“Thus Saith the Lord”

Whatever else it is, revelation is a genre. Conventionally, this is just to say that “revelation” is a type of text—like, “ransom note,” “eulogy,” or “syllabus.” We are able to identify genres when we see them, more or less, and this recognition aids our responses to texts. Anticipated or hoped-for responses can be specific actions (pay the ransom), or general affects (sit respectfully and feel edified by a eulogy), or even ironically failing (understand that you are supposed to do the reading on the syllabus, but don't). The technical sense in which theorists think about genre emphasizes the back-and-forth between text and audience necessary for successful recognition: a text can intend to inhabit a particular genre and thereby to prompt certain responses—theory-types call those responses “uptakes”—but it cannot guarantee that it will be successful. Genre is not a static category, but a relationship.2It is useful to frame the questions raised by John Taylor's 1886 revelation in terms of genre, because this framing sharpens the contrast between this text and the other with which it is unavoidably linked: Wilford Woodruff's 1890 Manifesto. Both are texts of authority issuing from a sitting prophet intervening in the controversy over plural marriage, but in their generic aspirations, they are very different. The Manifesto, by declining to lay claim to the genre of revelation when it was first issued, avoided the specter of God's own voice contradicting itself, gambling that a novel genre—the press-release style “official declaration,” as it's known today—could gain acceptance in the church. At their core, the arguments between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the smaller Mormon groups that see in the 1886 revelation a proof-text for continuing plural marriage are partly about competing and conflicting genres.The 1886 revelation is an example of what scholars have called “dialogic revelation” in the Mormon tradition: it is delivered in the first-person singular of the Lord and addressed to the prophet as a response to a specific question.3 Taylor issued nine other texts fitting this genre in the decade he led the church. The conventions of dialogic revelation had been established by Joseph Smith during the early years of his career, and Taylor's revelations share with Smith's both common concerns (obedience, covenant) and diction (“Thus saith the Lord,” “even so, amen”). They were issued by a sitting prophet, heir to Smith's mantle, and, often, formally affirmed by a vote of the leadership or the membership of the church, a practice Smith had instituted.4Compared to Taylor, none of Smith's successors as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued so many texts looking to be recognized as revelation according to the genre as Smith established it. At least by the time Taylor became prophet, members of his church had come to distinguish dialogic revelation from the sort of felt impressions that they believed guided the prophet as well as the general membership, according to their station, on an ongoing basis. This distinction likely grew at least partly out of the fact that Brigham Young, Taylor's predecessor, rarely engaged in dialogic revelation. Young's stated reasons for mostly avoiding the genre are telling and significant for this discussion of the 1886 revelation and the Manifesto. As Christopher James Blythe has articulated, Young complained that his flock clambered for revelations while failing to live by the ones they already had. Relatedly, he feared for them due to the awful stakes of disobeying anything couched as a revelation. “When revelation is given to any people, they must walk according to it, or suffer the penalty which is the punishment of disobedience,” Young lectured. Other genres had lower stakes: a word of counsel from him or a request for action ostensibly based on his prophetic knowledge of the divine will but not rendered as a divine command left room for human fallibility. “[W]hen the word is, ‘will you do thus and so?’[;] ‘It is the mind and will of God that you perform such and such a duty;’ the consequences of disobedience are not so dreadful, as they would be if the word of the Lord were to be written under the declaration, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”5Many Saints found Taylor's willingness to issue dialogic revelations a welcome return of prophetic form after decades of Young's reticence. When Taylor issued what would be his most widely-known revelation during his lifetime in October 1882, Isaiah M. Coombs, a tithing clerk for the church, wrote of it with palpable relief: “It is the first ‘Thus Saith the Lord’ that we have had in a long time and shows that the Lord has not forgotten us.”6Taylor's use of this genre re-established, briefly, the availability of the word of the Lord to top the words of everyone else. The October 1882 revelation, for example, appointed men to the church leadership. When it was first read out, George Q. Cannon spoke at length regarding its acceptance as the word of the Lord and observed that the appointments that the revelation resolved had been matters of contention among the brethren, such that this revelation to settle the matter ought to be a relief for everyone involved. “[W]hen the word of the Lord comes respecting matters of this kind, there is no difference of opinion, there is no room for difference of opinion.”7 Apostle John Henry Smith, present when the October 1882 revelation was first read, grumbled about its provisions and about Taylor's leadership style in general, but bowed before a “thus saith the Lord.”8Taylor recorded the September 1886 revelation with this background of previous success in issuing dialogic revelations. However, this one stands out due to some differences. It is the only of Taylor's revelations to survive in his own hand. George Reynolds, Taylor's secretary, acted as scribe for most all of the others, but when the 1886 revelation was recorded, Taylor was in hiding, without regular access to his staff and associates. In terms of genre, moreover, it is distinctive in its address. Of all of Taylor's known revelations, it is the most intimate, addressed specifically to “My Son John.”9 The logic of revelation publishing was a live question during Taylor's presidency. As Taylor resuscitated the genre, the laity wondered about their access to these new revelations. While two were published and even temporarily appeared in foreign-language editions of the Doctrine and Covenants, only one of Taylor's revelations can be said to have had wide circulation during his lifetime. Leaders explained the variable access to the revelations by observing that not all revelations were intended for the entire church: some were meant only for subsets of Saints. In an article published in the Juvenile Instructor in 1902, George Reynolds, Taylor's scribe, took for granted a distinction between authority and access. Reynolds explained that “Only a few of the revelations given through [Taylor] have been published, as the greater portion were not addressed to the Church as a whole, or to the world, but to individuals or special bodies of brethren.”10With this in mind, the 1886 revelation could be read to have an audience of one, serving as reassurance and solace for the prophet himself.11 D. Michael Quinn noted four decades ago that Taylor did respond to the September 1886 revelation with at least one specific uptake. While Taylor had spent years forcefully reminding his flock of the importance of the principle, it had been a long time since he had taken a new wife himself. In December of 1886, he married Josephine Roueche, daughter of the family with whom he spent the last half-year of his life in hiding.12In any case, the visceral “thus saith the Lord” of the 1886 revelation, laying claim to what was then the most authoritative genre of Mormon discourse, presents a stark contrast to the Woodruff Manifesto. Woodruff, like Taylor, did issue dialogic revelations and had done so less than a year before the Manifesto appeared. In late November 1889, as the brethren had debated, again, their next statement regarding plural marriage in the face of implacable federal opposition, George Q. Cannon had stated plainly what he hoped for and was rewarded. “[W]hatever is said I hope will be said by the word of the Lord. I want President Woodruff, if I can have my feelings gratified and if anything is to be said on this subject in this direction, to be able to say ‘thus saith the Lord.’”13 Woodruff returned the next day with, indeed, a “thus saith the Lord” counseling the brethren to take heart and not to be cajoled by the government into making promises that could ensnare them later: “Place not yourselves in jeopardy to your enemies by promise.”14 Cannon and others were relieved and heartened by the revelation. “How happy I am,” John Henry Smith wrote in his journal.15Less than a year later, though, Woodruff's office issued the Manifesto as a promise regarding the end of plural marriage. While the modern headnote says that Woodruff issued it “After receiving revelation,” the text itself, famously, does not attempt to lay claim to the genre of revelation; it is not a “thus saith the Lord.” As Quinn noted, some leaders could be touchy about the implication that the Manifesto itself was a revelation.16 The generic differences are important. In the Manifesto, the Lord speaks at a remove, the document representing a translation (to gesture toward another important Mormon genre) of what the Lord has revealed to the prophet. The first-person singular in the Manifesto is the “I” of Woodruff, not the Lord.Questions and controversies have long swirled around the 1886 revelation, revered as a proof text by those committed to continuing the practice of plural marriage, quietly ignored or openly doubted by the mainline church. The question has never really been, though, about whether or not the 1886 revelation was authentic. The question has been about the capacity of a novel Mormon genre—the “Official Declaration” as it is known today—to replace what had previously been the church's most authoritative genre. The 1886 revelation might ratchet up the tension wrought by the sense that one revelation contradicts another, but that tension was not new. When the Manifesto was issued, it was fresh with respect to Woodruff's own “don't make promises” revelation less than a year before. Either this tension could be accommodated by the church and by individual members, or it could not be.By 1933, B.H. Roberts could report that he didn't see what the big deal was. That year, one Burke Frandsen sent Roberts copies of Taylor's October 1882 and September 1886 revelations, asking his opinion (probably in a pointed fashion: Frandsen appears to have been flirting with fundamentalism).17 Roberts responded that he remembered the former well and had a vague knowledge of the latter, but that it really didn't matter much whether they were authenticated or not. “[A]ll of this was swept aside, of course, by the Woodruff Manifesto of 1890 which came after President Taylor's administration closed and Brother Woodruff's had begun.”18Conventionally, Roberts's easy acceptance of the idea that each successive prophet supplants, even to the point of contradiction, his predecessor could just be part and parcel of belief in continuous revelation, a faith in truth unfolding. Seen through the lens of the genre shift introduced by the Manifesto, however, it can be seen as a new emphasis on the person of the living prophet, an early articulation of the sort of thinking behind Ezra Taft Benson's insistence, a half-century later, that “The living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet.” That shift embodies the key move of twentieth-century Mormonism: the bureaucratization of priestly authority. The stark immediacy and intimacy of the 1886 revelation, addressed to “My Son John,” an audience of one, and the legalistic professionalism of the Manifesto, addressed to the anonymous entire world of people “Whom It May Concern,” sit on opposite sides of the fissure that separates Mormonism's past and present, a fissure defined not just by attitudes toward plural marriage but by the genres available to leadership and laity. It is not a coincidence that, post-Manifesto, the same fundamentalists who have maintained polygamy have also kept dialogic revelation central to their practices and assumptions, while Benson would maintain that “The prophet does not have to say ‘Thus saith the Lord’ to give us scripture.”19It is difficult to write about these two genres without appearing to rank them—who, really, can say that they are more moved by the bureaucratic language of the Manifesto than by the urgency of the revelation? However, they are better thought of as two genres aiming at similar uptakes, just two different ways of attempting to do the same thing, which is to answer the question, what is to be done? The shift in genre and the way that it succeeded for most Saints while failing for others says much about what Mormons were prepared to hear and from whom in 1890 and in the long years since.