From Light to White: The Place and Race of Jesus in Antebellum America

When it came time to codify his new revelation, Joseph Smith turned to a revolutionary innovation of the American Constitution: religious liberty. "[We] claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience," he and the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaimed in their 1842 articles of faith. "[We] allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may." Americans of Smith's era were following the first but not the second part of this instruction. They robustly embraced the direction of their consciences but then tried to force their faiths down the throats of others. What appeared to some as the flowering of religious democracy was to others nothing more than ecclesiastical chaos and irreconcilable conflict. This was how Smith had felt only a few decades earlier as a teenager. Coming of age in upstate New York, he had struggled with Protestant diversity. "My mind at times was greatly excited," he explained, because each group claimed that it was right and that the others were wrong. The Presbyterians bashed the Baptists and Methodists, while those two "were equally zealous in endeavoring to establish their own tenets and disprove all others."

Smith had only one option: "Ask of God," and in 1820 he did. Like other evangelicals of his day, he trekked into the forest, found a quiet place, and prayed. Then it happened. God appeared. He answered that Joseph should join none of the sects, and even better, God introduced him to Jesus.

Twelve years later, in 1832, Smith wrote, edited, and rewrote the tale of his vision. He strained to find the most accurate phrases, oftentimes crossing out words or including new ones above the line. He saw a "piller of fire." Or, rather, he did not see fire, and crossed that word out, but "light." It was a "piller of fire light above the brightnes of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me." Joseph continued to reduce to ink on paper the glory his eyes had witnessed: "I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph thy Sins are forgiven thee." That was not exactly right either. He saw the "crucifyed Lord" who actually said, "Joseph my Son thy Sins are forgiven thee." Jesus had come in the brightest of lights, and the Son of God had called Joseph his son.

"Our Saviour from the only authentic likeness of our Saviour cut on an emerald by command of Tiberius Caesar." An engraving by John Sartain, Philadelphia, 1866. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-99100].

Smith fine-tuned the tale as the years went on. In 1835 he recounted it this way: "I called on the Lord in mighty prayer, a pillar of fire appeared above my head . . . a personage appeared in the midst of this pillar of flame which was spread all around, and yet nothing consumed, another personage soon appeared like unto the first, he said unto me thy sins are forgiven thee, he testifyed unto me that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Seven years later, the "official" church description of the vision was published. It had Smith claiming that from the "pillar of light" he saw "two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air."

This all changed in the mid-1840s. The indescribable became describable. Blinding light was edited into pristine white. Smith told a follower in 1844 that the Jesus he beheld had a "light complexion [and] blue eyes." Another new believer, Anson Call, also saw a blue-eyed Jesus. Christ came to him with "light and beautiful skin with large blue eyes, a very full forehead and his hair considerably black." What had been painstakingly penned as blinding light, as a consuming fire, as defying all description, was now put in the form of a white man with blue eyes. In less than twenty years, Smith's account of...