Joseph Smith’s Martyrdom Grew Church

Historians generally agree on a distinction that is crucial for understanding Mormonism’s survival: martyrdom is not evidence of truth, but it is powerful social capital. Joseph Smith’s death did the opposite of what his enemies intended. It turned him into a martyr, and gave his followers resolve. Martyrdom provides a ready-made narrative of persecution and sanctity, it simplifies complex moral and historical questions into a story of good versus evil, and grants leaders enormous rhetorical leverage. It unifies followers around shared suffering, discourages internal dissent, and transforms tragedy into meaning. In this sense, Joseph Smith’s death didn’t function as any confirmation of his prophetic claims but as a social mechanism—an engine of cohesion that helped the movement survive, consolidate, and ultimately expand.

The Church did not survive on martyrdom alone. It endured largely because Brigham Young succeeded where Joseph Smith failed. After Joseph’s death, Young led the Saints west, leveraging the emotional power of martyrdom to harden group identity and resolve. In the isolation of the Great Basin, far from hostile neighbors and with minimal government oversight, Young achieved something Joseph never could: a religious society surrounded almost exclusively by believers. There, Young ruled for more than forty years as both prophet and de facto governor, presiding over a theocratic colony with little external accountability. The distance and seclusion gave Mormonism the buffer zone it desperately needed—space to control information, enforce obedience, and reshape culture without constant resistance.

One cannot help but wonder how differently Joseph Smith might have fared had he lived long enough to enjoy the same insulation, surrounded by followers rather than critics, protected by geography instead of exposed by proximity.

Joseph Smith once boasted, “I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam… Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it.” (History of the Church, Vol. 6). It’s a bold claim—equal parts audacious and revealing. Smith saw himself not just as a prophet, but as the ultimate spiritual leader, surpassing even Christ in his ability to hold a religious movement together.

Yet, the reality of Smith’s leadership tells a very different story.

A Founder, Not a Finisher

Charismatic Founder’s Legacy Secured By Death

Joseph Smith founded the Church of Christ in 1830, but by 1844—just 14 years later—he was dead, killed in a violent skirmish in Carthage Jail, leaving the church fractured and rudderless. Many of the earliest and most devoted followers had already been alienated, excommunicated, or driven away by Smith’s erratic leadership, failed promises, and increasingly authoritarian behavior. Among those who left were key witnesses to the Book of Mormon—people he once claimed were vital to establishing the truth of the Restoration. What kind of prophet drives out his own witnesses?

Smith’s administration of the church was plagued by instability. Financial failures like the Kirtland Safety Society left many destitute. The move to Nauvoo brought temporary peace, but also a centralized theocracy, a secret polygamous underworld, and a growing cult of personality around Smith. He crowned himself “King,” flirted with presidential ambitions, and amassed near-total control over civic, military, and spiritual life in Nauvoo. This wasn’t sustainable. It collapsed under its own weight.

Dangerous Charisma

Joseph Smith had charm, no doubt. He could flatter, persuade, and inspire loyalty. But he also had a pattern of self-destruction. He often turned on his closest friends, manipulated followers with promises of eternal glory, and even used the threat of damnation to coerce women into polygamous relationships. His relationships were riddled with betrayal, secrecy, and power plays.

Had he lived longer, the cracks would have widened. His accumulation of titles—mayor, general, prophet, president—suggests a man drunk on power. His increasingly delusional schemes, including secret councils to establish a theocratic government, were unsustainable. Joseph Smith wasn’t guiding the church toward the celestial kingdom—he was steering it off a cliff. His death, as tragic as it was, likely saved the church from imploding entirely.

Joseph’s Greatest Contribution: Dying

Ironically, Joseph Smith’s most lasting contribution to Mormonism may have been his death. His violent end turned him into a martyr and allowed his legacy to be mythologized. His devoted followers, those who hadn’t yet fled, could now canonize him in memory, unburdened by the chaos he continued to create in life. The LDS hymn “Praise to the Man” reads like beatification: Joseph became a Mormon saint, a Christlike figure who “sealed his testimony with his blood.”

His death provided a blank canvas upon which future leaders could paint an image of prophetic perfection, sanitizing the messiness of his life into a story of divine purpose and persecution. The church used his martyrdom to unify splintering factions and fuel a narrative of persecution, vengeance, and destiny.

Joseph’s history and deeds continue to be sanitized by the church. It is literally the only thing that can be done to continue the charade that has become the LDS Church. The church continues to “celebrate” the anniversary of this martyrdom. It was founded by a charlatan and continued by brutal and basic men, who claimed and saw themselves as men called and appointed by God to have any women they wanted and wield all power.

Sealed With Blood

Joseph is often cited in the church as a martyr, compared to many Christian martyrs, but especially to Jesus.

Events in Joseph Smith’s life follow a pattern of martyrdom that characterized the Savior and other scriptural figures…

“The martyrdom of Jesus the Christ is well established – it followed closely the pattern,” he said. “His life was the perfect life. His enemies, failing to find any guilt in Him resorted to mobocracy to end His life.” … The Savior had told His followers of His approaching death. He must die for the sins of the world and to seal His testimony. This He knew. His hour had come. They crucified Him, the Son of God, on Calvary.

Another day dawns – a new dispensation… The details of the life of Joseph Smith are familiar to us. He announced at once his glorious vision of the Father and the Son and was immediately oppressed and persecuted… Joseph Smith did not want to die. He had so much to live for, with his family, his friends, with his interest in the expanding kingdom, and he was still a young man, but though he hoped and prayed that the cup could pass, he knew it was inevitable… His work was not lost. His testimony goes steadily forward, on to infinity. As Alma had carried the torch for Abinadi, the apostles for the Savior, now came Brigham Young and the Twelve to continue the work of restoration… Men do not give their lives to perpetuate falsehoods. Martyrdom dissipates all question as to the sincerity of the martyr. Personalities do not survive the ages. They rise like a shooting star, shine brilliantly for a moment and disappear from view, but a martyr for a living cause, like the sun – shines on forever.”

Prophet’s death fits pattern of martyrdom
Spencer W. Kimball, April 1946 General Conference
https://www.thechurchnews.com/1993/10/16/23257868/prophets-death-fits-pattern-of-martyrdom/

The LDS Church’s teachings and manuals explicitly argue that Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s deaths “added a powerful seal to their testimonies” of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the restored gospel — implying that their martyrdom strengthened the church’s spiritual foundation and helped deflect skepticism.

Dissenters within the Church and opponents outside the Church brought about the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum Smith. Their deaths added a powerful seal to their testimonies of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. A study of the life and martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith will help students consider the many blessings the Lord has given them through the ministry of the Prophet Joseph Smith, through whom He restored His gospel in the latter days…

Joseph Smith laid the foundation for God’s work in this gospel dispensation. The Prophet Joseph Smith was innocent at the time of his death, and he had faithfully fulfilled the mission given to him by God.

Foundations of the Restoration Teacher Manual, Lesson 22: The Martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/foundations-of-the-restoration-teacher-manual/lesson-22-the-martyrdom-of-the-prophet-joseph-smith

The Church’s insistence that Joseph Smith was “innocent at the time of his death” is not just misleading—it is deliberately vague. Innocent of what, exactly? The statement is offered without charges, without context, and without engaging the very events that led to his imprisonment and death. The faithful are encouraged to assume blanket innocence while being carefully shielded from the Nauvoo Expositor’s actual claims. But those claims were not imaginary persecutions; they were specific, concrete accusations: that Joseph Smith and senior church leaders were secretly practicing plural marriage, abusing ecclesiastical power, and silencing dissent. Was Joseph innocent of secret polygamy? That is now impossible to maintain, because the Church itself later admitted—publicly and unequivocally—that Joseph did practice plural marriage. Was he innocent of suppressing whistleblowers? Hardly. He excommunicated members who refused to remain silent, prompting them to publish the Expositor in the first place. And was he innocent of destroying a printing press? No—that act is undisputed and is precisely why he was jailed. To call this “innocence” requires erasing the reasons he was arrested, ignoring the legitimacy of the accusations, and pretending the Church’s later admissions never happened. This is not historical clarity; it is institutional gaslighting dressed up as martyrdom.

The event that focused anti-Mormon hostilities and led directly to the Martyrdom was the action of Mayor Joseph Smith and the city council in closing a newly established opposition newspaper in Nauvoo. Mormon historians—including Elder B. H. Roberts—had conceded that this action was illegal, but as a young law professor pursuing original research, I was pleased to find a legal basis for this action in the Illinois law of 1844… We should judge the actions of our predecessors on the basis of the laws and commandments and circumstances of their day, not ours.

Men who knew Joseph best and stood closest to him in Church leadership loved and sustained him as a prophet. His brother Hyrum chose to die at his side… Like other faithful Latter-day Saints, I have built my life on the testimony and mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith. In all of my reading and original research, I have never been dissuaded from my testimony of his prophetic calling and of the gospel and priesthood restoration the Lord initiated through him.

Dallin H. Oaks, as LDS Apostle, currently LDS Church President, Joseph, the Man and the Prophet, April 1996, General Conference
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1996/04/joseph-the-man-and-the-prophet

Dallin Oaks did mention the “opposition newspaper in Nauvoo,” but not by name, when he claims that Mayor Joseph Smith (to distinguish him from Prophet Joseph Smith) and the city council were led to the action of “closing” this newspaper. They didn’t simply close the press, they destroyed it! Slight revising of history, and then Oaks claims the authority to declare that they did nothing wrong (or at least nothing illegal) and that they should be seen in light of the “laws and commandments and circumstances of their day, not ours.” But polygamy was not legal nor ethical in the 1830s and 1840s, so these can’t be genuinly trying to say Joseph did nothing wrong or illegal?

The church teaches that the death of Joseph Smith seals the testimony of his calling, the church, and the “restored” gospel. This framing deliberately invokes the imagery of ancient martyrs — faithful witnesses dying rather than denying divine truth. But Joseph and Hyrum did not die while defending scripture, refusing to renounce revelations, or standing before a tribunal proclaiming the truth of the Restoration. They died because Joseph Smith had ordered the destruction of a printing press that exposed his secret polygamy, abuses of power, and efforts to silence dissent. He wanted his secret polygamy to remain secret, that’s what he died for. His death was the result of political escalation, not theological witness.

The immediate cause of their imprisonment was not belief, but authority. Joseph Smith had fused religious leadership with civil power, declared martial law in Nauvoo, mobilized the Nauvoo Legion, and claimed sweeping powers that placed him functionally above both state and federal law. The Nauvoo Expositor did not attack the Book of Mormon — it exposed plural marriage, authoritarian governance, and theocratic ambition. Destroying the press was not an act of faith; it was an act of censorship. It was a decision rooted in fear of exposure, not devotion to revealed truth.

The oft-repeated image of Joseph and Hyrum going “like lambs to the slaughter” further distorts reality. Joseph was armed, fired a weapon, hitting at least two, and attempted to escape through the window. This was not a passive submission or a Christlike sacrifice. It was a violent confrontation born of Joseph’s own choices to suppress critics and entrench his power. Whatever sympathy one may feel for the brutality of the mob, it does not transform the circumstances of their deaths into sacred testimony.

Calling these deaths a “seal” on their revelation attempts to reframe a political and legal crisis as spiritual validation. It substitutes tragedy for evidence and emotion for accountability. If martyrdom seals truth, then the content of the beliefs no longer matters — only the suffering does. That logic asks believers to overlook the reasons Joseph was jailed, the abuses he was hiding, and the dissent he was silencing, and instead focus solely on the dramatic ending.

In the end, the martyrdom narrative functions not to clarify the truth of Joseph Smith’s claims, but to shield them. It turns scrutiny into sacrilege and questions into betrayal. But honest history demands we distinguish between dying for beliefs and dying because of one’s actions. Joseph and Hyrum Smith were not executed for their scriptures, their church, or their faith — they were killed amid the consequences of secrecy, authoritarianism, and a refusal to submit to the same laws governing everyone else. The “seal in blood” may be powerful rhetoric, but it is not an honest account of what actually happened. It is repeated over and over by subsequent church leaders, in part, because their authority is directly tied to Joseph’s reputation. Similar to how witnesses allegedly never deny their statements because of their involvement with the early church, subsequent leaders can never challenge Joseph Smith because their authority claims are directly reliant on Joseph’s authenticity.

I was acquainted with Joseph Smith for years. I have traveled with him; I have been with him in private and in public; I have associated with him in councils of all kinds; I have listened hundreds of times to his public teachings, and his advice to his friends and associates of a more private nature…. I was with him living, and with him when he died, when he was murdered in Carthage jail by a ruthless mob… I testify before God, angels, and men, that he was a good, honorable, virtuous man—that his doctrines were good, scriptural, and wholesome—that his precepts were such as became a man of God—that his private and public character was unimpeachable—and that he lived and died as a man of God and a gentleman.

John Taylor, The Gospel Kingdom, Collection of Teachings By John Taylor compiled by G. Homer Durham (1987)
Teachings of Presidents of the Church: John Taylor: Chapter 9: Joseph Smith, the Prophet of the Restoration
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-john-taylor/chapter-9

LDS commentary sometimes draws parallels between Joseph’s death and accepted patterns of Christian martyrdom — arguing that dying for a cause lends authority and resonates spiritually with believers, much like the deaths of early Christian figures. Secular perspectives support the idea that martyrdom can function as a powerful social mechanism: when a founder or high-status figure dies under dramatic circumstances for a cause, followers often interpret that death as heroic testimony, which can deepen commitment, attract attention to the movement, and strengthen internal cohesion.

The claim that Joseph Smith’s death “sealed his testimony in blood” rests on a powerful emotional appeal, not a rational one. Being killed does not retroactively make a person’s teachings true, inspired, or moral. It only proves that they were willing — or unable — to avoid a violent end. History is filled with leaders, prophets, revolutionaries, cult founders, and demagogues who died violently, and whose movements ranged from noble to disastrous. Their deaths influenced how followers remembered them, but not whether their claims corresponded to reality.

Who can justly say aught against Joseph Smith? I was as well acquainted with him, as any man. I do not believe that his father and mother knew him any better than I did. I do not think that a man lives on the earth that knew him any better than I did; and I am bold to say that, Jesus Christ excepted, no better man ever lived or does live upon this earth. I am his witness. He was persecuted for the same reason that any other righteous person has been or is persecuted at the present day…

Had Joseph Smith been an impostor and of the world, the world would not have hated him, but would have loved its own. Had Joseph Smith made political capital of his religion and calling, and raised up a political party, he doubtless would have become celebrated and renowned in the world as a great man and as a great leader.

Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 9:332, Volume 9, Discourse 68 (p 332)
A Knowledge of God Obtained Only Through Obedience to the Principles of Truth, Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, August 3, 1862
https://journalofdiscourses.com/9/68

Martyrdom works socially because it changes perception, not because it reveals truth. A violent death simplifies complex histories into a single emotionally charged narrative: he was killed, therefore he must have been right. It converts scrutiny into sympathy and doubt into loyalty. Once someone is framed as a martyr, questioning their actions feels cruel, even sacrilegious. That psychological shift benefits the movement — not because the evidence improved, but because emotional defenses went up.

If dying for a belief made that belief true, then contradictory claims would all be equally validated. People have died for Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, atheism, nationalism, communism, fascism, UFO cults, and apocalyptic prophecies that never came true. They cannot all be correct.

Sacrifice demonstrates sincerity, not accuracy. Conviction is not evidence.

Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it. In the short space of twenty years, he has brought forth the Book of Mormon, which he translated by the gift and power of God, and has been the means of publishing it on two continents; has sent the fulness of the everlasting gospel, which it contained, to the four quarters of the earth; has brought forth the revelations and commandments which compose this book of Doctrine and Covenants, and many other wise documents and instructions for the benefit of the children of men; gathered many thousands of the Latter-day Saints, founded a great city, and left a fame and name that cannot be slain. He lived great, and he died great in the eyes of God and his people; and like most of the Lord’s anointed in ancient times, has sealed his mission and his works with his own blood…

John Taylor, LDS Church President, Doctrine & Covenants 135:3
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/135?lang=eng&id=p3#p3

In Joseph Smith’s case, his death did not resolve the serious accusations against him — it froze them in place. It prevented further legal accountability, halted public exposure, and allowed followers to reinterpret his life through the lens of persecution rather than evidence. The Nauvoo Expositor, the destruction of the press, secret plural marriages, financial scandals, and shifting doctrines were not answered by his death; they were shielded by it. Martyrdom didn’t strengthen the truth of his claims — it insulated them from examination.

Ultimately, the idea that testimony is “sealed in blood” confuses how humans respond to stories with how truth is determined. Truth does not depend on how much someone suffered for it. It depends on evidence, consistency, transparency, and accountability — the very things martyr narratives tend to replace. If Joseph is no longer alive, he can’t be accountable for his actions, and those who point out the abusive actions are often dismissed as being insensitive to the plight and suffering he suffered. Emotional impact may grow after a violent death, but truth does not.

Fortifying the Church

Paradoxically the killing of Joseph Smith strengthened Mormonism rather than extinguishing it. Historians generally point to three complementary reasons Mormonism survived Joseph Smith’s scandals and assassination. First, Smith’s productive innovations. He’d often provide new scripture or revelations to power an organized institutional framework, and a mobilized people who had already been transformed by his teachings. Second, organizational structures and succession mechanisms that allowed leadership to be reconstituted and centralized quickly (even though there was no real succession plan). Third, the remaining church leadership issued immediate rhetorical and social responses that turned the killing into a martyrdom. This made it a binding memory and motivation for the faithful. The martyrdom was symbolically powerful, but scholarship shows that it was the organizational capacity (and Brigham Young’s consolidation of authority) that translated tragedy into durable institution.

Rather than perishing with him, Mormonism migrated to the Rocky Mountains, flourished there, and now claims millions of followers worldwide.

Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (Cover Sleeve)

While Joseph Smith may have founded the church, it was Brigham Young who truly grew it — not because his ambitions were nobler, but because his circumstances were far more favorable. In many ways, Smith and Young shared the same core impulses: centralized authority, prophetic absolutism, and an expectation of obedience that blurred the line between faith and submission. The difference is that Brigham succeeded where Joseph failed because he removed Mormonism from normal society altogether. By leading the Saints into the geographic isolation of the Great Basin, Young created a vast buffer zone that kept critics, federal oversight, and competing ideas largely at bay while trapping followers inside a closed social system. Within that isolation, he tightly controlled information, dictated culture, enforced conformity, and shaped a people whose identity revolved entirely around loyalty to church leadership. Growth under Brigham was not the organic spread of ideas competing in an open marketplace, but the expansion of a controlled society — one where dissent was dangerous, obedience was rewarded, and survival itself depended on staying in good standing with the man at the top.

In a sense, all the claimants drew Joseph’s mantle around them. They were not successors but agents or replicas of the man who had dominated the Mormon movement for fourteen years. Brigham Young, president of the Twelve, presided at the meeting where Rigdon made his case. Young took another approach, proposing that the Twelve lead the Church… At the August meeting when the issue was posed, the congregation sustained Brigham Young and the Twelve as the new Presidency with little visible resistance. Rigdon, increasingly erratic thereafter, left for Pennsylvania, where the remnant churches he formed faded in and out of existence until he died in New York in 1876.

Calling on Joseph’s charisma was one approach to succeeding him; another was to rely on his organization. Who had the right to be president? Brigham Young instinctively made succession a priesthood issue. When he heard of Joseph’s death, the first thing he wondered was “whether Joseph had taken the keys of the kingdom with him from the earth,” meaning priesthood authority. Young was thinking not of Joseph, but of Joseph’s system of priesthood keys and councils. Once he came to the conclusion that the keys had remained with the Church, and the Twelve possessed them, the right course was obvious: the Twelve should become the new First Presidency. When he spoke to the Saints in the August meeting in Nauvoo, he said he wanted to “speak of the organization of the Church.”

Appealing to the Church on these terms assumed that the members had incorporated the constitution of priesthood authority into their thinking. Young’s case worked because Joseph had laid the foundation in the early years. He had organized the Church by councils and then invested this governance system with charisma. The priesthood who manned the councils had “keys,” the powers to act for God. Young’s success demonstrated that the Church now existed in the minds of thousands of Mormons. In 1846, over ten thousand of them would march across the plains under Young’s direction. Before they left, they labored on the temple down to the final hour in order to receive the endowment they were convinced would exalt them. They did these things within the framework of a religious culture that had come into being in the fourteen years since Joseph organized the Church of Christ in 1830 with a few dozen members.

Richard L. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, p 556-557
https://archive.org/details/joseph-smith-rough-stone-rolling-richard-lyman-bushman_202402/page/556/mode/2up

Brigham Young ensured its survival, but he wasn’t a prophet in the same sense of Joseph. He had no revelations, and his unique doctrines (Adam-God theory, Racist bans, and more) have all been disavowed by the church since. He was a colonizer, a businessman, and an administrator. He transplanted Mormonism to the West, established the infrastructure and hierarchy that allowed it to usurp the West from the natives and reign over the desert as theocratic supreme ruler. For better or worse, he made Mormonism a functional, yet isolated and insulated society.

Under Brother Brigham’s leadership, Mormonism became a people, not just a belief system. Without him, few today would know what a Mormon is. If Joseph Smith is the theological founder of Mormonism, Brigham Young is the institutional founder. The norms of today are deeply uncomfortable with Young’s racism, polygamy, and authoritarianism, and those pillars remain seeded in Mormon culture.

It was Young who preserved and expanded the church from Nauvoo to Utah. Every other faction that split from Joseph Smith’s original church, and there were many, has since dwindled into obscurity. The Brighamite faction—the modern LDS Church—is the only one that succeeded. Not because of Joseph’s charisma, but because of Brigham’s structure and brutality.

Brigham Young built the modern LDS Church and the Utah settlement by demanding absolute obedience and by running church and territory with near-unchecked authority — a theocratic power that functioned, in practice, like his own personal syndicate. As president of the church and the de facto political leader in the Salt Lake Valley, he centralized control of land, law, and livelihood; dissenters were pushed out, excommunicated, and marginalized. Native peoples were dispossessed and subjected to policies that fueled violence and displacement. Even the women in his households, with whom he shared a bed, had little ability to refuse the harsh demands of a leader who treated loyalty as a duty. That combination of ruthless management, coercive social control, and occasional brutality is inseparable from Brigham’s legacy. He was unquestionably the organizer and colonizer who turned a persecuted sect into a functioning society, but to call him “great” misses half the story. If greatness requires virtue, Brigham must be judged as more terrible than great — brilliant at building institutions, but cruel in how he enforced them.

Young ran the Utah Territory much as Smith had run Nauvoo, and conflicts between religious and secular authorities soon re-emerged. The Mormon leaders were suspicious of both the character and intent of federal appointees… And over the next seven years, a succession of federal officers—judges, Indian agents, surveyors—came to the territory only to find that the governor would circumvent or reverse their decisions.

Young “has been so much in the habit of exercising his will which is supreme here, that no one will dare oppose anything he may say or do,” Indian agent Jacob Holeman wrote to his superior in Washington, D.C. in 1851—in effect going over Young’s head (Young was also the territory’s superintendent of Indian affairs). Surveyor General David Burr reported that Young told him federal surveyors “shall not be suffered to trespass” on Mormon lands. Through the mid-1850s, federal appointees returned East frustrated or intimidated or both, and some of them wrote books or articles about their travails. Anti-Mormon sentiment spread…

Smithsonian Magazine, The Brink of War, by David Roberts, June 2008
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-brink-of-war-48447228/

A Legacy Built on a Myth

Today, Joseph Smith is placed on a pedestal next to Jesus Christ—an irony, considering he once claimed superiority over Him. But the reality of Joseph’s life stands in stark contrast to the myth. He was charismatic, ambitious, and inventive, yes—but also deeply unstable and reckless. His movement survived not because of his greatness, but in spite of his failures. His martyrdom allowed others to reinvent him, and the racist Brigham Young, protected by distance, gave the church the structure to survive.

Joseph Smith may have founded Mormonism, but it was his death that built the church we know today. Had Smith lived long enough to be fully exposed, held publicly accountable, and punished for his abuses of power, church history might look very different. In many ways, that exposure was already beginning. The Nauvoo Expositor laid bare his secret polygamy, political overreach, and authoritarian rule. But instead of prompting widespread reckoning, it triggered suppression. By destroying the press and dying shortly thereafter, Smith escaped the long, public unraveling that might have followed. His death froze his image in time and transformed a deeply flawed leader into a martyr, shielding his legacy from sustained scrutiny.

The fact that so many remained faithful even after these revelations speaks less to the strength of the evidence and more to the power of belief and belonging. People wanted the church to be true. They had invested their identities, families, livelihoods, and hopes for eternity in the story. Walking away would have meant admitting they had been deceived — a psychological cost far greater than doubling down.

Mark Twain famously observed that it is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled, and that insight applies just as much here as it does in modern political movements that persist despite repeated disconfirmation. Evidence alone rarely changes minds when faith, identity, and community are at stake.

This raises an uncomfortable question: what would it actually take for church members to lose confidence in Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, or today’s leadership? The documentation is extensive. The contradictions are all well established. The abuses are not well hidden. Yet belief endures — not because the evidence is weak, but because facing it requires courage. It requires the willingness to sit with doubt, to risk belonging, and to examine cherished assumptions honestly. Once that examination is allowed, the conclusions are difficult to avoid. The story only holds together as long as one refuses to look too closely.

If any of this resonates with you, we invite you to share your own story of discovery and faith deconstruction. Telling these stories matters. When we speak openly about doubt, questions, and the moment the narrative stopped holding together, we empower skeptics, destigmatize uncertainty, and normalize the decision to stop believing what no longer withstands scrutiny. So many of us were taught to distrust our own reasoning whenever it conflicted with warm feelings toward the church, but refusing to ignore the growing landslide of evidence is not a moral failure—it is an act of integrity. The emotions of love, hope, and belonging we once felt were real, but they do not prove the institution is true; they only show how effectively those emotions were cultivated, redirected, and exploited. By reclaiming those virtuous feelings for ourselves—separate from an organization that has repeatedly caused harm—we loosen the church’s grip and free ourselves from its lingering tentacles. And in that freedom, many of us find something far more honest, more humane, and more lasting than belief ever was.

• Joseph Smith’s Most Arrogant Boast
• The Drawn Flaming Sword of Polygamy – Spiritual Abuse and Manipulation
• The Nauvoo Expositor And More Lies From Joseph Smith
• Leadership Suppress Dissenfecting Light – The Nauvoo Expositor
• Dallin H. Oaks & The Nauvoo Expositor
• Racist Brigham Young
• Martha Brotherton: Pressured by Church Leaders to Become a Plural Wife
• LDS Church Offended by American Primeval
• The Joseph Smith “Like a Lamb to the Slaughter” Narrative is Myth
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-brink-of-war-48447228/
• https://academic.oup.com/book/8938/chapter/155251426
• https://archive.org/details/joseph-smith-rough-stone-rolling-richard-lyman-bushman_202402/page/556/mode/2up
• https://rsc.byu.edu/champion-liberty-john-taylor/john-taylor-witness-martyrdom-prophet-joseph-smith
• https://mrm.org/martyrdom