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And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. This county cooperative society. Those words probably don't mean a whole lot to most individuals, but if you've ever seen the reality show, Escaping Polygamy, you may not realize that that is who we are going to be talking about today. Escaping Polygamy, as I said, was a reality show through A&E.
It premiered in 2014 and highlighted three individual women, Andrea Brewer, Jessica Christensen, and Chanel DeRue. These three grew up in the Davis County Cooperative Society, left the organization, and worked to get others out of this organization mainly because of its connection with plural marriage. What is this group, Eric, and why should those of us in Utah be concerned about them? And, I think we should also mention that because they are based in Utah, each and every one of us living in this state could very well rub shoulders with these individuals and not even know it, because unlike some of the other groups that claim their founder as being Joseph Smith, the Kingston clan, as they are also known as, dress just like everyone else. They don't have any kind of unique clothing like, let's say, the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Warren Jeffs group.
They don't usually have a unique hairstyle for the females either. They look like us, and therefore you could very well talk to somebody, let's say, in a grocery store who is a member of this group and not even know it. This group is not a very big group, estimated at 5,000, although some have said as large as 10,000, but there are very many of them living in the Salt Lake City and Bountiful area in northern Utah. So, yes, if you live in northern Utah, maybe your next-door neighbor goes to this church and you don't know it, because they're not going to be as unique looking as perhaps the FLDS, which we covered a couple of weeks ago. So, this group is known as the Latter-day Church of Christ.
As you mentioned, it was originally named the Davis County Cooperative Society. It's also been called the United Order. Some have called this group the Kingston Clan or the Kingston Cult, and members of the group do not like those terms.
They feel it's derogatory. So, if you're going to know somebody who is a part of this group, you don't want to call them the Kingston Cult. But the Latter-day Church of Christ, that was given to them in 1977. We should mention that Latter-day Church of Christ, they spell Latter-day, Latter, L-A-T-T-E-R, and then Day without a hyphen is a capital D-A-Y. It's probably important to note this because the groups themselves are pretty picky about this. Even though I've come across many members of the LDS Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they'll write me and they'll misspell Latter-day.
They'll either not put the hyphen in or they'll do a capital D, even though that church has always used the small d with a hyphen. What's interesting, Bill, is that they claim that their church is not to be considered a fundamentalist Mormon organization. And they're very much a capitalist group. I call them a capitalist polygamous group. You don't find many groups that are very much into the business end of things. It is a very rich group, has a lot of money with the leaders, of course.
The Kingstons are the leaders. They do not want to be associated with the FLDS or other polygamous groups that you might hear about. But yet the term fundamentalist Mormon churches, that's usually the term that's used referring to a lot of these splinter groups that do believe in the practice of plural marriage.
That's kind of a title that's been given to them by outsiders. Now, they may not like that, but it tends to explain, at least to those with whom you're trying to talk to about these groups, the category in which we see them falling in. I find a lot of these groups that we're covering in these weeks are fascinating. This might be one of the most fascinating groups.
If you want to go to our website to learn more, go to mrm.org slash Kingstons, K-I-N-G-S-T-O-N-S. But we need to talk about the leaders and how this religion got started. It started back in the 1930s. In fact, the man that is most responsible for starting this church is Charles W. Kingston, and he lived from 1884 to 1975. Now, he was a member of the LDS Church, but he felt that the Utah Church was an heir because it had abandoned the teaching of plural marriage. And with all of the other fundamentalist groups during that time, there were other people who were disassociating themselves from Mormonism. And he wrote a book, and the book's title was Laman Manasseh Victorious, A Message of Salvation and Redemption to His People Israel, first to Ephraim and Manasseh. And it talked about his beliefs, and it got him excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1929.
Then in 1935, his son, Charles Eldon Kingston, he founded the Davis County Cooperative Society, and he took the leadership reins on January 1, 1935. He claimed that he had been visited by six different spiritual personages, whom he said came to him at different times. And in the early years, the followers wore unique outer garments with no pockets, causing others to call them blue coats. Now, not having pockets was meant to signify that the members were not tied to worldly wealth. Ironically, though, Charles Eldon Kingston was a businessman, and he was the one who first pushed the church's business agenda.
The members were not allowed to wear shoes or hats as well. It's interesting. This is the guy that basically is responsible for this understanding that you're not supposed to be tied to worldly wealth, but yet the same individual is the one who tends to switch gears here. And now they're going to be pushing, as you say, a business agenda.
So they go from what seems to be like a vow of poverty to now a vow of let's be making money here. It's fascinating to me that this group, like some of the other groups that we have been looking at, place a strong emphasis on visitations from spiritual beings. Let me ask this question of our listeners. If you're a Latter-day Saint, how do you discern between the visitations of these alleged spiritual beings to Charles Eldon Kingston as opposed to Joseph Smith? You will believe readily that Joseph Smith was visited by a number of spiritual beings, but why do you automatically throw out the visitations from these other individuals who claim that they were also visited by spiritual beings?
I would think that that would cause some sort of a conflict among those who firmly believe that this is some kind of mark of authenticity, that your calling is being confirmed or your beliefs are being confirmed by the appearance of these spiritual beings. The Church has only had three different leaders. All of them are Kinkstons. Well, Charles Eldon Kingston dies at 39 in 1948. He dies of cancer, and so his brother, John Ortell Kingston, takes over. And he leads the Church for a very long time, from 1948 to 1987. He's the one that came up with the name of the Church, Latter-day Church of Christ in 1977.
And he had an even better business sense than Eldon. One of the things that he did is he has promoted incestuous marriages that continue in the Church today, because to be married to a Kingston is to be considered to be more pure. The bloodline is more pure. So he had 13 wives, and he had dozens of children. Now, it's hard to find out exactly how many wives and how many children, so oftentimes when we're talking about numbers with this group, we have to just guess. The current leader is Paul Eldon Kingston.
He was born in 1959, and he was a son of John Ortell Kingston. He's known as the Watchman on the Wall, and he does claim to hear from God regularly, and inherited the top leadership position in 1987. I tried to find out how many wives he had. I saw some older statistics that said he had 25 wives, but I did find one recent estimate that he has 34 wives and more than 500 children. Now, do the math and think about how many children that is.
If you only have 34 wives, they're all having to have at least 10 plus children, but we know that several of his wives have had as many as 16 children each. Now, he's a businessman. He's an accountant.
He's an attorney. He's the trustee and trust of the Davis County Cooperative Society run by the Church. So very much a business-minded family and a business-minded church. Now, this church, like some of the other groups that claim Joseph Smith as the head of their church, and again, it doesn't mean that these organizations were founded during the lifetime of Joseph Smith. Many of them were not, of course, but they do claim that Joseph Smith is the strong influence in their doctrinal position and even in their very existence. They all seem to claim that they more closely represent the teachings that Joseph Smith, and in this case, Brigham Young, the second president, and John Taylor, the third president, they more closely represent what those men were teaching at that time.
Now, naturally, when Wilford Woodruff becomes the president of the church, he becomes president number four. Because he signs the manifesto in 1890, he really becomes anathema in the eyes of people who belong to these polygamous groups, because they look at Wilford Woodruff as betraying the teachings of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor. So in this particular case, the Kingston group would see themselves as being the rightful church, holding more closely to the teachings of Smith, Young, and Taylor, even though there are other groups that would also say the same thing. This is where it gets a little bit confusing, folks, but again, as I mentioned before, this is kind of what we call the legacy of Joseph Smith. They all go back to Joseph Smith, and they claim him as their rightful authority.
So the reason why we've been talking about these groups, when somebody comes to you and says, which church do you go to, and you tell them whichever denominational church you go to, they're going to say, well, there's so many of your kinds of churches. Well, a Latter-day Saint may not realize that there are groups like the Davis County Cooperative Society, the Kingston group we're talking about. I think we have every right to say, well, what about all of the groups that claim that they are the ones that are following Joseph Smith? I don't think a lot of Latter-day Saints have thought of that. And I think it becomes more difficult for Latter-day Saints to answer that question, because so much of their truth claims are based in either what they call a supernatural experience, which only they by themselves seems to have ever had, there were no witnesses to a lot of these experiences, or it becomes more subjective. Whereas in Christianity, we would say, well, we go back to the Word of God, we go to the Bible. And if a group seems to be teaching things that contradict what the Bible has to say, there's a lot of self-policing within Christianity to call that out and to criticize those particular teachings. Tomorrow, we're going to continue looking at the Davis County Cooperative Society, otherwise known as the Latter-day Church of Christ. We're going to be looking more closely into some of the unique doctrines and some of the other doctrines that even the LDS Church still holds. They do have similarities in some areas, but we're going to be continuing our look at this group in tomorrow's broadcast. Thank you.
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