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The Book of Mormon:
A Voice from19th Century Dust
To many astute contemporaries of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon read like a
virtual guidebook to the arguments, controversies, and rhetoric of the great
revival period of the 1820’s. Regarding the rhetoric, alone, a professor
at the University of Michigan once reasoned that “either the Lord
intentionally made all the mistakes of the first edition and colored the
writings with the provincialisms of New York state, or, that the Lord was unable
to speak correctly or use other than the phrases and mannerisms of the locality
in which Joseph Smith lived.”1
 As for 19th
century issues, the famous Ohio
preacher, Alexander Campbell, whom Sidney Rigdon had followed
before joining forces with Joseph Smith, described the Book of Mormon as
containing “every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for
the last ten years.” He went on to say that Joseph...
“...decides all
the great controversies - infant baptism, ordination, the trinity,
regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement,
transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience,
the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may 
baptize, and even the question of free masonry, republican government, and the
rights of man.”2
Grant Palmer, former long-time LDS Institute educator, explored the
connection between the stories, sermons, and other
elements in the Book of
Mormon and the same from the Palmyra area revival culture. In his book, An
Insider’s View of Mormon Origins3,
he outlined five points that characterized the evangelical revivalism of the
day.
Each of these
points will be considered and compared with Book of Mormon equivalents:
 Camp settings.
Preaching that interlaced paraphrased biblical passages with revival terminology
designed to produce a powerful emotional impact.
A conversion pattern characterized by a conviction of sin, intense prayer for
forgiveness, and
a sweet calming assurance of being forgiven, often
accompanied by
trembling, tears, falling, and other physical manifestations.
Denunciation of Deists, Unitarians, Universalists, and Agnostics.
Vivid descriptions of the degenerate state of human beings.
1 B.H. Roberts,
Defense of
the Faith and the Saints (Salt Lake City: The Deseret
News, 1907-1912) vol. 1. p. 307, quoted in La Mar
Peterson, Creation of the Book of Mormon (Salt
Lake City: Freethinker Press, 2000), pp. 99-100.
2
Alexander Campbell, Delusions: An
Analysis of the Book of Mormon (Boston, 1832), p. 13,
quoted in Edwin Firmage, Jr., “Historical Criticism and
the Book of Mormon: A Personal Encounter,” American Apocrypha
(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002).
3 Grant
H. Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins (Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 2002).
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