I am Ryan McKnight. I'm Kara Santa Maria. I am Christopher Smith. Hi, I'm Andrew Torres. This is

Naked Mormonism. The Serial Mormon History podcast. Joseph Smith's plans for the Mormons and for America

at large, let's just say they were quite grand.

He had a lot in store for the world if he could carry out his plans to fruition and show

the world that a better version of itself awaited should it trust him as its supreme temporal

leader and Elohim as its supreme spiritual leader. How do you build a kingdom?

I mean, you basically have to buy it if you're averse to bloodshed, which Joe kind of was. And for this reason, money was always in a shortage.

Now, this is one of those bedrock issues that we talk about relatively frequently on the show,

kind of like polygamy or power struggles or dissent among trusted elites, and a few other

kind of fundamental issues which seem to influence nearly everything that happens in Navu Mormonism.

But my point is desperation fueled these desperate money ploys. The primary income for building the

Navu empire was tithing donations,

but those can be quite unreliable, especially as more Mormons giving more money to the church

resulted in an overall more destitute population. Beyond that, those who had more tended to give more.

Those folks became frequent targets of the leadership to extort

as much as possible from them. But if you're a rich guy and the prophet or apostles come knocking

a couple of times a month asking for money, it gets old pretty quickly and the promises

become more grand and less fulfilled. At the end of the day, Navu in 1844 was a big city, but it still

had a little town charm. It had grown from a small, homogenous group of people into a relatively

large metropolis, but it still retained many of the trappings of a small town. Everybody talked to

everybody about everybody else's business. People saw their neighbors every day, and that small town drama pervaded the culture, especially because those in authority in Navu were also the same figures in ecclesiastical authority. In normal small towns, you have the pastor to gossip about, and then you have the city council and mayor with their own set of gossip. In Navu, however,

those were the same people who were the subjects of town gossip. People were constantly

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