We’re about ready to finish our conversation with John Hamer and Lachlan MacKay of the Community of Christ and do a Mormon Schisms Tour! In this next conversation, we’ll talk about how confusing it must have been to live following the death of Joseph Smith.
John: You might have a branch where at a certain point, you’ve heard Joseph Smith has been killed. You are very sad. Brighamite missionaries come through. They say the Twelve are now in charge and things like that. Everyone says, “Hey, now we got it. We’ve read about that in the newspaper and this kind of thing.” Then, a couple of months later, somebody from Voree comes with the Voree Herald and they explain how the Twelve are in apostasy, and this and that, and why all of the prophetic gifts that prove that Strang is the successor, and they are like, “Oh, we’re Strangites now.”
There isn’t anything in particular that necessarily happens for the branch. So like I say for the Hedrickites, they are one of five, maybe, of these branches that are in a cluster around Bloomington, Illinois. I think probably at some point or another, they will have been affiliated with Strang, but at a certain point, maybe when he “affiliated,” whatever it even means. Strangite missionaries will come through there, and that’s one of the reasons why maybe they didn’t gather and go west.
We also talked about the founding of the RLDS Church.
John: This is the origin of the Reorganization. So the branches start to pray about it. They fall back on individual personal revelations for the individual congregations, the pastors. They start meeting together. As they are thinking about it, William Smith has a church in the meantime and William Smith has been promoting the idea of lineal succession. There has been, (I think I mentioned a while ago), there’s the sense that Joseph Smith’s posterity, somebody, one of his sons is going to be the successor or will emerge as the successor. They start to regather these branches and the form a conference organization, which is a loose structure. There’s no corporate entity here still.
So they pass resolutions together in conferences where they say they are going to wait for one of Joseph Smith’s sons, probably Joseph Smith III to emerge to receive the prophetic calling and to accept that mantle. So when that happens in 1860, he comes to a conference of the New Organization, what becomes the Reorganization and what becomes Community of Christ, then that becomes something that all these little branches start to get really excited about. Fairly quickly, then that Reorganization draws from all the different tradition churches, including people who had gone west who are dissatisfied with what was going on under Brigham Young in Utah.
It turns out that some other Mormon schismatic groups are contemporaries of Joseph Smith III. John talks briefly about several of these churches, “There’s more –ites; that’s hardly an exhaustive group so I don’t mean to be leaving anybody out. They are very interesting.” He’ll briefly discuss founding of the Hedrickites, Williamites, Josephites, Cutlerites, Whitmerites, and their relationship to the RLDS Church. Lachlan MacKay will also tell when and why the Kirtland Temple changed from a bluish-gray color to the current white color it is today. It’s going to be a fun conversation. I hope you check out our Mormon Schisms Tour!
Word of Wisdom
Apostle Lachlan MacKay of the Community of Christ discusses the historical context of the Word of Wisdom. It turns out that 19th century saints had no problem serving wine at weddings, and beer wasn’t forbidden. While many of us have heard of Prohibition, Temperance, and strong drinks, did you know that alcohol was used for ritual cleansing in the Kirtland Temple?
Lachlan: You get to Kirtland Temple and it expands a little bit. They would do a ritual cleansing outside the temple in the schoolhouse behind the temple or sometimes in Joseph’s home, so with cinnamon whiskey and perfumed water, ritual cleansing. Put on clean clothes. Go to the third floor of the temple, anoint the head with oil, sealing or confirming blessing of that anointing and then feet washing downstairs. That took weeks, so it’s not something you do in an afternoon. They spent months or years in preparation for that.
The process took weeks, and through that process, they understood that they were then empowered by the Holy Spirit and could go into the world. We wouldn’t allow our missionaries to go oversees until they had been endowed with power. So even 1839, most of the members have left Kirtland. There are new missionaries who were not there in the 1830s. Joseph had them detour through Kirtland—Theodore Turley, John Taylor among them. Brigham Young goes with [them] so that they can be empowered by the Holy Spirit, and only then could they sail to the United Kingdom.
GT: Oh wow. You also had mentioned they didn’t bathe everyday like we do now.
Lachlan: Yeah, so I think that cinnamon whiskey would cleanse,[1] it would sterilize. It would make them smell better, so it was purification physically, spiritually, in every way in preparation to go to the temple.
But that’s not all. Lachlan also tells about his fear of having a Word of Wisdom cook during youth camps!
GT chuckles: And then you also mentioned something about eating meat sparingly. I think you said some people wouldn’t eat between Easter and, was it Thanksgiving?
Lachlan: Thanksgiving. Yeah, I know Community of Christ members, this would not be typical at all, but I do know members who would not eat meat between Easter and Thanksgiving, which meant that whenever I visited there was tuna noodle casserole {chuckles}, because they didn’t consider fish meat. We do a lot of camps in Community of Christ, both as youth camps and family camps. My greatest fear as a kid was having a Word of Wisdom cook: not much meat, lots of whole grains, lots of fruits and vegetables. Now I spend a lot of time at camps, and my greatest fear is that we won’t have a Word of Wisdom cook.
What about the use of tobacco for cattle?
GT: Ok. There’s another reference that I wanted to mention. In fact I was going to ask this in the class today but I didn’t: the reference to tobacco. It says for “for all sick cattle.”[2] Tom Kimball was nice enough to send me a copy of Mormonism Unvailed, the first anti-Mormon book ever that Dan Vogel just recently put some awesome footnotes in there. I do remember E.D. Howe, who was definitely an anti-Mormon, a little bit over the top. It was kind of interesting to read that book. One of the things that he made fun of was the Word of Wisdom. He said, “well if you’re supposed to use this for sick cattle, what are you doing?” {everyone chuckles} [Joseph] didn’t prescribe that very well. Do you have any idea what that reference was?
Lachlan: I was just having a discussion with somebody who saw that it was often used for poultices,[3] maybe that’s the bruised part of the tobacco more than anything. The cattle part, this might be highly speculative, but it’s one of the things I want to track down. I was at the tow path on a canal in New Hope, Pennsylvania not long ago, reading an interpretive panel, and it talked about how the mules as they got tired would be given tobacco! {chuckles}
Lach has a lot of other amazing insights! Check out our conversation…..
Don’t forget to listen to our interview with Greg Prince on the Word of Wisdom, as well as our previous episode discussing why the Word of Wisdom led to James Strang’s death in Michigan. Were you aware of this? What are your thoughts on these other schismatic groups?
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[1] D&C 89:7 reads, “And, again, strong drinks are not for the belly, but for the washing of your bodies.”
[2] D&C 89:8 reads, “And again, tobacco is not for the body, neither for the belly, and is not good for man, but is an herb for bruises and all sick cattle, to be used with judgment and skill.”
[3] a soft, moist mass of material, typically of plant material or flour, applied to the body to relieve soreness and inflammation and kept in place with a cloth.
Wheat & Tares 
This is fascinating. I love that in the Community of Christ tradition the more orthodox members would try to avoid meat between Easter and Thanksgiving. I also loved the interview with Greg Prince. IMO we’ve taken sound principles of health from the 1820s and 1830s and made them into a strict Law of Moses dietary code that is clunky and increasingly irrelevant for life in the 21st century. A reboot is badly needed and will probably never happen because we are busy trying to keep up the illusion that things now are the same as they have always been. I would be a big proponent of changing the WOW TR question to two questions: 1. Do you strive to keep the principles of good health outlined in D&C89? This leaves room for the orthodox member to keep abstaining from the 4 don’ts and ignore the other aspects of meat consumption, diet and exercise. It also allows room for other members to take D&C 89 at face value and be temperate in all things. 2. Do you have any substance or behavioral addictions that you feel prevent you from being worthy to enter the temple? This gives people a chance to look at their lives and assess if they have a problem with alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, shopping, etc. that is holding them back and may need to be worked out with a counselor or therapist.
I like the suggestions, but as you’re aware, no alcoholic thinks he has a problem with alcohol.
That is a fair point. In earlier times the temple standard was avoiding drunkedness, not a total prohibition.
When my family visited Independence in 2016, I was amazed at the number of mormon-affiliated groups. For example, the Hedrickite church has at least 3 separate groups broken off since the 1920’s. Most of the groups are in Jackson County Missouri and are just a single congregation.
The effort to form the Reorganized church spanned almost 10 years; initially beginning in the fall of 1851. It wasn’t until the fall of 1857 that Joseph Smith 3rd was approached and offered leadership of the New Organization. He flatly refused, but later accepted in April 1860.
Priesthood silencing could occur in the RLDS for tobacco use, but other parts of the Word of Wisdom weren’t followed as strictly. In fact, there have been resolutions proposed at their World (General) Conference that would relax restrictions on alcohol.
I know that Lachlan is doing a study on the Word of Wisdom and may make recommendations for changes following the study, but I don’t know any timelines or anything like that. In the Sunday School class I attended, he discussed changes in both the LDS and RLDS positions on the WoW over the past century and indicated that rules for WoW observance among leaders was different than regular members. (It was also funny to me to hear the RLDS refer to “members” instead of “congregants” or some other term.)
“In earlier times the temple standard was avoiding drunkedness, not a total prohibition.”
Absolutely true. MacKay made a big point of that in the interview, and differentiated between the Temperance Movement vs. Prohibition. Mormons were always in the Temperance Movement until Heber J. Grant got ticked off after Utah was the deciding vote that removed Prohibition. It’s Grant that imposed Prohibition on the church.
Really interesting stuff, GT. I appreciate you doing these recaps since as you know I am allergic to podcasts. I have often thought that the “eat meat sparingly except in times of winter” related to the lack of refrigeration. Meat would often go bad during the warm months back then, something Upton Sinclair wrote about peripherally in his 1906 novel The Jungle, where he outlined the problems in the meat packing industry at the turn of the century. Skipping meat (but not fish which at the time would have been eaten after being freshly caught) would have been a good measure, sort of like why the Israelites shouldn’t be eating shellfish while wandering in the desert for 40 years.
I was recently reading from the Arrington biography that a church history author was told not to publish information about Brigham Young’s tobacco use because they didn’t want people to know, and they didn’t want to embarrass the family. It didn’t tie in with the neat narrative we liked to tell.