Joseph Smith the Deceiver

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

Everything I've read by Fawn Brodie has impressed me.  She was a rigorously honest historian, and a graceful stylist.

On a cruise this week, I've had a chance to re-read her first book, No Man Knows My History, the first biography of the "prophet" Joseph Smith which was neither Mormon hagiography nor biased anti-Mormon invective.  Brodie, a non-practicing Mormon herself, searched the historical documents of the LDS and RLDS archives, and affidavits collected by the earliest crusaders against Mormonism, subjecting both to the same strict examination.

The picture of Joseph Smith which emerges is not at all flattering.  Brodie gives Smith credit for his charismatic personality and his imagination, his attractive playfulness and his forceful oratory.  But she doesn't soft-play his earlier career as an unsuccessful treasure-hunter, his continued failed attempts to enrich himself (often at the expense of his followers), and his child-like craving for attention and grandeur.

Brodie came to the conclusion that Smith's theology, and his "Golden Bible," were products of his personality, and not revelations from God.  She was subsequently excommunicated by the "Saints," and her work attacked by Mormon historians.

In the over-70 years since publication, Brodie revised the biography once, and some of her conclusions (for example, the identity of Joseph Smith's children by various "plural marriages") have been challenged, sometimes successfully, by new evidence.  But she rigorously documented Smith's immature egotism, and how it manifested in the  "Book of Mormon" and his theology.

Smith at various time showed disdain for his own "Golden Bible."  When the cornerstone of the temple in Nauvoo was being laid, he placed in it the remaining original copy of the Book of Mormon, saying "I have had trouble enough with this thing," shocking one of his priestly witnesses (p.276).  One of his former high officials (albeit a particularly slippery one) who left the church later claimed that Smith proposed to him a plan to have plates engraved that he could exhibit for a fee as the original plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated (p. 316-7).

Brodie documents well the most fascinating fact of her subject, Smith's transformation from petty frontier con-man to prophet of God's new faith.  He  himself seemed at first to be amazed to find his revelations believed (much like Donald Trump's amazement that he could "...stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters").  He called his followers to their faces "...the greatest dupes, as a body of people, who ever lived..." (pp. 295-6).  To another visitor who remarked on the absolute power he held in Nauvoo, he agreed no man could be entrusted with unlimited power; but added in "a rich, comical aside" (said the visitor) "Remember, I am a prophet !" (ibid)

The tragedy for Joseph Smith, and his followers, was that he eventually came to believe his own deceptions, to the point that Brodie characterizes him as "...fully intoxicated with power and drunk with visions of empire and apocalyptic glory" (p. 354).  When he set out the "articles of faith" of Mormonism, one was that "the Book of Mormon  [is]  the word of God."  And he came to fully believe that he was himself God's sovereign ruling authority on earth, whose word supplanted all previous religious doctrines.  Another "article of faith," for example, was that "...men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression" (pp. 277-8).

Smith led his followers in self-deception (or let's say "hypocrisy").  After he'd been teaching "plural marriage" to his inner circle for some years, word leaked out.  Smith not only denied to the world that he and the "Saints" were practicing polygamy, he solicited affidavits from his people testifying there was no polygamy.  And he got them: not only from his high officials who already had "plural wives," but even from the parents of a 17-year old girl who were witnesses to their daughter's marriage to Smith only months before (pp. 320-1).

But the famous "revelation" that God commands the practice of polygamy was far from the most heretical of Smith's teachings.  (That revelation was nullified as God's abiding word for Mormons when a later "Prophet" heard God reject polygamy...conveniently, when polygamy was the issue blocking Utah from being admitted as a state of the United States.)  His greatest heresies were yet to come.

In the King Follett funeral sermon he declared that "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man...:" the "Adam-God" theology that Mormon leader Lorenzo Snow summarized, "As man now is, God once was: as God now is, man may be;” which Mormonism still teaches (p. 366).  In an argument with one of his authorities who opposed the church' "debauchery," he exclaimed "...we can all go to hell together and convert it into a heaven by casting the Devil out !  Hell is by no means the place the world of fools suppose it to be, but on the contrary, it is quite an agreeable place" (p. 370).

But more than re-defining God Himself, and hell, Smith's theology was most about glorifying himself.  In one of his last sermons, he proclaimed, "I have more to boast of than any man ever had.  I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam...I boast that no man ever did such a work as I..." (p. 374).  He clearly considered Jesus a lesser spiritual leader than himself; and his ambitions for secular glory also led him to proclaim himself General of his own Mormon army, and a candidate for President of the United States.

I admire Fawn Brodie;s life-long practice of honest history.  And nowhere does her integrity better serve truth than in documenting the spirit of anti-Christ at work in Joseph Smith and his "church" since its founding.