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What motivates “Becoming Brigham”? Not THIS.

What motivates “Becoming Brigham”? Not THIS.

Last updated on: January 31, 2026 at 12:30 pm by Dan Peterson

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What motivates “Becoming Brigham”? Not THIS. 2026-01-31T12:30:47-07:00 Dan Peterson

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An unidentified vagrant, shown here standing in the center, attempted to seize control of the 2024 Six Days in August fireside that preceded that film’s launch while, from left to right, Jenessa Sheffield (Vilate Kimball), Camrey Bagley Fox (Emma Smith), Dave Martinez (Thomas Sharp), Mark Goodman (writer/director), John Donovan Wilson (Brigham Young), Twyla Wilson (Mary Ann Angell Young), and Paul Wuthrich (Joseph Smith) looked on in stunned surprise. The photo was taken by Margaret Dayton, a friend and neighbor who was in the audience, and is used here with her kind permission.

We invite you to attend a special fireside about the Becoming Brigham documentary film project that will be held TONIGHT — Saturday, 31 January 2026 — at 7:00 P.M. in the Orem Lakeview Stake Center: 450 West 1800 South, Orem.

Special guests will include John Donovan Wilson (who played Brigham Young in Six Days in August) and Camrey Bagley Fox (who portrayed Emma Smith in both Witnesses and Six Days in August). They are two of the three co-hosts for Becoming Brigham.

And, while sitting around counting the minutes before tonight’s fireside, you might enjoy reading this article, which was written by Tad Walch for the Deseret News: “New video series seeks to fight back against false claims about a Latter-day Saint prophet: Each episode of ‘Becoming Brigham’ debunks fictions and caricatures of Brigham Young, also known as the American Moses”

From left to right, Elders Wilford Woodruff, Heber C. Kimball, and Brigham Young return home in a scene from Six Days in August.

For something on the order of twenty-one or perhaps even twenty-two years now, a deeply anonymous person whom I’ve labeled (with precise clinical accuracy) my Malevolent Stalker has leveled accusations against me of just about every bad and negative thing that his fecund imagination can invent — including but not limited to dishonesty, racism, mercenary greed, arrogance, disdain for the leaders of my own church, callous cruelty, antisemitism, financial malfeasance, misogyny, perpetually uncontrolled anger, and so forth. He’s created a monster of his own devising and publicly put my name on it. I don’t understand the gratification that he clearly derives from this exercise but, since he’s kept at it for more than two decades, it’s clear that he enjoys what he’s doing.

I have to admit, though, that his claim that I’m a religious bigot who holds faiths other than my own in contempt has always puzzled me, even more than his other accusations have. I’m not sure what more I could possibly have done during my life to demonstrate the accusation to be baseless and the truth to be precisely its opposite. For example, I taught Arabic and Islamic studies at Brigham Young University for the better part of four decades and did so — I can’t imagine that many with actual direct experience of my teaching would disagree — not merely with objective accuracy but, I think, with enthusiasm, sympathy, and even affection.

Moreover, I published a positive biography of Muhammad, founded and presided over a major series (the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative) of dual-language translations of classical Islamic, Eastern Christian, and Jewish books, participated in more interfaith dialogues than I can count, gave innumerable firesides on Islam to popular audiences both Latter-day Saint and otherwise on every inhabited continent, spoke in mosques and synagogues in the United States and multiple other countries in English and German and Arabic, (with the late William Hamblin) wrote a regular column on world religions for the Deseret News for several years, wrote on Islam for the official magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and even presented on Islam to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. I’ve led many tours to Israel, Egypt, Turkey, and Jordan because I love what is there to be seen and learned. If this is a record of displaying “contempt” for other religious faiths, I really don’t know what to say.

Now, my Malevolent Stalker is highlighting my supposed contempt for the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). According to his narrative, I gloated obnoxiously back when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obtained the Kirtland Temple (and several other properties and artifacts) from the Community of Christ and he is now claiming of Becoming Brigham (as he had previously claimed with Six Days in August) that it’s merely yet another expression of my disdain for the “Reorganites.”

But I never gloated over the acquisition of the Kirtland Temple, etc. Am I happy that we now own that building? Yes. Very much so. But I understand the deep sadness of members of our cousin-church at being obliged to let it go, and I feel for them. (For instance, I know and like Lachlan Mackay, who is one of the Twelve Apostles of the Community of Christ, and I was moved by his video statement about selling the Kirtland Temple.)

My delight at our (re-)obtaining the Kirtland Temple wasn’t at all based on taking pleasure in the fact that the Community of Christ lost possession of it. To use an analogy: It isn’t just or reasonable, in my view, to accuse most sports fans who rejoice when their team wins of taking sadistic pleasure in the pain of the fans of the other teamt.

And what of his claim that Becoming Brigham is an anti-Community of Christ project? It’s flat nonsense. Except, I suppose, in the inescapable but therefore trivial sense that believing that x is “opposed” to belief that not-x. Is it a reasonable use of language to assert that any Catholic who affirms her belief in Catholicism is, by that very act alone, anti-Mormon — and, for that matter, anti-Lutheran, anti-Orthodox, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Buddhist? To me, such a notion seems plain nonsense. And it’s a misuse of language.

In believing that the proper course in 1844 was to follow the leadership of Brigham Young and the Twelve , am I thereby denying that the proper course would have been to follow Sidney Rigdon or, later, James J. Strang or, later still, Joseph Smith III? Well, yes. Of course. Rather in the manner that saying 2+2=4 is implicitly to deny that 2+2=5 or 2+2=4.73. But that’s trivial. And, as a matter of fact, Six Days in August never said a word about the Community of Christ or the much later claim to leadership of Joseph Smith’s then very young son. Nor will Becoming Brigham have much if anything to say on the subject. It certainly doesn’t as it presently exists.

“Brigham Young,” “Heber C. Kimball,” and “Wilford Woodruff” between the filming of scenes in Upper Canada Village.

It seems that the horrors of the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ will continue to overflow until that blessed day when theism and theists are no longer around to plague humanity. Here, if you’re up for it, are three recent specimens:

“Church Delivers Food in Los Angeles to Commemorate America250 Celebration: Several downtown missions receive 40,000 pounds of shelf-stable food”

“The Perpetual Education Fund at 25: Expanding Opportunity Through Education: PEF has helped more than 130,000 people in over 80 countries become self-reliant”

“How the Church Is Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the United States”

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