Stephen C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 205–207 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.23 Book Review Stephen C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) Benjamin E. Park Sam Houston State University, Hunstville, USA The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has frequently been referred to as the “American religion,” primarily due to its birth on American soil. As such, scholars have often used the faith and its history as a case study for how a denomination is created, expands, and develops, within both a national and international context. Key to that story is how believers understand and teach the church’s core ideas, including its founding theophanies. Stephen C. Harper’s new book First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins should receive a ready audience , then, as it examines the narratives surrounding an event that Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s first prophet, claims jump-started the entire movement. In the spring of 1820, Joseph Smith was visited by God and told that there was no true religion in existence, necessitating a new church and restored priesthood authority. Or so he narrated over a dozen years later after he established a new denomination, first known as the Church of Christ. While coy concerning the event for much of his life, leading later skeptics to claim he had invented it wholesale, Smith told the story with more regularity and importance as the years progressed. By his death in 1844, there were several versions of the divine visitation in circulation. Within a few more decades, one of those accounts was canonized as LDS scripture; a century later, the story became central to the LDS American Religion 2:1 206 Church’s primary message to the world. The story of the vision’s reception is, in many ways, the story of how a religious community evolves. First Vision is divided into three parts: “Joseph Smith’s Memory,” which focuses on the narratives that came from Smith himself; “Collective Memory,” which traces the evolutions over the following century; and “Contested Memory,” which digs into the passionate, and often partisan, debates over the topic from the past seventy years. Throughout, Harper introduces the reader to a lot of dense scientific literature on how memory is consolidated, processed, and expanded, either in individual or group settings. To “remember,” he explains, is a collaborative and contextual activity, more akin to painting a picture with contemporary materials than it is uncovering a dusty photograph from an archival drawer. It is to be expected, then, that details, themes, and lessons evolve over years, decades, and generations. In the first section, Harper dissects the First Vision accounts left by Joseph Smith between 1830 and 1844. Surprisingly, and somewhat frustratingly, he does so not in chronological order but rather according to his broader methodological schema. The 1838/9 account, later canonized, was created in the wake of the Missouri conflict and was therefore framed by persecution; the 1832 account, the only one in Smith’s own hand, is obsessed with squaring with contemporary Methodist culture . And it was the 1835 account that is most historically reliable, argues Harper, because it was spontaneous and organic, and therefore not prompted by any external cue. While there isn’t much original analysis regarding these documents to those familiar with the dense literature concerning early Mormonism, Harper performs a service by compiling all this information into one place. What is truly new in First Vision, though, comes in the latter chapters of part one and the brunt of part two: while most scholars have argued that the founding theophany was basically unknown to average Mormons, Harper persuasively demonstrates that Smith spoke frequently on the topic in the later years of his life, and the story was spread widely by others quickly after his death. The main protagonist was apostle and historian Orson Pratt, who not only coined the term “First Vision” but also spoke and wrote about it frequently; by the 1890s, it had become so ubiquitous within LDS circles that they chose to make it the topic of the stained glass window that went into the Salt...