Brigham Young: Sermon on Mormon Governance

About the Author

Brigham Young was an early convert to the Mormon Church, which was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, Young's relative by marriage. Young quickly advanced within the Mormon hierarchy, becoming president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (the governing body of the church). After Smith's death in 1844, various leaders asserted their claims to become his successor. Rather than settling on a single candidate, the Mormon Church splintered into sects, each with its own leader. Young became the president of the largest faction, then centered in the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois. This faction became the modern-day Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). In 1846 conflict with the local population made the Mormon position in Illinois untenable, so Young ordered the church members to move westward, as many Americans were doing at the time. They established a new LDS center in the Utah Valley around the Great Salt Lake. There Young became the autocratic ruler of a Mormon state whose isolation made it in its early days a virtually independent country.

Young and Joseph Smith both came from poor families and had struggled to find some kind of economic stability prior to the foundation of Mormonism. Although they both had been born in Vermont, their families had moved to the “burnt-over” counties of Upstate New York, so called because the intensity and frequency of fundamentalist religious revivals had left almost no one “unsaved” during the period that was called the Second Great Awakening. Young was typical of many people in this environment. He converted to more than one sect of the Baptist Church and then became a Methodist before encountering the Book of Mormon, the church's sacred scripture, in 1832. Young himself first became accustomed to public speaking as the leader of a series of Bible-reading groups. He was a nervous speaker at first, but he was determined to perfect his skills through practice and rapidly did so. Smith had at one time worked as a treasure hunter, taking fees from landowners in exchange for using his methods of spiritual divination to discover buried treasure on their land. His supposed discovery of the golden tablets on which the Book of Mormon was written, buried on his own land, was an extension of this trade.

Young's work as a Mormon missionary and leader in the 1830s and 1840s accustomed him to addressing very large crowds, both of the converted and of those who had come to hear him with the possibility of becoming Mormons. He regularly spoke before crowds in eastern cities such as Boston or New York and in London. His manner of preaching was very much that of a fundamentalist preacher of that time. He supported his rhetoric with frequent biblical citations and appeals to his own authority and that of the hierarchy and “tradition” he represented. Once he was in control of the LDS Church and was the unquestioned leader of the Mormon community in Utah, he maintained this style, also supporting his political decisions and dictates with an appeal to his own authority as a prophet. He created a carefully crafted public image as a wise and holy authority. As such he made several addresses each week, technically classed as sermons, but given the theocratic nature of his rule, the religious and political functions of his speeches cannot be disentangled. Because Young was a national political figure from at least the late 1830s and increasingly so after Smith's death, his speeches were commonly reproduced and analyzed in national newspapers.

The texts in the Journal of Discourses were published first as a monthly magazine starting in January 1853 (continuing through 1886) and then were reprinted as hardbound annual collections the following year. The texts were compiled by stenographers present at the sermons rather than from revised reading scripts. Young did not speak from prepared notes. The historian Stanley Hirshson suggests that this might have been because Young was semiliterate, for the economic circumstances of his early family life allowed him to attend school for less than a year. This was not unusual at the time. Many popular church leaders learned rhetoric and memorized the text of the Bible through a lifetime of hearing sermons, without necessarily knowing how to read. Young’s brothers became Methodist ministers despite a complete lack of literacy. This would also tend to explain the high ratio of Young’s allusions to and quotations from the Bible as opposed to the Book of Mormon, which he did not hear read repeatedly during his youth. The texts in the Journal embody Young’s opinions and decisions at the height of his career, when he was the highest authority in the LDS Church and the virtual dictator of Utah. Although Young classed these talks as sermons, his discourses were as often political as religious, for in the Mormon view these two strands were inextricably intertwined.