Secret Societies and Scripture: A Conversation with Colby Townsend

What do the Illuminati, Freemasons, and anti-Jacobin conspiracies of the late 18th century have to do with the Book of Mormon? More than you might think.

In this episode of Dialogue Out Loud, co-editor Caroline Kline speaks with scholar Colby Townsend about his article “Secret Societies and the Political Context of Joseph Smith’s Rewritten Scripture” from the Fall 2025 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Townsend situates Joseph Smith’s early scriptural work not just within the familiar rise of anti-Masonry in 1820s America, but within a larger transatlantic panic over secret societies that emerged after the French Revolution.

Together, Kline and Townsend explore how these cultural and political fears shaped the way Smith and his contemporaries read and reimagined biblical stories — from Adam and Eve to Cain and Abel — and what that reveals about the intersection of politics, theology, and imagination in the early Restoration.