I really enjoyed the last day of Sunstone, since I was able to attend all day, rather than a session here or there.  Don Bradley gave a presentation titled “Dating Fanny Alger”, a bit of a play on words.  I remember he gave a funny line to the effect of “By all accounts, she was hot!”  Anyway, Bradley tried to pin down when the “affair” happened.  Apparently, Emma discovered Joseph and Fanny late at night in the barn.  According to Bradley, Alger appeared pregnant.  Emma threw a fit, and threw Alger out of the house.  (Apparently Alger had been working as a sort of nanny.)

The discovery of the relationship by Emma probably dates to the summer or fall of 1835.  Bradley recounted several people who have tried to pin down the date, and noted problems with each date.  Some authors have discussed an “embarrassing” incident of polygamy in August 1835.   Joseph left for Pontiac, Michigan possibly to avoid embarrassment for his role.  On Oct 14, 1835, Joseph describes “dealing with household issues”, possibly a reference to evict Fanny.  However, Mark Ashurst-Mcgee suggests this incident refers not to Fanny, but a problem with employees at the printing office.

Fanny left Kirtland in August or Sept 1836, so the incident must have occurred prior to that.  Bradley notes that dissenters condemned Joseph on July 24, and Joseph left for Salem, Massachusetts for a treasure trip the next day on July 25.  Bradley believes Joseph sent Fanny to Missouri at the same time.  William McLellin gave his famous quote about having “no confidence” in church leadership around this time as well.  Fanny soon married non-member Solomon Custer after just a 6 week courtship.  Bradley believes it may have been a cover of legitimacy if Fanny was indeed pregnant.

———–

Following Bridget Jack Meyer’s wonderful presentation on Women priesthood holders in early Christianity earlier in the week, I thought Joshua Gillon’s presentation called “Mormon Women Had the Priesthood in 1843: Examining the Claims” might be interesting.  I was greatly disappointed.  Josh is a PhD candidate of philosophy at Princeton, having completed a BA at BYU.  His talk was nothing more than a rant against the church.  He mis-characterized Michael Quinn’s discussion of women and the priesthood.  He employed tedious grammar exercises to make his points, and finished off with an F-bomb to end his presentation.  It was definitely the worst presentation I have ever heard at Sunstone, though there was another terrible one later in the day.

I wasn’t very excited to go the the panel called “Glenn Beck: Likely Mormon or Unlikely Mormon”, but there wasn’t anything else that sounded interesting at that time.  As I reviewed the list of panelists, I was looking forward to hearing Joanna Brooks of Mormon Matters, and David King Landrith of Mormon Mentality.  (I had met him earlier in the week.) Kathryn Hemingway, Eric Samuelson, and Robert Rees weren’t nearly so interesting as Joanna and David, though they all made good points.  Rees was the moderator and not a fan of Beck.  Landrith and Hemingway were supporters of Beck, while Brooks and Samuelson were not.

I really enjoyed Landrith’s presentation.  Landrith showed that Beck’s rhetoric is very similar to political discourse over the past 200 years.  Early founding fathers often compared each other to monarchists, and spoke about each other more harshly than Beck does of his opponents.  I thought it was an interesting presentation.  Brooks really wasn’t that antagonistic toward Beck.  She basically said we should ignore Beck because his ratings are going down and he knows it.  There is no need to feed into the frenzy–Beck will go away on his own.

Following lunch, I attended a fantastic presentation by Apostle Susan Skoor of the Community of Christ.  She discussed her personal faith journey, showing how she has moved among Fowler’s stages of faith.  Her talk was titled “Faith in the Midst of the Difficulties of Life.”  Baptized at age 8 into the RLDS church, she discussed losing her testimony in her 30s, nearly falling into atheism.  Receiving a blessing, and asked “Do you want to believe?”, as Alma says, she let this desire work in her.  She discussed her new found faith as a stage 5 person, and said she knew she was too selfish to reach stage 6.  As I listened to her story, I marveled at how open she was about her life’s journey.  I don’t think an LDS apostle would admit to losing faith as she did, and I don’t think an LDS apostle would discuss spirituality in such as “secular” way as she discussed Fowlers Faith Stage theory.  I was truly moved.

Clair Barrus discussed “Oliver Cowdery’s Rod of Nature.”  It was a bit too technical for me, but I know others enjoyed it.  Finally, I listened to a panel discuss “Men and the Priesthood: Taking on the Feminine.”  Tom Kimball discussed being an unorthodox Mormon.  His previous bishop did not want to let him baptize or ordain his children.  As the bishop got to know Tom better, he decided to allow it.  Tom has previously discussed his story on Mormon Stories.  Tom’s new bishop has taken a more hard line approach, and Tom’s boys have not progressed in the priesthood.  Tom compared his situation to the idea that women can’t ordain daughters in the LDS church as well.

Robin Linkart, President of the 6th Quorum of Seventy for the Community of Christ spoke next.  She gave an excellent presentation and discussed the new revelation in 1984 allowing women to hold the priesthood.  Many in the RLDS church broke off (they lost nearly 1/4 of their membership.)  She discussed the challenges the RLDS church went through, and her personal journey in the priesthood.  It was excellent.

Holly Welker spoke next.  She gave a rant that the priesthood should be abolished in the LDS church.  During Tom’s, Lisa’s, and the Q&A session, she made faces of disbelief and disagreement.  Honestly I believe a 5th grader would have better behavior than she exhibited.  She was incredibly rude and unprofessional.  Her behavior was embarrassing.

Lisa Butterworth finished up the panel.  She started the blog at FeministMormonHousewives.  Being a feminist and an unorthodox Mormon, she was asked to speak in support of the idea of an all-male priesthood.  She did the best she could, but it was evident that she didn’t fully support the topic she was asked to address.

Overall, I enjoyed most of the sessions.  If you missed my first post on Sunstone, click here.  I’m not sure why I attended so many feminist presentations, but I guess they sounded the most interesting.  So what is your take on women and the priesthood?  Do you see it happening in the LDS church in the next 20-50 years?  Would you support or oppose such a move if the prophet received a revelation allowing women to hold the priesthood?

Our controversial guest post today is from Rock Waterman.  Check out the original unabridged post at his blog, Pure Mormonism, so titled from his observation that the organic religion founded by Joseph Smith was nondogmatic and libertarian.

A couple of weeks ago Jeff Riggenbach sent me his latest book, Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction To Revisionism. I’ve had a passion for revisionist history for as long as I can remember, but something I read in Riggenbach’s informative volume caught me up short. It was an essential factor that I had never known or considered before, and which just so happens to have direct application to why the historical record about Joseph Smith and Polygamy is so confusing and contradictory.

While doing the research for her biography of Joseph Smith back in the 1940′s, Fawn Brodie wrote to a friend that “the more I work with the polygamy material, the more baffled I become.” She has not been alone. Every biographer since has struggled with the dichotomy of what Joseph Smith asserted and what the historical record appears to show.

I think Jeff Riggenbach may have uncovered the explanation for us.

Correcting The Past

If the study of history can be defined as “the science of discovering what happened,” then revisionism is the forensic science of methodically re-sifting through the evidence of the past to get at the truth of what really happened. According to Joseph R. Stromberg, “revisionism refers to any efforts to revise a faulty existing historical record or interpretation.”

Harry Elmer Barnes, the father of modern revisionist history, describes revisionism as “the effort to revise the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude.” As Riggenbach himself succinctly puts it, “We need to revise the historical record when we have new facts.”

What surprised me about Riggenbach’s book — and which is directly applicable to our discussion here — is his revelation that until quite recently there was no such thing as “history” as we usually think of it; that is, the kind of history that could actually be relied upon:

“It was the tail end of the 19th century before the calling of the historian had been professionalized and academicized to such an extent that a majority of practitioners in the field had come to hold the view of their discipline that we now take for granted -the historian as dispassionate seeker of truth, a scholar, much more like an anthropologist…Still, there were holdouts.” (Pg 27)

One “holdout” in the arena of Mormon historians may have been Joseph Fielding Smith, whose book Essentials in Church History was a book all missionaries were armed with in my day, and which turns out to have been of no more real use to the student of Mormon history than the 9/11 Commission Report is today for the person desiring to find out the complete truth about that particular event.  I relied upon Elder Smith’s book during my mission when I gave a presentation to a class of high school seniors in Milan, Missouri where I used it to refute “anti-Mormon lies” about Mormon complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Elder Smith (an apostle at the time he wrote it) placed the blame for the massacre squarely on the local Indians and John D. Lee, who he painted as a renegade Mormon with only a tenuous connection to the church. At any rate, he strongly implied, the members of the Fancher party were asking for it and had it coming.  Even today I feel like a dupe and a fool when I remember how vehemently I defended the official church position against what was the real truth of that sordid affair.

But to give him his due, Joseph Fielding Smith was little different than any other compiler of American history a hundred years ago, including the most famous and reputable of all, George Bancroft, whose ten volume History of the United States, published in 1874, remained the unchallenged standard work for decades. But even Bancroft’s classic History was far from objective:

“Bancroft believed that his job was to write a chronicle that would make his readers proud of their country’s history, and when it suited his didactic purpose, he fabricated.” (Why American History Is Not What They Say, Pg 27)

It was not only Bancroft who was making up history to suit his agenda; Riggenbach demonstrates how this “style” was common among virtually all historians of the time. He shows how “most of them saw themselves in particular as the providers of an important kind of inspirational literature.” Facts were elastic. This practice of bending reality to fit the lesson plan was rampant in the 19th century. It was systemic. And it was considered normal. One can easily see the parallels between writers wishing to portray actions of the American government favorably, and those within the LDS church tasked with portraying Mormon history in the most positive light. According to Riggenbach:

“The American history taught in most schools during the past hundred years faithfully reflected received opinion, and received opinion sees the United States as a consistent, devoted partisan of the same spirit of individual liberty that once moved its founders -a peace-loving nation that wishes the rest of the world only the best, and never goes to war except in self-defense.”

“Apply this set of principles to what we know of the past and, at the end of the day, you’ll wind up with quite a pile of facts that didn’t meet the criteria and now litter the cutting room floor.”

“The facts about the gross violations of individual liberty that have been championed by U.S. presidents almost since the beginning, for example -John Adams’s Sedition Acts, Andrew Jackson’s genocidal treatment of the American Indians, Abraham Lincoln’s military conscription (to say nothing of his suspension of habeas corpus and his imprisonment of newspaper editors who dared to disagree with his prosecution of the Civil War), William McKinley’s brutal suppression of the independence movement in the Philippines after the Spanish American War, Franklin Roosevelt’s order to round up American citizens of Japanese ancestry and imprison them in concentration camps- are any of these inconvenient facts likely to be selected for inclusion in a textbook based on the “commonly shared principle” of the saintliness of the U.S. government?” (Pg. 24)

Similarly we Mormons may ask ourselves if we should really expect inconvenient facts that reflect poorly on the “saintliness” of our church leaders to find their way into books and Sunday School manuals published by the church.

History: It Ain’t What It Used To Be

In 1972 the church appointed LDS Professor Leonard J. Arrington as the official Church Historian. This was the first time a real historian, a trained academic, had been given that post. This important office had always been held by a general authority. Arrington opened up the massive church archives to other Mormon academics, and the era of The New Mormon History was born. Surprise, surprise! That magic era didn’t last long; just barely a decade.

The archives were a treasure house of information for the excited historians involved. They were soon discovering things that the even the current leadership of the church hadn’t known about. Paul Toscano reports that Hyrum L. Andrus was opening wooden crates full of church records that had been nailed shut since they left Nauvoo in 1846. All kinds of fascinating stuff was in there. Books and essays were written based on these newly found letters, diaries, journals, newspapers, and records. But not all of the information in these documents was seen as favorable to church leadership. Some of the revisions seemed to contradict elements of what had become the official church history.

A massively ambitious multi-volume church history was planned, utilizing the talents of the church’s most qualified scholars and historians. Then one day the order came down from on high to scrap the project, and the historian’s office was “reorganized.” Arrington, who had been introduced at general conference with great fanfare for a vote of approval ten years earlier, was quietly released in 1982 without even a mention in conference or any vote of thanks. The position of Church Historian was again placed into the hands of a trusted general authority. The archives were closed to all but a select few, and have remained closed to this day.

For a fascinating example of the work of a revisionist Mormon historian, and and insight as to why revisionism is such a volatile subject to some within the church, let’s look at Richard Van Wagoner’s reexamination of the famous transmogrification of Brigham Young.

Mighty Morphing Fact Arrangers

We all know the basic story. It goes something like this. After the death of Joseph and Hyrum, the church was left leaderless. So the million dollar question on everyone’s mind: Who was next in line to lead it? A meeting was called, and Sidney Rigdon was first to speak. As the story goes, Rigdon got up and campaigned for himself to be the new prophet. Then it was Brigham Young’s turn, and as he spoke, the gathered throng witnessed a miracle. It looked to them as if Brigham Young had been transformed into Joseph Smith before their very eyes. Brigham’s visage became Joseph’s visage, his voice was Joseph’s voice, his mannerisms were Joseph’s. Clearly the spirit of Joseph Smith himself had returned to witness to the membership that Brigham Young was his anointed successor.

That’s the way most of us have heard it, but virtually every element of that story is false. Nothing even remotely resembling the described supernatural transformation took place. How do we know? We have new facts. Using letters, diaries, journals, newspaper accounts, and church records, Van Wagoner walks us through the event. He revises the history. You can read his essay here: The Making of a Mormon Myth. (You can find another excellent analysis by Reid L. Harper in the Fall 1996 Journal of Mormon History.)

The simple but true facts are that on August 8th, 1844, Sidney Rigdon, as remaining member of the First Presidency, spoke to a large gathering of the Saints, advocating that the church continue to be led by a triumvirate with himself as President. The next day, Brigham Young gave a speech proposing that the church instead should be governed by the twelve apostles as a body. He was not campaigning to be the next leader himself, nor would anyone have accepted him if he had made such a proposal. The membership eventually voted in favor of Brigham’s plan because he made the better speech and it was considered wiser that church government be spread among the twelve rather than to continue with a new First Presidency under the ailing Sidney Rigdon.

And that was it. No image, no visions, no voice. Just a rip-roaring good sermon by Brigham Young. There was no transfiguration of Brigham Young into the form of Joseph Smith, no morphing, no eerie ghost noises, no nothing.

Again, how do we know? From primary sources; the letters, diaries, journals, and newspapers of the time. Brigham’s speech was reported on in detail in both Nauvoo newspapers and recorded by scribes for the official church records. Hundreds of members present wrote about Brigham’s persuasive argument in great detail in their private journals. Nowhere was there a mention of the miraculous or divine. Not a hint.

Until years later.

Van Wagoner takes us through the transformation; not the transformation of Brigham to Joseph, but the transformation from historical truth to historical legend.

You Really Had To Be There

After the saints were settled in Utah, church leadership began to shake out in the form of a hierarchy with certain apostles recognized as having seniority over others. Almost immediately Brigham Young forsook the plan he had proposed that church affairs should be administered by the Twelve equally, and quietly adopted the plan that had been proposed by Sidney Rigdon — with himself in Sidney Rigdon’s place.

Although in his famous speech in the grove at Nauvoo Brigham had insisted that “you can’t put anyone at the head of the Twelve,” in no time he managed to maneuver himself at the head of the Twelve and into the role of successor to the prophet Joseph Smith. This aggrandizement was not what the Saints had originally voted for, but Brigham had more than proven his leadership abilities by getting them across the plains and settled in, and who were they to question the senior member of the Quorum?

It was soon being spoken about that “the mantle of Joseph had fallen on Brigham.” What that meant exactly was anybody’s guess. “Mantle” is both a verb and a noun, and is a very abstract term in this sense. Nothing tangible or spiritual or visible had actually “fallen” on Brigham Young. It was meant as a metaphor. But in 1857, 13 years after the speech in the grove, Albert Carrington took the account one step further. In a speech before a huge gathering of Saints, he said that he couldn’t tell Brigham from Joseph that day when Brigham was speaking.

Someone else soon claimed that he had sensed the very spirit of Joseph Smith while Brigham had been speaking. Then another person declared that he saw the very personage of Joseph take over Brigham’s body.

That was all it took. Mark Twain has famously said that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Human nature being what it is, there was soon no shortage of pioneers declaring that they had seen the miraculous transformation too. It was a sign! It was a miracle! Brigham Young had been transformed by the spirit of Joseph Smith into the image of Joseph Smith himself!

Some of the most prominent church leaders got caught up in the illusion. “His words went through me like electricity,” testified apostle Orson Hyde in 1869, “It was not the voice of Joseph Smith but there were the features, the gestures, and even the stature of Joseph before us in the person of Brigham.”

Eight years later, a full thirty-three years after the original event, Hyde went even further. On second thought, it was the voice of Joseph Smith after all, and more:

“I heard the voice of Joseph through him, and it was as familiar to me as the voice of my wife, the voice of my child, or the voice of my father. And not only the voice of Joseph did I distinctly and unmistakably hear, but I saw the very gestures of his person, the very features of his countenance, and if I mistake not, the very size of his person appeared on the stand. And it went through me with the thrill of conviction that Brigham was the man to lead this people. And from that day to the present there has not been a query or a doubt upon my mind with regard to the divinity of his appointment; I know that he was the man selected of God to fill the position he now holds.”

There’s just one problem with Orson Hyde’s testimony. He wasn’t there. Orson Hyde did not arrive in Nauvoo until August 13th.

Other prominent Mormons who weren’t present added their testimonies too. John D. Lee’s personal diary, Van Wagoner tells us, “makes it clear that he did not return to Nauvoo until 20 August, nearly two weeks later.” But that didn’t stop Lee from later saying “I myself, at the time, imagined that I saw and heard a strong resemblance to the Prophet in him.” Wilford Woodruff told the story from the pulpit many times over the years, embellishing it more than any of the others with each retelling. Interestingly, Woodruff was present that day and had written the most detailed and complete contemporary account of Brigham’s speech on the day he gave it. But in that original account he failed to mention any of the supernatural sights and sounds he miraculously recalled years later.

If the church leadership were inclined to exaggerate, the rank and file were up to the challenge too. According to Van Wagoner:

“Retrospective retellings of a ‘transfiguration,’ in a variety of forms, can be found in dozens of sources, yet no two seem to agree on precise details. Elizabeth Haven Barlow, a cousin of Brigham Young, for example, wrote that her mother told her that ‘thousands in that assembly’ saw Young ‘take on the form of Joseph Smith and heard his voice change to that of the Prophet’s.’ Eliza Ann Perry Benson reminisced that the Saints arose ‘from their seats enmass’ exclaiming ‘Joseph has come! He is here!’”

Too bad the newspapers neglected to notice the crowd going wild. It would have made good copy.

Thankfully, not every member of the church got caught up in the collective delusion. According to Van Wagoner:

Bishop George Miller, present at the gathering, later recalled that nothing supernatural had occurred on that day. Young made a “long and loud harangue,” Miller later wrote, for which I “could not see any point in the course of his remarks than to overturn Sidney Rigdon’s pretensions.”

Why It Matters, And Why It Doesn’t

Just as 19th century historian George Bancroft believed there was nothing wrong with fabricating and reshaping the facts as long as the resulting stories “would make his readers proud of their country’s history”, so did 19th century Mormons profess to fudging the facts if it led to promoting the faith. But such Mormon urban legends have a way of backfiring. Rather than strengthening testimonies, once the deception is revealed, testimonies are often destroyed. Witness the hordes of good and faithful people leaving the church in droves every year after discovering their testimonies were dependent on deeply held beliefs that had been manipulated by those they trusted most.

Nearly a hundred years ago B.H. Roberts was already concerned about this trend:

“Suppose your youth receive their impressions of church history from ‘pictures and stories’ and build their faith upon these alleged miracles [and] shall someday come face to face with the fact that their belief rests on falsehoods; what then will be the result? Will they not say that since these things are myth and our Church has permitted them to be perpetuated …might not the other fundamentals to the actual story of the Church, the things in which it had its origin, might they not all be lies and nothing but lies?”

Whack-a-Mole Wives

Members and ex-members alike deserve to take an objective look at the women who started popping up in late nineteenth century Utah claiming to have once been secretly married to Joseph Smith. We deserve to carefully analyze their claims one by one, and that’s just the kind of research Richard and Pamela Price have been engaged in for over thirty years.

Are these tales of secret marriages not that much different from tales of miraculous transfigurations, thought to aid in affirming the glorious doctrines of The Lord’s True Church? If an apostle could claim to witness a miracle he did not see, is it not conceivable that a woman might claim a marriage she did not experience? Did any of these women come forward earlier than the late 1870′s? Do we have any contemporary accounts of their secret marriages written in their diaries at the time they supposedly took place? Why don’t we hear anything of this until these women were well past middle age and the practice of plural marriage was under attack? Anyone could have claimed to have been married to Joseph Smith, since the marriages were alleged to have been secret and no marriage certificates exist. One wife would not even have known about any of the others. “You were married to Joseph Smith? No kidding! I was married to Joseph Smith!

“Well, howdy-do and pleased ta meetcha!”

All of these dubious claims were made by women who were firm believers in The Principle, having lived their entire adult lives as plural wives, nearly all of them to men of prominence in Utah society. They were absolutely convinced that the doctrine was introduced by Joseph, so a little exaggeration to affirm the legitimacy of the practice couldn’t hurt. Doubtless some of these gals may have come to believe Joseph Smith actually would have married them for real if he had actually met them.

Let’s take a quick look at just a couple of cases of women who have been presented to me as proof positive, absolutely-airtight-smoking-gun-evidence that Joseph Smith was a sex-obsessed Lothario.

The Smoking Gun Is A Toy Cap Pistol

1. Nancy Rigdon

Nancy Rigdon was the pretty nineteen year old daughter of First Councilor Sidney Rigdon, and the way the story is often told, Joseph Smith made advances toward her in a letter and she rejected him.

In volume II of Joseph Smith Fought Polygamy, the Prices examine this story in depth and document all the juicy details. You can read the complete analysis on their website here . I’ll give you the short version.

A letter was delivered to Miss Rigdon which she was told was from Joseph Smith. The letter did not contain Joseph’s signature, and Miss Rigdon rejected it because she knew where it had come from. She suspected it was the work of John C. Bennett, who held incriminating knowledge about her seduction by Chauncey Higbee and hoped for her cooperation in entrapping Joseph. What ended up happening to the poor girl was that her affair with Higbee was made public, causing her no end of humiliation.

Wouldn’t you know it, Bennett somehow had a copy of that letter to Nancy Rigdon of his own, which he published in the Sangamo Journal, and later in his book, claiming it was written by Joseph Smith to Nancy Rigdon. Gee, I wonder how he got that copy?

Joseph Smith made affidavit denying authorship of the letter, and Nancy Rigdon herself affirmed it had not come from Smith, “nor in his hand writing, but by another person, and in another person’s hand writing.” Nancy’s father didn’t believe the letter was from Joseph either. Neither copy of the notorious letter has been found to this day. All we know of it is from what Bennett published.

Some smoking gun.

2. Helen Mar Kimball

I suppose if we came across the diary of an innocent fourteen year old girl expressing horrified apprehension about her upcoming wedding to Joseph Smith, a grown man in his mid thirties, that would be pretty damning evidence, wouldn’t it?

That’s how the journal of Helen Mar Kimball is often presented. But the journal was written by Helen when she was nearly fifty and had been one of the plural wives of Orson F. Whitney her entire adult life. Helen tells a retrospective tale of desiring to be obedient to her father who wished her to be given to the Prophet to wife. The actual purpose of her story was to bolster support for the practice of plural marriage, to which she was a devoted acolyte.

Far from being the private diary of a frightened underage girl, this was a story Helen composed in the late 1870′s which she wrote for publication. Her story has all the earmarks of the type of fabricated “history” created to build testimonies among those who may have come to question the doctrine of plural marriage. Her conclusion was that plural marriage was wonderful. She was in with both feet. Why, she even had the privilege of being married at one time to the living Prophet himself, that’s how super-duper the whole thing was.

“I learned that plural marriage is a celestial principle,” she testified, “and saw… the necessity of obedience to those who hold the priesthood, and the danger of rebelling against or speaking lightly of the Lord’s anointed.”

Helen makes it clear in an accompanying poem that her marriage to Joseph was for eternity only. That is, the marriage was never consummated. This is a typical caveat of the women who came forward with these claims. They seemed to enjoy the status of an eternal marriage to the famous founder of their faith, but most were careful to make the point that there was never any hanky-panky going on. Joseph would claim them as his celestial mates later in the hereafter. They even had themselves sealed “again” to Joseph in the Utah temple in case anybody didn’t believe them.

Those who insist that Joseph Smith was a sex-obsessed letch scoring dozens of clandestine conquests at Nauvoo will have to explain to me how the biggest celebrity in the city, during the busiest time of his life and with everyone’s eyes constantly watching his every move, would be able to woo, court, and wed two to three women every month. And then explain to me this unusual talent he had for constantly picking ladies who refused to put out.

Helen Mar Kimball’s purpose in writing her tract was to help bolster support for “The Principle” at a time when it was coming under attack from outside the church and generating questions inside. Like anyone else of her generation and in her position, when it suited her purpose, she fabricated. She didn’t write what she did because she was fishing for sympathy, she was trolling for converts.

Art or Science?

Today the study of history is a social science, no longer the malleable “art” that it was prior to the twentieth century. So perhaps it’s time Mormons as well as ex-Mormons applied the scientific process when trying to determine whether Joseph Smith was being honest in his denunciation of polygamy, or whether he was a flaming hypocrite.

“Occam’s Razor” is the scientific principle embodied in the statement that “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” Perhaps Fawn Brodie’s frustrated bewilderment at the conflicting evidence tying Joseph Smith to plural marriage was simply a result of her having been raised in the church (as were most subsequent Joseph Smith biographers) and accepted as a “given” that the doctrine of polygamy originated with Joseph Smith. Was she predisposed to ignore the simplest explanation?

How many of us have ever thought to check the provenance of D&C 132? Haven’t we always just assumed that it was written in Joseph’s hand? We unquestioningly accept as truth what has been handed down to us from people whose own recollections of key events changed radically depending upon the lesson they wished to convey, and who lived in a time when even the professional historians were no sticklers for accuracy.

After weighing all the evidence in any historical controversy, the best we can conclude about any given event is that it was more likely to have happened one way, and less likely to have happened another. Important factors to consider are primary and contemporary accounts (accounts written at the time), versus secondary accounts, hearsay, and later recollections.

So here’s what it comes down to. On the one hand we have countless contemporary accounts in Joseph’s own words testifying of his incessant crusade to root out polygamy in the church and his threats to prosecute its practitioners. On the other hand we have scribes as early as 1847 testifying to their complicity in tampering with the dead man’s journals, along with an entire gallery of pinch-faced dowagers appearing from out of nowhere with a claim to fame for their secret weddings to a long dead super-celebrity.

Taking Joseph Smith at his word and approaching the later claims as hyperbole typical of the zeitgeist is the only way to make sense of all the contradictions. It’s the only way the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. No one really knows the truth about what happened back then. I wouldn’t pretend to. I’ve only read half of the revisionist history on the topic, and I’m told there’s much more yet to be made available. But if I were to offer an early opinion based on the evidence I’ve seen so far, I would have to say that it seems more likely that Joseph Smith was sincere about eradicating polygamy in the church; and given what we know about the 19th century proclivity for embellishing reality without shame as long as it was for a good cause, I’d have to conclude that it’s less likely that we can rely on the claims of Joseph Smith’s several “wives”.

I don’t quite understand this reluctance some people have -both believing Mormons as well as others raised in the parochial Mormon culture- to automatically reject new information that might force a paradigm shift in their thinking. I like how B.H. Roberts looked at it: “I find my own heart strengthened in the truth by getting rid of the untruth, the spectacular, the bizarre, as soon as I learn that it is based upon worthless testimony.”

I actually like discovering I might have been wrong about something. It’s kind of exhilarating. It tells me I’m still learning.

The friendship between Sidney Rigdon and Joseph Smith is very fascinating.  Sidney was one of the earliest, and most impressive converts, joining the church in December 1830.  His training as a Baptist minister was especially helpful to Joseph, and he often preached many wonderful sermons.  As time wore on, there were some really interesting issues between Joseph and Sidney.  Richard Van Wagoner wrote a biography called Sidney Rigdon: Portrait of Religious Excess.  The Missouri and Nauvoo periods were especially tumultuous.

With Sidney running the church in Quincy, Joseph and others were still in the Liberty Jail.  Through the first 10 years of the church, Sidney Rigdon and Joseph Smith seem to be in lock step with each other.  However, the Nauvoo period seems to show a few cracks in the friendship.  Were they serious?  Well, Joseph called Sidney to be his Vice Presidential nominee–but I’ll get to that later.

The people of Quincy, Illinois took in many of the saints following the expulsion from Missouri.  In 2002, the Tabernacle Choir did a benefit concert for the town of Quincy, to thank them for their kindness.  With Sidney released from Liberty Jail, his mood improved greatly, and he worked to impeach the government of Missouri.  At this time, Joseph Smith chose to reverse himself on the work of gathering saints, as well as consecration (or “common stock”, as in the letter below.)  From Liberty Jail, Joseph wrote to the church in Quincy on Mar 25,1839, that the saints should settle “in the most safe and quiet places they can find” between Kirtland and Far West.  Additionally, there must be “no organization of large bodies upon common stock principals.”  Footnote 9 on page 273 of book expounds this.

No further common stock programs were established during Joseph Smith’s life.  The prophet shaded the truth during his 1839-40 trip to Washington, DC., when he stated that Mormons would not share property in common.  “‘It has been reported by some vicious or de[s]igning characters’, he said, ‘that the church of Latter Day Saints believe in having their pro[p]erty in common and also the leaders of sa[id] church controlls said propperty….This is a base fabrication,’ he insisted, ‘on the contrary no person’s feelings can be more repugnant to such a principle than mine[,] every person in this Church has a right to controll his own proppe[r]ty’” (Joseph Smith to Mr. Editor [of the Chester County Register and Examiner], 22 Jan. 1840.)

After 2 failed attempts to escape from jail, Joseph and others bribed some guards with a promise of $800.  They returned to Quincy, and made plans to settle in Commerce (later named Nauvoo.)  Smith and Rigdon bought (for the church) $18,000 worth of property in Nauvoo, and were swindled out of $80,000 in Iowa.  As the saints moved to Nauvoo, Rigdon contracted malaria, which would plague him for years.  While there are several true reports of Joseph healing people of malaria, Sidney was not one of them.

The leadership continued to press for redress of the wrongs in Missouri, and traveled to DC to speak with Pres Van Buren.  Due to Rigdon’s eloquence, he was selected to be the spokesman for the group.  Rigdon made a valiant effort to travel to DC, but was just too sick, so Joseph Smith became the spokesman.  Smith was not impressed with Van Buren, and the meeting was a disappointment to the saints.

Nauvoo was initially prosperous, but not for long.  From page 278,

Although Nauvoo’s population increased dramatically in the early 1840′s, much of its short-lived prosperity was based on the same perilous real estate speculation that brought down Kirtland’s economy.  Rigdon and the Smiths once again pinned their financial aspirations on the hopes that new converts, aware of the prophet’s dark visions of America’s future, would flee their homelands, gather to Nauvoo–proclaimed city of refuge–and purchase property from the real estate arm of the church.  But of the more than 3,000 British converts who arrived in Nauvoo before 1846, most were poverty-stricken refugees from the English working class.  Sobering to the First Presidency was that real estate sales fell far below their expectation, forcing the brethren to default on the promissory notes they had co-signed.  Because the church was not yet a legal entity in 1839, Ridgon, the Smith brothers, and their wives were personally liable for the organization’s nearly $150,000 debt.

…

To pay for the vast acreage, Mormon property owners were advised to sign their real estate over to the church, through agents Isaac Galland and William Smith, in exchange for an equivalent value of land in Nauvoo…  Overwhelmed by their obligations, Rigdon and the Smith brothers sought a way out of their financial problems: bankruptcy.  [which happened in 1842]

I’d like to address to an awkward episode between Rigdon and Smith.  In 1842, Smith tested Rigdon’s friendship when Joseph proposed plural marriage to Sidney’s 19-year old daughter, Nancy.  Nancy was summoned on two occasions to meet Joseph, and was repulsed by the idea, threatening to “raise the neighbors” if Joseph didn’t let her go.  Through his scribe Joseph wrote an apology to Nancy, which she handed to her boyfriend, Francis Higbee.  The letter got out, (and was published in John C. Bennett’s expose on Mormon Polygamy–more on Bennett later) and eventually got to Sidney’s attention.

At first, Joseph denied all to Sidney.  Nancy stormed into the room saying,

“Joseph Smith you are telling that which is not true[.]  you did make such a proposition to me, and you know it.”  Another unnamed person said, “Nancy are you not afraid to call the Lord['s] anointed a cursed liar[?]“  “No”, replied Nancy, “I am not for he does lie and he knows it.”

[Rigdon's son-in-law, George] Robinson wrote that Smith, after acknowledging his proposition, sought a way out of the crisis by claiming he had approached Nancy “to ascertain whether she was virtuous or not, and took that course to learn the facts.”  But Sidney found that rationalization feeble.  Convinced of Smith’s involvement in the “spiritual wife business,” as Sidney later termed it, Rigdon concluded that Smith had “contracted a whoring spirit.”  This is why, according to Wickliffe [Sidney's son], Rigdon told family members immediately after the prophet left their home that Smith “could never be sealed to one of his daughters without his consent as he did not believe in the doctrine.”

Chapter 21 is the first chapter to address polygamy in the book, though it does go back in time to address rumors of polygamy in Kirtland and other places.  Let me sidetrack to Emma for a minute.  At times the issue of polygamy…

left Joseph and Emma’s marriage hanging by a thread.  Emma spent the last three years of her husband’s life jealously battling his errant yearnings, more than once threatening to return to her family in New York.  On one occasion, according to Smith’s private secretary, she threatened that if he continued to “indulge himself she would too.”  [William Clayton Diary] Although Emma apparently countenanced two of her husband’s 1843 sealings–to Emily and Eliza Partridge–she recanted within a day and demanded that Joseph give them up or “blood should flow.”  Her change of heart came after she found Joseph and Eliza Partridge secluded in an upstairs bedroom at the Smith home.  The realization that the sealing represented more than a “spiritual marriage” or “adoptive ordinance” devastated her. [From page 293]

Some of the footnotes are very interesting on this subject.  Footnote 26 on page 305 quotes an 1844 expose of Mormonism.  I don’t know if this can be corroborated, but I found it interesting.

“Emma’s threat to “be revenged and indulge herself” may have been merely a warning to the prophet to give up his spiritual wives.  But Joseph H. Jackson, a non-Mormon opportunist who gained the confidence of the prophet in Nauvoo, recorded in an 1844 expose of Mormonism:  “Emma wanted [William] Law for a spiritual husband,” and because Joseph “had so many spiritual wives, she thought it but fair that she would at least have one man spiritually sealed up to her and that she wanted Law, because he was such a ‘sweet little man.’”

Although there is nothing to suggest that Law and Emma were more to each other than friends, Law later confirmed that Joseph “offered to furnish his wife Emma with a substitute for h im, by way of compensation for his neglect of her, on condition that she would forever stop her opposition to polygamy and permit him to enjoy his young wives in peace and keep some of them in his house and to be well treated, etc.” (Salt Lake Tribune, 3 July 1887.)

Faithful Dissident talks about a deathbed confession of Emma, where Emma again denies polygamy.  Footnote 30, page 304 ”In 1846, two years after Joseph’s death, Emma Smith, in a conversation with Joseph W. Coolidge, remarked that “Joseph had abandoned plurality of wives before his death.”  Coolidge indicated from personal experience that he knew otherwise.  After a heated exchange Emma retorted with exasperation, “Then he was worthy of the death he died.”  (Joseph F. Smith diary, 28 Aug 1870.)

Another crack in the Rigdon and Smith friendship occurred in relation to the post office.  Rigdon had secured the lucrative position, wherein he was paid for every piece of mail that passed through.  It was one of the more lucrative positions one could hold.  Smith suspected Rigdon may have been trying to undermine Joseph, and wrote several letters trying to get Rigdon fired from the post office, and have Smith installed as his replacement.

John C Bennett, a former close personal aide of Joseph Smith, was excommunicated for unauthorized polygamy.  He then became a virulent anti-mormon.  According to Van Wagoner, Bennett is responsible for instigating many Missourians to continue to try to extradite Joseph, and also may have had a role in organizing the mobs which killed Joseph.  Bennett wrote a letter to Rigdon, trying to get help with his plan to bring down the prophet.  On page 315,

In early January, however, Rigdon did receive a message from Bennett.  The 10 January 1843 letter, also addressed to Orson Pratt, incorrectly assumed that its recipients would sympathize with Bennett’s plan to orchestrate the prophet’s downfall.

“Dear Friends–It is a long time since I have written you, and I should now much desire to see you; but I leave tonight to Missouri, to meet the messenger charged with the arrest of Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Lyman Wight and others, for murder, burglary, treason, etc., etc., who will be demanded in a few days on new indictments, found by the grand Jury of a called court, on the original evidence and in relation to which a nolle prosequi was entered by the district attorney.  New proceedings have been gotten up on the old charges and no habeus corpus can then save them.  We shall try Smith on the Boggs case when we get him into Missouri.  The war goes on, and although Smith thinks he is now safe, the enemy is near, even at the door.  He has awoke the wrong passenger….

P.S.  Will Mr. Rigdon please hand this letter to Mr. Pratt after reading?

After Rigdon read the letter he immediately handed it to Mr. Pratt, who then turned it over to Smith.  The prophet, initially dismayed that Rigdon has given the letter first to Pratt, took the dispatch to John Taylor, editor of Times and Seasons.  Smith instructed Taylor to publish the letter along with a statement condemning Rigdon’s actions.

….

Smith requested Taylor “to prefer charges against Sidney Rigdon before a court composed of twenty-four High Priests and three Bishops.”….  Before Taylor could publish the editorial or initiate action against Rigdon, the prophet approached Rigdon and “charged him with being leagued with [his] enemies to destroy him.”  Rigdon, according to Taylor, responded:  “I know it was wrong [not to give him the letter sooner]; but I darst not take upon myself the responsibility of making it known,” apparently because of his position as postmaster.  Rigdon’s explanation satisfied the prophet.  When Taylor asked him if he should proceed with the trial and publish the editorial, Smith replied, “I think you had better not, we will save him if we can.”

I want to mention one other footnote about Governor Boggs, which was alluded to in Bennett’s letter to Rigdon.  Governor Boggs had survived an assassination attempt.  Many people then and now believe Porter Rockwell, a body guard of Joseph Smith was responsible for the attempt.  Footnote 8 on page 325 says, ”The attempt on Boggs’s life took place on the night of 6 May 1842.  Orrin Porter Rockwell, one of Smith’s closest friends, was arrested later that year and charged with the attempted murder.  Although neither the prophet nor Rockwell was convicted of the crime, Rockwell never denied shooting Boggs.  General Patrick E. Conner reported that Rockwell told him, “I shot through the window and thought I had killed him, but I had only wonded him.  I was damned sorry that I had not killed the son of a bitch.”

I guess what is amazing to me is that Joseph continued to try to undermine Rigdon’s position as postmaster, and still suspected Rigdon was behind attempts to have Smith arrested.  Yet it seems they reconciled.  In 1844, dissatisfied with the current crop of presidential candidates, Joseph decided to run for President of the United States as a candidate of the Mormon Reform Party. He was nominated during a political caucus on January 29, 1844.

Joseph’s first choice for Vice President was James Arlington Bennett.  However, Bennett was ineligible due his Irish citizenship.  Joseph’s second choice was Solomon Copeland of Tennessee, who was not interested.  Sidney Rigdon was his third choice, and Rigdon enthusiastically accepted.  He gave a rousing address in General Conference on April 6 and 7, 1844.

The US Constitution states that the President and Vice President must be from two different states.  So, Sidney was called on a mission to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to set up residency.  (Rigdon was born in St. Clair Township which now consists of present-day neighborhoods in the City of Pittsburgh.)  He left for Pennsylvania on June 18.

Just prior to Rigdon leaving Nauvoo, William Law, a counselor in the First Presidency, Law’s wife and four others were excommunicated for opposing polygamy.  Rigdon informed Law that if they would “let all the difficulties drop” that Smith would restore Law and his friends back to their offices within the church.  Law refused, and helped print the Nauvoo Expositor on which came out on June 7, exposing polygamy.

Smith ordered the destruction of the press as a public nuisance.  On June 14, Rigdon sent a letter to Illinois governor Thomas Ford, asking for help, while denouncing the paper.  On June 18, Rigdon left Nauvoo, arriving in Pittsburgh on June 27.  Joseph and Hyrum were killed the next day, on June 28 in a hail of gunfire at the Carthage Jail.  Rigdon learned of the news five days later.

So, what is your reaction to all the events of Nauvoo?  Unlike the William Law (editor of the Nauvoo Expositor), Sidney was publicly silent on polygamy, though he was personally repulsed by the practice.  How would you have reacted if Smith had proposed marriage to your 19-year old daughter?  What do you make of the incident where Joseph tried to get Sidney fired from the post office?  It seems to me that this was a real life soap opera.  The Nauvoo period alone would make a great movie.

Okay, yes, I’m all amp’ed up about this one. Stupid David Leavitt has jumped on the anti-polygamy wagon again. He has taken on the custody case of a Juab County, Utah, woman who doesn’t want her soon-to-be ex-husband to have their children near any fundamentalist Mormons – see the following recent article from the Salt Lake Tribune: (and I have pasted some paragraphs below [emphasis mine]) -

Father says his custody rights violated because of Fundamentalist Mormon views

By Brooke Adams
The Salt Lake Tribune

Rocky Ridge » A Utah father is fighting an order that bars him from sharing his Fundamentalist Mormon views with his children or taking them to this small town he now calls home where most residents hold a religious belief in polygamy that a judge deemed ”harmful.”

Joseph Compton doesn’t like the label “Fundamentalist Mormon.” Instead, he prefers to describe himself as believing in “the gospel like Joseph Smith originally wrote it,” which includes the religious tenet of plural marriage.

But that belief has put him outside the law, 4th District Judge Donald J. Eyre said in ruling last fall that gave Kathleen Compton temporary custody of the couple’s four minor children, who range in age from 5 to 16. They also have four adult children.

Eyre ordered Compton, 49, to not “discuss polygamy or plural marriage with the minor children, allow the children to be in close proximity to those (other than himself) who practice polygamy or plural marriage or who aid or abet those who do.”

Eyre also barred Compton from taking the children within the incorporated boundaries of Rocky Ridge, a community located in Juab County where the berry farmer and fundamentalists who practice plural marriage live.

Allowing the children to associate with residents there would entail “unnecessary and harmful conflict” with the children’s non-polygamous upbringing, the judge said in his findings.

Compton said he is unwilling to deny his beliefs. But that does not give the state leeway to trample his rights under Utah law or the U.S. Constitution, he said.

“I want to be able to speak freely, I want to be able to travel freely, I want to be able to answer my children’s questions freely,” Compton said. “I have sincerely held religious beliefs that others object to. That’s OK. But I can’t have my free choice? That is what I object to.”

***********

Grave threat of harm? » Rocky Ridge, founded in 1972 and incorporated in 1996, has about 800 residents. A majority are members of the Apostolic United Brethren, also known as the Allred Group, which adheres to a fundamentalist version of Mormonism that includes plural marriage — which the sect only sanctions between consenting adults. The enclave includes homes, a private school, several businesses, an elk farm, a volunteer fire department and a church.

**************
The constitutional and parental rights issues raised in the Compton divorce case have been the subject of similar legal proceedings in Utah and several other states.

A Chicago judge ruled earlier this month that a Catholic father can take his preschool-age daughter to Mass even though the girl’s mother is raising her in the Jewish faith, undoing a previous decision that barred him from taking her to any “non-Jewish religious activities.” The judge said there was no evidence exposure to other religious practices would harm the child.

In 2006, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overturned a lower court decision that prohibited a father from sharing his Fundamentalist Mormon belief in polygamy with his minor daughter, finding that “illegality of the proposed conduct on its own is not sufficient to warrant the restriction.”

Absent a finding that discussing such matters would pose a “grave threat of harm” to a child, there is insufficient basis for the infringing on constitutionally protected right of a parent to “speak to a child about religion as he or she sees fit,” the court wrote.

And the Utah Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that living in a plural family alone was not reason enough to prohibit a couple from adopting children of one plural wife after she died of cancer. Polygamy may be prohibited, but that does not mean the state must deny any or all civil rights to polygamists, wrote Chief Justice Christine Durham.

David O. Leavitt, who is representing Kathleen Compton, said Thursday that the Utah case is “very much going to become a battle over [Joseph Compton's] right to say what he wants and the mother’s right and society’s right to protect children.”

****************

“An illegal lifestyle” » The Comptons, married nearly 27 years, built a home in Mona at the edge of Rocky Ridge in 2007 after moving to Utah from Missouri, where Compton’s scriptural studies first led him to see things “as they originally were.”

Yet, like his wife, Compton considered himself — and still does — a faithful member of the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, despite being excommunicated after his fundamentalist views were outed last summer in court proceedings.

************

In her divorce petition, Kathleen Compton, 47, said she gave her husband an ultimatum after he sought her consent last year to take a second wife: He could choose his family or the new woman and polygamy.

Compton refused to abandon his beliefs, though he has not gone ahead with that spiritual marriage, he says.

In initial proceedings, Compton represented himself. He has now hired Salt Lake Attorney Daniel Irvin, who represented polygamist John Daniel Kingston in a child welfare case.

Leavitt, who, as Juab County Attorney, prosecuted polygamist Tom Green in 2000, argued in a hearing last summer that Compton’s beliefs were “an inappropriate and illegal lifestyle” and asked Eyre to prevent him from taking the children into the “geographic boundaries” of Rocky Ridge.

Leavitt also asked that Compton be barred from leaving the children “in the custody or in the presence of anyone other than [himself] who espouses religious beliefs regarding polygamy,” according to a hearing transcript.

Leavitt said it would be inappropriate to expose the children to a felonious lifestyle. And in Rocky Ridge, “a very high percentage of that community is violating that law,” Leavitt said as he urged Eyre to draw a line around the town.

“It seems to me that we defeat every purpose if we don’t keep those children outside the geographic boundaries of a place that is a known haven for polygamy,” Leavitt said during the hearing. “We wouldn’t let a child go into a known drug house for the same reason. They’re both felonies.”

In a telephone interview, Leavitt said he has a “difficult time with the argument that something that is a felony is not going to be found inherently dangerous to children.

“You first have to come at this with the understanding that bigamy is a felony, and if you know anything about Rocky Ridge you’ll understand that it is a well-known haven for bigamists,” he said. “Polygamy is a felony and it is in the best interest of children to keep them away from that kind of conduct.”

**************

“A good father” » During the hearing, Compton told Eyre he had no intention of pressuring his children to adopt his beliefs.

“I just want to be a good father and have the opportunity to be with them and associate with them,” he said, adding that, “there is nothing to show that teaching children the importance of plural celestial marriage is damaging.”

But Eyre adopted the restrictions proposed by Leavitt, saying they were in keeping with Kathleen Compton’s desire to “maintain a certain religious background.” The judge also included a requirement that visits with the children take place at his wife’s apartment in Utah County — something Compton argued would be a hardship.

“It’s not convenient for her or me,” said Compton, who has rented the couple’s home and is living with a monogamous couple and their children in Rocky Ridge. “[My children] ask me every time how much longer before they can come stay at my house. I want my visitation in my home. ”

***********
But Leavitt said Kathleen Compton believes her husband “very much” wants to indoctrinate his children in the fundamentalist version of Mormonism, which violates the family’s religious traditions.

“This woman wants her children protected from the influence of polygamists,” he said. “We should not get hung up on what a parent’s right of expression is and forget what the children’s right to safety is.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
So, why do I say ‘idiot’? First, Utah has NO POLYGAMY STATUTES !!!!!!!!! Secondly, if the residents of Rocky Ridge are living in a “felonious lifestyle”, then Leavitt should get his prosecutor buddies to go in and ARREST THE FELONS. You and I both know he won’t, and they won’t. Why not? Because, even if Leavitt may not have read Lawrence v. Texas (June 2003), he knows that, since that decision, there is NO SUCH THING AS AN “illegal lifestyle”.

Sorry, but it just chaps me that he swaggers around chanting this hot-air B***S*** about people living an illegal lifestyle in an illegal place, teaching illegal ideas and raising their children in an illegal atmosphere. This was the substance of the issue in -

Musser v. Utah, 333 U.S. 95 (1948)

in that opinion see also -
Footnote 8

“But even advocacy of violation, however reprehensible morally, is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on.”

Mr. Justice Brandeis, concurring in Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357, at 274 U. S. 376.
Utah wanted to punish Joseph Musser because, at the time, polygamy was seen as illegal and a threat to “public morals”, and Musser was seen as a criminal because he taught the principle of plural marriage in a religious context. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Musser’s favor because, inter alia, he was not inciting his listeners to go out and instantly commit crimes, and he had every right to complain about what he saw to be “bad laws” in an effort to seek justifiable redress of a valid grievance.

I invite Leavitt to read Lawrence and Musser. Either way, Davey, you are an idiot!

The pretty, stupid state of Utah really makes me sick sometimes. What a charade! What a farce! If you law enforcement tyrants really truly view the ten or more thousand polygamists in this state as FELONS, then why in the Dickens don’t you put your testes where your mouth is and go and arrest them? While you’re at it, show me where in Utah statutes the words “polygamy” or “plural marriage” are found.

Otherwise, SHUT UP and go back into your pathetic little anti-Mormon hole.

Leavitt alone, Davey !!!

I was captivated by this 550-page novel, and fascinated by how relevant it is to readers of all backgrounds.  The story is told from the points of view of three main characters: Golden Richards, the convert to Mormon fundamentalism; Trish, one of his wives; and the preadolescent Rusty, one of Golden’s twenty-eight children.  If you’re of a certain age and a close reader, you’ll be able to place the time period in which it is set by the subtle cultural clues: a reference to Starsky and Hutch, a Sears Roebuck catalog, Postum, and a 1963 Cadillac with only 4,000 miles on it.  That Golden is presented as an apostle of a tiny polygamist sect in rural Utah doesn’t keep him from his true character of all-American everyman.  He has four wives, but some of the same marital challenges which are familiar to us all.  His twenty-eight children present him with the same provocations as my eight, and probably your four, and my neighbor’s two.  The fact that Udall is so skilled at probing the universalities of life gives his readers an opportunity to ponder our own life journeys as we enter into what we might otherwise consider the divergent spheres of the husband, wife, and child of a polygamous family.

Consider, for example, how much the description of a church service Golden attended connected not only to fundamentalist Mormons, but to mainstream Latter-day Saints as well as the rural roots of American Protestant religion.  In a sudden burst of emotion occasioned by the recent death of his mother and the preachings of “Uncle Chick,” Golden understands “that he is a changed person; his old self, that tattered shitty thing he never knew he so much despised, has been tossed aside.  Now Uncle Chick is finishing his testimony, affirming his faith in the gospel, in the saving Principle they hold so dear, and just before he finishes he smiles, as if apologizing for all the dramatics, and says, ‘Remember, brothers and sisters, God loves you,’ and Golden knows it is true.”  Then the announcement is made for a social to be held after the meeting with Sister Maxine’s famous walnut brownies.  The congregations sings a hymn, the words of which have never struck him quite as they do at that moment, and afterward the congregation of  ”red-cheeked children” and “smelly old farmers” and “hard-faced women” evokes every Church social I have ever attended.

In Golden’s triple-homed household, you’ll find little touches you may recognize from your own families; whether it be the notes one wife leaves in strategic places: “Turn off Light When Not in Use,” or efforts to unclog a toilet, or an idiosyncratic pet.  So when it comes to both the dysfunctionality the Richards’ experience and the strengths they lend each other, you’ll realize that these things have part and parcel in all of our lives.  You’ll nod when Golden pulls into his driveway under still-lit Christmas lights feeling that just maybe everything will be ALL RIGHT — and then you’ll cry when death and tragedy prove that nothing is OK, there is no explanation that suffices, and one has to find a way to go on.

For those readers who can’t stem the craving for a peek into the polygamous lifestyle, don’t worry, you’ll get your fix.  There’s a generous helping of all the pathos and loneliness the sharing of a husband evokes for a woman, as well of the comforts of having loyal sister wives when emergencies present themselves.  I love the scene where Trish has just delivered a stillborn baby and Golden won’t look at him.  Her sister-wife Beverly makes Golden hold the baby and sing him  a lullaby.  Then he is sent off to make arrangements while the four wives weep and admire the baby and hold hands and pray.  This scene is as beautiful as another is disturbing: Rose has to work up the courage to ask Trish if she will forego her night with Golden so he can attend a daughter’s high school band concert.

“He hasn’t been in over two weeks,” Trish whispered, even though now that the dryer had rattled into silence her words carried easily into every part of the room.  ”I’ve seen him twice in the past month.  If I don’t see him tonight, who knows how long it will be, you understand?  Rose?  I’m beginning to think he won’t even recognize me anymore.”

She laughed — a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood — but Rose only nodded, and Trish realized that both her eyes were now leaking tears.  Unable to speak or make a gesture of condolence or regret, she sat in the sunken chair, a black-hearted villain in her bank-robber’s mask, her shameful features hidden from view.  Nola, whose scissors had been poised above her customer’s springy hair during the entire exchange, sighed and resumed her snick snick snick.  Rose eased her hands from Trish’s grip and gently dried her hair with a towel.

She did not wait for Rose to comb out her tangled hair, did not wait for her turn in Nola’s chair.  A bitterness had risen in her throat, sudden and hot — that she should have to feel guilty for wanting to be a participant in her own life, that she should be ashamed of wanting to spend a few hours with her own husband! — and she knew she should leave immediately… She stepped out into the bright day, the sidewalk scorching white beneath her feet, the sky a pale panel of blue over her head, and walked slowly at first, her hair wet and wild, her face still covered with the handkerchief, and then began to run, making a break for it like the outlaw she was.

And then there are the comic moments in plural marriage, as when Golden gets a piece of gum stuck in the hair of a very personal spot!  You’ll have to read the book to hear about that one.  Oh yes, Brady Udall has captured life in polygamy as if he has lived it himself.

I think that if — back when I was a 19-year-old born-again Christian — someone had given me a synopsis of the contents of the Book of Mormon, that I would have declined to read it.  And perhaps if someone had divulged the story line of “The Lonely Polygamist” to me before I read it I might have considered it too depressing, too emotionally difficult to engage.  But interestingly enough, the Book of Mormon has taken me on an exciting and life-changing faith journey.  And Udall’s novel has provided surprising opportunities as well.  Its flawed and sometimes dysfunctional characters have paradoxically given me a measure of  hope.

At a Passover Seder this week, President Barack Obama’s message to American Jews focused on social justice. Obama said that the message of the Exodus teaches of oppression to be fought and freedom to be won, and that we all have a responsibility to fight against suffering and discrimination wherever we find it. Some Jewish journalists discussing the remarks saw them as a veiled reprimand against Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. Others heartily agreed that Jews should be particularly sensitive to oppression. The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer enthused:

“I’ve viewed Passover as an opportunity not just to reflect on the historical oppression of my own people but on the suffering of others in the present day… Passover doesn’t exist merely for Jews to congratulate ourselves on our continued existence — although that is no mean feat. The reminder that we were once slaves in Egypt is meant to make us consider contemporary questions of justice… If you’re unable to take away from Passover an understanding of your own role as a Jew in fighting the injustice done to other people who do not also happen to be Jewish, the experience is meaningless.”

It could be that the symbolic elements of the Jewish Passover are more meaningful to Mormons than to any religious group outside the Jews themselves.  We recognize the emblems of the Seder to be representative of the Messiah who came in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.  The lesson material includes several connections between descriptions of the Passover in the Old Testament and Jesus Christ.  It was during a Passover seder that Jesus proclaimed that the meal represented Himself and that He was instituting the New Covenant, which is celebrated by Christians in the form of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  Elder Jeffrey R. Holland admonished Latter-day Saints to view this sacrament as our passover, remembrance of our safety and deliverance and redemption.

In addition, Mormons experienced their own Exodus when they were led out of the boundaries of the United States by their “American Moses,” Brigham Young.  Leonard J. Arrington subtitled his biography of Young “American Moses,” explaining:

“Brigham was the same sort of a leader as Moses in serving people for a long period of time, in achieving their goal of entering into a kingdom blessed by God… Brigham was something for us that Moses was for the people of Israel. He led his people figuratively and quite literally, and they survived because of that leadership and their faith.

I do think the epic stories which identify the early Mormons and the children of Israel as a people persecuted for their religious convictions are meaningful. Obama’s exhortation to use this as a motivator to fight injustice rings true to my “Latter-day Israelite” heart. And this is why I’ve identified so strongly with the plight of the FLDS men of the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas who are now being sentenced for their plural marriages. I don’t expect any of the readers here at Mormon Matters to agree with me on this.  But I’m sad that the justice system is sending hard-working, religiously-motivated men to prison, depriving their young wives and children of their loving care.  I often wonder why we, with the heritage we have of being misunderstood for our unusual marital practices, are not more sympathetic to the men who have been sentenced this month. In particular, I speak of Merril Leroy Jessop, who was sentenced March 19th to a 75-year prison sentence and $10,000 fine. To me, this seems a clear case of religious discrimination and oppression. Jessop was accused of having sex with a girl who was 15 years old when he was 31 and already married. Even if you think these men are criminals who deserve to be punished and these young women are victims, the sentence is excessive.  A Wikipedia article states that the average sentence for convicted rapists was 11.8 years, while the actual time served was 5.4 years. What sets this case apart from many other similar situations? The prosecution asked the jury to send a message to a collective group of people, to make the price so high to dissuade others from doing the same. This is unconstitutional and in my eyes constitutes religious persecution.

I don’t want to go on about this particular case — it’s only one example of what I see as injustice and oppression, and there are of course many more.  But I do appreciate President Obama’s invitation to connect Exodus and the Passover story with social justice.  I thought I’d share with you what’s going through my mind during this Passover week, and what I’ll be thinking of as LDS Sunday School classes comfortably discuss Moses.

He has an interesting perspective on the Biblical story of Rachel and Leah.  As we all know, Jacob (who later changed his name to Israel), greatly loved Rachel.  After working for 7 years to marry Rachel, he was duped into marrying Rachel’s sister Leah, and then had to work another 7 years to marry Rachel.  Fertel makes an interesting note that Jacob didn’t complain that he married Leah, and was satisfied to know that he could still have Rachel.

Let me quote directly from the book, because I love this point.

Jacob lived in the community as a single man for seven years.  He knew the tradition that the older sister marries first.  That’s why he didn’t complain about marrying Leah….Jacob knew he had to marry Leah–that wasn’t a problem for him.  He wanted to marry Rachel, and the fact that he did not–that was a problem for him.  So when he was told that he would marry Rachel, he was satisfied.  That’s all he wanted.  He didn’t need an explanation for why he married Leah.  He knew he had to marry Leah in order to marry Rachel.  He knew that to marry the woman of his choice, he had to marry the woman of his fate too.  And that’s why the story of Jacob serves as a paragon for a successful marriage.  Because the truth is when you marry, you marry Rachel and Leah.  You choose your spouse which you don’t yet know–your fate.  And to succeed in love, you have to commit to both–Rachel and Leah, your choice and your fate, the revealed and the unrevealed.

…

Most people don’t enter a marriage with this attitude.  Most people, when they wake up to find Leah next to them, complain that Leah was not their choice.  Most people become frustrated with their spouse and their marriage when they discover character flaws, problems, and differences.  Most people feel so duped into marrying Leah that they divorce Rachel.  But it’s not possible to marry one without the other.  Leah always appears.  The key to success in love and marriage is to know what to do when “she” does.

Soul mates are not perfect for each other.  Soul mates love each other with all their imperfections.  Soul mates love each other no matter what.

I found this story intriguing, and have enjoyed the book and other materials from the package.  One of the pieces of advice I have tried to implement (which my wife fully supports) is to have a set day for a baby-sitter every Friday night.  This is a scheduled appointment, and we have a girl in the ward who has agreed to do this.  However, she has not proved as reliable as she agreed at the beginning.

Fertel says a consistent date night is a must, and should not be canceled for any reason.  He says it puts marriage as a priority, and forces you to do something.  And he says that the date night can’t include movies, or other people (ie no kids or extended family).  You must talk face to face for at least one hour, and it can’t include anything logistical.  Learn about hopes, dreams, philosophy of life, etc.  The more I thought about this, it reminds me of what dates were like when we were single.  Unfortunately, it seems that children and work crowd into the romance.  He says too many couples become roommates, and this is why we drift apart.  I must confess that I have fallen into this trap, and I resolve to get my marriage in better shape!

So, what do you think of Fertel’s analogy of Rachel and Leah?

There are, after all, Mormon women writers in these communities too:  Mormon women with their own rich stories to tell.

Thanks to a friend we met at our reading in Tempe, we have been invited to visit with a woman named Marylene and her friends in Colorado City.

Holly Welker, Susan Scott, Lisa Hadley, and I are listening to Led Zeppelin and talking about the Word of Wisdom as we pull off the 389 into Colorado City and cross the bridge over Short Creek.

Women of all ages in FLDS-signature pioneer dresses cross the streets, while young men in long-sleeved jeans shirts and pants ride ATVs through the red dust at the edge of the road.

We meet Marylene and her sister Irma. Earlier today on the phone, I spoke to Marylene about our project to collect the writings of Mormon women and archive them at the University of Utah, and she has brought us a short type-written essay about her life, which we accept with gratitude.

We follow them first to the Colorado City dairy (where we sample the famous squeaky cheese curds), then to the home of another woman named Priscilla, who is standing out back frying Utah-style scones in a deep fryer.  She offers us sizzling hot scones with powdered sugar and home canned pear jam.

Marylene, Irma, Priscilla, and a fourth woman named Ann invite us to tour their town in a big white family van.  For more than an hour, they drive us through Colorado City and Hilldale.  They show us large family homes, the award-winning Masada charter school in Centennial Park, the mercantile, the town birthing center, the churches, the park against the mountains where FLDS families are playing softball in the dusk, the empty lots where Bishop Fred Jessop once brought a small collection of zoo animals to entertain the local children.  Only a few ostriches are left, squatting in the red dust.  The town is still trying to recover from the reign of Warren Jeffs, and the SWAT teams and truckloads of media that came with it.

Our van stops in front of the little school house where the men and women of Short Creek huddled when hundreds of heavily armed law officers came to raid the town in 1953.  Priscilla and Marylene were young children when it happened, and Irma was born while her mother was in state custody down in Phoenix, Arizona.  They tell us of the children the state of Arizona tried to foster or adopt away from their parents, of the years it took for families to be reunited, of the way the fear the raid brought on has shaped the lives of their communities.

Holly asks them if they see any similarity in their situation and the situation of gay and lesbian families whose marriages are not recognized by the state.  The women nod their heads.  “Yes,” says Priscilla. “They are both issues of civil rights.”

Priscilla, Irma, Marylene, and Ann are all members of the Centenial Park Action Committee. Their goal is to make sure their voices are heard in the political and media debates that surround their small communities and the practice of plural marriage. In the long run, they hope to overturn the 1877 Supreme Court decision known as “Reynolds” that outlawed polygamy and declared it an “odious” “Asiatic” practice.

“We know we have a long road ahead of us,” says Priscilla.  “It’s like the first suffragettes and it took them their whole lifetimes to see women have the vote.”

The hour grows late.  We exchange hugs and phone numbers and email addresses with these women, our long-lost Mormon kin.

“Thanks for not being afraid to come to see us,” says Marylene before getting into her white Buick and guiding us back through Colorado City to the 389.

Tonight (Thursday), the Our Voices, Our Visions tour will continue at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Friday at UVU, and Saturday at the University of Utah. For full info, see mormonwomenwriters.blogspot.com.

A close friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous recently saw in the shadow of the temple his story follows

In October, I was fortunate to attend the Portland, Oregon, screening of the movie, In the Shadow of the Temple. http://www.intheshadowofthetemple.com The screening was hosted by the producers, Karen Di Millia and Dennis Lavery. Prior to the screening Dennis and Karen spoke for 10 minutes and explained how they started this project. After the screening they took questions and answers for roughly 30 minutes.

Lavery and DeMillia, who are not–and never have been–LDS, originally planned to make a movie about people who had left the religion of their youth. They attended a meeting of the Portland Humanist Society, explained their project, and asked if anyone had such stories they would be willing to share. In the course of discussing the project with members of the society, they were told that who they really needed to talk to was Sue Emmett, who had left the LDS church. After talking with Sue and others with whom she put them in touch, they decided to re-focus their project on the experience of those who have left the LDS church.

They did hundreds of hours of interviews over two years and edited it down to a 55 minute film. The film is very moving–a tribute to those who shared their stories as well as DeMillia and Lavery’s videography and editing skills.

About two dozen people appear in interviews in the film. Each story is unique, but a common thread runs throughout them all. All faced a similar rejection by family, friends and community. Some of those interviewed have left the church. Others no longer believe, but remain active because of family or community pressure. The latter are filmed in shadows, to obscure their identity. The film refers to these people as “Shadow Mormons.” They define “Shadow Mormons” as those who privately do not accept the exacting doctrine of the Church, but publicly profess to be true believers. They are in shadow to protect their relationships with family, friends and employers.

Someone commented to me after the film, “That’s you. You’re a Shadow Mormon.”

Yes, I’m a Shadow Mormon. Maybe that’s why this film hit me so hard. I haven’t believed in over 20 years – most of my adult life. Yet, during that time I’ve paid my tithing, gone to the temple, served in bishoprics and high councils and done all the things that were expected of me. Why? Because I am tied to the church by family and community.

The story of “Grace” (not her real name) resonated with me because it was so similar to mine. Her pain, and anger, were born of all the energy she has given to a religion that she doesn’t believe in. Finding out that the Church was not true was like a death experience for her. Like me, she tried following the Church’s teachings to fast, pray, read the scriptures and yet never felt she received the “burning in her bosom” that is promised in the scriptures.

What of the families and communities of these people? What are their stories, their experiences with loved ones who go through a process of losing belief and leaving the church. Only one person who was a family or friend agreed to be interviewed for the film. The believing husband that was interviewed told how he still loved his wife, even though she has left the church. What about the others? Are they embarrassed to say that the Church was more important than their relationship with the person who left?

The saddest stories, to me, were of divorce caused by one spouse believing and the other not believing. Michelle (another woman interviewed in the film) said her heart was broken that her husband would choose the Church over her. He told their marriage therapist that if she had not been Mormon he never would have married her. “There was more to me than being a Mormon,” she said. “And I thought that there was more to him.”

The dictionary defines empathy as “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” We could all use a little more empathy for those around us. I have had several people tell me, “I can’t imagine how a person could leave the church.” Either they need a better imagination or they need more empathy. Maybe they just need to see this film.

One of the questions at the screening–one that Lavery could not answer–was, “How do we get the right people to see this film?” Sadly, many members of the church would not even consider it. (It screened in Salt Lake City in October and got almost no media coverage.) The film does not try to de-convert anyone or disparage the doctrine of the church. It doesn’t assert that someone is right because he or she believes, or that someone else is right because he or she leaves the church. This film is about accepting people regardless of what they believe, and about how we treat those who believe differently than we do. I wish every member of the church could see this film.

Film Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICbylWK-i2Q&NR=1

Recently I drove up Little Cottonwood Canyon with my brother and nephew.  This is the canyon in which many of your ancestors pulled out  the granite for the construction of the salt lake temple. As soon as we passed the granite facings on the side of the canyon my nephew played a song on his iPod by Corb Lund Brother Brigham Brother Young and it brought mental flashes into my mind of men working on the side of the mountain blasting granite out of it.    It made me think of the struggles that men and women had even back then with the faith in many ways very similar to our day. From what I have read Mr Lund isn’t LDS but has relatives that are. Im assuming one of his relatives is a historian buff? Its probably safe to presume this song will never be played in a chapel but I can’t help liking it!  You can listen to his song Here

Brother Brigham Brother Young

music and lyrics by Corb Lund

I have sinned so gravely Brother Brigham, Brother Young
I have sinned so gravely Brother Young
That only you can save me Brother Brigham, Brother Young
That only you can save me Brother Young

I have revealed the temples secrets Brother Brigham, Brother Young
The temple garments, oaths and secrets Brother Young
I have apostatized and doubted Brother Brigham, Brother Young
And borne my testimony falsely Brother Young

And I have loved a woman Brother Brigham, Brother Young
A woman in adultery Brother Young
I have also wed a negress Brother Brigham, Brother Young
My fifth wife has some color Brigham Young

I now see that you’re a prophet Brother Brigham, Brother Young
A living, breathing prophet Brother Young
And now I believe the revelations Brother Brigham, Brother Young
I now believe your revelations, every one

Even the ones beyond all reason Brother Brigham, Brother Young
Even the ones beyond all reason Brother Young
For you’re the Lord’s own earthly prophet Brother Brigham, Brother Young
And he’s simply testing in our faith o Brigham Young

My only hope for exaltation Brother Brigham, Brother Young
My only chance for exaltation Brother Young
Is to send me o’er the rim of the basin Brother Brigham, Brother Young
The rim of the Great Salt Lake Basin Brother Young

For water cannot save me Brother Brigham, Brother Young
Baptismal water cannot save me Brigham Young
My sins are just too deep a dye o Brother Brigham, Brother Young
My sins are just too deep a stain o Brother Young

So send Avenging Angels Brother Brigham, Brother Young
Won’t you send Destroying Danites Brother Young
To spill my blood upon the earth o Brother Brigham, Brother Young

So what do you think?

Do you find the song offensive?

Is it historicaly accurate of what may have happened to some of the saints in the salt lake valley?

Does it bare some similarites to what we have gone through in our day or not?

I’d like to get into some of these details leading up to the Manifesto.  (This is a shorter version–more details are found here.)  I talked about the Manifesto previously in the context of whether the prophet would ever lead the church astray.  It should be noted that the church had been fighting federal anti-polygamy legislation for nearly 30 years, so I think it should be noted that the Manifesto banning polygamy in 1890 was not a spur-of-the-moment quick capitulation.  I’ll be taking my quotes from 2 books: Forgotten Kingdom by David Bigler, and Great Basin Kingdom, by Leonard Arrington.

It was during the administration of Abraham Lincoln that the first federal anti-polygamy legislation passed Congress, but Lincoln wanted to ignore the issue.  With the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln’s first priority was slavery.  In 1862, Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act which (from Wikipedia)

banned plural marriage and limited church and non-profit ownership in any territory of the United States to $50,000.^[1] The act targeted the Mormon church ownership in the Utah territory. The measure had no funds allocated for enforcement, and President Lincoln chose not enforce this law; instead Lincoln gave Brigham Young tacit permission to ignore the Morrill Act in exchange for not becoming involved with the Civil War.^[2] General Patrick Edward Connor, commanding officer of the federal forces garrisoned at Fort Douglas, Utah beginning in 1862 was explicitly instructed not to confront the Mormons over this or any other issue.

The footnote at Wikipedia is especially interesting.  Quoting from the book, Firmage, Edwin Brown; Mangrum, Richard Collin (2001), Zion in the courts, University of Illinois Press, p. 139, ISBN 0252069803, http://books.google.com/books?id=9AimifP2a-4C,

“Having signed the Morrill Act, Abraham Lincoln reportedly compared the Mormon Church to a log he had encountered as a farmer that was ‘too hard to split, too wet to burn and too heavy to move, so we plow around it. That’s what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.’”

If the church had capitulated at this point, I can understand critics who say that the church traded polygamy for statehood.  The church had been applying for statehood for 40 years when it finally happened, and were always ignored by Congress.  In fact, the state of Utah is less than half the size of the original territory of Deseret.  Congress split the Deseret Territory, and created the territory of Nevada.  Congress continued to take away slices of Utah and added them to Nevada in 1861, 1864, and 1866.  Check out this map.  Nevada even became a state before Utah, even though it was created after Utah.

Utah continued to practice polygamy in defiance of federal law for another 20 years following the Morrill Act.  Congress made several attempts to handle “The Mormon Question”.  Leonard Arrington (former church historian) documents some of these laws on page 357 from his book called Great Basin Kingdom.  (Much more detail is in the book.)

• The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 – passed.
• The Wade Act of 1866- failed to pass.  It would have prohibited church officers from solemnizing marriages, would have taxed the church, taken over the Nauvoo Legion, and sent federal officials to take over all government responsibilities, among other things.
• The Cullom Bill of 1869-70 – passed House but failed Senate.  Plural wives would have been deprived of immunity as witnesses involving their husband.  It would have authorized the President to send army of 25,000 to Utah, and would confiscate all property of any Mormon.
• The Ashley Bill of 1869 – failed to pass.   Here’s an exact quote:  “The bill provided for “the dismemberment” of Utah by transferring large slices of it to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado.”
  
• The Poland Act of 1874 – passed.  Gave federal attorney general and federal jurisdiction  over criminal, civil and chancery (equity) cases in Utah.
• The Edmunds Act of 1882 – passed.  Quoting from page 358, the act

“put teeth” in the 1862 law and attempted to eliminate the Mormon Church as a power in Utah by vesting the political machinery of the territory in federal non-Mormon appointive officers.  Specifically, the Edmunds Act provided heavy penalties for the practice of polygamy: defined cohabitation with a polygamous wife as a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed $300, by imprisonment not to exceed six months, or both; declared all persons guilty of polygamy or cohabitation incompetent for jury service; and disfranchised and declared ineligible for public office all persons guilty of polygamy or unlawful cohabitation…all elective offices were declared vacant…persons professing belief in polygamy or cohabitation as a religious principle, whether or not proved guilty of their practice, were ineligible to vote and to hold public office…in the first year of its existence it had excluded some 12,000 men and women from registration and voting.

when, on March 3, 1885, the Supreme Court denied  Clawson’s appeal and upheld the constitutionality of the law, territorial officials commenced the intensive prosecution of Mormon leaders in Utah and elsewhere known as “The Raid.”

Polygamous marriage being difficult to establish in the courts, the most common charge against the Mormons what of unlawful cohabitation, punishable by a $300 fine or six months in jail, or both.

…

There were 1,004 convictions for unlawful cohabitation under the Edmunds Act between 1884 and 1893, and another 31 for polygamy, but these hardly measure the magnitude of the effect of the Act upon Mormon society.  The period from 1885 to 1890 was marked by intensive “polyg hunts” for “cohabs.”  Officials of the church made a grave decision to fight each and every charge under the law.  Having taken sacred covenants to remain true to their wives “for time and all eternity,” they regarded it as unthinkable that they should desert these women in order to avoid punishment provided in the law of Babylon.  Accordingly, when it became clear early in 1885 that rigorous enforcement and interpretation of the law were to be held constitutional, church leaders–nearly all of whom had one or more plural wives–went “underground.”

…page 360

With almost all leaders of Latter-day Saint communities in prison or in hiding, business establishments were abandoned, or were kept in operation by inexperienced wives and children.  The ownership of the co-operatives drifted into the hands of a few individuals and eventually were converted into private enterprises.  Those United Orders which had survived until this period were discontinued.  There were no further meetings of Zion’s Central Board of Trade.  Almost every business history, in short, shows stagnation; almost every family history records widespread suffering and misery.  Above all, the church, as prime stimulator, financier, and regulator of the Mormon economy, was forced to withdraw from participation in most phases of activity.  The Raid, in other words, was a period of crippled group activity of every type, of decline in cooperative trade and industry–a period when, above all, church economic support was essential but not forthcoming–a period when planning would have saved much, but when planners dared not plan.

A more despairing situation than theirs, at that hour, has never been faced by an American community. Practically every Mormon man of any distinction was in prison, or had just served his term, or had escaped into exile.  Hundreds of Mormon women had left their homes and their children to flee from the officers of the law; many had been behind prison bars for refusing to answer the questions put to them in court; more were concealed, like outlaws, in the houses of friends…Old men were coming out of prison, broken in health.

The Edmunds-Tucker Act

Nevertheless, the Edmunds Law was unable to force a change in the attitude of Latter-day Saint authorities. It was an unwilling cross, but one which the create majority of members seemed prepared to bear rather than yield on what they regarded a religious principle.  Congress therefore moved almost immediately to increase the pressure, and after considering several proposals during a number of sessions, adopted, on February 19, 1887, an amendment to the 1862 law known as the Edmunds-Tucker Act.  Enacted into law without the signature of President Grover Cleveland, this “Anti-Polygamy Act,” as it was entitled, amended the 1862 law to provide as follows:

1.  That the Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, insofar as it had, or pretended to have, any legal existence, was dissolved.  The United States Attorney General was directed to instituted proceedings to accomplish dissolution.

2.  That the Attorney General institute proceedings to forfeit and escheat all property, both real and personal, of the dissolved church corporation held in violation of the 1862 limitation of $50,000, which was reaffirmed.  The property was to be disposed of by the Secretary of the Interior and the proceeds applied to the use and benefit of the district schools of Utah.

The books continues on, with 3 more items, including the abolition of women suffrage.  (Utah was the first or second state to allow women to vote–quite progressive, eh?)  Continuing from page 361,

The Edmunds-Tucker Act was a direct bid to destroy the temporal power of the Mormon Church.  Congressional leaders reasoned that the church would have to yield on the principle of plural marriage or suffer destruction as an organization of power and influence.  Church leaders did not see the matter in this light, however.  They believed (and were supported in this belief by several constitutional lawyers of national reputation) that several features of the Edmunds-Tucker Act were unconstitutional.  They further declared that they could not revoke the principle of polygamy:  Only God could do that; and, if He so decided, He would do so by direct revelation to the church–not by prohibitory national legislation.

The book details how many properties, including the Tithing Office, were placed or sold into private church members and/or stake hands, and hidden as much as possible.  A series of legal battles ensued as federal officials tried to track down church assets.  However, the government did uncover many of these transactions, and took control of the assets.  Arrington goes into great detail about many of these trials.  A trustee was appointed, and he charged enormous fees to maintain records of these properties.  He was removed later, but many of the church properties were squandered as payment for his services.

In January 1889, the church challenged the constitutionality of the confiscated properties, but lost again in the Supreme Court.  From page 375, the majority Supreme Court opinion read,

“Under these circumstances we have no doubt of the power of Congress to do as it did.”

However, the opinion was not unanimous.  Chief Justice Fuller and associate justices Field and Lamar

wrote a short but vigorous dissent based on the States’ Rights doctrine which had reached its farthest in the Dred Scott decision.  Wrote the Chief Justice:

In my opinion, Congress is restrained, nor merely by the limitations expressed in the Constitution, but also by the absence of any grant of power, express or implied in that instrument….  If this property was accumulated for purposes declared illegal, that does not justify its arbitrary disposition by judicial legislation.  In my judgment, its diversion under this Act of Congress is in contravention of specific limitations in the Constitution; unauthorized, expressly or by implication, by any of its provisions; and in disregard of the fundamental principle that the legislative power of the United States, as exercised by the agents of the people of this Republic, is delegated and not inherent.

From page 377,

The second effect of the Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Edmunds-Tucker Act was the church “Manifesto” proclaiming an end to the performance of plural marriage.

The Supreme Court decision on May 19, 1890 was nearly the final blow.  David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom page 354 outlines an even more ominous problem.

What made this ruling truly ominous was the appointment two months later of Henry W. Lawrence, a leader of the Godbeite schism, as receiver of church property.  He replaced the moderate former U.S. marshal Frank H. Dyer, who had earlier agreed to keep hands off the church’s temples under the provision of the law that exempted buildings used exclusively for “the worship of God.”  The Utah Supreme Court had approved this determination.  Now Lawrence and U.S. attorney Charles Varian, reappointed in 1889 by President Harrison, made it known they intended to overturn the agreement on the ground that temples in Logan, St. George, and Manti did not qualify for exemption since they were not places of public worship.  If upheld, this move would lead to confiscation of the church’s holiest places, where its most sacred ordinances were performed, including marriages.

Arrington writes in Great Basin Kingdom on page 355 that Church president Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal on Sept 25, 1890,

“I have arrived at a point in the history of my life as the president of the Church…where I am under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the church.”  On that date, just four months after the fateful decision of the Supreme Court, President Woodruff issued the “Official Declaration” which proclaimed the end of polygamy among the Mormons:

Inasamuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.

In the October 6 session of the general conference of the church, the congregation “unanimously sustained” this declaration as “authoritative and binding.”  Polygamy no longer had official sanction.

Forgotten Kingdom adds additional detail here.  From page 356,

While many treated the manifesto with skepticism, one who took it at face value was the magistrate who had sent more men to prison for violating  the marriage laws than anyone else.  The day after it was sustained, Judge Charles Zane on October 7 said that he would record the church “opposed to polygamy hereafter, unless something happened to change my opinion,” and he began only to fine violators, but not impose prison time.

Arrington, author of Great Basin Kingdom concurs discusses the issue of statehood on page 377,

The Manifesto declaring an end to officially sanctioned plural marriages also enabled the Mormons to achieve the goal of statehood, which had been denied them for over forty years.  Statehood gave them the prospect of getting rid, once and for all, of the unwanted and unfriendly federally appointed governors, judges, marshals, attorneys, and commissioners who had fought against them since 1852.  As part of the “deal” by which this was arranged, church officials are said to have given congressional and administration leaders to understand that they would support a proposition to prohibit forever the practice of polygamy in Utah; that the church would dissolve its Peoples’ Party and divide itself into Republican and Democratic supporters; and that the church would discontinue its alleged fight against Gentile business and relax its own economic efforts….The Raid had finally culminated in the long-sought goal of statehood, but had produced capitulation in many areas of Mormon uniqueness, not the least of which was the decline in the economic power and influence of the church.  The temporal Kingdom, for all practical purposes, was dead–slain by the dragon of Edmunds-Tucker.

So, what do you make of these events?  Did the church wimp out?  Should the church have defended the temples like the Jews did in the days of Nero?  Many Jews died, the temple was taken anyway and hasn’t been rebuilt in 2000 years.

When her children were smaller she had some good friends, a married couple, who had come to her with an offer of a polygamous marriage in the next life, if she wanted it.  They assured her that this would not involve any physical relationship in this life.  However, this couple would support her financially by paying her mortgage and offering other parental help, if she ever desired it.  Because this couple were good friends of this woman she was not offended but did feel a little uncomfortable and therefore politely turned them down. 

This reminded me of another conversation I had with a friend who had a girlfriend who was a significant influence on his life and lead him to serve a mission for the LDS Church.  She died shortly after he arrived in the mission field.  He felt that he wanted to marry this girl in the life to come so that he could offer her the highest blessings of the Celestial Kingdom.  He was so convinced of this that he felt that he would expect any future wife to understand and accept this before they were married.  He is currently married although I am unsure of how he feels about this now.

I offer these examples not as illustrations of Church wide practices but as a move to understand how this ‘doctrine’ still permeates LDS thought and practice, despite President Hinckley saying this practice was not doctrinal. 

These stories have something in common; I think they are both rooted in the commonly held misconception that polygamy was practiced as a means of financially supporting single women.  This seems to me as though it could be a form of ‘benevolent polygamy’. 

My initial response was surprise.  In the first story I am surprised at the faith of this couple and their concern for the eternal welfare of this woman and her children.  Secondly I feel a sense of wonder and interest in the ways that polygamy may be still being practiced celebately and in private.  She honestly did not feel that there was any physical motive behind the offer, and that interests me.  I am certainly not advocating this, or any other form of polygamy, but am more interested in people’s impressions about this. 

My questions are these:

What are your intial reactions to these variations of polygamy?

Would such people be subject to Church Discipline, if discovered?

Is this practical (in the first example)?  How would the woman break the marriage if she met someone?  Would this lead to some physical expectation down the line?

In the second story, there is a strong sense to me that this would be barrier in his current relationship; how do other people feel about this idea?  Is this a reasonable request?

(1) Was Joseph’s polygamy revelation really a disguise for his real motive as a womanizer (libertine)?

(2) What is the true nature of the Fanny Alger relationship?

(3) Was Eliza Snow pushed down the stairs by Emma?

Let’s look at how does Richard Bushman, author of Rough Stone Rolling sees these issues.

(1)  Was Joseph a Libertine?

I have never been especially fond of this position, and neither is Bushman.  I don’t think it adequately explains Joseph’s actions.  From page 325,

Because plural marriage was so sexually charged, the practice has provoked endless speculation about Joseph’s motives.  Was he a libertine in the guise of a prophet seducing women for his own pleasure?  The question can never be answered definitively from historical sources, but the language he used to describe marriage is known.  Joseph did not explain plural marriage as a love match or even a companionship.  Only slight hints of romance found its way into his proposals.  He understood plural marriage as a religious principle….As Joseph described the practice to [Levi] Hancock, plural marriage had the millennial purpose of fashioning a righteous generation on the eve of the Second Coming.

… page 437

Joseph exercised such untrammeled authority in Nauvoo that it is possible to imagine him thinking no conquest beyond his reach.  In theory, he could take what he wanted and browbeat his followers with threats of divine punishment.

This simple reading of Joseph’s motives is implicit in descriptions of him as “a charismatic, handsome man.”  They suggest he was irresistible and made the most of it.  Other Mormon men went along the way out of loyalty or in hopes of sharing power.  But missing from that picture is Joseph’s sense of himself.  In public and private, he spoke and acted as if guided by God.  All the doctrines, plans, programs, and claims were ,in his mind, the mandates of heaven.  They came to him as requirements, with a kind of irresistible certainty….

page 438,

The possibility of an imaginary revelation, erupting from his own heart and subconscious mind, seems not to have occurred to Joseph.  To him, the words came from heaven.  They required obedience even though the demand seemed contradictory or wrong.  The possibility of deception did not occur to him….

Joseph never wrote his personal feelings about plural marriage.  Save for the revelation given in the voice of God, everything on the subject comes from people around him.  But surely he realized that plural marriage would inflict terrible damage, that he ran the risk of wrecking his marriage and alienating his followers.  How could faithful Emma, to whom he pledged his love in every letter, accept additional wives?…Sexual excess was considered the all too common fruit of pretended revelation.  Joseph’s enemies would delight in one more evidence of a revelator’s antinomian transgressions.

… page 440

The personal anguish caused by plural marriage did not stop Joseph Smith from marrying more women.  He married three in 1841, eleven in 1842, and seventeen in 1843.  Historians debate these numbers, but the total figure is most likely between twenty-eight and thirty-three.  Larger numbers have been proposed based on the sealing records in the Nauvoo temple.  Eight additional women were sealed to Joseph in the temple after his death, possibly implying a marriage while he was still alive.  Whatever the exact number, the marriages are numerous enough to indicate an impersonal bond.  Joseph did not marry women to form a warm, human companionship, but to create a network of related wives, children, and kinsmen that would endure into the eternities…. He did not lust for women so much as he lusted for kin.

I found this last statement especially intriguing, because there is no DNA evidence that Joseph had any kin from wives other than Emma.  Continuing on page 440,

Romance played only a slight part.  In making proposals, Joseph would sometimes say God had given a woman to him, or they were meant for each other, but there was no romantic talk of adoring love.  He did not court his prospective wives by first trying to win their affections.  Often, he asked a relative–a father or an uncle–to propose the marriage.  Sometimes one of his current wives proposed for him.  When he made the proposal himself, a friend like Brigham Young was often present.  The language was religious and doctrinal, stressing that a new law has been revealed.  She was to seek spiritual confirmation.  Once consent was given, a formal ceremony was performed before witnesses, with Joseph dictating the words to the person officiating.

Joseph himself said nothing about sex in these marriages.  Other marriage experimenters in Joseph’s time focused on sexual relations.  The Shakers repudiated marriage altogether, considering sex beastly and unworthy of a millenial people….

page 441

We might expect that Joseph, the kind of dominant man who is thought to have strong libidinal urges, would betray his sexual drive in his talk and manner.  Bred outside the rising genteel culture, he was not inhibited by Victorian prudery.  But references to sexual pleasure are infrequent.  Years later, William Law, Joseph’s counselor in the First Presidency, said he was shocked to hear Joseph say one of his wives “afforded him great pleasure.”  That report is one of the few, and the fact that it shocked Law suggests that such comments were infrequent.  As Fawn Brodie said, “There was too much of the Puritan” in Joseph for him to be a “careless libertine.”

What was the nature of the Fanny Alger relationship?

Some people have wondered if Alger was ever pregnant.  Bushman says there is no good evidence of this position.  Many people often quote Oliver Cowdery (as does Bushman) as referring to the “dirty, nasty, filthy affair.”  First, let’s provide some background on Alger.  From pages 323-327,

Alger was fourteen when her family joined the Church in Mayfield, near Kirtland, in 1830.  In 1836, after a time as a serving girl in the Smith household, she left Kirtland and soon married.  Between those two dates, perhaps as early as 1831, she and Joseph were reportedly involved, but conflicting accounts make it difficult to establish the facts–much less to understand Joseph’s thoughts.

… page 324

Cowdery, long Joseph’s friend and associate in visions, was a casualty of the bad times.  In 1838, he was charged with “seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith jr by falsly insinuating that he was guilty of adultry &c.”  Fanny Alger’s name was never mentioned, but doubtless she was the woman in question.

…

Cowdery and Joseph aired their differences at a meeting in November 1837 where Joseph did not deny his relationship with Alger, but contended that he had never confessed to adultery.  Cowdery apparently had said otherwise, but backed down at the November meeting.  When the question was put to Cowdery “if he [Joseph] had ever acknowledged to him that he was guilty of such a thing…he answered No.”  That was all Joseph wanted: an admission that he had not termed the Alger affair adulterous.  As Cowdery told his brother, “just before leaving, he [Joseph] wanted to drop every past thing, in which had been a difficulty or difference–he called witnesses to the fact, gave me his hand in their presence, and I might have supposed of an honest man, calculated to say nothing of former matters.

These scraps of testimony recorded within a few years of the Alger business show how differently the various parties understood events…. On his part, Joseph never denied a relationship with Alger, but insisted it was not adulterous.  He wanted it on record that he had never confessed to such a sin.  Presumably, he felt innocent because he had married Alger.

After the Far West council excommunicated Cowdery, Alger disappears from the Mormon historical record for a quarter of a century.  Her story was recorded as many as sixty years later by witnesses who had strong reason to take sides.  Surprisingly, they all agree that Joseph married Fanny Alger as a plural wife.

… page 437

After marrying Fanny Alger sometime before 1836, Joseph, it appears, married no one else until he wed Louisa Beaman on April 5, 1841, in Nauvoo.  (Historians debate the possibility of one other wife in the interim.)

…page 325

Most of the other stories about Joseph’s plural marriage in Kirtland come from one individual without confirmation from a second source.  Ann Eliza, for example, included a story of Fanny being ejected by a furious Emma, one of the few scraps of information about her reaction.  Ann Eliza could not have been an eyewitness because she was not yet born, but she might have heard the story from her parents who were close to the Smiths.  Are such accounts to be believed?  One of the few tales that appears in more than one account was of Oliver Cowdery experimenting with plural wives himself, contrary to Joseph’s counsel.  That pattern of followers marrying prematurely without authorization was repeated later when some of Joseph’s followers used the doctrine of plural marriage as a license for marrying at will.  Stories like these, all of them partisan, must be treated with caution.

… page 326The end of Joseph’s relationship with Fanny Alger is as elusive as the beginning.  After leaving Kirtland in September 1836, Alger, reportedly a comely, amiable person, had no trouble remarrying.  Joseph asked her uncle Hancock to take her to Missouri, but she went with her parents instead.  They stopped in Indiana for a season, and while there she married Solomon Custer, a non-Mormon listed in the censuses as a grocer, baker, and merchant.  When her parents moved on, Alger remained in Indiana with her husband.  She bore nine children.  After Joseph’s death, Alger’s brother asked her about her relationship with the Prophet.  She replied:  “That is all a matter of my–own.  And I have nothing to Communicate.”

Was Eliza Snow pushed down the stairs?

Bushman doesn’t think so.  From page 493,

One story told in Utah in the 1880s had Emma pushing one of Mormondom’s most honored women, Eliza Roxcy Snow, down the stairs upon discovering she was married to Joseph, but the evidence for the incident is shaky.  Snow was a refined, intelligent woman who had been brought into the Smith household to teach their children.  She joined the Mormons in 1835 along with her sister Leonora and moved to Kirtland, where she boarded with the Smiths and taught school.  Slender and ramrod straight, Snow was the most intellectual of all the women converts.  She wrote poetry and prepared a constitution for the Female Relief Society.  Repelled at first by the practice of plural marriage, she concluded that she was “living in the dispensation of the fulness of times, embracing all the other Dispensations,” and so “surely Plural Marriage must necessarily be included.”  Brigham Young performed the ceremony for Joseph and Eliza on June 29, 1842.  She was thirty-eight, two years older than Joseph.  She later spoke of him as “my beloved husband, the choice of my heart and the crown of my life.”

In August 1842, Emma invited Eliza to move back into the Smith household.  In December, Eliza began teaching the Smith children and ran a school for them and others until March 1843.  Eliza noted in her diary that on February 11, 1843, while still teaching, she moved out of the Smiths’ house without saying why, though the reason could well be that on the same day, Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, moved in.  Later gossip blamed Emma.  All the versions of the Eliza story, however, were attenuated.  Most of them were tales told many decades after the fact and were second- or third-hand hearsay.  Some had Emma pushing Eliza, others said she beat her.  None hold up under scrutiny.  They have to be read skeptically because of the widespread dislike for Emma among the Utah Mormons.  Brigham Young never forgave her for breaking with the Church and not coming west.  She was considered a traitor to Mormonism because she remained behind and denied, in carefully worded statements that skirted the truth, that Joseph took additional wives.  When her sons, then leaders of a rival branch of Mormonism, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, came to Utah on missions in the 1860s, they tried to trace and discredit every claim that Joseph had multiple wives.  In response, the Utah church secured scores of affidavits from people who knew of the practice in Nauvoo.  Besides proving the existence of plural marriage, the affidavits attempted to refute the hypothesis that Joseph’s relations with his plural wives were purely spiritual.  Some members of the Reorganized Church accepted ceremonial marriages but thought Joseph never slept with his wives.  To rebut that view, the affidavits noted the occasions when Joseph occupied the same room with a wife, facts that might have been omitted had not the Utah Mormons been determined to prove the Joseph and his plural wives were married as completely as the later polygamists under Brigham Young.

Bushman gives so much detail, that it is hard to cover every aspect in a single post.  (There is more detail found here.)  But, given this information, what do you make of Smith’s practice of polygamy?  Are you comfortable with it?

While all Mormons are well-aware of polygamy, my first real encounter with uncomfortable facts about polygamy came when I heard John Dehlin’s interview of Todd Compton on Mormon Stories (episodes 12-14).  Compton wrote a book called “In Sacred Loneliness“, and goes into detail about all of Joseph Smith’s practices.  Then I read Richard Bushman’s book, “Rough Stone Rolling“, and was quite astonished to learn that Joseph married women who were currently married to other General Authorities, while they were still alive.

A third book, “Nauvoo Polygamy” by George Smith, caused me further discomfort with the practice, so much so that I never finished the book (but plan to go back to it later.)  My book club has picked 2 more books:  “The Mormon Question:” by Sarah Barringer Gordon (a non-mormon), and “More Wives Than One” Kathryn M. Daynes.  Additionally, I had been having a conversation with an RLDS blogger who claims Joseph Smith never taught or practiced polygamy.  (Since he is so rude, I refuse to publicize his site.)

I’m currently reading “Nauvoo: a place of Peace“, by Glen M. Leonard, which has a chapter on polygamy.  I read the first 125 or so pages, and found it focused on a lot of economic data, which I found rather dry.  So, I’m skipping ahead to some more interesting chapters.

Anyway, while I plan to devote some posts to Leonard’s chapter, which is written from a very sympathetic Mormon view, I have to say that from what I know so far about polygamy, I just do not believe it to be an inspired doctrine, just as I do not believe the priesthood ban was an inspired doctrine, as seen from my earlier post on that topic.  Now that may cause some people to ask if I believe Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet?  No.

I’m sure that seems like a big contradiction, but I have a more complex view of prophets.  I think they can make errors, even in revelation. I don’t believe a prophet is infallible.  I believe that when we look at Biblical prophets, we find errors in revelation, bad conduct, and pagan influences as well.  For example, I don’t believe God commanded genocide with Joshua, I question Abraham’s conduct with Hagar (and circumcision), and Jonah was a bigot towards the people of Nineveh (which deserves a future post.)  In short, I believe God uses fallible men to give revelations to.

So, while I respect Joshua “Choose you this day whom ye will serve”, Abraham, “the father of monotheism”, Jonah “swallowed by a great fish”, I can respect Joseph Smith as well.  Just as the former three were prophets, so is Joseph.  I have a testimony of the Book of Mormon, but my testimony of polygamy is completely different.  I can accept that Joseph spoke many inspired things, translated the Book of Mormon, and performed many miracles.  I can also accept that I don’t believe polygamy was inspired by God, just as the Curse of Cain was used by so many people to justify slavery.

So, as I post on polygamy in the future, I just want to make my perspective clear.  Comments?

OK Paul technically isn’t exactly an international DJ, not unless you consider that you can listen to his interviews on line.

He’s a returned missionary and member of the Grays Ward in the Romford Stake Essex England.  Paul got the show after being a presenter at Hospital Radio Chelmsford for a year and chased a local station for airtime:

“When I was asked to join Phoenix FM the station manager warned me that radio presenting wasn’t all easy but in fact involved a lot of voluntary service too.  I responded that I was a missionary in France for 2 years for the church and was used to giving service to others, as well as being actively involved in the church weekly.  The station manager was intrigued by this and I was invited to the station to explain more about my religious beliefs and the voluntary service I had done in France.  I was then offered the chance to begin a brand new religious show once a week that they had been wanting to start but couldn’t find anyone with the religious background to do it.  I put together the idea for a chat show where he would bring in local religious leaders and ask them about their beliefs on air and their views on current issues.”

Mark Pinchin and Ian Clarkson from the Church of Scientology – Listen   here

Highlights:

10 million members around the world. Their anti-drug program “Say no to drugs say yes to life”.  Human rights educational programme and other great work they do in the community.  We discussed the 8 dynamics, the founder of the church L. Ronald Hubbard and where the word “Scientology” comes from.

The core beliefs of the church of Scientology are:

Man is a spirit, he has lived before and that man is good. Through wisdom and knowledge man can improve any area of his life he wants. Scientology is all denominational and non-conversionary and members bring with them their own beliefs.

Great Interviews ( All the ads and music have been stripped out)

Habibur Rahman & Forad Edu – Islam / Alfurqaan Foundation
Father Matthew Bemand – St Thomas Church of England
Councillor Dudley Payne – Mayor of Brentwood
Mark Pinchin and Ian Clarkson – Scientology / Jive Aces
Ed Wellman – PhoenixFM Monday Classics
Richard Burch – Brentwood Buddhist Society
Chris Day – Crown Street Christian Fellowship
Reverand Peter Thomas (Baptist)
Reverand Trevor Jamison (United Reformed Church)
Julian May – ELIM
Father Paul Keane – Brentwood Catholic Cathedral
Bishop David Barter

The show can be seen at www.phoenixfm.com/proverbs98.php

Let us know your views

Faith needs reason because faith unchecked by reason can be just as deadly as reason unchecked by faith proved to be in the gulags of Soviet Russia, the Cultural Revolutions of Maoist China, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia.  (Would Stalin, Mao, and Pot have ordered the killings of millions if they had had faith in an afterlife and final judgment?)

We Mormons are certainly not immune to the potential dangers of unquestioning faith.

Brigham Young once said he feared that members of the Church would “settle down in a state of blind self-security, trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence that in itself would thwart the purposes of God in their salvation . . . .” (Journal of Discourses, 9:150 [quoted by James E. Faust, “Continuous Revelation,” Ensign, Nov 1989, 8].) When unconditional confidence in our church leaders is so often hailed as a virtue, one wonders what Brigham had in mind exactly when he warned church members against “trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence that in itself would thwart the purposes of God in [our] salvation”. I wonder, what are “the purposes of God in [our] salvation” that are potentially thwarted by “reckless confidence” in church leaders?

In a similar vein, Brigham taught that we Mormons still have work to do in identifying and rooting out erroneous beliefs held among us. He explained that we receive revelation “line upon line” only to the degree that we have first thrown off “our false traditions and foolish notions”. [1] For me, hearing an LDS Prophet acknowledge that even we Mormons have “false traditions and foolish notions” suggests we have an ongoing obligation to critically evaluate our longstanding doctrines, policies, and practices to determine whether any of them are, in fact, false and foolish.

Of course, the greatest obstacle to identifying our “false traditions and foolish notions” is our own unwillingness to critically examine ourselves. There is no doubt that critical evaluation of our doctrines, policies, and practices is a delicate art in LDS circles, and there are plenty of examples of how not to criticize the Church. However, if done properly, critical evaluation can help us identify the false traditions and foolish notions among us so that we may lay them off, and thereby open our hearts and minds to new revelation from God (the Church’s re-evaluation and abandonment of the pre-1978 priesthood ban being an excellent example). In other words, when done properly, critical evaluation does not tear down the Church, it builds up the Church.

But despite our having successfully cast aside certain false traditions and foolish notions in the past, and despite the scriptural warnings against being lulled into an “all is well in Zion” mentality, there persists a strong resistance to the idea that other false traditions and foolish notions may still exist among us. As a result, when reasoned inquiry suggests that a longstanding doctrine, policy, or practice may be a false tradition or foolish notion that we ought to cast aside, such suggestions are often met with a host of misquotations, misinterpretations, and misapplications of scripture and doctrine that collectively promote the idea that true faith requires us to continue to adhere to the officially established status quo, even if it seems to be erroneous in our reasoned judgment. (Might that be the “reckless confidence” Brigham Young warned us against?) And the problem with that approach is that it can potentially lead people to embrace all manner of falsehood and evil, and in the cleverest manner of all: by convincing people that true faith requires them to ignore their reasoned judgment.

To illustrate my point, I’ve presented a fictional conversation below between an FLDS leader and an FLDS teenage girl. In the discussion below, an FLDS teenage girl is having reasonable doubts about FLDS doctrines, policies, and practices. At every step of the way, her FLDS leader gives her familiar responses designed to reinforce the idea that God is testing her faith by seeing whether she will unconditionally obey her church leaders regardless of her reasonable objections. As you read the conversation below, ask yourself this one question: Should this FLDS teenage girl abandon her reasonable doubts about FLDS doctrines, policies, and practices and exercise unconditional faith in her church leaders? Or should she listen to her inner voice of reason and common sense, and reject the faith propositions that her parents and leaders are attempting to foist upon her?

FLDS LEADER: Susan, I hear rumors your faith in President Jeffs and the Brethren is weakening. What’s going on?

FLDS GIRL: Well, brother Jeppson, I have to be honest, I have been having serious doubts about whether everything President Jeffs and the Brethren are doing is right, and whether everything they’re telling us is true. I feel so confused, and the more I think about what they’re doing and what they’re teaching us, the less sense it all makes to me.

FLDS LEADER: Young lady, God will never give you doubt or confusion. Satan is the author of doubt and confusion. God gives you faith. You need to have faith, nothing wavering. Doubt not.

FLDS GIRL: I’ve heard that before, but I just can’t help having all these questions about whether the things our church leaders are doing are really God’s will.

FLDS LEADER: Be careful, young lady, you shouldn’t be questioning if what our church leaders do and say is right. Follow the Prophet, President Jeffs. Don’t go astray. And be very careful, because questioning the Brethren is the road to personal Apostasy.

FLDS GIRL: What does personal Apostasy mean?

FLDS LEADER: It means rejecting your church leaders, which cuts you off from the one true church and God.

FLDS GIRL: So when you say that questioning our leaders can lead to personal Apostasy, you’re saying that questioning our leaders can lead to disagreeing with our leaders and rejecting them?

FLDS LEADER: That’s right.

FLDS GIRL: But why should we fear disagreeing with our leaders and rejecting them if they are wrong?

FLDS LEADER: Susan, how could you possibly think the Brethren are wrong?

FLDS GIRL: Well, for one, it just seems that so much of what our FLDS leaders do and teach couldn’t possibly be inspired by God.

FLDS LEADER: Well, God’s ways are higher than man’s ways. It doesn’t make sense to you because even God’s foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of men.

FLDS GIRL: I know its not wise to reject God’s ways, but how do I know that what FLDS leaders are saying and doing is God’s way?

FLDS LEADER: Susan, surely you’ve heard that scripture enough times. “Whether by mine own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same.” There you have it. If our leaders say it, it’s the same as God saying it. If President Jeffs says it, then you can rest assured it is God’s way.

FLDS GIRL: I’m not so sure that’s the correct interpretation of that scripture. I read that scripture as saying if God says something to his servant, and his servant says it to us, then that indirect communication through a servant is the same as God saying it directly to us. In other words, if A says something to B, and B says it to C, then it’s the same as A saying it to C. But that’s quite a different proposition than the idea that everything B says to C must have come from A. That’s just bad logic.

FLDS LEADER: Bad logic? It seems to me you’re using the philosophies of men. And frankly, I don’t know where you get off thinking you have authority to interpret scripture for yourself. FLDS leaders alone have the authority to interpret scripture. And because we are God’s modern-day Prophets, what we say is new scripture, even if it seems to contradict existing scripture.

FLDS GIRL: I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy into that.

FLDS LEADER: You can’t buy into it? Young lady, you need to be humble. Be obedient. Be teachable. Be submissive. Don’t be so prideful and arrogant as to think that you are better able to discern the truth than your leaders who have decades of experience with matters of the Spirit.

FLDS GIRL: I’m sorry, but it just seems ridiculous to me that God would place in the hands of a select few men the ability to discern the truth, and then expect the rest of us to follow them no matter what.

FLDS LEADER: You’ve misunderstood me. I never said that FLDS leaders alone have the ability to discern the truth. You have the ability to know for yourself that FLDS leaders are God’s chosen prophets, seers, and revelators. First you must desire to believe, then you need to pray and ask God in faith, nothing doubting, if what the Brethren tell you is not true, and God will tell you that it is true.

FLDS GIRL: Well, I’ve done that, several times, but I don’t sense God confirming to me so many of the things the FLDS leaders and teaching and doing.

FLDS LEADER: Well, the Holy Spirit can only communicate with you if you have clean hands and a pure heart. Susan, is there any sin or other misdeed in your life that could be preventing you from feeling the whispers of the Holy Spirit?

FLDS GIRL: Sins and misdeeds? I’m sure I have plenty. The Bible teaches us that we have all sinned, and that not one doeth good. The Book of Mormon teaches us that we can’t count all the ways we can offend God. So I’m sure I have many sins.

FLDS LEADER: Well then, now we’re making progress. You need to repent of your sins, and when you’ve fully repented and abandoned all your sinful ways, you’ll be able to feel the Holy Spirit confirming the truthfulness of FLDS teachings. And if you do that and still can’t feel the Holy Spirit confirming the truthfulness of FLDS teachings, then you need to keep repenting until you can.

FLDS GIRL: Maybe I should have been more clear. Although I am sure I have sins, I can assure you that I am not guilty of any serious sins or transgressions. Like Joseph Smith, I can honestly say that “while I frequently fall into many foolish errors and display the weakness of youth, and the foibles of human nature; which, I am sorry to say, lead me into divers temptations, offensive in the sight of God. In making this confession, no one need suppose me guilty of any great or malignant sins.”

FLDS LEADER: Well then, if you are certain your heart is sufficiently pure to receive revelation, then all you need to do is give the Lord more time to give you a testimony. Be patient and exercise faith by doing whatever your leaders tell you to do. And by so doing, over time, maybe even after years or even decades, you will receive a testimony that what they are telling you is true. But don’t abandon the faith of your fathers. Endure to the end.

FLDS GIRL: I’m sorry, but I just can’t spend my whole life obeying orders and believing things that don’t make sense to me, hoping that one day, years or decades down the road, I might finally get a witness of their truthfulness. What if decades go by and that spiritual witness never comes? By the time I realize it was all wrong all along, it will be too late; most of my life will have already gone by.

FLDS LEADER: But you don’t have to worry about that, Susan, because if the Prophet tells you to do something and it’s wrong, and you obey it, then the Lord will only reward you for your faith and will never punish you for it. But don’t worry, because the Lord will never allow President Jeffs to lead us astray in the first place.

FLDS GIRL: I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me that God will reward me for doing something erroneous because I chose to disregard my reason and follow the commandments of men who claimed to be divinely inspired but weren’t. And I understand President Jeffs thinks the Lord will never let him lead us astray, but what if President Jeffs is leading us astray by telling us that he will never lead us astray?

FLDS LEADER: Listen, young lady, you know what the Proverb says: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not to thine own understanding.” Trusting in the Lord means trusting in his chosen prophets instead of relying on your own understanding.

FLDS GIRL: Well, maybe trusting in the Lord means trusting in his prophets, but how do I know the FLDS leaders are God’s chosen prophets in the first place?

FLDS LEADER: I already told you: repent and be clean, desire to believe, then pray in faith, nothing doubting, and if the answer doesn’t come, just keep obeying and doing what they tell you, and in doing everything they tell you to do, eventually you’ll know for yourself that what they say is true.

FLDS GIRL: And what if I’ve done that and I feel the Holy Spirit has told me something that contradicts what the Brethren have said?

FLDS LEADER: That won’t ever happen, because everything the Brethren say comes from the Holy Spirit. Remember: they will never lead us astray.

FLDS GIRL: I hate to say it, but it seems we’re just going around in circles here.

FLDS LEADER: You know, that’s a really contentious thing to say, and I’m getting really concerned by the contentious tone of your remarks. Stop contending with me and the Brethren. Contention is of the Devil.

FLDS GIRL: So let me get this straight: when our Church rejects all the other religions and churches and their leaders and their beliefs, that’s not contention. And when the Brethren tell members they’re wrong and that they need to get in line, that’s not contention either. But when members disagree with the Brethren, that’s contention?

FLDS LEADER: Young lady, I’m sad to say it, but it’s quite apparent to me that you just don’t have a broken heart and a contrite spirit.

FLDS GIRL: With all due respect, I don’t think it has anything to do with that. It’s just that so much of what our FLDS leaders are doing and saying these days seems to just defy plain common sense; it seems so illogical.

FLDS LEADER: But don’t you see, Susan, that’s the whole nature of faith — believing or doing something even if it contradicts your sense of reason! Do you think it made sense to Noah to build an ark when it wasn’t raining? Do you think it made sense to Abraham to have to kill his own son? But Noah and Abraham defied their “common sense”, their “reason”, their “logic”, and they did exactly what the Lord told them to do even though it seemed not to make any sense at the time.

FLDS GIRL: Look, I completely understand why we would need to follow a direct commandment from God like Noah and Abraham received, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense. But isn’t that a very different proposition than the idea that we need to unconditionally follow a man, President Jeffs, even if what he says doesn’t make sense to us? Isn’t that really just asking us to put blind faith in a man?

FLDS LEADER: No, Susan, that’s not asking you to put faith in a man because God is at the head of this FLDS Church. I so testify to you. Unconditionally obeying President Jeffs is not putting your faith in man; it’s putting your faith in God!

FLDS GIRL: Well, I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t make sense to me either. It seems like asking me to unconditionally obey President Jeffs and the Brethren is asking me to put my faith in man.

FLDS LEADER: Susan, I feel impressed to warn you that the eternal fate of your soul is at stake here, so let me get down to the bottom line. Susan, this whole life is really just a test to see if we will do everything the Lord requires of us, yes, even if it contradicts our “logic” and “reason”. And you need to understand that President Jeffs and the Brethren are the only ones on Earth who have the authority to tell us what the Lord requires. So by obeying them, you are demonstrating the faith that God requires of us. And in fact, the more illogical the Brethren’s actions or teachings seem to you, the more faith you are demonstrating to God when you obey them!

FLDS GIRL: So it seems you’re telling me to ignore my sense of reason.

FLDS LEADER: Well, Susan, that’s precisely what true faith requires!

FLDS GIRL: But why would God give us reason and then require us to forsake it?

FLDS LEADER: Well, I guess that’s a question we’re just going to have to wait until the next life to understand.

CONCLUSION

To be clear, the point of the fictional dialogue above is to illustrate how scripture and doctrine can be misinterpreted and misapplied to preach a false version of faith that can be probably found amongst most religions, churches, and denominations — an unquestioning faith; a faith that requires us to ignore reason; a faith that demands unconditional obedience to leaders because of their claimed divine authority. And the problem with that unreasoned faith is that it can lead people to embrace all manner of falsehood and evil by convincing devout believers in any church that the status quo established by their leaders must not be questioned, must not be challenged, must always be right, and must always be followed, no matter how unreasonable it may be.

NOTES:

[1] The full quote is as follows: “[God] would be glad to send angels to communicate further to this people, but there is no room to receive it, consequently, He cannot come and dwell with you. There is a further reason: we are not capacitated to throw off in one day all our traditions, and our prepossessed feelings and notions, but have to do it little by little. It is a gradual process, advancing from one step to another; and as we layoff our false traditions and foolish notions, we receive more and more light, and thus we grow in grace; and if we continue so to grow we shall be prepared eventually to receive the Son of Man, and that is what we are after.” (Journal of Discourses 2:309-318).

The only time I have seen Big Love is on a transatlantic flight back home to Salt Lake.  My initial thoughts were how amazing to have a church just like ours (almost) right in our back door and no one seems to know of it, as they keep it fairly discreet on the show.

From what I saw these Josephites seem to be very similar (i.e. Family Prayer, FHE, Family Council, even similar programs and auxiliaries).  They even seemed to act like Mormons I grew up with.

Since there was a split of Josephites from the Brighamites, wouldn’t most of these branches have similar temple ceremonies to ours?  If so shouldn’t they be the ones who are offended, not the Brighamites?

Big Love episode draws criticism from LDS Church

Before the first season of the HBO series Big Love aired more than two years ago, the show’s creator and HBO assured the Church that the series wouldn’t be about Mormons.

Here

Big Love Series to Show Rites from LDS Temples

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) – The HBO series “Big Love” will show its version of temple rites belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The episode is scheduled to air Sunday, March 15.

Here

‘Big Love’s’ promise to show LDS temple rituals has many crying foul

Richard Cowan, a BYU professor of church history and doctrine, said:  ”It isn’t something that we want to keep away from everyone who isn’t a member of our faith, but rather something we would like to share with those who are personally and spiritually prepared to appreciate it.”

Here

‘Big Love’ prompts LDS Church response and analysis

Certainly church members are offended when their most sacred practices are misrepresented or presented without context or understanding.  Last week some church members began e-mail chains calling for cancellations of subscriptions to AOL, which (like HBO) is owned by Time Warner.

Here

Please discuss anything and everything.

While I did cover most of the scriptures included in the lesson I went a completely different direction with it. This was the exact lesson I needed at this moment of time.  But the real point of the lesson was the fact that the purposes of God cannot be frustrated by Joseph Smith’s boneheaded weaknesses. This is a major and significant lesson.

Joseph was praying for forgiveness the night that Moroni came because he had become a lazy prankster who liked to dig for buried treasure. He knew he was not someone who would be expected to be a Prophet–there was nothing exceptional about him. He was not preparing himself very well for any great work.

But it was OK. God was going to use him anyway. Moroni comes to see him.

Then he meets Emma while employed digging for a long lost Spanish silver mine down by Harmony and instead of getting a real job and making himself respectable, he just dishonors Emma’s family and runs off with her to get married without blessing or permission. This was a selfish and impulsive act contrary to one of the 10 commandments. Can you imagine how he would be lauded in the Church today if he had stayed for a year working on a local farm proving himself to get Emma’s parents permission. But we largely ignore the elopement.

But it was OK. God was going to use him anyway. He gets the plates.

Then he gives the 116 pages to Martin after not taking no for an answer and a lifetime of Father Lehi’s work is gone in an instant. All Lehi’s blood sweat and tears put into his record are thrown down the drain because Joseph is a stubborn and disobedient sod.

But it was OK. God was going to use him anyway. He got the plates back and finished the rest of the book and the Small Plates of Nephi cover the gap in the story (to a certain extent).

The lesson covered the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon, but I taught the lesson of how Joseph kept failing during the process of bringing for the Book of Mormon (I only mentioned the elopement in passing) and how that was OK because he repented and the work of God rolled forward.

One cannot read Sections 3 and 10 honestly and think anything other than Joseph’s falling from his calling was not only possible but might have seemed at times likely. The doctrine of the Prophet not ever being able to lead the Church astray comes much latter. (It is found in the excerpted conference talks by Wilford Woodruff after the Manifesto in the PofGP.) In 1828 and the years following, it probably seemed likely to even Joseph that he would be rejected.

I also find it interesting that he is directly reproved in Section 3 verse 4 for his “carnal desires”. It is no surprise that later it is precisely his carnal desires leading to Fanny Alger and Marinda Knight and so many others that lead so many of the early Church leaders to conclude he was a fallen Prophet and leave his side.

I have a testimony that despite all Joseph’s weaknesses–including being too often a petty dictator and horny lustmonger–he was the Lord’s chosen. He made many mistakes, many serious mistakes. They ended up costing him his life. But his mistakes did not frustrate the purposes of God. The restoration happened, imperfectly, but it happened.

And so today the Church rolls forward. Imperfectly (very very imperfectly) but it rolls forward. Some cannot abide the imperfections. I don’t blame them. Sometimes I want to join them. Often even. But no imperfections, not matter how ugly or pervasive, can stop the work of God entirely. It is too hard for me to remember that truth.

I love Joseph Smith. I want to slap him upside the head for being so often a total idiot. But I love him just the same.

This is where I am at today anyway.

Seriously, think about it:

How many times have you heard someone complain about the Adam/God theory – or polygamy/polyandry – or Joseph’s statements regarding Adam-Ondi-Ahman – or the Manifesto – or the justifications for the Priesthood ban – or any other concept that was preached in the past that has been left by the wayside now?  How many of those people who complain also use their concern about these things to explain their crisis of faith – often linking it directly to the person who taught those views – including their struggles to accept that person as a real prophet of God explicitly because of the things they said and taught?  How many of those people then turn around and complain about how “boring” the Church is now and pine for the time when prophets were PROPHETS!!!! and boldly spoke their minds about the will and word of God – or the time when the Church was more liberal and free-wheeling and evolving day-to-day? Generally, these statements are followed by something like,

If only I had lived back then!  I would have embraced the Gospel and the Church back in the good old days.

My question is a simple one:

How can people complain about what a former Prophet taught then turn around and say they miss and long for “the good old days”?  I believe we are judged by how we handle our own day, just as the early Saints were judged by how they handled their own day.  The original members of the modern Church pined for the time of Christ and the ancient Church, forgetting that the earliest Christians were crucified and fed to lions.  We pine for the time of Joseph, forgetting that we might have been asked to engage in polygamy or polyandry – or been tarred and feathered – or lost multiple children and a spouse as we shivered and shuddered and struggled across the plains.

Personally, I’ll take my day over Joseph’s and Brigham’s any day and twice on Sunday – when they used to meet all day, and our entire three-hour block of meetings would have been the opening exercises.  Nostalgia is easy – especially for those who never lived in the times for which they are nostalgic.  It allows them to criticize (often harshly) those early leaders while pining for the time in which they lived.

No thanks.

Orson Pratt, who was an early defender of plural marriage, often explained that its purpose was to participate in the blessings of Abraham and to more effectively populate worlds:

“Therefore, a Father… could increase his kingdoms with his own children, in a hundred fold ratio above that of another who had only secured to himself one wife. As yet, we have only spoken of the hundred fold ratio as applied to his own children; but now let us endeavor to form some faint idea of the multiplied increase of worlds peopled by his grandchildren, over which he, of course, would hold authority and dominion as the Grand Patriarch of the endless generations of his posterity. …the one-hundredth generation would people more worlds than could be expressed by raising one million to the ninety-ninth power.” (The Seer, March 1853, p. 39)

Brigham Young concurred with Pratt when he stated:

“This is the reason why the doctrine of plurality of wives was revealed, that the noble spirits which are waiting for tabernacles might be brought forth.” (Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 197.)

The Book of Mormon is supportive of these conclusions. Although Jacob teaches that many of David and Solomon’s marriages were not sanctioned

Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord…there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none; For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women. And whoredoms are an abomination before me; thus saith the Lord of Hosts. (Jac. 2:24-29)

he also outlines the conditions under which he would approve polygamy:

30 For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things. (Jacob 2:30)

If the purpose of polygamy was to populate this world and the next, why did Joseph Smith have so little success in raising up posterity from his polygamous wives?

Over the years, there have been claims that some of Joseph’s plural wives had children by him. A thorough search of all children who could possibly have been sired by Joseph has been made. Each of the children of Joseph’s polygamous wives between the time they contracted marriage and Joseph’s death in 1844 were considered. Nine people have been identified by historians as being possible children of Joseph Smith:

• George Algernon Lightner (son of Mary Rollins Lightner who was also married to Adam Lightner), and Orson Washington Hyde (son of Marinda Johnson Hyde who was also married to Orson Hyde). These two children died as infants.
• Moroni Llewellyn Pratt (son of Mary Ann Frost Pratt, who was also married to Parley P. Pratt), Zebulon Jacobs (son of Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith, who was also married to Henry Bailey Jacobs) and Orrison Smith (son of Fanny Alger). These three alleged male descendants were ruled out by DNA testing in 2005.
• Mosiah Hancock (son of Clarissa Reed Hancock, who was married to Levi Hancock), Oliver Buell (son of Prescindia Huntington Buell, who was also married to Norman Buell). DNA testing also ruled out these two males in 2007.
• That leaves John Reed Hancock (son of Clarissa Reed Hancock, above) and Josephine Rosetta Lyon (daughter of Sylvia Sessions Lyon, who was also married to Windsor Lyon.)

I have included the Hancock sons despite the fact that Todd Compton and most reliable Joseph Smith specialists do not recognize Clarissa Hancock as being one of Joseph Smith’s wives. Josephine Lyon cannot be tested with current technology because Y-DNA genetic testing for non-male lines is not possible. Researchers are currently using autosomal DNA testing on descendants of Josephine Lyon and should be able to make a conclusion within the next two years.

Ugo Perego, director of operations at the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, where these DNA tests are ongoing, has stated: “I’m not saying the list I have is definitive or complete at all. But out of those we have data for, there is no evidence from DNA at this point that Joseph Smith had any children from women other than Emma Smith.”

One must ask the question: If the purpose of plural marriage was to propagate additional posterity, why did it seem to have failed in the case of Joseph Smith, the first modern Prophet to restore the practice?

The main difficulties with this lesson are:

1. Lack of context.  The letters (snippets) are presented without any context of the rocky relationship that existed between Joseph and Emma.  Although his polygamy was a sore topic with many ups and downs, none of that is mentioned to contextualize the relationship in the letters.  There were other points of discord between them that are also not mentioned.  It only references things like where they were and whether Emma was pregnant at the time or if a child had been sick.
2. No doctrine.  There is no doctrinal content whatsoever, just snippets of letters.
3. “Gag me with a spoon” factor.  Like all letters from this era, the language is flowery and exaggerated.  The style of writing is clichéd and designed to obfuscate meaning through emotionalism rather than to communicate directly and clearly.  What’s next?  A walk through “Cupid’s Grove” with Abigail and John Adams?  I know this kind of stuff is really appealing to some people; it’s just not my thing.  I’m sort of glad we quit signing letters “Your humble servant.”
4. Weak Application.  The letters are personal with no inherent universal application.  That, coupled with the ambiguous state of the Smith marriage (which is neatly avoided), and the nature of letters from this period (the sentimentality) greatly reduces their applicability.  Likening the scriptures unto ourselves is one thing; likening letters between Joseph and Emma to ourselves is much more difficult, especially with no meaningful context (although in this case, the context would probably make it even more meaningless to current lay members).

There are a few hints at the on-and-off strain in the relationship:

• “And as to yourself, if you want to know how much I want to see you, examine your feelings, how much you want to see me, and judge for yourself.”  (1839)
• “O Emma, … do not forsake me nor the truth, but remember me.”  (1838)

My favorite snippet, that seems much very folksy and personable.  He had a real fondness for that dog:

• “I want you to try to gain time and write to me a long letter and tell me all you can and even if old Major is alive yet and what those little prattlers say that cling around your neck.”  (1839)

Difficulties are naturally presented in highly emotional ways with a religious persecution spin.  There is a desire for the stories to be recast in a way that motivates further religious and familial devotion; for example:

• “Tell them I am in prison that their lives might be saved.”  (1839)

I’ve read a lot of things written in this time period, and I have to wonder.  The following frankly sounds like an oblique reference to a conjugal visit:

• “I take the liberty to tender you my sincere thanks for the two interesting and consoling visits that you have made me during my almost exiled situation. Tongue cannot express the gratitude of my heart, for the warm and true-hearted friendship you have manifested in these things towards me.”  (1842)

The questions provided in the lesson are not tremendously helpful either, but here is the direction I would take it to maximize personal applicability (sticking to the questions in bold).  The below is straight from the manual, except where indicated:

• Briefly review this chapter, noting Joseph Smith’s feelings toward Emma and their children.  What does his example teach about how we should speak and act in our families?  (Don’t write down anything negative?  Don’t express your true feelings in letters?  Accentuate the positive?) What can we learn from Joseph and Emma Smith’s efforts to write to one another and to see one another?  (Very little since there is no context and only one side to the conversation). What are some things you have done to show family members that you love them?
• The Prophet Joseph told Emma that he was “a true and faithful friend to [her] and the children forever,” and he thanked her for her “warm and true-hearted friendship” (pages 242, 246). What can husbands and wives do to nurture their friendship? (Well, if I’m right about the conjugal visit . . .  But seriously, folks.  I think this is a helpful question, and I would just let the sisters discuss.)
• In his letters, Joseph Smith showed trust in Emma, expressing confidence that she would make good decisions and do all she could to take care of the family (page 245). How might such expressions of trust influence the relationship between a husband and a wife?  (You could say he was expressing confidence in her ability to take care of the family in his absence, or you could say he was reminding her of her duties.  Given that he was largely absent, his instructions seem custodial to me and would probably tick me off.  Still, you could just throw out this question to the group about how you can build trust in a marriage, regardless of whether his letters are a good example of that.) How can we build trust in our marriages?
• Read the Prophet Joseph’s message to his children in the second paragraph on page 246. How might it have helped his children to receive this news?  (It made it clear to them that the thing that stood between them and their loving father was the mob.) During times of trial, what can parents do to show their children that they have faith in God?
• Review Joseph Smith’s expressions of trust in God found on pages 243–46. Identify several of these expressions that are particularly touching to you.  How can you apply these truths in your life? (Since this is not presenting “truth,” so much as faith, I would repurpose the question to “How can trials strengthen your faith in God?” which I realize is too broad and a lot like the last question.)

Since there is not a lot of meat here (which could be the upside of this lesson–it’s different from the other lessons), I will mention a few other lesson ideas I’ve seen bandied about (all of which sound pretty good to me at filling the allotted time):

• Have a man come in to read the letter snippets so people can hear them in a “Joseph” voice.  He could even tie his tie in a bow and put his shirt collars up in true 1830s fashion, if you are daring.
  
• Print the snippets out on old-style parchment paper with a seal and have sisters read them aloud.  A little crafty for my taste, but you could do it.
• Take time at the end of class to write a letter to loved one(s) sharing your faith, love, and trust.  Perhaps a little “precious,” but again, there’s time here to be filled.

That is the best I’ve got, gang.  Let me know your thoughts on what you think works best for this lesson.

Upon engaging unsettling historical evidence, most people will fall into one of roughly four groups:

1. The “Blind Faith” approach. Reject the evidence out of hand as “white noise” from Satan. Continue to accept the official church party line as 100% correct.  Steer clear of further information on this topic because it is apostate or unhealthy.
2. The “Have Your Cake and Eat it Too” approach. Accept one of the many apologetic explanations that attempts to reconcile the evidence while still hoping for additional information to exonerate.  In the end, the authenticity of the actual story is held more or less in tact.
3. The “Post Modern” approach. Realize that many factual and historical claims are simply unknowable and contingent on other unknowables, so it probably doesn’t matter.  What matters is what you think and do because religion is nothing more than personal/spiritual feelings about the Divine put into story, symbol, ceremony, and covenant.  All of us adopt some stories and reject others. This approach moves the focus away from Joseph Smith and onto you.  What has God told you? Do these stories resonate with you and help you become a better person?
4. The “See You Later Alligator” approach.  Accept the evidence as pretty damning and reject the church’s claims out of hand.  Likely reject Joseph as either delusional or very calculated.  Reject believers, especially those in categories 1 and 2 above, as seriously biased, or even deluded or calculated.

Obviously there are subcategories and various permutations to the above approaches.  Feel free to add categories I may have missed or to think of this as a sliding scale.  If your initial approach was to “ask of God” as Joseph Smith did, regardless of your answer (or lack thereof), you still likely fall into one of these categories.  Does that experience color where you fall on this scale?

The interesting thing is that you’ll probably use the same approach to any of Mormon issues you encounter (i.e. BOM historicity, polygamy, patriarchy, priesthood restoration, first vision, blacks and the priesthood, translation methods, etc.) and possibly to any Christian issues you encounter (i.e. creation story vs. cavemen, age of the earth, miracles, Christ’s conception, the concept of atonement when viewed as a historical event, etc.) or religious issues in general (i.e. the inability to empirically prove the existence of God, the inability to statistically prove the power of prayer to heal, etc.).

I’m not making any value judgements here. There isn’t a “correct” approach, only an approach that allows you to better engage with God.  Which do you choose?

He was a murderer (killed an Egyptian).  Joseph Smith was not accused of murder, but he did destroy a printing press and engage in suspicious treasure-digging endeavors.  Even so, Moses wins this one.

He was a thief and organized criminal, instructing his people to plunder the Egyptians and take everything of
value that wasn’t nailed down when they left.  Joseph Smith told the early Saints in Missouri to abandon their homes that were then destroyed or plundered by neighbors.  Once again, Moses wins.

He abandoned his people in the desert for long periods of time, then when they struggled due to his own absentee leadership, he blamed them (Exodus 32:1).  Many early church leaders left due to weaknesses they perceived in Joseph.  Let’s call this one a draw.

He was a mass-murderer, ordering his enforcers to slaughter 3000 men for worshiping the golden calf (Exodus 32:28).  Then he tried to poison them by making them drink it.  On the Zion’s camp journey, they did have to drink some pretty disgusting swamp water.  Still, not even close on this one–Moses takes it.

He hypocritically spared the life of his brother, who was the one who made the calf/idol in the first place.   Nepotism!  Joseph frequently misjudged others’ character out of love and loyalty for them, often to his own detriment.  Whether bolstering his father’s confidence or entrusting John C. Bennett with a leadership role he was unworthy to hold, Joseph often erred on the side of mercy with those whom he loved.  This looks like a draw.

He denied freedom-of-religion to those wanted to worship the golden calf and other idols.  Joseph’s political platform and the voting bloc of the early church caused many to fear that the church was becoming too powerful and would deny freedoms to neighbors and rights to citizens.  And those fears appear to be alive and well today in certain parts of the country.  But, given that one of our Articles of Faith specifically speaks to allowing all to worship how they choose, Moses once again wins this one.

He was a bigamist.  Joseph has 33 wives of record during his life time, some of which may have been platonic and none of which were openly co-habitating with him (unless you count Fanny Alger); still we have to give this one to Joseph.

Oh, and he was very homophobic, sexist (calling women unclean, and they were unclean for twice as long if they gave birth to a female child as opposed to a male child–how insulting!)  Joseph created the Relief Society and did not prohibit women from practicing the priesthood, although he also did not specifically ordain women to the offices in the priesthood.  Joseph was pretty progressive for his day; Moses clearly wins this one.

He was bigoted, prejudiced and provincial (he wouldn’t let his people date or marry non-Hebrews).  Joseph welcomed all visitors openly, offering his home to all, regardless of their race or religion.  He crafted a plan to buy and free all slaves so that their owners would not come after them for retribution, and his presidential platform was anti-slavery.  Moses was clearly the more bigoted.

I think with some research, one could come up with a lot more indictments on Moses’ character.

So, for those who like to criticize Joseph Smith, does this list more securely solidify him as a prophet?  Or do two wrongs not make a right?  Is Moses’ character simply characteristic of his era, or has the historical record been embellished over time?  How does the Lord work through imperfect prophets?  How do other modern-day prophets’ flaws stack up against these historical precedents?  Are modern-day prophets’ flaws evidence that humanity is evolving or that message control is getting tighter or something else?  Discuss.