Thus Saith Joseph Fielding Smith
A new biography offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of a man who continues to shape Latter-day Saint orthodoxy
In the most recent print edition of Wayfare magazine, Joe Spencer, a professor in BYU’s Department of Ancient Scripture and a leading scholar of the Book of Mormon, made the provocative argument that Bruce R. McConkie, author of the hugely influential compendium Mormon Doctrine, had been “treated unfairly,” and that “there’s more to what both the man and his work represented for the historical development of the Latter-day Saint faith than is generally allowed.” If we consider McConkie in full, Spencer argued, then what we see is the forebear of a new generation of Latter-day Saint theologians—Spencer among them—whose work is rooted in the Latter-day Saint canon and whose focus is the day-to-day experience of discipleship. Bruce R. McConkie planted and, half a century later, his trees have borne fruit.
Spencer’s argument was provocative because for a certain genre of Latter-day Saint, McConkie is almost always the culprit. McConkie, they remind their friends, subjected Eugene England to theological abuse. McConkie, they repeat, was a late and influential defender of the priesthood and temple ban for Black Latter-day Saints. (When the ban was finally lifted, McConkie told an embellished version of how church leaders came to that decision; President Kimball instructed him to adjust his account.) And both McConkie’s ideas and the striking certainty with which he expressed them, they malign, are still the guideposts for zealous Sunday School teachers.
Spencer’s Wayfare piece came to mind recently as I read Matt Bowman’s new, brief intellectual biography of Joseph Fielding Smith. Like Spencer—who, with Bowman, is co-editor of the series of which this book is a part—Bowman takes as his project the even-handed evaluation of a controversial church leader. Smith, after all, was both the father-in-law and chief theological mentor of Bruce R. McConkie, and much of what some Latter-day Saints lament about McConkie’s work was first present in the publications of Smith.
Like his son-in-law, Joseph Fielding Smith was a prolific apologist. He was the author of twenty-five books and pamphlets and scores of articles, and for most of the twentieth century he insisted—notwithstanding resistance from fellow church leaders and the likes of world-renowned scientist Henry Eyring—that the theory of organic evolution was false; that the earth was thousands, rather than billions, of years old; and that one’s race was determined by God, with “less worthy spirits [predestined to] come through less favored lineage.” In Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, Matthew Harris identifies Smith as one of the chief defenders of the priesthood and temple ban during the twentieth century, and as one of the apostles most responsible for preventing the policy from being reversed earlier.
Bowman, a gifted prose stylist and an insightful analyst of historical data, rehabilitates Joseph Fielding Smith not by defending his ideas, but rather by arguing that his ideas were just as complex and coherent as those of his intellectual opponents, and that even though Smith made errors, his opponents were not flawless thinkers themselves.
For example, Bowman repositions Smith’s opposition to organic evolution as part and parcel of a deep-seated skepticism about humanity’s capacity for progress. Not only did Smith refuse to believe in evolution as a principle of biology, he also “rejected evolution as a principle of history.” Species did not evolve, but civilizations did not either. Smith lived through the Progressive Era, through Theodore Roosevelt’s proclamation that “progress there must and shall be,” but he didn’t buy any of it. For him, humanity did not change, but simply see-sawed between wickedness and righteousness, beginning with Adam and continuing to the eschaton.
As Bowman points out, this hostility to narratives of progress could have its benefits. It was not altogether different from the prophetic humility of a Reinhold Neibuhr, and it kept Smith from endorsing a reading of the Bible that, according to Bowman, was tied up with antisemitism and supersessionism. That reading is one that Bowman attributes to the German scholar Julius Wellhausen, and its central thesis is that the Bible charts a progression from primitive animism (early Hebrew Bible) to ethical monotheism (late Hebrew Bible) to Christianity (New Testament). Smith objected to that framing because he believed that truth was eternal and not subject to evolution, but his objection to Wellhausen’s ideas also kept him clean from an ungenerous and historically inaccurate construction of Jewish history.
Another instance where Bowman rehabilitates Joseph Fielding Smith is in his narration of a famous showdown between the doctrinaire apostle and Heber Snell, a teacher in the Church Education System who had published a book on the Hebrew Bible.
Snell’s book, Ancient Israel: Its Story and Meaning, was rooted in scholarship that, following Wellhausen, talked of “the great progress made by the Hebrews in their thousand years of moral discipline.” That was one reason why Smith didn’t like it—he thought it was rife with errors, beginning with a failure to teach that the gospel as revealed to Joseph Smith had been present from the get-go. For Joseph Fielding Smith, as Bowman puts it, “ideas had consequences,” which meant that if Snell’s book were given the stamp of approval, the church would also be endorsing the faithlessness that the book would surely prompt in its readers.
In August 1950, Joseph Fielding Smith arranged for a meeting with Snell to go over his objections to Snell’s book. Snell was accompanied by his friend Sterling McMurrin, the University of Utah professor who would later serve as John F. Kennedy’s chief of education. In his report of the conversation, McMurrin described Smith as someone who was gifted at proof-texting but otherwise “completely uninformed about the Bible.” He also claimed that Smith failed to understand the nature of Snell’s project, that he responded to Snell’s historical work as though it were a work of theology.
Bowman finds McMurrin’s take wanting, and argues that Joseph Fielding Smith correctly perceived that Snell’s history was caught up in a theory of religious development which held that right action was superior to right belief. Snell’s history of ancient Israel was also an argument for the unimportance of dogma, and for Smith, dogma mattered a great deal.
All of this to say that Bowman’s version of the Snell/McMurrin/Smith debates pushes back against the notion that Joseph Fielding Smith was simply persecuting scholars who were valiantly invested in the capital-T truth. In its place, Bowman offers a careful and reasonably persuasive account of clashing visions of orthodoxy.
In sum, Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian is a nuanced and compelling analysis of a man whose outlook, strange and misguided as it may seem to us today, continues to shape the ecclesiastical world we inhabit. One small example of this is the continuing influence of J. Reuben Clark’s 1938 address “The Charted Course of the Church in Education,” a defense of prophetic authority and scriptural literalism that current BYU leadership quotes frequently and fondly. In American Zion, Ben Park writes that Joseph Fielding Smith was “elated” by Clark’s remarks, telling Clark that he had “been hoping and praying for a long time for something of this kind to happen.”
Nearly a century later, his prayers continue to be answered.