Other Religion Commons^™

The Inner Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

On more than one occasion in the 1970s, Leonard Arrington, the founder of this organization, told me I should write a psychological sketch of Joseph Smith. Leonard was probably thinking of Fawn Brodie's brief analysis of Joseph in the second edition of No Man Knows My History. Brodie thought Joseph might conform to a psychological type, "the impostor," described by psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre. A few years earlier, I had spent two years studying psychoanalysis, and Leonard probably thought I was as well prepared as anyone to write about Joseph Smith's psychodynamics. Arrington could not have foreseen the assortment of …

The Balancing Act: A Mormon Historian Reflects On His Biography Of Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Most reviews of my recent biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, mention that I am a practicing Mormon. The Sunday New York Times titled its review, "Latter-Day Saint: A practicing Mormon delivers a balanced biography of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith." Perhaps a little oversensitive, I wondered why this was news. Was a Mormon telling the story of the church’s founding prophet with a degree of objectivity something like man bites dog? Did the editor mean that a mind capable of embracing Mormonism would surely be incapable of a balanced portrayal? Or that Mormonism evokes loyalties so deep that …

The Archive Of Restoration Culture, 1997-2002, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

When I first began work on Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling in 1996, I realized that reconstructing the cultural environment of the Prophet would be one of my largest tasks. I could scarcely conceive how to go about probing the huge quantities of sermons, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, artworks, and private diaries that possibly bore on the restoration of the gospel in the 1820s through the 1840s. Yet the culture of that period bore directly on the success of the young church under Joseph Smith’s leadership. People would never be able to grasp theological ideas that were entirely foreign to …

Joseph Smith And Abraham Lincoln, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

In a letter to his friend John Stuart, dated March 1, 1840, Abraham Lincoln wrote that Joseph Smith had recently passed through Springfield, Illinois. In a tantalizingly brief report, Lincoln told Stuart that "Speed [another close friend] says he wrote you what Jo. Smith said about you as he passed here. We will procure the names of some of his people here and send them to you before long." The nature of Joseph's comment on Stuart can only be surmised. Joseph had spent the winter in Washington D.C., vainly seeking compensation for the Saints' losses in Missouri in 1839. He …

Joseph Smith’S Many Histories, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

I wish to explore, in broad general terms, the histories to which historians have attached Joseph Smith. As you can imagine, the context in which he is placed profoundly affects how people see the Prophet, since the history selected for a subject colors everything about it. Is he a money-digger like hundreds of other superstitious Yankees in his day, a religious fanatic like Muhammad was thought to be in Joseph’s time, a prophet like Moses, a religious revolutionary like Jesus? To a large extent, Joseph Smith assumes the character of the history selected for him. The broader the historical context, …

The Character Of Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The title of this essay, "The Character of Joseph Smith," may promise more than can ever be fulfilled. Joseph warned the Saints of the difficulty in trying to understand him. In the King Follett discourse given two months before his death, he told them, "You don't know me--you never will." Another version of the same speech says, "You never knew my heart. No man knows my hist[ory]." He seems to say that what we want to know most--his heart and his history--are not to be found out. No matter how much we study him, we must be cautious about believing …

The Little, Narrow, Prison Of Language: The Rhetoric Of Revelation, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

I want to raise an old question about Joseph Smith’s revelations, one that came up early in Church history when plans were first being made to publish the compilation of revelations called the Book of Commandments.1 The question is about the language of the revelations. Joseph noted in his history that at the November 1831 conference in Kirtland where publication was approved “some conversation was had concerning revelations and language.” This was the occasion when William E. McLellin, apparently the leading critic of the language, was challenged to make a revelation himself, and failed. Joseph said the Elders at the …

Was Joseph Smith A Gentleman? The Standard For Refinement In Utah, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The question of refinement cut even more deeply in Utah in the early days when the governance of the territory was at issue. The Latter-day Saints worked with a double handicap in striving to win respect from eastern travelers: in addition to the usual doubts about civilization in the West, the visitors were skeptical about Mormon religious fanaticism. Travelers came expecting that the poor credulous fools who submitted to the rule of Brigham Young would lack education, manners, taste, and intelligence—in short,would be as degraded as the woodcutters Trollope sighted along the banks of the Mississippi. The Saints for their …

Making Space For The Mormons, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This work is a lecture that was presented at Utah State University.

The Secret History Of Mormonism, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This is a book review.

Joseph Smith In The Current Age, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

What is the place of Joseph Smith's teachings in our time? What do his writings have to say in a world so much different from the one he himself lived in? If Joseph Smith were alive today, he would be 186 years old. Most of his writings have been in circulation for over 150 years. During that century and a half, vast changes in government, the economy, philosophical outlook, and popular values have transformed society. After all this, what do Joseph Smith's teachings have to say about the problems of the late twentieth-century society? We do not expect his writings …

Joseph Smith: The Prophet, Richard Bushman, Dean C. Jessee

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This is an encyclopedia article.

1820-1831, Background, Founding, New York Period, Richard Bushman, Larry C. Porter

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This is an encyclopedia article.

Joseph Smith's Family Background, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Because the Latter-day Saints love and honor Joseph Smith, we wish to create for him a family background in perfect harmony with his later life as a prophet. Not that his parents had to be wealthy or well-educated, for we know they certainly were not, but we believe they must have been devout people who taught their son faith in the Christian religion and surrounded him with their love.

Treasure-Seeking Then And Now, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Last August I attended the BYU conference on the Mark Hofmann documents where I had an opportunity to reflect on what the documents meant to me. After searching my thoughts and testing my feelings, I came to the conclusion that they meant very little. They did not mean much when they first came out, and their fall from historical authenticity had little effect on me later. That may sound like a strange confession from one who was writing on the early life of Joseph Smith at the very moment the "Salamander" and 1825 Joseph Smith letters came to light, with …

The Book Of Mormon In Early Mormon History, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Brief excerpt from content in lieu of an abstract:

Was Joseph Smith a magician? That question has always lingered over the early history of Mormonism, but in recent years interest in the issue of magic has been renewed. The flurry of excitement over the short-lived Hofmann letters, with their evidence of a magical outlook in the 1820s, turned the attention of Mormon historians as never before to the broader scholarship of folk magic. There we have found a growing literature on an underground world of magical practices among Christians throughout the western world.

The Character Of Joseph Smith: Insights From His Holographs, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

What kind of a man was Joseph Smith? His high calling as a prophet intensifies our curiosity about him as a person, but at the same time obscures him from view. As with so many public figures, the official stands in the way of the personal. We can picture him revealing the Lord's will, preaching to the Saints, and sitting in counsel, but we are also interested in him as a father, a friend, a husband, and a man.

The Book Of Mormon And The American Revolution, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The Book of Mormons, much like the Old Testament, was written to show Israel "what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers," and to testify of the coming Messiah. Although cast as a history, it is history with a high religious purpose, not the kind we ordinarily write today. The narrative touches only incidentally on the society, economics, and politics of the Nephites and Jaredites, leaving us to rely on oblique references and occasional asides to reconstruct total cultures. Government is dealt with more expressly than other aspects, however, perhaps because the prophets were often rulers themselves and …