Introduction and Guest Credentials

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1008

John Dehlin [00:00:11] Your mom and me, we've seen this life with eyes that only see in black and white. Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners. To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

John Hamer [00:01:03] Tune me out if you must I know you've heard enough

John Dehlin [00:01:14] But I sing this song Just because I hope you'll

John Hamer [00:01:19] be wiser than your daddy was I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy

John Dehlin [00:01:27] hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's November 9, 2018, and I could not be more excited to have today's guest. I say that a lot and I absolutely mean it today. Today we have John Hamer in the house. John Hamer. We'll have him introduce himself in a second, but basically many of you will remember that recently we had Kathleen Melanakis on to talk about Joseph Smith, the Joseph Smith family to talk about Mormon origins. She was really interested in forgery and counterfeiting, and so we talked a lot about that. But we realized during that episode that we really need in Mormon Stories to dig back into Mormon history, that those are some of our most beloved episodes. Those are most popular, those are the most needed. And so we're gonna do that. I'm working with Dan Vogel now to bring him on a Mormon Stories, and I reached out to John Hamer recently because one of the things that Mormonism needs really badly are plausible explanations for, you know, I'm just gonna say, I'll start by saying the Book of Mormon. So, you know, one of the things that the Church is trying to do is continue this narrative that the Book of Mormon was authored in a short number of days by uneducated people and that it must be a historical document, you know, because of whatever narrative they have. And recently the Church actually put out short video for youth that kind of addresses this idea of whether or not the Book of Mormon is historical, etc. And so, you know, what I think would be interesting, and I tried to do this with Kathleen Malonakis, is bring on a few people to give their best attempt at explaining how the Book of Mormon was authored. Now, that's not today's presentation because you really can't understand Book of Mormon authorship without first understanding folk magic and treasure digging. And so John Hamer has signed up to come on several episodes of Mormon Stories and discuss, at a minimum, this episode, which is going to be about folk magic and the Smith family and, you know, Upper State New York and Vermont and all that stuff. We're going to dig into folk magic this time. The next episode is going to be on John Hamer's theory on how the Book of Mormon was authored. We'll bring Dan Vogel on later. We'll have other scholars on. And of course, we're going to be bringing John Hamer back potentially for other episodes as well, because he's been developing all this amazing content for Community of Christ in Toronto. He has now become a 70 of community of Christ. He also is a pastor or a leader of the Toronto congregation of Community of Christ. And he's been creating all this wonderful content for his community, but he hasn't been sharing it with the rest of us. So, John Hamer, what's going on? Why are you holding out on this amazing content?

John Hamer [00:04:32] You're right. Sometimes you get really focused in on the, you know, the local stuff that you're doing and then you are not in any way. But there is a lot of things. So I have actually done. I don't know, there's hundreds of hours probably of additional content and thousands and thousands of slides. So I. On topics I think that a lot of your listeners are gonna be very interested in. So there's plenty to share now. So that's exciting.

John Dehlin [00:04:57] That's brilliant. Well, welcome back to Mormon Stories. You've been on many times. It's always awesome to have you. Will you give yourself the proper introduction that I didn't do justice to so people can know who you are, what you do, what your background is. And we'll jump right into the presentation.

John Hamer [00:05:15] Yeah, sir. So I've been around, I think, in the post Mormon community for about since it's been online almost, you know, for about 20 years when, you know, all the way back to exmormon.org, bulletin boards and that kind of a thing. But I. And anyway, so I go back in terms of my family, joined the movement in 1832, 1833, so seven generations ago. And I was raised in the LDS Church, but not in Utah, So in Minnesota and other places in the Midwest, I left. Well, I don't know if you all know this whole story. We got into more detail Maybe than I should. Yeah. The short version was when I, you know, I became a doubting teenager by the time that I was, let's say, 16 and reading the Book of Mormon and certainly the Book of Abraham, I had enough information as my historical background to know, not feel that those were historic. And so. And so. And then that on top of essentially the church's policies regarding race and sexism, especially gender, I decided when I became an adult that I was done. I wasn't interested in being part of it. And so it was only. And so I went off and went into history and actually studied medieval history in my graduate school. But I also started looking into my own family history, which turns out is, you know, Mormon history. And I found out that the story of Mormon history was so much more interesting than I had been led to believe growing up as a Mormon teenager. Just getting the manual version, which was just so watered down, whitewashed white, you know, white bread, wonder bread, that it was just. I found it to be so incredibly dull. It turns out that it's actually amazingly fascinating. I kind of immediately devoured everything. I started being. Going to the Mormon History association, the John Whitmer Historical Association. I kind of quickly, with my husband Mike, became directors of the John Whitmer Historical Association. And from there I met obviously all of the Community of Christ historians and their incredible community. They were continuously telling me about their church, which I totally didn't believe them, that it could be like it was because my entire perspective, really on churches was growing up in the Mormon Church. And so it was only after about 10 years of kind of looking into, wow, they really are serious about all of this stuff about inclusion, about not being credible, about being open to truth wherever you find it, about all this kind of authenticity that I said, okay, well, I have to be part of this thing. It's pretty amazing. So I joined Community of Christ on April 6, 2010, on the 150th anniversary of the reorganization, 180th anniversary of the organization of the church. And so I've been kind of devoting my life to this kind of stuff ever since then. So here in Toronto, I serve as chair of our social housing charities that we're able to address things like the problem of homelessness. We House about 180 people who are poor, have mental health conditions and things like that who might otherwise not be able to be housed. And we're doing that sort of those sort of missional things. So that's kind of my short thumbnail background.

John Dehlin [00:08:38] Beautiful. And you're Just a lovely, thoughtful human and I would say one of the most well versed in Mormon history people that I know. And so you're gonna have a hard time.

John Hamer [00:08:51] That's a very huge compliment because, you know, everybody.

John Dehlin [00:08:55] No, I mean, you know, there's Dan Vogel, there's Richard Bushman, there's Michael Quinn. And I would say, you know, different people are going to have different areas of expertise, but I would say you very much belong in that circle. That's my opinion.

John Hamer [00:09:10] Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Well, Dan, I'm excited that you have him coming on. He is going to have all of the primary sources so much at his fingertips. He is the, you know, he wrote all the books on that topic. Right. And so he's absolutely an amazing person to have. And so what I'm maybe going to bring here to you is a slightly different synthesis and hopefully how I can try to explain and make this origin story kind of understandable because like you're saying, I think that one of the things that happens in ex Mormonism is that people have a vision of how the contemporary LDS church in Utah portrays all of the Mormon origins, which is in a very literal way. You know, there's. It's in statues and paintings and movies that is very different from the actual primary source testimony. And so as a result of that, there is a much further leap you have to make in order to try to explain it. And like you say, also there is this very much, this attempts to play up the miraculous nature of the Book of Mormon as a composition. You know, that millions of books have been written. It's not, I mean, saying that a book has now appeared is not the biggest miracle in the universe that I can imagine. Just we try to stack up against all the other miracles and then also trying to, you know, at the beginning of his life, anyway, later Joseph Smith is talked up as, you know, as the greatest things since Christ. But in his origin times, everybody wants to make him out of being just a dumb bumpkin who, you know, is such an idiot. There's no way that he could have produced this particularly ordinary book that, you know, I don't know that is that I don't. Anyway, so as a result of that, by making those extremes, I think that people, you know, are confused, you know, tend to be confused and they want to either make conspiracies. So in other words, to try to address those issues where they want to have all kinds of other people wrote the book and gave it to Joseph Smith or he stole it from them. And all this kind of thing. And then otherwise, you know, anyway, conspiracy is about all of the origins. But I think that if we just look at the actual sources and understand it, we can actually very easily understand what this whole narrative is, you know, and understand the people.

John Dehlin [00:11:39] And just, you know, a lot of times people are going to listen or not listen to someone based on their credibility, the perception of whether they have an axe to grind, the perception of whether they're objective or biased in some way. And you're kind of a bit of a paradox in the sense, you know, you left the Mormon Church, you joined Community of Christ, which is a, you know, a tradition, a Latter Day Saint or, you know, a tradition based on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. So you can't really call you anti Joseph Smith or anti Book of Mormon.

John Hamer [00:12:12] Right, right. So obviously the Book of Mormon is part of the canon of Scripture and Community of Christ. And I think that the Book of Mormon actually, as 19th century scripture, and as we understand how it was written, which I think is pretty clear how it's composed, that we can get that as a window into biblical canon that is incredibly important in Christianity. So we were just at the Parliament of the World's religions this last week, which was held in Toronto. It's this thing. It's essentially 7,500 religious leaders from all of the world's religious traditions, you know, descended on Toronto. You guys had the last one you hosted in Salt Lake, I think, about three or four years ago. And so this idea is, it's like the World's Fair or the Olympics. It's a thing of an international gathering that rotates city by city. And during this, I was talking to an evangelical Christian who falls into this condition. That I believe anyway, is a problem that evangelical Christianity often gets of what I consider to be Bible worshiping, where they don't understand Scripture. Scripture is so alien from their encounter. It seems so ancient and all this kind of thing. It is actually an ancient thing. It was written 2001 to 2,600 years ago. And so as a result of that, you know, they can just assume that it's in this wholly other alien category. And they assume it. They can read it very, very literally when it is anything but. And we can show that through the disciplines of history, literary criticism and archaeology. So we can show things like, for example, that the Book of Daniel, the last book of the Hebrew Bible to be written and included in the canon, is written hundreds of years after the mythological figure of Daniel would have existed. It's not written by Daniel, the person who's writing it has very little understanding of Daniel's life. The stories are not, or in actual historical context, they're very rare instead of the time period when they are writing it. And so all of Daniel's prophecies up until that moment, which is in the second century before the common era, are spot on accurate. And then two years later, they go completely off the rails because the person is not able to predict the future beyond that. And so we were able to see with that component of the canon essentially how the, how literary prophecy in terms of future prediction, which is not what, you know, what one might say theologically what prophecy is supposed to be about. But the Book of Mormon, we can see the same exact thing in terms of all of the prophecies that lead up all the way till 1830 are pretty great. They're pretty amazing. Well, you know, I mean, there was in terms of like being able to predict spot on everything about Christ in the New Testament in ways that no matter how much Christians have always typologically read Isaiah as predicting Jesus, he didn't. It didn't actually say that it will be born and his mother's name will be Mary and his father's name will be Joseph. In other words, all these kind of predictions that are, you know, just absolutely the entire narrative as you get in the Book of Mormon or for example, all the way up to the anthem transcript issue, son's story is actually in the Book of Mormon because. And you know, again, it's predicted. But what happens in Nauvoo is not predicted in the Book of Mormon. Right.

John Dehlin [00:15:32] Yeah, yeah. You know, it's not predicted in the Book of Mormon is three degrees of glory. What's not predicted in the Book of Mormon is the temple ceremony. You know, Joseph, the idea of eternal progression.

John Hamer [00:15:45] Progression theology is not predicted. You get. Instead, what you get in the Book of Mormon is modalism. So the Father is the Son. So, you know, there is this idea that there is one God, that God is both. We're getting ahead of ourselves. Yeah. Anyway. But the point of it is that my point is that you can avoid being in a faith tradition that is a Christian heritage tradition and a restoration heritage tradition like community of Christ. By having this close hand understanding of scripture, we can put things like the Book of Daniel into context. We can understand how people in the past, you know, have written sacred story or as we might want to call it, myth, how they are writing and to make theological points. They're not trying to write, they're not actually writing history.

John Dehlin [00:16:38] And if I had to, tell me if this is an okay summary. You're basically saying the Book of Mormon, even though you view it as a 19th century document, it still has a lot of rich spiritual and even theological value, even if it wasn't necessarily created in the way that orthodox LDS Church members were taught. Is that what you're saying?

John Hamer [00:17:01] And also, I'm saying that as a result, we can also see that none of the books are created in that way. People are taught that the Book of Mormon is created is not how it was created, and that is also not how the Bible was created.

John Dehlin [00:17:16] Right. And we are going to have David Bacavoy on Mormon Stories next week to talk about applying historical criticism not just to the Old Testament, but also to the Book of Mormon. That'll be fun, right?

John Hamer [00:17:29] Wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I'd like to talk to you about all kinds of, you know, in future episodes too, about, you know, what we can understand about the historical Jesus and all this kind of thing. I know you've already had some really great experts on that. But anyway, you know, we can talk in some pretty serious detail.

John Dehlin [00:17:43] There's Bart Ehrman and then there's John Hamer. Right. So, I mean, we gotta.

John Hamer [00:17:48] Yeah. So in the same way that Daniel.

John Dehlin [00:17:52] Bart Ehrman's okay, but he's no John Hamer. You know what I mean?

John Hamer [00:17:56] We have different backgrounds. So his background is as a fundamental, you know, originally he, you know, as a fundamentalist. And so when he's looking back at the scripture, he is always deconstructing the fundamentalist Christian understanding and perspective on the Bible, which is different from the Mormon one. Right?

John Dehlin [00:18:14] Yeah, for sure.

John Hamer [00:18:15] In that sense, he can. He knows. He knows, you know, I don't know New Testament Greek. He does, you know, so there's. There's all kinds of things that, that he knows way more than I do and ever will. And same thing with, like I say, Dan Vogel in terms of all the primary source materials at his fingertips for this particular story. But everybody's bringing their own different parts of the synthesis. So.

John Dehlin [00:18:36] Well, really quick, we are broadcasting this live on Facebook. Sarah says, love John Hamer. Steve Ottison basically says that you're amazing that your Early Mormon stories episodes were instrumental in him going on a journey as a seeker, ultimately landing and trying out Community of Christ there in Seattle. Huge shout out to the Ottisons. We love you, Steve and family. Steve also says Dan Vogel would be great. Mary's excited about to hear from you. John and Daniel Lima says, I envy John's hair. How does it feel to be objectified, John Hamer?

John Hamer [00:19:16] You know, as now I'm what, I'm 48 now, so any compliments I get at this point, I'm going for a young Ben Franklin, really.

John Dehlin [00:19:28] So everyone who's listening just to the MP3, you will be able to get everything you need from this presentation just through listening. I just want to make sure everyone knows that. We also are sharing this on Facebook and on YouTube because John Hamer, along with being brilliant and pastor of a church and a 70th community of Christ and an entrepreneur business wise, he also is a graphic designer. He helped with the Joseph Smith Papers project. He's designed most of the book covers for most of the Mormon themed books you've probably read over the past few years. And he's developed these incredible PowerPoint slides that he's going to be showing for today's presentation. So if you have the ability to switch to YouTube or Facebook, you will really enjoy John's graphic design. Is that right, John?

John Hamer [00:20:17] Yes, I hope so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:19] So let's launch in. Why don't you switch to PowerPoint and we'll dig right into this presentation by John Hamer on the use of folk magic with Joseph Smith and early Mormonism.

Folk Magic in Early American Culture

John Hamer [00:20:32] Okay, so do you got this one?

John Dehlin [00:20:35] I see it. Yeah.

John Hamer [00:20:36] Okay. So, yeah, so this is again like you're saying, I wanted to talk about how I understand the composition of the Book of Mormon, but in so many ways that I think we have to have possibly two episodes as a background before we can get there. So this one is on the folk magic and the next one we might want to do is on maybe educational and doctrinal context, you know, that is immediately then reflected in the Book of Mormon. So anyway, so in this one we're going to talk about essentially the kind of folk tradition that the Smith family come out of.

John Dehlin [00:21:14] So if I can, let's do it. And we talked about this a little bit with Kathleen Malonakis, but we want to get more into it and you've got a lot to add.

John Hamer [00:21:22] Yeah, so this is one of the things that's always going to happen when a movement grows out of a folk tradition. There is essentially the difference between, let's say everyday common people or what peasant culture or any other kind of things, you know, and let's say the elite culture or the central tradition, the people that are at the contemporaries who are in the universities, who are writing newspapers and things like that. And so this is like the difference between Essentially the big culture and the little or folk culture. And so for those of us who are now, even though this is our ancestors, we now have gone to universities, we now are engaged in critical thinking and this kind of a thing. In a lot of ways we have a lot of trouble, you know, looking across this bridge and going back and seeing and having empathy for people who are engaged in folk culture. And we tend to be very dismissive of it. And so one of the things that more or less has always happened is that what regular people, everyday people are doing, that's not what we hear about when we're reading about the Middle Ages. We don't know anything about what the peasants are doing or thinking. Almost we're caring what the king and a couple elite bishops and all the people who are actually writing the books are essentially doing. So one of the things anyway that has always been going on locally has been essentially belief in and practice of folk magic, including for example, folk medicine. So here in Joseph Smith's era, this is only the very beginning of the time when, you know, western medicine is starting to develop in a way that actually is achieving good results. So there has been a tradition of medicine in the west from Aristotle and Hippocrates and everybody onward down through the central Middle Ages that involved. We now have it as essentially things like you're getting your out of humor and this is the four humors. And so that we kind of see it as every single time anybody has a problem that they'll cut you or bleed you or have leeches. And essentially this is, you know, based on essentially the traditional medicine that's actually the elite medicine. But then there's also then all the things that people have locally that are folk remedies. Some of these are based on known properties or things that actually do work, you know, and that kind of thing, a lot of it, folk medicine is based on, you know, the well known placebo effect. All the kind of things that you get results because you're paying attention to that you have hope or faith or any of those kind of things. In a lot of cases, that's what's. And rest a lot of cases that was what was necessary for anyway getting better. Other things though that people were interested and always have been interested in is essentially divination. And so people have all kinds of different ways they want to do that. Reading tea leaves, using dowsing rods. So like a, you can see here in the little description of the guy with a dowsing rod or divining rod, essentially you're holding Two halves of a rod that comes together. You walk around.

John Dehlin [00:24:38] Like a wishbone.

John Hamer [00:24:40] Yeah, like a wishbone. And you walk around and at certain moments, it'll you. You feel it'll like you. It's often done for looking for water. Right. So people still will do this. They walk around and then they want to dig a well. They feel like a tug or something like that or some. For whatever reason. And when they do that, they sense that that's the place that they're being guided to. To dig the water. Right.

John Dehlin [00:25:04] Like a Ouija board. Right. It's like the Ouija board guiding your fingers to a letter. Right.

John Hamer [00:25:09] It's exactly the same kind of magic as Ouija board. So the Ouija board does the exact same thing. And so that would be the same kind of magic as a divining rod. My grandparents. My grandparents, their life was genealogy and going to cemeteries and finding ancestors, they would use a divining rod to find the tombstones. And whether or not, you know, anyway, I don't know if that would be more effective as a result that way, but it could be that, you know, it's concentrating their thoughts in a different way. And so it worked in that way. But essentially people understand it as actually having some kind of a physical effect because the spirit or something is tugging on the rod. Right. And same thing like you say with the Ouija board. But there's all kinds of other things like, so, for example, adding, removing curses, love potions, all these kind of effects that people are interested in having happen. And so then there were just different kinds of ways that, you know, folk magic would do all those things.

John Dehlin [00:26:04] Can I ask a question about that category of kind of folk magic?

John Hamer [00:26:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:09] You know, talk about presentism and how it does or doesn't fit. You know, I tend to think of like, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as these, like, Renaissance men who were deists and they were rationalists and, you know, they didn't even think that maybe the New Testament was necessarily divine. So Jefferson, we have Jefferson yanking out, you know, any miracle in the New Testament and creating his own version of the New Testament that's pretty much secular. And so on the one hand, I've got these vision of these founders and these. These sort of Renaissance men that were in some ways very secular or deistic, and they weren't into superstition and magic men ahead of their times. And then we've got like, our are perceptions of people like Martin Harris. And you would want to say that anybody who believed in divining rods or this Sort of thing would be a bumbling fool idiot, you know what I mean? Can you talk about to what extent, how should we or shouldn't we view these historical figures in terms of the prevalence of this folk beliefs in these folk magic ideas and the terms of how credible or not credible or whether credibility should even come into the conversation when we talk about people who believed in these things. Because I'm guessing leeching and bleeding and all this stuff, you know, we think of that as stupid now, but maybe really smart people who are really credible believed in a lot of this stuff. Can you talk about that a little bit?

John Hamer [00:27:35] Sure. So yeah, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson represent, you know, genius level thinkers in the super elite of the time. Right. And so they are definitely, you know, right up there. There are all kinds of other, you know, elite thinkers, you know, let's say if you just even go just a little bit before that, for whom they wrote very serious treatises on what we now think of as things that influence folk medicine. What we think of that they wouldn't have been. It isn't actually folk medicine, it's more like what we maybe understand, let's say elite Chinese medicine. So lots of, lots of folk Chinese medicine is doing things like acupuncture. But then the, at the imperial court there would have been the guy that's writing the scientific, not scientific, the pseudo scientific, whatever. The idea for the time period, the, the level of what they understand that is like showing all the different kinds of little ways that this acupuncture does this or that, and they're making diagrams and they're teaching that in their, their high, the high level of school, whatever. They have their equivalent of a university in that same way in the middle ages and into the early modern time periods. The kind of medicine that is being taught, you know, is based on the four humors. So whether you were going to be, you know, you have too much blood, so you're sanguine, you have too much black bile or whatever, so you're colic or melancholic. And so we have all your billiness, all of these different kinds of qualities that essentially meant whether or not your humors are out of touch. And they're based on a elemental theory that goes all the way back to Aristotle. So the four elements, air, earth, fire and water. And you're having too much fire, so you're sanguinous, so you have to have leeches to get some of the excess fire and heat out of you. So that's the, that's kind of the Elite version of that. But then all of that kind of also peters into what the regular people are doing. They don't all have access to a university trained sorcerer. You know, essentially, you know, you can have another example. This is, you know, Newton, Isaac Newton, you know, wrote just as much about the apocalypse. You know, he believed he had come up with a science of future prediction based on his reading of, you know, the book of Revelation. You know, that so many of these early believers believed in astrology just the same amount as they believe in astronomy. In fact, the whole reason why astronomy and chemistry made it through the middle ages is essentially because of people's interest in astrology and alchemy. Right. And so it's only been more recently that these have diverged. And so there are very sophisticated thinkers that didn't have access to that information. And then we're going to say going down to Martin Harris's level, always throughout time, there have always been people that just don't have access to the kind of information. He's just a very normal person. So he maybe think of, you know, some of his contemporaries saw Martin Harris as being, let's say, especially, you know, especially credulous. Right. But there's lots of people in his same category. And then there would have been local people that are like the newspaper editor or whatever, who are already skeptics because they have access to some of this. And so that's just part of the ongoing, you know, human conversation. But I think that in general, this idea of, you know, folk magic and medicine and things like that, it was just much more widespread at that point than it is now. We still do all kinds of things that. Where we do things that are superstitious or that use ideas of sympathetic magic. One of the ones that I. That always is happening is in sports. So people in sports routinely do superstitious stuff about their team being able to win. Whether they can, they can't change their socks or anything they're going to do. And almost everybody, whether or not you're actually doing a superstitious thing about like that, almost everybody when they're watching a game, they're on TV and they actually see somebody, they've thrown the football or whatever and it's going and it's going, and people will all kind of go this way. In other words, they move, you know, themselves as if, because this is sympathetic magic. So if you do this, you know, you are your sense kind of willing the football to go the right way on the screen, even though obviously it doesn't work that way. Right. So there's all of these things that are quite deeply ingrained in us, and we shouldn't just look at any of these guys. You know, Martin Harris maybe is, you know, a little more credulous than a lot of other people, but there were lots of people that are like. Like this. So when we're getting to this plate story, the other money diggers, the other sorcerers, really believe Joseph Smith has the plates, and they're trying to use sorcery in order to find where he's hidden them so they can get them. You know, they want to get access to them.

John Dehlin [00:32:22] So, so smart people believed and still believe in folk magic. And I think even essential oils today, not that they're, you know, they're maybe legitimate, more and less legitimate uses of essential oils, but when people are wanting to use essential oils for healing cancer or that sort of thing. Yeah. So smart.

John Hamer [00:32:41] There could be all kinds of, like, people. There are very much people with celiac's disease who shouldn't be having gluten, but there's a huge phenomenon of everybody thinking the gluten is bad for them based on no real evidence, you know, this kind of thing. So, like you say, okay, all right.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] So smart and dumb people believed in folk magic back in the 19th century, right?

John Hamer [00:33:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:33:05] Okay, keep going.

Dowsing Rods, Seer Stones, and Treasure Digging

John Hamer [00:33:06] Okay, so one of those things is dousing rods. And so we know just from. We have accounts of both Joseph Sr. For example, Joseph Smith Sr. And also of Oliver Cowdery specifically using divining rods for different kinds of revelation. Right. And so one of the stories that we have in the. In the early Book of Mormon translation or Book of Mormon composition process is in the revelation, you know, that says essentially that Oliver Cowdery has, in the edited form, the gift of Aaron, or which is to say it was originally the gift with the rod. And this means, you know, essentially the divining rod. And so then they. Presumably, the way that he was going to maybe be able to do his own component of the Book of Mormon revelation process or composition process is through something that was somehow would have been related, like you say, to a Ouija board, because essentially they don't have a Ouija board, and those are invented later. But essentially where. Where the rod is somehow saying yes or no as words are coming to him and he's telling parts of the narrative, maybe the rod would have said, okay, yes, let's put that in, or, okay, no, that's not of God, or something like that. In any event, what Oliver Cowdery found was that he didn't feel that he had the inspiration to do that. But in any event, it's reflected here of this overall belief in different kinds of folk magic. So in this case, dividing rods. We also have, for example, our own account, Lucy Smith, talking about the family doing things like drawing magic circles. And the Hyrum Smith family, for example, has a whole set of magic talismans that were in the family's possession and continue to be so.

John Dehlin [00:34:56] And what would a talisman be used for? So why would Lucy draw magic through these?

John Hamer [00:35:03] I thought I might have one. I don't have. So what are the talismans for? It's things like protection. Things like, you know, the kind of thing that when people There's. There's ongoing, let's say, folk magic belief in Mormonism about, for example, garments, you know, providing some kind of protection, actual physical protection. I mean, I've heard essentially Mormon folk stories where, you know, like a missionary or somebody is burned up in a plane crash or whatever. But like everywhere where the garments were completely intact, you know, but so what. I mean, their head has been burned off, you know, but anyway, you know what I mean? So this is like a view, though, of trying to show kind of like the folk magic efficacy of, you know, like a particular thing. So a talisman or a magical document can have that same kind of idea. Or maybe it's something specifically to some particular goal, like you want to have achieved some kind of an end. And maybe it was drawn up for that kind of a purpose. So in other words, helping you towards a, you know, achieving something or finding something. You know, man, like, people do this now with manifesting, right? So there's like a big pop movement that if you just, you know, you just envision it, then you will achieve it. Yeah, that. That same kind of thing. And so in Lucy Mack Smith's story, you know, just as. Just as one of. Anyway, lots of accounts of this, but it's one that's coming from, you know, the mother herself. She says, let not my readers suppose that because I shall pursue another topic for a season, that we stopped our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of abrac, drawing magic circles or soothsaying to the neglect of all kinds of business. We never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation. But whilst we worked with our hands, we endeavored to remember the service and welfare of our souls. And so what she's saying here is that she's aware that people are critical of people who go off and are really focusing on their folk magic pursuits. But she's saying that. Just that. Yes, okay, we were doing that, but it's not because we stopped important things about labor, because really. And she's even saying here, service and welfare of our souls. She's tying together folk magic and folk magic pursuits, I think, here with her. Otherwise her folk Christian beliefs, which is to say that this is all part of the. Essentially the spiritual life.

John Dehlin [00:37:40] Got it. Yep, got it.

John Hamer [00:37:42] Okay. So we're very aware of, from sympathetic sources, Joseph Smith's use of different magic devices. Right. And so one of them being early called peep stone, later seer stones, for what's called, you know, essentially the folk magic practice of scrying. And so scrying is the idea of using something like a stone or a mirror or a piece of glass in order to. Or crystal ball so that you can essentially use that to focus a vision. And so it's essentially the same exact practice looking into, you know, we've seen the pictures now, anyway, everybody's quite familiar of taking a seer stone and putting it in a hat and looking in and looking into the. Into the stone. This is essentially the same kind of folk magic practice as the queen and Snow White's using when she goes to mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? And then what appears, the mirror shows an image of Snow White, Right. Instead of the queen. And that makes the queen bear mad. You know, so anyway, so in that same way, if you. Where are the. Where are the plates? Where is the. Where is Captain Kidd's treasure buried? So turns out then when you're looking in and you're using now not your physical eyes, but your spiritual eyes, and you're looking into the glass, you're looking into the mirror, into the crystal ball, the seer stone, the vision in your spiritual eye. What you envision then is that the Captain Kidd's treasure is buried, you know, at a particular bend of the Susquehanna river. And you kind of, you know, are able to narrow it down using that kind of folk magic visionary process in order to access it. You can also do the same exact thing then for using it to, you know, for finding the golden plates when they're where they're buried. Exactly. And another one would be using it then more of a seance like sense. Think of maybe later. So seances are a little bit later development, but you can think of that as essentially as people are challenging, sorry, channeling. They. Or at least they understand themselves to be channeling the other world. Right. So Either a spirit is talking through them, you know, as they close their eyes and are using this focus, or they are, you know, or maybe directly to God, you know, so something like. Like that, or Saint, you know.

John Dehlin [00:40:12] Yeah. And tell me if you plan on reading, and this will just come out of the blue, the Benjamin Franklin quote on treasure digging, do you have that in your presentation at some point?

John Hamer [00:40:23] No, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:40:24] Do you mind if I read that? Just to give people context?

John Hamer [00:40:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:40:28] Okay. Yeah. It's so important for people to understand just a couple basic things. One is this Captain Kidd thing, which is that there were these rumors going around that some pirate had buried a bunch of treasure somewhere in New England. And so everybody thought that under them was some buried gold treasure. Is that right?

John Hamer [00:40:47] Yeah, yeah. And so. And not only Captain Kidd. So Captain Kidd's pirates treasure is around somewhere as far as everybody's concerned. Also there's a sense maybe that De Soto, you know, so the Spanish explorer had buried all his treasure somewhere around there. In other words, they had nowhere that he'd gone. He hadn't gone anywhere near New England. But people all started assuming that. And finally, this is also the time period where this massive craze has happened in Europe and has spread across now to North America, where when Napoleon went and conquered Egypt, Napoleon and all of it's essentially pre archaeology, but essentially all of his Westerners who have access now to Egypt, they dig everything up, they find all and they loot essentially all these Egyptian ruins and gold. We get the Rosetta Stone and all these kind of things. And so people suddenly have a mania for ruins of the past, past civilizations and finding them. And so people in North America are also very much excited about finding ancient North American ruins and North American artifacts and things like that. And one of the things that they're also simultaneously aware of that we don't see anymore, is that because they've all been. They've all been destroyed, is that all of central North America, all the Midwest and Ontario here and across, are covered with ancient earthworks. And so it's essentially the mounds. And so there's all of these mounds. And it reflects obviously a very densely populated agricultural societies of which no longer exist at all among contemporary Native Americans in the 19th century. And so they are very eager to dig in those and find the remains of that civilization. And they assume perhaps treasure that's associated with it. The same way that Napoleon got treasure from Egypt.

John Dehlin [00:42:35] Yeah. So they're thinking between all these Indian mounds and the tales of Captain Kidd and other explorers, that you Know, if they don't like farming, if they don't like the mundane poverty of, you know, rural New England or, you know, expanding westward, sort of westward expansion with pioneers and whatever. If you don't like clearing rock out of fields, chopping down trees, you know, all the hard work that would, that would be, that would accompany westward expansion and pioneering and civilization. Maybe there's a quick, you know, treasure to be found that can make you rich immediately to help keep you from having to do all that hard work. Is that fair to say?

John Hamer [00:43:19] Sure. It's a 19th century get rich quick scheme.

John Dehlin [00:43:23] Yep. Just like pyramid schemes would be today, Right?

John Hamer [00:43:26] Yeah. And people who, and people like it with anything. People really believe in it. Right. So they, so they're. I think that there's a reason to imagine that Joseph Smith Sr. You know, really believed he was going to find these treasures and get rich and that would be how he would deal with it. I mean, they had been in this situation and their context was that they were a downwardly mobile family, they had had money and they were potentially going to try to go into a next level class thing of being merchants. He lost all of his money on this ginseng speculation that he tried to do. He then was trying to go into farming, which he would have preferred not to do. He was doing it at a very difficult time in Vermont's history where they had, for example, even the year without a summer because of the volcanic explosion. So three successive years of total crop failure, you know, beat out of him probably almost any desire that he had to try to give a go of being a farmer, which I think he probably wasn't as eager about it anyway. And so ultimately, when they do get to a better location in Palmyra and they're giving it a, you know, like kind of one last go ultimately when, when his creditors are surrounding him, rather than go through the work, like you say, of actually raising a crop and going through and being a farmer, it's at that moment when he still abandons the family and goes on treasure hunts, hoping to get rich quick.

John Dehlin [00:44:56] Right. And so let me read this quote from Benjamin Franklin that he would have written sometime in the 1700s. So this is decades and decades before any of the Joseph Smith treasure digging went on. So he says, and this is from the website follow the prophets.com under their section Treasure, Rocks and Magic. And it says, there are among us great numbers of honest artificers and laboring people who, fed with the vain hope of growing suddenly rich, neglect their business almost to the ruining of themselves and families and voluntarily endure abundance of fatigue in a fruitless search after imaginary hidden treasure. They wander through the woods and bushes by day to discover the marks and signs. At midnight they repair to the hopeful spot with spades and pickaxes. Full expectation. They labor violently, trembling at the same time in every joint through fear of certain malicious demons who are said to haunt and guard such places. So think Moroni, or you know, guarding the cave or the treasure. Think, you know, the demons coming, appearing when Joseph Smith is praying in the, you know, whatever account of the first vision, you know, these are relics. These parts of the stories we're familiar with are relics from this folk magic lore. Sorry, I jumped out of this quote.

John Hamer [00:46:32] Yeah, but no, exactly. So what you're saying showing here is that this is like general context. So even though since Mormons are the only people who kind of tell this story, it always seems like it's this completely unique experience or something like that. But in fact, this treasure digging was a mania, you know, so. And it's something that like you say, even decades earlier, people like Benjamin Franklin are complaining about that. People are that common people are being susceptible to a get rich quick scheme that's involving essentially belief in a folk magic that you would be able to use folk magic in order to counter the folk magic that's hiding or cursing the location of the treasure. And you can get at this kind of buried treasure, right?

John Dehlin [00:47:15] And just to finish it says at length a mighty hole is dug and perhaps several cartloads of earth thrown out. But alas, no cag or iron pot is found, no seaman's chest crammed with Spanish pistols or weighty pieces of eight. Then they conclude that through some mistake in the procedure, some rash word spoke or some rule of art neglected, the guardian spirit had power to sink it deeper into the earth and convey it out of their reach. Now just really quickly to kind of conclude this is, I think of the movie the Sting with Robert Redford and, and Paul Newman. And they're mad at this gangster, Irish gangster guy who's killed one of their friends, Luther. And so they're going through what are the scams that we can consider so that we can pick one to punish this mean gangster guy. And so they're going through, well, we can do roulette, we can do, you know, card tricks, we can do the wire, which has to do with horse races and a telegraph. And they're going through well known scams of the time by scammers. And I think it's fair to say that treasure Digging was one of the well known scams of the time for scammers. Is that fair to say or not fair to say?

John Hamer [00:48:47] Well, so it's completely possible that this is where a lot of the people are at. Although the particular kinds of like let's say organized crime scam that you're talking about about also involves a very deliberate attempt like those guys in the Sting are trying to do. They know that they're doing this as a very deliberate conspiracy or scam. Whereas I would, I actually think that we can see that a lot of these people who believe in folk magic actually believe that they, they believe all those things that you're talking about.

John Dehlin [00:49:20] Right. That's what makes tricky is they, sometimes they believe it.

John Hamer [00:49:24] Right. And so, I mean, I, I know that it's, it's hard for us, you know, because it's much easier for us to write a story like the sting because we, we, you know, you can understand essentially that a person, you know, is, I don't know, is trying to deliberately deceive people in order to have particular gain. But it's a lot harder for us to believe or to understand people who have these very crazy folk magic beliefs from our perspective. Right. And so in that sense, I think that, you know, whereas, okay, you can make the argument that the heart of each one of these, if this is your kind of view of it, there is like a guy who is kind of like that guy from the sting who is deceiving everybody else in the whole company. But I think that it's actually just probably even more likely is in peasant culture like this that the practitioner actually is a believer. They just are aware of more of the, of how you actually make the sausage. So in other words, it's not that they don't like sausage or, you know, eat sausage, but they know more what goes into it.

The Smith Family and Money Digging

John Dehlin [00:50:28] Okay, so there's two options. One, there's one option is that and we'll get into this. And I just want to see if you can cover it the best you can. As we talk about it, one option is the Smith family is knowingly deceiving people. They know there's no treasure. They know that this is a scam and they're just scamming people out of their money. That's, let's just say scenario one. Scenario two is they actually believe or think that there's treasure. They actually believe that they're treasure digging. They're actually sincerely gathering other people to search for the treasure. And when it's not found, they're as Disappointed as everyone. So those are. That's scenario one and two. And I just want you to.

John Hamer [00:51:07] Scenario three is that Joseph Sr. Believes it and is severely disappointed. And I think that's pretty clear. But then maybe Joseph Jr. Is the scammer. Right. So I think that that's one that people also maybe are interested in.

John Dehlin [00:51:22] Okay, cool. All right, so keep going. I'm sorry. Thanks for this conversation.

John Hamer [00:51:26] Yeah, yeah. Let's see if we can do this again. Okay. So the sphere stone. So we have the exact same experience that you just read about decades earlier, Benjamin Franklin complaining about. Right. So Joseph Sr. And the money digging companies that he's a part of, we have the contracts of them all receiving shares. We have all kinds of neighbors giving their various affidavit accounts. And that about the Smith family, Joseph Sr. And Joseph Jr. Being involved in money digging. And in fact, we have court testimony from Joseph's trial about it. So in other words, they're involved in money digging. And in general, as you say, as we read from Ben Franklin there, that ers Franklin that money diggers believe that the buried treasure is protected by magic, often guardian spirit who's able to make the treasure slippery, which causes its underground location to move. So you described that already.

John Dehlin [00:52:26] And weren't there dudes coming into Vermont or New York doing this treasure digging that Joseph and Joseph Sr. And even, you know, earlier generations of Smith and Cowdery family members would have had access to?

John Hamer [00:52:41] Oh yeah, this is a, this is pretty ubiquitous. I mean this is something that people. There's holes all over New England. And so and it's not just from Joseph Smith and those money diggers. It's. There's all kinds of fellow money diggers that are all doing it. And this is just also one of the things that their particular company is doing. So and so like I say, like you say, it's so they do this thing where you get like essentially however you're going to do it, a seer, for example, like how they would do it in Joseph Smith's company is Joseph Jr. Is the seer. He uses the stone to look into it. It determines the exact location. When you get that location. Then like they're suggesting you have to do a bunch of particular folk magic rituals in order to fix that location. So you draw a circle so that you're able to, let's say, take keep the guardian spirit from moving it out of the of the circle. And you have to either appease or thwart the guardian spirit by doing various things like whatever your particular motives Are whether in some cases. There are some. We don't know for sure, but there are some. Contemporaries said that it might also involve killing an animal. And, you know, using the blood is essentially a kind of a way to appease the spirit. Whether or not they did that, other folk magicians are doing that kind of a thing. And so anyway. And so in so doing that, and then they start digging at a particular time, like in the night or whatever they're gonna do. And then when they get to a particular point and they don't actually find the treasure as is described in the quote you read, they realize or they determine that they've made some kind of mistake in their folk magic ritual and that the spirit has made the treasure slippery and it has sunk deeper into the earth.

John Dehlin [00:54:29] Right, yeah. And I don't want. We may have rushed over the previous slide, which is the one with the Seer stone. I think it's really important to understand that this seer stone, because it comes in later with the Book of Mormon, the idea of a seer stone, Joseph got from Sally Chase, one of his neighbors. Right, sure.

John Hamer [00:54:47] Yeah, yeah, Yep, yep. So absolutely. So like you're saying here you have Joseph and as many of his neighbors. Yeah, I didn't read that. I guess like Sally Chase use peep stones or seer stones for scrying. So. And there's other people using these kind of scrying stones. It's like we're scrying.

John Dehlin [00:55:03] What's scrying?

John Hamer [00:55:04] Scrying is this folk magic practice of looking into a crystal ball and, you

John Dehlin [00:55:10] know, kind of like the evil wizard in Lord of the Rings, right? Saruman or whatever.

John Hamer [00:55:16] Yeah, yeah. Saruman has a. Whatever it's called a Planet Ear, you know, and so it's like a big crystal ball where he's able to see everywhere because of the. Because he has that. And Denethor has one of those too. So anyway, there's a couple of them in that. It's not that Tolkien made that up.

John Dehlin [00:55:36] Right.

John Hamer [00:55:37] You know, it's not that seer stones only exists with Joseph Smith. I mean, I mentioned an example is like the Queen and Snow White. It's a. You know, gypsies we think of as a common example of people with a seer stone. So in some cases. In some cases, it may be that in, you know, in those kind of things and carnivals and things like that, that really is a. You're maybe are, you know, deceiving the people around you. On the other hand, even in the cases of things like. Like Gypsy culture or something like that. There is probably a belief in folk magic, and it's just a matter of how much the person, again, as. Who's the practitioner of the folk art, they maybe know more of what goes into it and have a more nuanced view of it. And also they also have to figure out how to live with disappointment when some of their scrying doesn't work. Right. So they have ways that they explain it to themselves just as much as they explain it to those around them.

John Dehlin [00:56:38] Yeah, exactly. And I've been reading Dan Vogel's book, and he was so. He thought Sally Chase's stone was so cool. Did she give him one or did he find one in her well or something? Isn't that what he's.

John Hamer [00:56:51] Yeah. So this particular one, I think I got a slide somewhere on it. But anyway, this particular one is from the Chase property. So essentially, they're digging a well, or probably money digging, maybe. It was hard to know. And while they're digging, they say it's a well. While they're digging, they get a hold of the brownstone. And so. And so in that sense, it's. It's like, belongs to the Chases believe it belongs to them. And at some point or other, they return. You know, the Smiths return it to them. But then Hiram goes and asks for it back, and at a certain point, Willard Chase wants to get it back. And Hyrum says, well, you're not gonna get that one back. You know, those kind of things.

John Dehlin [00:57:27] Yeah. They believe the stone has power. And later in the story, Joseph goes off on his own. And as I read the book, in Vogel's book, he goes off for a day and disappears on search for a second magic stone. Isn't that right?

John Hamer [00:57:43] Yeah. Yeah. So there's. I think there's a sense that. I mean, and there's also testimony that we have that people have, you know, heard from Joseph Smith Sr. That every person has one of these stones that's attuned to them. In other words, that each. You can't look into Joseph Smith's seer stone and actually see anything with it because. Because it's attuned to him. But you can, of course.

John Dehlin [00:58:03] Right.

John Hamer [00:58:04] You can look into Sally Chase's stone, though, maybe, and she. Or she can see where yours is, and then you can go find your stone, and then that stone, through different kind of folk rituals, can be attuned to you and that kind of a thing. Right.

John Dehlin [00:58:15] Katie Smith writes, I want one. So, yeah, Katie wants her own stone.

John Hamer [00:58:20] I should have Had I have one, I forgot to bring it.

Seeing with Seer Stones and Folk Magic Beliefs

John Dehlin [00:58:24] Is it magic when you look into it, do you see things?

John Hamer [00:58:28] So the way it works in terms of seeing things is that the way you can envision things is with, again, your spiritual eyes. So you close your eyes, and if we were to all do this, if we all closed our eyes, and I say, I see a brilliant sunrise right now above the ocean and things like that. Do you see. Do you see the sun coming up over the ocean?

John Dehlin [00:58:55] You know, I see it. I see the sun coming up over the ocean, John.

John Hamer [00:58:58] So now you have envisioned that I see it.

John Dehlin [00:59:00] I can see it.

John Hamer [00:59:01] So anyway, so there is. There, you know, you can do spiritual practices of lead meditations of lead kind of shared visions and things like that. You can also, depending on your own folk metaphysical understanding, you may well think or you may well believe that different kinds of envisioning have, you know, an extra or supernatural source. And so certainly people who believe in folk magic believe in all sorts of different ways of the supernatural encountering our lives. And so one of the things that they are definitely, you know, have a sense of is that there is a veil that is separating our normal, unenchanted physical world from essentially the spirit realm, where all sorts of, you know, essentially in the. In the Middle Ages, all sorts of fairy things are happening or spirit things or ghost things. And so. And so you can, if. If the. If the veil from your physical eyes is lifted and you see that into that spiritual realm, you would see all of the spirits and everything like that that are all around, that are affecting everything. And so that's the. Their understanding, I think, of. Of the visionary, you know, and so anyway, so that my belief is that you can do that kind of envisioning, but in fact, it's not. So if you were encountering anything, if you want to say anything, that this is actual inspiration, I would argue theologically that this is inspiration that is open to everybody at all times. So as opposed to a communication that's a supernatural that is coming uniquely to you in this particular way. So. But that's my own theological argument.

John Dehlin [01:00:44] Got it. Okay. So this is all in the soup of Joseph Smith's upbringing.

John Hamer [01:00:49] Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's all over. Okay, so we mentioned here. Yeah, so they have the money digging and thwarting the guardian spirits and the slipperiness of the treasures. And so in addition to the quote that you read about how this is ubiquitous in North America, it also figures into just the literary components of the Book of Mormon. So the story in the Book of Mormon, the narrative in a couple places, it talks about this very thing occurring in the Book of Mormon texts. So from the Book of Mormon, Mormon. In the book of Mormon 1:19 to 20, or the LDS versification is 1:18 to 19 is. And these Gadiant and robbers who were among the Lamanites, did infest the land insomuch that the inhabitants thereof began to hide up their treasure in the earth. And, and by the way, this is also a mythological basis for the belief that is prevalent here that how all these treasures that they've been seeking all this time actually do exist, because now they're creating the source of the story for where the treasures got buried in the first place. So they began to hide up their treasures in the earth, and they became slippery because the Lord had cursed the land. So there's a magic curse here. The treasure is slippery. They're no longer able to be in the place where they buried them, that they could not hold them nor retain them again. They go to dig it back up into the exact same place, and it's not there. And it came to pass that there were sorceries and witchcrafts and magics, and the power of the evil one was wrought upon all the face of the land, even unto the fulfilling of all the words of Abinadi, and also Samuel, the Lamanite. So it's even, even directly cannot connect it here with sorcery and witchcraft, which is to say, anyway, the negative components. I think usually people believe that when they're doing their treasure digging that they're trying to use white magic or whatever. But in any event, it's folk magic and it's all interconnected with essentially religion. So even though we try to make this firm distinction between it, you know, the Lord is cursing the land, there's a curse, there's witchcraft, the earth is slippery, the treasures are not, you know, are slipping around. Right?

Folk Magic Woven into the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [01:02:55] Yeah. This is either either Joseph Smith's writing this folk magic that he participates in into the Book of Mormon, if you believe the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith or others, or God believes that treasure that's buried can be guarded by angels and be removed anytime and sent away. Right, right.

John Hamer [01:03:15] And so in that sense, if you want to have it that direction, then all of this treasure digging and money digging and everything like that, and the guardian spirits and things like that, and the captain kits, all that is all legitimate activity that Joseph and the Smith family been doing, because this is how the universe works. Right. Because it's right here in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:03:35] Yep.

John Hamer [01:03:36] Okay, so here's some of those magic papers that I was mentioning that are in the Hyrum Smith family. So I like this is just going back to this point. Modern educated people are very skeptical that uneducated folk actually believe in folk magic. But I think that there's not very much reason to doubt that Joseph Smith Sr. Was a very superstitious person. So I think if you. All of the things that we have of his writings, if you read through, for example, the patriarchal blessings that he dictated, which talk lots about magic all the time, saying, predicting that people will have various kinds of magic powers, we have people, you know, his neighbors who attested all kinds of things that he's trying to essentially tell them about things like money digging or about how to. How to use divining rods. And so when one of these neighbors who is very skeptical of all this folk magic, kind of thinks that there's. That it's all a humbug and there's nothing to it, Joseph Sr. Says, well, I saw you were using the rod and I thought I saw it wiggle. So I mean, I feel like it is working and you're just not giving it, you know, so. So that. And certainly one of the things, you know, that we have as an example is the degree to which if what he's doing, if Joe's a senior anyway, what he was trying to do in the money digging was to defraud people out of money so that he wouldn't go bankrupt. He is certainly, if that was his motive, he certainly was a complete failure because what he ends up doing is going bankrupt. And so he is actually, you know, at the end of this whole process, when the Book of Mormon gets going, he's essentially been arrested for unpaid debts. So he doesn't actually succeed in doing that and in fact seems to be hopeful that he'll actually be able to find the treasure, I think.

John Dehlin [01:05:30] But you also get the sense from the Vogel's book that he was an alcoholic, that he was shameful about that and that Lucy had to always be doing arts and crafts to sell to kind of keep the family afloat. And then it was Alvin's turn and hired him and Joseph to make the money because Joseph Smyrnior was just sort of a ne' er do. Well, is that fair to say?

John Hamer [01:05:51] Yeah, I think that that's fair to say. So I don't think that. I mean, so it is a problem, but that doesn't. So the fact that he's an alcoholic and is a ne' ER do well, I don't think that that means that whether or not he believes or doesn't believe.

John Dehlin [01:06:04] Yeah. And you're saying he does believe, and that if this is just a scam, you know, he really.

John Hamer [01:06:11] So he could potentially, you can argue opposite, like you say that he is a scam artist who's just really bad at it. But I believe that, you know, from having read a bunch of the stuff, I think that one of the components of him being an er do well is that he has a worldview that doesn't actually produce the results that he believes it will. So in other words, he believes that he'll get rich quick and have a treasure and not have to do all these things and, you know, and like farm. But in fact, he doesn't end up having that happen.

John Dehlin [01:06:43] Right. Doesn't work. Okay.

John Hamer [01:06:46] So, and so anyway, that's what I'm going to say is that I've said this, I've already said it a couple times, but the practitioners of folk magic actually often believe, as opposed to some of the con artists, although con artists sometimes also con themselves first. And so I do think that sometimes a used car salesman that seems to constantly be lying, I mean, an example would be potentially in your country, the head of your state right now seems to have a problem telling the truth. Is he aware of it? Or has he lied so much to himself that he's forgotten where the truth is? Right. So that could also be true for Conor.

John Dehlin [01:07:25] Apologies to my Republican conservative.

John Hamer [01:07:30] Anyway, that's just it. That's it.

John Dehlin [01:07:31] John Hamer's editorial comments do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Open Stories foundation or Mormon Stories podcast. No, I'm kidding.

John Hamer [01:07:41] We won't say anything further, but what I'll say is then the man holding the dowsing rod, my grandparents, when they were dowsing for finding ancestor graves, they believed that the dowsing rod worked. I mean, I believe they believed that they weren't trying to scam me as a grandkid. I don't think, you know, so anyway,

John Dehlin [01:08:02] your grandparents believed in this.

John Hamer [01:08:04] Yeah, yeah. There's all kinds of people believe on all kinds of. I mean, I meet people all the time who come here in Toronto who believe all kinds of things that I consider to be folk magic stuff about energy fields, about coincidences as signs, and all kinds of different things that are still quite prevalent today. Yeah. And I don't think that they're telling it to scam me. I think that they earnestly believe a lot of this stuff.

John Dehlin [01:08:39] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormastories.org better sing this song

John Hamer [01:08:51] just because I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy was.

John Dehlin [01:08:58] Wiser is a song written and performed by Mormon Stories listener Russell Ash, a message intended for his children to have love and kindness be their guiding star.

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1009

John Hamer [00:00:11] Your mom and me, we've seen this life with eyes that only see in black and white.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

John Hamer [00:01:03] Tune me out if you must I know you've heard enough

John Dehlin [00:01:14] But I sing

John Hamer [00:01:15] this song just because I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy was I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy well, I'll talk about a little bit about the belief versus them also being internally skeptical too. So I was just gonna say anyway then here if a medium who's giving a voice to a spirit, I think in that whole spiritual era when they're doing the seances, there's definitely some people doing the seances that have a thing rigged up so that they knock the table underneath and they're doing a scam. There's a bunch of people sitting around in these parties who, you know, are doing a Ouija board and they really think that they're actually getting messages, right?

Joseph Smith as Treasure Seer and Religious Seer

John Dehlin [00:01:55] Yep.

John Hamer [00:01:56] And likewise, people looking into the seer stone, they are envisioning, they believe their own, what they're, you know, their own thing that they're looking for. They're sending themselves into this kind of visionary trance whether, whether you want to, you know, whatever you want to describe about how anyway that your own visions of the spirit world or its non existence. So they know there's more to the art, like I say, than they let on to the audience. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're just simply lying cynics up and down. So often they believe in the magic, even if they know that some of what they're doing is a trick. Got it. So I'm going to say, suggested like I say, that when Joseph Sr. Is about to lose his farm in 1825, he takes his son on a money digging expedition which fails and leads to him losing his farm. You know, if you don't believe in money digging, you know, this wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do. He isn't the smartest guy in the world. But anyway, that's what he does. But I'M going to argue then even more remarkable if Joseph Jr. Doesn't believe in money digging and he doesn't believe in being able to kind of see where the kind of buried treasure are and all this when he's later church president and he's trying to solve this just massive debt that has occurred because of them building the Kirtland Temple, which is so much more than they could afford and everything else. He, in 1836, takes a bunch of core leaders, the church, to Salem, Massachusetts, to find what he's foreseen as a treasure that's buried in the basement of a house which doesn't end up being there. And it fails. And it actually ends up. They're not only, you know, there's wasting time on a treasure hunt, which. Why is he doing that if he knows that there's no treasure? You know, I mean, is it. I don't. You know, ultimately, again, just like his dad, they end up having. They lose everything, they go bankrupt and they have to flee the States, you know, because of that. So.

John Dehlin [00:03:46] So it sounds like you believe that Joe Smith Sr. And possibly Joe Smith Jr. Believe some are all of the underpinnings of this treasure seeking.

John Hamer [00:03:56] Yeah, So I think that they think that there's treasures. I think he wrote it into the Book of Mormon because he believes it, too.

John Dehlin [00:04:02] Okay, all right, cool.

John Hamer [00:04:04] That. That's there. And I think he also believes in the slippery stuff. But on the other hand, I think that he. Well, maybe I have a next slide. So here's the next slide. But on the other hand, I'm going to suggest that we have more than one voice in us. So whereas one of these, if you've. I don't know if you've seen this movie, this kid's movie, it's pretty funny. So anyway, whereas these different voices are all speaking inside. And one of these voices may well say, you're the greatest. You're a seer. You have all these powers that God's given you. There might be a voice that says, but you never can find anything. You're just making it up, you know, all of these things. Maybe it doesn't actually work. So I think that, in fact, you know, there are all kinds of interior voices that we hold and we can actually hold inside of ourselves mutually contradictory things. And so, I mean, one of my favorite ones is that happens in Star Trek as well. So anyway, one of the Star Trek episodes as an example, they go and they find an archaeological thing about a society. It's this. This thing that where each one of the Pearsons, what they shows is that inside the. Inside the representation of their self and their psyche, there's all the little ones inside, right. Inside the Kirlinmiskos, because there's all the voices that make up, you know, your internal contradictions. Right, got it. So I'm gonna suggest that whereas although some people do that, the very few people see themselves, you know, like, you know, I'm a villain and they're doing the. I don't know, I think even actually a lot of the James Bond villains don't think of themselves as villains, but maybe some of them do, you know, literarily. So people out from the outside, as we are looking at other people, we see them as conscious frauds, maybe with deliberate plots, consciously to deceive. But very few people tend to view themselves that way and instead justify their deceptions as white lies told with good intentions. And chronic liars, you know, often believe their own lies first. And so I've had friends who I think of as just being just complete. I'm not. This is not. I'm not suggesting that Joseph Sr. Or Joseph Jr. Are pathological liars or something like that, but I'm saying even in the case of a pathological liar, that they often lead their own lie first. I've had people do just outrageous things where they lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, all the way up to where they get just completely caught in the lie. And it's amazing because I think, how could you ever have allowed you to go this far? Because once they get to the caught moment, there's just nothing that can be done. And they're just there like this. And I think it's because they're believing themselves, you know, at some level. Otherwise why would they go down that path? Why would you go do that money digging thing that you didn't have to do?

John Dehlin [00:06:44] It's kind of like the noble lie or the. I don't know. Dan Vogel has a. The prophet, like, what does he call it? The pious fraud. Right. It's this idea that there's actually deep, deep, deep down, there's truth. But sometimes you got to use deception to get people to the truth. Is that right?

John Hamer [00:07:03] Yeah. And so I think that. I think that there's also, like you say in Dan's sense of an actual pious frauds or where the person actually even is viewing themselves as a fraud and they know that they are. On the other hand, I'm actually even gonna argue that even though there's one of your little voices in there that knows that, that there's a whole chorus of voices that maybe are saying something quite different, you know, and that we should also be aware of the other voices.

John Dehlin [00:07:26] Got it.

John Hamer [00:07:26] And so I think that in that same sense of what you're talking about, that one of these key texts for understanding Joseph Smith, one of the essentially most famous sequence in the Book of Mormon, which is in Christ first Nephi, chapter 1, verses 113 to 115, which is the LDS version, chapter 4, verses 12 to 13. And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again, slay him, slay Laban, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Behold, the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. And it is better that one man should perish than a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief. So, you know, this is a, you know, a key, huge argument for good ends justify bad means. Right. So in this case, it's the extreme case, you're going to murder somebody in their sleep, but because of this very good end that you want to achieve. Right?

John Dehlin [00:08:23] Yep. And those come from just voices in the head that we can call the spirit. But really, how do you know when it's the spirit versus just your head? Right.

John Hamer [00:08:32] Well, yeah, it could be. I mean, it's literary. So if that spirit here is literary. Yeah, but yes, and so, yeah, I'm not necessarily. It could be a voice in the head anyway. We don't have to even assume a voice in the head because it's literary as opposed to anyway, as opposed to testimony. Right. But I'm just suggesting that in terms of the overall, whether there's a voice or not, the overall philosophy, philosophical thing is the same underground underlying it, which is the principle of whether, you know, you can do some really bad thing like murder somebody if it's gonna have amazing consequences. You see, you go back in time and kill baby Hitler, you know, or something like that, because you know what, all the bad things are gonna happen. So he still, it still hasn't done all of those, you know, things that are gonna lead to that, to what, where he ultimately ends up being. But you kill him as a, when he's still an 8 year old and therefore, you know, as innocent as you can be. Right, right. So anyway, if you can justify that kind of a extreme case, then I think that you can also ultimately justify this, which is to say when you are being called out a bunch of times again and again, again after four years, that people want to have some kind of proof that these plates that you've been talking about are real and physical in some tangible way that you are able to give them a prop of a box that they can heft in order to. Even though you know that there's no actual physical gold plates inside the box. So, in other words, you have done this. You've followed the same precept that is in. In the Book of Mormon itself, which is there is an incredibly good end, if you believe that. I mean, I think that the book is trying to. It does believe that the author of the book. There's an incredibly good end here, and that's going to justify a couple little petty deceptions.

John Dehlin [00:10:33] Got it. Yep.

John Hamer [00:10:36] And so, just as ironically, I'll just mention, since so much of the Book of Mormon is simply comes directly from the Bible, it's sort of ironic that the source of this text is actually from a particular place in the Gospel of John where we read that there is this conspiracy. This is not a historical conspiracy, but it's one that's told in the Gospel of John's description. It's a conspiracy between the Sadducees and the Pharisees to kill Jesus. And so when we read it there, it says in John 11:49, 50, one of them named Caiaphas, being the high priest of the same year, said unto them, ye know nothing at all, nor. I'm covering my text here. Okay, yeah. Or consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation perish. Not. So, in other words, it's better here that we kill Jesus, you know, so that one man is going to die rather than the whole nation perish. And so even though this is quoted as essentially or reworked as an affirmative statement, so in other words, that we should be killing one guy so that the nation doesn't perish, in fact, in the biblical texts, the evangelist here is actually saying the opposite. In other words, that the high priest here is immoral for making this immoral argument. Right. So in other words, this isn't the teaching of Jesus or Christ or God the way it is in the Book of Mormon. It's actually the opposite. Right.

John Dehlin [00:12:01] So it got flipped somehow.

John Hamer [00:12:02] Antichrist conspiracy. Yeah. So anyway, as we're kind of drawing to, you know, like, you know, pull this all together, a lot of times when we are talking about Joseph Smith's treasure seeker or folk magic seer background, there is kind of a sense. Well, you know, when he was. When he was young or whatever, he was maybe involved in this kind of folk magic because his dad got him into it or whatever. But then by the. By a certain point, he started having. He had some visions of God and actual angels and things like that. And then he became something quite different, a religious seer. But the actual. And so that'll, for example, in rough stone rolling, the way that that sort of accomplished is all the treasure digging stuff can kind of just be put off in its own little chapter. And then it's therefore not part of the, the actual narrative of the rest because we've already dealt with it and we aren't, we aren't just intertwining it the way it is in the actual chronology. But I just. Anyway, this is a very simple timeline that I strung together here. That's just showing how essentially the treasure seer, Joseph Smith Treasure seer JOSEPH Smith RELIGIOUS SEER is entirely intertwined, you know, so depending on what the dating for it is, you know, in spring of 1820, Joseph Jr. Has a vision that's later remembered as what's called the first vision. It wasn't called that at the time. We call it that now in that same time period, his contemporaries say that he has been leading a money digging company all around Palmyra for then in the next couple years. So right at the time of the first vision and thereafter there's money digging going on. You mentioned the finding of the brown seer stone while digging at the Chase's. Well, that's then two years later in 1822. So the next year is the year. So while that after he has that seer stone in September 22nd. So on this magic date, the autumnal equinox, he has a vision of a spirit who shows him the location of buried gold plates. And he visits that and we'll see. Then I wrote it here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times. He may not have actually done it every time. He later reports that it's later reported that he visited every, every year on that same kind of magic date of the autumnal equinox, but because of different failures to appease the spirit in different ways, he came with either bring the right person, so it's the first, the second year he was supposed to have brought Alvin, but Alvin died. Then ultimately he decides that the person that he was supposed to bring is Emma. And so he brings her there on the fifth time, or he comes and he has greed in his heart. And so therefore he hasn't approached it with the right sense. And so then the spirit, the plates, if he's grabbed him, they suddenly are back in the box, right?

John Dehlin [00:14:59] So this whole Book of Mormon narrative is drenched in the folklore from the very dates he's claiming to have these visions with the spirits protecting the treasure, which is Moroni or Nephi, whatever name he's using at the time. He's doing it on a very well known date of folklore. Right, sure. And these treasures are being guarded, protected by a spirit, which fits with the Captain Kidd, Benjamin Franklin sort of narrative of the treasure being protected by spirits and they're even being withdrawn. Right, right. So that's just. It's the whole Book of Mormon narrative as it's originally being told or happening is being drenched with this folk magic, treasure digging stuff. It comes out of it. It doesn't appear a whole cloth. It comes out of. Right, right.

John Hamer [00:15:53] It's the same exact context, you know, and so, and by the way, and I'm also showing like here, timeline wise, it's exactly the same time as all the rest of the money digging time, you know, so it's, it's on the one hand exactly the same kind of experience. And on the other hand it's also this time period when he's busily engaged in money digging and scrying in a secular sense, if you want to call it that, essentially in a folk magic sense, it's not really secular. So anyway, the, you know, so again, he gets the. Right after that vision of the first vision of the Moroni and the second one where he isn't able to achieve the plates and the third, then in 1825, you know, he's part of the money digging company with his father, downboarding at the Hales, where he meets Emma that ultimately results in their elopement. But essentially he's down there because they're money diggers. You know, in the next year in March 1826, that's when he's up in South Bainbridge in the Colesville area, the area where, you know, where the Colesville branch is ultimately organized. You know, he's tried in court as a disorderly person, as a glass looker, as a person who is deceiving essentially the Knight family about whether or not he can find hidden treasure. And essentially the testimony that Joseph Knight has is that he does claim that he can do that, but it's actually true. And so this is a problem for actually the defense because New York State law at the time doesn't make any distinction between an actual seer and one who's, you know, a fraud. It's both of it's illegal. So anyway, so he ends up having to leave, you know, Leave town on leg bail, which is to say they take him, you know, don't, you know, leave the county and we won't bug you, you know, from there. Then he's back with his friends, you know, going to treasure dig in Harmony, Pennsylvania again. And he's going there to do that, you know, elopement after he eloped with Emma, much to his new father in law's dismay because he knows this young guy as only as a disreputable person who's a money digger and not a farmer. He at a certain point to go down there, he promises his father in law that he's going to give up the stone gazing and money digging and settle down to farming. They make an arrangement to that effect and he gets a little piece of property that he starts working on and starts wanting to farm. But it's that very same time period, just the next month that Joseph is back in Manchester Palmyra, where he says he has obtained the gold plates. And then it's the end of that year when the dictation begins for the part that's now lost.

John Dehlin [00:18:39] Okay, couple cool questions. Is that all right? Yeah. So I think it's important to note, and I don't want to overstate this or over dramatize it, but this is illegal activity that he's doing all along. So from 1820 to 1827, he's breaking the law doing things that cause people to end up in jail, is that right?

John Hamer [00:19:05] Yeah, you're not allowed to, you're not allowed to do this kind of scrying. So the way, the way you have to get in jail about it is essentially what ends up happening is that the members of the Knight family who thinks that he's a fraud, you know, essentially go and they swear out an order to get him arrested and then he's brought to court and that kind of a thing.

John Dehlin [00:19:26] But it's illegal, the whole thing, it's illegal activity, right?

John Hamer [00:19:30] Yeah. You're not allowed to, you're not allowed to pretend. You're not allowed to look into glass and into balls and tell people where to find lost things.

John Dehlin [00:19:39] And so this is, and this is, so this is a bit of a different image that we have than what we have of Joseph Smith growing up, at least in the LDS Church. You know, we see that he, you know, as a boy, his leg had the surgery and he refused the alcohol. And then he studied the King James version of the Bible and he reads the James passage and he has the first vision and he's trying to figure out which church is true. But the narrative that we've been told is always that he's this kind of earnest, you know, noble, righteous, valiant of a young man who ends up founding a church. And it's not to say that he's worse than dirt, but this paints a very different picture, which is that he was involved from a very young age in a lot of shady, illegal behavior. I don't mean to pick on him, but is that fair to say?

John Hamer [00:20:37] Yeah. So I've actually highlighted the treasure digging components of all this to show that it is, like you say, one of the major activities that he and his family are involved in during this time period. Does that mean that he also isn't an earnest religious believer? So, yeah, the problem, like you say, is not that the other isn't true, that he didn't. He did read and study the King James Bible. He did, you know, go to revivals. He did probably. I mean, I think very likely he did pray. And he maybe also, I think had envisioned. Envisioned things, you know, spirits that are religious as opposed to magic. Right. So in other words, that there is religious conviction too, but the problem here is that this portion of it is left out of the narrative. And so you're not getting the full picture is the problem. Not that the component is there.

John Dehlin [00:21:25] Just like there are dudes in the prison at Point of the Mountain who are very Christian and very religious. Right. You can be, you can be criminal and religious, right?

John Hamer [00:21:34] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:21:35] Yeah. Okay. Another thing. So we know that likely the first vision story is something he wrote back into history. And we, we think that because there's. The first account we ever have of him actually writing it down was in 1832. Right. Is. Is. And is there anyone who ever claimed to have heard him told that story prior to 1832 that, you know, of?

The First Vision and Its Historical Context

John Hamer [00:22:02] We don't have. So we don't have the. So, no, we don't have anything from that. You know, in other words, that comes from that time period. Right. So the. So it's not. So even though we tell that maybe I have the next slide even about this. No, I don't. I was thinking I was going to talk about any. So even though we tell the story this way now. So in the kind of post 1844 universe we, you know, have. In Latter Day Saint tradition, we almost always begin the story or, you know, like at the pivotal moment is the first vision, but this is not the way it was told or understood by Joseph Smith and his contemporaries. And so when my ancestors, like I mentioned, joined in 1832, 1833, they would not have heard the first vision story at all. They had those kind of discussions. They wouldn't have heard about it. What they heard about was the Book of Mormon story.

John Dehlin [00:22:54] And I'm just wondering, is there any evidence that he ever told anyone about the first vision in the 1820s? The answer would be no. Right?

John Hamer [00:23:03] Well, I think. Well, so they would have later recollections than maybe they did, but they don't have anything for sure that's contemporary from that time period because he's not important and it's not a particularly important vision.

John Dehlin [00:23:13] Okay, so here's the real question I was asking. When he is supposedly. You've got it here, 1823, there's a vision of a spirit showing him the location of the golden plates and he's going back and returning to the site regularly. Are there people at the time? Is he telling people this at the time? Oh, it's almost September 22nd, Mom, Lucy or I've got to go back to that place where.

John Hamer [00:23:43] So that's much more well known. So in other words, he is telling people at the time about the Moroni part, or he doesn't say Moroni, but anyway about the gold plates. So he is telling people about this later 1823 vision. So that vision, they are being told and in fact, actually long before the, you know, the, you know, the. Long before he says he actually obtains the plates, he already is telling stories from the plates. Right. So we have Lucy's recollection that, you know, one of the things that they did as a family activity is that Joseph would tell stories of the ancient inhabitants and all their customs and wars and all that kind of a thing. So in other words, he's already practicing the oral story composition process in any portion of this four years between when he's announced that the existence of the plates in a vision and before he said that he has obtained the plates in person.

John Dehlin [00:24:41] So he's got. And of course he's talking about plates. I mean, I guess I shouldn't say of course, but you would think that if in 1823 he's already talking about the gold plates that eventually, you know, he claims to translate the Book of Mormon from. Does that mean in 1823 he necessarily has the idea of the Book of Mormon already in mind, that he's plotting that seven years before its release, or is it a tale that grows.

John Hamer [00:25:12] Yeah, so I would say that we don't know for, you know, we can't be sure, but we can tell. We could Definitely see evolution of the idea. Right. So early. There's a sense that he has, that maybe other people will be involved in, in the coming forth or the translation of the plates and things like that. He's supposed to bring somebody with him to, to, you know, achieve the plates when he gets to, when he gets to harmony with, when he's married to Emma. Emma's pregnant. He foresees that he's his first son is going to be a boy, and that the boy will as a child be able to, you know, be the translator of the plates. But long before that child is born stillborn and doesn't actually occur, you know, that prophecy hasn't occurred. The actual dictation process has started. So in other words, he's already started doing that. But you get a sense of that, that there isn't, let's say, some kind of a master plan. But rather, as circumstances are changing, you have already announced the sense that there's plates and over time then you know how that actually manifests changes. Certainly once the last 116 pages were lost, then the beginning part of it changed. Right. So there, you know, so it is responding to the circumstances. The fact I've mentioned before that in the Book of Mormon there's the whole, the whole Anthon story is in the Book of Mormon. That obviously is a change from, you know, he wouldn't have written it like that in 1823. Right. So what we kind of see is that there's a, an emerging, he has an emerging vision of what the result of this vision of buried plates is going to achieve. And the ultimate, you know, result of it is the Book of Mormon. But anyway, it's not because there's a plan as of 1823, I would say.

John Dehlin [00:27:08] Okay, so, but, but that, but that is kind. If you believe that he just was the author of it and not, not it being a translation. That's kind of a long con. Right. That's a seven year con, basically, of starting to tell people, oh, I know about these plates and Open Angel's been visiting me and oh, I'm bringing people to the site three or four times. And, and so, so it is something that was envisioned very early.

John Hamer [00:27:35] Yeah, but I don't necessarily think it has to be a con. So here's why. So in the same way that when you are being a seer and you're looking into your seer stone, your crystal ball, and you are envisioning a buried treasure, that you know the location of Captain Kidd's treasure, you may well really believe that, you know, where that is. You know, his, his rivals, they themselves, they see the vision of the plates as well. You know, maybe he's conned them into thinking that. But anyway, they think that they have it, they want to get a hold of the plates. They think that they've seen them envision. So he may well, you know, have this sense that they're, you know, that there are those plates exist. Right. And that, and then from that, what takes shape is his understanding of what his calling to do with these plates is and that that changes based on, again, where he is in life, his circumstances, everything like that at some point or other. You know, like I say, there's no one of the things that we can say when we get it past the visionary stage. So when it's beyond looking into the crystal ball and to actually holding, you know, a box where he says that the plates are physically nailed inside this box and you can lift the box up, then we know that, in my opinion, that that's where, where you can say they can't explain this any other way than he's created a prop. And so there's some level of deception going on. So whether or not, though, the whole thing is some kind of a long con, I think that that doesn't necessarily follow, although you can certainly argue it. There's no way to say that it's not okay.

John Dehlin [00:29:19] But I mean, he's got the idea of a book as early as 1823, and he's telling people about it. Right?

John Hamer [00:29:25] Right. Yeah. And so the idea of the book is also, you know, very common. The same way as, you know, the money digging itself or the idea that the ancient inhabitants who built all of these mounds had some high civilization that is lost. And so the local archaeological enthusiasts who are all, I mean, you mentioned Thomas Jefferson in this regard. Thomas Jefferson himself went in, excavated one of the Indian mounds, Right. And so he went through and documented it and called upon other people to do the similar kinds of archaeological, or actually proto archaeological, actually grave robbing work, you know. You know, it was not very scientific. Most of his successors in that Thomas Jefferson was of a different order and caliber than like the people who followed. And so one of the things we're going to do when we talk about the Book of Mormon is talk about the contemporary belief, what's now called the myth of the Mound builders, and how the Book of Mormon narrative is in fact just telling what everybody understood at the time to be that very true history. But what we now understand, having done way more history in archaeology, and anything like that was simply mistaken history. Okay, so in that sense, I'd say that lots of people understood that the history of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas was the myth of the mound builders. And they all felt as they were all digging up the mounds, that the only way that they would be able to access that history is if they encountered that a text that was buried with it and that that would have to be engraved on stone or metal in order for it to have survived. Or I mean, the way Solomon Spaulding has his happen is that I think it's not parchment, but it's in a very secure, you know, rock box or something like that. So in other words, how you're going to be able to get access to that history. But the idea of that history is quite ubiquitous.

Evolution of Joseph Smith's Religious Purposes

John Dehlin [00:31:23] And so, and so if we can, if we can hold to our idea that Joseph starts out in a world of folk magic and seeing and that sort of thing, and then we see that idea progress to the point where Joseph actually thinks he's receiving stories about angels and Native Americans and their ancestors. Do you see this as Joseph maybe throughout these 10 years believing that God is teaching him and telling him stories about real people that really existed and that Joseph is forming in his mind a story or a narrative, believing that he is going to actually find real plates and believing that he will be putting to paper these visions and stories that God is channeling into his brain about these mound builders and their ancestors. Do you think that's what's going on here?

John Hamer [00:32:17] So I think that that case can also be made, yes. So in other words, I think that it's completely possible for us to think that he maybe is believing again in this kind of folk magic, essentially the same way that scrying maybe works also communication, seance style, with first spirits like Moroni, what's ultimately called moroni, also as understood angels, whatever, but then also ultimately channeling the divine voice itself. Right. And so I think that it's possible that that kind of sense of channeling would be the same as, you know, in other words, there are some of the voices in him are saying that that's true and a true prophetic thing. And others might have been skeptical and might have felt that he was deceiving. And so at a certain point, the ones that are end justifies the means can take over and say, since I can't take anymore, I've got this true calling, but no one believes me. And so then the, the, you take over and make a prop that is, you know, not True, Right. That is an actual clear deception. So I think that's one possibility. It's also possible, you know, to argue that this. That this is a long con. So I don't. Again, we can't. Lacking a confession on his part, what I'm trying to do here is understand how we can understand the guy within the historical context that he's in. And I'm arguing that because the way that we envision this now, so when we vision this whole thing as being really literal about all of these kind of supernatural interventions and things like that, the way they're portrayed in Mormon paintings and sculpture movies, that it becomes impossible to conclude anything other than what Gordon Hinckley would always say, which is either truth or fraud. But I'm saying that based on this kind of folk magic, religious context that this is coming out of, we don't necessarily know the level of how he understands these kind of spiritual practices. He knows that it's not visitations the way we now picturing it in those kind of ways. But does he think that this is an actual spiritual or supernatural or even divine calling? I think it's possible.

John Dehlin [00:34:33] Got it. Okay, great.

John Hamer [00:34:35] Okay. So just to tie all those things together, you know. So we've already said how buried treasure has spirit guardians. So as a treasure seer, Joseph already envisioned spirits guarding the treasure that the money diggers seek, the spirit guardian. The gold plates is envisioned the same way in a vision, which is to say not a visitation as it's always portrayed in the artwork. The spirit guarding the plates requires magic rituals to release them. Visiting on the equinox, bringing particular people, having particular motives, all that kind of thing. And I'm just going to mention here in terms of this angel thing, so spirit angel, Nephi Moroni. I don't think it even matters because

John Dehlin [00:35:11] tell people what the controversy is.

John Hamer [00:35:13] So people think that if so the words are used interchangeably. Some of the early accounts where people talking about Joseph encountering a spirit and this kind of thing. And obviously in the same way that you want to write your power with working with the rod out and make it be, you know, the power of Aaron, so that it doesn't seem as, you know, as embarrassing folk peasant magic or something like that, and you want to write out seer stone and instead say Urim and Thummim, because those are something in the Bible. So as you want to, as you're pulling out of the kind of common people milieu and the embarrassment of that people would like to. When you get into more sophisticated circles, you Want to. You want to have a more sophisticated narrative to switching the word angel for, I'm sorry, you know, stop saying spirit and start saying angel. But one of the. The reality is anyway, that Mormons now, what Mormons now call angels, the word that Mormons use, they use the word angel for like angel moroni, as an office, meaning the office of a divine messenger. And Mormons, I think, in Mormon cosmology, view that as either beings with spirit bodies, so essentially a spirit that hasn't been born in the mortal life yet, premortal spirit, or someone who is died but not been resurrected. So in other words, you know, that's either of those kind of people with spirit bodies can be angels because they are called to be a messenger for God. Right. Or they could be a resurrected being who already has a physical body. So that's essentially what Mormons use the word angel to mean for those first two categories, though. I mean, usually they don't have the first category, but for that second category, in other words, of a being that has died and isn't yet resurrected. So, for example, if there was an ancient prophet, Moroni or Nephi, who had died and who was now coming back even on a divine mission, what that being would be? In normal or standard Christianity, Islam, Judaism, that would be a ghost or a spirit, not an angel, because an angel in those in that cosmologically, in normal Christianity, Islam and Judaism, it refers to a different order of being that exists somewhere between humanity and God in the celestial order. Right. So it's not in that sense. Mormons don't believe in angels anyway. So they believe in. They have a different understanding fundamentally and that spirits are called angels or whatever. But it's mostly, I would argue that the reason why you want to use the word angel and not spirit is because if you're saying that a ghost visit Joseph Smith, it doesn't sound. I don't know, I mean, it sounds worse. Right, Right.

John Dehlin [00:37:55] Yeah. And so. And there was some confusing about who the angel was visiting Joseph. Right, Right.

John Hamer [00:38:02] So, yeah. So ultimately all of these early angelic visitations. So Moroni, it's not in the earliest that he's given a name. It's later interpreted to be Moroni in some. In one account or a couple accounts that they're, you know, it's maybe interpreted to be Nephi, whether, you know, in any event is probably not a named spirit in the original, in the original time at all. That's not contemporary to it. Likewise, certainly the later identification, for example, of the founding of the church Angelic visions that are ultimately labeled John the Baptist and the Apostles Peter, James and John. Again, those visions of angels or spirits were not identified with those names at that time. So it's only later that they're re remembered and given. Given those kind of names. And so.

John Dehlin [00:39:00] And at one point it's given the name Nephi, and then later it's given the name Moroni.

John Hamer [00:39:05] Right, right. And I think it's, it's arguing. I think you can argue it both ways on that. But in any event, I would say that the reality is, is that it's an unnamed spirit who's later understood by Mormon definition to be an angel. You know, who then ultimately people decide and you know, is that the angel, the spirit that it was is Moroni. But like you say, in some of the cases it's Nephi. I don't think it's as strong as all that to say was Nephi for sure first and then later Moroni? I think it's a little more complicated. But anyway, I think it's also kind of irrelevant.

John Dehlin [00:39:35] Okay, so essentially it's a vision. Well, it does show that the story's growing, right? That it's, it's always the idea of a story where they're always adding to it and sometimes changing things.

John Hamer [00:39:46] Well, so what? Yeah, exactly. So what happens is, you know, it's, it's. To begin with, it is not a visitation. It's a vision. And when you're closing your eyes and you're seeing an angel or a spirit, it isn't. It isn't. You know, so you can later, when you re remember that event, memory changes every time you retell something. And so, and so in that sense, because it's already a spiritual or ethereal thing at most, again, it could be remembered differently, you know, and the significance of it changes based on where you are at your time. So like I mentioned with the Peter, James and John stuff, that vision is whatever vision there had been originally, which is radically remembered differently in the context when they later have a Melchizedek priesthood. And then it was. And then it's retroactively said to be the restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood. That same thing happens with the ceiling power vision, which has nothing to do contemporaneously with the idea of sealing power, which hasn't evolved yet, but rather it's then later re remembered to occur in Kirtland during a little after the dedication.

John Dehlin [00:40:56] Got it. Okay, that's good. Thanks for clearing that up. That's good to know.

John Hamer [00:41:00] How do we tell that is because of anachronisms. Right. So nobody contemporaneously knows that they aren't acting that way. So, for example, with the priesthood, they don't immediately do all those priesthood things. And in fact, none of the early members have heard of those things. And so you mentioned that same thing with the first vision. So, in the same way, because the first vision hadn't had that kind of importance, but was probably important to Joseph Smith as his own personal born again or conversion story at that time period, but was not seen as an authorization to found a religious movement, it's only later remembered in that context when he actually had founded a religious movement. So in that same sense, none of the early people are remembering him talking about it at all. And so actually, all the way up through early founders of the church, like the Whitmers have no recollection of that.

John Dehlin [00:41:45] Yeah. Later they're like, hey, someone's making this up. Because I never heard about any of this stuff.

John Hamer [00:41:49] Right. And it just. It's just. That doesn't mean that vision didn't happen. It's just that it didn't happen in the way it's now remembered and interpreted.

John Dehlin [00:41:59] Right.

John Hamer [00:42:01] Okay. So like I say, whether then it's spirit or an angel, Nephi or Moroni, the vision is like, you know, all the other spirits and angels envisioned by early members of the church and their contemporaries. So it's not like this is the only time people see angels. There's all kinds of these early members that are seeing angels and angelic visions. We have times when they're seeing angels. Everybody's seeing angels in the Kirtland Temple, when they're all even together, you know, and so how is that happening? It's because the scales are taken off their physical eyes. They're seeing the visions with their spiritual eyes, you know, when the veil is lifted. And then they envision spiritual beings all around them. And in that same way, then, just like with the money digging, these early Mormon counts are not unique. The historical record is filled with, you know, with this kind of thing. This is what. How people have done. Right.

John Dehlin [00:42:48] Yeah. And that comes. That comes in later when Martin Harris admits that the witnesses didn't actually hold the plates with their physical hands and see them with their physical eyes. He basically claims that it was things they saw in their mind. Like when you had me envision the sunset at the beginning of this podcast. Right, right.

John Hamer [00:43:06] And we say we have. Every time when we have. When we see the actual example of it close at hand, it's like that it's like what Martin Harris specifically described quite clearly about, about the vision of the three witnesses. But it's also like the vision, the three degrees of glory that happens with Sidney, you know, Rigdon and Joseph Smith and the temple. In other words, that it's, they're there, they're all around them, they're talking about, do you see this? I see that, do you see this? That kind of thing. So that's what I also. Then we've already talked about this. But the first vision is also a vision, not a visitation. And so it's retroactively viewed as the origin of the restoration. The experience that's now called the first vision is largely unknown to early members. We've said in the earlier, less anachronistic retellings of the experience, essentially Joseph has a vision in which God or Christ, one or two, either one told him his sins are forgiven. And there are just lots and lots of contemporaries who have similar spiritual experiences. Essentially the context of second Great Awakening revival preaching is to try to get people to have this kind of experience. So the whole reason why this time period invents essentially hellfire and damnation kind of preaching is to get people to convince that they have, they're essentially in a sinful condition, they have no hope, they fall on the ground, as explained in all of the revivals that occur in the Book of Mormon. And they are then only lifted up because they feel in the spirit that they've essentially been born again and their sins are forgiven them. And so that's how they have that kind of experience. And so in that happening, they often record that they have a vision of God who tells them, or Christ and tells them that their sins are forgiven. And so this is something that we have anyway, at least dozens of examples that are almost identical records of.

John Dehlin [00:44:57] So we would grow up in the LDS tradition thinking, oh my gosh, some random farm boy in the middle of New York claims to have seen God, right? When in reality he would have grown up with all sorts of stories of other people having visits from God or visions with God or visions of Jesus. And he would have been one of many, many people that would have made that claim. He would have gotten the idea of having a vision from God or Jesus from a bunch of other people who made the same claims. And it may not have even been that remarkable for someone to have claimed that back then. Whereas now we hear, oh my gosh, some little 14 year old boy talked with God and Jesus. We're like, it's a miracle. That's Never happened to me. But in some sense it was actually really common back then, relatively speaking, versus today in a more secular society. No one's having those experiences, or at least you don't hear about any credible person having those experiences. And so it seems more remarkable when you hear about it now, thinking back then, when, in, when in reality, when it was happening, it wouldn't have seemed possibly that remarkable at all. Is that fair to say?

John Hamer [00:46:06] Sure, absolutely. So I mean, what's happening at the time is this was a part of the whole second Great Awakening. You wanted to get people to have this sense of a personal spiritual experience with the divine, where you feel that Christ's atoning power or grace washes over you. And that's the only thing, that grace or whatever is the only thing that makes you a true Christian and also makes it so that it makes it essentially so that, you know, you're born again is what born again Christians call it now. But that's. But essentially in the initial circumstances, that's actually what's causing you to be part of that kind of revival group as opposed to just joining up by baptism. Which is why, for example, in the earlier part of the Book of Mormon, when King Benjamin is doing his revival speech sermon in his reign, he isn't actually calling everybody to do baptism, but he's instead calling everybody to have this kind of born again experience. And it's only later in the narrative that with Alma, that the idea of meeting baptism arises.

Theology and Moral Themes in the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:47:27] So in some sense we're seeing the theology evolve throughout the book.

John Hamer [00:47:30] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:47:31] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:47:33] So anyway, like I've said a couple times here, although we sophisticated people in 21st century want to draw these clear lines between folk magic and legitimate religion, maybe or superstition. The Smith family is not sophisticated. I think they believe in the Bible, Christianity, folk magic, spirit, angels, God, Christ, dousing curses, magic circles, crying visions, both while they're asleep and while they're awake. And I think it's just all mixed up in their culture and also their own personal beliefs. And so the religious context that they come in, as I mentioned here, is this second Great Awakening, the burned over district. Although, you know, up until that time, European Americans are largely committed Christians. There are some Jews, of course, but anyway, there are no real established churches, especially in the frontier. It's amazing. Like the number of like actual physical church buildings that existed as of the Revolutionary War was like just, just a handful. I mean, it's crazy how few, you know, so it just hadn't caught up. But this changed dramatically with the Second Great Awakening and especially get going in the 1800s and the 1820s. And we know that the area that the Smiths live in is called the burned over district, which is just rapid expansion of sectarian denominations. So the Methodists, the Baptists, Presbyterians take off like nuts. And so this causes this religious division in the Smith family. And so both Joseph Sr. And Lucy Mack Smith are already skeptical of organized sex. And in fact, in the earliest version that we have of Joseph Smith's retelling of the first vision, he already knows by having done his Bible study that he feels that since none of the sects, since none of the Presbyterians or Anglicans or Episcopalians, in other words all the different groups that he's aware of are exactly like as he's reading about in the Bible, he already has decided that they don't represent the true Christianity, which is what both his parents believe. They instead have this earlier version of a personal study and relationship based on their own kind of reading of the Bible. But one of the things that happens in Joseph Junior's lifetime is Joseph Sr. Becomes convinced of one of his new teachings of Universalism. So we're aware today of an era of that Unitarian Universalism. And so the idea that's becoming popular here is that no just and merciful God, no merciful God could ever condemn a soul to an eternity of torment. That out of proportion it's disproportional punishment for whatever 50% of doing worse than good in a limited earth life to then have to suffer for all eternity. And so universalists argued that since that's doesn't reflect true justice or certainly not a merciful or loving God, that that's not the case and that in fact ultimately everybody would be, you know, achieve universal salvation anyway. That's. Joseph Sr. Was attracted to that, but as you mentioned that one of the issues maybe was, well, we'll talk about it anyway. In other words that if you were, if you believe that maybe you were able to like live your life and excuse your drinking and things like that because ultimately you don't feel fear. The hellfire is what people think anyway. So anyway, after though this revival in the fall of 1824, the mom, you know, Lucy and her three oldest children, including Hyrum, become Presbyterians and that causes them this religious divide. Joseph Jr. Later says he was partial to Methodism and Emma ultimately is a Methodist and they go to Methodist class together when they're married and living in harmony. But so anyway we've talked about anyway that Joseph Sr. Being a known Drunk. So one of the practical arguments against universalism was this. The fear of hellfire was necessary to prevent Christians from maintaining sinful, idle lives. And so, as we're going to see when we get into the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon argues very strongly. Joseph Jr. I'm saying, argues very strongly against his father's Unitarian and Universalist beliefs. And as we kind of have in this picture, one of the things. So as we'll fast forward to kind of this, one of the things that happens in the historical record that we know is how much he weeps when he sees his father baptized into his own organized church of Christ and healing the family sectarian division. So anyway, this is just a preview for the future ones. But one of the motives for this whole thing is, again, this pious end of healing the family's division is also part of the. Part of the motivation for the whole Book of Mormon project.

John Dehlin [00:52:16] I love it. Yeah, it's. So I think that when we think about, you know, when we learn, when we feel like we've been betrayed by the LDS Church for not having taught us the real history and we learned about polyandry, we learn about, you know, the Masonic influences on the temple ceremony and the Book of Abraham not matching up with the translation, we just think, oh, my gosh, he's a fraud. He was out for women, he was out for money. He was fooling people. But what you lay out is something that I've been feeling for quite some time, and I'm sure other people have really thought about this, and that's that Joseph Smith, like almost any prophet or, you know, religious inspired founder, was grappling with very real existential sort of questions of the day. He had, you know, he had had siblings die. He had had, you know, Alvin wasn't the only sibling of his to die. He's having all these preachers come in who are preaching this, that or the other is required to make it to heaven. So there's already this fear about, will I see Alvin again? Will I see my other dead siblings again? Who's gonna make it to heaven and who's not? And then he's got this religious turmoil between his dad and his mom. His dad's a universalist, isn't much for organized religion. And the mom is flirting with different religious traditions. And so there's this internal conflict in the family about which church is true and is it universalism or other things? And is baptism required or not? Because Alvin didn't apparently get baptized. And so a lot. Well, you know, just like you know, Emma noting that men are spitting tobacco in the temple, you know, leads to a revelation about the Word of Wisdom along with all the different temperance movements that were going around Ohio at the time. You know, you need to understand the context to understand the revelation. Understanding folk magic, understanding Smith family dynamics, peepstones, guardians of treasures as angels, treasures slipping leads to golden plates, leads to this idea of a moroni. All these questions about mound builders and Native Americans leads to questions about a book that should be made or books that could be created to answer these questions. And then you see all the theology in the Book of Mormon eventually potentially stemming from the theological sermons that Joseph was exposed to, that Emma was exposed to, that Lucy was exposed to, the questions about mortality and afterlife. You know, all those sermons reappearing in the book, you can basically say, and this is something that we'll get to with the Book of Mormon. Not only is the Book of Mormon not necessarily in and of itself a miracle, it's exactly the book that you would expect to be created if you were to understand everything about the historical Context of the 1820s in New York, Joseph Smith's own personal biography, and all the questions about Native Americans and all the religious debates of the time. It's basically all of this stuff we're talking about today is the soup or the milieu, the context that informs the book. Is that fair to say?

John Hamer [00:55:45] Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, once you are aware of the context and have a little bit of, also a broader perspective on just everything else, it's so part of its context. It's, in my opinion, I just find it inarguable. So that's why one of the reasons why I jumped at your chance to talk about this, because I'm just continuously amazed that people find it otherwise. And so just, you know, going through and making that case. I do want to make the point here because you brought up, you know, some of the later issues that I am not here trying to be an apologist for Joseph Smith. So when, you know, when we're gonna get to, you know, if we, if we were to do the whole history and get to the end.

John Dehlin [00:56:28] Oh, we will, we will.

John Hamer [00:56:30] Okay. So anyway, what he's doing, you know, with, you know, just in general with relationships with women in Nauvoo that he's calling marriages, including, you know, when my great, great, great, great grandparents gave, you know, their 15 year old daughter to him to be, you know, a wife. You know, this is nothing other than, you can say abusive authority at the, at the most terrible level because Here he is, he's every kind of authority, you know, he's legal, military, civil, judicial, you know, prophetic, you know, everything in their life. And this is how he's exercised that. So I'm not justifying that for a second. And also I'm also not. When we were talking about the particular verse in the Book of Mormon where essentially the philosophical proposition of ends justify means is essentially canonized, I also reject that personally, you know, as an ethical position. But my goal in this is to try to understand the people. And so how we can, given what we know about all of this, how do we, how can we best understand how this all fits together? And largely even in my trying to make explanations and essentially a window of trying to have some empathy for the, our ancestors here in understanding where they're coming from in some cases, I'm not actually even doing this as it's not about proof or not, because as far as I'm concerned, there are other places, and we'll talk about it, where we can show conclusively the Book of Mormon is a 19th century book. And so that's not what, you know, this is. A lot of these things are not about that kind of proof, but rather what we're trying to do is how do we understand these reports, these stories, given what we know?

John Dehlin [00:58:23] Yeah, yeah, it's just useful. It's just useful to kind of ground your worldview in the reality of the world and not in story or myth or legend, when you have much better, more plausible, reasonable explanations for, you know, for how to view something and upon which to base your worldview. It's a very different life if you believe the Book of Mormon is a historical document and that Native Americans literally come from Nephi and Lehi and they're all truly the God's chosen Israelites with blood of Israel running through their veins. And this is God's one true book and you need to obey it and the prophets that come out from it. That's a very different world than if you say, you know, view it as coming out of a very understandable 19th century historical context. That doesn't mean there can't be value or truth in it, but it's a very different foundation of a life when you see it for what it is versus maybe ways in which you are misled as to its founding. Does that make sense?

John Hamer [00:59:33] Yeah. So what I would say on that is that they're like you're saying the problem is not finding and deriving meaning from sacred story or myth. Even, you know, we can we can find presumably amazing truths in Hamlet. The problem is when we take, we take something that's not history and then literalistically believed, you end up with a worldview that is much like Joseph Smith seniors, where you really do believe that Captain Kidd's treasure is around the bend, you know, and you can, you know, lose the farm based on, you know, that incorrect literalistic belief. Right.

John Dehlin [01:00:16] Yeah, totally different. Well, cool. Well, this, I think. So is there anything else you want to cover today or does this kind of COVID what you had prepared for today?

Closing Reflections and Farewell

John Hamer [01:00:26] I think so. This is what I had covered for today. But yeah, plenty more to do because I want to, you know, kind of get into just why, you know, backwards and forwards. I don't want, on the one hand, I just, anyway, why I don't think that the Book of Mormon is why we have to be so, you know, amazed by it on the one hand or the why people, you know, have to come up with conspiracies to decide that Joseph Smith couldn't have composed it. So.

John Dehlin [01:00:57] Yeah. So what do our listeners have to look forward to? Our listeners and viewers, what do they have to look forward to in our next episode?

John Hamer [01:01:06] So the next episode I want to talk about the rest of the kind of American context where we're going to look at what were the theological or doctrinal controversies of the day, because then that'll also. We're not familiar with those anymore, except for in as much as they have lived on in Mormonism as fossils, because essentially most mainstream Christian tradition churches have moved on and they don't care about the particular issues that were driving everybody crazy in the 1830s. Likewise, those same ideas like universalism and every other kind of thing hadn't been dreamed of just a century or two before. But in any event, they are completely the context of actually understanding the theology and doctrine of the Book of Mormon, which is ultimately related to the later development of Mormon doctrine, but is actually not the same at all. The Book of Mormon doesn't have so much of what's the essentials to anyway, LDS or Utah Mormon doctrine, things like you've mentioned already, temples, eternal sealing families, all those things, a non monotheistic idea, progression theology, as opposed to the modalism that exists in the Book of Mormon, a very different idea of the divine itself. So anyway, so we'll look at all those kind of things so we can kind of see, you know, where all those come from and fit those into the context too.

John Dehlin [01:02:35] Yeah. And if I had to say what I'm most excited for It's John Hamer's theory of how the Book of Mormon got created.

John Hamer [01:02:42] Okay. Yeah, and that one, too. And then. Yeah. And so we'll also look at rumors of Joseph Smith being illiterate and that kind of thing.

John Dehlin [01:02:52] All right, well, John Hamer, I just want to. Is there any shout out you want to give or any sort of plug you want to make to our listeners before we sign off?

John Hamer [01:03:01] Yeah. So if you are interested in some of all of the different kinds of topics. So, for example, every Tuesday night at my congregation's website, which is Center Place, spelled the Canadian way, which is re. Centerplace, Ca. Every Tuesday night at 7:30 Eastern, I will give a lecture. And this following Tuesday, I'm actually doing one on medieval science and sorcery. And so all those things that we talked about in terms of the four humors, astrology, alchemy, we're gonna actually, like, look at those and look at how they had evolved in the Middle Ages and what their ancient classical precursors were. And so I think it'll dovetail very nicely in what we've been talking about in terms of the commoner folk magic that derives from that kind of medieval understanding.

John Dehlin [01:03:52] All right. And of course, if anyone wants to check out Community of Christ, they always can, Right?

John Hamer [01:03:58] Of course.

John Dehlin [01:03:59] Give us an update on the Seekers program, if there is one.

John Hamer [01:04:04] Well, so one of the things that, you know, we've been. One of the things that we're trying to intentionally do in Community of Christ is that because so many people are finding that they don't have a spiritual home in the faith tradition that they've grown up with. So, for example, you know, just because of the limitations of the role that women have, the ongoing policies of exclusion in the LGBT community, many people have come to Community of Christ to see, you know, what are your Restoration cousins? What is it actually kind of like. And so that program of kind of intentionally responding to that kind of seeking, we've called in Community of Christ, Latter Day Seekers. And so if you are interested in that, in other words, if you were seeking, you know, a spiritual home, an alternative within the Restoration tradition, where you don't have to, let's say, view all of these origin stories literally, you don't have to. All of the different things that, you know, obedience to authority, all the different things that related in terms of the LDS tradition, you can, you know, check us out and see what an alternative expression that has the same heritage. But as I've always said, everybody, in my view, we're not. We don't claim a community of Christ to be the one and only true church or that there is such a thing. Rather, we're all, in my view, in life's pilgrimage of life. There are all kinds of different ways that we approach the questions that you talk about our ancestors struggling with, the questions of life and death and meaning, of connectedness, of what our goals are, what's good and what's evil, what are we trying to promote in terms of making a better society. And, and people around the world and all the different traditions have different ways and different valuable ways that they address it, whether you're Buddhist, whether you're Hindu, whether you're an atheist. And so you don't have to, you know, have come on, you know, you don't have to follow the path that I'm on. I don't expect you to. Our principle and community of Christ in that sense is unity and diversity. So you would be very welcome. But you're also and welcome to see what we're, what we're about. But if you end up being feeling called or your life is moving in a different path, we also will welcome you on your way in that direction.

John Dehlin [01:06:28] And websites, people can search for all this good stuff.

John Hamer [01:06:32] Ladder day, I think ladder-day seekers.org that'll give you all the links you need.

John Dehlin [01:06:39] What about. Oh, and that's to your, to your Toronto congregation.

John Hamer [01:06:43] To the Toronto congregation. You can go to Centerplace ca and actually you can spell it either way because it redirects. But anyway, Centerplace ca.

John Dehlin [01:06:52] Okay, beautiful. Well, John Hamer, you're a gift to Mormonism. So it's such a thrill to have you back and I can't wait to have you back again soon to tell us how the Book of Mormon got created and other wonderful things.

John Hamer [01:07:06] All right, I'm looking forward to it. Talk to you again next week.

John Dehlin [01:07:08] Keep up the great work, John.

John Hamer [01:07:10] Thanks.

John Dehlin [01:07:10] And listeners, thanks for tuning in to Mormon Stories. Check us out@mormonstories.org if you value this type of programming. Please go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button. 1020, $100 a month, whatever you can afford. Helps to keep this podcast going, the Open Stories foundation going, and all the good things that we do. We really appreciate and need that support. We're grateful for Cody Layton who does our post production, our editing, and for the Open Stories foundation board that keep the Open Source foundation on the railroad tracks moving forward. Thanks everyone for your support. Please tell people about this episode. Please share it on social media like us and give us a positive review on our Mormon Stories podcast Facebook page. Please give us a positive review on iTunes, a five star review that helps in our ratings and of course follow us on Instagram Mormon Stories. Also on Twitter MormonStories. And yeah, please just share the word and help other people learn about this stuff. Thanks to all our donors that have made the billboard possible. If you're driving on I15 going north around 3200 South, I believe you'll see a Mormon Stories billboard there. We had several donors donate to make that possible. That'll be up through the end of December and we just want to thank everyone for making that possible as well. Our donors are amazing and as long as you guys keep supporting us, we'll keep doing great work and please look forward to interviews with David Bacavoy, more interviews with John Hamer and many other cool interviews coming up. We're going to keep bringing you great content for as long as we have support. So thanks again everybody. Take care.

John Hamer [01:08:53] I thought of another interview before you just sign up. I was just at the Parliament of World Religions with Matthew Bolton, who is the son of Apostle Andrew Bolton in Community of Christ, who last year won, his group won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in banning, you know, getting nuclear weapons banned. And so I'd like to bring Matthew on so that we. Because it's an interesting Mormon story. You're gonna want to hear about that, I think.

John Dehlin [01:09:17] I can't wait. Can't wait. Thanks for everything. Look forward to more partnership in the coming weeks, months and years. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org better sing this song

John Hamer [01:09:40] just because I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy was.

John Dehlin [01:09:47] Wiser is a song written and performed by Mormon Stories listener Russell Ash, a message intended for his children to have love and kindness be their guiding star.

John Hamer [01:09:58] It.

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