The Problem

“In recent decades,” writes Richard L. Bushman, “the environmentalist explanation of the Book of Mormon has replaced the Spalding hypothesis among non-Mormon scholars. . . . All but a few critics have dropped Spalding and Rigdon and credited Joseph Smith with authorship. . . . According to the environmentalists, Joseph absorbed images, attitudes, and conceptions from upstate New York rural culture and wove them into the Book of Mormon.” Thomas F. O’Dea, the late Catholic scholar whose pioneering sociological study *The Mormons* remains justly famous today (more than three decades after its initial publication), will serve as an example of the environmentalist position on the Book of Mormon:

“It is obviously an American work growing in the soil of American concerns in terms of its basic plot,” O’Dea declares. “There is a simple common-sense explanation which states that Joseph Smith was a formal person living in an atmosphere of religious excitement that influenced his behavior as it had that of so many thousands of others, and, through a unique concomitance of circumstances, influences, and pressures, led him from necromancy into revelation, from revelation to prophecy, and form prophecy to leadership of an important religious movement and to involvement in the bitter and fatal intergroup conflicts that his innovations and success had called forth. To the non-Mormon who does not accept the work of a divinely revealed scripture, such an explanation on the basis of the evidence at hand seems by far the most likely and safest.”

. . .

Clearly, the Gadianton robbers and the Masons differ on many crucial points. “The differences may explain,” says Bushman, “why critics in Joseph Smith’s own day made so little of anti-Masonry in the Book of Mormon.” Alexander Campbell barely mentioned the Masons in passing in his 1831 critique. Subsequent critics of the 1830s failed to bring them up at all, since they accepted the Spalding theory of the book’s origin—which could hardly reflect the anti-Masonic movement because Solomon Spalding had died in 1816, well before the Moran case and the ensuing clamor. Eventually, Campbell himself came to accept the Spalding theory and, consequently, dropped his allegation about Masonry. Such facts, coupled with early Mormon silence on Masonry, justify Bushman’s remark that “The people who knew anti-Masonry and the Book of Mormon in the 1830s made less of the connection than critics today.”