The Golden Age of That First Great Revelation

Abstract

Joseph F. Smith’s efforts to raise the profile of the first vision worked. In their wake, young Latter-day Saints needed only to evoke the vision to make several rhetorical points: that God was embodied and passionate and created humans in his image; that God and Christ were distinct, separate, yet unified; that the Christian churches and creeds were not Christ’s; that God continued to reveal himself; that Joseph Smith was his revelator. These ideas were collective knowledge among Latter-day Saints in 1900. And no story captured and conveyed their shared sense of God, their relationship to him and to other Christians, as potently as the story of Smith’s vision. Memory of Joseph Smith’s first vision was widely diffused among and deeply embedded in Latter-day Saints by 1900. It was widely retold in diverse settings and media and yielded great meaning as a cultural and theological resource.