The Book of Mormon’s doctrinal emphasis is on Jesus Christ, but one of its primary social preoccupations is “secret combinations.” This also appears in Smith’s 1830 revision of Genesis (later titled the “Book of Moses”). Several twentieth-century writers have interpreted these passages as referring specifically to the anti-Masonic fury that swept America in the late 1820s. New York state was the center of anti-Masonry after September 1826, when some Masons kidnapped and murdered William Morgan for revealing Freemasonry’s secret rites. He had prepared his book for publication in Canandaigua, only nine miles from Joseph Smith’s home in Manchester.

It is true that Palmyra newspapers in 1828 printed anti-Masonic articles that described Freemasonry as a “secret combination” and referred to “its secret and cut-throat OATHS” (emphasis in original). However, because “secret combination” was a catchy phrase, it soon entered American usage that had nothing to do with Freemasonry. For example, Daniel C. Peterson has demonstrated that by 1850 “secret combination” appeared in Supreme Court decisions against price-fixing.

Nevertheless, it is true that a newspaper reported in 1831 that Martin Harris “publickly declared that the ‘Golden Bible’ is the Anti-masonick Bible . . . “ Since 1827 Harris had been participating in Palmyra’s anti-Masonic convention. The village’s still-loyal Freemasons may have agreed with his assessment of the Book of Mormon, because in December 1830 Joseph wrote his “brother Hyrum, beware of the freemasons.” This referred to efforts of Palmyra residents to have Hyrum arrested for unpaid debts.

However, it is clear that anti-Masons quickly rejected Harris’s published claim that the Book of Mormon was anti-Masonic. A Philadelphia newspaper responded to Harris in this way: “We therefore mention the fact that the Antimasonic printer in Palmyra, refused to print the Mormon Bible; and it was printed by the publisher of the Wayne Sentinel, a masonic paper.” Harris’s interpretation may have not reflected Smith’s view, and interpretations of the Book of Mormon as anti-Masonic seem to fit the context of these passages only superficially.

For two years from 1827 until Joseph Smith began dictating the currently published translation, “secret combination” was widely used in New York state as a synonym for conspiracy. The origin of the phrase is far less important than the context of the phrase’s usage within a text. The text demonstrates whether a phrase is used narrowly according to its original application or generally according to its vernacular meaning.