Highlight: Violence & Mormonism

Apologia Studios

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

from a researcher's point of view, the Lafferty's were one of a string of fundamentalist murders, and they certainly were a dangerous duo, the two brothers, but they weren't the last of them.

00:16

More stuff has happened. It's just Joseph Smith and Brigham Young put out teachings that when taken to their ultimate extreme would lead them, lead followers, to commit murder.

00:33

And it doesn't mean all the polygamists are murderers. We don't need to be afraid of all of them. They are not to kill everyone.

00:40

But these killings related to the temple ritual of where you had for years in the oath of swearing on an oath to not reveal the secrets, not to fight against the church, to be faithful and all those things, lest your throat be slipped.

01:01

And so there's an undercurrent of this idea of people being killed for disobeying

01:10

God. So we see this in the Lafferty murders where the one sister, sister -in -law, is persuading the other sister -in -law to leave the group and helps her to, where did she go to?

01:31

Florida? Was it Florida she went to, I think? Yeah, I think it was. Yeah. And so that made her an apostate, which would have brought her under the curse of the temple oath of offering your life as a sacrifice to have your throat split for revealing and helping people to apostatize.

01:53

So that was Brenda's big sin is apostatizing from the true church, fighting against the true prophet, of course in this case was

02:03

Lafferty, not the regular Mormon church. And there is this undercurrent in Mormonism that produces these violent acts.

02:14

It doesn't mean all the Mormons are violent, and it doesn't mean that you need to be afraid of your next door neighbor.

02:20

It's in these extremist cults that take it so letter -of -the -law serious on all these covenants they make that gets some of them to this extreme measure of murder.

02:33

But then I guess the question would be, were they already a little unstable mentally and more susceptible to ending up killing someone?

02:42

But I just want to emphasize, this isn't all the Mormons. I have a question for you,

02:47

Sandra. So going back in LDS history, if we think about the

02:52

Missouri war or even Joseph Smith having the army of the Lord of Hosts, which rivaled the United States military at that time, was there any beliefs of Joseph Smith that are kind of consistently being played out with modern fundamentalists, like in terms of restoring the kingdom of God on earth with Doctrine and Covenants section 132 or anything of that nature?

03:16

Well, it was a gradual militarizing of Mormonism and becoming more radical.

03:24

At the start of Mormonism, I don't believe Joseph was promoting anything that radical, but as they got thrown out of different towns after they had experienced some of these attacks on their own people, like the

03:43

Hans Mill Massacre, there's things like that that pushed them into this ideology of we're the persecuted true followers of God and finally to the point that we need to protect the kingdom of God, and we're going to go into a forced submission to the kingdom of God.

04:03

So they become more radicalized as the Mormons are thrown out from place to place.

04:10

Of course, the Mormons never asked why were they thrown out from place to place, but there were reasons they were expelled from different places.

04:18

They had their own bad stuff going on on their own camp. Certainly it was taken too far by both sides, but when

04:26

Joseph set up the temple ritual in Nauvoo in the 1840s, by then he certainly was much more militaristic.

04:36

He had set up the Nauvoo Legion and made himself, what was it, a

04:42

Lieutenant General of the Nauvoo Legion, and there's paintings of him on his horse, holding his sword up there, charging out.

04:52

It looks pretty militant. So it was a growing militancy in Mormonism. And then when they came west, of course, they're fleeing the law, and they leave the

05:03

United States. A lot of Mormons seem to forget this. They weren't supportive of America.

05:09

I mean, they left the United States and came to Mexico. And by a quirk of fate, the next year, the

05:16

United States acquired the territory, and the Mormons were back under the rule of the United States, which caused conflicts because they wanted to have their own law and their own rule in Utah, which was just a territory at that point.

05:30

And it put them directly in conflict with the government. That led to all sorts of problems.

05:37

It was part of the problem of having a mountain metal massacre when Mormons killed a bunch of immigrants coming through the state, well, the territory.

05:47

So it's a long history of conflict and wars or whatever you want to call them.

05:57

Dan, did you have any thoughts, or what are you thinking so far? Yeah, there was a specific question regarding the

06:03

Lougherty brothers. Sandra, you may be aware of this, kind of tying into the whole topic of the throat -slitting thing that was going on in the temple.

06:15

I can't remember what year it was done, but Jeffrey R. Holland was in an interview with, I believe,

06:21

BBC, where they were asking him, were there penalties? This was right around the time Mitt Romney was going for president.

06:29

And so they were asking Jeffrey R. Holland, were these penalties in the temple? Were they in the temple? And Jeffrey finally admits it, that they were, but they're not anymore.

06:36

So the reason I'm even bringing this up is just one to validate that we have appropriate authorities of LDS confirming this.

06:45

But the question I wanted to offer to you is, we would kind of look at the Lougherty brothers utilizing this principle in an extremist, radical type of way.

06:55

Are you aware of any way that the LDS church would look at this slitting your throat in,

07:05

I hate saying an appropriate way, but is there a right way to look at this in the

07:10

LDS faith? Was there ever a time that the LDS church executed this themselves? What would be the difference between the right way to look at that and the extremist way, which would be

07:20

Lougherty's? Any thoughts? Well, under Brigham Young, it was not a church instituted practice.

07:30

I mean, it's not like where you have Catholics running

07:36

Spain or something. It wasn't an official program of the administration.

07:46

However, we have stories of bishops who sanctioned blood atonement in cases where the man committed adultery repeatedly and the church leaders in his area told him he had gone too far and the only way he could get forgiven would be to have his throat slit.

08:09

And I mean, I can't prove it from a court in case because they didn't go to court on any of it.

08:17

But I believe we can document early examples under Brigham Young of people who had their throat slit for disobeying the church.

08:27

But that was not done through an official channel that would go up to the top of the church.

08:33

It would have been a local thing that would have been done. Okay. And this whole throat slitting thing was eradicated,

08:41

I think around 1989 or somewhere around there. Would you have an idea? Well, okay.

08:48

We got to watch how we word this because people will think they were slitting throats up until then. Sure, sure, sure. Of course.

08:54

Okay. They were not slitting throats in the 1900s. The temple ceremony had an oath in it from early days that you promised not to reveal these things on the threat of death of having your throat slit.

09:18

They modified it to where it wasn't as gory as the original wording in about 1912 or something.

09:26

The oath where you symbolically, in the temple, drew your thumb across your throat to symbolize ways that life could be taken was in the ceremony until 1990.

09:39

They were not slitting people's throat up until 1990. They were doing a motion of it in a pantomime in the ceremony of the ways that life could be taken if you broke your oath.

09:53

Gotcha. So, they were taking that in 1990. Okay. So, the problem we have with this nowadays is that everyone that went through the temple ceremony after 1990 may very well tell you, you are crazy and listening to horrible liars because they've been through the temple for years and they never experienced this.

10:16

Yeah. Well, right, because they went through after 1990. We have tape recordings of it beforehand.

10:24

I mean, there's no doubt that that was in there. Yeah. All the

10:29

Mormon historians will concede that those were part of the elements of the ceremony before 1990.