The United Order Will Never Be the Same, Part One

I was part of the crowd of LDS members who dreamed wistfully of the day when we can live under the United Order again. It seemed the best economic system for artists to labor under. It would abolish poverty and allow us to fully live the law of consecration. It would defang our dog-eat-dog world and usher in a Zion society. In my early days as an AML-Lister, I argued strongly in favor of a Zion society as a distinct culture, within which the United Order would play a significant role.

I now retract everything I said back then.

I once envisioned writing a sweeping LDS science fiction novel that would dig deep into and explore the United Order. I started gathering up books to do research on the subject. Kent Huff's two books, Joseph Smith's United Order and Brigham Young's United Order, were in the group. I started reading them first.

They ruined my science fiction book and completely changed my outlook of the United Order.

Huff's premise is that we have the United Order all wrong. It is not an eternal principle. It was not established by revelation. Our concept of the Order today is one of those folk doctrines we've accepted that, when looked into in depth, does not bear up to scrutiny.

His proof is in two parts, and hence the two books to present it. I'll also review the two books separately, although they are inseparably connected, and one cannot be read without the other. This will also make my two reviews awkward, as I try to demarcate a single unifying concept into two pieces of writing.

The first book attempts to demonstrate that the United Order of Joseph Smith's time was nothing like the United Order of Brigham Young's time, nor like how we envision it today. It was in fact a legal partnership set up to function in a way very similar to how the modern Corporation of the President functions. Huff calls it the precursor to the Corporation of the President. Since corporate law in America was in its infancy and not fully established in those days, a partnership was used. A common synonym employed in Joseph Smith's time for the United Order was "united firm."

The original purpose for the united firm was to facilitate the settling of Kirtland and Missouri. Saints would come into Kirtland as others would leave for Missouri. The entire revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants that we think of as the defining revelation for the United Order (as we understand it today) was nothing more than a temporary process to handle this in- and outflux of settlers. We've construed it as divine instruction for the economic system of a permanent Zion society, when in fact it was nothing more than a God-directed pragmatic solution for a temporary situation in the history of the church.

Obviously a review is the wrong place to present the evidence for Huff's assertions -- that's what the book is for. My job is to talk about the book itself. Huff is making no attempt in his book to write marvelous prose. His job is to convince, and his book is geared toward that. The descriptive chapters are pleasant enough to read, but they are interspersed with chapters that are detailed with evidence and require a scholarly attitude while reading. If you are highly skeptical of his claims, the evidence is there for you to digest. If you just want to understand what his claims are and get a general, descriptive argument for them, you can skip over the detailed evidence. The book is demarcated fairly well that way.

Although this book needs the second book to complete the argument, it accomplishes an important function: to demonstrate that there never was a United Order as we understand it under the leadership of Joseph Smith, and that the supposed scriptural foundation for the system is a misinterpretation of scripture taken completely out of historical context. The next book, Brigham Young's United Order, takes on the much larger task of accounting for the origin of the mystical economic system that we have come to accept today as the divinely appointed system of any Zion society.

And my review of that book will go more in-depth on my conclusions about both books.

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D. Michael Martindale
dmichael@wwno.com