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The first organized opposition to Freemasonry came, not surprisingly, from
the Roman Catholic Church. Papal Bulls, official declarations and other
pronouncements from the Vatican have condemned the order which requires its
members to have a belief in a supreme being, and takes an eclectic and
tolerant approach to the world’s various religions. Some say that the
involvement of intellectuals, many of them with anticlerical political and
social philosophies, has contributed to the belief that the Masons were a
revolutionary group threatening the stability of autocratic regimes and
theocracies. Others feared the Masonic ideals of religious toleration and the
notion of political liberty which percolated through 18th century culture
through the Enlightenment. Leading Enlightenment figures from Voltaire to
D’Alambert were initiated into the lodges, along with scientists, writers, and
freethinkers. Even some clergy joined, but the secrecy of the lodge meetings,
along with peculiar rituals prompted some -- especially in Catholic countries
-- to suspect what might be taking place under the mantle of Masonry. In
1739, Pope Clement condemned the order, and even into the twentieth century,
the Vatican’s Code of Canon Law prohibited church followers from joining
“Masonic sects or any other similar associations which plot against the
church.”
In the United States, the first Masonic circles began to appear in 1733; by
the time of the American Revolution, nearly 150 lodges existed throughout the
colonies. Many masons were active participants in the uprising, and the
Masonic ideals of tolerance, brotherhood and political liberty resonated in
the institutions, documents and even the symbols which soon came to define the
new American Republic. Historian James Billington noted that Freemasonry was
“a moral meritocracy -- implicitly subversive within any static society based
on a traditionalist hierarchy.” Today, American freemasonry represents nearly
three-fourths of the total membership of over 6 million.
As official religions were “disestablished” in the new states of America,
religious groups quickly saw Masonic order as a threat to clerical authority
and orthodoxy. When a secret society in Bavaria, the Illuminati, were
ostensibly exposed for plotting against the civil and religious order, fears
quickly spread to the new world. Churchmen saw their own fate in the violent
downfall of the “ancient regime” in France. In the early republic’s more
conservative quarters, particularly the Federalist politicians and
Congregationalist religious leaders, the Illuminati hysteria became virulent
and contagious. Suspect of democracy and the Enlightenment, the
Congregationalists feared a mob uprising which would overthrow their
“Standing Order,” the church-state alliance of aristocrats and clergy.
Alexander Hamilton proclaimed, “The people! The people is a great beast!” By
1789, anti-Masonic and anti-Illuminist tracts and books were circulating
throughout the states. The Rev. Jedediah Morse, a member of the Standing
Order, promoted the dubious claims in works such as John Robison’s Proofs of
a Conspiracy, and the even more lurid opinions in the Abbe Barruel’s three
volume treatise on the “anti-religious” conspiracy of Masonry, Illuminism and
Jacobinism. President Adams ended up proclaiming a day of fasting and prayer
for the new republic, and Rev. Morse warned his audience at the New North
Church in Boston...
“Secret and systematic means have been adopted and pursued, with zeal and
activity, by wicked and artful men, in foreign countries, to undermine the
foundations of this Religion, and to overthrow its Altars... These impious
conspirators and philosophists have completely effected their purposes in a
large portion of Europe, and boast of their means of accomplishing their plans
in all parts of Christendom.”
| “So, it is not surprising to see the Freemasons now appearing as the latest
villains in conspiracy scenarios involving everything from an Atheistic
one-world government, to a cover-up about The Face on Mars.” |
Anti-Masonic hysteria erupted again in 1821, when William Morgan, a
Freemason who had threatened to reveal the secrets and beliefs of the group,
was allegedly kidnapped by his fellows. An Anti-Masonic Party was formed, and
by 1832 had grown sufficiently powerful to nominate a candidate, attorney
William Wirt, for president. He was defeated by Andrew Jackson, a Freemason,
but incredibly Wirt himself was purportedly a member of the order as well.
Into the nineteenth century and beyond, American Masonry became
increasingly identified with political and social elites; the order has
counted among its members dozens of presidents and other elected officials, as
well as leading industrialists, bankers, and economic movers-and-shakers.
Whatever revolutionary ideals the group once had have, at least in the United
States, been subsumed by the rise of what sociologist C. Wright Mills termed
“the power elite.” Masonry is known today as primarily a charitable
institution and “country club” network, although it still carries on the
tradition of quasi-secret signs, rituals, and an embellished history which,
with considerable license, attempts to trace the origins of the order back to
ancient times.
None of this has stopped the gnawing fear in some quarters of American
society that “something” dark and sinister was really going on inside of
Masonic lodges, that the antics of Shriners in miniature cars, the Order of
the Eastern Star cake sales, or the charity works of the fraternity were
simply camouflage for a political agenda in the service of Protestantism or,
later, perhaps the devil himself.
So, it is not surprising to see the Freemasons now appearing as the latest
villains in conspiracy scenarios involving everything from an Atheistic
one-world government, to a cover-up about The Face on Mars. Pat Robertson, who
never could resist a good tale no matter how ill-founded, and Art Bell -- does
he really believe this stuff? -- have both pointed the finger of suspicion at
those staid Lodge dudes in recent days.
Robertson is no amateur when it comes to, well, trying to scare the hell
out of his followers. A week of watching “The 700 Club” sends a polarized
message that while God “is working” to cure select medical maladies of some
viewers, from gastritis to pains in the limbs, the world is about to careen
out of control and into an abyss of the worst sort. Robertson informs us that
tornados, earthquakes, climatic conditions, plagues and that all important
spectre of nuclear confrontation in the Middle East is a sure sign that we are
in the “last days”, flirting with apocalypse. Before Jesus and Lucifer slug
it out on the plains of Armageddon, though, the faithful must endure the risk
of the Great Tribulation. Already, hidden cabals are at work with their
devious plans to erode American sovereignty and establish a One World
government. For Robertson, the cold war and a host of other subsequent
geopolitical events are just so much puppetry for the REAL masters lurking in
such nefarious organizations as the United Nations, the Bildeberger group, or
the Council on Foreign Relations.
Robertson’s conspiracy theories have led critics to charge that he has
drunk deeply at the same well waters as classical anti-semites who see a
“Jewish plot” to control the world. Professor Berndt Ostendorf, Chair of
American Studies at the University of Munich, says that the powerful American
televangelist peddles fear to his audience, and “is a deeply religious
anti-Semite.” In a lecture to a college audience titled “Conspiracy Nation: The
Fundamentalist Thought of Pat Robertson,” Ostendorf identified five key areas
which underpin his apocalyptic global view. They included:
- Fear of deviating from a core set of “Christian values.”
- Fear of the possible decline of the United States as a global power, and
its replacement by an amorphous “world government” run by a godless cabal.
- Fear of “Populist Centralism.”
- Fear of multiculturalism
- Racism. Traditional ethnic targets might include Blacks or Jews, but
recently Robertson has targeted UFO believers (he feels that they may qualify
for the death penalty according to one report) and people with AIDS.
While Robertson eschews the hard-edged rhetoric of more extreme groups like
the Christian Identity church or Aryan Nations, his Christian Broadcasting
Company recently took a swipe at that old bugaboo of conspiracy paranoia, the
Freemasons. On the Friday, April 24, 2020 installment of “The 700 Club,” a
CBN reporter presented the second of a three-part series titled “Secret
Societies, Behind the Mask of Freemasonry.”
“What goes on behind those bricked and shuttered windows? Why do men meet
in private, wear costumes, and conduct ancient rituals? Why are Masonic
secrets protected by violent blood oaths?”
Actually, the imagery of grown men conducting a overblown version of a
pre-adolescent Boy’s Tree House (“no girls allowed”) is cause for a degree of
curiosity, but I suspect that the real answers to these queries are more
prosaic and less flattering than Mr. Robertson would care to believe, or
indeed than most Freemasons would choose to admit. But “Behind the Mask of
Freemasonry” continued on to quote a former Mason who told the audience, “The
definition of a cult, as I see it, would be any organization or group of
people that embraces any kind of teaching that’s contrary to historic
established Christianity, according to the Word of God...”
How’s that for investigative reporting and analytical insight?
The gist of the CBN piece was that Masonry teaches a kind of universal
religion that happens to tolerate faiths of the non-Christian variety. There
is a fair sprinkling of twisted argument as well, like the charge: “We should
note here that the very secret of Masonry makes it impossible for a
good-standing Mason to explain or defend the Lodge’s practice in details.” And
there’s the admission that Freemasonry has had a “tremendous influence on U.S.
History,” and some of the figures I’m sure that Pat Robertson wouldn’t want to
denounce in public as devil worshippers or one world government cabalists...
guys like George Washington.
The CBN piece wraps up with the claim of another renegade Mason who
“believes (that) the ultimate god of Freemasonry is Lucifer -- Satan himself
-- not only because Satan seeks worship, but also... ‘if Satan can keep you
away from knowing Christ, that’s the key...’”
Fear of Masonic intrigue has appeared in another even more unlikely place,
the radio show of paranormal radio shock-jock Art Bell. This, too, is a
tangled tale which begins not in some Masonic lodge (although it ties in...)
but on Mars.
Start with a guy named Richard Hoagland, science writer and author of a
controversial book titled The Monuments of Mars. Hoagland argues that
photos from reconnaissance missions to the Red Planet show an enormous
artificial construction or artifact in the shape of a face. Surrounding this,
says Hoagland, is evidence of other structures, a virtual Martian city from
ancient times. Most astronomers and NASA scientists were highly skeptical of
this claim, arguing that the “face” on the planet’s Cydonia region was really
an artifact of a different sort, caused by geological features, shadows, and a
fair amount of anthropomorphic projection and imagination thrown in for good
measure. That didn’t stop the buzz on the internet or in numerous fanzines
and UFO periodicals. So when probes such as the NASA Global Survey and
Pathfinder relayed new high resolution photographs of the Martian surface,
inquiring minds wanted to know; “what would we see at the Cydonia area?”
For NASA, the skeptics, and science in general, it was a no-win situation.
If the Global Surveyor happened to malfunction, a distinct possibility when
you’re launching delicate equipment a few hundred million miles into space,
the conspiracy buffs might argue -- as they had suggested at the fate of a
Russian probe -- that it was destroyed so that no evidence of extraterrestrial
civilization would be revealed. (Why send the probe in the first place? we
might ask.) There was the possibility that Global Surveyor just might confirm
the existence of the “Face on Mars,” and much more. And there was the
probability that the “face” would be just what photo interpretation and other
evidence had earlier suggested -- light and shadows, illusion and imagination.
When the pictures of Mars from began streaming in, Art Bell’s late evening
talk show “became Conspiracy Central for the view that NASA was somehow still
covering up the existing of an ancient civilization in the planet’s Cydonia
region,” noted Art Levine in a special dispatch posted to MSNBC. An anonymous
caller to the program who would only identify himself as “Kent Smith” said
that during his tenure at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) he had
accidentally seen photos of the mysterious face, along with other compelling
evidence of cover-up such as a picture of giant pyramids and a “building minus
a roof and with one of the walls knocked out.”
Art Bell |
According to Levine, Hoagland and Bell set out to try and verify “Kent
Smith’s” incredible story. One technique involved “reverse speech” analysis
that claims to be able to uncover phrases and words imbedded in everyday talk
when played backwards. These hidden messages are said to reflect the musings
of the subconscious mind. Bell, whose program was already a platform for
nearly every conceivable kind of paranormal claim, no matter how outrageous,
was now flirting with a pop-culture belief once confined to America’s
fundamentalist loonies. Remember the hysteria over “back masking” on rock ’n
roll records, where heavy metal and rock groups were supposedly seducing
America’s youngsters with concealed messages about sex and the devil?
Neither “back masking” nor “reverse speech” analysis have really withstood
the test of inquiry. But reportedly, Hoagland and Bell saw all of this as
evidence of “remarkable cult religious references among various members of the
NASA team,” a “rogue group” in the nation’s leading space and technology
program. Levine says that for Hoagland, the purpose of this cabal is to
“fulfill Masonic traditions by carrying out ‘Egyptian ritual philosophy’
through space exploration.”
Levine adds that Hoagland is so convinced of the existence and perdition of
this Masonic group that he even suggests that the July 4 landing of the Mars
Pathfinder mission was faked, as were photos from the lander of a “howitzer on
Mars.”
There’s an ironic end to the tale of Hoagland, Art Bell and “Kent Smith” --
at least for now. Hoagland says that Kent Smith “admitted” that he was part
of a disinformation operation launched not by the Freemasons, but from the
Defense Intelligence Agency, with the purpose of discrediting the Art Bell
show. How’s that for stream of consciousness plot writing?
There is often an interaction between conspiracy theories and the claims of
pseudoscience advocates. After all, if Oswald wasn’t just lucky, who’s to say
that there is not a bevy of aliens coming-and-going from Area 51; or that NASA
begs for billions of taxpayer dollars to fund Martian landers and
reconnaissance of the Red Planet’s surface so that the evidence can be
concealed? And why not play a conversation backwards so that you can weave a
series of words and phrases you THOUGHT you might have heard into a
conspiratorial tapestry involving some Freemasons hiding out at Mission
Control?
It is entertaining stuff, though, just like “The X-Files.” The problem is
that we may be losing whatever sense of skepticism and proportion our culture
once had, as the area between fact and fiction disintegrates and broadens into
an enormous epistemological netherworld where all claims are equally true, and
nothing is really false. If we are all provided with our 15 minutes of media
fame, logic suggests that all ideas enjoy their comparable period of exposure,
and often acceptance, under the bright lights of studios, or the glowing
screens which increasingly wire us to the internet.
So some, like Pat Robertson, gaze suspiciously at those Masonic Lodges;
others stare into photographs of a distant planet looking for evidence of
something they already believe in, for reasons know perhaps only to
themselves. I look at the gauzy picture of terrain at Cydonia. Is it really
evidence of a once great and wise alien culture? Or is really an artifact we,
not Martians, invented, a countenance laughing at those who stare long
enough, and believe?
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Copyright
© 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by American Atheists.
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Americans love conspiracies.
From the early days of the republic to the
latest Arbitron ratings, we have demonstrated a dramatic penchant for fearing
hidden plots, cabals, secret agendas and cover-ups. Turn on the television
set and you can feast on a bacchanal of paranoia. Afternoon talk shows, when
not entertaining us with the pugilistic antics of Jerry Springer, remind us
that Satanic cabals, elaborate and powerful rings of child abductors or some
other threat to the civic order is loose upon the land. The claims get a bit
wilder as one edges into prime time. Chris Carter dishes us a steady diet of
paranormal angst in “The X-Files,” or a darker apocalyptic vision with his
latest series, “Millennium.” It may be fiction, but what is to distinguish
those scripts from the claims echoing from “unsolved mysteries”-type programs
which blend anecdotal accounts of alien abductions, ghosts and government
concealment with the graphic imagery of the evening news? It is no wonder
that surveys over the last decade suggest that increasing numbers of us
believe in the existence of marauding sexual perverts from space, or the
likelihood that Uncle Sam is obscuring the existence of craft from other
worlds at a place in Nevada known as Area 51.
As a result, Freemasons have
often found themselves outlawed in totalitarian societies. Masonic lodges
were shut down after the Russian revolution, and the group was banned by the
Nazis shortly after Adolph Hitler’s rise to power. Its semi secret rituals,
passwords, and an exotic history which mainstream historians dispute, has
often proven to be tantalizing and fertile soil for all kinds of speculation.