Joseph Smith, America's Prophet: Writing Mormon History

According to a recent headline in the New York Times, any one in America can be a prophet. "Prophet Wanted: Entry-Level Position, No Tablets or Burning Bush Required."¹ An independent filmmaker offering $5000 for aspiring prophets to start a new religion received some 300 applications, and the lucky winner is now hard at work constructing a religion from scratch, with the help of such modern tools as the Internet and marketing consultants. One wonders how Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet and subject of Richard Bushman's absorbing new biography Rough Stone Rolling, would have reacted to the offer. A former treasure-hunter who first sought gold in rocks before finding the golden tablets that contained the Book of Mormon, Smith was an entrepreneur through and through. He knew a good chance when he saw one.

It is impossible to tell the story of Joseph Smith without invoking the market and America's vexed relationship with consumer culture; in the hands of other scholars, Smith comes across as a shrewd if not necessarily unscrupulous manipulator of antebellum America's boundless thirst for the new and the risky. His career as a restless seeker after treasure both material and spiritual has made Smith's life into a morality tale about the pitfalls of American capitalism, in which greed and its attendant miseries leads to fanaticism and self-delusion. Seeking a quick road to wealth, he found a shortcut to a fool's heaven—or so his many debunkers have charged over the years. Joseph Smith may have been a casualty of antebellum Americans' obsession with a cruel and capricious market, but he was also a visionary who never wavered in his confidence that God was speaking directly to and through him. Bushman—a self-professed Mormon and distinguished historian of early America—seeks in this new biography to rescue the visionary Smith from the condescension of modern-day scoffers and skeptical historians. Bushman has been one of the most eloquent voices in favor of "believing history," by which he means not history told through the lens of a particular set of religious beliefs but history that takes theology and the experiential side of faith seriously. In this, his latest attempt to explicate Mormonism's peculiar beginnings for non-Mormons and Mormons alike, Bushman puts in practice the method he has preached for many years: examining the Prophet's life and writings with all the tools of scientific empirical enquiry while keeping his personal beliefs in suspension (a posture he sees as analogous to the agnostic's suspension of disbelief). The question of authenticity that has bedeviled scholarship on Joseph Smith ever since his death is, Bushman argues, a false choice that leads either to cynicism (Smith was a charlatan and fraud) or unprofessional credulity (Smith is exactly what he claimed to be, and his words are God's).² Believing historians neither substitute supernatural for natural causes nor merely tolerate the supernatural as a kind of primitive survival, a quaint reminder of how far humans have come in their quest for knowledge. Rather, in the manner of postmodern adepts who scorn all absolute claims of truth as naïve and patronizing (an irony truly worth savoring), the "faithful historian" recognizes that truth is multiple, fragile, and contingent, and writes a story that allows for but does not require or reject belief.

How successfully does Rough Stone Rolling embody the precepts of faithful history? Is there one voice or two—Bushman the historian and Bushman the Mormon—in this book? For the most part, Rough Stone Rolling is an artful tale of a quintessential American figure told by a masterful historian at the top of his game. Bushman's Smith is a fully realized historical character, with all his flaws and shortcomings on display; quick to anger, prone to reckless and grandiose schemes that threaten the financial and organizational stability of the fledgling movement, tormented by the same demons (poverty, humiliation...