The Encounter of the Young Joseph Smith with Presbyterianism

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Of the Protestant denominations vying for converts in western New York during the early nineteenth century, Methodism is rightly regarded as having made the greatest religious impress on the young Joseph Smith. Oliver Cowdery claimed that Smith had been “awakened” during a sermon by the Methodist minister George Lane. Smith himself said that his “mind became somewhat partial to the Methodist sect” and that he even “felt some desire to be united with them.” At some point between 1821 and 1829, Smith served as “a very passable exhorter” at Methodist camp meetings “away down in the woods, on the Vienna Road.” His wife, Emma Hale, was a Methodist, and shortly after her first pregnancy ended in a stillbirth (and Martin Harris lost Smith’s earliest dictations), Smith briefly joined a Methodist class meeting that convened at the home of Emma’s uncle, the Reverend Nathaniel Lewis. Two years later, when Smith organized his new church, both its conferences of elders and its commissioning of minimally trained missionaries had a Methodist flavor.

Nevertheless, if Methodism served as the most significant Protestant influence on the young Joseph Smith, Presbyterianism and its characteristic Calvinist theology played an important, if more negative, role in his religious development. When Joseph reported his earliest vision to his mother, he did not tell her that all Christian sects were equally erroneous. He said that “Presbyterianism [was] not true.”

In early nineteenth-century America, Presbyterians differed from most other Protestant denominations in that—at least in theory—they held to an elaborately refined theological system that stretched back to the Reformation. Like other branches of the Calvinist or “Reformed” tradition, Presbyterianism emphasized the sovereignty of God in the salvation of souls rather than the agency of man. Presbyterians insisted on the total inability of man to contribute to his own salvation, God’s predestination of the elect to everlasting life, the limitation of Christ’s atonement only to those who would be saved, the irresistible nature of God’s call to the elect, and the impossibility that any soul sanctified by God’s Spirit could fall from the state of grace. In other words, Calvinists insisted that salvation sprang from the immutable decree of God’s election rather than from an individual’s ability to achieve salvation through his or her own efforts. 

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Calvinism was in decline, especially beyond the older coastal settlements where religion of every sort seemed to wane. Pioneers traveled faster than preachers, and easterners feared that the frontier might degenerate into a haunt of lawlessness as well as religious indifference. Then a wave of revivals convulsed the Trans-Appalachian west, beginning with a spectacular outpouring of religious emotion at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801.

During this period of revival fervor, Presbyterian insistence on an educated ministry put that denomination at a disadvantage compared with Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples, whose more numerous and less educated clergy preached with primitive zeal to less sophisticated audiences. These less staid denominations outstripped Presbyterians in the competition for western converts; and because of the nature of their plea to the unconverted, even committed Calvinists were virtually forced to accommodate to an informal “Arminianism”—roughly, the belief that hu man free will does play some role in salvation. Some “New School” Presbyterians (most notably, Charles Finney) eventually abandoned Calvinism entirely; and in 1838, American Presbyterians rancorously divided into “Old School” and “New School” factions.

Still, it would be unwise to underestimate the continuing influence of Presbyterianism during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1854, the German Reformed Church historian Philip Schaff argued that Presbyterians were “without question one of the most numerous, respectable, worthy, intelligent, and influential denominations,” and one that had a “particularly strong hold on the solid middle class.” By the Plan of Union of 1801, Presbyterians and Congregationalists united their efforts to evangelize the West, and this joint effort worked largely to the benefit of the Presbyterians. Congregationalists, even in Connecticut, began calling themselves “Presbyterians,” and the upshot was that membership in the Presbyterian Church continued to grow, not only through conversions but also through the addition of many New Englanders.

The Joseph Smith family, like many others from New England, emigrated to western New York in the early nineteenth century bringing their sometimes-conflicted religious traditions with them. Lucy Mack Smith had been reared by a devout Congregationalist mother through a childhood that can truly be described as “a series of losses.” Thus, not surprisingly, when Lucy reached Palmyra, she developed a connection with the Presbyterian church, even though she held aloof from membership.

Presbyterians first established a church in the Palmyra area in 1797, but it was not until after a religious revival gripped the area in 1816 that the Western Presbyterian Church was organized. Although the land for this first meetinghouse in the village—the only church building that existed in Palmyra during Joseph Smith’s childhood—was donated for a union church, the building was constructed almost entirely by Presbyterians. The white, rectangular structure, built in the New England tradition, featured green blinds and a steeple with a gilded weathervane, although there was no bell. In the interior, a gallery reached by stairways on either side faced “a high pulpit . . . of primitive fashion.”

Sunday sermons, delivered both morning and afternoon, were long and doctrinal. Pews were rented, and Church discipline was rigorously enforced. Members were excommunicated not only for “intemperate use of spirituous liquors,” “having intercourse with females of bad character,” and reneging on bad debts, but also for having “denied the Bible” by declaring that “all men would be saved.” Furthermore, the elders and deacons who enforced this Church order were sturdy representatives of the local political and economic elite. How often Joseph Smith attended Palmyra’s Western Presbyterian Church is unknown; but late in life, a childhood acquaintance, Lorenzo Saunders, recalled that the first time he ever attended Sabbath School he went with “young Joe Smith at the old Presbyterian Church.”

A souring in the relationship between Joseph Smith and the Presbyterians seems to have occurred after the sudden and still mysterious death of his eldest brother, Alvin, on November 19, 1823. In old age, Joseph’s younger brother, William, claimed that, at Alvin’s funeral, the Rev. Benjamin B. Stockton, a Presbyterian minister, had “intimated very strongly” that Alvin had gone to hell.

It is often assumed that Stockton’s remarks offended the Smith fam ily and drove them from conventional religion. More likely, Stockton sim ply made a religious appeal, unexceptional for the period. The subsequent Palmyra revival of 1824–25 followed hard on Alvin’s death, and Benjamin Stockton served as a leader in that religious resurgence before becoming pastor of Western Presbyterian Church. Lucy Smith later reflected that “the whole neighborhood was very much aroused” and that the Smith family “flocked to the meeting house to see if there was a word of comfort for us.” Rather than being repelled by Stockton’s preaching, sometime before 1828 Lucy and three of her children—Hyrum, Samuel, and Sophronia—joined the Presbyterian church where Stockton was the pastor.

Doubtless, the fact that the Presbyterians were the most prestigious denomination in the neighborhood and the only ones with a meeting house was no deterrent to this decision, but it is unlikely that the religious-minded Lucy Mack Smith would have made such a momentous decision primarily for reasons of social class. More than twenty years earlier when the Smiths had lived in Randolph, Vermont, Lucy had sought spiritual comfort from a noted Presbyterian minister there, but characterized his message as “emptiness, vanity, vexation of spirit” that “palled upon my heart like the chill night air. . . . It did not fill the aching void within nor satisfy the craving hunger of the soul.”

Although Joseph later wrote that his “Father’s family was proselyted to the Presbyterian faith,”—rather than emphasizing his mother’s membership—the death of Alvin and the arrival of Stockton seem to have driven both Smith and his father (who glided easily between religious skepticism and folk mysticism) farther from the Presbyterian church and its Calvinistic doctrine. It was probably during this period that Joseph “became partial to the Methodist sect,” whose opposition to Reformed doctrine was notorious. Later Smith wrote that the “Presbyterians were most decided against the Baptists and Methodists, and used all their powers of either reason or sophistry to prove their errors, or at least to make the people think they were in error. On the other hand the Baptists and Methodists in their turn were equally Zealous in endeavoring to establish their own tenets and disprove all others.”

A possible implication of this phrasing is that to Joseph, Presbyterians stood on one side of a theological divide, Baptists and Methodists on the other. After all, Presbyterians gloried in the Protestant Reformation, whereas Francis Asbury, the effective founder of American Methodism, argued that the apostolic order had been lost during the first century and was only then about to be restored.

According to Lucy Smith, Joseph warned her that, although it would do the family “no injury” to join the Presbyterians, he believed her unaware of “the wickedness of their hearts.” As proof, he predicted that “Deacon Jessup” of the Presbyterian Church would “not scruple to take the last cow” from a widow with eight little children in order to satisfy a debt; and so, she said, it turned out.

Joseph Smith began dictating the Book of Mormon at about the same time that Benjamin Stockton left the pastorate of Western Presbyterian Church. Concurrently, Lucy and her children became inactive members. On March 10, 1830, after eighteen months of procedural delay, the communicants of the Smith family were formally disfellowshipped after a visit from three Church officials. Lucy later claimed that the three Presbyterians had conspired to destroy the Book of Mormon, although Church records note only that the Smiths “did not wish to unite with us any more.”

The Presbyterians more than had their revenge. In 1833, when D. P. Hurlbut busied himself collecting anti-Smith affidavits from Palmyra residents, at least ten Presbyterians, all members of the local elite—including Henry Jessup—swore that “Joseph Smith, Senior, and his son Joseph in particular,” were “entirely destitute of moral character, and addicted to vicious habits.”

Once the nature of Smith’s “golden Bible” became known, Joseph’s uncle, Jesse Smith, a staunch Calvinist with whom Joseph had lived for some months as a child, assailed the book as “a work of deception.” Joseph had made “use of the holy name of Jehovah!” Jesse remonstrated. The Rochester Observer, a Presbyterian newspaper, introduced the Book of Mormon below the title “Blasphemy!” And the New York Evangelist of New York City, another Presbyterian periodical, scorned the new scripture as a plagiarism of the Bible and its followers as persons carried away by a “strange delusion.”

In 1830, when Smith tried to organize his new converts in Colesville Township, southern New York, he came to believe—with some reason—that Presbyterians had engaged in a conspiracy against him. On the day before a June baptismal service, Rev. John Sherer, a local Presbyterian pastor, attempted what the twenty-first century might call a “cult rescue.” One of his parishioners, Emily Coburn, the sister-in-law of Mormon stalwart Newel Knight, had expressed interest in becoming a Mormon. Through a ruse, Sherer met Coburn in a nearby grove and not only expostulated with her but, taking her firmly by the hand, tried to lead her away. A knot of Mormons materialized, and Sherer was forced to retreat. Nevertheless, the next day Coburn was returned to her family through a power of attorney signed by her father. Emily Coburn soon made her peace with the Presbyterian Church that had disciplined her, but later that year she rejoined the Knights and was baptized a Mormon.

Joseph Smith’s troubles in Colesville had only begun. Presbyterians Abram W. Benton, Nathan Boynton, and Cyrus McMaster had Joseph arrested as a “disorderly person” and, when he was acquitted the following day, had him rearrested. After being acquitted a second time, he was forced to flee when local residents threatened mob violence. No wonder Smith later avowed in Nauvoo that he had been “ground” in “a Presbyterian smut machine.”

Given Smith’s early chafing against Presbyterianism, one might have expected more explicit antagonism toward its distinctive doctrines in the Book of Mormon. Certainly the Book of Mormon seems to contradict all five points of Calvinism (often abbreviated with the acronym TULIP): Total depravity (an inherited sin nature), Unconditional election (God’s choice and not the human being’s), Limited atonement (only some are saved), Irresistible grace (humankind cannot resist the call of God), and the Perseverance of the saints (salvation cannot be lost). Nevertheless, it has also been argued that the Book of Mormon incorporates Calvinist doctrine as well. For instance, Fawn Brodie—who was literarily gifted but religiously tone-deaf—claimed that in the Book of Mormon “Calvinism and Arminianism had equal status.”

Only one chapter of the Book of Mormon makes what seems to be a specific attack on Presbyterians and their upper-middle-class leaders. In Alma 31 (the only chapter in the Book of Mormon in which the Calvinist term “elected” is used), the prophet Alma heads a mission to the heretical Zoramites, who have “a place built up in the center of their synagogue, a place for standing . . . high above the head” that “would only admit one person.” This description suggests the elevated pulpit at Western Presbyterian Church, which represents the ascendancy of the preacher, his prayers, and his sermons. These Zoramites give repeated thanks to God that they are a “chosen and a holy people” and not like all others who are “elected to be cast by thy wrath down to hell.” Furthermore, the Zoramites are “a wicked and a perverse people” whose “hearts were set upon gold, and upon silver, and upon all manner of fine goods” (Alma 31:13, 17, 18, 24)—like the hypocritical Deacon Jessup of Western Presbyterian Church.

Nevertheless, with deference to the importance of Church architecture and social class, such superficialities are of lesser importance to Joseph Smith’s religious development than what he may have heard preached at Western Presbyterian Church between the family’s arrival in 1816–17 and the death of Alvin Smith in 1823. Unfortunately, two of the three clergymen who served the Church during that period are now little more than names. Like countless other country parsons of past generations, their shadowy memories survive only through Church lists and genealogies.

Only the Reverend Jesse Townsend (1766–1838), pastor of Western Presbyterian Church from August 1817 to 1820 (or 1821), has left suggestions about the sort of Presbyterianism that might have intersected with the imagination of the adolescent Joseph Smith. Townsend was born in Andover, Connecticut, ten years before the American Revolution and graduated from Yale College in 1790 at the mature age of twenty-five. He married the widow of another clergyman, a woman eleven years his senior, with whom he had four children, all of whom survived their parents. Townsend was first settled as pastor of the Congregational Church in Shelburne, Massachusetts (1792), and then was called to the Congregational Church in Durham, New York (1798). He preached for some years in Madison, New York, and took charge of a Utica academy for a year. After leaving Palmyra, Townsend served with the American Home Missionary Society in Illinois and Missouri, becoming perhaps the first Presbyterian clergyman resident in those states—and curiously anticipating the later moves of Joseph Smith. Returning to Palmyra in 1826, Townsend preached in the neighboring town of Sodus and supplied vacant pulpits in the area while preparing young men for college.

Virtually nothing remains of Townsend’s considerable literary efforts beyond a one-volume abridgment of a five-volume Church history, two published letters about New York revivals (1802–3), two published letters about the “Mormonites,” four unpublished private letters, and a dedication sermon preached at the Western Presbyterian Church in 1819. Intriguingly, even though he died two months after the denominational split of 1838, the man revealed in these documents does not fit the stereotype of either an Old School or a New School Presbyterian.

Townsend was a staunch Calvinist, yet fervently evangelistic. In the preface to his Church history abridgment, Townsend emphasizes that Church history demonstrates the “progress of truth and its salutary influence on a world ruined by sin,” certainly not the restorationist conviction that gospel truth had been hidden since the first century. Yet Townsend gladly worked under the auspices of the interdenominational American Home Missionary Society, which thoroughly offended Old School notions of denominational propriety. 

In his report of a revival in the Catskills that occurred in a frontier community without “one framed building in the whole settlement,” Townsend claimed to have spoken with nearly every resident “about the state of their souls,” eventually sparking a revival that led to the organization of a new church. Yet he also rejoiced that this backwoods congregation was “well united in Calvinistic sentiments,” ascribing the change in their condition to “the sovereign grace of God.” In the more settled parish of Durham, New York, Townsend registered “great rejoicing with Zion’s friends” over converts young and old who had come to the Savior. But he also gave thanks that “God has most mercifully preserved us from all appearances of enthusiasm. Though the word has been like the hammer and the fire to break in pieces the rock, yet the work has not been with noise and tumult.”

It is therefore all the more striking to read Townsend’s account of a dream that he had during a religious awakening in Homer, New York. In a letter to a fellow pastor, Townsend elliptically notes his successful mediation of disharmony that had threatened “the interests of that church & the welfare of Zion at large.” He recalled that, while his mind was troubled, he fell asleep and dreamed that he saw the church members “dressed in deep mourning.” After the presiding clergyman publicly confessed his sins to God and the congregation, the Church members did likewise “in the most solemn & impressive manner,” after which the “whole assembly burst into a flood of tears.” Although portions of this letter have been lost, the implication is that the events in the dream were replicated in the actual congregation. And yet it is unlikely that Townsend ever described this dream to his Palmyra congregation because he closes his account to his friend with the words, “I write this dream, brother, inter nos [between us].” Townsend’s obituary writer seems to have hit the mark when he described the clergyman as belonging to “the old school of New England divines” yet favoring whatever “measures of the day, whether new or old, as were instrumental in the salvation of souls.”

The sermon that Townsend preached at the dedication of the first Western Presbyterian Church in Palmyra is, on its surface, neither Calvinistic nor evangelistic in emphasis, although both themes are present on a deeper level. Rather Townsend’s sermon is a discourse in the grand style, appropriate for the most formal sort of ceremony at that time and place. Townsend understood what was expected of him and provided it. The Palmyra Register described the dedication as “solemn and interesting to every rational and sober mind,” with Townsend’s message and prayer being followed by the singing of an “elegant” dedicatory ode written for the occasion.

Townsend took as his text Luke 2:14, the message of the Christmas angels. He noted that Christ’s incarnation was “preparatory for the enlargement of his church” and further argued that buildings erected for the worship of God allowed men to “unite in the angelic song” sung at Christ’s birth. Townsend then launched into a long dedicatory prayer (during which the congregation remained standing) that concluded with a plea for his listeners to “truly become as individuals, a habitation of God, through the Spirit. See to it that you do this and you will be able to with the most animated delight to unite in the angelic song. ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ May you all do this and with one accord devoutly subjoin your sincere and cordial Amen.”

If Joseph Smith was present that day, one month shy of his fourteenth birthday, this sermon had much to engage his imagination, tuned as it was to sonorous religious language. And he might well have attended, because the dedication of the Presbyterian Church was as much community event as religious service. If so, it would have been the only dedication of a religious structure that Joseph witnessed before the dedication of the Kirtland Temple in 1836.

It is easy enough to spin webs of speculation. There are a limited number of ways in which religious buildings can be dedicated. The traditional Protestant orthodoxy of Townsend’s sermon is self-evident, as are the unconventional aspects of Joseph Smith’s Kirtland prayer. An imprecatory quality at Kirtland stands in contrast to a plea for brotherly unity in Palmyra. 

Still, one cannot help but note some at least superficial similarities between Palmyra and Kirtland. For instance, the text of the Palmyra sermon refers to an angelic visitation. The preacher calls the church a “temple,” asks God to fill the house with his glory, and requests that the ceremony be “a Pentecost to our souls.” Townsend refers to the church as “Zion” (as well as “the Israel of God”) and asks congregation members to “feel their hearts burn within them.” At Kirtland, Joseph Smith concluded his prayer with two sentences that might nearly have been exchanged with those of Townsend’s at Palmyra: 

And help us by the power of thy Spirit, that we may mingle our voices with those bright, shining seraphs around thy throne, with acclamations of praise, singing Hosanna to God and the Lamb! 

And let these, thine anointed ones, be clothed with salvation, and thy saints shout aloud for joy. Amen, and Amen. (D&C 109:79–80) 

Like the Palmyra dedication sermon, the Kirtland prayer was followed by a specially commissioned hymn. All coincidence perhaps. Nevertheless, it is comfortable to imagine that in 1819, a thirteen-year-old with rare aural gifts was deeply impressed by the most stylish ceremony western New York could have offered him, the dedication of a Presbyterian church. 

Yet the most influential element of Presbyterianism for Joseph Smith’s religious development was neither the early hostility of its members nor Smith’s possible later reflection of its formal sermonizing. Calvinism’s most important contribution to the Restoration was as a fully developed theological system against which Smith could react. To such a creative intellect, Methodism could serve only as a temporizing way station, not even intermediate to the emphasis Smith began to place on the exaltation of humankind. 

Calvinists worshipped a God who received the powerless inheritors of Adam’s sin through His grace alone. Joseph Smith gloried rather in agency, the ability of an individual to choose good or evil untrammeled by any predestinating power. Unlike the Presbyterians who emphasized God’s sovereignty, Smith declared that God had cast down Sa tan precisely because he had “sought to destroy the agency of man.” The Messiah had redeemed humanity from the fall so that men could “become free forever, knowing good from evil,” free “to act for themselves and not to be acted upon” (Moses 4:3; 2 Ne. 2:26). Without his exposure to Presbyterianism in half-settled but “burned-over” western New York, it is doubtful that Joseph Smith could have so expeditiously conceived such a sophisticated counter-system. Calvinism, rather than Methodism, provided an elaborate theological structure that Smith found worthy of his mettle. To him, it was indeed Presbyterianism that was most importantly “not true.”