Joseph Smith: America's Hermetic Prophet

Part 7

How this strange hermetic religion evolved into today's Mormon church is one of the more interesting questions awaiting detailed study, particularly as the contours of Joseph Smith's vision become more sharply defined. I can here, however, give only a rough summary of what followed Smith's death.

Joseph established no clear order of prophetic succession, and in the chaotic period after his martyrdom several followers claimed his office and prophetic mantle. Brigham Young, long a loyal apostle to Smith, emerged as the natural organizational leader and was eventually proclaimed the new "prophet, seer and revelator"--a position he held until his death three decades later. Forced to abandon Nauvoo in the winter of 1846, Brigham Young led his people through their difficult flight to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and there organized the new Mormon society.

Young staunchly defended the teachings and rituals presented by Smith in Nauvoo, including the temple ceremonies and the doctrines relating to polygamy. Isolated in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, he hoped to realize Joseph's millennial dreams and establish Zion unhampered by a hostile, misunderstanding world. But it was not to be. With the full force of the United States government and a Victorian public morality marshaled against the Mormon church, in 1890 the practice of polygamy had to be publicly abandoned. After its defeat in that epochal battle, Mormonism slowly found accommodation with the world it had fled. In the process, many elements of Joseph's mystery religion were necessarily veil or attenuated--and by the late twentieth century, perhaps largely forgotten.

For students of religion, the Prophet Joseph Smith today remains a grand American enigma--too potent a force to be dismissed uncommented, and yet too complex for facile categorization. In the final analysis, I must agree with Bloom that "we do not know Joseph Smith, as he prophesied that even his own could never hope to know him. He requires strong poets, major novelist, accomplished dramatists to tell his history, and they have not yet come to him." But the tides may be shifting. While the Prophet still awaits his poets, historians are examining with new wonder this most extraordinary chapter in American religious history.