How did Mormonism, unlike other modern religious cults created in the USA, become so popular it is/was the majority religion in some states?
alternate version of OP chart.
>>18528989They're only the majority religion in Utah (total pop. 3 million), and overall that's because it's an arid inland waste settled by them specifically. Otherwise it's just that unlike most of the established branches of Christianity they actively evangelize
>>18528989Because they were the most cooperative with the Federal Government. All the other cults were weird violent doomsday cults that drew the ire of law enforcement. Mormonism is milquetoast compared to them
>>18529020Only if you ignore everything prior to the Mormons formally dropping polygamy in 1890 to get recognition as a state
>>18528989If Jacob were resurrected right now, he would come back and see that Christianity is true, and likely move to Utah with his wives Rachel, and Leah. Just because it is a state that allows living with more than one wife at a time. You can’t do that in Texas, only one at a time here.But beyond that, Jacob would hate Mormonismand see that they are adding to the word of God by augmenting it with another Savior.God said His Son is the only way to Heaven. Jesus Christ literally means the Word of God made flesh. So if you augmented Jesus Christ with your own works, you are cursed and not going to the kingdom of Heaven. It also means that Mormons can show that you can be white and set up young people to have nice dressed clothes and a Religion to guide them but once they actually get set up it just falls apart because they have no idea what they are really doing. They are just following religion like Jews / Pharisees, and don’t see spiritual matters or understand. The are just confused like Americans with a religion. And it makes Roman Catholics just think oh look, another religion to add to my universal god and universal church.You can’t believe in a righteous path but God said that righteous path is only Jesus Christ who did it for you already on the cross. Your job is to just believe it. The problem is they already broke that rule by augmenting the kjv bible with their own.
>>18529020>Because they were the most cooperative with the Federal Government. All the other cults were weird violent doomsday cults that drew the ire of law enforcement. Mormonism is milquetoast compared to themI assume you aren't including later cults and tiny religious sects, like from the 20th and 21st century. Because there were a lot of those that were less violent than the mormons.However, some of those groups, like the hare krsnas (and other hindu decended groups), were even more different from christianity than mormons. Even if you argue that mormons aren't really christian, those other groups are far more distant regardless.>>18529028yeah weren't the mormons pretty violent at one point. they did a massacre.
because they were jettisoned from the US proper until they had a little ethnostate in the utah territory.It's not that it was "so popular", it's that they were the only population in those states.look up the perpetual emigration fund; they were importing mormon converts to actively settle there
another diagram
>>18528989They settled Utah and more or less made it an ethno-state. That's it, really. And ngl I think the mormons are more or less the same level of accepted as the JW, slightly below the Christian scientists and well below the SDAs.
>>18529200im not familiar with those last 2 groups
>>18528989Because they got kicked out of the other states for acting like such niggers that "extermination orders" were issued against them, so they all ran away to Utah and the US government had to start another war to bring them to heel.
>>18530750The Seventh Day Adventists?
>>18530790yeah, i've heard of them, but im not familiar with them. honestly not that familiar with the jw beliefs either.i know their all some kinda christian offshoot
>>18528989its older and places great importance on childbirth.
>>18530848They're nothing really special. For the most part they're just standard conservative American evangelical protestants. Their only really weird beliefs of note are.>Doctrine that Saturday, not Sunday, is the Sabbath.>That when you die, everyone just dies Atheist style. Christian, Heathen, Heretic, whatever. We all just go cold into the ground. They call this "Soul Sleep">This leads into what they think The Final Judgment entails. Basically Christians/Saved will get resurrected back to life eternally, and basically from there go on to standard Christian end-times beliefs about everything being great forever. Those who were not saved instead just stay dead. No eternal torture dimension, you just cease to exist because only God can give people eternal life. Basically what Atheists think happens. This doctrine is called "Annihilationism". Other than that they don't really do anything you wouldn't find in any random Southern Baptist or similar church.
>>18528989They become popular in Utah because they quite literally founded Utah. Mormons were settlers across all the areas they have a large population in.
>>18531332Well they technically don't believe in the trinity (it's complicated) and think an American Woman named Hellen White is God's last prophet (its from her and her visions from where they get most of their teachings). I don't know why'd you would exclude the strangest thing about them.
>>18531397what is the strangest thing about them? The lady they think is the prophet?
Other than the Catholic Church, there are no centralized Christian denominations in the US, really. It's mostly every church out for itself, with a few of them loosely organized in associations. Catholics have a lot of baggage in this country that they can't just shrug off the way the Mormons have. It might surprise you to know that Mormons at one time were probably the most hated religious group in the US, they were derided as a cult and driven out of New York state, and other places, and forced to relocate to the dusty frontier. Utah was not their first pick, it's where they settled to escape persecution and to try and set up an autonomous area to live according to their own laws. Until eventually the State of Utah forced them to comply with Utah's laws (i.e. getting rid of polygamy). The Mormons actually at one time armed themselves and were prepared to resist the government. They were seen as religious nutjobs and traitors. They've worked very hard to rehabilitate their public image, through charity and extremely strict rules about clean living and upholding the law. So now, most people see Mormons as nice and harmless, if incredibly dull. This means that far from being actively persecuted or avoided, people just leave them alone and don't mind having them as neighbors because they're so clean, polite, and law-abiding. It makes it a lot easier for Mormons to establish themselves in new communities with this positive reputation. So you have a highly centralized religious group that is seen as largely benign by the wider population and allowed to freely proliferate. Add onto this, the fact that Mormons proselytize A LOT. They are one of the most active missionary faiths in the US. And they also have very high fertility, far, far above the national average.Mormons are out-breeding the rest of the country, and they're actively converting new people from just about everywhere, nobody objects to Mormons moving into their neighborhood or building churches.
>>18531814I thought the US had laws against religious persecution?
>>18531825Those laws only apply to the government. The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom by not permitting Congress to pass laws affirming or restricting religious practice and every US State is required to uphold this amendment in their own constitutions before being accepted into the Union. But that doesn't mean people have to accept your religion or tolerate its practices (i.e. polygamy). It wasn't official, state-sanctioned persecution that drove the Mormons west, it was angry mobs.
>>18529165>leaving the church for any reason puts you in a place afterlife than the place where the worst people go.Classic.
>>18528989It's a holistic cult. It governs all parts of your life and ensures you stay alive and reproduce and keep following the cult. A bit like Islam. It's all nonsense of course, but it enables you to prosper in its system. And that's enough to make people stick to it. A lot shitty cults clash with human nature / basic needs and that's why they don't survive for very long.
>>18531955So essentially the same as every other religion?
>>18528989>How did Mormonism, unlike other modern religious cults created in the USA, become so popular it is/was the majority religion in some states?I think it probably functioned very well in frontier conditions. It's pretty well organized total world so they were more effective at settling Utah. Better to be in a big disciplined group with large families than on your own because you're gonna get scalped, bro:https://youtu.be/YJyX27Reu2wA lot of why I think religions "make sense" and survive and evolve is not the theology (which is ultimately nonsense) but the social organization the theology attaches to.
>>18531814>They've worked very hard to rehabilitate their public image, through charity and extremely strict rules about clean living and upholding the law. So now, most people see Mormons as nice and harmless, if incredibly dull ... Add onto this, the fact that Mormons proselytize A LOT.There has been a dispute over the size of a new temple in my area recently. (The Mormons compromised on the size of the steeple and met halfway, it ended up being smaller than what they originally wanted, which would've been massive, but not as small as a vocal group of opponents wanted.)In any event, they are very well behaved and have a stereotype of being like "golly, we'd really like to help you mow your lawn, would you let us, really???" There's a pair of them that has been bicyling around here for a few weeks. I saw them at Home Depot off all places talking to a group of other young people.
>>18531397I guess we have differing opinions on "strangest". Like I don't think it's particularly out of the ordinary for an American protestant denomination to have a founder who's held up as some kind of saint of prophet. I don't know what you mean about the trinity, since they have the standard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit formula.
>>18532274Mormon detected.
>>18531943kek
>>18532074The successful ones yeah
>>18528989It’s a cult that was forced to become respectable once Brigham Young died and severely curtailed its most unsavory aspects, allowing Mormons to pass themselves off as just another Christian denomination
>>18528989Early mormon settlers struck a motherload of gold and kept a lot of it secret to bribe the government and recruit their own little secret glowie army with specially minted gold coins and the usual blackmail schemes.
>>18528989>modern religious cultsUnlike many others, it's not a full on scam (like the Televangelists), nor is it completely opposed to having any fun (Jehova's Witnesses), and it also survived long enough to slowly filter out the standard wacky cult stuff
>>18533418what wacky cult stuff got filtered out?
>>18533884Look at the Mormon fundamentalists for a comparison.
>>18529165seems to me the worse a religion is, terrorizing, thieving from people, the higher its rate of conversion is
>>18533989Strict religions succeed while lax religions die out in the retirement home.
>>18533991The Catholic Church is the largest religious sect in the world
>>18531800Yeah. More or less. It's also why they spawn more conspiracy theorists and tiny cults than other denominations. Like the Branch Davidians, for example.Well I guess you can also say they believe to currently be in the end of times (ever since 1844), but that's meh.They also did Cornflakes, for what it's worth, and Kellogg the elder (not the cornflakes one) was a big proponent of infant circumcision. >>18532274I mean, outside the four (Smith, Taze Russel, Hellen White, Mary Baker Eddy) what other denominations have prophets?>I don't know what you mean about the trinity, since they have the standard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit formula.It's complicated, but you could argue they don't because the devil is in the details. They really haven't changed their actual beliefs on the subject much, they just started calling it trinity instead of the godhead (no relation to the mormon borderline tri-theist one).
This board is absolutely useless now isn't it?The lsd church became so popular because the missionaries did mass conversions in the UK. There was enormous poverty in many parts of Britain during the 19th century, the mormans just promised them a better life and even funded their travel across the atlantic. That's how mormanism became so popular in such a short duration of time.
>>18533976any examples for the readers?
>>18532181Yes that's usually the type of interaction people have with Mormons anymore. Ever since they capitulated to the state of Utah they've been very big on compromise and working within the rules of whatever community they expand into. They don't try to overthrow the established order, they become a part of it, and gradually expand influence through conversion and charity work.
>>18532337no need to reply to yourself
>>18533993And for most of its history apostasy to the Church was a capital crime and they actively policed their communities for heresy. The pope even signed off on a wholesale genocide against a heretical sect in the south of France. There used to be real, deadly consequences for defying the Church. Then the Protestant Reformation happened, and suddenly it wasn't crusades against helpless, pacifistic Cathars, but militant apostates willing to fight for their religious independence from Rome. And that pretty much broke the Papacy's worldly power, after the Wars of Religion concluded and a huge swathe of European kingdoms were now outside his purview. Never really recovered. Even Catholic nations going into the modern era largely disregarded the Pope as a worldly figure.
>>18535127You exaggerate, the catholic church was still very much active in preserving what it still had in the 18th and especially 19th centuries. The dispute between church and state wasn't resolved until the 19th century in the catholic world. The state usually won, for the record.
>>18535162My favourite one was Rosas though. In his personal correspondence he was all for temporal dictatorship of the pope, but his revealed preference was very clearly for the temporal dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Lots of wacky stories about the conflict between church and state in Latin America.
