I've got to confess, with the Mountain Meadows Massacre I'm close to factless. I know the general context of the tragedy, and it wasn't too unfairly presented in the PBS series the Mormons. The upshot is that a group of Mormons responded to their local leader (I think he was a Stake President?) when he got spooked for no good reason about a caravan of peaceful settlers who were guilty by association from the accident of having come from Arkansas where a prominent church leader had been recently assassinated. The leader ordered an armed conflict that was apparently carefully premeditated to involve a local Indian population so as to make it seem like it wasn't his own barbarism attacking them. When it was revealed that it wasn't ONLY Indians attacking them, the LDS leaders devised a way to wipe out witnesses, won the skirmish, captured the settlers, and then ordered all but children younger than 8 years old to be massacred.
Granted this was the wild, wild West at the time. Granted the Utah territory had tenuous, at times almost antagonistic relations with the US government (who had failed to protect their constitutional rights to free exercise of their religion, not to mention life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on many prominent occasions in the previous 25 years) even to the point where governor and Prophet Brigham Young refused to stretch his thin resources even thinner to comply with federal demands that travelling settlers be protected from Indian raids, for example--however, none of this explains such a twisted mind that would order unarmed innocents to die, execution-style, man, woman and child for a mere association with Arkansas.
I'm sure that people who DO know this story in any amount of detail have an explanation, but that's not my purpose here. It's rather to expose the fact that the way PBS framed the faith and the hierarchy of LDS leadership to this point in their documentary pointed to the "only" logical explanation of the events as if there were no other perspectives available, and as if this "only" conclusion exhausts the explanation so completely as to justify underscoring the viewer's hypothesis of suspicion toward the church in general.
Why include almost a full minute on how the very color of the rocks in the lands of southern Utah inspired zealotry? Why spend almost 15 minutes of a 2-hour documentary on an event the LDS themselves almost never talk about in Church, don't feel defined by in any way, and feel a great deal of shame or regret about when it does eventually come to their attention? And especially what is this principle of "perfect obedience" that one (non-member!) speaker claims is a central tenet of Mormonism which explains why 50+ men would follow an order to kill in this horrible cold-blooded fashion?
In the heyday of Nauvoo's success (its population at one time rivaled that of Chicago), a reporter asked Joseph Smith how he was able to organize such production among his people. His reply was that he taught them correct principles and then allowed them to govern themselves. This statement representing the heart of LDS doctrine much more centrally than any contrived notion of "perfect obedience", we now have the tools from which to analyze the explanation. From the hypothesis that Mormons in general (other than the leaders, of course) are automatons without consciences or brains of their own, of course the Mountain Meadows massacre makes sense. However, from the opposite hypothesis that the LDS are free-thinkers who just happen to choose what their leaders ask (although NOT all of the time, as evidenced by the preponderance of ex-Mormons cited in this very episode!—oh, but I guess they're the only really SANE and balanced ones, right?) might produce the same effect.
Now am I saying they are wrong to point out that whether by charisma or control some Mormons were responsible for an absolute evil? Of course not. Am I arguing that the men who pulled the triggers were in their right minds, and were choosing in free conscience such a terrible act? No, I'm not privy to their inner thoughts, and based on the evidence, it's easy enough to imagine how a weakness of character might have been encouraged by practices of blind faith such as might have been their education to produce this condemnable villainy. Therein, in fact, lies the shame of Mormons and believers of all religions alike: there are always fanatics among us (in some religions more than in others, due to the nature of the belief system, of course), there are always those who use the beliefs of their fellows or themselves to justify acts that are so contradictory to even a non-religious understanding of basic morality as to be unthinkably evil on their face. And let us agree clearly that their own religion condemns the leaders of the Mountain Meadows massacre!
And the blind obedience that was at the root IS a problem for LDS and all religions. There are enough examples of it to perpetuate a stereotype even when the majority of religions (especially Christian denominations, and ESPECIALLY the LDS) ALSO teach a scientific curiosity that should trump such blind obedience, should drive all believers to investigate their faith, test it, see what fruits it produces, and adjust beliefs according to the results. That sometimes faith in and allegiance to a living leader predictably follows from faith in the correct and eternal principle of obedience to God (especially where the doctrine involved--as in LDS doctrine--includes that God's will be revealed to certain men through a certain hierarchy of influence) to the exclusion of other principles of righteousness which can in turn lead to the danger of magnifying the evil that leader can do DOES NOT disprove the correctness of the principle of obedience, only the direction to which the leaders aimed it. A true faith in LDS principles would include obedience to the law, not lawlessness or a sense of being "above the law", as one commentator put it, which all the more condemns the perpetrators of the massacre (whose meeting in which the secret discussed could only be revealed on penalty of death is the very image of the "secret combinations" the Book of Mormon is replete with warnings against). The MM Massacre, far from being the symbol of the sense of being "God's anointed" or "speaking in the name of God" is the symbol of the opposite: of being an instrument of the evil one. The symbol is rather that of the perversion of the true principle of Priesthood and personal revelation as taught by the LDS. A true symbol of the correct principle would rather be the exodus, temple building despite situations of poverty, etc.
In the end, what I am saying is that non-believers pose a false and essentially cowardly solution to the problem of faith, and the PBS framing of the MM massacre as TYPICAL of what trusting MEN who claim to speak for God produce is evidence of an attitude that subscribes to this solution. Any claim that a man speaks for God is RADICAL, and therefore potentially dangerous, but also potentially ETERNALLY beneficial! So the solution to such a great potential danger being to run from it, or to disbelieve all such claims to authority (which is clearly the preferred PBS solution) is to ignore the potential eternal benefit should the claim turn out to be true. The question to deal with the issue head-on, then, should be rather: How can I know if this man is truly called of God. It takes the willingness to entertain the notion that he could be. It takes perhaps even the assumption that he is. And it takes acting upon the assumption, or experimenting to borrow a more scientific term (this IS a form of KNOWLEDGE we're seeking here! Not just a superstitious hope), in order to get a result that either confirms or denies the claim. The Mountain Meadows Massacre teaches us to be cautious, but scares us away from all belief in divine authority delegated to man only to the sealing of our own ignorance.
Comments
I believe your allusion to the Official Declaration quote at http://scriptures.lds.org/en/od/1 ( modern-day component of the LDS canon of scripture) about leaders being removed from their places when they attempt to lead the children of men astray pertained almost exclusively to the office of President/Prophet/Keyholder of the Church, but your overall point is as right on the money as it is unsavory to those who would question any and all allegiances of faith to a man. It's unsavory to some because they completely misread the OD statement to be claiming infallibility for the Prophet, along the lines that the Catholics believe of the Pope. A careful reader will note that even prophets never claim to be anything more than men, subject to all human frailties. The statement talks about the position of instrumentality they hold, NOT the nature of the individuals themselves--it's GOD that's infallible, and who therefore will not permit a Prophet to continue long in leading the entire Church astray. That person, we hope, will never need removal, but the possibility of requiring it is quite emphatically there.
It is sad and sometimes tragic, but absolutely predictable (per my previous post at http://defenseoftruth.blogspot.com/2007/05/liberty-equality-moral-agency-and-fort.html) that all men can be and have been led astray to misuse their own personal agency, and that some men have then magnified their sin by applying their influence through their sphere of ecclesiastical authority. In the history of the Restored Church this phenomenon has been documented to occur at the highest levels, and has appeared to spare only the office of President itself. (Doesn't it just chafe you non-believers to think I actually think such a fact is bona fide evidence that the statement about prophets not leading the church astray is true--it is, but only under assumptions you are not willing to make: that such an office actually exists.) And you're quite right that it is not a phenomenon unique to the LDS Church (to wit: cases of pedophilia among Catholic priests, "fallen" televangelists, etc.).
So if all are prone to sin, the issue, then, stops being this silly "You believers are all sheep", or "You think your leaders are infallible", and becomes a more serious "what if he IS right about being a spokesperson for God?" and "how can we know who to follow?". And the insidious part is that PBS is RIGHT to ask how otherwise ostensibly righteous members can go so horribly wrong! It IS a legitimate question, but the framing they give it leads to a superficial answer which wrongly attempts to, as you put it, "define a belief system of an entire church". If they would HONESTLY look into their own question (are we sheep?) they would discover quite the opposite: we're really quite heterogeneous in our thinking and behavior, and if we agree on certain points it's not because we're being told what to do or how to think, but rather we've been taught HOW to choose for ourselves--we just tend to CHOOSE THE RIGHT often, together or separately as that may be.
My mission president, who was a military man who had been involved in the ROTC for a long time, told the story once of being involved with some kind of contest (can't remember details) which somehow grouped a number of LDS applicants to some officer positions together with other competitors for the positions. Initially he was worried that their religious upbringing might make them "turn the other cheek" in contexts where it was rather toughness and steadfastness that were required: He thought the LDS applicants would turn out weak. On the contrary, they were disproportionately winners in the competition precisely because they had learned very young how to lead--themselves, and others--to make the right choices, no matter how tough the competition/adversity was. I think this observation more closely characterizes the general nature of LDS members everywhere. And anyone who's ever been to a PEC meeting knows the genuineness of concern a Bishop has for his ward--quite the opposite of heavy-handed authoritarianism, I'm sure we can all agree.