Will the Real Mormons Stand up and Sound the Alarm?

By Vern Porter

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is an influential church in the United States and beyond. Yet, it remains a mysterious entity to those who are not members. Now we find the church contains mysteries unknown to even those who call it their spiritual home.

In Will the Real Mormons Stand Up and Sound the Alarm? author Vern Porter shares his discovery of the potentially seamier side of the church. After nearly twenty years in the church, Porter was doing part-time missionary work when he ran across members obsessed with polygamy and racism. When he confronted them, the treatment he received led him to reexamine anti-Mormon accusations he had experienced from Baptists. For several years, he studied the Scriptures and history of the church, including the Journal of Discourses, a twenty-six-volume record of conference talks from the early 1850s to the mid-1880s. As he researched the church, it became obvious to him that its scholars and leaders had covered up details of Mormon doctrine and history from the churchs early days in Utah. Although he left the church for twenty-five years, he returned after experiencing some hard-to-forget dreams. Though most of his friends received him with open arms, some tried to drive him away.

In Will the Real Mormons Stand Up and Sound the Alarm? Porter pulls back the curtain and shares some of his real concerns about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, especially concerning more radical members and beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Dec 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480812918

Vern Porter

Vern Porter served a two-year, full-time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons—and was married in the temple. He has been a Sunday school teacher, scout leader, executive secretary, and one of the seven presidents of Seventy in a stake quorum of Seventy. He resides in Elk Grove, California.

Book preview

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Contents

Disclaimer and Warning

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1   Apostasy

Chapter 2   The Restoration

Chapter 3   Mormon Miracles

Chapter 4   Mormon Backsliding

Chapter 5   Nauvoo

Chapter 6   The Mormon Church Today

Chapter 7   My Personal Story

Chapter 8   My Mission

Chapter 9   Getting On With My Life

Chapter 10 To Hell and Back

Chapter 11 The Effort to Turn the Church into a Cult

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Disclaimer and Warning

Because of my lack of mental and physical stamina, I must apologize for the quality of the editing. My fight with cancer has been expensive so I have decided to do the editing myself rather than further impose on my friends.

I am no longer an apostate as I have been re-baptized and confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints after a 25 year absence from that church. My blessings have been restored so I am once again an Elder, I have a temple recommend, and I am active in my local ward.

My beliefs are my own and I am not a member of a secret group, nor do I wish to establish a following. I sustain Thomas S. Monson as the prophet and president of the Church. I believe that the general authorities need our prayers and deserve our good will even when we disagree with them.

I am writing this book as an objection to the failure of local members to respect my right to disagree with them on matters of speculation and the falsification of our history. There is no place in the church for a volunteer corps of self appointed Danites who believe that they have a right to persecute and ridicule those with whom they disagree. Members are adding speculation which has not be canonized to our list of official doctrine for the purpose of throwing their weight around and intimidating those who disagree with them.

This book contains criticisms of some of our past general authorities because I blame some of them for the bad behavior of local members and leaders. A misunderstanding of the scriptures has allowed some members and leaders to imagine that when they have an idea without their minds being darkened, they can consider the idea revelation. The result is sometimes solid doctrine being replaced by fables. I’m suggesting that when our youth leave home and start thinking for themselves some of them learn to see through these fables and their testimonies are damaged.

Many names are being left out as this book may cause even my best friends to be embarrassed about knowing me in the current authoritarian environment of the Church. The names of those who have verbally abused me were left out in order to avoid having to listen to their denials.

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List of Abbreviations

List of abbreviations for the most frequently quoted sources

BM = The Book of Mormon

CHC = A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

D&C = THE DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS of the LDS Church

HC = History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

LDS Church = The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Mormons = Members of the LDS Church

The King James version of the Bible is used

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Introduction

This book contains both the bitter and the sweet things I have to say about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons. Serving a mission from March of 1961-March of 1963 was a life changing experience. However, several times a year I am reminded of the year I spent working with the Church’s Boy Scout program in Chico, California about forty five years ago. The scout I remember best still calls me occasionally. He is married man and the father of several children most of whom have served on missions or will within a few years. He still calls me several times a year to tell me what a good influence I was in his life. When I was re-baptized several years ago he was there to welcome me back into the Church.

A lot has happened to me since I was born in Minnesota during the early 1940s. It was a part of the heartland marked by small farms, small towns, and small businesses. People there understood that their feelings of self-worth were bolstered by their success at providing for themselves and others. We didn’t need a book to tell us that no man is an island for we were in the land of community barn raising and country doctors who waited until the harvest to collect payment for services rendered and the penniless widow who would pay with what she could spare from her garden or flock. Because government was so small and so far away people had incentives for sticking together and being concerned about each other.

I was born in a log farmhouse, in an area where Mormons were unknown and you had to travel far to find someone who wasn’t descended from recent immigrants who had been born in northern Europe. By the time I was six years old we had left Minnesota for California without any memory on my part of any association with religion. When we were old enough to go to church without them our parents sent us (me and my two sisters) to the nearest church which was a Southern Baptist Church where I attended until I was eighteen. I became a Mormon (a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) when I was just out of high school. It changed my life and brought me renewed confidence in the goodness of God.

The Mormon doctrine about the barring of African blacks from the priesthood was somewhat of a mystery and it didn’t dawn on me at first how limiting it was to be unable to be ordained, but the fact that Joseph Smith had ordained a black man was some consolation. Also, it never dawned on me that shortly after the church was organized unworthy people infiltrated even it’s leadership organizations and not all of them left the Church after sabotaging the effort to settle in Missouri. The desire to change the Church to make it more to their liking strengthened them to endure even the horrible ordeal of crossing the plains to Utah sometimes in an untimely fashion and poorly equipped. Many lives were lost by some of the migrating groups. Their quest for personal power and influence in the affairs of the Church drove them to remain with the faithful.

Less than two years after joining the Church I was called to serve on a two year full time mission. The first two weeks were spent in the mission home in Salt Lake City. While there a black member of the Church bore his testimony to us. That helped to calm my concerns about discrimination in the Church. After serving my mission I attended Diablo Valley College near my home in California for several years where I became acquainted with an instructor who was doing a study on the attitudes of Mormons towards blacks for his Doctoral Thesis. It pleased me to find out his study showed that when Mormons were compared to non-Mormons of similar social/economic backgrounds the results were similar. This gave me some satisfaction for a few years for I was concerned that the practice of refusing to ordain blacks might have resulted in more bigotry in the Church than in the general population of the nation.

About fifteen years later I became a member of a stake quorum of Seventy which meant I was a permanent, part-time missionary working for a living at a regular job. Soon I noticed an effort by some to make the Church a haven for racists. The Mormons who were racists would tell their racist friends, You ought to join the Church, we know how to keep the blacks in their place. I was teaching the Investigator Class at that time so I told them, I believe we are much too proud of the fact that blacks can’t hold the priesthood. Their black skin is not the curse of Cain and they aren’t poison to the temple for they can be baptized for the dead there.

As a result of the abuse I received over those remarks I reexamined the old accusations against the Church by studying our histories, scriptures, and the record of conference talks from the early days in Utah instead of only our commentaries by Church leaders and scholars. Those early conference sermons are in a 26 volume set called the Journal of Discourses. I also had many long discussions with a knowledgeable member of the Church Institute Department in order to get some help in understanding inconsistencies in the teachings of the Church. I threw everything at him I could find in the scriptures, the Journal of Discourses and the Church histories and commentaries. He seemed to be familiar with all of them, but he didn’t even try to explain them, he merely said I know the Church is true.

It is my contention that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has on it’s membership roles and among the leaders some people with personal agendas to advance doctrine not in keeping with the gospel of Jesus Christ as described in our scriptures. I have no plan or desire to weed them out as the Lord will see to it in his own due time. Because the Lord made it clear that He wants the wheat and tares to grow up together in the last days I don’t believe that He will ask his leaders here on earth to entirely weed out heretics. But, I do wish to call attention to some of the false doctrine and cover ups which remain an embarrassment and a danger because they give encouragement to polygamists, closet racists, and pious snobs in the church who occasionally attempt to chase those who don’t agree with them, out of the Church. Every group, whether political, religious, or fraternal has fanatics in it who see enemies behind every disagreement and the LDS Church is no exception. It may be that we are especially vulnerable to this problem because we believe the canon of scripture is not full. We believe in modern day revelation.

The Latter-Day Saints are carrying such a burden of guilt over the death of Joseph Smith and their failure to settle Missouri that they will not stand for anyone accusing their leaders today as Joseph had been accused. Our leaders have learned to be tolerant of each other and are slow to admit that a head of the Church has given them false doctrine. So, unless there are exceptional circumstances, a leader’s heresies will be tolerated. Above all else we must avoid a repetition of our past disunity.

So at least some of our scholars know that we have been given a falsified and incomplete history of the Church in our commentaries and lesson manuals and they are part of a conspiracy to hide the truth from us. Perhaps it is because they don’t know how to explain it or are afraid to try. I suspect they are afraid to try because the Saints have been assured by some of our leaders that God would not let our prophet lead us astray. The Book of Mormon explains why that is false doctrine (Jacob 4:14). The Journal of Discourses contains the record of the false doctrine and good doctrine taught by Brigham Young and others.

At this point it is important to note that not only did the early Saints face a lot of mob violence, but the Governor of Missouri went so far as to swear out an extermination order against the Latter-Day Saints in the late 1830s. Perhaps the horrible hardships they endured were sufficient to cause them to be in denial about their history. On the other hand the court case brought against them by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints undoubtedly gave added incentive to be in denial.

Local leadership in the church is handled by unpaid clergy with temporary assignments, but they have a handbook to guide them in dealing with problems. The handbook and the guidance from the spirit which comes to humble servants of the Lord usually keeps things on an even keel when problems arise. However, when people feel threatened and leaders are mistaken about who their true friends are the handbook and the spirit can sometimes be tossed aside in favor of good old boy networks, and self-appointed Danites (Danites will be explained later in the book). Local leadership did not do right by me in more than one stake of Zion.

In my anger and frustration over being misled about our history by our own leaders I left the Church for about 25 years. Because of the beautiful doctrine of Jesus Christ which is contained in the Book of Mormon and the teachings of Joseph Smith I wasn’t ready to completely disassociate myself from the Mormon movement so I joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I soon noticed that the Reorganized Church was displaying attitudes towards the Book of Mormon which didn’t impress me so I left them after a couple of years.

I am back now and most of my LDS friends have received me with open arms. Some have not. An essay on Race and the Priesthood issued on December 6, 2013 clearly refutes historic arguments which justified racism and the withholding of the priesthood, but without acknowledging Brigham Young’s insistence that the policy would not change during mortality. An abbreviated version of Brigham’s beliefs was found in a speech he gave before the territorial legislature. The abbreviated version only mentioned that blacks would someday receive the priesthood, thus they could report that as they sought the revelation they were aware of the promises made by the prophets and presidents of the Church who have preceded us. This subtle subterfuge has been seen by some as a signal to get tough with anyone who speaks the truth on the matter, and I have learned this the hard way.

After coming back to the LDS Church many years later, I attended a meeting where a black member of the Church was the speaker. Like many members of the church I didn’t realize that there were any doubts in the minds of our leaders about withholding the priesthood from African Blacks for the whole of their mortal lives until I heard that brother speak. The quotation he gave us from President David O. McKay in 1954 was a complete surprise to me. By David O. McKay - 1954; There is not now, and there never has been a doctrine in this church that the Negroes are under a divine curse, there is no doctrine in the church of any kind pertaining to the Negro. We believe we have a scriptural precedent for withholding the priesthood from the Negro. It is a practice, not a doctrine and the practice someday will be changed, and that is all there is to it. Taken from David O. McKay & the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Greg Prince & William Robert Wright, pp79-80. David O. McKay apparently believed that the fact of speculation becoming so popular that many thought it to be revealed truth did not make it so.

From the afore mentioned black member I learned that the leaders of the Church were not all in agreement on the idea that the blacks would never obtain the priesthood during their mortal lives and I became aware that I’d forgotten a basic tenet of the Gospel which proclaims the equality of believers. The equality of believers is clearly taught in the New Testament, the Book of Mormon and our book of Doctrine and Covenants. In my book I will tell you how racist doctrine gained the upper hand among the Latter-Day Saints and show you some of the other false doctrine promoted in the Church, some of it no longer acknowledged.

The saints had brought many problems upon themselves and they were scourged from city to city for their failures. When they sang All is well, all is well, it was sang with a penitent spirit knowing that when they had been chastened the Lord would own them and bless them. They knew that the Lord chastises whom He loves. Today when we sing that song I sense something different is going on, perhaps not in every case, but there is a pronounced tendency towards the vanity which the Book of Mormon warns against. In 2nd Nephi it is referred to as being at ease in Zion and thinking, All is well in Zion, yea, Zion prospereth. The Book of Mormon itself warns us against our failure to believe that part of the Nephite record which we have been given first as seen in 3Nephi 26:9-11;

9) "And when they shall have received this, which is expedient that they should have first, to try their faith, and if it shall so be that they shall believe these things then shall the greater things be made manifest unto them.

10) And if it so be that they will not believe these things, then shall the greater things be withheld from them, unto their condemnation.

11) Behold, I was about to write them, all which were engraven (sp) upon the plates of Nephi, but the Lord forbade it, saying: I will try the faith of my people."

Notice that they were to be tested to see if they believed the Book of Mormon. Mormons tend to describe their being scourged from city to city as being tested and tried. The test was to see if they believed the Book of Mormon and being scourged from city to city was the punishment they were to receive for their disbelief and failure to be obedient. However, accepting punishment can also serve as a test. In September of 1832 the saints were told that the whole church was under condemnation, D&C 84:56-57;

56) "And this condemnation resteth upon the children of Zion, even all.

57) And they shall remain under this condemnation until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon ..."

The Lord did not sustain them and fight their battles as they tried to settle in Ohio, Missouri, and Nauvoo because they were not faithful. June of 1834 in D&C 105:3&7, the Lord chastised the people, but not the leaders of the church.

2) "But behold, they have not learned to be obedient to the things which I required at their hands, but are full of all manner of evil and do not impart of their substance, as becometh saints, to the poor and afflicted among them;

3) And my people must needs be chastened until they learn