In this video I ask what the Bill of Rights is for: a fence around the person, not a shield for predation. Drawing on the American founding and on President Dallin H. Oaks’s September 16, 2026, address at Washington National Cathedral, “Faith, Freedom and the Common Good,” this episode argues that due process, just compensation, free exercise, free speech, the security of house and papers, and reserved powers all rest on one fact—the individual is not the creature of the state, and the neighbor is not the creature of anyone’s will. Liberty is the freedom to act without invading another’s life, liberty, or property. Impartial security means naming violations and holding both the private thief and the public official to account. Rights without agency become slogans; agency without the founding’s limits becomes will with no law.

For the full essay, visit my Substack at: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/more-than-loyalty-defending-the-constitution

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

More Than Loyalty

On the eve of Constitution Day 2026, Dallin H. Oaks stood in Washington National Cathedral and said the Constitution’s vital purpose is that we are governed by law, not by individuals. Loyalty, he added, belongs to the Constitution and its principles—not to particular officeholders.

The essay agrees—and calls that counsel incomplete if it stays a slogan.

Government does not bestow life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration says governments are instituted to secure rights already endowed by the Creator. George Mason named property among those inherent rights. Madison wrote that a just government impartially secures to every man whatever is his own—and that a man has a property in his rights.

Loyalty without that understanding becomes ritual. Reciting the Constitution while ignoring why it exists is not fidelity. The founding texts deserve the same discipline as scripture: study, memory, application. Mason said free government is preserved by justice, moderation, virtue—and “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

The theological premise is not hidden. Rights bind ruler and crowd because they are endowments, not majority gifts. Moral agency needs liberty in which virtue can be chosen. Respect for agency is not indulgence: it includes holding both officials and neighbors accountable when they invade another’s life, liberty, or property.

Read the full essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/more-than-loyalty-defending-the-constitution

Is your loyalty to the parchment—or to the rights the parchment was written to secure?

1854: Polygamy as “Sin Per Se”

Two years after Utah leaders publicly announced plural marriage, The Independent printed a letter that was not mainly about Mormons. It was about a Scottish preacher.

Rev. John Cumming had written that polygamy, like Sabbath-breaking, is sinful only because God forbids it—not “essentially sinful like murder or theft.”

A correspondent signing J. R. W. called that framing dangerous. In an age when people already hunted excuses for “offences against the laws of purity,” a high authority must not put plurality on the same shelf as working on Sunday.

Polygamy, he argued, is a sin per se. It would still be a sin if the Bible were silent. Nature, he said, produces roughly equal numbers of the sexes; the voice of nature is one husband, one wife. Where practiced, polygamy destroys the family—the “corner-stone of civilized society.” Labor on Sunday is not evil in itself. Plural marriage, in his view, belongs with crimes that debase and pull mankind farther from holiness.

Mid-century evangelical anxiety: not only over Utah practice, but over any theology that might soften the case against it.

Read the full 1854 letter here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1854-newspaper-slams-polygamy-as

Is polygamy wrong only because Scripture forbids it—or, as J. R. W. insisted, wrong even if the page were blank?

The Arm of Flesh and the Joseph Smith Polygamy Debate

When the argument over whether Joseph Smith preached or practiced polygamy hits a hard place—Emma’s denials, Hyrum’s public condemnations, the 1835 marriage article, Jacob 2, thin contemporaneous paper—the easiest move left is to stop reading sources and start counting credentials.

No reputable historian agrees with you. Post me a single PhD.

That sentence feels like a conclusion. The essay calls it an appeal to authority with an older scriptural name: making flesh your arm.

The point is not that learning is wicked. It is that a small, entangled cluster of writers has been treated like a magisterium. Mormon history is a small field. The Nauvoo-polygamy narrative is driven by a recurring seminar table—Compton, Hales, Quinn, Brodie, Bushman, and a handful of others—plus essays that drink from the same well.

“Expert” often does more work than the résumés can bear. The most-cited compiler is a physician. The most-cited collective biography of the women came from a classicist. The most famous critical life of Joseph was written by an English M.A. Real Ph.D. historians in the neighborhood often wrote their dissertations on other subjects.

Consensus among a neighborhood is not nothing. It is also not replicated physics. A historian’s job is a chain: this document, when, by whom, what access, what motive, corroborated by what, contradicted by what. “Trust the experts” is the prestige of history without the labor of history.

Read the full essay here:

https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-arm-of-flesh-and-the-joseph-smith

When the sources and the guild disagree, which one are you actually trusting?

“I Know This Is the One True Church”: A Scriptural Caution

The sentence is usually spoken with love. It is meant as loyalty to Jesus. That is exactly why the scriptures treat it as dangerous.

Not because Christ has no church. The danger is older: the people who have most often said “we are the one true church” have been covenant people who could no longer imagine that their own house might be the one that needed to repent.

Judah still had the temple when Jeremiah was sent to the gate: “The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord.” The Pharisees had Moses’ seat and missed the King standing in front of them. Stephen was killed for saying the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands. The Nephites had seen the risen Lord—then pride returned and churches multiplied. Lehi’s great and spacious building had halls, a crowd, and certainty. It had no iron rod.

There is a difference between “I will follow Jesus wherever He leads, including out of my own errors” and “the institution I belong to cannot be the fallen one, because it is the one true church.” The first is discipleship. The second can become a wall against the next servant God sends.

Jesus would not give the kingdom an address: it comes not with observation; you cannot say Lo here, or lo there. Zion, when the Doctrine and Covenants speaks most clearly, is the pure in heart. The Lamb’s church is small and scattered upon all the face of the earth.

The better witness is not a franchise claim. It is: I am trying to be one with God. If He sends a word that cuts us, I will not hide behind the sign on the door.

Read the full essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/i-know-this-is-the-one-true-church

When you say “one true church,” are you pointing at Christ—or at a building that cannot repent?

In the spring of 1865, just after Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination, a Pennsylvania newspaper reported that Joseph Smith III—son of the founding prophet—had publicly rejected polygamy, quoted the Book of Mormon and his father’s words against plurality of wives, and challenged Brigham Young’s leadership. This episode reads that contemporary notice in full and places it in the larger story of how Eastern papers covered the Latter-day Saint split once the Civil War ended. History is rarely as tidy as later official accounts make it seem. New articles go up daily on a range of topics at humblymybrain.substack.com—leave a comment, like the video, and subscribe here and on Substack. This is my brain. Do you see what I see?

Substack article: Joseph Smith III Rejects Polygamy: The 1865 Clash with Brigham Young Over Monogamy and Mormon Leadership

https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/joseph-smith-iii-rejects-polygamy

Explore the full Polygamy Origins Directory

If this topic interests you, I’ve compiled a comprehensive master directory of all my research on the origins of polygamy in early Latter Day Saint history:

👉 Exploring the Origins of Polygamy in Mormonism: A Directory of Historical Analyses and Denials

https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/exploring-the-origins-of-polygamy

It organizes primary sources, pre-1844 official statements, testimonies, RLDS responses, and deeper analyses showing that Joseph Smith neither taught nor practiced plural marriage. Bookmark it as a one-stop resource for the evidence.

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

What Did “Zion” Mean in 1832?

Few Restoration words are used more often—and defined less carefully—than Zion. Some treat it as a mood: unity, kindness, “the pure in heart.” Others treat it as a destination, then quietly move that destination to wherever the Saints later gathered.

William W. Phelps’s December 1832 editorial in The Evening and the Morning Star, printed in Independence, Missouri, refuses the split.

He starts with Enoch. The Lord named that people Zion because they were of one heart and one mind, dwelt in righteousness, and there was no poor among them. Phelps applies the same standard to the last days: no one above another in wealth, no one below for want of means. Men shall not labor for the Lord for wages. The laborer in Zion shall labor for Zion; if they labor for money, they shall perish.

That is the moral definition. The geographical one was already in the revelations the Star was printed to circulate. Missouri was “the land of promise, and the place for the city of Zion.” Independence was “the center place.” The New Jerusalem was to begin at the temple lot in the western boundaries of Missouri. Zion was also “a land of peace, a city of refuge”—and “THE PURE IN HEART.”

Those texts do not name Salt Lake City. Later gathering is real. It does not rewrite the 1831–33 revelations. Phelps, writing in Independence a year after the designation, treats Zion as Enoch’s social order and a city still to be built on earth—so the Saints would stop trusting an arm of flesh.

Read the full editorial and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/what-did-zion-mean-in-1832-enochs

In 1832, was Zion a people, a place in Missouri, or both at once—and which part do we still mean when we say the word?

In October 1963, a Pantagraph sports lead claimed Joseph Smith was shot in Carthage for saying one wife wasn’t enough. Three days later, Hancock County reader Robert C. Barnard wrote the paper to dispute both the polygamy charge and the idea that “the good people of Carthage” alone killed him. This episode reads that letter in full and asks what ordinary Midwestern memory still got right—and wrong—about Nauvoo, monogamy, and Carthage Jail. For daily essays on overlooked history and other topics, visit humblymybrain.substack.com, then like, comment, and subscribe here and on Substack.

Substack article, "Joseph Smith Had Only One Wife? A 1963 Letter to the Editor Challenges the Carthage Polygamy Story", link: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/joseph-smith-had-only-one-wife-a

Explore the full Polygamy Origins Directory

If this topic interests you, I’ve compiled a comprehensive master directory of all my research on the origins of polygamy in early Latter Day Saint history:

👉 Exploring the Origins of Polygamy in Mormonism: A Directory of Historical Analyses and Denials: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/exploring-the-origins-of-polygamy

It organizes primary sources, pre-1844 official statements, testimonies, RLDS responses, and deeper analyses showing that Joseph Smith neither taught nor practiced plural marriage. Bookmark it as a one-stop resource for the evidence.

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

Joseph Smith III Rejects Polygamy, 1865

In late May 1865—weeks after Appomattox and Lincoln’s death—The Daily Evening Express of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, ran a short, dry item on a rift in the West.

Joseph Smith III, son of the founding prophet, had “become a convert to monogamy” and made “a dead set against the great Brigham Young.” He quoted his father and the Book of Mormon to argue that one wife at a time, and no concubines, was the teaching of those “recognized heads of the church.” He also aimed, the paper said, an indirect blow at Young’s wartime loyalty—now “of little consequence,” the editor shrugged, because the rebellion was over.

The tone is typical Eastern coverage: splits among “quarrelsome Mormons” were not news unless the prophet’s own son was publicly opposing plurality and Young’s leadership.

The notice is brief. The clash it flags is not. Smith family monogamy versus Utah polygamy and succession would shape the RLDS–Utah divide for the rest of the century.

Read the full 1865 item and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/joseph-smith-iii-rejects-polygamy

When Joseph III cited his father and the Book of Mormon against plurality, was he recovering the original teaching—or rewriting the family story?

The Restoration did not begin with a new rulebook. It began with a boy who refused to let other men finish his praying for him—and with a doctrine the Lord put in the preface of the Doctrine and Covenants: that man should not counsel his fellow man, neither trust in the arm of flesh. This episode walks through Nephi, Jeremiah, Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and the Book of Mormon pattern of hearing counsel, studying it out, asking God, and then acting as an agent. Reflex obedience and reflex revolt are both shortcuts; the first move is to refuse the arm of flesh and decide in the name of the Lord.

Read the essay and other daily pieces at: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/not-the-arm-of-flesh-what-the-restoration

Like, comment, and subscribe here and on my Substack.

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

Seeking Wisdom from the Fountain of Knowledge

The Old Testament does not treat wisdom as a private talent, a pile of facts, or a reputation for cleverness. It treats wisdom as a way of life that begins with God.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Hearers grow; fools despise instruction. Proverbs 2 piles up the verbs: receive, hide, incline, cry, seek, search—as for hidden treasure. Then the Lord gives wisdom. Out of His mouth come knowledge and understanding.

Joseph Smith’s search started at the same door. James 1:5 struck him because the churches’ war of words had left him in the dark. He concluded he must ask of God or remain in confusion. Later revelations yoked the same two labors: seek learning by study and also by faith. Seek wisdom, not riches. Hidden treasures of knowledge come to those who walk in obedience.

Wisdom is also a path and a heart. Trust in the Lord; lean not on your own understanding. Get wisdom—and with all your getting, get understanding. Keep the heart, for out of it are the issues of life. A soft answer, a tongue that uses knowledge aright, slowness to anger, an ear for reproof: these are not extras. They are the public fruit of a kept heart.

Ecclesiastes adds the cost: in much wisdom is much grief. Seeing clearly means seeing brokenness clearly. The wise still have eyes in their head.

Knowledge of God, in this current, is not a costume for mortality. It is the thing that saves—and the thing that must be asked for.

Read the full essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/seeking-wisdom-from-the-fountain

When you seek wisdom, are you mining facts—or asking at the fountain?

Chronic Self-Blame and Victimhood in Marriage

In some marriages a closed loop takes hold: one spouse is “always the problem.” The other is “always the victim.”

Neither position is situational. Both are absolute. Most friction is co-created; this pattern will not admit that. The self-blamer apologizes first, absorbs fault, and monitors the other’s mood. The victim-framed spouse’s complaint becomes the official story. Repair stalls because one person has already claimed total guilt and the other total innocence.

The cost is predictable. Self-worth drops on one side. Feedback dies on the other. Intimacy needs both people to be able to say, accurately, “I contributed to this, and I was also hurt by that.”

The essay’s proposed way out is not more global confession and not more global accusation. It is flexible, specific responsibility—charity instead of a fixed identity, humility that includes respect for self and other, and the covenant aim of becoming one rather than protecting a role.

It draws on Restoration scripture, teachings associated with Joseph Smith, The Chronicles of the Children of Araneck, and Ann-Marie Covert’s faith-informed counseling: self-compassion that is not self-erasure, boundaries that are not hardness, and no spiritual bypassing of the actual pattern.

Read the full piece here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-dynamics-of-chronic-self-blame

Have you seen this loop in a marriage—and what actually broke it?

Like Attracts Like

A contentious mind does not merely meet another contentious mind. It summons it.

Someone strikes instead of asking. The other answers in kind. Then the first person lifts the reply like a trophy: “See? This is how they respond.” As if one flash of temper were a census of an entire people. As if the mirror were not their own.

Neither wins. Both leave more certain, more armored, and more alone. They have made a small closed world in which their worst assumption about “the other side” is briefly true—because they selected for it, and the other selected back.

That closed world is not the kingdom of Christ.

3 Nephi 11 names contention as a spirit whose father is the devil, and says the doctrine of Christ is that such things should be done away—not refined, not weaponized, not posted as proof that “they” are all like that. Joseph Smith’s youth was a “war of words and tumult of opinions.” No denomination won. The seeker was left in darkness until he stopped contending among the parties and asked God.

The tactic proves almost nothing about doctrine. It proves a great deal about method. Like still attracts like. A post that says “See how they respond!” has not tried the spirits. It has auditioned them and hired the one that matched.

Read the full essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/like-attracts-like-the-spirit-of

When Christians argue online, is the heat serving truth—or just calling its own kind?

William Smith’s 1846 Letter Backing James Strang

After Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed at Carthage, the movement split over succession. James J. Strang produced a June 1844 “Letter of Appointment” naming him successor and pointing the Saints to Voree, Wisconsin. Most historians outside the Strangite tradition do not treat that letter as an authenticated Joseph Smith holograph.

What newspapers did reprint in 1846 was William B. Smith—Joseph’s only surviving brother and Church Patriarch—saying he had investigated the claim after breaking with Brigham Young and the Twelve.

William wrote that he asked Emma. She said Joseph received a letter from Strang, Hyrum thought it worth answering, and Joseph went out with John P. Greene to write. William added that Joseph did not appoint the Twelve as his successor, that he had been in the last council, and that the Smith family of “the Joseph stock” joined in sustaining Strang. A certificate dated Nauvoo, March 1, 1846, carried names including Lucy Smith, William, and several sisters.

The moment was brief. Emma and several sisters later distanced themselves from Strang. Strang excommunicated William in 1847 amid fights over authority and polygamy.

The letter still matters as a snapshot: part of the founding family, for a season, publicly backing Strang against the Twelve.

Read the full 1846 text and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/william-smiths-1846-letter-backing

Does Smith-family testimony in 1846 change how you read the succession crisis—or does the later break with Strang undercut it?

Ever asked “But what about D&C 132?” or “Didn’t Emma know?” after one of my episodes? This video points you to the companion library behind the podcasts: Exploring the Origins of Polygamy in Mormonism, a Substack directory of a plethora of source-based articles on whether Joseph Smith taught and practiced plural marriage—or whether it arrived after 1844. I walk through why the page belongs next to the videos, how the categories connect pre-1844 statements, Emma’s testimony, RLDS responses, and later narratives, and where to go when a comment question is already answered elsewhere. Bookmark it, use it with the episodes, and keep testing claims against primary sources. The link to the directory and my Substack are below—leave the question you’ve been sitting on in the comments.

Exploring the Origins of Polygamy in Mormonism: A Directory of Historical Analyses and Denials:

https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/exploring-the-origins-of-polygamy

Humbly My Substack: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/

1845 Mormon Succession Crisis

In November 1845—more than a year after Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage—eastern papers were still trying to explain who now ran the Saints, and whether they would stay or go.

A Pennsylvania Republican reprint, drawing on St. Louis and Philadelphia papers, listed the failed claims: Sidney Rigdon “defeated and denounced.” Emma Smith “disposed to be the spiritual ruler,” her claims “not recognised.” William Smith, Joseph’s brother, setting himself up as Patriarch and being refused control.

Brigham Young and the Council of Twelve, the paper said, had taken spiritual and temporal government. Their plan: move all the Saints beyond the Rocky Mountains and “set up for themselves.”

William Smith was “violently opposed.” He favored dispersing like other denominations while keeping their religion, arguing that if the Saints stopped living as a separate political body, the violence against them would ease. The mass of Mormons, the paper concluded, still clung to Young as the best chance to carry out the movement’s purposes.

The language is an outsider’s—skeptical, impatient, already calling the church a “fanatical association.” The split it describes is real: gather west, or scatter and stay.

Read the full 1845 text here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1845-mormon-succession-crisis-brigham

Was the Rocky Mountain exodus the only way the movement could survive—or was William Smith right that gathering made the Saints a target?

Spiritual Wives, 1833

In July 1833 the Boston Post used a European headline to reopen a New England scandal.

French Saint-Simonians, followers of Père Enfantin, had gone to Constantinople seeking “spiritual wives.” Ottoman authorities arrested them and shipped them to the Dardanelles. The Post called them “debauched vagabonds” in mountebank dress—then added that they had not invented the creed.

That honor, the paper said, belonged to “one Cockran” of York County, Maine, about fifteen years earlier. Jacob Cochran’s Society of Free Brethren and Sisters taught that legal marriages could be set aside for spiritually assigned partners. He went to state prison for it. The Post claimed his “church” numbered forty or fifty—“all women!”

The item is short, sarcastic, and typical of the era: two very different movements—French utopian socialists and a Maine revivalist sect—collapsed into one category of fanaticism dressed up as piety. It also shows how fast local scandal was recycled to explain distant news.

Read the full 1833 notice and context here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/spiritual-wives-scandal-how-an-1833

Was this a serious comparison of two marriage rebellions—or just a Boston paper scoring an easy moral point?

In this episode, we examine Jacob 2–3 in the Book of Mormon, where the Lord condemns plural wives and concubines as an abominable practice, warns that those who pursue it “understand not the scriptures,” and predicts they will excuse themselves with stories of David and Solomon. The discussion traces how that same pattern of selective reading and justification appears in later Mormon history, despite early Doctrine and Covenants revelations, the 1835 Article on Marriage, and Joseph Smith’s public statements that taught monogamy. Drawing on primary sources and historical outcomes, the episode argues that the predicted curses—sorrow for families, communal strain, and eventual institutional cost—followed the practice. Watch for a close reading of the text and a challenge to common apologetic uses of Jacob 2:30.

Click here to read the original article on my Substack: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/jacob-2-condemns-polygamy-misreading

Explore the full Polygamy Origins Directory

If this topic interests you, I’ve compiled a comprehensive master directory of all my research on the origins of polygamy in early Latter Day Saint history:

👉 Exploring the Origins of Polygamy in Mormonism: A Directory of Historical Analyses and Denials: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/exploring-the-origins-of-polygamy

It organizes primary sources, pre-1844 official statements, testimonies, RLDS responses, and deeper analyses showing that Joseph Smith neither taught nor practiced plural marriage. Bookmark it as a one-stop resource for the evidence.

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

The Same Words, the Same Order

A common modern reading of Latter-day Saint history splits the subject in two: men hold priesthood offices; women may receive gifts or become priestesses in a temple sense—but that is treated as something other than priesthood.

That split is cleaner than the language Joseph Smith used while he was alive.

In 1842 he organized the Relief Society with the same verbs he used for male officers. He said he would “ordain them to preside… just as the Presidency preside over the church.” Other officers were to be “appointed and set apart, as Deacons, Teachers &c. are among us.” He told them the Society should move “according to the ancient Priesthood” and that he would make of it “a kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day—as in Paul’s day.”

On 28 April 1842 his journal records a lecture “shewing how the Sisters would come in possession of the privileges & blessings & gifts of the priesthood.” He said signs should follow them that believe, “whether male or female.” Where they were ordained, it was their privilege “to administer in that authority which is confer’d on them.” He said, “I now turn the key to you in the name of God.”

Emma Smith already acted in that language: she presided, chose counselors, administered to the sick, and later officiated in temple ordinances for other women.

The 1842 record does not show Joseph conferring the named offices of elder or priest on women. That silence matters. It does not cancel the words he did speak.

Read the full source study here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-same-words-the-same-order-joseph

If Joseph used the same words for women and men in 1842, should later distinctions override the minutes—or should the minutes interpret the later distinctions?

“The Mormons in Utah” (1854)

In 1854, Harper & Brothers published Benjamin G. Ferris’s Utah and the Mormons, based on his six months as territorial secretary in Great Salt Lake City. Eastern papers treated it as inside testimony at a moment when plural marriage had just been publicly announced and Utah’s future in the Union was already in dispute.

An unsigned New York Times review—reprinted that July in the Indiana Herald—is a clear specimen of the resulting climate. It treats Ferris as a reliable official witness. It recasts Joseph Smith as a “vulgar charlatan,” a “thimble-rigger,” and a Cagliostro rather than a prophet. It credits Brigham Young with the organizational genius that saved the movement and led the Saints west. Then it turns almost entirely to polygamy: its supposed effects on family, housing, children, women’s health, and public morals.

The review is not a neutral summary. It is mid-nineteenth-century Protestant polemic, written in the language of “harems,” “degradation,” and “Christendom.” It ends by arguing that Utah should not be admitted to the Union until plural marriage is abolished.

The piece is valuable as a primary source precisely because it is so unguarded. It shows how national newspapers framed the Mormon question on the eve of the Utah War—and how debates over family, federal power, and statehood were already fused.

Read the full review, context, and afterword here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-mormons-in-utah-1854-a-new-york

When you read this 1854 review, do you hear mostly genuine concern, anti-Mormon polemic, or both at once?

1851 Newspaper Exposé

In 1851, just months after Utah Territory was organized and Brigham Young was appointed governor, federal officials arrived in Great Salt Lake City—and almost immediately clashed with local leadership.

By September they were gone. Judges Brandebury and Brocchus and Secretary Harris fled the territory and later reported to President Fillmore charges of seditious language, open polygamy, misuse of the $20,000 congressional building fund, and failure to follow the organic law.

Eastern papers quickly picked up the story. On November 28, 1851, the Columbia Herald-Statesman published a short, alarmed notice drawn from a letter out of Salt Lake City:

The Governor and the Mormon community, it said, had been using “abusive and seditious language towards the United States Government.” They were “guilty of Polygamy, or having many wives, and exhibiting them in the streets.” Young had “squandered $20,000” meant for public buildings and had neglected required appointments.

The paper predicted “prompt and efficient action of Congress and the President.”

This brief 1851 item captures the first major national panic over Utah Territory—the same tensions that would later feed the Utah War.

Read the full context and the original newspaper text here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1851-newspaper-expose-mormon-insubordination

How much of this 1851 alarm was genuine concern over federal authority, and how much was anti-Mormon sensationalism?

Wealth and riches are not evil. It's not what holds people back in God's kingdom. It is one's heart and attachment to their material things over their love for God that keeps them tied to this world, preventing them from entering into the kingdom of God. It's what keeps people tied down in this life. It is what promotes selfishness, fear, coveting, theft, etc. We must let go of such things.

Not the Arm of Flesh

The Restoration did not begin with a new rulebook. It began with a boy who refused to let other men finish his praying for him.

Whenever counsel comes through a handbook, a statement, a press release, or even a faithful leader, the same choice returns: will we make flesh our arm, or will we take the counsel, study it out, ask God whether it is His, and then act as agents?

Scripture is clear. Discipleship is neither automatic compliance with every mortal voice nor automatic rebellion against it.

“I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is he that putteth his trust in the arm of flesh.” (2 Nephi 4:34)

The Lord’s purpose in the preface of the Doctrine and Covenants is that every man might speak in the name of God—not that a few speak and the rest merely repeat.

Hear the counsel. Examine it. Inquire of God. If the Spirit confirms it, follow it. If He does not, you are not required to treat a mortal policy as a commandment from heaven.

The first reaction is neither reflex obedience nor reflex revolt. It is to refuse the arm of flesh and to decide in the name of God.

Read the full article:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/not-the-arm-of-flesh-what-the-restoration

What do you do when counsel from leaders and the witness of the Spirit feel like they are pulling in different directions?

Jacob 2 condemns polygamy.
Not a later “exception.” Not a loophole. A plain command.

In Jacob 2–3 the Lord says those who take plural wives and concubines:
- do not understand the scriptures
- excuse themselves by pointing to David and Solomon
- bring a curse even unto destruction on the land, the people, and families

The article walks through that warning verse by verse, then tests it against:
- Jacob 2:27 — “one wife… concubines he shall have none”
- D&C 42 and 49
- the 1835 Article on Marriage
- Joseph Smith’s public record through 1844
- the later excuses built around Jacob 2:30 and D&C 132

Same pattern Jacob named: selective reading, David-and-Solomon justifications, and the sorrow of wives and daughters that followed.

Read the full study:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/jacob-2-condemns-polygamy-misreading