Mormon Doctrine

Secret combinations

A Book of Mormon term, applied by name to the institutions of 1958 — and the naming is the part that dates.

Secret Combinations is a Book of Mormon phrase, and the entry's first job is the scriptural one: Cain's oath with Satan, the Jaredites, the Gadianton robbers, and Moroni's warning to “people now living”. Its second job is to say where they are, and that is where the entry stops being a gloss and starts being a document of its own decade.

The definition

Beginning in the days of Cain and continuing through all generations, whenever there have been unrighteous and apostate peoples on earth, Satan has revealed unto them his oaths, vows, and secret combinations.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Secret Combinations”, 1966 second edition, p. 489

The objectives are given as “murder, plunder, robbery, power, the destruction of freedom, and the persecution of the saints”, and the entry's cross-references — Apostasy, Cain, Church of the Devil, Communism, Master Mahan, Murderers — set out its range before a word of the body is read.

Where the entry says they are

One sentence does the work, and it is the sentence the entry is remembered for.

Reliable modern reports describe their existence among gangsters, as part of the governments of communist countries, in some labor organizations, and even in some religious groups.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Secret Combinations”, 1966 second edition, p. 489

The entry then applies Moroni's charge directly to the reader's own moment: “The Lord commandeth you, when ye shall see these things come among you that ye shall awake to a sense of your awful situation, because of this secret combination which shall be among you.” This passage is materially the same in both editions; the 1966 revision left it alone.

The context it was written in

The book was written at the height of the Cold War by a general authority of a church whose Quorum of the Twelve then included Ezra Taft Benson — recently United States Secretary of Agriculture, and the most vocal anti-communist voice in the Latter-day Saint leadership of the period. Reading “secret combinations” as a description of communist governments was not McConkie's private view; it was a common one in that quorum, and the Communism entry a few hundred pages earlier makes the identification at length.

Basically and chiefly, communism is a form of false religion; it is one of the major divisions of the church of the devil.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Communism”, 1966 second edition, p. 109

That entry then reproduces a First Presidency statement at length — “no patriotic American citizen may become either a communist or supporter of communism” — so the identification is not the author's alone. The clause that has aged least comfortably is not that one. It is “in some labor organizations”: a claim about American trade unions, stated as reportage, with nothing behind it but “reliable modern reports”.

Where it stands

The scriptural doctrine is taught unchanged: secret combinations are conspiracies for gain and power, and the Book of Mormon presents them as a standing danger to any society. What the church does not now do is name institutions. The identification of specific modern governments, unions or churches belongs to the entry and its decade, and comes with the same standing as everything else in the book — that of a commercial publication by a private author, never endorsed by the church.