Cache County’s Thatcher was an apostle who was dropped from the quorum

Nineteenth century Mormon apostle Moses Thatcher (above) is buried in the Logan City Cemetery. His death in 1909 at age 67 was national news. The prominent businessman, polygamist and politician never lost his fame, but he was famously smacked in a very public battle he waged with the LDS Church’s hierarchy in the mid 1890s.

In the Spring 1998 issue of Journal of Mormon History, Cache County LDS historian Kenneth W. Godfrey has a fascinating 35-page account of Thatcher’s battle with the LDS Church and his expulsion from the Quorum of the 12 Apostles. Intermixed in the drama is the war of words that was waged between the two competing newspapers in Utah; the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune, which championed Thatcher, and the church’s Deseret News, which criticized him.

However, Moses Thatcher was no apostate, even if he did come within a hair of being excommunicated from the LDS Church for failure to sustain a “Political Manifesto” from church leaders. The manifesto required church leaders to seek ecclesiastical OK prior to accepting an outside calling or seeking political office. Thatcher was a Democrat, which put him in conflict with many church leaders.

For a very long time, Thatcher, in a very public manner, refused to sustain the manifesto. His argument was that he feared average church leaders would be prohibited from political activism, which he considered, correctly if interpreted it as such, as church dictating to state.

Thatcher wasn’t alone in his initial concerns. For a while fellow church leader B. H. Roberts supported him. Eventually, however, Thatcher became the solo nay vote on this among church leaders, and gradually he became a constant subject of criticism from President Wilfred Woodruff and others. However, church leaders, mindful of Thatcher’s status as an apostle, were quite patient with him, giving him lots of time to recuperate from a chronic bowel illness, and lots of time to reconsider his position. They tried, to no avail, to convince Thatcher that the manifesto would not restrict speech.

On Thursday, Nov. 19, 1896, Thatcher missed his last opportunity to meet with the church hierarchy and explain his position. At the meeting, he was dropped from the quorum and relieved of all priesthood responsibilities. The Salt Lake Tribune featured the news with a huge headline, “Deposed.” The Deseret News editorialized, “The leaven has been working for a long, long time and for well nigh half a score years this same result might have been feared,” records Godfrey.

After being dropped, recounts Godfrey, a still defiant Thatcher almost was elected — by the Democratic-controlled Utah State Senate — to the U.S. Senate. He was a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, but was nosed out by Democrat Joseph L. Rawlins.

What killed Thatcher’s campaign was B.H. Roberts’ publicly opposing his candidacy. It was a clear indicator to the Cache County leader that losing the church approbation had secular consequences.

In August of 1897, Thatcher faced a church court that would determine whether he would remain a member of the LDS Church. At that time, Thatcher suddenly capitulated and recanted his previous opposition and criticisms. In fact, he admitted guilt to eight specific offenses and admitted “that he has obtained light wherein he was in the dark …”

Godfrey offers various ideas for what might have changed Thatcher’s ideas. One is that after the heat of the campaign, he could “reflect deeply and broadly” about the past events. Another was that the ostracism of the past 18 months since being dropped from the quorum was a reality he had a tough time dealing with.

The reason that seems most likely is that Thatcher was no longer ill. In the years prior and time of his dispute with the LDS Church leaders, Thatcher had suffered intensely from his bowel troubles. He had been addicted to morphine and treated for the pain as well as the tension associated with such, it’s very possible Thatcher was not thinking clearly.

There’s no doubt that church leaders were relieved that a prominent fellow member was back in the fold. As Godfrey puts it, “In short, when faced with being severed completely from Mormonism, a movement for which he had sacrificed so much, Thatcher finally chose church over state.”

For the rest of his life, Thatcher, who remained wealthy, was a partisan Democrat, In 1900, at Brigham Young College, he lectured in favor of socialism, recounts Godfrey.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

Early Mormon Lyman Royal Sherman died without ever knowing he was called to be an apostle

A lot of men have been called to be LDS apostles since Joseph Smith’s time. Today, an announcement of a new apostle is big news. In the early days of the LDS Church, many apostles became apostates. Some died, some were dropped over doctrinal disputes. An interesting footnote is the case of Lyman Royal Sherman, who lived and died without ever realizing that he had been called to be an apostle.

It’s open for debate as to whether Sherman should be considered an apostle. A traditionalist would say no, since he was only called and never ordained. However it’s clear that this faithful member of Smith’s church was intended to be an apostle had he lived.

BYU researcher Lyndon W. Cook, in a sketch of Sherman’s life, published in the fall 1978 Brigham Young University Studies, writes that Sherman was born May 22, 1804 in Vermont. He and his wife, Delcena, were baptized in Pomfret, N.Y., in January 1832. Sherman and his family lived in Kirtland, Ohio, until 1838.

According to Cook, Sherman was a close friend of Joseph Smith. He served as a president in the first Quorum of the Seventies from 1835 to 1837. Sherman also remained a very faithful member of the LDS Church. Just before Christmas 1835, Sherman approached Smith and said that he felt he was in need of a revelation. Smith obliged almost immediately, telling Sherman via the revelation that “your sins are forgiven” and “let your soul be at rest concerning your spiritual standing.”

Sherman also participated in secret anointings and ceremonies in the Kirtland Temple (see above) and according to reports, spoke in tongues. As the saints were being forced from Kirtland, opposition leaders sought to use a printing office to manufacture anti-LDS tracts. That printing office was destroyed by fire to prevent that, and historians believe it was the ever-faithful Sherman who set the blaze to thwart Smith’s enemies. Sherman then moved to Missouri and was on the Far West stake high council.

Here’s where it gets interesting. While in Liberty Jail in January 1839, Smith, Sidney Rigdon and Hyrum Smith wrote to Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball that Sherman should be made an apostle. However, unknown to Smith, Sherman’s health was ruined after the Kirtland strife and he was dying. Kimball and Young, for reasons still unclear, chose not to tell Sherman of his call to the apostleship. Perhaps Sherman was in a coma? In any event, this early church leader died in February 1839, in Far West, never knowing about his call.

Google Lyman Sherman and there are several accounts of his life that are interesting to read. In any event, his family remained active in the church. His wife, Delcena, crossed the plains to the Salt Lake Valley and died in 1854 in Salt Lake City.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published in StandardBlogs

Police, no-knock raid caught an LDS apostle in another woman’s bed

On Nov. 11, 1943, LDS apostles Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee gathered with Salt Lake City police officers, including Chief Reed Vetterli, outside the small Center Street apartment of elderly Anna Sofie Jacobsen. The apostles and officers burst into the home, breaking the door according to some accounts, and discovered LDS Apostle, Richard R. Lyman, 74, in bed with Jacobsen, who was not his wife. After gathering evidence, the two apostles reported back to J. Reuben Clark, first counselor to LDS President Heber J. Grant. Clark, who handled most of the church’s duties because Grant was ill, had ordered the raid. A day later, Lyman was excommunicated “for violation of the Christian law of chastity.”

The case of Richard Lyman is recounted by historian Gary James Bergera in the Fall 2011 Journal of Mormon History. Unlike the case of Albert Carrington, a 19th century LDS apostle also excommunicated for adultery, Lyman’s case is more complex. Unlike Carrington — who seems to have used his power to satisfy his lechery — Lyman appears to have been a victim of his own personal compassion, sexual dysfunctions within his marriage to his wife, Amy, personal tragedy in his family, and a rationalizing that his affair with Jacobsen was part of a polygamous pact that he had made with his mistress. For years, Lyman was bitter over his excommunication and sporadically continued his relationship with Jacobsen, who was also excommunicated.

There is some mirth in the idea of apostles in suits breaking in on the love nest of two senior citizens. However, by Bergera’s account, the affair shook the Quorum. In his diary, Spencer W. Kimball writes, “… To see great men such as the members of this quorum all in tears, some sobbing, all shocked, stunned by the impact was an unforgettable sight. …” In his memoirs, Kimball recounts the years that was spent getting Lyman ready for rebaptism and still lamented that the apostle eventually “… died a lay member of the church without Priesthood, without endowments, without sealings. …”

Bergera, in his article, has recounted trials in Lyman’s life that may have led to his rationalization that a sexual relationship with Jacobsen was not a violation of his church calling. His marriage to Amy Cassandra Brown ceased to have a sexual component after the birth of their second child. As Bergera relates in a footnote, “according to one family member, once Amy had brought forth two children, she informed Richard that their relationship from that point on would be celibate, living in amiable harmony …” Amy Brown’s biographer, David R. Hall, believes the pair’s gradual remoteness and lack of communication may have led to Richard’s adultery, writes Bergera.

In the 1920s, Lyman was assigned to assist Jacobsen in her efforts to return to the LDS Church. She was a Denmark native who had been excommunicated after being involved in a polygamous relationship after the church had banned the practice. In interviews just before he died (in 1963), Lyman recalls Jacobsen as “wonderfully unselfish and helpful.” As he prepared her for her rebaptism, the pair developed a close friendship and Lyman recalls that “she ‘was getting along in years with little or no hope of having a husband even in the great beyond,’” recounts Bergera. In 1925, after she was baptized, Lyman, suggested to Jacobsen, that the survivor among them get sealed to the other. Those preparations, which undoubtedly were a secret to Lyman’s sole wife, Amy, eventually progressed to sexual relations between the pair, who considered themselves “married.”

The death of the Lyman’s son, Wendell, 35, likely contributed to stress that Richard and Amy, with their emotional distance, probably didn’t handle well. Although Wendell’s death from carbon monoxide was reported in the press as an “accident,” it was most likely a suicide. Wendell had been depressed since the death of his young wife several years earlier and had recently clashed with his father over his drinking problems.

Given these trials, it’s not a surprise to consider that Lyman, in need of an emotional affair, allowed himself one that not surprisingly led to adultery. Bergera includes how Lyman rationalized his affair: “This woman had so many virtues and had done so much in an unselfish way for others that she and I agreed that while the present practice of the Church would not permit her to become my plural wife I began regarding her as my prospective plural wife with the mutual understanding that when by death or any other cause it would be possible for her to be my plural wife the ceremony would be performed.”

When Amy Brown Lyman was informed of her husband’s adultery and excommunication, her first words, according to Bergera’s article, were “I do not believe it. I do not believe it.” For Amy, the leader of the LDS Church’s women auxiliary The Relief Society, it was understandably a torturous blow. Bergera recounts that some advised Amy that she would be justified in leaving Richard. However, during this time of intense trial, as well as personal, public, and religious humiliation, Amy stayed with Richard. Frankly, it shows an admirable capacity for love, compassion and forgiveness by her. The pair went into seclusion for a while, in contact with family and close friends.

A comparison of the distinct strengths, temperament and even sensibility of the pair was demonstrated soon after the excommunication, recounts Bergera. Richard, soon after being expelled from his church, went to the LDS Church Office Building and asked to use his office. He was refused and told he had to leave. Amy, who also worked there, was greeted with warmth by future LDS Church President David O’McKay, who escorted her to her offices. Although Amy died four years before Richard, she enjoyed better health than him and nursed him through several age-related illnesses. Her explanation for her loyalty was simple: As Bergera notes in a footnote, Amy told “family members that ‘in every other way been an ideal husband and father ‘ and ‘she was not going to leave him now.’”

As mentioned, it took 11 years for Lyman to be rebaptized. He made many requests but they were defiant gestures, opportunities for him to criticize his former colleagues in the Quorum of the 12 Apostles who had kicked him out earlier. Finally, in the fall of 1956, Lyman’s repentance, couple with his wife’s assurances that she had forgiven him, resulted in his rebaptism. He died, as mentioned, a lay member without priesthood or temple recognitions. Those, Bergera recounts, were restored six years after his death.

As for Jacobsen, she lived the rest of her life in her Salt Lake City apartment. Bergera was unable to learn if she as ever rebaptized. Because the Lyman family, understandably, retreated into silence during crisis, it’s difficult to know why Lyman was defiant to former leaders, or the reasons for his sudden desire to repent and be baptized, or his late-in-life apathy that prevented priesthood blessings while he lived. 

His case is fascinating; it bridged the older church with its polygamy and preoccupation with making eternal plans while on earth, with the modern church and its more PR-friendly responses. Bergera notes that had Amy Lyman not left her husband in the 19th Century, she might have been excommunicated later for adultery as well, because 19th century church leaders considered adultery a dissolution of marital vows. There’s no doubt that the episode really shook up Lyman’s colleagues in the Quorum. Some speculate that the uncompromising message, considered harsh by some, of Kimball’s later, landmark LDS book, “The Miracle of Forgiveness,” is shaped by his experiences with Lyman’s sin and efforts to return to the church.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs.

Orson F. Whitney biography captures the contradictions of faith

Orson F. Whitney, an apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for almost a quarter century in the early part of the 20th century, is perhaps best known today for a 1929 speech delivered a little more than a year before his death.

As Dennis Horne, author of the biography, “The Life of Orson F. Whitney,” Cedar Fort Inc., notes, at the April 1929 LDS General Conference, Whitney promised faithful parents that their wayward children would be saved if they, the parents, remained faithful to their spiritual covenants. “Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, ’till you see the salvation of God,” Whitney promised in his discourse.

As Horne mentions, Whitney was certainly thinking of his eldest son, Horace “Race” Whitney, who had strayed from his parents’ faith. Race Whitney, a journalist and hopeful playwright, had been married and divorced twice -- to the same woman -- before he died of causes related to alcoholism at age 28.

Whitney is frankly more of a Wikipedia entry than a well-known historical figure of Mormonism.

Horne has affectionately focused on a life that bridged early Utah Mormonism to 20th century growth of the religion (1855-1930).

Using mostly the subject’s diary entries and autobiography, the author has constructed a life story interesting as much for its contradictions and secrets as for Whitney’s several-decades devotion to Mormonism. After a rocky start to adulthood, Whitney -- the son of Horace K. Whitney and Helen Mar Kimball, plural wife to Joseph Smith Jr. -- served a mission to Ohio and Pennsylvania at the age of 21. 

Now entrenched in his family faith, a new Salt Lake City bishop, Whitney married his first wife Zina Beal Smoot, and a year later, the new father was shipped to a second mission across the Atlantic Ocean to England where the first contradictions and secrets of Whitney’s life are revealed.

As Horne notes, Whitney was an emotional man, susceptible to praise and flattery. He also was a literary man, who would later write a four-volume History of Utah, two novel-size poems, and ghost write many articles for LDS leaders.

In England, Whitney entered a mission that was rife with dysfunctional behavior. The mission president, LDS apostle Albert Carrington, was later excommunicated for adultery while serving as mission leader and another missionary, Charles W. Stayner, was preaching a version of Mormonism that included reincarnation. During the mission, Whitney apparently made an energetic attempt to make a 16-year-old girl convert his plural wife, but was stymied by her mother’s objections.

As Horne relates, Whitney became a convert of Stayner’s theories for almost two decades, and was a driving force of a semi-secret Mormon group that discussed reincarnation and devised strategies to make Stayner the eventual prophet of the LDS Church. In fact, as his devotion to Stayner increased, Whitney partially supported his friend at the expense of his own family, and even lobbied LDS Church President Lorenzo Snow on reincarnation and Stayner.

During much of this time, Whitney was both a bishop and assistant church historian, as well as a noted author and poet in Utah. While it’s likely his long flirtation with reincarnation delayed his calling as an apostle, it never seemed close to harming his church membership, even as apostles and others publicly denounced the reincarnation doctrine.

It’s hard not to compare Whitney’s late 19th century obsession with changing the church’s position on reincarnation with the current Ordain Woman movement. The former, of course, did not lead to excommunication. Eventually Stayner, still a member of the church, died and soon afterward Whitney recanted his divergent beliefs, which essentially paved his way to an apostleship.

Horne’s biography is hampered because Whitney destroyed and edited large portions of his diary as he grew older. Examples of tampered diary entries include his relationships with Stayner, the English convert teen, some entries on reincarnation, and emotional affairs with some women (most notably Mary Laura Hickman) that Whitney would have clearly chosen as plural wives had he been allowed.

After the Second Manifesto of 1904, the LDS church hierarchy cracked down on polygamy, severely disciplining those who continued the principle. After he became an apostle in 1906, Horne notes that Whitney had the unpleasant task of disciplining longtime church members for polygamy, including former apostle and mentor John W. Taylor.

Whitney still believed in polygamy privately. There also is another confidante of Whitney’s, named “Dick,” who may have had the same Svengali-like effect on the apostle that Stayner once had. As with other potentially controversial aspects of his life, much of that subject was self-censored.

Before his first wife died in 1900, Whitney had one plural wife, Mary (May) Minerva Wells, the sister of a woman he had loved as a youth who had died. They had two children quickly but then were childless, although they stayed married until Whitney’s death. Frankly, there is not much of May in the diaries that Horne shares in his biography (Mary Laura Hickman is far more often on Whitney’s mind, for example) and one suspects that the couple’s relationship may have been strained.

Whitney’s health began to fail when he was called to be the LDS European Mission president in the early 1920s. The strain of dealing with a media assault on Mormonism in that country and added health problems to his prostate and kidney left him an invalid who could not even read by the time he returned to Utah. He regained his strength and served admirably as an apostle for the rest of his life.

In another example of his life of bridging generations, he was one of the first LDS leaders to often speak on KSL Radio. He died of pneumonia about a month after giving his final conference talk in April 1930.

Horne’s biography is an affectionate account of a man who deeply loved his religion and the men who led it. A bishop for three decades and apostle for 24 years, he expended all his talents, including writing and speaking, for his faith. As the book notes, he had failings and crisis of faith. That makes him real, and much preferable to the plaster saints that are sometimes constructed in hagiographies.

The biography is available here.

-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardNET

Apostle's adultery rocked LDS Church 130-plus years ago

More than 130 years ago, the young Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was roiled by a tawdry affair of power-based predator adultery by elderly apostle Albert Carrington, who once named to the church hierarchy used his authority to seduce far younger women, including British converts barely out of their teens. Despite allegations stretching back a decade, Carrington escaped punishment until one of his mistresses confessed the sexual escapades to her new husband. At that point, his fall was swift.

Historian Gary Bergera recounts the Carrington case in the Summer 2011 issue of Journal of Mormon History. (It’s the first of a three-part series on LDS leaders who were disciplined for sexual misconduct). Carrington’s case is interesting not only for his bizarre defense, which echoes U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 100-plus years later, but for the culture of sexual dysfunction of that era, where elderly male church leaders were urged to select young plural brides while on assignments, yet “excessive indulgence in the marital relation” were denounced as sinful from LDS pulpits at the same time.

There’s no doubt that Albert Carrington, once editor of the Deseret News, was a despicable rake, and the outrage of his fellow apostles, who excommunicated him, was sincere. As Bergera relates, in 1882, more than a decade after being called as an apostle, Carrington was finishing his tenure as head of the LDS Church’s European mission when word reached his successor, John Henry Smith, that the 69-year-old Carrington has been seen in compromising positions with his housekeeper, Sarah Kirkman, 20.

Although church leaders were concerned enough to do a formal investigation and request a detailed response from Carrington in 1883, his denials brought a temporary end to the matter. Carrington rather shrewdly confessed to being “unwise” in his familiarity with Kirkman, but strongly denied any sexual misconduct. That was explanation enough for the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, which unanimously retained him as a member.

However, as Bergera relates, it wasn’t too long before the Quorum learned that Carrington had lied to them. In 1885, Kirkman, now married, told her husband, Richard Bridge, of her past sexual relations with Carrington, some of which had occurred in Utah after her marriage. After this reached the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, more investigation revealed that Carrington had committed adultery with other young women.

Confronted by his peers in the Quorum, Carrington admitted to sexual activity but used what might have been called a Clintonian defense a century later. He denied he had committed adultery because he “had not mixed his seed” with the women. Using what was later disgustingly referred to as a “four-inch defense,” Carrington insisted that withdrawing and ejaculating outside the women he had sex with cleared him of adultery. As his fellow apostles listened in horror and skepticism, Carrington described his activities as “a little folly in Israel” and thanked the Lord for clearing him of the sin of adultery.

As Bergera notes, the Quorum quickly excommunicated him. Besides disapproval of the sins, his peers must have been angry with how Carrington’s behavior would hurt the church’s image, already suffering due to its practice of polygamy. Yet in his diary, Carrington, who had two wives, was mystified as to why he was cast out, insisting, Bergera records, that he had “never committed, even in thought,” adultery.

The former apostle’s health declined rapidly and before long he was bedridden. For more than a year, the now-repentant Carrington’s pleas for rebaptism were rejected by the apostles, many of whom were outraged at the blatant adultery, his explanations, and his longtime deception to them. One apostle, Moses Thatcher, Bergera records, was so incensed as to wish that adultery was a life-forfeiting sin. Future LDS President Heber J. Grant noted in his diary that Thatcher “hoped that the day was not far distant when the adulterer would forfeit his life, and then the question of rebaptism would never be raised.” Other apostles, with their new perception of the disgraced Carrington, “recollected” that he had never been a positive force in the quorum.

Time heals anger, as well as feelings of betrayal, and eventually mercy was granted Carrington. By the fall of 1887, the Quorum approved his re-baptism and confirmation. It occurred at the bedridden’s Carrington’s home. More than 30 years later, Grant, as LDS prophet, noted in General Conference that it was Section 64 of the LDS scripture Doctrine and Covenants, that moved him to OK Carrington’s rebaptism. Verse 10 reads, “I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.”

Bergera, in his JMH article, writes that many of the LDS apostles “may have wondered why Carrington, as family patriarch, had not simply brought Kirkman to Utah and married her regardless of his wives’ reaction.” Carrington was alone in London while mission president. Interestingly, Carrington and other missionaries had been urged by LDS President Brigham Young to get married. Bergera notes, from the Journal of Jesse Nathaniel Smith, that Young told Carrington and others in 1868: “When you get over there I want each of you to select a good girl and marry her.” However, Bergera adds that Carrington refused to marry another wife unless his first wife, Rhoda Maria, was with him to help select a plural wife.

As Bergera writes, “There are hints that Carrington’s first wife, Rhoda, did not respond favorably to the prospect of additional wives; and as a consequence, Carrington may have felt less constrained regarding extramarital sexual activity.” If that’s so, it was a life-wrecking assumption.

Carrington had been member of the LDS Church since the Nauvoo era. The stress of his excommunication doubtless contributed to his rapid physical and mental deterioration after 1885. (It also helped end his daughter Jane’s long marriage to Brigham Young’s son, apostle Brigham Young Jr.) In fall 1889, as the 76-year-old Carrington was dying, LDS leaders agreed to his family’s request that he receive the LDS priesthood so he could be buried in the faith’s garments. As Bergera relates from the diary of John Nuttall, secretary to the First Presidency, Carrington died minutes before he was to be ordained. “It was afterwards decided (that) Bro. Carrington may be buried in his Temple clothing,” Nuttall recorded on Sept. 19 1889.

In fact, 15 minutes after his death, LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff directed elders to ordain the deceased former apostle an elder. (Albert Carrington below)

Post originally published at StandardBlogs.

From LDS apostle to spiritualist: the journey of Amasa Mason Lyman

By Doug Gibson

In the spring 1983 edition of Dialogue, author Loretta L. Hefner recounts a sermon Mormon prophet Brigham Young delivered in 1867. Young said that doctrinal deviancy was not limited to the church rank and file. In fact, Young continued, among the present 12 apostles, “one did not believe in the existence of a personage called God,” another “believes that infants have the spirits of some who have formerly lived on earth,” and the third “has been preaching on the sly ... that the Savior was nothing more than a good man, and that his death had nothing to do with your salvation or mine.” 

Young was a sometimes caustic, even sarcastic LDS president, who once said that he kept the apostles in his pocket to take out when needed. He was not shy of public denunciations. The first two apostles mentioned by Young were Orson Pratt and Orson Hyde. Although Young used his influence late in life to make sure neither would be in a position to lead the LDS Church, Pratt and Hyde remained apostles.

The third apostle Young mentioned, Amasa Mason Lyman, would not survive his “heresy.” Lyman, baptized by Orson Pratt at 18, served 16 missions, spent months in a filthy Missouri jail cell with Mormon founder Joseph Smith, and attained the rank of apostle, only to lose it all in the final decade of his life. 

As Hefner relates in the Dialogue article, “From Apostle to Apostate: The Personal Struggle of Amasa Mason Lyman,” the LDS apostle proved his commitment to Mormonism countless times, but never seemed to shake an eccentric interest in spiritualism. In the 1850s, while establishing a branch of the church in San Bernadino, California, Lyman participated in seances.

The apostle’s interest in spiritualism might have remained a tolerated hobby — and of no danger to his church standing — had he not embraced “what later historians have termed the golden age of liberal theology,” writes Hefner. During this time, Lyman seems to have embraced “universalism,” or a belief that man, being derived from God, was inherently good and did not need Christ’s sacrifice to attain salvation.

In separate speeches — in 1862 in Dundee, Scotland and 1863 in Beaver, Utah — Lyman preached that Christ was only a moral reformer, and that man could redeem himself by correcting his errors. In short, Lyman denied the need for a savior.

To continue reading this essay, go to the Standard-Examiner web article, where the essay was previously published. It was first published on the now-defunct StandardBlogs.