Chapter III.
Spiritual fever: The Great American Wake-Up Call

(Second Great Awakening)

Back then, America was in the middle of its second full-on religious earthquake:
emotional, grassroots, often wild Christianity—no priests, no liturgy, just shouting, weeping, and field confessions.
People dropped into trances, saw visions, shook all over.
Everyone was chasing God—but on their own terms.
It was an era when any farmer could become a prophet, if he just had enough charm and a Bible—maybe even just a few stories he’d heard at the tavern.

Picture this:
A shack in upstate New York.
A teenage boy sits inside—Joseph Smith Jr., the future prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

He’s fourteen and has more questions than any rabbi in history.
His world is a mash-up of the Bible, chopped wood, and neighbors who hear voices in the cornfield.

He doesn’t know Lehi or Nephi or the Jews of Utah—yet.
But he’s about to meet Moroni, the angel who’ll tell him there are golden plates buried in the woods, plates telling the story of ancient Hebrews who rolled into America 2400 years earlier and set up their own version of Israel.

The time and place weren’t random.
Joseph Smith Jr. didn’t just drop from the sky—he was a product of this region, a place where heaven crashed into people’s heads every night in the form of visions, revelations, and a never-ending holy wrestling match for the soul.

You can’t understand Joseph’s childhood without the local brew:
folk magic, divining rods, seeing stones, protective spells—everyday stuff.
The Bible wasn’t just a sacred text, it was the user’s manual for reality.
Joseph read it like a map, and treated the world like a stomped vineyard, where anybody could get chosen.

Joseph Smith Jr.:
son of spiritual hunger, grandson of mystical fever,
a child of religious anarchy.
Product of the Burned-Over District.
Part of the Great Awakening.

1. Smith and the Revelations

Smith had revelations in the woods, in barns, on the road—there are multiple “first visions” because Smith himself kept revising his story.

When the angel Moroni shows up in 1827 with the golden plates—heavy, weird symbols, the works—Joseph gets down to “translating.”
He does it in a boat on the Susquehanna River (Pennsylvania), using “seer stones.”

That was straight-up common magic back then: a seer would have a “seeing stone” (which looked just like any river rock).
He’d drop it in a wide-brimmed hat, shove his face in (to block out the light), and
 see stuff.

The golden plates? Hidden under a blanket.
No one else ever saw them.
But thanks to the magic stones, Joseph didn’t have to touch them—he’d see the whole story in English right there in the stone.
He’d sit, read, dictate, while his secretary wrote down everything the angel Moroni was “sending via the heavenly chat app.”
The translation was “live”—the revelations flowed in like divine text messages.

Fifteen books later, voilĂ .

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints always called it „Urim and Thummim”—the biblical seer stones, because it sounded fancier.

2. It’s All Bible Fanfic

The Book of Mormon—official line:
“Another testament of Jesus Christ.”
Basically: “Bible Vol. 2, American Edition.”

Smith mixes biblical tropes—exodus, epic journeys, wars, conversions, revelations—with the American landscape, building a parareligion—a Bible for a new continent.

Pretty much every scene riffs on the Bible:
– parting seas, manna, battles, repentance,
– even the language is pure King James: “and it came to pass,” “verily,” “behold,” “I say unto you.”

His whole theology is built on stuff everyone already knew—just with a Native American in Eden, Jesus on the frontier, and a sprinkle of the American Dream:
anyone can be a prophet, if you just find the right translation stone.

Let’s take a peek at the Book of Mormon—America’s revealed Bible.

What’s In the Book of Mormon?

15 books (each named after a prophet), hundreds of pages of battles, prophecies, visions, and moral tales, theology close to Protestantism
The message: America is the promised land—but only for those who listen to God.

From Jerusalem to Jutland—How the Jews Became Indians

And it was in the days of Nebuchadnezzar


who had a name like a drunken linguist’s curse, and was king of Babylon with an ego the size of Mesopotamia—big on looting, exile, and a weird obsession with other people’s temples.

In 597 BC he strolls into Jerusalem like he owns the place, trashes everything, and drags the population off to Babylon in chains. Classic “you can’t stand here” move.

But not everyone gets caught, because Lehi—a wise old Jew— gets a warning from God before Jerusalem falls.

Lehi and his family were a circumcised proto-colonization squad sent by God across the ocean in 600 BC—a cool 2000 years before Columbus.

Lehi grabs the fam, some “friends” and “holy scrolls,” heads to the port,
builds a boat (think Noah, but more DIY), and sets off on a transoceanic Uber.
They cross the ocean, guided by a “divine compass” (like a GPS made of parchment), and land in “the promised land,” aka America.

Once on the new continent, Lehi’s two sons—Nephi and Laman—bicker like Cain and Abel on steroids.
Nephi—God’s favorite, founds the civilization of the good guys.
Laman—the rebel, goes rogue.
And that’s how you get two nations:

Nephites—honest, hardworking, “white and delightsome” (yes, it really says that).
Lamanites—darker-skinned, cursed for their sins, enemies of the Nephites.

Tribes fight, multiply, mix, for the next thousand years.

And then, according to the Mormons, the wild Lamanites become the ancestors of Native Americans—
Indians as the “lost tribe of Israel.”

The whole story of the Native Americans gets retconned into biblical roots:

Every new sect, every messiah, every founding myth needs a Jew:
No Jew, no success.
No Jew, no real apocalypse.
If Jews made it to Europe, Africa, Egypt, Babylon—why not Utah?

Jesus Drops By—After the Resurrection

After his resurrection, Jesus visits America. No joke.
He comes down from heaven like a rock star, preaches to the crowds, heals people, sets up new sacraments, starts “the Church in America.”

That’s the high point of the whole Book of Mormon.
But it doesn’t last.
Afterward—everything falls apart again.

Endgame: What Happens When Nobody Listens to Prophets

Around 400 AD, there’s a final battle at Cumorah.
The Lamanites wipe out the last Nephites.
The only surviving prophet, Moroni, buries the golden plates with the whole story in the ground—waiting for someone to dig them up.

“The Book of Mormon” isn’t just “the Bible in a teepee.”

It’s a national epic for the New World—an attempt to create a sacred myth for America,
a founding legend mixing spirituality, national identity, and revelation, fully aware that for skeptics, it sounds like LSD + the Bible + Pocahontas.

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