Commentary: Joseph vs. Brigham. Polygamy deniers. Why some insist on rewriting the Mormon past.

In 1694, Puritan minister Cotton Mather mourned that the younger generation of Puritans was uniquely depraved.

“Among all the deadly symptoms which threaten us with a speedy ruin,” he wrote, “there is none so ghastly than the ignorance, the wildness, the lewdness found in so great a part of the rising generation.”

The Puritans passed this tic on. Scholars call it the “declension narrative” — a tendency to worry that we are weaker than our ancestors, whether they be the Puritans or the Founding Fathers or Joseph Smith. If we were faithful to George Washington or our grandparents, our problems could be solved.

Of course, we don’t actually want to return to the whole of our ancestors’ world. It didn’t have great dental care, among other problems.

But declension narratives transform the past into what we want the present to be. They might serve conservative or liberal ends, or draw different lessons from the same event. They are a way of interpreting history.

I’ve thought about Cotton Mather often while watching contemporary cultural battles inside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A declension narrative was baked into the Mormon movement from the start, of course, when Joseph Smith proclaimed the need to restore a fallen Christianity. But the movement has produced no shortage of declension narratives about itself, too.

Joseph vs. Brigham

Among the most enduring declension narratives in Mormon history is the contrast between Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Young’s succession after Smith’s death was not a foregone conclusion. By the 20th century, the church’s official curriculum emphasized harmony between the two men. Others, however, seized on discontinuities between them to imagine different paths the movement might have taken.

The gentlest form of this narrative is the stereotype common among many Latter-day Saints: Joseph Smith was creative and innovative, while Young was stern and practical. Smith was imaginative and individualist; Young was boring and institutional.

In the 19th century, Joseph Smith III, son of the prophet and the first president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ) bent the comparison into a declension narrative that gave him power. He declared that his father, a “good man,” would never have signed off on various objectionable practices in the Utah-based church, like temple worship, Young’s intervention into politics, and the practice of polygamy.

Joseph Smith III’s father actually had done all of these things. But his aim was to generate a version of Joseph Smith that seemed respectable to the Protestant Christians who wielded power in the United States.

In the late 20th century, other Latter-day Saints found this declension narrative appealing for new reasons. They were steeped in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and the age’s suspicion of institution and trust in individual intuition.

Many Latter-day Saint writers in this period saw Joseph Smith as an avatar of those values and Brigham Young as a foreboding harbinger of bureaucracy. The history work of D. Michael Quinn emphasized the expanding ecclesiastical authority of the church itself; the theology of Paul and Margaret Toscano and the scholarship of Maxine Hanks and Janice Allred presented a Joseph Smith whose innovative ideas about gender equality were squelched under Young’s authority. Contemplatives like Philip McLemore saw Smith as a mystic fascinated with magic and personal religious experience.

These ideas found their most radical expressions in early 21st-century communities that grew up around writers like Denver Snuffer and Rock Waterman, both of whom insist Joseph Smith was really a visionary sage not terribly interested in churches. Waterman uses the term “pure Mormonism.” According to Waterman’s blog, Brigham Young mounted a “hostile takeover” and turned Smith’s community into a corporation.

I am not trying to prove one of these Smiths right or another wrong. The evidence scholars like Quinn or Hanks invoke is real. But it is true other scholars of these figures might emphasize different evidence. Some have made the case that Smith was a determined institutionalist entirely willing to wield bureaucratic power, or that Young was a visionary who spoke in tongues, had prophetic dreams and was interested in speculative theology.

The point is, our evidence of the past is almost never absolutely simple or definitive. Thus, we need to be attentive to how ready-made narratives might influence us, and be willing to consider other interpretations.

The rise of polygamy denial

The Mormon declension narrative has gained new life in the polygamy-denial movement, which insists that Smith never practiced plural marriage. The idea has been gaining steam among Latter-day Saints who find polygamy immoral, incompatible with the contemporary church’s emphasis on middle-class American monogamy, and with Joseph Smith’s own statements denying the practice.

Polygamy denial weds this traditional sexual ethic to the hostility toward organizations and bureaucracies that has seeped into Western politics since the 1960s.

Thus, its major figures might sound like Denver Snuffer, who weds polygamy denial to a critique of Brigham Young. According to Snuffer, Young invented polygamy to help him turn the church into an “oligarchy.”

The structure of declension narrative thinking lends polygamy denial a conspiratorial orientation. Its advocates theorize a large-scale conspiracy in which a small collection of leaders around Young tinkered with the historical record after Joseph Smith died in order to corrupt his church.

Much of what we know about the practice of plural marriage in Smith’s lifetime comes from the later testimony of women who married him. Some advocates of polygamy denial argue that Young and his supporters forced women to falsely claim they were married to Smith in public, even to the point of mentioning it in their diaries. They also maintain that Young’s people edited and sometimes forged documents to insert polygamy into the record of Smith’s life. At the most extreme, these Latter-day Saints argue that Young’s associates killed Smith.

It can be useful to reappraise old sources, look for new insights, and perhaps draw new conclusions. But much of the polygamy denial movement is guided by conspiracy thinking.

Conspiracy thinking has a long history in the United States. Like declension narratives, it’s not inherently liberal or conservative. It instead hypersimplifies the past. It blames events on small groups of people and ignores context and large-scale trends. But it creates heroes and villains, and so it can tell appealing stories with a clear moral at the end.

Declension narratives function like this, too. They present a past that is morally clear, morally simple, and seems very much like the present. Polygamy deniers are often vehement defenders of Joseph Smith, but they have just as often absorbed the conspiratorial thinking that has spread across American social media in the past decade.

Many polygamy deniers have come to be suspicious of the church itself — expressing dismay when President Russell M. Nelson encouraged members to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and growing wary of the church for, in their view, maintaining Young’s conspiracy.

Such patterns were evident among the Puritans, too. Periodically, small groups of believers, fired by declension narratives, would separate themselves from their comrades and found ever tinier communities certain that this time, perhaps, they would regain the real, true Christian faith that had been so tragically lost.

The past is, of course, far too complicated to be reduced to any single story of declension or restoration — or even, any single moral lesson. To successfully understand ourselves and confront the challenges before us, we need to unearth and make visible assumptions and stereotypes that declension narratives offer. Then we can look at the past, and hence the present, anew.

Note to readers • Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2024’s “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian,” 2023’s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012’s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.” This article is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.