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News Release —  20 July 2007

Elder Oaks Interview Transcript from PBS Documentary

Salt Lake City — 

The following is an edited transcript from the interview Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles — the second highest governing body of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — gave for the PBS documentary The Mormons :

Helen Whitney (HW): Could you just tell me a little about the grandmother running in to get the pewter as a self-contained story.

Dallin H. Oaks (DHO): Every fourth- or fifth-generation Mormon grows up with stories of their pioneer ancestors. I remember stories of burnings of homes and the expulsion from homes, the risking of life and sometimes the loss of life. That was part of my growing up as a Latter-day Saint boy. In fact, I have nothing but pioneer ancestors on either side of my ancestry. The last ancestor to join the Church joined in the 1850s and some joined as early as 1831 and 1832.

One of the stories that I grew up with that means a lot to me involves that period after Joseph Smith was murdered, when the mobs were trying to force Mormons to flee Illinois. And in that setting, several ancestors had their homes burned by mobs. A particularly poignant experience of my great-grandmother, 6-year-old Louisa Hall, later Louisa Hall Harris, tells how she and her mother fled into a cornfield as a mob burned their home. Then, as they hid in the cornfield, her mother dashed back into the burning home and told her daughter later that she had gone back to get a pewter pitcher. She said, “I’m not gonna leave that there for them to melt into bullets to kill us with!”

HW: What do you take from that story?

DHO: This kind of experience is an example of dedication and an example of the faith of my ancestors that challenges me to live up to that in faith and dedication.

HW: From your testimony of this, you made it very clear that you felt that no other American group ever endured anything comparable to the officially sanctioned persecution posed on members of your church. If you could just discuss that briefly, I think most people are totally unaware of this story — totally, completely — this is virgin territory for most of the secular audience that is going to be watching this film.

DHO: Religious persecution has been a fact of the American experience. Jews, Catholics, other groups have experienced this, and Mormons experienced that too. But in every case that I’m aware of, that persecution came from neighbors. But in the case of the Mormons, unique to that circumstance is the fact that the persecution of the Mormons was officially sanctioned by at least two different state governments. The governor of Missouri activated militia units and issued an order that the Mormons should be driven from the state or exterminated if they could not succeed in driving them out. Later, the governor of the state of Illinois activated militia units, and those militia units had united to drive the Mormons from the state. They protected those who were burning the Mormon homes, and they brought the official power of the government in the form of militia — military action to drive the Mormons out of Nauvoo. Earlier, a disbanded Illinois militia unit murdered the Prophet Joseph Smith.

HW: A range of people [Richard Bushman, Jan Shipps and others] talk about the varying reasons — not justifications — for why the Mormons were perceived as a threat. When I interviewed Richard Bushman, off-camera he said, “When I come to the end of all those explanations, there’s a mysterious other layer I can’t quite get to, can’t wrap my arms around, about why the Mormons were so feared and hated” in that period. Do you, in the end, come against a mystery when you look at the reasons for the persecution? Or does it seem comprehensible, looking at the 19th century at that point?

DHO: I think the persecution of the Mormons is largely comprehensible by the factors that existed at that time, but not entirely. There is an element in the fervency and persistency of it that is hard to explain on rational grounds.

On rational grounds, this was a new religion with at least two elements that were hard to digest in the religious community of that time. The nature of God and the claim of revelation, or prophetic leadership, together with the fact that that opened the canon of the Bible (so it seemed to be hostile to the Bible) — those are factors that would excite religious prejudice and persecution.

Easier for me to understand in the Nauvoo and Utah periods is the commercial rivalry. The Saints were a self-contained group; they didn’t trade with others. They were a commercial threat. It hasn’t been written about as much by the historians as I think it should be. In the Utah period, this is very well known and well understood. In the Nauvoo period, it is less well known. But I think the traffic on the Mississippi River helps to explain, because there were rapids right near Nauvoo, the Des Moines rapids, which at low water prevented shipping from going from the upper Mississippi to the lower Mississippi. There was a lot of freight, including the lead from the Galena, Illinois, mines. You had to transship in low water. That meant hiring wagons and drivers and horses and so on. And the transshipment traffic would be commercially very significant. It could be located in Nauvoo, at the upper part of the Des Moines rapids, or the commercial center could be in Warsaw, the lower part of the Des Moines rapids. The Mormons were competing with the people from Warsaw. Significantly it was a militia unit from Warsaw that murdered Joseph Smith. The anti-Mormonism of that time was focused strongly in Warsaw, where Thomas Sharp had a defamatory newspaper. So I’ve always felt that commercial rivalries were a very important part of that.

One of the major reasons for conflict between the Mormons and their neighbors was political rivalry — the fear that the Mormons would vote as a block as their leaders told them to. I see that factor beginning in Kirtland. It comes to focus sharply in the Missouri conflicts. It’s a very large factor in Nauvoo, in the expulsion from Illinois, and it was a major concern all through the Utah period. It culminated in the compromise that was worked out in connection with the seating of Senator Smoot after the turn of the century.

HW: And what about this “mysterious other layer?” Did you ever reflect on that or did you take those factors that you’ve spoken about to explain it?

DHO: I have a religious explanation for it. It’s unlike the other, which can be quantified in objective terms. I just think that this is the work of the Lord. The devil opposes it and moves people to oppose it by whatever means possible and on whatever grounds will pass muster in the court of public opinion. I think the fervency may come from this.

After you talk about all of the objective reasons for this persecution, there is still another layer necessary to explain the persistence of it and the fervency of it. I have to fall back on my belief that in this world there is good and there is evil. And some of the things that I see happening in the world like the Holocaust are only explainable by a manifest evil force, and I think some of that evil force was at work against the Mormons in this period.

HW: The question of religious freedom that we were addressing: I guess my question is, everybody has a different take on this. When the supreme courts finally weighed in and defined religious freedom and boundaries of it in relation to the Mormons, do you feel then that the Supreme Court ruling was overreaching, flawed or inappropriate, given the situation? There’s a range of opinions, as you well know as a Mormon and as a scholar of religious freedom and as a legal mind.

DHO: I am of two minds on whether the Reynolds case overreached the proper bounds of religious freedom. On one hand it was a terribly prejudiced ruling and as a result of it, some of my relatives went to prison, and I can’t ignore hostility to the ruling for that reason.

On the other hand, it was a development in formulating how religious organizations would relate to government, putting limits on how far religious practice could be permitted to go. And there have to be some limits to religious practice, even though it’s based on belief that is protected by the Constitution. There have to be limits on practice, and the Reynolds case was a first cut at putting limits on religious freedom, and those limits had to be placed. While you can argue with where the limits are placed — and they’ve been adjusted for more than a century since that ruling — it was a legitimate thing for the government to try to define them.

HW: In two or three sentences, please recap what that case was about. It was a really important case.

DHO: Well, if I can speak roughly, in the Reynolds case, you have a man who had married more than one wife — a violation of federal law which was enacted deliberately to prevent Mormons who lived in the United States territory from pursuing their religious practice of having more than one wife. And he was prosecuted and sentenced to prison for a violation of that law. And in the Reynolds case, the constitutionality of the law was challenged on the basis that religious freedom guaranteed the right to practice plural marriage.

HW: I asked a legal scholar about the repercussions of that case, and she said something very interesting, that it was like Protestant America is going after the Mormons and polygamy and thinking, “Do we want the government involved because it’ll set those limits that are our limits.” She said, “What we learn from those polygamy cases was that the Constitution protects the freedom of belief but not necessarily the freedom to act. And as the 20th century progressed and as believers began to feel themselves the new secularism biting at their heels, and to learn to live by rules that they themselves had opposed on amendments …”

DHO: That’s the limit.

HW: I’m all over the place right now. I don’t need a comment on it, but a quote by Jan Shipps (who’s one of the consultants on the show, early on the show about Joseph Smith and revelation), she says, and I’m sure you’re well aware of this quote, that “the only way you can solve the mystery of Mormonism is by coming to understand the enigma at its core. In the end, that mystery lies in Joseph Smith. He is the endlessly fascinating prophet puzzler.” What made him so puzzling and why was he in his time so controversial?

DHO: Joseph Smith was puzzling to those around him because they could not explain what he was doing or why he was doing it. He was an uneducated, uncultured [man], unconnected to any powers that be, who was organizing a church and telling people that God had spoken to him and told him that all of the churches of that day fell short and that the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ had to be restored and along with it the authority to act in God’s name in performing ordinances that would be binding in eternity. That position of Joseph Smith was a threat to every Christian religious faith in the American continent. I don’t think it was perceived by non-Christians to be a threat, but it was to them too, if they had thought about it. He challenged the whole religious establishment of his day, and he did it from a point of obscurity, without an education, or prominence, or position, or power or property.

HW: What were those bold ideas that got people really nervous?

DHO: At the root of Joseph Smith’s mission and claims is revelation from God, in the same sense that God spoke to Moses or to other prophets of the Old Testament, in the same sense that God spoke to and through the Twelve Apostles of Christ’s time and those who succeeded Him. Revelation from God to man, which the Christian world generally said ceased with the apostles at the time of Christ, and which Joseph Smith affirmed continued in our day, is at the root of Joseph Smith’s mission and his claim to the world.

HW: Would you agree the other huge idea is an embodied God?

DHO: The first revelation received by Joseph Smith was the appearance to him of the Father and the Son — embodied, separate, identifiable, tangible Beings who appeared to him in what we refer to as the First Vision. And that first revelation, concerning the nature of God as an embodied, glorified, resurrected Being, challenged the creeds of Christianity. Christianity describes God as a disembodied, incomprehensible, spiritual entity that fills the whole universe, and an indistinguishable Father and Son.

HW: A big idea! Any other idea that was startling and got people’s attention?

DHO: Before the close of his ministry, in Illinois, Joseph Smith put together the significance of what he had taught about the nature of God and the nature and destiny of man. He preached a great sermon not long before he was murdered that God was a glorified Man, glorified beyond our comprehension, (still incomprehensible in many ways), but a glorified, resurrected, physical Being, and it is the destiny of His children upon this earth, upon the conditions He has proscribed, to grow into that status themselves. That was a big idea, a challenging idea. It followed from the First Vision, and it was taught by Joseph Smith, and it is the explanation of many things that Mormons do — the whole theology of Mormonism.

HW: Is it the core of it?

DHO: That is the purpose of the life of men and women on this earth: to pursue their eternal destiny. Eternal means Godlike and to become like God. One of the succeeding prophets said: “As man is, God once was. And as God is, man may become.” That is an extremely challenging idea. We don’t understand, we’re not able to understand, all [about] how it comes to pass or what is at its origin, but it explains the purpose of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is to put people’s feet on the pathway to a glorified existence in the life to come that is incomprehensible, but far closer to God than the Christian world generally perceives.

We have the idea of heaven and hell, of course. Hell is a place where people go that have not done well in keeping God’s commandments. But even that is a kingdom of glory. After people have suffered for their sins, God has a place for them as His children, which is a kingdom of glory. And then the people who are good and honorable people go to a higher kingdom, likened in the scriptures to the glory of the moon in contrast to the glory of the stars for the first group.

Then there’s a third kingdom, which so little is known of that the Mormons are unique in speaking about it. It’s the celestial kingdom, where God and His Son, Jesus Christ, dwell. And the purpose of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the purpose of the ordinance of baptism, the purpose of the commandments and the purpose of the temple and its ordinances, is to qualify people for that celestial kingdom.

HW: Joseph, the man. I’ve read so much about him, talked to people who spent their lives looking at him. He’s clearly a man who is human and rich in contradictions and layered, and a man when he’s a man and a prophet when he’s a prophet. How do you see Joseph the man, and what do you perceive as his contradictions?

DHO: I begin by trying to imagine a 14-year-old boy having the vision that he had and then having a period of three or four years where he pondered what it meant, tried to grow up, and then having put upon him in his teen years the responsibility of beginning to translate the Book of Mormon and to organize a church. I think of the physical and emotional and spiritual immaturity of this young man. And so I cut a lot of slack for immature actions, incomplete understandings in the early years of this fledgling prophet. As he grows older, I marvel at what a quick study he is, how quickly he learns how to do the common things of relating to people, trying to earn a living for his family, making an organization, and defining positions and judging associates and delegating authority. I am amazed at every stage of his development. As I said, I cut him a lot of slack for what I would consider to be mistakes of immaturity or inexperience. I don’t see any moral deviations in this man. I don’t feel to apologize. People have charged him with things, but I think the record and the reliability of accusations that are made against him is questionable on the available evidence. So I exercise all doubts upon conflicting evidence in favor of the man who did what he did, who must’ve been a pure vessel for God to do so much through him.

HW: Joseph’s death (I’ve asked very few people to recount the events of the death). I sense it’s a powerful moment for you. I have some questions about it. I’d love it if you could just briefly tell the events leading up to his death. This is a powerful story. The night of his death he was with his friends.

DHO: The week that culminated in Joseph Smith’s death was a time of great stress for the Mormons in the city of Nauvoo. The governor had activated militia units; they were threatening to march on Nauvoo, and war, great loss of life, was in prospect. The Prophet Joseph Smith was seeking ways to take the steam out of this kettle. He agreed to surrender himself at the county seat of Carthage, some 20 miles from Nauvoo. He knew that his life would be in danger by doing that. His friends counseled him not to do it. He did it nevertheless in order to save his people. He surrendered himself on a charge of riot for the destruction of an opposition newspaper in Nauvoo. That was a relatively trivial charge, and he immediately had a hearing and was discharged. But in order to keep him in custody, the enemies charged him with treason, which was not a bailable offense so that the charge of treason, however frivolous it was, kept him in confinement.

While he was in the Carthage Jail for several days, plans were laid to murder him. The governor, whether he was part of the plan or not, facilitated the plan by discharging from state discipline the Warsaw militia. They were close enough to Carthage that when they were discharged from military discipline they simply took their militia arms and put their wet hands in a powder keg, blackening their faces so that it would make it difficult to recognize them, and went to Carthage. Some 100-plus stormed the jail and murdered Joseph Smith. Their leaders were subsequently charged but acquitted of the crime. Later, their counsel argued that the jury should not convict them because they had simply done what the people wanted them to do, and the people were sovereign. It was an argument later used in civil rights cases in the southern United States, in circumstances better known to this audience, but it originated in what an associate and I call “the Carthage Conspiracy.”

HW: Any details of his last hours?

DHO: He was in jail with his brother Hyrum with several other leaders of the Church. It’s hot in Illinois late in June. They were in a second-floor cell, more of a room than a cell. They had forebodings of death, and it was a very poignant time for men who, I think, assumed that their death was imminent. At one point in the afternoon Joseph asked associate John Taylor to sing the song “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief,” which is a ballad that tells of a person who encounters people in various extreme circumstances, starving or in jail or in persecution, who ministers to their needs and then later in a vision realizes that he’s ministered to the Savior Himself. And He said unto him, “Fear not, if ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me,” an essential biblical message. It’s a poignant kind of story and a fitting conclusion to a life of service in ministering to the needs of people in extreme circumstances and an affirmation that he had the benediction of his Savior on his life. 

HW: Contrary to a range of people’s views about the destruction of that press, you’ve felt strongly Joseph was well within his rights to destroy that press. 

DHO: A triggering circumstance that led to the death of Joseph Smith was the so-called riot in the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor. It was the charge of riot that took him to Carthage. The Nauvoo Expositor was a newspaper that published only one issue. It was published in Nauvoo by disaffected Mormons and enemies of Joseph Smith. It made a lot of charges that were very inflammatory about sexual behavior, about political repression, a variety of things. The city council of Nauvoo was very concerned about that press and felt that it would raise mobs to come to Nauvoo and destroy the city and murder the inhabitants. They, as government officials, had a very legitimate concern. They debated what to do about it. They read Blackstone, which was a major source of law on the frontier. In Blackstone’s commentaries on law, it says that the government officials had authority to destroy a nuisance. And they felt that the press was a nuisance. After two days of debate (this was not a sudden thing, and opposition was heard in the council), they finally decided to abate, which is to destroy, a nuisance. 

A nuisance is something like a stinking carcass or a chemical spill, something of this sort that poses a danger to the health and welfare of society. They gave an order to the city marshal to abate the nuisance. He went out and took the press and removed the type and threw it to the four winds, and destroyed the remaining copies, though there were many of them circulated. That was the suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor. I’ll now talk about the legal side of it.

Mormons have generally apologized — including official Mormon historians — for the destruction of the newspaper, deeming it an interference with freedom of the press, a sacred American Constitutional right. The problem with that, I found as I researched this according to the law of Illinois and the United States in 1844 (the year this took place), was that the freedom of the press in the First Amendment did not apply to state action or to city action at that period. It only came to apply to state action or city action by the amendments adopted after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment, and it was so declared by the United States Supreme Court in the 1930s in a 5-4 decision. Well, if it took the United States Supreme Court 100 years to declare that the freedom of the press protected the press against city or state action, [I can easily sympathize with] the people that struggled with that issue in 1844 in Illinois, a time when history shows us a lot of newspapers were destroyed on the frontier, mostly along abolitionist issues, pro-slavery or anti-slavery. It seems to me like it’s pretty extreme to say that Joseph Smith and his associates were violating the freedom of the press by what they did. They debated for two days, they fell back on Blackstone, they had no other precedents, and they thought it was legitimate to abate a nuisance, including a newspaper that they thought could bring death and destruction upon their city. 

It’s hard for us to imagine [sympathy] today, but I don’t think it’s fair to judge the 1844 city officials — including Joseph Smith — by our refined notions of law and public policy in this day. 

HW: Leaving legality aside, was it wise for him to do that? It led directly to his death. 

DHO: It’s hard to judge the wisdom of what he did without being in the circumstances he was in without the benefit of the hindsight. I assume he didn’t know it would lead directly to his death. I assume that before him was the possibility that mobs and militia would, as a result of the newspaper, come into Nauvoo and many would die, perhaps including him, but he was concerned about his people. And so it’s hard for us with the benefit of hindsight to make a clear judgment on what he should have done with the circumstances visible to him. 

HW: I’ve been struck with how absolute certain claims are and that there is no middle ground seemingly. Why does it seem to be no middle ground? Why is it either/or? What is that either/or situation and what do you feel about that?           

DHO: Now you’ve asked me a very important question. Ironically, I think it has a very simple answer. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot be just another church. We cannot be wishy-washy about our mission or our place in the world because we are a restoration of the true gospel of Jesus Christ, and if a restoration were not necessary we would have no reason to be. If we are not true to the claims of the Restoration, we have no reason for being. 

HW: What is the question then, the either/or, for people? 

DHO: If the Father and the Son did not appear to Joseph Smith, he was not called as a prophet to restore the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If Peter, James and John did not appear to restore the Melchizedek Priesthood, then the authority to perform the ordinances that define the uniqueness of this Church is not in this Church. There’s no room to say ”perhaps” or [to use] metaphor in that circumstance. 

HW: Resurrection — for some it became more of a central truth than a literal one. 

DHO: Sure, but you see, that’s a position [non-literal resurrection] that people who believe in the God they believe in have to have that position, because how do you get from the literal, resurrected Christ to the spirit essence that defines God in their minds? For us, that’s not an issue. We believe in a literal resurrection and a continued embodied identity of the Father and the Son. And that’s why the First Vision is so fundamental to us. 

HW: Take that thought once again. The stories must be believed in the physical entirety. It’s a bold idea, and that’s what gives strength. It’s perilous as well. 

DHO: The First Vision is something we take on faith because of the witness who has spoken of it. The Book of Mormon is something you can hold in your hand. It came from somewhere; it is not imaginary. It is there. Where did it come from and what is it? We put that forth to the world as a second witness of Jesus Christ, affirming that Christ is the Being we worship. He is our Savior. This is the second witness, given in our day, and we say, “We believe this book literally, and we believe that it shows that he who brought it forth was a prophet, just as the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy show that Moses, who brought them forth, was a prophet.” 

HW: Job, arguably, for me, is the most profound scripture ever written. Some say that none of [the book’s] truths are undermined that there may not have been a Job. Why is it all right to believe in that in a metaphorical, middle-ground way, but not your story? 

DHO: The book of Job is one of the books of the Old Testament. I do not know which prophet brought it forth. We know that Moses brought forth what’s called the Pentateuch, and it is part of the great religious tradition of Judaism and Christianity. The book of Job I cut quite a bit of slack in where that came from and how literal one takes it because its povenance is quite different than the provenance of the first five books of the Old Testament. The first five books of the Old Testament I give as an example like the New Testament. We know their provenance. Subject to a lot of questions we’d like to have answered, we know who wrote the book of Luke, and who wrote John, and Paul wrote his letters, and so on — a lot about their provenance. They originate with prophets; so did the Pentateuch, so did the Book of Mormon. They’re on the same footing. 

HW: There’s so much in biblical studies right now about what we don’t know. I think Mormons’ faith is tied to certain events. While some vulnerability is possibly felt with other faiths, that’s not the case with Mormons. 

DHO: We see some things as metaphorical. Clearly there’s some metaphorical expressions that have been used by prophets. And that’s a continuing struggle to know what is metaphorical (like the four corners of the earth — that’s a scriptural expression, I take as metaphorical) and what is literal. That’s on a continuum. I think it’s clear that Latter-day Saints consider that the index is very close to the literal side. It doesn’t exclude some metaphors, but it’s much closer to the literal side with respect to scriptures than many Christians or Jews read those same scriptures. 

HW: What would you say to faithful, liberal (in the absence of a better word) Mormons who are searching for “the middle way” to look at the Book of Mormon as an inspired text with profound spiritual meaning? 

DHO: To people who have a hard time with the literal claims of scripture, I would say: “Keep your life in balance between reliance on history, so-called, or geology or science, so-called, and reliance on spiritual witnesses and the testimony of the Holy Ghost. There are two ways to truth: science and revelation. If you find things that trouble you, don’t dismiss the spiritual explanation and hold with the scientific one. Keep your life in balance by continuing to do the things necessary to keep open the channels of communication to heaven as well as to scholarly journals.” 

HW: Describe what that middle way or middle ground is. 

DHO: It’s hard for me to define a middle ground because I don’t believe in a middle ground when it comes to morality. I don’t believe in situational ethics. I believe that truth is a knowledge of things as they are. I think we’re dealing with religious truth, and I don’t think that religious truth can be understood by scientific methods. 

Whenever science dilutes a religious truth or the revelation of God, it demeans it. While I understand the sincerity of those who are looking for a middle way, I think that God has the final answer on the purpose of life. He has the final answer on what is right and wrong. I don’t think there’s a middle way. I think that science and scholarship can lead us toward truth, but I think that people in the end must be willing to surrender their best judgment to revelation from God. 

HW: Could you use the middle way, though, in terms of the approach, let’s say the Book of Mormon? Is there a middle way? 

DHO: I don’t know what kind of middle way there could be on the Book of Mormon. Either it is a translation of an ancient record under the gift and power of God, or it was written by a mortal. What’s the middle way on that? I don’t think there is a middle way. I think where it came from is either this or that. It’s either what it claimed to be or somebody wrote it. If somebody else wrote it, we don’t have a scrap of evidence, not a viable theory remaining after the facts have been looked at, that anybody wrote it other than Joseph Smith. And the theory that Joseph Smith had the capacity to write it is even discredited by the people who don’t accept what he said about where it came from!

What is the middle way on where the Book of Mormon came from? 

HW: Possibly the “problem” the Book of Mormon has to a modern person is that there are no precedents [to the plates].

DHO: A book that has no origin, of course that’s a problem! Of course a book, translated from plates that you can’t examine to authenticate it is a terrible problem to anyone who approaches this in a scientific way. There have been other visionaries, but I don’t know of any who have written a book. So Joseph is unique in saying, “I had a vision, and it led to this book, and here’s the book! Read it, put it to the spiritual test.” Well, it can be put to the spiritual test. Millions have done that and have joined the Church. But it can’t be put to scientific test — that really bothers a scientific age! If I wanted science to draw on, it would bother me too. 

I suppose that we’re in a scientific age, but surely in human history there have been times when people would have said, “Visions in the age in iron? Visions in the age of sailboats?” [Slight laughter.] Any age could take its own marvels and use them to reject the simpler revelatory experiences of an earlier time. 

HW: I’ve wondered in your own journey whether you had your questioning moments of faith. 

DHO: No, I didn’t. Whether a person or how a person gets over the road in the development of their faith is suited to their own unique circumstances. I know for some the mountain of their faith originated in a volcanic eruption. The hot lava suddenly flowed, and then the mountain was constructed. For other people, it’s a sedimentary deposit — a little bit at a time over time, trying this, trying that, learning this and learning that, challenging this and challenging that. And then one day it has accumulated a mountain. That’s my experience, so I don’t have a specific defining moment. 

I came along raised by Mormon parents. Then I went to graduate school. There I met a lot of new ideas. I just tried to keep learning, and everything that I learned along the way affirmed my faith. I never found anything better. It accumulated gradually until one day I knew that I knew, and it has continued to accumulate since that time, and now I know better than I ever knew before. 

HW: Let’s talk a little bit about Mountain Meadows. [Others] have set the context. When did you first hear about it? 

DHO: I don’t remember when I first heard about the Mountain Meadow Massacre. It was, I think, in a classroom, probably high school level, maybe college, I heard that the terrible atrocity was perpetrated by the Indians in southern Utah. I didn’t grow up in southern Utah and wasn’t immediate to it, so it was just something, and it wasn’t a matter of concern. Later on, in my readings of Church history (this would be college, graduate-school level), I learned that local Church leaders had been participant with the Indians in this exercise. Later, the more I learned about it the more responsible the local Church leaders were. I also heard that Brigham Young heard about it when it was being planned and sent word, “Don’t do it!” and the rider didn’t get there in time to stop it. 

That’s controverted; people are arguing about the level of responsibility of Brigham Young, and I think we’ll know more about that when current scholarly work comes out. But my knowledge of that and concern with th

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