Jamie Loftus

But very few specific movements from this time still have the cultural hold on America that Mormonism does. Though Joseph Smith releases the Book of Mormon and the religion is formalized in 1830, but the religion's origin story connects to two incidents from the previous 10 years.

One was from 1820 when Joseph was 14 and asked both Jesus and God which religion to follow and was told by them, follow none of them. It is your job to prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus.

The other incident was in 1823, when a 17-year-old Smith is said to have been visited by the angel Moroni to repeat this calling, and was also told that there was an ancient record regarding God's dealings with the quote-unquote American continent that he needed to translate with a series of tools when he was a little older.

After the angel Moroni's visit, Joseph Smith says that he retrieved and divinely translated the text of the Book of Mormon, which was inscribed on thin gold plates. There is a bit of a Wizard of Oz-y quality to the way that this translation is dictated. There's magic stones, he's going behind curtains, and sometimes he wouldn't even use the gold plates.

He would instead put a special stone in a hat, then bury his face in said hat. But if you're a prophet, he explained, the stone lights up within the hat, and then you just dictate from there. This whole mystical plates thing also comes up in modern Scientology, where members in Florida are engraving the words of L. Ron Hubbard onto titanium plates as we speak.

It also harkens back to Helena Blavatsky's notion of the Akashic Records of the late 19th century, which were said to be indestructible tablets of the astral light. So there's that. A lot of this reminds me of spiritualism, which in its early days was composed of a lot of practical magic. Great movie.

And if you're not familiar with the origins of the Book of Mormon, to be fair, most religious origin stories are not significantly wilder than this. Spiritualism has a similarly mystical origin story. As for its contents, the Book of Mormon details the plight of a group of Jewish people in Jerusalem who escaped the city before it's destroyed in 600 BC.

They built a boat, sail it to the Americas, and soon become embroiled in a conflict within the group between two groups called the Neophytes and the Lamanites. One of the big changes made to the Book of Mormon later on is that the Lamanites were ancestors of all indigenous Americans. This language would later be softened to say that they were among the ancestors of some indigenous people.

So a group of Jewish people migrate to the Americas and become Lamanites. indigenous Americans. Okay, Jesus is a huge part of Mormonism and the Book of Mormon details that after Jesus is resurrected in 33 AD, he goes to visit the Americas where he is hailed as the pale prophet because yes, Mormon Jesus is white.

Some of their other beliefs as expressed through Joseph Smith are that God is a flesh and blood being who has a flesh and blood wife, his wife. who lives far away near a distant star. And God tells Joseph Smith that we earthlings were brought into being to create these nuclear families, to be closer to God so that one day we can live with God out of town on the star where he lives.

And to create these families, you hear a lot of the classic signifiers of fundamentalist religions. There is an emphasis on sacrifice, discipline, and suffering. There are rigid gender roles. There's canonical homophobia. There's absurd racism that was later scaled back in order to accommodate growth and membership.

Until a few decades ago, the Book of Mormon described members as, quote, a white and delightsome people, unquote. To this day, there is still a tacit don't ask, don't tell policy within the church about queerness. And that's an improvement from the mid 2010s when the children of queer parents were still not allowed to be baptized in the LDS.

Anyways, in his time, Joseph Smith was, per his account, declared a prophet by Jesus and genuinely did face a great deal of persecution.

In the early days where he was gathering followers in New York, he was arrested and ejected from the state and took his believers to Ohio to prepare for the second coming of Jesus in Zion, a location TBD paradise where Smith envisioned communities that would be governed by celestial laws as determined by him. As it progresses, Mormonism grows further away from traditional Christianity.

And before you know it, the Mormons are ousted from Ohio. Smith is tar and feathered before this. The group then moves to Missouri, which is great because the Lord just so happens to have told Joseph Smith that that's actually where Zion is, but also where the Garden of Eden was. So the Mormons start buying up land in Missouri.

And to remind you of the era of history we're in, this happened in 1831, just a year after the Indian Removal Act was passed and brought about 20 years of brutal genocide of the indigenous people. But once in Missouri, the Mormons are driven out again, this time with increasing violence.

And over the next few years, they head with Smith all over the Midwest, where they're treated with similar hostility most places they go. At one point, the governor of Missouri passed an extermination act. Eventually, they moved to Illinois, where they're permitted to set up a city of their own called Nauvoo, basically Zion 2.0.

And it's here where Smith lightly militarizes the group and increasingly sends out missionaries to continue to grow the faith. And at the same time, Smith is told by an angel to introduce one of the LDS's most controversial policies, polygamy. And polygamy wasn't something that was allowed to everyone in the faith at first, just the powerful in the church.

And during Smith's lifetime, the practice was kept fairly quiet. He married as many as 40 women, some of whom were underage. Women were expected to remain in the home, have many children, And to this day, there is an early and intense emphasis on being a wife and mother before all else.

The end of the line came for Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, where non-Mormon locals imprisoned and then killed he and his brother. He's been hailed as an eternal prophet in the Mormon church ever since, and is still an extremely prominent figure in the culture to this day.