SAMUEL MORRIS BROWN. In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death.

Abstract

Samuel M. Brown's new study is a highly debatable intellectual history of Joseph Smith's doctrines and religious practices. Brown's thesis—that Smith's evolving religious convictions stemmed from his lifelong preoccupation with death—is an exciting new paradigm for interpreting early Mormon history. Such uniquely Mormon beliefs as baptisms for the dead, patriarchal blessings, spiritual adoptions, temple endowments, and eternal marriage are portrayed as part of Smith's attempt to “conquer death.” Making “no attempt to assess the veracity of Joseph Smith's religious claims” (p. 5), Brown, an intensive care physician by profession, believes that the early death of Smith's beloved brother, Alvin, and later the deaths of six of Smith's eleven children, cast long shadows over his life. “Obsessed” with death, Smith set out to conquer it by developing doctrines and implementing sacerdotal temple rites and ordinances that “sealed” the faithful horizontally with God and vertically with families in an eternal chain of being, becoming, and belonging. Such “eternal progression” eventuated in the literal resurrection of both men and women in an eternal family exaltation and process of divinization. As Smith made clear in his famous King Follett Discourse of 1844 (later paraphrased by Mormon Church president Lorenzo Snow), “As man is, God once was; and as God now is, man may become.”