The Jaden Jeffs Podcast
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The Jaden Jeffs Podcast
Episode 70 | If Joseph Smith Lived Today, He'd End Up Like Warren Jeffs | Lindsay Hansen Park
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Joseph Smith vs. Warren Jeffs: Polygamy, Power, and Mormonism’s Dark Legacy | Lindsay Hansen Park
On the Jaden Jeffs Podcast, Jaden interviews Mormon historian Lindsay Hansen Park about parallels between Joseph Smith and Warren Jeffs, arguing Mormon culture can normalize coercion by making leaders righteous and excusing abuse. They discuss Joseph Smith’s polygamy (including a 14-year-old), power consolidation in Nauvoo, sincerity versus manipulation, and how his death created martyrdom that helped Mormonism endure. Lindsay describes Mormonism as “catnip for predators,” cites patterns of obedience, complicity, and victim-perpetrator complexity, and compares LDS corporatization with fundamentalist attempts to restore early doctrines. They cover Brigham Young’s influence, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and historical cover-up, Porter Rockwell’s violence, debates over the Journal of Discourses, Adam-God doctrine, psychedelic/trance theories in early Mormon ecstatic experiences, and challenges of healing after leaving high-control religion. Lindsay plugs Sunstone, her upcoming book The Ballad of Juanita Brooks, and her podcasts.
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01:19 Meet Lindsay Hansen Park
06:38 Joseph Smith vs Warren Jeffs
09:59 Martyrdom and Legacy
16:19 Victims and Perpetrators
17:55 Polygamy Then and Now
21:17 Occult Roots and Boredom
25:05 Childhood Parallels
31:37 Gold Plates and Confidence
39:20 Joseph Smith Sincerity
40:56 Warren Jeffs Psychology
45:09 Complicity Shared Delusion
48:11 Porter Rockwell Myth
49:33 Joseph Smith Child Brides
55:40 Predators and Mormon Culture
01:11:01 Charisma and Primary Voice
01:19:36 Brigham Young Guilty Pleasure
01:23:31 Loving a Complicated Father
01:25:09 Faithful Mormon Bad Manners
01:25:50 Journal of Discourses Debate
01:31:10 Mountain Meadows Responsibility
01:37:46 John D Lee Survival Lore
01:41:38 Polygamy Denial Conspiracies
01:49:26 Rulon Jeffs Infiltration Theory
01:55:26 Why Conspiracies Persist
01:58:25 Adam God Doctrine Setup
02:00:55 Brigham Young Origins
02:02:41 Church Scrubs Doctrine
02:04:52 Numbers And Polygamy
02:07:08 Occult Numerology Roots
02:11:26 Life After Mormonism
02:30:01 Book And Farewell
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How many times is Joseph Smith in jail? How many times were him and his buddies in jail? We have stories of coercion and predatory control. When you have predators as your leaders, you have to make them righteous. You develop an entire culture that justifies abuse and harm. And that's what we have today. And the historian Barbara Jones Brown is talking about how the Mormons turn their guns and shoot these immigrants at point blank range. And one of the boys goes, cool. And I was just like, buddy, no. No. And that's what happens when you have a bunch of frontier men who start what I'm gonna just be blunt is kind of a frontier sex cult. And they're predatory and they're scamming people and they're using the government. And you know, now we've lost all the LDS listeners. They're like, we can't trust what she says. And so Joseph Smith had that. I do believe that that was sincere. I believe at some point he probably had to make a choice in his brain how much of this is my bullshit and how much of this is happening. And I don't know if he lied to himself or he made a conscious choice to lie to others, but at some point, his integrity, if it existed, was absolutely co-opted by his greed and his ambition and his shadow sides, right?
SPEAKER_00Welcome everybody. This is the Jaden Jeffs podcast. Today I'm joined by Lindsay Hanson Park, who is the famous Mormon historian who basically knows everything about Joseph Smith more than anybody else. Uh she was a consultant on Under the Banner of Heaven and American Primeval. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_00Uh she grew up or she grew up Mormon, correct?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, LDS.
SPEAKER_00LDS. Can I say Mormon or do I have to say LDS?
SPEAKER_03Well, now if we follow my current prophet, you have to say LDS, but Mormon. I'm good with Mormon.
SPEAKER_00All right. But yeah, Lindsay, thanks for being here. And I'm just excited to talk to you about my dad and Joseph Smith. And today is Father's Day, too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, did we did we do that on purpose?
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_02Wow, that's that's that's weird.
SPEAKER_03That's spooky.
SPEAKER_00I know. I left religion and spooky things like that are still happening. Same, same man, same um it's like there's some kind of spiritual reality that just catches up to you sometimes.
SPEAKER_03What a way to celebrate for last day.
SPEAKER_00I know. What what am I supposed to even think about?
SPEAKER_03I I don't know. That you that is a long question for your therapist for mega life years.
SPEAKER_00Oh if I had one, I would ask him. Um well, this idea that I talk to a lot of Mormons and they love Joseph Smith, right? They worship him. Wait, are you you're not still Mormon, are you?
SPEAKER_03No, I claim the heritage. So when I say I'm Mormon, uh it's to me, I don't think it's something that washes off like it seven generations, both sides, like it's where I come from. So I claim the heritage, even though I'm not really proud of the legacy, if I if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's like that's what happened.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's just like it's who who I am, it formed who I am. And so, you know, I don't expect everyone who grew up in this culture to feel the same. But for me, it's like, you know, it's part of who I who I am. I'm not embarrassed about that. It's obviously a huge part of my work. So, but I don't really believe in, I certainly don't believe in the institutional claims. I carry some of the like metaphysical, uh like sometimes I'll pray still, even though like Heavenly Father and I have a problem, you know. But every once in a while that old stuff just comes up. So I I go with it when it's useful and when it's not, garbage. So I went through a huge atheist phase when I left the church and you know, and then um had some experiences that sort of brought me back to belief.
SPEAKER_00So you're kind of coming back around to being a Mormon like every like they knew you would.
SPEAKER_03Like they I'm coming back. I'm silencing my phone. I'm sorry, I keep getting calls.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're a famous historian, so you probably get all kinds of calls.
SPEAKER_03Well, I wouldn't say I know everything about Joseph Smith. There are historians that know far more, but I'll I'll do my best today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you're the most popular historian. I think I why is that?
SPEAKER_03Because I uh I can translate academic, scholarly stuff to a general audience, and I feel like uh that's my gift, right? Is being able to sort of uh synthesize all the information into a story that makes sense. My mom was a public historian, is what they call it. She would dress as a pioneer and go to like libraries and schools and teach the stories of Mormon pioneers. And so I grew up sort of with that cadence of storytelling, talking about the history, but telling it to fifth graders, right? And so sometimes Mormon historians and scholars, and I know the best out there, and I'm lucky to interact with them at my day job. I'm the executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation. Um, and so a lot of your folks, like the FLDS people, know me from your polygamy, but the majority of my work is around the what we call the like Mormon diaspora, all the different branches of Mormonism. So my job is to learn about all of them and know as much as I can about all of them. And I do that at Sunstone. So I have access to scholars, and sometimes they forget that like the rest of the world doesn't even know what a Nephi is. You know what I mean? So you have to be able to translate that. And yeah, I'm kind of the urin thumb for Mormon history.
SPEAKER_00You also look good on TikTok and YouTube. Like people scroll and they see you uh talking about Joseph Smith are like perfect. This is where I came from.
SPEAKER_03You know what? I actually hate being on camera. Anyone that knows that and knows me knows that. Like if I have to do a zoom call with my staff, I like having the camera off. It's just lots of years of like internalized Mormon body dysmorphia stuff. So it's not my favorite thing, but I uh I have written a book recently, and so I'm like, oh, I gotta get it back on TikTok. So back in the game, man. Oh, putting my face back on the YouTube.
SPEAKER_00Is your book out yet?
SPEAKER_03It's gonna be out in December. It's called The Ball of Juanita Brooks, and it's about the historian who uncovered the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is a big God.
SPEAKER_00I I gotta ask you about that. Yeah, but first let's talk about Joseph Smith versus my dad. So personally, I have a serious uh almost anger towards Mormons because they defend Joseph Smith so uh vehemently and they they throw Warren Jeffs under the bus. And I see these two individuals as very, very similar in my own mind. And so you have like Warren Jeffs, he probably he you could say he's a worse person, right? I don't I don't know how you would see that, but you could I can see the argument that he's a worse person, he married a 12-year-old, whatever. Didn't Joseph Smith marry like a 14-year-old, right? So I have these debates with Mormons, and I say, How is Joseph Smith better? He married a 14-year-old. Uh my dad married a 12-year-old, he married a 14-year-old. Like, do you support that or what? You know? Uh and they're they always go to saying, Oh, it's just a seething. It it was never your dad, uh, they say about Warren Jess, he had sexual intercourse. Uh, they say about Joseph Smith, he didn't. What do you think about this?
SPEAKER_03Well, I I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about all of that. First of all, I think your anger is justified. It drives me nuts too. And and I will say that when I first started learning about FLDS history, it was kind of this mind lamp labyrinth of like, oh my gosh, what? Because it is a very convenient narrative when you grow up in the LDS church to be like, we're we're not like that. That's crazy, that's gross, that's dark, and not see it reflected in our own church. And uh so that was that was like a huge crisis of faith to be like, oh, we're not that different. Actually, it's very, very similar. And I remember encountering, like, uh going down to Shore Creek um for the first time and touring Warren's home and it looking like my church house and just being like, what do I do with this? Uh so the similarities are absolutely there, and we can go into that. Second, I would say that one of the biggest differences between your dad and Joseph Smith is that your dad went through the trials of his crimes in in a modern court and they had tape recorders. Joseph Smith didn't have tape recorders, but I wonder if he did, if if the outcome would have been different. And so it doesn't mean that they're crime that they didn't have similar crimes. Now there are differences too, and those are important. Your father was able to scale at a way that Joseph Smith, frankly, didn't have time or power to do, and your dad really built on what Joseph Smith did. But I always like to say that that Warren Jeffs was cosplaying Joseph Smith. And so a lot of the stuff that we get from Warren Jeffs that is bad, he was trying deliberately to recreate from documents that he found with Joseph Smith. And so we can talk about that if you'd like as well.
SPEAKER_00I don't think people realize how obsessed my dad was with Joseph Smith. He he constantly was reading from Joseph Smith. He was going up to Salt Lake Library to get all the documents and books he could. So he was like obsessed. If Joseph Smith were alive today, uh and you have like the modern courts, DNA, all uh Netflix, all that stuff, does he end up canonized or does he end up like my dad?
SPEAKER_03I think uh he would probably end up like your dad in prison, not murdered. And so what Joseph Smith being killed by a mob did was turn him into a martyr, right? Which is what your dad has tried to recapitulate over and over, because a martyr is far more powerful than a sad guy that like disappears in a prison somewhere, right? And so I think that that's the biggest difference is that because Joseph Smith was killed by an extra legal mob, it has let him live on an infamy in a way that your dad will probably not.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I tell Mormons the best thing that ever happened for Mormonism is Joseph Smith being killed.
SPEAKER_03It's true. Yeah. You know, we've uh so at Sunstone, we have this conference at the end of July every year. We and you're invited to come this year. It's I think July 31st to August 2nd. And we bring all the Mormon scholars to talk about this stuff. And we've done a few sort of playful, imaginative, like what would happen if this happened in history? What do you think would happen? One of the questions often is what would Mormonism be if Joseph Smith wasn't murdered? And a lot of the theories, and again, they're only speculative, like scholars usually stay in their lane and they stick to the documents. But when they're being speculative, a lot of them think it would have probably petered out into a movement similar of the time. I mean, Joseph had a lot of contemporary movements that were happening, like um uh the I'm I'm thinking of the woman who Jemima Baker, who's who st believed she was like this unisex, the friend, the universal friend. And she had a group that kind of it's still there's remnants of these groups around, but they've kind of died out. And I think it would have been similar with Joseph Smith.
SPEAKER_00But he wrote the Book of Mormon and did all that stuff too.
SPEAKER_03So yeah, but he wasn't alone. I mean, uh other people were writing texts as well. I think he there were a few things that make him different of his contemporaries that gave him lasting power. But one of them was he was charismatic and he was attractive and he had a lot of powerful friends and he knew how to leverage power.
SPEAKER_01Joseph Smith.
SPEAKER_03Joseph Smith, yeah. Um, and in that way, I think he was different. I mean, we can go into the similarities and differences of your dad if you tell me how you want to do it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um well, do you think of a leader like Joseph Smith that has a vision and sets something up like Mormonism is more dangerous? Or do you think someone that inherits it like dad? Like who does more harm and is one person better than the other?
SPEAKER_03I mean, from a historical perspective, we don't make moral judgments, right? It should all be neutral. But if I were giving you my personal opinion as someone who grew up in the tradition, I think Joseph Smith's harm is far more skilled than anyone in the movement because he started it all and he did set a pattern, whether he meant to or not, of following the prophet. And your dad is only one expression of that. And I've seen in my work, like I said, my job is to track as many Mormon movements as I can. And Joseph Smith's life and the myth of his life has given many people, too many people, permission to recapitulate some really terrible things and enact harm at a scale that I think will far outpace your dad.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's crazy because well, dad wouldn't exist without Joseph Smith.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But just coming out of Mormonism and out of my dad's family, the mind, the mindset that I had, like I could totally be one of dad's helpers and loyal followers. I can totally seem like I had to get totally fucked up before I left. And it's so hard to get out of that. So like, I don't know, all these Mormons they can't change without insane pain or something.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think I think the discomfort has to outgrow um the the cost of changing, I guess. And so that's that's where you see the it tip. But you know, it that's not to say that your dad has not, you know, enacted incredible harm to people and like very sort of specific and sometimes strange harm. I mean, as I've helped get FLDS folks a lot of resources, that is a constant issue. And you and I have talked about this before, like getting a therapist that can understand these specific issues is very difficult, like because some of them are so strange and unique. And so I will say that I don't, as we're comparing, and I'm talking about simply scale of Joseph Smith, I don't want to say like that doesn't mean that your dad didn't do some very, very terrible things.
SPEAKER_00Oh no, I like that you say that because then I can I can uh tell my Mormon friends how awful Joseph Smith is.
SPEAKER_03I mean, he he really started a tradition, and because, and and I would say like you can't just put that on Joseph himself. You have to put it on anyone who carried his myth. And that's why I still uh claim the heritage because I I think it's really simple and probably too straightforward when people leave and then they're like, I'm not that anymore, and they're bad, and no one ever goes, What was my part in it? I think the real healing is when you go, How did I uphold that system? Let me be responsible for my part in it. And then I can and you know, recreating or uh redoing, or I won't even say repenting for the wrongs, but I really do think there's something about like acknowledging where you were participating in that. I upheld the myth of Joseph Smith for a long time. I mean, I didn't know better, right? And so the the responsibility is not the same as someone who knows better and actively lies, but I would say a lot of the myth that was created that was deliberately constructed and not and accidentally constructed about Joseph Smith has done a lot of harm too.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's one of the things I hear dad's wives saying who have left is like, oh, we didn't want that. We we weren't we weren't into it. And I'm like, yeah, the fuck you were. I was there, you guys were nobody was into it more than you guys. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Uh I see dad's wives, and I know you're like digging up Joseph Smith's wives and stuff, but I want to ask you if it's fair for me to characterize dads' wives as like victims and also uh perpetrators.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean that's the complexity in these systems, and I think that's why it's gonna be so hard for all of us to heal as like a generational community, because a lot of us do do bad things in God's name. And then when you leave, you're like, well, it wasn't my fault. Yes, and you still were the mechanism, you were the carrier of the thing that did that, right? And so there's not a lot of good language to reconcile that, and especially in your community where you guys were so actively encouraged to harm one another for the system. Um, I I like I it feels almost out of place for me to say how to how to look at that or how to deal with it. I think that it's a very complicated thing. And yeah, what do you do with someone who was indoctrinated their whole lives and victimize people? I mean, it's it's tricky. And I and luckily I don't have to make those moral distinctions, but I think anything that you feel about it is is justified.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Uh so Mormons view polygamy as something that went away. Like you know better than anybody how they view it today, which I I find totally unreasonable. FLDS still live it. They read 132 often, they're always reading these revelations about it, they're doing their best to live it. Historically, who's more how Joseph Smith wanted? Like right now, the FLDS or maybe some of these other fundamental groups, are they more how Joseph Smith intended Mormonism to be? Uh as far as the doctrine of and polygamy and stuff, or are the Mormons closer to how Joseph Smith intended it to be?
SPEAKER_03It's such an interesting question because I don't know Joseph Smith's intentions. And for someone who was supposed to be a prophet and seer looking into the future, I don't think he saw what this was gonna be, right? And if he does, I hope he's ashamed of it, to be honest with you. He should be. Um, because the legacy, for all the great that people talk about, it has done a lot of harm onto the world. I mean, it's it's a very American religion, and I always say it's one of America's biggest cultural exports because Mormons have gone out into the world to, you know, proselytize and colonize and all of those kind of American ideals. To answer your question, it's it's not a sexy answer to be like, oh, this one's better, this one's worse. I think they're both expressions of very different Joseph's. My church, the LDS, is very corporate. It's an expression of leadership consolidation, greed, money, power, right? If you have looked into the LDS church, landholdings were the biggest landowners in the world, uh, billions and billions of dollars of, you know, in their hedge funds, uh, obscene amounts of money. And it's very corporate, corporatized. Your dad was living, I think, the true believer part of Joseph Smith, like the very orthodox religious part. And I think it's worth noting, like you said, people don't understand how obsessed your dad was with Joseph Smith. And on purpose, he was going to recreate the man within himself. And so he he probably knows Joseph Smith's documentary history better than any LDS prophet. He's probably spent more time reading his voice and looking in the paperwork than hardly anyone else in LDS leadership. That's probably not true. I know a lot of prophets, and some get really obsessive too. But you know what I mean? Like he that was on purpose. That was by design. He wanted to recapitulate how he saw your dad. Now, I would the critique I would say is your dad is recapitulating Joseph in a modern world. He's giving his own interpretations, his own spin. There's a lot of controversy on some of the there are these contested documents in the history about like, did Joseph Smith author them? Are they really, you know, his or they're someone else? And your dad didn't really differentiate if he assumed it was from Joseph, he assumed it was his, right? And so there are those kind of debates, but I think your dad was actively trying to be the spiritual Joseph Smith, and he he did a pretty good job as far as those doctrines go.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think that spiritually there's something about when you get obsessed with Joseph Smith because there's a spirituality to it that makes I feel like everybody that does it do the same things. And I don't know what it is, but my my dad had just such a insane spirituality to him. I think like he was obsessed with the spirit of God, you know. And that kind of he got that from Joseph Smith and the early Mormon leader. And so he was obsessed with almost living in a different realm. I think that's kind of what happened as he got more and More obsessed, he almost went into this different realm from reading from these early leaders of the church. Because they've talked about that a lot. Like Brigham Young says, when you have it, you can see behind you as well as in front of you. And it's just like a very it's a different existence, you know.
SPEAKER_03Well, and that's worth pointing out too. So your dad had what Joseph Smith didn't have, which is you know Brigham Young's leadership, right? So your dad is in some ways way more like Brigham Young than Joseph Smith. And the only reason I say that is because Brigham Young scales Joseph Smith's thing and then adds his own. And in very many ways, Warren Jeffs is a Brighamite. Like his doctrine is very Brigham influenced. So that's a huge part of it, too. And the one of the biggest differences between your dad and Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith, first of all, grew up dirt poor, right? And we can talk about similarities of the childhood too. I'd love to do that. But Joseph Smith also grew up in occult magic. And so he had more freedom to use his imagination. By the time your dad comes to religion and spirituality, it's very conscripted into the Mormon idea. And it the patina of magic and mysticism. And frankly, the stuff I think is cool that Joseph Smith pulled from was stripped, completely stripped-mined from Mormonism when your dad finds it. And so your dad, it's interesting that when he gets into the documents, your dad could have picked up on some of the occult stuff, the Jupiter talisman and uh the Mars dagger and all the like uh Renaissance magic stuff that Joseph Smith was in. But your dad takes the brighamite, like stripped down from the folk magic. And now it's this like very bureaucratized sort of religion. And so that's that, you know, that's kind of a shame because I think what made Joseph Smith interesting, especially at the beginning, was he was really playful with the universe. He was like, oh, this is fun, this is spooky, this is a good ghost story, like we'll put this in. I mean, you know about the early treasure digs, right? It was like a treasure spirit, like a Spanish ghost guarding treasure chests. Like your dad didn't have any of that. Like he couldn't have fun with it. It was very boring, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. God, Mormonism is so boring.
SPEAKER_03It's so boring. And unfortunately, I would say, like, as far as boring goes, FLDS like takes the cake.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Like, I mean, you guys have some crazy doctrines, which makes it, I guess, it kind of exciting because exciting in a bad way, like everything is on the line. But man, those sermons I've listened. Yeah, I'm really sorry. You need your time back, man. I don't know how you get that back.
SPEAKER_00That's so unfair.
SPEAKER_03I mean, wouldn't it have been cool if your dad would have thrown in some like, you know, like tarot cards or something?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's too bad. So Joseph Smith at least had that, at least at the beginning. And then, of course, as he gets more corporatized and um powered up, I guess, with in Nabu, that's when you kind of see what you would recognize as Mormonism.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So do you think Joseph Smith and dad were similar in their childhood or not really?
SPEAKER_03I, you know what? Yes. Yes and no. Like there are differences. Differences being poverty for Joseph Smith. Uh, your dad grew up in relative wealth and comfort and power because it was an established church. I think that's the biggest difference. Joseph Smith created a tradition and your dad inherited one. Now, Joseph Smith was polling from other traditions, so it's similar, but he was kind of the founder and your dad inherited it.
SPEAKER_00We gotta give him some credit for that for sure.
SPEAKER_03Joseph?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a pretty crazy thing to do.
SPEAKER_03He wasn't the only one, though. People need to, you know, this was called the burnover district. Everyone was doing it.
SPEAKER_00But he was the only one that anything's lasted from.
SPEAKER_03That's true. He just did it really well, right? It's like uh he was like the influencer that rose to the top, right? Even though, and and there are a lot of reasons for that.
SPEAKER_00Imagine if he had YouTube.
SPEAKER_03You know, I think about that sometimes. Again, it would be a different ball game if there were a tape recorder in Nauvoo in the 1840s. Just different ballgame. But uh the differences. So those are some of the differences. Let me, and there are others, of course, but some of the similarities are they both have like a medical event in their childhood that defines them, right? Your dad was like born two months premature and he barely lived and uh he survived. Joseph Smith has the historic leg story where his leg is almost amputated. Um, they have these like mystical origins where they survive death. Um, they were both really favored and enabled by their mothers. Their mothers told them that they were special little boys, you know, and that they were gonna go on to do something great. And I think that that was a huge influence on both of them. I think both of their moms were very concerned and interested in helping consolidate their power. And there's some differences, of course, but I think that that's a similarity. And I think uh an obsessive sort of narcissism with themselves and their friends. Yeah, I think that that was similar too. So and you know, like they're I mean, Rulin had how many kids? 60 something. Yeah, Joseph had 10 siblings, so the obvious big differences, but um, your dad was really athletic, which surprises people that he like liked basketball and he played baseball. I mean, he he seems to like tall and linky, but he was pretty athletic. Joseph Smith was really athletic. They like to tumble about with the boys, so I guess there's some of that there. Um, so yeah, there I can see some similarities, but I think the biggest difference is your dad inherited something that had calcified over time. And then he tried to restore it, right, to what he thought Joseph was doing, but he took the worst parts of it. That's that's the biggest shame, I think.
SPEAKER_00Do you feel like Joseph Smith was a pretty strong narcissist when he was young?
SPEAKER_03I think there's good evidence. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, and I know everyone calls everyone a narcissist now if they don't like them, you know. But um, yeah, I think so. I think we have evidence to suggest. I don't know that babies are born narcissists. Well, maybe babies are narcissists, right? They need everything to be about them. Maybe he never grew out of it. I don't know. But um, yeah, I mean, we have stories of him taking advantage of people from an early age, but I also have more compassion for young Joseph because his early life seems like he's surviving, right? He was, he was, there's early stories of him drinking alcohol a lot, getting drunk a lot. His dad was a chronic alcoholic.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um it so it after the war of 1812, it kind of decimates the economy. And then they have the, you know, the big collapse in 1819, which is like the first Great Depression. You people lost their jobs and they really could only make money selling alcohol or working in maritime stuff like shipping or anything with sailing. And so Joseph Smith's family starts a beer and uh pub, like a beer and cake stand. So Lucy is selling beer and Joseph uh Sr. struggles with alcohol the rest of his life. Like there are stories of him disappearing, even you know, in Kirtland and Missouri, he would go disappear, get on a drunken bender and disappear for a long time, and then they'd have to find him. And so, in a lot of ways, I think Joseph Smith was trying to give his dad some dignity because his dad would always get taken advantage of by people. His dad was the one into treasure digging and Spanish ghosts and all that kind of stuff, which is really common. These were very superstitious, mystical people. So, you know, they believe Spanish gold was hidden everywhere and his dad was always going to find it and always on the verge of finding it. And then he invests in this ginseng trade and it falls apart. He loses all of Lucy's money. And he just can't get his act together. And so I think in some ways, Joseph Smith was haunted by that and was caught up in his own ghosts. I mean, there's stories of him, his family, they have to become like these tenant farmers getting whatever work they can, and they're working on the Durfee farm. And Joseph Smith is stealing alcohol from Mrs. Durfee's cabinet and getting drunk and revelating, talking about angels and ghosts and whatever. And so she switched allegedly like switched out the liquor with pepper sauce to trick him. So Joseph Smith had trouble doing that. There are stories of Joseph Smith Sr. going into town and talking about angels and visions and treasures, and people just thought he was kind of a town fool. And so Joseph really was overcompensating, I think. And my my personal take on the history was once he had this treasure spirit story, which evolved over time. Like I said, it was a Spanish ghost, it was the slippery treasure that maybe it's here, maybe it's here, and then we go to dig it up, and then it slips under the earth, and oh, we were so close, we almost had it. And they kept doing that until he gets the story of the gold plate and realizes that the treasure spirit becomes an angel. And now the angel guards this thing, and people start to, once he realizes, oh, if we give it the institutional backing of religion rather than this mystical stuff, people take it seriously. And then he meets Sidney Rigdon, uh, who was this very accomplished, respected, trained preacher.
SPEAKER_00Here, one thing was Joseph Smith uh super sincere in this gold plate thing?
SPEAKER_03Uh you know what? Who knows? Um that's the historical evidence can argue for any of it. I personal opinions, I mean, I don't know. I I go all over the place. I think it was probably a mix of both.
SPEAKER_00Because I think, well, let me ask you, does intelligence matter more for starting a religion or confidence, like just full-blown this is how it is, guys, you know?
SPEAKER_03I think confidence. I mean, I think if we would look at any other movements that start, right? You don't have to be particularly intelligent, you just have to be charismatic and have a good story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's like dating. If you're super confident, then it works. If you have an IQ of above of above 130, you're statistically three times less likely to get laid.
SPEAKER_03Well, if you're smart, you're probably getting in your own way a little bit about like maybe I shouldn't start a cult, right? Like maybe I don't take advantage of people. There are, and even if it's not a compassionate risk, like that is a bad thing to do to other people. It's like this could maybe get me into legal trouble or whatever, you know. Um Joseph Smith certainly, I do think was incredibly intelligent. I don't think you pull off what he did as long as he did without being incredibly gifted. And, you know, the the angry part of me doesn't want to give him that.
SPEAKER_00Like he think his IQ was like 130 or something.
SPEAKER_03I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I'll bet it was.
SPEAKER_03He I think he was gifted for sure. And and there are all kinds of academic scholarly debates on the origins of the Book of Mormon. You know, the LDS story that we were told is very similar to you. Like this poor farm boy that like threw this, like translated this miraculous thing. How could a poor farm boy do this? Well, a very resourceful one could figure it out. And I think when you are faced with the absolute crushing poverty coupled with humiliation, I mean, there are stories of Joseph Smith's family when when his dad's schemes would fall apart, that people would come and throw literal shit at their house. Like we're talking humiliation. And so he was highly motivated to make something of himself. And so, yeah, I think an intelligent person with confidence can do amazing things or really dangerous things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can't stand how Mormonism turns it into such, why do they have to turn it into such a boring story? We want to hear these crazy ass stories. Joseph Smith could be a way cooler story.
SPEAKER_03Church would have been more fun. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00God, they turn it into a boring story.
SPEAKER_03I know. That's the shame of modern Mormonism, is that most people are giving their lives to a very dry, stripped down doctrine. And let me say something nice about Mormonism.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_03Mormonism isn't all bad, right? Like I it taught me some Christian values of kindness and you know, uh integrity and all of those things, because Mormonism was also made up of many, many people. And a lot of those people were honest, sincere, good people trying to do their best. And thank God for them, because they gave Mormonism the credibility that it did to be good. That also upheld the shadow side, the, the, the darkness of it, right? And so, for whatever bad stuff was introduced, you can't deny that there was something that attracted people. And so I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give believers that there is an interpretation of Mormonism that is beautiful. However, it is constricted by loyalty to the institution and obedience to what I think are prophets with absolutely no prophetic wisdom or insight outside of, you know, any get help book that you can get off the internet. Like there is the beauty that comes from Mormonism, and there is some exists within the heart of good people, and it is extracted through, you know, a really boring mechanism now that is just orthodoxy and obedience.
SPEAKER_00Is there good in what do you think about the spiritual side of Joseph Smith? Was he seeing, was he tripping?
SPEAKER_03Well, well, there's theories about that. There, there are theories about that, right? It's called the ethnogenic theory of Mormonism, which taps into the ethnogenic theory of religion, which is basically that all big religious movements come from some sort of psychedelic, psychotropic experience that someone has and then gets like translated to a sober person and then becomes a sober religion, right? Um, there is that theory with Joseph Smith. There's very compelling evidence. You can look at Cody Niccone, Bryce uh Blink, Bryce Blinknagel's work, and other scholars who've looked into this. They believe that uh Joseph Smith might have had access to psychedelic uh DOTERRA root, things like that. We do know that Lucy Mack was uh experimenting with different tinctures and herbs, like many women and many people around her, they had access to drugs. Uh, humans have always had for a long, long time access to drugs. And so that is possible. I mean, if you map the Kirtland ecstatic experience, right? Where they're seeing heavenly angels and whatever, if you look at those experiences, you can map them over a mushroom trip. It's about six hours long. At one point, he asks everyone to lay down. Every people are laying down, they're seeing steamboats going across the sky. Like if you've if you tripped on mushrooms, you're like, oh hey, that makes sense. And I would like to say that anyone that dismisses that theory, uh, I would I don't really, I don't think I can have a conversation with you unless you've had a psychedelic experience because it's hard to, it's hard to explain otherwise.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think it's a possibility, but I think like we were talking about my dad's sermons are so boring. I think the problem though is when you get into it enough that you are kind of in this other spiritual whatever. You are almost having psychedelic experiences.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like my dad, I wouldn't be surprised because I had it happen to me. Like it's boring until you get there.
SPEAKER_03Well, that could be a trance experiment. I mean, like early, early uh folk magic spiritualism, they had something called a trance state where people would deliberately try to get into these meditative gamma wave in their brain, right? And so it's absolutely possible. I I believe that humans have incredible untapped abilities in the brain that we don't understand. And so even though your dad found a way to, you know, take the most boring version, I think the relentless boredom of it become became almost meditative, you know, got your brain into a certain frequency that that could put you in a place where you're having, you know, all kinds of I think that's what happened to him though.
SPEAKER_00I think he went uh I don't know what you call it. I I don't want to say psychotic, uh you know, where you get in there and you can't you can't pull back out.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Like a psychotic break almost. Like he crosses the threshold to be stuck there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the threshold into this other reality, and it's that's all he believes after.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, I I've thought about that a lot. Like, um let me go to Joseph Smith, then I want to talk about your dad and like OCD and and things like that. So Joseph Smith, you ask about his sincerity. I do think that there was a sincere boy in there, and I believe that there was a sincere mystic. I mean, if you look at his family's beliefs and the atmosphere, you're probably not familiar with this reference, but there are movies and cartoons and books called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Have you heard of this?
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh it's um way too fucking boring of a Mormon.
SPEAKER_03Well, I know, and you haven't seen very many movies. We're gonna change that.
SPEAKER_00But um, thank you.
SPEAKER_03Um God in New England at the time, it it's a famous ghost story that comes out in New England about this headless horseman that would like cut off your head if you crossed a bridge, right? And they turned it into movies. This is I always refer to that because that's what Joseph Smith and his family that was where they were steeped in. They believed everything was magic. Ghosts were everywhere, like the land was enchanted. And and I still find this when I go out to rural fundamentalist communities, people that are like cut off from the world. When you're in the land, the magic of the universe is so animated for people. Like things are spooky and alive. And so Joseph Smith had that. I do believe that that was sincere. I believe at some point he probably had to make a choice in his brain, how much of this is my bullshit and how much of this is happening. And I don't know if he lied to himself or he made a conscious choice to lie to others. But at some point, his integrity, if it existed, was absolutely co-opted by his greed and his ambition and his shadow sides, right? Your dad, in some ways, if I were to have compassion for your dad, which I know no one wants to hear, but I've always thought about your dad as like a seven-year-old kid, like eating Cheerios at the table, if he's allowed Cheerios. Um, and and like how does that translate into what we know now? And I think a lot of it is not just the pressures that your dad grew up in and the really toxic scripts that they gave for men like him to perform. Like his pathway was kind of sorry, his pathway was kind of like designated and chosen for him. And that's really tragic. But I think your dad has some sort of probably many undiagnosed mental illness, scrupulosity, and OCD. I see, I think, I think Mormonism, by the time we all inherited it, including your dad, the rules had compounded because you have all these new prophets and they have to add new stuff, and then they have their interpretations from other, you know, apostles and just people adding all these layers and rules, it becomes so impossible and contradictory that to be obedient to it, you have to become hyper-vigilant and incredibly OCD and scrupulous about it. And your dad is, he has all the markers of that, right? Like his obsession with these old documents, to the point that, you know, I heard I heard this one famous story about your dad really trying to push blood atonement onto the people, this frontier doctrine of Brigham Young, right? And you're he was, you know, he had this document to back it up and this document, and that his father, Rulin, slams his fist on the table and says, enough, stop talking about that, enough. Like, so that obsession to me, like what would the world be like today if your dad had just been sent to a therapist and like had it, you know, was able to work that out and had some healthy stuff introduced. Instead, it just got worse and worse and worse. And then I think your dad probably experienced a lot of trauma and sexual shame as a child that because he had no language to make sense of it, because there was no healthy discourse on like the abuse that's happening in our communities, right? And so he he used Joseph Smith's language to make sense of it. And I think one of the most dangerous things that happen in our community is when you're hurt by other people, by uh power, coercion, control. Sometimes that gives some people an entitlement. I'm hurt so I can hurt others because I'm hurt. Um, and I think your dad took it a step further and not only said the entitlement was his to perpetrate onto everyone else, but that he was going to find a religious justification for it. And in fact, an entitlement from God. And so that's kind of my theory on how your dad became that seven year old kid to what he became now. And I think it's if anyone is smart, it's a warning not to say that anyone is going to end up like your dad. But I do know plenty of people who feel like they can the ends justify. The means because they've been hurt, they can hurt others, and that's what turns a victim into a perpetrator.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but I see people like my dad all through these Mormon groups, and they're they don't have the same opportunity, but they're very similar in the way, like they're justifying this through their Mormon doctrine and that and all these things. And I'm just like, you guys, and they all say things like, We're unjust, we're so much different. I'm like, Yeah, you're doing the fucking same thing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, so to use doctrine to justify harm it is so uh it's I mean it's evil. It's it's so evil, but it's easy and Okay, but they don't see it, do they? That's that's where I get tongue-tied because I'm like, you know, I have been accused of of being too soft on harm because I'm trying to understand it. And so let me be clear, there's never like what your dad has done, I it's not even for me to speak on the harm that he's perpetrated. I have only witnessed, like I have not been the victim of, and so I don't want to tell anyone how to feel.
SPEAKER_00Well, I want to say something because everybody around my dad, absolutely, like if my dad said, I remember when he did say I'm not the prophet anymore, everybody's like, no, you are definitely the prophet. And for three months he said, I'm not the prophet. But his brothers came, they said, You're the prophet. Uh my grandpa, who was banning the religion before before my dad, also was like, we're supporting the prophet, you guys don't doubt anything. So people have this idea that Warren Jess was the only like the only power behind the FLDS. But he wasn't. It was all his wives. It it really was. They if if he doubted himself, his wives were there to tell him, like, no, like, you got this. Uh I never I I really believe every single person in that community, like, even if Warren Jeffs walked away, they would be like, No, you're you're our prophet.
SPEAKER_03Like, so yeah, they upheld it.
SPEAKER_00People have this idea that these groups are so controlled by one person, but it's more like a a shared delusion of just I don't know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and when we're talking about complicity and who's guilty and who's not, I that is above my pay grade to to decide. I think karma is its own justice in some ways. Like, and we're never gonna get the justice that is required in our communities because the pain is so deep and it's so dark. And as we know, like especially in the FLDS community, I've seen things that that have made it hard for me to get up out of bed in the morning because the darkness extends, right? Pain just is passed along forever. But I think if anyone listening out there knows that they did harm, and it for whatever reason, maybe you believed it at the time or whatever, yes, and it was a tragedy that you were raised in a culture where that stuff was so normalized. But if you can give justice to the people that you've helped, you should do that because that's the only justice we're gonna get is people looking at how they were complicit. And that takes some real ugly looks in the mirror. But to your point, like, do they know they're doing it? That's that's the that's the hard part because you're right, they're not controlled by one person. It's a system. And that's why your very first question about like who did more harm, this goes back to Joseph Smith. Does Joseph Smith could he account for the for the rotten fruit that came from what he grew? I don't think he could fathom how bad it would get. Um, that said, like he started something that just set us all on fire. And we have to put ourselves out because yeah, I think that harm is so normalized. And I'll just give you this as an abstract example. But I was talking to, I do a lot of work in film and a lot of work in writing and uh in westerns now. I'm doing a lot of work in westerns. And so Porter Rockwell, everyone wants a Porter, yeah, everyone wants a Porter Rockwell movie. And, you know, I've been approached by people who want uh, you know, faithful Mormons who want like Porter Rockwell to have his due. And it has not worked out between us because they see Porter Rockwell as this like righteous hero. And I see him as a terrifying murderer in a hand of a zealot, you know, like he's a mobster, he's the mobster's right-hand man, which is a great movie, by the way. Yeah, but it is not, it is not how we were raised to see him. And so I was talking with a uh fan of Porter Rockwell, and Porter Rockwell's very important to him. And and it was interesting when I was trying to understand why he thought Porter was a good guy, and I was like trying to really drill down. And it was just very clear at one point we and I try to be really polite with people and understand that they grew up with a mindset that that is incorrect history. But I said, you know, like um people are gonna, if we defend Porter on screen, there it's like defending Warren Jeffs. Like Porter's cause is not righteous, right? Joseph Smith was marrying 14-year-old girls. And he just instinctively said, Well, that's just how it was back then. That's just, you know, like, and they started to talk to me about, you know, girls that menstruate, and it's okay if you, and I was like, oh buddy, I'm gonna stop you right there. Uh and you know, I corrected him on like, that is not that are we gorillas? Like, are we primal apes? Is that who we want to be? Like, because gorillas and primates act this way, humans should do that? Like, that's the argument you're making. Like, first of all, it was not normalized to marry 14-year-olds. There's a reason Joseph Smith was murdered by an extra legal mob, right? People did not think his beliefs were kosher. They did not think his behavior with women was cool or normal or just what they did back then.
SPEAKER_00So you're pretty much saying he got murdered because he was marrying 14-year-olds.
SPEAKER_03That's a huge part of it. Yeah. It's a huge part of it. And you can argue it's a ceiling or not, but if you look at Helen Marr Kimball, who was the 14-year-old we're speaking of, if you look at her life, she resented it her whole life, even though she stayed faithful to the church, she talked about the pain that it caused. She talked about not being able to go to dances in Nauvoo with kids her age because she was married to the prophet. Now you tell me if he's not sleeping with her, and let's just throw them a bone and say it was all on the up and up. I don't know why sealing yourself sexually to or romantically or spiritually to a 14-year-old is on the up and up, but let's give them that bone for a minute. Then why did Helen Maher not get to be a normal kid? It withheld her from that life. Sex abuse is about power and control and coercion. What happened to Helen Maher, whether he touched her or not, was about power, control, and coercion. The results are the same. So when people try to argue he slept with his wife's or not, I my eyes glaze over. I'm like, that's not the point of the power and control and coercion. The elements are the same. Helen Maher was depressed the rest of her life. She would be so depressed, Eliza Arsnow would have to come over and they would try to get her out of bed. This was not a woman who had a healthy upbringing and healthy life. Her parents traded her to a man that I believe was deeply predatory for their salvation. That would break me too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's like if a modern leader of the church got sealed to a 14-year-old and they were over at their house occasionally, and you could say, Oh, they just got sealed. I think Mormons are out of their fucking minds. I want to sometimes take a baseball bat and just whack their butt when they're trying to make these arguments to me because they're so bullshit. Like, oh and I I grew up liking order in Port of Rockville too. But one time I was talking to some missionaries, and I heard this story growing up, and I have no idea where it comes from. But the story is that there's this man who uh tells Brigham Young that he's going to do a bunch of harm, and he's headed back east. And Brigham Young says you won't make it out of Utah. And Oren Porter Rockwell is coming into Utah, and this man laughs and tells Oren Porter Rockwell, Brother Brigham said I won't make it out of Utah. And so Warren Porter Rockwell pulls out his pistol and shoots him. It's like you didn't make it out of Utah. I don't know if that's a true story, but like we heard a lot of those stories.
SPEAKER_03And we and we thought they were funny, right? We're like, oh, that that guy, that murder, ha ha ha. Like I get it because I I do love a good John Wayne movie. I know I shouldn't, but I do. Like the romanticization of the West is something that we all do. It's us dealing with like the impact our ancestors have of like pillaging the earth and displacing and murdering indigenous people. Like we're like, oh, let's, you know, make a fun movie and a song about it, and it'll all be okay. So I get why we do that. Poor Rockwell killed teenage boys, dragged them on a horse in front of their mother. Like really, he he was, I think he was proud of it. He was really good at it. Um yeah, I mean, if you look at some of the murders that he carried out, and we're never gonna know the true body count, right? Because he didn't talk like Bill Hickman did, who was another enforcer of Brigham Young's, uh, this is this was a cold-blooded killer. I don't think he was a reluctant killer. I don't think he was a conflicted killer. And if D. Michael Quinn, who is a very famed historian, very detailed historian, also gay, Michael Quinn sees Porter Rockwell as a man in love with Joseph Smith. And Porter Rockwell actually didn't really live polygamy. He didn't have a lot of wives that lived at the same time. He wasn't really, his vice wasn't women. We'll put it that way. And so I don't know what motivated Porter, but I know the stories we tell about him are part of the problem. When we see, you know, I took a bunch of people to the Mountain Meadows Massacre site, which is a site where 120 innocent men, women, and children were murdered in cold blood by Mormons pretending to protect them. And then the Mormons, of course, cover it up and blame it on the Paiutes and other native bands, and which causes destruction and harm to the tribes for still, they're still living in the wake of that. And we're we're telling these Mormons, and including Mormon fundamentalists, these cute teenage boys from a Mormon fundamentalist sect, they're good kids, they're just raised in this tradition. And we're telling them this story. And the historian Barbara Jones Brown is talking about how the Mormons turn their guns and shoot these immigrants at point blank range. And one of the boys goes, cool. And I was just like, buddy, no, no. Like we take the wrong lessons. We have, and that's what happens when you have a bunch of frontier men who start what I'm gonna just be blunt, is kind of a frontier sex cult. And they're predatory and they're scamming people and they're using the government. And you know, now we've lost all the LDS listeners. They're like, we can't trust what she says. I'm sorry, I know your story, I know your take on it is different, but this is also another perspective. These guys were breaking the law. We have proof of that. How many times is Joseph Smith in jail? How many times were him and his buddies in jail? We have stories of coercion and predatory control. When you have predators as your leaders, you have to make them righteous. You develop an entire culture that justifies abuse and harm. And that's what we have today. And that's what your dad just walks right into. And so, really, the pump was already prime for your dad when he walked in. So whether people are born a predator and your dad just always had it in him or he was formed that way, I don't know. That's above my knowledge and expertise. But I will say that Mormonism is rife. Uh uh, Timothy Koznoff, who is a non-Mormon attorney that handles a lot of the sex abuse cases with the LDS church, he says all the time Mormonism is uh catnip for predators. We are perfect because we are primed to justify bad behavior, to even think it's cool, like in the Mountain Meadows Mascara, you know, scenario, but also to trust, to trust anyone. And so that's why we have all these MLMs and all the scams and financial fraud. And I always say we're the true crime genre for a reason. Mormons will be like, we're persecuted, we're being misrepresented. Are we? Are we? Like that's that's the thing that I think is so hard is when you grow up in the church, you grow up with this narrative of we're these pious pilgrims. Are we? Do you know what's going on in your neighbor's basement? Do you know about all the sexual abuse that everyone is perpetrating on each other? Like, are we what you think that we are? And um I think people don't want to deal with that, right? Because that's pulling up a rug of 200 years of really dark shadows that uh we have tried to turn into some sort of romance uh of whatever it is now.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I gotta ask. This isn't gonna be the easiest question to answer, but there is something about winning that people love. And I believe at a very fundamental human nature level, humans just admire winning more than they admire morality. They always say the moral thing, they love winning. They don't care if somebody's killed a thousand people, they just love the story. They forget all the people they've murdered, they just love the good story. It's like, oh my god, look at what this guy did. It's it's the same way with women. Joseph Smith loved or he had a he had a problem with women. Uh my dad had a problem with women. I remember this conversation I had with some of dad's wives. We were talking about his youngest wife, he married her at 12, and they had sexual intercourse. Me and a few of my sisters were arguing against a few of Dad's older wives. We were saying if this was some other 12-year-old with some other guy, you guys would be condemning it, and they agree with that. But they just love the winner. They just love the they defend it. I I've never seen somebody defend uh dad's underage wives like his other wives before they leave. Like all of them. You know? And I know they were raised in that. I just don't like when I look at the Mormon culture, you would think that girl who's being abused by the bishop hates it. But I don't know if that's true. I think when she gets older and understands what happened, she will. But will she walk away? I think most of the time the answer is no. Like, I remember back when the Texas raid happened, and God, I would have killed anybody for for dad at that time. Like, you know what I'm saying? I don't know. I don't I don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm just trying to say that the culture to some degree loves itself. And if if you're raised there, I guess even if you aren't, like people look at or importer Rockwell, even if there's horrific stories, and there's just automatically something they like about him.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, I mean same. Like uh, that's why it goes back to I still claim the Mormon identity, and you've heard my my true opinions here. Uh which uh, you know, I'm probably criticized the most when I I speak very frankly about like saying it's a frontier sex cult. Because it was because it, you know, our culture, it it's so normalized, it is so normalized, and we don't even have a language. So I'm gonna use an example and on something you just said, when you're talking about a 12-year-old having sexual intercourse, that's the term you use. We can't even call it rape, right? Because a 12-year-old having like cannot consent to that, right? She's a child. So even if she's saying yes and enthusiastically because that's what she's been groomed to do, we don't have language around it. And you certainly couldn't have used that word in the church, right? Um absolutely not. But it's hard to use it now. Like, and Mormon historians do this all the time. We have this patina of language that we've placed over these things. Plural marriage. We don't want to call it polygamy. Plural marriage is the higher law, polygamy is the lower law. Uh, we don't want to call it predatory, we call it uh, you know, divine revelation, or that's just how things were done back then, or whatever language we use to protect. So you said the culture loves itself, it's also self-protecting. And so we're again, if you if you make it easy and you say Joseph Smith was a cult leader or a predatory guy, and people don't like the word cult, especially in the academic community. Again, talking as a historian, you don't use words like that, right? Because it assumes a moral judgment and you're trying to be neutral. But if you take all of that out and you just say, these were predators running a spiritual organization, and yeah, some good came out of it because there were good people in there and they needed to be co-opted in a certain way, but they also needed their bad behavior excused. That's your answer to Mormonism. We have a cool culture who has built protections around predators. And if you look into the LDS church, we are this is why to point fingers at the F LDS and say you're bad, scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after church leader after church leader who's sexually abusing people. And frankly, I think that the sex abuse thing is so pervasive in our community because we don't have healthy sex narratives. And I know that in your community, you have so many kids left unattended. So kids are experimenting with each other at young ages, and then they're like, does that make me a predator? There's there's distinctions between kids experimenting and a 56-year-old marrying a 12-year-old girl and forcing her into this situation. And we have no discourse, no one knows how to talk about these things. And so everyone feels complicit. So then they feel like they have to make excuses. People feel guilty, they feel shame. They say, well, if I condemn that, what does that say about me? And that's why I ask people, take care of your own work. That's the way. But you have to look at it. You have to look at it. And yes, it was unfair that what happened to you, but look at the parts of you that made that okay. And those are the parts that you need to work on. And I have to tell you, I have been unpacking this stuff for 15 years, and I'm still finding ways that I'm like, oh man, how did I not see that? Like, because it's so, it's like drilled into our schools. Like this is DNA stuff for some of us, right? My ancestors defended this stuff for generations, and their lives depended on it. They had to cooperate to survive, to eat, to live. That doesn't go away just because like I learned Joseph Smith like did some bad things and I walk away and don't go to church on Sunday, right? That's still embedded in you. And so that's the thing that I think a lot of people don't like hearing either is like it's really easy to point the finger at some big institution. And the anger is justified, and I understand that too, but you also need to be unpacking it within yourself because it's there. The ways that you defend it, the ways that you protect it, the ways that you make sense of it, and the way that you let yourself off the hook for how you made it okay. And I made it okay because everyone around me made it okay, right? Like I didn't know the difference. I didn't know some things were bad until I learned that they were bad. But something in me always kind of knew. And and that's the thing that I that I think is really tragic is Mormonism spends a lot of time shishing that voice. We have uh uh the LDS discourse, and you can tell me how you grew up with the Holy Ghost, but if something made us uncomfortable, it was from Satan.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And right there, that just is the biggest red flag of the doctrine. Things that make you uncomfortable are usually your instinct telling you there's danger or there's something bad, or there's anything that requires growth. Makes you uncomfortable, right? You have to be confronted with something. And so right there, we're stopping people from growing outside of anything. And we're stopping them from trusting their own instincts. And that is a recipe for so much abuse, coercion, and control.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but that's what I was also saying about dad. He got super into that. You know, he taught it a lot for one. I think that's why they get into the underage lives. They're they're obsessed with this spiritual power. They think it's helping them talk to God and stuff. And these underage marriages, like they whatever that power is, it increases what whatever happens, they're getting more of it somehow. That's kind of I I really believe that's why all of them get into underage marriages.
SPEAKER_03Interesting. I I think there's something there about the shame that you feel when you uh to to dominate anyone sexually is to steal their power, right? And so perhaps your dad felt his power was taken away from him at an early age. And, you know, speaking for myself as a survivor, when that power was taken from me, you want to get your power back. And there are healthy ways to do that, and there are very unhealthy ways. And it seems to me like your dad decided that he would do what was done to him and he would take it from other people. And I think that that might create, I would imagine that creates a shame that is ravenous, that cannot be filled. And so you're always gonna want to be stealing power, stealing power. And if you look at your dad, that's what he did. He didn't know how to get power naturally. He know how to, he knew how to steal it from people. Getting power naturally is not forcing people with fear and coercion and penalties and threats. It works. That's you can control people that way. That works. That's not real leadership and power, right? Leadership and power is someone who is someone you want to emulate who is has natural courage, who stands up and has a moral compass and center, who doesn't need to force people into something. But your dad needed power by stealing it.
SPEAKER_00I think the one of the reasons I feel so upset at Mormons is I see my dad in a lot of Mormons, a lot of these Mormons, the way they talk about how they do things. Even the ones I've had so many bishops take a lot of interest in me, and president of stakes and stuff try to like convert me. And I'm like, dude, this is like my dad. They I can't believe like this person, they have a lot to say about dad, but God, the way they're talking about the church, the way they're justifying everything, the way they're trying to convince me to join, you're my fucking dad. Like what and then they go all the way, then I start talking about dad, and they're have all these things they want to say, but their their reasoning is almost like dad's, even against dad. I'm like, God, I I can't even I can't even explain to you how stupid you look.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I can't imagine what it must feel like to be you and to see that hypocrisy because just from my experience growing up LDS, it was shocking and unnerving and and still feels deeply unfair to me. I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine the patience it must take to talk to people about this because the ignorance is so huge, but it's also a little bit deliberate. Like this information is out there now. But when we bump up against these like these trigger wires of everybody, like I'm a walking trigger for people, the way that I talk, the way that I look, though, you know, just sets something off in people and they want to hate me for it. I'm I'm used to that now. I'm used to all kinds of nonsense being told about me because it's easier to blame than to look inward, right? So if we can deflect and distract ourselves from, you know, it's Warren Jess's fault. Well, Warren Jess is at fault for a lot of things, and we can go into all of those, but like that's not what they're talking about, right? And when they want to distinguish that, I don't, I don't know who who they think that they're talking to when they're talking to you, like trying to say this is bad, but this is somehow better. You of all people can recognize the patterns and what they're doing, but they can't. They can't, and that's the frustrating part.
SPEAKER_00Well, the frustrating part is that well uh when I'm talking to him, I'm like, you don't know how good of a conversation you could have with my dad. You have no idea. And if he talked to you for a half an hour, you would probably join what he had to what he was doing. You probably would.
SPEAKER_03Did you think your dad was charismatic? Because I always, I mean, I only listened to sermons and recordings. I've never met your dad. And so I found him incredibly dry and boring. But like, I wasn't lived, I wasn't primed to see that as like cool.
SPEAKER_00No. Uh dad's sermons. I I think at times could be charismatic, but I would say dad was charismatic. He he's a whole different person in when he's doing the sermons. Uh when he walked in the door, he's always happy, he's laughing, he's playing with the children. He has a brother, uh, Isaac, who's also extremely charismatic. Everybody loves him. If dad was on the construction job, he never had to be like the top guy. He was always just helping, he was encouraging people. Yeah, I would say he was pretty charismatic in his in his life, not in his sermons.
SPEAKER_03It's interesting. I mean, in the LDS church, like we the thing that I get a little embarrassed for my people for now is when they will share a quote from a prophet or like a clip from our conference of a prophet speaking, and they're like, isn't that powerful? Isn't that beautiful? And they don't realize that outside people think it's incredibly creepy, right? They're just like, oh, that old guy, like, he seems really angry and he's why is he talking in such a soft voice? Like they don't know it because I grew up venerating these guys. And so these they and in Mormonism, and this is FLDS too, like the the more you get into power, the more kind and soft your voice gets. And we actually call it the primary voice because it mimics like primary teachers talking to children, like, oh, aren't you so sweet? Like that. And women in leadership adopt that voice, and so do men. And you know, when we were talking about the Sam Bateman thing, like I listened, I was leaked early, like um when it was leaked to law enforcement, those tapes of him giving of men giving their children uh to him as wives, and their voices are so sweet, and their language is so kind and nice, and like you would never know by their affect that they are orchestrating something disgusting and evil and awful and wrong. It's because we it's it's almost like the worse you get, the nicer your voice gets as to like mass mask it or something. And so men in leadership are these like in in the LDS church, are they like these old grandfatherly guys with these very soft voices and this affect. And people don't realize like that is not that does not read as powerful. It is not persuasive to anyone outside of it. But when you grow up in it, you're like, that's what I want to be. That's what power looks like, that's what cool looks like. And then you meet like Maya Angelo and you're like, oh, that's actual wisdom. Like, that's how someone with power talks. But you just don't, you don't see it until you can have some distance from it. And so it's the tricky part because we're dealing with people who have never had anything else to disrupt them from that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that's another comparison, good comparison with for Mormons to look at my dad and realize like you you listen to his voice, you might think it's creepy. Everybody there doesn't think it's creepy at all. It's the very same. They think it's great. And if you listen to other FLDS men give sermons, they'd be very similar to dads, you know. It would be a very similar talk pattern, it wouldn't be some charismatic speech, it would just be it'd be very similar to dads. That's how everybody gave sermons in the FLDS. So it it wasn't unique to dad, you know, he had his own style, but that's true.
SPEAKER_03I almost think if we put Joseph Smith, like the frontier guy, and he was a rough and tumble frontier boy, like rough and tumble. If we put him and no one knew who he was, and we set him on a pulpit, a church, people would be offended. Oh, like and and he, I mean, I it would be maybe that would be divine justice to have him see what the his church has become. But I I wonder what he would think of it too. You know, it's so in my tradition, it's just so corporate and boring, and it forces people to not change and to not grow. That's why you get repetitive stuff every week. It's the same stuff regurgitated in different language. And that's not to say that people can't grow. I know a lot of good people inside the church, but the system is like giving them constituted military food over and over and over for spiritual nourishment. And like, how can you become wise from that? You know, you just I feel an incredible amount of compassion for people still stuck in the system because life is so big and so expansive and so rich. And it's a richness that even Joseph Smith and all his struggles was able to pull from, and he had that, and you don't even have that, you know, and that's that's a that's a tragedy of modern Mormonism is people are living very constricted lives and told that that's what happiness is, with very little to compare it to. And I'll have converts that tell me sometimes, like Mormonism, I I know what it was like before, and Mormonism has come come to that to help me achieve that. I will not discount that Mormonism has a steadying, stabilizing factor because it is so regulated. So if you came from a lot of chaos, I could see how that might be better. But as someone who grew up in it and was told this is what happened, happiness was defined for me, that family was defined for me, joy was defined for me. And I thought that the definitions given to me were universal definitions, only to realize that joy is very individual and subjective. Having gone outside of that, being like, oh yeah, the world is so much richer, but it's also so much harder. And it's uh John Larson, who's a famous LDS pod ex-Mormon podcaster, um, talks about it being on a cruise ship, right? Like being in the church is like being on a cruise ship. They feed you, you're gonna get the meal at the same time, you know the schedule, you're with the same people. But there are people off on little rafts on the ocean seeing incredible things that you will never see and going on adventures that you will never go. And sometimes their storms and their seas will be a lot bigger because they don't have the protection of the cruise ship. But what a life, you know, what an adventure. And that's what it feels like when you step out of Mormonism. You get off the cruise ship and you're like, oh man, that was that kind of sucked. I had a little single-room cabin with the same people my whole life. And now I'm off on this little raft and it it fucking sucks. Like it's hard to row by yourself, but look at the sunset and look at the stars and look at this island over here and this island over here. That's what I think it's like when you leave. But you can't explain it to someone who's only been on a cruise ship their whole life.
SPEAKER_00It's such a trip, though, because I I viewed the world. Yeah, I I can't I can't even describe how much of a trip it's been. So my life's almost been like tripping on mushrooms. At least after I started coming out, you know. So it's like, oh my god.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think I think in some ways, if I were to get spiritual again, I think it's interesting that so many of us came from an experience where at 10 years old, I knew all the answers to the world's most difficult questions. Like I knew them, I had it all figured out, which is an insane thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because part of living life is the mystery of it. And when you lose a worldview that you were so certain of, and that everyone around you was so certain of, it's a gift to be so wrong. Like that is truly a gift, and it hurts and it is painful and it kicks your ass all the time. But what a gift! And I don't know that everyone gets to have an experience as concentrated as we do. Some people do, it's archetypal. Everyone gets to have the experience of being wrong, but being so wrong about everything and losing so much on the line to be that wrong. Uh, I think that there's incredible adventure and beauty in that if you can come out the other side. But it's hard and it causes a lot of anger, and the anger's real.
SPEAKER_00I have a kind of a problem. Maybe you can help me. We'll see.
SPEAKER_02I'm not a therapist.
SPEAKER_00So I kind of like Brigham Young.
SPEAKER_02Oh no, we're not gonna have to fight over this.
SPEAKER_00I think part of it is because for so much of modern Mormonism, I feel like if I get out Brigham Young's sermons, he just ruins them. You know, like I can't always fall back to Joseph Smith, but I can always destroy Mormons with Brigham Young's words. You know, I feel that way. And maybe that's why maybe I just admire like the boldness. Because I don't I don't necessarily support like him hurting other people.
SPEAKER_02Sure, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But I guess it's just like my human nature, whatever. I like winners for whatever. You know?
SPEAKER_03He he reminds me of Oscar Wilde has this quote that he says, make people laugh. Tell people the truth, but make them laugh or they'll kill you. And of course, he was speaking about being a gay man, about like telling things, and he had to make them laugh so to for his survival. But I think about that sometimes. Brigham Young, he was so funny. And I hate that he was so funny because there's something charming about it. And like he has become this sort of sort of like totem, this archetype for me to the scapegoat, right? Like I put all my rage into Brigham Young, which is not fair. It's like, you know, you're I I believe the internet is different than than like if I met someone in your internet comments that are saying mean things about me, like if they saw me to my face, very few of them would behave the same, right?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03So I understand that if I saw Brigham Young, it might be different in person, but he's a very convenient person for me to just dump like all the problems are his fault. But he was so funny, and I hate he was because sometimes I'm like, damn it, that was such a good joke. You're a terrible man. But that was that was really funny. Yeah, he has this joke about uh one of the judges. Um, he was always in struggles with federal judges and Mormon judges, and there was a judge that had a bad eye. I don't know if I told you this yet. No, he couldn't see out of one eye, and Brigham would always talk about how to sneak around the government, and he was like, Well, just you know, make sure you're you're working with Judge Cradlebach's good eye. It's just like, oh man, that's so funny. Damn it. But uh yeah, I feel similarly like the boldness, but maybe that can be your window into compassion of why people still are attached to these things, right? Like it's gonna be in us in ways that we can't see. And you're and I think we spend the rest of our lives sort of unpacking that. That doesn't mean you need to be in your Mormon trauma the rest of your life, right? The world is big. But there are still ways that, like, I think if you lose compassion for for the Jaden that was stuck in it, like like you said, you would have killed for your dad.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03What is owed to that to that kid? And if you can do that, it can give you some compassion for for these folks. Because there's a there's a whole other side of the internet comment section. I'll notice when I'm talking about this, that they're like, Mormonism is a cult, full stop. Like Joseph Smith is a predator and you can't defend it. It's like, unless you have lived it and believed it so ardently and also used it to harm other people, I always say I was a really good Mormon and a terrible person. The better Mormon I was, the meaner I was to my friends who weren't Mormon, right? Like, that's not cool that I did that, but I did that because my definition of what love was was like shunning someone because I thought that that would help them. That is incredibly dysfunctional and messed up. I didn't know better. Once you know better, you do better. And that's that's the metric of how we judge we should judge people, right? But I I think that there's a whole contingent of people that will never understand what it is like to love someone like your dad, you know, who um he's your father. Like you're you can't escape that he's your father. You didn't choose to for him to be your father, and you have to live in in your skin, and no one else can do that for you. So when people want to make it very simple on their internet gotcha, their little take, their comment, it's never going to encapsulate a whole lifetime living in these contradictions, and there are plenty of them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can never describe to somebody just how just how much of a different world we lived in, and it really might be that like that harmed a lot of people, but he might have never had a chance to see outside of it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Again, intervention at seven years old. If someone were to come in, what would the world be like? We don't have that's not the timeline we're living on. We're living in the one we we got, but it is something to think about. And again, there's so much pain and the stakes are so high around this. So it's impossible not to evoke so much strong feelings in anyone listening, right? Mormons are gonna defend it ardently, ex-mormons are gonna say it's not enough. People from the outside are gonna think, you know, whatever they think. Again, they're not the ones that have to live in these contradictions constantly. And I think a healthy life is an integrated life that can remember what it was like and have compassion for that. But also patience and tolerance, but also the anger is real too. Like when you're sitting there and you're being condescended upon by faithful Mormons who think that they're gonna talk you into something that you don't know deep in your bones. It's incredibly like that's that's just the thing that I think about with with faithful Mormons now. I'm like, guys, it's just bad manners. It's like embarrassing, and you have bad manners, and you don't even know that you're doing it. Like it it sometimes I'm just embarrassed for them that that their faithfulness comes out in such bad manners.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Although Mormons get under my skin. Oh God. But I it's not that I don't have compassion for them. Um, are the journals of discourses? Uh a lot of more Mormons say these are unreliable uh transcripts of early Mormon uh can I quote the journals of discourses when I'm having an argument, or is that like not good information?
SPEAKER_03Well, I guess I would say it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to change hearts and minds, maybe not, but if your goal is to be historically accurate, you're well within the realm of safety. Journal discourses, it's it's tricky because there is a new transcription process happening with them. So the journal discourses were translated, sorry, transcribed uh in several ways. So how it would happen is Brigham Young and his leaders would travel to different wards and stakes all over the valley, and then someone would either follow them and transcribe them, usually Thomas Bullock or someone else. There, there are a handful of people that transcribed these. And so when you're listening to a sermon and you're writing it down, sometimes you're substituting words or you're not getting it fast enough. But these guys were really good at what they did. Thomas Bullock was excellent at what he did. And sometimes they wrote in shorthand. So Lejean Carruth is a faithful Latter-day Saint historian who is translating shorthand. She's very gifted. And her take is that Brigham Young is misunderstood because she's in his shorthand, she's read his stuff. Uh I appreciate that she's bringing some nuance to the discussion, but I also think that the bulk of the journal discourses are frontier violent doctrines. And you can't really get around that, even with the most generous. So the LDS will get away from those things because the journal discourses are many, many talks over time written and contradictory doctrines. Sometimes Brigham will tell someone in Paris, Idaho something he's not saying in southern Utah, right? And it will contradict. Um, or he'll it experiment with a doctrine here that doesn't square up with a doctrine here. Uh, and so LDS people have not canonized those things. And so then they think that they can eradicate that from their culture. But we take I've seen quotes of John Taylor from journal discourses on the vinyl and people's walls and their kitchens. Like it has infiltrated the thinking and the doctrine because it was said officially over the pulpit by a prophet, it still counts and people still use it. And so for them to scapegoat that and say, Oh, we don't believe in that, show me where you don't believe in that. Just because it's not considered part of the standard works, they're going to argue that you can't use them, but I don't think that that's fair.
SPEAKER_00Were they originally published by the church?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. And they were sold at Deseret Book at the church's arm for a long time.
SPEAKER_00So I was in there two years ago and they really they were in there. There's a set of them in there.
SPEAKER_03I mean, it's and people still look to them for quotes. And I mean, it's it's an absurd deflection to get away from. And listen, I am all for LDS people moving away from the harmful frontier doctrines. We should be, but not this way by denying that it didn't have an impact and that it hasn't impacted your culture of romanticizing the violent history into some beautiful like pioneer story, right? Um yeah, I don't know what to say other than that's the constant struggle. I don't think it will be resolved. But if you want to change hearts and minds of Mormons, they're going to first of all, FLDS are gonna outpace LDS people on scripture and doctrine all day. Like you just, do you want to win? You will cage match. I would never go in a cage match talking about scripture with you guys because you had to memorize that stuff at a crazy level, right? Like you had to hear this stuff all the time. Never gonna get in a cage match with you with you guys. That's the first thing that you're dealing with. Every LDS person thinks that they're an expert in Mormon history and Mormon scripture because they hear about it every Sunday. It is not the same thing. And so you're already bumping up against that ego of like, they know all the answers at 10 years old to everything, and you're coming in and saying, Well, what about this? And uh, so that's that's the hard part. I I think your biggest argument is your personal experience. They can't come at that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm not just trying to win LDS people. I have good conversations when it doesn't get into when people are open. I have good conversations, but a lot of the men specifically are very uh like I'll have good conversations with some, but then some are like, no, you gotta win on these arguments.
SPEAKER_03Who are they if they can't be in charge? Who are they if they don't? Yeah, I'm like what a goodest priesthood if you can't have authority over something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I'm kind of like, okay, I can win on those arguments. Yeah, sure. Uh uh anyway, it's it's it's hard to talk to LDS men specifically.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, solidarity, my friend. I definitely understand. I'm not uh they're not my biggest fans.
SPEAKER_00Um so what about the Mormon uh I watched American Primeval. What about the uh what do you call it? The Mormon Massacre, the Mount Metals Massacre. Um so I still feel like Brigham Young didn't like order it. What do you feel?
SPEAKER_03Well, just as a note with uh American Primeval, the the depiction of the massacre is not historically accurate at all, right? And speaking of romanticizing, like when you're talking about fictionalized TV versus documentaries, it's a different craft, it's a different narrative. Uh, it wouldn't have been the way that I chose to tell it. I had to work within the scope of what they hired me to do, right? Which was to make sure the Nauvoo Legion looked looked accurate and their camps were on point. I'm very proud of that. Um, but uh yeah, there is a debate over this massacre that we talked about, 120-ish uh immigrants coming through southern Utah. Did Brigham Young order it? We will never be able to prove or disprove that. Uh there, whatever evidence, and it's very important to note that everybody involved lied. Everybody involved lied. They took blood oaths to cover it up and to lie. And what we do have proof, definitive proof, is that Brigham Young was part of an orchestrated plot to cover it up. We have evidence of that. So we can prove that he covered it up and protected leaders that were involved. That is not disputed. Did he order it? I don't know. Uh Will Bagley, uh, faith, sorry, uh famous, not respected in the faithful Mormon community, but no one knew Overland Trail history like Will Bagley. He believes that Brigham Young did order it. And it kind of like drove him mad to his death. Like you could go to any historical event, and like this guy has read more documents than anyone I know. Like he knows Overland Trail stuff. Like you wouldn't believe, and he would sometimes rant about it. Like Brigham Young, you know, like nothing went on in this territory that he didn't know about. And I believe that to be true. I also believe that Brigham Young was really smart, and he he was never gonna order, he was never gonna put something like that pen to paper. My take, my personal take is he probably was like, I'm gonna create the conditions. And if it happens, it happened, you know, like because he did create the conditions. He preached blood atonement, he uh declared martial law, he wanted to punish outsiders. He definitely was using his law enforcement and his enforcers to go after and harass wagon trains. So did he mean for some of his most violent southern Utah men who he knew were capable of this violence, like John D. Lee, to do that? Who knows? But he sure as hell didn't try to stop it. I mean, we have this story of, you know, Haslam right it, which was the writer, you know, not reaching him in time. And then he was like, oh shoot, we should have stopped it. I don't believe that that's true. But I think what happened was they thought they were going to maybe harass and get something and it went wrong. And then when it went really wrong and they realized it wasn't Indians, it was Mormons coming after them, they had to cover it up. Brigham Young probably couldn't have accounted for that. But um, if someone had to be held responsible, I think he should have gone to jail over it. He was tried by the US government years later and got off on it. But um, yeah, I mean, he definitely wasn't innocent, but I don't think you could say that he ordered it directly now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I have such a problem with Brigham Young because he was so decisive in his leadership. And I I genuinely believe that without Brigham Young, Mormons Mormonism wouldn't be anything what it is today. And that's why I don't like how they try to put aside so many of his sermons and his works. That's why I think Brigham Young against the church today is such a good resource when you're arguing, but I'm not saying he did right. I'm just saying I feel like the modern church really they hate Brigham Young, but they exist because of Brigham Young. It's kind of the same with Joseph Smith, but Joseph Smith's almost easier to deal with.
SPEAKER_03Oh, for sure. And well, be part of it is we just have so much better documentation of Brigham Young. I mean, I always thought this was weird about your dad, too. Why did they bring scribes everywhere? To like your dad scribed everything, like bad, bad things, criminal things. And Joseph uh sometimes did, and Brigham did too. And it's like, guys, why did you write that down? I have to believe that there was a part of them that really believed that they had a righteous cause, like that they really believed in what they were doing. So, but I think that that's the wild part about Mormons that we do have so much documentation on our dirty laundry. And part of it is Brigham Young didn't think that he was doing wrong. Now, again, he could have ordered the massacre directly. They thought that they were at war. They definitely believed in the ends of time, end of days. Brigham Young definitely had a lot of really war-violent rhetoric. He was gonna take over the government and all this kind of stuff. It's possible. I think that would have been a huge strategic tactical error, as it was, as it ended up being. Um, so it seemed like a huge risk, but I think there's a part of him that just didn't care. He wanted, he wanted some blood. And uh another thing we got to look at, these early leaders is these most of the leader, the early leaders of the church were men who came from very violent frontier upbrings. A lot of them had fought in the original Black Hawk War, uh, worked in the uh silver mines, man camps. We're talking lots of alcohol, alcohol abuse, lots of um sex and prostitution and violence and assault and all those kinds of things. And then we put them in power and they're supposed to tell us about a kind God. I don't think so, right? Like they don't know kindness if it bit them in the face. And so we should be lucky that Brigham Young's sermons weren't worse. Because I mean, Brigham Young was a lot more pampered than, say, like John D. Lee. John D. Lee had a very violent upbringing, and that violence is expressed a lot. But Brigham Young's henchman, Jose Stout, chief of police, violent upbringing, Bill Hickman, violent upbringing, Porter Rockwell. We know very little about his childhood, which I think is not by accident. Um, and so these were guys who were deeply traumatized, and then uh, you know, expecting them to react in sort of a stable, healthy leadership way when the government comes. I don't think so.
SPEAKER_00Did John Dee Lee get shot?
SPEAKER_03Oh man, you know what? The very first time I heard of this theory of him not being shot was from FLDS. I didn't know it was a thing. Well, because you guys are around the Johnsons, right? Like, and so tell let me tell your listeners, tell me if I'm getting this wrong. So John D. Lee, he was one of the organizers of the massacre. He's one of the guys that decided when things go wrong, we're gonna kill all these innocent people. He is the only man that's ever held accountable. He's scapegoated by the church. Brigham Young throws him under the bus and he's executed. Sorry, he's executed by firing squad in 1877. Falls back into his coffin and he's buried. Then I hear from some FLDS are like, no, no, he never died. He wore a steel plate, and Benjamin F. Johnson's kids took him to the ranch in Arizona and he lived out his days. And I was like, what? I've never heard that. That's such a great story. I don't think it's true. Uh, if anyone has any evidence from your community, like anything, like journals, anything, I would love to see it. Love the story, but I think, I mean, I think it's been a while since we've been in that history, but John Dee Lee's wife, one of his wives and one of his sons, escorted the body back and buried it. It's possible. I don't think so. What do you think?
SPEAKER_00I've heard of since I was little. I know I that that it's like a common knowledge in the FLDS.
SPEAKER_03We need to compare lore sometime because like your stories of like Gaddy Ant and robbers up in the hills and stuff, and like your John Taylor Temple stories, and it's so cool. Like, that's why I say like FLDS is boring, but actually, you have some of these fun stories that we never heard. And I think it's also a Southern Utah thing, it's not just FLDS, but yeah, what a great story that he like got out of that and like survived somehow.
SPEAKER_00I think the way the FLDS view it is Brigham Young's way of dealing with it was to throw John Dee Lee under the bus or John D. Lee under the bus, but not actually kill him.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, it's it's an compelling conspiracy, and I and I get it. And all day today, we've been talking about like what the history actually says versus what we think, you know, and those are two different things, and we should be responsible about them, especially when I'm talking from a historical perspective. Right now, current scientific history goes with documentary history, which is very limited, but people get really orthodox. And what that means is we only can validate what the documents say. Now, think about the limitations of that. Documents can say whatever they want, people can write down whatever they want, doesn't mean it's true. And yeah, I was talking to you earlier. Like, I don't think chat GPT is a reliable thing with Mormon history because it only tells an aggregate narrative, it doesn't get into the to the history. Even that written down is not completely accurate because you've got sources that are still non-digitized to train the models. So it's interesting that like we've become so religious about documents, but speaking from a historical perspective, that's the best we can do. So, as far as documentary evidence of John D. Lee, there's absolutely no evidence for that. But I do love the stories. And, you know, I love this, the whole like Billy the Kid lore that like maybe he didn't die and Pat Garrett and he didn't shoot him, you know, and like it's it gives that archetype of like the the mystery of the West. I could see the the story for John D. Lee. And I would, like I said, I would love John the Johnson family in particular, if you have proof or someone who said that like John D. Lee got taken back to our family and we raised him, and I, you know, ate porridge with him once. Like, I would love to see that. But I just haven't seen any documents, I've just only heard tell.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But it's a great story.
SPEAKER_00What about the history of the church that Joseph uh does the church still support that and publish it? Yeah. Like the seven, seven or eight volumes of the history of the church?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, they do, and it's still used, and yeah, it's used in Sunday school and and for j uh, Joseph Smith's history? Yeah, but you guys are working with an so they do edit them. And so this is speaking in conspiracies, it's caused a problem within my community. So Brigham Young got Lucy Mack's history. She was writing one with um uh Martha Corey Smith, who's dictating her history of the church. Brigham Young didn't like it, and he did edit it to fit his narrative, right? So the church has done that. They have edited the history of the church to fit the sort of modern narrative that they are shaping. They're absolutely doing that. But what that has caused is a conspiracy within the LDS church that is really taken off that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy. He was like this pure, like unadulterated guy who like just misunderstood. And Brigham Young reinvented it. Like he was the corrupt pervert and he brought it in. And so we can still trust everything Joseph said. But like William Clayton, who was Joseph Smith's scribe, he was forging his diaries and he was changing, like it it's just like dangerous territory, and it's been really frustrating. Um, because Joseph Smith did actively try to hide his polygamy. So there he like gave conspiracy theorists like a bone, right? Because it's he was hiding it. And so it's a it's become a huge movement, you know. The internet scales everything, and it scaled these conspiracies too. So that's something that we're dealing with in the Mormon historical community.
SPEAKER_00What do you think about it? Did Joseph Smith live polygamy?
SPEAKER_03Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_03I mean, here's here's what I always try to say.
SPEAKER_00However many podcasts about all his wives.
SPEAKER_03I mean, so people will use that. The people that have been the meanest to me, honestly, um, are the polygamy deniers because they're just like, they're like, she, I mean, I won't even get into their criticisms. It's it's fascinating. But that their take is that I am so invested in my career in Joseph Smith having polygamy and the ergo, you can't, you know, believe anything I say. My career is not invested in Joseph Smith being a polygamist. And first of all, my whole life was invested in him not being a polygamist, by the way. I lost everything for uncovering this stuff and like synthesizing and putting it together. But over time, the polygamy wasn't the only thing emerging about Joseph Smith's character. Once I realized how he was utilizing and abusing government power, I mean, in Nauvoo, come on. He was the Chief Justice, he was the mayor of Nauvoo, he was the chancellor of the university, he ran the Nauvoo Legion, he was running for president, he was the president of the church.
SPEAKER_00Do you know what happens if you get in trouble?
SPEAKER_03Um, do you know who the chief justice answers to? They answer to the mayor. Guess who was the mayor? Joseph Smith. Guess who was the chief justice? Joseph Smith. Like, come on, you guys. Like, and and they were, they were counterfeiting. They were uh they were having secret hits on their enemies. They were raiding and stealing. This is not, this is not conspiracy. Joseph Smith was not a pious pilgrim. He was a frontier, rough and tumble, kind of a gangster sometimes. And so if you want to take polygamy off the table and think that he was sexually on the up and up, okay. First of all, let's go back to his youth, where he's admitting Grant Palmer's research. You can look into Grant Palmer alleges that Joseph Smith was visiting prostitutes at an early age. If you were a boy on the frontier, you probably were. That was not unique. Uh, there are many reports of Joseph Smith. I would say many. Uh, there are five or six that we have. Uh Sarah Pratt says that a famous steamboat madam was like really new Joseph Smith. They were good friends. Um, Emma Smith's best friend. I think, I think it was a year or two into their marriage, Emma goes, there's an account of her going to a neighbor because Joseph was hitting on her best friend. It he was in uh when he was on treasure digs, he was accused of impropriety with the stole sisters. Like, how far back do we want to go? Fanny Alger, was it a dirty, nasty affair? Was it a plural wife? She was 16 and he was her boss. So either way, it's not on the up and up. Like, I don't know how we do this or why we do this, but I think our we need to a faith crisis is so hard, right? Having your worldview be shifted. Not only is it so disorienting, but it comes at your ego. Like, am I stupid? How did I not see this? Could I be this wrong? And I think that there are a contingent of people that cannot deal with the level of distortion that they grew up in. And so they need to hold on to something. And I get it, I've clothed all kinds of stupid stuff and I've come a long way. And if you met me 10 years ago, I was a mess. Like, I'm still a mess, but like I understand why you're why you try to do that. And so I think that they're trying to claim something for themselves and keep it to have some sort of steadiness. And I just think you're building it on a house of sand, my friends. Like, if you're doing it to argue some morality in Joseph Smith, that is barking up a very wrong tree. But they're doing it. And their whole thing is that Brigham Young killed Joseph Smith, killed Joseph, or uh, you know, sought to take power, and which he did seek to take power. The way that Brigham Young got power from Joseph Smith, very clever. We'll give him props for that. Like that was a divine orchestration, but um without the divinity. But um, yeah, he killed him, he perverted it, they changed documents, and Brigham Young did change documents, you know.
SPEAKER_00And convinced all his wives to say different things or convinced all those women to say they were married to Joseph.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Come on. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00Come on.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and and that's the thing, you know, um, because later on, as polygamy is contested in the courts, and as we get towards the 20th century, uh Joseph F. Smith and uh Joseph Smith Jr.'s son come to Utah and they collect all these affidavits. And so you get these later accounts of women saying, I was married to Joseph, I slept in his bed, all this kind of stuff. And so the argument is those are so much later, so we can't, you know, that we can't take them seriously because they weren't contemporary. And it's like, okay, if we're gonna play that role, that game, then you can't take a lot of the stuff that we have from Joseph Smith seriously. Like William Clayton's journals are contested right now. That's the big hot one. They're saying that they're forged and changed. And it's like, okay, well, then you can't trust William Clayton's sources at all, which takes away most of what you know about Joseph Smith. Like, it doesn't work that way, you guys. It's it's a fun conspiracy in the same way John D. Lee being skirted away as a fun conspiracy. It speaks to something that you're like, well, that makes sense. That's what I would have done. That's you know, like, but I think it's preventing people from addressing the truth, which was that Joseph Smith was not an honest man when it came to power, especially sexual power. And if he wasn't abusing a network of women, which he absolutely was, but if he wasn't, we still have plenty of evidences where he he used that sort of coercion and control and humiliation with the people around him.
SPEAKER_00Do you FLDS believe that um Joseph F. Smith uh suffered a kind of blood atonement?
SPEAKER_02Oh, really? I don't think I've heard that.
SPEAKER_00Because he was loyal to John W. Woolley. Uh, but he was the president of the church. And the other apostles were threatening him if he didn't sign the second manifesto and get rid of polygamy totally out of the church. They were threatening him. So John W. Woolley basically said sign it. Uh But as a consequence, you're gonna have to basically have uh kind of a bad death.
SPEAKER_03I didn't know this. This is a story. I haven't heard this for a while.
SPEAKER_00I just heard it from my dad, but uh I don't know how reliable it is.
SPEAKER_03I that's the thing. Your dad, your dad was good at making up stuff too. Who knows? I mean, the one thing I was thinking of that's a great story. We should talk more about that later. I'd love to hear more about it, actually, because I'm trying to remember. I think Joseph F. Smith just died of like old age, or I can't remember. I can't recall it off the top of my head.
SPEAKER_00No, it it comes from grandfather. Really? Yeah, not just dad.
SPEAKER_03The one the one that I've heard from you guys that I would love more information on is that Rulin claimed in a priesthood meeting that he was called by um J. Ruben Clark to disrupt the priesthood to come and basically form a false church with the FLDS. Have you heard that story?
SPEAKER_00I've heard it. Um I actually think it's a good. I I was even writing a novel about it.
SPEAKER_03Really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because it's such a good story.
SPEAKER_01It's such a good story.
SPEAKER_00Because uh, if you think about it, I think I think it's too genius that it probably didn't happen. But the way the only way that Ruth and Jeff's got high in the FLDS was because of the way his wife was taken away. And if the church orchestrated that in a way that because it they want Ruth then to go and infiltrate and take over and ruin the FLDS, uh, if they managed to understand that the most important thing to get him to be an apostle was to take Zola, who was his wife in the LDS church, and basically make a big deal.
SPEAKER_03Because she was she was the daughter of a very powerful LDS leader. So that's the context for your listeners. But Rulin was married to Hubie Brown's daughter, Zola. And so he was on track to be important in the LDS church. So that gave him a lot of credibility in the fundamentalist community.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and so I think, in my view, if the church really did that, then they on purposely made the divorce between Ruth and Jeffs and Zola a big deal.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00So that the fundamentalist leaders would basically help Ruth and Jeff's through it, give him wives, and ordain him an apostle.
SPEAKER_03I think that's true, though. I mean, that that did happen. It did give him a lot of credibility.
SPEAKER_00It did.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah, I don't think he would have been an apostle if the question is if Jay Ruben Clark, who Jay Ruben Clark, that's another conspiracy. Like that guy was getting people to spy on each other. Like he was using CIA sort of tactics of time. FBI, he got the FBI FBI involved to bust fundamentalists. If he did call Rulin to deliberately start a fake church, um, I don't think that that happened at all. But if it did, it's a great story. The thing I will say is, like all conspiracies, like with Joseph Smith and you know, letting people off the hook with him being a bad guy, I think it it helps FLDS people make sense of like, what the hell happened? You know, it's like, oh, uh, that's a convenient story of like maybe, or I always hear like Rulin had it right, but or no, sorry, Uncle Roy had it right, but then Rulin, the Jeffs ruined it all. So that that's like a convenient way to be like, see, we always had the truth. We can still hold on to that. We can hung hold on to Uncle Roy's stuff, but Rulin Jeffs was corrupt from the start.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but another thing that is funny that kind of supports the story is we've uh the 1953 raid and all those persecutions that the Mormon church was helping bring on the polygamists, you know, they were actively involved in suppressing the fundamentalists. That all stopped just a couple of years after Ruben Jeff's was part of the joined the fundamentalists as an apostle, like all that stuff.
SPEAKER_03Okay, that's a good I mean I would read your novel, man. I really would. Like I I again being confronted with these conspiracies as an LDS person, I think there's still a part of me that's self-protecting. I was like, never, like our guy, never, you know, what do I care about Jay Ruben Clark? But uh yeah, I think it's interesting, and I'm glad you're talking about it. I think you should talk about it more. LDS historians should confront these things and they should look into it because stranger things have happened too. Like, I I used to be so against conspiracy. Again, when I left the church, I became very atheistic. There was no magic or animation to the world at all. And that was such a great way to live life. And then, you know, I've just I've kind of had my ass kicked with this Jeffrey Epstein stuff to be like, oh, a lot of the stuff I thought was crazy conspiracy was actually happening. What? Like, so who knows? I don't know what the church did. I know it was a very murky time, you know, during the rise of fundamentalism and ruling. And so it could happen. But we we have to we need the documents to be able to say that it did.
SPEAKER_00And I guess the other reason a lot of FLDS that are still wanting to be FLDS, uh, they're still they they leave out the Jeffs, they kind of just do their own thing now. They view Warren Jeffs. If you look at Warren Jeffs from the time he took over, only from the standpoint that he's just trying to destroy the mindset of the church so that nobody else can take over, then he's done almost the perfect thing. At the sacrifice of himself, that's some serious dedication.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. But it's a very big long run, yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, that's a 70-year mission carried out by Ruben and Warren Jeffs if that happened. But so that's why I just don't believe it.
SPEAKER_03But yeah, I I think I I think I would agree with you on that. But it is it's compelling, but I also do think that it is uh widely believed because, like I said, it gets people off the hook to be like, oh, that's what happened. I mean, what happened to the FLDS is a crazy story. It is, and yet it is Mormonism taken to its logical conclusion in so many ways, and so it's like probably inevitable. So if not your dad, who else would have stepped in to fill the vacuum? And now that your dad's in prison, as we've seen, like everyone thinks about Sam Bateman because that's the most recent. He's not the only one. There's guys stepping up all the time, troublesome people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he was stupid. That's the only reason, like those kind of things can go on for a long time. He was just really stupid. Um, I think that a lot of the, like I was saying before, Warren Jess was supported by a whole group of people, and those people, they don't just leave. Yeah, they they say, How were we wrong? What happened? It's gone so bad, and then they say, Oh, it was the Jeffs, this whole conspiracy happened with the Mormon church and the Jeff's coming in to ruin it all. Now we've got to group back together and like keep this thing going. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03It's it's our inability to confront what's in front of our face, like I said, like the polygamy deniers, the same thing. If they allow that Joseph Smith, if they spent less energy trying to fight what the documents do say, what the history does say, and of course there's gaps, and of course there's holes, and it's a controversial history. But if they Occam's razor did the easiest thing, Joseph Smith was a polygamist. Oh no. Like now you have to confront the thing that like maybe it's all a lie, and people don't want to do that. And I get it. I I started a whole podcast to try to fight it, you know, and you hear me actively lose my faith in real time, but it it's it's hard because, like I said, it's hard to get off that cruise ship and get in a little raft by yourself, especially when you don't want to. And and Mormonism does work for a lot of people, even if it keeps them stagnant, you know, and to leave that behind is sometimes too too great. And so we need to give ourselves better stories to sleep at night.
SPEAKER_00What do you think about the Adam God doctrine?
SPEAKER_03In what way?
SPEAKER_00Is it is it valid? Is it Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's uh is it their teaching? The church abandons it, right? Sure. The church does not believe in the Adam God doctrine. What is so bad about it? Why does the church is it because the the other Christian churches that the church is so against it? Was Joseph Smith for the Adam God doctrine? Well, so maybe we tell people so the Adam God, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Go ahead, you you explain what it is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the LDS Church right now believes that like Elohim is the father of Jesus Christ. And the FLDS also believes that the the Adam God doctrine says that Adam came to this earth and started the population on this earth, and that's how the earth even started getting humans. Uh the LDS people, I don't know what they believe or how they for sure look at it, but they don't believe that Adam was the father of the people on this earth, right? Yeah. They believe Elohim is. The F L DS believe Adam was. They also believe that Adam is the no, just the yeah, just the person that started the the God that started the population.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so so Brigham Young taught that Adam, the first man on earth in the Bible, and God were the same person, that that uh God came down in a human form and procreated, had children with Eve, who was the mother of this earth. And it's really a polygamous doctrine because it's it's arguing that Eve is uh so let me back up. So when you die in Mormonism, if you are righteous and you are a man, you get to become a god, like our God. Our God, we believe, was a human once, went through all these experiences, and then he elevated and became a god and created his own planets and his own worlds. Eve is the mother of this earth and his wife of this earth. But God, because he's a polygamous Mormon God and he's done right, he has many wives. And so for each wife, there's a planet, and she gets to be the Eve of that planet. So he'll go down and be Adam and procreate with that Eve on that planet. That's kind of the Adam God doctrine, right? Like that Adam and God are the same people. So Brigham Young started experimenting this with this. So did some of his um prophets and counselors, like Jedediah Grant, especially in the Mormon Reformation. This comes up, tracing it back to Joseph Smith. People like your father have tried to extrapolate, and you can take elements of it because they were talking about in Nauvoo is Jesus a polygamist? Did Jesus Jesus have multiple wives? Those kind of things. And so you can see where Brigham Young might have gotten some of those. And Brigham, like your father, was always very concerned in the lineage of his teachings. Like, I got it from this prophet, and this is where why it's credible. Because they can't just invent it, even though they're a prophet. They're supposed to like pull from like Joseph revealed it to me in a dream, you know, whatever, whatever provenance they get for their doctrine. I would place Adam God squarely as a Brigham Young doctrine. He tries it out, doesn't go well. Um, he gets an Orson Pratt. Um is it or I get the Orsons confused sometimes.
SPEAKER_00Orson Hyde and Orson Pratt.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and yeah.
SPEAKER_00Orson Hyde's like more probably a little bit more eloquent, right?
SPEAKER_03I think one of the Orsons gets in a fight with him over this and almost gets in trouble. I think it's Hyde. Um, so anyway, because Orson Pratt was into his own crazy doctrines too. I think Orson Hyde has a conflict with this. It starts to become a problem because people start wondering, like, and getting concerned with well, do I get a planet? How many planets? How many wives? That kind of thing. And so it becomes, it falls out of favor just because the logistics of that doctrine taken to its logical conclusion as it's applied with Mormonism is it doesn't work. But fundamentals just kept it. So you said that the church doesn't or abandon it. They abandon it, but they've never really gotten away from it. Like that, so one of the things the ex-Mormons in my community are mad about is the church hides documents, right? Like they've gotten rid of any Adam God stuff, they've scrubbed that from the archives. I don't think it was to lie necessarily. I think it was to stop people from going to fundamentalism. Because once you start getting into those doctrines and you're like, wait, Brigham Young said what? That's really interesting and that actually makes sense. But it also argues for a polygamy. So if that doctrine is true and a prophet that I believe is true said it, then maybe polygamy is true. And the LDS Church does not want that. So I think they're less concerned about hiding the truth from outsiders as they are concerned about people going to fundamentalism once they find these old documents, like your dad did.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, my view of the Adam God doctrine is that Mormonism doesn't really work without it. Like, I don't I don't really see Mormonism uh separate from the Adam God. Like, to me, you kind of have to have it. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03And it's it is a very logical brigamite polygamy doctrine for sure.
SPEAKER_00But it does kind of come from Joseph Smith's.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, tell me, tell me, tell me that originally.
SPEAKER_00Joseph Smith's late late teachings in Nauvoo is kind of where it starts.
SPEAKER_03Do you know where? Do you know what he said?
SPEAKER_00Or uh yeah, I think a big part of it comes like a lot of dad's teachings about it are pulled from the like the King Follett discourse.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00About about Jealousy's odds and stuff. Yeah. Um, I think a lot of people don't realize how uh kind of ironed out it is in the fundamentalist community. Like it's very well understood. Uh dad's father, uh Rulin, was super, super into that. And so he really taught preached a lot.
SPEAKER_03It's logical if you accept polygamy. If you don't, yeah, that's where you run into problems. And so that's why the LDS Church, like it just it's a polygamous doctrine.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_03And especially because like you guys have the like three, five, seven rule, too. Like, so in Mormon heaven, the we have three kingdoms of glory, really. Everyone dies and everyone gets shuffled into a kingdom. And the top one for the good, good, righteous mormons is a special kingdom. But even within that kingdom, and this is getting into Adam God, you have three kingdoms, yes, and depending on how many wives you have, gets you into that the highest, right? Three, five, seven. And so that goes into a higher thing, and it's just it's incompatible with modern Mormonism because like we don't practice gulligamy anymore.
SPEAKER_00Okay, the the thing about having three wives, Mormons. I I don't know where this comes from because I haven't been able to find the early doctrine. It was just a thing in the FLDS, like same.
SPEAKER_03We've tried to actually look for the origins. William Clayton kind of talks about numbers. At one point, Joseph Smith tells William Clayton, like, you can't have two sisters, because William wants to marry the same people that Joseph Smith wants to marry. So Joseph Smith comes up with a thing, like, oh, you can only have two that are sisters, like no more.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like my dad broke that one.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, of course. Your dad would have broke a lot of things, but um, yeah, so it as far as I can tell, and any of your listeners, if you guys have again documents help us in Mormon history. If we can have a document of someone said this or they heard that they said that, that helps us. But when I first heard 357, I was like, what is that? It is very fundamental, it's very polygamy-oriented. And 357 Mormons are not traditional numerologists, but those numbers have significance in Mormonism. And so I think that that's interesting. People say that Joseph Smith taught it. Uh, I just don't know that we can.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a big thing. Like to do certain ordinances, you always have to have three men. Dad, he always organized his wives in like when they're doing their prayer or whatever deals, uh, either seven or twelve. The apostles are always twelve, or there has to be seven apostles there to make a decision, but to be a complete quorum, there there has to be twelve apostles.
SPEAKER_03And you know what that's so interesting. When you look at Joseph Smith, he was so into the early occult, and numerology did matter. Those numbers had mystical meanings. Uh, the council of nine, right? Like uh, in fact, this is a funny aside, but I know Mormons now who love the Council of Nine and the Endowment because in alien lore, there's supposed to be a Council of Nine people in the New World Order that know about all the aliens. Like those numbers trace back to the occult. And so it's interesting that your dad was taking the numbers without the occult symbolism. They had now been like stripped down to like this Mormon meaning, but in a in a way, it's still the occult, right? Joseph Smith was using numbers according to occult magic and numerology. And then later on, you know, 200 years later, your dad is still using numbers. The meanings change, and they uh they but they still have the same significance, which is fascinating to me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's very difficult for me to tell the level of uh evil intent that my dad had. Because I know he was very burst on all the anti-Mormon literature, even everything about Joseph Smith's early life that he could get his hands on, he read. And so I can't tell if he was doing it on purpose or not. I just can't tell.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, it's probably a mix of all of it. Like we talked about, it's people want to know all the time if I think that Joseph Smith believed it or if I think the current LDS prophet believes it. And it's just like belief is one component. Like you have this whole culture around you, and you have incentives around you. And the incentives for Joseph were different than the incentives that your dad had, but sometimes they were the same. So it's hard. I mean, it's hard to tell what they what was sincere and what was made up and what was shame-based and what was shadow-based. Like, I don't know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00So you ever go to Mormon church?
SPEAKER_03Uh, just when I'm supporting my family members, but not not really. I got better things to do with my time on Sunday, like spending Father's Day with you.
SPEAKER_00I would feel I don't know, threatened if I walked into Mormon church.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm out there saying all this bullshit about him.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, uh it's like I said, I've had to grow really thick skin because the work that I do comes at people's hairpin triggers, you know? Um people said all kinds of things about me. And and every once in a while I'll get defensive, like, how why would you say that's not even rooted in truth? I'm so obsessed with like the document and the evidence. And so when people say things about me that are just like extrapolated or made up, or I'll say something on a Facebook post that they'll like piece together with patchwork that I did, and I'm just like, there's no proof for that. I've had to realize that like we all do it, right? I do it with Brigham Young. We need to blame other people for our feelings. And so when Mormons feel defensive because I say something on the internet that disagrees with their world choices, they feel judged by that. And I understand that. But uh, I'm coming to this from a very personal exploration. And um I've given my life to the study of it. So even if I confuse the orsons sometimes, I mean, I have 200 years of tradition in my head, including 400 plus breakoff groups. So I'm, you know, it's always the facts are all in there. My recall is not always what I wish it could be. But I've just I've accepted that's what it is. It used to hurt my feelings because belonging to the church meant so much to me. But now, like, I the only thing I tried to do is show I'm not here, I'm not here to be your enemy, man. Like, I just want the best information possible. And I always try to separate my opinion from fact, but I don't know. This is something people are taught to live and die on, and so they're gonna be really spicy about it.
SPEAKER_00Past Mormonism. Is there it's hard for a Mormon to see joy, but we talk about healing and we talk about, you know, continuing the boredom. Past Mormonism. But like I hate Sundays sometimes because whether you're in Mormonism or out of them, I don't know, it's just something's wrong. Okay. What what do you think? Like, when uh when you're a Mormon and you look out and you See all the stuff happening that might give you a cold feeling or whatever. The healing talk might give you a cold feeling. Like, what is their exciting past Mormonism? Like, genuinely interesting and uh I don't know. Like, you can't go, you can't go uh join some other crazy thing.
SPEAKER_03Oh, plenty of people do.
SPEAKER_00I would I would advise against it, but but like what is exciting outside?
SPEAKER_03Like well, I think you have to get real comfortable with not knowing the answers to things, and humans don't like that, right? We want safety, and and again, that's the structure that Mormonism gives people. It's a stabilizing factor in that, and to lose that is real, and it doesn't mean it's not good to lose that, but you know, I did have to go through a lot of anger, and anger masks grief, right? Anger is an emotion that is just holding the grief, and once the anger goes away, then you have to deal with the grief. And I still grieve sometimes. Like the dream that it gave me was so beautiful. The idea of having this beautiful, happy family and just living and serving people that seemed like a really good dream.
SPEAKER_00Being the mom of a world. Well, come on, look at what you missed out on.
SPEAKER_03I did grow up in a generation where they're like, we don't know that we teach that. I'm like, what? We don't get planets down? Jeez, like um, no, but the world is the exciting thing, is life gets to be what you make it and you get to decide. And as long as we keep allowing other people to do that for us, then you're gonna get into trouble. But if you can really get good and it's gonna be messy and you're gonna mess up and you're gonna make mistakes. And because you come from a community that has a lot of dysfunction and really bad boundaries. Like I will say, Mormons when they leave the church, their boundaries are bad. My boundaries were bad. Like I just didn't, we we all trauma bond with each other when we leave the church. We don't know how to develop real friendships outside of the church. And so people trauma bond, and then you get stuck with unhealthy people. Um allow for the messiness, allow for the anger. You were not allowed your anger in the church, so it's gonna take some time for it to burn away. And I think it's Maya Angelo. We brought her up earlier. She says, like, you know, um, what does she say? Like uh bitterness is a cancer, but anger can burn it away. And I think the anger does burn it away. But when the anger goes, then you're left with the grief. And that's the hard part, and that's what your life is protecting you from, because it's okay to be sad that you gave so many years to something, or that you behaved badly, or that people behave badly towards you. That the sad thing is this tradition does create so many victims, and that creates a lot of complexity. And a lot of the victims want to steal power that was stolen from them, right? And justify the means. I can hurt other people because it hurt me. Don't do that. God, don't do that. Transmute it. Turn it to art, turn it to story, turn it to something, but don't, don't steal power. Get find find a different way to get power. Um, but then some people don't want to deal with the humiliation of being a victim. And I've met a lot of folks, especially FLDS men, that are like, I don't want to be a victim. And I get that because you cannot live as a victim the rest of your life, but you have to acknowledge at some point that you were victimized and deal with the grief and the pain of that, and then move on from that. And that's a really hard one, especially men who who grew up with so much uh entitlement around power and authority to think that they were victimized. But you can't stay there either. There's nothing there for you to stay in romanticizing victimhood, right? But that's different for everyone, and it's not prescriptive, and only you can decide when you're healed from that. So outside of mortalism, there's a ton of work, there's a ton of healing. You come out malformed and dysfunctional with bad manners and bad boundaries. And so I think you have a responsibility to do the work, get the therapy, get the treatment, do whatever it is to make yourself not a danger to those around you. And when I say danger, I'm not talking about your dad-level danger, although we do know a lot of narcissists that are created in this community and entitlement. But just like your pain can be dangerous and messy. I look at the ways that I hurt other people when I was coming out of this messy experience, that it wasn't okay, you know? And I didn't mean to, but a lot of people don't mean to hurt other people when they're in pain. And so you have a responsibility to healing. And then outside of that, I think the the best thing you have outside of Mormonism is curiosity, uncontained. You can explore whatever you want, you can think about whatever you want, you can read whatever you want, you can go down what whatever rabbit hole, whatever you want. No cults. That's my rule. Like, don't get too organized about it. I I have returned to a sort of mysticism and belief and spirituality after many years. But my rule is don't get too organized about it. I don't follow gurus. I liked good advice from people, but uh, I think sex and religion are similar. They they deserve consent. And when someone is like putting it onto you with it, like if someone's preaching at you, bad manners. I did not consent for your religion to be placed upon me. And so I think that you have to make sure that you, because you've been primed as a Mormon to follow a leader, to follow a leader. It's so ingrained in you, you don't know. So just because you hear a good idea and you miss the community, don't get too organized, don't get too orthodox, don't get too attached to certitude. This world is a mystery. And it, if you approach it with an excitement and a curiosity and a wonder about the beauty and the mystery of it, life is gonna be so much better. And so for me, that's what I do. To me, it's a big crazy game. And I'm gonna play it every day and decide, you know, and and not take it so seriously. Because in Mormonism, it was so serious that it got stripped of any color. And I think if you just stop taking it so seriously, and when the hits come, you roll with it, and when uh the good comes, you roll with that too. But uh yeah, I think it's the curiosity that's the gift.
SPEAKER_00I agree, but sometimes when you grow up in that, it is a trip coming out of it. Oh god, like I can't even imagine to the point where you can't tell if you're real or you're gonna die. I don't know. That's a trip.
SPEAKER_03I mean, I I cannot imagine the level that you've gone through because mine was mine was very difficult. And it's still like I said, sometimes it'll sneak up on me and I'm like, damn, I'm still the very Mormon in my thinking about that to my detriment. I can't imagine what you've gone through. So kudos to you. Um in some ways, I know that this is your dad used to say your family was special and you guys were special. You guys did go through a very exclusive experience. And so, you know, I wonder what you'll be able to transmute that into. Like that that is an opportunity in some ways to really like my experience was concentrated, but yours was like extra concentrate. Yours is like the essential oils of worldview. So we'll see what what it does. But like what you're doing with the podcast, you're transmuting it. You could go out there with your dad's entitlement and hurt other people. You could do that. People would understand why that happened, but that's not what you're doing. You're trying to educate, you're trying to go a different route. And I think that that's that's the way is to take that pain and move the energy into something that's doesn't hurt.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's why I don't really believe in God anymore, is because like everything's unfair.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I can deal with it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, everything's unfair, but also that's good news, right? Like if you hit the rock, rock bottom, it's all up from here. Like there's uh everything's unfair, but everything's I I think a better way to reframe it a less nihilistic way for me would be there's no meaning to anything. We get to make the meaning. You get to make the meaning. Meaning was made for you your whole life on everything. Now it's your your decision, and you get to decide what that is, and so you can, you know, put a meaning on it that's the least charitable for your good, or you can find a meaning that that moves you forward. And I've had to fight for my own mental health to find meanings that move me forward and not get me stuck in the unfairness of it. But um, I also don't blame you for being in a place right now where you've only been out three years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, three to four.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, give yourself some gentleness and some credit. Like you were placed on this earth in a hard situation, and you're still here and you're still with us, and you're still trying to find your way through it. And I think that life will probably get better. Can't go back to that.
SPEAKER_00Can't go back to that grip though, because sometimes I'm dealing with I have some my brothers and sisters are awesome, but some of them I see them doing things and talking, and I'm like, God, you're like, I'll see them do the most sexist thing ever, and I'm like, oh god, you're still in the FLDS, bro. I don't know what to tell you, but you're still in the fucking FLES. People have it's it's way harder to leave all that. Even even when you think you left, you probably haven't.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, I mean that's what I said. I keep it's it still creeps up on me. Like, and so the but the fact that you have an awareness that you want to unpack those things, I think that that's the difference because I have met them. They're rare, but there are people that don't aren't interested in looking at their themselves, you know what I mean? And uh don't have a problem. Like, they like the misogyny that Mormonism gave them. That makes them feel powerful in this world. And it's like, okay, you're you're not someone I can be in community with, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's harder when it's your family.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes I drive past the oh, you know what one of the things that bothers me the worst is seeing those groups of Mormon moms. I don't know why. I don't know if it's like something to do with dad's wives, like these Mormon moms who are like kind of they feel higher class than everybody. I think it must be something to do with dad's moms, because that's how dad's family kind of was. But these Mormon moms, they just get on my nerves. I see them with like a couple kids and they're all they're they're all dressed the same way and they're in their own little cult, whatever it is. I'm like, God, I just want to like I don't know.
SPEAKER_03I think that's good news. It's it points to something it for me when I have those, and I call them triggers. I know that word is overused, but when when someone else brings something up in us of anger, that's telling us that there's something out of place with our definition of the world, right? And so the more that you can unpack that, the better. Like it's anger is a very useful uh emotion that way. And we weren't allowed it before. So like indulge yourself in that and then get curious about it after and be like, why does that bother me so much? What is it that I think about the world that and uh yeah, you're gonna have to do that with everything though, because that's what it takes. And unfortunately, it's gonna, I don't think it's an easy road, and yet you didn't choose it, and here you are, and what a what a crazy life you got placed in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, I got one last question for you. Um do you see yourself in 10 years still doing Mormon history? What do you think about the Mormon history space? Are you confident that we we are on the right track pretty soon, or are they gonna be way too many people believing in the bunch of bullshit like Brigham Young, Brigham Young's conspiracy theories? So, yeah, how do you see all that?
SPEAKER_03That's a great question. I mean, I I do a lot now in my work outside of Mormon stuff, um, but it's Mormon adjacent, right? So I do a lot of film work and I still do a lot of Mormon film work and consulting, but a lot of writing and a lot of stuff in Western history. Because to be honest with you, it got really dark. And, you know, especially when I I never meant to get into FLDS stuff. I got sort of pulled into it from folks in the community that needed help. And because I didn't have better boundaries around it, I just like tried to help everybody and do all the things. It was very Mormon lady in me. Like, I can help everyone. I can't say no, I need to help everybody. And it just got overwhelming and it got dark. And it it was, I walked a hard few very dark years where, you know, being in Mormon trauma and hearing about people's worst moments over and over, it was hard to go to sleep at night. It was hard to wake up in the morning, and I couldn't do that anymore. So I've had to sort of set boundaries around it. But I think because of my expertise, um, it will always be with me somehow. And so I'm trying to find ways to do it in ways that don't destroy my person, right? And, you know, I'm mostly off of social media just because, like I said, I make everybody mad for whatever reason. And you just get tired of people making up stuff. And you're like, again, a truth teller, you're like, I want to prove that's not true. Like, why would you say that? The internet is mean, and ex-Mormons and Mormons are deeply traumatized, and a lot of them have, you know, unchecked uh mental health problems they need to work out. I don't need them to work it out on me. So uh all of that stuff I don't want to have anything to do with these days. But my work is consistently putting me in the public more and more. And so I'm just having to learn how to set boundaries with that. And um, so I don't know. I don't know where 10 years will bring me. I will say that I have vast interests outside of Mormonism. I'm very interested in like science and physics and uh, you know, um esoteric stuff. And like what's that? Uh esoteric stuff. Like I love mysticism now. I love it historically, the occult, uh, magic, uh tarot, spiritualism.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'm scared.
SPEAKER_03Witch witchcraft. Um, I love that stuff. I love it as as a historical study, but I also like practicing it myself just for myself. I don't believe in organized stuff. Um don't need to be scared. It's all up here, but pal. Okay. It's all play. It's all play pretend. Um I love I love Western history. And so I'm doing a lot with Westerns. Um, I'm doing a lot of screenwriting these days. I've just wrote an adaptation of Olivia Harker's book, one for the Blackbird, one for the crow, which is has nothing to do with Mormonism, but it has to do with women on the frontier. So I definitely have interests outside of Mormonism, but I think I will always be attached to it because of what I do. And so as long as what I'm doing is useful, I will continue to do it. But I've stopped engaging in the community as much because it's a traumatized space. And traumatized people are dangerous until they work on their stuff. And so they will always lash out and be cruel and hurtful until they've healed that stuff. And so staying in there for very long is tricky. So I've mostly extricated myself from like the ex-Mormon community, not because I don't have such love for them, but because you know, I'm an easy target and I just I have to raise my kids and be a good person and like wake up in the morning and yeah, uh being around the toxic part of Mormonism isn't gonna do that for me.
SPEAKER_00If you drink a lot of soda, can you ever stop being a Mormon?
SPEAKER_03No, it's keeping it's my vice keeping me tethered to the to the telestial world forever. Oh, yeah, I don't recommend it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that mysticism stuff. You're not into it. Oh, I was so into it, but God, I I figured at some point I just decided I was gonna die if I kept going down that path. You know, that's what magic mushrooms, the magic mushrooms, they they did too much to me.
SPEAKER_03I know. Oh well, it's good to have a little belief and be playful, but like I said, if you get orthodox or take things too seriously, it gets dangerous. No cults. Um, humans are wired to join a cult, and I think we just need to be more playful with stuff. I I my rule with all of that stuff is it's play pretend. We have to have consent with others, we don't impose it on if someone starts revelating to me about what I mean, even if it's like a tarot reading and they start trying to tell me tarot works because it uses archetypes that are speak to the human consciousness. But if someone's trying to read my mind or future, I'm good. Like I'm good. But um I the utility I think is lovely, and the art is lovely, and the culture and the history is fascinating. And it did influence who where we come from, and so all of that I find incredibly interesting.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well, do you want to tell people where to find you and any last words you want to have you want to say?
SPEAKER_03Well, thanks for having me and for a very insightful conversation. It's been nice. Um, I just wrote a book about Mormon history. A ballad of Juanita Brooks, which you can order at benchmarkbooks or Amazon.com. It's coming out in December about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
SPEAKER_00So, what's the name?
SPEAKER_03The Ballad of Juanita Brooks. So Juanita Brooks was a historian whose grandfather was one of the leaders involved in the massacre. And she was a faithful Mormon lady in St. George in the 1950s, just like this little school teacher housewife that uncovered this story and wrote the first big treatment of the history, exposing all of it.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_03So it's about her and her story and what happened to her, which is pretty dramatic. So I wrote that book. Um, you can I am I'm not on social media a lot, but I am on Facebook, Instagram, and I did a TikTok to promote my book. So I'm gonna start doing that again. Um, and then uh yeah, you can find my work on Netflix Hulu FX. We got more stuff coming out. Um I have a I have two podcasts, I have the year of plugging me, which is my old podcast, History Mormon Plug Me. And now I do one called the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast with an incredibly brilliant historian, Brian Um Buchanan, who would, if you ever want to talk history, his recall is way better than mine. He wouldn't screw up the Orsons. Um, it's called the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast. And yeah, come to Sunstone. End of July at sunstone.org. We have a big conference with all these nerds coming together talking about this nerdy stuff. It's really fun.
SPEAKER_00Bunch of Mormons there or all kinds.
SPEAKER_03We I mean all kinds. We got like the the cultaro Mormons, we got the Mormon prophets, we got polygamists, we got ex-Mormons, we got the Mormons on Mushrooms, we got all like I think that's their podcast. That's the name of their podcast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm terrified.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, you should be a little terrified. I mean, boundaries, ex-Mormons, like we I get it, we don't need to go to the celestial kingdom with everything, right? Like moderation and all things is a good Mormon thing that we should take with us for sure. Although I don't listen with my sodas.
SPEAKER_00Don't go to the celestial kingdom with everybody, with everything.
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I'm gonna use some of this information you've given me to destroy Mormons in my future argument. No, even though I I've given them the sword of leaving. I know, it's crazy. I I will not tell them I got the information from you, okay.
SPEAKER_03And they wouldn't trust it if you didn't.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I'll give them some really good sources. That's right.
SPEAKER_03Give them Richard Bushman and you'll be tested.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Perfect. Well, thanks everybody for watching. Like and subscribe. Go find her book on Amazon and uh follow her on social media. Uh, we'll see you guys next time. Peace out.