As many others were, I was shocked and deeply saddened to learn (in my case, on Sunday evening) of the sudden and unexpected death of a young, talented defender of the Restoration: “In Memoriam: Sarah Allen.” This is a grievous loss, on every level and from every mortal perspective.
Flying earlier today from Salt Lake City to St. Louis, I unexpectedly found myself seated next to John Thompson of Scripture Central, who was headed out with his sister for a family matter. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with him, which lasted for the entire duration of the flight. Dr. Thompson has just launched an interesting new podcast, Heaven’s Code: Temples and Texts.
I’m on the western shore of the Mississippi River right now with Camrey Bagley Fox (who portrayed Emma Smith in Witnesses and Six Days in August) and John Donovan Wilson (who played Brigham Young in Six Days in August), as well as with Mark Goodman and James Jordan and Russ Richins (who make up Red Brick Film Works). We will be working in Nauvoo, Illinois, again this week on our imminently forthcoming series of mini-documentaries, Becoming Brigham. It will launch two weeks from today, on Monday, 26 January.
I closed my Sunday blog entry (“Some thoughts on the character of Joseph Smith”) with a variation of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” from Mere Christianity. (For a few of my thoughts on his original trilemma, see my 19 January 2023 column in Meridian Magazine: “Arguing for the Divinity of Jesus.”) Here is what I wrote:
This strikes me as quite significant, since the three basic options for explaining Joseph Smith seem to be, using the appropriate technical terminology, as follows:
- He was lying.
- He was nuts.
- He was telling the truth.
But option 1 appears to be incompatible with the historical evidence and option 2 has no real evidence to support it. Now what?
Now, is this too simple? Yes. Of course it is. Does it lack the proper nuancing? Yes, it obviously does. I use the trilemma as a heuristic device. By oversimplifying, I hope to clarify. It’s rather like looking at a map in lieu of an aerial photograph — even though, as the late University of Chicago historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith liked to point out, “map is not territory.” (For another approach to this topic, still not fully fleshed-out or nuanced but coming from a somewhat different angle, see my 2016 FAIR presentation, “The Logic Tree of Life, or, Why I Can’t Manage to Disbelieve.”)
So I will expand just a bit on what I said, in the first of what may turn out to be several “footnotes” to the passage cited above:
With Option 1 (“He was lying”), I was referring to his sincerity in his fundamental claims. I was not claiming that he never, ever, said anything that wasn’t true or that he never told a lie. There is probably no living person who has never told a lie of one sort or another. And even good people sometimes lie, sometimes with very good reason. “Does this dress make me look fat?” “Don’t you think that my boyfriend is handsome?” “How do you like the meal?” Sometimes, the appropriate answer is not the bluntly honest one. When visiting a gravely ill person, or attempting to comfort a seriously wounded person, the best comment won’t often be “You look absolutely terrible, Christine.” Sometimes it will be “You’re looking better” or “You’re going to be alright.” In a case where a person who has been gravely injured in an accident emerges precariously from a coma and asks about his wife and children, it might not be optimal to respond immediately “Oh, they all died!” If he is asked whether the D-Day invasion will occur on the beaches at Normandy on 6 June 1944, General Eisenhower’s best answer might not be “Why, yes! How clever of you to figure it out!” If the Gestapo asks whether you’re hiding Jews in the attic, responding that, “Yes, there’s a family of five up there, just take the stairs to your right” may not represent the moral ideal.
In order to illustrate Joseph Smith’s alleged dishonesty, some critics will point to his claims regarding the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham and similar matters. But that’s to beg the question. The truth and authenticity of his prophetic claims are precisely what is at issue.
Others, more seriously, will point to Joseph’s denials that he was practicing plural marriage when, in fact, he was. In those cases, he does indeed seem to have been prevaricating or obfuscating, rather in the same way that the patriarch Abraham (“the friend of God,” “the father of the faithful”) does in Genesis 12 and Genesis 20 when he disguises his actual relationship with his wife, Sarai or Sarah, from, respectively, Pharaoh in Egypt and Abimelek, the king of Gerar. (For an interesting discussion of the morality of the case of Abraham, see Thomas W. Mackay, “Abraham in Egypt: A Collation of Evidence for the Case of the Missing Wife,” BYU Studies Quarterly 10/4 [1970]: 429-451.)
Even if one takes the worst possible view of Joseph Smith’s behavior in the matter of early Latter-day Saint plural marriage — a practice that obviously put him and his church and community at potentially very grave risk — I think it still completely reasonable to argue that he held his religious views with entire sincerity. And, in fact, this is precisely what, in my judgment, the materials published in Dean Jessee’s two-volume edition of The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith and, subsequently, in the Joseph Smith Papers project do show. Joseph seems to have really believed.
For an illustrative example of what has emerged from recent historical work on Joseph Smith’s legal papers, see Gordon Madsen, “Joseph Smith as Guardian: The Lawrence Estate Case,” Journal of Mormon History 36/3 (2010): 172–211, which is also available online in slightly shorter form as Gordon A. Madsen, “Serving as Guardian under the Lawrence Estate, 1842–1844,” in Gordon A. Madsen, Jeffrey N. Walker, and John W. Welch, eds., Sustaining the Law: Joseph Smith’s Legal Encounters (Provo: BYU Studies, 2015), 329-356. The record appears to show, in this case as in others, that he acted with integrity.
Posted from Fort Madison, Iowa
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