(Once again, Sophie took all the photos in this segment.)
There was a scene in the 1986 movie “The Mission” where the visiting Catholic cardinal visits a plantation run by indigenous people on a Spanish mission in disputed territory in Paraguay in the mid-1700s. The cardinal asks what is done with the profits from the plantation, and the priest – an Indian – answers that the profits are divided between the workers.
“Ah,” observes the cardinal. “There is a French radical group that practices that doctrine.”
“Your eminence,” answers the Indian priest innocently. “It was a doctrine of the Early Church.”
This utopian idea that the early Christians shared all things in common and “had no poor among them” appealed to my dad as a young man – in particular how this applied to Mormonism in the 19th Century.
As early as Kirtland, Ohio in the 1830s, the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, was experimenting with communal living – called the United Order, with its accompanying principle, the Law of Consecration.
The Law of Consecration is supposed to work this way – everything that you have you “consecrate” to the Church. Of course, people’s definitions of what it means to “consecrate” your belongings can vary from person to person. United Order is supposed to work in the following manner – you consecrate everything you have to an agent of the Church – usually a bishop. This means that you give your property, holdings and equity over to this person, and they are supposed to deed back to you what you need to make a living. The rest of your property is then supposed to be common property of the Saints. From that point on, you are supposed to yearly consecrate your surplus to the bishop as well.
That is all fine and dandy, except that there was not one United Order in the Mormon Church that was handled the same way. Each one was different – from the one in Ohio, to those in Missouri and Illinois, and finally to those under Brigham Young in Utah.
Joseph Smith intended the United Order to be the reintroduction of Mosaic economic law in these latter-days. However, some have said that Sidney Rigdon influenced Joseph Smith when he brought some of his ideas of French communism that he had practiced in some of the Protestant sects he had belonged to previously. And in Utah, there is evidence that suggests that some of the Utah United Orders were Brigham Young’s experiments in Marxism after he read “The Communist Manifesto”. Orderville was one such United Order.
Just a word about Orderville. I could not have lived there. Even though it was one of the longest lived orders – and one of the most successful – it was one of the most strict. The Jewish kibbutzim in Israel have nothing on Orderville. They decided when and what you ate. There was a dress code, and the rules of conduct were so rigid that you could get kicked out of the order for practically anything.
The thing about United Order in Utah – it did not last. By the turn of the century, practically no one in the Church was living United Order anymore. It became an outlawed practice, like plural marriage. And in the minds of many, plural marriage and United Order were indelibly connected. In fact, it was Brigham Young who said, “The fullness of the gospel is plural marriage and United Order.”
So when Mormon fundamentalists organized themselves in the late 1920s, it is no coincidence that – not only did they begin to practice plural marriage again – but they began to practice a form of United Order.
I think it is interesting to note that many of the prominent figures in the early Mormon fundamentalist movement in the 1930s and 40s were also members of the Communist Party. Lyman Jessop considered himself a communist, and Joseph Musser campaigned for the Communist Party. In our post-Cold War era, this may seem shocking, un-American or plain silly. But I must point out that this was in the days before the follies of Soviet Marxism or Communist China were made manifest. And as far as being un-American, these were people whose fathers and grandfathers had been imprisoned and persecuted by the American government, and many of these men were imprisoned themselves by the FBI, many while there sons were fighting in the South Pacific. If you take this in consideration with the fact that United Order seemed on the surface to resemble communism, it is not that shocking that many of them belonged to the Communist Party.
Around 1935, the Barlow brothers joined up with the Johnson family to buy some land right on the Utah-Arizona border – and area called Short Creek (now the location of Colorado City/ Hildale, seat of the FLDS Church.) They intended to live United Order, and they invited any who wished to live with them to relocate. Many men did.
One of those men who went to investigate was Lyman Jessop (mentioned above). He read the charter for the order, called the United Effort Trust. He was disturbed. As I mentioned earlier, you consecrate to the Church, and then you are deeded back your stewardship, or inheritance. And you are supposed to hold title to this. But in Short Creek, the leaders held title to ALL land, and no one could own any property. You could build your home on a piece of property leased to you by the leaders. But the land was owned by the hierarchy. This disturbed Lyman Jessop, and this issue was one the problems that eventually led to “The Spilt” – the division of the FLDS and the AUB.
One man who lived in Short Creek in he 1940s told me a story. While he was up on the Kaibab plateau, working on lumber, the priesthood leadership barged into his home while his horrified wife looked on. They collected all of his food and redistributed it to people in need, leaving him with only a couple of jars of canned peaches.
“I had no freedom to make any of my own decisions,” he said. “About the only thing I could decide for myself was whether or not to get my wife pregnant.”
As I write this, I know of at least a dozen United Orders in Utah, Arizona and surrounding states. Communism is alive and well in America. LOL
But back to my dad. A young BYU student sits in the restricted section of library circa 1969. In order to read the forbidden books, he has had to arrange to have a professor sit across from him while he reads. He is not allowed to copy from the books, or to take them out of the library. They are controversial books on Mormon history and doctrine, filled with teachings no longer allowed by the Church. He read about plural marriage, the Adam-God Doctrine and about United Order.
He looks up at the bored professor sitting across from him and asks an incredulous question.
“Is this true? Did the early brethren really teach these things?”
The professor gives him a knowing smirk. “Yes. They did.”
The young man goes home and ponders these things for years, dreaming about how to live these things again. He talks to wife about them. He gets reprimanded by his bishop and by the church general authorities for talking about these things openly. He is threatened with excommunication. He teaches his children about them.
Now it is circa 1979, and this young man now has his nine year-old son with him. They are driving a green cargo van through the hot Mojave Desert, outside of Barstow, California on one of many business trips. The young man speaks for hours with his son about Mormon doctrines – including United Order. The boy hardly understands any of it. But he listens anyway.
Next time, I will talk about my father and his teachings of United Order, and how I decided to practice it.
“Ah,” observes the cardinal. “There is a French radical group that practices that doctrine.”
“Your eminence,” answers the Indian priest innocently. “It was a doctrine of the Early Church.”
This utopian idea that the early Christians shared all things in common and “had no poor among them” appealed to my dad as a young man – in particular how this applied to Mormonism in the 19th Century.
As early as Kirtland, Ohio in the 1830s, the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, was experimenting with communal living – called the United Order, with its accompanying principle, the Law of Consecration.
The Law of Consecration is supposed to work this way – everything that you have you “consecrate” to the Church. Of course, people’s definitions of what it means to “consecrate” your belongings can vary from person to person. United Order is supposed to work in the following manner – you consecrate everything you have to an agent of the Church – usually a bishop. This means that you give your property, holdings and equity over to this person, and they are supposed to deed back to you what you need to make a living. The rest of your property is then supposed to be common property of the Saints. From that point on, you are supposed to yearly consecrate your surplus to the bishop as well.
That is all fine and dandy, except that there was not one United Order in the Mormon Church that was handled the same way. Each one was different – from the one in Ohio, to those in Missouri and Illinois, and finally to those under Brigham Young in Utah.
Joseph Smith intended the United Order to be the reintroduction of Mosaic economic law in these latter-days. However, some have said that Sidney Rigdon influenced Joseph Smith when he brought some of his ideas of French communism that he had practiced in some of the Protestant sects he had belonged to previously. And in Utah, there is evidence that suggests that some of the Utah United Orders were Brigham Young’s experiments in Marxism after he read “The Communist Manifesto”. Orderville was one such United Order.
Just a word about Orderville. I could not have lived there. Even though it was one of the longest lived orders – and one of the most successful – it was one of the most strict. The Jewish kibbutzim in Israel have nothing on Orderville. They decided when and what you ate. There was a dress code, and the rules of conduct were so rigid that you could get kicked out of the order for practically anything.
The thing about United Order in Utah – it did not last. By the turn of the century, practically no one in the Church was living United Order anymore. It became an outlawed practice, like plural marriage. And in the minds of many, plural marriage and United Order were indelibly connected. In fact, it was Brigham Young who said, “The fullness of the gospel is plural marriage and United Order.”
So when Mormon fundamentalists organized themselves in the late 1920s, it is no coincidence that – not only did they begin to practice plural marriage again – but they began to practice a form of United Order.
I think it is interesting to note that many of the prominent figures in the early Mormon fundamentalist movement in the 1930s and 40s were also members of the Communist Party. Lyman Jessop considered himself a communist, and Joseph Musser campaigned for the Communist Party. In our post-Cold War era, this may seem shocking, un-American or plain silly. But I must point out that this was in the days before the follies of Soviet Marxism or Communist China were made manifest. And as far as being un-American, these were people whose fathers and grandfathers had been imprisoned and persecuted by the American government, and many of these men were imprisoned themselves by the FBI, many while there sons were fighting in the South Pacific. If you take this in consideration with the fact that United Order seemed on the surface to resemble communism, it is not that shocking that many of them belonged to the Communist Party.
Around 1935, the Barlow brothers joined up with the Johnson family to buy some land right on the Utah-Arizona border – and area called Short Creek (now the location of Colorado City/ Hildale, seat of the FLDS Church.) They intended to live United Order, and they invited any who wished to live with them to relocate. Many men did.
One of those men who went to investigate was Lyman Jessop (mentioned above). He read the charter for the order, called the United Effort Trust. He was disturbed. As I mentioned earlier, you consecrate to the Church, and then you are deeded back your stewardship, or inheritance. And you are supposed to hold title to this. But in Short Creek, the leaders held title to ALL land, and no one could own any property. You could build your home on a piece of property leased to you by the leaders. But the land was owned by the hierarchy. This disturbed Lyman Jessop, and this issue was one the problems that eventually led to “The Spilt” – the division of the FLDS and the AUB.
One man who lived in Short Creek in he 1940s told me a story. While he was up on the Kaibab plateau, working on lumber, the priesthood leadership barged into his home while his horrified wife looked on. They collected all of his food and redistributed it to people in need, leaving him with only a couple of jars of canned peaches.
“I had no freedom to make any of my own decisions,” he said. “About the only thing I could decide for myself was whether or not to get my wife pregnant.”
As I write this, I know of at least a dozen United Orders in Utah, Arizona and surrounding states. Communism is alive and well in America. LOL
But back to my dad. A young BYU student sits in the restricted section of library circa 1969. In order to read the forbidden books, he has had to arrange to have a professor sit across from him while he reads. He is not allowed to copy from the books, or to take them out of the library. They are controversial books on Mormon history and doctrine, filled with teachings no longer allowed by the Church. He read about plural marriage, the Adam-God Doctrine and about United Order.
He looks up at the bored professor sitting across from him and asks an incredulous question.
“Is this true? Did the early brethren really teach these things?”
The professor gives him a knowing smirk. “Yes. They did.”
The young man goes home and ponders these things for years, dreaming about how to live these things again. He talks to wife about them. He gets reprimanded by his bishop and by the church general authorities for talking about these things openly. He is threatened with excommunication. He teaches his children about them.
Now it is circa 1979, and this young man now has his nine year-old son with him. They are driving a green cargo van through the hot Mojave Desert, outside of Barstow, California on one of many business trips. The young man speaks for hours with his son about Mormon doctrines – including United Order. The boy hardly understands any of it. But he listens anyway.
Next time, I will talk about my father and his teachings of United Order, and how I decided to practice it.
5 comments:
Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor all spoke out against Socialism/Communism. I know it is a common misconception to mix the United Order and Communism together, but nothing could be further from the truth.
I think many people confuse socialism with communism, including those who believe in Socialism. A socialist who joins the Communist Party is like someone who comes to believe in Mormonism, and immediately joins the LDS church because it's the only Mormon church they know of.
The United Order is definitely a form of socialism. Socialism is not inherently bad. Compulsion and robbing man of his free will is evil, though. But in terms of social reforms, Socialists are responsible for many of the things that modern people take for granted, like a 40-hour work week.
Voluntary socialism, such as a United Order, ought not to threaten anyone. Compulsory socialism, with it's excessive taxation and involuntary redistribution of wealth, is nothing I could ever support. But I certainly don't begrudge those who make a well-informed decision to join a voluntary socialistic order. When the Bible says the early Christians *"had all things in common"*, it does not mean they all liked listening to the the same music and playing the same board games and had the same taste in clothes.
Thanks for your comments.
I will be addressing this in my posts to come.
I do want to point out - even though the early Christians had all things in common, the example of Ananias in Acts 5 - he still owned his own property.
He was not reprimanded for retaining property, but for misrepresenting what he had given.
Private ownership and free enterprise are tantamount to United Order, and without them you have communism.
That’s very interesting what you wrote about your father and forbidden books @ BYU. Back in 2004 when my family and I lived in SLC, we had a young female missionary come into our home with an older woman from the ward we lived within because we had questions the new missionary couldn’t answer. My late husband ask the older woman about the Church History Archives and why the corporate church wont let their own members in. She stated she first had to apply for a position volunteering in the Church Archives, its not just free admittance. She then continued to admitted that the real reason the corporate church doesnt want their own members in the Archives is to conceal the real history that they have locked in a vault. Only select members of the highest quorums to have access to the vault. Afterward, we did have an interesting conversation with her that evening about polygamy and its history. She totally understood we were from a polygamous background.
Thanks for your comments.
This is just added testimony to what my dad told me about BYU & the "hidden" records the Church has.
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