Recently, John Dehlin wrote: “Warren Jeffs is the logical conclusion to what Joseph Smith started.”
I wrote: “And yet there are millions of Mormons who have no desire to do and are frankly disgusted by the things that Jeffs has done. Let’s ignore all those people and sum up the whole of Joseph Smith and his religion in what this one man has done. Indeed, a logical conclusion.”
I followed up with this: “I think Jeffs is much more the logical conclusion of the harems of the 1850s through the end of the 19th century and that the harems of that time period are more suitably traced to Brigham Young and his inner circle for which we have flesh and blood proof, dozens of times over, of having indulged in adulterous, polygamist relationships.
“And to add to that flesh and blood proof, we have decades of sermons known to have come directly from Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, Parley Pratt, and many others advocating the practice and declaring it essential to exaltation. We can go straight to the journal of discourses for this.
“We have no such thing for Joseph Smith. The closest thing is D&C 132, which wasn’t made known to the church until 8 years after Joseph was killed. It was published along with D&C 110, the twin pillars of doctrinal foundation for the practice that Brigham Young promulgated and mass produced well after Joseph.”
And this: “If there is anything Joseph really taught that could be in any way understood to justify Brigham in the franchise that he began, I think Brigham extrapolated many light years further than what Joseph ever taught, intended, or had in mind. I think Joseph had very different things in his heart than Brigham. It’s convenient for Brigham to claim oral tradition as the foundation for his practice. What do we have as a basis to discern the heart of Brigham? We have the journal of discourses in which he says he would feel justified (on the basis of his doctrine of blood atonement) in putting a javelin through the heart of one of his wives caught in adultery.
“What do we have as a basis to discern the heart of Joseph? We have the whole of the Book of Mormon (in which polygamy is condemned), the 1835 doctrine and covenants, which contained a statement (removed decades after Joseph’s death) on marriage between one man and one woman as the only accepted definition of marriage, and…. oh yeah, we have the words of people decades later telling us what they heard Joseph tell them. Easy to put words in the mouth of a dead man.
“And ‘light years’ is used fully intentionally. Light is said to be the speed limit of the universe. Nothing can travel faster than light. What I’m wittingly and not merely figuratively saying here is that there seems to me to be a physical impossibility to directly link Joseph Smith to what Brigham Young became. The latter was acting of his own volition on his own errand in promulgating things that he held in his very own heart.”
In response to someone who talked about his dad having similar views to me, and mentioned Whitney Horning and Denver Snuffer, I wrote: “In short, I’d say, yes, you can probably put me in the same category as your dad. I haven’t yet read Whitney’s book, but I’m interested in doing so. And yes, I’ve read and listened to a lot from Denver.
“At the very least, I think Joseph Smith deserves the benefit of a doubt from us. Brigham was clear and overt about all of these things. We have a huge, direct basis for drawing conclusions about Brigham’s views.
“On the other hand, we have little to no direct basis for drawing the same conclusions about Joseph Smith. He never wrote about polygamy except to condemn it.
“Because of this complete lack of written evidence from Joseph himself, combined with the sometimes convincing accounts of members decades later – if we take them at face value – there inextricably follows the necessity for us to heap endless, inferred conclusions on Joseph about what else he must have been. We have to do this to explain away the pieces that don’t fit, if he was indeed a polygamist.
“First and foremost, he had to have been a pathological liar. And he had to have been preeminently good at it. He had to fool many of those closest to him, right down to Emma, who was ever devoted to him and defended him.
“Before we know it, we’re drawing conclusions and making statements that seem to endow Joseph with some kind of magical mojo that allowed him to cast spells on men and women, who were initially repulsed by the idea of polygamy, but eventually gave into him.
“Conveniently for Brigham, he didn’t need any of that magical mojo. He could just come right out and tell it like it was and people would fall in line.”
Then, he asked how I and his father could have previously believed that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy and been okay with that and then changed our view to condemn it. I wrote:
“Ah, that is a great question. You’ve got me thinking. I might have to come back to this. It’s a completely legitimate question. To be honest, it’ll probably take me some time to reflect back over the path that has led me to where I am right now.
“In short, let’s just say that a mental model I previously had about the church, its condition, and its teachings was replaced by another one that just seemed to explain so much more.
“This is how science progresses, by paradigm shifts. Revolutions in science always involve a reorientation of our view and our most basic assumptions or axioms we base our conclusions on. Something as simple as fixing the sun as the absolute reference frame in our solar system and saying it’s actually the earth going around the sun rather than vice versa simplified our models of planetary orbits. On the basis of an earth-centric reference frame, science had concluded that planets must move in complex loop-within-loop orbits. Moving to a sun-centric reference frame, a much simpler conception of the solar system naturally fell out of it.
“Essentially, that’s what Passing the Heavenly Gift did for me. That’s the only one of Denver’s books I’ve actually read all the way through (well, I also read a much shorter one called Ten Parables). Once we let go of the idea that Brigham and his successors had to be prophets in actual deed and not just in title or office in the church, we can simplify almost all the headache that the LDS church currently has as they try to either justify or sweep under the rug polygamy, blood atonement, refusal to give black members the priesthood, and so forth.”
Then, this person said he would love to see someone like me or his dad on Mormon Stories to talk about the process we’ve gone through in coming to believe this alternate version of history:
“I would love to see more on this topic on Mormon Stories. One possible impediment to seeing something like this is probably that most people who run in the ‘Dehlin’ or ‘Waters of Mormon’ types of circles are already utterly burned out on the topic. I don’t think they want to see yet another person who doesn’t believe Joseph was a Brigham-style polygamist. In fact, as I write this, I see someone putting laughy faces on my comments above. That’s a case in point.
“But, there is some stuff that John (Dehlin) has already done. I believe he interviewed Denver way back in like 2012 when I first came across Denver. In 2013, there was the interesting bubble trouble episode where they talked about some leaked power point slides where church leadership had put all the biggest threats to the church in different sized and colored bubbles. Denver was one of those bubbles. Then, there was an interview done with Adrian Larsen that I thought was interesting. I think that was John who did that one, but I’m not sure.”
I followed up with this: “Correction, it was actually Lindsay Hansen Park that did the interview with Adrian Larsen.”
As a more general comment in the main thread, I wrote: “I guess I just want to see credit given where credit is due. Brigham Young, in the great entrepreneurial spirit of America, succeeded in building an empire based on adultery and fear. And the journal of discourses gives us plenty of basis for concluding this. The Mormon Reformation was Brigham’s, not Joseph’s. The great institution of polygamy that lasted to the end of the 19th century, continuing illegally and secretly by some of the top leadership from 1890 through 1904, is Brigham’s, unequivocally.
“Only over the subsequent 100 years have we been able to shed ourselves of Brigham’s abominations. Joseph created none of that.”
And another follow-up thought: “I keep asking myself why I’m even here writing this stuff. And I think the answer to my own question is I feel like the soul of a beautiful religion is at stake.
“What I believe Joseph was actually trying to get people to embrace is a pearl of great price. And there were others with other designs in their hearts who came and shoveled a steamy heap of crap on top of that pearl. Many were happy to embrace the pile of crap, while very many others parted ways.
“This parting of ways has happened from the beginning. Emma did not follow Brigham. She was not fond of Brigham and stated that Brigham had made bogus of the church. She said that without Joseph, there was no church. Under Brigham’s reign of terror, many others subsequently parted ways after arriving in Utah. Brigham condemned these people as apostates.
“Still later, we have seen the LDS church bleed membership to the point that maybe only a fifth of members of record actually go to church. Had the pearl not been hidden and forgotten under a pile of crap, perhaps there would be many of these people who would still embrace the religion.”
In a separate comment, someone said something about being glad that Emma didn’t put up with Joseph’s BS. I wrote: “I’m actually wondering when she did that. She never called him out. She never left him. And she always denied that he practiced polygamy. That’s the great anomaly in this whole thing and one of the most important facts to give us pause when we ascribe to him the sorts of things Brigham was known without any question to have engaged in. Emma was intelligent, strong minded, and independent. She was strong enough to figuratively flip Brigham the bird. Why do we think she would have withered under Joseph had he been practicing polygamy?”
...it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ...that ye must build your foundation... 