My Mormon Obsession

Part Three

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the third part of my series on Mormonism. This is very far from orthodox Mormon history — to be clear, I’m a complete outsider to the faith — and is based on a reading of Mormonism as fundamentally an expression of the creative principle. Part One covered the story of Joseph Smith up to his arrival in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1839. Part Two addresses the deepening of Joseph Smith’s theology during his time in Nauvoo — alongside his enthusiastic adoption of the spiritual wife doctrine. Part Three — the final part — covers the last years of the Saints in Nauvoo.

Best,

Sam

MY MORMON OBSESSION

Joseph Smith, in his pursuit of personal fulfillment, had a peculiar problem. The vast majority of the Saints were with him on terms that diverged widely from where his beliefs had taken him to. The Saints were interested in The Book of Mormon and in the Church’s continuity with mainstream Christianity. But Smith was getting to something close to paganism, hedonism, and the pure creative spirit — and there was no way that he could entirely lift the veil on the deeper meaning of the Church without alienating his constituency. But, as Smith remarked around this time, “Deep water is what I am wont to swim in, it has become second nature to me,” and it all came together for him in a sermon that is a masterpiece both of theology and of memoir-writing.

Addressing the Saints for the funeral of an elder named King Follett, Smith, in 1844, let the Saints in to what he called “the great secret.” It is, he said, that “if you were to see God today, you would see him like a man in form — like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man.”

And with that bit of inspired nonsense, everything in Smith’s somewhat scattershot theology cohered. There was his interest in the plurality of Gods — based on his close reading of the language of the Old Testament. There was his interest in astronomy — the focus of the Kirtland period — and the idea that the virtuous would be rewarded with their own planet. There was his sense of the porous membrane between this world and the higher world — that one is not in opposition to the other, as in traditional Christian teaching, but is its fulfillment. There was the idea of the easy rapport between supernatural and human beings, which had always characterized Smith’s revelations. And there was his interest in perfectibility — in the ever-unfolding progress of human beings until they reach the station of absolute divinity, and which is achieved, presumably, above all through the creativity and largeness of spirit that Smith had so amply demonstrated throughout his career. “You have got to learn to be gods yourselves, the same as all gods have done before you, by going from one small degree to another, from exaltation to exaltation,” Smith said.

Recently discovered (alleged) daguerrotype of Joseph Smith

Smith’s relief is palpable at finally putting it all together. In the surviving extracts of the King Follett Sermon, he crowed, “This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principle of eternal life and so can you.”

And then, in what might as well have been his final valediction for the Saints, he offered up this enigmatic piece of autobiography:

You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it; I shall never undertake it. I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history. If had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself.

In other words, the miracle was not the Angel Moroni visiting Smith and his witnesses. It was not gold plates or magical spectacles emerging from a hill in upstate New York. It was the unfolding of Smith’s own life, and of the community that had followed him — and the sense of pure creation that had started out as basically a boy’s treasure hunt and then led to a young man’s rather turgid novel and then to an honest-to-god church and then to the scenes of heroism and near-martyrdom in Missouri and then to the cusp of a theocratic empire in Nauvoo with thousands upon thousands of people united entirely behind Smith and breathing life into his vision beyond even what he could have imagined.

***

This was April, 1844. Smith would be dead two months later. Even as Smith was generating his new, kaleidoscopic religion, the forces of propriety were working towards his downfall.

In 1842, after John C. Bennett’s departure, Smith had taken in a new number two — and he was, as Fawn Brodie writes, “as steadfast and incorruptible as Bennett had been treacherous and dissolute.” And that made him, actually, much more dangerous to Smith. We are now in the Jesus Christ Superstar part of Mormon history, and the Mormon Judas was equally a reputable person — balanced, practical, the “best loved of all the disciples.”

Law was from Toronto. He had been a doctor and mill owner. In 1836 he and his wife Jane were converted during a a Mormon mission to Canada. In 1839, they traveled to Nauvoo, together with Law’s brother Wilson. Smith soon elevated him to a leadership position and in due course made him his Second Counselor — although Law’s domain, very clearly, was limited to the respectable side of Nauvoo and away from the real heart of Smith’s power. “We were kept in the dark as long as possible and held up before the public as examples of the Mormon people,” Law recalled.

Law gradually became aware of Smith’s loose money-dealings and unorthodox theology, but it was the spiritual marriage revelation — passed around in zamizdat form — that drove him towards apostasy in early 1844. “I showed it to my wife. She and I were just turned upside down by it; we did not know what to do,” Law said in an interview towards the end of his life.

William Law in old age

But, as befits a story like this, it seems that the real issue was a love triangle. Jane Law was “amiable and handsome” and popular within Nauvoo. According to Joseph H. Jackson, Smith admitted to him that he had tried for two months, “using every argument in his power,” to win Jane Law for a spiritual wife. Wearing a veil, she would testify to a group of apostates who had formed on the margins of Nauvoo that Smith had made “indecent and wicked proposals to her.” In old age, after she had died, William Law recalled, “A truer, purer, more faithful wife never lived.” And he described her fury after the Laws had finally left Nauvoo — with Jane burning her copy of the Book of Mormon and declaring that no Mormon work could “find a place in her house.”

But it seems also that that may not be all to the story. Alexander Neibaur, one of Joseph Smith’s secretaries, wrote that, in the thick of the drama in Nauvoo, she beckoned to Smith when he was walking past her, threw her arms around him, and asked to be sealed to him.

Meanwhile, just to complete the flavor of a Turkish soap opera, Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife, who was undergoing her own turmoil over the spiritual marriage doctrine, for a time acceded to it so long as she could be married to — of all people in the world — William Law.

Law may well never have known of Emma’s proposal, and Neibaur’s account of Jane’s proposal to Joseph is not necessarily to be trusted, but the Laws’ departure from the Church in 1844 went beyond the usual disillusionment of apostates and had a more personal and vengeful streak to it. As Fawn Brodie wrote, William Law had “courage, tenacity, and a strange, misguided idealism.”

***

If Smith seemed to be at the height of his power in early 1844, there were nonetheless a number of clouds on the horizon. Somewhat like how Osho, in the midst of establishing his spiritual commune at Rajneeshpuram, had to deal with a very annoying summons from the INS, Smith, while creating his theocratic empire, was confronted with a warrant for his arrest renewing the old case from Missouri. In 1843, the law struck. A group of sheriffs— whom Joseph H. Jackson claimed to have been working for the entire time — arrested Smith while outside of Nauvoo on a preaching tour. But Smith, held during transit in a hotel in Dixon, Illinois, spoke out the second-floor window and drew a crowd. Those gathered good-naturedly called for a sermon on marriage, which Smith duly obliged, but, more importantly, word went out of Smith’s false imprisonment. A group raced to the prophet’s rescue. Meanwhile, Smith got ahold of Cyrus Walker, the leader of the Whig Party, who agreed to represent Smith and insisted on having him tried in Nauvoo. The sheriffs assumed that they would be torn apart in the Mormon city, but instead they were the witnesses to a startling scene: the entire city turning out to welcome the return of their prophet and the men weeping with thankfulness. Smith, with his usual good sense of humor, insisted on putting the sheriffs in the place of honor in the feast thrown for him.

With that, Missouri appeared to be defanged. Smith dedicated the spring of 1844 to his campaign for the presidency — running on, of all the interesting things, an abolitionist platform. (His proposal was to reimburse slaveholders with profits from the sale of public lands.) The campaign, not so surprisingly, went nowhere. John D. Lee, one of the Mormon faithful said that he would a “thousand times rather have been shut up in jail” than have gone canvassing for Smith for president. But the far greater trouble was from the animus that Smith had, by this time, stirred up in Illinois and from the apostates’ defection. In April 1844, the apostates — led by William Law and including, interestingly, Joseph H. Jackson — held a series of meetings within Nauvoo in which they fully revealed to one another the doctrine of celestial marriage and the perfidies of the Mormon leadership and attempted to form a rival church holding to what they held to be the true teachings of Mormonism, untouched by polygamy or plural gods. In June, they launched a newspaper, The Nauvoo Expositor.

The Expositor would have only a single issue. It was surprisingly tame, but its lead article telling the story of a “typical English girl” arriving in Nauvoo made clear the sort of sexual advances that could be expected for a new convert from the Mormon inner circle. Smith promptly ordered the newspaper’s press destroyed and all copies burned.

Nauvoo Expositor building

This brought out the fury of Illinois — both at Smith’s trammeling of the separation of church and state and at his desecration of the free press. The Hancock County court issued a warrant for his arrest and Smith, together with his brother Hyrum, fled across the Mississippi to a farmhouse in Iowa. A mob appeared to be forming to attack Nauvoo, and, just as he had in Missouri, Smith decided to surrender himself rather than spark a war. It was Hyrum —always the more hot-blooded of the two — who first made the suggestion, believing that by placing trust in God they would not be harmed. In their farmhouse in Iowa, Smith stared a long time at the fire in front of them and said, “If you go back I will go with you but we shall be butchered.”

***

This now is the Mormon Calvary, and it comes fully equipped with a Pontius Pilate in the figure of the milquetoast Illinois governor Thomas Ford. For several hours on June 26, Ford conducted an interview with Joseph Smith in his cell in Carthage. As Fawn Brodie put it, “They argued back and forth, testing each other’s sincerity and strength” — disputing above all what Ford took to be Smith’s challenge to the Constitution. Then Ford insisted upon traveling alone to Nauvoo to try to calm the Saints, and, in the meantime, disbanded the gathered non-Mormon militias. But, as soon as Ford had left, the militias marched out of town and then promptly turned around to Carthage jailhouse.

Governor Thomas Ford

A crowd of militiamen, with their faces painted black, gathered in the yard below. A group rushed the door. Hyrum was shot immediately. Joseph emptied his pistol into the crowd and then raced to the balcony and shouted “Oh Lord My God” at which point he was shot dead and tumbled into the yard below — a beautifully pious end until you realize that he was almost certainly interrupted in the middle of shouting the Masonic (!) cry of distress, “Oh lord my god, is there no help for the widow’s son?”

Almost as soon as he fell, there was a flash of lighting and the mob dispersed. A bullet had hit the wristwatch of John Taylor, who was visiting the Prophet, and froze the moment of his death at 5:16pm.

***

With Smith’s death begins the fifth and most consequent phase of Mormon history — the emigration to Utah. The Saints, a month after Smith’s death, held a gathering in which the early convert Sidney Rigdon was expected to assume the succession of the Church. But Rigdon, who was basically a blowhard, gave a long, meandering speech in which he spoke of tweaking the nose of Queen Victoria. Then, Brigham Young, who was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles but not particularly close to Smith, spoke — and, in the memory of the Saints, he seemed to transfigure into Joseph Smith.

Not surprisingly, though, the succession struggle continued. Rigdon would lead a group to Pittsburgh. Emma Smith would try to build a church around her 11-year-old son Joseph Smith III, which would eventually migrate to Independence, Missouri. A Joseph Smith-esque character, James Jesse Strang, claimed the leadership of the Church based both on an ordination from an angel at the moment of Smith’s death and a peculiar-and-never-completely-debunked letter written to him by Smith — and, in true Smith-like fashion, he crowned himself ‘king of the kingdom of God’ and established his reign on Beaver Island, Michigan. But the majority of the Saints followed Young and his calm, professional leadership.

Brigham Young c.1850

Young quickly recognized that a continued stay in Nauvoo was impossible. He organized the Saints and began the migration west in 1846. A fire and then a tornado would destroy the painstakingly-built temple, and Nauvoo would largely be cleared of its Mormon population by the end of the decade. From here, Mormon history takes on a very different character. There’s the flinty personality of Young. There’s the hardiness of the Mormons on the Western migration. The quiet dignity of the moment when, in 1847, the Saints reached the barren Great Salt Lake, and Young said, “It is enough. This is the right place.”

Polygamy would be openly practiced in Utah for the next half-century, but the Mormons would never again have the carefree, insouciant, endlessly creative spirit of Smith. Gradually, some of the rough edges would be taken off. The Mormons, in 1890, exchanged polygamy for statehood. The community became what it is now — a byword for sobriety, industry, community-mindedness, but, in style and politics, almost indistinguishable from the conservative Republican “moral majority.” The theology would emphasize its Christian roots, together with carefully-curated selections from Smith’s life. What would be missing was the spirit of where Smith got to in the Nauvoo phase — completely free, completely kaleidoscopic, with everything in his life answerable only to the creative principle.