Responses: Patrick Mason on David Pulsipher on Mormon Civil Disobedience

This post continues the JI’s occasional “Responses” series and contributes to the August theme of 20th Century Mormonism. Semi-regular guest and friend of the JI Patrick Mason, Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont, contributes this installment.

Review of David Pulsipher, “Prepared to Abide the Penalty’: Latter-day Saints and Civil Disobedience,” JMH 39:3 (Summer 2013): 131-162.

Pop quiz: Which group maintained the longest civil disobedience movement in American history, and the first such movement not to descend into violence? Since you’re reading a Mormon history blog, the question is a bit like asking who’s buried in Grant’s tomb. Yet even with the prodigious output of scholars working on Mormon related topics in recent years, there are relatively few offerings that not only give us new details but also really help us see Mormonism through a new perspective. David Pulsipher’s recent JMH article is one of those.

I should reveal my biases up front: David is a good friend, and the two of us are (slowly) working together on a book-length treatment of a Mormon theological ethic of peace. So I’m naturally inclined to say nice things about him and his work. This post will be no exception. The basic historical trajectory of Pulsipher’s article, covering the twenty-eight years from the first federal anti-polygamy legislation until the Manifesto, doesn’t cover any particularly new ground for students of Mormon history. It’s what Pulsipher does in covering that ground that is innovative. In a subfield that is always striving for relevance to broader themes and narratives, Pulsipher shows persuasively that Mormon polygamists (mostly the male priesthood leadership) anticipated many of the strategies that would be employed in the twentieth century by nonviolent civil disobedience movements led by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The Mormon case demonstrates how nonviolent social movements can “emerge from unexpected quarters” (134). More significantly, I think, the article shows how Mormon history profits from engagement with political theory–plenty of John Rawls here, in easily digestible form–and that Mormonism can contribute to and substantially nuance established political theory.

Pulsipher begins with definitions. The Latter-day Saints’ nineteenth-century civil disobedience, like that of later theorists and practitioners, had three key characteristics: “(1) a fundamental distinction between just and unjust laws, (2) a conscientious, public, and nonviolent breach of an unjust law, seeking to change that law either through moral suasion or by frustrating its enforcement, and (3) fidelity to the rule of law generally, demonstrated by a willingness to obey just laws and to submit to the legal penalties for disobeying unjust laws” (138).

A typically telling illustration of the Mormons’ approach is offered by John Taylor, who relates being brought into court to give evidence in a polygamy trial: “I was asked if I believed in keeping the laws of the United States. I answered Yes, I believe in keeping them all but one. What one is that? It is that one in relation to plurality of wives. Why don’t you believe in keeping that? Because I believe it is at variance with the genius and spirit of our institutions–it is a violation of the Constitution of the United States, and it is contrary to the law of God.” Taylor then said that he was “prepared to abide the penalty” of taking such a stance. (144)

Pulsipher also traces the Latter-day Saints’ twentieth-century retreat from the civil disobedience and in some ways their own history. He offers several compelling reasons for why the heritage of civil disobedience didn’t take hold in twentieth-century LDS culture: its failure to achieve its explicit purpose (to preserve plural marriage); the wide unpopularity of that proximate purpose, increasingly among the Saints themselves; Mormons’ shift to emphasize loyalty to the nation and their excellence in Victorian moral virtues; the continued use of the rhetoric and strategies of civil disobedience by Fundamentalist LDS groups; and the church leadership’s conservative reaction to the “disrespect for law and order” characteristic of the late 1960s.

But not all is lost: Pulsipher intriguingly provides an extended quote from a 2009 speech at BYU-Idaho in which Elder Dallin H. Oaks glowingly approved of a “national anti-government movement” led by a Mongolian woman (161). The lesson here is that Mormons are just like other Americans–we like civil disobedience, especially in retrospect, when it achieves goals we deem worthy, and castigate it as unpatriotic and dangerous when applied toward goals we don’t share.

I take minor exception to one small point made in the article. Pulsipher demonstrates persuasively how the Latter-day Saints relied upon biblical, not American, precedents in justifying their civil disobedience–Daniel, not Thoreau, was their archetype. Their remarkable persistence in the face of increasingly overwhelming pressure was rooted in large part in their millennial faith that Christ would rescue them from their oppressors. It is true, no doubt, that nineteenth-century Mormons had a more robust premillennialist outlook than did Martin Luther King, as Pulsipher points out. But black civil rights workers at the grassroots level–those without doctorates from liberal northeastern seminaries–carried their movement out in prophetic, ecstatic biblical tones.”[1] Twentieth century southern black millennialism no doubt looked different than nineteenth-century Mormon millennialism. But both the Mormons’ resistance to federal anti-polygamy law and grassroots southern blacks’ resistance to Jim Crow arguably drew more deeply from the Hebrew prophets than from the American liberal tradition.

For those of us who know David, this article displays the quality of his mind and his character. It is expertly researched, with strong documentation. It is perceptive and measured in tone. It is fair-minded, fully acknowledging the twentieth-century critique of civil disobedience but gently suggesting that those critiques were shaped by a particular historical moment. And the article reminds us, in the grand tradition of the vaunted southern historian C. Vann Woodward, that the past is strewn with “forgotten alternatives” for our (re-)discovery and (re-)consideration.[2]

______

[1] David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 102.

[2] See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1955]), chap. 2.

Guest Book Review: Seth Perry, “Mormons and the Bible: A Classic Gets a New Edition”

[Today’s book review comes from JI’s good friend Seth Perry, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where he wrote a dissertation on the Bible in early America, and will be a Visiting Professor of American Religion at Indiana University this fall.]

Since it was Philip Barlow?s Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (1991, 2013) that taught me to read paratexts, it seems fitting to approach Oxford University Press?s new and expanded edition of the book through the materials that frame it.

The back-cover blurbs attached to the new edition include these lines from a 1995 Dialogue review written by Scott Kenney, co-founder of Signature Books:

There can be no question that as a work of Mormon intellectual history this is a seminal ? and eminently readable ? work?.Mormons and the Bible has all the markings of a Mormon classic.

OUP likes the quote ? it also appears on my 1997 paperback. Characteristic of the genre, though, the blurb misses all of the subtlety of what Kenney was actually saying about the book.

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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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New Article: “Early Mormon Patriarchy and the Paradoxes of Democratic Religiosity in Jacksonian America”

Desperate times (the expected dearth of posts at the end of the semester) call for desperate measures (narcissistically posting about our own scholarship).

Parley Pratt, whose theology was as rugged as his looks.

In summer 2009, I participated in the Mormon Scholars Summer Seminar, that year led by Terryl Givens and Matt Grow, where I had the opportunity to study the writings of the Pratt brothers. While my seminar paper was on Parley Pratt’s theology of embodiment, which soon evolved into a larger article on early Mormon theologies of embodiment in general, the topic with which I became particularly transfixed was how Joseph Smith’s teachings were adapted and appropriated during the first few years after his death. At first, I was interested in the very parochial nature of the issue—the specifics of theological development, who said what and when, and what ideas were forgotten, emphasized, or even created anew. But I then became even more interested in broader questions: how were Smith’s ideas interpreted in the first place within a specific cultural environment, and how did Smith’s successors utilize that environment when molding their own theology? And further, what does that process tell us about the development of religious traditions in general, and the progression of religion in antebellum America in particular?

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“A Pink Life Raft in a Blue Ocean”: Feminist Studies of Mormonism– An Interview with Maxine Hanks, Part I

This is Part One of my interview with Maxine Hanks, who edited and published her well-known feminist anthology, Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, with Signature Books in 1992 here.

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New (and loaded) Issue of Mormon Historical Studies

If you haven’t noticed, we have a proliferation of Mormon history journals. So much so, in fact, that it is difficult to keep up. (One way to stay on top of things: the forthcoming Mormon Studies Review!) That’s where your friends at JI come in with our journal recaps.

One journal that unfortunately is often overlooked is Mormon Historical Studies, edited by Alex Baugh. This is unfortunate, because it is often the most “nerdy” and over-specialized of the journals–and I mean that as the highest compliment. When it comes to straight history, this journal often carries strong work, and its pages often smell of archival research. The most recent issue is no exception; in fact, it is perhaps one of the strongest issues they have published to day, partly because it is a combined issue for the entire 2012 year (they often publish two issues a year). Below are the contents, with a little commentary by yours truly.

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Women of Faith in the Latter Days, Vol 2

Review of: Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Brittany A. Chapman, eds., Women of Faith in the Latter Days: Volume Two, 1821 – 1845 (Deseret Book, 2012).

I really cannot improve upon the opening lines of the introduction to this projected seven-volume series:

Although approximately half the people in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been women, their lives of faith and dedication are just beginning to receive the attention they merit. This series, Women of Faith in the Latter Days, aims to enhance awareness of these women through inspirational accounts written for a general readership.

The newest edition, the second in the series, considers thirty women* born between 1821 and 1845, and it’s a blockbuster volume both in the women who are included and in the list of authors who set their hand to crafting readable yet accurate and historically contextualized narratives of their lives. The essays purposely introduce both “well-known and previously obscure” women, presenting them in alphabetical order, a notably democratic editorial decision. They epitomize the pioneer women whose piety and self-sacrifice could have easily become fossilized in sentimental hagiography. But that’s not what this series is about, thank heaven.

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The Beginning of Better Days

First I must say this: Hooray! The publication of the Nauvoo Relief Society Minutes has been a long time coming?one hundred and seventy one years, to be exact. The Beginning of Better Days: Divine Instruction to Women from the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. by Sheri Dew and Virginia H. Pearce, presents powerful words and meaningful experiences, both with the Nauvoo Relief Society and with its interpretation.

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A Booklist for Mormon Women’s History

Suppose that you were interested in Mormon women?s history, and suppose that you owned a library card and a computer. Now suppose you wished a smart group of LDS scholars would make you a list of classic texts and maybe comment a bit on why each book is worth a read. And while they were at it, throw in a roundup of web and digital resources for Mormon women?s history, too.

Voila! Today is your lucky day. The JI authors have been busy crowdsourcing this annotated bibliography of our must-read books and online archival resources for the history of Mormon women.

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75th Anniversary Review of Joseph Fielding Smith’s “Life of Joseph F. Smith”

 Joseph Fielding Smith, Life of Joseph F. Smith.  Salt Lake City:  The Deseret News Press, 1938.  490 pp.

This year marks the 75^th anniversary of the publication of a classic of Mormon biography, Joseph Fielding Smith?s Life of Joseph F. Smith.  It is a book that is many things:  part genealogy, part hagiography, part scrapbook, part apologia, part castigation of anti-Mormon sentiment of any shade, and part history of Mormonism?s transformation into a 20^th century organization.  Its 490 pages are replete with personal stories, the kind winnowed from a lifetime of observing a loved one and careful interviewing of those who knew JFS intimately.  Conversely,

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