I’ve been working away on the ‘what I read and thought about in January’ post, and I have found that no matter how much I try to cut it down, I end up writing more than half of it about Mormonism. I really was reading and thinking a lot about Mormonism last month! This was not prompted by this recent article which successively profiles the Mormon Wives (of Secret Lives fame), the famed tradwife Hannah Neeleman, and Heather Gay (an ex-Mormon who is one of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City)—but the article is a great illustration of Mormonism’s changing role in the culture, especially in the US, and this changing role was certainly part of what was driving my interest. Another part was my learning about Clement in December, and my recognition that some of Clement’s ideas had echoes in later Mormonism: I wanted to learn more about where Joseph Smith got these thoughts.
So, in order that that post doesn’t get too long, I’ve separated out Mormonism as a topic. This does mean it will be mid-February before you learn about everything else I read and thought about in January; sorry!
The Book of Mormon is pulp fiction
In the first place, in January I actually read the Book of Mormon! I want to emphasise that it is extraordinarily boring, and I strongly discourage you from trying to read it, and certainly you shouldn’t read the whole thing. (If you really want to try it, I have put an 80:20 strategy in the footnote to this sentence.)1 In fact, if you asked me to try to come up with interesting things about the Book of Mormon, my first thought would be ‘it’s kind of interesting how uninteresting its theology is’. Mormonism itself is absurdly theologically interesting, weird and bizarre and somewhat unhinged, but none of this is anywhere in the Book. The ideology of the Book is heated-over post-Wesley revival theology—it’s a bit Arminian, a bit ‘Oneness’ / Unitarian, a bit anti–infant baptism, and with a heavy emphasis on the atonement; but it’s hardly unique on any of these fronts, and certainly not compelling.
Of course, the story of the Book of Mormon is that some of the Lost Tribes of Israel made their way to America, split into good and evil groups, and the evil ones (the ancestors of American Indians) killed all the good ones—though not before the good ones got a visit from Jesus Christ himself! You might think this sounds entertainingly batshit; I assure you that it isn’t. The narrative is slow, slow, slow, and written with constant, unnecessary, repetitive verbal tics like ‘and it came to pass’ and ‘he, even he’ and ‘he spoke unto them saying’: I read Mark Twain’s famous review of the Book of Mormon, and his description, ‘chloroform in print’, isn’t too far off the mark.
You might ask: if the Book is so terrible—extremely terrible—how did it manage to convince so many people in the nineteenth century to become Mormons? I have a theory about this. While the book isn’t good, it is (in a very narrow sense) impressive. In the space of around three months in 1829, Joseph Smith dictated roughly 270,000 words, working without notes or visible manuscripts. He spoke clearly and coherently, with few-to-no stumbles or hesitations, no backtracking, and not even major breaks for thought. As far as we can tell, apart from in-the-moment corrections to scribal errors, the text was not revised significantly after Smith dictated it; he spoke the one and only draft, and then basically published it as-was. Mormon apologists will not hesitate to tell you that most people simply could not do this, certainly not without extensive writing experience, which Smith didn’t have.
The Mormon apologists are right about this. But that doesn’t mean that Smith was actually being revealed the words directly through his magic goggles or his magic rock-in-a-hat. (I’m sorry, guys, there’s no way to describe this that isn’t funny!) My theory is that Joseph Smith was a genuine innovator in fiction writing, and anticipated techniques that would only be rediscovered a century later.
To use an AI metaphor, writing is essentially a matter of repeatedly looking for the next token, finding le mot juste over and over and over again. But the space of possible tokens is huge, and brute force search is not efficient. Traditional writing uses techniques of creativity and reflection, but the Bitter Lesson tells us that these methods don’t scale. But twentieth-century ‘pulp’ writers realised a way to scale the production of fiction to industrial levels by substantially narrowing down the search space.
Every genre is made up of tropes and patterns that delimit its boundaries, separating it off from other genres. What many writers realised in the twentieth century (building on earlier techniques) was that these tropes and patterns could provide templates: stock plots, standard styles, cliché sentences. If you leaned heavily on these templates—and I mean heavily, using templates to tell you what happens down to the level of the individual paragraph—you could turn the task of writing into a matter of just mechanically pumping out sentences and improvising a few key details along the way. Lots of these writers described their techniques in detail, and they analogised the process to assembly lines, where standards and pre-designed models allowed for mass production. Pulp writers were so efficient at leveraging the constraints of genre to make search tractable that they could even literally randomise the process and still come up with coherent stories.
The Book of Mormon is so repetitive (both at the sentence level and at the level of story structure)2 and has such a cliché writing style, that I hypothesise: Joseph Smith managed to figure out some version of pulp fiction techniques a century ahead of anyone else. I can’t be sure of this, because he didn’t write down his methods (he had to keep up the pretence that the book was given to him by the angel Moroni!), but I think the resemblance is pretty strong.
Of course, these techniques require having genre conventions to draw on for your templates. But the historian Eran Shalev has done great work in filling out the details of a historical genre that is mostly forgotten now: King James Bible pastiches. I read a few of these, published around the time of the Book of Mormon, and many of them are very funny.
Even James, whose surname was Madison, delivered a written paper to the Great Sanhedrim [sic] of the people, who were assembled together. And the name of the city where the people were gathered together was called after the name of the chief captain of the land of Columbia, whose fame extendeth to the uttermost parts of the earth: albeit, he had gone to the land of his fathers. Nevertheless the people loved him, inasmuch as he wrought their deliverance from the yoke of tyranny in times past: so they called the city Washington. [The Late War.]
Now this man Napoleon, after sojourning in many days in the land of Egypt, suddenly took his departure from thence, and returned unto the country of the Gauls, and overthrew like a whirlwind the rulers thereof, and put himself at the head of the armies of the multitude, and declared himself to be the governor of the nation, which he began to rule with a rod of iron. [The First Book of Napoleon.]
This is exactly what the Book of Mormon sounds like, except that the Book of Mormon is much longer (and thus much more repetitive).
Genre conventions are as old as human storytelling. But the leveraging of genre conventions into extreme productivity (at the cost of cliché and repetitiveness) is a specific set of techniques that are an innovation of the modern world. As far as I can tell, Joseph Smith may have independently invented something like these techniques, a century before they would re-emerge. And so, although Smith’s achievement would become dime-a-dozen by the twentieth century (indeed, maybe the most prolific genre writer today is actually Mormon!), in the nineteenth century the Book of Mormon looked genuinely unique. Add a few credulous reports of divine visions, and you’ve got a religion on your hands!
This is presumably also why the Book of Mormon is so theologically boring. When he was writing it, Smith was not optimising for theological insight but for wordcount. (Hence also a phenomenon mentioned in one of the earliest reviews of the Book of Mormon, which is still extremely insightful, written by Northern Irish preacher Alexander Campbell: ‘[Smith] is better skilled in the controversies in New York than in the geography or history of Judea. He makes John baptise in the village of Bethabara, and says Jesus was born in Jerusalem.’) But after writing the book, Joseph Smith suddenly found himself in the role of prophet of a new religion, empowered to receive revelation directly from God. Now it was time to start optimising for theological insight… or, actually, on second thoughts, maybe it was time to optimise for personal prestige and power?
Con-artists are always also true believers
Because of the above-mentioned considerations, although you might get told off for the biographical fallacy, when it comes to interpreting Mormon theology you really have to see it in the light of Joseph Smith’s life: certainly, the religion’s holy book doesn’t help you. I read a bunch of articles, and tried out the three main biographies of Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Mormon author Richard Lyman, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet by ex-Mormon Dan Vogel, and No Man Knows My History, a much older biography from 1945 by ex-Mormon Fawn M. Brodie. (There’s also Samuel Morris Brown’s On Heaven as it is on Earth, which interprets Mormon theology in terms of Joseph Smith’s fear of death.)
Of everything I read, Fawn Brodie’s biography was easily the best and most insightful, and was the only one of the biographies I read start-to-finish. She makes a few mistakes,3 but (in general) where she differs from the consensus of modern writers, I find that she’s actually more convincing.
Brodie’s depiction of Smith reminded me of the character of Rick in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, which I read last year. The book is semi-autobiographical and (despite the title) is as much about con artists as about spies: Rick is a thinly-veiled portrait of le Carré’s con-artist dad, Ronnie Cornwell. In the novel, Rick clearly knows that the appealing stories he’s spinning to his marks are false, and the marks only believe them out of a combination of hope, naïveté, and wishful thinking. But crucially, Rick also believes a bunch of false stories out of wishful thinking: he spends beyond his means, ends up getting repossessed or going into bankruptcy a bunch of times, tries to get elected to parliament without wondering if his history of fraud might affect his campaign, etc. The stories Rick tells himself are different from the stories he tells his marks, but they’re equally bullshit.
Consider also Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF told the world that FTX had a bunch of inviolable safeguards to prevent runs on the exchange; that was nonsense, and he knew fine well that it was nonsense. But he seems to have genuinely believed—he seems to still genuinely believe!—in a different, but equally different, bullshit story: that (despite the complete lack of internal controls and the ‘hidden poorly internally labelled “fiat@” accounts’) he somehow could have gotten everyone their money back if he’d not been ‘forced’ to declare bankruptcy prematurely.
I take the lesson to be something like this. If you were hyper-efficient at convincing people to believe false stuff and taking advantage of their desires, and completely morally bankrupt, and also completely clear-eyed about reality yourself, you’d not content yourself with being a petty con-man or fraudster—you’d be more like Jeffrey Epstein or something, some shadowy figure with connections to the most powerful people in the world and a huge reserve of money and influence. If you’re a con-artist, it’s because you have only two out of the three: you have a preternatural charisma and ability to take advantage of people, you have low moral standards, but also (crucially) you aren’t able to avoid self-delusion, so your ability to strategise with clarity and focus is severely limited.
Vogel basically thinks Smith was a purely cynical liar, while Lyman (as a good Mormon) writes his whole narrative on the totally-implausible assumption that Smith was genuine. But Brodie’s picture of Smith, who (famously) ran bizarre hidden-Indian-gold scams before he wrote the Book of Mormon, is that he was both a con-man and a sincere believer in his own religious authority. On the one hand, Smith obviously knew that he had made the Book of Mormon up, he obviously knew that the famous ‘first vision’ never happened, he obviously knew that the bank he set up in Ohio as an adjunct to the Mormon church was lying about its reserves. But also, he did a bunch of things that are completely inexplicable on the ‘he was purely cynical’ view, like marching an army to Missouri that wasn’t big enough to actually take on any Missouri militias on its own but also wasn’t small enough to be ignored.
On Brodie’s telling, Smith came to believe that he genuinely was chosen by God: not by being handed golden plates by the angel Moroni, but still chosen. Being charismatic enough to gain thousands of followers certainly helped. His fundamental motivations were still prestige, power, wealth, and status, and his self-delusion helped launder these motivations into religious terms. But because he was genuinely self-deluded, not merely cynical, this ‘laundering’ process made a huge difference to his actions.
How Mormon theology was shaped by the dynamics of fraud
So Joseph Smith knew the story he told about the Book of Mormon was false, but still believed himself to be (in some sense) a genuine prophet. So he wanted to make religious proclamations—but he didn’t feel constrained by the theology of the Book of Mormon itself. Brodie doesn’t really discuss the theological implications of these dynamics as much as I’d like, but you can begin to see them in outline once you start to look.
As I said above, the Book of Mormon is non-Trinitarian in a ‘Oneness’ or ‘modalist’ way. Where mainstream Trinitarian Christianity says that Jesus and God the Father are ‘same in being’ but not ‘same in personhood’, the Book of Mormon is clear that these are two different names of the same person, there’s no distinction between Jesus and the Father. This is unusual but not unprecedented in American Christianity, and today you have the Oneness Pentecostals who are recognisably descended from the same tradition as the Book of Mormon. But later on, Joseph Smith goes all the way to the other extreme without stopping in the middle: Jesus and God the Father are entirely distinct beings.
I think we can take Brodie’s theory in a direction that she didn’t go. If con-artistry generally involves two different false narratives, a ‘private’ one and a ‘public’ one, then a natural development is for the con-artist to let a few trusted people in on the private narrative, thereby creating an ‘inner circle’. John le Carré describes how his father had close allies who helped him with his scams and campaigning; SBF had Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang.
In religious terms, this is a kind of esotericism: an inner teaching for initiates, of exactly the kind I described when I was writing about Clement last month. I don’t want to suggest that all religious esotericism develops out of fraud and con-artistry. Last month I suggested a different reason why early Christianity might have gone esoteric: it was potentially an attempt to stop schism.
But in the Mormon case specifically, I think this inner-circle phenomenon is exactly what happened. Joseph Smith admitted certain trusted allies into his inner circle and revealed new aspects of the religion to them. They learned a radical new theology where human beings have the opportunity to become gods in the afterlife, with their own worlds to rule over, and where God himself had been a human. Temple-based ceremonies like ‘endowment’ and ‘sealing’ developed for initiates, with their own ritual gestures, secret handshakes, special costumes, and religious significance, all of which are explicitly supposed to be kept secret. And, most famously, initiates were taught that they were allowed to marry multiple women.
Now, after Joseph Smith died, and especially after the Mormons moved to the middle of the desert and no longer worried about the reactions of unbelievers to their secret doctrines, many of the most distinctive elements of esoteric Mormon theology would be revealed publicly: leading LDS Church member Orson Pratt told the world about Mormon polygamy in 1852. Nowadays, even the secret handshakes in the temple ordinances are described on the internet. But while today it is public, the theology first developed as the ‘inner narrative’ of a con-artist, and I think this helps us interpret what’s going on.
Let’s take the most prominent example: polygamy. Joseph Smith found himself in a crazy position of power, there were a huge number of attractive women hanging on his every word, and (not unusually) he wanted to sleep with them. Many religious leaders just sleep around with no special theology, and manage to keep it—if not entirely secret—at least mostly secret. Potentially this is what Smith himself did a few times. But it’s hard to square ‘I am God’s prophet, a holy man’ with ‘I am committing straightforward adultery with no other justification than my own desire’ without at least some cognitive dissonance.
This is where Smith’s capacity for self-delusion, along with his obvious theological creativity, enters in. He finds space in his developing cosmology and theology for the idea that marriage is eternal, lasting even after death; so men who remarry after their wives die will find themselves with multiple wives in the afterlife; so polygamous marriages must therefore be justifiable. And then he sees the many polygamous marriages in the Old Testament, particularly Genesis, involving men who we are obviously meant to see as virtuous. Putting this all together, he found a story that let him combine ‘I am a virtuous prophet’ with ‘I am married and yet I am sleeping with two dozen women’, and he convinced himself that it was true: God wanted him to be polygamous.
This may have helped quell his cognitive dissonance, but it made life harder for the Mormons. Once Smith’s desire to sleep around was transmuted into esoteric theology, it could no longer be just a personal practice: he felt the need to teach his inner circle about it. As the surface-area of a secret increases, the risk that the story leaks massively increases, and this is exactly what happened in this case. Too many Mormon men were having too many polygamous marriages for it to stay secret, and before too long Mormons found themselves locked in a permanent state of on-and-off conflict with literally the entire rest of American society, because non-Mormons universally abhorred polygamy. This lasted until 1890, when the church publicly announced an end to polygamy—but privately retained it as an esoteric doctrine for the inner circle for many years.
Logistics and legitimacy
Like Ronnie Cornwell, like SBF, like many con-artists, Joseph Smith’s capacity for persuasion and confidence was huge but not inifinite—and his capacity for self-delusion stopped him from seeing his own limitations clearly. And so, he fell.
After his death, there were some leadership disputes, but the bulk of the Mormons sided with Brigham Young. Young was indeed one of Smith’s close confidants, but he wasn’t one of the earliest converts, he wasn’t in the highest leadership roles. Crucially, before Smith died he had appointed his son Joseph III to be his successor, not Young. And (frankly) Brigham Young seems like a bit of a prick: by all (non-Mormon) accounts he was domineering, authoritarian, really quite racist, and intellectually crude to boot. And to top it all off, his signature idea after Joseph Smith’s death was the completely-mad-seeming proposal that the Mormons basically wander into the desert, across half a continent, to find a place to live. Why on earth did the Mormons pick him as their leader?
I didn’t end up reading any books about Young specifically, so I can’t tell you for sure. But Brodie’s biography has some hints. One of the most striking passages describes the aforementioned Mormon army marching from Ohio to Missouri:
After a fortnight of marching, high spirits gave way to bickering. Every company ran short of bread except that of Brigham Young, who had noted the dangerously low supply of meal and had sent two men forward to purchase some for his own dozen soldiers. [Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 2nd ed., p. 149.]
Later on, in Missouri, almost all of the Mormon leaders were arrested: by pure chance, Young was one of the tiny number of exceptions. While church leaders languished in prison in Missouri, the faithful had to flee en masse across state lines to Illinois to avoid violence from anti-Mormon militias who were emboldened by the Missouri government. Many had to leave their property behind; many others had no property to begin with, it having been destroyed by the militias.
More than anything else the Mormons needed a man who looked at their exodus in terms of the supply problem. Young went to work with vigour that swept apathy and despair before it like a tidy broom. At his insistence two hundred of the best-equipped families oiled all their food and equipment to be used for the common good. He dispatched emissaries ahead to make deposits of corn along the route and to negotiate contracts for ferriage… ‘The word impossible has become obsolete with us,’ Eliza Snow wrote to a friend late in February. ‘It astonishes our enemies that our people suffer no more while passing through…’ [Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 2nd ed., p. 248.]
Brigham Young may not have been a moral exemplar. He may not have been theologically inspiring or religiously deep. He may have even been a massive cunt. But he’d make sure you’d fucking eat. If I were a Mormon in 1844—uprooted from my home, harassed by violent militias, not sure how I will make it through the next few years—and I had to choose between the inflexibly dogmatic Sidney Rigdon, the mystical seer James Strang, the still-underage Joseph Smith III, and Young… it’s not even close.
When it comes to political and religious legitimacy, charisma matters, the official rules of succession matter, family links matter—but logistics matter too. And clearly Brigham Young knew logistics.
First, skim the first 10 or so chapters of 1 Nephi, the bit where the ancient Israelites actually come to America. (Skim, don’t try to read closely, you’ll get bored and give up.) Then read 3 Nephi 11, where Jesus appears in America, and maybe the next few chapters where Jesus talks to the ‘Nephites’. Then skip ahead to Mormon 6–9, where the Nephites are destroyed by the Lamanites and the records of the ‘golden plates’ are hidden, for Joseph Smith to find centuries later. Pretty much all the narrative in between about what actually happens to the Nephites and the Lamanites is samey, repetitive, uninteresting, and unnecessary.
Then, for an overview of the theologically relevant bits, I’d look at 2 Nephi 2 and 2 Nephi 9 (about the atonement and then the Fall, both of which are pretty distinctive even in the Book of Mormon, although they will be spun way out in later Mormonism) and then read Mosiah 2–5, which is probably the most famous passage in the book among Mormons. You can then read Moroni 10, the last chapter of the whole Book of Mormon, which is the chapter missionaries use in asking people to pray for guidance about the truth of the Book.
Finally you can try reading some of Ether, which is a separate narrative about a completely different group of Abrahamic monotheists who also came to America, also believed in Jesus, were also wiped out at a battle at the ‘hill Cumorah’, and also left their story on metal plates to be found later. This is perhaps leaving 80:20 territory, but there’s some nuts stuff about completely air-tight wind-powered wooden barges that comes out of fucking nowhere. You might enjoy puzzling over the question ‘why on earth did Joseph Smith put this in here??????’
You don’t have to take my word that the stories in the Book of Mormon fit into narrowly-defined, formulaic structures that repeat over and over: these templates have actually been identified by Mormon theologians themselves as they excavate their holy book. The most famous is the ‘pride cycle’, but there are others. Michael Austin has described ‘the exodus pattern’, ‘eating a specific fruit’, and ‘the conversion of men who persecuted the church’ as standard repeating plots or ‘type-scenes’ across the length of the Book of Mormon. Richard Rust in Feasting on the Word says that in the Book of Mormon ‘it seems that every important action, event, or character type is repeated’, and cites numerous examples: ‘wealthy men [who] lose their riches as they pursue prophetic callings’, ‘prophets are cast out of cities and then return at the Lord’s bidding’, ‘Lamanite leaders are killed by a spear within their tents’. If you know the Old Testament at all, you will be able to see exactly where Joseph Smith got all these plot-templates.
Brodie makes a distinction between Smith’s earlier magical practices and and his later religious claims; in general this distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ doesn’t make sense, and in the specific case of Smith I think it’s been convincingly refuted by later analysts. But even here I think she’s still onto something: plausibly Smith did not start the Book of Mormon project thinking that he was starting a new religion, or even necessarily writing something that should be considered ‘scripture’; this more elevated conception developed over the course of the Book of Mormon project, especially after Martin Harris lost the first manuscript.
"chloroform in print" lol
Ironically, I am reading this and wondering how you write so much so quickly...very impressive!
Interesting!