Some religious beliefs are demonstrably false, while others strain credulity or are just plain implausible even if they can’t be completely disproven. But we’ve never argued that these beliefs can be put to some rational test to see if they amount to fraud. Somehow, a court in Britain is contemplating a change to our tradition of tolerating religious foolishness.
A disgruntled former Mormon has convinced an English court to file two summonses to appear against Thomas S. Monson, the current president of the Mormon Church.
Tom Phillips based his complaint on the Fraud Act of 2006, a British law that outlaws making a profit off of false representations. According to Phillips, this is precisely what the Mormon Church does — it uses statements it knows to be factually untrue in order to secure tithes from members of the Church.
The facts in question, court records show, are tenets of the Mormon faith, including that Joseph Smith translated The Book of Mormon from ancient gold plates, that Native Americans are descendants of a family of Israelites, and that death didn’t exist on this planet until 6,000 years ago.
“These are not statements of mere ‘beliefs’ or opinions or theories,” Phillips wrote. “They are made as actual facts and their truthfulness can be objectively tested with evidence.”
At a similar point in the development of Christianity, Celsus applied a rational test to the Church’s beliefs and found them wanting. It didn’t prevent the religion from spreading and eventually dominating all of Europe. But that’s not really the important thing. America is basically an answer to Europe’s inability to stop fighting over doctrinal differences. The solution was to allow people to believe whatever they want to, and to leave their congregations unmolested by the state. Are some simpletons separated from their money in a transaction that amounts to fraud?
Yes, of course. But, much more significantly, we stopped a cycle of religious violence that had lasted two hundred and fifty years. That the Book of Mormon was composed comparatively recently doesn’t really detract from its worth or truthfulness when compared to much older holy texts, it just seems that way. We tend to venerate things that last, so we marvel at the ruins of Greek and Roman civilization, but that doesn’t mean that their buildings were more real or more true than those built in the mid-19th Century.
It’s a mistake to single out one religion among many for making fraudulent claims. Policing that stuff has always turned out badly.