Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Smith, Jr.

Strip away the Book of Mormon and the steady drip of revelations, Joseph Smith warns, and Mormonism collapses into air. It is a line that refuses the usual religious comfort blanket: tradition, inherited creed, and ancient authority are not the load-bearing walls here. The point is blunt institutional triage. If your movement can be reduced to generic Christianity once its distinctive texts are removed, then it has no defensible reason to exist as a separate church. Smith is telling followers (and skeptics) that the differentiator is not merely moral teaching but an ongoing channel of divine communication, anchored in a new scripture and refreshed by new directives.

The subtext is equally strategic. In the 1830s and early 1840s, Mormonism was being battered by accusations of fraud, heresy, and social disorder, then physically driven from place to place. Smith answers that pressure by tightening the definition of legitimacy: the church is not a reform club or a frontier sect; it stands or falls on prophecy. That’s high-risk branding. It dares opponents to attack the keystone, not the ornament, while daring believers to accept a faith that cannot hide behind vague spirituality. If revelation is real, the movement is uniquely authorized; if it isn’t, there’s no middle ground where Mormonism can retreat and still call itself Mormonism.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it rejects half-belief. It turns a potential vulnerability (new scripture, new prophecy) into a test of seriousness: you don’t get to keep the community’s benefits while treating its claims as optional.