Understanding Brigham Young’s Spiritual Depth: A Fresh Perspective
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Cover image is a still from the upcoming film Six Days in August.
For many of us, the image of Brigham Young that holds sway in our minds is that of a stern, unsmiling man in his seventies. But that dour image owes more, perhaps, to the techniques and technology of early portrait photography than to the real character of the man. Moreover, he wasn’t always seventy-six. He wasn’t always in poor health and suffering from dental pain.
Brigham Young wasn’t yet thirty-five years of age when he was ordained an apostle, and he was barely forty-four when leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fell to him as the president and senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
By that time, he had established a reputation as a skilled craftsman and valued employee in western New York, where he had married, joined the Restored Church, lovingly tended a wife who was desperately ill with tuberculosis, and then, as a young widower, cared for his motherless children. With his longtime friend Heber C. Kimball—in whose home his twenty-six year-old wife had drawn her last breath—he had led impoverished refugees out of Missouri and presided over the spectacularly successful mission of the Twelve to England. There is no question that Brigham Young was a remarkably able leader and organizer.
But he was much more than that. The late Eugene England, a Stanford-educated student of literature and himself a very fine writer, wrote that “Brigham Young eventually became the most voluminous, wide-ranging, and, in my judgment, the most conceptually powerful orator the Mormon Church has produced, and he is certainly one of the most original, entertaining, and personally expressive of all those who have used the English language.”
Of more fundamental importance, after spending a great deal of time with Brigham Young’s surviving diaries Professor England declared that, “Together with the fairly large number of surviving holograph letters written after 1840, they reveal a man of tenderness, spiritual warmth, and insight, as well as the more commonly known Brigham of great energy and devotion.”
“One of the recurring themes in non-Mormon biographies of President Brigham Young,” wrote the late historian D. Michael Quinn (and, I would add, a common misconception even among Latter-day Saints ), “is the idea that he was not a very “spiritual” man. Such interpretations, however, not only misrepresent his character, they also totally disregard the evidence, both published and unpublished, that refutes such a stereotype.”
The new Interpreter Foundation theatrical film “Six Days in August,” however, will depict a Brigham Young who was a deeply religious seeker even before he encountered Joseph Smith and the Restoration. For instance, although probably few today are aware of it, he spoke in tongues on more than one occasion.
Something that the film will not show, since its story extends only into August 1844, is Brother Brigham’s familiarity with the world beyond the veil. But this is an important facet of his character.
Brent L. Top, now retired as a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, where he also served as the dean of Religious Education, has written, “I am convinced, as are some other scholars, that Brigham Young had near-death experiences, one of which happened right before the Saints entered the Salt Lake Valley in July of 1847. That may be one of the reasons he talked so much about the spirit world.”
“I can say with regard to parting with our friends, and going ourselves,” Brother Brigham remarked, “that I have been near enough to understand eternity so that I have had to exercise a great deal more faith to desire to live than I ever exercised in my whole life to live. The brightness and glory of the next apartment is inexpressible. It is not encumbered with this clog of dirt we are carrying around here so that when we advance in years we have to be stubbing along and to be careful lest we fall down. . . . But yonder, how different! . . .
“Here, we are continually troubled with ills and ailments of various kinds, . . . but in the spirit world we are free from all this and enjoy life, glory and intelligence.”
On another occasion, he told his audience, “I would like to say to you, my friends and brethren, if we could see things as they are, and as we shall see and understand them, this dark shadow and valley is so trifling that we shall turn round and look about upon it and think, when we have crossed it, why this is the greatest advantage of my whole existence, for I have passed from a state of sorrow, grief, mourning, woe, misery, pain, anguish and disappointment into a state of existence, where I can enjoy life to the fullest extent as far as that can be done without a body.
“My spirit is set free, I thirst no more, I want to sleep no more, I hunger no more, I tire no more, I run, I walk, I labor, I go, I come, I do this, I do that, whatever is required of me, nothing like pain or weariness, I am full of life, full of vigor, and I enjoy the presence of my heavenly Father, by the power of his Spirit. I want to say to my friends, if you will live your religion, live so as to be full of the faith of God, that the light of eternity will shine upon you, you can see and understand these things for yourselves.”
“We have more friends behind the veil,” he taught, “than on this side, and they will hail us more joyfully than you were ever welcomed by your parents and friends in this world; and you will rejoice more when you meet them than you ever rejoiced to see a friend in this life; and then we shall go on from step to step, from rejoicing to rejoicing, and from one intelligence and power to another, our happiness becoming more and more exquisite and sensible as we proceed in the words and powers of life.”
The film “Six Days in August” will also illustrate how the famously successful and “practical” Brigham Young put spiritual things first in his life—things that, to a non-believer, must surely seem transparently impractical distractions from urgent this-worldly needs. For instance, Brigham and his colleagues in the Twelve were deeply committed to Joseph Smith’s emphasis, during the last years of his ministry, on the completion of the Nauvoo Temple. At the same time, in seeming contradiction to that, they were just as committed to planning the removal of the Saints to beyond the Rocky Mountains. (In this, they differed from the priorities of most of those who failed to accept their leadership, including Sidney Rigdon and those who eventually coalesced to form the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as the Community of Christ. Most early dissenting groups, to a greater or lesser degree, disapproved of the teachings and practices of Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo.)
A practical man, yes. A highly successful man in terms of this world. But Brigham Young and the apostles devoted many hours, well into the night, at the end of their time in Nauvoo to something with little if any apparent mundane practical value: They performed the ordinances of the temple endowment for hundreds of Latter-day Saints who did not want to leave Nauvoo without them. These Saints yearned to receive those ordinances before their departure for the perilous trek beyond the western frontier and over the Rocky Mountains. Those who watch “Six Days in August” will see this. And, just a few days after the first pioneer company of Latter-day Saints entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, President Young struck the ground with his walking stick and proclaimed, “Here we will build the temple of our God.”
“What,” asked Joseph Smith, “was the object of gathering the Jews, or the people of God in any age of the world? . . . The main object was to build unto the Lord a house whereby He could reveal unto his people the ordinances of his house and the glories of his kingdom, and teach the people the way of salvation; for there are certain ordinances and principles that, when they are taught and practiced, must be done in a place or house built for that purpose.”
Brigham Young understood this. LaJean Purcell Carruth, an expert in nineteenth-century shorthand who has devoted innumerable hours to reconstructing the actual words of Brigham Young from surviving documents—words that have sometimes been inaccurately represented—offers an insightful perspective on the second president of the Church. She has, she says, come to see the term “American Moses,” which is often applied Brigham as an honorific and a tribute, as an unfortunate misrepresentation. Moses, she points out, led a single large group of rebellious people to political freedom. But he never entered the promised land, never founded a city, and could not establish the gospel among them. The word “Zion,” she notes, was not in his vocabulary. By contrast, Brigham Young often compared his people to the people of Enoch. In fact, he aspired to be not an American Moses but an American Enoch. It was his goal, insofar as he could, to establish Zion. And he put his entire heart, mind, and will into that effort.
As his descendant and biographer Elder S. Dilworth Young wrote, “It is quite evident that after 1832 Brigham Young was moved by one motive: Determination to obey the will of God as spoken thru the Prophet, and to support that Prophet with all that he possessed of time, talent, and means.[1]
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The official website of “Six Days in August” is located at https://witnessesfilm.com. Those who are interested can watch the film trailer there, and they can also request that the movie be screened in a theater near them. The film’s Facebook page offers scenes from the movie and interviews with its actors and creators and is frequently refreshed with new material: https://www.facebook.com/people/Six-Days-in-August-Film/100078782109737/.
For Brigham Young’s comments on the spirit world, see “Discourses of Brigham Young,” 379-380 and “Teachings of Brigham Young,” chapter 38.
I’ve enormously enjoyed the admiring portraits of President Young given in Eugene England, “Brother Brigham” (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980), and Hugh Nibley, “Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints” (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994). I also like S. Dilworth Young, ““Here is Brigham . . .” Brigham Young . . . the years to 1844” (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1964.
Of very great importance is Ronald K. Esplin, “Joseph, Brigham and the Twelve: A Succession of Continuity,” “BYU Studies” 21/3 (1981): 301-341. Along the same lines, I heartily recommend the remarks given by Prof. Gerrit Dirkmaat at the Interpreter Foundation’s eleventh birthday party in August 2023. A 48-minute video of Prof. Dirkmaat’s remarks is available here: “‘Sweeter Than Honey’: Brigham Young’s Devotion to Joseph Smith’s Teachings After the Martyrdom.”
[1] S. Dilworth Young, “Here is Brigham . . .” Brigham Young . . . the years to 1844 (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1964), Introduction.
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