One of “the great achievements of American literature”: Mormonism in Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, Part 1

During Winter semester 2006 I attended Grant Underwood’s U.S. Religious History course at BYU.[1] Our text for the class was Martin Marty’s Pilgrims in their Own Land, a narrative overview of American religious history. Although Marty is widely recognized as one of the leading historians of American religion, his chapter on Mormons is, to put it kindly, lacking. Many of the students in Underwood’s class complained widely that Marty “got it all wrong,” and “if he’s this wrong on Mormonism, how can we trust the rest of the book?” I remember thinking that these students were missing a crucial point; the greatest value in Marty’s book was not in the details of his presentation, but rather in the placing of Mormonism within the wider tapestry of America’s religious history. I thought, “We can’t expect these major historians to know all the details. What is important is where they place us.” Similarly, a year ago Chris wrote a post on Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution, in which Chris argued that the value of Sellers’s work was not in his admittedly-flawed discussion of Mormonism, but rather in the number of pages that Sellers chose to devote to Joseph Smith’s religion.

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Benchmark Books Lecture: George Smith on Nauvoo Polygamy

On December 10, 2008 Benchmark Books hosted a lecture/book signing with George Smith for his newly released Navuoo Polygamy: “But We Called It Celestial Marriage”.  We hope to have a review up soon of this book.  In the mean time, we want to provide a transcript of the proceedings.  Special thanks go to Brent Brizzi for his painstaking work in providing a transcription of the evening’s lecture.

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Book Review: Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to In Your Face

James Twitchell. Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to In Your Face. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. 324 pp.

James Twitchell, professor of English and Advertising at The University of Florida, explains on his website that his research interests include the effort to “interpret American culture in terms of commercialism.”

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“gigantic and sometimes polemical”: The Persistent Marginalization of Mormon History as an (Un)acceptable Field of Study

I am making my way through Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. I’ve skimmed through most of it before, but because it is the primary text to be used for a course I’m TAing next semester, I’m taking my time and more thoroughly analyzing the book.

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States and Nations

I just finished The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin, 2006), an 800-page tome by Niall Ferguson, the Lawrence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. [Tisch and Hoover, an interesting pair of sponsors.] Ferguson recounts the violent first half of the 20th century with reference to nations (in the classical sense of “peoples” or, more modernly, ethnic groups) rather than states, but doesn’t leave much hope for improvement as we move through the first half of the 21st century.  I’ll throw out a lifeline [hint: religion] in the closing paragraph.

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Examining Mormon Ethnicity (Part II)

I realized after thinking about my previous post that I did not really summarize what scholars mean by defining Mormons as an “ethnic” group or “ethnicity.” Different historians have explained the idea in different ways. For example, Dean L. May’s explanation emphasizes the shared migratory experience of the pioneers and the voluntary spatial isolation represented by Mormon settlement in the West. [1] Jan Shipps similarly argues in her Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition that “by virtue of a common paradigmatic experience as well as isolation, [Latter-day Saints have acquired an ethnic identity so distinct that it sets the Saints apart in much the same fashion that ethnic identity sets the Jews apart. [2] Patricia Limerick outlines the components of Mormon ethnicity as “the creation of a community in which religious belief laid the foundations for a new worldview, a new pattern of family organization, a new set of ambitions, a new combination of common bonds and obligations, a new definition of separate peoplehood.” [3] All of these definitions sound very apt until you start to think about the process of defining and the ways that these definitions either include or exclude.

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What’s in a Name, or, Are Fundamentalist Mormons Christian?

The now-common question, “Are Mormons Christian?” (and it’s various derivations, i.e. “Is Mormonism Christian?”; “Are anti-Mormons Christian?”; etc) has generated significant discussion, thoughtful analysis, contentious argument, and unfortunately quite a bit of immaturity, pettiness, and frustration among Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christians, and interested apologists and scholars over the years.

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