Cultural Crisis in the Mormon Kingdom

Until the time that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left western New York (where the church had been founded in 1830) and moved en masse to Kirtland, Ohio and then Far West, Missouri (where a second gathering place was established), the Mormons constituted a close-knit and fairly harmonious group. At Kirtland, however, serious internal discontent developed. In the wake of the collapse of the Anti-Banking Society in 1837 came widespread apostasy of many Mormons, several apostles included, who challenged Joseph Smith's role as prophetic leader whose word was the will of the Lord in secular as well as spiritual affairs. According to the prevailing interpretation, the causes were essentially economic. Fawn Brodie maintains in her chapter on the "Kirtland Disaster" that the "toppling of the Kirtland bank loosed a hornet's nest." Quoting Apostle Heber C. Kimball, she says that afterward "there were not twenty persons on earth that would declare that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God." Despite Smith's efforts to salvage his Ohio community, "with mercantile firms bankrupt, the steam mill silent, and the land values sinking to an appalling low, Kirtland was fast disintegrating." In a recent work, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton repeat the generalization: "in Kirtland ... Smith's failed bank led to internal dissension

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