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January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy 3 Comments

Kirtland Safety Society- Dispelling the Myths

The failure of the Kirtland Safety Society in 1837 was one of the darkest times in the history of the Restored Church with a third of Church leadership apostatizing, along with an eighth of the Church membership.

In Q&A format, this video dispels unfounded rumors hurled against the Prophet Joseph Smith and clarifies the circumstances leading to the failure.

Okay. On this video, I wanted to talk about the Kirtland Safety Society. There’s a lot of misconceptions about this, even members of the church are really confused by this period in our history that was a very dark time. Tremendous apostasy that occurred, especially with the leaders of the church and we’ll talk about that. But there’s four big things that are often talked about with this. The failure to prove that Joseph was not a prophet, that Joseph was trying to deceive by doing this, that Joseph operated an illegal operation and knew he was doing that, and then that the failure was due to Joseph recklessly printing bank notes.

We’ll be talking about that. And I wanted to do this video, maybe more of a Q&A kind of format. Here’s a question and then I’ll give some thoughts on it. First of all, why did the saints set up a bank in the first place? Well, this was in the infancy of the economy in the United States. There were frontier banks popping up in different places to help the economies move. There was really a lot of illiquid assets with land being the main asset. Kirtland was growing like crazy. It had doubled in the last two years, so they really needed to have some currency to help the economy to flow and be out of a barter type of system.

I do want to share one quote from the Paynesville Republican Ohio newspaper about the opening of the Kirtland Safety Society in January of 1837. Here it from the paper says, “It is said they have a large amount of specie on hand and have the means of obtaining much more, if necessary. If these facts be so, its circulation in some shape would be beneficial to community, and sensibly relieve the pressure in the market so much complained of.”

Was it legal? Well, they tried to get a charter twice. They were denied. There was some religious persecution, but there was also some fear of banks by some of the people in the legislature at the time, some hard money people that wanted just coins to operate without banks. There’s different things. But even the second time they went back with non members, they weren’t able to get it. They changed it to an anti bank, that’s why you may have heard it referred to an anti bank before, and operated as a joint stock company. Here’s the interesting thing. Critics will point out Joesph Smith and Sidney Rigdon were convicted of operating an illegal bank, or operating a bank without a charter. They were both fined $1000. So, that proves they were guilty, correct?

Well, let me share this with you. This is from R. McKay White and I’m going to put a paper that he did. He is an economist and an attorney. Great combination for addressing this. He did a great paper on the Kirtland Safety Society. I’ll put the link in the resources. But listen to this. He says, “The Committee of Revision [which is in the Ohio legislature] drafted a statute to replace the 1816 Act, and that was what Joseph was convicted under, which was adopted by the government in 1824. This act did not make banking without a charter illegal. The only legal consequence of circulating notes from a bank without a charter was that such notes were deemed null and void in the courts. There is no prohibition against issuing and circulating these notes, and no penalty for officers of unchartered banks. Under the 1824 Act, the Safety Society was legal.”

The prosecutor and the judge actually were both tied to an antagonist of the church, so that can give you a little bit of insight there. The appeal was not heard because the saints were fleeing to Missouri and so it probably would’ve been overturned if it was brought up.

Okay. Was it a wildcat bank? These were banks, no it was not. These were banks that were set up as a makeshift operation and they were a redemption spot for you to redeem, was set out in the sticks somewhere where the wildcats are and it was a fictitious location, essentially it was a defrauding operation. Joseph, the Kirtland Safety Society was set up in the middle of town. Clearly not a wildcat bank. How was it organized and funded? Well, there weren’t any MBAs at that time. Nobody could really have the skills to run the bank, so Joseph and Sidney were just as good as anybody else really to run the bank. It was set up as a joint stock company. There were over 100 shareholders. Even some non members were involved because they thought it was a great idea there, to help the economy there in Kirtland.

Okay. So, was a revelation involved in the founding and was Joseph acting in his capacity as a prophet? Now, this one’s really critical and the answers to both of those are no and no. Let me read these two quotes here. This is an interview with … Or excuse me, this is McKay White in his paper. He says, “The Safety Society wasn’t based on revelation. There was no direction from the Lord to establish it. Joseph Smith did not start it in his capacity as a prophet. The Safety Society was there for like any other business establishment in Kirtland and quite capable of failure. Secondly, Latter-Day Saints do not believe their leaders are infallible. Given the Safety Society was not directed by God and that Joseph Smith was subject to mortal weaknesses and failings, there was always a chance that the Safety Society would not succeed. Failure, however, would have no bearing on his calling as a prophet. Furthermore, as will be established, the failure had nothing to do with Joseph Smith or Sidney Rigdon. The Safety Society failed because of the poor use of agency of others.”

Then I wanted to share this from an LDS Perspectives podcast and I’ll link this, Episode 64, Religious and Financial Panic in Kirtland. This is an interview with a historian Elizabeth Kuehn. The question is posed to her, “Is it correct that Joseph Smith prophesied that the Kirtland Safety Society would be successful?”

And she said, “That’s a really interesting question. Technically he did not. Wilford Woodruff records in his journal that on the first day that the notes were available in exchange that Joseph has said that he had a revelation that the bank would be successful if executed on righteous principles. Later in a meeting on September 3, 1837 when John F. Boynton will bring up this very question of, ‘Well, the bank was founded on revelation, how could it fail?’, Joseph will correct him and say, ‘I never said that. I said that it had to be conducted on righteous principles and it was not.’ There is this sense that he’s not only defending the failure of the bank, but also limiting the revelation. This isn’t a continuation of the United Firm. This isn’t something that we have a revelation laying out exactly what they should do. It seems more as if he’s receiving direction to try something out that he, Sidney Rigdon, and others have said. A bank looks really promising. Let’s move forward with this. You kind of get the revelation after the fact saying, ‘Okay, this is what you want to try? Try it. If you function in the way that it’s supposed to, it can be successful.'”

One last quick little side note, it’s kind of interesting, Joseph did say optimistically one time, he thought that notes would be as good as gold someday. Today they actually are. If you go onto eBay and try and buy a note of the Kirtland Safety Society, it’s multiples of the price of gold today. Anywhere typically $3000 to $12,000 depending on different factors for a single note. Okay. Did Joseph try to deceive the people about the amount of coin reserves? Absolutely not. There was a story that’s continued to pass around that they had the chest on banks within the vault that had sand in the chest with silver coins on top. Well, the problem is the vault itself was two foot by two foot by about two and a half feet. It couldn’t have even happened.

Did Joseph recklessly print bank notes? Well, they printed 100,000 bank notes to fund the Safety Society. They had $21,000 in reserve of gold and silver coins. That would be a reserve ratio of 21%, which was considered very good capitalization for a bank. In fact, today the only requirement in the US is 10% there. They also had a lot of land as collateral as well, so absolutely not. Why did it fail then? Well, some people point to them not having a formal charter and others operated banks without that and many … They weren’t persecuted or prosecuted like Joseph was, we already talked about. But I would say that had a limited impact. It might’ve created a concern for using the notes by people.

The panic of 1837 in the US, the land values plummeted. It was a depression. One third of the banks in the United States failed. This, if you talk to people that don’t know a lot of the details about this story, this is what they pin it on. It certainly helped to finish off the bank, but the bank really fell apart before this took hold and it fell apart in the first few months particularly. The biggest components was an antagonist and an apostate. Those two. The antagonist was Grandison Newell. He was a competitor of lots of different businesses with those in Kirtland, the neighboring town of Paynesville. He went out and they were trying to buy up every note that they could get on this and then they would go in and try and redeem it for … they call it specie, but for the coins to try and wipe out their reserves.

This was driving down the value of the notes and so they could buy up even more. Sidney Rigdon panicked, closed the bank literally for 24 hours, didn’t know what to do. Joseph was out of town at this moment. And that helped also to lower the confidence in the bank. You had the saints then, John Johnson panicked. He sold a bunch of the land that was being used for collateral. The saints wouldn’t take, many of the merchants wouldn’t take the notes for doing business. Many of the people that had pledged to contribute for the stock to fund the company would not pay their commitments for this. So, it was really, it was a domino effect that started from Grandison Newell. He accomplished was he was trying to do. There was another very bad thing that happened within the bank and it was from Warren Parish who became a bitter apostate and he later admitted to Heber C. Kimball that he actually had embezzled $20,000. Joseph claimed that he noticed that whenever Warren was involved with just … if it was just Warren involved with the money, that money would come up missing.

And there was trunk there, and by the time he was able to get a search warrant to look in the trunk, the trunk disappeared and was gone. So, that also helped to wipe out the reserve. So, those are the reasons why it really did fail. Did Joseph lose anything? Well, look at the screen here. Joseph Smith was, along with three others, the largest shareholder of the Safety Society. All else equal, he would stand to lose the most if the Safety Society failed. He also paid more per share than 85% of the shareholders. If he was in it for the money, he would have gotten out at the first signs of trouble. Instead, while the Safety Society was really struggling, he increased his subscription in order to try to help the Safety Society succeed. That wasn’t all. He took out three loans on behalf of the Safety Society to give some added liquidity and then finally he even sold additional $5000 in personal property in order to give more rescue help.

Okay. How many apostatized from this? Well, this could be a whole nother story on its own, but this was a nightmare. I won’t go into all the detail, but Joseph wrote in his journal, “It seemed as though all the powers of earth and hell were combining their influence in an especial manner to overthrow the church at once and make a final end.” One third of the leaders of the church apostatized through this. In fact, they tried to start up their own organization, which failed. And then about an eighth of the church members failed. It was in this point that Joseph sent out some of his best brethren out to mission to Britain. That really saved the church as they moved later to Nauvoo and brought in a lot of new members and leaders there. I talked about that in a separate video, too.

Why would Joseph send off some of his greatest when he needed them the most? Okay. What are some lessons from this? Well, Milton Backman wrote in the Ensign an article called A Warning from Kirtland. I’ll link to this. But he said, “Saints who look back on this period learned some compelling lessons on which we today need to be aware. One of the pointed lessons we learned from the Kirtland apostasy is that no one should consider himself secure from the loss of faith, pride, criticism, speculation, envy, greed. These are enough to cause the most faithful to stumble. Parley P. Pratt, for example, declared that envyings, lying, strife, and divisions caused trouble and sorrow in Kirtland. He admitted that he was a victim of these failing.

But the lord knew his faith, his integrity of purpose, and helped him in his victory against an opposing spirit. Orson Hyde recalled that because he acted foolishly during this period of darkness, he temporarily lost the light of the Holy Ghost. Luke S. Johnson admitted that his mind became darkened and he neglected his church responsibilities after he had partaken of the spirit of speculation.

So, in conclusion I wanted to just put on the screen three paragraph summaries of almost everything I talked about here that you can look at if you like. I hope you enjoyed the video and subscribe for more. Thanks.

Resources:

Podcasts:

LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 64: Religious and Financial Panic in Kirtland – Elizabeth Kuehn http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/1…

Articles:

Fairmormon responses about Kirtland Safety Society: https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mo…

Ensign Article, Apr 1989 – A Warning From Kirtland, by Milton Backman Jr https://www.lds.org/ensign/1989/04/a-…

Miscellaneous:

Kirtland Safety Society paper by R McKay White- The Kirtland Safety Society: The Myths, the Facts, and the Prophet’s Good Name: https://www.fairmormon.org/wp-content…

Latter-day Saints’ Q&A is a video series not produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but by me, an ordinary member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an independent voice, with a passion for studying Church history and defending the faith. In this series, I provide evidences for the restoration, and address tough questions posed by critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offering faithful answers based on accurate research and historical references which will be posted at the end of each video.

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

Joseph Smith’s First Vision-Clarifications

In this video, I delineate the main objections raised by critics of Joseph Smith’s First Vision and offer clarifying, faithful resolutions based on accurate records and references.

Today, we’re going to talk about the First Vision and some of the issues that critics bring up about this experience that Joseph Smith had. The first is the multiple accounts of the First Vision. There are four main accounts that Joseph told. The first one was a private recording in an autobiography in 1832. 1835 account was Joseph telling the story to a visitor in his home that was then recorded by Warren Parish’s scribe into Joseph’s journal. The 1838 account we find in the scriptures. That’s the one that’s been canonized, and we have it in the Pearl of Great Price and Joseph Smith history, and then the 1842 account was the Wentworth letter. We also have five different accounts of people that wrote really secondhand accounts of when Joseph told them the story. They recorded what they remember Joseph telling them.

There are lots of different details in these different accounts, and I think they’re beautiful. Combined altogether, you get this wonderful holistic view of this experience. If you were to tell a story multiple times, you would emphasize different things to different audiences. There, the 1832 account was very focused on Joseph coming to the Lord seeking forgiveness of sins. The 1838 account was much more of the institutional church and the focus there. This is actually a fantastic book that I love, Opening the Heavens, that goes and takes the nine accounts and actually puts them together into a way where you can see each of the different areas, so Joseph Smith’s quest and struggle, or what Joseph Smith saw, for example. You can see all nine accounts listed there, and it’s fascinating to see different things.

Four accounts, the first two and the last two actually talk about one person coming and then another. Now, it’s interpreted a little bit, possibly implied in the 1832 account. It’s a little confusing. We’re going to talk about that next, but that’s a fascinating aspect to that as well. If you were to look at a couple of examples from the New Testament, Paul on the road to Damascus or the vision on the mount of transfiguration, there were multiple tellings of that with different details in the various accounts. It doesn’t mean the story is not true because there’s different details. In fact as you read this, there isn’t anything you’ll find that contradicts anything else. In fact, the 1838 account where we have two people being there, it just doesn’t say how exactly they came. The other accounts help you understand it sounds like one came first and then immediately followed thereafter by the Son.

So the next issue that’s often brought up is the wording of the 1832 account. This is the one that causes the most challenge from the critics bringing this up with the wording here. So let me read exactly what Joseph said. He said, in describing this, “A pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day came down from above and rested upon me, and I was filled with the spirit of God.” Then he says, “And the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord, and he spake unto me saying, ‘Joseph, my son, thy sins are forgiven thee.'” He uses the term “the Lord” twice, so some have criticized Joseph saying that there was really only one person here. Keep in mind the vernacular of that time and really today in some ways too, the Father and the Son being one, the Lord is a descriptive term for both there. But it does seem, especially when you hear the next time Joseph’s telling this, where he’s describing this, he’s saying one came and then one followed thereafter, so it really was only one first and then the second was introduced. I find it interesting, the last two accounts, 1843 and ’44 after the official accounts were published, he tells it the same way, again how there was one first and then another to follow. That’s the way I read that.

The next issue that’s sometimes brought up is (silence) why did Joseph wait 12 years to record this officially? A couple things. First of all, in 1832 there was a lot of criticism coming at the Church at that point in time. That was the year the office of the First Presidency was organized, and Joseph began recording different things and felt like there needed to be some history of his experiences recorded, also to rebut what was being spread and being publicized there from critics. If you look at his 1838 account, the way it starts, and it makes you wonder almost if there hadn’t have been critics, Joseph may have not told the story here at all. He said, “Owing to the many reports which had been put in circulation by evil disposed and designing persons,” he says, “I have been induced to write this history to disabuse the public mind about what has happened.”

So it is interesting. Joseph’s attitude about sacred things was to keep them sacred. He talked about if you receive a spiritual manifestation to keep it to yourself. If you remember when Moroni came to Joseph, he told him to tell his father about the experience, and the next day Moroni came to Joseph and asked if he had done it, and he said he hadn’t because he was afraid his father wouldn’t believe. Moroni then said, “Tell your father and he will believe,” which he did. Joseph had this reticence, this attitude about this. Also in 1832 account, he does actually say that he found none that would believe, so we don’t know how many he told, but he was very reticent to do it. We do know he told the Methodist preacher the experience and was rejected out of hand.

The last topic that’s sometimes brought up is about whether there was really revivals happening in 1820 in Palmyra. This really came from Reverend Wesley Walters. In the year of 1967, he did a study on just looking back at the papers that were around in Palmyra then to just try and identify, and he found nothing in the spring of 1820 there. So he said, “Well, then that gives us the proof that the Joseph didn’t have this vision because there wasn’t a religious excitement that he talked about.” Well, in his 1838 account, he says “Sometime in the second year after our removal to Manchester.” Now, they moved there in 1838, so this would be 1819. He says, “After our removal to Manchester, there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion. It commenced with the Methodist but soon became general among all the sects in that region of country. Indeed, the whole district of countries seemed affected by it.”

So first of, all he’s talking about Manchester, and one year earlier, 1819. There was an interesting side note I will tell you. There was a big snow storm on May 28th of 1820 in Palmyra, so there was actually a big revival in June 1820 in Palmyra, but that wasn’t considered spring. Well, if you had a big snow storm May 28th, you might consider June spring. Where Joseph’s really talking about it though is he said it was the whole district, and in fact even in Manchester in 1819 there was religious excitement, particularly the Methodists. There are journals from Methodist preachers now that had been found that record that. This was a great one that Milton Backman did on looking at where we have recordings of unusual religious excitement in 1819 and 1820 in upstate New York, particularly in the west in the Burned-over district, which was considered from the Finger Lakes over to Lake Erie. All those dots represent spots where there was recorded religious excitement, unusual religious excitement there. This is really close. Here’s Manchester right there, so you can see all around Joseph. That’s really what he alluded to there, so I think that’s kind of a silly argument for anyone to make, but it goes back to that research that was done in 1967.

So those are the things regarding the First Vision that I thought would be good. Again, this is Cliff Notes version. There’s lots of detail in all of these. I will put some details in the description of other links to go deeper on this if you’d like. Please subscribe, and we’ll look forward to the next video.

Resources:

Books:

Opening the Heavens, Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820-1844 by John Welch

Videos:

https://history.lds.org/article/josep…

https://history.lds.org/article/i-saw…

https://history.lds.org/article/owing…

https://history.lds.org/article/unusu…

Websites:

FairMormon: https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Jo…

Gospel Topics Essay: https://www.lds.org/topics/first-visi…

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

Mountain Meadows Massacre- Clarifications

This video discusses the somewhat incomprehensible Mountain Meadows Massacre, what led up to it, if Brigham Young ordered the massacre, the aftermath and some lessons we can take from this stunning and horrific event.

So in this video, I want to talk about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Really one of the, probably the most challenging period in the Church’s history. It’s a tragedy. There was a recent memorial service at 150 year anniversary of the massacre, and to pause for a minute, the massacre itself, if you’re not familiar with the specifics, there were 120 unarmed men, women and children who were massacred by 50 to 60 militia men, Latter-day Saints in the Mountain Meadows area, which is about 35 miles southwest of the Cedar City area. Seventeen children were not killed, they were considered too young to to tell down the road, and they were those that were under seven and they were kept alive.

President Eyring shared this at the memorial. This was approved by the First Presidency. This was Elder Eyring at the time in 2007, “What was done here long ago by members of our church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teachings and conduct. We cannot change what happened, but we can remember and honor those who were killed here. We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by the relatives to the present time. A separate expression of regret is owed to the Paiute people who have been unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre. Although the extent their involvement is disputed, it is believed they would not have participated without the direction and stimulus provided by local Church leaders and members.”

There was a recent Gospel Topics essay that was written on this. One section of that essay refers to a recent book published. In the essay it says, “In recent years the Church has made diligent efforts to learn everything possible about the massacre. In the early 2000s, historians in the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scoured archives throughout the United States for historical records; every Church record on the massacre was also opened to scrutiny. The resulting book by the authors Ronald Walker, Richard Turley Jr., and Glen Leonard was published by Oxford University Press in 2008.”

This is the book “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” and there will be a part two. This deals with the crime. The second book, which will be coming out soon, deals with the aftermath and the punishment period. I wanted to talk about how this could have happened, if Brigham Young was involved or gave the order, and then some lessons that that can be learned from this.

First of all, to set the stage, this was during the Utah War. There was concern as this was part of now the U.S. territory. President Buchanan was concerned with an uprising here in Utah, and with Brigham Young being the governor and the prophet of the people, they wanted to put it in a non Latter-day Saint governor, so they were sending Alfred Cummings here and escorting him here with a 1,500 troops from the U.S. Army. They were led by someone named William Harvey, who terrified the saints because of his reputation for brutal violence. He was replaced after two months by Johnston. That’s why we call it Johnston’s army there. Brigham declared Martial Law. He told people to keep their grain, do not sell any of their grain to the immigrants. They were coming through on the wagon trains for people passing through to California on the trails. Also to save your ammunition, to get your guns in good working order, to get the militia ready to protect the territory. That was the environment.

This wagon train, the Baker-Fancher party that was coming through. They were not able to to get their supplies in Salt Lake. As they traveled down to Cedar City, things were getting to a boiling point, and Cedar City was the last stop before you traveled to California. Things really were boiling over with this party, and they were making threats saying they were going to go and join the U.S. Army to battle the saints. Somebody even said they had a gun that killed Joseph Smith. There were rumors of poisoning that had happened up in Fillmore of poisoning of the water streams up there. That may have been fictitious, but these rumors were floating around. Parley P. Pratt had been murdered in Arkansas about a month after this party had had left that area. That may have been news that was involved there. There are a lot of things, a lot of confusion, very heightened tensions that were happening at this time.

Now I want to talk a little bit about what led up to the the attacks. So Isaac Haight was the stake president in Cedar City. He was furious with the behavior of this immigrant train that had come through and wanted to punish them for their threats. He was also the mayor and the militia leader there so ultimate theocracy, a position of power there, and that was part of the problem in what happened here. But he had to go to the militia leader of the overall area, which was William Dame he was down in Parowan. William Dame held a council there. This council came to the conclusion to not do anything. This was the dispatch they sent back to Isaac Haight in Cedar City, “Do not notice their threats, words are but wind-they injure no one; but if they (the emigrants) commit acts of violence against citizens inform me by express, and such measures will be adopted as will ensure tranquility”.

Well, he was still intent on punishing them so he came up with a new plan with John D. Lee, who was the militia person of where the train had gone to now, this Mountain Meadows area 35 miles southwest of Cedar City, and also he was the liaison with the Indians, and they came up with a plan to have Indians be involved in sending a message to them and doing a small attack, creating some pain and taking some of their livestock, et cetera. They presented, and any of the militia that would be involved would be dressed up as Indians. So they presented this plan to a council that Haight organized. The council was stunned and had a ton of resistance to it, and they said, we need to approach the prophet Brigham Young and get his recommendation on what we should be doing. They sent a dispatch, a three day express, that was the quickest to get it up to Salt Lake from Cedar at the time. That went up on September 7th. Well on that very day, Lee and some of the Indians, and you know, any militia that were dressed up as Indians did some small attacks.

It did start a five day siege and essentially the immigrant camp formed a circle to protect themselves and were buckled down there. Then there was a critical issue that happened. There were several immigrants that had wandered off. There were two militia men on horses that saw them and went and attacked them. A shot killed one of them. The other escaped and came back to the camp. That created sheer paranoia because now they knew that the immigrants would know that the saints were involved in this. It wasn’t just the Indians. They were fearful that when they got to California, they would tell this to the federal government, which would then come in. They were already on their way, so they thought this would create a very serious situation for everyone in Utah with the impending army approaching. That sent Haight back. He actually went to Parowan to visit Dame again.

They had a second council there in Parawon, and they actually had the same response. No, let them go if they’ll go in peace. Haight later lamented. He said, “I would give a world if I had it, if we had abided by decision of the council.” Here is where the Mountain Meadows Massacre was basically decided at this moment. Haight and the counselor that he brought with him met with William Dame after the meeting, pulled him aside, got him alone and told him two things they had not told the council. One was that they knew that the saints were involved now, that the white man was involved in this. Two, that most of the immigrants had already been killed, which was a complete fabrication, but this got Dame to change his mind, and Haight viewed it as the opportunity now to call in the militia.

He got John D. Lee to to go in on September 11th, a bad omen day. We’ve had another tragedy in our history of this country on that day. September 11th John D. Lee goes in with a white flag of surrender, essentially saying a peace treaty. They’ll let them come back to Cedar, they’ll escort them past the Indians and protect them if they’ll leave all their weapons, so they were unarmed. Then a pre-designed signal after about a mile, there was an ambush. All the militiamen and the Indians that were hiding came in and wiped out everybody but the youngest children, those who were under seven. There were 17 of them that were actually adopted then by the local people there. The government, federal government, several years later got them back to their extended families in Arkansas. The sheer, very challenging situation. Brigham Young’s letter arrives. It was written on September 10th. It arrives on September 13th two days after the attack.

Let me share with you the letter. His letter reported recent news that no U.S. Troops would be able to reach the territory before winter and then here’s the quote. “So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers and again averted the blow designed for our heads. In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of. If those who are there will leave, let them go in peace. While we should be on the alert, on hand and always ready, we should also possess ourselves in patience, preserving ourselves and property ever remembering that God rules.” When Haight read Young’s words, he sobbed like a child and can manage only the words “Too late, too late.”

Those invovled realized, especially after this letter that they had to provide a cover up, and there were lies and stories that were told. John D. Lee actually went up to meet Brigham Young 18 days later, came in, panting essentially as though he was reporting on what had just happened and said there were no white men involved. It was all the Paiute Indians that occurred with this massacre, but slowly over time, lots of details on this video I can’t get into, but things began to unraveled and the real story did come out eventually. Isaac Haight and John D. Lee were both ex-communicated. There were nine that were indicted. John D. Lee did get executed for the crime and I will say on the excommunication there has been a lot of controversy about this. There were no records in the local area there. Juanita Brooks wrote a famous book on this back in the 50s and said that the excommunication was a sham. It’s because it happened at the general church level. It was actually by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. The minutes actually were burned up in a fire that in the 1880’s, but this was recorded in three different journals of the participants in the council, the excommunications. It’s very clear evidence that it did in fact happen.

Now as far as some lessons just to close a couple of lessons. There was an interview that was done with Richard Turley Jr., one of the authors in the book here, but I’ll link in the resources for the video here. At the end he gives a couple of lessons from the writing of the book and thinking about this. First of all, if you want to just pause the screen, you can look at the full quote, but he talks about the slippery slope.

“… otherwise good people can end up committing an atrocity unless they make decisions that pull them off the slippery slope and back onto firmer ground.” There was bad judgment after bad judgment, cover up after cover up that happened throughout this process that led to the great atrocity. The second lesson he talks about, and I’d love for you to pause it and read this quote, but basically it’s that there is safety in councils. If they had followed the advice from any of the councils, none of this would’ve happened. No matter how bad the people were or if any of the rumors were true, even if they were all true, it wouldn’t have justified what happened there at the Mountain Meadows Massacre. That’s it for this one.

Resources:

Books:

Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Glen Leonard by Richard Turley Jr and Ronald Walker

Church Statements:

Church statement read by then Elder Eyring at 2007 memorial service recognizing 150 yr anniversary of the massacre: https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/articl…

Gospel Topics Essay discussing the Massacre: https://www.lds.org/topics/peace-and-…

Articles:

Ensign Article on the Massacre: https://www.lds.org/ensign/2007/09/th…

Podcasts:

Interview with Harold Turley Jr on LDS Perspectives Podcast: http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/1…

Websites:

Mountain Meadows Massacre website with excellent resources: https://mountainmeadowsmassacre.com

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

How Could They All Have Lied? -Evidences

This video discusses the hundreds of witnesses who experienced personal divine manifestations as part of Christ’s church being restored – it wasn’t just Joseph Smith!

So this video in the Evidences series was inspired by an article I read in the Deseret News about six years ago from Daniel Peterson. It was entitled, “Too many credible gospel witnesses to believe they all lied”. And Daniel was discussing how he came out of General Conference and saw a sign that read “Joseph lied”, and he started thinking about how many other people would have had to have lied.

It wouldn’t have been just Joseph and one of the paragraphs at the beginning of his article says, “It wasn’t just Joseph that would have had to lie … Lucy Mack Smith must have borne false witness in claiming to have held the breastplate that came with the Nephite record. Emma Smith and Katherine Smith Salisbury must have lied in their descriptions of the Book of Mormon plates. William Smith must have lied in estimating the weight of the plates at about 60 pounds. Mary Whitmer must have lied to her son and grandson in claiming to have seen them.”

If you recall, she was the first one to actually see the plates. And then of course we have the three witnesses that were shown the plates with the angel Moroni. All three of them left the church. Two came back, one didn’t. I’m going to do an entire separate video on that specifically, and then of the eight witnesses that saw just the plates, three of them left also. None of these individuals ever denied their testimony of what they experienced. I think that’s powerful witness. Also, if you think about the translation process, in the Book of Mormon Miracles video that I did, I talked a lot about that. How Emma talked about Joseph never needing to be told where he was when he took a break and started again, the translation, he wouldn’t ask for her to repeat where they were in the process. He couldn’t write a well-worded letter, she said, at that time. In the house Elizabeth Ann Whitmer who later married Oliver Cowdery, talked about the process that she witnessed.

She said, “I often sat by and saw and heard them translate and write for hours together. Joseph never had a curtain drawn between him and his scribe while he was translating. He would place the director in his hat, and then place his face in is hat, so as to exclude the light, and then read to his scribe the words he said as they appeared before him.” Oliver Cowdery described this process. He said, “These were days never to be forgotten, to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of Heaven.” Then Oliver ended up being a second witness, the law of witnesses when the Priesthood was restored at this time as well. John the Baptist, the Aaronic Priesthood, and then Peter, James and John a month later, in June of 1829, restoring the Melchizedeck Priesthood ,and again, Oliver fell away for a period of time, but came back towards the end of his life, but while he was out of the church he never denied any of these miraculous experiences.

There was a huge outpouring of the Saints in Kirtland. There are three great books I would recommend. Joseph himself had 76 documented visions and those are accounted for in this great book, “Opening the Heavens”. Another great book about Kirtland particularly, “The Savior in Kirtland” and then a newer book, “The Witness of Women”. Lots of great references and I’ll share some of the tidbits that I pulled together out of this. Hundreds of people had divine experiences and interactions with angelic beings in the Kirtland period. 23 had accounts directly with the Savior himself. I’ll share some of those experiences.

Philo Dibble actually talked about, where they were baptizing in Kirtland, he said, “A pillar of light was seen every evening for more than a month hovering over the place where we were doing the baptizing. One evening … the moon was not to be seen that night. Although it was cloudy, it was as light as noonday.”

Mary Elizabeth Lightner talked about an experience of seeing Joseph with a searchlight within him. He was transparent. She said, “I shall remember it and see it in my mind’s eye as long as I remain upon the earth.”

Martin Harris described how the Savior was in their midst but there was a veil over their eyes. That’s how they described how they saw Joseph.

Orson Pratt talked about seeing Joseph receive one of the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. “His face was exceedingly white and seemed to shine.”

Here are some other great experiences: The Father and the Son manifested themselves to Joseph Smith, Lyman Wight and Harvey Whitlock. The vision came as the Priesthood gathered in the log schoolhouse on the Isaac Morley farm to ordain the first high priests of the church.

John Murdoch testified that one of the Savior’s appearances in the School of the Prophets, saying, quote, “I beheld the face of the Lord.” Zebedee Coltrin who was one of the first seven presidents of the Seventy recorded several visions, at least one of which included both the Father and the Son.

Then of course Sidney Rigdon had the greatest vision, there with Joseph, they had the vision of the three degrees of glory. It went on for over an hour in the John Johnson farm in the upper story. There were 12 witnesses of this. Philo Dibble described how powerful the room was as they witnessed Joseph and Sydney experiencing this. Again, Sydney later left the church after the martyrdom but never denied having these experiences.

Frederick G. Williams in the First Presidency had an experience of actually seeing the temple, the Kirtland Temple, before the construction was begun at all. He said, “We went upon our knees, called on the Lord, and the building appeared within viewing distance; I being the first to discover it. Then all of us viewed it together. After we had taken a good look at the exterior, the building seemed to come right over us.”

Then at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, March 27th, 1836, there were almost a thousand people in the temple that witnessed this Pentecostal experience, they called it a great rushing wind. Many saw angels, even outside the temple. They thought the roof of the temple was on fire with this large pillar of light that was there. Truman Angel’s autobiography records that a heavenly messenger, who Joseph Smith said was Peter, had ‘come to accept the dedication’ and was seen entering the temple and sat between Frederick G. Williams and Joseph Smith Sr.

Nancy Tracy said, “The heavenly influence rested down upon that house … heavenly beings appeared to many … it was heaven on earth.”

Eliza R. Snow said, “The ceremonies of that dedication may be rehearsed, but no mortal language can describe the heavenly manifestations of that memorable day.”

And Benjamin Brown, this is a crazy story, he said, “One woman brought her child, about two months old. The woman and child entered and the child did not cry a word from eight until four in the afternoon. But when the Saints all shouted ‘Hosanna’, the child was nursing, but let go and shouted also. When the Saints paused, it paused. When they shouted, it shouted for three times. When they shouted ‘Amen’ it shouted also for three times. Then it resumed it’s nursing without any alarm.” Quite the story.

Charles Walker recorder Harrison Burgess’s account of the first endowments given in the Kirtland Temple. He said that all at once there was a heavenly and divine atmosphere surrounding them, and it seemed as if the rafters and beams were all gone and Joseph gazing up said, “I see the Son of God sitting at the right hand of the Father.” Hyrum Smith at the same instant said, “I behold the angels of Heaven,” and Roger Orton said, “I see the horses and the chariots of Heaven.”

At the solemn assembly, Heber C. Kimball said, “The beloved disciple John was seen in our midst,” by the prophet Joseph, Oliver Cowdery and others. Then of course the grand finale was on the following Sunday, after the dedication. It was Easter Sunday and Passover, April 3rd, 1836. This is canonized as Doctrine and Covenants section 110, the Savior appeared to both Joseph and Oliver, as a second witness, and said that He had received the temple. Also, Moses, Elias, and Elijah came and restored priesthood keys to both Joseph and Oliver, again as a second witness. Remember, Oliver left, never denied any of these things happening.

After the temple dedication, over the next year, there were lots of experiences that continued to happen. Prescendia Kimball talked about seeing angels on the top of the roof of the temple from end to end. She said a number of children in Kirtland saw the same. Another time they were praying in the temple and heard a choir of angels. She said, “…united and singing some song of Zion.” Invisible to them but in the corner of the temple she said, “Sweet harmony filled the temple of God.”

So I hope you enjoyed many of those different examples of a lot of the people that experienced the restoration. It wasn’t just Joseph Smith. Miraculous things happened and I want to share this quote at the end here from George Q. Cannon. He said in speaking of Joseph Smith and Oliver beholding the Savior in Kirtland, he said, “These witnesses are also supplemented by hundreds of others who have beheld in vision, glorious personages in these latter days. In the face of these testimonies which cannot be impeached successfully, is it any wonder that faith grows in the hearts of the people of God?”

I hope you enjoyed the video and subscribe for more. Thanks.

Resources:

Books:

The Savior in Kirtland by Karl Anderson

Opening the Heavens by John Welch

The Witness of Women by Janice Johnson and Jennifer Reeder

Articles:

Too many credible gospel witnesses to believe they all lied https://www.deseretnews.com/article/7…

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy 13 Comments

Priesthood & Temple Ban- How Did This Happen?

One of the most challenging items Latter-day Saints grapple with in their history is the priesthood and temple restriction for those of African decent in force between 1852 and 1978. This video tries to shed light on what led up to the ban, why it may have gone on for so long and thoughts on how God could have allowed this to happen. I still tried to keep it to a cliff-notes version but due to the topic, it ran longer than many of the other videos. I will also be producing a ‘part 2’ which will address misunderstood scriptures also relating to this history.

So in this video I wanted to talk about the priesthood and temple ban that was from 1852 to 1978. I want to talk about the history leading up to the ban, how the ban was explained and became entrenched, what led to the overturn of the ban and how that happened, the aftermath that followed, and then finish with some thoughts about how God would allow this to happen. I first want to share some official statements from the Church recently. In 2012 the church issued a statement, some of which contained this paragraph. “At some point, the Church stopped ordaining male members of African descent, although there were a few exceptions. It is not known precisely why, how or when this restriction began in the church, but it has ended. The Church unequivocally condemns racism, including any and all past racism by individuals both inside and outside the church.”

Then many don’t know this, but the inside of your scriptures, if you go to your electronic version, so your 1981 printed copy won’t have this, but in 2013 the Church added a new introduction to the Official Declaration number two, which was the revelation reversing the ban. In this I just have one sentence I’ll read: “Church records offer no clear insight into the origins of this practice. Church leaders believed that a revelation from God was needed to alter this practice.” So interesting. Then in 2013 the Church put out a Gospel Topics essay entitled “Race in the Priesthood.” I wanted to share one paragraph from that. They talk a lot in there about the racist culture of the time, and remember a lot of times we use a thing called presentism where we evaluate somebody’s past with our current view of things.

It was a very racist culture that the Church was founded in back then, and many things were used to justify that that had been around for, in some cases, centuries the opinions that were used. But as far as one sentence that I wanted to share from that essay says, “Today, the church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a primordial life, that mixed race marriages are a sin, or that blacks or people of any race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”

So let’s start with the history leading to the ban. First of all, the Book of Mormon says, “All are alike unto God,” and in five places in the Doctrine and Covenants it talks about going to preach the gospel to all the world, to every creature. So this really was the instruction to the saints. In the very early days in Missouri, W.W. Phelps wrote a piece welcoming free slaves to Missouri there, and it’s what really created all of the challenges, most of the challenges I should say in Missouri. They destroyed the press there and they drove the saints out of Jackson County. This was a big part of why. After all the problems when W.W. Phelps had put this out, he really did a 180 in his approach there. But that was the first foray into some of the challenges this was going to bring. Joseph Smith allowed blacks to have the priesthood. Some of the famous ones that we know of, very specifically, Elijah Abel and Q. Walker Lewis up in Mole, Massachusetts.

I love this quote from Joseph Smith talking about blacks. Many thought they did not even have souls. Here’s a quote from him: “They came into the world slaves, mentally and physically. Change their situation with the whites and they would be like them. They have souls, and are subjects of salvation.” I love this story of a man in Nauvoo who was selling liquor on Sunday to raise money to buy his child out of slavery. It was against the law there in Nauvoo. Joseph was the mayor of the town and had to inflict a fine on the man, but the next day he brought him a horse and gave it to him, and it was enough money he could sell to buy his child and free his child from slavery there. Also, when Joseph ran for president in 1844, part of his platform was an anti-slavery approach to the nation.

Also, Brigham Young. Many often look at Brigham Young’s statements in the past and view him as a racist. It is interesting to see in March of 1847, William McCary was another black man who was ordained to the priesthood. He was in Winter Quarters, and he felt like he was being picked on, abused by the saints there in Winter Quarters. Brigham Young met with him in March of 1847, and I want to share with you five snippets of things that Brigham Young told William McCary. One is “Your body is not what is your mission.” Two, “It’s nothing to do with the blood, for of one blood has God made all flesh,” kind of paraphrasing, Acts 17:26. He says, “We have one of our best elders, an African.” This was Q. Walker Lewis up in Lowell, Massachusetts, so Brigham obviously knew he was an elder and he was an African, and he was one of our best. He says, “We don’t care about the color,” and he says, “Show by your actions that you don’t care for what they say.”

The very next month, William McCary, Brigham was gone, but William McCary began to apostatize and really set up a separate group and was trying to target the women there with interracial polygamy. He was doing a sexualized sealing induction into this. It was really a very sad tale. They drove him out of town, excommunicated him from the church. Parley P. Pratt was the first one with this situation. This was the first comment about tying the priesthood ban to any type of a curse, and he says it was due to the curse of Ham that William McCary had that made him unworthy to hold the priesthood, so that was in April of 1847. Now in 1849, Lorenzo Snow was meeting with Brigham Young privately and asked Brigham, “when will the door be unlocked for the Africans?” And Brigham says at that point that it won’t be until all of the children of Abel, the seed of Abel, will be able to have the opportunity to have the priesthood, til they will have the priesthood, the seed of Cain as he viewed the blacks there.

So it was what happened during that two year period. Well, he learned about the William McCary situation. He found out that Q. Walker Lewis’ son, Enoch Lewis, got married to a white woman, which was against the laws. It was against the laws until 1967 in our country, and they had a child. That was a huge challenge for Brigham and for any in the nation the way they viewed that. Then they were also considering people from the south coming into Utah and the challenges that was going to bring with having their slaves come in. What would be the rules with regard to that? There weren’t a lot of slaves that ended up coming. In 1860, they had about 59 blacks in Utah. 29 were considered slaves. There Brigham did have a good attitude. In fact, he told one lady when she was looking to sell a slave, he asked if she would please sell it to somebody benevolent, and if she couldn’t find somebody, that he would buy him from her and release him to his freedom.

So he articulated in 1852 to the legislature, that that was the first public announcement that blacks could not hold the priesthood, and he viewed it as the reason was that they were at the seed of Cain, and this was a common thought. The LDS.org essay, “Race and the Priesthood,” the Gospel Topics essay talks about how this was a common held belief since 1730 that the blacks were from the seed of Cain, but Brigham ties it now to the priesthood. He also says he was afraid of intermarriage, and that that would potentially ruin the church if nobody could qualify to hold the priesthood down the road. That was part of his justification that he used. Again, this is in the Gospel Topics essay.

Now, an interesting sidebar wasn’t just the Latter Day Saints that had challenges with integration. The Latter Day Saints, they were banning people from having the priesthood, but they allowed them to be baptized and to worship together in the congregations. By 1852, Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists all had schisms or complete fractures over this issue. After the ban, there were different periods of controversy and challenge and debate. Orson Pratt was a defender against what Brigham was using as the justification for the ban being the seed of Cain. He felt like that was against Article of Faith number two that mentioned being punished for somebody else’s sins, a multi-generational curse, if you will. In 1869, in the School of the Prophets, Lorenzo Young asked Brigham if possibly it was due to the being neutral in the preexistence, that the blacks were were neutral and not valid in the preexistence, and that was the reason why their skin color was and that that was the reason for the the priesthood curse.

He said, “Absolutely not.” He says, “They received a body. There were no neutral spirits that received bodies. That that was the reward for keeping your first estate.” After Brigham’s death though, that certainly picked up some new life, and many were, of Orson Pratt’s opinion, that we couldn’t use a past curse as their rationale, so this did take on a quite a bit of life after Brigham, especially at the turn of the century. Now, one of the challenges that came was polygamy, and the nation made fun of the saints here in Utah often as degenerate, that the children from polygamy, they compared them to multiracial children. In fact, this is a book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. It talks about it. It’s a really helpful read. In fact, this is from the cover of Life magazine in 1904. If you look closely at that child right there, African American.

This is another good book on that, All Abraham’s Children, Armand Mauss, Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. That’s a great book on that too. So decade after decade, this just went on and more justification, more tradition, more cultural, that became very entrenched. So as time went on, things did begin to change, especially with President David O. McKay in the 1940s and 50s. He did soften the stance on different things. He did pray. He said he didn’t feel inspired though to lift the ban at that time. May have been that he needed to do, and there was a lot of work that needed to be done with the leadership and the Church as a whole to bring them along. In 1963, then Elder Kimball wrote to his son, he said, “I know the Lord could change the policy and forgive the possible error.” And then we had the civil rights in the 60s. We had a tremendous growth. It was beginning to start with the international church, and then they had the temple announced in Brazil in the mid 70s.

A lot of these things were adding a lot of focus to the issue. Interesting experience, in 1969 Hugh B. Brown in the First Presidency pushed for a procedural vote to reverse the ban. He felt like because it was a policy as they had looked at it, that it could be reversed by a procedural vote, and it lost by one vote. It was Herald B. Lee who said that he felt that it needed to be a revelation to be overturned. In 1973, Lester Bush wrote an article and dialogue. He had done a tremendous amount of historical research that had showed how Joseph Smith had approved of ordaining a brother into the priesthood and how Brigham Young had instituted it as a policy. There’s evidence that Spencer W. Kimball had a copy of this and had it marked up, so there were a lot of those kinds of things that were happening leading up to the revelation that did come in 1978. It was the only revelation received in the history of the Church that was given to the entire First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles all at the same time.

I wanted to share with you a few of the quotes from some of the people that participated in that. Bruce R. McConkie, as he described this powerful pentecostal experience, he says, “And we all heard the same voice, received the same message, and became personal witnesses that the word received was the mind and will and voice of the Lord.” He said, “It was in a miraculous and marvelous manner beyond anything that any then present had ever experienced.” Elder Hague, I really love this one. He said that, “As President Kimball arose from the altar, we surrounded it according to seniority, I being number 12. He turned to his right and I was the first member of the circle that he encountered. He put his arms around me, and as I embraced him, I felt the beating of his heart and the intense emotion that filled him. He then continued around the circle embracing each of the brethren. No one spoke. Overcome with emotion, we simply shook hands and quietly went to our dressing rooms.”

I love what Elder McConkie said. He said, “The reason the Lord chose to reveal this to the First Presidency and the Twelve rather than only to His prophet is due to the tremendous import in eternal significance of what was revealed. The Lord wanted independent witnesses who could bear record that the thing had happened.” Then it was a sustained by the entire body of the Church and canonized now as the Official Declaration Number Two. So following this grand revelation, it’s interesting to see some of the things that have been said after this. One of the famous ones was Bruce R. McConkie. Here’s the quote: “Forget everything that I have said or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world. We get our truth and our light line upon line and precept upon precept. We have now had added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past.”

President Hinckley and the 2006 April General Conference said, “How can any man holding the Melchizedek Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood, whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?” Then a couple of other quotes, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, April 2013 conference: “Except in the case of His only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with. That must be terribly frustrating to him, but He deals with it. So we should we. And when you see imperfection remember that the limitation is not in the divinity of the work.”

Then to finish up with a couple other things. I wanted to share the LDL sociologist, Armand Mauss, spoke at the Fair Mormon Conference in 2002, and he proposed kind of a hypothetical Q and A. It was kind of a fun process, but I took three quick snippets out of that, three questions and answers that I thought you’d find interesting. “Question: Why would early LDS leaders such as Brigham Young make seemingly racist comments?” “Answer: Because he was a 19th century American, and hardly any white people at that time, North or South, believed in equality for blacks. Slavery was still an unsettled issue throughout the nation with some even in the south opposed to it, and many even in the north who were willing to tolerate it. Brigham Young’s ideas were really right in the mainstream of American thinking at the time. They were very close to the ideas of other prominent Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln, who himself did not even free all slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation.

“Question: But don’t Mormons believe that their church is led by prophets of God? How could prophets have permitted racist ideas and practices to become parts of their religion?” “Prophets are not perfect,” is the answer, “and don’t claim to be, nor do they always act as prophets in what they say and do. People in all ages, including those who become prophets, grew up without questioning much that is assumed by everyone else in their respective cultures, unless some experience motivates them to seek revelation on a given matter.” “Question: Well, maybe so, but racism is such an obvious evil that I would think authentic prophets would have been more sensitive to it.” “Answer: Why? It seems obvious to all of us now, but not to who believed in Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s Burden and the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Even the original apostles of Jesus assume that non-Jews cannot become Christians unless they first accepted Judaism and circumcision. The Apostle Paul disputed that, but the idea persisted.” You might even recall Peter had to have a vision to take the gospel to the Gentiles rather than just the Jews.

And one of my favorite quotes ever is from apostle Ezra Taft Benson at the time, 1975, and he said, “If you see some individuals in the church doing things that disturb you, or you feel the Church is not doing things the way you think they could or should be done, the following principles might be helpful: God has to do work through mortals of varying degrees of spiritual progress. Sometimes he temporarily grants to man their unwise requests in order that they might learn from their own sad experiences. Some refer to this as the Samuel principle. The children of Israel wanted a king like all the other nations. The prophet Samuel was displeased and prayed to the Lord about it. The Lord responded by saying, ‘Samuel, they have not rejected thee, but they rejected me that I should not rein over them.’ The Lord told Samuel to warn the people of the consequences if they had a king. Samuel gave them the warning, but they still insisted on their king, so God gave them a king and let them suffer. They learned the hard way. God wanted it to be otherwise, but within certain bounds He grants unto men according to their desires.”

Now if you look today, the church is growing like wildfire in Africa. We have 500,000 members there now. In the October 2018 conference, 12 new temples were announced. Two of them were in Africa in Nigeria and Cape Verde. So one last question I ask myself, I ponder this, is could Brigham have received a revelation from God to withhold the priesthood and temple from the Africans? I say to myself, it’s definitely not for any of the reasons we’ve talked about in this video and all excuses have been given, but it could have been because of the racist attitudes of the members of the church and the byproduct of the culture that they lived in and went on for over a century. When the people were ready, the Lord obviously revealed it in an unbelievable manner to everybody, and if that was truly the case, Official Declaration Two could be viewed as a call to repentance.

Resources:

Websites:

Official Church Statement: Race and the Church: All Are Alike Unto God https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/articl…

Official Church Gospel Topics Essay – Race & The Priesthood https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-t…

Introduction to Official Declaration 2 (at end of D&C) added in 2013 https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-tes…

Blacklds.org

Blacksinthescriptures.com

Books:

All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage, by Armand Mauss

Neither White Nor Black, by Lester Bush and Armand Mauss

Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, by Paul Reeve

Podcasts:

LDS Perspectives Episode 43: Discussing the Priesthood Ban with members of the Genesis Group http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/0…

LDS Perspectives Episode 83: A History of Blacks and Global Mormonism with Russell Stevenson http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2018/0…

YouTube Videos:

Marvin Perkins at 2014 FairMormon Conference: Black Man Speaks Candidly About LDS, Race, Past Priesthood Restriction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfzFS…

Darius Gray presents at SLCC Lecture in 2007: Blacks in the Bible

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy 1 Comment

Polygamy- The Beginnings

This video discusses the beginnings of polygamy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While we often avoid this painful topic, faithful members who seek a better understanding of it, will have tools to answer the avalanche of criticisms leveled against us regarding this charged and sensitive topic. This video explains why polygamy was practiced, how to avoid judging its history through our present day eyes, better understanding for the criticisms leveled against Joesph Smith for how he started the practice, and how participants who struggled to live it were buoyed up by miraculous manifestations leading them to know it was, indeed, from God for that particular time, and for His particular purposes. The next video, part 2, will discuss the endings of polygamy in the church and what the afterlife might look like with regard to this principle (hint: would God require us to live an Abrahamic sacrifice throughout eternity?).

So, in this video I’m going to be talking about polygamy or plural marriage. I’m going to do a part two, which will be about the endings of polygamy and the afterlife and hopefully that’ll be a very comforting aspect to this, but this one, I want to really focus on the beginnings of polygamy. Also, this is a topic we don’t talk about much, where I think we want to distance ourselves from it. Say, “It was a long time ago. We don’t practice that anymore. It’s a painful topic. Feels very unfair. It’s challenging” and so, I think we have not studied the issues a lot and so one of the challenges is this is being pounded in today’s internet world and critics really are having a heyday with this topic and challenging people’s faiths with lots of different issues. There are actually great answers for many of the key criticisms, but it’s just we haven’t really taken time to study some of the issues because we really probably don’t want to. So, hopefully this video will be helpful in that way.

So, let’s talk a little bit about the history here. In fact, polygamy has actually been practiced in many cultures throughout the history of the world. The ancient Chinese, Native Americans, many African countries. In fact, still today, Hindus up until 1955. They changed that. The Muslims, in fact, still do. In fact, a third of the world today is still in areas where polygamy’s practiced or allowed, and if you are part of the Judeo-Christian culture and believe in the Old Testament, then you have to acknowledge that God allowed polygamy at times. In the Bible, in the Old Testament, there are 29 polygamists. Some of the famous ones, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon.

So, now let’s talk about how polygamy was started by Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in our day. Some of the key things I want to talk about with this topic as I get into this is one is presentism and that is basically taking how you see things today and applying that back to an earlier day and that can be fraught with risk, especially on some of these topics we’ll be going through.

A great example would be the second thing I would say is the understanding of sealing that we have today is very different than the way that they saw sealing back then. It was enrolled line-upon-line. In its infancy, they saw the sealing in a lot of different ways. First of all, they required the Melchizedek priesthood for a man to be sealed and so, if a wife had a husband die and he didn’t get the Melchizedek priesthood, she could not be sealed to him. They wouldn’t allow Melchizedek priesthoods to be done on a proxy basis after they were gone. Same thing with parents. You couldn’t be sealed to your parents if there wasn’t a Melchizedek priesthood holder as the father.

They saw a great desire to be sealed to general authorities or leaders binding there. They also had these dynastic sealings where they were trying to combine families in a sense, especially the leaders. A famous one was Heber C. Kimball wanted his daughter, Helen Mar Kimball, I’ll talk about her in a minute for another issue, but to Joseph Smith as a way to combine their two families. There’s a great book that I would recommend. This is just a great read. It’s fascinating. The Development of Temple Doctrine. Wilford Woodruff is when the revelation came in 1894 that basically set the stage for how we do sealings today and it’s just fascinating to see how that came about. Right after the Salt Lake temple dedication, that’s when we started the genealogy society, et cetera. So one little nugget that’s quite fascinating at the end of all this is in 1894 when Wilford Woodruff released the new sealing doctrine that he received from revelation, there were actually 13,000 sealings at that point that had been done between unrelated individuals. So, the sealing types of which we would not do today.

The third thing to remember is scarce records on this topic. It was practiced in the beginning very confidentially before it was rolled to the Church as a whole. So, there’s not a lot of records, and then also I would suggest reading some of the accounts of the people that were given this practice early on and what they had to say about it, especially the women. To give you some examples, Zina Huntington, “I made a greater sacrifice than to give my life, for I never anticipated again to be looked upon as an honorable woman. Nevertheless, I searched the scripture and by humble prayer to my heavenly father, I obtained a testimony for myself.” Mary Elizabeth Rollings, “A personage stood in front of the bed looking at me. Its clothes were whiter than anything I’d ever seen. I could look at its person, but when I saw its face so bright and more beautiful than any earthly being could be and those eyes piercing me through and through, I could not endure it.” And this is what Joseph had promised her, that she would receive this witness.

Lucy Walker. “Every feeling in my soul revolted against it.” After several restless nights on her knees in prayer, she said, “My room became filled with a heavenly influence. To me it was in comparison like the brilliant sun bursting through the darkest cloud. My soul was filled with a calm, sweet peace that I never knew. Supreme happiness took possession of my whole being and I received a powerful and irresistible testimony of the truth of the marriage covenant called celestial or plural marriage, which has been like an anchor to the soul through all the trials of life.”

You think about many pin this on Joseph as just Joseph. You have to answer for all these experiences. I did a video once called, “How Could They Have All Lied?” And it reminds me of this as we see these experiences that were had.

Elizabeth Whitney, her and her husband together, “We pondered upon the doctrine of polygamy continually and our prayers were unceasing that the Lord would grant us some special manifestation concerning this new and strange doctrine. The Lord was very merciful to us. He revealed unto us his power and glory. We were seemingly wrapped in a heavenly vision, a halo of light encircled us, and we were convinced in our own minds that God heard and approved our prayers. Our hearts were comforted and our faith made so perfect.

Now for a few brethren. Let’s look at Heber C. Kimball. “I never felt more sorrowful. I wept days. I had a good wife. I was satisfied.” Brigham Young, “It was the first time in my life that I desired the grave. I had to pray unceasingly and I had to exercise faith and the Lord revealed to me the truth of it and that satisfied me.” John Taylor, “I had always entertained strict ideas of virtue and I felt as a married man that this was to me, an appalling thing to do. Nothing but a knowledge of God, and the revelations of God, could have induced me to embrace such a principle as this. We, the Twelve, seemed to put off, as far as we could, what might be termed the evil day.”

And one of my favorites, Benjamin Johnson. Joseph had talked to him about marrying his sister and he said, “And almost an agony of feeling. I looked him straight in the face and said, ‘Brother Joseph, this is something I did not expect and I do not understand it. You know whether it is right. I do not. I want to do just as you tell me and I will try, but if I ever should know that you do this to dishonor and debauch my sister, I will kill you as sure as the Lord lives,’ and while his eye did not move from mine, he said with a smile in a soft tone, ‘But Benjamin, you will never know that, but you will know the principle is true and will greatly rejoice in what it is, what it will bring to you,’ but, ‘How?’ I asked, ‘Can I teach my sister when I myself do not understand?’ ‘But you will see and understand that,’ he said, ‘And when you open your mouth to talk to your sister, light will come to you and your mouth will be full and your tongue loose.'”

And then he described the experience talking to his sister. “I stood before her trembling, my knees shaking. Just so soon as I found power to open my mouth, it was filled, for the light of the Lord shown upon my understanding, and the subject that had seemed so dark now appeared of all subjects pertaining to our gospel, the most lucid and plain, and so my sister and myself were converted together.

I love some of those stories and that can help us see this principle at its inception. So, why was polygamy practiced? Why was it started up? So, I want to go through a timeline. 1831 was when Joseph Smith was going through trying to do the inspired version of the the Bible and is looking at the verses and was asking about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Great Patriarchs, and how it was that they were allowed to practice polygamy.

It was revealed to him at this time and it was codified in the revelation that was written out in 1843 that is now Doctrine and Covenants section 132. In that, there are four reasons told as to why and I’m going to give you four other really good ones too, but four key ones from D&C 132. Raise up seed now onto me, as it said in Jacob 2. In the Book of Mormon it says monogamy is the principle, but at times polygamy can be the the law for a period if it was to raise up seed unto the Lord. And it’s interesting, there were lower birth rates of polygamous wives than monogamous. However, the overall number of women that had married was much higher, and so the actual overall births were quite a bit higher in studies showing this, but the most important was who they were born to and the houses that they were raised in and those influences. The keys were through the prophet and that’s how the practice was done. I’ll talk more about that in the second video about really the Utah days.

Number two, Abrahamic sacrifice was a key test to ultimately try the saints. If you look at the screen, Helen Mar Kimball said, “The Prophet said that the practice of this principle would be the hardest trial the saints would ever have to test their faith. I did not try to conceal the fact of it’s having been a trial, but confess it had been one of the severest in my life, but that it had also proven one of the greatest of blessings. I could truly say it had done the most towards making me a saint and a free woman in every sense of the word and I knew many others who could say the same and to whom it had proven one of the greatest boons, a blessing in disguise.”

Number three is it also was a restitution of all things. Acts 3:19 through 21 says before the Lord comes again for the second coming, there would be a restitution of all things. This was part of that. And then number four, it allowed women the opportunity or more opportunities for exaltation. We learned in section 132 verse 19 that exaltation is achieved through the sealing power there of marriage, and so it did require a worthy spouse worthy husband, and so there was an interesting study that professor Catherine Danes did in 19th Century Utah, even though the men and women numbers were similar, the actual temple worthiness as measured by temple recommends and endowments was skewed to the women. So, it did allow those women in excess in that respect to have the blessings and benefits of that special ordinance.

Now, for the quick reasons why I think it was wonderful for the benefits that this provided at this time, one is those adoptions in dynastic sealings helped to form a powerful cohesion for the journey ahead. That was just brutal for them. Number two, it separated the saints from their environment. Sociologists have actually proved that for a religion to successfully grow, it requires to be a demanding religion and actually to have some moderate tension with its host community. You could say polygamy certainly did that. In fact, if you look at the RLDS, they rejected polygamy and if you look today, they are very small numbers and barely recognizable amongst the protestants in differences. Number three, economic advantages. So, if you think about it, the wealth was more equally distributed through this process of plural marriage, specifically because you had to prove and show that you had the resources to support another wife. And about 50% of the plural marriages in total happened between 1844 and 1859, which was the part of the transition to Utah, the settling of the frontier, essentially very harsh conditions and would be much more difficult without those resources maybe spread to that degree. The last thing I would say is social support, especially when the men were off serving missions.

Okay. So, when we jump forward to 1834. This is when Joseph was actually commanded by an angel to begin the practice of polygamy. He didn’t start right away. He wasn’t told, it sounds like, how to do it at all. There’s no manual. He was on his own. He talked about how challenging it was to break the molds of things. He says, “I tried for a number of years to get the minds of the saints prepared to receive the things of God, but we frequently see some of them, after suffering all they have for the work of God, will fly to pieces like glass as soon as anything comes that is contrary to their traditions.”

So, his first attempt, it didn’t go well, but it was with Fanny Alger and it was a housekeeper in the house. She was 18 or 19 at the time. Like I said, 1835, 1836 he got permission from the parents. He had Levi Hancock be the mediator as well as the one to perform the marriage. It doesn’t appear that Emma knew, but it’s a little uncertain. There aren’t records really clearly from either one of them personally firsthand, but she did find out. She blew up and could barely be consoled, and Joseph did not practice polygamy for another five years until the angel appeared again. That was in 1841. So, second time on there and Joseph began a practice that has become very hard to understand in our day today, and that was marrying women who were already married.

Now, if you look here, this is from the Gospel Topics Essays. He says, or they say there, “Joseph Smith’s sealings to women already married may have been an early version of linking one family to another. These ties extended both vertically from parent to child, and horizontally from one family to another. Today, such eternal bonds are achieved through the temple marriages of individuals who are also sealed to their own birth families. In Nauvoo, most, if not all, the first husbands seemed to have continued living in the same household with their wives during Joseph’s lifetime, and complaints about these sealings with Joseph Smith are virtually absent from the documentary record. These sealings may also be explained by Joseph’s reluctance to enter plural marriage because of the sorrow it would bring to his wife Emma. He may have believed that sealings to married women would comply with the Lord’s command without requiring him to have normal marriage relationships. This could explain why according to Lorenzo Snow, the angel reprimanded Joseph for having demurred on plural marriage even after he’d entered into the practice. After this rebuke, according to this interpretation, Joseph returned primarily to sealings with single women.

Another possibility is that in an era when lifespans were shorter than they are today, faithful women felt an urgency to be sealed by priesthood authority. Several of these women were married either to non-Mormons or former Mormons, and more than one of the women later expressed unhappiness in their present marriages. Living in a time when divorce was difficult to obtain, these women may have believed the sealing to Joseph Smith would give them blessings they might not otherwise receive in the next life.” As one example, Orson Hyde was a member of the Twelve. So, he’s one you would say, “Wow, that must have been a very faithful brother.” I’m sure he was, but his wife, Miranda, actually, when divorce laws were much easier and they were in Utah, she did divorce Orson Hyde back then. So, that was one of these women. So, one of the things I’d like to share this from a phenomenal book. If there’s one book I would like to recommend on this, it’s this publication. So Brian and Laura Hales have studied this topic I think more than anybody, done more research. They have a 1500 page trilogy on this. They’ve tried to get every document out there. They run a phenomenal website called Joseph Smith’s Polygamy. Very helpful for answers in even reader’s digest fashion. This is their book summarizing the 1500 page trilogy, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy Toward a Better Understanding. One tiny snippet out of that on this topic, “As odd as these arrangements seem to us today, it is important to note that there is no unambiguous evidence indicating that Joseph ever treated these women as wives and sexual partners. Observers may take solace that none of the civil couples tied to this union left any public complaints against Joseph for the arrangements.” In fact, even Joseph’s enemies did not use this against him at the time, which is a good indication they knew that these were eternity only marriages.

Now, there were two that may have been for time and eternity and these are the ones that critics have just bashed on for years and it’s a fascinating study in how these things can be portrayed by critics, and I want to just dive into one because it was just solved in a sense by a DNA study in 2016. So, one of these, there were 14 marriages to women that were already married. Two of them potentially according to the laws of the land, had not been divorced. However, they had been separated from their husbands and where it was very challenging and difficult to get divorces, especially if you’re poor, especially if you’re on the frontier, behavior was looked at significantly to determine that. So, in a sense they had the church divorce. Also, according to the scriptures, the new and everlasting covenant actually does away with all old covenants. So, in a sense, the old covenant would have been done away with this happening. However, critics said, “Hey, no, it’s not in the records, on the legal records back in Illinois in that time,” and so, they looked at this one thing, Sylvia Sessions on her death bed was one of these 14, called her daughter, Josephine Lyon, in and said, “Josephine, you are Joseph Smith’s daughter.”

Told her that. Well, so that was the evidence right there that Joseph practiced sexual relations with women that were married, which is called polyandry and it’s really in four times in D&C 132. It’s considered adultery, and so that’s where they thought they had kind of the smoking gun, the evidence here, but as I mentioned, you could also say that the old marriage was done away because of the new and everlasting covenant. However, DNA evidence in 2016 just showed that William Lyon, who was Sylvia’s prior husband was the father, not Joseph. So, I think she was talking about in a spiritual sense because of that sealing that had happened.

So, that’s the kind of stuff that’s happening out there and you don’t know these details and it can be very simple. Another issue that critics will bring up about this specific topic is they’ll say, “Joseph sent men off on missions so he can marry their wives,” which is just a crock. In fact, if you look, three of these we don’t have dates for. So, you can’t include those. The 11 we do have dates for only one of them, this would apply to, and it was Orson Hyde and literally was a year after he was out on his mission. We have a date, but we actually have a second date for Marinda and it was actually after Orson got home. So, even that. So, it’s easily debunked. The truth is there.

Okay. 1842. This was the third time the angel came. If you recall on the Gospel Topics Essay, it talks a little bit about that. The angel said that Joseph had demurred on practicing fully polygamy and there was actually a sword and he was threatened with destruction in this, and so this is when Joseph really started marrying heavily. 35 total wives, six of them we don’t have dates. 23 out of 29 happen in this next 18 months, so about 80%overall. According to my calculations, only about a quarter of these involved any type of sexual relations. So, even though he was commanded there and there were no children that can be found even with DNA evidence now there, but one of the biggest complaints that critics will also make are underage marriages, and there were two specific marriages that were under 16.

Now, one of them is very low documentation associated with it. Nancy Winchester, age 14 to 15, but possibly not even, some historians said maybe not even included as a wife. No real documentation to go off of on there. However, Hellen Mar Kimball was the other one. She was 14, three months away from being 15, and that marriage is very comforting if we know two things. One, no sexual relations. This was one of those that we talked about a dynastic sealing between the families. It was her father’s request, Heber. She agreed, and it was not viewed as a sexual situation at all. In fact, in Utah, there was a policy that they asked that if a marriage was done before age 18 that they wait until 18 for consummation and they subscribed that back to they believe from Joseph. There’s another thing I want to just show you. This was a graph that was, and this is another great book, The Persistence of Polygamy.

They’ve got a graph. They’ve done research on the census records of marriages, and so if you actually look, now 14 years old would have been eyebrow raising, but not completely unusual. If you look at this chart right here, this shows on the far right in 1850, those that were married at age 14 and under in the Midwest was 1.5% of the marriages, and I’ve got a great one to share with you. The governor of the state, Thomas Ford, governor of Illinois, was married at age 28 to a 15 year old. So, there’s a great example and this is a great case in using presentism that we do on this. So, the last thing on that, I wanted to just say in 1842, 1843, there were rumors being spread heavily. This was a confidential thing at the time. In the Gospel Topics Essay, it says here, “Nevertheless, rumors spread, a few men unscrupulously used these rumors to seduce women to join them in an unauthorized practice, sometimes referred to as spiritual wifery.”

John C. Bennet was the big one there. “When this was discovered, the men were cut off from the church. The rumors prompted members and leaders to issue carefully worded denials that denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy, but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated, celestial plural marriage. The statements emphasized that the C,hurch practiced no marital laws other than monogamy while implicitly leaving open the possibility that individuals under direction of God’s living prophet might do so.”

Okay, let’s go to 1843 and talk about Emma. So, Emma was up and down about polygamy. We don’t know a lot of details. In fact, there’s nothing in first person for Joseph or Emma. So, it’s very difficult on these. We are told in section 132 that Joseph had transgressed and Emma was to forgive him. We don’t know what that means, but it may be that he practiced polygamy without her acknowledgment. Maybe he was trying to not hurt her. Maybe he was trying to not have her be accountable and be responsible for the doctrine, or it could be that he did and he did tell her and she blew up and there was a discussion in there of the Law of Sarah, the first wife to give permission, but if rejected by the first wife, then maybe he felt justified to move forward. We don’t know. Up and down, but I do want to share a very powerful quote here from Emma Smith to Marie Jane Woodward, a domestic working the Smith home, overheard an emotional conversation between Emma and Joseph regarding plural marriage. Knowing that Mary Jane had been listening, Emma approached her the next morning. “She told me to sit down on the bed by her and we both sat down on the bed that I was making.

She looked very sad and cast down and there she said to me, ‘The principal of plural marriage is right, but I am like other women. I am naturally jealous-hearted and can talk back to Joseph as long as any wife can talk back to her husband, but what I want to say to you is this. You heard me finding fault with the principle. I want to say that principle is right. It is from our Father in Heaven. What I said I have got to repent of. The principle is right, but I am jealous-hearted. Now, never tell anybody that you heard me find fault with Joseph or that principle. The principle’s right, and if I or you or anyone else find fault with that principle, we’ve got to humble ourselves and repent of it.'”

At Joseph’s death, Emma cried over the casket and said Joseph was her crown. She loved Joseph to the end. So, at the martyrdom, there were 29 men, 50 women, that had been entered into the practice and by the time they arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, there were 196 men and 521 women, and then it became an official practice in 1852. I’ll talk about that a lot more in the next video. Hope you enjoyed. Subscribe for more. See you next time.

Resources:

Websites:

LDS.ORG Gospel Topics Essay: Plural Marriage in Kirtland & Nauvoo https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-mar…

Brian & Laura Hales Website Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: http://josephsmithspolygamy.org

Fairmormon – many subtopics covered https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mo…

Podcasts:

Hales – series of podcasts on their own channel – titled Joseph Smith’s Polygamy http://josephsmithspolygamy.org/audio/

LDS Perspectives Podcast Interview – Tough Questions About Mormon Polygamy http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/0…

YouTube Videos:

The Interpreter Foundation – Special Roundtable Discussion: Polygamy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-tgk…

Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Toward A Better Understanding – Brian & Laura Hales https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOV9Z…

Books:

The Persistence of Polygamy – Joesph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy by Newell Bringhurst and Craig Foster

Joseph Smith’s Polygamy – Toward A Better Understanding by Brian and Laura Hales

Wiford Woodruff’s Witness: The Development of Temple Doctrine by Jennifer Ann Mackley

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