Blood Atonement — What Was Taught and What Was Never Practiced
Blood atonement is the hardest material in the nineteenth-century Utah pulpit record, and an honest defense does not begin by claiming the sermons were mild. They were not. It begins with an honest account of how reliable the record of them actually is, then the sermons themselves quoted in full and the season they came out of, and then the thing they never became: no ordinance, no committee, no designated place, and no case ever established against the Church.
What Was Actually Said
First, a Note on the Source
Every sermon quoted below comes from the Journal of Discourses, and what that publication is bears directly on how much weight any single sentence in it can carry. A reader is owed that before the quotations, not after them. It was a private commercial venture: George D. Watt began it in 1854, printed it in Liverpool, and sold it by subscription to support his family, with a written endorsement from the First Presidency but not their editorial control. The Church took over the publication in 1860, and it ran to twenty-six volumes before ending in 1886. It was never an official publication, and the Church says so directly:
Gospel Topics, “Journal of Discourses”
“The Journal of Discourses is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
“Questions have been raised about the accuracy of some transcriptions. Modern technology and processes were not available for verifying the accuracy of transcriptions, and some significant mistakes have been documented.”
“By itself it is not an authoritative source of Church doctrine.”
The mechanism explains why. These sermons were preached extemporaneously, from no manuscript, with no recording of any kind. Watt took them down in Pitman shorthand, later transcribed his own notes — editing and rewriting as he wrote — and sent the result to England to be typeset. The speaker did not review it before it was printed. There is no stage anywhere in that chain at which anyone compared the published paragraph against what was said.
That is not a theoretical worry. Watt’s original shorthand survives, and LaJean Purcell Carruth — who spent decades learning to read it and transcribes it for the Church History Library — has now compared hundreds of sermons against their printed versions. Her finding is that the published texts “often differ significantly from what speakers actually said according to the original shorthand record.” Individual sermons diverge by hundreds of words. Whole passages appear in print with no shorthand behind them at all, including a large share of the scripture quotations. Other passages were simply dropped. And Watt routinely converted the speaker’s questions into flat declarative statements.
That last habit is worth sitting with, because it runs against the direction a defender would prefer. If Watt’s tendency was to turn questions into assertions, then the printed Journal of Discourses is likely to read as more categorical than the pulpit was, not less. Whatever the shorthand of these particular sermons would show, the plausible error runs toward harshness.
So the discipline has to cut both ways, and this page will not use any of it as an escape hatch. No shorthand comparison has yet been published for the 1856–57 Reformation sermons or for the February 1857 discourse. That means the wording quoted below is unconfirmed against the original record — it does not mean it is refuted. Unverified is not disproved, and a page that treated it as disproved would be doing exactly what it accuses critics of doing.
The honest use of all this is narrow. It means no single sentence from the Journal of Discourses should be treated as a verbatim, doctrinally binding utterance — not by a critic building a case and not by a defender parsing a clause. It does not mean the sermons did not happen or that their substance is in doubt; Roberts, the 1889 First Presidency, and the Church in 2010 all engage the substance rather than deny it. And it changes nothing in the argument this page makes, which takes the printed text at its harshest and rests on something no transcription question can touch: what was done afterward. The full account of this source — how it came to exist, who wrote the words down, what the surviving shorthand shows when it is laid beside the printed page, and the tests any single quotation from it has to pass — is set out at The Journal of Discourses — Is It a Valid Source?
The Sermons
With that stated, here is the text unabridged. On 21 September 1856, in the Bowery at Great Salt Lake City, Brigham Young preached the discourse in which the idea is most fully set out:
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 4:53 (21 September 1856)
“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; and the smoking incense would atone for their sins, whereas, if such is not the case, they will stick to them and remain upon them in the spirit world.”
Note the structure of that sentence, because it is the structure of the doctrine: the man himself is willing, and what he is willing to have happen is the offering of his own life. A page later, in the same sermon:
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 4:53–54
“And furthermore, I know that there are transgressors, who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them, and that the law might have its course.”
“There are sins that can be atoned for by an offering upon an altar, as in ancient days; and there are sins that the blood of a lamb, of a calf, or of turtle doves, cannot remit, but they must be atoned for by the blood of the man.”
Jedediah M. Grant, then Second Counselor in the First Presidency, spoke the same day and went past that structure, into a proposal for machinery:
Jedediah M. Grant, “Rebuking Iniquity,” Journal of Discourses 4:49–50 (21 September 1856)
“I say, that there are men and women that I would advise to go to the President immediately, and ask him to appoint a committee to attend to their case; and then let a place be selected, and let that committee shed their blood.”
“… if they are covenant breakers we need a place designated, where we can shed their blood.”
Five months later, on 8 February 1857, Young returned to the subject in the Tabernacle and put it to the people in front of him as a question about their own willingness.
Brigham Young, “To Know God is Eternal Life, Etc.,” Journal of Discourses 4:219–220 (8 February 1857)
“Will you love your brothers or sisters likewise, when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of their blood?”
“This is loving our neighbor as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it.”
“I could refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain, in order to atone for their sins. … That is the way to love mankind.”
The March 1856 Sermon
Earlier still, on 16 March 1856, Young gave bishops the illustration that every critical treatment of this subject leads with, and it deserves to be quoted rather than avoided:
Brigham Young, “Instructions to the Bishops, Etc.,” Journal of Discourses 3:247 (16 March 1856)
“Suppose you found your brother in bed with your wife, and put a javelin through both of them, you would be justified, and they would atone for their sins, and be received into the kingdom of God.”
That sentence is indefensible as rhetoric. It tells a room of bishops that a husband who kills two people in a moment of discovery would be justified, and it attaches a salvific outcome to the killing. No reading of context repairs it, and no defense of the underlying idea requires defending it. It should never have been said.
B. H. Roberts, the Church’s own historian, said as much when he came to this material — he opens his treatment by calling these sermons what they were:
B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church, 4:126 (1930)
“certain extreme and unqualified utterances of some of the leading elders of the church”
The Season These Sermons Came From
Context does not make the javelin sentence acceptable, and nothing below is offered to excuse it. But a reader who encounters these sermons with no sense of who was in that Bowery, and what had been done to them, will misjudge what kind of speech it was. This was not a settled, secure people speculating about violence in the abstract. It was a refugee population that had buried its dead and had every reason to believe the killing was not finished.
Within Living Memory of Everyone Present
- Their founding prophet murdered. Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed by a mob at Carthage Jail on 27 June 1844. The men tried for it were acquitted. Nobody was ever punished.
- A state ordered their extermination. Missouri Executive Order 44, issued by Governor Lilburn W. Boggs on 27 October 1838, directed that the Latter-day Saints be “exterminated or driven from the State.” Three days later seventeen were killed at Haun’s Mill.
- Driven out twice more. Expelled from Missouri in 1838–39 and from Nauvoo, Illinois, beginning in 1846 — leaving improved farms and a temple behind both times.
- Named a national target. The new Republican Party’s first national platform, adopted in June 1856 — three months before these sermons — called on Congress to prohibit in the territories “those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.”
- Hardship on the ground. Grasshopper plagues and crop failures in 1855 and 1856 and a continuing drought had brought real hunger. Church leaders read the suffering as chastening for laxity, and the Reformation began that September as a call to repentance.
- The road ran through their valley. Salt Lake sat astride the overland trail. Emigrant trains bound for California passed through the settlements continuously, including men from the very states that had driven them out.
Two points of chronology matter here, because they are commonly got wrong in both directions. The federal army did not prompt these sermons: President Buchanan ordered the expedition in May 1857, and Brigham Young learned of it on 24 July 1857 at Big Cottonwood Canyon — ten months after Grant’s sermon and five months after Young’s February discourse. And no federal anti-polygamy statute existed yet; the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act came in 1862. What existed in 1856 was a national political campaign to criminalize the Saints’ central domestic institution, and a decade of unpunished mob violence behind them. The army came afterward and confirmed the fear rather than creating it.
That was also simply an era of political violence in America. The 1850s produced the sacking of Lawrence, the caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, and the running warfare of Bleeding Kansas — all in 1856, the same year as these sermons. Fierce, absolute, blood-invoking rhetoric was the common register of American public speech in that decade. It does not excuse what was said in the Bowery, but it explains why the register sounds so foreign now, and it is worth asking why only one community’s version of it is remembered.
One further detail bears on what came of Grant’s proposal: Jedediah Grant died of pneumonia on 1 December 1856, roughly ten weeks after asking for a committee and a place. The man who made the proposal was dead before the year was out, and no one took it up.
The Church Was Never the Executioner
This is the claim that carries the subject, and it is unbroken. At no point was any ecclesiastical office authorized to put a person to death. There was no ordinance, no rite, no procedure, no officer acting in a priesthood capacity, and no channel through which such a thing could have been ordered. Nothing in the record touches it — not Grant, not Young, not the courts, not the federal investigators, not the Church’s own archive.
What the teaching actually described is visible in the structure of Young’s own sentences: the transgressor is the one who is willing, and it is his own life that is offered. Joseph Fielding Smith later stated the same structure about as carefully as it can be stated:
Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, 1:134–135
“Man may commit certain grievous sins—according to his light and knowledge—that will place him beyond the reach of the atoning blood of Christ. If then he would be saved, he must make sacrifice of his own life to atone—so far as in his power lies—for that sin, for the blood of Christ alone under certain circumstances will not avail.”
The man makes the sacrifice. That is the doctrine, and it is the same in 1856 and in Smith’s statement a century later.
Two passages from that season exceed it, and this page concedes both rather than explaining them away. Grant asked that the President appoint a committee and that a place be selected. Young, in February 1857, told his hearers that if a man wanted salvation and it required spilling his blood, “spill it” — a question and then an imperative directed at the people in the room. Neither can be read as a description of what a guilty man would want for himself. They are other people as agents.
But notice precisely what they are and are not. Neither makes the Church the executioner. Grant’s committee would have been an ad hoc body, not an office of the Church, and it was never appointed. Young’s imperative is framed as neighbor to neighbor — the whole passage is an exposition of loving one’s neighbor as oneself — not as an instruction to bishops acting ecclesiastically. And both were conditioned on a man who wanted it. Neither authorizes anyone to touch an unwilling person, and no unwilling person was ever touched under either.
Young also asserted that it had happened before — “I could refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain.” That is a claim, not evidence. He named no case, no date, no victim, no authorizing act, then or afterward, and none has been established since. An undocumented pulpit assertion that something occurred proves no more than an undocumented assertion that it did not. Roberts and the 1889 First Presidency both had far better access to the answer than Young’s hearers did, and both concluded there was nothing there.
Nothing Was Ever Instituted
The second fact is about outcome rather than intent, and it is the one no interpretation of the sermons can reach. Grant asked for a committee; no committee was ever appointed. He asked for a place to be designated; no place was ever designated. Nothing was made an ordinance, a rite, a procedure, or a policy. Roberts, writing with access to the Church’s own archive, states the outcome directly:
B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church, 4:126–137
“the suggestions seemingly made in the overzealous words of some of these leading elders were never acted upon. The Church never incorporated them into her polity.”
Thirty-three years after the Reformation sermons, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve put the same claim into an official declaration, at a moment when the Church was under federal pressure and had every incentive to be believed:
Official Declaration of the First Presidency and the Twelve, Salt Lake City, 12 December 1889
“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.”
“Notwithstanding all the stories told about the killing of apostates, no case of this kind has ever occurred, and of course has never been established against the Church we represent.”
“Hundreds of seceders from the Church have continuously resided and now live in this territory, many of whom have amassed considerable wealth, though bitterly opposed to the Mormon faith and people.”
That last sentence is the part critics rarely engage. Utah Territory in the 1880s was full of men who had left the Church, said so loudly, prospered locally, and were not touched. A society running an execution program against apostates does not produce a wealthy, vocal, resident population of them.
What the Record Does Not Contain
- No committee. Grant asked the President to appoint one. None was appointed.
- No place. Grant asked for a designated site. None was designated.
- No ordinance or procedure. Nothing was written into handbooks, liturgy, or Church polity.
- No case by order. There is no documented instance of any person put to death for blood atonement by order of Brigham Young or of any general authority of the Church.
- No legal order to operate in. The teaching presupposed a full theocratic jurisdiction administering capital law. Utah was a federal territory with federal courts. That jurisdiction never existed.
What the Standard Works Teach
The canon is not silent, and it does not go where the sermons went. Christ’s atonement is infinite; no man’s death supplements it for the purpose of salvation:
“Wherefore, it must needs be an infinite atonement—save it should be an infinite atonement this corruption could not put on incorruption.”
And where the canon addresses the killer directly, it hands him to the civil law rather than to the Church:
“And it shall come to pass, that if any persons among you shall kill they shall be delivered up and dealt with according to the laws of the land; for remember that he hath no forgiveness; and it shall be proved according to the laws of the land.”
The Gravity of Murder in Canon
- D&C 42:18 — “Thou shalt not kill; and he that kills shall not have forgiveness in this world, nor in the world to come.” Some sins are placed beyond ordinary remission.
- 1 John 3:15 — “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” The New Testament makes the same judgment of the deliberate taking of life.
- Alma 34:10–16 — Christ’s infinite and eternal sacrifice is the only atonement that saves; no mortal blood substitutes for it.
What Hebrews 11 Does and Does Not Establish
Defenders of this teaching commonly reach for the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, and it is worth being exact about what the passage can carry — because it is usually asked to carry more than it will.
“Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:”
What the verse does establish is real, and it disposes of the reflex objection. Scripture knows a category in which a person refuses deliverance and accepts death because he values his standing in the resurrection above the remainder of his mortal life — and it does not file that under horror. It files it under faith, in the chapter the New Testament reserves as its roll of the faithful. Anyone whose whole case against this teaching is that the very idea of a life laid down for an eternal end is self-evidently monstrous has an argument with Hebrews 11 before he has one with Brigham Young. The disanalogies are worth stating plainly rather than leaving for a critic to find: the people in Hebrews 11 are innocent rather than guilty, and they are refusing to recant under persecution rather than offering recompense for sin.
What the verse does not do is make the community an executioner — and that is the parallel worth drawing. The people in Hebrews 11 are killed by persecutors, from outside; the believing community never holds the sword, and the chapter’s praise runs entirely to the sufferer, those “of whom the world was not worthy.” That is the same shape the doctrine has when it is stated carefully: a death the person accepts, never a death the Church administers. Which is exactly why the February 1857 sermon is the passage that has to be conceded rather than defended. Everywhere else the structure holds; there, and only there, the question of shedding a man’s blood was put to the men sitting in the room.
Read together, the canon holds both halves without the sermons’ conclusion: murder is a sin of singular gravity, and the murderer is “delivered up” to the laws of the land. There is no scriptural warrant anywhere in the standard works for an ecclesiastical execution.
One Statement Filed Here That Belongs Elsewhere
Critics routinely list Young’s 8 March 1863 statement — “If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot” (Journal of Discourses 10:110) — under blood atonement. It does not belong here. There is no atoning language in it, no offering imagery, no shedding-as-remission, and no element of the transgressor’s own request. It is a racial capital-penalty statement, and it belongs to a different discussion — one this site takes up at The Priesthood Ban — What It Was and Why It Ended and The Book of Mormon Is Not a Racist Document. Filing it under blood atonement inflates the count of blood-atonement statements by borrowing one that fails every element of the definition.
The Church’s Position
On 18 October 1978, Elder Bruce R. McConkie answered a written inquiry from Thomas B. McAffee, then a law student at the University of Utah. McConkie stated in the letter that he was replying to McAffee’s 20 September 1978 letter to President Spencer W. Kimball, at the request of President Kimball and the First Presidency:
Bruce R. McConkie to Thomas B. McAffee, 18 October 1978
“If by blood atonement is meant the shedding of the blood of men to atone in some way for their own sins, the answer is No.”
“… 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.”
The letter was later submitted by the First Presidency to the court in the 1994 trial of James Edward Wood in Idaho, after Wood’s defense alleged that a local Church leader had spoken to him about shedding his own blood. (This is a separate matter from the 1982 Utah case also captioned State v. Wood, with which it is often confused.)
In June 2010, in connection with the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner, the Church issued a public statement:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, public statement, June 2010
“In the mid-19th century, when rhetorical, emotional oratory was common, some church members and leaders used strong language that included notions of people making restitution for their sins by giving up their own lives. However, so-called ‘blood atonement,’ by which individuals would be required to shed their own blood to pay for their sins, is not a doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in and teach the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people.”
Note what that statement does and does not do. It does not pretend the sermons were mild; it names the rhetoric and the era. What it denies is the operative claim — that anyone is required to shed his own blood to pay for sin.
The Biblical Comparison
The critic’s argument has to be tested against the standard it claims to apply. The Bible prescribes lethal sanctions at length, and does so through a judicial process:
Capital Law Administered Through Judges
- Deuteronomy 17:6–7 — “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death.” Capital sanction requires corroborated testimony before a tribunal.
- Deuteronomy 17:12 — Death prescribed for the man who will not hearken to the priest or “unto the judge” — the sentence runs through the standing judicial order.
- Leviticus 20 — Death prescribed for adultery, certain sexual acts, and cursing parents, administered by the congregation of Israel under the law.
Critics do not conclude from these passages that biblical religion is inherently homicidal. They contextualize: commands given to Israel under a specific covenantal and judicial order are distinguished from the enduring doctrinal core of the faith.
And the Underlying Proposition Is Not Obsolete
There is a reflex that treats the whole subject as self-evidently medieval — the idea that any offense could be grave enough to warrant a life. That reflex does not survive contact with current American law. Capital punishment for murder is the law federally and in a majority of states; Utah still permits execution by firing squad, and Idaho made the firing squad its primary method in 2025.
The harder case is more recent still. Since 2023, three states have made the sexual abuse of a young child a capital offense — Florida in 2023, Tennessee in 2024, and Idaho in 2025. Those statutes are not presently enforceable: in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008) the Supreme Court held, five to four, that the Eighth Amendment forbids the death penalty for crimes against an individual that do not result in death, and Florida’s first prosecution under its statute ended in a plea to life without parole. The legislatures passed them anyway, as open challenges to that precedent.
The point is not that those legislatures are right, and this page takes no position on whether they are. The point is that three of them voted, in this decade, that certain offenses against children are grave enough to warrant death — which makes it difficult to treat the underlying proposition as a nineteenth-century religious aberration that civilization has since outgrown. The question is live and contested in American law right now.
One distinction has to be kept clean, though, because it cuts against a careless use of this argument. Everything in the paragraphs above concerns punishment imposed by the state, after trial, on an unwilling defendant. That is not what blood atonement described. The doctrine at issue here was a man’s own offering of his own life — which is why the civil comparison establishes proportionality, and nothing more. It answers the objection that the gravity claim is barbaric. It does not, and is not offered to, justify anyone killing anyone.
Applied consistently, then, the contextualizing standard critics extend to Leviticus and Deuteronomy is what the 1856–57 material is owed. The difference in the Utah case runs in the Church’s favor: the biblical statutes were law in a jurisdiction that actually existed and were carried out, whereas the Utah sermons described a jurisdiction that never came into being and produced no procedure and no established case.
The Modern Cases
Two twentieth-century murder cases are regularly attached to this subject, and the first thing to concede is the general point: ideas do echo across generations, and a religious tradition does not get to disown its vocabulary the moment someone misuses it. Denying that outright would be evasive. The argument here is narrower and specific to these two cases — that invoking a phrase is not inheriting a doctrine, and that in both cases the operative authority was a self-appointed prophet’s fresh revelation, with “blood atonement” attached afterward as borrowed vocabulary that does not fit the facts.
The Lafferty Murders (24 July 1984, American Fork, Utah)
Ron and Dan Lafferty killed Brenda Wright Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica. Neither man was a member of the Church: Dan had been excommunicated in 1982, Ron in 1983, both before the murders. Ron was involved with Robert Crossfield’s School of the Prophets, a fundamentalist group with no connection to the Church.
The claimed authority for the killings was not any nineteenth-century sermon. It was a document Ron wrote in March 1984, entered into the record as the “removal revelation,” which purported to command that he “remove” four named individuals — Brenda and her baby, Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe — because they had become obstacles to his work. The operative language is removal of obstacles, not atonement for sin. When Ron showed the document to the School of the Prophets, its members were alarmed and forced the brothers out; even the fringe group he belonged to rejected it.
Two further facts settle it. The documented motives were grievance-based: Brenda had encouraged Ron’s wife to leave him and had opposed the brothers’ fundamentalism. And an infant of fifteen months has no sins requiring expiation under any formulation of the idea, LDS or otherwise — there is no version of blood atonement that reaches Erica. Randy Johnson, the American Fork chief of police who ran the investigation and who has since studied and taught on ritual and occult crime, has said the killings were not blood atonement or any other kind of ritual killing, and that what drove them was Ron’s anger and desire for vengeance under a religious cover.
The 4 O’Clock Murders (27 June 1988, Houston and Irving, Texas)
Four people were shot in coordinated attacks at four o’clock on the same afternoon: Mark Chynoweth, his brother Duane Chynoweth, Duane’s eight-year-old daughter Jennifer, and Eddie Marston. The three adults were defectors from Ervil LeBaron’s Church of the Lamb of God — a polygamous sect that had broken from the Church generations earlier and had no relationship to it. Heber LeBaron, Patricia LeBaron, and Douglas Barlow were convicted for their parts in the killings; Aaron LeBaron was later convicted as the orchestrator.
The authority invoked was Ervil LeBaron’s own scripture. Ervil had died on 15 August 1981 at the Utah State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence for ordering the 1977 murder of Rulon C. Allred, the rival polygamist leader of the Apostolic United Brethren. In prison he wrote a four-hundred-page work, The Book of the New Covenants, containing a hit list and a commandment to kill those on it. The 1988 killings executed that list.
Jennifer Chynoweth was not on it. She was eight years old and was shot alongside her father at the scene. Whatever that killing was, it was not an atonement for her sins, and no formulation of the doctrine — Young’s, Grant’s, or Smith’s — reaches an eight-year-old child. What the case actually documents is a man who claimed personal authority to issue death sentences by revelation, and followers who carried them out after his death.
In both cases the chain of authority runs to a living self-appointed prophet, not to a text. The phrase “blood atonement” is applied afterward, by press and prosecutors, to killings whose stated justifications — removing obstacles, executing traitors from a hit list — are not what the phrase means.
And the standard has to be applied evenly. If “an extremist later invoked your text” is disqualifying, then Deuteronomy 20:16–17 — “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — disqualifies the Hebrew Bible; Calvin’s Geneva burning Michael Servetus in 1553 disqualifies Reformed Christianity; and Luther’s 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, which called for burning synagogues and homes and was still being quoted four centuries later, disqualifies Lutheranism. That case is set out at Martin Luther’s Antisemitism Cannot Be Ignored. Nobody applies the standard that way to those traditions, and it should not be applied that way here either.
The Verdict
The sermons are real and they are stronger than most defenses of them admit. Brigham Young put the question of shedding a man’s blood to a congregation and claimed instances had occurred. Jedediah Grant asked for a committee and a place. The javelin illustration was indefensible when it was spoken and is indefensible now. None of that is in dispute here, and a defense that has to hide it is not worth making.
But the doctrine those sermons were reaching for is narrower than the caricature, and it is the one thing that survives every test: the recompense in view is the transgressor’s own, offered by him, for sins he alone committed. No ecclesiastical office was ever authorized to take a life. No ordinance, no rite, no procedure, no officer. The Church was never the executioner — and on that point the record has no gap in it at all.
Nor did the words become anything. No committee was appointed. No place was designated. Nothing entered Church polity. The theocratic jurisdiction the idea presupposed never existed in Utah. No case has ever been established of anyone put to death for blood atonement by order of Brigham Young or of any general authority — not by the federal officials who spent decades investigating the Church, not by the territorial courts, and not by the Church’s own historians. Young’s claim that such instances existed is an assertion he never documented and no one else has documented since.
So the honest verdict is narrower than either side usually wants. This was not a program, and it was not nothing. It was extreme preaching in an extreme season, recorded by a private reporter no one checked, never institutionalized, formally denied in 1889, formally repudiated in 1978 and again in 2010, and never carried out under Church authority in any case anyone has been able to produce.
Appendix — The Willingness Is the Principle
Everything above is about record and outcome. This is about the idea itself, and it is offered as reasoning rather than as doctrine, because there is no doctrine here to state. But something in the scriptural material keeps getting passed over by both sides of the argument, and it is worth setting down.
The Vagueness Is About Method, Not About Willingness
Read the quoted sermons again and notice which half of the picture is specified. Young: transgressors who would be “perfectly willing to have their blood spilt.” Young again: men who “would beg of their brethren.” Grant: a man who goes to the President himself and asks. Joseph Fielding Smith, a century later: “he must make sacrifice of his own life.” In every formulation on this page, the transgressor is the one who wants it. That element never varies.
What varies — what is never stated at all — is the mechanism. By whose hand? On whose warrant? After what finding, by what tribunal, with what appeal, at what place, under what record? None of it appears. Not one of these men ever answered the mechanical question, in the pulpit or afterward.
That silence is the entire leverage the critic has. A teaching that names the willing party and leaves the acting party blank invites a reader to fill the blank in, and the reader fills it in with the Church. But blank is blank. The men speaking in 1856 had no answer to the how because there was no how, and that is the same reason nothing was ever built afterward. You cannot institutionalize a doctrine whose only specified element is a man’s own consent.
Which Half Is the Principle?
So here is the question that the whole subject turns on, and it is rarely asked. Is the fundamental thing that a man gives his life, or that he loses it?
Those are not the same claim. Put two sentences side by side and the distance between them is the distance between the gospel and the caricature.
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
And here is what a critic hears in the 1856 sermons, fairly stated: you have done something so terrible that the only way to make restitution is for you to die.
Both sentences end with a dead man. They have nothing else in common. In the first, the giving carries the meaning — the act is love, and death is what love happened to cost. In the second, the death is the payment and the man is the currency. One is a gift and the other is a debt collection, and no amount of shared outcome makes them the same transaction.
Every scripture that touches this subject sits in the first sentence. Hebrews 11, discussed above, praises men who refused deliverance. John 15 makes the laying down of a life the summit of love rather than the settlement of an account. And the people of Alma 24, whom we will come to, covenanted to die rather than to kill. There is no passage anywhere in the standard works that sits in the second sentence.
The One Life That Actually Was Required
And a life was required. That much is not in question anywhere in the canon — the law demanded a death, and the demand was met.
Doctrine and Covenants 19:16–17
“For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent; But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I.”
Note the shape of it. He suffered so that they would not have to. The alternative is not that someone else pays in blood; the alternative is that the unrepentant man bears his own suffering, and nothing in the verse describes anyone shedding it for him. And when the Savior spoke about how his own life would be taken, he ruled out the taking:
“Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.”
His death was offered, not extracted. The willingness was the thing, stated as plainly as language permits. And Alma is exact about what that offering had to be, and about what it purchased:
“For it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall not be a human sacrifice; but it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice.”
“Now there is not any man that can sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another. Now, if a man murdereth, behold will our law, which is just, take the life of his brother? I say unto you, Nay. But the law requireth the life of him who hath murdered.”
“Therefore, it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice, and then shall there be, or it is expedient there should be, a stop to the shedding of blood; then shall the law of Moses be fulfilled.”
Three things in that passage, and each one runs against where the 1856 sermons were headed. Human sacrifice is ruled out by name, in the same sentence that establishes what the atonement had to be. Blood shed by one man is refused as payment for the sins of another — strictly, verse 11 forecloses the vicarious case rather than the reflexive one, and it is fairer to say so than to stretch it. And verse 13 names the effect: a stop to the shedding of blood, not a warrant for more of it.
So the willing sacrifice of a life was genuinely part of the atonement. It was his. The result it bought was the end of blood being shed, which is a strange foundation on which to build a case for shedding any.
What Was Never Revealed Cannot Be a Doctrine
Part of the honest answer is that this was never a finished thing. No revelation sets it out. There is no section of the Doctrine and Covenants that establishes it, no verse in the Book of Mormon that teaches it, no handbook that ever carried a procedure for it, and no member who has ever been asked to submit to it. A teaching that appears in extemporaneous sermons and nowhere in the canon is speculation in the plain sense of the word — reasoning out past what was actually given. Both sides tend to skip this, because a critic wants it to be doctrine and a defender wants it to be nothing, and it is neither.
What is not speculation is the legal order such a teaching would have required, and the canon closed that order:
“Behold, I am he that gave the law, and I am he who covenanted with my people Israel; therefore, the law in me is fulfilled, for I have come to fulfil the law; therefore it hath an end.”
“Behold, I am the law, and the light. Look unto me, and endure to the end, and ye shall live.”
The law of Moses was the lesser law and it ended. Its capital provisions ended with it. What replaced them, in this dispensation, is the instruction quoted earlier in this page: a killer is “delivered up and dealt with according to the laws of the land” (D&C 42:79). The Church does not put people to death. It hands them to the government that does, and it has done so from 1831 forward. McConkie’s 1978 letter says the same thing from the other end — the idea could only operate where church and state are one, as under Moses. They are not one. So it does not operate, and it never did.
Murder Was Forgiven in the Book of Mormon
Which leaves the hardest question, and the one that settles the rest of them. Is murder truly unforgivable? D&C 42:18 says the killer “shall not have forgiveness in this world, nor in the world to come,” and the whole premise of the 1856 sermons rests on that verse. If some sins are past the reach of ordinary repentance, something else has to reach them.
But the Book of Mormon contains a mass forgiveness of murderers, narrated at length, and it is as close to a controlled test of this idea as scripture provides. The people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi were murderers by their own accounting, and their king says so in the plainest terms available to him:
“And I also thank my God, yea, my great God, that he hath granted unto us that we might repent of these things, and also that he hath forgiven us of those our many sins and murders which we have committed, and taken away the guilt from our hearts, through the merits of his Son.”
Four things about that one sentence. The sins are murders, named as murders. The forgiveness is complete and in the past tense — already done, already granted. The mechanism is stated outright: “through the merits of his Son.” And every last one of these people was alive and well when it happened.
What they did next was bury their weapons and covenant “that rather than shed the blood of their brethren they would give up their own lives” (Alma 24:18). Then the Lamanites came down on them, and they went out and lay on the ground and did not resist, and a thousand and five of them were killed where they lay (Alma 24:21–22).
What Alma 24 Establishes
- The forgiveness came first. It preceded every death by an unmistakable interval — a burial of weapons, a migration, an invasion. Nobody died in order to obtain it.
- Their blood atoned for nothing. The text names the operative merit, and it is not theirs. It is his, and it had already been applied.
- Most of them lived. A thousand and five died out of a people counted in the thousands. If death were the condition of pardon, every survivor died unforgiven — and no one in the record treats them that way.
- More were converted than were killed. “The people of God were joined that day by more than the number who had been slain” (Alma 24:26). The deaths converted the killers. That is the opposite of an execution’s effect.
- The willingness was not optional. It was the covenant itself. They were forgiven, and then they promised to die rather than kill, and then they kept the promise. Nobody administered anything to them.
Read against the sermons, that record does something no amount of parsing of the Journal of Discourses can do. It shows the doctrine working. Murderers are forgiven through the merits of the Son alone, before any of them dies. And what is asked of them afterward is a real willingness to lose their lives rather than take one — a willingness most of them were never called on to make good.
So both halves are in the canon, and they are not the halves the argument usually assumes. The willingness to lay down a life is asked of a disciple, plainly, in the Old World and the New. The taking of a life is asked of no one, ever, anywhere in the standard works. The 1856 sermons were reaching for the first, in a register that let hearers — and every critic since — read them as the second.
Which is finally why the record after 1857 looks the way it does. There was nothing to institute. A committee, a place, a procedure, an officer — all of that belongs to the second sentence, and the second sentence was never the doctrine. What remained was the first, and the first has been the same since Gethsemane: he laid it down of himself, and no man took it from him.