You said above that “further historical background will reveal different conclusions.” If it’s true that Joseph Smith married more than two dozen women while he publicly and repeatedly claimed that he was not practicing polygamy, what different conclusions about that statement might be reached by investigating the historical background?

I said nothing about whether specific data points were verifiable or not. My original argument applied only to CONCLUSIONS drawn from decontextualized data points. Sure it’s reasonable for people to conclude that Joseph had at least a certain number of wives. And yes there are documented statements of denial. I wasn’t talking about that to begin with. I was talking about where people then take those isolated data points.

For example, is the audience supposed to take those two data points and say “wow, what a sneaky, philandering, law-breaking scumbag”?

Or are they supposed to reach some other conclusion. The way you selected the data points seems to imply that you’d like a negative conclusion about Joseph Smith. And for an American audience lacking any historical context within which to place these data points, that may indeed be the rather ignorant conclusion reached. But a further historical background will reveal different conclusions.

So it’s not so much particular data points and whether they are valid or not that my comment was aimed at. It is how opportunistic people take those isolated data points, and use the general ignorance of the audience to imply conclusions that are controversial at best.

My point was that a little humility about how much of a bead we’ve got on historical characters is in order. I think my example of Cornelius Ryan illustrates that point. And this is doubly true of polarizing characters – where inevitably, the sources we do have will be highly agenda-driven. There is plenty of room to say we don’t know in such instances.

But don’t underestimate the extent of what human beings do not know about even recent historical events. I just finished Cornelius Ryan’s classic World War II book “A Bridge Too Far.” Amazing amount of research that he did on that book. The footnotes are staggering. Military inventories, records, interviews, newspaper accounts, diaries, and massive amounts of pouring through US, British and German military records. And Ryan flat-out admits to the vast amount of detail that we do not know about the disastrous Allied invasion of Holland. For all his research, some of the biggest controversies, and some of the most crucial explanations remain lost to us. Many of them in fact.

The more one learns, the more one realizes how much is NOT known.

This is the case with Joseph Smith. People uncover tidbits, and then brashly assume that they have an accurate picture of the man. The reality is that we don’t really know. The truest part of Fawn Brodie’s book was the title: “No Man Knows My History.” That really is true. People don’t know him.

It doesn’t help matters that Mormonism’s founding history took place in one of the ugliest periods of US history. A time that most of America is trying hard to forget – that black hole in high school history books between the signing of the Bill of Rights and the Civil War. People in the United States are largely completely ignorant of this period of history. They fail to realize what a harsh, alien, and brutal time for our nation it was. They lack any sense of historical context with which to view the events of this time period.

And it is in this fog of ignorance that they study out the facts of Joseph Smith and the Mormons. In total isolation, they scrutinize the bare data surrounding the Mormon story, and then rise up in presentist indignation to pass judgment on the Mormon past by the values and assumptions of the 21st century. People just don’t get how ugly America was during this period. Therefore they have absolutely no workable basis for judging how relatively praiseworthy or ugly the Mormon history is.

I could go into examples, but I see no need. Suffice it to say that I think the single biggest step in vindicating Joseph Smith and the Mormons, is merely to educate oneself in 19th century American history. Once you understand the national context, Joseph does alright for himself.

But understanding that context is something that will remain beyond the reach of most.