Our Whole Strength

In the information age, growing awareness of Joseph Smith’s first vision accounts and the findings of the New Mormon History disrupted the collective Mormon memory of Smith’s vision. Of the saints who learned of the newly selected and related knowledge, many dismissed or disregarded it. But many experienced dissonance that led to deeper investigation. Some successfully incorporated new knowledge and consolidated a more complex but still orthodox memory. For others, however, a high degree of unresolved dissonance eroded their faith. They could no longer believe that Joseph Smith experienced a vision, but because it had become the seminal event underpinning their faith, they could agree with Gordon B. Hinckley that it either occurred or it did not, and if it did not, the faith was a fraud.

Under Attack

Drawing on newly discovered accounts (1832, 1835) and lots of contextual research, James Allen and Milton Backman added an alternative memory to the buffer on which the saints could draw for memory resources. Believing historians formed a faithful, complex understanding of Smith’s vision that accounted for the incongruity the critics saw in the historical record. The believing historians selected and related new items to old ones. They showed how new elements could be integrated recursively with the long-established story. The laity hardly noticed, however. Compared to the expanding number of Mormons whose conversions were often tied to the canonized account of Smith’s first vision, Mormon historians were a tiny minority. Publishing their findings did almost nothing to alter the Mormon collective memory or make it more resilient to critics. The disruptive potential of the newly discovered records and ways of interpreting them remained latent, waiting for an information age to unleash it.

New Light

As the number of Mormon converts pushed toward two million in the 1960s, Presbyterian minister Wesley Walters was not able to keep them from becoming Latter-day Saints. But he forced all serious scholars of Mormon history to reconsider the reliability of Joseph Smith’s first vision story with his novel research method and findings. Walters made the case that historical evidence disproved any sizeable revival in Joseph Smith’s vicinity in 1820, and therefore that Smith made up his story later, situating it in the context of a well-documented 1824 revival. Walters’s argument was later criticized for its fallacies of irrelevant proof negative proof, but it caused consternation among Latter-day Saint scholars at the time.

The Joseph (F.) Smith Story

Following the death of Lorenzo Snow in 1901, Joseph F. Smith was next in the line of prophetic successors. Joseph F. became the prophet and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in autumn. He ramped up efforts to commemorate Joseph Smith’s birthday and especially to rehearse his first vision. In the turn-of-the-century crisis that threatened to undermine Mormonism, Joseph F. Smith’s selection, relation, and repetition of the story of his uncle’s first vision helped the saints navigate their way to a new narrative, one in which plural marriage could be relinquished without eroding the saints’ faith in revelations received by their prophets past or present.

Consolidation

Neuroscience and some leading memory theorists agree that memories take time to develop or consolidate. Joseph Smith’s accounts of his first vision show that he was aware of his awareness during the experience. He consciously experienced the vision as it occurred, but he also re-experienced and interpreted it over time. That process continued throughout his life. This chapter reviews how the 1832, 1835, and 1838/39 accounts are similar and different, and how they line up with criticisms by Fawn Brodie. Finally, this chapter overviews the 1842 account, the last known first vision account to have been written or dictated by Joseph Smith.

Past, Present, and Persecution

Every memory has a culture, and Joseph Smith’s best-known account of his first vision (the 1838/39 account) consolidated in a hostile environment. Smith and his people were driven from Missouri by the governor’s executive order, he was jailed during the winter of 1838–39, and then he escaped to reunite with his exiled followers in Illinois. There he and associates renewed work on a manuscript history that begins with a defensive and defiant account of his first vision. The saints eventually canonized this version of Smith’s memory. It shapes their identity as a people persecuted for transcending creedal Christianity and accessing God directly. That outcome was not inevitable.

Afterword

By 2015, Latter-day Saints were beginning to consolidate a more resilient cultural memory of Smith’s vision based on unabashed selection, relation, and repetition of Smith’s accounts in church curriculum. Curriculum a generation earlier had avoided any potential first vision controversies. Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith had been banned, not his interpretation of Smith’s accounts was the curriculum, having been officially selected, related, and repeated via media that was much more likely than a lecture or a textbook to modulate memory formation in young Latter-day Saints. The consolidation of their shared memory will take time. So will the recursion process by which elements are added or subtracted and new memories form. Within a generation, relatively few saints will remember any of the earlier versions of their shared knowledge. This book will preserve those memories.

Gone Are the Days

Richard Bushman’s 2005 biography of Joseph Smith incorporated the findings of the New Mormon history. Bushman saw changes over time in Smith’s vision accounts and granted the critics that point, just not their interpretation that it meant Smith did not experience what he claimed. Bushman did not question whether Smith told the truth about his vision, only what truth he told he time he recorded it. Bushman’s Joseph Smith is therefore not the deceived or deceiving one of Fawn Brodie or Wesley Walters, but neither is he the simplified teenage prophet of the movies and manuals. Though initially barred from use in LDS religious education curriculum, provided the standard interpretation of Smith’s first vision adopted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by 2018. This was most evident in “First Vision Accounts” and Saints: The Standard of Truth, volume 1—products espoused and promoted by LDS leaders.

The Golden Age of That First Great Revelation

Joseph F. Smith’s efforts to raise the profile of the first vision worked. In their wake, young Latter-day Saints needed only to evoke the vision to make several rhetorical points: that God was embodied and passionate and created humans in his image; that God and Christ were distinct, separate, yet unified; that the Christian churches and creeds were not Christ’s; that God continued to reveal himself; that Joseph Smith was his revelator. These ideas were collective knowledge among Latter-day Saints in 1900. And no story captured and conveyed their shared sense of God, their relationship to him and to other Christians, as potently as the story of Smith’s vision. Memory of Joseph Smith’s first vision was widely diffused among and deeply embedded in Latter-day Saints by 1900. It was widely retold in diverse settings and media and yielded great meaning as a cultural and theological resource.

Straightforward Recital

Artistically written recursions of Joseph Smith’s first vision also began to appear in the 1880s, particularly through George Cannon and Andrew Jenson. These stories, while not intended to be historical representations, reflected and contributed to the recursion of collective memory and its transmission to the next generation. Distortion, while inevitable with retellings, occurs as the remembering entity favors coherence over accuracy. Forging collective memory from art, music, and print created by a shared memory and a multitude of individual ones, each inevitably distorted compared to Joseph Smith’s own memories of his first vision. But for all that, the collective memory the saints forged became incredibly strong, resilient, and extremely well known to them.