Did an angel with a drawn sword force Joseph Smith to start polygamy?

In his biography of Joseph Smith, “Rough Stone Rolling,” author Richard Lyman Bushman relates a popular Mormon legend/history regarding the Mormon prophet and his embrace of polygamy. He writes, “By delaying plural marriage, Joseph risked provoking God’s wrath. Mary (Elizabeth) Rollins Lightner, one of his plural wives, later said Joseph told her about the pressure he was under. ‘The angel came to me three times between the year of ’34 and ’42 and said I was to obey the principle or he would [s]lay me.’ Others told the story with an additional detail: the angel held a drawn sword.”

The would-be “destroying angel” that prompted Joseph Smith to get moving on polygamy is one of those “legends” that I heard from parents and others growing up as a young Latter-day Saint. I had always assumed it was another legend, such as the White Horse Prophecy, that gets passed around so often that it achieves a false legitimacy. However, there seems to be enough persons aware of this claim that it should be placed above folklore status.

In the book, “Nauvoo Polygamy, but we called it celestial marriage,” author George D. Smith adds to Bushman’s account with one caveat. He reports that Smith’s plural wife, Rollins Lightner, also included the drawn sword in her story. From “Nauvoo Polygamy,” D. Smith repeats a statement Rollins Lightner made in 1902, claiming Joseph Smith told her he had been commanded to marry her as far back as 1834, but had resisted, until, as she related “the Angel came to him three times, the last time with a drawn Sword and threatened his life.”

Rollins Lightner, quite reasonably, relates that she asked Smith “if God told him So, why did he not come and tell me [?]” Apparently, Rollins Lightner did have what she regarded as an angelic visitation. She said, “”… and an Angel came to me, it went through me like lightning.” The pair were married in 1842.

LDS historian Brian C. Hales, who has done a lot of research into polygamy and the early Mormon Church, cites LDS Apostle Erastus Snow as a supporting source that Joseph Smith felt his life was in danger if he did not implement polygamy. Hales writes, “Erastus Snow claimed that Joseph had ‘to plead on his knees before the Angel for his Life.” (Hales’ research lists many persons who were told, either secondhand or by Smith, of the angels’ visits and displeasure. The earliest account he has is 1854.)

If, as most historians believe, Fanny Alger was Joseph Smith’s first plural wife, there was several-years time of “foot-dragging” before the Mormon prophet began to implement polygamy. As Hales and other historians note, not-surprising opposition to the practice by Smith’s lawful wife, Emma, probably was the strongest reason for Smith’s reluctance. Emma Smith had reportedly kicked servant Alger out of the Smith home. Although reports are that she attempted to understand and countenance her husband’s polygamous efforts during the Nauvoo period, she was never able to accept it. After her husband’s murder, a key reason for her refusal to follow Brigham Young with most of the Saints to the Rocky Mountains was due to polygamy.

Bushman brings up another reason that Smith may have been reluctant to embrace polygamy. It was that skeptics of new religions tended to look for dysfunctional sexual behaviors as a reason to condemn the churches or movements. Bushman writes, “From the … sixteenth century to the camp meetings of the nineteenth, critics expected sexual improprieties from religious enthusiasts. Marital experiments by contemporary radical sects increased the suspicions. … With old barriers coming down, people were on the lookout for sexual aberrations.”

Joseph Smith was certainly smart enough to realize how Mormons would be if the young church embraced polygamy. He also, it is virtually universally acknowledged by historians, loved his wife Emma deeply and was loathe to do anything that would hurt her. These conflicts must have disturbed him.

The idea that lust motivated Joseph Smith’s desire for polygamy may satisfy his most severe critics, but the historical record does not support it. A wait of several years after the failed union with Fanny Alger shows reluctance for the practice, not desire. One need not believe that Joseph Smith pleaded before an angel with a sword to acknowledge that. The doctrine of plural marriage, as Smith and other early Mormon leaders understood it, was essential to increase eternal families, and one’s glory in the after-life. It’s likely that many of Smith’s plural marriages, particularly the ones that involved plural marriages to women already married, were sexless and intended only for the afterlife.

To active Mormons, and others who read all the church’s scriptures, the God described in the Doctrine and Covenants is, at least in verbal rhetoric, similar to the God of the Old Testament. Frankly, it’s not that difficult to picture a god of that temperament sending an angel with a sword to “persuade” Joseph Smith to start polygamy.

Nevertheless, whether the angel is a part of Mormon history, or just part of Mormon lore, will always be debated. Church leaders invited that discussion in 1934, when LDS apostle Melvin J. Ballard, wrote, “The statement … concerning the angel appearing with the drawn sword is not a matter that is in our own church history. While it may be all true, the church has not pronounced it authentic nor has it contradicted it.” (Hales, “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy Volume 1a)

Of course, that was during a time that the LDS Church leadership was slowly pursuing a more modern, accommodating church that would assimilate well with the rest of the world. Almost 50 years earlier, a period where the church was still embracing polygamy, Hales writes, “Future apostle Orson F. Whitney, grandson of Heber C. Kimball and son of Joseph Smith’s plural wife Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, apparently believed the story genuine. His 1888 biography of Heber C. Kimball includes this statement:

‘A grand and glorious principle had been revealed, and for years had slumbered in the breast of God’s Prophet, awaiting the time when, with safety to himself and the Church, it might be confided to the sacred keeping of a chosen few. That time had now come. An angel with a flaming sword descended from the courts of glory and, confronting the Prophet, commanded him in the name of the Lord to establish the principle so long concealed from the knowledge of the Saints and of the world — that of plural knowledge.’

I don’t know how many persons today believe in, or even know of, the alleged angel that threatened Joseph Smith to marry other women, but it clearly merits inclusion as a part of LDS Church history.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

Sonia Johnson and the ERA a contentious issue during presidency of Kimball

This essay was first published in April of 2010.

In “Lengthen Your Stride,” the biography of the Prophet Spencer W. Kimball’s tenure as LDS Church president, there is this anecdote: President Kimball, who in spring 1979 was being constantly called by Mormon dissenter Sonia Johnson, retreated to the foyer of the Church Office Building. He was observed by Relief Society President Barbara Smith, who asked him why he was working on papers in the foyer and not his office. The prophet admitted that he was trying to avoid Johnson’s calls, adding he didn’t want to lie when she was told he was not in his office.

Smith replied, “President, may I sit with you here for a while? Sonia’s after me too!”

It’s been more than three decades since Johnson was excommunicated from the LDS Church. She’s become an answer to a trivia game. But the controversy over the LDS Church’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment was a headache to church leaders, and particularly its leader, Kimball. In some ways it’s a lot like the uproar over the church’s support of a measure banning gay marriage in California.

The LDS Church actively opposed the ERA — which was steadily losing a battle to garner enough states to become part of the Constitution — for what it called “moral” reasons. Johnson, a lifetime Mormon from Cache County married and living in Virginia, became an active proponent of ERA.

According to “Lengthen Your Stride,” she engaged in a feisty debate with Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch while testifying on Capitol Hill. Johnson later helped start Mormons for ERA and persistently sought an interview with President Kimball.

Johnson claimed she wanted to know if the church’s opposition to the ERA was based on revelation or not. Kimball would not meet with her, believing it would accomplish nothing and that Johnson would manipulate what he would say to her. Johnson’s crusade made her famous. She became a symbol of feminist resentment against the Mormon Church. As she gained prominence, her rhetoric became more barbed. She urged, or suggested (depending on her or others’ interpretation) that people not invite LDS missionaries into their homes. She also referred to the LDS Church as a “savage misogyny.”

There’s no doubt that the LDS Church actively opposed the ERA. In 1978, a First Presidency letter read by bishops urged members to get engaged with other citizens to defeat the ERA. In a 1980 Church News editorial, the church expounded on its opposition. Later an insert in The Ensign was devoted to criticizing the ERA.

This is what the ERA actually said:
“Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.”

It seems a mild two dozen or so words, but its interpretation caused a decade or more of fierce debate. In late 1979, Sonia Johnson was excommunicated. For several years afterward, the LDS Church was subject to a lot of activism against it as a result of its ERA stance, particularly after the deadline for its passage expired.

In “Lengthen Your Stride,” it is recalled, “In January 1981, a group of twenty representing NOW and Ex-Mormons for ERA gathered at the gates of the Ogden Temple and burned temple garments…” The National Organization For Women, which described the Mormon Church as a major opponent in the effort to ratify the ERA, sent missionaries door to door in Utah to petition President Kimball. It was common for protesters to vote against sustaining LDS Church leaders at general conferences, to picket and to fly banners over many church meetings.

The protests faded in the mid-1980s as the ERA diminished as an issue. Sonia Johnson ran for president under a fringe party banner. She wrote a biography, “From Housewife to Heretic,” that can still be found at used bookstores, as well as other small-press books.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

The Spaulding Manuscript as Jeffersonian idealism, and not a Book of Mormon template

Solomon  Spaulding’s “Manuscript Found,” an unpublished novel by the 18th and 19th century minister, is a topic of interest to anti-Mormons. In 1834, Eber Howe, author of “Mormonism Unvailed,” claimed that “The Book of Mormon” plagiarizes Spaulding’s novel. What’s left of the Spaulding manuscript was found in the late 19th century, and cannot support any claim that Spaulding wrote the Mormon scripture. Some still stick to the theory that a lost version of Spaulding’s “Manuscript Found” contains a “Book of Mormon” template.

In the Fall 2012 “Journal of Mormon History,” Adam Jortner, assistant professor of history at Auburn University, posits an alternative reason to value the Spaulding manuscript. (“Solomon Spaulding’s Indians, Or, What the ‘Manuscript Found’ Really Tells Us”) Rather than putting primary emphasis on its relationship to the Mormon scripture, it should be examined as part of a utopian, Jeffersonian vision of assimilating American Indians through moving them from hunting to farming.

Some background on Spaulding. (All information is attributed to Jortner’s article): He was born in 1761, graduated from Dartmouth, and became a minister. He was not a financial success. Late in his life, living in Ohio, Spaulding wrote “Manuscript Found,” which he hoped would make him wealthy. It did not; only one publishing house even had a copy, and that was likely ignored. However, his novel was popular among his neighbors in Ohio. Before dying in 1816, Spaulding often recited, and had friends recite, from his novel. He also apparently produced many drafts of the story, which is why some speculate the one surviving copy is not the finished product.

The novel’s plot involves Romans who are settling to the new world (America). Led by Fabius, the pre-Columbus group lands in America and encounters “the Deliwares” tribe of natives. The Deliwares are described as savages who engage in strange ceremonial dances. Nevertheless, there is little hostility between the settlers and the natives, and Fabius’ group buys land from the Deliwares.

It isn’t long before sex enters Spaulding’s tale. One settler suggests marriage with the Deliware women. The tale becomes infused with racial bigotry. As Jortner recounts, “Fabius and his commander allow this ‘experiment’ to go forward, thus establishing interracial sex as a kind of second-class intimacy, although with considerable reservations and the explicit object of literally ‘whitening’ the resulting children.”

Later in the novel, Fabius travels west and encounters the “Ohons” tribe. The Ohons become more advanced than the Deliware. They have lighter skin, practice farming and animal husbandry instead of primarily hunting, and live, as Spaulding wrote, with an (architecture) “founded upon the true principles of Reason.” The Ohon also have a form of religion traditional to the early 19th century that Spaulding lived in. Much of Spaulding’s novel contrasts the customs, family and religious practices of the Ohon and the Deliware, to the detriment of the Deliwares. Ironically, the Ohon dynasty begins its slow deterioration after an Ohon prince improperly marries a princess from an inferior tribe. The upheavel leads to a more dogmatic theology, that takes reason away from the Ohon culture and beliefs.

What makes Spaulding’s manuscript an example of Jeffersonian idealism is that at the time it was written, there was a theory that American Indians could be assimilated into a western lifestyle through the purchasing of farmland and the subsequent transfer of Indians from hunting to farming.

As Jortner writes, “Much more striking than any parallels to LDS scripture or teachings, however, is the resemblance between the “Manuscript Found” and the idealism of Jeffersonian republicanism. The Jeffersonian dream of assimilation and the fear of prophetic response both appear in “Manuscript Found:” A white man shows up, teaches the Ohons deistic ideas and monogamy , and watches them become civilized — and whiter in color. Jeffersonian assimilation is also the plan of the Romans regarding the Deliware: intermarry, raise the children as Christians, and, in the ugly racist language of the time, ‘wipe clean’ both their savagery and their dark skins.”

Frankly, as racist as that seems today, such a policy with Indians was considered, 200 years ago, a progressive alternative to the prevailing, equally offensive, theory that Indians were incapable of change and needed to be conquered by force.

As Jorner writes, “Manuscript Found” … echoes the events in the Ohio country after Spaulding’s arrival in 1809.” These events included efforts to recruit Indian chiefs to follow the Jeffersonian ideal of moving to farmland and becoming “civilized,” which was defined by following the culture and customs of the white, Christian settlers. Not surprisingly, this effort met with strong resistance from many Indian chiefs. It’s probable that Spaulding, while writing his novel, was influenced by conflict between rival Indian leaders who resisted the Jeffersonian idealism, and other chiefs less resistant to the efforts.

As Jortner writes, “Given the context of the time of its creation, it is difficult not to see in “Manuscript Found” an ideological Jeffersonian commentary on the events of the day mixed in with the romance, adventure, and faux-travel narratives of a nineteenth-century novel.” Spaulding, it seems, was an advocate of a Jeffersonian solution for the American Indians.

“Manuscript Found” disproves most of the claims by Mormon opponents, such as Howe. There are no trips from Jerusalem. No “Nephis” or “Lehis” in Spaulding’s work; only the thin claim that lost versions include these “facts.” A far better historical context for Spaulding’s sprawling novel is offered by Jortner in the JMH. As he writes, “… the ‘Manuscript Found’ dreamed a different kind of dream — a frontier narrative that eulogized a utopian vision of Jeffersonian Indians happily engaged in the civilizing process.”

A racist fantasy? Of course, but a common one during  Spaulding’s era. After 180 years of attempting to tie “Manuscript Found” to “The Book of Mormon,” it’s time to place Spaulding’s manuscript, which earned him fame instead of riches, into its proper context.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

The Singles Ward remains the ultimate fun Mormon in-joke movie

I wrote this review/analysis more than nine years ago but decided to rescue it from Google Wayback to place on the blog. -- Doug Gibson

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I recently watched, for maybe the 10th time, the 2002 Halestorm film “The Singles Ward.” I love this film. It’s by far the best insider Mormon in-joke movie. It’s actually funny; most Mormon comedies aren’t.

If you are an active Latter-day Saint who has spent time in a singles ward, you’ll likely laugh a lot. If you are not LDS, it will likely bore you.

I’ll just spend a moment with the plot. It involves a divorced, semi-active LDS single Jonathan Jordan (Will Swenson), who works as a stand up comedian. In “plot device 45653” he meets a devout, gorgeous LDS coed Cammie Giles (Connie Young), who likes to speak her mind. They argue a lot, and eventually hit it off. They are surrounded by a horde of stereotypical LDS young adults who are funny because, like a grifter, there’s a little bit of truth to their stereotypes. There’s the computer geek, the rustic mechanic, the pretentious LDS coed who eventually marries the rustic mechanic, the delusional nerd, who of course ends up with a sexy wife, the naive, hickish missionary-to-be … and you get the picture.

“The Singles Ward,” because it’s a Halestorm film, invariably has a few “faith-promoting” scenes, but they are kept to a minimum, so the film is rarely boring. In one of the funniest scenes in the genre, Jonathan, in the Salt Lake City apartment of a cute bartender (Michelle Ainge) and full of bad intentions, opens her curtains to see a full view of the LDS Salt Lake City temple (with the proper music and all).

“The Singles Ward” also has a pretty good cast. Swenson is now a star on Broadway. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the revival of “Hair,” where he shows off a lot more skin than he does in “Singles Ward.” Young has had an unspectacular but consistent career over two decades. She has gained cult status with her performance as a teen in the “worst film” perennial “Troll 2” and appeared in the critically acclaimed documentary on the film, “Best Worst Movie.” Her most recent film was “Christmas Angel.” And LDS perennial film star Kirby Heyborne has had occasional success out of the genre he’s “famous” for.

Perhaps the most unique characteristic of “Singles Ward” is counting all the celebrities, major and minor, who made cameo appearances. I can’t think of a film that has this many.
They are (and I could have missed one or two) Wally Joyner, Richard Dutcher, Danny Ainge, Shawn Bradley, Jimmy Chunga, LaVell Edwards, Ron McBride (As Brother Giles … Cammie’s dad!!), Steve Young, Johnny Biscuit, Thurl Bailey, Julie Stoffer, Gordon Jump, Jason Buck, Ty Mattingly, Jared Hess and Dell Schanze.

And where else can you find a film where a bit player (Charisse Miller) is called “Sweet Spirit” in the credits.

There was a sequel to “The Singles Ward,” called, appropriately “The Singles 2nd Ward.” It involves Heyborne’s now-returned missionary, Dallen Martin, back at BYU as a religion professor and finding love with a gorgeous, sassy LDS student, Christine (Erin Chambers) … whatever. Did I mention these films are also LDS male fantasies?

It’s almost as much fun as the first “Singles Ward,” and Swenson, Young and the others make cameo appearances. Chambers, according to imdb.com, has an impressively long acting resume that includes stints on “Cold Case,” “Medium” and “Without a Trace.”

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs