Broadway, The Book of Mormon, and Blackness

Christopher Jones

(cross-posted at Juvenile Instructor)

Over at Religion Dispatches, Jared Farmer, professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of the excellent On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, reviews the multiple Tony Award-winning broadway play, The Book of Mormon.

By all accounts, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's satirical look at Mormon missionaries in Africa is funny. With very few exceptions, everyone I've talked to that has seen it---including a number of believing Latter-day Saints---has praised both its humor and its ultimately touching (if somewhat condescending) message about religion: Religion (especially the brand of religion preached by Mormons) is naive, silly, and based on absurd beliefs and unprovable truth claims, but that belief can ultimately motivate adherents to do good, help others, and improve the world.

Farmer largely agrees with this assessment. "The Book of Mormon is fun, and occasionally uproarious," he writes. "If the giddy laughter I heard at the sold-out show on Easter Sunday is any indication, theatergoers love it." He then goes on to offer a more complete critique of the play than I'd previously seen, noting the ways in which Parker and Stone's portrayal of Mormon missionaries is sometimes on target ("Pairs of missionaries (“companions”) do often resent each other; sexual tension, homophobia, homesickness, and boredom strain the relationships of these co-workers/roommates. Many missionaries dislike their geographic assignments. Even as they compete against each other for baptisms in the field, missionaries often struggle to convert a single person in two years of service.") and other times not even close ("Pairs of missionaries are never equals; there is always a “senior companion” and a “junior companion.” The various missionaries (men and women) in an area are supervised by one (male) “mission president” and his wife, not by a three-person bishopric. ... The missionary program certainly no longer encourages Latter-day Saints to gather in Salt Lake City."), and the concludes by suggesting that "Most egregiously, the play mischaracterizes Mormon theology." This is tricky territory, as Mormonism has no systematic theology, and some of Farmer's points seem more credible to me than others. I think he's right that "Unlike evangelical missionaries who want to save you from going to hell, LDS missionaries want to help you reach your potential in heaven. Mormon eschatology is radically egalitarian, and very American: everyone gets a second chance, everyone wins," but his suggestion that "for Joseph Smith and his followers, the existence of the translated text—proof of Smith’s prophetic powers—was more important than its contents" is open to debate. Farmer's argument echoes that of a former generation of historians, but much new research on early Mormonism suggests exactly the opposite; that early Mormons read the book's contents with care and that the Book of Mormon's teachings shaped early Mormon theology in ways previously ignored.

Couched in between Farmer's analysis and critique of the Book of Mormon musical, though, is something that has been repeatedly mentioned in passing by numerous friends but never fully teased out---a seemingly significant critique of the Broadway hit that those too focused on the delightful ways in which the South Park creators mock Mormons have opted to either ignore or quickly dismiss. I speak of the show's racial overtones. Farmer summarizes the salient points:

The plot twists at the end raise questions about the racial politics of the show. Only a threat of American violence saves the villagers from the tyranny of the local warlord. Only the ingenuity of the white men provides Africans a useful religion. The dewy-eyed boys from Utah share the genius of Joseph Smith: the Yankee spirit of invention. The musical’s happy ending, complete with black missionaries in neo-Mormon garb, contains a strong note of American chauvinism.

And then offers his most stinging critique of the musical:

I cringed in my seat at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre as I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous and saccharine. This combination is not impossible, but incredibly difficult to achieve. Parker, Stone, and Lopez don’t pull it off.

If nothing else, Farmer's critique on this point raises important questions about the intersections of religious and racial representation and satire, and that, I think, is a conversation worth having.

"To Normalize the False Teachings of Mormonism the World Over"

Paul Harvey

As the long -- very long -- Republican primary season just begins to get going, here's a little reminder that anti-Mormonism didn't die out in the 19th century, or in the 20th century, or after that: Warren Cole Smith, "A Vote for Romney is a Vote for the LDS Church." A little taste:

Placing a Mormon in that pulpit would be a source of pride and a shot of adrenaline for the LDS church. It would serve to normalize the false teachings of Mormonism the world over. It would also provide an opening to Mormon missionaries around the world, who could start every conversation: "Let me tell you about the American president." To elect a Mormon President is to advance the cause of the Mormon Church.

Yes, like the election of Richard Nixon normalized the teachings of Quakerism, and the election of Clinton the teachings of Southern Baptists. Anyway, further discussion of the evangelical division about Romney's faith may be found here, and doubtless in a million other places in the months to come. As for said pending discussion, don't you know that you can count me out.

Our friend Joanna Brooks is about to fire up a post about this, so I'll update here when that is up.

Update: It gets worse. Joanna recounts her conversation with the author here.

In the meantime, that little blast from the past requires an antidote, so here's an interview with the South Park-ers Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking about their musical The Book of Mormon, the full soundtrack of which I'm looking forward to hearing sometime soon. Maybe they'll follow with a sendup musical about the United Church of Christ, or the Unitarian Universalists.

Update: Also, I meant to put this in the original post, but blog friend and part-time basketball analyst Matt Bowman of Georgetown University reflects here, in The New Republic, on the comparative "business Mormonism" of Romney and contrasts that with the much hipper public image of Jon Huntsman. Taking the two together, he says, suggests a sort of generational shift in internal LDS dynamics and culture. Very interesting reading.

Playing Jane: Black Mormon History and Memory

Paul Harvey

While our blog contributor Chris Jones is getting ready to ace his comprehensives, he sent along this outstanding piece by Harvard graduate student Max Mueller: "Playing Jane: The History of a Pioneer Black Mormon Woman is Alive Today," published online at the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin. Highly recommended reading, particularly if (like me) you know absolutely nothing about this subject. The article discusses the historical re-creation efforts of Jerri Halwell, who "plays" the remarkable character of Jane Manning James, an African American woman who served in Joseph Smith's household, became a convert, made the trek to Utah, and remained a faithful member of the Church until 1908. A brief taste from this piece (footnotes omitted):

Last summer, I went to Salt Lake City to look for Jane Manning James in the archives of the LDS Church History Library and the archives of the Utah Historical Society. I hoped that Jane would speak to me from scratchy microfiche and dusty letter-books. I hoped she would tell me how she dealt with the precarious place in which she lived out her life as a black Mormon pioneer in Zion, simultaneously at the center and on the margins of the nineteenth-century Mormon experience. I planned to "ask" her: How did you understand your status as a beloved member of the community, celebrated as a friend of the first prophet's family, as a pioneer of 1847, and as a steadfast member of the LDS Church? At the same time, how did you come to terms with LDS Church policy that, due to your race, defines you as innately cursed and thus unworthy to receive the same blessings as your fellow white saints?

Although this was my plan, during my time in Salt Lake City, I found that the archives are not the only or even the best place to find Jane. Certainly, the archives shed light on the question of how Jane in writing subtly challenged the Church's marginalization of blacks within Mormon history and within the Mormon community. But it was in my interviews with Jerri and in my observations of her reenactments that I discovered the canon is not closed on Jane's story. The legacy of Jane's black Mormon experience unfolds today in the lives of modern black Mormons like Jerri, who strike a precarious balance between their ongoing struggles with the Mormon "folklore" about black spiritual inferiority and the spiritual truth they find within their own Mormon testimonies of faith.

Continue reading here.

Me the People: A Roundup on the Rally

Paul Harvey

Our contributor and uber-blogger over at The Way of Improvement Leads Home, John Fea, has a great op-ed piece in today's New York Daily News. He concludes:

What we saw on Saturday was a group of anti-big government Tea Party libertarians trying to reclaim the civil rights movement - an initiative whose success ultimately required one of the most forceful and moral acts of federal power in American history.

In the On Faith section of the Washington Post, a reporter analyzes the varied reactions to Beck from conservative Christians. Richard Land, the well-known conservative Southern Baptist leader and (evidently) an enthusiastic participant in the picnic on the Mall (even though he finds Beck's Mormonism to be, at best, a "fourth Abrahamic faith" rather than Christianity), gives some interesting commentary on this issue in an interview on NPR.

Finally, Joanna Brooks synthesizes all the commentary on Beck and the march and concludes that Beck is America's first Mormon televangelist, while Alex McNeill's " 'Me' the People" gives his very charitable and sympathetic impressions after wandering among the crowd at the Mall Saturday, and analyzes how and why the individualism of the "me" became defined as Christian (just as Richard Land does in his NPR interview) while the "we" is somehow defined outside the fold.

After all this, Colbert had it right from the start: this was all about restoring the civil rights movement to its white, conservative roots.

New Scholarship: Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South

by Edward J. Blum

For those of you still living in the present, I know this is a hard and confusing time. Reports of President Obama as a Muslim, debates over Ground Zero, and the start of the semester can trouble our souls. Perhaps you need an intellectual refuge. If you do, grab the current edition of the Journal of Southern History and read Patrick Q. Mason’s fantastic article on anti-Mormonism in the South <“Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 541-578)>. It’s a terrific study of how white southerners rallied against polygamy from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. Sure, it’s not a fun story (it involves murder and mayhem just like most aspects of American history), but the essay offers a lot to think about from the past.

Reviews in American Religious History

Paul Harvey

The new issue of Reviews in American History -- to me, the single most helpful professional periodical that I read -- brings focus to a number of titles of interest -- some we’ve blogged about here before, others not.

In “The Cult of Domesticity, Southern Style,” our friend Charles Irons reviews Scott Stephan’s Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South, a book that has quite unaccountably escaped our notice here. This work focuses intensively on domestic piety among a fairly elite class of white southern women. The home was the site of “many of their most significant religious experiences,” and the women Stephan studies put their suitors through a gauntlet of domestic devotion trials, remaining reserved while their courters strutted their evangelical bona fides. In the end, Irons concludes, Stephan shows that “white evangelical women found the process of reforming their own households to be extremely fulfilling,” while “more work is required to evaluate whether and why these domestic reformers were so wary of shining their light outside of their homes.”

Since we've missed discussing this work before, here's just a bit more about it, from the book's website:

In the years leading up to the Civil War, southern evangelical denominations moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the American South. Scott Stephan argues that female Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians played a crucial role in this transformation. While other scholars have pursued studies of southern evangelicalism in the context of churches, meetinghouses, and revivals, Stephan looks at the domestic rituals over which southern women had increasing authority-from consecrating newborns to God's care to ushering dying kin through life's final stages. Laymen and clergymen alike celebrated the contributions of these pious women to the experience and expansion of evangelicalism across the South. This acknowledged domestic authority allowed some women to take on more public roles in the conversion and education of southern youth within churches and academies, although always in the name of family and always cloaked in the language of Christian self-abnegation. At the same time, however, women's work in the name of domestic devotion often put them at odds with slaves, children, or husbands in their households who failed to meet their religious expectations and thereby jeopardized evangelical hopes of heavenly reunification of the family. Stephan uses the journals and correspondence of evangelical women from across the South to understand the interconnectedness of women's personal, family, and public piety. Rather than seeing evangelical women as entirely oppressed or resigned to the limits of their position in a patriarchal slave society, Stephan seeks to capture a sense of what agency was available to women through their moral authority.

Sara Dwyer-NcNulty reviews our blog contributor Kathleen Sprows Cummings’ New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (the link takes you to our previous post on Kathy's book). The review gives a thorough summary of the volume, and concludes with this reflection on Catholicism and gender: “The Catholic women under examination [the major figures studied by Cummings] did not seek to form an association of work together unless they had to. Gender was subordinate to religious identity. It appears, however, that rejecting gender was only required of women. For men, gender was (and is) paramount, and it was gender that guaranteed men’s access to power.”

Briefly, and off-topic, but interesting in conjunction with this: I can't help but compare those thoughts above with the interview with Sinead O'Connor on NPR today, who reflects on her famous television appearance in 1992 which was controversial then (ripping up a picture of the Pope, and all, you remember), but now appears prescient in terms of highlighting the issue of abuse. In the interview, she says,

"A lot of people misinterpret me and think I'm somehow anti-Catholic, and I'm not," she says. "I've acted out of a passionate love of the Holy Spirit and what is good about Catholicism. ... I have nothing but respect for any priest and nun that I've ever met. ... They've been disrespected and misrepresented. I think there's so much that's beautiful about Catholicism, but that has been clouded by the cover-up more even than the abuse."

She questions the beliefs of those in the church who would hide abuse: "[It's] as if they don't believe in God. They certainly don't believe in a God that is watching them or what they're doing."

To go on: Matthew Grow provides an assessment of a book we’ve discussed at length here before: Jared Farmer’s ON Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Farmer's interview about his book, at Religion Dispatches, can be found here.

Finally, Julian Zelizer of Princeton University provides a long, thorough, and synthetic set of reflections on the various historiographical "waves" of the study of American conservatism. While focused mostly on policy debates and not religious history, Zelizer has a section dealing with conflicts and divisions within contemporary conservatism, including the disappointment felt by religious conservatives in recent years in the public policy arena; well worth checking out.

Revisiting Reynolds: Mormon Polygamy, Natural Law, and Whiteness

(cross-posted at the Juvenile Instructor)

Nathan B. Oman, Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School and Associate Professor at William & Mary Law School, posted an article last week at SSRN (available for download here) that reconsiders the context and historical significance of the Reynolds v. United States, the famed 1879 Supreme Court case that ruled that Congress could punish Mormon polygamy and ultimately set the Latter-day Saints on the path to prohibiting plural marriage.

I was lucky enough to read an earlier draft of the article, and because Nate is currently shopping it to law reviews and historians may consequently miss it, I thought I'd post the abstract, along with a few of my own thoughts here:

Abstract:
In 1879, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the Free Exercise Clause for the first time, holding in Reynolds v. United States that Congress could punish Mormon polygamy. Historians have interpreted Reynolds and the massive wave of anti-polygamy legislation and litigation that it midwifed as an extension of Reconstruction into the American West. This Article offers a new historical interpretation, one that places the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds within an international context of Great Power imperialism and American international expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. It does this by recovering the lost theory of religious freedom that the Mormons offered in Reynolds, a theory grounded in the natural law tradition. It then shows how the Court rejected this theory by using British imperial law to interpret the scope of the first amendment. Unraveling the work done by these international analogies reveals how the legal debates in Reynolds reached back to natural law theorists of the seventeenth-century such as Hugo Grotius and forward to fin de siècle imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt. By analogizing the federal government to the British Raj, Reynolds provided a framework for national politicians in the 1880s to employ the supposedly discredited tactics of Reconstruction against the Mormons. Embedded in imperialist analogies, Reynolds and its progeny thus formed a prelude to the constitutional battles over American imperialism in the wake of the Spanish-American War. These constitutional debates reached their dénouement in The Insular Cases, where Reynolds and its progeny appeared not as Free Exercise cases but as precedents on the scope of American imperial power. This Article thus remaps key events in late nineteenth-century constitutional history, showing how the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds must be understood as part of America’s engagement with Great Power imperialism and the ideologies that sustained it.

Nate’s argument is both provocative and convincing. He builds on Sarah Barringer Gordon’s fine research presented in The Mormon Question that situates Reynolds within the context of what immediately proceeded it (abolitionism and Reconstruction) by exploring how the decision handed down in the case “also drew on international narratives, using analogies to British imperial law to interpret the scope of the first amendment” (p. 4). As part of this budding imperialist reasoning, Mormons, along with Catholics, Jews, and Italians, were racialized as something other than white. As Nate notes, though, “The logic of Mormon racial identity, however, was slightly different. According to the standard racial logic, behavior resulted from racial identity. … For Mormons, however, the logic moved in the opposite direction. A new race arose precisely because of the unnatural behaviors of the Latter-day Saints” (p. 22). Nate’s exploration of the legal implications of the racialization of Mormons dovetails nicely with Paul Reeve’s current research that situates the Mormon struggle for acceptance and Utah's quest for statehood as a social and cultural struggle for whiteness (as well as that of Sam Houston State grad student and Juvenile Instructor blogger Ed Jeter). Collectively, these scholars are taking Mormon history in new, exciting, and important directions that should interest legal historians and religious historians alike.

Mormon History Association Awards

From Spencer Fluhman, on behalf of the Mormon History Association:

MORMON HISTORY ASSOCIATION STUDENT AWARDS

The Mormon History Association (MHA) is pleased to announce two award competitions for exceptional student work exploring the history of those religious traditions originating with Joseph Smith, Jr. The Juanita Brooks Undergraduate and Graduate Paper Awards will be given to the best unpublished papers written in 2009 by an undergraduate and graduate student, respectively. Students are eligible to submit one paper for consideration. NEW FOR THIS YEAR'S COMPETITION: the winning graduate student essay will be published in the Journal of Mormon History, pending editorial review and appropriate revisions as determined by the Journal editor. (Provided the winning entry has not been submitted elsewhere for publication.) All submissions must be sent electronically (as either a "Word" or "PDF" document) to J. Spencer Fluhman, assistant professor of Church History & Doctrine, Brigham Young University, at fluhman@byu.edu. Submissions should include a cover sheet detailing the student's biographical information: name, department, institution, and undergraduate or graduate major, etc. Submissions must be received by February 15, 2010, to be considered. Awards will be presented at the MHA annual meeting in Independence, Missouri, in May 2010.

MHA BEST DISSERTATION AND BEST THESIS AWARDS

The Mormon History Association (MHA) is pleased to announce the Gerald E. Jones Dissertation Award and the Lester Bush Thesis Awards for the best dissertation and two theses on Mormon History completed in 2009. Nominated theses and dissertations can be submitted in hard copy or electronically (as either a “WordPerfect,” “Word,” or “.pdf” document) to Kent Powell, Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101, e-mail kpowell@utah.gov Submissions must be received by February 15, 2010, to be considered. Awards will be presented at the MHA annual meeting in Independence, Missouri, in May 2010.

Big Love's Reality Show

Paul Harvey

Here's something you don't see everyday: an FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) protest rally in Salt Lake City, reported on here, with photographs, by our friends at Juvenile Instructor, with background details on the controversy reported on in the local paper here, and further background and commentary here. As for the level of police state tension at today's protest gathering, suffice to say Chicago '68 it was not!

And since we're just a few days past Pioneer Day, here's the Pew Forum's report "A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.," full of interesting data.

Mormon History Association -- CFP

Mormon History Association
2010 Independence Missouri Conference
Call for Papers
The Home and the Homeland:
Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions

The forty-fifth annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held May 27-30, 2010, at the Kansas City Sports Complex Hotel in Kansas City, MO. It has been twenty-five years since the last MHA conference was held in Missouri. The 2010 theme, “The Home and the Homeland: Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions” recognizes the family as a central social and religious institution within Mormon traditions. Tanner Lecturer Catherine Brekus of the University of Chicago will address the topic of “Women in Early Mormonism.” Mormon traditions (also called Restoration traditions) have historically recognized the family and home as the spatial, social, and emotional place where men, women, and children become religious and moral people. Fatherhood and motherhood have been interpreted as religious, as well as biological and social roles. Papers and panels on all aspects of the history and practice of family life in all Restoration traditions are welcomed. Since Independence, Missouri, serves as the “homeland” to dozens of Restoration traditions, we especially encourage papers that examine or compare lesser studied groups. Of special note, 2010 marks the sesquicentennial of Joseph Smith III’s ordination as leader of the Community of Christ and the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first priesthood ordinations of women. Both events sparked controversy and caused the reexamination of how family roles shaped religious practices. Presenters could explore religious interpretation of the family, gender roles within the family, the Mormon religious experience within families, children and childhood, Mormon domestic architecture, or Mormon material culture.

MHA invites and actively seeks proposals for complete sessions, panels, and other presentations. While we encourage presentations related to the theme, we also welcome other proposals. While the Program Committee will give preference to complete two or three paper session proposals, individual paper proposals will be considered. Please send an abstract of the paper (no more than 300 words) that outlines your argument and the sources that will be used plus a short CV (no longer than two pages) for each speaker. Previously published papers will not be considered.

The deadline for proposals is October 1, 2009. Proposals should be sent by email to: mhameeting2010@gmail.com. Hard copies of proposals can also be sent to: Susanna Morrill, Lewis & Clark College, MSC 45, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd., Portland, OR 97219 or David Howlett, 222 E. Market St. Apt. 32, Iowa City, IA 52245. Notification for acceptance or rejection will be made by January 1, 2010. Additional instructions will be available on the MHA website at http://mhahome.org.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mormon Feminist: An Appreciation by Charles Cohen

Thanks to Spencer Fluhman at BYU, who recently sent along a report of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture meeting just convened in Salt Lake City. During the gathering, a premier scholar of early American religious history, Charles Cohen of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, delivered an appreciation of the influences on the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of The Midwife's Tale, The Age of Homespun, and other landmark works. Cohen reflects on the influence of Mormon thought and culture on Ulrich's scholarly work; or, how the personal becomes the historical. Thanks to Spencer Fluhman for his reporting on the conference, and Charles Cohen for consenting to have his remarks published here and also at The Juvenile Instructor.

_________________________________________________

Even by the capacious definitions of what constitutes early American history, Deseret makes for an unusual place in which to hold an Omohundro meeting. Utah has less claim on our attention than Ghana. The locale does have a certain logic, however, since some scholars known primarily for their work in our field have also contributed to Mormon history, including David Brion Davis, Gordon Wood, Alan Taylor, and John Brooke. For two of our most distinguished figures, however, the connection is both professional and personal; they emerge from as well as dissect that past. Richard Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich are Mormon historians in a twofold sense: scholars of Mormons, and scholars who are Mormons. For most of us that dual identification means little: the subject lies beyond our chronological horizon, and we base academic reputation on works, not faith. Important aspects of these colleagues intellectual lives transpire in a parallel universe that early Americanists barely know. Consequently, in Bushman’s case we overlook biographies of Joseph Smith and a new-modeled providentialism that radically critiques mainstream historiography’s secular epistemology. In Ulrich’s case, ignoring her Mormon identity blinds us to sources of inspiration invisible in her footnotes.

Ulrich is only now plunging into Mormon history full-bore, but she has made at least one prior excursion. In 2004 she delivered a plenary lecture to the Mormon History Association, whose script she has kindly shared with me, though, absent the accompanying forty-nine slides, the text resembles a sampler in progress, its pattern marked but the vivifying embellishments not yet stitched.[1] The talk is vintage Ulrich, opening with anecdotes about an enamel bowl her husband inherited and a brass bowl that a Chinese miner who literally bet his life in a high-stakes poker game gave to the man who won the hand—and him. The first bowl’s story leads via discrepant recollections of how her father-in-law whipped up his prize-winning angel food cake batter to an observation about the vagaries of memory, while the second’s tale reveals a nineteenth-century empire of goods in which souvenirs exported by migrant merchants in China reached Cantonese consumers in the Inter-mountain West. Demonstrating the value of reading objects and documents in tandem, the lecture’s body unpacks two other items: an unpainted secretary that Nathan Davis cobbled together for his daughter Sarah Davis Thatcher, and a quilt sewn by more than seventy women that the Fourteenth Ward Relief Society raffled off in 1857, a year of profound economic, environmental, and political stress for the Saints, to raise money for the poor. These examples subserve her central concern: Mormons are “blessed with an extraordinarily rich material culture and with a complex and deeply documented history, she notes, “But sometimes the two sides of our heritage sit in different rooms” (4). Objects, she concludes, reveal the struggles, ideals and contradictions “involved in the effort to create a culture and a faith in the Great Basin” (15). Substitute “New England” for “Great Basin” in that sentence and you have an apt epigraph for Ulrich’s work in early American history.

Ulrich’s lecture gestures toward a system for advancing Mormon social history beyond interminable discussions of polygamy. Mormon archives are stuffed, testimony to the Saints’ regard for documenting their past as a sacred trust combined with a passion for genealogy second only to that of hobbits. Yet despite the wealth of available resources, Mormon historians have typically demurred in situating their field within larger narratives of American history, and non-Mormons have seldom invited them to do so. Five years ago Ulrich pointed members of the MHA toward such an engagement, advertising the techniques she had perfected studying early American history and dropping pregnant hints about future lines of research such as analyzing the relationships among the seamstresses of the Fourteenth Ward quilt and their patterns or tracking the routes by which the quilt’s composite fabrics reached Salt Lake City from eastern mills. But Ulrich has always lead by example, not prescription, and she is currently engaged on a book concerned, she tells me, with “notions of family in nineteenth-century Mormon diaries … I want to know how these literate and semi-literate folks wrote about issues that to our minds seem very strange.”[2] Mormon historians are in for an experience, since we early Americanists know what happens when she gets her hands on a diary.

The heart of Ulrich’s method rings a subtle change on the credo of second-wave feminism: for her, the personal is the historical. Take a scribble or a secretary, parse its structure and function, unpack it meanings as they exfoliate from among those most closely connected with the piece to those farther away, and contextualize that discussion within the time period. Her gender analysis drives her to choose items associated with women and the female communities that formed around the object’s use. Nathan Davis intended that his gift to Sarah commemorate himself, but “Today,” Ulrich judges, “the secretary is less a memorial” to him ”than to his daughter” (8). “Cutting up fabric” to create the Fourteenth Ward quilt’s “fancy designs,” she remarks, “seems like a strange way to relie[ve] the poor” and “an inefficient enterprise,” but doing so relieved those women from “the drudgery of housekeeping, the burdens of self-sufficiency, the anxieties of polygamy, and the dangers of idleness” (14). We might think of her early American corpus, particularly A Midwife’s Tale and The Age of Homespun, as a collateral branch of the community studies genre that dominated colonial historiography in the 1970s and 80s; her version-framed by craft work rather than demography-reconstructed families through artifacts, not statistics. This method perfectly suits her subject matter, and it has illuminated women, families and material culture from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, but she did not derive it to suit a peculiarly early American research agenda. Indeed, to hear her tell it, her discipline and periodization found her: “My intellectual life,” she mused two decades ago, “has been built from ‘jest what happens to come.’” She sought a Ph.D. at the University of New Hampshire “not because it fitted some long-term life plan but because it was handy and relatively cheap.” She chose history despite having earned an M.A. in English ”because the history department was stronger at the time than the English department, and I thought I would get better training. I chose my field of concentration-early America-for much the same reason, though I must admit that the fit was perfect.”[3]

The insights underlying Ulrich’s technique come most readily from outside her professional training. She said as much in her 1992 commencement speech to this very campus: ”My children’s lives have been enriched by my scholarship, and my scholarship has been enriched by my life as a housewife and mother.”[4] Her way of writing about the past reflects a sensibility nurtured by and in constant dialogue with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her habit of elaborating history outward from a core of household activity and interaction through ramifying networks of kinship and community owes much to her embracing the Church’s valorization of domestic life and its construction of families genealogically and sacramentally across time, as well as to a feminist stance nurtured among the Mormon sisterhood who founded Exponent II in conscious emulation of the journals their nineteenth-century forbears had pioneered. Ulrich and her contemporaries were “sustained” in their endeavors, she told the University of Utah’s baccalaureates, “by a new understanding of the past. The lives of ’traditional women,’ women like Martha Ballard, taught us that American women had always sustained their communities as well as their homes. We also learned from women who claimed more public roles. Listen to this voice,” she urged the audience:

It is time that we utterly repudiate the pernicious dogma that marriage and a practical life-work are incompatible.

“Radical 1970s feminist?” she queried. “No, this is Louisa Greene Richards, a pious Latter-day Saint mother writing in the Woman’s Exponent, published in the territory of Utah in 1877. I can date a new era in my life from reading such words.”[5] To be sure, she learned something from her scholarly mentors at New Hampshire; most Mormon matriarchs do not win the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes. At heart, though, her perspective issues from her comfort at simultaneously appropriating and extending her religious tradition. “As a daughter of God,” she wrote in an essay explaining why the phrase “Mormon feminist” both is and is not oxymoronic, “I claim the right to all my gifts. I am a mother, an intellectual, a skeptic, a believer, a crafter of cookies and words.”[6] The personal is also the methodological.

That Laurel Ulrich is working on another major project means that this panel’s assessments are necessarily contingent. Still, we can acknowledge that a career which emerged from the dynamics of Mormon family and community life is now cycling back to explore that life with an analytical acumen perfected in limning the intimate spaces of early America.

_______________________________

[1] “Objects, Memory, and History,” Mormon History Association, Provo, UT, May 20, 2004.

[2] Email, Laurel Ulrich Thatcher to Charles Cohen, April 9, 2009.

[3] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Patchwork,” in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Emma Lou Thayne, All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir (Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1995), 25.

[4] Ulrich, “A Phil Beta Kappa Key and a Safety Pin,” in Ulrich and Thayne, All God’s Critters, 156.

[5] Ibid., 155-56. Italics in original.

[6] Ulrich, “Border Crossings,” in ibid., 198.

Extralocal History in Utah

Paul Harvey

We've blogged here previously about Jared Farmer's Parkman Prize-winning book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008). At The American Scholar, the author reflects on the meaning of writing local history with national significance: "Extralocal History." A great short read.

Liberty to the Downtrodden

John Turner

I've been looking forward to the appearance of a new book by Matthew J. Grow, an incoming YSAR and historian of nineteenth-century American religion.

Yale University Press has just released (available today on amazon.com) Grow's "Liberty to the Downtrodden": Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer. Kane, a diminutive hypochondriac, is most renowned as the friend of the Mormons who negotiated a peaceful solution to the 1857-58 Utah War. While drawing on rich archival sources to illuminate Kane's friendship with the Saints, Grow also uses Kane's varied career to reevaluate antebellum social reform:

Kane is representative of reformers who combined an allegiance to the Democratic Party, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism. The antebellum Democratic Party, though usually depicted as antireform because of its general support of southern slavery, had a significant reform wing, driven by the party's egalitarian impulses and more inclusive vision of American religious and ethnic pluralism ... The ethos of these anti-evangelical, Democratic reformers also resonated with romanticism. The emphasis that Jacksonian Democrats placed on liberty, by which they meant removing barriers to individual progress and freedom, corresponded with romanticism's emphasis on the individual and its belief in the perfectibility of mankind ... A romantic impulse impelled these reformers to sympathize with those on the margins of society, declare war on human suffering, and create a self-identity rooted in protecting the oppressed -- including slaves, prisoners, the poor, Catholic immigrants, and Mormons. (xvi)

I anticipate Liberty to the Downtrodden will reach the wide audience it deserves. Not only does Grow enrich our understanding of social reform, romanticism, and antebellum religion, he also writes eloquently and has constructed a lively narrative fitting of Kane's own unusual path through life.

Joseph Smith Papers

by John Turner

I recently obtained a copy of the long-awaited first volume of the Joseph Smith Papers: Journals (1832-1839), published by the newly created Church Historian's Press. This is a major project, projected to eventually comprise a generously annotated and illustrated forty-volume edition of Smith's journals, revelations, letters, etc. The next volume scheduled for release is the first in a series of Smith's Revelations and Translations. In terms of both staff and money, the church has invested heavily in this project.

Several things strike me as interesting about the JSP and this first volume. For starters, the market for Mormon history -- official (as in this project), semi-official (as in the Mountain Meadows Massacre project), and critical (as in recent works by Will Bagley and David Roberts) -- is astounding. The MMM book sold out its first printing and was probably 2008's best-selling book in American religious history. The first JSP volume sold out its 11,000 first printing almost immediately, and I imagine the second printing will go quickly as well. This reflects the incredible importance Latter-day Saints attach to their history and how critical it is to their faith. In that light, it is perhaps not surprising that church members rush to obtain a majestic edition of their founding prophet's first writings. I cannot imagine a similarly successful project for any other figure in American religious history, perhaps save Martin Luther King, Jr. (who most Americans revere as a political rather than a religious leader). We Presbyterians wouldn't exactly overwhelm amazon.com to purchase John Calvin's papers.

Smith's journals -- mostly kept by scribes and clerks -- have been published previously, in edited volumes by Scott Faulring and Dean Jessee, so the material presented here is not new. However, I find the new edition a significant improvement over those previous publications. Faulring's edition had very few annotations; JSP Vol. 1 contains generous background information, abundant annotations (recommending a variety of primary and secondary sources), illustrations, and maps. To give one example, on July 27, 1838, Smith's clerk George Robinson wrote "we have a company of Danites in these times," referring to a secret "paramilitary" organization that not very gently encouraged dissenters to leave the area. Needless to say, this has been a contested topic within Mormon history. The editors included a photograph of the page from the journal. Readers can see that the July 27 entry was scribbled through and obscured at some later date. The editors explain this, but it's illuminating to see the actual journal page.

Undoubtedly, as was the case with the MMM book, scholars will wonder about the ability of insiders to introduce and annotate the controversial issues of early Mormonism head-on and fairly. While those questions are unavoidable within this subfield of American religious history, these volumes -- may I live to see the release of the entire series -- will be indispensable for the next generation of scholars on Mormon history. While this first volume included journals previously published and therefore already accessible to scholars, some of the future volumes (including the upcoming Revelations) will publicize previously inaccessible sources. In an era in which many academic presses are shying away from expensive editions (it would have been difficult for the Jonathan Edwards papers to get off the ground with Yale in today's environment) or switching to online editions, I'm grateful for this project.

Beyond Toleration, and Beyond Those Yellowed Class Notes

Paul Harvey

It’s always annoying when one’s standard classroom shtick on some topic gets upset by new scholarship, compelling the sacrifice of a long-repeated chestnut; I hate it when reading something on a topic disables the ability so blithely to oversimplify long periods of history as easily anymore. It also forces you to move a lecture to the recycle bin and start over, just when you were ready to rely on the proverbial yellowed notes (now I guess the equivalent would be the Word 97 formatted word processed file) for the next thirty years.

One of these nuggets of compression that I had long relied on was this: religious freedom in American history has moved on a long arc from “toleration,” to “diversity,” to “pluralism,” and this generally can be followed or divided up into 18th, 19th, and 20th century components. In the eighteenth, [white] Americans learned that Presbyterians could (grudgingly) tolerate Baptists, and vice versa; in the nineteenth, that diversity of religious expression was a reality of the religious marketplace, and in the twentieth that pluralism ensured freedom of religious expression for those outside the Christian consensus.

Way too simple a narrative, to be sure, but at least in terms of looking at Protestant thought and establishments, it sort of worked, at least as a hanger on which to put stories for classroom consumption and discussion. It also worked to set up for examination those cases where the story did not work, or where it seemed to work in reverse (as in the rise of particular religious bigotries in the nineteenth century, after the more hopeful rhetoric of the eighteenth; Jefferson could blithely dismiss religious difference with his famous reference that contrasting beliefs neither picked his pocket nor broke his legs; many nineteenth-century white Protestants felt quite otherwise about, for example, Catholicism and Mormonism).

One of my longstanding, will-I-ever-finish-it projects has been to complicate that narrative by looking at the history of religious freedom from the standpoint of those who largely did not experience it in American history, especially Native peoples, African Americans, and others. Looking at their stories broadens our understanding of how Americans came to define religious freedom, and thus freedom itself, over the centuries. Others, notably Tracy Fessenden and more recently John Modern’s new long piece in Church History (“Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan”), have attacked this narrative arc from other perspectives. Modern suggests, for example, how antebellum religious benevolent organizations unwittingly created secularity by (among other things) quantifying religion. I’m still digesting his long and very difficult piece, so will save more comment on that later. It’s in the latest issue of Church History, and presages a larger project that’s going to present a picture of nineteenth-century American religious history fundamentally at odds with the story arising from books that focus on the evangelical consensus. It appears to be a smart bomb aimed at Noll et al.

From another, and perhaps more fundamentally optimistic side, Chris Beneke’s recent Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism finds a much earlier origin for more capacious ideas of freedom of religious expression. He argues that “toleration” is much too limited a way to understand eighteenth-century discussions of religion, for many already had moved “beyond toleration.”

The ironically named chapter “The End of Toleration,” for example, traces the demise of the limited concept of “toleration” into the sturdier practice of “religious liberty,” part of the overall story of how “Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them.”

In the eighteenth century, as now, Beneke suggests, “inclusion, equality, and cooperation among different groups mattered deeply. But then, unlike now, it was religious inclusion, religious equality, and religious cooperation that concerned people. Though still practiced inconsistently in the late eighteenth century, these ideals had become incontestable. The history of their controversial emergence is the history of America’s first great attempt to accommodate diversity, its first experiment with pluralism.” To put it another way, Beneke’s book totally cracks open the classroom nugget of compression that has served me, if not my students, so well. I hate it when people mess with my classroom M.O.

The bulk of this book traces this story of proto-pluralism through richly detailed case studies of controversies during the Great Awakening, Protestant unification during the threats posed by the French and Indian War, James Madison’s interventions in the religious liberty debate in Virginia, and various other controversies and episodes in particular colonies. All these particular stories are not new; the way Beneke puts them together to craft a large narrative is the true contribution of the book. The prose is lively and sprightly, the stories interesting and well-chosen, the argument engaging.

A couple of objections immediately come to mind -- certainly to my mind -- and to his credit Beneke deals with them forthrightly. One is that this is a story of whites, and white Protestants more particularly. Beneke argues that, by the nineteenth century, arguments for white supremacy no longer could really be based on religion (at least as applied to African Americans), precisely because the language of religious liberty and diversity was so well ensconced in the national discourse by that time. Consequently, defenses of white supremacy hinged more on pseudo-biological notions of race.

The point here is somewhat reminiscent of Colin Kidd’s The Forging of Races, which argues that the biblical narratives consistently undercut theories of polygeny, hence the secularization of racist constructions over time. To that, Beneke adds the following:

Since the 1950s, we have seen a shift in public language regarding race that was matched only once in American history -- by the shift in public language regarding religion that occurred during the eighteenth century. WE can be as thankful that terms such as ‘colored’ and ‘negro’ have most disappeared from our vocabularies as late eighteenth-century liberals and evangelicals were that terms such as ‘sectaries’ and ‘heretics’ had mostly disappeared from theirs. We decry the racial bigot, just as they decried the religious bigot. In both cases, the principle that weighs against exclusivist and implicitly hierarchical language is equal recognition. In both cases, integration helps to ensure that uncharitable language is confined to private life.

The second major objection is the harsh reality of anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century, the rise of which appears to contradict the major thrust of this book. This simply stands as a glaring exception to the story, and Beneke acknowledges the point: “Emboldened by their numbers and chastened by a surge of Protestant bigotry, the Catholic leadership rejected the established formula of religious pluralism in the United States. Full integration would simply have required too many unforgivable concessions. Decades passed before either they or the Protestant majority were fully ready to once again treat Catholicism as just one of many denominations.”

Later he addresses the story of the persecution of Mormons, and again finds that “When it came to antebellum Catholics and Mormons, the Protestant formula of equal rights for private judgment and social integration largely failed. . . . Mainstream Protestants had extended the canopy of ecumenism so broadly that they may have had a hard time understanding why anyone would refuse to take refuge beneath it. What reason could be given for such recalcitrance? When the answer was excessively complex or sufficiently unappealing, Protestants blamed Catholic missionaries and secret Mormon rituals; they blamed the pope and they blamed Joseph Smith. Whenever possible, they refrained from blaming anyone’ s particular beliefs, just as they refrained from blaming their own.”

Beneke’s lively and smartly optimistic book leaves me with a few thoughts. First, the story of Protestant pluralism traced here is more important than I have given it credit for. It was not easy to achieve; it was far in advance of most of the rest of Europe in practice (even if Locke provided many of the theories); and it provided some essential preconditions for pluralisms to come later. Second, the whiteness embedded in the particular concept of pluralism traced in this book remains central; Beneke repeatedly acknowledges this, but I would stress the point further. Finally, it makes me wonder if this is sort of Whig history in reverse. The more somber assessment provided in the epilogue chapter, in which groups outside the Protestant canopy found little or no protection from the rain (pun intended) of intolerance , suggests how Americans who had moved beyond toleration pretty soon thereafter moved back well on the other side of that ideological divide. Perhaps my classroom chestnut had it exactly backwards. History could repeat itself, as it were, twice: the first time as triumph, the second time as farce.

Mormon History Association Awards

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: MORMON HISTORY ASSOCIATION STUDENT AWARDS

The Mormon History Association is pleased to announce two award competitions for exceptional student work exploring the history of those religious traditions originating with Joseph Smith, Jr. The Juanita Brooks Undergraduate and Graduate Paper Awards will be given to the best unpublished papers written in 2008 by an undergraduate and graduate student, respectively.

All submissions must be sent electronically (as either a "WordPerfect," "Word," or ".pdf" document) to J. Spencer Fluhman, Brigham Young University: fluhman AT byu DOT edu.

Submissions should include a cover sheet detailing the student's biographical information: name, department, institution, and undergraduate or graduate major, etc. Submissions must be received by March 1, 2009, to be considered. One submission per student, please. Awards will be presented at the MHA annual meeting in Springfield, Illinois, in May 2009.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: MORMON HISTORY ASSOCIATION ARTICLE AWARDS

The Mormon History Association (MHA) is pleased to announce awards for exceptional published scholarship exploring the history of those religious traditions originating with Joseph Smith, Jr. The T. Edgar Lyon best article award and j. talmage Jones Awards of excellence will be given to the best articles published in 2008. Any member of the Mormon History Association may submit or nominate an article for consideration. Publishers/editors can submit up to five articles. All submissions must be sent electronically (as either a "WordPerfect," "Word," or ".pdf" document) to Michael N. Landon: landonmn AT ldschurch DOT org. Submissions must be received by February 15, 2009, to be considered. Awards will be presented at the MHA annual meeting in Springfield, Illinois, in May 2009.

Matthew Sutton on Mountain Meadows

by John G. Turner

The December 30 Christian Century has Matt Sutton's review of Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which almost certainly was the 2008 bestseller in Mormon history until the appearance of the first volume of the Joseph Smith Papers. Sutton allows that Massacre provides a good narrative of the events leading up to September 11, 1857, and makes a compelling case that [Brigham] Young did not order the massacre." He laments, however, the decision of the authors (Ronald Walker, Richard Turley, and Glen Leonard) to concentrate solely on the events leading up to the massacre and the massacre itself, saving the "aftermath" for a second book:

They deal solely with the crime, ignoring what they call the punishment, which was in fact a horrifying lack of justice in Young's Mormon-dominated Utah and gravely inadequate efforts by the church in most of the decades since to deal forthrightly with the controversy.

Sutton attributes this decision to the authors' position as believing Mormon historians:

They are certainly good historians, but they are also faithful Mormons. They probably could not find any way to tell the rest of the story without sacrificing one of these two commitments—either they would compromise historical integrity or they would anger their church.

This is a huge and complex topic, and I hope some of our readers will share their thoughts and expertise. My hesitant opinions on the massacre can be found here. My response to Matt's concern in a nutshell: If the authors made a compelling case about the culpability for the massacre, why presume they could not write an equally compelling account of its aftermath?

Readers looking for a detailed discussion of Walker, Turley, and Leonard's book should investigate this post at By Common Consent. Those interested in the dynamics of faith in Mormon History may enjoy this recent discussion at Juvenile Instructor.

Prophets, Prophets Every Where

by John G. Turner

From our recent posts it strikes me that we have no shortage of prophets in American religious history. Paul's quite right to point us to Thomas Slaughter's biography of John Woolman, which I'm eager to read.

For those who prefer to get their prophecy straight from the prophet's mouth (or pen, rather, or clerk's pen), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has just published its long-awaited first volume of the Joseph Smith Papers. Any friends or family still trying to find me a Christmas present have their problem solved. Update: I hear the first print run sold out. Still, I take belated gifts.

Speaking of prophets, I just enjoyed reading our friend Ed Blum's W.E.B. Du Bois, a very welcome diversion from the end-of-the-semester crunch. I've had a particularly soft spot for Du Bois ever since a member of one of my first classes submitted an earnest five-page essay on "W.E.B. Dubious." The spellchecker is not your friend!

I know others have discussed Ed's book here, but for those of you who have yet to savor his "religious biography" of an American Prophet, make plans over the holidays. One of the reasons this book succeeds is because of Ed's own passion (devotion, even) about Du Bois: I wrote this book as an acolyte, imagining myself sitting at Du Bois's feet, reading over his shoulder, and listening to the responses of the many he touched. I wrote this book to learn religion and spirituality from Du Bois. For certain months, I tried to live his day-to-day professional routine: morning walks, regular lunches, and evening conversation. I prayed his prayers to my students and endeavored to feel his moving in their hearts.

Blum proves a perceptive student of his seer, excoriating white American Christianity for its racist sins: As whites conflated the jig of Jim Crow with the teachings of Jesus Christ, and as they tightened the noose of Judge Lynch in the name of Jehovah Lord, the spiritual wage of whiteness sanctified the violent white supremacist America. Blum, though, doesn't end with prophetic rage. Du Bois and Blum preach from both testaments. As Du Bois prayed, "Nothing is so bad that good may not be put into it and make it better and save it from utter loss."

I learned a great deal from this book, one that will help me in the classroom, first by prompting me to assign not only Souls of Black Folk but to have students sample Du Bois's essays and short stories. I did not know that Du Bois wrote stories and poems with black Christs, mulatto Christs, and female Christs. Blum perceptively connects his prophet with later developments in black theology, liberation theology, and womanist theology.

I loved reading Du Bois's answer to "Is the civilization of the United States Christian?" He thought the question absurd. How African Americans (and, to a large extent, any historically informed and thoughtful Christian) must cringe when leaders of the Religious Right speak wistfully of returning to past Golden Ages of American Christianity that included things like slavery, lynchings, and segregation. Blum also rejects such frameworks: What makes no sense, however, is that an America of bombs and threats and red-scare witch hunts has been painted religious, while Du Bois's endorsements of peace, disarmament, economic uplift, and human brotherhood have been declared antireligious.

Prophets are never perfect. In Du Bois's case, it's still difficult for me not to be stunned at his credulous praise of the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison accepted the truth of communism as a "god that failed" -- Du Bois seems to have hardened his heart to the evils of Stalinist communism. When it comes to prophets in that era, I find Reinhold Niebuhr (or Wright and Ellison for that matter) to be a surer guide.

The most immediate contribution of Blum's book is his correction of a historiography that has presented Du Bois as irreligious or even antireligious. Blum easily convinced me that the truth is much more complex. Moreover, Blum sets aside the "audacious" proposition that he or anyone else could render a definitive judgment on the nature of Du Bois's belief, instead focusing on Du Bois's writings and the way that readers often received them as religious missives.

As Ed suggests in one of his recent posts, we need to be sensitive to the "destructivity of some religious forms in the United States," particularly -- I would add -- those of our own faith traditions if we have them. Blum has clearly learned that lesson well from Du Bois.

In terms of the prophetic subject of my own work, I'm certainly open to learning lessons from Brigham Young. I think I'll stop short of proclaiming myself an acolyte, however, as my wife warns against the full embrace of his lifestyle.

Scholarly Categories

by John G. Turner

I recently attended a service at a church belonging to the Anglican Mission in the Americas, which according to the movement's website is "a missionary movement of Rwanda committed to reaching the unchurched in North America."

The service featured liturgy (not surprising), praise songs, and hands being held high or waved in the air. One could fairly categorize it as evangelical, I think. Does that mean conservative? Not in terms of the worship music, which one certainly wouldn't hear at Trinity Church in Boston. Not in terms of race, as the congregation was biracial, unusual in these parts. In terms of theology? Probably, but "conservative" is a pretty imprecise term anyway.

The service got me thinking about how difficult it can be to categorize American churches and religious movements (it's hard enough for me to categorize myself sometimes). Historians like to bring order out of chaos. We hypothesize, categorize, and generalize -- how else to make sense out of the mountains of evidence we encounter?

I find it very difficult to place Mormonism on the landscape of antebellum American religion. Catherine Albanese, in A Republic of Mind and Spirit, places Mormonism within a broad stream of metaphysical religion. While I see some connections here (the Latter-day Saint emphasis on restoring family connections across the generations, for instance, was shared by many other nineteenth-century metaphysical movements), it is an imperfect fit. "Thus community among them," Albanese writes of metaphysicians, "has tended to be ad hoc and flexible, and authoritarian voices and concerns have not gotten very far." (pp. 6-7) Although particularly during the church's pre-Utah years, authoritarianism was always contested, it did get rather far in this case.

It's equally misleading to simplistically situate Mormons amidst the millenarians, the restorationists, the seekers, the hermeticists, or the radical evangelicals. Thus, for me, making sense of Mormonism is a constant challenge. The organizational hierarchy is baffling. As Richard Bushman concedes, "any effort to extract an organizational chart ends in confusion." (Rough Stone Rolling, 253) The theology is equally complex. The early Church of Christ (later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) shared characteristics with other restorationists, sometimes reflected the vibrant spirituality and theology of radical evangelicalism, and illustrated the influence of folk magic in the Early Republic.

Brigham Young expressed a similar frustration -- wonder, really, in his case -- when describing his 1832 conversion:

When I undertook to sound the doctrine of "Mormonism," I supposed I could handle it as I could the Methodist, Presbyterian, and other creeds of Christendom, which I had paid some considerable attention to, from the first of my knowing anything about religion. When "Mormonism" was first presented to me, I had not seen one sect of religionists whose doctrines, from beginning to end, did not appear to me like the man's masonry which he had in a box, and which he exhibited for a certain sum. He opened the main box from which he took another box; he unlocked that and slipped out another, then another, and another, and thus continued to take box out of box until he came to an exceedingly small piece of wood; he then said to the spectators, "That, gentlemen and ladies, is free masonry." I found all religions comparatively like this-they were so deficient in doctrine that when I tried to tie the loose ends and fragments together, they would break in my hands. When I commenced to examine "Mormonism," I found it impossible to take hold of either end of it. (Brigham Young discourse of 17 April 1853)

Most unique was the presence of the "Golden Bible," the Book of Mormon. In the end, though, what I find most striking about the early Latter-day Saint movement is its inherent dynamism, which the new Scripture symbolized. [I'm influenced by Terryl Givens's superb analysis here]. The Saints accepted not only an open canon but a prophet who continually took them in new directions, theologically and temporally. Especially during Joseph Smith's lifetime, and to a lesser extent under Brigham Young, Latter-day Saint theology and practice remained intensely fluid and dynamic. That dynamism perplexed Smith's followers and continues to perplex historians. It's hard to take hold of either end of it.

Seeing Visions, Hearing Things, and Having Fits

John G. Turner

Thanks for the proclaimed respite, Paul. It will do us all good.

My first week in graduate school, one of my professors assigned The Social History of Truth by Steven Shapin. I spent an entire weekend carefully reading it, underlining furiously, and taking copious notes. By the time my seminar met, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the book beyond its title. Its entire content had mysteriously eluded me.

It can be tough to visit foreign historiographical territory, even within the field of American religious history. I've been trying to get up to speed on religion in the antebellum United States to provide me with some context in my grapple with Mormonism. Therefore, I'm reading some new books and reviewing some I too loosely perused in graduate school. I found I absorbed Nathan Hatch's Democratization much more than Jon Buter's Awash in a Sea of Faith, for instance, so I've reread Butler. I love his characterization of the antebellum "spiritual hothouse."

Having mostly concentrated on evangelicalism, I find myself challenged by Catherine Albanese's insistence on the "role of metaphysics as a major player in the evolution of the national religiosity." (A Republic of Mind and Spirit) Moreover, although I've encountered histories of the occult in Butler and in various works on Mormonism, I'm staggered at Albanese's detailed and complex accounts of hermeticism, alchemy, and other forms of the occult in the United States. Unlike Butler, she doesn't think magic and the occult became relegated to the "folk" by the end of the eighteenth century. I also found her sections on Spiritualism and Theosophy very illuminating.

In seeking to further understanding these and related topics, I've turned to Ann Taves's Fits, Trances, & Visions, which traces religious and scientific accounts of involuntary movements from the awakenings of the 1740s through William James. As much a contribution to Religious Studies as history, Taves highlights the role of Methodism in American society in ways new to me, such as John Wesley's relatively open stance toward the supernatural, the development of "shouting Methodism," and the beginning healing revivals at the end of the nineteenth century. I found myself taking away insights about everything ranging from Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Smith to clairvoyant somnambules. [If there isn't a recent scholarly biography of Ellen G. White (the adventist prophetess), it needs to be written!]

I'm also very impressed with Leigh Schmidt's Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment. Intrigued by Joseph Smith pronouncing Brigham Young's glossolalia "the pure Adamic language," I learned from Schmidt that disciples of Swedenborg, among others, sought the pure tongue of angels in nineteenth-century America.

Unfortunately, my encounter with Albanese, Taves, and Schmidt -- all very erudite monographs -- leaves me feeling slightly akin to my reading of The Social History of Truth. Although I now have some sense of Swedenborg, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, I've realized not only how influential some of these "alternative" (i.e., not strictly Protestant) movements were but also how difficult they are to understand (at least for me). Perhaps I should have stuck with what Albanese terms the "evangelical thesis." I hadn't been planning on spending time on spiritualism in my American Religious History class this spring but now feel it's essential, so I'm going to have to spend more time digesting these topics. [I'm going to read Larry Moore's book on spiritualism, which I have hitherto neglected -- his Religious Outsiders is one of my all-time favorites, not least for his chapter on Mormonism]. Any suggestions for further reading on these subjects?