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warriors and intrigue, rich biblical symbols and autobiographical themes, the narrative was a revised and enhanced New Testament, and it included the details of a journey to America by Christ immediately after his resurrection to visit his chosen people. The book depicted a Hebrew tribe led by a man called Lehi, who had left Jerusalem in 600 BC and sailed to the Americas with his six sons and other followers. Once there, Smith wrote, the tribe broke into two warring factions: the devout and godly under the good son, Nephi; the evil sinners under the bad seed, Laman. God was seen as blessing the Nephites and all of their descendants with white skin, while cursing the violent Lamanites with dark skin. The “white and delight-some” Nephites battled the bloodthirsty Lamanites for six hundred years, until Christ rose from the dead, turned up in North America to preach to these displaced Palestinians, and persuaded each side to abandon its barbarous ways. The tale of the Nephites and the Lamanites explained the “Hebraic” origin of Native Americans, a popular theory of the day—that the Indians of North America were a remnant of the mythical lost tribes of Israel, and must therefore be “gathered” in anticipation of Christ’s return. “The theory that the Americans are of Jewish origin has been discussed more minutely and at greater length than any other,” writes the historian H. H. Bancroft.
    Reflective of the mystical leanings of the era, the
Book of
Mormon
was an unsophisticated view of the clash between good and evil. At the core was a belief that all churches had deviated from the true theology of Christianity—what Smith called the “Great Apostasy”—and that Smith’s divine task was to gather the remnants of Israel to a latter-day Zion and await the millennium. Central to the theology was a conviction that all male devotees were on the road to godhood, that all men could create their own worlds, and that all women, if pure and obedient to men, could be “pulled through the veil” to this kingdom as eternal companions to righteous men.
    Smith published the
Book of Mormon
in 1830. It not only became a best seller, it also created an entirely new and exciting theology. With himself at the helm as “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” Smith immediately assembled a church with six followers. A month later the ranks would swell to forty, and more than a thousand would be converted within a year. Denouncing the “false spirits” common to the post–Revolutionary War revivalism of the day, Smith spoke of ongoing, regular contact between God and men, and the seductive notion that humans could be creators of their own worlds. He contended that his divine revelations evidenced his infallibility, his entire religion having been based upon miracles that defied secular challenge. Neither Luther nor the Pope had spoken directly to God, Smith said in countering his critics, while he professed to have had more than a hundred personal conversations with God.
    Founding his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he created an evangelical socialism ruled by an autocratic cadre of “worthy males” and based on a theology of the fast-approaching end-time as prophesied in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. “In no other period in American history were ‘the last days’ felt to be so imminent,” Smith biographer Fawn Brodie puts it, “as in that between 1820 and 1845.” The earth was thought to be nearing six thousand years old, according to scientific calculations then current, and since biblical references suggested that a thousand years was a single day to God, many of the world’s religious leaders put the earth’s impending seventh day—the “day of rest and peace” when Christ would descend—at some point in the mid-1800s. “The literalist Mormon timetable counts forward from the first six ‘days’ of Genesis,” writes James Coates, “and the seventh day of a thousand years when God rested after