Editors'
Note: BYU Studies is the university’s journal of LDS thought and scholarship.
BYU Studies is dedicated to the premise that faith
is strengthened through the intellectual pursuit of light
and truth.
Richard
Bushman is perhaps the most respected scholar on Joseph
Smith within as well as outside of the Church and has published
extensively with BYU Studies. To learn more or to
subscribe to the journal, to go byustudies.byu.edu
Part One
discusses two types of writers of Joseph Smith biography:
believers that tend to idealize the Prophet, and skeptics
that look to depict Joseph as something of a scoundrel.
We pick up as Bushman discusses a new breed of “tolerant”
readers.
A
growing body of readers is ready for another depiction of
the Prophet. These readers do not want to be caught up in
the battles of believers and disbelievers; they are more
interested in knowing about an extraordinarily intriguing
person.
This
group of readers, I suggest, may not be satisfied with the
choices that Dan Vogel, one of Joseph’s best-informed critics,
offers to readers of Joseph Smith biographies. In describing
some of the supernatural events in Joseph’s early life,
Vogel says that we have three choices:
- Joseph Smith consciously deceived people
by making up events and lying about them;
- he unconsciously deceived people by imagining
events and calling them real;
- he told the truth.
Vogel
asserts that we cannot believe that Joseph told the truth
without abandoning all “rationalist categories of historical
investigation.”
[i] No one can believe rationally in the actuality
of supernatural happenings of the kind Joseph claimed for
himself. Therefore, he must have been a deceiver, either
consciously or unconsciously. Like Brodie, Vogel leans toward
conscious deceit. Vogel believes Joseph Smith knowingly
lied by claiming that he translated the Book of Mormon when
in fact Joseph was making it up as he went along.
For
my hypothetical body of twenty-first century readers, Vogel’s
alternatives represent a hard choice. Readers are being
asked to consider the revelations as either true or a form
of deception. Joseph Smith either spoke for God or he duped
people. There is no middle ground.
Vogel’s
set of alternatives represents a version of what I would
call “the strict Enlightenment,” by which I mean a form
of Enlightenment thought that forces everything into rational
categories of analysis and refuses to admit the validity
of any other forms of thought and belief.
By
this strict standard, Mohammad’s vision of Gabriel carrying
him to Jerusalem was a form of conscious or unconscious
deception. Saint Theresa’s transports, Native American vision
quests, Saint Paul’s encounter with Christ on the road to
Damascus—all these and hundreds of other reports of visitations
and journeys into heaven are conscious deceptions, or they
are the product of the visionaries’ imaginations and are
thus unconscious deceptions.
The
Enlightenment had a word for all these supposed revelations:
superstition. Joseph was categorized with a long line of
impostors, starting with Mohammad and continuing down through
the French Prophets and Joanna Southcott, the notorious
English prophetess. [ii] Enlightened newspaper editors and critics of
religion dealt with revelators by classifying them all as
frauds and throwing them all on the trash heap together.
For many years, Roget’s Thesaurus listed the Qur’an
and Book of Mormon together under “pseudo-revelation.” [iii]
click
to enlarge
Joseph
Smith, Mohammad, and other extrabiblical prophets could
be understood by putting them in the company of impostors
through the ages.
In
this postmodern era, when the Enlightenment itself has been
discredited, many readers may prefer to be less strict in
their rationality. Vogel himself thinks of Joseph Smith
as a sincere deceiver. He sympathetically concludes, “I
suggest Smith really believed he was called of God to preach
repentance to a sinful world but that he felt justified
in using deception to accomplish his mission more fully.” [iv]
Many
readers want to see human life as variegated, strange, and
rife with complex possibilities. These new readers are open
to experiences beyond the ordinary. They want to observe
lives that are unlike their own, sometimes in astounding
ways. As George Eliot said of the visionary Theresa of Avila,
“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how
the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments
of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of
Saint Theresa.” [v] In other words, Theresa’s visions take us to the
outer reaches of human capacity to places we don’t ordinarily
go.
This
desire to explore the varieties of human experience does
not require a dissection of every supposedly supernatural
event in order to find its rational, scientific basis. We
realize now that dissection kills the animal put under the
knife. We grant visionaries the benefit of the doubt and
acknowledge that they may have had experiences beyond conventional
understanding and knowledge. They are part of a grand human
effort to discover meaning through poetry, art, and revelation.
We
can delight in the diversity of human experience and rejoice
in all that God has wrought among his children. Modern readers
may be willing to allow that Joseph Smith was sincere in
saying he had visions and translated the Book of Mormon,
and simply want to know more. To call him a deceiver misses
the point of visions. In The American Religion, the
literary critic Harold Bloom, no believer in revealed religion,
relished the genius of Joseph Smith’s historical revelations
without getting bogged down in questions of scientific authenticity. [vi]
The
common presumption nowadays is that visionaries should not
be called “pious frauds,” Vogel’s term. [vii] That broad tolerance has come about partially
because of developments outside of Mormon historiography.
In a postcolonial time, the accusation that strange religions
are superstitions has been discredited by our experience
with native peoples. Imperialists once applied the term
“superstition” to the religions of colonized populations.
Discrediting their religion as superstition was one step
in subjecting them.
Now,
in our effort to see these colonized people on their own
terms, we want to give their religions full credit. That
transformation in the study of world religions has prepared
an audience to give more credence to Joseph Smith. Rather
than colonizing him in the name of Enlightenment rationality,
we listen more sympathetically. Contemporary readers will
look upon Joseph Smith as if they were tolerant ethnographers
going among native people. Interested students will want
to learn about the world of early Mormonism without disrupting
it and get as close as they can to the experience of revelation
as Joseph experienced it.
I
have presented the passing of the old twentieth-century
issue of authenticity as if this were a gain for Mormons.
Biographers of Joseph Smith now can write for an audience
with broad sympathies who will want to know more about revelation
and will not require that it be explained as pious deception.
But I wish now to reverse direction and ask if Mormons will
be happy with this outcome.
Is
it an improvement to end the war between believers and unbelievers
that raged in the biographies of the twentieth century?
The new tolerance permits a believing biographer like myself
to present more of Joseph’s revelations without fear of
running up against a wall of hostile disbelief, but is that
advantage counteracted by a blurring of the real issues?
Wouldn’t believing biographers prefer to have the question
of authenticity laid squarely before our readers, even at
the cost of having the revelations disputed? Do we want
Joseph Smith’s challenge to the world to be lost in a haze
of a patronizing kindness?
By
giving in to tolerance, there is a danger that Mormonism
will be treated like voodoo or shamanism—something to examine
in excruciating detail and with labored respect, while privately
the ethnographers believe these religious manifestations
are the product of frenzied minds and a primitive, prescientific
outlook. Wouldn’t we prefer to be taken seriously enough
to be directly opposed rather than condescended to?
Right
now, the Book of Mormon might aspire to be classed with
the Qur’an as the inspired book of a great world religion.
Many readers would go with us that far. But are Mormons
willing to accept that judgment, or do we want a more exclusive
claim on revelation? Many Mormons believe that Joseph Smith
and the scriptural revelations are in a class of their own,
distinct from Saint Theresa and Mohammad, and would be unhappy
to be put on such a list, no matter how distinguished the
other visionaries.
One
fact in Joseph Smith’s history may prevent his complete
absorption into the muffling embrace of liberal tolerance,
and that fact is the existence of the gold plates. Many
modern readers will acknowledge Joseph’s sincerity in his
more ordinary run of revelations. They can imagine holy
words coming into his mind as he wrote, “Hearken, O ye people
of my Church” (D&C 1:1). Most of the Doctrine and Covenants
fits within the limits of believable revelation—though privately
the readers may feel the words came from no greater distance
than Joseph’s own subconscious. But gold plates, sitting
on the table as Joseph translated, shown to witnesses to
feel and examine, touched by Emma as she cleaned house?
Such
a tangible artifact is hard to attribute to a standard religious
experience, even in an extraordinary person such as Joseph.
With the gold plates, we cross into the realm of deception
or psychotic delusion. In the minds of many readers, to
see and touch forty pounds of gold plates with ancient writings
on them, people had to be either tricked or confused. Joseph
turns back into the impostor or self-deluded fanatic. [viii]
Here
the old issue, then, reasserts itself. The broad-minded
reader has to ask, Can it be possible that Joseph Smith
did receive the gold plates from an angel? Was he guided
by heaven, or was he not? There is no hiding behind the
marvelous workings of the human spirit in explaining the
plates. Either something fishy was going on, or Joseph did
have a visitor from heaven.
The
believing biographer here must abandon his tolerant readers
to their own devices. The believer cannot help the unbeliever
understand and sympathize with Joseph recovering the plates
from the hillside. In that moment the issue is joined, the
old issue that has hovered over accounts of Joseph’s life
from the beginning: Did God speak to him or not?
Questions that are addressed in Part III of A Joseph Smith for the Twenty-First Century:
If Joseph’s most significant
contribution could be summed up in one word, what would
that word be?
Why is Joseph referred to
by some as an extremist prophet?
To what extent did early Mormonism
integrate American culture and ideals?
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learn more and to subscribe to BYU Studies, go to
byustudies.byu.edu
