Super Special Secret Source on Polygamy?

Intro Welcome to the Standard of Truth Podcast. In this podcast, Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat and Professor Richard LeDuc explore the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the life and teachings of Prophet Joseph Smith. They examine the original historical sources and provide context for events of the past. They approach the history of the Church with faith, expertise, and humor.

Gerrit Hi, welcome to another episode of The Standard of Truth Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat. I'm joined by my friend who's inching ever closer to the possible defense date, and there will be much rejoicing in the land. And they'll send presents to one another. The entire podcast family will come together with a loud huzzah as Richard crosses the finish line like the well-known tortoise in the tortoise and the hare analogy. Richard Ledoux.

Richard Hello, Gerrit. Thanks for having me back. What's funny about that is that I sent you a date of when I'm looking to defend, and your response as a great friend was, that's fantastic. I'd love to even come out, because who doesn't want to go to Stillwater in November? It's a hotspot, just an hour 15 minute drive from Tulsa or Oklahoma City. And so you're like, no, I'd love to come out. And my response was, oh, no, that's okay, making you feel like I was never getting a PhD at all.

Gerrit Yeah, I kind of felt like when I when I tried to like book a flight to go support Richard in this, that it was it was as if he's actually not been going to Oklahoma for his PhD work. Instead, he has been going there to gamble on Oklahoma State football, which did they cover their their spread last week, Richard?

Richard I'll bet he knows they they did, actually. They played pretty well.

Gerrit Interesting.

Richard They played pretty well.

Gerrit Wrong. So that's not what Richard's doing.

Richard No, of course not. But I do know how much good teams my son, my return missionary son this week, he's a sweet and innocent young man coming back from his mission, immediately thrown into the BYU, trying to find a job. Good luck with that. Best of luck. I believe I was a janitor and worked in a produce department at multiple stores. Gerrit, you were a taxi driver? We talked about that before.

Gerrit At one point, I was a taxi driver. I still have my taxi cab endorsement.

Richard That's hilarious.

Gerrit I fall back when this church history stuff goes south. I plan to try to get a medallion and just be a taxi driver.

Richard My understanding is that Cohen sells those medallions for super cheap.

Gerrit I've heard you can buy them. Yeah.

Richard That is a strange job to have as a taxi cab driver in Logan. I've always thought that's hilarious.

Gerrit I mean, so, and it was in Logan. I mean, cell phones were out, but they were terrible. It's not like someone could just text you. There was no app for this. You had to get a call from like dispatch. But in Logan, dispatch is just like one person who's like, hey, there's a lady over on Foreign Lane, and you'd go over there. So the only time that you ever had a lot of riders in your car was on Friday and Saturday night when everyone needed to ride home from the bar. And so you just kind of like...

Richard That was the White Owl?

Gerrit Oh, the White Owl was poppin.

Richard Crack a Lackin.

Gerrit Yeah, everybody wanted to go there. But when you did it during the day, 95% of your fares were not young people. They were getting a ride because they were no longer allowed to drive. And so, you know, the job was sold to me as something that, you know, oh yeah, you'll make... Sure, you're not gonna get paid almost anything, but you'll make so much money on tips. So, you know, and I'd been a pizza delivery driver in the past, so I was well aware of how, you know, you don't get paid very much, but you try to make it on tips. And sure, some of these people would tip me, but they were tipping by the scale and standards that was set sometime around the Calvin Coolidge administration.

Richard A hay penny?

Gerrit Yeah, I mean, they would be like, you know, you've been so nice, I'm gonna give you a whole quarter. Oh, boy. I can't wait to take that home to Angie. She'll be very impressed. We'll be able to eat the quarter, maybe. So, yeah, I was a taxi cab driver for a while. It was not lucrative in Logan, Utah, but I still maintain my taxi cab endorsement as the fallback plan for when you fail your PhD dissertation and this entire podcast collapses on the weight of it. Oh, that's good.

Richard I believe you told my son to apply to the MTC, and I think that he has to go through a CIA-level background check that will take about six months, and his mother and I are really happy to continue to pay for his lifestyle as he figures it out. We're hopeful that he will find a job soon. My understanding is that there are just so many jobs in Provo when school has already started that he just won't know what to do. But it is funny to me, the taxi cab driver and Logan, I was like, do you have to have any continuing education to keep up your license?

Gerrit You have to go do a special training and take a special exam from the DMV to get the taxi cab endorsement. But once you have the endorsement, as long as you re-up it and pay the extra money, it's surprising that the state really only requires money for you to re-up it. As long as you pay the extra money and don't let it lapse, every time you renew your license, you can just renew it.

Richard How about that? That's fun.

Gerrit I should show everyone my driver's license on our next newsletter so they can see the taxi cab endorsement and know that I'm not lying to them.

Richard Well, that's great. Well, Garry, we have, want to just jump straight into the Phebe Draper Palmer Brown mailbag.

Gerrit It were seven minutes.

Richard Just we're going to get straight to it here.

Gerrit Let's start off. No cross talk. Let's go.

Richard We got an email from Bryce, and it was one of the better emails we've ever received. We're still reading it. It is lengthy, and it is funny, and it is filled with all kinds of Easter eggs. But there is one particular part. He asks many questions, most of which we will never get to, some of which we might. Well, probably not. Well, Bryce listens to the show. He knows we'll never do it. But there is one specific story that he tells that I thought was particularly funny. To my dear friends, Dr. Gerrit, the Six Pistol Gunslinger Dirkmaat, and the world renowned Gangrenous Antelope, Professor Richard LeDuc. I first started listening to your podcast in March of this year, when a friend of mine suggested I listen to it after I told him I wanted to learn more about history, church and American. Then he goes on to say how much he hated it.

Richard I went ahead and removed that part of that. But eventually he got around to liking the show. And like Gerrit and I say, look, the podcast is an acquired taste. Give us four to five years, and you're going to start to like it.

Gerrit Yeah. I mean, essentially you'll start enjoying the podcast sometime around 10 to 15 years after we've stopped doing it.

Richard It's like when you see a star out in space, not knowing if that actually is burnt out because it takes so long for the light to travel.

Gerrit Yeah. Yeah. The supernova happened before the world was created, but you're just finding out about it now.

Richard Similar to how you will start to enjoy the podcast. He says, to entice you further, Richard, to share this email on the podcast, I served my mission in California, Carlsbad mission. Marietta and Temecula were my first two areas, Marietta for a particular time period and Temecula a little time after that. Let's just say the summers there are as hot as Protestant hell if you didn't have a car and had to be on a bike. Now, I didn't serve in the Carlsbad mission, but my mission, the California Riverside mission, has been carved up a little bit since I've come home. Gerrit, we baptized so many people that they had to build a temple, and they had to just break it up into additional, just so many people.

Gerrit You'll notice there's no temple in Wisconsin.

Richard Well, I'm kidding a little bit, obviously.

Gerrit I'm just putting out there that there's not a temple in Wisconsin.

Richard You're not kidding about that.

Gerrit No, there's not one.

Richard Well, so Murrieta and Temecula, when I served my mission, it was in Riverside. He's talking about how hot it is, how hot it is in Murrieta and Temecula. That was the coolest part of my mission. People would get really excited when they'd get transferred to Murrieta or Temecula because Oceanside was about an hour away, and sometimes you'd get a little bit of breeze that would come in, and the evenings, and cool things down. The fact that he's talking about how hot it is. Now, Carlsbad, it's got Legoland, it's got all the fun stuff down there on the ocean. No doubt, it was the hottest part of his mission. But I'm telling you, in the California Riverside mission, it was the coolest by a lot. I mean, we had Palm Springs.

Gerrit I feel like when Riker gets home from his mission, you're not going to be able to tell stories about how hot your mission was anymore.

Richard Tucson, my understanding is Tucson's warm, but I don't know that anything's hotter than Sun City, California.

Gerrit I've been there. Oh, it's-

Richard I mean, it's all people. I mean, people would, you know, they'd live in Riverside. They'd retire to Hemet, and then they'd die in Sun City. That's kind of the way that the progression would work.

Gerrit But they would die, not because they intended to like go into hospice there. They would just go there and burst into flames, is basically what you're saying.

Richard No one had grass. No one had grass. You know those movies or commercials where you're selling a Pepsi in some roadside gas station, right? Right. Like it shows the road and it looks wavy because it's just so hot, right? That's what my entire mission was. So in Sun City, no one had grass. Because people were a little bit older, so they didn't want to take care of it. So it was asphalt that they would paint green. I don't know what the temperature was because I didn't have a phone, or any way to check it. But they had those big thermometers out in front of, on their garages and they were buried at 135, as the heat is just radiating off of the asphalt.

Gerrit Would you say Sun City is hotter than the Palm Springs area?

Richard Boy, Palm Springs can get pretty hot. There's no question about it. But there is some grass, there's some vegetation.

Gerrit Well, that's just because all the rich people who live there are, how much money does it cost to water that grass? Pay it. It's all golf courses and grass.

Richard Well, I mean, I've joked with you about this before, where there's a couple of hills, the hills aren't too much, but going up the hill was the best part. Going down the hill, it was like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where your face is just melting off with the hot heat that's radiating anyway.

Gerrit You'd be riding a bike in this?

Richard Oh yeah, for sure. Well, so, I mean, Bryce goes on here to say that he was in Temecula, he was going down a hill, he reached for a phone that was buzzing and he thought it was somebody that, you know, likely a golden investigator.

Gerrit Sure.

Richard He was about to hit his companion's bike, hits the brake, goes flying through the air. He has the, I believe I can fly in his mind playing through the soundtrack of the way it is, as he sprains both his wrists and fractures his elbow. His companion later has a stress fracture in his leg. And so because of this group that is greatly injured, they end up getting a car. So then he doesn't have to, so he, as he says, escapes the flaming fires of hell with the car as they drove around. Anyway, it's very funny. Again, the email was great. Bryce, it was just absolutely hilarious. Longest and funniest email that we've received in some time.

Gerrit Yeah, I think that you've already received three book offers on the email.

Richard Yeah, I've actually just replaced the dissertation that I haven't been working on with that email. It's equivalent length. So this next email comes to us from Page, and the subject is new David Hughes Horne. David Hughes Horne is the person who knew George Albert Smith and wrote that.

Gerrit To reference back to a previous podcast about an alleged George Albert Smith prophecy.

Richard Yes. Dear Dr. Dirkmaat and almost Dr. LeDuc, I'm a Laurel Litner, and even paid for the premium content myself, seems a bit of a rarity among Litners. But I'm an old lady that loves the banter and the content.

Gerrit Well, you're going to love this podcast.

Richard I also am very interested in your next year's June trip, especially if you're going to the sacred ground of Hons Mill, which we hope to be able to do. I've been quite interested in a couple of podcasts on the reminiscences of President George Albert Smith by David Hughes Horn. Just as an aside, I was involved in medical research most of my career, and have now stayed one in genealogical research. I find dead people. Documenting sources is always of utmost importance, or I would have been laughed out of my laboratories and career. You mentioned the source of the apocryphal stories given to Brother David Horn, and my ears perked right up. They have been permitted the whole time. Then, my eyes were open. Just kidding. I had to check the obituaries to make certain it was the David Hughes Horn that I knew quite well.

Richard He was in my stake, and I served as a consultant in our Stake Family Search Center. On Monday nights, with David, my wife Barbara and daughter loved the family dearly. And they came to know that David was a retired mechanical engineer with good, wild story to tell every Monday night. Once he'd capture your ear, the night was over. He never mentioned those reminiscences of President George Albert Smith, but he was full of stories and were full of gospel lore and sometimes just what seemed like out there, almost hard to believe but very fascinating and entertaining stories. I was never certain what was fact and what was fiction. He was very intelligent man, but the takes changed slightly with every telling. Well, now any good storyteller.

Gerrit Right. I mean, you've tried to get your audience.

Richard Yeah, I've never told the same story twice.

Gerrit Once.

Richard Yeah, that's the Truman Madsen reference there. His lovely wife Barbara would shut him down after an hour or two, not to make our ears so tired. I loved him so much as a sweet guy who was becoming a bit, I loved him as a sweet guy, but by the time I got to know him, we weren't sure what the truth or entertaining enhancements were, but he could certainly capture your imagination. I don't know what really was told to him or his family in that precious time with President George Albert Smith, but for the last couple of years of his life, he could spin a great yarn. I still see his wife and daughter on occasion and love them both. I'm just not sure how much of what I heard was truth or good stories, especially later in life. Sometimes, I knew he believed them. He certainly had an impeachable testimony though. Brother Horan loved telling his stories to any year he could catch.

Richard Please don't misunderstand. He was and I'm sure still is a wonderful, intelligent man. His tales were just way out there. Regardless, he believed in the gospel as did his family. I also have a testimony that will not be rocked. I was born with the same gender attraction, and I did leave the church for 20 years, not because I didn't believe, but the negative I felt around, but negate, I felt like a round. Okay, now, sometimes, Gerrit.

Gerrit Do you just read the words, or are you just writing this for her? I feel like you're AI, your ChatGPT just went down.

Richard Well, so one of the things that happens is that there are things that are said in emails that are a little more private.

Gerrit A little too personal.

Richard Yes, and so as I'm reading them, you edit them for content. But I'm reading them on the fly, and we've already established I don't know how to read.

Gerrit You could have edited them before. Sure.

Richard That's something that would have been helpful earlier. But here we are.

Gerrit But not right now.

Richard No, right now, I've never sounded more, and we're obviously going to keep it in because I'm making the mistake.

Gerrit I mean, look, we could edit it, but if we were to take a poll among our listeners right now, should we edit Richard's mistake out? I think I know which way the poll would trend.

Richard Of course. Of course. She felt like a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole.

Gerrit So either way, she didn't feel like she fit in.

Richard Yes, she did not feel like she fit in. I'm glad that I'm blowing it here as she's sharing a very personal moment.

Gerrit Yeah, incredibly personal moving story.

Richard Yes, about the same gender attraction that she had and left the church for 20 years. I am very, very sorry, Paige. This is the type of banter I can only imagine that you just love.

Gerrit Yeah. I'm sure she's super impressed by this.

Richard I'm sorry, Paige. After living the life for 30 years in Florida, I knew I wanted to come back to Utah and back into the church in full fellowship. It was so much hard work, but fantastic leaders, my Savior and great friends, like the horns, helped me come back into full fellowship and now attend the temple. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, just awesome. You may not want me on the trip in June now, but I am interested. Thanks again, as always, faithful Litner, Paige.

Gerrit Paige, I want you on the trip even more so. First of all, as to the referenced, you know, personally knowing David Horne, everything that I ever, I mean, I didn't know him, but everything I read on him or saw of him was that he was an absolutely devoted member. And so I'm glad to hear that from somebody else who feels the same way. But I really want to spend a little bit of time and just commend you for your decision to sacrifice as much as you have in order to come back to the church and to become an active member again. I don't think there's very many people who fully understand the sacrifice that you've made.

Gerrit And you know, I don't know you. And so I certainly have no idea. But we live in a world where there are many people who argue that if you have to choose between something that is a part of you and your faith, well, you, the faith is what goes by the wayside. And so I cannot express my respect and love to you more reading that email. Thank you for being willing to sacrifice for the gospel and its truth. And absolutely would love to have you on a tour. If not, grateful to have you as a sister in the gospel. Would love to meet you sometime. And I'm humbled by your faithfulness.

Richard That's a beautiful sentiment. And we would like to direct Paige to standardoftruth.com, where she can click on tours and sign up for the tour. Getting aside, though, Paige, that was a beautiful email that was very, very perfectly read by me.

Gerrit Yeah, just keep saying it and some people will believe it.

Richard Yes, this last email, thankfully for everyone, it's the last one that comes to us from...

Gerrit And not just for this episode. We're no longer going to read emails. We've decided on the fly an executive decision was made. So when we say this is the last email, we mean that there is no Phebe Draper mail back. It's gone.

Richard I'm going to send some sort of device to the servers at Google, at Gmail, to fry their system so that there will be no more emails, not just on this podcast, ever.

Gerrit Ever, anywhere.

Richard Hi guys, I'm writing this fast and don't want to misspell your name, so I lumped you two together. I wanted to get this to you so you could protect anyone else that has experienced the same thing. I received a book from an unknown sender that is called Joseph Smith Revealed, a faithful telling, exploring, and alternative polygamy narrative. It is because of listening to this podcast that I knew to check the author and her credentials. No, she is not a historian with a PhD or a professor soon to have a PhD in business. What we've established, it's not going to be soon.

Gerrit I like her that she, that's her level of, you know what? If they've almost got their business PhD, I'm still willing to listen.

Richard I didn't order it and was very concerned about who sent it and how they got my address. I chatted with Amazon customer service who could not tell me who sent it. They said I could return it and get refunded for it. Whatever nefarious purpose was going on to get me to read the book didn't happen. Though I know Dr. Dirkmaat does not like to talk of polygamy, I asked Heavenly Father about it and had a personal experience regarding the truth of it. So I have a testimony of it. I can't be the only one that was targeted with this book. So if you hear of anyone else, tell them to return it and get the refund. Thanks for the education and protection I received in your podcast. Joanne, so that's very nice and the good thing is that you'll get a refund. So you come out ahead, number one. Number two, I actually regularly send order books and send them to Gerrit that I know he'll hate like this.

Richard But Joanne, in this case, I did not do that for you. I can promise.

Gerrit Very good. Well, so she asked the question about it, and it is a very strange thing that it was just sent to her with no notation, with no, I mean, look, every author is certainly desperate to get people to read their book. But at some point, you can't just send out free copies to everyone in the world. If you want to be able to publish it. So, I think that, you know, the first place that you went was correct. You went to who is the author of this book. Two things you want to look at, who's the author and where was it published? Well, we can figure out the second answer pretty quickly. Where was it published? It was self-published. Okay. So what does that mean when something is self-published? It means that, it doesn't mean that everything in it is false, but it does mean that nothing in the book, not one thing was independently verified by the publisher.

Gerrit Not one thing. Now that doesn't mean that something in the book is inherently false because it wasn't verified, but it's part of the publication process. Now, publishers, this is going to come as a shock to Richard, so I need him to brace himself, even with his almost business PhD in hand. Publishers are primarily interested in making money off of the books that they publish. What? It's a stunning, stunning thing. So at least publications that are designed to be popular. University presses are the academic standard because most university presses don't operate at a profit. Now, that does not mean that everything that is published in a university press is accurate. I've used the example before on this podcast of an outstanding book that was written about the idea of hell in early America, that when it came to Latter-day Saint theology, couldn't have been more wrong if they were just, you know, Googling on the internet, hey, what do Mormons believe?

Gerrit I mean, she confused terms. She used false sources. She equated, you know, decades later reminiscences as the same thing, as if someone were speaking it on their own. So, and that was an Ivy League published book. So I am not saying that if something is published by an academic press, that that means everything that is in it is accurate. I know firsthand as a scholar that that is totally not the case. However, when something is published at an academic press, when it's a history book, it at least goes through a peer review process, or it's at least supposed to. That means it's sent out to someone who is a published scholar on the topic that is under consideration, and that scholar provides feedback and will inform the press.

Gerrit You know, they may say, look, they are wrong about this, this, this, this, and this. And unless they change it, you can't publish this because this isn't true information. Now a press might still decide to publish it anyway, but usually presses try to protect themselves. They, as much as they want to make a big splash, they also don't want to have to issue a retraction if something is ridiculously false. Right? Now there are examples where peer review failed. I mean, famously failed, where peer reviews weren't really done, or when they were done, they were done with a political idea behind it. And I've used that example before of, you know, one of the things I was taught in my graduate school training was, we used the example of someone who wrote a book about early gun culture in America. And essentially what they wanted to argue is that by looking at probate records, is this the most boring thing we've ever talked about?

Gerrit I said probate records. I feel like once I say probate records, anyone who was listening is no longer listening.

Richard Look, I got a really good friend. He's a probate attorney. I think that Dan just got really excited.

Gerrit So is he listening or does he just not listen to the podcast?

Richard He doesn't listen to the podcast.

Gerrit But you can send him this episode.

Richard Well, so I did so poorly at the beginning. I'm not going to send this episode to anyone.

Gerrit What if you just cut a clip out of me saying probate records and sent him that?

Richard We'll see if we could. I'll send it to the University of Pacific or Pacific University Law School, see if I can get anybody going. That's where we went to law schools. This is both a shout out to Dan and his law school relating to probate to a person that doesn't listen to the podcast.

Gerrit Our lawyer friend Larry listening, do you think he got excited by the fact that we mentioned probate records?

Richard I don't think he does probate law, although you will be presenting actually in a couple of weeks.

Gerrit Yeah, in a few weeks to his group.

Richard Yeah, there you go. Bring it up there, Gerrit. Bring it up there.

Gerrit Okay, there's why I bring it up. Anyway, this guy argued that by going through probate records, he determined that it was actually a very small percentage of Americans actually owned guns. So he makes this claim, and of course the underlying aspect of the claim is that people who used the Second Amendment to defend private gun ownership today by claiming that gun ownership, you know, everyone owned a gun in early America, and so that's what they would have anticipated. They're actually wrong because records actually demonstrate the opposite. Now that book went through peer review. Unfortunately, I don't know who the peer reviewers are, but my guess is that those peer reviewers were a little bit clouded by what this book was saying.

Gerrit Look, it's not, I'm probably not surprising very many of our listeners that the Second Amendment is at times a controversial issue for some people.

Richard Whoa, hold on. So you're saying, first of all, the publishers are trying to make money, and now you're saying that the Second Amendment is controversial?

Gerrit To some people, it's occasionally controversial.

Richard Oh my gosh.

Gerrit Look, if I get to the quartering of truth, then, then we will know that we've arrived. I mean, there's a reason why you don't ever hear any arguments about the Third Amendment. The Third Amendment just passes by the wayside.

Richard Are people pro Third Amendment, like are anti Third Amendment? Have you found that in your studies?

Gerrit We should start a pro or anti Third Amendment to the constitution group. Yeah.

Richard We'll create a landing page and put it out and connect it to our website.

Gerrit Anti Third Amendment. We have to decide whether we want to be pro or anti.

Richard I think we want to mix it up, Gerrit. I think you can't just sit on the sidelines. I think we got to get in there. We got to be anti Third Amendment. I think we want troops. You want troops more than people's homes? Yeah. But I want them dressed the way they would have been dressed in revolutionary times. I don't want to wearing khaki or the khaki.

Gerrit The Marines can be in your home against your will, but only if they're wearing a three-cornered hat and maybe an off-blue suit coat.

Richard But it has to be British.

Gerrit Oh, so you want British troops stationed in your home?

Richard I want re-enactors stationed in people's homes. That's what I'm saying.

Gerrit I think we should talk to the people at Colonial Williamsburg about this.

Richard I've already sent a message to them on their website.

Gerrit As an aside, I believe this used to be true. I don't know if it still is, but at least used to be that the Third Amendment was the only amendment to the constitution that had never been challenged in the Supreme Court.

Richard You know what, get our crack research staff on that.

Gerrit Get our crack research. I mean, they've done so well with reading their emails so far. I'm sure they'll have an answer for us. Anyway, as you can imagine, this was an incredibly politically charged thing, and people were looking for this to be this kind of, ah-ha, ideas backing the Second Amendment are all faulty because, in fact, early Americans almost owned no guns at all. It wasn't everybody owns a gun. It was almost no one owns a gun. So that made it through peer review, and it got published, and boy, did it make a splash. And then certain gun right organizations hired their own historians to go check all of the research that was put into this book. So they went and they checked all the footnotes. What did they find? I'm generalizing here, I'm summarizing. So this is not word for word. But essentially what they found is that not only were some of the records that were cited as evidence of a lack of gun ownership, not only did they not say what this author claimed and what they said, in multiple cases, the archives that housed those probate records actually had no record of this scholar ever visiting and performing research.

Gerrit The scholar himself claimed that he had images of all those records, but they were unfortunately destroyed in a flood of his office and whatnot. And it was, you know, it was a huge, it was a huge scandal in the historical community. That's the reason why I was studying it when I was in, when I was in graduate school. My point is peer review is not perfect and publishers are far from perfect. So if peer review isn't perfect, if already bad things get published, even with peer review, what do you think happens when there is no peer review? I know one time I was reading an article for peer review and the person writing had confused the fact that Las Vegas had once been part of Utah territory.

Gerrit Because, of course, Las Vegas is in Nevada today. And so in this document, when they referenced Las Vegas, they assumed it had to have been Las Vegas, New Mexico, which there is a Las Vegas, do we have any listeners in Las Vegas, New Mexico?

Richard I don't believe so. My niece actually went to school in Las Vegas, New Mexico. What? She was on a rodeo scholarship. Yeah.

Gerrit Wow. I'm sure she doesn't listen to the podcast.

Richard So there's no question. Yeah, I could. Yeah. Hey, Kindy, you're getting a shout out.

Gerrit Yeah. You don't know what this is. You don't know what your uncle does. But also, anyway, and so that would have gone to publication because this clearly the publisher had no idea. Right. And it would have gone to publication if I hadn't pointed it out and said, Hey, actually, this is you. You just don't understand the history of Utah territory. You know, and and so what peer review can, you know, help correct mistakes. So now imagine what happens when there is no peer review. Again, listen to what I'm saying. I'm not saying that peer reviewed publications means that they're all accurate. What I'm saying is. You have a an improved chance of an accurate publication if other professionals read it and you have a press that doesn't want to be sullied by publishing a bunch of false stuff. Imagine if you don't have any of those things.

Gerrit So, when you write in your book, let me tell you the truth about Joseph Smith's plural marriages. Who's deciding whether or not what you're saying is an accurate statement? Who's deciding whether or not you're using the most accurate source? Who's deciding whether or not you're fairly representing the alternative arguments? Well, I'll tell you who. The answer is nobody. Again, I'm not saying that anything that's self-published is inherently false, but I am saying as a reader, if it's a topic that you are unfamiliar with, like you aren't a scholar yourself, you actually have no idea whether or not it's accurate. And you're putting your whole faith and trust that this person who published it on their own, is going to have the same skills at reviewing it and revising it as a professional in the field.

Gerrit Then you also have to ask your question, ask the question, why is it published by themselves? If the book has good information in it, if it's information that's helpful, if it's information that's provable, if it's information that's defensible, why is it being published on its own? Now, no doubt, there would be some people that say, well, because this is so powerful, it has so much truth in it that, you know, that the people who control the publishing enterprises and those, you know, those liberal academics at the university, they'll do everything they can to keep it from being published. Well, there are multiple, quite, you know, there are multiple quite conservative publishing outlets for, for those types of arguments. There are multiple outlets of publications that are, you know, not academic publications, but which there is some peer reviewing that's done.

Gerrit So you always have to ask yourself why. It's kind of like when we talk about, you know, the signs of the Second Coming. If this is really something that I need to be buying a bunch of dehydrated milk over, then why is it coming from some guy I've never heard of, then from the church itself? Similarly, if this book and the arguments in this book were academically credible. Now, look, maybe someone writes a book like, this is how I feel about rainbows. Okay, that's an opinion. But the very title of the book is making an academic historical claim. Joseph Smith revealed, what is that saying? That what we think about Joseph Smith is false. A faithful telling. Okay, so now it's making a claim that all the other accounts are not faithful.

Gerrit Exploring an alternative polygamy narrative. You can read what the description of the book is. Joseph Smith was a great Christian thinker, religious revolutionary, and a controversial figure. Hey, that sentence is true. Of all the things attributed to him, polygamy is one of the most controversial. Kind of bearing the lead on that. It is one of the most discussed issues in Mormon history and continues to be the center of an ongoing controversy and debate.

Richard Well, so now that's accurate. Every time you ever do a fireside ever, and you open it up to questions, every question is about polygamy.

Gerrit Yeah, every question. I'll be like, does anyone have a question about the First Vision? Yes. What drove us to the Second Wife? What in the world?

Richard Well, and this is part of the reason, you know, a little look behind the curtain here. Part of the reason I do so bad at reading these emails is because of all of the references to polygamy that I have to cut out on the fly. That's part of it.

Gerrit I see. So we're going to give it more references and you're just editing them out?

Richard I'm just editing them on the thought. By the way, Gerrit, the crack research staff got back to us on the Third Amendment. I know this interrupts what you're doing. So you let me know when will be the good time to give you a... No, no.

Gerrit Just tell me now.

Richard Okay. All right. The Third Amendment is... Now, this is according. So if you can believe it, constitution.congress.gov. So the liars there at that particular website. The Third Amendment has rarely been a subject of litigation and the Supreme Court has never directly construed it. Only two lower federal courts. There have been references to it. They say, as Justice Joseph Story stated in his commentaries on the constitution of the United States, the provision speaks for itself. So there's a couple of references, Griswold versus Connecticut.

Gerrit I hope that's Clark W. Griswold.

Richard It is. It is. Cats versus Connecticut. It seems like Connecticut's coming for your stuff, by the way.

Gerrit Why is Connecticut desperately trying to house troops in your home?

Richard Laird versus Tatum. These are areas of surveillance and zones of privacy, search and seizure, so it was tangentially there. Then there was a case in the state of New York that was claimed, they violated it. It's Engblom versus Carey. Finally, Connecticut isn't doing something to take away.

Gerrit But really, we're just talking about the Eastern Seaboard. They're the only people trying to put troops in your house.

Richard By the way, the cats, that's 1967, Griswold, that's 1965, and then this Engblom versus Carey is 82, relatively recently.

Gerrit The two were Vietnam War era ones, so probably surrounding things dealing with the Vietnam War and national Guard mobilization, things like that.

Richard So the Engblom versus Carey one, that was about corrections officers and the rights of prisoners relating to, so the Third Amendment concerning the state of New York violated correction officers' Third Amendment rights when they use their state-owned residences without the consent to house the members of the New York national Guard. So, that's the Second Circuit Court that heard that one.

Gerrit But the Supreme Court has never ruled on it.

Richard No, no, no, absolutely. And the Second Court, you know.

Gerrit I mean, come on, get out of here with your Second Court stuff.

Richard Yeah, I'm a Ninth Circuit guy, you know?

Gerrit Yeah. Oh, what about the Fifth?

Richard That's pretty good. Ninth's crazy. They were notorious for just making all kinds of rulings that get overturned.

Gerrit Anyway, whatever they want.

Richard There's your Third Amendment. There you go, Gerrit.

Gerrit That's good to know. I think all of our listeners were much edified about learning about the Third Amendment.

Richard But don't go to Connecticut.

Gerrit Yeah. Well, not if you're going to try to take away people's Third Amendment rights.

Richard No, that's what Connecticut is going to do.

Gerrit Oh yeah. Well, yeah. Don't go there if you don't want soldiers living in your house. We're going to have some of our Connecticut listeners email in and let us know how often that rights been violated.

Richard I love the idea. It's like it's 2024. Someone's in the Connecticut national Guard. They're walking into a random house. They're stomping their feet, kicking off the mud, going to have a seat on their couch.

Gerrit They all have British accents.

Richard Crack open, I assume, an adult beverage, possibly a soda and say, hey, what's on the TV tonight? They're like, who are you?

Gerrit They're demanding that you bring a Cornish game hand. What are you doing?

Richard You're like, this is Connecticut. What are you talking about?

Gerrit Yes. I need a Cornish game hand and I need some bangers. Bangers from the ash. The nice part about having the British take over your house and make you cook for them is you're not going to go through a lot of spices.

Richard Do you know how expensive saffron is or whatever?

Gerrit I mean, because you're going to be serving up some incredibly bland food. So you'll be fine on that department.

Richard Do you have a pot? Yes. Do you have water? Yes. That's all you need. We're going to be boiling everything.

Gerrit It's vinegar is the condiment. So back to this description that's on Amazon, right? The LDS Church claims that their past practice of plural marriage originated with Joseph. Other branches of early Mormonism, most notably the RLDS, claim that Joseph never taught or practiced anything that even closely resembled polygamy. Now there's an automatic full stop for me. Now look, this book just came out in the last two years. Okay? The RLDS Church, which is no longer called the RLDS Church, but the Community of Christ does not any longer affirm that Joseph never practiced polygamy. You can get it from their historians. Now, I realize there was a lengthy history in which they did argue that, which is all the more reason why someone needs to probably ask the question.

Gerrit If the branch, the break off of Mormonism, so called, that was most desperate to prove that Joseph never practiced polygamy is now admitting that he did, why would this author somehow have insight that trumps that? But notice, she's actually trying to do both. She's trying to claim that the RLDS support the argument she's making. Yet he consistently denied that he practiced plural marriage and spoke out against it both publicly and privately. Well, you'd have a really hard time proving that privately one, given the fact that we have numerous accounts that are privately. Publicly, it's true. Joseph Smith, in one public address, says, you know, I'm accused of having more than one wife, but I can only find one.

Gerrit I mean, and there can be reasons for that, that of course, these marriages are religious in nature, not illegal in nature as far as Illinois law is concerned. As you explore an alternative polygamy narrative, you may be surprised by what you find. You may even discover the truth. How about that? What a sell job on that.

Richard Is it in italics or something to where you would read it?

Gerrit No, I just knew that they wanted it read that way. Yeah. It's really low. So it's important then to figure out who the author is. Do they have any training? Are they a historian? Do they have any special access to sources? In other words, aside from the fact that I want to believe what they say, why am I going to listen to what they have to say? It's also important to note that this author is a noted and public face of the Denver Snufferite movement, which is an apostate movement following Denver Snuffer, who claims that the current church has been led astray. But don't worry, Denver has been visited with Jesus numerous times, and he's leading people the correct way. And so I'm actually not surprised, Joanne, that this was sent to you anonymously, because that's part of the way that this apostate movement attempts to increase its followers, is by just trying to help those who are active Latter-day Saints see things differently, but from inside of the church, and then they'll be led to this other narrative.

Gerrit You can tell just by some of the, from some of the comments that are on the Amazon about it. This book is long overdue. One of the many that are revealing so much so fast. It's filled with light and truth and ample evidence. I've been studying this subject for 30 years, trying to come to a correct determination of this principle. I was taught at church, but one which I never felt came from God. I've studied it for many sources, but was never satisfied. I was never satisfied and understood until now. In the past year, heaven has been revealing to my soul so many things. I shelved my concerns over the years because there was not good evidence until now. And then she goes on to say that section 132 was fabricated. It's now proven to be fabricated and tampered with. Proven to be fabricated. How in the world would you prove it to be fabricated?

Gerrit You have the person who wrote it down testifying that they're the ones who wrote it down. You have multiple people attesting to its creation, proving it to be fabricated is a really great example of someone overstating what evidence they could possibly have. God is not the author of it. I know without a doubt that polygamy is manmade. Okay, so God's not the author of it, you mean also God's not the author of it in the Bible as well.

Richard This is something that-

Gerrit God's doing a really poor job here.

Richard No question, God needs to do way better. This is a super frustrating point for me. Of all the things we've talked about, all the negative things about Connecticut, all the things we've said, this one just really sticks in my craw as it relates to this. I understand that the idea of polygamy is a hard one. I get that. I get how that can create problems for peoples based on our culture, based on our understanding, based on some of the history as people read that. But to state- and this happens all of the time. Polygamy is the worst moral sin that has ever happened in the history of ever, just blowing right past the entire Old Testament. It is something to me that is stunning and frustrating. I'm not saying that people, I can understand again why it's hard, but get out of here with that. It's just the stupidest thing I've ever. Look, you're coming at this and you're trying to be reasoned and whatever, but that's just stupid.

Gerrit Well, especially if you're going to still claim to be a Christian. Look, it's one of the things that early Latter-day Saints had to deal with. If you would have all these people condemning them and telling them they were going to burn in hell and what horrible people they were, and because they practice polygamy and being told that this isn't from God, and Latter-day Saints would say, what about, I don't know, Isaiah and Moses and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob? I mean, like the Old Testament is filled with the practice of plural marriage. And so in the 19th century, you better believe Latter-day Saints defending it. That's part of what they said. People would say, oh, that's not a practice from God. And Latter-day Saints would be like, wait a minute, you're the ones who say that every single word in the Bible is true. You're the ones attacking us because you say every word in the Bible is literally true, and that's the reason why we're false.

Gerrit And yet that's words in the Bible. Yeah, well, we don't do that anymore. Oh, very interesting. It's probably like the same way the Trinity is in the Bible, right? I mean, it's one of those things that is believed so culturally that people then want to claim they have evidence for it. I mean, this commenter on the book, what goes on a little rant to say that Brigham Young died in his lies and sins. He was never a prophet in any shape or form, which is the entire argument of the whole snufferite movement. Again, why do people who follow this woman and people like apostates like Denver Snuffer, I want to hear the reason why they think that only self-published, unacademic, un-peer-reviewed books on this topic can be published?

Gerrit Because I can tell you right now, I could list off a dozen academic presses that would publish a book demonstrating that Brigham Young invented polygamy and they are not Latter-day Saint presses, they are not friends of Latter-day Saints, and they would have a field day over it because it would undermine the entire truth claim of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because you'd be claiming that Brigham Young was a false prophet, therefore he couldn't have passed on any of the keys that are now held, which is what these apostate groups hold. So you better believe there are academic presses that would fight and claw over that. And there would be historians who would be winning gigantic Bancroft prizes in history if they could prove in an academic book that Brigham Young invented polygamy.

Gerrit It would be... Now, I realized to a Latter-day Saint, it's super personal when it's related to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. And so I've got to find a way that Joseph didn't practice it or teach it. But the rest of the world doesn't care. And I don't know that Latter-day Saints realize that. Sure, sure, the evangelical anti-Mormon who's attacking you is primarily going to attack what Joseph said and did. The vast majority of people consider the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormonism so-called in all of its facets, whether it's RLDS or LDS or whatever, as being a false religion. They're not carrying water for Brigham Young. Scholars who are trying to publish are not carrying water for Brigham Young.

Gerrit To them, it doesn't matter whether polygamy originated with Joseph Smith or with Brigham Young. You guys like ever practiced it, right? Okay, so John Taylor Wilford Woodruff, George Albert Smith, it doesn't make any difference to me. If anyone in the church ever practiced it, I'm going to claim that that's a moral evil. So it is something that people should actually take very seriously. The field of history is incredibly competitive. The field of history is constantly looking for ways that you can make arguments that other people haven't made, especially when it surrounds key figures from any religious group. If there were scholars who believe that there was complete and total evidence that the entirety of plural marriage was fabricated later by Brigham Young, they would publish on it.

Gerrit So you have to ask yourself, why is it that they aren't? Why are all the thousands of religious scholars in the nation, why are they well aware that it's obvious that the sources all indicate that Joseph never received Doctrine and Covenants section 132? Why is it that they aren't publishing on that then? Why is it always self-published? Why is it always a blog? Why is it always someone's YouTube channel? Why is it always some talk before an apostate group? Why isn't it published and winning people awards all the time? And you already know the answer why. It's because it can't get published, because it's not making an academic argument, because it's not following the rules of history. And you can't find a historian to put their name to it because it's a bad argument.

Gerrit Again, we talked about this before. I understand that this is a very difficult topic. I get it. Pretending that facts don't exist is not the way to deal with it. Because then what happens? Then you get led down a road to apostasy, where people will claim to you, aha, follow me, and you no longer have to believe that Joseph Smith ever practiced polygamy. Oh, and by the way, we're also not going to believe other things. We'll trade our two centuries of modern prophetic utterance, claiming that all of those people were liars and evil. Because here's the thing, it's not just Brigham Young. You don't get to just pretend that it's Brigham Young. What about John Taylor?

Gerrit Well, he was obviously in on it too. What about Wilford Woodruff? I'll guarantee you something. Anyone making the argument that Wilford Woodruff is deliberately lying about Joseph Smith's teachings on plural marriage has not read Wilford Woodruff's journals. And I get it, I understand. I'll give him a little bit of a pass, because, you know, they are thousands of pages long, because that guy kept a journal almost every day from the 1830s till his death in 1898. Still, you can't read those journals and come away going, oh, yeah, this person is obviously very, very deceitful. This person is just trying to buoy this up. There is no record that demonstrates any of that. What do you have?

Gerrit Hundreds of reminiscent accounts, dozens at the very least, of people saying that Joseph taught it and practiced it. Dozens of women who say that they practice it. Now, they're all liars. Eliza Arseneau, obvious liar. Everyone's always known Eliza Arseneau as a liar. She's also the person, by the way, that tells us that we have a Heavenly Mother. So she's not lying about that part. So that part is true. Okay. The part that I like is true. I also like the song, Oh My Father, but everything else is a lie. What about William Clayton's journal? Well, that's fabricated. Okay. Who says that it's fabricated? The FBI? Because they're pretty good at fabricated documents now. Well, the church had it for years. And so they obviously put that in there. Okay. Well, here's some letters from William Clayton, where he talks about how Joseph Smith taught him about plural marriage.

Gerrit So, so the journals that were written at the time on ink that we can test, on paper that we can test, they're fraudulent because they make a reference to Joseph, not a reference, dozens of references to Joseph teaching about plural marriage. But the person who also wrote those journals never claimed that they were fraudulent, and himself wrote many personal statements talking about plural marriage. You can see why an actual scholar says, this is ridiculous. You want to make an argument not because you have evidence, but because you want to say it stands to reason. I mean, I realize it's really difficult for people to come to terms with. But you know what?

Gerrit Paige had a very difficult life experience, a circumstance that is crushing, and she came to terms with it. The men and women who did practice polygamy in the early church, they came to terms with it. Lucy Walker is claiming that God miraculously told her to marry Joseph Smith. But this woman, in her unvetted, unpeer-reviewed, unacademic, uncredentialed book, would have you believe that Lucy Walker is a liar. That Eliza R. Snow is a liar. That Helen Kimball is a liar. Boy, a lot of people are liars. And it comes back to what I have said before on this topic.

Gerrit I recognize that it is very difficult to come to terms with. At the same time, all of your claims to defend women, which is often how polygamy is criticized, I just feel so bad for the women that practiced it. You can only go so far in your criticism before you're actually criticizing as liars the very people that you claim, and that's what it has to be. It just has to be a claim at that point. You claim that you care about it. Because if you actually cared about them, you would listen to them when they say, an angel appeared to me and told me to practice plural marriage. When they say, I prayed, and God told me that I was supposed to practice.

Gerrit Rather than throwing out all academic evidence, just so you can feel better about a very difficult topic, it's much easier or much more healthy spiritually, to just simply say, I don't know why God commanded plural marriage. I don't know how that will work out. I don't know how God will recompense all those who suffered under it. But I know the church is true. I know that President Nelson is a prophet. And hopefully we can all, you know, maybe that's your long dark night of the soul, as Mother Teresa talked about, trying to come to terms with it. Don't allow the fact that you don't fully understand a practice from the past to destroy your eternal future.

Gerrit Because the only way that any of us are going to the celestial kingdom with our families is if Joseph had those prophetic keys and he passed them on to Brigham Young. Pass them to John Taylor, to Wilfred Woodruff and on down the line. It's important that you don't allow people to claim that they have special knowledge as to why you shouldn't follow the church. Or if only you've read what I've read, then you don't have to follow, oh, President Nelson's wrong because I read this and X and Y. Or actually, I know more about, I mean, it's kind of what we've been talking about for the past couple of weeks. It's the same kind of thing. I know something about the Second Coming that no one else knows. And you might be very faithful and think that. But it's where we have to be the most careful, because that's how people get to see. I think about after Joseph's murder, there was a man by the name of James Emmett, who decided that he was going to lead a group of people out of Nauvoo, to kind of pre-leave, you know, before the church was ready to leave.

Gerrit I'm not waiting around for, you know, the army to come in and start slaughtering people again, like it did in far west. And James Emmett gathered up people. Now look, James Emmett was a faithful member of the church. He was a faithful guy. But the brethren kind of said, hey, you need to stop trying to gather people to go. And James Emmett eventually leaves with several dozen people and they move out west into Iowa and they become more and more disconnected with the church. Now, one of the problems is when a brother goes and visits this encampment and he finds that all of the people in the encampment feel like they were following Brother Joseph, who told them that they needed to leave Nauvoo. These people have no idea that James Emmett is not following the Council of the Twelve.

Gerrit And so the brethren actually prepare a letter. This is Nauvoo, February 27th, 1845. Dear brethren, we the Twelve and some of the other authorities of the church, being in council assembled, send unto you this epistle by the hand of our beloved, trustworthy and faithful brother, Amos Lyman, whom we have council to visit you and give you instructions for your good and salvation. Though our council has been lightly esteemed and disregarded by Brother Emmett, yet we believe that there are those among you who have been honestly and sincerely deceived by his vain pretensions and misrepresentations. There are really, really, really good people who, because they decide to follow anyone that isn't the prophet and the Quorum of the Twelve, will find themselves deceived.

Gerrit Not evil, not looking to destroy the world, not trying to fornicate every other second and spread the syphilis and mosquitoes that we've talked about in the past. They're honest and they're sincerely deceived. So how could they have been kept from being deceived? If instead of listening to James Emmett say, oh no, I talked to Brigham Young and it's like totally fine that we leave. They could have asked Brigham Young. I would have said, it's not. And they packed up their bags. In fact, we have great interviews. I know we don't really have time to go over this, but we have great interviews from some of these people explaining, like I totally thought I was doing what I was supposed to do, packing up and getting ready to leave. But you weren't following what the prophet was saying. You don't get behind the prophet. You don't get ahead of the prophet.

Gerrit And you certainly don't throw out 200 years of prophetic utterance simply because you don't understand some aspect of church history. You'd be giving up far too much and allowing yourself to be deceived. God did not send Joseph Smith, angels, visit him himself, Joseph being visited by God and Jesus multiple occasions. He did not restore all of the keys in order to have them all lost from the earth again after Joseph was murdered and a second restoration needed. Oh, don't worry. It just so happens to be through Denver snuffer. Yeah, the kingdom will never again be taken from the earth, except for actually it will be because that way I can get followers behind me.

Gerrit Don't allow yourself to be deceived. The keys of the kingdom are with the prophets and apostles. And if there is anyone urging you to believe something like the church is wrong, the current church is wrong, Brigham Youngwood, if there's anyone urging you to believe that here's where the church lost its authority, they are trying to deceive you. So hopefully no one else has the book sent to them, but at least you know what it is. It's a snufferite propaganda piece attempting to destroy people's testimony that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in fact the place that holds all the keys and the church that has been restored by God. So thank you so much for joining us, and we'll hopefully have slightly fewer emails read next week, but there's no way, because we have literally hundreds of them.

Gerrit And now we're just putting them right into the shredder. At this point, we get them, we print them off, we shred them, we get them, we print them off. And we printed them. Yeah, we're not even printing them. We're just hitting delete. Delete, delete, delete. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us.

Intro Thank you for listening to the Standard of Truth Podcast, hosted by historian Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat. If you know anybody that could benefit from the material in this episode, please share it with them. And for more resources, visit standardoftruth.com. Until next time.

Super Special Secret Source on Polygamy?

Chapters

Transcript

Quote board

Source shelf

Bryce's email to the Phebe Draper Palmer Brown Mailbag

David Hughes Horne's reminiscences of George Albert Smith

Joseph Smith Revealed: A Faithful Telling, Exploring an Alternative Polygamy Narrative (self-published)

A university-press book on the idea of hell in early America (title not named on air)

A peer-reviewed book on early American gun ownership from probate records (title not named on air)

Constitution Annotated, constitution.congress.gov, on the Third Amendment

Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), 'Cats v. Connecticut' (1967, as heard on air), Laird v. Tatum, and Engblom v. Carey (1982)

Amazon description of Joseph Smith Revealed

Community of Christ historians on Joseph Smith and plural marriage

Joseph Smith's public denial in Nauvoo (date not named on air)

Amazon reader reviews of Joseph Smith Revealed

D&C 132

Wilford Woodruff's journals, 1830s to 1898

William Clayton's journal and letters

Accounts of Eliza R. Snow, Lucy Walker and Helen Mar Kimball

The Twelve to James Emmett's company, Nauvoo, February 27, 1845

Episode quiz

What does Gerrit still hold as his fallback plan if church history goes south?

Fun with Numbers

From 1845 to 1967

Percentages said on air

Putting numbers to words

What this episode talks about more than usual

Names said most

Signature words

More from this episode

Claim check

Take it to class

Banter bin

The Phebe Draper Palmer Brown Mailbag

In General Conference

Go deeper

Super Special Secret Source on Polygamy?

Inching toward a defense

Bryce's email to the Phebe Draper Palmer Brown Mailbag

David Hughes Horne's reminiscences of George Albert Smith

Joseph Smith Revealed: A Faithful Telling, Exploring an Alternative Polygamy Narrative (self-published)

A university-press book on the idea of hell in early America (title not named on air)

A peer-reviewed book on early American gun ownership from probate records (title not named on air)

Constitution Annotated, constitution.congress.gov, on the Third Amendment

Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), 'Cats v. Connecticut' (1967, as heard on air), Laird v. Tatum, and Engblom v. Carey (1982)

Amazon description of Joseph Smith Revealed

Community of Christ historians on Joseph Smith and plural marriage

Joseph Smith's public denial in Nauvoo (date not named on air)

Amazon reader reviews of Joseph Smith Revealed

D&C 132

Wilford Woodruff's journals, 1830s to 1898

William Clayton's journal and letters

Accounts of Eliza R. Snow, Lucy Walker and Helen Mar Kimball

The Twelve to James Emmett's company, Nauvoo, February 27, 1845

What does Gerrit still hold as his fallback plan if church history goes south?

From 1845 to 1967

Percentages said on air

Putting numbers to words

What this episode talks about more than usual

Names said most

Signature words