Reviews
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Title: King Follett Sermon: A Biography
Author: William V. Smith
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Mormon Studies
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 372
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9781948218856
Price: $12.95
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
“The most interesting thing about Mormon theology is that it incorporates a liberal doctrine of man and a radically unorthodox concept of God,” Sterling McMurrin writes in his book The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion from 1965. That theology, as McMurrin explained, comes from the concepts Joseph Smith presented in Nauvoo, primarily in his King Follett sermon in April of 1844. Those concepts included eternal souls that were not contingent creations of an omniscient and omnipotent God, a rejection of original sin and salvation by grace alone, and a flattening of the differences between the physical and spiritual elements. My copy of McMurrin’s work is well-worn and underlined heavily.
After reading William V. Smith’s The King Follett Sermon: A Biography, I realize that there was a lot of subtlety, nuance, and even sex(!) that I had missed in Joseph Smith’s most famous sermon. The basic ideas were as I remembered them, but I had not fully comprehended the context or complexity of this two-hour discourse. William Smith’s new book dives deeply into the details of the sermon itself, the reasons for multiple published versions, and the many years when it was out of favor with the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Clearly, I still had much to learn.
Learn I did. As William Smith tracked the history of the Follett sermon, I was able to see how the incomplete theology that Joseph Smith hinted at in the Follett sermon began to create friction within the growing church. Delivered outdoors at a conference of the Church on April 7, 1844, the King Follett sermon was recorded by two scribes, Thomas Bullock and William Clayton. These are described by William Smith as aural audits, an attempt at a verbatim transcript of Joseph Smith’s words. The two scribes produced two different texts under less-than-ideal circumstances. There was a strong wind that made hearing Joseph Smith’s words difficult, and both scribes were attempting to record Joseph’s words verbatim without the help of shorthand. Later, efforts were made to incorporate notes made unofficially by other listeners in the audience. The net result is multiple versions of the sermon, and many questions about what exactly Joseph may have said and what interpretations were introduced by the scribes and later editors.
As William Smith sees it, there was a lot of explaining to be done. Joseph died only ten weeks later, leaving the interpretations to his successors in church leadership. Brigham Young’s 1852 public announcement of polygamy compounded some of the issues, creating tension between different opinions as to what Joseph was getting at. Was God the father of our spirits in a literal sense, borne of heavenly mothers? Were our spirits “organized” from more refined spiritual matter through this birth process? Did the exaltation of men require multiple eternal wives to bear additional spirits for future worlds? As William Smith shows, these arguments attempted to reconcile the teachings of the Church’s initial prophet with the actual lived religion of nineteenth-century Utah.
Smith does this in true biographical form by chronologically tracing the publication history of the various versions of Joseph’s sermon and how it was interpreted through the lens of polygamy and early temple sealing practice. Taken in concert with Joseph’s revelation on plural marriage, William Smith shows how the effects of the principles taught in Follett rippled through the nineteenth-century church. “The logic of sexuality in heaven had little relationship to JS’ teaching in Nauvoo, but the expansion/rewriting of that teaching seemed inevitable” [p 109].
Apostle Orson Hyde suggested in 1845 that children will be born in the likeness of their parents in heaven, just as they are in mortality [p 116]. Orson Pratt, Wilford Woodruff, and James Carrington tried to make sense of all this while walking together on the trek west in 1847. Joseph Smith’s uncreated spirits changed in the minds of some of his followers to the “sexual offspring of God-Mothers and a God-Father” to harmonize with the practice of polygamy [p 119]. Others tried to rationalize all of this with scientific theory of the time. “Whether human generation required only male seed…or male and female seed combined” was not well understood at the time [p 134]. Questions also arose over the idea that children who died before reaching maturity would be resurrected at the same age that they had attained at death.
William Smith traces this tension between Joseph’s incomplete explanations as manifested in published versions of the Follett Sermon. Scribes, church historians, and church leaders all had a hand in reconciling and publishing what William Smith counts as 23 different versions of the sermon. Describing what he calls the collision of Follett with history, William Smith shows that as polygamy was ending in the Church new explanations became necessary. Church historian B. H. Roberts, Apostles John A. Widtsoe and James E. Talmage, and future First Presidency member Charles W. Penrose all tried to reconcile the Follett sermon with the new circumstances. Joseph F. Smith determined that the various reports of the sermon were not reliable, causing the Follett sermon to fall out of favor. It was part of an effort on his part to “distance public Mormonism from nineteenth-century controversies and his developing methodology of ignoring the corpus of Mormon extracanonical texts” [p 202]. JFS feared such teachings would undermine faith in the founding prophet of the Restoration. Absent the foundation of polygamy, the nineteenth-century understanding of the sermon lacked context. Official publication of the sermon was discouraged, but it still circulated through other channels.
William Smith notes in Chapter 4 that Joseph F. Smith’s son, Joseph Fielding Smith, came to see the discourse in a different light and included it, with LDS Church approval, in his 1938 publication of Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith:
Bits and pieces of Follett and the outflow of early twentieth-century thought had worked their way firmly into Mormon language with ideas of deification: eternal progression, becoming like God, and I’m trying to be like Jesus. As a whole, however, Follett as a theological foundation stone (or perhaps stumbling block), lost much of its public significance in the Gospel According to the Twentieth-Century Church. [p 229]
We have preserved, William Smith notes, a compromise interpretation of Follett that preserves a Mother-in-Heaven image in our “Families are Forever” mantra.
Most recently, as William Smith wraps up his biography, the Follett sermon became something of a liberal theological hallmark of teachers and thinkers like Eugene England, Lowell Bennion, and LDS Institute teacher George Boyd. BYU Studies published an issue in 1978 that featured multiple articles about Follett. At the same time, the Protestant Right revived criticism of the Church by highlighting the more sensational aspects of Follett in the film The God Makers where a character states that he will become a god himself “with many goddess wives, who in the words of one woman on screen, will be ‘eternally pregnant’.” [p 251]
William Smith finishes his work with an appendix that incorporates a new critical text from the original audits and notes of the first-hand observers and major revisions by later editors. A second appendix gathers letters written to and by James E. Talmage about Follett and B. H. Roberts’ 1907 detailed article for The Improvement Era.
Lorenzo Snow summed up the King Follett sermon in his famous couplet, “As man now is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” Brigham Young shortened it to “As God is, man may become.” William Smith sums up his biography with the observation that “Follett is an important—if rather invisible—anchor of belief in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…[and] a fractured hidden standard work for Latter-day Saints” (Smith’s emphasis).