Yes & No. There are the three Gospel Topics essays on LDS.org that deal with the topic of polygamy. It probably won’t surprise you that Brian Hales played a significant role in this. However, there are two other authors who played a very significant role in the other two essays! Who are these women?
Brian Hales Role with the Gospel Topics Essays
GT: Are you working on any other books or projects that you’d like to share with us?
Brian: Well actually, yes I am. I’ve kind of shifted gears. I had somebody ask me just last week, it was Chris Smith. You know Chris. He’s got his Ph.D., nice guy. He said, “are you still writing on polygamy?”
I paused for a minute. I thought, “You know I don’t know what more there is to write.” I’d love to write some more on polyandry. Dan Vogel and I have been having a public disagreement on that topic. There’s no new evidence. He’s not brought forth any, and I don’t have any really to offer, some of the things I alluded to here. I’d love to see some new things come out on polyandry and I would write on that, but pretty much I think that everything that can be said without new evidence has kind of been said.
The thing that I would add as a response to your question, Rick, is that I’ve never been really been comfortable with the naturalist’s explanation of the text of the Book of Mormon. If you can see up here, maybe you can’t but there’s all these versions of the Book of Mormon up here, the different printings year by year and if you look at the naturalist view, it’s just that Joseph got up one day and started to dictate this text, the 116 pages. Then there’s a pause and we go to Oliver Cowdery shows up and then over a period of just a few weeks, he dictates 273,725 words by my count of the Book of Mormon text; that’s the 1830 version.
I’ve just never been comfortable that Joseph could have dictated that and so I’ve been investigating the different theories about that. I’ve written an article I hope to have published. In this article, what I did is I compared Joseph to other 24 year old or younger authors who wrote big books and I compared their education. I compared their word counts and the complexity of their books. When you line them all up, 24 years and older—Joseph was 23 when he dictated it but it was published a year later when he was 24. I have to use the publishing dates of these other books because they are obviously written before. The biggest book written by anybody 24 or younger is about 180,000. Joseph’s book is almost 50% longer.
GT: 180,000 words?
Brian: 180,000 words versus 273,000. Then when you look at the complexity—in fact I’ve got them on the shelf here somewhere. One of the books is just really simplistic. I tried to read it but it’s just—I couldn’t get into it. It’s written for like a seventh grader or an eighth grader, but it’s 180,000 words. Then there’s a series by a guy named Christopher Paolini—the Eragon Series, it’s an independent series it’s called. He wrote two books that were very long before the age of 24.
But again when you get into the text, it’s just pretty simplistic stuff. I mean the names and everything are very, very different, not nearly as complex. There’s no chiasmus or stylometric issues like with the Book of Mormon. So Joseph Smith is just curiously unique as an author of this Book of Mormon. So I’m focusing not only on the word count, but also on the way it was presented because the numbers don’t lie.
When people want to say Tolkien wrote a book and that’s just like Joseph writing the Book of Mormon or Shakespeare had all of these plays that are very complex, and that’s just like Joseph Smith, when you get into the details, Joseph is unique. There is no one like Joseph who had come up with a book like the Book of Mormon. That’s what the evidence is showing. In fact when I was putting this chart together, I actually posted it on ex-Mormon Reddit. I thought, if there’s something wrong with this…
GT: You’ll get feedback there!
Brian: because the Book of Mormon is way out. It’s just different. Whatever you want to say the reasons are, Joseph as an author at age 23, 24 of the Book of Mormon—he’s different from any other author that I could identify. They actually found one other author that was important, it was Paolini, but there’s still nothing there. So I’ll be interested on the critics’ view of these articles and things when they come out that I’m working on. Believe me it’s so much nicer than working on the controversial polygamy. I’m very happy to just be having fun with the Book of Mormon and how it has come forth.
GT: That’s cool. I just remembered two more questions that I wanted to ask you.
Brian: Ok.
GT: The Gospel Topics essay, I’ve seen a blog post, I guess Elder Marlin Jensen recently said that basically they commissioned a bunch of scholars to write a big essay, then the church would kind of condensed those down. I was just wondering, did you have anything to do with those Gospel Topics essays on polygamy?
Brian: Yeah, I gave them a very long essay, and then maybe a couple of years later they sent me the Gospel Topics essay that was similar to what we have today. I went through it all. I think we had one other meeting in the interim, maybe two. I just went through and made recommendations on it, and every recommendation I recommended in the text they accepted. There were some outside comments that I made some recommendations they did not, but they were very generous to allow me to do that. They do quote from the trilogy a number of times and an article I wrote was also referenced.
GT: So that took a few years for that whole process to go through?
Brian: Yeah, you know originally they were thinking of doing long answer, medium answer, short answer. That was the first thing that was asked of me on the topic of polyandry. Then I just sent them some general stuff, and I don’t know how many iterations it went through there. Again I was excited to contribute to that. I only looked at the Nauvoo material. I know they had Kathryn Daines help out, and Kathleen Flake I think also are the other two that did the input on plural marriage. I hope they don’t mind me saying that but they wanted outsiders to critique it. If there were problems, they wanted to know about them before they published it.
GT: Of course! Cool. Then my last question was, I know you’re an active Latter-day Saint. You used to sing in the Tabernacle Choir. I always told my wife. My wife has a big goal that she would like to sing in there.
Brian: Oh, good luck.
GT: Anyway, I’m just curious. Do your ward members know that you’ve written this big three volume set, and do they ever ask you questions or do they just not care?
Brian: You know most of them don’t know. We were at a ward party one time and we were sitting by some younger couples that I didn’t know because they had just split our ward, or rearranged the ward boundaries and there was a young gal sitting right across from me and she was, “Wait, you’re Brian Hales!”
She was really surprised. She had run into my CES Letter material because I’ve got a website that I think exposes the CES letter. She was surprised that way. But overall, I think most of them don’t know. Craig Foster who is also a polygamy scholar, especially on fundamentalism, he’s in my ward. We were just talking on Sunday and we just said, nobody in here really knows we’re doing all this controversial stuff. The bishop knows and our stake president knows, and of course they are very supportive.
What I tell people is if you don’t have a problem with polygamy then just don’t worry about it. I mean it’s hard to make polygamy make you feel good because of how unfair it is on earth. I don’t even tell them about my books because it can create questions and things. If their faith is good without it then I don’t think they need to know every nuance about what’s happening historically.
On the other hand, I do advise people to inoculate themselves and their families so that the first place, if they see it on the internet, they say, oh yeah, I know about that. I’ll plug my wife’s book, A Reason for Faith, 17 chapters each by an expert on all of the controversies in the church. I highly recommend that. People buy that A Reason for Faith. It comes in a CD as well.
Paul Reeve, who you’ve interviewed, he wrote a chapter on race and priesthood. Laura and I did two chapters on polygamy. There’s the Book of Abraham, Kinderhook plates, homosexuality. Richard Bushman did a chapter on treasure digging, so at least if you’ve read a book like that, and it’s not a big book. It’s an easy read. At least you’re kind of inoculated to these kinds of things so if you have a question, you don’t have to panic. Oh yeah, I never heard of that.
GT: So does the bishop and the stake president ever send people your way and say, “straighten these people out.” {chuckles}
Brian: Actually we meet with quite a few people.
GT: Oh really?
Brian: Some of them come with faith and we can give answers, and then they go away happier. I mean it isn’t an easy click your fingers, I’m doing better thing. But we always tell people, just keep learning. Be transparent. Learn everything. Don’t give up until you’ve learned. You don’t have to give up faith today. Find out what’s going on. You can read the anti’s but read the answers. Read the responses.
Other times when Laura and I meet with people, it’s just I think a box that they have to check as they’re on their way out of the church. “Oh yeah I met with the Hales. They didn’t help.” So they’ve kind of already given up their faith.
The only thing I would say is if you’ve got questions, dive in. I believe there’s somebody in the church who knows more about it than the person who wrote whatever you’re reading on the internet and they still believe. With respect to plural marriage, we certainly have read a lot. It strengthened my belief in Joseph. It didn’t make me like polygamy. I don’t. I never want to do it, but my belief in him as a true prophet has just been strengthened.
GT: Great. Alright, well thank you so much. I really appreciate this time that you’ve spent here with me on Gospel Tangents. If I have any more questions can I call you again?
Brian: Sure! {Both chuckle} That’s great.
GT: Alright, thanks a lot.
Brian: Thank you Rick.
GT: We’ll see you.
Look for Brian’s future essays on the topic of the Book of Mormon! (Don’t forget to listen to our other conversations, from Canadian polygamy, to polyandry, to teen brides, to monogamy, to Fanny Alger, to justifications for polygamy!)
Check out our conversation! There’s a video below and a transcript!
https://gospeltangents.com/shop/transcripts/hales-role-gospel-topics-essays/
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:09 — 12.1MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Email | | More
