Violence on the Mormon Frontier: Fact or Fiction? Elder Bruce R. McConkie insisted: ‘There is not one historical instance of so-called blood atonement in this dispensation,” yet recent researchers have concluded that Brigham Young’s support of “holy murder” helped create a “culture of violence” that promoted crimes ranging from individual murders to massacres. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism characterized blood atonement as a “rhetorical device” that “has never been practiced by the Church at any time.” Yet historian Juanita Brooks concluded blood atonement was a “literal and terrible reality.” What was the actual level of religiously motivated violence in frontier Mormonism?

Edward Leo Lyman, D. Michael Quinn, William Shepard, Polly Aird