New Joseph Smith bio presents him as something other than fraud or saint
Book Review: ‘Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet,’ by John J. Turner, ★★★★★
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism and the victim of assassination in 1844, is one of the most polarizing figures of 19th-century American history. For some, he was little more than a con man, while for others he was a literal prophet of God.
Smith is portrayed as something of the former in Fawn Brodie’s 1945 No Man Knows My History, who took a psychologically oriented approach for the first major scholarly and non-hagiographic biography of the religious leader. The next major academic bio of Smith, Richard Bushman’s 2005 Rough Stone Rolling, portrays him as something of the latter, even while recognizing his significant flaws.
And the latest full-length academic treatise on Smith, this month’s Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet by John J. Turner, completes the literary trilogy with a view of Smith that sees him as neither con man nor prophet — even though he had qualities of both.
As I read Turner’s 456-page work, I was frequently reminded of Indiana Jones. That comparison (mine, not the author’s) is far from a perfect one, but Turner’s Smith, like the fictional Jones, was resourceful, adventurous, creative, impulsive and charismatic. Turner’s Smith at times seems to relish the chaos that followed his impulsiveness.
Turner makes clear his personal views about Smith clear from the outset: “I wouldn’t trust him with my money, my wife, or my daughter,” he writes in his introduction. But he also sees Smith as a generous man who endeared himself to many who knew him well, and as one who provided “compelling and provocative answers to questions many American Christians were asking,” bringing “ideas and practices together into an original, attractive system.”
Turner, a professor of religious studies at George Mason University, was impelled to write the biography in part because of the wealth of information that has become available about Smith since Bushman’s biography was written. That information includes the Joseph Smith Papers, the effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to collect and publish all of Smith’s known writings.
Bushman had offered a relatively unvarnished view of Smith’s life, and it was a groundbreaking book, coming at a time when official LDS church sources barely acknowledged Smith’s practice of polygamy. Turner’s portrait of Smith is even more unvarnished, offering a more complete look of the stories behind Smith’s marrying of 30-some women, at least two of them already married. The tales often aren’t a pleasant read, largely because Smith more often than not withheld the truth from Emma, his first wife.1
I found Turner’s accounts of the early years of Smith’s spiritual journey the most fascinating. Smith grew up in a home without strong religious moorings, and even as an adolescent he wondered about the most important questions of life. Historians debate the particulars of what the LDS church calls the First Vision, a key event that led to Smith organizing a church, but Turner sees little reason to question the essence of Smith’s account:
Whether or not heavenly beings appeared to Joseph is a matter of faith, not historical inquiry. It is impossible for scholars to penetrate the marrow of anyone’s religious experience. At the same time, regardless of its particular content or exact date, there seems little reason to doubt the story’s core: that a spiritually distraught young man man sought, saw, and heard the Lord.
But Smith’s life becomes more problematic from there. Turner sees no reason to believe that Smith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, which Smith claimed originated with golden plates he dug up from the ground following angelic direction, has a historical basis; in fact, Turner cites plenty of evidence to show its connections with 19th-century religious culture, also citing incidents where Smith wouldn’t let even close friends, much less detractors, see the “golden plates.”
But does that mean the Book of Mormon was a fraud? Turner doesn’t think so, at least not in the way the word is usually used:
In the absence of evidence that anyone helped him compose the manuscript, the simplest conclusion is that Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon. One corollary of that conclusion is that at least on some level, Joseph deceived his family, friends, supporters, and readers. ...
The Book of Mormon project from start to finish was a stunning display of American audacity. Such chutzpah, if displayed by a political or business leader rather than a religious figure, would almost certainly elicit more respect than ridicule or condemnation.
What made Smith so successful as a religious leader was his uncanny ability inspire others to see what he could see, Turner concludes:
The experiences of the witnesses point to the power of Joseph’s spiritual leadership. Many Americans claimed to have visions. Joseph Smith had the much rarer ability of enabling others to share those visions. In this case, moreover, he made a mysterious hidden object present for other people. The immaterial became real.
Part of what makes Turner’s book compelling, even as he sometimes gets bogged down in the details of Smith’s frequent journeys and knotted finances and relationships, is that he seems to both distrust Smith and admire Smith for the way he was able to juggle so many conflicts, people, philosophical concepts and religious adaptations, all the while taking risks and coming out on top — until he didn’t.
This dual view of Smith may be one reason that the reader can come to the end of the book and still not fully know who Joseph Smith was. That’s not Turner’s fault; remember the Smith quote that Brodie used for the title of her psychobiography: “No man knows my history.” Even with the best of historical research, so much of Smith’s life remains hidden by his acts of intentional secrecy. Smith will always be an enigma, but Turner’s book will long be the work that best shows the complexity of the way that Smith both inspired and angered others.
Once she learned the truth, there were times that Emma seemed to give her blessing to her husband’s other marriages. In her later years, after Joseph’s death, she would deny that he was behind such a practice.