Historians who have spent decades studying the life of Joseph Smith Jr. — born 220 years ago on Dec. 23, 1805 — report that the deeper one is willing to study, the more clarity arises about the kind of man Joseph Smith actually was.
“We’re living in a generation of people for whom research means making a quick search on the internet,” says Richard E. Turley Jr., lead author on an extensive upcoming biography about Joseph Smith.
Much of that social media or YouTube content about religious matters, including the life and character of the Prophet Joseph Smith, has a distinctly antagonistic motivation, he says.
When it comes to such sacred events, Turley concludes that only the ones “tuned into the real dynamics of the situation, religiously and spiritually,” would comprehend the entirety of the event.
In the meantime, sophisticated sounding narratives may draw the ear of others, based on a selective gathering of evidence that validates pre-existent hostility. This happens often enough that it has become a whole scholarly focus.
Character assassination as a field of study
Joseph Smith is certainly not alone in facing such character attacks during his life, and after his death. Prominent people throughout history have often faced such rhetorical onslaughts, especially when they threaten established, entrenched interests.
Academic interest in character attacks was revived this last decade by the 2014 publication of “Character Assassination Throughout the Ages” and the 2020 “Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management.”
The scholars involved, hailing from George Mason University, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Baltimore, frame character assassination as a deliberate attempt to undermine credibility or public support, particularly in arenas of intense competition (politics, business, religion).
One of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century, the late Hannah Arendt, likewise argued that misrepresentation and vilification are often intentionally leveraged in hostile discourse today to strip opponents of legitimacy.
Such “delegitimization” has been studied across disciplines as a process of withdrawing legitimacy from an institution, actor, or practice by undermining its moral, legal, or social standing. A recent 2024 publication by British researchers similarly explores in detail the core components of “character assassination attacks” that draw on any dubious-looking fragment of a person’s life. They note that “to achieve reputational damage, it seeks to prompt a negative emotional response from the public towards the target.”
No chance to defend oneself
If serious accusations are directed at someone today, scholar Susan Easton Black points out this person would have a chance to offer a defense in a courtroom or other public forum.
By contrast, “the figures of the past, they’re not here to defend themselves, and yet we feel like we’re in a position where we can judge them,” says Claire Margaret Haynie, part of the team working on the new Joseph Smith biography.
They have no ability to speak for themselves other than, “the fragments that we have from their lives,” she says. “And I just think that’s so deeply unfair.”
Among this select group of historians who have studied the entirety of Joseph Smith’s life, more are speaking up forcefully about his integrity and character as a husband, father and religious leader — while encouraging more critical thinking about dramatic claims made online.
Quantity of evidence
A clear evaluation of any person or event historically depends on looking at “the totality of the evidence,” Turley says.
“That means you can’t just take one thing that may be historical and say that it represents the whole. If you don’t take the totality, you’re only going to get a little tiny glimpse of a portion of something.”
Earlier in her training as a historian, Claire Haynie recalled an unsettling moment after writing about another historical figure where she realized, “my goodness, if my story of my life was being told based on a couple of journal entries here, a couple of newspaper articles there, and somebody was trying to get a clear picture of who I was — they wouldn’t get it.
“That’s something that we forget in 2025,” Haynie told the Deseret News. “The past is gone. All that we have are fragments of it.”
This is why historians often talk about the importance of corroborating something with multiple sources, rather than just one. On that basis, Haynie says, “Historians are trying their best to gather those fragments and put together this idea of who a person was.”
If someone was going to tell the story of her own life, Haynie adds, she’d want that to be done “by somebody who was close to me, not just for a period of time, but who persisted with me — who knew the full arc of my life.”
In the context of Joseph Smith’s history, she suggests that means listening more closely to Lucy Mack Smith and Brigham Young, more than individuals like Ezra Booth or John C. Bennett who interacted with Joseph for only a few years.
Quality of evidence
When it comes to historical sources, Turley agrees, “You can’t just count them. You have to weigh them. Some sources are better than others. So you can’t just say, Well, I found 10 pieces that I like, and I’m going with that, you have to say, well … how good are they?”
For instance, how close was the person to a person, place and time and experience is crucial, Turley says — compared with an account coming from a person who “heard it from a friend, who sometimes heard it from a friend.”
This is important, Turley says, because in the vacuum where scant historical evidence exists, salacious claims have carried more weight, despite having a clear agenda behind them.
Evaluation of historical evidence therefore needs to include “a person’s feelings towards someone else,” Turley emphasizes. From an anthropological stance, the goal is to learn how a people perceives the world and their belief systems, he says. But if someone immediately brought a “skepticism of everything that they say, you’ll never comprehend what they’re doing.”
The heart behind the words
“Often, if someone is antagonistic towards another, they don’t see the totality,” Turley summarizes. “They see the antagonistic side of things.”
Just as historians try to guard against their own bias overly influencing the story they are telling, Matthew C. Godfrey, managing historian of The Joseph Smith Papers, emphasizes the importance of bringing the same attention to the biases of characters in history, in the stories they tell. “There’s a lot of depictions of Joseph from people who wanted to depict him in an unfavorable way, and so they did.”
For instance, Godfrey highlights the motivation behind Ezra Booth’s letters to the Ohio Star about Joseph Smith in 1831: “The whole reason why Ezra is writing these letters is to try to make people believe that Joseph’s not a prophet. That’s the bias that he comes from.”
Likewise, he says, “it’s very clear that John C. Bennett is depicting a distorted picture of plural marriage,” which is something the historian notes this antagonist didn’t necessarily know everything about. Yet again, the intent behind Bennett’s public commentaries was “solely to try to make people believe that Joseph is not a good person, and that he’s not a prophet.”
Others who knew Joseph Smith well in the same period, like John M. Bernhisel, stated that “the numerous ridiculous and scandalous reports in circulation respecting him, have not the least foundation in truth.”
In evaluating the quality of Joseph’s own witness to his life, Ronald O. Barney, former associate editor with the Joseph Smith Papers, notes that “over the course of his life, Joseph Smith was, perhaps surprisingly, freely open about his human limitations. Instead of being fearful that he might be exposed, as would a pretender, he readily acknowledged his weakness.”
Barney cites reproofs Joseph Smith had received from the Lord that were shared “for all to see” — noting that “he easily could have eliminated the reprimands that would eventually be published.”
Read more, not less
Turley refers to the famous couplet, “A little learning is a dangerous thing” where Alexander Pope goes on to encourage people to “drink deep” of the spring of knowledge, and not merely “taste it,” cautioning that “shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.”
The solution, according to Pope, is to drink more deeply. Turley says, “only when you become sober again will you be able to see things correctly” — before adding: “We live in a world of intoxicated people who think that they know.”
After a lifetime of study of Joseph Smith, Susan Easton Black acknowledges not all of her questions have been answered. But most of them have. Even amid lots of questions, she now feels grateful that she “never threw out my testimony or my willingness to serve at the ward or any level.” With more study, she said her testimony that Joseph Smith is a prophet has only been “reinforced year after year.”
She adds, “You don’t gain anything by tearing someone else down. It’s not a win for anyone, the person you talk about or what it does to your character.”
“Truth edifies, and truth from any source edifies,” Black concludes. “If you’re reading things that pull someone’s characters down, it doesn’t edify you or the one that wrote it.”
As one of this select group of historians who has studied Joseph Smith deeply, Claire Haynie likewise says, “I truly believe that he was a deeply good person, and that he was trying very honestly and sincerely to do what the Lord asked of him.”