One of the richest bodies of religious lore to develop in the United States. The Mormon
saga began in the spring of 1820 in Palmyra, New York, when young Joseph Smith, the
son of a local farmer, prayed earnestly to discover which of the many churches
contending for his membership he should join. According to Smith, God and his son,
Jesus Christ, appeared in answer to these prayers and told him he should join no church
because all churches then on Earth had lost the essence of the gospel once preached by
Christ. In subsequent years, Smith received further visitations from heavenly beings,
brought forth a new body of scriptures, and in 1830, under divine direction, “restored” to
the Earth the pristine organization originally established by Christ—named the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to distinguish it from the early church, but soon
nicknamed the Mormon Church by outsiders and insiders alike because of its
identification with Smith’s new scriptural offering, the Book of Mormon.
“The Joseph Smith Story,” canonized and told again and again by an ever-growing
number of followers, has to the present day served as the principal charter validating the
divine origin of the Mormon Church, but a large body of unofficial, or folk, narratives
has also developed and circulated orally among church members, serving equally
important functions. These narratives, belonging to the membership at large, will be told
on any occasion when a point needs to be emphasized or proven. Thus, the narratives are
recounted in Sunday-school classes, in fireside chats, in family circles, in casual
gatherings of friends, in carpools as people drive to and from work, and at work itself—in
short, in any situation in which Mormons rub shoulders with one another and talk about
their lives. Some of the stories are full-blown third-person legends; others are accounts of
personal experiences. But all of them are socially based, reveal deep-seated Mormon
attitudes and beliefs, and fill significant needs in the lives of both storytellers and their
audiences.
The stories cover the full range of Mormon experience, but most can be grouped into
three broad categories: (1) those that tie contemporary Mormons to the dramatic events of
their collective past; (2) those that testify to the truthfulness of the church’s teachings and
persuade church members to dedicate themselves fully to the Mormon cause; and (3)
those that provide relief through humor from the strictures of an authoritarian theological
system.