Redeeming Our Fathers

“I lost my job,” my dad stammered at the kitchen table. 

I was around fourteen years of age. My father was, to me, a genius. I used to try to find words in books that would stump him. “Do you know what a howdah is?” I would ask while reading a novel about India. He knew. He always knew. Every word. Every math problem. 

Dad was a chemical engineer. He worked for Xerox, managing a team of people designing photocopiers, which are, even though they jam all of the time, pretty amazing machines. 

When he was forty-five years old, Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. We knew what that meant because his father suffered from the same disease. Over the next several years Dad grew tremulous and slower. He sweated profusely when he became stressed, which was now most days at work. He started to have panic attacks.

Xerox didn’t fire Dad. They reassigned him to something less stressful, but for him it amounted to a demotion. One could sense his brokenness.

As the years passed Dad grew weaker both physically and mentally. I felt pity for him, but also an entirely unjustified disdain and embarrassment as he shuffled and stammered his way through a premature old age. 

I’m now older than Dad was when he developed Parkinson’s. I now look back on those years and feel embarrassed for my unkindness. My dad had his faults entirely unrelated to Parkinson’s. He wasn’t the ideal father, but I behaved with a lack of grace toward him.

I’ve thought about my father a lot while writing a biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., who had a much closer relationship to his father than I had to mine.

One of the aspects of Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling that I appreciate is his attention to the way that the younger Joseph assiduously honored his father and made his love for Joseph Sr. abundantly clear. He sobbed uncontrollably when his father was baptized. He ordained Joseph Sr. as the church’s patriarch. Joseph Jr. included his father in several of the most sacred moments of his life.

At a December 1834 feast, Joseph Sr. blessed his children and their spouses. Before he did so, he observed that he had grown old. His life had been full of hardship and “folly.” He had often been “out of the way, through wine.” Other people had scorned him. 

Joseph Sr.’s life included some embarrassing missteps. He had thrown away his property and reputation in a failed attempt to get rich quickly by shipping ginseng to China. Joseph Sr. never really got back on his feet. By the time the family started over in Palmyra, economic initiative in the family had devolved onto his oldest son, Alvin. The Smiths acquired a farm just over the Palmyra-Manchester line. After Alvin’s 1823 death, their progress stalled, and they lost their land when they failed to make the payments on it. 

When he blessed his namesake son, Joseph Sr. noted that Joseph Jr. had “suffered much” in his youth because of the “poverty and afflictions” of the family. But Joseph Jr. had responded to his father’s shortcomings with “perfect love.” He was like Shem, the biblical son of Noah, who covered up his naked and drunk father instead of laughing at him. And now the young prophet had made his flawed father a patriarch. 

I wish I had been more like Shem.

In terms of religion my family also has had some things in common with the Smiths. There was fracture. My mother is one of the few remaining dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian in the United States. She has led my home congregation’s women’s Bible study for nearly fifty years. 

My father was an agnostic. When I was younger he didn’t like going to church, so my mom, my sister, and I often went without him, much to her displeasure, especially because his indifference gave me license to be indifferent. My mom’s personality was strong enough to force me to keep going to our church’s youth group. Eventually I went of my own accord. My church was an evangelical mainline congregation at a time when those two adjectives didn’t form an oxymoron. 

My dad was incredibly gracious toward my evangelical fervor. I tried to witness to him. I remember one occasion at which I shared my testimony before a large group of donors to Young Life, an evangelical ministry that my church supported. He told me he was proud.

As any reader of Wayfare will know, the Smith family was more bitterly fractured over religion. Joseph Sr. wasn’t an agnostic like my father. He believed in Jesus Christ but not in any of the churches he encountered. He forbade his wife, Lucy Mack Smith, from attending Methodist meetings at a time when she was seeking assurance of her salvation. Some years later, she and several of their children joined a Presbyterian congregation in Palmyra, New York. Both Josephs kept their distance. Joseph Jr. leaned more toward his father than his mother when it came to church. After experiencing a vision of God the Father and Jesus Christ, Joseph Jr. told his mother that he had “learned for himself that Presbyterianism is not true.” The family’s religious divisions ended after the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and the 1830 founding of the Church of Christ. Both parents and all of their other children accepted the prophetic leadership of Joseph Jr. 

My own family didn’t have such a unified ending. Once he became infirm, my dad happily attended church. Without the Xerox meetings that had provided both purpose and stress, he wanted the fellowship and companionship that one can find in a healthy congregation. But like his parents before him, he never believed. 

My sister embraced a more conservative brand of evangelical Christianity. (My mom cannot stomach the music at any of the churches she has attended). One of my nieces is now a Catholic married to a Muslim. (More angst for my mother.) Religious unity is increasingly elusive for American families today.

In October 1835, Joseph Smith Sr. became severely ill. It was a difficult season in the younger Joseph’s life as well. Friends had helped him purchase a collection of Egyptian mummies and papyri for a rather outrageous sum. Joseph Jr. concluded that the scrolls included “the book of Abraham written by his own hand upon papyrus and found in the catacombs of Egypt,” but his work with these materials proceeded in frustrating fits and starts. For reasons that remain unclear, the prophet was in a sour mood for much of the fall, dissatisfied with the recently appointed twelve apostles and at odds with his brother William. He even brought his wife Emma to tears on one occasion by upbraiding her for leaving a Sunday meeting before the Lord’s Supper. 

Still, Joseph set other concerns aside to attend his ailing father. He brought Joseph Sr. “mild herbs,” and he returned to be with him several days in a row. The efforts seemed to no avail, as the patriarch was “failing fast.” Then, instead of preaching on Sunday, Joseph Jr. spent the morning in “secret prayer.” By himself, communing with the Lord, he received an answer: “thy father shall live.” Joseph spent the afternoon at his father’s side. That evening, David Whitmer came to the home. He and Joseph prayed together and laid their hands on the old man. “Our aged father arose and dressed himself, shouted and praised the Lord,” Joseph Jr. reported. He called his brother William to the room so that they could all join together in songs of praise.

Joseph Jr. was again at his father’s side five years later when Joseph Sr. again became gravely ill. He prayed for and laid hands on his father, but this time it was the end. During Joseph Sr.’s final days he discussed the newly announced doctrine of baptism for the dead with his family. Joseph Jr. blamed his father’s death on “ruthless mobs” whose persecutions had weakened the old man. 

Perhaps it is unremarkable that a child would take the time to pray for an ailing parent. I did pray for my father on occasion. I remember praying for his salvation. But as he grew infirm, I didn’t like spending time with him. Conversation was difficult. 

I would have come to be with him during a final illness, but he died unexpectedly and suddenly of a heart attack a dozen years ago. Fortunately, we visited my parents a few days before his death. Dad was unusually engaged with my daughter, playing with her in the swimming pool, pretending to be a whale. 

One doesn’t have to write an unflinching biography. Depending on the audience, there might be a good reason to write an admiring portrait that skirts more difficult material. 

Scholarly biographers, however, owe their readers the unvarnished truth about their subjects. Jonathan Eig, who has written about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali, reflected on this responsibility in the wake of posthumous revelations about the Canadian novelist Alice Munro. Munro’s second husband began abusing one of her daughters – now Andrea Robin Skinner – when she was nine years of age. Munro learned of the abuse but remained with her husband and grew estranged from her daughter. In 2005, Skinner approached Robert Thacker, who was completing a biography of her mother, and shared her story with him. Thacker allowed his book to go to press without including the information. 

Eig disappointed many readers by writing at length about King’s plagiarism, drinking, and adultery. “Why can’t you leave our hero alone?” one man asked him. Eig responded “that if we demand perfection of our heroes, we won’t have any.” He added that withholding important information about a subject’s flaws would undermine a reader’s trust in an author’s affirmation of his virtues. Eig once told Muhammad Ali’s family that the boxer deserved a “warts-and-all biography” that “presidents and popes” usually receive. I would add, moreover, that unflinching examinations of subjects such as King, Ali, and Munro reveal so much about both the frailty and majesty of the human condition. 

I’ve written several biographies and never have felt any hesitation about including any of my subject’s flaws. Maybe I’m just ruthless! My dissertation-turned-first book chronicled the career of Bill Bright, founder of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), one of the most influential evangelical ministries in late twentieth-century America. In return for the opportunity to interview Bill Bright’s widow, children, and many key ministry leaders, I agreed to share the manuscript with them prior to its publication. They objected to many things and certainly felt that I placed too much focus on relatively unimportant negative episodes instead of concentrating on matters of greater import. One man gave me a rather stern warning about the danger of opposing the Lord’s anointed. I drove home somewhat apprehensively.  

The objections of Bright’s family and associates were not necessarily wrong. Given that he had built an international ministry that was successful by many measures, did I focus too much on some of his flaws, foibles, and setbacks? I wouldn’t change my approach, but biographers should agonize a bit about whether they take an accurate measure of their subjects. Except in the case of thoroughly mendacious and unethical subjects, a “warts-and-all” biography shouldn’t let the warts overwhelm the all. 

“I began my work on the Ali book with a deep love for Ali,” recalls Jonathan Eig. “He was so beautiful, so clever, so brave.” He had to end his “love affair with Ali” in order to write a “useful biography.” 

Joseph Smith was also clever, brave, and good looking, but I didn’t have to end a “love affair” with him in order to write a useful biography. From my vantage point Smith always seemed a mix of warts and winsomeness. There was never a question about excluding information that cast him in a negative light, or a positive one for that matter. The harder question was how to keep the biography to a manageable length, especially after the Joseph Smith Papers project so helpfully organized and annotated the mountain of material now available about Smith. 

Take Smith’s marriages, for instance. Some of that material is decidedly unflattering. How much does one write about polygamy alongside all of Smith’s other activities during the last several years of his life? There isn’t an easy answer to that and similar questions. Does one privilege new material that hasn’t appeared elsewhere, or at least hasn’t appeared in prior biographies? That would be “useful.” Does one try to provide a balanced perspective on one’s subject, a mix of the good and the bad? And what is the point of a biography of someone like Smith? Should one try to explain his success? That doesn’t seem too hard. Penetrate to the essence of his religious experience? Impossible. Narrate how his life experiences shaped his ideas and actions? A reasonable goal. 

No biographies are perfect or definitive. There is no last word. It pays to be humble.

Does it help to find some points of connection with one’s subject? In the case of Joseph Smith, unlike in the case of Brigham Young (one of my other prior subjects), I have found a few such points. Perhaps I am grasping for them, because parallels are not especially abundant. But I can empathize with Smith seeing his father decline into infirmity and into what seemed like failure. I can relate to a sense of religious fracture within one’s family. And I can also relate to Smith’s longing for religious assurance. Like him, I have had times in my life in which I’ve felt intensely alone.

And Smith handled at least some of those moments better than I did. He lavished his father with respect. He was gracious to him. He sat by his side when he was ill and prayed for his recovery. He honored his father, and his mother and several other family members also. 

Are those especially important elements of Joseph Smith’s biography? They are at least part of the all. 

John G. Turner is the author of Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, coming from Yale University Press in Summer 2025. He is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Art by Alessandro Tiarini.

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