"I was seeing all these things where I was like 'Wow - what is the Nauvoo endowment doing in the Book of Mormon?' I had been convinced that Joseph Smith didn't know anything about the endowment until he became a freemason in 1842, instead I was seeing it all over the Book of Mormon. I was seeing it in accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision and acquiring his seer stone. I was seeing it in the accounts of the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon. My mind was kind of blown."
Come Back Podcast
Transcription
Ashly
0:00
Well I'm just so over the moon to have you on the podcast. I feel like I've just, I mean, when I first started the podcast I found an article. I think it was in the "Salt Lake Tribune" and it was about you and your story and then I listened to the podcast which I think was on "Fair," and then I saw you on "Saints Unscripted," and I was just like, wow, he's just so awesome. And I know that a lot of things that you talked about in those different episodes that you did are similar things that people struggle with today. That's a big thing that challenges their testimony, and so, I would love for you to just kind of jump in and tell us from the beginning your story and, where you are, when you were a kid what your testimony was like, then all the way up to just the whole thing. We'd love to hear it.
Don
1:52
Okay. Cool, sure, I started out on the East Coast. My parents were converts, so even though I do have Mormon history I don't have a deep Mormon heritage, pioneer heritage or anything like that, but I was from a really devout family. When I was 15, I became very devout myself and so I started, it was partly a result of seminary and the teacher telling us to like set goals, and so I started setting spiritual goals so I could grow more, learned I better keep my baptismal covenant. And so I was a pretty, maybe, precocious teenager. I was like 15 then. That was wonderful. Then within a couple years I had encountered things that raised my first doubts. This kind of happened accidentally. So, this local library—we lived in Utah at this time, the local library carried all kinds of church-related books including critical things like Jerald and Sandra Tanner's Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? And I would sort of steal glances at some of the stuff but I knew that it was, anti-Mormon, and so I had my guard up when I was dealing with that stuff. Then I encountered things that raised doubt in other ways. So it was actually Family Home Evening, and it wasn't anything in the lesson or anything like that. My dad took us to Deseret Book in Orem. He offered to let us each get any church book that we wanted. This was our Family Home Evening activity. And so there in the general authority section between Boyd K. Packer and Joseph Fielding Smith there was this book by B. H. Roberts titled Studies of the Book of Mormon, and for people in the audience who may not be familiar with this, or with B. H. Roberts, B. H. Roberts was a general authority. He was one of the church's best scholars in the early 20th century. He had edited the history of the Church, written the comprehensive history of the Church, written doctrinal books, and so on. And so I knew of this guy. He had died back in the '30s, and before he died he had written a manuscript of his studies of the Book of Mormon, that it was actually trying to create sort of a steel man version of the case against the Book of Mormon. So a sort of, or you could say like the devil's advocate case against the Book of Mormon in order to inspire Latter-day Saint scholars to figure out these issues better that he was raising. So for instance, he raised the issue of how quickly would all the languages among Native Americans have been able to evolve given the linguistic diversity of them and so on and he was comparing these things with the Book of Mormon and concluding the Book of Mormon doesn't look ancient, based on these arguments, and Joseph Smith maybe could have written it. And so I was really shocked. Like I said I was super devout and I had not had any questions about the history of the Book of Mormon so Nephi was just as real to me as George Washington. I hadn't questioned the existence of the one anymore than I had the other. This question then started to open up everything. If maybe the Book of Mormon wasn't true, then what about Christ and the resurrection. What about God and life after death?
I came, sort of close to becoming agnostic at 17 but I'd never, I didn't really at that point let go of my faith, I just had a more tenuous grasp on it. I still believed but it was sort of effortful to believe. So I was able to kind of start putting those issues more in the back of my mind, sort of partly resolve them over the next year and a half or so. And during that time I started doing Mormon history, so when I was 17 that was when I first went to the LDS church archives and started doing archival research. I would show up in my knee-length shorts and my t-shirt and spend the day during the summer like researching, or after school.
6:36
At that point I was going to East High in Salt Lake and so I would just take the bus from East High down to the church archives and do research. I wanted to understand church history because, sacred history, I wanted to understand Joseph Smith. Because I looked at the amount of revelation we had through Joseph Smith. I mean you look at, in the Bible how many books were written by the same -- how much material comes to us through the same person. Well you know Isaiah is a long book, there are five books contributed to Moses. But Joseph Smith, he's the revelator for the entire Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, Book of Mormon, and so there's a lot. So I figured if I wanted to understand revelation better, like the process of revelation, I should try to understand Joseph Smith more. And Joseph Smith became kind of a hero figure for me. I had, at that point, I had sort of some problems with the father figures in my life you could say. I wasn't getting along with my adoptive dad. I hadn't seen my natural dad in a long time. Joseph Smith felt like kind of a father figure to me spiritually and this became important later when I was disillusioned with Joseph Smith. That was a big deal for me. And so I became in essence kind of a Joseph Smithol-ogist, right? This is basically the biggest part of what I've devoted my life to, to this point. Really it’s like wrestling with religion, spirituality and particularly, trying to figure out this Joseph Smith character, what he did, how he thought, what his motives were, and so on. And so that's where I got started in Mormon history. I went on a mission to Texas, Bible belt, good experience. I came back from my mission and just immediately picked up doing church history projects again, started going back to the church archives, researching polygamy, researching all sorts of things about Joseph Smith, researching the Book of Mormon, priesthood restoration events, and so on. You know there's something when we read a book of history or an article the conclusions have already been pulled together for us. Everything's been made sense of already intellectually by the author and often if we're reading church history it's also been made sense in some way, spiritually, by the author. But when you're doing your own research it falls on you to make sense of things for yourself.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
I was making new discoveries about Joseph Smith. Sometimes I didn't know entirely what to do with those. I came up with questions for which I did not have good answers. And so gradually during this time, during my 20s, I didn't really realize it but I was gradually losing my faith, and I lost my faith first in the Church, in the restoration, and like I said I became very disillusioned with Joseph Smith. I started thinking that, I developed a new working model of him as an opportunist. I thought he was just in it for himself. I consequently really emotionally wrestled with him, this sort of fallen hero figure for me. Eventually I also lost faith in Christ and lost faith in God. That had to do in part with the problem of suffering, especially the sufferings of children. That was something that I didn't know how to square with God's love. And so, I ended up leaving the church. I stayed active for a while because I saw good things in the church, but eventually within a few years I decided to go inactive, and then I felt like there was no place in the church for me. I was by this time an atheist. I didn't feel like I wanted to be able to have something to offer to my community that would be useful but I felt like the things, the things the way that I was seeing them in my research would not be useful to the church. They would be detrimental. I didn't feel like I had anything to contribute and I didn't feel like I had a place and so I left. I actually had my name removed from the records of the church. So I sent in a letter requesting that my name be removed from the church records. When the letter came back telling me that I was no longer a member of the church I expected to feel liberated and I actually felt cut off. I felt bad. I felt like why did I do this again? This is the only real community that I've ever been part of and I've left it, and if I had wanted to come back to the church they would have wanted me to believe and that would have been a problem for me at that point.
It initiated what I refer to as a kind of personal wander in the wilderness where I was very involved in the sort of ExMormon social community here in Utah along the Wasatch Front. I went to lots of events. I went to, a couple times, to what they call the ExMormon Conference that they -- The ExMormon Foundation, put on every year. So one of my first steps back to God was – really came through gratitude. So I've always been interested in psychology. One area of psychology that I became interested in is what's known as positive psychology. So this is really about, like much of psychology traditionally has been about, how do human beings sort of go wrong. What goes wrong in the human psyche? Positive psychology is just the opposite. Positive psychology looks at kind of how, what goes right with human beings? What makes people happy? What are the strengths or virtues that human beings can develop? And so I was reading a book, just because I wanted to be a happier person, I was reading a book on The Psychology of Gratitude by Robert Emmons. Bob Emmons, he's a -- he's actually the world's premier researcher on the psychology of gratitude. He's also a devout Christian. I was reading in Bob's work and he really showed that gratitude, it had a remarkable number of benefits for people. People who were more grateful were happier, they were more resilient, they slept better, they were healthier, but also they were kinder, they had more meaning in their lives. They were enveloped in a kind of web of relationships with other people. I realized from reading this book that gratitude wasn't just something that I wanted to feel, it was something that I wanted to be. That I wanted to become a really grateful person, so I started keeping a gratitude journal and before the gratitude journal, I didn't realize it but I was, I was mildly depressed. I just, I was sort of feeling harassed by life a lot. Just dumb little events that would happen. Within a few weeks of starting the gratitude journal my outlook started to brighten, just, I started to realize how wonderful life was.
14:41
I was feeling so much gratitude for so many gifts in my life that I wanted to know more, who should I be grateful to and who should I express this gratitude to? I didn't believe in God I didn't believe in anything supernatural and so there wasn't a place entirely for me to direct that gratitude to and so that was kind of a first step toward God because I really was, I think in a lot of ways, I think I was longing for God. I was wanting to have this center, this spiritual center of my life, I certainly wanted my life to have a larger meaning. I had day-to-day meanings in my life but there was no sense of a larger purpose of things. Even though that's something that had always been important to me when I was a teenager—my sort of personal spiritual quest was driven by a desire for a sense of meaning and purpose, ultimate meaning. And so I was reading in a publication, it probably won't be familiar to most out there, a magazine called "Skeptic." "Skeptic Magazine," it's kind of what it sounds like, it's put together by a well-known skeptic, Michael Shermer. They have articles kind of debunking anything supernatural, so religious beliefs, ESP, certain alternative health practices and so on. There was an ad in the magazine for a book called Biocosm. The ad purported that this book would explain how there could be a larger purpose behind the universe without anything supernatural. And I thought, wow, that sounds like a book for me, that's where I was. I didn't believe in the supernatural but I longed for a larger sense of purpose.
16:36
And so reading the book, basically the book is in two halves and the first half the author really lays out a scientific problem called 'The problem of the fine tuning of the universe, of the constants of the universe, for the existence of life.' And the basic idea is if each of the basic parameters of the laws of physics, it said it like with a tuner knob how precisely would you have to set it in order for life to be able to exist in the universe? How narrow is that band? And it turns out the band is incredibly narrow. If you increase gravity by 1 billionth or decrease it by 1 billionth you end up either with, a universe where all the matter collapsed into black holes at the beginning or a universe where all the matter spread out evenly across the universe. There was no galaxies, no stars, and so no planets with life. The author showed that this was the case with all the laws of physics, all the basic laws of physics. And then he cited another scientist, a very well-respected scientist, one of the scientists who first helped discover black holes, saying that the chances of the constants of the universe being fine tuned for the existence of life the way they are by chance, was about 1 in 10 to the 200th power. Now, that number is so big it almost doesn't mean anything, like a trillion is one in, a trillion is 10 to the 12th.
17:10
One in 10 to the 200th is just this mind-boggling number. I realized that, based on chance, we shouldn't be here at all. And so then I was really primed for the second half of the book. I was like, “Okay, what's the answer?” because he not only established the fine tuning but he dismissed some of the attempts to explain it, which I'd heard about some of these attempts, and thought that they were compelling, and actually they're not at all. I thought, “Okay what's the answer? What caused this?” and his answer that he gives is really kind of not, he says that the universe, back at the beginning was fine tuned for the existence of life by our distant descendants, not like ancestors, descendants, right? That at the end of the universe our distant descendants are going to do something to make it restart with certain constants and he says that time is a closed loop, it just goes in like a giant circle and I thought, he thinks this is more likely than God? I had not believed in God but I didn't think the idea of a mind behind the universe was outlandish, whereas this seemed to me outlandish. And so, the author had given me this giant problem but no solution. The promised solution didn't work. And so, I started thinking about a lot of things about life, about the universe. I thought about how Einstein said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. The universe seems like a logically, rationally structured place, but why should it be?
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
So I started to actually believe in a mind behind the universe. I started to believe again in a God. I was, became, basically a deist and then I started reconsidering an earlier experience that I'd had. So one of those trips that I made to the church archives after high school when I was 18, I was headed back home, I was going to catch a bus at a certain crosswalk that's no longer there on State Street in Salt Lake and as I was stepping off this curb, as I had many times before. I had a voice in my mind tell me, "Don't go out in front of that car." And there was a big boat of a car coming around the corner, Buick or Oldsmobile or some other giant thing, so I stopped and just let the car pass in front of me and as I did I could see there was a driver and there was a front seat passenger and they were both looking down on the floor for something like somebody's Big Gulp had spilled or something. I realized I would have died, I would have been hit by this car and yet I wasn't, because of this warning. And so for years that had been like an evidence for me for the existence of God but then I had come to question even that. Before I left the church I had started thinking, well six million Jews died in the Holocaust, why should I think God saved me? So I was kind of really sort of denying my own experience. Like saying well this larger context invalidates this experience.
21:25
Now in Salt Lake again I had come to believe in some sort of God. I happened to be passing by this place every day on my way to work. I would walk to -- I worked out of the LDS family history library at the time. I'd walk past this spot where my life was saved and I came to realize by stopping at that spot and thinking about it that there was no way that I could have known what was going to happen with that car. That I received that warning from somewhere beyond myself. And so now I started beliefs that not only was there a God, but this God cared about us and intervened. I wanted a closer relationship with God. I started looking into religions again. I briefly became a member of The Bahá'í Faith. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Ashly
Huh-uh.
Don
So The Bahá'í Faith is actually a really expansive, really cool faith. It started around the same time as the LDS church but over in Persia. The founding principals really include the idea that all major religions were founded by prophets sent by God. They make a big deal out of, with the oneness of humankind, that God has made us all equal. God has made us all the same and that God wants us to be brought together more fully into a greater unity and so this really appealed to me. I was inspired by many of the teachings. I became a Bahá'í. And then within two or three months after that, just the most disastrous calamity struck. So I had a younger brother, my youngest brother, he was 25 at the time. His name was Charles. And Charles, I've never met anyone who knew Charles who didn't like him. It's common to say things, positive things about people after they're gone but everybody spoke well of Charles while he was still here. I talked to him the night before he died and everything seemed okay and the next day he was gone. And officially there was never any cause of death.
Ashly
Oh.
Don
Here's that it was actually probably that he mixed medications that interacted and that just, he just stopped breathing. At this time I had had a kind of vague sense of the afterlife, maybe there's some sort of ethereal after life, but I really was uncertain about a lot of things. And so, Charles's viewing was really the most terrible experience, it's the most terrible thing that I've ever seen. Everyone was just completely torn apart, and I saw my brother's body laid out there and I thought this is the last time I'm going to see my brother.
25:20
I thought even if there was some sort of mental existence after death I wouldn't see him as a person. I wouldn't know him. His mannerisms, his appearance, and so on would all be gone I assumed. And after that experience I really started wondering more about the afterlife. I started wondering more about the Christian claim, that there's a resurrection. And so I started reading in that. A friend of mine, who is a very devout Christian, gave me a book called The Resurrection of the Son of God by the scholar N.T. Wright. Wright goes through all the resurrection passages in the Bible and analyzes them carefully and puts them in their historical context and he concludes from all this that in order for the earl Christians to have believed that Jesus was risen from the dead, two things had to have happened. One is the tomb had to be empty, and two, they had to have seen. He then argues from those two things for the probability of the resurrection. I became persuaded that Christ really had risen from the dead and that I would see my brother again. And so one day after work I wasn't working for the church, like I said I was an ExMormon at the time
26:19
but I was doing estate research in the church, I mean the family history library. One evening after work I actually had been pondering all this and just realized I was completely convinced that God had tried to reach out to the world, reach out to me through Christ and so I went into one of the little side classrooms that they have there that was empty and prayed and just accepted Christ, confessed my sins and my sinfulness and on the way home that night walking home, I just experienced wave after wave of peace coming over me. And I like to say, it's not peace just like an absence of trouble, it's peace like a positive palpable presence, right? There's something there. It felt so thick you could cut it with a knife! I felt that God loved me, I felt God's love overwhelmingly and so I started kind of exploring, going to some different churches and so on. I didn't consider at that time going back to the LDS church because I thought that I knew for sure from my research on Joseph Smith, that Joseph Smith was a scoundrel and he made these things up and yet, as I was reading in the New Testament and so I'm trying to draw closer to Christ, I started to remember that at an early, earlier period of my life what really had helped me often to feel closest to Christ was to read the Book of Mormon. And so I thought, well, I know that Joseph Smith wrote it but it seemed useful to me in the past, so I'll try reading it again. And so I started reading the Book of Mormon devotionally alongside the New Testament. And I was getting a lot from it. Then I got really confused. Because like, what am I doing? I know that Joseph Smith wrote this. This isn't what it purports to be. Why am I using it to grow spiritually? And so I just decided to kind of temporarily put all of that up on the shelf. I went to grad school to study history further during the first part of that grad school I thought I'm just going to focus on school. I'm going to try to mostly leave these religious questions off to the side. And so, I did at first. For one of my classes I was going, at this point, I was going to Utah State and studying with Philip Barlow. He's an excellent Latter-day Saint scholar. But I had continued all my Mormon history studies, full board. In fact, I had … some of your audience may be familiar with Brian Hale's three-volume set titled "Joseph Smith's Polygamy." In it Brian had wanted to cite every source that had ever been cited in anything that had ever been written on Joseph Smith and polygamy and then see what additional sources could be found. Brian, he's an anesthesiologist, he did not have time to go be an archive rat, right? In all these archives day after day, and night, out the 1500 sources that he ended up using in these books. So he hired me and so I had continued my research on Joseph Smith both with my own projects and with paid research, like I did for Brian. In the research that I did,
30:13
I encountered, if you think about the difficult areas of Joseph Smith's life, polygamy would be one of these areas, right? I mean this is one of the things that had disturbed me when I left the church and I had written my own letter of resignation. I listed several reasons why I was leaving and Joseph Smith's polygamy was one of them. But then subsequently, I had this chance to do all this research in these hundreds of thousands of sources of Joseph Smith and polygamy so I was well aware of the man.
31:29
Ashly
Right.
Don
Like I might have mentioned this earlier but I, I'm essentially a Joseph Smithologist, right? This is what I do. So for this class that I was taking from Philip Barlow titled “Joseph Smith Biography and Autobiography.” I was doing a paper on how Joseph Smith became a seer. And I had come to the hypothesis that the explanation that Joseph Smith was given for how he became a seer early on was his first vision. That like it's literally his first vision and his first experience of second sight, spiritual sight, and so it's what makes him a seer. And so I was doing a paper on this, and while I was doing the paper a lot of things just really started to come together for me. Things that I had not seen before, so for instance, I had overlapping work about seers in the Book of Mormon. I was doing work on a book that's now published on what we can know about the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon. And so in my research on Joseph Smith's first vision and the lost 116 pages and just the Book of Mormon text that we have, I suddenly had a kind of insight that tied a lot of different things together. And so for instance I was looking at how do people become seers in LDS scripture and so in the Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon the brother of Jared becomes a seer. In the account of how he becomes a seer on the top of this mountain, Mount Zerin, there are lots of things that I suddenly saw a parallel of things that happen in the temple. So Joseph Smith had said that in Nauvoo that anciently mountaintops served as temples. Here you get the brother of Jared's experience, it's on a mountaintop, right? It says that he speaks with the Lord through the veil and during this experience the Lord puts his hand through the veil. He's going to touch some stones.
33:40
The brother of Jared sees his hand and the Lord tests the brother of Jared's faith and knowledge by asking him a series of questions beginning with the question about his hand. Then when he's passed the test, the Lord admits him into his presence and tells him you've been redeemed from the Fall which evokes the whole back story of Adam and Eve and the Lord gives him two additional stones, these white stones, the interpreters. Joseph Smith later talked about everyone who enters the Celestial Kingdom will receive a white stone and he quoted the Book of Revelation, Revelation 2:17. To him that overcometh, I will give unto him a white stone in the which is written a new name which no man knoweth save him that receiveth it. And I thought about the fact that in this narrative we're actually never told the name of the person this is all happening to in the Book of Mormon. At least, the brother of Jared, is why we call him “the brother of this other guy” and so there's a theme here of sort of an esoterically hidden secret name. But I was seeing all these things where I was like wow.
Ashly
Wow.
Don
Like what is the Nauvoo endowment doing in the Book of Mormon? Like I had been convinced that there was no Joseph Smith, didn't know anything about the Nauvoo endowment until he became a freemason in 1842 and instead now I was seeing the endowment all over the Book of Mormon. I was seeing it in accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision and his acquiring his first seer stone, his white stone. I was seeing it in accounts that we have about what was in the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon and so my mind was kind of blown.
Ashly
My mind is blown right now. Just hearing this, it's like wow.
35:09
Don
It's wild, right? Because one reason why people sometimes become disillusioned is, or one aspect of their disillusionment maybe is that they go to the temple and they're like this is weird I've never encountered anything like this before. You know because it's totally different from my church experience outside the temple.
Ashly
Yeah.
Don
Except maybe it's not. I mean if you've got that much of the endowment in the Book of Mormon then we've encountered these things before we just haven't recognized them.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
And so any way this really stood out to me and further research, there are some lesser known accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision and there are details in some of the accounts that get kind of overlooked. So we tend to think the first vision, it's all simple in terms of location of the experience. It all just happens there in that grove, right the Father and the Son come down. All the action is set there but Joseph says some things in different accounts that would suggest otherwise so in one account he says my mind was taken away from the natural objects which surrounded me. So, he wasn't looking around and seeing the trees and so on anymore. It's like …
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
In another account, I think it's the Joseph Smith History account that we all know, he says at the end of the experience, “When I came to myself again I found myself lying on my back gazing into heaven.” Well “came to myself again” suggests something may be different than just he's seeing all these things happen there in the grove, right? In Nauvoo he was talking once about the first vision and he suddenly started saying, anyone who has gazed into heaven for five minutes knows this, that, and the other. It's interesting that he's saying that in connection with describing the first vision. It makes it sound like during the first vision he actually gazes into heaven. When you think about how the Book of Mormon starts, the Book of Mormon starts with Lehi having his own first vision. In that experience a pillar of fire comes down. This isn't just like a sign right in the Old Testament in the story of Exodus, the pillar of fire is the presence of God that goes with the children of Israel. So the presence of God is coming down to Lehi, and then Lehi is lifted up to God's presence in heaven, right where he sees God sitting on his throne surrounded by angels and so there's this pattern here of God comes down to the man's level to lift the man up to God's level, right?
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
This based on different accounts of the first vision, different details that Joseph gave, this started to be my model for understanding the first vision, that it was actually sort of a multipart experience, right? Where first, you had the Divine comes down to Joseph Smith but then the Divine lifts Joseph Smith up to God's own level. He had a heavenly assent. As I thought about all this it just seemed incredibly powerful and I found it remarkable to think, and this guy is like 14, 15 years old and is he already trying to come up with the seed for a ritual, a temple ritual he's not going to give for decades later. Like I just it seemed way too forward-thinking for a teenager, just--
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
—something else is going on, and so that actually began to open me up to different possibilities. I started realizing that I had been approaching Joseph Smith strictly with a kind of negative set of questions where I would always ask anytime Joseph Smith opened his mouth and said something or anytime he did something; the question I would ask was, “What was in it for him?”
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
Right? I saw him as an opportunist. Well I started wondering is my question really limiting what I'm able to see. So much of what we can see in life depends on the questions that we ask. And this is true when we're going through a faith crisis, right? Because if the questions that we start to ask become exclusively negative sorts of questions, well what are the things about church history that are different from what I have been told? Or what are the difficulties in church history? What are the things that I can see that the modern church does that I don't like? And I'm not saying that we shouldn't give those things consideration. But it can become
Ashly
Yeah.
Don
40:28
focused on that, and the questions that we ask guide our focus. And so the questions I've been asking were questions that just made me look for negative aspects of Joseph Smith, selfishness basically.
Ashly
Right.
Don
So I started broadening the set of questions that I asked and I was soon able to see things that Joseph Smith was doing for other people. He did a lot of things for his family and he certainly wasn't just focused on himself.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
40:25
Don
I have come to see a ton of evidence for Joseph Smith's sincerity. One thing people sometimes say is we can't read the minds of the people of the past. We can't know what they were thinking.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
Now we humans have been gifted with social intelligence. The next time you make a trip to the store, you have to infer the intentions of a number of people that you've never met before in order to arrive at the store safely. We're actually quite good attributing motives as long as we have enough information to work with. Historians actually are in a really good position to assess the motives of historical figures, and here's why: Let's take the people who knew Joseph Smith during his lifetime. Let's say Emma, let's say Brigham Young. Emma is going to know certain things about Joseph Smith that we can't know, at least not very well. That his appearance, the tone of his voice, his mannerisms, the sweet nothings that he said, you know whatever, right? Like these are things that would be difficult for us to know but she could know very directly. However, we have a set of historical information about Joseph Smith that was actually much wider than her experience of him. Emma wasn't there in the core meetings that Joseph was part of. We have minutes from those meetings. Emma wasn't there in the court when Joseph was acting as Justice of the Peace, but we have the minutes of these meetings. Emma wasn't there for the conversations Joseph had with his plural wives but we have accounts from many of the plural wives. And so any given person in Joseph Smith's life would have actually only seen a small sliver of his life but we have records and accounts from thousands of people who encountered him in tens or hundreds of thousands of actions. In some ways, we can know Joseph Smith better than anyone who knew him while he was alive. Because we can get a bigger picture. We can see the patterns of his behavior across time and as I have looked at the patterns of Joseph Smith's behavior. Something that comes out crystal clearly is that Joseph Smith was religiously sincere. And we can see evidence for this from the time he's a child. For instance, his mother Lucy Mack Smith writes that Joseph, from the time he was a child was always especially interested in any discussions of a religious nature.
43:46
Well if Joseph Smith is never really a religious person, religion is just his stick as a con man –
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
—surely we're not supposed to believe that as a young child he's already thinking this. “Someday I'm going to grow up and I'm going to be a religious figure and so I better figure out religion in order to make my stick.” No, he's genuinely interested in matters of religion and spirituality from the time he's a young child. Also his parents believed him. If you've got kids you know if your child is inclined toward telling tall tales.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
Right? His parents did not see that in him. They believed him. They were in a position to know. We can see the way that Joseph responds to his childhood leg surgery. There are actually things that he's trying to do in the context where he's trying to help his father, during that experience. There's all kinds of evidence that I see that Joseph Smith was frequently watching for signs of divine providence in his life and then acting in accordance with those signs of divine providence. Like looking for what God, “What is God trying to tell me He wants me to do through the events in my life?” An opportunist doesn't care what God of the Universe is trying to tell him. He only cares what he wants. That's not this guy. This is a very different kind of guy than that. And so I see that, even strictly as a historian, like, totally apart from, if I were not a Latter-day Saint I would see it the exact same way, because this is, I've devoted much of my life to understanding this man.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
And I can tell you, he was religiously sincere. And so after I started getting this fuller picture of Joseph Smith, I started to reconsider having left the church. I started thinking again about my earlier spiritual experiences because I had had them. I had had spiritual experiences in the church, I had just come to dismiss them, think they were products of my own mind or something. But when it came down to it, there were some, like the one that I had mentioned earlier that had saved my life, where ultimately it was impossible to do that with them. I remember thinking, if I ask myself what is a testimony of my life's experience regarding the church? Is it true? I remember thinking, “Well of course.” You know, of course it is. Because my questions had not been about my own experience, they'd really been about things that I was finding in the history. And how do I make those things work? How do I put them together?
45:47
And so I initiated a return to the church. I was back in the church within two months to my shock! Within two months of approaching a bishop about that. I was just really beautifully re-embraced by the church. I had feared that there would be something punitive in the process of coming back. Couldn't have been further from the reality. The bishop was wonderful. The people in the ward were wonderful. People online that I had previously been arguing with, Latter-day Saints—there were hundreds. There were a couple hundred of them who came on to a message board where I announced my return of the church to greet me, to welcome me. And I've been back for several years now. It's been a marvelous, beautiful, experience and I can tell you with certainty … Well, I'll share this. So when I wrote my letter to resign from the church, I wrote it with the intention of making it so that I could never come back to the church. I thought I might be tempted at some point to want to go back and I thought I'm going to make that impossible. And so I, in my letter, I like bore my anti-testimony. Basically, I gave all kinds of reasons why the church wasn't true and so on. I found out when I was in the process of coming back to the church that I was going to need to, that we were going to need to talk about that letter. And I went home and I found a copy of the letter and then I cried, and I thought they're never going to let me back into the church. And so I called up the bishop in tears and he said to me, he said, son, if the church couldn't forgive it couldn't be the Lord's church. It is a gospel of forgiveness. I've been welcomed back beautifully and it's been a wonderful experience.
48:29
Ashly
So incredible. What you shared about, I mean, I had heard part of it but you actually didn't go into as much detail in what I heard before and so, I mean, this time you went into more detail. And to hear that from you is so, I mean it strengthens my own testimony so much because it's like, me being in this place of just having people tell things to me all the time on the internet— like, the church isn't true because of this, and the church isn't true because of this, and sometimes they say things that I've never even heard before. One of those things was the Freemason thing that somebody said to me. And I didn't understand and so I started doing some research and I heard what you said about it and I called my mom immediately and I just told her everything that you said, and it was like all of these pieces to this puzzle, they fit so beautifully and almost looking at it now I'm thinking, if these things that are in the temple endowment are in other places throughout history, like, to me it proves that maybe Joseph Smith didn't just make up this thing for the temple. Maybe it is something that is, through other places in history and I mean I am by no means a historian in any way but in my mind that completely made sense that like God's hand is in all of these different places. And I don't know, I just appreciate you sharing this so much because it just strengthens my testimony so much. And I just think about all the people who struggle with all of these hard questions, and if there's anybody that has completely dived into everything there is to know about church history, and just turned it upside down and went through every single square inch of it, it's you! And to find your way back in such a beautiful way is just so, I mean, my testimony is stronger hearing your story. And so, thank you so much for taking the time with us today and we are going to do a part two to this and I know that everybody listening to this is going to be over the moon to know we're going to do a part two, where listeners can ask questions for Don and you can submit them and we'll post a link on our website where you can submit questions. Are you still up for that, Don? Part two?
Don
Totally, totally, and also I'd be interested in going over, kind of as a follow up to this discussion, like some of the things that I learned more generally about wrestling with faith and doubt.
Ashly
Uh-huh.
Don
I'd be happy to take questions.
Ashly
Yes, I would love that. I think that a lot of people, especially right now, I mean people close to me have left the church over a lot of questions that feel unanswered. And I think that, I don't know, you just so beautifully are able to find peace with hard questions and I think that it would be a huge benefit for people to be able to just have you as kind of a sounding board and to give your advice when it comes to faith and doubt.
Don
Absolutely.
Ashly
Awesome. Okay. Round two, coming soon and I can't wait.
