Worlds of Joseph Smith Conference
Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 5:09 am
The following are notes on The Worlds of Joseph Smith conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., May 6, 2005. This conference is available for free in video format from the LDS Church website. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this conference, which is essentially about historiography: "how does one go about writing a Joseph Smith biography" is the operative question here. I really enjoyed the comments from Remini and Richard Hughes.
Richard Bushman, “Joseph Smith’s Many Histories” –
* (citing his wife Claudia Bushman’s “America Discovers Columbus”) Christopher Columbus was almost totally neglected in pre-Revolutionary histories, was only acknowledged as discoverer of America after the Revolution, when the new country needed a new hero. Calls Columbus “grandfather” of the USA.
* Each of us has many histories, each one designed for persons of different cultural contexts. We can draw from any of these histories in order to explain who we are.
* The context in which Joseph Smith is placed affects how we see him: Mohammad-like? Jesus-like? A money-digger? A seer?
* People who are impressed with Joseph Smith tend to place him in a more universal historical context, whereas those who are unimpressed place him in an exclusively local context. By limiting the historical horizon, we can make him seem smaller as a figure.
* Mormons call Joseph Smith an American in order to charm Americans. Non-Mormons call him American in order to make him seem a product of American culture. “Mormons see him as a prophet with an American accent;” non-Mormons see him as purely a product of his American environment.
* Mormons place him in a history of apostasy and restoration dating back to the Bible. Critical historians who nonetheless consider him important (like Josiah Quincy and Alexander Campbell) placed him in a long line of false prophets and religious frauds. Campbell offers a whole bunch of examples including the Egyptian magicians.
* Unfortunately, the anti-fanatics, inflamed by their hatred of fanaticism, have resorted to violence to quell the fanatics, as often as the fanatics have taken up arms in the cause of their faith. Religious fanatics as violent and dangerous is one of the oldest stereotypes. One “Turner” placed Joseph Smith and Mohammad into this category: dangerous and terrible, but grand.
* I. Woodbridge Riley: narrowed the context to a purely American and psychological history. Joseph Smith as deformed offspring of Yankee culture. Rejected Spalding theory. “Riley exploded this frail argument” (the Spalding theory) “and looked for evidence that Smith had written the book himself.” Said Joseph Smith had suffered epilepsy, chalked his visions up to side effects of seizures. Much of Joseph Smith’s behavior the result of a childhood injury. “Riley believed he had fully accounted for Joseph Smith and he did not amount to much.” Riley: “Was he demented or only degenerate?” Riley model set the pattern for other Joseph Smith biographies, incl. Fawn Brodie.
* Brodie makes Joseph Smith fit the “impostor” psychology type. “Purely a Yankee product.”
* Vogel’s bio is in the same tradition. Sociological analysis, family systems theory, and American environment influences explains all we need to know about Joseph Smith. No one has gone as far as Vogel in linking Book of Mormon plot to persons and events in Joseph Smith’s immediate context. Vogel carries the Riley model “to its ultimate realization, in extreme detail.” “Vogel’s work diminishes Joseph Smith by limiting” his historical horizon.
* Books of this sort do not open up new vistas for readers, merely reduce Joseph Smith to a colorful fraud. Do not plumb his depths. In Bushman’s opinion, we have reached the end of the line in this tradition of bios and will return to the 19th c. sort of transnational histories of Joseph Smith.
* Transnational histories: Jan Shipps, John Brooke, and Harold Bloom. Shipps “dazzled me with her brilliant analysis of early Mormonism” in her 1985 study Story of a New Religious Tradition. Did not limit Mormonism to Burned-over district. Compared Mormon origins to origins of X’ty, departs from X’ty as X’ty departed from Judaism.
* John Brooke Refiner’s Fire. Placed Mormonism in hermetic tradition. Smith was a miracle-worker of magus who sought divinity. This book dumbfounded Mormon readers because its connections were so tenuous. Nevertheless, it broke through the purely national boundaries of Joseph Smith studies.
* Harold Bloom thinks of Smith as supreme example of American religion, but also finds echoes of Biblical antiquity. Smith had an “uncanny ability to uncover ancient types such as Enoch or Metatron” that Bloom could “only attribute to his genius or demon.” A man in touch with religious currents from the deep past.
* These authors enlarge Smith, giving him greater scope, even though they do not all have a high view of him.
* “For a number of years, in my opinion, Joseph did not know who he was.” “Not until he translated the Book of Mormon did he know…” First Vision, discovery of seer stones, and command to translate plates (his mix of tresure-digging and religious involvement as a youth) are the “prophet puzzle,” and may have been as puzzling to Joseph Smith as to us.
* Joseph Smith was unable to go through an emotional conversion and so was worried about his sins. In the vision, the first words were “thy sins are forgiven thee.” He may have considered this a particularly dramatic “new birth” experience like what revival preachers talked about. His first reaction was to consult a minister—why do this if he had just been informed that all ministers are corrupt? He was confused and wanted guidance, like other new converts.
* Vogel argues that Joseph Smith may have wanted to make a career out of treasure-seeking, but Bushman sees him as compelled by his father and neighbors, an unwilling participant. “Joseph Smith knew his future did not lie with the treasure-seekers, yet he had a gift…” he did not know how this gift fit into the history of religion.
* In the case of the vision to translate the gold plates, there was no precedent to attach himself to.
* “An incomprehensible mixture of possible identities” were very confusing to Joseph Smith.
* Seeing lost objects in the stone prepared him to look into the Urim and Thummim and translate.
* Joseph Smith did not care much for Anthon’s opinion but he was thrilled to find that his response fulfilled a biblical prophecy. At last a thread tied Joseph Smith to the Bible and thereby a broader history. But it was the Book of Mormon that finally tied Joseph Smith to a broader history: king Mosiah, a seer and prophet.
* Book of Mormon places Israel on a world stage. Isaiah uses “isles of the sea” once, Nephi uses it 8 times.
* Our stories of Joseph Smith must comprehend his story of himself.
* Could Joseph Smith have created the Book of Mormon narrative himself? Doubtful that a small, purely American history could take all this into account. “A small history will not account for such a large man.”
* My thought: interesting that Dr. Bushman seems to have a higher opinion of Brooke than Vogel, even though Vogel’s use of sources is considerably more careful and responsible. But Brooke’s work presumably could have a faith-promoting function in that it aggrandizes Joseph Smith and ties him to something much bigger than himself. Thus, I think, Bushman’s preference for him.
1st Respondent – Robert V. Remini –
* Joseph Smith is the quintessential American. Everything about him strikes me as American.
* If you try to become a theologian or a psychologist, you are not a historian. If you try to defend him you’re not a historian but an apologist. If you condemn him and call him a fraud or a charlatan then you’re not a historian. The historian just looks at the facts, tries to find the rational reasons for why a person did the things they do.
* “I don’t think anybody at any time is divorced from the period, the environment, the country in which he lives. You are shaped by those things. And I believe Joseph Smith was shaped very much by the fact that he was born smack-dab in the middle of the Second Great Awakening.” Joseph Smith said he went to camp-meetings and wanted to experience the wild stuff but couldn’t; his family was very religious, father had dreams. How could Joseph not want to feel the presence of God?
* When Joseph talked to the clergyman he was contemptuous, not because Joseph was a child or because he claimed to see a vision; it was the message that all the denominations were wrong and their clergy corrupt.
* There is something about Joseph Smith that people either revered or wanted to attack… why was he hated so?
* Americans are very uncomfortable with what is strange and different, and this man was different.
* Bushman asks in a draft, why do foreigners go for it? Remini: foreigners have been going for all things American for ages. They love our government, music, movies, science. Why not our religion?
* Mormonism is an American religion and we ought to be proud of it. Look at what we’ve contributed!
* Places the Book of Mormon in a line of American documents stating who and what we are, alongside the Mayflower Compact, Decl. of Ind., Const., Bill of Rights.
* Because of Joseph Smith’s surgery he was a very quiet boy.
2nd Respondent – Richard Hughes –
* Campbellism and Mormonism shared much in common, one of which was adult baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins. Pepperdyne put up a statue of Columbus pointing out over the waters. “See, here’s water. What doth hinder my being baptized?”
* The Restorationist vision flourished in antebellum America to a degree that it has scarcely flourished at any other time in the past 2000 years (though it is an older vision).
* Almost every version of Restorationism in 19th c. America (incl. Campbell, Shakers, and Oneida) believed they were ushering in the millennium.
* What divided Joseph Smith and Campbell was the way they envisioned the task of Restoration. Joseph Smith was a Romantic, writing and speaking about the days of yore when prophets walked the earth. Campbell, on the other hand, was a child of Rationalism and the Enlightenment: God could speak only through the Bible.
* Shakers believed that if they recovered the purity of the church’s original purity (vis a vis celibacy), they would usher in the millennium. Official name of the church had to do with 2nd Coming. Ann Lee won only a few converts in England, but membership exploded into the thousands upon coming to America. John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida community: rejection of selfish thoughts and selfish ways, so did away with monogamous marriage in preference to “complex marriage,” or free-love. Noyes was a Restorationist who believed the Millennium had already come in 70 AD, thus could they could they restore a perfect society. Noyes attracted hundreds of followers.
* Restoration and millenarianism were built into American culture. The Decl. of Ind. And also Thomas Paine spoke of American government as a return to the original principles of nature as they were in the Garden of Eden. They also believed America would usher in a final golden age for all. Case in point Lyman Beecher. Seal of the United States says novus ordum seclorum: new order of the ages.
* These themes of the “cosmic rhythm of restoration and millennium” informed the many new restorationist sects.
* Joseph did have a history that transcended 19th c. America: the biblical saga.
* Joseph Smith had “one foot in American culture and one foot in biblical culture” and “fused the two in a profound act of creative genius.”
3rd Respondent – Grant Underwood –
* Consider Joseph in terms of Utopianism, alternative family values, biblical primitivism, millennarianism.
* Tertullian wrote that in the suppression of Montanism, the Holy Spirit was chased into a book.
* In the USA leading up to Joseph Smith there was an extensive visionary culture in such groups as Methodists and Presbyterians.
* One study has identified more than 400 prophets during this period.
* God had more prophets, tongues, and oracles than ever before. The problem became one of God’s loquacity rather than God’s hush.
* The minister’s disdain for Joseph Smith’s vision was because it was just another of a long string of claims to visions and charismatic experiences.
* Ann Lee “God’s work in these latter days is a strange work—even a marvelous work and a wonder.”
* In one of Joseph’s earliest letters he predicts the near arrival of the apocalypse to sweep away the Mormons’ enemies. In a public address he called people to repent and flee to Zion before the Second Coming came and scourged them. Later Joseph’s apocalypticism softened.
* The dichotomy between magic and religion is a false one. Samuel was sought after for his ability to locate lost donkeys as well as to proclaim words of YHWH. Seer stones and mineral rods have been employed by prophets throughout the ages. In both biblical history and early Mormonism, the written word of God overshadowed and superceded divinatory aids.
* In Tibet, the Termas are texts written in a cryptic language hidden all over the country. Those who find them and called Tertons and are considered great bodhissatvas. They renew the tradition by interpreting them.
* Joseph Smith is repeatedly likened to Moses and to ancient apostles.
* The proper realm of the historian is the visible world, but it would be a mistake to think history is opposed to a view in which God is the driving force behind events.
* Uniqueness of a religion does not prove divine origins. Comparative analysis does not necessarily say anything about origin, but rather only about similarities and differences.
* Parallelomania has given comparative analysis a bad name. Its problems are both inappropriate parallels and inappropriate inferences about origins.
* Comparisons to Kabbalah are not genetic. Mormon doctrine of divinization is very different on close analysis from what is found in the Kabbalah.
* Careful attention must be paid to Joseph’s immediate circles of discourse. We must understand his culture and verbal language.
Question and answer:
* Richard Hughes: there is an essential Joseph Smith, but it’s really hard to get at that, so we will continue to have many Joseph Smiths.
* Remini: As people in different times and places have different needs and things, people will continue to paint new portraits of Joseph Smith.
Richard Bushman, “Joseph Smith’s Many Histories” –
* (citing his wife Claudia Bushman’s “America Discovers Columbus”) Christopher Columbus was almost totally neglected in pre-Revolutionary histories, was only acknowledged as discoverer of America after the Revolution, when the new country needed a new hero. Calls Columbus “grandfather” of the USA.
* Each of us has many histories, each one designed for persons of different cultural contexts. We can draw from any of these histories in order to explain who we are.
* The context in which Joseph Smith is placed affects how we see him: Mohammad-like? Jesus-like? A money-digger? A seer?
* People who are impressed with Joseph Smith tend to place him in a more universal historical context, whereas those who are unimpressed place him in an exclusively local context. By limiting the historical horizon, we can make him seem smaller as a figure.
* Mormons call Joseph Smith an American in order to charm Americans. Non-Mormons call him American in order to make him seem a product of American culture. “Mormons see him as a prophet with an American accent;” non-Mormons see him as purely a product of his American environment.
* Mormons place him in a history of apostasy and restoration dating back to the Bible. Critical historians who nonetheless consider him important (like Josiah Quincy and Alexander Campbell) placed him in a long line of false prophets and religious frauds. Campbell offers a whole bunch of examples including the Egyptian magicians.
* Unfortunately, the anti-fanatics, inflamed by their hatred of fanaticism, have resorted to violence to quell the fanatics, as often as the fanatics have taken up arms in the cause of their faith. Religious fanatics as violent and dangerous is one of the oldest stereotypes. One “Turner” placed Joseph Smith and Mohammad into this category: dangerous and terrible, but grand.
* I. Woodbridge Riley: narrowed the context to a purely American and psychological history. Joseph Smith as deformed offspring of Yankee culture. Rejected Spalding theory. “Riley exploded this frail argument” (the Spalding theory) “and looked for evidence that Smith had written the book himself.” Said Joseph Smith had suffered epilepsy, chalked his visions up to side effects of seizures. Much of Joseph Smith’s behavior the result of a childhood injury. “Riley believed he had fully accounted for Joseph Smith and he did not amount to much.” Riley: “Was he demented or only degenerate?” Riley model set the pattern for other Joseph Smith biographies, incl. Fawn Brodie.
* Brodie makes Joseph Smith fit the “impostor” psychology type. “Purely a Yankee product.”
* Vogel’s bio is in the same tradition. Sociological analysis, family systems theory, and American environment influences explains all we need to know about Joseph Smith. No one has gone as far as Vogel in linking Book of Mormon plot to persons and events in Joseph Smith’s immediate context. Vogel carries the Riley model “to its ultimate realization, in extreme detail.” “Vogel’s work diminishes Joseph Smith by limiting” his historical horizon.
* Books of this sort do not open up new vistas for readers, merely reduce Joseph Smith to a colorful fraud. Do not plumb his depths. In Bushman’s opinion, we have reached the end of the line in this tradition of bios and will return to the 19th c. sort of transnational histories of Joseph Smith.
* Transnational histories: Jan Shipps, John Brooke, and Harold Bloom. Shipps “dazzled me with her brilliant analysis of early Mormonism” in her 1985 study Story of a New Religious Tradition. Did not limit Mormonism to Burned-over district. Compared Mormon origins to origins of X’ty, departs from X’ty as X’ty departed from Judaism.
* John Brooke Refiner’s Fire. Placed Mormonism in hermetic tradition. Smith was a miracle-worker of magus who sought divinity. This book dumbfounded Mormon readers because its connections were so tenuous. Nevertheless, it broke through the purely national boundaries of Joseph Smith studies.
* Harold Bloom thinks of Smith as supreme example of American religion, but also finds echoes of Biblical antiquity. Smith had an “uncanny ability to uncover ancient types such as Enoch or Metatron” that Bloom could “only attribute to his genius or demon.” A man in touch with religious currents from the deep past.
* These authors enlarge Smith, giving him greater scope, even though they do not all have a high view of him.
* “For a number of years, in my opinion, Joseph did not know who he was.” “Not until he translated the Book of Mormon did he know…” First Vision, discovery of seer stones, and command to translate plates (his mix of tresure-digging and religious involvement as a youth) are the “prophet puzzle,” and may have been as puzzling to Joseph Smith as to us.
* Joseph Smith was unable to go through an emotional conversion and so was worried about his sins. In the vision, the first words were “thy sins are forgiven thee.” He may have considered this a particularly dramatic “new birth” experience like what revival preachers talked about. His first reaction was to consult a minister—why do this if he had just been informed that all ministers are corrupt? He was confused and wanted guidance, like other new converts.
* Vogel argues that Joseph Smith may have wanted to make a career out of treasure-seeking, but Bushman sees him as compelled by his father and neighbors, an unwilling participant. “Joseph Smith knew his future did not lie with the treasure-seekers, yet he had a gift…” he did not know how this gift fit into the history of religion.
* In the case of the vision to translate the gold plates, there was no precedent to attach himself to.
* “An incomprehensible mixture of possible identities” were very confusing to Joseph Smith.
* Seeing lost objects in the stone prepared him to look into the Urim and Thummim and translate.
* Joseph Smith did not care much for Anthon’s opinion but he was thrilled to find that his response fulfilled a biblical prophecy. At last a thread tied Joseph Smith to the Bible and thereby a broader history. But it was the Book of Mormon that finally tied Joseph Smith to a broader history: king Mosiah, a seer and prophet.
* Book of Mormon places Israel on a world stage. Isaiah uses “isles of the sea” once, Nephi uses it 8 times.
* Our stories of Joseph Smith must comprehend his story of himself.
* Could Joseph Smith have created the Book of Mormon narrative himself? Doubtful that a small, purely American history could take all this into account. “A small history will not account for such a large man.”
* My thought: interesting that Dr. Bushman seems to have a higher opinion of Brooke than Vogel, even though Vogel’s use of sources is considerably more careful and responsible. But Brooke’s work presumably could have a faith-promoting function in that it aggrandizes Joseph Smith and ties him to something much bigger than himself. Thus, I think, Bushman’s preference for him.
1st Respondent – Robert V. Remini –
* Joseph Smith is the quintessential American. Everything about him strikes me as American.
* If you try to become a theologian or a psychologist, you are not a historian. If you try to defend him you’re not a historian but an apologist. If you condemn him and call him a fraud or a charlatan then you’re not a historian. The historian just looks at the facts, tries to find the rational reasons for why a person did the things they do.
* “I don’t think anybody at any time is divorced from the period, the environment, the country in which he lives. You are shaped by those things. And I believe Joseph Smith was shaped very much by the fact that he was born smack-dab in the middle of the Second Great Awakening.” Joseph Smith said he went to camp-meetings and wanted to experience the wild stuff but couldn’t; his family was very religious, father had dreams. How could Joseph not want to feel the presence of God?
* When Joseph talked to the clergyman he was contemptuous, not because Joseph was a child or because he claimed to see a vision; it was the message that all the denominations were wrong and their clergy corrupt.
* There is something about Joseph Smith that people either revered or wanted to attack… why was he hated so?
* Americans are very uncomfortable with what is strange and different, and this man was different.
* Bushman asks in a draft, why do foreigners go for it? Remini: foreigners have been going for all things American for ages. They love our government, music, movies, science. Why not our religion?
* Mormonism is an American religion and we ought to be proud of it. Look at what we’ve contributed!
* Places the Book of Mormon in a line of American documents stating who and what we are, alongside the Mayflower Compact, Decl. of Ind., Const., Bill of Rights.
* Because of Joseph Smith’s surgery he was a very quiet boy.
2nd Respondent – Richard Hughes –
* Campbellism and Mormonism shared much in common, one of which was adult baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins. Pepperdyne put up a statue of Columbus pointing out over the waters. “See, here’s water. What doth hinder my being baptized?”
* The Restorationist vision flourished in antebellum America to a degree that it has scarcely flourished at any other time in the past 2000 years (though it is an older vision).
* Almost every version of Restorationism in 19th c. America (incl. Campbell, Shakers, and Oneida) believed they were ushering in the millennium.
* What divided Joseph Smith and Campbell was the way they envisioned the task of Restoration. Joseph Smith was a Romantic, writing and speaking about the days of yore when prophets walked the earth. Campbell, on the other hand, was a child of Rationalism and the Enlightenment: God could speak only through the Bible.
* Shakers believed that if they recovered the purity of the church’s original purity (vis a vis celibacy), they would usher in the millennium. Official name of the church had to do with 2nd Coming. Ann Lee won only a few converts in England, but membership exploded into the thousands upon coming to America. John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida community: rejection of selfish thoughts and selfish ways, so did away with monogamous marriage in preference to “complex marriage,” or free-love. Noyes was a Restorationist who believed the Millennium had already come in 70 AD, thus could they could they restore a perfect society. Noyes attracted hundreds of followers.
* Restoration and millenarianism were built into American culture. The Decl. of Ind. And also Thomas Paine spoke of American government as a return to the original principles of nature as they were in the Garden of Eden. They also believed America would usher in a final golden age for all. Case in point Lyman Beecher. Seal of the United States says novus ordum seclorum: new order of the ages.
* These themes of the “cosmic rhythm of restoration and millennium” informed the many new restorationist sects.
* Joseph did have a history that transcended 19th c. America: the biblical saga.
* Joseph Smith had “one foot in American culture and one foot in biblical culture” and “fused the two in a profound act of creative genius.”
3rd Respondent – Grant Underwood –
* Consider Joseph in terms of Utopianism, alternative family values, biblical primitivism, millennarianism.
* Tertullian wrote that in the suppression of Montanism, the Holy Spirit was chased into a book.
* In the USA leading up to Joseph Smith there was an extensive visionary culture in such groups as Methodists and Presbyterians.
* One study has identified more than 400 prophets during this period.
* God had more prophets, tongues, and oracles than ever before. The problem became one of God’s loquacity rather than God’s hush.
* The minister’s disdain for Joseph Smith’s vision was because it was just another of a long string of claims to visions and charismatic experiences.
* Ann Lee “God’s work in these latter days is a strange work—even a marvelous work and a wonder.”
* In one of Joseph’s earliest letters he predicts the near arrival of the apocalypse to sweep away the Mormons’ enemies. In a public address he called people to repent and flee to Zion before the Second Coming came and scourged them. Later Joseph’s apocalypticism softened.
* The dichotomy between magic and religion is a false one. Samuel was sought after for his ability to locate lost donkeys as well as to proclaim words of YHWH. Seer stones and mineral rods have been employed by prophets throughout the ages. In both biblical history and early Mormonism, the written word of God overshadowed and superceded divinatory aids.
* In Tibet, the Termas are texts written in a cryptic language hidden all over the country. Those who find them and called Tertons and are considered great bodhissatvas. They renew the tradition by interpreting them.
* Joseph Smith is repeatedly likened to Moses and to ancient apostles.
* The proper realm of the historian is the visible world, but it would be a mistake to think history is opposed to a view in which God is the driving force behind events.
* Uniqueness of a religion does not prove divine origins. Comparative analysis does not necessarily say anything about origin, but rather only about similarities and differences.
* Parallelomania has given comparative analysis a bad name. Its problems are both inappropriate parallels and inappropriate inferences about origins.
* Comparisons to Kabbalah are not genetic. Mormon doctrine of divinization is very different on close analysis from what is found in the Kabbalah.
* Careful attention must be paid to Joseph’s immediate circles of discourse. We must understand his culture and verbal language.
Question and answer:
* Richard Hughes: there is an essential Joseph Smith, but it’s really hard to get at that, so we will continue to have many Joseph Smiths.
* Remini: As people in different times and places have different needs and things, people will continue to paint new portraits of Joseph Smith.