Pageant rekindles Smith debate

David Warner, a member of the LDS Church who serves as director of music and cultural arts for the church, insists the pageant illustrates to Christians how much they share with the Latter-day Saints.

"Many people familiar with the Christian tradition come in here and hear things they already know, and hopefully that will help them see the commonality that we have," Warner said.

"It's about families who come here to this area seeking the most American of ideas — religious freedom," he said. "It's important to realize they were doing something that has been done for centuries — following someone who spoke for God."

What Mormons and other Christians do not have in common, however, is the Book of Mormon, which millions believe is not just a work of art but prophetic.

"You do have to say he's some kind of genius if not inspired as a prophet," Bushman said of Smith. "They have to take him seriously as a force. Any religion that grows to 12 million people — even if you don't believe his theology at all, he was an influential person that has to be admired."

Bushman said intellectual forces aligned against religious miracles have diminished Smith's significance in the fabric of American history.

"They see him in the history of fanaticism in the 19th century," he said. "We need to make larger comparisons, let our imaginations roam a little bit and find other ways to look at Joseph Smith."

Remini does think Smith was a product of his own time who sincerely believed he had a divine calling.

"I like to believe that he was conditioned to believe that he could be an instrument of God and then began to see or hear or experience what you would call divine apparitions," Remini said.

Elder Marlin K. Jensen, director of the Joseph Smith Papers Project in Salt Lake City, said the church's mission of organizing Smith's letters and journals for posterity is "the single most important historical project for the church to undertake."

"Our beloved prophet Gordon B. Hinckley is fond of saying almost everything in the church is the lengthened shadow of Joseph Smith," he said.

The pageant is a part of that legacy, Jensen said.

"Without a strong memory of who we are, where we've been, what we've come through," Jensen said, "we can't live in the present with the kind of fullness we otherwise could."