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As scholars of the American religious past and present continue to move away from the consensus model, in which the upstart Latter-day Saint tradition had no real fit, and embrace conflict, contact, and other methodologies, Joseph Smith is beginning to get a new hearing in scholarly surveys, monographs, textbooks, and articles. The rationale behind this collection is that the day has come when the founder of Mormonism and his prominent role in American history and religious thought can not be denied. The attention paid to Smith’s teachings, charismatic ministry, and religion-making imagination now extends to scholars in American history, religious studies, sociology, biblical studies, Christian philosophy, Literature, and the Humanities--all of whom are represented in this collection. It is our intent to reflect in these pages the wide-ranging interest in Joseph Smith that the commemorative conferences only suggested.

This chapter finds that by contextualizing Smith's history as prophetic autobiography alongside Nat Turner's, uncannily similar aspects emerge. As a result, what the chapter calls a history of prophetism takes shape that delineates some of the forms and tragic consequences of prophetic self-assertion. The implications may be translatable across a spectrum of times and cultures.

This chapter illuminates Smith's religious-making imagination by juxtaposing him with America's greatest myth-making novelist of the 19th century, Herman Melville. Melville revealed a recurrent interest in things Mormon, and the most telling preoccupation that unites them, the chapter finds, is not so much the heights they achieved as successful creators of epic systems, as the depths they plumb as thought-divers, exploring the darkest abysses of human experience and of the tragic universe.

This chapter examines the Mormon prophet as a metaphysical figure. Noting that American religious history has too often limited itself to mainstream denominationalism and evangelicalism, the chapter has been able to limn the contours of metaphysical religion. This tradition emphasizes the world and human beings as ontologically parallel to, and deriving a stream of spiritual energy from, a higher reality. The consequent world view, as above, so below, is characteristic of hermeticism and modern mystics like Emanuel Swedenborg. Exploiting Richard Bushman's suggestion that Smith is a protean figure amenable to any number of religious agendas, this chapter finds he fits the bill perfectly as a proto-metaphysician. Extending the arguments of Bloom and Brooke, it argues that in addition to exploring occult antecedents and their influence on Joseph Smith, it is time for American historians to take account of the debt metaphysical religion owes to Joseph Smith.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the 1832 secession crisis involving South Carolina, reminding us that the popular violence enacted against the Mormons occurred in the immediate context of national debates and crisis over the states' rights question. Constitutional interpretation unfolded against, and under the influence of, this backdrop. The same prevailing views favoring state autonomy over federalism that facilitated eventual civil war also facilitated Mormon oppression. The chapter thus offers a rare political and constitutional context for understanding the Mormons' difficulties, the development of Joseph Smith's political views, and his own involvement in the national campaign of 1844.

This chapter proposes a simple fundamental in its account for Joseph Smith's religious appeal: he met a human need for the sacred. So, of course, do all religions, but Smith was different, the chapter argues, in constructing the LDS faith around two potent loci: new sacred words and new sacred places. His additions to scripture blend audacity and self-effacing, summarily annihilating the principle of sola scriptura, even as the personality delivering its coup de grace for Mormons is subsumed in the voice of God. As for place, Smith literalized the concept of Zion and introduced into Christian worship the concept and physical reality of the temple. In the process, he became the first American religious figure to exploit the power of sacred space.

This chapter connects Joseph Smith's religion-making, in both its scope and its method, to the intellectual revolution called Romanticism. Like all intellectual revolutionaries of that era from Malthus to Marx to Darwin, Joseph Smith rearticulated the fundamental vision of his field of influence in terms of contestation, struggle, and dynamism. His collapse of sacred distance, rupturing of the canon, doctrines of pre-existence and theosis, and gestures toward a comprehensive, scriptural Ur-Text—all betoken an emphasis on process over product, and a precarious tension between the searching and certainty that characterized both his personality and the faith he founded.

This chapter applies the analytical insights of Paul Tillich and William Whyte to the revelatory production of Joseph Smith. These choices are intended to further the project of an interdisciplinary, rather than provincial or academically ghettoized, approach to Mormon Studies. Specifically, the chapter considers the traumas of the young Smith, the psychodrama of his First Vision, and echoes of both in the Gethsemane theology Smith developed. The courage that is revealed in these contexts is embodied by Joseph Smith personally and institutionally in such forms as vicarious baptism, and counter-cultural practices like plural marriage. Finally, the chapter explores the paradox of the LDS emphasis on both courageous individualism in a church that makes corporate belonging and corporate rites salvifically indispensable.

This chapter comes to Mormonism as something only tangentially related to this chapter's author's own work in radically reformulating our understanding of ancient Jewish religion. The author of this chapter has elsewhere assessed the Book of Mormon in the context of pre-exilic Israelite religion. Here, that interest is extended here by considering the temple world view of early Israel before the reforms of King Josiah. Noting the primacy of this same temple-dominated vision in the prophetic career of Joseph Smith, the first part of this chapter concentrates on that subject. From his translation of the Book of Mormon through the corpus of his own visions, Joseph established continuity with the Bible as text and Jerusalem as sacred space. Equally important is the pattern in Joseph Smith of both chronicling sacred theophanies and urging their possibility in contemporary religious practice. That is why it has been argued that Joseph Smith's restoration converges on the key time, place, institutions, and issues involved in this chapter's reconstruction.

This chapter furthers the project of an intellectually richer account of Mormonism by offering a critique of the centrality of sympathy in the polemics that have engulfed Mormon historical studies from their inception, and proposing an alternative. The critique is situated in a largely postmodern, anti-essentialist conception of identity as a malleable and fluid concept. At the same time, it notes in Smith's own turn to ritual a validation of appearances over essence, doing over being. A focus on the epic of Mormonism's narrative rather than its characters, on popular rather than elite Mormon history, and on the geographical varieties with their correspondingly different accounts of Mormonism—all are presented here as powerful antidotes to the snares of an approach that links, and therefore reduces Joseph Smith and the religion he founded to an irresolvable debate over human motives.

This chapter contributes to the evangelical understanding of Joseph Smith. The interest of evangelical scholars in Mormonism has tended to be in the context of apologetics rather than scholarly inquiry. The chapter breaks new ground in this regard by responding to the probing question: Is Joseph Smith possible for you? It stakes out an alternative to the facile either/or approaches that refuse to relinquish the burden of judgment. Turning the study of Joseph Smith in the direction of reception-theory enables both a richer dialogue and the possibility of real insight into the religious yearnings and preoccupations of religious communities. As a tentative gesture in this direction, the chapter makes history in a modest way, rather than examining it.

This chapter argues that Joseph Smith is a genuine prophet of world historical importance. In a bold reversal (a non-Mormon), it takes such status as a historical given and a starting point that can enrich our study of various prophethoods, rather than as a laurel to be disputed about in religiously provincial and self-serving ways. This position is based largely on the enduring consequences of Smith's prophetic output, and then turns to analyze the constituent elements of his prophetic vocation: intelligibility, sincerity, charismatic force, cognitive complexity, and effectiveness. The chapter's main contribution in this regard is to probe the possibilities of taking prophecy seriously as an aspect of religious experience and cultural import, both objective and culturally mediated, but to do so without lapsing into irrationalism.

This chapter turns to the subject of what Joseph Smith himself had to say about Mormonism's relationship to other religions, and ways of accommodating religious pluralism. It further traces the trajectories of Mormon thought on Eastern religious traditions, following the death of Smith, during the balance of the 19th century. Rather than fitting neatly into conventional religious studies paradigms, the chapter argues that the Latter-day Saints warrant their own categorization as restoration inclusivists.

This chapter provides a bicentennial bibliographical chapter about the Mormon founder. It divides the voluminous manuscript sources on Smith into the various categories of journals, sermons and discourses, revelations, correspondence, personal history, administrative records, legal documents and judicial history, early Mormon publications, the papers of Smith's associates, and accounts of Smith's contemporaries. The chapter also separates the hundreds of published sources on Smith into sections on bibliographical guides and sources, diaries and personal writings, sermons and discourses and writings, personal history, revelations, and biographical studies.

This chapter discusses the political and theological role the ten tribes played in English imagination since the 17th century. It centers around the “Hope of Israel,” the most important book on the ten tribes and their geography written by Manasseh Ben‐Israel, a rabbi from Amsterdam with strong connections to millenarian circles in England wishing to hasten the end of time through finding the ten tribes. The chapter describes the significance of the tribes in English political and theological thinking against the backdrop of political upheavals in England and the English colonization of America. The chapter shows how English theologians developed new programs to convert the Native Americans through using the story of the Ten Tribes. The chapter also presents the rise of two new religious sects: Mormonism and British‐Israelism as a direct result of the earlier theologies.

In replacing monarchy with republicanism, the American Revolution set the stage for the growth of a variety of upstart groups united by their back‐to‐the‐Bible mentality and their conviction that scripture testified against Calvinist absolutism. This chapter examines this antebellum diversity, from the Universalists, who insisted that God would save all people in the end, to the Methodists, who taught that God granted prevenient grace enabling all people to choose or reject Christ. The chapter also surveys other groups driven by anti‐predestinarian zeal, including the founders of the Campbellites, Stoneites, Adventists, and Christian Scientists. The anti‐Calvinist backlash reached a dramatic culmination in Mormonism, which radically extended human free will into premortal and postmortal life. Yet the Mormon appeal to preexistence was not the era's only radical rebellion against Augustinianism. Opposition to predestination even led the era's most famous Protestant family, the Beecher clan, to reconsider the benefits of old heresies.

In May 1857, LDS apostle Parley P. Pratt, one of early Mormonism’s greatest defenders, was shot down in Arkansas by Hector McLean, the legal husband of a woman Pratt had taken as a plural wife two years previously. This high-profile incident acts as a prologue to this study of late nineteenth-century southern anti-Mormonism, as Pratt’s murder was a symptom of the broader cultural processes of honor, the unwritten law, and extralegal violence, all influenced by the nation’s revulsion with Mormon polygamy. The remainder of this chapter establishes the historical context of southern violence and religion and the presence of Mormonism in the South, then reviews the relevant literature and introduces the arguments in the remainder of the book.