Introduction and Episode Overview

Part 1 of 4 · Ep. 426

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John Dehlin and we're in the middle of a three part series on Mormon Stories. The first two hours of this series were spent with the wonderful John Hamer, who is a former member of the LDS Church, a current member of the Community of Christ, and we talked quite extensively about his journey, sort of, well, his appreciation for the church as a youth and as an adolescent, but his, his decision to leave the church and what brought him back into Mormonism as a culture and ultimately what led him back into a position of what I would call faith and into his decision to actually join or affiliate with the Community of Christ, which was formerly named the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And it was sort of a competing branch of the Restoration that came out of Joseph Smith's martyrdom. And the Community of Christ is a fascinating church and I started following them a few years ago when I met Bill Russell and I even released one of his interviews or speeches on the podcast. But the Community of Christ is fascinating for a more multiple set of reasons. Not only is it sort of impossible to be a member of the LDS Church without really, oh well, it's impossible to fully appreciate LDS Church history without understanding, I believe, the Community of Christ history because I believe they're interwoven and we'll probably see that today, but I also believe that the Community of Christ is just this inspirational example of not only staying true to many of Joseph Smith's fundamental teachings about ongoing revelation and an open camp canon and many other types of things that we'll talk about, but also it feels to me as though the reorganized Church sort of encountered and stared head on many of the intellectual and cultural issues in the 60s and 70s that the LDS Church is only getting around to facing, you know, in the 2000 teens. And, you know, the Community of Christ is still making positive changes recently, even as recently as the past couple years. And in many ways, I guess if we as LDS Church members want to see our future or learn about how we might optimally navigate our future, we have a lot to learn from the Community of Christ. So for all those reasons for, for the next Hour or two, we are going to have this amazing presentation by John hamer. It's on YouTube. So those of you who are just listening through audio, you're going to miss out on the full experience if you don't watch the YouTube version, because John Hamer is a gifted map maker and a gifted graphic designer. And every one of these historical points that we're going to cover is going to help, is going to have visual aids that really help us understand the history of the community of Christ and in many ways, the history of the LDS Church. And so we're going to cover that for the next hour or two, and then we're going to conclude with a discussion about where the community of Christ is. Now they have an exciting new program to reach out to people who no longer feel like they can maintain affiliation with the LDS Church. And personally, I'm just a fan of faith. I'm a fan of religious affiliation when it works for people. And so I want to make sure people know about it because it's very relevant and I think it means to do really good things and I would love to see it succeed. So with all of that, John Hamer, welcome back to Mormon Stories.

John Hamer [00:04:36] Thanks, John. That was a great introduction. And hopefully, I think when I had done a lot of the different study of the different smaller Latter Day Saint tradition churches and I could talk about, say, strangites and cutlerites and people I think are endlessly fascinating, they want to know more about cutlerites. But then if you ever start talking about the reorganized Church, people I think are either they have a negative opinion or they think it's going to be boring. They're bored by the idea of it. But I think that I like your introduction. I think that in fact, not only is it a fascinating story, but it is totally intertwined with the lds, mainline LDS story and actually had a lot of effect on where the Mormon Church is today, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:05:21] And I'll just say that I was as inspired when I read about how the community of Christ handled its intellectual and cultural issues starting in the 60s. I was as inspired by its history as I was by, I don't want to say Martin Luther King Jr. But, you know, Malcolm X or, you know, many great historical figures who we know as doing very courageous and bold things. I sort of look at the community of Christ or the reorganized Church as, in some ways, an institutional embodiment of character and integrity and a love of truth and of honesty. And I'm deeply inspired by them to this day. And so, yes, I, I urge my listeners to give this history their full attention and consideration because there's much to be inspired by here. How's that?

John Hamer [00:06:21] Perfect.

John Dehlin [00:06:22] All right, so we've got these Visuals. We're on YouTube for those who want to watch. Got some beautiful pictures, but let's launch in. John, I'll just, I'll just have a. I'll just have you tell me next slide or next image. And that'll be my cue to advance it here as I'm navigating this multimedia production.

John Hamer [00:06:42] All right, so I just have it up on my side, too. And so I'll just look at where I'm at.

John Dehlin [00:06:45] Okay, excellent.

The Constellation of Latter Day Saint Traditions

John Hamer [00:06:47] So after the title slide, I think we go right into this idea that I have just as an introduction. So I have talked to, I talk about the history of the different Latter Day Saint tradition churches, the many churches that exist within the overall banner or the overall religion of Mormonism. And when I do that, I find that actually in a general audience, there's very little awareness that there are multiple denominations within that religion. So then a lot of times I bring up, okay, well here, if you never have thought about that before and maybe even. And a lot of people in the mainline church, the LDS Church, haven't thought about it too much. They may have been just. There may have been some awareness more recently with news like Warren Jeffs of the raid down in El Dorado, Texas, where the polygamists, the children were taken from the polygamists by the Texas authorities. There may be some awareness that, okay, there are a group of people who are practicing polygamy who are a Mormon tradition faith, but obviously who aren't in the same church that, say, Mitt Romney is in, or the people who are the young men who, in tus, you know, riding bicycles up to your door and knock on your door and want to ask you about the Mormon Church. So there's obviously at least that much of a difference. And then there is some awareness sometimes, especially in the Mormon Church. Well, there are also these reorganized Mormons and there's something about, you know, I heard something about them. They changed their name Community of Christ. Maybe. There may not be too much more awareness than that, though.

John Dehlin [00:08:33] And sometimes, as you kind of referred, I always thought of the Ralds church prior to becoming more informed as kind of the losers. They're like these, you know, these kind of step cousins that really aren't legitimate and they totally lost, but they're still trying to maintain their legitimacy. But it is its own very rich tradition with very inspirational sort of cultural elements and historical happenings.

John Hamer [00:09:05] Well, you're definitely your poor cousin. Right. So there's the rich cousin that has, you know, and then there's cousins who, let's say, have a different tradition of tithing paying where you don't have to pay 10% before taxes, and so therefore they don't have any. Your cousins who don't have any money. That doesn't mean they don't have, like you say, a rich tradition that goes all the way back to the same starting point.

John Dehlin [00:09:32] Yeah. And much that we can learn and be inspired from. Yep.

John Hamer [00:09:37] So let's go on to the next one. And so what I actually then would like to point out is that in fact, in the, what I might call the constellation of Mormonism or the denominations that make up Latter Day Saint tradition churches, there are in fact, lots of different churches that are not in communion with each other. And so obviously, the one that everyone is very aware of, the LDS Church, and I usually use that. I'll use that terminology, even though Latter Day Saint is somewhat common to the whole movement. I'll just say LDS church to refer to the church that's headquartered in Salt Lake City that Thomas S. Monson is the president of. The LDS Church has millions of members. The Community of Christ who we're talking about today, it has hundreds of thousands of members, so it's much smaller. But then there are a group of churches that have in the thousands. And so these include some of the ones that we're aware of. So the FLDS Church, which is one of the fundamentalist Mormon churches, polygamous churches, and then also other Midwestern churches, including the Temple Lot Church, that people may be aware of because of their strategic location on the Temple Lot in Independence, some of the other churches. And so in general, as we kind of try to count them up, there's perhaps today 80 different expressions that are not in communion with each other, but are still large enough to have an active congregation. So there's many more than that, if you're going to count expressions down to the individual person who is not in communion with anybody, but may still be a restoration believer of some kind. But it's impossible at a certain point to start. There's people. Steve Shields has a book called Diversion Paths of the Restoration, and he does a heroic task of trying to get down to every individual person who's an independent believer. But I try to group it here to people who have an expression that's large enough that they have a church.

John Dehlin [00:11:35] Got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:11:38] Okay. So in the next slide, then, so when we think about this, then what do these all have in common as a religion? And so at their origin, these all go back to restoration. They all go back to the publication of the Book of Mormon and also to one of the founders of the movement, the founding prophet, Joseph Smith. And so let's go on. But Joseph Smith, during his lifetime, during his ministry as a leader of the early church. This is kind of my attempt to make. It's more of a. It's a timeline and kind of a schematic diagram map of the church during Joseph Smith's ministry. So the church isn't just in one particular place. It's not just one thing that's exactly the same throughout the entire time period. It's a thing that is where its headquarters is moving. It's moving from New York to Kirtland to Missouri to Nauvoo. What we often don't think about when we just have a very simplified map is that throughout almost the entire Kirtland period, there is another simultaneous nucleus of believers that are existing in Missouri. So that the Missouri period and the Kirtland period more or less overlap the whole time. And ultimately then the Nauvoo period. And then the thing that always gets left out whenever historians are telling the story of the church, I mean, we tend to write this thing as if it was just Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith. The story of the church is the Joseph Smith story. But if the story is told in any wider way, it's talking about the headquarters location and what's going on at headquarters. But throughout the entire period of time, the bulk of the membership is going to be spread around in all of these little branches throughout the Midwestern and eastern United States especially, and ultimately in Britain and other places like that, where local members are organized into congregations called branches. And one of the things I'm showing here with this diagram is that as more and more things are being revealed, as the prophet is constantly restoring things or adding new practices, and as the church is evolving, I'm doing that by color here, from kind of a New York blue era to ultimately kind of a Nauvoo yellow era, that the people. Let's say if you're with Joseph Smith in Kirtland, you're getting different teachings than the people the 800 miles away down in Missouri are getting. And so then when the church in Kirtland collapses and Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and the other leaders make it to Missouri, that changes. There's a big, abrupt thing that happens. So all the witnesses of the church all the leaders of the church in Missouri get kicked out at that moment. And then likewise, what I'm showing then with the branches is if you're just experiencing this by missionaries coming through every once in a while, and also by receiving the church newsletter, newspapers, the Times and Seasons and the preceding newspapers, your awareness of where the church is at, especially in Nauvoo, when Joseph Smith is taking a select inner core and teaching practices in secret to them, you are not on the same page with what's happening in the immediate circle of Joseph Smith out in the branches.

How the Early Church Changed Under Joseph Smith

John Dehlin [00:15:01] And I don't know if you're planning on covering this as well, but it's just important to realize how much the church changed just from the time of 1830 to Joseph's martyrdom. So for example, a really basic thing that I didn't know for many years was that the actual name of the church itself changed.

John Hamer [00:15:21] Is that true? Oh, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:15:23] So like give us an example.

John Hamer [00:15:24] Well, so we'll have. There is at the end because the RLDS church has a couple additional name changes, right? So I will have that. But just as a simple one, when the church is founded or when the church is organized because we use the word, it was important to them that it wasn't founded. It was simply the existing Church of Christ from ancient time, you know, from first century Palestine had fallen into disorder. It had been called Church of Christ, the Church of Christ. And so as restorationists, influenced by other restorationists like Alexander Campbell, who also believed that the church should only be called by that scriptural name, Church of Christ. That was the name that the church was organized under in New York. Unfortunately, the that name was taken by a lot of people, especially the Disciples of Christ, the Church of Christ that Alexander Campbell had founded. And so everybody who wasn't in the church immediately called the people in the church Mormons or Mormonites, which nobody ever liked. And to this day, a lot of the different Latter Day Saint tradition churches reject the name Mormon, including Community of Christ. Which people in Community of Christ don't think of themselves as being Mormons, but it is always an exterior name. And there's a kind of a love hate relationship that people in the LDS Church have had with it at different times. So I know that my great grandparents, which were who were old members, they would always write Mormon in quotes, you know, when they were saying Mormons, right. They didn't, they didn't consider that to be their name. So in possibly in a way to, in a way to combat this being called Mormons thing They decided in Kirtland right before they went out on the science camp military march to try to restore the people to Jackson county who'd been kicked out of Jackson County, Missouri. Right before this long 800 mile militia march, they changed the name of the church to Church of the Latter Day Saints. So that was the second name of the church, Church of the Latter Day Saints. And so that created this new brand identity, Latter Day Saint, which that has been, let's say, more widely embraced by most of the branches. But for a whole bunch of people, that change was, that was, that was totally unscriptural. So suddenly, Christ to church. This original church, which was known scripturally as the Church of Christ, now it's the Church of the Latter Day Saints. This is the exact problem why we don't believe the Presbyterian Church is the right church. The Church of Christ is not called the Methodist Church, it's called the Church of Christ. And so this was rejected by many people. And so many times when early Saints, they didn't call themselves saints. When the early members of the church rejected that, they would go back and they would rename the church Church of Christ, which is the original name. So as a compromise In Missouri in 1838, the new name got founded by Revelation. So Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And even then, the spelling isn't standardized until after Joseph Smith's death. So in Utah, that ends up becoming ladder dash, little D, Saints Day Saints. And then in other churches like the Reorganized Church, it's space, no dash, big capital D, Day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. So anyway, it's a complicated, messy thing, but the main point there, as I think your point you were making, is the church itself during Joseph Smith's lifetime. It's a moving target. It's not all in one place. It's not all one thing. There's new things that are happening. And you cannot. No one church after Joseph Smith's death can embrace the entire Joseph Smith experience because there's, there's too many competing things.

John Dehlin [00:19:08] Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to extend this too long, but I mean, even if you look at the doctrine and theology in the Book of Mormon, that probably maps relatively closely to the doctrine and the theology of Kirtland. It is very different and in some ways, you know, oppositional to a lot of the doctrine and theology we'd find in Nauvoo. And we all think that Joseph, you know, with the Aaronic priesthood and the Melchizedek priesthood, that that was all laid out from the very beginning, and that there were deacons and teachers and priests 12, 14 and 16 passing the sacrament. And, you know, the Melchizedek priesthood was really clear in reality. You know, the first several years of the church, as I understand it, no one even knew anything about the Melchizedek priesthood or its foundings. And many of the really early church leaders were surprised when they heard Joseph claim that he had been visited by Peter, James and John, because no one knew about that. And so major, major fundamental changes, even within five year periods within Joseph Smith's lifetime.

John Hamer [00:20:22] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:20:23] Okay, so I don't want to belabor that point, but I just, I think that's important.

John Hamer [00:20:26] Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's really important. I think that's a great point to make. And so all those things like you say, so if you were a person like David Whitmer, who signed up for a very early phase of Mormonism, over time a lot of these things started becoming uncomfortable to you. So he was a restorationist. He believed in this name, the Church of Christ. He actually is converted to Mormonism before there is a Book of Mormon. Right. So he's converted during the translation period. And so he is very kind of, it's important to him, the seer stone portion, the receiving revelation through stones. And so later when he gets kicked out of the church in Missouri, he ultimately, he continues to be a believing member, a believing, faithful adherent to the restoration. He wouldn't call it to the Latter Day Saints because he doesn't approve of that name change. And later when he restores or reorganizes his own church, a Whitmerite Church of Christ, he calls it the Church of Christ. And one of the things that David Whitmer does in that is the Church of Christ has as a practice receiving revelation through seer stones. And so he and the other church members in his Whitmerite church, you know, continue to emphasize then that that early portion of Mormonism, that kind of New York period, and not obviously wasn't even around for the Nauvoo period.

John Dehlin [00:21:54] Yeah. And another example would be that the, the original Book of Commandments actually forbade polygamy explicitly, which is very different from the way polygamy was allowed, you know, in the, in the early 1840s.

John Hamer [00:22:07] Right, well, so it's the original. Well, the Book of Mormon condemns it.

John Dehlin [00:22:11] Right?

John Hamer [00:22:12] That's right. And the Book of Mormon actually, that quotation from the Book of Mormon was actually the very first. So the RLDS church essentially is the anti polygamy faction of the early church. And so the anti polygamy faction of the early church, when they published their first newspaper, what they call the True. It's a very argumentative, polemical title. The True Latter Day Saints Herald, which is now just called the Herald. The masthead, above the masthead is this quotation from the the Book of Mormon that there shall be none among you that have be, save it one wife and of concubines you shall have none, or something. Right, right. It's like a quotation for the Book of Mormon. And that was the masthead. It was so important. And then, like you say, the Doctrine and Covenants, There's a section in the Doctrine and Covenants which was the section on marriage which says, inasmuch as this church has been beset with rumors about polygamy, we declare that it's only right to have, you know, like, one man and one woman or whatever as marriage. Right. And so that was in the original Doctrine and Covenants, and that was in the Doctrine and Covenants in the Utah Church all the way up until way later than you'd imagine. I can't. I don't know the exact date, but it's in the 50s or 60s or something. When they take that section out and add DNC132 in the LDS doctrine and covenants into that.

John Dehlin [00:23:26] Yeah, that's right. That's right. But these are sometimes oppositional doctrines or teachings.

John Hamer [00:23:32] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:23:32] Depending on what point of the church you're in. Okay, I've deterred this long enough. Let's keep going.

Core Tensions and Contradictions in Early Mormonism

John Hamer [00:23:36] Yeah, well, so, okay, so that brings us right into the next slide. So, okay, so that's because, okay, there are these just tensions that exist inherently in Mormonism. So on the one hand we have continuing revelation, but on the other hand, we have this notion that the revelation is the restoration of an ancient order of things. And so that every single thing that we may have revealed at any given time actually is this thing that has existed for all times. And so then the problem then is if you restore the name of the church has to be Church of Christ, and then you later restore that the name is Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which of those is the ancient order of things. If you restore that all of the offices of the church are complete as priesthood, which is teacher, priest, and elder, and that's it. And then you later, like you point out, okay, well, no, in fact, elder is part of this Melchizedek priesthood, and we also have high priests, and we also have all These other. Other offices that aren't in the Scriptures, for example, which one of those was the ancient order of things. And so that is the tension that affects people throughout the entire dynamic period of Joseph Smith's ministry, when revelation, in some cases an innovation, are a mile a minute. So just going on and on and on. And things are very different in 1844 than they were when David Whitmer had joined the church. And then the simultaneous thing that we have here also, though, is this idea that there is one prophet and then there's also personal revelation that everybody's receiving. And that's continuously also a tension, you know, where people like David Whitmer believed that everybody could be receiving revelations. And at a certain point, you know, there's some different. There's different tests of will and power, tests where at some point in order to function, Joseph Smith slowly asserts more and more and more control in the course of those 14 years, where more authority and more control is in the hands of the single prophet, the president of the church.

John Dehlin [00:25:46] And that may have even started with Hyman Page. Right, right.

John Hamer [00:25:50] All the way back. All the way back, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:51] Right.

John Hamer [00:25:51] So, I mean, at first there's this idea that's actually very kind of inclusive to this revelation, to Oliver Cowdery. You have the gift of doing this, too. You can be the one. You can be inspired and be providing inspired translation or composition of the Book of Mormon text itself. But then soon after the organization or in the next little phase when there's Hiram Page, who's one of the other Whitmer in laws, is taking, taking that license and maybe now potentially injecting chaos into the church by. If everybody is all receiving these revelations, is there any, you know, individual. Is there a focus?

John Dehlin [00:26:37] Right, right.

John Hamer [00:26:37] It's a tension.

John Dehlin [00:26:38] These are great tensions.

John Hamer [00:26:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:40] Okay. And I would even add, maybe, I don't want to add to your slide, but I think Joseph, not only one other tension might have been Joseph as leader versus having multiple leaders and distributed authority within the church. And even the tensions between the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency in the modern LDS Church, there seems to be tension about to what extent are we going to distribute authority in the church. Right, right.

John Hamer [00:27:07] Oh, yeah. That totally could fit into the one prophet personal revelation thing, which is existing right at the beginning, which is the prophet, is the prophet and is receiving revelation for the Church. On the other hand, there's the idea that the church is entirely organized by common consent.

John Dehlin [00:27:21] Right.

John Hamer [00:27:23] And so where is that line, too? Is the line closer to whatever Theo Democracy. Or is it closer to theo viceroyality, where the prophet is the vicar or the viceroy of Christ on earth? Or is it where the people are democratically all receiving revelation together as God's constitutional monarchy?

John Dehlin [00:27:46] Yeah, yeah. And the remnants of that is just in the modern LDS Church, where we all sustain people, but you never hear an objection, and the votes don't seem to really count. So there's sort of this.

John Hamer [00:27:56] And the alternate way that that could be taken is what happened in Community of Christ, which is that when our, you know, we have our General Conference, which now is called World Conference, that everybody who goes to General Conference is not just going to a big church meeting. It's rather in every local. They're called mission centers now. But anyway, functionally, it'd be like stakes or mission districts of the church. They send delegates to the conference, and the conference itself has motions. And the conference itself is essentially the supreme governing body of the church. So more emphasis anyway on the common consent side of it, as opposed to the rule of the prophet directly.

John Dehlin [00:28:38] And the votes are actually tallied and counted, right?

John Hamer [00:28:42] Absolutely. Oh, yeah. And motions pass and fail and all that kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:28:47] Yeah. Okay, cool. All right.

Shifting Hierarchies and Church Structure in the 1830s

John Hamer [00:28:50] All right. So here's another illustration. So we talked about in the next slide. So we talked about the name of the church changing another one. We just touched on this. So this is like a contrast between the 1830 hierarchy and what had emerged by 1835. So we mentioned that with the emergence of the different priesthood offices. And so initially, we really only have, when the church is organized, we have elders, priests, and teachers. Elders are equivalent or said to be equivalent of apostles. So all the elders who are going around are functionally apostles. And their only position that we have in terms of hierarchy is that in a kind of undifferentiated or not particularly explained way, Joseph Smith is the first elder among the elders. First among equals or something, possibly. And then Oliver Cowdery is like the second elder among the elders.

John Dehlin [00:29:40] So elder isn't elder in the original usage of. It was not a Melchizedek priesthood office, first of all.

John Hamer [00:29:47] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:29:48] And I don't see deacons here at all.

John Hamer [00:29:50] There were no deacons yet. That's later.

John Dehlin [00:29:52] Yeah. That's crazy. And so there's no mention of Melchizedek priesthood in those first five years.

John Hamer [00:30:00] Well, I don't know the exact timeline. It's like there's a. Okay, so what ends up happening is at some point or other, there's a difference between the higher priesthood and a lower Lesser priesthood. And so that's like the. So initially in a later evolution between these two pieces. So I'm doing here between 1830 and 1835, there are some transitional moments in between. And so what ends up happening is there's what's called a higher priesthood, which ultimately becomes like the Melchizedek priesthood. But first, there's no difference between being a high priest and just holding the higher priesthood. So later, the higher priesthood is equated with the Melchizedek priesthood. And then elder gets moved from being in the lesser priesthood to being into the higher priesthood, which is the Melchizedek priesthood.

John Dehlin [00:30:49] The office of elder gets promoted.

John Hamer [00:30:51] Right? Yeah, well, after having been demoted. Right. So, yeah. And so then, anyway, just like you say, fast Forward here to 1835, you know, this structure is wildly different. So we have now a first presidency, you know, three presidents, the president and two counselors. We have presiding patriarch or evangelist. Those terms are used interchangeably. We have these councils of high priests who we now have in the LDS Church. There's retained in the form of stake high councils and also the 12 apostles. And so there is the Headquarters High Council at Kirtland, there's the High Council of the Church at Missouri, and then there's the Traveling High Council of the Church, which are the 12. And so they are in charge of things that are even. They're even in charge of, like, the budget. They're in charge of anything that's like a court case, the presidency. At some points, if they want to have funding for something or if they want to build a temple or something like that, they go to the high Council and the High Council votes to approve funds or something like that. So there's things that the high councils are doing that we don't have as much anymore. You know, there's this presidency of the Church in Missouri, which is the forerunner of stake presidencies that have emerged. There's bishops that have emerged at the time. Bishops are not the leaders of congregations. The bishops are financial officers. They're in charge of the temporal affairs. Because the church is also having economic communal experiments. And so the bishops and bishoprics are in charge of property. And then the apostles in the 70s are specifically in charge of the missionary program.

John Dehlin [00:32:24] What would an 1835 Mormon call the head of their congregation?

John Hamer [00:32:28] You would either say pastor or you would say presiding elder or branch president. And so I think that it's crazy.

John Dehlin [00:32:37] I had no idea.

John Hamer [00:32:42] One of the things that the churches usually, when Mormons hear about anything that community of Christ does That's different from what happens in Utah. Then people immediately assume that the community of Christ is the one that has changed because you always assume that what you're doing is exactly the same all the way back. Talking about 12 year old deacons and stuff. Well, deacons are not 12 years old until Utah. That's a Utah innovation. Deacons were regular adult members in all the different branches, spread all around male members.

John Dehlin [00:33:13] And in some ways it's the Utah Church that's changed, not the community of church.

John Hamer [00:33:17] That part changed. Yeah. And then same thing with pastors. So if you read the article of faith that we believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, these apostles, priests, pastors. Pastors is one of those things that's in that list. Except for there are no pastors. Right. And the LDS Church, even though that's in the article of faith. Yeah, article of faith. Right. Well, so anyway, so that's a change. And same thing, the presiding patriarch, that's now been phased out in the LDS Church. And then also, for example, the first presidency here, the council itself has no relationship to the Council of twelve Apostles, which is a completely different body. But now the First Presidency in the LDS Church is the senior. The president itself of the First Presidency is the senior most apostle. And then they pick counselors, traditionally now based from the other members of the 15 apostles.

John Dehlin [00:34:14] Yeah, yep. Yeah. Radically different structures, even within a five year period.

John Hamer [00:34:19] Yeah. So that's what I'm just trying to say here in this case is that there is a, this is a moving target. And if you want to, you know, it is completely possible, like David Whitmer did when I was talking about the Whitmerite Church, to want to go back and replicate to the original organization and say that is in this grab bag of Mormon heritage. And that was a completely legitimate thing that I remember doing that I felt that I found was spiritually meaningful. And that's what my Whitmerite Mormon Church is going to emphasize.

John Dehlin [00:34:48] Right, Got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:34:50] Okay, so next slide. So this thing here is, this is kind of a, kind of a crazy one. So let's take those people. If we're one of those things that were green on the preceding slide where we have the First Presidency, the Missouri Presidency, the Apostles, the Kirtland Bishop, everybody, if we go then, and we go Fast forward to 1847 when Brigham Young in Council Bluffs reorganizes his faction and creates a new First Presidency for the first time. So in this interregnum that happens after the martyrdom he has been functioning as acting church president for the Nauvoo Church, and he's been busily moving everybody to the West. In the meantime, though, there hasn't been a functional first presidency. So when he decides that they are going to reorganize and have a new first presidency, what I've done here then is taken all of Those people from 1835 and tracked them and said, well, where were they all? And so among those 1835 people, the ones here that are orange, those are people that are still with, or they're with Brigham Young. The ones here that are blue are people that are in some other faction of the religion. The people in the kind of gray color are people that have left the religion altogether. And then obviously, the ones here that are dark are people who have died. So obviously, Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith's father, Edward Partridge. Some of these other people have died.

John Dehlin [00:36:22] And sort of what this is conveying for those who don't have this beautiful graphic is just that in 12 years, you know, a third have died, a third have gone on to other branches of Mormonism or have left Mormonism, and a third remained with Brigham.

John Hamer [00:36:38] Right, right, exactly. So, in other words, it's a complicated story. It's not just. We have this impression that I think, especially if you're in the LDS Church, that there's just one very straight and narrow path that is the entire flow of the whole thing. But it's a much more complicated story. If you're looking and you take of the original 12 apostles in 1835, a total of five of them are with Brigham, including Brigham.

John Dehlin [00:37:06] Right, right, yeah. It's more a fourth. They're deceased. A fourth left Mormonism, a fourth are members of other branches, and a fourth state with Brigham. Yeah, yeah. That's about a 25% retention rate.

John Hamer [00:37:19] Or we also might say joined with Brigham.

John Dehlin [00:37:21] Right, right, right.

John Hamer [00:37:22] On your perspective.

John Dehlin [00:37:24] Yeah, got it. Okay, good.

John Hamer [00:37:26] All right, so that's like a lot of, let's say, the preface. And so when we're talking about all of the different division and schism, the number one moment over and above the collapse of the church in Kirtland or the Mormon Missouri War, or any of these other things that happened during Joseph Smith's lifetime, the martyrdom event is the key thing that caused the succession crisis and the bulk of the different breakup of the different denominations that continue to this day. So, in fact, none of the denominations that were founded before the martyrdom continue to exist. So all of the main branches that exist today Trace themselves back to Division at 1844.

John Dehlin [00:38:14] Got it.

The Smith Family and Succession Questions

John Hamer [00:38:16] Okay, so next thing here. So the next thing here is just a little thing on the Smith family. So just as a background, the Smith family in Joseph Smith's person has been obviously operating the church. And Joseph has a bunch of different things where he is talking about. There's an interconnection between blood and lineage and priesthood that probably is way less emphasized pretty much anywhere in the Restoration anymore, but was kind of still a big deal at the time, which is that in the Book of Mormon it predicts that Joseph Smith Jr. Would be a descendant of Joseph of Egypt and that he would have this special role. He asserts that his father, special role for his father is presiding patriarch, evangelist of the church. That place which Joseph Smith said was a very high role, that it was kind of given to his father, that was then passed by lineage to his son Hyrum, kind of even without the structure of the First Presidency having anything to say about it. So it is a kind of a lineage based thing. There are ideas that the kind of vestiges of this to this day is there's this idea that Latter Day Saints are from the tribe of Ephraim, that they have either been adopted into that tribe or that they are actually being gathered as actual literal Ephraim knives that are being kind of gathered together from amongst the whole world. I think that's the older view than the more recent view might be that they would either be adopted into it or it's not emphasized at all. So anyway, in many cases the biography, the famous and wonderful biography of Emma Smith is called Mormon enigma. And it's because Emma tends to be an enigma to Mormons because they wonder, well, how is it possible that the wife and the family of the founding prophet have nothing to do with the religion of the founding prophet? And so in this, this is because this is from the Utah perspective that the story is ever told. And so it's an enigma. But I just want to have this as a background to. Okay, this is where the Smith family is at right at the time of the martyrdom. So Joseph Smith and all of the brothers, with the exception of William, who's the kind of least stable brother, and then are all have all died. And then. And then the children of Joseph and Emma are quite young. So Joseph iii is only 11.

John Dehlin [00:40:52] Will you be talking later about all the people that had claims to the succession?

John Hamer [00:40:57] Yeah, let's go to the next slide.

John Dehlin [00:40:58] Oh, is that, is that okay? Because I was going to ask a question. If you Weren't. Oh, there it is. Okay, got it.

John Hamer [00:41:03] There we go.

John Dehlin [00:41:03] All right.

John Hamer [00:41:03] Yeah. So we've gone through. We went through a little bit about what the, the structure of the church looked like. And the structure of the church is a little different from the structure of the church that exists in the LDS Church, where everything is very apostle centric. It's apostle centric in the LDS Church because the Apostles took control of the church that became the LDS Church and have continuedly concentrated power in the Quorum of the Apostles ever since. But it wasn't necessarily. There is, in the LDS Church, there is this idea that the First Presidency immediately dissolves when the president dies. There's nothing in scripture that says that might happen. And so one of the major potential leaders in a succession alternative is the surviving member of the First Presidency, Sidney Reagan. Another one who came forward and certainly had a claim is Brigham Young, who was the president of the 12. William Marx was president of the High Council. And I kind of alluded to the idea that the High Council had a much, especially the headquarters High Council had a much more central role in the early period than it does especially in the LDS Church afterwards, when high councils are essentially downgraded to just this very local stake level thing. There is no headquarters High Council. But at the time, the spheres of influence were divided. So the 12 were specifically in charge of missions, whereas the Headquarters High Council had some supervisory roles over the stakes. We mentioned William Smith. So he was an apostle. He had claims to be presiding patriarch of the church. And it's not clear the level where the presiding patriarch is. Joseph Smith made some extravagant statements that this was the most exalted role in the whole church. And then as we mentioned, Joseph III had been designated as a successor in various blessings, as had David Whitmer, although David Whitmer was out of the church at that point. And then other people who also later emerge as challengers are people like Alphaeus Cutler and James Strang.

John Dehlin [00:43:19] So just to be clear, you're saying that when Joseph Smith put his hands on Joseph Smith III, his head, he basically said, you will be my successor.

John Hamer [00:43:30] I really doubt that he said that ever. My feeling, we don't have the text of it. The text that we ever had of a Joseph Smith III blessing was a Hoffman forgery. So that is, we don't have the exact thing we do have. Hoffman was so good because he found documents, you know, in quotes, found documents that are the documents people presumed would exist based on what we knew in the record. And so there were all kinds of Recollections of multiple different blessings where it would have been things like, you will be a prophet. You know, so it's like a patriarchal Blessing where Joseph Jr. Is asserting that his son is going to be a prophet like him. Right. So I really doubted that he said it would be something as, you will succeed me as prophet. I don't think it would have been like that. David Whitmer was designated that way at a particular moment. If Joseph fell or something, then David Whitmer would be the successor. But that had been much earlier in a lot of things that happened since then, including David Whitmer leaving the church.

John Dehlin [00:44:37] When you say Joseph Smith III was designated as a successor, you mean that what happened?

John Hamer [00:44:44] That he was designated. In other words, that he was. That there was like a patriarchal blessing in which Joseph Smith Jr. Was giving the blessing and said, you're going to be a prophet and lead the church someday.

John Dehlin [00:44:56] Okay, got it.

John Hamer [00:44:57] But not that you would take over. Right. When I die or something like that.

John Dehlin [00:44:59] Got it.

John Hamer [00:45:01] And people remember that. And I think even Brigham Young has a recollection of that and said at some point or other, if the boy comes out to Utah, he'll have his place. Right. But that would have to mean that he would agree that Brigham Young and what had happened in the immatervening time had been legitimate, which that ultimately didn't happen.

John Dehlin [00:45:23] So regardless, it's unclear who Joseph intended to be his successor.

John Hamer [00:45:29] He intended Hiram to be his successor.

John Dehlin [00:45:30] Okay, Right, right.

John Hamer [00:45:32] I think it is clear whose successor was going to be. But Hiram died.

John Dehlin [00:45:40] And so as a result, that created a vacuum that you're saying at least nine people had potentially legitimate claims to.

John Hamer [00:45:48] Yeah, I mean, I think that these are people anyway who asserted claims. And it may well have been. Well, William Marx didn't anyway. Yes, I agree.

John Dehlin [00:45:56] And Cutler, what was his claim?

The Council of Fifty and Succession Contenders

John Hamer [00:46:00] So another thing that happened that had happened very recently, and this is. And I suggest that there's like this moving target in this grab bag of Joseph Smith's ministry. One of the last things that Joseph Smith was doing was he had restored, you know, he'd originally restored the priesthood. The priesthood was restored before the church was restored. So there were priesthood, There were elders and things in the church before there was a church, or there were elders in the priesthood before there was a church also. Then likewise, at the end in Nauvoo, Joseph had distorted the kingdom. And so this is the kingdom of God on earth. And people were ordained as prophets, priests and kings. And this was all done in the utmost Secrecy because it potentially could have been viewed as treason in the US and whether or not it counts or if it's just a title. Well it didn't only meant to be spiritual because it was also meant to be literal because they really believed that they were at the cusp of the second coming and the millenn millennial kingdom was going to be established on earth. So there was this council of the Kingdom of God on Earth which we tend to call now the council of 50 because the membership was supposed to be 50. And so the council of 50 was ordered after Joseph Smith being the senior most member. It was ordered by age. And so Alphaeus Cutler, who was one of the mason of the Masonic Temple and Masonry is an important thing, especially in temples. He was one of the also the older members. And so he's fourth or fifth or whatever his number is, you can find out in Quinn's Mormon Hierarchy Origins volume. Cutler has a claim to being close to the top of the list out of the steering committee of the council of 50. But the council of 50. And he later then asserts when the people above him have died in the steering committee that he recalls being on which was called, he's calling like a Council of Seven. When they all died or failed to act, then he asserted that it was up to him to reestablish the church.

John Dehlin [00:48:15] So anyone in The Council of 50 was sort of Mormon elite at the time it was created. True?

John Hamer [00:48:21] Well there were actually a couple tokens non Mormons that were on the committee. So yes, it was meant to represent, symbolically represent like the kingdom of the government of the world. And it was definitely elite people that were invited into it and they were all sworn to just utmost secrecy. And the fact that the secret had leaked, the fact that that had gone to William Law, the fact that the prospectus of the Nauvoo Expositor mentioned that the secrets of the council of 50 were going to be revealed in an upcoming issue. That that probably is the thing that caused the real panic and it led to the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor.

John Dehlin [00:49:07] It wasn't the more so than polygamy.

John Hamer [00:49:09] Everybody knew about polygamy. So in other words, there had been expose after expose in the surrounding paper since Kirtland, right? Yeah, People had heard rumors since Kirtland. It was very well known since John C. Bennett left the church. He went around and just exposed everything he knew, real information about Joseph's practice of polygamy. As a result of that it was quite well known. It wasn't necessarily believed as much inside Nauvoo, because it's not viewed as a credible source since he had left the church. And he also was very flamboyant, and not everything he said was real, but he does have a lot of real information inside there. And so all of that stuff was really quite well known. But this Council of 50 stuff is the thing that was really important to Joseph Smith at the end of his life. And this was the thing that after all these new oaths of secrecy and things like that, that that had all leaked out, you know, was a cause for real alarm.

John Dehlin [00:50:08] This is the deal when Joseph got ordained as king of the world, right?

John Hamer [00:50:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:12] Okay. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Lots of alternatives.

The August 1844 Succession Showdown at Nauvoo

John Hamer [00:50:17] All right. So the thing that we know about in the next slide is this August 8, 1844, showdown at Nauvoo. So ultimately, I mentioned William Marx as a potential claimant, the head of the presiding High council. Marx has the backing of Emma Smith, who is friend of her, their friends. And also she feels that he should step forward and become acting president of the church or acting leader of the church. Mark says no, the actual claimant here really is Sidney Rigdon, since he's the only surviving member of the first presidency. And so he supports Rigdon. Other Nauvoo reformers, people who might have been, let me say, the anti polygamy faction, the anti theocracy faction, what we might call anyway, progressive or whatever members in Nauvoo, they are in disarray because they're people like William Law who have actually just proceedingly left the functional church in order to try to reform it from without. So William Law, by leaving, by saying, this polygamy is going to be the end of us by this council of 50, this establishment of the kingdom, all these kind of things are things that we have to step back from the precipice. And they found the expositor. Well, they're all out of the church for these very reasons leading up to the martyrdom in the first place. Meanwhile, amongst the 12, then there's this rival successor to Sidney Rigdon's claim that comes back from this mission to run to try to get Joseph Smith elected president. All of the different elders and apostles and everybody are out campaigning for Joseph Smith campaign for to be president. Brigham Young comes back to Nauvoo, he rushes back to Nauvoo, and they have a kind of a showdown where both Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young make their cases for why they should. Why in Sidney Rigdon's case, why he should be named guardian of the church and Brigham Young's case, why there can't be a successor, why there can't be a guardian, but instead the 12

John Dehlin [00:52:20] should

John Hamer [00:52:21] be called upon to simply lead the church in the place of the First Presidency. And. And Brigham Young has at his backing both this inner group of core leaders, people who have been practicing polygamy in secret. People for whom if Sidney Rigdon were to become president of the church, everything that they've done, not only all of their kind of blessings and sealings and eternal afterlife, but even their just basic function of what they've been doing, their families would all come into horrible question and censor if an anti polygamist were to become head of the church. So obviously they're quite in support of having Brigham Young be in charge, as are then all of this huge group of British converts, people who are very familiar with the 12 because the 12 are in fact the missionaries of the church who have converted all these people.

John Dehlin [00:53:14] So Sidney Rigdon was never down with polygamy.

John Hamer [00:53:17] No, he's an opponent of polygamy, although he's unlike William Law, who left and wanted to expose polygamy, or James Bennett, who wrote exposes without being interested in reforming the church at all. He was just making it for his own benefit. William Law, he left the church, he wanted to expose this in order to reform the church. He started a reform Mormon church. He was hoping to write what he felt was the. The thing had gone off course and he was hoping to write the course. He said later in an interview that if he'd had a sense in the world, he never would have done it. He would have just kept quiet. He would have moved away and sold his property and lived a happy life completely having forgotten about it. Instead, he risked it all. He wanted to reform the whole thing and ended up losing everything. So they were out. And now I've forgotten the first part of the question. So anyway. Oh, yeah, Sidney Rigdon. And so Sidney Rigdon, though, had not. So his opposition had remained quiet. So in other words, he was not having exposes. He didn't side with William Law. He didn't side with Bennett. Joseph Smith had propositioned his daughter, which obviously signally found, I think, horribly offensive. She. So did his daughter, but they kept it quiet. In other words, they were willing to work with Joseph Smith and not to expose the thing as a scandal.

John Dehlin [00:54:50] Right. Okay, excellent.

John Hamer [00:54:54] So the showdown is a horrible fiasco for Sidney Rigdon. They've actually got. The LDS Church archives has recently found the shorthand transcript or being able to translate the Shorthand for the first time. So we actually, I guess, have the. Have Sidney's speech, and then his speech is not well received. Brigham Young's speech is incredibly well received. Ultimately, people are very confident that Brigham Young would be willing. Able to step into that role. People later remember it as a miraculous transfiguration, even. And then ultimately, then there's a rebuttal period given Sidney Rigdon. Instead of standing up to give the rebuttal himself, he has somebody stand up for him who ultimately endorses Brigham Young. So it's a disaster for Sidney.

John Dehlin [00:55:48] So anyway, and we've talked about this before, but there's no contemporary evidence that anyone actually witnessed Brigham Young's face or voice, you know, transforming into Joseph's. That's sort of creative, informed memory.

John Hamer [00:56:05] Again, it's a later memory. It actually. It doesn't fit what actually happened, because at the time, Brigham Young was not arguing that he should be the successor. He wasn't. Then, after he won, they didn't just sit down and ordain him to be prophet or something like that. Rather, he started to be acting president of the church. And the 12 were made functionally to serve as the first presidency. And so it became kind of a corporate leadership of the 12. And in fact, for the time period, people weren't calling Brigham Young's faction the Brighamites at that point. They were calling them the Twelveites because the twelve were the leaders. And it's only later, when Joseph III emerges as leader of the reorganization, and by the time that Brigham Young is president of his church and it is not the 12 that are leading it, that people have to remember that history a little bit differently in light of the new reality of Brigham Young, very well established as head of the church in Utah, and this challenger, who. Who has Joseph Smith's name, who looks like Joseph Smith, who reminds everybody of Joseph Smith, and who is potentially an enormous threat to Brigham Young's control of the church in Utah, although ultimately does

John Dehlin [00:57:21] not prove to be right, but there's no contemporary writings of any transfiguration ever happening.

John Hamer [00:57:29] That's right. Come, come, you saints. No toil nor labor fear. But with Jo.

Part 2 of 4 · Ep. 427

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org. hello and welcome back to an in depth discussion of the history of the community of Christ, or the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as it was once called. It's also a history of the LDS Church, all with the wonderful and inspiring John Hamer. So welcome back, John.

John Hamer [00:00:46] Hi, John. Thanks.

Brigham Young's Succession and Its Controversies

John Dehlin [00:00:47] So we left off, we covered sort of the founding of the original church that Joseph founded, which we learned wasn't actually called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but was called the Church of Christ. We went from sort of that founding of the church through the succession, the original succession crisis, I'll call it, which was the showdown between Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young. So where do we take off? Where do we take up from there?

John Hamer [00:01:17] So next, if we go to this next diagram, I'm having here kind of like a big circle which is kind of representing the whole church.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] And I'll remind our listeners that this is also on YouTube. So if you're not watching this on YouTube, we have some wonderful visuals you can check out on YouTube, but you can listen in audio form as well. So go ahead and continue. John. Sorry about that.

John Hamer [00:01:40] And whether or not they can see it, I could just say we envision a big circle that might represent the church as a whole because we tend to ignore the broader church whenever we tell church history, we really are focusing in really on the elite at headquarters. We tend to write that as if that's the entire history of the church, when obviously the bulk experience is the experience of all the members that comprise the church. And so obviously a lot of the people in the church had gathered to Nauvoo the headquarters, but there were branches spread all around the Midwest and the east, especially there were people in Britain and other places at the time of Joseph Smith's martyrdom. And of course, none of them were involved at all in that showdown between Brigham Young and Sidney Rigdon, since there was no capacity to have communication in that kind of time period.

John Dehlin [00:02:38] So just to restate, Brigham Young may have convinced most of the Nauvoo people to follow him who had not already left or died. But an outstanding question was what would happen with all the local, you know, congregations or groupings of Mormons throughout the world. Right? That was an outstanding question.

John Hamer [00:03:01] Exactly. And so he is. So Brigham Young quickly is in charge as acting president, church of the whole Nauvoo headquarters apparatus. But the people that are off in the branches, I mean, that doesn't necessarily have a lot of immediate effect on them. So for them, their connection to the churches that missionaries come through, and then they also are receiving the church's newspaper. So bringing young. The 12 are already. The 12 are already in charge of the newspaper, but through John Taylor as the editor of the Times and Seasons at this point. And so that is like the way, you know those church materials in this era where we have no Internet, this era where we have no telephone, telegram or any other thing, the way you're connected to the churches of denomination is through the printed press. And so these, these newspapers are kind of incredibly important. But what ends up happening is. So although Brigham Young doesn't initially want to leave Illinois, and I think that I personally think of this as counterfactual history, we don't. We can't say what might have happened or what this might have happened. I think that the decision to go with Brigham Young as opposed to Sidney Rigdon, ultimately guarantees that the people are going to have to leave Nauvoo, because Brigham Young is representing this faction that is involved in these secret practices like polygamy that the neighbors in Illinois are not just going to ultimately aren't going to be able to accept. Whereas if a anti polygamist had assumed control of the church, it is potentially possible that the church could have done its reconciliation that it ultimately does with the United states in the 1890s. It could have potentially done that in the 1840s in Illinois. But anyway, regardless, because they didn't, people had to leave Nauvoo. Nauvoo, this boom town becomes Nauvoo, this ghost town. Brigham Young establishes his new headquarters out in Salt Lake. In the meantime, though, other claimants emerge, like Sidney Rigdon, who moves his headquarters, the church to Pittsburgh, and Lyman White, who moves down to Texas. Closer at hand, people like William Smith, but also most successfully and kind of most surprisingly, James Strang, who creates a headquarters apparatus that has a complete. The whole structure from first presidency to apostles to presiding high council, patriarch, everything, and also newspaper. And so suddenly there are.

John Dehlin [00:05:30] You produce new scripture too, right?

John Hamer [00:05:31] And new scripture. So ultimately there are multiple headquarters apparatuses. And so, for example, you're at a certain moment, if you're in the Branc, or let's say you're still living in Kirtland at some point or other, Brigham Young's followers, his missionaries will come through with copies of the Times and Seasons. They'll hold meetings. Everyone's like, yeah, we agree. Brigham Young is the successor. He's the president of the church now. But then one of Strang's missionaries were actually in the Kirtland case. Strang actually came to Kirtland himself, held meetings in the temple, got everyone excited. Everyone read his newspaper. They all agreed that he was the successor. And then he reorganized as a Kirtland stake, and he has possession of that. And so in the branches, it wasn't necessarily clear who was. You know, it wasn't that there's two churches that exist or multiple churches that necessarily exist. There is this overall body of Mormons or Latter Day Saints, and they look to different headquarters, and sometimes they will go from one to the next without actually, you know, having to. Without changing their affiliation or becoming rebaptized or any such thing.

John Dehlin [00:06:44] And that's from 1844 to about 1853.

John Hamer [00:06:48] Yeah, that's kind of what I have it on this kind of chart. And some of these organizations that exist in that time period.

John Dehlin [00:06:53] Okay.

John Hamer [00:06:53] And so, I mean, the comparison I make is, so there's the schism of the Christian church, of the Catholic Church in the west, where at some point or other, there's a Pope in Rome and there's a Pope in Avignon. But even though different people, different countries, have allegiances to one pope or the other, it's not that there's an Avignonese Catholic Church and a Roman Catholic Church. They're all Catholics. They're all Christians, but they just have competing headquarters. And so it's kind of unpleasant. We can't even think of it this way now because all the churches are completely different from each other. In the LDS Church, all the buildings are owned by the Central Church Corporation. Right. And so it is. But there were no buildings at this time period. Nobody had any buildings except for headquarters. So this is all much more fluid.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] Got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:07:41] Okay. So, okay, the next slide. This is kind of a more conceptual thing. So in our first section here, I mentioned this idea that there is an evolving church. In other words, things that were the way the Mormonism was in 1830 New York are very different from 1839, Nauvoo. And then in the 1840s in Nauvoo, this inner group of people that have been introduced to some secret practices like plural marriage. That is completely. There's nothing of the kind happening in New York, obviously. So I'M doing this with color. I'm kind of taking this blue kind of through to Missouri green, to Nauvoo yellow, and then this orange, the secret color that's happening of things that Joseph Smith is denying in public, but practicing in private.

John Dehlin [00:08:27] Red hot council of 50 stuff.

John Hamer [00:08:29] Red hot council of 50, exactly. Which that doesn't even get kept by anybody. Right. So some of that, everybody dials back. So because Brigham Young says when even he gets going, he's like, well, I'm not sure about the last six months of this stuff. And so that all falls by the wayside. Right. So he pulls back to like 1843. Then the people in the. So when you're doing this, though, so as you're trying to envision, okay, well, what is the true Mormonism? What's my takeaway from this Mormon experience during Joseph Smith's ministry? Now that I'm finding myself in my own faction or in charge of my own church? How do I do? Where am I going with? So I'm saying that there's kind of three different ways that one can kind of envision what's my takeaway from this experience? What are we doing now? Where are we going now? And the first one I'm calling here is purification, which is people who want to look back and they want to say the church was right. Way back when we were doing this and we went off the rails, and that's what happened here, why Joseph got killed and why this all. You know, the church got destroyed in Nauvoo and everything else.

Three Frameworks for Understanding Latter Day Saint Movements

John Dehlin [00:09:33] And you chose not to use the term fundamentalism, which I think is interesting.

John Hamer [00:09:38] It's not fundamentalism. So any one of these. Any way that you can go here, you can be a fundamentalist anyway.

John Dehlin [00:09:45] Okay.

John Hamer [00:09:45] So any one of these things. So in other words. So the spectrum between what I'd call a fundamentalist and something like a progressive religious believer, that's more of a spectrum between whether you're viewing all these kinds of things as being highly literalistic, as opposed to where you're viewing a lot of these things as being symbolic. But that isn't really the breakdown of the problem between these competing factions. In 1844, everybody's pretty. Well, fundamentalists in 1844, they all have a kind of a very literalistic view of things at that point. There aren't very many people that are very progressive.

John Dehlin [00:10:26] Sometimes I associate fundamentalism with going back to the way it was earlier.

John Hamer [00:10:31] Yeah, that's what fundamentalists believe they're doing. That is not correct. So fundamentalists are not going back to the way things were. Fundamentalists are creating something new in reaction to the way things are now.

John Dehlin [00:10:44] And the other thing is, there's no such thing as the way things were. There's the way things were at a specific time at a specific place. Right? Yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [00:10:53] So fundamentalism, I mean, when people say the Taliban are medieval, that is absolutely, absolutely wrong. The Taliban are a brand new modern thing. They are a reaction to life in this modern world that we have. And they are operating in a way that is totally inconceivable for people in the Middle Ages who had a medieval worldview, who are not reactionary to modernism.

John Dehlin [00:11:17] Yeah. Because medieval Islam was pretty enlightened. Right.

John Hamer [00:11:24] Medieval Islam could be, depending on where you were. Right, right, right. There were many cases where medieval Islam was very much more enlightened than a lot of contemporary Christianity at different places. Yes, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:11:40] Wonderful. Okay, so three ways to envision the true Mormonism. You've got purification, preservation of the 1844 church, which was, however, the church was when Joseph died in Nauvoo, and then innovation.

John Hamer [00:11:56] Exactly. So either we'll. I'm going to have individual slides for each one. So why don't we move on and we'll talk about it?

John Dehlin [00:12:03] All right, let's do it.

John Hamer [00:12:04] Okay. So purification. So purification. When people are doing that, they've decided, okay, Joseph Smith became a fallen prophet is how they answer this question. So if we only could go back to when, you know, so when he instituted polygamy, that's when he became a fallen prophet. When he started that bank in Kirtland, that was wrong. When he did that, when he led Zion's camp, this attempt to have an illegal militia militarily restore people to Jackson county, which failed. When he changed the name of the church from Church of Christ to Church of the Latter Day Saints, when he edited his revelations. So when he took the Book of Commandments, all of these revelations were written one way. Suddenly, when we make the dnc, they're

John Dehlin [00:12:46] heavily edited and changed, sometimes to the opposite original meaning. Right.

John Hamer [00:12:50] Sometimes to the opposite original meaning. Sometimes huge new sections are added, all kinds of things. When we talked about this before, when we restored the high priesthood, so when we went beyond deacons, elders, all those kind of things, and we suddenly have this office of high priest, which is not scriptural. When he organized the church itself, ultimately, David Whitmer looks back on that and he says, that was a mistake. When we organized the church, we had a great church going here. When we just had restored the priesthood and we were elders, priests and teachers. We hadn't done any organizing of the church, and that was a mistake to do so. When people are looking at it that way, they say, if only we could go back to the way the church was at the beginning of Nauvoo, if only we could go back to the way it was in Missouri and Kirtland and New York, then we would bit back to the true church. And so different people. And one of the ways you could almost always pick out one of these people who kind of everybody can look at these things. It's not just like there's just purification or just innovation. It's always a mix. Right. So this is a simplification of the models. But one of the things when you're looking at people for whom purifying the church and going back to before Joseph was a fallen prophet, believing that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet, one of the identifiers is almost always that the guys are going to be called Church of Christ because that's the original name of the church. And they go back to it pretty quickly. They want to go back to that point. And so I mentioned David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses who's there in the founding of the church before the church is organized and also before the Book of Mormon is even published. Ultimately, he has a church of Christ, which we tend to call the Whitmerite Church, which I mentioned already in the previous section I had mentioned, involved even receiving revelations through seer stones. So the different members of the church were using seer stones to receive revelations. In other words, just like the earliest period of the church. Likewise, when the church in Kirtland collapses and Joseph and Sidney flee and they go to Missouri, the people who stay reorganize their church. They take the name back, they call it Church of Christ. And then they though they proceed to start peeling back the onion. The problem with it is when you're doing this is once you take one layer of the onion off, where do you go next? And so if you decide, well, the bank was obviously wrong, the name change was obviously wrong, but then they get to the point where, well, Warren Parrish gets to the point where he decides the Book of Mormon isn't right. The Book of Mormon is a fraud. And so when he did that, well, then Martin Harris, who's a member of his church, Martin Harris, who continues to have this intense testimony of the Book of Mormon, says, well, I don't agree with that. Right. And so the church can quickly unravel. When you go this purification route if you aren't able to fix into a particular place. And that happens with Warren Parish's church and also Sidney Rigdon's church. So Sidney Rigdon is constantly kind of dialing the thing back, and he dials it back to nothing at the end.

John Dehlin [00:15:45] And schisms beget more schisms.

John Hamer [00:15:47] That's right, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:48] Okay.

John Hamer [00:15:49] Okay. Next preservation. Okay, so what we have here is this idea, okay? What Joseph Smith really did here was restore the fullness of the Gospel. He sealed his testimony in blood. Boom, we're done. This is what we got. And we're just going to sit here and wait until the second Coming, because now we have it all. And so I would say that this is followed by churches like Brigham Young's church, Lyman White's church, Alphaeus Cutler's church, although in all cases, they dial it back a little bit. So I mentioned Brigham Young isn't comfortable with a lot of the developments in the council of 50 because he's been out on missions that whole time and maybe isn't aware of all that. And so that kind of falls by the wayside. But in general, it's like the late Nauvoo era stuff. And what Brigham Young really does is he takes those secret inner circle practices. And the main change that Brigham Young does is those are for everybody. So those now become the practices that everybody in the LDS Church will have as far as Brigham Young is concerned. Lyman White has a similar thing going on in his church down in Texas. Alphaeus Cutler. I have this color here a little bit differently, because although Alfast Cutler initially is doing most of the same things, eventually he decides that the polygamy is wrong. And the believers today in the Cutlerite church, they get upset if I were to say this. They don't believe that Cutlerites ever practiced polygamy, because what ended up happening is that the Cutlerites renounced it and then they suppressed all memory of it. And so they got rid of all practice of plural marriage, and they also wrote it out of their own history. And so the Cutlerites kind of preserve a little bit of the 1843 or 1844, but, you know, without polygamy. And so people like them and are interested in them because they also preserve a. They're the only Midwestern non Brighamite Mormon church that preserves kind of the Nauvoo era endowment. And so they still have that portion of it, but they don't have polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:17:58] And I'll just say one quick thing about the Brigham Young branch. In many ways, they're preservationists. Except in areas where sort of the surrounding culture sort of forced them to repeal or rescind or roll back certain practices. Right.

John Hamer [00:18:16] Yeah. So this is the initial. I would say that what this is going on here is the initial impulse. So, yes, ultimately, the LDS Church has had to make additional accommodations over the years. Right. And so, yes, polygamy. I mean, I say, obviously, the LDS Church is not polygamous today. So in other words, there has been an additional. There has been additional changes. This is just. This is the initial impulse.

John Dehlin [00:18:41] And also, Brigham Young added some of his own things over time, like Adam, God and blood atonement and those types

John Hamer [00:18:47] of things as well, which also then gets. Which also get rolled back.

John Dehlin [00:18:54] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:18:55] So again, I would like to. When I'm making a model like this, this is highly simplified. So everybody is doing everything. Brigham Young is rolling things back a little bit. He's preserving things a lot. He's innovating a little. And so there is. All of these things exist for everybody. But I'm just trying to group these in a way so that we can understand them more easily. But no one should. No one should think for a second that I'm saying that this is a static thing that he preserved perfectly. And there is no.

John Dehlin [00:19:21] Yeah, but there's a decent argument to be made that that preservationist impulse continues. And that's most. In the LDS Church, and that's most evident to me by the fact. How many sections of the Doctrine and Covenants have we added that didn't come from Joseph Smith?

John Hamer [00:19:38] Right.

John Dehlin [00:19:39] Is it none? I mean.

John Hamer [00:19:40] No, it's. What do you have, like, three?

John Dehlin [00:19:42] Well, yeah, I don't even count the official decorations. I just mean sections, you know, and is it three?

John Hamer [00:19:48] There's one Brigham Young section. There's one Joseph Smith III section. Dream or something. Right. And then there's. I don't know. There may be another one. I don't know. And then there's the two official declarations. So it's like two or three. And then we don't have a Joseph

John Dehlin [00:20:02] Smith III dream, do we?

John Hamer [00:20:05] No, no, no. Joseph F. Smith.

John Dehlin [00:20:07] Okay, got it. Yeah.

John Hamer [00:20:09] If I said Joseph iii. I'm sorry, Joseph F. Smith, his cousin who was president of the. And so, in fact, the Doctrine and Covenants are a little different because in the late 19th century or the mid 19th century, Orson Pratt went through Joseph Smith materials and added, like, another 30 or something sections of Joseph Smith material to the Utah dnc. So those are things that didn't exist in the Nauvoo DNC. They don't exist in the community of Christ dnc. And so that's why the community of Christ dnc you think, oh well, they can't have added too many more if they're only up to DNC 164. Well, we don't have about 30 or so of the LDS ones that are Joseph Smith related.

John Dehlin [00:20:46] So yeah, and this is a critique that the LDS Church keeps getting. If we have 15 prophets, seers and revelators, where's the prophecy, where's the seeing, where's the revelating? And it's a fair critique to say are we really living up to Joseph's vision of those offices or are we sort of maintaining ourselves in a semi preservationist state?

John Hamer [00:21:12] And ultimately like for example, if you, you can see the development of the thinking about the office of the Prophet in the LDS Church, if you read for example Mike Quinn's books. And so initially in Brigham Young's time and then more recently up until before David O. McKay's time, there was much more of a sense that the apostles, since the apostles are all prophets, seers and revelators and one of them is the president of the church, that there is a difference between Joseph Smith and the later successors to the presidency of the church. And you can still see it in sort of. And so they didn't initially call the leader of the church necessarily the prophet. He'd be the president, I guess is the way the Utah usage was working up until David O. McKay's era. And you can still see the difference in the, like you say on the one hand, based on the dnc. But also I've said, for example, if you're in the Mormon church and you talk about the prophet Joseph, you know who you're talking about. But if you were to talk about the prophet George, that's just, whoa. No one ever talks about George Albert Smith as the prophet George. Right. So it's different. There's a view. There is definitely a view difference there that's still kind of maintained there or the prophet. You really see that when you actually though go to some of the other churches and you think, oh, you go to the Strangite church. The Strangite church definitely had two prophets because Strang has as much material as Joseph Smith. And you really go there and this is a two profit church, not a one prophet church. So it's a big difference.

John Dehlin [00:22:52] And just one last thing that I'll just throw in because I think it's important. Two of the main additions to, to the canon of Revelation in the LDS Church today are actually repealing, not adding. They're saying we're taking away polygamy or we're going to give blacks the priesthood like Joseph had it. They're not actually adding anything. They're actually taking, taking away. Oh, okay. So cool. So that's preservationists.

John Hamer [00:23:21] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:23:21] Yep.

John Hamer [00:23:22] And so the last one here is what I was just calling innovationists. And so there is a hymn in Nauvoo that used to be in the hymn book called the Church Without a Prophet is not a Church For Me. They took that out of the LDS hymnal because initially what ended up happening was there wasn't initially there's this apostolic interregnum I mentioned where Brigham Young wasn't formally set apart in the new First Presidency. He was simply the acting head of the church because of his position as head of the Quorum of twelve Apostles, which was acting as the First Presidency. But there were rivals who did claim to be prophets. James Strang, Charles Thompson, Joseph Morris. And these are prophets who are in all cases prolific prophets. So you mentioned James Strang. He dug up new plates, he translated new ancient records, or what he called were ancient records, and they added, therefore, new scripture. So there's an additional book of standard works in the Strangite Mormon Church than exist in any other Mormon church. Likewise, Charles Thompson. So in the same exact way that Joseph Smith was busily engaged on revising the Bible, the Joseph Smith translation or inspired version of the Bible, Charles Thompson created an inspired version of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, which is this rewriting of the Book of Enoch that is filled with all kinds of latter day, deceitful, distinctive ideas about Adam and Eve and all this kind of thing. So it's a very fascinating book, but essentially there are in all of these cases. So I've made this an additional color. I mean, I'm using these color codes where we're going from this New York blue to Nauvoo yellow to secret practice orange. So these guys I've color coded here purple, because the color is, you know, in other words, the things are rolling on. They have a Mormon foundation that's in common with all the rest of us. But then they have this new stuff that is very different.

John Dehlin [00:25:25] And I notice you haven't mentioned the reorganized church of the community of Christ yet.

John Hamer [00:25:30] And there is no reorganized church yet at this point.

John Dehlin [00:25:34] Okay, got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:25:36] Yeah. So in the initial time period here, in the wake of the martyrdom, the Smith family, they temporarily leave Nauvoo. Everyone kind of tries to flee from Nauvoo. It's not a safe place. But ultimately, to secure her home or property, Emma and her family end up staying, and she lives the rest of her life in Nauvoo and dies in the Nauvoo house, which is this large hotel that Joseph and the church were busily trying to make during Joseph Smith's lifetime. So, anyway, so they are still in. In Nauvoo when almost no one else is, but they are not, at this point, affiliated. The Smith family are not affiliated with any of these churches.

John Dehlin [00:26:24] Got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:26:26] Okay. So I mentioned James Strang. There's all these different leaders, but I'm just going to highlight him a little bit as we go to the next slide, just to talk about kind of an interesting alternative for leadership of the church. So Strang is a strange one to have emerged as such a powerful rival to Brigham Young. Because he was a relatively new member of the church, he hadn't really held any. He wasn't part of the Nauvoo lead at all. He was a guy who was living off in one of the branches. He lived in Wisconsin. But he organizes a new church headquarters where he has that entire competing apparatus. He ends up being remarkably successful. He convinces, at different times, key leaders to join him. So I listed off here some of the people. William Marks, William Smith, Lucy Smith, Johnny Page, David Whitmer, John Whitmer, John C. Bennett even comes back to the church after his expose and becomes part of Strang's church. George Miller, George J. Adams. William McClellan comes back. So ultimately, he gathers thousands into his.

Early Splinter Groups and Rival Claimants

John Dehlin [00:27:37] When you say Lucy Smith, do you mean Joseph's mom?

John Hamer [00:27:40] Yeah, Joseph's mom.

John Dehlin [00:27:41] That's crazy. Joseph's brother William.

John Hamer [00:27:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:44] David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses, and John Whitmer. Right. His brother, one of the eight witnesses. That's awesome.

John Hamer [00:27:51] Yeah. Yeah. So David Whitmer and John Whitmer, they're living off in Missouri still. They get ahold of Strang's newspaper in his tracts. John Whitmer, even though he's the church's first historian and he is excommunicated during the schism of 1838, when Joseph Smith reasserts control of the Missouri Church. He's one of the leaders of the Missouri Church that gets kicked out, he continues to keep his book of history, that he was commanded by Revelation to keep a history of the church. And so he duly records that he was excommunicated from the church. And then he continues to record the history of the church for A while. So then after the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, in his own history book, John Whitmer records that James Strang is the successor. And that God raised up a successor to Joseph, and this is the new prophet and this kind of thing. But then the Whitmers later decide that they were wrong about that, and so he crosses that out. So ultimately, a lot of these people were only affiliated for a little while. So Lucy Smith is very closely connected with her last surviving son, William Smith, who is able to negotiate with Strang. Strang recognizes William as presiding patriarch of the church, and William recognizes James Strang as prophet of the church. And so they are together for a while. And so Lucy, who is affiliated with that. And the Strangites spend a lot of effort. They're very poor, as almost all of the early members are. But they're working very hard to try to raise money to get Lucy to move from Nauvoo to Voree, Wisconsin, their new headquarters. But in the meantime, what ends up happening is that William and Strang have this falling out. And so William ends up leaving Strang's church and having his own church, in which case then Lucy also is no longer affiliated with Strang's church.

John Dehlin [00:29:47] And it says here that he had ultimately had thousands in his religion, that many of these.

John Hamer [00:29:53] And again, I want to make the point that they're in a lot of cases in the branches, though, so they aren't all gathered to his headquarters. The number of people that are able to be in Voree, Wisconsin, is small because the property there is too expensive. But then Strang moves to Beaver island, which is the largest island in Lake Michigan. And so then a lot of people do move up there and has got quite a successful colony that affects Northern Michigan history.

John Dehlin [00:30:17] And he kind of takes over the Kirtland stake and sends missionaries to Britain, you say?

John Hamer [00:30:22] Yeah. So one of the other big showdowns that happens. So people are constantly leaving the early church. That just is happening all the time. But it continues to grow because people are joining faster. And one of the reasons why they're joining so fast is that there's this horrible economic depression in Northern Britain, northern England, where. Where they're having a depression after the first round of the Industrial Revolution. And so for people who are just horrifically poor in Britain, they're very amicable. They're interested in the Mormon message of the Promised Land being in America. That there's the regular American message. The streets are paved with gold. But also, we're building the Zionic Kingdom. And by the way, we Have a perpetual immigration fund, and we'll pay you to come over this kind of thing. So in other words, there's a huge influx of these British converts. And so Utah ends up having an overwhelmingly English character, unlike most of the United States. So if you look at the population figures, where is everybody from in the United States? As of the 1870 census, Utah has this incredible British or English place of origin that's way out of proportion to the whole rest of the United States, proportionally, anyway. So the second showdown that happens after that one that we've Talked about in 1844 between Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young is that Strang wants to get a hold of this entire flow of British converts. And so he sends Martin Harris, who is a become a Strangite, he sends Martin Harris as a missionary to England. And Martin Harris says, you're converted to the Book of Mormon. Well, look, in the Book of Mormon, I am one of the three witnesses, and I tell you, I can testify that the true successor to my friend Joseph Smith is the prophet James J. Strang. And so it's a pretty powerful on paper idea to do. But as we may well know from our own experience with Martin Harris in history, he is not a stable guy. He is not a wonderful representative you want on your team, necessarily. And so he's a little bit. Anyway, he discredits Strang ultimately. And the people don't go to Beaver Island, Michigan, and instead they go to Utah. And so the success of the Utah church in terms of overall growth is assured.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] Okay, that's fun, fun story.

John Hamer [00:33:03] But anyway, the rest of the whole thing. So why did people follow this guy? Right. So here's James Strang again. He's not part of the core, but what he does do provide for people is he provides this image of prophetic leadership, which is what a lot of people are still longing for. This is the thing that attracted people to Mormonism during Joseph Smith's ministry in the first place. So on the one hand, he has a letter of appointment which he believes, or he says is appointing him to be a successor by Joseph Smith. But the other, simultaneously, his argument is. But it does it in some ways. Yes, that's the scriptural thing that there's a section in the DNC that canonically says that Joseph Smith, if he falls, he'll have no power save to appoint a successor. And so that's where that canonically makes him the successor. But what's really important, Strang argues, I think, is that at the moment of Joseph Smith's martyrdom, Angels appeared to him and ordained him prophet, seer, revelator, and translator for the church. And so the spiritual gifts, it's not that anybody ever appointed Joseph Smith to be president in the first place. What matters is the divine portion. Right? And so he argues that makes that case. He digs up new plates. He has new witnesses of those plates. He makes new translations, new scriptures. There's new gathering places, new temples under construction, new headquarters, new newspapers. So it's ultimately a very exciting thing for the people for whom having constant innovations and constant restoration was the thing that they treasured most in their early Mormon experience.

John Dehlin [00:34:38] In other words, Joseph's model worked.

John Hamer [00:34:41] Joseph's model worked. And he did a very good job at carrying on with it.

John Dehlin [00:34:46] Yeah, got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:34:48] Okay. So we could bring now to another one of the paths, potential successors, William Smith. So William here, he's one of the original apostles of the restoration. He's the last Smith brother alive after 1844. He's got claim to this lineage role as being presiding patriarch, evangelist to the church, which is the role that his father, Joseph Smith Sr. Inaugurated. And that went to Hyrum, that Joseph Smith Sr. Ordained his son Hyrum, as his eldest surviving son, to that role. And William claimed that. And it initially, Brigham Young agreed. But that's part of the breakdown that he has then with Brigham Young. William has a lot of ego. He likes to define. He wants to define that job as being way more than Brigham Young is comfortable with William defining it. So he wants to call it. So William calls his title presiding patriarch over the church. And Brigham Young is very clear. No, you are presiding patriarch to the church, not even of the Church. Right. So there's a big gap between being the patriarch to the church and being patriarch over the church. Ultimately, he breaks with Brigham Young. He temporarily organizes his own church, later merges that with Strang. We mentioned breaks with Strang, and ultimately has his own church again. Anyway, when he's doing that, though, he is continuously emphasizing this idea into Midwestern Mormons in Illinois that that lineal priesthood is the true method of succession within the Smith family.

John Dehlin [00:36:29] I just have to say it must have been awful for Brigham Young to have so many of Joseph's family reject him because so much of the church is based on Joseph, yet those arguably closest to Joseph didn't accept Brigham Young. So what a bold and sort of gravity defying feat to wrestle the entire. Well, not the entire, but a huge percentage of the organization that Joseph built away from Joseph's family, Right?

John Hamer [00:37:01] Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It was A big. I mean, it's a big deal. And that's why I even say at the beginning of this whole thing, it's almost. This is why Emma is just looking at it solely from a Utah Mormon perspective. Emma is this crazy, strange Mormon enigma, if we think about it, from, say, from Joseph Smith, the man's perspective. If you ever imagine. Would you ever imagine that you, John Dehlin, as this founder of this religious movement, this church, and then you're all of your children, all of your heirs, everybody, you're totally out of it. In other words, your best friends and companions, the people who you're working with in the church, jobs. Take it off to some other state and your. Your errors have nothing to do with it.

John Dehlin [00:37:50] Yeah, it's crazy.

John Hamer [00:37:51] It's kind of a. It's weird, right? So it is kind of a strange, you know, complete division between the family and the. And the headquarters apparatus.

John Dehlin [00:38:01] It makes total sense why Emma was so maligned for so many years.

John Hamer [00:38:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:05] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:38:07] So, William. So anyway, I'm gonna so make a little bit of comment now if we go to the next slide about kind of this understory that's happening this whole time. Ultimately, when you ask, okay, what is the Civil War about in the US and the answer is slavery. Right. How much we might want to make

John Dehlin [00:38:28] it economic or states rights.

John Hamer [00:38:30] Economic or this kind of thing. If you look at the declaration that the Mississippi state legislature had, why are the seceding from the Union? Why do they have to have a second Declaration of Independence? They said, the answer is slavery. Anyway, so in the exact same way, the schism really, in the wake of there's all these things, there's these different competing leadership claims and everything like that, but the background story behind all of this problem is polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:39:01] Right.

John Hamer [00:39:02] And so I just have a little quick timeline here of kind of this background of happening in this whole time period. So 1843 is the polygamy revelation that ultimately becomes DNC 132 in the Utah tradition, but which is secret, so it isn't published. It's not part of the. It's not even part of the Utah DNC until well into the Utah period.

John Dehlin [00:39:25] And that never made it into the community of Christ dnc, Right?

John Hamer [00:39:29] Yeah, absolutely not. Definitely not. Yeah. The old one is still in the community of Christ dnc, the original DNC section that says that in as much as this church has been maligned with rumors of polygamy, we denounce it. Right.

John Dehlin [00:39:49] Section 110 or something like that.

John Hamer [00:39:50] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:39:51] 101, maybe. Okay.

John Hamer [00:39:53] And you know, the numbers are all different because all of the numbers have all been reordered and shuffled and everything like that.

John Dehlin [00:40:00] In both traditions.

John Hamer [00:40:01] In both traditions. So all that, you have to have a little chart about what all the numbers mean. And so they're all different. And there's difference from the 1837 DNC to the current Utah DNC and all that kind of things.

John Dehlin [00:40:11] Okay.

John Hamer [00:40:12] All right. So. Okay. So then we have there. Okay, after that, the polygamy being one of the major things that leads up to the martyrdom itself, one of the balls that Joseph Smith is juggling that lead to the end. So then in 1846, Strang, who we mentioned, is one of the successors. He. He actually denounces polygamy. So he's one of these guys who is out in the branches. He's not part of the inner circle. He doesn't personally believe it to be. He thinks it's something that Bennett originally thought of or whatever it is. In other words, he doesn't think it's a valid teaching because Joseph Smith publicly has been denouncing polygamy with his kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, kind of way that he was doing it, which is to say, I oppose polygamy. Because he's meaning privately, he's saying, but because polygamy is a human distortion of the true principle of celestial or plural marriage. And so he's publicly denouncing it, though. So Strang as a successor also denounces polygamy publicly and privately. And so when I mentioned that William Smith had merged in with Strang's church, the reason why Smith actually gets excommunicated by Strang, why that connection doesn't hold is because William moves to Wisconsin and does exactly what he had been doing under his brother, which is secretly practice polygamy and secretly teach polygamy, which Strang is opposed to. And he excommunicates William for that.

John Dehlin [00:41:38] In 47.

John Hamer [00:41:40] In 47. But by 49, there have been so many elite inner circle members of the Nauvoo Church who have joined with Strang that they've actually convinced him that Joseph Smith did practice bulimy, which he did. So in other words, there's enough witnesses that Strangle is convinced to it. And so then in 1849, he begins to practice polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:42:04] Right.

John Hamer [00:42:05] Okay. And so then in the meantime, William Smith has. And Strang is fairly open about it fairly soon. So he doesn't have a lot of secret skulking about with it. He does in an initial thing that he does where he's first practicing it, and that's kind of a public relations fiasco. But later he's openly living in Michigan with four wives or something at the end of his life. William Smith, though then having been kicked out of Strang's church previously for polygamy, has his own church where he's continuing to do Joseph Smith's practice of publicly denouncing polygamy but secretly practicing it. So he's publicly denouncing it, secretly practicing it, and people continuously in William Smith's church are catching him at it. And so he continues to kind of get in trouble. And so that leads up to ultimately 1853, when William Smith is actually indicted in Illinois for statutory rape because he's practicing polygamy with an underage wife. And so he ends up getting kicked out of his own kind of William Smith church for polygamy, which is this kind of midwestern, anti polygamy church, since all of his followers are against polygamy, even though he's practicing it. So it's 1852 that Brigham Young and his church start admitting to the practice openly, Although it's quite an open secret, Everybody's aware of that it's doing out there. But it was ultimately an embarrassment, you know, the missionaries. John Taylor, I think, is a missionary, and he's just barely published one of these nudge, nudge, wink, wink, denunciations of polygamy. Then the paper arrives the next day in which they're openly practicing it now. And so then John Taylor has to have his this kind of humiliating or embarrassing retraction. Oh, forget what I just said yesterday kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:43:50] So anyway, senator was practicing it while publishing a pamphlet denying its practice, right?

John Hamer [00:43:55] That's everybody's policy. That was Joseph Smith's policy, and that was everybody's policy. That continued to be Emma's policy, although she was not also practicing it. But she continued to denounce it for the rest of her life as publicly denouncing it and pretending that it didn't happen. And that was what everybody did. That's what Joseph Smith did. And that's what the policy was until 1852 for the Brighamites, when they admitted to it openly.

John Dehlin [00:44:16] What made Brigham Young admit to it? Do we know?

John Hamer [00:44:19] It had to have been preposterous not to. You build this house that has all these. You go to the lionhouse or this kind of thing. I mean, everybody who went to Utah, I mean, it wasn't a secret, secret anymore. Brigham Young's polygamy is completely different from Joseph Smith's, which is Joseph Smith's a secret practice that is just the select few in the inner circle that are committed to this practice that's secret. Brigham Young opens it up really widely and is much more widely practiced. And anybody who was going west to the Gold rush or any other thing noted that this was happening. So it was quite an open secret.

John Dehlin [00:45:03] Okay. But we don't know if there was any specific event that forced his hand in 1852 to make it public.

John Hamer [00:45:11] Yeah, I'll have to ask a Utah historian. That's fine. So I'm, you know, so I don't know exactly, but it definitely, by the open practice got him in trouble, and it's one of the reasons why Utah wasn't able to be a state for so long.

John Dehlin [00:45:27] Right. Okay.

John Hamer [00:45:28] You know. Okay. And so then ultimately, in 1856, then James Strang, who subsequently becomes polygamist, open polygamist, is himself martyred. So he also and all of his followers are expelled from Beaver island in Lake Michigan in much the same way that the Saints had been earlier. Saints had been expelled from Missouri, where the Joseph Smith had been killed.

John Dehlin [00:45:50] So he really replicated Joseph's model.

John Hamer [00:45:52] He did it all the whole way.

John Dehlin [00:45:55] He did the full Joseph. Yeah, okay. Sorry. That's. That's disrespectful.

John Hamer [00:46:24] Come, come, you Saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy.

Part 3 of 4 · Ep. 428

John Hamer [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org hello again and welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast on my multi part interview with John Hamer about the history of the community of Christ. Please join us on YouTube@YouTube.com MormonStories for the wonderful visuals that John Hamer provides to chronicle this history. But you can also listen in the audio format. We've covered John's story. We've covered how, how he left the elders church and came back to it. We've covered not came back to it, but decided to actually join the community of Christ. We've talked about the history of the church while Joseph was in it and sort of the succession crisis and the various schisms that emerged immediately following Joseph's martyrdom. And now in part three of this series, we're gonna begin talking about the emergence of what was originally called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as I understand it, John may correct me, and that eventually became renamed to the Community of Christ. So let's pick up where we left off, John.

Polygamy as the Central Driver of Schism

John Hamer [00:01:36] All right. Well, we had just been talking about how kind of the background of the whole story really behind the success and schism is polygamy. And so what if you had been, I was trying to talk in a restore here an idea that if you're part of the branch experience, so if you are sitting around in a little local congregation in Indiana and you know, you're getting the newspaper, you're taking maybe initially the times and seasons, at some point or other there's this interim period which with the Brigham Young where he doesn't even have a newspaper. And so because they're busy trying to get to the west at that point, maybe the missionaries are bringing you Strang's newspaper. You're not exactly sure. You know, you're still a believer in the restoration. Your branch is continuing to meet, but you're not exactly sure which one of the headquarters at any given moment, you might be enjoying one, you may be enjoying another. But behind this whole thing is polygamy, which you weren't part of the Nauvoo's inner circle. You never heard Joseph Smith do anything other than publish denunciations of it. But this thing is constantly coming up everywhere. And so at a certain Point, by the time of James Strang's martyrdom in 1856, you will have, if you were in that branch in the Midwest and presumably an opponent of polygamy, you know, you will have gone from this period where, you know, Brigham Young had been denying that he was doing it, but then suddenly in 1852, he openly says he is. And if you're against it, well, maybe that means can no longer be affiliated with his church. Likewise, William Smith had been continuing to denounce it, but then he gets even excommunicated from his own church for being caught at it. Strang had written some of the best denunciations of polygamy, maybe for you, but then suddenly, now he comes out in favor of it. And so you've gone through this whole time period where you are looking back to some portion of Latter Day Saint experience that isn't all about polygamy. And all of these headquarters seem to now have completely gone down this polygamy path that you're opposed to. And so a lot of these congregations then throughout the Midwest that continued to exist there ended up having lost any denominational affiliation. They may well have even been completely on board with Brigham Young until Brigham Young openly published that they are having polygamy in Utah. Okay, and so two of these guys then, or two of these Congregational leaders, if we go to the next slide here, I have here what's called the beginnings of a new organization of the church in 1851. Two of these people who are branch presidents or pastors of congregations, one in both in Wisconsin, actually, Jason W. Briggs and Zenis Gurley Sr. Both of them had been affiliated with the Strangite Church. And Jason Briggs even had been called to be one of William Smith's apostles when William Smith had his own church organization. And so both of them now have found themselves completely without a denomination for their branch to be affiliated with. And so both of them do what you do under this, or what many people do in a religion of personal revelation. They pray about it. And both of them, individually and separately, felt that they received inspiration or revelation that they shouldn't have their branch affiliate with any of them, and that at some point or other specifically, they felt that one of Joseph Smith's sons would eventually emerge to lead the church and restore the church and get rid of the stain of polygamy from the church. And so they began to have kind of a new organization, which is to say their work on creating, through holding general conferences, they work on creating a new denominational structure, a new one of These headquarters organizations that is, though, based in this case, congregation up. So branches up. So these are branches now that don't have a headquarters, and they are coming together through conferences to create a new headquarters structure.

John Dehlin [00:05:51] Okay.

John Hamer [00:05:52] And so if we go to the next map, so we have some of these early centers of congregations in the 1850s that are having conferences with each other dealing with this problem. How can we continue to be Book of Mormon believers? How can we continue to believe in Joseph Smith and the Restoration, even if we don't believe that polygamy is of God?

John Dehlin [00:06:15] Okay. And polygamy was the biggest differentiator for them.

John Hamer [00:06:21] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:06:22] In not wanting to affiliate with the Utah Church.

John Hamer [00:06:24] Right. And in some cases, specifically, it was that message when they got the news that Brigham Young said, yeah, yeah, we actually are. We actually are practicing polygamy. In other words, up until that time, they had believed the leadership. They had just said, well, okay, there's all these exposes, but the leaders are constantly denying that they're involved in this. And so we believe them. And then they felt betrayed when the curtain got pulled back and said, no, actually we are doing this. We were using code words or whatever. They felt that they felt betrayed in a lot of those cases. So this is the time period when a bunch of different reorganizations happen. So in addition to the reorganization that results in the community of Christ Church, this is also when the people in Pennsylvania reorganized as the Church of Jesus Christ. These are the people who were descended of Sidney Rigdon's church, but they had been somewhat in affiliation with Brigham Young and. Or Strang or any of these other leaders until such a time as Young is now openly espousing polygamy. And so then William Bickerton reorganizes that church, and we call it now the Bickertonite Church. And we usually think of that as being the third largest branch of the movement outside of the Brighamites and then the Josephites, which is to say the reorganization. And the same thing happens, too, at this time period, the Hedrickites. So Granville Hedrick in Illinois does the same thing. And those guys end up ultimately moving to independence, where they become the Temple Lot Church. But this is the moment that they all do it. Because of these, all the headquarters are openly practicing polygamy at this point.

John Dehlin [00:07:56] Got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:07:58] Okay. So at the same time, I'm going to bring back in an early leader here who we talked about a little bit during the initial succession crisis. William Marks in the next slide here. So he had been Nauvoo Stake President, President of the High Council in Nauvoo and a close friend of Emma. But he also, in the meantime, now has been a restoration seeker. So he sided, as we mentioned, with Sidney Rigdon's claims and became a Rigdonite. He later was impressed by Strang's claims, became a Strangite and ultimately a Thompsonite. And so now he is continuing to seek. He wants to find the old Mormonism that attracted him in the first place. And so he also becomes affiliated with these branches that are coming together to form what they were calling a new organization of the church. Right, okay, so that's happening there. So we'll go back to where Emma is.

John Dehlin [00:08:46] So.

Emma Smith and Her Family After the Nauvoo Exodus

John Hamer [00:08:47] So the next one, Emma and her family. So after the exodus, Nauvoo, which had never really had a well rounded economy. Nauvoo's economy is one of these things that we're kind of aware of now in the post real estate bubble meltdown that we've had in, I guess the global financial meltdown. But it's where prior to that happening, like the city of Phoenix, fully 30% of the people in Phoenix were involved in the construction of new houses, industry. And so this was kind of the economy that Nauvoo had too, which is the economy wasn't based on being important for trade or they were like an agricultural center or a center of industry, but it was a center that was a boom town where the people were employed building houses for all the new converts coming in. So then once everybody leaves, all you're left with in Nauvoo is houses. And so the houses have no value almost at all because it's just a city full of empty houses where there's nothing particularly to do. And so it's a very different experience for, say, Joseph Smith III and his brothers and adopted sister growing up in Nauvoo, the ghost town, as opposed to what he would have remembered from early childhood. Nauvoo, this incredible boom town.

John Dehlin [00:10:01] Right.

John Hamer [00:10:02] Okay. So just as a. For the Smith family. So we go to the next slide. There's a nice picture here of the Smith boys and then their stepfather. So on the. On the one hand, I think the Victorian ideal, there's this hope that the martyr or the prophets or the president's wife is going to just live in splendid isolation. The first Lady Polk's wife ended up continuously. She lived on 40 years or something after Polk had died, and she maintained his memory in the tomb and everything like that. Well, Emma didn't have the wealth to do that in this. She had property in Nauvoo, the property was worthless. It was become a rough river town. She had children to raise, one of which, the youngest one of which, David Hyrum, was born posthumously even after Joseph Smith's death. And so the realities of frontier life were that she needed to have a stepfather for the children and also to just secure her property and everything like that. She married Louis Bidem, and they ended up having a very good, close relationship in some ways. In some ways, there was more tragedy in the relationship in that he had some affairs, but he was a good stepfather to the kids.

John Dehlin [00:11:26] This looks like a rough group of guys. If I look at their clothes, they don't look all clean and prim and proper. They look kind of worn and a little bit dirty. Is that fair?

John Hamer [00:11:37] Yeah. Oh, I think so. They were not wealthy people. There's no. I mean, Nauvoo, like I said. Well, for one thing, they weren't particularly wealthy before. The early saints were not wealthy people. They were poor people. But then kind of living in the ruins of Nauvoo, the Smith family was certainly not particularly well off. They had some property. They were able to make ends meet to an extent, but not. Not living in luxury in any way.

John Dehlin [00:12:08] So this is Louis Bitumen, which is Emma's second husband, and then the four sons of Joseph Smith and Emma.

John Hamer [00:12:15] Right.

John Dehlin [00:12:16] Okay, got it. What a cool picture. That's a really cool picture.

John Hamer [00:12:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:20] Everyone should go watch this. Go look at this picture. It's really cool.

John Hamer [00:12:23] Yeah, there's some great. It's too bad that, you know, it's like we're like two years away. You know, Joseph Smith, like, died, like, two years too early, you know, in terms of pictures, because this is really the. It was just barely becoming super popular and available and way less expensive. And so we therefore have pictures, and there's lots of later pictures of Emma, but obviously it's just a couple years too early to have pictures of her husband and all these boys. Father.

John Dehlin [00:12:56] Got it.

John Hamer [00:12:58] Okay. So the experience. I mentioned a little bit about the experience that Joseph III had growing up. So 11 years old, his father is killed. The entire community that he's grown up in is pretty well wiped out and scattered. And it's not like this was the first time that they'd had to abandon, you know, that everything had been abandoned. He had been born in Kirtland and moved to Missouri and then ultimately had to walk across the ice with his mom as refugees to Illinois. And then when he grew up into adulthood, Joseph III was not living in a latter day Saint majority community in any way. He is living with non Mormons and he's living with non Mormons who in a lot of cases had absolutely hated what they felt was the threat that his father, the person who had his exact same name, Joseph Smith, represented to Republican values in the big are not in the. Not in the Republican sense of the Republican Party, but in terms of having a religious leader be in charge of civic institutions. And so all the different threats that people felt that his father had represented, these people are still around and they are Joseph Smith III's neighbors. And so he has to have a very different, different experience or the lessons he took from the early church is a little bit different than, let's say, his relatives and his co religionists who moved off to Utah and had their own separatist society. His society is completely surrounded by non Mormon neighbors.

Joseph Smith III Grows Up Among Non-Members

John Dehlin [00:14:39] Okay, so that's what you mean here by learning to live with neighbors. Joseph Smith III was surrounded by non Mormons and had to. Had to, you know, grow up in that environment.

John Hamer [00:14:50] Right. And ultimately the people in Nauvoo who are the new settlers, they ultimately elect him to be. They elect him to be a justice. So in other words, he's able to get along well enough that here's this. His dad had been, for them, this represented theocracy. And in other words, something they'd be afraid that that might even rear its head again. And they were afraid a little bit when the reorganization happened that maybe were going to start moving back to Nauvoo. But he made it very clear that the lesson that he had taken away from the Mormon, non Mormon conflicts was that the church didn't actually win when it decided to go the militant route.

John Dehlin [00:15:40] So some of these sensibilities that I associate with the community of Christ, more humility, friendship, you know, less exclusivism, less elitism, more broad thinking. Sounds like they kind of start with Joseph Smith III a little bit.

John Hamer [00:15:58] Definitely. So there. And his mom. Right, right, both of them. In some ways he's more his mother's son, sometimes in some ways, than his father's. You know, obviously he's a combined combination of the two of them, but he definitely retains, you know, her total. She was always completely opposed to polygamy, even if she was willing to work with Joseph occasionally on it. He continued to be an outspoken opponent of polygamy his whole life. Then simultaneously, though, like you say, the interpretation, there was always a. For the early church, there was this tension between, well, how are we going? Are we going to be Christians? And Turn the other cheek on these things, or are we going to have to stand up and actually fight for our rights and take up arms? And there was that. They would always waver between the two of those. And the takeaway in the Smith family anyway was when we. We actually never accomplished anything by taking up arms and attacking our neighbors.

John Dehlin [00:16:58] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:16:59] We did better when we understood our neighbors and when they understood us.

John Dehlin [00:17:02] Got it. Okay, great. I love those sensibilities.

John Hamer [00:17:06] Okay, so we go to the next one here. So this is a kind of a timeline, by the way.

John Dehlin [00:17:10] It's a very different sensibility than Brigham Young's in sort of 1850-1890, Utah. You know what I mean?

John Hamer [00:17:18] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:17:18] Where it was sort of defensive and kind of. I read it or reflect upon it as very defensive. Very much. Circle the wagons very much. We're gonna get you back.

John Hamer [00:17:30] You know, look at the temples. Look at the. Look at the architecture. So what's the difference in terms of the immediate thing that jumps out? If you look at the difference between the Nauvoo Temple and then the St. George, Manti, Logan and Salt Lake temples, the pioneer temples that Brigham Young started building. The temples are castles. In other words, this is not only where. Not only is it because they're the symbolism of the kingdom, but they're fortresses. Castles are fortresses. You have battlements. These are where we're having to defend ourselves. So in other words, we still have this idea that. No, what we need to do is separate out and man the battlements, because that's our takeaway from. From losing these wars. Not that we need to reach out the hand and learn to live peacefully with our neighbors, but rather, we need to have a stronger defensive perimeter to prevent them from attacking us.

John Dehlin [00:18:25] And I just want to make sure the listeners know I'm not judging Brigham Young negatively. No one knows what it must have been like to go through what the early saints went through. Even Joseph Smith iii.

John Hamer [00:18:38] Yeah. To be kicked out of your home, I mean, so many times, all of your property lost. I mean, it's a completely reasonable reaction to do that.

John Dehlin [00:18:45] Even Joseph Smith probably didn't experience the same level of trauma, Joseph iii, that Brigham Young and a lot of those early church leaders would have. Right.

John Hamer [00:18:55] Well, who knows? I mean, in other words, they're kids.

John Dehlin [00:18:58] Yeah, yeah, they're kids.

John Hamer [00:18:59] To a leader. But, I mean, you can maybe. I mean, your dad gets killed. I mean, it's a pretty traumatic.

John Dehlin [00:19:03] That's true.

John Hamer [00:19:04] That's true.

John Dehlin [00:19:05] Well, I'm just saying I'm not judging Brigham Young And I'm.

John Hamer [00:19:07] I'm saying you can always have takeaways that are different. In other words, people can have. There's more than one way to look at anything. And that is certainly. There's different responses. One hour. We can. Let's. We still need to do this. This is what we're called to do. We're going to go. And if they can keep following us, we're going to go where no one will ever follow us. We're going to go live in the desert.

John Dehlin [00:19:24] Right.

John Hamer [00:19:25] You know, in other words, that's a completely reasonable response. I'm just saying it's a different response that ended up happening in the Smith family, which is also a response which is when we gathered, the takeaway was when we gathered within number, when we took up arms, when we created, like the armies of Zion, like Zion's camp or the Danites. This got us into trouble. This is what this provoked our neighbors. And so that was. So those are different takeaways, but they're not saying that one is the right takeaway. This is a different takeaway.

John Dehlin [00:19:55] Got it. But it's definitely different sensibilities.

John Hamer [00:20:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:00] Yeah. Okay. Beautiful. Love it.

Competing Reorganization Movements in the 1850s and 1860s

John Hamer [00:20:03] Okay, so now if we go to the next slide here, this is like a timeline of these various. We talked about there being competing church organizations. And so with the exception of Brigham Young, who ultimately goes from success to success, whereas his organization maybe is not completely out of proportion to what Strang might have had at Strang's height. So there may be four to five times as many people and Brigham Young's organization than it may be that we're ever in Strang's organization. Depending on how you look at it or how you count it, some people think it's much closer, even like Steve Shields. In any event, Brigham Young wins and his organization gets bigger and bigger and bigger, whereas the others falter in different ways. So either in Strang's case, where he himself is martyred and his followers are scattered, or in other ways, the different competing leaders died, or in Alphaeus Cutler's case, by the 1860s, is an extremely ill health. So those other organizations start to dissolve and falter.

John Dehlin [00:21:04] So we've got this period where Brigham's winning, but there are a bunch of people left back in the Midwest that don't support the polygamy. And then you've got all these restorationist branches that started out okay, but over time, they start faltering or fizzling out or their leaders are dying. And so there's this vacuum of these branches that don't know with whom to affiliate. Is that right?

John Hamer [00:21:24] That's exactly right.

John Dehlin [00:21:25] Okay. All right. Got it.

John Hamer [00:21:26] So if we go to the next map, we can just see, okay, looking at the Midwest, these are just some of the different places where there were competing headquarters organizations. As you can see, they're kind of spread all around the Midwest. From the eastern portion where Pittsburgh, where Sidney Rigdon and William Bickerton are at, through Kirtland, and then Michigan with Strang, Minnesota with Cutlerites, and then across down to Missouri, even with the Whitmers. So there's different people spread it all around through the Midwest, essentially.

John Dehlin [00:21:55] Okay. Ripe for an emerging unifying institution.

John Hamer [00:22:00] Are you anticipating what's going to happen? All right, so exactly. So what ends up happening then is then actually a town called Amboy in Illinois, which is really the town that is built by the railroads next to this place that had been called Palestine Grove, which was the central stake of Williamson Smith's church. So it's sort of like the building on the remnants of the Williamite organization. Jason Briggs, who's this former Williamite apostle, and then Gurley, who's a former Strangite, and all of their congregations sort of come together and they have this conference in Amboy where they recognize Joseph Smith III as their. As the prophet of the church.

John Dehlin [00:22:52] Now, I'm on the slide that says gathering the branches. Is that what you're talking about?

John Hamer [00:22:56] I don't miss a slide on that. So anyway, I don't have a slide, but yes. So that's kind of gathering the branches. And so then having had that moment, this envoy conference for whatever that was.

John Dehlin [00:23:06] What year? What year was that?

John Hamer [00:23:08] April 6th, 1860.

John Dehlin [00:23:10] Oh, April 6th. So we've got the April 6th. It's exactly 30 years. 30 years after the formation of the original church. We've got a bunch of these branches getting together again. In what city and state?

John Hamer [00:23:22] Amboy, Illinois.

John Dehlin [00:23:23] Amboy, Illinois.

John Hamer [00:23:25] And so Emma and Joseph III go to this conference. And at the conference, the conference votes to recognize Joseph III as the prophet of the church and president of the church. And then he is ordained to that position by William Marx and other leaders.

John Dehlin [00:23:44] It'd be interesting to hear. I mean, I'm sure that there was a lot of talk and planning leading up to that event, right?

John Hamer [00:23:50] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:23:50] So I wonder what. I'd be curious. We don't need to get into it now, but some sort of critical mass of conversations must have been happening over months or years that would build the inertia that led to that meeting where that. Where that decision Happened?

John Hamer [00:24:06] Well, absolutely. So. So that. So those branches and the newer. Of the new organization before that meeting moment of reorganization, they had already kind of decided that at some point or other there was going to be a leader that would emerge from the Smith family. And so they were kind of excited and desperate for that. And they and everybody else actually from the Strangites, who were also then at that point without a prophet, and frankly, also the Brighamite Institution organization people would send periodically missionaries to Nauvoo and try to get Joseph III to either move out to Utah or accept leadership of the Strangite church or accept leadership of the new organization. And his answer to all of that sort of, was that he would not be comfortable doing any such thing unless he himself felt called to do that as a prophet. He's not going to just step forward and say, okay, I'm prophet or president of the church. And so there were experiences then that he's. He says, that he had leading up to this 1860 conference, which led him to say that when he got there, he came by power, not his own, that he came because he felt called to do that and felt called to go to that conference, as opposed to, for example, accepting the offer from the Strangite church to be prophet of the Strangite church, or the idea that he could go out to Utah and have his place or whatever, be. Be part of the organization ultimately, who knows, an apostle or whatever he would be made in Utah.

John Dehlin [00:25:38] But he must have agreed to ascend to this position of leadership before he attended this conference.

John Hamer [00:25:43] Yes, right. They did. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:25:45] Okay.

John Hamer [00:25:45] And so part of that was because William Marks had affiliated with the new organization. He was somebody that Emma trusted. She had held herself completely aloof from all of these organizations. And so when Marx, I think, visited with her or wrote to her and those kind of things, I think that that was part of the reason why the fact that Marx was affiliated with this and that he was able to explain what was going on that made her comfortable enough to become a member of the reorganization. In addition to whatever spiritual manifestations that Joseph III felt that he had would. It would have contributed to that.

John Dehlin [00:26:26] You know, I just have to pause and say there's something interesting going on here. Because you'd think with sort of simplistic interpretations that Joseph dies, the polygamy stuff comes out. No one would believe in Mormonism again or the Book of Mormon, and it would all just kind of fizzle and die. But here you've got literally almost dozens, if not hundreds of little branches that maintain belief in the Book of Mormon. They maintain belief in some flavor of Mormonism long after Joseph's martyrdom. And they're just hanging around hungry to sort of have it continue in a healthy way. So there's something about either Joseph's legacy or the Book of Mormon itself, or just the inherent human need for religion that just shows how important this stuff can be to people, right?

John Hamer [00:27:15] Well, I think absolutely, yeah. So in a lot of cases, not every case was the branch in continuous meeting in these places. In some places, as we were going to go to that next slide that you were saying, okay, gathering the branches, right?

John Dehlin [00:27:28] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:27:28] So that's just, I'm taking like one little place as an example. So this is southwest Iowa. So there's all of these little settlements in Iowa. This is where the area where across the river from where winter quarters was for Brigham Young's people. This is also Manti down there in the corner. This is where the, the Cutlerite Church was headquartered. And then up at the top of that preparation, that's where the Thompsonite Church was headquartered. And so different ones of these people had either at some point or other been Brighamites or Cutlerites or Thompsonites or even Strangites or who knows what all they had been. But they were old believing Latter Day Saints. Some of them had decided that they didn't want to go to Utah. They'd gotten to this incredible farmland. If you were a farmer and you got dragged across Iowa, you might think, well, maybe I'll just stay in Iowa, not go to, not go to Utah where there's this desert where I don't know if I want to be a farmer in a desert. Or in Cutler's case, he said, well, this is just upriver from Jackson County, Missouri. And why would I go all the way across the mountains? Because I just have to come back within a few years here because the second coming is about to happen. If I stay here, I can just get on a boat and go down the river and there's no reason for me to go out there anyway. What happens is there's these groupings may not have all been meeting continuously. In a lot of cases they weren't. But there's all these little dots here that I have on this map. These all become branches of the reorganization, you know, just in the 10 years following the reorganization in 1860. So suddenly there's all these old saints who like you say, for whatever reason, either because of their belief in the Book of Mormon or their just memory of their early Mormon experience and what that all Entailed, even if there were parts of it that were bad, they now remember, you know, and where they got kicked out of places, they now remember, you know, the good parts of it too. And when they hear the new missionaries from the reorganization coming around and saying, there's Joseph's son. Joseph has come and he's stepped forward and he's leading the church and we're going to restore that old Mormonism that we all knew and felt it was just a powerful message for people.

John Dehlin [00:29:33] That's awesome. Very interesting.

John Hamer [00:29:35] Okay, so I have that picture on there too. I love that we went. Manti is kind of a cool place to go. And that's one of the few surviving buildings from Cutlerite. Manti. Not Manti, Utah. Manti, Iowa.

John Dehlin [00:29:45] Right, right. Okay, cool.

The Role of Print Media in Building the Reorganized Church

John Hamer [00:29:48] Okay, so I mentioned just a brief. So we go to the next slide here. I mentioned briefly how the paper was the most important thing and that's really how the branches are all getting connected together. So one of the very earliest things that was crucial for Joseph III's new organization to get going is a new paper. And so they published this paper, which, like I said, initially is called the True Latter Day Saints Herald. In a very polemical, polemical way. These. We're the true Latter Day Saints. As opposed to which other ones, I wonder? Not the true ones. So it's a polemical thing. And then like I say right there, the masthead, if you can read it, it says, you know, hearken to the word of the Lord, for there shall not be any man among you who hath save it be one wife and concubines, he shall have none. Book of Mormon. And so that's like. You can tell what they're concerned with, right?

John Dehlin [00:30:40] Differentiation, right?

John Hamer [00:30:42] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:30:43] Competing product.

John Hamer [00:30:45] And so that's issue number one of the Herald.

John Dehlin [00:30:48] That doesn't have those sensibilities that I referred to earlier.

John Hamer [00:30:52] No, no, no. They were definitely announcing that they were the true Latter Day Saints and everybody else. So initially the new organization is again the one and only true church. So it retained that old time Mormonism too. So that was definitely the argument.

John Dehlin [00:31:10] Okay, interesting.

John Hamer [00:31:11] The Herald is then continuously published up to this day.

John Dehlin [00:31:14] Beautiful.

Early Reorganized Church Headquarters and Growth

John Hamer [00:31:16] Okay, so the next one. So initially Joseph iii, Emma and everybody, they, you know, Emma continues to live there all her life, but Joseph III lived in Nauvoo, which is functionally the headquarters then of the church again for the RLDS church. But because Nauvoo had become a ghost town and had fallen off the central economy of the late 19th century, it had no rail connection. If you ever go to Nauvoo now, you know, it's like one of the furthest places you can ever go from the interstate grid. Right. So you are not, you've got to really want to go there. It's not anywhere still to this day. It's in the middle of nowhere. And. And so if you weren't on a rail line in the 1860s, you weren't anywhere. And so they moved to a place nearer to Chicago on the rail line called Plano. And that ended up being the RLDS headquarters in the 1860s and 70s.

John Dehlin [00:32:13] Plano, Illinois.

John Hamer [00:32:15] Plano, Illinois, yeah. And that's near again, old branches that existed in the Joseph Smith's second era, junior era. And so it's actually like a town away from this town called Norway, Illinois, which is where the old Norwegian saints had settled in the 1840s, including great, great, great, great grandparents that were there. And almost all of the people in that branch became Strangites. But anyway, now they're all gathered into the reorganization. And so I have a picture there of the original, like congregations in Plano built this church called the Stone Church. And it's as you see, not very large. It has a cool holiness to the Lord inscription on it. Just like one of the, just like the temples. Right. But the reason why it's small is that the reorganization and Joseph iii, despite the fact that everybody on all these branches, one of the old Mormon things that they kind of want to do is they, they're excited about gathering. Like he's going to name a new gathering place and they're all going to move somewhere. And he's like, you know, that doesn't work out so well for us. Hold your horses, folks. Let's just build up Zion where you are and let's build up the congregations. Let's have more of a congregation based church than a headquarters gathering church. And so Plano, although it's functionally the headquarters, the church is where Joseph III is. It's where the offices of the Herald are. It's where all those kind of things happen. It's not a gathering place. And so it only has central congregations. But not in any way is it like the experience of Kirtland or Nauvoo.

John Dehlin [00:33:51] Got it.

John Hamer [00:33:55] The next one here is. This is just kind of a neat slide. I like it just because this is a picture of these elders, RLDs, missionaries in Australia with their gospel wagon. You can see on their little thing there, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of lds. Just like in the old time church, the missionaries went out in twos and elders and they ran around and they went from just a couple hundred people that were affiliated with the new organization in 1860 to fairly rapidly regathering in old Saints and then going from regathering the old saints to sending out missionaries to new places. And so one of the things, the places where RLDS missionaries were able to gather in old saints, actually in places like Australia and Tahiti where people had been kind of out of contact since the martyrdom or early. And so for example, we have seventh and eighth generation members of the church in Tahiti and there's now an apostle from Tahiti because it's sort of like the Mormon church in Samoa where there's just a lot of people in Samoa. Well, anyway, there's Tahiti, there are a lot of RLDS people.

John Dehlin [00:35:13] Interesting.

John Hamer [00:35:15] And in fact, if we go to the next one, people were so excited in 1872 or something about all these Tahitian members that when they make the first RLDS seal, there's a palm tree on there to indicate that kind of the. This isn't the first one, but they kept the palm tree for a while anyway, that they're indicating that the church is existing more than just. It's not just a US Church, you know, it's an Tahiti, it's in Britain and other kinds of places like that. And another point is in the seal. We talked a little bit about this peace strain that ends up being kind of central to the RLDS focus. So the idea that Joseph III has, we have to be able to live with neighbors. This comes through very early on. So the motto of the church, right from when they first have the seal and to this day now is peace. And so the goal is that we've been accused of militancy. We had our own militia and legions. But that's not the direction that the reorganized church is going. We're going to take it the other direction where our goal is to be a peace church.

John Dehlin [00:36:29] Was this seal created when Joseph III was still leader?

John Hamer [00:36:32] Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [00:36:34] What year did he die?

John Hamer [00:36:35] Or. I'm terrible at dates, but Anyway, it's like 1909.

John Dehlin [00:36:41] Okay. So yeah, this seals, this seal's got Jesus, you know, a young Jesus.

John Hamer [00:36:46] It's a, it's. I, I don't know if it's Jesus. It's like the child, right? The child. It's like the imagery of the, of the peaceable kingdom. So it's the lion lying down with the lamb and a Child. And then there's the child.

John Dehlin [00:36:58] And it says peace. And it's got the olive leaves and palm trees. And it's a very. It's trying to say. It's a softer feeling. It's. It's trying to say love and peace, really, which, you know, is.

John Hamer [00:37:12] It's. And it's a. And it's. And it goes all the way back, really, to very soon in the reorganization. So it's the. And there's a nice history of the. Of the seal.

John Dehlin [00:37:21] Okay.

John Hamer [00:37:22] In. In the. In the journal Restoration Studies.

John Dehlin [00:37:25] All right, beautiful.

John Hamer [00:37:27] Okay. Okay. But. So next slide. But just because Joseph is saying, let's be cautious, we don't want to gather. When we gather, that's when we offend our neighbors. Every single time we did a gathering, that was the problem. Nevertheless, everybody wants to gather, or a lot of people do. That's just one of the old Latter Day Saint things. You want to gather together and build up Zion. And so ultimately, Joseph III kind of tentatively or hesitantly authorizes a gathering place, but an optional gathering place if people really wanted to, in Iowa. And it's named Lamoni, after the king in the Book of Mormon, who is, you know, renounces violence. Right. So the goal here, again, we're going to gather, but the. The name we're pulling from our restoration heritage here is this peace strain. So Lamoni is going to be the name that we're having for this gathering place. And so Lamoni then becomes the new church's headquarters. It's kind of a Zionic experiment with what they tried to do with the early church, where people are doing agriculture and that kind of thing together in a cooperative agricultural community. And then they move things like the publishing house for the newspaper and the books and headquarters of the church and that sort of thing ultimately move there. And then it becomes also the place where the university is founded, the one

John Dehlin [00:39:01] that Bill Russell's at right now.

John Hamer [00:39:03] Yes. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:39:04] What's it called?

John Hamer [00:39:05] So Graceland University is in Lamoni, Iowa. Is in Lamoni, Iowa. Oh, yeah. And so Graceland. So they. Very early on, even though it's a very, you know, it's a relatively small denomination, it's just critically important. You know, it's an old Latter Day Saint thing to value education. Right. And so way back to the School of the Prophets, the School of the Apostles, everything in Kirtland, to the University of Nauvoo that they'd hoped to make, although it didn't actually ever get off the ground. The church is. It's still very small. Reorganized church land is set aside for Graceland College. You know, this is before Elvis had Graceland. Right. So it has nothing to do with Elvis. But anyway, so set aside for Graceland College, which is also though set up entirely as a. It's set us up as a. Independent of the denomination. So it's secular, it's able to. It isn't under the control of the denomination.

John Dehlin [00:40:05] Okay, got it.

John Hamer [00:40:07] Okay, so that's a couple slides. I don't know. You can see the old brick church is just in Lamoni that's unfortunately got burned down, doesn't exist anymore. And then Joseph Smith III's home in Lamoni, which is still preserved as a historic site. Neat old Victorian house to go visit.

John Dehlin [00:40:23] Oh, very cool.

John Hamer [00:40:25] Okay, if you see though, then on the next one here, that's kind of a map of the town of Lamoni, but you can also see in the inset there a map of Lamoni as compared to Plano, Nauvoo and Independence.

John Dehlin [00:40:38] Yes.

John Hamer [00:40:39] And so if you. I don't have on that map, but if you were to look at where Far West Missouri is and where Adam and I am are, those are in a line between Independence and Lamoni.

John Dehlin [00:40:52] Okay.

John Hamer [00:40:53] And so if you were to draw a line from Independence to Far west to Adam Ondi. Amen. And then you would just sneak across the border into Iowa, then you'd be in Lamoni, you know, so you could see that when they decided to found Lamoni, they found it on the railroad there line, but it's really just across the border and then pointing again at Independence, which still at the time was so critically important for all the factions of Mormonism. So it's hard to even think about it anymore. In 21st century LDS Church, very few people probably still think, well, pretty soon we're going to pack up the car and move to Jackson County, Missouri. That probably has mostly died out, but it was definitely. People definitely believed that that was going to happen in the late 19th century.

John Dehlin [00:41:41] Right? Yeah. Even, you know, I think that a lot of the saints in the LDS Church up until 1890 were really thinking the Second Coming was right around the corner, right?

John Hamer [00:41:53] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:41:53] For sure. Yep.

John Hamer [00:41:54] Yeah. And so again, I think Lamoni's location is with that thinking in mind.

John Dehlin [00:42:00] Yeah, Got it. Okay.

John Hamer [00:42:01] So they're not in Missouri, which is dangerous to be in, but they're across the border in the safest, closest place in Lamoni.

John Dehlin [00:42:08] Interesting.

John Hamer [00:42:10] But people did start going back, so you couldn't stop people from wanting to go back to Jackson County. And once the temple Lot church, guys. Once the Hedrickites came back and reclaimed the very center part of the temple lot where the traditional location of the dedication of the one temple site was. There's supposed to be 12 temples built. And so it's not the whole thing, but it's a portion of the temple lot, and it's that portion which is the traditional location for the dedication of the first temple. That happened in 1831. And so once they came back and they didn't seem to get killed by Missourians, then every people in the reorganization decided, well, it's okay for us to go back too. And several of them had revelations to go back. And so they started to move to Independence as well. And so the next picture there is the stone church, which is built in 1888 just across the street from the Temple Law Church. And so it's one of the early. It's the home for the early congregation of the Reorganized Church.

John Dehlin [00:43:14] Is that still around?

John Hamer [00:43:15] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:43:16] And it's still owned by the community of Christ.

John Hamer [00:43:18] Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful church. It was one of the central congregations for a whole long time. It still is. It's across the street from the. It's across the street from the temple lottery and Kitty corner from the temple.

John Dehlin [00:43:31] From the lds. The Community of Christ.

Doctrinal Differences Between the RLDS and LDS Churches

John Hamer [00:43:33] The Community of Christ Temple. The LDS temple's up by Liberty. Liberty Jail. It's up in that area up north of the river. It's not in Independence.

John Dehlin [00:43:42] Okay, cool.

John Hamer [00:43:43] Yeah. Okay. So we talked a little bit about. You asked me about Joseph iii. Was he still around and kind of all through that late date. I'm terrible at dates, but here we get to the slide. So here's the date. 1914. So he was in semi retirement towards the end, but he was president of the church for 54 years. And so as you could imagine, he put a real stamp on the whole RLDS identity. His biographer Roger Launius calls him the pragmatic prophet. He was actually pretty successful at bringing together old members who had followed all these different. Diverse leaders and had different beliefs. So it's not like, again, that Strang or Thompson or Whitmer or anybody else's beliefs in the meantime, between the martyrdom and the reorganization, it's not like they hadn't come up with a whole bunch of new things. So the Strangites, for example, had become and still are Seventh Day Sabbatarians. So they believe that the Sabbath is Saturday and they worship on Saturday. So Herald House, which is to say the community of Christ, the rlds printing house actually published a book about why the Lord's day is Sunday. Right. So in other words, there's like a lot of different new beliefs in Scripture and everything else that all of these different paths had all had, including some of the things in the last period of Joseph Smith himself's ministry that Joseph III had to kind of bring it all back together and weld that into an actual functional church, which is really quite a remarkable feat. And one of the ways he did that was he had kind of a strategy of waiting out old members. And so if you really, really were somebody who believed, let's say you really felt that the Book of Abraham ought to be one of the standard works. If you thought. And Joseph III didn't feel that that needed a place in the canon, he would be adamant about it. And what he'd say is, well, it's not important for as a test of membership, let's just talk about that later. And then you die. And then later never happened. We never did talk about that later. And so then Fast forward to 1968, and you're not having any problem that it turns out the Book of Abraham isn't a. Isn't a true translation, in other words, because it's not in the canon. So that ended up working out. But anyway, so that's kind of one of the ways that he was able to do that. So what he did was he kind of created a vision of the kind of Kirtland, Missouri period of Mormonism. He didn't take it all the way back. He never said that his father was a fallen prophet, but he definitely pruned back all the kind of later Nauvoo developments by kind of saying, well, those aren't tests of faith. You can believe that all you want, but we're just not going to emphasize that, and we're not writing that in the newspaper.

John Dehlin [00:46:43] I wonder why he didn't adopt, you know, eternal marriage. You'd think. You'd think that'd be something.

John Hamer [00:46:50] Eternal marriage is polygamy. I mean. I mean, we now say in the Mormon Church has gotten rid of polygamy. And so you talk about celestial marriages. If celestial marriage has one iota of sliver of difference between polygamy, but it is the same. Celestial marriage equals polygamy. That's what that means. It's only after the Mormon Church abandoned polygamy that they created an idea of celestial marriage apart from polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:47:15] Oh, okay. So in my. Wait a minute. So, like, you couldn't get sealed in the temple in a Non polygamous way prior to 1890.

John Hamer [00:47:29] I'm sure you could, but the doctrine itself was promulgated. The whole thing there. Celestial marriage. When you said celestial marriage, that meant plural marriage. So in other words, you could maybe have done it once, but the doctrine was that you needed to have plural marriage. And so the people who were bought into the doctrine of celestial marriage in the 19th century were the people who were the proponents of polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:47:59] I'm just thinking that this idea that the families are eternal and that marriage lasts beyond the grave, that feels like a really strong selling point for the modern LDS church.

John Hamer [00:48:10] Well, I can just say flame families can very well. No one believes that you are separated in afterlife.

John Dehlin [00:48:17] Right.

John Hamer [00:48:17] So that is that. That's it. There aren't.

John Dehlin [00:48:20] It's manufactured scarcity, you're saying it's. It's exactly.

John Hamer [00:48:24] There are not Christians who believe in an afterlife, who believe that they'll be separated from their loved ones in afterlife. Jesus has the thing that is in the gospels where it's recorded, they're in the kingdom of my father that are neither married nor given in marriage. But that doesn't mean that that's just a teaching that Jesus happened to have said. Right. Or it was recorded as if he said that depending on, you know, we'd have to look at the exact thing. But that doesn't mean that anybody believes they're separated from their loved ones in an afterlife. It means that people have maybe a different conception of what afterlife is going to be about than just more of the same. This life. Right.

John Dehlin [00:49:04] Okay. That explains why there's no celestial marriage in the reorganized church or community of Christ. What about proxy work for the dead? And what about endowment? Any idea why that wasn't perpetuated?

John Hamer [00:49:20] They had a lot of. So there was a lot of potential for proxy work for the dead. So sometimes, and I think sometimes on local levels, people were doing baptisms for the dead. Baptisms for the dead was something that had been done a little more generally in Nauvoo and before the temple was created. And some people did feel that that was important. And so I think people were occasionally

John Dehlin [00:49:43] doing that in the RLDS Church.

John Hamer [00:49:46] In the RLDS Church, but not Joseph iii. So that wasn't something that was critical at the headquarters level. There was still a question when the revelation came to early revelations came to build the temple in independence, there was still a question of whether or not the temple would be a place of doing baptisms for the dead. And the answer, the DNC's revelations are about those things is that it would not be. In other words, that that was something that was meaningful to people in Nauvoo, but it doesn't have to have been continued in any way. And the. The reason for it, the reason why it isn't. I think it isn't theologically necessary, is that I think that baptism, I would say, for me, anyway, I'm just going to say I can't speak for the church. Baptism isn't a saving ordinance that someone has to actually have done in order for something to happen. What is the mechanism when you get baptized on Earth? What is the thing that absolutely happens in some kind of heavenly calculus that meant that you had to have done that particular act and that unless you have actually physically done that, something meaningful didn't happen? I think that it is. It's an ordinance. It's something that you do to make. You can have all kinds of wonderful reasons to do it, which is why I decided that I wanted to be baptized into Community of Christ. I could have waited just a little bit of time because now Community of Christ accepts anybody's Christian baptism. If you wanted to join the church, John, you've been baptized in the LDS Church, and now to be a member of Community of Christ, you would only have to be confirmed a member. But I chose to be baptized because for me, baptism is a public idea of being reborn publicly with your congregation, with your denomination, to saying, I am part of this movement. This movement is valuable to me. But in the same way that you can be married without having the traditional ceremony of walking down the aisle, you can also, in my opinion, be baptized without having been immersed in water. Because I don't think that there's some kind of a celestial mechanism to make anything actually happen. When that public symbolic act happens, you could be baptized as well by saying you were baptized or writing, signing a piece of paper.

John Dehlin [00:52:18] Any idea why the endowment wasn't adopted by Joseph Smith iii?

John Hamer [00:52:25] I mean, again, it's one of the things that's associated with the plural marriage. So it is one of the secret. You know, it's one of the secret practices. I'd have to. I don't know. I don't know anything more than that as why it wasn't. I think that the endowment is something that. So it's a Nauvoo practice. It's different. It didn't take place in Kirtland. And so Joseph III is kind of dialing things back to an earlier stage of Mormonism. I think that for the endowment, I think it could Be a very meaningful. When I was talking about baptism for the dead, I think baptism for the dead can be a meaningful ordinance for the living. So if baptism for the dead, if you do baptism for the dead, where you are personally being baptized for like an ancestor or for a pioneer, that was important to you. Like, for example, I think it was Linda Newell who was baptized for Jane Manning. So that could be intensely powerful. Right. For Linda Newell. But I don't think it's essential for Jane Manning to have done that herself. So in the exact same way, I think that the endowment could still be a very spiritually meaningful spiritual practice, but it isn't something that is a saving ordinance. That's essential.

John Dehlin [00:53:55] And what I hear you say is that the more associated it was with Nauvoo, the less eager Joseph Smith III is likely to be to adopt it.

John Hamer [00:54:03] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:54:04] And just real quick, three degrees of glory. Does that stay or not stay?

John Hamer [00:54:09] That was definitely. That was, you know, that's part of the canon and it still is. And it was definitely. It was definitely taught all through the 20th century. If you look at RLDS, preaching charts and all these kind of things, I'd say that now, by and large, people would see that as being symbolic as opposed to. I don't think people think that if you were, are, you know, only so good or whatever, that you're going to be in a terrestrial kingdom, and that means that you're forever locked there for all eternity, and you can't ever. So I think that that part of it and kind of a literal aspect of it isn't particularly widely preached about in the rlds, the community of Christ today, although I'm sure some people do.

Accomplishments of Joseph Smith III as RLDS President

John Dehlin [00:54:57] Okay, so back to accomplishments of Joseph Smith iii. Sorry about that. Keep going.

John Hamer [00:55:02] Well, that's fine. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:55:03] So he.

John Hamer [00:55:04] I mean, ultimately, people always ask me, you know, if, you know, you talk about all these. This history of schism and Mormonism, is there any example of coming together? And it's hard to do that, but Joseph III really does a good job at that. So he brings. The reason why there are so few Strangites today is because almost everybody who was a Strangite became member of the reorganization. The white ITEs are extinct today because they all became members of the organization. There's only six Cutlerites today because almost all of Cutler's descendants that are part of the restoration are in community of Christ. So a lot of these different competing organizations are all successfully gathered in. And Joseph Smith III's this Thing of actually the danger that people have when they peel back the onion and they keep going back and back and back, well, he's able to fix on a kind of a common vision that doesn't get pulled back too far. And so it's able to be successful. And so in the course of his lifetime, there is or his ministry as the president of the church. The population of the RLDS church goes from 300 to 72,000, which is a pretty good run in terms of increase. He himself was personally the editor of the Herald, which I pointed out is a really important way for how the church just communicated with anybody very early on after the reorganization, while the operations are still so tiny, they're actually able to publish Joseph Smith's Bible revision in the Utah Church is called the Joseph Smith Translation. And what the reorganization calls the inspired version of the Bible, which is kind of a huge undertaking to take all of the revisions to finish the manuscript and publish an entire book as long as the Bible. And so that was done. There were I mentioned here on this list it says Orders of Enoch, but essentially continuing with the communitarian experiments of working together in economic cooperatives. That was done in the early church, the founding of the University. He adds 17 revelations which have been canonized in the community of Christ DNC, including in 1865, the one on blacks in the priesthood.

John Dehlin [00:57:16] And what does it say? What does that say?

John Hamer [00:57:19] It says that blacks can have the priesthood.

John Dehlin [00:57:20] Awesome. Did it say why they didn't ever have it to begin with?

John Hamer [00:57:27] I think it's a confirmational one. I don't think it says that blacks didn't have it. I think it says that black people can have the priesthood. But again, it's pragmatic. So it advises caution, don't just be hasty and ordain every single person. But we have to just take this slowly. It was done in the wake of the Civil War. Right. So the confirmation is happening when black people are by and large, there's no more slavery. Right.

John Dehlin [00:57:56] It's 96 years before the LDS Church.

John Hamer [00:57:59] Right?

John Dehlin [00:57:59] Yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [00:58:01] And then ultimately he himself regathers to Zion, so lives his last years in independence.

John Dehlin [00:58:08] Kind of a remarkable leader, huh?

John Hamer [00:58:10] Yeah, yeah, no, I think so. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:58:13] Okay.

John Hamer [00:58:15] And okay, so the next slide here I have here kind of dueling cousins. So his first cousin, who is Hyrum Smith's son, Joseph F. Smith, is his kind of direct contemporary six years younger. And Joseph F. Smith ended up being president of the LDS Church in an overlapping time period, 1901 to 1918.

John Dehlin [00:58:38] I wonder if they ever hung out. You Know, talked.

John Hamer [00:58:42] Yeah, they really hated each other.

John Dehlin [00:58:43] Really?

John Hamer [00:58:44] Yeah. Did not get along well. So. Yeah. So that's so sad. I know.

John Dehlin [00:58:50] I mean, I'm just imagining my first cousins, you know, I love them. Right. Like, yeah, they mean a lot to me, my first cousins.

John Hamer [00:58:56] Well, you know, when you talked about it in my story, you know, like putting family before church. Well, this is an example of church before family, between the two of them.

John Dehlin [00:59:07] Yeah. That's too bad.

John Hamer [00:59:08] I mean, Joseph III is just incredibly hostile to polygamy. Joseph F. Smith was a poster child. Yeah, poster child. Yeah, exactly. And then so Joseph III was hostile to Joseph F. Smith's actual family relationship, which is threatening on the, you know, just, you know, whatever. In other words, that's already hostile. Conversely, Joseph S. Smith was really assigned by Brigham Young when Joseph III emerged as kind of a leader. And he's sent out to. He decides to go out to Utah on missions and things like that. Joseph S. Smith is really kind of sent around to dog him to remind people we have Smiths too. And to say that I don't know, that Emma's a liar and this kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:59:55] Well, I don't know if you've done this, but I'd be fascinated to know was the community of Christ or the Reorganized Church ever considered to be a legitimate significant threat to the ongoing viability of the Utah LDS Church? And do you know at what point in history when the chasm in terms of size between the two churches was the smallest in terms of a difference?

John Hamer [01:00:25] Well, so go to the next slide. Okay, okay.

John Dehlin [01:00:28] Oh, got it. That was my question.

John Hamer [01:00:30] Yeah. So here's the relative thing. So in 1860, the RLDS church is nothing. Right. And the LDS church has got 80,000 people, let's say. And so then these are all the population figures for Mormon churches are never any good. But these are kind of like the self reported numbers. And so this is. They're both, both cases. Wrong. Right. So but you can see then by the time when the two of them, our presidents, obviously the LDS Church still dwarfs the RLDS church. But it's not like it is today, where the incredible post war growth in numbers of the LDS Church and the relative stagnation of community of Christ has meant that the two churches are just like worlds apart now. Like we showed they were much closer, you know, at this turn of the century, the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries.

John Dehlin [01:01:22] Okay. Yeah. So it was about a sixth of the size of the LDS Church at its relative peak.

John Hamer [01:01:29] Right. In terms of the two of Them. And so what the. And then what I'd say is in terms of the. As a viable or at least a semi scary thing for the hierarchy, it's the immediate time, though, at the beginning of that, when Joseph III first emerges as a claimant and claims his father's mantle. That was really the danger zone, probably because at that time when they first got out there, there were a lot of old time members who maybe were dissatisfied with theocracy or anything that was going on in Utah and were potentially very amenable to nostalgia of that old charismatic Joseph Smith. And here is his son who looks like him, especially some of his brothers looked exactly like their dad. And they're the missionaries that are sent out there. And so I think it. I would argue, and I think the case is sort of made in Quinn's book, that it's that moment that Brigham Young, who may have been on course to want to create his own kind of dynasty, and so he wanted to have Brigham Jr. Or one of his other sons succeed him. It's kind of that moment in the face of this threat that the Smith boys are now kind of having that the other succession model is definitely fixated on. In other words, we have to go back and legitimize what Brigham Young did. So we have to say kind of very clearly that. That it's always the head of the Council of twelve Apostles that has the right to succeed. We can't say it's a kind of thing that happens father to son, because if it happens father to son, and Brigham Jr. Is going to become the next president, what does that say about Brigham's dynasty in the first place? He's a usurper. And so I think that it ultimately is the RLDS Church that ends up fixating the LDS succession method that ends up happening and that you're locked into

John Dehlin [01:03:36] to this day probably been a pretty important factor of success for the LDS Church because it prevents succession crises. Right. And I don't think. I don't think blood lineage lasts anywhere into the 20th century, even. Even in Great Britain. It's just symbolic. And so blood lineage just isn't the way to go, you know?

John Hamer [01:03:56] No, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I'm not an advocate of it at all. But what I'd say is that, you know, when you're looking at this little thing, 80,000 versus 300, right. Then you think, why would they have any impact at all? But I think that they had an enormous impact right there. And so that's when you have to have these memories that there was the transfiguration of Brigham Young. He became like Joseph, that the First Presidency's always dissolved. And then that also prevents Brigham Young from being able to have his son succeed him the way he may have wanted.

John Dehlin [01:04:26] Yeah, that's fascinating. All right.

John Hamer [01:04:30] Okay. So, okay. In that course of that time period, now that the LDS Church now has settled into the kind of succession the way it does, the way they had to kind of tool back, on the one hand, they took the inner core of Nauvoo practices and then brought them all out, but then had to tool back and by 1890, at least, publicly abandoned polygamy and then later actually abandoned polygamy. And then let's look just like again, to the end of Joseph III's ministry. We can just kind of look at the diverging paths kind of up to 1910 between the two churches. So I'd argue that what happened in the LDS Church is these core beliefs in Nauvoo were brought into practice for all members, but later we can begin to have these accommodations by purging kind of these unpopular beliefs, as you mentioned. Whereas on the RLDS Church, what happens here is you bring this diverse groups of old saints together with different beliefs, and then there's a kind of purge of all Nauvoo innovations and a focus on a kind of Kirtland Mormonism. And so then we're left at that point then with these beliefs that include in the LDS Church, kind of Nauvoo theology, which includes progression theology, eternal progression, and multiple gods kind of theology, the Nauvoo endowment and baptisms for the dead, celestial plural marriage, which is later just celestial without the plural marriage. The Book of Abraham and then this new compilation, the Pearl of Great Price, are canonized and tithing, for example, is on income. Then in the RLDS Church, there's this total opposition to polygamy is the core of the identity, which is, in a way a negative identity, where we're kind of yelling at the top of our lungs what we're not, which is never necessarily a positive thing to be doing. But then keeping, for example, building Zion, so united orders, and also an emphasis on wanting to go back to Jackson county and actually going to Jackson county, kind of a trinitarian godhead that is kind of like a Kirtland theology, also having hold of the inspired version of the Bible, continually adding sections to the Doctrine and Covenants, and then this kind of new thing of pulling the strain of peace as opposed to militancy out of the early experience.

John Dehlin [01:06:44] You Know, two things that just occur to me that I would guess would have been difficult for the Ralds Church at some point, although maybe it wasn't. But one is that a lot of these Nauvoo teachings can be viewed as quite beautiful. You know, the. The expansive view of heaven and of gods, the. The eternal progression of mankind and our potential to become like God again. The endowments, you know, celestial, eternal marriage. Like, that's. Some say that's some of the best stuff, you know, that the LDS Church offers in terms of theology. It's some of the most ennobling and inspiring and motivating. Like, I wonder if that was ever hard for the RLDS Church to not go there. But even more importantly, since they still, you know, clearly, if blood lineage is important, there's a reverence to Joseph. And if that's where Joseph took things, there's got to be some gravity to say, let's stick with that, because Joseph's still awesome, and the older he got, you know, this is more. This could have been great revelation. And we're gonna. We're gonna, like, cut that off and say, you know, we love Joseph, but only up until 1838. Joseph, you know, and I imagine. And I don't know if that was hard for them, but I imagine that would have been hard for me to cut off those doctrines that many view as beautiful and to sort of limit part of Joseph's most mature, in some ways, spiritual gifts or inspirations.

John Hamer [01:08:29] Well, I think you're right. No, but I guess my point would be, though, let's say if you are already coming at this from this ancient order of things, and Joseph is, like, you're saying, by cutting anything that you're doing with Joseph Smith, you're cutting off part of Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [01:08:43] That's right.

John Hamer [01:08:44] And so it is still, you know, you don't have the council of 50. You don't have the Kingdom, so you don't have the last. And you also then have to cut off all of the early theology if you're keeping the late theology.

John Dehlin [01:08:56] That's right. We're doing it, too. You're saying.

John Hamer [01:08:59] Yeah, so you have to. It's a grab bag. You have to identify certain things. You know, you aren't all living in agricultural communes in Zion or whatever. In other words, there's these different things that are critical, like adding new sections to the dnc. So how do you accomplish, for example, getting rid of late Nauvoo stuff? Well, one thing is almost none of that makes its way into Scripture in terms of Joseph Smith's revelations. If you go into the Joseph Smith material, even including mostly stuff that was added later to the LDS portion, almost everything that Joseph has in revelations is actually coming from the Kirtland and Missouri periods, especially Kirtland. And so if you like look at, if you do like a pie graph and say, well, where are all of these DNC scriptures? They're all taking place in New York and Kirtland. And so in that way, if you're kind of focusing on Joseph, the producer of scripture, and if you were looking at fundamentally the Book of Mormon at the Joseph Smith translation, which again is primarily dated from 1831 to 1833 period, if you're looking at all of these revelations that make their way into the Doctrine and Covenants, you're going to get an earlier Joseph Smith than if you were focused on. If you are having to rely on memories of kind of practices and teachings that are done in secret but not published. And so there is actually kind of a natural way to do that. I mean, you have to look pretty hard to have the King Follet progression doctrine taught in any kind of writings of Joseph Smith. Right, right. So it's very rare. It's not in. People look in vain in the Book of Mormon to find eternal progression or to. In the DNC even to find much of it. There's a coup things that are kind of mentioned in the polygamy revelation, but otherwise it's not particularly easy to find that theology in the actual printed scripture. And so that's one of the reasons why people have kind of talked about, well, in this triptych, whatever it's called, the. Or the. In the. As God is.

John Dehlin [01:11:17] Right, the couplet.

John Hamer [01:11:19] The couplet, yeah. That half of the couplet has maybe fallen out of contemporary LDS Mormon theology. In other words, that people aren't necessarily. People are now being taught that, yes, you can become Godlike, but it isn't necessarily clear. It's maybe not in the manuals and maybe not preached from the pulpit in conference, whether or not God was once a man with a mortal body on a regular planet like Earth.

John Dehlin [01:11:44] Right, that's right. Yeah, that's true.

John Hamer [01:11:46] And so that may be a little bit of dialing back that's happening right now. It's hard to know. I mean, Gordon Hinckley said he didn't know much about it, but then he later said he did know about it. But anyway, so, you know, it's hard to say it's not in the manual anyway, I guess.

John Dehlin [01:11:59] Yeah. And I see what you're saying. I guess all I'm saying is that once you accept Joseph as a prophet, as an inspired and as this awesome guy, it'd be hard not to view his Nauvoo stuff as his most exciting, cutting edge stuff. You know what I mean?

John Hamer [01:12:14] Yeah, yeah, it certainly is exciting.

John Dehlin [01:12:16] Yeah.

John Hamer [01:12:19] But anyway, I guess I would say you have to have a different view. And I would have a different view of what a prophet or a person that is writing scripture are. I don't think of prophets or apostles, theological speculation as being authoritative. So Paul has all kinds of ideas. The Apostle Paul in ancient antiquity has all kinds of ideas, some of which are incredible. He's a really smart guy and he has all kinds of wonderful visionary stuff, but he also has stuff that I completely don't agree with. And we should say that that means he was a fallen apostle or any other thing. But anyway, so we have to just look at everybody in their own context and look at what they're doing and find where it is meaningful to us in the church today and where it isn't and even where it needs to be condemned.

John Dehlin [01:13:11] Now, this feels like a natural place for the break. Should this next slide be the end of our discussion or should we. Or should we chop now and then, and then start with the next slide? It looks like the next slide is kind of a. Yeah, I would just want.

John Hamer [01:13:23] Yeah, it's a sum up.

John Dehlin [01:13:24] Okay, let's. Let's sum up with the next slide. Okay. All right.

John Hamer [01:13:27] So you know, you're talking. So this last thing here I just want to have is this kind of way, if you look at it, how much we're all still as a religion or had been at least for a century or more, trapped in 1844. And we can see it in the idea of the succession theory just played out and how that affected the church. So if we take, as we mentioned, the LDS Church, what happened in 1844 is the senior most apostle became the new head of the church, which he opposed. The first, the surviving First Presidency member. And so in practice then in the LDS Church, there was another couple interregnums. When Brigham Young died, there was a little bit of, again, an interregnum. But what ended up happening is the First Presidency dissolved and the senior most apostle succeeded, which has resulted in very old leaders always being in charge of the LDS Church.

John Dehlin [01:14:25] Right.

John Hamer [01:14:25] We look for the Strang.

John Dehlin [01:14:27] The Gerontocracy. Yep.

John Hamer [01:14:28] Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so in some cases, obviously the head of the church, who may not be fully with us Right. So it might be just medically not there like Gezerdap,

John Dehlin [01:14:44] and certainly not inclined to be socially progressive on social issues.

John Hamer [01:14:49] That may well be also one of the reasons why for the difference between where the two churches have gone. And so looking at Strang, Strang's group. So Strang was appointed successor. He claimed that he was ordained by angels. In his later revelations said that the apostles totally didn't have the authority to do what Brigham Dunn did. In other words, there's actually Strangite scripture that says if you were to do that, you would be in apostasy. So so turns out, Brigham Young, you're apostate according to James tract. So the result that happened, though, was when he was martyred, he appointed no successor. For anybody to be considered a successor in the Strangite church, they require announcing that they've been angelically ordained. And specifically, all of the remaining Strangite apostles were not authorized to leave the church. And the result has been that there has been no successor. So the church continues now and hasn't had a prophet since the first two.

John Dehlin [01:15:40] Yeah, right.

John Hamer [01:15:40] Joseph Smith and James Strang. And then finally, then too locked in the community of Christ. So the appointment of successors. So the idea that Joseph Jr. Had appointed his son at some point to succeed him, appointment ends up being the succession. Means in this case, it was the son of the predecessor that ended up succeeding. And obviously apostles don't have the right to succeed. And so in practice, then that happened again. So Joseph III appointed his own son. The son is his successor. The first presidency continues. The first presidency has nothing to do with apostles. The apostles are a totally different group from the first presidency in their rlds church.

John Dehlin [01:16:16] And it turns out in the end that models of succession really matter.

John Hamer [01:16:20] It does. That totally affected the whole history of the three different churches. And very different things have resulted. Come, come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear. But with jo.

The Twentieth-Century Community of Christ

Part 4 of 4 · Ep. 429

John Hamer [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org hello and welcome back to Mormon Stories Podcast. We're on part four of an in depth look at the community of Christ with the wonderful John Hamer. We've talked about Joseph Smith. We've talked about the succession crisis. We've talked about kind of the time period between the succession crisis and the formation of the Reorganized Church. And then we've talked about the reorganized Church up until the death of Joseph Smith III. And this is all on YouTube. So please check out these wonderful visuals that John Hamer has. And let's pick up where we left off. So when Joseph Smith III died, was that a pretty big, sad moment and a big blow to the Reorganized Church?

John Hamer [00:01:16] Oh, I'm sure. Absolutely. I mean, it's like contemporary or a little earlier contemporary for, you know, to have gone in the British Empire where Queen Elizabeth was reigned for 50, whatever years. Right. a certain point, you don't remember anything other than that that's Victoria is who you imagine the queen to be. Or in this case, you know, Joseph III is after, you know, 50. Is it 57 years that I said? Anyway, after 54 years, you don't know anybody else to be prophet other than Joseph.

John Dehlin [00:01:48] Is there any LDS Church prophet that served 57 years or 54 years? 54 years, yeah. So how old was Joseph Smith III when he died?

John Hamer [00:02:02] So let's see. He was 82.

John Dehlin [00:02:05] Okay. Okay. And he started pretty young, so.

John Hamer [00:02:08] But he started young, so that's the difference, you know. So he started young just the same way his dad did. Yeah, but his dad died after 14 years.

John Dehlin [00:02:15] Right.

John Hamer [00:02:15] Well, so Brigham Young then is the next and last person in the LDS Church to start relatively young. But after that succession, succession, everybody was older and older and older. And then the passing of the generations only occurred when Joseph S. Smith, who was representing a younger generation, then took over. But he only took over as president of the LDS Church in 1901. So another 40 and one years after, after his cousin had begun being president of the RLDS church. In other words, he was 41 years older by the time he actually was head of the LDS Church. He lived on for another 17 years. And so that would have been the last youngest guy to be LDS Church president. And now obviously everybody's been very old by the time they succeed in the LDS tradition.

John Dehlin [00:03:11] Okay, so we've got the death of Joseph iii, who was the prophet that everyone would remember for so long. Where did they go from there?

John Hamer [00:03:21] Well, so even though people, I think, have had the idea that lineal succession was the only method, they didn't all believe that. And certainly both members of Joseph III's first presidency, who were his son, Fred M. Smith, and then the other counselor, his name was R.C. evans, both of them thought that they may be the successor. And ultimately R.C. evans, who is actually a leader of the church from Canada, who is actually from my home congregation, the Toronto congregation in Toronto, where I am. Anyway, so he, at a certain point, he became really disaffected because he felt that he would have been the successor. So in other words, it was. People immediately assume that there was going to always be lineal succession in the RLDS Church. And Joseph III emphasized that it wasn't, in fact, blood, that was his succession claim, but rather that his father had appointed him to be the successor. And so he, as a prophet, set up much more elaborate guidelines about the prophetic succession, which he called the letter of instruction to the church, which did not, which indicated that people outside of the family could succeed to be the president. But that said, he did then appoint his son, Fred M. Smith, to be his successor. And so it stayed in the Smith family, despite that teaching on the books.

John Dehlin [00:04:57] So who was his successor?

John Hamer [00:04:59] His son, Frederick Madison Smith.

John Dehlin [00:05:01] And that was not because of a system that he had put in place, but because.

John Hamer [00:05:06] Yeah, well, not because of lineal, in other words, not necessarily by right of lineal succession, but rather because he was appointed successor by his father, who had been the preceding president.

John Dehlin [00:05:14] So was that what he set up, that the prophet chooses its successor? Was that the system then?

John Hamer [00:05:20] That's the system. And then if the prophet, if suddenly there isn't a prophet, you know, the method by which the first Presidency, the first presidency does continue. And then, you know, there's the method by which we would arrive at a successor without appointment.

John Dehlin [00:05:37] Got it. Okay. But he's still got his son in there.

John Hamer [00:05:40] But he's still got his son in there.

John Dehlin [00:05:43] It's pretty sweet that he had a PhD in psychology.

John Hamer [00:05:46] Yes. So his son did, obviously. Yeah. So unlike then when Joseph S. Smith died in the LDS Church, then the most senior, most apostle then succeeded him. And so there continued to be older people in that generation in the leadership, whereas obviously, Fred M. Smith, Joseph III's successor, is substantially younger than his father. So you're always getting, again, younger leadership as a result of this. And so he's president then from the beginning, kind of the World War period. So from before World War I to just after World War II and all the intervening time period of the Depression. And like you pointed out, it's kind of crazy that as a guy who born in the 19th century from a movement that had been a bunch of farmers and people who had been very poor, that this emphasis, this early church emphasis on education really was kind of focused into this generation on him. So the second. So this is still only the grandson of Joseph Smith Jr. So Joseph Smith's son's son. And so he becomes the very first graduate of Graceland College, the church's college in Lamoni, Iowa. And then he also became one of the very first members of the church to have a PhD. So he had a PhD in psychology.

John Dehlin [00:07:10] Do you know where.

John Hamer [00:07:14] I don't mean to put you on the spot. I don't know. It's someplace anyway, I can't remember, like in Pennsylvania.

John Dehlin [00:07:21] And you think he was a true believer, like, this is the one true church and all that stuff?

John Hamer [00:07:24] Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:07:26] Interesting.

John Hamer [00:07:26] Yeah. Okay. But he also believed in it for. He wasn't all just, we're going to keep doing everything like it was done in 1830 kind of guy. He had an extremely, what we might call it, an expansive and a very modern idea of what Zion meant, especially now. Okay, we are no longer a church of subsistence farmers like we had been all through his father and his grandfather's era. Now we are people, working class people in this new industrial era. And so he really had this idea about, okay, what does Zion mean in this industrial era of everyone living in towns and working in factories and how should we build that? And he was influenced by the contemporary social gospel movement as a result of that.

John Dehlin [00:08:14] Okay, all right.

John Hamer [00:08:15] Okay. And so, for example, Zion continues to be just a really important concept in 20th century rlds church. And in fact, there's this adjective called Zionic, which if you do Google searches on, tends to yield a lot of RLDS stuff because it was very heavily used by RLDS people. And it doesn't really seem to be a word otherwise, but the adjective Zionic. And so I have in that next slide here, building the independent Sanitarium and Hospital, which is founded in independence in 1909, which is when Fred M. Is already starting to take over for his father. Then the next slide there is this thing that's called the ATHERTON plan, which is this, trying to have kind of a modern mechanized agricultural cooperative in Jackson County, Missouri. So the church builds this sort of wants to build anyway, gets going anyway on a modern poultry farm along the railroad there, where people are working with stewardships and working together and things in common to produce, to kind of build Zion in that kind of a more modern, mechanized way.

John Dehlin [00:09:26] So Zion. So cooperatives. That's awesome.

John Hamer [00:09:28] Yeah. Okay. And so then there's also bold plans. So we go to the next thing here, this idea of the auditorium, which he announced in 1920. And so the auditorium there, the seating capacity would have been 7,000. The population of independence in 1920 was 12,000. So it's like a kind of a giant thing for such a little church to be able to try to accomplish. And in some ways, this is, in a way, a. He didn't call it this, but I think there's reason to believe. He's kind of feeling like that. This is an idea of what the temple and independence would be. It didn't end up being called the temple, but it's sort of based on kind of a kirtland model where you have an upper and lower court, a meeting hall. You would hold all the general conferences here. It's sort of like a big tabernacle or a little conference center, since the supernacle is way bigger than this now. But it's way bigger than the tabernacle.

John Dehlin [00:10:25] Right, right. But it never got built.

John Hamer [00:10:27] No, it did, but. Okay, we'll go to the next one. So here's Zionic vision meets reality. It is a tiny church, but the depression hit, and so it was all they could do to just keep the thing going and not quite finish it. It took them 40, you know, not quite 40 years to actually finish the building.

John Dehlin [00:10:45] Oh, painful.

John Hamer [00:10:47] Yeah. So the whole long period of time was kind of a call to retire the debt and everything that the church suffered under because of the depression.

John Dehlin [00:10:56] Okay, got it.

John Hamer [00:10:58] All right. So, yeah, no, the auditorium is there. It's a beautiful. I mean, I like it as a building. It's kind of an interesting modern building, but a lot of people. It's not as gorgeous as the temple. Right, right, right.

John Dehlin [00:11:12] Okay.

Headquarters Structure and Presidential Succession

John Hamer [00:11:15] Okay. So I have here the next slide here. So the headquarters structure, you know, continued to kind of resemble what the Nauvoo headquarters had been. And so there's the first presidency. That's the leadership council. That's separate from the apostles. Apostles and the 70 are set over areas of the church, and they're specifically tasked to doing missionary work. There's also a standing high council, like the old presiding high council, that is kind of over church policies. And then there's this bishopric, the bishop in the Utah church, the bishops. During the migration, bishops displaced pastors or branch presidents as the head of congregations, because during the move, the bishop had to be in charge of these. Who were originally in charge of these temporal affairs. That was immediately on everyone's concern when you're in the wagon train and that kind of thing. And so the. These, though, in the RLDS tradition, continue to be the presiding officers. And then there's also the presiding patriarch, evangelist. Anyway, so I make this slide up here because one of the controversies that end up happening in Fred M's presidency is that here you've had this thing where his dad had been president for half a century. He is a new guy with new ideas. And a lot of people in the old councils were not. They weren't ready for his kind of shakeup. And so it did cause this kind of crisis that ended up being called the supreme directional control crisis, which was kind of his assertion that the president of the church and the first presidency had actual control of the church. And it wasn't the presiding bishopric, it wasn't the apostles or any of the other councils. They had to. The presidency is in charge.

John Dehlin [00:13:03] Little bit of a power struggle.

John Hamer [00:13:04] It was a power struggle to define what the different roles were. And functionally, it didn't actually do anything, but it did cause a. Did cause people to leave the church, which that always happens, you know. But anyway, so a couple thousand people walked across, left, and they got disgusted. They walked across the street and joined the Temple Lot Church. And so the Temple Lot Church had been down to like 20 or 30 members or something at some point, and now had a boom, boom suddenly. And so the Temple Lot Church, even though it has this completely different history going back after this moment in the 20s or 30s, the Temple Lot Church kind of transforms into an RLDS protest church. And so it still to this day is sort of like a RLDS church from the 1920s.

John Dehlin [00:13:48] Got it.

John Hamer [00:13:48] And so they kept a lot of that kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:13:50] Got it.

John Hamer [00:13:51] Anyway, so next, after Fred M. Died, his brother Israel A. Smith succeeded. He was appointed again by Fred M. So he was another son of Joseph.

John Dehlin [00:14:06] So Fred didn't choose his own son, he chose his brother, Right?

John Hamer [00:14:11] Yes. In fact, I don't think. Yeah, so Fred didn't have any sons. Ah, that's a problem. He has daughters.

John Dehlin [00:14:15] Got it.

John Hamer [00:14:16] So. So Fred has two daughters and so he appointed his brother to be successor. So I didn't mention on the other one. But anyway, in both cases, they're both Fred M. And Israel A. Smith are adding revelations to the Doctrine and Covenants. So Israel has another six his. He is, you know, not since he's kind of the immediate brother of Fred M. He's not coming in as a younger man. He is president of the church for another 12 years. And he is doing a lot of things that are sort of like old, kind of pre war still rlds stuff, or kind of a continuation of what Fred M. Had been doing, including kind of emphasizing it was like getting the job done, which is to say finish the auditorium, let's pay off all the debt, let's continue to kind of finish all these things that Fred M. Had had as his vision but hadn't been able to do because of the depression.

John Dehlin [00:15:10] I just want to say how wild it is that one of Joseph Smith's grandsons survives almost to 1960, well into the 1950s. We're talking a grandson of Joseph Smith.

John Hamer [00:15:25] You think that's wild? Let's go to the next slide. John. So when Israel A. Smith died in 1958, then his brother, W. Wallace Smith became president of the church. And so W. Because Joseph Smith III lived so long and because he outlived two of his wives, so he didn't have. He wasn't a polygamist, but he was a serial marrier. So his first wife died, his second wife died, his third wife. Then he had a son, W. Wallace Smith from that. Who was a generation younger than his older brothers. And so still a grandson of Joseph Smith Jr. Then becomes another president of the church and continues to be president of the church since 1978.

John Dehlin [00:16:18] Whoa, okay, wait. Why are there two W. Wallace Smith's

John Hamer [00:16:21] here, His son, then W. Is Wallace B. Smith. So. So if you're. You're on that chart, right?

John Dehlin [00:16:29] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:16:29] So it should say if maybe the one I gave you, it's. It's got a typo. The one I'm looking at, it's Wallace W. Wallace Smith. And then his son is Wallace.

John Dehlin [00:16:36] Okay. Yeah. Use the same name twice.

John Hamer [00:16:38] Okay. So there's a typo on that side. I'm sorry, I have another version that's fixed. I sent you an older one.

John Dehlin [00:16:43] Okay, so W. Wallace serves until 1978.

John Hamer [00:16:47] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:16:47] And that doesn't die.

John Hamer [00:16:49] He retires.

John Dehlin [00:16:50] And that's Joseph Smith's legitimate grandson.

John Hamer [00:16:52] Grandson.

John Dehlin [00:16:53] Unbelievable.

John Hamer [00:16:54] All the way up to 1978, Joseph Smith's just grandson not great grandson, nothing like that. Grandson and doesn't die. He retires and becomes emeritus prophet.

John Dehlin [00:17:03] That's some good genes right there.

John Hamer [00:17:05] Yeah. And so then he appoints his son, Wallace B. Smith is what that slide should say.

John Dehlin [00:17:12] Okay.

John Hamer [00:17:13] Wallace B. Smith, all right, becomes the president and prophet of the church at that point.

John Dehlin [00:17:18] Got it. Interesting.

John Hamer [00:17:20] So, yeah. So it's crazy how few generations we're talking about here.

John Dehlin [00:17:24] And so why does your slide say through 1996?

John Hamer [00:17:28] So he then. Wallace B. Smith. Wallace B. Smith retires in 1996. His father has died. Wallace B. Smith retires in 1996. He's a new successor. He becomes emeritus prophet of the church. He is alive today, and he is the emeritus prophet of the church.

John Dehlin [00:17:44] Okay, so the great grandson of Joseph Smith is still alive today.

John Hamer [00:17:48] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:17:49] That's amazing. Okay.

John Hamer [00:17:51] Okay. So I just want to show also we talked a little bit about this kind of anomalous office of presiding patriarchal evangelist as we go to the next slide.

John Dehlin [00:18:01] Yep.

John Hamer [00:18:01] Okay. So that had been started out as Joseph Smith, creating a position for his father, Joseph Smith Sr. And then Hyrum succeeded his father. Then there's this anomalous period where William Smith asserts kind of his role for it, but different people don't recognize him. So he's temporarily recognized by Brigham Young and then temporarily by Strachan. He asserts it himself in his own church. He's never recognized in Joseph Smith III's church as patriarch of the church, although he ultimately does join the reorganization. But people in the reorganization had remembered too much of the things that William did of his secret practice of polygamy and things like that. So he rejoins the church not as an apostle or as a patriarch, but just as a high priest. And so he continues to live as a member of the RLDS Church until his death as a missionary for the RLDS Church. But anyway, so once he dies, then the next presiding evangelist of the RLDS Church, or the first one since the reorganization, is Joseph III's son. I'm sorry, Joseph III's brother, Alexander H. Smith. And so then after Alexander, the role goes to his son, Frederick A. Smith. And after Frederick A. Smith, it goes to David Hiram Smith, who is just Joseph Smith Jr. S posthumous son, the kid that was born after Joseph Smith martyrdom, it goes to his son, Albert A. Smith. And so anyway, so there continues to be this idea in that role of presiding patriarch, evangelist, of that being in the Smith family. And all the way up into the. Just last year in the LDS Church, there was an emeritus Presiding patriarch who had been relieved in 1970 or something, 77 or something like that, of his duties, but had continued to live on. And he is a descendant of Hyrum Smith.

John Dehlin [00:19:57] Got it. Wow. Okay.

John Hamer [00:19:59] And so that only just barely was eliminated as an office in the LDS Church, I think this year.

John Dehlin [00:20:05] Right, okay.

John Hamer [00:20:06] But it was, the idea of it was that it had to be in the Smith family. But I want to point out here that in the RLDS church in 1958, they appointed Roy Scheville to be the presiding patriarch evangelist. And so already they moved away from lineal priesthood in the RLDS church in 1958 and instead picked Roy Scheville, who was probably the leading theologian of the church. A person who had had a. A PhD in Divinity from the University of Chicago School of Theology and was one of the professors at Graceland University.

John Dehlin [00:20:39] Nice.

Engagement with New Mormon History and Transparency

John Hamer [00:20:42] Okay, so as we're looking for, so we go to the next slide, this next transformation that happened. So when we first went from generation to generation Joseph Jr. And Joseph III to Fred M. And Israel A. Smith, we're going from this transformation of Americans in general, but also members of the church from being subsistence farmers to being industrial workers.

John Dehlin [00:21:02] Right.

John Hamer [00:21:02] Then the next thing that happens though, in the post war time period is we go this again. America's transformation from industrial workers, working class people by and large, to college educated service workers. And that's just something that's happened as a, as a general societal phenomenon, but it also affects the church in very serious ways, both the RLDS Church and the LDS Church. And so we go to the next slide here. In this post war environment, you know, there are like incredible opportunities, but also incredible challenges. And so, for example, in the post war period, suddenly Americans have the capacity to travel like never before. America is viewed differently than it ever had been. There are Americans that are occupying troops in Europe and Japan. Missionaries are traveling all over the place and there's this kind of worldwide expansion. So in the RLDS Church, that happens too. And so there's international expansion. The church is ultimately established in 50 countries. One of the things that they found out when they did that, so when they went to Japan and they're wandering around as missionaries and they're knocking on the door and they're like talking about who their church is, you know, the Japanese people, whatever, like will be something like, well, who are you? And we're like, well, we don't believe in polygamy. You know, we're not the Mormons. We don't believe this kind of Thing you know, you get a very, you quickly get to the limit of a negative identity. So if your opposition to polygamy is kind of like one of your main things that you like to talk about, the Japanese people are kind of like, well now you're what, you're Christian. I don't want to. What's that about? We don't really know anything about Christ. So they had to really start to kind of rethink what even the message is. And so that's certainly one of the things that happened in the post war period for the RLDS Church.

John Dehlin [00:22:49] So they say in the past it's been about we're the Joseph Smith Church that doesn't buy into polygamy, we're the anti Brigham Young Church. And then they're realizing they've got to have a new brand, a new product, a new.

John Hamer [00:23:04] Absolutely. Especially considering, by the way, LDS people could at that point fairly clearly say, well we don't believe it, we don't practice polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:23:11] The differentiators were, that is not

John Hamer [00:23:16] so obviously there had to be some soul searching in deciding, okay, this negative identity has run its course. What is it that we actually positively standing for? And that's certainly rethinking that happened in the post war environment. The other thing that's happening, and if we go to the next slide in the 60s and 70s, as you know and your entire program is very aware of, as you explored all this, the length and breadth of this phenomenon is the challenges of the new Mormon history. And the challenges of the new Mormon history have hit hit the RLDS Church just as much as, and maybe even a little bit before hitting the LDS Church. And I'm not saying this in this slide. What I'm saying is this is what the new Mormon history is saying. I'm not saying that I'm not making these definitive statements, but anyway. So the new Mormon history is arguing then that as we're going through these things that the Book of Mormon isn't an ancient document, that the inspired version or the Joseph Smith translation is not actually an accurate translation from ancient texts, that the Book of Abraham isn't a translation at all.

John Dehlin [00:24:17] Did Joseph claim that Joseph Smith translation was a translation? I guess it says translation. Did he claim to be reading Hebrew?

John Hamer [00:24:27] He ultimately did learn Hebrew. They did have a school where they tried to learn that. He didn't claim that there were any actual documents though. It's not like with the Book of Mormon where there is a claim that there is gold in place, that there's A text. So the next thing that gets translated, you may recall, it's in the dnc. There is a question that they have, which is, how do we account for this idea that in the Gospel of John, John is kind of promised that he'll live to see Christ's second coming? This is kind of like one of these things that the author of that gospel have as an unfulfilled prophecy or false prophecy. But the solution for it, when they prayed about it and wondered what happened about that, it didn't come by direct revelation, or at least isn't called to be direct revelation. According to the section of the dnc, rather, Joseph Smith says that there was a scroll that was written by the Apostle John that was in a cave somewhere or something like that in Turkey or something that they didn't actually have access to, but they were able to translate it nevertheless, and it becomes a section of the Doctrine and Covenants. Well, so that was actually the process of the Book of Mormon too. They didn't ever have the Book of Mormon plates in front. The plates were never in front of them when they were translating those things. It wasn't a direct thing where you're looking at plates and then writing. It's rather an idea. It's all done. The word translation there is definitely meant something completely different from what we would use it as. I mean, Joseph also used the word translation to, if you have your body translated from being a mortal body to be translated to being some kind of a heavenly body. So Moses didn't die, his body was translated into being celestial. If you listen to the early patriarchal blessings, Joseph Smith Sr's patriarchal blessings, he promised people the priesthood power to be able to translate themselves from planet to planet if they wanted to. So in other words, he used it to mean teleport. So they're using this word translation in a very different way than we do.

John Dehlin [00:26:31] Yeah, it sounds like he means channeling when he says translating.

John Hamer [00:26:36] Yeah, it means something related to an enchanted worldview. It means something related to miracles or, you know, powers of priesthood.

John Dehlin [00:26:51] And so the community of Christ in the 60s starts realizing that it's been saying translation of Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, translation of the Bible and Book of Abraham. And then in reality, they weren't translations, right?

John Hamer [00:27:06] Yeah, exactly. And that's what everybody is encountering. Right. So the new Mormon history, what ends up happening? So all of these members believing members, members who are in the exact same way that Bible scholars studied the Bible and turn over cherished traditions. It's not like they're doing that to do that. By and large, these are believing Christians who want to learn more about the Bible and how the Bible came to be in its present form. In the exact same way, people who are doing study of Mormon history and also scripture, you know, study of the Book of Mormon. So literary criticism of the Book of Mormon and looking into archaeology, the people who were our LDS church was very early way ahead of Thomas Stewart Ferguson to be doing archaeological research down in Mesoamerica looking for Book of Mormon artifacts. They're not doing that to debunk the Book of Mormon. They're doing it as very faithful people who have total expectation of finding artifacts. You know, but the problem with it is now that we are starting to have this population that aren't just being taught vernacularly, that aren't just having, you know, high school or lower education, but rather becoming college trained. They're having a different. They're coming up with different results now that professional scholarship is actually looking into these questions. And so this is a very serious challenge to the traditional understandings that everybody has had in the churches to that date.

John Dehlin [00:28:39] Got it.

John Hamer [00:28:41] And so one of the things that we find, and again we've mentioned, is that there's conflicting accounts of the first vision. But for the RLDS Church specifically, one of the most devastating things that happens is that is to find out, to come to find out that in fact, no matter how much Joseph Smith Jr. Publicly condemned polygamy and however much his sons tried to vindicate that position, and Emma continued to say that, it actually turns out that Joseph Smith Jr. Did practice polygamy. It's not in question historically at this point. The evidence is overwhelming. And so that obviously became very devastating to kind of the kind of core argument that the RLDS Church had been having for a century.

John Dehlin [00:29:25] Do you think that the RLDS Church, or are you aware of the LDS Church ever having kind of a September 6 equivalent era or impulse where the leaders of the church tried to hide or punish historians? Hide history or punish historians?

John Hamer [00:29:46] No, they didn't have that. The members, the leaders, by and large, were relatively open to study. So Fred m. Had a Ph.D. in other words, there is a tradition of really valuing learning and following learning where it leads. So actually the opposite thing is happening. So there's the same Arrington Don where our LDS Church has a professional historian for the very first time, the same way that as church historian before that, it had always been a general officer of the church, just like in the LDS Church, it had always been a General authority. And suddenly Arrington becomes an actual professional scholar who has made church historian. The same thing happens in the RLDS Church when Richard Howard becomes church historian. But the. So the thing happens is there is a lot of crisis and strife as many faithful regular members are really upset with what's coming out. Right. So this information that's coming out, but it's not that the historians are suppressed by the leaders, but rather it's a whole portion of the membership starts to become disgusted with the leaders for not doing that to the historians. In other words, for not renouncing this information that's coming out.

John Dehlin [00:31:18] The members got mad at the leaders for not doing that.

John Hamer [00:31:20] A whole portion of the members.

John Dehlin [00:31:22] Oh, wow. Interesting.

John Hamer [00:31:23] Yeah. But by and large, if anything, so the members of the leaders maybe acted a little cautiously often, but did not have any impulse to shut, by and large, to shut the scholars down. And so, you know, so the comparison that I make is that. So Leonard Arrington's one of his assistants is Mike Quinn, who ultimately becomes, you know, Arrington and his department are shut down, they're moved off to byu and ultimately the church historian ends up becoming a non historian again. It's a. It ends up being a general authority again in the LDS tradition and that Arrington's assistant Quinn is excommunicated as one of September 6th. The alternate thing that happens in our LDS history is that Dick Howard, Richard Howard's assistant, is Grant McMurray, and he ultimately ends up becoming the prophet and president of the church, the first one after the first nonspecific Smith to be head of the church.

John Dehlin [00:32:28] That's awesome.

John Hamer [00:32:28] And so in the parallel universe, it's what would have happened if the LDS church had been able to embrace all of these things and be able to digest them instead of just having kind

John Dehlin [00:32:41] of a negative reaction.

John Hamer [00:32:43] Yeah. A reaction where it was just a denial, reactive denial. And if Mike Quinn had succeeded to be. Had succeeded Spencer Kimball as president anyway, it wouldn't, because that's not how the succession works in the LDS church.

John Dehlin [00:32:57] But anyway, you know, I have to believe that the church is stronger now because of its period of denial, because the 70s and 80s and 90s turned out to be a really important time of growth. And so there may have been very.

John Hamer [00:33:13] There's never been any. And except for. I'd argue that it's not because they still haven't had any. They still haven't gone through the reckoning. So people are still constantly, you know, you're having to deal with the aftermath of it constantly how many people write to you and say, you know, John, I can't even believe all of this stuff. In other words, you know, there's hardly any that reckoning we've done in community of Christ. Right?

John Dehlin [00:33:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [00:33:36] So in other words, that reckoning still isn't done.

John Dehlin [00:33:39] Yeah, no, you're right. So you can't say, I just had a bishop email me today. He's like, I'm a bishop in Utah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, help me.

John Hamer [00:33:49] I'm sure you have that all the time. I had a Mormon high school student Yesterday say, Dear Mr. Hamer, I've listened to you on John Dehlin's show and John Larsen's show and your writings on By Common Consent. And I've always heard all of this whitewashed history, and I just want this kind of thing. I'm not even in your church.

John Dehlin [00:34:10] Right, right.

John Hamer [00:34:12] Much less you. You're getting this all the time. So I would say, whereas it's easier to market very bold truth claims if the truth claims are not, in fact, supportable. You are not. Your strength is a facade. Well, it looks like it's the case. But anyway, I don't. Anyway, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:34:35] No, no, no. I mean, I don't want to derail us, but in some ways, strength is strength. I mean, if someone punches you with the club, it's a club, and it hits you over the head. And the church, you know, it's true. It's true that the LDS Church's strength is built upon an inadequate and in some ways falsified narrative at times, but it's also true they're super strong. But that doesn't mean strong means the most moral or ethical necessarily, you know.

John Hamer [00:35:08] Sure. And it doesn't necessarily mean. Anyway, who knows? Right.

John Dehlin [00:35:11] Yeah. Yeah.

John Hamer [00:35:12] Because, you know, anyway, what could ultimately happen and how fast things can unravel, too. Like what the church is happening in Europe. Right. That's right. So who knows?

John Dehlin [00:35:23] But what's beautiful to me is that this is this moment of truth for the community of Christ and the LDS Church at about the same time. Time. And I would say. I would say the community of Christ probably did what by my values today, even though I'm active LDS and happy there, it seems like the community of Christ did the most noble, honorable, and moral ethical thing. I mean, it seems that way. I don't know that I'm right, but that's how I felt when I listened to Bill Russell tell the story.

John Hamer [00:35:59] Right, right. But then you're also conflicted because you say, and yet they're not doing so hot.

John Dehlin [00:36:06] Right, let's talk about that. So do your slides talk about that.

John Hamer [00:36:11] Yeah. Okay, so let's sum up where we are because we did a little bit of a diversion, but so we can go. Okay, so obviously the idea that Joseph Smith is the origin of polygamy, it was very hard for our LDS members.

John Dehlin [00:36:24] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:36:25] Okay, so. So let's say we did this thing where kind of the divergence had been up to the 20th century and so now getting it through the end of the 20th century, just these are kind of very simplistic additional sum ups for between LDs and RLDS. And so I would say in response to the new warming history, conservatives in the LDS church by and large kind of won at the first round wherever we're at one to now. And in the RLDS church is the other way around. So the progressives triumphed. And the reaction then is that the basic idea is to deny or explain away evidence about the Book of Mormon. The Book of Abraham still is continuing. I mean it's incredible. I think that the apologetic arguments of that gets crazy. But anyway, the Book of Abraham or the Joseph Smith translation kind of to affirm the canonized late version of the first vision. And again we mentioned the shutting down of the Arrington dawn and the not all of the 6th, September 6th were excommunicated, but the disciplining of September 6th intellectuals within the church. And so then on the other side of it, the RLDS side, more or less the idea is accepting evidence about the Book of Mormon, the inspired version, and also polygamy, even kind of looking to earlier accounts of the first vision as being more historically defensible, but also potentially better for our theology anyway.

John Dehlin [00:37:44] Right.

John Hamer [00:37:45] And then the historian, as we mentioned, becomes prophet and then also the leaders become academics and academics become. And vice versa, which that had already been happening.

John Dehlin [00:37:55] Yes, it's such a fun story. I just love the story.

John Hamer [00:37:59] Yeah, it's kind of a crazy divergent path where these reflections between these two cousins separated at not birth, but at adolescence, painful adolescence. Then. So you mentioned. Okay, well, okay, maybe the, if we go to the next slide, maybe the difference in age of leaders has had an effect on that. And so this is a study that my partner Mark Karpowitz had done in the middle like a few years back where he's a database expert and he just had put in fact it in all the leadership ages. So to get average ages of all the different leaders. And so this is just a little couple charts from that study and so one of them here is this is the average age of apostles in the LDS and RLDS churches. And so if you kind of look at what's happened here, the RLDS church, even in apostles, always had a tradition where the apostles would retire at a certain age. And so as a result of that, you can see kind of an average, the apostles stay in the RLDS church of being kind of in this kind of range between age 50 and 55 on an average. Whereas as you're kind of watching it as the millennium comes here, the average age of LDs apostles kind of snakes up to get to actually almost 80.

John Dehlin [00:39:15] Still growing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [00:39:18] And then if you do it, the other thing, so if you just go at the presidents of the church. So there's the same thing that happened if you go back and you look at Joseph Smith, he's super young when he's president of the church. Right. And then that is mirrored again for Joseph III in the RLDS church. And there's just this one moment of this overlap that we mentioned with the dueling cousins where suddenly Joseph III actually is older than his cousin by about six years. But then what ends up happening, you can see then as soon as Joseph III dies and it goes to his son, bam, all the way down.

John Dehlin [00:39:52] Right.

John Hamer [00:39:52] You know, and so, and then we have a young president again. And that has continued to be the case as more recently, there's a tradition now of the president's retiring and becoming emeritus prophet. And so the president of the church has continued to be somebody in much younger 50s and 60s, as opposed to there's this time period, as you can kind of see as of. I don't even know where to start. But anyway, the post war time period, 1950s, when the proportion of the time that the LDS president is above the age of 90 is like pretty well half the time, you know.

John Dehlin [00:40:31] Yeah. I mean, and there's important implications here because there's the tension between continuity and change. Right. And while there's many of us who would say, oh, it's such a drag to have old leaders, the benefit of having old leaders is slower change and more continuity, which sometimes can actually accrue to the benefit of the organization.

John Hamer [00:40:54] Oh, stability is a huge benefit too. So one of the reasons why whatever Britain was always successful as opposed to revolutionary Europe, was because they're just really ponderously slow at changing things. And same thing, the US has been successful in some ways because of all of the horrific checks on everything that make it so that political things don't turn change for generations. So it is very institutionally good in terms of. It can be very institutionally good. It can cause rigidity that can be bad at some points. But anyway, it can be quite good. On the other hand, it can be maddeningly frustrating. If you got to 1978 and you still have this kind of racist policy or you get to now and you wonder, is it ever going to be possible to have to cease priesthood discrimination on the basis of gender? Can you actually have full participation, full membership for women? I mean, you know, how close are we? Are we anywhere closer? I don't. You know, anyway, it doesn't look like there's any tea leaves that say there it is.

John Dehlin [00:41:58] Right, right. Okay. All right.

John Hamer [00:42:00] Okay. Okay. So just to round out the last little bit of the final. Smith. So we mentioned W. Wallace Smith and Wallace B. Smith. So again, W. Wallace is still just a grandson of Joseph Smith Jr. And then his son is a great grandson. And so they're presidents from 58 to 78 and then 78 to 96. W. Wallace Smith starts to have some of the. Some of his revelations, start to talk about the idea of finally building the temple in independence. And that is announced by his son, W. Wallace B. Smith in 1984 in kind of this revolutionary DNC section, DNC 156, which announces construction of the temple that will finally be built in the center place. But also that we are going to cease to have priesthood discrimination on the basis of gender. So women will be ordained. And then finally to round out all of the revolutionary things that Wallace Bee did, he appointed as his successor Anon Smith. So he said that this church, there's no reason for the church to be monarchy, that people are being called to fulfill the role of prophet who aren't in the Smith family. And the person who's being called W. Grant McMurray is outside of the family that had been in charge ever since the organization.

John Dehlin [00:43:28] Yeah. And the idea to an LDS Church member, the idea of the prophet just sort of I'm going to retire now. That's kind of unheard of, right?

John Hamer [00:43:37] Well, yeah, I guess so. But I mean it is. It's definitely unheard of. But on the other hand, it's very sensible. I guess it's now happened in the papacy for the first time since.

John Dehlin [00:43:50] In a long time.

John Hamer [00:43:51] Yeah, since Celestine V or something. Whatever it was. The last time that happened was a long time ago. But it's actually been pretty wonderful. Wallace B. Smith was a really great leader and he's continued to be a great leader, but emeritus prophet. So he has never stepped in and second guessed anything that his successors have done. But he does come and he's extremely helpful and supportive to all kinds of things in the church that the church is doing. So he was a great leader and he's been a great retired leader.

John Dehlin [00:44:21] That's great. That's interesting. Okay.

The Community of Christ Temple in Independence

John Hamer [00:44:24] Okay. So just in talking about the temple real quick. And so these are the. This next thing is a map. This on the left, the little image is this very famous plot of Zion. And so this is this 1833 plan with the 24 temples that would be in Independence, which is going to be the center place of the city of Zion in Jackson County, Missouri. And so if you take that and you take that diagram, you take the center part of that. I made this little mock up with all the little Independence temples. So what those maybe 24 temples on that plan would look like. And then there's the, this extra lot there for bishop storehouses. And then that is superimposed, you can see kind of the light green area on what we call the temple parcel or the greater temple lot, the original temple parcel. And so if you superimpose that using that little star there, which is kind of like what is traditionally regarded as the thing on the map. Where was the first temple to be dedicated? At the traditional dedication spot. We don't know that that's the dedication spot. That's what people later remembered. And now it's, it's marked as the traditional spot. Anyway, if you do that super imposing on it, that's kind of what that would look like. Okay, okay. But right after that, they made a new plan that was different and larger and more consolidated. They pointed out that that original one square mile plat would be far too small very fast. And so they made a four square mile one that reoriented the blocks and so then the second one and actually had a slightly different temple plan and this kind of thing. And so that's what the second parcel that the second plan would look like again superimposed on the temple parcel.

John Dehlin [00:46:07] Okay.

John Hamer [00:46:08] Okay. So then we go to the next thing here you can see what the actual thing looks like today. So again, that temple parcel is that light green area that's in this map. And you can see that the Church of Christ Temple lot is there and their property includes that traditional spot. But you can also see that the community of Christ Temple, Community of Christ Auditorium and the LDS Visitor center are all on that same temple parcel.

John Dehlin [00:46:33] Nice.

John Hamer [00:46:34] Anyway, and you can kind of Just, see, I just have that geography of it because it's kind of a really crazy place. When you go, you can see the, you know, in those kitty corners, you have the rlds, you know, the Community of Christ, the LDS Church, the Church of Christ Temple lot just across the street. The other way is the headquarters of the Remnant Church. You know, the Cutlerites are just a few blocks away. It's kind of like the one place in American religious geography where there is this contested central sacred place that is sort of like Jerusalem, where if you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and there's the Ethiopian churches up on the roof and the Greek churches, all these different places that all have a little claim to the places where the traditional spot where Jesus was crucified.

John Dehlin [00:47:24] Fascinating.

John Hamer [00:47:27] Okay, and so then just this next one is just kind of a picture of the temple. So the temple is done a little differently than what LDS people think of as temples. So it's not modeled on Nauvoo. It's modeled on Kirtland, which predates the Nauvoo endowment, predates Nauvoo ordinances, and instead is modeled on what the Revelation and the DNC for the Kirtland Temple called for, which is a house of learning, a house of words, worship, a house of order. So the idea is that this is where the school of the prophets is going to be. This is where what we call the temple school or the archives and library and all the historic documents of the church. It's also the headquarters of the church. Joseph Smith's office was in Kirtland Temple. It's a symbol of the church and open to all. So, you know, the idea of it is it's again taking from the grab bag of early Mormonism between the two temples that got built and kind of emphasizing the first one as opposed to the second one, which is the direction that the LDS Church has gone.

John Dehlin [00:48:21] Beautiful. So there's no endowments there. There's no temple marriage, there's no baptisms for the dead.

John Hamer [00:48:27] It's not about those.

John Dehlin [00:48:28] It's worship. It's like a mega church kind of.

John Hamer [00:48:32] Well, yeah, it's four special functions. And then in the community of Christ tradition, we've talked about this peace strain. It's also specially dedicated to peace. And so one of the things that is done there, which is a new thing that is not from the early time, is that every day there is a prayer for peace that is conducted there as a seminary, as a ceremony in the sanctum underneath that giant spiral and Every one of the countries of the world and. Or stateless peoples, indigenous peoples on a daily basis. You know, there's a prayer denominationally, but focused on the temple for peace for. And social justice for people, all peoples of the world. And so then we tend to do that as a. We do that, for example, on Sunday in our congregation. We do whatever the day is on the calendar for that Sunday. And so it's kind of an attempt to have us all focus on peace globally and then to hopefully act locally.

John Dehlin [00:49:32] Beautiful. All right.

Progressive Firsts and Modern Identity of the Community of Christ

John Hamer [00:49:35] And so kind of just rounding out these transformations, I have this kind of slide here with a list of kind of RLDS firsts.

John Dehlin [00:49:43] Now, wait, you don't have blacks receiving priesthood on this, on this slide? That would have happened in the late 1800s.

John Hamer [00:49:52] 1865.

John Dehlin [00:49:53] Okay, yeah. Okay.

John Hamer [00:49:54] So that is. That predates all of the. You know, there were interesting things that happened that were from an earlier era of the church, but this is all kind of from the transformational period, more recent times. So these are kind of firsts in the leadership. So, for example, the first Asian apostle, 1980. Women ordained to the priesthood in 85. The first women apostles in 98. The first African apostle in 2000. First women in the presiding bishopric, 2002. The first Latin American apostle in 2007. The first woman in the first presidency is 2007. And then it was just this year we had the first Tahitian apostle. And then also the other thing that also should be on this is an older slide, but the thing that should also now be on the slide is that in 2010, DNC164 allowed for recognition of marriages for LGBT people and to be decided on a nation by nation level in national conferences of the Church, and then subsequently national conferences in Canada, in Australia, and then this year in the United States have all affirmed that, you know, there should be no priesthood discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and that committed relationships, committed marriages for gay people are also sacraments and that should be performed by priesthood members.

John Dehlin [00:51:22] Beautiful. That's amazing stuff.

John Hamer [00:51:26] And so then in the course of the thing I mentioned, so after the Smiths, the last Smith prophet retired and became Emeritus prophet, W. Grant McMurray became the first non Smith prophet and President of the Church. He was president from 96 to 2004 and added again more sections to the DNC. While he was president, there was a new name for the church. So we keep saying RLDS, RLDScommunity of Christ. So I have on here kind of a chart with the whole history of name changes starting in 1830 with Church of Christ to then Church of the Latter Day Saints, or Church of Latter Day Saints to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to new organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints in the 70s. People were very aware all through the 20th century that reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints is just this horribly unwieldy name. I'd say, you know, there was a goal for trying to come up with something, and so there was a kind of an unofficial nickname of being called the Saints Church. But people. And I think you probably have the same thing. You know, even though you might call yourself a Latter Day Saint, calling yourself a saint, you easily call the people in Missouri who suffered, they were Saints, the Saints were thrown out of Missouri, or the Saints were massacred at Mont's Mill. But you weren't saying, hey, I'm a saint. In other words, it's a problematic thing in a way to come, kind of claim that even if the idea of it is that early Christians were called the Saints, and so that didn't stick. And so ultimately, what people came to and decide was to call the church Community of Christ, which brings it back to something similar to the original name of the church, Church of Christ, but emphasizing a thing that probably all different groups in the Restoration are really quite good at, which is to say emphasizing community. So one of the things, no matter how much people, let's say in the LDS church maybe are upset about truth claims or maybe social justice issues, a lot of cases they still are. So get such a meaningful experience out of the congregational experience, out of their ward experience, how much they love their warts, because the churches tend to always be really good at building community. And that's one thing that has been incredibly important, I think, across the sweep of the Restoration. And so the emphasis here in the new name is to say, that's something we get right, that's something that we value. That's something that we want to emphasize.

John Dehlin [00:54:01] Got it. Beautiful.

John Hamer [00:54:05] And so that just kind of brings us up to where we are today. So today, Community of Christ, what I say is it's a relatively liberal Christian denomination that honors the Restoration heritage. The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants are scripture. They're canonical. In Community of Christ, there's no creed, and members have a very diverse set of beliefs. In theory, there's 250,000 members spread around in 50 countries. But I would say that that population figure is not any better than the 14 million that the LDS Church claims. And the president right now is Steve Veazey, who has had two revelations added to the DNC since 2005. Just in terms of the next slide there. So the kind of the. We don't really talk. We don't memorize so much the articles of faith anymore, but instead we've kind of focused on what we have, our set of enduring principles, which are these ideas. Grace and generosity, the sacredness of creation, continuing revelation, the worth of all persons, the idea that everyone is called, all are called, that we're called to make responsible choices, called to pursue peace, that we can experience unity in diversity and then the blessings of community. That's a picture from the temple. This is a window, a stained glass window in the temple that represents the scripture. The field is white, all ready to harvest.

John Dehlin [00:55:26] Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

John Hamer [00:55:30] And just the very last thing I just want to say, we talk about, you know, all these new revelations to the DNC and adding, you know, having an open canon and all those kind of things. So I just have this as an example from one of the most recent sections, DNC163, which I just think is so powerful and meaningful. It's about. This section of. It is about our idea of Scripture or what the most recent thoughts have been canonized about Scripture. And it's, you know, things that are. Including, like, I was pulling out quotes here.

John Dehlin [00:56:01] Why don't you read the whole thing? I think it's cool.

John Hamer [00:56:03] I'll read the whole thing. Okay. Scripture is an indispensable witness to the eternal source of light and truth, which cannot be fully contained in any finite vessel or language.

John Dehlin [00:56:13] So it's saying it's beautiful and limited at the same time.

John Hamer [00:56:16] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:56:16] Yeah.

John Hamer [00:56:17] So it's a witness to eternal truth, but you cannot possibly contain truth in finite language.

John Dehlin [00:56:24] I love it.

John Hamer [00:56:25] Scripture has been written and shaped by human authors through experiences of revelation and ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the midst of time and culture.

John Dehlin [00:56:35] So it's contextual. It's got a human context and a

John Hamer [00:56:39] human response to revelation and inspiration. And humans exist in their time and culture.

John Dehlin [00:56:45] Everything's contextual, right? Yeah.

John Hamer [00:56:47] Has to be.

John Dehlin [00:56:48] Okay.

John Hamer [00:56:51] This is huge. The next one. Scripture is not to be worshiped or idolized. I mean, this is not a problem so much in the LDS tradition, but this is really a Protestant or especially fundamentalist Protestant thing that ends up happening. You know, that when Scripture is the sole source of authority, people, you know, call it whatever, Bible thumpers or whatever, every single thing is about you Know, Scripture is Word of God. It is Word of God as written in the King James Version, you know, straight from God's dictation machine to King James scribes. And. And as a result of that, by assuming this kind of insane infallibility into this human written document or human response to the divine document, you end up actually worshipping or idolizing a document. So that's what Scripture is, not to be worshiped or idolized. Only God, the Eternal One, of whom Scripture testifies, is worthy of worship. God's nature, as revealed in Jesus Christ and affirmed by the Holy Spirit, provides the ultimate standard by which any portion of Scripture should be interpreted and applied. And then finally, here it is not pleasing to God when any passage of Scripture is used to diminish or oppress races, genders, or classes of beings. Much physical and emotional violence has been done to some of God's beloved children through the misuse of Scripture. The church is called upon to confess and repent of such attitude and practices.

John Dehlin [00:58:22] Oh, amen.

John Hamer [00:58:27] That's continuing revelation.

John Dehlin [00:58:33] That's exactly what I was thinking.

John Hamer [00:58:36] So there we go. So that brings us. That's the end of the presentation.

John Dehlin [00:58:41] So. And I guess I just want to end by saying that this is a fascinating history. This is a beautiful tradition that I think is just worthy of so much respect. And at the same time, my guess is that the church has paid a price for some of its acts of conscience. And so the truth is all, almost all churches are in decline in the United States and in Europe these days. And so churches, just churches. Churches and the LDS churches, according to Marlon Jensen, experiencing its greatest, you know, moment of apostasy since Kirtland. And so churches are all in trouble. So. So I guess we're going to conclude by giving an introduction to our final segment. And that's just, you know, I'm sure that the church is, in this moment, the community of Christ is in this moment of reflection, trying to figure out what it's going to do to stay vibrant and relevant in the 21st century. True.

Relevance of the Community of Christ for Former Latter-day Saints

John Hamer [00:59:53] Absolutely. So this is the challenge when, even when going back to that moment that I was talking about is the precursor to the challenge of the new Mormon history. The bigger challenge is not the new Mormon history, although obviously that was huge. That challenge is actually faced by Christians. In other words, we've kind of talked about that when we're talking about putting the Bible into actual context. The challenge is when you're going from. When you're going from a membership that has, you know, has a high school or junior high or less education to people who are trained to do university kinds of thinking. It's massively different for how you can experience religion and truth claims. And so that has been the challenge across the board for all churches. And it's not going to, that isn't going to go away by doubling down on discredited truth claims. It's a point of reckoning. And so how are we reconciling it? Where are we at? I think that the community of Christ actually has a lot going for it that a bunch of other churches that are really also struggling don't have going for it. But we can talk about that in the next section.

John Dehlin [01:01:16] Yeah, so the next section is going to be kind of two things. What the community of Christ is doing now and how that relates to, let's just say, LDS Church members who are with liberal sensibilities, but even more specifically,

John Hamer [01:01:32] or even specifically, whether they're still members or not, people, the hemorrhage of a million ex Mormons that exist in North America or Brazil or all these kind of places. How people who have left but who maybe still would like to have a spiritual home. People who maybe couldn't stay in and are gone, but maybe now are starting a family and having kids and would say, boy, I'd really like to be able to raise my kids somewhere, but I don't see how I can if my children are going to be differentiated in this way by gender, this kind of thing. Or maybe they're gay. How do you know?

John Dehlin [01:02:09] Right. And so that's a little sneak preview for what's ahead. So, John Hamer, thank you so much for taking us through this rich four hour history of the community of Christ.

John Hamer [01:02:21] Thanks for putting up with me all these hours.

John Dehlin [01:02:23] All right, we'll see you in the next episode.

John Hamer [01:02:45] Come, come you saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy when you're with.

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