Prophet created cohesion, scholar says

PROVO — Joseph Smith's greatest legacy is not the remarkable growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a University of Richmond religious scholar said this week at Brigham Young University.

"Amway had a phenomenal growth rate," said Terryl Givens, professor of literature and religion and author of two books on Mormonism published by Oxford University Press.

Instead, Givens said Smith forged a "community with no real parallel, and few precedents, in the history of the world. . . . It is the quality of this community, not its rate of increase, that is the more vital fact, and the more enduring mystery, of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

His attempt to unravel the "mystery" led Givens to examine what Smith taught "that did not simply attract a faithful core of followers but galvanized and welded them into a powerfully cohesive group and that continues to endow a multimillion-member movement with those same bonds and cohesion and vitality today."

Givens said Smith's concept of a tender God and a noble human race appealed to his time. Many people were frustrated with the perception of God as angry and unapproachable and Western intellectuals in the 1700s and 1800s expressed doubts that organized religion could be compatible with the era's fresh and intense optimism about human potential. French author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that he "had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions."

"In Joseph Smith, religion and freedom found their first perfect, seamless synthesis," Givens said. "For it was in this environment that Joseph introduced a reinvented story of human origins, nature and potential. And in the greatest intellectual fusion of his age, Joseph argued that the majesty of God does not exist at the expense of the dignity of man.

"He made religion the advocate, rather than the enemy, of all that is best in human yearning."

Smith taught God was sympathetic and felt sorrow and joy. He also taught that every person could have direct communication with God, a dramatic and momentous break, Givens said, with the Old Testament pattern that restricted revelation to prophets.

"Joseph's conception of humankind was as radical — and as well-timed — as his views on deity and revelation," Givens said. "We are, he declared, eternally existent, inherently innocent, boundlessly free and infinitely perfectible. These notions simply had to have resonated with special force in a time . . . when, even more forcefully than in the Renaissance, traditional strictures on man's self-understanding were bursting."