Mormon Political Control in the West
THE Northwestern Christian Advocate says that the most serious of the sensational results of the recent political elections is the overwhelming defeat of the Republican candidate for mayor in Salt Lake City. This city has been of late years a Republican stronghold, and this sudden and complete reversal of political sentiment can mean nothing else than that the Mormon Church is directing the vote of its adherents in that State. “The gentiles declare,” says the Advocate, quoting the Salt Lake correspondent of the New York Sun, “that the Mormon Church has built up one of the strongest and most powerful political machines in the world;” and this machine, we are told, not only “controls all Utah elections, electing Democratic or Republican tickets at will,” but is planning “to hold the balance of power in the United States Senate by electing senators from Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon.” The failure of the efforts of non-Mormons to prevent the Mormon Church from securing political control in these States, says the Advocate, “should open the eyes of the American people to the peril which menaces these States and the nation.” The party which holds the “balance of power” in the national legislature is often able thereby to dictate terms to the government. The Advocate says that Senator-elect Smoot, of Utah, should be debarred from Congress because he, in common with other representatives of the Mormon hierarchy, has taken an oath inconsistent with allegiance to the United States, and places the authority of the church above that of the government. This oath is known as the “endowment oath,” and requires the one taking it to swear that he will avenge the blood of the Mormon “prophets” against the government of the United States, and teach the same obligation to his children; also that he will uphold the institution of polygamy. Such an oath is of course wholly contrary to the requirements of citizenship in the United States. The Mormon Church, however, is not the only church, nor the strongest numerically of any church, the hierarchy of which constitutes a secret-oath-bound organization. The papal hierarchy own an allegiance to their head in Rome which acknowledges that head to be the highest authority, both spiritual and political, on earth. The papacy is a union of church and state, an organization diametrically opposed in character to a republic, and is working to bend every other government to a conformity with itself. In its palmy days it dictated to kings and emperors, and it assumes the same authority to-day, boasting of its unchangeable character. In the German Reichstag the papal party, known as the “Center” party, has long held the “balance of power,” and by it the pope brought Bismarck to terms, and has made bargains with Emperor William through which the papacy is fast regaining power in the country of Martin Luther. What the Mormon Church is seeking to do here, the papacy has done there. There is indeed no church that can be trusted to keep out of politics save that which comprises the true followers of Him who declared, “My kingdom is not of this world.”