Mormon Prophet Research Articles

Thomas Sharp’s Warsaw Signal: Crafting an Anti-Mormon Rhetoric Prior to the Murder of Joseph Smith Jr.

ABSTRACT Thomas C. Sharp, editor of the Warsaw (IL) Signal from 1841–1844, was a prolific writer with a varied career in newspapers, law, and politics. His identity became intertwined with the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. in Nauvoo, Illinois. Sharp used the Signal to “stand in opposition to the encroachments of the fanatical band” and rally readers to exterminate Smith and the Mormons. In nine issues immediately preceding the June 1844 murder of Smith, Sharp isolated, concentrated, and repeated irreconcilable actions imputed to Smith to incite the assassination. The rhetorical strategy of vilification is used to illuminate how Sharp’s rhetoric—some 33,000 words in seventy-one articles on the Mormons—enraged citizens through characterizations of intentions, actions, purposes, and identities. Sharp’s inflammatory printing and formidable editorial influence is an example of the power of the nineteenth-century press. The findings serve as a warning to media consumers of the potent cogency of media manipulators and conspiracists.

ДЖЕЙМС СТРЭНГ (1813–1856) И «МОРМОНСКОЕ КОРОЛЕВСТВО» НА ВЕЛИКИХ ОЗЕРАХ В СЕРЕДИНЕ XIX ВЕКА

The article examines the activities of James Jesse Strang (1813-1856), the self-proclaimed prophet of the «Latter-day Saints», the leader of one of the major movements in early Mormonism, and his followers – the Strangites. A unique religious and socio-political phenomenon: the proclamation of the monarchy in the United States remains practically unexplored in Russian historiography. This article helps fill the gap. The analysis of information about the religious movement of the Strangites, its origin, features, main ideas, major milestones of history contained in Mormon documents, materials of the American periodical press and other sources of the middle of the XIX-th century is carried out. After the death of the founder of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), Strang managed to unite the intra-church opposition around him for a short time. He was supported by almost all dissatisfied with the new leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Brigham Young (1801-1877) and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (including many family members of the first Mormon prophet). They managed to create a separate religious organization. It is shown that Strang's ideal was not just a theocracy, but a theocratic monarchy, reminiscent of the theocratic rule of the ancient Jews during the Old Testament period. This radically distinguished his teaching from the ideas about the state structure of other Mormons, who were supporters of theodemocracy – an ideal government based on faith in God and built on the principles of republicanism. The separated Mormons sought to implement their utopian religious-political and social project in practice in the colonized region of the Great Lakes. But conflicts with local residents created great difficulties for the Strangites, acquiring an increasingly acute character in 1850–1856. The conflicts ended with the death of the prophet Strang, the expulsion of his followers from the island settlement, which led to the rapid disintegration of the community. The utopia of the Strangites turned out to be unrealized.

Haunted in Desolation: The Murder of Captain John Gunnison, Reconsidered

Deserts confuse, fogging memory and electrifying the imagination. In 1853, on Utah’s Sevier River, a ritualized killing spawned a folklore of deserts that lives on to this day. Captain John W. Gunnison, an engineer, had detoured into an ambush. Dismembered, decapitated, his heart torn from his chest, he had died, it was said, by order of the Mormon prophet and Utah’s Latter-day Saints. Fabulized over the decades, the tale was contorted with an evil king in a desert kingdom, with ghoulish assassins and restless corpses undead. Folklore saw what historians have been slow to perceive about hauntings in desolation. Memories of trauma run deep in disquieting strangeness. Places presumed to be empty set dark expectations for horror.

“In All Ages and All Churches”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism

“In All Ages and All Churches”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Mormonicity

Mormonicity

The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion: Utah, Photography, and Daniel George's Series God to Go West

The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion: Utah, Photography, and Daniel George's Series <i>God to Go West</i>

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women's Authority

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women's Authority

“Their Deeds Shall Be Made Manifest”: The Scandalous Mission of Joseph W. Clements to Great Britain, 1848–1851

“Their Deeds Shall Be Made Manifest”: The Scandalous Mission of Joseph W. Clements to Great Britain, 1848–1851

Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 154–156 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.16 Book Review Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) Daniel Vaca Brown University, Providence, USA “And you cannot deny it!” The signature phrase of the antebellum itinerant evangelist Lorenzo Dow, these words also serve as a sort of thesis statement for Seth Perry’s discerning, illuminating, and altogether excellent study of religious authority in early America. Drawing on extensive archival materials, Perry not only builds on earlier studies that have explored the proliferation and popularity of bibles and related print materials in early America but also questions a guiding premise animating much of that scholarship. Whereas scholars often have taken for granted that the Christian Bible served as “the era’s preeminent religious authority,” Perry asks how and why texts possess authority (3). He answers this question by arguing that bibles became authoritative through a variety of uses, all of which cultivated “authoritative relationships” within and between cultural communities. When Lorenzo Dow shouted his signature phrase at people in his audience, he did so in the knowledge that they already had situated themselves as religious subjects in a relationship with him and each other. Although ostensibly about bibles and the Bible, Perry’s book focuses above all on detailing processes through which early Americans became religious subjects who could not or would not deny particular authoritative claims. Daniel Vaca 155 Perry uses the concept of “scripturalization” to capture the processes through which people become subject to the authority of the Bible. Borrowing the term from the religious studies scholar Vincent Wimbush, who has challenged scholars to identify and interrogate the particular cultural ideas and practices that designate certain texts as “scriptural,” Perry defines scripturalization as the production of a “privileged distinction from other texts” and treats religious authority as the manifestation of such distinctions (6-7). Over five chapters, Perry not only details the features of bible production and distribution that shaped Bible culture in early America but also presents these features as contingencies through which religious authority and subjectivity took shape. The two chapters in Part I trace the history of bibles and bible readers in early America. Emphasizing that real and imagined readers shaped “the circuit of writing, production, distribution, and reception,” Perry argues in the book’s first chapter that Protestant bibles in Britain and early national US America premised their scripturalization on the idea that their readers required pedagogical intervention (39). Eighteenth-century British bibles often imagined readers as uneducated and male, while early American bibles increasingly cultivated an explicitly American national identity and treated women as consumers who had primary responsibility for buying bibles and teaching children to read them. The second chapter argues that early American readers scripturalized the Bible by applying it and expanding upon it through practices of citation, cross-referencing , and the creation of countless “parabiblical texts.” In Part II, Perry examines practices of scripturalization that do not involve explicit references to the Bible itself. Chapter three presents several examples of people using bible-based rhetorical gestures and physical actions to claim power and make themselves visible “in a culture where the Bible was the textual ground for the constitution of subjects” (68). Examples of “performative biblicism” include the behavior of Lorenzo Dow, who cultivated authority by acting and dressing like a biblical apostle, as well as the ministry of the African American itinerant Zilpha Elaw, who narrated her activities by drawing parallels especially with the apostle Paul. In chapter four, Perry shows how the scripturalized environment of early national America offered people new ways of interpreting spiritual visions and recounting them in writing. Focusing especially on the career of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the final chapter illustrates how “early Mormons scripturalized, and became the scripturalized subjects of, new texts” (111). Perry details how Smith not only performed biblicism in his own writing but also cultivated perception of his revelation’s reliability by incorporating authorial strategies and prefatory materials that bible publishers had used to assuage their own readers’ concerns. American Religion 1:2 156 The...

Polygamy, piousness, and the practice of medicine: Understanding Brigham Young and the predominance of female medical providers in early Utah.

The nineteenth century Mormon Prophet, Brigham Young, has long been lauded as progressive for sending dozens of Mormon women from the Utah territory to receive a formal medical education at The Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. This manuscript comes to a contrary conclusion through close reading of diaries and journals created by these same women and the public speeches of the Prophet himself. These texts have historically been held up as evidence of Prophet Young's encouragement of women as physicians. This new interpretation of historical texts includes stringent study of his speeches, as they were originally reported, alongside later citations by historians from within the faith that decontextualized his words to fit the Church's predominant narrative. This manuscript concludes that, contrary to Church tradition, the historical record provides evidence of Young's desire to enforce limits and separations along traditional gender lines rather than showing an intent to change those cultural norms.

Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record ed. by Kenneth L. Alford

Reviewed by: Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record ed. by Kenneth L. Alford Robert Wooster Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record. Edited by Kenneth L. Alford. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 864. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-87062-441-4.) "The purpose of this volume is to help make war-related Civil War records pertaining to Utah Territory more accessible," explains editor Kenneth L. [End Page 1005] Alford, professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University (p. 15). The present collection, buttressed by an essay emphasizing Utah's strategic importance to the wartime American West; an overview of the publication of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (70 vols. in 128; Washington, D.C., 1880–1901); and appendixes describing Utah's territorial borders, military geography, and military units serving there, achieves that goal. Scholars familiar with the Official Records will have less need than will their less-seasoned counterparts for the 504 records included from that series in the primary documents reprinted here. Additional records of events for the Second California and Eleventh Ohio Cavalry regiments are taken from the less accessible Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (100 vols.; Wilmington, N.C., 1994–2001). Most useful to academics are the remaining materials, featuring thirty documents from the Territorial Militia Records in the Utah State Archives. Thirty-nine additional orders, letters, and news reports were located in the Salt Lake City Deseret News, and the same number come from the Union Vedette, a newspaper published at Camp Douglas. Another four documents appear in the annual reports of the commissioner for Indian affairs for 1862 and 1863. Five others come from the Brigham Young Office Files, housed in the Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Two were located in the U.S. congressional serial set. From the National Archives come ten documents from the post returns of Camp Floyd, Camp Douglas, and Fort Bridger, as well as twenty from the Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General. Edward W. Tullidge's The History of Salt Lake City and Its Founders (Salt Lake City, 1886) has supplied four documents. One, authenticating Abraham Lincoln's authorization for Brigham Young to raise and equip one hundred short-term volunteers to protect the mails, was found in Volume 5 of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953). A letter signed by nearly three dozen officers in an unsuccessful effort to save territorial governor Stephen S. Harding from removal by his Mormon critics is taken from C. V. Waite's The Mormon Prophet and His Harem; or, An Authentic History of Brigham Young, His Numerous Wives and Children (Chicago, 1868). Civil War scholars will find especially useful several documents from the Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, which detail the allegations by two officers and a surgeon that numerous officers and civilians had been disloyal during the secession crisis, and the refutations of those charges by Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, Captain John Gibbon, and Lieutenant Wesley Merritt. Reprinted materials from the Deseret News reveal little-known details relating to the Bear River Massacre (1863), and documents from the Territorial Militia Records, the Brigham Young files, and the Union Vedette shed light on army-Mormon jealousies. As Alford acknowledges, Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record is by no means an exhaustive collection of documents relating to Civil War Utah. All save two of the archival materials reprinted from the Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, for example, come from 1861. Such is understandable, given the byzantine system army bureaucrats used to organize that collection, now housed in Record Group 94, but the failure to [End Page 1006] incorporate additional materials from this source, along with others housed in the National Archives, limits the book's real usefulness to a fairly narrow range of scholars. Robert Wooster Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Mormon Melodrama and the Syndication of Satire, fromBrigham Young(1940) toSouth Park(2003)

All I know about Mormonism I learned from South Park . This is a statement familiar to many professors of religious studies and American history, and it has yielded countless groans among them. But there are good reasons not only for why South Park has come to such authoritative status among students but also for why it might be useful-rather than limiting, frustrating, or embarrassing-as a starting point for classroom discussions about religion and the media of cultural familiarity. South Park's utility for Latter-day Saints and their historians alike can be explained by way of exploring Mormon-Hollywood relations-and representative concerns in polygamy, melodrama, and satire-from the makings of the film Brigham Young (20th Century-Fox, 1940) to the 2000s. LDS Church and Hollywood personnel have struggled together to and through the revelation that Mormon history is sometimes most intelligible through satire. This means not merely that Mormon origin stories and developmental practices have been subject to mockery in early media and film, although this is undoubtedly a point of real concern, but also that they may only be understandable via a kind of winking portrayal that allows for the possibilities of winking in portrayal and of the knowing incorporation of critique.ISouth Park, the wildly popular animated series about adolescent life in a small Colorado town, has several times featured Mormon themes and characters, and it devoted one episode-All About (2003)-entirely to the subject of Mormonism.1 In this episode, South Park resident (and perpetually acerbic manchild) Stan visits the home of a new classmate named Gary, whereupon he is enveloped by the saccharine rituals of a Family Home Evening: pleasant dinner conversations, noncompetitive board games, Rice Krispies squares, affirming songs, and scripture readings from the Book of Mormon. (The... Book of Mormon? What's that?, asked Stan. You know... the book that Joseph Smith found, Gary answered. Who's Joseph Smith? Only the most important person in the world.) The episode plot then unfolds in a series of flashbacks showing Mormon prophet Joseph Smith discovering (buried in a hill) and translating (with a magical seer stone) the text of the Book of Mormon; and it depicts Joseph founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the basis of its sacred existence and of Joseph's claims to visitation by God and Jesus. These flashbacks- themselves featuring the soundtrack refrain dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb for anyone who accepts Joseph's accounts and smart, smart, smart, smart for anyone who challenges them-are interspersed with present-day scenes depicting Stan and his family's sometimesappalled and sometimes-enthralled reactions to the story and the tenor of Gary's home life. By the end of the half-hour episode, Stan has grown increasingly upset by (what he takes to be) the lunacy of the LDS Church's origins tale and the doe-eyed credulity of his new neighbors, and he lashes out against them. You're right: the new kid's a douche, Stan reports to his South Park friends.All About does not end on this condemnatory note, however. The writers belie the apparent anti-Mormon feel of the episode at several points and in several ways, not least of these being the tenor of their satire itself. Humor here is derived not from outright ridicule, nor from egregious misrepresentation, but by combining historical correctness with political incorrectness (as when dumb, dumb sounds behind an accurate voicing of an accepted testimony), and also by oscillating between-and thus holding in tension-an ostensibly ludicrous past and a nevertheless laudable present, a world of seer stones and a world of familial nicety.2 Near the end of the episode, immediately following Stan's douche statement, Gary-the-Mormon enters the scene with an obscenity-capped retort of his own:Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. …

Book Review: The Persistence of Polygamy: Fundamentalist Mormon Polygamy from 1890 to the Present (Bringhurst N.G. and Foster C.L. eds.)

The Persistence of Polygamy: Fundamentalist Mormon Polygamy from 1890 to the Present Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster (Eds). Independence, Missouri. John Whitmer Books 2015, 629 pages.Polygamy is a fascinating topic for evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists alike because it is practiced by most primitive societies, meaning it was practiced in our own history. In these societies, females sexually select for the status of the males and thus the qualities that determine high status in such societies: physical health and, perhaps to a lesser extent, intelligence and certain personality traits. They do this because such a male provides them with healthier and more successful offspring and because the high status male will be able to invest in them and their offspring. In such societies, the headman might have 5 wives and many illegitimate children while around 40% of males will father no children at all. Indeed, Lynn (2011) has noted the persistence of polygyny among the British upper class right into Early Modern times, as it was effectively acceptable for them to father bastard children by mistresses.This volume is, therefore, significant because it explores, in painstaking detail, the only European-origin group which continues to practice polygamy in modern, Western society: the polygamous sects that have broken away from the mainline Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) in the USA. It is the third in a series of Persistence of Polygamy essay collections, with the same editors. The first looked at Joseph Smith and the origins of the practice (Bringhurst & Foster, 2010), while the second explored the practice in the early history of the church (Bringhurst & Foster, 2013).In the Introduction, the editors provide a readable history of the practice from 1890 onwards, when the official Mormon church banned it. It is appreciated that this is the third volume in a broader history of polygamy in the Mormon church, but it might have been useful to provide a little more background for the non-specialist on Mormon polygamy and the church in general. Joseph Smith, the first Mormon prophet, declared that all Mormons should be polygamous and himself had around 40 wives. The subject of intense persecution, the Mormons fled to Utah and established it as a state, but the persecution continued and the Mormon prophet in 1890 (a new prophet succeeds on the death of the last one, as with popes) banned polygamy. This led, eventually, to more fundamentalist Mormons deciding that the mainline church was disingenuous and establishing their own sects. One schism is known as the Apostolic United Brethren and is based in Utah. This split from the even more conservative, Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) in the 1980s. This has established itself in Hildale-Colorado City on the Utah-Arizona border. It was in the news in 2008 as its dictatorial and puritanical prophet, Warren Jeffs, was jailed in Texas for child abuse. He remains in prison and is still regarded as the sect's prophet.Other chapters give various enlightening insights into the history of Mormon polygamy. Barbara Jones Brown explores how, in the 1880s, various Mormons fled to Mexico in order to avoid persecution by the US government and set up colonies there. …

In Heaven as it is On Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. By Samuel Morris Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 396 pp. $34.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In Heaven as it is On Earth: Joseph Smith and Early Mormon Conquest of . By Samuel Morris Brown . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xii + 396 pp. $34.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesSamuel Brown begins his new monograph with a sigh-inducing, pedestrian line: Death has presided over life for all of human history (3). The remainder of his work, though, is remarkable. Brown, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine, provides most original and insightful reinterpretation of Joseph Smith and early Mormonism to emerge in last twenty years. Rather than retread familiar routes, Brown contextualizes early Mormonism within what he calls nineteenth-century culture of dying and explains Smith's seemingly fragmented theology and sacraments through this illuminating prism. In process, Brown not only reveals an aspect of early Mormonism that has been largely overlooked by other historians, he also highlights a part of antebellum American culture little studied--its frequent, sustained, and normalized ritual confrontations with in era before funerary industry. Additionally, Brown unveils an early Mormon theological system more eclectic in its origins, more systematically coherent, and more literal in its idiosyncratic biblical exegesis than most scholars previously imagined.Brown's focus on conquest of is not simply an account of Mormonism's quest for salvation. It is more particularly a focus on early Mormonism's negotiations of when and under what circumstances life ends, how much of earthly experience will persist, and what constitutes preparation for death (8). Brown's study of these negotiations transforms how historians can understand Joseph Smith and early Mormonism: Book of Mormon becomes a grave artifact and Smith's seerhood translates into a vocation to break death's silence. Joseph Smith's later theological innovations come into a new focus, too. By time of Smith's death, Mormon prophet had revealed a polyvalent family system [polygamy and ritual adoption], a utopian communitarianism grounded in mystical traditions about Enoch, a temple liturgy that taught his followers how to negotiate afterlife and promised them postmortal divinity, and a scandalously anthropomorphic God whom all humans could call Father (8). All of these seemingly disparate theological innovations found coherence in Smith's attempts to address problems posed by culture of holy dying--how one could be reassured of her eternal destiny, how one could know that earthly connections endured, and how one prepared for her own and hoped for assumption of immortality.Central to Smith's project was creation of what Brown calls a radical rejection of monogamous Victorian family. In heaven family, Mormons were bound together through sacramental links that stretched across time, as ancestors were connected through baptism for dead, and space, as new, complex families were created through sealings of ritual adoption and plural marriage. All of this sacramental welding could be comprehended within Smith's revision of the Great of Being, what Brown calls Mormon Chain of Belonging. Whereas Renaissance musings on Great of Being various static orders of species, heavenly and earthly, from God down to archangels and humans, Smith erased these traditional ontological distinctions and recast them all as variations in eternal glory, not substance or species, within one grand family that was dynamic, able to embrace possibility of progress (222). …

The Suffering Saints: Thomas L. Kane, Democratic Reform, and the Mormon Question in Antebellum America

In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Thomas L. Kane, a Philadelphia social reformer, became the Mormons' self-appointed advocate to the nation and embarked on a wide-ranging publicity campaign to transform the image of the Latter-day Saints in the American mind. While most Americans considered Mormonism fraudulent and fanatical, Kane depicted the Saints as a persecuted minority driven from their homes in search of religious liberty. His descriptions of the suffering Saints, conducted through the popular press and pamphlets, resonated with deeply held ideals of religious tolerance and changing ideas about the nature of pain. As a result, sympathizing with the Saints became temporarily fashionable. Kane's effort abruptly ended, however, when Mormons publicly acknowledged their practice of polygamy in 1852, thus ceding their role as noble victims in a narrative of suffering. Kane's campaign to shape perceptions of Mormonism illuminates the connections between social reform, print culture, and minority religions in nineteenth-century America. While antebellum reform is typically described as emerging from evangelical religion and Whig Party politics, Kane represents social reformers allied with the Democratic Party, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism. Mormonism's shifting image also reveals the struggles of nineteenth-century Americans to define the boundaries of religious freedom and practice. Marginal religious groups and their defenders used claims of victimhood to move to the rhetorical center of the nation's concerns. However, while Kane's emphasis on suffering briefly improved the Mormon image, it ironically reinforced the Latter-day Saints' drive for separatism that helped fuel the Mormon controversy for the rest of the century.

Junius and Joseph: Presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet

Copyright © 2005 Utah State University PressAll rights reservedUtah State University PressLogan, Utah 84322-7800www.usu.edu/usupressManufactured in the United States of AmericaPrinted on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wicks, Robert Sigfrid, 1954- Junius and Joseph : presidential politics and the assassination of the fi rst Mormon prophet / Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87421-607-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-87421-608-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Smith, Joseph, 1805-1844. 2. Smith, Joseph, 1805-1844--Assassination. 3. Presidential candidates--United States--Biography. 4. Mormons--United States--Biography. 5. Presidents--United States--Elec-tion--1844. 6. United States--Politics and government--1841-1845. 7. Whig Party (U.S.)--History--19th century. 8. Mormon Church--United States--Political activity--History--19th century. 9. Mormonism--Political aspects--United States--History--19th century. 10. Illinois--Politics and government--To 1865. I. Foister, Fred R., 1947- II. Title. BX8695.S6W49 2005 289.3’73’09034--dc22 2005004399 ISBN 0-87421-526-9 (e-book)

Junius and Joseph: presidential politics and the assassination of the first Mormon prophet

Junius and Joseph: presidential politics and the assassination of the first Mormon prophet

Junius &amp; Joseph: Presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet

Junius &amp; Joseph: Presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet

“I Teach Them Correct Principles and They Govern Themselves”: The Leadership Genius of the Mormon Prophet Abstract

In an age characterized by “strong-man” or “leader-centered” leadership styles, Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, set himself apart by leadership behaviors that centered in the conviction that the world of human interaction is governed by interpersonal and moral laws in just the same sense that the physical world is governed by the laws of nature. If one could identify these correct or “fixed principles,” and live in harmony with them, one would thereby gain leadership power and influence. From this belief grew his leadership dictum, “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.” Specifically, we note Smith's emphasis on integrity as a foundation for leadership interaction, both in truth-telling and in living in harmony with the correct principles one knows. In addition, Smith underscored the importance of unleashing the creative talent of followers by trusting them with sizeable responsibilities (empowerment, in today's terms), in demonstrating love for followers, and in having the courage to think and act independently of mainstream thought and practice. His chief concerns in selecting a leadership team included his focus on character, building an organizational structure which would institutionalize over time the principles he taught, and then motivating followers in pursuit of challenging goals.