Mormonism Revisited – Program 2

By: Ed Decker; ©1984

Temple marriage is an important step in a Mormon’s spiritual path. What are they taught about the purpose of this ceremony?

Temple Marriage

Introduction

Tonight on The John Ankerberg Show we will compare the truth claims of Mormonism with the truth claims of Orthodox Christianity. The claims of each are different. Mormons believe there are many gods, Christians believe there is just one. Mormons believe men can become gods; Christians do not. Christians believe only the Bible is God’s Word. Mormons believe there are other books besides the Bible that are divinely inspired. Mormons believe Joseph Smith is a prophet of God. Christians deny this.

Tonight, we are revisiting Mormonism, as four years ago we interviewed Mormon representatives. A year later, we interviewed the great-great-granddaughter of Brigham Young who left the Mormon Church. For tonight’s program, we invited both Mormons and former Mormons to come and present their views. A formal letter was sent to the head of communications of the Mormon Church and a personal invitation was extended to Dr. Wilford Griggs and Dr. Hugh Nibley, two of the leading scholars in Mormonism. At first, Drs. Griggs and Nibley said they would come, but later they cancelled and declined our invitation to speak to you tonight. But via excerpts from the documentary film, The God Makers, you will hear Mormon leaders present their beliefs. You will also meet Mr. Ed Decker, a man who for 20 years was a Temple Mormon and whose son is currently a Mormon missionary. We will ask Mr. Decker why he changed his mind concerning Mormonism after 20 years. Both Mormons and Christians are hard working, highly respected people. Both are sincere and dedicated in the practice of their beliefs. Our purpose during this series is not to question anyone’s sincerity. Rather, we will attempt to examine the evidence for the religious truth claim being made for purposes of comparison and knowledge. Ultimately, only you can decide which position is true. We invite you to join us.

---

Ankerberg: Welcome. This week again our guest is Mr. Ed Decker who was a Mormon for 20 years, married in the Temple in Los Angeles. And tonight, we want to find out what it was that you were told to do to become a god, and why is it so important to be married in the Temple. Ed, we are glad you are here, first of all.

Decker: Well, I am glad to be here. In order to become a god I have to go to the Temple and prepare myself for it. No Mormon can become a god or a goddess unless they go through the Temple ritual. That is the key. That’s the center of the Mormon theology.

Ankerberg: Alright, there is also quite a bit of moral pressure, if you want, in terms of your striving for godhood. And there are going to be statistics in this next film segment that comes out of the film, The God Makers, which hasn’t been shown any place except basically in Salt Lake City. I think you opened it there and invited the leaders and it is now starting to be shown in different parts of the country.

Decker: Everywhere now.

Ankerberg: It is a documentary, though, and we are just taking bits and pieces of it to jump off in our discussion. Let’s go right to the film and see this thing about the Mormon Church.

[Excerpt from The God Makers]

Decker: There is no doubt my motivation in all this stems partly from my own personal experiences. I look back on my own life, seeing a bishop counsel me to divorce my wife, seeing the five children whom I raised in the Mormon Church pulled from me, and spending all these years just trying to reestablish those relationships. I know literally hundreds of families whose stories like this could break your heart.

Narrator: Greg and Jolene divorced because of the Mormon Church, and have now remarried.

Jolene: He was raised a 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.

2nd Woman: Well, it became obvious to the church leaders that my husband was not going to go along with the church standards or the “word of wisdom” and had no desire to be active in the priesthood, and so they thought that it was perfectly fine and acceptable and encouraged me to divorce my husband.

3rd Woman: The second visit to the counselor, he went over the things that we had told him and he said, “Well, there are just some people that shouldn’t be married.”

Grant: 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.

Man’s Voice: And yet in my case, my wife was advised by the bishop it would be best for her to divorce me.

Grant: 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.

Woman’s Voice: 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.

Man’s Voice: And here’s a church that teaches family unity and they destroyed my marriage.

Decker: The pressure on the Mormon women is incredible. They must be perfect. They swear an oath of total obedience to the husband in the Mormon Temple. There is a whole area of psychiatric care dealing with the depression in the Mormon women.

Woman’s Voice: I have a friend who is a nurse in the psychiatric ward and she came to me and asked, “Why is it that there are so many Mormon women in my wing? What’s the trouble?” And I believe that it is simply because it is an impossibility to live up to the standards that are put upon these Mormon women.

Decker: They must be perfect so that they can go to exaltation with their husbands. They don’t even get out of the grave unless the husband calls them forth on the morning of the first resurrection. And if you do make it to celestial exaltation, heaven to the Mormon woman is being pregnant for all eternity, one spirit baby after the next.

Woman’s Voice: There came a point in my life as a Mormon woman that things were not going right at all. My whole time was spent in doing what the Mormon leaders had told me to do. In fact, I came to the point where I felt like life just wasn’t worth living anymore.

Narrator: Sandra Tanner, ex-Mormon, author, researcher, considered to be one of the greatest living authorities on Mormonism.

Tanner: Utah has a higher than the national average rate of divorce. It has higher than the national average rate of suicides. Especially teen suicide is much higher in Utah than it is nationally. This is partly due to the fact the Mormons emphasize perfection. And so many of these young people feel defeated in their striving for godhood; they can’t measure up to everything the church is asking of them and it just so demolishes their self-esteem that they can’t go on and so then they take their life.

---

Ankerberg: Ed, that’s a side that we very seldom hear about, and yet, actually if I can jump ahead in your story a little bit, didn’t your bishop tell you to divorce your wife?

Decker: Yes, he did and….

Ankerberg: And you did!

Decker: I did.

Ankerberg: Alright, we are going to come to that story in a little bit. But tell me a little bit about why this Temple marriage is so important.

Decker: Again, you have to understand that the Mormon’s godhood is tied to Temple marriage. If you haven’t been married for time and all eternity in the Temple, then you end up, even if you live a righteous life, without going through that ritual you end up in the middle kingdom of the three Mormon heavens.

Ankerberg: Okay, let’s just jump in here. Can you go and automatically apply to the Temple to get married?

Decker: No, you can’t. In fact, it is not an easy road. You have to live a very righteous life. You have to be a member of the church for a period of time, if you are a convert. Of course, if you grow up in the church, it is another period of time that you have to go through tests. You have to be interviewed first by your bishop and go through a series of very intimate questions, not only dealing with your personal life, but dealing with your finances, your attendance to the meetings, and all the many fast offerings that you give and whether or not you give….

Ankerberg: You even told me that they checked your W-2 form if they wanted.

Decker: And when I was involved in the bishopric, when we would have problems with a man during tithing settlement, which we would hold every year to check to be sure that they were being righteous in their financial giving, we in some cases actually had the man lay out his W-2 form to be certain that he is paying the proper tithe.

Ankerberg: Let’s go one step further; if the guy hadn’t paid it, then what?

Decker: Well, then if he wants to maintain his Temple recommend, he will have to ante up the bucks he has not put in.

Ankerberg: And if he doesn’t have it, he’s got to….

Decker: Then he has to go out and borrow it.

Ankerberg: Alright, and we have stories that they do. What else do you have to do to get a Temple recommend?

Decker: Well, when you have been reviewed finally and approved by the bishop, then he gives you an authorization to be viewed by the Stake President. Then the Stake President goes through another series of questions, again dealing with your integrity, dealing with your attendance at meetings, dealing with your….

Ankerberg: How many meetings do you have to attend as a Mormon?

Decker: I couldn’t even count them. The men would go to their priesthood meetings, to their Sunday School meetings, to their sacrament meetings, to welfare program meetings, to Boy Scouts, to mutuals. I spent most of my life as a Mormon going back and forth from meetings and to meetings.

Ankerberg: And you also had to show up on Monday night for what?

Decker: Well, at home we had to, as a commandment from God, have Family Home Evening every Monday night!

Ankerberg: What did you do there?

Decker: Then we went through a book, we had a lesson book, a planner book, and we would then sing songs and then we would bake cookies. If it was the night that I was supposed to do something, they would give me a list of things that I could do and we would together as a family communicate.

Ankerberg: And if you didn’t do that you couldn’t get a Temple recommend.

Decker: No, you couldn’t get a Temple recommend.

Ankerberg: And if you didn’t get your Temple recommend you couldn’t be married in the Temple and if you didn’t do that, you couldn’t become a god.

Decker: Now realize, only 25% of all the Mormons in the world have ever been in a Temple.

Ankerberg: Well, let’s break down the figures. There are five million Mormons. Okay, now of those, give me the figures.

Decker: Only 25% of those have ever been in a Temple.

Ankerberg: So, let’s say 1.2 million.

Decker: Okay, and of those that have been in a Temple, only half of them are still worthy to get back in. In other words, they have lost….

Ankerberg: So about 600,000 are left to get back in.

Decker: Okay, and of those, because of the bizarre rituals that take place in the Mormon Temple, only half of those who actually hold recommends even go back in and perform those rituals.

Ankerberg: So then there are 300,000 hard core believing Mormons?

Decker: Hard core Mormons.

Ankerberg: And you were one of them?

Decker: I was one of them.

Ankerberg: Alright, when you got the final okay after you went all through this.

Decker: You went to the Temple. First off, you were told that the man at the door had spiritual discernment that if you lied and it was not caught by the bishop or by the Stake President, that because you are in the house of the Lord and the power of God is there, that the man who checked your recommend, like a little card that would give you admission, he would have spiritual discernment to know that you lied and know secret sin. And I want to tell you, I was one nervous dude handing in my recommend as I went on in. And, you know, I got past that guy. That was a major accomplishment for me.

Ankerberg: Okay, now, but you, up to this point, you didn’t know what they were going to do there.

Decker: I was looking for the greatest spiritual experience in my entire life.

Ankerberg: To be married in the Temple.

Decker: To be married in the Temple; to take out what they called my endowments to become as God, a god in embryo. And what I found in there was so bizarre and so far removed from what I was told to expect that…

Ankerberg: How many folks remember Marie’s wedding? She had a what? $20,000 dress?

Decker: Right.

Ankerberg: Okay.

Decker: It’s a beautiful dress.

Ankerberg: Okay. You told me something that a lot of people don’t know about what happened as far as the Mormons when they get inside the Temple. What happens?

Decker: Well, as soon as you get in the Temple, they separate your bride from you and then for two hours or so during this Temple ritual building up to your wedding, she is not even allowed to sit with you, number one. And the first thing that happens is, she goes down into the ladies locker room and you go down to the men’s locker room and they strip you nude. Now, that’s the end of Marie’s dress right there. And until she comes back out in it again, she wears the secret garb of the Mormon Temple. She has nothing to do with that $20,000 dress. That’s just for the movie magazines.

Ankerberg: Okay. What did you put on?

Decker: Well, in the locker I took everything off. And then I put on a little thing called a shield. It was like a little poncho sheet and then they took me into another room and there they washed and anointed with oil each member of my body, speaking special incantative-type blessings upon each part of my body. Then, after I was finished with that, then they gave me a thing called the “garment of the holy priesthood” which is, in fact, long-johns, long underwear.

Ankerberg: You have it there. Do you want to show us?

Decker: Well, I have some here. What I was told at that time was that I would have to wear this 24 hours a day, seven days a week and that I was not allowed to remove it for anything. This is the “garment of the holy priesthood.” And it has secret markings on each of the breasts and the navel that protect you. It’s magic. It’s like an amulet or a talisman, and this gave me protection. But I was told that I could only keep this protection as long as I kept this on my body. I would wash in the shower, stand on this, have it on my body, stand on it, dry myself off. When I was dried, then step into my new garment.

Ankerberg: You never took it off?

Decker: No, you can’t.

Ankerberg: Okay, did you know any of this before you got to the Temple?

Decker: I didn’t have any idea. I was supposed to go to the house of the Lord to become as God, but I didn’t know God wore those kinds of things.

Ankerberg: Okay, and you went along with it?

Decker: Well, I was so scared I would have done anything. I mean, there wasn’t any question. My friends were with me and they were saying, “Yes, “Yes,” and I was being stroked. I was in a line. You know, there wasn’t a chance for me to say, “Wait a minute! Let me go home and pray about this. Let me check to see if this is okay or not.” Every Mormon that you know that has ever been through a Temple wears that underwear.

Ankerberg: What about showbiz people and people in baseball and so on like that?

Decker: Well, Marie Osmond gets a special dispensation and other people like her. If she wants to perform in a low-cut dress, because of that she can take the garment off and not wear it during it. But we are told if we as Mormons want to go swimming, for example, or if we are sports figures and we don’t want to embarrass people, we don’t want to offend God by displaying this in the locker room, then what we would do is, when we went out to that kind of situation, we would take off our garment at home, put on “Fruit of the Loom,” go to the sporting event, come back, take off the “Fruit of the Loom” and put on our garment again. And swimming, we were told that Satan has dominion over the water and the sea and so any time we went in the water, we were taking a very serious chance. And so we didn’t swim a lot.

Ankerberg: Okay. And then you were taken upstairs to another place and you are reunited with your bride.

Decker: No. I am not reunited with my bride. My bride is on the other side with the women. The women are not allowed to sit with the men in the Mormon Temple.

Ankerberg: And there you are told what?

Decker: There I am told that I am about to go partake of a series of rituals, that I will learn secret signs, combinations. I was given a secret name that only I and God knew and I was given my wife’s secret name.

Ankerberg: But she wasn’t given yours.

Decker: She was not allowed to know mine. I was never allowed to give my wife my name, nor was I ever allowed to discuss this.

Ankerberg: And you were never supposed to talk with even your wife after the…

Decker: Never talk about the Temple ritual outside the Temple, even with your wife.

Ankerberg: Okay, now what was the theology you were taught while you were in that room?

Decker: Well, the theology that I was taught, again, is a series of lessons. I was taught that Lucifer, who was our elder brother, gave instruction to Adam and Eve and taught them that in order for us to become as gods, they must partake of the fruit of the tree. Now, interestingly enough, when Adam partook of the fruit of the tree, he instantly became wise in the little play that was going on that we were watching during the part of that ceremony. And instantly he looked upon Lucifer and he saw an apron on Lucifer and he said, “What is that apron?” And Lucifer said, “It is the emblem of my power and my priesthood.” And then immediately Lucifer said, “Wait, here comes father. Quickly fashion ones for yourself and cover yourselves.” And instantly we then covered ourselves in the garment or the robe, fig leaf apron, that then became the center of the Temple clothing for the rest of the ceremony. I didn’t realize then that in Genesis 3 God rejected this. He refused to receive this.

And then later Adam and Eve go out of the Garden of Eden and there they build an altar. Then, wearing this garb that they have on, they build an altar and offer up offerings to God on the altar. The offerings are fruits and vegetables. And again, I didn’t know the Word of God. The Word of God says that was Cain’s offering.

And he’s standing there with his apron on crying out, “O God, hear the words of my mouth. O God, hear the words of my mouth. O God, hear the words of my mouth.” And Lucifer appears—not God, the Mormon Elohim—Lucifer appears and says, “I am the god of this world, what do you want?” And then he said he wanted to have a religious relationship with God. And so then Lucifer brings in a Christian pastor who we find out then is in the employ of Lucifer. He is a paid hireling of Lucifer and there this Christian pastor tries to tell Adam that God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit. He tries to describe the Trinitarian theology and it is then mocked and cursed in the Temple.

Ankerberg: Now all this is what you hear there. We are going to come back to this, Ed, in just a minute and find out more about the theology that you are told in that room before you meet your bride. But let’s go on to this next part of the film and see that and we will come back right to this.

Decker: Right.

[Excerpt from The God Makers]

Decker: The Mormon Church, with its beautiful ads in the Reader’s Digest, would like us to believe that it is 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 and calls him a hireling of Satan.

Woman’s Voice: 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.

Goodman: 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.

Narrator: 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.

[Interview in waiting line]

Interviewer: Do you consider Mormonism Christianity?

Answer Voice: Yes, I do. We believe in God the eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.

Goodman: 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.

Narrator: Joseph Smith’s first vision is the cornerstone of the Mormon Church and yet there are nine versions, each of which contradicts the other.

Tanner: Mormon leaders are deliberately keeping from you the true history of their religion because they know you will have a hard time believing it is from God if you saw how it really was all put together.

In the unpublished accounts 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, 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.

Decker: The Mormon Church keeps changing its Scriptures. The changes are incredible. There are so many thousands of them. Recently they canonized the 137^th 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 contain three blatantly false revelations, prophecies of Joseph Smith.

---

Ankerberg: Alright, what we want to find out is before we look at some of that evidence, what else were you taught up there in that sacred room before you met your wife about Mormon theology? And then, why is it not Christian?

Decker: I was taught that I must learn a series of secret signs, secret handshakes, secret combinations, secret penalties. I would have to swear oaths of obedience to the prophet, that if I was disobedient, I would have my throat slit from ear to ear, my tongue ripped out, that I would have my chest ripped from breast to breast and my heart ripped out. That I would have my belly ripped open and my bowels and my intestines spewed upon the ground if I broke these covenants that I swore. All the things that led up to it led up to the time when I stood before the veil. We all cried out, “Pe Le-El, Pe Le-El, Pe Le-El.” Crying out the same words that we were told that Adam cried out. And Adam got Lucifer!

God says, you know, in His holy Word that we are to lift up the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and He will draw all men unto Him. [Phil. 2; John 12:32] We didn’t even mention Jesus. I stood at the veil thinking that on the last day, on the judgment day, that I would meet God with my foot to his foot, my knee to his knee, my breast to his breast, my hand to his back, my other hand through the veil, with this underwear, holding his hand in a sacred patriarchal grip and that I would say, “Health in the navel, marrow in the bone. Strength to the loins in the sinew. Power in the priesthood be upon me and upon my posterity from generation to generation for all eternity.” And that was what was going to get me into heaven.

And when I found out that it is through the confession of the Lord Jesus Christ and Him as Lord and Savior that brings you into the presence of God, that’s the thing that brings you into salvation and not all these things. All these things turn out to be lies. They were not lifting up God. They were not lifting up his holy name. They weren’t lifting up Jesus. They were lifting up man. And it is a sin of self-exaltation; that thing that in Isaiah 14:12, the same thing that Lucifer was cast down in the pit for.

Ankerberg: And you did all of that?

Decker: Yes.

Ankerberg: And you accepted it?

Decker: Yes, I did.

Ankerberg: And you didn’t know anything about those curses before you went in there?

Decker: I had no idea. I had no time to think about it. They just didn’t say, “Now we are going to pray about this.” They just said, “Now all arise,” and we would stand up and do it. And I did it.

Ankerberg: Okay, then when did you meet your wife?

Decker: I finally met my wife after we both went through the entire process. When we stepped through the veil, then we went to a dealing room where in a period of about five minutes we were married and there the president of the Los Angeles Temple laid hands upon us, we knelt across the altar in the patriarchal grip holding our hands and then he said, “I seal upon you the dominions and kingdoms, the powers and principalities from above, the exaltations upon you and upon your children, upon them from generation to generation.” He laid a curse upon me and my family without me even knowing it.

But the Word of God says I was so blind. In Isaiah 44 it says that I didn’t know enough to even save my own soul. I became spiritually blind taking the God, the unimaginable God of the universe, and making Him like an image like unto man. God “gave me up” is what the Word of God says.

Ankerberg: Now, did you still expect that then you would become a god?

Decker: Absolutely.

Ankerberg: In other words, you felt from that point on it was all taken care of?

Decker: It was all taken care of as long as I was obedient to all the laws and ordinances, that I didn’t break my Temple covenants, and as long as I was righteous and I could keep my Temple recommend active, that I would actually become a god, or I stood a good chance. I didn’t know. I would never know until I was judged by Elohim, by Jesus, and by Joseph [Smith], whether or not I would go into the higher kingdom.

Ankerberg: Okay. Compare that system of working out your own way of becoming a god with what you now believe the Bible says.

Decker: Well, I found out that there is only one God and that the job of God is taken. In Hebrews 6:13, when He blessed Abraham, He swore by His own name because He knew none greater. We are heirs to the throne through Christ Jesus. And an heir only becomes king when the king dies, and our King is going to be alive forever more. The job is taken. We are sons of God, but we are sons of God through adoption, not through sexual relations with his goddess wives.

Ankerberg: Okay, next week we are going to actually look at the evidence concerning the Book of Mormon. Mormon missionaries talk about the archaeological evidence, the internal consistency, and we are going to actually look at it and hear from some archaeologists, from some historians, and examine those truth claims. I hope you will join us next week.

Read Part 3