Faith and Betrayal (3 page)

In 1840, Jean Rio’s paternal great-uncle, William Rio MacDonald, bequeathed a substantial amount of property and cash to her. MacDonald, who had been surgeon to the king, had resided at 46 Doughty Street, one of London’s most famous Georgian avenues. At the time of MacDonald’s death, the neighborhood was at the heart of the city’s literary life; that year Charles Dickens moved with his wife into the house next door. Among the property listed in MacDonald’s will along with the Doughty Street residence were “leaseholds” in Tabernacle Walk and Rose Court. Also bequeathed to Jean Rio were a home on Chiswell Street and all its “appurtenances,” the rents and profits from numerous other properties, and an annuity for the rest of her life, all “free from the control, debts, or engagements of her husband.”

Whether the family relocated from their Lake Street home to Doughty Street is unclear, but what is obvious is that Jean Rio Baker was a very wealthy woman in her own right by 1840. As she was living at the height of comfort, however, England was experiencing the most severe depression of the century. Since losing the American War of Independence, Great Britain had been in crisis. “Its politics were stuck in permanent factionalism and gridlock,” writes Arthur Herman. “A sense of malaise had settled over its ruling class, while popular unrest, encouraged by the French Revolution, spread across the provinces.”

Throughout the 1840s, the poverty and degradation brought about by the Industrial Revolution became more and more staggering, as depicted so famously by Charles Dickens in
Oliver Twist
and other novels of life in Victorian England. Women and children had entered the workforce in record numbers, and most of them suffered abhorrent factory conditions and earned a pittance for a backbreaking day’s work. People of various races and cultures were flocking to London in search of employment with the railways and shipyards, the new city-dwellers living in wretched conditions. Bedraggled children toiled for fourteen hours a day in factories; squalid brothels bred disease; the slums were awash in sewage; and there was a burgeoning criminal population. The grim deaths from the Irish famine that began with the blight of the potato crop in 1845 dominated the London newspapers, and Ireland was poised for violent revolution.

At the same moment, the Church of England was in a crisis of its own, as reformers increasingly sought a separation between church and state. All the critics seemed to agree that neither the church nor the government was adequately addressing the appalling social conditions. “When the inner cities are crying out, what are the [Ecclesiastical] Commissioners doing? They bought a palace for the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, lots of bedrooms,” British scholar Owen Chadwick writes of the rising tide of dissent and suspicion. As the populace increasingly protested the church’s corruption—bishops were burned in effigy and crowds called for Canterbury Cathedral to be turned into stables—politicians began pushing for reform to pacify a restless nation.

The Church of England stubbornly resisted the oncoming changes, providing a wedge for the evangelicals who were transforming the European and American religious landscapes. “Its piety tended to be sober, earnest, dutiful, austere, or even prosaic in expression,” Chadwick observes of the church at that time. Meanwhile, the evangelicals “preached their way into the hearts of rich and poor, neglectful of parish boundaries, friendly with dissent.” Rejecting the staid, authoritarian dogma of the past, this faction encouraged believers to choose feeling over thinking in their path to God. “Romantic literature and art, the sense of affection and the sensibility of beauty pervading European thought, the flowering of poetry, the medievalism of the novel or of architecture,” as Chadwick describes the new arousal, posed a threat to church conservatives. The evangelicals brought poverty, corruption, and injustice to the forefront of the national dialogue as part of the New Age movement to elevate society, and advocated a Christian Socialism that predated Marxist and other socialist phenomena in politics.

For all the world’s “progress,” in the first half of the nineteenth century the sense of the precariousness and fragility of life was keen, the populace at the mercy of a physical world of microbes and human physiology still little understood. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and influenza decimated entire cities. What a century later would be relatively minor diseases and accidents, at least in Europe and the United States, were often lethal. Children died of afflictions as common as runny noses and diarrhea. Slight wounds turned gangrenous and fatal. Congenital deformities and genetic diseases beyond any treatment seemed the vengeance of an unpredictable God. Even for Jean Rio, a privileged woman with servants, it was a life with its share of hardship and uncertainty. Like her peers, she was raised to fear and worship God, to see religion as the only true deliverance from life’s random travails.

In this era, one’s faith was defining, and it was expressed fulsomely, without shame or embarrassment. Agnostics and atheists were rare. Charles Darwin had not yet written
The
Origin of Species
challenging the simplistic biblical view of Creation. True believers accepted the Bible in literal terms— “felt as close to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and a host of other characters as they did to their own friends and relatives,” according to J.R.H. Moorman—and thought the Scriptures were infallible.

Jean Rio saw the degraded condition of British life as a clear sign of the approaching end-time in biblical terms—a millennial expectancy creating a groundswell at the time. Offended by the greedy, uncaring attitude of a Church of England that defied reform, she sought a different path to spiritual salvation. Of keen intellect and compassion, hers would be a fecund mind for Mormon persuasion.

Just as the Church of England was steeped in corruption and slow to recognize its crippling social irrelevance, religion in mid-nineteenth-century America was facing its own upheavals and transformations. With the evangelical movement of the 1820s, a rousing and muscular new spirituality had swept over most of the major denominations of America. New sects and new approaches were challenging the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others to faith and ritual. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of the many fledgling and often transitory movements born in the turbulence of the moment, a moment of frontier revivals, spiritual visitations, and widespread belief in magic and the occult. Growing out of this wider impulse, the Mormon Church as envisioned by its prophet and founder was to be a cooperative theocracy responsive to the social and spiritual needs of all mankind. Above all, the new religion was rooted in the fervent notion that the “latter days” were indeed at hand.

Fueled by millennialist passions for deliverance and everlasting life, Mormonism was born in a time known as the Second Great Awakening. It was conceived by a charismatic young American farmer named Joseph Smith, who claimed to have had a vision in 1823 in which an illuminated angel named Moroni directed him to excavate some ruins near his home in Palmyra, in western New York. Smith said Moroni visited him three times and told him that God had selected him to restore the one true church in North America in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ. His first job, Smith said he was told, was to find a book inscribed on golden plates that Moroni had buried in nearby Cumorah fourteen centuries earlier. To assist Smith in translating the “reformed Egyptian” symbols on the tablets would be two crystal seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, buried with the sacred texts.

The self-proclaimed prophet said he located and unearthed these golden plates on the designated night of September 22, 1827. He was then twenty-two. He said that by using the magic stones he was able to decipher the mysterious engravings, dictating the stories contained on the leaves to assistants. By April 1829, Smith, who was illiterate, had completed a 275,000-word manuscript. This
Book of Mormon,
named for the ancient military figure, was said to be based upon the journal of Mormon’s son, Moroni, the last diarist of the supposedly historic events.

Full of heroes and villains, bloodshed and miracles, warriors and intrigue, rich biblical symbols and autobiographical themes, the narrative was a revised and enhanced New Testament, and it included the details of a journey to America by Christ immediately after his resurrection to visit his chosen people. The book depicted a Hebrew tribe led by a man called Lehi, who had left Jerusalem in 600 BC and sailed to the Americas with his six sons and other followers. Once there, Smith wrote, the tribe broke into two warring factions: the devout and godly under the good son, Nephi; the evil sinners under the bad seed, Laman. God was seen as blessing the Nephites and all of their descendants with white skin, while cursing the violent Lamanites with dark skin. The “white and delight-some” Nephites battled the bloodthirsty Lamanites for six hundred years, until Christ rose from the dead, turned up in North America to preach to these displaced Palestinians, and persuaded each side to abandon its barbarous ways. The tale of the Nephites and the Lamanites explained the “Hebraic” origin of Native Americans, a popular theory of the day—that the Indians of North America were a remnant of the mythical lost tribes of Israel, and must therefore be “gathered” in anticipation of Christ’s return. “The theory that the Americans are of Jewish origin has been discussed more minutely and at greater length than any other,” writes the historian H. H. Bancroft.

Reflective of the mystical leanings of the era, the
Book of
Mormon
was an unsophisticated view of the clash between good and evil. At the core was a belief that all churches had deviated from the true theology of Christianity—what Smith called the “Great Apostasy”—and that Smith’s divine task was to gather the remnants of Israel to a latter-day Zion and await the millennium. Central to the theology was a conviction that all male devotees were on the road to godhood, that all men could create their own worlds, and that all women, if pure and obedient to men, could be “pulled through the veil” to this kingdom as eternal companions to righteous men.

Smith published the
Book of Mormon
in 1830. It not only became a best seller, it also created an entirely new and exciting theology. With himself at the helm as “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” Smith immediately assembled a church with six followers. A month later the ranks would swell to forty, and more than a thousand would be converted within a year. Denouncing the “false spirits” common to the post–Revolutionary War revivalism of the day, Smith spoke of ongoing, regular contact between God and men, and the seductive notion that humans could be creators of their own worlds. He contended that his divine revelations evidenced his infallibility, his entire religion having been based upon miracles that defied secular challenge. Neither Luther nor the Pope had spoken directly to God, Smith said in countering his critics, while he professed to have had more than a hundred personal conversations with God.

Founding his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he created an evangelical socialism ruled by an autocratic cadre of “worthy males” and based on a theology of the fast-approaching end-time as prophesied in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. “In no other period in American history were ‘the last days’ felt to be so imminent,” Smith biographer Fawn Brodie puts it, “as in that between 1820 and 1845.” The earth was thought to be nearing six thousand years old, according to scientific calculations then current, and since biblical references suggested that a thousand years was a single day to God, many of the world’s religious leaders put the earth’s impending seventh day—the “day of rest and peace” when Christ would descend—at some point in the mid-1800s. “The literalist Mormon timetable counts forward from the first six ‘days’ of Genesis,” writes James Coates, “and the seventh day of a thousand years when God rested after Adam and Eve began their time in Eden.” Smith’s apocalyptic vision included the fall of all churches and governments, which would leave his own theocracy as the ruling government of the world.

Early Mormonism held a number of fundamental beliefs, controversial among mainstream Christians at the time, that would find expression in the swelling New Age spiritual movement that began late in the twentieth century. The divine power of crystals, personal transformation, channeling, divination, astrology, holistic health, and the allegiance to a new world order all had credence in Joseph Smith’s religion. “Mormonism is an eclectic religious philosophy, drawn from Brahmin mysticism in the dependence of God, the Platonic and Gnostic notion of Eons, . . . Mahomedan sensualism, and the fanaticism of the sects of the early church . . . with the convenient idea of the transmigration of souls, from the Persian,” concluded a firsthand observer of the new phenomenon.

Smith’s homegrown American gospel that denied original sin and provided a road to godhood for the individual was a religious version of the American dream that defied the Calvinist vision of a vengeful God. In a culture in which parents and teachers told their boys they could grow up to be president, Smith held out to his flock the promise that they could become gods. Unlike any other creed in the United States, Mormonism, neither Judaic nor traditional Christian, maintained a strong cerebral appeal throughout its early years. “Joseph had convincing answers to the thorniest existential questions,” wrote Jon Krakauer in 2003—answers that were both explicit and comforting. “He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil.”

It would not be until twentieth-century science and scholarship debunked many of Smith’s claims that the theology itself would be widely ridiculed. Even its more controversial doctrine of polygamy found sanction in the Old Testament. By 1832 Smith had sent missionaries to evangelize throughout the eastern states. They preached “the Kingdom is come, glory hallelujah,” and met with unparalleled success. Smith began searching for a locale to build the “Kingdom of God upon Earth.”

As the numbers of converts grew, Smith moved his new church from New York State to Kirtland, Ohio, where his disciples converted and baptized the entire community. The once-humble Smith transformed himself into a powerful prophet and dictator, coming into increasing conflict with many of his neighbors and followers. Americans passionate about their new democracy found Smith’s theocracy outlandish if not threatening. Nearly all of his high-ranking churchmen fell out with him over his authoritarian rule, and his inner circle began to fade away. Smith said he then received a revelation from God that in order to save his church he must pursue converts in Great Britain who had been cradled with kings.