Knowing Brother Joseph Again

My in-laws gave me the new Richard Bushman biography for Christmas. I finished it on Friday. For a long time, I have looked for a comprehensive study of Joseph Smith just like this. It is a book that focuses more on the meaning of Joseph’s religion than endlessly debating its “truth.” More than that, though, it is a book I felt like I could finally trust. Bushman is just the right type of person to write about Joseph. He is a believer, but he takes seriously the claims of argument and evidence. He is affiliated with a non-LDS school (Columbia University), so his credibility as a respected historian is on the line and subject to serious non-Mormon review. Accordingly, I came away from the book thinking that I really knew Joseph for the first time – the Joseph as a human being, and not as the caricature drawn by both believers and critics. A believer in Joseph Smith, like me, now knows what he or she must come to terms with.

Here are just a few things I found interesting:

(1) Bushman writes at length about the implications of the following fact: Joseph did not see himself as building churches that would exist within communities; rather, Joseph wanted to build the communities themselves. From this simple impulse flowed many of Joseph’s greatest problems and achievements.

(2) Bushman has much to say about the relationship between Joseph and democracy, something that has interested me for a long time. Joseph was democratic in the sense of participatory democracy – giving simple farmers the chance to be eminent participants in God’s kingdom. Joseph was not so much interested in electoral democracy, with power given to the people to reign (although there are moments when councils legitimately overruled Joseph’s judgments). The democracy Joseph envisioned was more one of a “listening monarchy.” One person has complete executive power, but that person must be open to being influenced by surrounding intelligences.

(3) Bushman details how Joseph grew to be politically engaged with the outside world, and much of it had to do with the Saints’ construction of persecution narratives. These narratives assumed that there were good, sympathetic non-Mormons who would be moved by their plight. These narratives broke down the church=righteousness, world=wickedness dichotomy. For persecution narratives to have a point, you can’t have a black and white world anymore.


(4) And then there is plural marriage. Bushman describes how Joseph married dozens of women, many of whom were married to other men. He does a great job of trying to explain what all this meant to Joseph, though. He suggests that plural marriage was another manifestation of Joseph’s first for community (“He did not lust for women so much as he lusted for kin,” Bushman writes). I think he must be at least partially right in saying this, and what convinced me was his description of how Joseph married Brigham Young’s 58 year old sister. There is more going on in something like this than simple libido. It was hard, however, to read about how plural marriage played out in Joseph’s marriage to Emma.

(5) It was also hard to read about Joseph’s lapses in judgment – his weird passivity during the Missouri war, his inflammatory rhetoric and thin skin, his trust of bad people, his bad money management, and his failure to learn lessons about getting along with his neighbors. As I read this, though, I saw myself falling into these same traps in those situations. I saw myself in Joseph, in a sense, and I felt I could identify with errors.

(6) Bushman describes how Joseph was able to infuse mundane details with great religious significance. The simple act of record keeping during baptisms, for example, became an action of recording in heaven what happens on earth. Bushman shows clearly why even some outsiders have acknowledged Joseph’s “religious making imagination.”

(7) Overall, I came away with a greater admiration for Joseph. I knew Joseph had it rough, but I had no idea how rough. Reading about many of his close friends turning away from him was gut wrenching. But Joseph had a strong determination and will of steel. He was a real person, with real flaws, whose faith had a real impact.