Brother and sisters, I want to tell you a story. Parts of this story you have heard repeatedly throughout your life. Other parts, probably not as much. My hope is that in telling this story again I can give you something to apply to our world today.
I want you to go back to 1831 with me now. Think of Joseph Smith, translating the Book of Mormon. Think of the hatred he faced for his work. Think of how he, his young wife Emma, and his family were forced to flee from their lands, their communities, and their homes, rejected by family and friends because of Joseph’s work on the “Gold Bible.”
Think of those early members being forced by violent persecution to flee west, for the first time, as the small membership of the church moved, in total, from New York and Pennsylvania to Kirtland, Ohio. So many of them had homes and land that they either outright lost or had to sell so cheaply that they might as well have given it away. The story of Joseph Smith entering Kirtland for the first time, going to Newell K. Whitney and proclaiming to him, “Thou art the man!” and staying with him is often used as an example of prophetic foresight and the kindness of the man who would become one of the church’s first bishops, the example of who and what a bishop should be like.
A lesser known fact about that story is the reality that Joseph and Emma, who was pregnant with twins at the time, had nothing. They had lost everything in fleeing the East and did not even have a shack of their own as shelter from the cold winter. They had been driven from their homes, from their families, from the regions they had known and loved growing up, because of the Restoration. They were destitute and forced to live on the charity of complete strangers in order to survive. This was in February of 1831. Two months later their first children, twins Thaddeus and Louisa, would be born prematurely and die mere hours afterwards. Poverty and destitution often murders children in their cribs as it did to Jospeh amd Emma’s babies. Mother, fathers, brothers, and sisters look at your children and imagine you were in Joseph and Emma’s situation, with practically nothing because you were driven from your homes. What would you do? What could you do?
If you could go back and visit Joseph and Emma, huddled against the dark and the cold trying with all their might, praying with all their hearts, working with all their strength, to save the lives of their babies, what would you do if you had the power to do something differently for them?
Settled temporarily the church grows, until it has two headquarters, one in Kirtland and one in Independence, Missouri. Eventually the church has but one center, in Missouri. Why? Because the persecutions, violence, mobbings, and death threats in Kirtland grew so great that, once again, the membership and leadership of the church were forced to flee for their very lives. Again, everything was lost. This time including the first temple built to God in thousands of years, built the sacrifice of so much of the blood, sweat, and tears of the Saints, in which numerous heavenly beings had manifested, including Moses, Elijah, and even the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. All lost because the Latter-day Saints were forced out at bayonet point, once again forced to flee for refuge from the a deadly pogrom and mob violence.
The story in Missouri was scarcely better, Latter-day Saints there had already been forced out of Independence. The church’s printing office had been destroyed, its printing press wrecked, and the members were forced at gunpoint to sign a document promising they would leave the city or face even worse violence. In fact, the state formed a whole new county, Caldwell County, that they all had to move to and made it illegal for them to live outside of it. (pgs. 113-115) That is right, the state of Missouri essentially created a Mormon reservation and ordered everyone onto it. Soon it got even worse, as exemplified by the Extermination Order. Issued by the state governor, Lilburn W. Boggs, it ordered the state militias to “exterminate the Latter-day Saints or drive them from the state” for the public good. And exterminate and drive they did. The state militias of the time, the formal military units of the state, were turned loose against the Latter-day Saints. The Huan’s Mill Massacre happened and of course no one was ever held accountable for the slaughter of women and children that took place there. Latter-day Saint houses were burned to the ground. When the Saints tried to defend themselves, they were accused of treason and it was used to justify annihilating them. Even today the members of the era are hypocritically criticized for defending themselves in the face of extermination, criticized by people who would otherwise justify the same actions if undertaken by any other violently oppressed minority in history.
Most of the Saints fled to Far West and Adam-ondi-Ahman for protection. Samuel D. Lucas, a major general in the state militia, marched the state militia to Far West and laid siege to the town, threatening to invade and destroy it if Joseph and Hyrum didn’t surrender. Joseph said he would accept any terms for peace as long as it didn’t come to combat. He wanted to spare the Saints as much as possible. Even then an eyewitness later recounted that he had to “beg like a dog” for peace. Brigham Young remembered that as soon as Joseph, Hyrum, and other church leaders had surrendered themselves and the Mormon militia had laid down its arms, Lucas broke his oath that there would be peace if the Mormon leaders surrendered themselves to him. Lucas instead ordered his troops into the city where:
they commenced their ravages by plundering the citizens of their bedding, clothing, money, wearing apparel, and every thing of value they could lay their hands upon, and also attempting to violate the chastity of the women in sight of their husbands and friends, under the pretence of hunting for prisoners and arms. The soldiers shot down our oxen, cows, hogs and fowls, at our own doors, taking part away and leaving the rest to rot in the streets. The soldiers also turned their horses into our fields of corn.
Brigham Young: American Moses, pg. 68
People were driven from their homes, again in the dead of winter, a winter so harsh the rivers were frozen. Again, homes were lost. Lives were lost. Ten thousand people were forced to flee with only that which they could carry. If it had not been for the kindness of the people of Quincy, Illinois these early Latter-day Saints would have died in the frozen wilderness of the United States.
And why had Missouri been so bad? The same reason Kirtland had been. The same reason Nauvoo would be, the Latter-day Saints were a different religion. You can read the affidavits written by those early Missouri anti-Mormons. Two things they name as justifications again and again: Latter-day Saint attitudes to Blacks – most Saints were Easterners from the North and opposed to slavery – and their religion. (pg. 118) Surviving the winter the Saints reorganize and begin anew, this time draining a choleric swamp and founding whole new city in western Illinois.
Nauvoo, the City Beautiful, the City of Joseph. The Latter-day Saints, resettling in Illinois, did what they did best then and what we do best today. They went to work. Together they turned a bog on the edge of the Mississippi River into a city that rivaled Chicago in the same era. Here again the same story would play out. Isolated and hated for their differences in beliefs, Latter-day Saints faced constant calls for their extermination. Just read the words of the anti-Mormons from June 10,1844, mere weeks before the Martyrdom:
Resolved . . . that we hold ourselves at all times in readiness to cooperate with our fellow citizens in this state, Missouri, and Iowa, to exterminate – UTTERLY EXTERMINATE, the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders, the authors of our troubles.
Resolved . . . that the time, in our opinion, has arrived when the adherents of Smith as a body, shall be driven from the surrounding settlements into Nauvoo; that the Prophet and his miscreant adherents should then be demanded at their hands, and if not surrendered, A WAR OF EXTERMINATION SHOULD BE WAGED, to the entire destruction if necessary for our protection of his adherents.
Governor Ford and the Murderers of Joseph Smith, pg. 47
Once again, the official military units of the state would be let loose against the Latter-day Saints. This time neither Joseph nor Hyrum would escape. This time, in a dingy room in Carthage, Illinois, an armed militia with blackface on would attack Joseph and Hyrum and murder them in cold blood. Hyrum would be shot in the face at pointblank range. Joseph would be shot twice, fall from a two-story window, and then be shot three more times at pointblank range. The murderers wanted to ensure their work was done, so they were okay with a little overkill. This was no act of mass passion, but calculated assassination and cold-blooded murder.
For a brief moment it looked like this would galvanize the Latter-day Saints and motivate them to war. You see, this time the Latter-day Saints had a militia of their own, the Nauvoo Legion. They were armed. They were trained. They were ready. Anger and sorrow must have flowed through their veins as they mourned the murder of the Prophet and Patriarch. Imagine how you would feel if the protestors outside General Conference stormed the building one year, kidnapped the Prophet, and shot him in the face with a .44 caliber round at pointblank range.
How would you respond?
I imagine anger and violence would be the reaction of many.
But it never happened Nauvoo. In fact, the Latter-day Saints laid down their arms altogether, choosing peace instead of war. Illinois Governor Thomas Ford promised state protection for the Saints just as he had for Joseph and Hyrum. Such promised protection never manifested in Nauvoo just as it never did for the Prophet and Patriarch. Instead, again, the Saints were driven from their homes and the state supported the expulsion. (Alexander, Brigham Young, pg. 74) On the eve of completing the Nauvoo Temple, after being endowed from on high, the Saints fled. This time 15,000 people were forced from their homes under threat of extermination.
Again, it was winter, a winter so cold that the Mississippi River itself froze solid enough to allow fully outfitted wagons to cross without breaking the ice. Better prepared, but still not truly ready, the Saints camped in Winter Quarters, Nebraska. Winter Quarters was a true refugee camp. There were 800 cabins built of wood and sod to house 2,500 people. Scurvy was a constant concern as there wasn’t enough food other than meat. And even that was in short supply. Malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases plagued the settlement. Many people lived in literal mudholes dug into the ground with a grass roof. (pg. 40) Occupied until 1848, between 1846 and 1847 this was the headquarters for the church. It was from here those Latter-day Saints wagon trains left that entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
Now, why have I rehearsed this history to such a degree?
Today is the commemoration of the day that first wagon train of Saints entered the Salt Lake Valley. It was Pioneer Day; the closest we members have to our own holiday. But when I read this history, I can’t help concluding that these men and women were not pioneers. They were refugees.
It makes sense why we call them pioneers. It is a term steeped in Americana, the intrepid pioneers who want to move West to settle lands and build cities, the vanguard of the American nation. It legitimizes us by giving us a place in the national story of America, something so many members have always wanted. And of course, this is what the early Latter-day Saints wanted to do, right? Settle the West for America and her people?
Well, no. Not really. They did not voluntarily leave the United States. They were driven from it by near constant persecution, violence, oppression, and genocidal hatred. And I use that word genocidal intentionally. Dr. Thomas Alexander, author of Brigham Young and the Making of the Mormon Faith for the University of Oklahoma Press asserts that the concentrated efforts by Americans, especially in Missouri and Illinois where both local and state government got involved in the persecutions, was ethnic cleansing. (pgs. 73-74) When you use violence to forcibly expel a certain group of people from a territory that is ethnic cleansing, when you vow to exterminate those people if they do not leave then it becomes genocidal. Both of these happened to the Saints in Missouri and Illinois. I’ve even seen claims that Raphael Lemkin, the man who developed the legal concept on genocide, believed what happened to the Saints in Missouri was genocide. When the Saints fled the States, they were fleeing ethnic cleansing, extermination, and genocide.
When they decided to move West and settle in the Salt Lake Valley they were not moving into the American West. They were moving into northern Mexico and settling in the Mexican territory called Alta California. Dr. W. Paul Reeve, the Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah, explain the motivations of the Mormon refugees thusly:
They are fleeing the United States, and they feel like the US Constitution has failed them. It has failed to protect minority rights, and any time Mormons have lived amongst outsiders, they conclude that it has proven to their disadvantage. They’ve been driven out, and they are driven out yet again from Illinois.
When they arrive in the Great Basin, they are deliberately arriving in northern Mexico. They are crossing an international boarder. The Council of Fifty minutes give us evidence that they are actually looking for a space outside the bounds of firm state control, so they’re thinking about Texas, which at the time, was an independent nation — the Independent Republic of Texas. They’re thinking about Oregon, which is jointly claimed by Britain and the United States. Then they’re also thinking about Alta or Upper California, which is a broad geographic term that applied to this bigger region that included the Great Basin.
LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 65: The Early Mormon Search for Religious Liberty, Transcript pgs. 4-5
Every place the church leaders were looking to move to were either specifically outside of the control of the United States or, in the case of Oregon, in contested territory where another international power could challenge the power of the American government if it acted against the Saints as it later did after they had settled Utah. Many members of the church harbored entirely justified bitter hatred of the United States government. Hosea Stout, an early church leader and former bodyguard to the Prophet Joseph Smith, upon hearing of the outbreak of the Mexican-American War wrote in his journal:
I confess that I was glad to learn of war against the United States and was in hopes that it might never end until they were entirely destroyed, for they had driven us into the wilderness and was now laughing at us in our calamities.
LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 65: The Early Mormon Search for Religious Liberty, Transcript pg.3
Stout came across his anger honestly. As Laura Hales explains, he saw a bridge collapse as the Saints fled Nauvoo, dumping everyone on it into the freezing waters where they all died. Soon after, two of his three wives and all three of his children died at the refugee camp that was Winter Quarters. (pg.5) His losses are unsurprising when you realize things were so terrible at Winter Quarters that one of his children was almost eight months old before he ever lived inside of a house because up until that point they had lived in nothing more than a shack. Disease, starvation, and exposure killed his children along with many others all because the Saints had to flee the genocidal brutality of America as soon as possible, even if that meant leaving in the dead of winter.
A large percentage of the church membership wasn’t even American. About 25%, of the church membership was British when the church fled Nauvoo and by the time the church was leaving Winter Quarters that number had risen to almost 40%. (pg. 11) And that number doesn’t count immigrant members from other nations in Europe. It is hard to argue that these people were the pioneer vanguard of America when a large percentage of them weren’t American and they weren’t exactly moving voluntarily.
But that is what a refugee is, isn’t it? A refugee is “someone who has been forced to leave a country because of war or for religious or political reasons.” The Saints meet all these qualifications. They were forced to flee the United States under threat of violence with wars of extermination waged against them for their religious and political differences. Further, they were technically illegal immigrants as the government of Mexico had legally banned all immigration from the United States to Mexico after American immigrants had settled in what is today Texas, formed their own government, and then seceded from the Mexican nation to form the Republic of Texas.
I know some dispute the claim that the Saints were illegal immigrants because the United States annexed all of the American Southwest (at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848) so soon after the Saints first arrived, but that is an unconvincing counter-argument. We know Joseph Smith was planning to immigrate to the Rocky Mountains, and therefore to illegally immigrate to Mexico, as early as April 1842. (pg. 85) The Saints began settling the Salt Lake Valley fifteen months before the war ended and the Great Basin was still part of Northern Mexico. (See The Presidents of the Church, pg. 97) I doubt many people at the time thought the US would get as much territory as it did at the end of the war. The Saints had long planned to illegally immigrate to Mexico before the war began and had started illegally immigrating to Mexico before the war either began or ended. That makes the Saints intentional illegal immigrants.
So, why does this all matter?
The Refugees of ‘47, illegal immigrants fleeing a history of constant persecution, of being violently driven from place to place across the country and ultimately out of it into the wilderness, sought to establish a permanent home in a different nation where they could be safe from the genocidal hatred of the American mobs. Today, the refugees and immigrants of the world are looking for the same. Of course, they love the country and people they must leave behind. How could they not? Those lands have their heritage written in its stones and the ashes of their ancestors form the very land they live upon. But if they want a better future for themselves and their families that is not enough. They are looking for the same things those early Latter-day Saints refugees wanted, a place they can settle and a place they could call home. They are looking for safety and peace.
Earlier I asked you what you would do if you could go back and help Emma and Joseph as they fought to save the lives of their babies. You can’t do that. But you can help people in the same situation right now. There are babies and families you can save today. We can make sure no more children die in terror as they try to escape to a better place for themselves and their families. The church teaches that the scriptures command us to care for refugees and has created an entire program dedicated to organizing the efforts of members to help refugees throughout the world. The church’s support for illegal immigrants, including officially opposing deportation, has long been noted in the media as an oddity. It isn’t so odd if you know our history, if you know us. I have never been prouder of us as a people than when the church openly supported the Utah Compact against deporting illegal immigrants and when Utah’s governor was the only conservative Republican leader to ask for more refugees to be sent to his state.
These examples show us that this is not a Republican vs Democrat thing or a Progressive vs Conservative thing. This is a Latter-day Saint thing. This shows who we are and how we put our history and our faith into action. As a people descended literally and spiritually from refugees and illegal immigrants, as a church dedicated to the worship of He who was Himself a political refugee fleeing for his life from tyrannical kings when He could barely walk (and imagine how different His story would have been if Pharaoh’s armies had stood at the edge of his empire and refused Joseph and Mary entrance into it), as those whose history was forged by people who were thrown from their homes and driven from their lands again and again, whose men were murdered and women gang raped by barbaric thugs, and agents of the government, it is our calling now, as our church leaders have told us to “go and bring them in …otherwise your faith will be in vain.”
As a result of our history and our doctrine I cannot support current immigration programs – Leftist or Rightist – as they deny basic civil and human rights to immigrants. The same with current refugee policies. All are alike unto God. All are my brothers and sisters. To use violence against them for crossing imaginary and arbitrary lines on a piece of paper as they seek a better life for themselves and their families is despicable, anti-Christ, and evil. To allow politics to dictate my actions in such a way would be for me to entirely forget what it means to be a Latter-day Saint.
To me, this day, this Pioneer Day, is changed forever. Pioneer Day is Refugee Day. It can be no less, and may it always remind me of my calling from God to seek for Him among the weakest of the world and to serve Him among the lost and desolate. It is only in serving our fellowman that we can truly serve our God. That, to me, is the meaning of this day. This is why I celebrate it. Not because I have pioneer stock. But because I am the spiritual descendant of refugees and immigrants, because I know how I wish others had treated them, and what Christ calls me to do for the refugees and immigrants here and now. The Lord God Himself has taught:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God.”
“You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself”
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
On how we act now hangs everything.