Mormon Land

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just concluded one of the most unusual General Conferences in its history.

Due to crowd restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic, the sessions took place in a small auditorium in the Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City. While no more than 10 people were in that room, the conference may have never had a larger audience — transmitted online and on TV to millions around the world, many of them forced to hole up in their homes and eager to view a gathering that church President Russell M. Nelson long had promised would be unlike any other.

Nelson marked the bicentennial of founder Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” with a new proclamation. He unveiled a new church symbol. He announced new temples, including firsts for the Middle East and mainland China. And he called for another worldwide fast to pray for relief from COVID-19.

On this week’s podcast, Joseph Stuart, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah and a contributing editor to the Juvenile Instructor, a Mormon history blog, discusses the conference, its impact, its memorable moments and how it ultimately will be remembered.

It’s been several weeks since our latest “Mormon Land” podcast. Thankfully, not much has happened in that interval.

OK, let’s just say the world has turned upside down.

For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its fundamental operations, programs and plans have been upended by the coronavirus. Services have been canceled. All temples are closed. And tens of thousands of missionaries have been recalled, released or reassigned. All of this coming in front of an online spring General Conference that will mark the bicentennial of Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” but will have no public attendance.

Here to sort through these astonishing developments and look forward to this weekend’s conference is Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a major shift recently when it published online, in full, its updated General Handbook, which spells out policies, practices and procedures in the worldwide faith.

Previous handbooks were for leaders only. Now rank-and-file members and even outsiders can be on the same page when it comes to church governance. The guidelines include, for instance, new nomenclature for church discipline and a new section on transgender individuals. It even urges Latter-day Saints to “partake” of the sacrament, or communion, “with their right hand when possible."

Discussing these developments and other changes in the new handbook is Jonathan Stapley, a scientist and historian whose recent book, “The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology,” won top honors from the Mormon History Association. He also is a popular blogger for By Common Consent.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may think they know all about Nauvoo, the Illinois city on the banks of the Mississippi River that blossomed into their faith’s headquarters from 1839 to 1846.

There, Mormons built a fast-growing city-state that rivaled Chicago. There, they established a militia. There, they built their second temple. And there, they buried their beloved prophet.

But few know that during those Nauvoo years, church leaders worked to rewrite the U.S. Constitution even as Mormon founder Joseph Smith ran for U.S. president. Few know how polygamy emerged even as Smith worked to conceal and control it and how he struggled even mightier to win converts to these unorthodox unions, especially in his own household. His brother Hyrum, who was slain with him at Carthage, for instance, went from a vehement opponent of plural marriage to a zealous proponent almost overnight, while Joseph’s first wife, Emma, only occasionally veered from her disdain for the practice.

Historian Benjamin Park, author of the newly released “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier,” sheds new light on those subjects and more in this week’s podcast.

Listen here:

A printed Sunday school manual for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contained a disavowed racist teaching that referred to “dark skin” in the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, as a “curse” from God.

The church has acknowledged the error and corrected it in the online manual. But is that enough? Some Latter-day Saints say it isn’t. They want the faith’s top leaders to issue a statement to members worldwide and use the mistake as a teaching moment to help combat persistent bouts of racism.

And what about the overall curriculum? Does it fulfill its stated goals of helping members “deepen [their] conversion” and “become more like Jesus Christ”?

Religion News Service senior columnist Jana Riess addresses those questions and more in this week’s podcast.

In September 2018, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released its first authorized, in-depth look at the faith’s history in nearly a century.

The four-volume set, known as “Saints,” will explore Mormonism from its humble birth to its current global presence. The first volume, “Saints: The Standard of Truth,” examined church history from 1815 to 1846. The second book, “Saints: No Unhallowed Hand,” which came out Wednesday, covers 1846 to 1893. It includes, for example, Brigham Young’s presidency, polygamy, the priesthood ban, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and lesser-known but equally meaningful moments in church history. The 700-plus-page volume ends with the Salt Lake Temple dedication.

Discussing the project this week are Matthew Grow, managing director of the church History Department and general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, and Angela Hallstrom, a writer in the History Department and literary editor for the series.

Listen here.

Next week, Utahns will celebrate the Beehive State as the first place an American woman voted under equal suffrage laws.

Feb. 14 is the 150th anniversary of that first female vote, cast by Seraph Young (Brigham Young’s grandniece).

Discussing the suffrage movement, what led up to the vote, and the role of Latter-day Saint women in the effort is Katherine Kitterman, co-author of a book with Rebekah Ryan Clark that has just been published by Deseret Book called “Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah.”

This week’s podcast takes listeners to the early days of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, it travels back to the earliest day, the moment that gave birth to the Mormon movement.

Latter-day Saints know it as the “First Vision,” in which church founder Joseph Smith said he saw God.

As members around the globe prepare to mark the bicentennial of this event this spring, the “Joseph Smith Papers” project has released a series of six podcasts that explores this reported 1820 encounter with deity through the eyes of historians.

Discussing the “First Vision,” which gave rise to a world religion of more than 16 million members, and the various accounts Smith and others gave of the experience are Matt Grow, managing director of the church History Department and general editor of the “Joseph Smith Papers,” and Spencer McBride, a historian with the project and the host of the “First Vision” podcasts.

This year, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are studying the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon.

A printed Sunday school manual accompanying the course caused a stir recently when news broke that it contained outdated teachings about “dark skin” referred to in the text as being a “curse” and a sign of divine disfavor.

The church corrected the reference in its digital manual and an apostle even told a Martin Luther King Day gathering of the NAACP that he was “saddened” by the error. But the uproar has revived questions about race in the Book of Mormon and the Utah-based faith as a whole.

Discussing those issues on this week’s podcast is Michalyn Steele, who teaches at Brigham Young University’s law school and is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. She grew up in a small Latter-day Saint congregation on the Cattaraugus Reservation in New York.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are studying the Book of Mormon this year. This has focused renewed attention on the faith’s signature scripture and how it came to be — with stories of angels and gold plates and rocks called “seer stones.”

Discussing the text’s origins is Richard Bushman, author of the highly acclaimed Joseph Smith biography, “Rough Stone Rolling.” He is working on a book about the gold plates, which Latter-day Saints believe tell the religious history of peoples in the ancient Americas and which Smith said he translated into English. That translation now is known as the Book of Mormon.