Episode 152 - The Great Asleepening

The episode opens with the crew diving back into the second half of the CES Letter’s witnesses section, which means James Strang is back in the building wearing his tiny prophet tiara and demanding we respect his suspiciously better production design. Before the actual Strangery begins, aaaAAAaaa introduces the cocktail: the Raspberry Recanter, made with champagne, Château Monet raspberry liqueur, and “raspberries” that were spiritually witnessed as raspberries but, in mortality, were absolutely blackberries. The drink becomes its own mini-object lesson in Mormon testimony logic: if everyone signs a statement saying those berries were raspberries, who are we to question the sacred fruit affidavit?

The intro then becomes a glorious pop culture pinball machine, bouncing from a smoothie shop encounter with a flat-earth-adjacent YouTube prophet, to the new Minions movie, to Tyra Banks’ cursed 2011 fantasy novel Modelland, featuring names so unhinged they should require ecclesiastical discipline. The crew also spirals through House of the Dragon, Netflix’s live-action Avatar, the “Take Me to Bangladesh” trend, and America’s looming 250th birthday, which no one is feeling especially patriotic about because, frankly, the vibes are rancid and the fireworks are banned.

History: [00:35:45]

Abigail uses James Strang as the entry point for a broader tour of 19th-century American religious weirdness, specifically the horny little prophet kingdoms that kept sprouting out of the Second Great Awakening like theological mushrooms after a cursed rainstorm. Rather than retelling Strang’s whole Beaver Island saga again, she frames him as part of a wider pattern: charismatic men claiming God had authorized them to redesign society, collect followers, control property, and stick their penises wherever revelation conveniently pointed. Christian perfectionism becomes the historical umbrella here: the idea that believers could become sanctified in this life, which, when mixed with restorationist logic and unchecked male ego, often produced cult startups with bonus sex spreadsheets.

The segment covers Jacob Cochrane and the Cochraneites, whose spiritual wifery and proximity to early Mormon figures make Joseph Smith look less like an innovator and more like a guy shopping the regional prophet clearance rack. Then Abigail moves through Robert Matthews, later “Matthias,” a violent, unstable prophet figure whose orbit somehow included Sojourner Truth and a murder accusation involving Elijah Pearson and several plates of blackberries. The tour continues through the Battle Axes of Free Love Valley, Theophilus Ransom Gates’ nudist polyamorous Pennsylvania sect with an axe murder problem, John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community with “complex marriage,” communal property, and extremely cursed sexual governance, and Thomas Lake Harris’ Brotherhood of the New Life, where celestial counterparts and divine heavy breathing somehow became a whole thing. The final takeaway: Strang did not invent the American prophet-king fantasy, but he did put rhinestones on the machinery.

FHE: [01:24:52]

aaaAAAaaabishoni brings the episode back to James Strang and the CES Letter’s critique of witness testimony, comparing Strang directly to Joseph Smith and concluding, with due disgust, that Strang may have been a bad guy but at least he put effort into the con. Strang claimed angelic visits, produced plates, gathered eleven witnesses, introduced scripture, and founded a church, basically doing the Joseph Smith checklist but with actual props. The Voree plates get special attention because unlike Joseph’s gold plates, Strang’s plates were physically handled, described in detail, allegedly unearthed from a clay box under established roots and a stone, and even displayed publicly before later vanishing into historical couch cushions. The crew walks through possible fraud mechanics, including the idea that Strang had months to prepare the site or may have bored in from an angle, accidentally benefiting from a conveniently dramatic buried stone like a prophet-themed escape room designer.

The segment then turns the CES Letter’s witness argument back on Mormonism with a vengeance. If the church can dismiss Strang as a fraud even though most living Book of Mormon witnesses and much of Joseph Smith’s family accepted Strang’s prophetic claims, why does witness testimony suddenly become sacred-grade evidence only when it flatters Joseph? aaaAAAaaabishoni highlights the weakness of the Book of Mormon witness statements: no original document signed by all witnesses, no dates, no locations, family entanglements, excommunications, contradictory later statements, and Joseph’s proven talent for getting people to sign claims that were not true, including polygamy denials. The broader point lands hard: people have sincere, unretracted testimonies of Bigfoot, UFOs, aliens, and all manner of paranormal nonsense. Not recanting is not proof. And in the end, the whole witness issue is kneecapped by the rock-in-hat translation method anyway: ancient prophets allegedly engraved and preserved metal plates for centuries so Joseph could ignore them and dictate scripture from a hat like God’s dumbest magic trick. The episode closes in the name of Sojourner Truth, who did not do a murder, and with a final warning from the blackberry gospel: several plates is too many blackberries.

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