Photos of Brigham Young, like the one on the cover of John Turner's magnificent new biography, do not show him in the best light. His hair is long and unkempt, like a pageboy without the bangs, and his lips are pursed between a smirk and a smile. His eyes display a slight squint, as if he is challenging the viewer to guess his state of mind. Turner's book shows just how hard that would have been to do.

Joseph Smith's successor in the Mormon church, Young was as tough-looking and rough-spoken as Smith was handsome and charismatic. Young was a schemer, while Smith was a dreamer, which helps explain why Smith is immensely easier to love (or at least appreciate). Nonetheless, without Young, Mormons would not have had much of a history to tell, or a church to spread. Smith imagined countless kingdoms in the heavens above, but Young built one in the Great Salt Lake basin that is still going strong. He was, in Turner's words, "blunt spoken, pugnacious, and sometimes profane." He delighted in the comparison his followers made between himself and Moses—both were lawgivers as well as determined men of action who fought against impossible odds for religious freedom—except that Young made sure that he did not die before he entered (and ruled) his promised land.

Turner's first book was a biography of Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (which I reviewed for this magazine in May/June 2008). His new book should establish him as one of the best religious historians of his generation. Turner had unfettered access to Young's papers, and his keen eye for social context makes this book an excellent introduction to the story of Mormonism as well as an essential addition to the history of the American West. It should also do for Brigham Young what Richard Lyman Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling did for the Mormon prophet: make the case not only that Young was one of the most fascinating people of the 19th century but also that his importance in American history can no longer be overlooked. Indeed, some of that history will have to be revised to fit this "pioneer prophet" into its narrative.

Consider these claims from the book, a bit sensationalistic, perhaps, but compelling nonetheless: After the Mormons were expelled from Illinois, Young led them out West, where they "staked their claim to approximately one-sixth of the western United States, making Brigham Young the greatest colonizer in American history." And that land was to be populated: "By the time the transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869) greatly eased the financial and logistical burden of emigration, Brigham Young had presided over the organized emigration and settlement of more people than anyone else in American history." Looking abroad, "Mormons were the first American religious church or denomination to systematically evangelize Great Britain." And of course, there was polygamy: Over a period of nearly fifty years Young married at least 55 women, according to Turner's calculations, making him "probably the most oft-married man in America."

I should answer the question that everyone will be asking. Yes, this is a sympathetic treatment of its subject, even when it looks in depth at Young's darker side. Mormonism is a controversial topic for any historian, but Turner's prose is so smooth and his interpretations so balanced that I suspect Mormonism's defenders and detractors alike will flock to this book. Unlike Bushman, Turner is not a member of the Mormon church, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable. Critics of Mormonism will wish that Turner had been harder on Young, but how could any biographer not be enthralled by a man whose personality was as big as the Utah territory he spent thirty years defending from the U.S. government, non-Mormon emigrants, and its own native population? Those looking for Young's foibles and failures will find plenty of evidence here, from his theocratic posturing to his intemperate treatment of subordinates, but no close reader of these pages will be unmoved by the enormous responsibilities Young faced and the ingenuity and industry of his undertakings.

Young gave voice to many of the cultural and theological tensions that Mormonism holds together to this day. His pioneering spirit was evidence of his belief in good works over grace, yet his sermons emphasized just how much the faithful should depend upon and support one another. He was a man of enterprise who loved theological speculation; a defender of the right to divorce, especially for women, who sealed marriages in the Mormon Temple for all of eternity; and a staunch believer in lay leadership who ruled over the Mormon church like an autocrat. Perhaps most paradoxically, he was forced to build and fortify an earthly kingdom in the middle of the desert in order to have a place where Mormons could begin imagining what it would mean to collapse the differences between God and us, eternity and time, and the supernatural and the natural.

None of this could have been predicted based on his early life. Young was born in Vermont in 1801. His family moved to rural New York looking for prosperity but found destitution and misery instead. His mother died when he was a teenager and after that he was on his own, which forced him to develop the independent streak he demonstrated throughout his life. He was nearly thirty and, in Turner's words, "with no prospect of obtaining capital" when the Young family became acquainted with the Smith family. "When I saw Joseph Smith," Young later recalled, "he took heaven and brought it down to earth; and he took earth, and brought it up." Like Smith, Young was not comfortable with the plethora of competing Christian traditions clamoring for his attention. The audacity of Smith's Book of Mormon lit his imagination on fire. "I found it impossible to take hold of either end of it; I found it was from eternity, passed through time, and into eternity again." For the rest of his life he never faltered in his confidence in the story Smith claimed to have translated from golden plates.

Smith sent him to England "without purse or scrip" to "preacht as opertunity presented" (Young was always embarrassed about his poor spelling and bad grammar). In London he took in the tourist sights and began showing his genius for organization. The mission was a great success, with hundreds sailing for America and thousands more to follow over the years. "Down the road," Turner writes, "Young would be well positioned to lead those British emigrants, as many possessed memories of his spiritual leadership in England."

Turner points out that Young's leadership style before Smith's death was collaborative and deferential, traits that would change dramatically when Young became Smith's successor. Young was outside Boston when he heard about Smith's assassination. He had already assumed a prominent role in the church's ritual of proxy baptism for the dead, and he married more women in Nauvoo than anyone else, including Smith. What really helped him rise to the top of the Mormon hierarchy after his return to Nauvoo was his ability to divert the loyalty that many Mormons had to the Smith family into a complex variety of new family bonds and social contracts that coincided with his own political interests.

Smith left behind a number of secret rituals, increasingly speculative theological propositions, and a worldly ambition that knew no bounds. Young, who was at his best in leading the Mormons out of Nauvoo and into Utah, was determined to make Mormonism an earthly success. He was comfortable with power and exercised it without hesitation or compunction. "Always cognizant of the events that led to Joseph Smith's death," Turner observes, "Young took no chances with anything resembling disloyalty." When his authority was threatened, he often resorted to sharpening his millennial rhetoric by denouncing the United States and predicting its imminent demise.

Like Smith, Young was constantly looking for rituals that would tie the Mormon community together. "Men will have to be sealed to men," he proclaimed in 1859, "until the chain is united from Father Adam down to the last Saint." He was also always coming up with quixotic schemes to make the Mormon church more financially solvent. He even tried to create a unique phonetic alphabet for the Latter-day Saints.

Evidence that he tried to out-speculate Smith lies in his theological teachings on Adam, which were much maligned in his lifetime, even within Mormon circles, and are neglected today. Young begins with the idea that if Christ is a second Adam, as Paul claimed (1 Cor. 15:45, 47), then Adam must be a kind of first Christ (Rom. 5:14), at least in his pre-fallen state. For Young, this means that Adam had a hand in organizing this world before he became a member of it, and thus Adam can be called "our Father, our God, and the only God we have to do with." Needless to say, Young was not a systematic theologian, and he could get carried away by the power of his own rhetoric. The same speaking skills that enabled him to connect with every stratum of society led him to overestimate his ability to splice church doctrine.

If Young had a preferred rhetorical trope, it would be hyperbole, and this is the one topic that I think Turner could have tried harder to plumb. Young's public speech was often not intended to be taken literally. Take, for example, his advocacy of blood atonement for capital crimes, which Young presented as "a form of spiritual charity." Turner writes that, "In a chilling perversion of the golden rule, Young suggests that killing people before they had the opportunity to forsake their salvation 'is loving our neighbor as ourselves.' Young's comments were not spontaneous hyperbole." While it is true that Young promoted this doctrine off and on for several years, he was an inveterate, as well as spontaneous, exaggerator.

His expansive rhetoric was reflective of the wide open spaces of the West, and his ecclesial leadership depended on big gestures and dramatic performances. Turner admits as much, pointing out, "His public discourses were often crude, rambling, and full of bluster, but in private [he was] a different man." Young's positions on the issues of his day were pragmatic and thus constantly changing, so selective quotations can make him look as bad or as good as any historian wants. Turner quotes him generously to show just how hard he is to pin down. We will probably have to await much more archival work and a comprehensive analysis of Young's personal correspondence to round out an accurate portrait of his personal character.

On the controversial aspects of Young's career, Turner is even-handed. About the most notorious incident during Young's life, Turner writes, "A heinous crime executed after careful deliberation and subterfuge rather than in the heat of any battle, the Mountain Meadows Massacre testifies to the extreme levels of anxiety, hatred and avarice present in 1857 Utah." He finds no evidence that Young ordered the massacre but does say that he "bears significant responsibility" for announcing a policy to not discourage Indian attacks on emigrant wagon trains, a policy that might have led the murderers to presume his support.

Turner is also insightful about Young's attitude toward race. Young could sound more tolerant and progressive in his speeches than he was in his practices. The reason for the inconsistency had to do with the Mormon view of the afterlife. "Perhaps most fundamentally," Turner writes, "a church that emphasized forging links between the generations and eternal sealing between its members would not find it easy to incorporate black Americans within this ecclesial family." Other Protestants had the option of imagining a segregated heaven or reducing eternal life to a matter of disembodied souls experiencing peace and harmony. For Mormons, this life continues into the next; indeed, any intimacy shared in this life will be magnified in the afterlife. Young's vision of every person as an equal link in a chain of family connections stretching back to Adam did little to unchain blacks from the humiliation of racial prejudice.

Young ruled with a strong hand, but Turner shows how his legacy of centralized power permitted the church, in the decades following his death in 1877, to renounce polygamy in 1890 and abandon theocracy in order for Utah to become a state in 1896. He welcomed hard times, firmly believing that only fierce struggles with trials and tribulations could turn individual Mormons into a people with their own enduring character, but he also died a wealthy man who wanted his church to amass treasure as a defense against its enemies. Whether the Mormon people can be both peculiar and prosperous is a question he left for later generations to answer.

Stephen H. Webb teaches theology at Wabash College. His most recent book is Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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