In a volume producing the testimonies of many well-known Latter-day Saints, including LDS scholars such as Ann and Truman Madsen and Daniel C. Peterson, Richard Bushman wrote, in part, the following, where he affirms the divine origin and historicity of the Book of Mormon:
A lot has been written in opposition to the Book of Mormon and even more in its support. I have tried to keep up with this vast literature without claiming to command it all. Apart from all the technical arguments, I am impressed with the fact that Joseph Smith published this immensely complex book when he was just twenty-four. He had little education, had not attended church as a boy, could scarcely write a latter according to his wife, and yet produced 588 pages of sermons, prophecies, and history that most experienced authors would be hard-pressed to match.
I had this extraordinary fact in mind while visiting the country house of my daughter-in-law Harriet Bushman’s parents in Cornwall, England. Christopher Petherick, her father, casually mentioned the remarkable feat of Charlotte Brontë in writing Jane Eyre at age twenty-eight, causing a sensation in London literary circles. Her work seemed to come out of nowhere. Wondering if Brontë’s life paralleled Joseph Smith, I asked if the house library contained a biography of Charlotte Brontë, which it did. She grew up, I learned, in a provincial parsonage, somewhat like the isolation of Joseph Smith in upstate New Yor. But I also found that the parsonage was loaded with newspapers and books, and that from childhood Brontë wrote plays and stories with her sisters, all building up to her first novel. No build-up of any kind can be found to the Book of Mormon—no preliminary drafts, no attempts at other kinds of literature, no wide reading that we know of. Joseph Smith dictated the entire work in less than ninety days, going on page after page without interruption or review of what was written. His wife, who watched him while he dictated (and took down some of it herself), said no manuscript was in sight. It all came from the mouth of this plain, visionary farmer.
While I consider the very existence of the Book of Mormon an intellectual puzzle that scholars have yet to explain, in the final analysis of the marvels of the book are not the reason I believe. I don’t think you can build a life on a few intellectual reasons. My real reasons for believing all these years are more abstract and more powerful. The fact is that I find goodness in my Latter-day Saint life that I find nowhere else. When my mind is filled with scripture, when I speak of the Lord in prayer, when I comport myself in the way of Jesus, I am the man I want to be. I feel wisdom, concentration, compassion, and comprehension to a degree beyond anything I have known as a scholar or a teacher. I do everything better under the influences that radiate from the Latter-day Saint religion. I am a better father and husband, I give more to my children, I connect with the poor and needy, I counsel my students more truly, I am more unselfish. Moreover, I like what the religion does for my fellow Saints, both longtime members and new converts. It welds us together into a community of mutual trust and aid. Latter-day Saints, in my experience, are people of goodwill. They give to each other and to worthy works of every kind. We care for each other the way Jesus said we should. These experiences in my own congregation have persuaded me that nothing is more like to improve the world than conversion to the beliefs I have reassured all my life. (Richard Lyman Bushman, Why I Believe, ed. Keith W. Merrill [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 2002], 79-83, here, pp.81-82; on Joseph Smith and the claim he, like Brontë, was a story-teller in his youth, see Jeff Lindsay, Joseph the Amusing Teller of Tall Tales: Lucy Mack Smith's Puzzling Statement in Perspective)
In spite of the flagrant abuse of something Bushman once said about the “dominant narratives” of the early Church (see Daniel Peterson, Richard Bushman and the fundamental claims of Mormonism), Bushman is a believing Latter-day Saint who accepts the historical reality of the First Vision, the Book of Mormon, and the other “dominant narratives” of early LDS history and theology.
