| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d1267484e49">This article reads
<i>The Book of Mormon</i> as an attack on the incoherence of American nationalism – as, specifically, a book
about the inevitability of its own irrelevance. That is, its primary objection is
that in order for Joseph Smith to get any attention at all within the unruly public
sphere of Jacksonian America, he had to write a book that would get him the wrong
kind of attention – attention as a religious fanatic rather than as a critic of the
culture that creates religious fanatics. Joseph Smith believed there was something
rotten at the heart of America, but, being an uneducated farm boy from western New
York, he had no way to express his anger in a manner that would allow him to be taken
seriously. He could only be an ‘authority’ with regard to religion, and religious
authority, being ubiquitous, was no authority at all. Smith tracks the way the American
public sphere forced its marginalized persons to criticize it from a disadvantageous
position, and the way those critiques were turned to the establishment’s advantage.
For Joseph Smith, freedom of speech in America has always been a tool of the political
elites to keep the poor from speaking effectively.
</p>
|
|---|