Religion and American Culture Forum: “Contemporary Mormonism: America’s Most Successful ‘New Religion'”

Good news for scholars and students of contemporary Mormonism! The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI continues its emphasis on the study of modern Mormon culture with the latest issue of its journal. Back in September of last year, the Center convened a forum in Indianapolis with scholars Jan Shipps, Phil Barlow, Jana Reiss and former US Senator Bob Bennett to address ?Mormonism in the 21^st Century.? Now, the latest ?Forum? discussion in the Winter 2013 issue of Religion and American Culture features a heavyweight panel comprised of Terryl Givens, Kathryn Lofton, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Patrick Mason, who speak to different aspects of the theme ?Contemporary Mormonism: America?s Most Successful ?New Religion?.? The Forum piece offers sophisticated reflections on many of crucial pressure points of Mormonism today: gender, homosexuality, family, politics, perceptions, popular culture.

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Review: Exhibiting Mormonism

Neilson, Reid L. Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the Chicago World’s Fair.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 207 pp. + index.

Today the Chicago?s World Fair of 1893, also known as the Columbian Exposition, is largely lost from America?s collective memory. Despite the once-dazzling spectacle of its extraordinary landscape and architecture, all that lingers for most people now?if anything?is George Ferris? great Wheel, the risky engineering triumph that became the icon of the Fair. In its time, however, the Fair was perceived as the greatest American happening since the Civil War. It drew about 27 million visitors at a time when the national population stood at only about 65 million. The event galvanized the country in myriad ways, and profoundly dignified the city of Chicago.

Scholars often depict the Fair as a catalyst in American history. It had significant effects, for instance on the development of technology and architecture. Historians of American religion characterize the Fair and its Parliament of World Religions as a moment of growing self-consciousness for American Christians, a first encounter with previously unknown world faiths. It was the beginning, historians say, of a growing sense of religious pluralism. Together with the new scientific forces coming to bear on religion, this new awareness transformed American religious sensibilities in the latter half of the 19^th century.

Reid Neilson?s Exhibiting Mormonism: Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World?s Fair, published at the end of last year by Oxford, brings the argument of the Chicago Fair as pivotal moment home to Mormon history, plotting the Fair as a critical juncture in the story of Mormons? relationship with the rest of America. As Richard Bushman?s jacket blurb notes, Chicago was the Mormons? national ?coming out party,? and in this slender volume, Neilson shows how the Fair and other such events transformed Mormons? ways of introducing themselves to the rest of the nation.

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Kindred Spirits: The 19th Century Origins of Mormon Posthumous Celebrity Baptism

Given the ongoing public discussion of the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead, and particularly how this ritual been conducted by Latter-day Saints in behalf of notable public, ?celebrity? figures, it seemed appropriate to post a piece of my ongoing research into this singular religious concept. Specifically, here I note the emergence of the doctrine and practice of baptism for the dead and how it initially came to be performed on behalf of celebrity figures. Of course, the development of baptism for the dead fits into a number of larger contexts, including currents of developing Mormon theology in Nauvoo (as Sam Brown?s new book shows), and into a broader culture where Christian baptism was a common but diversely understood and valued practice. So this post doesn?t explain how baptism for the dead came into being, but it does describe how, once the practice was established, it first came to be a way for Mormons of claiming those whom they saw as the deserving dead beyond their family and personal friends.

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Contemporary Politics, Mormonism, and Sehat?s Myth of American Religious Freedom

Sehat, David. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Once again, the issues of religious freedom and freedom of conscience have surfaced in public discussion and popular awareness, both in the United States and abroad. Though often invisible in modern democratic life, these major issues have continued to rise to prominence episodically in American history, and it appears that we may be in or coming into one of those episodes. Between the debates over the building of Islamic mosques in various parts of the United States, the emerging conflict of the prosecution of gay rights with religiously-informed resistance, and the likely prospect of another religiously-informed presidential election ? the matter of religious freedom is increasingly at issue in the United States. This is, of course, to say nothing of other global developments like the recent persecution of Coptic Christians, the Pope?s consequent advocacy of religious freedom, and other religious freedom issues around the world.

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Nebuchadnezzar and The Mormon Social Imaginary

My presentation at the last MHA conference revolved around some ideas I?d been working with related to Mormon collective identity. A while ago I became fascinated with the way that Charles Taylor has been using the concept of ?social imaginaries? in his work in social philosophy. To him, a ?social imaginary? is basically the perceived social world of an individual, and Taylor?s work shows how these perceptions are critical for understanding how societies function. [1] This is an idea similar to the basic premise that Benedict Anderson introduced in Imagined Communities. Anderson focused on the phenomenon of the nation, and he described how the shared perceptions of citizens of were truly the element that made a nation possible. [2] In my view, both of these ideas ? ?social imaginaries? and ?imagined communities? have an important connection to the question of group or collective identity.

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Book Review: The Missouri Mormon Experience

Spencer, Thomas M, ed. The Missouri Mormon Experience. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010. x + 187 pp. Illustrations, maps, endnotes, index. Hardback: $34.95; ISBN 978-0-82-621887-2

Back in September of 2006, historians of Missouri and of Mormonism met in Jefferson City, MO for a somewhat unusual conference co-sponsored by two local organizations: The Missouri State Archives and the Columbia Missouri Stake of the LDS Church. As its title suggests, ?The Missouri Mormon Experience: A Conference of History and Commemoration? was intended to be simultaneously a historical venture and a social act ? intended to ?understand the troubles of the 1830s as well as to promote understanding between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state today.? It commemorated the 25^th anniversary of the rescindment of Lilburn Boggs? Extermination Order by Gov. Kit Bond (1976).

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A Modern Divinity School?

Part III in the JI’s ongoing series on secularism and religious education

In sifting through the thoughts that might be relevant to bring to this conversation, it quickly became clear that I wouldn?t be able to form any kind of comprehensive, useful model, or to get the satisfaction that comes with being able to see something as a whole. The differences that Matt articulated in the last post of the series run deep, and seem to impose considerable gulfs between all kinds of people that might try to talk about religion: we occupy largely different worlds. I also came to realize that the blog post is not terribly well suited to interdisciplinary analysis! All I can do here, I think, is try to illuminate a point of contact between the three broad categories we have been discussing ? secularism, religion, and education.

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“The new landscape of the religion blogosphere”

Editors of the SSRC (Social Science Research Council) blog The Immanent Frame have produced a report on the blogosphere and religion. It is presented with this introduction:

Blogs have given occasion to a whole new set of conversations about religion in public life. They represent a tremendous opportunity for publication, discussion, cross-fertilization, and critique of a kind never seen before. In principle, at least, the Internet offers an opportunity to break down old barriers and engender new communities. While the promise is vast, the actuality is only what those taking part happen to make of it.

This report surveys nearly 100 of the most influential blogs that contribute to an online discussion about religion in the public sphere and the academy. It places this religion blogosphere in the context of the blogosphere as a whole, maps out its contours, and presents the voices of some of the bloggers themselves.

Alas, by some oversight the Juvenile Instructor was not among the 100 “most influential blogs” surveyed, but what might the survey imply for the presence of Mormonism in online presentation and dialogue? How does the digital engagement of Mormonism and Mormon history line up with that of that other aspects of religion, from Catholic gossip to church-state activism? Interested parties can investigate here.

Mormons’ History, Sacred and Profane

One of the fresh insights provided by Jan Shipps? Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition when published in 1985 was its argument that Mormon history was ?not ordinary history.? Shipps explored the tensions surrounding interlocked, opposing construals of Mormonism. She also demonstrated how accounts of Mormon history and origins were the animating force behind the formation of Mormonism, which she characterized as a new, independent religious tradition. A self-supporting worldview, this tradition carried its own ways of understanding place, time, and human purpose.

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Christian Common Sense and the Shape of Mormonism

This is an attempt to think about Mormonism and Christian ideology in the course of American history. By Christian ideology here I think I mean assumptions or understandings so predominant at a given time that they can actually go unrecognized. In other words, I’m thinking about a silent (yet influential) common or shared sense. Although common sense might be pretty uniform at a given time, it turns out that it isn’t held in common over time. Hence, this is an effort to see how these conditions evolve over time and to demonstrate how, in the long run, that evolution can reveal the influence of the invisible.  We find that predominant convictions turn over slowly, and they leave a wide trail behind them. It seems to me that Mormonism contains a number of interesting remainders as a result of being codified in a particular historical moment and amongst beliefs and convictions that just went without saying.

Part of the impetus for this informal post was a conversation I had with my grandfather ? Douglas Tobler, retired professor of European History ? a few months ago, not long after the passing of Bob Matthews. He reminded me then that he and Bob used to carpool from Lindon to work together at BYU. He related a conversation that they once had during their commute about Mormon conceptions of grace, and the reasons why grace has seen so little  emphasis (especially in comparison with, say, born-again evangelicalism).

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