This guest post comes from stephen b., a Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He writes about religion in public life, secularism, modernity, and the Progressive Era. He also hosts the Mormon Studies podcast Scholars & Saints.

While historians can do their work largely not reliant on “high theory,” theory can’t do its work without the contingency and specificity of history. In her book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood talks about the embodied religious practices of Egyptian Muslim women in the piety movement of the Islamic Revival during the mid-1990s. By analyzing the conditions under which these women became subjects through embodied practices such as arguing, reading, memorizing, teaching, and so forth, Mahmood illustrated concretely why theories of agency and subject formation in the work of Judith Butler are problematic in the ways that they epistemologically exclude possibilities of agency that do not center on the feminist/liberal assumption that freedom is constitutive of agency (Nor do they acknowledge the need to ground, as Mahmood says, “a theory” in concrete examples).

Relatively few historians (Taylor Petrey being an important exception) likely deal much with Butlerian subject formation, but hopefully the point is sufficiently clear that theories capable of challenging Butler rely on meticulous archival and ethnographic research. But let me describe why developing such a theory might appeal to Mormon historians and historians of Mormonism(s).

I believe that there are things to learn from both the practice of the historical craft on Mormonism(s) and the ethnographic detailing of contemporary Mormonism(s) and their disciplines of history.

Let me suggest two examples that show something like what I’m saying:

1. In what was, unbelievably (although not once you heard her), one of her first academic conference presentations, Cathy Gilmore recently applied Robert Orsi’s model from History and Presence to her work, suggesting, if memory serves, that real presence is a valuable frame for doing history which is illustrated extraordinarily well by the practices of Mormon family history. Although skillful, her use of Orsi is not the point here. Rather, Gilmore’s embodied experience as both a family historian and a historian in academe seems to have given her intuitions that Orsi expressed well in the language of theory. But the theory was always immanent in both the history about Mormons and the embodied practices of doing history as a Mormon.

A similar example is Jake Johnson’s concept of “vocal vicariousness” from his 2019 book Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America. Vocal vicariousness is a theory of modern agency and performance. Indeed, Johnson writes, “To be religious, especially in a secular age, is to have come to terms with the inevitability of sonic mediation and vicariousness” (11).

If you think about it for a bit, you’ll think of examples too.

To conclude, what kinds of theory might find inspiration in concepts such as “translation” or, indeed, a “metaphysics of translation” (or metaphysical translation)? What might an analysis of embodied Latter-day Saint practices reveal about Mormon subjectivity? What can Mormonism(s) teach us about how to be modern?  How might “Mormon theory” speak back to Foucault’s account of “power/knowledge” or to the modes of critique expressed in genealogy or close reading?

Perhaps Religious Studies scholars should worry less about applying theoretical frameworks to explain Mormonism and instead listen to what it can tell us about theory.