Co-authored by an assistant prosecutor of the case, this is an incisive look at Jeffrey Lundgren, a self-proclaimed prophet of a deviant death cult, loosely based on the Book of the Mormon, who drove his followers to commit atrocious crimes--including the "blood sacrifice" murder of an innocent family. Features 14 pages of dramatic photographs. Fine.
The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians. Based on extensive investigation of the events surrounding the murder of over 120 men, women, and children, and drawing from a wealth of primary sources, Bagley explains how the murders occurred, reveals the involvement of territorial governor Brigham Young, and explores the subsequent suppression and distortion of events related to the massacre by the Mormon Church and others.
In the Fall of 1857, some 120 California-bound emigrants were killed in lonely Mountain Meadows in southern Utah; only eighteen young children were spared. The men on the ground after the bloody deed took an oath that they would never mention the event again, either in public or in private. The leaders of the Mormon church also counseled silence. The first report, soon after the massacre, described it as an Indian onslaught at which a few white men were present, only one of whom, John D. Lee, was actually named. With admirable scholarship, Mrs. Brooks has traced the background of conflict, analyzed the emotional climate at the time, pointed up the social and military organization in Utah, and revealed the forces which culminated in the great tragedy at Mountain Meadows. The result is a near-classic treatment which neither smears nor clears the participants as individuals. It portrays an atmosphere of war hysteria, whipped up by recitals of past persecutions and the vision of an approaching "army" coming to drive the Mormons from their homes.
The only temple completed by Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the Kirtland Temple in Kirtland, Ohio, receives 30,000 Mormon pilgrims every year. Though the site is sacred to all Mormons, the temple’s religious significance and the space itself are contested by rival Mormon dominations: its owner, the relatively liberal Community of Christ, and the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. David J. Howlett sets the biography of Kirtland Temple against the backdrop of religious rivalry. The two sides have long contested the temple's ownership, purpose, and significance in both the courts and Mormon literature. Yet members of each denomination have occasionally cooperated to establish periods of co-worship, host joint tours, and create friendships. Howlett uses the temple to build a model for understanding what he calls parallel pilgrimage--the set of dynamics of disagreement and alliance by religious rivals at a shared sacred site. At the same time, he illuminates social and intellectual changes in the two main branches of Mormonism since the 1830s, providing a much-needed history of the lesser-known Community of Christ.
Using clues from numerous archives, privately held records, museum collections, and even the soil where early members planted corn and homes, the author reconstructs the cultural experiences by which Kirtland's Latter-day Saints made sense of the revelations Joseph Smith pronounced.
Jedediah Morgan Grant was a man who knew no compromise when it came to principles—and his principles were clearly representative, argues Gene A. Sessions, of Mormonism’s first generation. His life is a glimpse of a Mormon world whose disappearance coincided with the death of this “pious yet rambunctiously radical preacher, flogging away at his people, demanding otherworldliness and constant sacrifice.” It was “an eschatological, pre-millennial world in which every individual teetered between salvation and damnation and in which unsanitary privies and appropriating a stray cow held the same potential for eternal doom as blasphemy and adultery.” Updated and newly illustrated with more photographs, this second edition of the award-winning documentary history (first published in 1982) chronicles Grant’s ubiquitous role in the Mormon history of the 1840s and ’50s. In addition to serving as counselor to Brigham Young during two tumultuous and influential years at the end of his life, he also portentously befriended Thomas L. Kane, worked to temper his unruly brother-in-law William Smith, captained a company of emigrants into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and journeyed to the East on several missions to bolster the position of the Mormons during the crises surrounding the runaway judges affair and the public revelation of polygamy. Jedediah Morgan Grant’s voice rises powerfully in these pages, startling in its urgency in summoning his people to sacrifice and moving in its tenderness as he communicated to his family. From hastily scribbled letters to extemporaneous sermons exhorting obedience, and the notations of still stunned listeners, the sound of “Mormon Thunder” rolls again in “a boisterous amplification of what Mormonism really was, and would never be again.”
High school psychology students will read about what motivates the criminals behind cult murders. After introducing the wide range of cults that exist in the world, this book focuses on those cults that often feature violence, abuse, ritual death, and mass murder. Religious, doomsday, and terrorist cults are just some of the cults covered in this detailed book. Historical accounts of cult murders are followed by descriptions of the psychology of the minds of cult leaders and followers.