American Zion

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• In June 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints completed a new library and archives. The massive five-story, 230,000-square-foot facility houses 270,000 books, pamphlets, and magazines, 240,000 collections of archival records, and tens of thousands of photographs and audiovisual recordings. Dozens of credentialed historians work in offices on the upper floors, and researchers frequent the desks and computers on the lower. The structure is evidence of a faith inescapably committed to preserving, minding, and detailing its past.
• It occurred to me that if Mormonism was characterized by a cacophony of divergent voices in the present day, it had likely been so for some time.
• Smith’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, dictated a memoir in her later years that recounted her son’s prophetic mission. Yet when Brigham Young, who claimed to be Smith’s successor, came to feel that the work was a threat to his own authority, he ordered all copies burned.
• Joseph Fielding Smith’s final years witnessed a new generation of historians within the faith who were less anxious to sacralize Mormonism’s past and more eager to place it within its historical context. Participants in this movement, calling themselves proponents of the “New Mormon History,” used tools from the secular academy to confront myths and stories that had long been taken for granted. One of the group’s leaders, Leonard J. Arrington, was the first credentialed scholar to be appointed church historian, in 1972. He helped open the archives to all researchers and promoted a version of Mormon history that could, in his words, “stand on two legs—the leg of faith and the leg of reason.”
• Yet when Arrington’s division produced a new one-volume history of the faith in 1976, The Story of the Latter-day Saints—it was meant to be a replacement for Smith’s Essentials in Church History—some leaders feared that it did not grant enough space for divinity. Despite the book’s immediate success in finding readers, church authorities decided not to issue a new printing for two decades. They also canceled a massive multivolume historical series that was scheduled for the church’s sesquicentennial in 1980. By 1982, Arrington was unceremoniously released as church historian; within another decade, several of Arrington’s fellow historians were excommunicated, and archival access was closely guarded once again.
• Mormonism quenched their thirst for biblical roots through modern-day prophets and apostles, for familial certainty through temple sealing rituals, and for elusive knowledge through priesthood authority. Joseph Smith offered an anchor to people who felt themselves at sea.
• The federal government soon declared war on the Mormon practices of polygamy and theocracy, at one point dispatching the army to Utah to quell what the government believed to be an insurrection four years before the Civil War. The ensuing legal dispute would come to shape how American law still defines the limits of religious liberty today.
• Even if not every American knows a Mormon, they still know Mormonism, and have a faint sense of its troubled—or troublesome—past.
• Joseph Smith’s first revelations spoke of a “people” who were united through God’s word. However, Mormon culture has never been fully homogeneous, despite an ecclesiastical emphasis on unity. The surrounding culture of religious competition and individual liberty—the same culture that enabled the Latter-day Saint church to exist in the first place—also ensured that members within the faith could fight over its true meaning. The tradition has, as a result, always been home to a wide spectrum of ideas and experiences. Some of these divisions resulted in denominational schism; scholars have traced more than four hundred different movements that have sprouted from Smith’s original vision.
• Similarly, the church’s first congregation in Ohio, in 1831, was led by a man known only as “Black Pete,” whose quick departure was indicative of the difficult place that non-White saints inhabited within the faith.
• Israel Daniel Rupp, a historian, had just published a volume documenting America’s many denominations, including a passage on Mormonism that Smith had provided. The prophet was thrilled with their inclusion, as “every sect” deserved to “tell its own history.” He then endorsed a vision of capturing a community’s highs and lows. “Although all is not gold that shines,” Smith confessed, they could take comfort that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” In other words, it is through the spirit of competition, the alchemy of refinement, that a people is formed. Smith’s first month as prophet featured a revelation insisting that the historical “record” should entail divine destiny, but in his last month he conceded that the process was much more complicated.
• Mormonism started as one family’s quest to achieve domestic unity, and now exists as a global faith—surely one of the more remarkable threads in this nation’s history.
• Citizens were afforded the chance to move, experiment, succeed, and, just as often, fail within a nation that prioritized the individual over the community. “This is the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom,” declared another of the era’s prophets, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• “It is my duty to say to you that the need was never greater of new revelation than now,” blasted Emerson to a shocked gathering of Harvard ministers-to-be in 1837. Though Emerson blanched at the type of revelation—and especially the revelatory authority—that eventually flowed from Joseph Smith Jr., he appreciated its audacity.
• Palmyra was amid what Lucy called “a great revival of religion,” a series of spiritual upheavals known as the Second Great Awakening. Itinerant ministers preaching hellfire sermons were so pervasive in upstate New York that later historians referred to it as the “burned-over district.”
• Closer to Palmyra, Asa Wild claimed to have learned from Christ himself that all denominations were corrupt. Whereas visionary experiences had previously been seen as a threat to religious order, America’s spiritual marketplace not only allowed but encouraged such episodes.
• He was both committed to finding truth and unmoored by the quest. The revivals only succeeded at stirring “division amongst the people,” as “all good feelings” were “entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.” Chaos reigned.
• Millions of believers today identify this moment as the “First Vision,” the origins of a global faith. In the 1820s, however, it was just another manifestation of America’s spiritual revolution, which opened the heavens for earnest seekers.
• From his mother, Joseph inherited an expectation of divine manifestations; from his father, a commitment to unorthodox searching. And from his nation, the prophet-to-be was afforded the freedom to embrace both.
• Once Joseph started dictating text, Emma, who served as his first scribe, was shocked at what she heard. Her husband “could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well worded letter,” yet here he was “dictating a book” with characters, plot, and doctrine. At one point after sharing a passage that detailed walls surrounding Jerusalem, Joseph asked if such a thing were plausible. When Emma confirmed it was, he shouted, “Oh! I was afraid I had been deceived.” Emma always referred to this work as a bedrock of her faith.
• The Book of Mormon was America’s most substantial contribution to the world’s scriptural canon. A multilayered story with numerous narrators, mixed genres, and elements that both drew from and challenged cultural currents, it was destined to elicit strong responses. Critics called it “the greatest piece of superstition that has ever come within the sphere of our knowledge” even before its publication. But the book was immediately embraced by Smith’s followers as profound scripture. Today, it inspires millions of believers and fascinates scores of religious scholars.
• Mormonism’s entrenched and consistent patriarchal culture was rooted in its founding scripture.
• Much of the Book of Mormon’s narrative demonstrates a deep uneasiness toward democracy. Nephi’s followers desire that he rule as “their king,” a position he reluctantly accepts because it was “according to the commandments of the Lord.” (Or not so reluctantly: Nephi has a penchant for, as narrator, highlighting simultaneously his own importance and his humility.) The only problem with monarchies is a pragmatic one: the impossibility of choosing “just men” for rulers. Even when a system of judges is established in lieu of a hereditary monarchy, the new law is based on God’s commandments rather than majority vote. “Now it is better that a man should be judged of God than of man,” Mosiah, the last of the prophet-kings, cautions, “for the judgments of God are always just, but the judgments of man are not always just.”
• Emma likely appreciated the additional space, but the new six rooms meant their domestic sphere doubled as church headquarters. She had missed the official founding in April, probably due to pressing matters in Harmony, but perhaps also from internal turmoil.
• As with most antebellum religions, women filled the pews but lacked access to the pulpit.
• As they departed, an emotional Isaac Hale told Joseph that he would “much rather have followed [Emma] to her grave.” Emma never saw her parents again.
• Smith’s authority was not to be questioned. Mormonism was a hierarchical structure, a check against democratic ethos, as “all things must be done in order.” The Church of Christ went through several ecclesiastical evolutions over the following two centuries, but prophetic supremacy was a constant throughline.
• Before becoming an international phenomenon, Mormonism was a family affair.
• No line can be drawn between the church and other governments, of the spi[r]itual and temporal affairs of the church. Revelations must govern. The voice of God, shall be the voice of the people. —brigham young, 18441
• The county in which Zion was to be built was named Jackson, after the current president Andrew Jackson, whose personality and politics dominated what came to be known as the Jacksonian era. It was seen, in retrospect and at the time, as a moment of democratic governance, what French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville termed the “tyranny of the majority.”
• At stake was how much religious freedom and cultural diversity a democracy could incorporate.
• Even more scandalous was the fact that prominent members included a formerly enslaved man known only as “Black Pete” as well as a “prophetess” named Laura Hubble. These displays of religious exuberance, interracial worship, and women’s authority threatened the frontier region’s already tenuous claims to cohesion.
• Both Black Pete and Laura Hubble disappeared from the community, casualties of the faith’s narrower boundaries.
• The cultural obsession became so immense that Ralph Waldo Emerson complained that every “reading man” had “a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”
• To coordinate the church’s economic activities, Smith organized the “United Firm,” though leaders kept the organization secret and discussed it only with code names.
• The Vision was Joseph Smith’s most audacious theological break with mainstream Christianity. Universalists, with whom some of Smith’s family had previously affiliated, similarly promised that every human soul would receive some degree of salvation. And some iconoclastic theologians, like Emanuel Swedenborg, had posited a tri-layered heaven. But the Mormon cosmos was a blend of universal salvation, Christ-centric redemption, and a heavenly hierarchy centered around Smith’s ever-growing conception of priesthood authority. Smith believed “the sublimity of the ideas” contained in the Vision were so powerful “that every honest man is constrained to exclaim: ‘It came from God.’
• The trauma from this early episode of persecution framed how the saints understood their relation to the wider world.
• In 1835, after newspapers reported 109 riots over just four months, one editor concluded that American politics were based more in “mobocracy” than in “democracy.” A young Abraham Lincoln bemoaned how mobs, especially in Missouri, were permitted to “burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity.” In such circumstances, he warned, “this government cannot last.”
• “For this purpose have I established the constitution of this Land,” the revelation implored, “by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” Many Americans believed the Constitution was divinely inspired, but the Mormons nearly canonized it.
• Nor did Mormons ever forgive the Missourians for evicting them from their property, or the government for failing to intervene. Their many grievances, piled high, shaped how the saints understood their relationship to American society.
• The entire structure cost around $40,000, an astronomical price for a cash-strapped faith.
• Smith informed all those ordained to these new positions that they could trace their authority back to ministrations from resurrected biblical figures like John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John. Some within the fold were skeptical. David Whitmer later claimed that he did not hear about any angelic ordinations until Kirtland.
• Where critics saw a pretentious fraud misunderstanding foreign languages, believers celebrated a visionary equipped to find meaning in mundane objects.
• Fiscal challenges bred spiritual discontent. Despite being assured that these banking problems were “common to our whole country,” members expected more from prophetic leaders.
• A lack of contemporary evidence makes it impossible to fully explicate Smith’s relationship with Alger. It is hard, however, to dismiss Cowdery’s assertion that it was an affair.
• Saints backed up their words with action by organizing their own vigilante group known as the Society of the Daughters of Zion, commonly called the Danites. Having learned from their previous Missouri experience that “all power belongs Originally and legitimately to the people,” their militia was ready for war.
• He signed an executive order that enlisted 2,500 state militiamen to quell the rebellion. “The Mormons must be treated as enemies,” he dictated, “and must be exterminated or driven from the state.” Though Rigdon was the first to use the “extermination” rhetoric, Boggs had the resources to carry through.
• Young, Snow, the Smiths, and the rest of the saints, as well as their descendants, never forgot what had happened to them in Missouri under the supposed banner of American democracy.
• Yet the prophet faced stiff resistance from everyone he encountered, including President Martin Van Buren. “What can I do,” Van Buren, famous for his political calculations, retorted; “if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole state of Missouri.” Discussions with legislators similarly went nowhere. Many hid behind the doctrine of states’ rights, while others admitted basic politicking. Smith and his followers never forgave Van Buren and his ilk for informing them that, while their cause was just, nothing could be done for them.
• Aided by new arrival John C. Bennett, a talented yet egotistical climber who introduced Smith to powerful Illinois politicians, they secured extensive powers through a very generous city charter. (Mormons were so enthralled with the legislation that they called it their “Magna Charta.”) They established their own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, with Smith as its head, which soon boasted more active soldiers than the state’s own reserves. Politicians like Douglas frequented the town to court their support. Other than the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa’s Prophetstown in neighboring Indiana, Nauvoo was the most successful religious city-state since puritan New England in the seventeenth century.
• But Emma Smith desired more. Though the society’s idea originated with Sarah Granger Kimball, a dedicated convert from New York, the prophet’s wife quickly became its driving force. She did not want the society to operate like the “other Societies in the world.” Eliza Snow argued that “as daughters of Zion, we should set an example.” Joseph promised that they would become a “kingdom of priests,” a phrase that indicated an evolution in the Mormon conception of “priesthood,” and one that participants like Snow carefully noted.
• Nauvoo proved to be a home for a multitude of sorts. That included Elijah Able, a Black convert who was born, possibly enslaved, in Maryland around 1810. Able joined Mormonism in 1832, was ordained an elder in Kirtland, and served missions to Canada and Cincinnati. In Nauvoo, he worked as a carpenter and undertaker and even owned land. He was joined in 1843 by Jane Manning, another Black saint who walked from New England to Nauvoo with a group of other African American converts denied steamboat passage because of their skin. When she told her story to Joseph Smith, the prophet wept at the tale and offered to house her. Not all Black residents of Nauvoo were similarly satisfied with their own situations, however. Several White converts from the South took advantage of Illinois’s porous laws and brought their enslaved men, women, and children.
• Members like Able and Manning were not denied full fellowship, but only because most saints believed their faith would help them transcend their Blackness. “Thou shalt be made equal to thy brethren,” Able’s patriarch blessing promised, because “thy soul [will] be white in eternity.”
• Smith approved of Able’s priesthood ordinations and offered some form of temple ritual to Manning. For the moment, Black members found an interracial home for worship.
• In May 1842 he introduced a small circle of men into what he called an “endowment,” a ritual based on “the principles and order of the priesthood.” Many of the elements were drawn from Masonry, into which he was recently inducted.
• All involved were sworn to absolute secrecy. “This is a day of much interest to my feelings,” Snow coyly wrote in her diary. Neither Elizabeth nor Sarah ever recorded their thoughts.
• Emma Smith was unaware of the full details concerning Smith’s new unions in 1842. As stalwart defenders of traditional morality, both she and Hyrum Smith promised to banish all those found practicing polygamy.
• At Hyrum’s request, Joseph dictated another revelation, perhaps his most consequential, on July 12, 1843, that detailed “the order of the priesthood.” It posited the doctrine of polygamy as the center of an eternal patriarchal structure and declared that faithful men and their wives would become “Gods” who populated innumerable worlds with their “seed.” Emma was commanded to submit lest she “be destroyed.” Undeterred, Emma threatened Joseph with divorce. Reconciliation came months later when Joseph agreed to no more plural unions. By then, he had been married to over thirty wives, some of them teenagers, most of them without Emma’s consent or knowledge.
• None of Joseph Smith’s wives became pregnant, though several of them, including Emily Partridge, later insisted that their marriages were consummated. It is impossible to know whether teenage brides, like Sarah Whitney or Helen Mar Kimball, the fourteen-year-old daughter of apostle Heber Kimball, had sex with their prophet husband. Nor is it possible to know how much of a say they had in the first place. Given the power disparity, however, it is unlikely they exercised much agency.
• Eliza Snow found redemption in this doctrine, arguing that if celestial beings were akin to earthly ones, then it was unreasonable that “in the heav’ns parents are single.” Mormon doctrine dictated that “I’ve a mother there,” meaning a Heavenly Mother who co-presided with her husband over the cosmos. The eternities were filled with deific beings. “Gods, angels, men,” wrote Parley Pratt, “are one great family, all of the same species, all related to each other, all bound together by kindred ties.” Mormonism’s radical theology was in full bloom.
• When John C. Calhoun, the South’s most powerful senator, responded that those issues were managed at the state level, Smith rejected such a “fragile” understanding of the Constitution. “The States rights doctrine,” the prophet believed, is “what feeds mobs.” Given his experience, it was a fair point.
• A group of Mormon dissenters organized that spring and established their own newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor. Its sole issue appeared on June 7, 1844, and detailed Smith’s polygamous activities and political ambitions. The prophet immediately denounced the newspaper and ordered its destruction, insisting that he “would rather die to morrow” than see their slander “go on.”
• Fearing further incrimination, Joseph ordered that the Council of Fifty’s minutes be destroyed.
• She dreamt of her family bringing redemption to the world. Instead, the world filled them with bullets.
• Smith had never been clear or consistent in a succession plan. The apostle Wilford Woodruff described the city of saints as “sheep without a shepherd.” The Quorum of the Twelve, most of whom were away on missions, returned to Nauvoo in August 1844 to find that Sidney Rigdon had claimed the throne. He had, after all, been as instrumental as anyone, save Smith, in building the faith, and was the last remaining member of the First Presidency. The previous fourteen years seemed to point to this moment. Yet Rigdon’s erratic behavior resulted in a fallen stature, and Brigham Young’s rise as president of the Quorum of the Twelve placed the ambitious apostle much closer to the now-deceased prophet. That he had presided over the missions that had courted thousands of converts also bolstered Young’s reputation.
• Young moved quickly to consolidate power. He released leaders who did not support the Twelve’s succession. “If you don’t know whose right it is to give revelations,” he bellowed, “I will tell you[:] It is I.” Few principles were as central to his tenure as a desire to never be undercut with dissent.
• Lucy gathered family and friends together in June 1845 and revealed a series of dreams that contained an ominous warning. Men with “blacker hearts” had failed to recognize that William held familial claim to “the Presidency of the Church.” (Joseph Smith had, at times, hinted at lineal succession.)
• Young never forgave the Smiths’ role in enabling a string of challengers. His animosity launched a rivalry between the LDS tradition and their founding family that would last for over a century.
• Further, Young’s belief that Emma’s opposition to polygamy was responsible for her husband’s death led him to curtail the limited advances Mormon women had achieved in Nauvoo. He denounced the Relief Society and counseled wives to fully submit to their husbands. “When I want Sisters” to organize, he trumpeted, “I will summon them to my aide.” Until then, “let them stay at home.” Young’s patriarchal Mormonism was shaped in response to the Smith women.
• “I also baptized two black men, Allen & Green,” he added, nearly as an afterthought. It is impossible to know whether Flake’s baptism was consensual or coerced. Regardless, he found himself in Mormonism’s vanguard after James sent him to accompany Brigham Young’s advance pioneer party in 1847. Flake entered the destination two days before the prophet. By the time Young viewed the Salt Lake Valley and declared it “the place,” Flake was already planting crops.
• The saints appeared as a distinct threat due to their twin allegiances to theocracy and polygamy. Both principles were deemed incongruous with American democracy. Not that the Mormons minded: they viewed America as a rotting carcass of moral decay and political failure.
• “His followers deem him an angel of light,” observed one visitor, while “his foes a goblin damned.” Everything about Young, just like the religion he led, appeared polemical.
• In 1847, the church had achieved cultural isolation and exercised unchecked political sovereignty; by 1869, they could claim neither.
• The saints raised a militia of five hundred men, named the Mormon Battalion, the first and only religion-based militia regiment in American history.
• The trek’s best chronicler was Wilford Woodruff, an earnest forty-year-old apostle with piercing eyes and large sideburns. Woodruff had begun his diary in 1835 shortly after his conversion and he kept daily records for the ensuing sixty years. The resulting thirty volumes totaling more than six thousand pages became one of nineteenth-century Mormonism’s most crucial records.
• When apostle Orson Pratt, Parley’s brother, argued that Young’s position was akin to Speaker of the House, Young retorted, “Shit on Congress.” Colonizing required a strong, singular hand.
• Young was officially a modern Moses, though one who lived to enter the promised land.
• That they read the Declaration on a day that commemorated their exit from America, and hailed a prophet, not the president, as their sovereign leader, marked the community’s breach with the nation.
• Walker later penned one of the period’s most successful abolitionist tracts, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World; Lewis, for his part, aided those fleeing slavery through the Underground Railroad.41 Lewis accepted the Mormon faith while living in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the early 1840s.
• Brigham Young bragged in early 1847 that Lewis was “one of the best elders” the church had to offer. It was also around this time that Lewis’s son, Enoch, married Mary Webster, a White member of the church.
• In a church that merged priesthood authority and familial relations, ordaining Black men to the priesthood opened the door to miscegenation.
• The final nail came when the territorial legislature met during the frigid first months of 1852. Apostle George A. Smith introduced a bill to legalize slavery in Utah Territory. Brigham Young, despite previously expressing moderate antislavery sentiments, backed the legislation and delivered a series of sermons that offered the most explicit anti-Black theology yet uttered in the Mormon tradition. Young declared himself “a firm believer in slavery,” though the legislation he supported differentiated Utah’s practice from that existing in the South. Those of African descent were “naturally designed” for service, as “the seed of Canaan”—the very genealogical marker placed on Lewis in his patriarchal blessing—were irrevocably cursed.47 Young’s position did not go unchallenged. Apostle Orson Pratt made a valiant abolitionist stand that included an impassioned plea for Black suffrage. Pratt, known for his philosophical mind and stubborn spirit, proclaimed that it was inhumane and hypocritical to allow slavery within their religious refuge. His efforts went unheeded, however. The all-Mormon gathering ratified the prophet’s recommendation, as well as legislation that outlawed interracial sex.
• Young proclaimed, for the first time in public, that those with African ancestry could not be ordained to the priesthood. The same inherited curse that bound them to slavery also relegated them to spiritual subordination. “If there never was a prophet or apostle of Jesus Christ [who] spoke it before,” he trumpeted, “I tell you [now], this people that are commonly called Negroes” could never “bear rule in the priesthood.” It was this sermon, delivered on February 5 before a political body, that entrenched Mormonism’s anti-Black theology.
• Repulsed, Lewis fled Zion and returned to the East. Not that Young minded. The prophet boasted later that year that the legislature’s actions had “nearly freed the territory of the colored population.”
• Belinda Pratt, one of Parley’s plural wives, penned America’s first polygamous defense authored by a woman. She argued that polygamy was the only way to save women from a life of ruin and men from lasciviousness.
• After her oldest child died, she mourned not having a doting spouse. “As I am not essential to your comfort or convenience,” she pleaded to her prophet-husband, “I desire you will give me to some other good man who has less cares.”
• Utah’s divorce laws were more liberal than most states’, and Young oversaw the dissolution of over 1,600 marriages before 1866. As one historian posited, “Divorce was perhaps the safety valve that made polygamy work.”
• These experiences taught her that despite her community’s patriarchal structure, or perhaps because of it, she could not rely on men for support. “I am determined to train my girls to habits of independence so that they never need to trust blindly,” she explained. Emmeline Wells’s tenacity later became a hallmark of Mormonism’s unique brand of feminism, one primarily aimed to carve out space for agency within, rather than against, an overwhelmingly patriarchal system.
• The practice caused the Mormon population to explode: by 1870, 60 percent of Utahns were younger than twenty.
• Young instructed in March 1856 that it was time for leaders to “put away their velvet lips and smooth things,” and instead “preach sermons like pitch forks tines downward [so] that the people might wake up.”
• This push for redoubled commitment came to be known as the Reformation, and it convinced many to be rebaptized and renew their covenants. Local leaders were given a list of questions to ask each member concerning their faith and practice through a home-visiting program that reaffirmed ward authority.
• At times Young’s rhetoric turned violent. He warned that there were some sins that exceeded Christ’s atonement and could be redeemed only through “the life & blood of the individual.”
• I frequently say ‘cut their infernal throats,’ ” Young once confessed, but “I don’t mean any such thing”—his statements on “blood atonement” both instigated and justified vigilante attacks, castrations, and perhaps even a few deaths. For a population that viewed his sayings as scripture, the promptings created a combustible and dangerous environment.
• With a shortage of marriage-age women, wives became younger. Young approved one man to marry a thirteen-year-old so long as he “preserve her intact until she is fully developed into Womanhood.” One local community’s median age for wives dropped to sixteen by 1860.64
• News of a coming army set Utah Territory aflame. Woodruff worried that the “United States had turned mob,” and the church decried the “tyrannical Administration” for “totally disregarding” their freedoms. Brigham Young was furious. He was determined “not to let any troops enter this territory,” as the saints would “make every preparation to give the U.S. a Sound drubbing.”
• When Lee reported to Young and apostle Wilford Woodruff later that month, Woodruff recorded Lee saying that the migrants had “belonged to the mob in Missouri & Illinois,” that there “was not a drop of innocent blood in their Camp,” and that it was the Indians who had done the killing anyhow. Massacre leaders and perpetrators continued for years to lie to Young that Indians were solely responsible for the massacre, and Young chose to believe them despite contrary evidence.
• Shortly after the Civil War commenced in 1861, Young quipped that he “prayed for the success of both North & South” in their attempt to kill each other.
• Young’s anger was particularly piqued during the sermon. He had discovered a copy of Lucy Mack Smith’s memoir at a local church leader’s home the night before, a text he had denounced when it was first released in 1853 for alleged factual errors. Why was anyone still reading this “tissue of falsehoods,” he demanded, when he had counseled otherwise? Young required that all members submit their copies to church leaders for destruction.
• Utah’s women did not see the government as their savior.
• “Our enemies pretend that in Utah, woman is held in a state of vassalage,” Snow said. “What nonsense!”
• Young told Cannon that “next to himself [Young], I was the most hated of any of the authorities.” One observer named him the “Mormon Richelieu,” a reference to the Catholic cardinal who exercised consolidated power in seventeenth-century France.
• “Utah is a land of marvels,” observed one newspaper. “She gives us, first, polygamy, which seems to be an outrage against ‘woman’s rights,’ and then offers the nation a ‘Female Suffrage Bill.’ ” The juxtaposition was jarring. “Was there ever a greater anomaly known in the history of society?”
• Stanton admitted being impressed, even if she still denounced polygamy. “I would rather be a woman among Mormons with the ballot in my hands,” she proclaimed, “than among Gentiles without the ballot.”
• Louisa Lula Greene received support from her great-uncle, Brigham Young, to start a newspaper for Mormon women in 1872, the Woman’s Exponent, dedicated to both agitating for rights and defending the church. Wells spent any spare hour at the newspaper’s offices, activities she acknowledged appeared “out-of place” for a woman but necessary for the higher cause. She pseudonymously wrote forty-three editorials arguing for women to play a larger public role and for husbands to involve their wives in financial decisions. Wells took pride in her work and was thrilled when her husband bragged to Cannon “of my being a journalist.”
• However, her husband’s courtship of a third wife prompted investigation into its origins. Stenhouse concluded that Joseph Smith’s revelation on polygamy was nothing more than a “strained effort” to “justify, under the sanction of a commandment, the leadings of his own passions.” Such an abhorrent principle could not be “of God,” as “from beginning to end, it is man, and weak man only.” She and her husband left the church, and her 1872 exposé, A Lady’s Life among the Mormons, which included Smith’s revelation as an appendix, became one of the most popular anti-Mormon tracts of the era.
• The tensions between the activisms of Snow, who prioritized patriarchal authority, Wells, who was open to external reforms, and Stenhouse, who rejected Mormonism entirely, were never fully reconciled. Indeed, these competing impulses remained at the heart of Mormonism’s unique varieties of feminism ever since.
• The Tribune had been founded by a cadre of dissenters who followed businessman William Godbe in denouncing Brigham Young as tyrannical. Mormons had made the “fatal error,” they argued, of believing “that God Almighty intended the priesthood to do our thinking.” They called for more liberality in thought and commerce. Fanny Stenhouse and her husband, Thomas, were among those who joined what became known as the Godbeites.
• When asked how many wives he had, Cannon merely responded, “enough to keep me from meddling with the wives and daughters of other men,” a reference to Washington’s salacious reputation. His wit and congeniality won him admiration even among his rivals.
• Young seethed at their lack of enthusiasm. “They almost say by their conduct that they do not want the Lord to reveal any thing unto them,” he griped. Most local orders dissolved within a year. That Young never consecrated his own property signaled its impending demise.
• Emmeline Wells, conversely, struggled with regrets and despair. She constantly fretted over the lack of attention and her loneliness. “My nervous system is impaired with the trials I have undergone in silence and alone,” she mused. “What can I do to gain favor in his sight?” Her diaries featured long passages about a romance-less union. She compensated by dedicating herself to church and suffragist duties. And she continued to publicly defend the practice.
• Snow announced in 1873 that the Relief Society would sponsor several women to travel east and be trained in medicine. This was part of a wider effort in the church to send their best and brightest to America’s top universities in order to prove their cultural competency and bring various expertise back to Utah, so long as the students refused to forfeit doctrinal fundamentals.
• When Snow and Young visited one remote community, they were hailed as presidents of “all the feminine portion of the human race.”
• Young, whose health was so poor that he was carried to the pulpit while on a chair, expressed that he was “not half satisfied,” nor would he be “untill the devils is whip[p]ed and driven from off the face of the Earth.”
• Young’s most contested teaching was that the Garden of Eden’s Adam was God, a divine being who, after creating the world, had then taken human form in order to inaugurate the human race. This complicated cosmology, never widely embraced, was temporarily codified in a lecture delivered at the temple’s veil, yet abandoned years later.
• Cannon was devastated to learn that some apostles felt that Young was at times too overbearing, even tyrannical. They did not “approve” of his leadership style, Cannon recorded, which featured “so strong and stiff a hand” that “they dare[d] not exhibit their feelings to him.” Lingering feelings of distrust made it impossible for the Quorum of the Twelve to sustain the next prophet for another three years.
• Among their petitions to Congress was for the federal government to revoke suffrage for Utah’s women. “We never thought woman could rise up against woman,” Wells fumed.
• The Supreme Court’s verdict, issued January 10, 1879, was one of the weightiest in the institution’s history. The justices concluded that religious belief could not trump the law. Allowing Mormons to practice polygamy would “make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land”; in such a circumstance, “government could exist only in name.” Definitively repudiating the doctrine of Scott v. Stamford, the court held that the federal government was both empowered and obliged to regulate the public good at all levels. And finally, because marriage was deemed a crucial ingredient for civic virtue, it was in the nation’s interest to abolish polygamy. Citizens were granted freedom for religious belief but not for religious action. Though complicated over the years, this “belief-action distinction,” as it came to be known, has guided First Amendment interpretation ever since.
• Wilford Woodruff spoke for many when he recorded in his diary a determination to never forfeit divine law. “I would rath[er] go to prison and to Death,” he threatened. It was not an idle promise: shortly after returning from Washington, Wells learned that her husband Daniel had been arrested and imprisoned for refusing to cooperate in a polygamy trial. She proudly recorded that his bravery “will be handed down to posterity.”
• Taylor delivered what would be his final public address on February 1, 1885. He declared to the gathered saints that this was only the most recent instance of the wicked oppressing the faithful. Those considered “grey-headed folks” had already endured the expulsion from Missouri, the martyrdom in Illinois, the quasi-war in Utah. God’s chosen had survived them all, and they would survive again.
• Responding to Cleveland’s admonition to “be like us,” Wells smoldered: “We would rather live behind your prison doors and look at the light of the blessed sun through your iron grated windows, than abate a single hair’s breadth, nor one jot or tittle, of our most holy faith in God’s most perfect and holy law.” Meanwhile, his wife struggled to earn a living on her own back in Utah.
• More than fifteen hundred criminal cases were processed in Utah during the 1880s, over 95 percent of which were related to polygamy. It was an episode of prosecution rarely rivaled in American history.
• Local Relief Society presidents marched in a procession overseen by priesthood leaders, a fitting tribute to Snow’s lifelong fascination with woman’s authority, albeit within a patriarchal framing.
• He dictated a string of revelations prophesying that polygamy would never disappear from the earth. When President Cleveland opened correspondence through back channels to avert further escalation, Taylor’s answer, through Cannon, was clear: “No surrender of principle.”
• Charles Penrose, a counselor in the Salt Lake Stake presidency, worried that “the endless subterfuges and prevarications which our present condition impose” threatened “to make our rising generation a race of deceivers.” Could too stringent a commitment to one principle lead to the erosion of others?
• He reaffirmed that he was prepared to fight the government tooth and nail over polygamy until death. And yet, he added, his eyes welling with tears, he had never “disobeyed” a prophet. Then, after voicing his support for the manifesto, Smith fell back into his chair, buried his face in his hands, and cried in agony. Nobody dared to oppose after that.
• B. H. Roberts learned of the statement while traveling on a train to Salt Lake City. His earliest feelings bordered on betrayal. Given “all the saints had suffered in sustaining that doctrine,” he considered the manifesto “a kind of cowardly proceeding.”
• Mormonism … is progressive and is destined to become the religion of the age. —b. h. roberts2
• Latter-day Saint leaders embarked on a quest to situate the faith in better relations with its surrounding nation. The next three decades featured a series of significant compromises meant to meet modernity’s new expectations, changes that were accelerated as the last of the pioneer generation passed away.
  • McKay Coppins piece
• Mormonism was “doomed from the time the civilization of the country closed around the Mormon community in Utah,” prophesied the New York Times in 1893.
• But polygamy’s theological draw persisted. One apostle who helped draft the document, Marriner Merrill—a stout man with seven wives and over forty children—wrote in his diary that it was merely a publicity measure taken solely to save the temples. When leaders debated a year later as to whether the manifesto held equal authority with Joseph Smith’s 1843 revelation, Merrill scoffed. He could not “endorse” such an idea, because he “did not believe the Manifesto was a revelation from God,” but was rather “formulated … for expediency to meet the present situation.”
• Even Woodruff privately insisted that it remained a divine law, and might have been sealed to another plural wife himself in 1897. Mexico soon became their polygamous refuge. Leaders held private discussions with Mexican officials who were anxious for immigration to their northern regions and were therefore willing to overlook, at least publicly, the saints’ marriage habits.
• Yet church leaders, led by Cannon, now worried that too many saints joining the Democrats would prove “disastrous” in losing Republican support and perpetuating the Mormon/gentile divide. And so this small circle of leaders labored to overcome this half century of tradition and push the Mormon vote toward the Republicans, as the GOP appeared more likely to deliver statehood and further amnesty for polygamous families. It was a “wonderful fact,” Cannon explained, “that the great Republican party, who had always been opposed to us, had now shown such friendship.”
• Most perturbed were Moses Thatcher, a middle-aged apostle, and B. H. Roberts, who was quickly becoming the faith’s foremost historical and theological spokesman. Both had deep Democratic ties and felt the church’s covert Republican support was a betrayal. They were especially angry that Lund, Lyman, and Smith were allowed to publicly support the Republicans, while they were told to hold their tongue. Thatcher publicly argued that Jesus, were he still alive, would vote Democratic due to their prioritization of the common man, just as Satan would vote Republican due to their preference for corporations. The First Presidency, however, feared that this backlash disrupted a tenuous balance, and Woodruff threatened to deny Thatcher and Roberts admission to the Salt Lake Temple’s dedication if they refused to fall in line.
• Statehood would finally go into effect in 1896 as long as the Utah constitution included one proviso: “that polygamous or plural marriages are prohibited forever.”
• As always, however, Mormon women paved their own path. The next year, Martha Hughes Cannon, a physician, became America’s first woman elected as a state senator, having defeated her own husband, Angus, George’s younger brother, in the process. Mormonism’s patriarchal control was always stronger in theory than practice. “Let us not waste our talents in the cauldron of modern nothingness,” the senator Martha Cannon argued, but rather become women of “intellect” and “action.”
• The Latter-day Saint community was now politically divided and culturally heterogeneous, as most church leaders leaned Republican while a majority of lay members leaned Democratic. It was a bargain that brought costs and benefits: Mormons had achieved statehood but lost their unity; they lost their sovereignty but achieved more credibility. It was the first of many uneven and inchoate steps toward assimilation. In a period of pragmatic bargains across the nation, the saints were prepared to make some of their own.
• Cannon’s death in 1901, the dawn of a new century, marked the passing of the old. Arguably no Mormon leader would again simultaneously and successfully wield so much ecclesiastical and political power, as his theocratic legacy was buried with him in the Salt Lake Cemetery, located on a hill overlooking the city he had towered over for decades.
• “Oh, I wish I were a man,” complained Leah Dunford, a granddaughter of Brigham Young, in 1893. “Men can do anything on earth, but if women think of anything but waiting on men, or cooking their meals, ‘they are out of their sphere.’
• Amy refused to forget all that she had learned. Still fully committed to her church, she was ready to use her skills and knowledge to build a modern future for her faith. She and her husband represented the New Mormons: educated, progressive, and acquainted with the ideas of the age.
• External and internal disputes had left the church depleted and desperate. By 1898, the church was $2 million in debt, primarily to banks outside of Utah. Church attendance was at an all-time low, in part due to lingering traditions dating back to the underground period but also due to a lack of significance associated with local congregations. Most wards reported only 15 percent attendance. Regional Relief Societies fared no better, as participation and dues plummeted from previous decades when they were more politically active. And as the national outcry over B. H. Roberts’s congressional seat had proved, a majority of Americans still distrusted the Mormons. It was no wonder that young members like the Lymans, despite their faithful heredity, were looking for new avenues for enlightenment.
• Most popular was Nephi Anderson’s 1898 novel, Added Upon, which followed key characters through their pre-earth, mortal, and postmortem existence, thereby exhibiting the entire plan of salvation.
• Throughout the nineteenth century, the church founded upon Joseph Smith’s countercultural protest had defined itself in opposition to America’s supposedly decaying ecclesiastical carcass by a series of institutional priorities: polygamy over monogamy, empire over state, kingdom over church. Now, at the dawn of the twentieth century, with a related yet distinct Joseph Smith in charge, the LDS faith appeared more mainstream, more traditional, more American. Mormonism “is solely an ecclesiastical organization,” Joseph F. insisted in a public editorial in 1903, “separate and distinct from the state.” Coming from a Smith, this was quite the claim.
• James was finally able to enter the Salt Lake Temple in November 1894 and was baptized on behalf of her deceased niece, Mary Stebbins. This vicarious baptism was not her only temple ritual that year, however. Six months earlier, on May 18, as James stood outside the temple walls, Zina Young stood in her place to be sealed to Joseph Smith, vicariously represented by his nephew, Joseph F. Smith. Rather than being sealed to Smith as a wife, as so many women had, or as a child, as James had requested, she was instead “attached as a Servitor for eternity.” It was a singular ritual, the only ordinance ever performed for someone still living but unable to participate, and the only instance in which someone was designated an eternal servant.
• She also dictated her own autobiography, claiming her position as one of the church’s most worthy believers. Her faith in Mormonism, she concluded, “is as strong today, nay it is if possible stronger than it was the day I was first baptized.”
• Mormonism’s racial line, up until this point, had been present but blurry. Its scattered policies mostly matched the oppressive impulses of the broader nation yet were still somewhat tempered by the faith’s more universalist beginnings. But as a new century beckoned, the temptation to assimilate into America’s culture of White supremacy, the desire to make another kind of bargain, increased.
• Asahel Woodruff, son of Wilford Woodruff and president of the central states mission, even dined in the Bankses’ home and vouched for his worthiness. When one alarmed southern missionary expressed concern, Woodruff replied that while interracial marriage and worship might be considered bad in the South, “we of the north do not consider this any bar to their being proper candidates for admittance into the fold of Christ.”
• But the ground was shifting beneath both Banks’s and Harmon’s feet. LDS missionaries and leaders alike, sharing their American contemporaries’ concerns over “amalgamation,” increasingly embraced racial segregation. Mormonism’s assimilation into White culture required a more stringent racial line.
• Jane Manning James, whose living memory posed complicating reminders. She wrote Joseph F. Smith once again in 1903, begging for the opportunity to “get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead.” Her request included a stamped envelope for Smith’s anticipated, but never composed, reply. The only thing that silenced her was death, which occurred on April 16, 1908. Smith, who never approved any of her petitions, spoke at her funeral in front of an audience that packed inside the same meetinghouse where James had worshipped for decades. He eulogized the woman whose life had been defined by her Blackness by saying that, once resurrected, she would “attain the longings of her soul and become a white and beautiful person.” Only in death could James cross, but not transcend, Mormonism’s color line.
• Prompted by another mission inquiry, Smith rewrote the past to formally draw their own color line for the present. He claimed in 1908 that while Joseph Smith had indeed ordained Able to the priesthood early in the 1830s, the “ordination was declared null and void by the Prophet himself” in the 1840s.
• Smith recognized the dilemma. Privately, he remained adamant that polygamy was central to God’s law; publicly, he labored feverishly to improve the church’s public standing. He could either keep allowing polygamy to covertly spread or finally achieve political assimilation, but not both.
• The manifesto had promised the end of polygamy, Smoot reminded Smith, and the apostle-senator refused to believe that they would “deceive” the public. It was time that church leaders finally embraced the modern world by being “honest with ourselves, with our fellow-men, and with our God.” Rather than straddling the fence, they had to pick a side.
• When none arrived, leadership reluctantly announced the apostles’ resignations at the April 1906 conference, a disclosure that elicited audible gasps from the tabernacle’s audience. Taylor and Cowley, along with Marriner Merrill, who had passed away in February of that year, were then replaced by three new apostles, all of whom appeared monogamist.
• It is unclear whether Smith truly wished to end polygamy. There is evidence that he secretly allowed plural sealings to continue, although without official sanction. It is also clear that several devoted leaders continued to solemnize new unions. As one polygamist wife, Annie Clark Tanner, later put it, many could not give up “the capstone” of the gospel, and were therefore “going, for a time, in both directions.”
• The doctrine of plural marriage remained a fundamental for generations to come, albeit outside official channels, even as its history and persistence became increasingly uncomfortable for leaders and followers alike, an aggravating thorn in the modern church’s side.
• The price for these reforms was high. For political acceptance, the church sacrificed one apostle in the 1890s, and two more a decade later; for cultural cohesion, it forfeited some of its most cherished doctrines and practices; for social stability, it surrendered a degree of its long-coveted sovereignty. The faithful were now far more divided and dispersed than ever before. America’s progressive age was defined by similar types of uneasy bargains and unexpected alliances. Mormons hoped only that the results would be worth it.
• Yet Clark’s religious commitments suffered as his political star rose. He rarely attended the local LDS branches, nor did he pay a full tithing or attend the temple for over two decades. Privately, he questioned the faith’s central doctrines and considered whether Joseph Smith could have “evolve[d]” his revelations “out of his own consciousness” or environment. Surrounded by the nation’s intellectuals and politicians, Clark could not help but embrace their progressive spirit. “Are we not entitled,” he posited, “but expected to think for ourselves?” Later in life, Clark admitted that his younger self had even flirted with atheism.
• This was the dawn of a reinvigorated debate over faith and reason. These “modernists” came to be known for their willingness to forfeit traditional, fundamental doctrines in their pursuit of truths based on scientific, rational, and secular modes of understanding.
• At the forefront was John A. Widtsoe, a Norwegian immigrant who possessed a serious demeanor and a distinguished goatee. Widtsoe earned degrees from Harvard and the University of Göttingen in Germany. While teaching at the Utah State Agricultural College in Logan, Utah, where he later served as president, he penned a series in the church magazine titled “Joseph Smith as Scientist.” The essays sought to prove that not only could “Mormonism and science harmonize” but that “Mormonism is abreast of the most modern of the established views of science, and that it has held them many years—in some cases before science adopted them.” Widtsoe even offered a tepid defense of evolution—though he separated humans from the organic process by insisting that they had not descended from animals—and argued that God directed the evolutionary process. The essays were later published by the church in a best-selling book.
• To the young Talmage, who sported round spectacles and a rounder face, it was not Darwin that was a threat to belief but rather those ministers who “dabble[d] with matters from which their ignorance keep them at a safe distance.”
• Widtsoe published his own theological opus, A Rational Theology, which argued that any modern religion must be in “complete harmony with all knowledge.” These projects reflected a willingness to draw from the era’s intellectual project of professionalization and secular investigation.
• John Dewey, a central figure in the field of American pragmatism, visited BYU’s campus and mingled with the faculty and students. Church periodicals featured editorials that argued that modern faith was to be “rational,” built upon intellectual reasoning as well as belief.
• Joseph F. Smith, hoping to reaffirm Mormonism’s fundamentals, attacked the creeping secularism. Under his supervision, the General Board of Education announced a ban in 1908 on teachers using any books on the Old or New Testament written outside the church, and the next year released an official statement on “The Origin of Man” that explicitly denounced the theory that “the original human being was a development from lower orders of the animal creation.” Speculative theories, Smith believed, had no place in the Kingdom of God.
• Despite the professors’ insistence that evolution could be taught in a way that was “faith promoting, not faith destroying,” they were all eventually forced out.
• Smith denounced the “theological scholastic aristocracy,” and even the progressive-minded B. H. Roberts scoffed at those who sided with the academics. In response to one student who claimed that higher criticism shot holes into his testimony of the Book of Mormon, Roberts proclaimed, “You have misstated the matter; you mean that the Book of Mormon shoots holes into higher criticism!”
• Clark felt the prodding of his church. He was also prodded by his wife, Luacine, known as “Lute,” who chastised him for his inactivity. She wrote him from Utah expressing disappointment that he could not attend the baptism of their youngest child, Reuben III, and blamed him for not being around to mentor him. “I hope your work and ambitions are worth the sacrifice,” she needled. At one point she noted that since he was “of age,” she would “leave your religious training alone, and attend to my own.”
• Later he confessed that this was a conscious choice, a decision to “quit rationalizing” belief and instead pledge loyalty to the faith, firmly concluding that there were limits to modernity’s reason. Clark forever thought poorly of those who chose otherwise.
• The apostolic ordinations of Talmage and Widtsoe seemed to portend a persistent, if faithful, engagement with secular thinking. Mormons, Talmage argued, had “pioneered the way” of integrating the “surprising progressiveness in modern views of things spiritual.”
• Simultaneously, male leaders discouraged women from performing ritual healings, a slow, but not complete, erosion of their previously rich practice. Joseph F. Smith’s mission to consolidate the church into a streamlined bureaucracy threatened to curtail the society’s independence and relevance.
• As one of Wells’s colleagues put it, the leader was “glad to permit old truths to be dressed up in new phraseology” and “old forms modified to meet changing conditions,” so long as the changes did not “disintegrate” or “destroy the institution itself.” She was willing to bend the society, but not break it.
• prompting the prophet to call all missionaries home and to support military involvement. “I do not want war,” he claimed, but “I would rather the oppressors should be killed, or destroyed, than to allow the oppressors to kill the innocent.”
• Smith spent the remainder of 1918 by himself in his bedroom contemplating life, contemplating death, and pleading for understanding. His eighty years had been filled with deep emotions and religious enthusiasm, a familial and spiritual sense of purpose. Now, as his days dimmed, he dipped once more into the prophetic legacy that flowed through his veins. On October 3, while reading the New Testament and pondering the fate of millions across the globe—dying from war, dying from flu, dying from evil—he claimed that “the Spirit of the Lord rested upon me, and I saw the hosts of the dead, both small and great.” His vision included witnessing “an innumerable company of the spirits,” both the just and the unjust, awaiting divine instruction. Christ, aided by his chosen messengers, including biblical prophets and Latter-day Saint leaders alike, granted the deceased both the knowledge and ordinances required for eternal rest. Nearly a century after his uncle, Joseph Smith, claimed a vision that answered the question of which church people should join, the latest Smith prophet dictated a vision that answered the question of what happened when people died. Mormonism’s first century was bookended by visions that answered Americans’ most pressing conundrums.
• A turning point came in spring 1921 when the First Presidency came to meet with Wells just before the April General Conference. She expected it to be a routine discussion, but Wells was instead informed that, rather than serving as Relief Society president until death, as each of her predecessors, save Emma Smith, had done, she would instead be released and replaced. Wells was devastated.
• Whenever an institution becomes an established, recognized, and permanent power, it becomes easy to be in sympathy with other institutional powers, and that is the seed-bed of conservatism. —james henry moyle1
• Once all the kids dispersed he approached her desk, sat down, and was ready to disclose details he had kept secret for decades. “My eyes have witnessed things that my tongue has never uttered,” he said, “and before I die I want it written down.” More, Johnson wanted Leavitt to do the writing. It was not to be. Perhaps unwilling to process the depth of the occasion, and otherwise distracted, Leavitt procrastinated setting aside time to serve as scribe. However, when Johnson fell ill soon after, and frequently called for “the little school teacher” to visit his bedside, it was too late. “I’ve lamented and scolded myself all my life,” Leavitt recalled years later, for failing to act promptly at Johnson’s request. She discovered that he was a key figure in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and was perhaps ready to reveal information he had long kept hidden. As a form of recompense, Juanita Leavitt—later, after marriage, Juanita Brooks—dedicated her life to unveiling the full story.
• In his debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), F. Scott Fitzgerald proclaimed that the “new generation” of Americans had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Simultaneously, the traumatic results of a global war and crippling economic depression left many desperate for relief from what prominent journalist Walter Lippmann denounced as the “acids of modernity.” “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us,” Lippmann explained. “We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it.”
• These national currents found expression within the Mormon community. At Brigham Young University, Franklin Harris attempted to tether the faith’s flagship academy to the broader scholarly world; in the Relief Society, Amy Brown Lyman retooled the organization to solve the era’s social problems; within leadership circles, B. H. Roberts addressed pressing theological and intellectual questions. In response, a cadre of strong-willed leaders concerned with these assimilationist strides—most notably J. Reuben Clark, who experienced a rapid and unexpected ascent—worked hard to curb them. Adherents of all stripes struggled to define the shifting boundaries of belonging and belief.
• Juanita Brooks acknowledged the growing rift, and even admitted that some might find her “in a state of apostasy.” She knew that those pushing retrenchment were reforming the faith in their image, just as she was trying to reform it in hers. But she would not go quietly. “I think it is as much my church as it is J. Reuben Clark’s or anyone else’s,” she concluded.
• Harris desired the university to follow other institutions by embracing the modern academy. “We must make of this institution a great center of religious thought,” he declared, and should “have in our library the leading writings of religious subjects from all parts of the world.”
• Harris even introduced new religion courses like “Evolution and Religion,” “Philosophy and Religion,” and “Comparative Religions”; of the forty-one religion courses taught in the 1920s, only seven dealt directly with Mormonism. Harris promised that his administration would prioritize “academic freedom without any attempt to avoid issues.” As a result of his efforts, BYU finally received university accreditation in 1928.7
• Church president Heber J. Grant was far more pragmatic than his predecessor and readily admitted a lack of interest in intellectual endeavors. “So far as I am concerned, having practically no education at all,” he told the BYU Board of Trustees in 1921, “I am not as capable of understanding these necessities as some other men.” This was a far cry from Joseph F. Smith, who anxiously oversaw doctrinal teaching on campus. Charles Penrose, a First Presidency counselor who lacked formal education yet prided himself on a more progressive belief, urged Grant to take an open stance concerning secular knowledge. They issued a statement that admitted “it is of little significance” if the “higher critics” were right concerning allegorical biblical passages.
• After a stream of visiting lecturers from the University of Chicago spoke to the gatherings, church leaders strengthened these institutional ties further: they agreed to sponsor several of their most promising teachers to travel to Chicago to earn degrees in religion. It appeared to be a new dawn for Mormon intellectualism. “Higher criticism is not [to be] feared by Latter-day Saints,” Widtsoe proclaimed.
• Richard Lyman praised Harris’s agenda, including the Chicago experiment. “When we have more men who can associate with great scholars,” he wrote, “the work of the Church will go forward much faster.”
• Like her mentor, Jane Addams, Lyman directly addressed the ills that plagued America, attempting to prove that religion could take a much more pragmatic and less dogmatic approach to the world.
• But in codifying Mormon rituals under an increasingly formal bureaucracy, Grant and other leaders also curtailed practices that had long been part of the faith’s tradition—most notably female ritual healings. The “priesthood” was now permanently associated with worthy men who held ecclesiastical offices, rather than a cosmic authority shared by believers, therefore erasing the space in which women had previously operated.
• B. h. roberts’s life was consumed by words. By his death, he had accumulated at least 1,300 books, many filled with marginalia as he desperately sought truths that meshed with his vision of the gospel. His own words filled quite a few volumes, too. Since 1888, he had written nearly twenty books on historical, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical matters, edited the documentary series History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and produced a string of apologetic works that responded to the age’s loudest critics. When invited by the non-Mormon Americana magazine to write a history of the church, he produced monthly forty-two-page installments from July 1909 to July 1915; the periodical adjusted its formatting and schedule to capture all these words. Eventually, the words were compiled, edited, and published in six volumes as part of the church’s centenary in 1930 to broad, if not unanimous, acclaim.
• William Riter, an educated Mormon residing in Washington, DC, wrote an earnest letter in 1921 to James Talmage regarding the Book of Mormon. Riter’s questions were of a different stripe than previous evangelical attacks rooted in doctrinal disputes. Instead, they were drawn from sociological, linguistic, scientific, and historical reasoning. How could the Nephite people, supposedly alone when they arrived on the North American continent, result in thousands of different Indigenous tongues and tribes? How could the text refer to horses, steel, and silk prior to the European colonization? Unable to find answers, Talmage turned to Roberts, who recognized the clear stakes: “If the origin of the Book of Mormon could be proved to be other than that set forth by Joseph Smith,” he reasoned, then the entire faith “must fall.”
• Roberts produced a 141-page document for the occasion that summarized not only Riter’s questions but several more he had stumbled upon while investigating. The meetings lasted from dawn to dusk, with Roberts presenting questions and begging his brethren, any of them, to provide convincing answers. None, according to Roberts, were persuasive, so he called for a third meeting, which took place two weeks later, again to an unsatisfying conclusion. Richard Lyman asked if this line of discussion would decrease doubt, and Roberts responded that further investigation “would very greatly increase…
• While presiding over the church’s northeastern states mission, headquartered in New York, he encountered Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, an 1823 book that also connected Indigenous people to the House of Israel. Roberts then produced two new projects, a 284-page study and an 18-page summary, that forthrightly challenged traditional defenses of the Book of Mormon. The Twelve, however, rejected both. While it is unlikely that Roberts had lost faith in the Book of Mormon—he continued to testify to its divinity—his anxious desire to use the tools of modernism to interpret, expand, and even revise traditional…
• Undeterred, the wordsmith sequestered himself for much of 1927 in New York City to work on his magnum opus. Staying mere blocks from the Union Theological Seminary, where the foremost debates over theological modernism were waged, Roberts worked on a systematic defense and rigorous examination of Mormonism. The result was a fifty-five-chapter tome entitled The Way, the Truth, the Life. It was the culmination of his apologetic career and the acme of Mormon modernism. Roberts drew from John Fiske, the American philosopher known for reconciling Christianity and evolution, and from Herbert Spencer, the social Darwinist. He cited over 150 contemporary philosophers, scientists, and theologians whose contributions were, according to Roberts, “the world’s best hope” for continued progress.
• He was dedicated to preserving a knowledge of the church’s persecuted past, serving as either assistant church historian or church historian from 1906 until 1970. But Smith was also the guardian of orthodoxy, an informal yet still earnest position he inherited from his father.
• Eventually, in early January 1931, both Roberts and Smith pleaded their cases before the Quorum of the Twelve. Roberts was chastised for acerbically questioning Smith’s competency, and Smith denounced Roberts’s “worldly philosophies” and “modernistic tendencies.”
• James Talmage, bothered by the confrontation, wondered where Smith was getting his ideas. He wrote his son, Sterling Talmage, who had followed his father’s footsteps into geology, and asked about George McCready Price’s The New Geology, a text that Smith had frequently cited. “All of Price’s arguments,” the younger Talmage responded, “were advanced and refuted from fifty to a hundred years ago.” Price’s work was neither “new,” nor really “geology.”
• B. H. Roberts pleaded with Smith to recognize that the time had come to forgo traditional beliefs in light of modern science. Smith, in response, insisted that Latter-day Saints were “not bound to receive the theories of men,” no matter “how great the weight of evidence may appear to be in favor of the theory, or how many men of world renown may accept it as established truth.”
• Despite his voluminous works, Roberts was far from a systematic thinker. He embraced the journey of learning more than the finality of knowledge. His was the modernist voyage, the unstoppable quest to accumulate data, theories, and, above all else, words, words upon words that explored the meaning of life, society, and even the cosmos. That his last decade was his most frustrating—that his final words went unpublished—was both a testament to the faith to which he held firm and a reflection of the church he feared he could no longer shape.
• These summer trainings had taken place for over a decade, and while they had previously been the nexus for introducing new and progressive theories, they had more recently become a battleground for competing ideas that echoed American disputes over modernism and fundamentalism. J. Reuben Clark was now determined to put an end to these debates. Titled “The Charted Course,” Clark’s address that dreary morning permanently transformed the direction of LDS intellectual life.
• Faculty were only to “spread revealed truth and reject worldly wisdom,” Grant dictated, “as we do not care what other people believe and what their teachings are.” The message of retrenchment was clear.
• Clark’s address to LDS educators in August 1938 marked the end of BYU’s modernist experiment. Speaking from the pulpit inside a log cabin as torrential rain pelted the exterior, Clark denounced the “newest fangled ideas” that did not square with divine truths, no matter how “backward” traditional doctrines may appear. Teachers must embrace the “essential fundamentals” of the gospel, which he defined as the infallibility of the scriptures and the divine calling of Joseph Smith. Any instructor not willing to pledge allegiance to these principles did not have a place in church education. The speech was as direct as it was partisan.
• Brooks was hired by FDR’s Works Progress Administration to find, preserve, and transcribe Mormon documents, quickly becoming a noted historian of the pioneer era. However, recognizing that her research was at odds with her community, Brooks kept a pile of clothes on the sewing table “with a threaded needle stuck to it” so that, whenever “interrupted” by visitors, she could claim she was merely performing housework.
• Brooks maintained that “the best way to turn a herd of cattle is not to ride directly counter to them, but to travel with them and turn them gradually.”
• Vardis Fisher’s Children of God (1939), Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua (1941), and Virginia Sorensen’s A Little Lower Than the Angels (1942) were all best-selling novels that used Mormon characters to tell an American saga.
• Reflecting the cultural dissonance between them and their church, these authors came to be known as the Lost Generation, a label that was shared with their contemporary American writers similarly disenchanted with modern culture.
• McKay then became despondent when, at the age of thirty, Brodie published a new biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, that depicted Mormonism’s founder as a religious fraud more rooted in his environment than in divinity.
• Brooks, though she disagreed with Brodie’s conclusion that Joseph Smith was “a conscious fraud and imposter,” couldn’t help but appreciate the book’s “literary quality” and “patient research.” She was upset, therefore, at the LDS leaders’ “hysterical” reaction, and complained that their defensive stance “makes it very hard” for a historian like her “to be loyal to the church.”
• Hugh Nibley, an eccentric classicist who soon became the faith’s most prominent apologist. His work was condescendingly titled No Ma’am, That’s Not History.
• The church was especially strong in Germany due to a century of missionary work, and many regional leaders in the nation supported the Third Reich’s authority. When one brave German teenager, Helmuth Hübener, was executed for publishing anti-Nazi propaganda, he was also excommunicated by the local branch president. An unexpected consequence of no longer gathering saints to America was the inability to equate a single national agenda with the church’s own.
• Their social work was to be constrained to supporting the Welfare Program, and their community work to “the promotion of faith and testimony,” leaving “social, cultural and educational efforts” to other groups. Clark summarized the shift several months later at General Conference: the Relief Society was to be “the handmaid to the priesthood.”
• The autonomy originally established by Emma Smith, expanded by Eliza R. Snow, defended by Emmeline B. Wells, and utilized by Amy Brown Lyman, was quickly evaporating into the streamlined priesthood organization.
• “Do not try to be anything else but good mothers and good homemakers,” Clark urged. The Relief Society, previously a quasi-autonomous machine built on pioneer visions and dedicated to societal reform, would be subsumed into an institution that prioritized homogeneity over individuality, and patriarchy over women’s rights.
• The campus population became so large that the church organized student-only worship congregations in 1956, hoping that close proximity would result in more marriages.
• Clark, though he still presented an image of unity, privately lamented the move. The prominent statesman spent the next decade in McKay’s shadow, even if his tedious and voluminous memos continued to shape the modern institution.
• A fellow apostle once remarked that “anyone who didn’t agree with Brother Benson’s mind was indeed a communist.” It was an exaggeration, but not by much.
• Benson declared in one of his first General Conference addresses that America was “founded on the truth of Christian principles,” ideas antithetical to socialism. Therefore, “this nation has become the world’s greatest power.” Eisenhower rode this cultural wave to a landslide victory in 1952 and rewarded followers with symbolic gestures like adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and enshrining “In God We Trust” as the national motto in 1956.
• And while it had taken 117 years for the church to reach one million members in 1947, it took only 16 more to reach two million (1963), and then 8 to reach three (1971). Church membership grew by 52 percent in the 1950s alone, which included doubling its membership outside North America.
• David O. McKay was only the second prophet to have never practiced polygamy, and the first who had become an apostle after the church had halted plural unions. He was therefore quite willing and anxious to place further distance between the church and its past. McKay taught that polygamy was “not a principle but a practice,” and the doctrine of marriage revealed to Joseph Smith concerned “the eternity of the marriage covenant” rather than its plurality. This rewriting of Smith’s polygamy revelation and the history that surrounded it was necessary for the church’s future and soon became standard curriculum. Leaders wanted a layoff on all polygamous discussion whatsoever, going so far as to pressure the University of Utah Press to refrain from publishing a book that detailed Joseph Smith’s plural unions. Juanita Brooks, still regarded as one of the faith’s best historians, reported that seminary teachers were “ordered not to even mention the word Polygamy” to their students. A silent history was much easier to manage.
• McKay instructed that because “the family is the foundation of society,” the church should no longer hire married women who had children. Gender roles were reaffirmed as crucial to national, and personal, prosperity. McKay emphasized that “the more woman becomes like man, the less he will respect her,”
• The percentage of women who labored outside the home almost doubled during the 1950s alone, and by 1970 half of adult women in Utah were employed. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book based on interviews with White suburban housewives struggling with “the problem that has no name”: a longing for success and dignity outside the home. The book sparked what came to be known as second-wave feminism, a social movement that upended traditional gender roles.
• Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood was an anti-feminist manifesto. “The first law of Heaven is obedience,” she repeatedly argued, “and it should be the first law of every home.” A woman should become a “domestic goddess,” which meant not only expert housekeeping and submitting to her husband, but also always wearing a dress and apron, mastering makeup application, minimizing personal problems, and never appearing intimidating. “A man doesn’t want an intellectual woman,” she cautioned.
• One LDS sociologist, Lowry Nelson, who researched the Caribbean and taught at the University of Minnesota, confessed that it was not until 1947 that he learned “there was a fixed doctrine” on priesthood and temple exclusion. Shocked, he immediately wrote church leaders hoping to dispel the rumor. But the First Presidency confirmed the policy and gave as one justification that racial integration would result in “the intermarriage of the Negro and White races.” When Nelson pressed further, they threatened his membership.
• Publicly, McKay optimistically told the South Africans that “the time will come” when the restriction would disappear; privately, he nervously wrote Clark that, if the policy continued, there would soon not be “sufficient men” to run the church in the Southern Hemisphere.
• The topic for the night, and the reason McConkie attended a meeting otherwise reserved for professors, was Joseph Fielding Smith’s recent book, Man: His Origin and Destiny. The work was a distillation of Smith’s fundamentalist views regarding evolution that dated back to his debates with B. H. Roberts decades earlier. “So far as the philosophy and wisdom of the world are concerned,” the book trumpeted, “they mean nothing unless they conform to the revealed word of God.”
• Now that he had outlived Roberts, James Talmage, John Widtsoe, and the other apostles with scholarly backgrounds, and their replacements were men without similar academic credentials, Smith had an unchallenged perch from which to shape modern Mormon thought.
• J. Reuben Clark published his own influential addition to the fundamentalist discourse, Why the King James Version, which squarely dismissed whole generations of academic biblical scholarship.
• Juanita Brooks. After a decade of dogged work, she had finally completed her magisterial history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and was in final discussions with Stanford University Press for publication. She knew there were risks. “I do not want to be excommunicated from my church,” she explained to the press’s director, “but if that is the price that I must pay for intellectual honesty, I shall pay it.”
• “I have always insisted that we not only sell ourselves short,” Brooks reasoned, “but we insult our Maker when we do not use the highest faculties He has given us.”
• His first book, Great Basin Kingdom (1958), was an economic history of the church that argued that since God’s truth “cannot be apprehended” by scholars, it was necessary to offer a “naturalistic discussion” of the world in which God’s people lived. He was later seen as the dean of a new scholarly movement known as New Mormon History.
• Nibley, and the church, faced a problem, however: the fragments’ translations did not match the text supplied by their founding prophet. Critics like Jerald and Sandra Tanner, who had left the church and were just beginning long careers dedicated to undermining the institution, immediately jumped on this fact and published the discrepancies.
• Church leaders recognized that some modern problems exceeded the capacity of traditional responses and required rigorous engagement. After witnessing the effect of Nibley’s Abraham defenses, the First Presidency devoted a substantial sum to another BYU professor, Truman Madsen, to investigate similar issues related to church history. Academically trained apologists like Nibley and Madsen could prove useful so long as their allegiance was beyond reproach; in return for providing research support, these faithful scholars were expected to consecrate their efforts to defending God’s kingdom against secular onslaughts.
• Leonard Arrington identified the two in 1969 as among the most prominent Mormon intellectuals of the era, as “McMurrin is concerned with ideas,” while “Nibley is with the faith.”
• That the two figures existed on the same spectrum of LDS thought—the same spectrum that also included Bruce R. McConkie and Juanita Brooks—demonstrated the schisms within the Mormon intellectual tradition.
• Spencer Kimball, the same apostle who prioritized attention to Indigenous communities, confessed in a private letter to his son that he prayed God would “release the ban and forgive the possible error.”
• Brown agitated to soften the racial restriction and ordain Black men to the Aaronic priesthood, to no avail. But when McKay chose Brown for the First Presidency in 1961, and elevated him to first counselor in 1963, Brown was positioned to help steer the impressionable prophet.
• While Brown and others successfully convinced McKay that the policy was a “practice” and not a “doctrine”—a theological distinction that loosened its certainty—the aging president maintained that any change required revelation.
• Many, including Joseph Fielding Smith, argued that those born to African ancestry were “less valiant” in the pre-mortal existence and therefore rightly punished. One popular LDS book, John Stewart’s Mormonism and the Negro, declared in 1960 that actions before this life were why some people lived in “squalor, filth, poverty, and degradation,” including the “lowest classes of society in Africa” who lived in a way similar “to that of the animals.” Denying them the priesthood, therefore, was “an act of mercy.”
• It was domestic politics that eventually curtailed the international possibilities. Ambrose Chukwu, a Nigerian student studying in California, discovered Stewart’s Mormonism and the Negro in 1963 and wrote home to expose the church’s anti-Black policies. It caused an uproar in both Nigeria and America. Later that year, Brown admitted to national journalists that, “in light of racial revelations everywhere,” the church was “looking toward the possibility of admitting Negroes.” The remark infuriated McKay and other leaders. Simultaneously, several BYU professors worked with LaMar Williams, the main contact for the Nigerian mission, to bring African students to campus. This once again raised the fear of interracial mixing. When McKay learned that the NAACP planned to press the church on the Nigeria question, the prophet had seen enough.
• Working with Sterling McMurrin, Brown drafted a statement that insisted “there is in this Church no doctrine, belief, or practice, that is intended to deny the enjoyment of full civil rights by any person regardless of race, color, or creed.” With McKay’s begrudging approval, Brown read the statement at the conference, and the NAACP canceled its protest. It was only a temporary solution.
• One man who wished the LDS church would have taken a different course was David Gillispie, a Black member in Ogden, Utah. Gillispie remembered being so excited at his baptism that he “thought [he] heard angels singing.” But his enthusiasm diminished as he witnessed his White male friends being ordained to the priesthood, performing ritual duties, and serving missions. He feared he had “reached a spiritual ‘dead end.’ ” Gillispie tried to stay committed by marrying an active Mormon woman and hoping to raise a family within the church, but the fact that he could not be sealed in the temple or bless and baptize his children was traumatic. When his young daughter passed away unexpectedly, he could not help but think that, since they were not sealed in the temple, he had no claim on her in the eternities.
• He could not help but question the racial ban. “Is this the will of God or the will of man?”
• His interest piqued, Bybee attended. Present was G. Edward Griffin, the director of the film, Anarchy U.S.A., who said he had received apostolic encouragement to spread his message to the saints. The film attacked the United Nations for enabling communism, claimed civil rights activists were communist pawns, and denounced both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson for secretly supporting America’s enemies. It also featured graphic images of the blood and carnage that resulted from communist regimes.64 Bybee was not impressed. The film used “innuendo, implication, guilt by association, labels, and half truths if not outright falsehoods” to present a partisan message. “I do not think the Lord’s House should be used as a forum for attacks on such subjects as the civil rights movement, the United Nations and federal legislation,” he wrote church leaders, “nor should Church authorities lend an air of authority to such undertakings.”
• “As the Mormons succeeded,” Kennedy once declared, “so America can succeed.” His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was even more effusive with his praise, and he and McKay developed a genuine friendship. After once rerouting Air Force One to Salt Lake City for an impromptu visit, Johnson remarked, “I always feel better after I have been in [McKay’s] presence.”
• One apostle, Delbert Stapley, privately reproved him for supporting equal rights, noting that previous presidents “who were very active in the Negro cause”—Abraham Lincoln and JFK—had met violent ends, possibly due to pushing policies “contrary to the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.” Romney, however, did not back down. “A Negro is a child of God just like I am,” he told Meet the Press, and “our most urgent domestic problem is to wipe out human injustice and discrimination against the Negroes.”
• When Welch published The Politician (1963), positing that Eisenhower was part of a global communist plot, even the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee and partisan firebrand Barry Goldwater denounced the work; Benson, conversely, sent copies to his fellow apostles as Christmas presents. He also regaled the saints with General Conference addresses that echoed these radical theories, including the accusation that Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists were a “tool of communist deception.” A few years later, he wrote the foreword for the racist diatribe The Black Hammer: A Study of Black Power, Red Influence, and White Alternatives (1967), one of the most extreme anti–civil rights works from the era.
• His book The Naked Communist (1958), which classified communism as a global evil within an eternal war, was a bestseller, especially after McKay praised it in General Conference. His religious writings, like The First Two Thousand Years (1953), which argued for a fundamentalist reading of scripture, also became immensely influential in LDS circles. (The praise, however, was not universal: “Brother Skousen’s book has been a plague,” complained Joseph Fielding Smith.)
• The First Presidency eventually released a statement that reaffirmed its opposition to communism but also critiqued those “who pretend to fight it by casting aspersions on our elected officials or other fellow citizens.” Benson complained that the statement sounded like an attack on him and Skousen—a suspicion McKay confirmed—and the church received hundreds of letters from right-wing saints upset with the message.
• As the decade progressed, and partisanship grew deeper, McKay’s management style became increasingly strained. His eagerness to please others and his quickly deteriorating health led him to frequently and abruptly switch courses, usually siding with whoever spoke with him last.
• Yet England still insisted on his Mormon bona fides. His liberal or conservative credentials, he later reminisced, could “change from one to the other simply by walking across Stanford Avenue from the university to the Institute building.” When surrounded by anti-war and civil rights activists, he was “that strange, non-smoking, short-haired, family-raising conservative”; when among the saints, he was “that strange liberal who renounced war and worried about fair-housing and free speech.” It was a tough balance, but one he was determined to maintain.
• David O. McKay had previously been resistant to the appeals from J. Reuben Clark and his successors, like Harold B. Lee, to formalize a system of correlation, instead hoping they could maintain a loose governing structure based on agency rather than control. Now, with a rapidly growing international body, there was a greater need to manage church lessons and practices more efficiently. Controlling disparate voices in an era of corporatization and bureaucratization was a tricky task, but one that was common in America at the time.
• Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine in 1958. McConkie, who never shied from proclaiming his interpretive authority, envisioned the massive volume to be the definitive overview of the faith. It was arranged by topic and ordered alphabetically, with sections as benign as “Card Playing” (“to the extent that church members play cards they are in apostasy and rebellion”) and as substantial as evolution (“how scrubby and groveling the intellectual” who “finds comfort in the theoretical postulates that mortal life began in the scum of the sea”). He also detailed how “negroes” were “less valiant in pre-existence” and therefore “had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them,” as well as identified Catholics as “the great and abominable church.”
• A committee was assigned to read the book and “make a list of the corrections” that could be printed as an addendum. The men eventually listed 1,067 errors within the 776 pages. To avoid public embarrassment, they decided to quietly allow the book to go out of print and instituted a rule that no church leader could publish a work without getting First Presidency approval. (McConkie had other plans, however, and convinced the impressionable McKay to let him republish a revised version a decade later.) The need for a standardized system was now clear.
• Correlation not only standardized Mormonism’s message and image, it cemented America’s postwar patriarchal ideal as the faith’s core.
• Esther Peterson, a consumer activist raised in Provo who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, mourned this shift. “When I was at BYU” in the 1920s, she reflected, “our thinking was so broad and so big” because “our faith could encompass these things.” But now she worried about “the narrowing” of opportunities for women. “Don’t read it,” she heard from some corners, and “don’t think about that.” Such limitations were inimical to her faith. “It’s the broadness that we need,” and Mormonism, at its heart, was “broad and big.”
• Harold B. Lee’s vision of a completely correlated church was not to be. But correlation enabled the church to continue its rapid growth through the 1960s.
  • lol the anti-communist propogandists loved a centrally planned church
• In April 1966, a new Birch Society–backed political organization, styling itself the “1976 Committee,” aimed to restore the nation to what members believed to be its libertarian principles during its bicentennial. They proposed running a third-party ticket with Strom Thurmond as president and Benson as vice president. Benson, ever eager to jump back into the political fray, begged McKay for approval. This was the only chance to “stem the drift toward socialism in this country,” Benson urged. McKay begrudgingly agreed. The prophet became worried, however, when, six months later, Benson was moved to the top of the ticket. By January 1967, there were even bumper stickers, and Benson claimed he received hundreds of letters urging him to run.86 Once again, the more moderate members of the First Presidency intervened, and once again, McKay waffled. When Benson’s General Conference talk in October 1966 critiqued, albeit indirectly, other apostles who lacked zeal in the cause of liberty, N. Eldon Tanner and Hugh Brown felt he had crossed a line. They opposed Benson’s request to publish the talk as a stand-alone pamphlet. At first, McKay acquiesced and told Benson he could not go forward with publication; two weeks later, however, when cornered by Benson in a private meeting, McKay flipped. His counselors were livid, especially when they learned in December that McKay had approved Benson’s presidential run. When confronted, the prophet denied his support; once again, he later reversed course, and even altered the meeting’s minutes to hide his indecisiveness.
• For once, McKay was decisive. “You should turn the offer down,” he said with conviction. This time, he was not willing to be swayed. Benson, hiding his disappointment, said he was willing to abide by the decision.
  • Feels like that was a Prophet knowing that the outcome would have been VERY bad, and most importantly that it was wrong.
• Sterling McMurrin, growing in national prominence, declared that it was time for the church to jettison its “crude superstitions about negroes.” Church leaders were incensed, and some apostles, including Joseph Fielding Smith, renewed calls for him to be “tried for his membership.” McKay, again, demurred, admitting that while he was “disturbed” by McMurrin’s comments, he wanted to avoid the backlash of a public excommunication. Hugh B. Brown, meanwhile, quietly gathered enough apostolic support to indeed jettison, or at least soften, the racial restriction, but his efforts were squashed by Harold B. Lee and other conservative members, who insisted it remain in place. Leaders prepared a compromise statement that reaffirmed the restriction’s revelatory status while also calling for all Black Americans to receive their “full Constitutional privileges.” Brown reluctantly signed, bereft that he had lost his chance at real change.
• The entire First Presidency soon concluded that Benson’s radical politics were also a hindrance to their global message.
  • Then why did God let him become the prophet?
• The First Presidency insisted that apostles should focus on “gospel principles” and “leave politics or pointed attacks on politics out of their talks.” When Benson refused to comply and denounced the United Nations in an address to BYU the next year, McKay immediately sent Brown to counter the message and emphasize that the church did not have an official position on the topic. Benson, expectedly, complained; McKay, unexpectedly, held firm, and published Brown’s statement for the entire church to see.
  • President McKay being the boss we needed.
• Benson’s later work. But his impact remained long after his partisan career ended. His voice rang last, and it rang the longest. Mormon culture, especially in the Mountain West, was now firmly and decisively in the conservative camp. Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 election was the last time Utah would ever vote Democratic for president. The region’s ground had permanently shifted along with the rest of America’s political geography in the wake of the era’s unrest.
• Our history is simply that of any group which struggles to maintain its identity as it copes with political, economic, and religious forces which seek to destroy or limit its uniqueness. —leonard j. arrington1
• Ulrich, who admitted that she was well acquainted with “the problem with no name” long before she read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, had recently started a graduate program at Simmons College. Another attendee, Claudia Bushman, who sat on a straight oak chair near the fireplace, was a doctoral student at Boston University. “The talk streamed through the room like sunshine,” Ulrich recalled, as they expressed their frustrations, disappointments, and confessions.
• Another gathering of faithful reformers took place the next year, once again in June, this time in Salt Lake City. Ruffin Bridgeforth, Darius Gray, and Eugene Orr, three Black converts, knelt in prayer in a vacant University of Utah classroom. The three men had very different personalities—Bridgeforth the conservative, Gray the pragmatist, and Orr the firebrand—but they were united in goal: to carve out a larger space for Black Mormons. They hoped the LDS church would reverse its racial restriction, ordain them to the priesthood, and allow their families access to temple ordinances. The men eventually gained an audience with three apostles, Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson, and Boyd K. Packer, who approved a new church-sponsored group for Black members. No plaque marked the origins of this movement, either. But since the organization was meant to symbolize a new beginning, they called it Genesis.
• The conservative framework for social stability proved most appealing, but it also meant entering cultural warfare. Paul Weyrich, founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, captured the meaning of this new battle. “It is a war of ideology, it’s a war of ideas, and it’s a war about our way of life,” Weyrich explained. “And it has to be fought with the same intensity, I think, and dedication as you would fight in a shooting war.”
• Leonard Arrington witnessed these profound shifts from the perspective of one of the faith’s most prominent historians. “Our religion cannot avoid coming to grips with historical truth,” he mused amid this transition, “because it is based on historical truth claims.”
• A graduate student at the University of Utah with a reputation for his dogged research, he had been assigned by Leonard Arrington to find missing records in the Church Administration Building’s basement. A frustrated archivist finally gave up helping the anxious Quinn and instead pointed him toward a “dimly lit expanse” in the basement’s corner to explore on his own. There, amid piles of boxes and books that had been restricted to academics for decades, Quinn found two stacks of material that nobody, including the church historian, knew existed. Held in dusty cardboard and wooden boxes were “hundreds—perhaps thousands—of leather-bound volumes in various sizes.” These included Brigham Young’s office diaries, daily minutes from the First Presidency’s office during the 1880s, and an assortment of nearly thirty thousand letters, speech manuscripts, and other invaluable documents. Quinn quickly lost track of time digging through the treasures. When he finally emerged from the basement, he surprised the guards, who assumed the building was empty.
• Hunter told Arrington that they had concluded that “the Church was mature enough that our history should be honest,” and that they no longer believed in “suppressing information, nor hiding documents, nor canceling or withholding minutes for possible scrutiny.”
• Arrington enthusiastically embraced the challenge of standing “on two legs—the leg of faith and the leg of reason.” Those who participated in this “period of excitement and optimism” came to refer to Arrington’s tenure as “Camelot.”
• Indeed, following reforms that were pushed by First Presidency counselor N. Eldon Tanner in the wake of financial difficulties in the 1960s, largely due to overspending, leaders transformed the institution’s financial management. They shifted from a save-and-spend model, hired financiers to privately grow an eventually massive investment portfolio, and ceased providing detailed accounting reports at each April General Conference. Though lacking previous generations’ transparency, the new model afforded the monetary stability necessary to support the church’s global efforts.
• Mormonism’s ability to retain consistency amid massive growth was a hallmark of its consolidation efforts.
• Kimball stood in stark contrast to his predecessor: whereas Lee was a firm and sober administrator who wanted control over minute decisions, Kimball was relaxed and known for wandering the halls to converse and joke.
• Church membership rapidly rose from three million to nearly eight million within fifteen years of Kimball’s ascension. Some scholars estimated that Mormonism was the fastest-growing global religion.
• “Congratulations on your Ladies’ issue of Dialogue!” wrote Juanita Brooks. However, they were critiqued both by conservative members for being too radical, and by liberals like England as too moderate—they were being “infantilized from all sides,” Bushman mused.
• Susan Kohler discovered a dusty set of the Woman’s Exponent, the newspaper published by Emmeline Wells and other saints from 1872 to 1914. Bushman believed they had found their intellectual predecessors, “a feminist publication by definition, encouraging women to speak for and to women, speaking up against injustice and inequality of opportunity, and about the equality of the genders.” This past provided clear relevance for the present. “These women were saying things in the 1870s,” insisted Laurel Ulrich, “that we had only begun to think!” They eventually started their own magazine dedicated to “faithful but frank” conversations that embraced both Mormonism and feminism. The new periodical was titled Exponent II, a nod to their foremothers.
• Smith publicly announced her opposition to the ERA in December 1974, and the Church News cited her in its own anti-ERA editorial the next month. The First Presidency eventually released a statement that identified the ERA as “a moral issue” and urged citizens “to reject this measure on the basis of its threat to the moral climate of the future.”
• The gathered women, anxious to defend their faith’s traditional values and defeat encroaching liberalism, vociferously crushed every resolution on the docket. Buoyed by this success, the LDS anti-ERA efforts spread across the nation.
• Pearson, a fourth-generation Mormon who was a playwright, performer, and poet, wrote an essay for the church’s magazine that highlighted the Relief Society’s fight for women’s rights in the 1870s. After it had passed the galley proof, church leaders discovered its content and were concerned that Pearson, publicly known for supporting the ERA, was a “controversial” figure. They pulled the essay at the last moment. Pearson learned about it only when she received a call from Arrington, who had heard the story from the magazine’s editor. “It looks like [women] are destined to be just like a bush,” she fumed, “just standing there but not allowed to express ourselves nor be regarded as human beings.”
• “At the very moment Mormon women began to discover their lost history,” Ulrich later admitted, they were “swept up” in the new world created by the anti-ERA push. “Suddenly in 1978 Mormonism and feminism seemed incompatible.”
• The man soon wrote about his experience, albeit anonymously, for Dialogue. It may well have been the first LGBTQ perspective published in any Mormon venue. The author detailed his lifelong attempt to fit into a heteronormative culture, including his many failed attempts at dating, his faithful service as a missionary, and his consistent temple attendance. His anxiety had heightened when, as a university student, he heard Joseph Fielding Smith state that “homosexuality was so filthy and abhorrent that he would rather see his sons dead than homosexual.” When he confessed his orientation to an apostle, he was told to participate in more “masculine activities” like basketball. Another leader advised him to marry a woman, but not to reveal his true sexuality or else it might “strain the relationship too severely.” He finally saw a therapist who helped him work through his feelings. And though he retained a testimony of the church’s truths, he could not help but conclude that “a single, much less homosexual, [individual] simply does not fit in.” He titled his essay “Solus”—Latin for alone.
• The dangers of homosexuality were a particular concern for Spencer Kimball, who had been assigned two decades earlier to work with members who confessed to same-sex attraction. He instructed BYU to not admit any gay students—“I cannot imagine that this university would ever enroll a pervert knowingly,” he declared to the student body in 1965—and helped formalize the church’s disciplinary measures. “Homosexuality” was officially included in the list of excommunicable offenses in 1968. Kimball’s most-read book, The Miracle of Forgiveness, published the next year, categorized homosexuality as a “crime against nature” and the “sin of the ages,” just below murder as the most heinous of sins.
• “My belief [is] that since I am an eternal being,” one member wrote for Affirmation’s newsletter, “I have always been gay, and [I] will be gay after I die.” Rather than being “a punishment from a loving God” to be “overcome,” or even a “test” he had to pass in mortality, his queerness was intrinsic to his eternal identity.
• Much of Bush’s limited free time was spent writing, mostly in response to the groundbreaking work of someone else. Two years earlier, a graduate student at Cornell named Stephen Taggart wrote an article on the origins of Mormonism’s racial restriction. Though he initially submitted the manuscript to Dialogue, his sudden and unexpected death resulted in his family publishing Taggart’s project as a book instead. The work argued that the racial policy was not present at Mormonism’s founding but instead originated after its sojourn in Missouri. The Salt Lake Tribune noted that the “weight of the evidence suggests that God did not place a curse upon the Negro—that his children did.” Even the New York Times mused on the book’s implications.36 Bush, for whom the topic had become an “obsession,” was not convinced that the restriction’s roots were in Missouri. Instead, his own research demonstrated that the policy came even later, likely after Joseph Smith’s death. He dashed off a review of Taggart’s book for Dialogue shortly after leaving on one of his assignments—he did not receive a physical copy of the publication until his ship docked in Bombay, India—and kept working on the topic until he had a four-hundred-page, single-spaced anthology filled with over a thousand items of documentary evidence.
• Bush told Arrington that the apostles insisted the “Negro doctrine” was “solved and settled,” and Bush left Utah convinced that “there appears to be no possibility of a change.”
• When “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview” appeared a few months later, spanning fifty-seven pages and 219 footnotes, it made an immediate impact. Besides sparking scholarly discussion, the essay was read by many church leaders who reconsidered the historical origins of one of the faith’s most distinctive practices. One general authority, Marion D. Hanks, later admitted that Bush’s scholarship “started to foment the pot.” The reaction from Bruce R. McConkie, whose popular book Mormon Doctrine tethered the restriction to Blacks’ less-valiant service in the preexistence, was more visceral: “CRAP!” he declared as he allegedly slammed the Dialogue issue onto his desk.
• One individual who expressed a keen interest in the topic, however, was Spencer W. Kimball. Though he was otherwise traditional by inclination, his pastoral approach and his background working with racial minorities made him open to reconsidering the restriction. He told journalists at his first press conference as president that he had given the issue “a great deal of thought, a great deal of prayer,” and that while any change would require a revelation, he quickly added, “but we believe in revelation.” He kept a notebook full of correspondence and news clippings related to the policy and was known for asking many people about their opinions on it.
• After decades of resistance, movement came remarkably quick. Kimball assigned several authorities, including McConkie, to investigate the scriptural and historical basis of the restriction. They all failed to find firm justification for the policy. Meanwhile, James E. Faust, an apostle in charge of global missions, frequently brought Kimball stacks of letters from potential converts in Africa, and the question of Brazil continued to hover. Kimball spent much of the early months of 1978 in prayer, often alone in the temple, sometimes disturbed only by cleaning crews who assumed the building was vacant. By March, with the Brazil temple only months from completion, he concluded it was time to finally remove the racial restriction.
• Though they did not refer to it, leaders took advantage of historical scholarship that had undercut the notion that the racial restriction was always present, and now framed the saga as pointing toward a “long-promised day” of racial universalism. The announcement immediately made national and international news.
• “Forget everything that I have said,” McConkie pronounced later that year. “We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that has now come into the world.” The new revelation, he explained, “erases all the darkness, and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don’t matter any more.”
• But despite appeals from Leonard Arrington to directly confront the issue, they decided to deny legitimacy to the fundamentalists’ claims of post-manifesto sealings and to downplay polygamy’s historical significance. Their phobia at times verged on the comical: at one point, Arrington was assigned to write an essay on Brigham Young’s family but instructed not to mention polygamy—a tall order when the man’s family included fifty-six wives.
• Lacking a full and honest history, “tens of thousands of Latter-day Saints will be increasingly vulnerable targets for polygamist cultists.” But even Quinn was shocked by what he found in the records. He knew that if he compiled his notes into a research article, which he planned to submit to Dialogue, “there is no power on earth that will spare me from excommunication.”
• Part of this animosity was rooted in a newly resurrected fear of “cults” that followed the mass murder-suicide at Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in 1978. A wave of books, pamphlets, and movies dredged up old stereotypes of conniving Mormon leaders and duped LDS followers. Mormons could not be trusted because they were theologically heretical and socially “weird.” Most successful was the film The God Makers, which was shown across America in the early 1980s and climaxed with around a million monthly viewers in 1984.
• While Johnson was too radical for Arrington’s taste, he admitted that “the Church cannot gain from this entire incident” and that “any bishop would be stupid to initiate a trial like this.”
• The fight reached Leonard Arrington’s History Division well before Hofmann entered the scene. After his team published Story of the Latter-day Saints, a devotional yet rigorous social history of the church, apostles Boyd K. Packer and Ezra Taft Benson commissioned a report that denounced it for “not bringing God into the picture,” highlighting “bad stories,” and “basically [being] a secular history.” Refusing to back down, a despondent Arrington met with the apostles, as well as the First Presidency, in a fateful meeting on September 21, 1976. Benson and Packer argued the “new history” caused “young people to lose faith” and “tended to degrade or demean Joseph Smith.” Arrington responded that an honest history would build, not tarnish, belief. The heated debate lasted for nearly two hours. Spencer Kimball, who presided over the discussion, reassured Arrington that he still had the leadership’s support, but the historian feared his end was approaching.
• The fight reached Leonard Arrington’s History Division well before Hofmann entered the scene. After his team published Story of the Latter-day Saints, a devotional yet rigorous social history of the church, apostles Boyd K. Packer and Ezra Taft Benson commissioned a report that denounced it for “not bringing God into the picture,” highlighting “bad stories,” and “basically [being] a secular history.” Refusing to back down, a despondent Arrington met with the apostles, as well as the First Presidency, in a fateful meeting on September 21, 1976. Benson and Packer argued the “new history” caused “young people to lose faith” and “tended to degrade or demean Joseph Smith.” Arrington responded that an honest history would build, not tarnish, belief. The heated debate lasted for nearly two hours. Spencer Kimball, who presided over the discussion, reassured Arrington that he still had the leadership’s support, but the historian feared his end was approaching.
• The fight reached Leonard Arrington’s History Division well before Hofmann entered the scene. After his team published Story of the Latter-day Saints, a devotional yet rigorous social history of the church, apostles Boyd K. Packer and Ezra Taft Benson commissioned a report that denounced it for “not bringing God into the picture,” highlighting “bad stories,” and “basically [being] a secular history.” Refusing to back down, a despondent Arrington met with the apostles, as well as the First Presidency, in a fateful meeting on September 21, 1976. Benson and Packer argued the “new history” caused “young people to lose faith” and “tended to degrade or demean Joseph Smith.” Arrington responded that an honest history would build, not tarnish, belief. The heated debate lasted for nearly two hours. Spencer Kimball, who presided over the discussion, reassured Arrington that he still had the leadership’s support, but the historian feared his end was approaching.
• In 1981, Packer again publicly railed against historians, including BYU professors, who judged the church according to academic standards rather than “the revealed word of the Lord.” It was imperative for saints to demonstrate God’s hand “in every hour and in every moment of the existence of the Church, from its beginning until now.” Historical work could never be “neutral,” because “there is a war going on, and we are engaged in it.”
• In 1981, Packer again publicly railed against historians, including BYU professors, who judged the church according to academic standards rather than “the revealed word of the Lord.” It was imperative for saints to demonstrate God’s hand “in every hour and in every moment of the existence of the Church, from its beginning until now.” Historical work could never be “neutral,” because “there is a war going on, and we are engaged in it.”
• In 1981, Packer again publicly railed against historians, including BYU professors, who judged the church according to academic standards rather than “the revealed word of the Lord.” It was imperative for saints to demonstrate God’s hand “in every hour and in every moment of the existence of the Church, from its beginning until now.” Historical work could never be “neutral,” because “there is a war going on, and we are engaged in it.”
• When it came to unflattering or controversial truths, Packer’s counsel was clear: “Some things that are true are not very useful.” He closed on an ominous note: “Those who have carefully purged their work of any religious faith in the name of academic freedom” should not “expect to be accommodated.”
• When it came to unflattering or controversial truths, Packer’s counsel was clear: “Some things that are true are not very useful.” He closed on an ominous note: “Those who have carefully purged their work of any religious faith in the name of academic freedom” should not “expect to be accommodated.”
• When it came to unflattering or controversial truths, Packer’s counsel was clear: “Some things that are true are not very useful.” He closed on an ominous note: “Those who have carefully purged their work of any religious faith in the name of academic freedom” should not “expect to be accommodated.”
• Hinckley summoned Quinn to meet with him in Salt Lake City, and while Quinn persuasively demonstrated his case—Hinckley was “visibly stunned” when hearing the truth about post-manifesto polygamy—the moderate apostle expressed grave concern “that you have publicly criticized living members of the Quorum of the Twelve.”
• Hinckley summoned Quinn to meet with him in Salt Lake City, and while Quinn persuasively demonstrated his case—Hinckley was “visibly stunned” when hearing the truth about post-manifesto polygamy—the moderate apostle expressed grave concern “that you have publicly criticized living members of the Quorum of the Twelve.”
• Hinckley summoned Quinn to meet with him in Salt Lake City, and while Quinn persuasively demonstrated his case—Hinckley was “visibly stunned” when hearing the truth about post-manifesto polygamy—the moderate apostle expressed grave concern “that you have publicly criticized living members of the Quorum of the Twelve.”
• Eugene England, who had finally secured a position at BYU after he agreed to distance himself from Dialogue, had delivered an address on campus in which he defended one of Joseph Smith’s more audacious, and controversial, doctrines: that God continued to progress in knowledge and power, an idea that rejected classical Christian arguments of omnipotence and omnipresence. The speech prompted an acerbic rebuke from Bruce R. McConkie in a university-wide devotional in which the apostle identified it as one of seven “deadly heresies.” When England continued the conversation through correspondence, McConkie’s response was blunt: “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is,” he trumpeted; “it is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”
• Eugene England, who had finally secured a position at BYU after he agreed to distance himself from Dialogue, had delivered an address on campus in which he defended one of Joseph Smith’s more audacious, and controversial, doctrines: that God continued to progress in knowledge and power, an idea that rejected classical Christian arguments of omnipotence and omnipresence. The speech prompted an acerbic rebuke from Bruce R. McConkie in a university-wide devotional in which the apostle identified it as one of seven “deadly heresies.” When England continued the conversation through correspondence, McConkie’s response was blunt: “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is,” he trumpeted; “it is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”
• Eugene England, who had finally secured a position at BYU after he agreed to distance himself from Dialogue, had delivered an address on campus in which he defended one of Joseph Smith’s more audacious, and controversial, doctrines: that God continued to progress in knowledge and power, an idea that rejected classical Christian arguments of omnipotence and omnipresence. The speech prompted an acerbic rebuke from Bruce R. McConkie in a university-wide devotional in which the apostle identified it as one of seven “deadly heresies.” When England continued the conversation through correspondence, McConkie’s response was blunt: “It is my province to teach to the Church what the doctrine is,” he trumpeted; “it is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”
• Benson and Packer hatched a plan to closely surveil all scholars associated with Dialogue, and over a dozen were summoned to meet with their local bishops. Hinckley, when he discovered the ploy, ceased the inquisition and reprimanded its proponents.
• Benson and Packer hatched a plan to closely surveil all scholars associated with Dialogue, and over a dozen were summoned to meet with their local bishops. Hinckley, when he discovered the ploy, ceased the inquisition and reprimanded its proponents.
• Benson and Packer hatched a plan to closely surveil all scholars associated with Dialogue, and over a dozen were summoned to meet with their local bishops. Hinckley, when he discovered the ploy, ceased the inquisition and reprimanded its proponents.
• Quinn finally published the article based on his decade-long post-manifesto-polygamy research. The essay filled ninety-seven pages, boasted 383 footnotes, and definitively dispelled the traditional LDS narrative that no polygamous unions were authorized after Woodruff’s manifesto. The impact was immediate.
• Quinn finally published the article based on his decade-long post-manifesto-polygamy research. The essay filled ninety-seven pages, boasted 383 footnotes, and definitively dispelled the traditional LDS narrative that no polygamous unions were authorized after Woodruff’s manifesto. The impact was immediate.
• Quinn finally published the article based on his decade-long post-manifesto-polygamy research. The essay filled ninety-seven pages, boasted 383 footnotes, and definitively dispelled the traditional LDS narrative that no polygamous unions were authorized after Woodruff’s manifesto. The impact was immediate.
• The workaround bought Quinn time. But he was finally forced to resign two years later after he published a book on early Mormonism and magic that was in part prompted by the Hofmann saga. Quinn’s only solace was an unflinching confidence that he had done “everything I had thought God wanted me to do.”
• The workaround bought Quinn time. But he was finally forced to resign two years later after he published a book on early Mormonism and magic that was in part prompted by the Hofmann saga. Quinn’s only solace was an unflinching confidence that he had done “everything I had thought God wanted me to do.”
• The workaround bought Quinn time. But he was finally forced to resign two years later after he published a book on early Mormonism and magic that was in part prompted by the Hofmann saga. Quinn’s only solace was an unflinching confidence that he had done “everything I had thought God wanted me to do.”
• To Alice Smith, a longtime member of the Relief Society board, Arrington soon raised the possibility of writing a new history of the Relief Society; he was shocked that she urged him not to proceed. “This would be too damaging to the testimonies of LDS women who would read it,” she reasoned, because “if it tells the truth, it will relate the deterioration of the power and position of women in the Church and will be very depressing to women who care.” If anything, Smith explained, women were losing prestige, as Relief Society leaders no longer had direct access to the First Presidency.
• To Alice Smith, a longtime member of the Relief Society board, Arrington soon raised the possibility of writing a new history of the Relief Society; he was shocked that she urged him not to proceed. “This would be too damaging to the testimonies of LDS women who would read it,” she reasoned, because “if it tells the truth, it will relate the deterioration of the power and position of women in the Church and will be very depressing to women who care.” If anything, Smith explained, women were losing prestige, as Relief Society leaders no longer had direct access to the First Presidency.
• To Alice Smith, a longtime member of the Relief Society board, Arrington soon raised the possibility of writing a new history of the Relief Society; he was shocked that she urged him not to proceed. “This would be too damaging to the testimonies of LDS women who would read it,” she reasoned, because “if it tells the truth, it will relate the deterioration of the power and position of women in the Church and will be very depressing to women who care.” If anything, Smith explained, women were losing prestige, as Relief Society leaders no longer had direct access to the First Presidency.
• An essay by Linda King Newell, also published in 1981, uncovered the forgotten history of Mormon women giving blessings. In 1984, Margaret Toscano, an instructor at BYU, delivered a public address that drew from gender theory and ancient studies to deconstruct the notion of hierarchical and patriarchal authorities altogether.
• An essay by Linda King Newell, also published in 1981, uncovered the forgotten history of Mormon women giving blessings. In 1984, Margaret Toscano, an instructor at BYU, delivered a public address that drew from gender theory and ancient studies to deconstruct the notion of hierarchical and patriarchal authorities altogether.
• An essay by Linda King Newell, also published in 1981, uncovered the forgotten history of Mormon women giving blessings. In 1984, Margaret Toscano, an instructor at BYU, delivered a public address that drew from gender theory and ancient studies to deconstruct the notion of hierarchical and patriarchal authorities altogether.
• Benson, though mellowed from his anti-communism heyday, intensified opposition to any attempts to redefine gender roles. “Contrary to conventional wisdom,” he taught in 1987, “a mother’s calling is in the home.” Women scholars who presented alternative research were on shaky ground. Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, who authored a groundbreaking biography of Emma Smith that depicted her as a reform-minded activist, were forbidden from speaking in any church setting.
• Benson, though mellowed from his anti-communism heyday, intensified opposition to any attempts to redefine gender roles. “Contrary to conventional wisdom,” he taught in 1987, “a mother’s calling is in the home.” Women scholars who presented alternative research were on shaky ground. Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, who authored a groundbreaking biography of Emma Smith that depicted her as a reform-minded activist, were forbidden from speaking in any church setting.
• Benson, though mellowed from his anti-communism heyday, intensified opposition to any attempts to redefine gender roles. “Contrary to conventional wisdom,” he taught in 1987, “a mother’s calling is in the home.” Women scholars who presented alternative research were on shaky ground. Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, who authored a groundbreaking biography of Emma Smith that depicted her as a reform-minded activist, were forbidden from speaking in any church setting.
• Then, only several months into his apostleship, he authored a memo that shaped much of the church’s political activities for the next three decades. Oaks urged his colleagues to look beyond the current disputes over gender and antidiscrimination laws and instead focus on one key target: same-sex marriage. “The interests at stake in the proposed legalization of so-called homosexual marriages,” he reasoned, “are sufficient to justify a formal Church position and significant efforts in opposition.”
• Then, only several months into his apostleship, he authored a memo that shaped much of the church’s political activities for the next three decades. Oaks urged his colleagues to look beyond the current disputes over gender and antidiscrimination laws and instead focus on one key target: same-sex marriage. “The interests at stake in the proposed legalization of so-called homosexual marriages,” he reasoned, “are sufficient to justify a formal Church position and significant efforts in opposition.”
• Then, only several months into his apostleship, he authored a memo that shaped much of the church’s political activities for the next three decades. Oaks urged his colleagues to look beyond the current disputes over gender and antidiscrimination laws and instead focus on one key target: same-sex marriage. “The interests at stake in the proposed legalization of so-called homosexual marriages,” he reasoned, “are sufficient to justify a formal Church position and significant efforts in opposition.”
• Later, in 1988, to further emphasize their standing in Christian circles, they encouraged journalists to avoid the Mormon nickname and refined their logo to make Jesus Christ larger than all the other words.
• After several years of increasing criticism, the First Presidency excommunicated Lee in September 1989 for apostasy and “conduct unbecoming a member.” A few years later, Lee confessed to molesting a twelve-year-old girl, though it is unclear whether church leaders were aware of it at the time. Lee was eager to suggest that his excommunication was political, and he provided the press with letters he had written that condemned leadership for neglecting the Native population.
• This yearlong tension culminated in a presentation by Lavina Fielding Anderson. A literary scholar who had previously edited church magazines, Anderson had recently cofounded the Mormon Alliance, an organization dedicated to documenting ecclesiastical and spiritual abuse within the institution. Her presentation, which balanced a genuine devotion to the faith with unflinching commitment to accountability, meticulously detailed dozens of actions taken by local and general leaders intended to suppress free thought. The accusations closed with a bombshell: she alleged the existence of “an internal espionage system that creates and maintains secret files on members of the church.”
• The church soon confirmed the existence of the Strengthening Church Members Committee, which a spokesperson said provided local leaders with “information designed to help them counsel with members who, however well-meaning, may hinder the progress of the Church through public criticism.” It was even chaired by two apostles, James E. Faust and Russell M. Nelson.
• Maxine Hanks, a feminist theologian, published an explosive volume, Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. It included chapters on controversial issues ranging from Heavenly Mother to women’s ordination. “Feminism has always existed in Mormonism,” Hanks declared, and the faith’s future depended on restoring fundamental doctrines of gender equality.
• But just as significant was American evangelicalism’s shift to prioritize conservative culture over dogma, creating a political coalition that sought power at the expense of doctrinal purity.
• Hinckley’s Mormonism was one not afraid of the public spotlight. He emphasized the faith’s optimistic outlook, community alliances, and inoffensive posture. “Bring with you all the good that you can,” he pronounced to potential converts, “and then let us see if we can add to it.”
• David and Betty Jackson were Black Baptists who joined the church in California during the early 1990s but grew frustrated with racist ideas still circulating in their congregation and in print. When they pressed their home teacher, Dennis Gladwell, about how the now-discarded racial restriction had lasted until 1978, Gladwell cited Bruce McConkie’s still-influential encyclopedic work, Mormon Doctrine. The Jacksons were unpersuaded. Finally, after a long and tearful discussion, Gladwell realized the harm these racist teachings inflicted long after the policy had been erased. He helped the Jacksons pen a twelve-page letter to Hinckley pleading with him to publicly repudiate these beliefs and remove Mormon Doctrine from print. They even drafted a new Official Declaration that pronounced these anti-Black doctrines “false.”
• But refusing to engage with the racial ideas that created and perpetuated the restriction in the first place allowed those same biases to continue.
• Working with Armand Mauss, a sociologist who had published extensively on Mormonism and race, they composed a thirty-four-page survey of LDS teachings on Blacks that they sent to Marlin K. Jensen, a church authority in Salt Lake City known for his sympathetic demeanor and pragmatic approach. Jensen, in turn, recognized the issue’s severity and organized an ad hoc committee composed of the Jacksons, Gladwell, Mauss, and a public affairs official tasked with summarizing the problems for the First Presidency. They hoped Hinckley might issue a public repudiation of racist “folklore” in June 1998, just in time for the twentieth anniversary of Spencer Kimball’s revelation.
• Church leaders took note of rising racism within the ranks even before the events in Arizona. Speaking in General Conference in 2006, Hinckley confessed alarm that “racial slurs and denigrating remarks are sometimes heard among us.” Racism, he insisted, had no place “among the priesthood of this Church.” Leaders and members alike wrestled with the legacies that remained from the since-extinguished policy, including the ideas and biases that both instigated and perpetuated it. Finally, in 2010, the church ceased the printing of McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine. Leaders claimed it was due to low sales, an assertion disputed by booksellers.
• Then, mere months after Smart’s reappearance, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith became an immediate bestseller. The book focused on the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her daughter, Erica, by two polygamist brothers-in-law, in order to explore the violent aspects of fundamentalism, Mormonism, and religion writ large. LDS authorities, aghast at the renewed attention, released no fewer than three tedious statements denouncing the work. (Two decades later, Under the Banner of Heaven remains America’s best-selling book on Mormonism; it was eventually adapted into a television series.)
• “There are no Mormon fundamentalists,” Gordon Hinckley told CNN’s Larry King in an effort to differentiate the denominations. Many complained when a 2007 PBS documentary devoted to the church, The Mormons, dedicated thirty minutes of its four-hour running time to the past and present of plural marriage. To modern Latter-day Saints, polygamy was an unfortunate artifact that could not be disposed of quickly enough.
• By 2003, Peggy Fletcher Stack had seen nearly everything. The great-granddaughter of a prophet, Heber Grant, and granddaughter of a senator, Wallace Bennett, Stack studied at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley before becoming a founder of Sunstone, the popular countercultural magazine, which she edited from 1978 to 1986. She was then hired by the Salt Lake Tribune in 1991 and became the premier reporter of Utah’s dominant religion. Her coverage ranged from the institution’s clashes with intellectuals in the 1990s to the church’s involvement with the Olympic Games in 2002. But she noticed one previously central facet of the Mormon scene was becoming less visible, and in October 2003 published a long column titled “Where Have All the Mormon Feminists Gone?”
• “There is not a president and Vice President in a family,” declared apostle L. Tom Perry, as “we have co-presidents working together.” Authorities retreated from their previous stance that urged large, “traditional” families, first removing a restriction on birth control and then stating that couples possessed the right to choose their number of children.
• Valerie Hudson, an academic and specialist on gender and international justice, delivered an influential address titled “The Two Trees.” She argued that the Garden of Eden provided an empowering narrative of separate but collaborative gender roles, and that “relationships of gender equality are the bricks of Zion.”
• While many feminists agreed on the language of empowerment, some still critiqued the corollary between motherhood and priesthood. (Not all women had children, they responded, and men were both priesthood holders and fathers.)
• A later decision to lower the age for missionary service for women from twenty-one to nineteen, and for men from nineteen to eighteen, resulted in a flood of women in the field. Previously assumed to be a fallback option for women who did not marry within a few years of high school, missionary work was now nearly as common for women as it was for men. Before the age change, only one in six missionaries was a woman; afterward, it was closer to one in three, and 45 percent of active Mormon women who identify as millennial served a mission.
• One obstacle was Arrington’s own ghost: when Utah State University’s archives opened the Arrington papers in 2001, two years after his death, some of the first visitors were church employees who scoured the collection and demanded that the university sequester 148 boxes and censor forty journal entries. (Those demands were eventually reduced to only the most controversial documents.)
• These new church historians responded to calls for more transparency by releasing a digital collection of significant archival sources in 2002 that filled seventy-four DVDs. They also announced the formation of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, which aimed to publish and analyze all known writings of the faith’s founding prophet according to the highest documentary standards. Leaders authorized and supported a new and unflinching account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre that went beyond Juanita Brooks’s half-century-old book in disrupting traditional and apologetic myths just after the tragedy’s sesquicentennial in 2007. Then, in 2009, the church completed a massive 250,000-square-foot, five-floor library across the street from Temple Square, the physical embodiment of a new optimistic era that would have made Arrington envious.
• For some progressives already skeptical of religion, LDS faith represented an ideological failing. “Someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism,” wrote an editor at Slate, exhibited “a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.”
• Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, explained this hesitancy by noting that many in their sphere continued to view Mormonism “as a Christian cult group.” The outspoken Reverend Bill Keller went so far as to say that a vote for Romney was “a vote for Satan.”
• “We are pro-marriage,” one training document explained to volunteers, “not anti-gay.” While hardly surprising, the results were staggering. The church made up only 2 percent of California’s population, but observers estimated that members contributed around half of the total $40 million in donations and 80–90 percent of the volunteer work. When the amendment passed by only a few points, Mormons were therefore frequently and loudly blamed.
• One solution was found in separating “orientation” from “action,” classifying the former as natural while the latter was sinful. Dallin H. Oaks, for instance, admitted as early as 1995 that “same-gender attraction” could be an “inborn” trait “acquired from a complex interaction of ‘nature and nurture.’ ” Even as they pressed forward with supporting anti-gay-marriage legislation—or, perhaps, because of it—they emphasized compassion for homosexuals by validating their orientation as natural, albeit sinful if acted upon. The language of “same-sex attraction” therefore enabled them to concede internal inclinations but retain the right to punish the “choice” of fulfilling the “temptation.” LGBTQ members were left in a sexual limbo, with their desires deemed natural but their activities still suspect. To reflect this shift, the church’s revised handbook in 2010 officially separated attraction from action.
• He scoffed at the idea that homosexuality was rooted in “inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural.” That could not be the case, because “why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone?” Yet Packer was fighting a losing battle. When a transcript was posted online, the address was edited to reflect new circumstances. Gone was the explicit harangue against “inborn tendencies.” By excising his “Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone?” remark, the church unofficially forfeited its belief that homosexuality was solely a social construct.
• One study found that while 69 percent of BYU students opposed gay marriage in 2004, that number had dwindled to 38 percent only a decade later.
• The June 2011 double issue of Newsweek featured Mitt Romney’s smiling head pasted on an LDS missionary’s body jumping in the air while holding the Book of Mormon. In multiple colors, the title read, “The Mormon Moment: How the Outsider Faith Creates Winners,” and the issue’s feature story focused on the media frenzy then circling the faith.
• The church’s reaction to the raunchy, irreverent, but acclaimed musical was remarkably restrained. “The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening,” their one-line statement needled, “but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever.” It even purchased a one-page advertisement in the Playbill that said, “You’ve seen the play … Now read the book.” Stone and Parker admitted that the institution’s response was “just brilliant.”
• “If Harvard Business School were a religion,” wrote Harvard professor, and LDS leader, Clayton Christensen, “it could be Mormonism.”
• More significantly, the statement was accompanied by a new document titled “Race and the Church: All Are Alike unto God.” This text admitted that the racial restriction originated after Joseph Smith, though hedged by saying, “It is not known precisely why.” The church then issued a new introduction to the 1978 revelation, which had been canonized as part of Latter-day Saint scripture, with the same historical information, as well as published another statement that disavowed “the theories advanced in the past.” These repudiations of past “speculation” were precisely what David and Betty Jackson had requested fourteen years earlier.
• The Pew Research Center estimated that only 1 percent of campaign coverage from major news outlets focused on the candidates’ faith. America’s theological chasm was no longer insurmountable.
• The next week, the Associated Press ran a story titled “And the Winner Is … the Mormon Church.” The LDS tradition, this common sentiment implied, had finally reached mainstream status, a validation Mormons had sought for over a century. If anything, journalists seemed bored with the religion. McKay Coppins, a Mormon who covered the campaign for BuzzFeed, noted how reporters assigned to accompany Romney to his church increasingly saw it “less as a tantalizing peek into the candidate’s strange religion,” and more as the way that most Mormons, as well as most Americans, view their faith: “A dull chore to be fulfilled out of obligation.” Romney’s campaign had lost, but his religion was here to stay.
• Archuleta had publicly announced that he belonged to the “LGBTQIA+ community” the previous summer, identifying himself as both bisexual and asexual. At that time he expressed a desire to still embrace his Latter-day Saint faith, including its prohibition on homosexual relationships. But now, only six months later, he wondered whether a balance between his faith and sexuality was even possible. His public confession was raw and emotional. “I can no longer pretend,” he shared between tears, “like everything’s fine.”
• Archuleta likened his situation to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, specifically when the fictional character was forced to choose between doing the “Christian” thing by turning in Jim, who was fleeing slavery, to authorities, or defying society’s expectations and letting him go free. “All right then,” Finn concluded as he chose the latter, “I’ll go to hell.” Archuleta’s narrative climax was no less dramatic: “I’m choosing damnation.”
• This dynamic and rigorous structure has succeeded in committing many youths to the church and its standards. Mormon millennials are more likely to believe in God than their contemporaries, more likely to attend church, pray, and read the scriptures, and more likely to follow rules of chastity and refrain from drugs and alcohol; they even claim more spiritual experiences than their parents’ generation. In an age when their peers are increasingly skeptical of both dogma and institutions, Mormon millennials have retained a commitment to unique truth claims and to local officials, though in more nuanced ways than their predecessors.
• Church leaders joined Catholics in defending clergy confidentiality when it comes to child-abuse reporting, to the chagrin of many members. While Mormon millennials are less anti-institution than their contemporaries, they are still less likely to fully trust their hierarchical authorities than previous generations.
• Young’s consistent and fervent opposition to materialism, and fear that the saints were becoming obsessed with consumer goods, might have made him squirm at the gaudy sight. Yet the modern church now possesses financial resources necessary for the long-term stability he had long craved. The reserves also enable the faith to be among the globe’s most powerful humanitarian givers. In 2022, for instance, the church donated over $1 billion worldwide to various efforts, including $32 million to the World Food Programme to address famine in Africa.
• In early 2012, Elder Marlin Jensen, the church historian who already helped inaugurate a new era of scholarly transparency, spoke to a gathering of Utah State University students. The mild-mannered leader discussed a growing wave of younger saints who were fleeing the church due to encountering “difficult” topics or “troublesome” history on the internet.
• A year later Hans Mattsson, previously one of the faith’s leading authorities in Europe, gave an exclusive interview to the New York Times about his personal faith crisis. Jensen posited that “not since Kirtland have we seen an exodus of the Church’s best and brightest leaders.”
• One podcaster, John Dehlin, gained popularity by drawing both prominent and common members alike onto his show to discuss thornier topics. He published a collection of testimonials in March 2012 on a website that featured 3,086 participants narrating why they lost faith in traditional teachings. The topics included, among others, the history of polygamy, multiple accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the Book of Mormon’s historicity, and the racial restriction. This and other data were eventually presented to leadership. The threat was far from new, however: church authorities had been briefed as early as 2008 that as much as three-quarters of their young single adult population was no longer active.
• Leaders were divided on how to act. Some pleaded for members not to, as apostle Quentin Cook put it, become “immersed” in “internet materials that magnify, exaggerate, and, in some cases, invent shortcomings of early Church leaders.” The church had long been the target of misrepresentation and malice, they argued, so it was best to just ignore derisive attacks. Another apostle, Jeffrey Holland, urged saints not to “hyperventilate” over information that could be easily discredited. The hope was that the ideological threat could merely be avoided. Such an approach had mostly worked for nearly two centuries.
• A group of leaders and historians, drawing on various projects that had been in progress for over a decade, focused on a new initiative in May 2012 to stem the tide: a series of essays, each focused on a difficult topic, that could acknowledge complexity while also reaffirming faith. They commissioned several trusted scholars to write initial drafts that were then edited by church historians and vetted by Latter-day Saint leaders.
• One of the driving forces behind the project was Dieter Uchtdorf, a German-born apostle and former pilot who had been in the First Presidency since 2008. He prepared saints for the essays’ release by preaching that, “to be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes,” and that “there may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine.” The best way to deal with the issues, he counseled, was to confront them head-on. Uchtdorf urged that “truth and transparency complement each other,” and that one could not exist without the other.
• In 2015, leaders excommunicated John Dehlin, the podcaster who built a financially successful podcast network predicated on critiquing traditional narratives, and disciplined or threatened to discipline many others.
• Maxine Hanks, who was excommunicated for her feminist scholarship, was rebaptized in 2012, insistent that both her and the church’s arc had bent back together; however, when Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was excommunicated for exposing ecclesiastical abuse, applied for rebaptism in 2018, the First Presidency denied her petition.
• Mormonism’s religious imagination—originating with Joseph Smith, synthesized through Eliza Snow, challenged by B. H. Roberts, refined by Juanita Brooks, and polished by the likes of Sterling McMurrin, Carol Pearson, Richard Bushman, and a myriad of others—remains as unsettled as ever, a sign of an open canon of truth that is as sweeping and audacious as the tradition from which it sprang.
• To Kate Kelly, a fiery human-rights attorney and BYU graduate, that meant finally granting women the priesthood. She formed a new organization, Ordain Women, in March 2013. When addressing the frequent rebuttal that Mormon women already “feel equal,” Kelly was resolute: “Equality is not a feeling.”
• Kelly’s continued agitation eventually resulted in excommunication in June 2014, a clear echo of Sonia Johnson’s story back in 1979. “I am not an apostate,” Kelly told journalists, “unless every single person who has questions to ask out loud is an apostate.”
• Neylan McBaine, a marketing executive and brand strategist, published an essay titled “A Moderate Mormon Manifesto.” She called for tweaks within the system that empowered women and spotlighted their talents. She started the Mormon Women Project, an online repository of women’s stories of how they balanced work, faith, and family. McBaine eventually published a book on the topic, Women at Church, that offered practical counsel for how to grant women more leadership duties and provide girls more visibility.
• Russell Nelson, at his inaugural press conference as the faith’s new president, was asked about gender roles in the church. His response cited a scriptural verse that explained how women were created “before the foundations of the world” to birth and raise children as a way to “glorify God.” Though Nelson did not specify it, this passage came from Doctrine & Covenants 132, the revelation Joseph Smith had dictated on polygamy in response to Emma Smith’s protest. It was a reminder that the faith’s polygamous past continued to shape the modern institution’s gendered expectations.
• A woman’s place in both Mormon homes and Mormon pews has transformed with each generation even as authorities insist that it remains eternally stable.
• Latter-day Saint support for Trump, both during and after the 2016 election, marked the faith tradition’s firm place within the modern Republican coalition. The GOP was “home,” no matter the name on the ticket. Even the church’s nonpartisan biannual letter encouraging members to vote subtly reflected this change: following Bill Clinton’s scandals, the church’s letter, a version of which is released every election year, had added the statement that members should “seek out and then uphold leaders who will act with integrity and are wise, good, and honest”; starting in 2016, however, that statement was removed, replaced with the more tepid admonition to seek candidates who support “principles compatible with the gospel.”
• A Public Religion Research Institute study the following spring determined that 46 percent of Mormons believed Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, which placed them only behind White Evangelicals, at 61 percent.
• Even Latter-day Saint leaders decried the extremes emblematic of the Trump era. Dallin H. Oaks indirectly denounced the Capitol insurrection in General Conference three months after it took place. “Sovereign power of the people,” he chastised, “does not mean that mobs and other groups of people can intervene to intimidate or force government action.”
• A 2020 survey revealed that while 80 percent of Mormons over the age of forty voted for Trump, only 43 percent of those below forty did. Indeed, Mormon millennials exhibited much more progressive views than their predecessors, with only 46 percent leaning Republican, a figure that paled in comparison to young Mormon voters only a decade earlier.
• The long road that led to the seemingly irreversible Mormon-Republican alliance was built over a century. It was made possible by a series of pragmatic compromises and cultural shifts. George Q. Cannon set the process in motion, J. Reuben Clark solidified its direction, Ezra Taft Benson shepherded its fulfillment, and Mitt Romney reaped its benefits. Not even Donald Trump could fracture its foundations. Yet while America’s conservative coalition appears to have been predetermined from the start, it was always historically contingent on particular personalities and cultural influences.
• Ever since Spencer W. Kimball announced the end to the policy, church officials have refused to offer an apology for the pain it had caused. For some leaders it is a matter of principle. “The history of the church is not to seek apologies or to give them,” Dallin H. Oaks remarked. He insisted that the word apology does not even appear in scripture. His position is rooted in a broader anxiety among White Americans. Many refuse to address the historic problem of racism because it shatters the myth of an idyllic past and highlights how some have benefited from a system of privilege. Instead of facing these terrible truths, James Baldwin frequently argued, White Americans cling to the “lie” of national innocence. These tensions are especially acute in the Latter-day Saint context. Acknowledging the racism inherent in past institutional policies opens the question of prophetic fallibility and undercuts authority in the present hierarchy.
• Despite one of the thirteen Gospel Topics essays documenting the historic, and human, origins of the restriction, three-quarters of Mormons polled in 2016 believed the ban was divinely inspired.
• Alice Faulkner Burch, Relief Society president for Genesis, the Black organization dating back to 1971, confessed in 2016 that “racism still exists and still has a tight grip within the LDS Church.” Things became worse after Trump’s election. One of the speakers at Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally in August 2017, the most notorious gathering of White supremacists in modern American history, was Ayla Stewart, a Mormon blogger. Stewart was part of a growing chorus of Mormon alt-right figures who wedded the racism of Trump’s movement with Latter-day Saint beliefs. They called themselves #DezNat, short for Deseret Nationalism, on Twitter. Darius Gray, one of Genesis’s founders, in 2022 bemoaned having witnessed a “resurgence of insensitive comments and attitudes the likes of which I have never experienced before.” The Public Religion Research Institute’s Structural Racism Index in 2022 found that Mormons ranked only behind White evangelicals in perpetuating White supremacy and racial inequality.
• Then, in the October 2020 conference following the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Nelson delivered one of the most pointed anti-racism addresses ever delivered by a Latter-day Saint president. He expressed grief that “our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice,” and he urged saints to help heal the world from racist ills. Speaking at BYU a few weeks later, Oaks proclaimed that all forms of racism must be “rooted out,” and even endorsed “Black Lives Matter” as a “universally acceptable message.” Notably, neither Oaks nor other leaders have walked back these messages following the conservative backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, Morehouse College awarded Nelson its inaugural Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize in 2023 for his efforts toward “universal justice.”
• A group of BYU faculty, students, and alumni organized a roundtable in 2019 to address lingering Mormon theologies of colonialism in the form of Latter-day Saint reverence toward Columbus. While much of America fought over the colonist’s bloody legacy, saints had a particularly complicated attachment: one Book of Mormon passage refers to a man being led by the “Spirit of God” to travel “upon the many waters.” Many saints therefore believed Columbus fulfilled a divine mission. Yet this “doctrine of discovery,” according to Diné scholar Farina King, is antithetical to the true gospel. Sacralizing stories of colonialism and conquest “have blinded and misled” members about “the complexities and realities of the past and their constant relevance to our present and future.” Roni Jo Draper, a Yurok professor at BYU, accused these ideas of providing a prophetic veneer to “an expression of white supremacy.”
• They hastily organized an interview between Todd Christofferson, an apostle, and Michael Otterson, the managing director of public affairs. Christofferson, whose brother is a prominent gay member of the faith, was visibly uncomfortable while defending the actions.
• Polling the next year determined that only 40 percent of millennial members backed the new policies. In response, Nelson felt it necessary a few months later to reaffirm that the changes came through “revelation”; yet the fact that Nelson’s address was removed from the church’s website shortly thereafter hinted at lingering ambivalence.
• In a rare concession to the broader culture, Oaks admitted that the retraction was in part “to reduce the hate and contention so common today.” Nelson later defended the original policies’ revelatory status while also celebrating their reversal by claiming that both actions were “motivated by love.”
• Oaks confessed in 2015 that “while we have been acquainted with lesbians and homosexuals for some time,” the “unique problems of a transgender situation” were not something they had yet codified. This was not completely true—the church’s handbook already stipulated that transgender men could not be ordained to the priesthood—but it did reflect a growing concern across American culture. As gay rights were increasingly protected in the nation, many activists, religious leaders, and politicians turned their attention to transsexuality.
• Finally, in 2019, Oaks addressed the same question he previously left unanswered when he closed the door on any form of acceptance. “The intended meaning of ‘gender’ in the family proclamation,” he told a gathering of leaders, is “biological sex at birth.”
• From Eliza R. Snow’s ruminations in the 1840s to Kris Irvin’s pleading in the 2020s, Heavenly Mother remained a platform for exploring Mormonism’s gendered imagination.
• The apostle, otherwise known for his compassionate rhetoric, then invoked a surprising analogy. While drawn from the Latter-day Saint tradition, it bordered on dangerous for an era of rising right-wing violence and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Holland recalled how those who built the Nauvoo Temple did so “with a trowel in one hand and a musket in the other,” a core memory of when the faith was in an armed conflict with its Illinois neighbors. He hoped modern saints would resurrect that devoted allegiance: “I would like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning.” In the same address that discouraged “divisive” language, Holland used the rhetoric of war to call for reinforcements.
• One of the reasons the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has proved to be so resilient and successful is its ability to provide a narrative of continuity while constantly adapting to new circumstances. Religions thrive when they transform with time but still convince followers they never change. Latter-day Saint leaders have been able to forfeit previously central doctrines—polygamy, theocracy, racial restriction—while simultaneously proclaiming compliance with eternal laws that never bend. Many observers wonder, then, if the faith will once again shift away from cultural allegiances that currently appear unshakable: right-wing politics, theological orthodoxy, and social conservatism, particularly in matters concerning gender and sexuality. History has shown that even the most unlikely outcomes can eventually become possible. Some elements for change are indeed present. Just as Mormonism faced intense pressure in the 1880s over polygamy and in the 1970s over the racial restriction, the church now faces pressure in the 2020s to change its stance on same-sex marriage. This push comes from external forces, with LGBTQ organizations labeling the Latter-day Saint church as a hate group, as well as internal: BYU students in 2021 protested the school’s LGBTQ policies by lighting the Y with rainbow colors; a year later, a Deseret News study found that 58 percent of active saints, including 89 percent of Utah residents in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old range, believed same-sex unions should be legal. Whether leaders recognize it or not, the war over preserving “traditional” marriage has already been lost.
• The battle they are waging is not between Mormons and America, as the dividing lines are now within America. Their temples are not under threat of being seized, their tax exemptions are not at risk of being revoked, and they are not vulnerable to being cast as a pariah. The same cultural currents that launched Latter-day Saint society on this trajectory have also made it nearly impossible—or at least difficult—to change directions.
• The story of Mormonism in America is the story of the changing parameters of American religion.
• The Mormon faith was born from a desire to address problems that society seemed unable to solve. Scripture, revelation, prophetic pronouncements, priesthood authority—these are testaments to a yearning for divine finality. For Zion. Democracy provides a license for freedom but also produces an anarchy of possibilities. Believers find strength in the doctrine that God cuts through the morass of opinions to reveal truth, to uncover bedrock. “Lo here,” cried the ministers of Joseph Smith’s day; “lo there,” cry the competing factions today. Mormonism is an attempt to find facts in a world of fictions, certainty in a realm of distrust, belonging in a sphere of disunion, permanence in an age of transience, a longing to slay the demon of emptiness and confusion as if the adversary were reachable and could be killed.
• The fact that there is an Atlantic-sized ocean of scholarship on Mormon history is both the field’s strength and what makes it so daunting. So many historians have produced articles and books that are crucial to understanding the faith’s past that it is impossible to list even a fraction of them. While word restrictions meant that only those works upon which I directly drew are cited in the endnotes, I could have cited hundreds, if not thousands, more. I am therefore thankful to the community of scholars who are hopefully as forgiving as they are brilliant.