Orson Pratt Jr., Erastus Snow, apostasy and excommunication

(Above, Orson Pratt Jr., from Pratt Family Photo Project)

I’ve been reading a lot about Orson Pratt, the early Mormon apostle and leader who almost left the young church over allegations of seduction and adultery involving his wife, Sarah M. Pratt, the prophet Joseph Smith and Smith’s assistant, John C. Bennett. Later, after reconciling his wife’s accusations against Smith and Bennett with his belief in Mormonism, the apostle Pratt often clashed with Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, over doctrines, including who God was and His attributes.

His disputes with Young cost Pratt a chance to be president of the church. His dispute with Smith, and the way he resolved it, ultimately cost him his relationship with his first wife, her belief in the church he sacrificed so much for, and the belief of the children he bore with Sarah, save one. That brings us to Orson Pratt, Jr., the eldest son of Orson and Sarah.

Orson Jr. was a lot like his father. Like his dad, he was an intellectual man who applied reason and evidence with faith. He was also an accomplished musician, talented enough to teach at the university level. Unlike his father, though, Orson Jr. was not able to reconcile his theological doubts with his respect for reason. He became a disbeliever of Mormonism, and in a very public forum in southern Utah, where he had been a member of that area’s theological hierarchy, Orson Jr. told a large crowd that he no longer believed Joseph Smith was a prophet or that Mormonism was the true church. His discourse took place in September 1864, the same month he was excommunicated at the urging of LDS Church Apostle Erastus Snow, who had supplanted Orson Sr., on a mission to England, as sole leader of the southern Utah LDS cotton mission.

In Orson Pratt Jr.: Gifted Son of an Apostle and an Apostate,” published in the journal Dialogue, Richard S. and Mary C. Van Wagoner provide more insight into Orson Jr.’s decision to leave Mormonism. Orson Jr. claims to have disbelieved Mormonism at an early age. This is supported by his brother Arthur telling a reporter that his mother, Sarah Pratt, would secretly teach the children — while Orson Sr. was away on his many missions — to disbelieve in Joseph Smith, polygamy and Mormonism.

Nevertheless, Orson Jr. lived the life of a favored young Mormon son. He married Susan Snow, the daughter LDS leader Zerubabel Snow, was appointed to a Salt Lake City alderman and LDS high council member in his early 20s, played organ concerts privately for Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders and became a prominent music teacher. In the early 1860s he followed his father to the southern Utah mission and was quickly elected St. George city alderman and LDS high councilman.

However, in 1864 Orson Jr. refused a mission call from President Brigham Young, and action that in those days, explain the Van Wagoners, “was tantamount to an announcement of personal apostasy.” Later that year, Orson Jr., writing in the literary journal, “Veprecula,” under the pen name, “Veritas,” argued that faith could not derive from the supernatural, but “must be a careful and patient exercise of reason.” Young Pratt’s reasoning was similar to his father’s earlier declarations that evidence must support faith, but Orson Jr. took a step his father never did — he applied that reasoning to reject his father’s teachings.

There is a certain irony to Erastus Snow — Orson Jr.’s uncle — leading the excommunication of Orson Jr., given that Orson Sr. had helped convert Snow to Mormonism 30 years earlier in Vermont. In his discourse, Orson Jr. denounced Snow as a man who had actively, but secretly, tried to convince his wife, Susan, to reject him. As Gary Bergera explains in his book, “Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith,” Snow’s beliefs on how to treat unbelieving family members may have played a large role in his desire to punish Orson Jr. with excommunication. In an 1857 LDS general conference address, Snow’s harsh beliefs on how to handle in-family apostasy were recorded: “…Sometimes we may err by being remiss in duty — too lenient in our families, and some of us may be under condemnation by being too careless about transgressors in our families; for if we hold fellowship with transgressors and spirits that are in rebellion against God and that will not repent and humble themselves — if we close our ears to it and go to sleep while wickedness is stalking unrebuked through our habitations, we become partakers in that transgression, and the consequences thereof will stick to us. …”

Snow went on to urge LDS families to send siblings and spouses who rejected the LDS Church teachings away from their families and out into the world, “better this than to harbour them where they were like a viper … corrupting and corroding in the midst of … family.”

The idea that members should cast out every young adult who rejects the Gospel of their parents fit the times of 1857, a time when the LDS church was at its most orthodox, and apostles such as George Albert Smith were sent to all corners of Utah to preach “us against them” fire-and-brimstone speeches; of such rhetoric was the Mountain Meadows Massacre wrought. But it hardly applied to the mild, academically talented, gifted musician, Orson Pratt Jr., who in more civil times would have been quietly released from his callings and left to live his existence outside the LDS Church without the theological stain of excommunication. Orson Pratt, Jr., by the way, lived a quiet, distinguished life in Ogden and Salt Lake City before dying in late 1903. He is buried in Salt Lake City and received a respectful obituary in the church-owned Deseret News. As late as September 1903, the ailing Pratt, who had moved to Ogden for his health, advertised in the Standard-Examiner for music students.

Mentioned in Bergera’s book is the suggestion that Orson Jr.’s excommunication was an attempt to embarrass his father and weaken his influence in the Quorum of the Twelve. According to Bergera, Orson Jr. initially refused to resign from his church position because he feared a “possible backlash for his father.” Also, Brigham Young blamed Orson Sr. for his son’s apostasy, calling his then-senior apostle “at heart an infidel.”

-- Doug Gibson

-- This post was originally published at StandardBlogs

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.