It was worse than censorship when Brigham Young University cancelled a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae in 2009. It was a missed opportunity.

Students are often incredulous when I tell them a government army once waged a war of extermination against members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the institution that owns and operates BYU. And they never believe it when they hear that until 1973, it was legal to kill a Mormon in the state of Missouri. “But we have freedom of religion in the U.S.!” they protest, reciting the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Despite these fine words, however, the government’s war on the LDS church in 1838 brings to mind Euripides’ Bacchae more readily than the Bill of Rights.

In the Bacchae, a charismatic stranger arrives in Thebes and is eagerly proselytizing. He says he is the Man-God Dionysus (Bacchus) incarnate, or else (he’s not as clear as he could be about the specifics) His prophet and spokesman. And his message is catching on: locals, many of them women, are converting to the new religion. Taking their name from Him, the Bacchae worship their god in a weird new way — by dancing in ecstatic groups, often at night, and crying out in furious joy — evohe! And inevitably, rumors say the sect practices sexual promiscuity.

The civil authority, King Pentheus, comes late to this scene and is aghast. Assuming the stranger is an impostor, he resolves to stamp the cult out. He declares war, ordering his soldiers to hunt the Bacchae down and arrest their prophet, but miracles — or reports of miracles —keep scaring the soldiers off. Undaunted, and at the stranger’s suggestion, Pentheus rides out to spy on the Bacchae from a perch on a high branch of a pine tree. When they spot him, however, the Bacchae transform into a mob of enraged fanatics. They attack Pentheus, lynch him, and mutilate his body.

These are the events of the ancient play, but amazingly, they also evoke the death of Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844), the founding prophet of the LDS Church. As Alex Beam’s riveting book American Crucifixion reminded us last year, in 1844 Smith was jailed, shot and his body nearly mutilated at the hands of a frenzied mob in Carthage, Illinois.

Suitably enough for this strange tragedy, however, in which identities, roles, and categories keep shifting, the equations in the comparison I would like to suggest are anything but stable. Following them out forces us to consider where the moral high ground lies — both within the play and, far more uncomfortably, in ourselves.

Mormonism is the American religion par excellence. It was founded here, its sacred history is here, its Promised Land is located here, and its ecclesiastical history is inseparable from American history. Despite ongoing prejudice, in two centuries it has grown into one of the world’s great religions, claiming more adherents than Judaism, winning a reputation for sobriety, and bringing meaning to the lives of millions. In the religion’s early days, however, practices and policies were far different from what they are today — and the hostilities they engendered were fierce.

The Mormonism on display in 1831 was a charismatic religion. At nightly prayer meetings, according to one witness,

Scenes of the most wild, frantic, and horrible fanaticism ensued. … Many would fall upon the floor, where they would lie for a long time apparently lifeless. … They would exhibit all the apish actions imaginable, making the most ridiculous grimaces, creeping upon their hands and feet, rolling upon the frozen ground, go through with all the Indian modes of warfare, such as knocking down, scalping, ripping open and tearing out the bowels. At other times they would run through the fields, get upon stumps, preach to imaginary congregations, enter the water and perform all the ceremony of baptizing, etc. Many would have fits of speaking all the different Indian dialects, which none could understand.

Hysterical fits, hallucinations, ecstatic shouting, fainting— from this perspective, these Saints were the ancient Bacchae sprung to life, dancing a Mormon thiasos. Their reported behaviors match what Pentheus reports early in the play (Bacchae 217–25):

…the women have left our homes in contrived Bacchic rites, and rush about in the shadowy mountains, honoring with dances this new deity Dionysus, whoever he is. I hear that mixing-bowls stand full in the midst of their assemblies, and that they each creep off different ways into secrecy to serve the beds of men, on the pretext that they are Maenads worshipping; but they consider Aphrodite before Bacchus.

Alcohol is missing, but the rest is there: late night meetings, frantic behaviors, and unintelligible cries of joy. And although the Church banned the practice in 1890, early church leaders were ardent polygamists. Though he did not cohabitate with or support them, Joseph Smith Jr., the Church’s founder, himself allegedly took — that is, slept with — between 25 and 48 plural wives, many of them simultaneously married to other men.

Who was this man, the American Dionysus? You don’t have to be Mormon to agree that Joseph Smith Jr. was one of the most fascinating individuals in American history. His story beggars belief.

Smith founded the LDS Church at Hill Cumorah, 90 minutes north of where I live in central New York state. There it was that in 1823, an angel appeared and gave him the golden plates of holy writ (each summer, the Church still sponsors a spectacular pageant on the spot). His early life is a series of treasure-hunting scams, court appearances for dubious business ventures, divine revelations, seductions of young women, and quick exits out of town, always one step ahead of the pitchforks. He was, in short, an amiable charlatan. Despite or because of this, by 1830 Smith had published the newest testament to the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and begun baptizing converts. By 1840, Smith and his followers had been chased from one state to the next.

By 1850 Smith was dead and his church, headed by Brigham Young, had relocated to Salt Lake Valley in Utah, Mexico. The Mormons had left America entirely.

Like Dionysus, Smith had some charisma that kept people — especially young women — coming back for more. Maybe it was his face, which was:

of a light complexion, light hair, blue eyes, very little beard…. His countenance was ever mild, affable … and there was something connected with the serene and steady penetrating glance of his eye, as if he would penetrate the deepest abyss of the human heart, gaze into eternity, penetrate the heavens, and comprehend all worlds.

Again, the description echoes what Pentheus says of the Stranger at the start of Bacchae (233–8):

some stranger, a swindler, a conjuror… fragrant in hair with golden curls, having in his eyes the wine-dark graces of Aphrodite. He is with the young girls day and night, alluring them with joyful mysteries.

It is not hard to imagine the gentile fathers and brothers of Ohio and Missouri wringing their hands when Smith and his converts arrived in town to proselytize them, their wives, and their daughters. Indeed, that is one reason why the governor of Missouri banned Mormonism and made war on its adherents.

Lilburn Boggs (1796–1860), the American Pentheus, was governor of Missouri from 1836–1840. He was in charge when Smith and his loyalists arrived in Missouri in 1838, joining coreligionists who had already settled in anticipation of Christ’s Second Coming. The Prophet’s arrival brought tensions to a fever pitch and sparked the 1838 Mormon War.

It was then that Boggs, ignoring the First Amendment, signed Executive Order 44 — the Mormon Extermination Order. Addressing one of his generals, Boggs wrote:

Sir: Since the order of this morning to you, directing you to cause four hundred mounted men to be raised within your division, I have received … information of the most appalling character, which entirely changes the face of things, and places the Mormons in the attitude of an open and avowed defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this state. … The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace — their outrages are beyond all description.

Three days later, Missouri militiamen descended upon and massacred a group of Saints.

Boggs’ militant rhetoric recapitulates that of Pentheus’ (778–85):

Already like fire does this insolence of the Bacchae blaze up, a great reproach for the Hellenes. But we must not hesitate. Go to the Electran gates, bid all the shield-bearers and riders of swift-footed horses to assemble, as well as all who brandish the light shield and pluck bowstrings with their hands, so that we can make an assault against the Bacchae.

And yet just as these equations of fact and fiction, ancient and modern, seem so clear, everything suddenly — as in Euripides’ play — undergoes a reversal.

Bacchae breaks into two halves. In the first, Pentheus is (at least nominally) in control and persecutes Dionysus and his followers. In the second, Dionysus is in control and destroys Pentheus. Just so, the adult life of Joseph Smith falls into two halves. In the first, in Missouri, the governor is in control and persecutes Smith and his followers. In the second, in Illinois, a new governor is in control and destroys Smith. What is most startling, however, is that the identity of the American Bacchae changes, too.

After the Mormons were driven from Missouri, they resettled in Illinois, and when Smith reappears six years later, his character is completely changed.

By 1844 Smith had taken his followers to the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where his power and megalomania grew apace. Chartered only four years prior, the city’s population had swollen to 12,000 and come to rival Chicago. And not content with merely standing there as a candidate for President of the United States, the 38-year-old Prophet declared himself “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth” — meaning Nauvoo.

Nominally, Smith was the mayor of Nauvoo and Lieutenant General of the Nauvoo Legion, its local militia of 2,500 troops. In actuality, Smith conducted himself as a king. When the first issue of a local paper, the Nauvoo Expositor, dared to criticize his increasingly controversial ideas in June 1844, Smith declared martial law and had the paper’s printing press destroyed.

That act directly contravened America law. The Illinois governor, Thomas Ford (1800–1850) had Smith arrested and confined on the second floor of a jailhouse in Carthage, Illinois. Smith went like a lamb to the slaughter. Ford guaranteed Smith’s safety, but two days later an angry mob stormed the jail, attacked, and murdered the Prophet. By one account, the mob even tried to cut off his head. What happened to Joseph Smith Jr. between June 25 and June 27, 1844, recapitulates, therefore, the angry mob’s destruction and mutilation of Pentheus at the end of Bacchae.

On this view, Smith is Pentheus and the governor has become the Stranger. Or is that really how the roles should have been assigned all along? Revisiting the events leading up to Smith’s arrest, it now seems that he was Pentheus — not Dionysus — throughout the day. Smith’s decision to declare martial law in Nauvoo and to call out (as he did) the men of his Nauvoo Legion to protect the city from outside violence now retroactively resembles Pentheus’ decision to muster soldiers to protect Thebes and persecute the Bacchae. The ability for the identities to shift and flow so readily is creepy, making it impossible not to think of what the befuddled Pentheus says to Dionysus at Bacchae 918–22:

Oh look! I think I see two suns, and twin Thebes, the seven-gated city. And you seem to lead me, being like a bull and horns seem to grow on your head. But were you ever before a beast? For you have certainly now become a bull.

At any rate, if Smith is Pentheus, who were the Bacchae that attacked and murdered him?

The formal answer is the “Carthage Greys,” an anti-Mormon militia. The actual answer, I would like to suggest, is us.

Readers of Bacchae often wonder why Pentheus doesn’t merely see the light and accept the worship of Dionysus in Thebes. Just so, LDS members might wonder why their fellow women and men don’t merely see the light and accept the Book of Mormon. Pondering those two questions in tandem can teach us something about ourselves.

In this connection it helps to consider a famous “rationalist” critique of Bacchae. In 1910 A. W. Verrall (1851–1912) published a remarkable interpretation of Euripides’ play. In his view, the Stranger is not Dionysus incarnate, despite his claims, but a simple charlatan of a kind all too familiar in the annals of human history. The upshot, explains Verrall, is that the play encodes Euripides’ measured thoughts on the nature of religious faith:

What he [Euripides] reports of it, if translated into mere prose, would seem to be this. It [religious faith] is a spirit which appeals chiefly to simple folk; it is more congenial to women than to men, though a man possessed by it may gain, especially over and through women, an almost unlimited influence. It is rapidly infectious. It is highly dangerous to political and hierarchical authority, thrives by repression, and, if intemperately handled, may convulse and even destroy society… It bestows upon the faithful an exquisite happiness, a supreme sense of harmony and joy, so that, in comparison with it, all things seem light and of no importance. It is credulous, rich in imagination, and averse from control, — indifferent therefore or hostile to science and to rational speculation, but open to fraud and easily roused to frenzy. Its love is ardent, its hatred furious, — a hatred which can obliterate all other feelings, and, in regard to an enemy of the faith, can even extinguish every sentiment of honour and humanity.

Although I’m in the minority on this, I think Verrall hit the bullseye. In my view, he was correct about the play in general and — misogyny apart — the intolerance of a proselytizing faith in particular, but he might have widened his definition of faith.

When a religion is theological and you do not believe it, it is easy to ignore it, though you may bridle at finding that your relatives do like it and are converting to it. When a religion is secular or scientific or political and you do believe it, however, it seems obviously rational, commonsense. Anyone who doesn’t share our views seems deluded or idiotic. He stands in the way of progress, his reasons unfathomable yet assuredly evil. In those circumstances, we too can feel the furious impulse to spread our gospel and proselytize the heathen for his own good.

This is what our secular authorities’ persecution of Smith and his Mormons can teach us — what that abortive performance of Bacchae in 2009 could have taught us. At a time when the distinction between tolerance and acceptance has just about disappeared, and with our social media daily enabling and abetting ever more glorious acts of public shaming, that performance might have helped us face a crucial question: What shall we do when we meet the Bacchae and they are us?

Michael Fontaine is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on Latin literature and Roman society. His newest book is Joannes Burmeister: Aulularia and Other Inversions of Plautus. Read more of his work here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.