Book confronts LDS tragedy

Turley said as they studied the scholarly literature on the history of violence and mass killing, they saw the conditions in southern Utah under which "ordinary people get swept up in a combination of their environment and group psychology to do things that they would never consider doing alone. I don't think it's unique to being 'God-driven,' but clearly people who get swept up in this kind of act do so because of a combination of factors we describe in the book."

Walker said the authors saw "very little unique about Mountain Meadows that is not replicated in many cultures and mass killings throughout history. It fits the pattern. We wanted the book to move beyond the polarity of Mormon vs. non-Mormon. Our overwhelming hope was to understand. We felt we couldn't do that unless we understand how people as a group, in group psychology in a time of stress, act. What happened in southern Utah is virtually a template of religious and ethnic violence in a time of war."

Turley said church founder Joseph Smith "cautioned against zeal without knowledge. That's been a theme throughout church history. I think the church's system of checks and balances works when it's allowed to. But in the case of the massacre, those were overridden. People got caught up in the emotions, in their own self-assuredness. They were caught up in feelings of retribution, caught up in trying to hide their own wrongdoing."

"Mormons are going to be reminded that church is made up of human beings," Barlow said. "The church needs to be conceived by its members as not essentially divine with a few freckles and warts, but as a group of people — fully human — trying to respond to the divine. I think there might be a mental paradigm shift to come to terms with the full humanity of the church as responding to the divine rather than being divine."

LDS scripture details the concept of "unrighteous dominion and lists specific things that contribute to it," Turley said. "One of them is to cover sin, another is to exercise unrighteous control over others. Both of those things came into play in this case. Leaders hatched a plan that went awry and tried to cover it with a greater wrong. It continued from one cascading wrongdoing to another."

Walker said he's come to see the massacre as a cautionary tale in making judgments about those who are different.

"It's a primer to teach us about humility and long-suffering. ... It's a case-study in how not to apply religion and how one should apply true religion in one's own life," he said.

As for "digging up the past," as many had worried they were doing for no good purpose, Walker said he believes it could be that the importance of the book "will not be in its historical findings but in its possible legacy for truth-telling," as a copy of the affidavits held by the church for more than a century are published and made available to the public.

"It's something like the Joseph Smith Papers Project," Turley said, adding "we hope to get it out more or less simultaneously with the first volume" of the book to be released next month. The text will be made available in hardcover book form.

---

E-mail: carrie@desnews.com