"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 Stone
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 like 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, like, 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, you know, 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 like a deep Mormon heritage, right,
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, right? So, this local library—we lived in Utah at this time,
the local library carried
all kinds of church-related books including like
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, I knew that it
was, you know, anti-Mormon, right, 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
Body 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, you know. 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, you
know, 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. You
know, 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 you know 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 you know 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, you know, there are five books contributed to
Moses. But Joseph Smith, right, he's the revelator for
the entire Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price,
Book of Mormon, you know, 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, right? 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 you know 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.
You know, 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, you know, disillusioned with Joseph Smith. I
started thinking that, you know, I developed a new
working model of him as an opportunist. I thought he was
just in it for himself. You know, 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. Like I stayed active for awhile 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? You know, this is the only real community that I've ever been part
of and I've left it, and you know 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, right? 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, right? 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?
You know 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. You know, I was wanting to have this center, this
spiritual center of my life, I certainly wanted my life
to have a larger meaning. You know 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, you know,
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, you know, 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? You know, how
narrow is that band? And it turns out the band is
incredibly narrow. If you, you know, increase gravity by
1 billionth or decrease it by 1 billionth you end up
either with, you know, 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, right,
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, like, based on chance, like, 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,
you know, 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, you know, what caused this and his answer that
he gives is really kind of not, like, 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 like 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? You know, like, I had not
believed in God but I didn't think the idea of a mind
behind the universe was outlandish, you know, whereas
this seemed to me outlandish. And so, the author had
given me this giant problem but no solution, right? 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,
you know, 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, you know.
I realized I would have died, you know, 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, you know, why should I think God saved me, you
know? So I was kind of really sort of denying my own
experience, right? 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,
right? 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. You know, 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,
right? 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, right? I started wondering more
about the Christian claim, right, 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 early
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, right, 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, you know,
Joseph Smith was a scoundrel and, you know, 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 you know 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 you know 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, you know, 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, you know, paid research, like I did for Brian. In
the research that I did, right,
30:13
I encountered, you know
if you think about the difficult areas of Joseph Smith's
life, polygamy would be one of these areas, right? I
mean this is it's one of the things that had disturbed
me when I left the church and I had, you know, written
my own letter of resignation, I listed several reasons
why I was leaving and Joseph Smith's polygamy was one of
them, you know. But then subsequently, right, I had this
chance to do all this research in these you know
hundreds of thousands of sources of Joseph Smith and
polygamy so I was well aware of the man, right?
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. Right, 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, right? 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,
right, 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, right.
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, right? 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,” right? 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, you
know, 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, right? 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, you know, 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, right? 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, right? 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, right? 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
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, right? Emma
wasn't there for the conversations Joseph had with his
plural wives but we have accounts from many of the
plural wives, right? 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, like, 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? You know, I
remember thinking, “Well of course.” You know, of course it
is. Like 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 you know, 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, you know. 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, you know, 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.
