John Taylor wrote a hymn with which you ought to be familiar. Mormons most often sing Praise to the Man by W. W. Phelps, though it is possible that this hymn was actually written by Eliza R. Snow, to commemorate Joseph as the prophet. But John Taylor was actually at Carthage, he actually became president of the church, and he never left it. Yet his hymn is not in the present hymnal. One wonders why.
There is an excellent arrangement of this song by Rob Gardner that I love and have performed many times. I have no answer as to why this song is not an official part of correlated Mormonism today, but what I want to discuss is the significance of this song to me as an ex-mormon.
I love the prophet. I love the honest 14-year old who was too honest to pretend religious certainty and persisted until he gained that for himself. I love the brave screaming child who refused whiskey when undergoing a brutal prairie surgery on his leg bone and was more worried about his mother's disposition than his own pain throughout the ordeal. I love the teenager who struggled to become worthy to retrieve the plates that were revealed to him by Moroni. I love the loving father, the dutiful husband. I love the family man who resisted polygamy until an angel threatened him with a sword and then fulfilled his Abrahamic test in spite of his fidelity to Emma. I love the honest and brave thinker who exploded the notions of the trinity, a closed canon, an immaterial ontology, and the cruelties of the Middle-age church. That prophet gave me Mormonism. That prophet taught me that the theological equivocations that pushed God nebulously back into unidentifiable, indistinct, impersonal nothingness were false. God is real. God is physical. Heaven is not ether.
But these things are not true. That prophet is dead. He was not killed by the hateful bullets of a bigoted mob. He was killed by those who made him because he never existed. Every story told in correlated Mormonism, especially about Joseph Smith, is incomplete and is often entirely false. I am not out of Mormonism because I hated Joseph Smith or the simple truths. I am out because I loved them so much.
I can hear the former apologist in me saying, "That view is too fundamentalist. Joseph never claimed that he was perfect. You lost your faith in him because you expected him to be perfect." This is simply not true. I had read Bushman, Brodie, Vogel, and Givens long before I left. It is absolutely true that with tremendous effort one can reconcile the ambiguities, the incompleteness, the occasional lies of correlated Mormonism with true belief in the restoration. But that costs so much.
It is not any member's fault for believing in a heroic Joseph Smith with certain, unimportant, faults. I notice in passing that the faults printed out by believers are usually things like pride, or as in Madsen, fighting too badassedly. They neglect to mention the fault of lying to Emma and to the courts and to the apostles about polygamy. They do not mention that his claim to be able to translate Egyptian is testable and that he has failed that test. Back to the point: the heroic Joseph is taught with precision by the church. Read Our Heritage. Read Church History in the Fulness of Time, Read the Joseph Smith Teachings Manual. Watch this. What is one to say when one discovers that this picture is not accurate? I'm sorry that I believed you too much? I'm sorry that I did not change to believe less so that I could believe in the modern church more?
Discovering infidelity in a spouse is analogous. What if I discovered that Dani had cheated on me? Marriage matters more than religion, and so I am confident that I would still stay with her, but apply that attack of fundamentalism here. Am I to be blamed for believing my spouse when she tells me she is faithful and she loves me? Did I trust and love her in too fundamental a way? Would you have me redefine marriage as something that is consistent with infidelity? Of course, this would be ridiculous.
I feel as passionately desperate about the loss of that Joseph as I would about the loss of my spouse. I love the Joseph in Our Heritage and in the Prophet of the Restoration video. The correlated Joseph Smith is one of the best stories ever told. He was one of the best men who has ever walked the earth, and the message he gave to mankind is stunningly, achingly, beautiful. But it is not true.
I, therefore mourn the passing of Joseph with emotions similar to John Taylor's. I share the sorrow. I share the anger.
Here is the legacy I take, however, from that heroic Joseph Smith. I will let him inspire me, precisely in the way that I let Jean Valjean, Sydney Carton, and Huckleberry Finn inspire me. I will apply his dialectical agonism and his relentless servility to truth. I will adopt Ulysses' mantra:
"Tho much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, - -
One equal tempor of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennyson, Ulysses 65-70
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