The wait for the long-anticipated biography Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet by John G. Turner is soon over. Available through Yale University Press, this is the first major biography released about the founding prophet of the Latter Day Saint movement since the completion of the Joseph Smith Papers project. It is a notable contribution to the study of Smith’s life by someone who has never been affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A lot of research went into the biography, and due to the smaller size of the book (464 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 in), the narrative is kept moving in a tight and concise fashion throughout. The size alone precludes the possibility of achieving the quixotic goal of an authoritative or comprehensive biography of Joseph Smith, though it does provide an updated view of an important figure in American and Latter-day Saint history with a balanced approach. While Turner is fair and even-handed in his approach, however, I suspect many members of the Church will not be happy with this book.
Richard Bushman once described how his biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, was unable to dethrone Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. “Brodie has shaped the view of the Prophet for half a century. Nothing we have written has challenged her domination. I had hoped my book would displace hers, but at best it will only be a contender in the ring, whereas before she reigned unchallenged.” Turner’s entry will stand as a third viable contender in the ring, but I doubt that it will completely displace these earlier biographies of Joseph Smith, particularly Bushman’s. As I read Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, I was reminded of Phillip Barlow’s assessment of Turner’s Brigham Young biography that was presented as a reader blurb on Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet: “Turner’s treatment of the complex Brigham Young is unsentimental, cogent, critical, and fair. It takes its place alongside Leonard Arrington’s magisterial American Moses as the essential, mutually challenging portraits of one of America’s greatest colonizers and religious figures.” The same could be said here—Turner’s treatment of Joseph Smith takes its place alongside Richard Bushman’s biography as the essential, mutually challenging portraits of one of America’s greatest religious figures.
Joseph Smith’s life is difficult to chronical because of the truth claims he made and the ways they influence people’s lives to this day. The biggest difference between assessing the lives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young is that while Brigham Young can be seen as sincere in his belief in Joseph Smith—whether Joseph Smith’s religious-making work was genuine or not—Joseph Smith is the point or origin of the Latter Day Saint movement. Rather than skirting the topic by sharing the accounts and evidence and leaving the decision up to the reader, Turner takes this head-on at one point and makes it clear that he believes Joseph Smith fabricated the story of the gold plates. “Readers deserve an author’s best sense of what transpired,” he wrote. “In this case, it is that Joseph did not have golden plates. When someone refuses to show a hidden, valuable object to others, the simplest explanation is that he does not possess it” (40). Oddly, however, the statement felt a bit shoehorned into the book, like he had received feedback that he needed to take an explicit stand on the subject and dropped it in with minimal editing around the insertion.
That decision, however, colored the entire book. The implication became that Joseph Smith was a gutsy scoundrel who wasn’t motivated to do hard work, but who loved living on the edge. It also led to a bothersome instance of Turner forcing evidence to match his conclusions rather than the other way around. When it came to his explanation for why Turner concluded that Smith fabricated the story of the gold plates, Turner noted that Smith refused to show them to others and “there aren’t witnesses in the ordinary sense of the term” (40). This was a somewhat surprising statement, given that the Eight Witnesses document portrays an experience that was defined by physically handling the plates in a normal fashion. As a result, Turner engaged in some bizarre hand-waving. While he admitted that when it came to the eight witnesses, “the physicality of these claims is striking,” he quickly dismissed the idea by stating that “Joseph Smith had the … ability of enabling others to share those visions,” allowing him to make “a mysterious hidden object present for other people. The immaterial became real” (59–60). It’s a leap in logic to make a statement like that, even if it conveniently places the incident into a preconceived framework for the narrative of the gold plates.
Given the position of John Turner’s biography as the first one post-Joseph Smith Papers to cover all of Joseph Smith’s life, there was a tendency to focus on topics that biographers hadn’t covered in detail for one reason or another. For example, Turner gave a more detailed look at his plural marriages (though he could have benefited from taking some time to incorporate the insights from Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy). And at times, it felt like it was difficult to see why so many thousands of people found Joseph Smith engaging and inspiring enough to leave family and friends, moving to a new community and donating money to the cause, even with Turner’s repeated references to Joseph Smith’s charisma. That is why I say that it’s important to read it alongside Richard Bushman’s biography, which does a much better job at highlighting that side of Joseph Smith.
That being said, Turner’s assessment of Joseph Smith (much as Barlow described his book on Brigham Young) is evenhanded, well-researched, well-written, and up-to-date. Throughout, it felt like a good-faith effort to portray Joseph Smith according to the best available scholarship of our time. I did not walk away feeling like John Turner had an axe to grind against Mormonism or that he was engaging in anti-Mormon polemics. The underlying disconnect is one of worldview between those who believe in Joseph Smith’s claims and those who do not. Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet is an important contribution to the field of Mormon studies that deserves a place in the pantheon of top-notch Joseph Smith biographies.
Comments
9 responses to “Review: Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet”
At that point, why not just go the Dan Vogel route and say he made tin plates?
That was my reaction too – the existence of some kind of metallic plates seems like one of the most solid facts in Joseph Smith’s history, with multiple witnesses, both official and unofficial. Their existence isn’t easy to explain, but there needs to be some kind of attempt at an explanation. Vogel at least faces up to the challenge.
Does Turner present a theory about the textual source of the Book of Mormon? That seems like another important component of a biography of Joseph Smith that would require some explanation.
Sounds like there’s room for more theorizing about Joseph Smith and the plates.
“Sounds like there’s room for more theorizing about Joseph Smith and the plates.”
Actually, there’s not. The options are:
1) Joseph Smith had ancient plates made by ancient prophets.
2) Joseph Smith had modern plates made by himself or by someone else.
3) Joseph Smith had no plates at all.
If option 1, then Joseph is a prophet.
If option 2, then he’s either a liar or a lunatic.
If option 3, same deal: liar or lunatic.
To quote Hume, “Nothing can shake the solidity of this reasoning; so short, so clear, so decisive.”
(If you want to be charitable to the “pious fraud” camp, or if you want to make friends in polite Gentile company, you can also call Joseph a sincere liar or a sincere lunatic for religious reasons.)
Take your pick. Have fun!
My book is a bit more complicated than that, Smoot. Again, Nephi deceives Zoram to get the plates. So what label applies to him?
But Turner is the topic of this post.
Turner does briefly mention Vogel’s tin plates theory, as well as Sonia Hazard’s printing plates, but concludes, “There isn’t sufficient evidence to support any of these speculations, but the absence of such evidence does not buttress Joseph’s own assertions.” Other than stating his “best sense” that there were no ancient plates, he forbears to suggest what Joseph did have. This is consistent with his stated approach in his Brigham Young biography: “When it was impossible to transcend the limitations of the historical record, I have preserved a sense of ambiguity.”
On the subject of sources for the Book of Mormon, Turner writes, “The idea that American Indians were the descendants of Jews was common during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, but the Book of Mormon does not closely resemble any known text in either its narrative or its argument. … In the absence of evidence that anyone helped him compose the manuscript, the simplest conclusion is that Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon.” From this conclusion Turner draws the two corollaries that “at least on some level, Joseph deceived his family, friends, supporters, and readers” and that “Joseph Smith was both bold and brilliant,” with “the native genius necessary to produce a complex set of interlocking narratives.”
“My book is a bit more complicated than that, Smoot.”
It doesn’t have to be. It’s only “complicated” because people (mostly either Mormon academics who don’t wish to embarrass themselves with their Gentile colleagues, or Gentile academics who don’t want to offend Mormon sensibilities when writing about their quaint but ultimately unserious religious truth claims) don’t want to face the stark reality of the choices Joseph Smith gave us when he claimed a resurrected Nephite prophet-angel gave him gold plates that said prophet-angel helped create in antiquity.
“Again, Nephi deceives Zoram to get the plates. So what label applies to him?”
If you can’t see the vast difference between Nephi’s one-time use of subterfuge to preserve his and his family’s lives, and Joseph Smith’s years-long career (wittingly or not) in the kind of con that would put him alongside L. Ron Hubbard or James Macpherson, then I’m not sure what more I can say.
“But Turner is the topic of this post.”
Indeed. Turner’s treatment of the witnesses—and many other aspects of Joseph Smith’s life—exemplifies the adage, “If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.”
“In the absence of evidence that anyone helped him compose the manuscript, the simplest conclusion is that Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon.”
We’ve come full circle back to Alexander Campbell after nearly 150 years of conspiracy theories (Solomon Spaulding, Ethan Smith, The Late War, etc.).
In a way, it’s actually sort of charming.
How many times does one need to lie, Stephen? Again, what category would you put Nephi in of your three groups? And it wasn’t about preserving their lives. The issue was to get the brass plates. Nephi deceived Zoram to get the plates.