The Crimes of Brigham Young: the Briefest Introduction

Fort Utah on the Timpanogas

If you're going to be LDS long term, one of the facts you have to accept and make peace with never trying to dispute, is that Brigham Young was a horrible person.

We don't openly talk about this as a community, so you can reach adulthood without ever having to wrestle with this too much. But that makes it all the more shocking when you discover how bad he was.

To say he was deeply flawed doesn't do it justice. Your uncle who says hateful stuff at the dinner table and disrespects his wife and children is deeply flawed. Brigham Young is so much worse than that, by several degrees of magnitude. He introduced and was complicit in extreme violence that was unnecessary and unjustifiable. By the standards of his day and ours, from the perspective of those inside the community and outside, he wasn't a good person. If what you imagine a good leader to be is the King Benjamin definition of someone who does good for his people and doesn't enrich himself from their labors, that's not a test Brigham Young can pass. At all. Not even a little bit.

There's too much history to get into, but here are the basics:

Brigham Young enriched himself constantly from other people. He gave himself the largest allowance of any Church leader in our history. He was living in finery when the rest of the Utah Territory was living in deprivation and squalor. He abused his position within the Church/consecration to make sure he never went without. D. Michael Quinn is the best authority we have on church finances and, to summarize his work, Church leadership has only improved over time in terms of leaders not abusing Church resources. But that was very easy to do because of how much Brigham Young abused them for his personal benefit.

The fact that he was openly racist and introduced slavery to the Utah Territory, undoing the work of Joseph Smith to put black and white Saints on more equal footing with each other is no secret. The Church openly admits to that one now, which is good. We need to be honest about the harm the institution has done in the past towards black people, and we're doing better on that front.

Where we still fail is the overwhelming amounts of violence and genocide our people engaged in against various indigenous tribes across the Midwest and in the areas of pioneer settlement in the Intermountain West. You may have heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is the event where John D. Lee murdered a group of innocent white travelers that were passing through Utah. What you may not know is that skirmish was part of the larger Black Hawk War against indigenous tribes that included over twenty years of violence, in which our people were consistently the aggressors. Mountain Meadows is the one you've heard of because, true to American form, we only acknowledge white wrongdoing when it hurts other white people. The number of indigenous people who were murdered in genocidal violence by the hands of our people, at the express orders of Brigham Young, is undeniable. It's well-documented history.

This is just one extermination order that exists in which senior Church leadership calls for the total extermination of entire indigenous tribes and nations. They used the Nauvoo Legion to do this.

 

 

You would think a group of people who were exterminated with orders like these would know better. But that's the trouble with unhealed trauma: it keeps you from learning from the worst things that happen to you and makes you repeat them instead.

Brigham Young didn't want to live adjacent to indigenous people in the Utah Territory and surrounding areas. He wanted to take their lands and their possessions, which was inseparable from native annihilation, regardless of what his intentions were. That's what he did to indigenous people who helped our people survive in terrain and elements they weren't prepared to live in. He rewarded them with violence, dishonesty, and betrayal.

There are many reasons you will hear me say that I want a one-on-one socker bopper fight with Brigham Young in a Wendy's parking lot. He has a lot to apologize for, to me and many other people. You cannot begin to understand what that means if you've never seen the scope of how much harm he did.

We cannot heal from what we don't acknowledge, and so much of the way we are today as a community is a direct result of all this violence. It's why our people mistrust outsiders, attempt to solve problems with unnecessary violence, and discredit any criticism for their loyalties to the prophet and senior Church leadership. It's who our people have been for so long, there is real intergenerational fear in trying to be anything else.

But that healing is necessary so we can stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

The Book of Mormon teaches in 2 Nephi 9:40:

I know that the words of truth are hard against all uncleanness; but the righteous fear them not, for they love the truth and are not shaken.

We are comfortable acknowledging this to be true about outsiders. Do we believe it when it concerns our own? Do we actually care more about what is right, rather than who we want to believe is right?

Such examination requires faith, honesty, and courage. Truth doesn't have the power to destroy faith, only flimsy and undeserved certainty. And if your certainty was based in falsehood, then best to dispense with it so you can live more fully in the truth.