According to the account in Joseph Smith - History, not long after the receiving the First Vision, Joseph related the story to a Methodist preacher, who reacted hostilely to the story. I quote Smith:
I was greatly surprised at his behavior; he treated my communication not only lightly, but with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil, that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles, and that there would never be any more of them. I soon found, however, that my telling the story had excited a great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion, and was the cause of great persecution, which continued to increase; and though I was an obscure boy, only between fourteen and fifteen years of age, and my circumstances in life such as to make a boy of no consequence in the world, yet men of high standing would take notice sufficient to excite the public mind against me, and create a bitter persecution; and this was common among all the sects—all united to persecute me.
So goes the official account. There is reason to believe that this didn't actually happen, as Joseph didn't make any mention of this event until years after it supposedly took place and he couldn't keep his story straight, but what I want to focus on today is the claim that the ministers of the day reacted with great hostility to anyone claiming any kind of vision. Would the preachers of the day have actually acted this way?
As MormonThink documents, visions were actually a common thing in the 1800s. Multiple people were claiming to see God, and they felt brave enough to publish their accounts of doing so. If men of high standing would unite to persecute Joseph Smith, why wouldn't they persecute these people as well?
There are certainly some people who claim that visions and revelations have ceased, or that they never occurred at any time, but the general attitude of Christians is to believe in these things, and I believe that this attitude was even more pronounced in Joseph Smith's than it is in ours. The Methodists, for instance, preached the reality of the ministering of angels and the witness of the Spirit. Would a Methodist preacher of the time actually declare that no one could receive a vision at all? Would other professors of religion actually join in persecuting anyone who claimed such?
I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that Joseph just made up the account of being persecuted. Am I wrong about the beliefs of the time? Let me know in the comments.