Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith's Theology

Dialogue has a rich and long history covering Mormonism’s founding prophet Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith’s teachings and the development of Mormon theology have had a lasting impact on religious and cultural history. Exploring the curated topics below can provide a more detailed understanding of different perspectives and scholarly discussions on Joseph Smith’s life, teachings, and historical context.

A Reflection on Joseph Smith’s Restorationist Vision of Truth

Ryan D. Ward

Dialogue 55.2 (Spring 2022): 93–102
The way of viewing truth in the Church differs from the common philosophical concept of truth as something that corresponds to the historical or present facts of a given situation.

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler’s Theological Position on the Nature of God

Loren Pankratz

Dialogue 55.2 (Spring 2022): 37–72
Joseph Smith’s teachings on God found in his preaching at the April 7, 1844 general conference, known as the King Follett Sermon, and Smith’s Sermon in the Grove, given at a meeting held just east of the Nauvoo Temple on June 16, 1844, have appeared to many to give strong support to this view. There, he taught that God was not always God but developed into God over time.

Praise to the Man: The Development of Joseph Smith Deification in Woolleyite Mormonism, 1929–1977

Cristina Rosetti

Dialogue 54.3 (Fall 2021): 41–65
However, the 1886 Revelation and subsequent statement also raised their own doctrinal questions that were continually developed through the lineage that became Woolleyite Mormonism. Namely, why was the resurrected Joseph Smith present alongside Jesus Christ at the meeting with John Taylor?

The Secular Binary of Joseph Smith’s Translations

Michael Hubbard MacKay

Dialogue 54.3 (Fall 2021): 1–40
The debate about Joseph Smith’s translations have primarily assumed that the translation was commensurable and focuses upon theories of authorial involvement of Joseph Smith.

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Fiona Givens

Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.

Salvation through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment

Benjamin E. Park

Dialogue 43.2 (Summer 2010): 1–44
A discussion of the theology of the body being combined with the spirit for various different reasons.

The Limits of Naturalistic Criteria for the Book of Mormon: Comparing Joseph Smith and Andrew Jackson Davis

William Davis

Dialogue 53.3 (Fall 2020): 73–103
Davis compares the two men, saying “Davis, like Smith, was raised in a poor household and received little formal education—Davis, in fact, would claim to have received only “little more than five months” of schooling.”

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon: Co-Founders of a Movement

Steven L. Shields

Dialogue 52.3 (Fall 2019): 1–18
Shields argues that if you deny or dismiss Sidney Ridgon’s contributions to the early church, then the scripture canon during this time would need to be reinterpreted.

Pedagogy of Perfection: Joseph Smith’s Perfectionism, How It was Taught in the Early LDS Church, and Its Contemporary Applicability

Richard Sleegers

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 105–143
Richard Sleegers contrasts 19th century Protestant teachings about salvations to what Joseph Smith taught about life after death.

A Documentary Note on a Letter to Joseph Smith. Romance, Death, and Polygamy: The Life and Times of Susan Hough Conrad and Lorenzo Dow Barnes

William V. Smith

Dialogue 49.4 (Winter 2016): 87–108
The history behind a letter that was written by missionary Jedediah Morgan Grant to Joseph Smith, which contained information about Susan Hough Conrad and her brief love writings with a missionary who was serving in England named Lorenzo Dow Barnes.

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Keith Parry

Dialogue 18.4 (Winter 1984): 65–80
Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.

Joseph Smith's Life

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Routinely, in speech and print, Church authorities and other Mormon commentators align the Mormon present and the Book of Mormon past in the following manner: We possess a unique understanding of the Indians. They are Lamanites, descendants of the Book of Mormon peoples, sprung from the House of Israel. The Book of Mormon was written for them in particular, so that they might be redeemed from the curse which fell upon their ancestors. As custodians of this record of their past, a sacred record of their heritage and destiny, we have a duty to ensure that the Indians regain their true identity. We accepted that responsibility from the first- our missionaries went among the Lamanites soon after the Church was restored. Since then, our prophets have seen to it that we have done our duty by the Indians. Now, more than ever, we must meet our obligations, for President Kimball has said that "the day of the Lamanite is surely here and we are God's instrument in helping to bring to pass the prophecies" of the Book of Mormon (TSGD 1978, 74).[1]

This statement expresses a sacred history, one to be faithfully accepted rather than tested. In it, the most substantial fact standing between the days of the Book of Mormon and the present is likely to be the "first mission to the Indians," undertaken by Parley P. Pratt and his companions in the winter of 1830-31. A pivotal element in the sacred history, the first mission stands for the inspiration of the Book of Mormon, for the unwavering Mormon commitment to the Lamanites over 150 years, and for the missionary zeal which Mormons should emulate now and in the future. Certainly, it will be taken to represent the quality of Mormon-Indian relations in Joseph Smith’s time. But two Mormon classics suggest that this popular interpretation of the first mission is too simple—that it is more valid as a reflection of the Mormon present and as a didactic tool for shaping the future than as a balanced depiction of the Mormon past. Together, Parley Pratt’s Autobiography and Joseph Smith’s History of the Church point to a complex of questions, and to their answers. What part did the Book of Mormon play in Mormon relations with the Indians during the Joseph Smith years? What emphasis did Mormons place upon missionary work with the Indians in those years? What effect did the gentile presence have on the relations of Mormons and Indians in that period? Did those relations prefigure developments during the Brigham Young years, and even into the present?

Addressing these questions, this essay offers a critique of the popular capsule history as it portrays the relations of Mormons and Indians in Joseph Smith's time. In its essentials, the critique does not draw upon secular analyses, for historians have written little enough on the topic. Rather, it is derived from hallowed Mormon texts: Parley Pratt's Autobiography, as the source of most accounts of the first Indian mission,[2] and Joseph Smith's History, which refers sporadically to the Lamanites as it chronicles the westward movement of the Mormons, from New York to Kirtland and Missouri, and then onward to Nauvoo. The critique rests upon an interpretation of what is and what is not to be found in those texts. So, only in a limited sense is this essay about a particular period in history. In a broader view, it is about the histories of a period—or at least about those which are most available to Mormons. These variant versions of history each have something to tell about Mormon-Indian relations in the present as well as in the past.

Parley Pratt’s Autobiography: The First Indian Mission

A few months after the restoration of the Church of Ghrist by Joseph Smith, a revelation was "given through the mouth of this Prophet, Seer and Translator, in which Elders Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer, Ziba Peterson and myself were appointed to go into the wilderness, through the western States, and to the Indian territory." So writes Parley Pratt, who then describes the westward journey from New York, which they began in October 1830: "After travelling for some days we called on an Indian nation at or near Buffalo; and spent part of a day with them, instructing them in the knowledge of the record of their forefathers. We were kindly received, and much interest was manifested by them. . . . . We made a present of two copies of the Book of Mormon to certain of them who could read, and repaired to Buffalo” (1979, 47). Preaching with great success among Sidney Rigdon's congregation at Kirtland, the missionaries established the Mormon faith in Ohio. Then, joined by Frederick G. Williams, they visited the Wyandots in the western part of the state. Again they were well received, and they laid the Book of Mormon before the tribe. The Wyandots "rejoiced in the tidings, bid us God speed, and desired us to write to them in relation to our success among the tribes further west, who had already removed to the Indian territory, where these expected soon to go" (p. 51).

Early in 1831, after tra veiling 15 00 miles, mostly on foot, the missionaries reached Independence, Missouri. With little delay, three of them crossed into Indian territory, "tarried one night" with the Shawnees, then "entered among the Delawares." That tribe's chief "had ever been opposed to the introduction of missionaries)) among them. At first, he refused to ca1l his council together, but he changed his mind as he "at last began to understand the nature of the Book [of Mormon]." After he and his council listened to Cowdery's "glad news," the chief told the missionaries that the Delawares were "new settlers in this place" and had much to do in the spring, "but we will build a council house, and meet together, and you shall read to us and teach us more concerning the Book of our fathers and the will of the Great Spirit” (pp. 52–56).

According to Pratt, excitement and interest were contagious among the Delawares as the missionaries "continued for several days to instruct the old chief and many of his tribe." But then:

The excitement . . . reached the frontier settlements in Missouri, and stirred up the jealousy and envy of the Indian agents and sectarian missionaries to that degree that we were soon ordered out of the Indian country as disturbers of the peace; and even threatened with the military in case of non-compliance. We accordingly departed from the Indian country, and came over the line, and commenced laboring in Jackson County, Missouri, among the whites.

Concluding this account, Pratt trusts that "at some future day, when the servants of God go forth in power to the remnant of Joseph, some precious seed will be found growing in their hearts, which was sown by us in that early day" (p. 57). Apart from a casual reference, his autobiography says nothing more about the first mission to the Indians.

Joseph Smith’s History: The First Indian Mission

The History of the Church provides some background for Parley Pratt's narrative. In September 1830, a revelation given through Joseph Smith instructed Oliver Cowdery to "go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them; and inasmuch as they receive thy teachings, thou shalt cause my church to be established among them” (HC 1:111). Some days later, responding to “a great desire . . . manifested by several of the Elders respecting the remnants of the house of Joseph, the Lamanites, residing in the west/' the Prophet sought and received further divine guidance, and he then instructed Whitmer, Peterson, and Pratt to proceed with Cowdery on the missionary venture (HC 1:116-19).

The History also includes a letter from Missouri, where Oliver Cowdery had "nothing particular to write as concerning the Lamanites" (HC 1: 182). In a footnote, B. H. Roberts claims that the first Indian mission "is a very prominent event in early Church ·history” (HC 1: 183), but such a conclusion could not be deduced from the text, which makes no mention of the Cowdery party's missionary work among the Indians. Though Pratt returned to the east to give him "verbal information/' Smith notes only that "the mission to Western Missouri and the gathering of the Saints to that place was the most important subject which then [in May 1831] engrossed the attention of the Church" (HC 1:181-82). Later in the year, after the leaders of the Church had assembled in Missouri, that land having been "consecrated for the gathering of the Saints," the Prophet records that "the first Sabbath after our arrival in Jackson county, Brother W. W. Phelps preached to a western audience over the boundary of the United States, wherein were present specimens of all the families of the earth . . . [including] several of the Lamanites or Indians—representative of Shem" (HC 1:189-91). At that point in Smith’s account of the Missouri years, the Indian disappears as anything but a focus for Mormon-gentile polemics.

Joseph Smith’s History: The Missouri Years

Pratt asserts that Mormons and gentiles were soon at odds over Mormon contact with Indians on the Missouri frontier, blaming the demise of the mission among the Delawares upon "the Indian agents and sectarian missionaries.”[3] Similarly, Joseph Smith claims that, when the Jackson County mob confronted the Mormons in 1833, "most of the clergy acting as missionaries to the Indians, or to the frontier inhabitants, were among the most prominent characters, that rose up . . . to destroy the rights of the Church.” He reports that he responded in print to the "slanderous tract" of a clergyman "sent by the Missionary Society to civilize and Christianize the heathen of the west," who 'had "used his influence among both Indians and whites to overthrow the Church in Jackson county” (HC 1: 372-73). He follows this entry with the text of a manifesto in which the "citizens of Jackson county" express an intention to "rid our society" of the Mormons. R. W. Cummins, the Indian agent responsible for the expulsion of the Cowdery party from Indian territory, is listed as one of the signatories (HC 1:3 7 4-7 6).

The first evidence of a concern among Mormons that their relations with Indians might provoke gentile hostility is found in a letter which Smith attributes to Frederick G. Williams, writing from Kirtland "to the Saints in Missouri” in 1833. By then the Prophet's second counselor, Williams refers to an earlier letter which claimed "that two Lamanites were at a meeting, and the following prophecy was delivered to them: — That they were our friends, and that the Lord had sent them there; and the time would soon come, when they would embrace the Gospel;' and, also, 'that if we will not fight for ourselves, the Indians will fight for us.'" Williams cautions, "Though all this may be true, yet, it is not needful that it should be spoken, for it is of no service to the Saints, and has a tendency to stir up the people to anger» (HC 1:417-19). However, an entry for 1836 shows that his warning was in vain. The "Minutes of a Public Meeting at Liberty, Missouri" describe Mormons as "objects of the deepest hatred and detestation to many of our citizens.” Then the Mormons

are charged, as they have hitherto been, with keeping up a constant communication with our Indian tribes on our frontiers, with declaring, even from the pulpit, that the Indians are a part of God's chosen people, and are destined by heaven to inherit this land, in common with themselves. We do not vouch for the correctness of these statements; but whether they are true or false, their effect has been the same in exciting our community (HC 2:450).

Having presented these minutes, the History documents two Mormon responses to the gentile agitation. According to the minutes of a “Public Meeting of the Saints in Clay County,” the focal Mormons denied "holding any communications with the Indians," assuring their gentile neighbors that they meant to stand "as ready to defend our country against their [the Indians'] barbarous ravages, as any other people" (HC 2: 453). In a letter addressed to the spokesmen for Clay County's gentiles, the leaders of the Church at Kirtland claim that the county's Mormons share "a decided determination to be among the first to repel any [Indian] invasion” (HC 2:458). But, despite their protestations, the Mormons were driven from Clay County. Two years later, in Caldwell County, Joseph Smith would again be required to deny that the Mormons “stir up the Indians to war, and to commit depredations" (HC 3:29).

Joseph Smith’s History: Nauvoo

When Joseph Smith's narrative passes to the Nauvoo years, his references to the Indians are again transformed. Most often, he records the presence in Nauvoo of Indian visitors. In 1841, Smith received Keokuk "and about one hundred chiefs and braves" of the Sac and Fox tribes, together with their families. He "instructed them in many things which the Lord had revealed unto me concerning their fathers, and the promises that were made concerning them in the Book of Mormon. I advised them to cease killing each other and . . . also to keep peace with the whites” (HC 4:401–2). Again, he reports "an interview with several Pottawatamie chiefs," adding an extract from Wilford Woodruff’s journal which attributes this speech to an Indian orator: "'We as a people have long been distressed and oppressed. We have been driven from our lands many times . . . . We have asked the Great Spirit to save us and let us live; and the Great Spirit has told us that he had raised up a great Prophet, chief, and friend, who would do us great good . . . . We have now come a great way to see you, and hear your words, and to have you tell us what to do.'" The Woodruff extract records that "Joseph was much affected and shed tears” at these words. In response, he told the chiefs that their fathers were once a great people, "but they left the Great Spirit, and would not hear his words or keep them. The Great Spirit left them, and they began to kill one another, and they have been poor and afflicted until now." Showing them the Book of Mormon—"the book which your fathers made"—Smith instructed them not to kill Indians or whites "but [to] ask the Great Spirit for what you want, and it will not be long before the Great Spirit will bless you, and you will cultivate the earth and build good houses like white men” (HC 5 :479-80). Other entries recording the visits of parties of Indians to Nauvoo are similarly phrased (HC 5:365; 6: 402).

One entry for the Nauvoo years contrasts with those just cited. The record of an "exploring excursion west" to the Pottawatamies, Jonathan Dunham's 1843 journal shows little of the missionary perspective. Lodged in the tribe's "main village," Dunham was clearly concerned to assess the potential of the area for Mormon settlement. He notes that the "water is good and the climate wholesome. Some considerable timber, though no very great sawing timber." He spent one day "in looking up the creek for a mill seat, and found one and two beds of iron ore." Yet Dunham did not lack a missionary impulse. Impressed by the tenor of Indian worship, he notes: "All that is wanting to make them the happiest people in the world is the Gospel . . . and to feel its power. Their sectarian creeds and ceremonies would go to the moles and bats soon” (HC 5: 541--49).

Indians and the Book of Mormon in the Joseph Smith Years

Together, Parley Pratt’s Autobiography and Joseph Smith’s History point to four related dimensions of the Mormon approach to the Indians in the Joseph Smith years: (1) the role of the Book of Mormon; (2) the relative priority of the missionary task among the Indians; (3) the place of Mormons and Indians in a society which was dominated by gentiles; and (4) the manner in which the Joseph Smith years prefigure the rest of Mormon history.

In 1830, even before the first mission, Parley Pratt and others felt a concern for the "remnants of the house of Joseph" because they accepted the Book of Mormon as scripture. Received as such, it gave a particular impetus to missionary work among the Lamanites. As well, it provided much of the substance of the missionary message to them. Pratt, Cowdery, and Smith all preached the Book of Mormon to the Indians, presenting it as an indigenous American scripture. Moreover, though Indians might reject the Mormon claim that it was the record of their Lamanite forefathers, the Book of Mormon structured the way in which Mormons understood the problems faced by the Indians. Both Cowdery and Smith attributed the desperate plight of the Indians to the moral defects of their ancestors. Cowdery told the Delawares that their forefathers once "prospered, and were strong and mighty. . . . But they became wicked" (Pratt 1979, 55). Reading the Book of Mormon past into the present, Joseph Smith told the supplicant Pottawatamies why their "fathers" ·had been "poor and afflicted until now" (HC 5: 480).

The Book of Mormon set the measure of the degeneracy of the Lamanites. At the same time, it gave direction to the missionary task among them. Both functions were implicit for Cowdery when he told the Delawares that their ancestors "cultivated the earth; built buildings and cities, and abounded in all good things, as the pale faces now do" (Pratt 1979, 55). Here, he drew upon Mormon scripture to invest the life style of the pioneer farmer and its environing “civilization” with absolute moral value, while denying any value to the life style of the Indian. In rescuing Indians from their "heathen worship,” Mormons would do more than save them from "drunken frolic" and a supposed propensity for violence (HC 4: 401 ; 5: 480, 542, 548; 6: 402). In the Mormon view, the spiritual regeneration of the Lamanites would flow from their acceptance of Mormon teachings and would lead them to "cultivate the earth and build good houses Eke white men" (HC 5: 480). Beyond that, they would "become great, and have plenty to eat and good clothes to wear" (Pratt 1979, 55). In effect, then, the Book of Mormon sacralized the attitudes and values of the American pioneer) even as it engendered a missionary commitment to the Lamanite. Together, these otherwise disparate postures defined the Mormon missionary task as the displacement in the Indian of an identifiably Indian culture.

Missionary Work with the Indians and the Building Up of Zion

While shaping the Mormon understanding of the Indians, the Book of Mormon provided an impetus for missionary contact with them, substance for the missionary message to them, and direction for the missionary task among them. That task was tied to the work of building Zion, itself a prerequisite to Christ's millennial reign. In his History, Joseph Smith declared that “one of the most important points in the faith of the Church . . . is the gathering of Israel (of whom the Lamanites constitute a part)," and he continued: "In speaking of the gathering, we mean . . . the gathering of the elect of the Lord out of every nation on earth, and bringing them to the place of the Lord of Hosts, when the city of righteousness shall be built” (HC 2: 357-58). Certainly, the revelation which gave rise to the first Indian mission also set in motion the building of that city. It did not instruct the departing missionaries to establish Zion's location, specifying only that "it shall be given hereafter" and "shall be on the borders by the Lamanites" (HC 1: 111). But there is much to suggest that, for Joseph Smith, the mission assigned to Cowdery was an intentional first step in 'locating Zion and in relocating the Mormon community. Pratt leaves the matter open, saying only that he was appointed "to go into the wilderness, through the western States, and to the Indian territory" (1979, 4 7). Consistent with that mandate, missionary visits to the Indians near Buffalo and to the Wyandots were made hurriedly as Cowdery's party pressed onward to the western frontier. When access to western Indians was denied them, only Pratt returned to the East to give a report. Then, in his narrative, the Prophet made no mention of the frustrated mission to the Indians, but wrote instead of gathering the Saints to Missouri. It seems that he "dreamed of a city in Missouri" for "his migrating disciples," and did not share their "illusion" of an "immediate, wholesale conversion of the 'Lamanites'" (Evans 1940, 61).

In any event, Joseph Smith’s History does not include an account of the first Indian mission. Moreover, it lacks an extended discussion of missionary work with the Indians or of a Mormon duty toward them. Nothing in it suggests that Smith saw the work as essential to the "building up of Zion"—a task which found its primary expression in the creation of a viable Mormon community. But such a judgment rests on the virtual absence of certain topics from the History.[4] To extend and refine that judgment other sources must be employed.

Assessing the priority of missionary work among the Lamanites during Joseph Smith's lifetime, Lawrence G. Coates refers to the polemical exchanges of the Missouri years to argue that gentile suspicions made it difficult for Mormons to involve themselves with Indians. He also shows that Mormon contact with Indians could excite the suspicion of gentiles even after the move from

Missouri to Nauvoo 1969, 56). But he acknowledges that) in Nauvoo, Indians “were unable to contribute their nomadic skills to a growing, vibrant Mormon community. There was little attraction for the wandering red man" (p. 5 7). Earlier, in Kirtland—far from the tensions of the frontier—“even after the Mormons . . . had gained a measure of economic strength, mission work among the Indians continued to suffer because a higher priority was placed on building a temple . . . than on teaching the savage." While the temple was under construction, only three elders seem to have been "sent to the Indians, and their stay was very short" (pp. 43-44).

Brigham Young was one of the three who were called to the Indian work at Kirtland in 1835. As leader, he was to "open the door of the gospel to the remnants of Joseph, who dwell among the Gentiles”—that is, writes Wayne B. Lynn, to the "many groups of Indians . . . living peacefully among the white settlers in the eastern . . . United States," where they were much more accessible than western Indians to Mormon missionary work. Later in the year, at a conference held in Freedom, New York, it was resolved that Young "go immediately . . . to an adjacent Indian tribe to open the door of salvation to them. Hands were laid upon his head [and upon the heads of his companions] for that purpose." Young "mentions his call" and reports the travels which ensued from it in his own history. But "if any Indians were contacted enroute, the result apparently was not worthy of mention." Nor were Indians mentioned during 1836 and 1837, when Young engaged in "short missions" to the "Eastern States.” It appears that “little, if anything, was accomplished by this group [ of three] among the Lamanites" (n.d., 11-14).

A different impression is left by Robert B. Flanders's account of events at the Wisconsin "pinery," which served for three years as a source of timber for the temple and other projects at Nauvoo. "Church leaders thought that sawmills . . . might be operated in the Winnebago Indian preserve at no cost other than for outfit and equipment” (1965, 183). However, as soon as the second working party arrived at the mill, late in 1842,

they began to have trouble with the Indians. The Winnebagos . . . demanded provisions under threat of burning the mill; they claimed . . . that the timber was rightly theirs. But they were put off with a Iittle food. Again in the winter of 1843-1844 the Indians threatened to make trouble, this time by putting the government on the Mormons for poaching. If, on the other hand, the Indians received food, they offered to intercede with the Indian agent to allow the Mormons to cut . . . where the best timber was (p. 184).

By 1844, the leaders at the pinery were advising its abandonment—but not on account of the Indians. In letters to Joseph Smith, Lyman Wight and George Miller proposed that they take the pinery colony to Texas "and there establish a Mormon mission. They would sell the mills, urge the friendly Indians to sell their lands to the government, and all go west together. . . . The Wisconsin Indian friends . . . would there aid in· large-scale conversions of Indians." The :letters from the pinery "struck fire in the Prophet's heart" (pp. 290-91). Within a week, Smith and his advisers had elaborated the proposal into a scheme whereby the Mormons would render aid to an independent Texas "by settling west Texas, thus creating a neutral buffer zone between the Texans on the one side and the Mexicans and perhaps the Indians on the other." An emissary had been "dispatched to Austin to begin negotiations with the Texas government” (p. 294).

Along with the Autobiography and the History, these three sources clarify Mormon priorities in the Joseph Smith years. Certainly, the Book of Mormon impelled a number of elders to serve as missionaries among the Lamanites. But, as Brigham Young shows, the most dedicated Mormons were not always imbued with a particular concern for Indians. Even so, it seems that the initiative for Indian missionary work lay more with the members of the Church than with Joseph Smith. The revelation which sent Parley Pratt to Missouri was shaped by a "great desire” expressed by some of the elders; the Texas proposal was made by the pinery leaders and backed by colony members. While Smith was quick to respond to both initiatives, he embedded them in Mormon settlement plains. He sent Jonathan Dunham to scout for a settlement site in Pottawatamie territory. He sent colonists to the Winnebago "preserve" to cut timber for Nauvoo. Neither project was conceived as a missionary outreach to the Indians who visited Nauvoo. The Prophet's design for that community called for English tradesmen rather than dispossessed Indian hunters. In sum, as Coates has noted, the gentile threat is not sufficient to explain the absence of a consistent Mormon missionary thrust among the Lamanites.

Evidently, in Joseph Smith's time, Mormon relations with Indians were beset by contradictions. The Book of Mormon afforded a positive view of a distant Indian past and of an Indian future which Mormons themselves were to mould through missionary work. But it also offered a view which allowed Mormons to distance themselves from their Indian contemporaries. They did so in Missouri, disclaiming any particular interest in the Indians when Mormon survival was at stake. There, as elsewhere, the task of building Zion. was not allowed to wait upon the conversion of the Lamanites. An ambivalent theology of the Lamanite allowed Mormon and Indian interests to be distinguished so that Mormons could practice a flexible “politics of the Indian.”

Mormons and Indians in a Gentile Polity

Mormon relations with the Indians were tied in complex ways to the gentile presence. Attributing religious significance both to the territory and to the Constitution of the United States, Mormons had to accomplish their premillennial tasks within a polity which was dominated by gentiles and which effectively excluded Indians from citizenship. The nature and the potential of this ethnic triad are discernible in the related issues of property rights and threats of violence. In clamoring for the expulsion of the Saints, the gentiles in Missouri implied their own vulnerability to an alliance of Mormons and Indians. In responding to gentile threats of violence, Mormons sometimes hinted at such an alliance, though they also claimed that they stood with gentiles against the threatening "savages"—a pioneer epithet. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith consistently urged Indians to forego violence among themselves and in their relations with whites. Yet, as Coates has noted, "Capitalizing upon his military image among the Indians> Smith frequently wore his Nauvoo Legion uniform. The Pottawatomies were so impressed that they invited the Mormons to join an alliance in which ten tribes had agreed to defend each other.” Smith demurred, but Brigadier General Henry King, the interpreter, was impelled to warn Iowa's governor: “It seems evident . . . that a grand conspiracy is about to be entered into between the Mormons and Indians to destroy all white settlements on the frontier” (Coates 1969, 56). Certainly, Smith did not decline the offer out of an inherent pacifism, for he accorded to Mormons the right to defend their lives and property. But he conceded no such right to the Indians, though he agreed that they had been much abused. Consistently, he interpreted recourse to violence on their part as a symptom of chronic Lamanite degeneracy rather than as an outcome of environmental disruption. Had he done otherwise, he would have called in question the underlying morality of the processes of the frontier, a morality which was grounded in the prophecies of the Book of Mormon.

Without justifying the actions and the attitudes of gentiles, the Book of Mormon validates their role as scourge to the fallen Indian (1 Ne. 22: 7). Though Joseph Smith found a place in his narrative for a protest made on behalf of the dispossessed Choctaws by one of their chiefs, he offered no comment other than that it provided a “specimen of the way the seed of Joseph are being ‘wasted before the Gentiles’” (HC 5:358–59). While he did not explicitly endorse the Indian removal policy of Andrew Jackson, "our venerable President," he suggests that the “joy that we shall feel . . . will be reward enough when it is shown that gathering them to themselves . . . is a wise measure” (HC 2:358–62). In 1844, when he became a. candidate for the American Presidency, "he said nothing about Indians" though his expansionist views were evident: "When we have the red man's consent, let the Union spread from the east to the west sea" (Coates 1969, 60; HC 6: 206).

Whatever Smith understood by "the red man's consent," it did not involve recognition of aboriginal title or other legal claims. At the pinery, the resources of an Indian "preserve" were treated as a free good. Having sympathized with the Pottawatamies over land they had already lost, the Prophet sent Jonathan Dunham to scout their territory for settlement. When visiting Sacs and Foxes "complained that they had been robbed of their lands by the whites," Smith agreed that "they had been wronged." But he countered that "we had bought this land and paid our money for if' before telling them not to sell any land in the future (HC 6: 402). Oliver Cowdery might promise that regenerated "red men" would "cultivate the earth in peace, in common with the pale faces, who were willing to believe and obey the same Book” (Pratt 1979, 55). But Mormon theology and practice conceded little to unregenerate foragers. Though Mormons spoke of an inheritance which they should share with Indians (2 Ne. 1: 5), they were as much involved as gentiles in the processes of the frontier. Like other Americans, they required that Indians accommodate themselves to those processes. At the same time, their millennial priorities distinguished them from gentiles. As millennialists on the one hand and as frontiersmen on the other, Mormons stood apart from gentiles and Lamanites. Yet, as the third member of an emergent ethnic system, they could find common ground with either.

Brigham Young and the Indians: Some Basic Continuities

For four decades after Joseph Smith's death, Mormons were more closely involved with Indians. In the Great Basin and southward, Mormons encountered viable Indian societies which had not yet been subordinated to American authority.[5] While the encounter produced "buckskin apostles," it also produced “Indian fighters.” Still, the God-given task of building Zion, with its premise of Mormon survival and prosperity, absorbed the energies of both, for their services were needed on the expanding frontier of Mormon settlement.[6] Along that frontier, Indians soon learned to distinguish between the “Mormon” and the “White man,” while “Americans” distinguished themselves from “Mormons” (Brooks 1944a, 18–19). Mormons and Indians were involved in the Mountain Meadows massacre of a gentile immigrant train (Brooks 1962). Mormons and Americans each suspected the other of attempting to activate Indian allies during the "Mormon conflict" with the United States (Furniss 1960, 161-62). Then, with American authority established in the Great Basin and Indians no longer a political factor, Brigham Young enlisted the aid of the United States in expelling them from the pale of Mormon settlement—an outcome which he had been seeking since 1850 (Christy 1978, 228–29).

Certainly, in the Brigham Young years, Mormon involvement with the Indians bore the stamp of that prophet's personality. As well, it was marked by the exigencies of settlement in the Great Basin. But, beyond the specifics of time and place, person and incident, the Brigham Young years were in various ways prefigured in Joseph Smith's time. Most obviously, the Book of Mormon continued to shape the Mormon understanding of the Lamanite. Yet that understanding was expressed in divergent "orientations" toward the Indian.[7] The "missionary" orientation fused condescension with an altruism which drew its strength from a prophetic view of the Lamanite future.[8] The "pioneer" orientation recognized the Indian as a rival—as a threat to Mormon interests or an impediment to their pursuit.[9] More evident when Mormons confronted Indians in the Great Basin, this almost secular perspective was incipient in Joseph Smith’s willingness to appropriate Indian land and resources for Mormon purposes.

Both the pioneer and the missionary perspectives were informed by the concept of the Lamanite, with its negative implications. Together, those perspectives supported a flexible theology of the Lamanite which let Mormons achieve pragmatic solutions to the problem of the Indian when altruism and the interests of the Mormon community were in tension. By giving priority to their millennial impulse, Mormons could pursue their own interests without regard for those of the Indian. They might argue, as Heber C. Kimball did, that Indians should not be paid for land which “‘belongs to our Father in heaven" (Larson 196-1, 314) . They might properly set aside the missionary task or subordinate it in other ways to that of building Zion. As in the Joseph Smith years, the Book of Mormon gave a pragmatic cast to relations with the Indians, and this in its turn gave greater latitude to Mormon relations with gentiles. The ethnic triad—more a matter of rhetoric in Joseph Smith’s time—was realized in action in the Great Basin.[10]

Parley P. Pratt and the Present

For the better part of seventy years, from the late 1880s, Mormons paid less attention to the Lamanites.[11] But, during the past three decades, their concern has been renewed. Once again, it bears the stamp of particular prophets—David O. McKay at first and then Spencer W. Kimball. Arguably, it is also a Mormon response to the growing political involvement of the Indian and the resurgence of Indian communities, not least in the American Southwest.[12] As in the Joseph Smith years, Mormons subscribe to a model of conversion which sees no value in Indian culture, and seeks to displace it, for example, through the placement program (Topper 1979). No less significant, though, for the relations of Mormons and Indians in the present, are their discrepant perceptions of the past.

Essentially, for Mormons, the "Indian history" of the Joseph Smith years has been collapsed into the story of the first mission to the Lamanites. That story has itself been reduced to a "ritualization" which focuses upon three ethnic stereotypes: dedicated Mormons, obstructive gentiles and incipiently responsive Lamanites.13 More specifically, this ritual history underscores a developing missionary impetus in the Church and, in particular, the renewed commitment to missionary work among the Lamanites (Britsch 1979, 22; Allen and Leonard 1976, 555-56). Coupled with Book of Mormon prophecy, Pratt's account now functions to validate the current missionary policies of the Church. But, as a representation of the Mormon past, it is history written backward. In expressing a commitment to the Lamanite, it gives Mormons the history they need—a sacred history in which altruism is untainted by self-interest, whether communal or personal. Of course, there is a historical continuity which links Parley Pratt’s journey with the present. It is the continuity of a missionary ideal which derives from the Book of Mormon. Mormons have, for a century and a half, shown a special concern for the Indian. But there is another continuity, a parallel continuity, to be discerned through a more critical approach to history. It is the continuity which carries the complexities of Joseph Smith's time through the Brigham Young years and into the present. Mormons will have to recognize that continuity if they are to cope with problems which are now arising in their relations with Indians—who have their own ritualized histories, and who are bringing them into the political arena (Parry n.d.).

Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of this article as a courtesy. There may be unintentional differences from the printed version. For citational and bibliographical purposes, please use the printed version or the PDFs provided online and on JSTOR.

[1] Though many other sources might have been cited, this composite statement drew in order upon: Burnett 1971, 12; Talmage 1976, 284; TSGD 1979, 194; Larsen 1966, 63; TSGD 1978, 69; Kimball 1971, 8; Doxey 1969, 198; MGD 1979, 145.

[2] Doxey 1969) 197; Evans 1940, 75; Petersen 1958, 55-59; Roberts 1965, 1: 220-25, 251-55; and TSGD, 1978, 70 all quote or paraphrase Pratt 1979, 47-57.

[3] Cowdery’s more vivid indictment specifies "Universalists, Atheists, Deists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and all the devils from the infernal pit" (Evans 1940, 75).

[4] A recent compilation of Smith’s personal writings points to the same conclusion. In it, the only indexed item which relates to his Indian contemporaries is a letter from Oliver Cowdery (Jesse 1984, 230–31).

[5] The competition for resources which led to the destruction of the "morally inferior" lifestyle of the Indian is discussed in Smaby 1975. See also Allen and Warner 1971; Euler 1966, 50-96; Peterson 1971.

[6] For missionary biographies, see Brooks 1944b and 1972; Brown 1960; Creer 1958; Little 1881; Smiley 1972. For early Mormon militia actions, see Christy 1978. For the role of the Indian mission on the frontier, see Campbell 1973; Peterson 1973, 212-13, and 1975.

[7] In a summary discussion of "stresses and strains" in Mormon society, O'Dea states that one of the "dilemmas" faced by Mormonism is that posed by "Mormon orientations to convert the Indians and their pioneer attitude of condescension and suspicion, as well of rivalry, toward them” (1957, 223). Here it is argued that O'Dea's "missionary" and "pioneer" orientations are not polar opposites, for they find common ground in the Book of Mormon. As well, they are not so much vocations as perspectives. Over time, a person might incline more or less toward one or the other, as Brigham Young did in his policies and pronouncements. See Larson 1963; O'Neil and Layton 1978.

[8] Condescension pervaded the missionary advocacy of Church authorities, as is seen in Jensen 1983. But, of all Mormons, the handful of men for whom missionary work with the Indians was a lifelong vocation were those least likely to hold that Indians were utterly degraded. See, for example, Jones 1960.

[9] In charge of the colonizing venture on the Little Colorado—officially an Indian mission—Lot Smith "became the symbol of trouble to the Indians" (Peterson 19 70, 412).

[10] Says Brooks of the Brigham Young years: "The three offer a triangle as intriguing as any provided by fiction" (1944a, 1).

[11] The responsibility of the Church toward the Indian disappears as a conference topic between 1890 and 1950 (Shepherd and Shepherd 1984, 241).

[12] In arguing that Mormons have an obligation to the Indian, Larsen notes: "In some states the Indian is becoming a factor to be reckoned with in the political power struggle" (1966, 58).

1985: Keith Parry “Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 18 No. 4 (1985): 65–80.

Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.

[post_title] => Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 18.4 (Winter 1984): 65–80
Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => joseph-smith-and-the-clash-of-sacred-cultures [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-06-09 01:01:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-06-09 01:01:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=16004 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

Why the Prophet is a Puzzle: The Challenges of Using Psychological Perspectives to Understand the Character and Motivation of Joseph Smith, Jr.

Lawrence Foster

Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 1–35
This article will explore how one of the most open-ended psychological interpretations of Smith’s prophetic leadership and motivation might contribute to better understanding the trajectory of this extraordinarily talented and conflicted individual whose life has so deeply impacted the religious movement he founded and, increasingly, the larger world.

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In 1945 Fawn McKay Brodie, a niece of David O. McKay, a Mormon General Authority and later president of the LDS Church, published a thoroughly researched, brilliantly written, and highly controversial biography of Joseph Smith Jr., entitled No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Although Brodie was eventually excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of the disturbing questions her book raised for believing Mormons, her biography went on to become arguably the single most influential work of Mormon historical scholarship in the twentieth century—and certainly the best-known. Astonishingly, No Man Knows My History remained in print in a hardbound edition (with a final “Supplement” added in 1971) for a full fifty years until 1995, when its hardbound sales had decreased sufficiently that Knopf finally brought out the book in a paperbound edition. As Fawn Brodie flamboyantly portrayed the Mormon prophet, he was an enigma flinging down a challenge to his future biographers when he declared, in a funeral address before thousands of followers in Mormon Nauvoo several months before his murder in 1844, “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it; I shall never understand it. . . . If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself.”[1]

In 1973 the non-Mormon historian Jan Shipps took up the Mormon prophet’s challenge in “The Prophet Puzzle: Suggestions Leading Toward a More Comprehensive Interpretation of Joseph Smith,” a paper presented at the first conference of the John Whitmer Historical Association that subsequently appeared as the lead article in the first issue of the new Journal of Mormon History in 1974.[2] Shipps urged Mormon historians to begin to move beyond the two highly polarized and seemingly incompatible perspectives that had previously dominated almost all treatments of the Mormon prophet. On the one hand, believing Mormons typically portrayed Joseph Smith as God’s chosen prophet who could do no wrong. On the other hand, non-Mormon writers typically described him as a highly manipulative and psychologically disturbed scoundrel. Shipps suggested, instead, that any credible historical treatment of the Mormon prophet must take him as a whole human being and see him in all his complexity as a “harmonious human multitude,” as Carl Van Doren famously characterized Benjamin Franklin.[3]

Although Shipps did not elaborate on precisely how such a holistic effort to understand Joseph Smith might best proceed, this article will explore how one of the most open-ended psychological interpretations of Smith’s prophetic leadership and motivation might contribute to better understanding the trajectory of this extraordinarily talented and conflicted individual whose life has so deeply impacted the religious movement he founded and, increasingly, the larger world.[4]

I

Understanding the personality, psychological dynamics, and motivation of any human being is a daunting task, but to comprehend the nature of genius—especially the elusive and controversial nature of religious genius—is even more challenging. The basis for great creativity in fields such as art, science, or politics has been a subject of extensive investigation that has not led to any clear and generally agreed-upon criteria for assessing and explaining such creativity. Religious genius—especially the prophetic leadership of founders of new religious movements—has been even more difficult to evaluate with openness and objectivity. A major reason is that those who revere their founding religious prophets often unrealistically assume that the credibility of the entire belief system their prophet-founder promulgated depends upon the prophet’s personal character having been exemplary and beyond reproach.

William James and other scholars have argued that great religious creativity typically begins with a problem or complex set of problems that the future prophet finds deeply disturbing. To use psychological jargon, “cognitive dissonance” is present. Individuals who eventually become prophets tend to find such dissonance more disturbing than their more normal contemporaries do. Prophets thus seek with unusual intensity to try to make sense of both their personal lives and their world. The dissonance experienced by religious geniuses—as opposed to geniuses in other fields such as art, science, or politics—also focuses with special intensity on value conflicts and inconsistencies. And once religious geniuses find a way to resolve their own inner conflicts, they come to view the approach that works for them as being universally valid for others as well. William James aptly comments: “[W]hen a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce . . . in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.”[5] In his essay “The Prophet,” the anthropologist Kenelm Burridge further suggests: “It is not appropriate to think of a prophet as reduced in size to a schizophrene or a paranoid, someone mentally sick. In relation to those to whom he speaks, a prophet is necessarily corrupted by his larger experience. He is an ‘outsider’, an odd one, extraordinary. Nevertheless, he specifically attempts to initiate, both in himself as well as in others, a process of moral regeneration.”[6]

The line between health and illness, between normal mood swings and those that might be viewed as extreme, is a very fine one indeed. It is often difficult for a contemporary psychiatrist who has worked closely with a patient to make an accurate diagnosis. To develop a nuanced psychological understanding of those who are long dead, even if their lives are extensively documented, is a far more difficult and speculative endeavor. Nonetheless, the judicious use of psychological perspectives may significantly enhance our understanding of influential individuals and their contributions. For example, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s study Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness draws upon both nineteenth-century and modern understandings of depression to show how Lincoln, gradually and with great effort, learned to harness his profound “melancholy” in ways that allowed him to address, creatively and effectively, the most severe threat the United States has ever faced to its survival as a unified nation. Perhaps Shenk’s greatest contribution has been to demonstrate how the skillful use of psychological insights can increase rather than decrease our appreciation of prominent historical figures and their achievements.[7] Similarly, although Joseph Smith’s complex and at times problematic personality could prove challenging, both to himself and to his followers, his internal contradictions and struggles to overcome them may have helped fuel his dynamism and success as a religious prophet.

I need to make three additional points before discussing one of the most compelling psychological approaches for understanding how Joseph Smith’s personality impacted his life and prophetic career. First, I believe that no single psychological framework, especially if rigidly applied, can fully explain Joseph Smith’s dynamic mental processes or why he did what he did throughout his larger-than-life career. For example, in The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Dissociated Mind, the surgeon William D. Morain has argued, in a brilliant but to my mind ultimately unconvincingly Freudian analysis, that the severe trauma young Joseph experienced when he went through major leg surgery without anesthesia at about the age of seven and then suffered a prolonged and difficult recovery period lasting several years somehow can explain all of his psychological characteristics and later prophetic activities as an adult.[8]

Equally unconvincing, in my opinion, is the other extreme position: that Joseph Smith can be credibly analyzed using any of a variety of different psychological approaches (just take your pick). This any-approach-will-work argument is illustrated by Terry Brink’s pretentious 1976 Journal of Mormon History article entitled, “Joseph Smith: The Verdict of Depth Psychology.”[9] In the article, Brink purports to show how Joseph Smith’s psychological dynamics might be analyzed using the approaches of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Erik Erikson. Brink naively concludes: “All of these schools of depth psychology reinforce the picture of Joseph Smith as a mentally healthy individual and recognize the important and positive role which religion played in his personality development.”[10] I believe that Brink’s superficial genuflection toward an eclectic mishmash of psychological approaches does little to help us understand anything about Joseph Smith that we don’t already know, or think we know.[11]

Finally, I must emphasize that many Mormons see any psychological interpretation of Joseph Smith’s actions and motives as unnecessary and inherently reductionistic. Most Latter-day Saints are convinced they can explain everything about Joseph Smith that needs explaining by acknowledging that his mission and revelations were divinely inspired. While sophisticated Mormon scholars may accept that naturalistic factors may have influenced a particular action Joseph Smith took or might provide valuable insight into his personality or actions, most committed Latter-day Saints are convinced that all they really need to know is that, however strange or puzzling Smith’s behavior may appear, he was simply following God’s will for his prophet and his Church. Ironically, this view that believing Mormons hold as a matter of faith is at least as reductionist as the extreme counterarguments made by non-Mormons who casually dismiss Smith as a fraud. I believe that both Joseph Smith’s supporters and detractors trivialize him by portraying him as either a stick-figure saint or a stick-figure villain instead of the complex, talented, and conflicted individual he actually was.

Just as Isaac Newton’s many well-documented psychological quirks and eccentricities neither prove nor disprove the validity of his brilliant discoveries about celestial mechanics, so Joseph Smith’s unusual personality characteristics neither prove nor disprove the validity of his religious insights, which ultimately remain beyond purely human proof or disproof. As William James noted in his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience: “If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.”[12]

The remainder of this article will discuss how one psychological approach might help us better understand the dynamics of Joseph Smith’s often puzzling personality and actions in a way that could be seen as credible by both secular scholars and by sophisticated Latter-day Saints who accept the divine nature of his religious mission.

II

The most useful psychological framework I have found to try to understand Joseph Smith’s prophetic motivation and dynamism is one that has been characteristic of many other leaders who have significantly impacted the world for good or ill. Stated most simply, the types of individuals we are talking about have a highly self-centered perspective. They see everything that happens in terms of how it impacts themselves; they believe that the way they see the world is the way others can and should see the world; and they manipulate others to achieve their own ends rather than viewing other individuals and their divergent goals empathically. Scholars use the term “narcissism” to describe this self-centered orientation. Initially all babies are highly narcissistic. They necessarily relate to the external world almost exclusively in terms of how the world impacts them personally. Yet as infants mature and become increasingly aware of the larger world and able to function more independently within it, they gradually realize that however much they may want or expect the world to revolve exclusively around them, in fact it does not. Mature adults thus eventually develop the ability to relate to others’ wants and needs empathically instead of simply relating to others in terms of their own needs and desires.[13]

Geniuses, however, often are highly intelligent and narcissistic individuals who become convinced that their unique insights or the particular ways they have resolved their personal problems can provide a universally valid way for others to solve their problems and understand the world. Narcissistic individuals may become convinced that the framework they have developed to explain the world is sufficient to account for everything—or at least everything of importance. This conviction can infuse their ideas with great emotional and analytical power. Yet because the insights of even the most brilliant individuals necessarily can only be a partial and incomplete representation of a more complex reality, when such insights are applied to the larger world, doing so may produce harmful or even disastrous results, especially if narcissistic individuals become powerful political or religious leaders.[14]

The concept of narcissism is more flexible and open-ended than many other psychological frameworks because narcissism refers to a certain personality type and does not necessarily imply that a person so diagnosed suffers from a mental illness or disorder, which can seem stigmatizing, dismissive, and reductionist. In addition, behavior that might initially suggest potential bipolar or manic-depressive tendencies—such as grandiosity, hypomania, or depression—may also occur in narcissistic individuals. Although my initial attempt to understand Joseph Smith’s psychology in my 1993 article “The Psychology of Religious Genius” explored the possibility that his behavior could have been influenced by manic depression, I have subsequently concluded that the behavior I initially viewed as bipolar can better be understood, instead, as associated with Smith’s narcissism.[15]

In order to assess whether or not Joseph Smith displayed narcissistic tendencies, it is helpful first to understand some of the personality characteristics associated with narcissism. A starting point is the description in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the so-called bible of modern psychiatry, about what it labels “narcissistic personality disorder.” Note that the DSM has been justly criticized because of its tendency to label behaviors it views as problematic as “disorders” or “illnesses,” even though milder forms of such behavior might fall well within the normal range of acceptable personality characteristics.[16] Qualifying its use of the term “narcissistic personality disorder,” the DSM-5 notes: “Many highly successful individuals display personality traits that might be considered narcissistic. Only when those traits are inflexible, maladaptive, and persisting, and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute narcissistic personality disorder.”[17] In this regard, I can’t help thinking of the Peanuts cartoon in which the hypercritical Lucy (of “Psychiatric-Care-Five-Cents” fame) hands Linus a scroll with a long list of his “faults,” to which he responds in exasperation, “These aren’t faults; these are character traits.”[18]

According to the description of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual:

Individuals with this disorder have a grandiose sense of self-importance. They routinely overestimate their abilities and inflate their accomplishments, often appearing boastful and pretentious. They may blithely assume that others attribute the same value to their efforts and may be surprised when the praise they expect and feel they deserve is not forthcoming. Often implicit in the inflated judgment of their own accomplishments is an underestimation (devaluation) of the contributions of others. Individuals with narcissistic personality disorder are often preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. They may ruminate about “long overdue” admiration and privilege and compare themselves favorably with famous or privileged people.

Individuals with this disorder generally require excessive admiration. Their self-esteem is almost invariably very fragile. . . . They expect to be catered to and are puzzled or furious when this does not happen. . . . This sense of entitlement, combined with a lack of sensitivity to the wants and needs of others, may result in the conscious or unconscious exploitation of others. They expect to be given whatever they may want or feel they need, no matter what it might mean to others. For example, these individuals may expect great dedication from others and may overwork them without regard to the impact on their lives.

Vulnerability in self-esteem makes individuals with narcissistic personality disorder very sensitive to “injury” from criticism or defeat. . . . They may react with disdain, rage, or defiant counterattack. Though overweening ambition and confidence may lead to high achievement, performance may be disrupted because of intolerance of criticism or defeat. . . . Sustained feelings of shame or humiliation may be associated with social withdrawal, depressed mood, and persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia) or major depressive disorder. In contrast, sustained periods of grandiosity may be associated with a hypomanic mood.[19]

I believe that Joseph Smith’s narcissism was his most obvious psychological characteristic; he ultimately viewed everything in terms of how it affected himself. For most non-Mormons, Smith’s conviction that he had a unique mission from God to create a synthesis of all previously valid human truth that would allow him to restore true Christianity in preparation for the coming of a literal kingdom of heaven on earth would qualify as “a grandiose sense of self-importance.” This is even more evident when one juxtaposes Smith’s claims of greatness with his unpromising background growing up as a poor, struggling farm boy in central New York State during the early nineteenth century. Similarly, Smith’s belief during the last three years of his life in Nauvoo that he was entitled to take large numbers of women as his plural wives may bespeak a “conscious or unconscious exploitation of others,” and the expectation that he should be given whatever he might want or feel he needed, “no matter what it might mean to others.”[20]

In my 2001 article, “The Psychology of Prophetic Charisma,”[21] I discussed some ways in which the concept of narcissism might help us better understand Joseph Smith’s personality and motivation. My article drew heavily upon arguments developed by the New Zealand psychologist Len Oakes in his pathbreaking study Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities.[22] Oakes based his research on his intensive qualitative and quantitative studies of the leaders and members of twenty contemporary New Zealand communal/religious groups and on his wide reading and his personal experience as the historian of one such group, the Centrepoint Community.[23] His study skillfully analyzed how narcissism could influence the sense of religious mission and drive of charismatic figures. Oakes was concerned to understand why prophetic figures become convinced that their personal perception of the world provides a universally valid way of understanding the nature of reality,[24] and he created a typology of five stages through which he believes charismatic leaders progress as they develop their distinctive sense of mission and prophetic careers. Only a few of Oakes’s arguments that are most relevant to this analysis will be mentioned here.

Oakes argues that a narcissistic orientation may cause leaders to behave in paradoxical, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways, since “every leader in the study appears to have split off part of his or her self in order to pursue their vision.”[25] Prophetic leaders focus so intensely on their personal goals and sense of mission that they downplay, ignore, or entirely repress other aspects of their lives and awareness. Consequently, these leaders display blind spots about their own weaknesses and behavior that are obvious to all who know them but that they cannot see or admit.[26]

Oakes further argues that the prophet ultimately needs his followers more than they need him. He notes that prophets often display an infantile, magical view of the world “wherein one need only wish to make it so.” As a result, prophets may be willing to distort reality in ways that outsiders or critics view as wishful thinking or lying. The prophet also displays a peculiar experience and transcendence of time that can be associated with memory distortions.[27] Oakes argues that “what the prophet knows as reality has some of the qualities of a dream, with fluid boundaries between the real and unreal, self and other, past and future, . . . God and humankind.”[28]

III

The remainder of this article will consider whether using the psychological concept of narcissism might help us bridge the “great divide” in Mormon historical writing between devout Latter-day Saints, who are firmly convinced that Joseph Smith was nothing but a sincere prophet of God, and most non-Mormons, who are equally convinced that Smith was nothing but a scheming and self-serving charlatan. Could a more nuanced use of the concept of narcissism help us move beyond such simplistic prophet-versus-fraud dichotomies to better appreciate Joseph Smith in all his human complexity? And might a better understanding of Joseph Smith’s psychological dynamics also help us comprehend why tensions in Nauvoo began spiraling out of control by the mid-1840s, leading to Joseph Smith’s tragic murder in June 1844?

That so many Mormons and non-Mormons for the better part of the past two centuries have firmly believed that Joseph Smith’s motivation could be explained by either the “sincere prophet” or the “manipulative fraud” narratives alone suggests to me that neither contradictory approach by itself can be adequate. Instead, both approaches must be partly true and partly false. In order to understand why believing Mormons have shown such intense adulation for their prophet while non-Mormons have typically denounced him as a self-serving fraud and con man, I believe that we must hold these two antithetical ways of understanding Joseph Smith in creative tension with each other. In short, to comprehend the intense positive and negative reactions Joseph Smith aroused among his followers and the larger public, I am convinced that the Mormon prophet must be understood, paradoxically, as both sincere and as a charlatan at the same time.

I first developed this concept in my 1981 Church History article “James J. Strang: The Prophet Who Failed” as I sought to understand Strang, the greatest of the many unsuccessful would-be claimants to Joseph Smith’s mantle immediately after his death, although I did not attempt to apply the concept to Smith then.[29] Dan Vogel has similarly described Joseph Smith as a “pious deceiver” or a “sincere fraud,” while Robert N. Hullinger has suggested that Smith may have engaged in some fraudulent activities in order to try to convey his religious message most effectively.[30] The point this concept seeks to convey is that Joseph Smith may have been the type of person who genuinely believed in his prophetic role and message but who also may have been prepared, if necessary, to dissimulate in order to achieve his personal and group objectives, which he saw as inextricably intertwined.

The Mormon psychiatrist Robert D. Anderson has astutely noted that people do not appeal to any objective measure of Smith’s truthfulness when they characterize him as either a sincere prophet or a self-serving fraud. Rather, both characterizations result from different ways of interpreting what the available evidence means. Anderson notes that while “a number of [Smith’s] dealings with others give marked evidence of expediency, deceit, coercion, and manipulation,” such behavior might also be seen as justifiable “if one believes that God commanded Smith to engage in them, or as purely manipulative and narcissistic if one does not.”[31] The psychologist Len Oakes insightfully speculates: “Is it possible that the narcissistic mind locates its meanings as much in the future as in the past? In the telling of a great lie, the lie would not be felt as false because it would not be compared with facts located in memory. Rather, it would be compared with ‘facts’ from an imagined, yet-to-become future that is experienced as just as real as the past.”[32]

Prophetic leaders are rarely driven either by purely self-aggrandizing or purely altruistic motives. Instead, in more intense ways than most individuals, prophetic figures typically display a combination of both self-interest and altruism. Smith’s close associate Oliver Huntington recalled: “Joseph Smith said that some people entirely denounce the principle of self-aggrandizement as wrong. ‘It is a correct principle,’ he said, ‘and may be indulged upon only one rule or plan—and that is to elevate, benefit and bless others first. If you will elevate others, the very work itself will exalt you. Upon no other plan can a man justly and permanently aggrandize himself.’”[33] Effective leaders must weigh competing interests and make hard decisions, sometimes choosing the lesser of several evils in order to attempt to move toward what they see as a higher good. Such an approach can also lead prophetic individuals to exploit or mistreat others because of what they take to be the cosmic significance of the goals they feel called upon to achieve.

An important point to keep in mind is that Joseph Smith was anything but the straitlaced prophetic stick figure so many modern Mormons have been taught to believe in. Instead, he could also be an outgoing, fun-loving, earthy, quick-thinking, and at times even outrageous man, unafraid to break with convention, who once declared, “a prophet is a prophet only when he is acting as such.”[34]

One of the most revealing descriptions of Joseph Smith comes from the pen of Josiah Quincy (1802–1882), a prominent New England intellectual who served as the mayor of Boston from 1823 to 1828 and as president of Harvard from 1842 to 1845.[35] Little more than a month before Smith was murdered in June 1844, Quincy spent several days in Nauvoo. There he was given the red-carpet treatment by Smith, whom he described as a man of remarkable personal presence, authority, and “rugged power,” even though Quincy said that his readers might “find so much that is puerile and even shocking in my report of the prophet’s conversation.”[36]

Quincy was particularly struck by the degree of adulation Smith received from his followers, who raptly hung on his every word and enthusiastically affirmed whatever Smith said as true. In a revealing aside that suggests Smith’s narcissism, Quincy commented:

I should not say quite all that struck me about Smith if I did not mention that he seemed to have a keen sense of the humorous aspects of his position. “It seems to me, General,” I said, as he was driving us to the river, about sunset, “that you have too much power to be safely trusted to one man.” “In your hands or that of any other person,” was the reply, “so much power would no doubt be dangerous. I am the only man in the world whom it would be safe to trust with it. Remember, I am a prophet!” The last five words were spoken in a rich comical aside, as if in hearty recognition of the ridiculous sound they might have in the ears of a Gentile.[37]

The Mormon historian Danel Bachman summarizes another story recounted by the loyal Mormon Edwin Rushton. Rushton described how Smith disguised himself as a sort of “trickster” figure and “put on” a group of Mormon converts who had just arrived in Nauvoo. Bachman writes:

On another occasion, when some new emigrants were arriving at Nauvoo, the Prophet disguised himself as a ruffian and met them at the wharf. Edwin Rushton’s father told him that the Prophet questioned them about their conviction that Joseph Smith was a prophet. When the elder Rushton affirmed his faith, Smith asked, “What would you think if I told you I was Joseph Smith?” Rushton again said that would make no difference to his belief. Smith then explained that he dressed and spoke in the manner he did to “see if their faith is strong enough to stand the things they must meet. If not they should turn back right now.”[38]

Another curious but revealing story about Joseph Smith is one that may or may not have ever happened. The initial recorded version of the story comes from William Huntington’s journal in early 1881, as published in a Mormon magazine in 1892—nearly half a century after Smith’s death. According to the story, someone once asked Smith whether any people lived on the moon. Yes, he confidently replied. People who live on the moon typically are about six feet tall, dress in Quaker style, and live nearly a thousand years![39] Modern readers, knowing what we now have discovered about the moon, can’t help finding such a story laughable or just plain ignorant. Yet according to Erich Robert Paul’s scholarly study Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology,[40] the belief that people lived on the moon was widely held in nineteenth-century America and it might well have sounded plausible at the time, as it apparently still did to William Huntington when he recorded the story in his journal decades later.

One thought-provoking take on the story is provided in Samuel W. Taylor’s insightful novel Nightfall at Nauvoo. Taylor imagines Smith responding to the question about whether people lived on the moon but afterwards talking with Eliza R. Snow, who was puzzled and privately turned to him to ask “how he knew so much about the inhabitants of the moon. He replied with a shrug that she should realize that a prophet always had to have an answer to every silly question. Why would people suppose that he should know anything about the moon, anyway?”[41] Of course, Smith might equally plausibly have believed that what he said was true, just as he apparently believed his own ad hoc pronouncements on many other topics about which he was in no position to know the correct answer.

Viewing Joseph Smith as a “sincere charlatan” influenced by narcissistic tendencies might help explain why he secretly introduced polygamous belief and practice among a small group of his closest followers in Nauvoo during the early 1840s. Ever since I began investigating this controversial topic more than four decades ago, my working hypothesis has been that Joseph Smith probably believed that it was desirable for a man to have more than one wife at a time, under certain circumstances. I further assumed that Smith may have held such beliefs because he personally wanted to have more than one wife (or sexual outlet) himself and because he may have become convinced that God had (conveniently) commanded him to take more than one wife.

The double-speak and double-think that necessarily occurred when Smith privately attempted to introduce polygamous belief and practice among a small group of his most loyal followers in Nauvoo, while most Mormons there were unaware that the practice was sanctioned by him, provides a well-documented illustration of the challenges Smith faced and the difficulty of deciding whether to consider him either a sincere prophet or a self-conscious fraud. If we again assume as our working hypothesis that Smith may have sincerely believed that introducing the practice of polygamy was a good idea—and even a divine command—he was nevertheless well aware that polygamy was illegal in Illinois and that his Mormon followers, who had been repeatedly admonished that strict monogamy was God’s will, would reject or even kill him if they realized that he was advocating what they considered to be a heinously sinful practice.

To address this dilemma, Smith skillfully adopted a two-pronged approach. In the theological realm, he began to introduce the belief that if marriage and family relationships were properly “sealed” for eternity under the authority of the Mormon priesthood on earth, those relationships would continue throughout the afterlife as well. The idea of being reunited with loved ones after death was very comforting to many Mormons in Nauvoo because of the high death rates there. Extending the belief to its logical patriarchal conclusion, however, also opened the way for a man to be successively sealed to a first wife who died and then to a second wife, with both of them continuing to be his wives in the afterlife in an “eternal marriage.” Extrapolating that heavenly model back into this life meant that a form of patriarchal polygamy could also be practiced in this life. Smith’s own polygamous behavior, and the polygamous practice that he introduced to at least thirty of his closest male followers before his death,[42] thus became the ideal heavenly model and the basis for all growth and progression, both in this life and in the afterlife, since the largest patriarchal families would have the most power and influence in both realms.[43]

The other part of Joseph Smith’s two-pronged approach was to issue apparent denials about polygamy to the vast majority of Nauvoo Mormons who didn’t realize that Smith and other Mormon leaders were advocating the practice of plural marriage using a code language to let individuals who were in on the practice understand that the denials were simply for public consumption.[44] For example, plural wives were often referred to as “spiritual wives” rather than temporal ones, yet they also were temporal wives.[45] When Joseph Smith was accused of practicing polygamy, he would typically issue statements along the lines of “this is too ridiculous to be believed,” although he carefully avoided saying that the allegations weren’t true.[46] In the meantime, Smith’s proxy surrogates would make the air blue by accusing individuals who made allegations about Smith’s improper sexual behavior of having engaged in the same actions for which they were criticizing Smith. As Fawn Brodie summarizes: “The denials of polygamy uttered by the Mormon leaders between 1835 and 1852, when it was finally admitted, are a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastics.”[47] Whether such behavior constituted a misrepresentation necessary to introduce a divine principle or was simply self-serving narcissism depends, as always, on whether one is viewing the events from inside or outside the group.

Like other narcissistic individuals, Smith felt he always had to be right on matters he considered important. He was upset when others did not give him the praise he expected and felt he deserved. Thus, his self-esteem was very fragile if he was criticized. He tended to see any challenge to his authority as unwarranted “persecution,” and he lashed out in fury against those he deemed his opponents, which caused even some of his closest followers to break with him. For anyone who supported Smith wholeheartedly, nothing was too good, yet those who criticized him risked being consigned to the outer darkness unless they repented and submitted themselves to his full authority again.

Portraying in-group/out-group tensions as simply the result of unjust “persecution” of one group by another can be an effective way to rationalize or explain away an individual’s or a group’s misbehavior toward those outside the group. For example, the Mormons in Nauvoo understandably believed they had been mistreated when they were harshly driven out of Missouri in 1838–39. The experience may, in turn, have led some Mormons to feel justified in retaliating against Missourians or others by “despoiling the Gentiles” in various ways. Engaging in such retaliatory actions, however, risks setting off a vicious cycle of ever-increasing conflict between opposing groups that can eventually cause both sides to feel threatened and victimized, as happened so tragically in both Missouri and in Nauvoo.[48]

Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo and throughout their history have been quite successful in creating compelling persecution narratives that portray any external criticism as caused by religious “persecution.” But Mormon writers have typically failed to consider whether specific non-Mormon criticisms might have actually had some validity and identified real problems or excesses the Latter-day Saints needed to address.[49]

In Glorious in Persecution: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1839–1844, the Mormon historian Martha Bradley-Evans skillfully and sympathetically frames her narrative around the ways in which Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo created and utilized complex persecution narratives in order to cement Mormon in-group loyalty. From this perspective, she is able to present some details about highly questionable polygamous behavior in which the Mormon prophet engaged without judging whether his actions were right or wrong. I believe that most present-day Mormon and non-Mormon historians would find her narrative factually and analytically credible and that many scholars from both camps would probably feel that Smith’s actions in his polygamous relationships would be suggestive of exploitative or psychologically disturbed behavior if the events in question had occurred in the present day.

In his essay “Joseph Smith and the Hazards of Charismatic Leadership,”[50] Mormon historian Gary James Bergera has provided arguably the most convincing brief analysis of how Joseph Smith’s increasing narcissism and grandiosity eventually led to his tragic death. Bergera’s thesis is that:

When a charismatic person assumes a position of leadership and fails to recognize the limitations of his power, convinced he can “transform his . . . fantasies into reality for his followers,” he may develop what psychologists refer to as megalomaniacal fantasies, including paranoid delusions. . . . The group may willingly surrender its ego to the leader “in order to preserve [its] love of the leader, and whatever esteem [it] experience[s] comes from the sense of devotion to the ideals and causes established in the leader’s image.” Yet the leader may experience little resistance in influencing his followers to do things they would not do otherwise, reconfirming the breadth of his own power and the ease with which his followers are able to achieve the realization of their own dreams as defined by the leader. “Attachment and omnipotence [can] mutually reinforce one another, omnipotence turning into a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ in which ‘everything is allowed and nothing is off limits.’”[51]

Bergera continues:

Embodying both the strengths and weaknesses of charismatic leadership, Joseph, during the final two years of his life, from 1842 to 1844, tested more than once the boundaries separating fantasy from reality, succumbing to those hazards problematic to charismatic leaders. In significant and, I believe, revealing ways, Joseph’s leadership is a case study of the hazards confronting charismatic leadership in crisis situations.[52]

According to Bergera, Joseph Smith’s conviction that he possessed a divinely based prophetic power led him to believe he had “power that transcended civil law” and that this belief suggests “the tenuousness of the grasp he may have held, at times, on reality.”[53]

But the discussion of Joseph’s occasional difficulty to distinguish fantasy from reality should not be construed as an attempt to address the validity of his prophetic calling. Rather, it presents an admittedly speculative attempt to better understand the mental state—the strains, pressures, conflicts, and contradictions—we all experience when expectations clash with reality. With Joseph, the effects of such struggles were perhaps more dramatic, affecting the lives of more people than would have been the case with a lesser individual.[54]

Bergera identifies twelve “examples of the extent to which Joseph may have sought to interpose his will over that normally imposed upon human behavior by external reality,” and he argues that each example “reflects what may be either maladaptive responses to Joseph’s environment or possible evidence of a growing sense of self-importance and personal omnipotence.”[55]

Here I shall only summarize Bergera’s analysis of one of the most important of those twelve examples of Smith’s overreach, namely, his efforts to introduce plural marriage belief and practice to some of his most loyal followers.[56] After Smith’s twelve apostles returned from their missions to England in 1841, he rapidly moved to introduce the idea of “celestial marriage” to them, along with its corollary, plural marriage. He tested their absolute loyalty to him by asking each of his apostles, at different times, to relinquish their wives to him so they might become his plural wives. “This apparently continued for almost one year before one apostle, Orson Pratt, failed to pass the test in July 1842. Sensitive to the scandal that could erupt from additional failures, Joseph suspended requiring such a show of faith.”[57]

Later that same month, according to the Mormon historian Andrew Ehat, Smith began to go to some of his most loyal followers in Nauvoo who had daughters of marriageable age to teach them the principles of plural marriage and request that they teach it to their daughters as well. Evidently “the price some paid for their own sealing for time and eternity was the marriage of their daughter to Joseph.”[58] “If Joseph’s move away from asking for the wives of married men to asking for the daughters of faithful couples was intended to minimize the risk of public exposure, it shortly, and not unexpectedly, proved unsuccessful. Joseph’s courtship of Nancy Rigdon, daughter of former First Presidency counselor Sidney Rigdon, became as damaging to his reputation as his attempted liaison with Apostle Orson Pratt’s wife.”[59]

According to Bergera, the most important internal challenge Joseph Smith may have faced “resulted from anticipated opposition to his practice from both his brother Hyrum and his wife, Emma.”

Apparently never once during the first twenty-four months Joseph secretly promoted and practiced the “celestial law of marriage” did either Emma consent to her husband’s taking another wife or Hyrum offer to perform or teach the sacred ordinance. Joseph’s tests, it may be argued, evince the possible expression of what can be termed a paranoid delusion in which not even his most faithful friends could be completely trusted without their being first required to demonstrate unconditional allegiance to his leadership. . . . If Joseph could endure the rejection of others, he could not suffer rejection from either Hyrum or Emma, and initially refused to court their hostile responses.[60]

Although Emma eventually acceded to her husband’s wishes temporarily, “her support was short-lived, and she soon became an active opponent of her husband’s secret teachings.”[61] Hyrum, by contrast, preached publicly against polygamy in May 1843, but he eventually came to believe it was divine after Brigham Young explained the doctrine to him, and he then became its staunch supporter.[62] Bergera argues that “the greatest factor contributing to [Joseph’s] image of virtual omnipotence was . . . the acceptance of polygamy by his brother, wife, and closest associates. More than any other expression of allegiance, their willingness to obey Joseph’s commands in an area so at odds with conventional Victorian morality may have contributed to what appears to be the slowly eroding barriers separating reality from fantasy.”[63] This eventually contributed to the creation of an opposition movement and a newspaper, The Nauvoo Expositor, which in effect put Joseph “on trial before his whole people.”[64] In response, Joseph destroyed both the newspaper and the printing press. This led to his arrest and incarceration in a jail in nearby Carthage, Illinois, where a mob in collusion with the local militia guarding the jail murdered Joseph and his brother Hyrum on June 23, 1844.

Bergera concludes: “The irony is that the leader who succeeds in pushing his movement toward the realization of their fantasies may well be on the way to his own self-destruction. . . . Perhaps if any benefit is to be derived from Joseph’s death it is that it may have saved his followers from a similar fate.”[65]

In a sermon in 1856, Brigham Young declared that he did not base his belief in the truth of Mormonism on Joseph Smith’s personal probity but on his doctrine. Using typically blunt rhetoric, Young declared:

The doctrine he [Joseph Smith] teaches is all I know about the matter, bring anything against that if you can. As to anything else, I do not care. If he acts like a devil, he has brought forth a doctrine that will save us if we will abide by it. He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor’s wife every night, run horses and gamble, I do not care anything about that, for I never embrace any man in my faith. But the doctrine he has produced will save you and me, and the whole world; and if you can find fault with that, find it.[66]

In conclusion, psychological frameworks are most likely to produce revealing historical insights into complex individuals when they are deployed judiciously and non-judgmentally to analyze behavior that might otherwise appear out of character or not to make sense. Conversely, when psychological theory is simply used as a Procrustean bed into which one tries to force a dynamic human being who transcends simple categories of analysis, it can become reductionist and counterproductive. Although all psychological attempts to understand human behavior are imperfect tools, I believe that the limited, judicious, and nuanced use of psychological perspectives to try to come to terms with Joseph Smith’s personality and impact may help bring us closer to resolving “the prophet puzzle,” including some parts of the puzzle that even Joseph himself may not have fully understood.

At the end of Josiah Quincy’s revealing account of his conversations with Joseph Smith in 1844, he expressed skepticism about Smith and his religious claims while also recognizing this rough-hewn man’s native intelligence and leadership ability. Quincy concluded, “I have endeavored to give the details of my visit to the Mormon prophet with absolute accuracy. If the reader does not know just what to make of Joseph Smith, I cannot help him out of the difficulty. I myself stand helpless before the puzzle.”[67]

Quincy’s words remind me of Immanuel Kant’s compelling statement in The Critique of Practical Reason, which I have taken the liberty to modify significantly here as: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the mind of man below.”[68] The mind of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, in all its dynamic complexity, must surely remain a subject of awe, wonder, and concern for anyone who attempts to understand it. Perhaps Joseph Smith most eloquently expressed his own and his biographers’ challenge when he declared: “No man knows my history. . . . If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself.”[69]

^[1] Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), vii. Brodie’s efforts to use psychological theory to help explain Joseph Smith’s personality and motivation are found in the 1971 “Supplement” to her original 1945 biography (405–25). Weaknesses in Brodie’s use of psychological theory are discussed in Charles L. Cohen, “No Man Knows My Psychology: Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith, and Psychoanalysis,” BYU Studies 44, no. 1 (2005): 55–78. Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999) provides her biography, while the continuing impact that No Man Knows My History has had on Mormon historical studies is explored in the essays in Newell G. Bringhurst, ed., Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996). Brodie’s later biographies of Thaddeus Stevens, Sir Richard Burton, and Thomas Jefferson also highlight her continuing fascination with larger-than-life public figures, as well as her flair for ferreting out controversial details about their private lives.

^[2] Jan Shipps, “The Prophet Puzzle: Suggestions Leading Toward a More Comprehensive Interpretation of Joseph Smith,” Journal of Mormon History 1 (1974): 3–20, reprinted with fourteen other essays about Joseph Smith’s psychological dynamics and prophetic motivation in Bryan Waterman, ed., The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999).

^[3] Shipps, “The Prophet Puzzle,” 19.

^[4] The literature by and about Joseph Smith Jr. is vast and often highly polemical because both Mormons and non-Mormons view him as the most important figure for understanding the early development and significance of the Mormon movement. For treatments before 1997, see James B. Allen, Ronald W. Walker, and David J. Whittaker, eds., Studies in Mormon History, 1830–1997: An Indexed Bibliography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 927–44. The ambitious Joseph Smith Papers editorial and publication project—currently underway under the auspices of the Office of the Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—is anticipated to include two dozen or more volumes. In the meantime, B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930) remains an important source despite its limitations. Richard L. Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) supplements, updates, qualifies, and in certain respects supersedes Brodie’s pioneering study, No Man Knows My History.

^[5] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: New American Library, 1958 [1902]), 36. The first chapter, “Religion and Neurology” (21–38), is especially insightful. It brilliantly explores the complexities of religious experiences and debunks popular reductionist treatments of religious genius. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002) assesses the book’s continuing influence and importance.

^[6] Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken, 1969), 162.

^[7] Joshua Wolf Shenk in Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 211–45 also discusses how his methodology relates to previous scholarly efforts to understand the significance of Lincoln’s continuing struggles with depression.

^[8] William D. Morain in The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Dissociated Mind (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 2005) attributes too much importance to this one traumatic event. Although Robert D. Anderson shares Morain’s view that young Joseph’s traumatic leg surgery significantly impacted his psychological development and subsequent career, Anderson nevertheless opines that “a single event, even an overwhelming one, does not make a prophet.” Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), xiii. Anderson’s study emphasizes the conflicted internal dynamics within the Smith family and young Joseph’s narcissism. Yet Anderson’s argument that the earliest sections of the Book of Mormon provide “a disguised version of Smith’s life” also could be criticized for being speculative and reductionist. Mind of Joseph Smith, 65. For a thought-provoking assessment of the tensions within the Smith family, see Dan Vogel, “Joseph Smith’s Family Dynamics,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 22 (2002): 51–74. Also see the documentary account by Lavina Fielding Anderson, ed., Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001). I am grateful to Dan Vogel for his thorough and insightful critique of an earlier draft of this article.

^[9] T. L. Brink, “Joseph Smith: The Verdict of Depth Psychology,” Journal of Mormon History 3 (1976): 73–83.

^[10] Brink, “Verdict of Depth Psychology,” 83.

^[11] My criticism of Brink’s article is not intended to deny the value of nuanced use of multiple analytical perspectives to try to understand an individual. In Makers of Psychology: The Personal Factor (New York: Insight Books, 1988), clinical psychologist Harvey Mindess critically yet sympathetically analyzes the lives and work of seven pioneering figures in psychology—Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, and Milton H. Erickson—arguing that each man’s distinctive personality influenced the type of personality theory and therapeutic approach he developed. In his tour-de-force conclusion on pages 147–68, Mindess suggests how one of his clients might have been analyzed and treated differently by Freud, Jung, a behaviorist, Rogers, or Erickson—and then how he treated her himself.

^[12] James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 37.

^[13] I alluded to this approach in my first book, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), reprinted as Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 227–28. While seeking to take the measure of the founding prophets of the three millennial religious groups I studied—Ann Lee of the Shakers, John Humphrey Noyes of the Oneida Community, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons—I realized that all three individuals appeared to view the entire world as revolving around themselves. After they eventually managed to work out a satisfying way of resolving their own religious and sexual problems, they became convinced that the same approach that worked for each of them could provide a universally valid way of resolving everyone else’s problems too.

A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon humorously characterizes narcissism. Calvin says to Hobbes: “I’m at peace with the world. I’m completely serene.” “Why is that?” Hobbes asks. Calvin answers: “I’ve discovered my purpose in life. I know why I was put here and why everything exists.” “Oh really?” Hobbes replies skeptically. “Yes, I am here so everybody can do what I want.” “It’s nice to have that cleared up,” Hobbes responds dryly. Calvin concludes, “Once everybody accepts it, they’ll be serene too.”

^[14] One example is Mao Zedong, who became one of the most creative—and destructive—leaders of the twentieth century. After leading a decades-long struggle that finally brought the communists to power over mainland China in 1949, Mao went on to preside over two of the worst man-made disasters in human history before his death in 1976. Mao’s most destructive campaign was the misnamed “Great Leap Forward” between 1958 and 1962. It led to the largest man-made famine in human history, with famine-related deaths variously estimated at thirty, thirty-six, or forty-five million people. Mao’s second disastrous campaign between 1965 and 1969, his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, caused more than a million deaths and set the Chinese economy and educational system back at least a generation. See Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1977); Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008); Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker & Company, 2010); and Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

The detailed memoir by Mao’s personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, translated by Tai Hung-Chao (New York: Random House, 1994), describes Mao’s narcissistic and bipolar personality characteristics. In addition to Mao’s narcissistic unwillingness to trust even his closest advisers, his work and sleep schedules, which were not known beyond his closest inner circle of advisers, were extremely erratic. Periods of manic activity could last up to thirty-six hours at a stretch without sleep, followed by as much as ten to twelve hours of such deep sleep that nothing could wake him. Mao also suffered lengthy bouts of depression, during which he remained largely in bed for months at a time.

^[15] In “The Psychology of Religious Genius: Joseph Smith and the Origins of New Religious Movements,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 1–22, I explored the suggestion of Mormon psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck that Joseph Smith might have exhibited manic-depressive tendencies. Robert D. Anderson, another Mormon psychiatrist, took sharp exceptions to this hypothesis, however, in the addendum to his “Toward an Introduction to a Psychobiography of Joseph Smith,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 268–72. Anderson wrote: “Here are some of the issues that the diagnosis of Bipolar Affective Disorder does not address: the results of an unstable and deprived childhood with many moves and periods of near-starvation; the results of a traumatic childhood surgery; the effects of being raised in a family with an alcoholic father, a mother predisposed to depression, and repeated failures and minimal esteem in the community; and the effect of being raised in a subculture of magical delusion, requiring deceit of self and others. I agree that Smith demonstrated grandiosity, but I see it as a progressive development going out of control toward the end of his life.” Anderson continued: “Five years ago, paying attention to the recurrent depressive episodes in Joseph’s mother and the life-long mental illness of his son [David Hyrum Smith], I seriously considered Bipolar II but abandoned it for the reasons given. Frankly I was sorry, for I would have liked to find an explanation for Smith’s later excesses that was out of his control. Other intellectuals in the Mormon world would understand this wish” (270–71).

^[16] For example, editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders before 1987 characterized homosexuality as a “psychiatric disorder,” although more recent editions no longer do so. In The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (New York: Penguin, 2013), Gary Greenberg sharply criticizes the DSM and the psychiatric profession’s tendency to “medicalize” disruptive behaviors at the extreme limits of the spectrum of normal human variability.

^[17] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 672, hereafter cited as DSM-5.

^[18] DSM-5, 646, states that its diagnostic approach “represents the categorical perspective that personality disorders are qualitatively different clinical syndromes [than the personality characteristics of normal individuals]”; however, it also acknowledges: “An alternative to the categorical approach is the dimensional perspective that personality disorders represent maladaptive variants of personality traits that merge imperceptibly into normality and into one another.” This latter approach is the one adopted in this article and suggested by Linus’s comment to Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon.

^[19] DSM-5, 670–71. For readability I have removed parenthetical references to the nine diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder in the original statement.

^[20] DSM-5, 670.

^[21] Lawrence Foster, “The Psychology of Prophetic Charisma: New Approaches to Understanding Joseph Smith and the Development of Charismatic Leadership,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 1–14, with a comment by Len Oakes, “The Prophet’s Fall: A Note in Response to Lawrence Foster’s ‘The Psychology of Prophetic Charisma,’” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 15–16.

^[22] In Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997), Oakes conducted in-depth interviews with the leader of each group, as well as with two or three important lower-level leaders. He also administered a standard psychological inventory known as the Adjective Checklist to both leaders and followers in order to secure quantitative data about how both leaders and followers in the groups compared to “normal” populations.

^[23] Len Oakes, Inside Centrepoint: The Story of a New Zealand Community (Auckland, N.Z.: Benton Ross, 1986) sympathetically describes this controversial therapeutic community’s development, way of life, and spiritual beliefs.

^[24] Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, 44–73. The core of Oakes’s argument is that the highly narcissistic figures who eventually take on prophetic leadership roles are individuals who, as young children, were protected for an unusually long time by their mother or other primary caregiver from the inevitable adjustments necessary to adapt to a larger world in which they were not omnipotent, not the primary center of attention. When a crisis inevitably shatters the idyllic mindset of the future charismatic leaders, they seek to make the larger world conform to their own needs and desires rather than adapt themselves to the realities of the environment around them. In this article, however, I will not focus on the psychological roots of narcissism but on how narcissism may influence religious leadership.

^[25] Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, 80–84, 165.

^[26] Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, 170. Regarding Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s prevarications, Oakes caustically comments, “he couldn’t understand when others refused to take him seriously because he took himself so seriously that he believed his own lies” (emphasis in the original).

^[27] Prophetic Charisma, 171–75.

^[28] Prophetic Charisma, 175.

^[29] In “James J. Strang: The Prophet Who Failed,” Church History 50, no. 2 (June 1981): 185, I stated: “The meticulous research of the non-Mormon historian Dale Morgan has established beyond any reasonable doubt that Strang’s letter of appointment from Joseph Smith was forged, and almost surely forged by Strang himself.” Yet I further argued that: “One cannot account plausibly for the sustained dedication that [Strang] showed in the face of all the hardships, poverty, and opposition he experienced, or the generally well-thought-out and humane quality of his ideals as due to simple fraud or psychopathology.” For scholarly studies of Strang, see Vickie Cleverley Speek, “God Has Made Us a Kingdom”: James Strang and the Midwest Mormons (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006), the most thoroughly researched and insightful recent study of Strang, his family life, and followers, as well as Milo M. Quaife’s classic account, The Kingdom of Saint James: A Narrative of the Mormons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1930). Strang’s polygamy appears to have been based more on pragmatic considerations than on religious principle. For example, he said simply that his wives were women “whom I would marry if the law permitted me.” Northern Islander, Oct. 11, 1855, as quoted in Quaife, Kingdom of Saint James, 101.

^[30] Dan Vogel characterizes Joseph Smith as a “pious deceiver” or a “sincere fraud,” in “‘The Prophet Puzzle’ Revisited,” reprinted in Waterman, ed., The Prophet Puzzle, 50, after carefully analyzing several cases in which he believes there is solid evidence of conscious deception on Smith’s part. Vogel asks: “[W]hat were the rationalizations, or more precisely the inner moral conflicts of an individual who deceives in God’s name while also holding sincere religious beliefs?” (54). He concludes: “I suggest that Smith really believed he was called by God to preach repentance to a sinful world but that he felt justified in using deception to accomplish his mission more fully” (61). Vogel’s analysis draws upon ideas from Robert N. Hullinger’s Mormon Answer to Skepticism: Why Joseph Smith Wrote the Book of Mormon (St. Louis: Clayton, 1980), reprinted as Joseph Smith’s Response to Skepticism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992).

^[31] Mind of Joseph Smith, xxiv–xxv.

^[32] Prophetic Charisma, 174; emphasis in the original.

^[33] Hyrum L. Andrus and Helen Mae Andrus, comps., They Knew the Prophet (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1974), 61, as quoted in Vogel, “‘The Prophet Puzzle’ Revisited,” 63.

^[34] History of the Church, 5:265. Statement from Feb. 8, 1843.

^[35] Quincy’s account has been reprinted as “Two Boston Brahmins Call on the Prophet,” in William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen, eds., Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 131–42. Richard Bushman summarizes Quincy’s report as the prologue to his biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 3–7.

^[36] Quincy, “Two Boston Brahmins,” 134.

^[37] Quincy, “Two Boston Brahmins,” 140.

^[38] Edwin Rushton, Journal, 2, as cited in Danel W. Bachman, “A Study of the Mormon Practice of Plural Marriage Before the Death of Joseph Smith” (master’s thesis, Purdue University, 1975), 169. Note that “Danel” is the correct spelling of Bachman’s first name.

^[39] The original version of the story is a third-hand account found in Oliver Huntington’s Journal, Book 14, 166, and in The History of Oliver B. Huntington, p. 10, typed copy, Marriott Library, University of Utah. Huntington claimed he had received the information from Philo Dibble. Huntington’s story is retold in “Our Sunday Chapter: The Inhabitants of the Moon,” The Young Woman’s Journal 3, no. 6 (1892): 263–64.

^[40] Erich Robert Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 109.

^[41] Samuel W. Taylor, Nightfall at Nauvoo (New York: Avon, 1973), 163.

^[42] Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy, 241–354, provides a detailed reconstruction of the circumstances under which Joseph Smith’s male followers entered into polygamous marriages prior to his death.

^[43] Foster, Religion and Sexuality, 142–46, summarizes the new “sealing” ceremonies introduced into the LDS Church in the early 1840s. William Victor Smith, Textual Studies of the Doctrine and Covenants: The Plural Marriage Revelation (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018) is a thorough and sophisticated analysis that contextualizes many issues associated with the revelation on plural and celestial marriage. The book also includes an addendum with the full text of the earliest manuscript version of the revelation, as recorded by Smith’s scribe Joseph C. Kingsbury (227–39).

^[44] In The True Origin of Mormon Polygamy (Cincinnati: Standard, 1914), Charles A. Shook analyzes, with lawyer-like precision, the reasons why the many Mormon statements in Nauvoo that appear to be denials of polygamy actually were not understood as denials by Latter-day Saints who had been initiated into polygamous belief and practice. The Peace Maker, or The Doctrines of the Millennium, a pamphlet defense of polygamy by Udney Hay Jacob published in late 1842, provides one example of such doublespeak. Although the pamphlet identified “J. Smith” as its “printer,” when Smith’s followers expressed outrage at the pamphlet’s argument, he backtracked and claimed he hadn’t been aware of the pamphlet’s contents before publishing it. Speaking out of both sides of his mouth, he added: “not that I am opposed to any man enjoying his privileges [a code word for polygamy]; but I do not wish to have my name associated with the authors [sic] in such an unmeaning rigmarole of non-sense, folly and trash” (emphasis added). Times and Seasons 4, Dec. 1, 1842, 32, as quoted in Foster, Religion and Sexuality, 319. For a more detailed discussion of the controversy, see Religion and Sexuality, 174–77.

^[45] In her 1882 defense of plural marriage, Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, a former plural wife of Joseph Smith, stated that during the early development of Mormon polygamy in Nauvoo, “spiritual wife was the title by which every woman who entered into this order was called, for it was taught and practiced as a spiritual order and not a temporal one though it was always spoken of sneeringly by those who did not believe in it.” Plural Marriage as Taught by the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1882), 15, as quoted in Foster, Religion and Sexuality, 318.

^[46] Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 322.

^[47] Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 321.

^[48] The mutual tensions between Mormons and non-Mormons in Missouri are discussed in Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987). For the tensions in Nauvoo, see John E. Hallwas and Roger D. Launius, eds., Cultures in Conflict: A Documentary History of the Mormon War in Illinois (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995). The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri highlights the excesses on both sides. For example, on July 4, 1838, the Mormon leader Sidney Rigdon, in his controversial “salt sermon,” declared “it must be as a war of extermination of us against them,” while three months later, on October 27, 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs officially issued his infamous order that the Mormons “must be driven from the state or exterminated if necessary.” LeSueur, Mormon War in Missouri, 50, 152.

^[49] Those seeking to develop a balanced understanding of controversial events in Mormon history would do well to compare the divergent approaches in such books as the sympathetic but generally candid Mormon study by James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976); the relentlessly hostile and one-sided, albeit factually accurate anti-Mormon exposé by Richard Abanes, One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002); and the wide-ranging, candid, and insightful non-Mormon study by Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

^[50] Citations from Bergera’s article are from the reprint in Waterman, The Prophet Puzzle, 239–57. The original article was printed as Gary James Bergera, “Joseph Smith and the Hazards of Charismatic Leadership,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 6 (1986): 33–42. The concept of charismatic leadership that the great German sociologist Max Weber developed was influenced by his knowledge about Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Although Weber said that the Book of Mormon was possibly a “hoax” and he opined that Joseph Smith might have been “a very sophisticated type of deliberate swindler,” he nevertheless concluded: “Sociological analysis, which must abstain from value judgments, will treat all these [individuals] on the same level as the men who, according to conventional judgments are the ‘greatest’ heroes, prophets, and saviours.” S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 19, 49. I am grateful to Dan Vogel for calling these citations to my attention.

^[51] Bergera, “Charismatic Leadership,” 239–40.

^[52]. Bergera, 240.

^[53] Bergera, 241.

^[54] Bergera, 241.

^[55] Bergera, 242.

^[56] Bergera’s 1986 summary of the development of Mormon polygamy is supported by major recent studies by professional Mormon historians. These include: Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997); George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy: “. . . but we called it celestial marriage” (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008); Martha Bradley-Evans, Glorious in Persecution: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1839–1844 (Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 2016); and D. Michael Quinn. “Evidence for the Sexual Side of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy” (presentation, Mormon History Association annual conference, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, June 29, 2012), enlarged final document dated December 31, 2012 available online at https://mormonpolygamydocuments.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Quinns-FINAL-RESPONSE.pdf. In addition, in Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013), Brian Hales, who is not a professional historian, has compiled almost all known documents from Mormon and non-Mormon sources relating to the development of early Mormon polygamy. Professional Mormon historians who have studied early Mormon polygamy most closely, however, have not found Hales’s apologetic interpretation of much of the evidence convincing.

^[57] Bergera, “Charismatic Leadership,” 248. For Bergera’s reconstruction of the complex issues raised by the Orson and Sarah Pratt case, see his Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 7–51. Orson F. Whitney’s biography of his grandfather, Life of Heber C. Kimball: An Apostle, the Father and Founder of the British Mission (Salt Lake City: Kimball Family, 1888), 333–35, states that Joseph Smith asked Heber to give his wife Vilate to him, stating that it was a requirement. After three days of intense mental turmoil, Heber presented Vilate to Smith. Smith then wept, embraced Heber, and said that he had not really wanted Vilate. He had just been determining if Heber’s loyalty to him was absolute. For similar tests of loyalty in which Smith asked Brigham Young and John Taylor to relinquish their wives to him, see Quinn, “Sexual Side of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy,” 42–46. Apostle Orson Hyde’s case was different. During Hyde’s mission to Palestine, Joseph Smith apparently took Hyde’s wife, Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde, as one of his plural wives without informing Hyde. When Hyde returned from his mission, he was reportedly very upset, but Smith apparently placated him by giving him two other women as plural wives. The details of this and other similar cases have understandably remained in contention. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 228–53; Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy, 327–29; and Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 452–55.

^[58] Bergera, “Charismatic Leadership,” 248.

^[59] Bergera, 248–49. The Nancy Rigdon controversy is detailed in Richard S. Van Wagoner, Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), 290–310.

^[60] Bergera, 249. The best-documented case in which Joseph Smith was married to a daughter of a close associate is that of Heber C. Kimball’s fourteen-year-old daughter Helen Mar Kimball. She described the experience retrospectively as extremely traumatic. In a detailed reminiscence to her children in 1881, she wrote: “Having a great desire to be connected with the Prophet, Joseph, he [her father] offered me to him; this I afterwards learned from the Prophet’s own mouth. My father had but one Ewe Lamb, but willingly laid her upon the alter [sic]: how cruel this seamed [sic] to the mother [Vilate] whose heartstrings were already stretched untill [sic] they were ready to snap asunder.” Before Helen reluctantly agreed to become Smith’s plural wife, he told her: “If you will take this step, it will ensure your eternal salvation & exaltation and that of your father’s household & all of your kindred.” She continues: “This promise was so great that I willingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a reward.” Quoted in Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 498, 499.

^[61] Bergera, “Charismatic Leadership,” 252.

^[62] Bergera, 249–50.

^[63] Bergera, 252.

^[64] Bergera, 250.

^[65] Bergera, 252.

^[66] Brigham Young, Nov. 9, 1856, Journal of Discourses, 4:78, as quoted in Quinn, “Sexual Side of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy,” 56–57.

^[67] Quincy, “Two Boston Brahmins,” 142.

^[68] Immanuel Kant’s original statement, in the Thomas Kingsmill Abbott translation of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics (New York: Longmans, Green, 1927), 260, reads: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”

^[69] As quoted in Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, vii.

[post_title] => Why the Prophet is a Puzzle: The Challenges of Using Psychological Perspectives to Understand the Character and Motivation of Joseph Smith, Jr. [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 1–35
This article will explore how one of the most open-ended psychological interpretations of Smith’s prophetic leadership and motivation might contribute to better understanding the trajectory of this extraordinarily talented and conflicted individual whose life has so deeply impacted the religious movement he founded and, increasingly, the larger world. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => why-the-prophet-is-a-puzzle-the-challenges-of-using-psychological-perspectives-to-understand-the-character-and-motivation-of-joseph-smith-jr [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-06-13 00:44:59 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-06-13 00:44:59 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=26355 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity

Steven L. Olsen

Dialogue 14.3 (Fall 1981): 89–100
Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of the First Vision has taken priority in structuring Mormon identity, despite the existence of different versions. This article explores why that version is so meaningful to Latter-day Saints, reflecting on the symbolic strucutre of the account.

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 16445 [post_author] => 3881 [post_date] => 2018-04-20 17:31:44 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-20 17:31:44 [post_content] =>

In 1838, Joseph Smith reduced to written form the sacred experience which led him to establish Mormonism.[1] his narrative relates a series of heavenly visitations which Smith said had begun eighteen years earlier and had continued until 1829. Although Smith drafted earlier and later accounts of these events, only the 1838 version has been officially recognized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith commenced his official History of the Church with this narrative. It also appeared in an 1851 collection of sacred and inspirational writings published by the Church in the British Isles. The permanent status of this text in Mormonism was secured in 1880 by its canonization at the hand of John Taylor who had recently succeeded Brigham Young to the Mormon Presidency. Since its canonization, the "Joseph Smith story," as it is known among Mormons, has become a primary document for the explication of Mormon doctrine and the introduction for many proselytes to the Church. The text has come to demand the loyalty of orthodox Mormons and has become one of Mormonism's most sacred texts.

Remarkable is the contrast between the official status of the 1838 version and the general neglect by the Church of the other accounts. This difference in status cannot be explained by the historical accuracy of the respective accounts. Despite some serious challenges to the chronology of the official account, Mormons have firmly defended its historicity, even though several of the non-canonized versions do not suffer from these perceived historical inaccuracies.[2] Neither can this distinction be demonstrated by the degree of complementarity of the different versions. Although some inconsistencies exist among the accounts, no official attempt has been made to supplement the canonized version with many rich details from the other versions.[3] Finally, despite the principal use of the official version to validate Mormon doctrine,[4] other versions could conceivably perform these didactic functions as well. In short, the Mormon Church seems to view the 1838 "Joseph Smith story" as an account apart, a different kind of narrative from the other versions, even from those written by Smith himself. This exclusive and inviolate position reinforces its sacredness in Mormonism.[5]

One possible reason for the considerable contrast in the Mormon attitude between the canonized and all other accounts is their respective relation to Mormon identity. That is, the unquestioned loyalty to the official version may be an expression more of Mormon ideology than of Mormon historiography or theology. One of the most important roles of this text in Mormonism may be the manner in which it articulates Mormonism's self-conscious mission to mankind.

The social and humanistic disciplines abound with studies of the significance of sacred narratives, often called creation myths, for the expression and maintenance of cultural identity.[6] Meaning in such narratives has been found to be communicated through symbolic as opposed to propositional logic. That is, sensory elements in the story connected with objects, images, persons and places are combined and recombined in discernible patterns which give the story cultural significance considerably greater than that given by the events themselves. As Alan Heimert has observed,

To discover the meaning of any utterance demands what is in substance a continuing act of literary interpretation, for the language with which an idea is presented, and the imaginative universe by which it is surrounded, often tell us more of an author's meaning and intention than his declarative propositions.[7]

This imaginative universe or these symbolic patterns constitute the structure of a narrative. This article will seek to analyze in the context of Mormon identity the structures used by Smith to express, and thereby interpret, his early sacred experiences.

Although many structural theories have been developed, the structuralism of Jean Piaget possesses two distinct advantages for the present study.[8] n the first place, Piaget sees "structuring" as the human process of imposing greater degrees of order upon and deriving additional levels of meaning from preexisting oral, visual, material, written and other cultural traditions. From this perspective, the Joseph Smith story becomes as much the reflection of Smith's perceptions and intentions within an expanding Mormon world-view as the description of a series of historical occurrences.

Secondly, Piaget identifies three characteristics of a well developed symbolic logic, namely wholeness, transformation and self-regulation. These provide the model with a method of analysis and criteria of falsifiability which allow for a level of scientific rigor unattainable from more impressionistic structural theories.

Piaget's first principle, wholeness, requires that the structure of a narrative be completely developed within the story. In the same way that a good story includes all relevant elements for its complete exposition, an adequate symbolic logic must be fully expressed within the narrative.

The symbolic structure of the Joseph Smith story exhibits the quality of wholeness. Briefly, the structure of the text is based on the dynamic contrast between two pairs of opposed yet fundamental concepts in Mormonism, namely Kingdom/World and heaven/earth.[9] The Joseph Smith story symbolically expresses the ideal Mormon relation between these two binary oppositions. That is, the Kingdom/World distinction is magnified and the heaven/ earth distinction is diminished throughout the narrative until the Kingdom overcomes the World and heaven and earth are united. These developments are wholly contained within the narrative.

Piaget's second characteristic, transformation, suggests that the events of the story are ordered not only in chronological and geographical sequence but also in terms of the text's symbolic logic. In the words of the anthropologist Edmund Leach, “the chronological sequence is itself of structural significance.”[10]

Two transformational principles operate within the Joseph Smith story to produce the ideal relationships between the Kingdom and the World, on the one hand, and between heaven and earth, on the other. The first principle, evolution, is the process of creating a new condition from a quite different and outmoded condition. The evolutionary process in the Joseph Smith story symbolically creates the ideal Kingdom/World contrast. The Kingdom overcomes the World in the narrative by destroying the World's institutions, eliminating the World's influence on members of the Kingdom, and ceasing all communication with the World. The Kingdom establishes itself in the narrative through the evolution of an institutional framework of action with the Kingdom and the regeneration of the individual in the ideal image of the Kingdom.

The second transformational principle of the Joseph Smith story is dialectics, that is, the process of increasingly approximating an ideal state through the resolution of contrasts. Dialectics operate in the narrative to symbolically unify heaven and earth. This is accomplished through the resolution of two pair of contrasting elements characteristic of the heaven/earth opposition, namely light/dark and high/low.

Piaget's third characteristic of a well-developed symbolic logic is self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to the patterns in the narrative, which are analogous to meter and stanzas in poetry and rhythm and movements in music. These patterns help set the mood of the story and reinforce its meaning.

The most obvious rhythms in the Joseph Smith story consist in the division of the narrative into three vignettes, each of which is characterized by a significant heavenly manifestation. More specific devices of self-regulation in the text include repetition, series, climax, ·and denouement.

The first vignette (vv. 1-26), known to Mormons as the "First Vision," finds young Joseph searching for God's true religion but being confused and bewildered by the organized churches of his day. Strengthened in his resolve to find the truth, Joseph retires to the woods near his home to ask God directly the whereabouts of the truth. During the prayer, he is assailed by an evil presence which nearly causes his destruction. At the point of Joseph's abandonment, the evil is dispelled by a glorious light in which appear two heavenly beings, identified as God the Father and Jesus Christ. They instruct the lad to avoid all modern religions.

Three years pass before the second vignette begins (vv. 27-54), during which Joseph has been adversely influenced by his friends. Wishing to be cleansed of the resulting taints, Joseph withdraws to the security of his bedroom to seek God's forgiveness. His prayers are answered by the appearance of an angel named Moroni who calls Joseph to restore the Kingdom of God to earth.

The third vignette (vv. 55-75) opens with Joseph digging for buried treasure. Unsuccessful at this enterprise, he withdraws from the working world to begin translating sacred records which Moroni has entrusted to his keeping. This translation is eventually published as the Book of Mormon. Wishing to verify the accuracy of the translation, Joseph sends a sympathetic neighbor, Martin Harris, to Professor Charles Anthon. The professor first attests to the accuracy of the translation, but upon learning of its reputed source, he withdraws his approval in disgust.

Following this rejection, Joseph immerses himself in the work of the Kingdom, and God rewards him first by providing him a scribe, Oliver Cowdery, to assist in the translation, and second by sending the resurrected John the Baptist to authorize Joseph and Oliver to baptize each other and anyone else who believes them. The Joseph Smith story ends with Joseph secure in the heavenly Kingdom he has just restored, yet increasingly persecuted by former friends and strangers alike.

We will now consider how these events are expressed by Joseph Smith in an imaginative universe or symbolic structure which defines Mormonism's self-conscious identity. The Kingdom/World dichotomy is symbolized most dramatically by the demise of the major institutions of the World. In the first vignette, institutionalized religion is overcome by the Kingdom. As the narrative begins, Joseph has no other concern in life than to find God's true church. Instead of truth, Joseph experiences hypocrisy, contention and confusion among the “different religious parties" of the day and feels himself unable "to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong."

To seek an answer, Joseph removes himself from the religions of the World and in a grove of trees near his home communicates with two heavenly beings. They repeat four times the answer to his question of the whereabouts of the true religion. Joseph is told a) he "must join none" of the existing churches; b) "that their creeds were an abomination"; c) "that those professors [of religion] were all corrupt"; and d) again not "to join with any of them" (vv. 19-20). Although Joseph alludes to "many other things" (v. 20) he learned during the "First Vision," the divine condemnation of existing religions is the only information included in the text.

Following his experience with the heavens, Joseph defends his newfound truth not only to the minister of the sect which had once attracted him (v. 21) but to "professors of religion" in general (v. 22) and to the very "powers of darkness" (v. 20) which had so recently nearly proven his demise. From this point in the text, Joseph has no further contact with organized religion. As far as the Kingdom is concerned, this institution of the World has been negated.

The society of the World is at issue in the second vignette. For three years after the "First Vision" Joseph mingles with "all classes of men" (v. 27) and in "all kinds of society" (v. 28). In defending his supernatural experiences, Joseph is persecuted by "those who ought to have been my friends and to have treated me kindly . . .” (v. 28). These associations lead Joseph into "all kinds of temptations" (v. 28). Although he confesses that such "foolish errors" and 0foibles of human nature" were not serious (v. 28), he seeks forgiveness of God after having withdrawn from the society of the World. His visitation from the angel Moroni takes him out of the World to define his initial status in the Kingdom—translator of sacred records (vv. 34–35). Following his experience with Moroni, Joseph has no further social contacts with any worldly associate. In short, the coming of Moroni negates the society of the World.

The third vignette contains two encounters between the Kingdom and the World. As with previous encounters, the representative of the Kingdom is adversely affected by his involvement with the World. God, however, provides him a means of escape. First of all, Joseph becomes involved with the economy of the World. Although, he is not alone in this enterprise, Joseph refers to his fellow workers only in occupational terms. He does not relate to them in the text as companions or friends (v. 56).

This get-rich-quick scheme earns Joseph nothing but the reputation of being a "money-digger." Embarrassed, he withdraws from the economy of the World and begins his mission to the Kingdom. From this point in the text, Joseph never again encounters the World's economies. God, however, provides for his temporal needs by sending a "farmer of respectability," Martin Harris, with the "timely aid" of fifty dollars (vv. 60-61).

Once Joseph has begun his mission in the Kingdom, the narrative has him no longer personally involved with any institution of the World. As a result, it is Martin Harris who takes a portion of the translated manuscript and some transcribed characters from the plates to a professor of education for verification. The professor approves of both until he learns of their reputed source. Hearing that they came from an angel, he withdraws his support stating that "there was no such thing now as ministering of angels" (v. 65).

This response climaxes the widening Kingdom/World opposition. At this point, the distinction has become categorical. The World is now the arch-enemy of the Kingdom in principle as well as in practice. Reconciliation between them is no longer possible. Consequently, no further contact with the World is sought by the Kingdom. As far as the Kingdom is concerned, the institutions of the World have been overcome.

From the perspective of the World, however, the principle of opposition becomes the practice of persecution. As the Kingdom progressively overcomes the World’s institutions, the World increasingly mobilizes against the Kingdom. Opposition to the Kingdom comes first from a single Methodist preacher (v. 21) and then from "professors of religion" as a group (v. 22). In the second vignette, the source of persecution has expanded to include "all classes of men, both religious and irreligious" (v. 27). By the third vignette, "persecution became more bitter and severe than before, and multitudes were on the alert continually to get [ the plates] if possible" (v. 60).

Despite the increased opposition, the World's influence on the Kingdom wanes as its institutions are negated. In the first vignette, Joseph is ignorant, isolated and powerless as a result of his involvement with the World. In the second vignette, the World affects only his moral integrity. Joseph's involvement with the economy of the World leaves him embarrassed and penniless but does not assail his character, and the involvement with the education of the World results only in disappointment. The narrative suggests that as the World mobilizes in opposition to the Kingdom, its influence on the Kingdom declines.

Joseph's patterns of communication in the text reinforce this logical progression. In the first vignette, Joseph discusses his spiritual experiences only with the World, in the form of sectarian preachers (vv. 21-22). He comes no closer to communicate his experiences with trusted family members than to inform his mother that her religion was "not true" (v. 20).

The second vignette finds Joseph's communications exclusively with "those who ought to have been my friends" (v. 28). After the visitation of Moroni, however, Joseph initiates open communication with family members and ceases direct communication with the World. In the words of Joseph, Moroni "commanded me to go to my father and tell him of the visions and commandments which I had received,, (v. 49).

The World, however, is still informed of the activities of the Kingdom, but only in an oblique manner, as indicated by the use of the passive voice in the text: '' . . . no sooner was it known that I had [ the plates], than the most strenuous exertions were used to get them from me” (v. 60). Joseph also indicates that by this time profane communication or "rumor with her ten thousand tongues was all the time employed in circulating falsehoods" about the Kingdom (v. 61).

After Joseph begins to translate the sacred record and after he becomes authorized to enlarge the Kingdom through baptism, communication with the World ceases altogether, and communication within the Kingdom, including that between heaven and earth, becomes well developed.

Our minds being now enlightened, we began to have the scriptures laid open to our understandings, and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us in a manner which we never could attain to previously, nor ever before thought of. In the meantime we were forced to keep secret the circumstances of having received the Priesthood and our having been baptized, owing to a spirit of persecution which had already manifested itself in the neighborhood (v. 74).

In short, as the Kingdom grows, the institutions of the World—religion, society, economy and education—are destroyed until the Kingdom has no more use for the World. The adverse effects of the World upon members of the Kingdom are also progressively eliminated. The increasing rift between the Kingdom and the World is seen as well in the mounting persecution of the Kingdom by the World and in the decreasing communications between them.

In the process of destroying the institutions of the World, the Kingdom recreates the individual in the ideal image of the Kingdom. In this respect1 Joseph Smith becomes the model of conversion in this sacred Mormon text. In the first vignette, Joseph describes himself as ignorant of the truth and unable of himself to find it: ". . . so great were the confusion and strife among the different denominations, that it was impossible for a person young as I was, and so unacquainted with men and things, to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong" (v. 8). The "two Personages" in the 11sacred grove" give Joseph sufficient knowledge not only to satisfy his own yearnings but to withstand the opposition of the "great ones of the most popular sects of the day" (v. 23) and the very /✓powers of darkness" (v. 20). After receiving this knowledge and throughout the rest of the narrative, Joseph never lacks for confidence or resources in establishing the Kingdom.

The second vignette is concerned with Joseph's moral integrity. His involvement with the society of the World results in his committing 11many foolish errors" and displaying "the weaknesses of youth, and the foibles of human nature" (v. 28). Joseph's repeated visits with the angel Moroni assure him of his acceptance by God. From this point in the narrative, Joseph shows no evidence of any faults in his character.

In the third vignette, Joseph acquires the trait of sociality. Until this point in the narrative, Joseph's companions have been either worldly as with 1 'those who ought to have been my friends . . ." or temporary as with his father and Martin Harris. Oliver Cowdery becomes Joseph's first companion in Kingdom building, assisting the Prophet to translate the plates. Not until Oliver begins his service does Joseph use the first person plural to describe his activities in the Kingdom (v. 68).

A final quality acquired by Joseph in coming to personify the Kingdom is power. Although he experiences the great power of the Kingdom from reading the Bible (vv. 11-12), he does not possess a portion of that power until John the Baptist confers on him the "Priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys [authority] of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins. . . " (v. 69). Upon being baptized, Joseph also receives the Holy Ghost which becomes an unexpected key of knowledge in establishing the Kingdom.

Joseph's experiences with the Kingdom withdraw him from a declining World and initiate him into the emerging Kingdom by developing in him the qualities of knowledge, purity, sociality and power. By the end of the narrative, Joseph has acquired not only these traits himself, but also the mechanisms in the form of baptism, Priesthood and the Holy Ghost to extend the qualities of conversion to all who will accept the Kingdom.

The evolution of the Kingdom is manifest, finally, on an institutional level in a series of activities having increasing significance for the Kingdom. The first activity, namely instruction, characterizes the Kingdom through the first two vignettes. The "First Vision" and Moroni's repeated visitations are wholly concerned with giving Joseph "instruction and intelligence . . . respecting what the Lord was going to do, and how and in what manner his Kingdom was to be conducted in the last days" (v. 54).

After Joseph receives the plates, the focus of institutional activity shifts to production. That is, Joseph now applies the instruction he has received to produce the first material evidence of the Kingdom's restoration, namely the Book of Mormon.

With the coming of John the Baptist the institutional activity of the Kingdom begins to shift once more from production to reproduction. That is, the Kingdom has evolved to the point at which others can begin to share in its growth. The ordination and baptism of Joseph and Oliver initiate this stage of the Kingdom's expansion.

In sum, the symbolic evolution of the Kingdom in the Joseph Smith story consists of destruction of the institutions of the World and the concurrent construction of the Kingdom. The former consists of the demise of the World's institutions, the World's influence on the Kingdom and its communication with the Kingdom. The latter involves creating the individual member in the image of the Kingdom and developing a framework of institutional activity consistent with the Kingdom's ultimate scope.

The second principle of systematic transformation in the Joseph Smith story is dialectics, which integrate the contrasting elements of heaven and earth in the text. The unification is symbolized first in the contrast of illumination, or light/dark dichotomy. As Joseph prays in the woods to find God's truth, "thick darkness gathered around" him. This darkness signals the presence of "some actual being from the unseen world," whose power causes Joseph nearly to "sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction.” Yet “just at this moment of great alarm," a pillar of light appears to disp·e1 the darkness. Joseph reports, "It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound." Within the light are "two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description'' (vv. 15-17). A more powerful contrast between light and dark could not be imagined than that which introduced Joseph to the Kingdom.

The light/dark contrast in the coming of Moroni is striking, but less so than in the "First Vision." Moroni comes to Joseph at night, which is simply the absence of light, not the presence of evil. The contrast is further muted by he light gradually dispelling the darkness. Joseph reports, "a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday" (v. 30). Joseph also uses language less sublime in describing Moroni's appearance than the "First Vision." Joseph describes Moroni's robe as having "a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen" and Moroni's countenance as being "glorious beyond description, and . . . truly like lightning" (vv. 31-32).

In the final manifestation of the Kingdom, John the Baptist appears to Joseph and Oliver during the day. The only contrast between the glory of the Baptist and the surrounding daylight is that John "descended in a cloud of light" (v. 68). Not only is the contrast minimal but it is made without further textual elaboration. In the three successive light/dark oppositions in the narrative, the contrast decreases and is the least at the point in the story when Joseph and Oliver are inducted into the Kingdom. In short, the resolution of the light/dark dichotomy symbolizes the union of heaven and earth which the restoration of the Kingdom was effecting.

Confirmation of this symbolic pattern exists as well in the opposition of elevation, or the contrast of "high" and "low." In the "First Vision," Joseph describes the "pillar of light" as appearing "exactly over my head" and descending "gradually until it fell upon me" (v. 16). The contrast between Joseph's position, namely "lying on my back, looking up into heaven," (v. 20) and the position of the "two Personages," "standing above me in the air," is considerable.

In the second vignette, Moroni appears somewhat elevated above Joseph, but less than the "two Personages." In Joseph's words, Moroni "appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor" (v. 30). The final vignette mentions no specific distinction in elevation between John the Baptist, on the one hand, and Joseph and Oliver, on the other. The only suggestion of a difference is that John lays his hands on Joseph and Oliver to confer on them the "Priesthood of Aaron" (vv. 68-69).

As the Kingdom becomes established, two of the principal symbolic distinctions between heaven and earth, namely light/dark and high/low, are eliminated. The evolution of the Kingdom also destroys all effective opposition so that by the end of the Joseph Smith story the Kingdom is secure in its foundations and optimistic in its directions. At the conclusion of the narrative, Joseph "prophesied concerning the rise of this Church, and many other things connected with the Church, and this generation of the children of men. We were filled with the Holy Ghost and rejoiced in the God of our salvation."

The symbolic logic of the Joseph Smith story expresses a fundamental aspect of Mormonism's self-conscious identity. Mormons believe that the religion founded by Joseph Smith embodies the Kingdom of God restored to earth following a long separation of man from the truth. According to Mormon reckoning, this heavenly kingdom in temporal form is destined to overthrow the kingdoms of the World and literally transform the earth into heaven. In other words, the 1838 Joseph Smith story not only experientially confirms much of Mormon theology, it symbolically defines its self-conscious identity.

None of the other versions express Mormon identity so simply yet so completely and elegantly as does the 1838 account. In fact, no other Mormon document can serve so well the role of cultural charter or creation myth. Smith's introduction to the 1838 version suggests that he intended to compose an official charter when he began to write.

Owing to the many reports which have been put in circulation by evildisposing and designing persons in relation to the rise anq progress of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . . . I have been induced to write this history, to disabuse the public mind, and put all inquirers after truth in possession of the facts ... so far as I have such facts in my possession (v. 1).

By integrating fundamental aspects of Mormon historical, theological and ideological consciousness into a simple narrative form, the Joseph Smith story becomes the model testimony among a people whose declarations of faith are often expressed in experiential terms. The text also establishes Joseph Smith as the model convert to a religion for which "overcoming the world" and "establishing heaven on earth" are as significant for the individual member as for the entire church. These slogans have been used throughout Mormon history to validate its theology, ethics, social organization and cosmology. Because the ideal Mormon relations between the Kingdom and the World and between heaven and earth are symbolically expressed in the Joseph Smith text, the narrative provides Latter-day Saints with an interpretive framework to order their lives and make meaningful their social and religious experiences.[11] The use of the text as an absolute marker of Mormon history and doctrine is largely a function of its ability to articulate the structure of Mormon identity.

[1] Joseph Smith Jr., The Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith 2 (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1978), pp. 46-57, originally published serially in Times and Seasons (Nauvoo, Illinois), 15 March-1 August 1842. Numbers in parentheses throughout this article refer to the verse(s) in the Joseph Smith text from which the information was taken.

[2] E.g., Reverend Wesley P. Walters and Richard L. Bushman, "Round table: The Question of the Palmyra Revivals," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969), pp. 60-100.

[3] James B. Allen, "Eight Contemporary Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision: What do we Learn from Them?" The Improvement Era 73 (April 1970), pp. 4-13; Paul R. Cheesman, "An Analysis of the Accounts Relating Joseph Smith's Early Visions" (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1965).

[4] James B. Allen, "The Significance of Joseph Smith's 'First Vision' in Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Autumn 1966), pp. 29-45.

[5] The Durkheimian tradition has viewed sacred phenomena as those which are separated and protected from mundane existence by ritual and moral imperatives, Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1915).

[6] Michael Lane, ed., An Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology I, II (New York: Basic Books, 1963, 1976); International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968 ed., "Myth and Symbol," by Victor Turner.

[7] Alan Heimerl, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 11.

[8] Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Channah Maschler (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).

[9] For present purposes, "Kingdom," "World," "Heaven" and "earth" are roughly equivalent to "sacred," "secular," "spiritual," and "material," respectively.

[10] Edmund Leach, "The Legitimacy of Solomon," in Genesis as Myth and other Essays (London: Cape Editions, 1969), p. 79.

[11] See Gifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 193-233.

1981: Steven L. Olsen “Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 14 No. 3 (1981): 89–100.

Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of the First Vision has taken priority in structuring Mormon identity, despite the existence of different versions. This article explores why that version is so meaningful to Latter-day Saints, reflecting on the symbolic strucutre of the account.

[post_title] => Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 14.3 (Fall 1981): 89–100
Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of the First Vision has taken priority in structuring Mormon identity, despite the existence of different versions. This article explores why that version is so meaningful to Latter-day Saints, reflecting on the symbolic strucutre of the account. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => joseph-smith-and-the-structure-of-mormon-identity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-06-19 18:40:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-06-19 18:40:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=16445 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

JOSEPH SMITH'S EXPERIENCE OF A METHODIST "CAMP-MEETING" IN 1820

D. Michael Quinn

Dialogue E-Paper July 12, 2006
As an alternative to myopic polarization, this essay provides new ways of understanding Joseph's narrative, analyzes previously neglected issues/data, and establishes a basis for perceiving in detail what the teenage boy experienced in the religious revivalism that led to his first theophany

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 30803 [post_author] => 2479 [post_date] => 2022-10-27 16:24:12 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-10-27 16:24:12 [post_content] =>

Since 1967, disbelieving critics of Joseph Smith Jr.'s accounts of his “First Vision" of deity have repeated the arguments and evidence given by minister-researcher Wesley P. Walters against the existence of an 1820 "religious excitement" (revival) in or near Palmyra, New York, as affirmed by the Mormon prophet's most detailed narrative. Since 1969, Smith's believing apologists[1] have repeated the rebuttal arguments and evidence given by BYU religion professor Milton V. Backman Jr. in support of such a revival which, Smith declared, led to his vision in 1820. For four decades, both sides have continued to approach this debated topic as if there were no alternative ways to examine the materials Walters and Backman cited, and as if there were no additional sources of significance to consider. The skeptics have been uniformly intransigent, while some apologists have made significant concessions.

This essay maintains that both sides have examined their evidences with tunnel vision, while both have likewise ignored issues and documents crucial to the topic. As an alternative to myopic polarization, this essay provides new ways of understanding Joseph's narrative, analyzes previously neglected issues/data, and establishes a basis for perceiving in detail what the teenage boy experienced in the religious revivalism that led to his first theophany. This is conservative revisionism.

An oddity in Mormon studies has been the decades-long repetition of Reverend Wesley P. Walters' claim in 1967 that "no revival occurred in the Palmyra area [of western New York State] in 1820." Rejecting all reminiscent accounts by Mormons, he made this assertion because of an allegedly "massive silence" about such a revival in documents written or published during that year. Instead, he argued, "the statement of Joseph Smith, Jr. cannot be true when he claims that he was stirred by an 1820 revival to make his inquiry in the grove [of trees] near his home." Walters insisted that various evidences showed Palmyra having no revivals from the fall of 1817 until 1824. Thus, Smith allegedly invented a fictitious revival to support his allegedly fictitious "First Vision" of deity in 1820 by superimposing on that year the extensive revivals which contemporary sources clearly described for Palmyra in 1824 and the following year.[2] Likewise, a hostile biographer wrote in 1999: "There was no significant revival in or around Palmyra in 1820," adding that "no known revival occurred in Palmyra between 1818 and 1823," and repeating: "no revivals in or around Palmyra [--] 1820.”[3]

Such unconditional denials seem odd for several reasons. First, the published diary of minister Aurora Seager commented that Palmyra had a revival in June 1818. After returning to his "home at Phelps on the 19th of May," he prepared to attend the annual meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church's Genesee Conference (the organizational subdivision for western New York):

I received, on the 18th of June, a letter from Brother [Billy] Hibbard, informing me that I had been received by the [eastern] New York Conference, and, at my request, had been transferred to the Genesee Conference. On [Friday,] the 19th [of June 1818,] I attended a camp-meeting at Palmyra [nearly fourteen miles from Phelps]. The arrival of Bishop Roberts, who seems to be a man of God, and is apostolic in his appearance, gave a deeper interest to the meeting until it closed. On Monday [at Palmyra's camp-meeting,] the sacrament was administered, about twenty were baptized; forty united with the [Methodist] Church, and the meeting closed. I accompanied the Bishop to Brother [Eleazer] Hawks, at Phelps, and on the 14th of July [1818,] I set out [from Phelps] with Brother [Zechariah] Paddock for the Genesee conference, which was to hold its session at Lansing, N.Y.[4]

This narrative in itself undermined Reverend Walters' emphatic declaration that Palmyra had no revival for more than six years after the fall of 1817.

In 1969 BYU religion professor Milton V. Backman Jr. made him aware of this diary entry, and Walters should have recognized that it demonstrated a fundamental flaw in part of his argument. However, he never acknowledged this document. Furthermore, in a 1980 article where he claimed to have read the "entire manuscript" which summarized the above entry from Seager's diary,[5] Walters ridiculed a Mormon author's assertion that Palmyra's revivals of 1817 continued into 1818.[6]

The second oddity about the decades-long repetition of the minister-researcher's denials involves Palmyra's weekly newspaper. Its edition of 28 June 1820 referred to out-of-town visitor James Couser, who died on June 26th, the day after he drunkenly left "the Camp-ground" following the evening services of "a camp-meeting which was held in this vicinity."[7] The Palmyra Register’s next edition denied that its editor intended "to charge the Methodists" with selling alcohol at "their camp-ground" while they "professedly met for the worship of their God."[8] Third, farmer's almanacs—on which the Smiths and other village dwellers depended—specified that spring began on 20 March 1820 and ended when summer commenced on 21 June.[9] Traditional LDS statements that Joseph's revival-inspired theophany happened at an unspecified time "in the spring of 1820"[10] thus allow for an event as late as one minute before midnight on June 20th. Fourth, starting with Backman and BYU religion professor Richard Lloyd Anderson in 1969, for more than thirty years LDS authors cited one or both of those newspaper articles as proof that there was at least one religious revival in Palmyra during the first six months of 1820.[11]

Why have some scholars continued to deny that there was a religious revival that year? First, because Joseph Smith's most detailed narration about the pre-vision revival (and especially commentaries on it by his mother Lucy in the preliminary manuscript of her "History," by his brother William, and by his scribe Oliver Cowdery—after consultation with Joseph) referred to circumstances of Palmyra's revival in 1824-25 (such as its occurrence after the death of Alvin Smith—who died in November 1823, the preaching by Methodist minister George Lane, the revival's expansion to include the Baptists and Presbyterian preachers like Benjamin Stockton, and the conversion of "great multitudes," including several Smith family members to the Presbyterian Church). Thus, nay-sayers conclude that Joseph's dating of the crucial revival as 1820 was "anachronistic" at best, and fraudulent at worst.[12]

Second, in his 1969 expansion of the original 1967 article, Walters himself mentioned the Palmyra Register’s articles about the camp-meeting of June 1820. Paradoxically, he cited them in a footnote to support his narrative statement: "Even the Palmyra newspaper, while reporting revivals at several places in the state, has no mention whatever of any revival in Palmyra or vicinity in 1819 or 1820.”[13]

It seems mind-boggling for the minister-researcher to cite confirming documentation as if it were disconfirmation, but Walters did so for a reason he only implied (that the articles did not specify the "camp-meeting" was a "revival"), as well as for two incomplete explanations. In the footnote, he wrote: "Even the Methodist camp meeting being held in the vicinity of the village has nothing more significant reported about it than that a man had gotten drunk at the grog shops while there and died the next morning." In other words, this meeting was insignificant because Palmyra's newspaper mentioned it in passing as simply the background for reporting a man's death, not as a newsworthy event in its own right. Later in the narrative text, he gave another explanation (again only partly stated): that this 1820 meeting was merely an outdoors gathering of the local congregation at "the Methodist camp grounds a mile from Palmyra, in the wooded area adjoining the Methodist chapel." Therefore, by implication only, Reverend Walters dismissed this "camp-meeting" as a regular congregational service on the evening of Sunday, 25 June 1820—thus, not a special revival.[14]

A third reason why some scholars have continued to deny that there was a revival that year is the evidence he presented in 1967 and 1969 that there was no dramatic increase (or "spike") in the denominational membership of Palmyra and surrounding towns during 1820, as one might expect following a religious revival as extensive as Smith described: "Indeed, the whole district of country seemed affected by it, and great multitudes united themselves to the different religious parties . . .”[15]

In 1969 Backman chipped away at Walters' arguments. During 1819-20, there were revivals in seven towns "within a radius of twenty-five miles of the Smith farm" and also throughout New York State, with increases among Baptists and Presbyterians both locally and statewide. Furthermore, although Methodist records for the immediate vicinity of Palmyra did not survive, existing records verified the denomination's conversions during 1820 in nearby towns, with a total increase of 2,256 Methodists in western New York as a whole for that year.[16]

Backman did not specify it in this way, but his expansive geography was justified because Joseph's phrase "the whole district of country" indicated the young man's familiarity with Methodist terms and regional organization. In July 1819 the Genesee Conference of western New York created the Ontario District, which comprised Ontario County, in which Palmyra was then located.[17] Specifically, Palmyra and Farmington (later named Manchester) were among the villages within the smaller Ontario Circuit of the Ontario District, and the Smith family lived in both villages from late 1816 through 1830.[18]

As the subdivision of a district, a Methodist circuit comprised "stations" or villages for preaching. One circuit might have few stations, while another had more than forty. Each circuit was served by an itinerant preacher (Methodist "circuit rider") who traveled on horseback to visit each station within a circuit.[19] For example, in 1817 the Genesee Conference assigned Alvin Torry to a circuit dozens of miles east of Palmyra, which circuit "embraced Scipio, Cayuga, Mentz, Elbridge, Jordan, Manlius, Onondaga, Owasco, Otisco, Auburn, Skaneateles and Spafford. . . . It was a four weeks' circuit, and all we could do in the preaching line, was to give each congregation one sermon once in two weeks; and this required us to preach almost every day in the week . . .” After the weeks necessary to make one circuit of preaching visits, the circuit-riders started all over again, whether they traveled in pairs or alone.[20]

From 1773 onward, the Methodist Episcopal Church published its annual statistics of membership for each conference (such as the Genesee), for each district within that conference, and for each circuit within that district. However, the published statistics did not reach to the level of each "station" (town/village within a circuit).[21]

Previous to 1819, Palmyra was in the Genesee Conference's same-named subdivision, "the Genesee District [which] embraced the whole territory from Cayuga Lake to Lake Erie, and from Lake Ontario, on the north, into Pennsylvania . . .”[22] Backman explained that this was "about five hundred miles" east-to-west, and "about three hundred miles" north-to-south. Also, contrary to Walters' initial assumption that the June 1820 camp-meeting took place at an existing chapel, Backman pointed out that the Methodists did not build a meetinghouse in Palmyra until 1822.[23]

In his 1980 article, the minister's most significant rebuttal was to challenge as "wishful thinking" the application to Palmyra of Methodist growth in western New York as a whole. This is the "ecological fallacy" in statistics, because an individual case can be very different from the general pattern of which it is only one part. Specifically, Walters charged Backman with wrongly calculating the statistics for Ontario Circuit:

What he should have done is to subtract the July, 1820, figures from the July, 1819, figures to look for any [Methodist] increases for the spring of 1820. Had he done this[,] he would have discovered a total loss of 59 members for the Ontario District [sic], the district where Joseph Smith lived.[24]

However, to arrive at this net loss, the minister-researcher actually did the opposite of what he described and then (at best) made an error of subtraction in the direction for which he was arguing. First, he inaccurately claimed that his calculations were based on "District" membership (roughly the entire county), when he meant the smallest Methodist unit of reported affiliation, the Ontario Circuit of a few towns/villages. Membership differences at the district level were in the hundreds during those years, and bore no similarity to the result he tabulated. Second, a comparison of the July 1819 Methodist affiliation of the Ontario District's Ontario Circuit (677 total) with the circuit's July 1820 membership (671 total) reveals a net loss of only six members. Walters was able to arrive at the non-existent "loss of 59 members" in only one way: he compared the circuit's July 1821 affiliation (622 total) with the July 1820 total of 671,resulting in a net loss of 49 which he then increased by ten. Those errors in his 1980 article (directed to evangelical ministers) appeared to be intentional, since his 1969 article (directed to Mormon apologists) correctly stated in the narrative text that the Methodist decline "for the entire circuit" was "6 for 1820," which he repeated in a 1969 source-note as "a net loss of 6."[25]

In fact, his eighteen-page article in 1980 was a polemical screed that began with the emphatic statement: "there was no revival either in Palmyra or anywhere near Joseph Smith's home in the year 1820," which Walters restated sixteen times before his concluding comment that "one cannot expect to find historical support for legendary events." Among the article's denials were: "this supposed 1820 camp meeting," and "without any evidence that there was either a camp meeting or a revival," and "nor can even a spark of a revival be found within at least a 15-mile radius of his home during that year." This 1980 response made no reference to the Palmyra Register’s articles about the villages “camp-meeting” in late June 1820—which Reverend Walters had at least mentioned in his 1969 footnote.[26]

He then prepared a book-length response, which H. Michael Marquardt revised and published in 1994 after the minister's death. Despite the expansiveness of Smith's phrase "the whole district of country," they countered that statewide, region-wide, and even county-wide indications of revivalism and moderate growth cannot compensate for no documentation to support Joseph's narrative of dramatic revivalism "in the place where we lived" during 1820.[27] By contrast, the spike in conversions described by Smith can be found only in 1824-25. In effect, they also thanked LDS apologists for demonstrating that Palmyra's Methodists had no chapel in June 1820 and therefore had camp-meetings outside for congregational purposes, apparently nullifying the significance of the newspaper's observations.[28] Like-minded authors have continued to restate Walters' 1967-94 arguments in part or whole.[29]

However, there was a crucial contradiction in Walters' claim for "massive silence" about Palmyra's 1820 revival. On the one hand, he insisted that it "is completely beyond possibility" that the local "Presbytery should have been ignorant of a great awakening at Palmyra" in 1820. On the other hand, he acknowledged that this same local Presbyterian Church declared in September 1824 that there had been "no remarkable revival of religion within our bounds," even though the Methodists were publishing reports of their own revivals near Palmyra since the late spring of that same year. Rather than acknowledging these as equivalent examples of Presbyterian myopia about the competing revivals by Methodists, Walters cited the Presbyterians for making a curious denial of the 1824 Palmyra revivals he emphasized, while he polemically used their 1820 denial as alleged proof of his argument that Palmyra had no revival that year.[30] Ironically, the minister openly used unequal standards to assess the same kind of evidence from the same source in order to arrive at opposite conclusions about 1820 and 1824.

In addition, before and after Palmyra's camp-meeting of late June 1818, the village's newspaper did not refer to this three-day revival (Friday to Monday). This silence is even more glaring because its principal speaker was Robert R. Roberts, one of only three Methodist bishops in North America.[31] This Palmyra revival (which commenced in the last days of spring 1818) also followed the pattern of "massive silence" in the kinds of documents that Walters emphasized to dismiss Joseph's affirmation of an 1820 revival in the spring.

This contemporary silence about two Methodist camp-meetings that unquestionably occurred two years apart in Palmyra should have raised fundamental doubts about the assumptions and assertions by Walters, as well as about his methodology. He discouraged such assessments by maintaining his own silence about the documentation of Palmyra's 1818 revival. Truly mystifying, however, is the fact that during four decades most apologists ignored the evidence for this 1818 revival, a confirmation that Backman himself buried in a footnote.[32]

Given ample opportunities for challenging the factual errors, historical misrepresentations, statistical gaffes, logical fallacies, and withheld evidence by Reverend Walters, various authors chose other alternatives for nearly forty years. Thankfully, LDS apologists generally avoided the disreputable approach of ad hominem attack, but a rigorous academic critique does not need to be polemical. Instead, many wrote as if his articles and book did not exist, others critiqued his writings superficially, and some apologists actually deferred to him.

Nevertheless, the most significant problem with Palmyra's camp-meeting of late June 1820 is that the Prophet specifically stated that his vision of deity occurred "early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty.”[33] Therefore, citing the Palmyra Register in June-July 1820 to demonstrate pre-vision revivalism would seem to be a fallacy of irrelevant proof, and skeptics can accurately say there is no indication of a revival there in March, April, nor even in May of that year. FARMS reviewer Gary F. Novak acknowledged that "merely finding a revival does not clear up every seeming problem with Joseph's story. . .”[34]

As a historian who has analyzed original narratives and revised documents that anachronistically changed Mormon developments,[35] I have another perspective about the fact (and it is a fact) that Smith's official narrative about 1820 included circumstances which occurred during Palmyra's revivals of 1824-25. Merging (conflating) circumstances from similar events that happened years apart will certainly confuse the historical record and will perplex anyone trying to sort out basic chronology. Nonetheless, conflation of actual circumstances from separate events is not the same as fraudulent invention of events that never occurred. Conflation also is not the combination of an actual event with a fictional event. Instead, it is very common for memoirs and autobiographies to merge similar events that actually occurred, due to the narrator's memory lapses or her/his intentional streamlining of the narrative to avoid repeating similar occurrences.[36]

I think the latter was the reason that in describing his 1820 vision, Joseph Smith's 1838 official history conflated circumstances of Palmyra's solitary Methodist revival in late spring of 1820 with the circumstances of Palmyra's extensive revivals of 1824 that resulted in his mother, his sister Sophronia, his brothers Hyrum and Samuel joining the Presbyterian Church. Joseph merged the two revivals, combined two different kinds of family conversions, and dated this multi-year conflation as 1820. While this is partially inaccurate, I see it as streamlining his narrative, not as an example of fraudulent invention.

This is not "privileging" Joseph's narrative. It is, in fact, acknowledging a general pattern in all autobiographies. A repeatedly published handbook for historical research explained that "not all discrepancies signalize a myth or a fraud. In autobiographies, for instance, one must be prepared to find errors in dates and names without necessarily inferring that the account is false. . . . It would be absurd to disbelieve the main fact [simply] because the date is two years off."[37]

Significantly, New York's Methodist Magazine also conflated its reports of multiple revivals into a single revival. For example, a March 1818 article about "REVIVAL OF RELIGION" in Maine described camp-meetings and chapel revivals in eight towns during four months, and an article that same year about "REVIVAL OF RELIGION" in Suffolk County, New York, referred to eight towns during a ten-month period.[38] An 1821 "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN FOUNTAIN-HEAD CIRCUIT THROUGH THE LAST YEAR" likewise described eight towns during ten months.[39] An 1824 article about "REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF RELIGION" referred to ten towns in six months.[40]

This conflation into one revival also appeared in reports about multiple revivals in a single city of New York State. "A SHORT SKETCH OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF TROY" started with February 1816 and concluded: "Upwards of a year has elapsed, since this good work commenced."[41] Another "SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF SCHNECTADY" referred to separate outbursts of religious renewal from December 1818 through April 1819.[42] Beyond the Empire State, an article on "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD IN PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA" also referred to camp-meetings from August 1819 to "last August" (1820).[43]

Even more relevant to the conflation in Joseph's 1838 history, New York’s Methodist Magazine—as indicated by the previous example—conflated into a single event various instances of revivalism that actually occurred during a year or more. The magazine's report of one "REVIVAL OF RELIGION" in four towns skipped from camp-meetings in July 1818 to camp-meetings in June of 1819.[44] Another article referred to "the memorable revival of religion in Chillicothe in 1818-19."[45] In an 1819 article, its minister-author concluded: "It is now fourteen months since this revival began, during which time it has spread an extent of more than twelve miles.”[46] An 1825 article about the "Revival in Bridgetown, N.J." referred to intermittent revivals "in this place during the two last conference years."[47] Even in the official magazine of New York's Methodists, it was standard practice to conflate time and space by regarding multiple camp-meetings and revivals as a single "revival."

This is consistent with Joseph's using the phrase "an unusual excitement on the subject of religion"[48] for local revivals that were actually separated by an interval of three or four years.[49] Then, as now, the word "excitement" has no plural, and can refer to multiple events.[50]

Whether the Mormon prophet, or a Methodist minister, or magazine editors—early nineteenth-century narrators saw no problem of accuracy when they conflated multiple revivals into one revival while giving retrospective narratives. It reflects the "presentist bias"[51]—used polemically in this case—to hold the unschooled Mormon prophet to a standard of literal accuracy not manifested by the well-educated editors of New York's Methodist Magazine in their reports about the religious “excitement” of revivalism.

Thus, when LDS apologists insist on the technical accuracy of every detail in Smith's official account of the First Vision,[52] they misread nineteenth-century narrative style and unnecessarily adopt the assumptions of disbelievers. As the most prominent example, LDS historian Richard Lyman Bushman wrote in 1994:

Can we be absolutely sure that we know Joseph must have been referring to the 1824 revival when he wrote his story? Marquardt speculates that he conflated events: "Perhaps Smith in retrospect blended in his mind events from 1820 with a revival occurring four years later" (p. 32). Possibly, but that conclusion, based on the confidence that we know better than the person who was there, seems premature to me.[53]

Resisting the reasonable explanation that Smith's official account conflated two different responses within his family to different revivals happening four years apart—an explanation which preserves the emphasis on 1820—Bushman paradoxically retreated from the traditional affirmation of 1820.[54]

He omitted from his 2005 bicentennial biography any reference to a revival that year. His "JOSEPH SMITH CHRONOLOGY" mentioned no revival, and his narrative gave specific dates only for Palmyra's "revival of 1816 and 1817." The text and source-notes also made no reference to Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1818, although Bushman's 1969 response to Walters had cited the manuscript which mentioned it and even though Bushman's 1970 response to another skeptic had paraphrased the manuscript's description of this 1818 revival.[55]

One of the source-notes in Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling even seemed to defer to the minister-researcher's assessment "that revivals in 1824 were the background for Joseph's first vision." The book's index reemphasized this with its entry for "Palmyra, New York . . . revivals in," whose only page referred to the revival "the year after Alvin's death" (in November 1823).[56] In view of Bushman's complaint in 1994 about the Walters-Marquardt "attempt to dynamite a segment of the traditional story" by ignoring the 1820 Palmyra Register’s references to a local camp-meeting,[57] it seems extraordinary that eleven years later his 740-page biography made no mention of the newspaper article he once found so important.

Aside from citing Walters, Bushman's only implied explanation for this lapse in 2005 was the observation: "When the census taker came to the Smiths in 1820, Joseph Jr. was not listed, probably because he was living elsewhere earning [money] during the growing season."[58] Like Donald L. Enders,[59] Bushman apparently assumed that the census enumeration commenced in June 1820 (the starting month for subsequent censuses). Since he concluded that young Joseph was absent from the Palmyra area during its camp-meeting, Bushman declined to mention the Palmyra Register’s articles. However, census-takers did not begin their work until 7 August 1820.[60] Joseph's absence from the census of his family had absolutely nothing to do with his whereabouts during Palmyra's religious revival two months earlier.

Nevertheless, Bushman is only one example of the withering effect that Reverend Wesley P. Walters has had on the previously confident declarations by Mormon apologists about dating the First Vision. In a 1994 interview (not published until 2005), Milton V. Backman Jr. declined to name "a Presbyterian minister" whose "pamphlet" had prodded him to begin researching New York State's early revivalism, but the BYU religion professor commented: "During this research, I found no evidence of a great revival in Palmyra in 1819 or 1820." In a remarkable turnabout, Backman said nothing about Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting that had been a sort of rallying cry by LDS authors for the previous decades. Instead, he claimed that Joseph Smith had been wrongfully interpreted as saying there was an 1820 revival in the immediate vicinity of Palmyra-Manchester, whereas "I found that probably there were more revivals and more people joining churches in upstate and western New York in 1819 and 1820 than in any other region of the United States." Thus, the crucial revivalism was strictly regional and allegedly not in Joseph’s neighborhood—a view that seemed to be a full-scale retreat from Backman's earlier emphasis on the Palmyra Register’s articles of 1820.[61]

Also for the bicentennial of the Mormon founder's birth, after a footnote citation to the findings and objections by the minister-researcher, James B. Allen and John W. Welch ended their 2005 essay (published by Church-owned Deseret Book Company) with these words: "In sum, this examination leads to the conclusion that the First Vision, in all probability, occurred in spring of 1820, when Joseph was fourteen years old. The preponderance of the evidence supports that conclusion."[62] While I applaud such willingness to be tentative when necessary, the evidence does not require it. In face, it demands a forthright emphasis on revivalism in Palmyra during the late spring of 1820.

For instance, there is a reasonable explanation for the lack of local reference to religious revivals in or near Palmyra, and for why the village newspaper ignored the "camp-meeting" of June 1820 until someone died. Aside from paid advertisements, it was unusual for small newspapers of this era to report local events.

In his book about New York State's village newspapers, Milton W. Hamilton explained more than forty years ago that "the editor's definition of his function included neither the purveying of neighborhood gossip nor the describing of outstanding happenings in the immediate vicinity." Why? Because small-town editors assumed that local residents would not "pay for information which they could secure by word of mouth from their neighbors." According to Hamilton, not until 1827 did a village newspaper start to regularly include local events, an editorial practice that took years to become common in rural newspapers of New York State. This was Walter A. Norton's 1991 response to the assertion of "massive silence" by Reverend Walters, a critique that skeptical authors have not acknowledged.[63] Likewise, as indication of his own silent abandonment of an 1820 revival, the seemingly exhaustive bibliography of Bushman’s 2005 Rough Stone Rolling cited neither Hamilton nor Norton,[64] even thought Bushman had criticized Walters and Marquardt in 1994 for ignoring the evidence and rebuttal.[65]

Apparently unaware of Reverend Seager's published account of a June 1818 revival in Palmyra that the village newspaper also ignored, Norton omitted this data that would have significantly strengthened his argument. However, as Norton did emphasize, the Palmyra Register was not merely reporting a local death in June 1820. Despite a disingenuous disclaimer, its editor used the dead man's drunkenness as reason to make snide comments about the Methodists who "professedly" gathered for worship. A strident advocate of alcohol "temperance," editor Timothy C. Strong was echoing a decades-long controversy.[66]

Unlike other evangelical Protestants, Methodists of this era did not require abstinence from alcoholic drinks, nor did most of the denomination's leaders even suggest it. English founder John Wesley "did not hesitate to recommend ale or beer" and approved drinking "a little bit" of wine every day, but he "drew a rather sharp line between a fermented liquor such as beer, ale, or wine and a distilled liquor such as rum or brandy." The American church's general conference meetings did not include alcohol abstinence among their numerous regulations governing personal conduct, and also followed Wesley's emphasis by forbidding Methodists only from engaging in the sale and manufacture of distilled liquors from 1780 to 1812. Until 1848, their official Disciplines did not even mention beer or wine with regard to the rank-and-file’s conduct.[67]

This official policy (or lack of it) became obvious during Methodist revivals. In a defense of camp-meetings (published in Brooklyn, New York), one minister acknowledged in 1806 that "some of the wild beasts of the people had half intoxicated themselves with ardent spirits.”[68] Two years later, a critical participant wrote that he "saw many" Methodist revivalists “drinking wine.”[69] In 1810 an observer of a camp-meeting at Bern, New York, reported that the Methodists even set up "grog-tents" to sell alcohol.[70] The official explanation for alcohol-selling "shops" at camp-meetings was to blame "those in the community who, [are] actuated from monetary motives. . ."[71] As described later in this essay, the isolated setting, physical dimensions, and duration of camp-meetings required the organizers to provide beverages for thirsty revivalists, even if a stream, river, pond, or lake was nearby. Therefore, because bottled beverages of some kind were a necessary supplement to the natural sources of water, Methodist camp-meeting attenders often brought or purchased bottles of beer and wine, which did not have the same stigma as distilled liquors and whiskeys (often called "spirituous drinks," or "spirits," or "ardent spirits").[72] Such behavior resulted in the Palmyra Register's sarcastic comments about the local camp-meeting.

This leads to the very specific understanding about the kind of religious gathering mentioned in Palmyra's newspaper of June 1820—a perspective that Walters never acknowledged and that Mormon apologists have insufficiently emphasized. In 1800 Methodists invented both the practice and term of "camp-meeting."[73] From its first issue in January 1818 through December 1828, New York's Methodist Magazine never used the term for the regular Sunday service of a congregation, whether it had a chapel or not. After attending such meetings for decades, a Methodist minister wrote emphatically: "Camp Meetings were never held to supply the lack of church buildings."[74]

Although it was customary to refer to a camp-meeting "in" or "at" a community, the gathering's structured space actually required a forest within walking distance from the outskirts of the community. Thus, the 1820 Palmyra newspaper referred to the "camp-meeting which was held in this vicinity."

Even when convening near a chapel, as in the 1819 "camp-meeting at Fountain-head meeting-house," Methodists shunned the confining structure of a building: "Here we had a large encampment" of revivalists in tents, and the writer observed that by the end of this camp-meeting, "the slain of the Lord [i.e., ecstatic converts] were lying in almost every direction—in the altar, in the woods, and in the tents. . ."[75] Even this camp-meeting's "altar" was not inside a chapel, as a non-Methodist observed at one of New York's forest-revivals in 1810: "Before the [preaching stand or] stage was a yard about thirty feet square, (which they called the altar). Their tents were made chiefly of canvas. . ."[76]

Correspondingly, in an 1819 "revival of religion" in Westchester County, New York, although there were too few Methodists to have a "house for divine worship" in the community, they could sleep in their own houses during the locals-only revival which, therefore, was called "the assembly," not "camp-meeting."[77] Repeatedly, when Methodists held a "revival of religion" in a chapel, they called it an assembly, or a "prayer meeting," or a "class meeting," but never “camp-meeting.”[78] Ignoring the denomination’s procedures, Reverend Walters and like-minded authors have also contradicted all historical documentation by even implying that Palmyra's 1820 "camp-meeting" was a regular Sunday meeting of local Methodists—with or without a chapel.

A camp-meetingwas a revival, but Methodists rarely used the cumbersome phrase "camp-meeting revival."[79] In fact, because local Methodists had no need to sleep in tents overnight in order to worship, the Palmyra Register's articles were actually emphasizing the noncongregational nature of this June 1820 gathering and its non-local attenders by referring to its "Camp-ground." In view of Palmyra's newspaper articles, it is significant that the Prophet's official reminiscence said this "unusual excitement . . . commenced with the Methodists."[80]

Moreover, there was no relevance in the objection by Walters that "the Methodists did not acquire their property in Palmyra `on the Vienna Road' until July 7th, 1821."[81] The Methodist Church rarely (if ever) owned the forested land on which its members held camp-meetings, because the only necessity was to obtain permission from the landowner for this temporary use.[82]

But if the crucial revival "in the place where we lived" actually commenced in late spring of 1820, then Joseph Smith's First Vision occurred no earlier. Why did he specify "early in the spring"[83] while giving his most detailed account in 1838? First, "early" or "late spring" might have seemed a distinction without a difference as he related events that happened eighteen years earlier in his tumultuous life.

Second, and more to the point, "early spring" of 1820 was too cold for a New York farmboy to visit "the woods" in "the morning of a beautiful clear day" for the motionless activity of solitary prayer.[84] During that year, an official of the U.S. Weather Service recorded temperatures for western New York at 7 AM, 2 PM, and 6 PM daily. After the technical arrival of spring, temperatures were under 50 degrees Fahrenheit even at two in the afternoon for all but two days during the rest of March 1820. Those relatively warmer days of 25-26 March reached no higher than 64 degrees at 2 PM, after the mornings started at 54 degrees and 56 degrees, respectively. It was snowing on 31 March, 5 April, and 7 April 1820. The first two weeks of April 1820 were chilly, reaching no higher than 58 degrees at two in the afternoon on the fifteenth, which began with a temperature of forty degrees at 7 AM. The last two weeks of April were not much better, and when the temperatures finally reached 72 degrees at 2 PM on April 21st, the morning commenced at 50 degrees. The next day was a bit warmer, but then the month cooled again until morning temperatures were in the low-fifties. The last two days of April 1820 reached only 62 degrees by 2 PM.[85] Although such weather conditions can occur on "the morning of a beautiful clear day," those frigid temperatures would not encourage any teenager to think of kneeling in a shaded grove of trees, which would be even colder than temperatures recorded by the weather service in the open air.

Published in Canandaigua, seventeen miles from Palmyra,[86] The Farmer's Diary had even predicted: "Clear and pretty cold" weather for 6-8 April 1820, with "some showers of hail, rain, or snow" for 14-18 April.[87] In one of its rare observations about local events, the Palmyra Register commented on 24 May 1820 that “we have been visited with two or three severe frosts, followed by a storm of snow, which happened on the morning of the 17th inst. [instant, i.e., of this month] . . . It is worthy of remark, that on the morning of the 17th May 1819, we had a similar snow storm, preceded and followed by very similar weather."[88] Therefore, because most people connect spring with warmer temperatures (above 70 degrees Fahrenheit), it is understandable that (eighteen-years-after-the-fact) Joseph forgot the late-arrival of spring weather to western New York in 1820.

He remembered it was warm enough to kneel in the wooded grove for an hour or so. This seemed like "early spring" in retrospect, especially because he began dictating this official narrative to clerk George W. Robinson on 27 April 1838 in Missouri, a southerly latitude where early spring was much warmer. This memory conflation (which changed western New York's chilly "early spring" of 1820 into comfortably warm morning weather) continued in the late spring of 1839 (on 10 June), when clerk James Mulholland started rewriting Robinson's 1838 version (now missing) into the final form known officially as "Joseph Smith's History."[89] Both believers and non-believers should accept the assessment of non-Mormon historian Lawrence Foster about Smith's first theophany: "whether or not an error was made in dating precisely when a vision occurred has no necessary connection with whether it [actually] occurred . . ."[90]

The unpredictability of warm days followed by chilly temperatures, rain, and even snow from March through May was why New York State's Methodists waited until late spring to schedule the first of each year's camp-meetings. They wanted a reasonable likelihood of several days with "agreeable weather,"[91] by which camp-meeting organizers meant "no rain,"[92] and "no breezes to disturb the candles, and no cold winds nor chilling damps, to render it very uncomfortable," even at night.[93]

In every report by New York's Methodist Magazine about revivals from 1818 through 1828, where the report included the word "camp-meeting," not a single one in the Northern States began earlier than June and none occurred after September.[94] The earliest reported date was 4 June 1819 when the "camp-meeting for Erie circuit" commenced.[95] In 1825 the earliest was June 7th,[96] while Palmyra hosted an 1826 camp-meeting that also started on 7 June.[97] Concerning the Susquehanna River border of western New York State, one minister wrote in 1825 that "our last camp-meeting in the district commenced on the 15th of September,"[98] and another New York camp-meeting began as late as September 26th.[99] Nevertheless, Methodist revivalists wanted to avoid the unfortunate experience of a camp-meeting in western New York's Genesee Conference that pushed the weather boundary too far into September 1817: "the season being cold and rainy, rendered our situation in the tented wilderness very unpleasant."[100] Therefore, for the best outcome, a Camp Meeting Manual later specified that these outdoor gatherings in "the latitude of the Middle States" should start no later than "the 15th of September."[101]

Small revivals did occur in the Northern States from October through May each year, but rain, cold weather, and snow limited such gatherings to homes, chapels, barns, or school houses.[102] Compared with forest camp-meetings attended by hundreds or thousands, the October-May revivals were family-sized. Because there were too few Methodists in Palmyra to have a meetinghouse until 1822, it was impossible for the village (in Ontario County at that time) to host a revival of significant size except during the camp-meeting "season," as Methodists called the revival period from June through September.[103]

A revival that "commenced with the Methodists ... in the place where we lived"[104] was not available to teenage Joseph until the late spring of any year. The "camp-meeting" mentioned by the Palmyra Register in June 1820 was the first local revival he could have attended that year.

In fact, Methodist revivals had uniform characteristics, as reported in numerous publications before 1820. By referring to early descriptions of camp-meetings, we can understand what fourteen-year-old Joseph saw and experienced at Palmyra that June. Even those who disbelieve his account of an 1820 revival have agreed that Methodism was the only denomination for which he showed any interest and participation.[105]

Methodist camp-meetings did not happen spontaneously, but were planned far in advance to occur in a physical space created according to instructions by the denomination's ministers and in printed guidelines. As the Camp Meeting Manual observed, “it was soon reduced to a regular system.”[106]

By 1817, multiple editions of a New York hymn book advised: "A Camp-meeting ought not to consist of less than fifty or one hundred tents or places for lodging" in the woods. Its Methodist author John C. Totten further specified: "It should continue, if the weather admitted, not less than three days and nights. It is not desirable to have more than two or three thousand people present, unless the majority were [converted] Christians."[107] The several-day duration was standard, and his caution was necessary because Methodist camp-meetings were sometimes attended by "two or three hundred spectators" who were not believers.[108]

Out-of-town worshippers dominated camp-meetings because the most devout followed revivalist preachers from place to place, while word-of-mouth notified an entire region of what would otherwise be a local event. From June to September, people journeyed "from fifty and sixty miles around" to attend Methodist camp-meetings.[109] While most traveled such distances in carriages, wagons, or on horseback, "a Sister Hendricks, who is the mother of seventeen children, fifteen of whom are living, walked seventeen miles to this [1819 Methodist] meeting."[110] Fifteen-year-old David Marks, a New York Baptist also living in Ontario County, walked "about 25 miles" in all kinds of weather to revivals in the early months of 1821.[111]

During the Methodist camp-meeting season, there was need for outsiders to "camp" in tents, while local residents could sleep at home--unless they wanted to participate in late night revivalism that "was carried on until morning without interruption."[112] For example, "several thousands of precious souls" attended a four-day camp-meeting at Rhinebeck, New York. There "the line of tents encircled the [preaching] ground, in most parts three deep, in number eighty five, besides covered waggons [sic]. On Thursday a person undertook to count the waggons [sic] and other carriages, and after reckoning several hundred, was obliged to desist, as he could not go through them all."[113]

Another Methodist author explained: "Sometimes there were many circles of tents divided by narrow streets and alleys, allowing room for the vast multitudes to pass, and space for small fires for the purpose of cooking." In keeping with Methodist regimentation, each camp-meeting's tent-lined "several streets, [were] numbered and labelled, so that they may be distinguished one from another" within the surrounding forest.[114]

Having a three-day duration as their minimum, camp-meetings most commonly lasted four days, according to New York's Methodist Magazine. At Long Island in August 1818, "there were from six to eight thousand people on the encampment" from Tuesday morning to Saturday morning.[115] "Between five and six thousand" attended a "Camp-meeting, held at Barre, Vermont" from Thursday to Monday in 1820.[116] "Not less than five thousand people" attended another 1820 "Camp-meeting, which commenced on Friday, July 14th," and ended on Tuesday, followed by "an extra Camp-Meeting" lasting from Friday to Tuesday in August.[117] One of the "highly favoured Camp-Meetings" in the Hudson River Valley began on 2 September 1822 "and closed on the 6th of September."[118] In 1825 a camp-meeting in the Champlain District lasted from Thursday, "the first to the morning of the fifth of September," Monday.[119]

Five-day revivals were the next most common. An 1821 camp-meeting in Kentucky started "on Friday night," and "we continued the meeting until Wednesday."[120] Another "camp-meeting” in New Hampshire "commenced on Thursday, and closed on Tuesday."[121] An 1823 camp-meeting in Maryland began on Friday, ending on Wednesday.[122] "From four to five thousand persons" attended a New Jersey camp-meeting that "commenced on [Thursday] the 5th and continued till [Tuesday] the 10th of August, 1824."[123] One in August 1825 started on Thursday and ended on Tuesday,[124] and two camp-meetings in 1826 began on Friday and ended on Wednesday.[125]

A six-day camp-meeting on Long Island was attended by "not less than 10,000" New Yorkers in August 1821.[126] An 1830s history of American Methodism (by the editor of New York Methodist Magazine in 1820-28) noted that “the meeting generally continues for four or five days, and in some instances eight or nine days.”[127]

Even that was not the maximum duration in the 1820s. One minister wrote in 1822: "This is the tenth day of the revival," and an 1825 camp-meeting in the Genesee Conference "continued ten days."[128]

Although Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting might have been as short as three days or as long as ten days, its mention in the newspaper's weekly issue on Wednesday, 28 June 1820 gave clues for the revival's commencement. Camp-meetings started on various days of the week, but Methodists showed a clear preference for beginning them on Thursday or Friday.[129] This was so widely known that a Methodist minister in Illinois (whose first camp-meeting was in 1818) wrote: "The meetings generally commenced on Friday."[130] For example, Palmyra's three-day camp-meeting of June 1818 began on Friday.[131]

This Methodist preference indicates a likely start-date of June 22nd or 23rd (early summer) for a short revival before the newspaper story about Couser's death, with an equally likely start-date of June 15th or 16th (Thursday-Friday) for a long camp-meeting commencing in late spring of 1820. While not precise, these beginning parameters are possible because his death was "a fixed point: [where] no doubt is possible" for verifying chronology.[132]

Neither the weekly newspaper nor another "fixed point" indicated when this camp-meeting revival adjourned, but almost none did so on Sundays, according to New York's Methodist Magazine. If a camp-meeting included Sunday, it typically ended on one of the following weekdays—in the morning or around noon. Palmyra's Methodist revival was definitely not concluding when Couser left it on the Sunday "evening preceding" his death.[133] Even with the extended daylight of summer, camp-meetings never ended during evening hours, because single females and out-of-town revivalists with children needed at least half a day of sunlight to travel safely back to their homes.[134]

Six years after this revival in late June 1820, "not less than ten thousand people" attended a camp-meeting "near the village" of Palmyra.[135] Such multitudes dwarfed the total population of host-villages such as Palmyra which had 3724 residents in 1820.[136] This was just one reason why camp-meetings were sensational events wherever they occurred.

Minister-researcher Walters repeatedly distorted the historical evidence by implying that a camp-meeting was an inferior kind of revival, not even worth mentioning as "a spark of a revival" in his discussion of Joseph's narrative about "religious excitement" in 1820. For American Methodists from 1800 to 1830, a camp-meeting was the most significant kind of religious revival.

As previously indicated, Zechariah Paddock was the traveling companion of Reverend Seager after Palmyra's camp-meeting in June 1818. Paddock "was licensed to preach in Canandaigua, N.Y., in the spring of 1817," and later wrote concerning the year "1817-18," that "the woods seemed to the Methodists to be God's special earthly temple. Their greatest revival triumphs were achieved in the grove."[137] Likewise, in describing "the great revivals of religion," the 1830s History of the Methodist Episcopal Church (be the editor of Methodist Magazine in 1820-28) stated that “the camp meetings were among the most efficient means of awakening the attention of the people to the things of eternity.”[138]

In keeping with their general silence about local matters during this time-period, weekly newspapers did not need to inform a town's residents about what had happened days earlier at such gatherings. Aside from the enormous increase of visitors, another reason for not reporting the obvious to village residents was "the sound of the singing, which was heard several miles" from a Methodist camp-meeting.[139] In addition, both favorable and unfavorable observers reported that the blare of trumpets heralded the commencement of Methodist preaching at 8 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and even at midnight during these camp-meetings.[140] After the midnight sermon, it was common that "singing, prayers and exhortation were continued more or less until three o'clock next morning . . ."[141]

In the stillness of June nights, sounds from the 1820 camp-meeting's trumpets and singers easily reached the Smith farm, creating an irresistible magnet for curious teenagers who were not already at the "Camp-ground." Fourteen-year-old Joseph was known around Palmyra as "inquisitive."[142]

Aside from unusual sounds, in the evenings a Methodist camp-meeting created an enchanting sight, "illuminated in every part by lamps, and formed the appearance of a populous city." In these forest-revivals, "at night the whole scene was awfully sublime. The ranges of tents, the fires reflecting light amidst the branches of the forest-trees, the candles and lamps illuminating the ground, hundreds moving to and fro with torches like Gideon's army . . ."[143]

But three-to-ten days of religious revivalism were only part of a camp-meeting's actual duration for a community. First, it took days to clear the "Camp-ground."

It required "two whole days" to clear the campsite attended by "several thousands" at Rhinebeck, New York. "Some of the brethren came more than ten and twelve miles to assist in the preliminary labours. When the underwood and lower branches of the trees were cleared away, the [preaching] stand for the preachers [was] erected and covered with an inclined canopy of boards . . ."[144] This took days because camp-meetings required a huge space.

For example, an 1825 Connecticut "encampment stretched about three quarters of a mile through a beautiful grove of oaks and cedars." Equal to thirteen American football fields placed end-to-end, this was the space necessary for the 1825 camp-meeting's "congregation of ten thousand" as they camped in tents.[145] Because that was two or three times more people than at Rhinebeck, it would correspondingly require more time to clear the "Camp-ground" of trees and foliage—probably four to six days. This was the only description of a camp-meeting's physical dimensions in New York’s Methodist Magazine, but its attendance was the same as the following year’s camp-meeting in Palmyra.[146]

Whether at Rhinebeck or at Palmyra, New York Methodists chose heavily wooded areas in order to control access. For instance, near Albany, "the place, that they had chosen for their rendezvous, was situated in a forest, at the foot of a large hill, with a creek on the opposite side, and about one hundred rods distant [i.e., 550 yards, five football fields] from any clearing or road; so that it could not be easily approached with a carriage or on horseback, except in one narrow path."[147]

In describing a camp-meeting at Petersburgh, New York, Reverend Francis Ward specified why he and fellow Methodists preferred the painstaking labor of carving out a worship space within a forest of dense undergrowth: "The place was chosen in a close forest, and was well suited for the purpose. Surrounded on all sides by a thicket, which was rendered almost impassable by the brush and underwood piled outside the lines, and only one narrow road opening into it, we found ourselves well secured against any annoyance from the wicked: a guard having been placed at the entrance to keep out those who came intoxicated or riotously . . .”[148]

Palmyra had not hosted a revival since June 1818.[149] Even if the organizers chose the same location for this 1820 camp-meeting, they had to use axes, saws, and hatchets against two years of new trees, branches, bushes, and brambles. Reverend Ward noted that this was noisy work: "The groves echoed with the strokes of the axe . . ."[150]

Furthermore, clearing away trees and undergrowth was only the first phase in the physical preparations for a camp-meeting. As indicated, the second phase required those with skills in carpentry to build the preaching stand and cover it "with an inclined canopy of boards."[151] The third phase, which the Camp Meeting Manual regarded as “especially” important, was “the grading” (or leveling) of the ground on which tents would be pitched and of the cleared space of ground (“the altar”) in front of the preacher’s platform.[152] This flat, cleared area for the standing listeners was at least 25-30 feet square, and sometimes “two or three acres, nearly square.”[153]

There was yet a fourth phase in the physical preparations for a camp-meeting. While some families brought small tents of their own, the organizers also provided huge tents, "many of which would hold several hundred persons" each.[154] These Methodist "society tents" were of substantial construction, as described for an 1819 camp-meeting: "The place was in a beautiful grove—the tents were generally well built of plank, with good floors, so as to be quite comfortable."[155] This required more days of work by volunteer carpenters after they finished the preaching stand, plus the time needed in the surrounding woods for "the cutting of poles for [these] tents."[156] Furthermore, it required time for laborers to erect these heavy poles to secure the massive tents against collapse from the multitudes jostling in and out of them almost constantly for days. In the Champlain District, "one week preceding the time appointed for the commencement of this [camp-]meeting, a number of tents was erected; and two or three days before the meeting began, there were many engaged in rearing up [more] tents . . ."[157]

Whether Palmyra had a short camp-meeting (with opening prayer and sermon on Thursday or Friday, 22-23 June) or a long camp-meeting (opening on June 15th or 16th), the four phases of its physical preparations were expected to take a total of "some weeks."[158] In other words, these "preliminary labours" began at the Palmyra campsite as early as the first week of June 1820. Even that was no surprise to Palmyrans because, as the Camp Meeting Manual later specified, the local clergy or a Methodist circuit-rider was supposed to give the town’s residents advance “notice of several months” for the event.[159]

The village newspaper maintained its general policy of avoiding local news (except paid advertisements), but Palmyra's anticipation of this camp-meeting led to the front-page story on Wednesday, 7 June 1820 about "Great Revivals in Religion." This article described "the religious excitement which has for some months prevailed" in Schnectady and five other communities of New York State, resulting in "not less than twelve hundred” converts. Next to it another article, a letter dated 1 May 1820, stated that "the glorious work of divine Grace" in Providence, Rhode Island had resulted in "not less than FIVE HUNDRED" converts locally and that "the work has spread into" ten other towns.[160]

With a newspaper editor as shrewd as bookseller Timothy C. Strong, there is every reason to believe that (for maximum sales of this issue of Palmyra Register) he timed these front-page articles to appear during the week the camp-meeting’s noisy preliminaries started. For Palmyrans in early June 1820, the obvious question was: “What will be the results of our revival?” Although not “early spring,” the first week of June was still well within the spring of 1820.

Two years earlier, Enoch Mudge's handbook had summarized the regimentation that Methodists imposed on these gatherings: "the setting [of] the watch [i.e., sentries]—the duty of the watch—their call to the people in the morning." In addition, these sentries were "appointed to superintend the encampment at night, to keep order, to see that no stragglers are on the ground, and to detect any disorderly conduct."[161] Thus, an 1819 booklet (originally published in New York) stated: "A Methodist camp-meeting has the appearance of a military expedition. The people generally take with them their luggage, [food] stores and provisions, and encamp in a forest."[162]

In reporting on a subsequent camp-meeting at Palmyra, the Methodist Magazine described its location: "a most beautiful and picturesque grove, near the village . . ."[163] As already stated, the camp-meeting in such a "grove" sometimes extended "three quarters of a mile" (thirteen football fields in length). Marquardt and Walters acknowledged that the later camp-meeting was "undoubtedly" at the same "site which also received mention in the Palmyra paper during the last week of June 1820 . . ."[164]

Nevertheless, Walters ignored the significance of the Palmyra newspaper's report and also contradicted all the descriptions of revivals he claimed to have read in New York's Methodist Magazine when the minister-researcher wrote: “Joseph’s account of the revival does not speak of it in terms that are compatible with it having been a camp meeting. It is clearly a local meeting where one could drop in on the meetings ‘as occasion would permit.’”[165]

As previously indicated, it was only after "some weeks" of physical preparations that the Methodist organizers regarded Palmyra's "Camp-ground" as ready for the arrival of out-of-town revivalists in June 1820. Even at the smallest reported camp-meeting, "the number of Methodists [was] probably, about four hundred,"[166] but there was no way to know in advance whether attendance would be small.

The organizers had to prepare Palmyra's "Camp-ground" for an attendance of thousands, or they invited chaos. That was a potentially dangerous outcome that Methodist regimentation had avoided for two previous decades of forest-revivals. For example, prior to commencing a Delaware camp-meeting, "seats were prepared for about two thousand. Meeting opened at three [PM]—a small congregation, and a small sermon." Yet within three days, the camp-meeting's attendance was "about three thousand."[167]

The objection of Reverend Walters and others[168] about the small increase of membership in Palmyra's churches during 1820 is based on the inaccurate assumption that a several-day revival always resulted in large numbers of local converts. To the contrary, at Canaan, New York: "In the year 1808 a revival broke out, and for a short time went on gloriously; fifteen or twenty souls were delivered from the bondage of sin," and then Canaan's Methodist minister wrote enthusiastically about an 1815 revival: "In this meeting several found redemption . . ."[169] Likewise, one Methodist minister said it was "most consoling" when "about a dozen sinners were converted" out of the six hundred persons who attended a camp-meeting in September 1822.[170] It was common for Methodist ministers to regard twenty total converts as cause for celebrating the success of camp-meetings with large attendance, and Palmyra's 1818 camp-meeting resulted in "about twenty" baptized converts.[171] Rather than always producing a spike in local church affiliation, in the 1820s a Methodist revival sometimes resulted in a few conversions that "not so much resembled a sudden and violent tempest, as the soft and fertilizing shower . . .”[172]

Nonetheless, there was a very significant (and heretofore overlooked) pattern in the statistics of Methodist affiliation as reported from 1 July 1819 to 20 July 1820. It is true that Ontario Circuit (which included Palmyra) declined from 677 Methodists to 671 during this period, a net loss of six members. However, this decline of less than one percent was dramatically lower than the declines reported in July 1820 for every other circuit in Ontario District, as compared with each circuit’s membership a year earlier. From the report of July 1819 to that of July 1820, Crooked Lake Circuit had a 42.9 percent decline in Methodist affiliation, Lyons Circuit had a 44.4 percent decline, Canandaigua Circuit had a 56.0 percent decline, and Seneca Circuit had a 56.6 percent decline in Methodist membership.[173] In other words, shortly after spring 1820, the Methodist retention rate in the immediate vicinity of Palmyra was 40-50 times greater than in the surrounding region.

What can explain the radically different statistics in Ontario Circuit? The obvious answer is that there were enough local converts to Methodism at Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820 to compensate for the rest of the circuit's decline in membership as reported in late July. In this case, the ecological fallacy of statistics has been to regard Ontario Circuit's very small decline as reflecting a decline in Palmyra's religious affiliation. To the contrary, as only one of the circuit's several preaching stations, Palmyra's significant conversions at its 1820 revival were what raised Ontario Circuit so far above the plummeting statistics of Methodist membership in the adjacent circuits. Rather than being some insignificant event, Palmyra’s 1820 camp-meeting was a crucial factor in local Methodism and in at least one person’s life who attended it.

Orsamus Turner, a nineteen-year-old apprentice in the office of the Palmyra Register, helped set the type for the articles of June 1820 about “Great Revivals” and about the local revival. He later described Joseph Smith Jr. "catching a spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road . . ."[174] Even in his most polemical publication, Reverend Walters admitted that Turner "left Palmyra about 1822," two years before the extensive revivalism the minister-researcher emphasized.[175]

From contemporary accounts of such Methodist revivals, this was what teenage Joseph experienced at the camp-meeting in June 1820:

. . . the meeting was conducted agreeably to the arrangements determined at its beginning. Family prayer in the morning at the tents; at eight o'clock, general prayer meeting at the stand; preaching; followed by exhortation, as occasion would require, at ten, two [in the afternoon], and six o'clock [in the evening], and the congregation called together by sound of trumpet. The intervals were occupied with occasional exercises [of faith and prayer] by groups of people in different parts of the [camp] ground. In the midst of those groups, one might observe some struck down to the earth by the power of God, and others agonizing for them in mighty prayer. As souls were brought out into the liberty of either justifying [grace] or sanctifying grace, and as distress changed to spiritual joy, prayer would also turn to praise, and the songs and shouts of salvation [would] break from the glad hearts and voices of scores and hundreds. . . .

. . . Now shrieks and groans of terror and distress issue from hearts pierced with the arrows of the Lord, and from hearts rejoicing in the Holy Ghost [issue] bursts of ["]glory, glory, glory,[" and those words] reverberate through the echoing woods. But these praying companies were generally broken up when the voice of the trumpet proclaimed the publication of the gospel [by preachers] . . .

On the successive days[,] we had vast congregations, who appeared possessed of invincible patience and fortitude, while with fixed attention they listened to the sermons . . .

On Friday and Saturday nights, at a very late hour, the people seemed exhausted with fatigue and retired to rest; but on Sunday night the work broke out with fresh power, and was carried on until morning without interruption. The camp exhibited a truly grand and magnificent scene. Very large fires were lighted up and blazed high all round inside the circle of tents—lighted candles were fastened to the trees, [so that] the reflection of the light on the tents and [on] the faces of the people, the variegated green of the spreading foliage above, and the deep sylvan shades which arrested the eye in every direction, were sufficient to impress the mind of the beholder with solemnity.—At twelve o'clock [midnight on Sunday,] the well known sound [of the trumpet] spread through the grove, and invited the people to attend the word of God—a profound silence ensued—the [preaching] stand was illuminated; and soon the midnight cry of judgment was anticipated: the Lord, who preached from heaven through the meeting, sent his word into the hearts of saints and sinners; the prayer meetings were increased with new convicts and converts, and on Monday morning [the camp-meeting's final day,] the love-feast commenced at the rising of the sun. It was opened with singing and prayer, and many spoke feelingly of the things of God; their joy was full, their cups were running over, and others catched the streaming bliss. . . .

[After] the love-feast[,] succeeded the last prayer-meeting . . . At length the last sermon was delivered and followed by exhortation, when the preachers, about twenty in number, drew up in a single line, and a procession was formed four deep, led by a preacher, in front of a number of little children singing hymns of praise, and followed by hundreds who joined in the songs of Zion, marching round the encampment.

. . . no eloquence can picture the animation, the affection, the tenderness of the people and preachers on separating . . . tears gushed from their eyes: some attempting to bid an adieu, sobs and sighs almost choked their utterance, while in others it was like a torrent bursting through every obstruction . . . the big drops rolled down their faces, or glistened in their eyes, and they seemed to say in the language of the ancient heathens, "See how these Christians love!" The tents were struck and the people dispersed . . .[176]

Although the above was Reverend Ward's description of a revival in Connecticut, this was how the highly regimented Methodists conducted every camp-meeting (including Palmyra's of 1820).

He verified this when next describing a Methodist camp-meeting in rural New York: "The plan of our proceeding was arranged in the usual way: family prayers at the opening and close of each day, in the tents—general prayer meetings before the [preaching] stand at eight [AM]—preaching at ten [AM], two [PM], and six o'clock [PM] in the day, and also at midnight— the intervals [in between] to be occupied with irregular [i.e., spontaneous] services."[177] This Methodist regimentation was still evident decades later in the Camp Meeting Manual’s hine-point outline for the daily “order of exercises and of domestic arrangements.”[178]

Who were the ministers at Palmyra's 1820 revival? As already indicated, the traditional Mormon claim for Reverends George Lane and Benjamin Stockton as the preachers is anachronistic conflation of memory and narrative. At a camp-meeting with small attendance, 20-40 percent of the participants were ministers who traveled from a large region surrounding the host-village (in this case, near Mount Pleasant, New York): "It was not very numerously attended, probably from 500 to 1000 persons, upwards of 200 of whom were professors of religion.”[179] But what about Palmyra’s camp-meeting?

A partial answer to that question was in the decades-later "Notes for a History of Methodism in Phelps" by Reverend M. P. Blakeslee. Harry Sarsnett said that preacher Elisha House "held" a "camp-meeting," at which Sarsnett converted to Methodism. Although Blakeslee did not give a specific date for this revival, his chronological discussion mentioned it after comments for 1 July 1819 and "for 1820," but before Blakeslee's comments on events in November-December 1820.[180]

How far in advance of November? Because participant Sarsnett remembered it as a "camp-meeting," this happened during the "season" from June to September. With the extensive preparations necessary, did two camp-meetings occur in the area between Palmyra and Phelps during the 1820 "season"? or did only one? Fragmentary evidence cannot answer that question definitely, but the evidence can support my conclusion that Sarsnett converted at the camp-meeting held near Palmyra, the same revival Joseph Smith attended.[181]

Listed as a Methodist elder since 1818,[182] House was a resident of Phelps, nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra,[183] yet much closer than Canandaigua. As indicated by Reverend Seager in June 1818, residents of Phelps traveled to camp-meetings in Palmyra, an out-of-town attendance which certainly occurred at Palmyra's revival in June 1820.

The list of unclaimed letters at Palmyra's post office provided a contemporary answer to the question of attendance at this camp-meeting, even though the list obviously did not identify all visitors. Most probably did not arrange for mail to be sent to them in Palmyra, while others picked up the mail they did receive there. The postal notices therefore mentioned only a very small percentage of actual visitors.

Nevertheless, the postmaster's notice for 30 June 1820 included "Rev. Benj. Bailey," who had traveled fifteen miles from his residence in Lyons to Palmyra, probably to attend its camp-meeting. He was the only Benjamin Bailey in Ontario County according to the censuses of 1810 and 1820.[184] As the Presbyterian minister assigned to Macedon (later named "East Palmyra"),[185] Reverend Bailey's attendance at Palmyra's 1820 Methodist revival was undoubtedly why Joseph Smith linked it with the Presbyterians, even though he conflated that linkage with the conversion of his relatives to the Presbyterian Church four years later.

In addition, the same postal notice showed that at least two ministers had journeyed long distances to Palmyra, undoubtedly to attend its camp-meeting in June.[186] Subsequently a Methodist minister in Victor, only eighteen miles distant, Samuel Talbot in 1820 was a resident of Pompey, eighty-five miles from Palmyra.[187] The postal notice also listed "Deacon Barber," but no one by the name of Barber resided in Palmyra according to the 1820 census. Although Barber families lived in Ontario County at this time, there apparently was only one "Deacon Barber" in western New York. "Deacon William Barber" (apparently a Methodist) lived near Scipioville, Cayuga County, nearly fifty miles from Palmyra. This was not an unusual distance even for non-ministerial attenders of camp-meetings.[188]

Because camp-meetings "ought to be almost continually vocal with psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs,"[189] publishers circulated hundreds to choose from. "HYMN XII" in Methodist minister Stith Mead's 1811 collection was one that Palmyra's revivalists of 1820 probably sang, just as Latter-day Saints have continued to do so to the present:

SWEET is the work, my God, my King.

To Praise thy name[,] give thanks and sing.[190]

Another selection for New York's rural camp-meetings was "Hymn 44" as published at Poughkeepsie the same year as Mead’s hymnal.

I know that my Redeemer lives,

What comfort this sweet sentence gives!

He lives, he lives, who once was dead,

He lives[,] my ever living head.[191]

Of these two hymns, only the latter was in the first hymnal of the new church Joseph Smith Jr. eventually organized.[192]

Of greater importance for understanding the First Vision were other selections from New York hymnals. Among the songs Joseph undoubtedly joined in singing at Palmyra's camp-meeting in June 1820 was this one from the 1811 Poughkeepsie collection of hymns Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings:

O do not be discourag’d

For Jesus is your friend,

And if you lack for knowledge,

He’ll not refuse to lend;

Neither will he upbraid you,

Though often you request

Those words restated the "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God" passage from the New Testament's Epistle of James that Joseph said inspired him in 1820. This hymn's first line ("O When shall I see Jesus") implied that such "knowledge" could reach the teenager through actually seeing the Savior during this life.[193]

Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting attenders definitely heard that hymn as revivalists "almost continually" participated in days and nights of singing. Its words were also in Reverend Mead's 1811 hymnal,[194] and by 1817 had been reprinted in nine editions of Totten's New York hymns USUALLY SUNG AT CAMP-MEETINGS.[195] In addition to eight printings of a Boston hymnal by1817, those words were also in two hymnals of 1819, including New York's fourth edition of Hymns and Spiritual Songs For the Use of Religious Assemblies.[196] Rather than a sermon, it was a universally sung camp-meting hymn that inspired Joseph Smith with the promise of James 1:5.

From 1809 to 1817, nine editions of Totten's New York hymnal even affirmed the literal reality of having a daytime vision of Jesus:

As at the time of noon,

My quadrant FAITH, I take,

To view my CHRIST, my sun,

If he the clouds should break:

I’m happy when his face I see,

I know then whereabouts I be.[197]

By 1817, these words had also appeared in the eight editions of Boston's hymnal.[198] It should be no surprise that many American revivalists published their visions of Jesus, even of seeing the Father and Son together.[199]

In 1809 Totten's New York collection of hymns USUALLY SUNG AT CAMP-MEETINGS even explained how a young man could obtain such a vision:

ONE ev'ning, pensive as I lay,

Alone upon the ground,

As I to God began to pray,

A light shone all around.

These words with power went through my heart

I've come to set you free;

Death[,] hell[,] nor grave shall never part,

My love (my son) from thee.[200]

Although Totten did not reprint this as often as the one about daytime theophany, Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting almost certainly sang this hymn. It was in Reverend Mead's 1811 hymnal, in the 1811 Poughkeepsie collection of hymns Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings, in Totten's 1811 edition, in the second edition of an 1818 collection of Camp-meeting Songs for the Pious, and in the second edition of Collection of Camp Meeting Hymns by the wife of famed revivalist Lorenzo Dow.[201] If (as seems very likely) Joseph sang this hymn at Palmyra's Methodist revival of 1820, it explains why the fourteen-year-old boy thought it not unusual to pray to God alone, to see Him in a "pillar of light," and to be "lying on my back, looking up into heaven."[202]

In 1820 the teenager took the words of these hymns literally, as he did the scripture from James. Even though they often read the same biblical passage and sang the same modern hymns, most Methodist ministers now regarded those words as literal only for biblical times and for the afterlife. This was a reversal in American Methodism, whose members and leaders had sometimes professed visions of Jesus from the 1790s through the first decade of the nineteenth century. However, "by the 1820s and 1830s in the mostly white Methodist Episcopal Church, there was a noticeable shift away from overt enthusiasm," especially visions and dreams.[203] As Joseph Smith said, these nay-sayers insisted "that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles, and that there would never be any more of them."[204]

In this regard, it is crucial that a leader of the Methodist Episcopal Church criticized some of those at Palmyra's June 1820 camp-meeting. In reporting on the later upsurge of revivals in the Ontario District (which included Palmyra), Reverend Abner Chase wrote on 1 July 1824 that "four years" ago [i.e., June 1820] "wild and ranting fanatics, caused the spirits of the faithful in a degree to sink." Previously a circuit-rider, he was "presiding elder" of the Ontario District in the summer of 1820. At Palmyra's 1820 Methodist camp-meeting, unnamed persons acted "wild" (like its drunk revivalist James Couser) and others said things that Reverend Chase regarded as fanatical.[205]

"Some few days after I had this vision," teenage Joseph confided his theophany to "one of the Methodist preachers who was active in the before mentioned religious excitement." The minister condemned Joseph's description "with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil . . .”[206] Various writers[207] have assumed that George Lane was the preacher, but in June-July 1820, Reverend Lane's responsibility was in the Susquehanna District on the Pennsylvania border, and there is no evidence that he attended Palmyra's camp-meeting revival in June 1820.[208]

William Barlow would be a likely candidate for this disbelieving preacher. He was circuit-rider for Ontario Circuit (in which Palmyra was located) from 1815 to July 1817. In July 1819 he became circuit-rider for his hometown of Canandaigua, seventeen miles from Palmyra.[209] However, within months he left the Methodists "in an irregular, unofficial manner," converted to "the Protestant Episcopal Church" (i.e., Anglican Episcopalian), and became Canandaigua's Episcopal rector in January 1820.[210] Without its own resident Methodist minister, Palmyra was served by circuit-riders, and Barlow's apostasy removed one of the nearest organizers for the town's camp-meeting of June 1820.

Although Methodist elder Elisha House was not currently a circuit-rider for this area,[211] his residence in Phelps was even closer to Palmyra, and it was practical for him to take over at least some of Barlow's responsibilities for the upcoming revival. As previously indicated for another camp-meeting in rural New York, "some of the brethren came more than ten and twelve miles to assist in the preliminary labours." It is therefore understandable why revival-convert Sarsnett, also living in Phelps,[212] remembered fellow-resident House as leader of the 1820 camp-meeting.

This camp-meeting was a turning point in the differing religious vitality of the two towns. Phelps had a Methodist meetinghouse by 1819, three years before Palmyra. Following Palmyra's 1820 revival, however, the Ontario Circuit (which included Palmyra) nearly maintained its rate of Methodist retention, while the Lyons Circuit (which included Phelps) plummeted. By the end of the 1820s, Palmyra was its own Methodist preaching circuit—four years before Phelps.[213] The camp-meeting of June 1820 began a shift of Methodist strength toward its host-village of Palmyra, a pattern that intensified with the dramatic revivals of 1824- 25 and continued into the next decade. It is no wonder that Joseph Smith and three residents of Phelps emphasized 1820 for this religious transition.[214]

Official appointments occurred only at the annual meetings of the Genesee Conference each July, but (during the six-month interim after Barlow's apostasy from Methodism in January 1820) Abner Chase apparently helped substitute for his abandoned duties at the upcoming revival in Palmyra. Barlow had married in the town of Pompey two years before Chase's 1818 appointment to its circuit, and the Methodist conference appointed Chase as Ontario District's presiding elder on 20 July 1820.[215]

As an isolated fact, Reverend Chase's pre-July assignment to Pompey, eighty-five miles from Palmyra, might seem to make it unlikely that he had any role in Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820. However, since one of his Methodist associates (Talbot) also traveled from Pompey to Palmyra before the village's postal notice at the end of June, this indicates that the two men traveled together to the camp-meeting that month.

Elisha House or Abner Chase was probably the Methodist minister who listened to the teenager's testimony of seeing God in June 1820. Either way, Chase learned of Joseph's assertion and dismissed the unschooled farmboy as a "ranting" fanatic.

Eighteen years after his First Vision of deity in 1820, Joseph Smith Jr. created problems for historical understanding by misremembering "early spring" and by conflating circumstances of that year with circumstances of Palmyra's revivals in 1824-25. Nevertheless, I disagree with BYU religion professor Paul H. Peterson's 1995 assessment "that Marquardt and Walters have a strong case in claiming that the 1824-25 revival satisfies all of the elements of Joseph's 1838 history more adequately than any other account."[216] That conclusion is based on the unnecessary assumption that all details in his account of local “excitement on the subject of religion” must apply to only one year’s experience with revivalism.

Fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith caught "a spark of Methodism" at Palmyra's camp-meeting revival in the late spring of 1820. This led him to seek forgiveness "for my own Sins" and to find theophany.[217]

Note: This article one of the special web-only series and not printed in a physical issue.

[1] For example, from 1994 to 1998 I published "revisionist" books that nonetheless cited Backman and emphasized his point of view about the First Vision (see my note 35 in this article). I use "apologist" as a non-judgmental, descriptive term, as explained in D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, rev. and enl. ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), x:

"Not every believer is an apologist, but apologists take special efforts to defend their cherished point of view—whether in religion, science, history, or some other belief/endeavor. It is not an insult to call someone an `apologist' (which I often do), nor is `apologist' an unconditional badge of honor. Like drivers on a highway, some apologists are careful, some are careless, some unintentionally injure the innocent, some are Good Samaritans, and a few are sociopaths. Like drivers, even good apologists make errors in judgment and occasionally violate the rules. The same is true for those who don't think they're apologists.

"In a tradition as old as debate, polemics is an extreme version of apologetics. Defending a point of view becomes less important than attacking one's opponents. Aside from their verbal viciousness, polemicists often resort to any method to promote their argument. Polemics intentionally destroys the give-and-take of sincerely respectful disagreement. In the resulting polarization, `all are punish'd.' Moving beyond apologist persuasion, LDS polemicists furiously (and often fraudulently) attack any non-traditional view of Mormonism. They don't mince words—they mince the truth."

By those definitions, I have always regarded myself as an honest apologist for Mormonism, especially in its controversies (where I have acknowledged perspectives of disbelief but also options for faith, and have allowed readers to arrive at their own conclusions). As in the above book, this article uses the term "apologist" to describe authors writing from a faith-perspective I share, even though we have not always approached various topics in the same ways.

In that regard, current readers can decide whether the following is an honest summary of my above-quoted statements, or whether the following is an example of polemics. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 292n71, commented on “his [Quinn’s] vitriolic response to his critics (some LDS apologists are, he suggests in his revised work, ‘sociopaths’[x]).”

[2] The nicknames "Mormon" and "Mormons" derive from Joseph Smith Jr.'s publication of The Book of Mormon in 1830 at Palmyra, New York, as his “translation” of extra-biblical scripture. See John W. Welch and Tim Rathbone, "Book of Mormon Translation by Joseph Smith," in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism: The History, Doctrine, and Procedure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 1:210-12. Wesley P. Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 67 (for “massive silence”), 61 (for “cannot be true”), 66 (for Palmyra “revivals in the years 1817, 1824, 1829, etc.”), 77n44 (for “reports of the 1816 [Palmyra] revival can be found in” various sources, with last citation as “Nov. 1, 1817”). Although Walters published a similar article by that title in Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 10 (Fall 1967) in which these quotes first appeared, he expanded it by one-third for what Dialogue’s editors called a “reprint” in their introductory essay, “Roundtable: The Question of the Palmyra Revival” (69). Because readers are more likely to have access to the Dialogue version of Walters’ article, I quote from it and cite its pagination. With one exception (in my note 13), I do not indicate variations between his 1967 and 1969 articles of the same title.

[3] Robert D. Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), 9, 69, 75. For discussion of this biography’s unrelenting hostility, see D. Michael Quinn, “biographers and the Mormon ‘Prophet Puzzle’: 1974-2004,” Journal of Mormon History 32 (Summer 2006): 229.

[4] E. Latimer, The Three Brothers: Sketches of the Lives of Rev. Aurora Seager, Rev. Micah Seager, Rev. Schuyler Seager, D.D. (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1880), 12 (for Aurora’s death in 1819), 21-22 (for quotes, including his 1818 “diary”); also F[rancis]. W. Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Nelson & Phillips, 1876), 139, for the July 1818 annual meeting in Lansing, New York, attended by Methodist bishop Robert R. Roberts; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828 (New York: T. Mason, G. Lane, J. Collord, 1840), 316 (for Billy Hibbard in New York Conference), 317 ("Aurora Seager goes to the Genesee Conference"), 318 (for Aurora Seager in Clarence Circuit of Genesee District in Genesee Conference and for "Zechariah" Paddock in Ridgeway Circuit of Genesee District—his brother Benjamin G. Paddock was assigned to a different district (roughly a county) this year and was less likely to be the "Brother Paddock" in Seager's diary entry). For modern studies, see Charles A. Johnson The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religious Harvest Time (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955); Dickson D. Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974); Kenneth O. Brown, Holy Ground: A Study of the American Camp Meeting (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).

Although the town of Vienna did not change its name to Phelps until the 1850s, various sources had previously referred to Phelps as if it were a town (including Reverend Seager in 1818 and the U.S. censuses from 1820 to 1850—see my note 212), when Phelps was actually a "township" containing several towns. Likewise, History of Ontario County, New York (Philadelphia: Everts, Ensign, and Everts, 1876), 179, noted: "seven village

EDUCATION	PEDAGOGY
Principle = Knowledge	Ordinance = Experience
Repentance, new life, resurrection	Baptism, washed clean, out of water
Pure life, overcome sins of generation	Washing, blessings on bodily parts
Act righteously with power given, stewardship from small to great	Anointing, preparatory king and priest
Set apart from the world, discipline over body, searching for truth, faithfulness	Priesthood garments, wear always, constant reminder, protection, etc.
Line upon line, growth in priesthood power, strong against temptations of Satan	Endowment, going from room to room, learning, clothing, covenants
Marriage for eternity, fidelity, family, offspring	Temple marriage, sealing, blessings
. . .	. . .
ALL: preparing to meet and be like God	ALL: preparing to meet and be like God

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith's Theology

A Reflection on Joseph Smith’s Restorationist Vision of Truth

Truth Revealed Anew

Truth as an Independent Agent

Truth as the Action of Embodied Humanity in History

Jesus as the Truth

God’s Glory as Truth

An Expanded Restorationist View of Truth

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler’s Theological Position on the Nature of God

An 1840 Sermon of Joseph Smith

The King Follett Sermon

Sermon in the Grove

Conclusion

Praise to the Man: The Development of Joseph Smith Deification in Woolleyite Mormonism, 1929–1977

The Lorin C. Woolley Statement

Mingling with Gods

The Office of the Holy Ghost

Gods Above Gods Infinitely

Conclusion

The Secular Binary of Joseph Smith’s Translations

The Book of Mormon

Early Revelations

Pure Language Document(s)

The Kirtland Egyptian Alphabets

Chart 6

Egyptian Grammar and Alphabet and the Book of Abraham

Esotericism and Symbolic Translation

The Prison of Language

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Reclamation of Divine Collaboration

Reclamation of Ecclesiastical Collaboration

Salvation through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment

Bodily Religions

Early LDS Views of the Body

Eternalizing Matter and Materializing Spirit

The Preexistence and the Embodiment of Power

Divine Embodiment

The Cultivation and Exaltation of Human Affections

The Temple and Domestic Heaven

Conclusion

The Limits of Naturalistic Criteria for the Book of Mormon: Comparing Joseph Smith and Andrew Jackson Davis

Comparing American Seers

The Poughkeepsie Seer

Fixations on Idiosyncratic Criteria

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon: Co-Founders of a Movement

Pedagogy of Perfection: Joseph Smith’s Perfectionism, How It was Taught in the Early LDS Church, and Its Contemporary Applicability

Conceptual Notes

1: Historical Context: Protestant View of Perfectionism; Search for Certainty of Salvation

2: Joseph Smith’s Own View on Certainty and Perfection: The Pinnacle of Salvation

3: Outward Forms: Joseph Smith’s Search for Fitting Ordinances: A Pedagogy of Perfection

4: Extension of Teachings and Blessings to the Saints Abroad—Gathering Reversed

Conclusion and Suggestions: Pedagogy of Perfection: The End in Mind and Education Toward That End

A Documentary Note on a Letter to Joseph Smith. Romance, Death, and Polygamy: The Life and Times of Susan Hough Conrad and Lorenzo Dow Barnes

Lorenzo Barnes

Susan Hough Conrad

Romance

Polygamy

Conclusion

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Joseph Smith's Life

Parley Pratt’s Autobiography: The First Indian Mission

Joseph Smith’s History: The First Indian Mission

Joseph Smith’s History: The Missouri Years

Joseph Smith’s History: Nauvoo

Indians and the Book of Mormon in the Joseph Smith Years

Missionary Work with the Indians and the Building Up of Zion

Mormons and Indians in a Gentile Polity

Brigham Young and the Indians: Some Basic Continuities

Parley P. Pratt and the Present

Why the Prophet is a Puzzle: The Challenges of Using Psychological Perspectives to Understand the Character and Motivation of Joseph Smith, Jr.

I

II

III

Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity

JOSEPH SMITH'S EXPERIENCE OF A METHODIST "CAMP-MEETING" IN 1820