishment of a Masonic/Templar Kingdom of God on earth in order to preserve the original republican and patriarchal system of government that the country had fought to establish against an encroaching Protestantism and virulent Evangelical feminism. Evangelicalism’s male ministers and female throng were considered a loose coalition of Puritans and theocrats hell-bent on destroying liberty, their preaching and incessant theological squabbling born of intolerance and motivated by a desire for absolute religious and political power. The Morgan affair and the rise of the Antimasonic Party with its unscrupulous attacks against men of Masonic sensibility (whether innocent or guilty) seemed not to bode well for the future of a Republic that, after all, Masons had had a hand in making. In hindsight, the Morgan affair ruined any chances of a Masonic Republic of the United States, ushering in the millennial reign of the Evangelical Empire and a certain tyranny of the (female moral) majority. In the midst of this contest of opinions—with gender at the center of the debate but by no means the only factor—Mormonism shot back, erring on the side of greater equality for women in hopes of restoring order along patriarchal lines: love at home and peace (once again?) throughout the land, perhaps even averting a bloody Civil War over slavery and ending the cruel scheme of Indian removal.
How Smith hoped to pull this off, effect change without simply giving himself over to Evangelical feminism, was impressive indeed and might be described as an ingenious and selective use of Masonic folklore. Smith reworked in narrative form (and essentially by rote) the best-known Masonic publication of the day, Thomas Smith Webb’s The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Freemasonry.24 The volume was certainly available to Smith, but the remarkable fact is that he undoubtedly never read it. That the Book of Mormon contains much that seems to have come straight out of Webb’s Monitor is simply a remarkable coincidence—not so remarkable, mind you, that a supernatural explanation is called for.25 More or less in keeping with my argument positioning the Book of Mormon as a type of nineteenth-century populist midrash (as opposed to mere rubbish as some would like to believe), Webb’s Monitor rather than the Bible makes slightly more sense as Smith’s canonical locus and interpretive jumping-off point for a whole array of creative departures. However, the esoterica of the Scottish Rite seems to be there, too, used sparingly and to the same end: the creation of a full-blown defense of androgynous Christian Masonry along hermetic lines.
“Laboring under the disadvantage of having access to few or no printed standards of authority,” the writers of the History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders explain, “it is amazing that [American Masons] managed to retain and perpetuate so much of the ‘true principles of Ancient Craft Masonry.’”26 In some important respects, the Mormon prophet was driven by a strong desire to defend Masonry in America against attack. Under very trying circumstances, he may not have been entirely faithful to the tradition as some understood it; at the same time, his departures, whether planned or not, had a positive purpose. The writers of the Concordant Orders concede that “from a ritualistic point of view a new Masonry may be said to have been created” (pp. 701–702). In Webb’s Monitor, for example, is the so-called American Rite—thirteen degrees in all—the Scottish Rite included at first and then removed, the Knights Templar earning no better than honorable mention, three degrees in total, ceremonial, and constituting no part of Masonry. That the Book of Mormon can be seen as a fine specimen of antebellum Masonic literary mimesis with a very different agenda, a corrective perhaps to the alleged revisionist attempts of Masons like Webb, who were intent on doing away with the “mysteries” (which in Masonic parlance are the esoteric degrees of the Scottish Rite with its thirty-three degrees and the ninety degrees of the Egyptian Rite).27 However, “the misalliance of a degree distinctively Jewish in its teachings,” as one late-nineteenth-century monitor explains, “with others founded upon the Christian religion, and teaching distinctively Christian doctrines … from a ritualistic point of view, was unfortunate, and is to be regretted, more especially as it … renders special preparations necessary to enable our English and Canadian Fratres eligible to visit our bodies.”28 Elsewhere, the tone is less conciliatory. “It must be apparent to the most casual observer,” it says, “that the peculiar dogmas of Christianity could never have had any connection with the universal creed of modern Freemasonry; therefore a Masonic Christian Order of Knights Templars is an anomaly” (p. 780). Here was the problem, in short, and it would take a revelation from God to turn the tide of Masonic opinion.
And so perhaps a pithy summary of my thesis will now prove comprehensible: The Book of Mormon can be seen as a well-crafted defense of Christian Masonry. The degrees of the Royal Arch, its strictly honorary set of chivalrous degrees, the Knights Templar, looking ahead to the no less chivalrous but mystical (or occult) degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite can be used to triangulate to a position for the Book of Mormon and the rationale of the Mormon faith. Smith hoped to outflank the Evangelical opposition by making the secret ritual world of manhood available to women, first in book form and subsequently in an androgynous Masonic raising ceremony indoors. What the Mormon prophet hoped to accomplish was the restoration of a beleaguered Masonic political order (looking backward and forward) that promised to end sectarian rivalry, reestablish social harmony, guarantee economic equality, and avoid racial discord through a carefully monitored system of polygamous mixed marriages.