The_New_Yorker_-_March_30_2020

(Wang) #1
BOOKS

GOD'S COUNTRY


How Mormons came to terms with the ftderal governm11nt.

BY CASEY CEP

I


t was an unlikely candidacy: a thirty-
eight--year old mayor from the heart-
land who pitched himself as the solu-
tion to partisan gridlock, played up his
military cxpcriencc, talked often about
his faith, and promised to end the wun-
try's moral decline. He was fond of
quoting the Founding Fathers, had an
army of grassroots supporters, and came
from a swing state. But the year was


  1. the state was Illinois, the parties
    were the Whigs and the Democrats,
    and the candidate was Joseph Smith,
    the founder of the Church of Jesus
    Christ of Latter-day Saints.
    Whether or not the country would
    have been with Joe, we'll never lmow:


on June 27th, a few months after an-
nouncing his candidacy, the first Mor-
mon to run for President became the
first Presidential candidate to be assas-
sinated. Smith's death marked the end
of a decisive period in Mormon his-
tory, one that is less familiar to most
outsiders than the Chun:h's founding,
in New York State, or its eventual mOVt:
to Utah, where, against considerable
odds, its members came to flourish.
But the chaotic months of Smith's Pres-
idential campaign and his effort to es-
tablish a theocracy in Illinois are the
subject of the historian Benjamin E.
Park's new book, "Kingdom of Nau-
voo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious

A new book, "Kingdom ofNau'IJOO," emmines]oseph Smith~ theocratic visions.


ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL ROGERS

Empire on the American Frontier"
(Liveright).
Park's book is a compelling history,
built from contemponneous accounts
and fiom the previously unreleased min-
utes of the Council of Fifty, a govern-
ing body of sorts that Smith convened
in Nauvoo, Illinois, when he was feel-
ing besieged by his enemies and antic-
ipating the Second Coming of Christ.
Its minutes help clarify Smith's some-
times contradictory polit:i.cal theology,
and Park's explication of them elevates
"Kingdom of Nauvoo" from pure reli-
gious history to the realm of political
theory. Park, an ambidatrous thinker,
is equally sensitive to the danger the
state can pose to religious minorities
and to the danger that a religious in-
stitution can pose to the secular state.
In his account, the early Mormons were
a rowdy band of neo-Puritans who
mounted a fundamental challenge to
the democratic experiment. The ten-
sions that they experienced-between
the right to niligi.ous freedom and the
limits of niligi.ous tolerance-still per-
sist today.

S


mith was twenty-one and afewycais
into a floundering career as a trea-
sure hunter when, per his own account,
he unearthed a set of golden plates bur-
ied in upstate New York. This was in
l.827, during the Second Great Awak-
ening. when charismatic preachers were
stoking religious fires around the coun-
try. Smith's parents had been drawn
into this religious passion-especially
his father, who dabbled in divination
until his dreams were :fillod with proph-
ecies. Smith's own visions were of an
angel named Moroni, who appeared to
him several times before finally instruct-
ing him to retrieve the plates buried in
Hill Cumorah. By then, Smith had
married a woman named Emma Hale,
who hdped transcribe the words that
Smith claimed to translate from the
plates-engravings in a language that
he called "rcfonned Egyptian."
Smith finished the transcription by
1830 and found a printer who agreed
to run off five thousand copies. The
result, the Book of Mormon, begins
as the record of a Jewish family in J e-
rusalem, who, around 600 B.C., build
a boat and sail to the Americas--where,
six centuries later, the risen Christ

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