Chapter 1
Justification, Religion, and Violence

September 11 (1857)

At dawn on September 7, 1857, a wagon train of emigrants camped at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah unexpectedly found themselves under attack. The emigrants—the Fancher–Baker party—were making their way from Arkansas to California. They numbered approximately 120, including men, women, and children of various ages, and they had perhaps 700 head of cattle with them. The attackers aimed coordinated barrages of gunfire at the party from different directions and their initial assault is reported to have resulted in seven deaths (Walker, Turley, and Leonard 2008, p. 158). However, that initial attack was soon repelled by the emigrant group who corralled their wagons and proceeded to fight off their assailants over the next five days. The attacking party was dressed as American Indians, and indeed some of them were Southern Paiute Indians. But the majority were white and were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). There were reports of fractious interactions between members of the Fancher–Baker party and Mormons whom they had encountered when passing through Utah (Bagley 2002, p. 98; Walker et al. 2008, p. 87).1 However, the party posed no threat to the Utahn Mormon community and were about to leave Utah for good.

In the late morning of September 11, a sub-group of the assailants removed their disguises and approached the corral, pretending to be representatives of a sympathetic local militia who could broker a deal between the emigrants and their Indian assailants. In exchange for livestock and supplies the representatives of the militia claimed that they would be able to persuade the assailants to cease hostilities and they would provide the emigrants with safe passage to nearby Cedar City. The emigrants were suspicious of the negotiating party, having seen through the disguises of their mainly white assailants; but as they were running low on water and ammunition, they felt that they had little choice but to accept the offer (Walker et al. 2008, p. 196), which was, as they feared, a “decoy.” The remaining members of the Fancher–Baker party, who had managed to survive five days of besiegement, left their corral and were ambushed soon after by other members of the Mormon-led assailant group. Every adult and every child over the age of six was massacred and their bodies hastily buried. The only survivors were seventeen small children and infants, who were adopted into nearby Mormon families, under the erroneous assumption that they would all be too young to remember the shocking events that had transpired.

Historians who have examined the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows massacre disagree about whether or not Brigham Young, the then President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, had a hand in orchestrating the massacre, but all seem to agree that at least some senior figures in the church were involved in planning the massacre and in the attempted cover-up that followed.2 Although there were many participants in the massacre, only one man was ever convicted for his actions and this conviction occurred almost twenty years after the event. The convicted man was John D. Lee, one of the ringleaders of the attacking party. Lee considered himself to be a scapegoat for the consequences of decisions made by church leaders; and although he admitted that he had killed some of the members of the Fancher–Baker party, he did not consider that he had done anything wrong. He believed that he was following just orders given to him by legitimate religious authorities. In his words: “I was guided in all that I did which is called criminal, by the orders of the leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”3 All of this information may come as a huge surprise to the many people who are unfamiliar with the events of September 11, 1857. The Mountain Meadows massacre has been largely forgotten and Mormons are not particularly associated with violence these days.

The massacre may have had a political motive.4 In 1857, Utah was a semi-independent territory of the USA and was majority Mormon and politically dominated by the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As well as being President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Brigham Young was Governor of Utah Territory at the time. The church leaders were enmeshed in a complicated struggle to retain as much of their independence as they could from the distant, but ever-encroaching, “gentile” United States government in Washington. Some of them believed that the US government did not appreciate the role that Mormons played as protectors of the many white emigrants traveling westwards to California through partially colonized territory inhabited by potentially hostile Indian tribes. Furthermore, they believed that it would be politically advantageous to the Mormons if the government came to value this role and that an Indian massacre of white emigrants might help make their point. After Brigham Young announced that the Indians would no longer be “held back” by the Utahn Mormon community, attempts were made by some of the Mormons to encourage local Indians to conduct an attack on emigrants traversing Utah (Walker et al. 2008, p. 137); and when these were unsuccessful a plan to fake an Indian massacre was hatched (Walker et al. 2008, pp. 140). Unfortunately for the conspirators, the attempt to present the massacre that did take place as the work of local Indians was considered extremely unconvincing by the mainstream American media, who laid the blame for it squarely on the Mormon community of Utah. Some newspapers called for military reprisals against that community (Bagley 2002, pp. 190–1).5

Upon reading the above political explanation of the motives for the massacre, the average person is unlikely to be any less appalled than they were when first told that the massacre took place. The slaughter of over one hundred people for political advantage is appalling, not because it might fail to serve a political end, but because it seems highly immoral to most of us to kill people who pose no threat, regardless of whether this is for political gain or not. For many, the immorality of the massacre will seem all the more appalling and astonishing given that its perpetrators were deeply religious people. However, many Utahn Mormons of the period did not consider the massacre to be either immoral, or unjustified; and Lee was able to appeal to nineteenth-century Mormon theology to justify his actions. Lee and other Mormons believed that the adults of the Fancher–Baker party had committed serious sins and that they needed others to “shed their blood for the remission of their sins” (Bagley 2002, p. 321). According to the doctrine of “blood atonement,” there are some sinful acts that are so serious that one cannot properly atone for them without being killed. In the words of Brigham Young:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints does not appear to have maintained an official list of sins that might require blood atonement. The threat of blood atonement was made against those who kill the innocent or commit acts of heresy (Coates 1991, p. 64), as well as those who commit adultery (Walker et al. 2008, p. 25), aide apostates, or marry apostates (Coates 1991, pp. 65–6). It is not entirely clear what the adult members of the Fancher–Baker party did to warrant blood atonement.7 One suggestion is that they may have been harboring apostates who were trying to escape Mormon Utah (Bagley 2002, p. 147). Another suggestion is that members of the party had boasted that they had been involved in the 1844 murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism (Bagley 2002, p. 117). A third suggestion is that members of the party had murdered local Indians by poisoning them (Bagley 2002, pp. 106–8). Lee and the other perpetrators of the massacre understood that non-Mormons would not accept the doctrine of blood atonement and the doctrine was a religious one, not written into Utahn law, so there was no prospect of applying it through legal channels. By blaming local Indians for the massacre, Lee are his collaborators would have hoped to be able to “blood atone” the adult members of the Fancher–Baker party without incurring the wrath and retribution of non-Mormon American “gentiles.”

The doctrine of blood atonement justifies the killing of particular people by appeal to improvements in the quality of the afterlife that those people can be expected to experience. Just like mainstream Christians, Mormons believe in an eternal afterlife. Unlike many mainstream Christians, they do not believe that only followers of the true religion will experience a good afterlife. However, only those who receive the atonement of Jesus Christ are eligible for the most desirable form of afterlife, which is to live in a state of “exaltation” with God. According to the doctrine of blood atonement, the atonement of Jesus Christ is...