LDS founder Joseph Smith thrived on energy, adventure and danger even as he built an enduring religion, says new biography

This month, scholar John Turner published what appears certain to go down as the most significant and up-to-date biography of Mormonism’s founder since Richard Bushman’s “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.”

Infused with the latest scholarship, Turner’s new book, “Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet,” reveals a Brother Joseph who is sometimes playful, sometimes reckless, often inspired, but always enterprising and forever fascinating.

Here are excerpts, lightly edited for length and clarity, from The Salt Lake Tribune’s latest “Mormon Land” podcast in which Turner, professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University and author “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet,” discussed what he discovered about Joseph Smith — the husband, the father, the book publisher, the community organizer, the city builder, the religious innovator, the polygamist, the visionary, and, above all, the prophet to millions of followers.

Whom did you find more interesting or difficult to depict — Brigham Young or Joseph Smith?

They were differently challenging to write about. With Brigham, there is a “mountain” of archival sources. It’s just an overwhelming number of documents to transcribe and search through and decipher and interpret. With Joseph Smith, it’s a much smaller corpus of material. It’s a little bit more well-worn, but I would say maybe more challenging, because, for some key moments of his life, we don’t have the sources we might want to have. And there’s sort of a border between history and matters of faith and belief that I didn’t have to engage as directly when I wrote about Brigham Young. They were both incredibly, incredibly fun to write about, [given] their huge personalities and diverse range of activities.

The book is called “the rise and fall” of Joseph Smith. What did you mean by “fall”?

I meant his rise from this impoverished farmhand in western New York to his fall at the hands of a murderous mob. “Rise and fall” is not meant to imply that he became God’s prophet and then became a fallen prophet. I’m not making that argument.

You say some writers see Joseph as a prophet, others as a scoundrel, but you see him as a bit of both. Which parts of him do you see in which category?

As someone who’s not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’m not coming at Joseph Smith with the question: Is he God’s prophet for the last dispensation or not? I’m taking that label rather differently. He had a clear self-conception as a prophet. The Book of Mormon refers to “a choice seer,” which is a clear reference to Joseph Smith, in my mind. By publishing the Book of Mormon, I argue that he really fulfilled that prophecy. He brought forth revelations. He generated texts that his followers understood as scripture. He introduced rituals that bound his followers to each other and to God. Scoundrel is kind of a tough word. What I mean is at several moments of his life, he behaved in ways that were less admirable. Part of that is about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon itself, which I do think did involve some subterfuge, in addition to some literary inspiration. Perhaps I’m also most critical of Joseph when it comes to his introduction and practice of plural marriage in the early 1840s during the last several years of his life.

What’s new in this book?

For the most part, Joseph’s life is rather well documented and has been for a couple of decades. One thing that I think is a little bit new and different in my approach is I want Joseph’s mirth, recklessness, love, love of adventure and drama and danger to come through. I purposefully didn’t write an absolutely long and ponderous biography. Joseph’s life moved. He’s always moving in new directions with tremendous energy, often plunging into controversy or “deep water,” as he sometimes called it, and so I wanted to capture that.

What makes you conclude that, to your “best sense,” Joseph did not have gold plates?

My conclusion rests on two things. Number one, Joseph kept some sort of object hidden and didn’t show it to anybody in an ordinary way. So subterfuge and deception seem more probable than actual golden plates. Secondly, there’s the published Book of Mormon itself. I rather like the Book of Mormon. There are passages in it that I find lovely, that I find inspirational, that I find dramatic as a Protestant Christian. There are also parts of the Book of Mormon that really resonate with me in a Christocentric sense, but I don’t understand it as an ancient record. If you conclude that the Book of Mormon is not an ancient record, but a 19th-century creation, then it makes a lot more sense to think that it flowed out of Joseph Smith’s literary mind, rather than had a basis in actual golden plates.

Tell us more about Joseph’s recklessness and living dangerously, especially when it came to polygamy?

There are a lot of serious parts of his life, but if we lean too far into that, we obscure some other things. Treasure hunting, for instance. Joseph was 20 years old. He’s out in the woods at night with other young men, looking for treasure with torches. I think he had fun doing that. Yet people approach that as maybe a scandalous part of his life. But it’s not, that’s kind of fun, right? Some of those stories about what happens right after Joseph gets the plates, where he’s dodging enemies in the woods at night, I’m not saying those weren’t harrowing. He even comes back injured after one such run. But I think he kind of enjoyed that, too. He comments that he’d feel almost out of sorts if he were out of danger. He loves adventure. When he wasn’t getting too upset with some of the other Zion’s Camp marchers, he loved that sort of thing; being on the road for days at a time, sleeping rough. Dodging sheriffs and other lawmen in the early 1840s is definitely harrowing, but I think he enjoyed those escapades. When he’s under arrest in a hotel in Illinois and somebody is knocking at the door and somebody is threatening to shoot him, he rips his shirt open, and he just yells, “Go ahead and shoot me.” This is a larger-than-life guy, who is clandestine. He’s sneaking in and out of town. Sometimes he’s meeting outside in a hidden location with a plural wife, wearing a disguise. There’s an element of adventure and thrill in that as well. He pursues plural marriage very recklessly during those several years…when there’s a lot of public controversy about it and potential for danger.

Let’s talk about Emma now. Was she the love of his life, and was he the love of hers? How did the relationship also evolve?

One of my lasting regrets is that we don’t have a greater window into Emma’s experience of many of these things. So she’s there, for instance, when Joseph gets the plates at night. Well, what’s she experiencing? I’d love to know. They go through a tremendous amount of heartache together. They lose several children, babies at birth or shortly afterward, during the first five years of their marriage. They lose an adopted son. They lose another young son early in the 1840s. Emma goes through a lot. They’re moving around a lot. She’s pregnant, often under difficult circumstances. It is a relationship that, obviously, has its ups and downs, and then there’s this tremendous conflict over polygamy in 1843. The remarkable thing to me is that in late 1843 and into 1844, the last half year of Joseph’s life, they seem to have transcended some of that conflict or set it aside. And there are some recorded moments of genuine warmth in journals during those months of warm conversations between the two of them. So no matter what else we would want to say about their relationship, there was an enduring warmth and commitment.

What was it about Joseph Smith that drew so many to follow him — despite the many hardships or sacrifices they would sometimes endure?

That kinetic energy and the grand ideas and the vision of a community with purpose and unity, those are all extremely attractive to people. Joseph, more so than many religious leaders of his time, spoke to genuine anxieties of American Christians who weren’t finding those anxieties addressed in other churches. So which of the churches, if any, is true? Joseph and his family were not the only Americans who were struggling with that question. Joseph provides a really clear answer — which is not attractive to most Americans — and a subset of Americans fervently love his answer. What about my loved ones who died without experiencing faith or baptism or this or that? In baptism for the dead, Joseph has a really creative answer that church members embrace with tremendous enthusiasm. Other Americans mock it as a ridiculous idea, but church members aren’t bothered by that. They immediately take to baptism for the dead. Sealing in marriage, which is connected to plural marriage and is therefore controversial, perhaps, but sealing in marriage also deeply spoke to the anxieties of church members. Am I going to be with my departed spouse again forever, and what happens if I remarry? Here are real theological, spiritual anxieties that Joseph’s teachings address in really creative, meaningful and ritualistic ways. Joseph had a real penchant for putting flesh on his teachings with rituals that made them real and powerful to his followers.

And what sometimes drove them away?

Some of the same things [that attracted them] pushed people away. There was always something else. Joseph was never fixed. He was always in motion. And new theological ideas were often challenging. Like the vision of different heavenly kingdoms. When Joseph gets to Nauvoo, there’s a torrent, really, of new ideas and rituals. So followers who might have embraced the church and been extremely satisfied with Joseph’s leadership at one point, several years later, Joseph might be going in new directions, and some of those church members didn’t want to follow him to those new places.

Literary critic Harold Bloom called Joseph Smith an authentic religious genius who excelled in religion-making imagination. Do you agree with that?

The range of Joseph’s religion-making activity is really remarkable. Several of the rituals that Joseph introduced which were new to American Christianity — and new to Christianity in general — proved of enduring power. It’s one thing to throw out some genius-level ideas without creating a structure in which they can take shape and persist, [but] I see that as a big part of Joseph’s genius. I’ve talked about his recklessness and energy. He also did have a desire for decorum and ecclesiastical order. He went about it in a characteristically kinetic way and created all sorts of different layers of church government. I would also say he created an iconic story or founding myth. The canonical account of the “First Vision” and Joseph’s early experiences over time shaped a people (not maybe as much during Joseph’s own life). In terms of a religion-maker, yes, absolutely. It’s not a single thing. It’s that whole package of what we could call prophetic activity.

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