Scott Woodward: The first and only publication of the Nauvoo Expositor was issued on June 7, 1844. It was an exposé sheet published by seven recently excommunicated dissenters of the Church in which they lay bare their grievances against Joseph Smith as both a prophet and politician in the most blistering, malignant, exaggerated, and provocative ways they could invent. This move was a calculated trap set to force the hand of Joseph and those close to him to take action against the Expositor’s printing press, which would open them up to legal charges that could get him to the county seat of Carthage, where he could be killed. On this episode of Church History Matters we take a close look at the details of that single published edition of the Nauvoo Expositor to understand just what was so inflammatory and untenable in it that Joseph and the City Council determined to take action against it, despite the clear risks of doing so. We also look at questions about the legality and wisdom of their actions. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today Casey and I dive into our third episode in this series about the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Now let’s get into it.

Casey Griffiths: Hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward: Hi, Casey.

Casey Griffiths: We’re continuing this story that I think the two of us are getting pretty wrapped up in.

Scott Woodward: There is so much.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. You actually texted me yesterday and said, “Hey, I’m reading the whole Nauvoo Expositor—”

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: “Do you want to join me?” And I was like, “. . . No.”

Scott Woodward: Dude, friends invite friends to read the Nauvoo Expositor with them.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah. Not that that doesn’t sound like a delightful way to spend an afternoon—I was just in some meetings and stuff, but that’s how you spent the day. And was it fruitful?

Scott Woodward: Well, it’s a depressing text that angers people still today.

Casey Griffiths: Yep.

Scott Woodward: And we’ll talk about how it also did so to the original audience, actually. But, yeah, we’ve been just diving deep into original texts here and trying to figure out how exactly to tell the story we want to tell today.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. And I want to point out that all these texts are available for you to read for yourself. The good people at the Joseph Smith Papers have digitized and placed most of these online, and we’re going to walk you through it, but you don’t have to take our word for it. If you have questions, go right after to the Joseph Smith Papers site, and look up any of these texts that we’re citing, and take a look for yourself. We’re working off the backs of some very, very great historians, and we want to acknowledge their work.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And what a time to be alive, honestly. Where all these documents are just there, you know, one click away from you at any given moment.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, you can go check out the documents yourself. That’s what I always encourage any of my serious students to do is get as close as you can to the primary documents and texts so that you can avoid as much spin and innuendo as possible, not that you can avoid it altogether, because sometimes that’s in the original documents.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: But it’s probably the best way to come to your own conclusions about these things.

Casey Griffiths: And man, is the Nauvoo Expositor a great example of that, where if you’ve read through some documents like section 132, or you’re familiar with primary sources from Nauvoo, you can see how the Nauvoo Expositor takes things and just spins them in the most negative direction possible.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: So read the Expositor, but also recognize that even this document is spinning things that were much less sinister—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —when they originally received, but you tweak a word here or there, and all of a sudden it sounds a lot more wicked and evil than it did in its original state.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. So that’s what we’re doing today. We’re going to talk about that. And the broader theme of this series is we’re looking at what were the factors that led to the death of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. And so far our answer to that question about those factors has been something like this: that it was a confluence of factors, right? There’s factors both outside the church and inside the church that eventually culminate in the martyrdom. And so should I just review what we’ve been talking about the last two episodes?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, let’s do a quick review.

Scott Woodward: Okay, a quick recap here. So in order to understand what leads to the martyrdom, we’ve got to understand a few different factors swirling together both inside and outside the church in 1844 that brings about this tragedy, which include, number one, the actions of Joseph Smith’s political enemies outside the church, as Joseph had announced his candidacy for the U. S. presidency. And that’s going to be a big factor in how his enemies are able to come after him. The martyrdom has been referred to by none other than President Dallin H. Oaks as a political assassination, actually. So politics has tons to do with this, and his political enemies will bring this about. Number two, the fall and the apostasy of key individuals within the church. It’s huge.

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward: Joseph said, “I might live as Caesar might have lived, were it not for a right hand Brutus.” So there’s some people inside the church who are going to seek to stab him in the back. And then third, the Nauvoo City Council’s decision to destroy the Nauvoo Expositor is going to be the third important factor that’s going to basically allow for a legal process to be leveled against Joseph and other church leaders and get them into jail. So those are kind of the three big factors, and by far the most consequential of these factors was the fall and apostasy of key individuals within the church at Nauvoo who, because of a personal vendetta against Joseph, will seek both publicly and privately to take him down. We talked last episode about probably the chief instigator of all this, which is William Law, Joseph’s second counselor in the First Presidency. Like, this is so crazy, Casey, that—can you imagine the second counselor in the First Presidency today conspiring to take out the church president? I mean, that’s what this was like in Nauvoo.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: William’s opposition to Joseph seems to have begun when Joseph introduced William to the principle of plural marriage, which William adamantly denounced. He said, “If an angel from heaven was to reveal to me that a man should have more than one wife, I would kill him.” I would kill that angel. Around the same time, in the fall of 1843, William had revealed a deep flaw in his own moral integrity when, upon his sickbed, he confessed to Hyrum Smith that he had committed adultery. And when William then asked Joseph if he and his wife, Jane, could still be sealed together at that time, in spite of this sin, Joseph inquired of the Lord, who revealed that William and Jane could not at that time be sealed because he was adulterous. It was at that point that William’s anger begins to burn within him toward Joseph Smith, and he starts plotting with other dissenters who opposed the prophet to somehow bring him down. And chief among these other dissenters was Chauncey Higbee. Chauncey Higbee, back in May of 1842, had been charged formally by Bishop George Miller with, “unchaste and unvirtuous conduct.” When the Nauvoo High Council had heard the case on the 21st of May 1842, witnesses testified that Chauncey had seduced several women by telling them that it was no sin to, “have free intercourse with women” as long as it was kept secret. Three of Higbee’s victims testify against him, at which point the high council formally excommunicates him from the church. He then is ticked. He’s arrested that same day for slander and defamation against the prophet and his wife, Emma, and he’s released on a $200 bond, but he remains indignant, angry, vindictive against Joseph Smith and those close to him. By the way, in his sexual misconduct in 1842, Chauncey was actually acting in league with the then Nauvoo mayor, John C. Bennett, which we talked about as well last time, who had basically kind of been the ring leader of this spiritual wifery movement, which was this secret serial adultery, essentially—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —where they would lie to their victims that Joseph Smith approved. John also assured these women that if they became pregnant, he, as a physician, would perform an abortion for them.

Casey Griffiths: Wow.

Scott Woodward: That’s actually testified openly in Nauvoo against him. It’s in the actual trial against John C. Bennett, these women say as much, and it’s published on the Joseph Smith Papers, Times and Seasons, August 1, 1842. I mean, this guy’s a piece of work, and Chauncey Higbee is right there telling these women, yeah, what John’s telling you is true, you know?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: But after his victims come out and expose John C. Bennett, he’s excommunicated from the church for lying and deceiving innocent women and committing adultery “in the most abominable and degraded manner.” And so after he was humiliated and angered, John storms out of Nauvoo threatening to send a mob after the saints, and then he starts writing deceitful letters to an Illinois paper accusing Joseph Smith of all the same immorality that he himself committed, spinning other patently false or grossly exaggerated stories about Joseph and Nauvoo, and, of course, it was easy for church members to see through John’s vindictive lies, but those who are not familiar with the saints gobbled this stuff up, and John does succeed in turning public opinion against Joseph Smith in many quarters of the United States. One of the papers that loved John C. Bennett’s stuff was notably Thomas Sharp’s paper, the Warsaw Signal. We’ve talked about Thomas Sharp. And he gobbles up John’s letters and republishes them. In fact, John C. Bennett even goes and visits Thomas Sharp and fed him more jaded information to print against the Mormons. And so, as we mentioned, Thomas Sharp is going to become the chief instigator of the mob that will kill Joseph and Hyrum. And so there is all these connections. We can draw this little web, right, with John C. Bennett, Chauncey Higbee, William Law, Thomas Sharp.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And then there’s a few others that are publicly mentioned by Joseph Smith when he learned in the spring of 1844 that there was a sinister conspiracy brewing among dissidents in the church to take his life and the lives of his family and other church leaders. In the speech that he gives on March 24, Joseph actually announces publicly the names of these people. He says, “I have been informed that a conspiracy has got up in this place for the purpose of taking the life of President Joseph Smith, his family, and all the Smith family and the heads of the church.” And then he announced, “The names of the persons revealed at the head of the conspiracy are as follows: Chauncey L. Higbee, Dr. Robert Foster, Joseph H. Jackson, and William and Wilson Law. Do you want to remind us who Robert Foster is and Joseph Jackson?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah. Robert Foster is up and down with Joseph Smith, but some of their conflict starts when Foster starts to build a hotel in Nauvoo that will directly compete with the Nauvoo House, which they’ve been commanded to build by revelation.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: They go back and forth. It seems like the break happens when Foster says a visitor, he never says who, came and tried to seduce his wife, and then Foster, like, goes off the rails, pulls a gun on his wife.

Scott Woodward: To try to force her to confess to him who it was.

Casey Griffiths: Try to force her to confess. When she doesn’t confess, gives her a gun, tells her to defend herself. Joseph Smith visits his wife, finds her at a neighbor’s house, and actually sits down in the presence of witnesses and just says, have I ever asked you to do anything inappropriate? Is there anything that’s not correct that’s happened between us? And she says, no. And that’s one thing that surprised me when I reviewed the sources this time is that even someone like Chauncey Higbee and John Bennett, who were just kind of scoundrels to begin with, Joseph Smith goes out of his way to try and reconcile with them and help them. There’s all these little notations in Joseph’s journal from the time where he’s like, I sat down with Francis Higbee or Chauncey Higbee. John C. Bennett was even given several second chances—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —before he—he’s excommunicated from the church in spite of all the stuff that he’s doing, and so this is all building to a point, and something’s got to give.

Scott Woodward: Over the next two months, these men and others associated with that conspiracy who had not yet been excommunicated are officially severed from the church, after which some of them formed their own church with William Law at its head as a space for those who still profess to believe the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, but who also now believe Joseph Smith is a fallen prophet. They call themselves the Reformed Mormon Church, which is interesting. So then on June 7, 1844, I think this is where we left off last time, things escalate dramatically when seven of these conspirators, including the three sets of brothers—William and Wilson Law, Chauncey and Francis Higbee, and Robert and Charles Foster, as well as Charles Ivins—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —they publish the first and only issue of a newspaper they call the Nauvoo Expositor. And I guess that leads to today’s burning question, doesn’t it, Casey?

Casey Griffiths: That is correct, which is, what was so dangerous about the Nauvoo Expositor, and how did its publication lead to the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith? One of the points we wanted to make last time is that the people publishing the Expositor weren’t upstanding citizens—

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: —to begin with, you know? April 26, 1844, a fight breaks out where one of them points a pistol directly at Joseph Smith’s chest and threatens to kill him, but is kind of talked off the ledge when it comes there. These are the people that are publishing the Nauvoo Expositor. And the Nauvoo Expositor is, well, something that needs to be understood. It’s really, we’ve mentioned and used this analogy before, the spark that lights the fuse—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —that leads to Joseph Smith’s death. The Expositor is published on June 7, and 20 days later Joseph and Hyrum are killed in Carthage Jail. And so the Expositor was out and out a scheme to remove Joseph Smith as head of the church, and, unfortunately, it works. The publishers of the Expositor aren’t the people that pull the trigger. That’s Thomas Sharp and his band of . . .

Scott Woodward: Scallywags.

Casey Griffiths: Scallywags.

Scott Woodward: Yep.

Casey Griffiths: But the publishers of the Nauvoo Expositor appear to have had something like this in mind—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —when they publish it.

Scott Woodward: So how do you want to start talking about the Nauvoo Expositor?

Casey Griffiths: Oh, man. Let’s give you a summary, and then maybe we’ll dive into the particulars. So the Expositor is published June 7. The claim in the Nauvoo Expositor is, “to give a full, candid, and succinct statement of the facts,” this is where it turns into all capital letters, “AS THEY REALLY EXIST IN THE CITY OF NAUVOO.” But most of the Expositor was focused on attacking Joseph and Hyrum Smith as the heads of the church. It hits it on three different fronts: religion, politics, and morality. So the writers of the Expositor, as you mentioned, believed that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet and believed his recent teachings were “heretical and damnable in their influence.” They charged that Joseph, Hyrum, and other church leaders, here’s another quote, “introduced false and damnable doctrines in the church, such as plurality of gods above the God of the universe, His liability to fall with his creations, the plurality of wives for time and eternity, and the doctrine of unconditional sealing up to eternal life against all crimes except the shedding of innocent blood.” And you can see in each one of those a semblance of truth, but also some serious, serious exaggerations. What the Expositor taught was kind of a mixture of truth and exaggerated falsehoods.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Part of this was Joseph Smith in April 1844 gave the King Follett Discourse, where he talks about the nature of God, and this is probably where the idea of plurality of gods comes from. He also began introducing and permitting eternal marriages, and that includes plural marriages to a small number of close associates, so that charge is true. Joseph Smith is introducing plural marriage.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: They—understandably, because plural marriage was so explosive, it was kept private because such personal matters were not punishable under the Illinois law unless they were open and notorious, and the condition of being sealed up to eternal life are all found in various places in scripture. Like, when somebody brought up Section 132’s provision on being sealed up except shedding against innocent blood, Joseph Fielding Smith quoted the Bible, where Jesus taught pretty much the same thing. In fact, most of these things were biblical, but, again, take a little spin, make it sound as bad as possible. That was kind of the way the Nauvoo Expositor was approaching most of these things.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. And one of the other stated purposes of the paper, they said, was that they deemed “it very important that the public should know the true cause of their dissenting from the church.” They felt like they were not allowed to defend themselves at their own church trial because they were excommunicated without, like, a trial being held with them present, and they said that was unlawful, illegal, and so in some ways this sheet, this Nauvoo Expositor is our opportunity to get off our chest all the things that we have to say in our defense. And so they want to “earnestly explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith.”

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Like, they’re coming at him. They’re also coming off recent excommunication trials of their own, which they feel like they didn’t get their digs in there.

Casey Griffiths: They’re publishing their burn book, basically. They want to make everybody that they’re mad at look bad.

Scott Woodward: In fact, this line made me laugh from the Nauvoo Expositor. It says, “It’s not that we have any private feelings to gratify or any private pique to settle that has induced us to be thus plain.” It’s like, okay, that’s exactly what this is, guys. You’re not operating out of these really pure motives like you’re pretending. The context here is a lot of anger and words and even attempted, like, murder schemes against the prophet prior to this sheet being published, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Like, recently Charles Foster had pointed a gun at Joseph’s chest, and Robert had, like, talked him down, but, like, these are guys who, like, hate Joseph. Like, they want him dead, and so to pretend that this paper is not to settle any “private pique” we have against Joseph is pretty hypocritical.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. So charges are religious, they’re moral, but then there’s a third one, and I think this one is tailored specifically to appeal to the people outside Nauvoo like Thomas Sharp, whose beef with Joseph Smith is primarily political.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: They declare that Joseph Smith is combining church and state in Nauvoo because he’s the church president, the mayor, and the commander of the Nauvoo militia.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: This concentration of power was to them both un-American and un-Christian, and what was worse in their minds, Joseph had recently announced that he was going to be a candidate for the presidency of the United States, which they felt would allow him to expand his dangerously anti-American amalgam of church and state into national politics.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: And so that’s tailor-made for a guy like Tom Sharp, who’s saying Joseph Smith is seeking all kinds of power, ecclesiastical power, political power, and his run for the presidency is just an open attempt to show that.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. So their three major attacks are what they call false doctrines, abominable whoredoms, their phrase, and this, like, un-American, un-Christian grasping for power. They think that’s evidence that Joseph Smith is a fallen prophet, that Joseph Smith is dangerous, and that Joseph Smith needs to be stopped at all costs, basically, right?

Casey Griffiths: Right.

Scott Woodward: All right, so that’s kind of the overview of the paper. Would it be interesting to, like, quote some juicy nuggets?

Casey Griffiths: You just read the whole thing. It seems like you’re locked and loaded to go, so indulge yourself, Scott.

Scott Woodward: Oh, geez. Okay. Well, yes, I did just read the entire thing again. It’s actually really, really long. Holy cow.

Casey Griffiths: It is. Yeah. Small print.

Scott Woodward: It’s really small print, and . . .

Casey Griffiths: You used to be able to buy, like, a copy of the Nauvoo Expositor at the Community of Christ sites in Nauvoo.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And huge, huge paper, small, small print.

Scott Woodward: Super small print.

Casey Griffiths: It’s not the ideal way of reading it, but they packed a lot of information into four pages.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Took me a few hours to read it, honestly. I was going slow and marking things and pulling out quotes, but here’s a few nuggets.

Casey Griffiths: Okay.

Scott Woodward: Just for y’all’s enjoyment here, so you could see what exactly the attacks are in their words. On those three points—and then there’s some character attacks. You know, they can’t resist taking a few shots at his character as well. Maybe I’ll start with a few. It says this: “Joseph and his accomplices are specimens of injustice of the most pernicious and diabolical character that ever stained the pages of the historian.” Joseph and his inner circle are, “heaven-daring, hell-deserving, godforsaken villains.” They say they’re “bloodthirsty and murderous.” They’re “demons in human shape who practice their dupes upon a credulous and superstitious people.” They say that they’re “miscreants” and “desperadoes,” “anarchists,” “sycophants,” “tyrants,” “base seducers,” “liars . . .” I mean, jeez.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Could I share a quote?

Scott Woodward: Yeah, yeah, yeah, jump in.

Casey Griffiths: This is about voting for Joseph Smith running for president. They wrote, “You are voting for a sycophant whose attempt for power finds no parallel in history. You are voting for a man who refuses to suffer criminals to be brought to justice, in the stead thereof, rescues them from the just demands of the law by habeas corpus. You are voting for a man who stands indicted, who’s now held to bail for the crimes of adultery and perjury, two of the gravest crimes known to our laws. Query not, then, for whom you are voting. It is for one of the blackest and basest scoundrels that has appeared upon the stage of human existence since the days of Nero and Caligula.” I mean, they compare Joseph Smith to Nero and Caligula, when a month before, they pointed a pistol at him and threatened to kill him, and all he did was fine them a hundred bucks, which feels like definitely not a Nero and not a Caligula. These guys wouldn’t be around to make these claims if he was that, but—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —whoa. They are having a good time when they wrote some of this stuff.

Scott Woodward: They are. Okay, let’s do another one. “The attempt at political power and influence, which we verity believe to be preposterous and absurd, we believe is inconsistent and not in accordance with the Christian religion. We do not believe that God ever raised up a prophet to Christianize a world by political schemes and intrigue.” Ooh, so they’re trying to make it sound like he’s going to use his political position to sort of Christianize people, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Abuse the power of politics to enforce religion.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. So all these charges, by the way, are directed at one aim. They write also, “the publishers deem it a sacred duty they owe to their country and their fellow citizens to advocate through the columns of the Expositor unconditional repeal of the Nauvoo City Charter.” So there’s the game. That’s what they’re actually going for, is they want the Nauvoo Charter to be repealed, and this is the reason why the Nauvoo Expositor is seen as dangerous by the Saints. Immediately this is going to set off alarm bells among the Saints, because we talked about this in our past episodes, but the Nauvoo Charter basically allowed the Saints the legal protections they needed to prevent another sequence of events like what happened in Missouri in 1838 from happening again.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: So immediately they are worried that if this Expositor keeps getting published and advocating for the reveal of the Nauvoo Charter, the Saints don’t have any legal means. And, again, go back to the individual experiences of the Laws, the Fosters, and the Higbees, when they threaten Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith just fines them. He fines them $10. When they pull a gun, he fines them $100, and they’re basically saying, we want to take away the law that allows him to do that, so that they don’t have any legal recourses. Because what Joseph Smith was doing, essentially, was when these guys threatened him he would use the law to try and discourage them from doing it, so they want the law to go away, essentially, so there’s no penalty if they pull a gun on the mayor or anything like that.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. And then they’ll be exposed and unable to protect themselves with their own militia—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —when the mobs come rushing in.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. So just to review, the Nauvoo Charter is enacted by the Illinois state legislature. It sets up the political, the judicial, and even the educational structures of the city, and it creates the Nauvoo Legion, which is a militia that allows the saints to kind of protect themselves. So why hasn’t a mob already attacked church settlements like what happened in Missouri? Because the saints have a legal means to protect themselves and have their own militia, essentially, that can intimidate other militias from different cities into launching any kinds of attacks like they did in Missouri. So this is scary stuff for the saints. If the Nauvoo Charter was repealed, it would mean that they had very few legal means to protect themselves against all kinds of persecutions. In fact, at one point they call the charter, the saints do, an unbreachable wall defending the rights of Zion.

Scott Woodward: Hmm. Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: So if they’re going to do anything legally, they need the Nauvoo Charter, and that’s the real aim of the Nauvoo Expositor is they want to repeal the Nauvoo Charter. And then all kinds of things can happen, just like happened in Missouri a few years prior to this event.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, this isn’t, like, a fair and balanced, reasonable publication that’s trying to show all the sides.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Like, it is bombastic. It is deliberately inflammatory. It is calculated to require a response from the mayor—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —which is Joseph Smith, and the city council, like, here’s another line, for instance: “Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, and many other official characters in the Church of Jesus Christ have introduced false and damnable doctrines into the Church. We therefore are constrained to denounce them as apostates from the pure and holy doctrines of Jesus Christ.” And then they say things like, “all is not well while whoredoms and all manner of abominations are practiced under the cloak of religion. Lo, the wolf is in the fold, arrayed in sheep’s clothing, and is spreading death and devastation among the saints.” Like, seriously, guys? Like, they’re making it sound like the bottom’s coming out of Nauvoo and Joseph’s the worst.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Okay, let’s do another one: “It is a notorious fact that many females in foreign climes and in countries to us unknown, even in the most distant regions of the eastern hemisphere, have been induced by the sound of the gospel to forsake friends and embark upon a voyage across waters that lie stretched over a great portion of the globe, as they suppose, to glorify God, that they can stand acquitted of the great day of God Almighty. But what is taught them on their arrival at this place?” Then they say, “Well, what happens is they’re given an invitation to come see the prophet. And they think they’re going to get some revelation from God to them to know His will, but instead they are told, after having been sworn in one of the most solemn manners to never divulge what’s revealed to them, with a penalty of death attached, that God Almighty has revealed it to him that she should be his, Joseph Smith’s, spiritual wife, for it was right anciently, and God will tolerate it again. She is then thunderstruck. She faints, recovers, and refuses. The prophet damns her if she rejects. She thinks of the great sacrifice and of the many thousand miles she’s traveled over sea and land that she might save her soul from pending ruin, and replies, ‘God’s will be done and not mine.’ Thus the prophet and his devotees in this way are gratified.” Oh, my gosh. What a salacious, soap opera-y perversion and twisting of the true facts of how Joseph ever proposed to his wives.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: What do you want to say about that?

Casey Griffiths: Well, this is a light skim from John C. Bennett. John C. Bennett, like we mentioned, published kind of series of salacious letters that are later compiled into a book, and one of the people that he took it from is a woman named Martha Brotherton. Martha Brotherton was an English convert who immigrated to Nauvoo with her family and was proposed to enter into plural marriage, not by Joseph Smith, like the Expositor is suggesting, because it—like I said, it’s a light skim of what Martha Brotherton wrote. Brigham Young actually proposes to her. Brigham Young brings her in, introduces plural marriage, and by the way, this is her original words in an anti-Mormon book, but based on what you just read, the Expositor is really taking her words and kind of rewriting them to the most extreme. For instance, when the system’s explained to her, she has trouble with it. She asks if she can hear from Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith is brought in.

Scott Woodward: Wait, wait, wait, so Brigham Young proposed to her, and she said, I want to hear this straight from Joseph?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Brigham Young brings her in and proposes to her and explains the system of plural marriage.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: When she says, I’m just really struggling with this, Brigham says, I’ll have Joseph explain it to you. This is from her own recollection. Joseph said, “Well, Martha, it’s lawful and right before God. I know it is. I have the keys of the kingdom, and whatever I bind on earth is bound in heaven, and whatever I loose on earth is loosed in heaven, and if you will accept of Brigham, you will be blessed. God shall bless you, and my blessing shall rest upon you, and if you be led by him, you will do well, for I know Brigham will take care of you.” So then Martha says, Can I have a little bit of time to think about this? This is the exchange: “Said I, ‘Do let me have a little bit more time to think about it. I will promise not to mention it to anyone.’ ‘Well, but look here,’ said Joseph. ‘You know a fellow will never be damned for doing the best he knows how.’ ‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘the best I know of is to go home and think and pray about it.’ ‘Well,’ said Young, ‘I shall leave it with brother Joseph whether it would be best for you to have time or not.’ Joseph Smith said, ‘I see no harm in her having time to think, if she will not fall into temptation.’ ‘Oh, sir,’ said I, ‘there’s no fear of my falling into temptation.’ ‘Well, but,’ said Brigham, ‘you must promise me you will never mention it to anyone.’ ‘I do promise it,’ said I. ‘Well,’ said Joseph, ‘you must promise me the same.’ I promised him the same. ‘Upon your honor,’ said he, ‘will you not tell?’ ‘No, sir, I will lose my life first,’ said I. ‘Well, that will do,’ said he. ‘That is the principle we go upon, and I think I can trust you, Martha,’ said he. ‘Yes,’ said I.” Now, Martha eventually decides she’s going to reject the proposal, and her and her parents leave Nauvoo. She has a sister that stays behind and stays loyal to the church, but that’s a much less sinister exchange than what the Nauvoo Expositor presents, essentially, where they explain it to her, she asks for time to think about it, they basically say yes, understanding the explosive nature of what they’re talking about, they ask her to keep it confidential, but she’s given time essentially to go and think about it. Like, consent was important. So the Expositor‘s taking stuff that’s in an already anti-Mormon book and—

Scott Woodward: Making it worse.

Casey Griffiths: —making it worse. They black out the names. They say they’re protecting the virtue of innocent females, but they don’t actually put in the full details of the story, they just put in kind of this cartoony version of the story—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —that, you know, in a lot of ways becomes the template for people accusing Latter-day Saints of coercion when it comes to plural marriage and things like that.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. So, bottom line, the purpose and intent of the Nauvoo Expositor is to turn people against Joseph, the leadership of Nauvoo, and the saints politically, especially, so that they can repeal the Nauvoo Charter—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —and leave the Saints exposed, and this seems to be the best-laid plan for them to really succeed in getting Joseph out of power.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. It’s not responsible journalism when you call someone Caligula, basically.

Scott Woodward: “Demons in human shape.”

Casey Griffiths: Say that it’s the worst offense in human history, which, again, they knew what they were doing, and they also knew that strong wording like this would require a response from the leadership of the church and of Nauvoo. So that’s what happens next, okay? Once the Expositor is published the city council has to consider what to do about this, because it’s saying all this stuff about the leadership of the church, and it’s calling for the legal end of Nauvoo, the repeal of the Nauvoo Charter, and so they meet together. They hold several meetings to discuss this.

Scott Woodward: So on Saturday, June 8, the very next day, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: The day after the first issue of the Nauvoo Expositor comes out, the Nauvoo City Council meets for, like, a long time. They meet for a total of what, six and a half hours in two different sessions?

Casey Griffiths: Yep.

Scott Woodward: Like, so walk us through kind of what happens at these council meetings.

Casey Griffiths: So this is important to know, too, because sometimes the destruction of the Expositor is depicted like everybody was just so angry they grabbed their pitchfork and their torches and they went down and they destroyed the Expositor press.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: So Joseph Smith is mayor, and he’s meeting with the city council, and by the way, they publish all of these minutes in a special edition of the Nauvoo Neighbor, which you can go and read on the Joseph Smith Papers site as well. So if you want to know the reasoning for why the Nauvoo Expositor press was destroyed, you can go read the Nauvoo Neighbor extra for yourself.

Scott Woodward: And you can get the actual minutes of the meeting of the council that made the decision.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, they’re trying to be as transparent as possible because they know that this is not going to look good, but they want their reasoning for destroying it to be clear. They not only meet on Saturday for six and a half hours, they take Sunday off, they observe the Sabbath, and then on Monday they meet for seven and a half more hours to discuss what the right thing is to do. So this is not a decision that they make lightly in any sense of the word.

Scott Woodward: Not an impulsive, reactionary decision.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, two full days. Finally, during the meetings Joseph Smith expresses a feeling: he says, the Expositor‘s publication was, “calculated to destroy the peace of the city, and it is not safe that such things should exist on account of the mob spirit which they tend to produce.” So Joseph Smith’s reasoning is, hey, the real reason behind this is to create violence against the saints, and that makes this unsafe. And that leads to the discussion of, can we allow them to continue to print the Nauvoo Expositor? So when you read through the minutes—and a couple years ago I wrote a KnoWhy for Scripture Central about this; I read through all the minutes and the Nauvoo Expositor—most of their discussion centered around what’s the legal definition of a public nuisance? The controversy for the Nauvoo Expositor is, did the decision destroy freedom of speech?

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And everybody’s heard that analogy, that you have freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean that you can yell “Fire!” In a crowded theater, that that—

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: —isn’t protected speech, essentially.

Scott Woodward: And we should point out that the Nauvoo Charter itself authorizes the removal of public nuisances explicitly.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, that’s correct.

Scott Woodward: And so the nature of the conversation is, what’s the definition of a public nuisance, and does this newspaper fall within the parameters of that so that we can legally and justly remove it, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. So in the minutes of the meeting, it demonstrates that they actually, they read excerpts from the Nauvoo Expositor.

Scott Woodward: We just did the same.

Casey Griffiths: Just like we’ve done. John Taylor’s there. By the way, all the apostles are out on proselyting missions except for John Taylor and Willard Richards as part of Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign. John Taylor declares that no city on earth would bear such slander, and then he reads excerpts from the United States Constitution about freedom of the press. So they’re not ignoring the Constitution: that’s an active part of the discussion. And then John Taylor said, “We are willing that they should publish the truth, but the paper is a nuisance. It stinks in the nose of every honest man.” And then John Taylor says, “I’m in favor of taking active measures to stop the Expositor from publishing further.”

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: At a certain point in their deliberations, they even bring out Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which was kind of the standard legal text from the time, to try and cite, well, is the Nauvoo Expositor a public nuisance? Does it fit the definition? Therefore, we can take steps.

Scott Woodward: Can a libelous press be deemed a public nuisance, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And according to Blackstone’s legal reasoning, he says yes.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Blackstone’s defines nuisance as anything that disturbs the peace of a community, stressing that the whole community has to rest under the stigma of these falsehoods. And then Joseph Smith also reads from the Illinois Constitution, Article 8, Section 12, touching on the responsibility of the press for its constitutional liberty. So they’re aware of all the legal issues here. The question is, is the Nauvoo Expositor a case of yelling fire in a crowded theater? If so, they have a responsibility as the city leaders to do something about it.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Which they know is not going to be without consequence, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And it seems that Joseph knows that this is the trap that’s been laid for him, and he knows he’s walking into it, but he doesn’t see a better alternative than to take action as city mayor.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Like, talk about a rock and a hard spot for him.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. So they deliberate all day Saturday, they rest on the Sabbath, they deliberate all day Monday. At 6:30 p. m. the council resolved that the Nauvoo Expositor was a public nuisance and ordered the destruction of its press. Joseph Smith, acting as mayor, issues an order to the town marshal to destroy the Expositor‘s press and any undistributed issues. Then, lest you think this is a mob action, the city marshal goes to the Expositor office, he serves the order to the publishers, he allows them to leave peaceably, and then he destroys all the copies of the Expositor and the press.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. He returns at, like, 8 p. m. that night to report, “that he had removed the press, type, printed papers, and fixtures into the street and burned them.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And it was him and about a hundred men, he says, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: So by 8 p. m., done. Order executed.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, and compare this to the destruction of the church press, say, in Independence in 1833, where not only is the printing press destroyed, but the printing office is burned, and the people in the printing office are tarred and feathered.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: In this case, they served a writ, they carried out the order, which was to destroy the press, and that was that. And all of this takes place with fair transparency. Joseph Smith writes a letter to Thomas Ford a few days after the council’s deliberations.

Scott Woodward: You’re talking about Governor Ford?

Casey Griffiths: Good old Tom Ford. This is kind of where he comes into the story, and we’re going to be talking a lot about him in our following episodes.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: But he explains to Tom Ford the reasons why they destroyed the press, and then, like I said, they published the minutes from the council meeting in the Nauvoo Neighbor so that everybody knows the reasoning, too. John Taylor said that Joseph Smith told Ford, “Our whole people were indignant, and loudly called upon our city authorities for a redress of their grievances, which if not attended to, they in themselves would have taken matter into their own hands, and summarily punished the audacious wretches. So Joseph Smith says everybody was so stirred up, we were worried there would be a mob action if we didn’t do something, and that someone could get hurt.” So he explains it to Governor Ford by saying, we knew something was going to happen, we decided to take legal action, and we felt that the legal action would quell the violence, that there could have been a greater loss of life and property if the city council had just done nothing.

Scott Woodward: Mm. That the citizens of Nauvoo themselves would have risen up and taken care of business with their own hands.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah. That’s basically what he’s saying.

Scott Woodward: So the question is, Casey, that a lot of people wonder after having heard about what happened, is was this legal? Like, what’s the difference between what the city council does in Nauvoo compared to what the mobs in Missouri did in 1833 to William W. Phelps’s press, you know, the church’s newspaper there?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Was this legal in the laws of the time?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Has anyone ever dug into that?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Tell us what we know about that.

Casey Griffiths: So a young law professor named Dallin H. Oaks—

Scott Woodward: Oh.

Casey Griffiths: —wrote a paper that appeared in a Utah legal journal called, “The Suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor.”

Scott Woodward: OK.

Casey Griffiths: And Dallin H. Oaks, you probably are familiar with his name—

Scott Woodward: I have heard of him, yes.

Casey Griffiths: —actually does a deep dive: forty-three pages of analysis on, was this legal? And here’s a couple things that he says: he starts out by saying, “Latter-day Saints have generally apologized, including official Mormon historians,” he’s talking about guys like B. H. Roberts, “for the destruction of the newspaper, deeming it an interference with the freedom of the press, a sacred American constitutional right.” However, President Oaks also, in his research, found that the question was much more complex legally than generally it’s given credit for. So most people will just come out and say, well, the Nauvoo City Council destroyed the press, that’s a violation of the Bill of Rights, freedom of the press. It’s not okay.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: The misunderstanding we sometimes have is exactly how federal laws were exercised with regards to states pre-Civil War. Civil War settled the question of, is the federal government supreme or the state government supreme? We still argue about that a little bit. But here’s what President Oaks found. He wrote, “I found, as I researched this law, according to the law of Illinois and the United States in 1844, was that the freedom of the press in the First Amendment did not apply to state action or to city action at that period.”

Scott Woodward: Whoa, okay, that’s huge.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: That’s huge.

Casey Griffiths: So in general, it wasn’t applied to state or city matters. It was a federal law. So if the federal government had interfered with freedom of the press, that would have been a violation of the Bill of Rights, but the way the law was interpreted in 1844, a state action or a city action wasn’t governed under the same law. He goes on to write, “It only came to apply to state action or city action by the amendments adopted after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, and it was so declared by the United States Supreme Court in the 1930s by a five-to-four decision. If it took the United States Supreme Court 100 years to declare that freedom of the press protected the press against city or state action, I can easily sympathize with the people that struggled with that issue in 1844 in Illinois, a time when history shows us a lot of newspapers were destroyed on the frontier, mostly along abolitionist issues, pro-slavery, anti-slavery.” So in his paper, President Oaks basically goes through and says, were there other places where this sort of thing happened? Yes. Were they deemed a violation of the Bill of Rights of the U. S. Constitution? No.

Scott Woodward: No.

Casey Griffiths: They were not. So was there precedent for what they did? Yes. The minutes show that they spent a lot of time considering the U. S. Constitution, the laws of the state of Illinois, and also what the Nauvoo Charter said before they took this action, and President Oaks kind of summarized this by saying this: he said, “It seems to me like it’s pretty extreme to say that Joseph Smith and his associates were violating the freedom of the press by what they did. They debated for two days, they fell back on Blackstone, they had no other precedents, and they thought it was legitimate to abate a nuisance, including a newspaper they thought could bring death and destruction upon their city.” So jumping the gun and saying, well, Joseph Smith was suppressing freedom of the press doesn’t take into account the context, and further how they went to great lengths to explain that this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment emotional decision. It was an agonizing legal decision that was only taken after hours and hours of deliberations in the city council.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Another attack I’ve heard against this in terms of the illegality of it is that it violates due process, right? The Fourteenth Amendment says that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Meaning they were supposed to put a trial together, have due process first, then once the trial and jury decided that this was illegal, then they could destroy it, or abate it, or whatever, right? But then I was in a meeting with President Oaks, and I heard him say this. This is in 2020, so pretty recent. He’s still thinking about this stuff. He’s speaking of the Fourteenth Amendment. He said, “That amendment was not adopted until 20 years after the Nauvoo suppression. The law in 1844, including interpretation of the state constitutional guarantees of a free press, offered considerable support for what Nauvoo had done.” And then he says, “Past actions should be judged by the laws and culture of that time.” And so, yeah, that would have violated the Fourteenth Amendment, except for one little itsy bitsy fact, which is that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t exist.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: So that’s really important: just to keep it in the context of the time.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. And by the way, there’s a great article on the Nauvoo Expositor in Gospel Library, and one of the things it notes is that as late as 1929 a city government closed down a newspaper for being a public nuisance. Now, that decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, but that’s when the Supreme Court actually solidified this aspect of the Fourteenth Amendment. So was it legal? I mean, yeah.

Scott Woodward: Seems like it was, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And it doesn’t seem like it was even a case where they were taking advantage of the law. They were reticent to use their legal powers to destroy the Expositor, probably because they knew it was going to cause a lot of problems, but they also felt that there was nothing else they could do: that if it continued to do what it was doing, violence would be the result.

Scott Woodward: So we could summarize it this way, maybe, then, that the destruction of the Expositor is not a rash decision made quickly in the heat of the moment, nor was it an illegal decision given the laws of the time. And the documents, from what we’ve looked at and talked about a little bit today, have shown that this was not sort of angry retaliation.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And so I think the documentary record is pretty clear that as far as Joseph and the city council understood they were acting legally to destroy the Expositor out of a desire to protect the city and its citizens from mob action. Another type of Missouri experience this was going to kick up eventually if they didn’t do something.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, let me summarize: this is the last paragraph of President Oaks’ forty-three-page legal article. He wrote, “A historian friendly to the people of Nauvoo has called the suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor, ‘the great Mormon mistake.’ That its consequences were disastrous to the Mormon leaders and that alternative means might have been employed cannot be doubted. Nevertheless, the common assumption of historians that the action taken by the city council to suppress the paper as a nuisance was entirely illegal is not well-founded. Aside from damages for unnecessary destruction of the press, for which the Nauvoo authorities were unquestionably liable, the remaining actions of the council, including its interpretation of the constitutional guarantee of free press, can be supported by references to the laws of their day.” So he goes so far as to say they may have gone too far in destroying the press, but destroying the Nauvoo Expositor or the copies that existed was well within their legal rights, and none of this was settled law at the time, and so if the first question is, was it legal to do what they did? Yeah, it was legal based on the laws of the time. The second question, and this is something that historians and people are still wrestling with was, was it wise? Like was there a better course of action that they could have taken?

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And that’s a tougher question to answer.

Scott Woodward: Mm. Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Now, if I can weigh on this a little bit—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —two words that kept popping out to me when I read the city council minutes were Haun’s Mill. They kept going back and saying, if we don’t do anything, will this result in another Haun’s Mill? And most of our listeners will be aware, but Haun’s Mill was an incident that took place in Missouri just a handful of years earlier, where seventeen men and boys were murdered by Missouri militia because of false allegations, claims that have been stirred up against the Saints. The militia just rode into the settlement called Haun’s Mill, surrounded the blacksmith shop where all the men were, and fired into it ’till everybody was wounded, and then walked in and executed everybody that was still alive. The trauma that had been inflicted upon the Saints in Missouri was also hovering over them like a specter during all these discussions.

Scott Woodward: 100 percent.

Casey Griffiths: In Missouri, we didn’t do anything to counter the falsehoods that were being spread about us.

Scott Woodward: And look what happened.

Casey Griffiths: Look what happened. What if we don’t do anything this time? Will we be facing another Haun’s Mill? Because it’s not just Nauvoo. It’s all the little settlements surrounding Nauvoo that are in very vulnerable positions. And by the way, the Nauvoo Charter was repealed the year after Joseph Smith’s death, and guess what happens? The smaller settlements, Yelrome and other places, start to get attacked by illegal mob factions, and the saints don’t have a legal means to defend themselves, so—

Scott Woodward: Here we go again.

Casey Griffiths: —all of this does actually come to pass, and it does kind of suggest that it may not have been unwise to stop the Expositor from doing what it was doing.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, and there’s an interesting moment that’s recorded by a church member named George Lobb, who notes a speech in his journal in which Joseph Smith explained the actions of the city council. He said, “Brother Joseph called a meeting at his own house and told the people that God showed him in an open vision in daylight that if he did not destroy that press, it would cause the blood of the saints to flow in the streets. So it’s clear that Joseph thought this was the best course of action to avoid a Haun’s Mill, to avoid a Missouri, but was he aware of the personal consequences this would bring about for him?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. It’s difficult to say, and that’s going to be the focus of the next story that we tell in our next episode—

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: —is when did Joseph Smith become aware that this could possibly lead to his death? It’s very possible that he knew this action may have done it, but this also sets off another theme that we’re going to explore in the next episode, which is when given the choice to incur further violence, Joseph Smith always chose the course that he thought would lead to less violence. He tries to take the non-violent way out, and the non-violent destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor is exhibit A on that. He didn’t incur any penalties against the publishers, they were allowed to peaceably step aside; he used the law to carry out what he thought was a vital function; and then, as the controversy grows and spreads and eventually leads to Joseph going to Carthage Jail, he’s taking steps everywhere along the way, and his motivation is almost always, if we do this, the violence will abate. This will calm things down. He’s not trying to stir things up. He’s trying to stop worse things like Haun’s Mill from happening.

Scott Woodward: Right. That’s well said. So we are going to explore that more next time. We’re going to look at what happens next. And I will say this, just to tee us up for next time: the very next day after this action was taken by the city marshal to destroy the press, charges of riot were promptly pressed by Francis Higbee against Joseph, Hyrum, and the rest of the city council, and a warrant was issued for their arrest, and this is going to set in motion the events that will eventually culminate in Joseph and Hyrum’s murder in Carthage.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: In less than three weeks.

Casey Griffiths: So the fuse has been lit, and now the time’s ticking. There’s twenty days until Joseph Smith is in Carthage Jail and assassinated by the Warsaw Militia.

Scott Woodward: So stay tuned. Next time we’ll dig into the next piece of the drama.

Casey Griffiths: That’s the next part of the story, is how he gets to Carthage. So—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —Scott, this has been sort of fun. I don’t love reading the Nauvoo Expositor, but . . .

Scott Woodward: No. Not the most uplifting piece of literature. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, but I did enjoy reading the city council minutes, and it’s always fun to get a chance to talk with you and go back and forth about these events, so.

Scott Woodward: Hundred percent. Thank you, brother. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week the saga continues as Casey and I chronicle what plays out in the aftermath of the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, including public outcry, arrests, trials, acquittals, interactions with Governor Thomas Ford, Joseph and Hyrum’s decision to flee Nauvoo, and their decision to return, and much more. We’ll see you then. If you’re enjoying Church History Matters, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Also, we’d love to hear your suggestions for future series on this podcast. If there’s a church history topic you think would be worth exploring for multiple episodes, send us your idea to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. We’ll consider all suggestions. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.