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How to Explain the Book of Mormon?

How to Explain the Book of Mormon?

Last updated on: November 5, 2025 at 8:23 pm by Dan Peterson

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How to Explain the Book of Mormon? 2025-11-05T20:23:57-07:00 Dan Peterson

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A small portion of Deer Creek Reservoir pretty much as it appeared today. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Up to the Heber Valley again today and back down again. Sometimes life gets in the way of what we would prefer to be doing. But it’s a nice drive, up Provo Canyon and along the shore of Deer Creek Reservoir. So I didn’t mind that too much.

During the time that I served as editor of the FARMS Review (one of the several titles under which it was published during my tenure), this was the entrance to my editorial office. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

A new article in our reprint series went up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation. It is Steadfast in Defense of Faith: “Reflections on the Genesis and Evolution of the FARMS Review under the Editorship of Daniel C. Peterson (1989–2011),” written by Shirley S. Ricks.

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Steadfast in Defense of Faith: Essays in Honor of Daniel C. Peterson, edited by Shirley Ricks, Stephen D. Ricks, and Louis Midgley. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/steadfast-in-defense-of-faith/.

“In this essay, I attempt to honor the vision and dedication of our friend Daniel C. Peterson, who brought to fruition a periodical with the intent to publish reviews of all books published on the Book of Mormon in a given year.”

Needless to say, the article is — as informed readers would surely expect it to be — a tedious but lengthy catalogue of cruelty, buffoonery, mendacity, hypocrisy, gluttony, callousness, mean-spiritedness, greed, failure, and sloth. I’m reliably informed that it’s nevertheless a highly sanitized abridgment of ¥e Lyfe and Abhominable Crymes of Daniel Petersonn, Apologist, Late of S. Gabriel’s Parish in Alta California, Briefly Subject to the Infidel Turk in el-Cairo, and Now Resident in the Quondam Townshippe of Sharon.

Karl G. Maeser, who joined the Church in Dresden, Germany, is generally regarded as the true founder of Brigham Young University. Above, the Maeser Memorial Building at BYU, which is one of the oldest buildings of the University. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Whatever the outcome on the football field turns out to be in Lubbock, Texas, this coming Saturday, Brigham Young University and its supporters have already scored a significant victory: “BYU fans have helped raise thousands of dollars for an ailing member of the Texas Tech family: An online fundraiser has yielded more than $63,000 in donations for a Red Raiders fan who was severely injured in an auto accident.” Perhaps we can raise the number a little higher still before this weekend’s game? Even a small donation — I’ve made a tiny and insignificant one myself — would be valuable, and it would send an important message on behalf of BYU and its fan base: Help Support Maddie’s Road to Recovery.

Richard Lyman Buahman in 2016. (Photograph from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship))

I’ve had a busy day today that kept me away from my keyboard and, thus, from doing the work that I typically do. So, once again, I’m going to share some notes from things that I’ve recently read. Here are a few passages from Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). Here, he is discussing the Book of Mormon and the plates, and the treatment of them by three outside authors: William Alexander Linn, The Story of the Mormons From the Date of their Origin to the Year 1901 (1902); I. Woodbridge Riley, The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith (1902); and Lily Dougall’s novel The Mormon Prophet (1899):

William Linn’s book was the least original of the three. Linn summarized current knowledge without advancing anything new about the origins of the Book of Mormon or the nature of Mormonism. He adhered to the standard Spaulding theory about the book’s origins. It was obvious, Linn thought, “some directing mind,” other than Smith’s “gave the final shape to the scheme.” The mastermind behind the text and the Golden Bible hoax must have been Sidney Rigdon building on the romance by Solomon Spalding.

Unlike Linn, Riley and Dougall found the Spalding hypothesis unconvincing. Riley spent over twenty-five pages minutely analyzing the “Spaulding-Rigdon Theory.” He went through the hypothesis point by point, noting the lack of evidence and concluding that “these marks of the book are not the marks of the man Rigdon.” Dougall dismissed the theory summarily, observing “that it [Book of Mormon] was an original production seems probable.”

The abandonment of the Spaulding-Rigdon hypothesis by two serious writers turned Mormon studies in a new direction. If Rigdon was not the mastermind behind the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith must have been, and how could that be explained? How did this unprepossessing treasure-seeker compose such a complex text? That question compelled observers to speculate about Joseph Smith’s mentality and temperament. What were the psychic sources of his visions and revelations?

Abner Cole and Eber D. Howe, the first of the serious critics, saw no need to investigate Smith’s mentality. They borrowed motives and mentality from historical stereotypes. Smith was an impostor and confidence man like other charlatans who troubled human society.

With Rigdon gone and Smith the author of Mormonism, Dougall and Riley needed a more encompassing explanation. Both asked what light the newly emerging science of psychology might throw on visions and revelations. Although addressing the same question, the two took different approaches. Riley claimed that Smith obviously suffered from epilepsy. His description of the First Vision with its darkness and his inability to speak, followed by a bright light and then release could not have been clearer. Riley traced the inclination to mental disturbances back through the family line, finding that the Smiths had been mentally impaired for generations.

Although cognizant of developments in psychological science, Lily Dougall took a more humanistic approach. She talked to William James about Smith’s visions not long before James’s Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which became The Varieties of Religious Experience. Dougall blended art with science, aiming to imagine Smith’s psychology artistically rather than scientifically. Dougall also wrote from a theological position. She spent her life breaking free from the strictures of her evangelical Christian father’s hard-edge Christianity. She gravitated toward modernist doubts about miracles and to broad church toleration of a wide range of Christian beliefs. She wanted to respect Mormons, even while distancing herself from their irrational belief in miracles and revelations. She was aware of the polemical, moralist tradition that preceded her. In her candid introduction, she acknowledged that “it has been earnestly suggested to me that to write on so false a religion in other than a polemic spirit would tend to the undermining of civilised life.” (91-92)

I note in passing that epilepsy was also invoked for a relatively brief while as an explanation for the Qur’an, which is believed by Muslims to be the transcription of revelations received by the Prophet Muhammad (ca. 570-632 AD):

Riley’s epilepsy diagnosis appealed in a time when physiological psychology seemed like a promising path for psychic research, but its range was limited. Epilepsy was of no help in understanding the gold plates. Riley had nothing to say about how the plates figured in Smith’s psychic economy. The epilepsy diagnosis, moreover, was tied to fashions in psychological research. At the time, epilepsy was also offered as an explanation of St. Paul’s Damascus vision too. As early ambitions for a broad application of the syndrome lost traction, their usefulness in understanding Joseph Smith faded as well. (95)

Professor Bushman also discusses Children of God (1939), by Vardis Fisher. It was, in its time, probably the most successful of “Mormon novels.”

Fisher and Dougall did their best to imagine what it meant subjectively to see God and write the Book of Mormon. The natural tendency of storytelling was to present an empathetic account, allowing the lead characters at least a measure of sincerity. To imagine them as duplicitous from the start would reduce interest in their fate and cast a long shadow over the rest of the story. Fisher balked, however, when it came to the plates. It was one thing to imagine a vision of God or even an aspiration to write the history of the Indians. It was another to pretend to poessess golden plates. After Joseph tells his family about his vision of the plates, Fisher has Joseph’s father express belief in their reality, warning Joseph to take care that the records not be stolen. At this point, Joseph must decide to go along with his father’s naive faith or tell him that they were not a material reality, that he “would visit the records only in a vision.” At the crucial moment, Joseph “let the opportunity pass” to tell the truth. He implicitly confirmed his followers’ belief that “he would visit a hill and open a vault and look with mortal eyes upon plates of gold.” Rationalizing the deceit to himself, Fisher’s Joseph reflects that “perhaps, indeed, the plates were real; for in this, as in many other matters, he was still uncertain.” (96)

Back, though, to Lily Dougall’s The Mormon Prophet:

Dougall likewise begins with a Smith who believes in his own plates but at the end has him confess his doubts. After one of her appeals for him to listen to reason, Joseph confesses to Susannah that he may not have seen the gold plates at all; they were just bricks. “As to them plates, I told you before I didn’t have them as much in my hands as I said I did. I got wrong a bit there too.” As from the beginning, the plates were the hinge between two understandings of Joseph Smith, sincere visionary or deceitful fraud. (97)

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William Alexander Linn

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