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A FairMormon Response to Questions Asked in Swedish Fireside with Elder's Jensen and Turley

1: BoM translation—2: Polygamy and Polyandry—3: Polygamy forced?—4: Book of Abraham—5: "Lying for Lord"—6: Mark Hofmann—7: Blood atonement—8: First Vision—9: Sanitized history—10: "Not all truth is useful"—11: Angelic affidavits—12: Blacks and priesthood—13: Temple concerns—14: Evidence of Vikings—15: Adam-God—16: Kinderhook

Question:

• Blood atonement. It’s just a strange thing altogether in my view.
• How many years was it practiced during this time?
• Did anybody die with blood atonement?

• Question: Did the Church practice blood atonement?
  Answer: Church leaders associated it with capital punishment.

My personal belief is that during Joseph Smith’s time period, based on statements in the bible, Joseph Smith said that when men shed blood, their blood should be shed. He’s talking about scripture. And I think that when you got into the Brigham Young times, that scripture was taken literally for a time [because] leaders taught that if people killed, then they deserved capital punishment. That [yeah] Old Testament-style event. [And t]hat sort of bounces around in the 1850s in particular when people are talking about, well how do you do this, you know? Is it literal? How do you shed a person’s blood in the process of capital punishment? And it gets to the late 1870s when they’re basically saying to people, hey look our belief on this is the same belief that other people have who believe in capital punishment. Now that’s, [that's] my very rapid historical summary of it.

—Elder Turley's response to this question at the Sweden fireside.

• Question: What is the Church's position on blood atonement?
  Answer: The Church states that blood atonement is not necessary.

From a church standpoint, blood atonement, meaning that it’s required for people to have their blood shed when they commit capital crimes, the church has gone on record saying that’s not necessary. So that’s the church position on it.

—Elder Turley's response to this question at the Sweden fireside.

• 1889:

Notwithstanding all the stories told about the killing of apostates, no case of this kind has ever occurred, and of course has never been established against the Church we represent. Hundreds of seceders from the Church have continuously resided and now live in this territory, many of whom have amassed considerable wealth, though bitterly opposed to the Mormon faith and people. Even those who made it their business to fabricate the vilest falsehoods, and to render them plausible by culling isolated passages from old sermons without the explanatory context, and have suffered no opportunity to escape them of vilifying and blackening the characters of the people, have remained among those whom they have thus persistently calumniated until the present day, without receiving the slightest personal injury.

We denounce as entirely untrue the allegation which has been made, that our Church favors or believes in the killing of persons who leave the Church or apostatize from its doctrines. We would view a punishment of this character for such an act with the utmost horror; it is abhorrent to us and is in direct opposition to the fundamental principles of our creed.

— Official Declaration, 12 December 1889, signed by the First Presidency (Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith), the Quorum of the Twelve (Lorenzo Snow, Franklin D. Richards, Brigham Young Jr., Moses Thatcher, Francis M. Lyman, John Henry Smith, George Teasdale, Heber J. Grant, John W. Taylor, M.W. Merrill, A.H. Lund, and Abraham H. Cannon), and counselors (John W. Young and Daniel H. Wells).

• 1912:

We believe in "blood atonement" by the sacrifice of the Savior, also that which is declared in Genesis 9:6. A capital sin committed by a man who has entered into the everlasting covenant merits capital punishment, which is the only atonement he can offer. But the penalty must be executed by an officer legally appointed under the law of the land.

— President Charles W. Penrose, "Peculiar Questions Briefly Answered," Improvement Era 15 no. 11 (September 1912).

• 2010:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released this statement Wednesday:

In the mid-19th century, when rhetorical, emotional oratory was common, some church members and leaders used strong language that included notions of people making restitution for their sins by giving up their own lives.

However, so-called "blood atonement," by which individuals would be required to shed their own blood to pay for their sins, is not a doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in and teach the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people. :::—Deseret News (Thursday, 17 June 2010), emphasis added.

• Question: For how many years was it practiced?

Answer: This is rather like asking, "Have you stopped beating your children?"

• It is not clear that the Church ever practiced "blood atonement" in the sense usually intended by anti-Mormon critics. That is, there is no evidence that the Church sought out apostates and murdered them extra-judicially.
• The rhetoric of blood atonement was largely confined to the late 1850s, during the so-called "Mormon Reformation."

• Question: Did anyone die from being blood atoned?

Answer: No.

• To be sure, there was some extra-legal violence in Utah, as there was everywhere on the American frontier (and as there still is today). However, it is not clear that any of these events were due to Church involvement in "blood atonement," though of course some members of the Church were involved. It is important to remember that the idea was to apply onto to apostate members of the Church who were endowed:

The doctrine of blood atonement which involved concern for the salvation of those to be subjected to it, could have little meaning in the Mountain Meadows massacre, or any other of the murders laid unproved on the Mormon threshold....Denials of murder charges which rode in on the backwash of the Reformation gradually resolved into defensible positions that (1) some known killings of the reform period resulted from motives not related to blood atonement, (2) that in spite of extreme statements by some of its leaders the church did not officially condone taking life other than through legal processes, (3) responsibility for any reversions to primitive practices of blood shedding must rest upon fanatical individuals. The whole experience continued in memory as a reminder of ill effects growing out of good causes carried to extremes.

— Gustave O. Larson, "The Mormon Reformation," Utah Historical Quarterly 26/1 (January 1958): 61-62.

• Contrary to the picture painted by critics, violence in Utah was lower than elsewhere:

The available evidence shows...that beyond a few well-publicized murders, we have every right to believe that compared with surrounding territories, Utah was a relatively murder- and violence-free community. Historians regularly cite such murders as the Potter-Parrish homicides of 1857 and the killing of J. King Robinson and S. Newton Brassfield in 1866 as evidence of Utah's violent character. Instead of making generalizations from juicy anecdotes, historians ought to use statistical and comparative methodology to interpret these events....

Although we lack a thorough comparative study of murders in Utah and other western areas, the available statistical information contradicts Bagley's [and the other critics'] impression of Utah society. The best evidence we have at this time is that Bagley [a critic] is wrong when he insists that "what made Utah's violence unique in the West was that it occurred in a settled, well-organized community whose leaders publicly sanctioned doctrines of vengeance and ritual murder." In fact, barring further evidence to the contrary, the best evidence we have at this point is that Utah was one of the least violent jurisdictions in the western United States.

— Thomas G. Alexander, "Review of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows," Brigham Young University Studies 31 no. 1 (January 2003), 167–.