{"id":103611,"date":"2024-01-28T16:19:01","date_gmt":"2024-01-28T23:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=103611"},"modified":"2024-01-28T16:19:01","modified_gmt":"2024-01-28T23:19:01","slug":"writing-history-is-easy-if-you-toss-out-the-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2024\/01\/writing-history-is-easy-if-you-toss-out-the-facts.html","title":{"rendered":"Writing history is easy if you toss out the facts."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I rarely dressed like this after a first date.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Somehow, I failed to call attention here to this little essay, even though it was published in Meridian Magazine<\/em> a full week ago. \u00a0Incidentally, too, just to clear up any confusion, despite the title of the article (which, I admit, could easily mislead many readers) it is not<\/em> an entry taken from my wife\u2019s diary: \u00a0\u201cOn Choosing Prince Charming\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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\n

<\/a>

The experience of the Eight Witnesses as re-created for the Interpreter Foundation docudrama \u201cUndaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon,\u201d in a still photograph by James Jordan. I frankly confess that I was disappointed, at first, by the very mundane appearance of this scene. But then I realized that my reaction was irrational. That the experience of the Eight Witnesses with the plates of the Book of Mormon was mundane, prosaic, matter of fact, is precisely the POINT of that experience, and it is what gives their account its remarkable evidentiary power.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

The sixth chapter of Richard Lyman Bushman\u2019s book Joseph Smith\u2019s Gold Plates: A Cultural History<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) is entitled \u201cFascination: Fiction, Lore, and Psychology, 1860-1910.\u201d \u00a0The chapter sketches a few representative attempts to explain the Book of Mormon away. \u00a0Among those writers that he examines are the Canadian-born Lily Dougall (1858-1923), who published a novel entitled The Mormon Prophet<\/em> in 1899; William Alexander Linn, a wealthy graduate of Yale College who, in 1902, published his The Story of the Mormons: From the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901<\/em>; and I. Woodbridge Riley, whose Yale Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1903 as The Founder of Mormonism<\/em>.<\/div>\n "\n

William Linn\u2019s 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\u2019s origins. It was obvious, Linn thought, \u201csome directing mind,\u201d other than Smith\u2019s \u201cgave the final shape to the scheme.\u201d 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 \u201cSpaulding-Rigdon Theory.\u201d He went through the hypothesis point by point, noting the lack of evidence and concluding that \u201cthese marks of the book are not the marks of the man Rigdon.\u201d Dougall dismissed the theory summarily, observing \u201cthat it [Book of Mormon] was an original production seems probable.\u201d<\/div>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/div>\n

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\u2019s visions not long before James\u2019s Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which became The Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em>. \u00a0Dougall blended art with science, aiming to imagine Smith\u2019s psychology artistically rather than scientifically.<\/div>\n

Dougall also wrote from a theological position. She spent her life breaking free from the strictures of her evangelical Christian father\u2019s hard-edge Christianity. She gravitated toward modernist doubts about miracles and to broad church toleration of a wide range of Christian beliefs. \u00a0She 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 \u201cit 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.\u201d \u00a0(91-92)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Professor Bushman continues with his summation:<\/div>\n "\n

Riley\u2019s epilepsy diagnosis appealed in a time when physiological psychology seemed like a promising path for psychic research, but its range was limited. \u00a0Epilepsy was of no help in understanding the gold plates. Riley had nothing to say about how the plates figured in Smith\u2019s 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\u2019s Damascus vision too. As early ambitions for a broad application of the syndrome lost traction, their usefulness in understanding Joseph Smith faded as well. \u00a0(95)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I add that there were similar, corresponding attempts, at approximately the same time, to explain the revelations received by the Prophet Muhammad as the product of epileptic seizures. \u00a0Those attempts have not held up well, and I\u2019m aware of no serious outside student of Islam who accepts or advocates such an explanation today. \u00a0Nor, for that matter, over roughly the past century or so.<\/div>\n

\n*
** *\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moreover, as one of the executive producers of the theatrical film Witnesses<\/em><\/a> (and of its accompanying docudrama<\/a> and short features<\/a>) I feel myself obliged to reemphasize Professor Bushman\u2019s comment that \u201cEpilepsy was of no help in understanding the gold plates.\u201d \u00a0Even an epileptic Joseph Smith \u2014 for the existence of whom there is, really, no evidence whatsoever \u2014 wouldn\u2019t account for the reported experiences of the Three Witnesses, the Eight Witnesses, or the informal or unofficial witnesses to the Book of Mormon plates.<\/div>\n*
** \n
** \n
** Professor Bushman also introduces Vardis Fisher, a writer who emerged from a Latter-day Saint background in Idaho, and his prize-winning 1939 novel Children of God<\/em>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
** "\n
** 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\u2019s 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\u2019s naive faith or tell him that they were not a material reality, that he \u201cwould visit the records only in a vision.\u201d At the crucial moment, Joseph \u201clet the opportunity pass\u201d to tell the truth. He implicitly confirmed his followers\u2019 belief that \u201che would visit a hill and open a vault and look with mortal eyes upon plates of gold.\u201d Rationalizing the deceit to himself, Fisher\u2019s Joseph reflects that \u201cperhaps, indeed, the plates were real; for in this, as in many other matters, he was still uncertain.\u201d<\/div>\n
** 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. \u201cAs to them plates, I told you before I didn\u2019t have them as much in my hands as I said I did. I got wrong a bit there too.\u201d \u00a0As from the beginning, the plates were the hinge between two understandings of Joseph Smith, sincere visionary or deceitful fraud. \u00a0(96-97)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
** Both Fisher and Dougall were novelists, of course, so they felt themselves free to invent history out of thin air. \u00a0Still, consumers of such things \u2014 neither Vardis Fisher nor, especially, Lily Dougall has many readers today, but their approach to the story of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon continues to flourish in some quarters, not all of which are clearly labeled \u201cfiction\u201d \u2014 need to be aware of what is being done.<\/div>\n
** \n
** Many years ago, a friend who knew something about the story of the early Restoration but didn\u2019t believe in it asked me why the plates were necessary if, as some sources seem to suggest, they weren\u2019t required to be right at hand while Joseph Smith was dictating. \u00a0I responded then, and I still believe, that they were necessary in order to force the choice between \u201csincere visionary\u201d and \u201cdeceitful fraud.\u201d I told him that they were an \u201cabsolutely indigestible lump in the throats of people like yourself,\u201d who wish to be friendly and sympathetic but who won\u2019t believe. Prophet or fraud. \u00a0The middle ground, if any exists at all, is very, very limited.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
** \n
** \u00a0<\/p>\n
** <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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