technology-mediated authority in early Mormonism

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As I wrote earlier, I recently appeared on the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast to discuss a recent publication in which I discuss the history of official Latter-day Saint domain names. Near the end of the interview, David Noyce (managing editor of the Tribune and one of the podcast hosts) asked me the “so what” question—sure, this history is interesting, but what’s the takeaway? Here’s (part of) how I answered:

When the church gets involved with technology, it is usually trying to build up its legitimacy, build up its authority, build up its reputation, but any technology that the church uses, and I have a wide view of technology so I think this goes all the way back to Joseph Smith Jr.’s seer stone and comes all the way up to the internet today, whenever you’re using a technology you buy into a system that treats legitimacy and treats authority in its own ways. And so, even though the church’s efforts at its websites, to build its social media presence, these are clearly meant to forward the church’s narrative about things. And you know, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. All organizations do this. But the church also has to play along.

Even though my work is looking at contemporary, digital technologies, you’ll notice that I made a passing reference to “Joseph Smith Jr.’s seer stone” (of which Wikipedia has a decent overview as an early Mormon technology. I don’t talk about seer stones in early Mormonism in my article, but in thinking about the relationship between technology and authority in Mormonism over the past several years, I’ve often gone back to Smith’s seer stone. It provides a helpful example that religion has always been mediated, this isn’t a new “digital” thing (something I learned from Giulia Evolvi; see, e.g., this article).

I’m obviously not the first to make this observation. In fact, this month, I’ll be ordering a couple of newish books (Gavin Feller’s Eternity in the Ether: A Mormon Media History and Mason Kamana Allred’s Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism so that I can start relying on solid scholarship rather than my decent familiarity with Mormon history when thinking about this connection. While I wait on these books, though, I was pleased to see Richard Howard use language along these lines in his 1996 second edition of Restoration Scriptures: A Study of Their Textual Development. In the context of describing Joseph Smith Jr.’s edits to certain sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, Howard wrote the following (emphasis is my own):

When Joseph Smith approached the reinterpretation of revision of Section 8, he reassessed the place of the forked stick in his theology. He saw the meaning of Cowdery’s gift of “working with teh rod of nature” in a different light. Both he and Cowdery had grown away from depending on the religious or mystical meanings in such mechanical objects as the water witching rod and seer stones. Joseph’s 1835 wording of Section 8 expressed in more general and symbolic terms the promise of the relationship of trust still existing between Cowdery and himself. It left behind the 1829 reliance on external media, which by 1835 had assumed in Joseph’s mind overtones of superstition and “white magic.”

Howard’s words emphasize that Mormonism has always been mediated (perhaps particularly so among religions, though I’m not well-read enough to make that argument yet), and they also improve on my comments above about how adopting technologies “buys into” the systems surrounding those technologies. In this case, Smith eventually opted out of the system of folk magic technologies because it carried baggage that outweighed the authority it had originally granted him. As I continue to write about online Mormonism, I’ll continue to be thinking about the relationship of technology and authority in that context. As I do that, I think it’s important that I consider that within historical context—this isn’t something new, as Howard suggests here and as I’m sure Feller and Allred will teach me more about.

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