Under the Banner of Heaven (16 page)

Charisma is a quality that’s hard to define and even harder to explain, but Joseph was flush with it. The term is derived from the Greek
kharis,
meaning “graced” or “a special gift of God,” and the Latin word
charhms,
defined as “gift of the holy spirit.” Its meaning has evolved through the centuries and is now seldom associated with sanctity, but Joseph’s brand of charisma seems to have been true to the original definition. He was imbued with that exceedingly rare magnetism possessed by history’s most celebrated religious leaders—an extraordinary spiritual power that always seems to be wrapped in both great mystery and great danger. More than a century and a half after his death, Joseph’s personal incandescence has lost little of its intensity. One can still see it blazing in the eyes of his Saints.

In any religion there is a tendency for the devout to reinvent their founding prophet as an idealized deity, obscuring and protecting him behind an impenetrable armor of myth. Mormons are certainly no different from the faithful of other sects in this regard, and they have done their best to airbrush every blemish from the portraits of Joseph they display to the world. But unlike Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, Joseph was a modern prophet who lived in the brightly lit age of the affidavit and the printing press. Because many who felt the pull of his immense charm left a written record of their observations, his imperfect humanity has not been so readily erased from the historical record.

The fact that he remains accessible to us as a real person, warts and all, makes it easier to feel empathy for Joseph, and sympathy. It also allows fascinating insights into what makes a religious genius tick.* According to Fawn Brodie, Joseph’s biographer, the prophet had an arresting physical presence:

He was big, powerful, and by ordinary standards very handsome, except for his nose, which was aquiline and prominent. His large blue eyes were fringed by fantastically long lashes which made his gaze seem veiled and slightly mysterious… When he was speaking with intense feeling the blood drained from his face, leaving a frightening, almost luminous pallor… He was no ordinary man.

*“Religious genius” is a wonderfully apt characterization that originated with William James, who introduced it, generically, in the first of the lectures collected in
Varieties of Religious Experience.
It was borrowed by Harold Bloom some ninety years later, in his book
The American Religion,
as the perfect way to describe Joseph Smith.

When Joseph addressed a crowd, he had a knack for making each individual feel as though he or she were being spoken to personally by the prophet. He seemed to sense each Saint’s spiritual needs—the entire congregation’s innermost hopes and pains and hungers—and then deliver a sermon that resonated in perfect pitch with every person’s private longing. Here is how Juanita Leavitt Brooks, an eminent Mormon historian, described the first time a convert named John D. Lee heard the prophet preach in Missouri in 1838*:

*Lee would become infamous in 1857, after the Saints had emigrated to Utah, for his role in the Mountain Meadows massacre.

Fawn Brodie was struck by accounts of Joseph’s “magnificent self-assurance”:

Lee had come prepared to be impressed, but the reality exceeded his expectations. He thought Joseph Smith carried an air of majesty that made him seem taller than his six feet as he faced the audience, and more handsome and commanding than an ordinary man. Attracting every eye and holding every heart by the sheer magnetism of his personality, he played upon the congregation as though it were a musical instrument responsive to his slightest touch.

Increased success had served to intensify his boldness and exuberance. The zest for living that he radiated never failed to inspire his own people with a sense of the richness of life. They followed him slavishly and devotedly, if only to warm themselves in the glow of his presence.

They built for him, preached for him, and made unbelievable sacrifices to carry out his orders, not only because they were convinced that he was God’s prophet but also because they loved him as a man. They were as elated when he won a wrestling match as they were awed when he dictated a new revelation. They retold tales of his generosity and tenderness, marveling that he fed so many of the poor in Nauvoo at his table without stint, and that he entertained friend and enemy alike. He was a genial host, warmhearted and friendly to all comers, and fiercely loyal to his friends.

Arguing that the popularity of the Mormon Church was primarily a function of Joseph’s singular charisma, Brodie insists that
The Book of Mormon
“lives today because of the prophet, not he because of the book.” Perhaps. But the allure of the new theology he introduced should not be discounted. Joseph’s inspired reworking of the traditional Christian narrative had much to do with his religion’s rapid growth.

To believers, of course, Mormon doctrine is the incontrovertible word of God. That word was nevertheless delivered via a very human instrument—Joseph Smith—who possessed uncanny theological instincts. Mormonism appeared in the right place, at the right time, to exploit a ripe niche that had opened in the nation’s ever-shifting spiritual ecology. Many Americans were dissatisfied with the calcified religions of the Old World. Joseph preached a fresh message that was exactly what a great number of people were eager to hear. He took measure of the public’s collective yearning and intuitively shaped his ideas to fit the precise dimensions of that inchoate desire.

Joseph had convincing answers to the thorniest existential questions—answers that were both explicit and comforting. He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic. Calvinists taught that mankind was by nature evil, and was watched over by a wrathful God bent on making humans atone for Adam’s original sin. They warned that the fires of hell were real. Suffering, they preached, was good for you.

In Joseph’s more optimistic cosmology, God’s chosen people—the Mormons—were inherently virtuous (albeit surrounded by wickedness) and didn’t need to atone for anything. Making money was a righteous pursuit: the Lord smiled on the rich, as well as those who aspired to become rich. And anyone who elected to obey church authorities, receive the testimony of Jesus, and follow a few simple rules could work his way up the ladder until, in the afterlife, he became a full-fledged god—the ruler of his very own world. “Joseph was no hair-shirt prophet,” Fawn Brodie observed.

He believed in the good life, with a moderate self-indulgence in food and drink, occasional sport, and good entertainment. And that he succeeded in enjoying himself to the hilt detracted not at all from the semi-deification with which his own people enshrouded him. Any protests of impropriety dissolved before his personal charm. “Man is that he might have joy” had been one of his first significant pronouncements in the
Book of Mormon,
and from that belief he had never deviated. He was gregarious, expansive, and genuinely fond of people. And it is no accident that his theology in the end discarded all traces of Calvinism and became an ingenious blend of supernaturalism and materialism, which promised in heaven a continuation of all earthly pleasures—work, wealth, sex, and power.

Joseph’s budding religion was both a reflection of the era’s Jacksonian ideals and a reactionary retreat from them. On the one hand, Joseph was a champion of the common man and a thorn in the side of the ruling elite. But on the other, he was deeply suspicious of the confusing babble of ideas sweeping the country, and was made nervous by the fickleness of democratic governance. His church was an attempt to erect a wall against modernity’s abundance of freedom, its unbridled celebration of the individual. Mormonism’s strictures and soothing assurances—its veneration
of order
—beckoned as a refuge from the complexity and manifold uncertainties of nineteenth-century America.

Joseph’s fresh take on Christianity excited his followers. Converts were energized by his groundbreaking doctrines—and the innovations didn’t stop: Mormons could watch their church taking form before their very eyes, in all sorts of novel and fantastic ways. By the mid-1840s, when Nauvoo was in full flower, Joseph had received 133 divine commandments that were weighty enough to be recorded for eternity in
The Doctrine and Covenants,
reflecting a significant evolution in Mormon theology. In several important regards, the religion practiced in Nauvoo was quite different from the religion practiced in Palmyra when the church was initially incorporated. And none of these changes had greater repercussions than the commandment Joseph recorded on July 12, 1843—canonized in
D&C
as Section 132—which very nearly shattered the church, brought about Joseph’s death at the hands of a lynch mob, and has been reverberating through American society ever since. It was in
D&C
132 that God revealed the “new and everlasting covenant” of plural marriage, a custom more commonly known to non-Mormons as polygamy.

ELEVEN

THE PRINCIPLE

It was in Kirtland… that Joseph began to tamper delicately with one of the most basic mores in Occidental society. He looked upon that society with singular detachment that can come only to a man satisfied with his own ultimate authority and possessed by a longing to remold the world closer to his heart’s desire. Nothing was so sacred that it could not be recast into a new utility or a new beauty.

Monogamy seemed to him
—
as it has seemed to many men who have not ceased to love their wives, but who have grown weary of connubial exclusiveness
—
an intolerably circumscribed way of life. “Whenever I see a pretty woman,” he once said to a friend, “I have to pray for grace.” But Joseph was no careless libertine who could be content with clandestine mistresses. There was too much of the Puritan in him, and he could not rest until he had redefined the nature of sin and erected a stupendous theological edifice to support his new theories on marriage.

Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History

In the early 1980s, when Dan Lafferty came across a copy of
The Peace Maker
in the library of Brigham Young University, he quickly became convinced that it had been written by Joseph Smith, using the pen name of Udney Hay Jacob. The booklet had been printed in Nauvoo in 1842, by the prophet’s own press. But Dan Lafferty is probably wrong about its authorship. Udney Hay Jacob was no apparition; his was not a nom de plume. He actually existed, and most scholars believe that Jacob, not Joseph Smith, wrote
The Peace Maker.
But most of those same scholars also acknowledge that the treatise would never have been published by the church printing office, with Joseph’s name on the title page, had the prophet not wholly endorsed it. If he wasn’t the author of
The Peace Maker,
Joseph was almost certainly responsible for the booklet’s conception and publication.

Joseph had been considering polygamy, and its place in the cosmological order, at least since the church was founded, but he was reluctant to broach this delicate subject with his Saints, lest they recoil in shock. By the time the Mormons were established in Nauvoo, he thought they might finally be ready to “receive the principle,” and he seems to have published
The Peace Maker
as a trial balloon. According to John D. Lee, who was living in Nauvoo when the booklet appeared, “Joseph, the Prophet, set a man by the name Sidney Hay Jacobs [sic}, to select from the Old Bible such scriptures as pertained to polygamy, or celestial marriage; and to write it in pamphlet form, and to advocate that doctrine. This he did as a feeler among the people, to pave the way for celestial marriage.”*

*“Celestial marriage,” “spiritual wifery,” and “plural marriage” are among the terms Joseph Smith coined as euphemisms for polygamy.

Unfortunately, the feeler did not produce the desired response.
The Peace Maker
created an uproar, prompting Joseph to claim, disingenuously, that it had been published “without my knowledge,” adding, “Had I been apprised of it, I should not have printed it.” The outcry over the booklet forced the prophet to issue strong public denunciations of polygamy, which was awkward because he had, in fact, been secretly engaging in spiritual wifery at least since 1833, and there is compelling circumstantial evidence that he began the practice even earlier.

One of the first women rumored to have been intimate with Joseph outside his marriage to Emma was Marinda Nancy Johnson, whom he met in 1831, shortly after the Saints moved from Palmyra to Kirtland, Ohio. Marinda’s mother, who suffered from chronic rheumatism that had paralyzed one of her arms, was among the crowds of curious Ohioans who came to see the Mormon Prophet with their own eyes. Accompanying the ailing woman was her husband, Benjamin, and a skeptical Methodist preacher who demanded of Joseph, “Here is Mrs. Johnson with a lame arm; has God given any power to men now on earth to cure her?”

Taking hold of Mrs. Johnson’s incapacitated hand, Joseph declared, “Woman, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command thee to be whole!”

According to a credible witness, “Mrs. Johnson at once lifted [her arm] up with ease.” Both Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were so moved by this miracle that they converted on the spot to Mormonism and invited the prophet to meet their fifteen children, including fifteen-year-old Marinda.

When she learned that her parents had come under the sway of Joseph Smith, Marinda later told a journalist, she initially felt “indignation and shame” that they had been duped by such a “ridiculous fake.” But that was before she met Joseph herself, and was exposed to the direct radiance of his charm. Later, upon encountering him for the first time, she reported, the prophet looked her full in the eye. With the greatest feeling of shame ever experienced, she felt her very soul laid bare before this man as she realized her thoughts concerning him. He smiled and her anger melted as snow before the sunshine. She knew he was what he claimed to be and never doubted him thereafter.