In this episode, we’re joined by historian and mapmaker John Hamer as he responds to Michelle Stone’s recent claims that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy. Drawing from historical records, primary sources, and his extensive research, John offers context and analysis on one of the most debated topics in Latter-day Saint history. Join us for an insightful conversation unpacking the complexities of Joseph Smith’s involvement in early Mormon polygamy.
John Hamer is an American-Canadian historian who has focused primarily on Mormon history and has published a number of books on the topic, including Scattering of the Saints: Schism Within Mormonism and House of the Lord: The Story of the Kirtland Temple. John Hamer was raised in the Mormon Church, left the religion and joined the Community of Christ Church in 2010 and now serves as a pastor in their Toronto Congregation.
Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Guest: John Hamer
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Introduction and Episode Overview
John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's March 20, 2025 and today we have a scandalously named episode for you. This is our guest's title for today's show. He's calling it Disinformation Addiction and Joseph Smith Polygamy Denialism. I was calling it something like a Mormon historian responds to, you know, Joseph Smith polygamy Denial. But for those of you who have not been regular viewers or listeners of Mormon Stories podcast, there's a very old and a quite new movement of faithful Latter Day Saints to deny that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, ever practiced polygamy.
John Dehlin [00:00:51] Recently we had Michelle Stone, who's viewed by many as the leader of the modern sort of movement to, you know, to perpetuate the idea that Joseph Smith didn't practice polygamy. We had her on Mormon Stories podcast recently. It was a six hour episode. She, I believe she's a lovely person, good heart, super smart, and she told her basic Mormon story and then shared her opinions and perspectives in a limited form about why she believes that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy. And we've also done an episode on LDS discussions about it. But when I was thinking about who my one of probably my favorite person in the world, I think I could safely say to address this topic, it's none other than John Hamer.
John Dehlin [00:01:40] And so let me bring him on now. John Hamer will not be an unfamiliar voice to Mormon Stories super fans. He's been on Mormon Stories podcast at least 11 times. But I'll bring him on now. Hey John Hamer, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories.
John Hamer [00:01:56] Hi John, I'm so happy to be back here. Always love hanging out with you and also love your audience, your program, everything. So thank you for having me.
John Dehlin [00:02:05] Likewise, we've had John Hamer in the past. The very first episode was episode 116, released January 24, 2010. So he's an OG. And the title of that was the LDS Succession Crisis. We've had John talking about joining the community of Christ as sort of a progressive or a post Mormon. He's talked about, he, he responded about the LDS Church's polygamy essays when they came out back in 2014.
John Dehlin [00:02:41] He has talked about folk magic, Joseph Smith and Mormon origins. John, you'll be interested to know that I was hanging out with my brother Joel this weekend, this past weekend in Florida and he just of his own accord, was watching your series on the creation of the Book of Mormon its 19th century context and your views on how the Book of Mormon was created, which I think is one of the best, if not the best series we've ever done on, you know, a thoughtful person's origins to the Book of Mormon. And we've done several other episodes, including some stuff on Mark Hoffman, undefining God, Redefining God and Rethinking spirituality.
John Hamer's Background and Current Work
John Dehlin [00:03:20] John Hamer, tell our guests just a tiny bit about you, who you are, and please tell them about what you're doing right now as well.
John Hamer [00:03:28] Sure. Gab so I'm a seventh generation Latter Day Saint, so I was born in the LDS Church, born, raised as a mission field Mormon, but deconstructed that for myself when I was a teenager when I didn't believe that the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham had historicity. And then really by the time I became an adult and could decide for myself, I left the church, left the movement as a religion for a whole long time and went off into the academic study of history and was very interested in that. But I was still interested in this as a culture. And I also then when I encountered Community of Christ and I didn't believe them at first that a church could actually not have a lot of be based on a lot of false truce claims, including especially one that traces its origin to Joseph Smith.
John Hamer [00:04:21] But I liked a lot of the progressive things in the direction that it had gone. And having connected with a lot of ex Mormons, I thought, well, this might be a great home for ex Mormons who are still interested in a religious movement. And then over the course of 10 years of that kind of seeking and my relationship with the church, ended up joining the church myself and that today I serve as the pastor of the downtown Toronto congregation of Community of Christ. Our beyond the Walls Global broadcast is the church's largest online ministry. So we live stream every Sunday and we have usually a thousand people watch over the course of the week.
John Hamer [00:05:02] And we also then I maintain a YouTube channel called Centerplace CA I'm sorry, that's our website. But anyway the Center Place channel where pretty much on Tuesday I talk about how can we have exploration of spirituality or even Christianity or restoration tradition without having to rely on truth claims that are not able to be held up in terms of history and other academic sciences. So I lecture on topics like that every Tuesday.
John Dehlin [00:05:33] I love it. And for those of you who if I could just add my endorsement, I personally would put John Hamer in the top five people I personally know and have a relationship with in terms of total knowledge of Mormon Church history. That's just my opinion, John, you may reject that. Categorically brilliant mind, but also a really good heart and a really good person who has not just checked out of sort of the restorationist tradition, but has done more than almost anyone I know to try and support thoughtful and compassionate and ethical engagement with the Latter Day Saint restoration tradition. So I, I. And he does great visuals. He's a graphic designer. He has a master's from the University of Michigan. I believe in cartography. Is that right, John?
John Hamer [00:06:29] In history, but my focus is on medieval mapping and things like that. So you remember that? Yeah, so.
John Dehlin [00:06:33] And also you, you were a editor, co editor or president of the John Whitmer Historical Association. Right.
John Hamer [00:06:40] So I've been president of the John Whitmer Historical Association. I was the initial editor of the founding editor for John Whitmer Books and so on. I've done a lot of work in university presses, publishing, that kind of thing.
John Dehlin [00:06:51] And haven't you done maps, literally for the Joseph Smith Papers project as well?
John Hamer [00:06:55] Yeah, yep, I've done maps for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and for Harold House, which is the Community of Christ version. And so I've fortunately been able to, I think, because I have a constructive, positive attitude about the restoration, my restoration heritage. Even though there's a partisan divide between, you know, different groups, I actually have quite a good relationship, I think, with the history department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with obviously the historian, community and community of Christ, John Whitmer, the Mormon History association and other groups. In fact, you know, other. Actually, I'm have a good relationship with fundamentalist Mormons, with, you know, with all of the different branches of the restoration tradition, because I'm actually, I think, I think quite positive and sympathetic to the movement and us wanting to be able to embrace this heritage that we share.
John Dehlin [00:07:50] So I love it. All right, well, with that intro, John, let's dive in. I'm going to hit this, this title head on. Disinformation, addiction and Joseph Smith polygamy denialism. I'm sure that Michelle Stone is going to interpret that as an attack. I'm not going to defend her in this episode other than to say she really doesn't like the term polygamy denier. She feels like it associates her unfairly with conspiracy theorists. And, you know, she feels like she's sincere and evidence based on. And again, this isn't going to be me defending her, but because, like, you know, I, I respect a lot about what she does. I just Wanted to kind of at least start by saying that. And other than that, I just want to hear the great things you have to say.
Defining Joseph Smith Polygamy Denialism
John Hamer [00:08:37] Yeah, well, and again, I don't meaning this to be focused on, on Michelle, obviously. She's the most prominent spokesperson right now. I think it's not the only person who has been engaged in this. I think in terms of what I think though is making what I'm going to argue here in this presentation, people in the Restoration tradition who are very earnest in their view, but who are doing an apologetic work and making a faith claim that is more akin to the way LDS people have sometimes done apologetics than following a methodologically sound or consistent approach that is historical. So in other words, this is why I actually unfortunately think this at present is definitely grouped into conspiracy theory and other sections like that.
John Hamer [00:09:32] And so I want to make that case. And I, and I'm actually the whole reason why I focused in on this, this topic as of 10 years ago when Rock Waterman was first kind of like promoting this idea among this group that has become known as like the Remnant, the snuffer community.
John Hamer [00:09:55] I think that it's because. Because I'm actually interested very much in this, the situation that we are facing in the 21st century where there is a broad rejection by a whole host of the population of expertise, a willingness to kind of just say any ideas are equally valid, whether or not it is, has some kind of accepted scientific or academically methodological, you know, underpinning where it actually is a tested idea versus just some random idea that someone might say that those are weighed equally nowadays often, and that this is part of then a general trend which, you know, that includes, you know, embracing of conspiracy theories that I'm kind of calling disinformation addiction.
John Hamer [00:10:50] And this is something I frankly, you know, preach about as one of the, what I said is the, the actual horsemen of the 21st century apocalypse, one of the things that are really having. Affecting our society in negative ways, I think.
John Dehlin [00:11:03] Love it. So if you don't mind, you, you being a member and even a leader in Community of Christ, whose, you know, former name was the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. That puts you close to this topic in particular very intimately. So for those, you know, half of our, over half of our Mormons never, sorry, over half of our audience has never been Mormon. And then a bunch of our audience is brand new to any of this and have never even really heard of the RLD Church. Can you briefly just explain to everyone why Community of Christ Slash the RLDS church would have particular interest or historical focus on this topic.
Why Polygamy Is Central to Mormon History
John Hamer [00:11:43] Yeah, so. So polygamy is ultimately the the central issue that of Mormonism and above Mormon history. Because when Joseph Smith started secretly teaching his followers polygamy and it broadly bringing in a broad group of loyalists in nauvoo in the 1840s when he started having himself sealed to as it's called in terms of Mormon term for marriage to number of women and girls in Nauvoo, including for example my great great great great grandparents, 15 year old daughter Nancy Mariah Winchester. When all of that was going on, he irrevocably change the course of the history of the movement and also cause the movement to fracture. So a bunch of loyalists, a majority of the loyalists in Nauvoo were in favor of that.
John Hamer [00:12:47] But many people were very much opposed and scandalized. People including a special member of the First Presidency named William Law who who broke from Joseph Smith and published a an expose of what was going on. Joseph Smith had proposed some kind of. Probably it's. It's theorized any. We don't have as good of information about this but people like Grant Palmer have done the research on William Law's testimony and have determined that for example that Joseph Smith may have proposed wife swapping with Joseph's with William Law and his wife. But any. In any event whatever happened there. William Law broke with Joseph Smith exposed polygamy to.
John Hamer [00:13:32] By publishing the Nauvoo Expositor. Joseph Smith used his authority as the mayor to destroy the press which caused a revolt all around the country in terms of the. A religious leader holding secular authority and using that to destroy a free press. It was. It rankled Republican idealism in the, you know, with the small R Republicanism of the. Of the era. And that ultimately led to Joseph Smith's death at the hands of a mob within you know, a few months after that. And so. So the people in the movement like William Law, William Law ultimately just leaves and becomes an ex Mormon. But there were many others within Nauvoo and especially around in the branches who were opposed to polygamy loyalists like Brigham Young for example, who ended up seizing or taking control of the institutional church in in Nauvoo and then ultimately moving west to the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Utah that continued what had been a completely secret practice to bringing it into the public.
John Hamer [00:14:43] Meanwhile, the opponents of polygamy in the Midwest centering around Joseph Smith's legal wife Emma and her children, especially the Eldest son, Joseph Smith iii. They formed what became known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which continued to oppose polygamy. And that ultimately becomes Community of Christ. But part of that opposition of polygamy.
John Hamer [00:15:07] So it had what was under Joseph III active denial that Joseph Smith had any involvement in it. And that unfortunately that founding error or that founding misstatement that Joseph III made ultimately, I think is very costly to his movement. It made it so that he was not able to win back a majority of the Utah Saints who were ensconced in polygamy and knew actually that Joseph Smith, his father, had been involved. And then ultimately this having this kind of foundational error when it was another trauma when Community of Christ started to wrestle with all of the different false faith or history claims, like for example, historicity of the Book of Mormon. And so that has led to, to the Church's very significant decline in the 21st century.
John Dehlin [00:16:02] So, and there was a point where the RLDS church, did they just announce, they decided and then announced that they no longer held the position that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy. And if so, when was that?
John Hamer [00:16:16] So, so the church, the church really didn't ever announce that. So say is what happened is that that as of the 1970s, as of the first time, the church had members who were trained historians. So the movement until the time period that we now call the new Mormon history, which is post World War II time period, until that time, actually academically trained historians were not involved in writing the history of the movement. And there were no, no historians who were either RLDS or LDS in other church historians were people who were general authorities who had no historical training. They just were people like Joseph Fielding Smith who were interested in history, but they were interested in telling identity stories that are sacred myths.
John Hamer [00:17:10] And they didn't have the training to actually do academic history. So that changed with Arrington, Leonard Arrington, in the Utah tradition and in the Missouri tradition and the Community of Christ tradition with Dick Howard, who was the first academically trained historian of the RLDS Church. Dick did then research on this and found out that the evidence is conclusive. Joseph Smith is the origin did practice polygamy and he is the origin of it.
John Hamer [00:17:39] And so then he ended up, you know, giving that report to the first presidency of the RLDS Church. It's too, they deemed it, I think, to be far too explosive, dynamite, you know, to, to actually publish in an official church publication.
John Hamer [00:17:56] Dick Howard was allowed to write a heav massaged and you know, pulling the conclusions back kind of essay in an independent publication, so a journal called Restoration Studies, and also simultaneously in the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. And so he.
John Hamer [00:18:15] He was able to publish an idea that, well, maybe it's. Maybe so, maybe not. I think, is kind of how, you know, the evidence was very clear, but he didn't draw conclusions from it. And that was the. That continues to be kind of where the church officially has wanted to be.
John Hamer [00:18:32] What ended up happening in the 22 thousands is that Steve Veazey, the president of the church in the 2000s and also to the present, issued a document called the Principles of History for Community of Christ, which state that the Church does not take any official positions on history. So the church simply retreated from taking positions on history at all officially.
John Hamer [00:18:54] And Mark Scheer was under extreme scrutiny from the First Presidency, which was scared that there were people who, in the church that are polygamy deniers or whatever, that still had that as a faith claim, not a historical claim, but they believed it was historical, but it's just a faith claim. So because of that, they didn't want to publish that. And in fact, my book, which is a very tiny little book called the Community of Christ and Illustrated history published in 2010 by Herald House, was the very first public acknowledgment by the RLDS Church, the Community of Christ, that Joseph Smith did institute polygamy? So, in other words, it was all the way to 2010, my book, that the church officially acknowledged it by. By printing a history book that says that he did it?
John Dehlin [00:19:44] So, yeah, was there ever a point where the Community of Christ, where Community of Christ paid a price for reversing its position or for acknowledging internally at least, that Joseph Smith actually did practice polygamy? And if so, is it fair to say that, number one, they're good historians at Community of Christ, but also they would have had every interest if there was good evidence to support that Joseph Smith didn't practice polygamy, or if there was just no evidence, no conclusive evidence that he did, is it fair to say Community of Christ would have had every interest in perpetuating the position that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy?
John Hamer [00:20:33] If it was a matter that was open to question, then we would have wanted to have it be. We would have never wanted to take the position that Joseph Smith had found in polygamy? So, yes, absolutely. When my book came out, there was a wonderful gentleman here in my congregation who.
John Hamer [00:20:54] He bought the book because he wanted to support me. But then when he got to the infamous page 13 of the book. The first time, you know, that any history and in all of the community of Christ had been able to publish a book on the church's official press. So Herald House, which is like our Deseret book, that was the first time it had done. He, it just, it just shook him. He's just like, this is not what I've been taught all my life. You know, he was in his 80s and, and, and there were lots and lots of people who had that reaction to me and my co authors, David Howlett and Barbara Walden, who were, you know, wonderful community of Christ historians.
John Hamer [00:21:29] And we are attempting in the way we framed that to be incredibly pastoral. But, you know, we still will get that reaction from old members. And so, yeah, it would have been if we could have said it any other way, if there was some way to validly say there's some, some room for fudging here and maybe this or maybe not. But the answer is no, it's, it's conclusive. There's a historical consensus Joseph Smith is the origin of Mormon polygamy. So.
John Dehlin [00:21:55] All right, well, let's dig into your presentation then, shall we?
John Hamer [00:21:58] Sure. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:21:59] All right, here, here we go. And you just tell me when to change. I'll switch it between you and the slides.
Disinformation, Addiction, and Motivated Reasoning
John Hamer [00:22:05] Okay. Well, like I say, I mean, I've provocatively titled this, right? So disinformation, addiction. And so in some ways, I'm a futurist. I'm a fan of science fiction, fairly famously a Star Trek fan, but I'm also a Star wars fan.
John Hamer [00:22:23] And you know, I. People have before, I'm in the library in the Heritage Room of the congregation here, but I've also done podcasts with you in the chapel, which has all the glowing spiral and lights behind it. And people have said, you know, John Hamer's coming from, I don't know, the youth, the Death Star, wherever it is you're. Or from the Enterprise, you know, in order to contact you. So in other words, I've often would like to have us achieve, like that vision of the future that, that, that I had as a little kid when I'm watching Star Trek. As a Star Trek fan of some time, we're going to have a more egalitarian society where it's just not going to be racist, it's not going to be sexist, where we are able to have abundance and not have to worry about possessions and selfishness or whatever, because we're worrying about instead enriching ourselves.
John Hamer [00:23:14] And so in Some ways when the computer age and the information age happened, I was one of those kind of optimistic visionaries who felt this is a way where we're finally going to get away from this tyranny. Of the three television networks that you and I grew up in, John, you know, the, the three broadcast news things that we're now going to get to a place where everybody democratically making their own content. You know, there, there will be able to be huge independent channels like Marmon Stories here or like my channel and so forth.
John Hamer [00:23:50] But one of the things that has also happened, you know, with the explosion of the Internet and the information age is that we are also now in a golden age of disinformation because people can put out any, anything. There had always been people who had hokey theories or conspiracy theories or, and that sort of thing, but now they have, you know, they're not just publishing little newsletters to each other. It is now people are able to group en masse and spread these things around. And so we're now in a place where large sections of the population reject expertise.
John Hamer [00:24:24] They reject the idea that knowledge can actually be established by a proven methodologies of science. Academic disciplines like history or archaeology that are able to make very robust and testable conclusions through, you know, an actual, you know, again, methodological ways of consistently approaching data. And instead people sort of feel like, well, any random proposition that you might make has the same weight as any other. So gravity is just a theory. So if you come up with some other theory, you know, of, of why you're sticking to the ear, that's just as good as something as robust as the scientific theory of gravity or of evolution.
John Hamer [00:25:12] And unfortunately, many people also prefer conspiracy theories over more difficult, complex truths. And we talked about this in that session of Mormon stories that you were talking about Book of Mormon authorship where I was giving kind of an equation before about how, you know, kind of why people, why people want to believe there, why people want extreme explanations for how the Book of Mormon was authored. And I explained how that, that in terms of the people wanting aliens to have built the pyramids, I took that as an example of an extreme conspiracy theory. And yet, John, I think you'll remember that once we started talking about that there were all these conspiracy, pyramid building, conspiracy theory people who came out of the woodworks.
John Hamer [00:26:03] So I've had a lot of people on my channel who are, you know, people who are committed to that disinformation, you know, and they, they just keep posting about it. Right?
John Dehlin [00:26:13] Yeah. And I, I promised you That I, I'm not going to be defending Michelle this whole time and I won't be. I will say that I think today is like the first day of a academic polygamy conference that with Cheryl Bruno, Michelle Stone has organized and they're going to be launching the, I think Journal for Mormon Polygamy. And a bunch of, I think big names are in Mormon studies are going to be attending and speaking at that conference, including Barbara Brown and Barbara Jones Brown and others. And so I'm guessing that Michelle would say this is, this is a red herring, this idea of people
John Dehlin [00:26:57] not being willing to engage in academic methods because I think Michelle and many in her movement believe they, they actually are different from conspiracy theorists and that they want to engage academically and they just think the, the documents aren't there anyway. Yeah, I've just, I, I, that's, I think that's all I'm going to say about Michelle for the rest of today, maybe.
John Hamer [00:27:21] Well, no, I mean, I, I, I, I applaud that path. Right. So in other words, this, I'm not, this is not a, even though we're talking about Michelle because you just had the, you know, because she's the most prominent person who's promoting this idea.
John Dehlin [00:27:35] Yeah.
John Hamer [00:27:36] I think the fact that she has gotten together with Cheryl that they are, they are, they are wanting to explore this from an academic direction. The fact that she's going, I think. Is Todd Compton going to be at this. I can't remember I saw the ads to this, but so certainly I'll look it up.
John Dehlin [00:27:53] I'll look it up.
John Hamer [00:27:54] You know, Todd is an excellent historian on this topic. His book In Sacred Loneliness is amazing. I recommend that to anybody who is interested in not just the topic of Mormon polygamy, but also, you know, to get it. Too often, too often this is all focused on Joseph Smith and people. One of the, I think the reason why people in the Mormon community have such extreme and also ungrounded ideas in about this is because everybody is so personally invested in their ideas of Joseph Smith. And what I love about Todd's book is that he takes biographies instead of all the women and is considering their perspectives and what they have to say.
John Hamer [00:28:43] And so I just think it's an amazing one. And he now has also come out with a new book on that, which is the documents behind it. And so that is so, that's really, so that I think is really important. And so, and so I think what, yes, we start to gather academics, what the academics can tell Michelle and other people who are interested in this idea, which I think is a faith claim idea, not a historical conclusion, is that there is a total historical consensus among the historians community that Joseph Smith is the origin of Mormon polygamy. And there's a way that you can, you can start to do the opposite way, but it's not by going through in this apologetic method of point by point debunking little pieces of evidence haphazardly that you don't like that one.
John Hamer [00:29:35] But it's instead by creating your alternative thesis, which in this case is that there's a vast, incredible conspiracy that Brigham Young is. Has. And then show how all of the audience, I'm sorry, all of the evidence supports that thesis. And unfortunately, because of the incredible amount of evidence, as well as we'll see the different types of evidence that can't be made to fit that alternate thesis. So until there is a alternate thesis, the consensus will remain.
John Dehlin [00:30:07] So. All right, let's jump back to your slides.
John Hamer [00:30:11] So, you know, going back to. Okay, again, until this is, until there is an academic alternative position, it's still in the realm of a conspiracy theory and disinformation. And like I say, the situation has become alarming enough that it's really difficult to use anything but the most. Even when we're using preposterous examples like aliens and the pyramids, there's a bunch of people who are alien pyramid conspiracists and they come out of the woodwork. And if we go to the next slide, there is also the added dimension of tribalism.
John Hamer [00:30:52] We're not going to get into politics on this podcast. I'll mention I'm now a Canadian. Canadians are very invested in what's going on in the US Right now because of the US President has a lot of focus on Canada, but as a result of the kind of extreme US Political tribalism that's going on right now and how different conspiracy theories and disinformation things are hooked up with that, with that tribalism. I'm just not gonna, I'm gonna try to avoid throwing analogies around about what some of the, what some of, some of the disinformation things are. That's why I've kind of stuck to. I'm going to stick to like aliens on the pyramids and flat Eartherism so that we can avoid some of the more contentious things.
John Dehlin [00:31:39] All right?
John Hamer [00:31:42] Okay, so this is a question actually for you, John, so why, why do people prefer disinformation? This is not necessarily a question as much of, for a historian as for, you know, A psychologist, Psychiatrist. So people who. Your. Your fields.
John Dehlin [00:32:02] Yeah. So I'm, I'm a little bit rusty, but I would. What, what it, what immediately comes to my mind is Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance management theory that you know, they have a worldview, they have a set of information and they have all sorts of emotional feelings and relationships and community tied to that worldview. And when they learn new information or have new experiences that are not harmonious with their knowledge base or their worldview, that difference between the new knowledge or learning or evidence or information in their worldview causes a lot of psychological and emotional distress.
John Dehlin [00:32:47] And there's either two things you could do really. You can reject the information that's being presented to you or you can, you know, accept it and, or harmonize it into your worldview. And that's the only way to resolve the dissonance. You either reject the information or you accept it and, or harmonize it. That's my best immediate reaction. I'm sure I'm rusty.
John Hamer [00:33:10] Yeah. But no, I think you, I mean, I think you've got it exactly right there. Right. So that's like maybe called belief perseverance or, or conceptual conservativism. In other words, that this is something that is not, it's not only, it's, it's just human nature. It's not only about, it's not only happening in religions, but this is one of the things that happens in, in scientific advance because even though science is all about having the, the best and robust tested explanation given the data that, that scientific inquiry is ongoing and there's always new data. But a lot of times the last generation of scientists is invested in the hypothesis that they've had and then they're less willing to have the revolutionary, you know, young Turks science community who, who overturn that, you know, and who say, well, no way it actually, you know, plate tectonics is how this all works or whatever it is, it's hard for the new theory to sometimes even break through because we have conceptual conservatism, there's a perseverance, you know, of this kind of belief.
John Hamer [00:34:15] And, and I think also, you know, in terms of some of the, that's if you have a, let's say a pre existing faith claim that you're kind of now finding new information about or seeing information that debunks it and then you reject that. But then there's also the, in terms of disinformation, addiction as a broader thing that can, you know, embracing of conspiracy theories. I think there's also a social component of.
John Hamer [00:34:46] It's psychologically exciting that you are part of the in group, you know, something that everybody else doesn't know. That's actually always been exciting, part of the Latter Day Saint movement. When we are claiming that we're the one and only true church, well, then we have some additional knowledge that all these other Christians, they don't get, they're not the true Christians. They don't understand the real thing. We've got the, we've got the, the secret special sauce that they, that they don't have. And, and so you can be very happy about that. And that can be, you know, that's, you know, for, let's say the aliens and the, you know, knowing, knowing that you're the one who knows that the aliens came and built the pyramids, you know, that you're part of a select group that knows more than you know, than everybody else.
John Hamer [00:35:28] And so we talked about this in the, you know, if you got the slide, we talked about this in the, in the Book of Mormon Authorship 1 where I said essentially in part, this is also, then can be this kind of a conspiracy about the aliens building the pyramids can also be based on a kind of a false equation that people build up in their minds when they think, well, these pyramids are really big and they're hard to build. And it's, and it's somehow there's a coincidence that there are pyramids in Egypt and there's also pyramids in, you know, and Guatemala.
John Hamer [00:35:58] 2. You know, it's impossible for ancient people to have the exp, you know, the engineering expertise to build big stone objects like pyramids. And it's impossible for ancient workers to have the capacity to build things with big stones. And so people provide an extra needed component, which is alien intervention because aliens can do anything, you know, that would allow for that equation to be fixed in their mind. But actually if we find out, you know, what archaeology tells us, what studies of the pyramids tell us and so forth, you know, making a pyramid is simpler than you think in terms of an engineering standpoint. The engineers of the Egyptians had actually had a lot more know how than people sometimes might think offhand.
John Hamer [00:36:49] And it turns out that ancient people were pretty good at dragging around big rocks. And so, and so what I try to say in that equation, I said in the last series that we did on Book of Mormon authorships that therefore the idea of extreme, extreme explanations are not necessary. Aliens aren't needed to solve that equation.
John Dehlin [00:37:09] All right. I love that graphic.
John Hamer [00:37:12] Well, I thought we'd revisit it. In some ways, I want to build on that one, that previous series we did. So but in doing this thing, in having this, embracing this particular conspiracy, I'm just using this as emblematic of all of these.
John Hamer [00:37:27] The conspiracy theorist is rejecting just a whole wealth of expertise. So archaeology, linguistics, the academic discipline of history, this has been Egypt has been extensively studied now for the past two centuries. And Egyptologists, historians, archaeologists have mapped out Egypt's history going all the way back to the fifth millennium B.C.
John Hamer [00:37:50] and so even though there had been all of these exotic ideas of this lost civilization that we knew very little about prior to the 1820s, when Jean Francois Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics, that's really far in the rear view mirror. We now have, you know, as much as you want to know about Egypt as you want to know. So, for example, if you go to the next slide, you know, the entire set of all of the dynasties, you know, going all the way back to 3000 BC, you know, we are able to date them with a lot of amazing, amazing detail. I mean, there'll be some things that aren't known within a year or two when the, some of the, you know, we can't know.
John Hamer [00:38:34] You know, there's only so much that the records tell us. But for a civilization, Egypt is rare because so much was written down and so much is able to survive in, in the environment of Egypt. And so, you know, expertise actually does give us all kinds of knowledge of ancient Egypt. Whereas people who want to, if we go to the next slide, embrace, you know, alien astronaut conspiracy theories, you know, also requires just this incredible ignorance that we now know of, of the distance and impracticability of travel even to the nearest stars. So back when I was a little kid and Star Trek was on, it was pretty easy to do a science fiction fantasy where you get in a ship and you beam up and you go really fast through things.
John Hamer [00:39:24] But if we warp speed or hyperspace or something like that, but, but the incredible distances involved, and without having the magic of warp, space speed or hyperspace means that it's just travel between the stars is, is a much bigger thing than anything we've done. So for us to send, to send a ship to some even very close by planet just so that we can lurk around in the distance and not, and not contact the inhabitants that are around for thousands of years or whatever the aliens are doing, you know, it requires more than the combined output of everything we've ever done. You know, as humans and built in order to just build the interstellar craft to get us there to do this nonsense thing.
John Hamer [00:40:11] So. So in any event, I just. This is an example of just because you have an idea, it doesn't mean it's the same as any other idea. There are reasons why ideas that are built up through deep study, through methodology are actually can say. Are can be said to be completely of a different order than just an idea that somebody has because they say, well, it's impossible for somebody to have built that thing. Or how can we explain that there are pyramids in both places or anything of those kind of things.
John Dehlin [00:40:46] So. Got it. Okay,
Why People Reject Evidence They Find Threatening
John Hamer [00:40:50] so we continue on this path to the next one. You know, when I was a teenager, my grandpa Hamer told me that he believed that black people and other non white people did evolve from apes from. You know, in other words, he believed in evolution, except for when it comes to white people. So he believed. And I don't know where you got this crazy idea, but anyway, he believed that white people were colonists from Mars. And so this is not an unusual idea in science fiction. So humans are not creatures of Earth in, in works like Battlestar Galactica, if you remember. So they're. The people are from out there life and out there, Larry Niven's universe, Earth people are from a different.
John Hamer [00:41:31] The people, the humans are from a different planet. They're from the pack planet. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it's the humans are descended from people from a different planet and so forth. There is evolution, but not for humans. Humans are a completely different order of things thing. And so, you know, in my, in my grandfather's case, you know, I will say that. Well, I'll talk about why he'd believe that. Let's go to the next one. So it's not an uncommon fantasy. So, you know, if you ever watched Battlestar Galactica like I did as a, as a kid, as a Mormon kid, this is a Mormon.
John Hamer [00:42:04] The creator of the show was Mormon, you know, and there are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe with tribes of humans that may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, the Toltecs, the Mayans. I think this was actually not that far off from my mom's view of, of Mormons, Mormonism too, because, you know, God is potentially off on the planet like Kolob. The Earth is not.
John Hamer [00:42:28] The Earth is a relatively new creation. It has these fossils not because of evolution, but because God had used pieces of other planets and Put it together to build, you know, to build the Earth and things like that. And that Adam, you know, is, you know, comes directly, there may been, have, have been life evolving because God created it that way, but Adam is coming directly from, from Kolob or whatever. So, so may it may well be that. And, and so the things like Battlestar Galactica, things like Mormon theology, you know, may also have, have influenced some of those things.
John Hamer [00:43:07] Except if we go to the next slide, you know, except that it did it, it didn't happen. So, so the narrative, exciting as that may be, that humans are of a completely different order of being than all other Earth life, that's absolutely false. So we know from the science of biology, the science of genetics, you know, that for example, we share 98/plus of our DNA with our closest cousins, chimpanzees, you know, all humans, including my wife, great grandpa, you know, are evolved from Earth animals despite, you know, his kind of faith claim to the contrary. And so if we go to the next one, the DNA evidence is conclusive, you know, this Battlestar Galactica thesis, you know, is false.
John Hamer [00:43:52] And so why I ask then why do you hold beliefs in contradiction to evidence? You know, even though, you know the evidence, you know, even though these beliefs have been proved false by like I say, rigorous scientific evidence, established academic methodologies, you know, you've already given one of the examples. You know, another example is like you say, people have these pre existing commitments and then, and then they experience dissonance when they, when they find new evidence or when they're given new evidence that doesn't go up with that. And it's like I say, it's not, it's not, it's not limited to religion. It can happen with everything.
John Hamer [00:44:32] So part of our identity myth in most, for almost everybody is we have nationalism as part of our mythos. So the movie Braveheart, it's a fun movie, people like it and all that kind of thing. It's terrible history.
John Hamer [00:44:49] And I had a friend who was from Scotland who's not a historian, but who, you know, didn't like the English. It's not uncommon for Scottish people to not like the English. And he watched Braveheart and he considered that to be every bit of it to be historic and every bit of it to be true. And so he had whole new reasons to hate the English. Now because of Prima nocta, which is this, this thing that's presented in Braveheart where, where English lords had the right or exercise the right of being allowed to deflower Scottish maidens on Their wedding night. It's completely false. That never happened.
John Hamer [00:45:26] This is not a. This is not a. Not a thing. But it, but it becomes part of your national myth or your national identity. You hold to it, you know, when these national myths are created. So.
John Dehlin [00:45:40] All right, sorry. Mel Gibson.
John Hamer [00:45:44] Sorry. He deserves it. All right, so let's go to religious propositions. So flat Eartherism is the other example I'm going to use. So it's on the rise again. It's a general secular conspiracy theory, and there are flat Earthers around in a society, but it was actually popularized in the modern era as a religious tenant, and it was promoted in the 20th century by a guy named Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who was the general overseer of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church. Have you heard of them?
John Dehlin [00:46:18] I don't. Unless it's an. Unless it's like a niche subgroup. I've never heard of him.
John Hamer [00:46:23] Yeah, so it was. It was actually a pretty big church. It was very popular. It grew very huge popularly at the end of the 19th century and, and Vohlova was in charge of it in the early 20th century. So if you go to the. The next slide, I can show you this.
John Hamer [00:46:46] So this is a picture of the tabernacle in the city of Zion, Illinois. And you can kind of see just how huge this is. And it's just filled with the followers, members of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, by the way. It's not Catholic. It has nothing to do with Catholics. They're just using the Catholic, which means universal. So it's a, it's a Protestant or, or a new church, new religious tradition, like the Latter Day Saint tradition, founded in Illinois here or organized or headquartered in Illinois. And it's actually kind of amazing that this town, that this group built, Zion, Illinois, you may have never heard of it.
John Hamer [00:47:25] I've been there. It's a little north of Chicago. It has this vast plat, and it is centered on a huge temple lot where this tabernacle was built. And if you go to the next slat or slide, you can see the plat of the city of Zion, Illinois. And so it's kind of an interesting.
John Hamer [00:47:45] I think it's interesting for people in the restoration tradition because we think of how big and impressive Nauvoo was. But this town actually got built out and it had huge industries, and so it's a. A very significant footprint. Although the church is largely doesn't exist anymore, there's a small little remnant of it left.
John Dehlin [00:48:05] Let me just really quickly share a comment from a viewer and a listener Blowfish writes John Hamer. I love your well rounded explanations. Thank you for your work. Thank you for being on Mormon Stories. I agree. I'll just also remind everybody, it would be fantastic if you could subscribe to this podcast to this YouTube channel on Spotify as well. If you can like this episode and comment on this episode and share this episode, that helps with engagement and it'll make YouTube more likely to share it. And I'll also add while you're subscribing to Mormon Stories podcast, please subscribe to Center Place YouTube channel. That's center with the Tre Place and you can find hundreds if not thousands of hours of John Hamer's educational courses, largely religious educational courses that he presents I think every Sunday from Center Place. Anyway, back to you, John Hamer.
John Hamer [00:48:58] Well, thank you. Yes. And thanks, thanks for that comment. I appreciate that a lot. So yeah, just going back to this group. Valieva, like I said, is the guy who popularized in modern times the flat earth theory. And so he published ads, he would take up big ads in Scientific American. He would challenge anybody who could to prove, you know, offer proof that the earth was round. And he would, you know, offer these big rewards. But of course, it was never possible to prove anything to Vuleva because he rejected all established scientific methodologies. And so, you know, he dismissed actual proofs and religiously held his belief in a flat earth.
Belief Perseverance and the Spalding Theory
John Hamer [00:49:39] This what we talked about here as belief perseverance. And so if we go to the next one, you know, as many listeners of Mormon stories I think know well from personal experience, if they left, let's say they left the Mormon Church and then they then want to get their wife out or their, you know, their husband out, or they want to tell, you know, friends and loved ones or something they may want to like their, their natural tendency is to want to like, give a whole bunch of evidence and just hit them up with all these things, evidence that disproves historically or some other way, literary criticism of the Book of Mormon to show that it's not an ancient document.
John Hamer [00:50:22] And it turns out that offering that kind of proof is really ineffective. Right. So as we've talked about, belief perseverance in the face of new information is just this natural trait. And so just giving the CES letter to somebody, you know, sometimes that works, but it often or usually doesn't. And actually it can lead to, you know, the person, it backfires, suffering. So for example, when my dad, who left the Mormon Church when I was in the teen, I guess in my twenties, after I'D left.
John Hamer [00:50:53] He then wrote a whole bunch of essays to my mom trying to, to get her to leave the Mormon Church. And she, you know, didn't believe any of those, wasn't interested in any of that kind of stuff. You know, if anything, like I say, it backfired and made her more committed.
John Hamer [00:51:08] And ultimately they went on for that for a long time. And so ultimately my mom made this deal with him. He could spend an entire year telling her all of the proofs that he could ever think of and he could present them formally and she would listen to every single one of them. And then after that year, he couldn't do ever talk to her about it ever again. And so she did that and she's lived happily ever after.
John Dehlin [00:51:35] That's awesome.
John Hamer [00:51:36] So another thing that we talked about in the, in the Book of Mormon Authorship 1 is this idea of, this idea of the Solomon's Balding Theory, right. And so there's a new, a new revival of the Spalding Theory through a book by Lars Nielsen. Lars is also a really nice guy. I was able to meet with him at Sunstone last year.
John Dehlin [00:52:07] He's also the brother of David Nielsen, who's known as the whistleblower for Ensign Peak. And it was actually Lars who was the original whistleblower in the sense that what's understood publicly is that Lars worked with David Nielsen to file the whistleblower complaint with the irs. But then Lars shared that news publicly. And did you know Lars and Dave are brothers?
John Hamer [00:52:34] I didn't know that. No, I hadn't, I hadn't known.
John Dehlin [00:52:36] Actually. I think they're identical twins.
John Hamer [00:52:39] Oh, okay.
John Dehlin [00:52:40] Just a little factoid anyway. Yeah, shout out to Lars. Super smart guy.
John Hamer [00:52:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I read his book, I could tell within a chapter or so this guy is a very smart person who has, is almost certainly a physical scientist who has no training in history.
John Dehlin [00:52:59] You know, I think he has a chemistry PhD from Harvard, if I'm not mistaken.
John Hamer [00:53:04] Yeah, yeah. And, and I'm, I'm sorry to say I didn't have to look it up to know that because I could just tell from reading it.
John Dehlin [00:53:10] So.
John Hamer [00:53:11] So, so unfortunately, so what I would say about. So about his book is that at certain point he came up with the he. He found in reading about Athanasius Kircher, who is a interesting figure, a 17th century polymath.
John Hamer [00:53:32] Athanasius Kircher is interesting because before Champion, before hieroglyphics were legitimately deciphered, he had a phony decipherment of Egyptian and, and his idea that he promoted and that everybody believed in early modern Europe was that these, these fantastic pictures of the hieroglyphs, that these were ideograms, that they, that they encapsulated whole sentences and things like that, that these were, they were not simply little glyph characters, but there was like a magic, almost a magic language that the ancient Egyptians had that.
John Hamer [00:54:14] And so Kircher, in his phony or false decipherment of Egyptian, he relied upon, he said a certain rabbi named Nephi. And so that's just a very interesting coincidence, you know, and I agree with Lars, that's an interesting coincidence. But he, based on that one coincidence, he then draws a whole bunch of, you know, additional things that he thinks are parallels where he thinks that somehow Kircher is a source for the Book of Mormon and that somehow, even though there's no direct evidence of it, that Solomon Spaulding had access to Kircher's work and that that somehow, somehow emphasizes or somehow buttresses this balding theory, which, which it doesn't really.
John Hamer [00:55:01] When unfortunately, they. I think it's. I think it's pretty clear that the name Nephi is not coming through this very obscure channel. A book that, that wasn't available to Spalding or Joseph Smith in, in English in, in the time frame when, when the name Nephi is available. The King James version of the book of Second Makames in verse 1:30, chapter 1, verse 36 talks about Nephi and it talks about, it uses the word Nephi in a. In a passage that's talking essentially about something magical, something that would appeal to Joseph Smith, I think. And so I think that we can say pretty clearly that the source of the name Nephi is not Kircher's work, but it's actually the Bible.
John Hamer [00:55:47] And, and that also then one of the things that I'm sorry to say for that Lars's work, you know, fails to describe again, this, this idea that Kircher, yes, Kircher does have an influence on Joseph Smith, for sure. Not via Samuel's Spalding. That's nothing to do with Simon Spalding.
John Hamer [00:56:06] Joseph Smith's Egyptian grammar relies on curturian understanding of Egyptian. And so Joseph Smith is working with the papyruses with all his scribes, and they're trying to get a decipherment of how the Egyptian language and grammar work. And then he uses each little glyph and he translates them as having a whole paragraph because he has this curturian idea of how Egyptian works. And it's not because he has access to Kircher's work. It's because Kircher has been so influential that that idea has has percolated throughout all of society up until that time. And so he's using that Curturian idea of that. And I, I talked about this long before Lars was looking into this, you know, back when I did a, a paper on the, on the decipherment of the Strang plates that, that Joseph Smith is using this Curchurian idea of um, of hieroglyphs even without knowing it.
John Hamer [00:57:03] So in any event, I wanted to mention that as, as an aside. That's kind of an aside here too, talking about, I want to talk about more seriously. Why do exos continue to do the same thing that I, that, you know, was accusing conspiracy theories about? So if we go to this, why do exmos whose identity is actually often based on the claim that their whole reason they left Mormonism is because they were presented with evidence that disproved its truth claims. So they had believed the Book of Mormon was history. They, they, they read the CES letter, they were persuaded by all of those arguments.
John Hamer [00:57:42] And yet, nevertheless, then they immediately fall into this belief that Solomon Spaulding is the Book of Mormon's author, despite there is an absolute academic consensus to the contrary. And I'm going to argue here that this is also an example of belief perseverance. So we had this other equation. Go to the next slide. We had this other equation in the, in the Book of Mormon authorship slide which gets quoted a lot on, on Reddit, you know, which is that you know that people who are Mormon and then even ex Mormon, they, they continue to believe this Mormon faith claim that as a 270,000 some word long book, the Book of Mormon was super hard to write.
John Hamer [00:58:27] Joseph Smith is supposedly this completely uneducated person who can barely write at the age 23. It's composed in this incredibly short amount of time. And so therefore you, you need to have something else to explain how you know, it could possibly have been written. Even after Mormons have rejected. Ex Mormons have rejected the idea that it's a, it's actually translating an ancient document or done supernaturally, they still want to have some other extreme explanation. And so, and if we go to the next slide, we argued in the Book of Mormon authorship series that actually, no, the composition of a book is much less a big deal than it sometimes seems like it is, that the Book of Mormon is very writable.
John Hamer [00:59:16] Joseph Smith is much smarter and more knowledgeable than he's often made out to be in this stage of his life by church apologetics. And indeed he continues to write texts like this. So I talked about the Egyptian and grammar and the writing that he does and things like the Book of Abraham, Moses, the Bible, Joseph Smith translation and so forth.
John Hamer [00:59:35] We've tested it out and the time frame for the composing the text is doable. And so therefore these kinds of extreme explanations are unnecessary. So there are lots of ex Mormons like your friend and mine, Randy Snyder, who recently passed away. I met him.
John Hamer [00:59:53] When I met him, he was a proponent of the Spalding Theory. And he actually invited me onto his podcast Infants on Thrones, because he had invited Craig Kle, who had done. Not a historian, but who had done a computer wordprint analysis, which was reviving the Spalding theory for a bunch of people.
John Hamer [01:00:16] And so he wanted me to talk about why historians like me are reject Spalding authorship. And so a lot of. I just feel like. So I've been involved in this, that particular one of these disinformation addictions or conspiracy theories. The Spalding Theory for this whole time too. But fortunately, lots of people like my friend Randy or your friend and mine, Randy, are actually, even though he was initially holding on to some of those kind of faith claims that that Joseph Smith was too uneducated, that the Book of Mormon is such a great thing that. But then he later was open to all of the evidence, competing evidence to this, that shows how the Book of Mormon on so many pages has Joseph Smith's fingerprints all around it, how it's so completely referencing things in his life, how it's fit to his own time and so forth, that, you know, that people can then ditch the conspiracy theories and accept the historical reality like he did.
John Dehlin [01:01:22] Yeah. And shout out to our dear late friend Randy Snyder, we love you, Randy, and we miss you, brother.
John Hamer [01:01:29] Yeah, absolutely. So what I want to say then about this topic is historians, regardless of affiliation, so non Mormons, Mormons, loyalist LDS people, liberal Mormons, ex Mormons, community of Christ historians, you know, everybody's weighed the evidence and universally historians conclude Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. Joseph Smith's practice of polygamy is the origin. There are details that, you know, can be argued about here and there, but this idea that there is some kind of Brigham Young conspiracy and Brigham Young was the originator of it, and Joseph Smith was fighting it the whole time is not a. A thesis that any academic has found to be persuasive. And if we go to the next one, that's because of just the enormous weight of the evidence.
The Documentary Evidence for Joseph Smith's Polygamy
John Hamer [01:02:17] So we just, unlike I'm trained primarily as a ancient and a medieval historian, and there's precious little evidence we have from antiquity. In the Middle Ages, you have pretty much. You're lucky if we have a couple sources. Otherwise we have to just have, have. We have one source and we have to read that source for its biases and so forth. We have to decide, well, we can't trust Josephus here for this reason, but we don't have any other sources to check him. And so therefore, this is what we have, what we're stuck with.
John Hamer [01:02:49] That is not the case for Joseph Smith, who is alive in modern times, who had, who made a lot of. He was a. A scandal of his era. So there were people who were observing him who were not members of the church.
John Hamer [01:03:07] He has a movement. He's writing all kinds of things while he's alive. He has a movement that continues on. He has people who dissent from him during his lifetime and write exposes. He has people who are loyal to him who are busy writing journals. He has people in the movement that splits apart who have competing loyalties after, after, after he's gone. And so, so we just have this incredible amount of.
John Hamer [01:03:35] Of evidence and it's ratcheted up to times, times 10 because of this decision that Joseph Smith III, the prophet of the Reorganized Church, made to, to try to rehabilitate his father's reputation and claim that Joseph Smith hadn't. His father, Joseph Smith Jr. Had never practiced poly.
John Hamer [01:03:58] As a result, people wrote down more evidence and more plainly than they ever would have and swore out affidavits than they ever would have in a Victorian era where many of the wives explained in their testimonies that not only were they sealed to the prophet and lived as his wife, in every sense, they'll say so that they are more forthcoming about that than they otherwise would have been.
John Dehlin [01:04:25] All right, so.
John Hamer [01:04:28] So yeah, if we go through these, these next couple. So in addition to this kind of loyal, this kind of evidence, both in Joseph's life and after, that includes evidence from insiders who remain loyal to Joseph Smith throughout his life and then who afterwards, including Brigham Young, but also all of Brigham Young's followers. So who remained loyal to Brigham Young after 1860 and the next one, that also includes evidence of insiders who were loyal to Joseph Smith in their life and stayed loyal to the movement, but then followed Joseph Smith III after 1860.
John Hamer [01:05:06] We have. And by the way, despite the fact that Joseph Smith III was arguing that his father was not a polygamist, there are Many of the RLDS leaders who knew better, people like William Marx who were saying, who were upset with Joseph III for, for making statements that he know they know to be false. There are then insiders who were loyal to Joseph Smith during his life, but who then went and were in factions where they opposed Brigham Young and opposed Joseph Smith iii. And so, you know, we have people that are, you know, continue to be Strangites who continue to testify to Joseph Smith's polygamy.
John Hamer [01:05:48] We have all of these other church groups in the Latter Day Saint tradition that are non Brighamite, non Josephite, and yet, and yet still trace their origins to Joseph Smith and, and the polygamy there. And then finally we have insiders who break with Joseph Smith and leave the movement.
John Hamer [01:06:07] People as infamous as John C. Bennett, but as also, I think as admirable as William Law. And in all of these cases, these are people, insiders with information about this, who all of these together speak essentially in one, one chorus, you know, that Joseph Smith is the origin of polygamy.
John Hamer [01:06:32] And there's no reason for these people who are just hate Brigham Young and are Brigham Young's enemies to, to hide the fact that there's. That's actually a conspiracy created by Brigham Young. You can see why the people who are loyalist to Brigham Young might do that, but it doesn't. It just can't be used to explain this evidence. So and so and so really what I'm trying to say here is because of the incredible weight of the evidence, it's actually a much easier ask to imagine the Spalding conspiracy theory, you know, where it only requires, you know, that, that Sidney Rigdon and Oliver Cowdery are in with Joseph Smith on a, on a, on a conspiracy theory to, to hide the fact that Solomon's balding is the true author and that maybe, and maybe Paul probably be Pratt or maybe dav.
John Hamer [01:07:25] The Whitmers are maybe involved in that too, or David Whitmer at least. In other words, it's a pretty limited conspiracy theory even though it's rejected by historical consensus for a Brigham Young as the origin of polygamy conspiracy theory. It's, it's, it just hundreds of conspirators, you know, you know, that needing to maintain their. The lie that it was Joseph Smith and not Brigham Young.
John Hamer [01:07:54] You know, even though the fact that they're horrible rivals of Brigham Young. You know, I wrote this essay called the, the Spalding Fable which talked about Sidney Rigdon taking the truth that he had been, you know, the guy, the mastermind behind the whole Book of Mormon plot, how he took it to his grave, because the last thing he'd want to have at the end of his life when he died alone and a popper without any followers, is that he last thing he'd want was credit.
John Hamer [01:08:21] You know, and, and this is also true, I think, for all of Brigham Young's rivals or frankly, even within his movement, all these people who, who didn't like him, you know, that for them to all keep their silence. So it's. It's crazy.
John Dehlin [01:08:37] All right,
John Hamer [01:08:40] so therefore, Joseph Smith, political polygamy denialism, you know, requires not only then this wholesale of rejection of history as an academic discipline. Ultimately, I mean, we'll see. The attempts to embrace it can only lead, in my opinion, to the historical consensus, which is what I've just established. So people will reject it.
John Hamer [01:09:02] The more, the more proponents of polygamy denialism become academic, then they will themselves reject their truth claim that they have right now. It also then requires, like I say, believing in conspiracy. That just extends far beyond credibility. And so it's not just even the Spalding theory territory, but I think, think it's closer to flat Eartherism and the pyramids. And so anyway, why are so many Mormons without this training in academic history then kind of warming up to this theory? And so I'm going to say ultimately it's because people just have this, you know, just love and also unrealistic vision in their hearts about Joseph Smith.
John Hamer [01:09:45] Include. These include wonderful people who are, you know, really nice and everything, but they just, you people get these emotional perspectives about Joseph Smith. And many of these portraits that people paint in their hearts are not going to be true in terms of historicity if you have the actual exposure to the evidence. And so I think that, you know, when I was saying that at the Spalding Theory at its heart, people, these are exos who believe that Joseph Smith was just too dumb to, to or illiterate or whatever to write such an incredible book.
John Hamer [01:10:18] People also don't want to believe that Joseph Smith did this just, you know, embarrassing, foolish, obnoxious, abusive thing that he did, which was establish polygamy and secrets, you know, among his followers. And, you know, if we hadn't done it would be great for all of us. We wouldn't have. We wouldn't have this. The central controversy, the central crisis, the central scandal, the sina qua non of Mormon history. It's what Mormon history became, you know, ultimately about. It's what the. It's what. What's what we're Gonna. We're living in that wake now.
John Dehlin [01:10:55] Julie's asking the name of that essay that you wrote about City Rigdon. Was it an essay?
John Hamer [01:11:02] Oh, yeah, yeah. It's called the Spalding Fable. Oh, and it's one of the Solomon Spalding.
John Dehlin [01:11:08] Okay.
John Hamer [01:11:09] Yeah. And so it's the. It's one of. It's a. It was a blog post on. By common consent. It's an old. Oh, it's still going. A Mormon group blog that I was a blogger on. And. And that has got to be one of. Again, one of my most quoted things I've ever written. People go back to the Spalding table essay. What I'm trying to show there is a. What I was trying to show in that essay is not a. It's not an academic essay. It's a. It's a dramatization of. Of what you have to believe to believe in the Spalding conspiracy theory. And so that's. That's the idea of it. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:11:41] Got it. Okay. Spalding Fable. We'll. We'll make sure and share that in the show notes. Thanks, John.
The Church's Historical Policy of Denying Polygamy
John Hamer [01:11:47] So one of the other reasons. So one of the other pictures that people have, you know, they have this picture of Joseph Smith. So Joseph Smith, in addition to teaching the principle of plural marriage to his inner circle of friends to women and girls, he was getting sealed to in Nauvoo, he also had a policy of what, you know, we sometimes call, I think, in Mormonism, lying for the Lord. And so that is that he had a churchwide policy of denying the practice in public.
John Hamer [01:12:20] So and he did that. He justified that in order to avoid external persecution. He said that the church should be, you know, destroyed if people found out about it, which sort of true. And also to suppress internal descent. So lots of people like William Law would have revolted. People in the branches would have revolted. People in converts in England would certainly have thought twice about going to the Americas once they learned about it.
John Hamer [01:12:51] And so this policy of lying about polygamy continued to be LDS Church policy. So Brigham Young takes control of that headquarters apparatus after Joseph Smith's death, and he maintains that until 1852. So even though everybody is living it very scandalously out in Utah, and it's a very, very open secret, it is still church policy all the way up until 1852 to lie about polygamy in Utah. And so actually, when they change the policy and they say, oh, yeah, we actually are living it, then that news goes all the way out to Europe where some of the missionaries, some of the Apostles are, they had just barely been publishing all these denials about the polygamy and then suddenly the, suddenly that's overturned.
John Hamer [01:13:32] And they say, oh, haha, sorry, our bad. I guess we're going to be talking TR. Tell the truth about this now. So that had been the policy and, and what people somehow can't ever get in my. And which I, I don't understand. But anyway, when they, when they look at Emma and all the things that Joseph Smith's legal wife Emma went through and they wonder how could Emma, how could Emma apparently, you know, in her last interview with her son Joseph iii, who had made it his lifelong position to try to clear his father's name and deny that his father had anything to do with polygamy.
John Hamer [01:14:11] How could she have affirmed that, what, what her son's policy was and lying, lied about polygamy when she knew otherwise? And the answers, I think is that that is the church's policy. That was the church's policy under Joseph Jr. It continues to be the church's policy in the RLDS church.
John Hamer [01:14:33] And it's the policy when, when she is giving that interview. And there is no reason that just because Brigham Young changes a policy that somehow that would cause the policy to change in the RLDS Church.
John Dehlin [01:14:45] Got it. Okay. And you, have you also mentioned on the slide that as we mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, the LDS Church maintained the position that just had never practiced polygamy until the 1980s, 80s.
John Hamer [01:14:59] Yeah. And when it started to say, well, we don't. We not know. And then like I said after that, you know, like I said in the 2000s, it finally came up with a position that, that we don't have policy. Policy or we don't take a position on it. You know, and then it was only in 2010 that a pub, a book was actually published that admitted it. So.
John Dehlin [01:15:18] Got it.
John Hamer [01:15:19] All right, so let's talk about lying for the Lord. So didn't always follow this, but Jefferson Smith certainly had this view of perjury where he feels like he's not really lying if he can say something that's technically the truth, even if he's saying it with the intent to deceive people and his audience. And so, for example, he would always openly condemn things like the spiritual wifery, or he would say polygamy is wrong and polygamy is of the devil. And he wouldn't explain that in public. He'd say that those kind of blanket pronouncements in public. Public, but privately, nudge, nudge, wink. Wink. He would teach that polygamy or spiritual wifery are Satan's counterfeit of God's true principle of celestial marriage, of plural marriage.
John Hamer [01:16:05] And. But he doesn't tell people publicly that. What. That's what he means. What he means publicly. Could people just think that he's making a blanket condemnation of polygamy in general, not that he's also accepting, making an exception for celestial marriage, for plural marriage, the secret thing that he's teaching. And so Paul, Paul, in one of the letters, the Apostle Paul, you know, talks about teaching new people and giving them milk before meat. And so this is one of the justifications that gets quoted by Mormon leaders about the practice of lying for the Lord.
John Dehlin [01:16:41] Got it.
John Hamer [01:16:43] And so an example would be after William Law had published that expose that I talked about of plural marriage marriage,
John Dehlin [01:16:50] and really quickly let people know how high up William Law was in. In the. In the organizational structure of the Church. He wasn't just some lay member, right?
John Hamer [01:17:00] No, no, no, no. William Law is. He was. He had been adopted into the First Presidency. Right. So he is a member of. You know, he's not one of the two counselors, but he's a special counselor in the First Presidency. The original First Presidency often had those.
John Hamer [01:17:13] He was also one of the richest people in Nauvoo. So William Law was a convert from here in Canada. He moved to Nauvoo with a lot of money, and he was able to, for example, open a big store. He was able to open a big mill. And so he was one of the people who were invested heavily in the town. And a lot of times when you are. You have that kind of. Those kind of resources and with that kind of a leader as well, then Joseph would co opt you. And so they were. They were close associates before William was told about plural marriage by Joseph and rejected it and then caused his expose to be published in the Nauvoo Expositor.
John Dehlin [01:17:54] So really quickly, Julia's saying it's her understanding that Emma used to tell people to only listen to Joseph from the stand, which to Julia suggests that she knew that he would say different things behind closed doors. I don't know if you can confirm that, but Julia is usually spot on. On.
John Hamer [01:18:13] Yeah. So. So this would be. So Emma is an opponent of polygamy, you know, so, you know, with the brief exception of when she wasn't and when she accepted it in secret for a brief time in Nauvoo and in circumstances under which she was continuously being lied to by Joseph. So.
John Hamer [01:18:37] So the practice was much Larger and more extensive than, than Emma knew Joseph was secretly marrying her friends, counselors in the Relief Society and so forth. And so, and it was only really with the, the dictation of the, the manuscript that was later canonized in the LDS Church's DNC 132, that, you know, where she's threatened with destruction by the Lord if she doesn't accept it.
John Hamer [01:19:09] That, that she temporarily accepts it. And when that happens, even, and, and she agrees to pick a couple girls for Joseph to be sealed to. He's actually already sealed to them. And those women later testify that, that they had already been married, but they go through the ceiling again for the benefit of Emma who is being deceived. Right. And so, and so Emma, Emma doesn't like the secret teachings that Joseph Smith is doing. If so, so it might be a thing that she's saying. Listen from the pulpit. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:19:39] Yeah.
John Hamer [01:19:40] All right. So. So one of the things he says from the pulpit or to a crowd is, you know, he says this new holy prophet, William Law. So William Law has published the Expositor and has founded the, the Reformed Mormon Church. He's gone to Carthage, the county seat that Nauvoo is in the County Inn in Illinois, Hancock county, and sworn that I have told him that I, I, that I told him that I was guilty of adultery. This spiritual wifeism. Why a man dares not speak or wink, wink, wink with. For fear of being accused of this. What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery and having seven wives, you know, when I can only find one.
John Hamer [01:20:22] So maybe he's looking around, you know, in the crowd and he's not, you know, he's like, I'm accused of having these wives, but if I look around, I'm only seeing one wife, you know, and that kind of a thing. So he's trying to say I'm opposed to spiritual wifism no matter what all these people said. So privately, he though, is teaching people the principle of celestial or plural marriage. And publicly he's denouncing spiritual wifeism. And so I, I mentioned this in terms of lying for the Lord. You know, this is, this wink that he's giving is maybe like the wink. If people remember when LDS President Gordon Hinckley, I think we went on Larry King and said that he doesn't know much about the idea of salvation, but essentially about, yeah, becoming gods and something like that.
John Hamer [01:21:09] Mormons becoming gods and having their own planets. We don't know much about that. We don't know if we, I don't know if we teach that, that kind of thing. Whatever he said to Larry King and then he came back to General Conference and he says, I know plenty about that or something. Whatever he said. Right. You probably remember the quote better than I do.
John Dehlin [01:21:22] Yeah. He basically said, you, you don't need to worry that I understand, you know, Mormon doctrine. I understand it great. And everybody laughs left. Everybody knew what he was talking about. Right. But he was basically just reassuring the membership that they could hold on to their ultra orthodox views that men could become gods. When because of the movie the God Makers, it was embarrassing to the church that the world was making it known that Mormons had this extreme belief by, by the view of many Christians that, that they could become gods. And so the church, and it was affecting the church's relationship with other Christian churches.
John Dehlin [01:22:01] So the church wanted its cake and eat it too. Hinckley wanted to tell the world to downplay and dismiss the Mormon belief that Mormons could become gods, but didn't want to lose membership over it. So he wanted to, he spoke out of both sides of his mouth, basically.
John Hamer [01:22:19] Yeah. And I guess what I would argue is that that's a, a, that's a example of lying for the Lord. Right. So he goes in the public, he, he says something that is, you know, he didn't necessarily entirely perjure himself, but he's meaning to deceive. Right. So his goal is to get people to not think that or publicly. And then he comes back in private and says to the members, oh, you know, we do, we, I know plenty about that, that kind of thing. Right. So it's a, you know, kind of lying for the Lord. And that's also, you know, this is the policy that Joseph F.
John Hamer [01:22:50] Smith has when, when he, when during the, in the early 20th century when they're trying to seat Utah's first senator, the Smoot hearings. And he comes and he testifies and he and other church leaders testify before the Senate committee and they're sworn in and so forth. And he begins by, by saying these kind of duplicitous statements where he is essentially lying for the Lord. He's perjuring himself by, but by saying things that are kind of inherently, they're not false, but they're meant to deceive. But then he's never had to experience before a thing where he gets follow up questions. So the senators are saying, well, do you mean this by that?
John Hamer [01:23:28] And so then he has to actually expose the truth under oath. And so the truth that they haven't really been given they hadn't really given up polygamy when they needed were supposed to have, you know.
John Dehlin [01:23:37] So another example, interestingly, of Gordon B. Hinckley lying for the Lord is when he was asked by Larry King if Mormons still practice polygamy.
John Hamer [01:23:44] Me.
John Dehlin [01:23:44] And he said it's no longer doctrinal, which isn't true because it's in The Doctrine Covenants 132. It has not been decanonized.
John Hamer [01:23:54] Right.
John Dehlin [01:23:55] And we know that two of the three members of the First Presidency today are in celestial plural marriages.
John Hamer [01:24:01] Right.
John Dehlin [01:24:02] So he was trying to say to the world we don't believe in polygamy anymore.
John Hamer [01:24:06] Right.
John Dehlin [01:24:07] When he, when he knows that it's still doctrinal. And what he was. He was trying to skate that technicality by say, by meaning to say it's no, you know, we no longer practice it in marriages of living people today. But to me, that was also dissembling or lying for the Lord, in my opinion.
John Hamer [01:24:28] Yeah, I think that that sounds like a good example too. Yeah. So they're trying to. They've been trying to certainly since, you know, Heber J. Grant, they've been trying to get polygamy out of the story. Right. I don't want polygamy to be part of the story anymore. We now have really given it up and we're done.
John Dehlin [01:24:42] Yeah.
John Hamer [01:24:43] So if we go to the next slide, this is kind of like a lying for the Lord about polygamy timeline. And so the early church, this is the policy. So in the Orange here in the 1840s, Joseph Smith wants himself. He does, and all of his followers are meant to lie about the practice of, of celestial or plural marriage. That it is happening. But out loud, you say it, you don't say it. And that changes, you know, in the tradition that falls out Brigham Young in 1852, when then Brigham Young changes that policy. So there's that purple line there where that goes from there until the first manifesto where the LDS Mormons are openly practicing polygamy again and admitting it against Joseph Smith's policy, which was to lie about.
John Hamer [01:25:29] About it. Then what happened in the. After the first manifesto, what we what is now called Official Declaration 1 in the, in the LDSDNC, Mormons promised or that that they were going to give it up. But. But they only did that to try to get statehood. And they thought the world was going to end. And so they figured he could. The he could. Wilford Woodruff figured he can run out the clock until the world ended. And so they go back to the Policy of lying about it while still secretly practicing.
John Hamer [01:25:58] But then, like I mentioned, with that, the smooth hearings and the other scandals as Americans were upset that they had been lied to, the church publishes a second manifesto telling people, no, we are going to stop it now. And ultimately there's a third and final manifesto after which they get rid of apostles who are still secretly doing it and that kind of thing. And that causes the schism with the fundamentalist Mormons, ultimately. But essentially that's the LDS path where, you know, there's this policy and it's actually done. There's two periods of it where polygamy is being practiced, and it's being practiced and denied publicly.
How the RLDS Tradition Denied Smith's Polygamy
John Hamer [01:26:33] In the Strangite church, James Strang comes out as a polygamist earlier. So in 1849. And so then the Strangites are. Strangite Mormons are openly able to be polygamous, although they're doing it substantially less. Less. Less percentage of the leader of the members are polygamous than in Utah. But then Strang is himself martyred and the practice dies out among the Strangites. And like I said, in the RLDS church, if we look at the timeline again, Emma has no reason to follow Brigham Young's policy change. She's not taking your orders from Brigham Young.
John Hamer [01:27:11] So in any event, there is no reversal of this. Joseph III initially would himself like to believe that he wants to. He has again, a vision of his father. He doesn't want to believe it. I. I think that ultimately he has been given sufficient evidence that he knows better by the end, but is deciding that he's going to ride it out.
John Hamer [01:27:34] His brother, David Hyrum Smith, who has been a missionary in Utah, who has been been given sufficient evidence that his. His faith in his. His father's innocence has been shattered. And he. There's a wonderful biography of him called From Mission to Madness. He ultimately, you know, has a mental breakdown. Whether or not that has anything to do with this dissonance that happens, you know, can't say. But anyway, in any event, that's. That's where they're at. And then. And again, all of the other early leaders, you know, William Marks, other. Others are very. In the RLDS movement who had any association or intimate association with Joseph Smith. They tell Joseph III that he's wrong, and Joseph III simply waits them out until they're all dead. And then he continues to insist.
John Dehlin [01:28:25] All right, that's a great timeline.
John Hamer [01:28:28] All right, so about the modern conspiracy theory. So, yeah, RLDS people believed that as a Matter of faith.
John Dehlin [01:28:35] Faith.
John Hamer [01:28:35] But Mormons obviously didn't. It's only been recently that people in the LDS tradition now have started to not believe that Joseph Smith is the origin of Mormon polygamy as a faith claim. And it's actually shocking whenever I tell to our LDS people that this is the position that has happened, they think they can't believe that this has changed. They say, how could that possibly be the case? Because they're used to the. Arguing with the. The other way around Mormons about this. But anyway, so.
John Hamer [01:29:05] So I became aware of this back when Rock Waterman published something about it and on a. On a chat board in the 2000s, some point. And I kind of. Because I've been so used to hearing these from RLDS conservatives that I kind of immediately wrote a kind of a mean essay back to Rock. And he was very.
John Hamer [01:29:28] He was, he was. I'm gonna say he was very polite and, and, and, and not even though I had been very aggressive in my response to this. This idea, I kind of feel like. Or maybe even overdid it. He. He was very effusive and kind of said, well, I'm not a historian. I was just saying things that I think what is an interesting idea that I like as an idea and so forth. And so we, you know, it wasn't a real fight or anything like that, but that's kind of where I became. Became, you know, aware of this. And so I don't know if Rock Waterman is ever. If I don't know the details of. If he became a part of the Remnant Movement or the.
John Dehlin [01:30:05] I think he did, but I'm not sure.
John Hamer [01:30:07] Yeah, so this Remnant Movement, you know, Denver Snuffer Jr. Has sort of been the inspiration behind it. Have. Have embraced old RLDS apologetics and they've read, for example, the 1970s book Joseph Fought Polygamy. It's an RLDS people who oppos Richard Price, the prices that left the RLDS church over.
John Hamer [01:30:36] Over RLDS historians becoming academically trained and actually doing academic studies of history. He didn't like that and went back to. To, you know, old faith claims that are not based on academic history. So. And they publish that. And that's been the thing that has influenced this conspiracy theory in.
John Hamer [01:30:58] In modern Utah Mormonism or this sort of people who are a little bit estranged from the. The Utah Church's organization and structure. And so I wanted to say, if we go to the next one, I'm actually very sympathetic to the idea, you know, within this shared Latter Day Saint tradition. This is my ethnic heritage.
John Hamer [01:31:24] For people who want to reclaim spiritual practices, they want to get rid of correlation and corporate leadership that controls so much in the, in the Utah church sphere. But for me, I think it's a real mistake to build the new. Their new movements.
John Hamer [01:31:43] Truth claims that have been conclusively shown to be false by academic disciplines. So I don't think that this is, you know, the path that you should go in and we have as an example of what happened in the. In the RLDS church. So go to the next slide. So I want to say, you know, this is the failure of Joseph Smith III's church. So Joseph III came to.
John Hamer [01:32:07] Came to power with like an incredible. Or came to. He got ordained. He was the head of the. A new organization. At a moment when, you know, the. The Latter Day Saint people in the Midwest were all scattered. He immediately was able to gather them all in from the different defunct movements that had existed, the Strangites and others.
John Hamer [01:32:26] And, and. And brought a whole bunch of new enthusiasm and really rebuilt a movement. And there was a lot of enthusiasm in Utah as well. Brigham Young as he aged, you know, had. Had become, you know, a lot of ways a tyrant.
John Hamer [01:32:43] He had control financially and everything else over so much. He was. There were lots of, There was lots of opposition. There were lots of people who were saying, who were saying, who were remembering, you know, the time under Joseph Smith and maybe would have been happy to recapture that. But Joseph Smith iii, rather than.
John Hamer [01:33:04] Rather than seeing his duty as being to our people, as to the movement and trying to help people who were part of what I think of as Brigham Young's tyranny, if he couldn't welcome them in because he was so much more interested in stamping out or, you know, defending his father's reputation from this thing that his father actually had done. And so if he had been able to have some kind of a different. If you'd had a different response that would have been inclusive of Latter Day Saint people in Utah whose lives were. And families were totally intertwined with this practice of polygamy. Even if they maybe would like to have started to get rid of it.
John Hamer [01:33:46] If you could have done that in a phased way, it would have been completely, you know, the whole, whole of our history would have been completely different. And I just want to have like that from the picture. I have this thing, a story of the wedge.
John Hamer [01:34:01] So I was raised lds. As I saying, I actually nothing I hated worse than General Conference. I found it to be so boring. I never I never understood, you know, this was a kid. But anyway, I never understood, you know, how Mormons are really, you know, all get excited about conference weekend and all this kind of thing. I'm like, what? Why? That was the part I did not like in this church. I was not interested in all these old guys. Out of all the different conferences I was ever having to go with, there's only one story I remember. And maybe your viewer, the listeners here will remember this better than me because I don't remember if it was Spencer Kimball or who.
John Hamer [01:34:31] Who told this thing, but it's the only general authority story that. From my childhood that I actually remember where again, these are always set like kids in kind of pioneer depression era Utah or whatever. They all. They all were. And they're out on the farm and some kid.
John Hamer [01:34:45] There's a little oak sapling of a tree. A kid, instead of putting things away, he has this iron wedge and he puts it in the. In the cleft of the tree and he forgets about it.
John Dehlin [01:34:57] It.
John Hamer [01:34:58] And he goes about his life and he grows up and he goes. An old man or something like that. And then at a key moment in the. In like a later time in his life, the. The tree. The tree, you know, has a wind or something like that, and it splits and. And crashes on both sides and it dies and. And it kills the tree, you know, which. Has this been on outlive for all this time? And. And then he realizes there's the wedge that had been grown into it that was creating this intrinsic weakness in the tree.
John Hamer [01:35:27] So I don't remember what general authority told this story, but this was the only one that I remember out of all of them. And in so many ways, I think that for the RLDS church, this lie that just III founded his church on is a weakness that ends up making the church weak when. When we have to come to terms with. With foundational truth claims and. And the. The falsehood of several traditional truth claims, this being one of the key ones.
John Dehlin [01:35:57] It looks like that talk is called hidden wedges.
John Hamer [01:36:00] Okay.
John Dehlin [01:36:00] Given by Thomas S. Monson, and it says April 2002. Does that timeline.
John Hamer [01:36:06] No. I would have had to have listened to this. He must have been repeating it from somebody from the 70s.
John Dehlin [01:36:10] Oh, wait. Oh, wait, sorry. It begins by saying in April 1966, Spencer B. Kimball gave a memorable address.
John Hamer [01:36:21] Okay. Okay.
John Dehlin [01:36:23] Yeah. Of an account written by Samuel T. Whitman entitled Forgotten Wedges.
John Hamer [01:36:29] Okay.
John Dehlin [01:36:29] It looks like maybe. Maybe Monson recycled. Yeah.
John Hamer [01:36:33] So it's probably recycled more than one story.
John Dehlin [01:36:35] Yeah.
John Hamer [01:36:36] So I Probably didn't hear it on the first telling, you know, but like I said, that's the one story that I remembered. And so I'm just, this is just my advice to do. It's, you know, obviously there's, you know, there's other foundational claims that are a problem. You know, I'm sure that the remnant folks in the remnant community are also committed to Book of Mormon historicity, which I think that people should also get past historicity and literalism because those are also not tenable ultimately. But, you know, people can believe what they want to believe. So that I am not attacking people's. People's faith claims. The issue is simply that these aren't history.
John Dehlin [01:37:14] Got it, Got it.
Responding to Modern Polygamy Denial Claims
John Hamer [01:37:16] And so, so that, you know, brings us back to Michelle. Right? So because I have this general concern for disinformation, addiction, as I've always been calling in the 21st century, the rejection, the broad rejection of expertise. And this coupled with my early interaction with Rock Waterman and then like what had been at that point a very nascent polygamy denial conspiracy in, in that time period in the early 2000s or in the late 2000s or whatever, 2010. So I went on Michelle's podcast. She's a very nice person, like you say, very earnestly held views, but I just hadn't realized the degree to which this has really gone.
John Hamer [01:37:54] It's really exploded, you know, this in the last 10 years. So what I wanted to say, if we go to the next one, that is that this is a truth claim as opposed to an academic right now. It is not an academic thesis. If she's, she. I know that she's working to, to found a conference and that there she's maybe going to go in that direction. And so I hope that that actually emerges and we'll see.
John Hamer [01:38:23] I think that if she does, she does go into that kind of a study, then ultimately she will and, and she supports. If she is open to that, if she's actually open to learning academic methodology, her conclusion will be ultimately the same that all historians have had.
John Dehlin [01:38:45] It's unfortunate that she's starting her own journal with Cheryl Bruno, only in the sense that I think if she really wanted to advance the field, approve her case, she would write, you know, do her research, write an article, publish it in the journal Mormon History or in the John Whitmer Journal or, you know, some, some really popular actual legitimate site, you know, peer reviewed historical journal versus start her own journal and then publish in it, which I don't mean to characterize what her plans are. Yeah, but to me, going through legitimate, established, peer reviewed, reputable sources would be the best way.
John Hamer [01:39:28] And by the way, the journals are very, are, you know, already very open to publishing. Right. So it's not a huge, there's not a huge barrier. This is a very welcoming historians community. When, you know, the very first MHA conference that I went to, I think back in 2003 or something like that, like the very first time I was at one of these conferences, Lavina Fielding Anser style, and just said, hey, let's just come in here and let's sit around in a circle. I want to find out who you are and all the things that you're working on. You know, in that same conference, like I had, I was able to have dinner with Dan Vogel, you know, and here's a guy who I'd read all of his books, you know, and he was just, he just wants to, you know, immediately welcoming.
John Hamer [01:40:10] And I've known him ever since. So it's a, I mean, and they, and Michelle was at the JWHA conference, which I think was great. And so I think that anyway, it's completely possible to do that. So I'm, again, I'm not trying to make this about Michelle, but what I want to say is that where we are right now in terms of the, the kind of way that she outlines the, the, the deep dives that she has where she, let's say, kind of haphazardly attacks individual little pieces of evidence and says why she thinks that all of this category of evidence has to be dismissed, or why she doesn't think that this evidence should count or all of those kind of things.
John Hamer [01:40:46] Things, I would say that that should be very familiar, that kind of methodology, not really methodology, that kind of tactic and strategy should be very familiar to people who are in the Mormon studies community or Mormon stories community. When you think of like kind of the Farms or Fair style apologetics, where when you're presented with just this preponderance of evidence about Book of Mormon anachronism, when we're, we are have the evidence of the Book of Mormon's literary dependence on, on 19th and, you know, 17th and 18th and 19th century texts, the, the King James Bible and so forth, that you then instead of, instead of having that kind of taking that evidence altogether, they instead, you know, drill down on each little, each little anachronism and say, well, you know, famously I have that picture of the Tapirs because you say, oh, well, there's no horses, but maybe the Nephites had tapirs and they were using the horse.
John Hamer [01:41:49] That's the most egregious one of those examples. Right. You know, and so I, we, people like that one as a, as a standout, but in other words, attacking the individual pieces. And so I have in the next slide is a kind of a quote I've made. I haven't given it, I think, in Mormon stories before, but this often is attributed to me.
John Hamer [01:42:09] So when we spend all of our time looking through a microscope at sample A and say that the patterns here look like sample B, what do you. What is sample A and B, John?
John Dehlin [01:42:21] To me, the one on the left looks like tree bark.
John Hamer [01:42:26] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:42:27] The one on the right could be almost anything. It could be something microscopic, it could be a blanket.
John Hamer [01:42:36] If you go to a slide ahead, it's the hide of an elephant. Right. When we get up so close to this, so it's, you know, we can tell ourselves that there's some kind of a meaningful connection between tree bark and elephant hide. Right. But if we go to the next one, if we zoom out, you know, we stop doing these things where we're talking about, you know, you know, some kind of very micro thing. If we look at the, the full picture, the evidence, you know, we can see that that sample is actually a forest and it's not an elephant. Right? So the, the Book of Mormon is a 19th century text.
John Hamer [01:43:09] It is not an ancient text. It doesn't matter how, you know, the close up of, you know, the patterns or whatever that people can, you know, spend all their time debating chiasmus. And it doesn't. That's not what. That doesn't matter because we, the conclusion of the, of literary dependence shows us that it's a 19th century text.
John Hamer [01:43:29] And so the quote that I have is in the next slide. You can avoid saying, well, this is a forest. If you spend all of your time staring at bark through a microscope and telling yourself that the pattern in bark is similar to the pattern in an elephant's hide, which I think is the app, you know, not a, not a methodology, but the strategy of this kind of apologetics. And so when I went on, you know, Michelle's podcast, she said, well, look, what you. I want you to bring is your best evidence of Joseph Smith's the Plagueamus so that she can shoot that down. You know, so she, it's like a shooting match where she wants to go each individual evidence.
John Hamer [01:44:05] And I know that, you know, she then. And she and other folks who have this faith claim have a laundry list of primary Sources that are kind of addressed haphazardly. You argue every, argue away, dismiss whole categories of it because that's how you have to approach this. It's like the Book of Mormon antiquity claims where, where they claim that you're actually, if you get a hit, you're doing something. So you know, nephilim or what, or what's it called is like, it's like a hit. It doesn't work because you get a score, a few hits. That's not, that's not how, you know, the evidence worked. The anachronisms already Show It's a 19th century document.
John Hamer [01:44:45] It's not a bad about, you know, hits and that kind of a thing. So, so like I was saying about this Brigham Young as a, as the origin of, of polygamy, so that you have to start then if you have that thesis, you have to, like you were saying, you know, like write out an article, write out a book, a study where you present how that happens. You show where that can be defended in, you know, the primary sources. And then you take all, all of the, of the sources that we have on polygamy, which are enormous. All of the types, you know, from, from insiders, outsiders, people who are loyal to Brigham Young, people who hated Brigham Young.
John Hamer [01:45:26] You know, how all of the, all of these evidence, all of these testimonies, how they fit this counter thesis that you're making, you know, so that has to be, has to be done. So it's not a matter of, of, you know, if you're saying, well, I, I think, you know, somebody brings up DNC 132 and he says, well, I don't think that was actually written by Joseph Smith. Well, I mean, so if going each and every one of those little things going down a rabbit hole on, on a laundry list is not how, how we get to historical conclusions or how when, when there is a, a widely accepted conclusion that we have a consensus.
John Hamer [01:46:01] That's how we have consensus. So, so it's not about taking these little potshots or getting hits or something like that. That, so, so one of the things that I did not do then, you know, for this presentation, because we're, we already have the historical consensus. So, so I'm going to leave. Yeah, if you go to the next one, I'm leaving. Going down the rabbit holes to Dan Vogel. So, you know, you know, usually when we talked about, we talked several times about the Book of Mormon presentation that I did with you on this podcast that's almost always cited side by side with Dan Stan has done Excellent.
John Hamer [01:46:36] Excellent. I mean, I, frankly, much of what I was saying was based on, you know, original research that Dan has done. So he and I agree on a lot of things. Unlike him, I actually don't like dueling with apologists. He loves doing it. So Dan, Dan, I do anticipate is going to go down this kind of laundry list. He's already started, so he has on his YouTube channel the first in a series of responses to Michelle. And so, you know, I think we can. Can Dan. Dan has done the same thing with, with Lars and the Spalding, his Spalding book. And so, and so I think that we can anticipate that there'll be plenty more of those from Dan.
John Dehlin [01:47:14] But I.
John Hamer [01:47:15] What I would like to do in this one is if we go to the next is I want to make a. A case for the Mormon Stories audience about, you know, just trusting a little bit an expertise that it's not just, just historical consensus is not the same as, as a, as an idea that you want to believe in because of an image that you have of Joseph Smith.
John Hamer [01:47:37] So, you know, I've mentioned how I met Randy. You know, he was a proponent of the Spalding theory. He had been revived, you know, by Craig Cradle's wordprint analysis. But I really think that Randy largely believed in it because, because he had preserved this belief that the Book of Mormon was too amazing for Joseph Smith to author and because, you know, and that's how I met. Met him and he was mad at me. He hated me for, for arguing against his view on that. But, you know, because he was a believer in academic expertise, he later became, you know, convinced by the historical consensus on that issue.
John Hamer [01:48:11] And so, you know, if we go to the next one, you know, I think our goal should be to, you know, uphold knowledge, not truth claims. In, in this congregation in Toronto here, one of our mottos that we remember and try to live by as central to the restoration is, you know, we uphold truth wherever it is found and even, even when it leads us to places that we're not comfortable with, like learning, you know, in some cases for the members here, you know, that Joseph Smith was the origin of, of Mormon polygamy. So I just want to say, you know, expertise is valuable. Academically informed history is actually more interesting than conspiracy theories.
John Hamer [01:48:55] You know, I recommend it already. Todd Compton's book. People should read that. People interested in the documents can read his new documentary version of it. Any of these interesting studies of Nauvoo. Nauvoo polygamy. George Smith's whole big, long study of Nauvoo polygamy. Dan Vogel's work on Joseph Smith making the prophet. Anyway, all of these things are incredibly interesting. Moran History is so interesting. And. And ultimately you can be religious without relying on truth claims that, you know, that academics have shown to be false. And ultimately, in my opinion, I think it's more healthy when we do so. So that's my case.
John Dehlin [01:49:36] Beautiful. All right, well, that. That's slightly. I. I expected the framing. I did think towards the end you would pull out some documents or some references. But I understand the point you're making, which is scholarship is a thing and academia is a thing, and books are a thing, and people need to read them and study them and study their assumptions and their biases when they're arriving at conclusions.
John Hamer [01:50:08] Well, and. And one of the reasons why. So I can parade a whole bunch of evidence and we might do this as a second. As a second version of this. But I wanted to frame it this way because I don't. This isn't about, again, taking my best evidence and putting it up so that then unmethodologically people can just say, well, I don't believe in that one. Or I just don't trust. I won't. I would never listen to Bennett because he. He was a person who betrayed Joseph Smith. Or I, you know, want to hear from all of these people who were Brigham Young loyalists. Obviously, they wouldn't.
John Hamer [01:50:39] They don't count. You know, so there'd be all kinds of different ways people can unmethodologically argue against every little bit of evidence and everything like that. For. For people who are already kind of committed down that path. I don't think that this argumenting, arguing that kind of debate is. Is very helpful or healthy. And so I don't. I try not to engage in it. I'd be very happy to, instead of going to. That's the kind of thing Dan likes to do. So you can have him on to do those. You know, he can. He can say, people have made this cause and that's false and misleading.
John Hamer [01:51:13] For this and this reason, what I kind of feel like we might do instead is we can just look at all of those different types, you know, of evidence, how consistent they are, all of the different testimony. You can read through all of these kinds of documents.
John Hamer [01:51:27] You can also. Anybody could do that by reading any one of these books that I was putting up, because they all make that case. That's, you know, when I'm talking about a historical consensus, all the Historians, you know, you know, agree until tell basically the same story. They disagree about different points. People have. People, some people think that Fanny Alger is, is definitely the first plural wife. Some other people think no, she was an affair that Joseph Smith was having and that he later developed, you know, more, more fully polygamy as an idea. But so to justify that kind of thing.
John Dehlin [01:52:02] Beautiful. So, John, I, I want to honor the spirit of, of your approach for this first episode. And if you're willing, I would absolutely love to take you up on a second episode.
John Hamer [01:52:13] Yeah, yeah.
John Dehlin [01:52:13] To kind of show some of the evidence. I did this with Michelle. Would you mind if I just asked you a few questions about some of the positions that she and others like her take just to hear you could dispatch with them quickly and just say you're trying to discredit, you know, ad hominem, you know, you could dispatch with just a high level response. But I, I want to give people the taste of your, your understanding of the evidence as well and without digging into the documents, kind of conclude with just some high level responses to some of the arguments. Is that okay?
John Hamer [01:52:50] Okay, sure.
John C. Bennett, William Law, and Corroborating Witnesses
John Dehlin [01:52:51] Okay. So let's just say, you know, one of the arguments we've got a lot. John C. Bennett was also of, you know, let's just say first presidency level leader in Nauvoo from, I don't know, 1840 to 1842 kind of time frame. And obviously John C. Bennett breaks from Joseph Smith and then says Joseph Smith was definitely practicing spiritual wifery or plural marriage. The common response there is that he was a bad guy, which is probably true. He was a liar, he was an abusive person in charlatan. And so you can't really trust what he had to say about Joseph Smith's polygamy. You know what, what would be your quick response to that?
John Hamer [01:53:34] So Bennett is a complicated figure. There's a beautiful biography of Bennett I'm trying to think of. I can't remember who wrote it anyway, I can't remember it now. But one of the great works of the whole collection of the new Mormon history, there's a great Bennett biography. He is a much more complicated figure than just a simple villain because for one thing, him getting discredited and kicked out from Joseph Smith initially, he's willing to take that as a kind of initial scapegoat. And he doesn't think that he's going to get kicked out. He's willing because of his alliance with Joseph Smith to be kind of a public scapegoat and things like that.
John Hamer [01:54:16] But yeah. Saintly Scoundrel by Andrew Smith is the. Is the name of that. I hardly recommend that biography. It's so fun and interesting and so. And so Bennett is. It's only after he's down that other people in Joseph Smith's court like Brigham Young and so on, who, who do not like this guy who has had. He's had all of this. He's the mayor of Nauvoo. He's. He's in the first presidency. In other words, this guy who was a Johnny Come lately has suddenly been taking their place. That should be for them. And so once he's down, they don't want him back. So Joseph probably would have been willing to forgive him and rehabilitate him or whatever after kind of a publicly scapegoating him.
John Hamer [01:54:55] It's only when he gets kicked out finally that he goes on this expose run. And one other thing about him is that he does not. It's not like he doesn't. He's not still interested in the movement. He is. He later joins the Strangite church and is part of Strang's first presidency. And so in other words, he's somebody who is very interested in the. In this kind of thing without being just a negative. It's called saintly scoundrel. He's a scoundrel, but he's also more complicated than that. So the counter argument to this thing though, than just dismissing all, let's say, insiders that Joseph Smith casts out who then write exposes.
John Hamer [01:55:33] In Bennett's case, he writes some very serious, some details. And almost all of those details are later confirmed by insurance insiders. So what he's doing is he is publishing Joseph Smith's secrets and Joseph Smith denies them in public at the time. But later Joseph Smith insiders, including especially the followers of Brigham Young, say no, that everything that he said is accurate or they release some of these names. They disagree with a bunch of the scandalous stuff. But the names of the wives are ultimately confused, confirmed. So it's. It doesn't actually something that we can reject out of hand. Certainly not. We read it for the biases it has.
John Dehlin [01:56:16] And I think Michelle even acknowledges that he, he, John C. Bennett, lists several names as first and last initials right at the time. And these, these are all later women who, who admit or. Or endorse that they were polygamous wives. And Michelle, as I understand it, admits that that's a curiosity to her. That's not compelling evidence, but it is. Okay. The thing that Cheryl Bruno and Cheryl Bruno, who would not identify as someone who denies that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.
John Hamer [01:56:57] Right.
John Dehlin [01:56:58] The thing that she and Michelle seem to agree upon is that whatever evidence they believe, that whatever evidence we do have about polygamy is problematic, that it either comes way too late, or it's possibly forged, or it's not written by credible people or the documents or second or third hand, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, so just to give a couple examples of that, Michelle Stone would say that the William Clayton journals are not. Not reliable because we don't have the originals. And whatever we do have are partial copies of copies. And so you just can't trust, you know, copies of copies of partial journals. What would you say about the William Clayton diaries in response to that argument?
John Hamer [01:57:50] So the standards or whatever that Michelle is imposing on sources is. Seems like it's what you might be trying to do for a criminal court, where you are trying to convict someone of a crime beyond all reasonable doubt. And you have to have a very high standard of that for a person in a criminal court, which is not the standard, you know, of history. That's not how. That's not how history works. History. We don't just ignore all evidence until we can absolutely convict somebody with this, a. A smoking gun. Rather, we look at all of the evidence and, and we say, do all the evidence.
John Hamer [01:58:35] Is it support. Does it support one another? We look at the different biases of. If even if. If a thing is a later copy, is the. Is the later copy that we have, then we can do a literary analysis of it. Is it filled with anachronisms? If people are right, if William Clayton was forging this journal as part of Brigham Young's conspiracy seven years later, or whenever he's doing it, he would instantly be introducing all kinds of anachronisms that would make the journal non credible and it would be able to be exposed using literary criticism. Right. So it's not just a matter of saying it's late.
John Hamer [01:59:13] It's a matter then of doing. Doing the literary analysis on it and saying, Here are the 200 anachronisms that William Clayton has made when he's claiming he's in Nauvoo, when in fact we know he's writing this eight years later in Salt Lake or something like that.
John Dehlin [01:59:32] There's a. There's a. One response. I'll share some comments or questions from the audience. Eric writes, Andrew F. Smith in his biography on page 125 to 126, shows proof that Bennett, John C. Bennett, would delete, add and omit and forge materials, therefore he cannot be trusted. What. See you, John Hamer to that. Yeah.
John Hamer [01:59:52] So Bennett is a liar. So yeah, you're not going to read Bennett's expose. Bennett's expose is also a hodgepodge. So it has good material in it and it has stuff that he just randomly recycles. You know, he's just trying to put out a book that he, he wrote really fast in order to have a bestseller so that he can have that accompany his, his best. He made all kinds of money run, you know, doing these speeches as he did, you know, Barnstor Cross. So like all historical sources, we have to analyze everything that Bennett has, you know, in terms of the biases that he has.
John Hamer [02:00:29] So Bennett is a self promoter. He's biased. He is trying to show, you know, a particular thing. He's trying to not make himself be as guilty of it as he is. He doesn't want to be arrested for, you know, polygamy, which is not legal. He is. So he's doing all kinds of things. That means that we can't take him on face value, but that doesn't mean we dismiss every single thing that he writes because he, some of the things that he includes are information that we can then look at in concert with other sources. The names, like we said, of those initials, those women who later came forward and they also testify that they had been married to Joseph Smith.
John Hamer [02:01:10] Smith, just as Bennett alleged. Well then that is why we believe Bennett. If we only had Bennett, if we didn't have all the rest of it, we would dismiss Bennett because of all of those reasons. But because it is consonant with the historical record, then it's, it's not only proves, buttresses the later testimonies and it also brings it into Joseph Smith's lifetime for sure.
John Dehlin [02:01:35] Dan Vogel, he's in the chat. Chat. We love you, Dan. Dan writes, Emma lied about polygamy, but we trust her account of the translation. And when he says we, he means, you know, I think believing Mormons or maybe he does as well.
John Dehlin [02:01:50] I was just going to make the point that Eric Martineau's accusations against John C. Bennett sound a lot like the accusations against Joseph Smith or the evidence against Joseph Smith that he would delete, ad omit and forge material feels he cannot be trusted. And that's a real problem. You can't really have it both ways. Mormons can't like pick and choose who they want to discredit. But then say Joseph Smith and Emma are heroes because I think, you know, that lying for the Lord point that you made earlier absolutely applies to Joseph. And yet lots of believing Mormons still and his, you know, demonstrably either forging and, or false translating documents, you know, clearly would, would undermine his authority if you're trying to hold Joseph by the same standard you're holding John C.
John Dehlin [02:02:40] Bennett. So I think that's something that people have to. To work out. Okay, thank you for entertaining these questions. Anyway, I'll. I have a few more.
John Hamer [02:02:50] Okay.
John Dehlin [02:02:52] And I think I know where you're going to go with this one. When, you know, I think that the strongest case for polygamy has at least recently been highlighted by Radio Free Mormon, where he basically is able to show parallels between, you know, newspaper reports of a meeting that I believe Hyrum Smith had with the Nauvoo City Council, where it, you know, people or in diary accounts. I'm, I'm always rough on the details, but basically there's really good evidence that all the main points in DNC 132 were then included in the Nauvoo Expositor, which was released before Joseph died, obviously. And there's even, I think, Nauvoo City Council minutes where those who are in attendance report that a revelation was written, read to the people at the Nauvoo City Council as well.
John Dehlin [02:03:53] And I'm probably massacring the history, but that's kind of, that, you know, that's kind of RFM's best case that you. This is really open and shut. If DNC132 was reflected in the Navu Expositor and the Navu Expositor was published by someone really close to Joseph Smith, meaning William Law before even Joseph Smith died, you know, open and shut case. And I don't think Michelle Stone has presented a really viable response to that, but basically what she has said is that you can't trust William and Jane Law because William Law was ambitious. He wanted to replace Joseph Smith.
John Dehlin [02:04:34] You know, he got things wrong in the Nauvoo Expositor. He wanted to become the new prophet. And these are my words, not hers. And he was, you know, an apostate and disgruntled. And so for all those reasons, you can't trust William Law. I think I know where you're going to respond, but go ahead.
John Hamer [02:04:51] Well, we have, we have like a later testimony of William Law. So he's interviewed after, after the whole Nauvoo period where he's more reflective and he kind of says he was a, he was a fool to have done the Expositor, that he should have quietly Sold out all of his, you know, because he lost so much money and everything like that to do it right, he should have quietly sold out all of his interests and just left the movement and not, not have made, you know, this whole thing happen the way he did. I don't think. I think that based on, like, where things went and, and his actions and so forth, I don't think we can read into his character that he was ambitious, that he wanted to replace Joseph Smith.
John Hamer [02:05:34] I think he very reluctantly took that path because he couldn't get Joseph Smith to leave the path that he was on. He wanted to, you know, go back and, you know, reform Mormonism and get it away from this, this practice that ultimately was going to be so destructive.
John Hamer [02:05:55] And, and so anyway, so, so. But in terms of what. That's William Law's character. So again, what we have with every single individual, we can't just dismiss people because, because they break with Joseph Smith and they're disloyal to Joseph Smith or something like that. That's something. Again, that's a religious position, a religious proposition that you have, not a historical one. We read all of the characters of history for their inherent biases that they have what they're doing. He is, you know, we have to read the Expositor for that. And so, but nevertheless, as, as you were alluding to the, the case made at Radio Free Mormons, and to the extent to which it doesn't matter what the bias is, to the extent to which the Expositor includes details that are entirely consonant with DNC132, that is a, that is evidence that, that DNC132 is a LDS.
John Hamer [02:06:53] DNC132 is an accurate copy of the revelation that Joseph was circulating to Hiram and to the city council and to Emma and so forth. So I'm sure the argument that Michelle would make on DNC132 is once again, we have a. We, we don't have the original because according to, I think it's Clayton, Emma Byrne, the original with Joseph, but he had a copy of it. And that's. And that's the copy. Once again, the way you.
John Dehlin [02:07:21] And she would also say it came way, way late, that it wasn't published and included in the DNC until the 18:1, what, 60s or 70s.
John Hamer [02:07:30] Yeah, but the manuscript isn't that late. But anyway of this copy. But anyway, whatever year of the manuscript, what especially let's say if it was way late, let's say it did come, it was written in 1870. If you look at the text of, of DNC 132, the church in the 1870s wouldn't have written it that way.
John Hamer [02:07:49] People immediately introduce anachronisms when they, when they forge documents that are later. DNC132 is just dripping with all kinds of things that Joseph is trying to persuade Emma and arguing with it. And it has the context at the time. So again, the case that you, you don't just say a text is late, you have to show, you know, you have to show, prove that it is not, you know, this copy is, is an actual, a forged document later and you can prove that through anachronisms. That's how we have dealt with Book of Mormon authorship. That's why we can conclusively say the Book of Mormon is a 19th century century document.
John Hamer [02:08:25] So if, if this was a later forgery, it would have anachronisms, it wouldn't reflect the context of the Nauvoo time and it wouldn't then have that same exact, you know, be consonant with things like the Expositor. Because the forgers wouldn't care about what William Law might have said in the Expositor. They would care about justifying polygamy as they were practicing it in the 1870s in Utah.
John Dehlin [02:08:50] Dan Vogel always coming in clutch in the comments he's writing. DNC 132 was copied by Joseph Kingsbury before he left Nauvoo about July 1843, which was again a year before Joseph was killed. So yeah, there are going to be anachronisms in DNC132.
John Hamer [02:09:07] Well there you go. Yeah, so, so yeah, Dan is on top of all of the, of all of the documents. We're so happy to have him. And like I said, I hope Dan, you don't mind that I have left it to you to go down the rabbit hole with all, with the apologists on all of this.
John Dehlin [02:09:20] So John Hamer, what would you say? You know, we know that I, I think it was in the Temple Lock case where so many of the women who claimed to be Joseph's plural wives were asked or forced by some accounts to sign these affidavits that they were wives of Joseph Smith in very deed, meaning that they did have sexual relations with them. I think Michelle Stone's argument there and others is that they were forced to sign those affidavits that Brigham Young was a tyrant and he, you know, you almost get the impression that, and, and there's, I think Cheryl and Michelle both claim that these were almost form letters that these women were forced to sign.
John Dehlin [02:10:02] So they weren't written by the women. They were just form letters there. There wasn't even significant variation between them. And that Brigham Young is a tyrant, forced them to sign it it because he was trying to defend his evil practices. That's my characterization of their argument. I'm sure I'm getting it wrong, but I think I'm conveying the sense of it. What would you say to someone who's entertaining that theory?
John Hamer [02:10:27] Well, so, so the temple lock case, like you say, is a, this is a case that the RLDS Church brought forth for its own, its own bias purposes. The RLDS Church felt like it had won a, a, an important, but it wasn't really, but an important case in Ohio over the Kirtland Temple where, where the RLDS Church gained possession of Kirtland Temple through adverse possession, which is to say that they own, they just happened to own it and so, and they were paying the taxes on it long enough. But in the course of that case, there was a ruling of, of finding where a local judge seemed to indicate that, that the RLDS Church was the, was the original church, you know, still constituted.
John Hamer [02:11:17] In other words, it was still functioning as the early church. And that is all our LDS people have ever wanted to say. In other words, we're of the original church, not the LDS people. They've, they've distorted it because they changed the doctrines of the church. And so, and so that had become a, A, a good public relations issue as far as the RLDS people were concerned. And so they, they brought the temple lot case with the purpose of trying to establish the same thing.
John Hamer [02:11:43] And so there, so there was an actual, an actual battle between the churches where, where, because the RLDES Church is trying to get a legal ruling that they were the, you know, that it was the actual, actual true church or whatever, the original church.
John Hamer [02:11:59] And but anyway, so yes, there were all kinds. Part of the issue was did the LDS Church change the doctrines to add polygamy or was polygamy part of the early church? And that was therefore why there were all of this testimony on this. And so my response to, to even Cheryl and also Michelle and their reading of these these is. I think you have to, doesn't they don't to me read like form letters. I think that there is, you know, individual details and testimony from different women.
John Hamer [02:12:32] But more importantly, it is not only Brighamites who have these testimonies. So, so Strangites come out of the works and they also testify about, about polygamy. So there is no reason for Strangites to. To assert, you know, oh yeah, Joseph Smith was the founder of this when Brigham Young was the, was the head of this conspiracy that Joseph Smith thought these guys fought, that these guys are opponents of Brigham Young. So again, we have all of this testimony from. It's not just Brigham Young loyalists. We have it also from all of these people, as we were just seeing with William Law and Bennett, people who break with just Smith.
John Hamer [02:13:15] But then we have people who are Joseph Smith loyalists who are opponents of Brigham Young. And so they are all. They're also having these testimonies and these practices. And so, and that includes in the temple lot case. So those people are not answering form letters, you know, that Brigham Young is controlling. It's their other churches.
John Dehlin [02:13:32] So, so the idea that these women were forced by Brigham Young or others to sign these affidavits or to make
John Hamer [02:13:39] these statements for that, that particular claim, then look at each individual woman. Look at if. Is there any evidence of that? So is there, do they have, do they have then a journal where one of these women said Brigham Young's thugs came and made me sign this thing? You know, I mean, this is a. There's. You can look into those kind of cases. It's not just something that you just say. You can demonstrate that by showing. Looking at the rest of the evidence, if there is any, which I don't think there is.
John Dehlin [02:14:06] So.
John Hamer [02:14:06] But anyway, I mean, those testimonies when I read them are compelling. So.
John Dehlin [02:14:12] So I'll just share a comment that you may find entertaining or you may not. Someone named Elixir says, this is so disappointing. And so I said, you know what is disappointing? Elixir? And then Alexia says, the lack of evidence of historians, the lack of evidence that historians bring and lack of background of the people from the time. Time versus Michelle who gives good details of the relationships. Yeah, so.
John Hamer [02:14:42] So unfortunately, you know, again, there is such a preponderance of evidence. You know, this is why I wanted to again frame what the issue here is to explain that, that we are dealing with, with the same kind of a thing that we have with Book of Mormon authorship where, where there is a forest here, here. But yes, is the, is the thing that Michelle doing this apologetic thing that the farms people do about Book of Mormon authorship where you drill down every single, on every single anachronism. You say, well, maybe there was metallurgy in Peru or maybe horses were tapirs or every single one of these little detail things where you try to explain away each individual little piece of evidence.
John Hamer [02:15:27] Haphazardly and without any methodology. That's not a valid framework. And so if historians, Dan, can go ahead and do this, but if historians follow apologists down every little rabbit hole, we're following into that trap of, of a non methodological, just a faith claim that is being backed up by haphazard statements. So that's why, yeah, we can make the case. Read any one of these books.
John Dehlin [02:15:57] He did address it. He did bring receipts.
John Hamer [02:15:59] Pete's.
John Dehlin [02:16:01] He brought 14 books for you to read. And that's, that's John Hamer's evidence presented today that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.
John Hamer [02:16:12] Yeah. And so we can go through, you know, some of the details of it, all these primary sources, like I said in the next episode, but I, I'm not going to go and respond to each one of these. Like, I say that like this is how, this is not how I did the Book of Mormon authorship one with you. Right. So I didn't start and say, oh, well, this explanation about Nahum is wrong. This explanation about chiasmus is wrong. If I just go down that whole laundry list, we're playing into this apologetic game that has already derailed us from finding truth.
Upcoming Polygamy Conference and Closing Thoughts
John Dehlin [02:16:43] Let me ask you about that. So for those who are interested, there's a Mormon polygamy conference that I believe starts tomorrow, May 21st. It goes till May 22nd. I think Taylor Petrie is presenting. I think you're right. Todd Compton's presenting again. Barbara Jones Brown, a lot of big names in, in Mormon studies. Some feel like it's a mistake to platform Michelle Stone at all. Some were saying I shouldn't have had her on the podcast. But then I talked to Barbara Brown and Bar, you know, and others. And, you know, there's, there's, there are people who just say, no, you engage people. And by engaging people, more sunlight is the best disinfectant. And so what do you think? Do you think it's healthy that people, that Cheryl and others are engaging with Michelle Stone and the tens or hundreds of thousands of people she represents, or do you think it's a mistake to engage with them?
John Hamer [02:17:43] No, I think it's. And to the extent that Cheryl wants to do that and people are excited about doing it, to the extent that anybody wants to spend all the time doing, you know, debunking videos or any one of the things, looking at every single one of those points, I think that's absolutely fine. I'm not, I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't do in that way. I Don't do that kind of apologetic dueling. What I would try to do is just like we did when we lay out the case for the.
John Hamer [02:18:14] The Book of Mormon evidence. One I would like to. Then it's really. It's very difficult because there's so much of the evidence. But anyway, where I would show it into those four quadrants that I was giving, where instead of any kind of, you know, this kind of focusing on, you know, all of the. All of the pieces that are. That they want to throw away and totally discredit what. What I would want to show how, like, we've already talked about how the testimony of these women that have come forward and who are followers of Brigham Young, which they discount because they said, well, Brigham Young made to do it.
John Hamer [02:18:51] And yet it. It buttresses this testimony from John C. Bennett, which they want to discount because John C. Bennett is a disloyal scoundrel. And yet the fact is that these two completely antagonistic sources buttress each other means that we can't just throw both of them out for these arbitrary reasons that they're citing. So. So that would be how we want to make, you know, show the. The full case, which I'll do with you later. Yeah.
Community of Christ Work and Listener Support
John Dehlin [02:19:22] All right. Well, today has been amazing. John Hamer, before we end, I want to give you a chance to promote or talk about anything you're doing with your Community of Christ Toronto congregation with. With your website, which again is called set. You can go to Center Place CA. That's C E N T R E Place CA. And then also there's the YouTube channel, Center Place. Tell everybody, see all the cool things y' all are doing. So. So that they can follow you because you do a weekly broadcast sharing history and knowledge, right?
John Hamer [02:20:05] Yeah, absolutely. So I2. We have two weekly broadcasts. So. So the one that we do is on Sunday is the Sunday service, our congregation. So I'm pastor of the congregation. Our congregation is online. So we live stream a service at 12 Eastern Eastern Time every week. And because.
John Hamer [02:20:26] Because we are not committed to focusing on scriptural literalism and historicity, we're not making any kind of faith claims that, you know, like any of the things in the Bible where we're hearing about supernatural things or anything like that, that nothing, no claims like that is happening. And instead, what we're looking at is this tradition we have in the restoration in Christianity of having a faith community where you can come together to talk about life issues, to consider the meaning of life, to work on activist goals together, to work on charity Together.
John Hamer [02:21:02] So as a result of having a very different kind of church than I think most of your listeners will be familiar with, we just continuously are having new people who come from either, you know, ex Mormons or xrlds, people from back in the day, but just as frequently people from other literalistic, fundamental Christian traditions who got ground up because they were taught all of these things about the Bible that they no longer believe are true, but they're still interested in the topics because they were abused by their churches, because they were gay, gay and lesbian or trans or something like that, or just women who are not given equality of purpose in a lot of churches.
John Hamer [02:21:51] So we're able to come together and have that church experience. And so lots of people are finding that and finding it to be unlike anything that they've experienced before. So people can come to that if they're interested in that, if they're not interested in church, which is fine.
John Hamer [02:22:04] I also, then on Tuesday night, I have a history, theology, philosophy lecture on the same channel. Many more people, we have 80,000 subscribers to that. Many more people listen to that. It's interesting. If you're interested in things like, you know, Bible topics, again, history of early Christianity, but then all kinds of other ones, then you can find those if you go to live. The live ones are the ones that you'd be looking at. And so recent ones of these podcasts or things like. Yeah, so these are popular ones. So who, who wrote Genesis, history of the last 10 tribes? What do we know about the historical Jesus?
John Hamer [02:22:39] Why Paul's church is one in early Christianity? What's the origin of the papacy? These are just some of the examples. Who was baal, lost books of the Bible, that kind of thing. So if you're interested in those kind of topics, we talk about those. And we do that from an academic perspective, not from a religious perspective.
John Hamer [02:22:55] And I've been told by everyone from Randy's brother Jimmy to my brother Ben that I also speak with a sonorous enough voice that they can use me to go to sleep all the time.
John Dehlin [02:23:11] They listen to more stories to fall asleep.
John Hamer [02:23:16] So if you're looking for more, more things to listen to, to fall asleep to, you can always use my channel.
John Dehlin [02:23:21] All right. Well, that's amazing. John Hamer, I'm so grateful you were able to do today's episode. I'm grateful to. Thankful for your friendship, for all you've done. Any final words of wisdom that you want to share before we wrap up today?
John Hamer [02:23:36] I just want to again say that, I mean, I think that actual History is so incredibly interesting. I'm one of, I guess the person from my era who if you can see behind me, I love books. I read books on paper. You know, this is an old fashioned thing that was made fun of in Star Trek, but who knew it would happen, happen so soon in our lifetimes. And, and there's just so much. When I was a little kid, I thought Mormon history was intensely boring because I was taught the, the correlated manual version of it. And it's only when, when I actually started reading the books historians wrote that I realized this is so, so interesting, so fun. We are part of a, a tradition that is so rich and, and, and, and, and so I just, just jump into it and embrace it.
John Dehlin [02:24:24] All right, well, John Hamer, you're a great friend, you're a great mind, great heart. Thank you so much for sharing us your thoughts today and let's have you back soon.
John Hamer [02:24:32] All right, thank you so much, John. I'll love to come back.
John Dehlin [02:24:35] And thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Please subscribe to this channel right now on YouTube. Please like this episode, comment on it and share it. That engagement encourages YouTube to share this episode of the algorithm so that other people can take advantage of it. We want to thank our donors. We have so many donors, at least a few thousand donors who donate monthly or annually to support the Open Stories Foundation. We couldn't do this without you. So thank you donors for making this happen. A small percentage of our revenue comes from Google Ads or YouTube ads ads or Spotify ads. The overwhelming majority of our revenue comes from just donors.
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John Dehlin [02:26:03] So thanks for joining us today. Thanks for the live stream stream. Thanks to everyone who makes all this possible. Thanks to Dan Vogel for being in the comments. Thanks to all the great historians like Von Brody and Todd Compton and George Smith and others that have done such great work Stay tuned for more great episodes on Mormon Stories in the weeks, months and years ahead. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
Thumbnail Credits: Main image of Joseph Smith by unknown painter, from Community of Christ Archives (public domain); Main image of Emma Smith is an enhanced version of a public domain image; Background image of the Kimball home taken by Julia Sanders
One Response
Minor correction. Joseph Smith did not propose a “wife swapping” notion according to William Law. According to Law what Smith proposed in conversation was that William would agree to become a “substitute” surrogate sexual partner for Emma. There are places is the 132nd section of the D&C that make oblique references to that in terms of telling Emma that she must cleave to Joseph and none else lest she be “destroyed”. That adjustment was clearly an effort to cover the notion that the Lord at first approved of the surrogate husband thing, but then that approval gets reversed by revision of Section 132 together with the notion that the original approval was just a test. If it was a test the minute that Joseph proposed this to Law he failed that test in my view. But in any case Law told him no. As the second councilor in the First Presidency Law was privy to a whole lot of what was going on in Nauvoo even while Joseph was denying involvement in polygamy (see History of the Church vol 6 page 411) BH Roberts. See also Dr. Wyl’s “The Mormons in Nauvoo” “an Honest Man’s Remorse” published in the Salt Lake Tribune July 3, 1887.