Charisma under Pressure Quotes

“Indeed, this was the lowest point of his career since the failure of Zion’s camp, having lost half of his apostles and many others in leadership positions and, most of all, having lost everything in Missouri, especially the holy land of Zion. His dream of establishing a New Jerusalem, of converting the Indians, of amassing a great army of holy warriors, and of saving the United States was virtually dead.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“The revelation defended church leaders and placed the blame squarely on the membership.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Smith was willing to pay a high price to maintain his charismatic integrity.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Tying Zion to a geographic spot by revelation was a miscalculation from which he would never fully recover.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“With the nation gripped by the terror of war and the possible dissolution of the Union, Smith seized the opportunity to legitimize his mission to build a utopian theocracy in the west.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“The fact that Smith called his revisions of the New Testament a “translation” seemed to imply that he was restoring the text to its original reading through the spirit, although evidence indicates he was reacting to the English text before him, not to the original Greek, which he could not read.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Smith was privately a Universalist despite the anti-Universalist rhetoric found in the Book of Mormon.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Smith’s confidence prevented him from appreciating the possibility of failure. The only thing that lay ahead was planning and building—turning his utopian vision into reality.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Cowdery had been called to preach the gospel to the Lamanites and “rear up a pillar as a witness where the Temple of God shall be built, in the glorious New-Jerusalem.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Ezra and Dorcas Booth were also converted by the exhibition of Smith’s apparent healing power. Reflecting on his conversion to Mormonism, Booth did not mention Elsa’s healing but described his emotions: “When I embraced Mormonism, I conscientiously believed it to be of God. The impressions of my mind were deep and powerful, and my feelings were excited to a degree to which I had been a stranger. Like a ghost, it haunted me by night and by day, until I was mysteriously hurried, as it were, by a kind of necessity, into the vortex of delusion.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Statistically, people recover or die at the same rate with or without attempted faith healing.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“About the same time, Whitmer began transcribing Smith’s revelations into a bound volume entitled “A Book of Commandments and Revelations of the Lord Given to Joseph the Seer and Others by the Inspiration of God and Gift and Power of the Holy Ghost Which Beareth Re[c]ord of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost Which Is One God Infinite and Eternal World without End Amen.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Not long after Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and Peter Whitmer Jr. left Kirtland to continue their journey to Missouri in mid-November 1830 the area was set ablaze by an uncontrollable fire of religious enthusiasm.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“For those who wondered how an incarnated God would behave as a child, Smith added three verses explaining that “Jesus … served under his father, and he spake not as other men, neither could he be taught; for he needed not that any man should teach him.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“and near the end instructed the Saints to “gether up your riches that you may purchase an inheritance” in the soon-to-be-revealed Zion.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“When Smith came to the introduction of circumcision as a token of God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17, he added a passage condemning infant baptism. God tells Abraham: “My people have gone astray from my precepts … and taken unto themselves the washing of children, … and have not known wherein [children] are accountable before me … And I will establish a covenant of circumcision with thee … that thou mayest know for ever that children are not accountable before me till eight years old.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“In revising and expanding the Bible, Smith’s procedure was similar to that of an ancient pseudepigraphist who, in the words of one Bible scholar, “created something new, an imaginary Sacred Past, the way it should have been.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“the “majority of … changes” in Smith’s inspired “translation” of the Bible “lack ancient textual support” but are instances where Smith “solves a problem created by the English translation in the KJV.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) cautions: “Many highly successful individuals display personality traits that might be considered narcissistic. Only when those traits are inflexible, maladaptive, and persisting, and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute narcissistic personality disorder”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“supporters of John Quincy Adams in New York quickly exploited the situation by attempting to draw the Masonic issue along factional lines. This strategy proved especially potent in western New York, where William Morgan,”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“The attraction to a charismatic leader, according to Weber, “may involve a subjective or internal reorientation born out of suffering, conflicts or enthusiasm,” and that this seems to occur “in times of psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, political distress.”100 Post also recognized that historical situations can be conducive to the rise of charismatic leadership: “At moments of societal crisis, otherwise mature and psychologically healthy individuals may temporarily come to feel overwhelmed and in need of a strong and self-assured leader.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“A second reconstitution occurred in 1838, when Smith began to create an official history of his life and the church he founded. In this history, which he began publishing in 1842 in the Mormon periodical Times and Seasons, Smith obfuscated the true nature of his early activity as a treasure seer, suppressed the folk-magic and treasure-seeking context of his 1823, 1824, and 1827 encounters with the “spirit” in charge of the gold plates, and inserted anachronistic elements such as the terms “angel” and “Urim and Thummim” (instead of “spirit” and “spectacles”), all of which gave this narrative a more mainstream Christian flavoring. In so doing, Smith was not only defending his reputation, he was reconstituting his charisma through a story that would be more appealing to the wider culture, thus attracting more converts and thereby expanding his charismatic authority.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“traditionalists have already equivocated on fundamental definitions of key terms like translation and revelation. Clearly, there are other ways to construe the evidence, even for traditionalists.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“while Smith’s truth-claims are beyond the scope of scholarship, the Book of Mormon’s historical status is another matter.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“scholarship simply lacks the tools necessary to make the kinds of determinations Bushman calls for.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“When one understands more fully the symbiosis of leader and follower, then perhaps Smith will seem less a puzzle and more like a person fulfilling his own needs through his followers. Shamans, prophets, heroes, and charismatic leaders are in important ways social constructs,2 because they mirror back to their followers what is demanded of them.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“In 1843 he declared: “I believe the bible, as it ought to be, as it came from the pen of the original writers.” He then gave an example of a problematic text that was resolved in his revision of the Old Testament, implying that he had corrected the text to its original reading.11”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“In his study of the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon, Hebrew scholar David Wright concluded that the Book of Mormon’s use of “Isaiah derives directly from the KJV text with some secondary modifications by Smith and that it does not derive from an ancient text through translation.”3 He also noted that the variant readings “can be explained as modifications of the KJV text, especially where there are italics,” and that Smith’s alterations of these italicized words often produced “incomplete and conceptually difficult or impossible readings” that were “incompatible with the Hebrew text” of Isaiah.4 New Testament scholar Stan Larson, in his study of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi 12–14, similarly concluded that the Book of Mormon’s text “originated in the nineteenth century, derived from unacknowledged plagiarism of the KJV,” which “Smith copied [from] the KJV blindly, not showing awareness of translation problems and errors in the KJV.”5 Larson also noted that some alterations were made to italicized words, but that “the Book of Mormon fails to revise places where the KJV text ought to have been printed in italics but is not.”6 Wright observed that the character of the alterations Smith made in his Bible revision are the same as what has been found in the Book of Mormon and that Smith’s 1829 efforts could be considered a “training ground” for his subsequent work on the Bible.7”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“Two of our number now commenced work as tailors in the village of Independence,” wrote Parley P. Pratt, “while the others crossed the frontier line and commenced a mission among the Lamanites.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839

“In the Spring they put him up a small frame house to live in while he stayed there.”
― Dan Vogel, Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839