What Are We to Make of the Gold Plates?

Authors

Richard Lyman Bushman

Keywords

gold plates, Book of Mormon, Latter-day Saints

Abstract

During the winter of 2020–2021, I worked on the manuscript that was eventually published as Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2023). The book was an attempt to describe the many ways the plates had been imagined from the time they were first described as a “Golden Bible” in the June 1829 Wayne Sentinel1 down to the Sunday School and missionary lessons today. I marveled at the enduring interest in the plates over time, not only among Latter-day Saints but also among other American writers. In my lifetime, the plates had appeared in the Book of Mormon musical and as the situational framework for Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Angels in America, first performed in 1993. I was convinced the plates’ endurance was partly due to the belief of the Saints. The fact that millions of people believed in their reality gave them heft. Without that belief, the plates would have become an easily forgotten historical oddity. It seemed to me that in the retelling of the plates’ history in the American imagination, the state of belief among Latter-day Saints today was a relevant piece of information. To find out

Recommended Citation

Bushman, Richard Lyman (2025) "What Are We to Make of the Gold Plates?," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 64: Iss. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol64/iss1/9