The United Order Will Never Be the Same, Part Two

What Joseph Smith's United Order was, Brigham Young's United Order is even more so. Plenty of descriptive argument for those who only want to understand what Huff is saying. But copious amounts of evidence is interspersed for those who want to dig through it. And its scope is much more sweeping than the first book.

The evidence is used in service of the premise that the United Order of the Utah period was an experimental system implemented by Brigham Young under circumstances of extreme survival. He was the leader of an exiled people literally carving a civilization out of nothing. For a while he was governor of the territory, but that rug was soon pulled out from under his feet. As the de facto leader of the region, but with no legal authority to back him up and nothing but hostility emanating from the titular legal authorities, Brigham Young was obliged to resort to extraordinary measures to govern his people. Their lives and their society were at stake. It was literally a matter of life an death that he succeed.

Although Huff focuses on the United Order, his hypothesis actually accounts for all sorts of thorny legacies in LDS history, which is the beauty of it. From the Adam-God theory to blood atonement to polygamy, Huff demonstrates that the unique and dire circumstances of nineteenth century Utah required drastic measures. Lacking the normal tools of civilization-building, Brigham Young employed the only source of authority he had -- ecclesiastical -- to forge a society with proper law enforcement and economics. Living in the midst of a desert and impoverishment, and with the army of the United States knocking at their gate, embodying the desires of that country to exterminate the Saints, Brigham Young's goal was the messy business of survival at any cost, and let future generations sort out the details.

These two books had a profound effect on me as I read them. I felt as if a number of significant puzzle pieces fell into place in my understanding of LDS history. I had one of those "Ah ha!" experiences where troubling dilemmas that wouldn't go away were finally resolved into a picture that made sense. Huff's hypothesis, in my opinion, resolves many difficulties from our history that have plagued us for over a century, and still plague us as our enemies wield them as weapons against us.

And all for the price of giving up a mystical economic system that is more the stuff of wish-fulfillment than reality. It was a price I gladly paid, even at the expense of retracting enthusiastically argued public stands I'd taken, even at the expense of a cool LDS science fiction book I would have written.

In his zeal to convince, Huff first wrote Brigham Young's United Order as a monstrous tome stuffed with everything he could think of to include. After some wise editing advice, he split out the cream of the book and put the rest into a third volume, which was never widely published or distributed. I've read this third volume and, although it contains some relevant information, especially about the issues beyond the United Order, it definitely was the secondary material, and you're not missing a great deal by reading only the first two volumes. The third volume is almost exclusively page after page of speeches from Brigham Young and other church leaders of the time.

I don't know if Joseph Smith's United Order and Brigham Young's United Order will have the same effect on you that they did on me. I don't know if Kent Huff's premise about the United Order will convince you. But I think I can state with assurety that, from now on, any treatise on the United Order that doesn't address the evidence Huff presented in these two books is an incomplete treatise. Huff has added a remarkable dimension to our understanding of the United Order that cannot be ignored.

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D. Michael Martindale
dmichael@wwno.com