Response: J.B. Haws Answers Questions about his recent JMH article and his forthcoming book (Part II)

We’re pleased today to welcome back J.B. Haws for Part II of our Q & A on his recent article in the JMH and his forthcoming book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), both exploring the changing image of Mormons in American media from George Romney’s presidential run in the 1960s to his son Mitt Romney’s campaigns in the early 21st century. Last time, we focused mainly on Haws’ methods and sources. Today, we’re exploring specific aspects of his analysis and a few of his conclusions.

Continue Reading

Response: J.B. Haws Answers Questions about his recent JMH article and his forthcoming book (Part I)

In August, I reviewed J.B. Haws’ recent article ?When Mormonism Mattered Less in Presidential Politics: George Romney?s 1968 Window of Possibilities?, published in the summer issue of the Journal of Mormon History. Haws, an Assistant Professor of Church History at BYU, graciously agreed to participate in a Q & A to answer some of my lingering questions and those submitted by members of the JI community. In the course of our conversation, we also discussed how the research he presented in his article is extended in his forthcoming (and highly-anticipated!) book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, December 2013), which promises to be an important and much-needed addition to our understanding of Mormonism in the contemporary period, as well as of public representations (and misrepresentations) of Mormonism across the last half of the 20th century.

JBH: I should say, by way of preface, that as I read through your questions, my reaction after every one was to think, ?Wow?great question.?  But I?m going to resist typing that every time (but just know I?m still thinking that!).  Thanks for these thoughtful and thought-provoking questions.

CHJ: Thank you, J. B.! We’re excited that you were willing to offer us some answers. So?let’s get to it!

Continue Reading

Visionary/Prophetic Children: A Research Query

As my contribution to this month’s theme of childhood, children, and youth, I want to throw around a couple of loosely-formed thoughts on how Mormonism fits into the history of childhood spirituality.

First, Mormons sometimes claim that the reason God appeared and spoke to the boy Joseph Smith that spring day in 1820 was specifically because JS was just a boy. As in the days of Samuel, God needed a pure vessel, one simultaneously untainted by worldly knowledge and skepticism and eager to learn and obey.

Of course, Joseph Smith isn’t the only boy/young man to experience a vision and receive a prophetic calling, and Mormons aren’t the only ones to connect the dots between the receipt of those visions and childhood innocence/willingness. American Christians have long used both the Old and New Testaments to bolster the claims of boy (and less commonly, girl) prophets and preachers. One researcher has found nearly 500 examples of child preachers from the 18th century until the present, and the phenomenon is particularly common in charismatic Christian churches, as the fascinating and somewhat tragic story of Marjoe Gortner illustrates. While historians have done a wonderful job of contextualizing Joseph Smith within the larger American prophetic tradition, they/we have mostly ignored where and how he fits into the history of childhood preachers/prophets. It seems like a potentially fruitful framework for understanding JS and his prophetic calling in new light.

Continue Reading

Guest Post: Bradley Kime on Mormonism in Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic

Today, we are pleased to announce a guest post on our July theme,  Mormons and Politics, from Bradley Kime. Here is a brief bio from Bradley: 

I just graduated from BYU with a BA in History. My Phi Kappa Phi paper, “American Unitarians and the George B. English Controversy” will be published in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment next summer, and my capstone paper, “Exhibiting Theology: James E. Talmage and Mormon Public Relations, 1915-1920,” is under review. I’ll be heading up to Utah State in a few weeks to work with Phil Barlow on an MA in History. 

I just finished reading Thomas Albert Howard’s God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). It’s a brilliant book that touches on JI’s themes for this month and last (politics and the many images of Mormonism). Howard wrote it in response to what many perceive to be the growing trans-Atlantic political implications of American religiosity vis-a-vis European secularity. Howard’s take is that a long-standing elite European discourse on American religion, which he traces through the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, has “left a sizable mark on the formative presuppositions” behind current policy differences and European perceptions of America. (200) In other words, he argues that elite European critiques of American religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries still impact trans-Atlantic political divisions in the twenty-first. And Mormonism seems to have been a particularly consistent target of those critiques. Along with some forays into the secularization and modernity debate, and the retrieval of two sympathetic commentators (Phillip Schaff and Jacques Maritain) from Tocqueville’s shadow, this is primarily a book about negative images of American religion as peddled by its cultured despisers across the pond.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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?

Continue Reading

“& exhort the Church”: Some Thoughts on the July 1830 Revelation to Emma Smith

?We Latter-day Saints are Methodists, as far as they have gone, only we have advanced further.? -Joseph Smith to Peter Cartwright[1]

I?ve argued elsewhere that the above quote encapsulates how many Methodist converts to early Mormonism understood their new religion. The more I study the trajectory of Methodism in antebellum America and the beginnings of Mormonism, the more I?m convinced that the statement also highlights an actual historical truth. In matters of ecclesiology, theology, and liturgy, early Mormons?whether consciously or not (and I think there?s some of both going on)?took a concept originated and/or popularized by Methodists and went one step further, thus simultaneously building on and challenging the foundation from which the new religion sprang.[2] For this reason, among others, I think a close reading of Mormon texts?including scriptural texts?that pays particular attention to Methodism?s discursive community can yield important insights into the Mormon past.[3]

Continue Reading

Research Query: Mormon Bachelorhood

From William and Mary graduate student and friend of JI Spencer Wells:

Continue Reading

Scholarly Inquiry: Spencer Fluhman answers your questions

J. Spencer Fluhman is assistant professor of History at Brigham Young University. He graduated summa cum laude from BYU with a degree in Near Eastern Studies (1998) and attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was awarded a MA (2000) and PhD (2006) in History. He is the author of the recently-released A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and the editor (with Andrew H. Hedges and Alonzo L. Gaskill) of  The Doctrine & Covenants: Revelations in Context (Religious Studies Center, BYU, and Deseret Book, 2008). He also guest edited (with Steven Harper and Jed Woodworth) the , ?Mormonism in Cultural Context.? Dr. Fluhman is also a dynamic lecturer and popular teacher at BYU. He personally mentored several of the bloggers at Juvenile Instructor, and remains a close friend and trusted mentor to the current generation of Mormon graduate students. Below he answers your questions about his recent book, broader researcher, and Mormon history more generally.

Continue Reading

Enoch and Zion

MARK ASHURST-MCGEE is a historian and documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers Project, where he specializes in document analysis and documentary editing methodology. He holds a PhD in history from Arizona State University and has trained at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He is a coeditor of the first volume in the Journals series and of the first volume of the Histories series of the Joseph Smith Papers. He is an author of peer-reviewed articles on Joseph Smith and early Mormon history. The following selection is taken from his 2008 dissertation: “Zion Rising: Joseph Smith’s Early Social and Political Thought.” Other works growing out of his dissertation are published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Mormon History (“Zion in America: The Origins of Mormon Constitutionalism” [vol. 38, no. 3 – Summer 2012]: 90-101) and in the just recently released anthology War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives (Kofford Books, 2012). Selections from his dissertation have also appeared here at the Juvenile Instructor, here and here. Ashurst-McGee is currently working on articles on political restorationism and Zion nationalism along the path of turning the dissertation into a monograph.

Joseph Smith’s Enoch expansion built on that for Enoch’s grandfather Enos, the grandson of Adam. Due to the “secret works of darkness” that had pervaded the land, Enos led “the residue of the people of God . . . out from the land which was called Shulon and dwelt in a land of promise, which he called after his own son whom he had named Cainan.”[1] Here was the original exodus of the righteous from among the wicked. Earlier, before Shulon’s corruption, Cain and the brethren of his secret combination had left Shulon for the land of Nod. Now Enos led God’s people from corrupt Shulon to the promised land of Cainan. As in the Book of Mormon, whether the righteous emigrate from a wicked nation or the wicked emigrate from a righteous nation, Smith’s scriptural narratives tend toward the territorial separation of the two. When the people of God left Shulon, they took with them the “book of remembrance” that had been kept by the prophets since the days of Adam.[2] Here was the archetypal civic text on which to found a new civilization. Enoch grew to manhood in the “land of righteousness” established by his grandfather Enos.[3]

Joseph Smith’s dramatic expansion of Genesis 5:24: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”–is by far the longest of his many revisions–adding over 4,000 words to the biblical account. The narrative of Enoch’s walk with God was apparently one of the “plain and precious parts” removed from the Bible.[4] Enoch’s history, as restored by Smith, began with a prophetic calling. The Lord commanded Enoch to leave Cainan and cry repentance to all men. Like Moses, Enoch complained of his slow speech. The Lord encouraged him: “Go forth and do as I have commanded thee, and no man shall pierce thee. Open thy mouth, and it shall be filled. . . . Behold, my Spirit is upon you. Wherefore, all thy words will I justify. And the mountains shall flee before you, and the rivers shall turn from their course.”[5] When Enoch began preaching and prophesying, people exclaimed “there is a strange thing in the land, a wild man hath come among us.” However, when Enoch testified against the evil in society, “all men were offended because of him.” Yet “no man laid his hands on him. For fear came on all them that heard him, for he walked with God.”[6] As with the Book of Mormon prophets protected from imprisonment and murder, the Lord protected Enoch. He received such divine power in preaching that no one dared to lay hands on him or pierce him.

When Enoch returned to land of Cainan, he became the leader of the people of God and infused the entire land with the same protective power by which he had preached abroad. Enoch thereby protected Cainan when enemy nations came to war against them:

And he spake the word of the Lord, and the earth trembled and the mountains fled, even according to his command, and the rivers of water were turned out of their course, and the roar of the lions was heard out of the wilderness. And all nations feared greatly, so powerful was the word of Enoch and so great was the power of the language which God had given him. There also came up a land out of the depths of the sea. And so great was the fear of the enemies of the people of God that they fled and stood afar off and went upon the land which came up out of the depths of the sea. And the giants of the land also stood afar off.

Formerly threatening nations and races feared Enoch to the point that they abandoned their own homelands in order to distance themselves from Cainan. The Lord thus protected Cainan, increasing the territorial distance between the righteous and the wicked.[7] He furthermore “blessed the land” of Cainan and sent a curse of “wars and bloodsheds” among their enemies. Finally, the Lord “came and dwelt with his people.” Now, more than ever, “the fear of the Lord was upon all nations, so great was the glory of the Lord which was upon his people.” The Lord named his people “Zion” and assumed his rightful reign as “Messiah, the King of Zion.” Zion’s borders needed no defense. The fear of God’s glory kept enemy powers at bay and his curse occupied them with wars among themselves. As Enoch exclaimed: “Surely, Zion shall dwell in safety forever.”

While enjoying this peaceful safety from the threat of invading foreign powers, Zion also abounded in domestic peace and tranquility: “they were of one heart, and of one mind, and dwelt in righteousness, and there were no poor among them.” Economic equality fostered social harmony. The communitarian economy of the primitive church found its perfection and erased all class-based enmity. Zion existed as the peaceful refuge from the contention and violence of the world.[8]

In Zion, the Lord showed Enoch a vision of the future history of the world. “And he beheld, and lo, Zion in process of time was taken up into heaven. And the Lord said unto Enoch: “Behold mine abode forever.”[9] Here was the ultimate exodus of the righteous from among the wicked. Enoch’s city left the world of man behind to live with God in heaven. Decades later, Smith’s early disciple Orson Pratt stated that when the Lord exalted Zion, he took “the whole city, the people and their habitations.”[10] Brigham Young, another early disciple of Smith and later his successor, taught that Enoch and his people were taken up with “their houses, gardens, fields, cattle, and all their possessions”–even the city’s adjoining “land, rivers, and everything pertaining to it, were taken away.”[11] Pratt agreed that “all the region of country occupied by them was translated, or taken away from the earth.”[12] Young even characterized Zion’s territory as a “portion of the earth.”[13] In his journal, early Mormon apostle Wilford Woodruff recounted “the opinion of the Prophet Joseph” that “when the City of Enoch fled & was translated it was whare the gulf of Mexico now is. It left that gulf a body of water.”[14] If these later teachings and reminiscences embellished Smith’s Enoch narrative, they only fleshed out the earthy materiality of the event already present in Smith’s bible expansion. The Lord’s removal of Enoch’s city from the earth to “mine abode” embodied the theoretically extremities of territorial separation of the righteous from the wicked. The world of men was now ready to be destroyed in the flood.

Enoch’s Zion provided the model for the Zion Joseph Smith meant to build. While the history of the Nephites in the Book of Mormon conveyed the “fullness of the gospel,” it was, in the final analysis, “a Record of a fallen people.”[15] The book began with the sack of Jerusalem. It charted the rise but also the ruin of the Nephite and Jaredite nations. Like the history of ancient Israel or even the Roman republic, the Book of Mormon served as a cautionary tale. For any ancient civilization to serve as a perfect model to emulate, it would have had to have overcome any external enemy and internal weakness. It would still be in existence. Yet no such government could be found on the earth. The “translation” of Zion from the earth opened the possibility for another kind of usable past. Enoch’s Zion–a civilization that rose and never fell–offered an ideal model for Smith’s Zion.

Joseph Smith’s next major biblical expansion would center on the character of Melchizedek, the priest-king who had blessed Israel’s grandfather Abraham.[16] Melchizedek held the same priesthood as Enoch, and therefore had power “to put at defiance the armies of nations.” As the king of Salem, a predecessor of Jerusalem, Melchizedek apparently had the power to protect his people as Enoch had. He was also “the keeper of the storehouse of God; Him whom God had appointed to receive tithes for the poor. Wherefore Abram paid unto him tithes of all that he had, of all the riches which he possessed, which God had given him more than that which he had need.”[17] As with Enoch’s classless society of one heart and one mind, Melchizedek’s program for economic redistribution fostered domestic peace. Melchizedek was “called the King of heaven by his people, or, in other words, the King of peace”–equating heaven and peace.[18]

Smith’s expansion of Genesis 14 added that from the time of Enoch to that of Melchizedek, “men having this faith coming up unto this order of God, were translated and taken up into heaven”:

And now, Melchizedek was a priest of this order; therefore he obtained peace in Salem . . . . And his people wrought righteousness, and obtained heaven, and sought for the city of Enoch which God had before taken, separating it from the earth.[19]

Melchizedek’s Salem proved that Enoch’s Zion was not unique in world history. It was a model that could be followed.

In the New Testament, Jesus had taught the doctrine of rapture. He explained that the last days would be days of great wickedness as it was in the days of Noe.” In the glory of Christ’s second coming, the earth would be destroyed by a baptism of fire just as it had been destroyed by a baptism of water in the days of Noah. But, he explained, just before the great and dreadful day of his return, “there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”[20] The Lord would remove the elect from the earth before purifying it with fire. Smith’s expansion of Genesis 14 recognized the possibility of individual rapture. Men having faith and priesthood like Enoch “were translated and taken up into heaven.” Yet the ideal rapture was a community, even a national, event. The trajectory of the communitarian programs in Enoch’s Zion and Melchizedek’s Salem ended in heaven with the Lord. Not only primitive Christian discipleship but salvation itself was a social affair. Smith’s theology veered away not only from the social and economic individualism of Jacksonian America but from the salvation theology of Protestantism. Smith turned away from the New Testament focus on individual and otherworldly salvation to the Old Testament notions of national salvation.

Although Melchizedek’s Salem showed that Enoch’s model could be followed, it also signaled the importance of geography. Salem, associated with the Old Jerusalem of the Old World, existed as a sister city to Enoch’s Zion, associated with the New Jerusalem in the New World. While the Jaredite and Nephite nations had faltered in the New World, Zion had not. While the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judea had met their end in the Old World, Salem had survived. These were societies that never came to ruin and therefore left no ruins behind. They no longer existed not because they had gone the way of all kingdoms but because the Lord had taken them up into heaven. While individuals could be taken up, the ultimate ideal of collective rapture therefore had occurred only in Enoch’s Zion and Melchizedek’s Salem, the primitive counterparts to end-times Jerusalem and New Jerusalem. Collective rapture did not immediately follow from community holiness, it required the right place. Smith’s narratives of Zion and Salem thus connected communitarian soteriology with sacred geography.

In his vision of the history of the world, Enoch saw not only the flood, but the life and atonement of Jesus Christ in the meridian of time and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon in the last days. The Lord explained that the Book of Mormon would serve to “gather out mine own elect from the four quarters of the earth unto a place which I shall prepare…an holy city…that my people may gird up their loins and be looking forth for the time of my coming. For there shall be my tabernacle, and it shall be called Zion, a New Jerusalem.” The Lord further explained, “Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there.”[21] Enoch’s Zion would return to earth with the Lord and join the latter-day Zion. His city therefore was much more than a model for the latter-day Zion; their destinies intertwined. Enoch had seen the rise of Smith’s Zion in the last days. Smith now foresaw the return of Enoch’s Zion at the end of the world. The two Zions were actually two halves of the same history. Smith thus grounded his utopian vision of the future in a mythological narrative of the past. In Smith’s later expansion of the Noah story, the Lord revealed that the City of Enoch would some day “come down out of heaven, and possess the earth.”[22] With the Lord, the “King of Zion,” Enoch and Joseph would reclaim the world for God’s people. This was the ultimate territorial restoration. The meek would truly inherit the earth.

________

1 Moses 6:12-17, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 159.

2 Moses 6:46, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.

3 Moses 6:41, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.

4 1 Nephi 13:26, 32, 34.

5 Moses 6:32-39, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.

6 Moses 6:37-39, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 161.

7 Moses 7:13-15, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 164-65.

8 Moses 7:15-20; 7:53, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 164-69.

9 Moses 7:18-20, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 165.

10 Orson Pratt, Sermon, 19 July 1874, in Journal of Discourses 17 (1875):147 (145-54).

11Brigham Young, Sermon, 20 April 1856 and 3 June 1860, in Journal of Discourses 3 (1856):320 (316-27); 8 (1861):279 (277-80).

12 Orson Pratt, Sermon, 19 July 1874, in Journal of Discourses 17 (1875):147 (145-54).

13 Brigham Young, Sermon, 20 April 1856, in Journal of Discourses, 3 (1856):320 (316-27).

14 Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal 6:482, 7:129.

15 Articles and Covenants of the Church of Christ, June 1830, in Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations, 62-68.

16 Genesis 14:18-20.

17 Smith, expansion of Genesis 14, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 78-79.

18 Smith, expansion of Genesis 14, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 78; compare Alma 13:17-18.

19 Smith, expansion of Genesis 14, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 78.

20 Luke 17:26-36; compare Matthew 24:37-42.

21 Moses 7:61-64, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 168-69.

22 Smith, expansion of Genesis 9, in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, 67; compare Smith’s expansion of Genesis 14 (78).