Mormon History Podcast – Gospel Tangents – Mormon History Podcast

What if you could do a virtual temples at home? Not every branch of the Restoration wanted a temple, and the groups covered in this closing conversation show just how far the idea could stretch — from outright rejection to a virtual temple.

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The Bickertonites are the clearest case of a group opting out of the temple tradition entirely. The church traces back to William Bickerton, the last apostle called by Sidney Rigdon before Rigdon’s own short-lived organization collapsed. In the chaotic years after Joseph Smith’s death, it wasn’t unusual for a small branch to drift between competing claimants depending on which traveling minister made the most persuasive case, and Bickerton’s group briefly aligned with Brigham Young’s church before Young’s 1852 public acknowledgment of polygamy, after decades of official denial, ended that association for good. Bickerton reorganized his branch independently, and it grew into a church centered on working-class, heavily Italian American communities in Pittsburgh and Detroit. Unlike nearly every other group in this series, the Bickertonites never built toward a temple, an endowment house, or even a symbolic room — the concept simply wasn’t part of their theology.

The more striking development is what happens when the idea of a temple gets detached from any building whatsoever. Several small, independent groups are now performing temple ordinances — the core ritual function a temple exists to serve — without a physical structure at all.

David Ferriman runs what’s effectively a Zoom-based ministry: he and his wife hold their own priesthood offices (he describes a Melchizedek priesthood, she a “Magdalene priesthood,” alongside Aaronic and “Miriam” priesthoods), and they perform temple ordinances, sealings, and other ritual work over video call, for a membership defined more by openness than by orthodoxy — same-sex sealings, plural sealings, and alternate scripture are all accommodated. He eventually wants to build a physical temple.

The Reformed Mormon movement, associated with Rob Lauer and Evan Sharley (both former members of John Hamer’s own Toronto congregation), goes a step further by removing hierarchy almost entirely. Rather than ordained clergy performing ordinances, the movement publishes something like a handbook that lets individuals set up their own home endowment — a framework rather than an institution, closer to open-source religion than to a church with a temple at its center.

A third group, the True Latter Day Saints, took a more traditional approach to the same idea: like the Cutlerites’ building in Manti, Iowa, they repurposed the upper floor of their own “red brick store” (in Manti, Utah, this time) as an endowment space — proof that the 19th-century pattern of a consecrated room above an ordinary building hasn’t disappeared, even as other groups move the same function onto the internet. And the Nielsen-Naylor congregation in Bluffdale, Utah — a group that split off from Centennial Park, itself a split from the FLDS — reportedly has early-stage plans for an actual temple building, suggesting the physical-building impulse hasn’t vanished even among the newest offshoots.

Across these cases, the throughline is that a “temple” was never really defined by its walls. For the Bickertonites, the ordinance tradition simply didn’t matter enough to carry forward. For the internet-era groups, the ordinances matter enormously — enough to perform them without a building, over a screen, or in someone’s living room. Hamer’s parting advice to any group considering a temple of its own is to plan deliberately, the way the Missouri fundamentalist group featured earlier in this series did, rather than building something modest and later outgrowing it. Across the full series, the idea of a temple has traveled from Kirtland and Nauvoo through pyramids and domed ceilings, Cutlerite endowment rooms, Strang’s unbuilt fortress temple, and finally here — to a ceremony performed entirely online.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

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CHAPTERS

James Strang is one of the strangest turns in Restoration history, including being crowned as a Mormon King. Historian John Hamer opens part four of this series by explaining just how unexpected his rise was.

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Almost as soon as Joseph Smith died, and right after Sidney Rigdon’s own short-lived church fizzled out, Strang emerged as an incredibly successful rival to Brigham Young. Strang gathered a following at Voree, Wisconsin, and John traces how his church took shape there. Strang was a firm opponent of polygamy, so as he built his movement he began unwinding some of Nauvoo’s newer practices while holding on to others. Baptism for the dead, which had been performed on the banks of the Mississippi, continued at Voree: Strang set apart a stretch of the White River, a small creek running through the community, and held a ceremony dedicating land there for a temple.

That temple never left the drawing board, but the plan was ambitious. Strang published a floor plan in the church newspaper, and John describes a design more elaborate than a simple meeting house, with ceremonial spaces suited to the rituals he was reviving. It’s a striking detail: a rival prophet in rural Wisconsin sketching out a temple of his own within a few years of Nauvoo’s fall.

The conversation turns to two of Strang’s most colorful episodes. The first is a family rupture. William Smith, Joseph Smith’s brother, joined Strang’s movement, but he was secretly practicing polygamy, the very thing Strang had built his church in opposition to. When Strang found out, he expelled him. The second is Strang’s coronation. George J. Adams, whom John describes as very theatrical, is the one who staged the ceremony that saw Strang crowned king, an image that has followed the Strangites ever since. John connects the ritual back to the Council of Fifty, which had already set Strang and others apart with titles like prophet, priest, and king before the coronation made it official and public.

Rick and John also weigh whether Strang’s community had anything like a full endowment. John’s answer is careful: they performed ordinances, and Strang cared about them as much as anyone, but John doesn’t think Voree had a dedicated endowment house in the way other groups did. The temple plan on the White River was the closest they came, and it was never built.

The Strangite movement didn’t last. Strang’s assassination in 1856 ended the kingdom at Voree and later on Beaver Island, and most of his followers scattered to other branches of the Restoration, including, in some cases, to the group that would become Community of Christ. But for a few remarkable years, Strang ran a rival Mormon kingdom complete with a crowned king, a dedicated baptismal creek, and unbuilt plans for a temple of its own.

Part 5 picks up with the groups that came after: the Bickertonites, who wanted nothing to do with temples at all, and a small Norwegian settlement in Illinois that Brigham Young himself once planned to build a temple in, before nearly the whole town turned Strangite overnight.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

Chapters

1:13 James Strang’s Unexpected Rise at Voree

4:20 Baptism for the Dead in the Voree Creek

6:21 George J. Adams Stages Strang’s Coronation

7:19 Strangite Endowments Without a Temple Building

7:37 Law of Adoption: Sealings Into Noble Households (continued into the 1960s)

11:23 What Happens When a Temple Is Never Finished

12:01 William Smith Expelled for Secret Polygamy

13:10 Did Polygamy Survive Strang? The Kansas Strangites

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What happened to the Nauvoo Endowment after Joseph Smith’s death? What happens to a temple idea when a group won’t follow Brigham Young west? In this third conversation of the series, historian John Hamer and host Rick Bennett follow two small groups that carried the Nauvoo endowment in their own directions: one that kept it alive in a room above a church, and one that took it to Texas.

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John starts with Alpheus Cutler, one of the chief builders of the Nauvoo Temple and a member of the Council of Fifty. When Brigham Young chose the Salt Lake valley, Cutler felt the Council had given him a special mission to lead the saints to Jackson County instead, and he stayed behind. The break produced the Cutlerites. At first they practiced polygamy like Brigham Young’s followers, but then decided it was a terrible mistake and broke apart the plural families, which John calls amazing and hard to do. Modern Cutlerites, he says, have written that chapter out of their history. What they kept was the Nauvoo endowment.

At their headquarters in Manti, Iowa, the Cutlerites set apart an upper story that John calls an endowment house, modeled on Joseph Smith’s Red Brick Store, where the endowment was first given. When they moved north, they built a two-story building the same way, with a church on the bottom floor and an endowment room above, and they did it again when part of the group regathered in Jackson County. By the time missionaries from the Reorganization arrived, about half of the Cutlerites had joined them, and John notes there are no descendants of Cutler in the Cutlerite church but plenty in Community of Christ. That makes the Cutlerites, he says, the only group outside the Brigham Young-descended churches that still keeps a Nauvoo-era endowment, which is why more people want to study them than there are Cutlerites. Rick, who has interviewed them, says only a handful remain

Then the conversation turns to Texas. Lyman Wight was an apostle who had led Zion’s Camp and sat on the Council of Fifty, which gave him an ambassadorial role with the Republic of Texas as a possible safe haven for the saints. When Brigham Young went west, Wight decided to finish the Texas plan. John says Brigham Young’s answer was that every king in the Council of Fifty had the right to build his own kingdom, as long as he didn’t take anyone from Nauvoo. Wight gathered people from the pineries of Wisconsin and founded several relatively successful colonies.

Rick notes that the Wightites built the first temple west of the Mississippi, thirty years before St. George. John agrees they called it a temple but thinks of it more as an endowment house, a space in a church building set apart for rituals, and one that predates the others. Rick adds that historian Mel Johnson says it wasn’t closed to outsiders, and John suggests the closed-door tradition grew out of the conflict in Utah, while Texans welcomed the colony. The Wightites faded after Joseph Smith III came forward, and their descendants are now in Community of Christ. John adds that Wight’s journal was held at the Herald’s headquarters until the building burned, and Rick recalls that the RLDS Church suppressed temple records because of polygamy.

Together with parts 1 and 2, these stories show how far the temple idea traveled from Kirtland and Nauvoo, and part 3 shows that a temple can be a room upstairs. Next, in part 4, John turns to James Strang, the Strangites, and their fortress temple plans at Voree. Don’t forget to check out John’s book!

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

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Chapters

0:43 Alpheus Cutler: Nauvoo Temple Builder & Council of Fifty

We’re moving beyond LDS Temples and looking at Fundamentalist Mormon temples. Nauvoo gave Latter-day Saints a temple built around Old Testament ordinances, and then the pioneers left it behind. In this second conversation of the series, historian John Hamer and host Rick Bennett follow that inheritance west to Utah, where an Endowment House filled the gap until a real temple could be finished, and then to the more surprising places it landed: the temples of Mormon fundamentalist groups, including a pyramid in the Utah desert.

John explains that the Endowment House, built on Temple Square, was a temporary but sacred place where the ordinances could be performed while the Salt Lake Temple took decades to complete. He suggests the wait was partly because the builders were aiming at something extraordinary for pioneers. We pause over a small mystery, whether the Endowment House had a baptismal font, before turning to the fundamentalist groups, who have built temples all over the place. John understands that the Apostolic United Brethren have an Endowment House in Draper and a temple in Mexico. The FLDS built a temple at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, though the church no longer holds it. John, an admitted architecture enthusiast, wants every group to have the nicest-looking temple it can, and confesses he was disappointed by how that one turned out.

Then comes the pyramid. Rick describes a pyramid-shaped temple built by Christ’s Church near Modena, Utah, a place the group calls Paquin. Someone even gave him a 3D-printed model of it, and he told them it should be the church’s icon, since who else has a pyramid temple? After it was vandalized and closed, the church moved its temple work to a second temple in Nevada, about thirty miles from Tonopah down dirt roads. Rick, who visited and stayed with members of the church, says the outside is not pretty, but the inside is beautiful.

The most striking temple may be the one built by a Missouri fundamentalist group. Rick visited the week before its dedication and, after helping install mirrors and curtains, was jokingly told he was now a temple worker. The rooms, creation, garden, terrestrial, and celestial, are covered in murals, and the celestial room’s dome is painted as a daytime sky that becomes an accurate night sky, with fiber-optic stars, when the lights go out. John says this is exactly the kind of thought he wishes every group put into its temple. Any independent fundamentalist group can worship there by appointment, yet many will not. That leads to the 1978 priesthood revelation, which many fundamentalists saw as another sign of LDS apostasy, and to the question of Black members: Rick says the Missouri group is the only one that welcomes them.

Across all these buildings, John draws a simple conclusion. Most of them are familiar to LDS eyes, built on the Nauvoo model, and groups without a temple set aside what amounts to an Endowment House, a consecrated room where ordinances can be performed. Part 1 traced the temple idea from the Bible through Kirtland to Nauvoo. Part 2 shows how the Nauvoo version spread among the fundamentalists. Next, in part 3, John turns to two groups that broke from Brigham Young, the Cutlerites and Lyman Wight’s Wightites.

Don’t foget to check out John’s book, Scattering of the Saints.

Chapters

1:40 The Salt Lake Endowment House

It sounds like a simple question, but historian John Hamer’s answer stretches from the Bible to a domed assembly hall in Independence, Missouri, and includes a temple that was called for by revelation, designed by an architect, and never built. In this first conversation of his return to Gospel Tangents, John, a Community of Christ Seventy and co-editor of Scattering of the Saints: Schism Within Mormonism, walks me through the building blocks.

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John starts with the Bible. Solomon’s temple is only one model, he explains. The New Testament offers another: the idea that the new covenant fulfilled the old, along with the gatherings of the early Christians in the Book of Acts. That second vision, he says, shaped the Kirtland Temple, a building of stacked assembly halls, and it became the model for Community of Christ’s understanding of temples ever after.

When Community of Christ members regathered in Jackson County, Missouri, they wanted a temple on that Kirtland model. What they built, John argues, was Frederick Madison Smith’s Auditorium, a massive assembly hall that he sees as a 20th-century version of the Kirtland Temple in everything but name. He points to a published drawing of Joseph Smith III’s temple vision, which looks like the Auditorium with steeples added, and notes that the Auditorium was built without them. Then the story turns. Smith’s assertion of church authority sparked a schism, and a couple thousand members moved to the Temple Lot church, the Hedrickites.

Their own temple plans carried the same Kirtland DNA. Otto Fetting’s revelations called for a temple, and an architect gave it a front like a Greek temple, or a bank, and a long, thin plan with one assembly hall stacked atop another. It was never built. The Depression hit, Fetting was pushed out of the church, and the diggers had to fill in the hole they had started.

Splinter groups from Community of Christ have echoed the pattern since. John describes the Remnant Church’s headquarters in an old high school across from the Temple Lot, with an inner room of Kirtland-style pulpits and a planned community center with a Kirtland-like exterior that was never built. When he asked its president whether that was a temple, the answer was no.

Then the conversation moves to Nauvoo, where something new enters. The Nauvoo temple began with Kirtland-style assembly halls but added a basin in the basement resting on oxen, drawn from Solomon’s temple. John connects that shift to the Old Testament practices Joseph Smith was restoring, including plural marriage, and to Freemasonry, whose traditions claim a lineage back to Solomon’s temple. That Nauvoo model, he says, went on to shape the other branches.

Together, these threads show two rival visions of what a temple is: the Kirtland idea of a place of assembly, and the Nauvoo idea of an Old Testament-style house of ordinances. This first conversation of the six-part series lays out that fork in the road. Next, in part 2, John turns to the Endowment House and fundamentalist temples, including a pyramid-shaped temple in Utah and a temple whose dome ceiling turns into the night sky.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome John Hamer

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Brigham didnt dissolve Relief Society! That’s what Katie Rich’s recent article on Brigham Young & the Relief Society claimed. It goes against the historical consensus and won an award at the Mormon History Association. She will explain her reasons here. We’ll also discuss how Exponent II accepts multiple positions on controversial issues. Is it hard to keep disparate opinions together?

Check out this playlist for more info on this topic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGUWDGlv87I&list=PLLhI8GMw9sJ4VKeJi6eTv4OMaRZiZnA0h

In this concluding episode, we discuss the personal impact of Exponent II and a groundbreaking re-examination of 19th-century history with authors Katie Rich and Heather Sundal. Katie shares her personal journey from being “terrified” to publish her first blog post in 2020 to becoming an award-winning historian. She describes Exponent II as an “incubator of voices,” providing a supportive community for women to move past the fear of being perceived as critical of the Church while exploring cognitive dissonance and authenticity.

The authors also address the “big tent” philosophy of their organization. Both emphasize that Exponent II allows them to remain in a community that “speaks their language” without needing to explain their complex identities.

The highlight of the episode is a deep dive into Katie’s award-winning research regarding Brigham Young and the Relief Society. Contrary to the widely accepted historical narrative that Brigham Young “shut down” or “disbanded” the Relief Society in 1845 due to his frustrations with Emma Smith, Katie argues that the organization actually fell apart in March 1844 due to internal conflicts over polygamy. Key insights include:

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Over the past three segments, Dr. Thomas Murphy, author of Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon, has walked us through his research connecting Haudenosaunee history to the origins of the Book of Mormon — from the Dartmouth/Moor’s Charity School connection, to the prophet Handsome Lake, to overlooked ties between Native nations and the Revolutionary War era. But all of it has been building toward one question we haven’t asked him directly yet: can the Book of Mormon be both fiction and scripture at the same time?

In our final segment, Murphy finally answers it. He also doesn’t shy away from the harder conversations his research raises — including the ethics of archaeology and the handling of indigenous remains in the search for Book of Mormon evidence, and where he actually lands on the long-running Heartland versus Mesoamerica debate.

This is the conversation this whole series has been leading up to, and it’s one of the most personal, thoughtful answers we’ve heard on this show.

Newsletter subscribers get early access to the full segment — sign up free at gospeltangents.com/newsletter to hear Murphy’s complete answer before it goes public.

Listen to the rest of the series wherever you get your podcasts.

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.

Are there echoes of Book of Mormon & Revolutionary War? When we talk about the relationship between early Mormonism and Native American communities, the conversation usually runs in one direction: how indigenous traditions may have influenced Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. But in this segment of our conversation with Dr. Thomas Murphy, author of Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon, we explore something far less discussed — how Haudenosaunee communities weren’t just absorbing outside religious ideas, they were producing scriptural traditions of their own.

At the center of this discussion is the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, who in the early 1800s developed a body of teachings — now known as the Code of Handsome Lake — blending traditional Haudenosaunee spirituality with elements adapted from the Christian missionaries who were increasingly present in Native communities at the time.

Murphy argues that Handsome Lake’s movement deserves to be understood on its own terms: not simply as a reaction to Christianity, but as a genuine act of religious innovation, produced by Native leaders navigating a rapidly changing world. It’s a reminder that the flow of religious ideas during this period wasn’t one-directional, and that Native communities were active shapers of their own spiritual futures, not passive recipients of outside influence.

From there, Murphy turns to something that surprises many readers: possible echoes of Onondaga language, geography, or tradition embedded within the Book of Mormon text itself. While these connections remain a matter of scholarly debate, Murphy lays out why he believes they deserve more serious attention than they’ve typically received, especially given the documented presence of Haudenosaunee students and communities in and around the Smith family’s world in upstate New York.

The conversation then shifts to a period most listeners will recognize from American history class, but rarely connect to Mormon origins: the Revolutionary War. Murphy highlights the often-overlooked role of the Oneida Nation, one of the few Haudenosaunee nations to formally ally with the American colonists during the war, and explores why this alliance — and its long-term consequences — matters for understanding the world the Smith family grew up in decades later. It’s a piece of history that rarely gets mentioned in conversations about the Book of Mormon’s origins, but Murphy argues it shouldn’t be treated as a footnote.

Taken together, this segment challenges listeners to think about the relationship between Native American history and early Mormonism as something more complicated — and more mutual — than a simple story of influence flowing in one direction. Murphy’s research suggests a much richer, messier picture: one where Native nations were simultaneously responding to colonization, encountering Christianity, allying with revolutionary movements, and building their own theological frameworks, all while living in close proximity to the very family that would go on to produce the Book of Mormon.

This is part 3 of our 4-part series with Dr. Thomas Murphy. In our previous segments, we covered his background and the controversial DNA research that first made him a controversial figure within LDS scholarship, along with the Dartmouth/Moor’s Charity School connection between the Smith family and Haudenosaunee students. In our next and final segment, Murphy tackles perhaps the biggest question of all: can the Book of Mormon be both fiction and scripture at the same time?

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.

1:21 – Indigenous Response to Christianity & Handsome Lake’s Visions

Did Native Americans use seer stones? What if the roots of the Book of Mormon’s narrative trace back not just to revelation, but to a classroom?

In this second part of our conversation with anthropologist Dr. Thomas Murphy, we explore a detail of Smith family history that rarely gets discussed: Hyrum Smith’s education at Dartmouth’s Moor’s Indian Charity School, where he studied alongside Haudenosaunee students. It’s a small historical fact with potentially large implications for how we understand the origins of the Book of Mormon.

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.

Moor’s Charity School was founded with the explicit purpose of educating Native American students alongside colonial settlers. Hyrum Smith — Joseph Smith’s own brother — sat in classrooms with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peers! This raises a compelling question: how much of the cultural and spiritual knowledge exchanged in that setting might have made its way, directly or indirectly, into the Smith family’s later religious project? Murphy doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he makes a compelling case that this connection deserves far more attention than it has historically received.

Zelph was a supposed ancient warrior whose bones Joseph Smith claimed to have identified during Zion’s Camp. Murphy examines whether these practices and stories reflect genuine Native American spiritual traditions, Mormon religious innovation, or some blend of both — a question that sits at the heart of his broader research.

This is part 2 of our multi-part conversation with Dr. Thomas Murphy on his book Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon. Subscribe to Gospel Tangents to follow the rest of the series, where we’ll explore Onondaga and Oneida connections, the ethics of Book of Mormon archaeology, and the long-running Heartland versus Mesoamerica debate.

Gospel Tangents is dedicated to exploring Mormon history, science, and theology through in-depth conversations with scholars, historians, and researchers.

Chapters

0:00 Dartmouth / Moor’s Indian Charity School Connection

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.

Can rigorous DNA research and religious scripture coexist? Years ago, Murphy’s groundbreaking DNA research directly challenged traditional Book of Mormon claims about Native American origins. It was a stance that put him at odds with his own stake president and nearly cost him his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For many in the Mormon studies world, Murphy’s name has been synonymous with that controversy ever since.

Now, Murphy returns to Gospel Tangents with something new: his first full-length book, Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon. And this time, the conversation isn’t just about DNA — it’s about history hiding in plain sight.

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.

Murphy’s central argument in this episode is striking: the Smith family had real, documented contact with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities living near Palmyra, New York, in the years leading up to the Book of Mormon’s publication. Rather than treating the Book of Mormon’s narrative as emerging in a vacuum, Murphy asks what it means that Joseph Smith grew up in close proximity to a living, sophisticated Native nation with its own oral traditions, history, and worldview. It’s a question that doesn’t get asked nearly often enough in Mormon history circles — and Murphy brings decades of anthropological training to bear on it.

Whether your interest lies in:

— this conversation offers a rare perspective from someone who has spent his career at the intersection of all three.

0:00 Thomas’s Background in Indigenous Studies/DNA

This is the first of four segments in our conversation with Dr. Thomas Murphy. Subscribe to Gospel Tangents to catch the rest of the series, where we’ll dig into topics ranging from seer stone divination to the ongoing Heartland versus Mesoamerica geography debate. Or you can get the whole episode at Patreon.com/gospeltangents

Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon by Dr. Thomas Murphy is available now.

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.