In my explorations, the first person to actually use the term pious fraud in conjunction with Mormonism was Mark Twain in Roughing It. Surprisingly, the reference was not to Joseph Smith, but to Brigham Young allegedly dressing up as Joseph Smith. This is Twain’s take on the narratives about assuming the prophetic mantle. More recently, Dan Vogel’s biography is essentially a book length defense of an earlier 1996 essay championing the pious fraud model as the most plausible solution framed by Jan Shipps in “The Prophet Puzzle:”
What we have in Mormon historiography is two Josephs: the one who started out digging for money and when he was unsuccessful, turned to propheteering, and the one who had visions and dreamed dreams, restored the church, and revealed the will of the Lord to a sinful world.
While Vogel argues that the pious fraud model can give us special insight into the mind of the prophet, the model is deficient in providing much explanation on other subjects. Richard Bushman pointed this out about Brodie’s (and by extension, I think, Vogel’s) biography in comparison to his own Rough Stone Rolling:
Many will prefer Fawn McKay Brodie’s account in No Man Knows My History. She portrayed Joseph Smith as a pious fraud who became a prophet despite perpetrating a hoax with the Book of Mormon. That does not work for me. In Brodie’s narrative. Mormon believers inevitably become simpleminded dupes. If Smith was a charlatan, everyone who followed him was deluded—including myself and all my Mormon friends. Making Joseph Smith an impostor may accord with our modern view of what is possible and impossible—no gold plates or angels, please—but it does not explain why he succeeded. Why did people then and now believe him? To understand their belief you have to get inside his world, in my opinion,and think of him as his followers did.
Pious fraud theory does a very poor job at handling the existence of the plates. However where students of Mormon history might be persuaded is in Joseph’s pre-translation activities as a village seer. Here Vogel’s thorough-going naturalism has the potential to more plausibly (in an Occam’s razor sense) explain the data in the early accounts. To paraphrase, Vogel asks us what is more plausible: believing in bleeding ghosts, slippery treasure, and seeing things underground that comes with the territory of treasure seeking folklore or simply believing that Joseph Smith deceived people into thinking he had spiritual gifts? As least one regular bloggernacle contributor (a very bright individual I might add) has embraced the latter:
Nor do I believe that God gave Joseph (and only Joseph out of the many, many treasure seers of early 19th-century New England) the power to actually see underground in his seer stones. So I’m left with some idea of Joseph the treasure seer as a fraud and a kind of backwoods con man.
The remarkable forthrightness is commendable, when so many historians merely report the substance of the treasure digging accounts and leave it up to their readers to judge their authenticity. In terms of apologetics, I think it is wise to be agnostic to things that are not part of our common experience like bleeding ghosts and slippery treasure, but I also think we need to go further and try to explain the consequences of choosing one position over another. To play Devil’s Advocate: If Joseph Smith misrepresented what he could see with his seer stone, I see no reason to tar his entire body of work. He was young and could have repented. If the data about his days as a treasure seeker are ambiguous, his religious works are not! Just about every high point in religious innovation came accompanied with profound spiritual experiences witnessed by multiple people.
It is difficult for me to advocate the pious fraud theory in such a manner. It seems to say more about a proponent author’s judgment on whether (and why) Joesph Smith lied on case by case basis (D&C 19, Zelph, polygamy denials, etc.) than it does about Joseph Smith. After polygamy and racial issues, the 3rd most common query to FAIR involves people disoriented by learning about seer stones. I think it is much more helpful to steer these individuals towards the literature that supports a prophet-in-training model as described by Mark Ashurst-McGee and to a lesser extent, Richard Bushman. As long as one doesn’t take the position that any explanation is better than the provided supernatural one, than I think this model holds up fairly well.
I actually think Joseph Smith was able to see treasure underground. He was able see the Book of Mormon in his seer stone before uncovering it. He had a reputation for being able to locate well water. He was able to read from the page of book with his back turned. He offered to beat Martin Harris in a foot race through the woods with a blindfold on and relying only on his seer stone. He located a pin Martin dropped in a pile of straw. He described what inns David Whitmer had stopped at on his 3 day journey from Fayette to Harmony. He described the homestead of Josiah Stowell from a similar distance. He located some animals that had been lost for 3 days for a neighbor and a mare for another neighbor. Stowell found a buried money at “Bend Mountain” as Joseph represented it. Joseph kept tabs on whether the plates were safe through his divining aid. Dale Broadhurst pointed out to me an account where Joseph Smith successfully used his gift as a seer to find where Judge Clark had dropped a wallet in a stream on a cross country trip. Many of these references are quoted in a message board thread I participated a few years ago on. I am aware that I am cherry picking the success accounts and not engaging in responsible source criticism.
Just to move forward, let’s take these anecdotes at face value. The question becomes how did Joseph see all of these objects obscured by distance or dirt? One model that I lack the expertise to thoroughly evaluate and hence leave for others is whether Joseph was crazy or mentally ill. The crazy model does an unsatisfactory poor job of explaining things observed by a group even when the power of suggestion, hypnotization, and propensity to hallucinate are considered.
Another model I won’t consider at length is the one used in the counter-cultists that concede that supernatural power was involved, but that it was all witchcraft and magic of the sort that the Bible strongly condemns. I think the Mormon apologetic response has been adequate in this area. Joseph Smith and many before and after him that had the gift of seeing thoroughly situated in the supernatural narratives of the Biblical good guys like Moses, Aaron, Samuel, Jesus, and the Apostles. In the Bible the presence of true wonder working prophets frequently drew competitors who duplicated miracles but drew power from false gods and evil spirits. If this paradigm has any understanding to offer, it might help explain some of Joseph’s failures as a treasure seer. Mischievous spirits could have been messing with Joseph Smith. It is not trivial that historical sources about Joseph incrementally have him learning how to discern evil spirits and the source of revelation whether it be of man, God, or the devil.
Moroni 7 is one such text that has been put into the service of the pious fraud model. Verse 16 reads in part
I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God
Looking through the lens of pious fraud. this passage might seem to suggest “the end justifies the means.” Restated, it is appropriate to lie if it brings someone closer to Christ. Such a reading, though, can at best be an ad hoc justification for something that has already occurred and produced observable pious results. It can’t be used in concocting a scheme, because the potential for disillusioned faith is immense if exposed. Whether the pious fraud is exposed or not, the impact, in general, is such that it strains the relationship the deceiver has with God. In sum, Mormon’s keys to discernment provide an interpretive framework when intent is not directly knowable. Mormonism has never embraced a strictly utilitarian philosophy if I read my Blake Ostler volumes right.
Vogel concluded an article locating numerous treasure digs by emphasizing Joseph’s failure as a treasure seer in contrast to his later success as a prophet. In some of these accounts of failure Joseph is described as reluctantly participating while being pressured to do so. Mormon apologists can comfortably admit that there were failures but some critics can’t admit to a single success despite overwhelming evidence. Vogel’s favorite story that illustrates that Joseph Smith was a pious fraud involves a friendly witness that described uncovering a feather but the treasure beneath it slipped away. Vogel considers it more plausible that Joseph planted the feather, but we have no evidence either way.
Vogel considers the failure accounts fit well within the general pattern of a charlatan in contrast to other historians have fit Joseph in the backdrop of other religiously-striving visionaries. What is interesting to me is despite having a law in the books against vagrant, defrauding seers and having over four years to build their case; Joseph’s opponents were unable to get a conviction. It seems odd that Joseph would form a profit-sharing company if he didn’t expect to find anything and he stuck around with his employer long after the initial dig was deemed a failure. If Joseph was a deceiving magician he was exceedingly bold to continue to do business in the same locale he was exposed. Perhaps Joseph didn’t read the How to be a Huckster guide very well.
I am open to suggestions how to better frame the issues or represent the arguments for or against the pious fraud model of understanding Joseph Smith and what the challenges of advocating the seer-in-training-model are.
Bleeding ghosts? What are bleeding ghosts?
larryco_,
You can read more about the bleeding ghost in the article by Larry Morris I link to with the words reluctantly participating above.
Off the top of my head, legend had it that Captain Kidd, a pirate had buried treasure somewhere. He killed a man, so the dead man’s spirit would haunt the burial site and protect the treasure from being disturbed. My personal opinion is that this aspects of this legend got ascribed to Joseph Smith, rather than actually seen by Joseph Smith in vision.
Keller:
Thank you. Holy salamander, it all sounds more Jack Sparrow than Joseph Smith.
Another possibility is that the Lewises (the hostile witnesses reporting this) distorted Joseph Smith’s accounts of the angel Moroni, who in some respects could be considered a dead ghost.
“the 3rd most common query to FAIR…seer stones”
As strange as the image may seem, there is a very basic way to approach the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Imagine an individual who puts a stone in a hat, and then his face, so there is no possible way of looking at any outside source material. Then, hour after hour, he dictates the contents of the Book of Mormon, with all its intricacies and spiritual content. This he does with at least one witness (the scribe) always there, and often more. It is reported that after breaks he never had to refer to where he had left off. What “religious genius” could do this? Mohammad? Swedenborg? Luther? Sadartha Ghatama? It brings to mind the monkey at the typewriter for an infinite period coming up with “Hamlet”.
It’s not as clean as the “scholarly” image of Joseph and Oliver, dressed in fine linen shirts, sitting at a table with Joseph’s hand on the open plates, acting as a traditional translator. But it is an image that absolutely leaves one saying “this really can’t be done.” Well, it was done, and, as Conan-Doyle’s Mr. Holmes would say “when all other possibilities have been exhausted, that which remains, no matter how unlikely, is the truth.”
To me, despite the scholarly work by Vogel and others that have made us take a second look at our assumptions concerning the Book of Mormon, I think the explanation given that it came forth by the gift and power of God, is the best.
Manual trackback: I think there is a false dichotomy at work here. I explain at Joseph and the Third Option
Jared*,
You are right that I wanted to focus on the two strongest models that account for Joseph’s activities. I did mention the “crazy” model and I would include delusion within that.
There are accounts of Joseph Smith that force us to choose (at least for that account) whether Joseph was lying or truly seeing and delusion is a distant third option, more of a non-option really. I think Vogel and I agree on that much in the feather account and on whether Joseph recovered plates he saw in vision.
Vogel supplements his pious fraud theory so that Joseph could have been delusional in some account reconstructions.
But if one picks and chooses on account-by-account basis which model holds sway, the coherency of any one model rapidly drops.
I suppose that I could also allow incursions of the sincerely deluded model to my prophet-in-training model, but I am partial to not being pegged down by naturalist assumptions, hence I favor our apologetics being agnostic on the issues like bleeding ghosts and slippery treasure.
Relying solely on the delusion model is going to cause problems for believers: if Joseph was deluded as a treasure seer, how can we be confident he had his act together as a prophet?
So when I evaluate a model I have to ask what it does a good and bad job explaining and what are the consequences of accepting it. The delusion model does a bad job of explaining Joseph’s successes and a great job explaining failures. One of the consequences of it is that it undermines the prophet’s truth claims and their is no seamless transition like the prophet-in-training models presents.
I’ve found D&C 5:4 interesting in this context.
“And you have a gift to translate the plates; and this is the first gift that I bestowed upon you, and I have commanded that you should pretend to no other gift until my purpose is fulfilled in this, for I will grant unto you no other gift until it is finished”.
This suggests the possibility that at some point young Joseph had mistakenly supposed and claimed that he had a spirital/magical gift for treasure funding. Then at some later time, he realized (or was told) that he did not, and gave up making such claims.
By that time, however, he had both friends pointing to these earlier claims as evidence of spiritual gifts (not necessarily the case) and enemies pointing to them as evidence of deliberate fraud (also not necessarily the case).
Cofutus, That is an interesting pasage and it almost requires its own blog thread. But since not much is happening here, I will present my analysis.
A first point to keep in mind is that this is not how the passage originally read. In the 1833 Book of Commandments, we read:
The “gift of translating” is merely an instance of the gift God granted to Joseph, or the “gift of seeing.” I believe God grsnted Joseph the more general gift of seeing because God provided Joseph the Nephite Interpreters. The very manner in which those Interpreters were found substantiated the method through which Joseph found them (through his seer stones) was also of God. Furthermore, after an initial translation period, Joseph reverted back to his seer stones to translate. My point is that we can not read that passage that the only spiritual gift was that of translation (although later texts identified that the principle use), because the very transmission of this revelation showed that Joseph could see other things besides Book of Mormon text.
Another revelation showed that Joseph’s God recognized that Oliver Cowdery had the gift of working Aaron’s rod. That was a gift Joseph had enjoyed earlier as well.
A third point is that in the 19th century the word pretend had a semantic wider range than it does now.
Here are some research notes I made about 6 months ago:
Keller,
I’m sure I don’t know the source material as well as you, and I agree that apologists should stay neutral on the issue, but I’m not sure that you have given delusion–as you put it–enough consideration. Deluded people can be very convincing. Finding a feather is impressive, but perhaps not as unlikely as it may seem. Another problem is that people can retrofit results to match predictions, such as in cold reading.
I won’t press the case further, but I do want to raise an interesting passage in Bushman’s RSR (pg 51).
—-quote—-
Alva Hale…said Joseph Jr. told him that the “gift of seeing with a stone” was “a gift from God” but that “‘peeping’ was all d–d nonsense”; he had been deceived in his treasure-seeking, but he did not intend to deceive anyone else.
—-end quote—-
I have not read the source for that statement, so I don’t know how much of that is Bushman’s interpretation of Alva. However, if Joseph admitted that he had been deceived, that would seem in line with the delusion (again, your term) model.
Jared*,
I think you make some very good points. If we take Alva’s quote at face value, it is not really clear to me what Joseph thought about the nature of deception, whether it was of the self-deception (delusional) kind or whether it was of he was deceived by supernatural, trickster spirits, or whether he was deceived by other treasure seers who asserted their methods (and explanations for failure) were legit. I think it would be hard for Joseph, himself, to pinpoint where the process broke down.
That reminds of an account where Joseph had momentary doubts about the translation process when the text indicated that Jerusalem had walls. Joseph had to ask his scribe if that was true. When it was confirmed Joseph had a sigh of relief and remarked that he had thought he had been deceived.
Jared, I plan on working on a wiki article for FAIR. You have convinced me that I should take delusion as a possibility more seriously.
Maybe Joseph’s relationship with treasure digging was a lot like can be compared to James E. Talmage’s with astrology. Talmage was initially a believer as a boy but after some failed experiments, scrapped it for a more scientific worldview. Talmage went onto to challenge treasure seers of his day who were wasting effort in Koyle dream mine.
A huge weakness of the delusion argument is, I think, the three and (especially) eight witnesses. Joseph might deceive himself about seeing angels, and dictating the Book of Mormon (though the latter seems a stretch).
But, how did he deceive himself into having physical plates, which he handed to eight people, who handled and examined them?
I think we’re stuck with either Joseph having real plates, or somehow actively deceiving others that he had real plates.
Great Post
If Smith was a charlatan, everyone who followed him was deluded—including myself and all my Mormon friends. Making Joseph Smith an impostor may accord with our modern view of what is possible and impossible—no gold plates or angels, please—but it does not explain why he succeeded. Why did people then and now believe him? To understand their belief you have to get inside his world, in my opinion,and think of him as his followers did.
Couldn’t this be said by extension of any other religious group which we consider to be apostate, including their adherents.
is there a way to become a content writer for the site?