Because Repicturing the Restoration is primarily aimed at Latter-day Saint students, this review shades towards devotional uses rather than academic purposes. If that’s not your cup of postem, this may not be the review for you.

I remember the first time I got into an argument with someone about Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon as a twenty-year-old. The zealous Protestant preacher had brought an armful of Chick tracts and other evangelical materials for “talking to your Mormon friends.” I told him that Joseph Smith certainly didn’t put his face in a hat to translate the Book of Mormon and that he had never looked in a “peep stone.” Three years later, sitting in a history class at BYU, I learned that I had been dead wrong.

Anthony Sweat’s Repicturing the Restoration is written with Latter-day Saint students, like twenty-year-old me, in mind. As Sweat explains, “visual art has long been a major force in Christianity, [but] it took about one hundred years” for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “to regularly use artistic imagery in its institutional publications to perpetuate its founding events and doctrines.”[i] Recent publications like the Joseph Smith Papers Project, the mainstreaming of academic scholarship on Mormonism, and the LDS Church’s Gospel Topics essays required new images to accompany newly presented information. 

Sweat’s focus on art is ultimately pedagogical. He uses his training as an artist to portray early events in the life of Joseph and Emma Smith, the early Church of Christ, and other topics important to Mormon historians. In doing so, he relies on his experiences as an educator in BYU’s Religious Education Department to highlight how sensitive historical subjects might be taught. Notably, he reminds readers that art is not “real life” or necessarily reflective of history. “History and art are intertwined entities (history needs to be visually represented, and artists need meaningful history to create impactful images).”[ii]

Sweat’s twenty-five chapters follow the same pattern, which will be especially helpful to those familiar with pedagogical design. First, the author introduces readers to the historical background of each painting’s subject matter with a narrative backed by primary sources. Next, he presents “An Image,” detailing how and why he chose to portray historical subjects as he did. Then, he provides a short “Application,” where readers can learn one or several ways to teach “difficult” history to Latter-day Saint students. These are all devotional—providing insight that may be persuasive to those who are not familiar with topics like Joseph Smith’s digging for seer stones, Joseph and Emma Smith’s marital strife over plural marriage, and other subjects that educators may find challenging to approach on their own.

With that said, there’s plenty of historical work in Repicturing the Restoration. He employs Joseph Smith Papers references as freely as he does Latter-day Saint scriptural references. He cites the documents he uses and explains how and why he uses artistic license. In other words, he shows how both historians and artists work to explain the past. While some may disagree with his conclusions, takeaways, or reliance upon particular sources, most readers will benefit from his straightforward explanations. Frankly, it’s a model that many Latter-day Saint educators would do well to remember: students want information given to them straight. Acting as though all history that wouldn’t be included in proselytizing materials is inherently dangerous leads to the type of binary thinking that bubbles up in faith crises among those unprepared to see anything but perfection in history of any kind, whether Latter-day Saint, American, Thai, Danish, or Nigerian.

Some topics Sweat addresses are not as neat and tidy as others are to teach. It’s one thing to explain the use of seer stones; it’s quite another to untangle the difficulties in Joseph and Emma Smith’s marriage or ideas like the “angel with the drawn sword.” Having taught Latter-day Saint history to its faith practitioners and to non-believers, I know that both parties tend to have much more probing questions about some topics than others. Gender, sexuality, and other broad topics that are front and center of modern concerns often cause more friction for college students than learning about treasure digging or other miracles whose acceptability is amplified by the passage of time.

Of course, Sweat isn’t trying to answer every question that could be posed; he only aims to give one possible way of teaching history to “expand understanding.” It’s important that a book co-published with Deseret Book, the LDS Church-owned publishing company, provides ways of teaching and accepting sensitive history—not relying alone on the contextualization given in Gospel Topics essays.

For educators, Sweat’s book represents a step forward in using historical scholarship and pedagogical training to improve teaching. I think about my twenty-year-old self and wonder how it might have affected my encounter with the Chick tract-wielding minister. I imagine it might have made me less defensive about Latter-day Saint history and more open to discussing how its history was meaningful to me—in all its texture, beauty, and messiness. I view Sweat’s book as a landmark in teaching Latter-day Saint history to Latter-day Saints and highly recommend it.

[i] Sweat, Repicturing the Restoration, x.

[ii] Sweat, Repicturing the Restoration, xiii.