Content Warning (CW): Rape, violence

John Bytheway: 00:01 And now Part III of followHIM.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 00:05 Okay. So the experience that they have had in Missouri hasn’t been good. They put out this Section 134, but the experience doesn’t get much better. So one year later, the Saints have moved to Clay County and things are starting to get a little hairy there. And it’s interesting what the government decides to do. They literally decide to create a new county, as one legislator put it, a Mormon Reservation. Now remember, just miles on the other side of the river is the Indian Territories which is a reservation, right?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 00:42 And by this time on the frontier particularly, we are being seen, even though most of the members of the Church are from New England and the Mid-Atlantic area, we are being seen as a different race. There’s been a lot of good scholarship lately, in newspapers, we’re being seen as a lower race of people, as many whites did in that time, as similar to American Indians or to Black slaves. And it’s interesting that the legislator would use the term, a Mormon Reservation, right? A place where you can go or we can just keep you confined.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 01:23 And we take it because it’s a place to be, where we can safely gather again, and Ohio is breaking down, and so we do. We go to Caldwell County and set up Far West. And one of the other counties that’s made out of that, Daviess County to the north, was meant to be open to everyone. And we took that to mean us as well. But the people that were Missourians who wanted to move there, took it to mean, no, you’re supposed to basically stay on the reservation, right? And this leads up to an 1838, the Congressional Election is coming up and some of our Saints there, in that Daviess County go to vote in the county seat called Gallatin.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 02:11 And they’re met by men who are going to try and stop them from voting. And they’re being whipped up by a candidate to stop them. And a fist fight breaks out, that leads to people grabbing lumber from the nearby yard on both sides and just beating each other severely. And the end result is we don’t get to vote. We literally, are stopped from exercising the right to vote. And rumors fly from that and people take that to mean, whatever they want it to mean. And that’s the beginning of what’s known as the Missouri War, the Mormon War of 1838.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 02:51 And things, of course as we know, spiral out of control. And you literally have militias from other counties going against the militia of Caldwell County, which is almost exclusively Latter-day Saint. You have a civil war, is what’s really going on. In fact before Kansas is bleeding, we talk about Bleeding Kansas leading to the Civil War, right? When Kansas is made a place where popular sovereignty, where you go there and then people will vote about who’s… Whether it’s going to be slave or free. And so you get these conflicts that’s called Bleeding Kansas, which leads right into the Civil War.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 03:32 Well before Kansas was bleeding, two decades before Kansas was bleeding, Missouri was bleeding, right? And of course that ends with the infamous extermination order and Joseph Smith in prison and horrible things. Some Latter-day Saints killed, all Latter-day Saints losing property, personal property, people beaten, women raped. It’s just awful. And then once again in the middle of winter, having to leave the state, walk across the frozen Mississippi. And so it is a traumatic… Compared to, first of all, compared to Jackson County where the things that happen are more traumatic. But it’s also back then the Church was split in two different places.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 04:22 Here, the Church that’s the faithful is all in one place. And so this is just an incredibly traumatic experience that haunts us in some ways even till today, right? With Haun’s Mill being the most famous of the atrocities. But we don’t even talk nearly enough about the other trauma, particularly that women experienced. And so when we’re kicked out, the general that’s in charge, General Clark actually says, don’t gather again, ever. This is the problem, you guys gather and you try and you build your Zion and it doesn’t belong in America, basically.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 05:01 He didn’t use those words but that’s basically what he’s saying, so just be like all the other churches and live in different places and believe in things. And some of the leaders like Sidney Rigdon and others are like, “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea, this isn’t working out.” And Joseph writes from the jail, “No, no. We gather.” Right. And while he’s still in jail, he’s got people specifically looking for spots, which eventually leads us to Nauvoo and gathering again. And when we do that, we decide something’s got to change. So Joseph Smith actually decides to go to Washington D.C. with redress, from them all the people, all the things that they’ve lost, they make lists, right? Of everything.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 05:47 You can look at them online, you can buy the book, that’s very specific. “We lost 20 chickens, a house, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, this is how much we think the government owes us.” It was easy to get appointments with the President of the United States back then, and he actually has a member of the Illinois legislature who gets him an appointment. And of course he meets with President Van Buren, and as everybody knows. And Van Buren says, “There’s nothing I can do for you.” In a sense he’s actually correct. There’s nothing federally he can do unless he wants to call the government of Missouri in rebellion against the government of Missouri. And he’s just not going to do that. We were hoping that maybe he would write something in the annual address to the nation, right? We call it, what do we call it now? The State of the Union, right?

John Bytheway: 06:37 State of the Union.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 06:37 Yeah. Back then it was written and put in all the newspapers. We were hoping for something at least in that. And he says, “I can do nothing for you.” Right? “Because, we forget the second part, “because basically, I’ll lose Missouri. That’s a strong Democratic state, I can’t. I’m not going to lose Missouri.” Right? And so Joseph has other men putting in this redress in the Congress trying it that way, and it dies by tricks in committee. And so Joseph leaves Washington-

Hank Smith: 07:09 Hey Derek?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 07:10 … Yeah.

Hank Smith: 07:11 Derek, I don’t know if our listeners are going to comprehend politicians who decide things based on votes. John, do-

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 07:19 John’s-

Hank Smith: 07:19 … You think our listeners are aware that doesn’t happen today. 

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 07:24 Or tricks in Congress to make sure things never-

Hank Smith: 07:27 -or tricks in Congress-

John Bytheway: 07:30 Congress has a continuing resolution.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 07:31 Yeah, exactly. He really believed that there and there was sympathy throughout the United States in the newspapers for what had happened in Missouri. And he really thought that, that could change the equation in Washington. And he comes away realizing it’s not going to be the case. If we don’t do something for ourselves, it’s never going to work here. And so luckily, they had walked into Illinois that was evenly split between the two parties, the Whig and Democratic party. And you’ve got now almost 10,000 people-

John Bytheway: 08:01 That are new?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 08:04 Yeah. We want you to be Democrats or yeah, we want you to be wigs. Right. Because it changes the balance in Illinois. And Joseph was smart to use that, to be able to get a charter, the Nauvoo Charter, which allowed for a sense of self-government. We would have our own government with elections with special legal rights and the Legion. Both times we’d been disarmed and here we would have an official Legion, that’s, that’s part of the city, not the county militia. And that belongs to, basically the Nauvoo, but in reality, that belongs to the Church. And so Missouri is hanging over everything. Everything. And so it works. We have our own little place there in Hancock County and we elect members and non-members to offices. And when people try and kidnap Joseph, he’s able to use the court system that was given them by the legislature to not get extradited to Missouri and be assassinated.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 09:17 There was kind of a breathing there in late 1840, 41, 42, that we can breathe again. We’re protected. We’re going to be okay. It starts to break down. And at the same time, it starts to break down, those ideas of protection. Joseph starts receiving revelation and in public and in private starts to talk differently. And it’s all around the temple. He’s talking in public about keys and he’s talking into the Relief Society about keys. And he’s talking to the people about… He’s using the Book of Revelation to talk of about priests and kings made by God. That rule with Christ for a thousand years, the government of God, an editorial comes out that summer, that talks about that God’s law has always been basically theocracy. That the Church and State are the same thing. And there’s kind of a change in his thinking, America has failed us. And it looks like it’s going to fail us again. And he kind of weaves this idea, what he’s later going to call Theo-democracy. And I’ll explain that really quick in a minute. And we don’t need to go in big detail about it, but there’s a real sense that we’ve been let down. That we and we have. There’s no doubt about it.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 10:46 And in the fall of 1843, as it looks, people are becoming more upset, more of us are arriving, looks like this Zion experiment could be headed toward persecution, again. We don’t want to repeat a Missouri. Joseph’s kind of last decision is to reach out to the candidates running for President of the United States and ask, what will you do if you’re elected, regarding us? Here’s our history, so forth. And three of them respond of the five, which actually shows that Joseph had become a person of importance in the nation, that they would actually take the time to respond. But all three of them say the same thing. We can’t do anything.

John Bytheway: 11:30 Would Latter-day Saints know any of these three?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 11:33 So the three that respond are Van Buren, who says, I told you what I told you.

John Bytheway: 11:38 Yeah.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 11:39 Henry Clay, who’s the great legislator and ends up being the Whig candidate who says the same thing says, I told you in Washington, probably the best thing for you to do is to go to Oregon. And then John C. Calhoun is very famous. He’s running, he’s been in there forever. He’s the big state’s rights guy of the South, stay out of our business, slavery’s our business kind of a guy. And so his response to Joseph is… He didn’t meet with him. So he says, this is a state’s rights issue and you stay out of it. And actually Joseph writes a very stinging rebuke that’s printed in newspapers, all across the country, especially the Whig newspapers. Where he takes Calhoun to task about, well, yeah. Well, what if it’s the state government, that’s actually doing the persecuting.

John Bytheway: 12:34 Can you spend some more time on that? Because-

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 12:37 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 12:38 Okay. So if somebody is robbing, mobbing, doing all that stuff, the federal response was?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 12:48 Nothing.

John Bytheway: 12:48 Okay. I know that’s in the Bill of Rights. I know that’s against the law, but the states will have to handle it?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 12:54 Yes. Because the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government. And so you know how you’ve seen lately, in the last few years that like the President of the United States can order all the federal employees to be masked or vaccinated? But he can’t do that, for the rest of, it’s that same kind of principle, in our federal system. Those aren’t actually made to be inside of the states, all of the Bill of Rights until the 13th Amendment after the Civil War. And so the remedy is to your state government. If you’re being mobbed, if your rights are being violated, you go to your state government, you don’t go to the federal government. Well, the problem with the Saints is, well, what if the state government is the one doing the mobbing and the robbing?

John Bytheway: 13:48 Yeah. And that’s what I was going to ask. So the laws are there for the state, but they’re just not willing-

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 13:55 They’re not enforcing them. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 13:55 … Not willing to do something?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 13:58 Yep. That’s exactly right.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 14:01 Right. And so it’s obviously, a lot more complicated than that, but the idea is that they don’t see any options anymore. And so in the end of January, a meeting is held of the leading brethren of the Church that are in town, and they propose and nominate Joseph to run for President of the United States, not just on an Independent ticket, but with Independent Electors. In other words, that means that we’ll create Electors for the Electoral College in every state. So it’s not just a PR thing. They’re actually building an infrastructure for there to be a chance if he won a state, for those votes to be cast in the Electoral College. So right from the very first meeting, it’s serious. They talk about sending certain people to certain places. Joseph says, send everybody who can reach out to electioneer. And this is his quote, “There’s oratory in the Church enough to get me in the first slide.” So the first time, so all political campaigns, believe that they could do everything.

Hank Smith: 15:16 Do you think that if one of the candidates would’ve responded positively, that Joseph doesn’t run and he supports that candidate with everything he has?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 15:25 Yes. Because in October, when things were really falling apart, there was a Church editorial called, “Who Should be the Next President of the United States?” And in that, it says, we want to find a candidate who will protect us, and then we will throw our votes and try and get everybody else to throw their votes to that candidate. And that’s when they choose, they write the letters and then the response is-

Hank Smith: 15:49 None of them will-

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 15:50 None of them will.

Hank Smith: 15:51 Well, you have no other option then.

John Bytheway: 15:51 You have no other option, at that point.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 15:54 So he’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to have to do it.” Now, he immediately, after in the weeks following, he writes a political pamphlet called, General Smith’s. You don’t want to do President Smith or Prophet Joseph Smith, because now you’ve got to talk to everybody in the country. So he takes his militia… By the way, he’s a Lieutenant General, is what the state gave him, think of that. So for context, there’s no Lieutenant General between George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War, except Joseph Smith. And so he writes this pamphlet called General Joseph Smith’s Views on the Powers and Policies of the Government of the United States. And it’s basically a presidential platform, which is something they didn’t do back then. They didn’t put out their views on specific things because then they could be held accountable to try and do those things. Joseph’s just the opposite. And he mails it to every person in the federal government that’s important, all the governors, and to all the major newspapers, because in those days how media worked was people just passed on, reprinted other newspapers. And that’s how the word of everything got around.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 17:08 So it gets all around the country and he does very specific things. But the things that it’s most noted for in his platform, is he wants to abolish slavery within a few years, by selling all the leftover land of the Louisiana Purchase and then buying the freedom of the slaves, which England had just done the decade before in the Caribbean. They had paid the masters for the freedom of the slaves. And so it’s something that had been done that he knew about and he offered that. And no one else is talking like that, except for the Liberty Party, but they’re also a small group. And so that’s a big thing to say. There’s several other things, but the other big one that’s important to us, is that he wanted to make it so that the President had power to enforce the Bill of Rights in the states and he uses that same justification that he uses in his letter to Calhoun. If the government of the state is the one doing the mobbing, then the federal government has to step in to protect freedom of religion and not alone, freedom of life or freedom of property.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 18:20 And so once this starts to get out and get a little traction, local Illinois people are like, this guy’s going too far now. And they call for a wolf hunt, which is not a subtle call for everybody to get their guns. And we’ll go hunt wolves, but maybe find Joseph out of town or whatever. And so Joseph realizes that the danger is getting quicker than he thought and gets the Council of 12 together and says, we need to start sending people West, to find where we go next. And if we can’t find enough people, then we’ll just wait until after the election. And we got to start looking for where to go in the west, because it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out here.

Hank Smith: 19:10 We have to leave the country.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 19:12 Yes.

Hank Smith: 19:12 Isn’t that right? We have to leave the country.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 19:14 Well, we’re going to try this election thing and we’re going to try some other things. But the writing seems to be on the wall, that we need to leave America because America is not giving us freedom of religion.

Hank Smith: 19:26 Imagine that, Derek, Latter-day Saints have to flee the United States.

John Bytheway: 19:31 I just think that some people hear, “Oh yeah, Joseph Smith was a candidate for President of the United States. Oh, that guy just had delusions of grandeur something.” And what you’re saying is as a direct result of not being able to redress the grievances that were happening to the Saints, they would’ve thrown their support behind another candidate, if they would’ve supported that, but that wasn’t happening. So as a direct result of that, he’s running for President, not because he’s kind of crazy ambitious or has political aspirations. Am I saying that accurately?

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 20:08 You are. And as Joseph Smith did with everything he throws the kitchen sink in. He goes for the gusto. And so I’m one of two experts in the entire world, on Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign, me and a fellow named McBride who’s in the Joseph Smith Papers. So Spencer, his book came out this year, my book came out last year and because of the Council of Fifty minutes, which I’ll introduce in just a second and because of his really good US history research and my 15 years of tracking down all the people who went on missions, you can’t call it a PR… There’s no… It has been called that in the past by historians, Church historians, especially. But the evidence is overwhelming that it was a real campaign. It wasn’t just a-

Hank Smith: 21:04 Tried to get our name out there.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 21:05 Yeah. Get our name out there or throw away our votes or whatever. And so with this wolf hunt, like I mentioned, they start planning to go out West as well. And the wolf hunt was actually planned for March 9th. Although it doesn’t happen on March 11th, two days later, Joseph Smith creates what’s called the Council of Fifty it’s real name is much longer and is literally calling it the Kingdom of God on Earth with the people in it as the Servants of God to do His Will. And it’s a council of fifty men. They meet confidentially and that their goals are made clear from the very first meeting. They are one, to find a place, where we can go, to leave, anywhere we can go to build up a Theo-democracy, to be able to worship, our rights. The only way we’re going to be able to do that is if we’re in control of our government. And two, to run this presidential campaign and see if we can’t get freedom of religion that way, as well. And so they’re working on both projects.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 22:18 Initially, they send someone to Texas, who’s not even a part of the United States yet, that their own Republic. And they actually negotiate a deal. Sam Houston does, with our ambassador to have us move down there, near the Mexican border to kind of be a buffer between the Texans and the Mexicans. But he doesn’t tell our ambassador, he’s also dealing with an ambassador from the United States and when our ambassador leaves, he actually does the handshake deal to join the United States. So, but I give you that, just to show that we’re thinking about going there, we’re thinking about going in California, which is basically all of Western United States or Oregon. Okay. So they’re thinking about that and the election, but by the April General Conference, they’ve thrown everything into the election. All this other stuff is kind of put on hold.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 23:10 And at the General Conference, there’s actually been a call for all the Elders that can possibly in the Church, get to Nauvoo because there’s going to be a special session where people are going to be sent out on missions. And so that special session… And then of course, this is the General Conference with the King Follet Discourse, you’ve got the Laws and the Higbees in the background who are former friends, former leaders, in the case of the Laws, who have now gone against Joseph. And that actually begins with the political issues in the fall and continues with plural marriage in the winter. And now they’ve broken off and created their own church and are calling Joseph a fallen prophet. So he’s got pressure now inside the community, as well as the pressure outside of the community, which sounds an awful lot like what happened with Missouri. Part of the reason Missouri can happen is because W.W. Phelps and others, Orson Hyde and others sign affidavits against the Church. So it seems like Missouri is repeating itself.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 24:11 And at this General Conference, the last session, there’s 1500 Elders that show up and Brigham Young and Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith, on purpose, isn’t there because it was against the rules of politics back then, to look like you wanted to be president or to electioneer for yourself. You didn’t do it because it was a gentleman thing, you were invited to run. And so he wasn’t at the meeting, but Brigham and Hyrum lead the meeting and they basically say, “Look, we are sending out missionaries and you’re going to do two things; you’re going to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. And you’re going to electioneer for Joseph Smith to be President of the United States. And we want you to electioneer with everybody that you can, we want you to do this. And we can have success.” Brigham Young, says, “This is a fire that can’t be put out.”

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 25:10 You read the firsthand accounts, it’s a really resounding meeting in the cheers for Joseph Smith for President. So at the end of the meeting, 277 people have signed up. By the time their names are listed in the Church newspapers the next week, you’re about to 350. And with assignments, they all have assignments to go to different states and there are presidents assigned to each state to run the missionary work, both the religious and the political side.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 25:41 That’s where I got interested in it, was looking at the missionaries. And I literally spent a decade chasing down every loose end and the internet helped. And I found out that the number is actually, if you don’t count the Quorum of the Twelve, they lead it, so they are. But if you don’t count them, the number I came to is 621. So there’s obviously more than that, that I just haven’t been able to find because you lose historical records, making it the largest missionary force in numbers until 1905. And as far as the number, percentage of available priesthood men being out on a mission, there’s never been again, like in the history of the Church. So, that right there tells you it’s a big deal. It’s not just a PR campaign, because they’re not just going out to say we’ve been abused and maybe you should vote for Joseph Smith. They’re holding conventions in each of the states, they’re nominating electors, who will go onto the electoral college. They’re renting big halls. They’re having big rallies and small rallies. They’re preaching and electioneering in homes, in schoolhouses, throughout all the states with a special, the most being sent to Illinois and New York, where they would have the most chance of influencing things would be those two states. But in the research I’ve done, it’s a very serious thing and they’re doing the best they can.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 27:08 And in some places they’re getting a little bit of support from those people who don’t like either party, but in some places, especially the South, they’re getting persecuted pretty bad, tarred and feathered, threatened, bricks thrown at them, all kinds of things. And while they’re out doing that, Joseph and the Council of Fifty, who consider themselves to be the, like I said, the Kingdom of God on Earth to Prepare for the Second Coming, when it comes, like we’ve all said there has to be a kingdom for Him to come to. Well, this revelation to him, he believed that that’s what they were doing. And if it doesn’t work out with the election, then we’ll leave the country. And he has this idea of Theo-democracy, which is where God and the people share power. In other words, God calls people, God calls people to be the rulers. The people sustain those rulers.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 28:09 And Joseph was very careful to say things like, and that he’d already done this before, that this doesn’t mean everybody’s a Latter-day Saint. He brought people who were not members of the Church into the Council of Fifty, actually. Not very many, it’s token, but at least shows where his mind was wanting to go. And so anyway, that election continues to progress. And locally, now back to Carthage, Joseph’s political enemies team up with Joseph’s religious enemies, who’ve just left the Church, the Laws and the Higbees. In fact, the leader of one of the parties actually is the one that gives the printing press to the Higbees and the Laws to print the Nauvoo Expositor. And so in the Nauvoo Expositor, this newspaper, that’s put up by Joseph’s enemies talks about plural marriage, goes into all those details. But those things have been out for years, that they’d had to combat with John C. Bennett, which you may have talked about in other podcasts.

Hank Smith: 29:17 We actually haven’t talked much about John C. Bennett, just give us a brief little-

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 29:21 Yeah, so John C. Bennett is the ultimate opportunist and he sees with the Mormons coming into with the Latter-day Saints, coming into Illinois, a chance to get at the top of something. And so he writes Joseph Smith saying, “Hey, I have influence in the legislature. I can help you out. I believe what’s happened to your people’s terrible. I want to be a member of your Church.” And Joseph takes him. It’s a perfect kind of guy for him to be able to get what he wants and he rises in the Church to being even an Assistant Counselor in the First Presidency. But Joseph starts to find out that he’s been leaving wives everywhere, that this guy is a serial adulterer. And the same time, Joseph Smith is teaching plural marriage secretly. He’s teaching that Joseph… We don’t even know that he knew about Joseph teaching… That’s usually what people say, but Brian C. Hale’s research on that, we’re not quite sure that he even knows what Joseph’s talking about. He’s just using his position in Church to be an adulterer. And when that comes to light and he in 1842, he resigns as Mayor and Joseph is elected as Mayor in his place. But John C. Bennett then goes on a nationwide tour saying that the Mormons are out to take over the world, that Joseph has this harem of women.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 30:40 And we actually send missionaries out then too, to discount those claims. And for the most part, the national media says, “You’re a nut, guy. What are you talking about? This is not happening there.” And so the fire’s put out pretty quickly, but what’s really concerning. I, I think for Joseph is that someone has leaked the Council of Fifty because talked about in the newspaper and his Presidential aspirations. He’s made out to be someone who is trying to take over the country, to enforce Mormonism on everybody. And so Joseph and the Council decide that if they don’t get rid of this paper, that Missouri will happen all over again. And so they vote as a council to not just destroy the issues of the paper, but destroy the press themselves, the press itself. And that leads to the crisis, which eventually leads to Joseph and Hyrum being in Carthage Jail, but not for The Expositor. The Expositor was just a way to get them to Carthage. Once they’re released on bond for that, they’re arrested for, wait for it, treason, just like Jesus. He’s convicted by the Sanhedrin, no seriously, he’s convicted by the Sanhedrin for blaspheme. But the charge when it gets to Pilate, is-

Hank Smith: 32:05 Switched.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 32:06 Treason.

Hank Smith: 32:06 Switched to treason.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 32:08 Against Caesar. And they do the same trick there. And that’s how they… There’s no bond for treason. And so he is kept in the jail. And then this, this organized mob who has all kinds of undertones, but political undertones, for sure. Assassinates Joseph and Hyrum and Joseph Smith literally becomes the first presidential candidate in the history of the United States to be assassinated.

John Bytheway: 32:33 Wow.

Hank Smith: 32:35 You add into there, Thomas Sharp and Governor-

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 32:38 Yeah. And Sharp’s doing it out of politics. And Governor Ford just is trying to avoid civil war, if you’re being generous to him. And so yeah, plural marriage is part of it. Yeah. But all of Zion is part of it. Zion for us is a whole way of life, a whole structure. It’s not just what people call religion. And so yeah. Joseph Smith was killed for his religion, absolutely. But there were definitely political undertones, as well as what is traditionally called religious undertones to what’s going on with his assassination, with his murder.

John Bytheway: 33:13 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 33:14 Wow. That was such a good lead up to 135.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 33:18 136, is going to be the Camp of Israel, how to organize our Exodus out of the country. That’s what happens. We are literally, it takes a year or so, but we are literally forced out of the nation. In fact, Governor Ford purposely, lies that there’s a federal force coming to take us and prevent us from leaving to make us leave in the middle of the winter, which causes all the deaths in Iowa, which is the worst part of the trip. That wouldn’t have happened, if the original agreement to leave in the spring had been honored. So we literally are kicked out of the United States and we want out, at that point. You’ve done nothing but murder and rape and kill, and now you’ve killed our leaders. In fact, you read the journals and they talk about the Latter-day Saints, we’re the real Americans. We’re the ones that really believe in the Constitution and all of its rights. And we’re going to go out here in the West and we’re going to do it on our own. We’re going to do it for ourselves. We’re going to create this Theo-democracy and we’ll, we’re going to call it Deseret. And the problem is they get out there and they start to do that. And then the United States wins the Mexican American War, and now they’re back in America. They’re only out for about a year, really out of America, before they’re right back in it.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 34:46 And that leads to the tension that goes for another half decade between us and the federal. We wanted the federal government to help us. Now, we actually want our own state government. So that we can just be ourselves and now the federal government, it’s like, you’re a territory, so that you’re under our control. And that leads to the plural marriage, the fights and all that, that leads to eventually the decision to end and to join the United States kind of full on. But I guess, just to kind of wrap that, so that leads into Section 136, about why we’re leaving in the first place. And just to kind of wrap that the whole narrative up, about what that might mean for us, both of these sections and all of this idea, is that to go back to 133, we have a specific commission to gather the House of Israel. That’s in 133, we have a specific mission to prepare the earth for the Savior’s return. That’s in Section 133, and it doesn’t just mean doing missionary work. It means creating a society and Section 45 tells us that it won’t just be members of the Church–a Zion society that is ready for the Christ to return to.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 36:03 That means, like we talked about, with most people are good and all that kind of stuff that we have a responsibility, not just to bring people into the Church of Jesus Christ, but to make the world a better place to build Zion. And that if that means working with people of other faith, that’s what we want to do. We want to and our young people, I think, need to understand that everything that Joseph introduced with the temple is leading to that idea of what eventually is coming. Which is this Theo-democratic monarchy in the Millennium, where everyone will be under the government, but not everybody will be a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And who’s going to introduce that. Who’s going to help the world come back together again. Who’s going to do all that. Well, he’ll already have kings and queens and priest, priestesses ready to go but we don’t wait till then. The idea is, Church leaders have said, we need to get involved now. If we don’t get involved now, we could lose, particularly, religious freedom. And so all that kind of goes together to show that God is in this work, he’s doing what we need to do. And we need to be doing, what we need to do, to build up Zion.

John Bytheway: 37:25 I’m just so glad for some of the nuggets, especially the idea, and I think I had heard it, but I really get it today, that Joseph Smith, it wasn’t just, I think I’ll run for President, it was direct result of trying to address the things that had happened, the persecution, the property, life, horrible things, as you mentioned, that it happened to the Saints. And just bringing attention to it even, very, really good.

Dr. Derek Sainsbury: 37:59 Yeah. Like I said, Spencer and I are the two experts in the world and we both came to the same… Well, we come to different conclusions about some things, but what you said, John, it’s absolutely… There’s no way with the Council of Fifty minutes, where they’re specifically talking about that, that’s out there now. There’s no way to not look at it that way, because that’s exactly what they’re talking about. And they’re saying that freedom of religion has to be everywhere. If we win the presidency, that doesn’t change that I’m President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, freedom of religion must exist for everybody. In fact, it’s during the campaign, he says that famous quote, “I’m just as willing to die for a Baptist or a Presbyterian or anybody else. And if I lose my life in this cause I am willing to be sacrificed upon the altar of virtue.” And he’s talking about, it’s a presidential little campaign speech.

John Bytheway: 38:56 Very interesting.

Hank Smith: 38:57 Wow. Yeah. We want to thank Dr. Derek Sainsbury for being with us. Wow. Just been an incredible day. We want to thank all of you for listening. We’re grateful for you and your support. Thank you to our executive producer, Steve and Shannon Sorensen. We love you. And we love our production team, Jamie Neilson, David Perry, Lisa Spice, Kyle Nelson, and Will Stoughton. thank you so much for your work. And we hope you’ll join us on our next episode of followHIM.