Listen: I’m recording podcast-style narrations for this series. You can listen on Substack and in the Substack app, catch Part 1 here.

When Joseph Smith published the Pearl of Great Price in 1838, he claimed to have received his “First Vision” and visit from God in 1820

The story goes that he didn’t know what church to join, so he went to the woods, fell on his knees, and asked God. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ (two distinctly different beings who also look identical) appeared before him and told him to join none of them. This is amusing because he was a practicing Methodist up until his founding of the church. This probably never happened. We were also told this exact recounting at least three times at various Mormon sites we visited, twice by missionaries and once by propaganda video.

Young Mormons are encouraged to memorize the 1838 account of the First Vision. This is despite neither Smith nor any of his contemporaries, documenting the final, canonized “First Vision” before 1838. 18 years is an awful long time to not mention something that would become the foundational event core to the Mormon faith. No First Vision means no Moroni visit means no Golden Plates. At least we know he was an honest and upstanding member of the community.

It’s well-documented that young Joseph was a “treasure digger,” who employed folk magic, like dowsing machines, to try to find buried treasure. He used this scam to trick fellow Upstate rubes into giving the poor farm boy (Mormons’ favorite characterization of young Joey Smith) money, which ultimately led to Joseph Smith’s first interaction with the United States justice system, when he was arrested in 1826 for being paid to find treasure he promised existed on a farm. and turned up empty.

The kickoff to all of the pain and suffering the Mormon church would go on to create, started when Joseph Smith claimed that an angel named Moroni visited him in 1823 and told him to go to Hill Cumorah, a small hill about two miles from his parents’ house (convenient) where the Golden Plates were supposedly buried. He claimed he had to go look for them on the same day in September every year for four years at the request of the Angel.

Supposedly, he was finally allowed to get the plates in 1827.

Welcome back to Putting the Moron in Moroni, my series covering the Mormon church’s influence on American history and culture with a road trip to holy sites in Missouri and Illinois.

This week, we’re not actually on the road trip yet. There’s a lot of church history that sets us up nicely to Joseph’s revelation of just where exactly Zion is, the New Jerusalem in the Americas, and the same place where Christ will return during the Second Coming are. We’re just getting started.

Thanks for joining us.

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The Golden Plates were allegedly in a script that has never been found to exist in any culture on Earth, which Joseph Smith called “Reformed Egyptian.”

It was this same “language” that Smith would go on to claim in 1842 was used in facsimiles of actual ancient Egyptian papyri he bought from a traveling salesman in 1835. In case he weren’t weird enough, he bought 4 mummies from the same salesman, too; this was, of course, for phrenology purposes.

The papyri he purchased were indeed authentic funeral papyri looted by Europeans digging up the necropolis in Thebes. Joseph Smith claimed they purported to depict the so-called Book of Abraham and allegedly an “untranslated Book of Joseph,” which turned out to be a copy of the Book of the Dead, a funerary document used in Egyptian society for over 1,500 years.

Joseph Smith was obsessed with convincing people he had a unique gift from God to be able to translate pretty much anything (anything to feel special I guess).

He wrote an “inspired” translation of the bible where he removed parts he didn’t like and added whole chunks. Almost none of it is in the modern LDS canon except for two included in The Pearl of Great Price: his total re-work of Genesis he called “The Book of Moses” and a new version of the Book of Matthew. Nothing says “The Word of the Lord” like rewriting one of the four canonical gospels.

The “translation” of the Book of Mormon allegedly took three years and was financed by a rich gullible man from Palmyra named Martin Harris. Harris’ wife left him over his financing of the translation and publishing after Smith could not recreate the same “translation” twice after she took the 116 pages they had made so far, which were never recovered. But Martin stood to be a financial beneficiary if the book takes off so our man was bought in. Dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb.

The “translation” process was absurd: sometimes the plates were in a different room entirely. Sometimes it was forbidden to see them. Sometimes they were under a sheet. Sometimes Moroni took them back. Sometimes you could watch Joseph. Sometimes he would wear a veil. Smith claimed the characters would spontaneously appear as he looked into a hat with two magic rocks. He also was functionally illiterate. This is not a serious religion.

The visit from Moroni and the Golden Plates are the keystone of the religion: if Joseph Smith faked or lied about the finding, translating, and publishing of the Book of Mormon, the entire premise of the religion falls apart. There were no Nephites or Lehites or Lamanites. The Urim and Thummim were just random polished rocks. There were no Golden Plates.

If Joseph lied, the Book of Mormon is b******t and the church isn’t true.

Perhaps the most baffling part of the entire translation affair relates to the Three Witnesses. In every copy of the Book of Mormon, there reads a letter that attests David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris’ all saw the gold plates and attest to the Book of Mormon’s legitimacy.

"And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true."

All three of the Book of Mormon’s original witnesses would be excommunicated from the church by Joseph Smith in 1838.

NOW That’s What I Call Legitimacy!

None of this really matters because after The Book of Mormon was published, it caught the attention of fellow Second Great Awakening nutjob Sidney Rigdon.

Rigdon had his own congregation of fanatics, and in 1830 he proposed to Jospeh Smith that they should combine their congregations and move the Mormons from Palmyra to Kirtland, Ohio, where Rigdon was currently set up.

This was advantageous for Smith, who had run into legal trouble in New York, including being charged with a misdemeanor for being a “disorderly person” in 1830. He also corroborated an account that he got into a violent scuffle with his neighbors, who claimed he had been raucous after a night of drinking (oh yeah, Joseph Smith was a big drinker even though he preached abstinence from alcohol) and assaulted six of his neighbors, whom Joseph Smith would later claim:

“[I] whipped the whole of them and escaped unhurt which they swore to as recorded”

Remember, if someone wrote it down it must have happened.

Sidney Rigdon will come up as a frequent accomplice (and later detractor) of Smith, but his conversion and merging of churches brought hundreds of new followers to the faith, a built-in community in Ohio, giving Smith and his cult an out as his reputation had deteriorated significantly in New York. Some cynics believe Rigdon was behind much of the writing in the Book of Mormon, but that’s water under the baptismal font as far as I’m concerned.

Rigdon also gave Smith an air of legitimacy: a man of the cloth was sold on Joseph Smith? Maybe he’s onto something…

Oh yeah, and God said in December 1830 that he couldn’t keep translating more things until he went to Ohio. Convenient.

The Upstate congregation of Smith’s Church of Christ was not exactly thrilled with the Rigdon developments, and there was a lot of resistance to the Prophet’s insistence in uprooting everyone’s lives to move to f*****g Ohio. But much like the legitimacy of the Book of Mormon’s translation, none of this mattered because in February 1831 the whole Smith family and a significant number of followers (some “fifty souls”) moved to Ohio anyway.

Smith took advantage of Sidney’s ability to lead a congregation and left Rigdon to look after the flock in Kirtland, while Joseph sought bigger ambitions: if Lamanites (read: Native Americans) were once followers of Christ, maybe they just need a little of the Prophet’s razzle-dazzle testimony to get on board.

Whether it was Joseph Smith’s hubris or a revelation from God, in June 1831, he revealed:

“Behold thus saith the Lord unto the Elders whom he hath called & chosen in these last days by the voice of his Spirit saying I the Lord will make known unto you what I will make known that ye shld [sic] do from this time untill [sic] the next conference which shall be held in Missorie [sic] upon the land which I will consecrate unto my People which are a remnant of Jacob & those who are heirs according to the covenant” - D&C 52:2

You really gotta love how much extra crap he includes to sound vaguely biblical. Religious doctrine based on his (very bad) vibes.

Joseph Smith gathered up a small group of about 8 people and they took off, mostly by boat and waterway, for the 900-ish mile journey west. They proselytized the whole way there, and Joseph’s ego must have been through the roof, because allegedly their missionarying worked on white people in Ohio and Illinois. People of the Second Great Awakening were really receptive to charismatic con men like Joseph Smith.

At the culmination of their journey, they find a small community near the Missouri River with just 20 or so buildings: the settlement of Independence.

Thanks for reading/listening. I promise next week we’re going full gonzo as, like the Mormons, trek some 435 miles to Independence, Missouri ourselves to see just how unserious these holy sites in the middle of nowhere are.

Over the next few issues, we’re going to:

* Find out where the Second Coming is happening (an empty field)

* Visit the Garden of Eden (an empty field)

* Accidentally condemn ourselves to Mormon Hell as we visit Joseph Smith’s grave (near a bunch of empty fields)

We’re looking for temple workers to come in during the day Monday through Friday because we just don’t have enough people. You’re not required but your salvation will be a lot easier if you just come in for a few hours. No we’re not paying you and no we won’t respect you.

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