Mormon Studies at AAR-SBL

Next weekend, tens of thousands of scholars of religion will come together in Baltimore, Maryland, for the joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. You could review the full program book for each group, but we thought we’d save you some time and trouble by providing a round-up of sessions and papers of interest to the Mormon Studies community. I have highlighted the JI affiliation of specific panelists. We hope to see many of you there!

For more information on any of the panels and papers listed below, including abstracts and the location of the presentations, please visit the official conference program books.

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Response: J.B. Haws Answers Questions about his recent JMH article and his forthcoming book (Part II)

We’re pleased today to welcome back J.B. Haws for Part II of our Q & A on his recent article in the JMH and his forthcoming book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), both exploring the changing image of Mormons in American media from George Romney’s presidential run in the 1960s to his son Mitt Romney’s campaigns in the early 21st century. Last time, we focused mainly on Haws’ methods and sources. Today, we’re exploring specific aspects of his analysis and a few of his conclusions.

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Response: J.B. Haws Answers Questions about his recent JMH article and his forthcoming book (Part I)

In August, I reviewed J.B. Haws’ recent article ?When Mormonism Mattered Less in Presidential Politics: George Romney?s 1968 Window of Possibilities?, published in the summer issue of the Journal of Mormon History. Haws, an Assistant Professor of Church History at BYU, graciously agreed to participate in a Q & A to answer some of my lingering questions and those submitted by members of the JI community. In the course of our conversation, we also discussed how the research he presented in his article is extended in his forthcoming (and highly-anticipated!) book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), which promises to be an important and much-needed addition to our understanding of Mormonism in the contemporary period, as well as of public representations (and misrepresentations) of Mormonism across the last half of the 20th century.

JBH: I should say, by way of preface, that as I read through your questions, my reaction after every one was to think, ?Wow?great question.?  But I?m going to resist typing that every time (but just know I?m still thinking that!).  Thanks for these thoughtful and thought-provoking questions.

CHJ: Thank you, J. B.! We’re excited that you were willing to offer us some answers. So?let’s get to it!

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A Crash Course in Material Culture for Tourists: The Mormon Beehive

Is this really a post about material culture? I started out thinking it would be, but I suppose it hasn’t really ended up that way as I’m not analyzing the ways in which the makers or users of these objects physically interact with them. Yet I think there’s something significant in the fact that the Mormon beehive is such a substantial physical presence, both as it is materially incorporated into so many Mormon sites and as it appears in so many of the mundane physical assertions of state power in Utah. Perhaps I’m grasping at straws in an effort to anchor myself to our monthly theme here at JI ? I’ll leave it for the readers of this post to decide!

I?ve always been a very visual person, and I take great delight in quizzing myself and the people around me on the people and pictures that we encounter in our everyday lives. I?m told it?s something of a trial to watch any BBC production with me, as every time a new character appears on screen I immediately give my fellow viewers a brief history of the actor?s previous performances and explain how their previous roles are being used to shape the audience?s reaction to the current character. (This might explain why my husband often chooses to go do something else when I turn on Masterpiece Theatre….) I do the same thing with Disney movies, and I also delighted, when I worked for the Disney Store in college and made frequent excursions to Orlando, at finding the ?hidden Mickeys? that Disney incorporates into designs all over its theme parks. It?s a shame Dan Brown isn?t better at what he does ? I?m a big fan of finding and analyzing hidden symbols… when they?re well hidden (or at least unnoticed or misunderstood by many) and worth finding anyway.

So imagine how much fun I have with the many not-so-hidden but all-too-overlooked symbols I have learned through my study of the Latter-day Saints (as evidenced here by the fact that all of the pictures below are mine, unless otherwise noted).

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Review: Haws, “When Mormonism Mattered Less in Presidential Politics: George Romney’s 1968 Window of Possibilities”

Mitt Romney?s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns came to seem, in the media frenzy of the last few years, like bookends to America?s much-touted Mormon moment. But Americans? fascination with the Latter-day Saints did not begin or end with Mitt Romney. This is not the first period in American history when non-Mormon Americans have, to some extent, embraced their LDS neighbors. In fact, Mitt Romney isn?t even the first Republican Romney whose religious affiliation has colored his national political image. His father George, the successful head of the American Motor Company in the 1950s and popular governor of Michigan in the 1960s, was a prominent candidate for the 1968 Republican nomination for President. Also like Mitt, George owed at least some measure of his political success to a period of increased interest in and positive feeling towards the Mormons. As J.B. Haws, Assistant Professor of Church History at BYU, shows in his article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Mormon History, George Romney?s candidacy was not seen as tainted by a ?Mormon problem,? as were his son?s campaigns a half-century later. [1] In the United States in the 1960s, the Romneys? Mormonism simply ?mattered less? than it does in the 21^st century. And if it mattered at all, Haws argues, it did so by lending George Romney the air of ?benign wholesomeness? that characterized public perceptions of the Latter-day Saints in this period (99).

Haws? current article is based on the research for his forthcoming book The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (OUP, November 2013), and essentially lays the groundwork for that longer study, in which he traces public perceptions of Mormonism in the American media across the last half-century. In the 1960s, he argues, George Romney ran for the Republican nomination for the presidency and faced remarkably few challenges to his religion?or at least what look like remarkably few challenges to those of us who lived through the most recent Mormon moment. By comparing political polling data from both Romneys? campaigns and examining news coverage of the elder Romney?s presidential aspirations and editorial commentary on his campaign and on the larger question of the role a candidate?s religion should play in voters? assessment of his fitness for office, Haws convincingly demonstrates that Americans were less concerned in the 1960s?or at least said they were less concerned?by the possibility of having a Mormon in the White House than were their early 21^st-century counterparts. While George Romney?s religion was occasionally challenged?primarily, Haws claims, regarding the Church?s policies on race (remember, George Romney was running for the presidency in the midst of the Civil Rights movements, and a decade before the Church lifted its ban on blacks in the priesthood)?according to Haws it was not Romney?s religion but his moderate politics and his ill-advised declaration in 1967 that he had been ?brainwashed? into supporting the Vietnam war that sunk him with American voters. In short, Haws argues that political views, not religious beliefs, were the elder Romney?s greatest obstacles.

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Wife… Mother… And…?

Let me be blunt. This makes me mad:

A seemingly innocent advertisement…

I walk home from work most days and on a one mile stretch of that walk, on Western Avenue in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, this ad appears on no fewer than three bus stop shelters. One of these bus stops is only a quarter of a mile from a playground and little league baseball diamond. It?s across the street from a grocery store. It doubles as a stop for school buses for children of various ages. And in a city where people routinely walk and use the public transit system, you can bet it gets seen. I?ve been contemplating it for weeks.

Why does this advertisement make me mad, you ask?

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Guest Post: Martyn Oliver, “Made in America”

PLEASE NOTE: All issues with the images below are the result of Cristine’s lack of technical prowess.

I?m pleased once again to present a guest post from another colleague whose work explores images of minorities in American culture, Martyn Oliver. Martyn is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He holds a BA from the University of Puget Sound, and earned his PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. Martyn?s work explores the construction of religious identity with particular emphasis on how Western literature depicts Islam and Muslims. 

I?m going to have to start with a confession: I don?t really know a whole lot about Mormons or the LDS Church. Aside from a few ex-Mormon friends and a very strange night in Paris? Charles de Gaulle airport, [1] my encounter with Mormonism both personally and professionally has been frighteningly thin.

So it?s been with great interest that I?ve followed The Juvenile Instructor during this month on Many Images of Mormonism. Crissy has this wonderful habit of inviting folk to do things they don?t know they can do and then convincing them they?re perfect for the task. Needless to say, I?ve been trying to figure out what her nefarious scheme is for me this time around.

To get right to it, she asked me to contribute something for y?all because I study Islam and the religious traditions of Central Asia, often in terms of how these traditions conform to or challenge our preconceptions about them, or in terms of how ?foreign? religions are depicted in the West (by which I don?t mean cowboys, I mean white folk?we should be honest about what the ?West? implies).

Anyhow, I?ve got this idea brewing: there?s an obvious tension within Mormonism, which you all have begun to spell out in fascinating detail, between the maintenance of?for lack of a better term?Mormon exceptionalism and Mormonism as authentically American. Without intending to gloss over the many subtleties of this situation, it seems that by and large there has been a push (as illustrated by Erin Anderson?s reprinting of Calvin Grondahl?s cartoon) for Mormons to be the ?most? American, and in the process not only contort themselves into rigid caricatures, but also implicitly illustrate the foibles of American self-perception. To put it another way, they try and out-WASP the WASP?s.

From my view, this is a mistake. If Mormonism really wanted to make common cause with a group of fellow Americans who are both religiously peculiar while still being deeply and inherently American, the obvious choice is clear. They should cozy up with what was once the Nation of Islam.

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Guest Post: Erin Anderson, “In and Out”

Today, as part of our continuing series on Mormonism’s Many Images, we are pleased to welcome Erin Anderson as a guest blogger. Erin left the LDS Church in her early teens, along with her parents and siblings; her extended family is still active. She holds degrees in religious studies from New York University and Boston University, and works as an administrator at Harvard.

The last time I set foot in an LDS building, more than a decade ago, I spent the entire day in the foyer. It was an ideal location. Like the rest of my immediate family, I had come to welcome these in-between settings: close enough to see friends and relatives, but removed from problematic religious spaces. My uncle?s wedding at the temple? We?ll volunteer to watch the kids outside. Visiting grandparents? Let?s fly in on Sunday afternoon, to spare them from asking us to church. We kept the peace by finding comfortable gray areas, neither embracing nor rejecting our heritage.

My parents, sisters, and I had withdrawn from a tight-knit congregation two years earlier, resulting in this ?betwixt and between? strategy. Even in Massachusetts? progressive Mormon community?surrounded by the lovely women of Exponent II?it had simply become too difficult for my mom and dad to raise three liberal, feminist daughters. And so I twiddled my thumbs that Sunday outside the chapel doors, already a veteran of living between two cultures at fourteen.

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Review: Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth, updated edition

Terryl L. Givens. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Paperback. 978-0-19-993380-8. $24.95.

Since its original publication in 1997, Terryl Givens? The Viper on the Hearth has been a mainstay of the study of Mormonism and anti-Mormonism in American culture. And deservedly so. Givens? work provided the first substantial scholarly book-length exploration of images of the Latter-day Saints in American culture in any time period. His examination of the representations of Mormons in the United States in the 19^th century is sweeping in its coverage of the period; thorough in its inclusion of a wide variety of sources, from newspapers to popular fiction to fictive memoirs; and convincing in its argument that, whatever American claims of separation of church and state and tolerance for differing religious views may have been, religion was at the heart of mainstream America?s intolerance, suspicion, and occasional violence toward the Mormons. For many students of Mormonism and of American religion, Viper has served as an introduction to anti-Mormonism in America. For the generation of scholars who have examined the subject since Viper?s first publication?including Megan Sanborn-Jones, Patrick Q. Mason, and J. Spencer Fluhman?Givens? scholarship has served as a guide. No one can engage in a study of anti-Mormonism in the United States without responding to his arguments about the mechanisms of and motivations behind anti-Mormon sentiment in American culture.

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Don’t Stand So Close to Me: On Not Hearing Elizabeth Smart

Please note: This post has been corrected. In earlier versions, the second and third paragraph were inadvertently transposed.

As we continue this month to consider images of Mormonism in popular culture, the Juvenile Instructor is pleased to host guest blogger Megan Goodwin. Megan is currently completing her PhD at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Her research interests include American religions, gender and sexuality, religious language and literature, religious alterity, and contemporary critical thought. Her dissertation, entitled “Good Fences: American Sexual Exceptionalism and Marginal Religions,” examines three captivity narratives – Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987), Michelle Smith’s Michelle Remembers (1989), and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) – as articulations of American Protestant anxieties about the challenges marginal religions pose to normative masculinity. Please join us in welcoming Megan to the Juvenile Instructor.

Elizabeth Smart-Gilmour

Elizabeth Smart made headlines this month when she advocated for human trafficking survivors at a conference hosted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Smart this year – I made her kidnapping (or rather Jon Krakauer’s treatment of Smart’s captivity in his inexorable Under the Banner of Heaven) the focal point of a national conference paper and a key element of my dissertation chapter on anti-Mormon religious intolerance.  But I missed that she’d spoken at this conference until the blogosphere erupted over her alleged condemnation of abstinence-based sex education.

During her 13 minute presentation, Smart recounted the details of her captivity and emphasized the need to teach children that they have intrinsic worth, regardless of how others might abuse or exploit them.  She further noted that “one of the questions that is most commonly asked [of her] is ‘well, why didn’t you run away?  Why didn’t you yell?  Why didn’t you scream?’”

This question immediately raised the hackles of my inner humorless feminist, who was already riled after a year of teaching Women’s and Gender Studies 101.  This question, as Smart notes, is common – an almost knee-jerk refrain when people feel survivors didn’t resist their own exploitation and abuses enough. (The metrics of “enough” are usually a bit murky.) This question, as I explained to my students this year, perpetuates rape culture: the popular and often unquestioned conviction that men are naturally sexually aggressive and dominant, while women are the natural targets of that sexual aggression and must resist unwanted overtures.  Or to put in simpler terms: women should try to avoid being raped, because, you know, rape happens.

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