The Pagan Invasion is an explosive new 13-part video series, providing a thorough behind-the-scenes examination of today's New Age movement and neo-pagan revival.
Each superbly produced volume features rare footage from around the world, along with expert analysis by noted Christian leaders and authors.
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The Pagan Invasion is an explosive new 13-part video series, providing a thorough behind-the-scenes examination of today's New Age movement and neo-pagan revival.
Pagan Invasion
Hello, I'm Chuck Smith.
And I'm Carol Matricciana. Welcome to this edition of The Pagan Invasion.
Today we're going to take a look at the vast empire of Joseph Smith. His followers are called Mormons and belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Founded in 1830, the Mormon Empire now encompasses billions of dollars in financial assets and real estate holdings, a membership of 7.5 million dedicated followers, and an incalculable amount of influence in city, state, and federal governments, law enforcement agencies, the CIA, and public schools.
The Los Angeles Times reports of high-level influence in the FBI with nicknames like the Mormon Mafia.
Other reports detail the large influence the Mormon Church wields in the financial community, citing that it is the largest business corporation in the western United States.
Beyond the PR image of the Osmond family and the beautiful voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, what is behind this incredible organization and what, in fact, is at the root of its doctrine and theology?
Today, in pursuit of Joseph Smith's original vision, the Mormon Church circles the globe with an aggressive missionary outreach. Mormon missionaries claim to be bringing true Christianity to the world, but in fact they have a completely different God from that of biblical Christianity, a different Jesus and a different Gospel.
Careful investigation indicates that Joseph Smith was in touch with the same superhuman source of revelation and power that has been the common inspiration behind all pagan religions throughout history.
Mormon's uniqueness is in the fact that it was the first really successful attempt to pass paganism off as Christianity.
At the heart of Mormon doctrine is the belief that we can become gods and goddesses. This is, in fact, one of the primary appeals and attractions of Joseph Smith's heretical teachings that you and I can become God.
The heart of Mormon theology began with Joseph Smith's bold assertion that every Christian on the face of the earth was following abominable creeds and was involved in total worldwide apostasy that had completely destroyed the church that Jesus Christ had founded.
After seeing a vision as a 14-year-old boy, Smith claimed that he had been ordained to restore truth to the earth and that as the modern founder of the true church, he alone was the dispenser of God's revelation and will.
Today the Mormon prophet and the 12 apostles of the Mormon church claim this absolute authority as their divinely inherited right. Those rejecting Joseph Smith's claim or the authority of the Mormon hierarchy are considered to be Gentiles outside of the true church and are without salvation.
A few years ago, the film The Godmakers was released, and for the first time on film, the Mormon belief system was presented for all to see. And as a result of the film, the growth rate of the Mormon church declined for the first time in its history.
It looks beautiful from the outside, but when you peel off the mask and talk to the victims, you uncover another part of the story. The documented evidence you are about to see may seem unbelievable, but it's all true.
When they took my family, there wasn't anything else to live for.
I tried to kill myself.
Thank God I didn't succeed.
I think the most difficult part of this for me is that they have turned my own beautiful children against me.
You know, the brainwashing techniques of this organization are really incredibly effective.
On behalf of a growing number of victims, Ed Decker, together with Dick Baer, themselves victims of this powerful organization, consulted with a Los Angeles-based law firm about filing a class action lawsuit.
Mr. Baer, Mr. Decker, just what are we dealing with here?
We're dealing with a massive organization, a multi-billion dollar corporation whose wealth is worldwide and whose influence is staggering.
I've got records of many, many homes that have been shattered by these people.
I consider it to be one of the most deceptive and most dangerous groups in the entire world.
I have documentation that ties it into the occult, into Satanism.
Mr. Decker, I don't doubt your sincerity, but I find this very hard to believe.
I mean, these people pride themselves in a sense of family togetherness and a very conspicuous form of moral rectitude.
That's part of the incredible deception, and that's what we have to dig into, and we need to expose it.
We need to open it up to the truth.
Salt Lake City, Utah, Mecca of Mormonism.
To the outside world, the Mormon church presents a carefully groomed Osmond family image.
With an emphasis on family togetherness and inspiring history and high moral standards,
the Mormon church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS,
turns out tens of thousands of missionaries a year whose goals are to spread Mormonism around the world.
Most of them are trained here at Brigham Young University.
Dr. Harold Goodman, BYU professor, former Mormon bishop, currently an LDS mission president.
Well, the church encourages the family to be as self-sustaining as possible in their activities,
starting with the family home evening where the father, who is the patriarch of the family,
would gather his family together. There they would have a prayer, an opening song or two.
I looked out the window and what did I see? Popcorn popping on the apricot tree.
We are very much a family-centered church because we believe that strong families make for a strong nation,
and strong nations make for a strong world.
The Mormon church has had a phenomenal growth.
In the next 50 years, it will be approximated about 70 million people to 100 million people.
There are many reasons why this is so. One is the vast missionary program we have over the world.
Approximately right now, 28,000 missionaries and 186 missions.
Thousands of early church members were recruited from Britain
and brought over to supplement the church in America during the 1830s.
Mr. Brian Grant is the director of public relations for the Mormon church in Great Britain and Ireland,
where membership has increased a thousand percent in the last 20 years.
I suppose everybody's idea of a Mormon missionary are those two dark young men who sort of ride around the town on bikes
and knock on your door at inopportune times.
In actual fact, we have an increasing number of young women serving in the missionary field
and also quite a lot of retired couples free of family responsibilities
who feel that they too want to share the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
So many people have joined the church, I believe, because of the gospel principles
that it gives understanding and enlightenment of who they are, who they were, and what they may become.
Jim and I came from very strong Christian families.
We were introduced to Mormonism through a business partner, Jim's.
I'd always had this preconceived idea that a Mormon was somebody who went around dressed in black and had 16 wives,
which was not true, of course.
These people seemed to be Christian.
Any people that I had ever been around that were Christian, they had these same attributes.
Just kind, good, loving people, family-oriented.
All the things they did revolved around their religion.
People at the Mormon church, they were all so friendly, and they took me in by dances
and all the different kids at school, they were all pushing me on, saying,
I'm so glad you're going to join the Mormon church.
They got me into the church through their social program, which is fabulous,
and the family atmosphere, which was mine was broken up, therefore I went right to it.
The youth are certainly the strength of the church in the future.
Consequently, we hold classes for the youth on Sunday.
We have athletic events for our youth.
We have socials where they would have fun games, dances.
Many of the social events, as well as regular church services, are held in the chapels
which are being built at a rate of two per day around the world.
However, the few dozen Mormon temples serve a completely different purpose.
No church services are held here.
Only secret ceremonies, which are reserved for an elite few.
The goal of every Latter-day Saint is to be married as a family unit in the House of the Lord,
and there receive these sacred blessings that will allow us to eventually,
if we're worthy, to dwell and be in the presence of our Heavenly Father.
You know, not all members of the church go to the temple.
That may be something that would surprise you, but to gain admittance to the temple,
one has to have what's called a temple recommend.
He has to receive a satisfactory interview from his bishop and from his stake president.
There he's asked, or she has asked, certain rather penetrating questions about their worthiness, their morality.
If he's a full tithe peer, that is the only way that we can be with our Heavenly Father.
Otherwise, we could not be in his presence.
By going through the temple and by adhering to various regulations, such as abstaining from tea or coffee,
paying a substantial portion of your income to the Mormon church,
and giving free labor to various church-run organizations,
the worthy Mormon can become a God himself in the life hereafter,
ruling over his own planet with a number of goddess wives.
So you can see why the temple is so important to the Latter-day Saint,
because if he is worthy to go on to the temple and there receive the sacred ordinances and covenants and keep them,
he can eventually grow into becoming a God himself.
Before this newly completed temple in Seattle was closed to all but a select group of Mormons,
visitors were given the opportunity to get a glimpse inside.
For many of these Mormons who came from thousands of miles away and stood for hours in the rain,
this may be the only time they will ever be allowed to enter a Mormon temple.
Tell me who God the Father is to you.
He is like you and I, every human being on the face of the earth.
Oh, is he a man?
Yes, he is.
How did he get to be God?
I don't know.
Yeah, he's perfect in every way.
So if we are perfect, can we become like God?
Yes, ma'am.
You know, the Mormon gods and goddesses, as Joseph Smith taught, were once upon a time just mere humans, just like us,
and they worked their way up to becoming gods.
There's supposed to be billions of these highly evolved humanoids somewhere out in space overseeing their own planet.
This sounds like science fiction or Greek mythology.
Would you say that the average Mormon believes these things?
Absolutely.
The Mormon church teaches that in order for me to become a goddess, I needed to marry a Mormon man in good standings with the church.
And without a husband that could take me through the temple, I wouldn't be able to go to heaven and be with my Heavenly Father.
According to Mormon theology, husbands and wives who have successfully achieved godhood will be required to populate their own planet by procreating as many spirit children as possible.
Ever since I was a little girl, I was taught that my primary purpose was to become a goddess in heaven so that I could multiply an earth.
And I wanted that. I wanted to be eternally pregnant and look down on an earth and say, that's mine, and I populated that whole earth and all those little babies I had.
To tell you the truth, I find it extremely difficult to believe that the Mormon attorneys and judges I know actually expect to become infinite gods
peopling new worlds and engaging in celestial sex with their goddess wives.
Why don't you ask them?
Well, I would be embarrassed, to be honest with you, and if it's true, as you've suggested, that these people do plan to reproduce themselves across the universe, well, I'd rather not know about it.
We do business with these gentlemen.
That's why it's such a secret. That's why even the Mormons don't talk about it. They're embarrassed by it, too.
Look, Mormonism is based upon the belief that extraterrestrial humanoids from a star in a distant place called Kolob visited this earth, came down to this earth, and visited a young boy, 14-year-old boy by the name of Joseph Smith.
Space gods from Kolob? Sounds like Von Deineken or Battlestar Galactica.
But we know it's bizarre. I know as a finite being, I can never become an infinite god. It's a logical absurdity.
That's when I stopped believing it, but I couldn't get my wife to even talk about it.
She had to divorce me and find another man that was working his way to godhood, or she could not become a god.
Are you saying that the Mormon church pressures individuals into divorcing their spouses when they're not measuring up to the church's standards, and also pressures them into marrying another spouse who is working for this godhood?
Greg and Jolene divorced because of the Mormon church and have now remarried.
He was raised Christian, and I was raised Mormon. We just had a very beautiful relationship, but it always came back to the Mormonism.
I had to convert him in some way, and after two and a half years of really trying hard, I just couldn't do it, and I was advised to divorce him.
I couldn't imagine a bishop actively counseling for divorce. His job is to seek for ways in which the marriage partners can be reconciled.
And yet in my case, my wife was advised by the bishop that it would be best for her to divorce me.
There will be situations where, for reasons of incompatibility of one form or another, divorce will become inevitable.
But because we have such a firm belief in the family unit and the sanctity of family life, it really would be the end of the road and not something that was ever entered into in terms of a convenience.
I went to my bishop, and he advised me that it would be better for me to live without him and to be a servant in Mormon heaven than to stay married to him.
And here is a church that teaches family unity, and they destroyed my marriage.
Gentlemen, this isn't helping your case. These people have the religious freedom to believe anything they want to.
But why should they have the freedom to break up families and destroy lives?
I couldn't ask for a better brother than Kip. Gene and Perry Eliason, father and brother of young Kip who committed suicide early in 1982 at the age of 16.
Kip was almost the perfect son. He was a four-point student at Capitol High School. He was involved with the track team where he got the most inspirational track team member.
The more deeply Kip got involved with the church, the more depressed he became. At that point he told me that he had fittings that were in direct conflict with the teachings of the church.
When Kip went to the LDS counselors, they only reinforced the teachings of the church, which just increased Kip's fittings of unworthiness.
I know what Kip was going through. I went to the same type interviews that he did. The pressure was great to strive for worthiness to be perfect all the time.
The only problem is Kip took it a little too seriously.
Ed Decker, who appears in the film The Godmakers, spent 19 years in the Mormon church. I recently asked him to reflect on some of the primary teachings of Mormonism.
Well, if you could take all the theology of Mormonism and sum it up in one sentence, I think that sentence would be the Mormon axiom of the law of eternal progression.
It goes this way. As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become. They teach that God was once a man who lived on another planet.
He grew and earned his right to become a God, and now the Mormon God, Elohim, lives on a planet called Kolob, somewhere in our galaxy with his many thousands of spiritual wives in a polygamous relationship of that sort.
Mormonism teaches basically that if each male member of the church is obedient to his priesthood calling, earns the right to become a God himself, that he will go off to another place like that with his many spiritual wives and become a God over some other planet, some other galaxy.
Are there any similarities between Christianity and Mormonism?
Mormonism, of course, has that veneer of Christianity. It's a Christian cult. They use the name of Jesus Christ. They talk about Christ. They pray in His name. It's the name of their church, the Church of Jesus Christ.
But again, you've got to look at the Jesus. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that false teachers will come and bring other Christs.
And you've got to take a look at the Mormon Christ and see if he matches up to Christianity or to paganism. And what you get with the Mormon Jesus, he's the brother of Lucifer.
He was created through an act of sex by the Mormon God coming down to earth and fathering him with one of his own daughters.
Again, there's that Greek mythology coming back into it again. And the Jesus of Mormonism was married. He converted water to wine at one of his own weddings.
And Joseph Smith himself was supposedly one of his offspring many generations back. And so you have a different Christ.
And you use the same words. You look at Christ in Mormonism and they think Jesus, but they give a different definition to it.
They give a different definition to all the theology. They use the Christian terms, but it has no Christianity as base.
Mormons are making an effort to step into orthodox Christianity. Are there any dangers in pursuing this type of packaging?
Well, I think it's a real danger, Carol, because you're seeing Mormons running these public service advertisements on television every time you turn on the TV.
They look Christian. They smell Christian. They taste Christian, but they're not. There's a veneer. There's a mask over them and their theology.
And they're not showing it to the public. It's a gnostic evil that's being presented as Christian.
And people who have no theological background are falling into the trap of thinking the people who are themselves victims of this lie are really the fruit of the theology.
Mormon doctrine teaches that all humans have lived in a premortal state before coming to this world.
We are not gods by birth, but are required to come to this earth to take on a physical human body in order to prove ourselves worthy of godhood.
Rejection of Joseph Smith's teaching and disobedience to the Mormon Church and its leadership hierarchy will, of course, be cause to forfeit one's right to godhood.
The Mormon Church, with its beautiful ads in the Reader's Digest, would like us to believe that it's Christian through and through, yet what the outsider sees is not what the insider sees.
In the Mormon Church, the Book of Mormon itself calls the Christian body the Whore of Babylon.
The temple ceremony mocks the Christian pastor, calls him a harling of Satan.
Once I got into the church, I was asking questions, and it wasn't the same.
It wasn't Christian as they had told my mom and myself. It just wasn't right.
Anyone that believes in Christ is a Christian, and we believe that we are Christians above all other denominations because we have so much revealed information about our Redeemer, our Savior, Jesus the Christ.
Mormons are instructed to use Christian terminology when talking to potential converts.
Words such as God, Jesus, and salvation all have different Mormon meanings, which the outsider may not be aware of.
Do you consider Mormonism Christianity?
Yes, I do. We believe in God the Eternal Father and in the Son Jesus Christ and in the Holy Ghost.
There are so many that have part of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We think the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has all of the gospel in its total fullness.
Joseph Smith's first vision is the cornerstone of the Mormon Church, and yet there are nine versions, each of which contradicts the other.
Mormon leaders are deliberately keeping from you the true history of their religion because they know you will have a hard time believing it's from God if you saw how it really was all put together in the unpublished account.
We find that Joseph Smith first said it was just Jesus that appeared to him.
The second time he wrote a story down, a few years later, he says many angels appeared to him.
Then some years later he says that two beings appeared.
He changes the date, he changes how old he is, he changes the motivation, why he went into the woods to pray, he changes who was there, and he changes what the message was that they gave him.
So if he were giving us an actual account of a real experience, we would assume he would have known the first time around whether it was God or Jesus, if it was both of them, what their message was, and when it happened.
Yet we find him redrafting this story.
Well, if you were a witness of an accident and someone asked you to tell about it, if you gave three accounts as divergent as those three are, people would say you couldn't have witnessed the event.
The Mormon church keeps changing its scriptures.
The changes are incredible.
There are so many thousands of them.
Recently they canonized the 137th section of the Doctrine and Covenants.
When I read this for the first time, I recognized that they omitted over 200 words of the actual revelation as written by Joseph Smith.
Why did the church omit the 200 words?
Because they contained three blatantly false revelations, prophecies of Joseph Smith.
You know, Joseph Smith said the moon was inhabited with people dressed like Quakers and living to be about a thousand years of age.
And Brigham Young seconded it when he said that the moon not only was inhabited, but the sun was inhabited.
I believe some of the strongest anti-Mormon literature, if you want to call it that, is the actual publications of the Mormon church.
The Mormon church has deliberately hidden the records of its early church leaders, of their early documents, their early publications from their members.
And there are so many things in the church records, if they were open for public inspection, it would tarnish this beautiful image that the church puts out.
The missionary comes to your door, we have a beautiful story to tell you about families, and they want to tell you what a glorious place this is to raise your children.
The missionary isn't part of the cover-up.
He doesn't know this.
He has been told that everything will check out.
It's all 100 percent true.
He thinks the records are open.
He doesn't even realize he couldn't go to Salt Lake and see these documents for himself.
Leaders have to go back and rework, rewrite, cover up, change, delete, add, all the way through on all of their books, their history, their scriptures.
They suppress their diaries, because these things show the confusion and the man-made nature of the theology and the religion.
The Book of Mormon claims to be an actual historical record, translated from real plates that Joseph Smith unearthed in a hill in New York.
Now, if this is a genuine history, one would assume you could study this just like you would study any historical book.
When we look at the Book of Mormon, we find an entirely different story. Instead of being an actual record of actual fact,
I have looked over maps, checked archaeological information, and I still am left to wonder, where is the land of Zarahimla?
Where is the valley of Nimrod? Where are the plains of Nefaha?
I have been unable to find a record of even one city as mentioned in the Book of Mormon.
We turn to the Book of Mormon. We have nothing. There is no Nephite language. There are no Nephite cities.
There is not a map in any Book of Mormon. You cannot locate any site. There is no evidence for the book, and yet it's supposed to be a historical record.
Many people do not understand the Book of Mormon. This is a history of the people that inhabited the American continent,
North, South, and Central America, from about 600 B.C. until about 420 A.D.
And we have much evidence, of course, of people having lived there.
I am led to believe from my research that this is not an actual story, but is a fairy tale, much like Alice in Wonderland.
Decades of searching by Mormon archaeologists have failed to uncover one scrap of evidence regarding the people or the places
or the events in the Book of Mormon.
And Mormon missionaries throughout the world are converting people to the Mormon Church by explaining to them
that archaeology has proven the Book of Mormon to be true.
It never ceases to amaze me the number of intelligent people that are in the Mormon Church that still accept things that cannot be substantiated.
They get so locked in that they are afraid to even take another look.
We've run into many times where they have admitted that rather than sit down and study with us,
they'll accept what their church leaders tell them.
The finality of the Mormon theology is not based upon evaluation by scriptural evidence,
but based entirely upon a burning in the bosom.
The Mormon scriptures tell you that that's what you must seek.
When the Mormon missionaries come to your home, they'll talk to you about the Book of Mormon.
They'll talk about the Prophet Joseph Smith.
And when they're done, they'll ask you to pray about it and to seek that divine burning in the bosom that they have
and that this will prove to you that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, that the Book of Mormon is really Scripture.
And so it becomes a subjective evaluation.
Scripture is not to be tested.
They would encourage us then to read the Book of Mormon.
Nothing in the Bible but to read various sections of the Book of Mormon
and to pray about it that we might know it was true.
When we discuss these things with Mormons, some will say,
I don't care if every prophecy of Joseph Smith is proven wrong.
I have a burning in my bosom that I know that the Church is true.
I'll say, have you tested him? I'm not going to test him.
I have that burning in my bosom.
It's that total and complete trust in anything Mormon.
Ed, you were in the Mormon Church for some 20 years.
Were you aware that Mormonism was not orthodox Christianity?
Well, yes, I really was.
But we didn't look at it like it was something wrong.
We never thought that we had added to orthodoxy.
We had restored the mystical knowledge that had been taken away.
The secrets of Christianity that were lost to the regular Christians
were restored by our prophets so that we had an illuminated knowledge,
the light of the real truth of God's requirement for His people on earth.
We had restored those things.
The Mormons seem to embrace the spirit, the moral beliefs of Christianity.
Do they in fact follow these principles in their private lives?
Well, I think the Mormon Church has a fantastic stand against abortion.
They're very pro-family.
So many of the things that the Christian body at large stand for,
the Mormons are 100% behind that.
But in actuality, if you look at the actual statistics of the Mormon people,
you find out that there's a higher-than-average divorce rate,
there's a higher-than-average suicide rate,
there's a higher-than-average children conceived out of wedlock,
there's a higher-than-average problem with depression in Mormon women.
It's that lie that they're living.
The Christian Mormonism is a Donnie Marie type.
Everybody's happy. Families are forever.
Everybody's sort of sweet and mom's baking cookies all the time.
And that's not real.
That's part of the PR picture of Mormonism.
And in actuality, Mormons are just like anybody else without Christ.
Their families are a mess. Their society is not together.
Their marriages are falling apart.
Joseph Smith's belief that men could turn themselves into God
was generally considered not only an absurdity in his day,
but the rankest of heresy.
Today, however, this one radical idea permeates many areas of secular society
and is at the heart of the New Age movement,
Eastern mysticism and occultic practices.
How could Joseph Smith have anticipated these modern developments?
Is all this just a coincidence,
or could there be something more sinister involved?
This is the most fascinating aspect of Mormonism
and underscores the dangers of Joseph Smith's latter-day empire
and its link to the pagan invasion.
The Mormon Church is the second largest financial institution
west of the Mississippi River.
It's very difficult to tell what the Mormon Church actually owns.
Someone has said that even the president of the Mormon Church may not know
because they might have bought something yesterday or sold something today.
The Mormon Church wields economic power more effectively
than any other organized religion in the world.
They own the $2.6 billion Beneficial Life Insurance Company,
the Deseret Management and Trust Corporation,
hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, farms.
They are a major stockholder in the L.A. Times.
They own TV and radio stations.
The ZCMI department store chain.
They have vast land holdings with ownerships in all 50 American states
throughout Canada and Europe and on every continent.
Two-thirds of their properties are tax-exempt.
Billions of dollars are extracted from church members each year
through their mandatory tithing program.
Mormons own a substantial portion of Hawaii.
They are one of the major financial institutions of this area.
When you go through the Polynesian Culture Center,
they offer you a tour over to their temple.
And next to the Salt Lake Temple,
the Hawaiian Temple receives the second largest number of visitors.
They give you a film presentation of the Mormon Church and have you sign in.
And then that name and address is forwarded to a missionary in the area that they are from.
And soon after you return home from your visit to the temple in Hawaii,
you will receive a knot from the Mormon missionary
asking you how you enjoyed your visit to the temple
and would you like to know more about the church,
using it as a way to get in to share with people the doctrine of Mormonism.
There are many people in the Mormon Church that are having trouble believing it,
many that are in it that don't really believe it at all.
My son realized after about five or six months that he had made a mistake in joining the Mormon Church
and one of the main things that made him realize that
was the ridiculousness of the idea that the Mormons teach that you can become a God.
Mormonism undercuts the Bible.
It undercuts all the other churches
so that the Mormon that starts to lose faith in Mormonism
will usually feel there's nothing out there to look into.
I, in fact, believe that if the Mormon Church wasn't true, there was no true church.
I had one of those burning testimonies of the Mormon Church.
When I was growing up, all through the years of my childhood,
my sisters and my brother and I were all best of friends and had a beautiful relationship.
Since I've come out of the Mormon Church,
my sisters and I have had no relationship at all.
One of the rules in the Mormon Church is that if you want to go to the temple,
you can't associate with a apostate member, and that's what they call me.
After I left the church, things were the same.
A lot of my friends wouldn't talk to me.
Now, even though I had left the church to my own free will
because I knew it was no longer true,
you are excommunicated in the Mormon Church,
and that excommunication is a dirty term.
With a few rare exceptions,
almost all of our Mormon friends just really wanted to have nothing to do with us.
In Utah, it's very hard for someone to leave the church and make it public.
There is, first of all, the threat for your job.
You may have a Mormon employer, and this could seriously threaten your work position.
Many of the people I see work for the church itself and are afraid of losing their position.
Some are afraid of divorce.
I know people in high positions that do not believe Mormonism.
I've talked to a Mormon bishop that told me he didn't believe Mormonism at all.
Recently, a Mormon family that we know, even my husband, began asking questions.
He called one night and he said,
I know what you're saying now is true.
There's no doubt in my mind I can't punch any holes in it.
But he said, I'm scared to death that I'm going to lose my wife and my children and my business
because when I make this known, what I have discovered, I will lose it all.
The motivation for many of them is that Mormonism is a nice place to raise your family.
It's the easy road.
If you're in danger and you're already in it, then why upset things?
The biggest danger was that they took me in and I was thinking it was a Christian church.
And it wasn't a Christian church.
It was a cult.
I remembered that I should ask Jesus into my heart.
I remembered hearing my Christian friends say that.
So I got down on my knees one day when I was all alone and asked Jesus to come into my heart.
I didn't know what I was doing, but when I got up, I had been born again.
I found out that Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life, and not an organization.
I had been looking all my life for something in the Mormon church
and I couldn't put my finger on what I was looking for.
Now when my mom accepted Christ in her life, she shared it with me.
I saw a joy in her life that I had never seen before in all her activity in the Mormon church.
And this is what I needed.
I feel very grateful to God that our whole family, my wife and myself and seven lovely children,
have come out of the Mormon church and know Jesus Christ in a very personal way.
Mr. Decker, Mr. Behr, I don't think we can take the case.
But there is fraud, deliberate misrepresentation, and the families, the lives that are being destroyed.
You don't have the money to fight the Mormon church. They have billions.
This thing could go on for years, and they have the resources to do it.
You've taken us to Kolob and back, but I don't think we can get a jury to accompany us.
This is all I have left for my son Kip. It was the last letter he left me.
Dad, I love you more than words can say. If it were possible, I would stay alive for only you.
For I really only love you, but it's not possible. I must first love myself, and I do not.
A strange fitting of darkness to self-hate overpowers all my defenses. I must, unfortunately, yield to it.
This turbulent fitting is only for a few to truly understand.
I feel that you do not comprehend the immense fitting of self-hatred I have.
This is the only way I feel that I can relieve myself of these fittings now.
Carry on with your life and be happy.
I love you more than words can say.
If you had to leave today, what would you miss the most?
Leave from the Church? From the Church? I would rather be dead.
Good afternoon, ma'am. We'd like to talk to you about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It is important that we thoroughly know the Word of God, because the Mormons prey upon a person's ignorance of God's Word.
And the majority of their converts come from people who were once a part of the Christian Church.
Because they do not really understand or know the Word of God, they are deceived into believing these visions and these lies that are perpetrated by the Mormons.
It is important that you know the teaching of God's Word.
And when you do, you will know that Jesus is not the brother of Lucifer.
You will know that Adam is not the God that we worship and serve.
And thus you will not be deceived into buying into the Mormon beliefs,
which will ultimately lead you to believe that you yourself can become God.
God said, I am God. There is no other. I know no other.
And thus this idea of man becoming God through the Mormon religion is just as wrong as man becoming God through Hinduism or through the New Age movement.
There is one God, and we must worship and serve Him and Him alone.
Within all of us, there is a God-shaped vacuum.
Throughout the ages, man has attempted to fill that void with the things of the world.
But it is only through a relationship with our Creator that we can be truly satisfied.
His Holy Scriptures reveal the way in which we can be reconciled to God, and that is through the provisions of His Son, Jesus Christ.
I'm Chuck Smith.
And I'm Carol Matriciana.
Join us again for another edition of The Pagan Invasion.
The Pagan Invasion is an explosive new 13-part video series providing a thorough behind-the-scenes examination of today's New Age movement and neo-pagan revival.
Each superbly produced volume features rare footage from around the world along with expert analysis by noted Christian leaders and authors.
For more information, contact your local Christian bookstore or call 1-800-828-2290.
California residents call 1-800-633-0869.
The Pagan Invasion is an explosive new 13-part video series providing a thorough behind-the-scenes examination of today's New Age movement and neo-pagan revival.
For more information, contact your local Christian bookstore or call 1-800-633-0869.
Thank you.