Book Review: What You Need to Know About Masons

This review has been sitting on the computer for a while. The book was given to me by an Insane Admirer. The late gentleman known to cyberspace as my Significant Other was belonged to a "Shriner" group. What the book actually says is that these groups can become corrupt and unchristian, of course, not that they all do. 

Title: What You Need to Know About Masons

Author: Ed Decker

Date: 1992

Publisher: Harvest House

ISBN: 0-89081-945-9

Length: 218 pages

Quote: “I discovered from an angry church deacon that the ritual of the Masonic Lodge was the actual foundation of the LDS Temple ritual.”

What you need to know about Masons, or what you’ll learn about them from reading this fictional exposé, is that they’re a group of human beings. Any group of human beings has the potential to go bad. Any organized group of human beings that has a formal structure, “rituals,” hierarchy, and long-term establishment, has the potential to become an evil personality cult. Decker reiterates throughout the book that this doesn’t mean every men’s group is a cult—only that some can be.

Although he did extensive research (which he describes) for this book, Decker was obligated to present his research in the form of a story that shows How Bad It Can Get when a social club enjoys a lot of influence in a small town. A young minister, invited to join the local lodge, objects to Pagan-inclusive language in a Masonic ritual and immediately locks horns with his father-in-law. Lodge members call for the removal of the minister. People in the church take sides. Violence erupts. A building burns down, and “being overinsured...he may not have lit the match, but no Mason in Badger Lake is going to burn down a building insured by Roy Wallace [the father-in-law] without first getting his okay.” The minister wins the congregation over by keeping his temper and being charitable, and eventually gets his job back.

It could be worse. Wallace is portrayed as a stubborn, cantankerous old man, not a real cult leader; encouraging someone to overinsure a warehouse and burn it down is as low as he’d go. The minister objects to invocations of Pagan gods, not the vice that has been uncovered in some investigations of actual lodges. There’s no suggestion that the fictional Masons of Badger Lake practice sodomy or prostitution, or even buy elections. Decker’s intention is not to turn people against the friendly Shriners in their neighborhood, but to make people pray for the Shriners’ souls. No harm is likely to be done by praying for people’s souls; therefore this should be a harmless book.

Who needs to read What You Need to Know About Masons? Probably men who have joined a club, marched in a parade, or taken up a collection for a children’s hospital, and been invited to consider “a higher degree” of Freemasonry. These men may appreciate Decker’s warning that, while most lodges simply dedicate themselves to God, some “higher level” rituals identify God with Baal, Jupiter, Osiris and other unsavory characters from ancient mythology. To most who participate in such rituals, an invocation of Jupiter probably seems less like initiation into a real Pagan cult than like riding a child’s tricycle in a parade, but some men of scrupulous conscience may want to back away.

Plenty of mainstream novels have portrayed the potential for any kind of social group to turn into a personality cult festering with vice and violence. Serious documentaries have exposed how it’s happened in social clubs, religious groups, therapy groups, corporate offices, and even, notoriously, the Nixon White House. I don’t see a need for Masons to complain about this little reminder that their organization is as vulnerable as any other.