Wednesday with Pascal: "A Very Big Humbug" (Part One)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has delved into the origins and early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka Mormonism. Pascal is aware that I was born and raised just a few miles down the road from where Joseph Smith launched his faith-based enterprise; he may believe that explains my stubborn interest in religion despite my avowed atheism. In any case, Pascal may be scratching away at this subject for a while.}

According to historian Winthrop Hudson, “The first half of the nineteenth century in the United States was a time of eager expectancy, unbridled enthusiasm, and restless ferment. A new nation and a new world were being born, and to many anything and everything were possible. It was a period when a comet’s tail was said to have swept America, and everyone went a little mad.” The European Enlightenment had influenced the founders of the United States, but it had yet to work its way to the American frontier, which, in the first decades of the 19^th century, included everything west of New England and east of the Mississippi River. ¹

Today, we think of the “Bible Belt” as comprising the states of the old Confederacy and some of the adjacent Midwest states, but in the early 19^th century, religious enthusiasm in America was at its height in the “burnt-over district” of upstate and western New York:

“Across the rolling hills of western New York and along the line of DeWitt Clinton’s famed Erie Canal, there stretched in the second quarter of the nineteenth century a ‘psychic highway’. Upon this broad belt of land congregated a people extraordinarily given to unusual beliefs, particularly devoted to crusades aimed at the perfection of mankind and the attainment of millennial happiness.” ²

The area in question gave rise, in just a few decades, to such luminaries as the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, whose parlor pranks became the basis of Spiritualism; John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the Oneida Community (near Utica), which failed as a commune but succeeded as a business enterprise producing silverware; the Shakers, founded in England by Mother Ann Lee but transplanted to the town of Watervliet, New York in 1776, from which they spread throughout the country; and the famous William Miller and his Millerites near Dunkirk, who gave up waiting for the end of the world and became Seventh-day Adventists instead. Alongside these sects, a “Second Great Awakening” was taking place, an enthusiastic outburst of evangelical Protestant revivalism associated with preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney. In western New York in the early 19^th century, prophets, visionaries, and seers abounded.

Which brings me to Joseph Smith, pride of Palmyra, New York and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. To be clear: I do not believe for one second in the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s “visions” or of the gold plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon, a book which was nothing more than a preposterous fairytale overlaid with a Biblical veneer. I believe, in short, that the entire Mormon enterprise was a low-budget, backwoods con game that got spectacularly out of hand, leading to a religious movement that Joseph Smith, to his credit, was savvy enough to take advantage of—at least until the charade got him killed. Prior to his death, Smith had experienced over a decade of fame and influence, which, for what it’s worth, is far more than Jesus managed.

The success of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is testimony to human credulity, to the need to believe, to the power of the religious imagination, and to how communities can be shaped in part by ridicule, opposition, and even persecution, tribulations which Joseph Smith and his followers endured. As Adam Gopnik put it, the story of Mormonism “is the story of faith, not [simply] of Joseph Smith’s faith. The allegiance is to the community that nurtured you, and it is bolstered by the community’s history of persecution, which makes you understandably inclined to defend its good name against all comers. It isn’t the truth of the Book, or the legends of Nephi, that undergird Mormon solidarity even among lapsed or wavering believers; it’s the memories of what other people were prepared to do in order to prevent your parents from believing. A critique of the creed, even a rational one, feels like an assault on the community.”

Mormonism’s rise resembles the first two centuries of Christianity, filled with visions, miracles, and martyrs, thereby illustrating the maxim that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Allow me to cite the words of Orson Pratt, speaking about the Book of Mormon:

This book must be either true or false. If true, it is one of the most important messages ever sent from God to man. If false, it is one of the most cunning, wicked, bold, deep-laid impositions ever palmed upon the world, calculated to deceive and to ruin millions who will hear it as the word of God.

Pratt’s was by no means an objective observer; he was an early convert to Mormonism, brought into the fold in 1830 at the age of nineteen by his older brother, Parley Pratt. Orson became a prominent Mormon missionary, theologian, and member of the church’s Quorum of Twelve. He was also something of a renowned mathematician. ³

One of the now quaint 19^th-century epithets often applied to the Book of Mormon was the word “humbug,” which was synonymous at the time with “hoax” and “fraud”. Few critics thought Joseph Smith to have been delusional; they thought he was a charlatan whose new “revelations” were spun from whole cloth (or plagiarized from others' cloth). Brigham Young Jr. is said to have asked John Gilbert (the book’s original typesetter) what he thought of the Book of Mormon’s authenticity. When Gilbert replied that the book was “a very big humbug, a hoax of gigantic proportions,” Young smiled and said, “If it is a humbug, it is the most successful humbug ever known.”

However, as Paul Gutjahr has noted, “Whether the Book of Mormon is a humbug or not is something of a moot question. In the two centuries since the book’s appearance, it has attracted millions of adherents.⁴ Perhaps the book’s greatest attraction was how it provided tangible testimony that God was once again speaking to humanity.” What God had to say varied, but what His sayings had in common is that they were transmitted through Joseph Smith. Other church elders were occasionally granted revelations, but any that clashed with Smith’s were summarily rejected. Early Mormon history, as a result, is filled with heretics, false prophets, excommunications, and sectarianism. It is also filled with a good deal of bloodshed, much of it aimed at the Mormons but some of it instigated by Mormons against their perceived enemies. In this, as in so many other ways, Mormonism gives us a window into how religions are formed, how they are sustained, how they become domesticated (i.e., respectable), and what happens once their initial spiritual ardor cools down.

One ought not to push the parallels too far, but Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York was, on the one hand, no more unlikely a prophet of God than Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Hosea, John the Baptist, or Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, if it’s true that God “writes straight with crooked lines,” He never used a line more crooked than Joseph Smith.

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¹ Thomas Jefferson’s “Louisiana Purchase” (1803) had in theory extended the frontier to the Pacific, and Lewis and Clark’s expedition would begin the process of exploration, settlement, and conquest of the inconvenient people who inhabited the territory. However, as of 1830, Chicago and St. Louis were about as far west as most Americans cared to venture.  

² Whitney Cross, quoted by Emerson Klees in Crucible of Ferment. 

³ Pratt’s life in the Mormon community was no bed of roses; his wife, Sarah, apparently caught the eye of Joseph Smith, who attempted to lure Sarah into his bed via his brand-new revelation of “plural marriages”. Rebuffed, Smith then spread the word that Sarah was having an affair with another member of the community (John C. Bennett), leading Orson Pratt to attempt suicide in 1842. He survived, although, in the long run, his marriage to Sarah did not.

⁴ Many of whom likely never read it, some of whom likely were unable to read it, and most of whom were likely attracted by the lifestyle of the community rather than by the pseudo-history so tediously detailed in the text.

Luckily, a photographer was on hand to capture the moment...