Although Joseph Fielding Smith (1876–1972) was not a theologian in the traditional academic sense – he had no post-high-school education – he was an influential leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) in the twentieth century by virtue of his lineage as a grand-nephew of the founder Joseph Smith, his prolific writings, his dogmatism, and his ecclesiastical position. (He was appointed to a lifelong apostleship at the age of 33 by his father, President Joseph F. Smith, and eventually became church president himself from 1970 to 1972.) Bowman traces the Protestant roots of many of Smith’s ideas, including his opposition to modernism, higher criticism, evolution, and racial equality, as well as his distinctly LDS approaches to prophetic infallibility, scriptural literalism, doctrinal orthodoxy, and the mortal consequences of premortal sin. Smith was hostile to the idea of progress and to scholarly expertise of all kinds, preferring to subordinate all knowledge to his own interpretations of the Bible and Latter-day Saint scripture, which rested primarily on proof-texting and the statements of earlier LDS authorities. Bowman documents Smith’s LDS-tinged fundamentalism in an engaging manner as he recounts several of the conflicts Smith had with more progressive church leaders and members, but by ending his book in 1975, before the church revoked its priesthood ban for Black men (in 1978), Bowman fails to grapple with his subject’s mixed legacy. While the current LDS Church retains many of the general attitudes espoused by Smith, it has explicitly rejected his strongly held opinions about race, evolution, and young earth creationism. Many Latter-day Saint thinkers in the next generation were put off by Smith’s anti-intellectual tendencies, and his books have now fallen out of favor. In treating Joseph Fielding Smith as sympathetically as possible and downplaying critical perspectives, this brief intellectual biography does not escape the pull of hagiography.