Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Introduction

Greetings, Juvenile Instructor readers! Matt B (one of your permabloggers) asked if I would be willing to do a bit of a guest stint as a blogger. I?m currently in a PhD program in systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, and teach as an instructor at Georgetown. Because I?m LDS, I?ve been asked to teach a class this semester on Mormonism, which I?ve titled ?Mormonism: A New World Religion.? This series of posts will be about my experience teaching the course. The title is supposed to have a bit of a double meaning. First, it?s a religion from the New World, one of the few (discounting the bewildering variety of Christianities) that originated in the New World. Second, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has predicted that Mormonism will be the next world religion to emerge since Islam.

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Notes on the Pew Survey.

Between October 25 and November 16 of last year, researchers for the Pew Forum interviewed 1,019 Americans who identified themselves as “Mormon.” That point is key.

There was surprise among the researchers and advisory board (including myself), and no doubt among the General Authorities when it turned out that 77% of Mormons in America attend church every week, because it is received common knowledge among most who care about such things that the actual rate of attendance (and tithepaying &etc) is nowhere near this high.

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Come October We Will Bid Goodbye to Elder Jensen as LDS Church Historian

He will be given Emeritus status at the October General Conference and Elder Steven E. Snow will become the new Church Historian.

I don’t know a lot about Elder Snow, but I do know that Elder Jensen will be sorely missed. He has been a tremendous advocate for Church History and those who have had even the most passing personal contact with him know him to be a genuine gem of a person.

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Panel Summary: “Teaching Mormonism in the Digital Age”

I spent this last weekend at the annual American Historical Association meeting and since the American Society of Church History is an affiliated organization and holds its meeting concurrently, I was able to sit in on the Mormon History Association panel entitled “Teaching Mormonism in the Digital Age.” What follows is a summary of the presentations given. Jan Shipps chaired the panel with Kathleen Flake, Patrick Mason, and Peter Thuesen participating. Jonathan Moore was supposed to participate, but ultimately was not able to make it. Dr. Flake tried to incorporate some aspects from his paper into her own. For me, the most exciting part of the panel involved the glimpses of Dr. Flake’s upcoming work which looks to be groundbreaking.  This rather long summary is from handwritten notes, so I make no claims to it being a perfect representation of the presenters’ ideas. Any mistakes are my own. I hope you enjoy.

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Mormon Books in the Wall Street Journal

(cross-posted at Religion in American History)

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Samuel Brown, professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah, friend of the JI, and author of the recently-released In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012), penned a short annotated list of “the five best” books on Mormonism, which included the following:

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Recently Published and Forthcoming Mormon History Books, 2011 Edition (Also: JI’s 1000th Post!)

UPDATES: See comments: 1, 13, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 28.

It’s time for the yearly round up of recently published and forthcoming Mormon history books. See last year’s list here. Be sure to also check out Ben’s recap of significant scholarship in 2011 and Stapley’s Christmas Gift Book Guide. Be sure to let me know what I missed in the comments. Rumors about book projects are always welcome! Finally, according to the WordPress stats, this is our 1000th published post. Not a bad milestone for any blog.

Arthur H. Clark & Oklahoma University Press

Gregory K. Armstrong, Matthew J. Grow, Dennis J. Siler. Parley P. Pratt and the Making of Mormonism. (AHC 2011)

James C. Work. Don?t Shoot the Gentile. (OUP 2011) ?A witty memoir of a non-Mormon teacher?s rookie years in Utah?

Call for Applicants: Paper Prizes in Communal Studies

Passed along from JI friend Matt Grow:

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA CENTER FOR COMMUNAL STUDIES CENTER PRIZE

The Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana announces its annual prize competition for the best undergraduate and graduate student paper on historic or contemporary communal groups, intentional communities and utopias.

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Book Review: Mason, Patrick Q. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

In The Mormon Menace, Patrick Mason adeptly traces the contours of anti-Mormonism in the late nineteenth-century South and explains how proselytizing, polygamy, and extra-legal violence shaped the South’s response to Mormonism. Mason attends to the ways in which southern honor, defined by a communal estimation of the individual and often deployed to protect or avenge the virtuous female, provided justification for illicit actions against Mormon missionaries. While granting that anti-Mormon violence paled in comparison to racial and political attacks against African Americans, Mason contends that “Mormonism was unique in the way it inspired southerners to set aside general norms of civility and religious tolerance” (13).

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Graduate Studies, Mormonism, and the Bloggernacle: A Survey

From Patrick Mason:

At the January 2012 meeting of the American Society for Church History, I’ll be on a panel called “Teaching Mormonism in a Digital Age.” In my comments I’ll be considering the impact of the “bloggernacle” on Mormon studies, specifically in regard to the current generation of graduate students. I have designed the following questionnaire to get a better handle on why people read Mormon blogs and what they get out of them. The questionnaire is for any graduate student, full or part time, LDS or non-LDS, in any academic field. The informed consent form on the first page will explain more, or you can contact me at patrick.mason@cgu.edu with any questions. Thanks for participating.

The link to survey is found here.

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.