149: We've Lost the Argument Denver Snuffer Podcast

In this installment Denver discusses the persistent malignment of Joseph Smith and how it stacks up against the actual evidence in the historical record up to the date of his death. The discussion further addresses how, as well as why, the inaccurate narrative of Joseph Smith has been promoted and perpetuated since his death in 1844.







Transcript















My wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law have a book—I don't know what they call it—book gang or something. (I know it’s not a book “club”; they wanted to sound more militant than that.) Whatever the group calls themselves—and they read books every month and then talk about them. And as a result, a book came to my wife’s attention that (the two of us) we read together (which is not altogether true; we listened to the book on tape as we were driving or sitting in a sauna until we finished the thing). However, we own a copy of the book. So I have looked into the text itself. It was a New York Times bestseller. [The] copyright is 2018, so it’s been around for a few years (although I’d not heard of it). [I] mentioned it to some people, and apparently, a lot of people have read this book. It's called Educated, A Memoir, written by Tara Westover. It’s autobiographical, but a number of things have been changed, as the book tells you; names and identifying details got changed because, apparently, some of the people who are living and who are identifiable if you knew her and her family well enough or her experiences well enough, you’d be able to identify them. So in that sense, it’s autobiographical—but it’s not altogether nonfiction; there is some fictionalized details to it.







She had a dysfunctional family, a father who was a survivalist and a conspiracy theorist. And they lived in Idaho on a farm with a junkyard on it, and he was a junker. And the family included a brother who was both abusive and suffered a number of head injuries that made him even more prone to violence. And she suffered at the hands of that abusive brother. But the family was “Mormon” (after a fashion)—a kind of conspiracy-theorist-based family with a strong patriarch who (the father, you know) ruled with an iron hand. She (in the book) would characterize her father as being bipolar and having some mental deficiencies.







But essentially she grew up uneducated, and then (through self study) managed to get herself through the ACT and got admitted and attended Brigham Young University where she got a bachelor’s degree and got the notice of a faculty member who sent her on a program to Cambridge. She wound up on a scholarship to Cambridge, got her Master’s of Philosophy (after her Bachelor’s at Brigham Young), her Master’s from Trinity College in Cambridge, [and] subsequently became a visiting fellow at Harvard University, and then returned to Cambridge where she got her Ph.D. in History in 2014.







Throughout the book... The story is gripping. I mean, it’s... Once you get started, it’s hard to put the book down. I imagine that if you were to ask for an account of the same events through the eyes of other people, that you may come away with a different conclusion about many of the people, many of the personalities, and many of the events in the book—and she makes no pretensions about it being altogether accurate.







But in her journey to become educated, she has to fight against the limitations of her background and overcome that—in a way that is a heroic story. And the details of the characters as they’re being unraveled in the story, it’s really quite gripping. And it’s remarkable. And she’s a remarkable person.







As she gets into her Ph.D. program and along the way, it becomes apparent that her command of historical investigation, different historical philosophies,