The Great and Abominable Church


1 Nephi 13:5-6,

5 And the angel said unto me: Behold the formation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity.
6 And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it.

As a young missionary reading this I often mistakenly came to the conclusion that the “great and abominable church” was the apostate church that eventually became the Catholic Church. This was the same church that removed the “plain and precious things” from the Bible. It was a simplistic and naive interpretation. It is easy to imagine how a corrupt clergy in an era when literacy was so low could manipulate the populace by altering scripture and changing ordinances. The Catholic Church claims to be the same church that was organized by Christ during his mortal ministry and coopted by the Roman Empire. To my perspective it was the “great and abominable church” that Nephi saw. What I failed to recognize was that later in the vision Nephi is told that there are only two churches, the great and abominable and the Church of the Lamb. Obviously there are more than two churches, in the traditional sense, in the world. The Catholic Church cannot be named as the only great and abominable church when even at the time of its forming there were several other churches.

Then what is the great and abominable church? Elder B. H. Roberts said,

“‘The Church of the devil’ here alluded to, I understand to mean not any particular church among men, or any one sect of religion, but something larger than that—something that includes within its boundaries all evil wherever it may be found; be as well as in schools of philosophy as in Christian sects as well in systems of ethics as in systems of religion—something that includes the whole empire of Satan—what I shall call ‘the Kingdom of Evil.’” (New Witness for God, 3:264. 1951)

I interpret this to mean that the great and abominable church not any single church as we understand the word but anything and everything that detracts people from the gospel. That makes things much more difficult and complex. The potential for apostasy is within everyone. No single church is its source. As humans we like to blame religions and other organizations for the troubles in the world. In reality it is more personal. The great apostasy did not start with the Catholic Church but when individual saints got lazy or greedy in their own righteousness, when they allowed the natural man to take over. We have to examine everything that we do or in which we are involved to ensure that it does not distract us from the gospel.