“Hadestown”

Last updated on: May 6, 2026 at 11:11 pm by Dan Peterson

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“Hadestown” 2026-05-06T23:11:47-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Brigham Young (John Donovan Wilson), Thomas Sharp (Dave Martinez), and Joseph Smith (Paul Wuthrich) enjoy a shaded moment between takes on the set of the Interpreter Foundation’s 2024 dramatic film Six Days in August.

One of the principal motivations behind our Becoming Brigham series (becomingbrigham.com) is our sense that Brigham Young has been libeled, traduced, and slandered to such an extent that even some innocent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been taken in — and their testimonies of the Restoration damaged — by the constant drumbeat of criticisms and misrepresentations. The attacks on Brother Brigham are, of course, challenging to faith in him as an apostle and a prophet. But they’re also distorted and unjust, when not just flatly false.

The distortions and falsehoods have flown thick and fast since his assumption of Church leadership. The wretchedly awful January 2025 Netflix miniseries American Primeval was an egregious example of such fictionalized pseudohistory, but it’s far from alone. I came across the following just yesterday, written by someone calling himself or herself skylark1250 in response (after a manner of speaking) to the interview that I did a while ago with Jasmin and Neal Rappleye and Steve Smoot at Informed Saints:

Young was a slave holder; read “The Other Slavery” with his taking children from American Indians to work in his wives houses and his farms. The Temple in Salt Lake City was built with the wealth stolen from the murdered families in this wagon train. Young took their gold and made himself a rich man. The cattle in the train, over 800 of them, were later branded with the church brand. The murderers stole money and belongings from the 120 people they murdered, and 38 children were killed. Young saw the wagon train when it came through Salt Lake. The train was advised to attend to their cattle by traveling to Mountain Meadows. It was grazing territory back then before floods changed the landscape. He wanted their wealth. But to steal it, he had to have everyone murdered. Young had blood on his hands. He was no Saint.

There is scarcely an assertion in skylark1250’s comment that would pass muster as accurate history with any serious scholar, Latter-day Saint or otherwise, who has devoted real attention to Brigham Young, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, or the question of slavery in Utah Territory. (See, for instance, my summary remarks at the 2025 FAIR Conference, on “Brigham Young and Slavery.”) Yet this is the kind of thing that we’re facing and that we’re trying to counter, and it’s why I’m asking people, if they have enjoyed or benefitted from Becoming Brigham, to share the series with others, whether in person or — and this would be very helpful — via social media. In the course of Becoming Brigham, we will be addressing every one of these issues — slavery in early Utah Territory, Brigham Young and race, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Brigham Young and violence, Brigham’s personal character, and more — with the help of expert specialist historians.

In this image, the risen Christ stands upon the broken door of the gates of Hades. Please note the shattered lock mechanisms of the door, scattered about the victorious Lord. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

This evening, my wife and I attended a performance at the Lyric Theatre in the West End of the play Hadestown. (Important notice: No donors to the Interpreter Foundation and no participants in the tour of England that’s set to begin tomorrow morning were defrauded to fund our theatre tickets.) Hadestown was described in something that I read about it as a rock musical, but I think it more accurate, musically speaking, to call it a blend of New Orleans jazz, blues, and gospel. It also blends and creatively, cleverly, reimagines the two ancient Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone for its story.

The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is at least 2500 years old, and that of Hades and Persephone can be shown to have existed, in some form, at least 3500 years ago. Which suggests that humans have been worried by death for quite some time now. (Think, too, of the story of Gilgamesh.). In this modern retelling, though, Hades also becomes (among other things) an oppressive industrial capitalist (the original “plutocrat,” I suppose) and Orpheus becomes (temporarily, at least) a labor organizer. (You would need to have seen the play to understand what I mean.)

So Hadestown is not only about death — and, true to its ancient pagan Greek roots, about the hopelessness, inevitability, and irreversibility of mortality (“It’s a sad song. But we sing it anyway”), starkly different from the Christian view and perhaps specially so from the Latter-day Saint position on the topic — but it is, most definitely, about death. In that light, I’m still thinking of a quotation from C. S. Lewis’s 1940 book The Problem of Pain that opens the play Shadowlands, which we saw last night, and that then closes the play:

You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.

I suppose that the purpose of repeating that quotation both before the drama’s narrative and at its conclusion is to bring home the difference between the theoretical musings of the bachelor Oxford don C. S. Lewis in 1940 and the agonized lamentations of the profoundly bereaved widower C. S. Lewis in 1961. Some have even thought that Lewis lost his faith.

But I think not. Here are some quotations from A Grief Observed, written out of the devastation that followed Joy’s passing:

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer. . . .

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination. . . .

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

And, finally, a passage in which Lewis cites a famous line from the medieval English anchoress Julian of Norwich (d. ca. 1416):

Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind. One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forebode. But the other, that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Is this accurate? (It came across my screen a day or two ago,). If so, it’s pretty remarkable.

In closing (as if the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ graphic immediately above isn’t sufficiently appalling in and of itself), I share a horror that I’ve also drawn from the Hitchens File: “Improving Child Nutrition in the Philippines: ‘Our combined efforts can bless many lives,’ says one stake presidency member.” One can only shudder.

Posted from London, England

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