149: We’ve Lost the Argument

In this installment Denver discusses the persistent malignment of Joseph Smith and how it stacks up against the actual evidence in the historical record up to the date of his death. The discussion further addresses how, as well as why, the inaccurate narrative of Joseph Smith has been promoted and perpetuated since his death in 1844. Transcript My wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law have a book—I don't know what they call it—book gang or something. (I know it’s not a book “club”; they wanted to sound more militant than that.) Whatever the group calls themselves—and they read books every month and then talk about them. And as a result, a book came to my wife’s attention that (the two of us) we read together (which is not altogether true; we listened to the book on tape as we were driving or sitting in a sauna until we finished the thing). However, we own a copy of the book. So I have looked into the text itself. It was a New York Times bestseller. [The] copyright is 2018, so it’s been around for a few years (although I’d not heard of it). [I] mentioned it to some people, and apparently, a lot of people have read this book. It's called Educated, A Memoir, written by Tara Westover. It’s autobiographical, but a number of things have been changed, as the book tells you; names and identifying details got changed because, apparently, some of the people who are living and who are identifiable if you knew her and her family well enough or her experiences well enough, you’d be able to identify them. So in that sense, it’s autobiographical—but it’s not altogether nonfiction; there is some fictionalized details to it. She had a dysfunctional family, a father who was a survivalist and a conspiracy theorist. And they lived in Idaho on a farm with a junkyard on it, and he was a junker. And the family included a brother who was both abusive and suffered a number of head injuries that made him even more prone to violence. And she suffered at the hands of that abusive brother. But the family was “Mormon” (after a fashion)—a kind of conspiracy-theorist-based family with a strong patriarch who (the father, you know) ruled with an iron hand. She (in the book) would characterize her father as being bipolar and having some mental deficiencies. But essentially she grew up uneducated, and then (through self study) managed to get herself through the ACT and got admitted and attended Brigham Young University where she got a bachelor’s degree and got the notice of a faculty member who sent her on a program to Cambridge. She wound up on a scholarship to Cambridge, got her Master’s of Philosophy (after her Bachelor’s at Brigham Young), her Master’s from Trinity College in Cambridge, [and] subsequently became a visiting fellow at Harvard University, and then returned to Cambridge where she got her Ph.D. in History in 2014. Throughout the book... The story is gripping. I mean, it’s... Once you get started, it’s hard to put the book down. I imagine that if you were to ask for an account of the same events through the eyes of other people, that you may come away with a different conclusion about many of the people, many of the personalities, and many of the events in the book—and she makes no pretensions about it being altogether accurate. But in her journey to become educated, she has to fight against the limitations of her background and overcome that—in a way that is a heroic story. And the details of the characters as they’re being unraveled in the story, it’s really quite gripping. And it’s remarkable. And she’s a remarkable person. As she gets into her Ph.D. program and along the way, it becomes apparent that her command of historical investigation, different historical philosophies, and different historians are something with which she’s acquainted at a doctoral level. And it’s an impressive sojourn throughout the whole of it. (And her writing style is really good; she creates a world through the words she employs that pulls you in and really lets you see the scenes unfold as she narrates them through.) But there was one thing in the book that saddened me considerably, because what it tells me is that—at this point, with the current state of historical analysis—we’ve altogether lost the argument, and people have reached a conclusion which, in my view, is unsupported by the historical record. But when a Ph.D. historian that writes such a compelling book includes this passage in it, it’s just now taken for granted that the thing I will read to you in a moment is an established fact beyond all dispute, and that you needn’t even investigate the matter any further. Here’s the paragraph: I thought of Joseph Smith, who’d had as many as 40 wives. Brigham Young had had 55 wives and 56 children. The church had ended the temporal practice of polygamy in 1890, but it had never recanted the doctrine. As a child, I’d been taught by my father but also in Sunday School that in the fullness of time, God would restore polygamy, and in the afterlife, I would be a plural wife. The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness. The more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given. Well, that might be true enough about where the LDS Church is at present, because they’ve said as much in their essays that they’ve put out on their website. But for someone who’s investigating the provenance of polygamy in the LDS Church, the picture is considerably more muddled than the paragraph that she’s given there. And she allows no room for doubt. She allows nothing for the possibility that perhaps what the church is advocating is not, in fact, supported by the historical record but was rather introduced by Brigham Young after the death of Joseph Smith. The work that has been done by Rob Fotheringham in the videos that he’s put out on YouTube, the book that has been written by Whitney Horning, and efforts by others (myself included) to go back and look at the source material raises considerable doubt about whether or not Joseph Smith ever had what would be called a “wife” other than Emma Smith. He proclaimed to the contrary, that he had that one wife. Joseph Smith certainly did something that was called “sealing.” But at the time that the word “sealing” was used during Joseph Smith's lifetime, the word did not necessarily imply marriage, and it certainly didn’t imply marital relations in a sexual sense. That changed considerably when the public practice was announced in 1852, and the effort to advocate it by Brigham Young turned sealing into not only marriage, but sexual relations and the production of progeny and so on. I mean, the form that it existed in before the death of Joseph Smith was nothing like the form that sealing took after it was adopted by Brigham Young. I would hope that historians would be a little more humble about the whole subject. The multi-volume set that Brian Hales put together advocates the party line and makes assumptions based upon the post “public announcement” of it in 1852 and the affidavits that got gathered when they were in the middle of litigation over the authenticity of the church’s claim to be the original during the Kirtland Temple lawsuit—and then, subsequently, the constitutional challenge to determine that it was an authentic part of the belief of Mormons that plural wives was in-and-of-itself “salvific.” Brigham Young attributed advice that he got from a U.S. Senator—and the likely candidate for that was Stephen Douglas; he doesn’t identify who the senator was—but that the senator had advised Brigham Young that if he could defend plural wives as an “essential part of salvation in the religion of the Mormons” that it would pass scrutiny under the First Amendment before the United States Supreme Court. That resulted in a whole series of sermons that, in fact, tied salvation directly to having plural wives (which, as it turns out following the Manifesto, becomes really clear that that was a convention that was adopted—a teaching that was adopted—for litigation purposes). They backed off of it, and Wilford Woodruff (and all those subsequent church leaders that followed after him) never once said, “Oh, and by the way, we continue to be damned because we don’t have plural wivery going on.” It just got eliminated, and salvation was still possible (in the Mormon religion) without the presence of the plural marriage. That epoch between the 1852 time period and the decision of the United States Supreme Court—in Reynolds vs. United States—was a period in which illegal contrivance was used in order to buttress a lawsuit that the church had hoped to win. And nothing more than that. But those statements—those dogmatic statements involving salvation—produced, in turn, a whole host of offshoot fundamentalist groups that believe that their salvation (using quotes from that era, using the Journal of Discourses, using things that were said by presidents of the church, things that were said by members of the Quorum of Twelve to justify winning a lawsuit), they rely on those today to justify the continued practice, with the mistaken belief that their salvation is dependent upon that. The whole of Mormon history has been polluted by the extravagant claims that Brigham Young made and attributed to Joseph Smith—because Brigham didn’t think that he had the persuasive authority to get people to adopt the practice if he was the originator. He had to lay it at the feet of the more respected predecessor, Joseph Smith. And so, he and others who wanted access to more women went along with him. But if you go to the historical record and you limit your inquiry to anything that was in existence on June 27th, 1844 (the day that Joseph Smith was murdered) and before that date, you don’t have anything to tie Joseph to the practice other than rumors and innuendos and accusations, many of which are from people that are not credible. ...