Faith and Betrayal Read Online Free Page A

century later would be relatively minor diseases and accidents, at least in Europe and the United States, were often lethal. Children died of afflictions as common as runny noses and diarrhea. Slight wounds turned gangrenous and fatal. Congenital deformities and genetic diseases beyond any treatment seemed the vengeance of an unpredictable God. Even for Jean Rio, a privileged woman with servants, it was a life with its share of hardship and uncertainty. Like her peers, she was raised to fear and worship God, to see religion as the only true deliverance from life’s random travails.
    In this era, one’s faith was defining, and it was expressed fulsomely, without shame or embarrassment. Agnostics and atheists were rare. Charles Darwin had not yet written
The
Origin of Species
challenging the simplistic biblical view of Creation. True believers accepted the Bible in literal terms— “felt as close to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and a host of other characters as they did to their own friends and relatives,” according to J.R.H. Moorman—and thought the Scriptures were infallible.
    Jean Rio saw the degraded condition of British life as a clear sign of the approaching end-time in biblical terms—a millennial expectancy creating a groundswell at the time. Offended by the greedy, uncaring attitude of a Church of England that defied reform, she sought a different path to spiritual salvation. Of keen intellect and compassion, hers would be a fecund mind for Mormon persuasion.
    Just as the Church of England was steeped in corruption and slow to recognize its crippling social irrelevance, religion in mid-nineteenth-century America was facing its own upheavals and transformations. With the evangelical movement of the 1820s, a rousing and muscular new spirituality had swept over most of the major denominations of America. New sects and new approaches were challenging the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others to faith and ritual. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of the many fledgling and often transitory movements born in the turbulence of the moment, a moment of frontier revivals, spiritual visitations, and widespread belief in magic and the occult. Growing out of this wider impulse, the Mormon Church as envisioned by its prophet and founder was to be a cooperative theocracy responsive to the social and spiritual needs of all mankind. Above all, the new religion was rooted in the fervent notion that the “latter days” were indeed at hand.
    Fueled by millennialist passions for deliverance and everlasting life, Mormonism was born in a time known as the Second Great Awakening. It was conceived by a charismatic young American farmer named Joseph Smith, who claimed to have had a vision in 1823 in which an illuminated angel named Moroni directed him to excavate some ruins near his home in Palmyra, in western New York. Smith said Moroni visited him three times and told him that God had selected him to restore the one true church in North America in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ. His first job, Smith said he was told, was to find a book inscribed on golden plates that Moroni had buried in nearby Cumorah fourteen centuries earlier. To assist Smith in translating the “reformed Egyptian” symbols on the tablets would be two crystal seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, buried with the sacred texts.
    The self-proclaimed prophet said he located and unearthed these golden plates on the designated night of September 22, 1827. He was then twenty-two. He said that by using the magic stones he was able to decipher the mysterious engravings, dictating the stories contained on the leaves to assistants. By April 1829, Smith, who was illiterate, had completed a 275,000-word manuscript. This
Book of Mormon,
named for the ancient military figure, was said to be based upon the journal of Mormon’s son, Moroni, the last diarist of the supposedly historic events.
    Full of heroes and villains, bloodshed and miracles,