I was tagged in a post on a Facebook thread by Bill Reel where he asked:
For believers, how do you solve the Lucy Walker conundrum. Do you choose to believe Joseph Smith lied to Lucy about what God told him OR Do you believe God encouraged Joseph to get sealed/married/Have sex with a 16 year old girl who the prophet Joseph Smith was raising and identified as his daughter?
My response:
I believe Joseph Smith had real spiritual experiences that led him to produce the Book of Mormon and start something that has evolved into a vibrant, valid religion where millions of people use it to honestly seek God and participate in the Christian mandate to right the wrongs of the world, care for the needy, and create a heaven on earth. We’re not perfect as a Church but we think we’re on the right track and getting better. I don’t think everything Joseph said or did came from God in a direct, God-breathed way. I think it was more like general impressions where he was left with his own ingenuity how to implement it. I think he made mistakes in implementing the religion and this episode likely represents one of those mistakes. Ultimately what’s important to me in my religion is not what happened in the past involving other people, but what happens inside my heart and mind when I attend church, pray, read scripture, serve, and otherwise attempt to live my religion.
It’s a great feeling when after writing a hilarious facebook post you get a few haha reactions.
But it kind of sucks when you bear your testimony and nine people laugh at it. I was accused of dodging the question and being too vague. So I followed up with this reply.
You asked how I solve the conundrum. I answered that question. But more specific to what I think happened related to Lucy Walker, I said think what he did was likely a mistake and not directed by God. I would have to refresh my memory on this particular episode, but I’ve frequently admitted that I think Joseph lied about some things related to polygamy, was deceptive about hiding it from Emma, and was manipulative and coercive with some of the girls. I think the church’s essay is actually refreshingly revealing on this. That said, I also don’t think his motivations were *purely* sexual or sinister (while admitting at least partially they likely were). I think he had a powerful spiritual revelation related to eternal marriage and sealing, and the whole polygamy episode was a bad implementation of that general revelation. We as a church eventually got it right, but it caused a lot of heartache along the way.
I thought that was a pretty direct answer, but I still got several people wanting me to clarify my position and accusing me of dodging.
This is so interesting and ironic to me, because when I went through faith crisis, my biggest complaint with LDS defenders, both the traditional Apologists like FARMS and Dan Peterson and the new school Neo-Apologists like Givens, Bushman, Miller, were that they were too vague in how they answered many of these questions. That became my primary goal in coming online and starting to post and blog about faith crisis issues. I was determined to never dodge and always give my direct opinion.
Easier said than done. When you answer a tough question, you know there are a lot of people potential hearing your answer. Exmormons wanting you to admit fault, faithful LDS wanting to know if you’re one of them, your wife (is she going to kick my butt for this?), your stake president, your kids. Every word is power packed with implications that might not be intended. I want to be direct. But it’s hard to articulate a position without misunderstanding.
I still have the goal to answer questions directly and never dodge. But I have more sympathy for people I used to criticize.
Speaking of “vagueapologetics”, Terryl Givens is someone I love now but someone who used to frustrate me due to this. I’m trying to understand the new project from the Bruce Hafen family Faith is Not Blind. More on that later, but here are a couple interesting quotes from Givens in an interview for this project. Givens is interesting in that to me he is clearly unorthodox/nuanced on a lot of levels. But then others argue with me saying he’s not unorthodox at all, and I’m just reading more into what he says.
When asked what the most troubling aspect of the BOM was from critical perspective, Givens said it was that some critics claim there is source material for the BOM like Solomon Spaulding, View of the Hebrews, and The Late War (a psuedo-biblical text written in Joseph’s day). I also would add to that generically the Protestant sermon language, doctrines, and phrases floating around in Joseph’s time and the New Testament itself. Givens admits that there seems to be “some striking congruences at times–or borrowing.”
But I came to a place where I believe and continue to believe that Joseph received impressions. He received ideas, glimpses, pictures, images, concepts. But that the Lord had to work through the cultural and intellectual vocabulary that was available to Joseph Smith. And so the particular means and wording I think aren’t the things on which we should hang our faith.
This is a more intellectually sound way to deal with this issue than to imagine God putting those words down specifically for him to copy as if he was dictating and not contributing any creative element. How unorthodox is this? You be the judge. I don’t hear a lot of other people talking this way about the Book of Mormon translation, but I hope we hear more of it. I would also love Givens to explain with a little more specificity how this would work and maybe a theoretical example. When I worked through this exercise, I ultimately decided it was easier to picture it as a purely non-historical text, while still allowing that it could be inspired and more relevant–inspiring.
Here’s another quote from the interview I thought was very interesting.
I know that many millennials especially bridle at the phrase “the only true and living church”. And that can create an impression of tribalism, exceptionalism, and pride. But on the other hand if you consider that officially Latter-day Saints are members of the only church that officially teach the preexistence of the soul, a Heavenly Father who feels our pain, a Heavenly Mother who lives in union with a Heavenly Father, a plan of salvation that envisions the eventual salvation of the entire human family without any barriers erected by death, the family as an eternal unit. There is something fairly unique about this conglomeration of doctrines taken together.
I don’t believe our church is the one and only exclusively true church of God in the same way that most members would view that. Based on this answer, I’m inclined to think Givens is closer to me on this than most of the people we sit in the pews with on Sundays. But I can’t say for sure. You be the judge.
At any rate, I love how he talks about the restored gospel, and I hope more will follow along, despite how vague it feels to some. One more quote from Givens from the interview which I 100% agree.
It (LDS Church) has what I consider to be the most profoundly satisfying, intellectually rigorous system of thought associated with any religion tradition I’ve studied…it is almost impossible to fully appreciate the majesty, and the clarity and the logical consistency of Joseph Smith’s restored system of thought.
Amen Brother Givens, thank you for your contributions.
Wheat & Tares 
Thanks for your post. I agree that your answer was fairly straightforward, but not the answer they were looking for.
Question about the BoM.
So what is the difference between “View of the Hebrews” and the Book of Mormon? Do you believe that they were created in a similar way? Is the only difference is that 1 was used as a foundation for a religion and another was not? Can’t you argue that Ethan Smith was a product of his time and was being inspired Similar to Joseph Smith.
I continue to work through my own faith crisis in dealing with the early history of the church and the subsequent ‘sanitizing’ of the records and educational materials. It doesn’t help that I’m a gay Mormon and also have to deal with the current church issues related to that. Double whammy!! My conclusions are somewhat in line with what was presented here and quoted by Terryl Givens. What surprises me most, though, is that well known LDS scholars/researchers/apologetics still refer to Heavenly Mother in the singular. For a religion that still believes in polygamy ( canonized scripture D&C Section 132) and whose former presidents insisted that polygamy was essential for exaltation….and who believe that God was once like man and that we can become like Him, it is only reasonable to believe that God practices polygamy and that there are multiple Heavenly Mothers. I would be curious to know if anyone else sees this.
Your first response did dodge the question. There were two questions in the original statement, and you only addressed the first one. That’s why people weren’t willing to give you the benefit of the doubt after you added the second comment.
debo. I guess that’s fair.
If I “got it wrong ” like Joseph I’d be excommunicated and probably go to jail.
“For believers, how do you solve the Lucy Walker conundrum.”
I don’t. It isn’t my problem to solve. Additionally, I am suspicious any time someone offers me only two choices (fallacy of the false alternatives).
“I still got several people wanting me to clarify my position and accusing me of dodging.”
That will happen until you provide the answer each wishes to hear.
Jesus seems to have dodged questions fairly adeptly. People wanted Jesus to clarify his position; but sometimes that demand was a trap and not really a request for information. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” is an example. If there was a teaching opportunity, he engaged with his questioners, otherwise not.
“For believers, how do you solve the Lucy Walker conundrum?” Here is my perspective as a believer:
1. What was most objectionable about Joseph’s “pursuit” of polygamy, in my opinion, was his lying to Emma about it. Also, his bringing some Church leaders into the “inner circle,” and keeping some leaders and members in the dark. But, given how fundamentally offensive polygamy was to the mores of the time, secrecy was probably his only viable option. In any event, polygamy proved disastrous for Joseph.
2. By today’s standards, for a 30-plus man to have sex with a 16-year-old girl is not only wrong, but criminal. It is child rape, even if the girl “consents.” I am glad that standards of decency evolve, and that it is viewed today as wrong. I know if a man Joseph ‘s age pursued my 16-year-old daughter, I would call the cops, and if that didn’t work—well, let’s not go there. I would consider taking out a Mafia contract on the guy.
3. But by the standards of the first part of the 1800s, it was not necessarily wrong. I have three examples in my own, non-Mormon, non-polygamous genealogy of this (England, Scotland, Upstate New York). The men all went out into the world to make their fortune, and they did not marry until they were well off. They then married, respectively, 16-, 17-, and 17-year-old girls, who, at that time, were considered old enough to marry. They had MANY children, and were married for many decades; in each case, the husband died before his wife. My wife’s family history has an 86-year-old widower from NC marrying his 39-year-old housekeeper. We think it was a marriage of convenience: she took care of him until he died, a few years later, and he gave her his estate, so she could be independent.
4. The only way I can square Joseph’s actions on polygamy (not limiting it to the Lucy Walker conundrum) is to accept at face value his statement that he never claimed he was a good man; he only claimed to have been called by God. That does not mean that he did not do wrong. Even if God wanted him to start polygamy (which I am agnostic about; I can either accept or reject it, and think this is not the key question to be asked about Joseph), the way he went about it was wrong, even in the 1800s. The secrecy was harmful and hurt lives.
From what I have read and taken away from the discussion on this blog regarding attempts to bring Joseph Smith and his status as a prophet and agent of God into greater clarity and focus, both the good and the bad, a la Givens and related neo-apologists, I draw the following general conclusions. The general idea seems to be that Joseph received real inspiration and revelations from God but, at times, stumbled in the process of attempting to implement those inspirations and revelations in the social, political, and personal context in which he lived working in tandem with the motivations, skills and other knowledge available to him as an individual in that setting. This apparently attempts to capture, or characterize, (perhaps explain) the process of how the divine (omniscient, omnipotent) interacts with the human (always limited in power; subject to forces and motivations beyond their full recognition or understanding, only able to see through a glass darkly, etc.) in bringing about particular events. Therefore, the claim is made, don’t look for signs of perfection in Joseph Smith, rather look for signs of inspiration and revelation, and what springs (or sprang) from that. Smith was, in short, both a divinely inspired prophet and a flawed human being. That combination, we are told, is bound to produce some hiccups, but you need to examine the big picture and the ultimate result to understand and evaluate what he produced. In addition, you need to view the restoration as an ongoing process that is self-improving and purifying.
Such examinations of a little understood process have the feel of sophistication and nuance that may strike one as illuminating. Unfortunately, for this approach to fly you are going to have to explain how we separate the divine, “true” aspects of what Joseph wrought and taught, from the chaff, so to speak. How are we to know which is which? What precise criteria are we going to apply to differentiate and untangle specific examples? Unless, that is, you are simply presupposing that the restoration Joseph began had a divine origin and purpose. From such a presupposition, however, you are subject to the charge of evading the issue and begging the question. If you are unwilling to question that supposition, then your entire explanation amounts to nothing more than hand waving.
Furthermore, suggesting that we view the restoration as an ongoing, self-improving, and self-purifying process again assumes that the initial impetus was indeed God inspired and established. But this is just the matter that is in question. On what basis are we to determine the veracity of the claim that what Joseph Smith taught and wrought was indeed the result of God’s intervention in the course of human history? Viewing the whole from a distance is a shifting of perspective that allows us to avoid the pesky, and messy, quicksand of details in which we can so easily get stuck without a deus ex machina to pull us out. It also represents a mental “slight of hand” that leads us to take our eyes off the real target.
In conclusion, I think that this is what leads some to reject this line of reasoning as pretty but not very satisfying – as vague and avoiding the issues. All of this, I realize, would need to be spelled out in greater detail. But, with no malice to anyone intended, the essential point I am trying to make is that when your final argument amounts to being simply a way of saying that viewed from the “right” perspective, the truth of something is self evident without spelling out how “rightness” is actually to be established rather than simply assumed, then it is difficult to see how such arguments can be considered dispositive.
You are free to believe in, have faith in, whatever you like. You are also free to believe the things you believe in are “profoundly satisfying” and “intellectually rigorous” and even stand in awe of them. But so am I, and many have done so over the centuries. Still believing it’s so, or feeling (very intensely) that it is so, does not make it so. Even the ability to spin a very nice, reasonable and inspiring story about why you believe it is so doesn’t make it so, though the process of digesting such can indeed be enjoyable. For that – to make it so, or at least compelling, rationally speaking – you have to provide sound evidence and a coherent rational argument for the case you think the evidence supports. Many (often unconscious) decisions are made in that process and therefore understanding what one takes for granted, or is assuming, and why, ought to be made abundantly clear throughout. That way the conclusions one is arguing for will not be found to have been smuggled back in through a side door, or simply left unaddressed because they have not been explicitly expressed. Well, this comment is overlong already, but I hope I have been able to make myself understood. If you have gotten this far, I thank you for your patience and ask you to assess my remarks in the firm but inoffensive spirit in which I make them
I disagree with debo. There is only one question posed in the original statement, and, ironically, it doesn’t have a question mark. There other “question”, as Michael 2 pointed out already, is not really being asked, but rather is a rhetorical device designed to put undesired answers on the defensive.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if bearing testimony on Facebook is ever really effective.
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I thought your FB responses were very reasonable. I have a very hard time with this new apologetic approach, however, even though I think the approach is far better than traditional apologetics. If Joseph’s revelations are reduced to vague impressions rather than the crystal clear dictations he claimed, then how are we to differentiate between his vague inspired impressions and just his own thoughts and desires? And more importantly, is there a difference? Consider the possibility that Joseph just wanted to marry more women and claimed that as revelation. Consider the even scarier possibility that Joseph truly believed that these thoughts and desires were actually God speaking to him. When we get leaders of movements who amass a certain amount of power who believe that God speaks to them through the thoughts that enter their heads, scary stuff can start to happen.
When I step back and look at the development of mormonism, I can see Joseph had some beautiful ideas and some really awful ones. What I can’t see is any difference between what he claimed about the source of good ones versus the disastrous ones. If I consider the possibility that God was not involved at all, that honestly seems the far more likely conclusion. The question I have left to consider is if Joseph believed God was indeed speaking to him through these vague inspirations and I believe Joseph was sincere in that. That, to me, is scary because it led to Joseph to believing that his desire to marry and have sex with women besides his wife were actually from God. I recognize that not all of Joseph’s polygamous activities were sexual, but enough of them were that it is clear this was involved.
I would rather believe in no God at all then one who only communicates in vague impressions that are indiscernible from one’s own thoughts and desires. At least that way, I don’t have to feel compelled to follow irrational desires because I believe God is demanding it.
The new apologetic approach presents a viewpoint that to me is indistinguishable from no Godly intervention. And what’s the difference between a God who doesn’t intervene, or who only does so in vague and unclear ways, and no God at all?
DoubtingTom asks “And what’s the difference between a God who doesn’t intervene, or who only does so in vague and unclear ways, and no God at all?”
It makes a HUGE difference in the next life (and whether there’s going to be one). As it happens I have my answer and it appears you have yours. That we have different answers is interesting and worth some study; my conclusion is that God chooses who to talk to for reasons known only to him, and so far as I know, no penalty attaches to persons who he has not made himself known to.
In my life God does intervene, but usually in rather subtle ways that most of the time could be coincidentally lucky and does not alter the timeline or deprive anyone of free agency.
Greatly enjoyed Rlindner’s remarks. As he/she said, the key is how to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have concluded that that often takes a long time, decades, perhaps hundreds of years. There is a clever story about when a Henry Kissinger went with Richard Nixon to China in 1972, and asked Premier Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution (1789-1793) and Zhou replied, “too early to tell.” Although it is a funny anecdote, there is a core of uncomfortable truth to Zhou’s remark. I believe the Church is just beginning to come to grips that sometimes the will of the Lord (revelation) can take a very long time to become known—-because it has to work through our human prejudices and mental limitations. And I think that this realization makes many Mormons uncomfortable, because we have grown up the thought that Joseph Smith received revelation in one solid, completed lump.
I think that the LDS Church, it’s (so-called) unchanging doctrine and “truth”…have become such a morass of nuance, spin, personal interpretation and a sprinkle of wishful thinking….that its’ kinda/sorta becoming a joke. Similar to the old Utah adage “If you don’t like the weather…what a few hours and it’ll change”. In this case – “if you don’t like the doctrine….give it a bit of time and pressure, and some focused apologetics and (Voila)…new revelation appears”! The church really is becoming an un-necessary appendage (useless really) in the individual spiritual lives of many, many people.
Doubting Tom. “The new apologetic approach presents a viewpoint that to me is indistinguishable from no Godly intervention. And what’s the difference between a God who doesn’t intervene, or who only does so in vague and unclear ways, and no God at all?”
There may be no difference. But to answer your question, the viewpoints that win over time are the ones that the LDS Body of Christ decide to retain and emphasize.
I think most of the “new apologetics” is a bit of a misnomer. There’s lots of people who write in what might be styled new apologetic as well as more traditional types. The main difference from what I can tell is that traditional apologetics focuses on historicity and positive evidence whereas new apologetics brackets such questions and focuses in on literary meaning. I definitely have my problems with only looking at literary meaning. I think its vastly insufficient to ground religious belief. I think the move towards it by some reflects broader trends in acadmeics where one can only write on religion when one does this. Traditional theology or the like tends to be dismissed at best in universities and often is seen as a disqualifying aspect of a scholar. If you want to be able to write on religion and hope to be respected outside of BYU then that pretty well constrains what you write.
I’ve no idea how many people writing so-called “new apologetics” actually bracket history in their own beliefs. I suspect fewer than many imagine. That’s not to say they might not have individual doubts about some things – the Book of Abraham is the popular one to doubt at the moment for instance. I’m pretty loath to infer what people’s beliefs are unless they make them explicit.
To the women under 18, it’s worth noting that while young marriages weren’t uncommon, neither were they common and in respected circles they were definitely looked down upon. However the social norms certainly were extremely different from today where people under 18 are considered children. It simply wasn’t at all uncommon to be treated as an adult, often going out on ones own, at 14 in that era. It was an era where few had formal schooling. Apprenticeships typically started at 14 and were basically full time adult jobs. It was extremely common for kids younger than 14 to be working jobs that were dangerous and treated as adults. I think there’s a definite sense of presentism when we look back at the early 19th century from our tradition. In fact I’d argue we probably infantilize teens too much, and arguably have extended adolescence well through ones 20s. Such thinking is completely alien to a time when opportunities for men were far more constrained and wealth we have unimaginable to nearly all people. Again that’s not to say young women marrying was common. The average age of marriage of the era was 21-22.
To Joseph’s acts, I think he felt constrained due to Emma’s opposition to polygamy. It’s of course easy to say he was wrong in that. But the choice was basically divorce Emma, whom he loved greatly and practice openly or do so in secret. He chose the latter which was his big mistake (IMO). Once it was secret that limited the people he could approach. I think that Todd Compton has established fairly strongly that Joseph’s aims were for dynastic marriages to link everyone into a single family. The idea of adoption didn’t really arise until Brigham Young had his vision from Joseph while heading west across the plains. It wasn’t really implemented until decades later. That’s the biggest problem I suspect for many – why didn’t Joseph simply adopt families as his children rather than connect to them through marriage.