Faithful Historian Deceives Mormons - Keith Erekson | Ep. 1990 | LDS Discussions Ep. 61

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2025

⏱️ 217 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Keith Erekson serves as the director of the historical research and outreach for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On January 12, 2025 he gave a fireside in which he answered tough questions. Today we are responding to that fireside and discussing such topics as polygamy, Joseph Smith marrying women who were already married, and the church hiding aspects of its history.

Show Notes

YouTube

00:03:40 Introducing the original fireside with Keith Erekson

00:10:23 Background on Keith Erekson who works for the Church

00:17:08 Erekson saying the church never hid anything from its history

00:21:30 How the Church has hidden its history

00:30:35 Mountain Meadows Massacre

00:37:25 Utah Mormon Reformation Questions

00:43:42 The Word of Wisdom

00:58:57 The Lord is guiding President Nelson to lead the church today

01:02:00 Clip of Elder Holland explaining how the Church moves with the world

01:08:19 Joseph Smith publicly denying that he lived polygamy

01:17:00 These firesides are for questioning members

01:18:42 John C. Bennett’s list of Joseph Smith’s wives

01:22:52 Denials of polygamy

01:29:29 What is the purpose of polygamy?

01:33:53 Monogamy is the rule plurality is the exception

01:42:16 The New and Everlasting Covenant means polygamy

01:52:52 Erekson on the Restoration of All Things

02:03:05 Why did Joseph Smith marry women who were already married?

02:10:40 The Law of Adoption

02:19:03 Joseph’s wives getting sealed to other people after his death

02:20:24 Sealings for Time only

02:21:54 Time and Eternity only sealings

02:31:31 Erekson on Mary Elizabeth Rollins

02:34:10 Dan Vogel on Mary Elizabeth Rolins

02:40:26 Is polygamy required for exaltation?

02:51:22 Are women just prizes in Mormonism?

02:55:46 Erekson on the Book of Abraham

03:07:50 Finding the scrolls for the Book of Abraham

03:12:20 Erekson saying we’ve always called these funerary texts

03:21:15 The diagram produced in the Book of Abraham

03:24:11 Joseph Smith and the Catalyst Theory for the Book of Abraham

03:27:00 Grading Keith Erekson on his knowledge, honesty, etc.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast, LDS Discussions Edition.
0:06.0	I am one of your host for today, John DeLinn. It's February 6th, 2025.
0:11.0	And today we are going to be discussing, or the title is, History Director tries to defend Mormonism.
0:20.0	And we're going to be talking about Dr. Keith Erickson.
0:24.5	For those of you don't know, the LDS Discussion Series is, I don't know, 55, 60 episodes in.
0:31.1	Julia, do you remember how many episodes we're in now?
0:33.8	This is episode 60.
0:35.4	Okay.
0:36.4	Yeah.
0:36.8	So a couple years ago, a guy named Mike, that's his code name, put together a website
0:44.6	called the LDS Discussions where he did a really in-depth thorough analysis of Mormon
0:49.6	Church Truth Claims, borrowing heavily from the works of people like the Sandra Tanner. Hey, Sandra.
0:56.0	Hi. Thanks for joining us. And so we did several deep dives into Mormon Church
1:02.3	truth claims, doing our best to be as thoughtful and as fair and as objective as possible.
1:08.2	Of course, we sometimes failed in our objectivity. But we've
1:13.6	done this extensive review of Mormon Church Truth claims all the way from Joseph Smith's
1:18.3	treasure digging to the priesthood rest, the alleged priesthood restoration, to changes in the
1:24.1	doctrine and covenants, to Book of Mormon translation, all the way through to modern day issues.
1:29.5	And, you know, this series, we highly recommend it. It's probably the most valuable thing I've done on Mormon stories in a long time, at least according to many of our viewers and listeners.
1:40.5	You can check it out on Spotify, an audio and video format. You can check it out on Apple Podcast as audio only, and you can check it out on YouTube under its own playlist under the Mormon Stories podcast channel called LDS Discussions. We highly recommend that you watch it from start to finish. It is 60 episodes now. But we, even though Mike had to
2:03.8	retire, and he's on to bigger and better things, and we miss him dearly, we like to continue
2:10.8	the LDS discussion series for a couple of reasons, even though it's without Mike. One is we have amazing
	...

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