Shiloh Logan on the Entanglement of Religion and Politics in the Legacy of Ezra Taft Benson

Embark on a historical journey with Shiloh Logan, a PhD student with a keen eye for the interwoven threads of religion and politics. This conversation pulls back the curtain on Ezra Taft Benson's formidable legacy within the LDS Church and American conservatism. As we navigate the corridors of the past, Shiloh illuminates the philosophies that fueled the controversial Cliven and Amon Bundy, and how Benson's teachings continue to resonate within the LDS community and beyond, challenging modern perceptions of government and individual liberties.

The episode traverses the complex terrain of the LDS Church's engagement with American culture, from the historical perspectives of Brigham Young to the delicate dance of modern leaders wrestling with Benson's political echoes. Discover how religious convictions are deeply entangled with the political ideologies of church members, and the balancing act the church endures in aligning evolving doctrines on race and inclusivity with the staunch conservatism of some of its followers. Shiloh's insights provide a rich backdrop for understanding the internal dynamics and external perceptions that the LDS Church contends with in contemporary society.

Concluding our exploration, we shed light on the broader implications of the LDS Church's intricate relationship with American identity. This episode is a mosaic of religious history, legal debates, and the shaping of American society through the lens of a minority faith. As Shiloh guides us through these narratives, we're left with a deeper appreciation for the complex ways religion and politics have interplayed in the American story, and how they continue to evolve and redefine the nation's character. Join us as we unravel the enduring impact of Mormonism on the fabric of American life and thought.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:34

Hello, welcome to our blog, and today I'm here with Shiloh Logan, no strange of the podcast, but today's here to roll as a PhD student in history and religion at the Claremont Graduate University. We're discussing a paper that I did not, sadly, see you give, but we talked about it at the US Society for Intellectual History, which I am always tempted to call sushi, even though it doesn't quite work.

Speaker 2: 2:03

I've been tempted myself.

Speaker 1: 2:07

And we're talking about something that's near and dear to me in a kind of strange way.

Speaker 1: 2:14

I'm not a native to Utah in any sense of that word, but I have been fascinated with the way as what Taff Bimson has affected the West and also, I think and you make a good argument for this in your paper the entirety of the religious right and maybe religious extremism in general because of the increasing will the West has played on larger US religious culture and I think you know I make a lot of hey talking about how like evangelical seated their religious thinking to like Catholics and Jews who are out of step with their own community.

Speaker 1: 2:57

But one of the things that I have noticed is like no, there's also a history of LDS and specifically strains of Mormonism having some effect on this. That is dramatically under covered and in fact, one of the things that you know in the popular narrative around the LDS right now, it's actually a moderating influence on religious politics in America. Look at Mitt Romney, look at the, the church leadership pushback on like Trumpism in Utah and yet you know the figure of Edgeritath Bimson and like maybe legends about Danites and stuff, and for most of my listeners this is all garbage to them but really does have an effect on religious, on religious political thinking in the United States, right? So to get us into the very basics, what does Clive and Bundy have to do with Edgeritath Bimson?

Speaker 2: 3:57

That's a great, it's a great lead in. So I mean it's absolutely fascinating. So my work at as a PhD student, my dissertation, is somewhat autobiographical. It's I grew up in as an active Latter-day Saint. I have Latter-day Saint heritage going back seven generations of both sides of my family and I'm no longer a church. I resigned from the church a few years ago but I'm still fascinated, still part of like this cultural aspect of who and what I am, or I came from right, and part of that is growing up in this community.

Speaker 2: 4:32

That was affected by Edgeritath Bimson specifically when he was the secretary of agriculture in the 1950s. Then, as soon as he's out of this being a secretary of agriculture, he comes back and he resumes his role full-time as an apostle for the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints and in that for the next 10 years he develops this philosophy that eventually permeates and trickles down into a lot of the church and really does a lot of effective heavy lifting in making the church culture ultra conservative. And it's interesting, it's almost like a little bit of a code switching where Latter-day Saints and evangelical Christians, their conservatism, runs so adjacent to each other but a lot of the Latter-day Saint discourse runs on kind of a different epistemology. They'll use the same discourse, they'll use the same language, they'll use the same rhetoric, but their cosmology is different. Their kind of the essence is different about who and what they are. And so they might be using the same words and the same kind of the same general meaning and they're going to be right there with you, kind of step by step with the conservative movements in Utah or with the United States. But then there's going to be like these moments when all of a sudden you see someone like Amon Bundy stick out and all of a sudden it's going to be framed as this radical extremist conservatism and people are going to be like what is going on in Utah, what's going on with the Mormons? And it really comes back to Ezra Taft Benson, because, to answer your question about Cliven Bundy, amon Bundy and a lot of the what we would label, or what most people would label, like extremist behavior, extremist political behavior.

Speaker 2: 6:18

I put the word extremism into my paper and somebody challenged me on it, and the reason why I put it in there was not even necessarily because of that. I think extremism is an inherent category that these people feel, but that that's how they perceive, that's how they're looked at. That's how they're pushing back against something that they think is wrong and vehemently so. And that code that the Bundy's are pushing back on is basically called the proper role of government, and that's what Ezra Taft Benson wrote in 1968. So when 1965 comes along in 1966, he's actually tapped by the John Birch Society.

Speaker 2: 7:02

The John Birch Society has put some pretty interesting people into power through the Republican Party and they think that they can get him the ticket to be the president, next president of the United States. And so when they get him they're trying to get him into into that position, to be the Republican nominee, and he doesn't get it. But in the meantime he's working behind the scenes really hard to be able to put together this political philosophy. Because, as he looked at the world, you need to have a principled, systematic, axiomatic philosophy that if people understand you, they'll know what policy you support before they even ask it. It's once they know your core principles they'll know where you come down. And this is what he calls a statesman.

Speaker 2: 7:46

So Benson always laments politicians, but he always advances the cause of the statesman and it comes down to the. He ends up creating this philosophy, the proper role of government as that principle, when for him planning to run for president, that this is going to be his, basically his platform, his presidential platform. And when you look at the justification for why the bundies did what the bundies did out in in Nevada and Oregon, and what a lot of these, a lot of these groups, a lot of sovereign citizen groups or any other what you consider ultra right wing conservative group in this, like this Liberty Community, utah libertarians, some anarchists, monarchists, things like that, they will commonly cite the proper role of government. That's their marching order, that's the worldview, that's where they they move an act from.

Speaker 1: 8:35

This is. I mean, this is actually interesting and there's a couple of parallels to the evangelical movement that I think are not obvious If you don't know the deeper religious history of the United States somewhat ed for felt Benson kind of represents. One of the things I like to point out is like it is not natural that when the LDS start to reconcile with the US federal government and incorporate that they would go anywhere near the Republicans because historically, just you know, after Lincoln, there is literally a plank in the Republican Party platform to call for the extermination of the LDS and all Mormon groups. You know, not just the LDS I shouldn't just limit it to them but like it's explicit in the Republican Party platform, it is not hidden at all and in some ways to me that's somewhat similar to what you see with evangelicals.

Speaker 1: 9:26

The evangelical movement has always been plagued by its racial history in a similar way to Mormons, but also in a way that's very different, and by that I mean, like most of the denominations of the evangelical movement in the south actually split off from their mainline, you know, versions over slavery. Initially it's not even questions of theology. In most of these cases the Southern Baptist split from the mainline Baptist over slavery, the Methodist are a little bit more mixed and they're also a little bit more mixed in the evangelical movement. The exceptions would be, I guess would be like the northern evangelical groups, like the Missouri and what's the other super conservative the Sennahalai Lutherans.

Speaker 2: 10:08

I can't ever remember.

Speaker 1: 10:09

But like those groups don't come from that. But most of the evangelical movements like, okay, yeah, we, we don't want people realizing that we left over slavery and also we're very tied to the Democratic Party till probably about the 1950s. Ezra Tapp Benson is interesting in that you know another thing that you can kind of see in the early churches it has a very, I wouldn't say, communist in any formal sense, but it has a very communal, anti-market identity for a long time until but one that is also not really interested in like external government at all or government socialism in any way Like. But you know, when I point out, like you know, the LDS have a very developed charity network from like before they were, they would have seen this as charity, as like this was an internal way of taking care of binding the community. There is almost a very communitarian ethos that doesn't seem to naturally fit with people like the birchers, right, and yet very clearly, I mean there's a lot of ironies about the birchers. The birchers explicitly based themselves off of the linenist cells. Like it's kind of funny. It was very much like we're going to use the communist evil ways against them in their attitude.

Speaker 1: 11:33

But with someone like Ezra Tapp Benson. What he, you know, what you kind of point out in this paper, is he reconciles Mormonism to some way to be able to speak a language that both seems like it's the same as modern American, evangelical and other kinds of even mainline conservatism and yet I hate to use the word dog whistles because it's that's has explicitly racial overtones and that's not really what I mean here but it rituals to a different theological and its epistemological framework that's somehow been made copacetic to this evangelical movement and I think we kind of still see that today like there's this increasing push, particularly for the LDS, but we also see it in like the Church of Christ Mormons, which people forget, worthy, that have also reconciled into the broader, you know, protestant movement to be both a people apart and also a people together. I mean, one of the things that you know, one of the big things recently, is like the LGS Church convincing Google to put the cross symbol on them as opposed to the the angel of Moroni symbol, which makes them look like a more conventional Christian church. And while you know people like, oh, that's trying to confuse people about the, the LDS, but the LDS is always thought they were Christian, the reason why they didn't put the cross symbol on, was they?

Speaker 1: 12:56

You know that was the bad, fallen, corrupt Christians. And we're the true church, right? We don't. And yet now there's this way in which there's a normalizing effect there. And I think what's interesting when you talk about Ezra Tath Benson is, in some ways he is both a way to people like George and Mitt Romney and a way to the Bundys like simultaneously. And that's kind of hard for a lot of people to comprehend if you're not used to LDS discourse, which I wasn't until the last couple years living here.

Speaker 2: 13:35

So yeah, yeah, there's a lot to parse out there with what you said, it's you know. So I don't focus a whole lot on the early 18th century, antebellum period with the development of the church. Of course I know it really well, but it's just, that's just not my area of specialty. But it's fascinating because when you have the development, the early, the early Latter-day Saints, the early Mormons, they really did consider themselves as the epitome of the American Republic and they were shocked I mean their identity was shocked when the American Republic turns against them. And that was just kind of their, their reification of their narrative about being God's chosen people in that God's chosen land, god's chosen constitution. This thing that God had established had been perverted and they were going to be the ones that were going to carry this away. And so when they're driven out of the United States and they go out to to what's now Salt Lake not to Utah, to Utah territory, they see themselves. You know, of course this is a common motif for people who are kind of driven out of their and displaced from their land but they see themselves as the Israelites in the Bible, being driven in in Brigadier Young, as the Moses, and yet they still maintain this American identity, that at the core they are the true sons and daughters of the American Republic and and this does keep this affinity for the constitution and for and for their own kind of their own Republican virtues as they go out there.

Speaker 2: 14:56

But but again, right as Joseph Smith, just before he's killed in 1844, the church ends up establishing.

Speaker 2: 15:04

There's this private group called the Council on 50 that they establish in Nauvoo, where they have a secret group of leaders of the church that are trying to plan for a theo democracy.

Speaker 2: 15:13

Where they're going to plan, if Joseph Smith is elected as president of the United States, then they're going to kind of try to evolve the constitution to become more of a theocratic democracy with Joseph Smith at the head. And then Brigadier Young tries to recreate this in Salt Lake, and so there's like this evolution of constitutional Republicanism While they're doing this thing. Then Brigadier Young tries to set up his own nation with Deseret, and that's why I-15, for those familiar with I-15, the freeway that runs north and south in Utah and runs all the way out through Vegas and into Los Angeles. That's why that freeway exists, because that's the corridor that Brigadier Young wants to take to create an ocean port for Deseret. He wants to co-op all that land for his own nation, and so all of the cities along the way are basically a day's ride journey all the way down. So it's a pretty interesting history and how that still functions and how we see remnants of that history. But when and then?

Speaker 1: 16:03

down to Chihuahua, where there's still remnants of other Republican communities Right.

Speaker 2: 16:08

And in California I mean, very few people realize that San Bernardino, the whole San Bernardino, was founded by the polygamous Latter-day Saints and so that was one of their early satellites in trying to take over Los Angeles. But as polygamy came again, the United States came against them for polygamy. From 1890 until well into the first two decades of the 20th century, the Latter-day Saints said the church said they weren't practicing polygamy anymore, but they still were behind the scenes. But this is really kind of a transitionary period where they're trying to out-America Americans, they're trying to out-Republic everybody else. And this is when they start ingracing themselves into the Republican Party Because, like you said, the Republican Party, you know, had put into their platform there's the twin relics of barbarism, of slavery and of polygamy. So they were coming after Mormons were wrapped in and kind of in the same evil milieu with slaveholders in the Republicans view, and so the Mormons grasped towards the Democrats and more and. But it was through the early 20th century they started trying to get back over into the Republican aspect of things and then Benson was highly. Benson was highly influenced. It's kind of interesting.

Speaker 2: 17:16

He's a little bit more. He's a farm boy in Idaho. He's born in 1899. He's a farm boy in Idaho. He rises up through the agricultural community in Idaho. He wants to be a farmer. He gets his master's degree, which is kind of a weird thing for someone to do, for a Latter-day Saint to do kind of in that time in that place.

Speaker 2: 17:33

But he's getting his education, formal education in agriculture. He tries to get his PhD, does a little bit of PhD work along the way and he wants to do farmers co-ops in Idaho. Like he supports these farmers co -ops in Idaho. He doesn't want the state involved but he's doing these kinds of like communitarian like you were talking about this. There's like remnants of this community building that he wants to do. But then once he gets in there he's highly influenced by another apostle, by another leader of the church, j Ruben Clark, who was heavily political, who was heavily conservative. And J Ruben Clark he was getting really wrapped into the whole protocols of the Elders of Zion and kind of the anti-Jewish movement and he had had some sympathies for the way Germany was treated after World War I and with what's going on with the social states there in Germany during.

Speaker 2: 18:25

World War II, so not quite a Nazi, but Not quite. But he's like things are complicated kind of a guy, and so he's very, very conservative minded at the same time and constitutionally minded. And there's even statements going and being floated around at the time like the constitution is much a part of my scripture and as much a part of scripture as the Bible is. And so when Billy Graham comes onto the scene in the 50s and all of a sudden we have McCarthyism and we have Ezra Taft Benson who's in Washington DC serving as the Secretary of Agriculture under Dwight D Eisenhower, and he gets to think that McCarthy is amazing and Hoover is his best friend and his ideological best friend. And by the time the 50s are over, I've joked a little bit that the Ezra Taft Benson is the Mormon version of Billy Graham, Just for the fact that what Billy Graham is trying to do in the 50s with really trying to revitalize the community and turn it towards the Bible and being that anti-communist kind of rhetoric with like pro-America sentiments and save our country with the Bible and get ourselves back on place, Benson does the same thing, but kind of with the Book of Mormon in the 60s and so he becomes kind of the echo. So these Latter-day Saints are. They're following, they're getting into the same conversation, but by this time the Latter-day Saints aren't leading out in the conversation. They're kind of an echo, a decade behind and doing it in their own discursive way, the only way that they're kind of informed by. And so that really leads into Benson's philosophy and, I guess, to make sense of it for those who aren't aware, you know, who don't know it, Benson's proper role of government and the principle that he uses is actually pretty simple.

Speaker 2: 20:08

He claims that in a constitutional republic, all power rests in the individual. It's the individual. Rights, individual liberties, inalienable rights, inalienable liberties. They're God given to each and every single person, and I don't have more rights than you have. We're all equal in our rights. And so, therefore, when we band together as a society of individuals and we elect a representative, we can only elect that representative to do something that we ourselves can do for ourselves, that we have the right to do for ourselves, because we all have the same rights. And so we can get together in a community and we can pick someone in our community and vote for them, and then we can give that individual certain things to represent us in, and we can enumerate them and put them down and then we can give that list to our representative to act in our state and then send that person to represent our neighborhood, our community, our state, whatever. And in Benson's view this enumeration of duties is the constitution and we as the people can give our representatives power that we ourselves possess, but we cannot delegate to our representative any power or duty that we can't enforce personally ourselves. So for instance, and as he argues that I can't go next door to my neighbor next door and say, hey, I have this really great social program, let's go take care of the poor, let's go, let's go do, let's go build a road, or let's go do something and then force my neighbor to pay for it. I don't have that authority so I can't. I can't choose a representative to go do that for me.

Speaker 2: 21:43

So whenever government acts beyond what an individual can do themselves, that's tyranny.

Speaker 2: 21:50

If the government assumes the power, that's usurpation, and if they act on it, that's tyranny.

Speaker 2: 21:55

So in a lot of the cases, when you see a lot of these cases, like with the Amon Bundy's and the standoffs, and you hear the rhetoric, you'll start to hear a lot of this rhetoric, where usurpation and tyranny start to enter the discourse a little bit more than most Americans would think is natural because of this proper rule of government rhetoric.

Speaker 2: 22:12

It's this idea that the constitutional law is defined by whether or not the individual can enact and enforce it themselves. That's the test, and if the individual can't do it themselves, it's blatantly unconstitutional before it even began. It doesn't matter if it's gone through the process, it doesn't matter if it's actually gone through everything. It doesn't matter if the law was created right, if it was signed off by the president or if the judicial judiciary. It doesn't matter any of that. A law is constitutional or not based on the fact if you can reason, I have the authority to do this myself, and if you do, then you can delegate it to the government to do it for you. But if you can't, then it's tyranny for the government to do it, and it's pretty much that simple.

Speaker 1: 22:53

I mean, what strikes me is like how both this rhymes with, like the normal conservative liberal, lockean Proviso, and yet it's actually in some ways far more radical. Because, if I actually take this very seriously, I also can't force my neighbor to pay for an army Like which, even like, unless you're an anarcho-capitalist like Murray Rothbart. Like that's considered a function of legitimate governments by most conservatives, like, okay, yeah, you can't, but that's legitimate. And is this an exception? Like are. Is it they just turn a blind eye to that, or is this actually part of their thinking?

Speaker 2: 23:41

No. So there's gonna be a lot of monarchists and anarchists who are gonna read Rothbart and who are gonna take that. They're gonna, you know, they're gonna be really inculcated into Mises and they're gonna be studying that kind of way of looking at it. Frederick Basiat and the law is another really big philosophical treatise that they'll turn to and they'll go to and so, yeah, this is where they're looking on going with it.

Speaker 2: 24:00

Now, I personally grew up in a home that did take it to those logical extremes and really informed a level of, like the sovereign citizens who believe that it's an illegitimate government, that the way the government operates, taxes interacts, has built the system, the banking systems, the welfare systems, the licensing systems, the corporate structures, the corporate licensing and regulating are all illegitimate government and that the and based on the proper of government axiom. That based it gets into an interpretation of scripture where in the Doctrine and Covenants 98, so this is a revelation that Joseph Smith was given, that Joseph Smith was given from God. That's the Latter-day Saints claim. But in section 98, which is still canonized scripture for Latter-day Saints, it says that God commands his people to obey the constitutional law of the land and the constitutional law of the land it defines as that which supports the liberty and freedom of all mankind. So when Benson renegotiates with this and is adding a lot of classical liberalism and is kind of renegotiating on things like Rothbard and Bastiat, this fits. This is a really clear and way of being able to negotiate with section 98 in a consistent way in his mind and in D&C I think it's 98, I think it's verse 11. It has this short verse that says that we are commanded to forsake, to cleave into all good and to forsake all evil, and anything that violates this principle is evil of constitutional government. And so there's a script, there's a seeming scriptural mandate from God that's based on this disinterpretation of scripture. That revelation of God comes first, obedience to the law comes second, obedience to the law if it follows the constitutional law of the land.

Speaker 2: 25:57

And so in that way you see, like, for instance, with Amon Bundy he's in the news recently and you see that even right now, all of his antics you know like is he just a crazy person? And the fact is no, he's not. He's acting very consistently with the principles that he says he believes in and that are there for him, and how he sees the world. He's actually being very methodological and very principled in his way and kind of, once you understand the worldview that he's operating by, you can plant his course and see his trajectory from a bird's eye view. It doesn't cause you wonder anymore, you see where he's going with it.

Speaker 2: 26:38

But him attacking the government or he doing what he does, is always in view of that lens and of scripture. And so it's Benson you brought up, you know, because from the paper that I presented on that Benson really does try to mix and marry the John Burr society rhetoric with the Latter-day Saint discourse, as though not just that they're compatible but they're the same thing. And so in doing this it's like there's this marrying for the first time, in a way that hasn't been done before, a reimagined version of classical liberalism with Latter-day Saint discourse, and that really gets the ball rolling and the snowball kind of pushed down off the mountain.

Speaker 1: 27:24

Yeah, I mean this says. I mean when you look at Emin Bundy, like, for example, he has some stances that are somewhat hard to square with people, even in his own larger networks who are not LDS. For example, emin Bundy was like kind of loosely sympathetic to Black Lives Matter because it was anti-government, and that made sense to me once I kind of rocked where he was coming from. And he's also sympathetic to groups that you know you could say are at least Western chauvinist groups, such as the Proud Boys, three Percenters and Patriot Player are outright racialists, such as Cleon, scowzen and those guys. And yet you can also see how he can still be fairly sympathetic, sincerely, to things like Black Lives Matter because it's within this framework of legitimate government and like, well, you don't have to legit. Like you know we can't go ask the government to go suppress Black people ourselves and have someone else pay for it. Like that doesn't make sense, like so I mean it's interesting and it throws people off.

Speaker 1: 28:38

I mean there is Ezra Taff. Benson is interesting to me when you think about this more moderating wing of the LDS now who wants to like morph it into mainstream society. He is a person that they can do that with, but they also have to kind of distance themselves from some of the implications of his rhetoric. But they can't abandon him because he's a president of the Church and an apostle. You can't do that so like.

Speaker 2: 29:04

Yeah, it's a catch 22 for the Church. Definitely it's not easy and I've heard, you know you hear a lot of rumors when you start talking to a lot of people and you know just about how that. Because Ezra Taff Benson did eventually become the president of the Church and in the Latter-day Saints world of you, to become the president of the Church, I mean it means something it kind of validates, like ex post facto, all of the things that you said before along the way. It's like God, it puts an extra stamp of God's approval on everything you've ever said before in that.

Speaker 1: 29:36

But it's becoming the Pope.

Speaker 1: 29:39

I mean I know it's gonna make LDS uncomfortable to make that, but like, actually, in some ways it's more than becoming the Pope, because you have authority morally, not just theologically, I mean like to get into, like the fine points of Catholic Dhamma. Technically the Pope is not morally infallible and neither would be a president of the Church either. But a president of the Church is appointed by God directly to be both a theological and prophetic and moral leader. Right, like for people who don't quite get that, yeah, it's really sticky.

Speaker 2: 30:20

Yeah, because you have. So, for instance, the president of the Cormorant, 12 Apostles just recently passed away, emerson Ballard, and he'd been on there for decades, you know, since I even was a kid, and so they just called a new apostle. And once you become an apostle, it's the second highest Cormorant in the Church, it's the second highest governing body in the Church, with 12 men, and you cycle through by seniority. So once you come into the Cormorant, you're the very last one, and then as people die in front of you, you basically move up in seniority until you're the last one surviving, basically. And once the president of the Church dies, the last remaining apostle becomes the next president.

Speaker 2: 31:01

So there's a little bit of a difference between that and the Pope, right? Because the Latter-day Saints know who's going to be next and they kind of figure that that's how God keeps the pulse on who he wants to be in the office, because he allowed that one to live longer than the rest of them, and so once he becomes the president of the Church, the central to the Latter-day Saints identity is the idea of the priesthood. The priesthood was restored through Joseph Smith with all the keys of Christ's Church to effectively have all of the ordinances of salvation and to be able to make the prophet and seer and revelator and the high priest of the Church. And so, yeah, what he says goes. But it's also kind of funny because at the same time Joseph Smith has this famous statement where he says I'm only a prophet when I'm acting as such.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Right, so similar out to Catholic apostle it is it is, but there's never any objective epistemology on what that means. It's like, well, when are you and when aren't you? And it's like, well, when I am, I am, and when I'm not, I'm not. And come to find out that's always determined in retrospect, once the prophet has said something and it's always given as divine revelation at the time. And then, as you've marched and you put time away from that event and if it becomes bad enough, like Brigham Young's slavery issue you know rhetoric or things like that. Or you know that the black people you know that the black race were fence sitters and that they were people who couldn't make up their mind in the pre-existence. You know this kind of rhetoric and all of a sudden, when you get into modern auditions, he's like you can't say that, that's what is that. And they're like oh well, that was his opinion. He was come to find out he was speaking as a man back then.

Speaker 1: 32:44

And so there's this kind of an eagerness Fasto revelation that invalidates when the prophet was acting as a prophet and when they were not Right yeah.

Speaker 2: 32:53

And so, and so there's a little bit of that going on with Benson in that, with a lot of what he said in the in the fifties and the sixties, the leaders of the church actually most of them didn't really like Benson, at least as much of his political rhetoric, and they thought that his political rhetoric would actually divide the church and send it down a pretty steep path. And so even Benson's counselors, gordon B Hinckley, who became the next president of the church, and Thomas S Monson, who then became the church after that they were always trying to run behind a Benson's back to basically thwart anything that he was doing with these constitution groups, with Clay on Scousen and and what have you. And so it's it, the church was, the leadership of the church weren't all on board with this. And he hear stories and you're like, yeah, they're even still trying to figure out how to renegotiate and grapple with this right wing, conservative aspect of the church that they think is harmful to the growth of the church, because it always puts the church in a negative spotlight when these things come out, like with the Bundy's or what have you.

Speaker 2: 33:58

And so they're always trying to negotiate on that and it's hard just because of how this idea of Revelation works and the leaders of the church and what is true and what is not. And how do individuals gain their own testimony of the church and their own witness of the truthfulness of the church? And when those feelings and witnesses that gave you a testimony of the church are the same feelings that testify that the Constitution is the Word of God and that you have to act in this way to be able to, to, to support God, then you've wrapped in your political discourse with your emotional reification, with your church identity and all of that's informing, and all cylinders fire at the same time that everything that you have based your knowledge on is telling you to go do this thing. And that's when we end up seeing things like like the Arizona standoff and the Oregon standoff and these instances of the protest.

Speaker 1: 34:49

I mean it's interesting to me because on one hand, I have had the narrative where, like, ok, well, the LDS like they had better relationships to Jewish people, they weren't engaged in anti-Semitism which is kind of true sometimes, but not always. And they, you know there was all this guilt about their position on race in the past, so they, of course they would never make, you know, outreaches to explicit racialist stuff today that ties into, like pre-Dred Scott interpretations of the Constitution, or people who don't think the Civil War amendments are valid. So there's that. And yet I do think about this. I mean to make a lot of Catholic comparisons. I'm going to make everybody uncomfortable today, but there is a way in which their view of the of the Constitution resembles like C Davanakis view of the Pope, like if the Constitution doesn't do what we think the Constitution's ultimate bedrock does, then that's the Constitution being unconstitutional, you know, for stuff like, I don't know, income tax.

Speaker 2: 36:08

A lot of that changed. So when, when Benson came out, the proper of government, the implications of that were everybody knew the implications of that and it's also ended up with a lot of the tax protesters. That's where my family came into it. My father came into it. He used to lecture with the on the Constitution in the late 70s and early 80s used to lecture. My father used to lecture with you know. At times he had guest lecture for the Freeman Institute, which was Cleon Scousen's group, and and would talk about tax law and about how you know, do a state planning to be able to get the you know, those damned IRS agents off your back and and and. So that was. That's that idea, that government's tyranny. They're coming after you.

Speaker 2: 36:49

But when Delaney Chokes was called into the 12 in the mid 80s, he had been working with as a law, as a professor at the University of Chicago in law.

Speaker 2: 37:04

He had been BYU's president and he had also served as a judge and so when he came in he was actually getting.

Speaker 2: 37:11

He was on a shortlist of two or three people to actually be Reagan's next tap for the Supreme Court and so it was either going to be him being an apostle or he was going to the United States Supreme Court kind of a thing, and he chose to go to the church and his philosophy, his conservative philosophy, which is much more conservative in a non libertarian kind of way, and so a non-Lachian conservative, it's a it's more kind of Hobbesian, if you would, and so when he ends up taking over, his influence has been really heavily felt since Benson died in the early 90s and and his legal advice, his legal influence, and that's really where we see the church moving away from as hard as they can, away from Benson's particular type of conservative rhetoric Because we have a lot of that going on in the church leadership which, again, they didn't like. Most of them didn't like Benson's rhetoric, they didn't like his political philosophy. They just couldn't deny publicly that he was the man in charge because he outlived everyone.

Speaker 1: 38:19

Well, I mean yeah, there is that element. I mean, you know, there is a way in which, in a very literal sense, the, particularly the modern LDS, are a gerontocracy, theocracy and like, in a very like, like, actually that's a justification you live long enough, you're the elder, it's necessarily gerontocratic, which is not entirely true of the early church, but that's beyond the scope of this conversation. But it's interesting to me with, like, the two visions of political leadership that you have, in which I've said that, like, in some ways, edger-teth built and leads to George Romney and thus met, but also, I mean in that, his model of engagement with the Republican party and that's early on. But he's also a competitor, literally a competitor, with George Romney. I mean they're both running in 68.

Speaker 1: 39:16

And you know, who does Ezra Tampiston run with? So just to make it kind of the obvious why the church might have problems with this today, even though they can't deny Benson is, you know, the first society wanted in the run was Strom Thurmond, like, who had just recently given up being a Democrat, and then, like, when that fails, he goes and like tries to help out George Wallace, george Wallace, actually sends a letter to President David McKay the President of the church at the time asking David McKay to release Benson from his duty so that he can run on a third party ticket as president with Benson as his VP.

Speaker 2: 39:56

After Benson doesn't get the Republican nod with Strom, and so and that's when David McKay just like cuts, cuts everything down, he's like no, we're not doing this anymore. He basically pulls Benson back in and doesn't let him be the political candidate, and so he's like you're not getting the Republican ticket, You're not doing that thing, we're not playing this game anymore. And so you see Benson kind of walking back from that after that. But yeah, that's a crazy time. Well in sixties or a crazy time for that thing.

Speaker 1: 40:22

But it is interesting because when I first heard about Clevin and Edmond Bundy, I assumed that they were FLDS, not LDS. Like when I was abroad, I had lived in or I had just wait. When did that happen? Arizona was what year? When did that happen? Arizona was what year? 2014? Yeah, I was abroad. So I was abroad. When that happened I was like, oh, it must be, it must be more FLDS shit.

Speaker 1: 40:46

That's literally what I thought and and I was surprised to learn even back then that it wasn't, that this was just like a particularly virulent interpretation of normal, of, like you know, standard LDS doctrine. This was not anything fundamentalist or polychemist or particularly you know, 19th century Mormon, you know, surviving into the 20th and 21st century. This was modern and that surprised me, given that I had associated well, like I'd always been like well, the LDS are really concerned about respectability. So of course, they're going to be like kind of center Republicans and they really want to downplay the early history of race. They want to. They want to talk about how Smith was anti-slavery kind of sort of not really. And you know, and it seems like Ezra's have been still sort of like a giant thorn in their side for that because he's hanging out with Neo Confederates like there's no way around that.

Speaker 2: 42:00

Yeah, it's really, it's really sticky, especially in through the late 70s when the church is trying, you know, ends the race ban on the priesthood. So because up until 1978, if you were black in the church you couldn't have the priesthood there are certain ordinances you couldn't. You couldn't be sealed in the temple, you couldn't have certain ordinances that Latter-day Saints commonly think are life-saving ordinances, are necessary for eternal salvation. And then when you have Benson coming out with this kind of rhetoric with this particular group, who's also adjacent to exactly what you're talking about with these, these very racist, and then Benson ends up getting in on the bandwagon, the anti-civil rights bandwagon, and calling it the a grand communist conspiracy.

Speaker 1: 42:40

You're hanging out with birches. You kind of have to Right.

Speaker 2: 42:43

Right and so it's. And so liberating, liberating this part of the population, is a communist conspiracy. And they don't feel like they're standing in the same kind of racist shoes as those in the south because of the proper rule of government, because they believe we have the same rights as black people Everybody has the same rights like like, we don't have more rights than they do. They're their children of God too and they have as many inalienable rights as we do. It's just that there's this other thing going on.

Speaker 2: 43:17

There's this tribal lineage thing about being a part of the House of Israel, and we become a part of the House of Israel through our priesthood power and through these priesthood ordinances of being able to adopt ourselves into the children and the family of Abraham. And, like within the church, there's a, there's a special blessing you get it usually once in your life called a patriarchal blessing, and there's a usually in every stake. There's at least one patriarch who's specially designed to give this particular type of blessing, and they usually give it to teenagers 14 or older, and in that blessing the patriarch will actually tell you what tribe of Israel you're in. Whether or not you're in, you know that, the tribe of Gad or Asher or you know of. Usually most everybody is in is in kind of through Joseph and Ephraim. Ephraim is like the biggest one that everybody's usually in but you can't be grafted into the House of Israel If you're of a particular type of lineage or cursed. You know there's like a cursed for that and so all of that's being renegotiated with and Benson still trying to do this political philosophy by people who are holding on To these racial remnants and the church is trying to kind of get out of that conversation.

Speaker 2: 44:25

And as soon as Benson, so Benson becomes the president of the church in the mid-80s. He ends up passing away in the mid-90s, 94 I think, 93, 94, and then Gordon be Hinkley, his counselor, becomes the new president of the church and is the president of the church until 2000 and I think early 2008, maybe late 2007, and Gordon be Hinkley basically revamps them to the face of the church. He really wants to bring the church out out of this kind of kind of obscurity and make it mainline, make it make it To where it's like normal. So people, you know it's not this really peculiar, weird kind of group out in the West, but it's like it's your, it's your next-door neighbor, it's everybody's favorite person. You know they'll bring the cookies kind of a thing, and so he ends up getting on 60 minutes and for the you know he's the first person to do a national interview in this kind of way.

Speaker 2: 45:16

He puts this new public image out for the Latter-day Saints and you know you talked about the fundamentalist in 2000 and early 2000s is when under the banner of heaven is John crack hours under the banner of heaven comes out and I don't have any reason to defend it or to not defend it. It's not very, very good history, it? You know? It's one of those things where you start with the theses and while looking for evidence for it, and that's just not how you do good history. But he, he writes this and it's still one of them, the best-selling books, all the Mormon genre today, 20 years later, and this is coming along just as Gordon be Hinkley's trying to do this really good face for Mormonism, and then you end up having this kind of thrown back at you and about the Lafferty's and what happened in the early 80s, and it's always this kind of thing that there's.

Speaker 2: 46:03

The church is always trying to renegotiate this image. You talk, you talked about Mitt Romney and we have the Mormon moment right in 2008, again in 2012, and there's argument that there's a second Mormon movement going on in the last four years with how the the media has covered documentaries about Mormonism from everything from from things like with I I forgot his name Hoffman in the 80s and the murders in the 80s and the fordgers in the 80s, and there's documentaries about the fundamentalists and there's documentaries about people leaving the church and there's documentaries. There's documentaries about all sorts of things. And then you have people like Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park who are always talking about the Mormons. You have the Book of Mormon musical and and you have this thing to where Mormons are always feeling like they're. They want to be a part of the conversation, but they're always kind of the one who's adjacent.

Speaker 2: 46:50

It's kind of the weird guy in the community and this really does affect their politics that they. They want to be ingratiated into the political conversation. They want to be brought into a political conversation. They're trying to be more normalized, even through their the early 21st century and over the last 20 years, but things keep on happening and you know you'll get under the banner of heaven or you'll get this, and so, finally, when Mitt Romney gets in there, you know, based on his father, based on his father, he would be running against as our tax Benson Romney is not a Benson Republican in any way, shape or form, and and so you see this new face of Mormonism coming out about what they want. But then, at the same time, now there's an inner attention in the church of these Constitutionalist, these libertarians, these anarchists, and that's when they start up and that's when they start coming up and acting out.

Speaker 1: 47:39

I mean this is. This is actually an interesting division because I remember, like you know, as Ritav Benson fans, recently being really mad about the, the current Quorum of the 12 being like get your vaccine and like some people leaving the church over it, which I just found funny. But it did sort of like all of a sudden, like the tensions in in Utah politics made sense to me because Utah, outside of Gomorrah, aka, where I live, salt Lake City, is an almost entirely Republican state. Now, if it wasn't so gerrymandered, it would be like it would. It would be less Republican, but it would still probably be like 60% GOP, 70% GOP. Even without the gerrymandering it's a very Republican state.

Speaker 1: 48:31

And yet Utah has, like basically there's two kinds of Republicans here. There's Romney Republicans who have slightly more institutional power actually, and then you have I Think of them as like Trump is, but I really they're like Bundiest and and it does kind of manifest in the tensions between Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, right, like and and it's very interesting because there's a group of very conservative in some ways, but communitarian, almost, you're right Hobbesian, kind of like what we have to like, you know, model communities for these fallen people, including these Gentiles. You know, strain and, interestingly, as if you're a liberal or a leftist person, these people are actually easier to work with whereas, like on the other side, you have Like the M and Bundy's type which could take your side on Randomly, on something like I said. Like black lives matter, like M and Bundy had a weirdly pro back lives matter statement while having segregationist in his larger network.

Speaker 2: 49:39

But he lost a lot of followers with that too.

Speaker 1: 49:41

Yeah, he did. I mean he. I mean it was one of these few points where I was like we were like, oh, it's a dog whistle. I'm like, no, I think he believes it. It's just, you know, he's coming from this for a very specific way. It's. But it made it clear to me kind of the difference between Western and Southern conservatism, which was interesting and like been the the brochers are trying to deliberately wed this and in this Mormon figure and then these like neo confederate evangelical-ish figures from the South. But there's also a natural tension there because, like frankly, neo confederates do not give a crap about the Constitution. They think it's a problem.

Speaker 2: 50:17

Why, you know, it's like we're constitutionalist if we can get rid of most of it and that's not going to be something that any like doctrinaire or the other person can explicitly sign up on, even if they're kind of implicitly on it, like yeah, it's really hard to parse out, like, I think, the white Christian, because if you talked with a Latter-day Saint, it's gonna be really hard to be for them to be able to parse out and to see their own identity about this white Christian Nationalistic identity and philosophy that is grained into this philosophy. It's really really hard to see that. And what really surprises most people when I talk to them about it is that this Liberty community that that I study and that I'm building an oral history collection on is that most of them are not Trump supporters and and and and this really surprises most most people because they tend to think and it's like this dualistic way that like if they're extremists, they must be, must be Trump. Well, bundy came out with the black lives matter. He also came out in in view of open borders, like you want it open board, and so he actually talked against Trump's wall and and that lost him a lot of followers as well. Like he was writing on like all sorts of Communities supporting him and kind of one by one, he started like chopping him away with the things that he was supporting.

Speaker 2: 51:42

And you like people like really perplexed, like why are you supporting Black lives matter? Why are you supporting the open wall, you know, in the immigration? So all of these extra other extremists that that you label extremists. They look at like, well, I guess you're not our guy. And and I was actually really impressed with With Bundy when he was doing that, not because unless I agree with him, but because he is being very consistent to that ideal that, as you kind of you look at him doing what he's doing, he's a, he is following a very systematic way of doing what he's doing and acting the way that he acts and With this proper role of government kind of kind of rhetoric and and so you see, with in Utah seems to believe the effort has been sent more than.

Speaker 2: 52:27

Yeah, yeah, it's really funny because in the proper look up so it's this book actually.

Speaker 1: 52:31

I have the stack here.

Speaker 2: 52:32

I got it back here. Um, it's actually this book, it's an enemy. Have done this. This is a 1969 book. This is the book where he puts in the proper role of government speech, and you can find it online, but that's that's the famous book that came out of I'm Benson. At the end of the proper role of government, he starts talking about the government's right to tax and but he just gave this whole long philosophical treatise about how you can't force people to do things, that you can't do them yourself and that that really does just kind of shoot yourself right in the foot. That I can't is exact any money from my neighbor to for anything if we're doing this whole thing. And so Benson kind of starts to violate a little bit of his own principle right up the gate and and so there is, yeah, we start to see people who are trying to double down on Benson. It's kind of out Benson, benson and and that becomes kind of an interesting issue.

Speaker 2: 53:28

That's one of the claims that I make in my in my research is just that the Latter-day Saint discourse works within this broader American discourse and there's always been attention from the very beginning. Between the Latter-day Saint worldview and the Republican worldview. Latter-day Saints see themselves as the epitome of the constitutional Republic. The broader American Republic Disagrees, and so there's attention, and as that Tension grows and goes back and forth, there are. There's a language that changed within the Latter-day Saint community that reflected the more broader American discourse, and this happened through the beginning of the 20th century, where he started to see that they kind of started having the same conversation. Latter-day Saints wanted to become more and more, more part of the Republic, to where they felt a part of this thing as opposed to an outsider for the last 80 years, and so they, as they were, trying to get inside of it. It did change the discourse within the community, but at the same time we ended up with with Benson's rhetoric.

Speaker 2: 54:25

Now we have Latter-day Saints that are Making not the broader American discourse, their primary identity and mode of meaning, but it's really doubling down on the Latter-day discourse as the primary mode of meaning and it's really proving that and it's then is disregarding the broader, the broader American, and that's where we end up seeing people like the Lori, like the, the, the daybell situation, mm-hmm, where, if you lot looked at her, her, her court appearance and you let, and her when she was being sentenced. I've literally been in rude With Latter-day Saints who have given that exact same kind of testimony about their personal experiences you know, spiritual experiences and Other people around are like, wow, that's, you know, you must be really close to God, kind of a thing, and and it really charges the room and it gets people really on the same page. And so this, this isn't something you would expect in church, but definitely in other pockets of Of the church, in those meetings, and so they really do have this language of the church that they're using. But then they ignore the broader discourse and also in the laws don't matter the broader American norms, traditions, the rules don't matter, it's all about the discourse, that the letter st Discourse and what it can prove, the logical ends of that, and so that's what it makes sense.

Speaker 2: 55:46

When you, when you take that idea to Daybell's rhetoric, you're like, oh, I see where she's going with that she's she's not being entirely inconsistent either. 99.9% of Latter-day Saints are not going to do what she does, but Her rhetoric does fit within the latter, the framework of the Latter-day Saint Discourse. Well, I mean, there's a country. I mean, you know, look, this is for me as an outsider.

Speaker 1: 56:13

I was not raising it like you were, I just kind of live here. You can't live in Utah without having to do anything Kind of live here. You can't live in Utah without having to deal with Latter-day Saint Discourse there's no way. But I've been sort of fascinated even with, like you know, you mentioned the curse, like okay, why did they deny the priesthood to blacks? Is because the curse of Ham when does that come from, interestingly, you know, and the long history of weird religious overwrite that is a Jewish and Muslim discourse. I mean, the first time you really kind of see it mentioned is specifically the black people's. Actually, unlike Ibn Kandun and Jareer Al-Tabari, that gets kind of imported and through Rashi, into slaveholders who want to justify it specifically for black people in the south, which is how it gets into the discourse and the burnt-over district because that's a debate there and it gets picked up by Smith at the same time. Smith is an abolitionist, like so there is this like long history that you know about these weird. I mean no one in the burnt-over district has any idea that like this notion of the curse of Ham comes from Jewish and Muslim sources and that like it's a weird reading by Opportunistic evangelicals to pick up on a tradition that's kind of been dropped Everywhere else and to reincorporate it as their justification for, for specifically racialized chattel slavery. You know which. They're actually getting like Jewish and Muslim sources that's brought over through the Portuguese and then cleaned up and then made into some kind of like Protestant myth which has no Protestant doctrinal back in, but is there nonetheless right, and then that shows up in the burnt-over district and then it shows up in LDS Discourses. But there's a counter discourse and Smith himself, because he's an op, he is, like I said, kind of sort of opposed the slavery they're not consistent on that, but he, I mean he was an abolitionist, particularly in the 1840s, and that's real. So, like these are, this is a contradiction in the LDS and it's kind of a contradiction because it's a contradiction in northern American culture, like by that I mean specifically the northeast American culture at the time in which the LDS is beginning to form a concrete identity, right, like so there is a way in which the scholar, christopher lash, actually, who like really misreads LDS and Mormon discourse, like he's like oh, that's just working-class discourse of the, of like the burnt-over district of the 1840s, and I'm like that's Not, that's really, really Optimistic of you to believe that, but he I do think he's right in one sense it.

Speaker 1: 59:16

One of the things that makes LDS culture so problematic for Protestant Christians is there's, like certain Protestant beliefs that are formalized and sacralized in LDS Culture that were like folk beliefs that all their Protestants would. They don't want you to know. They believe it, except for your racist granddad. Because like, for example and you know, I come from an interracial family but one of my one of my grandparents was a pretty avowed southern racialist and I heard the Carson hand stuff from him. And Then when I discovered that the LDS had both believed it and abandoned and I was like what, why would they do that? Because there's this whole other discourse in the LDS. There's a developed theology around it with the Nephites and the Lamanites and and all that that is completely lacking in the Protestant discourse.

Speaker 1: 1:00:09

But then you sort of like you kind of retroengineer it.

Speaker 1: 1:00:12

You go like, well, they were part of this, this.

Speaker 1: 1:00:17

You know they were in dialogue with this culture and they didn't really see themselves as totally separate from it.

Speaker 1: 1:00:23

They were like you know the, the, the Smith proposition is they were like the best real version of it.

Speaker 1: 1:00:30

You know, like they didn't see themselves as breaking from Christianity. They saw themselves as like, no, we're gonna out. You know, we are just going back to the old religion, even more than the other Protestants are. You know, um, I Get that get complicated once you start going out west and you start having Polygamy doctrines and all I mean, and you start also having, even before Smith dies, split off groups like the Stringerites and all that, although they ended up polygamous anyway, which is kind of funny. Um, but these are things. These are things that I find, you know, your answer to have been some story makes interesting. I mean, to me we're talking about a completely different time period but like, in a way, it is true that the LDS culture are both a people apart and also like so very Essentially weirdo American that you can't really see them anywhere else, like, even though they're an international, very rich Religion. You know that has tons of about reach abroad, but it's so tied into the United States history that it's hard to imagine it.

Speaker 2: 1:01:35

Um, the field of Mormon studies. The field of Mormon studies is really Interesting in this regard, especially for the last 20 years 20, 30 years Because it's really brought out some really good scholarship in demonstrating the centrality that Mormonism has played in the formation of not just American religious identity but of American identity itself, and that that's really shocking for a lot of people because Mormon studies is not really something. When you go to an academic conference, you go to the American History Association or if you go to a AR Mormonism, you know the Mormon crowd is not centered to any conversation. They're always the ones you still have to kind of fight and grapple for their their seat at the table. But at the same time there's really good read, like the very first Supreme Court case that comes about religion Reynolds v United States is about the Mormons. It's about the whole con. The whole thing that sets the ball in motion of the government really starting to define religion and religious practice is dealing with the Mormons, and this is where they have to start thinking about. Well, you can believe whatever you want to believe. You just can't do whatever you want to do Right, and so this, the believed action, practice and duality that we now live by is the Mormons and a lot of the Protestant solidification and reification of their identity is made in other rising the Mormons out west. And so when you see a lot of the newspapers and a lot of the, a lot of scholars have talked about how they print and how the East viewed the people out west and they use the, the Latter-day Saints, as the antithesis of their own identity, that they were the embodiment of the thing we are not, and so it solidifies the good community out east with this evil other out west. And there's a lot of this going on as some Mormons play that role in kind of playing the antithetical, un-american role, so Americans back east can feel good about themselves, and so a lot of this is happening on multiple levels and when we have Decisions that that at the core of the nation, to find what religion is, how it's practiced, how we view it.

Speaker 2: 1:03:41

That's one of the things I do in religious studies. I Struttle to. I'm an inner field in history and religious studies and it's an interesting position to be in because you know, I get on. I get religion on one side, I get the religious history on the religious studies on the other side, but one of the thing that those scholarly works that are kind of in the middle.

Speaker 2: 1:03:58

Here we talk a lot about how the Establishment clause that's you know of the United States that talks about the government not basically making any specific state Denomination. And Because of how the government Originally conceived of itself and conceived of what this religion thing was, it never really defined it. But eventually the government had to define religion for the sake of knowing what it couldn't do, and in that way government actually became the main purveyor and enforcer of what religion is, which is Just really actually kind of funny when you, when you look at the government is like the deemed secular. And what is this? What is the secular and what is the religious? You know, these categories Overlaps so much it's almost impossible to To use these categories analytically with any analytical usefulness. But this idea of the secular being that thing which enforces and defines the category of religion in this country, and then come to find out, surprise, religion looks and awfully just like Protestant Christianity. So that whenever any other Religion comes to the United States, in order for it to gain legitimacy here, it has to change what it looks like, and what it looks ends up looking like is just a different version of Protestant Christianity and and and so Mormonism is sent to.

Speaker 2: 1:05:17

Mormonism is central to that conversation. It's it played a central role in forming and solidifying that legally and politically and culturally and and so slowly there are, but there are some there's really good scholarship about, about that that comes into it, matthew Harris that I presented with there at the conference, at the sushi conference. They he's done a lot of good work on Benson. He's he's kind of the permanent Benson scholar right now and that that kind of work is showing how much Benson's Political philosophy still affects this conversation, with how the government and religion are always Renegotiating with each other. That conversation is always, always going on and religious identity is changing, political identity is always changing and it's it's an ever-evolving conversation and yeah, so hopefully I'll be able to add my, my one, my voice and a little bit of whatever I have to say to it as I Get through school and and I get out of my way.

Speaker 1: 1:06:20

Yeah, I, one of the things that I've become very obsessed with myself, even though I, you know, I, I you know, take the hard, I used to take the hard like Post Marxist how you understand history is looking at the economics, which I still think is super important.

Speaker 1: 1:06:36

I'll get me wrong, but like, I started thinking about the concept of I'm just gonna pick race because it's come up in this conversation but like, like, if you read pre-retizan's people, there is barely a notion of race.

Speaker 1: 1:06:51

There's some, there's some metaphors, there's some other rising of Roma and Jews, but like and and you know, muhammadians, who are probably some heretical Christians, we're not sure but the idea of Race and I make this point all the time like, if you don't really see the idea of European nests until Byzantium Collapses, like New Rome falls to the, the Ottoman and Celtic church, you don't really see like blackness and white whiteness coming up, until you have to justify maintaining A slave trade with the Congolese and Arab slave traders who might have, you know, african Christians in their midst, unless you have to, like, figure that out and Thus, similarly, I think you know, interestingly, when you look at this, you didn't notice, like, well, the whole concept of religion, like a 12th century peasant, doesn't think of what he believes as a religion, like he thinks of what he believes as true, like there's no, like secular, and this is like completely, you know, not part of this worldview, even though, yes, there's a church authority that's separate from the, there's a church court that's separate from, like, the king's court, but they're both courts that I have to deal with and they're both legally binding and I have like a concept of mine as a subject of the king, not really of the nation, but specifically of the king.

Speaker 1: 1:08:27

And then I have this concept of as a I'm a subject of Christendom and, in a way, the American problem is like we further reify that because we take this whole secularization stuff and somebody's more seriously than Europe, but ironically, in doing so, we get more involved in figuring out what religion actually is. And you're right, like you know, american Protestant religious studies, I say I mean I've been traded by saying it's Protestant, but like you, look at like what William James thinks a religion is and it's like, well, this is this like very liberal Protestant thing and that's what he thinks religion is like.

Speaker 2: 1:09:05

Right.

Speaker 1: 1:09:06

Right and you're right that the LDS are crucial for this and in a way that like rhymes with Jews. But it's different because Jews are external but not really because there's been Sephardic Jews in the United States going all the way back to, like I don't know, the 16th or the 17th century. But one of the things you notice about the way like say, when Jews want to be recognized as the legitimate people who are not like a separate nation, what do they do? Well, all of a sudden the synagogues look like churches. Go back and look at the old synagogues from the 17th and 18th century. They're even in a cross shape. It's bizarre. And then they like they dress up, they don't like.

Speaker 1: 1:09:56

Yes, there's Hebrew and Ladino publications going on in the United States but it's like very on the lowdown and we're not printing it here and the public discourse is very much in the discourse of Protestantism. And Mormons are interesting. You know the burnt over district in general is interesting, but Mormons are like the Ur form of that in some ways because it forces. You know, these weird, these weird groups and the second grand awakening really do kind of shock the system, the shakers and the Millerites, and if you look at where a lot of like the weird, religious weird again, I'm defining weird from the standpoint of Protestant. I'm not even a Protestant so I don't know why I do that but because we live here, right, you still, like all Americans, are kind of crypto Protestants, whether we want to be or not, even if we're secular Jews, so like secular Jewish, buddhist or whatever, so kind of Protestant because we, it's how, everything's been fine for us.

Speaker 1: 1:11:12

There is a way in which, like Mormons in particular, become the other that is emergent from yourself, as opposed to the external. Others, like Catholics or Jews, who are kind of internal, external. Others are indigenous people, are, you know, pre-dread, you know pre and immediately post dread, scott, african traditions get incorporated. These are outsider things. We can define the clear as outsiders. You can't define Mormons as outsiders except by, like almost sovereign exception, right, because I mean, you know Joseph Smith is not an outsider to upstate New York. Like there's just no way.

Speaker 2: 1:11:52

No, he was. He followed Methodism right and really, really staunch is father's universalism. And you know it's fascinating. You go back to the 12th century. I think it's a fascinating thing to do, especially with the word religion. You know it comes back from that Roman religio and what does that mean?

Speaker 2: 1:12:08

Back then it just meant work, you know, kind of like a worship and like a following. And up and until the time when we had the formation of, when the kind of the Catholic church became the Catholic church for the first time and religion was basically the Catholic church and the Catholic church was religion. But religion took a performative thing of, just like it was the ritual thing. You had to do the ritual, you had to do the things and you had to do the things in the right way and that was the important thing. And then, when you ended up with Luther and you had to put the Reformation, that changes things, because at that point now you have, you have comparative religion now, because you have two things now to like well, well, what's this? And that's when the centrality of belief becomes important. Belief wasn't important before then, this whole like religion thing and belief wasn't central to the project. But then all of a sudden, luther comes along and now belief is central to it and Calvinism.

Speaker 2: 1:13:00

And as soon as you now have this schism where Christianity becomes something fundamentally different it's not like the Orthodox churches and they split and they kind of they agree that they're the same thing. They just we're the ones who have the right authority, but it's a fundamentally different thing. They're no longer having papal authority, they're going to soul, a scripture. They're going to this reason and rationality we can pull from the scripture. This is a whole different type of Christianity. And so now they're taking this idea of this evolving concept of religion and they trans, just like you said, they transport it here to the United States and that ends up becoming kind of the epistemic background of the noise, the coding, the codes, all of American identity. So you're right, it's like whether or not we're actually, we could be an atheist Jew and we're still kind of latent Protestants in America, just because that's how we think, that's the culture of how we think. It was coded in that way and yeah, it's fascinating.

Speaker 1: 1:14:00

I was just talking to Michael Bayesian. He was telling me the story of like this kind of secular Jewish polemicist in the in the middle 18th century and how, and I was like, well, this guy doesn't sound like a Jew, he sounds like a Puritan. And you go like, and what he says is like, well, I am a Puritan, it's not about beliefs. This is just how they argue. And I'm like I'm of the same culture and you're just like, well, that there is a way in which you know there's both a post liberal and, in my world, like even a post Marxist, like not taking the kind of feedback loop of religious culture seriously on how it redefines all these categories and how you can't really escape it, even in a very material sense. Like the West, as we understand it, yes, is shaped by you know, what are we going to do with all these soldiers who we no longer use to fighting the South? We got to send them somewhere before they accidentally get a biddy and like try to take over the government or something. Go send them after the Native Americans expand that way. Okay, yes, there's that.

Speaker 1: 1:15:09

So there's also this sense of like all these religious groups, particularly the LDS, but not just the LDS who are, like, well, we got to get out of New England because, you know, these Anglicans and Baptists and more established old people are never going to accept us.

Speaker 1: 1:15:25

We're being kind of chased out on a rail. Well, let's just go further West, like, and let's go to Mexico and like, make it America, you know, even though we're also going to make it our own country, that's. There's a lot of interesting contradictions, particularly in the Brighamite side of things, but there is this sense of which, like the LDS are particularly, are particularly American problem, because they're both a rejection of the mainstream of the American culture, like you said, but they're also a manifestation of it, like, and there's no way around that. When you look at who's settling, like Mexico, it's like a mixture of like filibusters and then religious dissenters, and then they just kind of get lucky after the Mexican American war, like it's. But even then that you like, you know Utah doesn't get incorporated into the United States for a very long time.

Speaker 1: 1:16:30

You know it was like a potential state for you know, like most of the 19th century, like, yeah, it wasn't until like 18, 1896 or something like that.

Speaker 1: 1:16:40

Yeah, and even then, like you know, I talked about one of the ironies of the United States about, about Salt Lake City, for example is, during that time period, the first Jewish mayor in America happens in Salt Lake City, and it's basically because, like, well, who, who's going to get these LDS and these Protestants to agree? Well, let's find a third group, the Jews. They'll like sit between them and everybody will not trust them. So they'll trust them, yeah, which is, you know, which is an interesting thing when you meet modern LDS people, they're very proud of, oh, like, we never persecuted Jews and, like you know, even like, look at Brigham Young, he gave the Western Jews community their first cemetery, which is true.

Speaker 1: 1:17:27

And yet, like there is this, like you kind of hinted at it, there's another side of this where, like, the LDS are also trying to spit, to fit into mainstream American Protestant culture, which has some unfortunate other side effects that you kind of have to either accept or not Like. So I find that I find it fascinating and I find I find I also, like you, came away with this reading about the Bundys and the situation around that with, like this odd respect for Amen Bundy, where I'm like, well, I think he's kind of a loon, but I also think he's a morally consistent Like like he really believed this.

Speaker 2: 1:18:18

Yeah, it's like Love Him or Hate Him. He's consistent with what he's doing and he's very open with those principles about it. It's a weird positionality. It's a weird positionality to say I disagree with this but I also kind of respected at the same time.

Speaker 1: 1:18:33

Right, yeah, and a way that I kind of like don't like. You know, from reading about Ezra Tamp Benson after, after you know, after you talked to me about your paper, like I said, I didn't actually hear it, sadly, I had to go at it I remember looking all this up and going like well, this guy's kind of a hypocrite a little bit, like the stuff with taxes and the stuff with like how you can have an army, like just doesn't doesn't actually make sense with what he said. If you actually think it through it's, you know it's kind of like it's a similar. We talked about the Lockean conservatism but there's like this similar, like well, how do you ever justify property if, like, like in the United States, if your labor is what makes it property and like, well, but the weren't the indigenous people working on it? And then you have to like come up with this weird excuse for what they did wasn't labor, like like you know it's not that, but it's close to that where it's really close to that.

Speaker 1: 1:19:36

And then you meet somebody who's like no, like we were wrong for taking it, because it was what they did was labor, and you know we're going to outlock Locke. And you know there's a way in which Edmund Bundy is, in a way, because he's so consistent, embodying the contradictions of this position. Like yeah, he's going to oppose borders because, like you can't, your neighbor can't protect borders beyond their property line.

Speaker 2: 1:20:03

Like what do?

Speaker 1: 1:20:03

you want.

Speaker 2: 1:20:04

Yeah, that's that, that's exactly right, that that is the, that's the extrapolation of that principle, right? And so when you have the Latter-day Saints and they come out to Utah, you end up seeing like, yeah, it is this Lockean thing, but also Brigham Young is, you know, it's the whole industriousness, you know to be industrious and the whole, the whole be motive, you know, in the whole industry and that's his whole thing. And so you begin to see, like this time and labor Lockean ideal that comes into this Brigham Young philosophy that ends up incorporating and redefining Mormonism in the 19th century. Where they do come in, they see the indigenous people. But the indigenous people are, are Lamanites? Right, they're in fact.

Speaker 2: 1:20:45

There's a lot of rhetoric.

Speaker 2: 1:20:47

I'm having to study because I'm writing another paper on the evolution of the secret combination discourse and how the, the church is used, this concept of secret combinations and of evil things.

Speaker 2: 1:20:58

But they often label the, the indigenous people, as the secret combinations, the Gadgettons, the people from the Book of Mormon who destroyed the Nephites.

Speaker 2: 1:21:07

And so they start seeing things in the Book of Mormon motif that God's not actually protecting them in their land, because the Book of Mormon says that God will actually take away from you your lands of possession if you're not righteous. And so there's this idea that they're coming to the, to the cursed people, and taking away from them their lands of possession, because it's prophesied in the Book of Mormon that that'll happen to the Nephites, the Lamanites, if you're not righteous. So you come in, you inhabit it, you're industrious, you mix your time and labor with it. It's now yours. And then, by the way, we have a moral obligation to go convert them, because they are actually the people of the Book that we're, we're showing to the world. That's us, and so we have an obligation to them. But then when you actually hear about the genocide that the early Latter-day Saints caused among the indigenous people on the Wasatch Front, that becomes that Well, that just that just really complicates things.

Speaker 1: 1:21:57

So yeah, I mean, you know that's up there with the Mount Meadows massacre and stuff. That's like, well, we, we, we can kind of talk about that, but like, not really. Like, like are even like when did the Dianites stop existing, though, for real? Like, yeah, for those of you who don't know, the Dianites are kind of a secret police force. Is there still an army?

Speaker 2: 1:22:25

Is there still an?

Speaker 1: 1:22:25

army. Yeah, they're kind of a Mormon mafia. Slash more like a Mormon version of the Stern gang, if you know your your Zionist history. Slash a religious enforcer group. It's really hard to actually even say what all they were, but like, yes, official, all the F said recognizes them as existing. But there's kind of a haziness about when they stop existing. Yeah, yeah, you have them.

Speaker 2: 1:22:56

You have them appear in 1835 as a way for Joseph Smith to somehow push back on the Missouri and antagonism. And they act in kind of two capacities One is as moral enforcers of the Latter Day St Community and then number two as as armies to protect the Latter Day St Community from from the Missourians. And very few Latter Day Saints actually know about how the Missourian Latter Day Saints actually caused and committed quite a bit of violence from time to time through this whole thing, and so they weren't just persecuted.

Speaker 2: 1:23:31

They weren't just persecuted, no, no, they, they were tealing out their own. And so then at that point, when it comes back to push back on Joseph Smith for all of this and the extermination order comes out in Missouri, then at that point there's all the walking back of like oh no, no, no, no, no, I didn't have anything to do with this, I didn't talk about this, it's what. I didn't have anything to do with me, you know. And so then you start walking back and all the people you're throwing under the bus are like well, what about all the conversations that we had? Well, you're excommunicated now.

Speaker 2: 1:24:00

And so, because you're excommunicated, your testimony doesn't really mean anything to our community. So you're not. What you have to say is not valid. And it's really interesting is because, even now, that the testimony of those leaders of the church that were excommunicated or left the church, or who disagreed with the daughters of Zion, or the Danites, as they're commonly known, their testimonies, are not as valid and they're not taken seriously even now, which is really interesting. So, yeah, when did the, when did the Danites actually end? Well, who knows, latter-day Saints are still having, you know, historians are still having to prove that sometimes the Danites even existed, so it's a weird place to be in.

Speaker 1: 1:24:38

Yeah, I mean, you know, to be fair to the LDS, the problem that they have is that their religious history is modern.

Speaker 2: 1:24:50

The rest of us have, like like, no one had printing presses when we started doing shenanigans, so like you know, awful must be to start a religion in the age of the internet, now, that would be the worst. So yeah, but for real though.

Speaker 1: 1:25:10

You know, it's like Colt's got eight years for someone's going to out it, like you don't even have a generation man, you got like half a decade. But yeah, I mean, but it is interesting to think about. Like I mean, one of the ironies I remember, like you know, the the Smith had a particular dialogue about Muhammad Indians himself and and and Islam, and it's. It is like you know, maybe you were more onto that than you realize like, but also onto the rest of us too. Like there is a way which, like I wonder if we like got into I'm almost certain that if we got into, like old Christian movements of which it is a you know, you know I'm of the subscriber that like, christian movements were kind of class and kind of not in their critique of empire, but they're also don't have another language, they embrace empire and you know this tension is always there and I think it's their most religious.

Speaker 1: 1:26:06

To be frank, I don't even think it's like a particularly post Christian thing. Um, I mean, try to figure out, like, what really separates Judah and Israel and from Canaanites and actual history, when we can actually do archaeology. Good luck on that, like, um, so it's, it's, uh, I don't think it's particularly unique to either LDS or Christianity, but it is sort of like, I think, one of the things that I've always got a thought like why do Protestants have this really uncomfortable relationship with the LDS? And I'm like, well, maybe it's because, like, the ingredients are too obvious, like you know, they're right there, Like it's just like, like our stunts are in the past and it's harder to prove. Thank you, have a nice day Like, like often I've had similar thoughts.

Speaker 2: 1:27:03

It is the newness of, in fact, russell M Nelson. What was it? Just a couple of years, it was. He's half the age of the church, I guess. Like, numerically speaking, it's that old and the leaders of the church are that old and it's just. It has a lot of growing up to do and growing up in a very weird time and in information technology. And, yeah, it's all of Mormonism's shared qualities with Protestantism and what Protestantism wants to decry about Mormonism. Our thing is that Protestantism does but, as you said, yeah, it's, it's a lot of that's in the past and they deal with that in the past when they didn't have all of them.

Speaker 1: 1:27:46

Yeah, like you know, like, or when they control the printing presses, like you know, you know when they're standardizing the language and inventing the nations, like it's, it's a.

Speaker 2: 1:28:01

Joseph Smith tried to do that, but he got killed for it.

Speaker 1: 1:28:04

Yeah, probably doing it late.

Speaker 2: 1:28:07

Yeah, he did it too late, that was his, that was hit, I mean it's interesting cause I think about.

Speaker 1: 1:28:14

I think about this with a lot of like descendants of burnt over district groups though, because if you think about where, like our weird American fascination, like what are the weirdo Protestants and I say this for the standpoint of, like the people that the other Protestants don't want you to look at too hard and it's not just the LD assets, it's also. It also is like the branch Davidians, the Seventh Day Adventist, to a lesser degree, to witnesses, and you keep on like looking at it and like they all start in the same place, like they all started upstate New York. It's just, it's just like, hmm, something was going on. But I do think, you know, for all the talk of like America as a Christian nation or a secular nation or whatever and I think the Mormons are interesting because it proves that both were true simultaneously, because the whole category doesn't actually really make that much sense there is a way in which, like I have found it interesting how much the burnt over district in like recounting of American history, like it's mentioned, you know, like if you take your US history class, someone's probably gonna bring it up, and then we immediately do not actually talk about it, like even though it's the source of a lot of modern American religious identity. I mean, you know, I admit, because the state technically has to arbitrate itself as a neutral party in this, so it has to be very careful about talking about this stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:29:48

But there is a way in which, like there's a whole part of American history that's just like we're just not gonna talk about that, we're just not gonna really deal with it and it's gonna keep bubbling up in the way that Ezra's have been has. This way that, like I mean, I think it's interesting in an almost kind of dialectical way, in which in some ways in the mid 20th century, mormons are behind the evangelical dialogue but today they're kind of like in charge of it, like in some ways. So you know, when I think about, like the opposition to gay marriage, the LDS were in the forefront of that. You know they're also now in the forefront of giving that up. But like it's very interesting to like think about the some of them are. Let me rephrase that Like I foresee a lot of, I foresee a lot of difficulty with schisms in certain religions future which, again, like that's not like that I haven't happened.

Speaker 2: 1:30:56

It seems very prophetic. You should start a church, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:31:02

You know, it's like whatever, what I would read, what I would read, the wars and rumors of war line, and I'm like, well, that's like predicting rain and rumors of rain, but religious groups are gonna schism. Who knew, particularly ones that are highly invested on beliefs? But it is interesting to sort of like look at that. And I do think one thing we have to do, and this is to speak to your interest in both history and religious studies, which, by the way, as a person who is neither a historian nor a religious person, but as a person trained in both literature and anthropology, I'm always like, well, aren't they really kind of the same thing? Anyway, like, how can you do religious studies about history? I don't really know.

Speaker 2: 1:31:52

Like, we argue this all the time. Like half the people in religious studies are like what is this thing we're studying? Like, really honestly, can we just stop having this conversation about, like how to define religion and just be anthropologists already?

Speaker 1: 1:32:04

Yeah, I mean I always find I always like religious studies because I'm like, aren't you guys just like kind of sort of cultural anthropologists but like have a specific subfield, and also, aren't you kind of sort of historians, if I have a specific subfield? But you know, we're totally different. Yeah, you're totally different. Well, just like, as a funny side note, I'm gonna leave this in the show to get myself in trouble.

Speaker 1: 1:32:30

I, as I mentioned to you, I'm an MFA haver and a person who was trained in literary studies and pedagogy and in anthropology, but more in literary studies and pedagogy. And I'm at the intellectual history conference and I'm asked by a scholar who I won't name, like how does it feel to write about history, to kind of like move subfields, well, education, and I sort of flippantly say, without thinking about it, well, it requires me being more rigorous in my historiography and learning Chicago, and that's really the only difference. And like, and he looked at me like I had just like shot a dog and I was just like, but like, I gave you a historiography. That's the important thing, like, like, what's wrong with me?

Speaker 2: 1:33:24

Like you know, I you know, I don't get mad that you're writing about literature.

Speaker 1: 1:33:29

Why? I mean, if we don't have history, we're gonna have to write about literature. And I'm not gonna say that I'm not gonna say that.

Speaker 2: 1:33:38

I'm not gonna say that. I mean, if we don't have historiography or Chicago, you know what are we, but what are we? More than that, I don't know I don't know.

Speaker 1: 1:33:47

I mean like I do get it if you're talking about like material, like like, if I'm dealing ancient history, like I have to be like fairly conversant and like material decay stuff and I got to know a bunch of languages and but, like you know, if you're just talking about archive work, I'm like literary scholars do archive work man, like I don't know what you Like it's not, like you're the. I mean, admittedly we got lazy in the middle of the 20th century and just started like doing theory all the time, which, which you know, we have the opposite problem in history, which is like theory allergic. And then you know we're just like, well, all we do with theory. Now let's look, let's find whatever weirdo idea died in the early 20th century and like bring it back as a theoretical framework, because that's what we do.

Speaker 2: 1:34:30

But like that's you just described every day now of my life now, where it's like I wake up in the morning as the historian who is in first theory and I go to sleep at night as the religious studies guy who's just like always engaged in theory and the duality of this life. Yeah, yeah, I understand that. I feel that deeply. I feel kind of a thing.

Speaker 1: 1:34:50

Yeah, well, I mean also as a literary, as a literary study guys, there's also kind of an amateur historian. I'm always like, well, like some of us in literature should probably like give up some of our theoretical obsessions, like we don't really have to justify everything with Lacan, and some of us in history could like do with being honest that historiography has a theoretical project. To just be honest about that, like you know it really is.

Speaker 2: 1:35:17

Nobody wants to see it, so I'll give you. There's a book we read over in one of the classes. I just finished coursework and so I'm done with coursework, of coursework, thank God, and so one of the books we read. When Jesus came, the Cornmothers went away.

Speaker 1: 1:35:31

That's a great book.

Speaker 2: 1:35:32

But he starts with citing Eliade, which is a religious studies guy out of Chicago in the 60s who basically is the guy who starts. It's kind of like the Godfather of religious studies. He's really kind of the guy who helps form it. This together and some men this together. And I forgot that I was in a history class because I spent most of my time at that point in religious studies classes talking about North American religious history. And so I'm in a history class with non-religious studies people and they don't know who Eliade is, and so that was the point.

Speaker 2: 1:36:05

We get to talk about Eliade for a little bit and all of a sudden you see these students are all historians who now they have a little bit of theory. They're like, oh, this book makes so much more sense now. And that got us on a good conversation about theory and about how every book from these historians is dripping with theory. Historians like to deny they're doing theory and it reminds me of the John Maynard Keynes quote about economists. He says people think that they have opinions beyond whatever economists, that they're free from any of this other theory, he says. But the next words out of their mouths are basically the words of some defunct, dead economists that they don't know about, and it just kind of comes into that same thing for historians. And yeah, and that's really why I like religious studies, histories from people like Hugh Urban or Joseph Laycock, because they're historians that don't mind bringing in the theory and they're not apologetic about it, and I think it's refreshing just to be honest about it.

Speaker 1: 1:37:03

Yeah, I mean, I do think that like there are slight differences between religious studies, intellectual history and anthropology, but like they're very slight, and I really honestly and sincerely don't believe that you can, if you're going to be responsible in doing any of these, that you cannot touch on them and have to, like you know. But I don't know, I don't know. I mean, you know, one of the ironies of the humanities right now is that we're all dying and we're all in denial about it. We're trying to, like pretend that we're, like you know, separate from each other and as, simultaneously, the only people who take us seriously are podcasts and weirdo conservative Christians who want to have great books, curriculums, and which is just. I actually was laughing. I was like I remember when great books, like liberal education, was like a communist plot. What happened? Like you know, but nonetheless, here we are with all of our contradictions. The Mormons aren't the only people with contradictions, my friends.

Speaker 2: 1:38:08

No, no, they're not. They're not, they're just the flavor of the week that comes around every so often.

Speaker 1: 1:38:13

Well, I mean it is. I guess it is useful to be one of the both a person out of and also a scholar of something that may actually have relevance. I mean, one of the things that I do find interesting, you know, as you talk about it, is like Mormon studies is really. It's traditionally kind of relegated to two people, mormons and ex-Mormons. Like it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like a joke about if you ever read the newspaper here in Salt Lake. You go to Deseret News or you go to the Salt Lake City Tribune and like there's a thing on tax policy and all of a sudden you got Mormons and ex-Mormons arguing about the legitimacy of Joseph Smith in the comments and you're just like I don't, you know, and as with Taft Benson actually is a way to kind of understand how that happens, because you're just like wait, why does this matter? And you're like, oh, there actually is a reason. But like two outsiders is totally like what in the world. But it is interesting because I do think in a very real sense, if you want to understand American religious history, you have to understand the Berndobert district. And understand the Berndobert district, you know, the most successful, yeah, I think the most successful I mean both in terms of membership and in terms of money church out of that movement is the various forms of the Latter-day Saints, the FLDS, the LDS, the Strangerites, the Church of Christ.

Speaker 1: 1:39:39

Although churches of Christ are confusing, there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them. It's like which one are you? One of you is actually Mormons but you've been like hiding this whole time. Right, the Church of Christ, like has been, was very before. The LDS was very much like we're just going to pretend we're Normie Protestants. We're just going to pretend we're Normie Protestants, like they've been doing that for a long time. But it's an interesting thing that we'll look at and I think you can learn a lot about the American history and the history of the West and the history of you're right extremist political movements and you know, and also kind of mainstreamifications of similar ideas by looking at the LDS Like, it becomes very clear that in some ways like a microcosm of all the branches you have in the United States.

Speaker 1: 1:40:32

You can find in LDS culture.

Speaker 2: 1:40:34

Yeah, you know you brought up the Berndobert district. You know there Whitney Cross's book, the Berndobert district is a very popular book that talks about it. Good social history. Paul Johnson's book, the Shopkeepers Millennium, kind of comes after and uses that. Those are both good social histories. The one that really comes after that. It's still the standard in American religious history. It's like the top, easily probably with the top, if not the top book, at least the top two or three is by Nathan Hatch, called the democratization of American Christianity and it is. It talks about the Berndobert district in that whole area but it also brings in, you know, some Methodists, the Baptists, the Christian churches, the Black church, and talks about Joseph Smith as well and Mormonism and Nathan Hatch. You know the book was written in the end of 1989.

Speaker 2: 1:41:18

And for those who are familiar with historiography and kind of the history of history, you know the 60s and 70s really were to the social historians who were responding to to intellectual history. Intellectual history in the first of the 20th century was really all that everybody did. It was just histories of nations. Social history was really that thing that started pushing back and realizing hey, there's a whole segment of populations that we have never talked about. It's like, apparently you need to talk about women and apparently they have a story to tell and half the population had gone virtually unnoticed. And so you end up with social histories, you end up talking with other people and other and they end up taking it. And this is the time when Marx's framework becomes very popular within the study of history, because you end up having the tension that like why haven't we talked about histories before? Why haven't we talked about these other people before? It's like, oh well, we have dynamics of power and we have positionalities and we have these things that never been discussed. And this becomes the way that religion is talked about kind of in a Marxist way. Is religions, you know, the opiate of the masses and it's a form of control and you know we get a lot of that with with kind of crossing, with Johnson and Shopkeepers Millennium. But it's Hatch's book in 89 that really turns the course of this, because it's really the first cultural history treatment of the Berndover district that was done and everything afterwards. There's not been a book that's really unseated it as the primary book of that category. They've just there's been three or four really notable books that have kind of critiqued it and then built on it.

Speaker 2: 1:42:48

And it's really fascinating to answer, because you brought up some really good points a couple of times about all of the different churches that came out of the Berndover district and all of these different flavors, that that like, why did these groups come out of this and what happened? And I think it's absolutely fascinating that we do have so many American-born denominations and so American-born iterations of this Christian thing. And and like, what does that even mean? And so when you end up having the gatekeeping Protestant Christians who are, like, well, you know, are Seventh-day Adventist's Mormon or Seventh-day Adventist Christians or Mormon's Christians or Jehovah's Witnesses' Christians, like who's Christian, who's not, who, who's to say?

Speaker 2: 1:43:32

But because they take that discourse of the dynamic of power from that's kind of written into the American legal code, then there's a sense that they have some kind of authority to speak, to be able to define the category, and yet, at the same time, nobody's asking the question why are all of these American religions popping up? Like, what made that possible? Like, like, why is that even a thing? And not only that, but it's like, why is Mormonism now the wealthiest church maybe in the world? And it's it.

Speaker 1: 1:44:10

I looked it up, so it is the. It is the second wealthiest church in the world, only because we don't know the Vatican's true holdings. Yeah, we don't know the Vatican's true holdings. And also, each diocese is technically listed separately. Okay, the church that is richer is the Greek Orthodox church, but with the Vatican and Greek Orthodox church, the reason why they're rich is not money. It's that they like have these like 2000 year old, like property holdings that you know they just kind of have, whereas, like, if you were actually to look at liquid wealth, that's the LDS, that's like by far by the LDS, by a lot. Why, and why is?

Speaker 2: 1:44:48

that I mean because we can take a max-vabrarian approach of saying that Puritanism created capitalism. Right, you know all of this, all of this, this essence of like our uncertainty before God, and then we have to somehow prove ourselves. Even though we can't prove ourselves, we're still going to prove ourselves anyway. And and in our doubt and uncertainty, creates capitalism. And so we can say that American Puritanism creates capitalism. But that doesn't answer really why the LDS church has $200 billion and why other churches don't. But yet it happened here.

Speaker 1: 1:45:25

Yeah, it is like this is a funny thing that I think even makes Protestants uncomfortable, because it's just like oh yeah, they have a lot of money. How did that happen? Also, like they're big, they're not that big. Like like there are, there are plenty of they report 17, yeah, they report 17 millionish members.

Speaker 2: 1:45:50

But depending on who you listen to, I mean there's there's a dozen people talking about what's the actual percentage. So I've heard as low as maybe four to five million are active, actual active participating members out of 17,. Because we know that they count on their demographic sheets that if you were a child and you're baptized and then you never went back to church, that they will count you as an, as a member in that 17 million mark until, on record, you are 110 years old and even if they don't know if you've died or not, they'll still count you as a member. And those, those statistics are inflated about how many people there actually are. But out of 5 million, 6 million, even 7 million, let's say half of them, let's say half of the population, shows up $200 billion. That's pretty impressive, I mean that's.

Speaker 1: 1:46:40

I can't imagine we're going to actually pay Tive.

Speaker 2: 1:46:45

I mean, I guess, is that it?

Speaker 1: 1:46:50

No, I mean there's also reinvestments. I mean, like, like I do, actually there are. There are repercussions for not paying tives in in the LDS church which there aren't in other churches, but but I know I actually it is fascinating to look at because I have been like, how did they? What did they? How did they invest that? Well, like it's just like. The Catholics don't do that. Like, yes, they have a ton of money, but like they're not. Like liquidating Michelangelo's to invest it. Like it is, it is an interesting and very particularly American problem and yet, like so there's that. And and the other irony that I was kind of thinking about, as you were mentioning, like the, the gatekeeping of who counts after the burnover district, I'm like all of a sudden, the Protestants became Catholics and started really caring about the nice ingreed, including ones that historically don't like Baptist. Like it's just Like. Because it is funny whenever, like, I meet someone from the LDS who's like I didn't realize that people in this often think we're Christians, I'm like, no, they don't. Also don't think Catholics are Christians, but they really don't think you are. They think you're like bacon's or something I don't know. Like and like yeah, I didn't realize they wouldn't let us into the Christian school. I'm like, yeah, they don't like you. Like, like there might be politically aligned with you, but like it's out of desperation, my friend, like I think, as a kind of note, the end off of it is interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:48:41

I was Thank you about your, your turn, about cultural history. You know, as I said, like you know, I have a very socialist orientation but like I had to complicate, like Wilger, Like vulgar Marxist historiography would dealing with social reproduction and going like well, this is not all about Just power, like it isn't. There's something else going on here that is not just cynical manipulation. Yes, we've left out the power relations in the past and, like you know, like the trusting narratives of of religion, and that was bad. But there's also a way in which, like community survival, social reproduction and all this stuff is very much tied into this in a way that isn't just cynical, like there's cynical parts of it, absolutely, I'm particularly we're talking about someone like Smith or Brigham Young. But there's also non cynical parts of it.

Speaker 1: 1:49:30

And you know, I think one of the things about the LDS and ironically, weirdly and kind of bizarrely, I think South Park of all places kind of got onto this is like well, it's, you know, yes, it's.

Speaker 1: 1:49:47

Yes, all the the warts are are obvious and you know the see your stone stuff and the gold plates and it's a little bit like easy to make fun of. But also you're kind of a bigot for doing that because, like I said earlier, it, like this, applies to almost all the religions that you come across with and even some of the frankly secular movements. Whatever secular movement means that you come across with, to like there's always shenanigans and bullshit and and and pseudo epistemology info applications of of this and sectarianism. I mean, you know, as a person coming out of the left, like we know about sectarianism, like it's something we're probably better at than even Christians. So like it's, it is, it is, it is something to kind of have to deal with and I don't think you can simply just wipe it away. But oh, it's just power relations, like I don't think it's that at all.

Speaker 2: 1:50:41

Yeah, and, and that's really why I personally situate myself in a conversation between intellectual history and cultural history. Historically, I I've studied the history of ideas and I'm my undergradors in philosophy of the way you and, and so it's really that kind of that History philosophy.

Speaker 1: 1:50:58

Yeah, yeah, no, I got interested in anthropology because I dropped out of a philosophy degree. It seemed close when I was building. I was. I was actually. This would be my last comment and I will wrap up the show.

Speaker 1: 1:51:19

But like I was actually recently taking a group of high school students from a public school which is bizarre in and of itself, I don't want to get into, like the, the, the, the weird paradoxes I felt as an agent of the state Taking, taking kids to different schools in Utah and we went to BYU and I was both horrified and impressed simultaneously. It'll do that with with BYU culture, because I've been to many religious campuses in my my life, you know, even like Liberty University and stuff like that, and one of the things that I was interested in about BYU culture is while it is Secularizing, while it has like its own form of DEI that it calls something else because that's too liberal, but we have the same thing anyway. And while there's plenty of people like I know all the professors in the literature department and they're all basically heathens, except for the fantasy writers, but but yeah, it was interesting where you're like, oh, I feel like this is what Brandeis would have been like for Jews or Notre Dame would have been like for Catholics in the 60s, like. This is a really like. It's approaching secular culture, it's engaging with secular culture, it is definitely it's got secular professors in it and stuff like that, even though they have to like kind of stay chill with the LDS and you have to, but at the same time it does have a culture. That is a part and you feel it the moment you step on campus and that's not true for a lot of Protestant Christianity Today. Like if I was to go to, I actually did. I almost went to Mercer several times actually and I've been to Mercer campus all the time and you know, yes, they've less than seven Comanches Baptist convention now and they're like mainstream Baptist or whatever.

Speaker 1: 1:53:11

For those of you who don't follow the weird associations of minor, you know tiered colleges I mean important but not huge colleges in the South Yet there's nothing about Mercer culture that feels religious, even though it is a religious school, even though you have to do religious studies classes, like it doesn't feel religious. Be what you still does Like, and that's that's an interesting thing about what I think if you're gonna study, if you're a religious studies person in the US like and you don't want to study, like you know, marginal weirdo post boomer religions like American there, about a Buddhism or something. You're gonna want to study something like LDS, because you can learn a lot probably about Prior religious cultures and it's in its conversation with mainstream Modernity from it in ways that you can't for exactly any of any evangelical culture today, like one of the things that I point out. You know, like, oh, all the evangelical, all the white, oh, let me rephrase that all the white evangelicals are. Trump is now and I'm like that's because they've lost their own culture, like they don't have their own. That like Like, yes, christian nationalism has always been around and it's always gonna be like there's gonna be something like it, probably forever, even that Christian. But like Like there's something very specifically Weirdly about and I'm not gonna say secular something very Declinist about evangelical religion. That happened very fast when it Like, when you see it go from like kind of its own thing in the 90s and the early odds to like we just do what Trump says and that's what we believe, even though some of it's blatantly in contradiction with our own values in history.

Speaker 1: 1:54:54

And the LDS, interestingly, and these subgroups like we were talking about, like you know, these Bensonites. They actually are apart sincerely, so I Just tells you where they're at religiously now. Are they gonna stay white night that way? Who knows? It does feel like there's a lot of ex Mormons lately Maybe. I live in Utah and I live in the mora, which you know. The history of Salt Lake is quite funny because majority LDS until very recently and now it's only like 30% LDS, like yeah, and when you go to Utah County which for those of you who aren't used to the, to the political geography of Utah, that is, the urban but conservative side of the state, it feels very different. But even that I'm hearing is less and less actually LDS all the time, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:55:51

So yeah, all the Latter-day Saints centers are are definitely losing, losing ground that way, and self identity. It's really hard to gauge right now what the, the percentage of people who are resigning. I mean there's a mass exodus out of organized religion anyway, but there's a very specific brand of that going on with within the Latter-day Saint culture. But for those who are interested in, in, in Mormon studies and in any kind of religious history, if you're like looking for something to pick and there is a lot to get to glean from and there's a lot of good scholarship it's really weird because Mormon studies the fact that there's there's even a Mormon studies category and you won't have like a Jehovah's Witness category or something Adventist category of this with this way. But it's been said that Mormonism doesn't have a formal theology. It has a history that it treats like a theology. Hmm, and so because of that it's it's it's steeped in this really rich historiographical Narrative of itself and about how it's evolved.

Speaker 2: 1:56:50

I find the historiography of Mormon studies fascinating In how that tracks with the, with the academic community writ large but the, but how it's actually coming about now. In the last 20 years it used to be that up until about 2000 or so well. 1993 to 2000 it was that all of the scholars, of the Mormon scholars doing Mormon history we're doing church history and is from a scholarly perspective they were documenting the history of the church from a scholarly perspective. That changed about 20 years ago. So now you have scholars that are talking about more theory and they're using Mormonism as a case study. So it's no longer church history, it's it's talking about Mormonism as this Entity that's affecting change and being affected by change, and it's really produced some, some really really great scholarship. So if anybody's interested, definitely check it out. There's, there's good stuff there.

Speaker 1: 1:57:50

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm gonna ask you to do two recommendations. I don't normally ask this first one. Can you recommend some books that people who are completely unfamiliar to Mormon studies and don't know anything that we've been talking about I've been confused for the last few hours Can read? And then, where can people find your word?

Speaker 2: 1:58:10

Okay, so the yeah, a couple books to read on Mormon studies. So Jan ships writes really the first non. She's a non-matterty saint who writes really the first treatment of Mormonism in a scholarly way. It's the late 80s and so her book on on Mormonism and For those want to know more about Joseph Smith, richard Bushman is still kind of the standard for a history of of Of that, and so check out Richard Bushman's, his books called rough stone rolling.

Speaker 2: 1:58:37

There's a brand new book out last year by Kate Mormon, or Kate Mormon, her last name. It's fascinating. She was actually at the conference she she read for for our panel, but it is MOHR, man is her last name and she she grew up in In Utah but she wasn't Latter-day Saint and so Was phonetically Mormon. But anyway, it's. It's a funny story I'm, and her book is in fact I have it right here it's. It's called exceptionally queer, except you can't really tell her there, but yeah, exceptionally queer. This talks about Mormon peculiarity and US nationalism and she uses Queer theory to be able to talk about this, this, this conversation between Mormon identity and peculiarity and American exceptionalism and how those reified and how they renegotiated with each other. Using quirk, it's a. It's a brilliant book. Absolutely, absolutely Love this book. So so check, definitely check that out. And, yeah, over over the next little bit, I I would highly suggest anybody who's interested in in the stuff we do at Claremont. You can check out the Claremont Graduate University Mormon Studies page.

Speaker 2: 1:59:52

There's a growing, a growing collection of oral histories, which is where all of my works going on.

Speaker 2: 1:59:57

It's gonna be a while before I release my, my, my collection, but we'll have. We'll have anywhere between 100 150 oral histories for the Liberty community, for for this group that we're talking about, of people who, who self-identify as libertarians, anarchists, constitutionalists, scousonites, king of Goddard's, preppers, militiamen, those kinds of people and People in the communities with them and Monday and all those people about how they're negotiating their identity, how they perceive themselves as Latter-day Saints and how they negotiate these political philosophies. So, like I said, I'm right in between intellectual history and cultural history, it's like where do these ideas come from and then how? What's the lived experience about how people are Representing those ideas and finding identity and meaning from it in a in a discursive way, and so we'll be releasing that. But currently there's a growing, a growing podcast, a growing oral history with an attached podcast at Claremont graduate university and on the Mormon studies page that you can Google that talks about global Mormon Experiences and and those are great, so check those out.

Speaker 1: 2:00:57

All right, thank you so much and have a good rest of your evening.