MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell apologized Wednesday night for inaccurate comments he made a week earlier about the origins of the Mormon church. “I am truly sorry if I said something inaccurate about Joseph Smith, and I am happy to provide time on this show to a Church of Latter Day Saints spokesman to correct any inaccuracy,” he said on The Last Word, before adding “I just wish I could take those words back.” The words in question were spoken on April 3, in the middle of a monologue about Mitt Romney’s claim that President Barack Obama was trying to “establish a religion in America known as secularism.” O’Donnell brought up the Mormon religion’s origins to make the point that Romney, while attacking the beliefs of Obama, was vulnerable on the same score. “Religiously, Mitt Romney lives in the glass house of American politics,” he said. O’Donnell also said the following: Mormonism was created by a guy in upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it. Forty-eight wives later, Joseph Smith’s lifestyle was completely sanctified in the religion he invented to go with it, which Mitt Romney says he believes. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is traditionally averse to litigating its history and beliefs in the national media, so it is unlikely to take O’Donnell up on his offer. But the history of Joseph Smith and the origins of Mormonism are well documented. And there is little doubt that O’Donnell misrepresented them, by repeating a claim that has long been used by Mormon opponents to tar its followers as a sort of cult created to justify the sexual license of its founders. “O’Donnell has got the causation reversed,” says Richard Lyman Bushman, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University who wrote a recent biography of Smith called Rough Stone Rolling. Here is what is known to have happened: Smith was first married in 1827, and over the next three![]()
