Scott Woodward:
Facts don’t interpret themselves. People interpret facts. And the people best equipped to most accurately interpret facts are those who understand the contexts in which those facts were originally embedded. This is especially important in understanding church history, because a fact from church history, especially a potentially shocking or scandalous-sounding fact, isolated from its context, is a fact certain to be misunderstood. This reality is too often leveraged by critics against church members as a weapon of mass deception which has troubled many a testimony. This is why in today’s episode of Church History Matters, Casey and I discuss the crucial skill of properly contextualizing facts so we know what kind of meaning to give them and how to feel about them. And we then demonstrate how this skill works with some real life, potentially shocking examples. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our seventh episode of this series dealing with truth seeking and good thinking. Now let’s get into it. Casey, what’s going on?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Not much. How you doing, Scott? You ready for another mental jiu-jitsu round? Is that what we’re doing here?

Scott Woodward:
I think we’re doing some mental jiu-jitsu. I think that’s—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mental Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Our metaphors have gone from pickleball to jiu-jitsu.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh, I forgot. I forgot. This is like another round of mental pickleball with church history topics.

Scott Woodward:
I kind of like jiu-jitsu because then we can use the term grapple.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
We need to grapple with these issues, you know?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
These difficult topics.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s more, like, visceral, right? It’s not like you’re hitting a little ball. It’s like you’re wrestling with the issue and slamming it to the ground and everything like that.

Scott Woodward:
Blood, sweat, tears.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. No, no, no. We don’t advocate any violence. This is friendly mental jiu-jitsu. No blood.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Maybe a few tears.

Scott Woodward:
Plenty of sweat, though.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Plenty of sweat.

Scott Woodward:
Yes. Should we review what we’ve been talking about here?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
In this series we’re not really tackling a single church history topic as we have in past series. We’re trying to do something harder. We’re trying to slow down and examine the frameworks of thinking and the mental moves that durable disciples make as they encounter potentially faith-challenging material about our history or our doctrine. We’re trying to communicate and illustrate the mindset and the mental processes involved in seeking by study and also by faith, as D&C 88 says. That’s what we’re trying to do. Casey, you want to summarize? What did we talk about last time? What was our skill from last episode?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So our skill from last time was what we call mental flexibility, which is basically the idea that you’re not so rigid in your thinking that when a new fact is introduced it sort of shatters all your perceptions and everything that’s there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You have a new fact introduced, you kind of go, oh, I didn’t know that, and then you start to make adjustments. You’re flexible. We defined it as the ability to identify, challenge, and modify one’s own assumptions in light of new information after humble and honest analysis. And it does require humility.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Sometimes we get in the mindset of, hey, I’m the world’s expert on this. And when something comes up that we don’t know, all of a sudden it can feel really humiliating. But the truth is we’re learning new things all the time.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So when something comes along, you sometimes have to ask yourself, what are my assumptions about things? And this could be things about the nature of God, the way He works with people, prophets, or how the church operates.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And sometimes when those boundaries are violated, it feels like your faith is in jeopardy.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When you come across that, you find yourself at a crossroads, and you have two choices: You throw out everything that you believe about God, prophets, and the church, or you recognize that you could be wrong. You be a seeker. You go back to the sources or the best books, and then you reexamine your expectations against the truth of the Word of God and maybe modify your assumptions accordingly. Just to give you an example, a lot of people in the church struggle with this idea that prophets are not perfect, that they can make mistakes, even when they’re acting as prophets. But if you go back and look in the scriptures, you can find dozens of examples of this, where a person is acting in a prophetic calling and they make a mistake, and the Lord corrects them, and they move on. Everything from, you know, Moses neglected to circumcise his son, so Zipporah has to do it for him, to Joseph Smith loses the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. It wasn’t really his fault, it was Martin Harris, but he made a mistake sending it with Martin Harris.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So on and so forth. Paul and Barnabas got into an argument and couldn’t go on their mission anymore. We’re dealing with flawed, imperfect people.

Scott Woodward:
Jonah was a racist who wanted the entire city of Nineveh to burn. I mean, you’ve got some whoppers, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You’ve got some big ones. You’ve got some big ones. Jonah—oh my goodness, Jonah. It’s just—once you really delve into the scriptures, you find that this is not a museum of statuesque, perfect people. They’re flawed people that are really struggling, and that kind of brings the scriptures to life.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So going back to that, if your assumption is prophets never make mistakes, well, you need to actually reassess that. And it shouldn’t break your faith in prophets, but it should allow you to kind of grow in faith and recognize that while prophets are wonderful, and they do speak to God, and they do receive their callings from God, God allows them a fair amount of leeway, and sometimes within that leeway, they make mistakes. So you identified, like, three mental moves. Are we going to call these mental jiu-jitsu moves? Are we keeping the jiu-jitsu metaphor? Or what do you think?

Scott Woodward:
Let’s see if we can keep it going. Yeah. So first move is sweep the leg. No.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s a Cobra Kai move, Scott. That’s a dirty play.

Scott Woodward:
No, we don’t want to do anything dirty here when we’re grappling with difficult issues. No, mental move number one is—we called it identify your assumption. Can you slow down in your thinking enough to be able to say, like, what is my assumption here? Why do I feel so uncomfortable? What rubs me wrong about this situation? And if you can slow down enough to identify that, you’re a third of the way there, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Because then the next move, move two, is then challenge that assumption. Just ask yourself, like, is that actually true? Maybe we hear about, we’re reading through church history and we find that the bank of 1837 failed. We talked about this a little bit last time, right? The Kirtland Bank failed, along with a lot of banks in America, in the panic of 1837, but a lot of people lost their money, and it was money that they wouldn’t have lost if they hadn’t invested in the bank in Kirtland, most likely. But Joseph Smith had endorsed the bank, and so you kind of grapple with that, like, hold on. I don’t like that. I don’t like that a prophet endorsed a bank and then the bank failed and members of the church lost their money. Like, I don’t like that at all. Slow down. What’s your assumption? My assumption is prophets of God don’t endorse banks that fail, I think. Something like that. Well, okay. Move number two. Is that true? Is that true? Can prophets—like you just said, can prophets make a mistake like that? Could there be an error in judgment or maybe not foreseeing the future? I mean, it’s not a bad idea to start a bank. A lot of banks in America at that time are going to fail in the panic of ’37. There was some shenanigans. There’s Grandison Newell. There’s some other historical context, people trying to break the bank. But the point is people lost money in a bank that the prophet endorsed, and that hurt a lot of people, and that hurt their faith in him because it challenged their assumptions about prophets. So slow down. Like, is that okay? Can a prophet make that kind of a mistake? I don’t know. Let me go to the best books. Let me go to the best books. Let’s go to scripture first and see if prophets can make that sizable of a mistake, right? Let’s just go see. And what you find is, yeah, there’s plenty of prophetic mistakes in scripture. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t work through them. It doesn’t mean revelation doesn’t come through them. It doesn’t mean that God doesn’t guide prophets to fulfill His purposes with His children, but it also means that sometimes He lets them make mistakes, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s just it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So that’s mental move number three. I’m already starting to do it. Mental move number three is then, okay, modify your assumption in light of new information after humble and honest analysis. Is that too high of a standard to hold a prophet to, that he can’t encourage people to invest in a bank that fails? Is that too high a standard? Do I think prophets are just going to be guided in every single thing that they do and every move, every business move, every whatever? Yeah, maybe I’m being a little too rigid in my thinking. Let me back up a little bit on that. Then you start to kind of—after my humble and honest analysis, I can create a space in my soul for a prophet to make that kind of error and still be a true prophet. Yes, he endorsed the bank like that, but we also got the Book of Mormon through that same person. We also got the Doctrine and Covenants. We have some of the most remarkable revelations that have ever been vouchsafed to mankind through that weak servant, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
We have the temple ordinances. We—and on and on and on. Like, what else came through him? Just evaluating everything, trying to identify what’s rubbing you wrong, challenge that, go to the best sources, and then see if you can modify that assumption in light of scripture especially or other really good scholarship, right? That’s basically the jiu-jitsu right there, it’s move one, move two, move three.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, for instance, you used the example of the Kirtland Bank.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When I read more about that, it was a little challenging, but the assumption that people were making was that Joseph Smith was scamming people: it was a get-rich-quick scheme that failed. This is going to sound weird, but when I actually studied it and found out that Joseph Smith probably lost more than anybody, it actually helped me to say, hey, he wasn’t doing this because he was trying to get rich. He lost more than anybody else. He genuinely believed in it, and then he worked as hard as he could to pay off the debts that he had incurred there. It feels like he was honest in his dealings with other people. It was just an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Then when you learn about the—and we ought to do a whole episode on the Kirtland financial crisis.

Scott Woodward:
I agree.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When you learn about the wider forces at work, like the Panic of 1837 and Andrew Jackson killing the national bank, it really does all come into focus, and you say, this is unfortunate, and it may have been a mistake to encourage people to invest in the bank, but it doesn’t seem like there was any malfeasance. There was no ill intent.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Just an unfortunate combination of circumstances.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. If we have an assumption that prophets can foresee everything, then that just got violated.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Might need to modify that. Prophets can foresee some things, things that the Lord wants them to foresee, but prophets can’t foresee everything. This would be a good example of maybe modifying that assumption, right? Joseph didn’t see that coming. Is that okay? I think that’s okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And in our discussion right now, we’ve already been doing the skill we want to talk about today, which is contextualizing.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You’re going to talk about the Kirtland Bank, for instance, you’ve got to talk about the wider economic situation in 1830s America. You’ve got to talk about the panic of 1837, which caused hundreds of banks to fail.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And in doing all those things, you just have to recognize that these stories didn’t take place in a vacuum.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oftentimes a person who’s antagonistic towards the church will reduce a story down to its bare bones and provide no contextualization and then make the assumption that this is wrong based on a 21st century context that exists.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When we go back and we look at the world that these things took place in, actually a lot more stuff makes sense, especially on some of the most challenging issues in church history.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So mental flexibility, super important skill, crucial to seeking learning by study and by faith, because so much of learning is the work of unlearning and modifying our assumptions, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You must unlearn what you have learned. A wise master said that once.

Scott Woodward:
That’s right. A master of mental flexibility.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so should we talk about context?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s talk about context, yeah. Contextualization is the skill of the day.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s talk about it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s talk about it. We’re going to define that as the ability to put true but often shocking or uncomfortable facts into their historical, theological, and cultural context. This is useful when you’re studying any kind of scriptural text.

Scott Woodward:
Absolutely.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You’re studying the Bible. You have to take into account what’s the context they lived in.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And what were they doing within their context? And was it okay in their context even if it’s not okay within my context? I would feel very uncomfortable going to the temple and killing an animal, for instance. I’ve got to be honest with you. I’m sort of a coward. I don’t think I’ve ever, like, killed an animal. I went deer hunting with my dad, watched him gut the deer, and just thought, oh, I don’t know if this is for me.

Scott Woodward:
Not for me. Not for me.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. In the world the ancient Israelites lived in, killing an animal was something you did on a daily basis to feed your family.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And the Lord just takes that kind of mundane, daily thing and turns it into an act of devotion or worship. It’s weird to me, but I don’t think it was weird to them.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so I’ve got to do the work to put myself in the mental space that they occupied and get out of my head a little bit.

Scott Woodward:
It’s kind of a historical empathy in a sense, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
We can’t get out of the need for attributes. In our previous skill, modifying assumptions, we talked about humility is really important. Honesty is really important.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And now we’re talking about empathy is really important. Like, being able to get into the headspace and the time space of those that we are learning about. And that’s an act of empathy. That’s an empathetic move. Good historical thinking requires not just thinking but important attributes like humility and empathy. Maybe that’s an important thing to highlight.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Well, let’s talk about context.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Okay.

Scott Woodward:
Context matters because it helps you know what assumptions to bring to the facts that you’re hearing about, reading about, learning about, so that you now know what meaning to give to those facts. You used the example in scripture of animal sacrifice. Let’s do maybe a modern example where we don’t have to go even back in history, but let’s just try a really simple one, okay? So Casey I’m going to ask you three questions, okay?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Alright, I just want you to tell me how you feel. Just tell me how you feel, Casey. So question number one. This is an uncomfortable fact, but I’m going to drop it on you. How would you feel if I told you that your neighbor has killed people?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Uncomfortable. Let’s move. I always knew there was something shady about that guy. Our kids shouldn’t play together anymore. I’m just saying the first things that come to mind here.

Scott Woodward:
You’re doing better than expected, okay? Good job. Alright, let me ask another question. How would you feel, Casey, if I told you that your neighbor was a war hero who had killed people defending our country?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mmm. Okay. Okay. So now I’m, I don’t want to move.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. Alright.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I am proud. I definitely won’t sneak up and surprise him from behind or anything like that.

Scott Woodward:
No loud noises.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I actually, you know, have students in this situation that I taught in high school and went to Iraq and came back and opened up about their experiences, and first of all, deeply moved by what they went through and also just felt a need to, you know, embrace them, do what I could to try and help and heal them from having to do something terrible like that. But again, you know, that’s a different ballgame, right? I wouldn’t feel as much fear. I’d feel a desire to help them and admiration for the courage that they demonstrated.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So you went from fear to feeling proud and admiration.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s interesting. Okay, let’s do it one more. Let’s do one more. How would you feel, Casey, if I told you that your neighbor had been involved in a tragic accident, where his car had hit black ice, slid out of control, and killed people in oncoming traffic, but he survived?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hmm. Sympathy, right?

Scott Woodward:
Hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Sorrow for them having to deal with that. Yeah. It’s interesting how, you know, they killed a person. And if you put it in context, it can be three very different things, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. The context changes what assumptions you bring to the facts. The fact didn’t change. Your neighbor has killed people. That’s the fact, you know? But wow. Context affects what meaning you give to those facts and really affects how you feel about the facts and how you feel about your neighbor, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
You went from feeling fearful to feeling proud and admiration to feeling pity and sorrow. And that’s not because the fact changed, but it’s because the context in which the fact was embedded changed, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And that right there, that is so incredibly important and true with church history, right? Sometimes there are uncomfortable facts, which are totally true, that shock people when they don’t have the context, but they become much more palatable when we learn the context.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And they can even change the way that we feel about those involved, like Joseph Smith, for example. I think so much of what troubles church members’ faith today is when they come in contact with facts from our history that are stripped of their original context, whether that’s a doctrinal context or a cultural context or historical context. As I’ve mentioned in a previous series, I’ve said that a fact stripped of its context can be like an electrical wire stripped of its protective sheath. It’s quite shocking when you come in contact with it, right? Your neighbor has killed people. Bzzt! Ah! Right? But let’s give that some context. Let’s give it some context. Context helps to wrap such bare and shocking facts back into their kind of protective sheath, right? To neutralize the shock factor.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s the skill, right? The skill of contextualizing facts is the skill of learning the background behind the facts, whether that’s a historical background, a cultural background, a doctrinal background. Whatever you need to know to get into the context, and then bring that background to bear on the facts. And you’ll notice right away the way you feel about the facts shifts and changes. We’ve been doing this throughout different series, right? We just haven’t really drawn specific attention to the skill that we were doing, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I think you and I sort of do this naturally. It is a mental skill that has to be developed. When someone brings up something shocking, you pause and go, what’s the context of that?

Scott Woodward:
I wasn’t born being able to do that. Like, where did you learn it? When did it first click for you, like, context matters a lot, so now that’s just—it’s kind of second nature to you?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh, well, you know, it starts with good teachers that are well read and think deeply about things, and like we’ve mentioned a couple times on this podcast, that also think slowly about things, that don’t rush to assumptions, which is sometimes what a church antagonist wants you to do. They just throw something out there and don’t contextualize it at all, and you get mad and say, ooh, that’s wrong.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s cheap and easy to throw out shocking facts. It’s difficult and it requires a price to contextualize those facts.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But if you can pay that price, it really does present you with a richer version of almost every story. And that’s not just church history. That’s American history and world history. Like I said, there’s still right and wrong.

Scott Woodward:
Yep.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But sometimes context helps us understand why people do what they do.

Scott Woodward:
What I hear you saying is this is a skill that you’ve developed over time. As you’ve seen other people model it and then you’ve seen the value of it, this is just how you’ve come to think. It is a learnable skill, right, Casey? It’s not something that you either have it or you don’t. Would you say that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
You can learn it, you can see other people who do it well, and you can pick up on it, so.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. I hope we’ve modeled this well in our podcast, too. Just to give you an example, yesterday I was at my chiropractor. I was in an accident a couple weeks ago, so I have to go to a chiropractor. And this lady came in, and my chiropractor is a huge fan of our podcast.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, really? Shout out to Casey’s chiropractor.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So, yeah, every time I go he’s, like, popping my spine in and going, what do you think about this whole race and the priesthood thing and all this stuff? And this lady comes in, and, I mean, without knowing it, we all engaged in a conversation about our podcast on race and the priesthood.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And almost immediately my chiropractor goes, hey, do you know all the stuff that was going on about race in the early American Republic?

Scott Woodward:
And he was explaining this to his assistant?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
He’s explaining this to a client that came in, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, that’s so cool.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And he started to say, hey, the scientific leaders of the day, the political leaders of the day—and he started to contextualize the racial environment that the church was restored into, and it was sort of, like, beautiful because this guy, who is an excellent chiropractor but has probably had very little historical training, picked up on how to do this by listening to us do it. So that was a major win for me.

Scott Woodward:
I love it. That’s so cool.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It was really neat to see. And like I said, it’s not something that you start out doing, but it’s a skill that you gradually pick up as you carefully and thoughtfully study history.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Now what are some examples in previous series that we’ve done where we’ve been trying to illustrate this? I’m just thinking through. We started out with the First Vision, and we walked through every account of Joseph Smith that he gave of his First Vision, and sometimes people want to bring up multiple accounts of the First Vision as a point of controversy, right, try to do these cheap shots, if we’re still going with the jiu-jitsu analogy here. They do a little cheap shot by not giving you any context whatsoever and just saying stuff like, did you know there’s differences? Did you know that there’s some discrepancies between the accounts? Did you know—you know, it’s kind of like—I don’t know why I use my, like, deep, shady voice, but that’s kind of how it feels, right, when people are doing cheap shots. But we went through and showed how every single one of those four accounts that Joseph gives in the context totally determines, like, how he would share the First Vision, right? If it’s private, there’s so much in the first—in the 1832 account. He doesn’t intend this to, like, be published, and it’s so personal, right? Then his 1835 account’s to this, like, strange, like, Jewish guy, but Joseph thinks he’s talking to a Jew, and so he tells the story in, like, a Jewish-friendly way.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That context matters, right? Then 1838-39, like, the church is being completely, like, persecuted. They’ve just left Kirtland. He’s in Far West, about to go to Liberty Jail when he starts writing the history. He gets out of Liberty Jail when he finishes that part. It’s all about kind of this persecution response, right? Like, “In owing to the many reports that have been given” about us, like, I want to set the record straight. I want to give you the facts about what’s happened. I want you to hear it from me. And so he’s very factual and very technical.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And then ’42 he’s super bold, and people are asking him, like, tell us about your church. You guys are growing so fast. This is so impressive and so interesting. Like, tell us about you. Right? In the Wentworth letter. And so he’s kind of, like, more missionary minded. Like, each of those contexts matters. And the details in the various accounts of the First Vision make the sense that they do when you understand the context. And so we try to point it out there. We did a Book of Mormon translation. We’ve done it in Joseph Smith’s polygamy. We’ve done it in the Book of Abraham series. We’ve done it in the race and priesthood series.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
If you want, like, real deep dives, we just invite you to go back and just pick an episode and see if you can spot this in action.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Because this is the stuff of historical analysis.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And I remember on the First Vision one, for example, I hadn’t realized until we were recording the podcast that when Joseph Smith used the term pillar of flame as opposed to pillar of light, he was generally talking to Jewish people. He was talking to Robert Matthews, who he thought was Jewish, and Alexander Neibaur, who actually was Jewish. And it feels like, you know, rather than him smudging the details, it’s him trying to reach out to them and use their religious background as a way of saying, yeah, pillar of fire. That’s something you would recognize from the Old Testament, so.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I hope we’ve tried to model this for you in our podcast.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s do a couple short examples just to show kind of how this works.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Give me a scenario, Scott, and we’ll walk through it.

Scott Woodward:
All right. How about this? I’m just going to make up a name, all right? You have a friend named Carly, and Carly is struggling because of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. When you ask her, well, Carly, what, what exactly is it about Joseph’s polygamy that you’re struggling with? She kind of blurts it out. She’s like, Did you know that Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl? Like, I already knew he practiced plural marriage, but I just found out he married a 14-year-old, Casey. That is just so wrong on so many levels, she says. Alright, so, first of all, let’s just ask this question. Is that actually a true fact, Casey?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That is a true fact. Yes.

Scott Woodward:
So, okay, so that’s a true fact, and it’s a shocking fact. That’s an example of a shocking fact that actually rocks a lot of people’s world, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
This is a good way to tell, like, this needs context, right? Because it’s like, bzzzt! It’s like, ah! I don’t like this! I just learned a fact that it’s hard to, like, say it’s not true because it’s actually true. The more I look into it, it looks like it’s true. So alright, let’s do it. So what are some points of crucial context, Casey, historical or doctrinal, that would help your friend Carly to help neutralize the shock factor of this fact?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
OK, well, a couple things. First, the way we think of sealing today in the church is almost near synonymous with marriage. We think of it as kind of the same thing. We say a couple’s going to the temple to get sealed this week, and it’s just a synonym for marriage.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And in Nauvoo, it was much more complicated. And sealing was used the way that we still use it a little bit today, but not as often, which is the idea of creating a connection, a ceremony that creates a connection to people.

Scott Woodward:
Like when children are sealed to their parents.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right, right. And it appears that a lot of the sealings that Joseph Smith engaged in in Nauvoo were sealings in the sense that they were going to connect a family, but they weren’t marriages in the traditional sense where they live together as husband and wife, where they’re going to be intimate, where they’re going to have children, and it feels like this is one of those examples, too. Now, how do we know this? We know this because that’s what Helen said.

Scott Woodward:
Wait, who’s Helen?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Helen Mar Kimball is the 14-year-old.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s another thing is it drives me crazy when this is, oh, he married a 14-year-old and they don’t talk about her, they don’t talk about what she had to say about it. They completely dismiss her, and she just becomes a 14-year-old. Like, in the last week I had somebody bring this up and say, well, the church covered up the fact that he married a 14-year-old, and I’m like, no, they didn’t. The reason why we know any of this is because Helen wrote a book on plural marriage—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—years later that she was encouraged by the church to write. So there was no cover up. In fact, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if the church hadn’t urged her to tell her own story.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And allow her to be an actor within the story that has agency, freedom, volition, that can say how she felt about it. So that’s one context is what is sealing to them? Is sealing to them the same thing that it is to us? And if it’s different, how is it different?

Scott Woodward:
So it was a marriage, though, right? Like, Joseph would count Helen Mar Kimball as one of his wives.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I suppose so, and yet even that needs to be contextualized a little bit, doesn’t it?

Scott Woodward:
Yes, I think so.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Helen, and several of the women that Joseph Smith were sealed to, introduced a concept of an eternity-only marriage. That it was a marriage that connected the Smith and Kimball families in the eternities but did not act as a functioning marriage. The way we think of marriage today—wasn’t this type of marriage.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Specifically, and this is the question that kind of is lurking behind everybody’s concerns, was were they intimate with each other?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Was there a sexual relationship? No. There wasn’t. This was an eternity-only sealing, and there were no sexual relations happening.

Scott Woodward:
That’s really important, right? Because that’s, like, that’s what’s underneath everybody’s concern here.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Back up a little bit. You said that this was a sealing to connect the Kimball and the Smith families. That seems really important. Were Helen’s parents involved in this sealing at all?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, deeply involved. Heber and Vilate Kimball were some of Joseph’s dearest and closest friends. Now, this is a pattern we see amongst a lot of Joseph Smith’s connections, which is they were using sealing as a way to connect families.

Scott Woodward:
Almost like kind of the ancient, like, dynasties, right, where this dynasty would have a son, that dynasty would have a daughter, and their marriage would connect the two dynasties together, something like that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And so this has been called dynastic connections. Joseph Smith’s doing these dynastic connections, connecting families together through marriage which were not intended to be sexual relationships, but an eternity-only sealing to bind two families together, right? Not the way—we think normally vertically about this, don’t we? Like, I’m going to seal my parents to their parents, their parents to their parents. That’s a vertical sealing.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But Joseph’s doing these horizontal sealings, which we don’t see much today at all, where you would seal this family horizontally, laterally, to that family by a marriage connection. That’s what they understood was going on here.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. The way Richard Bushman describes it is it’s like they were trying to create this web of familial connection.

Scott Woodward:
I like that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Where everybody would be connected to each other and they’re making one grand family. And that’s why there’s other sort of wrinkles to the story, too, like the law of adoption, where someone could be sealed to someone as their child, even if they were an adult and they had no relationship. For instance, one of my ancestors, a man, was sealed to Brigham Young as his son. Today we wouldn’t do that, but in the early church where they have this wonderful sealing power, and they’re seeing, you know, the power of sealing to create lasting family relationships, they employed it in sometimes unexpected ways, at least unexpected from our perspective. But if we go back to their context, there must have been power in a group of people where almost everybody is a first-generation convert.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And many people have had to give up their families to join the church, to go to a person and say, hey, I love you so much I don’t want to just be your friend. I want you to be part of my family.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I want you to be sealed.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And that’s how Joseph and Emma approached Jane Manning James, right? They wanted her to be adopted as one of their daughters.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, that’s the way Jane tells the story.

Scott Woodward:
Super cool expression of love, deeper than a friendship. That’s a familial type of love.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so this is good. So that’s a good example. I think if Carly understands those things—Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl, as sketchy as that sounds on its face, as we dive deeper into it using, by the way, the best books, or best sources, and you can’t get better than Helen Mar Kimball’s own book on this. Her experience. Her parents were involved. It was actually her dad’s idea, if I remember right, that he suggested the connection between the Smith and the Kimballs and that his daughter would make a fine linkage point between them, and Helen consented, and there was no sexual relationship, and that was it. And they never lived together, they never—there’s no record of them ever, like, even spending time. This was simply a connection of two families, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Another maybe piece of context we could add in here is it’s uncommon for a 14-year-old to get married in our age and our society, but in 1840s America, was it? There was a study a few years ago published in a book by Newell Bringhurst where they looked at median ages of marriage in the 1840s. And when they pulled up all the census data that they could, they found out that 14 was on the younger side, but it was in the ballpark for a person to get married back then at that age. By the way, it still is in some places.

Scott Woodward:
What?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Last week I was listening to a podcast, and Stephen Colbert, you know, the host of The Late Show, said he went in to get his marriage license in South Carolina, and the guy at the desk said—first thing he said was, the girl has to be 14 and the boy has to be 15, at least. So, I mean, this was the ’90s, I guess, that that was common enough in South Carolina that, you know, that’s the first thing the marriage clerk says to you.

Scott Woodward:
Minimum age.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, minimum age. At any rate.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
What are some sources, Scott, that we could read and access this? Because not everybody’s going to have access to Helen Mar Kimball’s book.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But there’s plenty of places where we could go and find out a little bit more and hear her voice so that she’s not marginalized in her own story.

Scott Woodward:
Best place is her own voice. If you don’t have access to our own book, back in our plural marriage series, we actually plugged Brian Hales’ work pretty strongly. We recommend his website, his free website, josephsmithspolygamy.org. He’s got a little, short biography on every one of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. And you can click on Helen’s name and read what Brian has summarized there. He quotes from her, summarizes some stuff, and then in the footnotes, if you want to go dig deeper and see where that takes you, that would be good, too. The Gospel Topics essay mentions this and gives it some good context. Where else would you go, Casey?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’d say Saints as well.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
If you haven’t read Saints Volume 1, I think they do a pretty good job dealing with some of the complexities surrounding plural marriage, and Saints goes out of its way to emphasize the voices of these women, what they had to say about it, what their perspective was, and what the context is that they exist in. So Saints is a great example of all this stuff kind of put together in one place, and to be honest, Saints doesn’t pull its punches, you know? They bring up some stuff that is challenging but I think can be understood if you put in the effort.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Great historians doing exactly what we’re talking about today.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Well, let’s do another one.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Another jiu-jitsu round here.

Scott Woodward:
Ding ding ding! Fight!

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And I’ll introduce this one.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So here’s the scenario: Your cousin Lacey stumbled across a website critical of the church which pointed out there are many similarities between the clothing and rituals of Freemasonry and the endowment ceremony performed in Latter-day Saint temples. The similarities are so striking, in fact, there’s only one conclusion, according to this website, and that is Joseph Smith secretly plagiarized the Freemason stuff and pawned it off on the church as revealed restoration of an essential ordinance. Lacey is floored by this information. Her head is spinning. She calls you, a bit upset, and tells you about what she’s learned, seeking your perspective. Have you heard of this? she asks. So what are some of the contexts she’d need to know about Masonry and the temple endowment? Ooh, we need to do an episode on this, too. We’ll get to it eventually, but yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I think we should do a series on, like, the development of the temple ordinances. I think that’d be a really cool series, don’t you think?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You and I did a pretty good video on that that is on YouTube, but we need to do a deeper dive.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We were just skimming the surface there.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So give us some context.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, no, this is good, right? This is super real, super raw.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Someone notices connections between Freemasonry, the endowment, and we’re off to the races here, right? Accusations of plagiarism, Joseph being a fraud, trying to pawn this off on gullible church members. But we’re not going to let him get away with that, are we? You know, that kind of a vibe. Okay, so that’s a dirty jiu-jitsu move, right? The round’s over, and you turn your back, and then, you know, they kick you in the back when you’re—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“Put him in a body bag, Johnny!” That kind of thing, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So dirty move. No context. It’s not inaccurate. It’s not inaccurate. There are definitely similarities between Freemasonry and the endowment. So let’s first of all confirm the fact. That’s, I guess, move number one here is, is that actually a true fact? And in this case, yes, that’s a true fact. Yep, that is a true fact.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, that’s true.

Scott Woodward:
So what do we do with that fact? Well, we need more context to know how to feel about the fact, right? Because the fact itself isn’t telling us what we need to know. So how am I going to decide which assumptions to bring to this? How am I going to decide how to interpret that fact? Well, that’s where we now need to go. Step two, let’s look deeper into the context. Historical context. Doctrinal context. What should Lacey know in order to neutralize the shock factor of this true fact? Let me just walk through a few. So one important context is that two months before Joseph introduced the endowment ceremony, he had actually become a Mason in Nauvoo, a Freemason. And for those out there that don’t know what a Mason is and your only context for Masonry is National Treasure, which is not a bad place to start. If you don’t know what Masonry is, I like to summarize it by saying it’s kind of like Boy Scouts for grown up men. It’s man scouts. That’s what Masonry is. It’s a group of men who are dedicated to bettering their country, doing their duty to God, to better their community.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
If you’ve ever noticed the Boy Scouts, you know, they have, like, certain hand signs. Like, you shake with your left hand in Boy Scouts. You hold your arm to the square to make oaths. You know, you have three fingers up if you’re a—is it a wolf or a Webelo? Shoot. It’s starting to fade in my mind, but anyways, there’s different things you do with your hands, and that kind of shows that you’re part of the in group. There’s badges. There’s degrees that you can go up. Start as a, what do you start at? As a wolf, then a bear, and then a . . . What’s next?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh, man, you are pushing me. Bobcat. You start as a bobcat, don’t you?

Scott Woodward:
You start as a bobcat. The goal is to get up to eagle, right? This is Masonry.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Actually, Lord Baden Powell, from what I understand, like, the founder of Boy Scouts—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
—got his ideas from Masonry. So Masonry is the grown up version of Boy Scouts. There’s degrees of Masons. You start out as like a, what is it, like an apprentice? And you can go all the way up to these different, like, degrees of master Mason, like third degree or something like that. You go up by degrees, kind of like the badges in Boy Scouts. There’s hand clasps of brotherhood, fellowship, right? There’s different ways you could put your arms, like, to the square, that kind of stuff. You wear certain uniforms, like in Scouting there’s certain uniforms. There’s, like, a handkerchief. In Masonry there’s also uniforms. There’s, like, aprons that you wear. They have symbols, like, there’s a compass, not the kind that tells you true north, but the kind that draws circles. There’s compasses and squares. Because the idea of Masonry—I mean, if you Google, like, mason work, what that means is someone who works with bricks, or works with building, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And so there’s these kind of these building tools that are some of their signs, their symbols. So there’s a square used to make perfect 90 degree angles on a room. There’s compasses, and you’ll see the square and the compass superimposed over each other as the Masonic symbol. Because their history, they say, goes all the way back to Solomon’s Temple, where people worked on the temple to help build that to God and that there was kind of this guild that was formed, this guild of brotherhood, that is meant to advance the common good of mankind, that kind of thing.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So it was really cool. Joseph was attracted to it. His brother Hyrum was involved in Masonry long before he was.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
His dad.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, his dad. Yeah. And so this is a kind of a club or a group that is respectable in a lot of ways. Some people didn’t like it because there’s kind of, like, some secrecy with Masonry.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
You’re not supposed to talk about the rituals of Masonry unless you are a Mason, and so . . .

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And let’s be honest here: Most people’s knowledge about Masonry comes solely from the Nicolas Cage film National Treasure, right?

Scott Woodward:
Great film. Great flick.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Great movie. Watch it tonight. But it’s not the best representation of Masonry because it does sort of play on these stereotypes that it’s a secret society—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—that controls the country or something like that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When it came to contextualizing Masonry for me, I went to the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia.

Scott Woodward:
Such a cool temple.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I strolled in, expecting to be told to leave. Instead, it was like, do you want to go on a tour? Yeah. Okay, 15 bucks. I paid 15 bucks and then went on a lovely tour, had a long conversation with a Mason, went through their museum, where I saw George Washington’s Masonic apron. Benjamin Franklin was the founder of the Lodge. Fourteen presidents have been Masons, all good guys. No recent president has been a Mason. I think the last one was Gerald Ford. I sort of saw, oh yeah, I mean in the 19th century especially, this was a big thing among men, and it was a way that they made connections, but it doesn’t seem like there was anything sinister about it.

Scott Woodward:
No, I mean it’s dedicated to, like, bettering the community, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Like, you have to be a good man to be able to get in, you know, kind of a thing. You have a good reputation in the community already, and so that’s—so there’s nothing weird about it. It’s not a religion. You just had to be religious. You just had to believe in God.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
You didn’t have to be a certain denomination. You just—kind of like with Scouts, you know? “On my honor I’ll do my best to do my duty to God and my country.” You don’t have to be a Latter-day Saint. You could be anything. You could be Muslim. You could be, you know, Protestant. As long as you believe in God, like, that’s enough.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. In fact, in the Masonic Temple, they told us you have to believe in a higher power.

Scott Woodward:
There you go.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s their only standard. So it makes sense in context, if we’re going back to context here.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Joseph Smith becomes a Mason in Nauvoo.

Scott Woodward:
He does.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
They are in Nauvoo because they have been pushed from place to place to place, and in Nauvoo there’s a lot of circumspection of, hey, why does this keep happening? Are we too insular? And so they invite the Masons to set up a lodge in Nauvoo as a way of reaching out to other people.

Scott Woodward:
Creating connections, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. If we can create these connections, maybe the next time a crisis comes up people will know who we are, and they’ll support us. Masons were also well known for part of their ceremonies where they make a commitment to uphold and assist their fellow Mason.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
This all makes sense, that they would do this, but what about the idea of the Masonic ceremonies being in the temple?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Okay, good. So two months before Joseph introduces the endowment ceremony, he had become a Mason in Nauvoo. Now, another key piece here is that all those to whom Joseph gave the endowment were Masons.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There were nine men. This happens on the 4th of May, 1842. We have all their names. We could go through them if we want, but Hyrum was there, Bishop Newell K. Whitney’s there, a man named George Miller, Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards. These are men who are already Masons.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
What Joseph does is introduces to them the endowment. He says he instructed them in the principles and order of the priesthood, attending to washings, anointings, endowments, and the communication of keys pertaining to the Aaronic Priesthood, and so on, to the highest order of the Melchizedek Priesthood. So already you start to say, wait a minute. That kind of sounds Masonic in the sense that there’s orders, there’s grades, you can go from Apprentice up to Master Mason, and he’s saying that you start with his lower order of Aaronic and you go through all the orders of all the way up until the highest order of Melchizedek, so you already start to see some similarities there.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s keys. There’s certain things that you’re doing with your hands, like a Boy Scout left handshake, close to your heart. That’s symbolic meaning. There’s some of those kinds of things that are being introduced, which is also in Masonry. Their clothing is Masonic-looking. They’re wearing aprons. They’ll do robes, stuff like that. And so is this a coincidence? It turns out, no. And Joseph wasn’t trying to hide the fact that this is not a coincidence. Heber C. Kimball, who was there, for instance, he said, “There is a similarity of priesthood in Masonry. Brother Joseph says,” this is in a letter he wrote to Parley P. Pratt. He says, “Brother Joseph says Masonry was taken from priesthood but has become degenerated, but many things are perfect.” So Joseph Smith is saying, like, ooh, this has some really strong parallels to priesthood. It’s kind of a dilapidated version, but it’s—a lot of things are still quite legit. His close friend Benjamin F. Johnson said this: he said, “Joseph told me Freemasonry, as at present, was,” he called it, “the apostate endowments,” or, like, the degenerated endowment. Not meant to be a pejorative term, apostate, in that sense but just he says, “As sectarian religion was the apostate religion, so is Freemasonry the apostate endowment.” Again, not using that term as an attack but to say it has become degenerated or dilapidated and it needs a restoration. It needs life breathed back into it. It needs recontextualization. That kind of thing. So Joseph sees a vestige here, a vestige of the true thing in Masonry.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And he sought to incorporate those elements from Freemasonry that were true into the endowment, which was the more perfect thing. And so Joseph is trying to restore that in the sense of—think of an old, broken down building, restoring that building and building it back up. Some of the walls get to stay, but you’re also going to add a whole different side to things and polish it up and make it—bring it back to the original or better.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And I’ve got to say, one item of context that really helped me resolve this—because this was something that bugged me when I found out about it—was . . . The charge that Joseph plagiarized the endowment—pretty much every adult male in Nauvoo was a Mason.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And none of them accused Joseph Smith of plagiarism. So if Joseph Smith was trying to pull a fast one here and be like, oh, I totally came up with this ceremony on my own, he did a terrible job.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. They all recognized it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. They all recognized it. They all saw it. And Joseph Smith himself wasn’t saying this is wholly original. He was saying, I’m restoring something that has broken down a bit but that has true principles within it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And like I said, everybody was a Mason that was involved.

Scott Woodward:
Something like 3,000 Masons or something like that in Nauvoo at its peak?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The saints in Nauvoo embrace Masonry so enthusiastically that it starts to scare the other Masonic lodges because now there’s so many Masons in Nauvoo, so. There’s no cover up, and there’s no attempt to pass this off as his own thing. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s taking what’s good about Masonry and basically saying, this is good, but it’s corrupted and it can be used for something higher and better. And that was another assumption—I guess we’re talking about assumptions—that I brought to the endowment was that it was, you know, wholly original, that it was a revelation—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—directly from God. When you realize, if you go through the endowment, the person that Joseph Smith plagiarized the most was himself, the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. The book of Moses contains a significant portion of the endowment, and that is revealed in 1831, like way, way, way before anything happened in Nauvoo.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so, yeah, it feels like he may have adapted some of the Masons’ pedagogy, their methodology—

Scott Woodward:
For sure.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—but he’s putting it in a whole new context, especially if you understand that the Masonic ceremonies don’t have anything to do with the creation, fall, and atonement, which is what our endowment focuses on.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I think that’s really important context. One other item I’d add is this doctrinal context of early on in the Doctrine and Covenants, what is the Restoration all about? And Jesus gives a pretty clear explanation in Doctrine and Covenants 27, where he says that this dispensation of the gospel for the last time and for the fullness of times is the time in which, here’s Jesus speaking, “I will gather together in one all things both which are in heaven and which are on earth.” Both things which are in heaven and which are on earth. I think we’re down with what Restoration means when we’re talking about things in heaven, right? That’s normally what we think of when we think of Restoration: We’re thinking of truth being revealed that was not on earth and visions of truth that we didn’t have on earth and angels of God coming from heaven to earth, priesthood keys that were not on the earth coming back to earth, right? Things in heaven coming on earth. But it’s that second piece which is a little bit, like, puzzling. What does it mean that this dispensation be the time when he gathers together all things in heaven and on earth? What does that mean? Truth that’s already on earth is going to be gathered in? What we find with Joseph Smith’s practice is that he’s gathering truths from other religions, philosophies, practices, sacraments, structures, symbols, rituals that are already on the earth. You know, I’m thinking of things like, you know, something simple as hymns, the hymns that we sing at church. There’s already some really good hymns, and Joseph pulls them in. Emma brings them into the hymnbook. The fact that we use the Bible, that’s a great example of a truth that’s already on the earth that gets gathered into the whole Restoration, right? Let’s bring the Bible into this. It’s already here. We don’t need to bring the whole thing back wholesale. Let’s just, let’s bring it in. Let’s use it. So Masonry is another good example of truth that’s already on the earth, as Joseph said. There’s some things that are in it that are true. Some things that are even perfect in Masonry. And so Joseph, as a restorer of truth that’s already on earth, we could kind of typify his methods as modifying, adapting, reassembling, borrowing, recontextualizing, reworking, salvaging. All these words are useful in understanding what the project of Restoration is. Yes, it’s truth coming from heaven, but it’s also gathering the truth that’s already here, on earth, in one, in Christ.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so with Masonry, here’s a researcher: His name’s Clark Goble. He says, “In designing the endowment, Joseph made use of both Protestant elements as well as Masonic elements. It was not a straight borrowing. Some elements he followed, others he broke with.” Right? He’s taking the true, good, pulling it in. Other things he’s leaving out. The things that you mentioned, for instance, the ritualistic teaching form, the pedagogy, is good. He keeps it. Ritualistic teaching form. Outward forms, symbolic gestures with your hands. Keeps some clothing, aprons, that kind of stuff. Keeps it, adds to it a little bit with some robes. He’s modifying. He’s reassembling. He’s assimilating. He’s recontextualizing. He puts this in a very different context than the Masonic ceremonies. Now it’s about creation, fall, atonement, journeying through covenant into the presence of God. Nothing like what the Freemason ritual is.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so that part he ditches and gives the better thing but keeps some of the forms, right? Some of the gestures, some of the clothing, and the ritualistic teaching style. And so I’d say it like this: the endowment is a fusion of Masonic elements that are already on earth with inspiration from heaven. It’s a great example of what Jesus was talking about in D&C 27, right? It’s this fusion of truth on earth with truth from heaven. So that’s what we get in the endowment, of which—like you, Casey, that took me a while to get there. Took a lot of digging deeper into some of the best books, some of the best researchers on this to look at what’s—what’s actually going on here? What’s happening? Because my assumption was like yours. I thought this all just came from heaven, and D&C 27 and other places have helped me to say that’s not the point of the whole Restoration. There’s a whole bunch of good that’s already here, and we need to gather it all in together.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s get it and put it back together.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible is another good example of this, right? Like, the Bible’s already here, but it’s not complete, so we’re going to get truth from heaven and truth that’s already on earth and fuse it together in the JST, right? That’s a good way to think about JST. And this is now another cool example that the temple endowment itself is a mixture. It’s a fusion of both heaven and earth.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hence the term Restoration, right? And when it comes to Masonry, too, it kind of opened my eyes to see what if Joseph Smith saw the way that Masons presented their ceremonies and just said, this is a great way to convey information. Let’s borrow their pedagogy. You can kind of see the same thing in the 20th century, where when we’re building temples and we’re going to have to do it in multiple languages, they decide to borrow the methodology of filmmaking. Today it’s standard for us to go to the temple and use a film to present the endowment—

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—because that’s a really effective method of pedagogy that doesn’t require a lot of people and can be used in multiple languages.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Joseph Smith sees the Masons presenting this kind of play, where the story is told through acting, and realizes, oh, this is a really effective way to get people to engage with the covenants that they need to make as part of their endowment from heaven.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So, again, properly contextualized, this one isn’t a big deal for me, but it may require you to revisit your assumptions about where the temple ceremonies come from, and what they are, too, because another assumption I think I brought to the table was that what we were seeing in the temple was the most accurate account of Adam and Eve. And now when I go to the temple, I realize, no, it’s clearly a presentation geared towards the people that are there. I mean, there are parts of the endowment where they turn and break the fourth wall and speak to the audience.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I don’t think Adam did that in real life, turn and start talking to the audience.

Scott Woodward:
Look into the space, yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So it’s clear that it was engineered to be instructive and that it’s less a literal history of Adam and Eve and more of a, hey, Adam and Eve are going to act as symbols that represent men and women, the covenants that they make, the challenges that they face and how they return back into the presence of God.

Scott Woodward:
It’s a ritualistic teaching form that is pretty powerful, especially in a covenant-making context.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. A little context does wonders, doesn’t it?

Scott Woodward:
That’s good. By the way, I just saw you do something where you fused today’s skill and last time’s skill. You just used context.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh!

Scott Woodward:
See what you just did there? You just used context, and you said that that context helped to modify your assumption.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Now you just did a little mental flexibility there. These tools all work together, as you just saw Casey do that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Scott, under your training, I am becoming a—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, whatever.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—mental jiu-jitsu/pickleball master, because I just did that without even thinking about it.

Scott Woodward:
Without even thinking about it!

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Realizing, oh, you know what? I had some assumptions that may have been wrong. That’s okay!

Scott Woodward:
Totally fine.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Maybe I was wrong about that. But, and it could be this way instead. Very good. Very good.

Scott Woodward:
Only except that wasn’t under my tutelage. You’re already a master.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I learned it—I learned it by mentally grappling with you, so.

Scott Woodward:
Eh. Nice try.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
You’re my Yoda.

Scott Woodward:
Whatever.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s see if we can tie this together. Again, today’s word is contextualization.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The ability to put true but often shocking and uncomfortable facts into their historical, theological, and cultural context. You ask yourself, what is the world this took place in, and how is it different from mine, and is that affecting how I see this? So we’ve been through some major mental skills here that can help a person master the complexities of church history and really any tough historical topic or doctrinal or theological topic. I think we might need one more episode just to put everything together, go back and review what we’ve done, and then maybe provide a few more examples. And we want to point out some scholars that have done a really, really great job doing this.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So I think next time we’re going to introduce you to a few more voices like Bruce and Marie Hafen, like Anthony Sweat. Scott, who’s someone that you really like that does a good job with this?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, no, I love the Hafens. I like what Tony’s done, Tony Sweat. Keith Erickson has a great little book out. I think he’s done a fantastic job of trying to help us think slowly about some of these skills. So, yeah, we’ll probably highlight at least those three and anyone else that comes to mind.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, Spencer Fluhman has been wonderful. Steve Harper is great at kind of helping us think metacognitively about our own thinking. Yeah, so we’ll highlight some folks.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We’ll highlight some good people and point you in their direction.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And then I think we’re going to try and get one of those good people to come on and just walk us through their mental process. I guess we’d call them, you know, mental jiu-jitsu pickleball masters to come on and finally tell us if we’ve been doing good or if we’re still, you know, like, yellow belts.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Young apprentices, yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’m totally mixing all my metaphors here. I just called us yellow belts, which I think is a karate thing.

Scott Woodward:
Maybe we could just call this pickle-jitsu.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Pickle-jitsu.

Scott Woodward:
Maybe, yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, mental pickle-jitsu, just to add another layer to it. So that’s going to be totally fun, and we hope that you’ll join us as we continue to study mental pickle-jitsu.

Scott Woodward:
Pickle-jitsu.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Alright, alright, alright. The point is this is fun for us. We hope it’s fun for you, and we will see you next time. So until then, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
All right. Thanks, Casey. We’ll see you, man. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Join us next time as we dig yet deeper into the mental skill set of durable disciples by considering the important relationship between evidence and faith 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.