Scott Woodward: Did you know that one of the best-selling books in Latter-day Saint history on Amazon.com was not written by a Latter-day Saint or a historian? It was a controversial book written by atheist John Krakauer in 2003, titled Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, which still tops the Amazon charts and Kindle releases in the category Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and an adaptation of the book was released as a mini-series in 2022. One of the major premises of the book is that religion is inherently violent. To illustrate this premise, Krakauer combines stories from early Latter-day Saint history with the story of a tragic murder in 1984 committed by two former members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now, Krakauer’s work has been repeatedly criticized as a gross caricature of Latter-day Saint history and of religious people in general, but considering the widespread reach and influence of his fundamental premise and the LDS history he chose to support it, we felt like this is a topic that might warrant further investigation. So today on Church History Matters, Casey and I begin our multi-episode exploration of this question: Does faith in general, and the faith of the Latter-day Saints in particular, lend itself to acts of aggression and violence? What does reflecting on our church’s history, and specifically the violent episodes of our history, teach us about this important question? I’m Scott Woodward, a managing director at Scripture Central, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, also a managing director at Scripture Central, and today Casey and I dive into our first episode in this series, dealing with peace and violence in Latter-day Saint history. Now let’s get into it.

Casey Griffiths: Hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward: Hey, Casey. How are you, sir?

Casey Griffiths: So good. So good. So . . . I’m stealing your—I’m stealing your catchphrase, but I really am doing good.

Scott Woodward: Awesome.

Casey Griffiths: Life is good, so . . .

Scott Woodward: Dude, I’m excited to start this new series with you. This is a big one and an important one.

Casey Griffiths: This is one we’ve wanted to do for quite a while, but it’s also one of those ones that we’re trying to wrap our arms around, and I think it’s our last series this year. Is that right?

Scott Woodward: This is how we’re going to wrap up 2024.

Casey Griffiths: Okay. And then we have some surprises, yeah, so . . .

Scott Woodward: And we are going to make an announcement at the end of 2024 that we’re excited about, so stay tuned. We’ll just tease that right here with no explanation, but, yeah, at the end of 2024 we’re going to be doing a little something-something.

Casey Griffiths: No explanation, but we are going to be taking you through the happy months of the holidays—

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: —by talking about—are you ready? Can I say what we’re going to do?

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: Peace and violence among 19th century Latter-day Saints, so maybe this wasn’t the best idea because it’s going to be Christmas morning, and somebody’s going to be like, there’s a new Church History Matters on the Mountain Meadows Massacre and oh, boy, what a present, or something like that.

Scott Woodward: And we just want to wish you all very happy holidays.

Casey Griffiths: Happy holidays.

Scott Woodward: Joy to the world.

Casey Griffiths: Nonviolent holidays, yeah. Peace on earth.

Scott Woodward: Peace on earth.

Casey Griffiths: Good will towards men.

Scott Woodward: There’s the connection. There’s the connection.

Casey Griffiths: There’s the connection. At the time of year when we talk about the birth of our Savior and peace on earth and goodwill towards men and Thanksgiving, we want to talk about the opposite of that, so—or how we achieve peace on earth.

Scott Woodward: The yin to that yang, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: That is right.

Scott Woodward: There is the ideal that we’ll be celebrating this holiday, and there’s the real that we will be discussing in our church’s history and hoping that, knowing where we’ve been, we can all take steps closer toward that peace on earth and good will toward men, but . . .

Casey Griffiths: That is right. That is right. We can’t really start being nonviolent unless we understand the causes of violence and where Latter-day Saints have sometimes engaged in violence so that we know how to do better and be better. That’s the whole point of history is to learn from when things went wrong and try to do better the next time.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. This is a topic—violence in Latter-day Saint history—this is a topic that has troubled some members of the church. It’s just troubled some outside the church about us looking in and sometimes have wondered if we are a violent faith, Casey.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: So that’s kind of what we want to begin with today, isn’t it?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, and we need to recognize that for a lot of people outside the church, sometimes this is the starting point of their engagement with our story with Latter-day Saint history. For instance, Scott, if I asked you, what is the number one book on Amazon.com in the category of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, what would you guess is the number one book?

Scott Woodward: The number one book about Latter-day Saints? I’m thinking . . . I peeked on your notes, but I—

Casey Griffiths: You’ve seen the outline.

Scott Woodward: —I would not have guessed this, actually. I would not have guessed. I would have thought it was probably something by, you know, Richard Bushman or Stephen Harper or . . . I don’t know: something Joseph Smith Papers-y, but, spoiler alert, it’s not.

Casey Griffiths: It’s not. It’s not. The number one book on Amazon under the category Latter-day Saints is by John Krakauer, and it’s called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.

Scott Woodward: A Story of Violent Faith.

Casey Griffiths: That’s a grabby title, no doubt.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And, again, I looked it up right before we did this. It was number one in Kindle releases. I couldn’t find, like, the softback or hardback releases, but for about 20 years, because the book was released in 2003, Under the Banner of Heaven has been one of the top-selling books linked to Latter-day Saints and Latter-day Saint history.

Scott Woodward: And wasn’t this turned into, like, a mini-series on FX a few years ago, and . . . ?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Didn’t Spider-Man—didn’t Spider-Man star, like, the main detective? What’s his name?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, well, there are several Spider-Men now—

Scott Woodward: That’s true.

Casey Griffiths: —but this was Andrew Garfield, who I guess was the second cinematic Spider-Man.

Scott Woodward: Yes, Andrew Garfield.

Casey Griffiths: He was the lead in Under the Banner of Heaven when it appeared on FX.

Scott Woodward: So they turned Krakauer’s book into a miniseries starring Andrew Garfield.

Casey Griffiths: Yes.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: Full disclosure: I haven’t seen all the miniseries. I watched a little bit of it because I was doing a presentation at MHA on cinematic depictions of the martyrdom, and so I watched the episode where they depicted Joseph Smith’s death, but I didn’t watch the rest of it. In fact, I got a subscription to Hulu just so I could watch it for a month—

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: —and I watched one episode of Under the Banner of Heaven, and then I wound up watching the whole series of The Goldbergs, which is amazing, by the way. Everybody check out The Goldbergs. It’s a great show.

Scott Woodward: OK.

Casey Griffiths: But Under the Banner of Heaven just—I don’t know if it was my cup of Joe, and I’m a church historian, but whoo!

Scott Woodward: It’s tough, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: It’s tough. It’s tough to watch, and I can’t recommend it. What I saw was beautifully filmed. I guess I’ll say that.

Scott Woodward: Good cinematography. Horrible history.

Casey Griffiths: Good cinematography. Well, and, I mean, in Under the Banner of Heaven, too, they went out of their way to acknowledge that they had fictionalized a lot of elements.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: For instance, the story that Under the Banner of Heaven is mostly about is Dan and Ron Lafferty, who were a separatist group that broke away from the church, and they murdered Brenda Lafferty and her baby, Erica, which is a horrible story.

Scott Woodward: Worst story ever, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: They fictionalized parts about the Laffertys, like they invented a town that it took place in. I think they did this to try and protect people that were currently living, but Under the Banner of Heaven also intercuts the story of the Laffertys with the early history of the church, and that was where Under the Banner of Heaven, the TV series, kind of bothered me, because what I saw, there were whole scenes that were completely made up, that had no source in church history. Like, the episode I saw, there was a big conversation between Emma Smith and John Taylor that implied that John Taylor and the other apostles were trying to manipulate Joseph Smith into going to Carthage Jail so he’d be murdered, and that just doesn’t have any basis in reality.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: And we’re not going to address the miniseries because, like I said, the creators of the miniseries went out of their way to say that they had fictionalized a bunch of stuff.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And that makes it maybe a compelling story, but not great history, and so we’re just not going to deal with it, but let me talk about the book.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Tell us.

Casey Griffiths: John Krakauer is a great writer. I’m just going to say that right now. I’m a huge fan of his work. In fact, I was excited to read Under the Banner of Heaven because he’d written two works previously—one was called Into the Wild, which was about a young man, Chris McCandless, who disappeared in the Alaskan wilderness, and they found him, and they found his diary a few years later, and Krakauer just recounts his story. He does an excellent job. The other one was called Into Thin Air. It’s about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, which John Krakauer was part of. He was actually climbing Mount Everest when this huge disaster happened where, you know, more than a dozen climbers lost their lives, and I read it because a few years ago, one of my wife’s relatives died on Mount Everest, and I just got really into—

Scott Woodward: Oh, wow.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, he made it to the summit and then had a heart attack and passed away, and I learned all this crazy stuff, like, they don’t haul the bodies off the mountain because it’s too dangerous, and—

Scott Woodward: Oh my word.

Casey Griffiths: —what the mortality rates are of people, and so Krakauer’s book on Mount Everest was also really, really great, and, again, he’s a gripping writer. I’m going to give him that, but when I read Under the Banner of Heaven—which, I’m a fan, I was excited—I was pretty disappointed, to be honest with you. It appears that—Krakauer’s a journalist, you know. He’s an investigative journalist. The parts about the Laffertys and the modern-day stuff—what happened with the Laffertys happened in 1984 in American Fork, Utah, and sorry to keep dragging my wife into this, but the Laffertys lived in her ward boundaries—

Scott Woodward: Oh, wow.

Casey Griffiths: —when all this happens, too, so . . .

Scott Woodward: Holy cow. Now, they had been excommunicated from the church prior to their murder of Brenda and her baby, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. So the Laffertys were former members of the church who had joined with a splinter group called The School of the Prophets, and what happened was, is they became more and more extreme, and Brenda Lafferty, who was married to one of the Lafferty brothers, was murdered by the Laffertys along with her infant daughter, so it’s a horrible crime, but we have to emphasize, too, at the time that it happened, they were excommunicated from the church.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: But Krakauer kind of went out of his way to associate their deaths with the church, and this was upsetting to several people I know, because they talked about how Brenda had actually reached out to church members to try and get help, to get away from what was happening, and Brenda’s sister actually stepped forward after the miniseries came out and said, that doesn’t resemble what happened to my sister in any way, and she felt like it was a disservice to her sister. Now, that is the central narrative of Under the Banner of Heaven, but Krakauer also cuts back and forth between the early history of the church, and it seems like his thesis is basically that Latter-day Saints are inherently violent based on their beliefs.

Scott Woodward: Doesn’t he really have kind of a meta narrative of just how silly or dangerous religion is, period, and he’s using this episode in Latter-day Saint history to kind of show that?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, and I mean, he’s using Latter-day Saints as his illustration, but the thesis of the book appears to be that religion is inherently violent. Krakauer is a non-religious person.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And he sort of used the book to make that point, and it was serious enough that at the time when the book came out, the church, which very rarely does this, actually did publish a response where they listed all the things that Krakauer was inaccurate about, because there’s a whole bunch of inaccuracies in the book. Like, sometimes he even gets basic names wrong when he’s talking about the early history of the church, and they asked three people to respond to it. One of them was Robert Millet, who was a professor of religious outreach at BYU at the time; one of them was Michael Otterson, who was the head of church public relations; and another one was Rick Turley. Rick Turley was the managing director of family and church history, the church history department, and is still a name that most people know, so—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —all of them kind of went through it, and the general consensus was that Krakauer was kind of using the whole “one representative represents all.” Like, the analogy used by one of the reviewers was, it was kind of like arguing that all Germans are Nazis: that sort of thing.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Because some Germans did bad things, then every German must be bad.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Krakauer was kind of arguing that all Latter-day Saints have this violence bubbling underneath the surface, and by extension, all religious people, too. And this was 2003, so this was not long after the September 11th attacks, and everybody was kind of on edge about religion and violence because we’d just seen a really striking example of it happen on September 11th.

Scott Woodward: Religious extremism, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Which all religions can have that, and I think that’s more a commentary about humans. Humans are radicalizable, if that’s a word.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Humans can be radicalized in the name of religion or atheism or whatever. They just need a cause.

Casey Griffiths: You’re exactly right that that can go both ways, to where sometimes something like Islamophobia can cause us to be violent the other direction, where we’re violent towards people like Muslims because we see their faith as inherently violent. Krakauer was kind of trying to do the same thing with Latter-day Saints to basically say, here’s an example, therefore the entire group is violent. Like, let me quote a little bit from Rick Turley’s review.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Rick Turley wrote, “In the oft-quoted book, Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, David Hackett Fisher condemns those who reach generalizations based on insufficient sampling. He wrote, ‘There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a scientist who published an astonishing and improbable generalization about the behavior of rats. An incredulous colleague came to his laboratory and politely asked to see the records of the experiments on which the generalization was based. “Here they are,” said the scientist, dragging the notebook from a pile of papers on his desk, and pointing to a cage in the corner, he added, “And there’s the rat.”’” So . . .

Scott Woodward: The one rat. There’s the rat.

Casey Griffiths: You get the gist of this. Like, you’re taking one rat, and you’re making huge generalizations about an entire species.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Turley goes on to write, “Anxious to prove his own hypothesis, John Krakauer, author of Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, uses the anomalous Lafferty murder case of 1984 to look at Mormonism’s violent past and examine, ‘The underbelly of the United States’ most successful homegrown faith.’ Although the book may appeal to gullible persons,” this is what Rick Turley wrote, “who rise to such bait like trout to a fly hook, serious readers who want to understand Latter-day Saints and their history need not waste their time on it.”

Scott Woodward: Well said.

Casey Griffiths: Turley goes through—and by the way, we’ll provide a link in the show notes if you want to go to all this, where they go line by line through the book and explain all the inaccuracies, but I think Rick Turley was trying to deal with the question of the thesis of the book. So he goes on and points out that Krakauer is kind of irreligious himself, but that Krakauer tries to tie what the Laffertys did to September 11th and to all violence linked to religion. Like, this is also from Rick Turley’s review, but he’s quoting John Krakauer: John Krakauer wrote, “‘There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied,’ he posits in the prologue. ‘As a means of motivating people to be cruel and inhumane, as a means of motivating people to be evil, there may, in fact, be nothing more effective than religion,’” John Krakauer wrote.

Scott Woodward: Yikes.

Casey Griffiths: Then, “Referring to the ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ that resulted in the killings of [September 11], 2001, he goes on to say,” Krakauer, “that ‘men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions.’ He finds that ‘history has not lacked’ for Muslims, ‘Christians, Jews, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who’ve been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden and will be with us long after his demise.’” Then Turley says, “The glib assertion leads to [a] hypothesis for [the] book:” quoting Krakauer. Krakauer said, “Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocinization, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God—as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.” And Turley just notes that he’s using the Laffertys as an illustration of this thesis, that religion drives people to do violent things.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: That’s kind of what we’re dealing with, and that’s where we’re taking part of the idea for this, is the book that most people associate with Latter-day Saints, at least outside the church, deals with the question of violence in religion generally, but also violence in our faith particularly, and we felt like we needed to sort of address this—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —that we—it was a good thing for us to explore a little bit.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. In fact, that leads us to the burning question of today’s episode and of our series at large, which is, is the faith of the Latter-day Saints inherently violent? Now, we’re not going to have time to review every violent event involving Latter-day Saints in this series, but we are going to try to address the major events in our history. In fact, we have a Gospel Topics essay that’s been published by the church called “Peace and Violence Among 19th-century Latter-day Saints” that gives a brief review of the major events of the nineteenth century that we think everyone should take a look at. We’ll leave a link to that in the show notes here. The Gospel Topics essay actually notes the link to the violence Latter-day Saints endured and sometimes engaged in by saying this: “In 19th-century American society, community violence was common and often condoned. Much of the violence perpetrated by and against Latter-day Saints fell within the then-existing American tradition of extralegal vigilantism in which citizens organized to take justice into their own hands when they believed government was either oppressive or lacking.” So right away, Casey, the essay is doing what we always advocate for on this podcast, which is contextualize these historical facts, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: There are facts of violence. Now, we’ve got to make sure we keep them in the 19th-century context in which they occurred, and so that’s what we’re going to try to do throughout this series is always give context. Again, that doesn’t condone it, but understanding the environment in which it happened does help us to see it with hopefully some compassionate lenses.

Casey Griffiths: And we should point out at the same time, too, what they’re saying about 19th-century violence doesn’t just apply to Latter-day Saints. I mean, Latter-day Saints suffered violence in the 19th century. That’s an established fact, but—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —so did African Americans. So did Native Americans.

Scott Woodward: So did the Irish.

Casey Griffiths: Oh, the Irish, yeah, who, generally, you know, we think are doing great now, but in the 19th century, yeah. Violence against a person could boil down to somebody that looks exactly like you but has a different accent and comes from a different part of Northern Europe than you do. It was that kind of environment. And—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —we want to acknowledge that. We’re just going to spend the next few episodes talking about violence in that time period through the prism of the Latter-day Saint experience. We’re not trying to delegitimize anybody else’s experience or say that this only happened to us. There was violence against Catholics. Like, Joseph Smith—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —spoke out against violence against Catholicism and other Christian faiths.

Scott Woodward: Yep.

Casey Griffiths: But this was part of the lay of the land. In fact, the question isn’t, did violence occur? The question we would ask is, well, what role did Latter-day Saints play in violence?

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Well said. And I know, Casey, you have a cool way of framing violence that Latter-day Saints were involved in in various ways. Do you mind just walking us through kind of your little framework that you use when you talk about this? And we want to use this throughout our series.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. A couple years ago, I taught a class that was just on the Gospel Topics essays, so, you know, one night we did First Vision accounts and then Book of Mormon translation, and then we got to this essay, which was “Peace and Violence among 19th-century Latter-day Saints,” and the essay itself kind of sets up three categories. Like, one: what were the events where Latter-day Saints were primarily the victims of violence? That’s category one.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: Category two: where was it where Latter-day Saints engaged in conflicts with others where they kind of gave as good as they got? They had violent acts inflicted upon them, but they sometimes inflicted violence on others as a way of fighting back.

Scott Woodward: Kind of when they fought back, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And category three is when were Latter-day Saints the aggressors? Like, when were they the people inflicting violence on others?

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And I think the central idea here is to say what’s normal and what’s abnormal. Was it normal for Latter-day Saints to be the aggressors, or is it kind of an outlier? Is it exceptional? So this isn’t everything, but I kind of broke it down into categories, like situations—and we’re going to talk about most of these—when Latter-day Saints were the victims of violence: The mob attack on the John Johnson farm, which we’re going to talk about today, that’s kind of the earliest major act of organized violence that occurs against Latter-day Saints. Then there’s the expulsion from Jackson County. Latter-day Saints are expelled from Jackson County, where they’ve been told to build the city of Zion.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: They do fight back a little bit there, but for the most part, they are victims of this.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: When they’re expelled from Northwest Missouri, there’s some horrific violence, and Latter-day Saints are victimized there, though they do fight back a little bit, and then there’s the expulsion from Western Illinois, when Latter-day Saints are forced to leave the city of Nauvoo and go West, that they’ve been forcibly removed from their home. There’s a persecution that sweeps them out.

Scott Woodward: So that’s category one.

Casey Griffiths: That’s category one. Category two, where Latter-day Saints engage in conflicts with others—the earliest example that comes up is the Mormon War in Northwest Missouri. That overlaps with the expulsion we talked about, but in the early stages of 1838’s conflict, Latter-day Saints are trading blows with their neighbors. They would have a Latter-day Saint town get attacked like DeWitt or Adam-ondi-ahman, and then they would attack a non–Latter-day-Saint town, like Gallatin. Gallatin was attacked by Latter-day Saints.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Danites and stuff like that come into the story.

Scott Woodward: We’ll talk about all that.

Casey Griffiths: We’re going to talk about Danites, which is, you know, interesting stuff. We’re going to get to it.

Scott Woodward: For sure.

Casey Griffiths: And then there’s the conflict with the United States, the Johnston’s army, which some people refer to as America’s first civil war. In that one, Latter-day Saints do some things to provoke the war, and they also engage with the U. S. Army, primarily to slow them down so that they don’t get to Utah before the winter sets in, and that buys the Saints time to negotiate, but that is a back and forth.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: In the West, Latter-day Saints generally have a better record than most Europeans do in their engagement with Native Americans, but there were wars fought with Native Americans in Utah: the Wakara War, the Black Hawk War—conflicts where Latter-day Saints were sometimes provoked, and sometimes they also attacked Native Americans. Then there’s the crusade over plural marriage, which lasts for decades, and Latter-day Saints kind of go back and forth. There’s legal warfare, there’s sometimes physical altercations. When we come to the last category, which is when were Latter-day Saints the aggressors in the conflict, like, when are they just flat out and out the bad guys?

Scott Woodward: Instigators, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: The instigators. The sterling example is what I call the darkest day in the history of the church, and that is the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which uncontestably the church has issued an apology for, the church has built a monument for that it maintains. I just visited a couple days ago, which was powerful, but that is it. So I think if you look at the grand scheme, there’s been time when Latter-day Saints have been victims of violence, there’s been times when they fought back and forth, they gave as good as they got, and then there’s times like Mountain Meadows where Latter-day Saints engaged in horrific acts, but in this series, we’re going to try to go through these events and try to understand them and tackle the questions of why Latter-day Saints had violent acts carried out on them and why they at times engaged in violent acts, and we’re going to try and address the question of, is our faith inherently violent? Like, is it a feature or is it a bug? Is it the exception or is it the rule?

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: I think you probably know what direction we’re heading, but let’s take a look at it, and let’s see.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: So if we want to start addressing the question of violence among the religion of the Latter-day Saints, let’s start with our scriptures.

Scott Woodward: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: I want to warn against oversimplification here, because a lot of times people will take a Latter-day Saint work, like the Book of Mormon, and really oversimplify it. Like I’ve had people say the Book of Mormon is racist, but in reality, the Book of Mormon has a very nuanced exploration of racism. It doesn’t ignore it, doesn’t pretend like it doesn’t exist, but to say that, you know, the Nephites had light skin, and they were the good guys and the Lamanites had dark skin, and they were the bad guys is a gross oversimplification. That’s just not what the Book of Mormon says.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: They go back and forth. There’s an episode in The Book of Mormon where a Lamanite prophet condemns the Nephites for being racist. I mean, there’s a lot going on.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: The same thing with violence in the Book of Mormon. Like, most discussions about violence in the Book of Mormon talk about how there’s a lot of wars in the book, which there are, but I guess you could say that all scripture is violent because violence is part of life.

Scott Woodward: Part of the human experience, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: It’s part of the human experience. The Bible contains instances of violence. So does the Book of Mormon. The Doctrine and Covenants, surprisingly, when I started to review it, is probably the least violent book that we have right now and has several places where the saints are told to steer away from violence, to avoid violence, to raise up the banner of peace against those who would persecute them, but let’s hone in on the Book of Mormon—

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: —and take a look at what it depicts here. So the story that most people focus on, especially if they’re antagonistic towards Latter-day Saints, is Nephi and Laban, which is, you know, the first major story in the book.

Scott Woodward: God commands Nephi to kill a guy.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. And there’s a lot of context. Laban had already tried to kill Nephi and his brothers twice.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Nephi was a younger man. There is a huge, huge pause in the narrative when Nephi considers what it means to kill a person. In fact—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —Nephi simply writes this: 1 Nephi 4, “And it came to pass . . . I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.” Nephi is writing this later on, near the end of his life, the intertextuality hints, and he’s still, like, playing this out in his head. Like, it doesn’t seem like something that he does rashly or that’s depicted as an inherently heroic act.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: It seems like something that was still a trauma he was working through decades later.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And so I don’t think this is an assault on Nephi’s character. The issue that comes up here is, well, God’s commanding him to do it, because the narrative goes on, “The Spirit said unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into [thine] hands. Yea, . . . I also knew that [he’d] sought to take away my own life.” So Nephi’s walking through his reasoning here: this guy tried to kill me.

Scott Woodward: Which, by the way, in the Mosaic Law, which Nephi is under at that time, like—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 24 say that stealing and attempted murder are punishable by death, and so Nephi is reviewing some of that: he stole our stuff. He tried to kill us. He has now basically placed him into a position where, according to Mosaic Law, he could legitimately be killed, right?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: He’s walking through the rationale of the context of his day and the scripture he had. Anyway, continue.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. You mentioned attempted murder and stealing. The next thing Nephi says is “He [had also] taken away our property.” Like, he just took the stuff that they’d offered in exchange for the plates and then attempted to kill them, too. So he said, “And it came to pass . . . the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. [It’s] better that one man should perish than a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” Now, that is an incredibly complex episode that does present violence as being prompted by God, but also shows Nephi wrestling with the idea, and the whole narrative sort of depicts Nephi sort of saying, man, like, this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been asked to do. It’s not a revenge kill. It’s not a killing filled with glory. It’s not, like, an awesome moment for Nephi. It’s a terrible moment for him—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —that he’s still wrestling with years and years later.

Scott Woodward: He writes in such detail about it that it makes all of us wrestle with him. We’re like, geez, like, should he do this thing?

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And then when he does, we’re not sure if we should be happy about it.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: That’s a real wrestle.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, so violence and killing aren’t presented as, like, an out-and-out, hey, do it if you’re right. It’s something that you wrestle with and genuinely struggle with, and even though the book is filled with instances of violence, specifically wars—Mormon was a general, and he included a lot of accounts of wars—it always has this kind of undercurrent of, here’s the morality that they were wrestling with, so—

Scott Woodward: There’s a heaviness with it, yeah.

Casey Griffiths: There’s a heaviness with it, right? So Alma 48, the war chapters in the Book of Mormon. Mormon notes, “[It] was the faith of Moroni, and his heart did glory in it; not in the shedding of blood but in doing good, . . . preserving his people, . . . in keeping the commandments of God, yea, . . . resisting iniquity.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: It seems like the focus of the narrative of the war chapters is violence can be used in defense, but it’s not something that a person should glory in. If they glory in it, they’re starting to get into trouble and could potentially land in dangerous straits.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, and I think the next verses go on to say that if somebody is trying to kill your family, then you are justified by God in defending them, which I think any warm-blooded human would agree with, you know? Like, you can protect your family when someone’s trying to kill them.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: It’s not a glorious thing. Like you’re saying, it’s not depicted as glorious. It’s depicted as duty that is reluctantly taken up by righteous people sometimes to defend their family, their country, their faith.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. And then maybe the most moving narrative about violence in the Book of Mormon is the story of Mormon himself, where he notes violence as being the downfall of his entire society. He sees everybody that he cares about, except for one of his sons, be killed through violence. He sees women and children. He just, like, mourns over this, and then he writes—the last words that Mormon writes in the Book of Mormon are written to the people who killed his family, to the Lamanites. So, look at what he says to them, and look at what his plea to them is: he says, “Know ye that ye are of the house of Israel. Know ye that ye must come into repentance, or ye cannot be saved.” And “Know ye that ye must lay down your weapons of war, and delight no more in the shedding of blood, and take them not again, save it be that God shall command you.” So he’s saying, like, one of the things he desperately wants people to do is give up violence. Stop fighting. Don’t fight. It’s tough stuff.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And then there’s one last place where Mormon’s voice appears; that’s in Moroni 9, where a letter from Mormon is inserted, and Mormon says basically the big problem—verse 5, Moroni 9:5: “So exceedingly do they anger that it seemeth me they have no fear of death; . . . [they’ve] lost their love, one towards another; and they thirst after blood and revenge continually.” Like, he’s just rawly writing, these people are beyond feeling. They’ve lost even the sense of what the value of a human life is.

Scott Woodward: He’s talking about his own people here. He’s talking about the Nephites, and he’s—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: He is witnessing their downfall and their destruction. Like, the Book of Mormon is a tragedy. It ends with such a tragic thump here at the end, and this is why: he’s saying they love violence. They thirst after blood and revenge continually.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: He is depicting a love of violence as the cause of downfall here, at least one of the major causes.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. If anybody tells you the Book of Mormon glorifies violence, that is a wrong and really simplified narrative.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: It does recognize that violence occurs, but for the most part it sees violence as a horrific tragedy. Mormon condemns people on his side and people on the other side for the violence they commit, and it ends with this plea for people to put down their weapons of war and come unto Christ and not engage in violence any longer. So I don’t think you can make a case that the Book of Mormon inherently teaches a violent theology or philosophy.

Scott Woodward: No.

Casey Griffiths: And it doesn’t seem like you can pin any violence that Latter-day Saints committed on the Book of Mormon other than violence done in defense of home and hearth—of your family, basically.

Scott Woodward: Yep.

Casey Griffiths: This is a really, really quick skim. We’re not even talking about the anti-Nephi-Lehi’s—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —and how they’re presented as the most moral and unassailable people in the Book of Mormon, people that literally bury their weapons and refuse to fight. They’re upheld as the most moral group out of any group in the Book of Mormon. It’s just not—the book acknowledges violence—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —but it doesn’t condone violence, I think it’s fair to say.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, a hundred percent, and that’s—this is not an exhaustive run through the Book of Mormon. There are those—in fact, maybe at this point we could recommend Patrick Mason and David Pulsipher’s book called Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict. I think they’ve done some important work in working through some of the difficult passages of scripture about violence. Highly recommend. Now, Casey, even before the Book of Mormon was published, violence was used to try and stop Joseph Smith and his associates from their work.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, there’s violence that shows up fairly early on, and some of this Joseph Smith just hints at. He says stuff like, “No sooner [had I obtained the plates] than the most strenuous exertions were used to get them from me,” but if we look at non–Latter-day-Saint sources, I think you can see a support of that narrative, too. There was a guy named Thomas Taylor, who was a resident of Palmyra, and he’s interviewed—this is published in 1881, so it’s a late source, but when he was asked about the Smiths, he immediately, like, said, I remember how they were treated. Here’s what he said: he said, “I knew them very well. They were nice men, too. The only trouble was they were ahead of the people, and the people, as in every such case, turned out to abuse them because they have the manhood to stand for their own convictions. I’ve seen such work all through life.” Then he said, “What did the Smiths do that the people abused them so? They did not do anything. Why”—and this is where he gets specific: he says, “These rascals one time took Joseph Smith and ducked him in a pond that you see over there just because he preached what he believed and for nothing else. And if Jesus Christ had been there, they would have done the same to him.”

Scott Woodward: Ooh.

Casey Griffiths: “Now, I don’t believe like he did, but every man has a right to his religious opinions and to advocate his views, too. If people don’t like it, let them come out and meet him on the stand and show his error. Smith was always ready to exchange views with the best men they had.” So ducking a person in a pond isn’t a phrase we use very often today, but it’s the 19th-century equivalent of, like, waterboarding someone. It’s that you hold them—

Scott Woodward: Hold them under.

Casey Griffiths: —under the water, basically, while they struggle.

Scott Woodward: Pull them up before they drown.

Casey Griffiths: Put them back under. So Joseph Smith never mentions that. Again, it just comes from Thomas Taylor, but Joseph’s family noted violence, that especially after the plates were found, their house was broken into Lucy Mack Smith talked about maybe the first violent attack on record with Joseph Smith, where she said—when he went to get the plates, she wrote, “Before he got home, he was accosted three times with a severe stroke with a gun. When he struck the last one, he dislocated his thumb, which, however, he did not notice until he came into the side of the house, where he threw himself down in the corner of the fence to recover his breath. And as soon as he could get to go on, he rose and finished his race for the house, where he arrived altogether speechless from fright and exhaustion.” So violent means is used to try and obtain the plates.

Scott Woodward: So, yeah, like, if—this is, like, a few days after he obtained the plates on September 22. He had hid them in a log, got a box ready for them, and then he went up there, and on the hill there’s, like, these three guys that are, like, hiding, waiting to jump him, and one of them hits him in the back of the head with a gun. Joseph’s running down the hill with, like, this—what? How heavy are the plates? Like, almost fifty pounds or something. And he still makes it home, dodging these three guys and hitting one of them in the face, which I believe is the first instance we have on record of the laying on of hands in our dispensation as well from Joseph. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Casey Griffiths: All right, so even at the very inception of the restoration—we don’t know when what Thomas Taylor described happened, if it was after the First Vision or after the plates, but there’s violence inflicted on Joseph Smith and his family members in Palmyra. That’s part of the reason why they eventually have to leave Palmyra is because Joseph can’t translate if people are always trying to steal the plates, and eventually the whole family leaves because they endure so much harassment and persecution. Joseph relocates to Emma Smith’s hometown, which is Harmony, Pennsylvania, and in that region on the Pennsylvania and New York border, this is where we start to see people organizing and violence through legal means, but also with an undercurrent of possible physical violence there as well.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, so Joseph and Emma go down to Harmony, Pennsylvania, to get some peace, some separation from those in Palmyra who are trying to steal the plates from him, and even though Emma Smith’s father was not a believer in Joseph’s mission, Joseph says he became friendly to him, and he uses his influence to try to stay the persecution from people in Harmony that wanted to hurt Joseph, but over time it becomes apparent that Emma’s dad—his name’s Isaac—that Isaac Hale is not able to keep everyone at bay, and so that’s when they’re going to move to Fayette, New York, where the Book of Mormon translation is finished June of 1829, and then the translation is complete, but after the translation is complete, Joseph and Emma then go back to Harmony, hoping to return to, like, normal life, but in the summer of 1830, after the church is organized, now we start getting legal persecutions flaring up in and around Harmony that are eventually going to result in Joseph and Emma needing to leave their home there, never to return. In fact, there’s a moment of some violence that’s recorded about the day that Emma Smith was to get baptized. Emma was a believer in the latter-day work, but she didn’t get baptized in April of 1830 when the church was organized: it was actually a few months later, in June. She wanted to get baptized, so they went up to Colesville, which is down there by that Pennsylvania border. It’s on the New York side, and there was a nice little branch. There’s a nice little family there, the Knight family, that’s one of the key players in the early church there, and she wanted to get baptized there with several other converts, including members of the Knight family, and so on the afternoon of Saturday, June 26, they dammed up a stream in order to kind of create a little pool large enough to perform a baptism the next day, but, says Joseph’s history, “During the night, a mob collected and tore down our dam, which hindered us from attending to the baptism on the Sabbath, so, undeterred, early on Monday morning,” Joseph said, “we were on the alert, and before our enemies were aware of our proceedings, we had repaired the dam, and Emma, along with twelve other persons, were baptized by Oliver Cowdery. But even before the baptismal service was concluded,” Joseph writes, “the mob began again to collect. They amounted to about fifty men. Emma and the rest promptly went to the Knights’ home, but the mob followed them to the Knights’ home, and they surrounded the house of Mr. Knight,” I’m still quoting from Joseph, “raging with anger and apparently determined to commit violence upon us. Some asked questions, others threatened us, so that we thought it wisdom to leave and go to the house of Newel Knight. The mob followed us there, and it was only by the exercise of great prudence on our part, and reliance on our Heavenly Father, they were kept from laying violent hands upon us.” That’s the context of Emma Smith’s baptism. I don’t know what your baptism was like, Casey, but mine was a little more peaceful.

Casey Griffiths: Not like that.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Yeah, and so—that was not the end of the story, though. Like, so then there’s a meeting to confirm those who had just been baptized, to confirm them members of the church, but that was not allowed to happen. As they’re gathering together and preparing to start the meeting, Joseph was immediately arrested by a local constable on the charge—here’s the charge: of being, “a disorderly person” and “setting the country in an uproar by preaching the Book of Mormon.” I didn’t know those were illegal. Neither did Joseph, but he’s hauled away. He’s hauled away and taken to court. Actually, the constable later tells him that there was a plot to do him harm. The constable said that the plot was to get him into the hands of a mob who were now lying in ambush for Joseph, but that he, the constable, was determined to save Joseph from them, as he “had found me to be a different sort of person from what I had been represented to him.” And Joseph says, “I soon found that he had told me the truth of this matter, for not far from Mr. Knight’s house, the wagon in which we had set out was surrounded by the mob, who seemed only to await some signal from the constable, but to their great disappointment, he gave his horse a whip and drove me out of their reach.” And he says they were going so fast that one of the wagon wheels came off, which left him exposed again, vulnerable, and the mob almost caught up to them. However, he says, “We managed to get the wheel back on and again left them behind us.” So, like, close call. Close call.

Casey Griffiths: That is downright cinematic, right? That they’re putting the wheel on while the mob’s approaching them. This constable, who sounds like a really good man, he’s not named in the history. I don’t know if Joseph Smith learned his name, but they went on to South Bainbridge, where they stayed in the upper room of a tavern, Joseph Smith says, and he adds this detail: this is such a vivid detail. He said the constable, “slept during the night with his feet against the door and a loaded musket by his side whilst I occupied a bed which was in the room, he having declared that if we were interrupted unlawfully, that he would fight for me and defend me as far as in his power,” which would not make it easy for me to sleep, you know? If I’m with a cop and the cop’s like, I’m going to sleep with my feet against the door and my gun loaded in my hand, I would be like, it’s going to be hard for me to count enough sheep—

Scott Woodward: Going to be a tough night.

Casey Griffiths: —for that to go away, but oh my goodness. Yeah, again, these are legal threats—the constable is taking him in on a legal charge—but there is a looming physical threat surrounding this, too.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. The legal charge seemed to be a pretext simply to get him into the hands of the mob, and when the constable realized he’s not the kind of guy the mob had made him out to be, he’s like, oh, shoot. Now I need to protect this guy.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: But they do make it to court, which is a whole ’nother fun story. They do go to court the next day. Joseph is acquitted, and before he leaves the courthouse, he is arrested again by another constable. This one’s not so friendly. This constable drags him off.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Abuses him throughout the night. He takes him to a tavern. He withholds food and water, except for a little crust of bread and a tiny bit of water, and then instead of swearing to Joseph that he will protect him that night with a gun and his feet to the door, instead, he has Joseph lay on—by his arm. He has his arm around Joseph, and if Joseph started to move, this constable would squeeze him because he says, I’m not going to let you escape.

Casey Griffiths: Let me read from the history here: Joseph wrote, “He took me to a tavern and gathered in a number of men who used every means to abuse, ridicule, and insult me. They spit upon me. They pointed their fingers at me, saying, prophesy, prophesy, and thus did they imitate those who crucified the Savior of mankind, not knowing what they did. When we retired to bed, the constable made me lie next to the wall. He then laid himself down by me and put his arm around me, and upon my moving in the least would clench me fast, fearing that I intended to escape from him, and in this not very agreeable manner, we did pass the night.” So the night before, there’s a guy with his feet against the door with a gun, the second night, the other constable is literally, like, holding him, and that’s how they spend the night, which . . . Not pleasant. Not pleasant.

Scott Woodward: I love Joseph’s classic understatement here: “and in this not very agreeable manner [did we] pass the night.”

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Woodward: His history is full of these kinds of just fun little understatements.

Casey Griffiths: And Joseph mentions, a few days after those two things a mob tried to accost him and Oliver Cowdery. He said they had to travel all night to escape from them. They slept and watched alternately, and he says, we were persecuted on account of our religious faith. Clearly they’re the victims here. I mean, the charges are preaching the Book of Mormon, which it’s a pretty clear example of religious bigotry at play here.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: So these early attacks have that looming threat of physical violence, but they’re primarily legal attacks. They’re trying to throw Joseph Smith in jail. The first physical violence, organized physical violence—I’ll put it that way—that seems to happen to a Latter-day Saint is what happens to Joseph Smith in Hiram, Ohio.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And this is a story that’s probably well known, but worth reviewing the details of. Early physical encounters were brief. They were spontaneous. But Joseph Smith moves to Hiram, Ohio in 1831. This is where they decide to publish the Doctrine and Covenants. He’s moving there to work on his Bible translation project, and because he and Emma had just adopted a little boy and a little girl who’d lost their mother—this is Joseph Smith Murdock and Julia Smith Murdock.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And this is pretty rough. Like, good things happen at the John Johnson farm. If you ever get a chance to go there, it’s an amazing site. It’s the original house. This is where Joseph receives Section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants, in fact, just a couple weeks before the mob attack happened. This is where they decided to publish the Doctrine and Covenants. This is where five church conferences are held and a large portion of the Bible translation takes place, but it’s on March 24th—these spiritual outpourings come to an abrupt end on March 24th when violence displaced peace and crushed this little haven that Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon have built.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And we should say this is well documented. There’s Latter-day Saint and anti–Latter-day-Saint accounts of this. The local history written in Hiram, Ohio says, “The good people of Hiram and some others went to the house of Smith and Rigdon, took them out, stripped them to the buff, and treated them to a coat of tar and feathers and a rail ride, which induced them to leave.” now that is sugarcoating it.

Scott Woodward: The good people of Hiram.

Casey Griffiths: The good people. I’m so sorry, but good people—

Scott Woodward: It really says that.

Casey Griffiths: —don’t drag people out of their house. Yeah, it says—

Scott Woodward: it really says that.

Casey Griffiths: Strip them to the buff and coat them in tar and feathers.

Scott Woodward: And a rail ride.

Casey Griffiths: What the heck?

Scott Woodward: Yeah. “which induced them to leave.” Jeez.

Casey Griffiths: So recognizing perhaps a small amount of understatement in that local history, let’s go from some primary source participants, people that actually participated in it. So according to Latter-day Saint sources, here’s what happened. And some great historians, like Mark Staker, have written about this. We salute them for the good work. We’re stealing from them here. So on March 24th, 1832, Joseph and Emma were up late. They were taking care of their 11-month-old twins. Both the twins were ill. They were suffering from measles, which, again, is no laughing matter at this time and with children this young. As the night hours waned, Joseph slept while Emma comforted the little ones until a dozen men with blackened faces broke into their bedroom. The intruders grabbed Joseph’s shirt, his drawers, and his limbs, and in his struggle to free himself, spawned “threats of death from the lawless men in the room. This quieted me.” So they threatened to kill him, and that causes Joseph Smith to quiet down. They dragged Joseph Smith from the farmhouse to a meadow. And some people, like Karl Ricks Anderson and others are still using sources to try and figure out exactly where this takes place.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: I had an interesting day with Karl as we walked around the farm, trying to review the sources and figure out where this happens, but here’s what Joseph Smith says: as they’re carrying him there, he sees Sidney Rigdon lying on the ground, covered in blood. Sidney’s whole face is bloody, according to Joseph Smith.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Sidney had been attacked, tarred and feathered, and then dragged across the ground, and this is early, early spring. The ground’s still frozen and Sidney’s head was badly, badly lacerated. When Joseph Smith saw Sidney, he understood the stakes, what’s happening, and according to his account, he told the captors, “I hope you will have mercy and spare my life. I hope.” The mob dragged him thirty rods past Sidney Rigdon to the meadow, and then he said, “They proposed to beat and scratch me well, tear off my shirt and drawers, and leave me naked.”

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: And they said, “Call on your God for help. We’ll show you no mercy.”

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Woodward: So it seems like they intended to kill him.

Casey Griffiths: From the sources we have, one of the mobbers, who was a doctor, Dr. Dennison, tried to force a vial of poisonous nitric acid into Joseph’s mouth. And then he tried to—there’s no polite way to say this—he tried to emasculate Joseph. He tried to castrate Joseph.

Scott Woodward: Jeez.

Casey Griffiths: Joseph fights back. All this is happening while his clothes are being torn off. Joseph also said that one of the mobbers was scratching him with his fingernails. Joseph said, “Like a mad cat, he fell on me and muttered, G. D. ye.” That’s how Joseph Smith writes it in this history, “That’s the way the Holy Ghost falls on folks.” When Denison saw what was happening, he backs off, and he refuses to continue with the attempted castration, but this spurred on the other mobbers, who attempted to begin to tar and feather him, and we should point out this is pine tar. If you’ve ever gotten, like, pine sap on your clothes, this is that substance heated up—

Scott Woodward: Sticky.

Casey Griffiths: —and poured on a person. So it’s incredibly unpleasant. And Joseph said he heard somebody saying, “Symonds, Symonds, where’s the tar bucket?” “I don’t know,” answered one. “‘tis Eli’s left it.” They get the tar, they try to force the tar paddle into Joseph’s mouth, but Joseph twists his head that they could not. Another mobber cried, “G. D. ye, hold up your head, and let us give ye some tar.” And they forced tar into his mouth, almost smothering him. They covered his scratched and beaten body with this loathsome substance, and Joseph passed out. And so the mob takes off, and Joseph Smith struggles his way back to the house after he regains consciousness. The first thing he said was that he struggled to rid the tar from his mouth so that he could breathe. Like, these are details that don’t always come up. And then he said, “I saw two lights in the distance. I made my way towards them and found it was Father Johnson’s.” When he gets to the farmhouse, he tries to call out to Emma. Emma is in a high state of anxiety for obvious reasons.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And when she sees Joseph, she assumed that the tar that he was covered with was blood. And she concluded, according to Joseph, that he was “all crushed to pieces.” That’s the way he describes it, and she passes out. She fainted. The Johnsons, they run, they embrace Joseph, they bring him in. Throughout the remainder of the night they scrape off the tar. They attempt to remove the tar from his body, and common details we shared are the story of the next morning. Joseph Smith does preach a sermon on the steps of the John Johnson house. While he’s preaching the sermon, he says he recognizes several people from the mob who had come to listen to the sermon, and he went on and preached the sermon and baptized several people that day.

Scott Woodward: The local press actually gets ahold of this story, and they decry the vicious act as a base transaction, an unlawful act, a work of darkness, a diabolical trick, they said. Nevertheless, even as the press was talking with some level of sympathy, condemning the act, they then dropped this little condoning comment: They said, “But, bad as it is, it proves that Satan hath more power than pretended prophets of Mormonism.”

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: A little jab there in the press, like . . .

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. They can’t resist getting that little kind of last jab.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Geez.

Casey Griffiths: After this, Joseph does stay at the John Johnson home for about a week. Sidney Rigdon is in really bad shape. Some people trace some instability in Sidney to this attack and what happened there and how it affected him. And there is a pretty clear line of sight. It’s a couple of weeks after this that Sidney Rigdon says the keys are lost from the kingdom and Joseph Smith has to remove his keys, and some people talk about Sidney Rigdon having hysterical laughing fits.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Because he may have had a traumatic brain injury or something like that.

Scott Woodward: Newel K. Whitney says after this, Sidney was either “down in the cellar or up in the attic” mentally.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Maybe some sort of a trauma-induced bipolarism of some kind. I don’t—I’m not a medical expert on this. I don’t know how it works, but—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —he never seems to be quite the same after this—Sidney doesn’t seem.

Casey Griffiths: The most tragic element is this happens on the 24th. On the 29th, Joseph buries his son, Joseph Murdock Smith, this little adopted boy.

Scott Woodward: Little 11-month-old boy.

Casey Griffiths: 11-month-old baby boy who dies from measles, but was exposed to the cold when the mob attacked, and some people have said was the first victim of mobocracy in this dispensation. So serious consequences and serious violence that happens. The mob’s plan worked: Joseph and Emma leave Hiram, Ohio on April 1. Joseph goes to Missouri. Emma has to spend several weeks living with the Whitney family and a few others, and this is sort of Joseph’s introduction to physical violence, organized physical violence, where he saw some people, former friends—the person that this attack has pinned on a lot of times is Symonds Rider.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And we often oversimplify Symonds’s motives by saying his name was spelled wrong in his ordination certificate.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: That story actually comes from, like, Symonds’s funeral, which is several decades later and not from Symonds himself. By the way—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —Symonds Rider’s grave is almost within eyesight of the Johnson farm.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And if his name was spelled wrong, it’s still wrong in the Doctrine and Covenants, according to his headstone. But—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —several people, like Mark Staker, have pointed out that Symonds Rider spelled his name different ways at different times in his life.

Scott Woodward: My favorite thing is on his tombstone it misspells the word disciple, calls him a diciple. It misses the letter S, and so it’s he’s a—here’s a diciple of Jesus.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: It’s like, oh my word. Yep. There was always a little something lacking in Symonds Rider’s dicipleship.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Some good historians have pointed out that it’s very unlikely that Symonds Rider and the other members of the mob were motivated by misspelled names on ordination certificates.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: Symonds Rider’s wife—they both joined the church, but his wife was apparently a more ardent convert than him, and he was, according to Mark, upset that she was consecrating to the church. Like, it was a property issue that he was dealing with.

Scott Woodward: And he had not gone to Missouri with the first wave of missionaries and had discovered, he said, he had discovered Joseph’s scheme to take all the church members’ property. That’s how he writes it, but what he had actually discovered was Section 42 that describes the system of consecration of property, and he saw it in the worst possible light as the system by which Joseph Smith the prophet was trying to take everyone’s property, and so—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —yeah. Yeah, I think there was a misunderstanding there, and his wife had started to give to the church, and he wanted to put a stop to this.

Casey Griffiths: Complex motivations, and we don’t want to do a disservice to people like Symonds Rider, as much as we not like him, by oversimplifying what his motives may have been, but he is the instigator of the first organized physical violence against Latter-day Saints, and you can make the case that Joseph Smith Murdock is the first victim of organized mob violence against them, so—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Scott, in the examples we’ve gone through today, it’s pretty clear that, at least in early instances, Latter-day Saints were more the victims—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —than the perpetrators of violence.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: You can make all kinds of cases about if the people were provoked, but it doesn’t seem like something like the mob attack or the legal attacks in Colesville were sufficiently motivated to say that they were moral.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Griffiths: And there’s a gradual ratcheting up: It starts with legal attacks on Joseph Smith in Colesville with the threat of violence, then direct violence. That happens in Hiram. The John Johnson farm is the first instance of organized mob violence. And the men who attacked Joseph and Sidney did not take their lives, but they came close, and they showed that mob violence could be an effective tool against the Saints because Joseph and Sidney do leave Hiram at that time. Unfortunately, this is a prelude. This is the beginning—

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: —not the end of what happens. And—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —the next round of violence that we deal with is not going to be focused on an individual: It’s going to be systemic violence against a religion. For that, we’re going to talk about what happened in Jackson County, Missouri. That’s where it’s not just a crime to be a person claiming to be a prophet: It’s a crime to be a member of a religious organization. That’s what the saints deal with. So . . .

Scott Woodward: Yeah, which is full of complexity and really interesting group dynamics, which we’ll get into next time, so . . .

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Thank you, Casey.

Casey Griffiths: Thanks for sticking with us. Yeah, this is going to be tough stuff, but stuff we need to talk about, so we’ll see you next time.

Scott Woodward: All right. We’ll see you then. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. In our next episode, Casey and I look at the first time in our history that Latter-day Saints were victims of organized violence as a collective group of believers. The year was 1833, and the situation was the wholesale expulsion of the saints from Jackson County, Missouri. Why did this happen, and what do the revelations received by the Prophet Joseph Smith in response to this scenario teach us about peace and violence among Latter-day Saints? Join us next time as we dig in. If you’re enjoying or gaining value from Church History Matters, we would love it if you could pay it forward by telling your friends about it, or by taking a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti, 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. Can I say that again? All of our content is free because people like you donate to make it possible, and we couldn’t be more grateful. If you’re in a position where you are both willing and able to make a one-time or ongoing donation, be assured that your contribution will help us at Scripture Central produce and disseminate more quality content to help combat false and faith-eroding material out there in the digital marketplace of ideas. Also, while Casey and I 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.