Missouri Executive Order 44 (eat your heart out, George) was signed by Lilburn Boggs on October 23, 1838, and ordered that Mormons in the state be “exterminated” or exiled. This destroyed Boggs’ political career, but the order wasn’t formally rescinded until 1976 as a goodwill gesture by Governor Kit Bond. Zombie laws and orders are a hell of a drug that I imagine keep lawyers up at night.
Ah mormonism, the gift that keeps on giving trauma.
Mormonism is the end result of Protestant theology mingling with Capitalist economics.
The same experiment has produced Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, and dozens of other systems of social exploitation draped in religious clothing. Anywhere people need to believe an end to our industrial age self-flagellation is nigh, but cannot conceive of a society organized outside of theocratic principles, falls back into the same ritual of spiritualized mass marketing.
Funny story, Ol’ Joe was almost a socialist, but not quite. He was positively greedy for power, but he made some actual attempts at baking socialism into his cult’s doctrine in the early days.
They called it ‘The Law of Consecration’. When I was growing up, I was taught that the reason why communism keeps failing is because it could only work under a completely moral theocracy, so capitalism was our next best bet. It was just one of several lies I was told as a child.
The cult’s always been obsessed with scamming people out of their money. Smith was disingenuous about many things. The way he saw it, collective wealth meant that he could skim even more off the top under the guise of it being for the collective good. Just take a look at the Ensign Peak Investments lawsuits if you wanna see just how sincere they are about sharing anything with the rest of their followers. The leaders are self-dealing theocratic capitalist scum, it’s all prosperity gospel. It always has been.