Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormon America: The Power and the Promise

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To learn more about responses to: Richard and Joan Ostling

Wiki links	Mormon America: The Power and the Promise — (Index of claims)
Online	Louis Midgley, "Faulty Topography (Review of Mormon America: The Power and the Promise / And the Saints Go Marching On)," FARMS Review 14/1 (2002). [139–192] link Raymond Takashi Swenson, "Faith without Caricature? (Review of Mormon America: The Power and the Promise)," FARMS Review 13/2 (2001). [65–77] link
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Response to Mormon America: The Power and the Promise

A FAIR Analysis of: 'Mormon America: The Power and the Promise', a work by author: Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling

Response to Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, a work by Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling

Jump to details:

• Response to claims made in Mormon America: "Introduction: A New World Faith"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 1: Sealed with Blood"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 2: Beginnings: A Very American Gospel"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 3: The American Exodus"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 4: Polygamy Then and Now"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 5: Redefining the Kingdom of God"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 6: Almost Mainstream"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 7: Mormons, Inc."
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 8: Some Latter-day Stars"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 9: The Power Pyramid"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 10: Families Forever"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 11: A Peculiar People"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 12: Rituals Sacred and Secret"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 13: Two by Two"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 14: Saintly Indoctrination"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 15: Faithful History"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 16: The Gold Bible"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 17: Discovering 'Plain and Precious Things'"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 18: 'How God Came to Be God'"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 19: Are Mormons Christians? Are Non-Mormons Christians?"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 20: Rivals and Antagonists"
• Response to claims made in Mormon American "Chapter 21: Dissenters and Exiles"
• Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 22: Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century"
• Quote mining, misrepresentation and manipulation in Mormon America: The Power and the Promise

Response to claims made in Mormon America: "Introduction: A New World Faith"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: xv - The authors mention a temple of secret rituals with precincts forbidden to tourists and TV cameras
• Response to claim: xviii - It is claimed that LDS believe that the Garden of Eden was literally located around Independence, Missouri
• Response to claim: xix - The authors claim that God told Joseph to "revise significant portions of the Bible that Smith taught had been corrupted by Jews and Christians"
• Response to claim: xix - The book claims that there is no forum for public debate and that there is no church legislature to set policy
• Response to claim: xxv - Mormons abstain from alcohol and tobacco, as many other groups do, but also from caffeinated beverages

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 1: Sealed with Blood"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 3 - Joseph Smith organized the Council of Fifty to plan political future and had them anoint him “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on Earth"
• Response to claim: 10 - The temple rituals had many similarities to the Masonic rituals that the prophet had just learned
• Response to claim: 12 - Disagreement between Joseph Smith and John C. Bennett was “their competition for nineteen-year-old Nancy Rigdon as plural wife...Smith excommunicated Bennett"
• Response to claim: 13 - The Council of Fifty was formed as a theocratic policymaking body “shadow government”
• Response to claim: 13 - Joseph Smith was anointed “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on Earth"
• Response to claim: 16 - Joseph "could not allow the Expositor to publish the secret international negotiations masterminded by Mormonism’s earthly king"
• Response to claim: 16 - "With the backing of his Council, Smith ordered that the new press be smashed"
• Response to claim: 17 - Someone slipped a six-shooter into Joseph Smith's jail cell that he later fired into the attacking mob

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 2: Beginnings: A Very American Gospel"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 21 - Joseph Smith copied ideas from Swedenborgianism, with its concepts of eternal marriage and a three-tiered heaven
• Response to claim: 23 - "Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals"
• Response to claim: 25 - Seer stones illegal – 1826 Smith “found guilty” of disorderly conduct for money-digging
• Response to claim: 25 - Isaac Hale objected to marriage of Emma to Joseph because of “disreputable occupation of looking for treasure with magic stones rather than working the land like a respectable farmer
• Response to claim: 26 - During the translation, Joseph would work on one side of the blanket "with the Urim and Thummim as a kind of magic spectacles, his favorite seer stone, the golden plates, and the hat, while the scribe worked on the other"
• Response to claim: 26 - Joseph would "bury his face with the seer stone in the hat and then dictate words to the scribe"
• Response to claim: 29 - "View of the Hebrews...containing considerable material on the subject, as well as a description of ancient Central American Indian ruins"
• Response to claim: 31 - Book of Abraham used to justify policy toward blacks
• Response to claim: 31 - Joseph Smith used seer stone in 1836 to try and find treasure under a house in Salem, Massachusetts
• Response to claim: 34 - Danites were pledged to “plunder, lie, and even kill if deemed necessary"

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 3: The American Exodus"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 42 - The authors claim that there is historical evidence that Joseph Smith blessed his son, Joseph III that he would become his successor
• Response to claim: 54 - Mormons were responsible for the Mountain Meadows massacre

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 4: Polygamy Then and Now"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 58 - Joseph Smith initiated polygamy in the Church and had a large number of wives
• Response to claim: 58 - The authors claim that Fawn Brodie’s research was largely substantiated by later scholarship
• Response to claim: 58 - There were at least five cases of women who rejected his polygamous proposals
• Response to claim: 58 - At least 11 of Joseph's wives married to another man
• Response to claim: 59 - It is claimed that Joseph Smith "often" asked close friends for their wives and daughters
• Response to claim: 59 - Some of the marriages were the result of pressure or spiritual coercion from the prophet
• Response to claim: 60 - The “comely sixteen-year-old Fanny Alger” became Joseph's plural wife in 1833
• Response to claim: 60 - W.W. Phelps introduced an anti-polygamy resolution in Oliver Cowdery's handwriting while Joseph was away, which was adopted by the Church
• Response to claim: 61 - Smith conducted marriage for Newell Knight against law, since the woman was not yet divorced from her non-Mormon husband
• Response to claim: 61 - Joseph's youngest bride, in some ways typical, was fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball
• Response to claim: 62 - Helen Mar Kimball had not grasped that marriage in time to Joseph would eventually have a sexual component
• Response to claim: 66 - The Book of Mormon was "conventionally monogamous"
• Response to claim: 67 - Swedenborg taught “spiritual wifery” in marriage for eternity. Swedenborg was discussed in Smith’s hometown newspaper

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 5: Redefining the Kingdom of God"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 6: Almost Mainstream"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 7: Mormons, Inc."

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 115 - "Outsider's money estimates always raise disclaimers from officialdom, presumably because of the danger that fat-looking figures might weaken members' tithing compliance"

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 8: Some Latter-day Stars"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 9: The Power Pyramid"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 10: Families Forever"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 160 - The authors' claim that Mormons believe that even God himself is married
• Response to claim: 161 - Couples are "sealed forever" through secret ritual in a Mormon temple

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 11: A Peculiar People"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 12: Rituals Sacred and Secret"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 13: Two by Two"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 14: Saintly Indoctrination"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 15: Faithful History"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 16: The Gold Bible"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 17: Discovering 'Plain and Precious Things'"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 18: 'How God Came to Be God'"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 19: Are Mormons Christians? Are Non-Mormons Christians?"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 320 - The people of the New World were visited by the "Mormon Jesus"

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 20: Rivals and Antagonists"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Response to claims made in Mormon American "Chapter 21: Dissenters and Exiles"

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 352 - "The church has often swatted down intellectuals individually"
• Response to claim; 354 - The Church operates a clipping service called the "Strengthening Church Members Committee" to monitor individual members
• Response to claim: 354 - The LDS system of internal discipline "operates more like a small cult than a major denomination"
• Response to claim: 354 - The LDS Church penalizes members for "merely criticizing officialdom or for publishing truthful-if uncomfortable-information
• Response to claim: 354 - The LDS Church prosecutes "many more of its members" than other religious groups

Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 22: Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century"

There are currently no claims addressed in this chapter.

Quote mining, misrepresentation and manipulation in Mormon America: The Power and the Promise

Jump to details:

• Response to claim: 16 - "Smith knew that someone from the Council of Fifty, despite the secrecy oaths, had betrayed him...With the backing of his Council, Smith ordered that the new press be smashed"
• Response to claim: 29 - "Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews...containing considerable material on the subject, as well as a description of ancient Central American Indian ruins"
• Response to claim: 31 - "hoping one last time that the use of his seer stone might produce treasure that he had been told lay under a house (D&C 111)"
• Response to claim: 61 - Joseph Smith's "youngest bride, in some ways typical, was fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball"
• Response to claim: 62 - Helen Mar Kimball had "not grasped before the ceremony that the marriage in time would eventually have a sexual component"
• Response to claim: 320 - "the believers in the New World who were visited by the Mormon Jesus"
• Response to claim: 403 - "Evidence of Smith family magic activities too well documented for Mormons to deny"

About this work

Should non-Mormons write a book about Mormonism? The coauthors, are, admittedly, conventional Protestants...the outsiders will find some fascinating information and want to learn even more. And the insiders will see themselves portrayed fairly while learning some things they would not have known otherwise.
—Preface, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise

Mormon America is very much like two books in one. The first depicts individual Latter-day Saints "as a model minority, a hardworking people with more education than the American average, deeply committed to church and family" (p. xxiv)...Yet in the second part, when the Ostlings begin to discuss the church's doctrines, its history, and its leaders, they paint a landscape that, to a knowledgeable Latter-day Saint, is selective with a bias toward the sensational.
—Raymond Takashi Swenson, Faith without Caricature?, 2001

[T]he Ostlings do not want to seem openly or stridently hostile toward the Saints. They are, instead, condescending in ways that are analogous to the way virtually every community of believers gets treated by journalists, including evangelicals and their allies. But at times the Ostlings drop the guise of balanced, objective reporters.
—Louis Midgley, Faulty Topography, 2002

Reviews of the Work

Louis Midgley, "Faulty Topography"

Louis Midgley,  FARMS Review of Books, (2002)

The Ostlings recognize that "the Book of Mormon was controversial from the outset" (p. 261). They also realize that, "from the beginning to this day, the reaction of Book of Mormon readers has been divided between those committed to it as ancient literature and those who consider it a product of the nineteenth century" (p. 261). They argue that these "older polemical traditions" also "split on two sides of a simple prophet/fraud dichotomy: either Joseph Smith was everything he claimed to be, a true prophet entrusted with a new scripture from authentic ancient golden plates, or he was a charismatic fraud" (p. 261). They exploit the fact that recently a few authors operating on the fringes of the Mormon academic community, while denying that Joseph Smith was a genuine prophet and the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient text, have striven to avoid directly charging him with being a conscious fraud. The Ostlings are correct in claiming that some of these writers recognize that a "simple prophet/fraud dichotomy" does not exhaust all possible explanations (p. 261). They then indicate that "some participants in [the] current discussion" over the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon, while rejecting its authenticity, "would like to carve out a middle path" (p. 261) somewhere between its being read as an authentic ancient text and as a nineteenth-century sham. This effort by a few cultural Mormons, dissidents, and former Latter-day Saints is then turned by the Ostlings into a main component of their campaign against the Book of Mormon.

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