Succession Crisis (John Hamer 1 of 2)

Following the death of Joseph Smith, a succession crisis enveloped the Church. Several vied for leadership. While most people recognize Brigham Young and Joseph Smith III, there were several other leaders like Alpheus Cutler, Granville Hedrick, James Strang, and others who led movements still leading congregations today. Not only that, but others have broken off from these leaders, creating new churches numbering in the hundreds of “Mormon” congregations. John Hamer will discuss the reasons for schisms, and how these schisms continue through the present day. Check out our conversation…

Gospel Tangents

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Intro to John Hamer

Interview

GT 00:34 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I am so excited to have one of my favorite historians from Canada on. Can you tell us who you are?

John 00:45 Hey Rick, I’m very happy to be here. This is John Hamer.

GT 00:47 All right. John is the author of Scattering of the Saints, one of my favorite books, too, along with Newell Bringhurst. And we’re here to talk about the Succession Crisis. John’s already got his slides up. Do you want to give us any other intro information? What do people need to know about you before we get talking about the Succession Crisis?

John 01:10 Sure. Well, in addition to my background being in history, as you say, I also am a member of Community of Christ, and I serve as the pastor of the downtown Toronto congregation. This is a very venerable congregation in the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. It was first organized in 1836 with John Taylor as the pastor. And so, I count myself as the 40^th pastor in succession. And, also, my background in terms of doing history of the Latter Day Saint movement has been to focus on all of the different expressions of the movement, other than pretty much the big LDS Church. There’s lots of people that are studying the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with headquarters in Salt Lake. And so, I leave that to them. But I’ve always been so fascinated by all of the different ways that people understand and are participating in the movement outside of that main large expression, obviously including my own way here in Community of Christ. [It is] by far and away, the second largest of the denominations within the Latter Day Saint movement, but a very distant second, in the same way that some of the small ones are very distant from Community of Christ in size.

GT 02:35 Yeah, that’s awesome. You’re also a Seventy. We forgot to mention that.

John 02:40 Yes, that’s right. Yep. I serve in the priesthood Office of 70 and Community of Christ. So, you know, the 70s have had different existences. There’s a certain point there were like, the LDS Church had created a bazillion 70s. And right now, I think 70s In the LDS Church are pretty much all Church employees. Right? [They] are general officers. And so, we’re in a place in Community of Christ where it’s not quite like that. There are presidents of the different quorums of 70, who are church employees in Community of Christ, and then there are a bunch more 70s than that. But it’s rare. So it’s not like [that.] In Community of Christ, you don’t have automatic priesthood ordination, anyway. But the idea of it is the 70 are essentially outreach. It’s an outreach calling, so missionary calling.

GT 03:34 So I guess just to clarify the first and, I think, second quorums of Seventies are full-time Church employees, but the other quorums of Seventies are not. They’re called Area Authorities. They get airfare for flying to stake conferences, but I think that’s about it. At least that’s what Hans Mattsson said.

John 03:55 Ok. Yes, the other ones in the LDS Church, then, are what–we call that self-sustaining 70s. And so most Community of Christ 70s are self-sustaining. But some are church employees, but, usually, it’s not really. So, your calling is different from whether you’re a church employee in the Community of Christ. So, for example, most pastors, the role of like branch President or the corresponding role now in the LDS Church is Bishop, since in the Brighamite tradition the pastor role was displaced by the bishop role. Bishops continue in Community of Christ as the financial officers, specifically, usually of larger areas than a congregation. But a pastor, normally is, again, a self-sustaining role. And so I am a part-time employee of the Toronto congregation and a part-time employee of the Canadian church. But my job in neither case is 70 or pastor. It’s essentially to do different kinds of resource production and strategic planning and that sort of thing.

GT 05:06 Okay. Making maps, is that part of it?

John 05:09 No.

GT 05:10 No?

John 05:11 Making maps I do for fun. It’s not my job, per se, although I have been doing it still. So, I love to make maps. And so, this last year, I made a very cool (I’ll have to find the slide for you) but a giant wall map of Community of Christ in Canada. And it has the locations of where all of the congregations are all across Canada, as well as all of our campgrounds. So camping is a big part of the Community of Christ tradition. And then there were actually call-out maps for all of the campgrounds, how they’re all organized, and everything like that. So it was a big fun mapping project that became a big poster that I’m having printed to put on my wall. And other people will have on their wall.

GT 05:56 You’re the best map maker I know.

John 05:58 Thank you so much.

GT 06:01 Well very cool. All right. And I guess the other thing, we’ll do this really quickly. Where did you go to school? I think people would be interested to know that.

John 06:11 Yeah. So I got my undergrad in history from BYU. And so, when I was at BYU, I was actually a research assistant for Bill Hamblin. The very first book that I ever had published maps in, where I was actually developing, doing computer generated mapping at the time, [was while I was a research assistant.] So, it was very early PostScript/LinoPerfect computer generated maps back in 1990-91. And the very first book that I ever illustrated with a map is by Dan Peterson. So, I had those kinds of backgrounds of working with Dan Peterson and Bill Hamblin, back then, but I was also in publication. I loved publication, even at the time. And so, I was ultimately the publisher of the Student Review, which was independent [newspaper.] It is, again, the independent student newspaper. But I was also the production director of the Honors Department Journal, the History Department Journal, the Business School newspaper, because I very much was into publishing all the way back to then.

John 07:20 Oh, and then after BYU, my graduate work was in Medieval History at the University of Michigan, and I was a grad student far too long to have not finished my Ph.D., but that’s the way it is. So, I didn’t finish my dissertation. And so, I don’t have a Ph.D. from there. But what ended up happening was I got attracted again into publishing, doing maps, especially for the University of Michigan Press. And I started doing that professionally. So, I made maps for Columbia University Press, the University of Michigan, of course, Oxford University Press, all kinds of other presses, and went into that professionally for a while before finding other ways to go into publishing.

GT 08:04 Very good. Very good. All right. I didn’t realize you were a Wolverine. Their football team is really good this year. Are you following it all or not really?

John 08:12 I don’t. I’m not a sports fan. I have not actually been to one of those games, even though I lived in Ann Arbor for 15-20 years. I don’t even know how long. It was a long time. Anyway, I watched one football game once. So that’s the most I can say. It was funny, because all my roommates made my friend and I–[they] wanted [us] to watch this game. And it was hilarious to us. I really had no appreciation of football and things like that. It had been a very close game and probably against, like a major rival. It was either the Ohio State or the [Michigan State] Spartans or whatever. And it had come down essentially, to the wire. And then really, in the last seconds, Michigan made some kind of a fumble, and then somebody threw it or ran it the entire way back, across the entire field. And it was the worst upset. I don’t know, this would have been sometime 1993 or 1994. I don’t know what game it was. Anyways, it was a terrible upset, and everybody was in such anguish and my friend and I were just laughing, because we’d never seen this before. It seemed hilarious, but, obviously, that wasn’t an appreciated sentiment. So just out of respect to the University of Michigan and the Wolverines, I don’t watch any more of the games, in order to not have that kind of a fiasco happen. It’s in the same way that people continue to wear certain shirts so that they can win the game week after week, year after year. I continue to not watch the game, so that that same fiasco does not repeat. {Chuckles} You’re welcome, Ann Arbor.

GT 09:38 You can’t blame John for any losses. That’s funny. So, all right.

Intro to Succession Crisis

GT 09:57 Well, let’s jump into the succession crisis. This is something I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time. And I’ll let you take it away.

John 10:06 Sure, absolutely. This was originally a presentation that I worked on a whole long time ago. I now, more or less, do presentations every week on our Centre Place YouTube channel. I now have like thousands and thousands of slides. This was actually maybe just the first handful of presentations I ever made. And we were just at Sunstone U.K., where I was one of the keynote speakers and they had invited me to give this again, and so I’ve significantly updated it. So, your audience is getting a pretty new dust-off of an old presentation that now we’ve come back to. I’m calling it the 1844 Latter Day Saints Succession Crisis: Divergent Perspectives and Paths. So, all the way through this, I’m a map maker and chart maker. And I like to make visual ways of portraying information. So, part of this here is I’ve taken the Sunstone and having it broken up into pieces. Part of this will be different colors, and different color coding that will have meaning in the charts to some extent. Obviously, every time you create a map, or a chart or a model, it’s a simplification, just like anytime you write a history book, it’s over simplified. Real life is much larger and more complicated. Any thesis that you have is a model that can be more or less useful. But it is more or less because of how much detail you’re able to include, and it’s able to explain. So, there’s going to be some models here. Some of it is some shorthand, as this is a big movement. And so, we’re doing our best to include a lot of details, but try to organize it in a way that will be comprehensible. Let me see if I can get this to work. Yeah.

John 10:57 So I’ll just start off here. When you’re in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not everybody is particularly aware that there are dozens and dozens of living expressions of the Latter Day Saint movement. There may be people who are aware that there are some kooky Reorganized Mormons out there somewhere that have gotten it all wrong. You might have seen a Community of Christ Church or an RLDS Church, and I certainly did when I was a little kid when I was growing up in the LDS Church. I asked my mom about that, and she said, “Oh, those people are confused.” That was all the explanation I got. There might be some awareness. For example, if you live in Utah, itself, especially, [you might know] that there are fundamentalists. They have all kinds of actual fundamental tenets of Brighamite Mormonism that they’re adhering to, but the most obvious one is polygamy. Right? And so they’ll be thought of as people who are actively polygamous. Therefore, you have an understanding that, okay, well, there is maybe some diversity in this movement, but there’s actually so much more of it than people are really aware of.

John 11:32 So, in the course of this presentation, I’m using the 19^th century, but also convenient shorthand of using these “ite” names. In the Book of Mormon, the different groups are named Nephites obviously, Lamanites, and all manner of other “-ites” as the Book of Mormon talks about. In the same way, at the time when the schism happened, after 1844, as the different groups followed different leaders, people would be called Brighamites after people who followed Brigham Young, Strangites after people who follow James Strang. Cutlerites after the followers of Alpheus Cutler. Hedrickites after the followers of Granville Hedrick. Rigdonites after Sidney Rigdon. And Josephites after Joseph Smith the third, in other words, Joseph Smith, Jr, the founder’s son.

John 14:13 Essentially, those constellations are the ones that are still living. And obviously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by far, contains the most mass. And then, like I say, Community of Christ. But there are other Brighamite groups, both the fundamentalists that we talked about, the largest groupings of which are the Apostolic United Brethren, the AUB and the FLDS Church, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But there are newer expressions that are not fundamentalists, of which the Remnant is the most interesting and largest new one. Then, within Community of Christ, there are a whole bunch of expressions within the Josephite tradition, there are whole bunches of expressions that are not part of Community of Christ. And that, especially, emerged in the 1980s, when people were divided over ending priesthood discrimination on the basis of gender. So, there were many of the expressions of the Josephite movement that have been reorganized, themselves, in order to not practice women’s ordination, for example.

John 15:22 And then around the Temple Lot Church, the Hedrickites, there have been a number of other schisms. So, anyway, we’ll go through all of these. But one thing I’ll point out, even though I call this a constellation of Mormonism, in point of fact, most of the groups now, do not identify as Mormon and are not supposed to use the word Mormon. So, in the Josephite tradition and Community of Christ and actually, also, I think among the Temple Lot Church, and so forth, if they’re talking about Mormons, if you’re a Community of Christ person talking about Mormons, they’re really talking about members of the LDS Church or they’re talking about, possibly, they’re talking about their ancestors. But, in general, they’re talking about the contemporary LDS tradition. Likewise, as you’re aware, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are no longer self-identifying with the word Mormon and are not using it, so there is no longer a Mormon Tabernacle Choir. There’s a Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, or however the new name is.

John 16:25 I’m not actually sure. I wrote No, for the Remnant people. I’m not actually sure if they’re on board with that or not, but probably they are, I should think. But, nevertheless, therefore, the largest group of people who self-identify Mormon, therefore, are Mormon fundamentalists, or fundamentalist Mormons, who, actually, the LDS Church is very opposed to them using the word Mormon, even though they’ve abandoned it themselves. And then, also, of the other groups, the Strangites are very proud to call themselves Mormon. So, you can go to their church and they’re Mormons for sure. Anyway, but otherwise, the name is always complex. Right?

GT 17:05 Right. There are two Remnant Churches. I guess we should mention too.

John 17:10 I’m sorry, yes. We should even go back here. We will have to go through this, but yeah, when I’m talking about the [Remnant Group.] I’ve been talking about the Remnant so far, this organization is not really a church. Right? It’s a movement within the LDS Church or at the fringes of the LDS Church. We’ll talk about it, but then there is a, one of the larger Josephite tradition churches, one of the larger, what we might say, Restorationist schismatic groups from Community of Christ is called the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And as you say, the two of them are not related. They just share a name.

GT 17:46 Right.

John 17:48 Okay. All right, so going back to 1844. Even though Nauvoo, I think, especially maybe in the LDS tradition is remembered with a lot of nostalgia, as a city of Joseph, the city beautiful, city of Joseph, Nauvoo, and all this kind of a thing. In point of fact, actually, a lot of the division that later emerged, went back to Nauvoo, which, beneath its surface, was actually troubled. It had a lot of different troubles and division that it was already experiencing.

John 18:26 So, I’ve created a long time ago, this kind of schematic diagram for kind of describing what the church looked like in the Nauvoo era church. And so, at the center of the church was headquarters. Nauvoo here, that black inner circle with the inner parts of it, that’s like the church schematically centered on Nauvoo, but then surrounding that are all of these branches, which are actually, never get mentioned and don’t get remembered, but in fact, are where the bulk of the baptized membership of the church are in the Nauvoo era.

John 19:04 So, in other words, people that are spread across, especially the US Midwest and Northeast, and then also, England, is where more of the people who have been baptized, at least, are living. And so that’s part of the church. And then within Nauvoo, on the one hand, there are people who joined up very early. There are people who were more recent converts, again, mostly from the United States and Canada. And then most recently, there is a big influx of these British converts. Then within Nauvoo, there is an inner circle of church leaders, at the core, that Joseph Smith and the Nauvoo period is including in secret practices. So, an anointed quorum where they’re doing, they’re initiating practices that will later be identified as temple practices within the LDS tradition. In the Strangite tradition, they remember these as Kingdom practices, Kingdom ordinances. But, in any event, this is like secret ordinances that are not privy to everybody. So, again, as I’m kind of using colors, what I’m trying to indicate here is that the earliest stage of Mormonism I’m going to be identifying as blue.

John 20:23 The kind of Missouri and Ohio stages of Mormonism is more green. The public-facing Nauvoo era of Mormonism, I’m kind of calling yellow. And then the secret practices, like polygamy and temple practices, I’m calling as orange. So, at Nauvoo, you have people that signed up for all those different eras of the church. And so, people who got on board with what the church was like in New York, are side by side with people who have been brought into inner practices and taught very different new things in Nauvoo. So, there is already a separate division in terms of what might have been. Everybody’s convert, except for the most youngest people who have been born into the movement, everybody’s a convert in general. But you might have signed up for something very different from how the church is being lived at its core, at this time period. Does that make sense?

GT 21:21 Yeah, that’s really good.

John 21:24 Okay, so I’ll demonstrate a little bit of that, when I talk about some of the background history leading up to the succession crisis. But part of, always, what’s happening in Mormonism, especially early Mormonism, is that there are a couple of core tensions at the heart. And so, one of these is there is a tension between the idea that there’s continuing revelation, Right? So, right at the heart of the restoration tradition is this belief or tenet that the heavens are not closed, that God is still speaking. There wasn’t some time period when revelation was happening, and people had all these miracles and things like that, and that’s why scripture exists back in Bible times, but there’s no new scripture. Rather, there’s new scripture right now. In other words, that God is still speaking. And indeed, the early members really have a sense that they’re actually living scripture.

John 22:25 So, when John Whitmer, who is called to be the very first historian of the Church, by revelation, when he starts writing his history, he writes it in good old Book of Mormon talk. And so he says, “Now it came to pass, that the members did gather,” and all this kind of thing, because the reality is, they feel like when they’re going to that Kirtland Temple dedication, that they are living scripture, just as the early apostolic people did in the book of Acts as it’s, as they read about, anyway, in the book of Acts, or as the Book of Mormon people, that they read about in the Book of Mormon. And so, they have that same idea. So, there is continuing revelation, and that is held in the form of both personal revelation that everybody is entitled to, but, also, the fact that they have a prophet that they’re living with, in the person of Joseph Smith, Jr. But then, one of the tensions of continuing revelation is that the idea, always, is this is a restoration. And what’s being restored is the ancient order of things. And so, this is how things were in the church, at the time of the apostles, and so forth. But then, what ends up happening is, as the church keeps having new revelation, as it keeps evolving, some of the revelations are contradictory with each other. And they can’t, then, therefore, both be the ancient order of things, because which one of them was the ancient order of things? Right? And so that becomes a contradiction for people, especially people who come in early on, and they like the ancient order that they first sign up for, and then the revisions, they think that’s a contradiction. That’s not a new revelation. That’s a false Revelation. We are now falling. We’re falling into apostasy. Right?

John 24:12 Likewise, there is an inherent tension between this idea that everybody can receive personal revelation, and, indeed, that one of the earliest revelations of the Church is that everything shall be done by the common consent of the church, with the fact that there is one prophet, who is the prophet with a special calling to bring inspired counsel, or whatever they called it the time, commandments to the Church, revelations that ultimately get put into the Book of Commandments. [The Book of Commandments] becomes the book of the Doctrine and Covenants over time. That is a tool that that Prophet can use in order to concentrate power, as opposed to power being had by personal revelation and/or people voting in terms of common consent and that sort of thing. And part of the need for that, in a sense, is there’s the story of everybody in the New York era church having their own peep stone. Right? And so, Hiram Page starts receiving revelations for the Church. And everybody, lots of people say, “Oh, okay, well, those are, that’s the same as what we see Joseph Smith doing. We’re all called to be able to do this.” But, unfortunately, obviously, that can pretty quickly lead to chaos, because everybody is receiving contradictory revelations to each other. And so that ends up, again, being a tension.

GT 25:40 So yeah, Joseph Smith essentially says, “I’m the Revelator.” Ignore Hiram Page. Right?

John 25:46 Exactly. So yeah, but for some people, they maybe would have wanted it to stay that everybody got to receive revelation. So, here’s that color scheme that I’m talking about. I kind of showed this to show the Nauvoo map. But, essentially, let’s say that if we have a kind of a peep stone sharing, New York, kind of Mormonism, even in New York, kind of Kirtland, this green is for Kirtland and Far West, like I say, when you’re doing something as simple as diagrams with color, you have to simplify. So, this is way over-simplified. But, here, I’m more or less saying if the New York style of Mormonism, where people are all having their own peep stones, where it is much more about, like, a group of elders together, it is much less about Joseph Smith being fully in charge. That sort of a thing is different from, let’s say, the Kirtland and Far West periods, as things are evolving, actually they’re held simultaneously.

John 26:53 So, generally speaking, the entire time, people are in Kirtland, almost, there’s also a large group of the church that’s also in Missouri, and then Kirtland ends. And then there’s the last period in Far West. Then, like I was saying here, that kind of Nauvoo yellow and the intergroup and secret practices. And one of the things I even want to always stress here is that there’s always branches. And the people in the branches are always kind of tracking an earlier kind of Mormonism. In other words, they are not next to Joseph Smith, so they’re not getting all the latest stuff. They’re getting whatever’s published in the newspapers, and whatever the elders who come and visit them bring when they go around and travel to all the branches. Essentially, traveling elders go and visit the branches. And occasionally, they’ll bring the newspapers there. They subscribe to the newspaper from headquarters. But, generally speaking, they’re functioning with a lot more autonomy than is even conceivable at all, let’s say if you’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today, where everything has been correlated. There’s so much correlation and manuals, and all that kind of thing. These are really entirely autonomous units of the Church. And like I say, they’re not in full step with where the Church has gotten to at its latest iteration.

Evolving Church Structure

John 28:10 So, I use these diagrams. I’ve done it in a couple places before, but I think that they very starkly illustrates how rapidly the change is happening. If you just start in the blue part here, the New York part here on the left, the whole structure of the Church when it’s organized in April 6, 1830, is that they have already got elders, priests and teachers, and that’s it. And elders are considered to be apostles, according to a contemporary passage of what becomes the Doctrine and Covenants. Essentially, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery’s roles are to be the first elder and the second elder of the Church. And that’s the entirety of the Church’s structure when it starts. So, if you fast forward…

GT 29:00 Which is what John Whitmer liked, this structure here, right?

John 29:04 Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, so John Whitmer and especially David Whitmer, in other words, those guys, the Whitmers, all that all of the witnesses, essentially, signed up for this structure of the Church. Actually, when David Whitmer, who was one of the longest lived and last surviving witnesses of the Book of Mormon, he ultimately decides that he thinks that the organization of the Church was a mistake, that they had a really good church, just having restored priesthood, and he thinks, actually, maybe the Church structure, itself, when that happened in April 6, that that’s probably a step too far and it started them on the wrong path.

GT 29:42 Oh, that’s funny.

John 29:46 But, anyway, it did set them on the path and the thing started to change very, very rapidly, just after from 1830. So, when we get, like I say, fast forward a whole three years later, and you have now the structure in this green time period when the Church is, it’s kind of split between Kirtland and Missouri. So, now, the way it’s understood is there’s not just one order of priesthood, there’s understood that there is a lesser order of priesthood and a high priesthood. Some of the elders, which are understood to be a part of the lesser priesthood, have been set apart as high priests, or to the higher priesthood. It’s not yet become the office of high priest, necessarily, but rather, it is like a second layer, essentially. And then there are presidents of that high priesthood, those presidents of the high priesthood, which is still a title that is held by the First Presidency, that eventually becomes the First Presidency, but it hasn’t yet. Meanwhile, within the lesser priesthood, those New York offices of elder, priest and teacher, to that has been added Deacon, as well as the presiding elder of a branch, which has the title pastor. And then they’ve added these financial officers. There’s one for Kirtland, and there’s one for Zion. And as all your listeners know, where’s Zion?

GT 31:16 Jackson County.

John 31:17 Missouri. That’s right, it is not Utah. (Chuckling) Anyway, it could be Utah, now. But back then it was Missouri, as you said. They were called bishops of Zion, but it meant Missouri. And so that’s a bigger structure, as you see already than just what had been in the earlier time. Right? And then if we fast forward now, from 1833, a whole two years later, you can see that this structure really explodes. Now it’s more formalized. The lesser priesthood that’s now given a name, the Aaronic priesthood. The higher priesthood is now known as the Melchizedek priesthood. Elders have gotten an upgrade, so they’re now understood to be part of the Melchizedek priesthood.

John 32:12 Now the office of high priest has been fully formed now as an actual office. But in top of that, there have been additional councils that have been added. Specifically, there is a high council for Zion, a high council for Kirtland, and a traveling high council of apostles, the Council of the 12. And as another and a second missionary council has also been formed, the Presidents of 70, including then the Office of 70. And finally, well, in addition to the bishop, there’s now counselors in a bishopric, so that’s become kind of a bishopric. And then, in addition to that, then an office has been created for Joseph Smith’s father, Joseph Smith, Sr. He becomes the presiding patriarch evangelist of the Church. Both of those titles are in use in the early Church period, although we usually say, Presiding Patriarch. At this point, the title evangelist is the one we use in Community of Christ. In any event, that goes back to the beginning. And then there are, in addition to the presiding patriarch evangelists, there are in fact, other patriarchs called as well.

John 33:25 Anyway, you can see that’s a big difference than if you were David Whitmer and had signed up for a church that is a restoration of how you understood it to be in Acts, where you’re reading in the Bible. And you can read about elders. You can see the Bible. They have teachers. They have priests, but they don’t have, by the way, a First Presidency. There’s no first presidency in the Book of Acts. You can’t find that biblically. You are not finding a stake presidency or a high council in these ways. In other words, now it’s diverged from a biblical restoration to a restoration that is innovative. Let’s say, [it is] diverging from the ancient order and is more in that tension between ancient order and continuing revelation.

GT 34:16 Now, this does bring up a big question. Are you saying that the Aaronic priesthood wasn’t really well defined until 1835? Because that’s not what we get in our correlated history of the LDS Church.

John 34:30 Right, yeah. So, the correlated history has, I think, largely been shown to be anachronistic. So, later in the period now, at this time, and a little bit later than this, actually, most of this priesthood structure as exists in 1835, that’s mostly continued to this day. So, there hasn’t been like a crazy amount of changes. I mean, I don’t have on here area representatives and area authorities, and I don’t have the Relief Society and so forth. In other words, it’s not done, but it’s close to recognizable, at this point. But, in fact, what ends up happening, in order to justify it as an ancient order of things, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery retroactively placed the restorations of Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood, back in the Harmony days. And so, if you go to Harmony, Pennsylvania, there’ll be a little bronze statue that the LDS Church has made commemorating the restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood, let’s say.

GT 35:49 Melchizedek or Aaronic?

John 35:51 I think there’s one for the Melchizedek there, too. I think Aaronic and Melchizedek. The Melchizedek one is going to, I mean, the Aaronic one is with John. Isn’t it with John the Baptist or whatever?

GT 36:03 Right.

John 36:04 And then the Melchizedek one is Peter, James and John. Right?

GT 36:08 Right.

John 36:08 And so, I always think that if you have to resort to making a bronze statue about this, it’s saying you’re trying to justify something or create something, make it more real than maybe it was. So, there is no contemporary telling of that story. So, that story doesn’t fit what actually happened. It’s anachronistic. In other words, it’s a late recollection, or new memory. There were spiritual experiences that are happening Harmony, that’s definitely [true.] Anybody can agree with that. But it was not about Melchizedek and Aaronic priesthood. Those names are not known. They’re not used. So, it is only later, when those understandings have evolved, by 1835, and so on, that the memory of that gets ladled on to that earlier period. But you can read, for example, Greg Prince has an excellent book, The Power from on High. I don’t remember the subtitle, exactly. But it’s like, The Development of [Mormon] Priesthood in the LDS Tradition or something like that. And he outlines it very, very clearly. I think all historians agree that this is an anachronistic understanding. So, it didn’t happen, in other words.

GT 37:26 Well, so I mean, that brings up a couple questions, because it seems like we’ve pretty–and I know you said this is anachronistic, but I’m going to say it anyway. It seems like the Aaronic priesthood was May 15, 1829. Joseph and Oliver baptize each other in the, was the Susquehanna River? I’m not sure where.

John 37:48 Yeah.

GT 37:48 In the river, and then the more fuzzy stuff is Melchizedek priesthood.

John 37:58 But, it wouldn’t have been called Aaronic.

GT 38:00 Right. So, they wouldn’t have been called Aaronic. So, you’re saying that still we can accept that Joseph and Oliver baptized each other in 1829.

John 38:12 Yes.

GT 38:13 Okay.

John 38:13 No, no, they had elders.

GT 38:15 The name didn’t really exist.

John 38:17 That’s what I’m saying. They had elders, priests and teachers. Right? So, by the time they organized the Church, they had elders, priests and teachers. They understood that to be priesthood. And they understood, even, some of the jobs. So, they understood that elders, priests, I think priests can baptize. In other words, they understood who could baptize.

GT 38:35 Yeah, priests can baptize.

John 38:36 Priests are allowed to baptize. Elders are allowed to confirm. All of that, there’s already understanding of a lot of that as of 1830. But, the further understanding that all of those offices, for example, that Elder is a Melchizedek office, that is not how it was originally understood, as they first started developing this idea that there’s a higher priesthood. And they are not naming what the higher and lesser priesthoods are. They later get that idea from reading the letter to the Hebrews. And so, they’re reading the letter to the Hebrews, which talks about orders of priesthood, Aaronic and Melchizedek. And they actually misread it. So, what the author of Hebrews is actually saying, we no longer need an Aaronic priesthood. We don’t need priests of air. In other words, he wouldn’t have he’s using that to mean is the high priest in Jerusalem, we no longer need to have these animal sacrifices and so forth, because we have a high priest of the true order of Melchizedek, who is Jesus Christ, the eternal Lord, and so forth. And so, what Hebrews is saying is nobody needs to be either an Aaronic priest or a Melchizedek priest, but nevertheless, by talking about two orders of priesthood that gives them the idea that the lesser priesthood and the higher priesthood as they’ve already been experiencing, it should have those names.

GT 40:06 Okay. Okay. Because then it seems like Melchizedek priesthood is more fuzzy: 1829, 1830, 1831. Whatever the date was, you’re saying that wasn’t really defined until 1835.

John 40:21 So it’s got on, I’ve got to read in my chart here. So high priests are starting to be ordained in 1832. And then I’m saying that– precisely when, I guess I don’t say on this chart precisely. I’m not sure, exactly, when they–so, in 1833, they’re using the lesser and higher priesthood names. And so, when those get attached to Aaronic and Melchizedek, I don’t have the exact date for that. I’m just saying by 1835, they have defined it.

GT 41:01 Okay.

John 41:01 They’re not using…

GT 41:03 I was just going to ask if you had an idea of, was it 1829, 30, or 31, when the Melchizedek priesthood was restored?

John 41:14 So, it’s not. It’s not restored. It never got restored. So, what happened is, is that they start ordaining some of the elders to be in a higher priesthood, and that becomes the office of high priests. It evolves into the office of high priests, and having a higher priesthood, eventually, evolves into a separate order. But there is no restoration date for it. And that’s why, like I say, when they later look back on it and try to think about it, they remember or their memories add, or however they decide, they create the story that happened back in Harmony, but there is no actual event that it happens.

GT 42:03 Okay.

John 42:05 In my view.

GT 42:09 Yeah. All right.

John 42:10 Okay. Anyway, my main point here is [there’s a] big difference. So, if you go back again, from the blue period, to the middle here of the green period, you’ve already, if you’ve signed up for Blue Period Mormonism, it’s already got a big difference, by green period.

GT 42:29 Okay.

When Early Schisms Happened

John 42:30 So, I’m showing this a different way here, kind of chronologically. So, this is a a timeline chart of the Church from 1829, there to the 1830 organization up through Joseph Smith’s death in 1844. And, again, the headquarters is at the top line, so New York and then Kirtland. And then, simultaneously, with the Kirtland period, like I say, the majority actually or the larger settlement is actually happening in Zion, first in Jackson County, and then Clay County and then Caldwell County, Missouri, when after the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, when Joseph and Sidney Rigdon, and their loyalists flee from Ohio, that becomes headquarters, Far West, Missouri. And then, finally, after the Missouri-Mormon War, when everyone has to flee, and go as refugees into Illinois and founds Nauvoo, Church headquarters moves. Then, every single time Church headquarters moves, there’s also these schismatic events, like the collapse of the bank, the getting rid of the witnesses from the Church, the expulsion of the Missouri Church leadership, the Missouri-Mormon War, the martyrdom of Joseph Smith. Every moment when those kinds of things happen, that’s a time period when people are either left behind or they go their own way. And so that’s when the schism is happening, within the movement.

John 44:01 So, schism is happening every time that people who are committed and believing in the movement decide they can’t be in communion with each other, because they have such a differing vision of the direction that everything should go or what’s most essential about the Church that they split. And so, then that essentially duplicates expressions or divided expressions of the movement. That happens, especially then, at these kinds of moments.

GT 44:36 Okay.

John 44:38 So, obviously, the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith is the most important one of these and this is all background for the topic, which is the Succession Crisis and its aftermath, which is the general topic here today. And so, Hyrum was a member the First Presidency. He is the Associate President of the Church. In some ways, because Joseph Smith had talked about restoring the kingdom, he had kind of been giving the sense that Hyrum was the one that was now going to be in charge of the Church and so forth. In that sense, if Joseph had been killed alone, Hyrum would almost certainly have been the successor, who would have assumed leadership of the Church. But, of course, both of them were killed together. And so, as a result of that, there was no clear successor at the time of Joseph Smith’s death. Shortly after Hyrum and Joseph died, Samuel H. Smith also dies. And so that leaves the Smith family with only one surviving adult male: William Smith, who’d been one of the original apostles, but was not particularly seen as a stable or popular apostle. And in any event, he had been presiding over some of the Eastern missions, and his wife was ill, and so he doesn’t actually show up at Nauvoo, anytime soon. So, it’s many months later, before he goes back at all.

1844 Succession Candidates

John 46:07 And so in Nauvoo, anyway, Emma, and also Lucy Mack, Joseph’s mom, Emma has widow, and then Joseph Smith III is a boy of 11. Right. And so even though there were many occasions that both Joseph Smith Senior who gave in a patriarchal blessing to Joseph, III, that he would one day succeed in his father’s role. And then Joseph Jr. also gave several blessings that “you will be my successor,” he said in Liberty Jail, and a special blessing. And he also gave him one more blessing to that effect as, as he left to surrender himself to Carthage. So lots of people felt that Joseph III would eventually be the successor. The problem is, he’s 11-year-old kid. And so even if this has become a kingdom on the Mississippi, and Joseph Smith has himself actually been proclaimed Prophet, Priest and King, King of the Kingdom of God on earth. Kingdom sometimes have minority’s when the king dies. Sometimes the prince who’s a kid gets made king. It’s a lot more complicated to do that with a church. So in this sense, there might have been an idea that the successor would eventually be Joseph III. Brigham Young even suggested that one day this boy will have his due. But if we, if we talk about that too much out loud, he’s going to get killed. And so, in other words, it’s for his safety, that even talk of that is on hold, and so on.

John 47:42 So anyway, the Smiths are fairly knocked out in terms of being players in this. And so that leads to a number of different succession alternatives, none of whom are very particularly clear claims as to why they should now take over. They’ve said that Joseph III had been designated as successor. Another person who had been designated as a successor was David Whitmer. And there is a verse in the Doctrine and Covenants that says, “If my servant Joseph Smith shall fall, he shall have no power, save it be to name another in his stead.” And so, having actually designated a successor was sort of a big deal, because you then had a canon law, a canon legal, which is to say, according to the Doctrine and Covenants, claim to why you should be the successor. But David Whitmer wasn’t in the Church. David Whitmer had left or separated, and he’d stayed in Missouri. And so, he wasn’t in any kind of position to immediately exercise some kind of a claim, “Oh, I should be the leader now.” And so, the most obvious claimants…

GT 48:50 But, he did organize his own church, though, right?

John 48:53 He did eventually. But he’s not really a–so, what happens is, he’s very interesting. We’ll go into it. But what happens is, initially, a church is organized in his name. One of the ex-apostles, William McLellin, remembered that designation, when David Whitmer had been designated successor, way back. I don’t know. It was around the time of Zion’s Camp or something like that. So, because of that, McLellin said, “Well, Whitmer is now the successor.” And so, he went there and sort of convinced David Whitmer that that was the case. And then, having gotten their lukewarm, tentative, agreement, McLellin went to Kirtland where there’s a whole bunch of Latter-day Saints, who are not affiliated, really, with any particular church at that point. And he reorganizes his own church there, but it’s a Whitmerite church, that he is kind of the viceroy of. And so he makes a newspaper and he’s running this whole thing. And you know, kind of like the Whitmers get this newspaper and they’re like, “What is is going on?” So, McLellin has his own sort of Whitmerite church without the Whitmers’ say so. Anyway, meanwhile the Whitmers have, actually, at that point, have gotten a hold of Strang’s newspaper. They initially like that idea. But then, much later, like you say, Whitmer organizes his own church or reorganizes his own church. It’s actually after Oliver Cowdery comes and visits him. And they kind of make the decision that maybe they’re going to reorganize the church, because they’re the ones that actually hold the keys to the dispensation, as the witnesses. And, unfortunately, Oliver Cowdery then dies at David Whitmer’s house and so it’s not–anyway, but Whitmer goes ahead and reorganizes his own kind of Whitmerite church at that point.

GT 50:49 Do you know what year that was approximately?

John 50:55 I have to look. If I’ve got dates later in the presentation, it will be there, but it’s, like, the year, if you can look it up, the year that Oliver Cowdery dies, that’s when it would have been.

GT 51:04 Okay. So that was probably 1860s or something.

John 51:08 No, no, it’s earlier.

GT 51:10 It’s not that late?

John 51:11 Yeah, it’s…

GT 51:12 It’s in the 50s, probably?

John 51:13 Now, there’s one other person I’ll ask you why you didn’t put him on, but I guess he didn’t have an official claim, is Granville Hedrick.

John 51:13 Yeah. So, Oliver Cowdery–when he actually reorganizes, it is after. So, he organizes it later, like you say. Probably Whitmer, we’d have to look at the dates. But I would suggest that, like Oliver Cowdery actually was actually trying to activate fairly early on. So, that would have been like the late 1840s and dies at that point. And then, it’s a few years later, maybe immediately in the aftermath of when Brigham Young publicly admits that they’re all practicing polygamy, because that’s crucial moment that everybody–once that pretext is off. So the whole pretense–entirely during Nauvoo in Joseph Smith’s era was that they are actively saying they are not practicing polygamy. And that is a policy, a Church policy that Brigham Young continues up until whatever it is, 1853. And so it’s a crazy pretext. Everybody knows they’re lying. Everybody that goes to Utah can see that they’re openly practicing polygamy, but at some point or other, they admit it. And once they do, that changes everything. Everybody who was onboard and believing that it was just anti-Mormon lies about the polygamy, they all say, “That’s it. I’m not being part of this. Brigham Young has lost us.” And so that’s when William Bickerton reorganizes his Church in Pittsburgh, and that becomes the Bickertonite Church. This is the activation for the Reorganization, the Hedrickites, everybody to kind of get going, because they’re opponents of polygamy. It also totally destroys the mission and the Church in England. Suddenly, the Church population there collapses. So, that’s a huge moment of schism that happens, as well.

GT 53:09 There’s one more person. I’ll ask why you didn’t have him on, but I guess he didn’t have an official claim: Granville Hedrick.

John 53:14 So this is the 1844 alternatives. So, 1844-45. We’ll get to Hedrick and where he comes from. But, essentially, nobody, I mean, in a way, the reason why I put Strang the last on this list, nobody would have thought of Strang as a claimant at this point. But he becomes a claimant very fast. Whereas Granville Hedrick only asserts a claim much later, and so that’s why. Anyway, we’ll get to where that fits in a little bit down. Anyway, so he doesn’t make it. He doesn’t express a claim. What ends up happening is the claim retroactively for the Hedrickites is that they are an independent set of five branches in Illinois and Indiana, that do not affiliate with any of the factional churches, and they eventually come together and reorganize themselves. So, in other words, they are still a group that draws itself from 1844. But they didn’t assert an independent claim to leadership, until, again, like, that moment when Brigham Young has come out as a polygamist, when James Strang has come out as a polygamist. So, initially Granville Hedrick is in part of the conference with the other people who end up being the leaders of the Reorganization. So, when he is initially actually tasked at early Reorganization conferences to write a pamphlet and so on. But eventually, because the Hedrickites have one of the apostles who has stayed with them. He ends up convincing them that no, that they shouldn’t be part of that. And he reorganizes their church and creates Hedrick as the new chief of the apostles and so they get all new apostles.

John 55:10 Hedrick starts to receive revelations. And they decide that what the most important thing to do is to go back to Zion and reclaim the temple site there, because of the end time is coming, and they need to build the temple or reclaim the temple lot in time for the Second Coming. So, I would say he’s not a major alternative at 1844. But I get your point. It’s a group that that goes back to there. Although what’s really happening, that’s why I was showing consistently on all of those charts, the branches. The branches do all have autonomous existence. But, I would say that those Hedrickite branches, at a certain point, there’s almost certainly where they will have been affiliated nominally with the Brighamites and affiliated kind of nominally with Strangites. In other words, they are autonomous branches. They don’t have a headquarters, but they might have looked to Strang’s headquarters, or Brigham Young’s headquarters or probably both alternatively, depending on which headquarters sends missionaries, and which newspaper you get a hold of. So, essentially, you’re having your regular Sunday service and you don’t really care what’s going on at which headquarters it might be, it just continues. And then, like I say, when a Strangite missionary comes through, oh, you’re Strangites, now. When the Brighamite missionary comes and brings the Brighamite newspaper, oh, maybe we’re looking to that. And maybe different people in the congregations did one or the other. But so, they do have, let’s say, existence that goes back to 1844.

GT 56:49 Okay.

John 56:50 So like I say, in this alternative, the person who is best poised, in a way, to take leadership is Sidney Regan, who is the last surviving member of the First Presidency. Rigdon is simultaneously, at this point, Joseph Smith’s running mate, Joseph Smith’s most important venture, in his own mind in 1844, was running for president. And so he was running on his own ticket as an independent with Sidney Rigdon as his running mate. Sidney Rigdon, obviously, had been a major partner going all the way back. Nevertheless, he’s an opponent of polygamy. And so, he is not a satisfactory candidate for all of the people who are committed to polygamy. And so there are other possibilities, then. William Marks is the President of the Presiding High Council at Nauvoo. That’s essentially– there’s a separation of power that the First Presidency is over, where the Church is divided between organized stakes and the mission field. The Traveling High Council of the 12 Apostles are in charge of the mission field, and they organized the stakes are under the control of the presiding High Council, which is in Nauvoo Stake. And so, anywhere where there’s another stake, that stake High Council, well, that stake will have a high council stake. The stake high council can appeal decisions to the Presiding High Council in Nauvoo. Essentially, those are separate powers or whatever, under the First Presidency. Emma, who was friends with William Marks and who thinks–William Marks is also an opponent of polygamy. Emma very much wants William Marks to us be named the new, either President of the Church or Acting President of the Church. Marks, nevertheless, thinks that Sidney Rigdon has the best legal claim and so he supports Sidney Rigdon. So that essentially eliminate Marks’ potential claim.

John 58:59 Meanwhile, Brigham Young is, essentially, the leader as I say, of the apostles and has had charge over the mission field and he is also pretty much the leader in terms of all of the secret practices and other things. So, he is already a practicing polygamist. He is respected by all of the people who are in that kind of inner-practices group. And so for them, the people who were– really, existentially, their family life is really at stake. If Marks or Rigdon come to power and they say that all of this celestial marriage business is bogus, you’re not only just losing a doctrine, you have completely affected your family life structure. And here your daughters or sisters, these additional wives will be–this is part of Victorian times, here. They’re horribly shamed by whatever this practice was, if it’s not a true doctrine of the Church. So, they’re quite committed to making sure that an anti-polygamist doesn’t get to be the leader.

John 1:00:13 And also Brigham Young as the leader of the apostles, since the apostles are the ones that converted this entire giant swath of the British members. So, there’s a vast proportion of the population of Nauvoo are these British converts. The British converts also know the apostles, on the one hand, and two, they’re kind of completely committed. They can’t just go back to Britain. All of the old timey American converts or Canadian too, including, like William Law, they can just go back to their own family connections. He just goes off and lives in Wisconsin, and that’s fine. You know what I mean? In other words, at a certain point, they’re able to easily meld back into the American countryside, whereas these British converts are kind of stuck. I mean, they might be able to do it, but it’s much more scary. So, they’re all pretty much all jazzed up for Brigham Young.

John 1:01:10 Sidney Rigdon, also, does a really bad job with the showdown speech. And he makes a big tactical mistake. At the end of the speech–so he makes a speech. He wants to be made guardian of the Church. Brigham Young makes a speech, and he says, “We can’t have a successor. You no longer have a prophet in the flesh, but you have apostles. Let’s name the apostles to be the acting First Presidency of the Church.” Then Sidney Rigdon gets a rebuttal. But he’s feeling tired or whatever. And so, he invites a friend of his to give the speech for him. The friend has been convinced by Brigham Young and so he gives it in favor of Brigham Young. Anyway, Sidney Rigdon blows it. And so, the Council of the Twelve becomes the acting First Presidency. And the next day, Brigham Young is signing his name as Acting Church President or President of the Church. And so, within a couple of weeks, Sidney Rigdon is warned out of Nauvoo, he has to flee for his safety. And Brigham Young has been able to secure his leadership or the leadership of the Twelve, anyway, over the Church headquarters.

John 1:02:14 There are a couple other potential succession alternatives that were mentioning here. So, just the fact that Brigham Young has done that, that doesn’t mean that everybody is ready to follow him. And so, Lyman Wight, for example, had been considered, himself, probably senior to Brigham Young. He had been, like the general over Zions Camp. Most of the apostles are called because of their participation in Zions Camp. Lyman Wight stays behind and is sort of the leader in Missouri. So, he doesn’t get called into the Council of Twelve immediately. If he had been, he would be a senior member to Brigham Young, and he probably considered himself to be relatively senior to Brigham Young. He is also part of the newly restored kingdom of God on earth, the Council of 50. And he was an ambassador who has been part of the mission to Texas. And so, one of the relocation possibilities that the Council of Fifty and Joseph Smith had been considering, they’d sent ambassadors to all the nations of the world. The only one that received them was the sort of semi-dubious Republic of Texas, which is not quite a real country, but it considered itself to be a real country. It received the ambassadors from the Council of 50. And Sam Houston was perfectly ready to say, “Sure, we’ll give you guys your own kingdom. We’ll give it the border, the disputed border between Texas and Mexico. So, you can have all the land between the Nuevas River,” or whatever it is, “And the Rio Grande, and that’ll be more Mormondom.” And then that way, if there’s any war that happens between Mexico and Texas, guess where it’s going to get fought? We want a lot of Mormon cannon fodder there.

John 1:03:51 And so, Lyman Wight believes that he has sanction of the Council of 50 to do that. Brigham Young sort of agrees that everybody in the Council of 50 has been called to be a prince and they can raise up their kingdom anywhere they want. So, Lyman Wight, who has been in charge of the pineries up in Wisconsin, takes his entire Mormon colony up in Wisconsin, he completely relocates it down to the area around Austin, Texas and things like that down there, where he creates a very successful set of Mormon colonies. But he is denied bringing anybody else. So, Brigham Young does not let him take anybody from Nauvoo to do that. He can only bring his own people down there. And so, Lyman Wight does not say—he sort of agrees, “Okay, I’m fine. I’m one of the Twelve now. I’m fine with saying that there’s no First Presidency, that the Twelve are acting as a First Presidency.” But ultimately, he ends up breaking with Brigham Young when Brigham Young, three years later, creates a new First Presidency with himself at the head. So Lyman Wight is one of those people who had been in Liberty Jail. His own testimony was that he’d witnessed Joseph dictating and giving a blessing to Joseph III, that “you will be my successor.” So Lyman Wight never considered himself to be the leader, he always felt that should be waiting for Joseph III. And, indeed, at the end of his life, he’s returning, actually, to the Midwest with a bunch of his colonists. He dies along the way, but essentially, he’s investigating Joseph III’s claims as he’s come of age, and has it started in the Reorganization. Most of the Wightites end up joining the Reorganized Church as a result of that, even though they’ve been polygamous, and are doing the temple endowment, things that Joseph III is not interested in. And, so, even to this day, the President of the Presidents of 70 in Community of Christ, John Wight, is a direct descendant, then of Lyman Wight. And so that’s part of that tradition.

GT 1:03:51 Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.

John 1:04:11 Yeah. Who else have we got on here?

GT 1:04:29 I’m guessing Lyman Wight was probably older than Brigham, because I know the original quorum was, seniority was based on age.

John 1:05:57 Right.

GT 1:05:57 And so is that kind of why Lyman considered himself more senior than Brigham?

John 1:06:03 I’m remembering that to be the case. So, I think that that’s the case, right? And so I’m not sure what the order would be between–the older apostles that had either left or died. The oldest was Thomas B. Marsh, and he left. And then David W. Patten died or was killed in the Battle of Crooked River. And so, I think that Lyman Wight was up in that age range, in other words, older than Brigham Young and Heber Kimball. But then he was only ordained after the Missouri war. So in other words, therefore, he had a lower rank, because he was a more junior addition to the council.

GT 1:06:39 Because of time in the quorum.

John 1:06:41 Yeah. So of these, then, Alphaeus Cutler also is on board, with Brigham Young and the Twelve, when the Twelve are in charge. And he’s, in fact, the leader of one of the pioneer camps that goes across Iowa. And one of the places in Winter Quarters in Omaha is called Cutler’s Camp, even. And so, Cutler established himself there. But, again, he is apparently not on board with the reorganization of a new first presidency with Brigham Young in charge. And so, he refuses to go west further, and he just stays in the Iowa region. And that’s where the kind of Cutlerite tradition is going. At a certain point, in retrospect, he remembers that he was part of a special Council of Seven within the Council of 50. And so according to him, anyway, I don’t think we have a lot of other support for this. But, essentially, six other guys died. And he was the last member of the Council of Seven, and that gave him the, as he was older, right? Again, so the Council of 50, was also organized in seniority by age, except for Joseph Smith. So, again, he was up there in the ranks in the Council of 50. And so, at a certain point, he felt that he was activated to do his own kingdom building kind of thing, which he did in a town called Manti, Iowa in kind of Southwest Iowa. One of the complaints he said was, “Why should I go all the way across those mountains, when we know the end is coming? And where we’re supposed to be at the end is Jackson County, Missouri. And I can just get on a boat and go downriver from Manti, Iowa straight to Kansas City/Independence. So, that’s Alphaeus Cutler.

John 1:06:44 That’s funny, because when I hear Council of Seven, I think Anne Wilde and the polygamists, and they have their own Council of Friends.

John 1:08:18 That’s right.

GT 1:08:19 Is there any tie between those two, or is that just a coincidence?

John 1:08:25 No. I think that’s a coincidence, because I think that that Council of Seven, so that’s different, because I think that that is understood to be a council that’s created by John Taylor, right?

GT 1:08:55 Okay, yeah.

John 1:08:56 And so it is mean to preserve “the principle” [of plural marriage] in their understanding of it.

GT 1:09:01 So, they just have the same name.

John 1:09:02 It just has the same name. Essentially, the idea of this Council of Seven for Cutler, is that this is a subgroup of the Council of 50. Whereas the Council of Friends or the Council of Seven, are, essentially, alternative apostles, I think in the Fundamentalist Mormon tradition. Even though we all get lumped together, there’s a difference in the sense between the Kingdom and the Church. So, the priesthood is restored first, then the Church is restored. And finally, the Kingdom is restored. I think Alphaeus Cutler is focused on the Kingdom, as opposed to the Church. And, even to this day, the Cutlerites are interested in the Kingdom power and Kingdom stuff. And they kind of, I think, understand themselves. They don’t think of themselves–there’s only six or so of them left, and so they don’t think of themselves as being, like, the whole Church or something like that, but rather among the Latter-day Saint tradition, they are the people who are especially entrusted with some kind of Kingdom power, which, essentially when the Second Coming happens, they’re going to bring, when everybody’s re-gathered or something.

GT 1:09:37 Okay.

John 1:09:38 And then, finally, there’s James Strang, of these groups, who, again, wasn’t anybody that would be on anybody’s radar. But he later says that at the moment of Joseph Smith’s assassination, that he had an angel appear to him and had an angelic ordination. So, in the sense that it says in the Doctrine & Covenants, for example, for the sealing power, there cannot be, save it be one man hold the power at any one time on Earth. Essentially, Strang’s argument is that those keys can’t be shared out. In other words, the David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery say in their letters to each other, “The Twelve have not the keys to lead the Church into the dispensation. But we, the three witnesses,” in other words, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, especially, “have the keys.” Likewise, the Twelve say that the keys are distributed among them, and so on, and that they now can run [the Church,] even if there’s no single First Presidency, they will be able to operate the Church.

John 1:10:12 Strang says that, as you can’t distribute keys, so there can never be but, save it be one man on the earth at the time [that] has the keys. And so as soon as Joseph Smith was killed, Angel recovered the keys from Joseph Smith, he goes to heaven, and the keys then immediately passed to Strang, through angelic ordination. So, he starts to make a more, let’s say, a claim not based on longtime service in the Church, he’s a brand new convert. But rather he is able to duplicate a lot of the kind of prophetic role that Joseph Smith had had, which many of Joseph Smith’s other successors here are not doing. So, in so many ways, people have been operating in Joseph Smith’s presence and shadow, but that doesn’t mean that they were prepared. Brigham Young isn’t the kind of charismatic guy, who is the spiritually innovative, this creative thinker who is prepared to give a bunch of extemporaneous, dictate extemporaneous revelations that everybody is then really excited about following. He has other skills and so forth. But Strang is the kind of guy who could do that. And so that is familiar and comforting to a lot of the people at this time.

GT 1:11:22 Yeah, so he kind of leapfrogs over everybody with the angel.

John 1:12:39 That’s right.

Showdown Between Sidney & Brigham

John 1:12:40 Okay, so like I said, it comes to the showdown. We already talked about how that happened and how that failed. So, like I said, Emma wanted Marks to lead. Marks said no. [He points to] Sidney Rigdon, like I mentioned. All those British converts, all the polygamists were already backing Brigham Young as their candidate. A lot of people were not interested in Sidney Rigdon, in any event. And then the other reformers that would have been possible, like William Law, have already kind of left the Church. That was actually the thing that precipitated the martyrdom in the first place. In other words, the fact that the reformed Mormon Church, led by William Law was publishing their own newspaper, that got destroyed and so on.

GT 1:13:21 The Expositor.

John 1:13:22 Yeah. And so I always just put on these charts, the branches, because nobody asks anybody in the branches. But they’re out there with their own ideas, I guess. So, I had showed a different version of this chart before where, by 1835, we had had this hierarchy that exists. So, we have a Kirtland High Council, Zion High Council, Missouri presidency, 12 apostles, Missouri bishopric, Presidents of 70. There’s a Kirtland Bishop, a Presiding Patriarch, a First Presidency and so forth. What I bring this back to show is that these are all real people. So, in other words, people in 1835 have those offices. So, if we take each of those squares as a person, and fast forward to 1847, this is kind of where everybody has kind of ended up. So, the ones that I have kind of dark here, dark brown, died or were killed. The gray ones here have left and so they are no longer involved in any Mormon faction or Latter-day Saint faction. The ones that are in orange are either Brigham Young or have sided with Brigham Young. And then the ones that are blue are in some other Latter Day Saint faction or group. So, anyway, there’s a lot that are following Brigham Young, and certainly an overwhelming majority of the members in Nauvoo, who stay in the Church, follow Brigham Young west, but it doesn’t mean that all of the leaders follow him, and it also doesn’t mean that all of the members follow. Because the majority, probably of all the members in all the different branches, are not, actually, moving west. Some of them do, of course, but a lot of them are able to stay in the Midwest, where they’re not being persecuted the same way that, or not in a showdown with state authorities the way people Nauvoo are.

GT 1:15:19 So I’m trying to identify those first two on the 12 apostles would be David Marsh,

John 1:15:26 And Patten.

GT 1:15:26 In gray and then David Patten [in brown.]

John 1:15:28 Right.

GT 1:15:29 And so the third one over is Brigham Young.

John 1:15:31 Right. Then Heber Kimball.

GT 1:15:32 And then I don’t know the seniority after that.

John 1:15:33 Heber Kimball is, like, only a week or two younger than Brigham Young. So, if he’d been born three weeks earlier, he would have been the person who was the president of the Twelve. And history would be different, and it wouldn’t be…

GT 1:15:37 So there were only five that followed Brigham, basically. And Brigham was one of the five?

John 1:15:52 Of the original. By the time by the time we get to Nauvoo, a lot of those have been replaced. And so, he has plenty more of the 1844 apostles who follow him, because, in fact, the Twelve are in charge.

GT 1:16:08 Okay, these are the original Twelve.

John 1:16:09 These are the original ones. So there have been a bunch of other people like Boynton and McLellin who have left, and so forth. McLellin would be a blue one here, because he’s actually an active in a different group and so forth.

GT 1:16:24 Okay.

Rival Church Organizations 1844-53

John 1:16:25 All right. So, like I say, what ends up happening then is everybody flees Nauvoo and rival church organizations happen. Within this broad group of the Church, all the branches, like I say, the different branches will look to different headquarters organizations, the biggest of which, is the Twelve, and then after 1847, it’s led by Brigham Young, in his new First Presidency off in Utah. Like I said, on that chart, you can kind of see Cutler was kind of going halfway with them, but stayed in Iowa, and so then it’s not part of them. So the Cutlerites in Iowa. Lyman Wight went to Texas, we had mentioned. We mentioned James Strang, who’s originally in Wisconsin, and he ultimately moves to Beaver Island in Michigan, as his headquarters. Sidney Rigdon, I said was scared out of town by, warned out of town by loyalists to the apostles and so he relocates to Pennsylvania, where he reorganizes his church. David Whitmer, as I said, had a church that was kind of organized in his name in Ohio and later he reorganized as his own church in Missouri, much later.

John 1:17:34 And then additional to those are on this list here. George Hinkle has an interesting history. He was a guy who was one of the heads of the Mormon militia, the actual legitimate militia, not the Danites, in the Missouri Mormon War. And he was charged by Joseph Smith to surrender. So, the Missouri state militia is surrounding all the people in Far West and there was every chance that, actually, there could be a just a giant massacre, where the militia just kills everybody. Instead, at the end Joseph Smith negotiated total surrender, and so Hinkle surrenders. And they turn over all of the leaders. A lot of them are charged with treason, and Joseph Smith is held for that and so on. But everybody’s so upset with the defeat, that Hinkle later gets scapegoated. Joseph Smith blames him and says that he acted alone, or he wasn’t just following orders or anything like that. And so, he gets kicked out of the Church. But he had been a loyalist the whole time. So, it was news to him, right? So, he had no idea that that story changed around him. And so, he kind of had created his own kind of reformed Mormon Church, already, in Iowa in 1840.

John 1:19:06 And as I mentioned, also, there’s a reformed Mormon church that William Law, this former member of the First Presidency, has already created with the Nauvoo Expositor in Nauvoo. The other person that’s on here that does organize his own church at a certain point, a couple points, is William Smith, that last surviving adult Smith brother. So, essentially, there are rival church organizations. So what do you need to have? When you have a church organization, what you usually want to have is that entire priesthood apparatus, where you have a First Presidency, a Council Twelve. You can have a presiding this and that and all the other things. And then you want to have a newspaper, and you want to, let’s say, set up a place to start building a new temple and so on. In general, in some cases, if you’re a smaller group, you’re not trying to have a whole headquarters like Lyman Wight, you’ll maybe build like an endowment house where you have that as kind of your branch headquarters where you can continue to do temple endowments and so forth. They have the similar thing for the Cutlerites. But, essentially, in terms of competing newspapers, at a certain point, like I say, a lot of these do end up having newspapers. So, at different times, the Rigdonites have their own newspaper and so on. People, then, in the branches are able to decide which one they’re aligning with, and maybe switching between which one they’re aligning with, based on what they’re reading in the current newspaper, from the current headquarters that they’re getting a paper from.

Temple vs Endowment House

GT 1:20:39 So you think in Texas, Lyman Wight, that was an endowment house. It wasn’t a temple? Because I know Mel Johnson says…

John 1:20:49 Mel Johnson calls it a temple. Here’s the thing. Yes, it’s a temple and they probably use the word temple and same thing you can call the Cutlerite church a temple. For me, this is my own personal bias, as a Latter Day Saint. So, I do not consider the little buildings where endowments are done to be temples. I consider them to be endowment houses. And so, there’s a Detroit what the LDS Church calls a temple in Detroit, Michigan, or St. Paul, Minnesota, or Anchorage, Alaska, these are these little tiny buildings. The are cardboard, cookie cutter cutouts of each other. They are not big, substantial, impressive buildings, like the temple in Rome or something like that, that has been built more recently. So, I’m perfectly happy to say the temple in Rome is a temple, but I still think of these little ones as being kind of endowment houses. I know that they’re dedicated as temples and they can call them temples, but I’m not I don’t really give them credit for that. So that’s my own personal thing. I’m a snob about temples. You’ve got to make your temple bigger for it to count. (Chuckling)

GT 1:21:29 (Chuckling) That’s interesting. So, the Monticello Temple, you’d call that an endowment house?

John 1:22:16 Yes.

GT 1:22:18 Because it’s small. Okay, interesting.

John 1:22:21 The LDS Church has lots of really impressive temples, the Washington D.C. Temple was just one of the most impressive modern temples that has been built. I just think that architecturally, it’s amazing. But, the little ones, anyway, so I don’t–that’s my own personal thing. So yes, they’re temples. We can call it. We can say that the one in, the little building and in Texas is a temple and the Cutlerites have two temples, then, if that’s going to be the case. And then all of the little fundamentalist churches have temples, too, I guess? Actually, the fundamentalists are building a big temple in Missouri. I don’t know if you saw that.

GT 1:23:04 I haven’t heard that. Is that the AUB or somebody else?

John 1:23:07 So in Scattering of the Saints, Anne Wilde wrote the article on fundamentalist Mormonism for Newell and myself, as we were trying to get kind of more of the insider perspective on understanding fundamentalist Mormonism. And one of the things that she talked about as a very new thing, the book is now kind of old, but as a very new thing that was happening at the time, she was talking about how there was a new kind of cooperative group that is inclusive of many different fundamentalist groups, called the Missouri group or something like that, where they’ve all gathered or sent representatives to gather. It’s south of Jackson County. Why it’s not in Jackson County, I have no idea. Because it seems to me, Jackson County is huge, and it’s got lots of cheap land. Why wouldn’t you just move to Jackson County. But anyway, it’s south of Jackson County. I guess, Jackson County, at the time did go all the way to the south. So maybe they’re considering it to be what Jackson County was as of 1830 or something? I don’t know. Anyway, so I’m not sure. I just thought of that.

John 1:24:19 But anyway, it’s south of Jackson County, and they’re building a really impressive temple. I don’t have it, because it’s a secret, I guess. Somebody showed me pictures of it, and it’s got the big baptismal font with all the oxen and everything.

John 1:24:36 Yeah, They’re building a real thing you know. So, I don’t have the pictures, because people just showed it to me on their phones to show me the construction site and things like that, because it’s a secret. But I was impressed. Anyway, that’s a new thing that’s happening.

GT 1:24:53 But you don’t know which group that is.

John 1:24:55 My understanding is it’s a joint operation from multiple different fundamentalist Mormon groups, including independents, in other words, people who are independent Mormon fundamentalists. I mean, obviously, Warren Jeffs and the FLDS Church built a big, if very problematic temple in in El Dorado, Texas. Anyway, there’s a couple of smaller ones, too, that are that are less impressive. But the problem with that one is, I feel like Warren Jeffs must have taken a napkin and drawn something on the back of it or something like that. And then they built it to scale. And it is a weird building. And, of course, then it also had some other issues that are very problematic, too, because of Jeff’s works.

GT 1:25:46 Well, and I was talking to Craig Foster, and Newell Bringhurst, and they said that 85% of the people have left the FLDS right now. That temple, because it was raided, has, essentially, been desecrated.

John 1:26:03 Right, and so that temple doesn’t even count. So, it was raided, and I think that, also, because they just don’t even believe in government and law and so forth. They failed to even file that they own the property and things like that. So, I think it’s all been seized by Texas, right?

GT 1:26:18 Yeah, I believe so.

John 1:26:19 Anyway, so I’ll stop making my idiosyncratic diatribes about temples. (Chuckling) One of the things I’ve always been–so building and building communities, city planning, architecture is one of the things that I considered going into as a kid. And as a kid, I would like design temples and stake centers, and chapels and things like that, and also cities and that kind of thing. And so one of the things that I loved as, like, a 13-year-old was going to Nauvoo and seeing, building out. It’s like going to Colonial Williamsburg, which also made me excited when I was a kid. I went to see that, and so that’s why I’ve got that idiosyncratic part of me that’s a part of the tradition that appeals to me, personally.

GT 1:27:05 Well, do you know, because the state of Texas owns the FLDS temple, can anybody go visit it? Do you know?

John 1:27:12 I do not know. I would like to find that out. If someone knows and they put it in the comments, and that we can go, I’m going to go, because I…

GT 1:27:22 You need to take me, then. I guess we need to play a trip. I know I believe Craig Foster, and I want to say Brian Hales has been inside and seen the inside. But I don’t know. I should ask them, I guess.

John 1:27:38 It’d be cool if that could happen. I’ll say, like, even before the raid happened and everything like that, we were on a big, long road trip. Actually, we were going around and actually interviewing Strangites. So, we were doing research for the modern history of the Strangite Church and there are actually Strangites who are settled in Texas, not too far away from there. And it’s kind of totally coincidental because, again, the Wighties, Strangites and fundamentalists Brighamites have nothing to do with each other. These traditions are not overlapping. But a lot of people get down in Texas. Seemingly it’s a good place to go found your own church and live on your own. But, actually, the Texas government, despite this freewheeling attitude, they have a kind of a strong, “Let’s massacre everybody,” instinct. So, I’d think twice before relocating to Texas.

GT 1:27:36 With Waco.

John 1:27:37 Yeah, exactly. So, both the FLDS and the Branch Davidians didn’t do as well. So, don’t think that just because of Texas’ reputation that you’re going be able to have your own independent, freewheeling, heavily armed religious group, and you’ll get away with it. But, in any event, people do go there. And so we were there.

GT 1:28:51 Sam Houston is one success.

John 1:28:52 So, we were there, and we almost talked our way onto the compound. And so, I hadn’t pre-done it. Probably, if I’d pre-done a letter and things like that, we might have been able to get a tour. But because I had made Scattering of the Saints and because it’s actually, again, not antagonistic to different expressions, right? In other words, it is explaining that people are in schism, and so forth, I was known, including to the FLDS people. And so, we got to the gate and they called headquarters and things like that. And the problem with it was, I guess, everybody was off doing something and so they couldn’t have, there was nobody to take me around. But we almost got in there. So, I would still like to do that.

GT 1:29:41 Yeah, well, are you going to Whitmer [Conference]? Because it’s in Fredericksburg. It might be far away.

John 1:29:45 Right, yeah, once you’re there, you might as well go.

GT 1:29:56 We’ll do the post conference tour or something.

Schismatic Map

John 1:30:00 Okay. Here’s some of my maps. And so, this is the traditional Mormon history map that everybody will be familiar with. This is coming out. It would have come out of a bunch of textbooks, even a regular American high school textbook, that shows essentially, how did a church that was founded in upstate New York get to Salt Lake City, right? And so this is usually done on a map of the contemporary United States. And so, therefore, it’s missing the fact that there isn’t this context. So, when they go to Far West, this is the end of the settler frontier, right? So it’s on the border with the Lamanites, on the border of the permanent Indian Territory, where in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson, has been relocating all of the eastern tribes immediately west of the line into what is now Kansas, what was then the unorganized Indian territory. And so, the gathering of the Lamanites, the gathering of the Native Americans/Lamanites, as they were understood by the early members, they thought was an End Times sign.

John 1:31:15 And that’s why they also identified Independence, not as the center of the continent or the center of the country, anyway, it was actually at the far extreme frontier of the country, at that time period. And so, I’ve also kind of been showing how, when I’m talking about this before, there wasn’t just one place where the Church in New York was. It was scattered branches and things like that, who coalesced together for headquarters in Kirtland, and that Kirtland and the Missouri periods were happening mostly simultaneously, which is why there’s multiple, even though they’re very close together, between Jackson County, Clay County and Caldwell County, and there were continuing migrations from headquarters, and Kirtland, where land was expensive. Because it would have already been settled a generation before, to the frontier, where part of the American dream of the 19^th century was the government was stealing land directly from Indians and selling it to settlers for cheap. So, anybody could clear land and make their own 40-acre or 80-acre farm, and essentially have the American dream of being a subsistence farmer.

John 1:32:17 And so Zion worked best when land was cheap. And so in Kirtland, people couldn’t move there. Because of the land was too expensive to buy up. They had a plat to build the city of Kirtland the same as they had for Independence, for Far West, for Adam-ondi-Ahman and so forth, for Nauvoo. But they weren’t even able to own, buy up all the farms around Kirtland to actually ever build the plat. So, there’s only a few blocks and streets that still exist, to this day, of what the plant was.

John 1:32:59 But when they get to Missouri, if they hadn’t immediately gone nuts and tried to take over the whole northwest of the state, if they had gotten, just built up and actually been there for a while and built all the farms in Caldwell County and so forth, I think that would have been very difficult to actually push anybody out. Because at a certain point it wouldn’t have just been fresh settlers and so forth. There was land to be had and they were able to occupy, again, the whole county and later they would have been able to move into the other counties, if, once they were actually established.

John 1:33:34 It was the same thing. Nauvoo is a little bit of a step back. So the land is semi-settled. They’re able to buy a plat, but they’re not able to have all of the whole farmland and the hinterlands because there’s already farmers there and there’s already existing towns like Carthage, that they become rivals of. And so, they would have been better served if they had moved to the Iowa territory, which was the original plan. And it might have been very difficult to kick them out, if they had been on the other side of the border. But they’re wooed to moving into Illinois by politicians who are trying to coax the refugees in, in order to tip the balance between the Whigs and the Democrats. And Joseph Smith is very happy to play that game. Unfortunately, they grow tired of him because he won’t become a block for either one of them and actually, he plays both of them off against each other and they ultimately decide to wash their hands of the Mormon vote as too problematic.

John 1:34:30 We also should note here that as the migration is happening for Brigham Young and so forth, this is happening at the time of the Mexican War. And so, they’re moving outside of the boundaries of the United States, as they’re going, with the intention of, essentially, just like Lyman Wight is trying to go to that border land between Texas Republic and Mexico, in order to have their own independent kingdom, be free of the United States. Brigham Young would like to also leave, but the war takes place at the same time and the US, then, annexes all the land around them, and they’re find themselves American again.

John 1:35:18 In addition to that, though, one of the things that we don’t normally see is the fact that there was a bunch of places that people went. In other words, it doesn’t everybody doesn’t just end up in Salt Lake. There is the motion of Sidney Rigdon and his group, back to Pittsburgh and the gathering of the Wighties knights down to Zodiac, the Strangites to Wisconsin and Michigan, the Cutlerites, going across the plains, and then being in Manti there in Iowa, and later going to Minnesota, before ending up finally in Missouri. And then, finally, also on there, the Reorganization staying in Nauvoo, around Illinois and so forth, and then eventually to Iowa. And finally, back to Jackson County. Anyway, so those are still keeping the details. And it’s, again, very simplified, but just to show that original map is leaving out a lot of details.

GT 1:36:00 Right, yeah, definitely. I like this map, it’s cool.

John 1:36:05 So what’s some of the aftermath of this? So I brought back my colors code here, just to remind people of New York kind of blue, green in Kirtland and Missouri period, yellow, the overt practices that are developed by Nauvoo and the secret practices in orange. When the succession crisis happens, when different people go different ways, when, again, the Church and even families break apart because different people who are fervent believers in the movement have different things that they consider essential, there are at least three different broad categories I like to propose here as a model. And obviously, all models are simplifications. But there are three different, let’s say, broad ways to envision, “What’s the true Mormonism?” In other words, now that Joseph Smith has gone, how can we continue what we’ve already started. And so, there’s three categories, broadly. I call [these categories,] essentially, purification, which is to say, “We need to restore the Church back to the way it was at an earlier time. Obviously, this is a catastrophe that Joseph Smith has been killed. Why did this happen?” Well, the Church went off the rails at different times, as far as these people are thinking, anyway. People whose intent is or whose idea is that we need to purify and get back to an old kind of restoration experience. So they’ll say, “Well, it was obviously a mistake to destroy that newspaper. It was a mistake to initiate polygamy and some of these other practices. It was a mistake when we took up arms and had our own militia, or even when we took up arms for Zion’s Camp, and so forth. It was a mistake when we changed the name of the Church. It was a mistake when we multiplied these priesthood practices or priesthood offices and things like that.” In other words, you keep on rolling back the onion until you decide [it’s] back to a stage that you liked better. So that’s one way.

John 1:38:10 Another way is, we got the fullness of the gospel. In a lot of cases, we’re pretty confident that the end of the time is coming pretty soon. A lot of people are confident that it is only going to be within 10-20 years. And they’ve done the math, based on some of Joseph Smith’s prophecies, and so forth. And they’re pretty confident that it’s going to be like, the early 1890s is the last possible moment, for this to happen. So it’s going to be within a lot of our lifetimes.

John 1:38:36 Like I say, Alphaeus Cutler says, “Hey, I’m not crossing those stupid mountains, only to have to cross them again, I’m just going to stay here by the river and sail a boat down, even barge down to Jackson County, because the end is happening.” So, these folks are kind of saying, “We’ve got the fullness of the gospel. The prophet’s testimony has been sealed with their blood. We now need to hold on and preserve, exactly as it’s been, what we’ve got here in 1844, until the end of the dispensation, which is very soon.”

John 1:39:14 And then, finally, there’s a group who was like, “Hey, did you remember how the Church evolved from blue, to green, to green to yellow, to orange? I signed up for continuing revelation. I signed up for this kind of dynamism of, as things are going on, there’s a prophet who is speaking to God and telling us how we should react to the next thing. I’m not sitting around and going to either start going backwards, or start being static, which is its own new, completely different experience. The experience that I’ve had has been continual change. And, so, therefore, I want that same experience to continue.” And so, I think that those are very legitimate, broad strokes/ways that people who are believing Latter Day Saints or at certain point if they don’t like the name Latter Day Saint, because they don’t like the change of the name, in some cases. So, [this is how] believing participants in the Restoration, understand the true essence of the Church.

{end of Part 1}

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