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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Book of Mormon into Darkness

Please join us in welcoming this guest post from Edward Blum, a recognized scholar of race and religion in U.S. history who has contributed to JI previously. Ed is associate professor of history at San Diego State University. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and most recently, co-author (with Paul Harvey) of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012). He is the co-editor (with Paul Harvey) of The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (2012), (with Jason R. Young) The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections (2009), and (with W. Scott Poole) Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (2005). Ed also blogs at Religion in American History and Teaching United States History, and last week attended his very first Mormon History Association conference in Layton, Utah.

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Has darkness ever overwhelmed you? Have you seen cities sink and communities set ablaze? Has a voice saved you? If you know the Book of Mormon, then you are familiar with the tale I tell. After hundreds of pages chronicling the ebbs and flows of civilizations, the narrative reaches a climax. In Palestine, Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. The world felt the reverberations. “Thick darkness” fell upon the land. Nothing could bring light, “neither candles, neither torches; neither could there be fire kindled with their fine and exceeding dry wood, so that there could not be any light at all.” The sounds of howling and weeping pieced the darkness. Sadness reigned.

It is difficult to overstate the drama and the beauty of the Book of Mormon’s rendering of these days. As one who watched silvery strands cloud the corneas of my infant son and darken his vision onto blindness, as one who takes the Christ story seriously in the depth of my soul, and as one who more and more considers the place of the sun and the moon, the land and the sea, in our religious imaginations, this scripture leaves me in tears. It also leaves me spinning about why the Book of Mormon is vital for American religious historians. It is not simply an artifact. It is also a treasure trove of ideas. To me, it should be required reading for anyone in my guild, and here are a few reasons.

First, the contents and the context feed one another. Most of us teach the context of Mormonism’s emergence. We teach about the second great awakening and the burned-over district, the dramatic tale of young Joseph Smith visited by God the Father, Jesus the Son, and Moroni the angel, and the complex and conflicted translating process. The content dramatizes the context and vice versa. When Joseph Smith translated the tale of the world going dark, he was sitting in darkness. When Smith described the various plates that had different forms of history written upon them, Smith was working from plates that held sacred histories at the same time George Bancroft was writing from paper on paper alternative histories of America. I am not suggesting that the context determined the content, not one bit. Rather, the drama of Smith’s translation seems heightened when we take seriously the text which he translated.

Second, the “wrapping” of the Book of Mormon can be stunningly interesting. There was not one Book of Mormon, but several even from the beginning. As Laurie Maffly-Kipp notes in her introduction to the Penguin edition, slight changes from the 1830 to the 1840 edition were crucial. The 1830 version used the word “white” to refer to the Lamanites. The 1840 version used “pure.” It was the 1830 version that became “the” wording for more than a century. Just as the distinction between “light” and “white” is crucial when we think of how Smith’s first vision is textually rendered versus how it is visually displayed, the difference between “white” and “pure” has been crucial too. Following the 1978 declaration to end the priesthood ban on black men, the 1981 edition inserted “pure.”

There have been other meaningful modifications as well, and not all textual. We know of the new subtitle, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” but there was also the inclusion of imagery. The Book of Mormon I grabbed from a hotel in 2007, which was my first introduction to the book, has eight images after an introduction and the testimonies. Heinrich Hofmann’s “The Lord Jesus Christ” looks slightly down and to our right, perhaps directing with his eyes to turn the page. (interestingly enough, it is a Hofmann painting of Jesus that “frames” Thomas S. Monson’s online biography, an image he claims to have had since the 1950s). On the next page of this Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith looks to the left, as if back at Jesus. Then there is Lehi, Alma, Samuel the Lamanite, and finally John Scott’s “Jesus Christ visits the Americas” and Tom Lovell’s “Moroni buries the Nephite record.” Bulging biceps and earnest prayer mark these paintings. The images frame the text, providing readers a narrative before the narrative. A visual arc precedes the textual arc. What is not there is fascinating too. There is no “first vision” so God the Father is not viewed in human form. Reading these images offer another layer of reading the Book of Mormon.

Finally, the arguments against reading the Book(s) of Mormon seem weak to me. It may be the case, as Terryl Givens has argued, that few Americans read the Book of Mormon in the nineteenth century. But that is true of lots of books and other texts. How many fugitive slave narratives went unread? Emily Dickinson’s poetry was kept private. Moreover, some pretty important Americans did read the book, including Brigham Young.

It is too easy to quote Mark Twain to explain away the book. To be blunt, there is a lot of nineteenth-century writing that felt like “chloroform in print.” Most of my students dislike Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it is too long and too detailed. Moby-Dick is so full of symbol, symbols, and symbolism that it often feels like the whale itself: too massive to comprehend. Readers can just as easily get lost searching for the white whale as they are following the Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, and all the other “ites.”

What I love about the Book of Mormon is that Smith and the writers were willing to tarry where Moby-Dick’s “Ishmael” was not. Near the beginning of Melville’s work, the one we can call “Ishmael” stumbles into a “Negro” church. There, he hears a sermon about “the darkness of blackness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing.” Ishmael “backed out.” To him, it was a “trap.”

When we read the Book of Mormon, we willingly enter the “trap.” The darkness descends; the world weeps. But then a voice calls; a body appears; we touch it and listen to his teachings. Then, we are told to sing. Perhaps Mark Twain’s boredom (and ours) tells us a lot more about his (and our) sacred (in)sensitivities and less about Smith or the Book of Mormon.

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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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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Mormon Robots

[Part of the Many Images of Mormonism series.]

In the 2012 US presidential campaign candidate Mitt Romney was frequently described as a robot or robot-like. Mormons in general are sometimes compared to robots, the Borg (a cybernetic species from Star Trek), or Stepford Wives. In this post I will look at some of the context for using robots to describe people, particularly when those people are Mormon. [1]

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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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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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Women’s History Month at the JI: Thoughts on Elizabeth Kane (Smith)

By Alex D. Smith

“To be burned unread if I die, unless Tom cares to read it. No one else. Mind! I will haunt any one who does!

1. D. K.

I have waited with eager anticipation for Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane to fulfill this threat inscribed on the first page her 1860 diary. Elizabeth, if you are listening, at your convenience.

I appreciate the opportunity to participate in the Juvenile Instructor’s Mormon women’s history month by giving brief and informal tribute to a woman and friend whom I greatly respect and who has shaped my understanding of the value of personal record-keeping. My unabashed objective with the space below is to encourage the reading of Elizabeth’s published papers, rather than to convey information about her.

When asked to recommend a book on Mormon history or even just history in general to an interested uninitiated reader, among my first choices are always Elizabeth Kane’s Twelve Mormon Homes or A Gentile’s Account of Life in Utah’s Dixie. Either of these books–the former a series of accounts about Elizabeth’s winter 1872­­-1873 trip with her husband and two sons from Salt Lake City to St. George, published during her lifetime by her father, and the latter a more recent transcription of her journal during the months staying in St. George on the same trip–are sure to engage any reader. A non-Mormon with sympathies toward the church far less developed than her husband’s, Elizabeth is at once a careful observer, sensitive interviewer, and a capable (sometimes profound) writer.

In her more famous Twelve Mormon Homes, Elizabeth describes the homes of families of members of the church she stayed with while on the journey south from Salt Lake to St. George. Traveling in company with Brigham Young and others, Elizabeth’s narrative of the trip contains descriptions of the prophet not found elsewhere, including anecdotes about Young inspecting the company’s carriages each morning wearing sealskin boots and a “hideous pair of green goggles”[1] and recounting his humorous interactions with Pahvant chief Kanosh, and providing Elizabeth’s own theories explaining the power of Young’s leadership over saints in the satellite settlements:

When we reached the end of a day’s journey, after taking off our outer garments and washing off the dust, it was the custom of our party to assemble before the fire in the sitting-room, and the leading “brothers and sisters” of the settlement would come in to pay their respects. . . . At these informal audiences, reports, complaints, and petitions were made; and I think I gathered more of the actual working of Mormonism by listening to them than from any other source. They talked away to Brigham Young about every conceivable matter, from the fluxing of an ore to the advantages of a Navajo bit, and expected him to remember every child in every cotter’s family. And he really seemed to do so, and to be at home, and be rightfully deemed infallible on every subject. I think he must make fewer mistakes than most popes, from his being in such constant intercourse with his people. I noticed that he never seemed uninterested, but gave an unforced attention to the person addressing him, which suggested a mind free from care. I used to fancy that he wasted a great deal of power in this way; but I soon saw that he was accumulating it.[2]

Elizabeth’s lesser known journal from the months spent in St. George is, if anything, even more enlightening. As a non-Mormon, but with close access to Young and local church leaders, Elizabeth was uniquely situated to provide a perspective on aspects of early Mormon life–most notably plural marriage–that are as foreign to Mormon readers today as they were to her. While her journals include valuable insights into many areas of the St. George experience, from irrigation to the United Order (at a conference in the tabernacle devoted to the latter, Elizabeth writes, “I don’t understand myself exactly what is contemplated by the leaders, nor do the sheep of the flock, apparently, but they seem willing to follow in the direction indicated”[3]), the real strength of her account lies in her interviews with Mormon women. During the trip to Utah Territory, at Brigham Young’s recommendation and ostensibly for her husband’s health, Elizabeth stayed in the homes of a number of women involved in plural marriage relationships, and her questioning of them about the practice was seemingly as direct and dauntless as it was respectful. The record resulting from these exchanges, including such important topics as the relationships between wives in shared discipline of children, adds a piece to the puzzle of our understanding of Utah polygamy.

Elizabeth’s preconceptions of the Mormons prior to her trip to the West had been colored by her indignance at what she considered the derogatory coupling of her husband and Mormonism by her Philadelphia society. As a result of close interaction with the saints on this journey, her attitude toward the saints underwent a significant transformation which is honestly and touchingly revealed in her journal. Toward the end of her stay in St. George, Elizabeth wrote a note to her daughter Harriet, who had remained back East: “You will not understand how I have come to pity this people; for you know how hard it was for me to make up my mind to come among them and associate with them, even for the sake of benefiting Fathers health by this climate. I have written to you as a sort of penance for the hard thoughts and contemptuous opinions I have myself instilled of you.”[4] Earlier she wrote, “If I had entries in this diary to make again, they would be written in a kindlier spirit.”[5]

The concluding words of Elizabeth’s St. George journal are a more eloquent testimony to the power of her narrative than anything I might say:

On my return to Salt Lake City I spent a week or so at the Lion House, a step which I took as a public testimony to the little circle of those to whom my name is known, that my opinion of the Mormon women had so changed during the winter that I was willing to eat salt with them.

It would probably be more interesting to my father should I describe that household than any other in Utah. I am the only “Gentile woman” to whom every door within the walls was set freely open, and who was invited to the most familiar intercourse with Brigham Young’s wives and children. Yet that very fact seals my lips. I was not there as a newspaper correspondent, but as the wife of an honored and trusted friend of the head of the household. The members of that family have already suffered enough from the prying curiosity of strangers. . . .

The Mormon battle-ground is no longer in the Salt Lake Valley.

I found the best men and women, the most earnest in their belief, the most self-denying and “primitive Christian” in their behaviour clad in the homespun garments of the remote settlements.

It will all pass away soon enough, unless Persecution befriends them by making the young pass through the same purifying fires their elders traversed, burning out the impure and unsound in faith. Such industry as the Mormon religion inculcates, with such simple habits as prevail among the “Saints of the old Rock,” will too soon bring corrupting Wealth.

No use for us to “put down the Mormons.” The World, the Flesh, and the Devil sap earnestness soon enough.

“And I for one shall say, Alas!”[6]

[1] Elizabeth Wood Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah to Arizona. Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City, UT: 1974, p. 5. Young’s hideous green riding glasses may be seen on display in the Presidents of the Church exhibit in the LDS Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, though sadly with less colorful language on the identifying label.

[2] Ibid., 101.

[3] Norman R. Bowen, ed., A Gentile’s Account of Life in Utah’s Dixie, 1872-73: Elizabeth Kane’s St. George Journal. Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City, UT: 1995, pp. 155-156.

[4] Ibid., 170.

[5] Ibid., 168.

[6] Ibid., 177-179.

Women’s History Month at JI

Although we may not be able to top black history month, which had a stellar lineup of contributors, posts, and CFPs and then ended with a major change to the LDS scriptures concerning the church’s conscious remembering (literally, re-membering) its early African American priesthood holders and rejecting any revelatory basis for the priesthood ban – and here, let me interject a hearty hallelujah! – we would like to begin (lamb-like) with some thoughts, questions, and considerations for women’s history month in March. My tongue-in-cheek hope would be that, if our mojo is similar, Joseph Smith’s 1842 revelation to the Relief Society recorded in Eliza R. Snow’s Minute Book becomes D&C 139. By April 1st.

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Never an Atlas so Handsome

First, a confession: I’m a stats dropout. It was the one course in college that I dropped. If someone had told me that it was something a historian actually should know, maybe I would have stuck with it (or maybe not). These days, I’m a dolt when it comes to sigma values and such, but I do love a good visualization of statistics. And if digitization and “big data” are the next frontiers in humanities research, then statisticians, especially those who can find compelling ways to visualize data, will find themselves in high demand.

Nowadays, data-crunching needs computers of mind-blogging speed and the results are enlivened with visualizations of breathtaking complexity and beauty (one of my favorites turns the NY subway schedule into a haunting musical map). But in the late 19th century, the U.S. government crunched monumental stacks of data, like those collected in the decennial census, using just paper and pencil, index cards and a whole bunch of person-hours — but nonetheless managed to make some of the most stunning data visualizations ever conceived. The “golden age” just may have been the successive publication of three big statistical atlases using information gathered in the 1870, 1880 and 1890 censuses, replete with gorgeous lithography and chock-full of Progressive social scientific hubris.

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