A Note on Joseph Smith’s First Vision and Its Import in the Shaping of Early Mormonism

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Some years ago Sidney E. Mead, then professor of American church history at the University of Chicago, argued that the two live movements of the 18th century which shaped American Christianity were pietism and rationalism.[1] By pietism he meant that religious fervor and enthusiasm which were passionately promoted by the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, whose advocates generally took the position that religion is essentially rooted in religious affections or, as they put it, the heart. The pietists maintained that the convictions which one thus feels are the best guide to ultimate religious truth. Pietists, Mead argued, cared much more for the heart than the head. Like John Wesley, it was more important to them that one’s feelings toward Christ and the church were affirmative than that one should have an orthodox view of Christian doctrine. 

Rationalism, on the other hand, is a movement which became powerful in the 17th and 18th centuries which sought to bring man’s thinking about the universe, man, civil government and religion into conformity with the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Isaac Newton. The overriding tendency within the Enlightenment was to view the universe in all its aspects in largely naturalistic terms, to find its every activity governed by laws that man can comprehend through observation, reason and experiment. In Mead’s view the Enlightenment constituted “a new religion” which placed emphasis on the study of God’s handiwork as a better source of knowledge about the creator than the hearsay offered by biblical interpreters.[2]

It is my suspicion that both these movements had greater influence in shaping the genius of Mormonism—its essential spirit or thrust—than we have recognized. The starting point for Mormonism, as everybody knew until Fawn Brodie misinterpreted the matter, was the first vision. But historians have been so concerned with Brodie’s question, whether Joseph Smith had such a vision, which I assume has now been fairly well established, that they have failed to think about its import in a sufficiently broad historical context.[3] Smith’s account of the vision is generally familiar. 

Some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester, there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion. . . . Some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist. For notwithstanding the great love which the converts to these different faiths expressed at the time of their conversion, and the great zeal manifested by the respective clergy, who were active in getting up and promoting this extraordinary scene of religious feeling, in order to have everybody converted, as they were pleased to call it, let them join what sect they pleased—yet when the converts began to file off, some to one party and some to another, it was seen that the seemingly good feelings of both the priests and the converts were more pretended than real; for a scene of great confusion and bad feeling ensued; … So great were the confusion and strife among the different denominations, that it was impos- sible for a person young as I was, and so unacquainted with men and things, to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong. My mind at times was greatly excited, the cry and tumult were so great and incessant. . . . 

While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”

. . . At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion, or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God. . . . I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray Vocally. 

After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. 

Smith recorded that after a struggle with the powers of darkness two personages appeared to him in vision. 

My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right—and which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; they teach for doctrines the commandments of men; having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.” He again forbade me to join with any of them. . . .[4]

Mario DePillis has helped us to understand some of the significance of this vision by demonstrating that it provides a basis for religious authority in a sectarian age.[5] But I would like to consider the vision still further and see if there is not something more than DePillis has perceived. I suspect that the whole quality of Mormon religious life has its beginnings in the first vision in ways that we have not adequately understood. 

I begin by reconsidering the religious background of the Smith family. From some of the new sources available to us in Salt Lake City we are better able to reconstruct their early religious situation. In Vermont the Prophet’s mother, Lucy, had suffered a terrible illness, but made a miraculous recovery which she attributed to the power of God. Seeking confirmation from her local minister concerning the divine power that had been manifest in her life, she found him concerned only about her physical comfort. Angry at his worldliness, she became a religious seeker, wandering from pastor to pastor and church to church seeking those of more devout mind and spirit.[6] At Tunbridge she began attending Methodist meetings, but her husband, Joseph, hesitated, being ridiculed by his brothers and also his father, Asael, who threw a copy of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason to him and demanded that he read it first.[7] Asael, a convert to Universal ism, may have been trying to keep his son faithful to that sect which they both had joined by 1797.[8] Lucy says, however, that her husband afterward became a seeker, arguing that the true church of Christ was not upon the earth, an idea with which Lucy had flirted but apparently discarded upon her commitment to Methodism.[9]

When the Smiths moved to western New York, after many financial reverses and some hardships, they acquired a farm and revived the family fortunes to a modest degree. In time, we are not sure just when, but it may have been in 1823, Lucy and some of her children joined the Presbyterians, but again Joseph Sr. was reluctant, perhaps because of his general skepticism as to the validity of sectarian religion, but also because the local Presbyterian minister had offended him by saying that Alvin, his unconverted son, recently deceased, had gone to hell.[10]

This constitutes the Smith family’s relevant religious background for reflection upon the first vision. To be sure, Joseph was confronted at the revival with ministers contending for the preeminance of their own sect, and he could not make up his mind amid the “war of words” which was right and which was wrong. But Alexander Neibaur’s journal at the Historian’s Archives tells us that when part of the Smith family was converted at the revival, Joseph “wanted to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the rest but could feel nothing.”[11] In an emotion-filled situation he was numb, immobilized by conflicting feelings. It seems likely that his indecision resulted from the differing attitudes of his parents. His mother had reacquired commitments to organized religion. According to her son William, she had attended the revivals and, “being much concerned about the spiritual welfare of the family,”[12] persuaded most of them to attend. Joseph Sr. went to two or three meetings, but then “peremptorily refused going any more.”[13] Young Joseph, according to Lucy, “from the first utterly refused even to attend their meetings,”[14] but she may have worn down his opposition, for he says in his history that he did attend at times.[15] It was while he was at one of the revivals that his mother and other members of the family were converted under highly emotional circumstances. Joseph’s consternation was considerable, for he could not respond to the revival affirmatively and still please his father. Thus, he “wanted to feel & shout like the rest,” but dared not. He shared his father’s distrust of the clergy involved with the revival for he told his mother that Deacon Jessup of the Presbyterians was a selfish and worldly man.[16]

He was unquestionably influenced by his father’s conviction that the true church was not on the earth, for he wrote in his unpublished history that prior to his vision he searched the scriptures and decided that all “had apostatized from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament.”[17] Yet he tells us elsewhere that he entertained the idea of joining the Methodists[18] and, according to one account, actually did so.[19] Here was a young man torn with doubt and uncertainty in an area of utmost concern to himself—his relationship to his parents and his relationship to God. His vision settled this turmoil. He would join no old-line church, but under the inspiration of his vision establish one on the New Testament model. He had settled finally somewhere between his two parents—convinced that existing churches were wrong, but determined to restore the true one and not remain the rest of his life outside the confines of organized religion. 

There is another dimension here revealed by Oliver Cowdery. He tells us that a central question for Joseph when he inquired of the Lord was whether “a Supreme Being did exist.”[20] Joseph’s doubts may have developed when he was unable to reconcile the conflicting doctrines of the contending sects, or they may have been of longer duration, resulting from his direct or indirect contact with the ideas of the Deist, Thomas Paine, whom Asael had read and passed on to Joseph Smith Sr. 

The Smiths may have gleaned from Paine one of the principles which became seminal for the new Mormon movement. Paine, like Thomas Jefferson, believed that the prevailing churches were apostate, that they taught the doctrines of men.[21] Paine also taught that the Bible was filled with error, especially due to mistranslation. That Mormon Article of Faith which affirms “we believe the Bible as far as it is translated correctly” might owe something to Paine’s critical evaluations.[22] Paine’s challenging arguments may also have led the Prophet to the conclusion that if Christianity was to be vindicated, a fresh revelation from the Lord was a necessity, and that there must be a restoration of the true church. But at this point, in proclaiming the reception of a new divine revelation, the prophet took issue with the Deists, a matter I will return to in a moment. 

If Oliver Cowdery has correctly reported Joseph Smith’s skeptical frame of mind on the eve of the first vision, then it may be that we have a key insight into the shaping of the Mormon mind. Brigham Young manifested a similar and a typically Mormon way of thinking after the collapse of the Kirtland bank when he said he had a feeling that “Joseph was not right in his financial management,” but quickly realized that if he were to “harbor a thought in my heart that Joseph could be wrong in anything, I would begin to lose confidence in his being the mouthpiece for the Almighty, and I would be left . . . upon the brink of the precipice, ready to plunge into what we call the gulf of infidelity, ready to believe neither in God nor His servants, and to say there is no God.”[23]

Robert West has shown that to a considerable extent the thinking of Alexander Campbell ran along parallel lines, that he had been enamored with rationalistic arguments, and due to these had become alienated from the old line churches and their creeds. Campbell at one point in his life faced the possibility of total disbelief. West indicates that Campbell came to blame the “hireling” clergy and Bible mistranslations for the corruption of Christianity, and that Campbell’s stress upon restorationism was a stopping place, a “half-way house to infidelity.”[24]

There is considerable evidence to suggest that historically Mormonism was part of the same national movement.[25] When we recall the emphasis placed upon rational argument and scientific evidence by the Mormons,[26] that the Book of Mormon was a “new witness” for Christ, and that Alma refutes agnosticism and offers rationalistic arguments for the existence of God,[27] when we remember how the Mormons opposed man-made creeds and Bible mistranslations and stressed the need for a restoration, it seems quite possible that Mormonism was also a half-way house, a stopping place for those who were so alienated from the “sects” of the day that they were close to disbelief. 

There is considerable biographical evidence to support this view. Converts to Mormonism ranged from those who were devout believers in the religion of the Bible (but not that of the “sects”) to many who due to disillusionment with quarrelsome sectarianism or secular rationalism, had begun to doubt revealed religion and even the existence of God. Lorenzo Dow Young, Brigham’s brother, indicated that although he was “from his youth a professor of religion, [he] was averse to joining any church, not believing that any of the sects walked up to the precepts contained in the Bible.”[28] William Huntington, once a Presbyterian, had left the church in 1832, believing “they had a form of Godliness but denied the power thereof.” He searched the scriptures and found that “the faith once delivered to the Saints was not among men.”[29] Apostle Amasa Lyman, although religiously inclined, joined no church until he became a Mormon in 1832.[30] Wilford Woodruff said that 

At an early age my mind was exercised upon religious subjects, although I never made a profession until 1830. I did not then join any church for the reason that I could not find any denomination whose doctrines, faith and practice agreed with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.[31] 

Hannah Last, a convert from England, spoke for many of these early converts who were disillusioned with sectarianism saying “the foundations of my religious faith had been shaken” by the discrepancies between sectarian doctrines and Bible teachings.[32] James Ure, another English convert, said he had joined no church for “such contention-devision[sic]-anarcy & corruption did not come from God, but was of man.”[33] Like Ure, fully a third of the Americans who were converted to Mormonism in the early years belonged to no church at the time the Mormon elders called.[34]

There were many, leaders and ordinary members alike, whose alienation was such that they stood upon the brink of full-blown infidelity. John Taylor, a casualty of sectarian controversy, observed in 1844: “if fifty years find this nation prosperous without Mormonism, Joseph Smith was a false prophet, and there is no God.”[35] Andrew Smith, an English convert, said he “began to sink . . . into enfedelity [sic] . . . began to think religion as taught by professed ministers of the Gospel was an imposition and that all were false teachers.”[36] James By water said that his father was “an unbeliever in [the] sectarian version of religion. He possessed some infidel works, which I read in after years, and partook of the same spirit to some extent.”[37] Francis De St. Jeor said he had been a reader of historical works and “hereby I became a skeptic in regard to religion as taught and practiced by the professors of Christianity.”[38] Leaders like John Boynton, Lyman Johnson, Warren Parrish and Benjamin Winchester, who apostatized from the church, entertained renouncing all revealed religion after their disaffection. One of these dissenters said “Moses was a rascal and the prophets were tyrants, Jesus a despot and Paul a base liar.” Parrish said he agreed in principle. Winchester repudiated revealed religion as humbug, the result of naturalistic causes.[39]

Perhaps only a few, like Asael and Joseph Smith Sr., James Bywater, Benjamin Winchester and Francis De St. Jeor, were directly influenced by rationalistic writings. Nonetheless, a secular world view had challenged Christian assumptions and penetrated the thinking of the average man by the early nineteenth century.[40] There is ample evidence to indicate that the Mormons were no exception. In this light, some of the paradoxical aspects of Joseph Smith’s well known remark about his personal history becomes understandable. Joseph is quoted by Willard Richards as saying “I don’t blame you for not believing my history had I not experienced it I could not believe it myself.”[41]

If, indeed, many converts to Mormonism were teetering upon the brink of infidelity before accepting the faith, it helps make it clear why they clung so tenaciously to the faith afterward, despite hardships, persecutions and disappointments in their prophetic expectations.[42] It helps explain too, why the Mormons tended to argue that the gospel is either “true or it isn’t,” an outlook which we find in early Mormon missionary tracts.[43] And it helps also to explain the need for supporting evidence, witnesses, physical ruins in South America, “internal consistencies” of the Book of Mormon and the rest. 

But to return to my discussion of the first vision. Perhaps the principal message of that vision was not the nature of the Godhead, but that a variety of contending denominations each preaching a different message could not be right. The vision informed Joseph Smith that none was right and that the true church would have to be restored. That announcement placed the Mormons at odds with the rest of Protestant America who were making adjustments to American religious plural ism. Most American Protestants in the 19th century came to terms intellectually with American religious diversity by tacitly accepting a concept which the 18th century rationalists called “the essentials of true religion.” Protestants grudgingly acknowleged with the rationalists that all evangelical denominations teach the essentials—faith in God and belief in divine judgment—and are thus worthy to coexist in American society. By so defining the essentials, Protestants also came to uneasy terms with existing religious pluralism, in the meantime leaving much of everyday life and society outside the realm of church concern. As Sidney Mead has shown, this left Protestants singularly unprepared to deal with the non essentials of industrialism, immigration and urbanization which became major portions of the American post-Civil War experience. From the standpoint of influencing the social order, institutional Protestantism was bankrupt and what ever reform efforts there were largely had to come from outside the churches.[44]

Now here the Mormons made a somewhat paradoxical but enormously important departure from the mainstream. While their world view, as Sterling McMurrin maintains,[45] was pluralistic, their social attitudes were anti-pluralistic, and it was this anti-pluralism that governed much of the Mormon social experience. Mormons stressed that the mainline churches were totally corrupt, that within their confines there can be no salvation. By denouncing sectarianism as confusing and faith-destroying, and by insisting upon the necessity of new religious authority, Joseph Smith denied the sufficiency of the essentials of true religion. He thus repudiated the rationale for American religious pluralism, condemning it as ungodly. The logical consequence for Smith and Mormons was the anti-pluralistic Kingdom of God, where all aspects of life were brought under the control of a prophet-politician who set out to restructure society from the ground up. An infallible prophet, a political kingdom, the United Order and even polygamy were four of the major by-products of this rejection of American pluralism. Mormons made enemies of their fellow Americans for this restructuring, and especially for the stipulation so evident at Nauvoo that the prophet, not the people, shall judge.[46]

The first vision has special significance with respect to another point. In joining the Methodists and then the Presbyterians, Lucy Mack Smith became more or less reconciled to the American religious settlement. However, in siding with his father, the prophet took the road to religious dissent. His program of new revelation and new scripture was a declaration of war upon a basic Protestant belief—that the Bible is a sufficient guide to faith and salvation. Sensing this, the Protestant historian, Robert Baird, writing in 1844, unjustly included the Mormons among the infidels. No wonder that in New York the first organized opposition to Mormonism and its prophet came from the Presbyterians who frankly admitted that their purpose in taking Joseph Smith to court in 1830 was to frustrate his religious innovations and stop his preaching of the Book of Mormon.[47]

There is, on the other hand, another aspect of the first vision experience that is difficult to treat historically, but important in shaping the Mormon mind. Clearly, in the grove in 1820 Joseph Smith repudiated Protestant revivals, for it was his conviction that they led to sectarian conflict and this in turn led to family tensions, disorientation and disbelief. But revivalism was a virtual American institution and in repudiating it the prophet set his face against what to many Americans was the crux of Christianity itself. Thus, Robert Baird listed the Mormons among the infidels not only because they had adopted a new scriptural base, but because they were hostile to revivalism.[48] In rejecting some of the most sacred forms of religious expression in America the Mormon prophet set himself and his people upon a new and divergent path. 

Yet I wonder if in rejecting the forms of Evangelical Protestantism—its confusing revivals and pluralistic churches—the Mormon prophet rejected entirely its Spirit.[49] That is, I wonder whether he rejected the pietism that was manifest in the revivals, the religion of the heart, which seems to me to be so much a part of Mormonism as well as of Protestantism. It may be that Mormon testimony as a pledge of commitment to the community has its roots in the Puritan conversion experience, but such a relationship is hard to trace. However, somewhere along the way Mormon testimony became more Protestant than Puritan by expressing the idea that whatever truth reason may convey, the greater truth is revealed in the heart. It was a position taken by Horace Bushnell when he was confronted with the challenge of rationalism in the early 19th century.[50] I wonder if this commitment to what the heart says, or in Mormon terminology the spirit, was a part of Joseph Smith’s conscious experience in the grove and thus something of a deliberate choice. That is, was there a rejection by the prophet in 1820 of some of the secular implications of rationalism, and a commitment to a kind of experiential faith that transcends to some degree the reason? Again, Joseph’s statement “had I not experienced it I could not believe it myself” suggests this possibility.[51] If so, if the vision thus provided young Joseph with a conscious commitment to pietism above rationalism, while he retained his faith in an orderly universe and a reasonable God, we can better understand why there has been such an uneasy tension between faith and reason in Mormonism, as Thomas F. O’Dea has shown.[52] I think it helps to make clear also why so much of Mormon ism, at least the Utah variety, has become a religion that is largely program oriented rather than ideologically oriented. Mormonism affirms the reality of two world views that are basically irreconcilable. Mormons who have their roots most firmly planted in the world of the spirit and those who have theirs in the naturalistic world can come together only by playing down ideas and stressing an everyday religious program. 

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[1] Sidney E. Mead, “American Protestantism During the Revolutionary Epoch,” Church History, 23 (December, 1953), 279-94. 

[2] See Mead’s recent, Old Religion in the Brave New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 82-84. 

[3] On the limitations of Fawn Brodie’s interpretation of Joseph Smith’s first vision see my “Secular or Sectarian History: A Critique of No Man Knows My History,” Church History, 43 (April, 1974). 

[4] Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1973), pp 3-6. 

[5] Mario DePillis, “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, I (Fall, 1966), 68-88. 

[6] Lucy’s account of this in the unpublished manuscript of her history in the Historian’s Archives reads as it does in the more accessible edited version by Preston Nibley. See Nibley’s History of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954), p. 35. 

[7] In Lucy Mack Smith’s unpublished manuscript, n.p. Joseph Senior told his wife there was little to be gained for attending Methodist meetings and “it gave our friends such disagreeable feelings.” 

[8] Richard Anderson, Joseph Smith’s New England Heritage (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1971), p. 106.

[9] Nibley, pp. 36, 46. 

[10] Ibid., p. 90 and the recollections of William Smith in Deserer News, January 20, 1894.

[11] There are no page numbers in the diary, but Joseph’s remarks were made on May 24 between 1841 and 1844.

[12] See William Smith’s testimony in the Sainrs Herald, XXXI, pp. 643-44. 

[13] Nibley, p. 90.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Joseph Smith, History of the Church, I, 3. 

[16] Nibley, p. 91.

[17] This is Joseph’s initial account of his vision included in his Kirtland Letter Book, written in 1832. The letter book is in the Church Archives. 

[18] Joseph Smith, History of the Church, I, 3. 

[19] Pomeroy Tucker, Origin, Rise and Progress of Mormonism (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1867), p. 18. 

[20] Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, I (February, 1835), p. 78. 

[21] Thomas Paine, Age of Reason (London, 1796), Pt. I, pp. 19-20, 36, 43, and Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University, 1970), pp. 50-52. 

[22] Paine, Pt. I, p. 16. 

[23] “A Discourse, by President Brigham Young, Delivered in the Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, March 29, 1857,” Journal of Discourses, IV, p. 297. 

[24] Robert Frederick West, Alexander Campbell and Natural Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). 

[25] See my “Role of Christian Primitivism in the Origin and Development of the Mormo n Kingdom, 1830-1844” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1968), pp. 8-60. 

[26] A casual reading of the diaries and/or letters of many important Mormon missionaries, such as John E. Page, William E. McLellin, Orson and Parley Pratt, Benjamin Winchester, Wilford Woodruff and others suggests the importance that rational debate and rational argument played in their early success. There was a strong tendency from the very first to place emphasis on physical evidence, such as the archeological findings in South America. The letters and diaries are in the archives of the RLDS or the LDS churches in Independence and Salt Lake City. Peter H. Burnett provides us with a very insightful account of how Joseph Smith made use of rational argument when in the midst of a new audience. See Burnett’s Recollections of an Old Pioneer (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1880), pp. 39-40. 

[27] Alma 39:44, 48; and Lawrence M. Yorguson, “Aspects of Social, Geographical and Religious Backgrounds of One Hundred Early Mormon Converts, 1830-1837” (unpublished M.A. Thesis, Department of History, Brigham Young University, 1974), pp. 43-44, 47-51. 

[28] “History of Brigham Young,” Millennial Star, XXV 0une, 1863), 406-07. 

[29] William Huntington, “Diary,” Part I, p. 2 in the Brigham Young University Library.

[30] “History of Amasa Lyman,” Millennial Star, XXVII (July, 1865), 472. 

[31] History of Wilford Woodruff,” Millennial Star, XXVII (March, 1865), 167. 

[32] Hannah Last Cornaby, Autobiography and Poems (Salt Lake City: J. C. Graham & Co., 1881), p. 22. 

[33] “Diary of James Ure, ” pp. 1-3, in the Church Archives. 

[34] Yorguson, pp. 43-44, 47-51. 

[35] Nauvoo Neighbor, December 11, 1844. 

[36] “Journal of Andrew Smith,” in the Church Archives. 

[37] Hyrum W. Vallentine, The Trio’s Pilgrimage (1947), pp. 1-3. 

[38] Andrew Jenson, L.D.S. Biographical Encyclopedia, I, pp. 548-49. 

[39] Thomas B. Marsh said that after breaking with Joseph Smith, Warren Parrish became a “disbeliever in revealed religion.” Although Parrish became a leader in the “Old Standard” movement, Marsh said he remained a deist. See Elders Journal, I (July, 1838), p. 36; also George A. Smith to Brother Fleming, March 29, 1838, in the George A. Smith papers, Church Archives. See also Charles L. Woodward, “The First Half Century of Mormonism, ” p. 195 for Benjamin Winchester’s autobiography which reveals his inclinations towards rationalism and skepticism after leaving the Mormons. This manuscript is in the New York Public Library. 

[40] R. Lawrence Moore, “Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of Spirit Rappings, ” American Quarterly, 24 (October, 1972), pp. 474-500.

[41] “Joseph Smith’s Journal kept by Willard Richards/’ April 7, 1844, in the Church Archives. 

[42] Benjamin F. Johnson comments in his letter to George Gibbs on how many of Joseph Smith’s most “sanguine ” expectations came to naught. A copy of his letter is in the BYU library. 

[43] See Orson Pratt’s Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon (Liverpool: S W Richards 1852), p. 1. 

[44] Sidney E. Mead, “American Protestantism Since the Civil War. I. From Denominationalism to Americanism, ” Journal of Religion, Vol. XXXVI (January, 1956), pp. 2-4. 

[45] Sterling M. McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City University of Utah, 1965), pp. 1-3. 

[46] The prophet’s first vision was anti-pluralistic in emphasis. So too were Mormon institutions. See my “Role of Christian Primitivism,” especially pp. 64-79, but the entire dissertation develops the point. Anti-Mormon opposition to prophetic prerogative is traced too in Dallin H. Oak s and my Carthage Conspiracy (Urbana: University of Indiana Press, 1975). 

[47] Robert Baird, Religion in America, Pt. I (New York: Harper & Bros., 1844), p. 288; and Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate, II (April 9, 1831). 

[48] Baird, p . 288. 

[49] Winthrop Hudson discusses with insight the deep ideological commitment of Americans to the reality of religious pluralism. See American Protestantism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1961), pp. 37-48. 

[50] Sidney E. Mead, “From Denominationalism to Americanism,” p. 3. 

[51] Joseph Smith’s Journal, kept by Willard Richards under date April 7, 1844. 

[52] Thomas F. O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 222-42.