“Renegade ‘Mormon’ dissenters are running through the world and spreading various foul and libelous reports against us [regarding polygamy/adultery], thinking thereby to gain the friendship of the world, because they know that we are not of the world, and that the world hates us; therefore they [the world] make a tool of these fellows [the dissenters]: and by them try to do all the injury they can, and after that they hate them worse than they do us, because they find them to be base traitors and sycophants.
“Such characters God hates; we cannot love them. The world hates them, and we sometimes think that the devil ought to be ashamed of them.”
Joseph Smith Jr. – 16 December 1838, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – Volume 3 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1905), 230.