Blood Atonement
The claim:
"Along with Adam-God, Brigham taught a doctrine known as 'Blood Atonement' where a person's blood had to be shed to atone for their own sins as it was beyond the atonement of Jesus Christ."[1]
"There are sins that men commit for which they cannot receive forgiveness in this world, or in that which is to come, and if they had their eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins . . . I have had men come to me and offer their lives to atone for their sins. It is true that the blood of the Son of God was shed for sins through the fall and those committed by men, yet men can commit sins which it can never remit."[1:1]
Behind the nineteenth-century language, the accusation comes down to this. Brigham Young, the second president of the Church, taught that some sins are so serious the death of Christ cannot cover them, and that a person guilty of them needs their own blood shed to be forgiven. The language is severe, and the CES Letter quotes it accurately. Brigham preached it in September 1856. The published record keeps it under his name. The Church's own history essay confirms he said it.[2]
Four months after that sermon, in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, the same Brigham Young stood up and told the Saints the opposite: if they "will sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life."[3] The CES Letter quotes the September rhetoric. It never quotes the February correction. And nearly everything about this question lives in the gap between those two sermons.
What the critics leave out of the sermon
Read the September 21, 1856 sermon in full, then the sermon Brigham preached four months later. Two things show up that the CES Letter never engages.
The first is how Brigham framed the whole idea. In the middle of the harsh language he says the point "is to save them, not to destroy them," and he describes a guilty man willingly offering his own life, not a Church putting anyone to death.[4] Even at the literal surface, the sermon never authorizes an execution by Church order. It pictures a voluntary self-offering for sins the preacher believed were beyond ordinary repentance. None of that softens the language to modern ears, but it does put the sermon in a different category from the picture the CES Letter paints, where the Church claims a right to spill a member's blood.
The second is the four-months-later sermon the CES Letter skips entirely. In February 1857, Brigham told the same congregation that "the wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle's being in full force," and then gave the line that settles the practical question: faithful living forgives sins "without taking life."[3:1] This is no modern apologist softening Brigham for him. In his own second sermon on the subject, Brigham himself says the principle could not be applied in his day and that the path to forgiveness ran through repentance rather than blood. The September rhetoric came with conditions, and the man who preached it is the one who imposed them.
This was a six-month revival, not a settled teaching
The sermons read very differently once you know when and why they were preached. They were not routine Sunday lessons. They belong to the Mormon Reformation of 1856 to 1857, a short, intense religious revival with a clear beginning and a clear end.
In the years leading up to it, the Saints in Utah were battered by drought, crop-killing insect swarms, and a brutal winter that wiped out much of their livestock. Church leaders read the disasters as a call to repent, and they launched a revival to shake a spiritually lax people back into line. The preaching turned deliberately fiery, the way revival preaching across nineteenth-century America turned fiery, with graphic warnings meant to shock people into changing. Blood-atonement language was the most extreme register that revival produced.
The CES Letter never mentions how small a part of Brigham's preaching this was. About 390 of Brigham's sermons survive in print.[5] The extreme blood-atonement language sits almost entirely inside that six-month window.[6] A teaching he actually held as settled doctrine would have run through his whole ministry. This one spikes during one revival and then disappears. After the revival ended, broken by the approach of a federal army in the Utah War, Brigham led the Church for another nineteen years and never returned to that language. None of his successors revived it.[6:1] A sharp trigger, a brief peak, then a clean stop is how a contained revival episode behaves, and nothing like how a standing doctrine does. The in-depth version lays out the full setting and the close parallels to the revival preaching of the Saints' Protestant neighbors.
The Church's own scripture had already forbidden it
Everything above matters, but the CES Letter never puts the decisive fact on the table: the Church had already settled, in its own scripture, whether a religious group may take a member's life. It settled it in 1835, twenty-one years before the September sermon, and the answer was no.
Doctrine and Covenants section 134 is a declaration on government and law that the Church adopted by unanimous vote in 1835. It says plainly that no religious society, this one included, has any authority "to put them in jeopardy of either life or limb." A church's only tools, it says, are to remove someone from membership and withdraw fellowship. Punishing crime belongs to the civil government, not the church.[7] That was canonized scripture, voted on and binding, a generation before the rhetoric. A literal, Church-run blood atonement was forbidden by the Church's standing law the entire time Brigham was preaching about it.
There is a second rule, older still, that does the rest of the work. Since 1830 the Church has held that nothing becomes its binding doctrine unless the whole body of the Church accepts it by a sustaining vote, what the scriptures call "common consent."[8] Measure blood atonement against that test and the result is clean: it was never written into scripture, never put to the members for a vote, never accepted as binding.
This is the same machinery that handled Adam-God, the other hard Brigham Young teaching, and it reached the same verdict. A president of the Church preaching something hard from the pulpit, with all the force he can put behind it, still does not count as the Church adopting it as doctrine. The Restoration drew that line from the beginning, and blood atonement was on the wrong side of it from the first sermon.
So the CES Letter's running refrain, "yesterday's doctrine is today's false doctrine," assumes the thing it has to prove: that this was ever the Church's doctrine.[9] By the Church's own rules, in place before Brigham spoke, there was no doctrine here to reverse. There was a severe sermon the system never let cross the line.
The costs: a slow correction and Mountain Meadows
The first cost is timing. Brigham qualified the rhetoric himself in February 1857, but the first major public clarification aimed at outsiders did not come until 1884, twenty-eight years after the September sermon, and the most quoted modern statement came in 1978.[10] The Church corrected the error, and it corrected it early and internally, but it was slow to do so loudly and in public.
The second cost is heavier. This rhetoric was in the air during the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857, when a group of Mormon militiamen and their Paiute allies in southern Utah murdered about 120 emigrants passing through. If blood atonement were ever going to turn into real killing, that moment, with the revival fresh, a war scare on, and the settlements far from Salt Lake, was when it would have.
The record shows local leaders did the deciding, and Brigham tried to stop it. When the crisis began, a rider was sent 300 miles to ask Brigham what to do. His written answer, sent the same day, told the local leaders to leave the emigrants alone: "You must not meddle with them. . . . [I]f those who are there will leave let them go in peace."[11] The letter arrived too late. The massacre had already happened.
The careful modern history of the event was written with full Church Historian's Office cooperation, and the Church's own essay condenses its conclusion into one sentence: "while intemperate preaching about outsiders by Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and other leaders contributed to a climate of hostility, President Young did not order the massacre."[12][2:1] The revival rhetoric helped poison the air the local leaders were breathing, and that share of the blame is the Church's to carry. The evidence does not show the Church ordering the killings, sanctioning them, or applying blood atonement as doctrine.
And the Church has owned the tragedy. Standing at the site on the 150th anniversary, President Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency called what happened there "a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct."[13]
A few harder threads run past even this, including the historian Will Bagley's case and Brigham's own striking claim that his sermons could be called scripture. The in-depth version meets the sharpest critical case and Brigham's "scripture" claim in full, along with what the surviving records simply cannot settle.
Never a doctrine to reverse
The episode proves a prophet can be sincerely wrong about a hard theological point, and that the Church has a way to keep one man's error from becoming everyone's doctrine. That way was not improvised afterward to clean up the mess. The earliest Latter-day Saint scripture already says God's servants were given his words "in their weakness," and that "inasmuch as they erred it might be made known." The safeguards were built in at the start, for exactly this kind of moment.
So measure blood atonement against every test the Church has ever used. It was never canonized. It was never sustained by the members. It was never administered as Church practice, a point the Encyclopedia of Mormonism states flatly: this "is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time."[14] The 1889 First Presidency went out of its way to denounce as "entirely untrue" any claim that the Church believes in killing those who leave it.[15] And the 1835 scripture that forbade the whole thing was never changed. On every test the Church has, the rhetoric came up short, which is exactly what the safeguards were built to make happen, slowly and without drama.
That is also why an episode this ugly does not sink the larger case. The Church never asked anyone to believe Brigham was incapable of error. It asked them to trust an institution built to absorb errors like this one without coming apart, and on this question it held. The scripture that barred the practice was twenty-one years old when the sermon was preached, and the first qualification came from the preacher himself, four months later. Brigham's worst sermon belongs to one six-month window in 1856 and 1857. The rules that contained it are still in force today.
This is the sister case to Adam-God; for the parallel pattern of a slow institutional correction, see the priesthood and temple ban.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
"Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/peace-and-violence-among-19th-century-latter-day-saints. The essay explicitly cites Brigham Young's Journal of Discourses 4:53–54 and Heber C. Kimball's Journal of Discourses 7:16–21. Its main text says Reformation-era leaders "preached with fiery rhetoric, warning against the evils of those who dissented from or opposed the Church"; the phrase "intemperate preaching about outsiders" appears in the essay's summary of Walker, Turley, and Leonard's conclusion that such preaching "contributed to a climate of hostility" while "President Young did not order the massacre." The essay's endnote 36 quotes Paul H. Peterson's 1989 characterization of the sermons as "hyperbole or incendiary talk," "likely designed to frighten church members into conforming with Latter-day Saint principles," and concedes that "it is likely that in at least one instance, a few Latter-day Saints acted on this rhetoric." The essay quotes the First Presidency 1889 Manifesto and attributes Mountain Meadows to "tragic decisions by local Church leaders." ↩︎ ↩︎
Brigham Young, "To Know God is Eternal Life—God the Father of Our Spirits and Bodies—Things Created Spiritually First—Atonement By the Shedding of Blood," discourse of February 8, 1857, delivered in the Tabernacle, Journal of Discourses 4:215–221 (Liverpool: S. W. Richards, 1857). Scribed by George D. Watt. Available at https://jod.mrm.org/4/215. The CES Letter does not cite or quote this sermon; it contains Brigham's own qualifying statements that "the wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle's being in full force, but the time will come when the law of God will be in full force" and, in full, "But now I say, in the name of the Lord, that if this people will sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life." Note that this discourse is sometimes confused in secondary literature with the September 21, 1856 sermon ("The People of God Disciplined By Trials"); the two are distinct sermons in the same volume of Journal of Discourses. ↩︎ ↩︎
Brigham Young, "The People of God Disciplined By Trials—Atonement By the Shedding of Blood—Our Heavenly Father—A Privilege Given to All the Married Sisters in Utah," discourse of September 21, 1856, delivered in the Bowery, Journal of Discourses 4:51–57 (Liverpool: S. W. Richards, 1857), with the blood-atonement passages at 4:53–54. Scribed by George D. Watt. Available at https://jod.mrm.org/4/51. The same meeting featured Jedediah M. Grant's companion sermon, Journal of Discourses 4:49–51. The "We need a reformation in the midst of this people; we need a thorough reform" passage is at JD 4:52. The CES Letter renders the sacrifice list as "the blood of a lamb, or a calf, or of turtle dove"; the primary Journal of Discourses text reads "the blood of a lamb, of a calf, or of turtle doves." The CES Letter's own quotation (reproduced verbatim in the article's
[^CLBloodAtonement]block above) preserves the CES Letter's transcription; the JD-attributed quotations elsewhere in the article conform to the primary source. ↩︎Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), s.v. "Journal of Discourses" (entry by Ronald G. Watt). https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Journal_of_Discourses. Of the 1,438 discourses preserved in the 26 volumes, "Brigham Young gave 390; John Taylor, 162; Orson Pratt, 127; Heber C. Kimball, 113; and George Q. Cannon, 111." ↩︎
Paul H. Peterson, "The Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857: The Rhetoric and the Reality," Journal of Mormon History 15 (1989): 59–87. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/mormonhistory/vol15/iss1/1/. Peterson's article is the standard scholarly treatment of the Reformation period and establishes the temporal boundaries (September 1856 to spring 1858), the environmental triggers, Jedediah M. Grant's revivalist methods (including the four-day Kaysville conference beginning Saturday, September 13, 1856, with nearly five hundred immersed under Grant's direction, pp. 65–66), and the framing of Reformation rhetoric as homiletic-revivalist rather than policy-establishing. Citing the February 8, 1857 discourse (JD 4:219, his n. 113), Peterson concludes that Brigham "probably entertained a theoretical notion of an ideal future theocratic society that would require individuals to atone for grievous sin," while "he clearly recognized that such a practice would be illegal according to existing statutes"; the belief "influenced the course of capital punishment legislation in Utah, but outside of this it was largely hypothetical." He writes: "While references to blood atonement can be found both before and after the Reformation, those made in September 1856 are among the most pointed and oft-referred to" (p. 67). His judgment that Brigham "was not above using hyperbole or incendiary talk to bring about desired results" (p. 67) is quoted in part in endnote 36 of the Gospel Topics Essay "Peace and Violence." Peterson's earlier BYU dissertation ("The Mormon Reformation," Ph.D. diss., 1981) is the foundational document for the published article. ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 134:1, 7–10 (1835). Adopted by unanimous vote at a general assembly of the Church on August 17, 1835. Verses 7, 8, 9, and 10 disavow any role for religious societies in administering criminal punishment ("we do not believe that any religious society has authority to try men on the right of property or life, to take from them this world's goods, or to put them in jeopardy of either life or limb"), restrict religious societies' legitimate response to "excommunication" and "withdraw[ing] from them their fellowship," and assign criminal punishment to civil authority ("by the laws of that government in which the offense is committed"). The Joseph Smith Papers project documents the August 17, 1835 adoption: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/declaration-on-government-and-law-circa-august-1835-dc-134/1. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 26:2 (1830). The full verse: "And all things shall be done by common consent in the church, by much prayer and faith, for all things you shall receive by faith. Amen." Revealed in 1830 and canonized with the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, the common-consent rule predates the Reformation rhetoric by twenty-six years. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," p. 63. The refrain is repeated on pp. 64, 66, and 69. ↩︎
Bruce R. McConkie to Thomas B. McAffee, October 18, 1978. McConkie wrote under direction of President Spencer W. Kimball and the First Presidency. Key passages: "There simply is no such thing among us as a doctrine of blood atonement that grants a remission of sins or confers any other benefit upon a person because his own blood is shed for sins"; "Brigham Young and the others were speaking of a theoretical principle that operated in ages past and not in either their or our day"; "This doctrine can only operate in a day when there is no separation of Church and State and when the power to take life is vested in the ruling theocracy as was the case in the day of Moses"; "From the day of Joseph Smith to the present there has been no single instance of so-called blood atonement under any pretext." The letter is widely circulated; the full text is reproduced at SHIELDS, http://www.shields-research.org/General/blood_atonement.htm, and it is quoted in part in the Wikipedia article "Blood atonement," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_atonement. ↩︎
Brigham Young to Isaac C. Haight, September 10, 1857. Transcribed in Richard E. Turley Jr., "The Mountain Meadows Massacre," Ensign, September 2007, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2007/09/the-mountain-meadows-massacre, which also records Haight's "sobbed like a child" / "Too late, too late" reaction; reproduced and analyzed in Walker/Turley/Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008), and in Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950; rev. 1962). The Ensign transcription, original spelling preserved, reads: "In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them untill they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of[.] [I]f those who are there will leave let them go in peace. While we should be on the alert, on hand and always ready we should also possess ourselves in patience, preserving ourselves and property ever remembering that God rules." Original held in the Brigham Young letterbooks, Church History Library. ↩︎
Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 5–6 on George A. Smith's preaching tour and the September 1857 events. The definitive scholarly history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Written with full Church Historian's Office cooperation; Richard E. Turley Jr. was Assistant Church Historian at the time of writing. The Gospel Topics Essay "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints" summarizes the book's conclusion: "while intemperate preaching about outsiders by Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and other leaders contributed to a climate of hostility, President Young did not order the massacre." The book reproduces and analyzes the September 10, 1857 letter from Brigham Young to Isaac Haight, the September 1857 George A. Smith preaching tour through southern Utah, the timing of James Haslam's ride from Cedar City to Salt Lake City and back, and the Lee prosecution. ↩︎
Henry B. Eyring, statement at the 150th anniversary commemoration of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, September 11, 2007. "150th Anniversary of Mountain Meadows Massacre," Church Newsroom, September 11, 2007, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/150th-anniversary-of-mountain-meadows-massacre; discussed in Turley/Brown 2023. Eyring: "What was done here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct. . . . We cannot change what happened, but we can remember and honor those who were killed here." The statement also placed responsibility: "the responsibility for the massacre lies with local leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the regions near Mountain Meadows who also held civic and military positions and with members of the Church acting under their direction." ↩︎
Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), s.v. "Blood Atonement" (entry by Lowell M. Snow). https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Blood_Atonement. The entry states: "This view is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time." It frames Brigham's Reformation rhetoric as theoretical Mosaic-theocratic principle ("Since such a theocracy has not been operative in modern times, the practical effect of the idea was its use as a rhetorical device"), and emphasizes that Christ's atonement is the means by which sins are forgiven for those who repent. ↩︎
"Manifesto of the Presidency and Apostles," December 12, 1889, signed by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. Transcript at the Wilford Woodruff Papers, https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/documents/9f5e09f2-1b79-49d4-9328-e670e2d7d184; also reproduced in Messages of the First Presidency, ed. James R. Clark, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965–75), 3:183–187. The Manifesto states: "We denounce as entirely untrue the allegation which has been made, that our Church favors or believes in the killing of persons who leave the Church or apostatize from its doctrines. We would view a punishment of this character for such an act with the utmost horror; it is abhorrent to us and is in direct opposition to the fundamental principles of our creed." Issued in response to federal anti-Mormon agitation during the Edmunds Act period. ↩︎