Reddit mentions of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Some good suggestions in this thread.

I think I'd start with the Gospel Topic essay "Race and the Priesthood." It's not focused on Joseph Smith, but it's short and a good broad overview of race and the church.

I ditto the suggestion of Paul Reeve's new book Religion of a Different Color. I'd read the chapters on blacks (I think there's only 3 of them, if I remember right?) and look up the sources used in the footnotes.

I'd also grab Richard Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling and look through the index and see what he had to say about the topic. I'd take careful look at the footnotes in the most relevant passages and look up those sources too.

For primary sources, you're going to have to do a bit of digging (but digging is fun!)

Here is a copy of Jane Manning James's autobiography at the Church History Library that she dictated in 1902 (MS 4425). She talks about meeting Joseph Smith on the third page. She was a free black woman who lived with Joseph and worked in his household (and as I recall, she was one of the first pioneers who came to Utah too). First-person reminiscent accounts are wonderful because you get a perspective that isn't available anywhere else, but you have to be cautious too, because it's someone looking backwards and their view is colored by everything that has happened since that time. In this account James is an old woman recollecting things that happened nearly 60 years earlier.

Josephsmithpapers.org is another good spot to start. You'll have to be creative in using the search box, however, because the site won't give you results on terms like "African-American," because that's a modern term. You'll have to think of terminology that would've been contemporary to Joseph Smith's time like "slave" or "Negro." Joseph never gave a long, definitive statement on the topic. What we do have are largely snippets and incidental comments that when grouped together will give you some idea of his thoughts on the matter.

I think modern readers researching this topic need to keep 3 thoughts in mind:

1. Abolitionists in Joseph's time were considered radicals. Joseph lived 20-30 years before the Civil War. (For some perspective, think of a hot-button social topic today and then think what the talking heads on the news were saying about that same topic 30 years ago.) To really simplify a topic that has had entire books devoted to it, the moderate view on slavery at the time was to maintain the status quo.
   
   
2. Joseph's views changed over time. His statements in 1836-38 when the church is dealing with pro-slavery neighbors in Missouri are going to be different than his statements in 1843 when he decides to run for president. Additionally, all of us, whether we realize it or not, say different things to different people in different contexts, and Joseph was no different. Something said in private may be phrased more emphatically than something meant to be published in the newspaper. Similarly, something said over the pulpit in Nauvoo may be framed differently than a political piece sent to a major newspaper in the eastern states.
   
   
3. Additionally, Joseph rarely wrote things himself--he preferred to dictate and he had no problem in allowing his clerks editorial privilege (this was typical for a guy in his position). Some things were ghostwritten with Joseph's approval. So, a good rule of thumb when encountering a primary document is to thoroughly answer the question, who wrote this item and why did they write it?
   
   Here are a few items to get you started:
   
   

• an 1836 letter to the editor of the Church paper on abolitionism, slavery, and missionary work in the southern states written after an abolitionist gave a public lecture in Kirtland
  
  
• a brief 1842 piece opposing slavery published in the Church paper
  
  
• an answer to Orson Hyde's question on "the situation of the Negro?" given in January 1843
  
  And it'd be worth looking up material on Joseph's political platform when he ran for president too. He had the really interesting idea of compensated emancipation. Basically, the idea was to sell government land in the west and use the proceeds to buy freedom of existing slaves. Theoretically, no more slavery and everyone's happy. I'm not sure I've heard of another candidate suggesting it quite as early as Joseph did.
  
  edit: spelling and formatting

I mean, what's your bar for acceptable sources? There's a long history of scholarship surrounding early Mormon history. You shouldn't feel bad that you don't know everything there is to know--few people do. But you likewise shouldn't blame others for your ignorance. You also shouldn't project your experience on others (and like /u/everything_is_free said, we all should be better about that).

But some stuff to get started:

The Maxwell Institute

FairMormon

Our own /u/brianhales

Richard Bushman

Also if anyone tries to claim it is just an Anti-Mormon lie, go to Deseret Bookstore, owned by the Mormon church, open up Rough Stone Rolling.

It is documented there. An official documentation of the event from first hand accounts.

You can also purchase it online from the Deseret Book

https://deseretbook.com/p/joseph-smith-rough-stone-rolling-richard-l-bushman-5351?variant_id=104298-paperback

Or get an ebook from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Smith-Rough-Stone-Rolling-ebook/dp/B000XUBEZM

If you haven't studied "anti-Mormon" sources, you can't claim you aren't any of those things, because that's part of it. The constant reminders to only get your information from the church. That is one of the biggest elements of indoctrination, brainwashing, and sheltering.

They're preventing you from doing thorough research and frankly, it's not our job to digest all of for you. The problems with the church are so numerous there is no way anyone is going to be able to lay them all out for you in a comment on a reddit post. Asking us to tell you why we left is not evidence you weren't indoctrinated if you refuse to go do the study yourself.

Most active members have no idea just how much information there is and that no, it is not spun. Here's a little bit of the history on why and how the real history the church is now trying to manage finally came out. There is a couple in Provo who have a Christian ministry basically dedicated to taking down the Mormon church. Around 1990 they published a pamphlet that talked about some serious stuff the vast majority of members didn't know, like Joseph's Smith polygamy. Normally the church wouldn't respond to these things, but they felt the claims were worrisome enough (getting questions from members) they needed to publish a response, so they invited two BYU historians into the archives (you know the ones in the mountain) to study ALL of the historical documents they had and write a refutation debunking the Tanner's claims.

For about two years Michael Quinn and Dan Vogel studied every document and took photos of each one, with the church's blessing. Problem was, not only did what they find back up the Tanner's claims, but the actual history was much worse (things like Polyandry). They did write a rebuttal, but it was rejected by the Q15 and they were told not to publish anything at all, ever. More than twenty years later the essays on lds.org the church finally published to at least be a little bit honest are right out of Vogel and Quinns essays. By being a little bit I mean, if you not only read the essays, but then follow the footnotes, well. It's not good. The Saints book is the same way. It doesn't out and out lie, but talk about out of context and leaving out very important information if it's too faith challenging. It's still not fully honest. Not even remotely. Shouldn't the church have to be as honest as they expect the membership?

Being historians, not publishing and keeping it all a secret didn't sit well with them and they published anyway. In fact, Dan Vogel made all those facsimiles of all those documents, thousands and thousands of them, available to any other scholar wanting to pour through them and publish their own findings. For their trouble they were excommunicated as part of the September Six (google it).

Many (maybe most on church history) of the anti-Mormon books out there directly source these documents and you can even get them yourself. Dan Vogel published all of them in several volumes called, "Early Mormon Documents." The goal was to publish all the source material he and Quinn had collected without editorial comment. I'm not sure how much more objective it can get or how any Mormon can claim the stacks of books that came out of these are not sourced or dishonest.

If you want a summary list of the major issues, and it's a long one, you should download the free pdf version of the CES letter on cesletter.org. Then read the rebuttals over on Fair Mormon. Then read the rebuttals to the rebuttals.

When I left, a nice summary didn't exist, so I had to read books and boy did I read a lot of them. I happened to start with Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, which is well sourced out of the RLDS archives, but I also read Grant Palmer's, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins. Incidentally, he was another BYU professor excommunicated for publishing the irrefutable truth. Keep in mind, these people were active members. They were not trying to tear down the church. They simply felt it was morally wrong to continue to have blatant and significant inaccuracies in teaching manuals, in conference talks, in Seminary, in well......everything.

My reading list (those I can remember at least):

Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

An Insider's View of Mormon Origins

Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (A Biography)

No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith

The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power

Mormon America: The Power and the Promise

If you still think everything other than what is directly published by the church are anti-Mormon lies or tricks, well I can help you there at too. How deep have you gotten into Journal of Discourses? It's almost worse than anything written by an anti-Mormon. So much worse than a couple of troublesome quotes. I also re-read the D&C while reading Teaching of the Prophet Joseph Smith in tandem. It was a lot harder to swallow that way to say the least and both of those are obviously considered faithful study.

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If you want to claim you aren't brainwashed or indoctrinated you have to do the work. Saying "I posted on Reddit and no one convinced me," or the other favorite, "people much smarter than me have already studied all that and say its fine," are not valid arguments. They're lazy cop outs.

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Good luck on your search for truth. I encourage you to study it out from ALL sources, including faithful sources you haven't yet studied.

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edited to add: Forgot one of the most important. In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith

edited edited to add: If you want something a little more biased for the church you can even just read Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. If you're going to read the D&C and Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith at the same time as I did, I recommend at least reading this one first. It's going to be much clearer if you've read at least one of the biographies and Rough Stone Rolling was published by Deseret Book.

> I've been reading No Man Knows My History,

It's not exactly an unbiased history. I'd recommend Alex Beam's American Crucifixion for a more evenhanded biography of Joseph Smith, or perhaps Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lynn Bushman, though it's also more about the birth and growth of the Mormon Church (though Bushman does spend some time talking about Smith).

Beam is a non-Mormon journalist, Bushman is a practicing Mormon and Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University

http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Smith-Rough-Rolling-ebook/dp/B000XUBEZM

They have a "Kindle price". If you download the kindle reader for your phone, you should be able to buy it for $14, and read it at your leisure.