Refiner's Fire Ministries

“The Book of Mormon is not a book of love, but of terror, hatred, and destruction.”

Repeat after me: This is not a political blog.

That having been said, let me say this: About two years ago I was creeping around the internet looking for information about Joseph Smith and his church. Googling is one of my favorite sports. You can do it in your jammies while eating Chips Ahoy out of the package and wearing your tinfoil hat. No one is the wiser. Anyway, the word ‘Narcissism’ jumped into my head. So I Googled ‘Joseph Smith narcissism’ and got about fourteen million hits, give or take ten thousand or so. The most prominent link on the first page was a book by Robert D. Anderson titled Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith (Signature Books; Salt Lake City; 1999.)

I went to the website and was swept away in a veritable feast of psycho-speak. Dr Anderson is a semi-retired psychiatrist who maintains a private practice and whose specialty is psychoanalysis. He is also a Mormon. Or was a Mormon. His roots go very deep into those disenfranchised farmers and lower class citizens of England and Scotland when the Mormon Church was engaged in its mass recruiting effort. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Mormon missionaries by the hundreds descended like so many locusts, converting the population and giving them hope in their hopelessness, his paternal great-grandparents in Glasgow were among those who fell under the spell of the Book of Mormon.

I ordered the book and when it came I read large portions of it, not necessarily in chronological order, simply because I couldn’t decide where to settle. The fault lies not with the author but with my mindset at the time. I was going through the trauma of “oozing” out of the Restoration and I couldn’t sit still for more than seven seconds at a time. So, after quite literally wearing the book out flipping back and forth I shelved it.

Fast forward to the election of 2008. Remember, this is not a political blog. Shortly after November 4th I began seeing references to the president elect and narcissism on various conservative websites. Being a curious soul I pursued everything I could on the subject because I suppose, deep down I felt if they could nail the diagnosis on him then surely they could get rid of him. Live and learn.

So I dragged out Anderson’s book and did a more thorough job of reading it. Anyone who has read the Book of Mormon from cover to cover even once will become mesmerized by the analysis and horrified by the outcome. I don’t pretend to agree with everything Anderson asserts, but the possibilities are incredibly tantalizing. I shouted, “I didn’t know that!” at least twice per page, which I suppose beats moving your lips silently while you read. Anderson alleges that the entire Book of Mormon is about Smith, pure and simple, and that he inserts folks and experiences from his life, naming them and using them to advance his fantasy. And that is probably the most inane and simplistic description of one of the most complex books available today.

Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith could be called a posthumous psychoanalysis and resultant diagnosis of the prophet and founder of the Mormon Church. From the outset Dr. Anderson has Smith pegged as narcissistic, pointing up the very earliest experiences of Smith, many of which the average Mormon has no knowledge. One can only wonder if Smith’s surgeries at the hands of a frontier barbarian, one Dr. Hyrum Smith, when Joseph was seven (pp.23-28), might have been the event that sealed Joseph’s fate. Added to the profound dysfunction of the Smith family, it’s possible it was ultimately the proverbial straw that disabled the camel.

Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith is available at the above website and Amazon or probably any other major bookstore. If you don’t want to read the book go to this website and you will learn probably more than you ever want to know about the book, people who read the book, and the Mormons.

Happy reading and God bless

Jan