April 27, 2016 Show with “A Tribute to William Norman Grigg”

On April 12, 2017, a dear old friend of mine unexpectedly entered

into eternal peace with his beloved Savior, Jesus Christ, at the age of 54.

His name is William Norman Grigg, a Mormon convert to the true Christ and true Gospel of

the Scriptures.

He was former senior editor of the New American Magazine, an outspoken Christian libertarian

and unwavering constitutionalist, and a frequent guest on the old Iron Sharpens Iron

radio broadcast airing out of Long Island, New York.

It is in loving memory of Will that I now air two one -hour interviews with him back to back.

I hope you are as blessed listening to them as I was conducting them.

William Norman Grigg will certainly be missed, but our loss is Heaven's gain.

Welcome to Iron Sharpens Iron.

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facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27, 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one

man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and

direct you to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you,

the listener, with your own questions.

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Good afternoon, Long Island, New York, Connecticut, and those listening internationally over the internet.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron.

The attack on the World Trade Center here in New York City was not the only massacre conducted by

religious fanatics following a false prophet on the date September 11th.

Today we're going to be discussing an entirely different massacre that occurred on September

11th, 1857, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, involving the brutal murder of

120 women, men, and children by a Mormon militia.

These innocent victims were immigrants, mostly from Arkansas, traveling to California, who had the misfortune of

passing through the Utah Territory during the infamous Utah War between Mormon settlers and the United

States federal government.

And we're going to be discussing the Mountain Meadows Massacre today with our guest, William Norman Grigg, who is

a former high priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, the Mormons, who converted to

evangelical Christianity by the grace of God.

And we are excited today to be addressing this very fascinating topic.

We'll be right back after these messages with William Norman Grigg.

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Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnsen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron.

And as I just announced, today our guest is my friend William Norman Grigg, one of my very favorite

guests on Iron Sharpens Iron.

William Norman Grigg is a former high priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the

Mormons, who converted to evangelical Christianity.

And we're going to be discussing the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a horrific event in our nation's history, which ironically

occurred on September 11th in 1857, involving the brutal murder of 120 men, women, and

children by a Mormon militia.

And as I said earlier, these innocent victims were immigrants, mostly from Arkansas, traveling to California, who had the

misfortune of passing through the Utah Territory during the infamous Utah War between Mormon

settlers and the United States federal government.

These Mormon assassins only spared the lives of 17 of the youngest children.

And this is a timely interview today with William Norman Grigg, due to the extremely controversial motion picture,

September Dawn, starring Academy Award winning actor John Voight, which is scheduled to debut

on the 24th of August.

But welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron, William Norman Grigg.

Chris, thanks so much for having me again, it's a blessing to be with you.

Yes, and it's always a blessing to have you on the program.

Well, before we even go into the topic at hand, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, just briefly give our

listeners some background about your conversion from Mormonism to Biblical Christianity, because some of our listeners

may not have heard your interview in the past.

And we are now recording our programs on downloadable

MP3s, thanks to Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona.

So this will have a lot farther exposure, I believe, than your previous interviews.

Well, that's very good to know.

As you mentioned, I was raised in the LDS church.

I was adopted at the age of six weeks by a Mormon couple.

And they are among the nicest, most decent people you'd ever want to meet.

I think there's no man I've ever met finer than my father.

And my mother has helped me in every way.

And they are fifth generation Mormons.

And at the age of six weeks, I was adopted into that family and baptized in the Mormon church at age eight,

and at age 12 became a deacon, which was an Aaronic or Levitical priesthood as the Mormon church designates that

office, and served a Mormon mission to Mexico and Guatemala in 1982 to

1984.

And it was while I was in Guatemala, on October the 11th, not September 11th, October the 11th

of 1983 that I was reading in the book of Luke, and specifically about the experience

of Jesus in the garden, when it suddenly occurred to me that I was

completely incapable of saving myself or playing any significant role in the

transaction whereby my sins would be expunged and I would be made worthy in God's sight.

And as a Mormon, I had been taught, and I had taught as a Mormon missionary, that salvation consists

of a transaction in which God does most of the work, but you have to do a certain portion of the

work in order to be saved and to be put on a course for what is called exaltation or Godhood.

And it was impressed upon my soul at the time that inasmuch as I was going to be saved, it was God who was

going to be doing that, that I was never going to be a being like God.

I suddenly understood the personal dimension of salvation that I had been paying lip service

to, which is specifically that Jesus died for me.

And it obviously changed the way I looked at Jesus, because

I had never really fully come to understand Him as my Lord, my God, and my Savior.

And it changed the way I looked at Mormonism, because Mormonism is centered on Joseph Smith and the works and

poems of Joseph Smith and not the saving role of Jesus Christ.

And from the moment that I had that experience, I had really no interest in talking about Joseph Smith.

I wanted to be talking about Jesus and teaching about Jesus.

And it took me a number of years, the better part of two decades as a matter of fact, fully to reconcile myself to

the fact that Mormonism was preaching a gospel as

it styles the doctrines that it teaches that was completely foreign to what the Bible taught about

the person, the role, the identity, the teachings, and the saving influence,

the saving work of Jesus Christ.

And it wasn't until actually I had been married in the Mormon temple and started to raise children in the Mormon church that I came to realize that

I simply couldn't be part.

Of it.

I couldn't see our children having the same experiences that I had, where I was being

raised in a system where my future had been planned for me and thinking was to be kept to the minimum,

and that it seemed to be a tremendously cruel thing to inflict that on our children.

But more importantly, I didn't want them to be alienated from the true Jesus as taught in

the Bible, whom I had come to know at the most unlikely time of my life, which is while I was serving a Mormon mission.

And through the grace of God, my wife Corinne and I and our then four, now five children

were able formally to leave the Mormon church in 2003.

Yeah, well, it blesses me every time I hear your testimony.

It's obvious you get very moved by retelling the story of your conversion, and I praise God

that you have not taken your conversion for granted.

It's still something that's very precious to you, so much so that you are moved every time I hear you

explain how the Lord saved you.

In fact, we have to have you on once again for a full hour just to give

the longer version of your testimony, because the last time that you were on, that was truly one of the most

moving programs I can remember ever doing.

So basically this, just so any Mormons who may be listening don't get the wrong idea about William

Norman Grigg, you don't have some axe to grind about the Mormon church that you were treated horribly or something.

This is just because of the fact that you discovered that the true Jesus Christ and the true gospel of

scripture, and you came to realize that the Mormon church theologically was wrong on every single major point,

really, of theology.

It started with the most important point, which is who is Jesus Christ?

Yes.

The Mormon church teaches that Jesus Christ is just like us, but he's a little bit further along in the program, as if salvation were

arranged through a multi -level marketing scheme.

And Mormons, I hasten to point out, are among the most hard -working, decent, talented,

intelligent people you'd ever encounter, and I love them.

They are my people in the same sense that Paul would refer to the Jews as his people.

And as Paul said of the Jews, I say of the Mormons, it is my wish that they would all be saved.

And it is my earnest hope that God will make some use of me in bringing these wonderful

people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Well, it's very interesting how, I think in only two generations or so, two, perhaps three generations, the

Mormons went from being a despised and feared cult to

being embraced as a part of Americana.

As much as baseball and apple pie, really.

It's a remarkable transformation.

I can't really think of the likes of it in recorded human history, at least Western history.

But the Mormons at the time, immediately following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, were looked upon

with a type of skepticism and hostility not all that dissimilar to the attitude we have toward

the Taliban.

And the parallels are not merely facile, they're actually quite fascinating.

Here you have a desert -dwelling, polygamous theocracy that had been

involved in a relationship with the central government in Washington, D .C.

Brigham Young had been a federal, though he was a federal government, the territorial governor of Utah, and

he had also been the Indian agent.

And by virtue of making him the Indian agent for Utah, he was able to arrange with some of the renegade

Indian bands to make sorties against people who were traveling through Utah

to get to California.

And according to Will Bagley's book, Blood of the Prophets, Will Bagley being a lay historian from Utah who

had remarkable access to a lot of the documentary evidence that had not been previously accessible,

one of Brigham Young's objectives in helping to plan the Mountain Meadows Massacre was to demonstrate to

Washington at a time when there was a low -grade war between the Utah Mormon government and the federal government of

Washington, that the Mormons controlled access to California by controlling the overland routes, and that

by allying themselves with renegade Indians, they could attack wagon trains and other ventures

that were being conducted at the time to take emigrants from the United States

out to California.

And so there are some really interesting parallels here because there are elements of the Taliban who had been allied with Washington against the

Soviet Union during the 1980s.

And as well, you have here this horrific spectacle of mass murder being conducted

ritualistically in the name of religion.

The original plan, according to Bagley, was that the Indians would conduct the massacre.

They would be a deniable asset of the Mormon theocracy, but it would be

pretty clear that the Mormon theocracy could control the Indians.

At least that would be the subtextual message that would be sent to Washington.

But the Indians couldn't take out the Fancher train.

The leaders of the wagon train, their last name was Fancher.

And the Fancher train was led by some very experienced people who had been on many

previous expeditions.

And so they were able to withstand the initial assault of the Indians.

And the assault was being directed or at least in some sense assisted by Mormon leaders who were

on scene directing the attacks.

And so on the final day of the siege, September 11th, the local Mormon leaders,

under a flag of truce, had negotiated an arrangement whereby the Fancher train would be let out of its

defensive position.

And what happened was that the women and children were separated from the men, and each of the men was

accompanied at his immediate side by an armed Mormon.

They were disarmed.

This is supposedly the condition under which they were going to be released by the Indians.

And as soon as the men were separated from the women and children, one of the Mormon leaders said, Brethren, do your duty to

Israel.

And at that point, the Mormon standing next to a male member of the Fancher party turned and shot that

male member of the Fancher party.

And then the massacre began where Indians and Mormons alike set upon

the women and children and killed them, all of them, except for 17 small children

who were considered to be beneath the age of accountability, which is eight years old in Mormon theology.

And by doing so, supposedly they were sparing innocent blood.

If you were to kill somebody above the age of eight, the assumption was in Mormon theology to be killing a

sinner.

But somebody beneath the age of eight, below the age of eight, was considered to be not accountable before God.

How nice of them.

Oh, yeah, very thoughtful and discriminating in that respect.

But there were children younger than the age of eight who were killed.

There was a mishap, a really fascinating incident that occurred in 1999 when an

excavation was taking place out in the region next to the Mountain Meadows Memorial

there in southern Utah.

The backhoe unearthed a shallow grave that contained some of the remains of the victims.

And the immediate reaction of the part of the state government of Utah was just to bury back up again.

But of course, that would have been a crime because it's a crime scene and you can't tamper with a crime scene under state

law in Utah and most other places.

So they allowed some forensic scientists of the CSI variety, if you will, to

inspect the remains that were contained in some of these shallow graves.

And they found, among other things, the skeletal remains of very small children who must have been younger than eight

who had been dispatched by a single gunshot, apparently at point blank range to the head.

That wasn't the sort of thing that would have happened if you had Indians besetting these people with tomahawks and

knives and so forth.

I mean, that was clear evidence that one of the Mormon militiamen had dispatched the victim

in that fashion.

And so obviously you're dealing here with a premeditated mass murder that was

conducted partially for reasons of state, because once again, the Mormon theocracy was in a

relationship that was somewhat hostile with the government in Washington.

But it was something propelled by a religious ideology.

And one of the really important contributing factors to the hostility that led to the Mountain Meadows Massacre

was that several months earlier, Parley P. Pratt, a very beloved Mormon apostle,

had been tracked down and killed in Arkansas by Hector McLean, who was the legal husband of a woman

Parley P. Pratt had converted to Mormonism and then had taken into his polygamous seraglio.

And Hector McLean was an unbalanced man.

He was an unbalanced, violent man who decided to track down Parley P. Pratt and kill him.

And that deed was accomplished in Arkansas.

And according to Will Bagley, Hector McLean's wife was present in July, the July 24th

celebration of the arrival of the Mormons to Salt Lake.

She was there on the dais next to Brigham Young.

And that emotional resonance, this outrage over what was perceived as the martyrdom

of the beloved apostle Parley P. Pratt, who, by the way, is an ancestor of mine.

My father is a direct descendant of Parley P. Pratt.

I don't remember which of his wives.

Now, that's the miracle of polygamy is that you have a rather wide ancestral net of that.

Sort.

But Parley P.

Pratt was well -beloved.

And when his quote -unquote widow, who, of course, was his paramour, not his widow in

any legitimate sense, was there amid the sense that the Gentile government

was going to come into the Utah Valley, their place of refuge, and wipe them out.

There was a real war psychosis that took hold of the Mormons.

And so this was something that was cultivated and diligently nurtured by the Mormon leadership, because every

totalitarian or authoritarian government just loves to cultivate a sense of siege on the

part of its subject population.

In fact, let's pick right up on that when we return from a break, William.

Sure.

Be right back after these messages with more of William Norman Grigg and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

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Welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron.

If you've just tuned us in, we are interviewing today William Norman Grigg, a former high priest

in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints who converted to evangelical Christianity.

And he is addressing with us today the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a horrific event in our nation's history

which ironically occurred on September 11th in 1857 involving the brutal murder of

120 men, women, and children by a Mormon militia.

William, where we left off, you were talking about the siege mentality that was being cultivated by the

Mormons at this time.

Well, starting about a year before the massacre, actually as early as 1855

or 1854, Brigham Young and his counselor Jedediah Grant

had been preaching a series of sermons about sifting out the people for their righteousness, the idea that

there had been a number of reverses in their existence.

Just take a look at the history of the Mormon Church.

It really is pretty much fraught with all kinds of adversity, much of it self -inflicted.

Most of the persecution that they endured, I believe, consists of pretty much standard museum

-quality exhibits of the type of thing that happens when innocent people get the worst of fights that their leaders pick with

others.

And Joseph Smith, from the very beginning of Mormonism, had been perceived as a very

presumptuous, arrogant, and pushy man.

And when they moved from location to location, Joseph Smith would conjure out a

revelation declaring that said location was to be the God -given inheritance of the

Mormon people.

And, of course, that didn't sit well with the people who were already living there.

That happened in Missouri in 1831, and that resulted in about seven years of intercommunal

warfare that was just horrible.

If you remember, Missouri, in the years leading up to the Civil War, was the spectacle

of all kinds of violence of the sort that you would later associate with places like Beirut and Bosnia.

And the Mormons ended up in the middle of this.

And so, often, there was an inclination on the part of the Mormons already to feel some of the siege by the larger world of the

Gentiles, as they were constantly referred to.

And so, the Mormon Reformation of the 1850s focused on the idea that they had to purify themselves,

they had to be rebaptized, they had to reassert their temple oaths, which is something that had started Nauvoo

after the temple was completed.

I believe it was completed following the death of Joseph Smith, or it was never fully completed.

That would have been in 1844.

One of the things that Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant both preached about very prolifically was blood

atonement, the idea being that there are some sins that are so serious.

This goes back to the nature of Mormon salvation doctrine that I alluded to in the first segment.

There are some sins so serious that the blood of Christ cannot avail when someone

seeks salvation.

And so, in order to accomplish salvation, someone guilty of a sin of this sort, which could be murder,

adultery, ironically enough, or apostasy from the Mormon faith, in order

to seek salvation, it was necessary that the supplicant allow his blood to be shed so that

it can compensate for the fact that the blood of Christ is inadequate to cover that sin.

Now, if there are sins the blood of Christ cannot atone for, then we can't be

confident, we cannot have faith that the blood of Christ can atone for any sin.

You see, the point is, that's not what the Bible teaches.

You know, that's something that's not unique to Mormonism, but is certainly distinctive in the American sense of Mormonism.

There are cognate teachings that you can find, for instance, in some strains of Islam.

And you can find other cultic movements that preach very similar concepts, the idea that there's a certain type of

altruism that one must display by being willing to kill somebody in order for that person to be saved eventually.

There are some unfortunate things in Christian history where people have succumbed to that same delusion, but this is something that was being

taught in 1855 -1856 in what was called the Mormon Reformation.

And of course, when it became clear that the Mormon priesthood government in the territory of Utah

was unwilling to submit to civil authority, Washington became concerned, and hostility began to

escalate between Salt Lake City and Washington.

And at the time, 1857, when all these events sort of coalesced, you had

on top of that the death of Parley P. Pratt by Hector MacLean.

Parley P. Pratt had made a way with Hector MacLean's wife, converted her to Mormonism,

taken her on as his ninth polygamous wife.

And Hector MacLean, being a violent, unbalanced man, stalked Parley P. Pratt all the way from San Francisco to

Arkansas, where he killed Parley P. Pratt.

And then Hector MacLean's widow reportedly was there in July of 1857

as the sanctified widow of the late departed apostle.

And so by this time, there was something, as I said, akin to a war psychosis that had gripped the Utah

Mormon community, and it was cultivated by the Mormon leadership.

George Smith, another apostle, he was somebody who was sort of a vainglorious individual.

He wore a girdle and a toupee, and he had false teeth and glasses.

And some of the Indians he dealt with referred to him as the man who comes apart.

Sounds like a televangelist.

Yeah, really.

He was a type of televangelist.

This individual, known by the Indians as the man who comes apart, did the circuit -riding preaching

tours of the settlements down through southern Utah, where he was talking about, among other things, blood

atonement and the evil of the Gentile world, and how the time had come for a

confrontation between God's people, the Mormons, as they styled themselves, the Gentiles, and how

perhaps someday in the near future, you would be using the blood of the Gentiles to water your

fruit trees.

That's a particular illustration that he used that I found to be particularly offensive.

And all this was coalescing just as this wagon train showed up from Arkansas in the late

summer of 1857.

And the rumors started to circulate, and I have a distant ancestor who was involved in

circulating these rumors, that this Arkansan wagon train contained members of the Missouri

Wildcats, who supposedly boasted that they had killed and otherwise oppressed Mormons in

Missouri, that they had raped Mormon women, that they supposedly had the very gun that was used to kill Joseph and Hyrum

Smith in July of 1844, and so forth.

There's not so much as a particle of truth to any of those rumors, but they had been circulated in the

summer of 1857, and they have been more or less canonized through repetition in

Mormon folk history.

The idea being that this was a degenerate band of wastrels, that they were disreputable

people, they were violent, they were abusive, and that they boasted about doing horrible things to Mormons.

None of this is true.

As a matter of fact, a fellow by the name of Ronald Esplin—actually, I think it was Richard Turley—Ronald Esplin and Richard

Turley are Mormon Church historians who are putting out the Mormon Church's version of what happened on the morning of

September 11, 1857, in the forthcoming book.

And they have both admitted that there's no truth to any of these rumors about the misconduct by the

Arkansans immigrants as they reached the Salt Lake Valley.

It was just their misfortune—or not the Salt Lake Valley, it was Utah—it was their misfortune that they happened to be Gentiles in a wagon

train approaching Utah at a time when Utah was being primed to hate Gentiles and to

expect war with the Gentiles.

Everywhere they went, they were denied forage, they were denied supplies, they were denied the opportunity to trade and

conduct commerce, to resupply the wagon train.

This is a decree that was set up by Brigham Young.

They were not to trade with the Gentiles.

And those who actually went so far as to do so were punished, often quite brutally.

There were a couple of instances in, I believe, Spanish Fork, Utah, where on one occasion a man who

actually sold, I think it was onions, to a member of the Fancher wagon train was beaten and

punished by his local church officials because he was trading with the Gentiles.

But they were driven down to this remote and fairly inaccessible place near Cedar City,

Utah, called Mountain Meadows.

And the Mormon priesthood leadership of the Cedar City Stake, working

under the guidance of Salt Lake City—this is what Will Bagley has documented—they knew

that this wagon train was to be used up.

And the idea, once again, was that the Paiute Indians were supposed to conduct the attack,

but because they weren't adequate to the task, the Mormons, who were more or less backing them up and giving them

advice and direction, took the matter in hand themselves and consummated the dirty deed.

There's a journal entry that Will Bagley located and published in his book in which

Brigham Young is talking with an Indian leader and offers them the cattle and the wealth

contained in that wagon train, specifically referring to the Fancher party wagon train.

And the only reason he would do this, obviously, was so as to induce that Indian leader and

his band to attack that wagon train and plunder it.

And the Indian leader in question, whose name eludes me right now, was somewhat reluctant to do so.

I mean, he thought that the Americans had been treating them quite well, but there were some elements of

the Paiute tribe who were willing to carry this out.

So they basically hired assassins, the Indians.

Yeah, they didn't really want to be doing the dirty work for the Mormon hierarchy.

And that was the theme, by the way, that you could see in Brigham Young's speeches of the period.

He talked about Brother Lemuel, and that refers to the Book of Mormon passage where Laman and

Lemuel, who were the older brothers of the main character Nephi, Nephi being the good, righteous brother, Laman

and Lemuel being the rebellious brothers.

Laman and Lemuel were cursed by God and smitten with a dark skin as a token of divine disfavor.

And they're supposedly the ancestors of the American Indians.

And as it happens, I am what Mormons call a Lamanite.

That is the Mormon expression for an American Indian, a Native American, a Mexican of Indian ancestry.

I'm a dark brown individual who has that ancestry.

And that played a role in my perceptions of the Mormon Church, because I found it puzzling that God would color code

people for righteousness.

It seems a summarily unscriptural concept.

But in any case, Brother Lemuel, the Indians, were supposedly going to be the strong arm of the Mormon

hierarchy in rebuking the iniquitous government of the Gentiles.

And we can see from the documentation in Will Bagley's book that there were covert plans being made to

bring this about that led to Mountain Meadows.

So basically, this wagon train could have been any non -Mormon group, and they would

have been massacred anyway.

Probably.

In this case, because they came from Arkansas, which is where Parley P. Pratt had been killed, there was

that much more envenomed reaction on the part of the Mormons to this particular wagon train.

And the fact that Arkansas, of course, borders on Missouri, and that led to speculation that there were Missourians

who were part of that train, that added another layer of rancor, if you will, to the perception of the Mormons

as those wagon trains showed up.

I do think it's interesting to point out that the Fanchers, the brothers who led that wagon train, were of French

ancestry, and they were Reformed Christians.

They were descended from Huguenots who survived the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Wow.

Boy, that is a family that has a little bit of baggage in its genealogy.

Wow, I never heard that before.

Yeah, that's another thing underscored in Will Bagley's very fine book and a couple of other sources I've seen where they talk about the

lineage of the Fancher party, that you have people who survived the hideous, horrible,

world -historic atrocity called the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, who end up in the United States

and get wiped out by a group of Mormons on September 11, 1857.

What's really interesting about that particular date, by the way, is that on exactly the same day, or within a

24 -hour period of the Mount Meadows Massacre, there was a steamship that sank in

the Gulf of Mexico, called the Esa Central America, that contained a rather large

quantity of gold that was being taken to eastern banks in order to help finance some of the

agricultural businesses that were then thriving.

And so you had this really weird juxtaposition where suddenly it looked as if people couldn't travel the overland routes to

California.

And the Esa Central America journey started out with people in California going across the Isthmus and

into the Gulf to get to Florida.

It seemed like you couldn't travel on the sea lanes, either, because your steamships are going to sink.

And it led to a mini -depression.

These two events together really threw a scare into people, the same sort of way that our September 11th threw a scare into people about

air travel and other means of transportation.

And it had that kind of emotional impact for a lot of people.

They were really concerned about the possibility that until this fanaticism was arrested and

somehow dealt with, that really the country was going to be very badly off.

And that makes it all the more dramatic to see that within a couple of generations, Mormons were being brought into the mainstream, and now there's a

university named after Brigham Young.

If you were to put yourself in the mind of an American circa, say, 1861 or 1870 or

so, the fact that Brigham Young has a university named after him would strike

that American as being as bizarre as if you could look 100 years in the future and see a university named after

Osama Bin Laden.

Yeah, or Hitler High.

Yeah, exactly.

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Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnsen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, and we are interviewing William Norman Grigg, a former

high priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, who converted to

evangelical Christianity, and William is addressing the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and this is

largely due to the fact that there is a movie coming out this month, debuting this month on

August 24th, actually, called September Dawn, starring Academy Award -winning actor

John Voight, and I'm very eager to see this movie.

I don't know how accurate it is.

Obviously, I haven't seen it yet, and I don't believe you've seen any preview of it, have you, William?

I've seen very short previews of the film, and I've read a couple of fairly extensive interviews with

the director, and the thing that I find really interesting is that while they have

created for John Voight a character who is extraneous to the historical setting

as a way of just, I guess, helping the audience identify with what's going on, the character John Voight plays is a fictive

character.

For the most part, they have hewn pretty closely to the actual record, particularly whenever Brigham Young is

actually speaking.

From what the director said, and I haven't seen the film, so I can't attest to this firsthand, but he said that all the lines of

dialogue spoken by Brigham Young in this film are documentable.

They're taken either from the publicly available sermons, which were

digested into the Journal of Discourses, which was an authoritative chronology and

authoritative record of the public sermons, the tabernacle, and elsewhere, or they're taken from diary journal entries that are

contemporaneous to the period.

The role of Brigham Young is being played by Terrence Stamp, which is sort of interesting because he played Zod,

the great antagonist of Superman's father in Superman II.

I don't know if you remember that film.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

He's apparently making a very fine living playing megalomaniac like Zod and Brigham Young, but

he's, I think, an Academy Award -winning British actor.

Sorry about that.

What I understand, the Brigham Young character will be heard preaching

blood atonement sermons and such like, talking about the supposed virtue of hewing down

apostates and Gentiles, splitting their throats so that their blood may be spilled on the ground

and ascend as an incense to the Almighty so as to provide them with some hope of

redemption.

It's purely macabre stuff, but it's all historically accurate.

That's very much faithful to Mormonism of that period.

Now, although you and I would view presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a liberal, one can't

help but wonder if, since this is a Hollywood production, that this movie would

never have been made, perhaps, unless who was a Republican candidate for presidency was a Mormon.

The timing just seems to be very interesting.

Wouldn't you agree?

William?

We've lost our guest.

I believe we have our guest back online.

Will, are you there?

Will Gregg, are you there?

I think we are now reconnected with William Gregg, correct?

Yes, we are.

Yes, I was starting to wonder if Mitt Romney's campaign volunteers had cut the lines to your phone or

something because you went dead immediately when I was somewhat tongue -in

-cheek, but actually somewhat seriously suggesting the possibility that this movie was created just

because of the fact that we have a Republican candidate for president who's a Mormon, and although you and I would view him

as a liberal, the Hollywood is known for their hatred of

anyone who was a Republican, regardless of what their ideology is.

Yeah, that much is certain.

John Voight, by the way, considers himself to be some kind of conservative, which, frankly, is ludicrous.

I mean, here's somebody whose breakthrough is an X -rated role in Midnight Cowboy.

Yeah, but he could have changed his ideology since then.

Yeah, sort of a Mark Foley -style Republican or something of that sort, I don't know, but

he was asked that question by Robert Novak, the columnist for the Chicago Sun -Times syndicate a number of weeks ago

after the film September Dawn, or at least a preliminary cut of the film, was

screened for the Motion Picture Association of America, and what John Voight said is, well, no,

I'm a conservative, but I don't really want to be doing any injury to any of the Republican candidates, and he said he

doesn't have anything against Mitt Romney as a man or as a politician.

He said, however, that he thinks that it's timely and necessary to take a serious look at what

happens when you're dealing with the fusion of politics and religious fanaticism, where you have a sense that

somebody who is anointed by God has the right to rule over others and to impose his

will through terror, which is what he sees happening during the reign of Brigham Young, and I think that's a very accurate

perception of what it was like to be living in the Utah Territory under the reign of Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant and

people of that ilk.

You were making reference earlier to the setback into the school of Catholicism, the idea that there's no legitimate pope for

quite a while in the Roman Catholic Church.

Well, not commenting upon that specific controversy, I think it's interesting that in Mormon fundamentalism you find a very

similar perspective on the prophetic succession in

the Mormon Church.

I mean, Brigham Young was the successor to Joseph Smith, and the Mormon Church today claims that

there was a discontinuity between, say, 100 A .D. and

1830 when Joseph Smith organized the Mormon Church, which they claim is the restoration of the original primitive

church founded by Jesus Christ and led by his apostles and disciples.

But they say that since 1830 there's been an unbroken continuity from Joseph Smith to Gordon B. Hinckley, but there are those

in the fundamentalist community who say that, no, that thread was broken when the church repudiated polygamy in 1890.

And it only repudiated polygamy under the threat of being expropriated by the federal government,

and it did so, the Mormon Church, as part of a grand bargain to allow Utah to achieve statehood a

few years later.

But it was also still practicing polygamy, sabrosa.

You had people who were still going out and contracting polygamous unions as late as the

19 -teens or even into the 1920s.

And off of that movement has budded a number of fundamentalist communities who are really much more

faithful to Mormonism as practiced by Brigham Young than the current

mainstream Mormon Church represented by Gordon B. Hinckley and increasingly represented in the public mind by

Mitt Romney, whose father, by the way, was a polygamous Mormon.

Who, forgive me, his father was not.

His father was his grandfather.

That would be a news item, wouldn't it?

That would be breaking news.

George Romney, who ran for the presidency in the 1960s, had been a polygamous.

No, it was his grandfather who lived in the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico,

where a lot of the polygamous Mormons sought refuge after 1890 or the early years of the 20th

century.

And the colonies in northern Mexico are really an interesting Moss -Easley -Cantina

type environment.

You remember that line from Star Wars about the Moss -Easley spaceport being a

wretched hive of scum and villainy?

Well, the Mormon colonies are a little like that, because on the one hand, you have relatively respectable people who

no longer practice polygamy and who are trying to live lives of

decency and uprightness.

On the other hand, you've got some elements of the LeBaron clan and other really hyper -violent,

serious Mormon fundamentalists who see nothing at all amiss in practicing blood atonement and

doing all the other things that characterize Mormonism in the pure, unalloyed malignance

of its original incarnation under Brigham Young.

And it was out of that ambit that the Romney family, interestingly enough, came from.

And if people poke around in that a little bit, they'll be somewhat mortified with some of the things they'll find out.

Behind the facade of Mitt Romney, who's a gregarious, engaging guy, he looks like the

world's oldest living Osmond brother, or sort of like what Ted Danson would look like if Ted

Danson hadn't lived a life of such dissipation.

He's somebody who really does put a photogenic and appealing face on Mormonism, which is why

he's so valuable to the Mormon hierarchy and why this film is somewhat problematic to Mitt Romney's

campaign chances, as Novak pointed out.

There are a lot of people who are very wealthy and very influential in the upper realms of business

and politics who are very devout Mormons, who are no doubt very upset about this film,

because if it finds any traction, any commercial traction this summer, that's going to be a difficult thing, because it's

not exactly your standard popcorn epic.

If this film does find its audience, however, it's going to have an impact on the way people perceive Mitt Romney.

I think that's potentially a very good thing, because it would give us some room to start talking about the fact that

Mormonism is a religion of human construction.

It was the fabrication of somebody who created a religion for the same reason that all religions are created, and that

is to satisfy his appetites for money, power, and sex.

It's very much akin to what Muhammad did.

Take a look at Muhammad's religion.

What Muhammad wanted, Muhammad could get through revelation, and what he wanted was money, power, and sex.

The same thing is true of Joseph Smith, who once referred to himself as a second Muhammad.

The works that were done by Brigham Young in Joseph Smith's name and the disciples of Joseph Smith on September 11,

1857, were very much the works of what you would expect from people who were the disciples of a second Muhammad.

Well, I don't want to claim to be a prophet, no pun intended, speaking about Mormonism, but if you recall,

one of the first times I interviewed you, William, I had said to you, in wonderment, why isn't

the liberal media giving us information about the Meadows Mountain massacre, and

exposing this because of the fact that we have a Republican candidate for president, and sure enough, we

have a movie coming out.

How honest or dishonest has the LDS church been

regarding this?

They have a history, a notorious history, of rewriting history.

I mean, even the Book of Mormon has been rewritten, I don't know how many times.

Several.

Yes, and cover -ups and so forth.

And you just mentioned that there's a new book coming out by Mormons that seems to be fairly honest about it, but how recent has this

honesty been occurring?

Well, they often will make a virtue of necessity.

When they have no other choice, and once it's widely accepted that the standard version of history that

the Mormon church has been promoting is no longer being taken seriously, then they will yield to the

inevitability of the moment, and they will admit what everybody already knows to be the truth.

They may be at that point with respect to the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

When I went to the Mountain Meadows site 11 years ago, I spoke with the missionaries

who were at Cedar City at a local visitor center, and I was really upset because the

depiction given of what happened on that horrible morning was entirely antiseptic from the Mormon

point of view.

There was no identification as to who it was who actually attacked this wagon train.

It's something that apparently just materialized out of a cloudless sky and an

unbroken horizon.

Suddenly, somebody came along and wiped out this wagon train.

I said, that's not true.

To the credit of this missionary, a very nice lady in her 60s, she said, no, that's not true, and we really don't

like it.

We should be telling the truth about things of this sort.

That once again testifies to the basic resilient decency of the Mormon people.

They don't like being put in the position of having to lie for their faith.

I remember, just by way of a good example of another problematic issue here, when in June of

1978 the Mormon Church ended its ban on ordination of black men to be priests in the Mormon

Church, I remember the palpable relief of my parents.

They no longer had to defend the indefensible.

They no longer had to say, well, we're taught that black people in the previous existence, in

the spiritual existence prior to obtaining mortal bodies, had been less than valiant, and that at some point they

will have these blessings given to them.

They obviously didn't like having to recite that line of thinking.

Once the policy was done away with, they felt a great deal of relief over it.

I think that there's a certain catharsis that's going to happen as the truth is made more widely known and more

widely acknowledged in the Mormon Church as to what happened on September 11th of

1857, but that will put a lot of Mormons in a really problematic position because what does that say about

the priesthood leadership of the Mormon Church?

About the prophetic leadership, supposedly, of Brigham Young?

What does it say about the fact that when these innocent people were under the power of

people who were supposedly the exponents of the one true Christian faith, that those people

were butchered horribly?

And that for 20 years, the Mormon president, Brigham Young, was at very least an accessory

after the fact and an active participant in the cover -up that blamed one man for this massacre.

They're going to ask questions like that.

Once people start thinking, it's difficult to get out of that habit.

Independent thought is the one thing that a cult cannot afford to cultivate.

Well, William, any plans to write a book of your own on Mormonism?

You have such a rich knowledge of their history and teaching.

I would love to, but as it happens right now, I'm busy getting another

book published.

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks that will come out.

And then I've got another writing project I'm involved in with a very nice gentleman from Texas

that's next in the queue.

And after that, I've got another book project I started about a year ago that I finally want to

get off my desk.

But after these three things are finally out and after I've cleared my desk of these

other projects, maybe that's something I could do.

I'd sure like to.

I've got a lot to say on this subject.

Yes.

And how can our listeners contact you, your website and so forth?

The best way to contact me is through the RightSource, which is a web portal for news and commentary.

RightSourceOnline .com, not the RightSource, just RightSourceOnline .com.

If you look at the left side of the screen, about a third of the way down the screen, if you scroll down, there'll be a photograph of

yours truly.

And it will have two links.

One is to an e -zine and the other is to a blog.

They're both called Pro Libertate, which is Latin meaning for freedom.

And the blog is updated between three and five times a week.

The e -zine, rather more austerely than that.

But if you're interested in seeing what I have to say, that's the best way to do it.

Great.

And the website for the movie September Dawn is SeptemberDawn .net.

SeptemberDawn .net.

And interestingly enough, they have a link for a very good Christian organization to that

website for the Utah Lighthouse Ministry that was founded by Gerald and Sandra Tanner, former

Mormons who became Christians.

It's probably the most popular Christian outreach to Mormonism in existence.

The Utah Lighthouse Ministries website, if you're interested for further information, www .utlm

.org.

That's utlm .org.

And also my friend James White, Alpha and Omega Ministries is aomin .org.

Don't go away.

There's one more interview left to be heard conducted with the late William Norman Grigg back

in 2007 after these messages.

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Welcome to Iron Sharpens Iron, the only daily live broadcast in the New York metropolitan and

greater Long Island area on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians

have a platform to address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27, 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one

man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and

directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you,

the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's our host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Long Island, New York, Connecticut, and those listening internationally over the internet.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron.

We have one of my favorite guests on the program today, William Norman Grigg.

Those of you who listen to Iron Sharpens Iron regularly will probably remember that William Norman Grigg is a former high

priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, who by

God's grace converted to evangelical Christianity.

And he's going to be speaking about his testimony today.

Many of you may remember that he was recently on our program on August 7th, actually, discussing the

Mountain Meadows Massacre, which was a horrific event in our nation's history, where a Mormon

militia in the 1800s brutally and savagely murdered 120 men,

women, and children who were innocent victims, really, just

passing through Utah on their way out to California from Arkansas.

Well, I thought it might be a good idea to have William on again to discuss his personal testimony, because it's one of the most

moving testimonies I've ever heard.

And especially since this movie is debuting this Friday, it will give our listeners some more background

on Mormonism before they may see this movie.

Want to call up your family and friends during this station break, especially if they're Mormon, and have them tune in to 1440

AM on the dial if they live on Long Island or the coast of Connecticut.

But they can listen anywhere in the entire world at www .wnygspiritofny .com.

That's www .wnygspiritofny .com.

We'll be right back after these messages with William Norman Grigg.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the Pastors Study every Saturday

from 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time on WLIE Radio,

www .wlie540am .com.

We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit The Pastors Study by calling in

with your questions.

Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull.

Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for A Visit to the Pastors Study, because everyone needs

a pastor.

Thank you very much, brother.

And in studio with me to co -host today's program is Pastor Mark Grimaldi of Grace Reform Baptist Church in

Merrick, Long Island.

It's great to have you in the studio again, Mark.

Good to be here again, Chris.

Thank you, and good afternoon, William.

Good afternoon.

William, let's hear about your upbringing in the Mormon faith.

I understand that you were adopted by Mormon parents and raised and nurtured in that faith.

Yes, I was adopted by a wonderful Mormon couple when I was about six weeks of age.

I was born in southeastern Idaho, which is sort of an outlier of what used to be the old

territory of Deseret.

If you would know anything about how that part of the country was settled, the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Great Salt Lake

Basin on July 24th of 1847, and once they had established sort of

a headquarters in what would become Great Salt Lake City, and now, of course, commonly known simply as Salt Lake City, they began to

expand outwards.

They settled some parts of Oregon and some parts of Idaho.

There's a very heavy LDS or Mormon presence in southeastern Idaho, as I mentioned, as well as Montana, Wyoming,

and fairly heavy settlements were made in California, Nevada, some in Arizona as well.

During what I call the Caliphate period, when Brigham Young and his immediate successors were in charge in what they

called the territory of Deseret, this area was called, as I mentioned, Deseret.

That's an invented term from the Book of Mormon that supposedly means the honeybee, and that explains why the beehive is the state

symbol of Utah.

Yes, I was wondering why, when I went to the Mormon temple in New York City with Dr. James White, there were

beehives in the woodwork all over the place.

Yeah, it's an interesting symbol.

I mean carvings of beehives, not real beehives.

Yeah, it supposedly represents industry.

That's the motto of the state of Utah, industry, which, of course, is a commendable thing on the surface, but as I've gotten

older, I've come to look upon the beehive as a symbol of collectivism, which I find to be not nearly as commendable as industry.

But in any case, I was born in southeastern Idaho.

To the best of my knowledge, my biological father was an indigent worker from

Mexico.

My mother was a young woman of about 15 years who knew

sort of indirectly some people associated with my adoptive parents.

Specifically, she knew an attorney in the area whose first name was Norman.

That's where my middle name comes from.

That's one of the reasons I use my middle name is in tribute to the man who arranged the adoption to my

parents.

He was in a Mormon bishopric as a counselor to my father, who was a bishop in the Burley, Idaho

ward at the time.

So I was adopted at the age of about six weeks and raised from the time of my

earliest memories in a Mormon household.

I was baptized at age eight.

At age 12, I was ordained a deacon, which seems sort of a peculiar thing to people

in Christian nominations who are accustomed to seeing deacons as older men who take responsibility for a congregation.

But I was ordained a deacon at age 12.

That was a matter of some controversy before I was ordained, because I'm a very dark brown complexioned man,

and I was a very dark brown complexioned child.

This all happened before 1978.

Some people thought that I had African ancestry because of my features and physiognomy.

Yes, you might want to let our listeners know the Mormon view in the 70s and

prior going all the way back to its origins of racism.

Sure.

The idea was that people who were of African ancestry, men of African ancestry, could never be ordained to the Mormon priesthood

because of a curse that was symbolized by the color of their skin, that they were supposedly the descendants of Cain through Ham.

That's not a belief which is exclusive to Mormons, but it's a belief that is exclusively taught scripturally in Mormonism,

because one of the volumes recognized as scripture by the Mormons, The Pearl of Great Price, does teach that doctrine,

and it was codified as an official doctrine of the church until it was repealed by supposed revelation in June of 1978.

But there's a cognate teaching in the Book of Mormon about the supposed origins of the American Indians, the

Polynesians, and the Latin Americans, anybody who would be considered an Indian.

Supposedly a descendant of a pair of evildoers by the name of Laman and Lemuel, who were the wicked

elder brothers of Nephi, who was sort of the heroic character of the first part of the Book of Mormon.

And they were supposedly cursed with dark skins as well, but no priesthood or nation band obtained that cursing.

But as I said before, there's this peculiar belief in Mormonism that God has color -coded people for righteousness and

acceptability.

And as an eight-, nine-, ten -year -old child, I would occasionally be asked if I had lineage problems that would prevent me

from being ordained to the priesthood.

I didn't understand what that meant until I had a conversation with my parents that was also triggered by an

experience I had at a family reunion that was attended by a distant cousin who had married

a wonderful man who was black, and they were treated with sort of cold formality, a certain

distant politeness.

And I couldn't understand why people were treating them with such reserve.

My mother explained that because this cousin of mine had married a black man, their children wouldn't be able to hold the priesthood.

I couldn't understand then, and of course I can't understand now, although in a larger sense perhaps I can, why so much

significance attached to the melanin content of a given individual and why God would see fit to withhold certain blessings to

people because of the color of their skin, as if he'd somehow made a mistake, or as if somehow

his prejudices tracked the lines of those of the people who surround him.

But as I said, that policy was repealed in 1978 in large measure because of political expediency, and in my

case because I was a quote -unquote Lamanite as opposed to a quote -unquote descendant of Cain,

there was no problem with me being ordained to the Mormon priesthood as a deacon at age 12.

So it was only those who were descendants of Africa, if you will, of African descent,

that were barred from the priesthood?

That's correct.

And Brigham Young went so far as to say, and he said this repeatedly as a matter of emphatically preached

doctrine for over a decade, that it was a capital offense for somebody of the chosen seed,

meaning the primarily Scandinavian or British fair -complexioned

blue -eyed Mormons to marry someone of the accursed race, meaning people of black ancestry, and

that the penalty under the law of God was always and always would be death on the spot for somebody who

would so intermingle races.

He was somebody who was very candid about his beliefs, which is convenient because the beliefs are very repellent and they're also still

foundational to Mormonism, and so if you have access to the Journal of Discourses, which is this

Talmudic collection of writings and speeches by the founding prophets and

apostles of Mormonism, you can go back and read where Brigham Young said all these abhorrent things and you can see how

they are intimately connected to the teachings of Joseph Smith and they're integral to the

worldview and cosmology and doctrine of Mormonism.

Now I don't want to belabor the racist issue because we did dedicate an entire program on that one theme of the racism of

Mormonism, but I do want to just ask one more question regarding that.

Was there any other restrictions given to those of African descent other than being barred from the

priesthood?

Well, the biggest issue that naturally descends from the ban on priesthood

ordination was the fact that African men could not be sealed in the Mormon

temples, which meant that they could not proceed as candidates for exaltation, which in Mormonism means godhood.

The idea is that there is this plan that exists independent of God and the plan was

what God followed in order to become God and that if you follow the same program ascending the ladder of

the Mormon doctrine and gospel, you will eventually achieve deified status yourself and that was foreclosed to

people of black ancestry before 1978.

They couldn't be ordained to the Melchizedek priesthood in Mormonism, which means they didn't have access to sealing, which meant that

they would be, according to the doctrine preached by Brigham Young and his successors until June of 1978 and still

believed today by many fundamentalist Mormons.

Blacks would in the eternities be the servants of those who are entitled to exaltation.

So the best they could hope for would be a doorman, I guess, at the gates of the celestial realm.

It's amazing that there were still blacks who joined the Mormon church.

Yeah, it defies my understanding, but there are people who've converted

in recent decades.

Yeah, Gladys Knight. Gladys Knight.

That ancestry.

I'm sorry?

Gladys Knight.

Gladys Knight is perhaps the most conspicuous and most puzzling example.

There have been a number of people as well who have converted overseas in Africa.

For a while in the early 1990s, there was actually a great deal of missionary activity by the Mormon church in

Africa.

It's since sort of lost traction as it has elsewhere in the developing world, particularly in Latin America and some other places.

In the 1960s and 1970s, I had a seminary teacher who recalled that period for my benefit during one of our

conversations when I was in high school.

The seminary, I should point out, refers to release time religious instruction for Mormons who were attending public

schools.

I didn't go to a seminary in the sense of special training for theology.

But my seminary teacher had been to Brazil on his mission.

And Brazil, of course, as you know, is riotously diverse in terms of the ethnic

mix and composition of those who are Brazilian.

It's almost impossible to find somebody in Brazil who doesn't have a little bit of African ancestry.

The Mormon doctrine inflexibly taught that anybody who had a bloodline supposedly contaminated by so

much as a single drop of African blood was banned from priesthood ordination.

And so he had a lot of difficulty because it's almost impossible to find who is and who is not a person

of African ancestry in Brazil.

I suspect that's what led to the change in policies.

As a matter of fact, the former Mormon, a possible a possible Grand Richards said so on the record, I

believe, in an interview with Reverend Wesley Walters about 25 or 30 years ago.

And so it once again is a case of expediency rather than principle.

So let's return to your childhood.

And you were told that when you were being examined for it, was it for the diaconate that people were

somewhat cautious because they were worried that you might have African ancestry and so forth?

Yes, there was a great deal of concern about that.

And once that concern had been relieved, I had another experience.

It was almost as unpleasant.

It really made an impression on me.

I once again have been attending seminary.

One of my seminary teachers, and this must have happened when I was about 14 years old or so.

And of course, when you're 14 or 15 years old, you're already a pudding of insecurities to begin with.

I was attending a seminary class one morning and the topic of the Lamanites, the Book of Mormon, came

up.

And the Book of Mormon teaches that if the so -called Lamanites accept the Mormon gospel and

they exercise faith and diligence in improving themselves in the context of the gospel, at some point the curse will be removed and

they'll become white and the lights in them.

My seminary teacher was teaching that.

That's something I didn't really need to hear.

I didn't really need to hear that the color of my skin supposedly represented the defect for which I couldn't be held

accountable.

Because, well, that I was being held accountable for in spite of the fact that it was the supposed result of something

ancestors hundreds or thousands of years earlier had done.

And that happened when I was about 14 or 15.

And then I went to an LDS -owned and operated junior college in Rexburg.

My family had moved there when I was 16.

And it is now called Brigham Young University, Idaho.

At the time it was called Ricks College, after the founder of the city of Rexburg.

And then at age 19, I served a full -time Mormon mission in Mexico and in Guatemala.

And prior to that time, although I had read the Book of Mormon and had attended church and gone to Sunday school and done

many of the things, if not all the things that were expected of me, I really hadn't studied the doctrine all that

carefully.

And the biggest issue, the most important issue, is one that I'd spent the least amount of time

focusing on, and that was the question of who is Jesus Christ.

And it's not really, I think, to denigrate my parents

to say that that wasn't really the focus of the things that they had taught me, because Mormonism really doesn't

focus on Jesus Christ in that he is depicted as somebody being fundamentally like the rest of

us, as opposed to being the incarnation, the literal incarnation of the one true God, you know, the

self -existing being who spoke the universe into existence.

Jesus is depicted in Mormonism as a created spirit brother of all of us who is following the same

program.

As a matter of fact, I taught a Sunday school class once in which somebody said the only difference between the Savior and the rest of us

is that he's a little further ahead in the program.

And this reflects the idea in Mormonism that salvation is basically like a multi -level marketing program, and

God is just your upline.

But when I was in the missionary training center in Provo for the first time, I read a book by a Mormon apostle named James

E. Talmadge called Jesus the Christ.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was essentially a palimpsest, or better stated, an

outright plagiarism of Farrar's life of Christ, which I've since read, and I can certainly see where Talmadge,

if not stole, then at least borrowed shamelessly huge portions of Farrar's much

more credible and doctrinally reliable work, The Life of Christ.

And it finally started to dawn on me that Jesus Christ was somebody much more important than Joseph

Smith.

I had reached the age of 19 without starting to get a glimmer of that understanding, and

I look at that in some ways as sort of a prelude to what later.

Happened in my mission.

In fact, we're going to pick up on that point of your testimony right when we return from

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Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnzen, if you've just tuned us in.

Our guest today is William Norman Grigg, a former high priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, who converted to evangelical Christianity.

My co -host in studio with me is Pastor Mark Grimaldi of Grace Reform Baptist Church of Long Island in

Merrick, New York.

But if you could pick up where you left off, William, you were talking about you were just starting to get, as someone in your

late teens, I believe, you were getting a glimmer of how, in reality, Jesus Christ was a

far more important figure than Joseph Smith, I believe you were.

Saying.

That's exactly right.

I was 19 at the time.

The Missionary Training Center is a facility, a campus in Orem, Utah, that is used to train

prospective missionaries in languages and also sales approaches.

While I was there, I made relatively short work of that book, Jesus the Christ by James Talmadge, which I

didn't know at the time.

It had drawn heavily, to the point of plagiarism, I believe, from a much more estimable book, Farrar's

Life of Christ.

I started to understand that Jesus Christ was not like us, that he

was and is God.

I actually had a telephone conversation with my parents after I finished that book, saying, I finally begin to understand here

that Jesus Christ is actually not only a figure

whose birth we celebrate and whose resurrection we celebrate, but he is literally God.

That's something that I took with me when I went to Mexico.

I spent six months in Mexico and then ended up in Guatemala.

My visa was not renewed after six months.

It's interesting that in order to obtain a visa, I had to lie about what I was going to do in Mexico, because the law at the time, I don't know if it's changed

since then, but the law at the time made it impossible for non -citizens of Mexico who were not

Catholic to proselytize.

As one of these little transparent falsehoods that are altogether common in some circles, I had to get a visa saying

that I was a sports instructor.

I was nothing of the sort.

I proselytized for the Mormon church.

I ended up in Guatemala in early 1983.

I was there for the coup that took place in the spring of that year, which was an interesting experience.

As my mission began to wind down, I should point out at this juncture, incidentally, that I only served 18 months

rather than two years because at the time they had shortened the length of the mission for young men to

a year and a half and two years on account of the economy at the time.

But as my mission began to wind down, I began to reflect a little bit more deeply about some of the things I was teaching and some of the things I

was really trying to understand regarding my beliefs.

It was in October of 1983 on the 11th day of that month, as I recall.

I was in a little town called Zaquina Law in Guatemala, which was basically a

juncture, a little point in the road.

You had a major interstate that had branched off at a right angle and went off in another direction.

Where those roads joined, there was a little town called Zaquina Law.

I was living with a companion.

Obviously, you have a 24 -7 companion as a Mormon missionary in a building that had

been a bar.

We were surrounded by bars.

We had converted one of the rooms into a meeting area.

We were holding meetings in that room and then using the other as our living quarters.

We were having companionship study that morning.

The subject was the atonement of Jesus Christ, which is obviously the most important subject you can discuss or contemplate.

We were reading some passages from that book by Talmadge, which once again derived

whatever of any value it had from the life of Christ.

We were also reading the 22nd chapter of Luke,.

Which talks about the...

Take your time, brother.

I know you get very emotional when you relate to.

Your conversion.

Yeah.

It discusses the

events of the night of Christ's betrayal and his prayer.

In the garden.

It is very moving to me that you continually have such a

heartfelt reaction whenever you give the account of your testimony of

conversion.

I can't keep my composure as I.

Read those passages.

I came to understand that I put Jesus on the cross, but

that I betrayed him.

My sin was what put him there.

In spite of everything I had been teaching, I could not

possibly have salvation of my own merits.

I still can't understand

it.

I'm sure that nobody can comprehend it in the slightest.

For whatever reason, Jesus did that.

He claimed me and

that as a gift of his love and his grace,

he paid the forfeit for my sin.

It broke my heart, Chris.

It still does to this day, whenever I think of it.

Amen.

Well, it's very obvious that it still.

Does, brother.

If we would all be that moved by her own being rescued by

Jesus Christ in his mercy.

And grace, rescued from sin, death, and hell.

That experience was really strange because as I mentioned, I was in the

middle of studying with my companion.

Suddenly, I broke down and cried for probably about 15 minutes.

I'm sure he didn't know what was going on.

I'm just as.

Sure that I didn't adequately explain it to him.

You really had no biblical concept of the atonement provided by Christ before then, did you?

No, I really didn't.

I had been taught.

The Mormon view, which is that salvation is essentially a team effort.

This is an example actually that we would use in our

discussions with missionaries, that you would have Jesus essentially co -signing a loan with you

and serving as the default debtor in the event that you

couldn't pay the entire amount.

It would be sort of like an 80 -20 mortgage arrangement or something of that nature.

I didn't understand until that moment that I was entirely different from

Jesus, that he's the eternal God and I am his creation.

It's not a partnership in any sense apart from his grace and his condescension

reaching out to claim me as a fallen created being through his grace

and applying his blood to blot out the consequences of my sin.

My contribution to this transaction was first of all being a sinner

and secondly recognizing that and turning myself entirely over to the sovereignty of

God.

I didn't understand that.

I thought that there had to be some other element in which I would somehow qualify myself and make myself worthy

and then on the momentum provided to me by the atonement I would go on to become a being like

God.

So it was a complete shock to me and of course it put me in a really difficult position because I still had more than

a month and a half of my mission left and I didn't really want to be preaching Mormonism for the balance of my mission.

I wanted to be talking about Jesus.

When I came back literally a day and a half after I got back from the mission, I was back in school

at Rexburg.

I had a full -ride scholarship in the music program, the performance program, and so I immediately went

back to my routine for all intents and purposes as a then

20 -year -old return missionary who had his life and program all sketched out for

him according to the teachings and programs of the church.

I had been changed.

I didn't see Mormonism the same way.

I didn't see Jesus the same way obviously and I found myself in a really peculiar

position in that I still had callings and assignments in the church but I didn't want to

talk about Mormonism.

I didn't.

Want to talk about Joseph Smith.

I wanted to talk about Jesus Christ.

Do you have much communication with evangelical Christians at this point?

Well, Rexburg, Idaho at this point was about 95 to 97.

Percent Mormon and so the answer would be no.

As I mentioned, it was sort of one of these little stagnant pools, if you will, that remain

after the tide of Mormon theocracy retreated.

I say that not disrespectfully because Rexburg is full of wonderful people and Mormons by and large tend to be

people of great achievement and some of the nicest neighbors you could ever have.

In the same sense that Paul would say of the Jews, they are still my people, the Mormons are still my people.

My prayer for them is that they all come to know Christ and be saved.

People have got to understand that when you are dealing in a business or political

enterprise or when you are trying to do something worthwhile in the community, chances are you are going to be running into a lot of

people who are Mormons.

They tend to be overrepresented where you are talking about.

Achievement and performance in those realms.

And basically the only thing that Mormonism has in common at all with biblical

Christianity is probably their views of morality.

Exactly.

They live chaste, abstemious lives.

They believe in community service.

They believe in having large families.

They are very family -focused.

What they lack is what the young in the scriptural encounter with Jesus lacked.

We talked about how I have lived my life this way.

I have obeyed all the commandments since I was a child.

Take up your cross and follow me.

That is the one thing you lack.

You cannot make it on the basis of your own performance and your own righteousness.

Mormons tend to be strapped to this Pelagian treadmill and they don't understand that

the burdens that they are taking on themselves are not doing anything to put them

in a position that will lead them to salvation, genuine salvation, where they come to

understand and know the real Jesus as opposed to this artifact of Mormon teaching.

When I was in Rexburg, once again in a Mormon intensive environment, we were taken there for that reason.

My father wanted to raise his children at the time.

He went on to adopt.

I mentioned this before just by way of illustrating the tremendous generosity of my parents.

They adopted seven children.

They adopted six of us.

They had seven children altogether.

Six of us are adopted.

There were very few people who were evangelical Christians.

One that I remember very well was Mark Kargis, who was the wrestling coach and my football coach, a

backfield coach.

I played football at Madison High School in Rexburg.

He was a wonderful man, just a terrific man, who was very bold when

occasion called for it.

He would rebuke people about their unchristian behavior and he would feel no

compunctions against speaking in outright biblical terms in school.

He probably helped me more than I realized.

I had a couple of evangelical Christian friends with whom I played football and baseball as well.

They probably helped more than they realized.

It's like.

Pick up right where you left off when we return from our break.

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Welcome back.

This is Chris Zarnes and your host of Iron Sharpens Iron.

Our guest today is William Norman Grigg, a former high priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly

known as the Mormons, who converted to evangelical Christianity by the grace of God.

And William, I want our audience to be crystal clear on this in case this may have slipped by them

somehow.

Your conversion testimony is not like going from Methodist to Baptist or something.

These are two religions, Mormonism and Christianity, that could not be more antithetical toward one another.

That's correct.

On every issue, on the nature of man, on the nature of God, on the nature of the atonement,

on the issue of creation.

A lot of people may not realize that Mormons do not believe in creation, correct?

That's correct.

That God merely organized matter, is that it?

That's exactly right.

And on the issue of heaven.

The authority of scripture.

The authority of scripture, heaven and hell.

I mean, on every single issue.

The only thing, as we said, that they really have in common is a basic, decent morality.

Biblical morality, which isn't even straight across the board, because you do have some flip -flopping,

it seems, on the abortion issue, which actually surprised me greatly when I had learned that Mitt Romney, the

presidential candidate, was at one time pro -abortion.

And I was wondering, how on earth could a Mormon in good standing remain a pro -abortionist?

That is an interesting perplexity.

I think it's interesting to point out as well that, as is often the case in Mormonism,

Mormon culture, Mitt Romney and I share a common ancestor, and that would be of all the

unlikely people, John Lathrop.

I just found this out yesterday, that Mr. Lathrop's sons include some people who

begat the lineage that gave us the Pratt brothers, who were the

apostles in the early era of Mormonism.

Parley P. Pratt was the great supposed martyr of Mormonism, who was murdered

by the legal husband of a woman, whom Parley P. Pratt had converted to Mormonism and made his, I believe, ninth

polygamous quote -unquote wife.

I'm a direct descendant by adoption of Parley P. Pratt, if I understand it correctly.

The Romney line also goes through the Pratt line, so for some reason we're distantly related, not that I take any pride

in that connection.

But Mitt Romney's position on abortion, as he's pointed out himself, when he was pro -abortion, meaning he

believed that abortion was a legitimate and moral choice in some circumstances, was in many

ways compatible with the practice and standards of the Mormon church today.

But 125, 130 years ago, you could and hear sermons being preached by people like Orson

Hyde and Orson Pratt, who said that abortion was nothing other than murder.

And the reason why they did so at the time was they wanted to contrast what they considered to be the moral liabilities of

monogamy to the superior morality, as they thought, of polygamy.

They believed that monogamy was a human creation, that it was a product

of a pagan concept that was inherited by the Christian world from

Roman and Greek antiquity, and that polygamy was actually the divinely ordained pattern of

marriage.

And that at some point God would stretch forth his hand and smite down this backwards

apostate monogamous nation and enthrone polygamy as the standard.

And in that context they were trying to say, the leaders of the Mormon church at the time, that because

monogamy limited the sexual outlet of the husband, that he would seek

some other way to express that desire, and that led to such things as prostitution and

bastardy and abortion.

And so it was in the context of trying to vindicate the doctrine of the Mormon church regarding polygamy that the Mormon church leaders 125,

130 years ago were describing abortion as what it is, which is murder, child murder.

Today, however, in the interest, once again, of political expediency, and largely

because of the influence of Gordon B. Hinckley, who's the incoming president of the Mormon church, the LDS

position as contained in the Handbook of General Instructions given to Mormon bishops is actually much more latitudinarian.

A Mormon woman can obtain an abortion for any reason.

She can convince her bishop is suitable.

And Mitt Romney has been a bishop, and when he talked about his embrace of the so

-called pro -choice view, said that he had seen in his own family the horrible consequences of illegal abortion,

and that's why he supported, supposedly with all the passion of his being, the idea of keeping

abortion legal and supposedly safe.

It's never been safe.

It never will be safe.

It certainly isn't safe to the primary victim, the baby, but it's not safe to the mother in the procedure as well.

And I don't doubt for a second that, as a bishop, he probably counseled women that if they considered it to

be an excessive burden, that they could probably go and have their pregnancy ended through the death of the child.

Wow.

But when you talk about the moral basis of Mormonism, I have to make a very important distinction here.

There is something that Michael Quinn, D. Michael Quinn, a former Mormon

historian of some note, has pointed out, a concept called theocratic ethics.

And theocratic ethics literally led to mass bloodshed, mass murder at Mountain Meadows.

The theocratic ethic dictates, this is something Joseph Smith was preaching in the context of polygamy once again,

that whatever your church leader instructs you to do is right, and that if you do

it and it's wrong, God will honor your obedience in defiance of whether or not what you

did is objectively moral or not.

Now, when I was working my way out of Mormonism, it took me decades to do it because of family connections and

because of the fact that I was completely immersed in the culture.

I spent basically 22 years trying to work my way out of the Mormon church, to give you some idea of how

tenacious that hold can be on somebody who desperately wants to have communion

with fellow believers.

When you come to know Jesus, you feel his absence very keenly.

And I was spiritually emaciated when I would go to Mormon services every Sunday and hear

the administrative matters.

A Mormon service is much more like a business meeting than a worship meeting, and hear people talk about all these

things that have nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ.

I wanted to talk about Jesus Christ.

I wanted to celebrate him.

I wanted to worship him, serve him.

I wanted to exhaust my lungs in singing praises to him.

You don't do that at a Mormon service.

But the thing is, while I was working my way out of Mormonism, I had

interviews with my state president, and he once again recited to me this whole idea that the

highest principle of the celestial kingdom in Mormonism is obedience, and you should adhere to your

leaders.

And if they tell you to do something that is wrong, and you do it anyway, then God will bless your obedience.

And I said, well, President, doesn't that imply that the Mormon priesthood leader is superior to God, because you're

supposedly saying that the Mormon leader can supposedly bind God to reward

sin.

Isn't that what you're trying to tell me?

And he stopped for a second, and he said, I never thought of it that way before.

I said, well, I hadn't thought of it that way before either until recently.

I'd never really given it serious thoughts.

Don't feel so badly, but now that it's on the table, what do you think of this?

And by the way, Pastor Mark.

Has a question for you, William.

Yes, hi, William.

I wanted to just ask you a question regarding my own experience.

I've had some experiences where I've gotten to seek to have some interaction with Mormons,

be it at my door or at the park.

And generally, it seems like the average lay person would almost, at least on the surface,

agree with everything we say.

And I'm wondering if the lay people of Mormonism are ignorant of a lot of the theological issues that

are there, like the priesthood would understand and so on.

Sure.

Yeah.

Mormons don't.

Study theology.

What most Mormons do on Sundays, as I mentioned, has little to do with worship or actual instruction.

Almost everything that is taught on any given Sunday in a Mormon meeting house, whether you're talking about Salt

Lake City, Utah, Sakinalog, Guatemala, comes out of a manual that has been

specifically prepared and processed to excise most of the theology from it.

And so much of what they're taught has to do with clean living, public

service, and obedience to the authorities, the church.

And so they don't think about theological issues.

The only time where they're likely to be exposed to deep theology is if they happen to study it at BYU or

BYU -Idaho or some of the church -owned operating universities, or if they take an interest in it as laymen, if

they become apologists, for instance.

Most of what Mormons believe is really rather anodyne.

They generally don't believe a lot of what the church actually teaches.

And the church goes to great extents, really, to conceal from the public or, frankly,

to misrepresent what is actually taught.

You don't get that until after you've been to the temple and you're ritually committed through a quasi -Masonic

ordinance to support the church at all hazards.

At that point, they feel safe in providing you with what they call the meat of the.

Gospel.

Yes, I spoke to, not too long ago, I spoke to two or three young Mormon ladies

who were at a campground with some of our people from the church and were talking to them about the gospel and

it's Christ alone and not your works and so on.

And they were totally agreeing with everything.

They were saying, yeah, I almost felt like I didn't know where to go because I was giving them the right gospel and so on.

Well, the way to go from that is to say, well, if you can rely.

On Christ alone for your salvation, then why is it necessary to undergo all

these additional impositions and rituals and ordinances?

I mean, at some point, if they've studied the issue, they'll say, well, because there's something beyond salvation.

They will admit that there is a category distinction to be drawn here between what the Mormons

call salvation and what the Christian world calls salvation because salvation is merely preparatory in Mormonism for

exaltation.

You become a candidate for the celestial kingdom once you're saved.

And in Mormonism, salvation consists of the physical resurrection, which is to be extended to

all men.

And under that perspective, as taught in Mormonism, you're saved because Christ has already guaranteed that

whatever you've done, you'll be raised from the grave.

Beyond that, you enter into a graded and works -based assignment in the next realm.

And by the way, one of the things...

In fact, William, could you pick up right after the break?

We'll be right back.

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For many years to come.

William, you were just about to make another point.

I believe that you were contrasting the salvation of grace alone through faith alone and Christ alone in the Mormon.

Ritualism and works of merit.

Exactly.

One other thing that people don't understand is that Mormonism is actually universalist.

It actually teaches that apart from a few people who are sons of perdition, everybody is going to be saved and

receive some degree of glory or the other.

The only way you can become a son of perdition, quite frankly, is to become an apostate like.

Myself.

Yes, hell is only reserved for former Mormons who left the Mormon church.

That's.

Essentially it.

The thing about the Mormon concept of salvation versus the Mormon concept of exaltation,

once again, if you assume that everybody does some good, that's more or less the pitch that Gordon Hinckley

makes.

He'll say, and he said this time and time again, the purpose of Mormonism is to make bad men good and good

men better.

It's difficult for me to think of a more humanistic approach to life because we're all bad men

and the only thing that can make us better is to be redeemed by Jesus Christ.

It has nothing to do with a program or an organization.

It has to do with his grace and his sovereignty.

The thing is, Gordon Hinckley will often say, when he's been invited, for instance, to address the World Affairs Council

in California, as he has a couple of times, what we say to the world, Hinckley will say,

is, come bring all the good that you have and let's see if we can add something to it.

In other words, it's more of a sales pitch than a type of evangelism.

What they will say is that any Christian faith, and they actually say the same thing about Islam as a matter of fact,

and this is something I've documented on my website, is that Mormon apologists have actually said that there are ways

that Islam is more nearly similar to Mormonism than conventional Christianity, which is something that they do

not want to emphasize right now, but is, as a matter of fact, true.

But they'll say that any good Christian denomination is enough to bring you to a

state of salvation, to bring you to an understanding of who Jesus Christ is, and because we're all going to

be resurrected, that's all we need to worry about in terms of salvation.

But in order to be put on a track for celestial glory and godhood, you have to become a Mormon and progress step

by step up the hierarchical ladder until you receive your endowments in the temple

and become a candidate for the celestial kingdom, and thereby, by adhering to everything your leaders

teach you, will eventually be put on a course for godhood.

And that, of course,.

Is completely contrary to what Christianity teaches.

Yes, in fact, Mormonism is so intensely polytheistic, they would make Hindus blush,

because they have an infinite number of gods.

Yeah, well, they actually say they're hanateistic, in that they believe that there's only one of this

immense congregation of gods who is our god, but they believe that there are more exalted beings

than there are particles of sand on the beaches of all the oceans of the world.

That's actually something that was published in a series of essays called The Seer, that was.

Published back in the 1800s to validate polygamy.

And Pastor Mark Romaldi had a question for you.

Yes, William, I was just curious, too, about when you had converted to Christianity up

to this present time, how have your parents, your adopted parents, how have they responded to.

You?

Well, they'd understood that something had changed in me, but it wasn't until my family and I formally

left the Mormon church, had our names stricken from the records at our own request a number of years ago, in 2003, that

things became a little bit dicey.

And there was a certain sterility that

developed in our relationship that I'm happy to say is being overcome now.

I mean, we moved out to Idaho a couple of years ago, because my parents are getting older.

My dad is in his 80s, my mother's in her late 70s.

That's sort of high middle age for a Mormon.

A Mormon's life expectancy is in the 90s somewhere.

But still, they're slowing down.

They're expending what remains of their time here, mortality.

We wanted to be close to them, to help them, to love them, to serve them, and hopefully to be the means whereby God

can lead them to salvation.

And for the first year and a half or two years, it was really difficult, because they are required

by the conditions laid out in the temple recommend interview

to avoid contact with apostates, to have no sympathy or affiliation with apostates.

That would include members of your own household.

So they're required by their obligation to the Mormon church not to be

on the same convivial, loving basis with me that they were before my so -called apostasy.

And I, until very recently, was employed by an

organization in which my boss was a member of the local Mormon state presidency.

And that put me in an interesting position there as well.

I was surrounded by friends and co -workers and family, all of whom were very faithful Mormons and who were

required to look upon me as somebody who was bound for petition because of my apostasy.

And living here in Western Idaho, as opposed to Eastern Idaho, there's not nearly the concentration of Mormons in

Western Idaho that there is in Southeastern Idaho.

But they are still a very prominent presence here.

This little town, Payette, Idaho, I live in is fewer than 8 ,000 population.

But we frequently receive visits from the Mormon missionaries who were sent my way by well -meaning but

misguided members of my family.

The local Mormon ward here has a bishop, Grand Greg, who is my cousin.

And so I'm really situated in a really interesting position here in that these

people know me and they know that I'm not malicious, that I am not evil in the sense of

actively seeking to do ill to others.

They see that I'm a responsible family man and husband.

But by virtue of the teachings that they've received, they believe that basically I'm in Satan's power

because I've broken my temple vows.

And now I am until such time as I supposedly repent under Satan's power.

Well, William, I knew that it was going to be an impossible task to interview you in one hour.

Next time I'm going to demand at gunpoint that I have a second hour for this broadcast when I'm interviewing you.

But I look forward to having you back.

William, quickly let our listeners know how they may contact you and your website.

OK, my website is accessible.

My blog is accessible through the right source, www

.rightsourceonline .com.

There you can find a button that will take you to my blog.

It's entitled Pro Libertate.

Well, I eagerly look forward to having you back on again on the Yarn Trap Bazaar and program, William,

perhaps after we both see the September Dawn movie.

Yes, let's do that.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mark Romaldi, for being our co -host today in the studio.

Quickly let our listeners know how they can contact Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Merritt.

Yes, at 516 -379 -2408. 516 -379 -2408.

Thank you who listened today, and always remember that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater Savior

than you are a sinner.

God bless.