To watch this episode on YouTube, click HERE.
Transcript of David’s YouTube video below:
Mr. Beat (not to be confused with Mr. Beast) recently made a video about Latter-day Saint history and OH MY HECK, we’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get to it.
33:28 – 34:08 “There’s no way to sugarcoat this: Joseph Smith was basically a con artist, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to whitewash history … ”
This clip is from the end of his video, but I wanted to talk about it first because it’s very clear throughout the video that this belief — that Joseph Smith was a fraud — colors the way he talks about pretty much all of church history. He’s unfortunately very flippant and sarcastic in the video and is apparently a big fan of what South Park has to say about our faith, which he references many times. I don’t think he’s ever been a member of our faith, but the first hashtag he includes under his video is “#exmormon.” In the comments section, Mr. Beat expressed that anyone who believes that Joseph Smith was a true prophet has no credibility. Believers just cherry-pick evidence, while he says he considers ALL the available evidence.
True to that belief, if commenters pushing back on him were found to be believing Latter-day Saints, it seems they were too often simply dismissed. Now, I’m not pointing this out just to be rude to Mr. Beat — I’m just trying to make the point that, unfortunately, this source is far from fair and balanced, and while he does include many facts throughout his video, he leaves out many important facts that add important context. As a small example, after claiming that Joseph was a fraud, he says this:
33:36 Before his untimely death, he had been arrested at least 42 times, according to one source.
According to the transcript, that source was this 1977 BYU devotional, which actually claims that Joseph was “falsely” arrested 42 times. I started to wonder why Mr. Beat would have left that word out of his presentation and why he was getting information from an almost 50-year-old outdated BYU speech, but after finding very similar wording citing this same source on Wikipedia, my guess is that he probably never actually read the source. If he had dug deeper in more recent sources, he would have found that he actually faced closer to 50 criminal cases and “that not once was he found legally guilty of any charges against him….”
But let’s go back towards the beginning of the video and get a little deeper into some of Mr. Beat’s arguments:
[The clip about treasure-digging starts at about 5:47. Include the “wizard” line, and 6:28 where he talks about Joseph Sr. teaching Joseph Jr. “how to hustle people.” He drops the topic but comes back around 8:20]
Alright, so most critics that bring up Joseph Smith’s treasure-digging present you with two options: Either this was an evil witchrafty practice, or just outright fraudulent. Both options look bad for Joseph. But there’s a third option that Mr. Beat either isn’t aware of or chooses not to bring up: This article by anthropologist Manuel Padro indicates that “Treasure hunting was explicitly a form of Christian folk-religiosity as practiced in upstate New York and New England. For many rural Yankees, ‘treasure-seeking was a materialistic extension of their Christian faith. …’”
In this folk-Christian tradition, it was believed that when someone buried treasure and then died, their spirit would not be able to move on until the treasure was found and put to good use. Sincere treasure hunters felt that they were actually helping to free souls from purgatory, so to speak. If hunters failed to acquire the treasure, non-believers might chalk it up to fraudulence, while sincere practitioners attributed it to interfering evil spirits or their own lack of faith.
Professor of Early Modern History Johanne Dillenger wrote, “We cannot understand early modern treasure hunting if we ignore its double purpose: it was a means to make money, but it was also an act of Christian devotion that helped a poor soul to finally enter the hereafter. The spiritual motivation was essentially genuine.” And for anyone wondering, I want to emphasize that these researchers are not members of our faith.
So if this was a Christian thing, why did it get such a bad rap? Largely because it had roots in Catholicism, and the early United States was very, very Protestant. The dominant ideology painted the treasure quest as heretical, and that’s the version of history that has been passed down to us.
And by the way, he throws up a screen full of dollar signs, suggesting that treasure-digging was a lucrative endeavor for Joseph Sr.. That was not the case. They were predominantly farmers and very poor.
7:27 [“Also I should add that the first vision has had multiple versions over the years…”].
He doesn’t spend much time on this, so I won’t either, but yes, Joseph wrote down or told the story of his 1820 vision multiple times over the years to different people in different situations—and while the gist of the story is the same, there are some differences in the details. For example, the 1832 account says he was 16 at the time of the vision. The 1835 account says he was about 14 at the time. The 1835 account says he saw two personages along with many angels, while the 1838 account says he saw God the Father and Jesus but doesn’t mention the other angels. I don’t mean to be flippant about this if people are sincerely concerned about it, but I agree with this quote from the non-Latter-day Saint historian Stephen Prothero, whose conclusion about this controversy was essentially “meh.” But if this is new information to you and you’d like to dive deeper, here’s a whole book about this topic.
7:59 [over the next four years, Joseph supposedly tried to find these plates but couldn’t locate them]. Mr. Beat lists no source for this information in the transcript, so I don’t know where he’s getting it from, but this is incorrect. The angel Moroni told Joseph where the plates were in the hill. He moved the stone covering and saw the plates were there, but he wasn’t allowed to take them home yet. He met with Moroni at that location at the same time every year for four years and was then allowed to take them home.
9:40 – [Smith said they had reformed Egyptian written on them, and he was the only one who could translate it into English — but nobody could actually see the golden plates, nor could they actually see Joseph Smith translating them. Isn’t that convenient? Later Smith said he could…(stop at image of him translating)”]
OK sorry for the abrupt cut — I just thought it was ironic that he claims that no one could see Joseph while he was translating, but then he immediately cuts to a picture of Joseph translating right in front of his scribe. Which is it? In this case, the picture is correct. We have multiple witnesses of the translation confirming that Joseph translated in full view of his scribe and sometimes others and that he had no notes or reference materials available to him during the dictation of the text. Some people are going to claim there was a curtain drawn between him and his scribe. That argument doesn’t hold water — we did a whole video on it, linked in the description.
His other claim was that nobody could see the golden plates. That is not true. The official 3 and 8 witnesses did see the plates after the translation was complete. Mr. Beat briefly mentions the 3 official witnesses later in the video, but he doesn’t mention anything at all about the additional 8 witnesses or the unofficial witnesses and the experiences they had with the plates. This is a massive omission, but the fact is that Joseph’s story is much easier to shrug off if he really was the only person to see the plates. But once almost a dozen other people start saying, “No, really, they’re real. I saw them,” … what do you do with that? It gets even more complicated when you learn that none of the 11 official witnesses ever recanted. Quite the opposite — they reaffirmed their testimony throughout the rest of their lives, even in the face of life-threatening persecution in some cases.
Some say, “They only saw them with their spiritual eyes.” We’ve done a couple of episodes on that. Again, I don’t think that holds water. Others say, “Well, they clearly can’t be trusted because they were all friends or relatives of Joseph Smith.” But I wonder — if these witnesses are not credible because they were friends of Joseph Smith, do they become credible after many of them fell out with Joseph Smith and left the Church? It would have been a great opportunity to say it was all a sham, but even then, they reaffirmed that the plates were real and that the Book of Mormon was true. Explaining away the witnesses, in my view, is one of the biggest issues that critics need to address if Joseph Smith was just a fraud, and Mr. Beat makes no attempt to do so. He seems more than willing to present the faith-challenging perspective but less than willing to give much stage time to anything faith-affirming, which is unfortunate.
14:55 revelations from Oliver and Hiram Page from the devil. Only Joseph.
Alright so it seems like the assumption being made here is that nobody but the prophet is allowed to receive revelations from God. This is incorrect. God wants to communicate with all of his children through revelation. The problem in this specific scenario was that Hiram Page was claiming to receive revelations for the Church. In response to this situation, Joseph receives a revelation recorded today in Doctrine and Covenants section 28 that teaches essentially that God is a god of order and that revelations for the whole Church are going to come through the proper channels — namely, the president of the Church. And I think that makes total sense, so this is a non-issue for me.
16:50 “Smith’s friend, Isaac Morley, had multiple wives, and Joseph thought “huh, maybe i could pull that off too””
The claim here is that Joseph got the idea to institute polygamy in Kirtland, Ohio, from Isaac Morley, who practiced polygamy. Again, he provides no source for this, and this information is simply incorrect. Volume 2 of “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy” indicates that Isaac Morley didn’t participate in polygamy until December 19th, 1843, in Nauvoo, long after the Kirtland era and long after Joseph Smith had already begun practicing polygamy.
21:30 [“Joseph Smith had as many as 49 wives, some getting married to him as young as 14 years old”]
One of the 14-year-olds was Helen Mar Kimball. Her father organized this marriage with Joseph as a way to connect their families through eternity. She continued to live with her parents after they were sealed. Joseph was killed a few months later. There’s no evidence that their marriage was ever consummated. Again, we’ve done a whole video on this, linked in the description.
The other wife Mr. Beat probably had in mind was Nancy Winchester. We know very little about her marriage to Joseph. Her brother, Benjamin, was critical of Joseph Smith but never says his sister was married to him — perhaps because he didn’t know about it or because it never happened. We don’t have a sealing date for her. If it did happen, she probably would have been either 14 or 15 at the time. In the chart Mr. Beat uses, she’s 15. On Wikipedia, which is the source he cites in his transcript, she’s 14. In either case, as Brian Hales notes, “no documentation exists suggesting that she was sexually involved with the Prophet at any time….”
Now, I’m not saying this information means you have to be OK with polygamy or the age of these women. You can come to your own conclusions — I just want to make sure you’re basing your conclusions on accurate information, and unfortunately, Mr. Beat seems to be leaving a lot out.
23:30 [no one to lead the Church after Joseph’s death, so Brigham Young took advantage of it and made himself the leader]
Brigham is portrayed here as kind of a usurper — he saw an opportunity to seize power, slipped in, and took it. What he’s not telling you is that Brigham Young was the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at the time. It’s true that Joseph didn’t leave a clear successor after his death. It likely would have been his brother, Hyrum, but Hyrum was killed with him. The only other serious options were Sidney Rigdon or Brigham Young. Rigdon had some issues at that point in the Church. So, yeah, most people totally supported Brigham Young. They didn’t just go along with it for the heck of it — it made sense.
Shifting gears a bit — you guys, here’s the deal. As we’ve seen, there are a lot of blatant inaccuracies in Mr. Beat’s video. This response video is just a selection of some of the issues I saw. But what is perhaps more concerning is the pattern of stating partial truths, or incomplete truths, that drastically affect how people unfamiliar with the history are going to interpret things. As Latter-day Saints, we need to be careful and develop the skills necessary to be able to spot not only the inaccuracies but the half-truths as well. Now, I don’t know Mr. Beat. Based on this comment from his wife (see quote in the video), it looks like he’s been through some serious stuff. I don’t know what that is. But I assume he’s hurting, and I wish him the best. I hope he finds healing.
It feels like every few months now, someone is coming out with a video on YouTube about Latter-day Saint history. I often see comments on those videos from people saying, How is it possible for Mormons to believe in this? Well, I would challenge people to think about that question some more. Maybe hold off on making the assumption that Latter-day Saints are all just brainwashed cultists burying their heads in the sand. Maybe think about why people might be drawn to our faith. What is it that believers see that some of these YouTubers aren’t seeing? What is it that some of these YouTubers aren’t showing you? You might be surprised by what you find. And even if you don’t end up adopting our beliefs, hopefully, it opens up an opportunity for understanding and empathy rather than antagonism and belittlement.
If you liked this response video go check out this one while you’re here, and have a great day!
Learning More:
— From David: “The truth about Joseph Smith, treasure-digging, witchcraft, magic, and the occult.”: https://tinyurl.com/mr3p93b6
— From David: “Was the Book of Mormon dictated from behind a curtain?”: https://tinyurl.com/yy9j6p3c
— From David: “Let’s talk about the Martin Harris ‘spiritual eyes’ claims”: https://tinyurl.com/4j4yxu44
— From David: “Checking CES Letter claims about the ‘imaginary plates’”: https://tinyurl.com/4spy7uza
— From David (about Helen Mar Kimball): “Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old???”: https://tinyurl.com/597patzs
— “Legal Trials of the Prophet: Joseph Smith’s Life in Court,” by Joseph I. Bentley: https://tinyurl.com/46bwak5t
— “Joseph Smith and the Criminal Justice System,” via the Joseph Smith Papers: https://tinyurl.com/449haus6
— Transcript of Mr. Beat’s video (with citations): https://tinyurl.com/4y67tdmm