A new biography of Joseph Fielding Smith examines the prophet’s legacy and enriches understanding of his views on topics such as scriptures, progress, and orthodoxy. In Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian, readers are given insight into the forces that shaped Smith’s worldview and the influence he continues to have on the modern church. Biographer Matthew Bowman discusses the life and legacy of the grand-nephew of Joseph Smith, Jr in this interview.
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Who was Joseph Fielding Smith?
We could answer this institutionally. Joseph Fielding Smith was a General Authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for more than sixty years. He was an apostle from 1910 to 1970; he was the president of the Quorum of the Twelve from 1951 to 1970; he was president of the Church from 1970 to 1972.
He also served in a number of other offices—he was the Church’s historian for decades; he served on committees supervising the Church’s educational programs and publications for years.
Beyond his immense institutional influence, Joseph Fielding Smith was also the most influential theologian in the Church in the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the century, his position on a number of theological questions (such as the age of the earth and the creation of humanity) made him a decided minority.
By the end of the twentieth century, his positions were regnant across the Church’s publications, curricula, and public venues.
How did family heritage affect Joseph Fielding Smith’s worldview?
Joseph Fielding Smith was deeply aware of being a “Smith,” part of the royal family of the Church. He had two patriarchal blessings over the course of his life, and took from them a mandate. He believed that because of his heritage he held responsibility to defend the Church’s scripture and theology, and eventually, to police its orthodoxy.
This mandate was flavored by a sense of persecution that derived from his family. He grew up hearing his father, Joseph F. Smith, describe seeing the assassinated bodies of his own father, Hyrum Smith, and uncle Joseph Smith Jr.
When Joseph Fielding Smith was a young boy, his father and mother fled the United States to avoid arrest for practicing polygamy, and federal officials repeatedly entered his home.
He grew up, in short, believing that the world was hostile to his Church.
He was not entirely wrong.
Why did Joseph Fielding Smith become so influential?
The simplest answer is because he was so long lived. Joseph Fielding Smith published works defending the Church for more than sixty years. Multiple generations of Saints grew up perceiving him as an authority.
Another answer is because he wanted to be influential. He wrote many books that he wanted to be read; he promoted them and tried to get them used in the curriculum of various Church organizations. He also took on a column in Church publications in which he answered “gospel questions” specifically to reach the lay members of the Church.
What was Joseph Fielding Smith’s hermeneutical approach to the scriptures?
The common answer here is that Joseph Fielding Smith was a “literalist,” which is a term that doesn’t actually mean much and is misleading. Smith, like many others described as literalists, fully accepted that scripture contains metaphors and analogies and is often intended to be read in those ways. When people say he was literalist, they often mean that he took the stories in scripture to be descriptive of actual historical events, which is a bit more useful and accurate.
Joseph Fielding Smith drew—sometimes consciously—on a series of concepts invented by conservative Protestants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These include “plenary inspiration,” the belief that the original manuscripts of the Bible were inspired by God and therefore are “inerrant,” without error in their claims. Smith at times used this phrase to describe scripture. Some Protestants asserted “verbal plenary inspiration”—the notion that God inspired the precise words of scripture as well as its claims.
He was aware that this was a problem.
Many Protestants also asserted the notion of scriptural “perspicuity,” which is the idea that God intended scripture to be comprehensible to anybody. The word believers in this concept often invoked was “plain.” Scriptures’ “plain meaning,” then, was understandable to all.
One of the great conundrums of Joseph Fielding Smith’s life was his growing awareness that people might disagree about the “plain meaning” of scripture. He was aware that this was a problem. Over and over, then, to resolve the issue he appealed not only to scripture itself, but also to the authority of prophets—including, of course, his own family.
How did he compare with fundamentalist Protestants?
The term “fundamentalist” is a difficult one. It’s often used today simply to refer to Christians who are socially conservative. It was coined by Protestants in a few denominations—particularly Baptists and Presbyterians—in the 1920s to refer to Christians who accepted the historical veracity of Biblical miracles, and, by corollary, the plenary inspiration of the Bible.
Historians, though, have also pointed to what one scholar has called a “militant anti-modernism;” that is, fundamentalists did not only hold to a set of theological beliefs, but also mobilized in an attempt to squash liberal Christianity, a movement emerging in the late nineteenth century that rejected the veracity of biblical miracles and plenary inspiration.
Joseph Fielding Smith shared, I think most importantly, in a sense of anti-modernism. But he also scorned several things about the Protestant fundamentalist movement.
He rejected, for instance, its insistence that the Bible was the sole source of truth about God—referring specifically to his belief in prophets as well as scripture beyond the Bible. He also denied the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, which Protestants held as a fundamental.
How did he impact perceptions of church history?
Joseph Fielding Smith was the Church’s official historian for decades. He produced a number of books that shaped how twentieth century Saints understood their past, particularly his 1922 Essentials in Church History—a single volume history of the faith.
Smith drew many of the patterns that he cited in that text from earlier historians—B. H. Roberts in particular. But he amplified and emphasized several themes that Roberts had also stressed, in particular, framing the history of the Church as a minority group striving against persecution. He also emphasized the centrality of the Smith family.
In what ways did Joseph Fielding Smith not believe in progress?
The notion of “progress” became an axiom in the nineteenth-century Western world. It was born from the spread of democratic revolutions across the Western world, from the birth and formulation of “science” both as a profession and a way of organizing knowledge, and by the late nineteenth century, the idea of social sciences—disciplines like sociology and social work that promised that science could help reorganize human societies to ensure flourishing.
Liberal Christians embraced the idea of “progress” as a natural inevitability and as a concept that helped them assimilate ideas like the theory of evolution.
He associated ideologies of human progress with pride.
Note that the theory of evolution, as Darwin enunciated it, is not progressive. For Darwin, change is random and not directed. But as many non-scientists understood Darwin, he was describing development toward constant improvement. Thus, many twentieth-century writers, intellectuals, and politicians in the United States were convinced that humanity was on an inevitable upward trajectory.
Many fundamentalists rejected the notion of progress because they believed that the revelation of knowledge and truth in the Bible was sufficient for all humanity.
For the most part, they also continued to believe in the Reformation doctrine of salvation by grace alone—and thus were skeptical about human capacity to better ourselves. Joseph Fielding Smith embraced the first but not the second.
Like many Saints he believed in human perfectibility.
But he also believed that all knowledge was granted through divine revelation. He associated ideologies of human progress with pride, and a denial of the fact that God had always revealed all truth to humanity through prophets, from Adam to Joseph Smith.
This was a particular twist on anti-modernism, blending it with traditional ideas of restorationism long-standing in the Church.
Why was Joseph Fielding Smith so deeply opposed to the idea of evolution?
I hope it’s becoming clear now that Joseph Fielding Smith opposed evolution not simply because he believed it contradicted the book of Genesis, but also because he perceived it as part of a broad modernist project that he objected to from the get-go.
He seized on the notion of “survival of the fittest,” for instance, a common paraphrase of Darwin’s ideas, and argued that it was deeply anti-humanistic and a way to justify rapacious abuse of the poor and the marginalized.
Joseph Fielding Smith believed that the theory of evolution would lead to an inhumane and cruel society—an argument he shared with other Christian antievolutionists.
What happened when B. H. Roberts tried to publish a manual reconciling evolution with Genesis?
In 1933, B. H. Roberts, a tremendous intellect and prolific writer, submitted for approval of the Quorum of the Twelve a manuscript called THE TRUTH THE WAY THE LIFE. This was the first attempt to generate a systematic theology for the Church—an attempt to line up every problem and intellectual question in a coherent way.
Roberts was a liberal Christian, one who believed strongly both in progress and evolution as a social principle. He was committed to reconciling theology and science, and one of the ways he did this was by suggesting that human-like creatures existed on the earth long before Adam and Eve. That idea, he thought, would allow both for scientific suggestions about the age of the earth and a traditional reading of the Genesis narrative.
Joseph Fielding Smith objected to this. He believed that the fall of Adam and Eve introduced death into the universe—that was how he read Genesis—and therefore tried to stop Roberts’s book from being published.
When all of them were dead, he published his own refutation.
Eventually the First Presidency held a series of meetings with B. H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith. They concluded that Roberts’s book shouldn’t be published, but not necessarily because they took Smith’s side.
Rather, they concluded that both Roberts and Smith—and other Church leaders—should not be engaging in controversy about questions that the First Presidency itself did not believe there was a clear answer to.
However, as it happened, Fielding Smith outlived every member of that First Presidency as well as Roberts, and when all of them were dead, Joseph Fielding Smith published his own refutation of Roberts—a book called MAN: HIS ORIGIN AND DESTINY.
Why did Joseph Fielding Smith value orthodoxy so strongly?
I suggest in the volume that Joseph Fielding Smith was in some ways the inventor of “orthodoxy,” by which I mean the idea that correct belief should be foundational for all else in the Church.
This is another way that he was influenced by Protestantism, a branch of Christianity which emphasizes theology, belief, and words—as opposed to, say, Roman Catholicism, which emphasizes community and ritual, or Eastern Orthodoxy, which emphasizes ritual and personal experience.
This drove many of his efforts.
Joseph Fielding Smith absorbed not merely from Protestantism but also from that early twentieth century faith in science and education the conviction that once you teach people the right ideas they will do the right things. He therefore believed that it was important to promote and enforce correct belief in the Church.
This drove many of his efforts in publishing and spreading his ideas; it drove his conflict with Roberts and many other intellectuals in the Church whom he believed were spreading incorrect ideas.
This conviction, I think, was a lasting legacy he left to the Church. By the late twentieth century, his theology had become the theology spread in Church curriculum and church educators in the Church Education System (CES), which, perhaps more than any other department of the Church embraced the work of Joseph Fielding Smith and his son-in-law and heir Bruce R. McConkie. CES also embraced the notion that correct belief is foundational to correct behavior.
I think that by the early twenty-first century this emphasis on orthodoxy began to fade somewhat, in response to globalization, among other things.
But many in the United States who grew up in the Church that Joseph Fielding Smith created still retain this sense that theology is central to what it means to be a Saint.
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About the interview participant
Matthew Bowman is Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, Claremont Graduate University and the author of Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian and The Mormon People: the Making of an American Faith (among other works). He is a specialist in American religious history, with particular interests in Mormonism, new religious movements, and the development of the concept of “religion” in the United States. He teaches courses on North American religions and Mormonism in the department of religion, and on the history of the United States in the department of history.
Further Reading
- How Did Joseph Fielding Smith Contribute to the 1978 Priesthood Revelation?
- Is Bruce R. McConkie Treated Unfairly?
- Who Was Joseph Fielding Smith’s Father?
- How Did Joseph Fielding Smith Impact Genealogy in the Church?
- What Did Joseph Fielding Smith Think About the King Follett Sermon?
Joseph Fielding Smith Resources
- Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian (University of Illinois Press)
- True and Faithful: Joseph Fielding Smith as Mormon Historian and Theologian (BYU Studies)
- Joseph Fielding Smith Exhibition (Church History)
- Joseph Fielding Smith, 2 Nephi 2:22, and “Death Before the Fall” in Church History (Ben Spackman)
- Joseph Fielding Smith’s Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President (Dialogue)
