The Antibiotic-resistant Belief System in Winter Quarters

Today, I lifted weights. Not just physical weights: spiritual weights. It was heavy.

I was listening to an episode of the Sunstone History podcast. Lindsay and Bryan were talking about how polygamy was taking root in Winter Quarters. For historical context: Winter Quarters was a big rest stop on the trail westward. Non-Mormons and former-believers weren’t nearby anymore, like they had been in Nauvoo, nor was Church leadership centralized or clear. Brigham wasn’t calling himself “Prophet” yet, he was just shepherding the Saints for the time being (or so he was saying). Emma was refusing to go West. Doctrine and Covenants section 132 was still not canonized. Polygamy was….kind of secret, especially for missionaries. But in the tight-knit community of persecuted castaways that was Winter Quarters, it was becoming more of an open secret. Men were sleeping around in tents and wagons with any woman who would fling up their skirts to “the Revelation.” And, obviously, that led to what Ann Eliza would later call, the “utter misery only polygamous wives can experience,” for the first wives of said men.

This is all another way to say that it sucked. And not just because of the Nebraska winter or the scanty provisions.

One especially poignant quote was from a young newlywed who had been separated from her husband after only 4 months. He had been sent on a mission to England while she went to Winter Quarters. She was privy to the horror show of watching her friends sinking into the gloom pit of polygamy. He was fantasizing about his own personal brothel and writing her letters asking her to start grooming another woman to be ready as a second wife for him when he got back.

Anyway, her response was this:

If you had seen what I have seen you would not wonder why I wrote [that I don’t want to help you find a second wife already]. For there is no such a thing as happiness known here when a man has more than one. It really seems to me that this is a day in which woman is destined to misery.“

Mary Haskin to Samuel Richards

Besides the heartbreak of this quote, something that agitates me when I hear this is: Why did she stay? Why did any of them stay? Why did these women (and these men) justify so much sadistic cruelty, hatred, callousness, indifference? Many of the Saints in Winter Quarters had converted based on the premise that Mormonism was some kind of “restored” Christianity. Most of them had been Christians to begin with so this new religion hadn’t seemed so strange. At least, it hadn’t seemed so strange back then.

But out here on the frontier, these people were isolated from all of their homelands, there were major counterfeiting operations, they were plundering outsiders every chance they got, and of course, they were living this fornication-fraught “Everlasting Principle” and they were getting freer and easier with domestic violence, verbal abuse, and jealousy games. In other words: they were living in a way that their former Christian-selves would have balked at, scorned, disdained. (And other Christians of that era did balk at it.)

So, why did these devout persons keep going? What were they thinking? What kept them going day after wretched day? Why didn’t this cesspool of debauchery dispel the illusion of Joseph’s paper-thin Christianity? Why did they keep adding violation on violation on violation of their body and their conscience?

Some of them at least, clearly knew they were unhappy. Even if they had been cult-sniped enough to not be able to label it as “misery,” they clearly knew it felt awful.

What kind of person would believe this to be God’s way?

These are important questions, I think, because unless we understand the patterns of the past, we have little safeguard against making the same mistakes in the future.

Which leads me to…a theory.

Maybe it’s not a totally new theory, actually, maybe it the adaptation of a different theory.

Pause this thought on polygamy for a moment and let’s talk about germ-theory.

In germ-theory, we knew that bacteria are adaptable. When treating someone sick with a bacterial infection, an antibiotic remedy needs to strong enough to eradicate the bacteria immediately (or semi-immediately, since usually a course of antibiotics takes about 7-10 days). If the antibiotic is introduced at doses too low to get rid of the disease or is taken too inconsistently to make sure the bacteria is really gone, the pathogens has the chance to adapt and become resistant to the antibiotic.

Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria are therefore some of the most dangerous forms of disease.

Ideologies bear striking similarities to bacteria in this way. They “spread” like diseases, they “infect” a host. They influence people’s behavior or ability to act, they can sometimes be “quarantined” or “contained” like breakouts of disease, but it is tricky.

I’m not the first to notice this. The Red Scare in America drummed up panic about Marxism by comparing it to a contagious infection. C.S. Lewis calls Christianity an “infection.” John Larsen, of Post-Mormon fame, calls religion “a mind virus.”

The Mormon or LDS or TOJCOLDS leadership these days says the same thing. They want to “inoculate” members and the youth from the rampantly contagious idea that the Church is built on lies and corruption. Of course, that contagion is all the more robust, since it is also true.

The point is: ideological spread is similar to bacterial spread. Ideological infection is similar to bacterial infection. And just like bacterial resistance to antibiotics, ideological resistance to eradication is also observable.

The example of Mormons in Winter Quarters is one such case. People, particularly women knew there was something wrong. They felt the sickness. Often, the stress of polygamy made them physically sick too. They knew they were confused. They knew they didn’t like polygamy, they knew it made them feel depressed “to the point of death.” They knew they felt lonely, desperate, and sad.

They also knew that the only real answer to “why” from Mormonism was about polygamy. Polygamy, polygamy, polygamy: God just wants a lot of polygamy. Forever. That’s eternity. Polygamy all the way down.

Yet, immersed in this soup of nonsense, they seemed unable connect the dots that their unhappiness was not a problem of obedience, but rather a symptom of believing an ideology that was fundamentally corrupt. Their native spiritual-mental “immune system” had been bamboozled into thinking that the remedy to this sickness was just obeying differently or more or longer or over there in the Salt Lake Valley. They had already been so weakened by this pathogenic belief that they couldn’t muster the strength to reach the conclusion that their misery was an infection of ideas.

They were drowning in a puddle, unable to stand up.

I don’t think this makes the Saints of Winter Quarters dumb. (Obviously, some of them were dumb. Some of us are always dumb.) But there were also lots of very intelligent, educated, creative people in Mormonism in the 19th century; just like there are intelligent people in the Church now; just like there are intelligent people who get sick with any other bacterial infection. It doesn’t really have to do with intelligence. It seems to have more to do with…immunology.

The Victorian worldview was rather innocent ideologically. There was an naive trust in the idea that a person could just tell if a leader, movement, a missionary, were good or trustworthy by how they looked, the way they dressed, and how confident they were. As we can tell from early conversion accounts, people were often converted after one confidently-delivered sermon, one lovely singing performance, or even from the earnest look in a missionary’s eyes. The average person trusted to an absurd degree that these markers of social magnetism were reliable indicators of truth, doctrinal consistency, or goodwill.

There was almost no understanding at that time about cult tactics, the vulnerability of the brain to manipulation, about the impact of social environment or body language on persuasion, or about inconsistent connection between appearance and conduct. The average Victorian-era individual was bound by a worldview that taught them that if a man looked nice, earnest, sincere, then he was. They couldn’t see how a like-able prophet such as Joseph Smith could be charming to the public and also be corrupt and covetous behind the scenes. They could not understand how or why they had spiritual experience(s) relating to this new Church if that Church wasn’t actually god’s-will-on-earth. This was especially true when it came to topics about religion. God would not let a liar use his name in vain, surely, thus, a confident person fluent in using the name of Jesus was probably trustworthy.

Thus, with Mormonism the average person met a new ideological bacteria.

That man sang with such fervor about God that it brought tears to my eyes, how could he be anything but a true servant of goodness?

How could a Church with so many scriptures end up being Un-Christian?

Why would God have made them feel so good about their baptism or conversion and then feel so wretched once they were living it?

The answers to these questions have been hard-won in the modern day through years and years of exposés, observation, scholarship, and documentaries. The answers aren’t just about 19th century Mormonism, but that is included. They are about all cults, ideologies, and most churches too. Even so, modern peoples who have not studied cult dynamics fall victim to these mind-traps all the time.

Now, we can see cult patterns that were also in play at Winter Quarters: people were separated from what was familiar. The line between righteous follower and wicked unbeliever was constantly reinforced by Church Leaders, keeping followers fearful. Believers were incentivized to sacrifice for that imminent–very imminent!!–divine cameo of the Second Coming, that would justify their sacrifices. Specialized jargon was used to sift in-group members from out-group members. Jargon also destabilized followers, making them more influenceable. Followers were made to participate in shady sexual, financial, and criminal activity, all of which made them reprehensible to the outside world, thus, reinforcing the insider-outsider tension. And, of course, the creepiest ideas were introduced slowly–milk before meat!–and served with copious congratulations from the “inner ring” of followers.

Maybe in the modern day, a large group of followers would have developed a mental immune reaction to this pathogenic environment. Maybe in the modern day, the Internet would have served as an antibiotic to quickly and clearly identify the Mormon ideology as infected. Maybe the CES Letter would have been enough of a booster shot to pierce the thick fog of obedience that kept followers trundling miserably toward “Zion.” But the immune response to a new cult is always slow in developing, especially for those already burdened with other ideologies (like Millenarianism) that reinforce that new one (like Mormonism).

In Winter Quarters, though, there was little hope of untangling these mental knots. There was no body of literature on cult dynamics, no experts like Stephen Hassan or Amanda Montell to study. There was no I-escaped-from-the-FLDS-nightmare subgenre to read. There were no Netflix documentaries to show how cult leaders all use the same despicable lines to lure people into their ideology and then trap them beneath authoritarianism. There was no YouTube or Reddit on which to ask “AITA for asking my husband to spend one night with me in my tent when he’s spending 3 nights in a row with his new wife…?”

And that isolation made the ideological bacteria of Mormonism very very resistant to eradication. It made it very very resistant to reason. It made it very very resistant to common sense, conscience, spirituality, the outside world, and everything else.

And besides the isolation, it was being perpetuated by a newly vindicated sub-group of horny Church elders determined to live up to “their privileges” as Saints of the Most High God.* For women caught without immunity to such ideas, what could they do?

*A man “living up to his privileges” in Church-speak at this time, meant that he felt himself entitled to live out his sexual fantasy of polygamy with no “whining” from the women who had to put up with him.