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St. George, at Its Core

St. George, at Its Core

Last updated on: June 24, 2026 at 11:27 pm by Dan Peterson

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St. George, at Its Core 2026-06-24T23:27:00-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Construction on the St. George Tabernacle (shown here in a Wikimedia Commons public domain photo) began in 1863, and the building was dedicated by Brigham Young Jr. in 1876.

Apart from a few minutes directly in front of it, we spent the morning and the afternoon today filming inside the St. George Tabernacle, up on the speaker’s stand — where prophets and apostles have spoken from Brigham Young’s time down to the present day. Our discussion focused on a special conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that was convened in August 1852. The conference obviously didn’t convene in the Tabernacle in St. George, on which construction wouldn’t begin for very nearly eleven years thereafter. Rather, it was held in the Old Adobe Tabernacle on what we now know as Temple Square in Salt Lake City, which was demolished in 1877 to create the space where today’s Assembly Hall stands.

The Assembly Hall on Temple Square was finished in 1888. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

The August 1852 special conference — “special” because it was neither the traditional spring general conference, typically held around the beginning of April, nor the regular fall general conference, which comes at about the beginning of October — focused on two specific themes:

The first of them was missionary work. As might be expected, the expulsion from Nauvoo and the massive emigration across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains, and the effort of establishing new settlements and planting and harvesting crops in the Great Basin West had diverted the attention of the Church and its leaders somewhat from proselytizing efforts. Now, though, half a decade had passed since their initial entry into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Accordingly, I suppose that they might have been feeling relatively stable, established, and secure. So, after powerful sermons on the obligation to take the Restored Gospel to the nations, several score mission calls were extended from the pulpit. Mission assignments — to places such as Hong Kong, Hindustan, and Capetown — were described as relatively short-term, mostly not extending to more than three to five years in length (!). For a small, exiled community in the isolated American West, it was a breathtakingly audacious vision.

The second theme of the conference was plural marriage, which was probably a fairly open secret among the Saints in Utah but which had, heretofore, not been openly acknowledged or admitted. Brigham Young asked Elder Orson Pratt, a member of the Twelve and arguably the leading intellectual in the Church for much of the nineteenth century, to make the announcement and to deliver an explanation and a defense. Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage, now known as Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, formed the partial basis for Elder Pratt’s exposition, along with the abundant biblical materials about polygamy among the patriarchs and others of the Old Testament. Section 132 was published shortly thereafter in the Deseret News, making public not only the doctrine and practice of plural marriage but also the wonderful idea of eternal marriage.

As you can readily see from our filming yesterday at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and from our work today on plural marriage — of which there will be more in future filming — we are, as critics of our Becoming Brigham effort have long predicted, avoiding the difficult issues.

Here’s one area, though, where the critics will be able to focus their continued indignation: Between our morning and afternoon filming sessions, we had our major meal today at Benja Thai and Sushi in downtown St. George. It was, as it always has been, really, really good. (There is also a second location, Benja’s Thai Garden, on the opposite end of the city. It, too, is really, really good.) This isn’t the old one-main-street St. George of the Big Hand Cafe and Dick’s Cafe that I knew as a boy when we drove through from Southern California.

But some venerable elements remain, and I felt the obligation to pay one of them a visit: It’s Thomas Judd’s Store, about which I’ve written here previously. (See, for example, “Thomas Judd’s Store and Other Matters.”). It’s a direct tie to my mother’s past here in St. George.

The original movie poster for Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), in a Wikimedia Commons public domain image

During our Interpreter Foundation and Redbrick Film Works filming expeditions, it’s become customary to have a “movie night” for our team on the evening of our last day of work, before we begin the return journey home. We’ve watched some really good and interesting films that I might not otherwise have come across; it’s fun to see the choices made by professional actors and cinematographers. This time around, it was my turn to choose the film — and my choice for tonight fell on the classic 1966 independent horror classic Manos: The Hands of Fate, which is often (and quite justifiably) included on lists of the worst movies ever made. Actually, the original plan was to watch just a few minutes of Manos and then to switch over to The Mission (1986). But, alas, the internet connection in our lavish and luxurious hotel was too slow for us to be able to run it. So, staring incredulously at the screen, we saw Manos: The Hands of Fate in its indescribable, unspeakable entirety.

A decline in smoking represents a serious threat to the healthcare professions as well as to the financial stability of hospitals such as this one in southern California. (Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Finally, an entry from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: The evil effects of at least one religious persuasion are immediately apparent from this story: “Who’s still smoking? Rates vary across states: While cigarette use is down across age groups, the numbers remain significant” Think of the consequences: Longer-living and healthier people threaten serious harm to the livelihood of our medical professionals and to our healthcare industry. Within a short time, they will almost certainly lead to larger populations. And larger populations cause increased environmental degradation, overuse of natural resources, and innumerable other evils of similar nature. But do theists care? Not at all.

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