Brigham Young and the Rape of Teenagers
My answer to criticism of my comments on Brigham Young
Just a reminder that Brian’s Bullshit-Free Zone is a personal project, unaffiliated with Skeptoid Media. After my Skeptoid episode on the Mountain Meadows Massacre — when 50-60 Mormons massacred 120-140 innocent emigrants, mostly women and children — I needed a place to post the note which follows. I originally posted this on Facebook, but plenty of people don’t/won’t use Facebook, so I am re-posting it here with a few updates, where it’s accessible to everyone.
Skeptoid episode #768 was on the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, and it was necessary to say a few descriptive words about Brigham Young, the Mormon leader at the time. I said he was “probably one of the most capable and commanding personalities the world has ever known (in addition to being a serial rapist of multiple underage wives).”
No, Brigham’s child wives were not relevant to the episode. So why did I include this statement? Was it just an opportunity for some hit & run, gratuitous Mormon bashing? It was a question I struggled with for several days. Initially it wasn’t in there. Then I added it, pondered, and took it out. Shortly before recording I put it back in, and am glad I did so.
I have been doing Skeptoid long enough to know that if I had not said it, I’d have been deluged by listeners decrying me for saying something complimentary (“capable and commanding”) about an individual who was also so deeply flawed. I also knew that if I did say it, I would receive ample criticism from others, including Latter Day Saint listeners. Predictably this is just what happened. This note is to explain why.
As noted above, Brigham’s rape of his teenage wives was not relevant to the episode’s topic. There is another important proviso that many have pointed out: by the standards of the day, Brigham, in his 40s, marrying teens as young as 15 (possibly 13) is believed by many to have been not all that unusual. It was not illegal and would never have been called rape. But by today’s standards, it’s unquestionably illegal and is rape. So how should we view the past: through the lens of today’s standards, or by contemporary ones? Pointing out the “standards of the day” is something I do myself, and it’s often important. A favorite example is MKULTRA (when the CIA sponsored research on mind control for 20 years, including giving LSD to people without their knowledge or consent). By today’s standards, some of the MKULTRA research was horrific. But by the ethics standards of the 1950s and 1960s, almost all the MKULTRA projects were perfectly acceptable.
So I had plenty of reasons not to include the comment on Brigham, and as I said, the decision was neither lightly made nor a slam dunk. But for one thing, the popular belief that old men often married teenage girls is not true. It happened and it was legal, but it was scarcely more common then than it is now, and would be just as shocking to 19th century metropolitan gentry than it would be to today’s. As it was, marriage between teenage girls and much older men was confined largely to fringe religious groups like the Mormons and others. It was then, as it is now, a devastating and abusive practice, even though they may not have understood the effects of such trauma — according to their “standards of the day”.
In the end, the scales tipped for me in the direction of including this fact about Brigham Young. Given that the LDS church is still pretty stone-age when it comes to women’s rights (women still can’t hold the priesthood; men can be sealed [eternally married in a temple ceremony] to multiple women, but living women can’t be sealed to multiple men, etc.) Women are absolutely not considered equal in the church. I felt this was a teachable moment.
Some of the LDS members who have emailed me since this episode was released were quick to state that their church has made great strides in women’s rights. I am not moved. Any such conversation must begin with “Men and women have equal rights in this church,” period, full stop. If you can’t start with that most basic statement, you have no right to make any others. “We’re less misogynistic than we used to be” doesn’t cut it.
We do not grant slaveholders any special treatment because slavery was the standard of the day, and I made the decision to apply the same rationale to men who wed and raped children. Barbarism is barbarism, and if I’m going to deservedly point out some of Brigham Young’s excellent qualities, my choice is to fairly balance that with some of his others.
I'm curious why almost every religious or spiritual cult (and in some cases, mainstream religions) ultimately end up controlling the sex lives of their believers? Has there been research on this? Is it an asymmetrical power dynamic that's exploited because of outsized ego of its leadership? I'm genuinely curious to understand why this is such a common occurrence.
Judging the ethics and morality if historical figures, or for that matter present day members of other cultures, is a difficult issue. If you don’t do it, one can appear to be ignoring or condoning terrible things. But if you do do it, one can appear naive and perhaps the kind of person who unrealistically expects the universe to conform to their own expectations of behavior.