Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum

 Glenn Beck and the Heartlanders

by Douglas K. Christensen, BMAF Vice President

The meteoric rise in popularity of satellite and cable tv transmission, plus the enormous impact of the internet has brought with it a host of almost unknown personalities like Glenn Beck. His popularity has grown to the point that he is now a nationally and internationally known news commentator who requires 24 hour security protection.  The story of his conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has become fairly well known among the LDS membership and to a lesser degree among the general public.  Only rarely does he make mention of his membership on his television show, but freely discusses it in some of his books.  As a consequence, undoubtedly Beck is aware that any comments or arguments he makes may be taken by some as representative of LDS doctrine and world view.

Much of Glenn's appeal is undoubtedly due to his willingness to discuss social mores, religion, and politics, which he does with great intensity, humor and research. He is fearless when it comes to taking a stand on things controversial.  He is generally liked or at least tolerated by the LDS audience, and often gets a chuckle from them when he introduces recognizable "mormonisms" which are eagerly accepted by a conservative audience of primarily evangelicals who don't have a clue the source of his material.  Occasionally Beck shows his naivete by misapplying a bit of LDS doctrine or tradition, so I wasn't surprised when I followed his presentation on ancient american peoples.  But then his emphasis shifted to accusing the rise of "manifest destiny" as collusion among Americans to keep the story of an ancient north american Indian culture relatively unknown.  As he began making claims about "thousands of cities", cultured occupants, etc. I suddenly realized I had read all this before.  Not in history books, not in scientific journals, but in the propaganda of a group calling themselves the Heartlanders.

The Heartlanders, headed primarily by Rod Meldrum an untrained layman, have chosen to go back in time scientifically and resurrect and support with new techniques the claim that Book of Mormon events took place in the northeastern United States, a scenario which has been rejected by LDS scientists for over 100 years.  The Heartlanders have developed new theories about DNA studies purporting to prove that Hebrew descendants can be found in North America but not Central America (Mesoamerica).  All reputable DNA experts have rejected their methodology and conclusions.  They have interviewed many scientists trained in the archaeology and anthropology of the North American Indian tribes and then twisted their statements to prove their point.

In a recent issue of the quarterly scientific magazine National Center for Science Education, volume 31, number 2 (2011) appeared an article detailing the misuse of information by the Heartland group in producing their DVD "Lost Civilizations of North America" which Rod Meldrum touts as evidence for his theory.  in March 2010, the producers of the DVD, Barry McLerran and Rick Stout, interviewed researchers with expertise on North American archaeology—Terry Barnhart, Kenneth Feder, Sonya Atalay, Deborah Bolnick, Bradley Lepper, Alice Kehoe, and Roger Kennedy—at length. Then they skillfully edited the interviews "to make it appear that we agreed with the film’s thesis: that various artifacts shown in the film gave evidence supporting the Mormon story." The producers sent the scholars a rough version of the film in March 2010, provoking immediate e-mail demands for rectification of this misrepresentation. Two of the younger scholars contacted legal counsel at their universities about possible lawsuits, should the film be released with distortions of their interviews, provoking immediate e-mail demands for rectification of this misrepresentation.

This article, critical of what Meldrum and others were doing, appeared in the National Center for Science Education magazine and was called, "The Lost Civilizations of North America Found......Again" and was written by Alice Beck Kehoe, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Marquette University and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of several books on indigenous cultures of North America and North American archeology. She is also a long-time activist in support of evolutionary science and has been active in opposing and refuting pseudoscientific claims.

Kehoe writes that "Glenn Beck, the Fox Network talk-show personality, recently featured the DVD The Lost Civilizations of North America on his show and exclaimed, 'I was blown away'—not, by the Midwest’s impressive earthen architecture of Hopewell, Cahokia, and Mississippians documented in the video, but by their apparent affirmation of a Mormon claim that the Lost Tribes of Israel inhabited North America. Beck, brought up Roman Catholic, converted to Mormonism (http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1885/),which teaches that Jesus Christ as well as the biblical “lost tribes of Israel” came to America, and “that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent” as written in the Book of Mormon revealed to Joseph Smith in New York state during the 1820s."

She goes on in her report: "The artifacts discovered in the Midwest during the 19th century and the surviving earthworks were all the evidence Beck needed to fulfill this prophecy. He held up a copy of one of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology Reports to quote a few words of its founding director, John Wesley Powell, and pointed to a blackboard inscribed “Science, Government, Commerce, Religion = Collusion of Power”. Because, he told viewers, Powell had stated that “only the savage would be considered” by the Smithsonian, Beck reasoned that that evidence of the civilized Lost Tribes of Israel woul be ignored. Jumping to the supposition that such evidence had been collected, he asserted that Powell, as an employee of the federal government, must have relegated it to the obscurity of boxes in the Smithsonian’s basement. Shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Area 51!"

What especially disturbed the scholars was that the connection to the Mormon legend had not been disclosed; the producers had said the film would be about appreciating First Nations’ (ethnic) achievements. Proof of the Mormon evangelical purpose of the DVD—and not just poor documentary making—is apparent at the Book of Mormon Evidence website (http:// www.bookofmormonevidence.org/index.php), which describes the DVD as offering new evidences for the Book of Mormon as a literal historical record of real people and places. The website directs its readers to ... "Watch Glenn Beck on FOX NEWS referencing this documentary film. …" "This hour long film will 'forever change your view about the strength of the claims of the Book of Mormon relative to where it may have taken place.'" The finished DVD that Beck saw did re-edit the non-Mormon scholars’ interviews to modify the apparent links between Mormon claims and their words. However, little was changed overall: Beck began his talk-show segment recommending the DVD by telling viewers that the Hopewell Octagon earthwork at Newark, Ohio, has the same esoteric dimensions as the Great Pyramid at Giza (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMyyFq1pM04), implying a direct connection between the two. Beck was particularly enthusiastic over the Newark Holy Stones, an odd set of small stone objects with Hebrew inscriptions discovered in 1860 in Newark, Ohio, by a local surveyor. He presumed the Lost Tribes of Israel would have made inscriptions in Hebrew, and that the stones dated from Book of Mormon scriptural times corresponding to Old Testament first millennium bc, and the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth. Since Newark is a major Hopewell site, the objects are inferred by some archaeologists to have been deposited in Hopewell times (100 bc–400 ad), although there is no direct association with other artifacts of reliable age, nor reliable dating of the objects themselves. The stone is local. Given the many Jewish peddlers in the Midwest from its earliest settlement in the 19th century, the secular interpretation is that the set of“Holy Stones” was carved at that time by one of them, as a pastime or marker of Jewish presence on the frontier, and then later preserved in the archeological record as so many other artifacts without provenance are known to be. With such artifacts, age can be neither demonstrated nor invalidated.

In response to Beck’s program, archaeologist Bradley Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society described Beck’s distortions in the Columbus Dispatch (2010 Dec 29), The newspaper noted, “Beck’s program did not respond to requests for comment.”  Lepper summarizes by stating, "The Lost Civilizations of North America DVD can be ignored since it misrepresents reputable interpretations of Midwest archaeological data—except, perhaps, by those interested in the persistence of pseudoarcheological claims about the cultures and peoples of North America before European colonization.  It is unfortunate that Glenn Beck did not use his forum to emphasize the true charge that Manifest Destiny propaganda fed the racist denigration of America’s past and its ethnic citizens."