Society for Historians of the Early American Republic "Dictated by Christ": Joseph Smith and the Politics of Revelation Author(s): Steven C. Harper Source: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 275-304 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30043410 . Accessed: 17/12/2013 11:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Pennsylvania Press and Society for Historians of the Early American Republic are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Early Republic. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.170.195.144 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:51:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "Dictatedby Christ" Joseph Smith and the Politics of Revelation STEVEN C. HARPER God does not Himselfneed to speakfor us to find sure signs of His will; it is enoughto observethe customaryprogress of natureand the continuous tendencyof events;I know, withoutspecial revelation, that the starsfollow orbits in spacetraced by His finger.-Alexisde Tocqueville' The Churchof Jesus Christof Latter-daySaints was foundedupon directrevela- tion, as the truechurch of God has everbeen, accordingto the scriptures.-Joseph Smith2 A few months after Alexis de Tocqueville's birth in Paris in July 1805, Joseph Smith was born in less auspicious circumstances in the Vermont hills and destined to grow up "without book-learning and with the homeliest of all human names." These two sons of young republics never met, but their lives intersected in telling ways. The works with which they are most closely associated, the Book of Mormon (1830) and Democ- racy in America (1835), remain compelling and profound, not least for Steven C. Harper is an assistant professor of Church History & Doctrine at Brigham Young University and a volume editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. He thanks the scholars on whose work this article depends, as well as Jonathan Sassi, Spencer Fluhman, and anonymous readers for the JER who offered useful advice to improve earlier drafts. 1. Alexis de 'Tocqueville,Democracy in Amerzca,trans. George Lawrence and ed. J. P. Mayer(New York,1969), 12. 2. Quoted in I. Daniel Rupp, He Pasa Ekklesia:An OriginalHistory of the ReligiousDenominations at PresentExisting in the UnitedStates, 1844. Journal of theEarly Republic, 26 (Summer2006) CopyrightC 2006 Societyfor Historiansof the EarlyAmerican Republic. All rightsreserved. This content downloaded from 129.170.195.144 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:51:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 276 * JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Summer 2006) the way they work together to highlight the politics of revelation in a culture that locates authority in the people.3 A year before Tocqueville embarked for America, Smith published the Book of Mormon in Palmyra, New York. Said to be a divinely inspired translation of an encrypted Egyptian history of a Jewish clan exiled to the Americas, the book's "real radicalism," Terryl Givens wrote, "is in the way it emphatically models, chronicles, and then enacts a version of divine discourse that contests prevailing theologies of revelation." As Tocqueville journeyed to America, Smith continued to receive revela- tions. While Tocqueville landed in America, Parley Pratt,John Murdock, "and several other [Mormon] elders, went to Joseph Smith, and asked him to inquire of the Lord" about the fits, trances, and visions they had witnessed among their peers. "After we had joined in prayer," Pratt wrote, Smith "dictated in our presence the ... revelation: each sentence was uttered slowly and very distinctly, and with a pause between each, sufficiently long for it to be recorded by an ordinary writer, in long hand."4 Tocqueville was sure, along with increasing numbers of Americans, that "God does not Himself need to speak for us to find sure signs of His will." Rather, "patient observation" shows the "gradual and measured advance of equality, [and] that discovery alone gives this progress the sacred character of the will of the Sovereign Master. In that case, the effort to halt democracy appears as a fight against God Himself." Al- though Smith valued democratic government, his revelations implicitly rejected popular sovereignty, while for Tocqueville "the true beginning of American democracy is the dogma of the sovereignty of the people, a dogma logically incompatible with the acceptance of any authority, in- cluding traditional religion." By their nature as well as their tone, Smith's 3. Tocqueville was born July 29, 1805, Smith on Dec. 23; Andre Jardin, Toc- queville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis (New York, 1988), 1; Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past From the Leaves of OldJournals (Boston, MA, 1883), 376-400; Book Magazine (July/Aug. 2003) named the Book of Mormon to its list of twenty books that changed America. 4. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford, 2002), 208; Parley P. Pratt, Jr., ed., Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (Salt Lake City, UT, 1950), 61-62; Bruce N. Westergren, ed., From Historian to Dissident: The Book of John Whitmer (Salt Lake City, UT, 1995), 57-58. This content downloaded from 129.170.195.144 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:51:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Harper,JOSEPH SMITH AND THE POLITICSOF REVELATION* 277 Alexis de Tocquevillein 1844, by Theodore Chasseriau,courtesy of the NationalGallery of Art, Washington,DC. revelations assumed authority. The voice of God repeatedly declares His prerogative to make and execute the law and bring offenders to judg- ment. The revelations therefore created hostility to acceptable modes of discourse and challenged assumed wisdom. Simply put, for Smith and his followers, the undemocratic voice of God they heard so "very dis- tinctly" trumped the voice of the people. During Tocqueville's brief ob- servation of democracy in America from May 1831 to February 1832, Smith dictated more than fifty revelations to guide his multiplying fol- lowers.5 That Smith's revelations were persuasive to thousands of Americans in the 1830s and 1840s raises the question of why? Moreover, why did Smith's revelations garner such remarkable degrees of loyalty while he simultaneously attracted hostility that remains down to today's national 5. HarveyC. Mansfieldand DelbaWinthrop, "Editor's Introduction," in Toc- queville, Democracy in America (Chicago, IL, 2000), 83; Ibid., 12-13; Terryl L. Givens, The Viperon the Hearth: Mormons,Myths, and the Constructionof Heresy (New York,1997), 88-89. Manyof Smith'srevelations are publishedin TheDoc- trine and Covenants (Salt Lake City, UT, 1981), hereafter cited as Doctrine and Covenants. This content downloaded from 129.170.195.144 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:51:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 278 * JOURNALOF THE EARLYREPUBLIC (Summer 2006) Joseph Smith by WilliamWhitaker, 1979, courtesy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints. bestsellers like Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)? Fi- nally, why, after his lynching in 1844, was Smith mourned by thousands of devout followers while being pilloried by such critics as the one who hastened to write of the "wonderful events which have taken place?"6 Efforts to answer the question of Smith's persuasiveness often draw 6. David W. Kilbourneto ReverendThomas Dent,June 29, 1844, Kilbourne Collection(State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines). This content downloaded from 129.170.195.144 on Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:51:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Harper,JOSEPH SMITH AND THE POLITICSOF REVELATION* 279 on sociology. David Brion Davis claimed that Mormons were "usually the descendants of those cast off by the Half-Way Covenant. They were the churchgoers who did not belong, the Bible readers who did not understand"; they were believers in the "gibberish of a crazy boy," a "practically illiterate ragamuffin." Thus, "Mormonism," Davis con- cluded, "can be seen as the extreme result of the evils of literal minded- ness," a biological and cultural remnant of Puritan declension. Whitney Cross identified Mormon converts as "easily swayed" Yankees, drawn from the established villages of upstate New York in response to evangeli- cal revivals. Mario DePillis argued that Mormonism attracted the "so- cially dislocated" of the American frontier, where "prospective converts almost always lived under unstable local social, economic, or religious conditions, usually in a newly settled, value disoriented society." These "socially disinherited" folks "could no longer look to their former reli- gious leaders and former ways of life for security and orientation" and were thus primed for conversion. Charles Sellers avers that "Mormon- ism's remarkable appeal was more social than theological," but his evi- dence is theological rather than sociological. Each of these explanations asserts "long established sociological truth," but none of them makes an empirical case. Evidence of disorientation is as conspicuously absent as its definition, having been assumed ever since contemporary critics fashioned early Mormons into intelligible Others. Only easily swayed, disoriented, "desperate converts" could voluntarily follow Smith, this established but circular truth goes, therefore converts were all of those things. Smith is dismissed as theologically vacuous and his converts as lacking intelligence and motivated by "secular frustration," economic anxiety, or some similarly sensible reason.7 Smith has recently been reconsidered more seriously.