The Psychology of Religious Genius: Joseph Smith and the Origins of New Religious Movements

Abstract

The nature of genius -especially religious genius -is an elusive and controversial topic.Great and recognized creativity in fields such as art, science, or politics has been the subject of extensive investigation without leading to clear and generally agreed upon criteria for assessing and accounting for such achievement.Religious genius, especially the prophetic leadership of founders of new religious movements, has proven even more difficult to evaluate with any degree of openness and objectivity.Adherents to new faiths often accept at face value prophetic claims to having had direct communication with the divine, while naive critics and apostates in equally one-dimensional fashion tend to see nothing but fraud and delusion in such claims.Neither approach begins to do justice to complexities that characterize the classic foundational phenomena that noted American psychologist William James explored so convincingly in his still unsurpassed analysis of the psychology of religious genius, The Varieties of Religious Experience } This essay focuses on one particularly well-documented case of religious genius -that of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, founder of a rapidlygrowing religious movement that now numbers more than 8 million 1.The edition cited here is William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in