Afterword

Abstract

By 2015, Latter-day Saints were beginning to consolidate a more resilient cultural memory of Smith’s vision based on unabashed selection, relation, and repetition of Smith’s accounts in church curriculum. Curriculum a generation earlier had avoided any potential first vision controversies. Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith had been banned, not his interpretation of Smith’s accounts was the curriculum, having been officially selected, related, and repeated via media that was much more likely than a lecture or a textbook to modulate memory formation in young Latter-day Saints. The consolidation of their shared memory will take time. So will the recursion process by which elements are added or subtracted and new memories form. Within a generation, relatively few saints will remember any of the earlier versions of their shared knowledge. This book will preserve those memories.