Lying for the Lord

Lying for the Lord is the practice of presenting deception as a means of defending religious authority or advancing the interests of the Kingdom of God. The book also identifies it by the related term Theocratic ethics. The expression gathers together a public denial of plural marriage, the legal arrangements used to privilege religious law, and Jacob Hamblin’s conduct as both a protector of the Church and a self-interested operator. Its importance lies in the gap it reveals between claims of sacred purpose and the consequences of withholding or distorting the truth.

Concealment of plural marriage

When the first wagon trains left Nauvoo in February 1846, only a handful of the emigrants knew that Church leaders were already practicing plural marriage. At Sugar Creek in Iowa, nine miles beyond the western banks of the Mississippi River, the doctrine was shared openly with the rank and file. The revelation of the practice within the emigrant community did not end concealment from the wider public.

Brigham Young and his counselors continued to deny that Mormons practiced polygamy for years, including after the Saints had settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley. That public posture persisted as the United States expanded westward and Utah became part of the country after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The book presents concealment as a response to political vulnerability: the Saints’ effort to establish a religious community beyond the reach of outside authority was complicated when the republic followed them west.

Divine and civil authority

The expression is tied to a larger dispute over which rules should govern. Brigham Young argued that God’s laws took precedence over human laws, especially those imposed by Gentile governments. In Deseret, Mormon lawmakers expanded the authority of probate courts controlled by Brigham Young, displacing federal jurisdiction in practice. Most probate judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were composed almost entirely of Mormons who based verdicts on instructions from Church leaders.

These arrangements show how religious authority could operate through institutions as well as public claims. The issue was not only whether plural marriage would be acknowledged, but which authority had the power to define and enforce the law. The book’s account links the language of religious duty to a system in which local courts could make Church leadership’s interpretation prevail when it conflicted with federal law.

Jacob Hamblin and the limits of testimony

Jacob Hamblin’s reputation among the Saints of southern Utah was captured by his nickname, Honest Jake. The book sets that reputation against evidence that he lied when he believed it would advance the Kingdom of God, and also when doing so would enrich him. John D. Lee used sharply different nicknames for Hamblin, a contrast that underscores how disputed his character was.

In September 1857, after the Mountain Meadows massacre, Hamblin directed a robbery of the William Dukes wagon train. The emigrants had paid Mormon guides $1,815 for an escort, but a band posing as Paiutes took their possessions, including more than three hundred cattle. Some of the apparent attackers had blue eyes, curly hair, and patches of white skin; according to the account, Mormons had painted their faces to resemble Paiutes, following Hamblin’s instructions. The Paiutes received a few cattle, while Hamblin kept most of the herd, claiming he was safeguarding it for the emigrants. When William Dukes sent someone to reclaim the animals, Hamblin hid most of them in the mountains for three weeks, until the representative left nearly empty-handed.

Hamblin was not at the Mountain Meadows when the Fancher train was attacked and did not directly participate in the massacre. Afterward, however, he lied about what he knew in order to protect the Church. That history bears directly on his 1869 report that the Shivwits had confessed to killing John Wesley Powell’s men. Powell corroborated Hamblin’s account, but the book asks whether he understood the Shivwits’ words or simply repeated Hamblin’s translation. The distinction matters: the credibility of a confession depends not only on who gave it, but also on who interpreted it.

A disputed moral vocabulary

The book does not treat every religious claim or act of concealment as interchangeable. Instead, it uses Lying for the Lord to name a specific justification: deception presented as service to a sacred cause. In the plural-marriage dispute, the phrase describes a public denial maintained alongside a private practice. In Hamblin’s story, it also sits beside deception carried out for personal gain, making the claimed defense of religious community harder to separate from self-interest.

The expression therefore marks a collision between religious loyalty, institutional control, and accountability to people outside the group. It also shapes how evidence is read: Hamblin’s past does not by itself settle what happened in the later account of the Shivwits’ confession, but it gives the reader reason to examine his testimony and the role of translation with caution.