Summary
Joseph Smith Jr.'s upbringing was characterized by a juxtaposition of his mother's religious devotion and his father's religious liberalism, contributing to his imaginative nature and eventual self-identification as "The Prophet." Lucy Mack Smith, influenced by a family with strong devout beliefs and marred by early experiences of illness and death, infused a sense of religious zeal into her household, impacting Joseph Jr.'s spiritual development and the religious dynamics within their family.
Lucy Mack Smith was deeply committed to religious practices, influenced by her upbringing and personal struggles, leading her to seek a "change of heart" through dedicated Bible study and prayer, despite her fears of joining a single denomination due to potential social repercussions. Her narrative reveals a profound desire for religious fulfillment, marked by her quest for spirituality beyond traditional church boundaries, which profoundly impacted her son, Joseph Smith Jr., and contributed to the philosophical foundations of the Book of Mormon.
Joseph Smith Jr.'s founding of the Church and the creation of the Book of Mormon were influenced by the religious aspirations and visions of his parents, particularly his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, who desired a "true religion." His father, Joseph Smith Sr., was also receptive to religious change, and the family's psychological and spiritual needs may have contributed to Joseph Jr.'s drive to provide religious fulfillment, positioning himself as a pivotal figure in achieving the family's spiritual peace.
Maternal Influence
Heart in the Home, Wellsville, Utah
Live from the Mecca of Mormonism, it’s . . . "Heart of the Matter" Show #5 Maternal Influence Jan 30th, 07. I’m Shawn McCraneyFounder of TGNN and developer of the fulfilled perspective—calling people to faith outside of religion., your host.
People frequently ask, “How can we help you guys?” Can I offer three suggestions? Tell your friends and neighbors about the show! Get on chat rooms and share the site. Distribute flyers! You can get them online under the “Getting Involved” page.
Pray! For revival in Utah. Pray for our viewership. Pray for the ministry. Ask your pastor to have us come out to the service and host a Heart in the Church! We’re currently scheduling March of 07 currently.
First printing of Born-Again Mormon almost gone! Next edition will have page numbers and bigger font (how boring). Get one of the remaining originals online at www.bornagainmormon.com or email us!
Remember, Heart in the Park 2007 on July 7th, 2007. A little Hank Williams, Senior. A little Patsy Cline. Some Johnny Cash. We’ll tell you all about it later, but set that date aside to join us! Church Scouts?
IDAHO VIEWERS
Nampa Civic Center
Sunday, February 11th 7pm
Alright, let’s have a word of prayer.
PRAYER PRAYER PRAYER
Joseph Smith's Parents
Last week I described Joseph Smith’s Father. The picture was of a man who would not embrace any organized religion, who as a Universalist believed everyone would be saved, who waited for the true Church of Jesus to be restored to the earth through his family, who faced great financial woes and battled with the bottle a bit and had a penchant for spending not a little time in the search of lost and buried treasures using magic stones, rods, and visions. We also mentioned that he was a dreamer whose dreams even wound up somehow in the text of the Book of Mormon.
Tonight we are going to look at another influence on the boy prophet – even his mother, Lucy Mack Smith.
Now there is a lot more information on Joseph Smith’s mother than his father. I am merely going to give you some background on what made her who she was. Over the course of the year, I’ll fill in the blanks about her whereabouts, contributions, and views.
There are differences of opinions on whether Joseph Senior and Lucy’s marriage was harmonious. Vogel and Hill say it wasn’t. And Bushman says it was. But all three agree that there was certainly religious conflict within the marriage and home.
Lucy Mack Smith's Background
Like many of you, and like Joseph Junior himself, I know from first-hand experience what it is like to be in a home where the matriarch was religiously inclined and the patriarch was religiously liberal. There’s a certain dynamic that occurs in a home where the parents do not see religion through the same lens. The point here is to get you to try and imagine how a religiously liberal father and a religiously exuberant and devoted mother would contribute to the make-up of an imaginative son who later called himself “The Prophet.”
From the beginning, life was hard on Lucy Mack Smith. In writing about her existence, she spoke primarily about illness and deathSeparation from God—now overcome. Physical death remains, but it no longer separates us from life with God.. Bushman writes that Lucy measured her “early years not by happy friendships and childish adventures but by deaths and illnesses.” This took its toll on her emotional health. At nineteen years of age she wrote: “I was pensive and melancholy, and often in my reflections, I thought life was not worth possessing.”
I do not mean to infer that Lucy was without God. She came from a family that was extremely devout in their religious appellations. Her oldest brother, Jason, became a preacher at twenty years old, having sought for spiritual gifts outside of established churches since he was just sixteen. He later established a religious commune in Canada.
When Lucy was just 16, as her two older sisters Lovina and Lovisa were about to die, they spent their last breaths warning bedside listeners on the importance of “preparing for eternity.”
Religious Influences Within the Family
Lucy was accustomed to religious differences in the home as her own mother and father seemed to bear the same faith-traits she and her husband Joseph Senior bore in their marriage. Lucy’s mother Lydia, who as a Calvinist was raised in a Deacon’s house, joined the Congregational Church at thirty after she married her husband Solomon, who at that time spent his days in failed searches for wealth. Like the Smith family Lucy would someday join through marriage, Solomon Mack was also a Universalist up until he found the Lord in 1809.
Lucy Mack Smith's Religious Journey
Piety within her to her mother, however, who at a minimum ensured that her family gathered twice daily for morning and evening prayers. Lucy’s similar dedication to religious practices would greatly influence her own brood years later, especially Joseph Junior.
At nineteen, possibly in response to the depressed state she found herself in, Lucy said in her Biographical Sketches, “In the midst of the anxiety of my mind, I determined to obtain that which I had heard spoken of from the pulpit – a change of heart.” Interestingly enough, the Bible never uses such phraseology as change of heart or mighty change of heart, that Lucy does, and that her son Joseph would use in the text of the Book of Mormon (Alma 5:22) years later. Lucy goes on to say that “I spent much of my time in reading the Bible and praying.” Nevertheless, she was afraid to join any single denomination for fear of offending another.
As devoted as she was to religious practices, Lucy did maintain an attitude that was shared by her husband and the rest of the Smith family. She said, “If I remain a member of no church, all religious people will say I am of the world; and if I join some one of the different denominations, all the rest will say I am in error. No church will admit that I am right, except the one I am associated.” While at first glance this may seem to be an indictment on the various Christian Churches at the time, who just “couldn’t get along,” it is also quite revelatory of Lucy Smith’s mind and personality.
Lucy's Response to Prospects of Death
Listen to it again. “If I remain a member of no church, all religious people will say I am of the world; and if I join some one of the different denominations, all the rest will say I am in error. No church will admit that I am right, except the one I am associated.” Several dominant personality traits of Lucy Mack Smith present themselves time and time again when reading about her life. They are an almost overwhelming obsession with pleasing God through religious allegiance and a desire to maintain a certain level of social standing with the community around her. These traits carried over into her marriage to Joseph Smith Senior.
LDS Psychologist C. Jess Grosbeck wrote: “An overriding theme that emerges from Lucy Mack’s autobiography is perfectionism and moralism surrounding a religious quest that was part of an attempt to save and heal her husband.” With a history of New England Puritan leanings, a Calvinist mother who raised her, and bouts of anxiety and depression, Lucy was primed for a life of religious obsession – and everything which that entails.
After marrying Joseph Smith Senior and having given birth to three children, Lucy got very, very sick. Some say it was consumption, some say pneumonia. By its description, some even believe it was a nervous breakdown. Describing her condition she wrote, “I continued to grow weaker and weaker, until I could barely endure a footfall on the floor, except in stocking-foot, and no one was allowed to speak in the room above a whisper.”
A Methodist exhorter came to visit and asked her if she was ready to die. She recalls her response in her autobiography: “I knew not the ways of Christ; besides, there appeared to be a dark and lonely chasm, between myself and the Savior, which I dared not attempt to pass.” As she laid there in bed she contemplated her death and thought that by “straining towards the light (which I knew lay just beyond the gloomy veil before me) that I could discover a faint glimmer.”
Search for Spiritual Assurance
During that same night, she begged God to spare her life and secretly covenanted that “if He would let me live I would endeavor to get that religion that would enable me to serve Him right whether it was in the Bible or wherever it might be found even if it was to be obtained from heaven by prayer and faith.” She then heard a voice speak to her that said, “Seek, and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened up to you. Ye believe in God, believe also in me.” Her recovery began immediately thereafter.
In this recitation of Lucy’s own words, we learn that Joseph Smith’s mother was unsure of her salvation even as she laid at death's door and in spite of her religious upbringing. She was visionary, to the point of “seeing a faint glimmer of light from heaven." She was willing to embrace religion, even one found outside the Bible if it would enable her.
The Life and Influences of Joseph Smith Junior
To “serve God right” and would spend her life in search of this religion if her life was spared. Received an audible communication from God. All of these events and beliefs were well established well before her prophet Son was born.
How do you choose to view these factual portraits of the parents of Joseph Smith? I am not pretending to say that I am certain as to how they contributed to the make-up of Joseph Junior, but I do admit I think they provide some possible explanations for why he approached religion as he did. In addition to her religious make-up and moralism, Lucy Mack Smith was, like her husband Joseph Senior and their future son, Joseph Junior, a visionary and a prophetic dreamer.
Lucy Mack Smith’s Visionary Experience
In 1803 or 1804, when she was greatly troubled by her husband’s resistance to organized religion, Lucy “retired to a grove of trees to pray” for her husband to experience a change of heart. While sleeping later that night, she had a dream of two trees standing in the wind. According to Lucy, the trees represented her husband and his stubborn brother, Jesse. From this dream she was able to interpret the future religious state of both men – with her husband becoming flexible to God’s truth and her brother-in-law remaining stiff and immovable to it.
With a father as a stubborn Universalist and a nagging habit for drink and magic, and a mother who secretly covenanted with God to spend her days searching for the “true religion” the family was in need of something no less than a religious savior. It was in these conditions that Joseph Smith Junior was born, becoming, as it were, the prime candidate in the Smith home to bring them peace. Jesus obviously hadn’t done it for them. They had had Jesus for decades in their families and lives and what did He bring? Religion couldn’t heal them. All it did was bring division! No, something had to be done and it must have seemed to Joseph Junior like nothing was going to change unless he took steps to make it happen. In a sense, he made himself their savior.
Establishing the Church
I propose that the Book of Mormon and the establishment of the Church was in part – in part – a response to the immediate needs of Joseph Junior’s parents and family. I think the announcement of seeing a vision of the Lord fit well into the psychological make-up of his mother and I think the announcement from this visage that “all the churches were wrong” pleased his father. I think that the announcement of the buried Golden Plates gave the family further hope, and I think the text of the translated book provided seven years later gave the Smith family all the direction, promise, and public acclaim they could ever desire. Indeed, Lucy Mack Smith’s wishful prayer of “getting that religion whether it was in the Bible or wherever it might be found . . .” was fulfilled . . . since not by God, then by her own son.
Alright, let’s go to the phones. (801) 973-tv20 973-8820
Interacting with the Audience
COMMENT ON CALLS:
Appreciate your compliments of me but try and get to you questions/comments quickly. First time callers, please. Get right to the Heart of the MatterTGNN’s original show where Shawn McCraney deconstructed religion and developed fulfilled theology.!
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
It is hardly surprising to know, in this context, that the Broome County Courier on December 29, 1831, called Joseph Smith a “second Messiah.”
READ RECENT EMAIL COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS
CONCLUSION We will head toward the first vision next week. Tune into The Infallible Word Mondays at 9:30 pm and Friday evening at 8:30 pm!
