Why were the Latter-day Saints persecuted so harshly?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

In 19^th Century America, Catholic immigrants were subjected to shameful riots, but nothing compares with the persecution against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“LDS”). Mobs and some government officials, egged on by frontier newspapers, flagrantly violated the Saints’ religious freedom guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Those odious depredations are among major themes in an important biography of the church’s founder released this week: “Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet” (Yale University Press) by historian John G. Turner of George Mason University.

Heavy oppression could not overcome Smith’s remarkable spiritual command that inspired devotees to embrace his unique messages and organization. Starting with six members in 1830, the LDS church grew steadily despite outside pressures and internal dissent, defections, excommunications and restorations among the Prophet’s chosen aides. His church was to become the most successful of the countless new faiths that originated in America.

Hostile Protestants

The religious prejudice roused against exotic LDS doctrines and practices occurred in a heavily Protestant, Bible-believing culture. Theology aside, some disliked Smith’s opposition to slavery, distrusted the clannish Saints, or resented their political influence. By 1844, the Prophet’s advocacy of polygamy, thoroughly repellent to Americans’ moral sensibility, became the pivotal problem and led to assassination of the founding Prophet.

Early on, the Saints felt unwelcome in upstate New York and gathered at Kirtland, Ohio, where vigilantes soon assaulted, tarred and feathered the Prophet. The Ohio location later became untenable amid muddled church finances when Smith operated a bank without the required state license that issued currency which became worthless. He had to flee creditors and the authorities. Turner says Ohio “ecclesiastical chaos” also resulted from reports of Smith’s relationship with his housemaid, which anticipated his polygamy proclamation.

Next, the Saints regrouped in western Missouri, where Smith taught that Adam and Eve once dwelled and Jesus Christ would return to reign, with the millennial Temple located in Independence. As the citizenry turned antagonistic, the Saints armed for defense and escalated their rhetoric. When mutual violence erupted, the governor finally expelled the Saints and Smith was hit with the most dangerous of his 21 criminal indictments, for supposed treason.

By 1839, most Saints gathered in an Illinois riverfront town renamed Nauvoo. Smith presided as mayor of a virtual theocratic city-state and commanded a sizable militia for defense that roused fears. In 1844, Smith became an independent candidate for U.S. president and was secretly proclaimed the cosmic “king” by his new, clandestine political arm, the Council of Fifty.

Demolishing a Printing Press

In those same months, more LDS followers learned about Smith’s polygamy teaching and practice. Dissenters broke away and printed an anti-polygamy newspaper whose presses were demolished upon order of Mayor Smith. After he was arrested, organized vigilantes stormed the jail where he was held and murdered him. No-one was ever punished for the crime. The harried Saints then undertook their celebrated trek to refuge in what became Salt Lake City, Utah.

Smith’s exclusivist claims provoked religious hostility. LDS scripture recounts his youthful confusion about competing Protestant churches whece in 1820 he experienced a visitation by two “personages,” God and Jesus Christ. The Savior commanded Smith to shun existing churches because “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight.” Instead, Smith was commissioned to lead the latter-day restoration of true Christianity, which had disappeared after Jesus’ disciples passed away.

Subsequent visitations directed Smith to dig up metal plates buried near Palmyra, New York, said to depict Jews who traveled from the Holy Land to become Native Americans and were visited by the risen Jesus. Smith dictated this Book of Mormon to scribes while staring into a hat. Official witnesses testified that they handled or had visions of the plates before an angel took them way. Another divine revelation established the male priesthood that in LDS doctrine exercises exclusive authority to act on God’s behalf.

Smith’s innovations included secret temple endowment rituals, and proxy baptisms on behalf of persons who died before the true Gospel was restored. The Prophet added to the Bible 138 revelations and five texts, including ancient Egyptian funeral scrolls he conveyed as memoirs from Abraham. Smith also  rewrote 51 of the Bible’s 66 books, but his church uses only the conventional King James Version.

Plural Gods

Smith’s unusual beliefs contained in LDS scripture include plural gods, that faithful LDS believers become “gods” in heaven, and that God the Father “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” Smith’s final sermon (not part of scripture) stated that “God himself … is a man like unto one of yourselves.” Smith believed humans are spirit children sired by both the heavenly Father and the Mother, though this was not defined doctrine till 1909.

As Turner summarizes Smith’s career, “Whether it was religion, marriage, or politics, he burst through the conventions of his time,” The biographer’s attitude is that of a highly-informed outsider free to criticize or scratch his head while striving to be fair-minded. His research benefited from the online 27-volume “Joseph Smith Papers” completed in 2023 by the church history department.

A further word about polygamy. Religion News Service reported last month that “many” LDS members still wonder whether Smith really practiced what the church calls “plural marriage.” Yet LDS scripture records that God revealed this commandment to Smith in 1831, which he formalized in 1843. The church’s own 2021 booklet “Let’s Talk About Polygamy” admits “most scholars” estimate that Smith married “between 30 and 40 women.”

The new biography lists “more than 30 wives” and tells the stories of 27. They included wives already married to other men, a mother-daughter pair, and two as young as 14. The biographer concludes that some plural marriages were clearly sexual and others possibly platonic and charitable. Smith sometimes employed spiritual coercion to gain a wife and had to deceive his loyal first wife Emma, many devoted followers, and the American public. Smith’s successor Brigham Young openly proclaimed the polygamy teaching in 1852, but it was suspended in 1890 when federal law threatened the church’s very existence.

Today, Smith’s church counts 6.9 million U.S. members and 17.5 million worldwide, with 316 temples operating and another 66 planned. The Book of Mormon is said to be the most widely-distributed writing ever to originate in America. Currently, 74,127 young short-term missionary volunteers are  proclaiming Smith’s beliefs worldwide. And church real estate holdings and liquid assets defy belief.

Notes:

The most influential prior biographies have been “No Man Knows My History” (1945) by skeptical LDS defector Fawn Brodie, and the contrasting “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling” (2005) by an LDS believer, Columbia University historian Richard Bushman. The church has commissioned a future official biography to be titled “Joseph the Prophet.”

Style: This article uses “LDS” and “Saints” because the church rejected its familiar “Mormon” nickname in 2018.

The Religion Guy is the co-author of “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise,” and, like Turner, a Protestant who in candor does not himself embrace LDS revelations.