Part I: Reading The Book of Mormon
I’ve been listening to this podcast habitually starting with Episode 1 since I discovered it. It is called Naked Mormonism, and if you ever wanted to know about what would appear to be the failure of religion, this is a great place to start.
As Orthodox Christians, we have two options. The first is that there is no salvation outside the Orthodox Church; this is the traditional view until the rise of the heresy of Ecumenism. The second option which has become en vogue today is that all people proclaiming to be Christians are in fact somehow Christians (how people who believe different things can have the same label is beyond me, but you make more money off conferences and academic articles if you play the Ecumenism game).
This leaves Orthodox Ecumenists (a real oxymoron) painted in a corner because the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the Community of Christ are “Member Communions” of the National Council of Churches.
My point being that if Mormons and Orthodox Christians are both equally “Christian” then this podcast reveals the significant failure of Christianity. Littered throughout the episodes are the stories of the casualties of Ecumenical Christianity: Mormonism, Roman Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, Non-Denominationalism, Full-Gospel Non-Denominationalism, World Assemblies of God Fellowship (Assemblies of God), Messianic Judaism (Judaism too), and American Protestant Revivalism, Protestant Restorationism, and Classical Protestantism. People who were never taught—or at best taught poorly—share their stories; as someone educated in these matters, the ignorance and fallacious thought-processes are striking, and their personal stories heartbreaking. But this is what religious leaders are dealing with, or worse yet, are complicit in compounding.
My own interest in Mormonism goes way back to when I was an adolescent occultist. On TV the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would air these commercials on Canadian TV for free Book of Mormons and Mormon KJV Bibles. So, of course, I and my friend Critter would order ridiculous amounts of them using various names, but always the same address. This must’ve been around Grade 7, Junior High, whatever age that makes me I’m not sure.
Around this time I also saw the movie The God Makers on VHS, and lucky for me I had a copy of The Satanic Bible, so when the film brings out The Satanic Bible I was able to check “The Book of Lucifer” just to make sure they were lying, which of course I already knew—as I basically knew that whole Bible by heart already at that age. Maybe that’s why Mormonism stuck with me so much, perhaps I wondered why so-called Protestant groups would lie about what The Satanic Bible said in order to show Mormonism was false?
I kept up my studies of Mormonism throughout the years, and it was the summer prior to my first year of seminary, August of 2015?, when I first learned that the LDS had released photos of Smith’s seer stone that got me researching more and I concluded that Mormonism is not a human fabrication, but one of the best cases of the demonic, that it is a literally Satanic religion. I came to this conclusion as a demonologist, and it is from this perspective that the LDS movement is of great interest to me.
So my summer reading, thanks to this podcast, is to read the Book of Mormon, as I have never read the entire thing. So I plan on reading it cover-to-cover. At first I was going to read the Penguin edition, which is “based on the last edition supervised by Joseph Smith before his violent and untimely death at the age of thirty-eight,” but have since decided upon reading the Yale Book of Mormon, edited by the Mormon at the head of the Critical Text Project, Royal Skousen. Feel free to join me, and we can bounce ideas around. The Book of Mormon alone should make this a rather interesting Summer. So buy some excellent craft beer, roll out a blanket or open up an umbrella over a deck, and cheers to an honest reading of a book held to be North-American-made-Scripture by very many people all over the planet.
Part II: Timeline
(Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy etc. here)
Part III: Resources
National Council of Churches – Member Communions
The Book of Mormon Critical Text Project
6 August 2015 – Book of Mormon Printer’s Manuscript, Photos of Seer Stone Featured in New Book
8 September 2015 – How BYU Destroyed Ancient Book of Mormon Studies
20 April 2016 – Are Mormons Developing Toward Greater Orthodoxy? – Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
May 2016 – MORMONS APPROACHING ORTHODOXY – Richard J. Mouw
June 2016 – Mormons at the Forefront – Terryl Givens
13 May 2017 – Utah’s Largest Newspaper Interviews Mormon to Orthodox Christian Convert – Cameron Davis
13 May 2017 – Utah Mormons, Protestants finding new spiritual home in ancient Orthodox church: Utah Mormons and Protestants are rediscovering a reverence for God by converting to Orthodoxy. – Bob Mims
3 January 2018 – Faith and Doubt: Mormonism and Orthodox Christianity – Arthur Hatton
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