Fundamentalism

Abstract

J. Reuben Clark’s 1938 speech to Mormon religious educators established a litmus test of orthodoxy based on belief in the historicity of Joseph Smith’s first vision. Dale Morgan and then Fawn Brodie provided source-critical readings of the evidence that called the historicity of the vision into question. Mormons who were aware of the tensions between these views had to wrestle with them. Faced with a new attack on Smith’s canonized account of his first vision, prophets and apostles stood with the story, trusting it as history and upholding it as a model for young, increasingly educated Latter-day Saints to follow.