Pioneer Day: Recommended Reading from JI’s archives

Happy Pioneer Day, readers! Thank you for your patience with us lately — we know things have been slow around here (they tend to get that way during the summer), but we have some exciting things planned moving forward and hope you’ll keep checking in, reading, and commenting moving forward.

In recognition of Pioneer Day, I’ve culled from the Juvenile Instructor’s archives links to several previous posts treating Mormon Pioneers in one sense or another. In hopes that they’ll prove interesting to those who missed them the first time around (and to those, like me, interested in revisiting them), here we go:

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Repudiating the Pearl of Great Price?: More on Reactions to the 1978 Revelation

Earlier this year, I posted some thoughts on Latter-day Saints’ reaction to the announcement of the 1978 revelation on the race-based temple and priesthood ban. The post elicited a lot of excellent responses, including several from Latter-day Saints who shared their own memories and recollections of LDS responses in the wake of the revelation. Among the most intriguing comments, though, came from commenter Ben S., who offered an anecdote he once heard about “several hundred LDS [who] signed their names to a full-page ad in a local newspaper to the effect that they knew Kimball was a fallen prophet, this revelation wasn?t possible, on the basis of past statements, scriptural interpretation, etc.”

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Relief Society Handbook: Spotlight on American Gender Norms

Susanna Morrill is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lewis and Clark College in Portland where she teaches courses in United States religious history. She received her doctorate in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. Her work in the recent past has focused on how early Mormon women used popular literature in order to argue for the theological importance of their roles in the home, community, and church.

I finally got around to reading carefully the latest handbook of the Relief Society, Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society. It got me thinking about the symbolic connection between women and the home in Mormon and American culture. A little further afield, it got me thinking about feminine divinity in Mormonism and U.S. religious traditions and public discourses.

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?Judah?s Daughters?: A Reflection on Teaching Women in the Old Testament

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to our latest guest blogger, Spencer Wells. Spencer is currently a PhD student in history at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His is currently beginning work on dissertation project examining pacifists in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. His research in Mormon studies focuses on issues of religious and sexual tolerance. In his spare time Spencer enjoys hiking and making horrendously bad puns. Seriously folks, his puns are legendary. Here he offers his thoughts on his experience teaching a “Women in the Old Testament” Institute course over the past year.

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Once every four years the LDS Sunday School trots out the Old Testament for the Saints? perusal and edification. At times, the decision raises hackles. Complaints, of course, vary. Isaiah?s opacity dismays some, Hebraic ritual etherizes others. And theological protests invariably sprout up. As a personal acquaintance argued with me years ago, God?s actions throughout the Old Testament place Him at odds with modern liberal values. Complicit in razing cities, murdering children, and oppressing women, this teenaged Jehovah played the part of a brooding, angst-ridden Hayden Christiansen (think Anakin Skywalker) to near perfection.

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Practicing Charity: Everyday Daughters of God

By Laura Allred Hurtado

On Monday, I attended a lecture celebrating the Relief Society Commemoration given by Sharon Eubank, Director of LDS Charities, sponsored by the Church History Department. Her comments were titled ?Matriarchy? and she indexed the many ways Mormon women have historically performed acts of charity and whose legacy of service continue to have influence on the many projects LDS charities executes today, albeit on a much grander scale.

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“Undone:” The Contours of a Folk Tale

There?s a new Mormon urban legend making the rounds.

You may have heard it before ? even from me.

The story goes like this: an infant has been brought to be blessed and given a name in a Mormon sacrament meeting, a public rite of passage initiating the newborn into the community of the congregation, and by extension, into the Church as a whole. The father for whatever reason is unavailable to perform the ceremony, so an elderly relative, generally a grandfather, steps in. The child is brought before the congregation, the old man lays his hands upon it, and promptly ordains the child to priestly office. The blessing ritual has been bungled.

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Mormons and Basketball in the Philippines

LDS Meeting House, Kabankalan, Negros Occidental.

Just a quick note today to point readers to my post that went up yesterday at Peculiar People. It looks at the basketball-crazed nation of the Philippines and wonders about the place of basketball-crazed Mormons within that wider phenomenon. If you served a mission in the Philippines or are a basketball fan or otherwise want to weigh in, please do, either in the comments here or over there. Here’s a preview:

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“Crows Can Now Eat Crickets”: An attempt to complicate our understanding of LDS reactions to the 1978 Revelation on the race-based Priesthood and Temple Ban

What follows is a sort of follow-up to Joey’s excellent post last week analyzing reactions to the 1978 revelation ending the race-based priesthood and temple ban. I am admittedly far outside of my own field here, and it is entirely possible I’m not aware of some study that has already been written and published. Please feel free to point out any such work in the comments, and to otherwise respond to the post.

In December 2007, perennial presidential candidate and prominent Mormon Mitt Romney was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the 1978 revelation that signaled a shift in LDS church policy and lifted the ban that had previously denied people of African descent ordination to the priesthood and entrance into LDS temples. Romney’s response was a familiar one to most Mormons:

I can remember when I heard about the change being made. I was driving home from ? I think it was law school, but I was driving home ? going through the Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept. Even to this day, it?s emotional.

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Mormon Studies in Unexpected Places: Volume 2 – Beastie Boys; Or, “No Man Knows My Lyrics”

This is the second entry in the recently launched, occasional, not-at-all regular, sporadic  JI series, Mormon Studies in Unexpected Places. The basic idea is fairly straightforward: to identify instances in which Mormon Studies authors and/or their books, articles, etc. make an unexpected appearance in popular culture, political discourse, etc. Read the first entry here.

I’m like Fawn Brodie?

A few weeks ago, my cousin excitedly asked me on facebook if I knew that a Beastie Boys song contained a lyric referencing Fawn Brodie. I wasn’t aware, but it seemed plausible enough — the band is known for their clever lyrics, the late Adam “MCA” Yauch was reportedly somewhat eclectic in his own approach to religion, and their 1994 hit single, “Root Down,” referenced the band’s preference for snowboarding the powder of Utah’s slopes. Still, I was surprised to learn of the Fawn Brodie lyric.

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Where is Mormonism in the study of post-World War II Religion and Politics?

This past semester, I wrote a brief historiography of American religion and Evangelicalism in my American Religious History course. For the assignment, I read several books released in the past 5 years regarding this sub-field of American religious history (I addressed one of my favorites here). While writing the paper, my mind kept returning to a sermons of Ezra Taft Benson’s in 1962.

Benson’s sermon, excerpted below, highlights the possibilities of studying church leader’s political views and potential ramifications in shaping their believer’s politics.[1] For a bit of context, Benson gave these remarks after visiting the Soviet Union, and one year from the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The political and economic overtones not have been out of place in Evangelical sermons in the South at the same time (at least in my reading of post-WWII Evangelicalism and politics).

• We must never forget exactly what communism really is. Communism is far more than an economic system. It is a total philosophy of life–atheistic and completely opposed to all that we hold dear. 
• We believe in a moral code. Communism denies innate right or wrong. As W. Cleon Skousen has said in his timely book, The Naked Communist, the communist “has convinced himself that nothing is evil which answers the call of expediency.” This is a most damnable doctrine.
• We believe in religion as a mode of life resulting from our faith in God. Communism contends that all religion must be overthrown because it inhibits the spirit of world revolution. Earl Browder, a long-time leader of the Communist Party in the U. S. A., said, “. . . we Communists do not distinguish between good and bad religions, because we think they are all bad.”
• I visited the Soviet Union last fall; I saw no evidence that the communist leaders have altered their goal of world conquest”by economic if not by military means.” [But]It takes a month’s wages to buy a pair of shoes and two months or more to buy a suit of clothes.  
• What can you and I do to help meet this grave challenge from a godless, atheistic, cruelly materialistic system–to preserve our God-given free way of life? This is a choice land …Blessed by the Almighty, our forebears have made and kept it so. It will continue to be a land of freedom and liberty as long as we are able and willing to advance in the light of sound and enduring principles of right. Let us stand eternal watch against the accumulation of too much power in government. Finally, let us all rededicate our lives and our nation to do the will of God. 

Researchers may be able to answer important questions stemming from this sermon and others. To what degree was Benson in line with other conservative religious leaders at the time? Did Mormons have a peculiar form of political conservatism, tied to their canonical statements on the Constitution? Who were the movers and shakers in Mormon anti-Communism outside of Benson, McKay, and Cleon Skousen? How did they work together to shape the Church’s public political positions? How important was financial prosperity a key to Christian anti-communism? These questions could easily be extended to other religiously motivated political movements after the Second World War. These questions could also help historians of Mormonism move their projects further into the twentieth century.

The study of Mormonism seems particularly apt for studying Christian anti-Communism, beyond its embodiment in Ezra Taft Benson, David O. McKay, W. Cleon Skousen, and others. Such a study could elucidate particular strains of Mormon conservatism mingled with its theology; it could also show how Mormon yearnings to be both “Christian” and “American” may have led them to ally politically with Evangelicals–bringing Mormonism into broader historiographies and conversations.