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This book is about how Joseph Smith established religious authority and a long-lasting, complex priesthood structure. The thesis of this book builds on three scholars’ major ideas about religious authority and Mormonism in the antebellum United States. In an effort to move the conversation toward politics and its relationship to religion, Porterfield focused on the constraint of populism. Though it is true that Mormonism grew, as Hatch shows, from the populist appeal of a lay priesthood and communal living in early Mormonism, Flake demonstrates that the Mormon priesthood was hierarchical. Left just outside the focus of the work of Hatch, Porterfield, and Flake is the role of Joseph Smith defining Mormon authority—a role that has not been fully examined. Smith’s authority grew in opposition to the civic and political authority that evangelicals were garnering and as a countertrend to the populist religious movements of the Second Great Awakening. In fact, Smith’s prophetic voice and scripture formed a hierarchical priesthood structure that eventually empowered every male member of his church to become a prophet, priest, and king, although they answered to each leader above them within the same structure. Reinforced by that structure, Smith’s prophetic voice became the arbiter of authority. It had the ultimate power to create and guide, and it was used to form a strong lay priesthood order in a stable hierarchical democracy devoid of the kind of democratic political authority that evangelicals fostered.

The year-long fact-finding mission of Mormon apostle David O. McKay and his traveling companion Hugh J. Cannon to the colonies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of the most significant moments of the twentieth century for Mormonism. Although the contemporary church has grown to become a global presence, the early decades of the last century found missionaries struggling to gain converts abroad. For the church’s leadership, it was a pioneering endeavor to visit, observe, and fellowship with the church’s expanding global constituency in the Pacific. Other general authorities had visited individual church missions at various times—especially across Europe. None, however, had ever circumnavigated the globe, using the Pacific as a focal point of travel. In today’s information age, where such visits occur almost weekly for many senior church leaders, the significance of such an expedition is easy to overlook. When McKay was called in October 1920, no one knew the tour would eventually form many of the most important initiatives he had undertaken when he became church president three decades later. McKay’s rich and vivid account of his and Cannon’s 61,646-mile around-the-world journey illustrates the roots of Mormonism’s globalization. His diary account is without doubt one of the more significant texts in the historical cannon of global Mormon studies.