Mormon Sealings & Nate Oman w/ Bryan Buchanan – LDS Discussions

Welcome and Introduction to the Episode

John Dehlin 0:00 Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am not your host for today, John Dehlin. It is May 26, 2026 and today we have another LDS discussions episode that we're excited to bring to you. And we're going to be talking about the messiness of Mormon Temple ceilings. I am so excited that we have all, all the way from the UK traveling here to be with us in studio again as part of the regular LDS discussions team, the Nemo, the Mormon. Hey, Nemo.

Nemo 0:36 Hey, everyone. How's it going?

John Dehlin 0:38 And for the first time, to help us become more, I don't know, self sufficient and diverse in the Mormon Stories leadership catalog, we have Nemo running the cameras. So, Nemo, you're learning how to run Mormon Story Studios. What's that like for you?

Nemo 0:57 That is very difficult. You'll notice there's some lag. I don't know how John does it, but we'll see how it goes.

John Dehlin 1:03 All right, so Nemo's running the cameras and we have Julia Remote who is assisting us from Zion Old. Zion Old. Zion Old New.

Julia 1:14 Zion New Old.

Guest 3 1:16 No.

Julia 1:17 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:19 Thanks for joining us today.

Julia 1:20 Yeah, of course.

John Dehlin 1:22 And of course we're so excited to have back on Mormon Stories podcast the Brian Buchanan of Benchmark Books and of the Sunstone History podcast. Hey, Brian.

Bryan Buchanan 1:33 Hello, everybody. Nice to be back with you again.

John Dehlin 1:36 What a topic. Super interesting. We have to bring in the big guns and that's what Brian Buchanan is. He's a big gun.

Bryan Buchanan 1:42 I consider myself a large gun for sure.

John Dehlin 1:45 He's taller than me.

Bryan Buchanan 1:47 A rare thing in your world.

John Dehlin 1:48 It is, it is. All right, so really quickly I have to give the LDS discussions to disclaimers. The LDS discussion series for those who are joining us on this series for the first time is like a 70 plus episode series that we started years ago with the now famous mike of ldsdiscussions.com. this is a guy who joined the church as a convert, wrote a ton of really high quality essays about Mormon Church truth claims, has an entire website called LDSDiscussions.com and the content and the thinking was so good that we did a 60, 70 plus series episode series with him. You can find it on the LDS discussions playlist on the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. It's integrated into the Mormon Stories podcast feed. You can also find it as its own podcast series on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. And it's definitely one of the top three to five most important things I've done in my 21 years on Mormon Stories podcast. And I Believe that every episode, if not almost every episode, of LDS discussions includes Nemo the Mormon. Is that true? Nemo?

Nemo 2:55 There's a lot of them. There's definitely a lot of them. And I've been here since episode two.

John Dehlin 2:59 Right.

Nemo 2:59 A lot.

John Dehlin 3:01 And Julia's joined us for a lot of them as well. And recently we've been bringing Colby on. But this series is best consumed in sequence. So the best thing you could do to have all the knowledge and context that you need is to go back, pause this episode, start with episode one, watch it all the way through, and then check out today's episode on Ceilings. So that's the LDS discussions throat clearing that we always do. Julie or Nemo, anything you want to add?

Julia 3:32 No, I think that was great.

Introducing Nate Oman and the Messy History of Sealings

John Dehlin 3:34 Okay. All right, so I'll just give a little bit of context. So the title slide for today is the Messy History of Mormon Ceilings. And it's got a picture of someone who has been on Mormon stories. Stories, believe it or not. It's the professor, William and Mary, I believe, law professor and legal scholar Nate Ohman, who I had on Mormon stories. Julia, what episode was it? 54.

Julia 3:59 54, yep.

John Dehlin 4:00 So this is one of the very, very early episodes, I believe. Nate Oman, I think he went to Harvard Law School. He was one of the original blogger Knackle. Guys, do you want to read that slide? Julia, about Nate Omen.

Julia 4:12 Sure. Nate Oman is the Rawlins professor at Law at the Law School of the College of William and Mary. He is a legal scholar and educator. He is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints and founded the website Times and Seasons. He served a mission in Korea and graduated from BYU with a political science degree and a juris degree doctor degree from Harvard Law School. Nate Oman is married to Heather Bennett, whose father is Senator Robert or Bob Bennett.

John Dehlin 4:40 Yeah. And so I met Nate early on in 2004, when the Mormon blogger Knuckle was on fire. This was by common consent, Times and Seasons, Feminist Mormon housewives, millennial star. There were these heavyweight intellectual Mormon thinkers that were creating really interesting blog posts, and Nate was one of them. And so that's my history with Nate. And then, of course, I've been a big fan of the Faith Matters movement, which is this nonprofit that is led by. There's this really cool board of directors. There's this guy named Bill Turnbull and his wife. What is her name? Is it Heather?

Julia 5:28 Susan.

John Dehlin 5:29 Bill and Susan Turnbull. And it also includes Tim and Aubrey Chavez, who are amazing. David and Kristen Turnbull. I believe David and Bill Turnbull are Brothers. And then there's Chris and Liz Crittenden and Greg and Kristin Trimble. And if you were to go to the board of directors of Faith Matters, historically it's got people like Patrick Mason and Dan Witherspoon and, and Tom Christofferson and just all of the, you know, Tom McConkey. It's the faith Matters group that's been holding this annual conference called RESTORE every year, which is like progressive liberal Mormon General Conference. 5000 plus people are attending these days every year. It's a really great group and they're all about carving out thoughtful, faithful, progressive spaces, sometimes even non literal spaces within Mormonism. And so I followed their amazing YouTube channel and podcast for several years. Now. Tim and Aubrey are the hosts of it, but I noticed that they sometimes would be very thoughtful and careful about what topics they dove into and however many months are. Julia, do you remember how many months ago this episode, the series came out?

Bryan Buchanan 6:55 I think this episode was November, if I remember right.

John Dehlin 6:58 Okay. So last year, around November, they come out with this 5ish part series.

Bryan Buchanan 7:04 Oh, this, this specific one is November. Yeah, that's right. I forgot it was part of the series. Yeah, that was an interesting series. The topics they chose for that and who they had on.

John Dehlin 7:11 Who do you remember them having on?

Bryan Buchanan 7:13 Let's see, who else did they. They have Pat Mason on and then I think Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was on.

John Dehlin 7:18 Yep. I think Richard Bushman. Yeah. Was probably on.

Bryan Buchanan 7:23 Heck of a lineup.

John Dehlin 7:24 Yeah. And they covered it in multiple episodes, but there was one episode and Bill Turnbull was on one of the episodes, but they had an episode with Nate Ohman. So as part of this five part whatever series on polygamy, Nate Ohman took on the topic of ceiling. And so I listened to that in all the episodes and I was just blown away by the stuff I was learning from Nate Ullman about Ceilings that I had never heard before. So, Julia, I reached out to you months ago and said we need to do an episode for, for LDS discussions on Ceilings. Now, Julia, you tell me why it's taken so long to get this episode ready. Is it because it involves so much research?

Julia 8:05 No. Well, not on my part. So, yeah, so we got these slides ready a while ago, but we were trying to get everything figured out because I can't think of a better person to have this discussion with than Bryant Buchanan.

John Dehlin 8:16 Absolutely.

Julia 8:17 And I know that you did your episode with Lindsay Hansen park about the history of polygamy with Joseph and the history of polygamy under Brigham and then. But this one, I've never. I didn't hear about these things. I. This is the only episode I've seen from Faith Matters so far. And just, I. You know, and I think, John, you can say the same thing. Like, I grew up in the church. I served a mission. I was gospel doctrine teacher. I didn't know this type of history. And so this is formatted as a. Not really a response to Nate Oman, but kind of an expansion of. I don't know if you guys would classify it, Claire. Classified as that, but. But, you know, and then, Brian, you've. You've sent in your history and your timeline, and it's. It's so good and so detailed, and I'm very excited to have this conversation.

John Dehlin 8:57 And that's part of why this took so long. I was like, julia, we need a timeline, because the timeline is fascinating and it's good. So everyone, all I have to say is this is a banger. This is a big topic. This is going to blow your minds. And now Julia and Brian will. Nima and I would turn the time over to y', all, and we'll just throw in comments here and there. So take it away, Julia.

The Purpose and Theology of Sealings

Julia 9:17 Yeah, so the first thing that I just wanted to talk about is there's this clip from Nate Omen talking about the purpose of ceilings. And so we'll just go ahead and play that one and then jump off from there.

Nate Oman (video clip) 9:29 Of ceiling centers on the idea that salvation consists of becoming part of an exalted kingdom of exalted beings. And that part of what it means to become exalted is to be exalted in a sort of kingdom of priesthood. What exactly that means is left pretty vague. Okay. But you have to be connected in some way to some kind of a priesthood kingdom. And the way you get connected into a priesthood kingdom is through a sealing ordinance. It's not the only way, but one of the ways that you do is that the sealing ordinance creates a connection that is a sort of eternal and exalting connection of some kind. And then those connections sort of build networks that take us back ultimately to be sealed into God's kingdom and to receive his exaltation.

Julia 10:28 Exaltation was the last word. Okay, so this. And then looking at your outline, Brian, I just wanted to talk about how, like, what was Joseph Smith's perspective of ceilings at the beginning? And then I don't know if you want to expound on anything that Nate said here.

Nate Oman (video clip) 10:42 Sure.

Bryan Buchanan 10:43 So this idea that modern Mormons have of sealing two people together. Right. If you ask a modern Mormon, what does the word sealing mean it's the idea of joining two people together. Right. But that's a concept that takes a while to get to. So in early Mormonism, you'll see the word ceiling pop up in the Book of Mormon, for example, and what it's doing there is essentially looking at biblical ideas of the term sealing. So in the ancient world, a letter, a document, you would put a physical seal on wax, something like that, to seal it so that it would have integrity. So when it gets to the person, you know that it comes to you intact. And of course, you'll see that literal idea of seal. But then obviously that's a really good metaphor. And so that shows up the idea of sealing blessings on someone or people being sealed up to eternal life. And that's where it comes up in early Mormonism. So you'll see, like I said, you'll see Book of Mormon references to it. And then, for example, the revelation that's now the first section of the Doctrine of Covenants, we'll talk about this idea of sealing up to eternal life. And what's really interesting is we'll see with early missionaries that go out, they will seal up entire congregations to eternal life. And so you can see them using these biblical concepts of that. But this idea of sealing two people together, that doesn't come around until Nauvoo. So this is a Good, you know, 10 years into the existence of Mormonism. So along the way, obviously, people are being married. And in New York, the very earliest years, it's just very normal civil marriage. They'll be married by a justice of the peace, and it will be recorded with the county, just like any other person would be. Then as Mormons leave there and go to different places, they'll start performing marriages in Missouri, and it will be actually be church elders who will do that. No problems there. Now, it's when we get to my shirt here, Kirtland, that it starts to get a little trickier. And so we have a case in 1835 where Sidney Rigdon will actually be tried for performing the marriage of Orson Hyde without a license. And what's so interesting is Ohio law did allow for church officials to perform marriages without a license as long as the marriage accorded with the rules and regulations of the church. Well, Mormons didn't have one yet. And so the Joseph Smith papers people argue for, that's probably one of the reasons why the statement on marriage, that obviously will become fairly controversial later on, that's why that is drafted, because it sets out a system of How Mormons conceive of marriage.

Nemo 13:26 That's the one from the Book of Commandments.

Bryan Buchanan 13:28 So, yeah, so that's in the very first Doctrine of Covenants. And that one is such an interesting thing because Joseph Smith is not there physically in Kirtland when it's voted on to be added. It seems like it's probably Oliver Cowdery and W.W. phelps that prepare it. And so there's always been somewhat of a question of how much input did Joseph Smith have on that statement. And that comes up in several different discussions later on.

John Dehlin 13:54 So, Brian, I apologize. I want to go back for just a second. For some reason, when I think ceiling, I think Alvin, I basically think one of the things that traumatized Joseph Smith and the Smith family was ALVIN Dying in 1823 or whatever. And the teachings that Joseph and others have been given that if someone's not baptized by the right authority, they don't get to go to heaven. So this sort of Smith family angst that not everyone's going to be together in heaven. So then at that point, baptism with authority, plus baptism for the dead gets everyone baptized with the right authority. And then baptism for the dead gets everyone baptized with authority by also by everyone who wasn't able to get that baptism while they were alive. Right. So now we've got everyone baptized in Joseph Smith's kind of theology. But then he starts thinking about marriages and he starts. He's probably. He's clearly contemplating even polygamy as early as 1829, because he's starting to talk

Bryan Buchanan 15:06 about the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin 15:07 Right. He started talking Jacob about, well, if there's an exception, maybe we'll have it.

Bryan Buchanan 15:13 Now, just so we're all clear, that has. Of course, that's not saying you can do polygamy. We're all clear. Like that's not an outcome.

John Dehlin 15:21 But anyway, for some reason, I tagged this idea of all of us being sealed together in one big happy family in the eternities in the social kingdom as having that sort of foundation. Is that me imposing that on the narrative, or do you think that's where this whole sealing angst might begin for Joseph and the Smith family?

Bryan Buchanan 15:44 I just would like to applaud your pronunciation of angst. I thought that was quite good. Alvin is really interesting. So you have what becomes section 137 about the vision of the celestial kingdom, Right? Think so. And Alvin has the context for that. Right. And the other thing is you're talking about that, that made me think of it is you have this really interesting explosion of theology between the end of Missouri and Missouri is hard because we don't have, like, the production of records just across the board evaporates. They're busy literally fighting for their refugees. Yeah, they're. They're not creating a lot of stuff, so. So tracking the evolution of thoughts and ideas and doctrines and practices through Missouri is kind of hard because of that. Obviously, they're doing things. Things are changing. Things are evolving. It's hard to nail that down. So what you see then is they get to Nauvoo and.

Sealing Power Origins and Nauvoo Theology

John Dehlin 16:40 But did the sealing power. Was it granted in Kirtland, at the Kirtland Temple?

Bryan Buchanan 16:46 What is the sealing power? Are you talking, like, the modern Mormon sense of, like, sealing two people together?

John Dehlin 16:50 Well, you get the sense that someone gave keys to someone saying you have the power to seal.

Bryan Buchanan 16:55 That's the. That's because, for example, when they get to Nauvoo, as soon as they get settled, the 12 leave to go back to find Nemo's people because they were heathens and convert them. And he will give these very interesting training sessions almost to the 12. And in one of those, he says that this is where he starts talking about concepts like the more sure word of prophecy calling an election made sure. And in one of these, I think it's Woodruff that records it. He says the. This is the sealing power. And so as late as 1839, somewhere, kind of fall, 1839, to him, that's the sealing power.

John Dehlin 17:40 Why do I have in my mind that, like Elijah or Elijah or, you know, in the curdling temple, gave the power to seal the hearts of the children to their fathers and all that stuff?

Bryan Buchanan 17:51 So then going forward in Nauvoo, we start to see Elijah become this incredibly important figure, and Joseph Smith will start talking about him.

John Dehlin 18:00 But did that not happen in Kirtland?

Bryan Buchanan 18:01 It does, but it's not until kind of partway into Nauvoo that he starts talking about it. So in a modern Mormon theological sense, I think if you asked people, the sealing power is restored by Elijah in this visionary experience that he and Oliver Cowgy have in the Kirtland Temple. But it's not for a while that they start talking about it.

Nemo 18:23 And that is a theme in Joseph Smith's life, is that something will happen.

Bryan Buchanan 18:27 Yep.

Nemo 18:27 And then it'll take a few years for it to percolate and for it to actually be spoken about. Talking about the first vision. We talk about this,

Bryan Buchanan 18:35 that very much follows that pattern.

Nemo 18:37 It's the thing.

John Dehlin 18:37 Okay, thank you. Thank you for clearing that up.

Bryan Buchanan 18:40 And so you have people like, I'd say probably Truman Madsen is most famous for this, arguing that their experience in Liberty Jail, they have all this time to think, and obviously they're writing, and all of these ideas are percolating. That's. That's a great word. And so then there's this explosion of things, practices, doctrines, policy, all these things in Nauvoo. Nauvoo is just like Mormon theology, fed rocket fuel.

Nate Oman (video clip) 19:10 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 19:10 And so that's so interesting is that all of a sudden, he is just brimming over with these theological concepts and sealing in the way that modern Mormons will think of that comes out of this.

Nemo 19:23 And do we think it's the security of being in Nauvoo that allows this sort of theology to explode? Because, like you said, Missouri, they're fighting for their lives. They're all moving. It's quite transient. And all of a sudden, they get more settled in Nauvoo. And so then Joseph can start focusing again on building up the theology of the church and starting to talk about all these things.

Bryan Buchanan 19:40 Byproduct of malaria, all the mosquitoes. Like, really, honestly, like, why is Nauvoo so. So fertile?

Nemo 19:47 I guess that's what I'm getting at is.

Bryan Buchanan 19:48 Yeah.

Nemo 19:49 Why Nauvoo? Was it just the fact they were more settled? They felt like they had their own place?

Bryan Buchanan 19:52 Like, it's a good question, because very quickly, Nauvoo will be probably not as chaotic as Missouri, obviously, but extremely chaotic. Right. He's in hiding. There's extradition attempts. There's all these things very early on. So it's a great question. I don't know the answer. I don't know that anyone's ever nailed down why Nauvoo becomes so. It's just theology everywhere.

Nemo 20:18 Yeah.

John Dehlin 20:19 Well, I kind of derailed us. So where were we before I threw that question in?

Bryan Buchanan 20:23 We were getting to how we get to what a modern Mormon would think of. Of sealing.

John Dehlin 20:27 Okay, keep going.

Bryan Buchanan 20:27 And that's not until Nauvoo.

John Dehlin 20:30 Okay. And it's hard to not combine sealing with Joseph introducing polygamy.

Bryan Buchanan 20:37 You know, it's extremely hard because they're connected, literally the same people. So, yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin 20:45 Go, Julia.

Early Sealing Concerns and Exaltation

Julia 20:46 Well, I also want to throw in something kind of what you were saying, Nemo, how things come out later, Alvin dies, and then it isn't until 1840 or proxy baptism start happening. Right. Because that was one of his concerns, is that Alvin hadn't been baptized. Is that correct?

Bryan Buchanan 21:01 Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So Alvin, it does seem to be this trigger trauma is a good word to throw in there because it is very. It seems like they were extremely close. It comes from Lucy's memoirs. But this. This. This idea that it's this quack doctor that poisons him essentially with mercury, it is very traumatic for the family. And so it seems to be a catalyst that spurs a lot of his thinking on family and connectedness.

Guest 3 21:32 And.

Bryan Buchanan 21:32 And you know, that what we need to do here impacts what happens there. Like, all of those concepts definitely do seem to be tied to Alvin.

Julia 21:40 Okay. Okay. So moving forward, this next part, Nate Owen talks about the first concerns with the sealings

Nate Oman (video clip) 21:53 patient. So the earliest concern with sealing is about being sealed into an exalting kingdom. And there are two ways that this shows up that to modern Latter Day Saints just seems really weird. So the first way that it shows up is in polygamy and plural ceilings. So we think of plural ceilings in part because people talk this way like, it's not. Not bad or wrong to say this, but this is what we focus on, is we think about ceilings in terms of families, and then we think about families as at the center of that is an eternal union between a and a woman in a marriage. And then we think about plural ceilings is like, there were plural families, and so there. It's like sort of eternal families on steroids. Right. Is sort of thinking about it. Definitely. Like, you totally find 19th century Latin polygamists talking that way about theology of polygamy. But one of the things that was happening in plural ceilings is that the plural ceilings were a way of creating connections between people. So one of the weird things about plural ceilings is like, when what counts as a marriage and what counts as a sealing doesn't completely overlap. So you have women who are sealed to men who don't really have any kind of social relationship to those men. You have women who are sealed to men while being married to another man, and they continue to be married to that other man even though they've been sealed. So what those sealings are doing is they're like creating these connections in which people are sort of plugging themselves into a spiritual kingdom. And in Joseph Smith's day, the only kind of ceiling that Joseph Smith conceptualized or had an idea of was a marriage ceiling. Like, that was the only. If you think about, like, he has a kind of toolbox of ordinances, the only ordinance that he has is this idea of marriage ceilings. And then everybody has to be sealed together. So all connections have to occur through marriage ceilings. So.

John Dehlin 23:52 So wait. So I was introduced that term dynastic ceilings, at some point 20 years ago, just this idea of families being sealed to families, men be sealed. Did he just say that in Joseph's mind, there was no such thing as dynastic seal?

Nemo 24:06 No, I think what he was saying was in order to create the dynastic ceilings, what Joseph used was the only tool he had available to him, which was the idea of a marriage ceiling. Now, I find that difficult to swallow when you have God giving the exact amount of shares that people can buy in the Navy mansion house to then have the idea saying, well, you know, God didn't give him anything more detailed than that. He just said, you're going to have to use this one tool to do everything when you can get really specific about other stuff. But yeah, I think that was the, the thrust of his argument was, look, all Joseph had available was the idea of an eternal ceiling as a marriage ceiling. So if you wanted to be dynastically sealed to Helen Mar Kimball or the Kimball family, then I guess you had to marry her.

John Dehlin 24:46 Dang.

Nemo 24:47 Shoot. You can see that's where the, the apologetic would go, right?

John Dehlin 24:50 I really want to be sealed to you. There's only one way to do it.

Bryan Buchanan 24:54 I don't have any other options to make. Well, you think it's difficult to disentangle ceiling from polygamy? Here we go.

Nemo 25:01 Yeah.

John Dehlin 25:01 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 25:02 So as best we can tell, the first ceiling, ceiling. And again, like this concept of ceiling, up until right now, 1841, this concept of that meaning joining two people together doesn't exist. This is sealing people up to eternal life, sealing them up to damnation, sealing blessings on their head, like a patriarchal blessing. Sometimes that language will come up. That is the way that seal, that verb, that concept is used until now.

Nemo 25:30 They say sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise is a phrase that's in my hand.

Bryan Buchanan 25:33 Exactly. A New Testament phrase. So that's how the Bible uses it. Both Old and New Testament is, is again like that. That metaphor of the wax seal is your, your ceiling. Now you can see how it's. It becomes very easy to apply that to the idea of joining two people. Right. But it's not yet. Not until now.

Nemo 25:49 Until now. So where is.

Bryan Buchanan 25:51 So 1841? As best we can tell, the first eternity ceiling is between Joseph Smith and Louisa Beeman. So this, this is. And of course, that would be a polygamous ceiling. And that troubles a lot of people to learn that the concept of eternity ceilings begins with polygamy.

John Dehlin 26:09 Well, also troubling that it doesn't begin With Emma. Like, why didn't Joseph begin by sealing himself to his first wife?

Bryan Buchanan 26:15 No, that's not a part of the toolbox.

Nemo 26:17 Well, even if the only tool he's got is marriage ceilings, then why wouldn't he practice it first with Emma? Why wouldn't he go, okay, right. I'm guessing myself to my wife first, and then I want to be, you know, in with the Beeman family. So I guess I'll seal myself to Louisa or whatever that looks like.

John Dehlin 26:31 And how many plural marriages had he already engaged in before Beeman? Louisa, Beeman?

Bryan Buchanan 26:37 That's a good question. So he. I'm trying to remember if Nate maybe somewhere in there. So that's the. That's one of. That's the earliest. Probably polygamous relationship.

John Dehlin 26:49 Or affair.

Bryan Buchanan 26:50 Or affair. Really hard to nail down what's going on, because a theme of polygamy, we don't have records. You know, there is essentially nothing contemporary that talks about. It's only after the fact, when it blows up, that we start to hear about it. So Don Bradley, who's done the most research on it, dates that relationship to probably 1836. And then Fanny leaves and goes to. To Ohio. In college, I was helping a friend do her family history, and we're looking at a census record, and there's her guy. And they're on the same page is the Custer family. So Fanny's husband.

Julia 27:25 Oh, dang.

Bryan Buchanan 27:26 That was kind. I was like, I know you was

John Dehlin 27:28 in Dublin, Ohio, or Dublin, Indiana. Were they in Ohio?

Bryan Buchanan 27:33 They were in Ohio.

Origins of Polygamous Sealings and Joseph Smith

John Dehlin 27:34 Anyway, they told me it was Dublin, Indiana.

Bryan Buchanan 27:37 There might be an Indiana, too, but. But one 1836.

John Dehlin 27:41 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 27:42 So that's. That's way before this.

John Dehlin 27:44 But is Beeman Joseph's third wife, technically? As far as we know.

Bryan Buchanan 27:49 Technically is a tough word. So the other one you have is possibly a relationship in Far West.

John Dehlin 27:54 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 27:55 With Lucinda Pendleton, who's fascinating because her first husband is William Morgan.

John Dehlin 28:00 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 28:00 Who writes the expose of masonry and then gets yeeted.

John Dehlin 28:05 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 28:05 Somewhere what happened to him is very mysterious. Probably gets whacked.

John Dehlin 28:09 So is Beeman the first poly. That's Nauvoo Polygamous.

Bryan Buchanan 28:13 That's the first one where we feel fairly confident there's a ceremony. And the reason that we're confident about this one is Louisa's sister, Mary Adeline. Her brother is a guy named Joseph Bates. Noble usually went by Bates. He and Joseph Smith were really good friends. And so Bates will later write affidavits. He will testify in the Temple Lot case way down the road. And what he says is that in 1841, he performs a ceremony, sealing, uniting, marrying Joseph to Louisa for eternity. And so that's important because that gives us our first sort of concrete ish relationship of a polygamous nature where there's a ceremony, it's starting to look much more formalized and ritualized. Right.

John Dehlin 29:05 And why couldn't Joseph have just sealed himself to Emma as the first one?

Bryan Buchanan 29:09 This is a theme that we're going to see a lot is there are.

John Dehlin 29:13 Other than the fact rules he didn't

Bryan Buchanan 29:15 want her regulations there. There are ways of doing it that look very ad hoc. It's. Well, it probably doesn't work if I do this. So, Bates, why don't you marry us? It feels like that. He says. In one time he talks about this. He says that she was dressed in man's clothing. He was down by the river. They're obviously trying to keep this secret. Joseph will tell him the ceremony. Bates then repeats it back. And that's interesting because in one of the accounts about Fanny Alger is same thing. So this is Mosiah Hancock, who's a kid at the time. So his father is Levi Hancock, Mormon Battalion guy, and he is married to Fanny's. Let's see, Levi's wife is Fanny's mother's brother. So Mosiah and Fanny are cousins. And so, same kind of thing. He says Joseph will tell a ceremony to Levi. Levi repeats it back.

Nemo 30:17 And that has echoes into the temple ceremony, right, where you receive information and you echo information back. There's a theme through there of this revelation process where Joseph will give someone information, then they're then authorized to do it and give it back. He has to be the one to receive it from God, right? He has to be the one to bring it down, and then he can hand it over to someone else.

Bryan Buchanan 30:36 When you start seeing themes like that, it's so hard with reminiscent accounts because you always have to wonder, are you remembering that that's where the theme started, or is that later pattern that you're now familiar with, coloring your memory of the earlier thing, the fact that Joseph

John Dehlin 30:52 hid it From Emma For 22 marriages, polygamy suggests to me that sealing was the carrot to help convince people to be okay with polygamy. In other words, I'm Joseph. I'm of course going to be exalted. I'm going to be in the highest degree of heaven with Heavenly Father if you want to be with me, or. Or if your dad wants to be with me, or if you and your parents and your Family want to be with me. Well, then we have to be married or sealed together so that then your entire family can be with me exalted in heaven. So it was kind of like a carrot, maybe as a way to manipulate people into being okay with polygamy.

Nemo 31:34 That's what we're saying. By being okay with polygamy, there is being okay with, I would imagine, the sexual nature or the sexual part of polygamy. The idea of these extramarital sexual relations with these women.

John Dehlin 31:43 That's what it looks like to me.

Nemo 31:44 Because that's the thing you'd want to hide from Emma, right, if you were Joseph?

Bryan Buchanan 31:47 Certainly seems like it. So one of the other ways that the Fanny Alger Levi Hancock connection is explained is that Levi wanted to be married to Clarissa, Fanny's mother's sister, if I'm remembering this right. And so again, you do this, and then. Then I can marry you to her. More carrots. So.

John Dehlin 32:10 And we didn't approach Emma about it because he wasn't worried about Emma. He was already having sex with Emma. He wanted to have sex with the other women. So he didn't need to get sealed to Emma because he was already, you know, okay with Emma in that way. It was the other women he was trying to entice. So that. That's why being sealed first, that's all

Bryan Buchanan 32:29 the place of em. And all this is very problematic.

John Dehlin 32:32 Yeah. Okay.

Nemo 32:32 It's almost episode unto itself.

Bryan Buchanan 32:34 I think part of this. The difficulty in putting a lot of specifics to how all this plays out is because we have. Exactly. We have no diaries by these women who are explaining how this happens. The closest thing we get is Eliza Snow begins her Nauvoo diary the day that it seems that she's sailed to Joseph Smith. And she kind of hints at it. One of the craziest stories from the 1980s is this woman pops up saying that she is a descendant of Emma Smith and she has inherited all of these Emma materials, like a Seer Stone. But most importantly, a bunch of diaries. And this comes to the attention of Linda Newell and Val Avery, who are just about done with Mormon Enigma, this fantastic biography of Emma. This, of course, they are wildly excited about. And they're like, hey, can we get a hold of these? Can we see these? Oh, yeah, no, I've. Let me. Let me FedEx them out and, oh, well, my sister has some of them and okay, we'll get them shipped. Bad news. The shipment got lost. And so they get like a FedEx person on the case and they start Tracking it and then the whole house, cars, this lady just made it all up.

Nate Oman (video clip) 33:39 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 33:40 Imagine if that had been real. Imagine if we had one good candid diary from a woman in Nauvoo talking about polygamy.

Nemo 33:48 Yeah. But then there was probably also a don't talk about it mantra that may have even extended into their diaries. Right. There's so much secrecy about this and

Bryan Buchanan 33:55 you can understand why it is both illegal. It is extremely frowned upon in Victorian society. So it's extremely understandable. A you don't have a lot of women keeping diaries at that point, period. And the ones that do, yeah, you can see why they're not going to talk about it as much.

Nemo 34:10 And you know, the, some of the materials we have things like the Happiness Letter, Joseph Smith asking people to destroy and get rid of. So, you know, you have these materials that were probably produced and then are being destroyed and got rid of. And it's only thanks to people like Nancy Rigdon who don't that we have some sort of glimpse into, into this also.

Bryan Buchanan 34:26 That. All right, so we have our first polygamous. Our first eternity ceiling is a polygamous one. Then we have maybe our first monogamous eternity only ceiling. This one's tough. This one comes from a story told later on by Heber C. Kimball to a son in law and back to carrots. So this is this incredibly difficult story of where Joseph asks Heber if he can have his wife Vilate to be married to him. And they agonize over it and finally they come with their hearts bleeding and say, yes, brother Joseph, yes, that's okay. He breaks down in tears and essentially it's, it's, you know, Charlie has just given his gobstopper back and Willie's like, it's a test. Like with Abrahamic test.

Nemo 35:18 Exactly.

Bryan Buchanan 35:19 Yes.

Nemo 35:19 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 35:20 And so this is a really interesting theme. So back to this carrot and stick or test and reward kind of thing. We'll see that come up. If you can do this really hard thing, then you'll get this blessing.

Nemo 35:32 So it's supposed to be a sales technique because you know when you go in with a high off from like, no, but I do swim lesson and you feel like you've won. Is it similar in the sense that he's gone for the late and he's gone, oh, no. Okay, maybe I'll allow it. But it doesn't test.

Bryan Buchanan 35:44 He doesn't accept it.

Nemo 35:45 But can I have your daughter then? Okay, right, fine. Because all of a sudden he's not taking his wife anymore. It's just his daughter. And that's much more palatable in the

Bryan Buchanan 35:54 sense the Kimball story is tough.

Nemo 35:57 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 35:58 Why not have another tough story? Another. Another carrot story. So this is probably a better documented first monogamous eternity ceiling. So in this case, his close friends Newell and Elizabeth and Whitney have a daughter, Sarah Ann Whitney, teenager. And in this case, the family agrees to allow her to be sealed to Joseph Smith. Same kind of thing where Joseph provides a ceremony that Newell will then use as he performs the marriage. And this one is fascinating because we have the actual text of this is unfortunately a later copy, but seems to be legitimate. We have no reason to doubt it. And the way that it's framed is so interesting because it talks about the Holy Fathers. In fact, you know what, Julia? Do you mind? Do you want to read that? So this is the actual text of how this ceremony apparently was performed.

Julia 36:51 Okay, perfect. Read the whole thing.

Bryan Buchanan 36:54 Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Julia 36:56 You both mutually agree, calling them by name to be each other's companions so long as you both shall live, preserving yourselves for each other and from all others and also throughout eternity, reserving only those rights which have been given to my servant Joseph by revelation and commandment and by legal authority in times past. If you both agree to covenant to do this, I then give you, S.A. whitney, my daughter, to Joseph Smith to be his wife, to observe all the rights between you both that belong to that condition. I do it in my own name and in the name of my wife, your mother, and in the name of my holy progenitors by the right of birth, which is of priesthood vested in me by revelation and commandment and promise of the living God obtained by the holy Melchizedek, Jethro, and others of the Holy Fathers, commanding in the name of the Lord, all those powers to concentrate in you and through you to your posterity forever. All these things I do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that through his order he may be glorified, and that through the power of anointing, David may reign king over Israel, which shall hereafter be revealed. Let immortality and eternal life henceforth be sealed upon your heads forever and ever.

Bryan Buchanan 38:13 I think that's fascinating. Throwing in. I saw Nemo's eyebrows go up at the mention of Jethro.

Nemo 38:19 Who's Jethro?

Bryan Buchanan 38:20 So, Moses, father in law. And notice you don't get Elijah there's. And you don't get Abraham. It's very much that vein, but it's just such an interesting, very highly ritualized way to talk about how this ceremony is Taking place.

Nemo 38:36 I also noticed the transactional nature of it. It's like, okay, this is a sealing ordinance for you and your wife, and in so doing, you're giving your daughter to me as a not yet.

Bryan Buchanan 38:46 So it's like three weeks after that.

Nemo 38:47 But they agreed. But they agreed to it in that ceremony. Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 38:51 And so then again, test, reward, three weeks later, Joseph then seals Newell and Elizabeth, her parents, in a monogamous eternity ceiling. So that's our first, much better documented the Heber Kimball one. Really hard to know what to make of that one maybe happened. But so we can see now we have both happening polygamous and monogamous eternity ceilings start to take place and the context in which they're done and the conditions of them, the language around them. Really interesting. Again, like this is so far removed from how they a Kirtland style theology.

Julia 39:30 Okay.

Nemo 39:30 Before far removed from anything familiar to modern members of the church in terms of those sorts of ceremonies, the way they're phrased, the way they're worded, sort of. So we'll talk about similarities in there to temple ceilings. You can hear some of the language carries over, but because the language of

Bryan Buchanan 39:45 current ceilings very much draws back on this era of ceilings feelings and feels like out of time because of that. Yeah, Julia.

Timeline of Early Marriage Sealings

Julia 39:56 So I was just gonna say, before we get too far ahead in the timeline, I just want to review refer listeners I on the screen. I am making this timeline. And so we have the first marriage ceiling. But then before we get too far ahead with the. Not with the monogamous ceilings, Nate Oman talks about dynastic ceilings. And I wanted to share a clip about that, so we'll jump to that.

Nate Oman (video clip) 40:20 So like, for example, Heber C. Kimball wants to have a sealing connection with Joseph Smith. There is only one kind of ceiling that exists, and that kind of ceiling is a marriage ceiling. So Heber C. Kimball asks Joseph Smith to be sealed to his teenage daughter. Right. It's one of Joseph Smith's youngest plural wives. That ceiling was created because Heber C. Kimball wanted a connection with Joseph Smith that was a ceiling connection. And the plural ceiling was a way of doing that. So one thing that's happening in plural marriage is just stuff that's not marriage that we think of as being marriage. It's about people getting these sort of ceiling connections into some sort of exalting kingdom.

John Dehlin 41:09 I just have to note who would have told Heber that the only way that he can be with Joseph is to have Joseph marry Heber's daughter Helen. Where would Heber have gotten that idea.

Nemo 41:22 Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin 41:23 Right. And that's just so problematic when the prophet is saying, I've been talking to God. God says there's great things in store for you. Somehow it always leads to Joseph having more sex with more women.

Nemo 41:38 It's the way that Joseph Smith gets to say, oh, well, an angel threatened me, so if you don't want me me to die, then you've got to do what I say, right?

John Dehlin 41:44 Or like, your whole family won't be sealed. You have 24 hours to either say yes to my proposal to be my polygamous wife, or you and your whole family will be shut out of the celestial kingdom.

Bryan Buchanan 41:55 Aubrey brings this up later on, but in all of those scenarios, the person noticeably absent from those discussions is the woman being her consent.

John Dehlin 42:04 Right?

Bryan Buchanan 42:05 Not being talked, not being asked. It's sort of all right, honey, we've talked about this and we feel like this is the best idea. Are you. Can we talk into this kind of. It's a. The power. Power dynamics there are real non. Pleasant.

Julia 42:20 Yeah, so. So one of the things Nate Oman is saying, he says what's happening are things that we don't think of as. As ceilings or as marriages is how we view them today. But I have three quotes here from Helen where she, I think, is disagreeing with what Nate Oman is saying, and I'll go ahead and read them. Helen herself defined polygamy, saying it was revealed to the latter that there were thousands of spirits yet unborn who were anxiously waiting for the privilege of coming down to take tabernacles of flesh that their glory might be complete, which makes this plural life system an actual necessity. And then another one, she also writes, the principle was established by the prophet Joseph Smith, and all who have entered into it in righteousness have done so for the purpose of raising a righteous seed. And the object is that we may be restored back to that Eden from whence we fell. And then the last one comes from Catherine Lewis, that was published in 1848 and she's quoting. Seems to be quoting Helen. And we can talk about that. Brian. Helen, who says, I would never have been sealed to Joseph had I known it was anything more than ceremony. I was young and they deceived me by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.

Nemo 43:33 So before we get to the provenance of that final quote, I think it is interesting that still language is used today to encourage young women to get married and have children. The current prophet, the church, is actually quite obsessed with people getting married and having children. It seems to be something he's really worried about. That language is still used, that, hey, there's spirits waiting to come down and have bodies. And so in order for that to

Bryan Buchanan 43:56 happen, is it just me that's hearing Saturday's Warrior in the background? We make freaking musicals about this.

John Dehlin 44:02 Jimmy, Jimmy, don't forget your promise.

Bryan Buchanan 44:06 Yeah, that's fairly embedded into Mormons is lost on me.

Nate Oman (video clip) 44:10 But, yeah, it's.

Bryan Buchanan 44:12 Imagine Saturday's word with the British accent.

John Dehlin 44:16 It's a promise.

Nemo 44:19 I don't know how I feel about that, but I've not seen Sustain Warrior. I'm aware it's a thing. Maybe we should do a viewing episode one time. That could be fun. But, yeah. So this same language, the same borderline coercive language is being used today that was used back then.

Bryan Buchanan 44:35 Helen is fascinating because we have as much from her as probably any of the women who married Joseph Smith as plural wives. And she's interesting because she is very loyal. That's why the Catherine Lewis one is interesting. So that's a source that I think most people would just dismiss out of hand as being antagonistic, which is probably too abrupt. It's that word deceived. I think that's the key word. I can see it two ways. I could see that that's Catherine wanting Helen, obviously, to say she's deceived. If it is actually how Helen felt, it could be a moment where. Because in others, she hints that she. She didn't love being like this is this. She's the woman who was not happy that she couldn't go to dances, that kind of thing. So I could see it in sort of more of a unguarded moment, using the word deceived because she. She wasn't fully on board. Imagine that a woman who's not really consulted beforehand, who doesn't have much of a say in this, who's basically just said, this is kind of.

Nemo 45:37 And who's seven months shy of her 15th birthday.

John Dehlin 45:40 But also the fact that the whole dynastic ceiling thing, spoiler alert. Ends up getting squashed and erased from our practice, lends credibility to the idea that at some point she's like, hey, all that stuff everyone told me kind of just went away. I don't know.

Bryan Buchanan 45:56 But it only gets squashed in the sense that polygamy goes away because those ceilings will continue to happen. Maybe not quite so overt as some of the Nauvoo era ones, but that idea of. Of the dynastic aspect of it, of linking families together, very much part of the deal down you know, you'll have. Joseph F. Smith will marry Richards, and, you know, John Taylor's son will marry a canon. You know, those kinds of things that have very much that flavor of dynasticism. As earlier on.

Nemo 46:29 You still have those big Mormon families now. Right. You still have those names you recognize, thanks to polygamy. It is one of the. I guess the hallmarks of a polygamous society, even once the polygamy is done.

Nate Oman (video clip) 46:39 Sure.

Nemo 46:40 Is that there's these big families and people are all interrelated and there's still this nepotism in church leadership. Now, I think Henry B. Eyring is a literal nephew descendant of Joseph Smith.

Bryan Buchanan 46:50 Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. That was. That was kind of the topic of Michael Quinn's early. His thesis and dissertation were these family relationships among the hierarchy. And then obviously, the other aspect of these dynastic ceilings that we're calling them is the question of that Nate brings up is what sort of relationship ensued from those? Because it does seem like there were some of them that didn't have a sexual dimension to them. On the other hand, there were some that definitely did seem. Again, we have a problem in being terribly specific about this because not surprisingly, these women don't really want to be super.

Nemo 47:33 Who's writing that in a diary.

Bryan Buchanan 47:34 Bold about this? Right.

Nemo 47:35 Who's writing that down?

Bryan Buchanan 47:36 Yeah, the. What we. So what we work on in a lot of cases is, for example, testimony from the Temple Lock case down in the 1890s, and the lawyers who are deposing these women are. Are trying their very best to make them be bold and overt and concrete about how they're describing it, and they don't want to.

Nemo 47:56 But then we. We look at these documentaries now, this latest documentary that's just come out about members of polygamous communities, they're still practicing polygamy now. And when these women are in front of law enforcement, when they're in front of outsiders and they're being asked these questions, you see how they clam up. You see how they retract.

Bryan Buchanan 48:12 One wants to talk about this, even someone they don't know.

Nate Oman (video clip) 48:14 Yeah.

Nemo 48:15 Even though they're not happy with their situation, even though they're not happy with what's going on, because we see that some of them, when they do get candid, they're very honest about that at the time, they will staunchly defend it. And I think this is something that's become more obvious to me. Is that what these women say, even if they do say it can't always be taken as an indicator of how things truly were because they're in such an unbalanced power dynamic, they're in such a difficult situation that they have no choice often but to defend the situation in which they're.

Bryan Buchanan 48:43 What benefit is it to be candid in those. That situation?

Nate Oman (video clip) 48:46 Exactly.

Bryan Buchanan 48:46 None. Zero.

Nemo 48:47 Yeah.

Julia 48:49 So my understanding is that Joseph didn't marry Helen Marr until 1843. Is that correct?

Bryan Buchanan 48:54 Seems like that's the timing.

Nate Oman (video clip) 48:55 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 48:55 Yeah, yeah.

Julia 48:55 Okay. And so I think a lot of people, when they say dynastic, they just mean, to my knowledge, a relationship that doesn't consist of sex. And so I think one of the first dynastic ceilings that a lot of people point to is Zina Huntington and Joseph Smith in 1841. And I don't know if you would agree to that, but on the timeline, I've added that as the first dynastic ceiling. And then later you have the first marriage ceiling, which is, as you said, between Heber C. Kimball and is it Violet or Vilate Villate.

Bryan Buchanan 49:25 Yeah.

Julia 49:25 And then you did say there was one that was better documented.

Bryan Buchanan 49:28 Yeah. The Whitney seems to be easier to nail down. But again, like the Kimball one very well could have happened. And if it did, the timeline does seem to be before the Whitney one. So.

The Law of Adoption and Dynastic Kingdoms

Julia 49:40 Okay, and then the next part that I want to talk about is this law of adoption, which I think is a fascinating topic.

Nate Oman (video clip) 49:48 Second way that Kingdom theology shows up is something called the law of adoption. So the law of adoption is actually not instituted by Joseph Smith. It's instituted by Brigham Young and the Quorum of the twelve Apostles shortly after Joseph Smith's martyrdom. They think that they're carrying forward Joseph Smith's teachings. It may be that this is Brigham Young working out what he sees as the implications of the doctrines and things that he learned from Joseph Smith. Maybe Joseph Smith taught this to him and he's just doing what Joseph Smith taught him. I don't know the answer to that question. But in the law of adoption, what happens is adults are sealed in non conjugal ceilings to other adults. So men are sealed to other men. Women might be with their husbands, sealed to another man as an adoptive sealing. So those are ceilings. They're not understood as conjugal. So they're not like marriage ceilings. I would not claim and think it would be wrong to claim that these are like same sex marriage ceilings or something like that, even though they are adult male to adult male ceilings of people who are not related by blood. But the idea was by being spiritually adopted into someone's sort of family. I become part of their expanded exalting kingdom. And everybody needs to be involved in some kind of exalting kingdom. We need to have tools that allow us to be sealed into those exalting kingdoms. And the law of adoption, which are these adult adoptive ceilings, is a way of doing that.

Julia 51:24 Then in my timeline, I'm adding the first recording. Recording of the law of adoption was in 1847.

Bryan Buchanan 51:33 Adoption is really interesting. So as Nauvoo progresses, we talked about the first eternity ceiling is a polygamous one. And then shortly thereafter, we start to see monogamous eternity ceilings, but especially the monogamous ones are sort of scattered. There's just a couple. Until there is this group that Joseph Smith organizes where the Nauvoo era endowment is given to these people. And it's within that setting that a lot of what's going on starts to take place. And this is a select group. This is a group probably not well known to larger Nauvoo. So this is very much the inner circle. These are kind of the elites of Nauvoo. And so when Joseph Smith is finally sealed to Emma in 1843, so two years after the first polygamous eternity sealing, it's within that context. And so slowly, a few select people will start to be sealed, either as monogamous first couples and then as polygamous couples. But this is a very small group. So the. The number of monogamous ceilings, I think, is somewhere around 25 couples. Polygamists, it's. I don't know, maybe double that. So that's a tiny, tiny fraction. Nauvoo is huge by this point. So that is a very small percentage of the people who even know about this, and then certainly a smaller number who are participating in this.

Nemo 52:49 It's an inner circle, somewhat like getting your second anointing.

Bryan Buchanan 52:52 It's. It's very much like. It's. It's. It's. It's for the elite at this point. Then what's so interesting is that when they. After Joseph Smith's death, as Brigham Young really pushes the completion of the Nauvoo Temple, that the scope of it explodes. And they don't actually finish it. It's finished enough where they can start using it. So the end of 1845, going into 1846, and remember, the bulk under Brigham Young's leadership will leave in February. So this is this tiny little window. Hundreds of people. If you have ancestors who lived in Nauvoo, there's a Good chance that they may have been part of this rapidly expanding group. And it's no longer secret, it's no longer restricted. And that's so interesting that Joseph Smith decided to keep it really, really closed. Private, small scale. Brigham Young is like, let's blow it up. Yeah.

Nemo 53:44 And I mean, that's very much one of the fundamental differences between Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. It's often said that Joseph Smith started the church, but Brigham Young kept it alive and made it what it was. You know, it's his managerial style, it's his way of expanding things, of growing things like that that really kind of put the church where it is today. But I do find it fascinating that the first mention of the law of adoption is after Joseph's death. And I think sometimes there's this tendency. Am I. That's right.

Nate Oman (video clip) 54:12 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 54:13 Well, I think that's the first time that specific phrase shows up.

Nemo 54:17 Yeah. Because their concept exists.

Bryan Buchanan 54:18 Yeah. Well. And they even call that adoption. Yeah. In Nauvoo. So they start doing. They'll do all of those types of ceilings. So they'll do monogamous ones. And sometimes we'll have fairly good descriptions of those. And that's really interesting because that's the first time where the concept, the word seal is used, joining two people together. So that's as early as about 1846. That, with that word, now becomes the modern concept of it. Right.

Julia 54:45 So my understanding, when I was doing this research, I found two phrases used by Parley P. Pratt in 1843 and then another one that was in 1837, where he talks about the law of adoption. I'll throw it up on the screen. And I think it's all in reference to Jew and gentile, not a sealing ordinance. Would you say that's correct?

Bryan Buchanan 55:05 Definitely. So the whole basic concept, beside behind this is you might. In a. In a perfect world, you'd have sort of this unbroken chain. And this chain is a really interesting concept. There's this fascinating diagram that I think it's Orson Hyde puts together, and they publish it. And you have a crown at the top, and then you have like a center line and then branches and so, you know, tree, chain, whatever. It's like this. This connected thing. And being part of that is really, really important. And so in a perfect, unpolluted world, everyone is part of this just naturally. And so they'll talk about, you know, this is where that concept of being born in the covenant comes out of this. This. This concept here. And so this is something like guys like Jonathan Stapley Sam Brown this chain, the great chain of being, this priesthood chain, that's something that these guys will talk about, but it's not a perfect world. And so what happens is all of these people, you need to be part of the chain. And so the solution then is they are adopted, they're grafted. That's where this tree language of like the Book of Mormon gets used. And so, but they start now developing a ceremony by which these adoptions into the chain, the house, the tree, the family, whatever it is, can happen. And so we start to see those taking place alongside normal couple ceilings. And we do actually have parent to child ceilings. But the adoption one is so interesting. And from the beginning, it seems like no one quite understood how it worked. It was this stopgap solution to an imperfect world. And no one seems to be ever thoroughly satisfied with it or understands why it works or why it needs to exist, but they start doing it.

John Dehlin 56:57 The fact that it emerges after Joseph's dead, right, in practice for sure. This suggests that, number one, again, that originally it was about Joseph Smith, in my interpretation, having sexual conquest. But also wasn't it Joseph deciding who got to marry who? He was almost kind of brokering the women and the daughters in Nauvoo, kind of like cattle. And now the prophet's gone, so it's not about him having sexual conquest. And now the prophet's not there to decide who gets which woman, who gets whose daughter, who gets whose wife. And so, but then they're still stuck with the residue of people needing to get sealed so that this one big chain can happen. And so it seems to be an outgrowth of Joseph dying.

Bryan Buchanan 57:48 The question of things that Brigham Young does, says, preaches, how much of that originates with him versus how much of that he's just continuing? Joseph Smith's legacy, which is what he will claim to be doing all along the way, is really hard to nail down. For example, just recently we had a new transcript of a sermon from Brigham Young that Le Jean Carruth had transcribed from shorthand that hadn't really been seen before. And in that, Brigham Young claims that this concept of Adam, God, that later becomes important and continues to be important for most Mormon fundamentalists. He says explicitly, Joseph Smith taught. This problem, of course, is we don't have any contemporary record of that. Anytime Brigham Young is remembering history, it's really problematic because he is explicitly using it in very calculated ways at times. And so when he says, well, this happened in Kirtland, this happened in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith did this. Joseph Smith taught me this. In the absence of a contemporary record, it's hard. Problem is it's a spotty record. So for Joseph Smith's discourses, I think the estimate is somewhere around like 25% of his public sermons were captured in any degree. That's a quarter. So there's always the possibility that Joseph Smith was actually talking about adoption ideas. Maybe even frequently. Promise is if he were, it seems like somebody would have thought that was important. They would have mentioned it in their journal. They would have somewhere it would show up. It doesn't.

John Dehlin 59:22 Yeah. Really quickly, Nate. Julie, I don't know if you caught this, but Nate was like these weren't same sex marriages in the traditional. And while I'm sure what he meant was as far as he knows the men weren't having sex. Could he or anyone explain what the difference is between two men being sealed who happen to be spouses and sexually involved with each other versus a father of one household and the father of another household being sealed together in some sort of dynastic ceiling? He wants to really insist that there was no. It seems like he's saying there's no sex involved. But can anyone tell me what the difference would have been between two heads of household being sealed as men and two gay men? And isn't it Taylor Petrie that wants to say this is the great opening that the church should use to allow same sex marriage ceiling someday?

Nemo 1:00:11 Well, I think Nate is trying to close that door and try to say no, no, I'm not replying. And, and possibly just because he doesn't want to be speak seen as speaking on this topic and try and promote this topic under a prophet who is against.

John Dehlin 1:00:23 Yeah, right. But I mean why, why, why shouldn't that be in theory an opening to someday allow same sex marriage?

Bryan Buchanan 1:00:32 I think Taylor's in the temple. That's a tough road hoe like sure you know about that. Can you envision a time where same sex ceilings happen in a temple? My answer is no, of course.

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:00:44 But I'm not.

John Dehlin 1:00:44 I'm only saying theologically. I'm not saying practically.

Bryan Buchanan 1:00:48 Taylor is right that that's the best theological foundation that that discussion could happen.

John Dehlin 1:00:54 But how is two heads of household men being sealed together any different for God? Because there's no.

Bryan Buchanan 1:00:59 Well, for God. Sure. No, it's this about a sexual dimension to a relationship. I mean, that's polygamy. Yeah, same thing.

Nemo 1:01:05 The sexual dimension of the relationship continues into the eternities.

John Dehlin 1:01:10 Yeah.

Nemo 1:01:10 You know, it's eternal. Procreation is a sexual act still, they're having spirit children is a sex, but

John Dehlin 1:01:15 not between Joseph and Heber. They're not having sex in the, in the social kingdom.

Bryan Buchanan 1:01:18 Right, yeah, yeah.

Nemo 1:01:19 So, yeah. So this is so, so the point, the idea would be that if you are sealing these two men, the worry is then they'll get it on in the attorney. Essentially these two heterosexual men, there's no fear that they may do that.

Bryan Buchanan 1:01:30 Right?

John Dehlin 1:01:31 I know. I'm just saying it, it is, it is a meaningless distinction.

Nemo 1:01:36 Oh, absolutely, I agree. I'm just saying maybe that's where, that's where the distinction is being drawn by

Bryan Buchanan 1:01:41 the impulse for that distinction, I think is very much from that.

John Dehlin 1:01:43 Okay, sorry.

Bryan Buchanan 1:01:44 So if I think the best way to understand adoption, the core principle is the idea that these earlier generations that are now dead, we're not confident that they would be in this chain. Right. We're not convinced they were believers. And so it's risky to be sealed to them in the way that modern Mormon ceilings happen along family lines. Right. So adoption is the way to avoid the riskiness. So we stop at someone that we're confident is righteous, valiant, whatever were sealed to them. And then the way that it usually ends up is, you know, this guy is sealed to this guy who then is then sealed to Brigham Young and then he's sealed to Joseph Smith. And that sort of closes off the dispensation that, that, that completes the chain right there for our times. And, and I, the. That is what's undergirding all of this. And so that's why in, in subsequent years, why you aren't, why you were adopted to John Taylor as opposed to being sealed to your father, who's then sealed to your grandfather because your grandfather wasn't Mormon. And so we don't know about him, he's iffy. And so we just bypass that altogether. But that is not wholly satisfying to everyone down the line. So, yeah, so by the end of Nauvoo, so by February 1846, when the Brigham portion of Mormons start to leave Nauvoo, what we have, we have monogamous eternity ceilings, we have polygamous eternity ceilings, then we have proxy versions of both of those. Right. For people that are dead, we have parent to child ceilings, but again only kind of like living known folks. And then we have adoptions. So men and by extension their families being sealed and attached to someone else. And it's really interesting to see like some of them, you'd guess, Bergamyong, Heber C. Kimmel, John Taylor. But then you have People like John D. Lee who are very much part of that. And in fact, Julia, would you mind? There's the description from a guy named George Lobb who is adopted to John D. Lee as a spiritual son. And he leaves, I think, probably the best early generation description of how they thought about adoption.

Julia 1:04:07 So before we go there, before I read this, I wanted to push back a little bit because Juanita Brooks, I have two sources from her about Joseph Smith starting the law of adoption. So in her book on John D. Lee, she says that the law of adoption was practiced a short duration and never widely. Never widely practiced. This was the adoption of young men and their wives to one of the leaders. And then in her next book on Hosea Stout, she says Joseph Smith had sealed to himself a number of his most faithful followers. And I just wanted to throw those out there just to see if you had a response or if Juanita Brooks is just mistaken. And then it did really start with Brigham.

Bryan Buchanan 1:04:45 Yeah, these are probably the two most often cited statements on early era adoption from Juanita, because again, she's writing about John D. Lee, specifically Hosea Stout to a lesser degree. But these are guys who are involved in adoption, especially John D. Lee. So he's adopted to Brigham Young. It's a big deal. For a time, he will kind of sign things John D. Lee Young and talk about being a spiritual son of Brigham Young. So it's very important to him. The problem is her assertion that Joseph Smith is sealed to Brigham Young and other leaders. There's just no evidence for it. And Jonathan Stapley brings that up and he says, I think we just have to conclude she was just wrong. I think it was a very natural assumption that that would have happened. And it's actually quite surprising that it didn't, because I started thinking about this as we were working on this is why, why don't we see that? Why isn't Heber C. Kimball being adopted to Joseph Smith? Because that's later especially. That's how they will describe it. Like I said, this guy to this guy and then this guy to Brigham Young, and then Brigham Young to Joseph Smith. Close the loop. Except that doesn't seem to happen. So it was, I think it was a very natural assumption. And in fairness to her, the awareness of what kind of records were available at that, you know, from Nauvoo wasn't quite as robust as is now with the Internet and, you know, all this work we've done. And more to the point, even if she were aware of them, I don't think they'd let her see them. You know, if she goes to the. The historian's office in the days of Joseph Fielding Smith is like, hey, I want to see records of adoptions. And can I have those? Joseph Fielding Smith is like, get out of here. We don't give you anything. She's famously on record as trying to get things and being shut down. And it's to her credit that her history was as good as it was, which still holds up really, really well, even though she's being stonewalled a lot of places. So I think this is a case where I think she just made an assumption, and it's. It's not borne out.

Julia 1:06:48 Okay. Okay. So it seems like I was thinking if Joseph had the law of adoption, he wouldn't need dynastic sealings. He would just seal himself directly to Heber. And so I guess that's why they have to make these dynastic ceilings so that he can be sealed to Heber through Helen Mar.

Bryan Buchanan 1:07:02 And I think we probably should be careful to make too much out of the dynastic description of these. I think sometimes that's more us looking back, trying to make sense of it than it is how they thought about it at that time.

Julia 1:07:18 I agree. I just. I think dynastic is a. Seems like a necessary part of looking at polygamy, if you want to say that they weren't having sex. And so, like, because I don't know that there's ev. I don't think that there's good enough evidence for him that he didn't have sex with people like Zion Huntington. Yeah. So I just.

Bryan Buchanan 1:07:33 I think a lot of those cases, we have made assumptions which we have to do because we. We don't have anything else to go with. And it very well be that there was a sexual dimension to Joseph's relationship with Zina and some of these other women that have been described as these eternity only dynastic kind of ceilings. We just. We don't know enough to be able to be too definite, I'd say, is the caution. And I would like to point out that I think Nate does a good job throughout that interview of. Of talking again, messy, like we said, but then saying there's no. There's no. There's no handbook. There isn't distinct policy on this. And so I think Nate is careful to say in places like, it's hard, it's complex, we don't know.

Julia 1:08:19 Yeah. Okay, so I can go back and read the George Love. Is. Is that what you want?

Bryan Buchanan 1:08:23 Yeah. Yeah. This is I think this is super interesting.

Julia 1:08:26 So on the 5th of February of 1846, I and my wife Mary Jane, with many others, was adopted into John D. Lee's family. This I took upon myself the name of Lee in this manner. George Lobb Lee and my wife, Mary Jane Law Lob Lee. This order of adoption will link the chain of the priesthood in such a way that it cannot be separated. By covenanting before God, angels and the present witnesses, we covenant together for him to be a father unto those who are sealed to him, to do unto them as he would do unto his children, and to counsel them in righteousness, and to teach them all the principles of salvation, and to share unto them all the blessings to comfort these and all that are calculated to make them happy both in time and in eternity. Now, we also did covenant on our side to do all the good for his upbuilding and happiness. And both in time and eternity. This was done in the house of the Lord, across the altar, as was prepared for the purpose of ordinances.

Nemo 1:09:25 So we've got there some language that comes forward into the modern temple endowment. God, angels and these witnesses is very familiar in that context. That's what you were saying earlier, Brian.

Bryan Buchanan 1:09:36 I don't know that we ever have a written text for the ceremony of adoption. My assumption is it probably looks very much like the sealing ceremony that we do have with a few little tweaks, that's my guess. And so it's interesting to see that already. So this is February, we've only been doing adoptions for like a month now. It already feels very formalized, very ritualized. Right. But again, this would be a fun rabbit hole is why is George Lobb being adopted to John D. Lee as opposed to like a Brigham Young? But why not? Is he not being sealed to his father? I. My guess is his father was not Mormon. But also another concept that will become more important later in Utah is the concept of, well, what if this guy actually has higher priesthood than this guy? That will come up in. When we start talking about cancellation of ceilings, that concept. So at the end of Nauvoo, at the very tail end, it's chaotic. They're running the temple literally night and day. They are trying to administer these ordinances to absolutely everyone that they can. And so like I mentioned, we have all these different categories of ways of attaching people together that all exist on parallel tracks by the end of Navio. So that sort of sets our course for the next 60 plus years, all those different categories of things.

John Dehlin 1:11:00 And the way I make sense of that is, I think about the 41 part series that I just completed with John Turner. It was like every time Joseph got himself in a pickle, whether it was Zion's camp or the Fanny Alger debacle or the Kirtland bank scandal, or what started happening in Nauvoo, he had always promised a new endowment from on high, a new set of blessings, a new elevated form of gifts or powers from on high, which culminates in the second anointing, but it also culminates in these sealing ceremonies.

Bryan Buchanan 1:11:35 And the idea. People keep that idea of culminating in the second anointing in the back of your head.

John Dehlin 1:11:40 Okay? And my only point is it just sounds like Joseph got everywhere excited about this, the final special super sealing endowment from on High. And then he dies and gets killed. And there's a bunch of people saying, wait, I didn't get mine. I didn't have a daughter to get to.

Bryan Buchanan 1:11:55 You never heard about it.

John Dehlin 1:11:56 Yeah, yeah. Or they didn't hear about it. So they're all like trying to get in on this special big culminating endowment that Joseph promised towards the end that he gave to Emma and that he gave to other people towards the end. Right.

Bryan Buchanan 1:12:09 The importance of it gets spread until more people are aware of it and again, want to have it. Right. So there's the story. The one day they are planning to close the temple because they literally need to pack to get out of there. And people clamor for it. And so the decision is we'll just kind of keep it open all night long. And so this depiction of the frenzy of temple activity in the partially finished Nauvoo temple is so interesting. Guys that are sleeping there through the night, women are washing clothes 24, 7. And every so often they got to unstring the bow. And so they have a dance in the temple and, you know, they have a watermelon bust or something. And like just this picture of the frenzy of activity, like, to them that is so crucially important because they're leaving to a place without a temple. And one other thing that I want to mention before we leave Nauvoo is the. This theology of a place really develops here. And we see that because some of the earlier Joseph Smith era ceilings, monogamous and polygamous, will be redone because it's now in a temple. And so the. The idea of a building that is understood to be a temple is critically important. And it's important to note the distinction between the Kirtland era temple. I've noticed this really interesting trend that people are like, it wasn't called a temple. Sure it was. Wilford Woodruff called it a temple. They did also call it a house of the Lord. But what's important is functionally it looks so much different than the Nauvoo Temple. And so this idea of a temple being where ordinances whenever possible, and sometimes that's the only possible place they have to be done within the walls of that specific building.

Julia 1:13:59 Okay, I want to, I wanted to also, I want to also point out, I don't know that you talked about the dream from Brigham. He had a dream about Joseph and he's, he says, tell me more about this law of adoption is my understanding. But I also. Brigham also calls it a great and glorious doctrine. And if I'm not mistaken, I think later he says, this is so important that it can only be done in a temple. Is that correct?

Bryan Buchanan 1:14:21 Yes. And so that's when you said this. You know, there's this progression of ordinances culminating in the second anointing. That's how modern Mormons would understand it because we don't have adoption anymore. So there's a sermon later on in Utah where Brigham Young will very explicitly say, the law of adoption is the highest, holiest ordinance. And we'll see that when we talk about the Endowment House. Let's remind ourselves we'll talk about that. Okay. The dream. So as we leave Nauvoo, we now have this adoption thing and you have guys who are. Some guys who are actively. They'll use words like electioneering and campaigning to build their own kingdoms. There's this really interesting snippet. From now, going forward, we start to have more women's diaries, which is helpful too. So there's this woman, Mary Haskin Parker Richards. Her husband, his uncle is Willard Richards. So a guy who will be Brigham Young's right hand man until his early death, he will say, if I had 12 daughters, then I would want them married to 12 good men. And then I would have like this kingdom. It's really interesting. It sort of reminds me in the office where they show young Michael Scott, he said, I want 99 friends. And then they would all have to play with me. And it's this idea of having like, I'm going to create my own kingdom.

Adoption Practices Expanding and Declining

John Dehlin 1:15:47 Well, it gives multi level marketing vibes. It gives MLM vibes. Your downline, be your celestial.

Bryan Buchanan 1:15:55 It's printed and I think the millennial star.

John Dehlin 1:15:57 Yeah.

Nemo 1:15:58 For another office reference, you've got that pyramid scheme, right. And he has to go.

Bryan Buchanan 1:16:02 And it's not A pyramid. Oh, wait, it's a pyramid.

Nemo 1:16:04 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. When there's the diagram in front of you, then you can see it.

Bryan Buchanan 1:16:08 It is interesting because you have sort of two elements of it. You have guys who people are talking about are actively campaigning for it, but then not, you know, not. Not surprisingly, people who are petitioning to be adopted. To who? Heber? Brigham. If I'm going to be adopted, I want to be adopted to the highest. I want the best chance for exaltation. So what's really interesting is they don't. Once they are done using the Nauvoo Temple, that's the end of adoptions. So apparently, what happens is they create a waiting list. And so Jonathan Stapley points this out. There's Richard Bennett, who has done a lot of writing on this from a more faithful perspective. Richard's done some great stuff. However, I think one of the things I agree with Stapley, I think he messes up, is saying that adoptions happen after Nauvoo. And Stapley argues what happens is he was looking at the waiting list as ones that took place. So, again, you can see if you understand this concept of the chain that's starting to be talked about, and you're like, well, I want to be part of the chain. I want to be exalted. I think we should probably be adopted to Brigham, but they're not doing them anymore. And what's so interesting is you have. We've brought this up, like, these ad hoc ways that start to become policy over time. Well, we can't do adoptions without a temple. Why? They were being done before Brigham Young, you know. Now the adoptions, those are interesting because those were only done within the Nauvoo Temple.

John Dehlin 1:17:41 Didn't they do baptisms for the dead in rivers?

Bryan Buchanan 1:17:44 Until. What does Joseph Smith say? We're not doing that anymore because we need to do them in the font that's dedicated. That's part of. It's the first thing of the temple that's done.

Nemo 1:17:54 The theme that seems to be coming up here, and it's a theme that continues into modern Mormonism, is gatekeeping.

John Dehlin 1:17:58 Yeah.

Nemo 1:17:59 Is the idea that, okay, now you have to do it in our special building. Okay, now you have to be. If you want to get your best chance at salvation, you've got to be adopted to one of these best guys. And so leaders of the church now still want to be the key to people's salvation. They don't do it through direct adoption ceilings or anything like that anymore. But it's now. Okay. Obedience is really important. You've got to listen to us. You've got to do what we say. And that's how you then get your.

Bryan Buchanan 1:18:20 No outside voices.

Nemo 1:18:21 No outside voices. Listen to us.

Bryan Buchanan 1:18:24 So it's a good podcast.

John Dehlin 1:18:25 It's all about, what are you saying, Brian? What do you say? What's. What's the subtext?

Bryan Buchanan 1:18:31 The idea of how authority is reined in. For example, as they leave Nauvoo and we're into the wilderness, which is so interesting because the Israelites create a temple in the wilderness.

John Dehlin 1:18:44 I've always thought that was with a tent, that mortar.

Bryan Buchanan 1:18:48 I mean, yeah, they wanted to build a formal one, but that was just as good.

John Dehlin 1:18:51 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 1:18:52 So they go off into the wilderness, and Brigham starts to try to centralize that authority. And so the idea is that only the president of the church can do ceilings, except he says, we're not even going to do those because we don't have a temple. But he breaks his own rule. And John D. Lee, for example, is sealed to a wife. And he explicitly says in his diary, this was done. It's really interesting. They use this metaphor of Moses where there's a thing and the people petitioned him, and so he's like, fine, I'm not doing this because it's a good idea or it's right. But because you asked for it a million times. They talked about this famously in the

Nemo 1:19:27 history of the church doing something because someone asked for it a lot of times got 116 pages of manuscript loss lost.

Bryan Buchanan 1:19:32 Right.

Nemo 1:19:32 So you think they would have learned their lessons.

Bryan Buchanan 1:19:34 No, it's clear that he does it, and he makes exceptions, but he doesn't really like it. Yeah, but he does it anyways. That comes up a few times. Because we're in the wilderness. We don't have a temple yet.

Nemo 1:19:45 Before you jump back to Julia, I think it's important to note that this idea of needing a temple also gives a unifying goal to a group of people who are otherwise wandering through a desert. Right. Let's go find a place where we can build this special building.

Bryan Buchanan 1:19:56 And that's always when that. The second they get to Utah, the first thing they do, essentially, is big policy decision is select a temple site. Yeah, that's huge because again, over this period of Joseph Smith's death, we do the Nava temple, and then we leave and we go in the middle of nowhere. Right. This desire for a formal temple in which we can now do these things that we've told you are so important. Well, then we need the building.

Nemo 1:20:24 Yeah, it's a unifying narrative. It's going to get them through that journey to go find a place where they can do that.

Bryan Buchanan 1:20:29 So in this interim period, we see these ad hoc policies start to develop. There appear to be some proxy baptisms that are done in like winter quarters. There are a few ceilings. There are no second anointings. There's no parent to child ceilings, and definitely no adoptions. Why? Because that's. They decided. Like, there's no written formalized thing to point to that says, well, we can't do this because there's a section in the Doctrine and Covenants. Right. That says we can't do it. It's just we have decided within this theology of place that's developing that these things. Yes, without a formal temple, these things, definitely not these things sometimes without a temple. So those categories are fascinating to me, I think, because they've just decided that's

John Dehlin 1:21:16 the way they really are making it up as they go along.

Bryan Buchanan 1:21:19 Which again, because Brigham Young sees himself as an entirely different kind of prophet than Joseph Smith. He famously has the one revelation, whatever you want to call it, that gets added to the doctrine covenants is very Brigham Young. It's like these are wagons and this and that. Like, it's a very how to do things. He doesn't have these theological policy revelations that Joseph Smith does. So it becomes less like formal, canonized scripture as what Brigham says in a meeting, which he says, of course, is just as good as what Joseph Smith was doing. So that's where we get to this dream that Julia mentioned is as they are in the wilderness, it's clear, like this adoption, very, very clear. No one is satisfied with it, including Brigham Young. And he tells this story that he has a dream with Joseph Smith and he's like, hey, the boys have been asking about adoption. What's the deal? Joseph Smith's solution in Brigham Young's dream is tell them to keep the spirit and then it'll all work out. I love that the solution is wholly not helpful. That's just pray and read your scriptures and it'll all work out. So it's clear that adoption is being again, made up as you go. It is. It is the most grassroots seat of the pants ordinance that develops, I think

Nemo 1:22:57 by far, so sort of quite expedience based.

Bryan Buchanan 1:22:59 Definitely.

Nemo 1:23:00 Very much so. Julia, do you want to take us to the next slide?

Julia 1:23:02 Yeah. So what I have next is the shifting from the law of adoption to what we, I think now think of as. As ceilings to families. And I think this happened under Wilford Woodruff, if I'm not mistaken. So I on my timeline, I have added in 1894, the law of adoption is discontinued. And then there's a clip. And I don't want to. If you have anything else, Brian, that you wanted to fill in before that, because I think this next clip is from naoman discussing this change or this shift.

Bryan Buchanan 1:23:29 Okay. Yeah, let's set up the history to that because that is. That is a huge chunk of time. And again, this is. This is so Mormon history. Be like, let's jump from 1847 to a giant thing in 1894. That's. This is the fun part. So they're in the wilderness. There are a few things they do, but not much. And then they get to Utah and they immediately want to start redoing things. So there are some ceilings that happen in Brigham Young's office, and they'll do some when they go on preaching tours, especially down south, they'll go to parallon and the local leader there, they'll do ceilings in his office. But everyone understands these are stop gaps. Right? This is not the ideal. We want a formal temple. So they know the way they conceive of the Salt Lake temple. It's going to take them a long time. So the first thing they do is they build what they call a council house. And for just a couple years, they'll use that as a partial temple. So again, some things, not adoptions, not parents, child ceilings, and not second anointings. Then they build the endowment house. Basically the same kind of thing. But what's so interesting is in 1867, they all of the sudden start doing second anointings. So this back to your comment that it all culminates in the second anointing. Not at this point. That's okay to do. And including proxy, second annoyings, in some cases, those are okay to be done in the endowment house. Living ceilings, sure. Proxy ceilings, sure. Adoptions, parents, child ceilings. Those are no GOs. Endowments in the endowment. Proxy endowments. That's not a thing. They can't be done. Why? Because they can't be done.

Nemo 1:25:13 And the arbitrary nature of this is so fascinating. I mean, the covenant path TM has not been developed yet, just rides through along to the second anointing. But the arbitrary nature of this is just fascinating because you look at the new visitor center that they've created now down temple square where they have an undedicated temple, essentially the people are just gonna be able to walk around in perpetuity. It's just a permanent.

Bryan Buchanan 1:25:37 Can you Imagine this happening not that long ago.

Nemo 1:25:40 Exactly. And it's. But the arbitrary nature of that is okay, because they've not dedicated it. This exact same building, this exact same furniture, this exact same space. Fine. The general public, all in sundry, can just wander around it. It's not sacred. So, again, it's this further evolving of this theology of space, and it seems to be just based on fairly arbitrary things. Okay, well, we've dedicated this, so you can come in. We haven't dedicated it.

Bryan Buchanan 1:26:04 Why? Because it is.

Nemo 1:26:06 Exactly.

Bryan Buchanan 1:26:07 Yeah. And so we'll see. They're still thinking about the concepts of adoption, even though they're not doing it. And Brigham Young. Well, this is where he will really start to outline that this is the most important. And that's an interesting concept because they're not doing it. So it's the most important thing. But you still have to wait so that. That you. You could see that within the carrot sphere, I suppose. And. But we see really interesting things that happen. So we will get some good descriptions of how ceilings happen. It's during this period that Orson Pratt will publish the text of the sealing ceremony for a plural marriage. And he does this in the Seer. And it's one of these many cases where he and Brigham Young butt heads. Because Brigham's like, why are we. Why are we publishing this to the world? And Orson's like, I thought we're trying to explain how great and noble all of this is. And I thought that's what he wanted me to do. But the ceremony is so interesting because the. They come before and they stand in front. Here's the husband, and here's the first wife, and here's the plural wife. And the first wife takes the plural wife's hand and places it in the husband's hand. So this is the. The physical manifestation of, like, the law of Sarah. Right. You agree to this, and you are giving you. Because you control it. That is fascinating to me. There's this case where W.W. phelps is back east, and before he comes west, he has himself sealed to a couple women so that, of course, they can have sex on the trail. It's pretty clear. That's why it happens. Brigham Young is furious. This is this. This periodic expansion and contraction of the authority. This is a period where it's very contracted. This is not okay. And he talks then about how the. The first wife holds the keys of the sealing power. And that I thought was so interesting. It's like. But she doesn't. There's so many cases, like Emma.

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:28:07 Yeah.

Nemo 1:28:08 Didn't like DNC 132.

Bryan Buchanan 1:28:10 Right. Like, you hold the keys. No, you don't. It sounds good, but it's in practice. That's not at all how it works. Then you have very interesting things about proxy ceilings. So dead people being sealed to living people. So Joseph S. Smith, who worked in the endowment house for many years, records this amazing entry of a day's work there where this woman gives him this list of women who were prisoners of some sort. This is like European people. And so three of them are sealed to him, and a couple to Uncle Joseph with this guy as proxy, and a couple to his father Hiram by proxy, and a couple to Grandpa Joseph and Uncle Samuel. And this. This concept of. Of proxy ceilings where one party is still living are super interesting. And you have one where. Trying to think who it was now.

Nemo 1:29:09 Oh.

Bryan Buchanan 1:29:10 Heber C. Kimball, in a general conference talk, talks about how the husband had died and living man wanted to have the dead man's wives sealed to them. And he's like, no, no, no, we don't rob the dead. We do for them what they can't do for themselves. We don't rob them. That's wild.

Nemo 1:29:30 Yes.

Julia 1:29:30 Okay. I wanted to talk about that, too, because I know the story of Martha Brotherton where Brigham wanted to marry her and she refused. So she leaves. My understanding is that she leaves Nauvoo and gets married. But once Brigham finds out that she. That she is, I think she and her husband both have passed away. As if I'm understanding it. He seals himself to her. So I don't understand his. This whole not robbing the dead.

Bryan Buchanan 1:29:53 That's really interesting. I have a friend, actually, who's going to be presenting on Martha and the Brothertons at, I think, mha, and that'll be really good. She is, Marianne Clements is her name, one of the smartest people in Mormon studies right now. So she's really good at taking sort of the traditional narrative of people and doing the research necessary to say, no, it's. It's not this. It's this. It's more complicated. That kind of thing. I remember. I think she mentions that. That idea of Brigham after they're dead, having her sealed him. There's more to the story. So that one, I'd say stay tuned.

Julia 1:30:30 Okay.

Bryan Buchanan 1:30:32 But yeah, this kind of interim period is really interesting because we see this theology of place kind of take hold because the endowment house is where things are done. But it's certain things. But it's only until we get to formal temples. And so Then beginning in 1877, our first temple in Utah, in St. George, is completed. And now we start doing everything there. My house is still open during that time, and they shut it down for time, and then they reopen it, but only for certain cases. And then it's just kind of back to normal.

Julia 1:31:06 Julia, I wanted to ask. So you talk about the Seer and how Orson Pratt published this ceremony, but you make a note. You said then the word seal does not. It doesn't. It doesn't use the word seal.

Bryan Buchanan 1:31:18 Yes. Yeah. So that's the text if Modern Mormons, if you read the text that Orson Pratt publishes, it's for a plural marriage, but it's essentially the current, still used ceremony for sealing, of course, monogamous marriages today. And the language of sealing them together isn't there. We're sealing blessings. We're sealing them up to the first resurrection, but we're not sealing them to each other. So even then, that language, the way we currently think about it, isn't there. And the ceremony still isn't there.

Julia 1:31:52 That's so interesting.

Bryan Buchanan 1:31:53 Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was. I. I'd forgotten. I was like, wait, do they use the term seal, you two together? No, they're legally and lawfully wedded, basically.

Julia 1:32:03 And then I. If we're ready, I'd like to talk about this shift in. I guess it's. It's 1894, where he shifts from doing adoption ceilings outside of the family and then doing it to the family, if that's okay. Okay. So we've got this clip from Nate Oman talking about this shift.

Wilford Woodruff Remaking Temple Ordinances

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:32:24 And in the 1890s, Wilford Woodruff, in some ways, sort of remakes the temple and particularly remakes ceiling ordinances. And he does that in two ways. So the first is he issues the manifesto, which sort of starts a complicated and messy process of ending plural marriage. The other thing in 1894 that he says is we're going to end the law of adoption. So we're still going to have ceilings in which adults are sealed in adoptive ceilings to other people. But these adoptive ceilings are now going to happen along family lines. So before 1894, you would do adoptive ceilings, and oftentimes you would do adoptive ceilings if people were Latter Day Saints. So, like, I might be sealed to my father if my father died before we could go to the temple, but he was a Latter Day Saint, so I'd be sealed to my father, but then my father might be sealed to Brigham Young posthumously, or like all of my ancestors might be sealed to me in adoptive ceilings. And then I would be sealed to Brigham Young.

Guest 3 1:33:36 So they were not Latter Day Saints.

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:33:38 If they were not Latter Day Saints. The other thing again. Right. It's dangerous to think like there's a manual that explains.

Guest 3 1:33:45 Right, okay, right.

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:33:46 Because there isn't. It's just like a practice that's happening. So what Wilford Woodruff is, according to the sermon that he gives in 1894, he's never really completely comfortable with the law of adoption. So he'd sort of been in a stupor of thought about the law of adoption. He says he'd been in a stupor of thought about the law of adoption, like, all the way back in Nauvoo. He was sort of uncomfortable with it. So I sort of have this vision of Wilfred sort of being uncomfortable with this for a long, long, long, long time. And then he says, I received revelation in 1894. And what the revelation says is, we're going to continue to adopt his. We're going to do them along family lines. So you are going to be sealed to your grandfather, and then your grandfather is going to be sealed to his father and his father, and his father and father, mother, all the way back and all the way back to Adam, if we can do it, is what says, before 1894, nobody did those ceilings. People did not seal their ancestors.

Julia 1:34:40 Okay. So, and I think that the. What he's talking about, if I'm not mistaken, is this sermon here where he said. Where he's talking about his. He wants everyone, let every man be adopted to his father. That is the will of the God to his people. And then he says, I've had friends adopted to me. And he says, but we're not. But I've had a peculiar feeling about this, especially lately. And this was published in the millennial star in 1894, from Wilford Woodruff, Just

Bryan Buchanan 1:35:05 kind of a random tangent. The fact that it shows up there, I think it's also published in the Deseret News, is because you don't have, like, a formal published conference report at this point, which you think now, like the idea that the conference talks are your walk and talk for the next six months. That is not a thing then. And so they would publish them in the newspaper, some of them, but it would be weeks, months. They might publish some of them in the Millennial Star. So the way that information was disseminated and maybe the relative importance of that is very different than it is currently.

Nemo 1:35:38 But then that's because I suppose earlier on in the church, you still had this very revelatory process. This idea that new Scripture is coming particularly under Joseph Smith, you've got Doctrine and Covenants stuff being added to all the time. It's possible that in the slowdown of the addition to the Doctrine and Covenants and things like that into the 20th century, you're then going to see the increased importance of conference talks.

Bryan Buchanan 1:36:01 It is interesting because Brigham Young will talk about, you know, what I tell you is the word and will of the Lord. But if it's only the people in that audience that are hearing it, or maybe published in the Journal of Discourses in England, that how many people are going to get their hands on, how many people are going to get that message? So that dissemination of information is very different. Random tangent there. All right, so this is a big one. So this is a General Conference talk, April 1894. This makes enough noise that people will record that in their diaries that he preached this sermon. And people seem to grasp the shift that he's talking about.

John Dehlin 1:36:40 He's basically canceling.

Bryan Buchanan 1:36:41 Yeah, we're not doing adoptions anymore. We're going to start doing ancestral line sealings. So before where we did it, like, he, like Nate mentioned, maybe I would be sealed to my father who died, but he was Mormon, and we knew him, and we could kind of vouch for him. Now it's like, nope, you do to your father, but then your grandfather, who was never Mormon, who, you know, died in Connecticut, and then to his father, and then sometimes you'll still see a vestige in that. Well, and then we'll kind of just seal the whole package to Joseph Smith. But that will start to drift away over time. But what's interesting is he says, you know, I've had this peculiar feeling as we were doing research for this. I realized I've not seen much on kind of. Why does he suddenly decide in April 19, 1894, to give this particular sermon? He's been troubled about it since Nauvoo. Well, that was 50 years ago. Why now? I found a really interesting entry in George Q. Cannon's journal. So Cannon is his counselor. Cannon is a. He's very much an intellect. He's, I think, much more intellectually inclined than pretty much all of his counseling, his colleagues, including Woodruff. And he says, so this is a month before. So this is March 1894, month before conference. He says adoption came up and, you know, there was. He will use all this passive language. A discussion was had, a decision was made, reading. He's pushing it. Yeah, because he is troubled about it, but he wants to do something about it. And so you have decades of inertia where people keep saying they're not quite sure, but it just rides. And so he says, well, in connection with general conference, the temple presidents will be here. Let's sit down, let's have a full on discussion about this. And what's so interesting is he then says that a couple weeks before this, Lorenzo Snow, one of the 12 who will become the president of the Salt Lake Temple, comes in. They start talking about adoption. And Snow's essentially like, well, should I, should we do adoption or should, you know, should we be sealed to our ancestors? And Cannon says, I think you should be sealed to your ancestors. And he says, joseph F. Smith agreed with me. And then he says, Wilford Woodruff kind of agreed with me. But what's clear, he says, but not to the point where a decision would be made. So then they apparently have this meeting and it seems like it's out of this process that Lorenzo Snow, Wilford Woodruff, sorry, makes a decision that we are done with adoptions. We're going to do ancestral lines back as far as you can go. But what's so telling to me is Wilford says, I've been troubled about this all along the way. He has people adopted to him. Now, in some cases those were people petitioning to be adopted to him. But a lot of times it's him. So he's troubled about it, but he still keeps doing it over decades, canon, radio silence. In his journal, it doesn't seem like he has people adopted to him. So he's troubled about it. And so his solution is, oh, I don't think we should do it. And at this juncture, when he, they kind of decide we're going to do something about this, he's had people who've petitioned to be adopted to him and he says, nope, hold on, let's see what's going to happen. So what's so interesting, Nate paired this with the manifesto. And saying that this talk ends adoption is sort of like saying that the manifesto of 1890 also Wilford Woodruff, ended polygamy. Not quite the same. I would argue the manifesto didn't end polygamy because it wasn't intended to do so.

Nemo 1:40:26 And Nate says as much in his comments. He says it and it began the very messy or complicated process. Right?

Bryan Buchanan 1:40:32 It did, but that wasn't, that was the result of conditions, not a conscious decision to end it. Right. That's a whole other discussion, this one, it does seem like the intent is to make that shift, but it's slow. So if you look at the statistics in 1894, in, I think it was the Salt Lake Temple, a third of all the adoptions that year come after that conference talk. The temple president is there, the recorder is there. They're all there listening to it. And yet they still happen.

Nemo 1:41:07 And yet can you imagine that now an edict comes down from General Conference, say, I don't know, the word Mormon is suddenly anathema and we're not to use it anymore. And overnight you have people switching their Facebooks, they have people changing the names of their URLs, channels, you have URLs, you have all this stuff changes immediately. And some of it, yeah, is the Internet, some of it's the hyper connectivity of the modern world. But Soviet is just the way the church is now is so much more authoritarian than it was at this time. You've got people in positions that nowadays, you know, a temple recorder would never dare not follow the latest recording policies for the temple, would never dare allow ordinances that have been stopped by the president of the church to be recorded and to happen. And yet that's what we're seeing here. So I think it's always just interesting to look at how the modern church behaves now and compare it to the early church.

Bryan Buchanan 1:41:59 What I found, one thing for one thing I found so interesting is in statistics of the Salt Lake Temple, you have adoptions happening, not many, but like a couple a month as late as 1945. And it's pretty clear their adoptions, because you have children to parent, ceilings next to them. You have normal ceilings here. Like, it seems very clear. These are this style of adoptions that are happening.

Julia 1:42:21 40, 1945.

Bryan Buchanan 1:42:23 And that was only because that was as late as I had the statistics. I'd love to have a description of like this adoption in March 18, 1945. Who was it and why. That's pretty late. You know, 50 years after that shift that it didn't shift for that case.

John Dehlin 1:42:42 I just think it bears pausing to think about the implications that for so many years, Joseph's practicing polyandry, marrying other men's wives. But then. And that practice is kind of done away with, or we're doing polygamy until we stop. Or like you taught us in the second anointing episodes that we did that for decades, second anointings were emphasized, and then for decades they weren't. Or we're using the term Mormon, and then we're not. Or garments are to your wrists and to your ankles until they're not. And there Are Masonic crucial Masonic rituals in the temple ceremony until they're not. And you know what's, what seems just pretty obvious is number one, they're kind of making it up as they go along that anything can change that. The only thing that's going to make a change is when someone decides, like with Russell and Nelson, I don't like the term Mormon. Okay, he's going to be the one that stops it. But then if someone follows him, like Oakes, who doesn't like the changes Nelson made, well, he's going to change it back. And there's this idea that like when elephants fight, the grass gets hurt. Like the brethren make it up as they go along. They change whatever they want. And now we're stuck with like gay people not being able to get married in the temple or doing, you know, I have family members that like all they do for hours a week is they go to the temple and they perform ceilings for dead people. What?

Bryan Buchanan 1:44:16 Ancestral line ceilings? Yeah, because there's a whole lot of those you can do.

John Dehlin 1:44:20 Yeah. But like, you know, I've said this a million times in Mormon stories that our service missionaries are full time young missionaries. They could be getting water to people without clean water. They could be curing malaria, they could be dealing with literacy. There's so many ways they could be blessing the world. And more importantly, there's so many temple workers that could be doing that type of service. But instead they're doing baptisms for the dead, endowments for the dead, sealing for the dead. It seems like such a catastrophic waste of time and energy if it's the type of thing that some subsequent prophet could just go, we're not going to do that anymore.

Bryan Buchanan 1:45:03 That's a very narrow view, John. That's only until those, those conditions are only until you die. This is eternity.

John Dehlin 1:45:09 But I mean, any eternal ordinance can be de. Emphasized or extinguished or altered when whatever prophet decides that they want to.

Bryan Buchanan 1:45:19 But that, that way of thinking about it doesn't happen within that worldview. Right. That, that, that's not, it's not extinguishing, it's changing it because. Because it needed to be changed. So within that worldview, it makes perfect sense.

Nemo 1:45:34 Well, it's that line from the happiness that whatever God's commands of his children is necessary no matter what it is.

Bryan Buchanan 1:45:40 Because it's God commanding.

Nemo 1:45:41 Because it's God's commands. It.

Bryan Buchanan 1:45:42 That's where it originated.

Nemo 1:45:43 Yeah. And that which seems strange and wrong in one circumstances is right in another. You know, it's the expediency law. Of Mormonism, it's okay, well, what do we need to be doing now? If God says so, then we do it.

John Dehlin 1:45:54 But from a stand, from a standpoint of informed consent, people deserve to know that these guys just change stuff when they feel like it or when the implications of the policies or ordinances or doctrines that they've taught become too complicated or fraught, they just change it. And God could have made all of this very clear every single time along the way that one of these things gets implemented. He could have implemented the rules, the standards, the practices, the structure. Because we've got several DNC sections that are very specific. Right?

Nemo 1:46:26 Yeah. Mansion House, again, it's that idea of Nate Oman saying, oh, there wasn't an instruction booklet, there wasn't a manual of this.

John Dehlin 1:46:32 Why wasn't that right? I mean, I think we all need to understand that. And so now when garments, all of a sudden, women's garments, they can show their shoulders. And garments are shrinking and shrinking because of social media pressure now that black people can have the priesthood. Pick your thing. Everything is changeable. Everything is flexible. If there's enough pressure or if just the whims of a modern prophet or apostle overtake, anything is changeable. Anything is up for grabs.

Nemo 1:47:02 It's like Elder Haney said, the key is to follow a living prophet. The words of dead prophets do not gain value with age. They don't appreciate in time. So just follow the living prophet.

John Dehlin 1:47:12 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 1:47:12 It would be interesting to look at journals from people around this time to see if there was much opposition to this announced shift in thinking. Because where you have things like the end of polygamy, when it does become an end in within the church, obviously there's great backlash. That's the fundamentalist movement. When the garments are changed, there's put. That's within the fundamentalist movement. Same kind of thing. I wonder if there was opposition. I mean, the fact that there continues to be adoptions pretty well signals that some people thought, I think we should still be doing this. But it seems, if there was opposition, it seems to be less than other decisions. And as a result, we see a lot of pretty huge changes. They found the Genealogical Society in 1894, and that's where you really start to see temple work explode. Because again, it's along these ancestral lines where there's, you know, I've got ancestors. I can go order this book from New England that has the. The Jones family in New England back till they arrived in America and beyond. So that's a. That opens the way for a lot of, of temple work. So the modern concept of these, of people that get engaged in this to this great degree kind of become. Comes out of this. That wasn't a thing before for 60 years and it still won't be for a little while yet. But that's what sparks it.

Plural Marriage Sealings Discontinued

Julia 1:48:40 Yeah. Okay, so I want to show my timeline again. And so I've added plural marriage ceilings discontinued. And I really should have put parentheses around both of these. Discontinued. And then the ancestral ceilings of sealing, you know, you to your family lines.

John Dehlin 1:48:55 The years. Julia, just for those listening.

Julia 1:48:57 Yeah. So plural marriage ceiling with the first manifesto in 1890 happened in September. And then the beginning of the ancestral ceilings happened in 1894. And then. Brian, can you tell us, you said, you said that. Oh, excuse me. You said that the, the seal, the law of adoption happened, continued from that, from, from when they were supposed to end it to 94. And then will you remind us when the polygamy. When the, the last known plural ceiling happened?

Bryan Buchanan 1:49:24 That's a tough one, I would say. I've. This is a question that comes up. If I had to put a date in which polygamy stops within the LDS Church, it's no longer authorized, I would argue 1909 is your best cutoff because it's at that point that they really start getting serious about disciplining. So that's when they start bringing people in, grilling them, and then disfellowshipping and then excommunicating. So that's a solid 20 year period. And honestly, if Reed Smoot isn't elected as a senator and there isn't this lengthy series of hearings, that is the worst PR imaginable. If that doesn't happen, there's a whole alternate timeline to go through. So it's, it's, I think only because of that that it really becomes an issue where they actually decide, okay, I think we're done now. So adoption, it's, it's, it's sort of the same problem is we just don't understand it as well yet. And that's. I started poking through here. I, I think a good, like documentary history of adoption would be fun. It would be difficult in the 20th century because I don't think you'd be able to get all of the stuff you need. But clearly it's happening for a long time after on somewhat of a scale. So why is it still happening? Who's doing it? Who are they being adopted to? Is it just old habits die hard? I don't know. Because it does seem all along the way you have people who were not really happy with adoption, it's despite Brigham Young saying it's the most important thing. You don't have people who seem to really glom onto it. So it's this interesting practice that, again, grows out of this concept that if we're not sure if these guys are safe, then we shouldn't be sealed to them. And one rationale for Woodruff changing this is that he had changed his mind about that principle. And that's. It's hard to say. There is this. There's a letter where he says, no, you shouldn't be sealed to this guy, because we're not. We're not sure. And that's like late 1880s. So if he does change his mind on this, it's a pretty rapid shift in perspective. And that very well could be because that does seem to be the principle that's behind all of adoption. So if we're not doing adoption anymore, deciding. And he does seem to hint that after death, most people will accept Mormonism in the spirit world. So that. That does seem to be part of his. His changed worldview.

Nemo 1:51:59 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 1:51:59 But tracking when he changes it and how and why is. Is I don't think is well understood.

Nemo 1:52:06 Tracking the changes in worldview of the prophet can be quite, really hard because they're going to try and keep that from the public because they won't want to appear consistent.

Bryan Buchanan 1:52:13 And that's diaries, hints, and letters. You know, that's. That's where you start to piece together how a perspective shift happens. And that's really difficult. Sure. It's satisfying when you can do it and say, oh, there we go. There's the line. That's what is.

Nemo 1:52:27 What does Nate have for us next? Julia?

Julia 1:52:29 Okay, so Nate next talks about how there are more temple ordinances to come. And so, John, that made me think of what you were just saying about how these are just men making decisions. But also it made me think, as a queer woman, of this idea of maybe, maybe other things coming in the future, really.

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:52:48 So I think about President Nelson when he rededicated the Washington, D.C. temple. He gave a sermon in the temple dedication, and he said, the Lord hasn't finished revealing all of the temple ordinances to us. He hasn't finished revealing everything about the temple to us. So that's an ongoing process of revelation. And I think you see that in the way. In which. The way we think about temple oranges start shifting at the end of the 19th century. And if you have to pick a date, I'd pick 1894.

Julia 1:53:16 Did you have any thoughts on that, Brian?

Bryan Buchanan 1:53:19 This is interesting. Yeah. I would tend to couch that statement that there's more to come in a very broad brush sense. I think, to me, that is part of this heightened importance of words of a prophet as sort of a defining feature of Mormonism. It's always been there, obviously, but I think, you know, we don't. We obviously don't do polygamy anymore. Word of wisdom is not really as emphasized as it used to be. So this importance of what the prophet says, I think that's become more of a defining feature. So I. I think I'd put that more in that camp, because if you think about it, when we don't have a new temple ordinance since Nauvoo, like, there's nothing since then. So the idea of, like, some wholly new ordinance or like a radical change to an existing ordinance.

Nemo 1:54:12 Well, to be clear, the endowment has changed a lot since Nauvoo.

Bryan Buchanan 1:54:15 It has, but I would say, like, the structure of it is still there. Like, it feels like an 1840s fish.

Nemo 1:54:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, so there's this change to the color of the scales. Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 1:54:26 So I don't. I don't see him hinting at some even kind of radical change within temple ordinances. So, yeah, to me, that's more just kind of the importance of. And. And obviously to him, the unfolding of the restoration, that was a huge theme of his. Like, there's. There's so much coming. I. To me, I just put it within that rhetoric.

Nemo 1:54:48 Nelson loves to say, all right, you've not seen anything yet. He wanted to Vitamins. He wanted to be the prophet known for being the change maker. That's why he changed things that didn't really need to be changed.

Bryan Buchanan 1:54:58 And. And mostly they were small changes. Right. These are. No one looks at those and. And sees them as anything on par as manifesto the 1894.

Nemo 1:55:07 He wants you to be seen that way. And I think a lot of members tried to paint it that way. I think if you're looking at it objectively, he didn't.

Bryan Buchanan 1:55:13 Right.

Nemo 1:55:13 But the. The feeling around all the changes he made very often was that.

Julia 1:55:18 I think it's just interesting that he was talking, quoting Nelson, who is, you know, the. Just the most recent prophet, as saying that there's more to come, because I can't even fathom, like, what. What else there would be, but if we're ready to move on. So Nate goes back a little bit in this next clip, and he's talking about the first proxy temple. And I just wanted to share that clip really fast.

Guest 3 1:55:39 And can I ask you about that? Because that's fascinating. It seems like in most cases, we sort of just layer on more meaning and. But. But law of adoption was so interesting because it's like an explicit change in direction. So what happened to all of those ceilings that had already been performed? Were they resealed to people in their own minds?

Nate Oman (video clip) 1:55:57 That's a great question, because this revelation comes down in 1894, and people have been doing temple work for their ancestors, starting with the St. George Temple in 1877. Also important to understand is that, as I understand it, there are no proxy temple ordinances before 1877. So there are endowment ordinances. There are ceilings in the endowment houses, but they're only for living people. There aren't proxy ordinances. Proxy ordinances have to be done in the temple. So there had been all this proxy work that had been done under the sort of law of adoption understanding. And so lots of people had done, like, a lot of genealogy, and they had all these ancestors going back to the. The Mayflower, and all these people had been adopted in adoptive ceilings to Joseph Smith or to Hebert or someone. So then what happens is people write letters to Wilf Wood Woodruff, and they say, you know, I'd really like to be sealed to grandpa. Can I be sealed to grandpa instead of being sealed to premium? So what do we do with that? And Wilford Woodruff comes up with a sort of policy. Again, that's a little anachronistic, but this is what he does. He says, if anybody asks, we will cancel the previous ceiling, and we will note the cancellation of the previous ceilings in the records of the temple. And they can be sealed along family lines. If they don't request it, we leave the ceiling in place. We don't do anything.

Julia 1:57:21 And then I added it on my timeline. The first proxy temple ordinances in 1877. And just. Brian, do you have anything to say on that?

Bryan Buchanan 1:57:30 Definitely. The way that you frame it as temple ordinance is. Yes, because you can't do a temple ordinance unless, by definition, you have a temple. Nate is partially there. We've already talked about this. But to reemphasize. So, for example, in the endowment house, you have lots of proxy ordinances, but only certain categories, Right? So you have the baptisms, you have ceilings. You have even second anointings that are done, but you don't have. Have specifically no parent's child and no adoptions and no proxy ordinances. Those three are not so yes and no, you do have some, you don't have others. And again, that theology of place is so important. So offshoot of this is, what about polygamous ceilings that take place A, after the manifesto and B, not in attempt temple. So again, in the perfect world that they envision, all ordinances happen with the temple. But there are, there's, you know, there's a million things. So that's why sometimes apostles will do on their tours, they will seal monogamous ceilings. Like if they go, they go to Arizona. Like traveling from Arizona up to, you know, even to St. George isn't super fun sometimes, especially if you're close to the Mexican border. So they will sometimes seal monogamous ceilings. Sometimes they will seal polygamous seal ceilings. Well then, fast forward 30, 40 years and the son, the granddaughter, writes to Heber J. Grant and says, you know, my parents were sealed by John W. Taylor when he was on this tour in 1897. Is that good or do we need to have it done? And the responses are really interesting because they're usually very kind of waffly. They're like, you know, if you can, sure, that that would be good, but not, it's not like necessary. So that, to me, that's so interesting. And I just found a fascinating letter there within the, the church's genealogical department. They had a special services, like the Interesting question division, essentially, like special situations. And I have to think that the guys. Anytime I see a letter usually posted on FamilySearch, treasure trove of these things, anytime I see that guy's signature, I'm excited because I know that's going to be a fun letter. And it's these people saying, okay, our parents were sealed by Anthony Ivins in the Mexican colonies. Is it valid? What do we do? And he responds, and he says, okay, we went and checked. And in fact, that is mentioned in the journal of Anthony Ivins, who performed the marriage. It's not. What it is is that he kept a marriage record of all the plural marriages he did in Mexico. And his son, who was. He had a couple sons and they were both sort of cultural Mormons. It's probably the best way to describe them. And they excerpted some of those marriages and then apparently gave the record back because they were idiots. And so it seems like what happened is that guy went and consulted the marriage record and that was the first time I'd ever seen any official mention of that record. And they said, okay, it's there. I think that's good. So that's interesting. So that's. They didn't even suggest that it needed to be redone, even though it was not in a temple. So that's part of it is a theology of place. But then I think we need more research on. He seems to be kind of referring to specific things like what if you have an adoption ceiling now what do we get rid of that? I don't know. My sense is that probably just kind of let it lie. Like that was adoption. That we did that before. We don't do it now. Like, we just, we kind of don't talk about that anymore. This is our program now.

Proxy Ordinances and Evolving Sealing Meanings

Nemo 2:01:09 Isn't this fascinating that the whole point of Joseph Smith going to the grove of trees was to pray? Because there was so much confusion and God is not an author of confusion. And yet in the very necessary ordinances to achieve salvation, there's a lot of confusion. No one seems to be quite sure what needs to be happening. And it again strikes me as fascinating compared to the modern church, how all these things have to be done. Precisely. If someone doesn't do certain parts of

Bryan Buchanan 2:01:38 the endowment, hair comes up out of the water.

Nemo 2:01:41 Comes out of the water for baptism. All those little things.

Bryan Buchanan 2:01:44 One word wrong in a sacrament prayer.

Nemo 2:01:45 Exactly. Then you're getting a young man redoing it. All this sort of stuff, this scrupulosity that builds off the back of all that. Whereas you've got guys in the early 20th century going, oh, he was kind of baptized in the middle of nowhere in Mexico and it really ought to have been done in a temple. But I guess if you can. Yeah, fine, whatever.

Bryan Buchanan 2:02:01 Yeah. The, the, and the attitudes on that will shift and they will shift from person to person. And so it shows how profits have

Nemo 2:02:08 an impact because they've got. You've got.

Bryan Buchanan 2:02:10 And not just profits.

Nemo 2:02:11 Not just profits. Yeah. Who's working within the. The systems.

Bryan Buchanan 2:02:16 Yeah, yeah. So on our second annoying discussion, the importance of a guy like George Richards who's like, whoa, hold on. In the modern interpretation, in a post adoption world where things culminate in the second anointing, why aren't we giving it to anybody? And so you have like in the 60s, there's a guy who is a BYU dude who's on a mission and the apostles do a Q and A session. Right. I think it's in the MTC or the language training mission or the missionary home, whatever it was at that point. And I always wonder, the apostles are like, all right, let's throw it open to Q and A. Do you want to do that in the crowd so this guy is like, hold on. Is the secondary thing really necessary? And Lee's response is, essentially, you've received all that you need. Hold on. That's not how it was before. So this idea of adoption is the highest, holiest ordinance according to Brigham Young, until it wasn't. Right. And so that shift is really interesting because what happens when people see that? And so that's why I wonder if there was some opposition to adopt to the shift away from adoption, what it looked like. Because if somebody reads Brigham Young saying explicitly that adoption was the highest and holy. Well, now what? And so I would. I would really like to see the. Did they cancel those adoption ceilings? And if so, what does that cancel look like? I know in some cases there were literal cancellations in records where it was like, we crossed that out in red ink, you know, so did it look like that or was it canceled in like, a broad sense? Like, that's no longer valid.

Nemo 2:03:58 Seems to be. There's more trust in the. God will put the red ink through the ledger book in heaven and he'll kind of sort it out. And then you guys just do the

Bryan Buchanan 2:04:04 heavenly book of the law. Right.

Nemo 2:04:06 That law worked out. And to an extent, that still kind of exists when, you know, when church leaders can't answer difficult questions about divorce or other things like that, they'll kind of just say, well, it'll all be worked out, but there's a lot less.

Bryan Buchanan 2:04:19 When will it be worked out?

Nemo 2:04:20 Oh, in the eternity.

Bryan Buchanan 2:04:21 Isn't that in the millennium?

Nemo 2:04:22 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 2:04:22 I love that. That's like when. You don't know when. Just hunt it to the.

Nemo 2:04:27 Kick it down the road to millennium. But it seems to be less of that now. We seem to be a lot more concerned.

Bryan Buchanan 2:04:32 That is not rhetoric. When was the last time you heard, like, things will get worked out in. In the millennium? That's an interesting vestige of earlier times, I think, because angels will be there and they'll have records they can bring and they can help sort that. We don't talk like that anymore. I think that's, to me, because that was a very common solution to a problem, is it's okay, Jesus is coming back, he's going to put things in order, and we're. We'll get this all straightened out then.

Nemo 2:04:56 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:04:57 Not really something we talk about much anymore.

Julia 2:05:00 Yeah. And then to make it more complicated, Nate is now talking, as you were just talking about, is the ceiling cancellations.

Cancellation of Sealings and Church Authority

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:05:11 The other thing that comes out is this idea of cancellation of ceilings. So we have this notion, right, that the President of the church has the keys to cancel the ceiling ordinances, and that sort of wipes the ceiling out. And then you could do other new kinds of ceilings. Nobody, as near as I can tell before Wilford Woodruff, thought that you could do that. Brigham Young did not think, as near as I can tell, did not think that he could cancel ceilings.

Guest 3 2:05:38 So even in the case of divorce, because I know Brigham Young, we've talked about how he. Like, there were a lot of divorces happening.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:05:43 Yes.

Guest 3 2:05:43 In Brigham Young's time, that didn't necessarily come with it, or there wasn't even an understanding, you're saying, of a need to cancel.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:05:50 Yeah. So as I understand it, Brigham Young did not think that he had the authority to cancel ceilings. They were doing divorces. There were what was called a church divorce, where people would come to the president of the church, they say, we want to get a divorce. And then the president of the church would say, yeah, you can get divorced. And Brigham was pretty liberal about granting divorces, especially to women. He was harder on men. So he would give all these sermons that would be like, never get divorced. And if you're complaining about your husband and your wife, you're a bad person, then don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. So he's like. His bark and growl is really fierce and ferocious. But then when you ask him to actually do something, he's like, yeah, you don't have to stay married to that loser. And so they'd grant the divorce, but the church divorce was just thought as a divorce. And it would do things like set out alimony or child support obligations, all those things that a secular divorce does. And in a world where you have lots of plural marriages and the plural marriages, you can't litigate those in front of the secular court system, the internal church process becomes really important because basically substituting for what the legal system would do. So then in the 1890s, they developed this idea that maybe those church divorces are also maybe canceling ceilings. But the earliest cases I found where the president of the church explicitly says, cancel that ceiling is Wilford Woodruff, and he's saying, we're canceling law of adoption ceilings.

Bryan Buchanan 2:07:14 Oh, boy, that's a fun discussion.

Nemo 2:07:16 There's so much to talk about there, including the fact that he's trying to say what Brigham Young probably didn't think this or didn't think that. How do you know what Brigham Young thought? There could have been a number of reasons why he didn't cancel.

Bryan Buchanan 2:07:29 Well, and the question of what Brigham Young thought is when did Brigham Young think that and why? Yeah, because like, you know, most people, he changed his mind on things or, you know, depending on the circumstances or whatever.

Nemo 2:07:42 We've just heard about Brigham Young, the feminist, right. Who's actually, you know, he was way harsher on men than he was on women.

Bryan Buchanan 2:07:48 I will admit. I think of all the things that we were going to talk about, this one really piqued my interest. Like certain things will just wave a red flag in front of me because my knee jerk response was like, no, that's, that's nonsense. And I realized that was a much more difficult question to answer with any specificity. So I think the best way to do it is we'll talk the stories of a couple people and then some statements that Brigham Young makes. So because Nate is right, like Brigham Young will say pretty explicitly, like, you know, in a world of polygamy, like, there's no such thing as a divorce. He'll say things like that. But what we also have are some specific cases that don't use like the phrase cancel a ceiling or cancellation or see, you know, that cancel word doesn't appear. I, trust me, I looked long and hard on this one. I don't think you can find that word in the Brigham Young era or even into the John Taylor era. Maybe part of the problem is for Brigham Young, we have a good portion of the things we'd want for a discussion like this, right? We have his journals, we have his correspondence. What we don't have access to is within his papers at the church history library, there's a whole file about divorces. And I would love to see that because at some point, at some point, they develop a formal written bill of divorce. It was in triplicate. The husband gets one, the wife gets one, and then there's an office copy. I've asked a couple people and I'm like, have you ever seen one of those? Because I would love to know what is the language on that? Because here we go. A first case in 1857, you have a guy named John Hyde who petitions for a divorce and it becomes before church leaders and they talk about it. And in fact, Julia, do you. Could you find that it's 1857, John Hyde? Because the language that's used around dissolving it, I don't, you know, whatever word you would use to me functionally sounds like canceling a ceiling.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:10:00 Okay.

Bryan Buchanan 2:10:00 I think it's like Heber C. Kimball is talking.

Julia 2:10:03 Yes, Kimball is speaking. This is from 1857. Emotion has been put. Has been put and unanimously carried that John Hyde be cut off, root and branch, that is himself and all the roots and the branches that are within him. This has no allusion to his family. He has taken a course by which he has lost his family and forfeited his priesthood. He has forfeited his membership. The limb is cut off, but the priesthood takes the fruit that was attached to the limb and saves it if it will be saved. Do you understand me? His wife is cut off from this church, but she is free from him. She is just as free from him as though she never had belonged to him. The limb she was connected to is cut off and she must again be grafted into the tree if she wishes to be saved. That is all about it.

John Dehlin 2:10:50 Dang.

Nemo 2:10:51 Wow.

Bryan Buchanan 2:10:52 So that phrase, as though she had never been with him, kind of, to me, functionally, that sounds like that ceiling does not exist anymore. Now, is there a ledger where that physical ceiling is now lined out? I don't know. There might be. But functionally, to me, that looks exactly like the later, kind of more formalized cancellation of ceiling where it's like, lined out in the record. So that's kind of an interesting one.

Nemo 2:11:18 It certainly is. It's an annulment. It's as though it never happened. Right.

Bryan Buchanan 2:11:21 Yeah. So, I mean, again, like, that seems you're not using the word cancel, but you might as well be like. And. And. And she's free. Right. She could now be sealed to someone else, because that's important. Men, of course, can be sealed. Women. No, but it's important.

Nemo 2:11:36 She needs to be grafted back in. She needs to be sealed to a

Bryan Buchanan 2:11:38 man again in order to achieve exaltation, whatever language. Again, that worldview of she's got to be adopted back in. Right.

John Dehlin 2:11:46 Just women are always like cattle. It's just like, oh, sorry, the husband did something wrong.

Bryan Buchanan 2:11:52 Well, and this was interesting because he got excommunicated. Right?

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:11:54 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:11:54 So this first story is a little bit different. So a couple others.

John Dehlin 2:11:58 It's still weird. They're just. They're nothing without their husband.

Bryan Buchanan 2:12:01 Oh, you don't think she was in the meaning?

Julia 2:12:04 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:12:06 Again, like, it should be nice to know what she thought about all of this.

John Dehlin 2:12:10 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:12:10 And John Hyde's an interesting one because he'll. He'll publish. That gets sort of classified under the expose genre. And so most of the time he just gets written off a little, that he's untrustworthy, blah, blah, blah. Worth taking a better look at him, I would say. And part of this, too. This is a theme that Lindsay likes to talk about a lot, is just how messy the Mormon polygamy world was. Like, you don't realize if you have longtime Mormon ancestors, they might have been married, sealed to any number of people. And tracing these sometimes is really difficult because, like, if you go on to familysearch, you'll see, well, this woman seems to have four different spouses. This one doesn't even have a marriage date. This one, there's no marriage date, but there's a couple children. This one, there's children, but they seem to be this guy's children. Like, it's really messy. And so I think that's something that modern Mormons don't realize is just how fluid those. Those marriage dynamics were. And so it is an interesting fact that Brigham Young apparently does not charge to perform a ceiling, but he does charge 10 bucks for a divorce. And in one place, he talks about what he uses it for. It's sort of like play money or something. So. And it does seem to be he did not want those marriages to be dissolved. If you can make it happen, even if it sucks, that's what you should do. Obviously, a theme that will stay around within Mormonism for a long time.

Julia 2:13:36 So I have a question.

Bryan Buchanan 2:13:37 Yeah.

Julia 2:13:37 So people, like, analyze it or. Yeah, analyze the web. Who wanted a divorce from Brigham and she was able to, I guess, obtain it. Does he still think in his mind that he's going to have her in heaven? I just want to know how he's processing. For these women who. Who ask for divorce.

Bryan Buchanan 2:13:53 I would be willing to bet Brigham Young did not consider that ceiling canceled.

Julia 2:13:56 Okay.

Bryan Buchanan 2:13:57 In any sense of the word.

Julia 2:13:58 Yeah, that's what I figured.

Bryan Buchanan 2:14:00 Yeah, for sure. And again, like, the concept of what does that mean functionally? What is that? What are people doing around that again? Is that. Is it records? Is it just like the leaders are like, yeah, it's dissolved. It's just. We said it. It's fiat. Right. As opposed to something written, I declare

Nemo 2:14:18 bankruptcy, you know, and that's it.

Bryan Buchanan 2:14:20 Declared. What more do you need?

John Dehlin 2:14:23 So is that. Add a new entry to your timeline, Julia?

Julia 2:14:26 Yes. So there's now the first sealing cancellation happens in 1894. And then one thing that Nate Oman does not talk about, and I know that you talk about in your notes, is this specifically unique ceiling with Jane Manning. James.

John Dehlin 2:14:40 Call it. What's it called, Julia. Read the slide.

Julia 2:14:44 The eternal servant ceiling. I don't know if that's the exact language that's used, but that's how I label it.

Bryan Buchanan 2:14:49 That's what's so interesting about him. So Jane Manning is a black woman who is converted to mormonism in the 1840s, comes to Nauvoo, lives in the Joseph Smith house, is apparently quite close to them. And then in later years in Utah, she's married, I think, twice. And this is a woman who is not willing to accept what's become the status quo answer of black people are not allowed. It's usually. I'm glad we've shifted to talking about the temple and priesthood band, because obviously it's not just man. The temple restrictions are just as big a part of this story as the priesthood restrictions were. So what she does is periodically she will petition to have temple ordinances.

Julia 2:15:36 Wait, can I ask, was Jane Manning able to do baptisms in the temple or was she unable to go at all?

Bryan Buchanan 2:15:41 She was, but. And this probably won't be surprising, even though it's still gross, they apparently would have special days set aside for when black Mormons would come do this. They are kept in a separate record. There's actually a really good article on black Mormons performing proxy baptisms that's in a collection of essays that signature published that my friend Christian Larson was the editor of. That's. That's interesting. That was sort of like the. The. The crumbs, right? You can do this. Are you happy now? Is that enough? Will you quit bugging us? That's very much the attitude behind it. But Jane is not satisfied with that. She's been around since Nauvoo. She knows how these ordinances are talked about and their importance within Mormon theology. So she keeps writing and says, hey, can I be endowed? Hey, can I be sealed? And they keep saying no until they come up with this again. Ad hoc, holy, unique ceremony. But what's so important is the verb. She is not sealed to Joseph Smith. She is attached. That was. I guarantee you that was not, you know, casual language that was very much intentional, like, okay, do you have the text of that?

Julia 2:17:03 Yeah, yeah. So it says, attached as a servitor. No, it's not on the slide. It's just in his notes. Attached as a servitor for eternity to the prophet Joseph Smith. Also, I wanted to point out to the audience who's never. Who's never been Mormon when you get your temple recommend card. Well, no, maybe this isn't the case, because, like the. For adults, you can go. If you get your temple recommend, you can go do baptisms and you can go do any of the other temple work as a As a young teenager, I guess they started at age 11. You get a unique one that's just for baptism. Limited use. So you're saying that they had limited use recommends really one time only. But also like I'm going to ask this even though I already know the answer. Black individuals could not do temple work for anyone who was white. I just wanted to ask that they own.

Bryan Buchanan 2:17:52 The only thing was, was the proxy baptisms. And again, even as late as we're getting into the 1890s now, the amount of black Mormons is still relatively very,

John Dehlin 2:18:01 very small proxy for Black Death.

Bryan Buchanan 2:18:04 Well, because it's for their ancestors. Right, right. And we're getting.

Julia 2:18:09 Well, because you have people, you have people who have. Hang on, just. I just going to ask this question. So like you have people who have. Who I think, I think Elijah had. He had white ancestors.

Bryan Buchanan 2:18:20 Elijah Abel, usually there's some white ancestry in. In.

Julia 2:18:23 Right. So would they do. Would they be allowed to do the work for their ancestors who were white? I'm just curious.

Bryan Buchanan 2:18:29 Depends on whether or not they are known in the Mormon world as being black or not. For example, right there is this fantastic database that Paul Reeve is involved with. Artist partial is involved with. It's hosted by the University of Utah. It's called the Century of Black Mormons. And it is this unbelievable collection of biographical sketches about all these people that they have identified as being black. Now, in some cases they had black ancestry but passed as white. For example, a guy named Captain James Brown, who very well known, turns out had black ancestry except he passed. And so as a result he was sealed to plural wives, the whole everything because he wasn't seen as black. So it was the question of whether you were known and presented and understood to be black within the larger community. If so proxy baptisms. And I imagine that had to have been a very small fraction of black Mormons even at that. That was it.

Nemo 2:19:31 And then we see it progress into. Even if you then pass, there's questions of your genealogical record and going back and there's the not one drop rule.

Bryan Buchanan 2:19:37 Yeah. How far back you gotta. You have to trace your ancestry out of Africa.

Nemo 2:19:41 Yeah, exactly.

Bryan Buchanan 2:19:42 Yeah. So yeah, in the case of Jane, she was known to be black. And so as a result this was the. The crappy compromise. Now to make it even better, Jane, or worse, not even within the walls of the temple, it was apparently, I believe it was Zina Huntington. So Quincy Newell, who has written a book on Jane, really good researcher. She not Mormon, never Mormon, but as her specialty is African American religion, And so she was as qualified as anyone on earth to write this book and did a great job. She apparently has seen a photograph of this record. And so as a result she was, she cleared up a couple things and I think she was the one that correctly identified who the proxy was. Jane not even allowed within the walls of the temple for this made up ritual that attached her to Joseph Smith's family.

John Dehlin 2:20:41 Do you want to show that slide, Julia?

Julia 2:20:42 Yeah. This slide comes from Quincy's book and I just wanted to show at the end so she doesn't use the language that you had proposed in your, in your file that you sent, but at the very bottom. So Stapley places Jane's sealing ceremony in the context of understanding of ceilings as creating the family of God and Brigham Young's abiding belief that black Mormon women and men were not to be integrated into the material family of God. And that just is so heartbreaking to me.

Bryan Buchanan 2:21:09 Well, I disagree with the word ceiling there. To me that was a very conscious decision made that it was not a ceiling. It functioned, it was its own thing. It was separate but not even equal like it was its own thing. So I think using the word ceiling there actually is probably not even warranted.

Julia 2:21:28 So I'll show my slide anyway. But like it's at the very, like at the very bottom it says first ceiling to eternal servant, but it's not a ceiling. I should have change it and say attachment.

Bryan Buchanan 2:21:37 I mean again, like there are people who are, are portraying it as such. I, I totally disagree.

John Dehlin 2:21:42 So it should say first attachment.

Julia 2:21:44 First attachment.

Bryan Buchanan 2:21:45 Attachment. And only I think the only way to understand it is this was they thought would pacify her. Really. This would get her to quit bugging. Yeah, yeah, it didn't.

John Dehlin 2:21:56 Elijah Abel's descendants also caused a stir by writing general authorities and saying, hey, as I remember they.

Bryan Buchanan 2:22:05 What's interesting is they were, they were ordained a priesthood too.

John Dehlin 2:22:09 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 2:22:11 It's complicated. And again there's the question of passing or not. And the way that the family thinks about their Mormon ancestry is complicated. There's really great entry in Century Black Mormons on Elijah too. So. And part of this discussion is going to evolve because there's a lot of research that's being done that is demonstrating that there were a whole lot of people with black ancestry who participated in temple ordinances because they passed.

John Dehlin 2:22:39 I mean, it's just another evidence that God isn't behind a lot of this because God would have thought this through and God wouldn't have excluded black people.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:22:48 Right.

John Dehlin 2:22:48 And God would have Understood that lots of white people have black ancestry and lots of black people have white ancestry and that the distinction between black and white doesn't even make sense.

Nemo 2:22:56 Well, yeah, my very. I won't name them, but I have a family member who. Extended family member who is very white. And they were telling me very proudly, oh, yeah, no, I have a black African ancestor who is a freed slave. And then they married a white woman and this sort of thing. I said, oh, okay. And so when did your dad get the priesthood? Was it before 1978? Because then is his priesthood legitimate? Because he received his priesthood under the not one drop policy. And if he did have a drop of black African ancestry, as you've just told me, then what's. And then you. He gave you the priesthood. So is your priesthood still valid now? He didn't appreciate that I was going to say.

Bryan Buchanan 2:23:33 I'm guessing that's not a discussion.

Nemo 2:23:34 It wasn't the conversation that they really wanted to have with me, but it is. What happens when you have these arbitrary rules and when you have these arbitrary exclusions is people that otherwise you would think could have no black African ancestry. Turns out they can. And if they don't know and they don't find out until later, all of a sudden, what happens?

Jane Manning James and Racial Exclusion from Sealings

Julia 2:23:52 Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:23:53 So with, with those. By the end of the 19th century, we've more or less got our modern concept of ceiling in place.

Julia 2:24:00 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 2:24:01 Because we're. Polygamy is quickly phasing out. We're not doing adoptions anymore. We're down to monogamous ceilings, and we're down to child to parent, extending way back, but through ancestral lines. That's what we're doing.

John Dehlin 2:24:14 Yeah.

Nemo 2:24:15 And that.

Bryan Buchanan 2:24:15 So that's pretty well set in place.

John Dehlin 2:24:17 That's a pretty radical transformation from how it all started.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:24:20 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:24:21 Joseph wouldn't have recognized, you know, how it ended up.

Bryan Buchanan 2:24:24 Sam Taylor writes this great essay in Sunstone where he says, Joseph Smith appears at the Redwood first ward in the 1980s. He walks in and sits down and what is this? This is not my church.

John Dehlin 2:24:36 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:24:37 And again, what if Joseph Smith lives another five years? If he was in fact talking about adoption principles, do those rituals and ceremonies start to take place during his life?

John Dehlin 2:24:47 And I was going to say, if Joseph had been bisexual, then there would be ceilings amongst men that were sexual, like they were just, you know, whatever their feelings were, their opinions, their prejudices, they would, as prophets, mold the church and its ordinances and its theologies to fit whatever their proclivities were at the time. Yeah.

Julia 2:25:13 And I'LL just put a. So d. Michael Quinn wrote a book called Same Sex Dynamics among study among 19th century saints. I can't. Something like that. But he talks about this idea that Joseph Smith could have been bisexual. But so next. So that was the end of my timeline as far as the ceilings. But then I have. There's four clips from Nate that I wanted to play and talk about, but I wanted to. I wanted to check. Brian, did you want to say anything else about the timeline before jumping?

Bryan Buchanan 2:25:39 I don't think so. I think we're pretty good.

Julia 2:25:41 Okay, perfect. So this next one is Joseph Smith thought of or what he meant when he talked about ceilings people.

Joseph Smith's Vision of Family vs. Modern Forever Families

Guest 3 2:25:48 And it's just. It's so fascinating to imagine that to Joseph Smith, it sounds like it really wasn't about the nuclear family. It wasn't. Families can be together forever in this era of our church. Is that right? Is that what you're saying?

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:26:00 It's complicated. So in a very simple way, you could say yes. Joseph Smith's primary way of thinking about what sealing ordinances were doing was not to bind up nuclear families and sort of replicate them into the eternities. He thought that what we're doing is we're being sealed up to eternal life or something like that. If you go through Joseph Smith's writings and sermons, this phrase sealed up to eternal life, he uses that a lot.

Guest 3 2:26:25 Yeah.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:26:25 That said, he totally has this idea that ceilings unite couples in the eternities and that you want to be united to the man or woman that you love and is your spouse in the eternities.

Julia 2:26:38 I just wanted to say really fast, as a missionary, that's one of the biggest polls for people is so you can be with your family forever. But to Joseph, that wasn't something he was thinking about. And then I'll just open it up for you guys to get.

John Dehlin 2:26:51 Yeah. Brian, Did Joseph believe that this. This idea that if a couple is sealed before the children are born, and then the children are born under the covenant, so they automatically are part of the covenant? Was any of that in Joseph Smith's mind?

Bryan Buchanan 2:27:08 It's hard. You get this statement from Orson Whitney later where he says, you know, Joseph Smith taught us. And he never taught a more comforting doctrine. And it was exactly that. Like that that ceiling had the power to save the kids into the fourth generation, even if they wander the tentacles of divine providence region. And that has been repeated a whole bunch of times. Orson was creative. He was a poet. He was not a historian. Even though he wrote history, there's no

John Dehlin 2:27:37 evidence that Joseph said or believed those things.

Bryan Buchanan 2:27:39 Again, what's in that 75% of his sermons that we don't have records of or the things that he told in private that that person didn't keep a journal. It's hard. What we have doesn't seem like that, but hard to tell. And. And the concept of the family, again, like, it's so tied up with polygamy that trying to look at it from modern lenses, like, you can't. It's polygamy is part of the discussion. If the polygamy is no longer part of the discussion. Well, that you just ripped half of the. The stuff out of it. So.

Julia 2:28:15 Yeah. Okay. This next clip is about the emphasis, the more recent emphasis on forever families.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:28:24 And when they talk about families, especially for Wyff Wood Woodruff, what they're mostly talking about is extended families of, like, chains of ancestors is what they mean, families. And maybe they're also talking about, like, the eternity of the marriage relationship, but the focus on, like, families can be together forever. Nobody is singing that song in primary in 1905. So that idea of families and the strong association that the temple has with the nuclear family and the temple is the way that you're going to be with your family forever. If I had to sort of pick the prophet who articulates that, It's David O. McKay, really. So what.

Julia 2:29:05 That's really recent.

Bryan Buchanan 2:29:06 That's not that long.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:29:07 And again, like, you can overstate the discontinuities. Right, Right. So, like, I'm sure you can find Heber J. Grant talking about being married for eternity or something like that.

John Dehlin 2:29:19 You can see Aubrey's. The wheels that are head moving. Like, this is a problem. Right.

Nemo 2:29:26 You also see him rush to defend and go up. But I'm not saying prophets disagree. I'm sure you can find other prophets who also agreed. Yeah, don't worry about that.

John Dehlin 2:29:35 Aubrey's like, that's really late as a David Obligation theme.

Bryan Buchanan 2:29:39 That definitely does seem to be 20th century. Yeah. Again, you have hints, like as early as 1835, you've got W.W. phelps writing to his wife. And it's an interesting time because it's when they're working on the Abraham stuff, which starts to get into, like, eternal concepts of things like that really hadn't been talked about. And he says this new idea that I've got, that if we remain faithful, we can be together for eternity. That's fascinating. You have a couple statements by or about Parley P. Pratt, whose first wife had died of, like, the eternity of that so you do see hints of it. But yeah, it as an emphasized theme, again with the power of a song. You know, that that definitely does is in 20th century emphasis and becoming the

Nemo 2:30:24 USP of Mormonism, I guess. Because the unique selling point of Mormonism very much now is you get to be with your family forever. We're the ones that believe in eternal families. The counterpoint to that is actually, no, we're the only ones that think that a cup of coffee will separate you from your family forever. A lot of Christians just tend to believe you will be with your family by dint of getting to heaven in the first place. So we're the only ones that really litigated it. But that is again one of the big unique selling points of Mormonism. And that sort of shifted. It's gone in many ways through variations. It went from being the one true church looking for a restoration. Everyone's trying to work out what religion should join. We are the correct one into if

Bryan Buchanan 2:31:01 you don't stand out, what's the point

Nemo 2:31:02 exactly then into okay, right. Well, we're the ones that teach about eternal families now. And now the question is, what is it? What is it today in 2026, what is the USP of Mormonism? Because they've abandoned so much that the question is, what is it about Mormonism? That's just one for the listeners to kind of write about in the comments is what is the USP of Mormonism in 2026 when it's becoming more and more mainstream in so many ways?

Julia 2:31:26 I just keep thinking of how this idea of Joseph walking into a current church meeting, how he wouldn't recognize it. I remember reading Hugh Nibley's response to Fawn Brody's book. And he says something similar to that. He's like, Joseph, this church hasn't changed since Joseph restored it. And like, I think that's the farthest thing from the truth. But this next clip from Nate is

Bryan Buchanan 2:31:48 a wife to Sacrament Me.

Julia 2:31:54 So this next one is Nate. This is a piece of history that I didn't know. And Nate talks about how prophets would pay people to do temple work.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:32:02 When Heber J. Grant was doing temple work for all of his ancestors. So he was following the counsel from the prophet from President Woodruff. And he had gotten all of this information about his ancestors and he wanted to do the temple work for all of them. He didn't have time to do it. And there weren't like lots of patrons that were going to the temple to do it. So he paid people to do it. And that was actually pretty common because it would take a lot of time. And so there are people in the church, and you pay these people sort of their modest expense to do temple work, because most people didn't do temple work.

Nemo 2:32:34 And where is that now? Where is my stipend for all the time I spent as a temple worker doing temple work?

Bryan Buchanan 2:32:41 You have some actual funds that are set up.

John Dehlin 2:32:44 That's a really cool precedent that I wish we followed.

Nemo 2:32:48 Paying people to do things at church like, you know, clean the buildings or, you know, temple work.

Bryan Buchanan 2:32:53 It is interesting. And it does grow out of that 1894 shift of we are no longer doing adoptions. We're doing these ancestral line ceilings, which pulls in a lot of people, right? Because now it doesn't. We don't. It doesn't matter whether or not we knew they were just righteous, faithful Mormon, whatever. It's all of your ancestors, as far as you can do. So you start to get guys like Franklin D. Richards, like Wilford Woodruff, who will write back to cousins in New England, or people who are publishing these books on these family lines, right? And so they start to amass these huge troves of names. And in addition to that theology of place we talked about, you also have this theology of body. Like, these ordinances have to be done here by people. And that is such a unique concept that doesn't get talked about enough. Like, it has to be done in

Nemo 2:33:45 a body because we came to Earth to gain those bodies. And so the salvation that we came to Earth to get can only be got while on Earth. So it has to be done by proxy.

Bryan Buchanan 2:33:54 And you can't do, like, a batch, you know, you can't do anything like that. It has to be one by one by one by one by one.

John Dehlin 2:34:00 And, Julie, I don't know if you even know that this episode exists. And YouTube, Brian or Nemo. We interviewed a guy who used to work at church headquarters over, like, family history.

Bryan Buchanan 2:34:11 Yes, that was fascinating.

John Dehlin 2:34:13 And before the church computerized all of the record keeping regarding proxy work for the dead, they would have actual individuals having their work performed for them 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 or dozens of times, to the point where, like, Hitler and Eva Braun were sealed together, like, nine or 10 different times in different places.

Bryan Buchanan 2:34:39 But more importantly, he's actually good now, by the way. He's pretty good in the spirit world.

John Dehlin 2:34:43 But I mean. No, but I mean, tens of thousands of people went through the temple to do their initiatories, to do their endowments, to do the ceilings for individuals who had Already had their washing and they

Bryan Buchanan 2:34:59 had a system to try to prevent that. They had this thing called the Temple Index Bureau. Imagine the most index cards you can think of and then multiply that by a billion rows of rows. So that was. The thing is, like, you would do it and then that information would be submitted there as a central clearinghouse because they knew that was an issue, but it was so hard. And sometimes they would keep local records and they didn't necessarily get transferred. And again, without computers, good luck.

John Dehlin 2:35:26 But there was also this point where they ran out of names.

Bryan Buchanan 2:35:29 Even after computerizing, they ran out of names.

John Dehlin 2:35:31 And so they would kind of just turn the blind eye and allow people's work to be done multiple times. Or.

Bryan Buchanan 2:35:38 Or they would do. That's where indexing starts from. All right. People are not submitting enough on their own. So what if you guys. You go get the parish blessing records from this tiny little town in the UK and we're going to pull every name out of that and then we'll do those ordinances because they need it. The problem is, is those people are connected. And if it's just this name existing in a vacuum, then even in a computerized era, they're going to get redone because they're not connected to anything. So we're not sure if this guy is that guy. Turns out they are. And they got done a bunch of times.

Nemo 2:36:12 And it also turns out the family history is quite difficult. Once you go back maybe three or four generations, it starts to get quite tricky to determine exactly who's who and make sure they've got that same.

Bryan Buchanan 2:36:21 You're saying we're not all related to that one. Duke of.

Nemo 2:36:25 Oh, well, you know, of times, all of a sudden I'm descendants of Norman conquerors, you know, because some woman in Utah has decided that, oh, this person's actually. This person made up. My family history changes. Yeah. All of a sudden. Charlemagne. Direct ancestor.

Bryan Buchanan 2:36:39 Exactly.

Nemo 2:36:40 Because that was in Farmington.

Bryan Buchanan 2:36:42 Luckily we don't do that as much anymore. But there was that push, like you needed to be descended from kings.

John Dehlin 2:36:48 I remember. I remember doing proxy work for, like, Joseph who. There was no last name. There was no.

Bryan Buchanan 2:36:55 About 1680, it was like.

John Dehlin 2:36:57 Yeah, from about 1680.

Julia 2:36:59 Right.

John Dehlin 2:36:59 And that's who I did.

Bryan Buchanan 2:37:02 So there aren't a lot of developments in the 20th century, but one really interesting one is they had had this idea that it had to be done in order. Right. This person, their dad, they have to be baptized and then they're in doubt, and then they can be sealed and to a spouse and if they had one, or their parents. Right. That at some point somebody was like, hold on. The way we're doing this is because again, there's a crunch for names. And so it was like a data processor. It was like, all right, hear me out. What if we don't have to do them in order? Like, they're dead. Who cares? So as a result, they could do. Because, you know, you can do. You can go and do 20 ceilings or whatever in the amount of time it takes to do one endowment. Yeah. Because again, you got to do it in the body. And you can't cheat, you can't batch, and you can't shortcut. So as a result, they reconfigured the order. So that's one of the big developments.

The Endowment as a Bottleneck and Women's Role in Sealings

Nemo 2:37:53 The endowment is the bottleneck because, you know, you got what the B, C, I, E, S, S, P was, what was written on the cards right back there. Isn't confirmation industry endowments always waiting to get stamped. And it's always E, it's always endowment waiting to get ticked off with a little red marker.

Bryan Buchanan 2:38:08 And that's in a modern era where that ceremony takes like, like two hours or less, not eight.

John Dehlin 2:38:13 And it's just wild, the belief that God is up there thinking, unless Nemo in 2015 sits for two hours in a super long and boring move.

Bryan Buchanan 2:38:27 No, no, no, no. You need to be a savior on Mount Zion. That's how it's service. Like, this is the highest, holiest kind of service.

John Dehlin 2:38:34 Yeah, but like to hold someone's eternal salvation hostage to Nemo sitting through a movie for the 80th time.

Bryan Buchanan 2:38:42 So these are eternal truths.

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:38:44 So.

Bryan Buchanan 2:38:45 I know, but it's just within that worldview. That's. That's why it's so important. That's why it's worth this amount of time, is because this is critically important,

Nemo 2:38:55 why it will kill the church. I mean, sorry, we're getting a tangent here for a second, but these temples that are being built where there aren't really people to service them, like in the UK where temples are getting announced, where there's not enough members to earn them, people will feel so compelled to go and do this work for their dead ancestors that they're not going to be out there meeting people in the streets. They're not going to be out there being with their neighbors, being ambassadors for the church, generally just growing the church and doing the things you would expect. They're not going to be able to do that because they're going to have to be in the temple in all their spare time, of which they don't have much anyway, because they've all got three callings.

John Dehlin 2:39:24 But Nemo, it is brilliant. We think about the three classic missions of the church. Perfect the saints, proclaim the gospel, redeem the dead. The first two people are leaving in droves. The church is hemorrhaging. So investing money in perfecting the saints is not always a very good investment. And the missionary work, except in developing countries where you can really take advantage of people who don't have access to the information, you know, tracting, is basically declared dead on arrival in 2026. So the place to invest, where you have the best shot of having a return is in redeeming the dead, because you're helping at least keep the members that you have by one requiring them to pay a tithing, requiring them to be worthy, and then keeping them busy by having them go to the temple and feel like they're doing something significant, which is doing all this proxy work for dead people. It is actually a brilliant move because you certainly don't want to keep investing in perfecting the saints and proclaiming the gospel. You feel about that when people are hemorrhaging.

Nemo 2:40:34 You've heard about the fourth one that was added to the mission of church helping the poor and needy.

John Dehlin 2:40:38 I mean, is that an afterthought that

Nemo 2:40:40 got added as an afterthought, maybe in

John Dehlin 2:40:42 peak addition to the mission of the church.

Nemo 2:40:45 And the church doesn't seem to do much with it because then you've got people like Kevin Pearson standing up and saying the mission of the church is not to help the poor and needy of the world. Yeah. All right.

Julia 2:40:54 Anyway.

Nemo 2:40:55 Anyway, it's ridiculous.

John Dehlin 2:40:57 Go ahead, Julia.

Julia 2:40:58 I was just going to say with indexing, I was called as an indexer going back a little bit at BYU, Idaho, and me and along with 20 others, would go to a lab and we would look at these old parish documents or all these old censuses, and we would type them up so that people could then search and find these individuals. We're not paid to do that. But I also want to say, Brian, because before this, you mentioned that these people who the prophet was paying to do the temple work, did you say it was during a time of depression, so it was helpful to these people?

Bryan Buchanan 2:41:24 Yeah. So as you get this expansion of temple work following the shift, all of a sudden there you have a lot more people doing temple work and a lot more need to do it, because all of a sudden you have way more names, way more people. Right. And so there are Several things that happen. One of them is they. I don't know that it really caught on, but it was actually a really good idea, is you have people in, say, Europe or wherever the records are held who go do the genealogical research and get it all organized and send it here where the temples are. And then in return, the people here will then perform this temple work. And then the other thing that you have is the concept that Nate mentioned is paying people. And it was. I think it really did have a largely. It was. It was a generous thing. It was like, largely older people who. To kind of help them out. Especially, like you see it in the Great Depression. It was a way, like, we. We think what you're doing is important and you need money. And so this is a way to get around it. And so, like, Grant Heber. J. Grant was very interested and actually did probably, I would say, easily more temple work than any of his colleagues. Like, it's wild to think about. Like, when Reed Smoot is asked if. About temple stuff, he's like, I haven't been since I was sealed to my wife. That guy's an apostle.

Nemo 2:42:43 Wow.

Bryan Buchanan 2:42:44 So the importance of you doing proxy temple work obviously isn't a thing really, until that 1894 shift. And even then, it will take a couple generations to really entrench. And so I think it was. It was a good. Helpful.

Julia 2:43:00 Yeah, that's what. That's what I was thinking, too, because it's helping to redeem the dead and it's also helping the poor, which is what Nemo was just saying. And I really like that idea.

Bryan Buchanan 2:43:07 Yeah.

Julia 2:43:08 If we're ready, there's this one final clip that I wanted to share, talking about the women and how they were seen as kind of being used.

Nemo 2:43:16 Oh, we're finally ready to address the struggles of the women, are we, Effy?

Guest 3 2:43:21 One random example of another way that it seems like there was still, Even in the 50s, this feeling that women somehow were contributing to this, to a man's kingdom, like, to his family kingdom. And it just feels like there's so little autonomy. It feels like it feels so misaligned with our genuine belief in partnership. So I'd love to hear how you metabolize that. I think this is probably one of these ways. Exactly. That you brought up in the beginning, where our understanding of God's work in the world is evolving as we grow and evolve and culture matures and evolves, too. But that's what's excruciating about this to me. That, like, the women seem like objects

Nate Oman (video clip) 2:44:01 in the story, I. I think those are completely valid concerns. Right. Like, I'm not a woman, so I'm sure my sort of emotional experience of this is different. But that said, the fact that I think, like, I think the proper understanding of the Helen Mark Kimball story is I don't think Joseph Smith is a child predator, but I do think the story is that Helen Mark Kimball is being used as a sort of liturgical tool to create connections between men. And that is in its own way troubling. Right? It's troubling in a way that doesn't fit neatly into a script about child predators or something, but because of the way it instrumentalizes women in that relationship, I think clearly, right. There is a really strong patriarchal through line, through the kingdom theology and the lineage theology. Right. Among other things. Because when Wilford Woodruff is saying we need to be sealed along ancestral lines, the ancestral lines that he has in mind, he talks about are patrilineal lines, not matrilineal lines, although they're end up being matrilineal ceilings as well. Right. Because women will be sealed to their parents. So, yes, I think that that is all true. And women who find that troubling, I don't think are mistaken or wrong or anything like that. I think it's genuinely troubling.

Julia 2:45:27 So, Dan, to me, hearing Aubry ask that question breaks my heart because she, in this church that she's a part of, there's a limit for women. They can't, they can't go to heaven on their own. They can't be saved. They can't achieve the highest part of the. The celestial kingdom. It's. They're very limited.

John Dehlin 2:45:49 It also brokered like cattle. You read DNC 132, which they cover in another episode on Faith Matters as a part of this polygamy series, God or Jesus talks about Mormon women being assigned to men like cattle. Like, that's just, that's just how it all began. And it's never stopped being that way.

Bryan Buchanan 2:46:09 I think the, the idea, the genuine belief in partnership is an interesting idea. I would say it's certainly gotten better. The problem is it comes out of this history that did not have a genuine belief in partnership. And you can try as hard as you want, but the problem is ceilings do arise not out of a genuine belief in partnership. It arises in connection with polygamy and is inextricably tied to it in that early history. And so it's really hard to make that into a current genuine belief in partnership when the origins of it really aren't.

Nemo 2:46:47 And this is where I think we have problems with people like Aubrey and the Givens and other apologists like Patrick Mason, through the best will in the world. What they will sometimes present inadvertently is their view of the church, as though that is what the church believes. So Aubrey probably does have a genuine belief in partnership. That's probably how her marriage works. If she's married, that's probably how her relationships are. And she'll take that and say, well, so how do I mesh what we're talking about here with our genuine belief in partnership? As though that is the church's position, and it's not. It's how she's allowed to exist in the church through various privileges that she experiences or through her ability to keep that separate. But it's not actually what the church believes. And similarly with people like the Givens is in Patromation, they'll present things sometimes that are great and sound wonderful and that they get to experience, that they get to believe, but that aren't what is being taught over the pulpit.

John Dehlin 2:47:35 I see it slightly different, Nemo, because I think the Brethren, the leaders of the Church, allow Faith Matters and restore to exist. In other words, the top leaders of the church want members to be able to cover all sides of an issue. They want the church effectively to be able to speak out of both sides of its mouth. They want Joseph Smith to be a true prophet. They want the Scriptures to be true. They want all the doctrines to be as they've been established and never changing. And they want Aubrey and the Faith Matters crowd to be able to feel like couples are partners. And so they've got the family on the proclamation that basically says what? That the husband presides. In a marriage of equals, the husband presides and their equals. Like, they want it to be both presiding but equal. Right? Presiding but equal. Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:48:34 Just as one. Take a point, John, element of this, the why it's so hard to make that the current belief. Like, if we go back to that 1835 statement on marriage, they talk about how it is not right to. For to try to get a woman to convert to Mormonism against her husband's wishes. That sounds almost exactly the way they will talk about the idea of preaching to an enslaved person. Like, if their master doesn't want them to be baptized, well, then we shouldn't pressure them to do that. That language is. Is very similar and not by accident, I would argue.

Julia 2:49:08 Oh, my gosh. Yeah, but when you're. I was gonna say, John, when you were talking, it Made me think of how there seems to be, like, different churches in Mormonism or like, so Charlie Bird, for example, he and his husband live in a church that did not exist for me. I would not have been allowed to do that. And then you have people.

John Dehlin 2:49:25 What you mean by that? Because people don't know who Charlie Bird is or what you mean.

Julia 2:49:29 Right. So I was excommunicated in part because I was dating a woman and I divorced from my husband and I started dating her. But then you have Charlie Bird, who is in this ward, I think, in Utah, and he and his husband go to church. As far as I understand, they have a calling. They take the sacrament and they just announced that they're expecting, that they're going to have a baby. And so, like, the church exists for them, but it doesn't exist that way for me or this woman's marriage. Aubry. Her marriage can exist supported by the church that looks different from somebody else who. Whose husband presides, and it looks very different from hers. So, like, it just. It just seems to be the case, especially with, like, this new book that came out, Torn Jeff Strong, where he seems to be saying, in a way, like, Mormons practice Mormonism so differently that. But they practice it correctly. Does that make sense? Like, this one's correct and supported, but it looks totally different from this one over here that looks. That is correct and supported. There's just different ways that people experience Mormonism.

John Dehlin 2:50:24 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 2:50:24 Aubrey could have reacted in that last clip very differently. That could have been a very much more aggressive tone, I guess. And you do that for long enough, she will not be allowed to remain where she is. So the way that you wonder, question, doubt, push back, is very important. If it's. If it's. If it's underneath that. That threshold, it's okay. But if it exceeds that, especially in a public sphere, you know, for long enough or two excessively, you will not be allowed to revision.

John Dehlin 2:51:04 Sweet.

Nemo 2:51:05 Yeah.

Julia 2:51:05 Right.

John Dehlin 2:51:07 Yeah.

Nemo 2:51:07 We know that by experience, right, John?

John Dehlin 2:51:09 Yeah, yeah, yeah. End up like me and Nemo, excommunicate. Yeah, yeah. And also, like, she's not dumb, she's very smart. She knows that she has to be very measured and careful about not criticizing the brethren. And she knows that she has to be very soft and sweet.

Bryan Buchanan 2:51:30 Well, in a heart, I think she is very loyal and she is a believer, and she wants to make this work. Yeah, That's a, you know, an impulse that a lot of people have had, and there's different ways of dealing with it, and there are different results as A consequence.

John Dehlin 2:51:44 And I wanted to follow that line. Did you have anything else you want to say about. Okay, so like Nate Omen, like there's, there's a part of me that just really does think about Occam's Razor. Like what we just witnessed, these slides, these video clips with Nate Ohman, all of your explanations, Brian, that were brilliant. What, what they show to me is that this was a big cluster F, right? That, that Joseph Smith. What's, what's Occam's Razor? What's the simplest explanation? The simplest explanation is that Joseph wanted to have sex with lots of women and he needed a theological justification for doing it because Fanny Alger went sideways. It's not good when the prophet has affairs. So the prophet better have a theological justification if he wants to sleep around. Polygamy becomes that, ceilings become that, and you know, the new and everlasting covenant becomes a way for Joseph to justify what I would say is pretty clear sexual predation if you factor in the amount of power and influence and control he has as prophet. And so yes, he's gotta add a carrot to the dad. Heber C. Kimball. Add a carrot to others to have it be about dynastic stuff or family to family, or we're all going to be together in the afterlife. And by the way, cute 16 year old, your family all gets to come too if you agree in 24 hours to be sealed to me and thus have sex with me. That's clearly what was going on. And then all of the stuff in the Nauvoo time period and after is basically all the subsequent leaders trying to do damage control, trying to correct, trying to deal with the exceptions, trying to figure out how to perpetuate these doctrines and teachings and practices as they're going to encompass more and more and more people where Joseph's not involved at all, where he's not brokering the women, where he's not actually being with the women, having sex with the women. And so there's like 60 to 80 years of just like weird twists on the doctrines and the theologies and doing things and undoing things and adding things and then taking things away until it becomes so absurd and silly that all the really weird contortionist strange stuff gets canceled and we're left with some very, very, very simple practices. But that also were quite burdensome to the future of Mormons because a lot of us are stuck doing baptisms and initiatories and ceilings and endowments by proxy, wasting a ton of time in these dead, lifeless, repetitive ordinances according to now church teachings for a thousand years during the millennium, all we're going to be doing are these dead repetitive proxy ordinances for dead people. That is the purpose of the thousand year millenn to Mormon doctrine of theology. That's all absurd. And so I'm looking at Nate Oman. He's forgotten more than I'll ever know. Smarter than me for sure. And he's like a serious attorney. He's a tenured law professor. William and Mary. He's trying to make sense of all this as a believer. And Aubrey, this faithful, brilliant, wonderful human is like. I thought we believed in partnership, but that's not what the historical record seems to show. Like they are doing everything they can to avoid Occam's razor simplest answer, which was that Joseph Smith was a predator. And Brian, I'm just curious. When Nate Omen says the answer isn't that Joseph Smith was a predator, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is that like. Brian? I. I think there's probably few people that have spent more time and recorded more hours of audio and video or audio trying to make sense of Joseph Smith's polygamy. Is that where you come down? Clearly, the answer isn't that Joseph was a predator.

Assessing Joseph Smith's Polygamy and Historical Records

Bryan Buchanan 2:56:01 Predator. Maybe not. But.

John Dehlin 2:56:03 Wait, why? Well, because it's rude.

Bryan Buchanan 2:56:06 No, because. Because I think there are predator predators.

John Dehlin 2:56:10 Predator.

Bryan Buchanan 2:56:11 Light

Nemo 2:56:13 predator.

John Dehlin 2:56:14 So, no, seriously, the Moon Sisters. So like.

Bryan Buchanan 2:56:16 Or is it zero? What? Predator Zero.

Nemo 2:56:19 Or diet we're making? Yeah, he's a diet predator. Or is he predator?

John Dehlin 2:56:24 No, but I mean, are we all keeping sweet when we're afraid to call Joseph a predator? Like the William Clayton, he's married to one of the Moon Sisters. He goes to Joseph and says, I want the second moon sister. Joseph says, okay. Then he comes to Joseph and says, I want the third moon sister.

Bryan Buchanan 2:56:41 That's a little much.

John Dehlin 2:56:42 And Joseph says, nope, I get her.

Julia 2:56:44 Or like Zina.

John Dehlin 2:56:45 How is that not a predator?

Bryan Buchanan 2:56:47 Well, go ahead.

John Dehlin 2:56:48 What were you gonna say, Julia?

Julia 2:56:49 I was gonna say, or like Zina or these other women who are already married. Like, for example, I would not hesitate to call who's the flds. I would not hesitate to call him a predator. But I don't know what the difference is between Joseph and Warren Jeff. That. That we would. I would not also make that distinction

John Dehlin 2:57:06 other than we don't want to get in trouble by the brethren or suffer the social collateral damage.

Bryan Buchanan 2:57:11 This is. This is hard for me because this. I've. I've spent enough time looking at the FLDS community To me, there is a stark difference between a Joseph Smith and a Brigham Young and Warren Jeffs, like just orders of magnitude. Now, I think Warren comes.

Nemo 2:57:25 He.

Bryan Buchanan 2:57:25 Obviously, he comes from that theological soup, sure. But just like the. The way the behavior happens is. Is orders of magnitude different.

Nemo 2:57:34 But I have a.

Bryan Buchanan 2:57:35 The chair recognizes Nemo.

Nemo 2:57:36 Thank you. I made a point in a recent video where I was talking about the new Sam Bateman documentary, and I.

Bryan Buchanan 2:57:41 Or a Sam Bateman.

Nemo 2:57:42 Yeah. I wondered, is it just an accident of historical distance that we don't view Joseph Smith in the same way? In that we have records, but they're written, they're not audio and video. We can't hear these girls talking, so we don't feel the same things. We don't have that same evocative action. If we could hear these girls trying to say no to Joseph Smith and then him convincing them, would that make us talk differently about him? Instead, all we get is a written memoir saying, oh, I didn't really want this, but I then knelt down in my room and prayed for several nights, and then all of a sudden felt really good about it, as the church writes in their essay. Right. And that's a lot more cold and clinical to read versus hearing the audio of him saying, I want you to testify there's no darkness in it. And these scared girls saying, yeah, no, there isn't. There isn't. Even though you can tell they don't want to be there.

Bryan Buchanan 2:58:26 That's. That is a fair point. We're left with the records that we're left with, which the. The amount of records and the type of records in two eras are very different. That's. That is a very fair point. Based on what we have, I would argue there's a large difference between the two, but again, it all derives from the same theology. Now, I will say also there's a theological worldview and where this all does make sense. Sense, because polygamy is a biblical doctrine. That is. That is right and good. Then it obviously, as a literal restoration, it's got to be right now. Now, again, do I believe that? No, I do not believe that. That's nonsense. But I can. I can. I can see the. The worldview that. That allows for this sacrifice brings forth the blessings, heaven. Like it should be hard. We're a peculiar people. It should be different. Right. So there. There I can see a worldview in which this. This does now is a perfect. No, because it's God working through imperfect people. Like that worldview gives you a lot of leeway to make sense of things like this. Again, do I believe that? I do not. But I can see how a worldview allows for that. And again, like as we pointed out, these are, these are smart people. They're not dumb people. They're well read people and see the world differently.

John Dehlin 2:59:46 So why do we resist? Could you have a. Do you have a sense for why we resist? Like John Turner? One of my favorite quotes from him is I wouldn't trust Joseph Smith with my wife or daughter. Well, what does he mean by that? He means he feels like Joseph Smith was a predator. Now why wouldn't he want to use that word? And why wouldn't you want to use that word?

Bryan Buchanan 3:00:07 Because I, I think Warren is the greatest example of this because I think when people hear the world word predator, they think a guy like Warren Jeffs, who, to be fair, I don't think that's Joseph Smith. Warren is a very uncharismatic person who people are not drawn to, who don't love. Joseph Smith does have that. And I think John Turner did an excellent job of making him a better, more rounded person that, who does these, these, these problematic, questionable, bad things. But that also has this side of him. So now again, is, is that. Are there predators who aren't like that? Definitely are predators who follow that model. Exactly. So I guess. Joseph Smith is Hitler.

Nemo 3:00:58 That's, that's as in someone who does problematic things has redeeming features. So therefore. Well, but they still do the same problematic things as the person who doesn't have the redeeming features.

John Dehlin 3:01:08 What I'm stuck with is a one, one man abuses 10 children. Another man abuses 30 children. The man who abuses 30 children doesn't make it so the first man isn't an abuser.

Nemo 3:01:21 That's kind of the point I'm making.

John Dehlin 3:01:22 Yeah, exactly.

Nemo 3:01:23 Redeeming features don't change the thing that they should.

John Dehlin 3:01:25 No, I'm not talking about redeeming features. I'm talking about scale. What you seem to be saying is because Warren Jess was twice as bad as Joseph, then we can't use that term.

Nemo 3:01:33 I was hearing the charisma.

Julia 3:01:35 I was hearing the charisma too.

Bryan Buchanan 3:01:36 Yeah. To me that there's a part of Joseph Smith that is generous and giving and positive and loving that I absolutely do is wholly devoid in a Warren Jeffs. Like, that's pure.

John Dehlin 3:01:47 But most child abusers are super charismatic, loving, trusted members of a family of

Bryan Buchanan 3:01:52 that come from like love or a genuine good character. I don't think so. That's the thing is I think Joseph Smith does have part of him that is genuinely good. Problem is that it's mixed with things that are unequivocally bad.

John Dehlin 3:02:07 But I think there are a lot of child abusers who have good aspects to them.

Nemo 3:02:11 So this is my point. Does the good then stop you calling them a predator would be the question.

John Dehlin 3:02:16 Or the scale.

Nemo 3:02:17 Or the scale.

Bryan Buchanan 3:02:18 To me, I guess maybe it's less using the term predator is that it tends to equate Warren Jeffs like a guy like Warren Jeffs and Joseph Smith on the same planet.

John Dehlin 3:02:27 I understand why you're saying there's no,

Nemo 3:02:29 there's no delineation between those.

Bryan Buchanan 3:02:30 Right.

John Dehlin 3:02:31 And I'm not saying that Joseph Smith was as bad as Warren Jeffs. What I am saying is to a lot of people, 12 year old versus 14 year old isn't a big difference. And 50 wives versus 30, to the outside world, they're all predators. But there's something about Mormon culture where we keep sweet when we talk about Joseph. Even people who don't believe in Joseph or have left the church, they're like, oh, no, no, no, we can't use that word because it's Joseph. And whether it's like my access to church archives will be restricted or my buddies in the Mormon History association will not like it or they'll get mad at me, I don't know exactly what the cultural reasons are for why we're so hesitant, but it seems like that's a thing.

Nemo 3:03:12 Could it be linked in with the way that people won't use the word cult sometimes to describe the church? Because for some people, they say, well, it's not useful to a conversation, perhaps, and maybe, maybe calling Joseph Smith a predator is just not useful to a conversation. It shuts down conversation too quickly with certain individuals where you could have a more mean.

Bryan Buchanan 3:03:31 I think it's so easy to take that from 0 to 100 with no middle ground.

John Dehlin 3:03:36 Yeah, I see that point.

Bryan Buchanan 3:03:38 Yeah, like, you know, because you can talk about different cults that are wholly different than Mormonism in that there's really no redeeming anything there. There's no impulse toward good. It's. It's just bad, bad news all the way down.

John Dehlin 3:03:50 But the flip side is we risk downplaying and minimizing this is true. The, the very, very bad, egregious behavior. Because if I was guilty of Joseph Smith's behavior, I guarantee you the church's apologist would call me a sexual predator. If I had identical behavior to Joseph Smith as it related to the production of scripture, they would Call me a fraud. And if I had identical behavior to Joseph Smith as it related to women and teenage girls and other people's wives and other people's daughters, I would be called a sexual predator, I think.

Bryan Buchanan 3:04:25 Yeah, that's true.

John Dehlin 3:04:26 Yeah. So we're giving.

Nemo 3:04:27 So the question is, why are we not applying that same standard to Joseph Smith?

John Dehlin 3:04:30 Because his behavior was deeply problematic. And that's my point, is we lose something when we're not willing to call a spade a spade. I think we lose something anyway.

Nemo 3:04:41 Okay, Julia.

Julia 3:04:43 Yeah. So I was gonna say, I just kind of want to change this question a little bit to. Because I don't. I. I do think it's hard for members to think about it in that way. But my question would be, do prophets speak to God? Because God is. Is not the author of confusion. He's a God of order. And so my last slide is just the timeline again, where you just see all these different changes, see how things were stopped. And even. Even I would put asterisks to be like, oh, actually, it was continued until 1954, or whatever. And then continue. Polygamy was continued on until the 1900s. So, like, it was. It's just really messy. And so to me, one of my questions is, can you read that?

John Dehlin 3:05:18 Because there's people that can't see it because they're just listening.

Julia 3:05:20 So it's just an overview of what. Of what we've talked about. So. And then, Brian, if I. If any of these are incorrect, please tell me. So the first baptisms for the dead happened in August of 1840. The first plural ceiling, which was the first ceiling anyway, was with Louisa Beaman in 1841. Their first endowment was in 1842. The law of adoption ceiling was performed between 1847 and then it stopped 47 years later. Well, I mean, no, that's not true either, because you said it was in the 19th century. Yeah, okay. But ending generally in 1894. Dynastic ceilings, that's a different distinction. But the first one was with Zina Huntington in 1841. And then you have husband and wife ceilings that are not polygamy in 1842, which is with Heber and Vilate. And then you have parent child ceilings that begin in 1894 with Wilford Woodruff. And then you have the eternal attachment with Jane manning James in 1894. And so to me, like, if. If Joseph and the prophets were speaking to God, what would it look like? Would it look like this? Would it look this messy? Because to me, it wouldn't to Me, it would look like Joseph getting sealed to Emma first. Getting. Getting Alvin sealed to his family, getting his deceased children who died at childbirth, sealed to him. That's what it would look like to me if that were. And then the other thing is, I can see them falling in. Like, I can see a world where polygamy would happen. I would not. I still don't. I don't accept Joseph marrying. I mean, it happened. But I mean, like, in a perfect world, you wouldn't be sealed to people who. Women who are already married. There's just different things that look so messy that it makes me wonder, where is God in all of this?

John Dehlin 3:06:59 Yeah, but Nate. And Nate Ullman uses the term matures or evolves. They're euphemisms that somehow make all that confusion. Okay.

Bryan Buchanan 3:07:09 I mean, you look at that list, you just read, like, only the first one. I would. I think we can. We can. Everyone can agree that's exactly how it happened.

Julia 3:07:18 Right?

Bryan Buchanan 3:07:19 Like, messy is a great word. And it is interesting because you can see, like, right now, I. My. I have teenage daughters, and we're learning to drive. And how do we teach drive? Because you can't teach a kid. You can't tell a kid every time exactly what to do every single time, or they don't learn. So, like, you can see worldviews in which a messiness is not only what we observe, but it's necessary. And also, other people will look at that and be like, that sounds like really crappy parenting to me. Yeah. The question of, is God involved in this? To what degree is it? Blah, blah. That is Your mileage may vary on that. Like, again, the Occam's Razor answer is, he's not. Pretty obvious. But again, like, you could. There's a worldview in which you can make. Take that.

Why This History Was Hidden and Final Reflections

John Dehlin 3:08:12 Yeah. Yeah. And there's a writer to your question, Julia, which is why weren't any of us taught this? Why were we all told, this is how it used to be? And then it evolved this way, and then it changed this way, and then it changed back, and then it was totally extinguished. And now what we have bears almost no resemblance to how it started. And at least you should know this to have full informed consent. No Mormons anywhere learned any of this in any formal church setting, I'm willing to bet.

Nate Oman (video clip) 3:08:39 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:08:39 Fair.

Bryan Buchanan 3:08:40 Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it will be equated to other areas of life. Like, how many Ford employees are taught that Henry Ford was a virulent anti Semite?

Nemo 3:08:49 Right.

Bryan Buchanan 3:08:49 That's business. Again, like, yeah, that's that's not in the nature of organizations to lay out the messiness.

Nate Oman (video clip) 3:08:59 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 3:09:00 Because it's messy and it's hard to. And it. It ultimately makes what you're trying to do more difficult, and it makes people

John Dehlin 3:09:08 ask if they got it wrong, then. Then maybe they're getting it wrong.

Bryan Buchanan 3:09:12 That's a door that's real tough to close.

Nemo 3:09:14 Yeah. And that's why you have these. The church, like Ballard saying, we've never tried to hide anything from anyone while knowing that's good. Yeah. That they have.

Bryan Buchanan 3:09:23 Right. That's what your listeners want to hear.

John Dehlin 3:09:26 Yeah.

Nate Oman (video clip) 3:09:26 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 3:09:27 Problem is, is it's messy.

John Dehlin 3:09:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nemo 3:09:31 Right.

John Dehlin 3:09:31 But I do. Can I just also say great job, Nate Ohman, because you brought this to our attention and you're brilliant and this is really good.

Bryan Buchanan 3:09:39 His presentation was messy.

John Dehlin 3:09:41 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 3:09:41 Like, listeners were introduced to a whole bunch of messiness there that I'm guessing a lot of them had never heard.

John Dehlin 3:09:46 And yeah, everyone go check out his whole. His whole presentation because it's brilliant and we only captured parts of it. So shout out to Nate Ullman. Brilliant presentation. Shout out to Faith Matters, Brilliant series on polygamy. And just shout out to the Turnbull brothers, to Aubrey and Tim and everyone in that Faith Matters organization and the Restore organization. If you are a Mormon who wants to stay in the church, wants to remain faithful, but can't do it as an orthodox literal believer, check out Faith Matters. Check out Restore. It's brilliant stuff. They're doing amazing work of walking that fine line, and I'm so proud. You know, it's what we tried to do with Mormon Matters podcast. It's what we tried to do with the thoughtful Faith podcast. And it's just brilliant that they're successfully doing it and that they haven't gotten in trouble and that the church now is sort of silently endorsing them as an avenue or a channel for Mormons that want to stay in the faith but also want to be knowledgeable about history and faithful and committed. It's a bigger 10. How can we not all celebrate Faith

Bryan Buchanan 3:11:00 Matters and restore the impulse to deal with messiness? Should be applauded.

John Dehlin 3:11:05 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 3:11:06 And Aubrey at the beginning talks about how I want to confront questions head on. I don't want to ignore them. Like that's. That's fair.

Nate Oman (video clip) 3:11:13 Positive.

Nemo 3:11:14 As much as I complain about the way they present things and, you know, I complain about. Apologies Apologists about that. Apologists come in different calibers, and there are people who are just wanting to have the conversation and, you know, I can get A bit frustrated sometimes that they're not necessarily willing to delineate what their experience is versus what's actually been taught over the pulpit. But also, I think your point about what the Church tolerates, particularly now, has become very important because, you know, the Church isn't tolerating Mormon stories. They are trying to sue you. Right. They're suing you. That that's what they're doing. You can. We're going to look at something else on a future episode where someone that isn't officially church affiliated is using church copyrighted materials in their, you know, in their YouTube banner, in their thumbnails, in whatever. They're clearly being tolerated by the church. And it's going to become more important, I think, over the years to see what the Church tolerates as well as what they actively promote as part of the narrative. So I think that's a really good point, John.

John Dehlin 3:12:07 Well, the Internet is forcing the Church to tolerate all sorts of things in 2026 that they would have never tolerated 10 or 15 years ago, two years ago. Today's faithful apologist, Mormon influencer is 10 or 15 years ago excommunicated for sure. You know, podcaster or blogger.

Bryan Buchanan 3:12:24 98 of the sources that we consulted on this are digitized, transcribed, whatever. Most of those are on a church dime. So again, like that's to be applauded. Digitizing. No, I'm tracking Joseph Smith papers, BYU Church history library. Those are fully authorized.

John Dehlin 3:12:44 Yeah, right.

Bryan Buchanan 3:12:44 Official sources that are being paid for. Yeah, that's. That's digitizing messiness.

John Dehlin 3:12:50 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nemo 3:12:51 And that is to be uploaded. Yeah, you're right.

John Dehlin 3:12:54 Brilliant. Well, Brian, what a treat to have you back. Sorry, I got really heated at the end.

Bryan Buchanan 3:12:59 Do you do that, John, ever?

Nemo 3:13:02 It's not even caffeinated.

John Dehlin 3:13:04 Well, you're a good sport, Brian, and we love your sense of humor, but mostly your depth and breadth of knowledge on 19th century stuff.

Bryan Buchanan 3:13:15 And if you walk away from this thing thinking history is boring, then we don't know what to tell you.

John Dehlin 3:13:23 So. Well. And Brian, we shout out your. Your podcast with Lindsay and all the good things you do at Benchmark as well.

Bryan Buchanan 3:13:28 Yep. So day job is Benchmark Books. So hopefully I think we can put in the show notes. Not surprisingly, there's a lot on this topic. There's articles, there's books, great stuff. There's a lot of people have wrestled with these concepts.

John Dehlin 3:13:42 Go to Benchmark Books first to buy your Mormon books.

Bryan Buchanan 3:13:45 I will happily talk to you about this stuff. So that's the day job and then on the side I do the Sunstone Mormon history podcast. Mormons in the title. So far so good with Hanson Park. There's actually two episodes that we're going to do that grow out of this that are both loosely regarded regarding the concept of canceling ceilings that are these two women's stories that are real messy and fascinating.

John Dehlin 3:14:11 Wait, you're saving the good stuff for your podcast? Is that what I mean?

Bryan Buchanan 3:14:14 You'll have to do like this length of discussion just to talk about that.

John Dehlin 3:14:18 So you'll tell people to watch this first before they.

Bryan Buchanan 3:14:21 Because that will get context to those discussions that we're going to have because they fall into this long history of things. So we, we do more or less chronological walk through Mormon history with tangents. So we get really fun listener people. That was a couple of the. The cases in here came because people are like, hey, these are my ancestors. What's going on here? Yeah, because they're discovering, oh, my ancestors were messy.

Guest Introductions and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin 3:14:48 So Nemo, tell everyone what you do and why they should follow you.

Nemo 3:14:52 Run Nemo, the woman YouTube channel. You can find it, Nemo the Mormon on all social media. But yeah, I mainly focus on the institutional church as it currently stands and sort of fact checking what it is they have to say and generally being a bit of a nuisance. I think you could probably end up

Bryan Buchanan 3:15:07 deceiving people by calling yourself a Mormon.

Nemo 3:15:09 Right? Yeah. Well, no, it says, have you been sued? No, no, it says at the top of my YouTube banner, this is not an official publication of the Mormon Church. And then on my Instagram, I think it says unofficially Mormon. So hedging up, cover those bases.

Bryan Buchanan 3:15:24 Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:15:25 And Julia, tell us about you really quick.

Julia 3:15:28 Yeah, I'm analyzing Mormonism on all the platforms where you can consume the shorter content, so.

John Dehlin 3:15:33 And did you just have a five year anniversary or something?

Julia 3:15:35 I did, yeah. I've been making content for five years, which is kind of wild. Like, I don't know, like, Brian, how long have you been doing your podcast? And Nemo, how long have you been doing your content?

Bryan Buchanan 3:15:43 You asked the wrong guy.

Nemo 3:15:44 I've been going six years.

John Dehlin 3:15:46 He doesn't know how long he's been doing the podcast.

Bryan Buchanan 3:15:49 People will ask about earlier episodes and I will forget that we've done them. I don't remember what they are. And that's with, you know, like three digits.

John Dehlin 3:15:57 You're making me feel. You're making me feel better.

Bryan Buchanan 3:15:59 No, that's.

John Dehlin 3:16:00 I can't even imagine that person.

Nemo 3:16:02 Decades.

Bryan Buchanan 3:16:03 Yeah, no, it's around that same time. And it's wild. That time passes so fast.

John Dehlin 3:16:08 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 3:16:08 But yeah, that's. It's fun to see the flourishing of podcast voices.

Nate Oman (video clip) 3:16:14 Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan 3:16:15 Has it given us a bunch of crappy podcasts? It sure has.

John Dehlin 3:16:18 Hey, wait a minute.

Bryan Buchanan 3:16:18 Giving us more good podcasts. It sure has.

John Dehlin 3:16:22 Name the crappy ones. Go.

Bryan Buchanan 3:16:23 Oh, there's a guy. He's out there deceiving people. He refuses to listen to lawyers. I can't remember his name.

John Dehlin 3:16:31 Anything else, Julia?

Julia 3:16:32 No, I think that's good.

John Dehlin 3:16:34 All right, well, again, thanks to Nate, Omen, thanks to Faith Matters, Tim and Aubrey, thanks to the Turnbull brothers. Thanks to Julia Yu for putting these slides together. Brian, thanks for adding to the outline that Julie put together. Nemo, you always do a good job of vetting the slides and helping organize things. And yeah, thanks to Brooklyn. She'll be helping out the post production. Thanks to our donors that make all this possible. Thanks to our board as well. And if you donate to keep all this possible because we try and pay everybody for their involvement. Thank you for your support. If you don't donate to Mormon Stories podcast and you like this type of content, if you want to support see the LDS discussion series continue, please become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org donate again. This LDS discussion series is what, Julia? 70 something?

Julia 3:17:26 75. I don't know.

John Dehlin 3:17:29 This is 75.5ish. In a long series of amazing episodes. Start out from the beginning. Check us out at LDS discussions wherever you get your podcasts or on the Mormon Stories podcast playlist on YouTube. Thank you to Mike. Check out LDSDiscussions.com for Mike's original essays. Mike, we love you and yeah, we are getting sued by the Mormon Church. And if you want to support us in that way, you can go to mormonstories.org legal and donate to our legal defense fund because we believe they're trying to smear us and silence us and shut us down. So anyway, thanks for joining us. The best way you can support us other than that is to subscribe to all our channels. Julia's, Nemo's and Brian and Lindsay's. You can also, like, you can comment, you can email us@mormonstoriesmail.com we love your feedback, we love your subscriptions and your likes. You can share this everywhere as well. Those are all ways to help us and we love your feedback and we hope to have more episodes. Julia, Nemo, are there other LDS discussions episodes in the works that we want to tease?

Nemo 3:18:43 Yeah, there's some stuff with the Book of Abraham because we haven't talked about that in a while. So that'll be coming up. Yeah, that's the one I want to tease right now, I think. Watch this space for that.

John Dehlin 3:18:51 All right. Anything else, Julia?

Julia 3:18:53 Oh, yeah. I'm really excited about that one.

John Dehlin 3:18:55 Well, maybe Jasmine Rapely will appear in my stories.

Nemo 3:18:59 Yeah, she might be an involuntary guest on the show.

John Dehlin 3:19:03 We've had her before in LDS discussions. The Skin of Blackness conversation was fun. All right, thanks for joining us today. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of LDS Discussions and Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care, everybody.

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