Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is October 8, 2020 and we are back to discuss an amazingly important book for modern Mormonism and for those who care about Mormonism in the past. For those who are fans of Mormon history, the book is Watchmen on the Tower, Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Rite. And the author is Dr. Matthew L. Harris. He is a professor of history at Colorado State University, Pueblo. He's authored a lot of books including he's co editor of the Mormon Church and Blacks A Documentary History. He's also editor of Thunder from the Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics which, which was his first book on Ezra Tap Benson. This is his second book on Ezra Taft Benson. Ezra Tap Benson was what, the 12th prophet of the LDS Church, is that right, Matt? 12th prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He's a cousin of mine, my grandma Carma Benson Parkinson and Ezra Tap Benson were close cousins and Ezra Taft Benson was a really important figure in 20th century Mormonism. If you were not able to join us for the first five and a half hours that we did a couple days ago, we covered the first three chapters in Matt's amazing groundbreaking book. Those chapters covered Ezra Benson's young years, his involvement in farming co ops that led to his time in Washington D.C. where he was a stake president. Met a bunch of influential Mormons there, including the Marriotts and the Wilkinsons and J. Reuben Clark, all these important figures in Mormonism. Cleon Skousen. Later on, Henson becomes tapped to serve as Secretary of Agriculture under Dwight D. Eisenhower for eight years, two full terms, which was kind of unheard of for a Mormon and for someone from Idaho or Utah at the time. And we talked about how Ezra Tap Benson exhibited some racist views, some views towards surveillance, some habits and behaviors that included surveillance. And he started really becoming influenced by Cleon Skousen and a man named Robert Welch who becomes the founder of the John Birch Society. And we talked about how after Ezra Taf Benson leaves the Eisenhower administration after his eight year term starting with about 1960, the next ten years he becomes sort of just a terror for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, preaching conspiracy theories and ultra right wing dogma in General Conference, embracing the John Birch Society, interweaving John Birch teachings which were incredibly racist but also conspiratorial, they're anti communist. And he basically spent the 70s as a Mormon Apostle embarrassing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and teaching the membership this sort of ultra white, right wing, conspiratorial, anti communist view of, of the world and accusing everyone, including his former, loyal, supportive President Eisenhower, accusing him of being a communist, accusing almost everyone and their dog is being a communist. And I'm not being super accurate, but I'm just trying to give you a flavor for what we covered last time. And we sort of ended towards the end of the 1960s where the church, you know, obviously in 1963, the church sent Ezra Taf Benson almost in exile, almost as a punishment. They sent him to Europe to sort of get him out of everyone's hair because he was becoming an embarrassment. And again, by 1968, he's trying to form a presidential ticket with two super racists, Strom Thurmond, and also with George Wallace, the controversial governor of Alabama. And we ended last, last podcast episode was sort of this meeting with several Mormon apostles and one of the Marriotts where they're basically saying, how do we deal with Ezra Taft Benson, his racism? This is wrecking the church. And that's kind of where we ended. And that sort of concludes chapter three. And basically what we're going to be covering today are chapters four and five of Matthew Harris's book, along with the epilogue. This is going to basically take us into the 70s when the church finally succeeds at reigning president or apostle Ezra Tab Benson in, because they tried for a decade or two to rein him in and he just would not be reined in. So we're going to be answering the question today, how in the heck did we reign in Ezra Taf Benson? And then how did we remake his image, which comes from chapter five of Matt Harris's book. How did we remake his image so that he could serve as president of the church without causing an uproar and without damaging the church even more than he did? And then of course, there's an epilogue that we're going to be covering, which kind of ties and discusses numerous things. But one of the important things that Matt covers is how Ezra Taft Benson's influence in the John Bircher Society influence lives with us today, whether it's with Damon Bundy or Julie Rowe or the Prepper movement and I would even say Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. You know, those are some of the things worth discussing. So that's the introduction to Today. We're definitely going to be going for another few hours. We want to welcome everyone who has joined us either on our YouTube livestream or our Facebook livestream. Please share this episode with everyone on your social media so people can know to join us live. We really welcome the interactivity of our live guests. They can share experiences with Desert Tab Benson or the John Birch Society. They can ask questions. They can help clarify things. If we get something wrong, we really love that interaction. So we welcome our live listeners and encourage you to join with us in today's conversation. So, without any further ado, Matt Harris. Dr. Matt Harris, welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Matt Harris [00:07:08] Thanks, John. Appreciate you having me back.

John Dehlin [00:07:10] The feedback on our first five and a half hours has been overwhelmingly positive. People are loving your work, Matt.

Matt Harris [00:07:16] Thanks. I appreciate the comments. I've been reading, trying to read what folks are saying and, and I'm always heartened when someone shares a Benson story. You know, I knew him, I went to a sermon of his. So that's, that's always neat.

John Dehlin [00:07:30] That's awesome. Well, I tried to give kind of a. A quick overview of what we covered last time. Feel free to sort of like either correct anything I, I got wrong, add anything to it and set the stage for what we're going to be talking about over the next few hours, if you'd like.

Benson's Controversial Legacy in the Church

Matt Harris [00:07:48] Sure. So the word I'd use is not embarrassing, maybe controversial. I don't think.

John Dehlin [00:07:54] In terms of what brethren.

Matt Harris [00:07:57] I don't think they thought he was embarrassing, but that he was controversial.

John Dehlin [00:08:00] Okay.

Matt Harris [00:08:01] And, yeah, I mean, that's just a modern little, I guess, gloss, perhaps if one doesn't share Benson's politics. And maybe it is embarrassing.

John Dehlin [00:08:09] I mean, I guess Hubie Brown, it's fair to say Hubie Brown would have been embarrassed by.

Matt Harris [00:08:14] Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And he would be the outlier of the outlier. Yeah. Yes, that's correct.

John Dehlin [00:08:21] And I guess that's important because you're. You're basically saying more of the Quorum supported what he was saying and doing than opposed it. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Matt Harris [00:08:29] Yeah. And I think that we're going to talk about this hour, you know, the pushback that the Quorum gives him. But I don't think that he would have. That Benson would have gotten the pushback had not the Saints written into church headquarters to complain. Because certainly Most of the 12, as I've mentioned elsewhere, they weren't conspiracists, but they certainly shared his conservative politics about the role of government and so forth. And so Brown would have been an outlier, certainly. But. And Brown did think he was embarrassing. There's no question. When they sent him to Europe, Brown said something interesting. He said, I Hope he never comes back. So just an interesting thing to say to a fellow apostle. But anyway, he was controversial, and that's why the brethren started to rein him in in the 1960s when he was really trying to link the Birches John Birch society with the LDS Church. And it put President McKay in a tremendously difficult position because he adored Elder Benson, as Elder Benson adored the elderly church president. So. But President McKay also knew from his counselors, Henry Moyle and Hugh Brown, that he had to do something about Benson because of these letters. It was harmful to the church. And so just to recap, Benson or President McKay does reign or does tell Elder Benson that you can no longer attend Birch Meetings, you can no longer, or you can't become a member of the Birch Society, you can't serve on its board. And so a lot of people say that. They say interesting two things. They'll say that Benson was a member of the Birch Society, which is not true. But the reason why they say that is because he always promoted the Birch line in general conference and basic civic sermons or civic addresses. And the other side is that he wasn't a member of the Birch Society. And when folks say that, I think that always needs a caveat, which is he, he wanted to be, but the church president wouldn't allow it. And it's the same thing with Cleon Skousen. It wasn't that he needed the church president to endorse or to give him the AOK to join the Birch Society, but Skousen knew that it was controversial too. So he didn't officially join so he could tell people like Benson, I'm not an official member. When something was controversial, you know, something was published in the news. And so that was sort of their, their out. I'm not a member of. Well, it's not because they didn't want to be. It's because it was bad publicity at that point for Skousen and then for Benson, it's because the church president had said no. And it really was. As I mentioned last hour in our podcast, Robert Welch needed someone like Ezra Taft Benson. The Birch Society was coming under heavy, heavy criticism from Republicans in the party, from other conservatives, from libertarians. And it's not so much the politics, it's the conspiracy stuff that, you know, when you, when you call a five star general, a beloved American president, Dwight Eisenhower, a communist, I mean, that, that's just not going to go well in mainstream politics. And so the Birch Society comes under assault. They reach out, they meet Robert Welch meets Ezra Taft Benson. And Welch recognizes right away that Benson can do great things for the Burt Society because of his authoritative position as a former member of Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet. And Elder Benson finds the Birch Society a great organization to help spread this anti communist message. So they really, it's sort of a simpatico relationship. And throughout the 60s, as Elder Benson is trying to align the Birch Society with the church, some of the conservative brethren, they push back. And just two instances of people who push back. One of them is Harold B. Lee, who's very conservative theologically and politically, but he's just beside himself that the Birch Society in Benson's become a distraction. It's hard to share the gospel message if you have this senior apostle going around the countryside talking about conspiracy theories. And then the second person that pushes back, who had been pushing back for a number of years, was of course Hubie Brown, who by the mid-60s had elevated to the first counselor in the first presidency. So Hubie Brown, just a couple of thoughts about Brown. He had been pushing to have President McKay rein in Benson. And McKay told Benson that he couldn't teach or couldn't speak at any more Birch Society meetings or mention the Birch Society in general conferences, but he still gave Elder Benson the right to talk about anti communism anyway. So Brown felt that Benson would go on unchecked as long as President McKay was alive. And Harold B. Lee felt that too. And so Hubie Brown, though, would often take veiled jabs at Ezra Taft. Benson. And let me just read one. This comes from a really well known speech that Hugh Brown gave to a BYU devotional audience. This is in 1968. It's titled God is the Gardener. And the context for this speech is the previous week Elder Benson had given this rip roaring address at BYU in which he talked about secret combinations in the government. And he's quoting Ethereum in the book from the Book of Mormon to emphasize that there are gaddyat and robbers in today's government. So all of this conspiracy stuff Elder Benson also talked about in this famous speech, it's called Book of Mormon Warns America. And Benson also talks about black power advocates coming to Salt Lake and they're going to burn the place down. They're going to burn Temple Square. It's really extraordinary. Anyway, so Elder Brown or President Brown spoke the following week after Benson's controversial speech. And I'll just read a couple of lines from this. Brown says, quote, beware of those who feel obliged to prove their own patriotism by calling into question the loyalty of others. Be skeptical of Those who attempt to demonstrate their love of country by demeaning its institutions know that the men of both major political parties who guide the nation's executive, legislative and judicial branches are men of unquestioned loyalty, and we should stand by and support them. And then lastly. And that's end quote, lastly, Brown says, quote, at a time when radicals of the right or left would inflame race against race, avoid those who preach the evil doctrines of racism. Close quote. He's talking about Benson. And after this address is over, dozens and dozens of Latter Day Saints, both who heard it at BYU and elsewhere, when this sermon is published, they write the First Presidency, and they want to know who is speaking for the church, Apostle Benson or President Brown. So these disagreements between these two seniors, LDS officials, are not lost on the church body. And one last thing to share is that Hugh Brown kept a really, a big file on Benson. And this is from Brown's papers. And you can see right here, this, this is a public forum and written by Grant Ivins that was published in 1966 in the Salt Tribune. And, and you can see the title. It's called Most Divisive Influence. Is that right? Yeah, Most Divisive Influence. And it's written by Grant Ivins, son of the late First Presidency counselor Anthony Ivins. And basically this article just criticizes Ezra Taft Benson and the John Burt Society. And after this lengthy criticism, you can see Hugh Brown, he keeps a copy of it and he put amen, exclamation point. And anyway, so Brown is just thoroughly fed up with Ezra Taft Benson and the Birch Society. Oh, you're on mute.

Benson and the John Birch Society

John Dehlin [00:16:56] So that's actually Hubie Brown's handwriting that you just showed us.

Matt Harris [00:16:59] That is Hubie Brown's handwriting. Amen, exclamation point.

John Dehlin [00:17:04] And for those who don't know, he was in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at the time. He wrote that about one of his apostles.

Matt Harris [00:17:12] Yeah. Beware of those who teach the evil doctrines of racism. I love that. And beware of those who feel obliged to prove their own patriotism. This is Benson he's referring to.

John Dehlin [00:17:24] And we probably already mentioned this, but if we haven't, I just want to reiterate it. One of the biggest problems I have with President Benson, with Apostle Benson and his support of the John Berkshire Society, is that at its foundation, it was super racist. This whole new world order, you know, Skousen, slash Bircher stuff, it was built on the premise, number one, that it was Jews. They were orchestrating, you know, the civil Rights movement, and that's bad for some reason. And then B, even though it's untrue, and then B, that they're basically that the Jews organized the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. As a communist conspiracy to take down the United States. So it's basically using red scare, red baiting to defame the civil rights movement, which only was an attempt to get southern blacks to be able to vote because they were being excluded from the voting booth, you know, because of Jim Crow laws. And so Martin Luther King Jr. And they're trying to not allow blacks to be lynched in the South. They're trying to get them to vote. They're trying to get rid of separate but equal and all the segregation, trying to give them a leg up, get rid of their poverty. That's what the civil rights movement was about. And yet here Ezra Tap Benson is, along with the John Birch Society, running around saying, hey, Jews are at the bottom of this. And this is not a sincere effort to bring civil rights and equality to a group that's been marginalized and even enslaved for centuries. This is a communist conspiracy to take down America. You patriots, wave your flags, be patriotic, be loyal, and don't support this evil, bad civil rights movement. And that's not what we want from our prophets, seers and revelators. These men are supposed to be direct access to God, special witnesses of Christ. They're supposed to have the ability, the power of discernment, and they're supposed to lead our country in a healthy, positive direction, not derail important civil rights movements by using conspiracy theories that are super racist and harmful to the achievement of social justice, you know, in our citizenry. Did I get that wrong or is that okay as a summary?

Matt Harris [00:19:55] Well, yeah, it was. So Benson's unique with his views on civil rights. So the church as a whole, except for Hugh Brown and a few other general authorities, the church as a whole, they do. They don't support civil rights for the reasons I mentioned last hour, which is they fear black sexuality. Similar to most of America at the time. Most Americans don't believe in interracial marriage, and Mormons are in that group. And so the idea is that if you promote racial equality, which is where you get this communist connection, right? Communists want economic equality. Well, Dr. King wants racial equality. If you promote racial equality, that means that black people should be able to vote like white people. That means that black people should be able to hold a job without being discriminated against because of the color of their skin or live in a certain neighborhood if they can afford to live in that neighborhood, as opposed to being turned away from the neighborhood because of racist restrictive covenants that keep black people out. And so if you allow this integration, which is what Dr. King and other civil rights leaders want, then black people and white people become familiar with each other and that will ultimately lead to marriage, which is what, of course, Mormons and other Christian groups fear the most. But Ezra Tab Benson takes it a step further. He says that that's all true. Interracial marriage is awful. It's against God's commandments. But he also says that, that Dr. King is being used as a pawn from the Kremlin. The Soviets, these Communist Soviets, these godless Soviets, these aliens, atheistic Soviets as he called them, they are using Dr. King and Dr. King doesn't even know it. That's the interesting thing. And so it's not just Dr. King that he's. He's going after. He's also going after the naacp, which will become a interesting part of our story later on today.

Benson's Attacks on the NAACP and Civil Rights

John Dehlin [00:21:49] Tell our listeners who that is for those who don't know.

Matt Harris [00:21:52] Yeah, so the. It's a National association for the Advancement of Colored People. It's a special interest group to advocate for racial equality. And without going into a lot of detail, it got started in the early part of the 20th century as a response to lynching, when blacks in the south were being lynched at disproportionate, in disproportionate numbers. The NAACP organized to fight against lynching and then subsequently to push for civil rights. And so it was Dr. King and his followers and also the NAACP that Apostle Benson targeted the most. He didn't target other civil rights groups like the Congress of racial equality or SNCC, these young student activists, but he goes after Dr. King and his followers. He goes after the NAACP. And then lastly, he goes after black power advocates, which become part. Important to the story, or black Marxists. And frequently Dr. King doesn't make a distinction between the aggressive black power advocates who support violence and revolution, as opposed to, say, Dr. King who marches through the streets peacefully. He doesn't make distinctions. They're all Marxists and they all want revolution, which of course is absurd, but that's, that's just, you know, that's what he's doing. So I want to make a. Before we, we transition to reining him in further, I want to make a, just a quick distinction that Elder Benson does not promote the church's views on civil rights. In 1963, Hugh Brown gave a talk or gave an endorsement of civil rights with the approval of the church president. The church supports civil rights. It doesn't talk about any particular civil rights bill like housing or jobs or voting even, but it's an endorsement of the broad principles of civil rights. And Elder Benson, at the same time that President Brown is speaking on behalf of the church, Elder Benson is undermining that message by implying that Latter Day Saints or by implying that Dr. King is part of a communist conspiracy. So there's an image problem with the church, this high profile apostle, this former senior figure in the Eisenhower administration, who has a different view on civil rights than his church and also his political party. Most Republicans do not believe that Dr. King is a communist. Some of them, like Barry Goldwater, oppose civil rights, but not the reasons that Benson opposes them.

John Dehlin [00:24:26] Love it. So, all right, so I, I, is it time to start chapter four and reading in the apostle? Because I think it's worth reminding our listeners that they tried many, many times in the, in the, you know, let's just say late 50s, early 60s to control stock, you know, remind us what they did in the 50s and 60s to try and control or tamp down Benson as a precursor for why the seventies were so important. Because it's, it's the, it's the decade where they finally were able to succeed at reining him in. Is that right?

Church Leaders Begin Reining in Benson

Matt Harris [00:25:04] Yeah. So the 50s, they didn't try to control him. He was in Washington. He was in Eisenhower's cabinet. And he shares an ideological affinity with J. Rubin Clark, who was another conspiracist. There were probably, in my opinion, two conspiracists among the upper echelons of church leadership. One is Benson, of course, and the other one is J. Reuben Clark. So, so Benson was in the cabinet. He was, by and large, behaving himself just talking about his conspiracy ideas in private, mostly in the 50s. It's in the 60s when he meets the Burt Society, when he starts to talk about these conspiracy ideas publicly and embrace the Birch Society publicly. And his son is a member of the Birch Society, works for the church or the Birch Society. And it's during the 1960s where the brethren start to receive lots of criticisms about the Bensons and also Cleon Skousen. And so the church does a few things to try to rein him in, albeit moderately. One, they send him to Europe for a while to get him out of the country. As Joseph Fielding Smith said, we hope when he returns, his blood will be purified. I love that. And this is a private letter that Joseph Fielding Smith Writes that gets leaked to the press. Another thing that the church leaders do is they speak in. Hugh Brown speaks in the priesthood session of General Conference, and he says that we should not use our meeting houses for political recruitment purposes. He doesn't mention the Birch Society, but everybody knows who he's talking about, that we shouldn't use the LDS meeting houses for political recruitment meetings. And Then also President McKay pulls him in and says, elder Benson, it's you. You can't say that we endorse the Burt Society. It's controversial. We should stay away from that stuff. You can continue to talk about anti communism, but that's okay. What's interesting is when McKay called him in to do that, told him he couldn't go to any more Birch meetings and all of that stuff. Benson tried and tried and tried in the 1960s, even though the church president said, stop with the Burt stuff. No more meetings. Benson even flew Robert Welch, the head of the Birch Society and also Benson's close friend, even flew him to Salt Lake to meet with the aging Mormon leader to convince him to allow Apostle Benson to join the board of the Birch Society. They're losing numbers. They need fundraising. And what a better person put on the board than this Mormon apostle. And of course, David O. McKay, kind of a. He's an old Scot and he's got a temper. And Hugh Brown said, this is kind of. I hate to say this, but it's kind of a crass thing that Brown said. He said, if you put a gun to his head, you only make him more angry talking about President McKay. So he's got this Scottish temper. And after Robert Welch came to visit President McKay after McKay had repeatedly said, no, you can't join the Bird Society or sit on its board, McKay was angry and took out his anger on Benson a little bit that he would allow Robert Welch to come and importune him to join when he already said no two or three times. So this is all the stuff that's going on, trying to rein him in. A couple of times Benson gave some a sermon in General Conference. And Elder Benson wanted to use this sermon in the church education system, where Latter Day Saints could study it in their Sunday school meetings, in their Priesthood Relief Society meetings, and after the General Conference sermon, Hugh Brown and Eldon Tanner and also Joseph Fielding Smith, who by that point, 1965, was a member of the first presidency. So Hugh Brown, n. Eldon Tanner and Joseph Fielding Smith circulate the sermon with Benson's request to mimeograph it and to disperse it to the church. And Brown says we should not distribute this kind of propaganda, exclamation point. And Joseph Fielding Smith and NL and Tanner, they're part of these conversations. So Elise Brown in this respect views some of his sermonizing as, as propaganda. So I'm going to turn my phone off here. I'm getting. Thought I did that already. Anyway, so. So they start to rein him in. And I want to take readers now to 1970. In January of 1970, when President McKay dies, which means that Elder Benson's protector is no longer. That is that when Harold Lee and Joseph Fielding Smith and Hugh Brown and even Mark Peterson were angry that he kept trying to push the Birch Society on the church. Now everyone knows he can no longer do that because his protector is gone. And his protector, of course, is President McKay, with whom he was very close. And so when President McKay died in 1970, January of 1970, the church was in absolute turmoil. The dozens of athletic teams around the United States were protesting BYU because of its racial policies. BYU didn't want to recruit black students again. They didn't. They feared interracial marriage. So why have black students on campus if there's just a handful of them and the predominant student body is white? Certainly they're going to date and eventually marry. So that was the fear. And so these athletic teams had pushed back on byu, refused to play them, and in fact, like Stanford, threatened to sever all ties with them. And there was a civil rights investigation going on at the time. This is in January of 1970. And also when President Brown was dropped from the first presidency because he was pushing for racial equality, he was pushing to end the priesthood ban quite heavily. Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold Lee decide that he needs to be dropped from the First Presidency. And so there's some bitterness there on the part of Hugh Brown that they had just dropped him from the First Presidency because he was crusading to end the priesthood ban. In the meantime, in January, or actually April of 1970, there's this, as Harold Lee put it, a vicious rumor that's circulating that a stake president in Salt Lake was circulating that Ezra Taft Benson ought to be the next church president replacing David O. McKay. And for your listeners who may not know this, that in LDS Convention, it's the most senior apostle who becomes the church president. It's not the one who's the most popular. It's not a vote. It's the person who's been in the quorum of the 12 the longest, and in this case it's 95 year old Joseph Fielding Smith. And so there are lots of Latter Day Saints who think he's too old. They think he's sleepy, he's not competent. And so, given all that's going on in 1970, both within the church and also with the Vietnam War raging on and with racial unrest in America's cities, we need a patriot like Ezra Taft Benson to guide the church in these latter days. And this wasn't an idle rumor because Harold B. Lee will address it in General Conference, and Apostle Kimball writes about it in his journal. So the brethren are just a nerve that there's a Latter Day Saint out there who thinks that Elder Benson ought to be the next church president, bypassing the person that Mormon Convention suggests should be. And that's, of course, Joseph Fielding Smith. Well, it's not. It doesn't materialize. But what's interesting is that Ezra Taft Benson does not refute this rumor. He doesn't try to downplay it. He doesn't try to say, you know, I'm flattered, but it's. President Smith will be our next church president. He'll be ordained at the April conference. Benson doesn't do anything. He keeps mum, doesn't say a word. And so I share this story because it speaks to how popular Elder Benson was in 1970. All right, so that's. That's the vicious rumor that circulates in 1970. President Smith is sworn into. He's not sworn in. You can tell. I've been watching politics, right? He's ordained the next church president. He chooses Harold B. Lee and Ellen

Benson's Rise to Church President

John Dehlin [00:33:56] Tanner as his counselors, and Brown gets dropped. And the only other time I'm aware, in the 20th century or in the modern church history where someone gets dropped from the first presidency is Uchtdorf. When Uchtdorf got dropped recently, I, I know there was some stuff that went on with Brigham Young in the 1800s, but that was super rare, right, for someone to be dismissed from the First Presidency. Normally they just added members if they needed to, right?

Matt Harris [00:34:23] Yeah, it is. I should have. Years ago, I wrote Mike Quinn an email and I said, has this ever happened before? And he, he said it happened in the. Has it ever happened in the 20th century is what I asked. He said there was a counselor who was dropped from the first presidency in the early 20th century, and I forget who it. Who it was. So if I read his email correctly, that would make Brown the second person dropped. And then, of course, Dieter Uchtdorf, the third person, dropped from the First Presidency. And Uchtdorf is an interesting case because he's certainly, you know, vigorous. He seems to have his faculties intact. And I don't know, or I haven't read the reason given for why he was dropped. I don't think they gave a reason, actually. But Brown, they did give a reason. They said because of his frail health that it was better for him to no longer be in the First Presidency. And he did have frail health. That part is true. But it's also true, as Brown himself knew and as his family knew, he was dropped because he was crusading to end the priesthood ban. And quite frankly, he was bitter about it.

John Dehlin [00:35:30] 1. One thing I read in your book that was shocking, on page 83, you write Benson inferred that Brown could be excommunicated from the church, just as early church apostles had been excommunicated. So that's a pretty significant tension in the Quorum. If one Quorum member is recommending that a member of the first presidency or suggesting that a member of the first presidency might be excommunicated, that's pretty intense. And maybe, maybe part of why he was dropped is because one, Brown was in the minority, and two, there was just so much tension. They just wanted to drop the tension.

Matt Harris [00:36:12] Well, the tension didn't go away because he resumed his place in the quorum of the 12. So he's still with Benson. He's still with, you know, other apostles. But you're right, John, it's extraordinary to think that you can have a. That Apostle Benson could give a talk in general Conference, and he could say. He could say, beware of traitors in the church leadership. There are Judases among us. I mean, this is the kind of language they're using. And of course, Benson's not mentioning Brown by name, but everybody knows in the leadership who. Who he's talking about. And just as Brown was cryptic in his criticisms of Elder Benson at the BYU devotional address in 1968, I referenced a moment ago and other addresses. So Benson was cryptic when he was talking about Brown, but he calls him a Judas. There are Judases among us. And in private, of course, he's calling him a socialist and all kinds of things. And this is obviously troublesome. There's a great story told after that conference. When Benson called, he said, beware, you know, there are traitors in the church. There were Judases among us. After that sermon was. Was told or was given, Brown, of course, was visibly agitated. You know, you can imagine he's sitting just a few feet behind Elder Benson at the pulpit in the tabernacle, listening to this in real time. And he's can only imagine what's going on in his mind. And anyway, after the sermon was over, Ernest Wilkinson, who had a VIP chair close to the tabernacle, rushed over to President Brown after that particular conference session had ended. And Wilkinson, who didn't like Brown and Brown didn't like Wilkinson. Lots of dynamics going on here. Anyway, Wilkinson said, congratulations on a fine sermon, President Brown. And Brown just stared at him and he said, I don't think I'm going to be excommunicated anytime soon, and walked away. And that's all he said. Didn't even say thank you. Nothing. Just I don't think I'm going to be excommunicated anytime soon. And that's of course, what what Benson was implying.

John Dehlin [00:38:19] That's so intense. Let me, let me bring in a couple quick comments from our listeners. Hippie Dachshunds writes as type Benson was a single reason my parents didn't convert to the LDS Church back in the 60s. They thought any church with such an odious character as one of its leaders couldn't be the one true church. I thought that was interesting. I also just want to throw a little comment, a little compliment to you, Matt Frederick writes, John, of all the guests you've hosted, Matt must be one of the most informed, dynamic presenters. Thank you for this series. Incredibly enlightening. Thank you, Dr. Harris, for sharing your time with us. Let me ask you a quick question from my from my dear friend Gerardo. He asks, how much was the interracial marriage prohibition, actual doctrine versus just kind of like opinion or policy? I think Gerardo wants to make the point that these days it's really popular for top church leaders to be dismissing things as just opinion or policy when when certain things were clearly understood to be doctrine back in the day. Do you, do you have that information handy?

Matt Harris [00:39:31] Yeah, I'm writing a book about this now, so this is all stuff I've been immersed in. So Latter Day Saints, as I mentioned, were parallel national trends with interracial marriage. And just a recap or just to contextualize this story, just briefly, that after the American Civil War, when the south had lost and the south is the Confederacy's in tatters, that a lot of Americans are upset that now that African Americans are free they've been emancipated, that what they really wanted all along was to marry white people. And that's completely patently absurd. But that's the racist idea that Confederates were circulating in the decades after the Civil War. And so, not surprisingly, People in the south started talking about pure blood, right? That somehow we can't mix black people with white people because it will taint this idea of pure blood, which is just utter nonsense. The Human Genome Project teaches us a lot of things, among them that races have been moving around the globe for centuries, mixing and marrying and all of that stuff. So this idea that there's a pure race is just absurd. It's racist is what it is. It's a white supremacist language anyway. So Americans in the south in particular, but not just in the south, are promoting this idea that whites and blacks and whites and brown people and others should not be mixing. So it wasn't just whites and blacks. It was a whole number of people. And so they codified this into law. So after the Civil War, many states will embrace anti miscegenation laws, including Utah. So it makes it illegal for a white person to marry a black person. And also in Utah's case, white people couldn't marry Asians or any other minorities. So again, the notion is white people have to marry white people, Asians have to marry Asians, and blacks have to marry blacks. So in 1963, Utah changes its lifts, its interracial statute prohibiting interracial marriage, the miscegenation statute, as it's called. And the legislatures who did this in Utah, they went to President McKay and they said, what do you think? We're thinking about doing this? Because too many of our people, our people, our white people are marrying Asians. We've got Latter Day Saint gis who are coming back from wherever around the globe, and they're, they're marrying Asians, they're marrying different kinds of people. And our, our statute here in Utah criminalizes that. And of course, it puts him in a really tough position because if you, if you decriminalize it, then you're allowing white people to marry black people. And they know that's the risk they're taking in 1963 if they get rid of this miscegenation statute, that it will lead to black people marrying white people. That's what they fear the most. But, but really what they wanted was to allow white Latter Day Saints to marry Asians that they had met. In fact, there are Asian special interest groups in Utah who really push for the end of this miscegenation statute. And the NAACP in Utah, they support it of course, too. It's not that they want interracial marriage. They just want to remove all barriers of discrimination. So in 1967, the Supreme Court will rule in a famous court case called Loving v. Virginia. And it'll deal with a light skinned black woman and a white man. And the court will strike down interracial laws in the United States. But Utah had struck theirs down four years earlier or ended theirs four years earlier through legislative fiat as opposed to a judicial ruling. And so in this case, Utah was ahead of the game maybe once for its life, you know, in race issues. But is this doctrine? What does the church say about this? There is no place in the church handbook or which is usually the form that articulates church doctrine. There's no place that talks about interracial marriage being a sin. However, the Saints are reading this wherever there is church literature. They read it in Mormon doctrine by Bruce McConkey, they read it by Joseph Fielding Smith, Spencer W. Kimball. They're reading it and hearing it everywhere that black people and white people should not mix and marry. They say it publicly and they say it privately. And it's not just a recommendation, it is a doctrine. So what I'm trying to say is it's not. Interracial marriage is not officially prohibited in the church handbook that I can think of. I'll have to go back and check. But it's mostly in private and also in sermons in which they warn against it. And in the 1960s, throughout the Civil rights era, most Americans are starting to gradually support interracial marriage. And the key word is gradually. And Latter Day Saints are going to hold on to this. Let me say one last thing about this. I just want to jump ahead and I don't want to go off on a discursive road here, but I think it's really fascinating to know which is when the priesthood revelation occurs in June of 1978. This creates a huge dilemma for the church. One of the reasons why the church leaders had said that blacks and whites shouldn't marry is because of the priesthood restriction. If a black man marries a white woman, their posterity is going to be cursed. They can't go to the temple, they can't exercise the priesthood and so forth. Well, with the priesthood revelation that ends that that should no longer be a justification to keep black people and white people from marrying. However, there are church leaders like Elder Packer and others who are just adamant and President Kimball who were just adamant that black people and white people shouldn't marry. And it creates a hardship for black Latter Day Saints, especially those who go to byu and the student body is overwhelmingly white. Well, who are they going to date? And there's one black Latter Day Saint that I know of. He wrote President Kimball a letter, and he said, dear President Kimball, I'm taught that I should marry within my race, but there aren't any black people at byu. What would you have me do? Marry a white person or marry someone outside a black person outside of the faith. And it creates this incredible, incredible dilemma. President Kimball addresses this with a black woman who, who's engaged to a white man at byu. So she, she met him at byu and he, she. She had been told by two apostles and her stake president, her bishop, that this is forbidden by the church. And she really has this agonizing moment where she loves this man, wants to marry this white man. And so she goes into President Kimball's office, has an appointment with him, and she says, is this the doctrine of the church? I've got to know. And President Kimball said, we try to keep the races to marry within each other, that blacks should marry blacks and whites should marry whites. But no, it's not church doctrine. And you have my blessing if you think this is the right thing to do. And so this is an extraordinary moment where the church president is really having to, you know, know, come to grips with this new racial doctrine that also includes interracial marriage. And let me just end here, this, this section, which is that the brethren have different views aft on interracial marriage long after the priesthood revelation. And there was a memo that had circulated at BYU in the early 80s. And this is part of my next book. And in this memo, the memo said that they didn't want a lot. A large number of black people at byu, black students, because they were afraid of interracial marriage. Keep the numbers low. And one of the critics of the memo, BYU faculty member, said that, look, this is against. This is illegal. We can't have quotas here. And if they meet our qualifications both scholastically and spiritually, then we need to admit them. We can't just keep the number of black students low. And, and that's why the memo circulated, because Even in the 1980s, they were still worried about blacks and whites marrying.

Interracial Marriage and Racial Policy Debates

John Dehlin [00:48:00] Got it. Thank you for. Thanks for clarifying that, Matt. I was. I was really inspired by a figure in your book named. And we're going back to chapter four, Reigning in the Apostle. I was inspired by what you wrote about J.D. williams on page 85. You want to tell us the story of J.D. i have written. I have written next to it hero in big capital letters. Because based on my, my value system, what JD Williams did was pretty heroic. You want to talk about that?

J.D. Williams as a Voice of Dissent

Matt Harris [00:48:32] Yeah, I, I, I have to admit, J.D. williams is a hero of mine too. So J.D. williams was a political science professor at the University of Utah for over four decades and he passed away, oh goodness, maybe 10 years ago. And anyway, I had a chance to meet him before he passed away. He was, he's a one time Mormon bishop. In the early 1960s, he taught a whole generation of, of students, including Karl Rove, who was the mastermind with George W. Bush's campaign. So he was beloved among students at Utah. He was a gifted teacher. He was just a kind sort of humanitarian person. And he's also a liberal. And APostle Benson and J.D. williams just clashed. I can't think of two people at polar opposites who just, just clashed. And J.D. williams, even though in the early 60s he was a bishop, he was not afraid to speak out against Elder Benson. And so by 1966, J.D. williams was just 30, thoroughly fed up with the Birch Society. Everywhere he went, he had Birchers in his ward. He just as a liberal and as a humanitarian, as someone who supported civil rights. He introduced Dr. King, for example, when King came to the University of Utah to speak in the 60s. So Williams pushed back against Elder Benson. And in 1966, he circulated, he wrote a private memo called Operation Checkmate, and he sent it to each of the members of the quorum of the 12 in the first presidency except Ezra Taft Benson. And in this memo, Operation Checkmate, he calls on the Quorum to drop Benson from the Quorum. He's embarrassing. He won't quit. And so Williams is discouraged when they don't drop him from the Quorum because again, this is 1966. So President McKay is still alive and President McKay, I don't have a response to how he viewed this. Unfortunately, it's not, he doesn't give his response in his diary, but Spencer Kimball talks about it and some others, and they know that Elder Benson is causing ruffles among the church body. What other? A quick story about J.D. williams last hour on the podcast. So my apologies if some of you haven't seen the first podcast, but the first podcast we talked about how LDS Congressman Ralph Harding had given this controversial address on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington criticizing his former mentor, Ezra Taft Benson, the same apostle who sent the Congressman apart as a missionary, you know, a few decades earlier. Well, anyway, when that story came out that Congressman Harding had denounced Apostle Benson for not defending Eisenhower against claims that he was a communist, and also when those newspaper articles were leaked by Joseph Fielding Smith and David O. McKay's, sons talking about Benson being sent to Europe to get politics out of his system when they were leaked to an Idaho newspaper. It was J.D. williams who took those two letters that were published and also Congressman Harding speech and mailed them to General Eisenhower at his retirement home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And he identified who he was. I'm a former bishop, I'm a lifelong active Latter Day Saint. I think you should know what your former cabinet member is doing. And Ike wrote him back a nice letter thanking him for sending along these goodies that I'm sure Ike didn't want to read about, but he did nonetheless.

John Dehlin [00:52:25] I love it. Okay, so I love these, these sorts of figures. We're kind of heroic. So going to page 86 of your book, you talk about how. And you've already referenced that letter that was basically written saying let's jump past Joseph Fielding Smith and Spencer B. Kimball and, and just get right to President Benson as prophet. That's what a member wrote. And you wrote that President Benson didn't denounce that. And you have Spencer B. Kimball calling that a vicious thing for anyone to suggest to skip the seniority, the order of succession that allows someone to become prophet. But then you talk about the new first Presidency being formed and that they warn Ezra Tap Benson that they give him a warning. So let's start there. I think this basically pages 86 and 87 is when the real reigning in starts happening. So talk about the warning he got from the new first presidency, whether, you know, whether or not it was heated, how he violated it, and how it leads ultimately to this quorum of the 15 walkout. I was just blown away about the walkout that happens on page 87. So, so take us through all that because that's, this is high drama for me.

New Church Leadership Warns and Restrains Benson

Matt Harris [00:53:43] So, so Joseph Phillips Smith is the new church president and Harold Lee and, and Eldon Tanner and they told Benson that he was done and they specifically warned him a bit about a few things that you are no longer able to talk about. Gaddy at and robbers, secret combinations, conspiracies, the Burt Society, all of this stuff. And President Smith says that if anyone talks about secret combinations and gaddy aten robbers, it'll be the church president, me. So they, they put him, they, they put the clamps down on him and they warn him, you're done and put yourself in Apostle Benson's shoes for just a moment. That last hour I talked about his prophetic or his apostolic calling which that, that David O. McKay had given him before he went back to Washington D.C. and his apostolic calling was to warn the Saints against big government, liberalism, socialism, and so forth. And now you've got a church president saying, you can no longer fill your apostolic calling. You can no longer be a watchman on the tower. I know that's what the previous president told you, but. But I'm the new guy in town. And so they warn him no longer. You can't talk about these conspiracies and getting it robbers. So Benson, Benson, in the April of 1972 conference, ignores all of this, and he gives this rousing speech, and I'll just read part of it. Benson says that he warns about a great conspiracy in the Book of Mormon. This is General Conference, April 1972. He warns about a great conspiracy in the Book of Mormon. Not a conspiracy theory, Benson writes, not a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy fact. Those are Benson's words. And he peppered his talk with references From Ether, chapter 8, verse 22, one of his favorite verses in the Book of Mormon on secret combinations. And then, more controversially, Benson embraces in conference a book written by A. Bircher called None Dare Call it Conspiracy, which avows a. That there are world governments that are forming from the U.S. london, Paris and New York City. It's this cabal of rich people who are conspiring to overtake the world.

John Dehlin [00:56:04] And it mentions Jews, right?

Matt Harris [00:56:06] Jews are part of it. Yeah, Jews are part of it. So he. He embraces this book in conference and Joseph Fielding and Harold Lee, who. Who's really the authoritative voice given President Smith's age. But Harold Lee and Joseph Fielding are just beside themselves. And they instruct the Ensign to drop this reference when it's published. Don't promote Bert stuff. So they have him drop it.

John Dehlin [00:56:34] And I don't think, you know, this is something that happens occasionally. It happened with Boyd K. Packer, you know, when he gave that awful talk that said, you know, about LGBT people and the question about whether or not, you know, that's something that can, you know, one can be born with. He gives that famous quote, why would a loving heavenly Father do this to anyone? Not thinking about down syndrome and birth defects and all sorts of awful things people are born with or difficult things or challenging things. And there's the Ronald Pullman talk. But what I don't think orthodox members understand is that apostles, prophetseers and revelators are sometimes censored or edited. And this was one of those times where a prophet, you know, a prophet Sarah, and Revelator, an apostle, after he gives a general conference talk, gets his talk edited That's a significant thing, right?

Matt Harris [00:57:30] It is. And Benson's been edited several times by this point and there are lots of. I referenced the Book of Mormon Warns America, that incendiary speech at BYU that he gave where Hugh Brown followed up the next week and gave his talk to counteract Elder Benson's talk. Well, anyway, Benson was upset that the Book of Mormon Warns America was not published. And of course nobody tells him. Benson, you would think that being so close to President McKay and the first Presidency or the fellow apostles, hey, Elder Benson, we're not going to publish that devotional address because it's controversial. Well, President McKay and Brown and Tanner had warned Ernest Wilkinson, look, if there's something really controversial that he gives at byu, we're not going to publish it or anything that's controversial, especially during the civil rights movement. So if there's an apostle or a church leader that gives this talk that could be construed as racist and that could harm the church, don't publish it. And that's what happened with the Book of Mormon Warns America. And Benson doesn't know about it. He waits for it to be published, as is the customer. You know, you wait a few weeks and BYU will mimographic and sell it for, you know, just to cover the cost. And it's, it's not published. And he's upset and he writes, Ernest Wilkinson, why isn't this published? And he writes back and he says, I'm on strict orders to not publish anything that denigrates American political politicians, the Supreme Court. And he just listed several things, the United Nations. I can't publish any of this stuff. I've got strict orders. So don't shoot the messenger. Go back to President McKay and take it up with him if you have issues. It's the same thing too. Just a quick, quick story that Eldridge G. Smith, the patriarch of the church, and this is a Smith, of course, it's his right to be the church patriarch by, by the Doctrine and Covenants. It had to be in the Smith line. And anyway, Elder Eldridge D. Smith gave the most tone deaf talk that one could ever imagine at BYU and in the midst of the Civil Rights movement. And he's talking about lineage for black people. And he says that, I'm going to paraphrase, but he says that black people will be servants to white people in the hereafter. He's quoting something that most leaders at that point were not talking about in Mormon discourse, but certainly earlier leaders like Joseph F. Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith even, and other leaders had talked about that that somehow black people were only fit to be servants in the hereafter, based on this biblical verse. And Elder Smith says this at byu, and keep in mind there are three black people at BYU when he gave that sermon, and one of whom was there. And so anyway, Wilkinson, who's not really progressive on race issues, he hears this speech and alarm bells go off. And he sends the speech to Harold B. Lee, and he circles the part where he talks about black people being servants to white people in the hereafter. And he also talks about, you know, don't give them a lineage because, you know, they don't want to be told they're from Cain. So just omit the lineage part. Just give them a. Like their patriarchal blessings would be like priesthood blessings or comfort blessings for maybe a father or church figure anyway, but omit lineage. And so Harold B. Lee reads it again, he's no conservative on race either, or. Or progressive. Lee reads it, oh, my goodness, we've got a problem here. And he sends it to David O. McKay, the church president. And McKay, who's pretty old by this point, he reads the speech and he says to. Writes back to Wilkinson, he says, some people just don't get it. We're taking potshots from critics everywhere. And here you have our church patriarch saying this at a devotional address. Don't publish it. And so some of the brethren are just absolutely tone deaf. And some of the brethren are keenly aware of the controversial nature of, you know, saying things like this. And so Benson is tone deaf too, when it comes to the stuff he's saying about race, about conspiracy. And Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold Lee reckon in Spencer Kimball, certainly, that we'll get to his presidency in a moment. But they recognize how harmful this rhetoric is to the church, and so they rein him in. They tell him not to talk about conspiracies and gaddy at and robbers and socialism and calling the presidents of the United States communists and all of that stuff. But what does he do in April of 1972? He says that there's a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy fact that there are things going on in the country that we need to know about, and Benson felt it was his job to warn about it. So they warn him in or they rein him in. They tell they don't publish that part that I just referenced, referring to none to dare call it conspiracy. And then just shortly after that, Elder Benson, who's been told repeatedly to give up politics by this point, he gives this. There's an instructional Meeting among the apostles and some other general authorities in the temple. And Benson was, was supposed to sermonize on something religious in nature, but instead he turns it into a religious screed, an anti communist greed. Our youth are not learning how to fight communism. And he's got graphs and charts that he's trying to share with the brethren. And Harold B. Lee was so disgusted by this, he gets up and he walks out of the temple right in the mid part of his presentation. And as the story goes, a couple of other general authorities followed him out. One other general authority didn't know what to do. He's just sitting there watching the most influential apostle at this point, Harold Lee, walk out and a couple of others followed him out. And the other apostle just sat there thinking, you know, I want to walk out, but I don't want to embarrass Elder Benson. So this is the stuff that goes on. There's one report that I have that this is. They stripped him of all of his committee assignments. President Lee and President Smith, they, they, he's no longer chair of this committee, chair of that committee, they strip him of everything.

John Dehlin [01:03:37] I think, I think this is a really important point. I don't think people understand kind of how the church bureaucracy works. But there are basically various departments like the missionary department, the priesthood department, the construct temple construction department, other departments, and there's marketing and pr. And usually every. Tell me if I'm wrong. Every department has a senior apostle and a junior apostle that oversees the department. And that's kind of how the first presidency kind of delegates management and overseeing of the church's internal bureaucracies by the priesthood leadership. Do I have that right? Do you want to add or take away anything from that?

Matt Harris [01:04:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah, just add. One quick thing about that is that that was a recent phenomenon, what you just explained by recent, I mean early 70s, the brethren were involved in so many different things. And they hired a PR firm from Chicago to look at their organizational scheme. And what they. One of the things they came up with is the apostles were spending too much time on mundane bureaucratic things. And so they rearranged some of the their duties and they put them over bureaucracies that they had once run themselves. And now lower church bureaucrats, people who are not in church leadership, are fulfilling the duties that the apostles used to do. And the apostles meet with these people, you know, once a week, once a month, however long, the committee, whatever is required from the committee. And so they oversee it in this kind of capacity. And in this case, Benson was stripped of all of his committee assignments, essentially, they took his power away from him. And that was their, their way, Lee and Smith, of saying, look, we've had it. And Benson, of course, is just. He's just fit to be tied. He's furious.

John Dehlin [01:05:29] Do we know what his committee assignments were?

Matt Harris [01:05:31] I don't. The document that I have that talks about this doesn't mention the committee assignments. It just says that he's been stripped of his committees.

John Dehlin [01:05:38] Okay, okay.

Matt Harris [01:05:40] Nor. Nor do I know when those committee assignments were reassigned to him. I wish I knew that, but I don't.

John Dehlin [01:05:45] Okay, that's great. I just want to add a comment from one of my favorite listeners. Cecile Shellman writes my patriot. She. She is from the, the Nugent family, which was the first Jamaican family baptized in Jamaica. We had Spencer Nugent on previously on Mormon Stories. So Cecil is, is Spencer's sister or, or Spencer is Cecil's brother. But Cecil writes, my patriarchal blessing did not have a lineage. Neither did my parents. And that's something I think a lot of Mormons don't know. Is that, that you would think that a patriarchal blessing always comes with the lineage. And like you told us, and like Cecil confirms, the, the patriarchs just punted and omitted lineage from people's patriarchal blessing because we had all this weird teachings about, about Cain and the curse of Cain and Ham and, and if it's the blood of Israel, it's certainly not African American blood. And, you know, is that right? They just basically punted for our African Americans on their.

Matt Harris [01:06:56] I mean, that's, that's not entirely correct because what happens is they don't have a policy for African Americans or people of black African descent. They don't have a policy about how you pronounce lineage on black people. And so what happens is this is. Actually, I'm going to tie this back to Benson. Benson talks about this. It's really interesting. So throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, they don't have a policy. And so patriarchs are all over the place on lineage. Some of them will pronounce a lineage of Cain or Ham on somebody of black African descent, which is. You can imagine how insulting and offensive that is to being told that you're part of this biblical counterfeiter, this lineage. You're outside of the house of Israel anyway. So some patriarchs do that, and they recognize that that's problematic because obviously a person receiving their blessing wants to be comforted by this blessing. And this is hardly comforting. Other times, patriarchs declare the blessings of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, these are priesthood and temple blessings. And that's problematic because those are priesthood and temple Blessings. And before 1978, our black brothers and sisters were not supposed to have those, those blessings. And then the third one is Eldridge Smith, who doesn't want to give any lineage. And so if you talk to people from, who receive blessings under Eldridge Smith's direction, they don't get lineage. And Darius Gray, Eugene Orr, those are early pioneer members of the Genesis group. They don't receive their lineage. And so in 1970, the brethren are. They meet in Salt Lake in the temple to figure out what to do about lineage because it's all over the place in the church in terms of, with black people. And they studied other patriarchal blessings that were given to black people. And Gordon B. Hinckley, who was then a junior apostle, he had the assignment to work with the church historian to compile these blessings and to look at them, to study them and to figure out, you know, let's set some policy here because we're all over the place. And we certainly can't declare the blessings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, nor can we pronounce Cain or Ham, because that is deeply problematic. And so somebody, one of the apostles, I think it's Richard L. Evans, he says, let's just not do any lineage at all. Which is what Eldrich D. Smith was doing. And Ezra Taft Benson, of all people, he pipes up and he says, no, we have an obligation to declare lineage. That's the purpose of these blessings. And so they couldn't decide what to do because so they kick the can down the road. They just tell the patriarchs, well, just use your follow the Spirit and the Spirit will direct you what to do. Well, that was the whole point of that apostle meeting in 1970, is that the patriarchs were following the Spirit and the Spirit was all over the place telling them different lineages or none at all. And so they didn't ever resolve the issue. And they had tried and tried and tried. And patriarchs would write them, the church leaders notes and they would say something like, dear elder so and so, dear apostle so and so I'm going to give a blessing to a black person next week. And I'm deeply apprehensive. Can you give me guidance? What do I do? I mean, they're just searching for answers. And as late as 1976, Apostle Packer leads this committee to look into it. And at that committee, they don't have any resolutions either. And by 1978, with the priesthood revelation, they then Come up with an unofficial policy where people who are once deemed cursed in Mormon theology can now be adopted into the House of Israel. And that becomes sort of the, the new policy after the priesthood revolution.

John Dehlin [01:10:50] Yeah. So fascinating. This whole blood lineage thing that Joseph Smith left us with, the Book of Mormon has been so problematic. And I'm looking forward to your book where I'm sure you're going to be going into that quite a bit. Okay, so they strip them that, you know, we have general authorities walking out of his talks. We have, you know, we have him being stripped of his committee assignments. I, I'm gonna pause and just, just ask one more question. Like when you describe things like he's sending books, you know, Berkshire Books to Eisenhower. He's sending Berkshire Books to the quorum of the 15. I call quorum of the 15 the first presidency, the quorum of the 12. He's sending Berkshire Books to Richard Nixon, who doesn't even like him, didn't even want him in the administration, who declined to bring him into his administration. You just get the feeling that he's kind of lost it. And I know you're not Von Brody, I know you're not a psychologist, but whether it's him ignoring prophets, seers and revelators telling him to cool down, or like sitting in his office sending Bircher books to everybody with all these kind of harebrained super racist conspiracy theories, you kind of get the sense that he's gone insane or lost touch with reality. Do you have any way you can provide perspective on just his mental well being by the 70s, or is that outside your, your purview or auspices?

Questions About Benson's Motivations and Mental State

Matt Harris [01:12:23] No, there's. As a historian, I ask these kinds of questions. What motivates people when. I mean, just think about this intuitively. Secretary Benson was very close to Eisenhower and his wife Mamie. And in fact, the Bensons, Ezra and Flora, had Ike and Mamie over to their house for family home evening. They were close. And Eisenhower had protected Benson for eight years. The church president wanted to bring him back from D.C. because he was causing too much controversy in Washington with his farm policies. And President Eisenhower said, no, President McKay, I need him here with me. And so he stays a second term. And the question I have as a historian, I thought, how could Benson turn on him like this and call him a Commie after he leaves the, the Cabinet? How could he call John Foster Dulles a Commie who was the Secretary of State, or Alan Dulles the President, or the Director of the CIA, or Milton Eisenhower a close confidant to his brother Ike. How could Benson do this? Surely he knows they're not communists. He worked with these guys. And so that's a question that, of course, you hypothesize about. And why would Benson, why would he persist in these kinds of things when it's clearly causing dissension within the church ranks? Well, he has a following, for one. He's got loyal Latter Day Saints who, Who share his politics and even his conspiracy theories. And I know we'll get to this in a minute, but we've got similar issues today, right? We've got the church leaders, and we've got folks who are into conspiracy Latter Day Saints who are into conspiracies. And the church is just not into that stuff today anyway. So what is motivating Elder Benson? And he. He doesn't. He's not mentally ill. He doesn't have some neuroses that I can think or see. He's. He's functioning. I'm not competent to judge that anyway. But what drives him is this apostolic calling. This is why God wants him in the quorum. And initially the apostles, his associates in the 12, they. They understand it. Legrand Richards, the voluble Legrand Richards was asked about a government question. And Delbert Stapley, the apostle, was asked a government question. And they both said, go see Ezra Tap Benson. That's his ballywick. That's his thing. That's his calling. If you want to ask about something else about the church, maybe that's my calling, Elder Richards would say, but politics, the freedom issue, that's what they usually called it. The euphemism, the freedom issue. Go see President Elder Benson. Well, that happened for a while in the 60s, and then he became so controversial, Latter Day Saints were no longer saying, go see Elder Benson on the freedom issue because it was causing problems. And so what would make Elder Benson defy President Smith and President Lee? And the. The answer is, again, this calling that he felt that God wanted him to be a watchman on the tower for Latter Day Saints. And I want to just share one thing that's really, I think, instructive, that after Lee's sermon, or after Benson's sermon and after Lee had walked out of his address in the temple, Benson gave another General Conference talk. And this is what he said. I'm going to read just part of it. Quote, we must not permit fear of criticism to keep us from doing our duty, even at the risk of our council being labeled as political. As government becomes more and more entwined in our daily lives, as watchmen on the tower. It is our obligation and right as leaders to speak out against current evils, evils that strike at the very foundation of all we hold dear as the true Church of Christ and as members of Christian nations. Now this is in April of 73, a year after he had endorsed none dare call it conspiracy and conference. And Benson doesn't mention Harold B. Lee by name, but that's the reference behind this, that we have a right to speak out. We have a right to watch and to warn. Two words that Benson loved to give. And so indirectly he was speaking to Harold B. Lee that this is my calling, allow me to do my calling. And of course, Lee would have nothing of it.

John Dehlin [01:17:01] Yeah, knowing. Knowing a lot personally, knowing a lot of the descendants of Ezra, to have Benson because it's part of my family. Sometimes I've wondered if there was. This is gonna. This may be really controversial, but I've wondered if there was a. Some sort of high functioning autism spectrum sort of thing. Just an inability to. To really sometimes just understand socially what's going on around him. Just this militancy and drive that really. That really could not perceive or understand the reactions of many of those close to him. It's obviously just speculation and it's probably highly controversial, but.

Matt Harris [01:17:48] Yeah, no, I understand. I have a son with autism who's low function and I understand autism quite well. I don't think so. I think there's. It's a combination of things between his prophetic or apostolic calling, his conservative politics. He's an ideologue. And also he's just a stubborn personality. He, he has a sense of. That his voice in politics really matters because he had been back in Washington and was at the seat of political power for eight long years. And I think some of the brethren, Harold B. Lee in particular, and Hugh Brown, they were outspoken in private about how his head got too big because he was in politics and because he thought he knew things that the other brethren didn't know. And that gave him a unique advantage, having served in the Cabinet. And so Lee talks about this. He writes a letter to his friend J. Willard Marriott, and he said that Ezra's head is just way too big. He needs to be humbled. And he also said that the Lord has a way of humbling Apostle Benson. So I think that's what it is mostly is his unique experience in government, his personality. He's just a really stubborn kind of guy. And also he really feels like that President McKay has given him his marching orders and that subsequent church presidents are not allowing him to fulfill what President McKay called him to do.

John Dehlin [01:19:17] All right, well, thanks for speculating with me a tiny bit or at least trying to think about this a little more. Okay, so we know that after David O. McKay died that we had two prophets in succession that served really relatively brief period periods. So that's Joseph Fielding Smith and, and then Harold B. Lee that, that both serve very short periods of time. Is that right?

Matt Harris [01:19:40] Correct. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:42] And so anything you want to talk about their administrations. And then it seems like it was Spence W. Kimball that really was able to kind of nail this thing down in terms of raining. Reigning in ast Benson, anything else you want to mention about Joseph Fielding Smith or Harold B. Lee's administrations relative to Ezra Tab Benson?

Matt Harris [01:20:01] Before we talk about Kimball, just one last thing. So reigning in Benson, it starts with Joseph Fielding Smith and then it goes to his successor, Harold B. Lee. They're both in lockstep. That Birch politics. It's done. There's a person who, a Latter Day Saint from Wyoming who, who contacted Elder Benson. This is in the. This would have been during Harold B. Lee's presidency. And he said, can you run for the president? We want you to run for the presidency. Benson knew that this was a hot potato. And this is of all things, putting him back into politics would be just sure to trigger Lee. And Benson did something that he would later regret. He said, you'll have to talk to the church president on that. So the story goes, this good brother from Wyoming calls President Lee and explains who he is and why he's calling. And Lee hangs up on him. Won't even dignify the question. Just. And Lee had a really, he was a fiery personality. And so I think it really took Harold Lee to. Benson has, you know, a very strong constitution as well. And so it took someone like Harold Lee to really start to reign in Benson. And once Lee dies after a short illness, the diminutive, soft spoken Spencer W. Kimball becomes the next church president. And Spencer Kimball and Ezra Taft Benson go back a long way. They were both called into the quorum of the 12 on the same day within minutes of each other in 1943. And the only reason why Kimball was the senior apostle, he was ordained first is because he was older by a little bit. And so that was the reason. So they had been in the Quorum for a long time. Kimball was never a rebel rouser with Benson. He was his equal almost in seniority. And so Kimball rarely spoke about the John Birch Society in public, but in private, in his diary in the 1950s or, excuse me, 1960s. He's very clear about this. In his diary, he said that the Birch Society is causing us problems. I wish Elder Benson would stop, but he's not in authority to rein him in. Let Harold Lee do it and Hugh Brown and all those guys, Joseph Fielding Smith. So he doesn't say anything. But when he becomes the church president, Benson feels like he knows him well and he can reopen that John Birch Society door. So one of the first things that Benson does after President Kimball is ordained, the church president, is that he goes to a board of trustees meeting at byu and he says, let's give Robert Welch an honorary degree. And Kimball and the board. Robert Welch is the president of the Birch Society. President Kimball says, no, we're not going to give Robert Welch an honorary degree. Let's have a Birch Society student club at byu. No. And so Kimball tells him, look, you're not to talk about the Birch Society. Gaddy at and robbers, secret conspiracies. All of that stuff from President Smith and President Lee still stands with my administration and Benson. Benson, for a. Doesn't listen. He doesn't listen. He gives a sermon in 1975 in which he talks about conspiracies and he uses the word conspiracies. And the speech. This is kind of interesting. The speech was written by a Mormon, Bircher, who taught at BYU in the religion department, named Glenn Pearson. And Elder Benson, he wrote. He called. I guess he called Glenn Pearson before the speech. And he said, hey, look, I'm going to give a general conference sermon next week, and I'm going to borrow from your book, but I'm not going to give you any attribution. I just want you to know, don't be alarmed. And Pearson writes this in a letter to his friend and explains. And he was kind of miffed that, you know, that Benson would use Pearson's ideas. But anyway, there's a government conspiracy, gaddy aten, robbers, all of this stuff. So he. He's. He's relighting this very controversial flame. And President Kimball is upset. One of the things that he also does is he. He gives this. This controversial address at byu. And I'm gonna just look at part of it, Read part of it. He tells the BYU student body in 1977. He says, when you accept food stamps, you accept an unearned handout that other working people are paying for. You do not earn food stamps or welfare payments. You did not come to this university to be a welfare recipient. You were not here to be a parasite or A freeloader. And then later on he calls welfare legalized plunder. And what's interesting about that address is that this is byu. They're taught to procreate, to have children everywhere. Well, how many of these kids have insurance to cover the cost of these births? Very few. And so they're doing it on the taxpayer dime of the citizens of Utah. They're planning their families at BYU while their students using welfare services from the state of Utah. And what's interesting is that Benson knows this is going on. They talk about welfare payouts to BYU students at board of trustees meetings and they even mentioned dollar amounts that somehow X dollars in taxpayer monies are being distributed to BYU students to start their families to have children. And so he gives us this address that drop out of school if you're doing this. And I don't know what this. At the time the percentage of the BYU student population was married with children, much less how many of them were on the the government dole having their families. But it was a significant amount, enough for him to address it. The other thing that Benson does at about the same time is that he gives this high profile interview to the Salt Lake Tribune in which he endorses the American Independent Party. So Benson's politics are beyond mainstream. He's left the Republican Party, so to speak. Civil rights kind of pushed him out, to be honest, because they're all.

John Dehlin [01:26:40] Because they're all communists, right? All the Republicans and Democrats are communists.

Matt Harris [01:26:43] Not all, not all. But it's among other issues. It's the.

John Dehlin [01:26:48] I'm joking, I'm joking. But I mean if Nixon is, and you know what I'm saying, like if Eisenhower is like he's. Well, he has named a lot of the leadership in the Republican Party.

Matt Harris [01:27:00] Right? You're right. He leaves the Republican Party in part for a period because Nixon, with whom he worked in the Eisenhower Cabinet, is now the president in 1968. And when Nixon was elected, Benson had filled out papers to be the Secretary of Agriculture in the Nixon administration. Round two. And Nixon, of course, doesn't even dignify this. Are you crazy? I'm not going to put Benson back in as the Agricultural Secretary. It's not because he doesn't know farm policy. He's very conversant with farm policy. He's controversial. He was controversial in the 50s under Eisenhower. And he's also controversial because he's in lockstep of the Burt Society. So Nixon just throws his application, puts it aside, they don't even dignify and instead it's kind of an alt. The ultimate slight. Nixon chose a man named Earl Butts as his agricultural secretary, who was an underling to Benson in the Eisenhower administration. So not only does Nixon just push aside Benson's application, but he chooses the man that Benson had once presided over. And that was just an additional insult. But Nixon embraces civil rights by 1968, as does most of the Republican Party. They recognized that it was a divisive issue in 1964 with Goldwater, when half the party supported it and the other half didn't. That's one of the reasons why Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater in 1964. The party wasn't aligned with civil rights. But also Nixon had expanded government bureaucracies, right, Creating osha, the Environmental Protection Agency. Also, he does the unthinkable. He opens up diplomatic relations with communist China. And this just sends Benson to the roof. He writes in these nasty letters, how could you do this? Dick called him Dick. How could you do this? This is the enemy. And Nixon would occasionally respond to some of the letters, but for the most part, left him alone. And Benson, 1972. I can't figure this out, the psychology of this. But Eisenhower died in 1969, and Benson felt badly, at least at the time. He said that this is a great American hero. We'll miss him, and said all these nice things about Benson publicly. But in 1972, few years after Ike had been dead, Benson wrote Nixon a letter, and he alleged that Eisenhower was responsible, his foreign policy was responsible for. For the slaughters in Central Europe. And when I read this letter, I thought, oh, my goodness, 1972, he's calling the late Dwight Eisenhower responsible for all these slaughters in Central Europe. I had no idea what promoted this letter, the context, I just don't know. But Nixon's aide said, we're not going to respond to this rubbish. This is what they say in private. And he would also send Nixon Burt's literature, as you mentioned earlier, John, and as I point out in the book. Book and the AIDS are always interesting. The Nixon Presidential Library, they keep everything, which is awesome for a historian like me. And in these memos that the AIDS would write, they would screen Benson's letters and other letters too, and they would write, we're not going to respond to this. We're not going to dignify this. This is the sort of thing they would do. And so Nixon just sort of pushed Benson aside in a very similar way that Jagger Hoover did. FBI director, when Benson would try to send Bert's literature to him. So Anyway, he leaves the Republican Party and endorses the American Independent Party. This is the same party that George Wallace, that he flirted with running in 1968, where President McKay said, no, you can't run with a white supremacist. And Benson thinks that in 1974, he thinks that the American Independent Party teaches, quote, divine, eternal principles. And it's a third party. It's a controversial party. It's also the party that will influence the Bundys, the American Independent Party of Utah. We'll get to the Bundys in a minute. So Benson endorses the party publicly and he wants the church to endorse the party as well. It's controversial because, for a lot of reasons, it's an extremist third party, for one. But for two, President Kimball's trying to grow the church. And it's hard to spread the gospel globally if you've got an extremist within your ranks. In your ranks. So anyway, the church issues this statement saying that we are neutral in politics. We won't endorse any kind of political views. And that's what Elder Benson was driving at in some of the interviews he had been given, that the church may endorse this. And President Kimball made it very clear we're not going to endorse any political parties. But Benson also said something controversial in 1974 that would draw him a stern rebuke from President Kimball. He said that you cannot be a good Latter Day Saint and a good Democrat if you are properly living the gospel. And the Salt Lake Tribune publishes this, and President Kimball receives this. Dozens of complaints from people like J.D. williams and others who do not like the direction that the church is going in. Let me read just a short statement from President Kimball's diary where he addresses this. These complaints coming in about Benson trying to get the church to support the American Independent Party and also where he's denouncing the Democratic Party, saying that you cannot be a good Latter Day Saint, a Democrat. This is from Elder President Benson's or, excuse me, President Kimball's diary. A number of people came in to deplore the things that Elder Benson said. Since then, I have talked to him and I doubt he will go into politics anymore. I explained to Brother Benson that I felt that as the President of the council of the 12. So Benson's the president of the Council of 12. He's the next in line to be the church president, that Benson is the president of the council of 12. He had a position of great honor and respect than anything he could possibly get through political sources and that certainly this should be first in his life, in his thoughts, in his interests. He seemed to agree and felt very sorry that he had brought any reproach or embarrassment to the church. Well, Benson didn't learn his lesson because a month later he said something else to the press. And Kimball calls him in again and he says in his diary, counsel Brother Benson that all the general authorities must speak with one voice and we cannot take any partisan position in politics with either candidates or parties. And so he's talking about the evils of government welfare. He's talking about secret combinations and gaddy Anton robbers. And he's saying things publicly about the Democratic Party that he'd been saying for a long time, by the way. Way. But this 1974 interview, he says it really the most clear, the most succinct. And now Kimball has a problem on his hands because Elder Benson has this massive following. After some of these general conference sermons, people would write him letters. Dear Elder Benson, you're going to be the last prophet of this dispensation to usher in the end times. You are the one who will save the Constitution. I mean, he has this really massive following and it's getting out of control. It's getting out of hand. And by 1980, President Kimball will reign. Will. Will put the kibosh on Benson once and for all. In a famous sermon at devotional address at BYU. This is February 1980. Elder Benson gave this extremely controversial address. I know that's redundant to say because a lot of this is controversial, but he gives us address called 14 Fundamental Points in following the Prophet. And I'll just, just cop out a couple of them.

Benson's Fourteen Fundamentals of Following the Prophet

John Dehlin [01:35:19] Actually. I was gonna, I was gonna maybe cover a few of them.

Matt Harris [01:35:23] Please.

John Dehlin [01:35:24] So, so I've got, I've got the list here and, and you. I think it'd be fun to actually talk about several of these because what I understood from, from reading your book and I hadn't thought about it this way, it's almost like he's prepping the membership for his own prophetic administration. And it's so. I think that might have been. It's almost like a pre power grab that would have felt very threatening to the, the member, other members of the quorum of the 12 and the existing first presidency and basically speaking outside of his authority. Are all those things fair to say as context for why this was so problematic?

Matt Harris [01:36:09] Oh, absolutely. He was going to merge the church with the right wing.

John Dehlin [01:36:14] Okay. And so I'm going to read a couple of These. And let you and me talk about why this speech might have been perceived as troublesome for the first presidency and specifically Spencer B. Kimball. He was. He was disturbed by this, right?

Matt Harris [01:36:30] Extremely so.

John Dehlin [01:36:32] Okay, so number one is the prophet is the only man who speaks for the Lord in everything problematic. Why? Potentially

Matt Harris [01:36:43] because that gives him the imprimatur to say things about politics.

John Dehlin [01:36:47] Yeah.

Matt Harris [01:36:47] And that people can't question him and

John Dehlin [01:36:49] he's the only man. So nobody can. No. You know, Hubie, Hubie, the ghost of Hubie Brown and any other apostle that wants to disagree. If they're, you know, in the quorum or even counselors in the First Presidency, they don't matter. Right, Right. Okay. The living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works. And I remember being taught this when I was at byu. Why might that be problematic?

Matt Harris [01:37:14] Once again, it's elevating one person. There are no checks and balances. Right. If you're elevating the prophet, there aren't checks and balances. And if you compare that statement with earlier church presidents like Joseph Hilling Smith would oftentimes say that we have an obligation as Latter Day Saints to take the standard works and to check them against what prophets and apostles are saying to see that they're in alignment. And now Elder Benson saying those checks are. We're going to do away with those checks.

John Dehlin [01:37:44] That's a great way to think about it is just a check and balance. Right. A living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet. And that, you know, that's for some, that's even Joseph Smith. That basically has to have Benson saying, when I become prophet, my words are more important than even our religion's founder, Joseph Smith.

Matt Harris [01:38:04] Right, Right. And whatever President Kimball said, McKay, Joseph Smith doesn't matter. I'm the guy in charge now. Yeah, yeah. We're getting a theme here. Right. A pattern.

John Dehlin [01:38:15] Yeah. The prophet will never lead the church astray. Again. That's problematic because how do you walk back a really disturbing thing a prophet says. And Brigham Young and many others said some really disturbing things. How do you. How do you walk back any future thing A crazy Ezra to have Benson prophet might say once he's, you know, said declaratively that a prophet will never leave the church astray. Right.

Matt Harris [01:38:40] Yeah. And I think this. A little additional context on that is that the, the last time that was said that. I know maybe one of your listeners can correct me on this if I, if I misremember this, but was 1979 and Ellen Tanner had said that before in General conference that the prophet can no longer allow the church to be led astray. And it started during World War II, that whole nomenclature. And so people would say to Benson when he was an apostle, they would say, oh, that's just Elder Benson's, you know, know, opinion. He doesn't speak for the church. That's what Hugh Brown would frequently say. Oh, that's just his opinion about Dr. King and civil rights. He doesn't speak for the church. And President Elder Benson's now saying, when I'm the church president, I will speak for the church, and. And I will not lead you astray. That's. Those are, those are really. That's an important statement. And I don't think the church teaches this today as much. If they do, I'm not aware of it. This is, this is controversial because really what it is is it's removing the ownership to be thinking, rational people and placing all that trust on church leaders who will never lead you astray. And sometimes people do make. Our religious leaders do make poor decisions they make. They give us bad counsel all the time.

John Dehlin [01:39:54] All the time.

Matt Harris [01:39:57] Right.

John Dehlin [01:39:57] Happens all the time. Prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials. And of course, there's that. Benson didn't even finish his graduate degrees. Right.

Matt Harris [01:40:12] Master's degree.

John Dehlin [01:40:12] He did Master's, but now his PhD. But he's also saying he can talk about any. And some of these other future points. Say it that he doesn't have to have any particular training or expertise. He can talk on all possible subjects authoritatively. He doesn't have to say thus saith the Lord. Right. So anything you want to comment on that? Basically, he's just saying we could talk about anything without any knowledge or expertise.

Matt Harris [01:40:39] Well, what he's driving at is, is that whatever I say as a church president, it's going to be. It's going to be the gospel. And unlike. It's interesting how Mormons promote doctrine. Right. You know, there's. It's really. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon. Brigham Young in the 19th century didn't need to have the Quorum of the Twelve and his two counselors say, yeah, we agree with you. Let's call this. Dr. Brigham Young was such an authoritative leader, he would just speak and, you know, whatever I say from the pulpit can be considered the words of Christ. And by the 20th century, you start to get checks on doctrine. And let me give you a couple of examples. In the mid 20th century, the doctrine that becomes doctrine is the first presidency. It's a provenance of the first presidency. So it's when the church president and his two counselors agree to something, that becomes the church doctrine. And so it's a, it's a prophetic statement. And that allows. That inoculates the church president from saying something on the, on the side where he just gives his opinion or does something. You can just say, oh, that was just the church president speaking for himself. But when his counselors and he sign on, that becomes doctrine. And this evolves throughout the 20th century, where now you get the quorum of the 12 who buy in. And I just heard, let's see, a few years ago, I think it was trying to think who it was. It was D. Todd Christofferson, I think in conference. He talked about this five years ago. Maybe he talked about doctrine being the provenance of the first presidency and the quorum of the 12. That's an interesting addition. It didn't used to be that way. So that's an extra check on how the church defines its doctrine. And Benson's saying that I don't need my counselors or the quorum to buy off on this. What I say is going to be the doctrine of the church.

Defining Doctrine and Prophetic Authority

John Dehlin [01:42:30] Yeah, it's kind of a power grab in so many ways. All right. He also wants to kind of address the fact that he's not always popular, that he's not, you know, that everyone doesn't always love him, or that he offends a lot of people because he says things like the prophet does not have to say, sorry. The prophet tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know. There's kind of this anti science kind of thing. The prophet is not limited by men's reasoning. The prophet can receive revelation on any matter, temporal or spiritual. The prophet may advise on civic matters, political matters.

Matt Harris [01:43:13] Right there for a moment.

John Dehlin [01:43:15] Yeah, please.

Matt Harris [01:43:16] Probably that right there. And the idea that the current prophet's more important than the dead prophet or the standard works, those two or three ideas become the biggest touchstones in this sermon. The prophet can speak in civic or political affairs. And this is, this is the, the fear that people have the most, that this prophet, he's now violated some of these unspoken rules about checks and balances. He's now going to align the church with the American Independent Party. And that really is a huge fear. He wants to create a voting bloc like the Moral Majority, this Evangelical Christians from the 1970s who cluster around a host of social issues like abortion and gay rights and the civil rights movement, high taxes and so forth. And this is what he's driving at. He sees their political success as. And this is something that he wants for the church. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:44:14] And that's got to strike terror into the hearts of, of the brethren a little bit because they know he's, he's on tap to become prophet. Let's see a couple other things. The two groups who have the greatest difficulty in following the Prophet are the proud who are learned and the proud who are rich. So again, kind of an anti science and anti intellectual, you know, perspective that our church has a rich legacy and sometimes promoting or harboring the prophet will not necessarily be popular with the world or the worldly. And he does throw a bone to the, to the counselors in the first presidency saying, the prophet and his counselors make up the first Presidency, the highest quorum of the church. Yeah. And then he ends by saying, the Prophet and the Presidency, follow them and be blessed, reject them and suffer. So a little bit of fear, a little bit of good old fashioned fear thrown in at the end.

Matt Harris [01:45:16] I, I remember when I read this speech for the first time, I was at byu and it was a religion class called Teachings of the Living Prophets.

John Dehlin [01:45:23] Yeah.

Matt Harris [01:45:24] It was part of it. The address was in the manual. And you know, I just read it and it didn't, it wasn't controversial at all. And how could it be? It didn't have any context. And so when I got into the archives writing this book, I was amazed at visiting various archives that had letters that they sent to the First Presidency. So, for example, J.D. williams, in his papers at the University of Utah, he has a stack of letters that high from not just his colleagues, Latter Day Saint colleagues at the University of Utah, but also BYU colleagues who had to be circumspect, obviously because of their employment for the church. But they were writing into President Kimball saying, this is, this is, this is not right. This is not right. We see the writing on the wall. He's going to be the church president. President Kimball, of course, is in frail health. He'd been for a long time. And they're absolutely horrified that when President Benson, Elder Benson, becomes the church president, that somehow he's going to link the church with the Republican Party, the American Independent Party, and maybe even the John Birch Society. And so when these letters come into President Kimball, there are people who write into the newspapers, the Ogden newspaper, the Salt Tribune, the Desert News. I mean, they're complaining all over the place about this. And it becomes a national estate spectacle. So this is not just quiet. Everybody who read the newspapers, they know this is a controversial speech anyway. President Kimball, who doesn't like controversy, sort of a mild mannered man. Let me give you a sense of his personality for a quick moment. His brother in law is the scientist Henry Eyring, who possibly would have won the Nobel Peace Prize had he not gone to the University of Utah. That's what at least Sterling McMurran speculates, had he stayed at Princeton, maybe he would have won this big award. And McMurran speculates that it's because the, the committee was racist or prejudiced towards Mormons. I don't know if that's true, but he does have incredible stature. And Spencer Kimball and Eyring talk a lot at family gatherings about various church issues. And also his brother in law, George Boyd, who was a Mormon intellectual, taught in the church's education system. I know that may sound like an oxymoron today, but in those days there truly were some intellectuals in the church education system. And so George Boyd, who had a doctorate degree in religious philosophy, and then so he's the brother in law to Spencer Kimball. And then he would talk to Henry Eyring, I guess his cousin. To think about this, someone's going to correct me. I'm sure the genealogy here, I think it's Eyring's Kimball's cousin. But anyway, at family gatherings, the three men would be together talking, Eyring, Boyd and Kimball. And they would talk about spiritual things, just fine, no problem. But when it turned to evolution or any kind of secular matter and Boyd and Eyring would get into these vigorous debates and arguments, Kimball would just leave. He just couldn't handle, didn't want to engage, just didn't like the conflict. Not that, you know, a debate is conflict, but that's how he perceived it. And that's what Boyd said. Boyd writes about this. He just didn't want to be around our debates, didn't want to be around him. So he would walk away at these family gatherings. And so when, when these letters come in to protest President Benson or Elder Benson, this, this happens after Kimball had called him in several times in his office to reprove him about things he was saying about politics. So this is sort of the climax of several years of just tension between the church president and the most senior apostle, Benson. And so Spencer Kimball called Benson in and he said, this is in the spring of 1980. And he said, you need to apologize. You've embarrassed the church. You need to apologize to the quorum of the 12 at our Thursday meeting. You need to apologize. And Benson is just this isn't a good moment. And so he goes to the meeting, this is in the Salt Lake Temple, and he apologizes to the quorum of the 12.

Spencer W. Kimball's Apologies and Corrections

John Dehlin [01:49:43] And apologize for what? Make that really clear. What's he apologizing for?

Matt Harris [01:49:47] For injecting politics into the church discourse when he's been warned repeatedly not to. It's causing bad publicity for the church and it's harming the church. And the brethren don't like controversy. They don't like bad publicity. And so. And Benson's been doing this for a number of years now because, remember, Lee and Smith had reined him in, but he resumed all of this stuff with Kimball because he thought he knew Kimball well. And I'm going to be just cynical for a quick moment, but he thought he could take advantage of Kimball. Really, he thought he did. They were in the quorum together in 1943, they're called the same time together. They had served for decades together, and he thought he could take advantage of him. And President Kimball, boy, had a little more fire in his belly than Benson had predicted. So anyway, Benson had been talking to him nicely in private. Stop. And he wouldn't. And then he gives this controversial address in 1980, and again it's controversial because he's injecting politics again into the church body and he's laying the groundwork for his own church presidency. That's what they fear the most, these critics. So Kimball apologize, and so he apologizes in the temple to the 12. And boy, I'm trying to wrap my mind around this one. Kimball tells him afterwards, it's not sincere enough. Apologize again to all the general authorities in our next week's meeting. And so we've got accounts from members of the first quorum of the 70 who witnessed this second apology from the most senior apostle and the man who is likely to be the next church president. And in the church archives, there's a document that I'll. I'll just share parts of it with that I think your readers might find this interesting. I'm going to put it up here. It's called Apology. This is from the church archives, and it says that it has been reported in the news media that I said in a speech at BYU that a liberal Democrat cannot be a good Mormon. I made no such distinction in a speech at byu, nor have I done so in any other speeches. Current news media reports are likely referring to a long ago interview, the result of which produced a misinterpretation of comments I made during the interview. Although the reporters single out a particular political party in his line of questioning. My response was intended to apply to principle and philosophies rather than parties. I would like it publicly known that I recognize there are faithful members of the church affiliated with both major political parties in this country. Without making specific reference to any organization, political or otherwise, I would submit that it would be difficult for a faithful member of a church who has a clear understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ to embrace principles that are in direct opposition to the doctrines, principles and moral standards of the Church. I also want to publicly state that I have always been and am now in complete agreement with the Church's institutional policy of refraining from the endorsement of parties and candidates. Now, I can tell you a couple things. I don't think he gave this, he didn't write this, by the way. This is not Benson. He would never write this sort of thing. This is a public relations piece. And secondly, it's not clear if he ever gave it anywhere, but they did draft a statement because of the publicity that this, this controversial BYU devotional address had generated.

John Dehlin [01:53:34] Yeah, and I just, I also just add that I've often, and this is a little bit of my cynicism coming in. I, I've often felt, studying history from my point of view, that the two most sacred things to the top church leadership are PR and authority. And, and if Eztap Benson is violating two of the most sacred rules, which is continuing to give the church bad pr, and he's, and he's disobeying his leaders and that's just deeply problematic. And so I just love this vision of this diminutive, as I think you said, humble, you know, big eared, balding, almost Yoda, like church president taking Ezra to have Benson to the woodshed and forcing him to apologize two times in front of everybody, that just seems really serious. And you make it pretty clear in this awesome book that Ezra TAF Benson wasn't one to apologize. But I also just hate this thing that Izzotab Benson probably learned and that the church repeats, which is whenever they say something or do something super irresponsible, it's always, I was misquoted. Right? When, when oftentimes they weren't misquoted. But that's just, you know, that's just the excuse that they often give. And it's, it's. There's. There, there seems to be. And may this is a human problem. There seems to be a real problem with honesty that is in humanity. But we wouldn't expect this level of honesty. This Problem with honesty to be amongst people that we all sustain as special witnesses of Christ and prophets, seers and revelators and all of this intrigue and conflict. And again, even dishonesty behind closed doors, especially when the Church works so hard to make us. I mean, I think you should probably talk about this just for a second. Which is one of the golden rules of leadership in the top hierarchy of the Church is the appearance of unanimity. And so the irony that I think your book really draws out is the contrast between the appearance they want us to all feel or perceive, which is that there's total unanimity in the court quorum and just the total, severe, major conflict that's going on behind the scenes. Anything you want to say about that?

Matt Harris [01:56:00] Well, so. So again, we have to go back to what revelation looks like in the church. And it's not, you know, God appeared to the prophet or Moses and the burning of the bush. Nothing dramatic like that. Mormon revelation is far less interesting, to be honest, than, you know, some supernatural being appearing to you. Most Latter Day Saints would say that when God speaks to them, it's to the still, small voice or the Holy Spirit, various euphemisms like that. But Mormon revelation at the highest levels of the church really means it's a collaborative work session among the apostles. When there's a problem or a policy or a doctrine that they talk about, they, as Hugh Brown put it, we hash it, we rehash it, we discuss it, we pray about it. And then the church president says, I feel inspired to say this is what we'll do. And that becomes the revelation. It's just disgusting talking. And they want to do. They do want to create this unified appearance. And this is part of the problem, right, that you've got this controversial apostle who clearly is not on the church's page. I mean, President Kimball is trying to grow the church. And one of the staple points of his ministry is he says that every member, a missionary, lengthen your stride. He's talking about sharing the Mormon message. He wants to bring the church into black African nations. This is one of the fundamental things that changes the priesthood ban. Right, Lifts the priesthood ban. So after this priesthood revelation, they're trying to draw the church. And Benson is not helpful priesthood, particularly if you're trying to move into Northern Europe or. President Kimball had aspirations of moving in behind the Iron Curtain. This is the Cold War still going on. So he predicted one day that the gospel would be in communist China and communist Russia. And so he's not being unified. And what's interesting about the priesthood revelation is Benson is just consumed by this idea. There is a conspiracy in the government, and there are various manifestations of this conspiracy, from the government spending on social welfare programs to civil rights issues to any number of other issues. This is kind of interesting if you could see this here. This is an article that the Birch Society had put out. It's called A Serpent in the House. The kgb, so the Secret Russian intelligence apparatus, the kgb. Benson reads this article, and this is just a few weeks after the priesthood revelation. Of all the things just after the Priest of revelation, he reads this article, and the article states that there are KGB agents who have infiltrated the Jimmy Carter administration, the U.S. supreme Court, the U.S. house, and the U.S. senate. The commies are everywhere. I mean, he's off the rails at this point. And this is like August of 1978, actually, a couple of weeks after the priesthood revelation, he sends it. Benson sends this article to William Webster, who's replaced, who succeeded J. Edgar Hoover as the Director of the FBI. And he basically says, you should be aware of this stuff. This is going on under your watch. And just like Director Hoover and just like other people, like Nixon, they didn't even dignify it. This is just something we're not going to deal with. This is the conspiracy stuff is just really overwhelming the church. And what's interesting, if you look at Sherry Dew's biography of Ezra Taft Benson, it's published during his presidency in 1987, Desert Book publishes it. It's actually, by Desert Book standards, it's. It's obviously, it's a work of devotion, which is fine. That's what Desert Book does. But it's. Dew does something interesting. She. She leaves out the Birch Society. And Robert Wells doesn't talk about him at all, which is extraordinary given the influence that the Birch Society has in Benson's life. And. But she recognizes by the late 70s that she said, she said that Benson's worried about political affairs, but she doesn't talk about the controversial nature in which he broaches that with the church body. And she hints, just hints, that President Kimball had problems with it and wanted him to apologize, but doesn't go into the details, and she doesn't mention the second apology that happened a week later. So this guy is. Is clearly controversial. And by 1985, when Spencer W. Kimball died, the rumor mill is just going. It's just lighting up everywhere that this controversial Birch Mormon is going to politicize the church, align the church with the Republican Party. He's Going to call Reed Benson into the quorum of the 12. And Cleon Skousen. These are all the rumors that's going on as he as Ezra Tap Benson's ordained the church presidency. The mic John.

John Dehlin [02:01:20] Oh, yeah, I mute sometimes. And before we jump into your wonderful chapter five, which is remaking Benson, basically how the church had to refashion his image because they don't want to scuttle the rules of seniority because that provides stability to the church and it prevents all sorts of instability that would happen if apostles and First Presidency members were jockeying for succession. So they've got to keep that succession thing in place. So they've got to let Benson become prophet, which means they have to remake his image so that it's not problematic. And I remember I was in high school by 1985, and I remember, you know, living all the way in Katy, Texas, hearing some Mormons say that they were a little bit troubled by Benson becoming prophet. I'm like, what? He's a prophet? We don't, we never have concerns about our prophet becoming prophet. It's the Lord's anointed. But as a teenager growing up in Katy, Texas, I didn't have all this background about the John Birch stuff and the politics and all the problems. But before we jump into that, I just want to just have you. I want to ask you, we, we know that Ezra Tap Benson is on record of holding super racist views, whether it's about, you know, Jews, anti Semitic stuff or anti civil rights or anti interracial marriage. Can you just tell us really briefly why did he even Let the, the 1978 revelation happen? Why didn't he oppose it? Why didn't he fight it? And do we have any sense for how Kimball would have gotten him on board? I think that we discussed previously, either privately or in our discussion, that, you know, the way the 1978 revelation happened was by. By the right people dying and the right consensus being achieved so that everyone could support it in a unanimous way. Any idea what made Benson, who might have been disinclined to support something like the reversal of the priesthood ban? Any idea how he ended up accepting it and not fighting it?

Remaking Benson's Image and the Priesthood Ban

Matt Harris [02:03:28] Well, boy, this is the subject of the book I'm working on now.

John Dehlin [02:03:32] Okay, well, we don't have to get into that.

Matt Harris [02:03:33] If you think I can briefly answer it. So Spencer Kimball recognizes that the ban is a barrier to church growth, and he wants to lift the ban the minute he becomes the church president. And the issue is that there are some doctrinal Hardliners like Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold Lee, who died. But there's. There are also doctrinal hardliners like Bruce McConkie and Mark Peterson and also Benson in the Quorum. And so Kimball has to figure out a way to achieve this consensus, which is required of Mormon revelation, and do so in a way where he can bring these three senior apostles on board. Actually, Conkey wouldn't have been a senior apostle at that point, since he was just put into the Quorum just a few years earlier. But anyway, so Kimball, President Kimball worked with each of the apostles privately and collectively, and explained to them the barrier that this ban was causing for the church, that it cannot grow internationally and fulfill this biblical mandate to bring the gospel to every nation, kindred tongue and people, if you can't go into black African nations. And so President Kimball, the biggest person he had to Overcome was Bruce McConkie, but also Ezra Taft Benson. And Benson knew from talking to President Kimball that this was a barrier to church growth, and he agreed to it. And Benson, oddly enough, if you read the accounts of the Revelation, Ezra Taft Benson is one of the ones who gushes the most, in private, anyway, about it. You get bits and pieces from his two desert book biographies, but in private, he's gushing about the Revelation, how necessary it is. And so Benson comes around to it.

John Dehlin [02:05:15] Yeah, well, I guess we're all grateful that that happened, so can't complain too much. Okay, so is it time to talk about Chapter 5 and the remaking of Benson's image? Is that right? And I have to admit that the biggest controversy I associate with the Benson administration is his sort of becoming senile or his dementia or however you want to frame it. And then the controversies around his son. Well, the church working so super hard to make it look like he was still leading the church, even though he was incapacitated for the final few years of his administration. And then, of course, his son even being willing to speak publicly about how his dad was really not coherent and even to own the fact that the church was misrepresenting and not being honest about how unequipped and unable President Benson was in his final years to lead the church. And your book actually doesn't talk about. Did you consider including any of that stuff or it was because it was a political focus, probably that you didn't mention that.

Matt Harris [02:06:34] Well, I. No, I didn't. By 1989, Gordon Hinckley and Tom Monson had worked with the church's legal team. I think it was 89 work with the church's legal team to transfer the decision making authority over to the counselors. And that's because of President Benson's declining health. And so that's huge. And there were some other issues along these lines with President McKay during his last years as well. It's kind of like invoking the 25th Amendment today, right, when you have a president incapacitated. But that's what was going on, allowing Gordon Hinckley to make the decisions for the church in the late 80s, given President Benson's rapidly declining health. And just as a reminder, he died in 1994. So the last, like you said, John, the last few years of his ministry, President Kimball, he was essentially, he was comatose. And his grandson, Steve Benson, just could not understand the. Why the church would give the impression that President Benson was alive and conducting the affairs of the church when in truth, his grandfather was sitting in a rocking chair with a warm blanket on, rocking back and forth with all kinds of tubes in his body, and he was mute. He couldn't speak. And so. And I think that Hinckley and Monson had consulted the President as much as they could. It wasn't like they were deliberately trying to go around his back. But the truth was he was just incapacitated. And a lot of people were upset because they, they accused Hinckley and Monson of usurping Ezra Taft Benson's authority. If we can go back just for a moment, John, as we get into his presidency, I want to try to lead readers here for a moment, please. So, so we've talked about that. Benson is a controversial figure. Obviously that people were worried, at least some people, Latter Day Saints were worried about him politicizing the church. U.S. news and World Report published a piece in 1974. 1974, this is almost a decade before he was the church president, in which they warned, beware, this guy will be the president soon. So people have been watching Benson for a long time, both inside and outside of the church. And I'm frequently told or not told, but Latter Day Saints will frequently comment to me when I give public speeches about Benson. They'll say, boy, isn't it great that the Lord had a way of just chastising him or softening his heart so that he wouldn't politicize the church. He used to do that when he was an apostle, but he doesn't do it anymore when he's, when he's the church president. And I served a mission in Idaho and I grew up in Maine, so I served a mission in Idaho, and my mission President was next door neighbors with Ezra Tap Benson in Midway, Utah. And I remember hearing stories, lots of stories about Benson, the Lord softening his heart when he became the church president. And I remember when a junior apostle named Russell Nelson spoke to my mission. And Apostle Nelson had only been in the quorum for a couple of three years at that point. Guess I'm aging myself now. And anyway, Nelson said this to we young missionaries. He said, wasn't the Lord magnificent just to soften his heart with his political views. And I had no idea what he was talking about. Softened his heart with his political views. What does that mean? I whispered to my companion. What's he talking about? I don't know. So anyway, there was this fear that he would politicize the church, and the church narrative became that the Lord had softened him. And the truth is, is that Benson, by 1985, had just been battered and beat up, starting with Joseph Fielding Smith, then to Harold Lee, and then Spencer Kimball just really put the kibosh on him by embarrassing him, indeed, humiliating him before the 12, and then the general authorities. And Gordon Hinckley deserves, really was the last person to rein him in, because Hinckley was this enormously influential church administrator. He was called into the first presidency in 1981, and at one point he fulfilled the role that J. Reuben Clark had done earlier when J. Reuben Clark, Heber J. Grant and George Albert Smith were incapacitated and Clark was running the church. And so it was with Gordon Hinckley when N. Eldon Tanner became sick and George Romney, and now Gordon Hinckley as a third counselor is running the church because Kimball, Romney and Tanner are all incapacitated. So Gordon Hinckley is an extremely efficient and skilled administrator, and he's not close to Benson at all. And as much as Hinckley could, being a junior apostle, he would make his views felt about Apostle Benson. But Ezra Benson keeps him in the First Presidency because he had been running the church for at least a handful of years by the time that President Benson became the church president in 1985. And anyway, Benson did have a better relationship with Monson and was somewhat close to him, but not Hinckley. And so he kept Hinckley on board. And Hinckley made it very, very clear to him, your politics are hurting the church. Stop. And Benson listens to this. He probably had the, you know, I guess the authority as the church president to, you know, give sermons and conference about this or that, gaddy aunt robbers or whatever. But the truth is that Benson only talks about Gaddingatin robbers and growing government agencies, as he put it on a handful of occasions. And for the most part, his sermons are less political, and his attention turns to families reading the Book of Mormon Temples, food supply, all of these other issues that are essentially non political. And sometimes Latter Day Saints will say to me, you know, God softened his heart. And the truth is that Hinckley had reigned him in, and Benson will now rely on surrogates to spread the Birch message. And one of the first things that I always share with Latter Day Saints when they say, oh, God softened his heart, and he no longer talked about politics. Well, it's true he deemphasized his views on politics, but not for the reasons that you're implying, that somehow he had a change of heart. That's not true at all. He had been so controversial over such a long period of time. The first two weeks into his presidency, the first thing Benson does is he writes the Birch Society people, and he says, can you send them Thomas Monson, Gordon Hinckley, and my secretary, D. Arthur Haycock, can you send them Birch literature? I'll pay for it. Bill me. And he does this. He writes him a guy named John McManus, the who was the church, the Birch Society president, and he was the author of what was called a Birch Log. It was a little statement, I think it was weekly that the Birch Society, written by John McManus, would put out every week, one page in which he would talk about some kind of thing in world affairs. And he said to McManus, President Benson said, can you send the Birch log to my counselors as well? So now they're getting the Birch log, they're getting Birch literature, and they push back. They push back. I interviewed with McManus and I said, what happened? And he said, I don't know what happened, but I do know that somebody from church headquarters said, please don't send us any more Birch stuff from Hinckley Monson Haycock. And the general authorities wrote him and said, no more Birch Logs. We don't want this stuff. So they're pushing back hardcore on him. And Benson still feels the need to alarm the world about big government. Even though Ronald Reagan, a man that he likes and admires, is in the White House, he still sees, you know, a threat to the government. And when there's an opening in the general authority ranks, he wants to elevate H. Verland Anderson, his old Birch friend from the 60s, who's a BYU professor who had written his most famous speech address called A Proper Sphere. The Proper Sphere of government that was supposed to be part of George Wallace's presidential campaign, but then Benson subsequently gave it at the LDS General Conference in 1968. Anyway, Benson wants to elevate Verland Anderson to the quorum of the 12. And Hinckley and Monson put their foot down and they work out a compromise that will bring him into the second quorum of the 70 instead. And the second quorum is a three year term and you're done. Unlike the first quorum or the quorum of the 12 where it's a lifetime appointment. And one of the things that Benson asked H. Verland Anderson to do is to finish writing this book called the Book of Mormon and the Constitution. And it talks about gaddy and robbers, government conspiracies, all of the stuff that Benson was told not to talk about. Well, now he's going to have a surrogate do it. And when Gordon Hinckley gets word of it, he tells Anderson when actually it's Hinckley who called Berlin Anderson into his position. He said that you are not to talk about government conspiracies, gaddy at and robbers. You were not to write this book. You were not to talk to the Saints about it. And then when he had his exit interview three years later, H. Verland Anderson Hinckley said the same thing. The rules still apply that you're not to go around talking to the Saints about government conspiracies. And so obviously what we're seeing here is Hinckley's trying to move the church from the far right to the center right. And Benson's clearly doesn't support this. But so President Hinckley's really the upper leadership, they're trying to drive a wedge between this far right thought and also the Burt Society is a really great, great story told by a general authority named Malcolm Jepson, who, who's now deceased. Jepson was the physician before he was called into church leadership. He was the personal physician to the Benson's, to Ezra and flora. And when Dr. Jepson was at his medical clinic one day, his good friend from Brigham City, Utah, Boyd Packer, Apostle Packer had stopped by unannounced, uninvited to Dr. Jepson's clinic. And he walked into the clinic and Dr. Jepson was with a patient. And so Dr. Jepson excused himself, obviously knowing that there was something urgent going on for, for a church apostle to visit him at work. And Apostle Packer said to his, his boyhood friend, Dr. Jepson, he said, the Lord has Told me to tell you that you are not to join the John Birch society. This is 1989. And Jepsen said, why? And Packer said, you will know soon enough. Do not join. And so a week or two later, Elder Packer calls Malcolm Jepson into the quorum of the 70. And I've talked to Jepson's family and I what did that mean? And I think they interpreted the same way I did, which was that it would have been a disqualifying factor had Jepson joined the Burt Society. The church was moving away from this stuff and they just didn't want to deal with any more of this right wing extremism. And they also, when Jepson was called into the Quorum, they gave him. His oversight was in Utah and Idaho. So he was part of the Utah south presidency, however they called it in those days. But that was his territory. He was the general authority. He and his two counselors over Idaho and Utah. And this is in the early 90s when right wing extremism was just going off the charts. Bo Gritz, for example, a Mormon convert, former Green Beret, was running for the presidency on a populist ticket, anti gay rights, anti immigration, pro guns, all of that stuff. And he met with Benson and he wanted Benson's endorsement, his blessing. And the church PR person came out and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't do any of this stuff. And Bo Grit's got like 10% of the vote if you take counties in Utah and counties in Idaho. He got 10% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election with Bill Clinton and George Bush and I guess Ross Perot. So anyway, there's this extremism going on in the church and it's making Gordon B. Hinckley intensely uncomfortable.

Benson's Final Years and Changing Perception

John Dehlin [02:19:22] Right. And I, and I just, I really liked. For me, and I'm going to be touching back on a theme that I kind of started this section with. This photo for me, really represents kind of number one, what I'm trying to communicate, but also what I felt as I was watching the Benson administration. You know, we're all taught, and maybe this is simplistic, but I think it's important. We're all kind of taught as Mormons that, you know, a prophet leads the church, that the prophet talks to God and then he lets the rest of us know what's going on.

Steve Benson, the Freeman Institute, and Mormon Far Right

Matt Harris [02:20:03] So.

John Dehlin [02:20:04] And, you know, and so that's kind of how we are all led to think it works. And I don't think I'm just Making that up because I think the fact that Hinckley and Monson worked so hard to make all the members feel like Benson was leading the church even when he was incapacitated kind of really proves that point. But to go back to this book and the politics of it is that what this photo represents to me is that Benson wasn't standing on his own. And this literally shows Hinckley and Monson holding the prophet up. And what it really goes to show, and what I understand Chapter five to really be saying is that it wasn't so much a prophet leading the church, it was these high level bureaucrats behind the scenes managing public relations and perception and doing a lot of what I think Hinckley was probably most skilled at, which was manipulating public perception, changing public perception and improving the church's image and or Benson's image to help bolster and maintain the belief that not only Benson was in charge of, but that he had corrected and gotten right and that he was on message. And I guess it just. There's two things that again, really stuck out to me in chapter five. It was the behind the scenes bureaucracy that really holds the church up and just the church's passion for PR and public perception. And I guess I'm saying the 80s and 90s represented for me some of Gordon B. Hinckley's finest hours of master craftsman, public relations, and basically marketing. Is that, is that fair to, to say, in your view?

Matt Harris [02:22:08] Oh, I think so. I mean, sure. This is, this is part of, this is part of a concerted effort to remake his image after years of controversy. And you're right to point out Gordon B. Hinckley has a background in public relations and he worked for the church's various news affiliates the church owned before he was called as an apostle in 1963. So Hinckley also recognizes that the church has suffered from right wing extremism. And so this is part of this concerted PR push is, like I said, to move it to the far right and, or to the center. Right. And one of the challenges that the Church has, and Hinckley's well aware of this, is that Benson has a record. It's kind of like a Supreme Court justice, right, who's up for nomination before the U.S. senate. And they've got a record. You know, that's why law professors are the worst, because they write a lot and you can't just slide them through if they've got a massive record. Well, Benson has a record. He has given speeches condemning Dr. King as a commie. You know all of this stuff. And Democrats are communists and just really incendiary language. And Benson or Kinkley knows and Monson that they have a challenge on their hands to try to, you know, move the church away from the far right so that it can grow internationally. And a couple things that happened during Benson's ministry early in his presidency that really alarmed them. One is Benson's friend, a guy named Evan Mecham, was the, was elected the governor in Arizona in 1987. And the first thing that Evan Mecham does, Governor Mecham, Ezra Tab Benson's friend is and also a member of the John Birch Society, also a member of the Freeman Institute. Cleon Skousen. So Mecham's hardcore right wing. First thing Mecham does is that he issues an executive order rescinding the Martin Luther King federal holiday in Arizona. And oh my goodness, Arizona Mormons are extremely controversial. Tons of Mormons in Arizona, they're angry at this because now people are calling Mechum and the church, by extension, racist. And this is a church that has a long history of racism. And so they didn't like that. And then there are other people, devotees of Benson and Skousen and by extension Mecham, who this is the right thing to do. Dr. King's a communist. We knew it. And so it becomes such a huge brouhaha in Arizona. And Steve Benson, the president's grandson, oh my goodness, this is like a soap opera. Steve Benson, who works for the Arizona Gazette, I think one of the Arizona papers, I think it's a Gazette. Anyway, he's a cartoonist, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist. And he just mocks Evan Mecham in his brilliant cartoons. And Mecomb also gets in trouble for obstruction of justice. Some other reasons he gets recalled from office. So there's a lot of things going on with him. But anyway, President Benson reportedly had visited his inauguration, Mecomb's inauguration, and set him apart in the temple before he became the governor in a very similar way perhaps to what David O. McKay and J. Reuben Clark did with Benson before he went to Washington. And so this comes out that this Mormon guy, Mormon governor, rescinds the holiday and it divides Latter Day Saints in Arizona. And of course, people are highly critical of Mecum and Utah doesn't support it either. And what happens is, is that there's

John Dehlin [02:25:42] support the holiday, Martin Luther King Jr.

Matt Harris [02:25:44] Holiday, support the MLK holiday either. And this is, it's a huge, huge cast a shadow over his early presidency because they had been talking about the federal holiday in 1979. And then by the early 80s, I think it was 84, President Reagan signs it into law. And then by 1985, it's talked about in the Utah legislature for the first time. And of course the Utah lawmakers like, oh no, he's a commie. We're not going to dignify this. Move on to the next topic. And by 1986 it comes up again. Anyway, so this is all going on in Arizona and Utah and Mormons are getting bad publicity because the rest of the country will gradually accept the Martin Luther King federal holiday. But Utah is a holdout. They refuse to do it. And people look at Ezra Taft Benson, Latter Day Saints included, he's the holdup. Look what he said about King back in the 60s. Well, by this point in the 1980s, the PR, the church's PR machine, they know this is a problem. And in fact it was exacerbated by a Mormon Latter Day Saint Bircher named Julian Sanders. He published a letter or a sermon. It was published, a sermon that Benson had written in the 60s condemning Dr. King as a liar, a thief, an adulterer and as an agent of Satan. I mean, it was really dramatic language. And the Arizona newspaper published this. And once again, context is interesting. This is something that President Benson had written when he was an apostle, but now it's being republished when he's the church president. And this is precisely the sort of thing that the church's PR handlers had feared the most, that people would bring up his racial past. And they did. And so in Utah, President Benson, he doesn't say anything. He doesn't say anything about the MLK holiday. But what the PR people do is they say that they issue a public release statement saying that President Benson loves all people of all races and all nationalities. Just a sort of general statement. And furthermore, BYU invites Coretta Scott King to speak at a, at a form assembly in 1986.

John Dehlin [02:28:06] That's the late wife of. That's the wife of Martin Luther King. The late Martin Luther King Jr. Right?

Matt Harris [02:28:10] Yes, that's correct. So Martin had died in April of 68 and now his, his wife is now passed, but she was invited by BYU President Jeff Holland and, and he was the president. Anyway, I don't know if he personally invited her, but nonetheless it was done on his watch. They invited Coretta Scott King to come to campus during the midst of the Utah legislature debating the MLK holiday. And so you've got these conservative Mormon legislatures, lawmakers doing one thing opposing Dr. King at the state level. And then you've got BYU, this church owned institution, bringing the late wife of Dr. King to campus. And the Birchers in Utah county, they blow a gasket. They write President Holland, they write the board of trustees. How could you bring a communist to campus to further her cause? Why give her this, this platform? And they're upset. And I wish I had the board of trustees minutes for that. I don't. But I do have some of the letters they write to President Benson, his Birch Mormons complaining. And I do have, I do know what the church officials are saying about it. Well, I know what the BYU people are saying about it. And so their university and some of the students seem to welcome this. And even one of the associate academic vice presidents tells the faculty, this is something we would like you to attend. I mean, they're really promoting it. And they're writing letters to the Daily Universe, the BYU student newspaper in which they're talking about Dr. King. In the meanwhile, Birch Mormons are shuddering and pushing back. And I think I'll share this with you, jump ahead just for a quick moment. But so the, the Utah pushes back against the MLK holiday. They just refuse to do it. They've been thoroughly indoctrinated by Cleon Skiles and Ezra Tap Benson's writings. And they hold these, these meetings called Freeman Institute Seminars. And the Freeman Institute was this ultra right wing organization that Cleon skousen created in 1971. And the Freeman, of course, is a play on the group the Freeman from the Book of Mormon. And it's essentially a surrogate or replacement, if you will, for the Birch Society. And by the early 70s, the Birch Society had become thoroughly controversial. And even Skousen recognized that he couldn't go around claiming any kind of Birch affinity with the controversy that had occurred in the 1960s. So he starts his own right wing group called the Freeman Institute. They have leadership, they have a journal. He has Benson speak at one of their inaugural meetings. In other meetings, the headquarters initially were in Provo, just right off campus. And they're everything that you think they are. Their journal reads like a libertarian screed. Anti Social Security, anti Medicaid, Medicare, anti taxes, anti un. I mean, all of the things the Burt Society had touted clean. Skousen is now touting. And also too like the Birch Society, Skousen gets rebuked by President Kimball when he tries to use LDS meeting houses for Freeman recruitment sessions. And even in 1979, President Kimball sent out a letter with his name and his two counselors on it. They sent a Letter out to LDS bishops and stake presidents in the Intermountain west and basically saying, do not allow the use of LDS chapels for Freeman Institute meetings. And my father was a bishop at the time in Arizona. We moved to Maine later, but my father was a bishop at the time in Arizona. And he received one of these letters and he read it over the pulpit that they're not supposed to use. Freeman Institute. Allow the Freeman group to come in and to use the chapel. So anyway, the Freeman Institute, they have seminars in which they train. They're like training sessions is what they call them. And they would advertise it in the most grandiose way. You know, come to our Freeman session next week. We will teach you where the Communists will strike next. I mean. And so Cleon Skousen and some of his associates would lead these seminars. Benson would speak at them when his time permitted. Keep in mind that he was a senior member of the 12 at this point. And anyway, from these seminars, a lot of these Utah politicians in Arizona, Utah and Idaho would attend them. And many of the Utah lawmakers in the 1980s were graduates of the seminar. They had attended and had been and had been indoctrinated by Skousen and his associates. And so they were taught that Dr. King, of course, was a Communist. And so why would you recognize a Communist? And they didn't. And so in the 1990s, it became incredibly embarrassing for the church to have to defend why the state of Utah is not supportive of the Martin Luther King holiday. And at one point, the lawmakers, in 1986, they had passed legislation. They called it Human Rights Day, which is incredibly embarrassing for the black community and for the progressive white community in Utah because they didn't even deign to mention Dr. King's name. And the articulate and eloquent and just a man I admire immensely, the Reverend France Davis, the esteemed Baptist professor or Baptist minister in Salt Lake, who just retired. But he came to Salt Lake in the early 70s and presided over the Baptist Calvary Church for all these years, up until, I think, last year or the year before, anyway. Just an incredible human being. And Reverend Davis said in 1986, he said, I know why they're calling it Human Rights Day because they're racist. They don't want to mention Dr. King. And they would never say that on the legislative record because they didn't want it to be to go into the record. But they would say it in private to one of the black lawmakers who was pushing the MLK holiday, and they would say it to themselves and to others why they weren't doing it. It's because they thought King was a communist. Anyway, so this gets back to this happens during President Benson's presidency, and it transcends his presidency into Gordon Hinckley's presidency. And by 1998, Gordon Hinckley does something that no other LDS Church president has ever done. So Hinckley's the president now, and he accepts an invitation to speak at the NAACP convention in Salt Lake, the National association for the Advancement of Colored People, the same organization that Benson and Skousen had been besmirching for years as a communist organization. And President Hinckley, who's trying to move this church from the center right or to the far right to the center right, recognizes that the church has to make. Make it right with the black community after years of disparaging them. And so he agrees to speak at their meeting. And as he's speaking at their regional NAACP convention meeting, he's talking about parenting through love and being a good father to your parents. And he does talk about, we need more love and unity in the world. It's really a nice speech. And as he's given this speech, Darius Gray, who's been a faithful Latter Day Saint for a number of years, African American man, he's sitting next to a general authority, and he turns to the general authority, and he whispers in the authority's ear. He said, as President Hinckley is speaking, he said, why do we not support the King holiday? This is embarrassing. Why? And the general authority said, that's a good point. Let's look into this. So the general authority talked to President Hinckley later and said, look, this is causing us, the church, undue embarrassment. We don't need this. Can we have the church's lobbyists work with the lawmakers on the Hill to support legislation? And so President Hinckley deserves some of the credit, not all, but some of the credit for having the church get behind it. And by having the KSL radio station and some of the other news affiliates publish positive things about the King holiday. And they didn't want to, you know, say something in General Conference or the Ensign that's just too controversial. They don't want to offend some people, I suppose, who oppose the holiday, but they start to do it in subtle ways by sending the message out through their news affiliates to that it's okay to support Dr. King. He was a man of vision and harmony and racial justice. And just after that happened in 2000, Utah became the 50th state in the union to adopt the Martin Luther King holiday. And one cannot imagine that happening under President Benson's watch.

John Dehlin [02:37:17] And I underlined that part on. I believe it's on page 111 where you mentioned that it was, that it was last. I wanted to fact check that and make sure because that seemed just so astounding to me. So I googled what was the last state to ratify MLK Day. And it mentions New Hampshire, it mentions Virginia. The best I could find is an article that put Utah in the last five. So I, I guess Google didn't confirm Utah as the last state. Did you have to look into that or.

Matt Harris [02:37:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:37:53] So what is Google wrong in this case?

Matt Harris [02:37:56] Well, it's, it's nuanced. So New Hampshire. So this is where it gets. The details are a little interesting on this, that in New Hampshire and South Carolina and a few other states, they had versions of the King holiday already, just different names. And then by 2000, they had changed the name to the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday, but they were honoring him earlier in some other different kind of version. And that's in New Hampshire's case, South Carolina's case, if I recall, they had had. They allowed. It was a day off or they honored it, but they didn't give people a day off, if that matters, if that means, as I recall. And so by 2000, they decided to give them the day off. Utah had a similar version of that with Human Rights Day. But Human Rights Day, of course, wasn't just, it wasn't Dr. King, it was just all human rights. They just didn't want to honor Dr. King exclusively. And one of the reasons why is some of these lawmakers said that, you know, he's not better than we've got President's Day. We don't even have George Washington Day or Abraham Lincoln Day. Why would we just give him his own holiday? There was a lot of that going on, too. And so by 2000, Utah was, it was the last state to make it exclusively Martin Luther King Day, whereas other states had recognized Dr. King but didn't give people time off, didn't give them benefits. And by 2000, I think that Utah, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and there was one other state that had adopted the whole kit and caboodle, meaning that they gave them paid time off from work. They did. If you were a government employee, you didn't have to go into school that day or work that day. And so that's why it's a little nuanced with the 50th state.

John Dehlin [02:39:44] And do we know the first state in what year the first state was that ratified? I'm just. That's probably putting you on the spot.

Matt Harris [02:39:53] No, I can tell you just quickly though that 1969, it was first proposed just after. A year after Dr. King died. Okay, 69. And then by 1979, there was a push in Washington to do something about it. So this is Jimmy Carter's administration and Utah's Congressman, Gun McKay was in the Congress at the time, and I've gone through his papers, so I'd read stuff like this. So Gun McKay, they were talking about honoring MLK in 1979, doing a federal holiday, and McKay floated a trial balloon to some of his constituents. And some of his constituents, at least the ones who wrote him back, said, absolutely not. Why would we want to honor a Commie? And so Gun McKay doesn't get the support that he needs from his constituents. So nothing happens. And then by 1984, as I mentioned, President Reagan will eventually cited into law, which is sort of ironic because he wasn't a warm endorser of civil rights and he certainly wasn't into racial equality during his presidency. In fact, Reagan did much to harm voting rights for African Americans. But anyway, he did cite it into law, and it was controversial, not just in Utah, but American, at least among Utah politicians. Orrin Hatch rejected it at first, but oddly enough, the conservative or Hatch decided to go come around and support it. So I don't know the first state that supported it, but I can tell you that Utahns didn't support it initially for obvious reasons. And also the John Birch Society launched a massive campaign against it, as did Jesse Helms and some other conservative senators from the South.

Liberal and Progressive Latter-day Saints Push Back

John Dehlin [02:41:38] Yeah, and I, I just, you know, I think what this touches on is a theme that a lot of liberal and progressive Mormons are frustrated about. We, we want to think that our prophet seers and revelators are, number one, very sensitive to really important issues like human rights, civil rights, and that as prophet seers and revelators, we would be leading charges to, you know, to end slavery. We would be leading charges to give women the vote. We would be leading the ERA movement. We would be leading, you know, we would be the first state to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, and I think there's a lot of liberal and progressive Mormons that are frustrated that in, in the LGBT rights movement as well, leading the efforts to support same sex love or whatever. And I think in liberal and progressive Mormonism, there's a frustration that it's almost textbook reliable that the Mormon Church and or Utah will be two to three decades behind any major civil rights initiative. And I think I'm just echoing what a lot of my friends or probably listeners feel, which is this frustration. Why are we so behind? Why aren't we leading? You know.

Matt Harris [02:42:54] Well, you know, it's interesting and I know you know this, John, but the church is certainly it follows a similar pattern in terms of worship services in most places in terms of the way sacrament meetings are run. But if you go to say Heber, Arizona, where my father grew up, which is a. They loved Benson and Skousen even to this day, at least Latter Day Saints of an older generation and you go to one of their worship services and it wouldn't be uncommon to hear stuff from the Freeman Institute or a Skousen, someone quoting from Cleon Skousen over the pulpit in sacrament meeting or Ezra Taft Benson. And if you contrast that view and go to say, Brooklyn, New York, or maybe where I went, grew up in Maine, I mean, you wouldn't get any Skousen. And of course we got Benson because he was the church president when I was growing up and coming of age in the 1980s and he was also the church president who signed my mission papers. So we got plenty of Benson just because he was the church president.

John Dehlin [02:43:58] Mine too.

Matt Harris [02:43:59] Yeah. So we didn't get the, but we didn't get the Scousen and, and the other right wing stuff that you would get in these small little rural communities in say Heber, Arizona and also where I places where I served in my, my mission in Idaho. It's almost like it's a cult following of these people. And if you tell them that, and I've shared this with one of my relatives who, who's from that area and I just said, you know, Skousen and Benson were enormously controversial and my relative, I mean, just really, it's not that he pushed back and didn't believe me. He just had never heard that before. He grew up in an echo chamber in his ward in Arizona and everybody was quoting Skousen and Benson like it was mainstream. And maybe good people can disagree about how mainstream Skousen and Benson were. I suppose it depends on where he lived. Right. But clearly, as my book shows that in the upper echelons of the church he was, Benson and Skousen were trying to move the church too far to the right and it just wasn't good for the church message, the church image and the ability for the church to expand internationally. And so When I talk to Latter Day Saints like this, it's like it shows shocking to them when they realize that this is not really just accepted by everybody. Skousen and Benson. And then today if you talk to a progressive Latter Day Saint and you mentioned Skousen or even Benson, I mean, it's a sense of embarrassment to think that, you know, gosh, I had a senior church leader who thought that Dr. King was a communist and that the entire movement was fomented by communists. That's just nuts. And I always have to push back too on the other side, which is all church leaders believe that that is just simply not the case. I haven't seen any evidence that other church leaders believe that King was a communist. And so we try to lump them all into the big broad brush. And that's just not true according to the evidence. So the church does have differences. And we, depending on our values, whether we're liberal, progressive, conservative, I think we have to recognize these kinds of things. And I think that the larger point for this and one of the things that I wanted to share at the end of this book is how Benson had become radicalized his views and how after he died, his followers had used his sermons to form secret societies. They were Benson followers and some of them had joined militia groups because they thought that Benson's writings would permit it. Some of them were obsessively fixated on the end times because of some sermons he had given back in the 70s about food storage. Some of them had visions that God had told them in the vision that the government was corrupt. This is during President Obama's presidency and that the United nations was evil. Some of them had used Benson to justify taking over federal property in Oregon three years ago. These are the Bundy brothers. And so you get all of these people who are invoking Benson's name to advance their cause. And I'm going to turn just quickly and share with your readers a best selling book that's really fascinating called Educated.

John Dehlin [02:47:25] And we've, we've interviewed Tara Westover twice on Mormon stories.

Matt Harris [02:47:28] Okay, so you're, some of your listeners might be familiar with her, but tell you a personal story that I had with her is that I read the book and I, I loved it. And, and since I'm into this sort of research, I knew the buzzwords and I was reading the book and I thought, okay, rural Idaho, she's learning about this worldwide conspiracy of gentlemen Jews. She's Dr. King's a commie. I mean, just goes on and on, right? This is Benson and Skousen, but yet you don't see any Benson and Skousen because her publisher told her wisely, I think, to avoid politicizing your book if you want Latter Day Saints to read it. And I know lots of Latter Day Saints who have read this book and enjoyed it, and they didn't catch the religious overtones. But her family is just immersed in Birch stuff and Benson and Skousen. And so I wrote her an email and I said, I read your book and I really enjoyed it. And what is your father? What. What is he reading? And I didn't want to bait her or anything, you know, and she said, oh, he's. She's, he's reading Birch stuff. He's a member of the Birch Society. He loves Benson, he loves Skousen. The Making of America is his favorite history book, which is a Skousen book. And so she, you see that influence all over the place in the. She tells a great story. Tara Westover, when she went to BYU and she was studying history and they were talking about the Holocaust, and she had never heard of the Holocaust before. And her professor was just shocked. And didn't you know, this is no time to joke. This is serious. And Westover's response is, I'm not joking. I don't know what you're talking about. So in this radical homeschooling program that she had adopted from Cleon Skouse and her parents, she had never learned about the Holocaust. And she also recognized something else that she learned in her world history class. The professor was talking about this conspiracy tract about where Jews would overtake the world and they would control the nations, the world's banks. And she thought, oh, my goodness, this is something my dad had frequently talked about growing up. And of course, this is the Protocol, the Elders of Zion pamphlet that J. Reuben Clark and Ezra Tap Benson had exchanged in the 1950s. And her father, of course, was immersed in this sort of ideology. So this stuff is going on all over the place in right wing Mormon circles. The church is. A lot of Latter Day Saints are promoting Benson stuff on their websites. I'm frequently told, oh, it's. Nobody knows about Benson. That's just an older generation. And I'm thinking, boy, have you been online there? There's a younger generation of millennials who clearly know his writings and they're making websites all over the place and they're publishing Skousen and Benson. And the person that really probably promotes Benson the most, oddly enough, is a Mormon convert named Glenn Beck. And Beck promotes Benson's Sermons on his show. When he had a show on cnn, I guess it was cnn, right? So he's, he's talking about Ezra Tab

John Dehlin [02:50:31] Benson was Fox News, wasn't he?

Matt Harris [02:50:35] Well, Glenn Beck, was it? CNN first, then Fox News?

John Dehlin [02:50:39] Maybe, maybe, yeah.

Matt Harris [02:50:41] Boy, my memory's a little shady on that anyway, but so he's on TV though, and he has a large following and he's promoting, he plays clips of Benson's sermons from the 60s and he's telling Americans, wake up. And then of course, when Barack Obama was elected president, we've got to save the Constitution. This is all the stuff that Beck is promoting that the Bundys are watching and that a lot of other right wing folks are watching. And the church, meanwhile, is trying to get away from this stuff. Gordon Hinckley and his successors in the church presidency, they find this right wing extremism both challenging and disturbing. And they don't know what to do. And except when something really radical happens, like when the Bundys took over the federal property, the media would contact the church and say they're quoting Mormon scripture, they're quoting Benson, one of your leaders. Is this condoned by the church? Is there anything in the scriptural canon that would justify an armed takeover of government property? And the church, of course, was quick to condemn this through a PR release. And there's nothing that in Mormon scripture that supports any of this stuff, despite what they say. But yet the Bundys, like other right wing extremists, they're quoting Benson's sermons all over the place. And the only line that the church can give at the time is Malcolm Jepsen gives this line, he said to the extremists, he's talking to some survivalist Mormon extremists. He says, you keep quoting Benson, but Benson gave those words years ago during a much different time and during a much different condition. And that's the best that he could give to push, keep him at arm's length without telling them like, you know, look, he was controversial. He still is controversial. The church wants to move in a different direction. Forget about him, quote the current church president, not the guy who just died. And anyway, so there's all kinds of, I talk about in the book, these extremist groups that from not just the Bundys and Tara Westover, Julia Rowe, a prepper, pretty, predicts the end times. She's quoting Benson, puts them all over her web page. But also the guy that kidnapped Elizabeth Smart was a Benson devotee.

John Dehlin [02:52:54] Brian David Mitchell.

Matt Harris [02:52:55] Brian David Mitchell, the, the fringe polygamy sect in Manti, Utah was, was formed in response to President Benson and the New World Order. So there's a lot of this stuff going on. And even to this day, the church still struggles to know what to do with these right wing extremists.

John Dehlin [02:53:18] Yeah. Yep. And so Edge Benson's legacy really remains with us. And I love, I love how your book ends by tying Ezra Tap Benson's legacy and influence to, you know, Bundys, Julie Rowe, preppers, Glenn Beck. And it's a really significant thing. I remember when I was at byu, there was a. There was a fellow freshman in my dorms in Chipman Hall. I was in Chipman hall, they were in Budge hall. It was the honors dorms. And she told me that they were like wealthy Mormons from California. She and her dad were moving to like Cedar City or, you know, Duck Creek somewhere, starting a community based on constitutionalist principles inspired by Israel Benson. Like this stuff really affected people's lives and actually continues to affect people's lives. I loved how your book tied all that in.

Matt Harris [02:54:21] Yeah. Let me share just a quick story, John, if I may, about that's not in the book, but I think it's appropriate. I used to teach. I teach at Colorado State University now. I'm a professor of history. And before I came to Colorado, my family and I taught for four years at Dixie State University in Southern Utah. And so I was on the faculty there. And somebody asked me, they knew I was a Latter Day Saint. And one of my colleagues, who I don't think was lds, said, we've got some controversy in the community. We want you to moderate a debate. And of course I said, moderate what? Who's debating? And this is in 2001, when people in Laverkin, Utah, actually I mentioned this in the book, but people in La Verkin, Utah decided that they were going to declare Laverkin, Utah a UN free zone. That is that if somehow some catastrophe occurred in southern Utah that the United nations wasn't welcome. I mean, it's just as one of those throwaway statements, you know, but hey, whatever. The mayor decided to make it so they weren't going to allow the UN to come to Liverkin, Utah. And I never heard of Laverkin. You know, I thought it was, you know, somebody's name. Oh, interesting. Who they name it after. And so it was controversial. It made the New York Times, you know, just embarrassing, right? You know, little tiny town in Utah, they hate the United Nations. They think they're full of Communists. This is 2001 and they wrote these people in Utah had been trying for years to get Utah to make a similar statement, the state of Utah to make some just kind of general statement about that Utah doesn't support the UN This. And they would send the people from Laverkin would send Benson's anti UN writings to bolster their cause. Anyway, all this conspiracy conspiratorial stuff with the UN So they asked me to moderate this debate. And it was. So I invited the mayor of Laverkin, the guy that sponsored the resolution to oppose the UN And I also, I invited a person who worked for the un. He was living in Salt Lake at the time. Somebody had passed his name on to me. He was a LDS bishop. And so I thought h somebody who works for the un he's on the inside, he's an LDS bishop. Let's have these two guys debate about the un, about its, what it does, who's part of it? Are these people communists? And anyway, I set the ground rules of the debate in a very similar way than what we saw last night and you know, let these speak for two minutes or three minutes and you can respond and you know, all of that stuff, typical debate. And the Leverkin crowd just wouldn't let the bishop talk. They just boo. And I thought to myself, what did I get myself into? And anyway, so I told them very emphatically that look, this is a debate, we're at a university campus and you need to show respect. And so I was firm with them and they finally shut up. But afterwards the debate ended and about two days later in the mail I received a thicket, a big thick envelope of some of, of general conference sermons from Ezra Taft Benson and J. Reuben Clark talking about the evils of the un. Somebody had tracked down my address who had obviously attended the debate. And my wife was just horrified, thinking that somebody would send it. This political stuff is right wing stuff in the mail. So that was my, my first, that was my initial foray into the anti UN crowd. And this same crowd, by the way, would influence people at byu. Recall the BYU physics professor Stephen Jones, who in I think 2006 was let go of BYU or they forced him into early retirement. This is the professor who talked about the UN or the World Trade center coming down. The government had planted bombs to bring it down. And so, you know, it wasn't terrorists who did this, it was the US government who blew up these, this World Trade Center. And so another conspiracy theory and Stephen E. Jones had been talking about gaddy at robbers in the government for A long time. And he went on this, the lecture circuit with a guy named. I got his book. His name is Jack Monet. He worked for the church education system for a short period. And he wrote a book called Awakening to Our Awful Situation where he talks about how Nephite prophets had predicted our day that the government would be full of gaddy and robbers and secret combinations. And so Jack Monet and Stephen Jones, the physicist who predicted that the government had blown up the buildings in New York, they were going around for a while in the church talking about all of these different conspiracies. And so Benson's influence is just long and extensive.

John Dehlin [02:59:30] Yeah. So one of the. There. There are two. There are at least two more themes that I want to make sure we cover before we end, along with any other themes you want to cover, Matt. And I'm just always in awe of your. Your recall and your storytelling abilities. This is so great. And I'll just mention the Malcolm Jepsen thing. People don't know this, but the most downloaded and viewed Mormon stories episode of all time is Christine Jepsen Clark, who is the daughter of Malcolm Jepsen. He was Boyd K. Packer's best friend. He was a general authority. He was the doctor to Boyd K. Packer. And I'm hearing from you, the doctor also Desertab Benson. I think it's interesting to note that it seems like once he was called as a general authority, he became a hatchet man for the church to both excommunicate scholars and Liberals. Meaning the September 6th and Armand Ma. Sorry, the September 6th and a lot of the Sunstone dialogue, kind of liberal Mormon historians, the feminists, et cetera, Michael Quinn. And he was also excommunicating people like our Armand Moss and these Manti polygamists and these John Birchers. And I guess it made me think of, number one, everyone should go listen to Christine Jepsen Clark's Mormon Stories interview. It's top five of all time. It's amazing, but it gave me a little bit of sympathy for the Brethren because I often think about them as only excommunicating and attacking apostate liberals. People who lose their faith in the church, people who talk about the Church's truthful history in ways that make the Brethren uncomfortable. But the truth is they're always having excommunicate people on both sides. They excommunicate the John de Lynn's and Kate Kelly's and Jeremy Runnels is. And the Bill Reals, but also the, you know, Denver Snuffers and the Armand Mosses and the ones who get too conservative.

Matt Harris [03:01:25] So wasn't excommunicated. Just a quick correction. Who. Who Moss. Arman Moss, the scholar. Armin Moss was not.

John Dehlin [03:01:33] I meant Avram Gileadi. If I said Avram.

Matt Harris [03:01:36] No, my. My late dear friend Arman Moss was not excommunicated.

John Dehlin [03:01:39] Sorry, I meant. I meant Avram Gileadi. So Gileadi was one of the September six that was too, too fundamentalist, too conservative. And, and then a lot of us have been more liberal, but I guess I'm just saying, just reminded me that they're having to be vigilant on both sides of the ideological and let's just say political spectrum. But, but just that job of, of Malcolm Jepsen being a hatchet man for, for the leaders is an interesting role. I want to just highlight that for a second. But two. Two other things I want to make sure we talk about along with anything else you want to close with. One is just my, my description of, of a uber problem. And I texted you sort of some of these themes before we started. If I had to summarize. One of the main problems that I think Ezra Tab Benson's influence on the church highlights is it's the problem of a combination of a few doctrines or policies. So it starts with this teaching that members of the Quorum of the twelve end of the First Presidency are prophets, seers and revelators because to members. Oh, and that they're special witnesses of Jesus Christ. To members. What that signals is they're talking to God. They. They've got this bat phone direct communication with God and makes them too powerful because it basically communicates to members that when a prophet, seer, revelator speaks, that they're. That they're speaking God's words or Jesus's. They're communicating Jesus's desires. So that's problem number one. But then you add to that the fact that they have lifetime tenure, these guys, they can get called in their 30s and 40s, back in the 40s and 50s, you know, and that they'll be serving, you know, into their 90s, long beyond the point where they can absorb modern sensibilities. And so we're basically getting cold warriors, almost Pre World War II kind of sensibilities leading a modern church. And that's a problem if you believe that we should keep up with the times or maybe even be ahead of the times. It's hard when we have what I call a nonagenarian gerontocracy, right. That these super old Dudes are in their 90s leading a church claiming to be mouthpieces for God and Jesus, when in reality they're just bringing their radical cold war anti communist racist teachings into modern sensibilities. And so it's that lifetime tenure, the seniority system, the egregiously excessive title of prophets here, revelator mouthpieces for God. And then just this idea that the quorum has to be unanimous and that they're always worrying about undermining their own authority by criticizing current or past leaders. I would imagine that they would have wanted to maybe support the civil rights movement earlier. But as long as a prophet, seer and revelator is like denouncing it, how long do they have to wait before they can support the civil rights movement? Because as soon as they support the civil rights movement, they're contradicting one of their fellow prophets, seers and revelators. And so these are kind of the policies or the teachings or the doctrines I think that become so problematic and that in the past have, number one, caused the church so many problems, but number two, misled the membership for so long. Because if just one, if one of their members of the quorum becomes too outspoken, they can speak up publicly in a way that, that corners the church and traps the church into supporting harmful policies for a long, long time just out of the fear of the brethren not wanting to contradict each other in public. Now I just threw a lot at you. That's my summary of like some of the main problems that your book helped distill for me. Tell me if you agree or if you feel like I got any of that synthesis right or where you disagree or where you would add or detract from that analysis.

Matt Harris [03:06:15] Well, the. So that obviously this has been a criticism for a lot of people in the church who, you know, Russell Nelson was born in memory here, what, 1923 or something, and he's in his 90s today. And it's just hard for some Latter Day Saints to even connect with somebody that old. And as you pointed out, the church is a gerontocracy and it's just so, so, so slow to change for a number of reasons. But as late as 1968, Hugh Brown recognized that this is a problem. And Hugh Brown saw that Joseph Fielding Smith was going to be the church president. So you're going to replace one 90 plus year old president in David O. McKay with another 90 plus year old president in Joseph Fielding Smith. And Hugh Brown thought this is, this is a disaster. At that point, Joseph Hilling Smith was sleeping through half of his core meetings, and so he was going to be the next church president. It was so controversial to have Smith be the president. They didn't even know if he would be able to give his first Sermon at the April 1970 General Conference, if he can get through it without something happening. And when he did do it, the brother in private. Oh, breathed a sigh of relief. Well, anyway, Brown didn't like this, and Brown had teamed up with The President, President McKay's sons, David Lawrence and Louella McKay, and they went to legal counsel. Let's bypass this guy. There's a lot going on around David. O'. Kay. And let's appoint Harold B. Lee. Let's just go right to Lee. We know he's going to be the church president. Might as well be him now. Anyway, they push back because they're so wedded to this idea of convention. And so they lose. But it causes a lot of bitter feelings. That's another reason why Brown was kicked out of the First Presidency is because he tried to do an end around Joseph Hilly Smith. A small little detail. And anyway, but this is the point I'm driving at, is that Brown had produced a document that would retire all general authorities at the age of 70. And if they supported that document, he would have retired himself. And in all general authorities, that means the first quorum. That means the first quarter of the 70, that means the apostles. That means everybody over the age of 70. So it wasn't until, I think 1979 where they. Somebody will correct me if I'm misremembering, but it wasn't until 1979 where President Kimball. So 10 years later, roughly, President Kimball said, oh, President Brown made a good point. Let's. Let's make emeritus at age 70. And they. They do it for the first quorum and second quorums of the 70, but not for the apostles. And that was the whole point of doing it, is to get these octogenarians, himself included, out of church leadership, to get more vigorous and robust leadership in mind. And so it presents a problem for the church when you have. When you're wedded to this convention, that you've got to have the most senior apostle. It's only the most senior apostle who can become the church president. Because what that means is, is that your chances of becoming the church president means that you have to outlive other people. And so people could look at, you know, when Stephen Bednar was called, oh, he's young. He's definitely going to be the president one day. And which I think is crazy to do it this way, because you want to be able to have a leader that would inspire the saints the most, whether through their youth, their vigor, their ideas, maybe even their charisma, their connection to people. And it shouldn't be just some old 90 year old person who may or may not be an effective leader. But. And the other thing that that's problematic about this is what happens when these old men become the church president and they're already in frail health. And Harold B. Lee's case, he was in his early 70s and nobody could have predicted that he would have passed away after a short illness after, you know, just a year and a half into office. And they didn't think that Spencer Kimball would last long either. The guy had open heart surgery and he had cancer. But yet he lived until 1985. But the last few years of his church presidency, he was in tremendous pain and his counselors were running the church. And then they became incapacitated and then Hinckley was running the church. And then fast forward, you get the same thing happening with Benson, and then you get it with Monson. But the differences between Monson and Benson, in my opinion, is that the church had Hinckley, as you pointed out, John had Hinckley, and Monson had tried to give the impression that Benson was still running the church, when the truth is he wasn't. He was non compos mentis, he couldn't even talk. But yet he's running the church, which is not a good thing to do. And I think the brethren learned from that mistake because they took heavy criticism from that. When Steve Benson, the president's grandson, went public with it, he gave an interview to one of the Arizona newspapers and he met with Neil Massel and Dallin Oaks and asked him about it. And anyway, so he went public with it and with Thomas S. Monson's presidency. Towards the end, when he was sick, I thought, I read into it that the church was trying to be a little bit more transparent. He went to the hospital, he was sick. And recently Elder Holland went into the hospital for an undisclosed illness. And although he's not the church president, the church was pretty quick about saying, you know, he's got an undisclosed illness. It's not Covid, but he's got an undisclosed illness. So I think they're trying to be a little bit more transparent about their health. But the truth is that the quorum of the 12 is not unlike a board of directors in a business where they have to really work together. And Wheedle and cajole each other, twist each other's arms and sometimes you just get outvoted. You just, you're outvoted. There are a few times where the late Boyd Packer, he wouldn't compromise. He wasn't going to get his way. And so what he would do is he would withdraw from the Quorum vote so that they could say that it was unanimous. And it's like the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776 when the Second Continental Congress is debating it. And we like to think, oh, the Continental Congress, it was all unanimous. Woo. Well, the truth is there are a handful of guys who, who refrain from voting in July of 1776 because they didn't support independence. So they recused themselves from voting so that people could say it's unanimous. And that's the same thing in the quorum of the 12. They have vigorous policy debates and doctrinal debates, and when some of them don't get their way, they just refrain from voting. That way they can say, according to the Doctrine Covenants, we've received a consensus.

John Dehlin [03:13:09] Right. Okay. Well, I think that at least for me, the one thing that I really want to make sure we cover before we end. And again, let me just tell everyone that the book is Ezra Tab Benson and the Making of the Mormon Rite by Dr. Matthew Harris. This is published by University of Utah Press. And what I'm going to now share just really quickly for those who are streaming with us live, I'll share a link because I want everyone to buy this book. I think if we want great Mormon history, if we want great Mormon scholarship, we have to financially support it because that's the way that we pay our authors and our publishers to do more great history. And this is the only way we find out what's really going on behind the scenes. Otherwise we just assume it's all the hand of God moving our, our leaders in divine ways. But this is how we see behind the curtain and see what, what the level levers are that are, that are moving the machine behind the curtain. So, so I just posted the link. Please go buy this book right now. Consider it if you're a progressive or a post Mormon, consider it secular tithing. Consider it post Mormon tithing, ex Mormon tithing support scholars. And if you're a believing Mormon, just consider it improving your church by transparency and awareness. So regardless of where you are on the spectrum, support this book. Support Matt Harris. So one of the things, Matt, that I want to end with is, and this is, this is not a Political statement. This is just an observer of Mormonism statement. If I think about my upbringing in the Mormon Church, I think about a real, let's just say, values that are very conservative. Values of honesty, values of kindness, values of charity, values of sexual purity. Right. These are the types of values that I associate with Mormonism. So I grew up, never tried alcohol, never tried drugs, never had sex with a girl before marriage, was taught to be kind, never to lie, et cetera, regardless of your politics around Donald Trump at all. And this is not an anti Trump statement. I guess I have been just curious to see how supportive Morgan Mormons and Utahns are of Donald Trump. Just because it seems to be like if I, if there's ever been a president that represents what I have perceived to be the Mormon values I was raised with. If there's ever been a president who most represents the opposite of those values in terms of the way he speaks his language and the way he's, he's known to have treated women, his past, his divorces, his sexual behavior. This isn't an anti Trump statement. It's just to say I can't think of a less Mormon president than, than how I perceive Donald Trump to be. I've never, it just, it's been mind blowing to me that, to see that Utah is among the most supportive states of Donald Trump. And this goes to sort of a, a question that I think you have a lot to say about, which is how did Utah get so conservative, so Republican? And we've talked about this all throughout this conversation and obviously Ezra Tab Benson plays a role and I guess a follow up question to that is how much of the blame or the responsibility can we put on Ezra tap Benson for the fact that Utah is among the two most Republican voting states in the union? I understand it behind Wyoming, Utah is the, is the number two most Republican voting state in the union. How much responsibility do we sign to Ezra to have Benson for or not for this situation we're in? And I hope and feel free to clarify or contextualize everything I just asked, but I'm kind of stunned and I want to know how much Benson is to blame or not for where we are.

How Utah Became So Politically Conservative

Matt Harris [03:17:37] Yeah, these are all great questions and I think they're, they're worth asking. So before I speak directly to your two questions, John, let me just give a, if I may, just a very brief overview of political voting patterns in Utah. We'll start with the Great Depression, the New Deal and Utahns will support the Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal four times during the 1930s and 40s, during the New Deal, in the Great Depression, in World War II. When I say four times, recall that there were not term limits limiting presidents to two terms during those years. They did happened after Roosevelt. But anyway, so Franklin Roosevelt was present four times. And Americans had voted him into office at something like a ratio of 70% of the vote in Utah to 60% nationally. So Utahns loved him. They loved the New Deal. They were receiving something like $5 and change per capita of government assistance during the Great Depression. The national average is like a buck 85. And clearly this is a problem because this is when the church's welfare systems created that the church leaders, Heber J. Grant and J. Reuben Clark and then David O. McKay in the first presidency, they didn't want the government controlling that much of the lives of Latter Day Saints. And so they created an alternative welfare system where you had to work for what you received as opposed to getting a free dole from the government anyway. So that was four years in the first presidency. They were very. They were emphatic, do not support Franklin Roosevelt. And they did. They were independent. They voted for him. They voted for Harry Truman in 1948. And then latter Day Saints by slim margin supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, and then they supported him again in 1956. Certainly Benson had something to do with this in the Cabinet. And then in 19. I shouldn't say just Benson, but most Mormons were moderate in the 1950s, just like President Eisenhower was, was by 1960, by a slim margin, Latter Day Saints in Utah support Richard Nixon by a slim margin over John F. Kennedy. And then by 1964, Latter Day Saints in Utah support Lyndon Johnson by 10 percentage points over the extremely conservative Ezra Tab Benson backed candidate Barry Goldwater. And so, and then that's amazing to me because, Larry, Lyndon Johnson is extremely liberal. Liberal and Medicaid, Medicare, all of this stuff, civil rights, voting rights. This comes from Lyndon Johnson. And Latter Day Saints support him in 1964 by a pretty healthy margin. By 1968 and again in 72, they support Nixon. And by the mid-1970s, Latter Day Saints have now supported Republican presidents. And it's been that way ever since. And with Reagan, of course, you see the numbers go up since Utah's loved Reagan. And so the question is, I'm frequently asked, why did. Why is there a voting block today, a Republican voting block? Utah's been said to be the reddest state in the country. And I think there's a couple of reasons that there are things going on in the 60s that concern the church and concern the church body. And of course, the civil rights movement, you get in the early 70s, the equal rights Amendment, you get Roe v. Wade and abortion. And so Latter Day Saints are moving away from the Democratic Party because that's the party that would typically be a little bit more accepting of those things. And they're moving to the GOP because their church leaders are preaching against abortion. They're preaching against high taxes, like Benson. They're preaching against, in some instances, civil rights a little earlier. And so Latter Day Saints are listening to their leaders and they're morphing to the right. And when you read political scientists who talk about Utah electoral patterns, they frequently talk about these social issues. And I think they're dead right. There's no question that there are larger societal trends going on that pull Latter Day Saints away from the Democratic Party. But the problem is that some of these political scientists omit Ezra Taft Benson's rhetoric denouncing the Democratic Party. I mean, here's a senior apostle who has been saying for decades now that the Democratic Party is the forerunner to socialism or the forerunner to communism and that liberal policies are putting us on the royal road to communism. They're hearing this everywhere, in general conference addresses, at byu, devotional addresses. They're hearing it at byu. Get off the welfare state, if you're on food stamps, drop out. I mean, when Latter Day Saints are hearing this stuff, of course they're associating this with one party. And so we're remiss to discount Benson's significant influence in politics in moving Latter Day Saints to the right. And I think it's really, it's a huge problem for the church because one of the things that President Hinckley, when he becomes the church president in 1995, is one of the things that he's worried about is that the LDS Church turns into something like the Moral Majority, this cluster of evangelical Christians who really in large part helped to get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980. But the problem is that these evangelicals, even today, of course, are now tied to right wing politics. And there are lots of moderate to left leaning evangelical ministers who are embarrassed by this. The first thing when you talk about evangelical politics, you think of right wing extremism and they're upset by this. And one of the things, or some of among the things that these moderate to liberal evangelical ministers will tell you is it didn't used to be this way where we, we politicized our politics. If you look at the 19th century, it was Protestant evangelicals who were at the forefront of all of these progressive changes, including abolitionism and women's rights. And now what do we get? We get the church, the evangelicals who are closely aligned with the Republican Party and trying to really set the clock back. Gordon B. Hinckley watches this with horror and doesn't like the, the church is sort of moving in this direction. Didn't like that Benson was, was putting out a little trial balloon that the church may endorse a political party or a platform. He thinks, like Kimball, President Hinckley thought this was bad for the church, bad for the growth of the church. And so Hinckley wanted to move the church, as I've been saying throughout our podcast today, from the far right to the, to the center right. And we, we still have this with us today. We have just two days ago, a poll came out in Utah that Utah support Donald J. Trump by 10 percentage points. And I'm frequently asked when I speak about Benson, if Benson were alive today, what would he say about Donald Trump? And this is a really an intriguing question because whether you like Benson's politics or not, I don't think I've ever, ever studied a Mormon leader, maybe even a political leader who was more remarkably consistent in his ideology than Ezra Taft Benson. He was an ideologue from the early years of his life in terms of not supporting the government and being independent and that sort of thing to the day that he died. And Donald Trump is not an ideologue. He doesn't have the core principles and the grounding that someone like Ezra Taft Benson would have, have. And just a few years ago, Donald Trump was supporting, was very outspoken about abortion rights. Right. And now, of course, we're only going to put somebody on the Supreme Court who oppose, who opposes Roe. So there are lots of issues with this. You mentioned women's rights, things of that nature. But just take something more, I shouldn't say more important because it's not more important, but take something like Russian interference in our election. What would Benson say about that? Because he, he had such harsh things to say about Communist Russia. And Benson would be appalled, absolutely appalled that we have interference in our elections. The Senate report that came out two weeks ago, a bipartisan report, Republicans and Democrats both said this. Benson would have been just incredibly alarmed by all of this. And if Benson were alive today, he would certainly be criticizing the welfare state. He'd be criticizing big government in our lives. He would be criticizing, he'd be endorsing, you know, more of states rights, things of that nature. But Benson would be appalled that our democratic elections would be tampered with by a foreign power. He'd also be appalled. Benson respected the democratic process. He, unlike these militia groups and some of the other extremists who claim his name to invoke their, their ideas, some of whom were violent, Benson would absolutely oppose violence. And he did oppose violence. There was no evidence in his writings that he ever talked about, you know, marching somewhere with guns. None of that stuff. In fact, Benson always said, make your voice heard at the ballot box. Vote. And to suggest, as we have today, a president who's trying so hard to limit the right to vote, who's trying, who's proposed two months ago to postpone the elections this fall, that would have been anathema to someone like Ezra Tab Benson, who was completely wedded to the Democratic republic. And he believed that. He studied the Founding Fathers, he quoted them often, particularly Thomas Jefferson. And to suggest that if he were alive today, he would see a demagogue like, like Trump, he would have bolted the Republican Party and gone to some other party. There's. There's no doubt in my mind that he wouldn't have tolerated this stuff because it's an assault in our democracy and therefore an insult in our Constitution. Okay, so get me going on this stuff, John.

John Dehlin [03:28:05] No, no, no. So you don't. You feel it's weird, though, because I'm so torn because I, again, putting politics aside, like, or maybe not like, I do worry a bit about, you know, if I had my biggest concerns right now. It's, it is constitutional. I, I'm concerned about how the electoral process is being sort of questioned. And with all the postal post office shenanigans and the concerns about mail in ballots and basically Trump saying that if he loses, like, forget the politics of it all. I think there are good reasons to be conservative, good reasons to be Democrat. I'm not partisan. I'm actually a registered Republican in Utah because I wanted to vote for Huntsman in the primaries. I'm definitely moderate. I'm more independent than I am affiliated with any party. I think what's been alarming to me is when Trump is sort of refused. Even last night, when Vice President Pence was in the debate, the moderator asked Pence, is Trump going to abdicate the throne? Is he going to step down if he loses the election? Because Trump's made so much noise about how if, if he wins, he's fine, but if he loses, then the election was rigged, which gives the impression that he's not going to step down. And even when Pence was asked this last night, will Trump step down if he loses? Pence, like, talked about his record. His perception of the record wouldn't even answer the question. Like, that's my biggest concern. And I can. For those who love the Constitution, I think what's most foundational, one of the most foundational things about the revolution and about the Constitution is the peaceful transfer of power. Because that's what King's, you know, there's this joke in the Hamilton thing about Washington stepping down. And King George says, I didn't know that's something a leader could do is step down. Right. But it feels like Trump is sort of sending messages that he wants to kind of like violate some of the most sacred principles of the Constitution. And it really is hard. On the one hand, it's hard to see Benson not freaking out about that sort of thing. On the other hand, all the brethren are silent now on Donald Trump. Like, we've got kind of almost the opposite where nobody's saying anything. And you would think whether it's, you know, Donald Trump paying for abortions or assaulting women or even these constitutional concerns, there's a part of me is a Mormon that would want my leaders to speak out against some of these things that really seem troubling, anti constitutional, or that would violate the sensibilities of kind of our more Mormon roots. And so I'm torn because part of me wants the brethren to say, listen, support Republicans if you want, but this president kind of goes beyond the pale and. And we're not hearing that. So are you ever mixed about that? Are you ever wanting sometimes the leaders to speak up?

Matt Harris [03:31:20] Oh, ask my mother. We've had conversations about this, which, yes, the answer is yes. And just told my mother recently, I just said, you know, I know General Conference is coming up. I hope that they address some of these issues, whether it's racial unrest, whether it's the peaceful transition of power. And my mom at one point, you know, well, they don't get into controversial issues or they want to stay political. And I'm thinking to my, I told her very directly, I said, you know, what could be a bigger moral issue of the day than addressing a peaceful transition of power or addressing issues of race as our cities and our communities are just beside themselves because of systematic racism. And I haven't read the talk yet, but I know Dallin Oaks in his General Conference address, I read about this in the newspaper, but he did talk about that Mormons should support a peaceful transition of power and so that's incredible. And they talked about race a lot, which is important. But the problem is with race in the church is that when the brethren talk about race, most people in the church who need this sermon, they don't think they're racist. So if you just think about race as an iceberg, if you will, and the tip of the iceberg is above the water that you can see. The tip of the iceberg might be the Ku Klux Klan or some white supremacist group, or using the N word. Right. And so people could say, you know, I'm not a member of the Klan. I don't use the N word, so I'm not a racist. And then the stuff beneath the water that you. You cannot see, you know, nobody's around. You'll tell off colored racial jokes, or you'll just say, oh, black people on welfare, they're lazy, or the black lives matter. What a hate group. Because there's somehow one or two outspoken people in the group that somehow speak for the rest of the group. Right? Right. And so it's. Or in LDS parlance, don't worry, brother. So, and so, who's black? You can. Don't ask. Worry about this race stuff that was, you know, taught for a while. You can hold the priesthood now. God lifted the curse in 1978. You were once less valiant, but now you're valiant. And you know, that's deeply offensive. Or this idea of racial fluidity, you know, that God had cursed you with a black skin, that somehow, through your moral property and your righteousness, your skin color will be lighter over time. And finally, God will make you white in the Resurrection, because that's, of course, purity. You have to be pure to be in his presence. It's those kinds of racial tropes that still dominate in Mormon circles and elsewhere, too, to be fair, in Christian circles. But it dominates. And so my point is, it's good to talk about race. It's good to denounce race like some of the church leaders did recently in conference. But that's not good enough because most of the people hearing it don't think it applies to them. Why? Because it's that stuff above the. The water. It's, I don't use the N word or I don't belong to the Ku Klux Klan. Right. It's easy to denounce the. What Trump said in 2017 to the Charlottesville marchers, you know, when he said that there are people on both sides that are worthy. I mean, really, what is redeeming about A white supremacist. And again, the debate a couple of weeks ago, he couldn't even denounce it. So it's easy for the church to do that and easy for all of us to do it. What's harder is to point out racist views that people hold that have been long entrenched. And my point is the church needs to address this. And if the church is serious about it, they would hold racial sensitivity training and they would say things like, you know, if, if you. It's no longer fashionable to teach that black people are cursed. Stop it. If you do that, you're a racist. The church condemns us under the most harsh penalties possible. They haven't done this. It's no longer fashionable to teach that somehow you did something that God didn't approve of in a pre earth life and he punished you with a dark skin and therefore deprived you of the priesthood as a man. And also your, your wife, the temple, the rituals of the temple. And so also the church needs black art, the church needs black music. The church needs expressions of not just the African American or other cultures, but cultures that are just, that really extend beyond the intermountain West. And the church needs to inculcate these various voices and various values, not just in art and literature and music and, and so forth, but also in the leadership of the church. It's really, really hard for an all white leadership. You know, Utah or Idaho or from Arizona where most of these guys are from and have been. It's really hard for them to understand what it's like to live in an inner city and you join the church and if you're African American and you want to bring your kids up in the church and you're struggling yourself as a black person with these kinds of, you know, racial teachings, but then you have to teach it to your, your young son, you know. Yeah, the church used to teach that black people were cursed and the kids trying to understand what that means. And anyway, so the church needs to do, go above and beyond denouncing racism and to really, really do some uncomfortable work about acknowledging the church's racial history itself and then secondly, holding some training sessions so that these well intentioned Latter Day Saints could understand and make the church more inclusive for people of color.

Race, Politics, and the Church's Ongoing Reckoning

John Dehlin [03:37:09] Yeah. And again, my leaders get really mad at me when I bring up politics and I'm torn because I do have views and I do have opinions, but I was just arguing with my mom this morning. My mom is like, I think Trump's an idiot. I hate him. But I'M voting Republican because, you know, abortion or because he, because of judges or, you know, and, and, or she's very concerned about socialist policies or the country becoming too socialist. And I just want to be really clear that this isn't me trying to tell my listeners that they should vote one way or the other. This isn't me saying that I'm not a big Biden fan. This isn't me saying anything other than on the podcast that it just seems like Trump is sort of the farthest you could get imaginable from sort of Mormon sensibilities in so many ways. And me feeling confused about that. And, and I'm not trying to tell people how to vote per se, but, but this is a really interesting and weird time. And the final thing that I just wanted to talk about, along with anything else you wanted to talk about, Matt, is that there are so many themes, as I'm reading your wonderful book, that seem to still be it's almost like past his prologue. It's almost like so many of these themes that Ezra Tab Benson was dealing with, that the church was dealing with in the 50s, 60s and 70s are still with us. So the theme of Russian influence still with us. The theme of conspiracy theories, whether it's the John Birch Society or QANON today, still with us, the issues of race, whether it's civil rights movement of the past or Black Lives Matter today,

Matt Harris [03:39:09] these

John Dehlin [03:39:09] are all like it's almost like we continue to experience and struggle with and even suffer from the very same issues decade to decade to decade. Do you see in modern politics major themes from your book reemerging in today's political landscape? And how do you make sense of all that?

Matt Harris [03:39:39] Boy, that's, that's a lot there. So this is the, the church's, the church's issue is interesting. You know, I don't ever foresee the church leaders giving up and getting up in conference and denouncing, you know, a politician by name. And so they, they sort of dance around it. And obviously, if people are informed and they're paying attention, when Dallin Oaks talks about a peaceful transition of power, he's talking about Donald Trump, the only person in our public life who's talking about there not being a peaceful transition of power. And so, and so I think that Oaks is doing the right thing there. I don't know if it's probably not a good thing to get into when you start calling leaders out, political leaders out by name. But on the other hand, the church tries to, tries to honor, you know, flexibility in the church. They really want their church body to choose for themselves the. The kinds of things that the parties that they accept. And they don't want to get in the business of telling people how to vote or how to think. And that's. That's what Ezra Benson was trying to do for the longest time. And so they're really walking this fine line. But yet there are people that are espousing these conspiracy theories today. That's deeply unsettling. And what I would say to that is that it's really important that we get away from conspiracy theories. These are just theories without evidence, really. That's what this is. And we really want to ground ourselves in some kind of rational thought where we can ask ourselves, did the Russians really interfere in our last election? And I don't think this is really. This doesn't need to be too high. Falugin. You can ask something, just something as simple as, what does it mean to you, Mr. Trump supporter or conspiracy theorist, that a group of Senate Republicans have said that this is a problem, that there is. There is. This is going on. They're interfering as we speak. What does that mean to you? And you can say something like, don't tell me this is deep state. That's intellectually lazy. You're telling me that the members of the US Senate, the Republican Party, they're members of a deep state. Come on. Or the intelligence agencies that were, many of whom were appointed by President Trump. So I talked to some of the folks who support President Trump in my community, and I get deep state right away. I'm thinking that's not going to work with me. Let's talk about this. What does this mean to you? That our leaders, our generals who are conservative, have said there's a problem. We've got to ground ourselves in evidence and rationality. And if somebody just sends something to you on Facebook or tweets you, some conspiracy, whatever, this is just not how we want to live our lives, where we embrace conspiracies, where there's no factual evidence for any of this stuff. And I agree with you, John. If people want to be conservatives or moderates or liberals, that's their business. That's their right. But whatever you are, wherever you're at on that political spectrum, embrace rational thought, hopefully have some details and some facts to back up your positions. I think that is enormously important. And also, too, about the kinds of leaders that we choose, whether you're a Republican, independent or a Democrat. I think President Benson, maybe this is maybe one of the ways to End is President Benson. Over and over and over again throughout his nearly 50 plus years in public life, both as a political person and as a religious leader, he always talked about choosing the best men and women to run for office. And interestingly enough, he, he oftentimes used the word women, too. Men and women. I say interestingly enough because oftentimes he thought women should stay at home. That was their role. But he talked about men and women who ought to run for office, good men and women, men of high character and integrity. And it's troublesome to me who, for people today who will claim to support our current president, but yet then they'll just say, oh, but he's a horrible human being. And I, I just, you know, we want people who are honest and who are ethical in public life, and we may not always agree with their policy differences. And that's okay. We don't always have to agree with policy, but certainly we ought to agree on how we treat people. People and how civil we can become in our discourse. And if we can't do that, our democracy is not working the way that it ought to work. And even Benson is outspoken as he was. This is really interesting. Benson always talked about, at least in public discourse, being civil. And that's something that I always admired and respected about him, is even though he had profound disagreements with, with people, and even though he would sometimes take these subtle shots at them or jabs at them, he did talk about being civil. Didn't always live up to his own ideals, but he always talked about being civil and he always talked about good leaders, and he always bore testimony to our democratic republic and our Constitution being inspired and so forth. And it's troublesome to me today where we see Latter Day Saints who are not showing the same respect for the Constitution or a peaceful transition of power and our democracy as Benson did. Lastly, that I would say, is as we become rational people and we govern our lives based on rational principles, that when someone says to us that there's voting fraud, that there's corruption going on and all of this stuff, we hear this daily, right? President Trump talks about it. I hope as rational people, we say, show me the evidence. Where is there evidence that there's voting fraud? It was just said by the, at the debate, presidential debate last week, he said that they were dumping them in a river. Okay, okay, there's, there are ballots that have been mail in ballots being dumped in a river. Where's the river? Who found the ballots? How many of them? And has this been corroborated? But you don't get any of this stuff because I don't think people are asking the right questions. They're just taking their information lock, stock and barrel without just asking a few simple, basic questions that would lead you to believe that this is not true. And then lastly, people who study election fraud, there's just no election. They've been doing this for years. There is just no election fraud. Among political scientists and historians and legal scholars who study this stuff, there's. It's just negligently. Negligently or statistically, it's negligible the impact. So it's just not an issue. And oddly enough, the state that has one of the best melon ballot records is Utah, a red state. So it's just simply in my state, Colorado, too. So it's just simply remiss to think that there's all this fraud and corruption going on. And as rational people, we need to really ask hard questions, questions so that we're not, you know, led astray by people who might want to lead us astray.

John Dehlin [03:46:45] I love it. Well, it's always tricky. I have one. I have at least one listener who said goodbye, and he. He tuned out because we broached politics. And that's always the. The tension. We walk again. The point isn't to say one candidate over another. It's just to. I think. I think a really important message you drove home is just that we need to be as informed as possible. Truth matters. Facts matter. Reality matters. Conspiracy theories can be really harmful. They were harmful to Benson. They were harmful to the church back then, and they seem to be. And I don't care which. Conspiracy. Conspiracy against liberals, conspiracy against, you know, conservatives, Republican conspiracies, Democrat conspiracies. Let's just. Let's just. Let's just have an allegiance to evidence and truth and facts and information, to quality news sources. And I know there's different types of news sources, and that's okay, but there is a. There is a hierarchy or a pecking order of more credible versus less credible news sources. And let's try and just get the best information we can to make the best decisions. Hopefully that's not too controversial.

Matt Harris [03:47:56] Amen.

Final Reflections and Closing the Conversation

John Dehlin [03:47:58] All right, well, Matt, any other. Any other themes that you wanted to mention about this amazing book before we close, or did we cover all the main themes that you wanted to cover?

Matt Harris [03:48:10] I think. I think we covered the main themes. Just want to thank your readers for staying with us and being patient, and I've enjoyed talking to you and reading your comments and questions. So thank you very much.

John Dehlin [03:48:22] Well, the book is Ezra Tap Benson, Watchmen on the Tower, Ezra Tab Benson and the Making of the Mormon Rite. The author is Matthew Harris. Please go purchase this book. You can Google it. You buy it at University of Utah Press. Support Matt, support his scholarship. Support Mormon historians and Mormon scholars. Consider it ex Mormon or post Mormon or liberal Mormon or progressive Mormon or orthodox Mormon tithing, because transparency is good and truth matters and evidence matters. Matt, tell us really quickly, you're working on a few more books. What are the ones you want to talk about? Just to give us a heads up about whatever you want to tell us about what you're working on next.

Matt Harris [03:49:09] Yeah, so I'm writing a book about. It's called the Long Awaited Blacks and Mormons and the Quest for Racial justice since World War II. So that's, I'm about 80% of the way through that manuscript and that'll be published probably a year, year and a half out. I am also writing a book on Hubie Brown, a biography that and also J. Reuben Clark. So I've got two, two biographies coming up of Mormon leaders and also just had a book that was published on the LDS Gospel Topics Essays. It's a collection of scholars that I had edited along with my co editor Newell Bringhurst, a scholar of Mormon studies who lives in California. And it talks about how the Gospel of Studies essays were released, why the Church wrote them and how they were released, and how the Church has been striving for more transparency in recent years. And also there's a bunch of scholars, myself included, who contributed essays about the various different gospel topics, essays ranging from polygamy to race and the priesthood, which is the one I wrote to the Book of Abraham, the Book of Mormon. So anyway, it's, it's, they're, they're really a, it's a nice collection of essays from Catholic scholars, Community of Christ, Latter Day Saint scholars, Presbyterian scholars. So it's a range of different scholars who evaluate these essays and try to make sense of them, praising the parts that the church that needs to be praised and then talking about where some of the essays come up a little bit short in terms of its transparency. So it was a fun project to do. And that book just came out a couple of weeks ago along with my Benson book.

John Dehlin [03:50:49] And we plan to cover that book on Mormon stories as well in the coming weeks, correct?

Matt Harris [03:50:54] Yeah, I have some of the authors on to interview them about their work. It's, that's really phenomenal.

John Dehlin [03:50:59] I'm excited about that. So we'll be reviewing some of the gospel topics essays formally with some scholars on Mormon stories coming up. All right, Matt. Well, you're super generous with your time. I'm proud that Mormon Stories podcast is going to be the place that grants you the longest interview. You are worthy of nine hour interviews. Your books are worthy of nine hour interviews. So I have no embarrassment or shame that we, that we got you for that amount of time. But I do have a lot of gratitude that you are willing to give us so much time and I just hope we drive a lot of sales. But most importantly, I hope you feel our gratitude as a people for your amazing scholarship, for your generosity, for your professionalism. And we are just on our metaphorical edges of our seats anticipating future books that you write for us.

Matt Harris [03:51:57] Thanks, John. I appreciate it. And thank you again to your listeners. This is, I really enjoyed this. Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:52:02] Good. And then, and then, so, so Matt, thank you so much. And then just a final thing to our listeners, if you appreciate this programming, if, if you value it, in addition to buying this book and supporting Matt, please, please donate. Become a monthly donor to the Open Stories foundation of Mormon Stories. You can go to MormonStories.org click on the donate button. 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month. Whatever you can afford. We're 501c3. Your tax deductions or your donations are tax deductible in the US we're transparent in our finances and we will continue bringing to you great programming like this for as long as you're willing to support it. Less than 1% of our listeners actually donate. So for every 100 listeners and viewers, less than one donates, and if we could just get that up to 1% or 2%, we could be ensured to provide you with this content for decades to come. So please consider just becoming a monthly donor and we'll continue bringing great scholars like Matt on Mormon Stories Podcast. Thanks again, Matt. You're awesome.

Matt Harris [03:53:12] Thanks Don. Thank you everybody.

John Dehlin [03:53:14] Thanks listeners and viewers. You guys take, take care and we'll see you guys all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Thanks to everyone who joined us on Facebook and YouTube. Your comments and feedback are great. Email us at mormonstories at gmail. Com Comment at mormonstories. Org. We'll see you guys all again soon. Take care everybody.

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.