Mormon Land

William Clayton is likely known to most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as the author of the beloved pioneer hymn, “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” To historians, though, Clayton was a key figure in Mormonism’s beginnings, especially during the years in Nauvoo, Illinois. He served as secretary and scribe for church founder Joseph Smith, keeping a detailed diary of all the happenings — and controversies — during that pivotal period.
He recorded Smith dictating passages in the faith’s Doctrine and Covenants, including the section about polygamy, or “plural marriage,” as it was known.
For more than a century, the church kept a tight lid on Clayton’s journals, allowing only select scholars access to them. But next year the Utah-based faith is publishing the full record, with careful annotations, through Yale University Press. Even before the publication, however, Clayton’s account has been questioned by those who do not believe Smith practiced polygamy.
On this week’s show, Matthew Grow, managing director of the Church History Department, and Matthew McBride, director of publications for the department, discuss Clayton, his journals, what they say — and don’t say — about polygamy, and day-to-day life in Nauvoo.

Brazilian Helvécio Martins was the first Black general authority in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He was named a dozen years after the Utah-based faith ended its 126-year priesthood/temple ban in 1978.
His son Marcus Martins had just turned 19 and thus, by most accounts, became the church’s first Black missionary after the change.
The younger Martins went on to earn a master’s degree in organizational behavior and a doctorate in sociology of religion, race and ethnic relations. Eventually, he became chair of religious education at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. He has served as a mission president, twice as bishop, and as a full-time senior missionary with his wife, Mirian.
All this time, Marcus Martins has remained keenly interested in the politics and sociology of Mormonism. He has addressed how geopolitical, sociocultural and technological trends have affected missionary and temple work.
As he prepares to embark on his third church mission in Brazil — which recently surpassed Mexico as having more Latter-day Saints than any other nation outside the U.S. — Martins discusses why Brazilians have embraced this American-born faith and how they view U.S. culture, traditions and politics?

“As a Latter-day Saint artist, Joseph Brickey had painted church founder Joseph Smith dozens of times. So he was naturally skeptical in 2022, when he first saw headlines about a recently discovered daguerreotype that was reported to be the only known photo of Smith.
He had studied extensively the human form, including facial structures. He had seen other photos making similar claims that were easily dismissed as frauds. So he cautiously delved into more research about the new find and now, after four years of careful study comparing it to Smith’s death mask and reading primary documents describing Mormonism’s most famous leader, he is convinced it is the real Joseph.
And he has crafted a new sculpture and painted a new portrait based not on the old images but on the daguerreotype.
On this week’s show, Brickey, co-author of the forthcoming book and documentary “Brother Joseph Again: Restoring the Visual Image of Joseph Smith Jr.,” talks about his research of the daguerreotype, his latest artwork of Smith, and how it better reflects his view of the Mormon prophet.
He is joined by art historian Jenny Champoux, who explains the human fascination with faces and why it matters to believers what Smith looked like.

There was a time in the 1960s when W. Cleon Skousen, who died in 2006 at 92, was a widely known and controversial conservative figure in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Skousen was a popular speaker, teacher and writer, whose books about scriptures reflected a literal, nonmodernist approach to the Bible.
He was a zealous anti-communist who freely mixed his Mormonism with his political views. He worked for a time as a special agent for the FBI and later as Salt Lake City’s police chief. His books — including “The First 2,000 Years” and “The Naked Communist” — became ubiquitous in Latter-day Saint homes as members grappled with the Cold War and predictions of an imminent apocalypse.
On this week’s show, Latter-day Saint historian Benjamin Park, who is working on a biography of Skousen, discusses the man’s early beginnings and why his works are finding an unexpected audience among President Donald Trump’s supporters today.

Earlier this month, general authority Seventy historian Kyle McKay apologized for remarks he made at a regional worship service in Oklahoma.
In his controversial comments, McKay, the official historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, briefly reenacted a racist rendition of the African American spiritual “This Little Light of Mine,” which he described as “a song where white people try to sing like Black people.”
In his apology, he said, “My words have caused offense and injury, and put a blight on an otherwise wonderful weekend.”
This episode raises larger questions about how Latter-day Saint congregations can or should respectfully incorporate not only this song but also other African American songs recently added to the church’s official hymnbook.
These week’s show features two Black Latter-day Saint musicians: Kimberly Applewhite Teitter, a clinical psychologist and the assistant director for the Debra Bonner Unity Gospel Choir, and Krispin Banks, a musician, songwriter and podcaster who believes music can unite believers across cultures and bring people closer to Jesus Christ.

There was a time in the 1960s and ’70s, when Marion Duff Hanks was better known than almost any other Latter-day Saint leader.
The boyish, handsome, charismatic and deeply literate Hanks was tapped in 1953 at age 31 as a general authority in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was not released from full-time service in the faith until 1992.
“Duff” (as his friends called him) was beloved for his winning ways as a speaker and teacher, his rapport with teens, and his ability to discuss Shakespeare, popular television shows, the scriptures, newspaper stories, ancient history and contemporary issues. Members also smiled at the light-colored suits he sometimes donned for General Conferences amid a sea of black.
He was the mission president to two future apostles (Jeffrey R. Holland and Quentin L. Cook) and a groundbreaking historian (D. Michael Quinn) — and loved all his charges.
At the same time, Hanks, who died in 2011, was a “progressive” before many Latter-day Saints even knew what the word meant. He spoke of Christ and social justice, for example, and reached out to those on the margins of the church — which made him a hero and mentor to writers like Carol Lynn Pearson and activists like Warner Woodworth.
Yet few modern members know of Hanks’ extraordinary life.
Last year, Hanks’ son, Richard Hanks, wrote a biography of his father, “To Be a Friend of Christ: The Life of Marion D. Hanks,” drawing on otherwise unavailable primary sources — journals, correspondence, notebooks and recordings. And the Utah-based faith recently made a ton of Hanks’ papers publicly available.
On this week’s show, Richard Hanks discusses his father’s life, and what his work meant for the church and future generations.

For about a decade, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been in a costly rebrand aimed in part at shoring up its bona fides as a Christian denomination.
Not everyone is convinced, including, it appears, inside the federal government.
Late last week, the U.S. Department of Defense, helmed by conservative evangelical Pete Hegseth, issued a new, vastly pared down list of codes for religions recognized by its Chaplain Corps.
The Utah-based faith made the cut but with a catch. As the all-Republican and Latter-day Saint delegation from the Beehive State complained on social media, the church was not tagged as “Christian.” Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant denominations, yes. Not Latter-day Saints.
The government, it seemed, had weighed in on a long-standing theological debate, and not in Temple Square’s favor.
The department has since reissued the list, removing the “Christian” tag entirely. But the debate continues to whirl.
Joseph DuWors is a retired Army major and chaplain, Latter-day Saint convert and doctoral candidate in Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. Nathaniel Wiewora is an associate professor of history at Harding University in Arkansas, and the author of the 2024 book “Sins of Christendom: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism.”
They unpacked the controversy — its historical roots and implications — in the latest episode of “Mormon Land.”

Carol Lynn Pearson, renowned Latter-day Saint poet, playwright and activist, began keeping a nearly daily diary when she was a senior at Brigham Young High School in 1956. And she never stopped.
The first of her four volumes, which is out now, reads like a chronicle of Mormonism’s intellectual history from the 1960s through 1980s.
Pearson, who grew up in Utah and now lives in California, comments on the battle over civil rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, as well as the issues of patriarchy and polygamy in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Her first book of poetry, “Beginnings,” sold an astounding 150,000 copies, making her one of Mormonism’s earliest celebrities. The feisty writer went on to produce several more bestsellers, including “The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy” and “No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around Our Gay Loved Ones.”
Pearson is a lively storyteller as she recounts conversations with top Latter-day Saint leaders, including church President Dallin Oaks (whom she knew when he led Brigham Young University) and longtime Relief Society General President Belle Spafford. And she movingly describes in “Goodbye, I Love You,” falling in love with Gerald Pearson, having children with him, letting him go to live as a gay man, and welcoming him back to care for him as he died of AIDS.

Jeff Strong, a former bishop, mission president and BYU faculty member, finds himself in a similar position to an increasing number of parents in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While he remains a believing, practicing and devout member, he has loved ones (including three of his five children) who have left the faith. Thus, his new book, titled “Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn From Them,” is more than instructive and insightful; it’s personal.
The volume includes a sweeping study on Latter-day Saint disaffiliation, revealing that about 40% of active members in the United States have stopped participating over the past quarter century.
Why is that? Is it church doctrine, policy or culture? Is it, for instance, the faith’s opposition to same-sex marriage or the occasionally cruel comments about the LGBTQ+ community that may spring up in Sunday school? Does the tension come from the racist remarks Brigham Young made about Black people or from diminished trust in the church for not sharing that part of the faith’s history?
On this week’s show, Strong discusses the church’s disaffiliation “crisis,” why so many Latter-day Saints are abandoning the faith, what the stayers get wrong about the leavers, and how members of every stripe can better find belonging no matter where they are in their spiritual journeys.

Ronell Hugh says he was recently hiking a trail in Highland, Utah, when a white man in a gray truck leaned out his window and shouted a racist threat.
It was a moment both startling and deeply troubling for the president of the Genesis Group, a support organization for Black Latter-day Saints.
Hugh hadn’t been threatened like that before since living in the Beehive State. But he had heard lots of stories from other members of his Black congregation, who told him that racism has been on the rise due to the current political climate in the country as well as in Utah, where The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the dominant religious institution.
On this week’s show, Hugh, a Latter-day Saint convert and marketing executive who most recently worked for church-owned Deseret Book, discusses the increase in racial tension, what top church leaders have said about it and how Latter-day Saints can counter the sin of racism.