"Joseph Smith - Rough Stone Rolling" by Richard Bushman

Above: Joseph Smith - Rough Stone Rolling - Richard Bushman - 561 pages.

"L'Audace, toujours l'audace!"

I've read a number of biographies of Joseph Smith including, recently, "No Man Knows My History," by Fawn Brodie and "The Kingdom of Nauvoo," by Benjaman E. Park. I also learned about Joseph Smith in Sunday School, High School Seminary, and BYU religion courses during my early life. I'm the ultimate procrastinator. I've had a copy of "Joseph Smith - Rough Stone Rolling" on my bookshelf since it was published in 2005. Better late than never to read the book!

Author Richard Lyman Bushman was my Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, Mormon, Saints) Bishop in Boston, 1969 to 1971, while I was studying at Harvard Business School (HBS). If Bishop Bushman remembered me, it would probably have been for my declaring in a Fast and Testimony Meeting that I had paid my tithing, but still got drafted into the army. Look, it got quite a laugh from the congregation at the time. Richard Bushman, a serious historian (BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard), is retired as Professor of History, Emeritus, Columbia University, New York City, NY.

The central question of any study of Joseph Smith is this: How does an illiterate farm boy, making seeming far-fetched claims of talking to God, Jesus Christ, and angels, persevere through unimaginable persecution, to found a successful world religion? By reading Bushman's book, you may not find an answer to this question, but you'll discover a comprehensive, well researched narrative of the events associated with the founding of the LDS Church through Joseph Smith's martyrdom at age thirty-eight in 1844. After reading this book, today considered the seminal biography of Joseph Smith, you'll have more than enough information to make up your own mind about the validity of Joseph Smith's seeming radical claims.

As I read Bushman's book, I try to channel the thinking of my ancestors. What impelled my forebears to uproot from their homes Scandinavia and England mid 19th Century to journey to the United States to join Joseph Smith's movement? Did they really believe Joseph's Smith's claim that in his teens God and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision telling him that existing Christian churches had departed from the truth? Did they truly accept that an angel from heaven instructed Joseph to unearth long lost golden plates (The Book of Mormon) with a record of an early American civilization that had originated in Jerusalem? Had they bought into Joseph's professed radical belief about God once being a man? What was the hook that caused my ancestors to uproot in the face of having to embrace outré religious doctrines and likely persecution?

Early LDS Church growth was not dispersed around the United States. New converts were encouraged to gather where the Church was headquartered. When the Mormon population grew to become a dominant force in communities that they chose to inhabit, considering their political influence at the voting booth, (not to mention what many considered to be the Mormons' outré doctrines) and the influence of Joseph Smith to call the Mormon vote in the Church's self-interest, non-Mormon residents of the area always turned against the Mormons. The Saints were driven out of Missouri in 1839 following an extermination order issued by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs.

Through the Missouri period the insular nature of the Saints and their embracing non-conventional scripture such as the Book of Mormon and Joseph's periodic revelations was "bad enough," but during the mid to late 1830's, these perturbations aside, Joseph's religion more or less paralleled conventional Christian worship. But, later, in Illinois, feeling protected by a Mormon self government city charter issued by the Illinois state legislature, Joseph doubled down. It was during the Nauvoo period that Joseph put forward new doctrines that pushed Mormon theology even further beyond conventional understandings of Christianity. Plural marriage was gingerly implemented by Joseph Smith and key confidants. The idea of Mormonism as a self governing kingdom to spread throughout the world was further advanced. The concept of God as an organizer but not a creator was put forward. Finally, "blaspheme!" "God" was once a man and had progressed to his current exalted state.

Joseph's Nauvoo outpouring of new doctrines was too much, even for some of his own loyalists. As I read, I asked myself how I, as a follower of Joseph, would have reacted to his new doctrines had I lived during the Nauvoo period. I think of William Law and his wife Jane. Law, was an Irish immigrant that had been converted to Mormonism in Canada in 1836. The Laws were earnest, decent people of means. In 1841 Law was made First Councellor in the Church First Presidency. Law, a valued Smith confidant, was appalled by Joseph's new doctrines. He became a dissident, and even started a parallel church organization based on Joseph's pre Nauvoo doctrines. It is not hard to understand how anyone's faith would be tested as Joseph pushed the doctrinal envelope far beyond conventional concepts of Christianity.

At times when conventional thinking might argue for temperance or backing off, Joseph, like Frederick the Great, who said, "L'Audace, toujours l'audace!" when his forces seemed to be on the verge of defeat, was audacious at times of stress and heightened resistance.

When the fledgling LDS Church was down and out financially early 1830s Ohio, Joseph started a bank. When the Ohio legislature refused to issue him a banking charter, Joseph audaciously turned his bank into an "anti-bank" and issued script. The bank eventually folded. At this low point, the Mormons were forced to leave Ohio, even after having constructed a beautiful temple in Kirtland. The Ohio low point would have been a good time to consolidate... to regroup. But no. What did "audacious" Joseph do? Before starting a migration of his members to a new church headquarters in Missouri, Joseph sent his most trusted, capable men on missions to Europe to find new members. These European missionary forays were responsible for bringing tens of thousands of new members, including my own ancestors, to join the LDS Church. Audacious yes. But, also prescient.

Considering the Missouri persecutions of the Mormons in the late 1830's, now that the Saints were in Illinois, wouldn't it seem prudent for Joseph to tone down the doctrinal differences with other Christian churches and perhaps encourage the LDS Church membership to better integrate, at least on secular matters, with the locals? Was it in the best interest of Joseph's movement to introduce seeming outré doctrines that anyone could foresee would trouble adherents and locals alike? But, no, audacious Joseph introduces a great unfolding of "controversial" Mormon doctrine.

The Nauvoo Charter was not enough to protect Joseph Smith in the face of his audaciousness. Dissenting Mormons and non-Mormons alike, triggered by Joseph ordering the destruction of a printing press run by Mormon dissidents, cooperated to have him arrested. Joseph and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob storming the Carthage, Illinois jail where Joseph was being held as he awaited trial, 27 June 1844.

Following Joseph Smith's martyrdom, Brigham Young took his place and, in another Joseph-inspired audacious move led the Saints from Nauvoo 1500 miles by covered wagon over the plains to the Great Basin where the Church finally found a persecution free home. Not without hiccups along the way, the Utah based Church grew from strength to strength to finally in the twenty first century become a worldwide religion counting upwards of sixteen million members.

Joseph's audacity wasn't the only critical factor in Joseph Smith's success. Smith was a master organizer for one. But what is Bushman's take on the Mormon prophet?

Only a person of powerful conviction could have remained productive and hopeful through the discouragements. For years, the kingdom existed primarily in Joseph's mind. He was one of those unlettered men who could have built a railroad or governed a state. Josiah Quincy saw in him "that kingly faculty which directs, as by intrinsic right." But where his powers came from is a mystery. His upbringing seems so inadequate to his ambitions. He was undoubtedly blessed with intelligence and will, and the Bible, his achieve cultural resource, was a trove of possibilities, but how was he able to perceive what lay in its pages? Whence the new scripture, the global schemes for a kingdom, the stories of eternity? He lacked the learning to conceive of the world on such a scale.

His people marveled that he did so much when he was just one of them, and his accomplishments - translations, cities, missions, gatherings, priesthoods, temples, cosmologies, governments - are astonishing by any standard. Joseph Smith himself did not take credit for his achievements. All he could speak of was his "marvilous (sic) experience." Perhaps his signal trait was trust in his own inspiration. He knew he was no more than a rough stone cut from a Vermont hillside. He told one audience "he was but a man,... a plain, untutored man; seeking what he should do to be saved." But his revelations enabled him, as one scholar has said of prophets, "to do unaccustomed things." It was his calling, as Joseph himself put it, to "lay a foundation that will revolutionize the whole world.

Both Fawn Brodie's "No Man Knows My History," (which I read for the second time last year) and Richard Bushman's book move beyond the popular stereotype of Joseph Smith as a colorful fraud. Both authors acknowledge the prodigious accomplishments of Joseph Smith. Brodie openly doubts Joseph's claimed divine inspiration and attributes his success to an unbridled imagination able to amplify already existing narratives swirling in an America undergoing religious revival. Bushman, unlike Brodie, puts forward the data and research, without pulling punches, and asks the reader to surmise about how Mormon success has emerged given Joseph Smith's contradictions, leaving the door open for the reader to accept Joseph Smith's claims. There is little doubt that Joseph Smith, unlearned though he may have been, made substantial contributions to Christian theology and founded a lasting Church that has a well anchored foundation in the modern world.