We’re continuing our discussion of Joseph Musser, one of the most influential leaders in Mormon fundamentalism. Dr Cristina Rossetti discussed the history and evolution of Mormon fundamentalism in Short Creek, Arizona and Utah, focusing on major raids in 1944 and 1953, subsequent splits, and the changing nature of fundamentalism within the polygamist community. She highlighted a generational divide in how to be a fundamentalist and the challenges faced by children of polygamous parents during the 1953 raid. Cristina also discussed potential successors to Joseph Musser’s leadership position in the FLDS, with John Y. Barlow and LeRoy Johnson emerging as importabt leaders following Musser’s death.
Mormon history, polygamy, and prison experiences.
Cristina noted that both men and women in fundamentalist Mormon communities were persecuted and imprisoned for polygamy in the 1940s and 1950s. She noted photos of women in prison who looked quite proud of themselves for defending polygamy. In order to be released, men were asked to sign loyalty oaths. Some did, and some didn’t. Joseph Musser signed, despite not intending to be loyal. This caused tension among polygamous fundamentalists who refused to sign. The tension between those who signed the oath and those who did not, led to a major schism in the community. As a general rule, those who refused to sign the oath ended up in what became either the FLDS or independent communties, while those who signed the oath ended up in the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB.)
Fundamentalism in the LDS church and its evolution over time.
Cristina argues that there is a generational divide in Mormon fundamentalism, with younger generations rejecting traditional fundamentalist beliefs and practices. At one time, many fundamentalists encouraged children to join the LDS Church, go on missions, get endowments and their first sealing, and then return to the fundamentalist communites for “the higher law.” Cristina said this happened a lot during the 1960s-80s, but that millenials and Gen Z polygamists are much less likely to do that. They stay within their own communities.
The polygamy raids of 1944 and 1953 were especially traumatic in Short Creek (known as Colorado City, Arizona and Hilldale, Utah.) The twin cities were on the Utah-Arizona border so that people could literally cross the street if law enforcement in either state came. In 1953, Utah & Arizona, along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms coordinated a raid on both cities to capture polygamists. Children of polygamous parents in Short Creek were forcibly taken by authorities without regard to their parents’ religious beliefs or practices. Even children of monogamist parents were removed from their parents. With the raid taking place at night, it has caused polygamists to view all outsiders with great suspicious.
FLDS history, placement marriage, and leadership.
The FLDS Church started to turn toward one-man rule. John Y. Barlow became the leader of the Short Creek community, and essentially became the the matchmaker in the FLDS community, deciding who marries who in the town. Placement marriage becomes an issue, leading to a split in the community. Leaders of what became the AUB split over the issue, being led by Joseph Musser.
Leadership and power struggle in a Utah-based religious group.
Charismatic leaders emerge in early Mormon fundamentalism: John Barlow and Joseph Musser. Barlow was a leader in Short Creek, while Musser lived in the Salt Lake City area. Joseph Musser had a stroke, and was treated by Rulon Allred. Musser chose Allred to become the Second Elder, essentially naming Allred to replace Musser. This bypassed others with more seniority, including his own son, Guy Musser, who opposed Allred’s ordination. He claimed his father is not fit due to stroke.
GT and Cristina discuss the split between FLDS and AUB after Musser’s death.
Some have dated the split to 1951, but Cristina felt it was better to date it to 1954 when Joseph Musser died. The split leads to both groups following their own councils. LeRoy Johnson become the leader in Short Creek and was known as Uncle Roy. This became the FLDS Church, which did not officially incorporate until the 1990s. Rulon Allred lived near Salt Lake and led the AUB. Allred was killed by Ervil Lebaron’s wives in 1977, and the group incorporated in 1979. Following Rulon’s death, his brother Owen took over leadership of the AUB.
Mormon fundamentalism, splintering, and independence.
Centennial Park split with the FLDS Church around 1986, over the issue of one-man rule. Centennial Park refers to the 1886 John Taylor revelation saying polygamy would never be revoked. They sometimes referred to themselves as the Second Ward, and the short Creek group as the First Ward. They live not far from Short Creek in Arizona.
Other fundamentalists split with the FLDS Church. The Louis Kelch group refused to sign a document promising to live the United Order with the FLDS Church and became independent polygamists who lived in Southern Utah. They felt the Taylor revelation only authorized polygamy to exist outside the LDS Church and were not authorized to start a church or live the United Order.
Economic order of heaven during Great Depression.
Cristina discussed Joseph Musser’s theological innovations, including priesthood, polygamy, and the United order. Fundamentalists often lost jobs when it was discovered they were polygamists, causing great hardship. Plus, they couldn’t participate in the LDS Church’s Welfare program or resort to state welfare due to their polygamy status making them ineligible for government aid. Musser looked to Joseph Smith’s concepts of Consecration and United order during the Great Depression, imagining it as a solution to economic challenges.
Musser’s focus on women’s roles and dignity.
Cristina: Musser highlights women in polygamy, cares for them through sexual regimentation. While discouraging any form of birth control, Musser’s law of purity specifies no sex while breastfeeding or pregnant, thinking this protected women. He often pedestal-ized women in the community.
Mormon beliefs about Godhead, Multiple Mortal Probations
Musser believes is the author of the fundamentalist belief that Joseph Smith is the Holy Ghost. Rick asked about some biblical references to the Holy Ghost, but Musser focused instead on the teachings of the prophets, including the idea that the Holy Ghost needs a body to attain exaltation.
Musser also authoreed the idea of multiple mortal probations. MMP (Multiple Mortal Probations) is the idea that if not perfect in this life, one can come back and do it again. MMP is tied to particular groups, like TLC, and people who espouse it believe in successive sojourns in the same gender and species. It is essentially a form of reincarnation.
Fundamentalist Mormonism views on alcohol and coffee consumption
Cristina noted that Fundamentalism has much more liberal views on alcohol consumption and tobacco use. At the local grocery store, Bee’s, one can purchase Journal of Discourses while right behind it is the Wine & Beer Cave. Fundamentalists drink coffee in moderation as well as wine and beer. They generally avoid hard liquor.
Mormon fundamentalism and race
Race wasn’t really an issue in any of Musser’s writings, and only became an issue in the 1970s when the LDS Church lifted the race ban on blacks. Rulon Allred quoted Brigham Young that blacks would receive the priesthood after all of the descendants of Abel had received it first. Most fundamentalist groups still refuse to baptize blacks.
Fundamentalist Church history and splits.
Another split with the AUB occured following Rulon Allred’s death. Gerald Peterson Sr. claims ordaination by Rulon Allred in a vision, creating a split in the group. Peterson’s group is known as “Christ’s Church” or “The Righteous Branch.” For more information on this group, see https://gospeltangents.com/tag/the-righteous-branch/
The Nielsen-Naylor Group is a breakoff of Centennial Park, and the Thompson Group split from the AUB. There are other groups, like the Lebaron group that are completely independent of the Musser-Woolley foundation.
What are thoughts about why fundamentalism continues to thrive?
Wheat & Tares 
When I first moved to Utah, I taught in the small town of Ticaboo in Garfield County. One of the teachers I taught with as a child in Short Creek during the 1953 raids and was taken from her home and raised in Escalante. She ended up eloping at 16 on a dare from someone and married a man about 10 years older. They were told it would never last but it did, over 50 years. She had two children, one of which became an LDS Stake President.
I then moved to another small Utah town in Juab County. I eventually became the technology director for my school district and drove to the West Desert Communities of Callao and Trout Creek/Partoon. There were a couple of polygamous communities in that area and also the Tom Green compound. I got to know some of his children and also some of his wives as well as wives and children in the other communities. They are not all the same. They may have similar religious beliefs but each group seems to take on beliefs of their “leader.” Because of that, people move in and out of the communities based more on relationships than on ideology.
I also saw many different kinds of people. Some of the wives were very independent and I think liked the lifestyle because they could still be a wife and mother but they didn’t have to put up with men very much. Others seems helpless and had to have a man around to do everything. I was hard to tell if the husband/wife relationship was built around love or some interpretation of the “gospel.” The children, for the most part, seems like regular children, particularly when they were younger, say under 12. But, as they got closer to 16/18 you could see changes. The boys didn’t really know what to do unless they did well in school and then they’d work towards college or something like that to get away and the girls seemed to be a little too knowledgeable about the world and but at the same time terribly naive about who they really were.
When Tom Green went to prison, his “family” moved to the city and in some ways fell apart yet still remained a family. When the local leader in one of the communities was killed in a truck rollover accident, the community, which consisted of many of his wives and children also feel apart as other men competed to be the leader. I also learned that there were various factions among the fundamentalists and they didn’t mix very well with an underlying fear of what happened to the LaBarrons. Some groups were very conservative in dress and action and others much more “normal.”
Finally, in my little town, while there were no polygamous groups, there were individuals that had very fundamentalist beliefs within the LDS church. They would offer their opinions in Gospel Doctrine classes or Priesthood/Relief Society classes with an air of “righteousness” about them. They would also many times meet at individual homes as a group of like minded people for study classes. Over time, a few years, these groups evolved into prayer circles with their temple clothes, and actively trying to get some other members of the ward involved. I was never invited because as the gospel doctrine teacher they could already tell I was way to “liberal” for their way of thinking. Eventually one of the “leaders” of the prayer groups asked, with his wife’s consent, another woman to be his wife. She was not prepared for that and told on him and he was excommunicated. His father was the former bishop and it was a big mess because the son (who had 5 children) would go around and tell everyone how the church could take away his membership but never take his priesthood because it was eternal. His oldest daughter rebelled and was killed driving drunk. He blessed the grave using a temple ceremony and his father, the former bishop, said that he was glad she died before she was able to commit a greater sin and be cast out forever.
My neighbor across the street from my house also became very involved with fundamentalist factions. He was excommunicated before he moved to my town because he baptized his oldest daughter in a lake without telling anyone and just presented “paperwork” to the ward about this ordinance. When the stake president called him on it, he refused to change anything and said it was his right as a father, hence the excommunication. His views after that became much more fundamentalist and he became very upset about the restoration of the priesthood to Blacks. At one point he was interested in coming back to the church but the missionaries assigned to work with him, had one elder who was black. The Bishop was at my house visiting me once since I was his counselor and we got a frantic call to go to that house because he was threatening to kill the elder. We were able to get him out unharmed but that man was more cemented in his views and never came back. As a matter of fact his oldest son got married to two sisters for his first marriage and his daughters each got married into polygamous families that live around St. Johns, AZ.
So what do I think about Fundamentalists? Many are born into it, just like any other religions, but there are others who choose to belong. Tom Green was LDS and went down the rabbit hole of fundamentalism until he had 6 or 7 wives but he wasn’t really affiliated with any fundamentalist sects. He was a law unto himself. My neighbor did the same thing by letting the fundamentalist teachings found in the church become his gospel and coupling it with his racist and ultra conservative political views he joined one of the sects and left our town and the LDS Church. The groups I’ve seen in my county are like my neighbor but belong to different sects of fundamentalism based on birth and personality of leaders. Small doctrinal disputes end up being large rifts in fundamentalist religions. The one thing they have in common is a cult of personality manifest in both their religious and political beliefs justified by a logic to believe in the “truth” changing inconvenient arguments with “revelations.”
Nice discussion, Rick B. The whole topic of “LDS fundamentalism” is uncomfortable to most LDS, partly because most would just rather avoid the whole topic of polygamy, and partly because how LDS fundamentalist groups operate in terms of the role of women and messy leadership transitions shines a light on similar problems in 19th-century LDS history.
It’s interesting to note how there is the Community of Christ on the left or progressive side of the LDS Church, sometimes a destination for those LDS who move out of the Church in that direction — and a variety of LDS fundamentalist groups that attract LDS members who move to the right and want to embrace plural marriage and consecration, etc. Of course, most LDS who exit just avoid religion entirely or find a mainstream Christain denomination to attend. For those who want their Mormonism without the LDS, it’s fundamentalists or the progressive CoC.