Nineteenth-century America was a land of prophets unseen since ancient Israel. These preachers roamed the frontier, erecting churches and gathering followings. One obscure but particularly extreme example from Ohio “jumped off a riverbank in an attempt to catch the heavenly message.” Another, born into an obscure family of hardscrabble New York farmers, soon passed into the very same rural Midwestern town. Surrounded by failed apostles, this one would go on to build a church with 17 million adherents. In the new biography Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, John G. Turner sets out to discover what separated Joseph Smith from his contemporaries.
Turner is a professor at George Mason University specializing in American religious movements. His past work has covered both Evangelical Protestantism and Mormonism, including a prior biography of Utah Mormon leader Brigham Young. As a non-Mormon friendly to the various church organizations that date themselves to Joseph Smith’s movement, Turner is ideally placed to chronicle a figure in sore need of a serious portrait.
Mormonism is not unknown, but the most publicly defining motifs of the faith Smith founded, from abstention from coffee to residence in Utah, all post-date his death. Previous biographies of Smith have been either anti-Mormon screeds or hagiographies. Given the options of prophet or scoundrel, Turner clarifies from the beginning that he sees Smith as “a bit of both.” With this mindset, he presents perhaps the most balanced biography of Joseph Smith ever written.
To Turner, Smith is both “bold and brilliant.” His “stunning display of American audacity” deserves “more respect than ridicule or condemnation.” If Mormons of today are scandalized, it may most be over their prophet’s recorded penchant for coffee, tea, and wine, not an attempt at theological retort or personal slander.
Turner portrays Smith, typically referred to by “Joseph” throughout, as a product of the Great Awakening milieu. In the process, the biography unveils a history of early Mormonism that presents questions as tantalizing as those of early Christianity and Islam. Unlike either, it can be carefully and reliably documented through photographs and thousands of pages of testimonies.
Turner’s exposition of Smith’s family is telling of the seeming religious revival in modern youth. Smith’s grandfather preferred The Age of Reason to the Bible. Smith himself was not baptized until after he began his career as a prophet, despite his family’s eventual turn to professing Calvinism.
Turner speculates that some of Smith’s beliefs could have emerged in reaction to this familial faith in predestination. Mormonism to this day bears the opprobrium of many Evangelicals for holding that salvation comes via works and is open to those of all religions.
Central to Turner’s view of Smith as “more audacious than mendacious” is his coverage of the Book of Mormon. Mark Twain is the most famous anti-Mormon critic to have lampooned Smith’s scripture as bad literature. Turner dissents and posits legitimate literary value of the work as a facsimile of early 19th-century America.
By denying divine authorship to the work, Turner argues, we must come to recognize Joseph Smith as one of early America’s most remarkable authors. Turner notes that the Book of Mormon is, by some measures, the most widely circulated piece of American literature, and that analyzing this contribution as such has been widely neglected by most observers.
Turner covers only briefly the extensive evidence dismissing the legitimacy of documents Smith claimed to translate. Instead, he focuses on the meaning of the Mormon texts as exposing meaning within Smith’s life and the wider context of 19th-century America. For instance, he dissects the Book of Mormon‘s comparison of Joseph Smith to the Israelite Joseph enslaved in Egypt as a means of psychoanalyzing Smith’s view of his own life story.
Turner’s goal is to put the reader in Smith’s head, not to present a critical analysis. Generally, he gives Smith’s version of events, writing “an angel appeared” as opposed to constantly adding “according to Smith’s account.” The biography is readable, if not immediately captivating. It piques interest as Smith crosses paths with recognizable figures from Lincoln’s future rival Stephen Douglas to William Clark of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition.
By the book’s final chapters, however, Turner turns the prophetic biography into a riveting narrative. Driven from Missouri to Illinois by persecution, a paranoid Smith becomes far less sympathetic and far more reckless. He begins claiming titles such that, by his death, he was mayor, prophet, general, a declared candidate for president of the United States, and the husband to more than 30 women.
In these same frenzied final years of Smith’s life, he added to his religion’s canon a new series of revelations. These formalized the belief that there are countless Gods, all of which began with flesh-and-blood, a radical turn away from Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.
Admirers of politics will find much to savor in Turner’s telling of Smith’s later-life political vision. Mormons came to turn on the government, both ideologically and practically. Hyrum Smith publicly declared his brother “like Moses … only greater” at a meeting to organize a new government. Joseph Smith followed by denouncing the Constitution, which he once dubbed the “wisdom of God,” as an obsolete “old dead horse’s head” and accepting the vote of his loyalists to be crowned as “prophet, priest, and king.”
Boston brahmin Josiah Quincy told Smith he held too much power on an 1844 visit, to which Smith responded, “I am the only man in the world to whom it would be safe to trust with it.” Meanwhile, Mormon leaders secretly sent emissaries to the Sioux to probe for the likelihood of an alliance against the United States, while publicly petitioning Congress for the right to raise an army and march westward.
The book quickens to a frenetic pace as the weeks approach Smith’s murder. Husbands enraged over Smith taking their wives, politicians furious over having lost the Mormon vote, and countless other enemies gradually converge on Smith. His own (first) wife organized a public denunciation of polygamy. Weeks later, Smith ordered his followers to smash the presses of the Nauvoo Expositor, formed by anti-polygamist Mormons to denounce their “fallen prophet.”
The walls came crashing down. As general of the Nauvoo Legion, Smith put the city under martial law, but his position was now untenable. Turner paints a vivid yet careful portrait as Smith rides into Carthage, Illinois, to be first jailed and then lynched by an angry mob.
Turner ends abruptly with Smith’s death, devoting only a brief epilogue to the aftermath. This decision is understandable for the book’s scope. Nonetheless, a more thorough coverage of the succession crisis after Smith’s death may have better suited the conclusion.
Growing up in Utah as a non-Mormon, I often found Smith at the center of my discussions on religion. Though my own family has not been Mormon for decades, I can trace my heritage back to 2 of Joseph Smith’s original 12 apostles and one of his polygamous wives. Despite finding familiar names throughout the book, it vastly broadened my knowledge of Smith and the forces that shaped him.
Turner’s biography is sure to greatly expand the understanding of Joseph Smith for Mormons, non-Mormons, laymen, and specialists alike. Those of all backgrounds may expect to be entertained as well as educated on the other end of the journey.
Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet
by John G. Turner
Yale University Press, 464 pp., $35
Shiv Parihar, a student at Claremont McKenna College, writes on socio-cultural history. His work has appeared in Providence, the American Spectator, Fusion, and his Substack.
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