Faithful Historian Deceives Mormons – Keith Erekson

Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin 0:01 Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast, LDS Discussions Edition. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It's February 6, 2025 and today we are going to be discussing or the title is History Director Tries to Defend Mormonism. And we're going to be talking about Dr. Keith Erickson. For those of you who don't know, the LDS discussion series is, is, I don't know, 55, 60 episodes in Julia. Do you remember how many episodes we're in now?

Julia 0:33 This is episode 60.

John Dehlin 0:35 Okay. Yeah. So a couple of years ago, a guy named Mike, that's his code name, put together a website called LDS Discussions where he did a really in depth, thorough analysis of Mormon's church truth claims, borrowing heavily from the works of people like the Sandra Tanner. Hey, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner 0:56 Hi.

John Dehlin 0:56 Thanks for joining us. And so we did several deep dives into Mormon Church truth claims, doing our best to be as thoughtful and as fair and as objective as possible. Of course, we sometimes failed in our objectivity, but we've done this extensive review of Mormon Church truth claims all the way from Joseph Smith's treasure digging to the alleged priesthood restoration to changes in the doctrine and covenants to Book of Mormon translation, all the way through to modern day issues. And you know this series, we highly recommend it. It's probably the most valuable thing I've done on Mormon stories in a long time, at least according to many of our viewers and listeners. You can check it out on Spotify in audio and video format. You can check it out on Apple podcast as audio only. And you can check it out on YouTube under its own playlist under the Mormon Stories podcast channel called LDS Discussions. We highly recommend that you watch it from start to finish. It is 60 episodes now. But even though Mike had to retire and he's on to bigger and better things and we miss him dearly, we like to continue the LDS discussion series for a couple reasons, even though it's without Mike. One is we have amazing replacements for Mike like the Sandra Tanner. Hello, Sandra. Welcome again. I'll just, I'll show you as much as I can. It's like more cowboy, more cowbell, more Sandra Tanner. Thanks for joining us. We also have Gerardo joining us. Hey, Gerardo.

Nemo 2:33 Hey John.

John Dehlin 2:35 And of course, as always, we have Nemo joining us from the uk. Hey, Nemo. You're muted, but we imagine you said hi. Thanks for joining us. And Julie is going to be helping out with production today, but she'll jump on as well. And the only other thing I'll just say is that we, we're continuing the series because one, there's a lot of topics we didn't cover. But two, every time we do a new LDS discussions episode, we're going to be reminding people about the series and, and plugging it. And we think this is a timeless series. And so we want to just keep promoting it. And so for all those reasons, plus so many of you love it, we're doing it now. I want to just have Gerardo explain to us why he had the idea for today's episode and what we're going to be doing today. So, Gerardo.

Keith Erekson's Fireside and Panel Introductions

Gerardo Sumano 3:30 Yeah, so I came up on these, on the video or the recording of this fireside on the YouTube channel, 132 problems. And they did a response, you know, based on their understanding or their belief that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy. So on the polygamy part, and she posted the entire video. So that's kind of where I watched it. And I thought what was interesting about it is. Well, first of all, it's kind of not very.

John Dehlin 4:01 What's 132Problems?

Gerardo Sumano 4:03 So it's a YouTube channel from. My goodness, what's, what's her name?

Julia 4:08 Michelle.

Gerardo Sumano 4:09 Michelle Stone.

John Dehlin 4:10 Is this the polygamy denier?

Gerardo Sumano 4:12 Yeah.

John Dehlin 4:12 Michelle Stone.

Guest 4:13 Yes.

John Dehlin 4:13 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 4:14 Yeah.

John Dehlin 4:14 All right. So. So she posts this video of Keith Erickson.

Gerardo Sumano 4:19 Yes.

John Dehlin 4:19 Okay. And then you.

Gerardo Sumano 4:21 Yeah, And I, and I watched the, the fireside.

John Dehlin 4:23 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 4:24 And you know, it's, it's kind of hard these days to find recordings like this of, of firesides when someone that works at church headquarters is going to an entire stake and talking about difficult problems with church history. So that's why I thought it would be interesting to cover it because, you know, it's, he's being, he, he's speaking in his official capacity as a church employee, someone who has been working in the church history department and also to an entire stake with the stake president behind him. So it's kind of like endorsed. Right. And I thought it would be interesting to point out how the church is defending itself these days.

John Dehlin 5:07 Okay. That's fascinating. And I think I did this once with Patrick Mason when I got a copy of a sort of an apologetic fireside he did. But I think that's really, really useful. Okay. So we're going to be reviewing a formally church approved fireside where church Employee and history PhD Keith Erickson tries to explain a lot of the problems with Mormon church history and truth claims. That.

Gerardo Sumano 5:37 Right, that's right.

John Dehlin 5:38 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 5:38 And he covers, I should say he covers tons of different topics. He goes through them super quickly. I picked just a few. Maybe we could do a part 2. Depends on how people like this. This one.

John Dehlin 5:51 Okay, so we're not doing the whole.

Gerardo Sumano 5:52 But we're not doing the whole. Yeah, it's just too long. He went like. And spoke for two hours.

John Dehlin 5:57 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 5:58 And he was literally going through topics, like, so fast.

John Dehlin 6:02 So which topics are we covering today?

Gerardo Sumano 6:03 So Mountain Man Massacre, mostly polygamy, because that's the one he spent the longest on. And then if we have time, a little bit of Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin 6:13 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 6:14 Yeah.

John Dehlin 6:14 Okay. Sandra, tell our viewers and listeners just really quickly who you are, because every generation needs to know who Sandra and Gerald Tanner were, slash, are.

Sandra Tanner 6:25 Well, my husband and I, Gerald, were raised fifth generation Mormon. And when we were in our late teens, we were confronted with contradictions in LDS Church history that caused us to start researching. And we ended up spending our whole life writing and researching on the problems of Mormon history. We formally left the church, and in order to leave, we had to be excommunicated because back in 1960, you didn't get to resign, you only got excommunicated. So anyways, I've spent my whole adult life writing and researching on the problems of Mormon history.

John Dehlin 7:12 And if people want to check out the many, many books and publications you and Gerald have published, how do they find them?

Sandra Tanner 7:19 On our website, utlm.org we have digitally put up all our. Well, almost all of our research books and writings through 60 years of research. So almost any topic these guys are going to touch on is probably in something we wrote.

John Dehlin 7:41 Yeah, absolutely. If you value Mormon think, or the CES letter or basically any modern work of Mormon history in some way or another. You have. Gerald, you're standing on the shoulders of. Of the Tanner. Is that fair?

Sandra Tanner 7:57 I hope so.

John Dehlin 7:58 Okay. All right. And. And of course, just to. To do the plug. Nemo, you are the. You're the chief dog at Nemo, the Mormon YouTube channel, right?

Nemo 8:10 Yeah. UK's leading commentator on the church. And this episode actually has a bit of a European perspective because Jessica Frankel's in the chat telling us that this was in Germany to answer questions. It was quite an empty sort of building. And I was aware that he was making his way to Europe to do some of these. Keith has done these firesides in the uk, similar ones where he takes questions from people and answers them. He did sort of a Q and A around the time that the three apostles came to the UK as well. It was that kind of British rescue thing going on. He was Keith was part of that. And he went around the UK doing sort of Ask Me Anything Firesides on church history.

Guest 8:46 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 8:47 I should also say that the reason why he's going through a lot of topics really fast is because he's literally responding questions that people sent the Stake Presidency before he arrived. So he filtered through different questions that people were asking and he's responding to them as best as he can.

Nemo 9:09 And that's a format that's actually pioneered, I think certainly in Europe, as far as I'm aware, in the uk, Coventry Stakes, the first one. I certainly heard about doing it, where the state presidency set up an open forum where people can submit their questions to ask about difficult things about the church. And then they have, you know, the state presidency and others try and answer the questions for them in a sort of open style. I've certainly not heard of that anywhere else.

John Dehlin 9:36 Excellent. And Nemo, you were particularly excited to appear on an episode with Sandra Tanner. Can you tell us why?

Nemo 9:43 Oh, don't make me be be sycophantic. It is a great honor to be on the show with Sandra. I met Sandra. I've had the pleasure of meeting Sandra in person. And yeah, it's just nice to be on a show with her and to try not to embarrass myself in front of her.

John Dehlin 10:05 Sandra, are you a Nemo, the Mormon fan?

Sandra Tanner 10:08 Of course. Everybody loves Nemo.

John Dehlin 10:10 Oh, look at that. Nemo. Everyone loves Nemo.

Sandra Tanner 10:14 We love to hear his voice.

Background on Keith Erekson

John Dehlin 10:18 All right, well, let's begin. Well, I put together a quick slide, just about just a little background on Keith. So let me just tell you all who Keith is from his he has his own webpage. It says Keith A. Erickson, Sensible History for Everybody. And it says Keith A. Erickson is an award winning author, teacher and public historian who currently serves as the Director of Historical Research and Outreach for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Keith he also sits on the editorial board of the Church Historians Press. Erickson has authored numerous books and articles on topics including politics, hoaxes, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Latter Day Saint history. His work has been published in various scholarly journals including the Journal of American History, the History Teacher, the Journal of Abraham Lincoln association, the the Oral History Review and Latter Day Saint History Journals. Erickson is a talented public speaker with a passion for helping history make sense. He speaks often to public audiences and the media, directs workshops with social teachers and history professionals, and consults with leaders of historical sites and commemorations. He enjoys speaking at Latter Day Saint conferences and events including BYU Education Week and Ruth's Tech. For seven years, he directed the church history library, overseeing expanded online research access and enriched public exhibits. Before leading church history library, he was a tenured associate professor of history and founding director of the center for History Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas at El Paso, or utep. I'll stop there. It says he grew up near Baltimore, Maryland, and now lives near Salt Lake City with his wife and children. And then the only other thing I will add is that we looked up to see what degrees he had. He has a bachelor's in sociology from BYU, a master's in history from BYU, a PhD in history from the Hoosiers, Indiana University of Bloomington, and then finally, for some reason, six years after he got his PhD, he got an MBA, a master's in business administration from UTEP.

Nemo 12:54 It's because you can't be successful in the Mormon Church without an mba, John. Didn't you know that?

John Dehlin 12:58 Oh, no, I thought it was a law degree. I thought all. I thought all Mormon historians were lawyers.

Nemo 13:05 It's a law degree or an mba. You need one of those two things to get ahead.

John Dehlin 13:09 Any. Anyone have a comment about his background? At least we're not arguing with a lawyer who's pretending to be a historian. Right, right.

Sandra Tanner 13:17 He knows his topic, and that's what makes his comments all the more problematic.

John Dehlin 13:23 Oh, because he should know better, Is that what you're saying?

Sandra Tanner 13:26 Better?

John Dehlin 13:26 He knows better. Okay. All right. Any other, any other comments about Erickson?

Gerardo Sumano 13:34 It is quite astonishing how confident he says a lot of these things and

Sandra Tanner 13:38 data,

Gerardo Sumano 13:40 and he has, you know, several dozen members there watching this and believing everything he's saying. So with the authority, you know, of being in the stand, standing up the pulpit, and then with the stake president behind him. So, yeah, I agree with Sandra. It's, it's, it's kind of problematic, and we'll, we'll figure out why in a sec.

John Dehlin 14:04 Okay. All right, Nemo, were you saying something?

Nemo 14:08 Having listened to him speak and address these kind of firesides, I can see why the church would pick him for this kind of role. He's definitely what they want to try and make happen. And he's certainly trying to say the things that the church wants him to say, and he's quite effective in that sense until you stop and take a peer into what he's actually saying.

Grading Erekson on Honesty and Integrity

John Dehlin 14:26 All right, well, that's, I guess that's going to be kind of our focus today, is kind of grading Erickson on his honesty and integrity as he, as he educates people about the church's. History is he deceptive? And of course, the church is accountable because they're utilizing him globally. So we do want to welcome all our livestream viewers and listeners. Sometimes we like to do these episodes as live streams, if for no other reason than that we can incorporate your comments and feedback. So y' all can kind of be the judges here, and y' all can let us know if you like the stuff he's dishing or if you don't. We also want to thank everyone who is in the position to show us support. We just got a live chat from a super chat from Lady Brat Face. She writes, this is the full dream team. Love you all. And the only thing I would argue is that we. We miss Mike, but other than that, thanks, Lady Bradface for the super chat. And Mike, we love and miss you. Okay, now I'm gonna admit I haven't seen any of these clips yet, so this is a cold viewing for me.

Sandra Tanner 15:37 Oh, dear.

John Dehlin 15:38 Sandra, you've seen them?

Sandra Tanner 15:40 Yeah. I don't know if I got quite to the end of this thing, but that was a long one. But. But I watched most of it.

John Dehlin 15:47 Okay. And Gerardo, you've seen them?

Gerardo Sumano 15:49 Yeah.

John Dehlin 15:50 Okay. And Julia, you did the slides, right?

Julia 15:53 Yeah, well, Gerardo did the clips, but I've seen all the clips. Yeah.

John Dehlin 15:56 How about you, Nemo?

Nemo 15:58 I'm sort of half cold into this. I've seen bits of it.

John Dehlin 16:01 Okay. All right, well, we welcome feedback from the audience, and we'll ask Maven to star really good comments or questions. And specifically, Maven, if our viewers or listeners either have good questions or really have strong opinions about either Keith Erickson doing a super good, honest job or being really, really deceptive. We want to hear feedback, and we're going to let our viewers and listeners sort of grade Erickson along with us. All right, so without any further ado, should we go ahead and go to the first clip?

Has the Church Hidden Its History?

Gerardo Sumano 16:36 Let's do it.

John Dehlin 16:36 Is there anything, Gerardo, you want to say before we start?

Gerardo Sumano 16:39 There's a lot of introduction that I think. I mean, we already did, so we skipped through it. A lot of that. So he's gonna write. He's gonna get right to the first topic. Mountain massacre.

John Dehlin 16:52 Okay. All right, well, let's go ahead and check out the first thing he has to say about the Mountain Meadows massacre. I'm not seeing the. There we go. Okay, let's go and play it.

Guest 17:10 So people are always encountering things from church history they didn't know, and then they get upset. They're like, why didn't I know that. And sometimes people have taught that thing before. And then what you teach, you get kind of invested in it. Maybe you got in a fight with someone about it on your mission, with your mission companion. And for years you've known you were right and your companion was an idiot. And so when we encounter things that we didn't know in the kind of conspiracy culture war model, the mindset is to think, well, the only way I couldn't know that is if someone was hiding it from me. Because clearly I know everything. I mean, you can hear the, the hubris in there, right? Here's another example from the messenger. God called on the Earth today, few years ago at general conference. President Nelson got up and he said, I have been studying the gathering of Isra for 40 years. And he had all the footnotes. You do go back. He's been talking about the gathering and Abraham Abrahamic Covenant since the 1980s. And then he said, imagine my surprise when I was studying with some Jewish scholars and I learned another meaning for the word Israel. Let God prevail. You remember this talk? And he talked about it, but you notice how he said it. He didn't say, I can't believe the Jews been hiding this from me all this time. He stood up in front of the entire world and he said, I'm 90 something. Because a few years ago, back when he was a baby in the 90s, he said, I'm 90 something years old. I am the president of the church, and I didn't know something. That's the model. If I don't know something. If only there was a word for I don't know a thing. And then now I know it. Oh, someone was hiding. No, no, Learn. That's the word. That's the word.

John Dehlin 19:08 Sorry.

Gerardo Sumano 19:08 So I guess there was a, an intro. But like, basically he's talking about

Guest 19:14 if

Gerardo Sumano 19:15 the church is hiding history, which I think it would be something to start with.

John Dehlin 19:18 Yeah. So like, it sounds like he's basically making the argument that the church has never really hit its history. What did you hear, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner 19:26 Well, yes, and that's a bit of a surprise to me because my experience was certainly that they were hiding church history. They were hiding the different accounts of the first vision. Who knew about the 1832 first vision? In 1960, when Gerald and I were researching the first vision, we asked about that nobody was publishing it. It wasn't until after we made an issue of first vision stuff that finally it comes out in. Joseph Fielding Smith had been hiding that account and finally let Dr. Cheeseman at the BYU have it for a thesis, but they do hide church history. And he's going to go on and talk about Mountain Meadows. It was certainly hidden from my family. I mean, my great grandpa participated in the massacre. I didn't grow up knowing anything about that. They were all sworn to secrecy.

John Dehlin 20:28 Yeah,

Gerardo Sumano 20:31 Julia has a slight, pretty. A pretty good slight right there, right after that one. Just to talk about where he just lists. She. She lists.

Nemo 20:38 Can I several something in there real quick? I don't know. I put my hand up, but I don't know if you can see me, so.

John Dehlin 20:43 No, just jump in, Nemo.

Nemo 20:45 Okay? Just jump in. I think his point about the Jews I find particularly problematic. He makes this point as though, like President Nelson had a right to expect, or rather that President Nelson was saying, well, look, they weren't hiding anything from me. I just learned something. But he had no right to expect the Jewish scholars would teach him something, whereas we had every right to expect that the leaders, the church would teach us honestly about the history of the church. It's just a bad comparison.

Gerardo Sumano 21:08 Yeah, it's a terrible comparison. Like, what does the Jews have anything to do with. I mean, I guess, yeah, they know more than President Nelson about the Bible, but. Yeah. What responsibility, I guess, do the Jews have to President Nelson to talk.

Nemo 21:24 Exactly.

Gerardo Sumano 21:25 Knowledge of the Bible.

John Dehlin 21:27 Well, let's check out this slide that Julie put together. I'll just go and read it. So, Julia, how would you title this slide?

Julia 21:36 Oh, just like Church Hiding History, I guess.

John Dehlin 21:38 Okay. All right, so you've got that Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives. This is something you're saying the church hidden the church hid from its members in the world because that was first published in 2014. You're saying that's what the Gospel topics polygamy essay, Julia.

Julia 21:55 Yeah, but it was also all over, like the New York Times, like it was a bunch of. There was a bunch of news articles that were releasing about this too, because 2014 was when it became worldwide news.

John Dehlin 22:03 Yeah, and I'm going to say that is deceptive. I. I did not know about Joseph Smith's 30 plus wives throughout all my time as a member. I'm 45. Never once in any church setting up until I was excommunicated at age 45 did I ever hear any discussion of Joseph Smith's plural wives in any of my church. Sunday school, elders, quorum priesthood, et cetera. I had to learn that on my own, mostly from scholars the church excommunicated and they excommunicated the scholars. Why Sandra,

Sandra Tanner 22:35 you drew a blank.

John Dehlin 22:37 Why does the Church excommunicate scholars?

Sandra Tanner 22:39 Generally, because they speak too forthrightly.

John Dehlin 22:44 Right.

Sandra Tanner 22:45 They don't do a good PR job.

John Dehlin 22:48 But also, what happens when the Church excommunicates a scholar in terms of members?

Sandra Tanner 22:53 Trust me, a lot of them get excommunicated.

John Dehlin 22:57 Do members want to listen to.

Gerardo Sumano 22:59 Want to listen to what? The excommunicated?

Sandra Tanner 23:01 Yes. Once you're out of the church, then you're disreputable. No one can believe what you say.

John Dehlin 23:06 And so part of the way the church hides information from its members is to excommunicate the truth tellers.

Sandra Tanner 23:13 To tell you, to take you off the reading list.

John Dehlin 23:15 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 23:16 You now are tainted. Oh, well, you can't read him.

John Dehlin 23:21 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 23:21 Because he was excommunicated.

John Dehlin 23:23 Absolutely.

Nemo 23:24 Which makes me surprised that they haven't excommunicated Richard Bushman, if I'm honest. Just because you read rough stone rolling and you think, well, hang on. I wasn't told any of this. I'm not sure how he got away with it, but that's because he keeps

Sandra Tanner 23:34 saying Joseph's a prophet, and. And as long as you keep saluting the flag, they keep you on the roll.

John Dehlin 23:41 Yeah.

Nemo 23:42 Okay. I should have done that.

Sandra Tanner 23:44 There you are.

Nemo 23:45 Where were you, Sandra?

John Dehlin 23:47 You clearly saluted the wrong flag.

Nemo 23:50 Oh, well, I always have from my.

Julia 23:51 My birth.

John Dehlin 23:53 I was expecting you to pull out your Union Jack and wave it around.

Nemo 23:57 I don't have it with me. Darn it.

Gerardo Sumano 23:59 Okay. All right.

John Dehlin 24:00 Okay. Let's go to the next bullet the Church has hid. According to Julia, the fact that the Church has physically owned a Seer Stone.

Julia 24:10 Well, also, like, we've. We've talked about it. Hang on. We've talked about some of the LDS discussions episodes before where, like, none of the manuals or none of the church materials were they even publishing about the Seer Stone. And we've. We've tracked that before. So. Yeah, like, in my take, the Church is hiding that.

John Dehlin 24:24 Yeah. And I remember it was a big deal that in 2015, the church released, as far as I know, its first official formal photo of one of the many Joseph Smith Seer stones that it had in its vault for, what, 100 plus years? Sandra.

Sandra Tanner 24:39 Yes.

John Dehlin 24:40 Yeah. Okay. Sandra mentioned the 1832 account of the first vision. It wasn't published until 1970, and it was only published six years after the Tanner published about its existence. So you were instrumental in the Church coming clean on that one.

Sandra Tanner 24:59 Yes.

John Dehlin 25:00 But their hands were forced, right? It wasn't.

Sandra Tanner 25:02 They were forced to come out with the discussion of the different accounts.

John Dehlin 25:05 Yeah. Okay. The next one is that the Book of Abraham was not a literal translation. Again, the church first admits that, according to Julia, in 2014, again, I'm assuming with its Gospel topics essay. Sandra, you spent several decades trying to get the Church to own up to the translation problem.

Sandra Tanner 25:24 Right, Right. We were writing about this in the late 60s. Gerald did an article in dialogue where he showed the papyri have nothing to do with the Book of Abraham. It's all a hodgepodge of how Joseph reconstructed the facsimiles. So it takes them, what, 50 years to get around to saying, well, okay, yeah, he didn't really translate the papyri.

John Dehlin 25:53 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 25:54 But it took 50 years.

John Dehlin 25:55 Yeah, that's right. Julie has a few more things she lists as possible things the church has hidden. Post Manifesto polygamy, the origins of the Word of Wisdom, the Adam God theory. I mean, the church has kind of acknowledged Adam God theory, right?

Gerardo Sumano 26:10 Not really. There's actually so in, you know, how they've made, like, now dozens of Little's Gospel topic essays. Adam God theory is not there is the only one that. One of the probably only ones that they have not.

John Dehlin 26:24 There's also not one on like, Book of Mormon historicity, like. No, like anachronism.

Gerardo Sumano 26:29 Right.

John Dehlin 26:30 And that. That sort of thing.

Gerardo Sumano 26:31 Archaeology. Right.

John Dehlin 26:32 Yeah. Yeah. Sandra. And I know that one of the reasons Michael Quinn was excommunicated was because he was publishing on post Manifesto Polygamy. Is that right?

Sandra Tanner 26:43 Right. He did a big article in dialogue that really put out a ream of facts on polygamy in early Utah and in early Joseph Smith period that nobody knew, so that it was very startling to people to read his articles on this.

John Dehlin 27:07 Yeah. Any other big omissions, Sandra, that you can. I don't mean to put you on the spot that the Church continues to hide from its members.

Sandra Tanner 27:15 Well, those are probably some of the classic ones.

John Dehlin 27:19 Yeah. So I guess how do we grade Keith Erickson in terms of sort of communicating to the membership in Mass that the Church has never hid its history?

Sandra Tanner 27:30 Well, it's gaslighting us.

John Dehlin 27:33 Yeah.

Nemo 27:34 It's victim blaming. He's like, why are you guys assuming that you would know everything? That sounds a little hubristic, doesn't it, for you to think that you should know everything if you discover something you didn't know. But that's. It's a straw man. Because that's not the argument people are making. The argument people are making is we were taught something that wasn't true or we weren't taught the things that were true by the people we would expect to teach those things to us.

John Dehlin 27:57 That's right. Okay, well, so, so far out of the gate, Keith Erickson's not doing so great. Let's go ahead and go to the next clip.

Gerardo Sumano 28:08 Mountain.

John Dehlin 28:09 This is about Mountain Meadows, master.

Gerardo Sumano 28:10 Yeah. Sorry.

John Dehlin 28:12 And we should mention Sandra, do you remember how the church treated Juanita Brooks when she finally came out with her historic book on the Mountain Meadows massacre as a faithful member? Do you remember?

Sandra Tanner 28:24 I'm not sure what you're getting at. She didn't get excommunicated, but she was

John Dehlin 28:28 kind of intimidated and excommunication was on the table. Right.

Sandra Tanner 28:32 Well. And she didn't get to see all the documents she wanted to see.

John Dehlin 28:37 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 28:37 They held back from her things that she asked for in her research.

John Dehlin 28:42 Yeah. She definitely wasn't celebrated as a truth teller. And I think if a prophet hadn't have intervened, she was set to be excommunicated.

Gerardo Sumano 28:52 Yeah, just.

John Dehlin 28:53 And it's. It's a book that's largely stood up to scrutiny over time.

Sandra Tanner 28:57 Oh, yes. Yes, it was. Class. It was an amazing book, especially for the time period that she did it. What was that? In the forties? I don't remember when she first came out with it. Pretty early, but back in that time frame. So. Amazing research that she did.

John Dehlin 29:17 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 29:18 What's even more preposterous about what he's about to say is that the Church has now come clean on the Mount's metal massacre. You know, we, Barbara Jones, co author a book with one of the most important historians, you know, official church historians, Turley, about a Mountain Mountain Meadows massacre. So the fact that Key. The way that he's going to talk about it, it's kind of alarming to me. But let's listen to it.

John Dehlin 29:51 Okay. And really quickly, just because we always love. We always love when Dan Vogel is here and contributing. Dan Vogel reminds us that the Church is still hiding the William Clayton journals.

Sandra Tanner 30:05 Yes. But he goes on in this fireside to say, oh, the church is going to publish them. Finally, this year, we're going to publish them.

John Dehlin 30:13 Why are you laughing, Gerardo and Julia,

Gerardo Sumano 30:14 just funny that he says that we. We're not hiding anything.

Sandra Tanner 30:19 It only took them 100 years to get around to this, but.

John Dehlin 30:24 All right. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and go to the next clip.

Gerardo Sumano 30:27 I wonder how much is going to be redacted, but.

John Dehlin 30:29 Oh, right. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 30:31 From the.

John Dehlin 30:33 That's fine. Okay, let's go to the next clip.

Mountain Meadows Massacre and Church Leadership

Guest 30:36 But the question behind it is. Well, this was about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. So if you go in the John the Baptist one, there is a little brief summary of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Yes. About 20 Latter Day Saints in 1857 murdered 120 people from Arkansas. It was done in cold blood. The. There is no justification. They will stand before God to be held accountable for the sin of murder. There's nothing we can say about that now. Some of the rumors around it were that Brigham Young authorized it or ordered it. That's false. Here's the way it played out. The people were in Cedar City. They got together and had a stake council. I've been to a couple state council meetings. Sometimes they're boring. This one was kind of interesting. They were trying to decide what to do about the people.

Nemo 31:30 People.

Guest 31:30 And they talk through in the council meeting, the council says, don't do anything. Let them pass. Well, people leave that council and say, we don't like the answer of the council. We're going to go do something. And so, yes, they're Latter Day Saints. Here's a spoiler alert. There's like millions of Latter Day Saints on the earth tonight. And some of them commit crimes. There are prisons in Utah filled with them. When I lived in Texas, we had the state prison in our word boundaries. And Latter Day Saints get shipped there. There's nothing in our teachings that say you become a church member, you don't commit crimes. So, yes, it's a terrible thing that happened, but no, it's not representative of the church or organized by the church or perpetrated by the church. Now, to show these work together.

John Dehlin 32:21 Okay, so credit to him. He acknowledges that it happened. He acknowledges that in his view, 20 church members were involved. He says there's no justification they'll be judged by God. But he says Brigham Young didn't authorize. And by the way, people commit crimes in and out of the church, but that doesn't mean Mormons are bad people. Any reactions, Pam?

Nemo 32:43 I have thoughts. His tone at the beginning was like, yes, I ate your sandwich, but you know what? You just left it out on the counter. So of course I was going to eat a sandwich. Like, it was borderline dismissive. Yes, 20 Latter Day Saints did go murder some people.

Gerardo Sumano 32:58 It's actually a lie. It's not 20. It's way more than that. Well, I'll talk about it.

Nemo 33:02 Yeah, yeah, but like, his tone is just, like, incredibly dismissive of what is a horrific event. So there's. That's, that's the first point. And then the second point is this idea he said, there's nothing in Last Day Saint teachings that stops you committing crimes. No, but there are a lot of Latter Day Saint teachings that should make you the sort of person that doesn't. And if people are at any sort of increased rate committing crimes, as members of the Church, we have to look at, are there any failings in our institution or anything within our institution that may cause them to commit crimes at all? Because there is a level of responsibility. You can't just completely absolve the Church of any responsibility because the Church's teachings are deeply embroiled in people's lives. So you can't just absolve the Church of any responsibility for people's further actions. There's always a place of, was there anything about their membership of the Church that may have caused them to participate in X action or Y? It's not always going to be the case that it did, but it should always be a question that's asked, I would think, because. Because of how like, pervasive the Church is in people's lives and their worldview.

Sandra Tanner 34:07 I thought it was amazing that he was so dismissive of that. Oh, they committed a crime and they'll have to pay for it and they'll be stand before God as murderers. Well, wait a minute. John D. Lee was the guy that got executed for this. They later, the church later reinstated him and restored all his temple ceilings.

John Dehlin 34:29 So in effect, he was pardoned by the Church.

Sandra Tanner 34:31 So the Church pardoned him. They aren't holding him accountable for murder because in Mormonism, murder is the unforgivable sin. So how could they later restore John D. Lee to membership and give him back all his plural wives? That says to me, the Church did not see him as committing murder.

John Dehlin 34:49 So I guess either Keith Erickson doesn't know that John D. Lee was pardoned, or he.

Sandra Tanner 34:56 I think he has to know.

Gerardo Sumano 34:58 And I mean, where is he getting this 20 number? Like, other than trying to intentionally say a lie that like, to, to feel, make people feel okay about this? The number of the perpetrators was significantly larger. Historians estimate that was over between 50 to 60 armed Mormon militiamen who directly participated in it, along with 30 to 40 local Native Americans who were recruited and manipulated by the Mormons to assist in the attack. And like, that would be, you know, like we were talking, we were texting a little bit with Brent Metcalf, who brought up a good point. Like, if we applied the same percentage today of 17 million members, it would be the equivalent of 18,000 Mormons committing a similar act.

Sandra Tanner 35:49 And these Were all the church leaders in the area. This, this wasn't just some renegade Mormon elders out there in the boondocks. This was the stake president, this was the bishop, this was the priesthood leaders. These were the men planning this. This was not just some hole in the wall thing by a few elders. This was the church leadership in southern Utah.

Gerardo Sumano 36:13 Yeah, this story that he tells about the Cedar Council, about how it was like some rogue members who ended up committing the crime because the council decided not to do anything. That is completely a misrepresentation of what actually happened. The so it was Isaac Hyde, the local militia leader. And remember this is like the Navu Legion who is like officially approved by the church. He wanted to attack the immigrants. And after the council delay the action, Height met with William Dave, a higher ranking leader who approved the attack. So the decision was not just a few rogue individuals ignoring leadership like he makes it sound. So that's pretty problematic. If and if you add what Nemo said, you know, this was the reason why this happened was not because oh, they just all of a sudden wanted to commit murder. It was all surrounded all this rhetoric of violence and blood atonement that bring a Myung was preaching and the that the church was sanctioning.

John Dehlin 37:20 Let's jump to the slides because Julie, I think you prepared a few slides to address that.

Julia 37:25 Yeah, so I just want to read. So during the Mormon reformation period, which was 1856 through 1857, men from the church were sent out to ask these questions to the members. This was a precursor to the Mormon the temple recommend questions that we asked today. So if you skip to the next slide. Nemo, can you read number one, the number one question that is asked to Latter Day Saints.

Nemo 37:45 So the first question asked the Latter Day Saints in this period before they can enter the temple is have you committed murder by shedding innocent blood or consenting thereto.

Julia 37:55 Thanks. Yeah, so that's, yeah, that's the number one question. So like it's not fair of him to. It's not fair of Keith Erickson to say like these are just some rogue people or like oh everyone there's just going to be crime when you have a lot of, you know, population of Mormons like this was, this was the culture that the Mormons were in right now. There was a lot of violence. Like if you go to the next slide, John, I talk a little bit about the blood atonement and things like that. Yeah. So the very first question, have you committed murder? Brigham Young's teachings as well as Joseph Smith's Because I think those are the roots of the blood atonement are in Joseph Smith's teachings also concerning the blood atonement created a certain mindset in many of the early saints that would lead them to destroy the lives of many individuals. The blood atonement is the doctrine that there are some sins so severe that Jesus Christ's sacrifice alone cannot alone cannot atone for them. And so the blood of the sinner must be shed. So this is the, this is just how they're. This is just how Mormonism is right now. And so like that. It doesn't surprise me at all that there's. That this whole thing is happening with the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

John Dehlin 38:56 Yeah. And you know, I just say from everything I've read from objective historians, Brigham Young and Brigham Young is your great great grandpa, right?

Sandra Tanner 39:07 Yes.

John Dehlin 39:08 And from everything I've read, whether or not he actually commanded it, number one, he did command at least one genocide which was of the, as I understand it, were they Paiutes in kind of Utah county area.

Sandra Tanner 39:22 Oh, I can't remember.

John Dehlin 39:24 Tippanogos tribe where he literally signs an extermination order of the Timpanogos Native Americans. But even if we can't find evidence that he ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre with the Utah Reformation, he certainly used a lot of violent rhetoric, including blood atonement, rhetoric that would agitate and stoke animosity towards non Mormons that at least at a minimum contributed to what ultimately became violent acts.

Sandra Tanner 39:56 Right. You have to understand that the Mormons at the time were worried about the federal troops coming into Utah to take over things and fearing that there was going to be a war with the United States. There was a lot of tension and there were reasons to want the wagon train supplies because if they're going to go to war with the United States, they needed the supplies in that wagon. So there were many reasons coming into why this particular wagon train would have been picked, but it was the rhetoric that was going around stirring up the people with hate towards the outside world, hate towards the Gentiles, fear of the outside world, that all played into this.

Nemo 40:50 I'm also. Am I wrong in thinking that the oath of vengeance for the death of Joseph Smith played a part in some of this?

Sandra Tanner 40:56 Absolutely.

Nemo 40:57 Because of where the wagon train was coming from and the people that they thought were involved in the mob that killed him.

Sandra Tanner 41:02 Yeah.

John Dehlin 41:02 Tell us about that, Cedra.

Sandra Tanner 41:04 Well, the main body of the wagon train were people from Arkansas that were just simply transferring to California to start a new life. But Parley P. Pratt Apostle had been killed in Arkansas just months before this happened. And the Mormons had taken an oath in the temple of vengeance against anyone that kills the prophets stemming from the death of Joseph and Hyrum. And so when news reached them of Parley Pratt being killed in Arkansas, that marked Arkansas as on the enemy list. So right off the bat, these people were in danger coming into Utah at this particular time.

John Dehlin 41:53 Yeah. Julie, did you have anything you wanted to add about that?

Julia 41:57 No, I think those were great comments.

Nemo 41:58 Okay. In sum, Brigham Young didn't have to directly order the Mountain Meadows Massacre in order to be responsible for it by teaching things like blood atonement and creating an environment in which something like that could happen.

Sandra Tanner 42:09 Right.

Gerardo Sumano 42:10 Yeah.

Julia 42:11 So.

John Dehlin 42:12 So I guess I want to say, so far on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, what grade are we giving Erickson for his truthfulness? And is it fair to say he's not trying to give an extensive coverage? He's just.

Gerardo Sumano 42:24 But when you say 20 people, like, when it's ending with, like, random members who wear rogue. Like, he's making up, like, stuff.

John Dehlin 42:35 Yeah. So he's downplaying happy with him.

Sandra Tanner 42:39 No, he's downplaying the importance and significance of the massacre. And he's done the horror of it.

John Dehlin 42:45 And he's not providing important context for the violence.

Sandra Tanner 42:48 Right.

John Dehlin 42:49 For the violent circumstances that Brigham Young helped foment.

Gerardo Sumano 42:52 I could give him a pass for the. For the. For not providing context, you know, but, like, may. Literally making up stuff like the number of people and the fact that this was, like, just random Mormons who were bloodthirsty, like, that's deceptive. That's just deceptive.

John Dehlin 43:13 Okay. All right. So far, Keith Erickson's not doing so great for his honesty.

Gerardo Sumano 43:20 We should give him.

John Dehlin 43:21 If he keeps going. Julie, I'm gonna have you rename this episode History Director Deceives Mormons about History, and then name him in the title, because if he's.

Gerardo Sumano 43:32 It gets worse.

John Dehlin 43:33 It gets worse.

Guest 43:34 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 43:34 Wait until we get to polygamy.

John Dehlin 43:36 Okay. All right, all right, all right. Well, let's keep going. Let's go to the next clip.

The Word of Wisdom and Temple Recommend Standards

Guest 43:42 In early Latter Day Saint history, the word of wisdom is given when Brigham Young is present in the church. They try really hard, but people don't follow it. And because, frankly, all the people are addicted to it. They were addicted to it long before the 1830s. And so during Brigham Young's presidency, they basically say, well, let's stop really teaching it to the old people, and we'll teach it to the rising generations. They're not Addicted yet. Let's teach them to do this. And so the first people for whom living the Word of Wisdom was a requirement for a temple recommend were full time missionaries, young people, 19, 18, 20 year olds as they go out in the field. And so that happened in 1918 and that was in the 1920s when it became a requirement for every church member. A few years ago, they raised the bar on mission.

John Dehlin 44:36 Okay, what's the problem with that?

Gerardo Sumano 44:42 This was not a terrible one, but like it was kind of interesting. Just this story about the Word of Wisdom. And I think it's a lot more complex. The story. It's also was a little hard to hear about. The reason why it was not implemented outright was because people were addicted to it. Like this idea that Mormons have, like if you drink one sip of coffee, you're going to become addicted to it. So like never do it. So playing into that idea. But Julia, I'm curious to what you thought about it because you know a little bit more about the history on the Word of Wisdom. You did some research on it?

Julia 45:21 Yeah, so I haven't made a slide. Is it up? There we go.

Gerardo Sumano 45:26 There we go.

Julia 45:27 Yeah. So there's a slide that I made. So the first nine prophets did not strictly abide by the Word of Wisdom. And how many are there? What is Nelson? Is he. Is he like 15 or what is he.

Sandra Tanner 45:38 Is he.

John Dehlin 45:39 What number is he?

Julia 45:40 What number? 17. I think 17th. Okay, so like half of them, like. Right. Anyway, I just think that's interesting. And if you go to the next slide, I can. I'll give a little more information.

John Dehlin 45:49 Okay.

Julia 45:50 Yeah. So like Joseph Smith, he regular, regularly partook of tea, coffee and wine. And he smoked a pipe. Brigham Young, he said once, if a person is weary, worn out, cast down, fainting or dying, a brandy sling, a little wine or a cup of tea is good to revive them. Do not throw these things away. In fact, he was instructing the saints to carry them across the plains, which Nemo and I were talking about before the episode aired. John Taylor drank tea, coffee, wine, and he smoked a bite, smoked a pipe and tobacco. Wilford Woodruff drank brandy as well as port wine and coffee. You can see all these in their journals too. Lorenzo Snow, he drank wine. Joseph F. Smith also drank wine. And he had a history of physical abuse that some theorize might have been enhanced by the alcohol. There's stories of him abusing his neighbor, his sister's teacher at school, things like that. I think even his wife, Heber J. Grant, struggled with alcohol drinking as many as six glasses of beer every day. And in 1921 he made adherence to the word of wisdom a prerequisite for the temple admission. But George Albert Smith, he took brandy for medical reasons. And one of the funniest stories to me is David O. McKay once, to everyone's surprise, he ate a rum cake and they were like, whoa, why are you eating this? This is remnant. He says the word of wisdom forbade drinking alcohol, not eating it anyway. So just I thought this was a fun like just a little overview of like not all the prophets strictly adhere to the word of wisdom. And Keith is just not, not mischaracterizing it I guess. But anyway, what are your guys thoughts on that clip?

Sandra Tanner 47:18 Well, we were all raised on this faith promoting story of how Joseph Smith refused. Was it whiskey or whatever that was offered to him on his leg surgery as a boy. And this was our wonderful example of why we should keep the word of wisdom. And yet now he's going to say, oh well, the early guys, none of them kept it. That's okay. It didn't become law until in the 1920s. Well then why were we never told that? We were told oh no. From day one. Joseph was this great example of refusing alcohol, which how many of us knew that he had wine the night that he was in the Carthage jail before he was killed. We didn't get that in seminary. I didn't anyways.

Nemo 48:14 Yeah, and you've got John Taylor saying some have said, you know, it was for this reason or that reason. No, it was just to lift our spirits because we were down. It's, you know, it's, it's very clear why they were drinking it. And I think it's interesting when you read DNC89 that it's sent not by way of commandment but by way of a word of wisdom. So it's in the revelation that hey, you don't have to do this. This is just, this is, you know, advisory almost. Well that was never the narrative we were given. Sorry.

Sandra Tanner 48:43 Well, you have, I don't remember what year it was the book came out. Joseph, Brigham Young's letters to his Son. Sons. Wow, when was that? In the 80s or something. And that caused quite a ruckus because in it Brigham writes to my great Grandpa, Brigham Young Jr. Who was on a mission I think in England at the time, that he hoped he'd been able to give up tobacco because Brigham hadn't used it for the last year or two. And that caused a big surprise in the community when that book came out because no one understood that the Brethren didn't keep the Word of Wisdom in those time periods.

John Dehlin 49:25 And Sandra, my memory is. I'm thinking back to Leonard Arrington's memoir. He was church historian, official church historian from 1972 to 1982. It was that type of uncovering that came through the historians that he worked with that made the general authorities get so mad that they shut down eventually the church history department. Because he was informing members of things like the Word of Wisdom, habits of past apostles and prophets that they didn't know about in the 1970s and 80s.

Sandra Tanner 50:03 Absolutely. I mean, I remember when that book came out and someone called me on the phone, oh, you've got to get this volume, because it tells about Brigham and Brigham Jr. And whether or not they were still using tobacco as adults. When you're talking about the president of the church and an apostle, and we were all surprised by that, I want

Gerardo Sumano 50:23 to make a point about. Because this is really important too. And it's from what you're saying, Sandra, Keith Erickson is participating in that deception. If you listen really carefully to what he's saying, he's saying that the Brethren tried really hard for members to follow it, but the members were all addicted to it. So then they had to have the new missionaries, the new. The new members, the younger people, be the commandment for them, because the Brethren just couldn't deal with the old people.

John Dehlin 50:53 So you're saying he's deceiving people by not admitting that the leaders themselves were also addicted.

Gerardo Sumano 50:58 Yeah, well, not addicted. They just didn't see it the way that they want to enforce it today.

Julia 51:03 But also, also I had a thought too, because he's talking about missionaries in the early days. And missionaries in the early days were usually like they were more well established. They were older men with wives and children. I don't think they were really sending 18 year olds on missions. I could be. I could be.

Nemo 51:17 I picked up on that as well.

Julia 51:19 I really don't think he's sending the young people out. I think he's sending these.

John Dehlin 51:22 No, they're sending out like my great grandpa, right? His two plural wives with multiple children, some of the wives pregnant. She sent those people on missions to Europe while their children and wives sometimes literally starved.

Nemo 51:38 And so this all speaks to the temple recommend interview and how temple recommend worthiness is so important in Mormonism more broadly. Because the moment it becomes a temple recommend requirement, that's when it starts to get really strict. That's when people are really monitoring it. Because up until that point where you could still go to the temple. You could still do this stuff. Because it was advisory. It was something people were sort of doing, sort of. Not the moment he BJ Grant makes it part of the temple recommend requirements. In part. I've heard someone fact check me. Because of his own struggles with sort of substances, he essentially went, right, no, I'm going cold turkey. Everyone else going to have to go cold turkey, too. We're going to make this part of the temple recommend requirement. We're just going to make this a blanket ban. Now then all of a sudden, this becomes a commandment. This becomes something really serious. This becomes one cup of coffee keeps you out of heaven, whereas you've got these leaders running around in the early days. It's just about that shows the power of the temple recommend and temple attendance in defining Mormon worthiness. Right?

Sandra Tanner 52:37 Yeah.

Julia 52:38 And that's exactly the reason why he implemented it. Nemo.

John Dehlin 52:40 All right, so really quickly, I'm trying to be a tiny bit technical now with these slides. Tell me if we can give Erickson the benefit of the doubt. Technically, this slide presentation you put together, Julia, a lot of these instances technically aren't violations of the word of wisdom, because like Nemo said at the time, these prophets or revelators were drinking wine and beer. At least it wasn't forbidden. Right. The word of wisdom technically didn't forbid. Tell me if I'm wrong. It didn't forbid beer. It doesn't if you read even the Book of Mormon. Now, the Board of Wisdom now as it's in the Doctrine and Covenants, is it allows beer, Is that right, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner 53:25 Yes. I don't think most Mormons realize that,

John Dehlin 53:28 but yes, that's mild drinks of barley. Is that what it's called? And then it doesn't forbid wine as

Nemo 53:34 long as you make it yourself.

John Dehlin 53:36 Right?

Sandra Tanner 53:36 Yeah. You have to make it. Yes. Homebrew is okay.

John Dehlin 53:39 Okay, so home brewed wine, mild drinks of barley, which is beer, and then it allows. It only forbids hot drinks. So that's where I guess if they're drinking coffee, I'm assuming that these prophets and revelators are drinking hot coffee, not Starbucks cold brew or iced coffee. So I guess there's no way that they are violating the word of wisdom with coffee, is that right?

Nemo 54:05 But again, violating is the wrong word because at that point it wasn't a commandment to be violated. Okay, that's because that's not how it originally was. Was brought about.

Sandra Tanner 54:15 But the problem is it's a technicality of how you word things. Yes. They weren't viol the word of wisdom in Brigham Young's day and later apostles up through the turn of the century, because it wasn't a commandment. But we were told that they were keeping it. It was presented to us. I remember the story they had of Brigham Young always carrying a plug of tobacco in his vest pocket to show how God had given him the power to. To withstand using tobacco, that he always had this plug there unused, that he carried around to show that he had the ability to withstand this habit. And I look back on those stories that I was taught as a young person, and I think, wait a minute. Then why is he writing to his son in England about hope? You've been able to give up your tobacco habit. I've given up mine for the last year or two. And so I'll agree that he probably had a plug of tobacco in his vest pocket. My question is, how often was he getting it out of his vest? So it's the way they frame things. We were given a picture of the early saints keeping the word of wisdom, which the historians have had to have known all along was not the way it was really being lived. But we were taught that in seminary, that was the world we grew up

Nemo 55:46 in, that they had to tell it that way because they now have to. They now have to keep this commandment as it is now upheld by the members. And one of the ways to do that is to appeal to the very first prophets of the church. And see, look, they did it. So therefore, that's why we need to do it now, because it's harder to try and explain now why it wasn't a commandment once upon a time, and now it is, and why. And the influence that prohibition may have played on that and all the other influences. It's much neater and cleaner just to tell people. Yep, from the moment it was revealed, all the prophets and apostles followed it. So you should, too.

John Dehlin 56:20 Yeah. And I think. I think the biggest issue they have, they want members to believe that the church doctrine has never changed and that the church's rules have never changed. But if they admit that it was, like, at first it was okay. Then when the revelation came, we were kind of advised against it. But then later it was made more formal and lots of prophecies, revelators were doing all the wrong things over time, then it makes the church look loosey goosey and like, you know, things get changed and updated. I just saw recently a photo from the BYU Idaho soda machine on campus, and it shows, like, 11 sodas available now. To BYU Idaho students. And like, nine out of 11 of the sodas now available on BYU Idaho campus are. Are caffeinated. Does that surprise you, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 57:11 No.

John Dehlin 57:12 Based on when you were at BYU Idaho, does that surprise you?

Gerardo Sumano 57:15 It does, I guess if I. If I think about how I was raised with, like, this idea that caffeine was bad.

John Dehlin 57:22 Well, you went to BYU Idaho. Were nine of the 11 soda.

Gerardo Sumano 57:25 No, no, no. There was. I mean, there was no caffeine, caffeinated drinks on the fountain when they started.

Sandra Tanner 57:31 When they started carrying Coke products at byu.

John Dehlin 57:35 And.

Sandra Tanner 57:35 And there was newspaper articles about this. Let's see, when was this that happened? I can't remember the time frame, but when they made this switch over the newspapers, asked someone at BYU why they hadn't had Coke there before, and some guy makes the statement, well, no one asked for it before, and, you know, jaw dropped. What do you mean no one asked for it before? They're all sneaking it on campus because they can't buy it there. It's just pressure comes up that they finally cave in and put Coke on campus. But it's just amazing how they can finesse their history. Well, it's just. It's just amazing how they can change the narrative from what we all experienced as children, as teenagers, and. And then make it sound like, oh, well, it was all your problem.

John Dehlin 58:35 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 58:35 It's your perception that's wrong. Not that we were hiding anything.

John Dehlin 58:39 The Mormon history memory hole is real. Is that right, Sandra? Okay, let's go ahead and go to the next clip and let's see what else, brother.

Gerardo Sumano 58:49 This was about Preston Nelson, and we're about to get into polygamy after this one, but yeah.

John Dehlin 58:54 Okay. All right, so let's play next clip.

Guest 58:59 We're not in a church that's trying to stay true to what we did in 1830. That's a fundamentalist strain that runs through our culture. This isn't the church of 1830. This is the Church of the Living Christ. He's alive. He is guiding President Nelson right now. So that kind of framework that says, oh, in the good old days it was true and now we're soft is the backwards framework. It's an ongoing restoration. That's the exciting part.

John Dehlin 59:30 Well, I mean, ongoing revelation is one of the main selling points of Mormonism. What's wrong with what he said?

Sandra Tanner 59:37 Well, it's backward revelation.

Gerardo Sumano 59:38 He said ongoing restoration, which is not

Sandra Tanner 59:40 the ongoing restoration, seems to be taking away things that were revealed earlier. Working backwards. Going to have polygamy. Oh, no, we're Going to take that away. Blacks can't have the priesthood. Oh, well, yeah, they can have it now. I mean, yes, they are changing their doctrines. Which all brings up this whole issue of. I was raised with this idea that we are the restored church because the dirty Catholics changed everything and set us all on a road.

John Dehlin 1:00:14 They corrupted everything. Right.

Sandra Tanner 1:00:15 They corrupted it and changed the doctrines. That was what made the Catholics so bad. They changed the doctrines.

Gerardo Sumano 1:00:21 And the ordinances.

Sandra Tanner 1:00:22 And the ordinances. They changed the ordinances. Well, the Mormons can change the ordinances all the time, and it doesn't seem to count. So let's revise the temple ceremony again. I can't tell you how many times it's been revised just in my lifetime. And it gets to be a kinder, gentler ceremony. They're taking away parts of the temple ceremony. God isn't revealing more stuff to them. He's taking away the things that he did reveal.

John Dehlin 1:00:52 Yeah, yeah, that's the problem.

Gerardo Sumano 1:00:55 And there have people that have raised this issue. And some historians have pointed out that this idea of the ongoing restoration is actually a pretty new concept. Like, if you go back just a few decades ago, in fact, people were saying that the restoration was already done. You know, I think Joseph Smith said that the restoration had been completed. So this is pretty new. And I think it came with President Nelson of this idea of an ongoing restoration that the church has been talking about more recently. Because if you keep talking about something that keeps being restored is like Sandra said, then you can make okay to be changing stuff, because now we have more light that before we didn't have. You know, instead of like. Yeah, but that's kind of interesting.

The Priesthood Ban and Church Social Positions

John Dehlin 1:01:45 All right, so we've got a. We've got a slide here. And this is like, it's, It's a side of Elder Holland. All right, let's.

Gerardo Sumano 1:01:53 Let's see how, how, how, how God. He's going to explain to us how God is guiding President Nelson today.

John Dehlin 1:02:00 Okay. And culturally, here's kind of what happens.

Nemo 1:02:06 The world is here, and we're more conservative here. And we're not going to do what

John Dehlin 1:02:15 the world does, you know, live together

Nemo 1:02:18 or never get married or whatever.

John Dehlin 1:02:20 But as the world progresses, cultures change.

Nemo 1:02:25 They go here and then we go

John Dehlin 1:02:27 here, and then they go here and we go here. And before long, you look up and we're perilously close, where we would never have thought to be before.

Nemo 1:02:41 So let's stay fixed on gospel principles and not cultural issues and not the societal commitments of the time.

John Dehlin 1:02:52 I've said too much Sister. Yeah.

Nemo 1:02:56 You said too much.

John Dehlin 1:02:57 Nemo thoughts?

Nemo 1:02:59 He definitely said too much. Right. He essentially said the quiet part out loud and acknowledged that the church essentially has this habit of staying 10 paces behind societal progress.

John Dehlin 1:03:09 Yeah. What I just. What I just heard is him saying that the church follows social progress. Did I. Did I misunderstand him?

Sandra Tanner 1:03:17 Yes, I follow way behind.

John Dehlin 1:03:19 Just slow.

Sandra Tanner 1:03:20 Yes. Like on the racial issue. A little slow on that one.

John Dehlin 1:03:24 Yeah, yeah. Whether it's women, whether it's, you know, people of color, lgbt, you know, so many issues.

Nemo 1:03:33 Accepting what the historians have revealed about the history of the church.

John Dehlin 1:03:37 Science. Right. The validity of science.

Gerardo Sumano 1:03:39 DNA.

John Dehlin 1:03:40 DNA, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:03:41 Egyptology.

John Dehlin 1:03:42 Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of weird that he would. He would.

Nemo 1:03:47 Earlier, Sandra gave some examples of where it's taken the church 50 years to admit what she and Gerald figured out. Yeah. In the 60s, right?

Sandra Tanner 1:03:55 Yes.

John Dehlin 1:03:58 Yeah. It's kind of silly for them to pretend they don't succumb to the whims of social pressure. Right. Sandra, like, in your experience. I'll just list some things and you tell me if you could think of a precursor. So the church's changing the temple ceremony. Were there any social pressures that led to that?

Sandra Tanner 1:04:19 Well, yes. People were doing exposes and showing how ridiculous the ceremony was, how it related to Masonry, how the ceremony was just copying Masonic wording. And so gradually, the church has taken those parts out.

John Dehlin 1:04:36 And Gerardo, we did a long, extensive series with Dr. Matt Harris called Second Class Saints, which I highly recommend, which talked about the priesthood ban. Do you remember any social precursors to the lifting of the priesthood ban?

Gerardo Sumano 1:04:52 Yeah, I mean, just so much. Just, even just the. The church was pro segregation, the church was against interracial marriage. All those things have, like, changed as. As society has changed. Not just giving and what black people, the priesthood.

John Dehlin 1:05:10 What are a couple things that caused the church to change on the priesthood?

Gerardo Sumano 1:05:14 Base social pressure or the church looking like they were, like, bigots, basically.

Sandra Tanner 1:05:21 I mean, yeah, it also went into the expansion desire of the church. They wanted to expand into bigger market. And so if you're going to go into Brazil, for instance, where you have a society that's very much mixed, you had the problem of blacks, half black people joining Mormonism. And so the church could see they're going to have to change the racial stand. There were people of mixed heritage joining the church and being given the priesthood. And so it all was an obvious change that was going to have to be made. It was an unsupportable position.

John Dehlin 1:06:05 And I'll just add, when I started my PhD in psychology. In 2009, the church was still a member of Evergreen, which was a conversion therapy organization for LGBT members. The church taught that being gay, that having same sex attraction was a perversion, that it was an influence of the devil, that. That you should pray the gay away. That you should. If you're a gay man, you should just marry a woman and it'll go away. If you're a lesbian, you just marry a man and it'll go away. And they would send it a general authority every year to the Evergreen Conference to speak and support conversion therapy. Now, if you fast forward, the church has changed all those things. Why? Because the Internet, because of lawsuits against, you know, this church and other churches, because of the brutality and the lack of scientific basis of conversion therapy, and just because of the suicide epidemics that movies like Believer with Dan Reynolds and Tyler Glenn, you know, just beat the church into submission about the LGBT suicide epidemic. That's why the church has softened its rhetoric against LGBT people. Not to mention the. The rolling back of the November 2015 policy in 2019. Right. You know, what was the precursor for that, Gerardo? What made the church change and roll back the 2015.

Julia 1:07:31 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:07:32 People were leaving the church. Like, it didn't make any sense.

John Dehlin 1:07:36 Yeah. People were resigning in Mass.

Julia 1:07:38 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:07:38 Right.

Gerardo Sumano 1:07:38 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:07:39 Yeah. And so the church. What guides the church, Sandra, if it's not revelation, what is?

Sandra Tanner 1:07:46 Pressure. Public pressure.

John Dehlin 1:07:48 Is that your opinion?

Sandra Tanner 1:07:49 Yeah, I think so, yeah.

John Dehlin 1:07:51 Nemo, you agree?

Nemo 1:07:52 Yeah, I think it's that mixed with power. If the church feels like it's losing its power or its control, then it will shift to try and keep that control.

John Dehlin 1:08:00 It's kind of. It's kind of money, power and influence, pr, public perception. I. I call those, like, the most sacred things in Mormonism.

Gerardo Sumano 1:08:09 Yeah.

Nemo 1:08:09 I think they're the true. That's the true threefold mission of the church.

John Dehlin 1:08:12 Yeah.

Nemo 1:08:13 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:08:14 All right, let's go ahead and go to the next clip.

Joseph Smith's Public Denials of Polygamy

Guest 1:08:20 Okay, now, another part of this question was since he publicly denied that he did. This is one of the things we talk about in the essay. But let's talk about it in detail right here. So there are about a half a dozen sources that are published in Nauvoo, and some one is by Joe's. Well, one is Joseph in a sermon that's actually minutes in his journal, but he and Hiram publish one in a newspaper. Hiram publishes another one the year before. There's a group of women and a group of men. So we've got about half a dozen of these denials now. Here's what you need to do as a good historian, as a good disciple of Jesus Christ. I'll start with the bad way to do it. The bad way to do it is to just take a couple of words that you want to make your point, pluck them out, and then throw them at people and say, see, here's this. Let me show you how to do it. We already talked about the vision of the kingdoms of glory, right? One of the things that says there that the celestial kingdom is for. And here's the whole phrase, just men who are made perfect in the blood of the Savior. Now, I could just take those words, just men, and say, the celestial kingdom is for just men. Do you see how I did that? One of my favorite little memes says I can do all things with a verse taken out of context. And so when we look at these denials, what we need to do is read the whole thing in context. So let me show you what to read. For every one of them refers to a specific other false teaching about sex. So here's a little backstory, quick as possible. There's a guy in Nauvoo. He's in the First Presidency. He commits sins. He seduces women, rapes them. His name is John C. Bennett. He's excommunicated. Then he gets angry and he starts going out publishing and saying, the Mormons have invented a thing called spiritual wifery. And John C. Bennett gives all. He gives all the details. It's an expose. And so he says, this is how spiritual wifery works. Anybody who wants can have sex. If you get pregnant, there's no problem. You just have an abortion and you get free food if you do it. That's spiritual wifery that John C. Bennett is talking about. So now when you go and read the denials, read them. And George A. Smith was later an apostle young man in Nauvoo. He said, anybody who reads these can see that they were carefully worded denials. So what does he mean by carefully worded? What they say is, we do not teach John C. Bennett's spiritual wifery. He made that up. And we don't do that.

John Dehlin 1:11:24 Whoa. All right, Santa, we're gonna give you first shot.

Sandra Tanner 1:11:28 Well, okay. So he's. He's trying to say that when Joseph Smith prints denials of polygamy, it's this fine wording that Joseph Smith is saying, we don't do John C. Bennett's type of spiritual wifery. He doesn't then go on to explain the way we do plural marriage is this way it's just a flat denial. And so. Well, let's look at Joseph Smith's last denial. When he gives us in his sermon, he says what a thing it is for a man to be accused of having seven wives when I can only find one. Now the Mormons want to say, well, he was right. He only had one wife because the others weren't legal. And it's this parsing of phrases that just drives you nuts in church history apologetics, that the denials were there purposely to put down that they were practicing polygamy whatever way you want to give the label to it. Joseph had many wives. He was lying to his wife. Not just the church. He lied to his wife. He had at least 20 wives before he talks to her about his revelation on polygamy. I mean, she's not giving her permission for all of this. It's all a big lie kept from the people of Nauvoo, kept from his wife. There are rumors of it out there. Yes. John C. Bennett blows the lid on Joseph living polygamy. Emma has to be aware that something's afoot, but she's trying to hang on to belief. Evidently, the Joseph's telling her, oh, well, yeah, that's just Bennett. That's not me. But Emma realizes there's something going on. And it's obvious when this guy, later in his talk, he talks about. What all was known in Nauvoo. But Emma is aware that things are going on. And it shows up in Clayton's diary, which in this fireside. He talks later about the Clayton diaries going to come out next year. In Clayton's diary, he talks about Joseph's polygamy. This idea that you can just put a different label on what Joseph's doing and then be able to say, oh, well, his denial of John C. Bennett was all honest and true, and he wasn't hiding anything. He was just saying, we don't do John C. Bennett's type of thing. But he never explains Joseph's kind of polygamy.

John Dehlin 1:14:20 Yeah. So just to fact check him, let me see if I understand what you're saying, Sandra. What I just heard. Well, what I heard Erickson say is there's about six published denials.

Sandra Tanner 1:14:29 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:14:30 And that what I heard him say is that they're all. All six of them are. Are denials of John C. Bennett style spiritual wifery. But then that quote you just told me is at least one example of a denial that wasn't about John C. Bennett style spiritual wifery. Which means, in my mind, Keith Erickson Is deceiving his audience?

Sandra Tanner 1:14:59 He's cherry picking. Yes.

John Dehlin 1:15:01 So did he just deceive the audience?

Guest 1:15:03 He did.

Gerardo Sumano 1:15:04 Totally 100.

John Dehlin 1:15:06 And he has to know better, right?

Sandra Tanner 1:15:07 Yeah, I think so.

Nemo 1:15:08 Can I throw something out here, John, please?

John Dehlin 1:15:10 Yeah.

Nemo 1:15:11 So I think you could sum up what he just said in. In a very simple way. Hey, guys. Joseph Smith didn't lie by commission. He lied by omission. Completely different. He lied because he left stuff out, not because he said something that wasn't true. And I want to pull up Chapter 31 of Gospel Principles, the chapter on honesty.

John Dehlin 1:15:29 Okay?

Nemo 1:15:29 Lying is intentionally deceiving others bearing false witnesses, one form of lying. And then it goes on to say, thou shalt not bear false witness, etc. There are many other forms of lying. When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth. Whenever we lead people in any way to believe something that is not true, we are not being honest. So no matter what way, Keith Erickson wants to frame it by the church's own standard of honesty as it's laid out in Gospel Principles. Joseph wasn't being honest whether he lied directly by saying, no, I'm not doing something that he actually was, or whether he lied by saying, well, I'm not doing that thing that you're accusing me of knowing perfectly well. You are really accusing me of polygamy. Doesn't matter. He's still not being honest. He's still lying.

John Dehlin 1:16:18 And Keith Erickson is lying here. He's not being fully honest.

Gerardo Sumano 1:16:21 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:16:22 As he's, you know, it. I think it's. It's worth mentioning the stakes here. These youth or adults. Is this mostly youth or.

Gerardo Sumano 1:16:30 They're both.

John Dehlin 1:16:31 Yeah, they're making really important decisions. Do I want to give 10% of my income to the church? Do I want to commit my life to the church through covenants? Do I want to give my children to the church mission? Do I want to go on missions? Do I want to give all this service? They deserve to know the truth. And so if they're coming. And as I read here, somebody said that at least in some of these firesides, maybe it's the one in Germany. Let me read a comment. Jessica Frankel writes, the fireside in Germany was only for questioning members. And so, first of all, they're filtering out these firesides. They don't give it to all members. Just like the Gospel topics essays are not made aware to all members. Most Bishoprics, bishops, stake presidents, stake presidencies that I've interviewed on Mormon stories as recently as last week were not aware of the gospel topics essays as recently as this very year or last year. So the church continues to hide this information from both the leadership and the membership. But then when they do these firesides, as Jessica writes, it's only for questioning members. And you had to go with your bishop. And the chapels were relatively empty. So not only is Keith Erickson deceiving, continuing the deception when he goes on these firesides, but the church continues to withhold this information from the general membership.

Gerardo Sumano 1:18:00 Yeah, yeah, I had a question about Jonesy Bennett because he did you want to say something?

John Dehlin 1:18:09 Yo, Joe, Julie has a slide about John C. Bennett.

Gerardo Sumano 1:18:12 Oh, okay. Just. But just like this, this claim that he. He's a rapist is.

Julia 1:18:18 Oh, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:18:18 My understanding is, like, he was not accused of anything that Joseph was not equally as guilty of, like, coercing women into. Into relationships.

John Dehlin 1:18:29 Oh, wow.

Nemo 1:18:30 Yeah. Yeah. If. If Keith Harrison wants to describe what John C. Bennett was doing as rape, then we have to look at whether Joseph Smith was guilty of the same thing. Is that what you're saying, Harada? Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:18:39 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:18:40 Julie, do you want to tell us about your slide on John C. Bennett?

Julia 1:18:43 Yeah. So we've done episodes on this in the past through four L. Es discussions, and this is just one of the slides that I had used then. So many apologists brush off Bennett's spiritual wifery and say that it had nothing to do with Joseph Smith's polygamy or that they are over the top accusations. And while his expose had a lot of misinformation, like we've talked about, like the Cloistered Sisters or the Sisters of the Black Veil or whatever, Bennett successfully named at least six of Joseph Smith's plural wives. And then I've listed some of them out. So, like, he knew to some degree what was happening with Joseph Smith. Like, so I still don't have a good idea. And I think Dan Vogel's in the comments. I still don't have a good idea of how apologists want to separate. This is. This is what spiritual lifery is and this is what Joseph Smith's polygamy is. Because to me, they look the same. Like, And I think that's why Bennett. They look the same to Bennett too. And so, like, I don't understand the difference.

Gerardo Sumano 1:19:28 I think the, the one, the one I've heard from apologists is like, Joseph had to authorize it and John C. Bennett was just picking whatever woman he found on the street.

Nemo 1:19:38 And isn't that true, Isn't that true of the church still today? Right. If, if, if I go out or, or let's pick Sandra. If Sandra goes out and talks about these things, she gets excommunicated, or in order to remove herself from the church, she has to be excommunicated and people will throw vitriol at her. But if you're authorized to go out and talk about the problems of early church history, now that the church wants to admit to it, all of a sudden, it's fine. Mormon moral standards don't seem to be about whether something is inherently right or wrong. They seem to be about whether you are authorized correctly to do it by a church leader.

John Dehlin 1:20:12 Yeah.

Nemo 1:20:12 You know, you can go out and Mormon apologists today will go out and give wild theories about what Mormonism is. You know, the givens is present a version of Mormonism that just doesn't exist in most people's lives. And they paint it as, this is what Mormonism can be for you. And yet they're allowed to. And they're not excommunicated for apostasy or for teaching false doctrine because they are authorized to do so by the right leader. It's, it's not about whether what they're doing is right or wrong. It's about whether they're authorized or not. And you see the same here with polygamy. The only difference between what John C. Bennett was doing, what Joseph Smith was doing, it seems, is that Joseph Smith was allowed to by his own rules and John C. Bennett wasn't.

John Dehlin 1:20:49 I want to add a comment that Dan Vogel has added in the chats. Dan, we love you. You're with us. He wrotes, he writes the term spiritual wifery was used by Mormons too. And so I guess what he's saying there is Joseph Smith was trying to distinguish between his righteous polygamy, which would not have been called spiritual wifery, according to Keith Erickson, and John C. Bennett's immoral polygamy, which Joseph Smith is labeling his spiritual wifery. But Dan Vogel is saying that term spiritual wifery was used interchangeably to describe both types of polygamy. Do we have any verification of that on the panel?

Gerardo Sumano 1:21:33 I. I believe that's my understanding as well.

John Dehlin 1:21:36 Yeah. I wouldn't want to disagree with Dan Vogel. Would you, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner 1:21:39 No, it all just comes down to Joseph wants to be in control of all of the disbursement of women.

John Dehlin 1:21:48 Yeah. The other thing I just wanted to add is that who called John C. Bennett, like, by the time John C. Bennett was in power, wasn't he mayor of Nauvoo?

Sandra Tanner 1:21:58 Well, he's second in command to Joseph Smith.

Guest 1:21:59 Wasn't he co president.

John Dehlin 1:22:01 Co president of the church? Like if Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, why did he put a rapist abuser of women as his co president?

Sandra Tanner 1:22:13 Right. He had left his wife and kids in another state. I mean, Bennett didn't come into the church as some wonderful Christian leader. Yeah, he already was tainted.

John Dehlin 1:22:24 But what Ericsson Erickson's trying to say is that he was just some rogue rapist, rapist, sort of abortionist guy in the community. But he was Joseph Smith's right hand man.

Sandra Tanner 1:22:35 Right?

John Dehlin 1:22:35 Am I wrong?

Sandra Tanner 1:22:36 Joseph did not have a very good sense of discernment on the men he picked.

John Dehlin 1:22:42 Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, I guess we've made the point with John C. Bennett. Should we go on to the next slide?

Sandra Tanner 1:22:50 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:22:50 All right.

Guest 1:22:53 And John C. Bennett did make that up. And they don't do that. Plural marriage was not anybody who wants to do whatever they want. Plural marriage was a priesthood ordinance and it had responsibilities and obligations. And so it was a different thing. So you see what they're saying. So the person who says, looky, looky, I found this word deny. And Joseph is the author. Your answer is thanks for taking deny out of context.

Gerardo Sumano 1:23:21 Please.

Guest 1:23:21 You need to read the full text of the statement and then you need to understand what's going on. Another one, there's a guy in Wisconsin who says that whatever priesthood you get, you can get as many wives as you want. And so Joseph and Hyrum published the denial saying, we are not preaching what this guy in Wisconsin is preaching. And so, so there we go with some evidence.

John Dehlin 1:23:45 All right, I'm really bothered as well, because Joseph Smith's destruction of the printing press is the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, which was again his, his other right hand man, William Law, exposing Joseph Smith's polygamy. So wouldn't it be honest for Keith Erickson to admit that Joseph Smith destroying the Nauvoo Expositor in the printing press and what, excommunicating William Law, isn't that also a denial or an attempt to hide his behavior?

Sandra Tanner 1:24:20 Absolutely. Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:24:22 Yeah.

Nemo 1:24:23 No, Keith just wants to limit it to these moments where he's saying, well, hang on, Joseph was actually just denying something that wasn't totally accurate. So he could deny that and then not have to address the underlying accusation, which is understood to be an accusation of polygamy, which he totally was doing.

Sandra Tanner 1:24:39 Well, and I think it was funny that Erickson makes the point. Oh, well, it wasn't like Bennett's polygamy because Joseph was done with certain requirements and standards and all of this. And I'm thinking, like what. What were the standards?

John Dehlin 1:24:58 There was the age standard, right? He wouldn't have wives above 13 or below 14, right?

Sandra Tanner 1:25:05 Well, yes, we didn't take children for

Julia 1:25:08 women who are already married.

Sandra Tanner 1:25:10 But what are the standards that Joseph's using? It's not like these are acknowledged wives set up as accepted wives in the community. There are no standards here. He marries married women that go on living with their own husbands. He marries single girls that go on living with their parents.

John Dehlin 1:25:31 He marries domestic help. He marries foster children entrusted to his care. He marries mother, daughter pairs, he marries sister pairs, and he marries girls as young as 14. Like, what were Joseph's standards? He didn't.

Gerardo Sumano 1:25:46 I. Yeah, it really bothered me.

Guest 1:25:49 I don't know if.

Gerardo Sumano 1:25:49 Julia, do you know anything about that wins the Wisconsin. Wisconsin polygamy denial because I found something.

John Dehlin 1:25:56 I felt like a red hairy.

Gerardo Sumano 1:25:59 I. I want to read about it really quickly. So in early 1844, by this point, Joseph had over 30 wives. This affected Mormons, including William BL, a former member of the first president, began exposing Joseph Smith's secret polygamy. And Joseph and Hyam issued a public denial of polygamy. In response to growing accusations, the Wisconsin Saints wrote a letter to Joseph Smith asking for clarification on whether polygamy was being taught. Joseph Van Hyrum responded with an absolute denial, which were published in the Times and Seasons. Joseph Smith, in a letter to the Wisconsin Mormons, stated, we are charged with advocating a plurality of wives. Now this is as false as the many other ridiculous charges we are brought against us. Hyrum issued a similar denial, saying, there is no such doctrine taught here, neither is there any such thing practiced here.

Nemo 1:26:59 And can I, like, I almost want to be fair to them in a weird way and say, I understand why they would deny it. There was a lot of pressure for them to deny it. You know, bigamy was illegal in Illinois from 1833, I think onwards. It was not a legal thing they were doing. I would understand why they would want to be covert about it. And that's where Keith Erickson should go. If he wants to make any sort of defense of Joseph Smith denying polygamy and lying about it, he would have to try and make some sort of argument about it being expedient to do so for the safety of the Saints or whatever. Like I can. I could I would have more time for that kind of argument rather than saying, oh, it's okay. Because what Joseph did was very cleverly word his denials that he was denying something while avoiding the underlying question.

John Dehlin 1:27:44 And we can't forget to mention that he was sealed to 22 women by my count, before he ever, you know, admitted to Emma that he was even practicing plural marriage. Correct.

Sandra Tanner 1:27:58 Right.

John Dehlin 1:28:00 And, and, and D and C, 132. The. The polygamy revelation mandates the law of Sarah, which is that the first wife gets to choose subsequent spouses. And Joseph did not honor the scriptural requirement that he vet his first 22 wives with Emma. He just violated that. Well, go ahead, Julia.

Julia 1:28:23 Sorry. Doesn't it say in there though, if she refuses, he can just bypass her anyway? So don't they like bring in the love Sarah and then toss it out immediately?

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:29 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 1:28:30 Yes. He has an escape clause.

Nemo 1:28:34 It's the best heads I win, tails you lose, ever.

John Dehlin 1:28:37 Yeah, but how can she deny the first 22 wives if she doesn't even know about them? And again, so Keith is. You know, what was offensive to me is Keith's trying to say there's no denial here. Right. Joseph's not denying polygamy.

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:51 When people say that he's denying, people are taking it out of context.

Nemo 1:28:54 Yeah, yeah, that's because they're seeing that he's denying something and saying, ah, look, see, he's lying. Whereas to Harada's point. What Harada just went read. You know, it's almost like he's going to start getting into that Jordan Peterson territory. Oh, well, it depends what you mean by wives. You know, I mean, like, yeah, we all have to get to a point where we. We even with the presentism argument, wives means the same thing then as it does now. It's not that long ago.

John Dehlin 1:29:18 Yeah, yeah. This is outrageously deceptive so far on Keith Erickson's part. Let's go and go to the next clip.

The Stated Purpose of Polygamy

Guest 1:29:26 All right, so now let's go to the next question here. What was the purpose of polygamy? I was raised to believe it was to procreate and help the imbalance of women to men. Okay, let's stop there. That's wrong. We have census data. We know how many men and women there were. There were actually slightly more men in latter day Saint communities. So I think people tell that one because it feels like a friendly way to talk about polygamy, but it's just wrong. So don't say that when there's not an imbalance.

John Dehlin 1:29:58 Why does he Use the term friendly. Why does he just say deceptive?

Sandra Tanner 1:30:02 We were all raised with that explanation that this idea that, oh, well, we need to quit saying that rumor or something. No, no, this is what was officially taught to us. That the whole. That was the whole reason was that.

Nemo 1:30:19 Yeah, it's what DNC132 says, right, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner 1:30:23 Yes. Yes. If I will sayeth, Lord, I will command my people what? To raise up seed. And this is where this whole section with Erickson gets so confusing on his verbiage, because he, on the one hand he says, well, yeah, it was to raise up seed. And then the other hand he says, yes, but it wasn't needed to raise up seed because there wasn't an imbalance. And yet he wants to circle back around again to the whole reason for polygamy was to raise up seed. Joseph didn't raise up seed through polygamy. So he didn't ultimately answer the question, why? Why did Joseph Smith live polygamy? It had nothing to do with raising up a righteous seed.

John Dehlin 1:31:06 And isn't it true that they've compared number of children by polygamous wives to number of children by non polygamous wives? And non polygamous wives were actually more fertile, produced more babies than polygamous wives. So they're actually reducing the number of righteous seed. Unless you believe that only children of anointed polygamists are more righteous somehow than the general membership.

Sandra Tanner 1:31:36 In Utah, they had a higher number of men, which he's conceding there. So that without polygamy, the Mormons could have had all the same number of children they didn't need, or more. Or more. They could have had more children. If the women had had their own homes, their own husband living their own lives, they would have had more children. I mean, these polygamous husbands made the rounds periodically to these different homes. The women didn't have as many children as they would have had with a husband who was in the home full time.

Gerardo Sumano 1:32:12 Yeah, it would have been more successful if Joseph had gone with Emma's idea of one wife, two men.

John Dehlin 1:32:20 My brother, roosters and chickens do it Right.

Nemo 1:32:23 And it's what Julia had said previous year. What it actually does is it raises the number of children per man. Right. So one man has more children. So it's a dynastic thing. It creates these big families that are all centered around these individuals that want power and influence.

John Dehlin 1:32:40 Do you want to add anything to that, Julia?

Julia 1:32:42 Well, yeah. So like with Brigham Young, he had like 50. I can never remember the number. If it's 56 wives and 57 children or whatever. But, like, he only had. He only procreated with a few of them. So, yeah, if you would have left those other women alone and given their own husband, yeah, they would have had more children. But, yeah, like, that's a really interesting thing that you were saying, Nemo, because, like, they thought that the more kids you had, the more wise you had, that greater your exaltation would be. In fact, Brigham Young, I think, is at one point, he tells Zina, who is sealed to Joseph and has her own husband who's a member of the church. But he says, if you marry me, then you'll have a higher exaltation than if you just stayed with Joseph. And. Which doesn't make sense unless you think of it as like, oh, it increased. Or like, he had more wives and more children than Joseph did. Like, I wonder if that's what's going on there. But, like, yeah, so that. So, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:33:26 All right. Yeah. So again, Keith Erickson is just not acknowledging that church leaders misled members for 150, 200 years.

Sandra Tanner 1:33:38 Right, right.

John Dehlin 1:33:39 And. And non members. Right.

Sandra Tanner 1:33:41 And none of their excuses give us a reason for Joseph having plural wives.

John Dehlin 1:33:48 Yeah, right. Yeah. All right, let's go to the next clip.

Guest 1:33:53 So now the church says many of the marriages were only spiritual and not physical. Who got it wrong? Got that great binary in there. Right? You see, we're sharpening our elbows. So let's just go to the. The real question. What is the purpose of polygamy? I like to think about this question in kind of like a bullseye or a target.

Julia 1:34:13 It.

Guest 1:34:13 There's right at the center, and then there's a little ring around it. Right at the center is scripture. So let's ask the question that way. What scripture gives a purpose, states a purpose for plural marriage. If you go through all the scriptures, there is only one.

Nemo 1:34:33 Okay.

Guest 1:34:34 The Old Testament tells stories. These people took a different wife and had children, and whatever tells the stories. There's not a single verse in the Old Testament that gives a reason, a statement. The one is in the Book of Mormon. It's in Jacob, chapter two. This is another wonderful verse to take things out of context. So we need to. We need to read the whole thing. And. And in the 21st century, we hate reading the whole thing. We want to scroll fast, click, like, move on. So we gotta pause, stop scrolling, and pay attention here in Jacob, Chapter two, this, he's giving a sermon, and it's kind of long, and he's a little Nervous. Nephi has just died. He's the new leader. It's his first big address, and he has to address some major sins. The people were committing whoredoms, and they were trying to justify it by saying, oh, yeah, all those people in Old Testament times had wives and concubines. So we can too. So over several verses In Jacob chapter two, four, from like, verse 22 to, like 35, you got to read all of those. But Jacob starts in, and he says, those are whoredoms. That is wrong. I, the Lord, delight in the chastity of women. The law of chastity is right in there. Then it says, marriage is to be between a man and a woman, and a man should have one wife, no concubines. Jacob says. Then it gets to a phrase that I'm. That is touched on here, says, nevertheless. And Jacob is presenting this in the first person. Word of the Lord, if I will raise up seed unto myself, I will command my people otherwise. Okay, so we've got this kind of a couple of ideas connected into in there. When we were writing the Saints History, Volume one, we're just people, historian people. We tried to synthesize that whole long passage into this sentence. Monogamy is the rule, plurality is the exception. And that's the way we wrote it. We gave it to the First Presidency in the Quorum of the twelve. They said, yes, that's the way to say it. And that's the way Jacob says it. A man and a wife, they should be married. That's the rule. Live the law of chastity. Nevertheless, there was an exception in Jacob chapter two. Okay, now if you actually try and read all of section 132, it's structured the same way. You can't just dive in and find little quotes from section 132 that you like or hate, because they're all there. But you have to read the whole thing. But section 132 follows that same arc. It begins with Joseph asking a question, what the heck's going on with wives and concubines? Whatever Joseph asked the question, the answer is what matters. And so the answer is the first, like, 18 verses is the Lord talking about, he doesn't use this word because it's a modern word, but I'll use our modern word because you're all modern people. You're not 1840s people. Civil marriage. That's the word. And it has. It says, you know what? If there are contracts, bonds, biggle, all these legal terms, that's what they're saying. They're talking about a civil marriage. Whatever you do to organize yourself, that ends when you die. That's the first 18 verses. Then it gets to the next, like 19, and into the 20s, it says, makes a contrast. There's a different marriage, an eternal marriage, and it gives a whole all. In that whole passage, the people have to be righteous. It has to be sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise. It has to be undertaken by. With proper authority. Then eternal marriage. And we're not talking about plural marriage yet. We haven't seen that word. Eternal marriage between a man and woman is the contrast to civil marriage. So the first 25 verses of section 132 are saying, whatever you do with civil authority ends. Whatever you do with my authority survives. That's the first thing that Section 132 does. That's one of the teachings that we as Latter Day Saints share most frequently. It's one of the things that brings us comfort and peace and solace, that our family will. Will be perpetuated beyond the grave. Beautiful teachings. In the first 25 verses. Then you get into 30s. It says, okay, so there's this guy, Abraham. And then it talk. In the 30s verses, it talks about plural marriage and it talks about Abraham. And then here's what it says. It says, it was counted unto Abraham for righteousness. Okay, that is not a ringing endorsement. If I try and go to heaven and tell the Lord I took care of my wife and children, I don't want him to say, eh, yeah, we'll count that. So we've got the same arc. The eternal marriage is the ideal. It's the. It's the standard. It's the pattern. And that one counted, that one worked. It was an exception. So. So Jacob has the same framework. Section 132 has the frame, same framework. And that's the way we tried to write it. Monogamy is the rule. Plurality is the exception. So back to this right at the center of the bullseye. We have only one scripture that gives a reason to raise up seed. Now, this question used the word procreate, which I will say, because I've got the microphone, is a little different than raise up seed. We talked about rising rising generation a little bit earlier. It isn't just a baby factory that God is after with plural. It's raising a people. And so that's what they do.

John Dehlin 1:40:42 Man, Some of that was some word salady. But before we. Before I have the panelists opine, everyone remember your comments. Let me just have Julia sort of clear the slides. She prepared Because, Julia, these are responses, right?

Julia 1:40:59 What do you mean? Which slides?

John Dehlin 1:41:00 In the slides after.

Julia 1:41:01 Yeah. So those ones are just the verses because he points out only one. He says there's only one verse, but I. But he's missing out on D and C132.

John Dehlin 1:41:09 Yeah. So do you want to explain these slides really quick?

Julia 1:41:11 Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So, yeah, so in Jacob, too, he talks. He's quoting that one. For I, the Lord, if I will raise up seed, I will command my people. And then the next one, I don't know why he's saying there's only one. Because in the next 1, D and C132, these verses on polygamy, for they, these wives, these plural wives are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth. And so that's. So I don't understand why he's leaving that off.

Nemo 1:41:34 I do.

Julia 1:41:36 Do you want to?

Guest 1:41:37 Yeah, yeah.

Nemo 1:41:37 I know exactly what he is. Do you know. Did you. Did everyone pick up on it when he said, we don't like to read to the end because we're impatient and we're modern and we just want to grab the bit we want. Guess who then gave an entire diatribe about DNC132 and ended in the verses of 30? Because there's over 60 verses in DNC132. He stops around the 30s and goes, right, okay, I'm done talking about this now. Keith, I'm looking at you.

John Dehlin 1:42:03 Go ahead and keep going, Julia.

Julia 1:42:04 Okay, so, yeah, and then there's another. If you skip to the next slide, I'm pretty sure he talks about this too, because he talks about how the new and everlasting covenant is the rule and stuff like that. Or the everlasting covenant.

Gerardo Sumano 1:42:14 So, yeah, so I want to talk about that because he does not mention the new and everlasting covenant. And I think that's the reason. I mean, I think he's doing it purposely because the whole he's trying to say he's starting to separate poly. Polygamy from normal marriage. Right? And saying, like, monogamy is a rule, plural marriage is the exception. And that's not like the entire reason why DNC132 is given is to reveal this new and everlasting covenant, which new and everlasting covenant. At that time, it meant polygamy. So the reason why 132 was revealed was to reveal polygamy, not to reveal monogamy. So that's why I want you to create this slide and talk to us about It.

Julia 1:43:00 Yeah. So, yeah, this is now becoming the rule, like the new and everlasting covenant. The polygamy is supposed to be the rule anyway, so I'll just read this. The church admits that the new and everlasting covenant took on different meanings during Joseph Smith's lifetime. And you can see the little clipping from Joseph Smith papers. One of the main meanings was polygamy. When Presendia Huntington married Joseph Smith In 1841, she referred to it as the new and everlasting covenant. And this is from Todd Compton's book, and I put the references in. When discussing polygamy with Sarah Ann Whitney, Joseph Smith called it the new and everlasting covenant. Another wife, Emily Partridge, referred to it as the new and everlasting covenant of polygamy. Likewise, D&C132 speaks of the new and everlasting covenant as polygamy. So this is becoming the rule. Polygamy is becoming the rule, not. Not the exception.

Nemo 1:43:45 Yeah. And it says in D and C132, and it's verse six. And as pertaining to the new and everlasting covenant, it was instituted for the fullness of my glory. And he that receiveth the fullness thereof must and shall abide the law, or he shall be damned, saith the Lord God. So this isn't just like an optional thing. It's like if you've received the command to engage in polygamy, if you've received this from God, then you better do it or you'll be damned.

Guest 1:44:11 So.

John Dehlin 1:44:12 So have we given our best response for the argument that new and everlasting covenant is not about polygamy? What he's saying is new and everlasting covenant is about eternal marriage and eternal families and the polygamy stuff that comes after and is separate. That's his argument. Sandra, are you buying that?

Sandra Tanner 1:44:32 I don't buy that, but that's what he's arguing.

John Dehlin 1:44:35 We have good evidence for why that's not accurate.

Sandra Tanner 1:44:39 Well, the documents that we've just gone over show that the terms were used interchangeably. Polygamy and everlasting covenant, it was all the same thing.

John Dehlin 1:44:50 Okay. Is it possible that those who did that did it in error? That they were confusing the two is

Julia 1:44:56 his own wives doing it in error?

Sandra Tanner 1:44:59 Well, you have going into the Utah period, everyone's talking about plural marriage as an essential element that they had to practice for top exaltation.

John Dehlin 1:45:11 Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, Sandra, or others. Aren't there a lot of quotes where Mormon prophets, seers and Revelators say that polygamy is a requirement for exaltation.

Sandra Tanner 1:45:23 Yes. And that's why they don't want to give it up in 1890, because they understood it to be essential for their exaltation. And that's why John Taylor the son, goes on living polygamy after the manifesto and gets excommunicated for it because he felt it was essential.

John Dehlin 1:45:44 Yeah.

Nemo 1:45:45 And again, the header of D&C132. Sorry, I'm just going to keep going back to the scriptures because they undermine Keith Erickson. The church's official explainer for D&C132 is that it was revelation given through Joseph Smith, the prophet in Nauvoo, Illinois, recorded July 12, 1843, relating to the new and everlasting covenant, including the eternity of the marriage covenant and the principle of plural marriage. So the eternity of the marriage covenant and the principle of plural marriage both form the new and everlasting covenant. Yeah, it's there. The church has explained it.

D&C 132 and Emma Smith

Gerardo Sumano 1:46:16 Yeah. And if it was this, like, beautiful thing about revealing the power to seal people together, and just the way that Mormons see it today, we. Why did Joseph kept this revelation hidden from the membership?

Sandra Tanner 1:46:31 Why did he keep it hidden from Emma?

Gerardo Sumano 1:46:34 Right, right.

Sandra Tanner 1:46:37 If. If it was just for eternal sealing and polygamy was a side factor, he could have told her all of that stuff already, right?

Nemo 1:46:46 Yeah, absolutely. It's. It's the way he acted around it shows what it was. Because if it was just as innocent as this religious ceremony whereby he's sealed eternally to these women, but it has no bearing on what he does with them in real life, then everyone could know about it.

Sandra Tanner 1:47:01 Yes.

John Dehlin 1:47:02 Well, let me just review some of the comments that have been made so far, because again, I'm going to be changing the title, this episode to History Director Deceives Mormons. You know, Keith Erickson, because it just seems like it's already horrible. But just to kind of share how the audience is feeling so far, Dan Vogel writes, this guy doesn't know what is going on. Jennifer Hallman Waite says, does this guy even believe what he's saying? I think that's a fair question. Jim Bridge writes, he's just waffling, utter gibberish. That's Jim Bridges feedback. And if there are believers out there that really like or want to defend Keith Erickson, we want to hear that, too. Or non believers. Person of interest writes, this is a painful man. I really can't stand to watch him cringy. Okay, so that's kind of how people are feeling. Mormon civil war. That's Peter, I think.

Nemo 1:48:08 Yeah. Pick up.

John Dehlin 1:48:10 Good grief. Changing the meaning of words like Bednar and Oakes do as the great solution to the problems. Pathetic. Tell us how you really feel, Peter Bleakley. And then Dan Vogel shares. Sandra's right, it was a requirement. And basically what he's saying there is polygamy wasn't just like this limited, optional, secondary sort of thing. It was literally all Mormons wanted to go to the celestial kingdom and be exalted. It was a requirement for exaltation for what, 100 years?

Sandra Tanner 1:48:45 Right?

John Dehlin 1:48:46 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:48:46 I have a question and you might not know the answer to that the top of your head, Sandra or Julia, but do we know at all if Joseph, when he was marrying those 22 women before Emma, before 130, before the NC132 was even revealed, was he approaching them and telling them about this beautiful priesthood authority that would allow them to be together forever? Like, is this something Joseph was teaching already while he was marrying those, those women? Or is this something that he came up with to appease Emma to be like, well, if I come up with this doctrine of being able to be together forever and sealing and all that, Emma's gonna be, feel, feel really good because she's lost all these children and, and she'll feel really good about it and maybe she will be okay with polygamy.

Sandra Tanner 1:49:40 Like, do we know, I don't know that we know exactly what all Joseph used as a selling point. But the thing we seem to see in his selling point to these different women is that an angel appeared and was going to destroy him if he didn't live. Polygamy, that seems to be the narrative that worked the best on these different women he marries. So I'm not sure how much he focused on the eternal ceiling aspect with him.

Julia 1:50:11 Right.

Sandra Tanner 1:50:12 But there was a threat, hey, this angel is going to kill me if I don't do this. So I've just got to ask you if you'll marry me. But with Emma, he goes the route of, oh yes, it's going to be this wonderful ceiling for all eternity. So I think the pitch changes depending on what one he thinks works the best. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:50:35 Because with Helen, my Kimball, wasn't it like her whole family would be saved.

Sandra Tanner 1:50:39 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:50:40 Or condemned whether she accepted or not.

Julia 1:50:43 Right.

Nemo 1:50:43 And I guess that's how you convince a 14 year old girl to do

Gerardo Sumano 1:50:47 with like, oh, let's live together forever and the power of the priesthood and beautiful ceiling ceremony being revealed, in my opinion.

Julia 1:50:54 Well, yeah. And I. As you're speaking, I was. I think it's Mary Elizabeth Leitner where he told that all the, like, she was his before the world began and all the devils in hell couldn't, couldn't take her from him. Like there's that rhetoric where he seems to believe in soulmates or whatever, but I don't think he ever frames it like, we're gonna have kids forever, we're gonna be together forever, or this beautiful ceiling or whatever. I don't think he's doing that. I think it's just that was a selling point for Mary Elizabeth Rollins or whoever rather than like this beautiful thing with like Emma and like how she was losing her children and she could be with them forever. I don't think that's what he was doing.

John Dehlin 1:51:24 Right. Really quickly, I just want to thank all of the people that are joining us now in the live stream or joining us later. And I just want to ask you really quickly, please subscribe to the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. Please like this episode and please share it because that's the only way that kind of we grow and that encourages YouTube and Facebook as well. Subscribe to us there. Those subscriptions just really help the algorithms prioritize these videos. So please take a minute to subscribe on YouTube and Facebook and as well Instagram and TikTok. Also, we want to just acknowledge that the only way we're able to do these episodes is from the generous donations of our monthly and annual donors. If you want to help keep this type of programming alive, including the LDS discussion series and you're not a donor, please go to mormorestories.org, click on the donate button. Become a monthly donor. In that way, we'll be able to keep providing this LDS discussion series and others. Okay, one more comment that I'll quickly share. And I don't know if this is fair or not, but Rosemary Bennett writes, this guy lies every time he moves his mouth. I mean, we are cherry picking things that we think are lies.

Gerardo Sumano 1:52:40 Well, there's a lot more.

John Dehlin 1:52:41 There's a lot more.

Gerardo Sumano 1:52:42 Like it was just too much.

John Dehlin 1:52:45 Okay, well, let's keep going. Let's keep going. Let's hear the next clip.

Guest 1:52:50 They do. Okay, so that's the bullseye. No. Oh, let's, let's name another one that's not there that doesn't have a scripture. We say this all the time in Latter Day Saint culture and there's no scripture for it. It's actually, again, contrary to scripture. So let's talk about it. The the idea is, well, why did we do it? It was part of the restoration of all things. Have you heard that? Have you said that? It's okay if you said it. You're wrong.

Sandra Tanner 1:53:18 But.

Guest 1:53:19 But we're humble together tonight. So here's, here's why was everything from the Old Testament restored? Do we not eat pigs? Do not eat shellfish? Do we stone people who break the Sabbath? Boy, I hope not. Especially if the chiefs are in the super bowl on a certain Sunday. So we have hardened this idea that the restoration of all things meant every single thing had to come back. And it didn't. It's been selective. So that's not enough. That's context. It's in the air. There's a restoration. Things are coming back. But having a restoration, that's the. That's the faulty leap that says plural marriage had to come back because it happened back then. It came back because as the Lord says through Jacob in Jacob, chapter two, nevertheless, if I will raise up seat under myself, I will command my people otherwise. And so he commanded otherwise for about 40 years. And so if you look at the history of the world, and I don't even have all the data, so let's just look at the Latter Day Saints. If you count all the dead ones since 1830, they're about 26 million latter day Saints. They're not all on the earth now, obviously, but. Okay, we're going to talk about all of them. 26 million of them. How many practice plural marriage? A couple thousand in those first years. So do you see the same pattern here? Monogamy is the rule. 25.9. Whatever. I can't do math on the fly. You know, a lot of million Latter Day Saints didn't. And then, yeah, there's an exception for a time where it happened. Okay, so now.

John Dehlin 1:55:09 All right, so really quickly, panelists, remember your response. Julia, you've got a slide. Because you want to address this notion of a restoration of all things.

Julia 1:55:18 Yeah, I'm really confused. I feel like maybe I don't understand what he's saying, but I'm really confused why he said there's no verse on this, like it's the opposite of Scripture. And maybe this is. I don't know. But in DC 27, which in the 1830 edition, it doesn't say this because a lot of the, A lot of Joseph Smith added a bunch of things. But in DNC 27, the 1835 edition, and what's on the. What's in our edition right now in 2025, it says that the, the. There's going to be restoration. I've committed the keys of bringing to pass the rest of all things. And so like there's. It is in scripture. I don't understand why Erickson's saying it's not. Am I misunderstanding what he's trying to say? Do you do.

Sandra Tanner 1:55:58 No, I think he's very confused.

John Dehlin 1:56:01 Yeah. He's basically trying to say that we've all erred whenever we've given the impression that all things needed to be restored. But I would just ask, where did we get that? It's not like we made that up. Like, didn't prophets, seers and revelators from the beginning? Is it a Mormon doctrine that like Adam and Eve baptized people with Christian baptisms, that Adam and Eve and their posterity did Christian rites and rituals, including the temple ceremony, and that every dispensation, all the ordinances of the gospel had to be restored each dispensation? That's what I was taught growing up.

Sandra Tanner 1:56:44 Yes, that's what I was taught.

Julia 1:56:45 Also Joseph Smith, in some of the Journal of Discourses, they talk about how Joseph even taught that Adam was a polygamist because of this. Of Lilith, of her presence in the Garden of Eden as well. So I just thought that was interesting where he was trying to justify, I think, the restoration of all things, saying that polygamy was there at the beginning and it needs to be restored.

John Dehlin 1:57:02 And isn't that why we claim that the Masonic Lodge temple ceremony originally was similar or identical to the Temple ceremony that Joseph Smith implemented? Because they need to be the same, Whatever the temple ceremony, the original temple

Sandra Tanner 1:57:22 ceremony would have had that same ring of Masonic elements.

John Dehlin 1:57:27 The Jewish pre Christ temple ceremony, according to Mormons, needed to be like the Masonic ceremony because then the Masonic ceremony leading to Joseph Smith's restoration of the temple ceremony would be a restoration of all things. Am I making that up?

Nemo 1:57:45 Because the Masons guarded the secrets of Solomon's Temple over the generations and brought them along.

Sandra Tanner 1:57:50 Right.

Nemo 1:57:50 But what people have now discovered is that's actually just their own sort of origin myth and it's sort of medieval stonemasons and, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit less spectacular.

Gerardo Sumano 1:58:00 So you're ready for. So he's saying that, saying that the polygamy, the reason why Joseph practiced polygamy, it is incorrect to say it's because of the restoration of all things. He hasn't read Doctrine Covenants 132, because I'm gonna read to you verse 40 and it's really short and it's talking about David and Solomon and Abraham and their concubines and wives. And it says, Verse 40, I am the Lord thy God, and I gave unto thee my servant Joseph, an appointment and restore all things.

Julia 1:58:39 Whoa.

Nemo 1:58:42 This is why he stopped at the verses that begin with 30. This is why they don't go further into D&C.132. But remember, Keith, we have to read it all. We shouldn't be impatient. We need to read the whole thing.

John Dehlin 1:58:54 Yeah, and I'll just also make the point that he's not acknowledging that prophets, seers and revelators deceived or mistaught. Deceived, worst case scenario. Or mistaught, best case scenario, erred, misled, led astray the membership for 150 to 200 years. Because he's acting like it's just the membership that sort of just made up this idea of a restoration of all things, when we all know it's the prophets series of revelators. It's in the scripture and it's in the scriptures. Right. How is he? How is he sleeping at night?

Sandra Tanner 1:59:34 He has selective memory.

John Dehlin 1:59:36 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:59:37 Yeah.

Julia 1:59:37 Also. Also he gets some of his numbers wrong again. Because Herod, are you pointing out about the 20 men? But it was really a lot more. He's like, oh, we only live polygamy for 40 years. But I think if you think of polygamy as starting in the 30s, early 30s, because he's telling women or he's commanding it to live with the. The Native Americans as polygamy. And then I think it ended in the 1920s with post manifesto polygamy. And anyway, I think it was closer

Gerardo Sumano 1:59:59 to 90 years that Mormons the numbers as small.

Julia 2:00:04 Right.

John Dehlin 2:00:04 Possible. Yeah, you are absolutely right, Julia.

Guest 2:00:07 There was.

John Dehlin 2:00:07 There was apostle sanctioned polygamy. Mormon apostle sanctioned polygamy at least in the nineteen teens.

Sandra Tanner 2:00:15 Right.

Nemo 2:00:15 I mean, the last Mormon prophet was Heber J. Grant, 1945. He was polygamous, was he not?

John Dehlin 2:00:21 Yeah, but we're talking about marriages taking

Sandra Tanner 2:00:24 plural wives after the manifesto. Yeah. For at least a dozen years.

John Dehlin 2:00:29 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 2:00:30 More.

John Dehlin 2:00:30 Yeah. So you're right, Julia. That's at least 70, 80.

Julia 2:00:34 Right. So he's getting his numbers wrong again.

John Dehlin 2:00:36 Yeah. And it's always erring on the side of minimizing, like you said.

Nemo 2:00:40 Right.

John Dehlin 2:00:41 So that's just. That's just as honest. Also, can somebody answer me this? They've changed it. Like in the LDS discussions episode. One of the most important episodes we ever did was on changes to the Doctrine and Covenants, which is based on the groundbreaking work largely of Sandra and Gerald Tanner. Like, we know that the church can change the Doctrine and Covenants. Well, there's a really easy answer to the temporary and non restorative teachings of plural marriage found in DNC132. What's the answer, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner 2:01:16 I've lost where you're going.

John Dehlin 2:01:17 Change it. Right. Why don't the Brethren just cut in half DNC132 issue new scriptures and have it end in verse 35? It could be really easy, right, Nemo?

Nemo 2:01:30 Yeah, absolutely.

Sandra Tanner 2:01:34 Why don't we just go back to using section 101 that they had,

John Dehlin 2:01:40 which prohibited polygamy, which said in as much as of.

Sandra Tanner 2:01:43 We have been accused of the crime and of fornication and polygamy, we declare one man should have one wife. That was the order of the church. That was what was in the Doctrine of Covenants. When Joseph's going to these teenage girls to convince them to go into polygamy, There was a section in the Doctrine of Covenants that said they didn't believe in it. When he went to these married women, the DNC said they didn't believe in polygamy. I mean, the deception the church perpetrated through this whole period is just astounding.

John Dehlin 2:02:13 Wasn't it like the 1870s when they finally added DNC 132 to the scriptures?

Sandra Tanner 2:02:19 The section 101 denouncing polygamy was in every edition of the Doctrine and covenants till 1876.

John Dehlin 2:02:28 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 2:02:29 So, I mean, when he wants to talk about. Oh, well, those denials don't count because that was just referring to Bennett's polygamy or something. The denial was in the Doctrine and Covenants that said they didn't believe polygamy.

John Dehlin 2:02:45 Herodo, you got a shout out from Dan. Dan. Dan Vogel writes, Gerardo, Bam. So that you must have thrown a truth.

Julia 2:02:52 That's why you're dancy.

John Dehlin 2:02:53 Yeah, you must have thrown a truth bomb that Dan Vogel endorsed. Good job, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano 2:02:58 Nice. Nice.

John Dehlin 2:03:00 All right, well, let's keep going. The deceptions continue. This guy literally can't open his mouth without. Without deceiving people. All right, let's play the next clip.

Joseph Smith Marrying Women Already Married

Guest 2:03:10 Okay. What was the purpose. We'll stay a purpose here of Joseph Smith marrying women who were already married? Where is this taught in Scripture? That had to be restored. All right, so we are going to ignore the second half of the question because that's a false one. There isn't. So. But let's go to this one. So let's start with data. Yes. Joseph Smith was sealed to 12 women who were previously married. And at the time of their sealing, Joseph continued to be married to other men. And so none of these left us an explanation of why. So this is one of those places where we say, that was one of the pieces of the past I wish survived. We've got evidence from these women, but not evidence of why. So a couple of patterns emerge. So we're going to talk about specific people in general patterns, and I don't have a link between them, so. But here's some patterns. One pattern that we find in early plural marriage is families wanting to be connected to each other. Now, this is different than the way Latter Day Saints think about sealing today for one very good reason. We changed how we do ceiling in April 1894. Did you know that we hit it in the church history topics? There's one called ceiling. Wilford Woodruff is president of the church. He gets up a general conference and he says, all right, we've been doing sealing not the way the Lord wants it. Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to seal a person to their parents, their grandparents, their children, and we're going to create a chain of the human family back to Adam and Eve. And you're sitting there saying, wait, that's what. That's what ceiling is. But so what were they doing before 1894? Well, turns out they were doing a lot of things and different things. And so part of what happened in 1894 was saying, this is how ceiling. How the Lord wants ceiling to work. So Wilford Woodruff doesn't use these words, but I'm going to use, again, 21st century words because I think they help us. If we talk about Wilford Woodruff's great chain of the human family, let's call that vertical. Me to my parents, to my grandparents, my children, I've got a vertical chain. He didn't call that, but I am. So then what's happening before 1894? I'm going to call horizontal because it's going to help us think about it. If we go back and say Joseph and the people in Nauvoo, you weren't thinking about sealing the same way I do. That's correct. They weren't. So how are they thinking about it? One of the ways is they're thinking about it horizontal. They're thinking about, how do I be connected to the people that I know? Now, this isn't plural marriage, but it's another temple ordinance, Baptism for the dead. When that began in Nauvoo in the Mississippi river in 1841, you couldn't be baptized for somebody you didn't know. You had to give up proof this person was dead. And then you also had to say to the, to the witness, I knew this person in life, and they were a good person. And they just died right before the restoration came. And if they were still alive, I'm convinced they would have accepted it. And so the first temple work was for. They would. If they time traveled now and found some of you in the genealogy library tracking people down from 800 years ago, they'd be like, what on earth are you thinking you're supposed to do? People that you know, and that's the way they're thinking about temple ordinances and these connections.

John Dehlin 2:07:02 All right, really quickly. Oh, Sandra, you. You're jumping out of your chair. Go ahead.

Sandra Tanner 2:07:06 This is such a confusing conglomeration. He's making these confusing issues. Baptism for the dead's got nothing to do with this issue of sealings the ceilings that he's talking about. The change that was made was originally they were sealing men to men. A man could be sealed to a higher priesthood authority guy like you could get sealed to Brigham Young or to Joseph Smith to be a part of his family conglomeration. And then they changed it. No, we're going to just seal father to grandfather to great grandfather in a family chain instead of man to man, trying to get his own great big kingdom. But that has nothing to do with the sealing of his marrying married women, because this did not involve sealing the man in this marriage to Joseph Smith. So it doesn't even qualify in the sealing of men to men. This was sealing women to Joseph Smith. It excluded the husband from the deal entirely. He wasn't part of the eternal family.

John Dehlin 2:08:15 I'm also confused as to why he's calling pre-1894 dynastic ceilings horizontal. Because isn't. Is it a dynastic ceiling all about being in like the. The equivalent of the Mormon celestial mlm. Upline, like you want to get sealed to someone upline who's royal, who's of royal lineage, who's like a big name? And so is it that vertical.

Sandra Tanner 2:08:41 You're trying to increase your vertical track than the person you're related to, dad to grandpa, to great grandpa.

John Dehlin 2:08:48 But it's. It's dynastic. It's totally vertical, right?

Sandra Tanner 2:08:51 Yes, it is in that sense.

Gerardo Sumano 2:08:52 Well, but he didn't explain the way you did, John. He's trying to make it sound like, oh, John, I know you and I want to be.

John Dehlin 2:08:58 No, but it wasn't like, I want to be in Joseph's upline. Yeah. I want to be in Brigham's upline, Nemo.

Nemo 2:09:06 But what. What you're getting there with John is, is vertical in terms of hierarchy, in terms of power structures, in terms of who is above who in the pecking order. I think what he means by horizontal is more that it's not direct lineage as you would image it. In a family tree. Grandparents are placed above, grandchildren are placed below. It's to someone on the side who's of your same generation. Right. In a different family or this or that. That's what I think he means by horizontal.

Sandra Tanner 2:09:30 But then you're into Joseph's horizontal.

John Dehlin 2:09:33 Yeah, but Nemo, as our resident monarchist, you know, dynasties, dynastic, all about lineage, Right.

Nemo 2:09:43 It is all about lineage, but it's also about spreading out. This is why all the royal families of Europe are all intermarried. Right. Because within that generation, you've got to link them all together. And then. So then their kids are all not going to invade each other because, oh, my cousin's actually the king of, you know, Spain or whatever.

John Dehlin 2:09:59 I understand what he's trying to do, but it's just kind of misleading. It's not like I'm just trying. Friends were getting sealed to friends because what's the point?

Gerardo Sumano 2:10:06 What. How does that. Any of that explain the same social

Nemo 2:10:10 that exists here will exist there?

Gerardo Sumano 2:10:12 Other than. Yeah, other than making the members dizzy about all these changes. Doesn't explain why Joseph Smith was marrying other men's wives.

John Dehlin 2:10:23 Yeah, that's right. It's kind of a red herring. It's kind of misleading. Back to your point, Sandra. Yeah, yeah.

Nemo 2:10:31 What?

John Dehlin 2:10:32 So any other. Any other. Oh, Julie, you had some slides. Do you want to just take us through the law of adoption?

Julia 2:10:38 Yeah. So Sandra already kind of talked about this, but I kind of want to go through it a little bit anyway. So one of the earliest aspects of the Mormon Church was the law of adoption. And as you mentioned, that is sealing men to men who were not related to each other. In 1847, Brigham Young was visited by Joseph Smith in a dream. And in the dream, he asked Joseph more about the law of adoption. And in my opinion, because he knew what it was called, this. It's. It seems to make more sense that Joseph Smith was the one who first taught this law of adoption. Because otherwise, why would Brigham be inquiring him about learning more about it? Because it was recently after. Right after he passed away, right after he was killed. So in 1862, Brigham Young even called the law of adoption a great and glorious doctrine. And in 1873, Brigham Young even emphasized that men could seal. They could seal men to women outside of the Mormon temple, but a temple was absolutely necessary for the law of adoption and sealing men to men. And so he says, but we can seal women to men, but not men to men without a temple. And as he says, it wasn't until Wilford Woodruff, the fourth Mormon prophet, that the law of adoption was done away. In the 1890s, Wilfred, quote, had a peculiar feeling, unquote, about sealing men together who were not related and charged the members of the church to be sealed only to their relatives, their fathers and grandfathers. In explaining the law of adoption, historian Juanita Brooks explained, the idea behind it was that in establishing the kingdom of God on earth, there should also be a celestial relationship. If the prophet Joseph were to become a God over a minor planet, he must not only have a large posterity, but also assistance of practical skills. And so it's like, again, like, you're saying the dynastic, like, he's trying to make himself bigger because he's having people sealed to him through the love adoption. So, yeah, so.

Sandra Tanner 2:12:12 But none of that relates to why he's marrying married women.

Julia 2:12:16 Right.

Sandra Tanner 2:12:17 He's just diverted the whole discussion into a side topic that doesn't relate.

Julia 2:12:22 Right. So, like, one of the things that I think about, too, a lot is when people say, oh, he was just trying to connect the families. He was just trying to connect Helen Mark Kimball. She was 14. He was just. He wasn't gonna sleep with her. He was just connecting the families. If that's the case, why didn't he just marry Hebert? Or, like, if he was trying to connect himself to the Huntingtons, why did he marry Zina, who was already married to Henry? Why not just marry himself to, like, Dimmick her brother? Like, none of that makes any sense because the law of adoption already existed. And so if you jump to the next slide, John. So, yeah. Oh, sorry. So if the true reason for Joseph Smith marrying women who were already married was simply to connect the families or even women who weren't married, why wouldn't he simply seal himself to their husbands or brothers? The fact that evidence exists for sexual relationships with at least 12 of these 14 women might lead one to conclude that Joseph Smith's reasoning for sealing himself to women who are already married was for more than simply familial connection. So he.

Sandra Tanner 2:13:17 Yes. Building a celestial harem.

Julia 2:13:20 Right.

John Dehlin 2:13:21 Yeah. So we we can't forget what the original question was. Right? The original question was, why is Joseph marrying and having sex with women already married to other men?

Gerardo Sumano 2:13:31 Oh, he's gonna say that didn't happen.

John Dehlin 2:13:33 So he goes off and then starts talking about the law of adoption, which has nothing to do with Joseph marrying women. Marriage other.

Nemo 2:13:40 Did you. Did you hear the way he started to talk about it as well? It's like Joseph was. Was married to women who were married and continued to be married during that time. It's like. It's like he wanted to say. Yeah, he wanted to say they were married as though. And thought he could maybe leave it there to imply that they weren't when they married Joseph and then realized, no, I do have to actually admit that at least.

John Dehlin 2:14:03 And he totally bypasses the question, why in the world are prophets and revelators for 40 or 50 years having this weird ordinance of men being sealed to men, and then all of a sudden it's erased? Like, don't they talk to God? Like, wouldn't they have implemented that because God wanted it? And if God wanted it, then why are they taking it away? And by the way, Sandra or Julia, are either of you offended that, like, marriages of women to men. Oh, they don't really need a temple, but ceilings of men to men. Well, they require a temple ceiling bros. Right. Why are women. Why are women's ceilings not as important as men's ceilings to men?

Gerardo Sumano 2:14:44 And there's Gay Mormons would really like that.

Julia 2:14:46 Right, right. But I've never heard any stories of women being sealed to women without a man involved, so that. That just didn't happen.

John Dehlin 2:14:52 But women. But again, women being sealed to men doesn't really need it. Men being sealed to men get that

Nemo 2:15:00 temple about that priesthood.

John Dehlin 2:15:02 Yeah. So that's all kind of. Kind of weird. Okay. All right.

Erekson's Evasions on Plural Marriage Questions

Sandra Tanner 2:15:07 But just notice we still have not answered the question. Why was he marrying these women?

Gerardo Sumano 2:15:15 He started by saying, we don't know, but.

John Dehlin 2:15:17 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 2:15:19 And he made us dizzy with.

Sandra Tanner 2:15:20 Well, he's trying to end up saying, well, the reason is because of Jacob. Was it chapter two or whatever? No, that isn't the reason, because he's already said they didn't have kids.

John Dehlin 2:15:29 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 2:15:30 So that wasn't the reason.

John Dehlin 2:15:32 Is it fair to say a red herring is deception? Nemo, you're our resident logic expert. It's kind of like Obi Wan Kenobi or whoever saying, these are not the droids you're looking for by bringing up a red herring. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about. But is it fair to say that's a form of deception?

Nemo 2:15:52 Yeah, because what you're, what you're doing is you're deceiving someone by drawing their attention away from the thing that they desire to know.

John Dehlin 2:15:59 And I guess we don't know if that's intentional.

Gerardo Sumano 2:16:03 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:16:03 Or if, you know, it's, It's.

Nemo 2:16:05 Well, no, because he was like, you have questions so he could give a simple answer.

Gerardo Sumano 2:16:08 Yeah.

Nemo 2:16:10 He doesn't need to give this complex answer to try and distract away from the answer he doesn't want to give or the accuracy he can't give. Because. Because if he was being completely honest, if he doesn't know, he could just say, I don't know, and then move on. Right. He's. He feels this pressure because of his position and because of his need to bolster the church. He feels this pressure to provide an answer, and that's why he has to give this long convoluted thing about the law of adoption.

Gerardo Sumano 2:16:32 Yeah. It's like he's. Yeah, it's just, it's kind of like he's standing in front of a dead body waving his hands and saying, don't look over here, look over there, you know?

John Dehlin 2:16:47 Yeah, yeah. And, and, and still most members have never heard of Joseph Smith's polygamy, let alone the word polyandry, let alone this notion of dynastic ceilings. So part of the meta framework for all of this is that these issues we're discussing are still withheld from the general membership today in 2025. The church is still deceiving the membership by withholding these facts from them.

Sandra Tanner 2:17:19 People are not today aware of all these different types of strains of thought in Mormonism, of ceiling to married women, sealing to men changing to ceiling to grandpas. Yes, a Mormon today thinks they understand temple ceilings, but temple ceilings are very complicated. There's a very deep history of different strains of thought in this that he's just glossing over.

John Dehlin 2:17:56 Yeah. The only way you learn this stuff is if you are lucky to stumble on the gospel topics essays because the Church has intentionally made them hard to

Gerardo Sumano 2:18:04 find and you have to piece it together.

John Dehlin 2:18:06 Right. Or if you get to go to one of these super special firesides that are limited to only people who are already doubting or questioning.

Gerardo Sumano 2:18:14 And you're going to be deceived, but

Sandra Tanner 2:18:15 you still wouldn't understand it because you would have been given this convoluted string of different things that you don't know how to piece them together or what

John Dehlin 2:18:26 they all mean, because Certainly Mormons aren't taught critical thinking skills. Yeah, right, Right.

Sandra Tanner 2:18:32 Well, who would understand what this guy's even referring to?

Nemo 2:18:35 Yeah, because the average Mormon doesn't know about the law of adoption. So this feel. That's a good point, Sandra. This feels almost like a new revelation to these people. So it feels like an answer, even if it isn't one, because they're learning something they were never taught about before.

Sandra Tanner 2:18:48 Before.

Gerardo Sumano 2:18:49 Yeah.

Nemo 2:18:49 So he can then pass that off as an answer to the question by revealing something they didn't know, but it doesn't really answer that question.

Sandra Tanner 2:18:58 Right.

John Dehlin 2:18:59 All right, let's go to the next slide.

Guest 2:19:04 So that helps us with one idea that comes out of plural marriage. That seems weird. People who are sealed to Joseph, when he dies, they get sealed again to other people. Brigham Heber C. Kimball.

Gerardo Sumano 2:19:19 Wait, pause there.

John Dehlin 2:19:20 He just makes it sound like he just helped us with something.

Sandra Tanner 2:19:25 I don't think so.

Gerardo Sumano 2:19:26 But this is even worse. This is even worse.

John Dehlin 2:19:29 I just answered your question.

Gerardo Sumano 2:19:31 You know when he says, like. Like, yeah, they were just all trying to steal to each other because Joseph's wives, when he died, they all got sealed to Brigham.

Guest 2:19:41 Like.

Gerardo Sumano 2:19:42 No, they got sealed to Brigham because Brigham was writing to their husbands, like, Zina and saying, like, she's mine now. Like, it's. It was not. Because, oh, we. We just want to be all sealed to each other. So now all of his wives go to him.

John Dehlin 2:19:58 Yeah. Once Joseph. Once Joseph had been sealed to his 30, whatever, 40 wives, why did they need to get resealed to somebody else?

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:05 Yeah, and, well, he's saying, like, oh, it's because they're all trying to be a big family.

Nemo 2:20:10 Dan Vogels put in the comments. Sealed for time only.

John Dehlin 2:20:14 And, well, what is that? Where is that teaching today? For time only?

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:21 Well, that happens actually today.

John Dehlin 2:20:22 Sealed.

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:23 Yeah. So women. Women who have been already sealed to other men.

Julia 2:20:29 Oh, yeah, there was.

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:30 When their husbands die, they can get. They can get sealed.

John Dehlin 2:20:33 Sealed, but for time only.

Sandra Tanner 2:20:35 Yeah. Oh, that's ridiculous.

John Dehlin 2:20:38 That's called marriage. Is that called marriage?

Julia 2:20:40 That's just.

Sandra Tanner 2:20:41 Just marriage. Make him feel good. We'll call it ceiling.

Nemo 2:20:45 Well, I mean, as a Brit, as an outsider, could it be. So here in the uk, I have to get married in a building that anyone can come into, which means I can't get married in a temple. So we have a civil ceremony, and then we have a temple ceremony. But in the States, particularly in Utah, your wedding ceremony is also your legal ceremony. Right. Your. Your temple ceremonies also your legal ceremony. Right. So the phrase ceiling as it refers to a. A Mormon wedding in a temple, that could be just as an outsider's view. Is that how you could end up with ceilings for time, that concept? Because, well, that's just the name for getting married in a Mormon temple.

Sandra Tanner 2:21:21 No, I think that by putting ceiling on it, they're trying to give some extra special feeling to the couple that there was some special ordinance before God when it was just a marriage.

Gerardo Sumano 2:21:32 Okay.

John Dehlin 2:21:33 Yeah. It's like permanently artificial or permanently temporary. Why do you need a temporary ceiling? Ceiling imply forever. Yeah, it's. It's like an oxymoron.

Sandra Tanner 2:21:42 Yes.

John Dehlin 2:21:43 Two words that don't belong. Temporary ceiling. Yeah, it's like permanently temporary.

Gerardo Sumano 2:21:48 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:21:48 It doesn't make sense.

Nemo 2:21:49 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:21:50 All right, let's keep going.

Guest 2:21:53 In a vertical model, that makes no sense because you're saying, well, hey, you got a vertical chain all the way back to Adam. You don't need another one. In a horizontal model, we can see that it makes a certain kind of sense. Oh, no, my link. Joseph is gone. I need a link to another person. And so people do repeat ceilings in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s. There's a whole bunch of people in the 1860s and 70s who Joseph has been dead for 20 years. And they come in and they say, well, I knew Joseph back in Navajo, who. I want to be sealed to him. There's like 200 people that get sealed to Joseph after he's dead, 20 years after he's dead. They're just doing it different. And that's part of what Wilford Woodruff is saying. All of these different things aren't the thing. Here's the way where it will be organized. So back to the question about women who are married to other men. The evidence we have from them is there were no sexual relations. They. They are married to a man. They come and get sealed to Joseph. They go back home to their home, and they live with their husband. They raise their children. Children. There's no marital interaction with Joseph. Again. But if we look down the list of women who are sealed and are married to someone else, we see several prominent families. We see the Whitney family. Newell. Newell, Whitney. We. And so. So that's one pattern. We see patterns going on. We don't have the Whitney's saying, this is why we did it, but we've got kind of the pattern.

John Dehlin 2:23:23 All right, Julia, you've got a slide for us.

Gerardo Sumano 2:23:25 That was me.

John Dehlin 2:23:28 Someone has a slide for us.

Gerardo Sumano 2:23:29 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:23:29 About Gerardo.

Sandra Tanner 2:23:32 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:23:32 So whether. So basically Q on me. Julia, the video.

Julia 2:23:37 Oh, sorry. Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:23:39 So. So Basically, he's claiming that, yes, Joseph married women who are already married to other men, but he's claiming there's no evidence of sex.

Gerardo Sumano 2:23:49 And that's how he explains what's the purpose? Because, remember, the question was, what's the purpose? And then he's answ is like, well, there was no sex.

John Dehlin 2:23:55 All right, so you got a slide. You want to. You want to discuss the slide?

Gerardo Sumano 2:23:59 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:23:59 Okay, go for it.

Gerardo Sumano 2:24:00 Sorry I interrupted.

John Dehlin 2:24:01 No, it's good.

Gerardo Sumano 2:24:01 Okay. So the. So this one is just a screenshot from a vid from the series of three videos that Dan Vogel has on his YouTube channel called Joseph Smith and Other Men's Wives. And he has three pretty long videos where he goes through every single one of the wives and he explains. He basically is just contesting church apologists and showing why he believes. And there's evidence that Joseph did indeed have sexual relations with most of these women who were already married to other men. So this is his table that he put that he has on that video. So you have. On the left side, he lists the 14 women that were married to Joseph in Polyandru's marriages. On the second column, we have their. The names of their legal husbands, the 14 of them. And then the third column says time and eternity ceiling. And the reason why he's addressing the time and eternity ceiling is because there's this idea that was actually initiated by, I believe, Emma Smith, but then has been really propped up by apologies, like Brian Hales, that Joseph, when he came up with the doctrine of ceilings, there was like time and eternity ceilings and time only ceilings. And the idea is that, well, what Brian Hills is that the polyandruist marriages were all for time only or, sorry, for eternity only, not for time, meaning that he could not have sex with them during this life because they were not his wife during this life. And what Joe. What Dan Vogel shows is that there is strong evidence for most of these that they were both time and eternity. Because directly contesting what apologist Brian Hill says. And then he has the fourth column, evidence of sexuality.

Julia 2:26:08 And.

Gerardo Sumano 2:26:09 And he has 11 for them. Is he. He says, yes, that. That we have evidence that there was sexual relations with 11 of the 14 women and for only three of them, Elizabeth David, Sarah Kingsley, and Ruth Vose. We. He's. Dan Bogle says we do not have evidence of sexual relations, but for. For 11 of them, we do.

John Dehlin 2:26:37 One thing that I'm really confused about, didn't we spend the first 10 or 15 minutes of this episode explaining why God says polygamy? Is necessary. Sandra, do you remember in the Book of Mormon, why does God say polygamy

Sandra Tanner 2:26:51 might be necessary to raise up seed?

John Dehlin 2:26:54 So why are we even having this question of whether or not Joseph had sex with his polyandrous wives? If the Book of Mormon is telling us what the purpose of that polyandry would be, what would it be?

Sandra Tanner 2:27:10 Well, the problem is that Mormons are embarrassed by the fact of Joseph having sex with women who were currently living with a husband. And to the outsiders, the rest of us look at that, say, well, that kind of looks like adultery.

John Dehlin 2:27:30 And so they're swinging or, you know, so.

Sandra Tanner 2:27:35 So they have to try to put a religious spin on this. How do we save Joseph from being accused of adultery? Well, you can't. He did have sex with many of these women. And we have Sylvia Session as an example. You're going to go on with something else on that.

John Dehlin 2:28:00 Keep going. I was talking to her.

Sandra Tanner 2:28:02 Sylvia Sessions, in her old age, tells her daughter Josephine that she was named Josephine because she was Joseph's child. But then DNA shows that Josephine really was the daughter of the husband. Okay, so that takes her out of Joseph having a child in polygamy, but it shows that Sylvia was sleeping with the husband and Joseph at the same time. Otherwise, you don't confuse who's the husband of your child.

John Dehlin 2:28:36 Right.

Sandra Tanner 2:28:37 So we have absolutely, from the mother, the statement that she was having sex with Joseph while she was married, and

John Dehlin 2:28:47 the affidavits that we have that the Reorganized Church put together on Joseph's polygamous wives. Were any of those polyandrust wives that, you know, women who basically swore affidavits attesting to them marrying Joseph in every deed, in other words, sexually.

Sandra Tanner 2:29:08 I don't remember the list, I don't

Julia 2:29:11 think, from my memory, because we're working on an episode about this, gathering all the information of the evidence of sexuality between all the wives. I don't. I don't recall off the top of my head any of them being polyandrous. You have, like, Eliza R. Snow. You have the Partridge Sisters. You have, I think, Louisa. They talk about Louisa Beeman through Joseph Bates Noble. I don't think any of them are polyandrous, but I could be wrong.

John Dehlin 2:29:32 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 2:29:32 Well, we do know Sylvia, right?

Gerardo Sumano 2:29:35 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:29:35 And certainly, again, the question of this episode is, is Keith Erickson deceiving people?

Julia 2:29:41 He is.

John Dehlin 2:29:42 Does he not know about.

Sandra Tanner 2:29:45 He has to know about Sylvia. All the historians know about Sylvia's story.

Gerardo Sumano 2:29:49 And he's gonna. He's gonna talk about one of them. And then I Have a rebuttal by Dan Vogels. I directly contradicts what he's about to say about one of the wives, but yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 2:29:59 And if he doesn't know, for some weird reason, he knows now people need to let him know. I'm gonna just ask everybody. I want everybody. If you feel like Keith Erickson, his deceiving members, will you get Keith Erickson's email address? Email him and tell him to watch this episode and to change his roadshow to stop deceiving members. Julie, I'm gonna have you look up or Maven, I'm gonna have you look up his email address. We're gonna put it on screen, and I'm gonna ask all of you to email him to put him on notice if he doesn't know all the instances where he's deceiving people.

Gerardo Sumano 2:30:35 Don't be mean though.

John Dehlin 2:30:36 What? No, no, no. Be nice.

Nemo 2:30:38 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:30:39 Be friendly, be kind. Don't harass him. Don't call him. Don't call him a lying liar. Say we assume that, that you just aren't aware. Even though you're a PhD in history and official church historian. We just assume you're not aware of like 20 or 30 really important things that you're deceiving members about. So here's the episode. Please fix your deceiving history. We're gonna. I'm gonna just ask that of everybody. And then maybe we'll do a follow up episode on what your experiences were. You can read to us or share with us his responses to you. Maybe we'll do a whole lds.

Gerardo Sumano 2:31:18 Maybe you really choice.

Nemo 2:31:21 That's one way to get him to not respond.

John Dehlin 2:31:24 Well, he believes in honesty, right. So maybe he will. All right, should we go to the next clip?

Gerardo Sumano 2:31:29 Let's go.

Guest 2:31:29 Okay, here's another pattern. This is one that we tell in Saints Volume 1. There's a young woman, her name is Mary Elizabeth Rollins. She has a wonderful story right here in Independence. We meet her. Well, most people meet her in Independence, so we'll start there. The printing press is destroyed and a couple of teenage girls grab the pages, take them out into the field. Mary Elizabeth Rollins is one of those teenage girls. She had been baptized a couple years earlier when she was 12. She read the Book of Mormon straight through in one sitting. Has a powerful testimony. One of the earliest converts. And then again the story here. But she grows up and she moves to Nauvoo. And in Nauvoo, she marries a man named Adam Lightner. And Adam is a great guy. He owns a store. People Go there. He gets voted on to the city council. People work with him. They love him. She loves him. They're happily married. There's only one problem. Adam is not a member of the church. It's not a problem for being on the city council. Joseph is the mayor. Adam's on the city council. They work together. They're friends. They're. He's a good person, but he just hasn't joined the church. Church. And so when temple ordinances are revealed and when people can be connected to each other and they are excited, Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner is one of the people who gets sealed to Joseph. She's already married to Adam. And it's so. And this one looks like, again, we don't have Mary saying, this is why we did it, but it looks like that's the way for Mary to be connected in the way they're working with ceilings. If Adam's not a member, then Mary gets.

John Dehlin 2:33:20 All right.

Gerardo Sumano 2:33:21 Yeah, I mean, it's pretty disturbing. Tell us, what's this idea that, oh, eternal marriage was revealed. Everyone was getting sealed. So then Mary Elizabeth was left alone because she does. Didn't have a husband who was a Mormon, so she had to get married to Joseph. But. So I just want you to play the video then from the next slide, John, where Dan Vogel has a. A clip regarding Mary Elizabeth Rollins.

John Dehlin 2:33:52 Okay, so this is a clip from Dan Vogel's very awesome and important YouTube channel. The day after she and her husband arrived in Nauvoo in early February, 1842, Joseph Smith visited Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner with Brigham Young and proposed marriage to her in a most unusual way. As she recalled, Brother Joseph told me that the angel had appeared to him three times, the last time with a drawn sword, commanding him to take me as his wife. He told me in 1834, he saw me standing by his side while preaching in Kirtland, Ohio. I was a thousand miles away from him at that time. The angel appeared to him and told him what it meant, but he became afraid and did not dare to write me. But after seven years, the angel appeared the third time and threatened his life unless he done what he the angel told him. Mary was naturally skeptical and wondered why Smith waited so long to tell her. But he assured her that she would receive a testimony that the principle of plural marriage was true. She said an angel appeared to her one night, but she was so afraid she couldn't speak. But neither did the angel. Nevertheless, she believed it was a sign and that her prayers had been answered. When Smith married Mary Elizabeth later that same month. She had been married to non Mormon adam Lightner since 1835 and was eight months pregnant. Eight months pregnant. Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 2:35:32 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:35:33 Tell us what that just said.

Gerardo Sumano 2:35:35 Just this idea that he's, he's trying to advance that, oh, poor Mary Elizabeth liner, she was gonna get. She was gonna left. Be left alone. So Joseph came to so she could be sealed and connected that way. And he's leaving out this, this pretty disturbing story of an angel coming three times to. To coerce Joseph into supposedly marrying her.

Nemo 2:36:00 And interestingly, right. Keith Erickson wants to talk about patterns that keep emerging. The pattern of Joseph Smith being visited by someone after seven years. Right. Seven years seems to be one of those numbers he gravitates towards. It's. I noticed that he propositioned her after the angel had come to him seven years later. Which means that the last time the angel had come to him was the year in which Mary got married, which means then before that she was single. If he is telling the truth about these, you know, times that he wanted to marry her. And I just thought that timeline is quite interesting. I wonder how old she was. You know, she's, she's aged during this time. So maybe initially he fancied it when she was younger and then, yeah, she's a bit older now. I don't know. The timeline just sticks out to me for some reason.

Sandra Tanner 2:36:44 Well, yeah, she's only a young teenager. I think she's only about 15 or so or 16 when she marries Leitner. I mean, she just, she's a young person. But this idea that Joseph can go to these women and give them this line about this angel came with a drawn sword that said I had to enter into polygamy or I was going to be destroyed. I mean, it is such a manipulative approach to young girls or to married women to come to them with this kind of sales pitch that you are going to be responsible for my death because I have to go into polygamy and if you turn me down, that could be my undoing. It's such a spiritual pressure and manipulation. I mean, it's just reprehensible to go to these people with these kinds of pressure points on them.

Gerardo Sumano 2:37:51 Yeah, and, and more reprehensible that Keith Erickson is talking about her and spinning. Well, not just spinning, like completely leaving that out, that out and creating a new story for her.

John Dehlin 2:38:04 Maybe he's never heard of the angel with the flaming sword.

Sandra Tanner 2:38:10 This man has studied church history enough that I will not give him a pass on not knowing these things. Anyone that has read superficially on polygamy and who entered into polygamy with Joseph Smith would know these stories.

John Dehlin 2:38:27 Julia, why are you laughing?

Julia 2:38:28 Oh, I just thought it was funny because, like, yeah, these stories, everyone, like Brian Hill talks about these stories, like, these stories are very, very well known. There's no way he doesn't.

John Dehlin 2:38:37 All right, so I haven't yet been able to find his email address. If any of you can find it, please share it in the comments.

Nemo 2:38:42 I think there might be a reason that it's not publicly available, John.

John Dehlin 2:38:45 Absolutely. Well, here's the link I could find. So if you go to keitherickson.com contact, that's K-E-I-T-H E R E K-S-O-N.com contact you can fill out a form, email Keith Erickson, let him know that he has put him on notice that he's intentionally or unintentionally deceiving the world. Be kind, be nice, give him the benefit of the doubt, and let's see if he issues an apology or attraction. Or worst case, let's see if he changes his deceptions or corrects his deceptions in future episodes. I also want to add, Dan Vogel writes, I haven't seen that video for years. So glad we're re reintroducing you to your own content, Dan Vogel. And then Dan also says marrying pregnant women was one way to control birth.

Gerardo Sumano 2:39:41 Yeah, because she was eight months pregnant when hungry.

Nemo 2:39:46 Yeah, he missed the comment, John, where he said, I think Nemo is right. I don't even know what he was saying about. I just think, you know, it doesn't matter, really. Put that on my bio. I think Nimu is right, Dan Vogel, you know, it's. That's the sort of endorsements I need right now.

John Dehlin 2:40:00 You know, you need a tattoo, Nemo. That's like Dan Vogel's face. And then like a little bubble. Cartoon bubble. I think Nemo was right.

Nemo 2:40:09 I think Dan's now gonna take out restraining order. John. Thanks for that. Cool.

John Dehlin 2:40:14 All right. Well, he keeps lying. This is really, really. This is really, really deceptive. Let's keep going. Let's go to the next clip.

Brigham Young's Teachings on Polygamy and Exaltation

Guest 2:40:26 Okay, here's one. Will you expound on what historians and Elder Cook said at Nauvoo regarding the status of marriage in exaltation? Okay, this is really specific one. If you don't remember that event. It was back when volume one of Saints was released. We did an event at the Nauvoo Temple. Q A like this. People submitted questions. Elder Quinton L. Cook responded. And so one of the questions that was asked is a question that haunts people. So the church stops practicing plural marriage in 1890. In 1904, we begin excommunicating people who practice it, and they're serious about it. There are three members of the Quorum of the Twelve who get excommunicated after 1904 for. Because they refuse to stop. So this is difficult for people. And so.

Julia 2:41:22 But.

Guest 2:41:23 But one of the things that haunts people today, I grew up with four sisters. I have four daughters. Is this thing in the back of my head like, well, well, am I gonna have to do that? Because there was an exception. A couple of thousand people did it. Am I gonna have to. To do it? And so that was the question that came through. And now the answer depends on what you hope for. If you're one of those who. Who's like, because there are these today, maybe you've met some who really want to do plural marriage and wanted to come back, this answer is not going to help you. But here's the answer. Elder Cook said he actually took the question to the quorum of the 12th, and they talked it over. And you can see this online. But this is the way Elder Cook talked about it. He said, we talk. I talked with my brethren, and we agreed that plural marriage had served its purpose. That was his language. So when we attached that to that big framework that monogamy is the rule, plurality is the exception. And this was in 2018, the quorum of the 12 saying, thriller Cook, it served its purpose. We don't know any purpose for it now in the 21st century. And so they did it in the past. We don't do it now. Now, since 1890, church leaders have taught that plural marriage is absolutely not required for salvation or exaltation or celestial kingdom or highest derision. However you want to frame it, they have repeated it over and over and over. Wilford Woodruff taught it in 1890, Joseph F. Smith in 1904, Heber J. Grant in the 1920s, and they repeated it in the 1930s. We have church leaders saying that this is not required over and over and over again. And yet it still haunts people in the back of your. Our minds. And so Alma had a sinful wish, so I have a sinful wish. His sinful wish was that he could speak with the voice of an angel and convince everybody of one fact. Here's my sinful wish. I wish I could let every woman in the church today know that you will not be required to Practice plural marriage. That should be gone. Church leaders have repeated this so many times, but we cling to it in our culture and our folktales. And so please, if you're carrying that burden, please, please let it go. It is. It is not what is being taught.

Sandra Tanner 2:44:12 So.

John Dehlin 2:44:13 So folktale. Let's address that right off. There's the. The very next slide. Addresses. He used that word, folktale. Who wants to address this slide? Julia?

Julia 2:44:23 Yeah, so I should have put the dates on there because he was talking about certain dates, but I left those off. But I left the references behind it. So Brigham Young taught that if you deny polygamy, you will be damned. He also taught that if you reject polygamy, you will lose your spouse in the celestial kingdom. Joseph F. Smith taught that those who have the ability to live polygamy and don't shall be damned. He also taught, without polygamy, there is no exaltation. John Taylor.

John Dehlin 2:44:47 That's pretty bold, right?

Julia 2:44:49 John Taylor taught that you cannot reject polygamy and be. And be allowed to enter God's glory. Heber C. Kimball taught that if you oppose polygamy, you commit apostasy. He also taught that if you go against polygamy, you will be damned. Wilford Woodruff taught that if you do away with polygamy, you might as well do away with prophets, apostles, and Revelation.

John Dehlin 2:45:06 Now how in the world does he get away saying that? It's just folktales.

Nemo 2:45:11 I can tell you how, because according to Alan Haney, the words of prophets do not gain value with age. And you shouldn't use the words of past prophets to negate the words of living prophets. He said that in General Conference. That is the position of the church is that a living prophet is more important than a dead prophet. But the problem is this is still in DNC132, right? Like I read to you earlier, it's in verse six. If you. If like. Like Joseph F. Smith said, if you are given the opportunity to practice polygamy, you don't take it, you will be damned. The person who doesn't do it will be damned. And forget the new and everlasting covenant which is required for eternal exaltation. Sorry.

Gerardo Sumano 2:45:47 Yeah, Forget about the scriptures. They're sealing men to multiple women's for eternity today.

Guest 2:45:54 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 2:45:54 Both of our highest officers in the church, the president of the church and his first counselor, are both sealed for eternity. Women.

John Dehlin 2:46:03 Yeah.

Nemo 2:46:04 And they don't talk about having to pick, do they?

John Dehlin 2:46:06 If polygamy has. If polygamy has served its purpose, why did Russell M. Nelson get sealed to his second wife after his first wife died?

Nemo 2:46:14 Is that for time only?

John Dehlin 2:46:17 No, no, it's an eternal ceiling. And if polygamy has served its purpose, why did Dallin H. Oaks get sealed to his second wife as well?

Gerardo Sumano 2:46:27 Yeah. Are their first wives going to get a Choice? According to DNC132, they won't.

John Dehlin 2:46:32 It's a polygamous ceiling, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner 2:46:34 Okay. He's trying to help the women of the church not worry that they may have to live polygamy. And so he says in his talk that no one will be forced to live polygamy. What he's not saying is there'll be no polygamy. He's not saying there's no polygamy in heaven. He's saying the women will not be forced to live it. You have a choice. What does that mean? It means if you die before your husband and he then later marries another woman in the temple, you will not be forced to live polygamy with that second woman. But what does that mean? It means you are the one out. He is still going to be eternally married to her. Your kids will be part of that family unit. You will be out in the cold. So what they're saying is, no, you won't be forced to live polygamy, but it'll mean you will not have exaltation because you're then exiting your eternal ceiling.

Nemo 2:47:37 That is brilliant.

John Dehlin 2:47:38 Yeah, brilliant, Sandra. And I'll just add, how the freak does he know he's not an authority? How can he say definitively, how can UTEP professor, former professor, MBA Keith Erickson, how in the world can he say definitively that women won't be required Mormon women, exalted Mormon women won't be required to practice polygamy?

Gerardo Sumano 2:48:04 Emma didn't have a choice. Emma didn't have a choice. Yeah, go ahead.

John Dehlin 2:48:09 Yeah. So he can't say that he's not a prophet. Syrian revelator. What we do have is lots of prophets and revelators saying that they will be forced or they won't go to exaltation. But then secondly, again, it's like, yeah, those women that were told the story that an angel with the flaming sword told Joseph that he'd be killed if they didn't practice polygamy? Like, how much consent would it be if you're a sealed woman in the afterlife and you're told, okay, you don't have to practice polygamy, it's just you won't be exalted with your children and your husband like, is that consent? Is consent even possible? If eternal salvation and exaltation are tied to plural marriage, like so many prophets, seers and revelators have already testified. This doesn't make sense.

Sandra Tanner 2:48:58 Well, these ceilings are still going on. Well, like was mentioned about the two top leaders of the church having plural wives in. On the books.

John Dehlin 2:49:08 Yeah. They could just stop it. The church could say, no more sealings. Right.

Sandra Tanner 2:49:14 Well, it doesn't solve the problem of all the people that already got sealed.

John Dehlin 2:49:17 No, but. But even then, if. If. If, as Erickson is claiming, polygamy has served its purpose, why are men in 2025 still allowed to get sealed to plural wives if their previous wife has died? Why. Why not just have it be civil marriages? Right.

Nemo 2:49:37 And we know they can change it because we. We know they can change the way ceilings are done because Keith Erickson has said that they changed in the 80s. Right. And we know that they just recently changed it. That when you're doing work for deceased ancestors, they don't have to have been married. They can have just been cohabitating, and you can still seal them together as husband and wife in the temple, which, I mean, that didn't get a lot of press, and I thought maybe it should have. But these, they're still making changes to the way sealings are done now. So there's no reason they couldn't just change this.

Sandra Tanner 2:50:04 It's also confusing. It's that the everlasting gospel gets changed every other year.

John Dehlin 2:50:14 Absolutely. And Nemo. I just wanna. I wanna flex back. I just got a comment from Dan Vogel. He says. Excellent point, John.

Nemo 2:50:21 Dan, how could you betray me like this?

John Dehlin 2:50:25 Oh, wow. I actually got a Dan Vogel.

Sandra Tanner 2:50:27 Well, and then he says the polygamy. The reason for polygamy has been fulfilled. What was fulfilled? He still never answered why Joseph was practicing it.

John Dehlin 2:50:40 Oh, dear. This is too fun. This is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Nemo 2:50:47 This easy. This man is. He's the head of his history and outreach for the church. It's so bad, this easy to look at what he's saying and go, that's just not honest.

John Dehlin 2:50:57 At least use Patrick Mason or Spencer Fluman because they're not gonna lie like this. Yeah, even. Even like Anthony Sweat.

Gerardo Sumano 2:51:05 I think that's why they don't use them for this type of.

John Dehlin 2:51:09 Because they're too honest.

Gerardo Sumano 2:51:10 Because they're too honest.

Nemo 2:51:11 Yeah. That's why Spencer Fluman's out in the cold, right?

Gerardo Sumano 2:51:13 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:51:14 Yeah.

Nemo 2:51:14 He's too good Faith.

John Dehlin 2:51:16 Yeah. All right, well, let's keep going.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 2:51:19 That was it. And so here's kind of the way the, the, the. The false logic goes.

Video Clip 1 2:51:27 Talk about false logic.

Video Clip 1 2:51:28 I hear these old folk tales about plural marriage, that a man is righteous and he gets a bunch of wives. Well, am I just a gift? Am I just a prize? Am I not a person? Do I not even have any value? What kind of God would see his daughters that way? How can I have faith in a God like that? How can I pray to a God like that? And I can tell you that's not who God is. That's.

Video Clip 1 2:51:49 I'm going to disagree. That's the Mormon God. What kind of God would do that to a woman? The Mormon God is the correct answer. Keith Erickson. I just had to. Had to clarify that. Sorry. Okay, we'll keep going wrong.

Video Clip 1 2:52:01 God loves you. You're an individual person. He will not give you away as a prize. He will not require you to do a thing. And that is really, really clear.

Nemo 2:52:13 He will not require you to do a thing.

John Dehlin 2:52:16 I read DNC132. What? Where God literally is distributing women like cattle, saying they'll be taken away from this guy, given unto this guy, destroyed

Nemo 2:52:26 if they don't consent. Like what.

John Dehlin 2:52:28 What does he mean, God doesn't award women as prizes? What does he mean?

Sandra Tanner 2:52:34 Well, and it goes back to this whole problem of if she doesn't consent to the plural marriage, she's out of the picture of the marriage. She's leaving the. The exaltation track.

John Dehlin 2:52:47 Julie, you've got a slide. You want to talk about this slide?

Julia 2:52:50 Yeah. So this just popped into my head, but there's other ones, like Kimball comparing women. He says, I think no more of taking a woman than I do buying a cow. So, like, anyway. But this is also Heber c. Kimball. In 1857, he stated, in the spirit world, there is an increase of males and females. There are millions of them. And if I'm faithful all the time and continue right along with Brother Brigham, who will go to Brother Joseph and say, here are here. We are, Brother Joseph. We are here ourselves. And we are here ourselves, are we not, with none of the prosperity property we possess in our probationary state, not even the rings on our fingers? He will say to us, come along, my boys, we will give you a good suit of clothes. Where are your wives? They are back yonder. They would not follow us. Never mind, says Joseph, here are thousands. Have all you want. Perhaps some do not believe that, but I am just simple enough to believe it. And like, to me, that's just that just screams. Women are prizes. Like have all you want. There's just thousands of them. Like, they're not asking the women's whether they want to marry Kimball or Brigham or whoever. Like there's. I don't know. This just. It's just gross how Mormonism does this.

Nemo 2:53:53 What's the quote from? I forget who it's from where they basically talk about, stop taking all the good looking ones for yourself. Bring it back here so we can. I believe the phrase is have a fair shake.

Julia 2:54:02 Yeah, I think it is.

John Dehlin 2:54:05 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 2:54:06 We should do an event. Do I hear C. Kimball's house. Did you know that it exists? Like, that they have like a recreation of his house.

John Dehlin 2:54:15 Oh, he received Kibble's house in Salt Lake City.

Gerardo Sumano 2:54:18 And you could do like a. Yeah, you can rent. Rent it for like events.

Sandra Tanner 2:54:23 Sold.

John Dehlin 2:54:25 All right, we'll think about that. It's a good idea. Sandra. You can be. You can be the main speaker. Yeah, no, I mean, just listen. Homework assignment for any viewer listener. Go read D and C. 132.

Guest 2:54:41 All of it.

John Dehlin 2:54:41 Tell me. All of it. Not just. In fact, you can skip verses 1 through 25. Right. Just start around 30, read to the end and you tell me if God doesn't distribute women like property or cattle.

Guest 2:54:55 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:54:56 Is that fair, Julia?

Julia 2:54:57 Yeah, that's totally fair, Sandra.

John Dehlin 2:54:59 Do you approve?

Sandra Tanner 2:55:00 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:55:01 All right, so we're the. And then return and report.

Gerardo Sumano 2:55:04 What about destroying Emma? If she doesn't agree, Sept. And Emma will be destroyed. Like, what. What is all this talk about? They'll have a choice. Like he hasn't read the scriptures.

Sandra Tanner 2:55:16 Emma sure didn't have a choice.

Gerardo Sumano 2:55:18 Right?

John Dehlin 2:55:18 Yeah, because she was told she'd be destroyed. I a good. This, this is a good point to recommend a really good book called the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy by Carolyn Pearson, our dear friend. We've also done an episode on Mormon stories where she talks about that book. Both are excellent. Check out that book. Just so you can understand how polygamy continues to haunt women today, even in 2025. All right, let's go to the next clip.

Origins of the Book of Abraham Papyri

Guest 2:55:47 After Napoleon conquered everybody. Oh, so this is still see it in museum.

John Dehlin 2:55:55 Okay, so just as a segue.

Gerardo Sumano 2:55:58 Yes.

John Dehlin 2:55:59 We're now switching the Book of Abraham.

Gerardo Sumano 2:56:01 Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 2:56:01 Okay. Which we've covered extensively with Dr. Michael Cohen Mormon stories. But let's just.

Gerardo Sumano 2:56:08 Robert.

John Dehlin 2:56:08 What did I say? Michael Coe, Robert Rittner and LDS discussions. Did some Book of Abraham stuff as well. All right, so let's go ahead and roll that clip today.

Guest 2:56:19 And so all kinds of things are being taken out and so some mummies get excavated and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York city, and in 1835, they end up in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early restoration group, GoFundMe or something. They. But people pull their money and they buy them, and then they start. Look, now they own them. They start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, oh, yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls. And then they're looking at the scrolls, and we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing. No other evidence that. That Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part.

John Dehlin 2:57:33 I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were there.

Gerardo Sumano 2:57:35 He's lying. We do know.

Guest 2:57:38 Oh, my gosh.

Nemo 2:57:39 Oh, it's the missing scroll again.

Gerardo Sumano 2:57:41 I just can't, Like, I can't count how many lies there was. Oracles, inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls. Like, for sure. Like, I have all the people right here that mentioned two scrolls like W.W. phelps and Oliver Cowdy. Everyone said is we have two scrolls and some other scraps of papyri. He's saying that the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papyri. He is later. Or his. Because he's. The way he's gonna frame this is to say. Well, like, the.

John Dehlin 2:58:19 The.

Gerardo Sumano 2:58:20 The. The Mormons brought this. Like, they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting. And then Joseph discovered that there was some ancient writings like that. That's. That's a lie as well. But, I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scrap. Among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. But. But yeah, we. We can.

Nemo 2:59:01 Which is placed under the head of the Mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes.

Gerardo Sumano 2:59:06 Exactly. Yeah, but yeah. So anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papyri. And then the other one was Joseph again.

John Dehlin 2:59:23 So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them.

Gerardo Sumano 2:59:27 Yeah. So here I have visual. I created this a while ago for an episode with this, with the back your professor. But basically so you can visualize it. So at the top you would see on the, on the left side I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be the scroll of Abraham, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph. And then the other scraps and fragments that the witnesses that were there described as. Well, here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide.

John Dehlin 3:00:03 The next slide.

Gerardo Sumano 3:00:04 Yeah. Okay, so we again at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham if you look. Because the way Joseph by this point he had started learning Hebrew. So he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, to. Sorry, from. From right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, with the, with the image that we have in our scriptures as facsimile number one. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it.

Julia 3:00:48 He.

Gerardo Sumano 3:00:49 The Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at the commencement of, of this account or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. And, and then we know we, we have. Because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But there's a piece of. And I have it right there around the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent. That black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. With Egyptologists tell us today that's the section around that size would be the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's going to make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were.

Guest 3:01:45 But we do know, Sandra, you and

John Dehlin 3:01:48 Jerry were, were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Sandra Tanner 3:01:57 Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there and we were on the track of locating them. At the time the Church negotiated to get the papyri back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how Gerald got involved in that early article in dialogue about the papyri, showing that Joseph Smith was filling in parts of the scroll with text from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript or something. And so clear, back in the late 60s, we were challenging the Church on this and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham somehow being proven by these papyri that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, no, sorry, these don't translate to anything you're talking about. Well, it's taken the Church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham, so then they have to go to some sort of mystical way of having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the Church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham.

John Dehlin 3:03:42 And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church kind of admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments.

Sandra Tanner 3:03:53 Right. Well, we knew that clear back in

John Dehlin 3:03:55 1970, but the church didn't. But the Church wouldn't admit it.

Gerardo Sumano 3:03:59 I think as early as 1912 isn't like one Egyptologist.

John Dehlin 3:04:04 New York Times published like a front page article basically saying Book of Abraham's a fraud.

Sandra Tanner 3:04:08 Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papyri illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now. But the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, the Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion.

John Dehlin 3:04:42 And Joseph did translate those.

Sandra Tanner 3:04:45 The images, translated the facsimiles, and they say nothing that he said.

Nemo 3:04:51 Yeah, the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just

Gerardo Sumano 3:04:57 some sort of inspired apologists want to separate the facsimiles from the text today but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles like the, the first one of the first chapter and the first chapters of Book of Abraham. It says, you know, if you go back and look at the commencement of, of these, of this text for, for, you know, an image of, of what I'm talking about.

Sandra Tanner 3:05:24 Yeah. Abraham says, I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record.

Gerardo Sumano 3:05:29 That. Exactly.

Sandra Tanner 3:05:30 So that refer. The text refers you to facsimile number one. And facsimile number one has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion Osiris and Anubis.

John Dehlin 3:05:45 Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles in the Scriptures.

Sandra Tanner 3:05:48 Yes, they still do. They still do, but they're still there.

John Dehlin 3:05:51 Y.

Gerardo Sumano 3:05:52 This is what's like, even the craziest thing. Joseph Smith, in his personal history in 8040s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, we don't know how many scrolls. Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls.

Nemo 3:06:11 But we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative. Right. We can ignore Joseph Smith.

Gerardo Sumano 3:06:15 Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. phelps. And as.

Nemo 3:06:17 I don't know. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 3:06:18 It's just.

John Dehlin 3:06:20 Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with a motive for why Erickson is deceiving people, it's because he, he. Because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed, that that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception.

Sandra Tanner 3:06:50 Right. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had, that they would say anything different from what we have. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it?

The Book of Abraham as a Smoking Gun

John Dehlin 3:07:04 We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the. The biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator.

Sandra Tanner 3:07:14 Right. We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text which the scholars seem to be conceding today. When they talk about, as he looked at the papyri, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him. They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text.

John Dehlin 3:07:46 It's a Revelation. Yeah. All right, let's go to the next clip.

Guest 3:07:52 1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter Day Saint, and he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people.

John Dehlin 3:08:33 Why are you laughing, Gerardo and Siddhartha?

Sandra Tanner 3:08:35 Well, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Attia comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Attia stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one. And Atia immediately recognizes and oh, my goodness, this is Joseph Smith's papyri. You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. This wasn't a discovery made by Attia. Now, Dr. Attia was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that this miraculous finding of the Book of Abraham Scriptures by

Gerardo Sumano 3:09:38 an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right?

Sandra Tanner 3:09:41 Yes. And he wasn't Mormon. He was Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the Church in orchestrating the acquiring of the papyri by the Church, which gets into a real funny story because the Church acquires them not by purchase per se, but through a gift. The Church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papyri to the Church.

John Dehlin 3:10:35 Why wouldn't the Church just buy them?

Sandra Tanner 3:10:37 Because they, the Church never buys anything. The Church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. It's cheaper.

John Dehlin 3:10:44 Oh, okay. Because the Church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erickson a bad historian or a lying historian?

Gerardo Sumano 3:10:54 Both.

Sandra Tanner 3:10:55 I don't know on this. I, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's being honest, he's then shoddy. Because anyone that has read Very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papyri to Dr. Attia. This they interviewed in dialogue. A Journal of Mormon Thought has interviews with these men at the museum where they tell this about how this transaction took place.

John Dehlin 3:11:31 Sandra, he's not allowed to read dialogue because it's not an approved source.

Sandra Tanner 3:11:34 I. I forgot that dialogue's an anti Mormon source.

Gerardo Sumano 3:11:37 They'll make up a story then. Yeah, if you don't make it up.

Nemo 3:11:43 Can I just share a quick thought about this?

John Dehlin 3:11:44 Because you're muted. So am I.

Julia 3:11:47 No, I can hear you.

John Dehlin 3:11:49 Well, I don't hear you.

Nemo 3:11:50 Oh, right. Well, sorry. Nemo, can you talk?

John Dehlin 3:11:54 I want to make sure I can hear.

Julia 3:11:55 Yeah, I. I can. I can talk. I can hear it.

John Dehlin 3:11:57 We're disconnected. Let me see.

Julia 3:11:58 Okay.

John Dehlin 3:11:59 Okay. Talk now.

Nemo 3:12:00 Okay. Right.

Julia 3:12:01 Okay.

John Dehlin 3:12:01 I hear you. That was my fault. You were.

Julia 3:12:03 Okay.

John Dehlin 3:12:03 The audience could hear you. I couldn't. That's my fault.

Nemo 3:12:05 Okay.

Guest 3:12:05 Right.

Nemo 3:12:06 So Kyle S. McKay, right, is a lawyer, and he's currently the church historian. And I've made the point before that the. The difference between historians and lawyers is that they both deal with facts and try and work out things. But lawyers have a motive to do what's best for their client and present the facts in a way that helps the person that's hired them. And a historian has an interest in the truth and what the facts actually tell us. The problem is, Keith Erickson's trying to be both. He's. He's having to be a historian. He's having to act like a lawyer. He's having to look at these facts and go, how can I present them in such a way that makes my team win? And that means he can't be a good historian because he's having to act like a lawyer.

Gerardo Sumano 3:12:46 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:12:47 That's fair. All right, let's go to the next clip. We're almost done.

Guest 3:12:52 1967. There's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not.

John Dehlin 3:12:58 We already did that one, right?

Gerardo Sumano 3:13:00 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:13:00 Oh, we didn't finish it.

Sandra Tanner 3:13:01 Didn't finish it.

Gerardo Sumano 3:13:02 I. Oh. Did you pass it?

John Dehlin 3:13:03 Yeah, but I just lost it. Should we play the rest of it?

Gerardo Sumano 3:13:07 No, let's.

Nemo 3:13:08 I think Sandra told the story well enough. Okay.

John Dehlin 3:13:10 All right, let's go to the next one.

Guest 3:13:13 Okay, so now here's the next way you can play Gotcha on the Internet with this one. You can say the Egyptologists looked at those and they said, they're all funerary texts. That's the word. You'll see it over and over. Funerary texts, book of breathings, book of whatever. Funerary texts.

John Dehlin 3:13:31 A little smirk.

Guest 3:13:33 Yeah. They were buried with mummies. We've been telling that story since 1835. That is not the shocker story. Of course they're funerary texts. They're things that people buried with them because they thought they were important. So that is not the dagger that says, oh, no, they're funerary texts. Thank you for telling me what we've known since 1835.

Sandra Tanner 3:13:56 Life.

Guest 3:13:58 So. So one way people think about this is they'll say, you know what? This doesn't bother me. I got 10 pieces, a whole bunch of scrolls. The one source we have didn't say Abraham, you remember? I. I gave you the quote.

John Dehlin 3:14:13 It was.

Guest 3:14:13 Among them are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. So the one source we have says there's a whole bunch of stuff and Abraham and Joseph are in there somewhere. So.

John Dehlin 3:14:25 Oh, my gosh. I'll let you go first, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner 3:14:28 Well, this is. He is just throwing in words to confuse everyone. Joseph tells us, I unrolled this scroll and here's the writings of Abraham and this other one's the writing of Joseph. I don't understand how he gets this, but idea that there's just a. Just boatloads of papyri out here and somewhere in this was Abraham and somewhere there was Joseph stuff and we just don't know anything. It's just a ridiculous puffing up of words to avoid dealing with the real issue.

Nemo 3:15:10 Dan Vogel, our honorary panelist, put that on screen where he says, the book of Abraham is not a funerary text.

Julia 3:15:16 Yeah, that makes no sense why he would say that.

Gerardo Sumano 3:15:19 Yeah, well, and then if you, if you make his story true that there was boatloads of papyri and among them, like there was a book of Abraham and then an entire book of Joseph. You would need rooms full of papyri to fit all that text in there. Because one of the problems that we have with the papyri that we have today is that you cannot fit the book of Abraham in the length of. Of what the papyri is, even if it was written in Egyptian.

John Dehlin 3:15:49 Based on how hydro.

Guest 3:15:52 Right.

Gerardo Sumano 3:15:53 Based on how high? Because in Joseph Smith's time, they or Joseph believed that one hieroglyphic could be translated to multiple words or sentences or

Sandra Tanner 3:16:03 paragraphs, a whole paragraph.

Gerardo Sumano 3:16:05 So with that idea, yes. But with what we know today, if he wants to fit the book of Abraham and book of Joseph among a ton of other stuff he would like, I mean, Whoa. You would need, like, so much papyri.

Nemo 3:16:22 That's why the missing long scroll thing is, like, is a way to try and get around that. It's like, oh, there's this missing papyri that's long enough to contain all of it. And it's like, yeah, no, there wasn't.

Julia 3:16:32 It just feels really deceptive where he's like, oh, from the 1830s or whatever that we've been saying. It's funerary text. Never at any point did Joseph say, this is funerary text. Like, that's not at all what the rhetoric is. I don't know why he's spinning it that way.

John Dehlin 3:16:44 Yeah, like that. That was just mind blowing. He has this smarmy smirk and he's mocking. He says, it's just Internet trolls. But, Sandra, I think you've been doing this work long before the Internet, right?

Sandra Tanner 3:16:58 Yes, well, yes, we were trolls long before, but, yes, the claim that Joseph's making for what he has are at odds with the actual description of what he had. Yes, they're funerary texts. That's the problem. They have nothing about Abraham. There's nothing about the biblical text on any of the scroll, any of the pieces of papyri that Joseph Smith had in his possession. None of them had anything to do with the Hebrew religion. None of them had to do with Abraham. They all were Egyptian deities. Anyone can look up on Wikipedia, look up Egyptian deities and you will see the same gods depicted on the papyri as in the Egyptian religion. You've got Anubis, you've got Osiris, Isis. Can't remember them all right now, but that they're all represented on those papyri that are easily discernible as Egyptian deities.

Gerardo Sumano 3:18:11 Yeah, and not just. Not just. Yeah, not just the. The gods are represented in the stories, but the pictures themselves are common. Like, you can find the same exact pictures in other places in Egypt and in other papyri. They're not like something new that Abraham drew to tell us about his story when he was being sacrificed. Yes.

John Dehlin 3:18:40 Yeah. The facsimiles appear in lots of scrolls.

Gerardo Sumano 3:18:44 Right.

Sandra Tanner 3:18:45 It's like me taking a picture of the Statue of Liberty and trying to tell you that it's really Jesus.

John Dehlin 3:18:52 Yeah.

Sandra Tanner 3:18:52 I mean, once you've seen the Statue of Liberty, you know what it represents. And it doesn't represent Jesus, but the Mormons are trying to tell us, well, that statue of Osiris doesn't mean Osiris. That's really Abraham sitting on that throne. No, it's Osiris.

John Dehlin 3:19:09 Well, what's particularly disturbing about this is that Erickson is mocking, you know, critics for saying truth tellers. Yeah, he's mocking truth tellers for saying that Joseph Smith's translation was erroneous. Because while the scrolls are funerary texts, Joseph didn't produce funerary texts. He produced the Book of Abraham, which is not funerary text, which is manufactured revelation. That's false and ahistorical. But Erickson is being very deceptive by saying, oh, the church has always told people the scrolls or funerary texts. They've said that since 1835. It's an overt, egregious, outrageous, smirky, mocking, deceptive, misrepresentation.

Nemo 3:20:01 Right.

Gerardo Sumano 3:20:02 Two things.

John Dehlin 3:20:05 The.

Gerardo Sumano 3:20:06 I think when we talk about funerary texts, people need to understand funeral texts in Egyptian, or for Egyptians, it would mean texts that would help the person that died have information needed to, like, pass to the. To the other side. And so that's why it's called funerary text, and that's why they were buried with the person. So just that. That's something important to understand. It's not about the Book of Abraham. Doesn't have anything to do with that, but.

Sandra Tanner 3:20:38 Right.

Gerardo Sumano 3:20:38 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:20:39 All right, let's go ahead and play the next clip. We've only got two more clips to go.

Guest 3:20:45 Okay, so now here's the next way you can play Gotcha. On the Internet with this one. You can say the Egyptologist looked at those and they said, we've had this one already.

Gerardo Sumano 3:20:55 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:20:55 Oh, oh, oh, okay.

Guest 3:20:56 I'm sorry.

John Dehlin 3:20:57 So did we talk about the slide that came after Julia?

Julia 3:21:01 No, no, that one's Gerardo's. I think he kind of referenced it, but he can go ahead and talk about that if he wants.

John Dehlin 3:21:05 Did we already cover it, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 3:21:07 Yeah, yeah, just basically the story of the two scrolls.

John Dehlin 3:21:12 Okay. Okay. So then. Then we're on to the last clip.

Guest 3:21:16 For many people, they say that. Okay, great. That's fine. Okay, now there's one piece that doesn't. That. That doesn't work for. And this is the piece. One of those 10 pieces is the little diagram that's reproduced in the Book of Abraham. And it's the one where there's a person laying on a table and being sacrificed. And so if you've ever been bored as a teenager in Sunday school and flipped to the only pictures in scripture, you went to that one and you saw there's a little description about what's going on in the photograph about, you know, the gods and People and whatever. Okay, so we have that. That image is one of the papyrus fragments. And Egyptologists look at that and they say, yeah, that doesn't say the thing that. That says right underneath there. Okay, so now we take a step back. We don't have any idea what's going on in Joseph's mind as he translates things he doesn't tell us. Every time Joseph is asked, how did you translate the Book of Mormon? He says, I did it by the gift and power of God. We don't even have an account from Joseph about the Book of Abraham. All the accounts are more.

Gerardo Sumano 3:22:32 This is crazy that we don't have an account of what Joseph was thinking when he was translating the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin 3:22:38 Like, that's the grammar enough.

Gerardo Sumano 3:22:40 Yeah, yeah. We have the grammar Alphabet written by multiple people simultaneously. Where, like, they were literally telling us exactly how they were thinking. The papyri must be translated. They were writing the characters on the left side and telling us the meaning of the characters.

John Dehlin 3:22:57 Yeah, just crazy. And again, check out the Robert Rittner series on Mormon stories where he goes into depth. He's. He was the world's most foremost Egyptologist and authority on Egyptology in the Book of Mormon. And he shows Book of Abraham. What did I say?

Sandra Tanner 3:23:14 The Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin 3:23:16 Thank you.

Nemo 3:23:17 And if Keith Erickson wants to try and shift to say, oh, it was only scribes that wrote down what Joseph is doing and all this other stuff, well, those same scribes that wrote the grammar Alphabet of the Egyptian language were trusted to write sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. So at what point do we stop trusting the scribes that write things down for Joseph? Because that's going to start to undermine a lot more things than just the Book of Abraham.

Gerardo Sumano 3:23:37 We have a version of it in Joseph Smith's own handwriting. So, like, we can't pin it on the scribes on that one either. It's just. It's kind crazy.

John Dehlin 3:23:47 All right, let's finish.

Gerardo Sumano 3:23:47 Oh, sorry, one more thing. The church has officially admitted that those things. What? Those things are in the Joseph Smith Papers project. So, like, there's not. We. We can't skirt around it.

Nemo 3:23:59 Like, the key's not even agreeing with the Joseph Smith Papers project at this point.

Gerardo Sumano 3:24:02 Exactly. Which he's supposedly in charge of.

John Dehlin 3:24:04 Yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead and finish the clip.

Guest 3:24:09 Practical. It's like, I spent the day working on the Abraham manuscripts, so, like, really high level. His journal is filled with those. Spent the day working on Abraham. What was he worried? How did it work? Like, we don't know anything about that. So again, this is people in the, in the gap saying, oh, no, we don't know how it worked. Sometimes people look for patterns. And here's an interesting pattern. We'll go back to the Joseph Smith Bible translation. When Joseph sat down to translate the Bible, he opens up to Genesis chapter one, verse one. And the first thing that happens is he has a vision. All kinds of stuff about Moses and God and all the worlds that were created. And Moses asked why? And Jehovah says, well, this is my work in my glory to bring to pass the immortality, eternal life. All of that stuff that we have in Moses chapter one today is a vision that Joseph had before he even looked at the words in the beginning. That's why in the book of Moses, in the beginning comes in Moses chapter two. And Moses chapter two lines up with Genesis chapter one. Because that whole vision is received just by opening the Bible and, and starting to do the work. And so people use a word called catalyst. Clearly none of those words in that vision are in Genesis chapter one. But doing the work of translation was a catalyst for Joseph to receive more revelation. This actually happens all the time. About eight or nine revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants come while Joseph is translating the Bible. And they are. And you'll see it in the heading, he was translating the Bible. They asked about this. And this revelation comes. So we know that that's so. So some people will say, well, Joseph could have sat down and looked at the thing and it could have been a catalyst to learn more. I don't know. You make peace with it however you want. It's not a temple recommend. Question of which one it had. It was. So if you ask me which one it was, I say, I don't know. I think missing manuscript is helpful. Catalyst is interesting, but remember, filling gaps. I don't know what Joseph was doing. I'm not going to tell you that I know what Joseph was doing when he does it, because he didn't tell us that. So there's a quick version of it. Did we get all the issues all right?

Nemo 3:26:42 I'm not even sure the guy on the stand believes him. Yeah, well.

John Dehlin 3:26:51 And. And Julia, at any point, if you need to go, you could totally go. I just want to make sure you don't stay beyond when you can. But, Julie, I just want to thank. Before we wrap up, I'm going to ask everyone to kind of grade Keith Erickson on his scholarship and on his honesty from A to F. So, Julia, before you go, what grade are you giving Keith Erickson first on his scholarship A to F? What's your grade?

Final Grades for Erekson's Scholarship and Honesty

Julia 3:27:18 Scholarship, as in, like, the things that he's presenting.

John Dehlin 3:27:20 Because, like, he's presenting accuracy, his knowledge,

Julia 3:27:23 you know, because he's missing. Like, we've been having slides about the things that he's been missing. So I don't. I don't like his scholarship either.

John Dehlin 3:27:31 C. Is that a D?

Julia 3:27:33 D?

John Dehlin 3:27:34 Okay, how about his honesty?

Julia 3:27:37 No, I don't like it at all. He's, like. He's, like, holding things back, and he's, like, telling you false numbers. He's telling you false things like, I don't know, you don't want to give

John Dehlin 3:27:46 a grade because you're too.

Julia 3:27:47 I don't want to give a grade.

John Dehlin 3:27:48 All right. Any final thoughts, Julie, before you have to go?

Julia 3:27:51 No. This is really good. And, like, I like when people go to these. If this is true, that you had to go see your bishop to go to this meeting to have your questions resolved, he is doing a really bad job of resolving anything. Like, in fact, like, he didn't even answer the question of, like, why did Joseph practice polygamy to begin with? Or why was he marrying women who were already married? Like, those were never answered. And, like, he's. Again, he's like, oh, this isn't a temple recommend question. Just make peace with it however you want. Like, no, but hang on. This is. Can be a question that breaks somebody's faith. It doesn't have to be a temple recommend question. Like, it's still a really hard thing that we need to have answered or figure out, and he's just sort of brushing it off. So I don't, like. I don't like what he's doing, and I think he needs to do a better job.

John Dehlin 3:28:29 Well, Julia, thanks for all the part you played in helping bring today's episode to us. Thank you.

Julia 3:28:34 Yeah, of course.

John Dehlin 3:28:35 Nemo, are you too. Are Brits too polite to give grades if they're not nice grades?

Nemo 3:28:43 Well, I mean, I want to add a third category. His ability to answer questions that are put to him. And I'd give him a square F for that one.

John Dehlin 3:28:51 Oh, just answering questions directly.

Nemo 3:28:53 He just. He just can't answer the questions. Like, Sandra keeps having to go, he's still not answered it.

John Dehlin 3:28:59 What grade you give him on honesty? A to F on honesty.

Nemo 3:29:02 An E. Oh, wow.

Sandra Tanner 3:29:04 Is there an E?

John Dehlin 3:29:05 Wait, is that. Is that worse? Is that worse or better?

Nemo 3:29:10 That's better than an F. Okay. It just goes the Alphabet down, doesn't it?

John Dehlin 3:29:16 Do Brits give The grade E, I think so. We don't have E. We don't have E's in the United States.

Nemo 3:29:25 It's ABCD and F. What you guys got against E, it's a perfectly legitimate part of the algorithm.

Sandra Tanner 3:29:31 Our great system doesn't include E. We skipped that one. ABCD and then F. Man, the E

Nemo 3:29:38 is getting some serious underrepresentation in the States. We need to fix this. Okay.

Sandra Tanner 3:29:43 He qualifies for E. Yeah.

Nemo 3:29:45 I'll give him an F plus.

John Dehlin 3:29:47 Okay. All right.

Nemo 3:29:50 And then. Yeah, for his scholarship. Like, the problem is with scholarship, it's how. Well you have a handle on the. The. The subject matter, I would think. And to Sandra's point, I feel as though he has got a pretty good handle on it, which is why his honesty score is so low, because I refuse to believe that he doesn't have a good handle on this stuff, because it's not difficult to have a good handle on this stuff. So his. His scholarship's up there. He must know his stuff. He's probably like, a C or a D. But his honesty lets him down because he can't present it all because there's motivations that won't let him.

Gerardo Sumano 3:30:26 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:30:26 All right, Gerardo, what's. What's the great grade on honesty? F. F on honesty. And on scholarship.

Gerardo Sumano 3:30:35 Yeah, probably a D. I don't know, Dion. Honesty and on scholarship.

John Dehlin 3:30:39 On scholarship. Okay, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner 3:30:41 I give him a D straight across.

John Dehlin 3:30:43 D, straight across. Well, I'll just say I'm going to give him an F for empathy, because what he never does, he never admits any wrongdoing by Joseph Smith. He never admits any wrongdoing by any church leader, including by the modern Mormon Church. So basically, there's no point where he just says, yeah, critics or people who lose their faith have legitimate reasons to be concerned. He basically either gaslights or mocks people who have genuine, legitimate, either criticisms or concerns. And I think that's the biggest disservice here of all is that none of these people are going to leave this meeting feeling like the church has ever aired on anything and that any of their. If they are struggling or if any of their loved ones or friends or family are struggling, they're not going to leave with any sense of, like, yeah, there are problems. The church has made mistakes. Joseph did things wrong. It's as if Joseph has been perfect, the church has been perfect. And again, gaslighting. These are not the droids you're looking for, and I think that's a huge problem.

Sandra Tanner 3:31:58 Yeah.

Guest 3:32:00 Yeah.

Closing Thoughts and Final Reflections

John Dehlin 3:32:00 All right, well, nemo you are coming to the United States. Do you want to get a quick plug for Thrive and for your get together?

Nemo 3:32:10 Yeah. So I'm coming to the United States of America. The last weekend in February. I'll be at Thrive St. George. You can get your tickets. I think there are no tickets.

John Dehlin 3:32:22 It's sold out, unfortunately.

Nemo 3:32:24 Yeah, sorry folks. And the other event I'm doing is also selling out fast. So get your tickets for that. I'm doing an event Friday the 8th, is it.

John Dehlin 3:32:33 Do you want to paste the link in the comments for those who want

Nemo 3:32:36 to see it readily available?

John Dehlin 3:32:37 Let's find out and we'll paste it in the. You can paste it in the comments and we'll have Maven hopefully add it to the show notes.

Nemo 3:32:44 Oh, I've got it here. Hang on. Let me put that in the comments.

John Dehlin 3:32:46 It's mormonstories.org I think it's Nemo event, right?

Nemo 3:32:51 Yeah, I put the donor box link in the. In the comments. But yeah, the, the VIP dinner sold out, but there's still general admission tickets. It's an evening with John and Nemo. We'll be be chatting and I believe Sam Shelley will turn up and cause carnage as well. So it's gonna be a great night just to. To kind of me and John to talk about the recent events with max communication and all that sort of good stuff. But yeah, I'll be. I'll be in lovely Deseret for a couple of weeks. All right, that'll be great.

John Dehlin 3:33:21 Well, Nemo, thanks so much for joining us. And also, please everybody, in addition to subscribing to, you know, subscribing to Mormon Stories podcast on YouTube, the channel and on Facebook, make sure and also subscribe to Nemo, the Mormon YouTube channel. He does great work. Check out his work. And while you're becoming a monthly donor to the Open Stories foundation or Mormon Stories, you can also support Nemo as well. Is that through Donor Box or Venmo or what?

Nemo 3:33:53 Yes, through. Through Donor Box. My. My donations are down so much I'm having to eat off brand Jammie Dodgers. It's, it's. It's not good times over here, John, I tell you.

John Dehlin 3:34:01 Okay, so how do they support you?

Nemo 3:34:04 Where do they go in a box.org Nemo at the moment, I think it is.

John Dehlin 3:34:08 All right, well, thanks for joining us today, Nemo. It's been great to have you.

Nemo 3:34:11 Pleasure. My pleasure.

John Dehlin 3:34:12 Any final words?

Gerardo Sumano 3:34:15 No, thank you. Thanks for having us. It was good episode.

John Dehlin 3:34:19 Well, thanks to you as well. You and Julia together made this happen. So thanks, Gerardo, for making this happen. All right, Sandra, because you're the goat, and when I say goat, I mean the greatest of all time, we give you the final word.

Sandra Tanner 3:34:31 Oh, wow. All right. I just want to point out that the one answer that could have solved everything is that Joseph made it all up. But they can't come to that conclusion.

John Dehlin 3:34:45 Yeah, that's a bridge too far, as they say.

Sandra Tanner 3:34:48 Bridge too far.

John Dehlin 3:34:49 Well, Sandra, we're so honored that you're able to join us here occasionally on Mormon Stories. You've retired. Yes, trying, but people love you. Any episode with you gets, like over 100,000 views almost automatically.

Sandra Tanner 3:35:07 I'm helping the cause.

John Dehlin 3:35:08 What's it like to be 83 or 84 and still have star power? Star power.

Sandra Tanner 3:35:13 Wow. Well, it's really fun when I go out to dinner and someone comes up and gives me a hug, it's says, oh, you helped me. So thank you to my public.

John Dehlin 3:35:23 All right, and again, if you want to check out Sandra's a scholarship, go to utlm.org yes and they can get PDFs.

Sandra Tanner 3:35:34 Yes.

John Dehlin 3:35:35 Of all your eternity.

Sandra Tanner 3:35:36 You can read everything you want to know.

John Dehlin 3:35:38 All right, well, thanks, Sandra, for making this happen. And again, thanks to everyone who made comments today. Thanks to Dan Vogel for his great scholarship and for his comments today. Thanks to everyone who joined us on the live stream. Thanks to Maven for helping out, as well as Brooklyn and our board of directors. There's so much behind the scenes that goes on to make this stuff possible. So we just want to thank everyone for that. Thanks to our donors. We couldn't do this without you monthly donors. If you are not a donor and you value this content, please become a monthly donor. Go to mormorestories.org, click on the donate button. Become a monthly donor and we'll keep doing this stuff Again. Please subscribe. And like please comment. Please share these episodes with others. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com with any of your feedback. And again, we're always looking for guests on Mormon Stories or panelists. So if you've got something to say and you want to come on Mormon Stories, go to MormonStories.org apply to be a guest on Mormon Stories and we'd love to consider you. Again, thanks to everyone for joining us. I think that's all for today. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.