Rough Stone Rolling II: beginnings

The sociologist Peter Berger has posited that human beings are born incomplete. To function in the world, to gain the things we need, we must participate in the creation of a social reality: a set of relationships, of explanations, of norms, of, more than anything else, meanings. These things give us the tools with which to interact with each other and to justify our ways of living. The notion that when we are ten years old certain people who are older than we are have the right to make us sit at a desk and spell for hours on end, for example, is a construct that exists entirely within our heads, and yet we accept it as 'real,' because it and the state, and the family, and driver's licenses, and US Weekly hold the chaos at bay. They give us categories and expectations and ScanTron forms and other things that help us feel like we have some modicum of control and understanding over the ludicrousness of the world.



The most powerful of these constructs Berger calls 'the sacred canopy;' religion. It is the most powerful because by its very nature it is about ultimates: it gives us final meanings and ultimate purposes and most vital relationships and absolute authorities. All other forms of these things are, to religious folk, either types (earthly parents versus heavenly parents), or incomplete shadows (as Christians have variously dismissed the state, or science, or those moving pictures they have now), or subsumed within religion and endowed with its authority (marriage).

Berger says that the sacred canopy is so powerful because it claims all such meaning. A successful religion should offer us theodicies - that is, explanations for why bad things happen. It should be able to explain why the world works the way it does. And if holes appear, things get tense.

(And, rounding the corner to Joseph Smith . . . )

On page xx, Bushman offers us a very interesting personality profile of Joseph. The man had a temper and an iron will and thin skin and a deep love for sitting in council and writing letters to his wife. He made no effort, Bushman tells us, to prove his detractors wrong or to argue; he simply did what he did, which in his case was to dictate paragraphs that began, "Hearken, O ye people which profess my name, saith the Lord your God." He just went on his way, taking little notice of the internal contradictions and failures and troubles that he left in his wake. And his disinclination to argue was not out of frustration or annoyance with his critics; Joseph left Josiah Quincy, the eminent Bostonian visitor to Nauvoo, confounded. As Quincy wrote (7), he informed Quincy that he was a prophet with a sly note of irony in his voice; Joseph well knew how ridiculous he sounded, and he loved the sheer vigorous audacity, the showmanship, of it.

Joseph, among other things, was an improviser.

This, perhaps, is the greatest theme of the early portion of the book. And it raises some Bergerian difficulties.

About twenty-five years ago, Jan Shipps, a Methodist and probably one of the two or three most interesting and important folks in the meta-history that is the world of Mormon studies, wrote an article called 'The Prophet Puzzle." In this she noted that there seemed to be two Joseph Smiths rattling around back there in 1820s upstate New York. The one was the young man who read the Bible, who had seen God the Father and Jesus Christ, the pious farmer who worked hard and kept his nose clean and who occasionally received visits from Moroni and spent his evenings telling his family stories about the Nephites.

The other was the guy who got himself indicted in 1826 for promising Josiah Stowell that he could find buried treasure with a peepstone, because he had great experience with such money digs. This is the guy who seems to have hung out a lot with noted rapscallion Willard Chase and a mysterious figure named Luman Walters, who is actually called a 'magician' in some of the surviving documents. Walters was noted for possessing "his book, and his rusty sword, and his magic stone, and his stuffed Toad, and all his implements of witchcraft," and for occasionally sacrificing chickens.

The great contribution of Bushman's 1984 book (wherein the stuff about Walters can be found) Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, (aided and abetted, in a weird way, by D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View) is the attempt that culminates in Rough Stone Rolling: to reconcile the two Joseph Smiths. (ie, 39, 75)

Bushman does this by giving an incomplete Joseph, a Joseph who seems not to have grasped the full meanings of what we today call "the First Vision" until around 1838; a Joseph who was driven by his familial insecurities, by a weak and alcoholic father and a domineering mother and was obsessed with questions of salvation, both spiritual and material.

The influence of evangelicalism on young Joseph, in this reading, cannot be overstated. Salvation rested in a personal encounter with God. Joseph was not the only seeker of his time; indeed, he was more typical than not - in both his desires and in his answer. In another article, Bushman counted several dozen visions of Christ reported in Joseph's neighborhood and youth.

This Joseph finds in his experiences redemption. Dan Vogel's partial biography Joseph Smith: the making of a prophet does us the great service of an excruciatingly close reading of the Book of Mormon, and finds a great deal of Smith family dynamics therein. While such a reading is difficult to prove, Bushman draws upon it (ie, 106) to argue that the young, confused, visionary-inclined man saw in the record (and in the seerstones, and in the visions) a pathway to a sacred version of his own life; he identified with Nephi, saw himself in Ammon's discourse on seers and prophets. (Here, perhaps, are the roots of modern Mormon scripture reading methods.) He gradually lifted his gaze and found his calling.

The Anthon situation is a useful example here: though the college professor seems to have later felt somewhat jerked around by the Mormons, the experience for Joseph was profound. In the event, Joseph saw scripture made reality (ie, 65); he began to grasp that his life and actions might have a part in a larger, providential history, a grand scheme that he could only glimpse the edges of. He saw answers to the tensions of his own life in the stories of Nephi; Bushman's note that the Book of Mormon is in some sense the greatest revelation of Joseph Smith is pertinent here, because it reminds us of the profoundly important role that the Book played in Joseph's own life, in his self-conceptions and his struggles with his own spiritual anxieties.

(And of course Bushman's fascinating thoughts about the Book of Mormon - how it is a profoundly un-democratic, un-capitalist text are worth discussing. If he's right, that a whole host of nationalist Latter-day Saints who read the work as a libertarian textbook of United States history are sunk.)

Of course, there are two problems here.

1) This is the sort of thing that makes non-Mormon readers uncomfortable with Rough Stone Rolling. While it is possible to argue that Joseph grew out of seerstones into an Old Testament prophet, Bushman edges close to making truth claims in doing so; his argument is somewhat teleological, with a divine ending. Positing that Joseph saw himself in the record comes awfully close to stating that there was one.

And truth claims, he himself argues (and rightly so) are old hat. This is an impossible argument to resolve, absent Moroni himself popping up in a drugstore somewhere. The far more interesting question, Bushman rightly points out, is not whether there were plates but why people believed there were. (54)

2) Is the argument really, completely, convincing? I confess, though it goes a long way, it does not entirely do it for me. Joseph never gave up his seerstones, though he used them less and less (the First Presidency still has at least one of them), and nobody's ever explained why he ditched the Urim and Thummim for the stone to complete the translation process. Similarly, there's no real evidence that Joseph saw what he was in as a transition. There's no journal entry in which somebody says that Joseph told them he realized that treasure hunting was not actually a good use of his gifts; no evidence that Lucy Mack ever renounced "the faculty of Abrac." (50) The original version of D&C 8 referred to Oliver Cowdery's gifts as a dowser. To be sure, much of the magical world of 1820s New York exists even in the sacred stories we tell today (Moroni, for instance, behaves a lot like a spirit treasure guardian - appearing three times, requiring Joseph to return to the treasure repeatedly on a significant date, etc); there is some sense of transition there. But an easy transition; a shaking off of foolish youth, does not quite do it for me. The two Josephs remain slightly out of fit. Bushman's arguments on page 69, for example, explaining that Joseph "could no longer see" the preparatory role that magic had played in his life when he wrote his 1838 history seem a stretch to me.

This is not to say I find Joseph's involvement with magic troubling; actually, I don't at all (it strikes me as somewhat nifty, actually). But it is to say that the facts seem a bit more murky than a clean narrative of progress might suggest.

And such, then, does Joseph organize a church. We've often stereotyped Joseph as the great visionary of Church history and Brigham as the great organizer, but it's worth noting that Joseph almost immediately begins to erect a series of offices and systems of authority. Indeed, such was the egalitarian nature of the exuberant organization of the early church that Joseph himself was downplayed (112). Oliver Cowdery (who presided at the first conference) initially had as much practical authority as Joseph himself did; missionaries spoke of prophecy rather than a prophet. Until, of course, Joseph faced dissention. Here, the iron side of his personality came out; there were excommunications for things which people seemingly did not know were crimes.

And this, then, brings us back to Peter Berger. The problem with a developing prophet, and indeed, with the principle of continuing revelation, is that the sacred canopy must exist within time. It is contingent, open to change and possibly historical error; it implies that there was a time when certain truths did not apply. Some Mormons struggle against this, and seek to turn the what-we-know-now into the universally-true. We see this when seminary videos make much about the seven-year-old Joseph's refusal of alcohol before his leg operation (granting him a perhaps prophetic vision of the Word of Wisdom circa 1923); we see it in works like Millet and McConkie's Doctrinal Commentary on the Book of Mormon, which are less interested in exploring the Book of Mormon as a text in its own right than in extracting verses from it to demonstrate the importance of issues raised in 1990s general conference talks.

Bushman, however, gives us a Joseph - and hence a religion - of its time, a religion, perhaps in many ways unfamiliar to the one we practice today. In doing so he gives us new ways of thinking about our own faith; the possibility for cognitive dissonance may exist, but so also does the potential for a broadened sacred canopy.