Mere Freemasonry

A California Mason’s View of the Craft

What is Freemasonry, really?

Not the conspiracy theories. Not the Hollywood mythology. Not the whispered rumors about secret handshakes and world domination. The real thing – the fraternity that has been quietly shaping good men for hundreds of years, that built hospitals in the Gold Rush mud before California was even a state, that has been banned by every totalitarian regime of the twentieth century precisely because it represents everything authoritarianism cannot tolerate.

Mere Freemasonry is written from inside the lodge by a man who has spent nearly twenty years as a California Freemason and who makes no apology for making the case for the fraternity he loves. In the oldest sense of the word, Shawn is a Masonic apologist – not someone who apologizes for Freemasonry, but someone who answers its critics, addresses its scandals honestly, and argues that what happens behind the tyled door of a California lodge is worth understanding.

This is his attempt to answer all of them at once – about California Freemasonry specifically, and about the Craft generally – honestly, completely, and without pretending the hard parts don’t exist.

This book will tell you:

• What the three degrees of Freemasonry actually mean – and why the Master Mason degree asks the hardest question.
• Why the Catholic Church has been trying to suppress Freemasonry since 1738 – and why that argument is more complicated than either side admits.
• The truth about Albert Pike, the Lucifer quote, and the Taxil Hoax – the nineteenth-century fraud that is still circulating on YouTube.
• What the Illuminati actually was, what it wasn’t, and what the online “Illuminati membership” offers actually are.
• Why every totalitarian regime of the twentieth century – the Nazis, fascists, communists, Franco, Stalin, Saddam Hussein – banned Freemasonry, and what that tells you about what the fraternity actually stands for.
• About the Morgan Affair and Lodge P2 – the real Masonic scandals.
• How California Freemasonry started and has been producing better men for 175 years.

This book will not tell you:

The ritual. The passwords. The grips. Those belong to the lodge room, and they stay there.

Mere Freemasonry is written for the curious outsider who wants a straight answer. For the new Mason trying to understand what he just joined. For the lapsed member who walked away and wonders if he left something behind. For the skeptic who has heard the charges and wants to know if any of them are true. And for the man in the parking lot who has seen the square and compasses on a car and wondered what it means.