Following the Kirtland Banking Crisis in 1838, Joseph Smith left town in the dead of the night.  The town of Kirtland was basically bankrupt.  Because of this, ownership of the temple was claimed by several people.  John Hamer and Lachlan MacKay will talk about Kirtland Temple ownership problems.  It’s a little bit like a soap-opera.   We’ll also hear an episode where people stormed the temple with guns and knives to try to take ownership of the temple.

Lachlan:  This is the one where Joseph Smith Sr. is at the pulpit on the west end.  The dissenters are concerned and hoping to take possession of the temple, and they stormed to the front with guns and knives drawn.  I think this is Oliver Huntington, one of the Huntington boys said, “Them that had chicken-hearts dove out the windows for safety.”

The police are called in to restore order.  They rush in and they knocked over a stove-pipe.  So I just imagine soot filling the room.  The best part is, after that chaos, they eject the belligerents and resume the services of the day.  {Everyone chuckles}

GT:  Really!  Wow.

Lachlan:  So I think that’s probably what you were referring to.

GT:  Yeah, it must have been quite a service!  {all chuckle}  We don’t talk about that in the LDS tradition very often.  I remember reading that somewhere and just going, “Wow!”

Lachlan:  I think one of them is even—they are walking from the front to the back, in some cases over the back of the pews, so stepping from pew-box to pew-box because the aisles are full of people, so they have to walk on the top of the pew-boxes to get up there.

We also talk about some other Mormon groups:  Strangites & Hedrickites and their involvement in Kirtland Temple ownership.  I also update our previous conversation with Dr. Richard Bennett about Brigham Young trying to sell the Kirtland Temple!  Was the Kirtland Temple turned into a sheep shed?  How did the Kirtland Banking Crisis affect ownership?  What else can we learn about the Kirtland Temple over the years?  Check out our conversation…..

https://youtu.be/YuJpYMmGh2g

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In our next conversation, we’ll talk about differences in temple worship between the LDS Church and the RLDS Church.  (Note:  The Community of Christ has been historically known as the RLDS Church.)  Community of Christ Apostle, Lachlan MacKay and John Hamer (a Seventy) discuss the differences in temple worship between the two churches, and how the temple has evolved.

Lachlan:  Sure.  So Kirtland in the 1830s, it’s a house for public worship with a strong emphasis on empowerment, both spiritually and intellectually.  Two-thirds of Kirtland Temple was classroom space.  You would worship in the temple on Sundays, and you would go to school six days a week.  Kirtland High School met on the third floor.  Students ranged in age from six through adults, so it was the center of their community life.

My sense is that in Nauvoo the same was going to be true, but you did start to have to have, I believe, a receipt saying you were a tithe payer in order to gain access to the baptismal font, and they didn’t welcome non-members in the temple in Nauvoo while they were performing ordinances, but it was still a public building.  That receipt, I think, is what many generations later would become the idea of a temple recommend.

...

John:  This idea for the LDS tradition of having what constitutes temple work and everything like that, almost all of this is extremely different than what existed in Kirtland.  There’s no font, like you say, in the Kirtland Temple.  That’s something that begins in Nauvoo.  The same thing, the Endowment ceremony, and things like that is taking place after Joseph Smith had been exposed to Freemasonry and things like that so that also isn’t taking place, the whole liturgy and things like that in Kirtland.

I have a chart.  I’ll give it to you so you can splice it in if you want for the videos, but essentially where you take the spaces that exist, you’ve taken Kirtland, like what Lach is telling you about, the spaces of worship, the space for learning, the space for order, the church offices and things like that, you can see where they have that same major portion of the space is devoted to that in Nauvoo, but then there’s also the space for the baptism of the dead in the basement and there’s a space for endowments in the attic.

Then you go to Salt Lake, all of that is preserved so there’s a big solemn assembly hall and things like that in the Salt Lake Temple.  There are the offices for the apostles and things like that, but then when you get to the little temples that are in the LDS tradition, which might be what most Mormons in the Utah tradition are exposed to, they don’t have any of those things that are from the Kirtland period.  All they have is the basement and attic part of the Nauvoo Temple and that’s their whole experience.  So they go and that’s their temple experience.  They go to Kirtland and say, “What did these Reorganites do to the temple?  It’s not even—it’s so alien.”  That’s what Kirtland is!  But anyway, we’re each honoring different parts of the heritage.

We’ll also talk about baptism for the dead as well as vision of Elijah in 1836 in the Kirtland Temple.  It’s going to be a very interesting conversation.  I hope you check it out (as well as part 1 of our conversation)!

https://youtu.be/rLfMRzvEUUk

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I’m excited to start 2018 two amazing guests: a Seventy and an Apostle of the Community of Christ: John Hamer and Lachlan MacKay. I’ll let them introduce themselves.

Lachlan:  Sure, [I'm] Lachlan MacKay, a member of the Council of Twelve in the Community of Christ.  I oversee the northeast field in the U.S. which is Michigan and basically Kirtland to Maine to Virginia.  I have functional assignments including Community of Christ Historic Sites.  I oversee historic sites and lead the church history and sacred story team.

John: In terms of the history work that I do, I primarily have studied the broader Latter-day Saint tradition churches.  Like I say that would be all manner of –ites, so the Strangites,[1] especially but also Cutlerites[2] and Hendrickites[3] and everybody else, Josephites,[4] our tradition.  I’m a member of Community of Christ.  I serve as the pastor of the downtown Toronto congregation.  I’ve been called to be a Seventy.  I’m a Seventy-designate.  The ordination will happen in October.[5]  I am also a past president of the John Whitmer Historical Association (JWHA), which is essentially the other –ites, or the Community of Christ’s version of the Mormon History Association (MHA), those kind of things.

We’ll be talking a little bit about LDS myths.

GT:  One of my favorite blog posts was, it’s been a decade now, the Top Myths about the Community of Christ for Mormons.

John:  Oh yeah, the Top 10 myths, I don’t remember exactly how it was, the top 10 Mormon myths about the Community of Christ or something like that.  That one we ended up doing a couple of podcasts with that. I think we did one on Mormon Expression that was on that same topic.

One of the ones for the LDS Tradition, one of the blogs posts that gets the most traction is for whatever reason, sometime in your curriculum every spring you do the Milk & Strippings story.[6]  Then suddenly this essay that I’ve written that has been read more times is on the Milk & Strippings story because every May or something like that it comes up for some reason.  I don’t know why.

We will also talk about the construction of the Kirtland Temple.  (Don't forget to check out our previous discussion with Dr. Mark Staker and Dr. Richard Bennett!)  Check out our conversation!

https://youtu.be/Agt2SKt9M6U

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[1] Because so many churches founded by Joseph Smith have similar names, sometimes it is easier to name the groups by their next founder.  For example, the Strangites have a similar name as the mainline LDS Church.  Their church is officially known with slightly different capitalization and punctuation as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (vs. Latter-day Saints), and were founded by James Strang following an angelic visit.  We will talk more about them in a future episode.

[2] Cutlerites were founded by Alpheus Cutler and are officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ.

[3] Hedrickites were founded by Granville Hedrick and officially known as the Church of Christ or Church of Christ (Temple Lot.)  They are sometimes referred to as the Temple Lot Church.  We will discuss them in a future episode.

[4] Josephites are better known as Community of Christ or RLDS Church.

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Happy New Year. I’m your host of Gospel Tangents, Rick Bennett.  We’re counting down the Top 20 Moments that were most surprising moments in 2017 here on Gospel Tangents.  I’ve learned a lot over this year.

1. Let’s start with some scoops!  Paul Reeve told me he participated in writing the Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood at LDS.org.  Unfortunately, I had some camera problems, but the audio worked just fine.  This is still my most downloaded moment of 2017!

GT:  Very good.  Now I want to ask you another question.  I’m hoping you’ll answer.  I’ve heard rumors, and that’s all they are is rumors that you played a role in compiling that essay [Race and the Priesthood].  Do you have any response to that?

Paul laughs:  I did help with the essay. Yeah, Yeah.

GT:  So was it, can you describe your role?

Paul:  Well the Church History Department invited me to write an extended essay. It ended up being about 55 pages long with footnotes and everything like I would produce as an academic essay.  Once they were satisfied with that it was sent up the line, several layers of approval process and then the Church History Department actually boiled down that longer essay to what got posted online so I had no say over what got posted online, what eventually appeared as Race and the Priesthood, but it was a condensed version of the longer piece that I produced for them.

2.  What other scholars participated? I asked a similar question to Dr. Brian Hales regarding the polygamy essays

Brian:  Yeah, I gave them a very long essay, and then maybe a couple of years later they sent me the Gospel Topics essay that was similar to what we have today.  I went through it all.  I think we had one other meeting in the interim, maybe two.  I just went through and made recommendations on it, and every recommendation I recommended in the text they accepted.  There were some outside comments that I made some recommendations they did not, but they were very generous to allow me to do that.  They do quote from the trilogy a number of times and an article I wrote was also referenced.

GT:  So that took a few years for that whole process to go through?

Brian:  Yeah, you know originally they were thinking of doing long answer, medium answer, short answer.  That was the first thing that was asked of me on the topic of polyandry.  Then I just sent them some general stuff, and I don’t know how many iterations it went through there.  Again I was excited to contribute to that.  I only looked at the Nauvoo material.  I know they had Kathryn Daines help out, and Kathleen Flake I think also are the other two that did the input on plural marriage.  I hope they don’t mind me saying that but they wanted outsiders to critique it.

3.  That wasn’t all. Ugo Perego was involved in the Book of Mormon essay

Ugo:  Yeah I helped writing that… it wasn’t only me.  I actually took the lead on the project of writing that.  I wrote a much more extensive paper which has been published as well in the Interpreter, the online Mormon journal.  It’s about 40 pages long and then from that the Church condensed it down to what is the in Gospel Topics today.

4.  Since we’re on the Book of Mormon, we had some interesting conversations. David Rosenvall had an interesting theory on how Asian DNA ended up in America.

David:  our hypothesis is that you have at least everyone that came over with Jared and his brother who dispersed for thousands of years, and if you assume that there are some that didn’t come across the ocean who were also related to them, who may have been a big part of how Asia became, there’s a good chance that the people of North America and the people of Asia are going to have the same DNA.  The difference is they used boats to get them across and ma...

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I was lucky to be interviewed by Brandt Malone and Brian Whitney of the Mormon News Report.  Here's where they asked me the questions, rather than the other way around!  Thanks Brian and Brandt!  I encourage you all to listen to the entire episode here, but here's a short version with just my interview!

They usually do audio only, but I added some photos and graphics on the Youtube site, so be sure to check that out!

https://youtu.be/0IAU00myIwU

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Many of you are probably familiar with the story of Helmuth Hübener.  He was the young German teenager that was executed by Adolf Hitler for treason.  It’s a wonderful story and BYU actually turned it into a play in the 1970s.  However, Church leaders were upset by the play and decided to suppress it.  Why was that?  Dr. David Conley Nelson details, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.”  This is the story about Hübener you probably haven’t heard.

Elder Monson arrives and he takes in the play and he just doesn’t seem to be as happy according to other witnesses as the rest of them.  Word comes down two days later through Dallin Oaks, there will be no more productions of “Huebener Against the Reich.”  In fact, Thomas Rogers is prohibited from releasing—it’s his intellectual property, but he is prohibited from giving permission for anybody else to use that play.

GT: Wow.

David:  Furthermore, Alan Keele and Douglas Tobler are “asked” to put a hold on their research and not publish anything.  A couple of things have happened.  First off the German-American community got to Thomas Monson.  They don’t like it, they don’t like it at all because Hübener should not be considered a hero, he should be considered in some of their eyes an example of how not to behave.

What does Dr. Nelson believe?

The fact is, and this is my professional opinion, that Thomas Monson got it wrong because he didn’t know enough about German culture.  He was a real great knowledgeable guy about German-American Mormons, but he did not realize that it was in the church’s best interest.  If he thought it was the church’s best interest to suppress Hübener, he was just diametrically wrong.  It would have been in the church’s best interest to promote Hübener.

Find out what else Nelson said, and don't forget to listen to our episodes on Jewish Genealogy and J. Reuben Clark!  Check out our conversation!

https://youtu.be/Yod6VoT4arg

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Since it’s the end of the year I wanted to ask a special favor.  We’re going to do a year-end review of all the fun interviews we’ve done here at Gospel Tangents, and I’d like to hear what was your most favorite interview, as well as what were the most surprising things you learned over this past year on Gospel Tangents?  You can email me at Gospel Tangents at gmail dot com or you can also check out this link https://kwiksurveys.com/s/zK1fouUh that I’ve got for a special survey.  I would like to include any comments you have in our year-end special.  It will be coming next week.  Please include that as soon as you can either by email or you can fill out the survey!  Thanks a lot.  I’d really appreciate it.

Take part in our online Survey on the Best of 2017 at Gospel Tangents

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When Adolf Hitler came to power, one of the things he wanted to do was to find Jews and Jewish ancestry.  He did this through genealogy.  Of course the LDS Church is very interested in genealogical research and used LDS basketball and genealogy to their advantage to leverage a better relationship with Hitler.

David:  We both know why Mormons do genealogy and that’s to research and eventually baptize ancestors who have passed away so they can receive temple ordinances and they can receive eternal exaltation.

We all know why the Germans did genealogy.  They did genealogy to identify anybody with Jewish blood so that the Jews could eventually be eliminated from the face of the earth.

...

It was just one of these things where the desires and needs of the church coincided with the desires and needs of the Nazi government.  The Mormons were not afraid to shout from the rooftops and put articles in the Deseret News back home with how wonderful it has become for the church now that the genealogy archives, doors have swung open, “so that everyone can prove their grandmother was not a Jewess.”

Was it a good idea for the LDS Church to help Hitler find Jews?

We’ll also talk about the 1936 Olympics.  How did Mormon missionaries help out with the German Olympic effort?  The answer is very interesting and Dr. David Nelson will tell us more about it in our next conversation.

The only people that knew anything about basketball in Germany at the time were a few foreign university students from the United States and Canada, and guess who?  The Mormon missionaries!

Check it out!

https://youtu.be/4g9Lp9lKNqc

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Since it’s the end of the year I wanted to ask a special favor.  We’re going to do a year-end review of all the fun interviews we’ve done here at Gospel Tangents, and I’d like to hear what was your most favorite interview, as well as what were the most surprising things you learned over this past year on Gospel Tangents?  You can email me at Gospel Tangents at gmail dot com or you can also check out this link https://kwiksurveys.com/s/zK1fouUh that I’ve got for a special survey.  I would like to include any comments you have in our year-end special.  It will be coming next week.  Please include that as soon as you can either by email or you can fill out the survey!  Thanks a lot.  I’d really appreciate it.

Take part in our online Survey on the Best of 2017 at Gospel Tangents

The Mormon Church is very well known for having a very well-organized institution. It wasn’t always the case though. It turns out that J. Reuben Clark and David O. McKay called a mission president to Berlin, while President Grant who was in Europe at the time called a different man to be mission president. Both mission presidents arrived in Berlin. What happens next? Dr. David Nelson tells a very interesting story about rival mission presidents in the Berlin, Germany mission.

David:  Heber J. Grant was in Germany.  What he was doing is he was celebrating 100 years of Mormonism in Europe, so he is on a 3 month tour of Germany, the prophet, seer, and revelator, Heber J. Grant.  He comes to Bern, Switzerland where the mission home is for what was known as then, the Swiss-German mission, later on became the West German mission.  He stays with Swiss-German mission, Philemon Kelly, who was a kindly man, a doctor from Idaho, a physician, medical doctor.  Sometime during stay, Pres Grant goes to Pres. Kelly and says, “How you like to be the mission president in Berlin?”

That’s a plum assignment.  Philemon Kelly [said], “I’ll take it.”  He packed up and he’s gone.

At same time while President Grant is gone from Salt Lake City, David O. McKay and J. Reuben Clark are calling Albert C. Rees to be the mission president in Berlin, the same city.  The newspapers in Salt Lake City give goodbye editorials to Alfred C. Rees because he’s one of them.  He’s part of the newspaper industry there.  There’s no doubt he is going to Berlin, but when he gets to Berlin he finds Philemon Kelly and his wife already installed in the mission home in the Tiergarten and Kelly won’t give it up.

In my book I write for a month or a month and a half, these two guys are competing.  No way Rees could turn around and take the consolation prize in Frankfurt, so he goes and rents a home, which the mission has to pay for, down the street and we have rival mission presidents in Berlin for this period of time.

Who won?  You'll have to listen to find out!  Dr. Nelson also discusses some LDS interactions with Adolph Hitler.

David:  You had a situation that happened there where some 900 German adolescent girls, not Mormons, but 900 adolescent girls came home from rally pregnant, unmarried girls ages 14-17.  There was an investigation.  In 400 cases they could not determine who father was because girl had multiple sexual partners.  This caused a stir and quite a bit of controversy in a police state.  You don’t raise a lot of heck in Nazi Germany.  You don’t go around screaming to people to supervise these kids better because you don’t scream at anybody in that type of a situation.

...

Elizabeth Welker writes letter to Gertrud Schultz-Klink and expresses some worries about that.  A couple of Klink’s assistants get in touch with her and agree to let her tour some youth camps, so she can see for herself the level of discipline enforced, and level of supervision at youth camps.  One of these trips, Shultz-Klink is in the limousine with Adolph Hitler because Adolph Hitler is going out to see the camps himself.  Shultz-Klink gets picked up, and she is in the same car with Hitler.  They go out there and they inspect this camp.  There were a couple of other times under Schultz-Klink’s underlings came out at took her to other took to other youth meetings.  In the end Elizabeth Welker is just absolutely bamboozled, and believes German adolescent girls are the best teenage girls in world, and they are being led better than anybody else, certainly a lot better than our permissive situation in the United States.

Welker writes an article on the moral status of German girls in the Improvement Era!

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As Hitler came to power in Germany, how did the LDS Church respond?  In our next conversation, we’ll talk to Dr. David Nelson and we’ll talk specifically about how J Reuben Clark of the First Presidency dealt with Jews in Hitler’s Germany.  It wasn’t a pretty picture.  Nelson describes the political environment Clark grew up around.

David:  Yes, well J. Reuben Clark, you’re right.  He was pretty much against war to start off with because the Republicans in his period of time were isolationist.  They were very much against the League of Nations[1] after World War I and J. Reuben Clark was an old-style Republican.  But yes J. Reuben Clark was a xenophobe, a nativist, and an anti-Semite.

He had a long government career during Republican administrations and then he was in private practice as a lawyer when Woodrow Wilson served eight years as a Democrat as president after [Teddy] Roosevelt up until his [Roosevelt’s] death in 1921.  J. Reuben Clark was primarily a nativist and xenophobe, and he became, because of his experiences in the eastern United States, he became an anti-Semite.  When J. Reuben Clark gave the valedictory address at the University of Utah in 1898, the whole thing was filled with anti-immigrant sentiment.

Now this was not just J. Reuben Clark.  One of the bad things about American progressivism at the time, and don’t think of progressivism back then as progressive is used as the word today.  There were good things in progressivism, but there was a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in progressivism.  Immigrants are coming over, they’re taking our jobs away from us and all that.

Find out what Clark said!  We'll also talk about how he responded to both Jewish and non-Jewish immigration requests to the United States.  Check out our conversation…..

https://youtu.be/K3IyHa7ZAKw

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[1] This was a forerunner of the United Nations and was proposed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as a reaction to World War I.

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(Problem with previous post, so this is a fix.)  On December 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States.  I’m sure it was an awful Christmas that year.  This is the 76th anniversary of the declaration of war.  In our next conversation, we’ll talk to Dr. David Conley Nelson and he’ll talk about German persecution of Mormon missionaries in Germany before Hitler.

David:  When the golden spike was driven in Promontory Point, [Utah] and two railroads were connected in 1870s-1880s, one German newspaper said the government was doing that so they could send a train to Utah with troops to put down the Mormon rebellion.  So in that particular atmosphere, a lot of local policemen would round up Mormon missionaries.  They would put them in jail for a day and then let them loose, or a local judge would tell them that they could have a suspended sentence and go home, charged with what?  I don’t know.

GT:  These were just trumped up charges.

David:  If they would just leave the country.  Well what they would do, is that a missionary would get kicked out of Bavaria, so he’d go to Saxony instead of leaving and go home.  A Saxon missionary, American missionary being kicked out would go to Bavaria and replace them.

Just prior to Hitler taking over Germany, there was a question about who would take over Germany:  the Communists or the Nazis.

David:  The mission presidents are writing these letters home saying, we’re afraid for the church for the national socialists and the communists battling for power in the streets.

Don't forget to listen to our introduction on this topic.  Check out our conversation…..

https://youtu.be/uQLnBAUb24s

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