Welcome to Study Faith with AI, where we use the power of AI to help you explore the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I'm Meg Jensen.

And I'm Paul Carter,

and we're Google AIs. Whether you're a lifelong member or just starting to learn about the Church, we're here to dive deep into its history, beliefs, and culture.

So, if you're ready to learn, you're in the right place.

That's right.

Let's get started. 

Welcome to the deep dive. Today we're really digging into a, well, a pretty complex part of early American history.

That's right. We're looking at Joseph Smith's financial activities in Kirtland, Ohio.

We've gathered quite a few historical documents, different analyses, and our mission really is to unpack this period.

Yeah. Figure out the key moments, what actually happened, and um why it mattered.

Kirtland feels like this major crossroads, doesn't it? You have these big spiritual goals of a new religious movement

colliding right up against the hard realities of money and organizing an economy.

And that collision, that interplay, it had some pretty profound consequences down the line.

Definitely. So where should we start? Maybe with Sidney Rigdon.

Yes, absolutely. Let's kick things off with Sidney Rigdon. He is such a pivotal figure here. He was a former Baptist minister, you know,

right? Influenced by Alexander Campbell and that whole restoration movement idea getting back to uh original Christianity.

And here's where it gets really interesting. Like you said, Rigdon converts to what they call the Church of Christ back then,

late 1830.

And the impact is almost immediate, just dramatic.

The speed is what's striking. He converts and boom, soon after, he and Edward Partridge head off to New York

to meet Joseph Smith.

Exactly. And just weeks after that meeting, this major instruction comes out.

Yeah. A revelation from Joseph Smith. It's now Doctrine and Covenants section 37

telling the saints basically pack up moved to Kirtland, Ohio

to escape some kind of unspecified enemy. It's a huge move,

a massive uprooting really spurred on by this new connection with Rigdon.

And Rigdon wasn't just one person. He brought a significant following from his Ohio ministry, right?

And also these theological ideas, primitive Christianity, direct revelation that, well, they really clicked with what Joseph Smith was already developing.

It created this powerful momentum pushing the whole movement west towards Ohio.

So they get to Kirtland. What did they find?

Well, they walk into this interesting social dynamic. Some of the converts already there in Ohio were operating under this idea that basically what belonged to a brother belonged to any of the brethren. A kind of communal living,

an early experiment in communalism.

Exactly. And while the intention might have been noble, the reports say it led to confusion and disappointments.

That makes sense. Idealism without clear structures can get messy fast. Who's responsible for what? You know,

it's a classic challenge for new communities, isn't it? That practical sharing.

Absolutely. You need to find roles otherwise.

Yeah.

Confusion.

But even with that internal confusion, Joseph Smith and the folks arriving from New York got quite a bit of help from these Ohio converts.

They did. Free housing, land, that communal support system was already there for them.

So that initial generosity was key, but it probably also set up a kind of interdependence within the group.

Definitely established a foothold for them, but maybe also created expectations, obligations that would um tie into later financial stuff.

Okay. So, the community is settling in Kirtland. Now, we start seeing more, let's say, formal financial moves

like buying land.

Exactly. Farms right next to Kirtland start getting purchased often on credit by Church leaders.

Okay. Buying big parcels

and then dividing them up into smaller city lots

and selling them off but at higher prices.

Significantly marked up. It appears it's an early sign of land speculation, maybe reflecting that hope for rapid growth. But also relying on credit introduces risk right from the start. A big risk.

And this ambition wasn't just about land. They formed something called the literary and mercantile establishment,

right? Which later gets renamed in the Doctrine and Covenants to sound more uh spiritual

storehouse for the poor of my people.

Yeah. This organization, the United firm, basically pulls together the Church's storehouse and its printing business,

trying to create an economic engine for the Church, manage the money, help the poor.

It's an attempt to structure those earlier communal ideas, put them into a more formal system.

But like a lot of early ventures, it hit snags, financial difficulties,

and even debts among the leaders within the firm,

which led to a well, let's call it an unusual solution,

very unusual. Joseph Smith steps in with what's called a “not-written revelation”.

Not written,

meaning apparently not formally recorded at the time in the same way as others. And it essentially told the members of the firm to forgive the debts owed to them by others in the firm.

Wow. Wiping the slate clean internally via revelation.

Kind of. It shows how spiritual authority was being used to tackle these very earthly economic problems.

But it does raise questions, doesn't it, about transparency, how the average member saw these kinds of decisions.

For sure. And the money pressure in Kirtland was intense. So intense that the Zion's Camp expedition,

the trip to help the Saints in Missouri.

Yeah. that was apparently used at least partly as a way to raise funds to pay off these Kirtland debts.

So things were really interconnected problems in Kirtland affecting missions elsewhere.

Totally.

And with the United firm struggling, they needed other ways to bring in money and deal with the debt,

which leads us to tithing and contributions,

right? The pressure on members to chip in financially, it really ramped up, not just for Church debts, but also the personal debts of the leadership.

It gets blurry where one ends and the other begins.

We even have a record of some Warren Harris being formally charged in a Church council.

Charged with what?

Want of benevolence to the poor and charity to the Church. Basically not contributing enough.

That doesn't sound very voluntary, does it?

Not entirely. It puts people in a tough spot balancing faith and these growing financial demands.

It really highlights that tricky line between free will offering and well community expectation or pressure. How voluntary is charity when not giving enough leads to discipline?

Yeah. complex dynamic. And that brings us to maybe the most famous Kirtland venture, the bank.

Ah, yes. The Kirtland Safety Society.

Initially called the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, established November 1836.

But then they reorganized it slightly, right? As an anti-banking company.

Yes. In January 1837, it's crucial to remember the background here. Andrew Jackson's bank war.

Absolutely. Jackson had dismantled the national bank leading to this explosion of state banks and even unchartered private banks.

A much more decentralized and you could argue unstable financial system

and specie, actual gold and silver coins, was scarce hard currency was hard to come by

so into this volatile scene step Joseph Smith and other Church leaders they decide to start their own private bank

even though they couldn't get a state charter for it in Ohio.

Right, operating without a charter wasn't unheard of then but it was definitely risky politically and financially.

It meant no official state oversight, no stamp of approval that might build public trust. They did try to get a charter, didn't they?

They did. Yeah. Applied to the Ohio legislature, but it failed.

So, plan B.

Plan B seems to have been acquiring a controlling interest in an existing bank over in Michigan. The Bank of Monroe.

Interesting move. Trying to get legitimacy or maybe just access to printing plates or something through an existing charter, even in another state.

Shows their determination or maybe desperation to get this financial engine running.

And like other banks, they started issuing their own paper money, bank notes - basically IOUs, right? Promises to pay the bearer in gold or silver if they brought the note back to the bank.

Exactly. But the value of those notes depended entirely on whether people believe the bank actually had the gold and silver to back them up. Public confidence was everything.

And Joseph Smith wasn't just a bystander here. He was right in the thick of it in the bank's leadership.

His role as prophet was now directly tied to the success or failure of this bank.

Meanwhile, while the bank's getting set up, up. Joseph Smith and others are still buying up land around Kirtland.

Still using credit

often. Yeah. By 1836, Joseph Smith personally owed a pretty significant amount from these land deals and other ventures. Some of it was specifically for setting up that communal economy we talked about earlier.

And that's just the debt we know about from lawsuits later on, right? The actual amount might have been higher

probably. So, you have this growing mountain of debt, personal debt, Church debt, bank setup costs. It's precarious.

The hope must have been that land prices would keep rising and the bank would be a huge success covering everything.

And this is where it gets really tangled. Calls for donations for tithing

start getting explicitly linked not just to Church needs but also to paying off these debts, including the personal debts of the leaders.

It's hard to separate Church finances from the leader's personal finances in the appeals being made.

Raises those questions again about transparency, accountability. How do the average member perceive that?

Yeah. And there's also a suggestion, isn't there, that the bank might have been used to help converts buy land when they moved to Kirtland.

Yeah. Potentially acting as the middleman in real estate deals,

which would tie the members own financial well-being even more closely to the bank's survival. If the bank goes down, maybe their land deal does too.

Exactly. It makes the bank's stability absolutely critical. But well, spoiler alert, it wasn't stable.

No, the whole thing collapsed. The nationwide financial panic of 1837 hit hard.

All right. That affected banks everywhere. And the Bank of Monroe, the one they'd invested in over in Michigan.

That failed, too.

So, the Kirtland Safety Society was vulnerable. Not enough specie, not enough gold and silver reserves,

and they'd apparently issued too many banknotes, maybe made too many loans based on shaky assets. Public confidence just evaporated.

Understandably, people started showing up wanting to trade their Kirtland notes for actual coin,

which the bank couldn't provide.

Nope. They simply didn't have enough hard currency. So, by the summer of 1837, it closed its doors.

Then the fallout was immediate. Lawsuits started flying.

Grandison Newell was a key figure there, suing Joseph Smith and other bank leaders for unauthorized banking under an old 1816 law.

But the accusations went beyond just illegal banking, didn't they?

Oh yeah. Warren Parish, who had been Joseph Smith's scribe and even president of the bank for a short time,

he turned into a major critic,

a very vocal one. He accused Joseph Smith of lying, deception, outright fraud in how the bank was run.

Specific claims - 

claims about exaggerating how much gold and silver they actually had, misrepresenting the value of the currency they were circulating, falsifying the books essentially.

Really serious charges of financial misconduct coming from an insider.

Absolutely. And all this, the bank failure, the lawsuits, parishes accusations, it triggered a massive crisis of faith for many.

The Kirtland apostasy or Kirtland dissension as it's often called.

Confidence in Joseph Smith's leadership just plummeted for a significant group of members. You had people described as intelligent and reasonable members getting really worried

about what specifically?

About what they saw as Joseph Smith grabbing too much power, focusing too much on money and worldly things. They felt that early spiritual focus was being lost.

A spirit of worldly ambition was the phrase some used.

Even Oliver Cowdery, one of the earliest most important figures,

right? One of the Three Witnesses,

he clashed with the leadership over this. He basically refused to accept Church authority, telling him what to do in his temporal his financial affairs

which was seen by some leaders as denying the faith itself.

It shows that deep tension. Where does religious authority end and personal financial autonomy begin?

So people started leaving.

Key people did. Warren Parish obviously Frederick G. Williams who had been a counselor in the first presidency. John Johnson his withdrawal of support apparently hit the bank's solvency hard. The Pratt brothers Orson and Parley were disaffected for a time.

A major hemorrhage of talent and early leadership. And amidst all this chaos,

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon resigned from the bank,

trying to distance themselves, perhaps cut their losses.

Possibly an attempt to manage the fallout, but the damage was largely done by then.

And the legacy of all this, it's huge.

It really is. The immediate consequence was Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon having to flee Kirtland.

Literally fleeing under cover of night in January 1838. Why?

Mounting lawsuits, potential arrest warrants, and just intense opposition - and even threats from former followers and locals

and they arrived in far west Missouri

basically broke & penniless shows the personal financial cost of the Kirtland experiment failing.

This whole Kirtland crisis it's really the first major split, the first big schism in the movement isn't it?

Absolutely. It seriously damaged Joseph Smith's image as a prophet for many and created divisions that lasted.

And did the financial approach change much after this? Say, in Nauvoo?

Well you still see land speculation in Nauvoo. Large-scale economic projects intertwined with Church finances. So, some patterns seem to repeat.

The Kirtland model wasn't entirely abandoned. Then,

it seems the impulse to combine the spiritual and the temporal in these big community building projects continued.

Even the Kirtland Temple, which is such an important spiritual landmark,

got caught up in the financial mess. Years after Joseph Smith's death, there were legal attempts to seize and sell the temple to pay off old judgments against him. from the Kirtland debts.

Wow, that really shows the long shadow this crisis cast.

It does. Thankfully, the reorganized Church, now Community of Christ, under Joseph Smith III, eventually secured and preserved the temple.

It's interesting, though, to contrast Kirtland with what happened later in Utah under Brigham Young.

Yeah, the financial system there, while still having its own complexities and technically issuing its own currency, wasn't fully legal. It seemed more stable, at least internally. Their paper money apparently had better backing or at least enjoyed more trust. within the Mormon community.

Maybe lessons learned, hard lessons from the Kirtland Bank failure.

You'd have to think so. Perhaps a more pragmatic, maybe more tightly controlled approach developed out of that earlier um chaotic experience.

So, wrapping up this deep dive, what we see in Kirtland is just this incredibly complex picture.

Yeah. Ambition, big dreams, but also massive debt operating in a really tough, unregulated banking environment

leading to internal fights, dissent, serious accusations of fraud and mismanagement.

And running through it all is that central theme, Joseph Smith's role as both spiritual leader and um temporal leader, deeply involved in these financial projects.

That blend proved innovative in some ways, but ultimately deeply problematic in Kirtland.

It raises fundamental questions, doesn't it, about how faith and finance mix or maybe sometimes don't mix well.

Which leads us to our final thought for you, the listener. Think about those inherent tensions. When a religious movement gets heavily involved in big financial ventures. What happens?

How does it affect people's faith? How does it impact the community's unity? What does it do to the leader's authority?

What can we learn from Kirtland about that tricky intersection of faith, community, and money? Definitely something to chew on.

A lot to think about.

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