Latter-day Saint Thought

On Miracles

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Elijah calling down fire from heaven, 21st century version Years ago I saw a New Atheist-y meme that showed a cartoon panel of “the power of God across time,” starting with the creation of the world, moving onto the great flood and turning water into wine, and then ending with Christ appearing on toast, with the idea that in today’s age we kind of grasp at straws to see this little miracle here or there whereas in the past there were seas being split and fire coming out of the heavens to burn up sacrifices.  This is one of those things where I think they have a point on some level. As a general principle I think miracles operate at the same cadence and magnitude today that they did in the past (typically in the subtle, private moments of our lives) and the farther back the record goes the more I’m open to the possibility that the miracles described were later additions, that the correlation between the magnitude and how public the miracle was and how old it is is attributable to the kind of folkloric additions that we see in just about every really old story that has had time to evolve and become grander. Ethics aside, If Brigham Young isn’t calling down a pillar of fire to block the way of the invading US Army in Echo Canyon, or President Oaks isn’t calling she-bears out of Cottonwood Canyon…

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Church Leadership and Policies

An Influential Letter You’ve Probably Not Heard Of: Wilford Woodruff to Heber J. Grant, March 28, 1887

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Over the last century, for better or worse, we have had four men who became president of the Church while health concerns and/or advanced age made their capacity to carry out the role of Church president questionable. (George Albert Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith, Spencer W. Kimball, and Howard W. Hunter are the four I have in mind.) In addition, the average age of Church presidents at time of ascension to the presidency in the last century was around 81 years old, meaning that many of them lost the ability to function within a few years of becoming Church president, just as a fact of age. I do not believe that is likely to change, and there is one rather obscure document more than any other that has ensured that is the case—a letter written by Wilford Woodruff in 1887.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Grinding the Faces of the Poor Through the Lottery

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I do not have the brain chemistry for gambling. If I bet my house on a coin flip and won, I would be a sleepless wreck for weeks anxiously wondering about what would have happened had I lost. (Like tobacco, this is one of those Latter-day Saint rules I would keep even if I left the Church). Perhaps because of this, the idea of a gambling addiction, where people destroy their lives because they need the next hit or are trying to get back to even, is very viscerally unpleasant to me (which makes gambling addiction-centered films such as Molly’s Game, The Gambler [preferably the 1974 version, which is based on Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name] and Uncut Gems very intense for me), and I am glad that Utah is one of the most anti-gambling states in the country. I usually bristle at the reflexive Utah=Latter-day Saint connection that many draw, but in this case it makes theoretical sense that Utah’s anti-gambling is in part derived from its Latter-day Saint heritage.  Recently due to a Supreme Court decision the floodgates for sports gambling were opened across the country, and many states liberalized gambling laws. They did this in a staggered fashion, which makes it so that researchers can more rigorously draw causal conclusions about what happens when sports gambling is legalized. A recent paper that just dropped found that when online sports gambling was legalized they “find a roughly…

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Book Reviews, Race and the Priesthood

A Review: Second Class Saints

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The priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry is a topic that is both fraught and crucial in understanding the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Matthew Harris’s recently-published Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality provides one of the most in-depth looks at that ban, with a special focus on the process by which it was challenged and lifted in the twentieth century by the 1978 priesthood revelation. It also discusses the ongoing effects of the ban and the anti-Black teachings in the Church that framed it after the revelation and the reluctance of Church leaders to come out against those teachings until 2013. Ultimately, however, the focus of the book is “on racism as it affected Black and biracial people in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (p. xiv).

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From the Desk Co-posts, Joseph Smith

John Turner on his Joseph Smith Biography

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John Turner is known in Latter-day Saint circles for his biography of Brigham Young and his book The Mormon Jesus: A Biography. Next year, however, he will add to that collection with John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography. Turner recently spoke about the forthcoming biography with From the Desk, and announced that “I loved writing Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, which Yale University Press will publish in Summer of 2025.” What follows here is a copost to the full interview.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Churches with Sound Fundamentals Are Very Robust

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Imagine President Nelson and the First Presidency came out with a revelation prophesying that the Second Coming would happen on a specific year (yes, that would never happen in the Church for a great number of reasons, but suspend disbelief for a second). This message was trumpeted from the General Conference pulpit on multiple occasions and carried across multiple issues of the Ensign. Missionaries are told to incorporate the message of God’s imminent coming in their materials. After several years of this kind of consistent, focused preparation the prophesied date comes….and nothing happens. At first there’s some fudge factor. Maybe it’s the next month or the next year? But soon it becomes clear that the entire prophecy is wrong.  Would that be the death knell to the Church? Something very similar to this actually happened to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1975. My understanding was that there was always some level of plausible deniability, but you had to be a more nuanced believer to read between the lines of official material to parse out such a space. The Witnesses by and large were gearing up for the Second Coming.  And what happened to them when Christ failed to arrive? I ran across this graph of Witness growth during the 20th century (citation, since I don’t know how to do footnotes in WordPress: Sturgis, Paul W. “Institutional versus Contextual Explanations for the Growth of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States, 1945-2002.”…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Being a Mormon without Believing in a Historical Book of Mormon, Part 1

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I think I stopped believing that the Book of Mormon was historical in 2011. I keep a journal, but didn’t write that “event” down. Anyway, sometime around then, but I’ve continued practicing Mormonism. I was called as a bishop in December 2018, so did the bishop thing not believing the Book of Mormon was historical. I’ve seen comments on this blog and elsewhere noting that most non-history BoM believers end up leaving. That’s probably true, but some stick around, like me. This is a big topic that I’ll break into a few posts (perhaps post some over at the JI), but I figured I’d start with a little background. As we all know, debates over BoM historicity tend to be central to debates over validity of the faith, so when I got into Mormon history at the end of my undergrad at BYU, even though that meant early republic US religious history and not ancient Mesoamerica, that issues of historicity floated in the background nonetheless.

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Book Reviews, Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations, a Review

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Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations, edited by Stephen O. Smoot and Brian C. Passantino, is a new collection of revelations by or attributed to Joseph Smith. It builds upon the research and publication of documents by the Joseph Smith Papers Project, drawing together the relevant documents into one easily accessible place and providing context for each. The main section of the book focuses on revelations that can reliably be attributed to Joseph Smith while an appendix contains revelations that either are attributed to someone close to Joseph Smith or are late, second-hand recollections that may or may not be accurate and authentic reproductions of Joseph Smith revelations.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

On Pie and Beer Day

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Last Utah post for a while, I promise Imagine you lived in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia, or some other area settled by a historically disenfranchised religious group. Also imagine, if you will, that this Jewish or Muslim or what have you group had a local holiday that celebrated their escape from persecution and their settlement in their new land.  In such a situation, using wordplay to come up with an alternative holiday where one ate pork would be considered in poor taste given the genesis of the holiday. (Or, for example, a Friday Meat Day on Good Friday for a Catholic community). The mature thing to do would be to be happy for them, maybe even join in the local celebrations. You wouldn’t be offended just because it was particular to the religious group that has historical roots in the place. If you switch Mormon with literally any other group, Buddhist, Muslim, Baha’i, whatever, this is obvious, but for some reason this is one of those things where it’s normatively okay to be demeaning towards Latter-day Saints in a way that would be considered inappropriate for virtually any other religious group. 

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Latter-day Saint Thought

The New Ex-Mormons

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We just returned from our yearly-ish pilgrimage to Utah. Trips to Utah are always an opportunity  to stick my finger in the air to get a more subjective, qualitative sense of things are going in the Church. Of course, Utah does not equal the Church in so many ways, but it does act as a sort of financial and membership ballast, and the amount of Mormon-ness in Utah is big enough that one can notice trends and patterns that would be harder to discern from random noise with a smaller sample size. However, here I’m not backing up any of these conjectures with quantitative data, it’s just my own anecdotal sense that may or may not be right, for what it’s worth. Back in my day Utahns could basically be separated out into three groups: members, whether active or not, ex-members, and never members. Typically but not always there were tensions between the first two groups, and ex-members either moved to Salt Lake Valley or left Utah altogether. The ex-Mormon identity was a very reified, concrete thing. It could hardly be otherwise with a relatively high-tension, high demand religion like the Church. Now I’m noticing another group, the second-generation ex-members. Some are what immigration scholars would call “generation 1.5,” or people who are born in one country as children but moved to another country young enough that for all intentions and purposes the UK/the US/whatever is the only country that…

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20th Century History, Book Reviews

A Review: The Last Called Mormon Colonization

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Growing up in Utah, I heard many pioneer stories about my ancestors and their colleagues who traveled west to settle the Intermountain West region. I found, however, that many of the stories focused on the journey itself rather than the years that followed as they established settlements and survived in an arid region. The latter half is just as important, as is the observation that many people uprooted their lives repeatedly to settle more remote areas beyond the Wasatch Front in Utah. One dramatic story of that sort is among the last that could be considered pioneering—the settling of the Big Horn Basin in northern Wyoming in the early twentieth century.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Misuse of the “Lost Sheep” Parable

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People often misuse the Parable of the Lost Sheep, where the Lord leaves the 99 to go after the 1, and draw analogies and connections that don’t make a lot of sense given the premises of the Parable, so I thought I’d make a set of guidelines for logically using the Parable. Note: I have wanted to do this post for a while, and it is in no way a critique or analysis of the Church’s recent 99+1 initiative. The motivation for this came from non-Church sources.  If you self-identify as “the lost sheep” the logical corollary is that you should return and join the 99 crowd instead of making the Shepherd come after you.    There is also the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” parable. Sometimes people have to be isolated for the good of the flock, this is part of what Church discipline is for. Jesus didn’t leave the 99 to find the one wolf in sheep’s clothing.   On that note, the point of the parable isn’t that the one lost sheep is in fact in the right and all of the others are in the wrong. The lost sheep is, in fact, lost, and the point is not that they are going to co-opt the role of the shepherd and lead them somewhere else.   Jesus doesn’t leave the 99 to find the lost sheep to only find out that the lost sheep was where everybody should…

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Book Reviews

A Review: Buffalo Bill and the Mormons

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Buffalo Bill and the Mormons by Brent M. Rogers is a fun and interesting book about the intersections of “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s life with the Latter-day Saints. The basic idea is that the American superstar, soldier, bison hunter, and showman launched his acting career at a time when anti-Mormon propaganda had become a profitable and popular area of storytelling. Cody embraced using Latter-day Saints as stock villains in his storylines, portraying Latter-day Saints as enemies of the proper home. Cody was, of course, the defender of the proper home in the plays in which he performed and seems to have initially believed the messages of that propaganda to some degree. 

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Latter-day Saint Thought

To Live in Utah or not to Live in Utah? The Grand Debate

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I asked Dalle-3 to “Create two images side-by-side, one representing Utah in a good light and one representing Utah in a bad light. Show me images that show bad things particular to Utah and good things particular to Utah, instead of just generic bad and good things.”  In the image it generated “the left side highlights Utah’s natural beauty and outdoor activities, while the right side depicts issues like smog from the Salt Lake City inversion, a dried-up Great Salt Lake, and urban congestion.” For my family living in Utah is the eternal question (“next year in Utah”). Like a lot of members, we have a lot of ties leading back to our homeland. For my children Utah is the land of milk and honey, a Willy Wonka-esque existence of eternal grandparent candy and attention, where the urinals flow with ambrosia and nobody ever raises their voice. They talk about “those East Coasters” with a lilt of disdain despite the fact that they themselves are, in fact, born and raised East Coasters (kind of the flip side of those lifelong Utahns who say they’re “from” the cool state they lived in for a few years as a kid while their parents were in graduate school). As of now we feel that we are where we need to be right now, but we’ve thought through the pros and cons many times.  Con: Housing Affordability Dear Utahns, this is insane. You can’t…

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From the Desk Co-posts, Temples

Wilford Woodruff and the Founding Fathers

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While Wilford Woodruff has only one canonized document in Latter-day Saint scriptures (Official Declaration 1), he did record a number of visions and revelations of his own. Perhaps the best-known among these is his vision of Wilford Woodruff and the Founding Fathers that led him to do proxy temple work for them and other eminent individuals. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Jennifer Mackley discussed what we know about Wilford Woodruff’s vision. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Interesting Wikipedia Articles About Latter-day Saints

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Murderer, Ex-Mormon (according to Wikipedia) James Earl Ray A recent project of mine has been to figure out a way to generate a list of all Wikipedia articles that mention the word “Mormon” or “Latter-day Saint” so that we can generate the comprehensive compendium of all things Latter-day Saint/Mormon on Wikipedia.  This project was inspired in part by an episode of the Omnibus podcast by Ken Jennings and Jon Roderick (incidentally, IMHO the wittiest podcast out there) about a prison breakout by James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr. Ken Jennings, who as most of us know is a member, bemusedly noted that the Wikipedia article on Ray indicated that he had been raised a Mormon. After preliminarily digging into the cited reference, however, Jennings seemed skeptical, and when I checked the page myself that little bit had been removed. (As an aside, given the sensitivities around racial issues given our history, I’m 1000% sure we would all know if the killer of Dr. King was raised Mormon).  Still, it made me curious about other less-known tidbits, plus I thought it would be fun to have a variety of other comprehensive lists: a complete list of all celebrities raised Mormon, a complete listing of all organisms named after Mormons (more than you’d think), etc., which could easily be generated by scraping the meta-tags on the ur-list.   To create such a list I…

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20th Century History, From the Desk Co-posts

The Latter-day Saint Chicago Experiment

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The Chicago Experiment was an effort to train some of the best teachers in the Church to the academic standards of Biblical Studies applied elsewhere in Western Civilization during the 1930s. The results were mixed, with some of the scholars going on to improve the Church Education System, while others struggled to reconcile what they had learned with their faith. Casey Griffiths discussed the Chicago Experiment in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saints history blog, From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the interview. 

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Latter-day Saint Thought

The Endowment and the Traditional Latin Mass: Beauty, Holiness, and Structure

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Due to some things I’m involved in, I recently attended a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). For the uninitiated, after Vatican II the Catholic Mass was changed to be more user-friendly. It was conducted in the vernacular instead of Latin and was shortened. While in the past the priest traditionally faced towards the East as he was blessing the Eucharist, facing towards God and the coming of Christ, gradually it became more standard for priests to face the congregation. 

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Book of Mormon, Guest Bloggers

All Indians Today Descend From Lehi

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As the children of Lehi and Sariah intermarried with first Ishamel’s offspring and then their children intermixed with the natives of the Americas, what has been the result genetically after 2,600 years? Are the American Indians encountered by the Europeans in 1492 and beyond also descendants of Lehi and Sariah?

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Sien Hoornik, Vincent Van Gogh, and Making All Things New

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Sorrow, a Van Gogh drawing of a pregnant Sien Hoornik Selling only one painting during his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh has become the archetype of the tortured genius not appreciated until after his death. His long-running mental health problems have been the subject of movies and ballads (with one moving example being Don McLean and later Josh Groban’s Vincent). There’s something about the narrative that tickles at our Jungian senses. Somebody who is dealt a bad hand all throughout their life has a deus ex machina glory thrust upon them, sort of a posthumous version of the classic folklore motif of the peasant who finds out that they’re royalty. Much less well known is Van Gogh’s muse during his time in The Hague whose life paralleled his in some ways. Sien Hoornik was a single mother prostitute born into abject poverty who gave birth to four children (two of whom died), and who was wracked by venereal diseases throughout her life. Van Gogh took her and her children in while she worked for him as a model in what some consider to be his only romantic relationship. They considered marriage, but due to pressure from Van Gogh’s family about marrying beneath his social status he eventually turned her out, after which time she probably went back to working as a prostitute to feed her family. She took her own life about twenty years later.  Now that she belongs to the…

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