J. Reuben Clark's Fundamentalist Reasons for Rejecting Mormon Fundamentalism

John Taylor's September 1886 revelation was an impossibility for J. Reuben Clark. The newly-appointed First Presidency counselor had a very precise and systematic approach to religion, one that reaffirmed ecclesiastical authority, doctrinal purity, and historical consistency—all three principles that would be undercut should the alleged manuscript in John Taylor's hand be proven credible. The cognitive dissonance caused by the revelation, both its myths and its reality, reveals key lessons concerning Clark's (and Mormonism's) religious imagination during an era of transition.J. Reuben Clark took a circuitous path toward the First Presidency. He had spent most of his adulthood outside Utah and was not fully involved in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, instead devoting his time as a partisan Republican and talented lawyer, eventually being elevated to U.S. ambassador to Mexico. But as his political star rose, so did his reputation among church leaders. Heber J. Grant, who became church president in 1918, was especially impressed with Clark's skill and hoped the diplomat could help modernize church leadership, especially as they navigated the difficult Great Depression years. So, when his second counselor, Charles W. Nibley, passed away in 1931, Grant invited Clark to join the faith's top governing body despite the new counselor having never held any leadership position. After considerable internal debate, Clark agreed and moved into the First Presidency after his ambassador duties ended in 1933.1Once Clark assumed the position, he immediately aimed to curtail divergent expressions, modernize church bureaucracy, and reaffirm ecclesiastical authority—the very forms of standardization that Grant must have had in mind. He drafted long and legalistic memos on topics ranging from how the church should interact with the government's ongoing New Deal program to how youth programs should emphasize traditional virtues. He scaled back the autonomy of auxiliary organizations like the Relief Society and overturned the left-leaning editorial board of the Deseret News. Many of these initiatives shaped the church for the ensuing century.2There was one other threat of which Clark was acutely aware: the growing circle of polygamists who believed the church's forfeiture of a core doctrine had been a mistake. There had never been a furlough in devout Latter-day Saints secretly solemnizing new plural unions long after Wilford Woodruff's manifesto in 1890, even following Joseph F. Smith's threat to excommunicate polygamists in the early 1900s. Many of these polygamists began consolidating around particular figures and ideas in the 1920s. Key leaders of this movement included John Woolley and his son, Lorin, who had been close to John Taylor in the 1880s during the underground period. They claimed that they possessed special priesthood authority that enabled them to perform polygamist sealings despite the church's official position.3Key to the Woolleys’ claims was a narrative surrounding John Taylor in September 1886. In response to both external and internal pressure to forfeit plural marriage, they explained, Taylor pled with God for clarification. In response, Taylor was visited by God, Jesus Christ, and Joseph Smith, then dictated a revelation that swore the divine command for polygamy could never be revoked, and ordained a clandestine council, of which the Woolleys were allegedly part. Joseph Musser, for instance, attended a meeting on March 12, 1922, where he heard the entire story and recorded details in his diary.4 Soon, the revelation and surrounding events appeared in literature published by the polygamists.5The polygamist origin story was a direct threat to Latter-day Saint church leaders’ authority. In 1931, just before Heber J. Grant invited Clark to join the First Presidency, the prophet used his time at General Conference to denounce the “propaganda for and the unlawful practice of pretended ‘plural marriage,’” promising to excommunicate those who aided this underground network.6 Then, during the April 1933 General Conference at which Clark was sustained to his new calling, yet another new pamphlet was distributed outside the tabernacle, repeating the Woolleys’ story.7 Two months later, after Clark had been briefed on the growing polygamist movement, he felt church leaders needed to act quickly and decisively. Just like he had with other issues in 1933, Clark believed the best approach was a legalistic memo and consolidated action.8The result was a First Presidency Statement that appeared on the front page of the church section of the church-owned Deseret News on June 17, 1933. “The First Presidency have [sic] recently received letters making inquiry concerning the position of the Church regarding the contracting of polygamous or plural unions,” it began. There was a “secret” and “oath-bound organization” that was solemnizing “adulterous relations under the guise of a pretended and false polygamous or plural marriage ceremony.” Because of these allegations, it was necessary to clearly state “the position of the Church on the matter” as well as provide “the historical facts” regarding the institution's forfeiture of polygamy decades before.9The statement begins with an extended description of marriage's necessity and significance that mirrored monogamous and conservative morals: religions were right to encourage matrimonial unions, spouses were obligated to remain faithful to each other, and parents had a duty to raise righteous children. Latter-day Saints had believed these principles prior to “the doctrine of the eternity of the marriage covenant and plural marriage” being revealed, and therefore monogamous fidelity was the norm, with polygamy the exception. The statement then provides a general history of the introduction, rise, and prosecution of Mormon polygamy, and emphasizes that the practice ended with Woodruff's manifesto in 1890. Yet despite church and federal officials coming to a clear and fair agreement, “a few misguided members” then “secretly associated themselves together for the avowed purpose of perpetuating the practice of polygamous or plural marriage.” These post-manifesto polygamists did not represent church authorities and betrayed the very compromise that allowed the church to recover from decades of battles.This narrative concerning the church's relationship to polygamy was structured to match partisan priorities rather than to meet standards for historical accuracy. Polygamy, according to the statement, did not begin until Joseph Smith's July 1843 revelation, canonized as Doctrine & Covenants 132, which elided the complicated origins of plural sealings. Saints are depicted as then openly practicing polygamy as a sincerely-held belief until a legislative act in 1874 made it illegal, a timeline that ignores both how polygamy remained private for years as well as the fact that it was illegal long before the 1874 Poland Act; this framing enabled the First Presidency to distance the practice of plural marriage in the nineteenth century from the modern-day polygamists in the twentieth, whom they denounced as both secretive and illegal.Another narrative stretch regarded church officials’ involvement with post-manifesto polygamous sealings. According to Clark's statement, the “lawless” individuals who perpetuated plural marriage never did so with the leadership's blessing, and authorities promptly spoke out when rumors reached their attention, as in 1904 when Joseph F. Smith issued what came to be known as the “Second Manifesto.” It is “made plain,” the statement argues, “that the discontinuance of polygamous or plural marriage was obligatory and justifiable” ever since 1890, and anyone who claimed otherwise was spreading lies.There are several key phrases within the statement's historical section that deserve attention. Clark's description of the polygamists as a “secret” and “oath-bound organization,” which he repeats three times, might appear odd given the church's own history, including its secret and controversial temple rituals that they still practiced. But the accusation fit within a wider religious and political environment. Within a Mormon context, Clark connected these clandestine organizations to “the Nephites and Lamanites” in the Book of Mormon, secretive societies that worked to undercut the community. And within a political context, Clark was echoing wider moral outcries common among conservatives that blamed covert threats for menacing the nation; fears concerning a Communist insurgency had driven the previous decade's “red scare,” and rising antisemitism spread unfounded and dangerous rumors concerning a Jewish cabal manipulating the global economy. Polygamists were therefore lumped in with these wider anti-American dangers.10After providing a freshly minted historical narrative, the statement addresses two main arguments posited by modern polygamists that Clark claims are “false allegations,” the disproval of which would unravel all other claims to validity: the “pretended revelation” of John Taylor from September 1886 and the allegation that Taylor ordained several men to perpetuate the practice should the church ever concede to external pressure. The revelation and its surrounding events were tied together as the polygamists’ origin myth.To Clark, Taylor's September 1886 revelation simply did not exist. Not only was the revelation not found within “the archives of the church,” but the archive did not even possess “record of any such revelation, nor any evidence justifying a belief that any such revelation was ever given.” Nor was there any documentary support for the secret priesthood council, Clark alleged. Further, even if the revelation existed, it was “never presented to and adopted by the Church,” and therefore was not as binding as Woodruff's manifesto, which was sustained by the leadership as well as the general membership. And finally, the ordination of a secret council went against Joseph Smith's own prophetic instruction that only the president of the church controlled the sealing power.These references to “the archives of the church” are carefully worded. They likely reflect a legalistic dodge. There was certainly documentary evidence concerning Taylor's revelation. Heber J. Grant's own diary recorded his being told about the revelation by Taylor's son, John W. Taylor, on September 30, 1890, only days after Woodruff's manifesto.11 Grant was also present at a Quorum of the Twelve meeting on April 1, 1892, when Taylor again spoke of the revelation, which was recorded in apostle Abraham Cannon's diary.12 These documentary records, however, were not in the church's institutional archives, even if Grant would have been well aware of their contents. Further, Joseph Fielding Smith, an apostle and Joseph F. Smith's son who worked in the Church Historian's Office, recorded a typescript of the revelation in August 1909.13 While it is possible this transcript was in the church's archives at the time, it is also likely that Smith kept it in his own family records or considered it a private possession. Clark, a trained and skilled lawyer, perhaps saw an option to structure a denial that was literally true—that the archives did not contain evidence for the revelation—to avoid acknowledging the inconvenient truth: that documentary evidence for the document was plentiful. It is also likely that Clark's reference to the “revelation” as “pretended” was concerning more than just the textual document, but the broader story that included divine visitations from God, Jesus Christ, and Joseph Smith, as well as the ordination of a secret priesthood council. This seems implied in Clark's dating of the revelation to two days—September 26–27, 1886—signifying both the dictation of the revelation as well as the events that allegedly happened surrounding it.Clark's denial was tethered to an overall religious mindset that was, ironically, fundamentalist in nature. America during the interwar years featured a rising number of critics who denounced what they saw as secular inroads corrupting modern society. Academic fields like biology that taught evolution, higher criticism that undercut biblical narratives, and sociology and psychology that critiqued common theories of the human experience—these were all threats to foundational, Christian values. American believers had to return to fundamentals. While the more dogmatic movements within religious circles rallied around the “fundamentalist” label, conservative intellectuals similarly uncomfortable with these cultural developments posited the rejection of contemporary, progressive scholarship as the key to social stability. Scholars now refer to these groups as “anti-modernists.”14J. Reuben Clark drew from both these strains of fundamentalist thinking as he sought to shape the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1930s. He once complained how he had “come to deplore the fact that some of our ‘literatti’ as I call them,” did not “spend more time on the gospel as revealed, and less on the pagan philosophy of ancient times and the near-pagan philosophy of modern times.”15 He believed the church would be more stable and better situated if it returned to their core principles, stripped ideological diversions, and reaffirmed centralized control. This impulse culminated in his 1938 “Charted Course” address to Latter-day Saint religious educators that insisted that they focus on the “fundamentals” of the gospel.16These fundamentalist attitudes are found in at least three themes within the 1933 statement: appeals to doctrinal consistency, reaffirmations of ecclesiastical authority, and pledges for patriotic loyalty. Combatting the polygamists’ claim that plural marriage was a core doctrine within the Mormon tradition, Clark countered that monogamous unions predated, coincided, and outlasted the divine command for men to take multiple wives. The church was therefore not changing its beliefs when it forfeited that particular practice. Theological consistency was maintained. Similarly, prophetic authority and ecclesiastical order had also been a hallmark throughout the faith's existence, an institutional bedrock that provided foundation and boundaries for the community. The post-manifesto polygamists’ appeal to a secretive, extra-apostolic presiding body was a diversion from that principle. And finally, Clark's version of a historical narrative emphasized uniformity, simplicity, and fidelity, both in maintaining core principles but also in abiding by American law. Elements from the past that did not fit the correlated message were simply impossible. That's why John Taylor's alleged revelation, and the origin story surrounding it, had to be a pretense.The First Presidency statement did not convince all its readers. If Clark's reference to the “revelation” was meant to apply to more than just the text, attention nevertheless immediately turned to the particular document. One individual was particularly perturbed. Nellie Taylor, the widowed plural wife of John W. Taylor, not only knew that her father-in-law's revelation was not “pretended,” but she knew where it existed. She alerted Anthony Ivins, the other counselor in the First Presidency, that they should speak to Frank Y. Taylor, another son of the deceased prophet. Taylor eventually turned the revelation over to the First Presidency, though not before the family facilitated photographs that were then spread around the polygamist community. The document the church insisted did not exist was now in their possession.17How did Clark respond to this turn of events? Besides creating a straightforward memorandum documenting how they took ownership of the revelation, he remained silent. Neither he nor other church leaders corrected their previous and publicized statement, nor did they nuance their narrative toward the historical record. Though Clark did not again publicly and explicitly denounce the revelation as “pretended”—church leaders no longer focused their attention on the particular document but instead on the larger origin story of divine visitations and secret ordinations—he escalated his collaboration with ecclesiastical and civic authorities to excommunicate and prosecute polygamists, a move that, rather than curtailing the movement, only consolidated it into a more cohesive community, soon known as “fundamentalism.”18The dispute between post-manifesto polygamists and J. Reuben Clark was a dispute over fundamentals. Moreover, it was a fundamentalist dispute. For all their disagreements over particulars, they shared much of a similar worldview: that contemporary America was drawing away from their foundations, and it was necessary to return to core principles. To return to fundamentals.And when those fundamentals conflict with textual evidence, the easiest solution is often to table the question, sequester the source of consternation, and refuse to confront its sobering consequences.