President -----
532 Emerson
Neenah, WI 54956
Bishop -----
712 E. Greenfield
Appleton, WI 54913
February 10, 2003
Dear Friends:
This letter is a formal request from our family that our names
be removed from the records of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). This decision was not prompted
by a personal slight or some other petty offense, but rather by
a shared conclusion that we no longer believe in the doctrines
or practices of the LDS Church. Our faith in Jesus Christ and
desire to follow Him remain unchanged, as does our commitment to
abide by the standards of conduct He prescribed. We simply
believe it impossible to follow Him within the constraints of
Mormonism.
Our family has been the beneficiary of many acts of kindness and
generosity by members of the Appleton Stake, and for this we
will always be grateful. It is our hope that the friendships we
have made with members of the LDS Church will endure, and we
will do all we can to ensure that they do.
It is appropriate to provide a very brief outline of the reasons
behind our decision to leave the LDS Church. They can be
organized into four categories: Doctrinal, organizational,
historical, and political.
Doctrinal
*We believe the biblical testimony that Jesus Christ, our
Creator and Redeemer, is and always has been God. We do not
believe that He is our “Elder Brother,” an individual like us
who is (in the words of a comment made during one of Will’s
Gospel Doctrine classes) “just a little further along in the
program” than we are.
*We believe that salvation is a gift of grace; that good works
are a reflection of God’s redemptive power operating through His
people; and that “exaltation” consists of being redeemed from
our sinful nature through God’s intervention, rather than
ascending, through our purported righteousness, to a status akin
to His.
*We accept the Bible’s teaching that the “law and the prophets
were until John [the Baptist]” and that through His atonement,
Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets. Accordingly, believers
need not go through a mortal intermediary (such as an LDS
“priesthood leader”) in order to have access to God.
Organizational
By design, LDS Church interposes an elaborate bureaucracy
between God and those who wish to follow Him. The operative
principle in Mormonism is that one supposedly can only follow
God by offering unconditional obedience to men. In politics,
this pernicious concept is called the “Leader Principle,” a
doctrine that has underwritten history’s bloodiest crimes. Its
spiritual consequences can be no less tragic.
The mechanisms of indoctrination and conformity within Mormonism
are uncomfortably similar to those we have studied in
totalitarian societies. There is little practical difference
between North Korean children singing hymns to the glory of
“Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il, and Mormon Primary children reciting
the mantra “Follow the Prophet, follow the Prophet, follow the
Prophet, don’t go astray….” In either case, the children are
being conditioned to place their conscience in escrow, impute a
God-like status to a man, and surrender their moral agency to a
human organization.
Perhaps the most effective – and certainly the most invasive –
of these mechanisms of social control is the temple recommend
interview, a practice with roots in the “Reformation” period of
Mormonism (about which more below). Responsible, sober adults
committed to living a Christian life should not be subjected to
the annual indignity of a lengthy, detailed inquiry regarding
their beliefs, associations, and private lives. We certainly
wouldn’t abide such treatment by agents of the government, and
there is no scriptural warrant for enduring such scrutiny as a
condition of religious fellowship.
Historical
As active Mormons seeking to invite others into the Church, we
often recited the scriptural principle that a tree is judged by
its fruits. When that standard is applied to the Church’s
history, the results aren’t particularly “faith-promoting.” What
follows is not pleasant, but such candor is necessary in order
to give clear expression to our views.
*During his lifetime, Joseph Smith gave equivocal and,
sometimes, flatly self-contradictory accounts of the “First
Vision.” Furthermore, many early leaders of the Church (Brigham
Young and John Taylor among them) seemed not to know about the
“First Vision” at all.
*The document called the “Book of Abraham” has been definitively
debunked as an artifact of Joseph Smith’s malicious imagination.
*Reliable documentation (including unimpeachably pro-Mormon
accounts) proves that Joseph Smith’s practice of “polygamy”
began years before he claimed to receive the “sealing power.”
The same sources also document that Joseph took as “plural
wives” women who were married to living spouses; that he
contracted polygamous “marriages” without his wife’s knowledge
or consent; and that his actions were illegal and cloaked in
secrecy and lies; the same is true of Brigham Young, John
Taylor, and other Mormon leaders, including those who continued
to practice polygamy following the 1890 “Manifesto.”
*That the Mormon temple ritual is largely derived from
Freemasonry is beyond dispute. That its original function was to
protect the criminal secrecy in which polygamy was practiced in
Nauvoo is a reasonable and compelling surmise. How the pre-1990
version of that ritual could be squared with the Book of
Mormon’s unambiguous condemnation of secret, oath-bound
societies was a question that long tormented Will (Korrin didn’t
undergo the ceremony until after 1990). He later realized that
while the temple ceremony served no celestial purpose,
its terrestrial purpose – binding Mormons to the Church
and their leaders at all hazards – was obvious, and dreadful.
*The doctrinal centerpiece of the above-mentioned Utah
“Reformation” was the hideous concept of “Blood Atonement.” The
sermons of Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant on this subject are
of a piece with the hateful outpourings of the Ayatollah Khomeni,
and utterly repellent to anyone whose soul harbors a particle of
Christian decency. While some responsible people are unconvinced
that the principles enunciated by Young and Grant were actually
put into practice, the fact that those principles were publicly
taught provides more than adequate grounds for rejecting them as
men of God.
*It was in the context of the Utah “Reformation” that the
atrocity called the “Mountain Meadows Massacre” took place, an
act of premeditated mass murder that was, until the Oklahoma
City bombing, the single bloodiest act of terrorism committed on
American soil. Recent scholarship proves that the massacre was
organized through priesthood channels, committed by Mormons
convinced that they acted with official approval, and
precipitated by the actions of Brigham Young. At the very least,
Brigham had guilty foreknowledge of the initial assault on the
Fancher Wagon Train, connived with local Indian leaders to
arrange it, and was an accessory after the fact to the final
massacre; at worst, he was as deeply involved in that September
11, 1857 crime as Osama bin Laden was in the attacks of
September 11, 2001.
To this day, the Church has never admitted these facts,
preferring instead to engage in Clintonian evasions, lawyerly
dissimulation, and special pleading. The Church cannot admit the
truth about Mountain Meadows, because that incident illustrates
the lethal consequences of the Mormon “Leader Principle” carried
to its logical conclusion.
Political
The butchers of Mountain Meadows acted on the principle “When
our leaders speak, the thinking has been done.” As Gordon B.
Hinckley and his associates cautiously but unmistakably lead the
LDS Church into the bosom of the New World Order, this variety
of docile subservience is being asked of honest, honorable, and
patriotic Latter-day Saints who would otherwise work to preserve
our liberty and national independence.
Will and Korrin vividly remember a conversation several years
ago during which a thoroughly decent, politically conservative
Mormon friend declared: “If we have a living Prophet, then
whatever he tells us to do must be right. So if President
Hinckley told me to take the Mark of the Beast, I’d do it,
because we’ve been told that our leaders can’t lead us astray –
and even if they were to do so, we’d be blessed for our
righteousness.”
The scenario described by our friend is becoming less
hypothetical every day. Since 1993, when the Church sent Elder
Nelson as its delegate to the UN-connected “Parliament of World
Religions,” the Church has drawn increasingly close to the worst
elements of the emerging global superstate.
*In 1995, the Tabernacle hosted the closing session of a UN
conference on the (effective abolition of the) family.
*During the 2002 Winter Olympics, President Hinckley
conspicuously endorsed UN Secretary General Kofi Annan – who has
the blood of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Christians on his
hands -- as a “good … wonderful man working to bring peace and
goodness to the world.”
*During the same Olympic Games, the Conference Center was lent
for use in a UN conference that featured Annan and other dubious
notables (such as pro-terrorist cleric Desmond Tutu of South
Africa).
*On February 9th of this year, the Tabernacle is to host the
second annual “Interfaith Roundtable Musical Tribute to the
Human Spirit,” an outgrowth of the UN-connected “interfaith”
movement. The event would bring together various Christian
denominations as well as Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu clerics for
music, prayer, and worship. Former Tabernacle Choir Director
Jerald Ottley explained: “Music is a way for people of different
faiths and beliefs to worship together.” To worship what,
exactly? The whole point of Christian fellowship is to be
separate from the world and the various types of idolatry that
pollute it: “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of
darkness, but rather reprove them” (Eph. 5:11). On that note --
*During the late 1990s, the LDS Foundation (operated by the
Office of the Presiding Bishopric) gave a sizeable donation to
Hare Krishnas in central Utah to build a Hindu temple. Among the
diabolical doctrines that hijack souls and engender human
tragedy, Hinduism is quite possibly the worst. It is also the
polluted fountain from which flows the “New Age” movement that
is central to the UN’s religious agenda. (It’s worth mentioning
in this connection that the 1993 Parliament of World Religions,
to which the Church sent Elder Nelson, began as a celebration
mounted by Hindus to celebrate the centennial of their
missionary outreach to the United States.)
*President Hinckley has repeatedly addressed meetings of the
World Affairs Council of Southern California, emphasizing the
fact that he leads a large contingent of honest, hardworking,
self-effacing people who gladly do as they are told by their
religious leaders. This message was certainly a welcome one to
the power brokers who attend such elite gatherings.
*With the active support of the Church leadership, BYU has
organized a large and well-funded network of UN-accredited
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to lobby the UN on behalf
of “pro-family” policies. This approach actually fortifies the
UN’s claim to be a legislative body with a global mandate. It’s
entirely possible that the one thing that could save the UN from
well-deserved oblivion will be the misdirected efforts of
Mormons and other decent people to “reform” the body and make it
“work.” These well-intentioned people are effectively rebuilding
the Tower of Babel, convinced that by doing so they are engaged
in God’s work.
The foregoing list of reasons for our decision to withdraw from
the LDS Church is sufficient, but not exhaustive. We ask that
our decision be honored and that our names be removed from the
Church’s records immediately. To expedite this matter, we
provide the following names and biographical information:
William Norman Grigg
b. February 4, 1963 in Burley, Cassia County, Idaho
Korrin Weeks Grigg
b. September 15, 1970 in Ft. Worth, Arlington County, Texas
William Wallace Grigg
b. November 28, 1997 in Neenah, Winnebago County, Wisconsin
Isaiah Athanasius Grigg
b. July 1, 1999 in Neenah, Winnebago County, Wisconsin
Jefferson Leonidas Grigg
b. March 6, 2001 in Neenah, Winnebago County, Wisconsin
Katrina Antigone Grigg
b. January 20, 2003 in Neenah, Winnebago County, Wisconsin
Respectfully,
William Norman Grigg
Korrin Weeks Grigg
(On behalf of our entire family)