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  • Post-Modern Joseph Smith: Faith and Irony
  • Jane Barnes (bio)

I. The Angel, the Gold Plates, and the Power of Joseph’s Charm

I met Joseph Smith in Fawn Brodie’s incredible biography, No Man Knows My History. He was born in 1805 and grew up in a New England that was soaked in religion and folk magic. Right away, I found Joseph funny, wonderfully funny and ironic and modern. As a boy, he was a mischievous show-off and religious visionary. He used an enchanted peep stone to look for gold in his neighbors’ backyards. When his skills as a treasure digger were challenged, he proved himself by finding a pheasant feather he had himself personally buried. Yet his prayers were also answered by shattering appearances from God and his Son, followed by angelic visitations from Moroni, who told the boy about the gold plates and God’s “great work for him.” It would take Joseph four years to grow worthy of digging up the plates which contained the fullness of Christ’s gospel for the New World. Once he had received them, he put the seer stone into his hat once again, put his face in the hat and translated the Book of Mormon from the “reformed Egyptian” scrolling across the darkness.

I loved this irreverent story of the first new Christian scripture since the Bible. I wasn’t sure why, but it had sacred charm for me. It gave me the same hushed, joyful pleasure I got from singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” at Christmas as a child. Not long after my first thrilling encounter with Joseph, I signed on as a writer for a PBS series called The Mormons. Joseph had tapped into my childhood remnant of religious feeling. I hoped working on the film would help me expand the connection. The documentary took several years to make, during [End Page 490] which my feelings for Joseph were all but crushed in the torrent of research, controversy and practical challenges which are part of making a film. Just when I thought I’d lost him, en route to a location scout outside Richmond, I was literally stopped in traffic by a head-splitting revelation of his presence, something so strong it left me terrified I might become a Mormon. It was a demanding religion, and I wasn’t sure I could live up to all its expectations. I wrote and published an essay about my “near conversion,” but instead of laying the experience to rest, the piece seemed to consolidate its power. I realized I needed to seriously consider and explore whether I could possibly convert. This meant coming to terms with what I really thought of Joseph Smith.

Biographies about Joseph agree about the basic circumstances of his developing years. He’s a cheerful, loving boy. The family spends more time reading the Bible than going to church. The Smiths are surrounded by revivals, self-dramatizing prophets, and many emotional conversions. According to his mother, Joseph is not as interested in books as her other children, nor has he read the Bible through. Though uneducated, he has “a fertile imagination” and a “meditative” mind. There are dead Indians and gold “treasure in the hills.” No stranger to their appeal, Joseph goes after them with magic stones. God is also calling him to a great work through dramatic visions. The boy moves back and forth between his earthly quest and his divine one. Gradually, though, he sets his magical pursuits aside for transforming experiences with the Angel Moroni, the gold plates, and The Book of Mormon.

Depending on whether writers shade the basic account toward the dark or the light, Joseph becomes a cynic or a visionary, a money grubber or a religious seeker, a fraud or a prophet of God. There’s still no significant consensus on the genius boy who’s stopped traffic for almost two hundred years with questions like whether his peep stone really worked. Listening to grown scholars argue about Joseph and [End Page 491] his stone, almost any honest child would have to pinch herself and bite the inside of her cheeks to keep from laughing. The stone worked...

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