National Council on Public History

Case Statement

In 2010, I took a job as a historian/documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. This project has the goal of publishing either in print or online all known and obtainable documents either created or owned by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. In my position with the project, I research the historical context behind Joseph Smith documents and write introductions and annotation that provide context to readers, thereby helping them understand how and why a document was created, how it was transmitted, and how it was received. In the course of performing such research, my colleagues and I have been able to discover new insights into Joseph Smith’s life and have been able to illuminate more clearly his own personal history and the early history of the church.

The project is part of the church’s History Department and is partially funded by the church. The support of high church leaders for this project has been used as evidence that church leadership seeks to make its history more transparent for the average church member. Certainly, those of us working on the project hope that our efforts will become accepted and used by church members, even though our primary audience for the project consists of scholars of both history and religious studies. However, getting the water to the end of the row, so to speak, is sometimes difficult. This was emphasized to me in September 2014 when I and several of my colleagues visited sites important to the history of Joseph Smith and the church in Kirtland, Ohio.

Beginning in 1831, church members began to move to Kirtland, spurred on by a revelation dictated by Smith that directed the church to locate there. For the next seven years, Smith and his family resided either in Kirtland or in nearby Hiram, Ohio. In these locations, Smith dictated many revelations that were later published and canonized as the Doctrine and Covenants, a book that Latter-day Saints accept as scripture. Especially important to the theology of the Latter-day Saints was a vision that Smith said he and fellow church leader Sidney Rigdon experienced in February 1832 about the afterlife and the kingdoms of glory that those who had lived on the earth would inherit. Kirtland was also the site of the first Latter-day Saint temple—a structure that church members believed God commanded them to build as his house. Several significant administrative developments also occurred in Kirtland, including the formation of the School of the Prophets as a training ground for missionaries, the establishment of a high council that helped govern the church in Kirtland, and the calling of twelve apostles as another administrative unit. As one church member has stated, “many pivotal events of the latter-day kingdom of God occurred” in Kirtland, making it a location of considerable significance for Latter-day Saints.[1]

Through the years, the church has obtained possession of several pieces of property in Kirtland and the vicinity. These include the Newel K. Whitney store in Kirtland, where Smith and his family lived from 1832 to late 1833 and where Smith held the School of the Prophets; the Isaac Morley property in Kirtland where Smith also resided; and the John Johnson farm in Hiram where Smith and his family stayed from September 1831 to September 1832. At the Johnson farm, Smith and Rigdon worked on what Smith regarded as an inspired revision of the Bible and also reported seeing their vision of the afterlife. Such sites are visited by tens of thousands of Latter-day Saints and others each year.

Although the church has a Historic Sites Division within the Church History Department—staffed by individuals with doctorates in archeology and history and well-versed in cultural resource management—interpretation of these sites is under the purview of the church’s Missionary Department. This means that volunteers who serve the church in a proselytizing capacity are those working as docents at the sites. The church’s Historic Sites Division has input into interpretive plans and is responsible for site preservation and conservation, but the messages conveyed come through individuals who likely have no academic training in history and who are more concerned with providing visitors with a spiritual experience than with conveying an accurate portrayal of the past. Indeed, the purpose statement of the Kirtland sites declares that the objective of the church is to help visitors “feel the significance of the Church’s divine role in helping all people return to God” and to get them “to more fully embrace and share gospel truths.”[2]

I experienced these interpretive methods firsthand in September 2014 when I and a few of my Joseph Smith Papers colleagues toured Kirtland and the surrounding area. As I had conducted in-depth research over the past three years on Joseph Smith and the church in Kirtland between 1831 and 1835, I was interested in seeing how the history of the sites was presented. For the most part, I found no glaring errors in the history, although there were minor points here and there that I took issue with. What was more concerning was the depiction of a kind of cardboard Joseph Smith—a figure with little complexity. One of the things we have tried to do in the Smith Papers is to show that Joseph Smith was an actual human being with real concerns that he struggled with. Getting a more traditional view of Joseph Smith as a sort of saint-on-a-pedestal was disappointing. I also found it fascinating that the missionaries seemed quite intent on making sure we had a spiritual experience at the sites. At times, their methods felt manipulative—even for someone like me who had served as a missionary for the church earlier in my life—and the efforts to extract a spiritual experience detracted significantly from my overall experience.

Touring the Kirtland Temple, however, was a different experience, in large part because the temple is owned by the Community of Christ, a church started several years after Joseph Smith’s death by his son Joseph Smith III.[3] The individual who led us through the temple was Ron Romig, the site coordinator and historic sites specialist for the temple and an individual who has a master’s degree in archival studies and who has published numerous historical articles in professional journals. Ron is no less devoted to his church than the missionaries are to theirs, yet his tour of the Kirtland Temple focused on the history of the site, rather than on proselytizing. As he took us through the building and discussed aspects of its construction, including the financial difficulties that Smith and the church were under at the time, we gained a greater respect for these individuals who believed so strongly that God had commanded them to construct the edifice. Significantly, the deepest spiritual connection I felt to any of the sites in Kirtland came in the Kirtland Temple when Ron invited our group to sing “The Spirit of God,” a hymn that church members sang at the temple’s dedication in 1836. Far and away, my experience at the Kirtland Temple was much more memorable and informative than at any other site in Kirtland.

Touring the Kirtland sites generated several questions in my mind that pertain to religion and historic sites. What should a religion’s main commitment be to interpreting sites they own? Should education outweigh proselytizing? Do they have to be mutually exclusive? How can historians and others working in the field help influence the interpretation of these sites? How can they get the information they are uncovering to the interpreters, especially if a church does not seem too intent on giving those with academic credentials ultimate responsibility for interpretation? What if sites with religious significance are not owned by churches themselves? How much emphasis should be placed on the religious importance of these sites to believers? I believe these questions are important not only for Mormon sites but for sites of other religions as well.

[1] Karl Ricks Anderson, Joseph Smith’s Kirtland: Eyewitness Accounts (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company, 1989), vii.

[2] “Purpose Statement and Key Messages for Ohio Historic Sites,” in Steven L. Olsen, “A History of Restoring Historic Kirtland,” Journal of Mormon History 30 (Spring 2004): 123.

[3] At the time of its founding, the Community of Christ was called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Discussion