Marriage and children
Lucy Mack married Joseph Smith Sr., in January 1796 with $1,000 wedding gift from her brother, Stephen Mack, and his business partner. Lucy Smith and Joseph Smith Sr shared belief in and practice of folk religion and magic, common in their time, but had very different views on salvation. Smith Sr was a devout Universalist, who founded a Universalist Society with his brother and father, but abstained from institutionalized sects. Lucy became Presbyterian during her marriage, which resulted in her being pressured to ensure her whole family join to avoid being lost to damnation. As a result, Lucy felt heavy personal responsibility for the moral and religious guidance of her children. Her folk and organized religious engagement with her children led her to emerge as a major influence in preparing them for their involvement in the founding of Church of Christ in 1830.
Six years and two children into her marriage to Smith Sr Lucy became ill enough from consumption, the ailment that killed two of her sisters, that she feared she was dying. "I knew not the ways of Christ, besides there appeared to be a dark and lonesome chasm between myself and the Saviour[sic], which I dared not attempt to pass." Lucy spent a night pleading to God to making numerous promises to live an exemplary religious life if she was allowed to live. Eventually she experienced a hopeful supernatural reassurance, "Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. Let your heart be comforted; ye believe in God, believe also in me." Lucy sought to live up to the promises she had made throughout her dire illness.
Smith's piety and principles were major moral influence in her children's lives, but she was also concerned about her husband's spiritual well-being. New England ministers declared that a wife's conversion could also help her perform "her great task of bringing men back to God" (Welter, 162). Various publications of the early nineteenth century pointed out:Religion or piety was the core of women's virtue, the source of her strength. Religion belonged to woman by divine right, a gift of God and nature. This "peculiar susceptibility" to religion was given her for a reason: "the vestal flame of piety, lighted tip by Heaven in the breast of woman" would throw its beams into the naughty world of men (Welter, 152).
According to Nancy Woloch, "Female converts outnumbered male converts three to two in the Second Great Awakening in New England. ... By 1814, for instance, women outnumbered men in the churches and religious societies in rural Utica, and they could be relied upon to urge the conversion of family members" (121).
Smith took the initiative in trying to involve her family in seeking the "true church." In light of Joseph Sr.'s indifference, she sought consolation in prayer that the gospel would be brought to her husband and was reassured by a dream that her husband would be given "the pure and undefiled Gospel of the Son of God" (56). About this time, Joseph Sr. began having dreams with symbolic content that were interpreted as being related to his ambivalence about religious faith. These dreams continued after the family's move to Palmyra, New York, until he had had seven in all; Lucy remembered five well enough to quote in detail.
