'Saved or Damned' : Tracing a Persistent Protestantism in Early Mormon Thought
BYU Studies
Summer 1985
25
1985
85-103
"In the July 1838 issue of the Elders' Journal, Joseph Smith responded to series of questions which he said were daily and hourly asked by all classes of people. To the question "Will everybody be damned but Mormons?" he replied, "Yes, and a great portion of them, unless they repent and work righteousness." For years, I have assumed, along with others, that Joseph's response was rather tongue-in-cheek. Actually, as we shall see, he was very much in earnest and was simply reflecting a sentiment widely held among the early Saints. Benjamin Winchester, for example, reasoned that as "Mormonism" was the restoration of the New Testament Christianity "all who reject this will be damned, if the scriptures are true." Such categorical statements were indeed rooted in the scriptures, particularly passages like Mark 16:16: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall damned." One finds this verse frequently and unequivocally invoked in the early literature. But what of the honest and honorable of other churches? A Times and Seasons editorial answered bluntly that it did not matter "how often a man prayed, how much alms he gave, how often he fasted, or how punctual he was in paying his tithes, if he believed not, he would be damned." Such either/or thinking did belong to some fanatic fringe; it permeated the membership from the Prophet on down. In a Nauvoo address Joseph referred to the various professors of religion who do not believe in revelation & the oracles of God and said, "I tell you in the name of Jesus Christ they will be damned & when you get into the eternal world you will find it to be so they cannot escape the damnation of hell." A week later, he singled out the Presbyterians as an example and declared, "If they reject our voice they shall be damned." For modern Latter-day Saints accustomed to extolling the vision of the three degrees of glory as the antidote to the confining polarities of Protestant conceptions of the afterlife, the idea that early Mormons spoke almost entirely in terms of either being saved in the celestial kingdom or else being damned, rather than discussing terrestrial or telestial salvation, seems foreign indeed. Yet it is the purpose of this article to trace within Mormon thought the persisting lineaments of traditional Salvationist rhetoric and to demonstrate that the vision of the three degrees of glory did not begin to alter such notions until the end of the Nauvoo period." [Publisher's abstract]