The Book of Mormon is, in any case, only one of many pronouncements that Smith offered his new troops, apparently improvising as he went along, according to the shifting spiritual needs of the moment. (After other followers began to have revelations from angels of their own, the Holy Ghost inspired Smith to the conclusive revelation that only his revelations ought to be church policy.) As all our authors remind us, Mormonism was just one of countless sects dating from the Second Great Awakening, that period of the early nineteenth century which saw the first expression of the kind of hyper-emotional, revivalist Methodism that has remained the signature style of American Christianity into our own time. Smith’s part of upstate New York was called, Gutjahr tells us, “the ‘Burned-Over District,’ because the region was so often swept by the flames of the Holy Spirit.” All the sects had their own creeds, visionaries, and beliefs; they ranged from the Millerites, an upstate cult whose founder taught that the world would come to an end and Jesus return on March 21, 1843, all the way to the Oneida Community, whose members believed that Jesus had already returned and given everybody license for free love.

What made Smith’s followers stick by him, even after the local Protestants became openly hostile and the Latter-day Saints had to flee from state to state and town to town? One thing—and it seems peculiar to the Mormons—was the thrill of believing in a wholly American revelation. It happened here, to people like us: angels came and told us that the land was not story-less and virgin but ancient and possessed of a secret history. (This meant assigning the native people a made-up past and ignoring their actual past; what to do about the Indians, who were both the “ancients” and the “Others,” became a source of theological and practical grief.) Curiously, the Americanness of the revelation was also one of the things that made it irresistible to the thousands of working-class Englishmen and women who converted to the new faith in the eighteen-thirties and forties; visiting Mormon apostles, led by a promising Smith lieutenant named Brigham Young, told prospective immigrants that “millions upon millions of acres of land lie before them unoccupied, with a soil as rich as Eden.”

The powers that possession of the Book of Mormon conferred mattered more than the doctrines that it contained. “Rarely did missionaries draw on the verses and stories of the Book of Mormon in sermons,” Bowman explains. “Rather, they brandished the book as tangible proof of Joseph Smith’s divine calling.” Some holy texts, the Gospels, for instance, are evangelical instruments meant to convert people who read them; others are sacred objects meant to be venerated. The Book of Mormon is a book of the second sort. As the French religious historian Jean-Christophe Attias points out, in traditional Judaism the physical presence of the Scripture is at least as important as its content: when the Torah is unrolled during the service, it’s meant to be admired, not apprehended. That the Mormons had a book of their own counted for almost as much as what the Book of Mormon said.

Mormonism had other assets. Smith held (especially in the sermons he preached toward the end of his life) that God and angels and men were all members of the same species. “God that sits enthroned is a man like one of you” and “God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man” were two of his most emphatic aphorisms on the subject. (People who were “exalted,” in Smith’s language, were men moving toward godhood, as God himself had once been a man who achieved it.) Although in many other respects, as Fluhman and Bowman point out, Mormonism was orthodox in its outlook—Jesus is the sole Messiah, and his history as told in the Gospels is taken to be true, if incomplete—the doctrine of God-as-Man divided Smith’s cult from the others, and scared the pants off even charismatic Protestantism: the Protestants were willing to accept that we are made in his image, but not that we are made of the same flesh.

This doctrine led in turn to various theological niceties, which seem to have risen and receded in the faith’s theology over the years: one is that the birth of Jesus had to have been the consequence of a “natural action”—i.e., that God the Father knew Mary in a carnal way, in order to produce the Messiah. (This doctrine is currently in disfavor, but it had a long life.) Another is that God, being an exalted man, must have a wife, or several wives, as men do; she is known as the Heavenly Mother, and is a being distinct from Mary. (Smith’s belief in exaltation evolved into the belief that other planets were inhabited by men even more exalted than we are; Smith taught that the truly exalted will get not just entry into Heaven but a planet of their own to run. This is now taken, or taught, metaphorically, the way conventional Christians often think of Hell, but it was part of the story.)

And then the Book of Mormon, unlike anything in the five books of the Torah, is told in a kind of flat first person: the book’s opening chapters all begin with the formula “I, Nephi.” This was not just an American Bible; it was a Bible with an evangelical, camp-meeting tone laid over the Old Testament vocabulary. The testimonial is the essential genre of the Great Awakening, and the Book of Mormon, for all its pastiche, is at heart a testimonial—starting with Nephi’s own account of how he got his people here. Even if you didn’t stay to find out what I, Nephi, did, the fact that I, Nephi, did it counted for a lot. Among other Christian texts, perhaps only the Gnostic Gospels of the early Christian centuries use the first person in quite this way. (Luke and Revelation begin with a personal introduction, but aren’t really personal stories.) And, though the charge of Gnosticism was often directed at them maliciously by other Christians, Mormonism does have a definite Gnostic aroma. Like the Gnostics, the Mormons thought that the conventional texts had too much atonement and too little attainment. Mormonism objects to making a big deal of the morbid agony of Jesus on the Cross at the expense of the more cheerful apparition of Man-made-into-God. This is why there are no crosses on Mormon temples; our guy triumphed far more than he suffered.

America, one might fairly say, had two foundings: the first under the Enlightenment guidance of its rich intellectual founders, and a second with the popular, evangelical Second Great Awakening, which flamed a quarter century afterward. Ever since, the two have, like the Lamanites and the Nephites, been at war for the soul of the country, with the politics not always easily predictable; it was really the Awakening side that led to abolitionism. (Smith ran for President on an advanced abolitionist platform, in 1844.) Over time, the spiritual descendants of the Awakening have sought to annex Enlightenment doctrines, chiefly through the claim that the Founders were not skeptical Enlightenment deists but passionate Evangelical fundamentalists, while the Enlightenment-minded have tried to annex the Awakening’s passionate energy to their causes, as in the civil-rights movement, where black churches became the emotional engine of what was, on its face, a legal argument about public facilities. Mormonism is a child of this fracture. In one way, it is a product of the Enlightenment love of secret histories and societies and rococo cosmologies—a “Magic Flute” for America, sung with a massed choir. (Many of its rituals and symbols seem to have a source in Freemasonry; Smith was an inducted Mason.) But it is also an instance of popular religious turbulence, not at all esoteric in its appeal but fully open to the world and evangelical in spirit.