The visions or revelations of Joseph Smith came about in America at a time in this country when many others were receiving their own visions or revelations, paving the way for Smith’s and the acceptance of his by others.  The United States was a land of equality, equal opportunity, and populism.  It despised a king and state religion.  It liked, loved really, democratic society, where everyone’s voice was heard, and it was, therefore, acceptable to get your own personal revelation from God as a part of your personal relationship with God.  That spirit is still very alive in America.  Americans distrust their own institutions and this is woven into the fabric of being an American.  That includes the institution of the church.

In early nineteenth century, especially on the frontier, people operated in many unconventional ways, depending on superstitions in medicine, farming, and predicting the weather.  It was not unusual to use dowsing to find water with a special, forked stick.  People could see signs everywhere, giving them guidance from above or within.  Snake oil salesman got their name in this era, literally selling snake oil, promising cures to almost anything, circumventing the conventional manner of tending to one’s health.

Joseph Smith was 14 years of age when he had his first vision or revelation from God, and the Smiths, Joseph Smith Sr. and mom, Lucy, weren’t members of a church.  Joseph Jr. didn’t come up with the idea of getting visions.  It was a thing to have.  Only special people had them.

The Smiths couldn’t find a church they liked or agreed with, were still looking, and then Joseph ‘heard from God’ that there was no true church to join.  Convenient.  Churches have set beliefs and if you are a rank and file non-clergy, you might disagree, your opinion probably doesn’t count for much, and you don’t have a means of having your own in those situations.  You might not want the church doctrines and practices imposed on you and also their financial obligations.  You want a church where perhaps everyone could share, like is seen in the first church in Jerusalem in Acts chapters 2 and 5.  That’s what churches should do, accept your way and then take care of you with little expectation.

On top of everything above, even though there was freedom, it was tough to navigate the new world, especially if you were not born into wealth, grinding it out to earn a living.  Many made it through subsistence farming, sometimes succeeding, perhaps enough to invest in a cockamamie get-rich-quick scheme, lose everything and start over again.  People still are very allured by the suggestion of some easier path to success, willing to subject themselves to whatever comes along that promises to work better, reinventing the wheel.

Joseph Smith lived in an environment, a culture, that someone could believe that God was talking to him directly.  All of the new, astounding doctrines and practices of LDS came by this manner, contradicting doctrines and practices hitherto already established in the history of Christianity:  the preexistence of human souls or spirits, God was once a man on another planet before being exalted to Godhood, celestial marriage, polygamy, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not the same being, God organized the world but did not create it from nothing, and proxy baptism for dead people.  It was also revealed to him through a story that all of these beliefs were the original truth that had been lost and buried for 1400 years.  On many occasions, Joseph Smith and then other Mormon leaders received revelations at a time that fit whatever it was they needed to hear from God to make a pronouncement to deal with that situation.

Matthew Bowman writes in The Mormon People:  The Making of an American Faith (pp. 10-12):

The Smiths had unwittingly moved into an ideal location for a family with unresolved spiritual yearnings, the center of what one historian has called “the antebellum spiritual hothouse” and another “the burned-over district.” . . . . The optimism, instability, and freedom of the New York frontier were life’s blood to the eclecticism and experimentation always to be found at the margins of mainstream Christianity.  The Shakers, for instance, so named for their physical worship services, had fled to America from a disapproving Britain under the leadership of Ann Lee, whom they believe to be Christ reincarnated.  In the United States, they found fertile ground for both converts and settlement, and in 1826 they established a colony less than thirty miles from Palmyra. . . . North of Albany, the farmer William Miller sat by the fire in his home in Low Hampton, New York, feverishly working out the precise date of the Second Coming from the book of Daniel for his thousands of followers, who were convinced that they needed no trained pastors to interpret scripture for them.

But the Smiths had always been drawn — particularly Lucy — not to such visionaries but to the more mainstream ecstasies of evangelical revivalism.  The force behind revivalism was the Methodists, who . . . urged potential converts to embrace Christ in a personal divine encounter.  At Methodist camp meetings, itinerant preachers, though frequently uneducated and even unlettered, learned how to muse the Holy Spirit among their listeners.  Between rousing and sometimes raucous gospel hymns, they offered not prepared sermon on doctrinal topics but emotional appeals, promising forgiveness, warning of hell, reaching their hands to the heavens, and pleading with the crowd to leave sin behind and walk forward to be saved in the arms of Christ. . . . “Men are so spiritually sluggish,” declared Charles Grandison Finney, the great revivalist of the age, “that they must be so excited that they will break over their countervailing influences before they will obey God.”  Finney’s talents shone in a month-long revival in 1830-31 in Rochester, a few miles from Palmyra, in which he converted hundreds. . . .

The sort of spiritual manifestations the Smith family had already experienced were not new to most revivalists.  Portentous dreams were common particularly among itinerant Methodist preachers, as were the type of healings and providential manifestations Lucy had experienced. . . .

It was in this atmosphere that Joseph Jr., then a young teenager, began thinking about religion.

The ecstasies and visions of revivalism were the seedbed or hothouse for Joseph Smith and the new religion.  What makes this acceptable?  Some might say, because what they revealed was not false.  I don’t know that they can say, that what they’re saying is in fact true.  How do you know it’s true, if it is?  Someone could say, it’s scriptural.  Well, then you don’t need a vision or a revelation from God.  It’s already in the Bible.  If cannot be proven to be false, then it is an acceptable vision or revelation.

If someone can hear revelations from God, how do those differentiate from scripture?  If they are from God, that is equal to scripture.  One cannot accept visions and revelations as from God.  That opens up Pandora’s box.  It’s not acceptable.  And yet it is today.  You really can’t question it.  You’ve got to accept whatever version of it.  How does a LDS today distinguish evangelical visions from their LDS ones?  It really just buttresses the point of Mormon visions and revelations, that God is still talking to men.  He’s still talking to Mormons.

LDS do not have a kind of closed canon of scripture.  They have their continued visions, their continued revelations, even if they don’t like the LDS teachings, which many  LDS has a problem with, and with their prophets.  What has pushed LDS along is their continued revelations.  I had a long talk last Saturday to an LDS man, coming out of the garage of his big house, a CEO of a small software company, and he disconnects from LDS doctrine, but he’s got his own testimony, his own experience, his own way of connecting with God, so he can pick and choose.  LDS is fine with that.  They encourage it.  They might call it “the burning in the bosom.”  Before Joseph Smith got his first vision, he prayed James 1:5, and that’s become the pattern of LDS since then.

I estimate that a majority of Baptists still get direct messages from God.  They call it different things, but these impressions are authoritative, nonetheless, very often for some of the major decisions of their lives. When they give testimony to the important decisions, they don’t say, it was scriptural, my church was fine with it, so I had the liberty to do it, so I did.  They say, I knew, God told me.  Sometimes God also told the spouse, as a validation.  Both knew.  Both heard.

The one who questions the experience is the one who says he’s in authority, he’s a king, taking away from the egalitarian nature of receiving visions. Some kind of exegesis of an authoritative book is not sufficient for a genuine Christian experience.  Obviously there are contradictions, because many have been excommunicated for contradicting the vision of someone in authority, Smith or Brigham Young.  The acceptance of a democratic community fine with your receiving your vision or revelation is the level playing field.  Revelations aren’t just for the elite few, but for anyone.  This is the “antebellum spiritual hothouse” that we still live in.