Kendall Buchanan is a Provo business owner with a wife and six kids, and a passion for religious scholarship, especially Mormonism.
Visions of Glory is a side-effect of our spiritually vibrant Mormon culture. Part 1 of a three-part series discussing the book and its significance.
Ever since Visions of Glory was spotted in a photo with Lori Daybell lounging by a pool, the book has taken on a villainous reputation for inspiring a string of visionary Mormon criminals residing in Utah. The 1980s gave us Mark Hoffman and the Lafferty brothers. The 2020s will be remembered for Hildebrant-Franke, the Daybells, and (crossing my fingers) Tim Ballard.
A year ago I realized that the chattering classes debating Visions of Glory probably hadn’t read it. The book is a millenarian work about the spirit world and the end-of-times; as you can imagine, it is a nutty read. It’s also a smashing success for an LDS publication. What surprised me when I read it for myself, however, was how familiar it felt.
A recent Times & Seasons post,Spiritual Experiences Going Off the Rails, by Stephen Fleming, a friend of mine, inspired this three-part series. I pinged Stephen as this is an amateur fascination of mine—I’m taken by claims to odd spiritual manifestations; and I believe their stories are inseparable from our collective Mormon experience.
For Latter-day Saints who value authority and respectability, Visions of Glory is a fraud that led vulnerable Church members away from true doctrine. Critics of the Church, meanwhile, gawk at the book’s religious fanaticism, calling it indicative of Mormon gullibility.
I argue that outgrowths like Visions of Glory represent an integral byproduct of our otherwise laudable and spiritually vibrant Mormon culture. I don’t defend the book, but I do say that the impulse that created it is inseparable from the intensity of our inner spiritual lives.
Written by John Pontius, Visions of Glory is a kind of memoir told by Pontius’ intimate friend, “Spencer”. Pontius begins by attempting to establish credibility with his audience—Spencer had kept his visions within the revelatory guardrails taught by Church leaders, holding them secret for 40 years; he wasn’t speaking for the Church; and when the Spirit finally impressed him to share the visions with a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, the General Authority assured him they were from God.
The book is compelling because it is specific. Spencer’s visions bring readers in on the secrets of the spirit world and predict the end of the world in high fidelity. (Spoiler: An earthquake creates a canyon running from California to Texas!)
These visions are triggered by a series of “post-death” experiences—which happen oddly often. (Note: “post” emphasizes that he was definitely dead, not just “near” dead.) Lots of evidence substantiates near-death experiences, and therefore they are a salient primer for Latter-day Saint readers. Near-death experiences are overwhelmingly positive, usually involve meeting deceased loved ones, and often validate our belief that the other side resembles the world we live in.
Still, reading it myself was sort of a letdown. I’d expected critics to have identified something truly nefarious—Mormon Stories attempted a deep dive into the book and their conclusions won’t surprise you. Rather, the book’s themes derive from speculative, but heartfelt and widely-held, Mormon beliefs.
Spencer died for the first time at the age of thirty-three following a series of kidney infections which required a special kind of X-ray. During the procedure he slipped from the doctor’s hands, his spirit collapsing through the hospital bed. Like others who have passed on, Spencer became a detached observer of his physical surroundings.
Unlike others, Spencer then wandered the halls of the hospital. He perceived the medical workers’ souls, discerning “without judgment” between the righteous and the unrighteous. Like Mormon prophets before him, the visions gave him sight forwards and backwards. He witnessed his biological father leaving his mother and gazed on as she wrestled with the decision to abort him.
Spencer laces his stories with doctrinal expansions and inspirational asides that give his visions spiritual authority: “We spend so much time entertaining and pleasing ourselves that we do not fully realize how important every moment and every interaction truly is to God.”
He admits he doesn’t always understand what he’s shown. Following his second death while on vacation in Tahiti, he sees a horrific “history of the spiritual and non-spiritual practices of the ancient Tahitians” as they become cannibals.
As the book progresses, the visions tackle grander and more sweeping themes, eventually encompassing the Millennium and the end of the world, carefully keeping his visions plausible within Mormon prophecy. The righteous possess seer stones, and Zion floods the earth.
Like other millenarian works, Spencer’s stories are unsurprisingly solipsistic—the book casts Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, and even humdrum landmarks like the Church Office Building as prominent actors on a world stage: “Because of the collapse of civil authority, the Church had become the only organized group of people remaining.”
In the end, Christ returns to meet those preparing for Him. Spencer warns that some people will continue to deny the gospel. Some critics have accused Spencer and Pontius of behaving like scam artists, deliberately using sensational material to dupe the credulous. But to what end?
In 2014, Thomas Harrison, “Spencer”, disclosed his identity in a public apology to address criticisms he was receiving within the Church. He explained his deep reluctance to share his experiences, but after reading President Thomas S. Monson’s encouragement to share “testimonies and special sacred experiences” Pontius prevailed with a book.
Visions of Glory sold hundreds of thousands of copies, making it one of the most successful Latter-day Saint books ever printed, on par with The Infinite Atonement and Believing Christ.[1] Harrison is still around, and has had plenty of time to reflect on the book’s influence. Pontius, for his part, never saw the book’s success—he died in 2012, two weeks after the book was published.
In 2023 his wife launched a website to combat the negative attention the book drew in the wake of the Daybell murders. A prominent review says, “I’m a bit perturbed by the charges levied against Brother Pontius and “Spencer” as they are the complete opposite to my experience… Most of the time reading it I felt a very strong spirit, testifying to me of its truth.”
The book is utterly sensational. It’s apocalyptic and batty. Yet I have a measure of sympathy for its motivations. It purports to uncover the “mysteries” that tug at us as Latter-day Saints—those simply seeking to better understand where we came from and where we’re going.
(Part 2 will briefly explore Mormonism’s heritage of mystery-seeking.)
[1] Book sales are hard to estimate, but Pontius’ website boasts over 200,000 copies sold. Few LDS books exceed even 10,000.
Leave a Reply