Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [10]
On January 1, 1857, Francis Kerby and his wife and children sailed to America, and three years later they joined the last of the Mormons’ handcart expeditions to Utah (the handcarters literally walked their way across America, pushing and carrying carts that held their possessions). After his arrival in Utah, Kerby was apparently never the same man. Whereas in England he had kept a meticulous and proud list of all his ecclesiastical activities—and, in fact, had held high rank among the church’s U.K. clergy—after he got to Utah, he was less interested in keeping track of his life within the church, and seemingly less interested in church activity itself. Indeed, the final thirty-three years of his diary notations consists almost exclusively of remarks about marriages, births, and deaths. There are no long passages in those last pages about his beliefs and devotions, as there had been during his English career.
My mother had a theory about what happened to Francis Kerby: She thought he had a crisis of faith. “He was never the same man after the Mountain Meadows Massacre happened,” she once said. “He couldn’t believe that the Mormons would have done such a thing, and after he learned the truth about it he never had the same heart for the church he had once loved.”
THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE HAD TAKEN PLACE IN 1857 —the same year that Francis Kerby had arrived in America—but the roots of the tragedy reach back into Mormonism’s earlier years, when Joseph Smith began to conceive a theology that might prove as merciless and bloody as the history he had envisioned for the Book of Mormon. More particularly, the event’s proper history probably began during the Nauvoo era, when Smith first promulgated a principle that was to become: known, infamously, as Blood Atonement. Aside from the practice of polygamy, no other Mormon teaching has proven as complex or controversial as Blood Atonement. In its most widely understood sense—and in Joseph Smith’s original precept—the tenet runs like this: If you take a life, or commit any comparable ultimate sin, then your blood must be shed. Hanging or imprisonment would not suffice for punishment or restitution. The manner of death had to be one in which your blood spilled onto the ground, as an apology to God.
In recent years, mindful of its historical image as a vengeful people, the Mormon Church has gone to pains to disavow this interpretation. The real principle of Blood Atonement, the modern theologians claim, is a matter of redemption, not vengeance. Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of the world by the shedding of his own blood; if you believed in Jesus as the Son of God, and if you followed his teachings and obeyed his laws, then you would be purged of sin through his blood. However, there are some sins that are so grave—and murder is one—that if you commit these deeds, you have placed yourself beyond the power of Christ’s atonement. The only hope for redeeming such sin is to have your own blood shed—and even that may not be enough to earn forgiveness in the next world. But for this form of Blood Atonement to be properly carried out, we must all wait for a better world when the civil and spiritual laws are administered by the same government, and such a time has not yet come.
That’s the official account, but the legends