I look forward to meeting him someday.

President Faust, in his final conference address recounted the blessing of peace that my in-laws found through choosing to forgive.

I should add something to what I wrote above. I have a very laid back, easy going personality. I don’t let much rile me. These days I’m familiar with every major argument against the Church, but none of that stuff bothers me, and I can let it slide off my back.

But I remember that when I first read the salamander letter, I was really thrown for a loop. That easily could have been the one that knocked me off the ledge. Nothing I’ve encountered before or since bothered me as much as the salamander letter did.

I didn’t panic, however. I rolled up my sleeves and learned what I could about folk magic. (This was before Quinn’s book came out.) I actually started in non-LDS history writing, such as Jon Butler, which dealt with a slightly earlier period of American history. And having an actual historical context to put that into helped me tremendously not to wig out over the letter.

That was part of the reason I taught that class. I made special trips to university libraries to be able to read some of the historical literature, and I knew that the ordinary members of my class weren’t going to do something like that, so I needed to share what I had found with my brothers and sisters.

In relation to KB’s comments about openness and innoculation:

For those who didn’t go to BYU, Church history is taught in three sections: 1820s-1844, 1844-1900, 1900-present. The courses are taught by history professors even though they are under the auspices of the religion department (I think). Anyhow, I took all three courses and had professors for the second and third thirds who approached controversial subjects in almost opposite ways.

My teacher for the last third (1900-present) asked us on the first day of class if we had heard about anything from church history that bothered us. As folks raised their hands and volunteered “polygamy,” “priesthood restrictions,” “MMM,” and the like, she gave one sentence “answers” for each controversy. For instance, on the priesthood restrictions she said “that was a policy, not a doctrine.” After about five minutes of this, she informed us this was all we needed to know about those subjects and then we did not discuss them again for the rest of the term.

Now, maybe that helped some people, I don’t know. But for me, that seemed to try to stuff the monsters back in the closet, so to speak–it just made people fearful of what they might find if they opened the door.

The professor I had for the second third, on the other hand, often spent almost half of our class time talking about these subjects. He would have us read (often primary) sources ahead of time and then come to class to discuss what it would have been like to live a polygamous life, or why the MMM might have occurred. He opened the door to let the monsters out. After he did that, we found that most of the “monsters” were really just mice and even those that still seemed kind of strange were not nearly as scary as they might otherwise have seemed.

It seems to me that with the almost universal proliferation of information, most members of the Church (at least in the U.S.) are eventually going to find the monsters. So much better, it seems, to let that encounter happen in a faithful place where the events and ideas can be placed in proper context and where faithful discussion can follow. Otherwise, we risk this happening in a strange place inimical to faith and often the shock that comes when a person discovers the gap between what he thought he knew and what seems to be the case can really shake a person’ testimony.

It means so much, I think, to have someone say, “I know all about [whatever], and I still know the Gospel is true.”

As to the issue of the Church leadership not immediately identifying the true nature of the letter (or of the Kinderhook Plates), I would refer to the experience of Elisha the prophet:

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/2_kgs/4/27#27

27 And when she came to the man of God to the hill, she caught him by the feet: but Gehazi came near to thrust her away. And the man of God said, Let her alone; for her soul is vexed within her: and the Lord hath hid it from me, and hath not told me.

So much for “Batphone to God”. That God can, and does, deliberately withhold information from the prophets for reasons of his own is plainly evident here.

When the Salamander Letter and other Hoffman documents were acquired, they were reproduced in the Church News with discussion of them by Dallin Oaks and others. One of the things Hoffman produced was a supposed transcript from the Golden Plates, not the one we are familiar with, that I later saw displayed (in reproduction) at the Martin Harris house in Palmyra. The alleged Joseph Smith III blessing was featured not only in LDS publications but also in a brochure that the RLDS Church handed out at the Kirtland Temple. These “documents” were used by critics to beat up the Church over its history, but the Church was very open about them, just as it had been a decade earlier with the Joseph Smith Papyri from the Metropolitan Musuem of Art in New York.

It was clear at the time of Hoffman’s ascendancy that his most enthusiastic cheerleaders were people pushing the “New Mormon History”. They had itching ears and Hoffman’s documents were scratching that itch. Some historians who were critical of the “official history” of the Church embraced the Hoffman forgeries with enthusiasm, waving them as they called for a revision of the official version of events.

It is clear that (a) the “official history” has proven much more durable than many of the alternative views, (b) the Church did nothing dishonorable, did not waste a lot of Church funds buying documents from Hoffman, and disclosed the significant ones very openly, while (c) many of the critics of the “official history” called into question their own credibility by forcefully advocating the Hoffman documents in a display of remarkable credulity. Yet if you see an occasional story nowadays referring to the episode on TV or in a magazine or non-Mormon author’s book (e.g. Mormon America by the Ostlings), the stories try to depict the historians as heroes and the Church leaders as dupes, when the truth was more the opposite.

In a way, the Hoffman episode was evidence that Church history had achieved enough importance that it was the target of an effort to undermine it. Yet it also uncannily harks back to the Lord’s description of how the people who stole the original 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript were planning to use it to attack Joseph Smith’s credibility. Standing alone, it seems like a scheme that is unlikely just because it would involve so much work to carry out a deception against something that was not even yet an organized church. Yet Hoffman demonstrates that hatred for the Church can inspire a skilled liar to tremendous feats of forgery. And as has been pointed out above, Sillitoe and others have guessed that Hoffman’s long-range goal was to use these planted documents both as a field test of his skills and to authenticate the handwriting of Martin Harris for his coup de grace: producing the “lost 116 pages”, and fulfilling Satan’s original plan 150 years late.

As for the salamander shaped hole – Quinn revised the book and it’s excellent. It is disingenuous to defame his work because the letters turned out to be forgeries. There is a lot of great evidence in that book with the footnotes to back it up to demonstrate folk magic as an integral part of JS’s life.

It seems that Mormons can’t handle the folk magic aspect of JS. I arrived at that conclusion from a recent visit to church museums in SLC where all signs of folk magic have been removed from display, from the comments posted here, and from the changes to the Doctrine and Covenants.

I didn’t mean to be short in my brief description of the events, though this was rather short and to the point; I put this post up to briefly describe the facts, because the topic was coming up in another thread.