Chapter 7: Character Witness Part 2

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Action-Redaction

“What should you leave out of the legacy that you leave?”

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Family Fan

I was given three family names at birth; in addition to my last name, my first and middle names are also surnames – my first name being my mother’s maiden name, and my middle name being my great-grandmother’s maiden name. The tradition of naming children after ancestors or scriptural heroes is particularly strong among Mormons; the intention, in the words of Helaman, is that “when you remember your names…ye may remember their works…that they were good.”

I don’t know if that’s what motivated my parents to give me three last names, but I do know that each of my grandparents wanted to pass along the latter-day legacy to their children and grandchildren – an inheritance built around the good works of their faithful ancestors.

There is coding in my blood that has been passed down to me right through the Mormon pioneers, and their stories have been with me for as long as I can remember. As a family, we visited ancestral farms, homes, villages, churches, and workplaces in their old world, traveling to Switzerland, Poland, Germany, and other European destinations on our search. Back in the U.S., we discovered their gravestones in Nauvoo, found their names in the register of the Mormon Battalion museum, and visited the homesteads where they began their new lives as U.S. immigrants – and as newly converted Latter-Day Saints.

Some kids might complain about being dragged along on a family history tour; maybe I was a bit of an oddball, but I’ve actually been fascinated by the stories of my ancestry ever since I can remember. Along the way, I’ve also developed a tendency to dig a bit deeper to find the real story about my ancestors’ lives – even when those stories cover things they perhaps would have preferred to omit from the official transcript of their lives.

The records that have been passed along through the generations and that eventually came into my own hands are full of inspiring stories; some of the episodes can be quite amusing as well. We’ve got funny stories that have become part of our folklore on both sides of the family:

On my mom’s side, for example, we have the Italian in the Woodpile, who would hide outside my grandfather’s great grandmother’s window on their Swiss farm, waiting for an opportunity to sneak in. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before he became my grandfather’s great-grandfather, much to the embarrassment of the family.

Would I wish to see that story redacted and sanitized to make my predecessors all look like puritans? As much as my Swiss ancestors would like to have swept the truth away at the time to avoid what they saw as a pollution of their gene pool, I certainly wouldn’t want the account erased from our written history! Knowing this story, my cousins and I can all say we’ve got some Italian blood in us – and in some cases, that explains a lot!

I’m not sure how that account aligns with the mnemonic presented in the Book of Mormon, but when I think of my own name – which I share with my ancestors – I do think of their works…all of their works. And when I look at photos of the farm in our family album, I can’t help but notice the woodpile next to the house…at which point it’s hard to keep a straight face!

Switching to my dad’s side, we’ve got the story of the nameless baby. As best as I can recall, here’s how the story goes:

My grandfather’s great grandfather, Jonathan Hampton, was converted to the LDS faith by Brigham Young in Canada. Jonathan and Brigham both travelled to Kirtland after Jonathan’s baptism, where both became interested in a new convert named Julia Foster. Competing amongst themselves to ask for her hand in marriage, Jonathan won out; but when Brigham Young later found out that Jonathan and Julia were still deciding on a name for their new baby, he asked for the privilege of giving the baby a name and a blessing…and in his typically headstrong way, he bestowed the name of “Brigham Young Hampton” on my grandfather’s grandfather.

While this is one of the only anecdotes that has commonly been passed down from generation to generation, in this case there is an easy opportunity to dig a whole lot deeper. This story and more – including Brigham Young’s later marriage to my grandfather’s grandmother, Julia Foster – are covered in Brigham Young Hampton’s journal, which is an amazing, 40,000-word account of frontier life; thanks to Google, it is readily accessible to anyone on the planet with an internet connection.

Brigham Young Hampton is amazingly candid about his personal life in the journal; he freely describes his bickering wives, for example, and how simultaneously making three women happy proved to be an understandably impossible task. In the end, he could only hold on to one wife, the two divorces having occurred just in time for him to avoid being forced to choose between loyal wives or to go into hiding when polygamy was formally renounced by the church.

The story of his wife Mary Jane’s ascension from the number three position to that of First Wife comes across as almost humorous in Brigham Young Hampton’s journal, but some of the terse recitations leave the reader wondering if there is more to the story than his own words relate.

Mary Jane went through incredibly difficult trials in her life; during a diphtheria epidemic in 1870, for example, she tragically lost four of her five young children – two on the same day! She died while my grandfather, Hamp, was serving a mission in Germany, so he had to read about his grandmother’s funeral service in a letter from his family. In the eulogy, as Hamp read in the letter, Mary Jane was portrayed as the noblest type of mother, having raised not only her own children but other mothers’ children as well.

When I first read that letter myself as part of some research I was doing for a book about my grandfather’s life, I didn’t give much thought to these other step-children – or to the ex-sister-wives who bore them. The only version of the story that I had seen came from my own bloodline, and in Brigham Young Hampton’s journals he suggests that the step-children were abandoned by their biological mothers, and that’s the end of the story.

Really? Well who were these other women, and why would they willingly give up their own children? Wives #1 and #2, Bertha and Helen Hampton, are part of my family too; so shouldn’t their stories be told, and shouldn’t their legacies be passed down right along with Brigham Young Hampton’s?

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Nitro

The LDS Church recently produced an amusing family history cartoon that encourages church members to research their family history. Although I don’t think it was the point of the cartoon, the first part of that video brilliantly describes the next step of my own experience as I dug a little deeper into the lives of the two women whom Mary Jane replaced. Here’s the clip that really nailed it for me:

As I read Bertha and Helen’s stories, I felt much like the guy with the nitro glycerine in the test tube. Honestly, if my computer’s webcam had been on when I found their words and read them through, I think the camera would have captured an expression exactly like the guy’s face in that last frame!

OK, all humor aside – and if you can pardon the Jaredite pun – this is the part where Shiz gets real:

Brigham Young Hampton’s first wife was Bertha King. He claims that she left him to care for their five children alone, but let’s have a look at Wife #2 for some deeper insights into this story:

A few years into his initially monogamous marriage to Bertha, Brigham Young Hampton – I’ll call him BYH going forward to avoid confusion with Brigham Young and Brigham Young Junior – began to expand his horizons. Knowing that he needed to comply with Joseph Smith’s vision of plural marriage to reach the highest rung of the ladder and gain entry to the Kingdom of God, he set his eyes on newly arrived Helen Bone, a 19-year old, Australian-born convert.

When she was just ten years old, growing up in the convict colony of Tasmania, Helen lost her mother and several of her siblings, presumably to illness. Her father decided to leave Van Diemen’s Land and brought what was left of his family back to his hometown in England, where he heard the message of the restoration – including the promise of eternal families. He decided to uproot again and join the Saints in Zion.

On arrival in Utah, Helen and her younger sister Mary Anne were quickly courted to fill the growing demand for plural wives.

[Now it doesn’t take a genius to realize that requiring faithful men to marry multiple women as an entry requirement for the pearly gates is unsustainable over time – unless, of course, you have an influx of overwhelmingly female converts or a growing number of lost boys or “unfaithful” single men! In that environment, it is no surprise that Helen and Mary Anne’s value as ladder rungs for ambitious brethren set off an immediate, underhanded bidding process.]

Helen bought into the authority of the church leaders but like many members of the church at the time, she found the idea of polygamy to be repulsive. When a man twelve years older than her with a wife and four children propositioned her with marriage, Helen wanted nothing to do with it. To coerce her into compliance with his demands, however, her suitor, Brigham Young Hampton, relentlessly threatened her with hellfire and damnation. First Wife Bertha also laid on the pressure; fearing for her own soul, Helen eventually consented.

“I’m the one who should be crying,” Bertha said to her when she saw Helen in tears on her wedding day, “I didn’t want you, and I despise polygamy.”

Based on her own experience after almost a decade of abuse, Bertha told her that any hopes of happiness and peace with BYH were false. Helen wondered whether God wanted her to humble herself and – in Abrahamic fashion – become willing to sacrifice her selfish, prudish, puritan ideals on the altar; but just hours after the wedding, she decided it was all too much to bear: she packed her things and left Salt Lake City, hoping to escape what she saw as a life of imprisonment. At some point, however, the eternal nature of her vows struck her, and she turned around – perhaps hoping to achieve some sort of redemption through her suffering.

Helen was devastated when their first baby was stillborn; eventually she bore two more children who survived their early years – yet faced a number of hardships along the way. All I know about First Wife Bertha from this time period is that at some point she also decided that she had had enough and left for Nevada. Helen was given Bertha’s five children to raise in addition to her own; in his journals, BYH makes it sound like Bertha abandoned her children voluntarily, but interviews with Bertha’s friends about the “whippings” she received – and Helen’s own experience over the next few years – certainly indicate otherwise!

Shortly after Bertha left, Helen gave birth to a fourth child; less than a week later, BYH took a new love interest, Miss Mary Jane Robinson, to the Grand Ball to celebrate the driving of the Golden Spike and the completion of the intercontinental railroad. At the next ball, BYH again chose Mary Jane over his wife as his date; by this time, however, Helen had recovered enough from childbirth – and from the death of the infant two weeks later – to storm into the ball and “make a squall” in front of the couple. Not surprisingly, when BYH married Mary Jane less than two months later with the blessing of the Presiding Bishopric of the church, it was done in secret from Helen.

Of course, Helen eventually found out about the marriage to Mary Jane. That revelation came in the form of BYH’s demand that she vacate the house that she had kept for over five years – along with all of her furniture and the items she had sewn as a seamstress – and to relinquish her two living children and her five step children to their new mother, Wife #3. BYH had planned to move Helen into a rented room down the street, but she refused and tried to stop him from entering the house. According to Helen’s testimony in a Bishop’s Court, BYH beat her savagely with his brass-capped cane for this defiance – and left her bleeding profusely on the doorstep.

After this episode, BYH cut off all temporal support, but Helen still refused to give up her children. As winter arrived, BYH laid an all-out siege that finally got her grovelling. Lacking any food stores for the winter – and after sawing up her fence posts for firewood – she sent one of her hungry children to beg BYH for some food and for some additional fuel to keep warm. The child came back with nothing but the imperative message to “Tell your mother to go to hell!”

With his temporal influence exhausted, and faced with Helen’s stubborn refusal to yield, BYH next turned to spiritual threats. When the standard threats began to lose their potency, he pulled out the ultimate card in the possession of any Mormon High Priest at the time: He told Helen he would leave her veiled. Now that may not seem to be all that great of a threat to a modern reader, but back in Helen’s day, it was a curse worse than death or hell; it meant perpetual limbo – an infernal disappearance into eternal non-existence.

In the custom of the day, a woman’s temple veil was drawn over her face on her death; this veil was only to be lifted by her own husband to “resurrect her.” The sinister part of this practice was that temple-endowed Mormon men had been told – or at least believed – that they had a choice in the matter…and that they could base their judgmental choice on the woman’s fidelity and faithfulness – not just in terms of her adherence to Mormon principles, but subject to her lifelong obedience and submission to her husband’s will.

Now you can argue all you want about whether this misguided notion was official doctrine at the time – plenty has been written on the subject, and apologists say that the sanctioned writings on the topic indicate that the husband could only act on the direction of Christ Himself in conducting this ordinance. But in practice, there is no arguing about the fact that manipulative men of the day used the phrase, “I won’t resurrect you” to convince their wives that they had the power and authority to make that choice. And Helen, for one, took that intimidating curse absolutely seriously at the time – much as she laughed it off in her later years when she came to doubt the origins and authenticity of the LDS Church.

In the face of physical abuse and verbal threats, Helen decided to stand fast and keep her two children, in her eyes giving up her role as their mother in the next life in order to be a mother to them in the mortal life. Helen’s conscience was constantly being torn between what she felt was God’s will and what others were telling her was God’s will. During this period of her life, she still placed a great deal of faith in the Bishop’s courts, where well-meaning counselors tended to sympathize with her needs but failed to see their judgments for child support through. BYH and Helen were typically sent home from these court proceedings with recommendations to try harder to work things out through prayer and study, giving scriptural edits to “endure to the end” a whole new meaning!

While she managed to hold onto her own children, Bertha’s children were eventually given to Mary Jane to raise while BYH continued to be sealed to other women. During these miserable years while she battled with conflicting loyalties, Helen discovered that her husband was involved in even darker secrets than the breach of his paternal obligations.

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Peepholes

On his arrival in Utah, BYH had been taken in as a son by his godfather, Brigham Young, who also appointed his mother Julia to be the matron of the Lion House after she became the 36^th wife of the “Old Boss” as he was called back in the day. This connection gained BYH some influence among church officials and the leading men of Salt Lake City; he eventually became one of Brigham Young’s personal bodyguards – a role that sprang from the personal confidence he had garnered from the self-proclaimed “dictator” of the Territory of Utah.

Given his marital issues over the years, BYH had also been dragged through enough courts to become very familiar with many local law enforcement officials. The men presiding over the secular courts had to deal with spiritual squabbles between their own wives, and BYH’s manner of dealing with his wives wasn’t necessarily viewed negatively; in some cases, he befriended the judges and legislators who presided over him. With these connections in his pocket, he ended up joining the police force himself and was eventually appointed as the constable of Salt Lake City.

The territorial police force at the time comprised officers with a volatile concoction of church and state loyalties. Non-Mormon politicians of the day were sometimes unwilling to push the Church’s agenda on Utah’s legislation; in some cases they publicly denounced Brigham Young, who wanted these agitators removed from office. BYH’s hatred of gentiles and “dirty apostates” was well known (and is well documented in his own journals), and this inclination – along with his influence in law enforcement – made him very useful to Brigham Young’s strategic interests.

I’m sure the real story of the ambient environment in Utah in the 1860s lies somewhere in a middle ground between what is presented today in Church-sponsored Pioneer Day floats and the Taliban-style autocracy depicted in contemporary, non-Mormon news reports. In any case, BYH knew that according to Brigham Young’s rhetoric, evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed was a capital crime (as were theft, adultery, interracial marriage, and a number of other infractions and blasphemes).

We do have to remember that Federal troops had been mobilized to put down the Mormon rebellion at the time. Recognizing that most decent parents would be willing to fight to the death to save their own children; church leaders capitalized on that protective inclination, and the frequent repetition of one-sided accounts of the Mormon extermination from their prior settlements in the east was used to inspire the formation of a defensive force in Utah. Local militia members feared that the marching troops were under direct orders to crush their lifestyle, destroy their faith, rape their wives, and murder their children; so it is understandable that subversive and even offensive tactics were justified as appropriate measures of defense against this armed enemy. Speaking from the makeshift tabernacle on Temple Square, Brigham Young and his counselors found inflammatory rhetoric to be very useful in galvanizing the unity that would be required for the coming battle. Viewed through the Mormon lens, this was wartime!

In this environment, non-Mormon politicians were despised by the Saints as being complicit with the enemies of the LDS Church and were often pressured to leave the state, but ex-Mormon politicians were a heretical breed of their own. On par with Judas Iscariot, these anti-Christs were beyond redemption. The Book of Mormon clearly places “Denial of the Spirit” as the Number 1 crime against God and humanity, well above cold-blooded murder or any other crime that an earth-bound soul could commit. In dealing with these traitors in his position of influence, BYH adopted this ranking system and applied what he saw as a higher code of conduct that lay well above the law of the land or even the secondary laws of God.

BYH’s paternal obligations and wedding vows slid even further down the priority list in the face of his increasing responsibilities for defending the Kingdom of God in the Salt Lake Valley as the constable. He began to meet behind closed doors with other influential officers. Some of the clandestine meetings occurred in his own house, where Helen claims to have overheard plots in which BYH and other alleged member of the Danites – a vigilante group bent on retribution – planned the murders of several ex-Mormon politicians who were trying to draw people away from the church. Helen even claims to have foiled some of the murder plots by warning the targets not to go to the place of the planned executions.

Now many volumes have been written on the subject of the Danites, and I’m not about to claim that I have any concrete evidence that they even existed in Utah or that Brigham Young ordered any of these hits directly; but the role of the church in the next sordid episode is well documented – and carries with it some insidious implications.

With his murder plots apparently foiled, BYH took another approach to blackmail his targets: He leased whorehouses (Heber J. Grant’s word, not mine!) from Brigham Young’s estate and hired prostitutes to approach and seduce enemies of the Church – and then paid them extra to allow law enforcement officials to watch them in action through strategically placed peepholes in Church-owned buildings. [Perhaps unsurprisingly, the entire police force (with only two notable exceptions) volunteered for the service of acquiring eye witness accounts that could be used in the prosecution of the Church’s enemies!] The charges generally had the intended effect on the targeted officials, resulting in either their conviction or their deportation from the state.

The Brigham Young Trust Company Building with the fourth floor outfitted as a brothel

The Church’s goal in supporting this effort was to divert attention away from those pushing for anti-polygamy laws by exposing their own scandalous affairs; the diversion seems to have worked for a time, but once these rather embarrassing entrapments came to light – the court proceedings were part of the public record, after all – the eye witnesses had to admit their role in the sting. BYH’s willingness to sit in prison as the silent scapegoat for the whole operation marked the end of the countering court case against the Church, but I don’t see how that can exonerate those who paid him for this work – reportedly with laundered tithing funds! BYH claimed that his actions were done with the full knowledge of the board of directors of Brigham Young’s trading company (including First Presidency member George Q. Cannon and notable apostles) but stopped short of pointing his finger directly at his godfather, Brigham Young.

Knowing what I have gathered about Brigham Young’s Trumpesque character and leadership style, however, I simply can’t fathom the notion that BYH devised, executed, and was paid for this notorious idea on his own with Brigham Young’s complete ignorance. In any case, the records show financial ties between the brothels and the church coffers despite outright denials of any role in the scandal whatsoever. To me the Church’s denial of involvement in the face of all indications to the contrary – including transaction reports for “services” rendered to the church by BYH and the leading madams of Salt Lake – calls every subsequent denial of an official role in violent retributions and other sordid affairs into question.

BYH’s willingness to ignore moral and legal codes in order to protect the Church’s reputation is clear from the court transcripts of the day. Blatant bribery and frontier-style corruption was relatively commonplace at the time, and there are plenty of contemporary examples in which “lying for the Lord” under oath was considered to be perfectly acceptable by church leaders, who justified their actions with the belief that the court official administering the oath that they were breaking represented a government that sought to eradicate the defendants from existence – and was therefore an enemy that should be fought with clandestine subterfuge at any opportunity.

The Church’s bribery of government informants is perhaps understandable in this light, but when a corpse showed up in the Salt Lake City morgue with Masonic symbols carved into the skin – and the throat slit so deeply from ear to ear as to nearly decapitate the victim – the rules of engagement had apparently been thrown out entirely. Reading about the Coleman case makes me sick – and that sickness becomes even more revolting when I’m left wondering whether my own grandfather’s grandfather could have been guilty of planning or executing such a disturbing crime.

Helen accuses BYH of plotting the same type of “blood atonement” murders in accordance with Brigham Young’s very detailed edicts but does not indicate any knowledge that they were actually carried out. I do wonder how reliable Helen’s testimony is in this case; after all, it comes compiled with the writings of another scapegoat, John D. Lee, who was the only man executed for a role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Like Hampton, Lee claimed he was only following orders, but how high up the chain these orders went is still disputed to this day.

Helen’s testimony ended up as an appendix in later printings of Lee’s autobiography, which was unfortunately repackaged into an anti-Mormon tract, allowing faithful Saints to dismiss its entire content as diabolical falsehood. She had also joined the Ladies Anti-Polygamy League, which put her at further odds with church officials and in their eyes gave her a motive to concoct disparaging stories.

So I find myself stuck in a bit of a predicament on this issue. Was Helen’s testimony of the murder plots and of her own abuse indeed exaggerated by anti-Mormon and anti-Polygamist editors? I certainly don’t know the answer, and I would gladly let BYH have his own say in the matter, but this next chapter is where things really explode for me.

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Hearsay

The problem with relying on BYH’s words is that if you search his journal for the time period covering Helen’s most violent abuse as well as the episodes aligning with the alleged murder plans, you will come up empty; you see, the four pages covering the period from 1867 to 1870 are missing from the journal. Were these pages just full of mundane entries that were accidentally lost? Or was this a deliberate redaction due to the potentially embarrassing content of the journal entries? While I accept both options as possibilities, my gut tells me to go with the latter, but that conclusion still leaves me with the question of whether the driving force behind the removal of these pages was to avoid staining the reputation of BYH as an individual, of the Hampton family name, or of the LDS Church?

Helen claims to have been a victim of abuse, but BYH plays the victim card as well in his own writings, asserting that Helen was a harlot who dishonoured him by running after other men. Maybe she’s right, maybe he’s right, or maybe they’re both right. At least now I’ve got two sides of the story. The records that were originally passed down to me included his account but excluded hers; I don’t know if her testimony was deliberately excluded from our family history by my own ancestors, but now that I’ve tracked down her account, I surprisingly find that I’m missing a significant part of his!

I don’t see anything in Helen’s testimony that gives me any reason to doubt its truth; her stories align seamlessly with other available records from the time and are corroborated by others. Witnesses claim to have seen the scars she bore from BYH’s beatings, for example; were these self-inflicted wounds that were conveniently blamed on a pious husband by a jealous, deceitful wife with an aim to destroy him and his church? Possible? Remotely, I guess. Probable? You make the call!

In any case, I would like to break the cycle of deliberate redaction and historical manipulation right here and right now. The LDS Church has been plagued by a tendency to delete certain elements of history in an embarrassingly backfiring effort to, ironically, spare embarrassment; that tendency has at times propagated to individual histories as well. As much as I wish certain crimes like the Mountain Meadows Massacre had never occurred in the first place, I think there are lessons to be learned in all mistakes, and I believe that trying to erase them from the record just leads to further speculation and an increased possibility of a repetition of those mistakes. I don’t know whose account is the more accurate between Helen’s and BYH’s, but until there’s proof one way or another, I believe that both accounts deserve to be heard. And I, for one, will include both testimonies when I pass written accounts of my heritage on to my own children.

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Implications

So where does this little revelation leave me? I know full well that the buck didn’t stop with BYH when he was indicted for his crimes; maybe he was just doing as he was told, or maybe he just went too far in implementing figurative statements from his leaders all on his own accord. In any case, I’m still left with conflicting accounts of what happened behind closed doors in his home. When I weigh out the split perspectives and try to put it all into context, however, I have to admit that I have a hard time dismissing Helen’s version of the truth. As much as I’d like to hope that her reports of the hellfire threats and savage beatings were fictitious, I can’t quite take that imaginative leap…and given my suspicion as to what actually occurred, when I see the photograph of Brigham Young Hampton in my own family tree, he invokes a whole new set of feelings in me. Whereas I was raised to honor my pioneer heritage as epitomized in the stoic images of my faithful, hard-working, plains-crossing ancestors, my first reaction is now to point at him and say, “You Bastard!”

I’m sure it’s common for those researching their ancestry to discover inclinations and associations in their heritage that the researcher would prefer not to be associated with. If you were to find out that your ancestor was a Nazi or a slave owner or a KKK member, for example, it might feel a bit repulsive to imagine that person’s DNA running through your own blood. But in my case, Helen’s saga takes things even further; two parts of her story in particular trigger an explosion that, in turn, lights other fuses in a chain reaction that ends up blowing the whole powder keg!

#1 is the Church’s denial of involvement in the prostitution scandal

#2 is the threats Helen received to pressure her into becoming a plural wife

The implications of #1 are clear. The Church’s role in the prostitution scandal can now be proved, so what does the initial denial mean when you consider that there is a similar denial that the Church ordered my own ancestor, BYH, to murder ex-Mormons as is alleged by his ex-wife? Who should get the benefit of doubt given the blatant lies about the sex scandal? If church officials are willing to publicly deny something under oath that they wished to keep secret (much like Joseph Smith did in his speeches and newspaper articles about polygamy while practicing it covertly), where do you draw the line? If the reputation of the church is to be preserved at all costs, including at the price of your own integrity on cross examination in court, how much credence should be placed in the denials of affiliation with other scandalous practices? The only thing clear to me in this case is that I have no rationale whatsoever for drawing any sort of line around official statements issued by the public affairs department of the LDS Church. In this case, I’m left with a reliance on my own case-by-case, gut instinct rather than an automatic trust in a sanitized, party-line account issued by those with much on the line to lose.

As far as #2, this one took a little longer to sink in for me, but the reported threats against Helen appear to be symptomatic of a systematically sanctioned structure of abuse, the existence of which is similarly denied today. The denials exasperate me just the same considering the similarities of the threats that BYH used against Helen to the threats that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both made against their own prospective wives, including both those who eventually consented to their advances as well as those who refused them. [It might be worth noting that the coercive demands are described much more openly in the journals of women who rejected the advances – and thus weren’t under threat of being eternally veiled by their husbands for their evil speaking.]

Maybe BYH came up with these “eternal-death” threats all on his own; or maybe Helen just made them all up herself; or perhaps she copied her accusations from the journal entries of Joseph Smith’s and Brigham Young’s wives, who also made them up on their own. Far-fetched as it sounds, I guess that scenario is remotely possible with enough mental gymnastics. But if we’re talking about reasonable doubt? I’d say we’re well beyond that here!

To me it makes much more sense to stop super-stretching my neurons and recognize that BYH learned these manipulative tactics from his predecessors in the principle, including his very own godfather, who in turn learned it from his own mentor, Joseph Smith…who had learned that it was a very effective way to get girls to submit themselves to him – and to convince them to keep the relationships secret from First Wife Emma (or rather First-Legal-and-22^nd-Sealed-and-Only-Publicly-Acknowledged-Wife Emma).

Whatever the source of these threats, this is where we get into the definition of consent, which is one of the main lessons in life that I want to pass along to my own daughters and sons. Some of the girls solicited by Joseph Smith to join his harem eventually consented to his demands, just as Helen did to BYH’s very similar stipulations. And some of them eventually had visions of their own in which angels or other spiritual witnesses told them it was all part of God’s plan, just as many modern-day fundamentalist wives claim to receive similar confirmation of polygamy’s divine purpose today.

But under that sort of pressure, are you really in any position to grant your consent?

We know full well that someone threatening physical death as an alternative to sex cannot legally or morally receive consent. If a victim has a knife to her throat and she says “OK, you win”, is that consent? She said OK, after all!

If you then look at a culture in which spiritual death is sincerely believed to be many orders of magnitude more serious than physical death, the sad truth is that the same devious outcome can be achieved under duress by using words as the only weapon. In that environment, if you have been deceived into believing that the person demanding your consent has the power to damn you to hell and then “disappear” you out of existence – and when that person threatens to do so if you don’t comply with his demands – can you in that instance really offer your true consent?

No?

Well if not, what do you call non-consensual sex?

Yes, that’s right, we have a four-letter word for the crime in the English language!

“Wait a second,” you may say, “You can’t go imposing today’s definition of consent on people who lived in the 1800s!”

Well, when the instigator claims to be in direct contact with the same eternal being that is worshipped by today’s believers, then yes, I’m afraid you can! Maybe other contemporaries can hide behind the guise of cultural conformance and historical context; but Joseph Smith claimed to be having regular conversations with a timeless God who granted him the right to tie a girl’s salvation to her submission – along with the convenient right to keep the demanded relationships secret from his lawful wife. In Fundamentalist style, Brigham Young then kept up the same pressure tactics and invoked the power of his priesthood to trade women as property, rewarding those men who were faithful to him with wives and bestowed blessing while stripping those who opposed him of their wives and families and condemning their souls to hell. This approach seems to have worked extremely well for Church authorities; and from what I can tell, grandpa’s grandpa learned these manipulative tactics from his leaders very, very effectively.

While you can’t expect perfection from early LDS prophets, their claim to speak for God puts them in a unique category altogether; if they were correct about their assertion to be leading Christ’s only earthly organization and acting on his behalf for the entire planet, you might at least expect decent, humane, Christlike treatment of others. Instead you get this!

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Characterization

If you trace BYH’s coercion to its source, you’ll find yourself facing an angel with a drawn sword – and weighing out the believability or unbelievability of that predicament.

Now I obviously don’t have any evidence for or against the appearance of the angel that Joseph Smith said threatened to destroy him if he didn’t take more wives. To me, “the angel made me do it” sure sounds like a convenient way to get his wife off his back after having been caught in a relationship with his young housekeeper; but in these sorts of cases that can’t possibly be decided on evidence, I feel the need to look a bit deeper into Joseph Smith’s character traits and his other actions for which evidence does exist before deciding whether or not I can believe the truthfulness of his unprovable claims about angels – or at least whether or not I can accept that he himself believed in the truthfulness of his own angelic claims!

Before even starting down that track, though, does the angel really matter? Do I even need to have an opinion about the reality of that scene?

Well, having invested a good chunk of my life in the pursuit of Joseph Smith’s vision, I’d say yes, by all means it does. You see, in the case of using spiritual compulsion on teenage brides, that angel is the only thing that separates Joseph Smith from Vernon “the Davidian” Koresh, Warren Jeffs, or any other predatory cult leader who has walked this earth. If that angel disintegrates into an imaginary figment, Joseph Smith descends into depravity – and those who sing praises to the man ought to add a verse each for Koresh and Jeffs along with a few more to cover Jimmy Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, Rajneesh, and any other scheming manipulator who comes to mind. So yes, to the millions of Mormons who stand true to their faith, the question of character – and the existence of the exonerating angel – is absolutely key!

Making assumptions around someone’s actions based on trends and tendencies rather than direct evidence is a tenuous business; although it only provides indications, that’s why character witnesses are called in court. Their testimony might not be enough for a conviction, but it can help frame the overall context of the complete picture. Even if we try to be non-judgmental ourselves, we still end up having to make these sorts of judgments all the time about people – for example, when we decide whose version of a story to tell our children, and which details to leave out.

Lacking any evidence for or against a personal appearance by an angel, I can only settle this issue for myself on the basis of character. An instrument in every Mormon’s toolkit is supposed to be an ability to pray about a question and to use the direction of divine inspiration to discover the truth. I have to admit, I’m not blessed with the ability to base a decision about truth on those sorts of feelings. When all I have is positive, uplifting stories about Joseph Smith, it might feel good to think of him as a prophet – and to convince myself that I have received a spiritual confirmation of that belief. But one-sided portrayals paint portraits of fictional characters – not reality! And when I look at all of the available accounts, I’m faced with conflicting testimonies about his character; regardless of the sincerity of my supplication, it just doesn’t feel right to ignore the accounts of the young girls who were propositioned under devious pressures – and to call them outright liars!

Mormon missionaries are schooled to preach Moroni’s promise to every potential convert right off the bat. After reading inspirational passages from the Book of Mormon, missionaries issue the challenge to:

“ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”

If that promise is used as the scale for weighing out whether an account of millions of people is factual or fictional, couldn’t it also be applied to individual records such as Helen Hampton’s?

I’d say yes, by all means! Using whatever standard of measure that you have at your disposal, go ahead and test her truth claims against everything you know and feel. If Moroni’s promise is your measuring stick, why not apply it here? If you’ll agree with that approach, I’ll go ahead and issue that same challenge to every one of BYH’s descendants using every cliché I can muster: I would exort you to read Helen Hampton’s testimony. And when you read these things, study them out in your heart and in your mind. Pray faithfully, sincerely, and with real intent. Ponderize her words from the dust if you will!

While you’re at it, go ahead and apply the missionary-style challenge to decide ahead of time that you are going to follow that feeling through, whatever the cost. If you read her words and you’re faced with what the Doctrine and Covenants calls a “stupor of thought”, well then you’re off the hook. If, on the other hand, you feel a confirmation of their truth, aren’t you obliged under the terms of Moroni’s promise to go with your gut, reach a decision, and act on it? If you prayed with “real intent”, doesn’t that mean having the actual intention to do something about it in the event of a positive answer?

What? That quickly? Without further evidence?

Yes, why not? Aren’t investigators around the world being issued that same life-changing challenge every day – sometimes less than five minutes after having first cracked open the Book of Mormon?

If you receive a glowing, positive answer in the form of the proverbial burning in the bosom when you read Helen’s testimony, then why not join her cause? She wanted to expose the systematic abuses that she witnessed and experienced. The least that my fellow descendants of BYH can do in this case is to let her speak by including her testimony when your family history files are passed along to your own posterity.

If feelings can be used to ascertain truth, well in this case, I feel the truth of Helen’s words to the bone – much more strongly, in fact, than any impression that the promise itself was issued by an ancient Jewish-American-Indian with golden plates and a shovel. In fulfilment of Moroni’s promise, I do get that burning in the bosom when I read Helen’s testimony – along with it a burning rage that makes me want to tear down the foundations of any institution that promotes the sort of abuse that she endured! On the other hand, if that institution and those who adhere to its principles can begin to acknowledge and disavow abuse in any form – past or present – well at least that’s a good start.

All sarcasm aside, whether you call it a spiritual confirmation, simple logic, or gut instinct, I happen to believe Helen’s words. She believed polygamy was wrong. And if she is right, Joseph Smith is wrong on the subject…which now puts him on the witness stand in the trial taking place in my own head.

The question for me reduces to this: Was Joseph Smith the type of character who would have made up a story about an angel in order to protect himself and his legacy? Or was he a man of integrity who reluctantly, faithfully, and humbly submitted himself to God’s will in this case – in line with what I was raised to believe from Day 1? In order to answer that questions for myself, I’ll need to look a bit closer for some clues.

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Infanticide

Now there is nothing funny about killing babies; I wouldn’t dare make light of that sort of an image; in fact, it makes me uncomfortable to even put the word kill next to the word baby in print.

The image of a tiny casket should rightly evoke deep emotions in us. I get choked up reading about those babies who were overcome by the elements on the Pioneer Trail, for example. Combined with stories of their parents being chased from their homes by angry mobs, that imagery has long been used to motivate and inspire the Saints, sometimes for a good cause, and at other times – as in the violent allegations against BYH – to incite brutal retaliation.

It is hard enough to process the thought of a baby dying from illness or exposure like in the oft-recited tales set in the wintry Great Plains; but the image of a baby being killed in a deliberate, premeditated act stirs up a completely different spectrum of emotions.

When I toured an old naval warship in Portland about twenty years ago, I asked a volunteer diesel mechanic on the vessel a question, which he answered in a thick German accent. I then asked him about his hometown, and he dove straight into a story about how his hometown no longer exists. His original childhood home had been in a German village within the modern-day borders of Poland, but the German population was driven out by the advancing Russian troops as Hitler’s Reich collapsed. He had been caught in a stream of refugees heading west that was backed up by the constriction created by one of the few remaining bridges over the Elbe River. He told me that in order to clear the bridge for their tanks and artillery, the Russian troops ran ahead of the column and pushed the refugees out of the way, shoving people over the edge of the bridge. The soldiers indiscriminately cleared the human traffic jam with the butts of their rifles, and this 80-year-old man teared up when he described baby carriages being tossed into the deep river with babies still in them. His heartbreak quickly transformed into a tirade against the filthy Russians who could commit such a barbaric act. This hatred had brewed inside of him from that day forward – all the way through the next forty years of Russian occupation, during which the very soldiers who had committed these atrocities lived in barracks down the street from him and crossed paths with him in the marketplace.

In today’s world, how many of us will ever witness something as atrocious as the murder of a baby at point blank range? And without that sort of horrific imagery burned into our minds, can we really cast any judgment on this man for his hatred for the Russians? And what about the Russian soldiers whose hatred of the Germans had been galvanized over generations by propaganda about how the Kaiser’s soldiers would allegedly toss Russian babies in the air and catch them on their bayonets? Whether or not that awful, awful scene ever happened in real life – that same anecdote has appeared on both sides of the front lines of several wars, after all – the design of retelling such a brutal tale seems to be a desire to incite a spirit of revenge for such crimes within the hearts of morale-sapped troops or to inspire an uprising within an oppressed civilian population.

So if I don’t even know whether or not the bayonet slayings are founded in truth, how dare I invoke that sort of imagery here? Yes, it’s an absolutely horrible scene to imagine, yet most Christians freely share biblical accounts of widespread slaughters of a similar nature with their own children:

The darkest part of the Christmas story, for example, is depicted in the Coventry Carol, which portrays the Massacre of the Innocents and calls out its mastermind, the evil King Herod, by name in its lyrics. Much of the animosity that Christians feel toward this particular Herod – the father of Herod Antipas, who shared a role in Christ’s condemnation – results from his role in this barbarity.

The lyrics of the song are absolutely heartbreaking; the words are a last lullaby that three women sing for their infant boys. With Herod’s death squad drawing closer, they know their babies won’t make it through the night, so they try to put them to sleep as peacefully as possible:

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay,
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too how may we do,
For to preserve this day,
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay”?

Herod the king in his raging,
Charged he hath this day,
His men of might in his own sight,
All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee,
And ever mourn and may,
For thy parting neither say not sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

Ever since the Middle Ages, the tragic song has been sung as part of a traditional Christmas play in Coventry. When the Coventry Cathedral was destroyed by German bombs just before Christmas in 1940, the city went into mourning along with all of Britain. On Christmas Day, the BBC broadcast its Christmas message – including the singing of the Coventry Carol – from the ruins of the burned out cathedral.

The rubble of Coventry

Along with men, women, and children, a number of babies had been burned and crushed in Coventry’s rubble, including the cathedral that to this day has never been rebuilt. In the eyes of the British people, this was a Massacre of Innocents on par with Herod’s; when the choir got to the words about Herod’s rage, I imagine their own rage would have been incited against Hitler, whose name could easily have been substituted for Herod’s in the lyrics of the song.

I’m sure the British soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy a few years later were still filled with that perhaps rightful rage. So where does all of this anger end? As a German citizen, did the old diesel mechanic I ran into in Portland – who couldn’t forgive the Russian troops for their crime against innocence – share in the complicit guilt for the bombing of Coventry? Did he have a right to blame the Russians for the same sort of crimes that his own people had committed as aggressors? In the face of these unanswerable questions, one thing that is clear to me is the natural tendency to view those guilty of infanticide as the embodiment of absolute evil – and to seek justice and retribution for their crimes.

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Leap of faith

I get a lump in my throat just reading the lyrics or hearing the melody of the Coventry Carol and imagining the terrible event that it depicts. Even though the scene is set over two thousand years ago, the thought of the baby boys in Bethlehem drifting off to their last sleep stirs up the same powerful emotions in me as the much more recent images of the baby carriages in the freezing Elbe or the smoldering tombs of Coventry.

But here’s a question: Did Herod’s massacre even happen? I had always assumed that it did – maybe just because I never considered the possibility that it didn’t – but when you look for evidence or historical accounts of the slaughter, all you find is a single, third-hand account in one of the gospels, with absolutely no corroboration from the other gospels or from any other secular sources.

What if there were Herodites today who insisted on Herod’s innocence – people who firmly believed that he did not commit infanticide? What if these people argued that the purported massacre sounds way too similar to Pharaoh’s alleged cruelty thousands of years before? Given how useful the story of Pharaoh’s evil edict had been over the millennia in galvanizing Hebrew unity against gentiles, wouldn’t it be a convenient way to throw Herod under the same bus? It sure sounds like it could have been made up as some sort of oral tradition given the similar story lines; so do you think the Herodites might have a point?

Despite the almost unbelievable similarities in the two stories and the underwhelming evidence for the Herodian massacre, however, the story is almost universally believed among Christians and is still told in Christian Christmas services around the world. Any doubt is eradicated under the notion that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as described in a number of articles like this one: “Did Herod really slaughter baby boys in Bethlehem?“

The arguments that are typically put forward in support of its occurrence focus on historical plausibility; the question then becomes not whether it happened, but whether it could have happened.

Proponents of the story argue that there’s no proof nor any other indication that it did not happen (though you could say that about pretty much anything at all) so they tend to just accept the story as it appears in the Bible. Those who argue for the historicity of the biblical account can also say, “Just look at the terrible things that Herod is known to have done. He certainly could have and would have ordered the slaughter of those baby boys!”

I guess I would agree with that assumption; knowing what I do about Herod’s recorded actions – including a propensity for murdering his own family members and committing widespread atrocities whenever his power was threatened, I believe that we can judge his character and make assumptions around his proclivity for certain malicious tendencies. And in that light, I am completely convinced that if Herod had been told of some sort of competition for his throne, he would have done everything in his power to eliminate that threat, regardless of the age of the potential usurpers.

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Evolution

So what does any of this ancient history have to do with my own ancestry? The incendiary details I keep running across in my own family history research extend right through to my own childhood and to the unravelling lines that I have been fed about Joseph Smith ever since I can remember. One by one over the decades, I have had to drop a previous view of his story and adopt a new interpretation. With that repeating process in mind, I’d like to know whether I should stop in my tracks at the LDS Church’s latter-day version of the story, or whether I should take one more step off this precarious path and accept the plausibility of a single, third-hand accusation that disintegrates my former view of Joseph Smith entirely.

My problem here is that I have been sold a slippery story over the years concerning polygamy:

Story line #1 (10 years old): God gave Brigham Young special permission to temporarily allow polygamy because there were more women than men, and the women needed to be taken care of in order to make it across the freezing plains. As soon as that need was over, a manifesto was issued to officially end the practice. Polygamy was for the women’s own temporal protection and didn’t involve any of that icky sex stuff; Joseph Smith was monogamous, and anyone claiming otherwise has succumbed to the dark side of the force.

Story line #2 (15 years old): God also allows polygamy when His people are dying off because the surplus widows and single women couldn’t otherwise have children. The pioneers found themselves in these circumstances and required “more seed,” which was only provided by reluctant men submitting themselves to God’s will. An angel visited Joseph Smith and told him that at some point in the distant future, polygamy might be ok in theory as a population booster, which unfortunately might also have to involve some of that increasingly interesting sex stuff, but Brother Joseph never practiced it himself. Anyone claiming otherwise has yielded to the Evil Emperor.

Story line #3 (20 years old): OK, there might be just a bit more to the story; after Joseph Smith received the revelation about polygamy that is in the Doctrine and Covenants, some women were symbolically and spiritually sealed to him, but he “turned it off” like a good missionary should and never had any of that bridle-your-passions-sex with them. Anyone claiming otherwise is two-timing as a Sith Lord.

Story line #4 (25 years old): Well, in fact, some of the spiritual marriages actually happened before the doctrine was officially canonized, but Joseph and Emma reluctantly prayed about it together and both received spiritual confirmation of its truth before it was ever practiced. God knew the gentiles weren’t ready to hear about it yet and that the evil mob would drive them from the beautiful city of Nauvoo if the practice of spiritual wivery went public. This pearl was too sacred for the swine, so God told His prophet to keep it quiet…but Joseph never actually lied about it. Anyone claiming otherwise should count their midichlorians.

Story line #5 (30 years old): OK, some of the statements that Joseph Smith made in public might have been slightly untrue. But the public denials of the practice were in essence “lying for the Lord” for the preservation of His Church against the mobsters…so the deceit was fully justified and was, in fact, God’s idea, not Joseph’s! And, by the way, these were purely spiritual unions and not in the least sexual…except for maybe one or two, but these were isolated cases in which single women with no other prospects for the saving ordinance of marriage needed Joseph Smith to provide the obliging service with their full, age-of-majority consent. Besides, an angel told him to do it, and both Joseph and his new brides received an equally powerful, spiritual confirmation of the truthfulness of the principle. Anyone claiming otherwise…yep, drafted by the First Order.

Story line #6 (35 years old): Well, in fact, Joseph shared a bed with some younger girls who were still living with their parents…but Joseph struck a gentleman’s deal with their fathers to make sure their families would be blessed for granting their permission. A few of the ceremonies may have been performed without Emma’s knowledge, but as soon as she had humbled herself with sufficient spiritual growth, she was ready to accept the principle herself. These marriages were mostly symbolic and entirely consensual; anyone claiming they were sexual need only to look at the absolute lack of DNA evidence of any other progeny, which given the lack of reliable birth control in the day, proves that he wasn’t in it for the sex. Anyone claiming otherwise…you get the idea!

Story line #7 (40 years old): OK, some of these women were still married to their husbands when they married Joseph Smith, so we need to expand our definitions and learn a new word called polyandry. And some of the wives were taken away from their husbands, and some husbands were sent away on missions while their wives moved in with Joseph Smith. But these cases were very isolated, and the total number of Joseph Smith’s wives wasn’t in the hundreds as some have claimed; absolutely, positively, it was less than 50! Some of the girls might have been as young as 14, but that was perfectly normal back then. Anyone claiming otherwise is rebel scum…but wait a second, you’re starting to lose me here – aren’t those the good guys? Or are the good guys the ones saying that despite this twisted application of the practice, it still has a divine source? Ok, now we’re pushing it. Seriously???!!!

Story line #8 (45 years old): Well, in fact, it was all about the sex to begin with, and some of that sex even resulted in pregnancies, but the pregnancies didn’t result in further births because one of Joseph Smith’s close associates was an abortionist who reportedly took care of a few inconvenient problems that might have otherwise caused reputational damage to the fledgling Church and its autocratic leader. Just like in Laban’s day, it is better for one little soul to be lost than for the entire world to be deprived of the Kingdom of God and to slip back into the dark ages just because of one man’s indiscretions. Anyone claiming otherwise…hang on, I guess this is where it ends, because the entire body of the LDS Church claims otherwise!

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The last of these eight evolving stories obviously crosses the official delineation of the front line – a line that has been in steady retreat my whole life but now stands temporarily teetering on a perilous perch somewhere between Story #7 and Story #8. In this case, I feel a bit like the fabled frog in the near-boiling water: I accepted the slowly inoculating history that I learned at each step along the way from Story #1 through Story #7 and hardly noticed the rising temperature; the substantiation of Story #8 would bring the water to a complete boil, and I believe an official acknowledgment of that story line would cause a whole lot of frogs to start jumping out of the water – at least those still in control of their faculties at that point. That said, I’m fully convinced that even in the absence of Story #8, if I had been presented with the scalding temperature of Story #7 without a 40-year acclimation process facilitated by each of the preceding admissions, I don’t think I could ever have dipped my foot in the water in the first place – and I certainly could not have convinced myself that there was any sort of divine source for the doctrine and practice of polygamy in its Mormon incarnation!

Now by no means did this eye-opening process need to take me 40 years; even in the pre-Google era, I could have read all of this a long time ago if I had really done my homework. I had, in fact, read much of it when I was first handed anti-Mormon tracts as a teenager at church history sites – including citations of the alleged abortions taken from Fawn Brodie’s 1945 biography of Joseph Smith. But I had been told by my own teachers and youth leaders not to trust those pernicious sources. When it comes to controversial topics, Mormons have been told repeatedly from the pulpit to seek their answers from the only reliable source – in this case the official publications of the LDS Church. Anything else should be dutifully cast aside as fake news – or in the remote chance of some sliver of truth, having at least been deceptively taken out of context.

Along those lines, LDS sources today may claim that the rumors that support Story #8 were devised by evil, cunning anti-Christs who wanted to destroy the Kingdom of God on this earth. Remember, though, that’s what I was initially told about the “rumors” that preceded each subsequent acknowledgement of the ever-changing story. And the body of the church – at least those who bother to look – are now told by official sources that the first seven concessions had nothing to do with the devil’s Evil Empire and that each one actually steered us closer and closer to the whole truth after all. This, of course, suddenly leaves the 8^th position dangling as the only one of the listed allegations that is aligned with angels of darkness; and I, for one, am left wondering who can be trusted to shed some light on the subject.

Not all of the false positions stated above were printed in official LDS materials; in my case, some of the denials of the real truth about Joseph Smith’s polygamy came from leaders, teachers or other personal contacts who weren’t comfortable admitting the embarrassing truth to their own non-Mormon friends and decided to water down the story with made-up excuses – and ultimately ended up sharing the incorrect justifications for Joseph Smith’s behavior within Mormon circles as well. Accepting each increasingly loathsome tenet along the way seemed to make church members very uncomfortable – at least that was my impression in my own Sunday school classes – because the previous, sanitized version felt better. But the expanding revelations ultimately got swallowed and digested because a belief in the truth of the overall message seemed to trump both reason and morality – and in this case, both simultaneously!

So the evolving concessions of these story lines are not necessarily all that was available in the meetinghouse libraries but rather what I accepted as my inner belief and personal rationalisation at the time – with the full backing of the Mormon community around me. In any case, the fact that there was a gradually receding official stance is well documented, and I would guess that most pre-Internet Mormons of my age in the Church have been fed more than one of the erroneous justifications for polygamy over the years – and have unfortunately spread those same lies to investigators, seminary students, and even to our own children.

None of the revisionist accounts was ever freely admitted but was only condoned once “anti-Mormon” truth-seekers confronted the Church Historical Department with evidence that couldn’t be refuted – and that couldn’t be kept from the Googling eyes of young seminary students. I would certainly hope that we’re now at the point of full disclosure and that the real, un-spun truth stops short of Story #8; in this case, I can rest that hope on the fact that I have seen no direct proof that Joseph Smith actually ordered any abortions – the accusations all seem to be based on a single, third-hand, unsubstantiated account.

I’m sure most of my Mormon friends would be appalled at the mere insinuation of Story #8; it is such an abhorrent thought that it doesn’t even get acknowledged with an official denial. No doubt, any report of abortions performed under Joseph Smith’s roof would be wholeheartedly and unequivocally decried by the LDS Church if the challenge arose, but one question I first have to ask myself is this: If any evidence for Story #8 happened to find itself into the hands of the LDS Church archives, would it be publicly acknowledged or would it be suppressed and locked away in a sealed vault? The fate of the Hofman forgeries and other embarrassments makes me doubt that such a find would be greeted with an open-door policy, so perhaps the absence of evidence in this case should be accompanied by some salinity. In the meantime, though, we’re all stuck with no more than rumors as a basis. I hate to make an unfounded decision, but in this case, I assume I will go to the grave without any further evidence on the subject at all; so should we all just bury the story and dismiss it as hearsay?

My problem in simply rejecting Story #8 is that I trusted seven different versions of the truth from my own leaders and predecessors that each turned out to be more true than the last; and frankly, relying on that same source to guide my internal acceptance of the current party line just doesn’t feel right. Shouldn’t I leave my belief or non-belief in the matter to my own conscience, filling in the gaps in the evidence the same way I do with Herod’s purported role in the Christmas story – in which case I end up having to look at character traits and other proven actions for which evidence does exist in order to assess the scenario’s plausibility?

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Plausibility

Going back to the horrible war stories recited above, I’m now left wondering whether Joseph Smith was on par with the baby-killing soldiers directed by Pharaoh, Herod, Hitler, and Stalin. The thought alone makes me shudder, especially considering that I’ve spent a fair portion of my life singing praises to the man. An official denial of these transgressions wouldn’t necessarily mean much to me considering the ongoing denial of culpability in BYH’s prostitution sting and similar scandals; so in this case, I find myself having to draw and rationalize my own conclusion based on presumption, knowing that my final inclination is absolutely consequential in determining how I live out the second half of my life.

As mentioned at the beginning, we’ll never have any physical evidence for or against the reported appearance of the angel with the drawn sword, and we may similarly never have any absolute proof of the abortions that John Bennet reportedly performed under Joseph Smith’s direction. In this case, much like my opinion on the Massacre of the Innocents, my decision on where to stand will have to be based on whether or not the alleged perpetrator was the type of character who would respond to a threat in such an unscrupulous manner. In the case of Joseph Smith, my question boils down to whether he was the kind of person who would make up fake excuses to save his own skin. If the answer is no, then I’m comfortable dropping the implications of Story #8 based on his personal integrity. If the answer is yes, however, I’d at least feel the need to explore the validity of these accusations against him.

Here are three questions that my own reasoning follows, the first two of which are based on real events, and the last of which is perhaps hypothetical:

How did Joseph Smith react when his role as a prophet and his reputation as a translator were being threatened, and indecipherable scrolls came into his possession? A. He produced a made-up translation.
How did he react when he was caught in an affair with his young housekeeper? A. He said an angel commanded it.
How would he have reacted if one of his legally illegitimate sexual partners had turned up pregnant? Well, this one has at least two answers: A1. Fess up or A2. get his confidant to do what it takes to remove the problem.

The answer to Question #1 is not ambiguous. His translation of the Book of Abraham is made up. Supporters of its truth are stuck having to say that God wanted him to provide a made-up translation, or perhaps that the made-up translation actually came directly from God. But it’s made up in any case. Whether or not you consider it to be inspired, it is simply not a translation.

The angelic answer to Question #2 is also not ambiguous. We know that’s what he claimed, but the underlying motive behind the claim remains unknown. If you believe that a real messenger from the realms of glory would have commanded these secret unions under duress, essentially removing not just the woman’s consent from the equation, but Joseph’s true consent as well, feel free to stop reading right here, because nothing else I say is going to matter in the face of your conviction. As for me, even if I could make myself believe that Joseph indeed saw an angel with a drawn sword commanding him to abuse others, I would have to question under whose command…and then let it be stated that a truly heroic man should have stood up and refused to comply, taking that sword right through the heart if that’s what it took in order to protect those girls!

In the end, my inclination on this second fork in the road is guided by the answer to Question #1. As for me, I’m calling BS: Made up!

So when I’m faced with the potentially hypothetical scenario in Question #3, I’m taken down a road that scares the hell out of me to say the least. Some of these girls had been manipulated into non-consensual sexual relations under duress; that much is clear. If the alleged abortions indeed occurred, one might assume that the same level of duress would have been applied to see them through, in which case the victims wouldn’t just be sacrificing their own bodies as they did with their marriages, but they would now be asked to sacrifice their unborn children as well in order to preserve the reputation of the Kingdom of God and its sole mouthpiece on earth. Perhaps we should take this one back to the same absolving compliance with God’s will as in Question #2; after all, any real or imagined angel capable of forcing two non-consensual partners on each other would certainly not hesitate to draw that same sword on an in-utero infant!

The humorous accounts of Joseph Smith’s attempts to produce an Egyptian grammar book and other oddities in Church history suddenly aren’t so funny anymore when they start pointing toward the fallout from his increasingly consequential character flaws. If this sort of coercion actually happened, in my eyes the whole Mormon movement wouldn’t just dissolve into a delusion or a hoax, it paints either the founder or the commanding angel as downright evil.

So in this case, I would absolutely love to believe the Church’s portrayal of Joseph Smith’s impeccable character. But these skewed depictions stem from the same media relations team that continues to deny events that I can read about directly in my own ancestors’ journals. So perhaps a few reversals are in order if those at the helm of the church want me to start accepting their version of the truth. How about we stop calling Hor Abraham for starters! In the meantime, given the trajectory of my answers to Questions #1 and #2, to me any denial of my answer to Question #3 falls into the same category: Made up!

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Davidian

I guess I’ve always sensed that the origins of polygamy were messed up in some way; yet somehow I thought Joseph Smith could still be inspired by deity while doing rotten things. Mormon Sunday School lessons are full of “good tree=good fruit” and “bad tree=bad fruit” imagery as well as the reverse logic for discerning good from evil. I’ve never been able to see things with such a binary vision, but within Mormonism, when you think you’ve found a rotten piece of fruit, you’re told that it can’t actually be rotten to the core – and that you really need to focus on the other really delicious pieces of fruit. Only a good tree can produce a good piece of fruit, after all; the apparently rotten piece of fruit can’t possibly indicate a bad tree, so its presence is ignored under the pretense of God’s mysterious ways. Perhaps what you thought was a rotten piece of fruit just looks rotten when it’s spun out of context. Or perhaps the glare of the sun got in your eyes or you were wearing sunglasses that only let you see the apparent mold “darkly”. If you do think you saw it clearly, perhaps you should be looking at with more intent, or perhaps your own insincerity is to blame for the misperception. And if that all fails the test, there’s always the chance that an evil imposter secretly put it there to try to trick you, in which case you can’t blame the good tree!

To me, even the sanitized version of Mormon polygamy seems just plain rotten; but I have to admit that I previously excused Joseph Smith’s trespasses with an Old Testament-style, Davidian argument: If God spoke to David, the son of Jesse, after his complicit role in murder and adultery – and delivered Jesus Himself through that bloodline – then why couldn’t He speak to Joseph Smith after his own philandering and deliver a restored Gospel on the back of a similarly flawed character?

Could God really speak to a philanderer? The Bible is full of examples that would indicate so, but what about modern examples? When people like Brian Mitchell, Warren Jeffs, or David Koresh claim that God commanded their philandering, the general public rejects that notion because of their depraved, “bad-fruit” actions. As for myself, I’m trying to find definitions that condemn the actions of Mitchell, Jeffs, and Koresh, but exonerate Joseph Smith.

Calling a revered prophet a rapist might be shocking and offensive to followers, so I’ll leave the selection of an alternative term open-ended and list a simple line of reasoning that again follows three basic questions and allows everyone to insert their own preferred term:

Q. What do you call non-consensual sex?
A. _ _ _ _
Q. What do you call the perpetrator of non-consensual sex?
A. _ _ _ _ _ _
Q. Did the alleged perpetrator have the sexual partner’s consent?
A. Y E S or N O

Well there you go. Whatever term you choose to fill in the blanks with, the label is tied to the definition of consent. And if you accept the fact that the men in question here claimed a position of authority over their victims, I believe the women they took advantage of were in no position to grant their true consent. If the answer to Question #3 is “Yes,” the preceding labels don’t apply. You are free to go! If the answer is “No,” however, the selected labels stick – whatever they may be!

If you agree that at least some of the girls propositioned by Joseph Smith could not have granted true consent under the threats they received from him, that would make Joseph Smith a Perpetrator Of Non-Consensual Sex. I don’t know if calling him a P.O.N.C.S. is any less offensive than calling him a rapist, but I’ll insert the bracketed euphemism here to provide the reader with the opportunity for some perhaps less offensive interjections. If you claim that he was not a [PONCS], you’ll have to claim that the he had the consent of every single one of his targets – in which case you can answer Question #3 with a resounding “Yes!” and comfortably throw out the non-applicable terms above it.

Really? The associated threats of eternal harm in the face of non-compliance are well documented. Do you really believe that Joseph Smith’s plural brides “consented” to those advances? If you say yes, I’d ask you to then seek out Elizabeth Smart while she’s on her way to her next interview with Oprah. Stop her in the street, look her in the face, and call her a liar. “You said you were raped!” you could shout at her, “That isn’t true, because you consented to sex with that man!”

In Elizabeth Smart’s case, it most certainly was rape. She is the victim, plain and simple; and the fanatical, diabolical culprit is clearly a rapist. So why should Joseph Smith get a break?

Of the roughly 100 brides shared by the first two LDS prophets (and in some cases, I do mean shared), how many cases of non-consent does it take to make either one of them a [PONCS]? One! So even if 99 of 100 cases were entirely consensual, we would find ourselves stuck with a [PONCS] at the head of the LDS church. If we’re going to exonerate them, wouldn’t we have to exonerate Brian Mitchell as well, given that his advances and threats were so much less malignant than those issued by the early Mormon prophets? If you think Brian Mitchell’s threats of physical death to his victim and her family are more serious than the Mormon prophets’ threats of spiritual death for their victims and their families, you may need to have a closer look at Mormon culture and doctrine, which completely deemphasizes benign physical consequences in an eternal perspective.

To a Mormon who believes that their prophet possesses the divine “sealing power,” which is defined as the ability to bind God’s will with their own promises, spiritual condemnation is a fate far worse than having a knife held to your mortal neck. [The loophole, of course, is that the mortal prophet is not actually invoking his own will – he just happens to know God so well, and is so intimately familiar with his will, that his proclamations, threats and promises are in fact only recitations of exactly what God Himself would have said under the circumstances!] In that light, prophetic threats of spiritual death in the face of non-compliance, and prophetic promises of tremendous spiritual rewards in the face of submission – not just for the girl in question but for her whole family for generations before her and for generations to come – supercede any material threat or reward for true believers of Mormonism.

And that’s why I say that Joseph Smith was a [PONCS]. And Brigham Young was a [PONCS]. And my own grandfather’s grandfather was a [PONCS], with a young Australian named Helen Hampton as one of his victims – a victim who was cast out and discarded and erased from my own family history for speaking up for herself. I, for one, think that she has been silenced long enough – let her speak!

~~~~~~~~~~

Tirade

In trying to land on a verdict not just for Joseph Smith’s actions but also for his intentions, I have to ask myself whether I believe that he made up the story about the angel or whether he actually thought he was being threatened by a real, divine messenger. If there is such a thing at all, I am thoroughly convinced that no angel of God would demand rape, or non-consensual sex, or whatever you wish to call it; but in my eyes Joseph Smith’s belief or non-belief in this manipulative message can put his subsequent actions in seeking surplus wives anywhere on the spectrum between delusional philandering and outright treachery. When the needle passes deliberate deceit and points toward utter evil, my wandering thoughts can keep right on marching – eventually landing on the plausibility that Joseph Smith may have committed unspeakable crimes to save his own skin, including coercing his plural wives into having abortions. And if that occurred, his wives would most certainly have been sworn to secrecy surrounding the matter, sealed by the same threats of hellfire that convinced his victims to engage in the relationship in the first place.

That damning scenario would completely transform my entire outlook of a man whose life I have studied since childhood – and whose gradually revealed faults I had previously managed to accept like a slow inoculation. But I have no immunity against this particular flesh-eating virus; if I did come to the conclusion that these abortions occurred under his coercion, the pedestal would certainly crumble; in fact I would kick it right out from under him if I could!

That synopsis would shed a whole different light on the faith-promoting, ancestral stories that are woven through so many generations of my family tree. Now I hate to preface the following little tirade with a disclaimer, but I know that this final part of my family history journey is going to come across as offensive to those who buy into Joseph Smith’s divine mission. So here is my disclaimer: What follows below is not a balanced conclusion but just one of the temporary shocks that my soul gets while the pendulum swings back and forth. This is not necessarily my permanent position but rather where my mind takes me when I follow one of the more sinister trajectories to its ultimate destination. That said, here is a passing revelation that I see with my “spiritual eyes” if you will:

If his own megalomaniacal vision was in any way correct, upon my death I will not just encounter Joseph Smith standing by the wayside, but I’ll actually find him guarding the gates of heaven! If that ends up being the case, I’d expect to see a choir of Mormons singing him praises as they did in this life, begging him for permission to enter through the gates…and perhaps scared to the bone of his condescending disapproval if they fell short in adhering to his restored checklists for salvation.

As for myself, if a tunnel of light brings me face to face with Joseph Smith as a gatekeeper, and if these accusations about his cold-hearted deception are true, I’d first need to shake off my surprise that a divine being would have granted him any measure of authority to judge a single soul’s worthiness. Then I’d look at him quizzically, realizing that he is standing between me and the embrace of the loving God I hoped beyond hope to see in his place.

Then, once I recover from my disbelief, instead of singing him praises I’d look him square in the eye…and then I’d punch him in the face and say, “You Bastard!”

“This one is for Helen and Bertha Hampton and the abuse they suffered under the pretense of polygamy!”

“This one is for my grandfather who spent his whole life disappointed that his own father decided not to adhere to your made-up rules, believing that they would be eternally separated as a result!”

“This one, square in the jaw, is for his great-grandfather, Jonathan, who lost his life – and his son’s – guarding made-up secrets and following misguided orders!

And if my hand is sore at this point, maybe I’ll step back and contrast that scenario with my own vision of how I would have expected his prophesied, executive role to be reversed:

In my own equally absurd, but perhaps more palatable and plausible dream, I see a massive crowd at heaven’s gate; right next to the grand entrance is a jury box filled with fundamentalist lost boys and abused girls. And I would expect that Joseph would have to stand there on trial and answer to a long line of accusers before God while He alone – not me or you or them or any person at all – gets to be the gatekeeper in deciding Joseph’s fate.

Taking it further in the unfolding scene in my head, I would picture someone like Clayne Jeffs – who committed suicide after suffering unspeakable abuse in rooms with Joseph Smith’s portrait reigning on the walls – reading the charges. Maybe we could also hear a few words from Brenda Lafferty, whose infant daughter Erica was robbed of a chance at life, her throat having been slit by those implementing the sordid steps of retribution that were passed directly through to Joseph’s successors.

Maybe in all fairness Joseph can have his own defense attorney who questions whether he should be blamed for crimes in which evil people latched onto an evil principle to fulfil their own evil desires, shielding their abusive practices in the myth of divine approval. Perhaps God as the final judge would grant him some measure of absolution in that light; but if the crime spree was set into motion by a self-obsessed narcissist who couldn’t stand getting caught himself, I assume some measure of responsibility would stick through to sentencing. In any case, once all of the charges have been read, I’d perhaps like to see Clayne’s aptly named son, Justice, help carry out whatever sentence has been earned.

Now I might want to see Joseph get a few more punches from people like Jennifer Hoffman, who mourns her son’s loss every day, not knowing that the mental illness that possessed her son’s killer was brought about by adherence to Joseph Smith’s delusions. But as I consider her trials, I realize that I need to review my own life, which then takes me to the painful point of self-incrimination. This is the hard part where I’m put on trial myself and have to acknowledge that her son’s shooter radicalized ideas that he learned from teachers just like me. So perhaps I can’t judge at all – and perhaps I might end up with a sore jaw too, since I deserve to stand there and take punches not just from Jennifer but from my own wife and children as well for the bull-headed, autocratic way in which I implemented Joseph’s teachings in our own family life over the years.

I realize full well that I also owe additional apologies to many others for casting judgment through a lens of hypocrisy, deciding for myself whose superior digestive systems were capable of processing “advanced history” as it has been called, and from whom the “meat” should be withheld until the “milk” could be fully digested. All I can say for myself at this point is that I am deeply sorry. And armed with the wider perspective accompanying that introspection, if I do someday find that Joseph is the gatekeeper for those knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door, I’ll go ahead and try to find myself another entrance…or maybe just turn my back on the whole party. Because I want no part of the misogyny, violence, coercion, racism, or deceit that I would expect to find behind any gate that he is guarding.

As I mentioned above, I’ve included this little rant here not because it reflects how I feel all the time, but as an attempt to show that the underlying motives behind the legacy of Mormonism’s formation can have some very consequential implications, depending how you view them. And while I believe that deep down inside the structure of the church there are some toxic elements that need correction, in the meantime, I back off from this stance and smile when my friends and family baptize their kids into the organisation, tell them half the story, send them out into the world to distribute books with racist undertones and admitted mistranslations, and congratulate them when they graduate from the “Lord’s University” that happens to bear the name of a [PONCS]. That might sound two-faced or hypocritical, but I do understand that one of life’s great privileges is the chance to interact with those whose beliefs differ from our own; I could be wrong about my own views, after all, so my face-to-face silence is merely an effort to adopt a “live and let live” attitude of not just genuine tolerance, but true acceptance of the validity of their perspective.

Now to bring this particular rant to a close, I realize that it might sound offensive to call a Mormon prophet a [PONCS], but keep in mind that Joseph Smith himself said it was actually the angel who was the [PONCS], which could potentially be viewed as an even more offensive accusation than the one I’m making here. If you disagree with my line of reasoning, let’s go back to the visual of a court case. Picture yourself on the jury of a case where an attacker has been caught holding a knife to a woman’s throat and demanding sex. Initially it sounds like a clear-cut case, but what if in this instance it is complicated by the fact that the attacker himself had a knife to his own throat, held by another individual who demanded that the act take place? In my eyes, the third party is now guilty of not one, but two cases of rape. Now you could potentially argue that the threatened man should have tried harder to protect the woman, perhaps even offering up his own life to save her, but am I wrong in casting the primary guilty verdict on the ultimate instigator? And what if that third party, in turn, was merely in the service of a boss to whom he had sworn his allegiance, and he was just following orders? Could you then pin the whole thing on the boss? Or could the guilt be equally split between the boss and his henchman?

Whoever ends up with the blame, a crime was committed in this case, so shouldn’t someone be held responsible in the end? The only other way out of this one is to claim that it wasn’t a crime at all. Really? How could that be? It seems so obvious that there was, in fact, a crime, but if you’ll work with me here, maybe we can find a loophole:

The only way I can possibly imagine steering things out of court altogether is to claim that the ultimate compliance with the demands – though perhaps initially under the appearance of a threat – was eventually consensual before the act was consummated. Apologist views of Mormon polygamy actually take that approach, whitewashing the whole scene in a bath of peace and light that filled everyone’s souls before any sex act took place. Reading my own relatives’ words about how deeply they were repulsed by the notion of a polygamous marriage to a man claiming to have the power to damn their souls, however, and discovering how much they abhorred the principle right up through their wedding nights and beyond, I for one can’t make a case for consent. And if you agree that it was non-consensual, then a crime has been committed. And when Joseph Smith finds any finger pointing in his direction, he effectively redirects the accusation and points his finger directly to his own God as the [PONCS]. Well, I’m sorry, that’s not my God!

So how do I go around justifying my smile and my silence when Mormons go about their business? I guess I’m back to a Davidian argument. Can I adhere to or at least respect something that a [PONCS] promoted? Well, do I respect the beliefs of Jews who have died for their religion while still believing that David should have been locked up for his crimes? Sure, their temples and synagogues and rituals can still hold beauty! Do I feel that their belief system should be dismantled in its entirety due to David’s weakness? Perhaps not, but should we white-wash David’s transgressions and redact them from the record in the process of defending the faith? Should we rip those pages from the Bible just like the pages of BYH’s journals were ripped out of his? Absolutely not! David’s story is as relevant to the lessons of the Bible as the stories of the more pious prophets or saints. Let us learn from it! Let it be told!

~~~~~~~~~~

Journalism

Thanks to a Book of Mormon edict that has been etched into the psyche of well-meaning adherents throughout the church’s history, Mormons believe their maker will someday ask them to “bring forth the record which ye have kept,” and that any missing content will be met with the question, “How be it that ye have not written this thing?”

Jesus making sure native Americans did not redact their records

The resulting propensity for record-keeping has ensured that even potentially embarrassing disclosures are preserved for future generations to scrutinize; in the face of changing doctrines and practices, personal journals bypass official channels and can require some very awkward rationalizations from apologists. It’s not surprising that today’s LDS apostles cede their personal records to the church, ensuring that they can be harmonized prior to publication. Thanks to a thorough dose of redaction, some records – like the missing pages of BYH’s journal – may never see the light of day; despite those efforts, however, thanks to the explosion of the internet, some secrets that were kept in supposedly private diaries are getting harder and harder to keep.

Encouragement to record your experiences, throughs, and feelings in the LDS Youth Magazine

In the case of BYH, it appears that the contents of the missing pages were so embarrassing or incriminatory that a higher law superceding the edict given to Nephi the Third was summoned, allowing an abridgment of the record that he kept. If the missing pages are ever found, I would hope the omission turns out to have been an inadvertent misplacement, and that the contents show instances of kindness and the traits that we like to admire in people. If they do, wouldn’t we proclaim his deeds from the rooftops and view his life as a positive example that inspires us to try to emulate those qualities? But if they don’t, does that mean we should bury them again? Or should we rather use the bad example to learn our own lessons for good?

My grandfather’s journals that are stored in BYU’s archives are likewise full of blacked out redactions. Who went to this effort, and whom were they trying to spare from embarrassment? Whoever went through that effort claimed the right to know the information themselves, but to withhold it from others. Shouldn’t history be an open book? For adherents to Christianity, doesn’t the Bible challenge its readers to “prove ALL things?”

A sample of my grandfather’s records in cold storage at the BYU library

I do understand that personal accounts are not always accurate; BYH claimed in his journal, for example, that his father Jonathan died protecting Joseph Smith. That’s the faith-promoting story I had always heard from my own parents; but when you look at the dates, Jonathan died six months after Joseph Smith’s death. I would assume that there is something to the story; maybe Jonathan died later from injuries originally sustained on the job or maybe he died protecting Joseph Smith’s legacy…and over time the last word was dropped from the story. Whatever the case, I’m fully aware that just because something is stated in someone’s journal doesn’t necessarily make it the truth – but it’s a good place to start looking!

Now let’s suppose that BYH was complicit in executing Brigham Young’s vision of retribution on non-believers and dissenters in literal fashion as Helen claimed in her own writings. Would the knowledge of those actions now, in today’s world, be considered a good thing or a bad thing? To me, a truth that occurred in a previous century can no longer be considered to be inherently good or bad. It might seem good or bad for the image of an organisation or a family name, or perhaps we might agree that a particular act was morally repugnant at the time that it was committed, but our presence and our very existence today requires that event to have occurred, so if it happened, let’s tell it like it happened! The “goodness” or “badness” of a historical event is irrelevant; let’s just look at history objectively and try to learn something from the context!

As for myself, I have done some things in my life that were perhaps admirable and some things that were downright despicable. My own journals are full of that proof. Maybe I reject the notion of Joseph Smith’s impeccable record because of the dichotomous nature of my own virtues and vices, faults and flaws. But in the end, that’s the only lens I have through which to view the world. And with that lens in one hand and a mirror in the other, I do recognize some positive things that I have done in my life that I hope have benefited others. But I know I’ve also been an absolute @$$hole at times [feel free to substitute your own synonym for sphincter if you’d prefer a less offensive term]. Maybe you know somebody who has never been an @$$hole. Ever. But I suspect at times all men are @$$holes, even those who claim, “Not me!” And perhaps especially those who claim, “Not me!” I would suspect this applies even to Joseph Smith and to my predecessors. And perhaps especially to Joseph Smith and my predecessors!

I tend to keep everything with a personal inscription, including every hand-written letter that has ever been sent to me. When my kids open the box with letters from my ex-girlfriends, they will see some written proof that I was an @$$hole. Should I burn those letters? I know full well that they’re not going to find an Italiana in the woodpile or any scandal of that nature, but those letters are going to show that I’ve been guilty of far worse infractions, such as pride, intolerance or other crimes against humanity. On a number of occasions, for example, the letters prove that I was guilty of drawing a break-up out into a dreadfully long process, exhibiting a whole lot of dishonesty, deceit, and hypocrisy in the process. In my eyes today, that makes me an @$$hole. Could my kids learn something from that? Could those letters help them learn that it’s best to fess up when you’ve lost interest in someone instead of denying the truth and pretending to be a good guy who is looking out for someone else’s feelings – while in reality trampling all over them and then venting about it privately in a journal? Will my own mistakes help them learn how to be happy being their imperfect, true selves? Or will they learn to live a dichotomous life just like I learned to “turn off” my own feelings and doubts and inclinations for the supposed greater good – like I did as a missionary and as a Sunday school teacher…and as a really lame boyfriend?

The natural man is an enemy of God, after all, and must be suppressed and bridled according to the lessons I was taught. So if I wasn’t attracted to a BYU relief society president who ticked all the boxes and would have made my family proud, should I have pretended to be? Although I’ve always been heterosexual, perhaps there are some parallels to homosexual members of the church in this case: I wasn’t attracted to what they told me I should be attracted to. And I felt guilty for it. And I thought if I stuck with it long enough, my answer from God would come, and He would burn that conviction of the “rightness” of this particular partner or that one into my soul. And I waited. And waited. And kept asking. And I figured my own flawed intent prevented an answer that I didn’t actually want to get. I can see today that I was completely narcissistic and delusional with that expectation; and perhaps deep down inside I realized that given my own doubts about the origins of the church I had no business trying to pretend I was “all in” and marrying someone who could profess their unquestioning knowledge of its absolute truth. These are some of the struggles that are documented in my journals and in some very painful letters. Should they be cast into the fire so I can rewrite my own history?

Given the insights and lessons that I feel could have been gained from Helen, Bertha, and BYH’s unabridged accounts, I’ll say no. And I’ll take the hit if needed; so when my kids hear someday after I’m gone that this guy Krey was a real @$$hole, maybe they would have denied it – if I hadn’t freely admitted it myself while I still walked this earth. This is the record that I am keeping, and now that they know that little secret, it won’t come as any surprise to them; in fact, I’ll issue that admission as my own Proclamation to the World, if you will.

So instead of saying “What? Not my dad! He wasn’t like that!” to someone accusing me of having been an @$$hole, my kids can just say, “Yep, I know, he told us so…and I try my best not to be one, since that was my dad’s main mission in life – to raise kids who aren’t @$$holes!”

I could pretend to be a superhero who boldly resisted every temptation to act with self-interest, a noble character who always stood up for what was right, and I could try to present that fictional account to my posterity in an attempt to guilt them into following my pious example by wanting to be more like me. Or I could tell them the whole story and let them learn from the mistakes as well. In my eyes, selling one side of the story effectively prevents a whole lot of lessons from being learned – and leads to the unnecessary repetition of critical mistakes.

I tend to believe in people’s good intentions, including those who selectively withhold information, even if I sometimes disagree with their underlying motive. A captured wartime spy doesn’t blab everything they know, for example, because they believe that their discretion complies with a greater cause; in some of these cases, I would consider keeping secrets to be outright heroic. I understand why people who feel they are engaged in a battle with sinister forces feel the responsibility to “Lie for the Lord”, for example, in order to advance the Kingdom of God – even at the price of truth; I have to admit I did the same thing with outdated, debunked videos as a missionary!

So I don’t want to call anybody’s character into question with this rhetoric; in the case of redacting Mormon history, however, I now believe that the battle is being fought on the wrong front, in a man-made Matrix that is merely a distraction. In my own conviction, for whatever that’s worth, the real battle is for the humane treatment of others, not for the preservation of a dogmatic system. Telling the whole story promotes introspective empathy that can help us treat others more humanely, even if an organization’s public image – or my own – is tarnished in the process. Withholding selected information to avoid reputational harm leads to incorrect conclusions and can undermine our ability to progress in life and treat others humanely; so whenever I get a chance to tell someone’s story, I am going to fight for a balanced portrayal, whether or not it shakes some institutional foundations.

~~~~~~~~~~

Half-Truth

Portraying Mormons as innocent victims driven from their homes by angry mobs has long been part of the galvanizing identity of the Saints. The stories that have formed the basis of this mentality are far from static, however, demonstrably morphing with each re-telling; stories about Carthage Jail, the Mormon Battalion, Hawn’s Mill, and Liberty Jail – to name just a few – have completely evolved over time. Perhaps some of the current, official accounts of these events are getting closer to reality now that so much more research is readily available, but in many cases only one side of the story is presented.

Finding out that many of the anti-Mormon accusations leading up to the violent episodes of Mormon history were actually true – but were publicly denied by Joseph Smith and other leaders at the time – can be anywhere from eye-opening to earth-shattering for faithful church members who had previously only heard sanitized accounts. When you contemplate the illegal harassment of the whistling and whittling brigades, for example, and then look at the fallout that occurred when they overstepped their mandates into Danite revenge, it definitely adds some context around the Mormon extermination from Missouri. Or when you consider how serious a crime was committed with the illegal destruction of a printing press – and how offensive that crime would have been to American citizens who focused so much of their patriotism on the Freedom of the Press – the flip side of the Carthage coin starts to materialize.

The imagery of the innocent lamb that Joseph invoked prior to his death implies that he willingly gave himself up in submission to God’s will. [Never mind the fact that this particular lamb actually shot back at his attackers and struck a few in the process before submitting to his fate!] The phrase “like a lamb to the slaughter” implies complete innocence; it doesn’t just infer that the lamb is less guilty than the slaughterer, but that the lamb possesses zero guilt at all – an absolute absence of guilt! Perhaps Joseph Smith didn’t deserve a death sentence for his crimes, but if you ask me, he certainly deserved to be locked up in jail for violations committed against the Freedom of the Press.

Now that the whole story leading up to his arrest is available to anyone who wishes to look, I’d ask any believing Mormon a probing question: do you really believe that Joseph Smith was falsely accused as Mormon lesson manuals indicate? I’m assuming many would say yes; that’s the victim-sided story I heard my whole life, after all! When I stood in the room where he was shot, I heard sobs from other Mormon tourists as they looked out the window and imagined the innocent lamb’s helpless fall. Of course the mob lynching was a horribly illegal act in itself, and the tears are absolutely understandable. But when you’ve been told from your earliest memories that Joseph and his cell-mates were wrongfully imprisoned prior to the gun-battle in Carthage, coming to the realization that they actually deserved to be charged for crimes that they actually did commit – and that you would have locked them up yourself if you had been a duty-bound officer of the constitutional law at the time – can be quite disconcerting to say the least!

There is a current social media drive poking fun at the claim that polygamy had nothing to do with sex. Their catch phrase: “Not about the sex, my @$$!” Paraphrasing that catch phrase with a substitution, I would say the same thing here: “Lamb to the slaughter, my @$$!” Perhaps Joseph was innocent of a capital crime, but he was certainly guilty of a felony; in that light, the image of the blameless lamb presents a distorted exaggeration of reality, but it continues to receive all of the official airtime today without any countering context. And just as Mormon folklore portrays Joseph as a humble, innocent victim of the evil mobsters at Carthage, he is likewise portrayed in similar fashion with his reluctant obedience in taking on extramarital partners. He claimed that he was only doing God’s will, after all!

Official church publications tend to focus on records written by priesthood holders – which can explain why so much of church history comes across from a male-dominated perspective. The real story of Joseph Smith’s unions and the other polygamous marriages that followed, however, may be more openly reflected by the accounts written in Helen and Bertha’s journals than by the accounts presented in LDS lesson manuals. In Helen and Bertha’s cases, the only thing more repugnant than entering into the union itself was the thought of the flames of hell consuming their souls – which they were told was the only viable alternative to submission.

Would you ever expect to see that horrible choice acknowledged in General Conference? Will these stories ever be told from the pulpit? Such an unlikely admission would just be a single step toward transparency, but I think there is a fear among the LDS leadership that the single step would start many adherents down a path of disillusionment with no return. Would the current organization be willing to distance itself from a man whose proven deceit shattered so many lives? Could there be Mormonism without Joseph Smith? Would there be scientology without L. Ron Hubbard? I don’t know the answer; perhaps we should ask the Community of Christ. They seem to be doing just fine even with the acknowledgment that polygamy was not approved by God.

I don’t expect the LDS church to throw Joseph Smith under the bus all at once, but I for one, disavow my association with the man I thought I knew. Off-the-wall interpretations of ancient symbols on papyrus are one thing. But coercing young girls into relationships against their will under threat of damnation while claiming to act as God’s mouthpiece? To paraphrase Hugh Nibley’s apologetics, “Sorry sir, that’s not consent!”

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The Greater Good

Let’s take the concept of half-truths back to the hypothetical Herodites who insist on Herod’s innocence. If the Herodites withheld the negative press about Herod from their own children – redacting both his proven crimes against humanity as well as unproven accusations – and only taught them about the great and wonderful things that he accomplished in keeping a cohesive kingdom running during a difficult period in history, wouldn’t those children profess their so-called knowledge of his greatness to the end of their days? When faced with the insinuation of reprehensible crimes such as the Christmas story slaughter, they would likely proclaim his innocence, denying that their hero could possibly be guilty of such things.

Likewise, Mormons who have been sold a one-sided account of Joseph Smith’s piety will claim right off that bat that he couldn’t possibly be a baby killer like Herod. “I know it!” they will say, “I feel it right here in my heart!” Well, I would agree that the fictional character I thought I knew as a child could never have been capable of such a thing, and the unshakeable faith that I used to have in him would probably have continued if I had relied solely on the redacted truth; but the more I’ve learned about his actions and the underlying motives behind them from the full range of available sources, the more I wonder how far he would go with his desperation to maintain control of the movement that he founded – especially if he believed that the survival of that movement trumped every other cause on earth, be it past, present, or future!

History has shown that the absolute belief in a greater good can be used to rationalize absolutely anything. With a strong enough belief, people will even sacrifice their own souls for the greater cause. Picture the predicament faced by Wilford Woodruff, for example: Without polygamy, the Saints couldn’t be saved. But with it, the Kingdom would crumble. At least publicly – and perhaps in their eyes only temporarily – the Church gave up what was supposedly a saving ordinance when faced with the alternative of utter destruction.

How about killing babies? Can that ever be rationalized? I guess it comes down to whether your cause supercedes the collateral damage in your own conscience. Let’s jump around the history books a bit to find some examples:

If the airman looking through the bombsight on the Enola Gay, for instance, could have uttered a sincere prayer and connected with deity in the instant that his thumb was resting on the bomb release – if he could have asked his maker a single yes/no question and tried to get in tune with the response – would he have felt a divine prompting to push the button, knowing that thousands and thousands of civilians, including innocent babies, would be killed or horribly disfigured in the chain reaction that followed? If so, you could say that those killings were approved by God, with the threat of the alternative – in this case a prolonged battle on the ground – superceding the collateral damage and providing an exceptional clause to the commandment, “Thou Shalt not Kill.”

Perhaps Thomas Ferebee, the Midwestern farm boy who actually released the bomb, was right in following his orders and dropping the “Little Boy” bomb on the unsuspecting population of Nagasaki. It is no surprise that the plane accompanying the Enola Gay to photograph the aftermath was dubbed “Necessary Evil”, which is just how Thomas viewed his job. As a Christian, he knew the Ten Commandments; yet he stated for the record that he didn’t regret his role in bringing to pass the deadly mushroom cloud, because in his words it was “a job that had to be done.” As far as the innocent young Japanese victims, if the United States lost the war, these babies might grow up to become Ferebee’s own hardened enemies, threatening vastly more innocent children back on the home front. In all likelihood, he shared his superiors’ belief that prolonging the war would have resulted in many more deaths than Oppenheimer’s deadly little toy.

Fast forwarding a few decades, the U.S. pilots flying drones around Afghanistan can now easily zoom in on their own collateral damage in real time. In some cases, those drone attacks have been based on reliable intelligence; in other cases, we sometimes find out in hindsight that the intelligence was flawed. In the latter scenario, would it matter whether the distribution of false intelligence was sparked by ignorance, fear, lies, vengeance, impatience, or power trips? In the event of an innocent death, does the credibility of the evidence justify or vilify the drone pilot at the end of the day? Or can the pilot’s belief in U.S. supremacy reconcile a commitment to follow orders from higher command no matter what?

Turning it around, the 9/11 hijackers would have seen many of their victims at close range as they stood in line to board their last plane. If one of them happened to have looked into the eyes of the day’s youngest victim – in this case a three-year old on her way to Australia – would the hijacker have wavered in his resolve to see the plan through? Or given his level of conviction, would he have coldly called the child’s death a necessary evil or collateral damage – subordinate to his overall cause – and proceeded with the task at hand? The power of indoctrination is formidable; the resolution to proceed as planned had already been made, and I honestly don’t think any glance into a child’s eyes at that point could possibly have changed the outcome.

Taking it back to the Wild West, Helen Hampton claimed that BYH collaborated with the Danites, a group deriving its name from a biblical prophecy that in their eyes gave Mormons – as the embodiment of God’s Kingdom on the earth – absolute supremacy to take the land and possess it “for ever, even for ever and ever.” In the Old Testament references cited by the Danites, the Tribes of Israel had divine permission to exterminate every living thing that stood in their path. I must say I’ve been relieved to find out that biblical scholars are virtually unanimous in calling most of these accounts of wholesale slaughter pure fiction, but I do find it a bit disturbing that to this day Christians still sing praises to the valour of the sword-wielding troops whose shouts brought down the defensive walls of Jericho and other heathen strongholds.

Abraham is honoured for having the willingness and subservience to kill a child by billions of Christian, Muslims, and Jews worldwide – most of whom are probably relieved that he didn’t have to see it through – but in the case of the Army of Israel, we essentially cheer them on as they go about their business of genocide. In many biblical accounts, the entire population, including men, women, and children – and surely babies as well – were eradicated, justified by a more righteous cause than the Canaanites and other tribes of infidels could ever muster. Despite what would have been a traumatic atrocity, at the end of the day, a random foot soldier in Joshua’s battalion could probably sleep in peace after wiping the blood from his sword, aided by a conviction that he had done “what needed to be done.”

The bloodshed of Mountain Meadows may have been justified by its perpetrators in similar fashion. Many accounts of that horrible event – at least the half-truths that found their way into my seminary lessons – painted the perpetrators as evil rogues acting without a directive from above; any connection to Brigham Young or church headquarters has historically been met with an outright denial by Mormon apologists. Again, if any hard proof of the connection existed in the church archives, it would surely be kept under lock and key to this day, so the absence of evidence may not be as significant as it seems; but my problem with this excuse is that you don’t even need any direct order to see his complicity in the travesty. Whether or not he had any role in directing the actions, Brigham Young had encouraged the proliferation of tales depicting one-sided Mormon victimization and had openly promised deadly consequences for any gentile that represented a threat; maybe that’s not enough to implicate him as the only guilty party, but to me the most disturbing chapter that can be substantiated with actual records occurred after news of the massacre reached him. Brigham Young’s reaction on hearing the news can essentially be summed up in two words: “Good riddance!” Brigham Young’s revelling would likely never see the light of day again if today’s LDS sources were the only publishers, but thanks to the internet, the original sources containing Brigham Young’s words are widely available, and the fact that the massacre was welcome news to him is no longer refuted by the LDS Church.

I have to let this one sink in for a while, since I’m linked to this man’s name not just through my fossilized family history, but on my current social media profiles as well. So let me get this straight: Brigham Young welcomed the news of the Mountain Meadows Massacre – he welcomed the fact that babies had been taken by their feet, and swung in the air, and had their skulls bashed in against wagon wheels. Does it matter whether or not he actually ordered the clandestine strike as Deseret’s self-proclaimed dictator? To me his reaction says it all: these people were his enemies, and just like a medieval crusader, he believed they were better off dead than living as heathen infidels, with the potential to grow up as his enemies.

Moving on to his godson, BYH claims that he was wrongfully imprisoned for one of the most notorious murders in Utah’s history. Just like he took the fall for those up the chain in the sex scandal, in this case I believe he took the fall for those under his command who actually committed the act. But to me the most surprising and disturbing revelation coming out of the murder of the gentile dentist, Dr. Thomas Robinson, is the fact that when two representatives sent by Brigham Young came to get BYH out of jail, BYH believed that they had been sent to kill him.

Now why would he believe that? Let’s think this one through: They had been sent by his own Godfather; and he actually believed the Godfather himself was capable of directing a mafia-style hit! Maybe some can attribute that to paranoia, but I for one, have to ask myself why it seemed like a realistic scenario. And to me, the only reasonable answer to that question is that BYH knew the “old boss” – and his tendency to order pre-emptive strikes – well enough to justify those fears.

BYH’s own autobiography is divided into sections for which he scripted his own headings. Is it any surprise that these titles include captions such as “Always have the drop on our enemies” and “Strike the First Blow”?

Less than ten pages into the Book of Mormon, readers are faced with the trade-off between the destruction of one soul – Laban being the first of several examples – against the overarching goal of preserving the Kingdom of God at any cost. So if Joseph Smith was caught fathering children with the maidens of Nauvoo, and if the revelation of these pregnancies would compromise his work, can we draw any parallels to the Sword of Laban? Maybe Joseph Smith fully believed that he had restored God’s kingdom on earth regardless of what went on in his bedroom. If so, could he allow the salvation of humanity to be threatened by his extramarital indiscretions? A single soul is certainly a small price to pay when the whole fate of not just this planet but “worlds without number” is at stake!

In the Book of Mormon story, Laban had passed out and couldn’t possibly defend himself. And just like Laban’s head, perhaps the price for the preservation of the Kingdom of Nauvoo had to be paid by a defenseless, unborn victim.

In Laban’s case, the need for a pre-emptive strike might be apparent. If he had been allowed to see another day, Laban would have woken up with a hangover – and would have then promptly ordered his mercenaries to pursue Lehi’s clan. So his death was a justifiable, necessary evil that God Himself condoned. Could the same be said for children? Well, justifiable or not, isn’t that the same excuse used by Thomas Ferebee as well as soldiers under the direction of Hitler, Stalin, Herod, Pharaoh, or Joshua? Isn’t that the same rationalization that John Lee and the criminals under his direction must have made when they found babies among their enemies? When these babies grow up, won’t they turn into formidable threats? Aren’t they better off dead? Any affirmative answers to these questions effectively justifies a pre-emptive strike.

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In the end, I am trying to draw some parallels with the potential justifications, but I am not trying to convince anyone one way or the other about Herod or Joseph Smith being baby killers. I honestly don’t know whether or not either event actually occurred. But I do want to point out the similarities between the underlying arguments: following the same logic, what holds for one could either indict or exonerate both together. Maybe Joseph Smith was appalled at the abortions that John Bennet performed after admittedly philandering around Nauvoo. Maybe Joseph never actually promoted that sort of solution among his own wives. Then again, maybe Herod never ordered babies to be massacred, either. I certainly don’t know the answer to either question, but lacking hard evidence, my opinion in both cases keeps coming down to character.

When I recite the Christmas story to my children, should I choose to present the story about Herod as a historical truth merely because I am convinced that he was just that sort of guy? If I can condemn Herod for atrocities for which I have no evidence, should I take the same leap of plausibility with Joseph Smith? If so, I find myself facing a very uncomfortable image, because I am completely convinced that if Joseph Smith was caught as the illegitimate father of an underage, pregnant girl in the community that he was overseeing, he would have done anything – absolutely anything – to protect the “greater good” of his own legacy.

Brigham Young was well known for his ultimatums, as demonstrated by his famous “Go to Provo or go to hell” comment that showed up on T Shirts all over BYU campus during my time there. But as audacious as Brigham Young was, he claimed that everything he learned about polygamy and even about blood atonement came directly from Joseph Smith’s mouth, which he further claimed to be merely a relay for God’s own will. So although blood atonement may have been preached most bluntly by Brigham Young, it certainly wasn’t his idea. I believe he would have claimed it for himself if he had come up with it himself, but he gave the credit for the idea to Joseph Smith. You can point the finger at God if you wish, but that particular doctrine – as expounded by both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young – shows just how far faithful followers are expected to go in the name of salvation.

Brigham Young was known for telling a husband right in the middle of general conference – in front of all his peers and family – that he would go to hell if he didn’t comply with the directive to marry more wives and then leave them to serve missions. Again, history has shown this to be a precedent set by his predecessor.

It really doesn’t surprise me to find BYH telling women they would go to hell if they disobeyed his demands; he was probably treated the same way himself by Brigham Young and by his other church leaders. In church records, like so many other priesthood holders in his day, BYH appears to be a God-fearing Mormon deserving of admiration for his sacrifices. From all appearances, whenever a direct order came down the chain, he just fell into line. His willingness to throw himself under the wagon wheel gained him the trust of those in the highest positions. When members of the first presidency were seeking to evade authorities on charges of cohabitation, for example, he risked his own imprisonment by harboring the fugitives in his own home.

He also sold everything he owned to serve a cotton-picking mission (literally!), leaving behind four young children. Somehow this act of submission is seen as righteous offering because he did what God was asking of him through Brigham Young as a direct mouthpiece. But that’s exactly what makes this sort of compliance so disturbing: Many faithful girls in their day believed that Brigham Young and Joseph Smith literally spoke for God – and that God Himself had authored the phrase “by the mouth of mine own servants, it is the same!” As much as many of them abhorred the idea of polygamy, when the advances were made, some prospective plural wives felt like God Himself was asking it of them, demanding that they sacrifice their own bodies like Isaac on the altar.

Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young said some absolutely awful things that the church will probably never even put into print in their searchable online archives. While I believe some of those statements are incredibly offensive, I am not suggesting we strike them from the record. I am merely suggesting that we consider all available angles of each story in reaching our own conclusions. I believe that even those that are considered inappropriate today should remain as a testimonial of the context at the time.

When I look at the Y on the hill above my alma mater, it makes me wonder why this man’s legacy has been tattooed into a mountainside for all below to gaze upon. And why does that man’s name continue to accompany my profile wherever I go? As much as I stand against redactions, I’ll break the rule here and expunge my historical record with a redaction of my own: I think it’s high time I take a stand and drop Brigham Young’s name from my personal profile. While of course I can’t undo the fact that I attended an institution that bore his name at the time, perhaps it will not always be so. In the meantime, I have to admit that it nauseates me to dress up my cv with the name of a man who spewed out racist rhetoric in God’s name. So there you go: having removed his name from my resumes and social media profiles, I’m now guilty of redaction as well. So who am I to judge others for their own redactions?

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Testimonial

In Brigham Young Hampton’s case, he acknowledges the “lashing” that he gave those who wronged him. Others describe “whippings” that his wives received, the severity of which may be open to interpretation; but decades later, when pressed for details about her marriage, Helen couldn’t bear to recite them. We can only guess at the details of what actually occurred behind closed doors, but given the written accounts, I would assume the abuse was quite brutal.

I do want to try to see all sides of the issue and trace any actions to their root cause wherever we have enough information to do so. In accusing BYH of being an abuser, does his own history of having been abused himself provide any justifying context? According to his own words, both he and his mother were savagely and “unmercifully” beaten and abused by his “gentile” step-father; would it really be any surprise to find out that he exercised what he learned as a child when he needed compliance or so-called consent for something as an adult? Can his admitted hatred and mistrust of so-called gentiles be blamed on his own childhood abuser, shielding him from guilt for his own intolerance?

In the eyes of those who believe in the eternal validity of LDS ordinances, those questions – along with everything else I have said about him – become entirely irrelevant to BYH’s post-mortal standing thanks to a special get-out-of-jail-free card. As they neared the end of their own mortal journeys, BYH and Wife #3 ultimately received their free ticket to the Kingdom directly from the prophet himself in the form of a second anointing. According to the ceremonial words, having his calling and election “made sure” essentially ensures his salvation forevermore – with no correlation to any earthly actions whatsoever!

When I looked at BYH’s photo in my family history albums as a child, I actually viewed him as that absolved soul. But where I used to see prime pioneer stock – an anointed man who had given his all for Zion – now I see a different character altogether; regardless of any absolution that he may have felt upon receiving his pardon from the prophet, I simply don’t see any way around the notion that he was an abusive [PONCS] and that the supposed mouthpiece of God whom he revered sanctioned those non-consensual acts. In both cases, perhaps some of those acts can be explained by looking at incidents of childhood trauma. But let’s be honest about the effects – and how to encourage prevention – instead of trying to pretend it all went down like some whitewashed Pioneer Day parade!

My goal here is not universal condemnation; perhaps we’re all in glass houses and no stones should be thrown at all. My aim is simply to promote the balanced presentation of the whole available truth – or at least what’s left of it to look at – when people are deciding whether they ought to dedicate their life to a particular philosophy.

Here are a few images showing some of the available sources that contain Helen and Bertha Hampton’s testimonies:

I hope their words are given equal air time going forward. The missing pages of BYH’s journal, however, may have permanently disappeared from the record, leaving me with all sorts of questions. Who redacted his testimony? Who decided that Helen’s testimony should be thrown out after she lost her faith in the cause? Were these efforts to spare embarrassment for the family, the church, or both? As for me, I’m done worrying about embarrassment. I’m facing the back side of the hill with my next couple of birthdays, and as the Australians say, “I can’t be bothered” to keep up one-sided images anymore.

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Benediction

Mormons are taught to close any lesson or talk with a challenge and a testimony, and I sometimes catch myself doing that as part of my inherent presentation style even when I’m teaching secular subjects like water hammer or dam design. For better or worse, when I wrap up a topic, my punctuation mark of choice invariably becomes a testimonial exclamation point. In keeping with that habit, here’s my feeble attempt at a testimony and a direct challenge to close out this particular chapter:

If you happen to dig up some dirt in your family history, go ahead and disavow that particular practice for yourself if you feel the need to. But don’t deny the event’s occurrence. Don’t bury your history or sweep it back into the closet. State the truth. Own it if it’s yours. And even if falls outside of a previous comfort zone, use that truth to make the world a better place!

To my siblings, parents, children, cousins, second cousins and so on who are descended from BYH through Wife #3:

When you write your own history and decide what to pass along and what to omit, will you let your own posterity know of the rampant abuse committed by our own forefathers in trying to comply with the principle of polygamy? Will you use their real stories, in this case including the accounts of Wives #1 and #2, for the purpose of breaking any ongoing cycle of abuse? If your kids feel their own blood boiling when they read it, will you let them have that right to feel angry? If so, perhaps it will help them stand up against abuse among their own peers or avoid being suckered into a one-sided, self-serving relationship themselves someday!

Or will you try to bury any negative accounts as those before us have done? If your plan is to pass along only the positive examples and hope that will do the trick, good luck with that; maybe your kids will never find out the whole story, and fictional, piecemeal accounts will remain their sole truth until their own mortal journey ends. Or maybe they’ll end up doing a bit of family history sleuthing on their own when they’re approaching fifty years old as I did – in which case I again call up the visual of Mr. Nitro Glycerine that I shared at the beginning of this article as a very fitting analogy for my own research experience.

So why would I recommend digging up Helen and Bertha’s testimonies of atrocious sexual abuse and putting it out into the open? Well, one reason might be that an organization that covers up and denies the sexual abuse in its past may tend to want to do the same with ongoing sexual abuse today. To me the acknowledgment of Helen and Bertha’s testimonies would be a good first step in recognizing the systematic abuse that was condoned and taught from the very top back in their day – and making sure that it is eradicated along with any hint of supposed male superiority or divine approval going forward.

As far as the real reasons Joseph Smith decided to implement polygamy, I honestly don’t have any idea. By his own admission, he was wondering why God granted Solomon the desires of his heart, including hundreds of wives and concubines. The question alone raises serious concerns about his own motives; whatever the case, I do know the story that I was sold about it being a temporary solution to get destitute, surplus women across the frozen plains after their husbands had been killed by intolerant mobs is utter nonsense. And whatever alternative account you accept, I believe that the real truth of the matter should be disturbing to anyone who looks at it, whether you’re an apologist, a critic, or simply undecided on the matter. Yes, some people received their own spiritual witnesses of its sanctity in the end – that is well documented. But just like fundamentalists today continue to receive their own spiritual witnesses of the principle and write their testimonies of abusive practices in their own journals to be passed along to their children, those feelings don’t make the practice divine. As a Latter-day Saint, you may believe in a divine origin for polygamy, and it’s obviously your right to pass that conviction along to your children, but even in light of that view, I believe that excluding the real, brutal sacrifices made in fulfilment of the principle plays down the very sacrifices they wanted to offer up to their Lord.

Well, I’d like to finally put this subject to rest, so this is the testimony, last of all, that I’ll leave to my own children on this topic: True consent is free of threats, coercion, or manipulation. The Mormon institution of polygamy was founded on those tactics and has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with God!

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[Next: Chapter 8: Ultimatum]