It is impossible for anyone to be completely objective, even when he tries. How objective can a book be that constantly uses disparaging and belittling language?
The book relies on scare words that are emotionally laden. It is filled with words calculated to alarm others and give offense to Latter-day Saints.
First the matter of priesthood administrations. Let me give a few examples. One day I was summoned to the emergency room at a local hospital, where I found the other members of my family being treated for minor injuries they had suffered in an automobile accident. The children were sobbing. There wasn’t much I could do, but when our eldest daughter, who was ten at the time, said, “Dad, please give us a blessing,” I was grateful for having been taught this principle in church.
This sacred practice that I learned as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) has brought me and my family great joy over the years and I have considered it similar to the Savior’s asking his disciples to “lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (Mark 16:18). It seemed akin to when our Lord Jesus Christ said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me,” and he blessed them (Matt. 19:14).
Reading The God Makers I was disturbed when it charged that such blessings performed by Latter-day Saints are satanic and that by giving them I was placing my “children in occult bondage” (249:27). The book further told me that the blessings that I as a father and church leader give are like “fortunetelling” (249:13). I had considered the giving of blessings to be like the giving of blessings by Jacob and other Old Testament leaders (Gen. 49:28).
My participation in temple ceremonies permits me to wear sacred underclothing. These are garments that remind me of the solemn covenants of loyalty and purity that I have made before God and my mate in the House of the Lord. Reading The God Makers, I am told that I am really wearing “magic underwear” with occult, paganistic markings that “allegedly give it protective powers” (146:11). Later I read that one of the authors boasts of wearing the “temple costume” in lectures before large audiences around the world (190:13). Then the book claims “every Mormon temple stands as an astonishing monument to a lie” (208:32).
A lifetime of joy, service and study in the Church has led me to love the prophet Joseph Smith, but in the book I am told, “Long before Hitler and Stalin used the technique so effectively, Joseph Smith learned . . . if you tell a big lie often enough, many people will eventually believe” (208:29). Knowing that the LDS prophet taught that the Lord delights in chastity (Jacob 2:28), I was angered when I read that he was “scandalously depraved” (165:38) and only wanted “wealth, power and sex” (170:22).
Many times in my life I have been inspired with new insights while reading and teaching from the three volumes of new scripture (The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price) Joseph Smith gave to the world. I was thus also annoyed to read that he was only an “amateur fortune-teller” (114:30) and that the “murderers of the Prophet did not accuse him wrongfully” (173:28).
When I return home from traveling abroad I am thankful for the freedom I enjoy in the United States and particularly in Utah. However, on the pages of The God Makers I am told I am restrained in a “Zion Curtain” (7:5) and the Church restricts my freedoms with conditions “similar to those behind the Iron Curtain” (7:22).
The book goes on to claim that I am “powerless” (231:21), “manipulated” (231:32), “dishonest” (237:25), “atheistic” (259:32) and cannot be called “a Christian” (246:30). I also am told that my leaders wield more economic power than “the State of Israel or the Pope in Rome” (230:1).
The authors say, “We have attempted to present carefully and factually the truth about what the Mormon Church really believes and practices” (244:2) and “our purpose is not to harm the Latter-day Saints” (11:35). However, Christianity Today (July 16, 1982, p. 32) says they have “dedicated their lives to winning Mormons away from the faith” (18:27).
Other examples of non objective and inflammatory language in the book:
- “A deliberate scheme that got out of hand” (101:6).
- “Mormons believe this amazing tale” (26:24).
- “The Church has . . . built a monument to its own astonishing hypocrisy” (208:9).
- Those who pray to know the truth about Mormonism will be given a “yes” answer, but from Satan (170:18).
- It is perverse to pray about the truthfulness of Mormonism (170:14).
- Temple Square is a tourist trap (85:24).
- “Many early Mormon leaders were liars, cheats, adulterers, and seducers . . . claiming ‘divine revelation’ to justify their crimes against humanity” (152:4).
- Joseph Smith was an “egomaniac” (221:10) and a “wanton adulterer”(169:last 2)
- “False prophecies, broken promises, lies, deception, egomania” are the truth about Joseph Smith (226:21).
- “Obsessive ambition of world domination [by the LDS Church] is . . .secretly plotted” (234:24).
- Wearing the LDS temple garment is “like wearing a rabbit’s foot'(189:14).
- “A shocking expose of what the Mormon Church really believes” (front cover).
No wonder, with loaded emotional language like this, some have said The God Makers is its own worst enemy.
