By GuestSeptember 21, 2012
We recently invited Jared Farmer, associate professor of history at Stony Brook University and author of On Zion’s Mount, to answer some questions about his latest project, Mormons in the Media, 1830-2012.
What was the genesis of this (e-book) project? Did it start as a casual interest that only later became a serious project? Was it an outgrowth of teaching?
All of the above. The past couple of years I spent a lot of time creating a personal archive of historic images for use in my lecture courses. In the process I got quite good at finding images online–using familiar search engines (e.g., Google Images, Flickr), as well as some obscure sites, and many educational databases that are inaccessible to non-academics because of paywalls. This past spring, once Romney cinched the GOP nomination, I decided it would be worthwhile–and fun–to put my image-finding skills to public use. What began as a diversion from my book manuscript (Trees in Paradise: A California History, due out next year) became a minor obsession; what was supposed to be a little online illustrated essay on portrayals of Mormon facial hair became Mormons in the Media. I ended up spending far more time than I budgeted, and I used up my professorial tithing on eBay buying LDS ephemera.
What led you to publish electronically rather than in a more traditional format?
Three reasons: 1) I wanted to get it out in time for the election season; and e-publishing, whatever else you may think of it, has a fast turnaround. 2) I wanted to reach a non-academic audience, including journalists. 3) It would be a violation of copyright law to commercially publish most of the twentieth-century material, and it would be a nightmare to track down permissions for print publication (and prohibitively expensive to pay use fees).
In the preface, you indicate that you will consider outsider-generated images of Mormons, as well as images promoted by Latter-day Saints themselves. To what extent were these coherent categories?
Today, Mormons are much more in control of their image than a century ago. There were, of course, Mormon painters, illustrators, and photographers in the pioneer period, but most of their work was created for home consumption, and there were precious few Latter-day Saints in positions of media power outside of Utah. For heuristic purposes, I would propose this rough periodization of Mormon image-making in the U.S. public sphere: 1) From Joseph Smith, Jr., to Joseph F. Smith, when outsiders largely defined the (overwhelmingly negative) visual image of Mormons. 2) From Joseph F. Smith to David O. McKay, when the LDS Church reacted defensively to continued anti-Mormon visual stereotypes, including cinematic images, and set up a rudimentary PR program. 3) From President McKay and the television until President Hinckley and the Internet, when the brethren in Salt Lake presided over a permanent, professionalized, proactive PR program. 4) The current era, dominated by the Web, in which images generated by Mormons, ex-Mormons, non-Mormons, and anti-Mormons swirl together, often making reference to one another; and in which lay members at their internet-connected devices do as much work as the expanded corps of media relations officers in the Church Office Building to shape the image of Mormons and Mormonism (sometimes at the invitation of the brethren, sometimes to their chagrin).
Who do you envision using this collection (the media? teachers? students? scholars?) and how?
I’m hoping that during the election season, my e-book will find its way into the hand” slaps” of many journalists assigned to the Romney beat and/or the religion beat. Although there are many new and noteworthy LDS-themed books out there–Joanna Brooks, Matthew Bowman, Spencer Fluhman, and John Turner being the most prominent authors–I think my work fills a niche: it’s illustrated, it’s in color, and it’s free.
At some point after the election, I plan to take down the website, and work on a final, revised version of Mormons in the Media that includes events up to Election Day. I also want to obtain higher-resolution scans of some of the older material. Next year I plan to create a personal website where I will permanently host the revised e-book.
Speaking of revisions: I rushed this out in time for the GOP convention. When I go back for a new round of editing, I anticipate that I will find more than a few errors and typos. If any of your readers spot mistakes, they should let me know. I also welcome ideas for additions.
After this “Mormon Moment” ends (I can sense the impending fatigue), my e-book will primarily be useful as a resource for undergraduate courses on U.S. western history and U.S. religious history. I would be delighted if professors devised primary source assignments around the collection, or simply projected some of the images in their lecture halls.
Also, perhaps a few graduate students and independent scholars will find seeds of research projects in this collection;or “image dump,” if you want to be critical. For this audience–including readers of the Juvenile Instructor–I wanted to provide a fresh (if admittedly rough) update to the classic (but now dated and out-of-date) The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834-1914 by Bunker and Bitton.
It’s a bit puzzling, given the current prominence of media studies and mass communication studies in academia, that scholars haven’t done more with LDS visual and material cultures as manifestations of American pop culture. For Mormon cultural apologetics, you can consult Terryl Givens’s excellent People of Paradox, but that’s not exactly what I’m looking for. I’m unmoved by the perennial question, “Where are the great Mormon artists?” (I think the answer remains “nowhere”–though I have a soft spot for Minerva Teichert). More fertile questions might include: Thinking historically and sociologically, what is the function of the “Mormon middlebrow”–the aesthetic behind almost all LDS art, architecture, and visual culture? What explains its endurance? What is the historical relationship between Joseph Smith’s fantastic religious imagination and the uninspired realism of twentieth-century visual imaginings of the pre-life, the afterlife, and the Book of Mormon? Why does the interior decoration of contemporary Mormon temples so closely resemble the faux-aristocratic styling on display in the steroidal mansions of the nouveau riche? How would one write the history of Mormon fashion?including outerwear, garments, and hair? What is the relationship of Latter-day Saints, past and present, to images of religious violence? How do anti-Mormon visual portrayals of temple violence relate to the much older anti-Semitic iconographic tradition of blood libel? And so on.
Your readers probably don’t need this advice, but I’ll give it anyway: For umpteen images of seldom-seen Mormoniana with expert historical commentary, you must follow Ardis Parshall at Keepapitchinin. Her blog is a box of treasures.
Do you see yourself, in part, as a “Mormon historian,” given that you wrote your first two books on Utah/Mormon-related topics and have now issued this e-book on Mormons in the media? Do you have future plans to write on Mormons/Mormonism?
Actually, I’ve never considered myself a Mormon historian. I wear two main hats: environmental historian and historian of the American West. As a subset of the latter, I proudly think of myself as a historian of Utah (and will be contributing the first chapter to a forthcoming textbook on that subject). My discomfort with the label “Mormon historian” is not primarily political. It’s more about being aware of my limitations as a scholar. I have expertise in the peoples and landscapes of Utah, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. But when it comes to the history of Mormonism, there is such a high standard of scholarship! When I compare myself to the leading researchers in the field, past and present, I can really only claim to be an expert on Mormonism of the 1850s, and perhaps Mormon-Indian relations across the nineteenth century. My command of Church history is competent but hardly extraordinary.
Because I am an insider-outsider (in contradistinction to Jan Shipps, an outsider-insider), I enjoy a sideways view of Mormonism. Because I know enough–but not too much–about LDS history, I probably see certain things and make certain connections more easily than most insiders and outsiders. I enjoy being an interloper.
In addition to my two main fields (environmental, western), I aspire to be a cultural critic with a broad purview, including religion. For example, I recently wrote an essay on yoga for Reviews in American History. Earlier I wrote a review of The Book of Mormon (the musical) for Religion Dispatches. Mormons in the Media falls in this category of cultural criticism.
After the upcoming revision of my e-book, I don’t anticipate doing another Mormon (or even western) project in the foreseeable future. My next couple of book projects will take me toward the global history of science and technology. But who knows: maybe someday, in my “senior years” as a scholar, I’ll come back home, as they say.
By GuestSeptember 18, 2012
MARK ASHURST-MCGEE is a historian and documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers Project, where he specializes in document analysis and documentary editing methodology. He holds a PhD in history from Arizona State University and has trained at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He is a coeditor of the first volume in the Journals series and of the first volume of the Histories series of the Joseph Smith Papers. He is an author of peer-reviewed articles on Joseph Smith and early Mormon history. The following selection is taken from his 2008 dissertation: “Zion Rising: Joseph Smith’s Early Social and Political Thought.” Other works growing out of his dissertation are published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Mormon History (“Zion in America: The Origins of Mormon Constitutionalism” [vol. 38, no. 3 – Summer 2012]: 90-101) and in the just recently released anthology War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives (Kofford Books, 2012). Selections from his dissertation have also appeared here at the Juvenile Instructor, here and here. Ashurst-McGee is currently working on articles on political restorationism and Zion nationalism along the path of turning the dissertation into a monograph.
Joseph Smith’s Enoch expansion built on that for Enoch’s grandfather Enos, the grandson of Adam. Due to the “secret works of darkness” that had pervaded the land, Enos led “the residue of the people of God . . . out from the land which was called Shulon and dwelt in a land of promise, which he called after his own son whom he had named Cainan.”[1] Here was the original exodus of the righteous from among the wicked. Earlier, before Shulon’s corruption, Cain and the brethren of his secret combination had left Shulon for the land of Nod. Now Enos led God’s people from corrupt Shulon to the promised land of Cainan. As in the Book of Mormon, whether the righteous emigrate from a wicked nation or the wicked emigrate from a righteous nation, Smith’s scriptural narratives tend toward the territorial separation of the two. When the people of God left Shulon, they took with them the “book of remembrance” that had been kept by the prophets since the days of Adam.[2] Here was the archetypal civic text on which to found a new civilization. Enoch grew to manhood in the “land of righteousness” established by his grandfather Enos.[3]
Joseph Smith’s dramatic expansion of Genesis 5:24: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”–is by far the longest of his many revisions–adding over 4,000 words to the biblical account. The narrative of Enoch’s walk with God was apparently one of the “plain and precious parts” removed from the Bible.[4] Enoch’s history, as restored by Smith, began with a prophetic calling. The Lord commanded Enoch to leave Cainan and cry repentance to all men. Like Moses, Enoch complained of his slow speech. The Lord encouraged him: “Go forth and do as I have commanded thee, and no man shall pierce thee. Open thy mouth, and it shall be filled. . . . Behold, my Spirit is upon you. Wherefore, all thy words will I justify. And the mountains shall flee before you, and the rivers shall turn from their course.”[5] When Enoch began preaching and prophesying, people exclaimed “there is a strange thing in the land, a wild man hath come among us.” However, when Enoch testified against the evil in society, “all men were offended because of him.” Yet “no man laid his hands on him. For fear came on all them that heard him, for he walked with God.”[6] As with the Book of Mormon prophets protected from imprisonment and murder, the Lord protected Enoch. He received such divine power in preaching that no one dared to lay hands on him or pierce him.
When Enoch returned to land of Cainan, he became the leader of the people of God and infused the entire land with the same protective power by which he had preached abroad. Enoch thereby protected Cainan when enemy nations came to war against them:
And he spake the word of the Lord, and the earth trembled and the mountains fled, even according to his command, and the rivers of water were turned out of their course, and the roar of the lions was heard out of the wilderness. And all nations feared greatly, so powerful was the word of Enoch and so great was the power of the language which God had given him. There also came up a land out of the depths of the sea. And so great was the fear of the enemies of the people of God that they fled and stood afar off and went upon the land which came up out of the depths of the sea. And the giants of the land also stood afar off.
Formerly threatening nations and races feared Enoch to the point that they abandoned their own homelands in order to distance themselves from Cainan. The Lord thus protected Cainan, increasing the territorial distance between the righteous and the wicked.[7] He furthermore “blessed the land” of Cainan and sent a curse of “wars and bloodsheds” among their enemies. Finally, the Lord “came and dwelt with his people.” Now, more than ever, “the fear of the Lord was upon all nations, so great was the glory of the Lord which was upon his people.” The Lord named his people “Zion” and assumed his rightful reign as “Messiah, the King of Zion.” Zion’s borders needed no defense. The fear of God’s glory kept enemy powers at bay and his curse occupied them with wars among themselves. As Enoch exclaimed: “Surely, Zion shall dwell in safety forever.”
While enjoying this peaceful safety from the threat of invading foreign powers, Zion also abounded in domestic peace and tranquility: “they were of one heart, and of one mind, and dwelt in righteousness, and there were no poor among them.” Economic equality fostered social harmony. The communitarian economy of the primitive church found its perfection and erased all class-based enmity. Zion existed as the peaceful refuge from the contention and violence of the world.[8]
In Zion, the Lord showed Enoch a vision of the future history of the world. “And he beheld, and lo, Zion in process of time was taken up into heaven. And the Lord said unto Enoch: “Behold mine abode forever.”[9] Here was the ultimate exodus of the righteous from among the wicked. Enoch’s city left the world of man behind to live with God in heaven. Decades later, Smith’s early disciple Orson Pratt stated that when the Lord exalted Zion, he took “the whole city, the people and their habitations.”[10] Brigham Young, another early disciple of Smith and later his successor, taught that Enoch and his people were taken up with “their houses, gardens, fields, cattle, and all their possessions”–even the city’s adjoining “land, rivers, and everything pertaining to it, were taken away.”[11] Pratt agreed that “all the region of country occupied by them was translated, or taken away from the earth.”[12] Young even characterized Zion’s territory as a “portion of the earth.”[13] In his journal, early Mormon apostle Wilford Woodruff recounted “the opinion of the Prophet Joseph” that “when the City of Enoch fled & was translated it was whare the gulf of Mexico now is. It left that gulf a body of water.”[14] If these later teachings and reminiscences embellished Smith’s Enoch narrative, they only fleshed out the earthy materiality of the event already present in Smith’s bible expansion. The Lord’s removal of Enoch’s city from the earth to “mine abode” embodied the theoretically extremities of territorial separation of the righteous from the wicked. The world of men was now ready to be destroyed in the flood.
Enoch’s Zion provided the model for the Zion Joseph Smith meant to build. While the history of the Nephites in the Book of Mormon conveyed the “fullness of the gospel,” it was, in the final analysis, “a Record of a fallen people.”[15] The book began with the sack of Jerusalem. It charted the rise but also the ruin of the Nephite and Jaredite nations. Like the history of ancient Israel or even the Roman republic, the Book of Mormon served as a cautionary tale. For any ancient civilization to serve as a perfect model to emulate, it would have had to have overcome any external enemy and internal weakness. It would still be in existence. Yet no such government could be found on the earth. The “translation” of Zion from the earth opened the possibility for another kind of usable past. Enoch’s Zion–a civilization that rose and never fell–offered an ideal model for Smith’s Zion.
Joseph Smith’s next major biblical expansion would center on the character of Melchizedek, the priest-king who had blessed Israel’s grandfather Abraham.[16] Melchizedek held the same priesthood as Enoch, and therefore had power “to put at defiance the armies of nations.” As the king of Salem, a predecessor of Jerusalem, Melchizedek apparently had the power to protect his people as Enoch had. He was also “the keeper of the storehouse of God; Him whom God had appointed to receive tithes for the poor. Wherefore Abram paid unto him tithes of all that he had, of all the riches which he possessed, which God had given him more than that which he had need.”[17] As with Enoch’s classless society of one heart and one mind, Melchizedek’s program for economic redistribution fostered domestic peace. Melchizedek was “called the King of heaven by his people, or, in other words, the King of peace”–equating heaven and peace.[18]
Smith’s expansion of Genesis 14 added that from the time of Enoch to that of Melchizedek, “men having this faith coming up unto this order of God, were translated and taken up into heaven”:
And now, Melchizedek was a priest of this order; therefore he obtained peace in Salem . . . . And his people wrought righteousness, and obtained heaven, and sought for the city of Enoch which God had before taken, separating it from the earth.[19]
Melchizedek’s Salem proved that Enoch’s Zion was not unique in world history. It was a model that could be followed.
In the New Testament, Jesus had taught the doctrine of rapture. He explained that the last days would be days of great wickedness as it was in the days of Noe.” In the glory of Christ’s second coming, the earth would be destroyed by a baptism of fire just as it had been destroyed by a baptism of water in the days of Noah. But, he explained, just before the great and dreadful day of his return, “there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”[20] The Lord would remove the elect from the earth before purifying it with fire. Smith’s expansion of Genesis 14 recognized the possibility of individual rapture. Men having faith and priesthood like Enoch “were translated and taken up into heaven.” Yet the ideal rapture was a community, even a national, event. The trajectory of the communitarian programs in Enoch’s Zion and Melchizedek’s Salem ended in heaven with the Lord. Not only primitive Christian discipleship but salvation itself was a social affair. Smith’s theology veered away not only from the social and economic individualism of Jacksonian America but from the salvation theology of Protestantism. Smith turned away from the New Testament focus on individual and otherworldly salvation to the Old Testament notions of national salvation.
Although Melchizedek’s Salem showed that Enoch’s model could be followed, it also signaled the importance of geography. Salem, associated with the Old Jerusalem of the Old World, existed as a sister city to Enoch’s Zion, associated with the New Jerusalem in the New World. While the Jaredite and Nephite nations had faltered in the New World, Zion had not. While the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judea had met their end in the Old World, Salem had survived. These were societies that never came to ruin and therefore left no ruins behind. They no longer existed not because they had gone the way of all kingdoms but because the Lord had taken them up into heaven. While individuals could be taken up, the ultimate ideal of collective rapture therefore had occurred only in Enoch’s Zion and Melchizedek’s Salem, the primitive counterparts to end-times Jerusalem and New Jerusalem. Collective rapture did not immediately follow from community holiness, it required the right place. Smith’s narratives of Zion and Salem thus connected communitarian soteriology with sacred geography.
In his vision of the history of the world, Enoch saw not only the flood, but the life and atonement of Jesus Christ in the meridian of time and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon in the last days. The Lord explained that the Book of Mormon would serve to “gather out mine own elect from the four quarters of the earth unto a place which I shall prepare…an holy city…that my people may gird up their loins and be looking forth for the time of my coming. For there shall be my tabernacle, and it shall be called Zion, a New Jerusalem.” The Lord further explained, “Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there.”[21] Enoch’s Zion would return to earth with the Lord and join the latter-day Zion. His city therefore was much more than a model for the latter-day Zion; their destinies intertwined. Enoch had seen the rise of Smith’s Zion in the last days. Smith now foresaw the return of Enoch’s Zion at the end of the world. The two Zions were actually two halves of the same history. Smith thus grounded his utopian vision of the future in a mythological narrative of the past. In Smith’s later expansion of the Noah story, the Lord revealed that the City of Enoch would some day “come down out of heaven, and possess the earth.”[22] With the Lord, the “King of Zion,” Enoch and Joseph would reclaim the world for God’s people. This was the ultimate territorial restoration. The meek would truly inherit the earth.
________
1 Moses 6:12-17, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 159.
2 Moses 6:46, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.
3 Moses 6:41, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.
4 1 Nephi 13:26, 32, 34.
5 Moses 6:32-39, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.
6 Moses 6:37-39, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.
7 Moses 7:13-15, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 164-65.
8 Moses 7:15-20; 7:53, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 164-69.
9 Moses 7:18-20, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 165.
10 Orson Pratt, Sermon, 19 July 1874, in Journal of Discourses 17 (1875):147 (145-54).
11Brigham Young, Sermon, 20 April 1856 and 3 June 1860, in Journal of Discourses 3 (1856):320 (316-27); 8 (1861):279 (277-80).
12 Orson Pratt, Sermon, 19 July 1874, in Journal of Discourses 17 (1875):147 (145-54).
13 Brigham Young, Sermon, 20 April 1856, in Journal of Discourses, 3 (1856):320 (316-27).
14 Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal 6:482, 7:129.
15 Articles and Covenants of the Church of Christ, June 1830, in Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations, 62-68.
16 Genesis 14:18-20.
17 Smith, expansion of Genesis 14, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 78-79.
18 Smith, expansion of Genesis 14, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 78; compare Alma 13:17-18.
19 Smith, expansion of Genesis 14, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 78.
20 Luke 17:26-36; compare Matthew 24:37-42.
21 Moses 7:61-64, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 168-69.
22 Smith, expansion of Genesis 9, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 67; compare Smith’s expansion of Genesis 14 (78).
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