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Prophetic Authority
The Prophet of the Burned-Over District
By his death in 1844, Joseph Smith was the president of a well-organized priesthood and even a king within the Mormon kingdom of God. He claimed to possess religious authority that enabled him to build cities, create a Mormon society, and establish governance over thousands of Americans. At the root of his authority were the imposing words of a prophet that took shape on the scrawling pages of his Bible-like canon of Mormon scripture. Like others in the antebellum period, Smith had emerged from the chaotic clamor of sectarian strife, claiming to open the heavens and possess authority from God. Yet the importance of his charismatic experiences was not established through ecstatic camp meetings or public demonstrations, nor did it depend on the certainty of a closed biblical canon. Rather, Smith’s authority derived from his efforts to open the Christian canon and add new scripture. This inevitably placed him at the apex of a hierarchy of Mormon religious authority.
To explore the foundations of Mormon religious authority, this chapter will introduce the idea of a Mormon prophet and demonstrate how the production of the Book of Mormon established Smith’s claim to authority and how his ongoing revelation created a hospitable environment to maintain his prophetic authority hierarchically within his church. This will lay the foundational concepts for how Smith developed and maintained a hierarchical role while developing a democratic priesthood. It will also set the scene for how an inclusive populist priesthood could eventually embrace a hierarchical ecclesiology, as demonstrated by Kathleen Flake’s work. This chapter will begin to define what a Mormon prophet looks like and how Joseph Smith established his prophethood and authority through the charismatic practices of communing with the dead and producing modern revelation and ancient scripture. It will establish that this kind a charisma founds authority and creates a space in which prophetic authority can exist charismatically without the grounding of an institution.
Prophet of the Burned-Over District
During the first few years of his ministry in the late 1820s, the number of people who believed Joseph Smith was a prophet was limited to dozens instead of hundreds. Yet his religious authority rested on that prophetic identity and his ability to convince others of it. The fertile bed of Americans seeking refuge from sectarian squabbles and partisan conflict caused some to react positively to Smith’s unique claims to authority. He rose to power as a “voice from the dust,” a prophet restoring ancient order and speaking directly for God. He presented a confident sense of stability in a world of strife. His initial approach did not give poor men church authority or a democratic priestly order (these elements would arrive later); it offered a definitive, certain voice in an environment of competing voices.
Smith found authority within a visionary world. His prophetic mission began three years after his powerful theophany, known as his 1820 “First Vision,” in which he claimed to have seen Jesus Christ. This was a claim also made by the revivalist Charles Finney, who lived in Adams, New York, in 1821. Seeing Christ face-to-face was not unheard of in the Burned-over District. Revivalists questioned the Enlightenment preference for emotionless rationality as they expressed excitement for remarkable visionary experiences at revivals across New York State. Authors even began publishing their experiences for others, broadening the impact of the revivals. Joseph Rakestraw’s Extraordinary Instance of Divine Guidance (1814), for example, marked these kinds of visionary impulses, and Orson Pratt’s Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions (1840) described Joseph Smith’s visionary claims in the 1820s and early 1830s in a similar vein. Individuals like Finney saw these experiences as callings to preach or testify, whereas Smith understood them as events that developed his authority to act as a prophet and even deliver new scripture.
Visions of angels and even Christ did not create prophets out of other Christians and certainly did not lead to an open canon. Their visions were evidence for belief, packaged as signs of the restoration of Christ’s New Testament church, but Protestants did not see them as evidence of prophethood. Visions generally guided revivalists back to the text of the Bible rather than toward following a modern prophet. So what made Smith different? How did Smith convince others, if they too were having visions, that he was a prophet? When an open heaven was no longer a singular event, what shifted Smith into an exceptional religious space? The foundations of religious authority, formed by the relationship between religion and politics, had already allowed the public to hear the message of evangelicals and self-declared preachers. Yet the accepted religious boundaries of the nineteenth-century United States placed Smith’s claims well outside the standards of Christian orthodoxy.
The appeal to the authority of a prophet also appeared elsewhere in antebellum America. Jemima Wilkinson, Robert Matthews (Matthias), and Mother Ann Lee all represented a type of prophetic figure that emerged from the First and Second Great Awakenings, all of them basing their claims on a kind of messianic mysticism. If they did not directly teach that they were new embodiments of the Messiah, they did little to prevent others from claiming that about them. Their messages found an appreciative audience. As religion began to detach itself from civic authority after the Revolution, it was fueled by democratic zeal and shaped into a more independent kind of authority. Democratic religious groups like Methodists and Baptists grew in the same soil but favored different approaches in order to attract individuals to their congregations. Mistrust of politics and government, along with concern for an unknown future during the early republic, created an environment that refashioned religious authority. At the extreme end of the changes to religion were the prophets of the early nineteenth century, including Wilkinson and Matthews, who capitalized on this notion of being God’s single representative on earth, presenting themselves as a solution to the dilemma of competing Christian voices. Matthews, for example, claimed to speak for God when he emerged as a prophet in New York at the same time that Smith began his ministry. Matthews reduced the power and authority of the Bible by teaching his adherents to stop praying and reading the scriptures in exchange for listening to and following his voice.
In this context of visions and prophetic claims, Smith’s close friend and supporter William W. Phelps pondered how a prophet would obtain validation. He wrote, “If you start a church with a prophet in it, everybody will be against you, as they were against Ann Lee, Joanna Southcoate, and Jemima Wilkinson.” Smith was not the first to claim that he was a prophet, nor would he be the last. Because he came from a family with no firm tradition in any denomination, no sect or local group saw him as a member of their congregation, nor did they lend him their support. The lack of either hereditary or denominational support then raises the question: how did Joseph Smith reinforce his sense of his calling?
The most obvious difference between him and other prophets was the Book of Mormon and the open canon of Mormonism. Smith’s claim to be a prophet was not exclusive, but the way that he came to be known as a prophet was that he rooted his claim in the production of the Book of Mormon. Smith’s prophetic authority was intimately linked with his production of the Book of Mormon precisely because the narrative of that production—one that involved vision, revelation, purification, translation, and inspiration—witnessed a unique form of divine investiture that was formally recognized by Smith’s followers.
The Practices of a Prophet: Producing the Book of Mormon
To produce another Bible, even a “Gold Bible” from ancient America, made Smith an impostor to many, but to his followers, it made him a prophet. Smith’s claim to be a prophet was bolstered by supporting narratives about the recovery and translation of gold plates to produce the text of the Book of Mormon, including supposed interaction with an angel and the retrieval of an ancient record. The possession of gold plates in itself functioned as a supporting narrative for his claims. Smith did not simply act like a prophet: he used material implements to bind himself successfully to a perceived ancient world from which he produced an ancient text.
One can find Smith’s first claim to authority within a narrative about an ancient Book of Mormon prophet named Moroni, who visited Smith to offer him power and authority to bring forth a translation of the Book of Mormon. If the translated text were not persuasive enough to outsiders, Smith’s claim to have been visited by a long-dead character in the Book of Mormon, appearing as a resurrected being, reinforced the book’s authenticity—and his own prophetic importance. One of Smith’s earliest revelations explained that Moroni “inspired him from on high and gave unto him power.” Smith’s revelation states, “God visited [Joseph Smith] by an holy angel.” This angel gave Smith “commandments which inspired him from on high, and gave unto him power, by the means of which was before prepared that he should translate a book.” Smith described this power as the “gift and power of God” in the preface of the Book of Mormon.
From these records, it is clear that the angel intended to empower and authorize Smith, not simply inspire him to be good or faithful. In one of the earliest accounts describing Smith’s angelic visits, a local Palmyra newspaper, the Palmyra Freeman, described the exchange between Smith and the angel who transferred the gold plates into his possession. The anti-Masonic editor, Jonathan Hadley, had spoken directly to Smith in the summer of 1829 and given a rare contemporary reaction to Smith’s claims. He wrote that Smith “reported that he had been visited in a dream by the spirit of the Almighty [Moroni], and informed that in a certain hill in that town, was deposited this Golden Bible, containing an ancient record of divine nature and origin.” To Hadley, Smith’s claim that he retrieved an ancient record from an angel was preposterous and worth reporting to the public. Smith’s earliest claim to authority here invokes “the spirit of the Almighty,” who transferred the plates into his possession. The physical plates (whose material presence gestures toward notions of proof and logic so common to the Enlightenment) pointed toward the supernatural delivery and their “divine nature.” Hadley declared, “It was said that the leaves of the Bible were plates of gold about eight inches long, six wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, on which were engraved characters or hieroglyphics.” Hadley’s description of the material reality of the plates represents the way in which Smith cultivated his credibility: if the plates physically existed, then the angel transferred them into Smith’s possession, thus marking Smith as one empowered or authorized to receive such a record via divine direction.
The immaterial angelic visit became a physical reality within Smith’s story. In 1839 Joseph Smith described a far more elaborate exchange, in which he met with Moroni once every year for four years. In that later account, Smith emphasized the physical reality of the ancient prophet, now an angelic being with physical features: “His hands were naked and his arms also a little above the wrist. … His head and neck were also bare. I could discover that he had no other clothing on but this robe as it was open so that I could see in his bosom.” While the 1829 version had Moroni appearing to Smith only as a spirit in a dream, Smith’s 1839 account is enmeshed within an increasingly material reality. This contrasts with Finney, who had originally described his own vision as being “face to face” but later decided that the vision occurred only in “a mental state.” Smith insisted instead that an ancient prophet stood before him, the same prophet (later described in the Book of Mormon) who buried the ancient record more than fifteen hundred years earlier for him to uncover. Smith’s 1839 history explains that Moroni directed him to the spot where “under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates deposited in a stone box,” which also contained a sacred relic similar to the Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament.
The location of these events held significance. Many in the United States believed their country was a providential place, selected for divine purposes. Joseph Smith likewise believed that the New York landscape itself held an abundance of ancient artifacts that individuals could access in the soil. Some conjectured that Native American populations originated from ancient Israel, an idea disseminated by preachers from the earliest European explorers through the nineteenth century. Even as some in the educated classes began to challenge this theory, scholars at the American Philosophical Society eagerly compared Native American characters to various European languages, Egyptian, and even Hebrew. Smith added a potential physical reality to this idea, quite literally materializing it as he elaborated on the engrained belief in America. To pull an ancient Christian record from the ground would be exhilarating in the sense that it supported a belief already generally established among the US populace.
Like a royal coronation, the plates and the Urim and Thummim crowned Smith as a religious leader. Smith’s claim to be a prophet, prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon, rested firmly on the idea that an ancient American prophet had visited him to deliver physical artifacts buried by an exterminated people. As Hadley wrote in 1829, Smith claimed that the plates were “divine in nature and origin,” and by such investiture, God sanctioned Smith, “ordained” by way of the physical exchange that occurred between him and the angel God sent. Smith continued to connect his practical world of religious objects to the miraculous metaphysical world of religion. The four years he spent meeting with the angel Moroni in order to prepare to retrieve the plates overlapped with his nocturnal money-digging pursuits, assisted by his seer stones, and Smith drew on these experiences in order to frame and formulate his t...
