Where Do I Come From? What Am I? Where Am I Going?: Exploring Representations of Mormonism to Understand American Religious History

In my years in Boston, I have been a frequent visitor at the city?s wonderful Museum of Fine Arts. While I couldn?t name a single favorite object, one piece that I return to again and again is Paul Gauguin?s epic masterpiece, ?Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?? While there is much to be said about the painting, I?m most concerned in this post with its title. Students and scholars tend to be a self-critical bunch, and I think most of us regularly ask these questions of ourselves and try to have ready answers for our colleagues. But when you?re a non-Mormon in the world of Mormon Studies, I?ve found that those questions take on a special shape and urgency. Who am I? What?s my real interest in Mormonism? What exactly am I going to do with my scholarly explorations of Mormonism in American culture? What?s a non-Mormon doing studying the Latter-day Saints? Am I anti-? Is it a fetish? Am I on the road to conversion? All of these questions are regularly leveled at me by Mormons and non-Mormons alike, and regularly with a degree of suspicion bordering on accusation.

So, where do I come from? I was raised in rural America, in a family that I only realized as I got older was noteworthy for our relative religious diversity ? and our general acceptance of it. We counted members of a variety of Christian denominations in the extended clan, including a number of very heterodox members of different denominations (a Methodist grandmother who argued with people in church that the Trinity wasn?t biblical, anyone?), as well as nonbelievers of several different stripes. There was disagreement, but in general we accepted that we were all doing our best and, really, none of us could be sure we had the corner on the meaning of life. It wasn?t until I was in my teens that I realized that many of the people around me ? most of whom were generally decent people ? were not as comfortable with religious difference as much of my family seemed to be. (As I got older, I also began to see that my family members were much more tolerant of Christian diversity than they were of non-Christian religions.) Unfortunately, I witnessed some respected adults in my life making very ugly comments ? which they often used their professed Christianity to justify ? about other people and their religions. In my teenaged brain, this gave rise to two questions: Isn?t Christianity supposed to be about loving your neighbor? Isn?t the United States supposed to be about separation of church and state and thus acceptance of religious diversity?

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Bob Dylan and the Mormons…?

I am not a Bob Dylan fan. But I happen to live with one, and I?ve learned a lot about Dylan by osmosis. I suppose it?s only fair that some of my husband?s knowledge about music that isn?t to my taste has rubbed off on me. In the last several years, he?s become something of a scholar of representations of the Latter-day Saints in American history without any significant interest in the subject ? a hazard of living with someone who?s working on their PhD. [1] He has also become a valuable scout of sources for me, and can spot a pop culture reference to Mormonism at twenty paces. Imagine our mutual surprise when he recently starting putting things in front of me in which Bob Dylan makes explicit ? and sometimes admiring ? reference to the Mormons.

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Romney Lost. Is the Mormon Moment Over? And What Would That Mean, Anyway?

Mitt Romney hoped to be the Mormon JFK. Instead, he will now go down in the history books as the Mormons? Al Smith ? the Roman Catholic who was nominated for the presidency by the Democratic Party in 1928, but lost to Calvin Coolidge in part because of anti-Catholic prejudice.

But I?m not interested in how long it will be before we elect our first Mormon president. I?m more interested in the so-called ?Mormon Moment,? and what the end of Mitt Romney?s political career means for the place of Mormons in American culture. With Romney (and his ubiquitous political ads) out of the spotlight, will the Latter-day Saints now fade from the national stage? Will Americans forget about their odd Mormon neighbors and move on to lambasting and lampooning someone else?

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Lecture Report: Janet Bennion and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on “The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism”

On Thursday, October 25, Janet Bennion, Professor of Anthropology at Lyndon State College in Vermont, delivered a lecture, ?The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism,? at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. Professor Bennion is an expert on the contemporary practice of polygamy among Mormon fundamentalists, and the author of several books on the subject. Bennion?s lecture focused on her most recent book, Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism, which she presented as a synthesis of her more than twenty years of research among polygamous groups in North America. Her goal, she said, was to produce a readable work that would educate the general public about these groups, as well as better preparing law enforcement officials to deal with them?and thus to avoid another event like the ill-managed 2008 raid on the FLDS Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas.

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Boston-area lecture: “The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism”

We thought that some of the New England branch of the JI community might be interested in this upcoming event at Brandeis University:

?The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism?

A lecture by Janet Bennion, author of Polygamy in Primetime

Thursday, October 25, 2012, 7:00 to 9:00pm

Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Epstein Building, Brandeis University
515 South Street, Waltham MA 02454

Media portrayals of Mormon women have focused on the potential for oppression and abuse within both the mainline church and fundamentalists sects. Drawing on her 17 years of fieldwork among fundamentalist polygamous Mormons, Janet Bennion argues that some “sister wives” find fulfillment and even empowerment through their domestic arrangements. In this lecture, she will be joined by historian Laurel Ulrich to look beyond the official patriarchy and find the subtle feminisms Mormon women embody.

Janet Bennion is a professor of social sciences at Lyndon State College in Vermont. Her latest book, “Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism”, was published in 2012 by the Brandeis Series on Gender, Culture, Religion, and Law, a collaboration between the HBI and the University Press of New England.

Free and open to the public.

Parking in Epstein Lot.

RSVP encouraged: hbi@brandeis.edu

The Mormon Image Today

Sister Wives. The Book of Mormon on Broadway. And of course the presidential campaign trail.

Mormons are everywhere in the media in 2012, and by many measures the Mormon image is faring well in the early 21^st century. Yes, the Brown family encompasses more wives and children than the average American family, but Sister Wives showcases the seemingly very normal lives that Kody, Meri, Janelle, Christine, Robyn, and their 17 children lead, struggling with relationships and weight and decisions about where to live or go to school. The Book of Mormon pokes fun at young Latter-day Saint missionaries, but in the end the show sings the Mormons? praises for the good they do in the world. In presidential politics, Mormonism is a virtually silent presence in Mitt Romney?s campaign, but when it is brought forward it underlines the candidate?s service, both during his mission in France and during his years as a bishop and stake president in Massachusetts, and the family values that supported his 40+ year marriage to his high school sweetheart and nurtured their five handsome, successful sons.

But in each of these current examples of Mormonism in the media spotlight, there is significant underlying negativity.

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Republicans, Romneys, and Mormon Moments: American Images of the LDS in the 1950s

Mitt Romney is a politician born not in the wrong place, but the wrong time. While his opponents in the Republican primary accused him of untrustworthy geographic origins and thus of not being a real Republican, in fact Romney is simply running sixty years too late. If this were 1952 instead of 2012, the ?Massachusetts moderate? would have enjoyed a political climate that twice elected Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower?the father of such massive government spending projects as the interstate highway system, who spoke openly of the value of organized labor for protecting working Americans [1]. As many have asserted during this election cycle, past Republican luminaries would not survive in their own party after its hard turn to the right in recent decades.

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The First ?American Mormons?

The media is buzzing about the current ?Mormon moment,? by which they mean that Americans, in contrast with decades past, currently seem fascinated by and inclined to be positive about the Latter-day Saints. But this is not non-Mormon America?s first flirtation with this long-suspected native-born religion. Americans have had several such moments of fascination with the Saints throughout the last century.

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