Transcription
Previously on Let's Get Real, I threatened to sue the church. I think I have never actually mentioned this before.
On today's episode of Let's Get Real, we'd like to introduce John Bradley, Don Bradley, author of *The 416 Pages: Reconstructing the Missing Contents of the Book of Mormon*.
Hello everyone. Back when I was an ex-Mormon, an atheist, I got hired by Brian Hill to research Joseph Smith and polygamy. I promise that the presentation itself will be similarly dramatic.
I met with the stake president. One of the last things he said to me was he had a feeling that I would be back. Now that I was seeing the historical data through this larger lens, I needed to be back in the church.
Up next, Don Bradley, part two. This is going to be an exclusive for you, the first time I've talked about this in a podcast. This has to do with Joseph Smith and polygamy. What were Joseph Smith's motives?
A number of lines of argument convinced me. And remember, I just want to know what happened. If Joseph Smith is doing this to sort of maximize his immediate sex with the hot babes, somebody needed to give this guy lessons because he's doing it wrong.
After I had the big wow moment of realizing that there was much more going on with this Joseph Smith character than I had thought, I realized that his motives were not one-dimensional, as I had once thought.
I realized that the church had worked in my life, the restoration had worked in my own life, that my own life experience bore that out. Then I decided to return to the church.
This was just over the summer while I was in grad school. I was doing some work in Salt Lake. I actually went back to the stake president in Utah Valley who had said to me, remember the last thing he said? He had a feeling I would be back.
I had humored him, thinking it was possible while thinking, I'm never going back. I was scared to go back. I had a lot of trepidation. I didn't know my bishop. When I had left, he was a really good guy, but he had kind of misinformed me.
He had told me that what I was doing was worse than being excommunicated. But really, someone had told him this because I was sort of presuming to remove myself from the church when I shouldn't do that.
So I actually thought that when I came back, there was going to be something sort of punitive to that process of coming back. I didn't want it to be a long, drawn-out process with sort of discipline.
So I found that stake president, knocked on his door, and said, "Do you remember me?" He did. I said, "Do you remember what you said to me at the end of that meeting?" He said, "I think so."
I said, "Well, you told me you had a feeling I'd be back, and guess what? I want to come back to the church." So I asked him, "What will I have to do to come back?"
He gave me just a little bit of a glimpse because at that time, I think it's changed now. It's actually part of the reason why I like to tell my story. When I left the church, there was so much information online about how to leave the church.
When I went to come back to the church, there was nothing. This was 2010, almost exactly five years later. There was nothing. I felt like I was flying blind. I didn't know what the process was going to be like.
That stake president just gave me the smallest glimpse of the process. He said, "Well, you have to go to church, or it's sort of up to your bishop. He'll set the terms, and he might want you to take the discussions."
I remember thinking, "Please no, please no, don't let me take the discussions." So I went and met with the bishop. He was a guy I didn't know at all, just a wonderful man.
I told him kind of where I had been the last several years of my life and that I wanted to come back to the church. He told me, "The Lord wants you back in His church."
He told me later, after he talked to the stake president about what needed to be done, that I was going to have to revisit my letter. Now remember, I wrote that letter not only to leave the church but to bar the way of ever coming back.
I wrote that letter to keep myself out of the church. Remember, I had threatened the church with legal action in that letter, which the church really doesn't like. No institution likes that, and I knew that.
This was part of my strategy to keep myself from ever being able to come back. Like I said, it sort of bore my anti-testimony about all kinds of issues in the latter.
After the bishop said that, I went home, found a copy of my letter, and cried. I read the letter and cried. I thought, when I saw what I had said, "I forgot that I said that."
I was like, "They are never letting me back in the church." So I called the bishop in tears and told him. He said, "Son, if the church couldn't forgive, it couldn't be the Lord's church."
He had me take the discussions. At first, I was dreading it, and then I just accepted it as part of the process. I thought, "Well, this is, among other things, going to be kind of an interesting anthropological experiment."
I've been on the other side of the discussions, giving the discussions. So what's it like to be an investigator? The bishop did not want me to tell the missionaries that I had been a member of the church before because he thought if I did, they would leave things out of the discussions.
He wanted them to give everything. So those missionaries were about to show up at my place, and I realized that in the hallway they would be walking through, I had bookcases with every conceivable book on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.
I started racing to move those bookcases into my bedroom, and I finished just before the knock came on the door. They came, and they taught me the discussions.
After the first discussion, I had actually been talking with people on a message board about warm stuff, which, you know, gets messy. Like on the internet, people misunderstand each other way more than they understand each other.
There's a lot of backbiting, you might say, fighting. So that's what I'd been doing before they came, before I moved the books.
After they left, I was sitting there pondering what they'd said, what we talked about, and then I thought, "Oh, what was I doing before?" Because I thought, "I'll go back to doing that."
I thought I was on that message board, and I thought about it. I felt like I was at such an elevated place right now that it felt like that would be going back into the swamp. I just didn't feel like doing that.
I thought, "I'm feeling the spirit." Even though the missionary discussions are so simple, they're so basic, every one of those discussions, I felt like I learned something new about the gospel. I had new insights.
Wow! I've been at this for a while, right? This has been, like, since I was 15. This has been the biggest focus in my life.
You know, what did you learn? I'd have to look at notes or journal entries because I don't remember. I just don't remember insights.
Less than two months, I completed the discussions. Less than two months. Oh, okay. So the bishop, remember, I had concerns about my letter.
I'm a better writer than I am a speaker, and so I had really crafted that letter very well. Wordsmith that it was, it was a powerful letter.
Now I've been told that I was going to have to meet with the bishop and account for the things that I said in the letter, explain the things I said in the letter. I thought, "How do I do that?"
Because my writing self is more powerful than my speaking self. My writing self crafted this great exit letter. What am I going to say now to contextualize that and be better, stronger than that?
The bishop asked me, at his discretion, to write a new letter responding to my old letter. I did, and my new letter swallowed my old letter whole.
My new letter was so much more powerful. After the discussions were done, he asked me to meet with him and his counselors and bring the letter and read it out loud.
Wow! The moment that I got done reading that letter, he said, "On behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I'd like to invite you to be re-baptized."
I scheduled a baptism for the next Sunday. I asked a really good friend of mine, Lincoln Cannon, to do that because he gave a real example to me of being constructive instead of tearing down.
I'd actually found that going back to church for those couple of months had been a really uplifting experience. I had expected it to annoy me because that's how I felt when I was leaving the church.
I felt really alienated from it, and honestly, I kind of needed a break from church, but I didn't take one. I just kept going, even though I was feeling so upset about it, and that just made it worse for a while back before I left.
But now I was thinking, you know, people seemed much more thoughtful at church than I remembered. After a while, I realized the church couldn't have changed that much in five years. What had changed was this guy.
Oh, that is the punchline! So whereas before I had been kind of on edge, kind of expecting to be offended or upset or whatever, now I was more charitable.
I was more open to other people's insights, and I was more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in what they were saying. I recognized that we're all human, and I don't have to agree with everything that everybody says.
But actually, when I was open to it, people had a lot of insights. Just to show that God had a sense of humor, okay, I've been going back to church for two months.
It was the day that I was getting baptized. We had the three meetings, right? We had sacrament meeting, Sunday school, and then Elder's Quorum, the last meeting of those two months before my baptism.
It was like two hours before I was going to get baptized. We had a lesson in Elder's Quorum about authority and priesthood authority. The Elder's Quorum teacher asked people to do skits, and the skits were acting out the theme of authority.
I remember one of the skits was like he had one guy pretending he was driving down the road, and this other guy pretends he pulls him over. He says, "Excuse me, sir, I'm just one of your neighbors here in this neighborhood, and I noticed you didn't stop completely at that sign, so I'm giving you a ticket. You need to pay me 50 or something."
Of course, the upshot is it's funny, right? Because this guy's not a cop. He's not a police officer. He doesn't have any authority to do this.
So the driver's like, "Well, who are you? What's your authority?" That made the point.
Well, then the last skit, this is the very end of Elder's Quorum, right before I'm going to be re-baptized. The instructor had the guy saying he had a revelation that the second coming was near.
As a test of our faith, the Lord wanted us to take ourselves and our families up to Mount St. Helens and throw ourselves in. I think he's picturing it because it's a volcano. He's picturing you had probably like a crater with lava in it, which I don't think is the case.
Then everybody's laughing, right? Because obviously, the question is, well, who is this guy to tell us this? People were laughing, and one of the people in the Quorum said, "Yeah, like we do that if anybody but the prophet told us to."
Somebody else said, "Yeah." Suddenly, I stopped laughing. I'm like, "Wait a minute, we're not laughing about the same thing."
I'm laughing because this is completely absurd, and they're laughing because the wrong guy is telling us to do it.
I thought, okay, there are some things in the culture of the church that I don't always like, and they're still there. I'm still going to encounter them.
It was like that was being told to me in a very funny way right before I got baptized. So I still got baptized because obviously, that's not that big a deal.
I went on to one of the message boards, now it's the Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board, to announce my re-baptism to people that I had previously been arguing with.
Mostly, they're Saints on the board. Over 200 people came on to that thread to welcome me back to the church. I was just overwhelmed.
People like Brian Hill, people like Dan Peterson, who had known me when I was outside the church, had always been kind to me and, of course, were very welcoming and very happy for me when I came back.
I had to go through what's called the restoration of blessings. This was another thing that was like a big gray area in my mind. I had no idea what it is. You hear that such a thing exists, but I didn't have any mental image of what this is.
Is it an ordinance? Do I go back to the temple to get it? What is it? This is a year after re-baptism. You're eligible for this if you've been through the temple before.
Basically, the stake president just laid his hands on my head, gave me a blessing, and said that all of my former blessings were restored: temple blessings, priesthood, and so on.
So it's like an ordination or blessing, and there was a letter accompanying that blessing from the First Presidency.
I actually got permission from Elder Jensen, who was the church historian and general authority at the time, before I first shared this publicly. So it's okay for me to share all this.
But I wanted other people to know what this process is like because, like I said, when you're going to leave the church, there's so much information online. When you're going to come back, not so much.
I want people to know what this process is like. Remember how that bishop had said to me, "If the church couldn't forgive, it couldn't be the Lord's church."
In that letter from the First Presidency, it quoted the Doctrine and Covenants saying that "to him that repenteth, I will remember his sins no more."
When you come back, if you have left the church, if you've been through the temple before, there will be a note on your membership record that says your original endowment date and your new baptism date.
So it'll be clear that you must have been out of the church because your endowment date will be before your baptism date. Once you have a restoration of blessings, they've removed that from your membership record.
It shows your original baptism date, and so it is exactly the same as if you had never left the church at all.
So if anyone wonders if the church really forgives, I can tell you they do. They do.
Five months after I came back to the church, I got a call from a good friend, Mark Masters McGee of the Joseph Smith Papers, saying that they wanted to bring me on for a while to help with the earliest Joseph Smith documents, the 1820s documents for Documents Volume One of the Joseph Smith Papers.
I wanted to ask you, do you know that I was out of the church just recently? I barely came back, and I plastered the internet with non-believing things and so on.
But I didn't ask that because I knew he knew, because Mark was at my rebound. Later, while I was at the Joseph Smith Papers, I got a chance to meet with Elder Jensen about something else, Marlon K. Jensen.
At the end of our conversation, he said, "I want you to know that we know all about your little detour that you took in your faith, and it doesn't matter. We're just happy to have you here and contributing."
When I asked later if I could share that, he said yes. He added, "Just make sure that people realize that it's a big deal to leave the church. It is serious."
But I hear what he's saying, right? I was welcomed back beautifully, and it's been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
I thought, Stephen, when I came back to the church, I actually thought I was giving up my career in Mormon history because I knew I would have some new findings to share with people.
But my whole career trajectory had been that I was going to give a naturalistic explanation of Mormonism, and I thought I was sacrificing on that.
I thought that people might not trust me because I'd been out of the church for a while. What I learned eventually was it was the exact opposite.
There were a lot of people who told me, "You know, I believe you more because you were out of the church for a while." So that makes sense to me why.
They told me, "I mean, why would you say that?" I would say, "Because you've seen both sides." You know what I mean?
But more importantly, the part that I would say more is the witness that you have of mercy. I feel like that strength of more than just the history, right?
But the foundation of him, I feel like even makes it even stronger. You know what I mean?
Right, right. So people told me things like this. They told me that with certain other historians and scholars in the church, they wonder, "Have they really opened their mind to the critical evidence? Have they opened their mind to the evidence against, or have they always just looked at it from one side?"
They said with me, they know that's not the case. They know I've looked at the thing from all different sides.
I've been really amazed at that, and I've been really happy to be back in the church and to be able to contribute.
One of the things, so as I talked about Joseph Smith's sincerity, this is going to be an exclusive for you, the first time I've talked about this in a podcast.
I gave a presentation. This has to do with Joseph Smith and polygamy and kind of how some of those dots connect.
I gave a presentation first at the John Whitmer Historical Association in Nauvoo a few years ago, and most recently, I gave it at an overlapping presentation at the Fair Conference about the origin of Nauvoo polygamy.
At the Fair Conference and JWHA, I was just talking about how Nauvoo polygamy starts. At the Fair Conference, I was talking more about what were Joseph Smith's motives. Can we tell how sincere he was religiously, prophetically?
This is one of the evidences that I brought in. When we think about someone's sincerity, can we really know someone's motives? Can we get inside somebody's head?
Now, sometimes people might question that, right? But like on the way driving here, I had to assess the intentions of a number of people that I don't know.
I have no idea who they are. They're just like these to me anonymous people in these cars. We are wired to be able to infer other people's intentions.
We obviously can do that with people who are around us, right? But a historian is in a unique position to do that with people in the past.
Let's take Joseph Smith. Okay, Emma Smith knew Joseph particularly in certain contexts. She obviously knew him best as a husband and father to their children.
Brigham Young knew Joseph more as a fellow priesthood leader, like, you know, from a context of priesthood quorums. Oliver Cowdery had known him as a friend, like someone he worked with on the translation of the Book of Mormon, as someone who experienced visionary experiences with him.
Hiram Smith knew him as a brother. Each of these people had a different angle on him. They're just like what we were saying earlier about looking at things from different angles.
You get someone from different angles, and you get a bigger picture of them. Any one of those people only had mostly their own angle on Joseph.
Emma did not know what was going on in those quorum meetings. Brigham did. Brigham did not know what Joseph was saying when he whispered in her ear or how he was caring for their children, right?
They each had their own little niche, their own little slice that they saw of him. A historian has the advantage for someone like Joseph Smith that there are thousands of people who left some sort of record or reminiscence of Joseph Smith.
There are thousands of records. The Joseph Smith Papers has compiled thousands, like 10,000 different sources. Some of those sources are journals that have daily journal entries.
We have others. Those are just the sources that were created in some way by Joseph Smith. Then we have additional sources created by people around him that talk about him.
So we have at least tens of thousands of data points on Joseph Smith, tens of thousands of actions, tens of thousands of statements that he made.
What we can do is we can line those up in chronological order and also just like to see cause and effect relationships between his actions.
Then that gives us a sense of what his motives are, and we can get a bigger picture of the man than anyone who knew him in life.
We can't get a deeper picture of their particular angle. So Emma could have described what Joseph looked like, what his voice sounded like, the specific things he said to his children, and so on in ways that we can't know.
But we have a much wider angle than Emma had because we have records from thousands of people, not just one person's experience.
So we can know. This is why when I talk about Joseph reading the signs of prominence, I can see that in the data.
We can see the things that his mother said about how he was always interested in everything of a religious nature from the time he was a little child.
So he's not a con man who just latches on to religion. He's not interested in religion as a child, and then he just latches on to an adult life to get something else.
He has an intrinsic interest in religion from the time he's a child. His parents believe his claims. Parents know. You've got kids.
If your children are prone to tell stories, parents know that because children are not good at lying. They think they might think they are, but they're not.
Parents have the advantage that they've been children before, but children have never been parents before. So his parents and his older siblings, who should know if he's a storyteller, believe him absolutely.
So much so that they stake their lives on it. Hiram dies for it. Then we have all the things in Nauvoo and elsewhere.
We can line up not only his family's angle but all these different angles. From those things, I can lay out a number of lines of argument that convince me.
And remember, I just want to know what happened. So if Joseph Smith were a fraud, I would want to know that. In fact, I did want to know that.
That's why when I thought my evidence was pointing that way, that's what I believed. My money's where my mouth is on this one. I just want to know what happened.
If the evidence were to show that he was a fraud, that's what I'd believe. In fact, that's what I did believe when the evidence seemed to show that.
Now I have a much wider set of evidence, and I can tell you Joseph Smith was religiously and prophetically sincere. His religious teachings that he taught, he believed, and he believed that God was guiding him.
One of the areas that this comes out is in Joseph Smith's polygamy. Okay, that's an interesting spot. Just let me throw that out there.
Polygamy is one of the areas where the people who think that Joseph Smith is a con man, what do they say are the giveaways? A lot of the ages, people who are married.
Well, is that what you're saying? Is everything? I mean, even the fact that he practiced polygamy, just that alone. I've talked to people. I talked to somebody at Sunstone.
Is that what you mean, though? Yeah, well, like what gives it away? What intention is what you mean, right?
So they see the big giveaway, I think, as being that he practiced polygamy in the first place. Then the details of how he did it, the ages, and so on.
They think, "Well, he's just lusting after these young women." They're like, "Why else would somebody introduce polygamy other than it's just all about sex?"
Remember, this was what I had thought when I started the two years of research for Brian Hill, processing through those 1,500 sources and then doing further research after the research for Brian.
I was assuming it was all about sex, and so I have a really good picture of the data here, the evidence.
What eventually happened, though, is I started piecing together a few lines of evidence for this. I'm going to lay out one, but I've got like two other big ones that they'll have to wait for publication.
I'm going to publish this too, and it makes for a great PowerPoint presentation. We don't have PowerPoint here, so there are some things you have to visualize.
Oh, okay, yeah, oh cool. So we have some signs of polygamy before Nauvoo. Obviously, the narratives about Fanny Alger.
But what we have before Nauvoo is kind of vague. There are conflicting stories about the nature of the relationship. There's conflicting information people have given about the timing of the relationship.
People place it all the way from 1833 to 1836 when it starts. It's not clear what the date was based on that.
There's no credible narrative identifying who would have performed a marriage between them. I think, and I have one publication out on this already, I'm going to have two more.
I think that actually there's a lot more we can figure out about it, about the nature of the relationship, and that it actually points pretty solidly to Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger doing this under the idea that this is biblical polygamy.
But because that relationship is brief, after the relationship kind of comes out, it gets dissolved. We don't know a lot about it.
This seems more like, in a way, proto-polygamy. It's not until Nauvoo that Joseph Smith is actually introducing a new marriage system, if this makes sense.
So there appears to be a polygamous relationship in Kirtland, but a full-blown polygamous marriage system comes in Nauvoo. In Nauvoo, we have exact marriage dates.
We know who performed a number of these marriages, and we know that once the marriages were discovered, in all cases except one, they were not abandoned. Joseph is teaching other men to do polygamy as well.
He's not the only one who goes on into it. So in Nauvoo, we have the introduction of a new social system, a new marriage system.
If you want to understand any cultural system, any social system, a social practice, you've got to look at the origins of it to understand why.
Why does this practice exist? Why did they just? Well, look at the original instance. Look at what I would call the prototype case.
I'm saying Fanny Alger, there’s polygamy, there's a polygamous relationship. But as far as like a new system, the commencement of Nauvoo polygamy is in 1841.
We're told as far back as 1886, people are saying that it starts with Joseph Smith's marriage to Louisa, or there's some historical sources suggesting it might be pronounced Louisa Beeman.
Supposedly, according to one affidavit, Joseph Smith married Louisa Beeman on April 5th, 1841.
Now, I like to say that much of history is getting the events in the right order. It actually matters because think about this word, right? It was San Pellegrino.
Yeah, that's Pellegrino. Because we're all practiced at reading. When you look at those letters in the right order, you don't have to try to read it. You can't help but read.
Once you look at the letters, your brain just sees the word. Once we get historical events in the right order, the cause and effect relationships, the story just kind of pops out.
Often, we don't get the story right because we don't have the events in the right order. We haven't figured out what comes before what.
So it matters what order he married these women in. The commonly accepted story is he marries Eliza Beeman first, then he marries Zina Huntington Jacobs, then her sister Priscilla, and then others from there.
There's something funny about the marriage to Louisa Beeman, though. It's several months before the others. Once Joseph starts Nauvoo polygamy, there's usually only a gap of like a month or so between marriages.
Between Eliza Beeman, who supposedly is first, and Zina Huntington Jacobs, there are six and a half months. So it's an unusually big gap.
Also, I'm assuming your audience knows, right, that like early in Nauvoo, Joseph was often sealing women who were already legally married to another man.
That's right, and there's a lot of controversy about why. What is he doing? In any case, we know that Zina Huntington was married. Her sister Priscilla was married.
All the women after Louisa, the next several women that he marries, had all gotten married already to someone else before Joseph.
Okay, so Louisa is an outlier. In Joseph Smith's first dozen Nauvoo marriages, he's being sealed to married women except Louisa, who supposedly is first.
So why is this one? One of these things is not like the others, right? Why is it they know that date for sure?
No, no, and that's the issue. Okay, wait, the thing is, do they know any of the dates? Yes, okay.
Some of the dates, for instance, Zina's marriage, she gives us the date October 27, 1841. She gives us the date.
Louisa Beeman died in 1845. She doesn't give any accounts of her marriage to Joseph Smith, but her brother-in-law, Joseph B. Noble, performed the marriage.
He says it was April 5th, 1841. So that's the date that's been used. But he also says it was on the sixth. He also says it was May. He also says it was 1840. He also says it was 1842.
He doesn't know. He doesn't remember the date. The date that he does give, April 5th, two years after that, April 5th, 1843, Joseph Noble and her support marriage.
It's on April 5th. It's the same day he says in this one affidavit that Joseph's marriage was. In other words, what's the likelihood that it's on the exact same day? Not good.
Not really. He's probably using the date of his own first plural marriage and projecting it back onto Joseph's.
The fact that his accounts all disagree with one another shows he doesn't remember. I don't think he ever gives the same date twice in any of them.
How many total does he give? Well, he gives two days. He gives two months, April and May, and he gives three years.
Somewhere between 1840 and 1842. It's not 1840 because that would be long before the others.
The only thing is the dates have in common is they're all in the early 1840s, and they're all in the spring. So it looks like he remembers the time of year. He remembers that it's spring, but he doesn't remember really anything else.
So here's where this becomes significant. In the Temple Lot case, in the 1890s, he's called on to testify, and he's asked about the date of the marriage.
He says, "I performed this marriage." He's asked the date, and he keeps waffling on the date. Ultimately, he says, "Well, sometime between 1840 and '42. I don't know."
So then the attorney cross-examining him asks, "Well, you don't know when it was. Where was it?" He says, "It was at my house in Nauvoo."
Aha! Okay, I've got him. He doesn't build his house until after the fall of 1841. So there's no way the marriage occurred at his house in the spring before the house existed.
He doesn't move to Nauvoo until when did he build the house? Well, actually, we don't know anything about the house. We just know it was after he moved to Nauvoo in the fall.
If it's in the spring, it ain't the spring of 1841. It's the spring of 1842. Interesting.
So suddenly, remember this guy, this Louisa Beeman, was at the front of the list. She's number one on the list. She's not really number one.
She actually moves over, so she takes her proper place. This is why it's good for visuals. Maybe I can get you some slides for this.
But she moves from being first to being like 10th or 12th or something. She moves significantly.
So then we look at, well, then who was the first? Now the plural wife, the one who was number two, becomes number one. So that's Zina Huntington Jacobs.
A thought experiment that I like to do with people is, and I'd be interested in having you, okay, and like the audience, people in the audience, I'd like to have you do a quick thought experiment.
I want you to like actually visualize, okay, just for a minute, just for a moment, like Joseph Smith looking at the woman who's going to be his first plural wife and thinking about marrying her, right?
Anticipating being married to her. Okay, okay, I guess you've got an image. Now, you can open your eyes. I'm just trying to make it real.
Okay, so let me ask you this. How many months pregnant was she in your image? Not pregnant. Okay, in real life, she was seven months pregnant.
In real life, Zina Huntington Jacobs, the first, the first, okay, says she marries him on October 27, 1841. She has a child on January 2, 1842.
Whoa! Just over two months later, she was seven months pregnant.
So think about the story that people have from a disaffected angle. What is this polygamy thing all about when Joseph Smith is starting up Nauvoo polygamy?
Why is he doing it? What are his motives? The idea is, "Well, it sucks. What else could it be?"
Well, if that were the correct model, remember what we do is we compare models. How well does this model explain the behavior that we see versus this model over here with different models?
If it's about sex, if it's just he wants to expand his sexual circle, right? He wants to have sex with more women, lusting after women or whatever, you would expect that he would be going for women who would be the most immediately sexually available and the most attractive.
In the medical beliefs of the time, you shouldn't have sex during pregnancy because it was believed to be harmful to the mother and the child.
A woman who's seven months pregnant is not going to be immediately sexually available. If this is about sex on that model, we'd expect him to start Nauvoo polygamy with the young, non-pregnant, immediately available women.
Instead, he's starting with a pregnant woman. The next woman after her is Priscilla. It appears she's pregnant.
For sure, we know that she had a baby. She marries him in December. He seals her in mid-December or something, December 17, 1841.
We know from family records that she has a baby in '42. We just don't know the day. They didn't record the baby's actual birthday. They just put in the family records 1842.
Well, given that a pregnancy lasts nine months from the year, lasts 12 months, there is more than a two-thirds chance that she was pregnant at the time that Joseph marries her.
Now, the third wife after her, pretty seems pretty clear she's not pregnant, but the fourth one, her wife, Mary Elizabeth Rollins Leitner, was seven or eight months pregnant.
Wow! We know when the baby was born, and it even says she was pregnant in her account. We know when the baby was born, and we know the marriage occurred in January-February.
The baby's born in March, and so we know she's seven or eight months pregnant.
Okay, and so this is not so. Just like when you imagined Joseph looking at his prospective first plural wife, you didn't imagine her pregnant.
No, all the people who are taking the model of Joseph Smith, particularly those people who are taking the model that it's about sex, they're definitely not picturing pregnant women.
That's not what they would predict from their model at all. They're not predicting that, right? But that's actually what's happening. Nauvoo polygamy starts with pregnant women.
Interesting. So they are not going to be as attractive at that time, and they're not going to be sexually available at that time.
So it's the nature of libido that libido doesn't say, "I want to have sex someday."
[Laughter] If it's about sex, like if Joseph Smith is doing this to sort of maximize his immediate sex with the hot babes, somebody needed to give this guy lessons because he's doing it wrong.
It doesn't fit. So what are some of the arguments that people might have to say, "Okay, well, so it's not about sex?"
What else might they say that it was about besides that? So once we see that, like just saying it sucks isn't a good explanatory model for a historian.
It doesn't explain. So you're just testing that one first. A good explanatory model actually explains.
The sex, he started Nauvoo polygamy for sex model doesn't explain this. So the thing we can say, I think with the greatest confidence, is this doesn't look like it's about sex.
If it were, we'd expect him to do it differently. Then we can ask, "Well, what was it about?"
Now the fact that more than one, it looks like three of the four early Nauvoo plural marriages that occurred were with pregnant women, and at least two of them were very pregnant women.
What it looks like is he's deliberately selecting very pregnant women, suggesting that it's almost as if he wants a child to be born within that marriage as soon as possible.
But it doesn't matter whether it's his own biological child or not. Joseph's earlier revelations had an idea of lineal priesthood, that he had special priesthood blessings that he inherited by lineage and that his children could inherit from him.
One reasonable possibility, then, given that theological context, is that by marrying the pregnant women, Joseph was essentially trying to adopt their children into these special blessings that he understood that his lineage had.
Now, another model that we could use here, and I'm not saying this is absolute, right? Because I'm impressing this as a historian, and I'm just trying to figure out what happened.
But because how old is Joseph at that time? He's 35. Okay, because I'm just saying because then that's because even Emma, like it's almost like for his own posterity through his first wife, right?
Well, technically, that's another detail, but it wouldn't be possible unless he would have intentionally gotten married and then had sex with one of the women, and then they had a child, right?
But you're saying he purposely chose someone who was already married, who was already pregnant, at least with the intent to potentially have that baby to be born underneath these promises he's coming.
One reasonable possibility here is if Joseph understood that polygamy was about raising up a righteous posterity, raising up seed to God, that he may be trying to do that without the necessity of having polygamous sex.
That he's doing it by trying to adopt these women's children and so on. That understanding, his motives would be the exact opposite of what people are often assuming.
Rather than his early Nauvoo plural marriages appearing to be motivated by sex, they appear to have religious theological motives that may even involve trying to avoid having to go the route of polygamous sex.
So that at least is way more consistent with the pattern of what he's doing than the model that this is about sex.
I think, too, like what I was trying to hit at, too, is even with even if Savior was with Emma, it was very unlikely that she—I mean, she could have conceived if his intention was to have a child born on the covenant.
Do you see what I'm saying? If she's probably later in her years as well. Oh, yeah, you see what I'm saying?
It's like the chance is a little bit older than him. He's almost 36 at the time that he marries Zina. He's coming up older than him.
So, yeah, do you see it to make it even stronger? It's like if he could have, if that was really his intention, then you have to worry about having sex and then also to have a baby born into a covenant.
The chances of him doing it with her were probably very interesting. I mean, they do have a child in 1844, but to shore up what you're saying, actually, I've looked at this, and women's fertility actually starts to significantly drop around 37, which is exactly how old Emma was at the time.
And so that would fit. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Interesting stuff.
So the pattern, if we look at the details of Joseph Smith's behavior, right, those details will fit some models of understanding him better than other models.
And over and over, I'm seeing that the model that he's simply an opportunist doesn't fit. It doesn't fit.
And again, I would caution, like, I mean, I do see Joseph Smith as very human. I'm not saying he never does anything wrong or self-interested. He certainly does, right?
But the thing is that he does those things in a larger context that discloses his care for other people, like his family, right?
His religious sincerity and his very strong belief that God is a prophet, that God is working through him, that God is guiding him.
Yes, so that is one of the things that has really—that's about—that's really, yeah, that doesn't change my view of him.
Wow! So how did you discover that? Like, you just dug deeper and deeper and deeper and found that those different dates and then the brother—now wait, who was it that you said that was bad at—?
Joseph B. Noble. Yeah, you just were looking in the—well, it was multiple things.
I am totally open to building on what any other historian finds, and there's a historian who, until recently, was like, I think, kind of the head of Signature Books, Gary Bergera.
Gary, he's definitely coming from the vantage point of Joseph Smith. He thinks that Joseph Smith is, I think, maybe a pious fraud is what he thinks it is or something.
But he published an article several years back in *Dialogue*, arguing that the dates of some of Joseph Smith's early Nauvoo marriages are more uncertain than people have realized.
So he reprinted various affidavits where Joseph Noble and others give a range of dates. It was actually once I saw that article, I realized, A, he was right. He was really on to something.
Now, Gary didn't draw out the next step kind of conclusion, which was, well, if Joseph B. Noble is all over the map on his dates, and if he didn't move into his house if he didn't move to Nauvoo until fall of '41, he wasn't performing that marriage in Nauvoo in spring of '41.
So that pushes it to '42. So Louisa is not the first. So then you look at Zina, and I don't think I realized at first that Zina was pregnant.
I think I'd known that but forgotten it. So then I started thinking, well, if Zina's the first, then that means he starts out with polygamy.
He starts out with marrying women who are already married, and I thought, why? So all of his early Nauvoo marriages are actually to women who have already married someone else.
Why? What's up? Then something I was looking at something to try to understand this better, and I realized she was pregnant.
She was very, very pregnant, and I thought, that's huge because that has implications for understanding why he's—this is the prototype case of Nauvoo polygamy.
Why is he doing it? This has implications for understanding his motives. Then only subsequently did I, like, I was examining the other early wives, and I just, out of that research came, oh, that's right, Mary Elizabeth Rollins was pregnant.
Then, oh, wait a minute, Priscilla was probably pregnant too. By that time, I was looking to see if the women were pregnant, and this appears to be something that just nobody's done.
It's just like looked at, okay, how many other women were pregnant and so on, and what does that disclose? What are the implications?
That's interesting. That's powerful, man.
So this is just a side note. I don't even know if I'll put this in here at all, but I'm just curious to you personally to know if when they started—because he started inviting other men to practice.
Yeah, at the start of theirs, were there any—did you see any signs of that too? Not to make the assumption that some of the other men, the other women were pregnant at times.
Now that would be, yeah, that's a good, interesting question. One of the early—the earliest additional man that Joseph appears to bring into Nauvoo polygamy is Willard Richards.
Excuse me, in that case, it would have been a polyandrous marriage. She was already married, but I don't believe she was pregnant.
I could—I have reason to think she wasn't, but I would have to look into that again. That is an interesting question to see if this is a pattern that extends beyond just Joseph.
By the way, I mean, one thing that people might—one issue that people might raise is, well, maybe these children were actually Joseph Smith's children.
Maybe he was already having a relationship with the woman before he married her. Interesting.
So it's good to know that the children of these marriages, Zina's marriage, the child survived, and I believe the same thing's the case with Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner.
But certainly with Zina, their child, Zebulon Henry Jacobs, has living male descendants whose Y chromosomes have been tested, and they are—he was absolutely the son of her legal husband, not the son of Joseph Smith.
And it just—yeah, that's really cool.
So with that same question, I'm wondering, though, that because Joseph Smith, his keys are different, right?
Okay, which I think is—that would you feel like even strengthens it even more that it was only him? If it was only him because him being the, you know, I mean, or even to their belief that he was the head of the dispensation.
I mean, it wasn't just that he had the Melchizedek priesthood, but he was like, you know, like his keys, like his—I don't know, I see his name, not his man.
So what am I trying to say? I don't know enough about the details of what the name specifically are, but like his priesthood is different, right?
Right. Anyway, a lot of people say that people leave the church, but they don't leave it alone.
What is your perspective on that? Because even for you, I mean, your intention to keep on—I mean, that was your job to be a historian and to study it, but you said that you would still go to, you know, different conferences and things like that.
What is your perspective? Yeah, sure. I mean, I would have multiple kind of perspectives on that.
So one would be, I mean, that's not true as a general principle. Yeah, I'm wondering because there actually are a lot of people who left the church quietly.
Yeah, I haven't had any sort of animus against the church. They just stopped believing. A lot of people who just like go inactive or maybe have their name removed from the records.
I was actually interested in this at the time that I left the church. There was some historian—I forgot his name, but I don't know if I can quite bring it to the surface.
But I was really fascinated. I read an interview that someone did with this guy, and he had stopped believing in the church, but he still was like friendly toward it, well-disposed toward it.
So there are a lot of people. The thing about that thing, people can leave the church, but they can't leave it alone, is only the instances where that's true stand out.
If someone finally leaves the church, nobody really notices. But if somebody leaves the church and they raise a big fuss and they attack the church, whatever, everybody notices.
That's really interesting. But I would also say, I mean, one thing I would like for other Latter-day Saints to understand more is like what it's like to leave the church and how that looks.
Because it looks so different, and there really is a lot of judgment that's put on people.
So about a decade ago or more, then-President Dieter Uchtdorf gave a talk in conference called "Come Join with Us."
I love that talk. In one of the things he said in that talk was that people often assume that when someone leaves the church, they just left because they were offended or because they wanted to sin.
He actually said that that's actually like insulting to people who leave. That's just a stereotype.
Obviously, there are people who leave because they're offended. I think there are a lot of times, maybe teenagers or whatever, whose friends drink and do other things that the church doesn't support, and they sort of drift away from the church.
But since they have a different lifestyle, in my experience as an ex-Mormon at that time, among other ex-Mormons going to ex-Mormon social events, the other ex-Mormons were like me.
They had really been really devout. They had really strongly believed. This had been really important to them, but they found things that made them question, and then they ended up leaving.
I'm not saying that like any of us are perfect, and there are things that I can see in retrospect about when I left that I think, "Well, that's something I could have been doing differently in my life," or whatever.
But I didn't leave because I wanted to sin. I mean, the restoration had provided the ultimate meaning of my life. That's not something I was going to give up without a fight.
I was trying to retain belief, but not retaining belief, right?
When people leave the church, one of the reasons why they behave in ways that are problematic—so there are a couple reasons, right?
So if you have a family member or friend who starts having doubts, maybe loses their faith, you might see them like having a beer or drinking coffee or whatever, like doing things that are not in line with the church's standards.
Then the easy assumption there is, "Well, yeah, they're just doubting or disbelieving because they want to do those things."
But hold on, hold on, hold on. Think this through, right? Like why were those people not drinking before?
Yeah, because they believed in the Word of Wisdom. Once they don't believe in the Word of Wisdom anymore, what reason do they have to not drink coffee or drink alcohol?
Also, something to recognize about people who leave the church, and this is important to me because like when I was outside the church, there were some people, like I said, who were really kind to me, right?
Like Brian Hill, like Dan Peterson and others, but there were also people on the internet who just assumed the worst of me.
They thought I was core. They thought I was on there to lead other people astray, like deliberately lead other people astray.
That's just like, hmm, whatever happened to like judge not or something? Like what do you—what did they know about me?
They didn't know anything. All they knew about me was some things I said on the internet. That's it. They didn't know what was going on inside of me or my own struggles or whatever, you know?
So anyway, when people leave the church or have doubts, they often start in a way kind of acting out. They might say things that are like deliberately provocative.
So if you go on, I don't know if the Recovery from Mormonism board still exists on exmormon.org, but for years when I occasionally go there, it was like a cesspool, right?
Because people would say they would be very angry, and they would say things they would think it was funny to pair obscenities with some general authority.
They would create some quote from Boyd K. Packer where he used a bunch of obscenities and so on. This seemed hilarious to them, right?
Now, why this? It seems very juvenile. Why would an adult do this? Right? Well, I can tell you why.
It's because the church is actually really, really powerful, giving someone a sense of identity. If you ever try to break away from a powerful sense of identity, it's a really hard thing to do.
Sometimes what you have to do is actually act against that sense of identity, right? So like if you leave the church, but you still never have a beer or never drink a cup of coffee, keep wearing garments or whatever, you don't feel like you've left the church.
You feel like you're still allowed to be saying, even though your intention is, "I don't believe this anymore."
I feel like I need to leave those. So part of the way that people acquire a new identity is by deliberately acting out against the old identity.
That's usually just a phase. So if you've got relatives or friends who are going on the internet and like using obscenities about the church or whatever, give them time.
Usually, that's going to pass. There are only a few—only a small percentage kind of get stuck there.
Oh, most don't. And this would be another thing about like, I guess I would say to people who are maybe now to address like people who are questioning, yeah, I have doubts or maybe lost their faith, right?
Let's say, don't give up. Let's say, keep searching, right? Because like in my case, I spent years developing a model of Joseph Smith as an opportunist.
I, like I said, helped process most of—you know, find and process through research most of the 1,500 sources that Brian Hill cites about Joseph Smith and polygamy.
I wish that whole time exploring the model that building this model of Joseph Smith as like an opportunist motivated by sex in this polygamy.
I held that view for more than just those five years. The polygamy was really about sex. I held it for a very long time.
Then I started finding this—the discovery I laid out to you about the order of the marriages. That wasn't the first discovery.
There was another one before that that made me think, "Whoa, wait a minute. What I'm finding doesn't fit that model."
It suggests he had theological, spiritual motives for polygamy. Then I found other stuff since then, even additional stuff.
And so I kind of like had to eat humble pie, right? Because I had made myself one of the two biggest experts in the world on this subject and arguably knew the sources better than anybody.
Yet I was fundamentally wrong about Joseph Smith's motive, and I recognized that strongly now. Those were not his motives.
I'm not saying that like he wasn't attracted to his wives and that that didn't factor in in some way. This isn't the reason for polygamy, right?
And so like I was able to come back to the church ultimately because I kept searching, even though I thought I had it figured out.
I didn't stop taking in new information. I'm not unique in this, right?
If people have like—if they stay open to what they might find, if I could be wrong, if I could get that level of expertise on Joseph Smith's polygamy and be wrong about his motives until I discovered something new, I can be wrong about all kinds of things, and so can other people, even if they think that they're experts in whatever they're studying, right?
In my experience, too, part of what helped me to come back to the church was not only taking a wider view of the historical sources, the evidence, but taking a wider view of things that I experienced.
It's not just focusing on what was wrong with the church, what were the flaws that I saw in Latter-day Saint culture, in the community, and so on, but what were the things that worked?
What were the things that the church had taught me that were good, that worked in my life? And so often, it really is the case.
A lot of times, there's a temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? So if you are doubting, right, if you're questioning, keep hold of what you do know is good, right?
Like the things that work in your life, the ways that the church encourages you to do good, to serve others, to connect with others, to do good things for your family, whatever it is that you find in the church that's helpful, to keep holding on to that, you know?
And also, a big thing that I left out of the earlier part of my journey has been just huge for me, both in like returning to spirituality and then in making sense of a lot of things, it's been gratitude.
When I left the church, I was in a bad place emotionally. I was frustrated. I felt very disillusioned with Joseph Smith, and I think this is the case for a lot of people.
A lot of people, when they leave, it's so disturbing what they're going through and maybe the conflict they get in with family members or whatever.
Well, there's research that shows in positive psychology that when we are having negative experiences, we get a kind of tunnel vision.
Even literally, like they've done studies on how well we can see things in our peripheral vision when we're in a good mood or a bad mood.
I think most people, when they've been depressed at some time to some degree, they realize that like when we're depressed, we get tunnel vision, right?
You only see the bad. Or when you're angry, when you're angry, you can only see things that make you angry. You don't see the good things that you—you don't feel grateful or whatever, you know?
When I was in an emotionally bad place when I left the church, that gave me tunnel vision. It narrowed how well I could see what the different possibilities were.
It was actually like practicing gratitude, like starting to keep a gratitude journal and so on, to really consider more what are the good things in my life that I've started to become happier and less—I sort of was able to maybe kind of overcome, if you will, some of my conditioning around like the things that had been painful for me in leaving the church, right?
And get like a bigger vision. Then I started to be able to see more possibilities because being happier, the research shows, helps us to be more creative, helps us to have a wider vision.
One of the world's greatest experts on the psychology of gratitude, Robert Emmons, he wrote a book called something like *Thanks: The Psychology of Gratitude*.
I read this book when I was an atheist, and I realized that I really wanted to become a grateful person. When I started looking at the good things in my life, the blessings of my life, and realizing that I didn't have anybody to thank, that was in a way, that was kind of a first step even before I read that book.
It was kind of a first step into like having a sense of like at least conceptualizing on wanting there to be a God.
In wrestling with the question of God a little more, but Robert Emmons is a devout Christian, and I've communicated with him some, become something of a friend of his, and he's such a cool guy.
But he told me some of the things that he's learned about gratitude in recent years that are not in his publications yet, and about how gratitude connects with spirituality.
He told me that he used to go to a church that had like less of an emphasis on grace, and then he started going to one that had more of an emphasis on grace.
He helped him understand that like this is the root of the gospel, is that we're offered a gift and something to be grateful for.
We shouldn't—as the gratitude is not about trying to force ourselves to feel something we feel like we should feel. Gratitude is about recognizing the reality that everything in my life ultimately comes from outside of me.
I did not create any of this. This opportunity to be here talking with you today, I didn't create this studio. I didn't create this body of mine. Others made this for me.
I am the recipient of countless gifts. Gratitude, he says, is the most honest way to live a life because it recognizes the reality that everything ultimately comes from outside of me.
Everything that I have, even the things that I do something with, like my research, I didn't create the mind that I was given.
I didn't create the historical research materials. I didn't create the other books that I read that go into my process of research.
Sure, I do something with what I'm given, but everything before that is given. I mean, and so he started to find, Bob Emmons, that when he started realizing more the grace that he's been given, the gifts that he's been given, he stopped having doubts in his faith.
He said that he, from his insight now, is that not only is gratitude—not only does gratitude build faith, he says gratitude is faith.
So the more we cultivate our gratitude to God, to other people, and maybe even like to the church, right?
To the other people who have done service for us, who've taught us, and so on, like the more it builds us up, we can have a closer relationship with God.
We can be happier and have a better life, and it encourages us to give more to other people when we realize we've received.
Apostle Paul says, "What do you have that you did not receive?" Once we realize everything is received, we realize, "I should be doing word help other people," right?
It broadens our vision beyond ourselves. It broadens our ability to see possibilities, and it strengthens our faith. It is a kind of faith.
So, you know, if you're wrestling with faith, like a counterintuitive thing, something you won't usually hear, right? Like learn gratitude, right?
Learn to recognize. You don't have to make up things to be grateful for. Look around and identify the things that you have that are gifts to be grateful for.
Wow! This has all been amazing. This last piece that you're mentioning to me is what redemption really is.
Because when you realize that there's nothing that you could do to earn or buy that, you know, your natural reaction is with God's—that merciful to me, then I need to be more merciful to others, right?
But if I'm just seeking that mercy, like expecting it, well, you already have it. Once you start to see that, it changes the way you see other people.
It changes, I think, like that's the epitome of what reciprocity is when it comes to repentance. I think you're not owing them anything because you could have even bought it in the first place.
I think that an interesting theme to this whole thing to me is that ideal is that idea in your whole experience that you had.
I don't want to project that onto you or anything, but it's just the idea of like if you look back at all these experiences that you've mentioned, you can really see these intricate little details of God putting you there, putting you here, reminding you this, reminding you that.
The thing that really changed—none of it changed. You just saw it differently, like you mentioned. God has been there through the whole journey.
He was there. He never—he was there even when I was alone, right? Like even when to me there was no God, right?
I give up on God. God never gave up on me, and that's it, right?
I'm listening to this all, as long as this conversation has been, this is the tiny nutshell of like, oh, what happened, right?
There was a lot that was really painful and difficult, you know? And yet I can look back and, just like I was saying earlier about Joseph Smith looking in his life and seeing the signs of providence, I see that same hand in my life.
In something that I'll be publishing in the future on the First Vision was another part of what brought me back.
I came to see that Joseph Smith mentions in different places the idea that like the First Vision—he implies that the First Vision wasn't all just in the grove, and actually God came down to his level to lift him up to God's level.
There was a heavenly ascent that Joseph, like Lehi. Yes, and Lehi's First Vision, the presence of God comes down on that pillar of fire, and then Lehi is lifted up and sees God seated on his throne.
This happened. I'll be arguing there's good evidence this happened in the First Vision.
So think about this, okay? What is the gospel of Jesus Christ? Well, the early Christians had a formula where they said God became man in order that man might become God.
Look in the Book of Mormon. On the title page, it says the Book of Mormon is here to show us that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God.
Right? He's God, right? But he's God who came down to our level as human beings to lift us up to his level.
The First Vision encapsulates the whole gospel plan. God came down to our level. He comes down to Joseph's level and lifts us up to his level, which he does with Joseph, right?
This is another thing that I've seen. This is something that we have to be so grateful for, right? That God would do this for us.
We are never alone, right? The whole gospel plan centers around his willingness to come down to our level, to be with us in all of our suffering, in everything that we go through, and everything that happens to us.
Even when we cannot see it, cannot perceive it, he is there with us. As we accept that gift, right, we recognize the magnitude of that gift.
Then think about like what the people who were baptized in Mosiah 18, the Waters of Mormon, they're covenanting that they will take upon themselves the burdens of others, right?
We are imitating what he does for us. When we're baptized, just like he came down to our level to bear our burdens and lift us up, what we covenant when we come into the church is that we will comfort those who stand in need of comfort.
We will mourn with those who mourn. We will bear one another's burdens. We will, as Paul says, live the law of Christ by bearing one another's burdens.
So that is the gospel. The gospel is what we receive from him and accept from him, and then that we go and do likewise.
We live our lives that way. So this is what we're supposed to be having faith in.
Was Joseph Smith perfect? Was he a perfect exemplar? Or was Brigham Young racist? Did these guys do everything right? No, no, no, no, no.
The gospel isn't about them. They're vehicles, they're instruments. The gospel is about what God did for us in Jesus Christ and how then, as we gratefully receive that, it inspires us to go and do the same for other people.
That's the gospel. I won't add anything to it. I always end this way.
I believe what we said is true. This is Don Bradley, historian genius, I believe. But don't take our word for it. Find out for yourself. Until next time.