Scott Woodward: Most of the main branches of the Restoration were formed within roughly two decades of the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith. One clear exception, however, is the Mormon Fundamentalist movement. Here’s a little backstory: in 1890 President Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto announcing the Church’s intention to submit to those laws recently passed and declared constitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court forbidding plural marriage. Then, in 1904, as a result of the Reed Smoot hearings before the U. S. Senate and the national attention this brought to the continued practice of plural marriage in Utah, President Joseph F. Smith issued what is known as the Second Manifesto, which announced the church’s policy to excommunicate anyone who continued to enter into new polygamous marriages. Yet some church members felt that the manifestos of Presidents Woodruff and Smith were not inspired, and within a few decades, those who dissented against these manifestos or were excommunicated from the LDS Church for entering into additional plural marriages, began to gather on the Utah Arizona border at a place known as Short Creek. They believed in a 1912 statement by Lorin C. Woolley, who had been a courier of President John Taylor, about an unpublished 1886 revelation of President Taylor wherein the Lord declared that the New and Everlasting Covenant had not been revoked, nor would it ever be. This language was interpreted by those in this group to mean that plural marriage would never be withdrawn. They concluded, therefore, that President Taylor’s unpublished revelation, and their interpretation of it, overruled and superseded the First Manifesto of President Woodruff in 1890, and the Second Manifesto of President Smith in 1904. For them, they were staying true to this core, fundamental element of Mormonism, while the LDS Church was not. In time, these Mormon fundamentalists fragmented into various additional groups, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS Church, the Apostolic United Brethren, or AUB, the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days, among others. So in this episode of Church History Matters, Casey and I sit down with Dr. Brian Hales, an expert researcher and author of several books on the Mormon fundamentalist movement, to discuss with him this fascinating branch of the Restoration. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our thirteenth episode in this series dealing with succession in the presidency. Now let’s get into it. Hello, Casey.

Casey Griffiths: Hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward: How are you, man?

Casey Griffiths: I’m great. So good. So good.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, well, we are very excited for today’s episode. We are in this fun part of this series on succession in the presidency, where we are exploring the other branches of the Restoration that are not the LDS Church, that did not come across the plains with the Twelve, with Brigham Young at the head, except that today is kind of the exception to that, right? We’re talking about a branch of the church that branches later after we come to the West, after we come to Utah, after this group that’s followed the Twelve halfway across the United States, and then there’s a later fracture, and so we’re excited to talk about that. We have a special guest with us: Brian Hales. You want to say hi, Brian?

Brian Hales: Hello. Thank you for having me, Casey and Scott.

Casey Griffiths: It’s great to have you with us, and like Scott mentioned, the two major schism points in Latter-day Saint history are 1844, when there were questions over succession—most people followed Brigham Young, but there’s a number of other movements—and then 1890, when plural marriage ended, when the Manifesto was given. It’s a complicated story. This is where a lot of schismatic groups come from. We were talking about before we started here that we were going to do this ourselves, but Brian has written a great book—it’s from Greg Kofford press. It’s called Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto—that walks through this, and it is quite a complicated web. We figured since we know Brian, and he’s already been on our podcast and done an excellent job, we’d just bring him in and have him be our expert today, and we’ll ask the questions.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: So this is a little bit different from other interviews we’ve done where we’ve had listener questions. This is Brian—he’s going to be walking us through this, and we’ll kind of ask the questions as we go.

Scott Woodward: We’ll be the students today, so that’ll be fun. Let me give a quick bio on Brian for those of you who do not know Brian: Brian Hales is a retired anesthesiologist, and he’s the author or co-author of several books on Mormon fundamentalism polygamy and on Joseph Smith’s polygamy. We had Brian on the show to talk about Joseph Smith’s polygamy back in our polygamy series, and now we have him back to talk about Mormon fundamentalism polygamy. He’s written at least two books. Is it more than two, Brian, on Mormon fundamentalism?

Brian Hales: There was one I wrote—my first book was written in 1991. It was called The Priesthood of Modern Polygamy: An LDS Perspective, so—

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: Yeah, it goes way back.

Scott Woodward: There you go. Okay, so you’ve been studying this for quite some time, and now you are currently researching the origin of the Book of Mormon.

Brian Hales: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Correct?

Brian Hales: It’s better than studying polygamy, to be honest with you.

Casey Griffiths: Well, that’s maybe where we want to start, Brian. How did a nice, young, Latter-day Saint lad like you get interested in researching the polygamist breakoffs of the church? Tell us your origin story here.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: Well, I had a member of my family who joined the Allred polygamy group, and we’ll talk about them. They’re called the AUB, and through this, they sent me the standard documents and narratives that they were embracing, and they wanted me to investigate it, which I did, and I will admit I even prayed the prayer, if this is true, let me know, Lord, and I—but I’ll be honest with you: I was never impressed with the very topic that we’re going to discuss today, and that’s the authority claims. And so I was never drawn to it at all, but I was fascinated by it, and I realized very quickly that no one had written a history of this movement either from inside or outside. Then excitement kind of got me going so that I wrote that book in 2006, which kind of tried to outline at least all the nuances that then could be identified.

Casey Griffiths: And what a huge task, because we were mentioning before we started recording that there’s not a lot of scholars from within these movements, there’s not a lot of historians, who would be open about sharing, and so it kind of took an outsider to come in and say, let’s put this all together into one big picture.

Brian Hales: Well, that was my conclusion. I had some help from Max Anderson who had written Polygamy Story, but that was not a history. That was mostly “We’re right; you’re wrong” kind of a book written to the fundamentalists. So I was grateful to Greg Kofford, who took on that book, and it’s done well. It actually received the John Whitmer Best Book Award in 2007, so . . .

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Tremendous piece of scholarship, and seems like everything that you touch seems to be pretty great scholarship, Brian. So we want to encourage you to continue all your good work. I mean, with the Book of Mormon, we can’t wait to see what comes of that. You do have a book coming out, don’t you, about the Book of Mormon and its translation?

Brian Hales: Yeah, it’s—it’ll increase the dialogue over what skills did Joseph have in 1829, and how was he able to produce the word stream, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger the—but hopefully within the next year or so.

Scott Woodward: That’s great. Well, we’ll look forward to that. Okay, so today, then, we want to hear the story. Where do you want to begin? Where does the story of the Fundamentalist break-offs of the church begin, Brian?

Brian Hales: First off, let me just say thank you for letting me come on, and over the years, I haven’t actually been asked to discuss this, and I’m going to try to be succinct for the audience and not get into too many details, but hopefully at the end they’ll be able to understand where the average fundamentalist comes in contrast to the mainstream members, the Latter-day Saints. So as we look at all of the fundamentalists, there are—about half of these individuals are called independents, and I just want to define those right off the bat. These are individuals who really are not worried about Joseph Smith’s declaration in section 132 in verses 7, 18, and 19. It talks about one man who holds the keys of sealing, the authority to seal a marriage that’s eternal. It doesn’t have to be a polygamous marriage, but it is an eternal marriage.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: And these independents have found a way around not worrying about the one man or obtaining the authorization of that one man, and so they just kind of do their own thing, and they kind of define the parameters, and that’s probably half the polygamists who tie themselves back to the Latter-day Saint tradition. The other half, the vast majority of them, trace the break-off from the Church to an 1886 meeting.

Casey Griffiths: Okay.

Brian Hales: This is a—it occurred September 27, according to the narrative. Now, let me just preface this by saying I don’t think this happened.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: Okay. I’m going to describe it according to the accepted narrative of these fundamentalists and specifically the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, and the Apostolic United Brethren, who are the Allred Group, and I don’t want to show them any disrespect as I do this, but I’m just telling you I don’t think this meeting ever occurred, but this is the key meeting where we find authority ostensibly leaving the church and then overseeing the fundamentalist polygamists’ activities.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: In this meeting, September 27, it’s an eight-hour meeting, and the evening before this meeting John Taylor is reported to have actually had a vision and met the Savior. Just to let you know, I think he probably did that night. There’s evidence to support that, but the next day there is supposed to be this eight-hour meeting, and I don’t think this occurred, but it—there were thirteen people in attendance. During this meeting John Taylor is floating above the floor—

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: —and declaring very loudly that he would rather have his hand cut off than sign a manifesto. During this meeting a revelation is made, is recorded, and five copies are made, and then after this eight-hour meeting with these thirteen people, there’s a second meeting with five individuals, and during this meeting a resurrected Joseph Smith appears.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Brian Hales: And he shakes their hand, and he oversees the ordination of five men with authority that is supposed to be higher than any authority in the church. At the time, Lorin Woolley is the guy who is reporting all of this in the 1920s, and he called them high priest apostles, and they were members of a quorum called the Quorum of Seven Friends, which is higher than the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and higher than the Quorum of the First Presidency in the Church. This is their description.

Scott Woodward: Oh, wow.

Brian Hales: So this is where the claim is that the keys left the Church. Now, exactly when the Church stopped—the Church President stopped being the presiding priesthood authority, and it shifted to this Quorum of Friends, and it’s kind of a hazy zone.

Scott Woodward: Sure.

Brian Hales: One of the reasons I really don’t believe this ever happened is that nobody mentioned it for 35 years.

Scott Woodward: It seems like that would be big news if President Taylor’s floating off the ground and the resurrected Joseph Smith returned.

Brian Hales: Exactly, and if you read the account, they’re not told to keep it secret. No—there’s no admonition to “Look: this needs to be hush-hush.” This would have been the greatest spiritual, you know, manifestation since the Kirtland Temple, I think we could say.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: And the saints were reeling from being on the underground. You know, law enforcement was all over them for polygamy, and hearing about this would have sustained their faith and their resolve, and it would have been a really nice, you know, discussion point to spread quietly among the Latter-day Saints. Nobody mentions it for 35 years, and then Lorin Woolley, in the 1920s when the excommunicated fundamentalists are gathering and trying to find their way into some new phase of polygamy outside of the church, Lorin Woolley is one of many speakers, and his message is that back in 1886, I got authority. Now, I mentioned there were five individuals, and the other—one of them was George Q. Cannon, who didn’t need an ordination. He was already an apostle, and he could seal marriages.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: The other four were two bodyguards, and neither of them ever sealed a marriage or presided in any meeting that anybody can identify. One of them kept a journal, and that left two additional individuals: One was John W. Woolley, who is Lorin’s father. Now, John Woolley did seal marriages, but I can’t find anywhere where he corroborated an 8-hour meeting or an ordination in 1886. He doesn’t leave a testimony to that. And all of these men are dead except for John, and John is in his 90s, he’s hard of hearing, he’s not really contributing to the dialogue: It’s just Lorin’s voice, and you could argue that the Law of Witnesses would require more than Lorin.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: There was a second person who came up and said he went to the meeting, but he specifically said, I was not there for any ordinations. So does that kind of explain—does that make sense why I worry about the validity of this story?

Casey Griffiths: Correct me if I’m wrong: Some fundamentalist groups believe that the church retained authority, but they were kind of set aside as a special group that was going to preserve the principle of plural marriage. Is that accurate?

Brian Hales: Well, let’s come back to that because it is accurate: It occurred in the 1960s with the Allred Group.

Casey Griffiths: Okay.

Brian Hales: But that’s after the split, and we kind of need to work our way up to that, so yeah. Good point, though.

Scott Woodward: So—and just to clarify, as we’re talking about all this history, this is not just about what we know as the FLDS movement. Does it start with FLDS and then branch into what you called the independent group, and then another one you said was the AUB, the Apostolic United Brethren. Is that a different group? And—like, how many groups are there total? Do they all start as the FLDS church, or how does this work?

Brian Hales: No, this is really a good question. I appreciate you clarifying. When I use the term fundamentalist, we’re not talking about any church.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: The FLDS church came into being in the 1990s.

Scott Woodward: Oh.

Brian Hales: And before that they just called themselves fundamentalists. They didn’t incorporate until then.

Scott Woodward: The 1990s?

Brian Hales: Well, it incorporated under the name FLDS.

Scott Woodward: Wow. So that’s pretty recent.

Brian Hales: Yeah. Yeah, and the—at the same time, the AUB is incorporating under that name. So you see the two names appearing, but it’s very late.

Scott Woodward: Ah. Wow.

Brian Hales: Prior to that they’re just fundamentalists that are trying to do polygamy, and they don’t really have a name per se.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Casey Griffiths: Okay.

Brian Hales: They have a united effort plan, which is an attempt to do the law of consecration, and this actually grows out of the 1920s. What we find is Lorin Woolley—he’s a storyteller, and this is another reason why I find that this story is not credible. He also claimed to be a secret service agent, and when he was excommunicated in 1924, it wasn’t for polygamy, because he wasn’t a polygamist. We have him being a polygamist only with one woman in 1932 because his original wife, his monogamous wife, wasn’t going to have anything to do with it, and so we don’t find polygamy actually being the problem. He’s excommunicated for telling stories about the leading brethren of the church and making claims that are simply not credible. He claimed to be transported by one of the three Nephites down to the Yucatan, where there was a temple, and there was a Lamanite where he gave all of his authority there, and the reason that we need to take these stories seriously is that they were recorded by one of his stalwart followers named Joseph Musser, and Musser was there in these meetings and recorded, at the time—these are contemporaneous records by a believer, and they just record Lorin Woolley’s teachings, and they really make him out to be quite a storyteller. And some of the facts can be checked, and they don’t check out. And in my mind, I think Lorin just had the right story for the right crowd at the right moment. They needed authority, he had a story for authority, and then Musser took that story and blew it up and wrote it up in a 1929 account that Lorin signed. We don’t have any writings from Lorin Woolley, just this account that Musser put together, and that is the one that has been kind of a missionary tool for the fundamentalists in general when—because you read it, and you go, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Well, fact check, okay? Study it out in your mind before you start praying about this stuff. That’s the advice that I would give.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: But in the 1930s we find most of the fundamentalists are united behind this idea that Lorin Woolley has recreated—he’s called other people, with Joseph Musser being one of them, into this Council of Seven Friends, and they are presiding over polygamists down in Short Creek, which is now Colorado City. It’s down on the border of Utah and Arizona. You could call the 1930s and ’40s kind of a golden age because there is some law enforcement pushback. The church is not happy about it, but they’re really able to accomplish mostly what they want. They don’t have a lot of resources, but they’re gathering people, and they’re practicing their polygamy. And then in the 1940s is when law enforcement starts to get involved. There’s a raid in 1945. There’s another one in 1953 down in Short Creek. And let me just mention this, Casey and Scott, I think that in the 1940s, when Heber J. Grant was president of the church, as near as I can tell, President Grant said, we are a monogamous church. We’re not going to talk about polygamy anymore. We’re not going to discuss Joseph Smith’s polygamy. We’re not going to research it. It’s not going to be in our curriculum. And for the next decades, it’s not there, and, you know, in the 2000s before the Gospel Topic Essay came out, there were members saying, “Why did I not hear about Joseph Smith being a polygamist? Why did I not learn about these things?”

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: I personally believe that it was because of a policy that Heber J. Grant made in the 1940s as he’s unhappy with all of the media attention that these polygamists are getting. He wanted the message out there that we’re a monogamous church, and so within the church, the church historians, nobody is doing polygamy research until the 2000s, when Don Bradley and I got involved with researching it—the church was very happy to have us do it, but they had done very little, and it was mostly, I think, because of this policy that just dated back decades. And so if people ask, why didn’t we learn about it? I think it’s a response to the 1940s and ’50s, because polygamists then were getting a lot of press.

Scott Woodward: Interesting. So that’s an unintended consequence of Heber J. Grant’s policy of, let’s tell our story as a monogamous church, which, today the unintended consequence is some church members are sideswiped by Joseph Smith’s polygamy or otherwise, and they sometimes feel hurt. Like, why haven’t I been taught this my whole life, right? I think that’s becoming less and less the case because we’re doing a better job of telling the story, thanks—

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: —in part to your good work, Brian, but we’re doing a lot to tell the story now, and so I think hopefully in the next generation or so, we don’t have people saying that “I feel betrayed by the church for not having heard our history,” you know, as it actually happened, so . . . But that’s interesting. I did not know about that 1940s and ’50s policy of Heber J. Grant. That does explain some things.

Casey Griffiths: It does.

Brian Hales: No, I was just going to say, it’s a deduction on my part. I just should clarify. I haven’t heard anybody actually tell me that, but it seems pretty clear that’s when it went underground inside the church as a discussion point, so . . .

Casey Griffiths: And going back to this 1887 meeting, is this considered canonized scripture by fundamentalists? Is there a place where you could read it and sort of see it for yourself?

Brian Hales: It’s a great question, and I’m glad you asked it, because the interesting thing about this account of the eight-hour meeting is that there is evidence that John Taylor did meet with the Savior the night before, and there’s other accounts that this happened on the underground months before, but it’s also there is a revelation. I do believe it’s a genuine revelation. Now, the revelation is dated September 27th, and it was found by John W. Taylor, John Taylor’s son, among his effects after John Taylor died. That’s the history we can document. But, see, this meeting says that it was received during the meeting, so I think Lorin Woolley wrapped his narrative around a true event, which is the recording of this revelation, but the interesting thing is he also says in this narrative that there were five copies made. Nobody has ever heard of those copies. They have not shown up anywhere, and there’s good evidence that Lorin Woolley himself did not have a copy in 1886 or 1890 or 1912, because he seems to have come aware of it in about 1915 when a guy named Nathaniel Baldwin, who made headphones for World War I, but he was—he’d made some money, and he was in Utah. He kind of embraces the polygamy movement, but Baldwin had a copy and presented it at these meetings of the fundamentalists, and that’s where Woolley seems to have seen it for the first time, even though his narrative says that there were five copies made in 1886, but yes, you can read it, and it has a lot of ambiguous language to it, but it doesn’t talk about authority or the one man who must authorize any eternal marriage, and so the ambiguities can be interpreted however you want, but the only person’s opinion of that revelation—and I think it’s genuine: I think it’s from John Taylor—the only person whose opinion matters is the one man who holds the keys. If he wants to read it one way, then fine, and let it guide his authorizing of eternal marriage is fine. If he doesn’t, it’s a non-issue, because he holds the keys.

Casey Griffiths: Can you give us a quick summary of what the revelation says?

Brian Hales: It talks about how the law will never be abrogated. And, of course, a polygamist view of that is the law is polygamy, but the law has never been polygamy. If it were, there’d be polygamists in the Book of Mormon. Okay, the law is the law of eternal marriage. And this is explained very plainly in verses 16 and 17 of section 132. To break the law is to die without being sealed in an eternal marriage. They live separately and singly to all eternity without exaltation in their saved condition, and that’s how you break the law. It’s not by being a monogamist, and verses 19 and 20 start that if a man marries a wife by proper authority—it mentions the authority again—and they live worthily, then they become exalted. They become Gods. So you see there is a promise of exaltation to a monogamous couple in verses 19 and 20.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: The idea that the law in this, the revelation that John Taylor wrote, is strictly plural marriage is simply just not supported.

Scott Woodward: So is the—it says the law shall not be abrogated.

Brian Hales: Abrogated, yes. And it talks about commandments that can’t be withdrawn and things like this. Again, the language, I would argue, is ambiguous. I’ve written an article on it. It was published in The Persistence of Polygamy, Volume 3, I think, but it doesn’t say or authorize the continuation of plural marriage. It just doesn’t, so.

Scott Woodward: Okay, so let me just try to summarize so far. So if this is somebody’s first introduction to this history, this can be ziggy and zaggy, and so let me just make sure I’ve got this right: so in 1886 John Taylor had a legitimate revelation about the law not being abrogated, and the context there would be the government’s pressure during this time to shut down the church, to confiscate temples, etc. Are we right on that in the timeline here? This is the Edmunds-Tucker Act era, and this would be the context that President Taylor will be speaking into, would be those that are concerned that somehow the church is going to be crushed into oblivion, and as a counterpoint, he’s saying something like, no, at least not the most crucial things. Something like that. Is that the right context here?

Brian Hales: Yes. Yeah. And we should add that John Taylor was probably asking, can we give up polygamy? And he definitely received this revelation and understood it to mean, well, not now.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: But as again, I emphasize that the only person whose opinion is going to matter is the one person holding the keys, and at that time he interpreted it—

Scott Woodward: Not now.

Brian Hales: —to say that not at this time. Now, Mike Quinn looked at this, and he said it really doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before in the other revelations, and I agree with Michael on that.

Scott Woodward: So when President Woodruff in 1890 issues the manifesto, there are those who—from this movement, this subset of Latter-day Saints—who are opposed to the Manifesto. They want to cite the 1886 revelation as preventing the validity of the Manifesto. Essentially, they’re trying to quote it to say, no, because in 1886 President Taylor had a revelation that polygamy would never end. Is that right? Am I following this story correctly?

Brian Hales: No, that’s very well summarized. In fact, I think part of the problem and the authority given to the 1886 revelation is what happened to it because John Taylor—John W. Taylor, when he—he shared it with a few people in the 1890s and the early 1900s, but when he was excommunicated, he referred to it, and yet he acknowledged that it didn’t say polygamy was going to continue. He just says, here’s a revelation. And the church’s response, though, was to try to sequester it or squelch its—the knowledge of it. They called it a scrap of paper. It said it’s not in the Church Historian’s Office. Well, it was probably somewhere outside of the office, but the Church knew about it, so they tried to make it look like this either wasn’t important or that it didn’t exist at all, and if the Church had just come out and said, “Yeah, here it is. Read it. It doesn’t mean that polygamy can’t be stopped.”

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: If they had, I think, taken that approach, I think that it wouldn’t have near the impact that it has had in the past, especially in those early decades when the fundamentalists are coming together and learning about it.

Casey Griffiths: But this is sort of the fundamentalist constitution, right? This is the starting point of their movement. Fundamentalists believe that this revelation is saying plural marriage has to endure forever. That’s how they interpret it.

Scott Woodward: That’s what’s most fundamental, right? Isn’t that where the word fundamentalism is hearkening to this concept, right? That this is so fundamental, it’s never going away. That’s why we refer to them as fundamentalists. Is that correct?

Brian Hales: Well, that’s an interesting question because the word fundamentalist was first applied to Protestants in the 1920s, and the first time I could find it applied to the polygamists was 1935 by Joseph Musser. He had a magazine called Truth, went on for 21 years. He was a very charismatic and good writer. Personally, he—I think he personally carried the movement even though he wasn’t the leader for a couple of decades there, but he used that term to refer to himself, but history has shown that fundamentalists—and you probably already know this, maybe more than I—that the fundamentalist movements usually embrace with gusto two or three older principles, but they have to add a lot of modern principles to shore it up and make it work for a new generation. And so even though they call themselves fundamentalists, you can see where they’re really not fundamental in all things, and they have brought in a lot of new ideas to try to keep the movement going.

Scott Woodward: Okay. So before 1930s, what did they call themselves if not fundamentalists?

Brian Hales: You know, I don’t know that they had a name for themselves. They really didn’t gather together except around the—this council of seven friends. They called it the priesthood set up or the priesthood, and they sometimes would just call them—it’s “the work” or we are “the priesthood.” These are kind of terms that they would use then. “Oh. Oh, he’s joining the work,” or, you know, “You obey the priesthood” would meaning the fundamentalist leaders.

Scott Woodward: Okay. So when does it initially start to coalesce? You said it’s—is it down in Short Creek, down by Arizona? Is that the first beginnings of a coalescence of those that would be seen as outside of the LDS church, or did they see themselves still as members of the church when they started gathering down there? Walk us through that part of the story. Where does this start to become a separation, a clean separation between LDS and this other group that’s continuing to persist in their polygamy when President Woodruff has called a stop to it?

Brian Hales: This coalescence doesn’t really occur until the 1920s, and then, as I said, the golden age is the 1930s and the early 1940s.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: At the time a guy named John Y. Barlow is the leader, and Barlow’s not very charismatic, and—but his number two man is Joseph Musser, and Musser is highly charismatic, and he’s a writer, and he’s a publisher. He’s got booklets. He’s got the magazine Truth that’s out there, so they all kind of rally around those publications and around this movement, and Heber J. Grant is not real happy with any of it. He’s trying to squelch it, to move it out of the mainstream media when it arrives there And then, in the 1940s, there’s some raids. As I mentioned, in 1953, there’s a raid in Short Creek, but what we find is two large groups. There’s a large group in Utah, up in Salt Lake, and then there’s a large group down at Short Creek, and this becomes more significant because Barlow dies in 1952. That leaves Joseph Musser as the uncontested leader of everybody north and south, but one of the problems with the Council of Seven Friends is that even though Lorin Woolley introduced it when he was teaching in the 1930 and 1931 era, and Joseph Musser is writing down all of his notes, there’s really nothing in there that tells you how does the next senior member of this Council of Friends, how does that person arrive there? Is it by designation, or is it by seniority in the quorum? As we have in the Quorum of the Twelve today, you rise to become the presiding apostle through your seniority. Up until Musser, the next person in seniority was also the designated person. Musser tried to break that tradition, and he tried to designate Rulon Allred as his next, his “first elder,” I think they called it, and that meant that he was going to succeed Musser when Musser died, and this bypassed the seniority of all of the council members. And there were more than seven now. I think there were twelve or thirteen. They just kept calling people to this council. And so the people in the council, when Musser died—and actually the split occurred before that—they rejected Allred, and they went down to Short Creek, and they became what would eventually be the FLDS Church, and then those who stayed north in Utah and followed Rulon Allred are the ones that became the AUB, or the Apostolic United Brethren. And it’s interesting to watch the trajectory of these two groups because in the Allred Group up north, they added more people to the council until there were twelve or thirteen, just in their own council, but they followed a seniority pattern to the person who became the senior member. But in the 1960s people were asking Rulon Allred, well, now wait: if we preside over the church, then why don’t we preside over the church? I mean, if we have the authority and we’re senior to them, why aren’t we trying to tell them what to do? And why don’t we? Why don’t they acknowledge this?

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: Rulon Allred changed, I would say, Lorin Woolley’s teachings in that he said, no, no, no, we don’t preside over the church. The church is still the true church. They’re doing all the heavy lifting of missionary work and temple building. Our job is just to be polygamists. We are the polygamist branch, and, Casey, you alluded to this earlier, but Rulon taught, no, we are just the polygamist branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our job is to see that no year passes without a child being born in polygamy. That’s our job. That’s all that’s expected. Now, that isn’t what Lorin taught. It’s pretty plain if people will go back and look. But it also became kind of convenient, because then they don’t have to worry about being missionaries and worrying about, you know, taking the gospel and temples to all of the world. But if you follow the FLDS line, which is down at Shore Creek, which became Colorado City, what happened was they rallied behind a guy named Leroy Johnson, and when he died, Rulon Jeffs, this is Warren’s father, Rulon Jeffs becomes the senior member of the council. He dismisses a couple of junior members that he disagreed with. The others all die off. Well, Rulon Jeffs doesn’t call any new members of the council.

Scott Woodward: Oh, wow.

Brian Hales: So it’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening down in—with the Allred Group. They’re expanding the council and following seniority. Well, Rulon Jeffs is consolidating his power into one. So when he dies, ostensibly Warren was designated to be his successor, and there is—it’s one-man rule. It’s one-man rule, and he may have had a counselor here and there, but it’s the single man that’s ruling in the FLDS whereby you have a whole council up north with the Allreds. Does that make sense?

Scott Woodward: I think so.

Casey Griffiths: Like I said, it’s pretty complicated, but . . .

Scott Woodward: So why Short Creek? Tell me if this is true: I’ve heard that they chose Short Creek because they thought it was ideal to be able to avoid state raids because they could just jump across the state line. Is that true? Is that why they chose that area?

Brian Hales: I think they chose that area because they could acquire it without having to put down a lot of money.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: It’s really desolate down there, not a real desirable location. But also what you said about state lines, I think, was in their thinking, that, oh, well, if we have a problem in Utah, we can just skip over to Arizona or vice versa.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Hales: It didn’t really help them too much, although the raid was clearly in Arizona, and Utah opted not to participate in the 1953 raid. There may have been some advantage there that most of them were willing to take their lumps for polygamy, and I think history shows us that when you start persecuting a group, that actually creates a stronger group. They bind together, you know, against the oppression, and—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: —and it doesn’t always help your objectives from a government standpoint.

Scott Woodward: Okay. At what point did the fundamentalists of either branch get excommunicated from the LDS church? Because they’re down there claiming that they’re just the polygamist branch of the true church. How did the leaders of the LDS church view them, and when was their official excommunications from the LDS side?

Brian Hales: No, no, it’s a good question. The—most of the people that formed these groups in the 1920s and ’30s were discovered to be polygamists and were just excommunicated, like Joseph Musser, like John White Barlow.

Scott Woodward: Okay.

Brian Hales: And their local leaders would take action when they would embrace polygamy. The 1930s there were families living down in Short Creek area, they embraced polygamy, and they were excommunicated by their local leaders once they were found out. Some of them are leading a double life for a few years, but it usually catches up with them, and they usually proselytize Latter-day Saints. They don’t send out—they would send out some missionaries, but they were sent to Latter-day Saints to try to convince them to become polygamists. They weren’t sending missionaries out to baptize and preach the gospel to—unto every creature. That wasn’t the objective.

Casey Griffiths: I’ve been wondering: what was the response of this group when the manifesto was issued? Like, do we know anything about how they responded to the manifesto? I know that there was a wide spectrum of reception when the manifesto was given, that some people were very relieved, but a lot of people were really devastated that the church was moving on from this principle that they’d defended, that they’d sacrificed so much for.

Brian Hales: Well, it’s interesting: Jen Shipps, who I’m sure you know that name, she was a historian, not a Latter-day Saint, but a fine historian. She made the observation that polygamy and the church—that church members embraced it very slowly until it became their identity, and then they let go of it just as slowly. They started it secretly, practiced it openly, and then when the manifesto came, they didn’t just immediately give it up: They let go of it just about as slowly, very symmetrically over the next few decades. There were reasons for that. The manifesto said nothing about the wives of current polygamists. And there was duplicity, as you know, the—they were secretly doing more plural marriages, they wanted to say out of the country, in Canada and Mexico, but they were still doing them secretly in Utah as well. And so you see the secrecy that we saw in Nauvoo with the starting of polygamy is kind of duplicated in the 1890s until 1904, where the church is secretly continuing it on very—you know, maybe a dozen authorized plural marriages a year for fourteen years, and then Joseph F. Smith goes back east, and he’s grilled by the prosecutor back there for the Senate and—

Scott Woodward: During the Reed Smoot trials?

Brian Hales: Right.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: And he comes back, and I cannot find him prospectively authorizing any plural marriages after he returns from the Smoot hearing depositions that they took because he could see the government wasn’t going to let this continue. The secrecy had been broached, and that really is a dividing line. There were some marriages that were allowed after that that were performed by people who thought they had authority, and each one was a special case that had to be judged, but I don’t find Joseph F. Smith allowing any—in fact, bending over backwards not to let that happen, but there’s lots of ambiguity, simplicity there by the leaders as they’re letting go of this principle, this identity that had become so strong in the ’60s and 1870s, 1880s. And then after the manifesto in 1904, we still find a couple of apostles that are continuing it without President Smith’s permission, and they’re excommunicated or dropped from the quorum, and then in the 1910s there’s just people trying to do it ’cause they feel like they should, they start to come together in the ’20s for meetings, then in the 1930s is when they’re actually kind of a church-like group under this priesthood organization that Woolley had described.

Casey Griffiths: And just to clarify, that 1904, I believe, second manifesto is where Joseph F. comes out and says, we’re not going to practice plural marriage whether it’s legal or not. That was some of the ambiguity in Official Declaration 1 was Official Declaration 1 said, we’re going to obey the laws of the land. The 1904 declaration says, we’re not going to practice plural marriage anywhere, and if anybody does practice plural marriage or perform one, they’ll be excommunicated from the church.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And then as if to illustrate, shortly after, Matthias Cowley and John W. Taylor, who is the guy who has this revelation, are both removed from the Quorum of the Twelve, and eventually John W. Taylor’s excommunicated.

Brian Hales: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: That sends a message, but afterwards people keep practicing, and then you’re saying it gradually coalesces into this movement that then has Salt Lake—a Salt Lake branch and a Short Creek branch. Is that accurate?

Brian Hales: For those times, that pretty much describes what’s going on, so . . .

Casey Griffiths: The reason why I brought up a lot of the questions, Brian, honestly, is a couple of years ago, I was the ward mission leader, and there was a guy who moved into our ward who practiced—he was a polygamist, but it was complicated. He was a single polygamist. Like, he hadn’t gotten married, and—

Scott Woodward: Ideological polygamist? Wait, what does he mean?

Casey Griffiths: He was an idea—yes. Like, one time I went over, and he was on a date with a girl and I said, “Did you know he’s a polygamist?” And she was like, what? And I blew his cover, but he was like, “Man, I’m not a polygamist yet. I’m just hoping to be.”

Scott Woodward: An aspiring polygamist. Wow.

Casey Griffiths: He was an aspiring polygamist, and I picked his brain, and when I asked him, when do you think that the church lost its authority? He said Heber J. Grant. Like, I was expecting him to say Wilford Woodruff, but he said, no, Heber J. Grant. He was the last one that practiced plural marriage, and the guy actually had a shelf of books with Bruce R. McConkie and the words of Joseph Smith, and some good stuff, but that was his response with, like, no hesitation: Yeah, we think you guys were okay until Heber J. Grant, but after that, he felt like we’d gone off the rails. It does sound like—you said in the 1960s was when they started to say, we’ve been called to preserve plural marriage while the main church does the work, builds the temples, so on and so forth, became the argument. Is that accurate, Brian?

Brian Hales: Well, that describes the AUB, the Allred Group, their position. But the FLDS, they just basically said, we’re the true church, and those guys up in Salt Lake are the false church. And so they didn’t retain any connection, and this is where you’ve got Warren Jeffs telling the women what to wear, not to wear red, and crazy things that Joseph Smith never would have approved or even recognized as being something attached to the restoration.

Casey Griffiths: So if we’re distinguishing between the two groups, the FLDS is kind of the more extreme of the two. When you see—like, if you go to Cedar City sometimes you’ll see members wearing these—especially women have a very specific hairstyles, very specific clothing styles. That’s the FLDS influence.

Brian Hales: Correct. That’s Warren Jeffs and his followers. The Allred Group, they may wear long garments, and so you see them in long sleeve shirts, but they aren’t going to be of a pattern or anything like that. And they’re all among us. I mean, they’re really good people, good workers. They’re good families within their religious paradigm.

Casey Griffiths: And so the AUB is the Allred Group, the Apostolic United Brethren. They actually, I should mention, have a building just up the road from my house in Saratoga Springs, over the hill in Bluffdale, correct? There’s a temple there.

Brian Hales: Yep. That’s the one. They have a, yeah, an endowment house.

Casey Griffiths: An endowment house. And they’re a little bit more contemporary. If you saw one of them on the street, you wouldn’t see them wearing different clothes like you would with the FLDS. Is that correct?

Brian Hales: Not—you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know.

Scott Woodward: Wow. Kind of like a orthodox Jew versus a reformed Jew.

Brian Hales: Yeah, there’s definitely a different—and then you’ve got all the independents that are out there, and we could just mention that the LeBaron line—the LeBarons got a lot of notoriety through Ervil and the murders and things back in the ’70s, but they don’t ascribe to Lorin Woolley. They actually claim authority through Benjamin F. Johnson, and it’s a real stretch.

Scott Woodward: Whoa. Whoa. Okay, tell us that story.

Casey Griffiths: So, yeah, we we’ve got to stop you here because I heard two words that I want to follow up on: the murders, which you can’t just say, “Oh, and then the murders” and move right on, and then Benjamin F. Johnson, who is an important figure in Nauvoo when we’re talking about plural marriage there. So you’ve got to give us a little bit more detail on—this is the LeBaron group, correct? So give us the story there. Spill the tea.

Brian Hales: It’s fascinating because of the intricacy of this theory, and it goes like this: Benjamin F. Johnson was adopted to Joseph Smith, so he’s claimed to be the heir of Joseph Smith’s keys.

Scott Woodward: Okay. Okay.

Brian Hales: Okay? So that gets him to Benjamin F. Johnson. Then we believe that Benjamin F. Johnson gave his keys to A. Dayer LeBaron, one of his grandsons, and he had, like, a hundred because he had polygamous wives. That’s another problem, okay? But then A. Dayer LeBaron is supposed to have given it to some of his sons, and there was Ross, and there was Ervil, and I’m blocking on the other sons, but Ervil’s the famous one, because Ervil assumed to have the keys to run the church, and they have a very elaborate, “Priesthood Expounded” pamphlet, and you read through it, and you’re going, “Oh, my gosh, this makes sense.” Well, when you get into it, it doesn’t make any sense at all, but it—on the surface, it has an appeal, and then Ervil wrote that, but he went to Rulon Allred’s group and put flyers on the cars in the parking lot when they were meeting, demanding that they tithe to him.

Scott Woodward: Oh.

Brian Hales: He wanted these polygamists to give their tithing funds to Ervil because he was the guy, and when they refused, he decided to kill Rulon.

Scott Woodward: Oh, my.

Brian Hales: And he got a couple of his followers to kill Rulon, Rulon Allred, in ’77, ’78, but he was actually hoping that his own brother Verlan would show up at the funeral, which he did, and that then he could kill his brother. That was Ervil’s plan.

Scott Woodward: Oh, my word.

Brian Hales: But there was too much police there that the hit team that was dispatched chickened out. Ervil wasn’t real happy about it, but they eventually prosecuted him, and he died in prison. But that’s the line of authority for the LeBarons. It’s entirely disconnected from anything to do with Lorin Woolley and that—those claims.

Casey Griffiths: That they’re kind of off on their own.

Brian Hales: Yeah, and there still are LeBarons down in Mexico, I’m told. In fact, the drug cartel, I think, nailed some of the women in a—killed them a couple of years ago down there. I don’t know if you remember, there was a report. I think those were associated with the LeBarons down there.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. There was a pretty intense book written about what happened to that polygamist group in Northern Mexico, that apparently a group of mostly women from the movement were riding along, and they were attacked by one of the drug cartels, and a lot of them were killed.

Brian Hales: Yeah, I think those were LeBarons, but there are independents down there as well, and the FLDS, I think, has a temple outside of Mexico. They’ve had that for decades. I’m not sure how people get to it these days, but . . .

Scott Woodward: What kind of things do they do inside their temple?

Brian Hales: When the Allred Group built their first temple in the—I want to say ’80s, I think it was, because they rejected the priesthood going to all worthy members. They rejected that and felt they couldn’t sneak into the church, the mainstream temples. They wanted to have their own, and so they tried—they got their own endowment. I don’t know. I’ve heard different stories. I don’t know that I dare relate any of them as being accurate, so . . .

Casey Griffiths: Is this the pyramid temple that’s in Modena, Utah?

Brian Hales: No.

Casey Griffiths: Okay. Can I ask about that really fast, Brian? And I want to tell a story. So back during the pandemic, when we couldn’t travel very much, a group of other BYU faculty, we decided to go on a cultural tour of Southern Utah, and we went to Modena, Utah, where there’s a group called the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they have a temple there—this is out in the west desert of Iron County, Utah—that’s pyramid shaped, and one of the elders from the church agreed to give us the first discussion, and we didn’t know that it took about five hours to get the first discussion. And he explained, you know, how he came into the church and how he knew it, and it was interesting because he explained that beyond the law of chastity, there was a law called the law of purity, that you should only be intimate with your spouse if you’re intending to procreate, to create children. We listened to him for a really long time, and the pyramid temple was right there, and we were trying to see if he’d let us in and ultimately he didn’t, but do you know anything about the Righteous Branch, this group that lives near Modena, Utah?

Brian Hales: No, but there are lots of these very small groups that tie back somehow to either the fundamentalist lines or they claim ties back to Joseph somehow, but that’s when I—honestly, I haven’t been that interested in the modern polygamist movements, fundamentalist movements, and I’m not an expert on that. There are others who could tell you more.

Casey Griffiths: But they’d probably be an example of independents, and the way you’re kind of breaking down the movement is there’s the FLDS, that’s the more conservative movement; the AUB, which is sort of the more, I guess you’d say, mainstream?

Scott Woodward: Assimilated movement, or something?

Casey Griffiths: Assimilated movement. And then the independents that are kind of family-based, that are mostly doing their own thing.

Brian Hales: Well, you know, another name we could mention that people will have heard is the Kingstons. They had the Davis County Co-op, which was an attempt to replicate the law of consecration. They have a tie back to Lorin Woolley, but I think—I talked with one of them a few years ago, and it sounded like they not only had moved away from any tie-in to Lorin Woolley, but their leader was Elden Kingston, and he went up behind Bountiful into the mountains and came back reporting that he had had a new dispensation through him: that he had had angels appear to him, authority was given to him, and so the Kingstons today, on some of—they are polygamists, and yet they really, even though they kind of tie back to Joseph Smith, they think they’ve gone beyond Joseph Smith. He was the Elias, and Eldon Kingston is the Elijah. He’s the real thing, and Joseph was just a preliminary act, and that’s kind of where they are today. And this kind of a notion—you know, I asked Stephen Shields, who wrote Divergent Paths of the Restoration: I said, “How many of the people breaking away from the restoration claim to have seen God the Father, Jesus Christ, and/or an angel?” I mean, a visual, a visionary experience before they left the church. And he said there was around forty. This has been about ten years ago, and Denver Snuffer was the last guy on that list. Some of you may know that name, but this is not uncommon for people to report angels coming down and giving authority or giving them—you know, telling them what to do, and this occurs among the polygamists as well. They have to take a stand on polygamy. Are we going to be polygamists or not? But there was a leader down in Manti about 15 years ago, and I’m blocking on his name. He claimed that he set up an altar in his house, and he and his wife prayed, and all these angels came down, and he started his own movement, and they were monogamous, but pretty soon he’s practicing polygamy, and there’s dissension within his movement. I mean, this is a pattern that’s very common with people leaving the church and making their own claims to authority or to these authorizations.

Casey Griffiths: And in that spirit of talking about prominent people that practice plural marriage, we started talking about this before we turned the recorder on, but the TV show Sister Wives—which I know a number of people who are huge fans of Sister Wives and have followed it. You mentioned that they briefly affiliated with the AUB, but they’re independent as well. Is that correct?

Brian Hales: That’s my understanding, and it really isn’t uncommon for people: I know of several who have been very strong supporters of the Allred Group particularly, but then after a while they just don’t seem to need whatever the AUB has to offer, and consequently they just break away and become independents, and I think that’s—at least some of those sister wives were affiliated with the AUB at one point.

Casey Griffiths: And I bring that up because—I haven’t watched Sister Wives, but I’ve seen news articles on it, and it seems like they’re all dressed in contemporary clothing, and they don’t live in a compound or anything like that. They’re assimilated, to use the word that Scott brought up a little bit.

Brian Hales: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: As you’ve studied this history, how would you explain to somebody—what do you see as the distinguishing elements that would discount the legitimacy claims here? I know you’ve mentioned to me that you see five problems. I was wondering if you wanted to go through those or if there’s any others that you wanted to mention as to why you disagree so much with this.

Brian Hales: Well, I think—I appreciate the question, and I think one of the biggest reasons why I don’t see any of the fundamentalist leaders as being a true heir to Joseph Smith is a little surprising because what we find in D&C 132 is there’s one man who holds the keys of sealing, and in the Doctrine and Covenants, it talks about the president of the high priesthood.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: In verse 91 it says the duty of the president of the office of the high priesthood is to preside over the whole church and be like unto Moses.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: So this president of the high priesthood is over everything, like Moses was. But we also read in verse 82 that if the president of the high priesthood shall transgress, he shall be had in remembrance before the common council of the church, who shall be assisted by the twelve counselors of the high priesthood. In other words, Joseph Smith was not above a disciplinary council. It’s the checks and balances. This is a true doctrine, and yet if you go to the Council of Friends, whether it becomes Warren Jeffs or the current leadership, there is no description of how to deal with these individuals if they should transgress, and there’s this saying that absolute authority corrupts—

Scott Woodward: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Brian Hales: And this is, I think, what we see with Warren. I mean, the pseudo-religious organization he works within is not from Joseph Smith. And how do I know that? Because there’s no checks and balances. There is no council that is capable of looking at him should he transgress. He has absolute power. That is not something that is part of the restored gospel. And so this, to me, is a huge evidence that this is not from Joseph Smith’s God to, you know, to put it that way. Another problem is that the one man who holds the keys to seal also holds the keys to gather Israel and to gather the dead, and they would be very anxious about sending out missionaries. They would be anxious about building temples. These early fundamentalist leaders sent out no missionaries. None at all. And they didn’t build temples for decades. And so if this man is actually holding all of these keys, which they professed at least initially, you would expect there to be more anxiety, I think, in that one leader to exercise the keys to gather Israel. A second thing that I would just say is that we acknowledge that Joseph Smith asked about polygamy when he got section 132.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Brian Hales: And God is saying, okay, Joseph, I’m going to answer your question about polygamy, but I’m going to do it by giving you the new and everlasting covenant. Oh, and by the way, if you don’t obey it, you’re going to be damned, and we kind of talked about that earlier, and the polygamists will say, well, the new and everlasting covenant of marriage is polygamy, but as we talked about earlier, no, it isn’t. The law is not plural marriage. The law is eternal marriage.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Brian Hales: And that’s what Joseph learns in this, and polygamy isn’t mentioned in the next thirty verses after verse 1 of section 132. Another concern that I have about the Fundamentalists involves the emphasis, particularly among the FLDS, regarding sexuality. And Warren Jeffs really did some highly perverted things, and maybe you know this, but he came out with a decree that until he got out of the prison, there was to be no other sexual relations among his followers.

Scott Woodward: Oh, gee.

Brian Hales: And if you looked, if you attended, if you went to Walmart in St. George or in Cedar City, you would see these people dressed as his followers. They weren’t carrying babies. There weren’t little toddlers running around at their feet. Now, I don’t know if this has changed. There was talk that he actually appointed a few men to go out and populate among these plural wives throughout his church, and I don’t want to get—this can get grotesque rather quickly, but the perversions are very much sexually oriented, and yet we don’t find Joseph putting any emphasis on sexuality. It’s part of polygamy: it’s—verse 63 says that one of the reasons is to multiply and replenish the earth, but we don’t find that he’s emphasizing it among his own plural wives. He probably did have a child or two that we don’t know about. There’s good evidence for that, that this wasn’t the emphasis that we find the FLDS putting upon it. Now, the AUB, they seem to treat it just like the mainstream church, but this to me is another problem that the FLDS have. And maybe just let me just say that plural marriage is not a covenant, it’s not a ceremony, it’s not an ordinance—it’s a principle of the gospel that may be permitted or not permitted or commanded as God directs. It’s a practice that is part of the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, a practice that may be implemented or not.

Scott Woodward: No, that’s interesting. I just—you’ve studied this more than most. I think that’s helpful just to see those breaking points. The way you’re framing it is how it diverges from the Joseph Smith practice of polygamy, which I think is a helpful way to frame it.

Casey Griffiths: That there’s some serious divergences, and—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —I will say we want to end on more of an upbeat note, even though this is a really complex subject and we could probably ask a lot more questions—

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: —but one of the things we wanted to ask about is you’ve researched, and in researching, you’ve come into contact with people from these different traditions. What’s your experience been interacting with them?

Brian Hales: You know, I have many friends that are among the fundamentalists, and before Warren Jeffs, I visited Hilldale and Colorado City a number of times. I found these people to be kind and wanting the same things that we want, except they were convinced that they needed to practice polygamy. My message to them was, hey, look, just study it out in your mind before you pray. Don’t just get down and pray, oh, God, do you want me to be a polygamist? Get down and find authority, because if there’s no authority, there’s no plural marriage, in God’s eyes. This is a very plain teaching from Joseph Smith. And this was something I wanted to share, but since the FLDS have kind of become very recluse, my interactions have been mostly with members of the Apostolic United Brethren, and I have friends there. In fact, the leader of their group is a super nice guy. I just think the world of him, and he’s sincere. He wants to do the right thing, and he’s trying to help out people that are living in polygamy, and polygamy’s hard. Let’s face it. And sometimes, though, I think that people who are practicing something that’s hard feel that they—it must be hard because God wants them to do it. Well, it’s not always the case, you know? We may choose to do hard things thinking it’s God’s will, when maybe it isn’t, and that would be my position, but these are still very good people. They’re God-fearing, they have wonderful families, they read the Book of Mormon, they meet and give wonderful talks, much of which we would agree with. I would just bring us back to the authority issue, but just to say that these are really good people, and I’ve appreciated my friendships with them.

Casey Griffiths: So, Brian, if a person wants to explore this topic a little bit more and understand the history of these groups, there’s your book that we’ve mentioned. Are there other resources they can go to?

Brian Hales: Yeah, I have a website called mormonfundamentalism.com, and it has essays there that talk about the 1886 revelation, and there are little essays on all of the history that are quite concise, but informative. There’s discussion on section 132 and a chart that I put together that kind of outlines how the early groups broke away from each other, and maybe recommend that.

Scott Woodward: Excellent. A free resource. Even better.

Brian Hales: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: Free resource, and I’m just looking at it, and there’s a number of interesting things here, including—I’m looking right now at the written revelations of John Taylor, which is a link to an article written by Richard Holzapfel and Christopher Jones . . .

Scott Woodward: —called “John the Revelator.”

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. All the revelations John Taylor received, a lot of which—I don’t think any of them—well, I can say positively none of them were canonized and placed in the Doctrine and Covenants, but that are revelations John Taylor received, so go and check that out. There’s a lot of good resources there to explore.

Brian Hales: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Well, we sure appreciate having you on the show today, Brian. Thanks for coming. You are an endless well of interesting history. Thank you for your research. Thanks for your great work.

Brian Hales: Well, thank you for having me.

Casey Griffiths: And we’ll mention, again, your work is available. The book’s called Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto by Greg Kofford Books, so if you’re interested in studying more about this, and we might be a little bit worried about you if you are, go and get Brian’s book, and he’ll walk you through the whole process and help sort it out. So this has been immensely helpful to me. I really appreciate what you’ve done.

Brian Hales: Well, thank you again for having me.

Scott Woodward: Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters, and another big thank you to Dr. Brian Hales for being on our show today. In our next and final episode in this series, Casey and I sit down with our friend Dr. Christopher Blythe, a gifted historian, author, and Joseph Smith Papers editor, to help us land the plane on our now-sprawling series on Succession. 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. 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.