Scott Woodward:
Hi, this is Scott from Church History Matters. After today’s episode, we’ve only got one more to go to wrap this series up, and we want to hear more of your questions. Next week we will be pleased to have as our special guest Dr. Aaron Miller to help us respond to your questions about current or modern church finances. Dr. Miller teaches nonprofit management and ethics in the Romney Institute at BYU, has co-authored the Business Ethics Field Guide, and has thoughtfully written about modern church financial issues. So please send your thoughtful questions in anytime before February 29, 2024 to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. Let us know your name, where you’re from, and try to keep each question as concise as possible when you email them in. That helps out a lot. Okay, now on to the episode. Doctrine and Covenants 119 directs church members to pay essentially two tithings: the first tithing being a one-time donation of all of their surplus property, meaning whatever they don’t have immediate need of, and the second tithing being an ongoing payment of one tenth of what they would make in interest annually if they invested their total net worth at 6 percent. So when did we shift in the church away from the payment of tithing in that two-part way to the more general approach today of really only one type of tithe, as 10 percent of our income? Also, who are the Danites, and what role did they play in early tithing collection in Far West? Furthermore, how is it okay for some full-time church leaders today to receive a financial stipend or allowance? Is that historically justified in the revelations and early practice of the church? Also, related question: is it considered priestcraft for people to receive money for their efforts to build Zion? Finally, after Joseph Smith’s martyrdom, was there significant disagreement between Brigham Young and Emma Smith regarding church financial assets? And if so, what role did that play in their turbulent relationship over the next decades? All of these questions and more coming your way on today’s episode of Church History Matters with special guest Dr. Elizabeth Kuehn and a surprise guest that we added last minute. We think you’ll like him. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our seventh episode of this series dealing with consecration and church finance. Now, let’s get into it.

Casey Griffiths:
Hello, Scott.

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

Casey Griffiths:
Good. How are you?

Scott Woodward:
Fantastic. We’re coming to an end here of our financial series. This has been a blast.

Casey Griffiths:
It’s been fascinating, right? And so many issues. Whenever we finish a series, I feel like we’ve got to do six more episodes, but you know that that might be exhausting for our listeners.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. There are things we haven’t covered, and we acknowledge that, which is one of the reasons we solicit questions from our listeners, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. We do have kind of a great two-part finale of this series, and we have a delightful surprise for you.

Scott Woodward:
There’s a little surprise we’re sneaking in today.

Casey Griffiths:
There’s a little surprise. We planned on having Elizabeth Kuehn here with us to answer questions about the early financial history of the church, but Elizabeth has surprised and delighted us by inviting Jeffrey Mahas to join us, too. So say hi, Elizabeth and Jeffrey.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Hi, glad to be here.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, happy to be here.

Casey Griffiths:
And you are married to each other. Two historians, married and out there fighting crime in the world, correct?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Or at least researching finances.

Scott Woodward:
Same thing. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah. And you met while you were working on the Joseph Smith Papers project together, correct?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah, we did.

Casey Griffiths:
Yes. The Jim and Pam of the Church History Department, I guess you’d say.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
I guess so.

Scott Woodward:
Well, we’re super excited to have not just one of you, but both of you on today’s show. That’s exciting. So thanks for being with us.

Casey Griffiths:
And we’ll let you talk a little bit about the work you’ve already done, but we’ve got a short bio here, just to introduce both of you. Offer any corrections. So let’s start with Elizabeth. Elizabeth A. Kuehn is a historian in the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is the lead historian on the Financial Records Series and a volume editor of the document series of the Joseph Smith Papers Project and has also worked on the discourses of Eliza R. Snow, and her research specializes in the Latter-day Saint community in Kirtland, Ohio, the financial records of Joseph Smith—she’s also worked on controversies in Nauvoo in 1842, including John C. Bennett’s accusations, Joseph Smith’s bankruptcy proceedings, and plural marriage. She’s also working to bring greater inclusion of women and representation of their experiences to the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Elizabeth received her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in History and Classical Language Certificate from Arizona State University and her Master of Arts degree in European and Women’s History from Purdue University as well. And so, Elizabeth, we’re glad to have you with us, and let me take a minute and introduce Jeffrey as well. So Jeffrey Mahas is also a historian and researcher at the Joseph Smith Papers. He is the volume editor of the Administrative Records, that’s the Council of Fifty minutes. Jeffrey worked on Documents volumes 6, 11, 13, and A1, which is the Council of Fifty minutes. He has a master’s degree in history from the University of Utah. And you’ve also worked as a collections manager at L. Tom Perry Special Collections at BYU, correct, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Mahas:
That’s correct. It’s a very minor position that has a very impressive title.

Casey Griffiths:
Like a lot of things. So we’re thrilled to have both of you with us. Do you want to take a moment and just tell us how you both got involved in the Joseph Smith Papers and a little bit about your work there?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Well, we’ve both been here over 10 years now, so a while. I started out of grad school and kind of cut my teeth on the Kirtland Bank. That was what kind of piqued my financial interest, and kind of just kept chipping away at financial questions for Joseph until we started the Financial Records series in 2020.

Casey Griffiths:
And that’s what put you on our radar, is you’ve done a couple podcasts where you’ve talked about the Kirtland Safety Society. There’s some really good materials in Gospel Library, little videos where Elizabeth explains the Kirtland financial crisis and gives insight into that, and so we’re just excited to have you here because that’s part of what we’re talking about, financial crises and how church finance has developed over time. And you’re the lead editor in that series.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah. And I started with the Joseph Smith Papers in April of 2013. I started with a one-year internship. I’m currently on year eleven of that one-year internship, so they must like something that I’m doing, because they kept me around, and I got started working on the Council of Fifty minutes. I’ve got to work on a lot of really exciting, interesting things, including the tithing revelation given in 1838, as well as a lot in Nauvoo. For a while I worked under Elizabeth in the Financial series, so she and I have been talking church finances under Joseph Smith for a long time.

Scott Woodward:
Love it. Well, what an honor to have both of you here, then. You guys are—we couldn’t have picked two better scholars to have for this series, so are you ready to jump into some questions?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Sure.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. We’ve got a lot of hungry listeners who sent us in a lot of cool questions that, we’ll just invite your best responses, and we’ll go from there. One question that I was thinking of, Elizabeth, as Casey was reading your bio is I just wondered, like, studying the Kirtland bank, studying that crisis and all the fallout that came from that, that seems to have kind of changed the trajectory of the church, with significant apostles dropping away, which then created vacancies for other apostles to come in who later become presidents of the church. I mean, there’s some really significant, like, fallout or I guess outcomes that come from that. What are some insights that you would share with us just about that period? What are some of the, I guess, key takeaways from the Kirtland bank crisis that you would hope that most members of the church would know, would realize, would learn from?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
What a great question. So I think one of the major takeaways is understanding the larger context. A lot of times we kind of put absolutely everything on Joseph, right? He’s just to blame. It was a mistake. We’ve kind of fallen into a lot of those assumptions, and what I think has been really key, and it was really wonderful that Elder Cook decided to highlight it in one of his general conference talks, was that there’s a larger economic crisis going on at this time. There’s a financial panic. This is really early capitalism, right? So there’s a lot of instability. There’s this time of kind of financial crisis as banks don’t have enough resources and they close and there’s lots of strains on the specie or kind of the hard currency that’s circulating in the country, and so a profound reason about why the Safety Society closes is that larger crisis. The other thing that I think is a major takeaway is that Joseph and a lot of the early church leaders, they like this idea of a bank, but they don’t quite know what they’re doing. And so they’re trying to do the best they can, but they have very, very limited funding, and they kind of set up the funding structure wrong. And the records that we have are really awesome in that they show that there’s actually an upward trend, that people are actually paying more than what they need to to kind of make the bank work for a time, and then you hit this moment of panic and financial crisis and it just bottoms out, and so kind of getting into the quantitative kind of hard data was kind of a really fun and rewarding part of that research. But you’re right in that there’s a lot going on, and that crisis leads to other crises, right? Like, land values plummet. We have Parley P. Pratt, who, you know, this prominent, strong apostle, preacher, he has his absolute moment of crisis, right? Where he’s just not sure that he wants to follow Joseph.

Scott Woodward:
He struggled for a few weeks? A few months?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
A few months, and then he kind of has a change of heart, yeah, and he writes about, you know, coming to Joseph in tears and apologizing and kind of repenting.

Scott Woodward:
Touching story.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
It’s a great story. But you have this kind of moment of trial for a lot of, especially the apostles, where it’s this question of, are you going to follow Joseph even if that doesn’t always mean success and prominence and prosperity, or are you in it for the money?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Warren Parrish, who is this beloved scribe of Joseph’s, ends up being in it for the money, and he really turns against Joseph in that period when he wants the bank to continue. He wants to be able to make money from it and profit from it. His goal isn’t the larger goal of building Zion. He’s interested in the financial means. And so when that falls apart he’s angry at Joseph, right? And he attacks, and yeah, he’s out and ultimately forms a rival church and kind of creates a schism in the Kirtland community. But I think the biggest takeaway for me is that for so much of this, it’s not about the bank. It’s about people’s testimonies. And it’s about what they—what their underlying belief in Joseph was.

Scott Woodward:
What do you mean? Meaning that the—

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Did they really believe him to be a prophet?

Scott Woodward:
And that the bank kind of exposed what was already going on underneath the surface.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And to add to that context, my understanding is the Kirtland bank crisis coincides with a national panic, right? Hundreds of banks throughout the United States fail during this time, not just in Kirtland. And sometimes we don’t always recognize, hey, the big picture here is that there was a lot going on everywhere and not just where the saints were.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Absolutely.

Jeffrey Mahas:
I’m nowhere near the expert on this that Elizabeth is, but one thing that’s always stood out to me is if you read the broader literature, We’re very accustomed to ideas of boom-and-bust economics, that there could be a recession, that there’s broader market forces that are at work in our everyday lives. That’s not something that’s really understood by people, and this happens in 1819 when the United States has its first big economic crisis, its first recession, and again in 1837 there’s kind of people panicking, wondering why: I haven’t done anything wrong. Why are suddenly things going so bad? And you don’t have this understanding that there’s a broader context at play. So I think when you look at Kirtland and you see people having these extreme reactions to what’s going on with Joseph, with the bank and with Kirtland itself financially, I think you can see that larger cultural stress, that they’re not sure: I thought I was doing everything right. Why have things gone so poorly?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And what applies to Joseph prophetically as well, because he tells the saints early on, you know, if you invest, if you help me build up the city, we’ll prosper. And so a lot of them are like, you were wrong. And so I think it gets at the heart of, like, do you believe a prophet is infallible? Do you believe, you know, they’re omniscient, they’re all-knowing, and if that’s your belief, how do you handle when they make a mistake, when they get something wrong? And so that’s where I think you get this real kind of testimony moment where, like, Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff were like, yeah, I totally believe in Joseph. The bank’s not my issue. And so many, for them, the bank and its failure is.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. It’s kind of those underlying assumptions about what you think a prophet is and to what extent you believe they can make mistakes.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Is it true, Elizabeth, I’ve heard, that Joseph Smith lost the most money out of the Kirtland Bank? Can you verify that or I guess contextualize that? Did he lose the most money?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yes, he did. And I was happy to write that footnote. I’m glad to see it’s trickled down. He lost over $6,000 in the attempt to fund and keep solvent the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, and that’s more than anybody else loses. Significantly more.

Casey Griffiths:
He’s got more skin in the game than anybody and maybe pays the higher price than anybody, too.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
But like you said, finance is the lead story here, but maybe not the main story of what was going on in Kirtland.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
That leads into some of the questions from some of our listeners. There are several questions about tithing, and it’s interesting to think how the 1837 failure of the Kirtland Bank leads to the 1838 revelation on tithing. We needed a way to fund the needs of the church, right?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s a question from Dennis in Oklahoma. He asked this question: he said, “Did the church consider tithing to be two percent at some point in time?” And Casey and I alluded to this a little bit in one of our episodes, that Bishop Whitney had come up with some proposals about how to fund the church, and two percent was a number thrown around. Can you maybe talk about two percent a little bit there? Kind of, what, end of 1837, beginning of 1838?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah, so the church and the bishops are trying to figure out how to tithe the people, right? And this becomes a particular question in Far West, as they’re trying to work it out there. They don’t have, of course, the kind of burden of debt that the Kirtland Saints have with the Kirtland Temple, and so we kind of have these, you know, two locations of the church kind of figuring things out in tandem, but kind of having slightly different financial situations. And so you’re right, like, Bishop Partridge, Bishop Whitney, they’re working through these ideas. And in 1837 the Bishopric in Far West recommend that a two percent tithe be implemented against every head of household to ask them to essentially donate for the church’s needs, but I think it’s important to stress this is just a proposal. Like you said, they’re throwing around numbers, they’re kind of playing with ideas of having this fluctuating tithing rate that will address the needs of the church.

Jeffrey Mahas:
And the idea with this, when they throw out the number of two percent, the idea at the time is the bishopric and the local high council can meet together and discuss what are the needs of the church to feed the poor and to take care of church resources? What’s the amount of money that we need each year? And so they throw out two percent, saying we think a two percent tithe will be what will be required next year. But as Elizabeth said, this is a proposal that the bishopric makes to the High Council. It doesn’t seem like it’s ever implemented. These questions are still circulating. Church leaders are still asking them into July 1838, leading to Doctrine and Covenants section 119.

Scott Woodward:
The tithing revelation.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And this two percent is not two percent of income, correct? This is two percent of your net worth.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Talk to us about how that’s different.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So I think one of the fundamental things you have to understand here is that their economy is different than ours. So they’re functioning largely with an agrarian economy, meaning that most everyone is farming, or they want to have a farm, or they’re working on a farm. And so the idea of income is just not really a concept of the 19th century. You’re not earning a salary, a paycheck, like we do today. Maybe you’re earning wages for a short time, maybe you’re working on a project, are a teacher for a time. Usually these aren’t, you know, annual incomes the same way that we think about incomes. So net worth, basically all that you own, is what you’re being tithed on, which is usually your farm, your farming tools, your animals, your property, what clothing you have, what furniture you have, that kind of an idea.

Scott Woodward:
Wow, so fascinating.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Up until the second half of the 19th century the church is really operating in a cashless society. You have gold and silver specie, but it’s very rare, and you’re almost always functioning on a barter system. Even if you’re working for someone, the conditions of your labor aren’t going to be, I’m paying you cash money or I’m paying you in gold. No. It’s going to be, I’ll pay you in my extra apples. I’ll give you some of the crops that we harvest. If I own a store and you’re working in my store you can draw goods that you need out of my store as part of your paycheck. It’s not like anyone’s actually getting money as a means—as an annual income at this time.

Casey Griffiths:
And I—you see that reflected in these early consecration deeds, right, where most of them, instead of saying, “This is my net worth in dollars,” it’s like, “I’ve got these tools”—I’m thinking of one that I read where it’s like, you know, “Various sundry items valued at this,” that they’re working on a different system than we are, and we don’t always appreciate that.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Absolutely.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so that kind of plays into some questions that we have here about tithing. So we’re in, what, July of 1838. Got some pressing debt pressing down on Joseph and Sidney. I think it was a debt they owed to some—to a lawyer, some legal fees, something like that.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
They have a lot of debts.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. Yeah. So let me ask this: so in that tithing revelation, this is from Chris from West Jordan, he said, “It was mentioned in your podcast that Bishop Partridge explained to Bishop Whitney that the Lord’s phrase about tithing being one tenth of all their interest annually didn’t mean ten percent of your income but ten percent of what you would hypothetically make in profit if you invested your net worth for a year at a six percent return. So when exactly did this original interpretation change to being a percentage of income as we practice it today?”

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So I wanted to kind of step back and say one thing we don’t have is a lot of explanation of how D&C 119 actually functioned.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
We have this one paragraph from Bishop Partridge, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And it’s kind of a complicated one, especially to a modern reader.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And so I wanted to walk through it just a bit, because I think it can be easily misunderstood. 119 is talking about a two-tiered tithing system, right? So the first part required that church members consecrate everything that they considered to be surplus, everything that you didn’t need for your immediate sustenance and well-being, but, of course, that can be pretty subjective and prone to interpretation.

Scott Woodward:
Uh-huh. Yeah. So that’s verses one through three.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
That’s that first tithing.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So you’ve got that surplus, and then the next part required that members pay annually or yearly one tenth of the interest of their net worth. And Partridge uses six percent here because that’s the standard interest rate of the time.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So that’s where he’s bringing that in.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And so this shift to income happens really gradually, and I think it happens as the economy changes, right? We talked about the agrarian economy. As we shift more to this more capitalistic market economy, that’s when income becomes the driving influence. The actual practice of 119, as far as we can document, doesn’t last very long. And what we do have from Brigham Young and John Corrill and others suggests that the saints were not overly generous in their interpretation of surplus property, and so a lot wasn’t necessarily given in. And so there’s not a lot being gleaned from this.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So they kind of have to pivot pretty quickly after this, and the next time that we have a clearer picture of tithing is really Nauvoo, after they’ve been driven out of Missouri. And in Nauvoo the practice shifts to ten percent of your net worth. That kind of becomes the staple, but it’s ten percent of your entire net worth at the commencement of the building of the Nauvoo Temple, and then an annual tithing payment after that. So they’re still following vaguely the same model, but it shifts a little bit.

Casey Griffiths:
Let me say something for the members of the church not being generous: this was a tumultuous time.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
It’s a very difficult time, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, the revelation’s received in the summer of 1838, which is basically just a month or two before, for lack of a better phrase, all heck breaks loose, and they are evicted from the state of Missouri, and most of them lose their property, so the tentativeness of the situation may have played a role in the lack of giving the Saints made. They’re in survival mode. And it’s not until Nauvoo, when they get settled in a little bit, that they can really start looking at how they’re going to interpret this revelation, what its implications are. Is that fair to say?

Jeffrey Mahas:
That might be. There also might be some overzealousness on the part of some church leaders. So, for example, the Danites are intricately connected with the tithing revelation.

Casey Griffiths:
Interesting.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Where, from the sources we can tell, like Joseph Smith’s journal that’s kept by George Robinson, it talks about how the Danite organization is created to help gather the tithings.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, wow.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Kind of forcibly.

Scott Woodward:
And could you just pause for a second to tell our listeners, because we haven’t covered Danites at all. Just a quick context. Who are the Danites?

Casey Griffiths:
I want to mention that Danites and tithing were not on my bingo card for today, too. I didn’t think they were going to end up in the same set. So I am—I’m riveted. Tell us a little bit about that.

Scott Woodward:
Please.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Well, we don’t know a lot about this, but we know that during 1838, many church leaders feel like, we’ve been pushed far enough. They pushed us out of Jackson County. They pushed us out of Clay County. We’ve been largely pushed out of Kirtland. We’ve been pushed enough, and it’s time to stand up, and it’s time to stand up for ourselves and maybe fight back. And so you have the organization of a kind of paramilitary militia that’s created by church leaders to support the First Presidency and to defend and support the church.

Scott Woodward:
So it’s kind of a paramilitary group that’s also being tasked with the collection of tithing?

Jeffrey Mahas:
And we know from some sources, a handful of sources, that the Danites were tasked with the collection of tithing.

Scott Woodward:
That sounds kind of intimidating.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah. It may have been. We don’t know as much about this as we would like—

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Jeffrey Mahas:
—but we know that they are connected, but we also know that John Corrill, who leaves the church after 1838 and writes a history of his experiences, kind of dismisses the whole attempt to put Doctrine and Covenants section 119 into practice.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting.

Jeffrey Mahas:
So we have statements by Brigham Young who criti—late—much later, decades later, criticizing the saints, saying they showed up to pay their surplus tithing, and all they gave us was a lame cow with one eye. But then we also have John Corrill who—he would know: He was in charge of the bishop’s storehouse in Far West—who says the attempts by the Danites to try and gather tithing never amounted to much. And so already, just within a few, probably weeks if not months, even before hostilities really break out in Missouri with the Mormon war there, the system of tithing kind of already collapses almost as soon as it—they try to implement it. And part of that might be—we know the Saints are desperately poor. Again, the Saints in Missouri, they’re Saints that are being—the people that are there are ones that have been forced out of Kirtland. They’re ones that were forced out of Jackson County and then Clay County. They’re trying to rebuild a new settlement. It’s not an easy time for anyone. We know that provisions, food, everything’s tight and hard to come by, and people are suffering even before you bring in the state militia or mobs that are trying to kick you out of Missouri. It’s already a hard time.

Scott Woodward:
So this isn’t like we’re in this great season of abundance and church members are being stingy. Like, there really is not much surplus to go around.

Jeffrey Mahas:
That’s probably the case, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. So that kind of helps redeem the saints a little bit in my eyes that they’re—

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
They’re trying, but—

Jeffrey Mahas:
I mean, this is kind of a tangent, but I think it’s related. You know, there’s the famous story that supposedly Thomas Marsh, a apostle, left the church after his wife got into a fight with others over milk strippings. That story’s told for the first time in church re—in records about seven or eight years after it supposedly happened, so there’s a question of how accurate is it, but even if we take it at face value, say it is a hundred percent accurate, if you read some of the sources of the saints living at Adam-ondi-ahman or some of these other outlying settlements, corn mush is all they have to eat, and so you could see the issue of milk strippings, it sounds trivial.

Casey Griffiths:
Right, right.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
But if that’s all you have—

Jeffrey Mahas:
If that’s all you have, then you might be more likely to fight over the little sustenance that you have.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And if it’s about providing for your family, right, being able to feed your children, that adds a much higher stake than, like, the pettiness that I think that story sometimes gets.

Scott Woodward:
No, this is all so good. Okay, so let’s swing it back to D&C 119 here. So there’s these two tithes, and the Danites were tasked somehow, to some degree, we’re not sure exactly all the details, but they were tasked with somehow assessing and collecting surplus, which there wasn’t much to go around. So that’s the—that’s tithing number one, which seems to, like you’re saying, seems to start to kind of fall in upon itself because there’s not much there to give. But then tell us about that second tithing, then, in verse four: one tenth of all their interest annually. Are they doing that in Far West? Does that not pick up until Nauvoo, and then it kind of seems to shift there? Like, tell us about the history of verse four.

Jeffrey Mahas:
It’s hard for us to say. We don’t have any financial records of the church in Far West, so it’s really difficult for us to say to what extent is this being practiced? Again, we have that one letter from Bishop Partridge, and that letter was in a private family possession until only just a few years ago, so even historians didn’t know about this, but we have one paragraph of context and almost nothing else to really understand how is this being practiced on the ground. How is it actually being practiced? And that remains true until probably 1841. As Elizabeth said, there’s some kind of a shift in tithing practices when they move to Nauvoo, but the time period from 1839 to 1841 is one that we don’t have very good records for. Starting in late 1841, when we get good records, suddenly we have all of the tithing records of the church, starting in December of 1841, so by that time, we can see that in Nauvoo they’re practicing an ideal of, if you’re in Nauvoo when they start building the temple, there is an expectation to give ten percent of all you have to the construction of the temple, and then ten percent of your increase annually, which they do not—unlike Bishop Partridge, they do not helpfully describe what that means.

Scott Woodward:
Because that’s a subtle shift from interest to increase.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And by the way, it doesn’t help that Bishop Partridge died in 1840, right?

Jeffrey Mahas:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Now the very man who was charged to implement all of this is dead. I guess you’ve got Newell K. Whitney that maybe could have carried on there, but . . .

Casey Griffiths:
And can I add a question? Is Bishop Whitney the reason why we start having good records? Is he more assiduous in his record-keeping?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
He is a wonderful record-keeper. He doesn’t usually keep tithing records.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, okay.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So the ones that we can thank for the tithing records are really Willard Richards and William Clayton.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So they start keeping tithing records. So this goes back to the incorporation of the church in Nauvoo. When they’re officially incorporated with the state of Illinois, Joseph becomes trustee-in-trust, or essentially the head of the financial means of the church, right? He’s in charge of church finances as trustee. Tithing collection had been in the realm of the Nauvoo Temple Committee, and Elias Higbee isn’t keeping very good records. There’s some problems with the record keeping. Joseph sees this and says, wait a minute. Let’s—I’m going to take this on. Let’s get this sorted out. And that’s when he appoints Willard Richards as the temple recorder to record the tithing that’s coming in because this is such a big part of how they plan to build the Nauvoo Temple. And so with Willard Richards’ appointment and with William Clayton coming, you get these professional clerks and scribes who know what they’re doing, who are keeping really accurate and detailed records, and that’s why we get wonderful records kept for the trustee and for the tithing, one of which I’ll have to do a shout-out for: The Book of the Law of the Lord is perhaps one of my favorite records in all of the Joseph Smith Papers, but it’s all of the Nauvoo-era tithing, and that’s on the Joseph Smith Papers website. So if anyone wants to explore it, search for their ancestors in it, it’s up online, and they can do that.

Scott Woodward:
Uh-huh. Yeah.

Jeffrey Mahas:
To take us back to your question, though, I think if I were to pinpoint—we do have a number of shifts between 1838 and 1841 where we start getting good records, and if I were to identify those shifts, I’d say there’s the subtle shift connecting tithing to the construction of the Nauvoo Temple directly. I think that is one shift that we see.

Scott Woodward:
Didn’t D&C 119 connect it directly to the Far West Temple? So the Nauvoo Temple sort of takes the spot of that, or?

Jeffrey Mahas:
It did. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, the Nauvoo temple takes the place of that, and another thing that we see happening as early as 1840 is there’s a recognition that, like we talked about earlier, the saints are impoverished, particularly in Nauvoo. They’ve been kicked out of Missouri now. They’ve lost everything they have. And so there’s clearly a question about how can a totally impoverished people pay a tithing, and the solution that the church comes up with is that every household, every head of household will be required to perform one day in ten labor on the temple. And so we start to see a shift from the emphasis in Nauvoo on you need to pay a tithing, to more you need to work your tithing. You need to work one day in every ten to be considered a faithful tithe payer in Nauvoo.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s a direct response to poverty.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, because of their poverty. Outside of Nauvoo they’re still collecting donations and consecrations, and they’re bringing them into the city, and wealthy saints who can afford to give are giving in Nauvoo, but generally the tithing that people are offering within the city is they’re working one day in every ten. And so the labor tithing emerges as the main mode that most people are able to pay their tithing. And the last shift, like Elizabeth talked about, is that whereas prior to this bishops had kind of had a central or the central role over collecting tithings and donations and finances, with the incorporation of the church with Joseph Smith appointed as church trustee, Joseph take—ends up taking on that responsibility on himself. Again, you asked how much is Bishop Whitney involved in paying tithing. Until 1845, or 1844 and 1845, he’s not involved in the—in collecting church tithing.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Until he becomes trustee in place of Joseph.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so I’m hearing you answer this question from Chris when he said, when exactly did this original interpretation change to being a percentage of income as we practice it today? So the answer, so far, I’m hearing is, so it’s going to go from interest in 1838 to increase in Nauvoo, and that’s also paid in time if you don’t have money. When does it become income, as it’s often defined today? Have we already covered that piece? Did I miss that? Or is that not until Salt Lake?

Jeffrey Mahas:
No, that’s not until Salt Lake and probably not until later. I will say Elizabeth and I have done a lot of work on trying to figure out the history of tithing in Nauvoo, and I think a lot more needs to be done to understand the history and development of tithing from—

Elizabeth Kuehn:
In Utah.

Jeffrey Mahas:
—in Utah, from 1847 until the 20th century. My guess is, I think it’s not until Lorenzo Snow starts to re-emphasize tithing much later that the full shift to income really comes into fruition.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And you’re going to see a lot of tithing in kind, right, where you’re paying it in livestock or crops or, you know, other things that you can make. And that’s true, I think, well into, like, the 1930s, you know, even maybe 1950s in certain areas, right? If farming is the main industry in that community, they’re going to be paying their tithing in what they have.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I’ve got a family history account of my great-grandmother paying tithing in chickens.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Super cool. Super interesting.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
That’s awesome.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. That Lorenzo Snow period, is that when that first tithing drops off, the verses one through three where they’re not doing all the surplus property at that point, and then it just kind of goes to a pure sort of income-based type tithing?

Jeffrey Mahas:
So we should say we have records in church newspapers of church leaders saying you should pay this initial tithing, ten percent of all you have, when you join the church, when you come to Nauvoo or when the Nauvoo temple was commenced. What we don’t have is a record of anyone doing it.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
That’s not true.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Well, not entirely. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Oh. I’m so glad we’ve got both of you here.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So we do have some really fun records in The Book of the Law of the Lord where British immigrants will say, here’s my ten percent, and it will be recorded as, like, their ten percent net worth that they’re giving.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
But you’re right after that point, right?

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
We don’t have, necessarily, record of that in Utah.

Jeffrey Mahas:
And as you have apostles and other church leaders going out and collecting tithing, the reality is church members abroad are—no one’s sitting down with a calculator and figuring things out. I think they’re figuring out, what can I give right now? Either a dollar amount or what surplus goods do I have? So we have accounts of church members, whether missionaries or just on business in the East, will stop by a branch, and the branch will get really excited and say, oh, it’s someone from Nauvoo. Quick, everyone gather whatever you have to send as a tithing to Nauvoo, and so, you know, they’ll send handkerchiefs, socks.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Jewelry.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Jewelry, dried apples—whatever they can hand off quickly to send as their tithing. No one’s sitting down with an abacus and figuring out exactly how much they should be giving.

Scott Woodward:
Is an abacus a primitive Excel spreadsheet?

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, pretty much.

Scott Woodward:
Perfect. Wow, that’s actually kind of touching. I actually love the visual of people gathering things to give to those who are going to go back to Nauvoo. That’s actually touching.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ve read somewhere that—I think it might be in the article on consecration and stewardship on the church website—that sometimes people would donate tithing, and then it would be given straight back to them because they were so poor. It was like the act of paying tithing was just seen as an act of devotion.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right. And that’s especially true for, like, widows or women whose husbands are on missions and, you know, are facing, like, you know, trying financial circumstances. And sometimes it’ll be kind of almost like a token tithe, right? Where it’s like, well, here’s my wedding ring. Or, you know, here’s the rifle that we use to hunt food. Or there’s one instance of a poor temple worker who donates his tools to work on the temple, and those are given back to him so he can work on the temple.

Scott Woodward:
That’s cool. I love that. So that actually leads into a question by Brett. Brett asked, “Was there ever a revelation or a statement by a prophet that officially discontinues the giving of surplus property,” that first tithe, until it just becomes the one tenth of their income annually? Is there a continuing revelation moment that we could point to to say, yeah, here’s where it shifts away from 119, or is it more just kind of watching the practice of the church change that we sort of infer a revelation, I guess?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah. We don’t have a revelation or statement from Joseph, but I think you’re right that it’s more the practice changing and also, in certain kind of ways, the needs of the church. They’re trying to figure out a way to build the Nauvoo temple without going into debt. They learned that lesson in Kirtland. They learned the cost of that lesson. And so they’re trying to do something different. The Lord specifically tells them, do not go into debt to build this temple. And so they’ve got to figure out an alternative. And that’s part of what you see get kind of codified in Nauvoo: the sense of labor tithing that Jeffrey’s talked about, and then the sense of property tithing, which is this net worth, kind of annual tithe.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So fascinating.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay. So our questions that we received kind of broke down into two categories. One had to do with the financial practice of tithing and consecration, but a whole other set of questions had to do with compensation for church leaders. For instance, Connor from Orlando, Florida said, “Joseph Smith received all of his income from church finances, yet he lived in a relatively fancy home, even called the mansion house.” This is in when he’s in Nauvoo. “Brigham Young was also known to be quite wealthy compared to the early saints, so did church leaders have a higher standard of living than other church members or ever take advantage of church finances for personal gain?”

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And I would say that we need to take a few steps back with this question because I think there’s a lot of assumptions at play here. So Connor’s assuming that Joseph Smith received all of his income from the church, which was not the case. He further assumes that Joseph Smith’s home was fancy, which I think leads him to the further assumption that church leaders might have had a higher standard of living or might have taken advantage of church finances in some way. So just a reminder that Joseph Smith and Emma Smith frequently did not have a home of their own. They often lived in other people’s homes, often with little space of their own. When they did have their own home, they were sharing it with family or others who needed a place to stay, and it was rarely what would have been considered fancy in the 19th century. Now, since he mentions the mansion house, which is an anachronistic term for the Nauvoo Mansion, let’s jump to Nauvoo. So Joseph and Emma’s first home in Nauvoo is called the Homestead, and it’s a modest log home. It’s definitely nicer than some, but not really fancy. And then after this, in 1843, Joseph Smith will build the Nauvoo mansion, and this is primarily a hotel, and so we need to understand it in that context. And this is really kind of a stopgap measure for the Nauvoo House, which is a hotel or boarding house that the saints were commanded in D&C 124 to build at the same time as the Nauvoo temple. So the Lord’s commanding them to build two things: a temple and this Nauvoo house, which was never completed. Well, the temple was. So the Nauvoo Mansion isn’t simply Joseph’s home, but a hotel, and he has a few rooms in that hotel.

Jeffrey Mahas:
In fact, he runs the hotel himself for just a few months, and after a few months he decides this is way too much work, and he leases out the hotel to Ebenezer Robinson. So even after a few months Joseph and his family are only living in three or four rooms in this massive hotel. So, yes, it’s called the Nauvoo Mansion at the time, but Joseph is only living in a fraction of that space while the rest of it is being shared with guests, boarders, and others, and for a good portion of the time that Joseph lives there he’s not even running the hotel or gathering the profits of people staying there. He’s leased that out to someone else.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So the full, like, twenty-two-room hotel isn’t his home.

Casey Griffiths:
And my understanding is he only lived in the mansion house for, say, the last eight months of his life or so, is that correct?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
It’s a pretty short window.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, it’s a short window.

Casey Griffiths:
This is where it’s kind of helpful to visit Nauvoo because you get to see the mansion house, which is still there. It’s smaller because they’ve taken down a couple wings, but you can also see the homestead, which he lived in almost the entire time. And it’s considerably more humble. Like, we’re talking, like, a log-cabin-type structure.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right.

Casey Griffiths:
I don’t think it’s fair to say he lived in the mansion house or that he was living in this mansion while everybody else is in some kind of hovel. It doesn’t seem like that’s what really happened.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right. And I also wanted to address Connor’s kind of implicit question about where Joseph is receiving his income, where he’s getting his money. So Joseph has several businesses in Nauvoo that he’s running, including a dry goods store, the hotel for a short time, a printing office. You know, he’s doing lots of things outside of this, and that’s to support his family. So it’s not like he’s, you know, living off of the church. As church trustee he spent much of his time managing the church’s finances and does receive a small wage for that work. That’s true for the clerks. That’s true for everyone working on the temple. They receive a small daily wage.

Jeffrey Mahas:
That daily wage starts as one dollar a day. It’s later increased to two dollars a day, but it’s not a lot of money.

Scott Woodward:
So he’s not really living a higher standard of living than other church members at the time, as Connor is asking, yeah.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right, just to kind of put it into perspective, you also have the fact that he’s taking on a lot of debt. A lot of those Kirtland Temple debts have followed him to Nauvoo. It’s ultimately why he tries to file for bankruptcy. Debt is a constant in his life. So I think we have to keep that in mind. And then, to pivot to the Brigham Young half of the question, for Brigham Young, his finances vary considerably. His family was deeply impoverished while he was a missionary in England. We have Vilate Kimball describing the Youngs’ home as, you know, a three-sided shack that’s letting the rain in. That’s not grand by any imagination. Over time in Nauvoo, he’s able to build a comfortable brick home. I wouldn’t call it fancy or ornate. It’s serviceable. It’s good.

Casey Griffiths:
Still there. Yeah. You can go look at it.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
It’s still there. Yeah. Right. You can visit it in Nauvoo. And then in Utah, Brigham and the church essentially found the industry of Utah, right? They’re filling the roles that the government or corporations would usually fill. And so, yes, Brigham does profit from this, but I think there’s kind of larger questions about intention here. And this goes back, I think, to a lot of my experience with, like, the Kirtland bank and the Kirtland research. You know, what’s the larger intention? Is the intention to help the Saints and build Zion? Or is the intention to have a really fancy house and live better than everybody else? And I would say that their intention is to help the Saints and to build Zion.

Jeffrey Mahas:
And I would add, this is kind of an aside, but, you know, we do have what you might call labor disputes or class disputes that are happening in Nauvoo as—because there’s a lot of really impoverished saints, and they’re really struggling. There are moments when some, like the stonecutters in Nauvoo, allege that church leaders are taking advantage of them or are taking more than they should out of tithing revenue, but those allegations are never levied against Joseph or Brigham Young. Those are against others much lower down on the church hierarchy list. And in fact, those allegations are even discussed. They’re deliberated and laid bare in the April 1843 General Conference. The main business of that conference was to answer these allegations that accused largely Elias Higbee and Reynolds Cahoon, of the Nauvoo Temple committee, of profiting more than they should from the church, and at that meeting all of the accounts are opened up, they’re discussed, and ultimately Cahoon and Higbee apologize for their conduct and pledge to do better. So even when there’s disputes in the church, even when there are people who are suffering, we don’t really see many people pointing a finger, accusing Joseph of profiting off of the church, although we do see them accusing others.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
That being said, it is a favorite criticism of the anti-Mormons, this idea that when you join a church and you give your tithing or your money to it, that Joseph will then profit off of that, right? John C. Bennett throws that allegation around. Several others do as well, so, like, the records do not show that, and we don’t see members, you know, in the trenches saying that, but it’s an accusation that’s kind of levied against them from outside, and I think it’s kind of crept into our understanding of it.

Casey Griffiths:
That leads us to maybe a related question, which is just the idea that—I think there’s a general misunderstanding in the church that church leaders aren’t compensated, and, of course, most church leaders aren’t. Lay leaders, your local bishop or your stake president, don’t receive compensation, but we had someone, this is Aaron from Boise, he said, “Most of us are not trained clergy, but we serve in the church willingly and without pay as part of the law of consecration, but isn’t it true the church funds cover living expenses for some, or maybe all, full-time leaders? Certainly mission leaders, but also general authorities. How does that work today and historically, and how does that square with consecration and unpaid clergy?” We’re just asking you to square historically, but the idea that church leaders are compensated, does that contradict consecration? Does that cause any heartburn or anything like that?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So I would say this is not our area of expertise, right? We’re 19th-century historians. But the church has noted that general authorities who are required to leave their careers when they’re called to full-time church service are provided with a living allowance, and that this living allowance is uniform for all general authorities, and that the funds don’t come from tithing, but rather from the church’s financial investments. So that’s kind of the modern situation. I would say I don’t know the numbers, but from my limited understanding, I think it’s a modest amount, and that it makes it possible for a broader number of individuals to serve as general authorities, and not only those who are financially independent or well off and could do it off of their own savings. Historically, only a few church leaders were really provided with many funds. The Twelve Apostles and other missionaries in the early church served their missions relying on the generosity and donations of members, even strangers, and as we’ve talked about, in Nauvoo, as trustee, Joseph Smith earned that small daily wage, as did his clerks and other temple workers, but it’s not like the church is paying, you know, significant amounts out to church leaders. Joseph and Sidney, several times in the early church, kind of petition the high council and say, hey, can you help us? Funds are really tight. We’re working a lot for the church. We’re not able to farm. We’re not able to do other things.

Scott Woodward:
One of our listeners, Gabe from Provo, actually asked about that very thing, about Joseph and Sidney asking the high council in Far West for compensation for their services in the church. And his question was, “Was the high council, not Joseph, in control of the finances of the church?” Did Joseph have to approach the high council to release funds? Like, how did that work?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
In Kirtland and Missouri, he did. So in Kirtland and Missouri, you get this situation where the bishopric, the First Presidency, and the high council are counseling together about church finances, and largely, it’s a lack of funds. And so they’re heavily depending on the generosity of donations, those from, like, John Tanner and Vienna Jaques, right, that are giving really generously to church leaders so that the temple or land can be paid for, and it shifts in Nauvoo, as we’ve talked about, when Joseph becomes trustee. That’s when he becomes essentially the financial head of the church and really takes that responsibility on himself, and so at that point, he might be counseling, but he’s in ultimate control.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Again, I would just add, what we see Joseph and Sidney doing there is exactly what Joseph was instructed to do in Doctrine and Covenants section 20, which is talking about the disposition of tithing, where it says there, it says the First Presidency, the Bishopric, and the high council will meet together to discuss how the Church’s tithing will be used.

Scott Woodward:
No, this is section 120?

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, section 120. At that time, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles’ authority was generally seen as only existing outside of established stakes, so what we see happening is Joseph is meeting with the established stake high council, with the bishopric, and he and Sidney are requesting compensation in that instance. And the one thing I would add is, like Elizabeth said, there’s often allegations that Joseph is profiting off of the saints. One way we—that this allegation is levied is that as trustee, Joseph is in charge of all of the church land, the land that the church has purchased that they’re then selling to people who are coming to Nauvoo, and so the allegation is that Joseph is getting wealthy off of all of these land purchases, and one of the things that Elizabeth and my research has shown is that initially, in the initial period of settling Nauvoo from 1839 to 1841, over forty percent of all properties that were, I’m using air quotes here, “sold” by the church were actually given away without any promise of repayment. And even the lands that were formally sold, they’re being sold on credit. They’re being given to church members in the promise that someday they’ll pay them back. And nine times out of ten, those payments probably never materialized. And we have Joseph’s agents, his financial agents, making a re—a financial report, kind of panicking, like, oh no, we have to pay the debts that we accrued in buying this land, and we’re not getting any money from selling these lands, and what money they do get, when you look at the financial records of the trustee office and the land books that we have, you can see whatever money they’re getting is just being turned around to pay off other debts or to try and settle other church obligations. It’s not like Joseph is sitting on a pile of gold or cash. The money is constantly being used to try and pay down church debts or other obligations the church has.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay, this comes from Joshua in Clinton, Utah. But also Candy, and I don’t know exactly where Candy’s from, but Joshua said, “Some of my non-Latter-day Saint Christian friends say it’s wrong for a church leader to accept any money for their service. How should I respond to them?” And Candy said, “Is it priestcraft to use The Church of Jesus Christ or your association with it to make money?” So, again, just more principle questions than historical questions, but based on your reading of the history, what do you think about those two?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So I think historically it’s important to keep in mind that it’s fairly standard practice among Christian sects for the minister to be paid. That was true in the 19th century, and it largely continues to today. I think it’s rare to find a Christian sect that doesn’t pay their church leaders when it’s a minister or a pastor over a local congregation. Additionally, a lot of the work that we consider to be kind of the general callings of the, church doing programs for children or administrative kind of work, if you were in a local parish church or, you know, other kind of local churches, you would usually be paid for that kind of work. And that’s not true in our church. That’s just asked to give voluntarily, without pay, as service and consecration. So I would say that there’s definitely a historical precedent for payment of church leaders, and, in large part, most Latter-day Saint church leaders are not being paid.

Scott Woodward:
Could we draw the line in our church at full-time versus part-time? Is that basically where the line is drawn in terms of who gets paid and who doesn’t? Like, if you ask somebody to leave their employment to go on a mission for three years, the church is going to provide a stipend, but if you’re asked to help with the teacher’s quorum or help with the activities, you know, of your ward, like, that’s going to be a different scenario. So it’s basically full-time versus part-time. Is that a fair division?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
I think so.

Jeffrey Mahas:
I think so today. There’s some areas that I’m not as much of an expert in, but I do know that some positions, like at times in the 19th century when—if you were called to be bishop, that was a lifetime calling. That was something that you would have for a long time. You would receive some kind of stipend or some kind of compensation because that essentially became a new job, a new role for you, but yeah, in the current church, yeah, I think—I think that’s a good summation, the difference between full-time and part-time.

Scott Woodward:
You mentioned the bishops. I’m thinking of the very first one with Bishop Partridge all the way back to D&C 41, where the Lord says in verse 9, “I have called my servant Edward Partridge, and I give a commandment that he should be appointed by the voice of the church and ordained a bishop unto the church,” and then he says this, “to leave his merchandise and to spend all his time in the labors of the church.” And then the very next section, section 42, allows for him to draw from the bishop’s storehouse to take care of his family, right? So I think there you see in 1831 early on that pattern of if it’s full-time, yes, you can draw upon the resources of the church. Otherwise, yeah, not so much.

Casey Griffiths:
And we should clarify here, too, we’re talking about ecclesiastical authority within the church. Church has employees. Elizabeth, you and Jeff both work for the church history department. That’s your career, right?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yep.

Casey Griffiths:
Scott and I both teach at church schools, that’s our career, but we don’t have any ecclesiastical authority in the church because of our career. It comes and goes based on revelation to the leaders of the church, and it’s separate from our careers. What about the question of priestcraft? Is it wrong to use your association with the church to make money? Any feelings on that?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So I think one of the kind of first things that came to mind with this question was a need to define priestcraft. And so I turned to the Book of Mormon, right? And in 2 Nephi 26:29 it defines it as priestcrafts are the men that “preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world that they may get gain and praise of the world, but they seek not the welfare of Zion.” And so ultimately, when I thought about this question, I think it becomes a question of intention. What is the purpose that someone has behind what they’re doing? Is the intention to help people better understand church teachings or scriptures or church history? Is it made with the intention to help members to build Zion, or is it to get worldly praise and wealth and, you know, some of these contradictory things? And so I think that is a clear demarcation, and I would say that the way that this question was phrased in kind of the long form, where it suggested that, you know, authors and podcasters and those trying to, you know, do anything with church materials, might be guilty of priestcraft. I think that’s too expansive of a definition, but then you bring this intention, and, sure, I think maybe you’ll find individuals that are kind of setting themselves up for that worldly praise or gain, or maybe, I think, maybe more importantly, are saying that they’re the only source of understanding or interpretation, and even might be contradicting the church, and I think that’s maybe more to be wary of than just benefiting financially.

Scott Woodward:
So the test of priestcraft is not simply, are they getting paid?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
The real question is, are they setting themselves up as a light to get gain and praise? Are they seeking their own welfare rather than the welfare of Zion? That’s the Book of Mormon test.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And I want to point out that in our podcast, Scott is always the one who says, like and subscribe at the end. So he’s more guilty of priestcraft than me. I’m just . . .

Scott Woodward:
Whatever. But, hey, this is actually a good time to remind everyone to like and subscribe to this podcast. Let’s ask one more question here.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
This one’s from Chris. I’m not sure where Chris is from, but Chris said, “As I understand, there was some substantial disagreement about financial assets after Joseph’s martyrdom between Brigham Young and Emma Smith. Could you please detail what these were and what the consequences were for Emma, Brigham, and the church, and then any lessons from that history that could inform our experience today?” Chris asks.

Jeffrey Mahas:
All right, buckle up.

Scott Woodward:
Uh-oh.

Jeffrey Mahas:
I’ve just finished working on an article on this that’s slated to be published in a couple years, probably. I think there’s a common conception, there’s a common understanding that there is a big fight between Emma and Brigham Young over church finances and other issues after Joseph Smith’s death. What I have found is that that disagreement, that conflict, is almost entirely misunderstood by people today.

Scott Woodward:
Ah, shoot.

Jeffrey Mahas:
So I would argue you do have a big break between Brigham Young and Emma Smith, but finances doesn’t lead to that break. That break is over broader things like plural marriage and other aspects of Joseph’s legacy and teaching, so that break is there. What we really see is Emma has a breakdown in her relationship with essentially everyone else in church leadership over finances. To try and lay the groundwork for this, we’ve talked a lot about how Joseph was elected church trustee when the church was incorporated in 1841, and there’s a good-faith effort to try and distinguish Joseph’s personal assets from church assets, but there’s still a lot of overlap. There’s a lot of confusion over who exactly owns what, in some instances. So, for example, in one of Joseph’s last letters to Emma, he tells her, while I’m gone, you have my permission to sell the Quincy Farm or any other property you need to, with this implication that the Quincy Farm belonged to Emma and Joseph. But Emma and Joseph had given the Quincy Farm to the church several years earlier, so it was technically church property, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding over where exactly are the assets held. Right after Joseph is killed William Clayton, who’s Joseph’s chief financial clerk, notes that the situation with Joseph’s estate looks really gloomy because Joseph, in his life, had accumulated a lot of debts to try and take care of the needs of the church, and most of those debts were in Joseph’s personal name, but most of the property that had been purchased was in the name of the church, and so if you’re looking at a balance sheet, you’re seeing a lot of personal debt from Joseph, but not a lot of personal assets. And Clayton, William Clayton, is working very closely with Emma Smith at this time, and I’m sure she’s seeing the same thing, and so Emma is distraught over the death of her husband. She’s also concerned about the welfare of her children, and she is also, needs to be said, bitter about the direction that Brigham Young is taking the church.

Scott Woodward:
In terms of plural marriage.

Jeffrey Mahas:
With plural marriage and other things like that. In this moment Emma approaches several trusted lawyers that Joseph had worked with in his life, and these lawyers tell Emma, everything your husband Joseph did as church trustee was illegal. You need to try and take control of all of the church assets. And Emma listens to the attorneys. And so Emma makes an attempt to try and gain access to all of these church assets.

Scott Woodward:
And Brigham Young says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Initially, it’s William Clayton, it’s Newell K. Whitney, and then ultimately it’s Brigham Young who says, hold up. Ultimately, church leaders are able to pass a state law in Illinois that ex post facto retroactively legalizes everything Joseph did as church trustee—

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Griffiths:
Wow.

Jeffrey Mahas:
—to try and head off this claim that Emma makes for essentially all of the church’s assets. And that lasts for a number of years, but starting in 1847 there’s still this tension between Emma Smith and many church leaders. Starting in 1847, Emma and her new husband, Lewis Bidamon, just start selling church assets as if they belonged to Emma and Bidamon, ignoring the church. And they’ll pub—they start publicly saying, the organization of the church is illegal, we own all this property, and they begin just selling it out from under the church. You have church leaders that are left in Nauvoo that are trying to sell properties in Nauvoo to finance the saints, the poor, impoverished saints at Winter Quarters, and in the midst of that hardship, Emma comes and essentially pulls the rug out from under them. It leads to a lot of legal fighting over Joseph Smith’s estate that Emma gets drawn into, and that lasts until 1852. So you want to know, what are the long-term consequences.

Scott Woodward:
Well, can I, before you talk about that, can I just ask the particulars about the claims of illegality? Like—

Jeffrey Mahas:
Sure.

Scott Woodward:
—what did Joseph do that was illegal, and was this just, like, a technicality, or is this something nefarious he’s being accused of, or, like, what’s the nature of the illegality?

Jeffrey Mahas:
Illinois law has a very narrow definition of what a church could do. So while Joseph Smith was alive, you were allowed to own five acres of property for a meeting house or a cemetery and thirty-five acres of land for, like, an outdoor meeting ground to hold camp meetings, and that is all you’re allowed to do as a church trustee under Illinois law. The Illinois law is really set up with Protestant parish local churches in mind, and it doesn’t really translate to other religions very well. There’s a large body of scholarship talking about how the Catholic Church, which is a much more centralized, organized religion, struggles to make sense of these laws that you have in Illinois and elsewhere. There’s a lot of trying to—how do we make our church structure work under these narrowly defined laws? And so that’s the same—we come up with that same pressure, where you have laws that are designed for a local, single-congregation church, and that’s the laws that Joseph is trying to operate under in Illinois for a church that spans states and countries by the 1840s. We don’t know how familiar Joseph Smith was with these laws. President Oaks, before he was a general authority, wrote a little bit about this in some scholarly articles, and he postulated that maybe Joseph was unaware of these laws, or unaware of some of the restrictions on these laws. We just don’t know to what extent Joseph was aware, but that’s where the attorneys come to Emma and say, Joseph has more than forty acres of property, and it’s not for these narrow purposes, and so you should be able to claim all of this land.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And so the thousands of acres that Joseph is holding as trustee-in-trust essentially invalidates that small clause, right, of the forty acres.

Scott Woodward:
So now it seems like it’s personal, private property of the Smith family.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
But church leaders are saying, hold on now. Hold on now. Yeah. Okay.

Jeffrey Mahas:
And so, again, they’re able to pass a law in 1845 that says that all of Joseph’s actions as church trustee were legal, but it left unclear what’s the legal status of the church moving forward after Joseph’s death? And that’s what Emma takes advantage of to say, I’m going to claim this property. And so, you know, the question of what’s the consequences, the ultimate consequences of this conflict are the Saints at Winter Quarters are deprived of the proceeds of sales from Nauvoo. Emma Smith wins a temporary victory by selling this land, but by claiming this land, it draws the attention of Joseph Smith’s creditors, who had largely left the situation alone. The largest of these was the United States government, and the United States government swoops in in 1850 and says, Joseph owed us a lot of money for buying a steamboat back in 1840, and we want that money back. And they take Emma and several dozen others to court and end up claiming all of this land that Emma had tried to sell. So ultimately the church doesn’t get the land, Emma doesn’t get the land, and Uncle Sam gets the land. That’s the ultimate resolution of this conflict.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
But it also creates a profound divide between Emma and, you know, Brigham Young and the Saints that followed, right? Both feel ill-used by the other, and that’s a tension that exists, I would say, throughout Emma’s lifetime, throughout Brigham’s lifetime, that they have this kind of grudge against each other because of this conflict.

Jeffrey Mahas:
You see that in the writings and sermons of both church leaders and leaders of the reorganized church, the Community of Christ, Joseph’s children, where they’re bearing a grudge against the Utah church, saying, you impoverished us, and the Utah church is turning around and saying, no, actually, you impoverished us, and it’s kind of—that fight gets perpetuated down the generations that way.

Scott Woodward:
And how would you characterize Emma’s motives in what she did? Because in some ways, you know, you can kind of see the Saints in Winter Quarters feeling like, she’s a jerk. Like, why is she doing this? Would you characterize her motives as, in any way, nefarious? Is she trying to create pain? Where’s Emma coming from in all this?

Elizabeth Kuehn:
I don’t think it’s nefarious. And this is something that Jeffrey and I disagree on slightly. So let’s be opaque about that. I think that Emma is coming from a place of concern about financial security, about providing for her family. She’s lost her husband, tragically, right? And now it’s on her to provide for her children, to take care of them, right? And their future.

Scott Woodward:
Is she married to Lewis Bidamon at this time or not yet?

Jeffrey Mahas:
They marry in 1847, in December of 1847.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
So there’s a number of years where that responsibility is solely on her shoulders, and so I’m cognizant of the grieving widow who, by the way, is also pregnant, you know, and has a lot on her plate. I think she really feels like the deck is stacked against her, and that she needs to make sure that there’s someone looking out for her, even if that’s her making sure that down the road, that there are assets, that there are ways to take care of her family.

Scott Woodward:
Jeffrey, how would you weigh in on that?

Jeffrey Mahas:
On the other side of that, I think there’s also some other things we need to take into account, and that is after Joseph’s death there starts to be some expressions of entitlement from members of the Smith family. We see this with William Smith. We see this with some other things that other members of the family say, where they come at it with this perception of, don’t you know how much we’ve given to this church? And that’s true. They had. You know, we wouldn’t have a church without the Smith family, but by that time, we also wouldn’t have a church without all of the thousands of Latter-day Saints who had consecrated and given up everything, and so I think there is, to some degree, a sense of entitlement, and also, I think there’s also a sense of bitterness on the part of Emma over the direction of the church with plural marriage and other things, and there’s a bitterness right back on the part of some church leaders, most notably Almon Babbitt, who’s one of these church leaders who’s left behind to sell church assets. We know from Smith family tradition and accounts the two did not get along and actively sought to undermine and fight with each other in what becomes a really bitter, drawn-out battle.

Scott Woodward:
So this is humans being human, in some ways, of being offended and kind of some of the things we do when those emotions are running hot.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ve got to admit, when you brought that up, my pioneer genes were activated, and I was like, why is Emma trying to take away from my ancestors trying to cross the plains? But then immediately I thought, oh, but she is worried about her family and where they’re going to get their income from. So I don’t know if there’s a bad guy here, but I can definitely see how one side could demonize the other, too.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
And ultimately everyone loses, which is really the saddest part.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Except for Uncle Sam.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s the saddest possible outcome. That’s just—nobody ended up being happy, so. Oh, that’s too bad.

Scott Woodward:
You guys are a load of fun, you know that? This has been really great to have you on and get your insights and learn from you. How wonderful.

Elizabeth Kuehn:
Pleasure to be here.

Jeffrey Mahas:
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Scott Woodward:
All right, guys. So here’s our last question for you from Sarah, from Rexburg. She asked, “What’s a major takeaway you’ve gained from researching Joseph Smith and early church financial records? How, if at all, she asked, has your in-depth research about Joseph Smith’s financial records impacted your own faith life?”

Elizabeth Kuehn:
One of the things that I have been profoundly touched by in researching and reviewing Joseph’s financial records is his generosity. He was immensely generous, and we have record of that. We have record of him grabbing money and giving it to someone in the street who needs it. We have so many examples of him helping people, and even on a larger level, he burdens himself with the debts of the church so that others aren’t hurt financially. He takes that on himself, and that, to me, is just a testament of who he was and what his priorities were. I’ve talked a lot about intentions, and that, I think, is one of the things that is really meaningful to me in that you see lots of accusations leveled against Joseph for nefarious ends, right? For self-serving ends. And the Joseph that I have come to know in these sources is not self-serving. He is all about the saints. He is all about giving all that he can for the saints. And he was both a man of God and a man, and he had his flaws. He had his weaknesses. But for me, that almost makes him more relatable and, I think, gives me a modicum of hope that if he’s flawed and the Lord’s able to do wonderful things with him, then the Lord can use, you know, us, flawed as we are, to accomplish his ends.

Casey Griffiths:
Thank you so much. Jeff, did you want to add anything to that?

Jeffrey Mahas:
One of the things that’s inspiring to me is, you know—like, you talked a minute ago, Scott, about, like, so these are just, this is humans doing human things. And I think that can be true on the bad side of things, but the more that I’ve looked into talking specifically about finances today, the more I’ve looked into the records of the church, and, you know, it’s something that I like to tell people is, we have the receipts. We have, at least for Nauvoo, we have the entire financial picture of the church laid out before us, and I can’t see any nefarious thing going on in these records. There’s minor things. There’s hiccups every now and again. There’s accusations of partiality. There’s human things being traded back and forth. But in general, what you see is you see the records of a community and a church that is trying to build Zion and trying to build a temple, and they’re trying to do it the best they can with great sacrifice and great dedication. And I think, as I’ve studied the financial records of the church in Nauvoo, I think the testimony of the saints is written on every page of what they were willing to give, what they were willing to consecrate to the Lord to try and make the dream of Zion and the building of a temple happen.

Casey Griffiths:
Well.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Griffiths:
Thank you both so much. This is just—I mean, wow. You’ve both convinced me to take a closer look at the financial records, so thank you so much.

Scott Woodward:
Appreciate you both being on, and thanks for your great work and all you do to help the history of the church become more clear to us modern folks and help us to draw the kind of lessons that you’ve helped us to see today, so we really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week we wrap this series up with a Q&R with Dr. Aaron Miller. So, again, please submit your questions about modern church finances by February 29, 2024 to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. We look forward to hearing from you. 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. 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.