Evildoers act like God is to blame

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Mar 17, 2003 by Lee BensonDeseret News columnist

Religion is a serious subject, but don't you wish some people took it a lot less seriously?

Skyscrapers topple, countries divide, bombs explode in crowded marketplaces, all in the name of God.

And here at home, a pretty blond teenager loses her girlhood -- her inalienable right to be a geeky ninth-grader just like everybody else and to wonder when she'll get her first prom dress and go on her first real date and stand in star-struck awe of the high school seniors -- in that same name.

A lot of things are recoverable in this life, but innocence isn't one of them.

Brian David Mitchell, who became Emmanuel David Isaiah, is expected to be charged with kidnapping in the case of Elizabeth Ann Smart, who became Augustine Marshall, but a far more accurate charge would be religious terrorism.

In his own small-time way, Mitchell terrorized Elizabeth, her family and her community every bit as much as Osama bin Laden and those pilots who flew into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 terrorized America. Bin Laden said the Muslim God Allah told him to send the pilots into the buildings; Mitchell said the God of Abraham told him to take Elizabeth at knifepoint. You tell me the difference.

In Utah, we have our own brand of religious terrorist -- former members of the LDS Church who find their own far-out spiritual orbits. A basic tenet of the LDS faith is that God speaks to man today -- and they think it means them. Every few years one of these would-be prophets, like a recurring nightmare, surfaces. They all believe they are unique, but they are not. God talked to Brian David Mitchell the same way he was supposed to have talked to a long line of others.

The entire time I've been in journalism, dating back to the mid- 1970s, they have regularly paraded past us in the media. There was self-proclaimed prophet Ervil LeBaron in 1976, who was convicted as responsible, along with his impressionable family, for 28 murders. There was self-proclaimed prophet Charles Bruce Longo in 1978, who killed himself and was followed by the deaths of his wife and six of their children as they plunged from the top story of a Salt Lake hotel. There was self-proclaimed prophet Ron Lafferty and his brother, Dan Lafferty, who in 1984 killed their sister-in-law and 15- month-old niece. There was Mark Hofmann in 1985, so obsessed to prove the LDS faith wrong through forgeries that he murdered two people in an attempt to keep his secret.

There have been others, like Cody Judy, who in 1993 threatened to blow up an LDS apostle if he didn't read a letter declaring Judy the next prophet, but these are the most recent and most notorious.

Longo is the closest parallel to this week's headlines. Convinced that he was either God or called of God, Charles Bruce Longo, like Brian David Mitchell, changed his first two names to Immanuel David. And like Longo's wife, Mitchell's wife, Wanda, would follow him anywhere.

I don't know about you, but I like the kind of religion that teaches us to be kind, honest, productive, thoughtful and considerate of others, and pretty much leaves it at that.

And when it comes to bad guys, I much prefer the defense "The devil made me do it" to "God made me do it." Stuff the devil makes you do is bad, sometimes real bad, but admitting that it's bad at least makes it honest.

In my book, doing bad and calling it good is as bad as it gets.

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.