Joseph Smith is not a gospel principle

The focus of this week's reading was Joseph Smith's role in the Restoration. The study guide prompts me to reflect on what scriptures and doctrines have come to us through Joseph Smith—which I could do, except that my thoughts this week kept running in more . . . I dunno . . . grouchy directions. I'm tired of the adulation of Joseph Smith—the reverential references to "the Prophet Joseph" and how amazing he was and how indebted we are to him; his bland, saccharine portrait gazing at you every time you turn around. Maybe the Joseph Smith bicentennial burned me out, but I'm to the snapping point of wanting to bite people's heads off.

When I created LiberalMormon.net, I deliberately didn't create a page on Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith is not a gospel principle. Joseph Smith was an instrument, a conduit, for generating texts and rituals and other practices that teach us gospel principles. The conduit is not what matters. When I'm thirsty, what matters is the water that comes out of the tap, not the pipes under the sink that convey the water to me. In fact, when I look under the sink, it's not a pretty sight, which is why we keep the pipes under the sink, out of sight. And even after I get the water from the pipe, I still have to run it through an extra filter before it's really palatable for drinking.

That's the metaphor that came to me this week for articulating my feelings about Joseph Smith. He's the pipe under the sink. He's gungy and corroded and not something I want to make a portrait of to hang over my desk to look at for inspiration. He was egotistical and foolish and pathologically in need of loyal followers—and to make it worse, prone to the delusion that his egotistical, foolish, pathological impulses were revelations from God. In other words, your garden-variety charismatic leader of a small but successful new religious movement. Having developed an acquired taste for the water that comes out of Joseph Smith's tap, and finding that it provides me with essential vitamins and minerals (once it's been filtered), I'm appropriately grateful to God for the water; but I'm not interested in opening the cabinet under the sink to gaze in awe at the plumbing or sing its praises. [Let's refrain from a Freudian reading of that last sentence, shall we?]

As I said, my thoughts this week have been grouchy. If I were to do an exercise like writing a letter to Joseph Smith, you'd see more of my positive feelings toward the fruits of his ministry. At the same time, I feel strongly that adulation of Joseph Smith is spiritually unhealthy, as is the adulation of any charismatic leader: it tends toward idolatry; it creates an environment where unrighteous dominion can thrive. And the desire of my heart is for a Mormon community that values the good things that come to us through the texts and practices Smith brought forth but isn't centered on him as a charismatic leader—"the Prophet," with a capital P.

You see the seeds of that kind of Mormonism—the shoots, even—in early sections of the D&C. But it doesn't last long; Smith himself made sure of that. D&C 20, the composition of which was initiated by Oliver Cowdery, presents Joseph and Oliver as co-directors of the church, and then doesn't name Joseph Smith again, though it refers to him elliptically in its brief summary of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon—the point of which is not, as in later versions of Mormon orthodoxy, that Joseph Smith is the uniquely chosen one through whom God restored modern revelation or the authority of the priesthood, but that his experience illustrates the principle that God inspires "men"—that is, people in the plural—to his holy work today as in generations past. That is to say, Joseph's prophetic experiences (he isn't actually referred to here as "prophet") are certainly important in this vision of the origins of the church; but they aren't central in the way they become, for example, when Joseph Smith sits down to write a book called History of the Church, which immediately turns into his autobiography. D&C 20 has much less to say about Joseph Smith and his visions than it does about the various offices and representative conferences that are to govern the church: there is nothing in this document to indicate that its author understands Joseph as exercising hierarchical authority in the church as God's mouthpiece. That comes in D&C 21, in which Joseph (unsatisfied with the role assigned to him in D&C 20?) announces that there will be a record kept in which he is named as prophet and seer and that the Saints are to receive his words as if from the mouth of God. In subsequent revelations (D&C 28; 32), we see Smith moving to gradually diminish Oliver Cowdery's authority to offer prophetic utterances and to delegitimize competing prophetic voices like Hiram Page's. Joseph is determined to be sole king of the mountain—king of the earth, actually, according to a ceremony performed in Nauvoo. And the LDS Church has been content to grant him that central charismatic authority, partly because they want to transfer that same authority to the current church president.

What's the alternative? I need to end this post and move on with my day, so I don't have time to launch into that except to quickly gesture to some possibilities: taking seriously the model of democratic church governance described in D&C 20; recognizing Smith as deeply flawed instrument and repudiating the tendency to treat him and other church leaders as basically infallible, or at least beyond criticism; to focus more on the Church as a community divinely called to a redemptive work than on exalting the rectitude and authority of the office-holders who have responsibility, in our organization, for coordinating that work. But this is all alien to the impulses that have shaped Mormon orthodoxy ever since large numbers of Saints bought into Joseph Smith's own inflated sense of his importance.