Mormonism and Suffering

By Pete Wosnik

Last fall I took a class from Dr. Philip Barlow at USU called Religion, Evil, and Human Suffering. This was really big class, not in terms of the amount of students who took it, but rather in its subject matter as well as its breadth. Mormonism was only allotted a few precious class hours, but the class gave me an added appreciation for Mormon theological contributions to the larger world. Something I quickly learned in the course was that all religious traditions have grappled with the problems of pain, suffering, and evil; indeed, most religions are born in such conditions.

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Mormonism in Cultural Context: A Special Journal of Mormon History Issue in Honor of Richard Bushman

The last few years have been a coronation of sorts for Richard Bushman–and rightfully so. After a prolific and prestigious career, the American Historical Association devoted a session to his work, the Mormon History Association distinguished him with their Leonard Arrington Award, and a group of former students held a conference in his honor. (I wrote my reflections of the conference here.) The most recent issue of Journal of Mormon History includes many of the papers presented at that last conference, including several JIers. I just finished the entire issue last weekend, and concluded it was probably the strongest JMH issue in years, as nearly every article was at an exceptionally high level of academic standards.

(It should be noted, however, that the issue as a whole was strong in a few very, very narrow fields: Joseph Smith’s thought, Mormonism and political thought, and historical thought in general. See a pattern? Now this is primarily the result of the participants’ building off of Richard Bushman’s own work–a commemorative issue in honor of Jill Derr would probably look much different, for instance–so the lack of engagement with the 20th century, material culture, lived religion, or, gasp, women’s history can, at least partially, be overlooked. But since these themes tend to dominate Mormon history in general, I maintain the “partially” qualifier.)

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Article Spotlight: Benjamin Park, ?(Re)Interpreting Early Mormon Thought?

Mormonism has a complicated relationship with Protestantism. It also has a complicated relationship with the United States of America. If Mitt Romney?s impending nomination as the Republican candidate for President has done nothing else, it has reinforced in my mind that complexity. It was with sincere appreciation, then, that I read Ben Park?s timely article in the latest issue of Dialogue. No, Ben?s essay does not address Mitt Romney. But it does examine Mormonism?s historical relationship with both the American nation and its Protestant establishment.

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Revisiting the Impossible Question – Part II

And…the objections :

Firstly, her claim that gender is nothing but a construct based on a discourse of power, and sex is but a mysterious part of our eternal identity, leaves nothing clearly meaningful in the concepts of maleness and femaleness. This approach seems to elide differences, as others from the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, to Mary Wollstonecraft, have attempted to do. To me, it is clear that Mormon doctrine is fully committed to the concept of differentiation, and the idea that being male or female is an eternal part of our identity (or in other words, that sex and gender are inextricably linked, if not the same thing). Our doctrine of Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, the temple narrative that is so grounded in the crowning union of male and female and the creation-wide participation in procreation and regeneration*, the creation narrative steeped in organizing matter and creating order by separation, differentiation, opposition, and the underlying narrative of the plan of salvation that begins and ends with a family of male and female parents?not to mention the explicit Proclamation on the Family?confirm this binary. But if, as Flake and others say, gender is constructed, and sexual differentiation is evolutionary, what is the binary on which creation, exaltation, and eternal marriage are constructed, and which persists through the eternities as an element in our identity? With such a paradigm, are we left with anything at all?

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Revisiting the Impossible Question- Part I

Last post, I offered some musings about the supposedly ?impossible question? I posed to Kathleen Flake at the Methodist-Mormon conference back in February, regarding the definition of femininity and masculinity. At the time, neither the question nor the answer seemed to satisfy either of us, so Dr. Flake kindly offered to follow up with me later to continue the conversation. It was a thought-provoking conversation, and after giving it more thought, I?ve come back to the drawing board with more questions and ideas.

By way of quick summary, I had asked Kathleen Flake to define masculinity and femininity in a way that

a) did not reduce them to mere sexual characteristics or biological difference (which, on its own, seems void of real significance, and furthermore, seems difficult to untangle from temporal causes like evolutionary strategies, which don?t seem to be necessary in a pre or post mortal existence)

b) did not reduce them to character attributes (which seem to boil down to characteristics that should ultimately be universally shunned [coarseness, aggression, emotional neediness, etc.], or universally cultivated [compassion, gentleness, creativity, reason])

c) explains the necessary synthesis of a male and female counterpart for the state of exaltation (as prescribed by doctrines regarding the necessity of temple marriage sealings as we now understand them: monogamous, male-female spousal units)

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The Tensions of Church and State, Public and Private: Tracing Mormonism’s Political Theology in the 19th Century

As the “world is governed too much” and as there is not a nation or dynasty, now occupying the earth, which acknowledges Almighty God as their law giver, and as “crown won by blood, by blood must be maintained,” I go emphatically, virtuously, and humanely, for a THEODEMOCRACY, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.               -Joseph Smith, 1844

I was at dinner a couple nights ago with some American historians discussing the current GOP election. Someone made the astute point that one reason this year’s primaries will likely go longer than previous elections—including the possibility that there won’t be a winner prior to the convention—is that the election rules have changed, most especially the way votes are proportioned in each contest. Typical protocols and boundaries, it seems, are now gone, leading to the rambunctious and contested situation we are currently in. Among those typical rules that have disappeared, someone jokingly added, was the separation of church and state. We all laughed, but at the same time sighed because we knew there was more truth in that quip than we would like to admit.

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Thoughts on Gender in Mormon Theology – stemming from Mormon and Protestant Encounters

Rachael has a BA in history from Brigham Young University, is currently slaving away working in a law office in Washington DC, and is waiting to hear back about graduate schools this Fall. This post ushers in her guest-posting stint with JI.

?Gender is a modern invention,? Kathleen Flake declared yesterday at the Crossroads conference. Any logical discussion of the question of gender in Mormon theology was therefore declared ?impossible.? At least that?s how I and dozens of others understood her response that wasn?t a response to my query on the subject.

Today at Stake Conference, Elder Scott spoke of the sanctity of womanhood, and the need for men to appreciate and affirm women who ?magnify? the divine endowment of feminine traits they have been given.

Clearly, the theological place and meaning of gender is a massively tangled bramble bush of an issue, and this post is in no way meant to resolve the question I posed to Kathleen Flake yesterday as to what exactly constitutes ?femininity? and ?masculinity? in our eternal identity, and what implications these notions can have beyond the mortal realm and particularly in exaltation. This matter, of course, also has direct bearing on the controversy surrounding traditional and same-sex marriage, and I firmly believe that the Church needs a clear explanation of what gender is and why the particular synthesis of one man and one woman is the divinely ordained model, in order to offer more compelling defenses (theologically, at least) for traditional marriage. (I won?t countenance polygamy in this discussion as a potential arrangement in the afterlife. We can argue about that premise in another post).

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Mormonism and “Historical/Traditional” Christianity

My dissertation committee felt I sort of gave them a bait and switch at my prospectus defense.  I had spent three years telling them I wanted to compare Mormonism to medieval Christianity (which I’m still doing) but for my prospectus I was now talking about Mormonism and Neoplatonism.  They found this all rather confusing and wanted brainstorm other angles I could take.  In the midst of all this, my medieval advisor exclaimed, “I know what your thesis should be.  It should be how Christian Mormonism is.  This is all thoroughly Christian, it’s just not Protestant.”

What is Christian depends on one’s point of view.  Medieval Christianity was very different from Protestantism.  As I’ve noted around here a few times, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 presents a very different picture of traditional Christianity than do Protestants.

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Joseph Smith’s Politics, part 2

 Continued from part 1

The Saints soon shifted the focus of their attention to government at the state level. Acting on perceived signals from the governor’s office of his willingness to provide them with a militia escort to reoccupy their lands–but not to protect them once there–Joseph Smith raised a security force. In the summer of 1834, over two hundred Mormon men gathered from Kirtland and other eastern congregations to march to Missouri. However, news of the Mormon army reached Missouri before the army itself. Seized with war hysteria, the Jackson citizenry prepared to hold the county or die fighting. Smith aborted the venture when his army reached Zion’s exiles in neighboring Clay County and learned that state support for the reoccupation had evaporated. Several months later, however, the state legislature found a new solution to the “Mormon problem” in the creation of Caldwell County. It was commonly understood that Caldwell had been set aside for Mormon settlement.

New conflict erupted in 1838 when the Mormons settlers filled Caldwell and began spilling into neighboring counties. When vigilante activity began in Daviess County, the Saints called on Governor Lilburn Boggs to protect them. Boggs dispatched state militia, which disbanded and dispersed the vigilantes. When vigilantes attacked in Carroll County, the Saints’ appeals for help were denied and they had to abandon their colony there. Then vigilante activity resumed in Daviess County, and the Saints decided they would have to defend themselves. In response to a preemptive strike they made in Daviess and another engagement on the border between Caldwell and Ray counties, Governor Boggs declared the Mormons enemies of the state and ordered the state militia to drive them out of Missouri. Clearly the Saints had satisfied the injunction in the redemption revelation to weary the governor.

From the dungeon of a Missouri jailhouse, Joseph Smith wrote to the Saints–who had resettled in Illinois and Iowa–and instructed them to begin counting the costs of the Missouri expulsion in lands lost and confiscated chattel property. Using the language of the revelation on Zion’s redemption, he informed the Saints it was now time to focus their efforts on the national level. After escaping from his guards and rejoining the Saints, Smith gathered up all the documentation he could and took it to the nation’s capital to present to President Martin Van Buren and the 26th congress. He hoped that the federal government would intervene to restore the Saints to their land or remunerate them for their losses. In December 1839, when Smith arrived in the city, he called on the President at the White House. Upon hearing his case, Van Buren reportedly replied, “what can I do” I can do nothing for you,”if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri.” Following Constitutional interpretation–and especially as a states’ rights Democrat–Van Buren was unwilling to interfere in Missouri’s domestic affairs. But Smith viewed his reaction in a campaign context as well. In another version of the incident, Van Buren was reported to have said, “your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you . . . If I take up for you I shall lose the vote of Missouri.”

While Van Buren’s unwillingness to help the Saints almost closed the door on the presidential stage of appeal outlined in the redemption revelation, the context of the impending election opened the door wide again–for if Van Buren would not help them perhaps William Henry Harrison and the Whigs would. As the party of moral activism, the Whigs were more likely to interfere in domestic matters. With their Democratic patronage uncompensated, the Saints shifted their allegiance to the Whig party and voted for Harrison. Although Van Buren took both Missouri and Illinois, he did not retake the White House. But then neither did Harrison, except for a few weeks of terminal illness. Smith–unsatisfied with the “pseudo whig democrat reign” of John Tyler–waited for the next election. In the meantime, ongoing immigration made the Saints a demographic force to be reckoned with in Illinois. They became deeply involved in politics at the county and state levels. From the state legislature, they obtained a charter for their city Nauvoo granting broad powers of political autonomy. The new city council quickly passed a law protecting religious freedom for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. Smith soon became the mayor.

As the 1844 election approached, Smith and other leaders sent letters asking the various candidates what they would do for the Mormon people if elected. Those who responded offered no assurance of help. The purpose of the inquiry was to find the candidate most likely to do something about their redress petitions, but the responses they received ruled out the viability of support even before the election. However, the Saints had not exhausted all of their options in pursuing the divine mandate to appeal to the national executive; if none of the candidates in the field were willing to take up their cause, the Saints could field their own candidate. Joseph Smith prepared to run for president himself. Once an alienated separatist, he had become a petitioner to the government and then a candidate for its highest office. His immediate sights were now set on Washington, not New Jerusalem. The campaign was another huge step for the Saints toward participation in American political culture. Smith converted his entire missionary force into campaign workers and sent his chief lieutenants into the field to manage their efforts. Reaching out to Catholics and other minorities, he attempted to build a “coalition of the oppressed.” Drawn into public dialogue, Smith constructed a platform that weighed in on contemporary issues ranging from banking and commerce to the question of Texas annexation.

Smith’s platform centered, however, on civil rights and the federal protection they deserved. Though with the interests of his own people foremost in his mind, he focused his critique on slavery and the American prison system–advocating universal emancipation from both. In politics, as in religion, Smith’s views were far from orthodox. Smith’s political thought derived not from a deep study of classical theory but from his idiosyncratic religious worldview and from the existential experience of oppression. Smith knew firsthand the dark side of democracy and the dilemma it posed for American public life. Beyond serving as a Moses to his own people, Smith now offered a prophetic critique of the government to the nation at large. Attacking states rights, he explicitly advocated federal protection of the freedoms articulated in the Constitution.

Though more deeply engaged in American politics than ever, Smith had also placed himself and his people on the brink of fulfilling the commandment to seek government redress at the national level and thereby justifying them in taking their case back to God. And so, in the middle of his campaign for the American presidency, Smith also organized a secret Mormon government and made contingency plans to move his people once again and build a newer Zion in a farther west.

Around the same time, the Mormons in Nauvoo grew to constitute a majority of the Hancock County population. Their bloc vote now determined who would attain office. Smith’s bid for the American presidency, however unlikely, only further incensed those in western Illinois who despised the concentrated religious and political power he wielded. Conflict with the area’s early settlers, similar to that which had occurred in the counties of western Missouri, eventually led to Smith’s murder. A lynch mob gunned him down in June 1844 while he was being held prisoner in the Hancock County jailhouse. It was largely due to Smith’s assassination that the Mormon leadership determined they had fulfilled their obligations in appealing to the government.

As persecution and violence continued to grow, the Saints once again disengaged from American politics and set their sights on finding a place apart where they could live independently and peacefully. Again they looked to the far west, but this time beyond the reach of American territorial claims. Following the example of the Republic of Texas, they hoped to carve out a piece of northern Mexican territory for themselves. After the Mormons left the states, but before they reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, America declared war on its neighbor to the west. A year after the Mormons reached their new home, the treaty ending the war placed them once again within American territory. For the moment, however, their new land was no more American than it had been Mexican. The Great Basin was Indian country. Brigham Young took up again Joseph Smith’s Zion project.

And so it was that Smith’s political ideas were not without consequence. His dream of independence and isolation affected the lives of tens of thousands of converts who migrated to the Mormon stronghold in the intermountain west. There they would struggle against the United States for another half century before submitting to its sovereignty.

Joseph Smith’s Politics, part 1

Friend of the blog Mark Ashurst-McGee has agreed to share with us his 2010 AHA paper, which provides an overview of the arguments in Mark’s award-winning dissertation on Joseph Smith’s political thought. For those who don’t know Mark’s work, you should stop what you’re doing and start catching up now. He’s currently working as an editor on the Joseph Smith Papers. I’ve broken the paper into two parts. For full documentation, see the dissertation, “Zion Rising: Joseph Smith’s Early Social and Political Thought” (ASU, 2008) –DG

I would like to speak to the fundamental impulse within Mormonism to withdraw from the wider society into a sectarian “Zion”–as Joseph Smith called it–as well as the paradoxical necessity of political involvement to protect this separatist project.

As founding prophet and president of a new church–now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–Joseph Smith sent missionaries throughout the English Atlantic world inviting all who would listen to leave worldly Babylon behind. His missionary force called on individuals not only to embrace the gospel through baptism and confirmation but to migrate to the Mormon center of “gathering.” Converts were to leave behind not just their inner sins and worldly habits but their lands and improvements, family and friends, churches and communities. The Latter-day Saints were to move to the western reaches of the United States and build the new society of Zion.

Smith’s disengagement from America is perplexing given the patriotic tenor of the times. He was born within a quarter century of the Revolutionary War, in which both of his grandfathers had served. He grew to manhood in the period of nationalism following the War of 1812. But for Smith and his family, as for many other Americans, the hopes and dreams of the new republic went unfulfilled. Smith considered America’s revolution and founding to be acts of providence, but he also believed that the republic’s golden age had come and gone. Peace and harmony were giving way to contention and strife between religious denominations, socioeconomic classes, and political parties. His Book of Mormon, published in 1830, identified the American Indians as a branch of the House of Israel to whom God had given the Americas as a promised land. The book also foretold that in the last days these American Israelites would reclaim the continent as sovereign territorial domain. Smith’s further revelations charged his followers to awaken the Indians to their true identity, join with them, and help them build the New Jerusalem in the New World. The Indians would then begin reclaiming the Americas for Israel beginning at this capital city. Zion, the holy land of the western hemisphere, would grow in size and power without aggression as the contention in America and the other nations of the world escalated into violence, warfare, destruction, and collapse. The Zion of Joseph Smith’s mind was essentially Mormon and exclusivist in its government rule by the Mormon priesthood, but Zion had a cosmopolitan and inclusivist aspect as well: It would welcome converts from every “nation, kindred, tongue, and people”–regardless of race or class–and would also welcome the unconverted who fled to Zion seeking refuge from the wars of nations.

Mormonism’s genesis illustrates clearly that not all Americans shared the optimism of the early republic. Most early American reformers, while seeing serious problems in American society, believed fervently in their ability to provide the necessary legal remedies or institutional support to solve the nation’s problems. Even abolitionists, feminists, and others who perceived flaws deep within American society optimistically pursued their crusade to save the nation. In contrast, Shakers, Harmonists, and other separatists abandoned the endeavor of general reform and turned to internal projects. More pessimistic than these separatist groups, who created pockets of sacred community within America, Joseph Smith called upon his followers to leave America behind and help him establish a new nation in the western borderlands. The early mission of the Latter-day Saints to leave America and join the Indians shows the depth of their alienation. It serves as a potent illustration of the profound discontent experienced by many in the social turbulence following America’s political, economic, and religious revolutions.

In 1831, a year after organizing the “Church of Christ” in New York, Joseph Smith led a small group of church members to the western edge of the United States. From a cluster of settlements in Jackson County, Missouri, the Saints attempted to affect a communion with the Indians living in the reservations just across the border. When their efforts failed, they pressed forward to establish Zion themselves. The early settlers of Jackson County watched with concern, then with fear and loathing, as the Mormon community grew in size and strength. After two years of Mormon migration, the early settlers could see that the demographic balance of power was about to shift. Then, in the summer of 1833, the Mormon newspaper published the Missouri statutes regarding free blacks along with a word of caution regarding immigration. The prospect of free black Mormons moving into Jackson County was more than the early settlers would bear. They saw the Mormons constructing a citizenry that was entirely incompatible with their own. Vigilantes destroyed the Mormon print shop that had published the paper and demanded that the Mormons leave. By the end of the year they had driven the Saints from the county with whips and rifles.

The magnitude of their losses in land and improvements–and their inability to recover their lands on their own–compelled Smith and the Saints to engage with America on its own political terms. In December 1833, Smith delivered a revelation to his people in which God commanded them to seek redress from government and “redeem” Zion. The revelation explained the means of this redemption by using Jesus’ parable of the unjust judge, in which a widow pled her case before a judge and continually wearied him with her complaints until he finally avenged her of the wrongs she had suffered–not out of a sense of justice but to relieve himself of her pestering. The Saints were to weary the government in a similar manner. Before, the Mormons had gone to great lengths to distance themselves from worldly government. Now they mounted an aggressive campaign to win political favor for their cause. Their effort to resuscitate the separatist Zion project ironically required them to accommodate themselves to the broader political landscape.

While the appeal for help forced the Saints to abandon their theocratic posturing, in their fear of further persecution and in their appeals to American government the Mormons turned away from their former interest in the nation’s most oppressed peoples. Like white laborers and immigrants, when they claimed the privileges of American citizenship they played by the rules of the dominant political culture of white manhood suffrage. So long as they maintained a presence in Missouri, the Mormons went out of their way to distance themselves from the broad cause of anti-slavery. The mission to join with the Indians faded even further into the future.

An even more crucial point regarding the revelation on Zion’s redemption was that it introduced a process of appeal that ultimately led back to God. If rejected in the courts, the Saints were to take their case higher: “let them importune at the feet of the Judge and if he heed them not let them importune at the feet of the Governor and if the Governor heed them not let them importune at the feet of the President and if the President heed them not then will the Lord arise . . . and in his fury vex the nation.” The revelation placed the immediate burden of redeeming Zion on the Saints and committed them to engage with the government at the local, state, and even national level. And yet, at the same time, the trajectory of appeal traced out in the revelation suggested that in the end only God would avenge them. The effort to reclaim their lands was a tenuous reengagement with America.

The pivotal revelation on Zion’s redemption became as important in Smith’s outlook as the revelations that had brought Zion into being. It would frame his efforts and his understanding of events for the rest of his life. The first step toward redeeming Zion was to seek redress through the local courts. In response to earlier incidents of vandalism, the Saints had already attempted to enter complaints with officers of the Jackson County court–many of whom had signed the vigilante circular calling for an expulsion posse. As the Jackson court had earlier refused to take their complaints, the Saints filed their complaints at the local circuit court. When the circuit court came to Jackson in February 1834, Mormon witnesses reentered the county with the state attorney general and an escort of 250 state militia. However, after the attorney general read the hostile climate he dropped the state’s Mormon cases. He explained to the Saints that it was useless to try them before a jury of Jackson citizens. Mormon civil cases, though granted venue in neighboring Ray County, fared little better.

To be continued…