One of the big ticket items among 2025’s Mormon Studies books is John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography. It was officially released earlier this week, though I published my review earlier this month. In addition, however, John Turner recently shared some of his thoughts on the book in an interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
During the interview, John Turner shared some of his approach to Joseph Smith:
There are all sorts of contrary opinions about Joseph. Yes, we should test them against the available evidence. But I would say that a biographer’s task isn’t first and foremost to sift those contrary opinions. It’s to immerse oneself in the historical record and in the world in which Joseph Smith inhabited. In order to do that well, one has to set aside some of those contemporary “contraries”—at least for a time.
There are, of course, challenges with digging into any historical record:
If you glance at the Joseph Smith Papers published volumes, you see these massive tomes stuffed with documents, journals, letters, histories, and accounts of sermons. But even for the best-documented years of Joseph Smith’s life, it’s necessarily fragmentary.
And then there are the less-documented periods of his life. For instance, any reconstruction of Joseph’s childhood relies on the history dictated by Lucy Mack Smith in the mid-1840s. It’s a great but flawed source, and Joseph said relatively little about his early years.
Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage is another example of an area with sketchy documentation, which has enabled polygamy skeptics to pedal theories separating him from the Principle for many decades.
One of the more interesting portions of the interview was when Turner was asked “How can we understand moments when Joseph claimed divine authority versus when he seemed to improvise?” He responded,
I resist the idea that if Smith ever improvised that it means he was a fraud through and through. I don’t think it’s that simple.
I also love Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s smart point that scholars don’t hold politicians or entrepreneurs to the same standards of sincerity and probity as they do religious leaders. The latter, however, can be just as fallible and malleable without necessarily being unadmirable.
There’s a lovely letter from Joseph to Emma from June 1832. In it, he writes about going into the woods to pray amid loneliness and stresses his desire to be with Christ. It seems very heartfelt and sincere.
By contrast, Joseph Smith once scribbled a revelation on a scrap of paper and tossed it to a man opposing him at a Nauvoo city council meeting. That doesn’t seem so sincere.
But in either case, we don’t ultimately know:
- Joseph knew that other people would read his letter to Emma. Did he curate his spiritual experiences in order to make a positive impression on those readers? Quite possibly.
- And if Joseph believed that he was a prophet and seer, why couldn’t he jot down a revelation on the spur of the moment?
I take some clear stands in the book. Joseph didn’t possess golden plates with an ancient record on them. Joseph experienced visions of divine beings. But I didn’t think it was my task to assess whether or not Joseph Smith sincerely believed that every message he dictated or vocalized was from God.
It’s one of the challenging aspects of Joseph Smith’s life work – discerning the extent to which the revelations were shaped by Joseph Smith vs. the Divine.
Another particularly interesting discussion is the question of what might have happened if Joseph Smith had lived longer.
Historians tend to eschew counterfactuals,and I think there’s good reason to do so in this case. Would Joseph Smith have abandoned polygamy or expanded it? We don’t know.
In my biography, I argue that Joseph became increasingly reckless and desperate during the later Nauvoo years, a trend that I attribute at least in part to the intense trauma he and his people endured in Missouri.
Would that trend have continued? Again, we don’t know.
Had Joseph not been murdered, he probably would have led the Saints, or at least those who would follow him, to a new gathering place.
After other setbacks in his life, Joseph customarily displayed renewed vision and vigor, so I presume that would have been the case once again. He always had a new plan grander than the last plan.
I wish we knew about that plan. One of the realities of completing a biography is that as one works on drafts, one reprises the life of one’s subject repeatedly. In this case, the ending is so sad and tragic that I hated working my way through it so many times.
Given the increasingly reckless and desperate direction of his trajectory during his later years, it’s difficult to know exactly where he would have taken things. One possibility is that he would have gone off the rails and self-destructed the religious movement, as many of his claimed successors did. (If that was the case, it is possible to say that the Lord had a hand in the timing of his death, preparing the way for Brigham Young to take charge and stabilize the religion.) Or, he may have moved to the west and calmed down, choosing a more stable pathway. Without some sort of multiverse exploration, it’s difficult to know what would have happened.
One last side note, given my own interest in Latter-day Saint hymnody, I loved that John Turner shared some of the Latter-day Saint hymns he has appreciated. (Turner, it should be noted is a Presbyterian, who noted, “my own Christianity sort of straddles mainline and evangelical Protestantism”):
As an aside, I love many Latter-day Saint hymns, including:
- “O My Father”
- “Adam-ondi-Ahman”
- “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning”
- “Have I Done Any Good in the World Today?”
I even like “Praise to the Man!” And I love the fact that Latter-day Saints and other Christians share many hymns.
It was a fun side comment.
For more about John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk and read the full interview.
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