Ripples from a (Seer) Stone: Religious, Technological, and Magical Modalities

The problem, this time, was a stone (depicted in Figure 1). A worn, enchanted relic, used for scrying and prophecy. Or alternately a piece of technology, programmed to decode an ancient tongue. Or, perhaps, a religious object, the option which was in some ways the most disturbing possibility of them all.

Before the stone, there had been other problems: race, or same-sex marriage, or women's priesthood. But what happened this time was a stone. The stone was in the possession of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But then that stone had long been in the Church's possession, or at times in the personal custody of Church leaders, since sometime roughly around 1877.¹ It was rather the unveiling of the stone in the summer of 2015 that was the precipitating incident. The image of the stone was included as a part of a two-volume facsimile and transcription of the printer's manuscript for the Book of Mormon.² The stone wasn't much, brown and worn smooth banded jasper, about 5.5 by 3.5 by 4 cm; many of the photographs showed it alongside an equally small pouch, a worn leather container with a drawstring. This stone was one of the seer stones that belonged to the treasure hunter and self-confessed prophet Joseph Smith; among other things, these stones were

Figure 1.

Joseph Smith's seer stone with pouch. Courtesy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

used to help Smith translate some putatively ancient tablets from a language said to be "reformed Egyptian" into what became The Book of Mormon. Smith would go on to found what is sometimes called the "Restored Gospel" tradition, a religious movement which includes the roughly sixteen millionperson Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often colloquially referred to as the Mormon Church).³

"Joseph," as some Latter-day Saints simply refer to him, was a complicated figure, who often evokes equally complicated feelings. He is celebrated as a moral exemplar; but at the same time, his institution of what was referred to as "celestial marriage" or "spiritual wifery"—that is, polygamy—troubles a sizable number of contemporary Mormons, especially as one of those wives was only fourteen when she was wed to him. Of course, there are other aspects of the Church that many members find troubling: issues revolving around the history of the Book of Mormon, a sacred text chronicling the struggles and eventual fall of a group of Hebrew refugees in the New World; questions asked about the origins and nature of a ban, which ran from 1852 until 1978, on African Americans either joining the priesthood of all (male) believers or being admitted to the Mormon Temples, where central saving ordinances (that is, rituals) were performed; and concerns about Church policy towards LGBTQI members, and particularly young members of that community, who are understood as being emotionally vulnerable and poorly equipped to handle the disjuncture between their sexuality and their strongly heteronormative faith.

Having questions or concerns, of course, did not automatically equate with loss of faith; while there were numbers of believers who felt obliged to leave the Church because of these and other difficulties, many more found a way to make peace with these revelations and still "have a testimony that the Church is true," which is how Mormons refer to their ability to publicly proclaim their faith. And an easy majority didn't even feel that they had to struggle to keep their faith. Still, thanks to the Internet's capacity to disseminate news, there seemed to be a fatigue among many members I spoke to that was rooted in the various events circulating troubling issues through the loose Mormon confederation of non-Church-affiliated social media sites, podcasts, and blogs that is occasionally tongue-in-cheek referred to as the "Bloggernacle." So the institutional Church, an organization that is very...