Prophetic Authority

This book is about how Joseph Smith established religious authority and a long-lasting, complex priesthood structure. The thesis of this book builds on three scholars’ major ideas about religious authority and Mormonism in the antebellum United States. In an effort to move the conversation toward politics and its relationship to religion, Porterfield focused on the constraint of populism. Though it is true that Mormonism grew, as Hatch shows, from the populist appeal of a lay priesthood and communal living in early Mormonism, Flake demonstrates that the Mormon priesthood was hierarchical. Left just outside the focus of the work of Hatch, Porterfield, and Flake is the role of Joseph Smith defining Mormon authority—a role that has not been fully examined. Smith’s authority grew in opposition to the civic and political authority that evangelicals were garnering and as a countertrend to the populist religious movements of the Second Great Awakening. In fact, Smith’s prophetic voice and scripture formed a hierarchical priesthood structure that eventually empowered every male member of his church to become a prophet, priest, and king, although they answered to each leader above them within the same structure. Reinforced by that structure, Smith’s prophetic voice became the arbiter of authority. It had the ultimate power to create and guide, and it was used to form a strong lay priesthood order in a stable hierarchical democracy devoid of the kind of democratic political authority that evangelicals fostered.