Mike Otterson is coming home. Not all the way home (he is a Scouser) but a lot closer than he has been for most of his career. Otterson’s professional journey in journalism and then public relations has taken him from Liverpool to Canberra, from Tokyo to Salt Lake City, and now on his retirement he is coming back to London.
After a time in secular journalism, Otterson began work as a public relations officer, and eventually became the senior public relations officer for Mormonism worldwide. After decades in this work, he retired a few months ago and has been sent to London to function as president of the Mormon temple just outside the capital. In this new capacity he is not permitted to engage in media relations, but I had the good fortune to be able to speak to him in the month between his retirement and the assumption of his new duties.
Otterson was raised a Methodist. In his teens his mother’s health prevented her from attending their chapel but she insisted that her son continue doing so. This met some resentment. Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s, Otterson drank in the revolutionary atmosphere. For him as an adolescent it seemed obvious that religion was merely the opium of the people. He was secretary of the Liverpool Astronomical Society. He built his own telescope and ground the lenses himself.
His journey to materialism seemed complete. And perhaps it was. But in the end it was to be a materialism of a radically different kind from that espoused by Marx and Engels. At this time one of Mike’s sisters became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons. Michael’s mother was not at all pleased at her daughter’s transformation and encouraged her son to look into the refutation of his sibling’s new creed. Michael buried himself in the writings on Mormonism to be found in the public library (uniformly hostile), but he also investigated his sister’s new religion for himself. The consequence was his own conversion to the creed of Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith.
Near the end of the Book of Mormon – one of the books Mormonism’s 19th-century founder added to the canon – the text appeals to the reader to pray for enlightenment as to whether the claims of the book are not true. One might think this a rather audacious reversal of the burden of proof, but in Mike’s case there was no problem: he received enlightenment concerning the truth of Mormonism, embraced its rites and tenets and it has guided the rest of his life. “I put that passage to the test and received my answer to that witness,” he says.
Without trying to be impertinent, Mormonism is rather a singular creed. Its essential tenets are these: only bodies exist (spirit as conceived of by the Catholic Church and the Greco-Scholastic philosophical tradition does not exist). All beings, including intelligent entities, are bodily and all intelligent entities are of the same species. God, angels, men and demons are all essentially divine. The being that the Mormons call “God” is, in fact, just the oldest and chief of a great race of potential and actual deities – “gods in embryo”, as Otterson puts it – many of whom will or do rule their own planets as “gods”.
In great council, these beings prior to the creation of this planet propounded two rival plans for the development of the human race. God’s plan allowed full range to the freedom and autonomy of the men of this world, even at the price of the moral failure and positive damnation of many. Satan disagreed and wished to infantilise mankind in order to protect them from themselves even at the price of their moral agency.
God was not open to Satan’s alternative scheme. Satan rebelled, seeking to frustrate God’s plans, but became in the process a key element in their realisation, facilitating by his wiles the moral freedom and maturation of Earth’s inhabitants. As Otterson puts it: “Human beings are literally the spirit-children of God who come to earth in spirit form for a period of earthly probation.”
Obviously, this bears little or no resemblance to historically recoverable Christian doctrine (although I suppose it savours a little of the heresies of Origen and Teilhard de Chardin). According to Smith’s visions, the “true Gospel” was lost before even the apostolic fathers of the early 2nd century. Fortunately, in addition to the canonical resurrection appearances recounted in the New Testament, Christ (God’s son in a far more corporeal Jovian way than Catholics believe) also travelled to the Americas, where there dwelt a number of Jewish communities to whom he also revealed his message and who, unlike the benighted inhabitants of the eastern hemisphere, did not mangle but correctly preserved his teachings.
A man later transformed into the angel Moroni transcribed their sacred texts on to golden tablets and concealed them in a hill in what would later be upstate New York. Hundreds of years later, Joseph Smith, guided by the same angel, rediscovered and transcribed them with the help of a special seeing-stone which he kept in his hat. Smith was given exclusive access to the tablets which were later spirited away from this world forever and therefore cannot be consulted.
It might seem hard to imagine that such extensive and unverifiable claims could take hold of a large following. But the colonies which originally comprised the United States of America were first populated by ambitious entrepreneurs and sectarian Protestants, and a blend of these two spirits lives on in the instincts of its people. Of course Divinisation is an important part of Catholic doctrine. But this participation in the Divine Nature is supernatural and consists in knowing and loving God as He knows and loves Himself. For Mormons, it consists in ruling your own planet and begetting your own potentially divine offspring in the corporeal way the Mormon god has done.
Chalcedonian Christians might think what Otterson calls the “mind-boggling doctrines that really set us apart from other faiths” madness, but Otterson disagrees. “Think of a human embryo of a few cells and compare that with the enormous complexity of a mature adult,” he argues. “It may be that the difference between those two things is just as great as between us and God.”
Otterson agrees that the Mormons may inspire particular alarm in some conservative Protestants because the flexible Mormon canon draws attention to the logical shortcomings of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (not least the inability of Protestants to explain how they know which books are scriptural and how they justify their re-editing of the Old Testament).
The Catholic Church holds that the Bible alone cannot conceivably be self-constituting or self-interpreting. But the 73-book canon of Scripture defined by the Church is closed, and while tradition is also a source of revelation, that revelation ended at the death of the last Apostle and cannot be expanded. The function of the Magisterium is to exclude erroneous interpretations of the deposit of faith delivered once and for all to the Apostles, not to invent new doctrines (although theologians and clerics need constantly to be reminded of this).
For the Mormons, in contrast, their hierarchy is inspired and can in principle add new revelations and new canonical books indefinitely. (Otterson points out that this is not a frequent occurrence: the last addition was in the 1970s). Nor are the Mormon scriptures held to be precisely inerrant in the way Catholics hold the Bible to be free of all error. Polygamy used to be allowed, but was dropped under pressure from the US government. Despite the enthusiasm of certain German bishops for the laity “marrying” multiple individuals concurrently, we trust that the Holy Spirit will prevent the Spouse of Christ from picking up the discarded doctrines of the Latter-day Saints.
In the years after the Second World War Mormonism had a tremendous expansion. It has now slowed, but not without leaving the Mormon Church a significant force in America and a presence worldwide. One might think that the doctrinal flexibility inherent to their structures would encourage the Mormons to avoid trouble in the contemporary climate of aggressive secularism and LGBT rights. But they have actually been a bastion of opposition to this process. For Mormonism, a religion in which God is literally the father of the human race, the family is absolutely central.
The Catholic Church rejects the validity of Mormon baptism. Although Mormons use the Trinitarian formula, as far as the Magisterium is concerned they mean something entirely different by those words. The philosopher Edward Feser maintains that Mormons are essentially atheists, as the entity they call God would be (if he existed) simply an alien and has nothing to do with the Creator of the universe known to natural reason and revealed in Christ.
I tried to pursue the question with Otterson of what it is that makes the Mormon god worthy of worship and belief. For Catholics, what God is and that God is are identical. For this reason God is infinite in all perfections and is the Good itself and the object of our adoration who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
The assent of faith given to the Catholic faith is absolute. As the Catechism teaches: “Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. ”
If, as Mormonism teaches us, “we are of the same species as God”, why should we give absolute credence to what he tells us? After all, human beings lie often and Satan lies all the time. For Otterman, it is a trust built “over and over and over again” upon the foundation of the initial experience of conviction, or “witness”, that he had in response to the challenge of the Book of Mormon.
In one Father Brown story, Chesterton’s hero realises that someone dressed as a Catholic priest is an imposter because he overhears him disparaging reason. Our God is the Logos, the light which enlightens every man who has shone in our hearts in the person of Jesus Christ. One might wonder if merely a feeling of certainty is enough to justify assent to the mind-boggling doctrines of Mormonism.
Alan Fimister is assistant professor at St John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver
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