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Reports from those who’ve seen it

Reports from those who’ve seen it

Last updated on: January 12, 2025 at 11:52 pm by Dan Peterson

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Reports from those who’ve seen it 2025-01-12T23:52:25-07:00 Dan Peterson

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An aerial view of Caesarea Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast of Israel, showing the Roman theater, the small peninsula on which Herod’s palace stood, and, in the upper left, the hippodrome. This Caesarea (entirely distinct from Caesarea Philippi) was the Roman capital of Judaea during the time of Jesus and Paul. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

The other day, I saw myself characterized over at the Peterson Obsession Board as a very lonely and unpleasant old man. Curiously, though, I don’t actually feel old.

However, I do admit to having published a column in Meridian Magazine the other day about a man who, some on the Obsession Board might contend, was an apparently kindred spirit — and who is undeniably quite ancient: “A Tear for King Herod”

Brigham Young, ca. 1850

I haven’t watched American Primeval, and I very likely won’t. It just doesn’t appeal to me. Not even slightly. (One suggestion over at the Peterson Obsession Board is that, as the executive producer [with my wife] of, thus far, Robert Cundick: A Sacred Service of Music, Witnesses, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, and Six Days in August, I can’t bring myself to watch it lest I be exposed to actual high-quality filmmaking.) That said, I am interested in American Primeval as a current media phenomenon and for what effect it will likely have on public perceptions of my faith and my church. Accordingly, I’m curious enough about it to want to hear from people whose judgment I respect who have seen the miniseries.

With his permission to do so, I share a response that Steve Densley, the executive vice president of the Interpreter Foundation, posted on Facebook:

Here’s my review of American Primeval:

TLDR: The Old West was violent. Especially the Mormons. Oh. And they were weird religious fanatics.

Extended Version: This show has strong production value with gorgeous, if muted, cinematography. The performances are good. But the writing is sometimes weak as it portrays Latter-day Saints as caricatures of real people. I’m surprised they didn’t give Brigham Young a mustache to twirl as he plotted the expansion of his “kingdom” and the demise of the U.S. Government and any other group that got in his way. The Mormons are religious fanatics, and power-hungry, and their worship services apparently consist only of listening to angry, apocalyptic sermons in darkly lit tents. A brief backstory is provided, by way of photos of news headlines, indicating how the Mormons had been wronged by others when they were driven from their homes and their leader, Joseph Smith, was murdered. But the implied result is that they have become paranoid and consumed with blood lust. While the wrongs committed against them help explain their actions, we are expected to be unsympathetic toward, if not repulsed by, these dangerous weirdos.

Regarding the historical events, much of it is inaccurate and one-dimensional. For example, its portrayal of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is more impressionistic than true to the facts. And, of course, the show falsely indicates that Brigham Young was involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is a position held by almost no historians and based on mere speculation.

In short, you would be well-advised to skip this one. But since it is the number one show on Netflix right now, I’m sure it will be seen by many. The upshot of it is that I think it is likely that people will wonder about the historical events and what Latter-day Saints were really like. (Reasonable people will have their doubts about this show.) It would be nice if it encouraged people to learn more and share the truth with others about Latter-day Saints and their history. Too bad it didn’t have that effect on the filmmakers.

In two prior blog entries, here and here, I’ve actually suggested some resources for learning the truth about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and about Brigham Young and about life in what the late Leonard Arrington called the Latter-day Saints’ “Great Basin Kingdom.”

A monument erected (by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’m told) at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in southern Utah
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

And here are a couple of Facebook reactions from Zander Sturgill, a Latter-day Saint and a Native American who is part of the media team with our friends at Scripture Central. Again, I share these Facebook posts here with his kind permission:

Just forced myself to watch American Primeval on Netflix. It pretty much devolves into madness when the evil bloodthirsty Mormons, dressed in KKK-like hoods, don’t just kill pioneers, but an entire U.S. Army troop, and an entire Shoshone tribe. The series doesn’t claim to be historically accurate, but when it twists historical events that bad, I think it does more harm than good for honest history.

P.S. I published a video about the Mountain Meadows Massacre that I’ll link in the comments. If you’re interested in the real account.

This is Brother Sturgill’s video about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It runs just slightly less than eleven and a half minutes: “The Tragic Mountain Meadows Massacre: How and Why it Happened.” And then, in another Facebook entry, he writes as follows:

I made a little review/response video to American Primeval. I think it’s pretty disappointing, even if it is fiction. I saw some videos of people from India, and realized that the show is telling people that Latter-day Saints are a bloodthirsty, twisted, deranged people. My video is linked in the comments section.

Here is Brother Sturgill’s video review. It runs slightly longer than ten minutes: “What American Primeval Gets Wrong About Latter-day Saints (Mormons) Review”

I confess that the response in India to which Brother Sturgill alludes — I haven’t seen anything about Indian reactions myself, and I don’t know where to find an account of them — concerns me somewhat. India has been bedeviled in recent years by quite a bit of inter-religious violence. From Wikipedia:

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom classified India as Tier-2 in persecuting religious minorities, the same as that of Iraq and Egypt. In a 2018 report, USCIRF charged Hindu nationalist groups for their campaign to “Saffronize” India through violence, intimidation, and harassment against non-Hindus. Approximately one-third of state governments enforced anti-conversion and/or anti-cattle slaughter laws against non-Hindus, and mobs engaged in violence against Muslims whose families have been engaged in the dairy, leather, or beef trades for generations, and against Christians for proselytizing.

And things under Prime Minister Narendra Modi aren’t exactly getting any better. So it doesn’t strike me as especially helpful to inject into that volatile mix a miniseries that arguably portrays Latter-day Saints as “a bloodthirsty, twisted, deranged people.”

Finally, though, I share a couple of comments from the Peterson Obsession Board, which takes a rather different view of things than I do.

The first comes from the POB cast member whose moniker resembles “Dumb Dud”: Evidently abandoning a prior claim that I’ve lately faulted Peggy Fletcher Stack (for her recent Salt Lake Tribune exposé of a supposed crackdown on academic freedom at BYU) and Lindsay Hansen Park (a principal advisor for American Primeval) because they’re gurlz (and, thus, icky with cooties), he has now effectively announced that, if only Lindsay Hansen Park agreed with my views more than she does, I would disagree less with her views. It’s the kind of profound insight that fairly takes one’s breath away.

The second comes from a response to American Primeval that was posted online by an avowed critic of the Church. He didn’t offer unmixed praise for the miniseries, which he thought cinematically flawed. Still, although it finds little or no support in the historical evidence or among reputable historians — quite the contrary, in fact — he really, really liked the historical thrust of the miniseries:

The film did place the blame for the MMM directly on the church, as it should be. It also portrayed Brigham Young as being aware of the MMM. The actor who played Brigham Young did an excellent, well-researched job. Young came across as an arrogant authoritarian, which I believe he was.

Ah, faith!

I’m reliably informed, by the way, that I’m almost uncontrollably, even hysterically, angry about American Primeval. And that could be! I haven’t looked outside for the past few minutes, but it’s very possible that my incandescent rage at the miniseries has set the sidewalks to buckling and the asphalt pavement to boiling. So you should probably maintain a safe distance from me. (Roughly two or three parsecs ought to suffice.)

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