The Fastest Growing Religion on Earth
In 1823, an 18-year-old boy from Palmyra, New York, was visited by an angel, who told him of some magical gold plates. Armed with special glasses, he was able to translate them into a book that told about how the lost tribe of Israel was visited by Jesus in the Americas hundreds of years ago. In 1831, he started a church in Kirtland, Ohio.
He later said that church members could act as proxies for deceased persons, baptize them, and “seal” them into family clans that would be reunited in Heaven. His successor wrote about “the perfect mania” that possessed some of his followers as they started “to get up printed records of their ancestors.”
Over the next 168 years, 113 million people were introduced, after death, to the church.
Members of his church, called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, commonly known as the Mormons), are worried that their ancestors who lived before the beginning of the church won’t be able to join them in heaven. But in order to get them into the church, they have to figure out who they are first.
That makes them some pretty damn good genealogists.
They’ve got a vault carved into the solid granite of a mountain 20 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah, where they store information about the births, marriages and deaths of over 2 billion people, the largest single database on the details of the human race in the world. Buried 600 feet into the mountain, protected by two nine-ton and one 14-ton doors built to withstand a nuclear blast, the Granite Mountain Vault isn’t going anywhere soon. Five billion documents are stored on 1 ½ million rolls of microfilm and 1 ½ million microfiche. Twenty-five thousand volunteers are currently working to scan and index all of these documents as well as put them on the Internet so that one day soon you can access all of this data while sitting in your kitchen in your slippers with a notebook computer on your lap.
Ancestry.com, a subscription-based service started by members of the LDS church, has 900,000 subscribers, and is growing. Ancestry put millions of documents online, including five billion names. They have census records for all of the US from the past 200 years, birth, marriage and death records, and more. In May of 2007, they dumped the military records of all of the soldiers who fought in all of the US wars, 90 million of them, online.
Genealogy is now America’s #1 hobby. Millions of documents are being put on line so that subscribers can sit in their kitchens rather than traipsing across the country in search of obscure church and governmental archives.
As the fastest-growing church in the world, you have to wonder if the Mormons are onto something. That connecting with the nodes of your family, those linked to you by sperm and eggs and DNA, looping simultaneously backward and forward through space and time, like the drooping lines connecting the electricity towers that move through mowed swaths of forest in the rural parts of America, will lead you to paradise?
Who am I to say no?
8 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Mike, January 12, 2010 @ 11:39 pm
Geneology is pretty damn interesting, but you have to admit, the whole base of that religion is ridiculous. Bet they have more than microfiche in that granite vault.
By D, January 24, 2010 @ 2:31 pm
Unfortunatley much of the information in this article about the “mormon” church is false. The gold plates were not “magical”, neither did Joseph Smith ever claim them to be. The gold plates are an ancient record of people who lived on the American Continent from about 600B.C. to 400A.D. when this record was burried. He did not use “special glasses,” but translated by the gift and power of God. Also, the church was first organized in April of 1830 in New York, not in Ohio. I suggest that if you people out there want to know facts about the church and its beliefs, you should ask an actual member of the church, or go to the official church website. (www.mormon.org)
By D, January 24, 2010 @ 2:34 pm
I would like to add though that your recognition of their geneological efforts is appreciated.
By John Sawyer, February 5, 2010 @ 4:34 am
Who are you to say no?
You’re a thinking person who shouldn’t take fantastic stories at face value, regardless of their devotion to something interesting, like genealogy–they’re not interested in it for the same reasons you might be.
By banana_the_poet, February 6, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
I have to mention the brilliantly funny South Park episode on this subject called All about the Mormons.
That’s it.
By Jenoye Cole, February 10, 2010 @ 12:42 am
Dear D.,
Your insider’s view and attempted correction is not totally based on fact.
The founder of your religion informed people that he used the “Urim and the Thumin” (I believe is how he spelled them).which he defined as “religious spectacles” (i.e., a kind of holy eye-glasses) to interpret/translate the supposed plates of gold with esoteric information on them. (Where are they? Why haven’t they been published?) Scholars later informed us that the Urim and Thumin” of the Bible were, in fact, a kind of holy dice used by priests to give answers to believers’ questions in ancient, Old Testament times.
This was one small clue that Smith’s visions were not necessarily based on or in line with biblical facts or views. If “us people out here” want to know the facts about the church and its beliefs, we will check external and internal sources (and realize that some of them have been changed for PR and proselytizing reasons and others have been hidden or suppressed for other reasons).
Questionable beginnings and practices do not keep me from appreciating the high level of ethics and caring for others of the average Mormon, the great genealogical (spelled with an “a”) gifts they have given the world, and the consistently wonderful and outstanding music of the Morman Tabernacle Choir.
By Grace, February 16, 2010 @ 6:43 pm
I lived in Mormon community, I have Mormon relatives, I love Mormons. But their own written history has some serious problems to it and it’s there for the reading and research if anyone wants to know where it all came from straight from the horse’s mouth.
By Chris, February 22, 2010 @ 12:12 am
There is an incredible amount of disinformation out there on the LDS church. Go to the fairlds.org site for apologetic rebuttles to all of the non sense, don’t go to Mormon.org because it will not go into these topics indepth.