Billions shall know “Brother Joseph” again

Over 200 years ago, late in the evening of this day, Sept. 21, 1823, a young 17-year-old Joseph Smith looked up in the midst of sincere prayer. When recalling the night some years later, Joseph wrote that an angel appeared to him as “a messenger sent from the presence of God.” The angel then called him by name.
Among the many things the young Joseph heard that night, the heavenly messenger relayed a statement regarding Joseph’s name that must have been for him altogether inchoate and incomprehensible. The angel said to Joseph that “God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”
Little did the prophet-boy know that in the years, and now centuries to follow, his name would be the means (for some good, and for some evil) of bringing about a revolutionary religious birth in America, and now in the whole world. As the late, renowned professor at Yale Harold Bloom once wrote, this young Joseph would be the means of producing a religion that became a people, one that is consistently “the hardest working, most cohesive block in our (American) society … Salt Lake City may yet become the religious capital of the United States.”
Of course, not everyone who’s heard the name Joseph Smith will speak as highly of him as did Bloom. Many critics have done well to fulfill their half of this angelic prophecy by holding Joseph’s name for “evil.”
But the other half of this prophetic statement holds equally true. For millions on this earth and more, the name of Joseph Smith is held in the highest “good” possible.
Writing further on the good of Joseph’s name, Bloom stated that “Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history,” and that “Smith matters permanently, to America and the world.”
Bloom, who was raised an Orthodox Jew and not religious as an adult, speculated that had Joseph Smith lived even 30 years longer (he died at age 38) that “the West might now be fully as different an American culture as the South is, because much if not most of the West could well have become Smith’s Kingdom of God in America.”
Continuing, Bloom stating that “one’s dominant emotion towards (Smith) must be wonder. There is no other figure remotely like him in our entire national history, and it is unlikely that anyone like him ever can come again.”
The good spoken of Joseph’s name continues: “So rich and varied a personality, so vital a spark of divinity, is almost beyond the limits of the human, as normally we construe those limits. To one who does not believe in him, but who has studied him intensely, Smith becomes almost a mythology in himself…. I do not qualify to pass on the rest of the Mormon creed, but I also do not find it possible to doubt that Joseph Smith was an authentic prophet.”
While Bloom never did believe the teachings of Joseph Smith, his intellectual honesty would not allow him to call Joseph’s name anything but good.
Steven Harper, professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University, spoke about how Joseph’s name has been had for good in the world today. “My mind goes to the 1834 meeting they held in Kirtland,” he said, “in a little one room school. According to Wilford Woodruff, Joseph listens to everyone and then says something like ‘I’ve been edified by what has been said here tonight, but none of you have any idea what we’re up to here. This kingdom will fill the hemisphere, and then it will fill the world.’”
“Of course now we can see that fulfilled, at least in part,” Harper continued. “The internet goes to every corner of the globe and everywhere you go Joseph’s name is known for good and evil.”
“So what an unlikely thing to say. It’s an audacious thing for (Joseph) to say, except he didn’t say it. It was an angel standing midair that said it to him. And it couldn’t be less likely to be fulfilled, if all you knew was what Joseph knew at the time. Joseph called himself an obscure boy, no one of consequence.”
Harper continued: “Joseph Smith has the homeliest of all names. There are literally dozens of Joseph Smiths in the census records for New York around the time Joseph lives there.” The young boy really was “no one of consequence,” he said. “So why would his name be had for good or evil? But here we are. The gospel has gone global, there are missionaries in Mongolia, native Mongolian missionaries now proclaim the gospel, and in Africa, and in North America and elsewhere, everywhere declaring the restoration and quoting from Joseph’s manuscript history, testifying of Joseph’s first vision, it’s remarkable.”
The Russian author Leo Tolstoy once spoke in the highest terms possible regarding the fruits of Joseph’s name now found in the people who follow his teachings. This master novelist said that the “Mormon people teach the American religion; their principles teach the people not only of Heaven and its attendant glories, but how to live so that their social and economic relations with each other are placed on a sound basis.”
Tolstoy, like Bloom, observed the industry and stability and prosperity of the people Joseph forged in the crucibles of the American Midwest — a people, as Harper explained, the now-many millions strong across the globe who revere Joseph’s name, and call him, like Moses or Abraham of old: prophet, seer, and revelator.
Tolstoy, something of a literary prophet himself, continued: “If the people follow the teachings of this Church, nothing can stop their progress — it will be limitless. There have been great movements started in the past but they have died or been modified before they reached maturity. If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third or fourth generation, it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known.”
That power includes $1.36 billion given in humanitarian relief and 6.2 million hours of volunteer work in 2023 alone, a people with knowledge of biblical scripture, an education system of over 1 million students, with a remarkable 150,000 engaged in Church-sponsored higher education, etc. All this, and much more to come, from the good name of that 17-year-old boy, Joseph Smith.
Many who hold Joseph’s name “for evil” accuse Latter-day Saints of speaking so much good of Joseph’s name that we veer into the realm of worship. Many will cite our hymn, “Praise to the Man,” as an example of our “overzealous” reverence for his name. But most don’t know that this hymn is one of the earliest fulfillments of the above-mentioned prophecy.
In late 1838, the lyricist of the hymn, W. W. Phelps, contributed to the betrayal of Joseph Smith that almost led to Joseph’s illegal execution, and ultimately culminated in five bitter and unjust winter months of incarceration at Liberty Jail.
Joseph was initially indignant about Phelps’ actions, before later feeling new softness towards him. Elder Neal A Maxwell of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles explained what happened next, when in 1840 “W. W. Phelps pled for readmission into the Church, Joseph Smith, who pledged from jail to act later ‘in the spirit of generosity,’ wrote a powerful and redemptive letter, the closing lines of which were, ‘Come on, dear brother, since the war is past, For friends at first, are friends again at last.’ No wonder a grateful Brother Phelps, soon after Joseph’s June 1844 martyrdom, wrote the text ‘Praise to the man who communed with Jehovah.’”
As W. W. Phelps turned his gratitude for the greatness of the Prophet Joseph Smith into poetry, he inadvertently expressed what millions to follow — those who hold Joseph’s name for good, believers and non-believers alike — would feel: “Honored and blessed be his ever great name!”
The final line of the hymn’s fourth verse rings with the boldness of Joseph’s midnight messenger: “millions shall know ‘Brother Joseph’ again.” Not only do millions now know him, but millions upon millions speak both good and evil of his name, just as foretold. But as the world grows more interconnected, and as information is more easily accessible and transmittable, the time will soon come when it will be more accurate to sing, even to the fulfillment of a once-obscure prophecy: “billions shall know ‘Brother Joseph’ again.”
Scott Raines is a Latter-day Saint writer interested in the arts, technology and religion. He lives in Utah.