M* recently asked the noted historian and author Richard Lyman Bushman to talk about his new book, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005). Jed Woodworth, an occasional commenter at M*, interviewed Professor Bushman, who graciously provided the answers to questions provided by Jed.
Comments are welcome. In between speaking engagements Professor Bushman may dip into the discussion on occasion.
You say in the preface that Rough Stone Rolling pays more attention to Joseph Smith’s religious thought than previous biographies. Was there some aspect of his thought that you ended up falling in love with much to your delight? Did any aspect repel you?
Plural marriage is hard for anyone who is happily married to understand, but it does not repel me as it does many Latter-day Saints.
I can picture saintly people forming a communal bond within a household or series of households. It drops barriers that hedge up our strongest passions, and so strikes fear into our hearts, but it erects new barriers that in time the Utah Saints grew accustomed to. I love the King Follett doctrines about a vastly intelligent and powerful God taking wandering, primitive spirits under his wing and teaching them how to achieve glory.
What about Joseph Smith so charmed his followers? You make the point that most converts never knew the Prophet before they converted. What kept them believing after they met him?
I don’t think a lot of the Nauvoo Saints knew him intimately. They heard him speak and saw him around town, but were not his intimates. Yet they did love him, as you say. I think it was because he wore his heart on his sleeve. He let his anger rip and he overflowed with love. His impetuosity sometimes made him hard to live with but people knew where they stood. A great, emotionally-charged personality can be magnetic.
One school of thought says historians do better when they aggressively argue for a position on issues of controversy. Yet on many of the modern controversies surrounding Joseph Smith—Book of Mormon historicity, the date of Melchizedek priesthood restoration, the place of Church organization, the meaning of polyandry—you present the evidence without coming down definitively one way or another. Why is that?
I see no reason to solve problems that cannot be solved. When you go beyond the evidence, you get in trouble. Premature closure leads to error.
You have called your historical method broadly empathetic, a method sometimes mistaken for partisanship. Did empathizing with Joseph ever make it difficult for you to empathize with Emma?
Not in the least. I see their relationship as tragic. She believed in him but could not bear plural marriage. He loved her but could not resist his own revelation. They were both heroic actors on a large stage trapped in terrible moral dilemmas.
Mormonism as a violent religion is one of the most enduring images in the popular press, starting with E. D. Howe and coming down to the present in Jon Krakauer. Rough Stone Rolling, however, says Mormon militarism was reactive, not native, to the tradition. “What could the Mormons do but defend themselves like a nation?†you ask rhetorically at one point (235-36). Given the perception of militarism, has Mormonism been radically misunderstood? Is it important for Joseph Smith to be known as a peace-loving prophet?
I am not sure Joseph was a peace-loving prophet. He was outraged at the treatment his people received and was passionate to overcome his enemies. He also was desperate because he could not see how to accomplish it. He brought together military bodies in Zion’s Camp and the Nauvoo Legion, but he knew that resistance was futile. The Mormons would always lose in an outright war. He struggled to erect political institutions like the municipal court to protect himself and the Saints, but they were frail reeds. His failure to solve the problem of American violence was dramatically demonstrated by his death. Unfortunately, along the way he sometimes cultivated the violent elements among his followers who did wish to use force, and they were responsible for the greatest mistake in our history.
For a long time observers represented Joseph Smith’s Mormonism as authoritarian religion. More recently, scholars like Nathan Hatch have emphasized its democratic elements. What does Joseph Smith stand to gain in this debate? What does he stand to lose?
I have chastised Nathan Hatch for leaving Christ out of The Democratization of American Christianity. Evangelical Christians were not setting about to be democrats, but to preach Christ crucified. He acknowledged the lacuna but justified his work on the grounds that it made Christianity more attractive in the modern world. I don’t think we want to play that game. I think we are perfectly justified in claiming that Joseph Smith’s teachings were radically democratic in some respects, but they were thoroughly hierarchical in others. Both sides have to be stressed. The double-sidedness has to be kept in mind to understand the conflicts that arose when an Oliver Cowdery or a John Corrill switched from Kingdom language to republican speech. By going from one language to the other, the Kingdom virtues of obedience and consecration of properties are transformed into aspects of tyranny.
Joseph Smith was a man who sought to imitate the Bible. Is there anything extra-biblical about him?
“Imitate†is not exactly the word I would use. He certainly drew upon the Bible and justified virtually every doctrine with a biblical passage. The question here is which Bible. The Bible scarcely exists apart from interpretation. It is infinitely malleable. There is a Calvinist Bible, a Catholic Bible, scores of other Bibles, and then Joseph Smith’s Bible. His originality lay not so much in going beyond the Bible but in going beyond the Protestant Bible. Priesthood, temples, corporeal God, human divinization, are all in the Bible but not the Bible Joseph’s Protestant neighbors were reading. They would consider him radically extra-biblical as evangelists do today; he would think otherwise, and in some striking instances such as God working in councils, modern biblical scholarship supports Joseph Smith.
Is Joseph Smith an American tragedy? Does he have a tragic flaw in the spirit of Lear or Oedipus?
I have said as much, though it is a peculiar kind of flaw: the conviction that he spoke for God. It was the same flaw that brought down other American prophets like Anne Hutchinson, Nat Turner, and Martin Luther King. The flaw really, however, is within the American system that cannot accept its own prophets. To rid the republic of its fanatical enemies (see question 9 below), its citizens have to resort to undemocratic means. That is what I mean by the phrase “the logic of the visionary life†in the introduction. We cannot reconcile our two founding documents: the constitution and the Bible. One makes the people the voice of God, the other the prophets. The two are always in danger of clashing unless moderation is exercised on both sides.
Rough Stone Rolling devotes considerable time to Joseph Smith’s critics: Booth, Campbell, Howe, Bacheler, Turner, Bennett, and Law, among others. Was this choice conscious on your part? What do the critics have to teach us about Joseph Smith?
Partly I was thinking of balance. The attacks on Joseph Smith were as much a part of his world as the testimonies of the believers. He lived under constant critical pressure; to understand his life, we must be aware of the pressure cooker environment. Especially I wanted readers–Mormons and non-Mormons alike–to recognize the influence of the “fanatic†stereotype, which I say at one point, with perhaps a little exaggeration, was as influential in American thought as racial stereotypes. People came with a pre-formed category of religious fanaticism that went back as far as Martin Luther and beyond, really. It is part of the liberal mind to require adequate enemies who wish to crush all the liberal virtues of free speech and individual choice. The religious fanatic has served that purpose for hundreds of years and still does. This animus against fanaticism informs Jon Krakauer’s book. Mormons are the enemy he loves to hate. Since the stereotype turns up in its full beauty in the writings of Joseph’s critics, I wanted to give them voice.
What are the practical consequences of the golden plates for appreciating Joseph Smith’s place in American religious history? Are the plates an inevitable snag that get outsiders hung up on whether Joseph told the truth?
The truth of the implied hypothesis is borne out by the Larry McMurtry review in the New York Review of Books (November 17, 2005). All McMurtry could talk about was the plates and plural marriage, the two most sensational points of Joseph’s career. I gave a talk at the Princeton Club about Joseph Smith in mid-October dealing with this very point. The problem with seeing Joseph Smith as a fraud, based on the gold plates story and plural marriage, is that it stops inquiry. He can be dismissed out of hand, and everything else he did is obscured.
Is Joseph Smith’s kingdom-building useful in a post-9/11 world?
What defines the post-9/11 world? Fear of terrorism, American militarism, Samuel Huntington-type cultural conflict? I think Joseph Smith’s kingdom-building is useful in general. Perhaps its greatest use now is to restore calm and security, so that we do not take extreme measures. Knowing we have each other and the protection of God, we should continue to see all people as God’s children and avoid rash action that will hurt more than it will help. Unfortunately, I am not sure it always works that way. Our apocalyptic tendencies take hold, and we look for the worst. We should be immune to panic but we are sometimes not.
What does it mean to say that “the judgment of history has been that Joseph’s great achievement was the creation of the Mormon people†(559)?
By history I mean non-Mormon scholars who consider Joseph Smith’s achievements after 200 years. They may dispute the scope and literary power of the Book of Mormon, dismiss Zion, the temples, priesthood, the doctrinal revolution and everything else, but they do not deny the people who came into being because of Joseph. At a discussion between evangelicals and Mormons at the American Academy of Religion in November 2004, Mark Noll said he considered Joseph Smith’s claims to be “empty†but he could not gainsay the strength of the Mormon community.
Joseph Smith’s conception of a church of cities, rather than a church of congregations, you say at one point, was “doomed†in 1830s America (222). Despite the demise of Zion cities, the Zion idea has shown remarkable durability among believing Mormons for more than one hundred and fifty years. Why is Zion one of Joseph Smith’s most resilient theological innovations?
A difficult question to answer. In New York City we are 20,000 people scattered in a population of 7 million. How can we consider ourselves in any sense a city? One reason may be the lasting force of the gathering. For sixty years we formed actual cities, and that may have engrained the communal concept into our cultural genes. (I think in general we have not adequately weighed the influence of that gathering period on our culture.) Another reason may be the continuing force of the word “consecration.†The heart of Zion was the consecration of all our properties to God and each other. When we use that word in the temple the memories of that complete consecration still play over the word. We are more committed to one another than other religious groups.
Many thanks to Professor Bushman for these thoughtful answers. And thanks to Jed for putting together the interview. All comments in this thread are to adhere to Millennial Star’s comments policy.