The Mormon Old Man of the Mountain

One of my favorite hyperbolic descriptions of Brigham Young (??In the course of an unusually long life, he was never known to do a generous or unselfish action??) includes the line: ?If we search history for his prototypes, we find him a mixture of Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Kohrassan, and that terrible chief of the assassins, the Old Man of the Mountain.? [1] I recently wrote about the Mormon Mokanna; today I address the other half of the mix. In the mid- and late-nineteenth century, critics of Mormonism sometimes compared Mormons to the ?Old Man of the Mountain,? the leader of what Marco Polo and many since understood to be the fanatically dedicated and fantastically skilled Hashashin / ?Assassins.?

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Images: Forty-Three Long Stockings A-Hangin’ on the Wall

With this post we begin an occasional series entitled ?Images.? We?ll post an image?contemporary photograph, political cartoon, post card, picture of an object, book cover, whatever?briefly describe it, and then invite comment on the image and/or its context. Hopefully we?ll accumulate a small collection of crowd-annotated Mormon-related images. Furthermore, the text descriptions of the images might help researchers find images via text searches.

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MHA Newsletter Summary, December 2014 Edition

The December 2014 Mormon History Association newsletter (Vol 49, No 4) is available online here. For your convenience, I will hit some highlights.

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List of the First 85 Sister Missionaries

Below is a first-draft list of sister missionaries called in the first three years of the formal female missionary program. I needed to know which ?number? an early sister missionary was for another project; I was surprised at how difficult the information was to chase down in digital form. To spare others similar pain, I submit the following list. I also commend the list to any History instructor assigning mini-biographies to classes of undergraduates (and please share the results). While we?re on the subject, check out Matt McBride?s http://sistermissionaries.org/.

Please note, with emphasis, the first-ness of the draft. I have verified very little on the list and am certain there are transcription errors and possibly even wholesale omissions.

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Joseph Smith Papers Project publishes Documents, Volume 3

On Monday, December 1, the Joseph Smith Papers Project released their newest volume: Documents, Volume 3 provides transcriptions of letters, city and temple plans, revelations, reports of discourses, and minutes dating between February 1833 and March 1834, a period that began with glorious hopes of building Zion in Jackson County, Missouri, but descended into crisis on two fronts. In Kirtland, the excommunicated Doctor Philastus Hurlbut began publishing negative accounts of Joseph Smith, and in Jackson County, mob violence led to the expulsion of Mormons from their legally purchased lands.

At the launch of this newest volume, Matthew Grow, head of the Publications Division at the Church History Library, also announced that Joseph Smith Papers Project staff have refreshed the project?s website. To improve the user experience, the team has improved the navigation and readability of the site, added a Table of Contents to the document viewer to enable users to switch pages more easily, and improved the site?s search capabilities.

While Documents, Volume 1 contained a profusion of early revelation documents, Volume 3 has fewer revelations, but a greater variety of documents. Noteworthy documents include: meeting minutes of a collective, shared vision at the School of the Prophets in March 1833; a warrant with a long list of names of prominent Mormons that prevented those named from attaining legal residency and voting rights in Jackson County; annotated drawings of temple and city plans (this is the first volume to reproduce architectural designs and drawings of city plans; it is quite the type-setting feat!); and letters that shed light on the lives of Joseph Smith?s less prominent contemporaries who moved to Jackson County directly in response to his revelations.

These documents are compelling for various reasons. In reference to the March 1833 meeting minutes, Gerrit Dirkmaat, one of the volume editors, observed that most visionary accounts come from Joseph Smith. A handful of visionary accounts come from small groups, such as the ?Testimony of the Three Witnesses? to the Gold Plates. The account recorded by Frederick G. Williams of the collective vision at the March 1833 meeting is unique because a relatively large number of people participated in the event.

Alison Palmer, one of the editors, discussed the process of figuring out how to reproduce the city and temple drawings in a book format in a way that preserved the evolving relationship of the annotations to the designs. The document of the City of Zion Plat, for instance, is 17×22 inches in size. It depicts multiple religious buildings in the central block, and identifies the surrounding blocks as residential spaces. Ultimately, the team divided this document into nine sections and transcribed each.

According the to the volume editors, Joseph Smith?s correspondence reveals his unwavering confidence that Zion would be built. The time delay in communication (it took three weeks for a letter from Jackson County to arrive in Kirtland, for instance) was very interesting to me, especially in light of the need for immediate decisions in response to the increasing mob violence.

The Documents series is one out of six being published by the Joseph Smith Papers Project. The other five series are: Revelations and Translations, Histories, Journals, Legal and Business Records, and Administrative Documents. Photographs, videos, curricula/lesson plans for secular universities, and, of course, images of the documents themselves are all available on the Joseph Smith Papers Project Website.

Talking about Joseph Smith’s Polygamy with Your Kids: One Dad’s Experience

With the new polygamy essays out, I’ve heard and seen a number of comments along the lines of “we can maybe wrap our brains around this, but how in the world are we supposed to explain this to our children?” Good question. I, like probably a lot of bloggernacle folks, have tried to make it a point to go over various often undressed points of early Mormon history my my kids (like the seer stone) but I had neglected polygamy. This neglect was brought to my attention one summer after my then twelve-year-old son had returned from a trip to California to spend a week with his non-Mormon friends. He informed us that they had been razzing him about polygamy, something he knew nothing about. My wife and I started into a basic explanation of how we used to practice this but no more when he cut us off by asking, “But it was wrong, right?”

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Exemplification and Religious Education: Reactions to the News of Joseph Smith?s Polygamy as an Indicator of Concern

Andrea?s recent comment about the portrayal of Joseph Smith’s marriage relationship(s) in popular Mormon history and art prompted me to do this little study. What have LDS Church members learned from the media produced by the institutional Church about Joseph Smith?s polygamous marriages?

First, some theory.

The Exemplification of religion in the Media:

We have to be careful about assuming effects from the media because, with so many variables in play, media effects generally are not uniform nor strong. With that important caveat, empirical research in the field of mass communications on the theory of exemplification has demonstrated that the examples selected by storytellers (e.g., news reporters) do have an effect on people?s perceptions of the world?whether historical or current. This theory helps to explain why, after the passage of time, people tend to remember concrete examples rather than abstract assertions or numerical data.

Theorists have concluded from empirical evidence that the following process occurs in the brain: people use given examples to make intuitive leaps to a whole picture in their minds. In other words, ?knowledge? of how the world works tends to be based on isolated, often-atypical evidence that is imprinted visually in the brain.

I would argue that this theory also has implications for religious education. Not only do religion teachers often carry the weight of propounding authoritative Truth, they also often rely on exemplification as a teaching method. That is, the use of examples (verbal and visual) to convey a larger concept is arguably an intuitive storytelling and/or educational strategy. Zillmann (1999) has explained the concept of exemplification:

?Everybody is familiar with examples. Everybody has been given examples, and everybody has related examples to others, in efforts to elucidate a broader concept or issue. Everybody, therefore, has some tacit understanding of a relationship between an example and a larger entity to be exemplified by it. Implied is that more than one example exists? (p. 72).

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

We missed a week or two, so let’s hope this week’s roundup makes up for it. Or, at the least, is better than nothing.

By the way, have you heard if Mormonism has been the news lately?

In a way, this last week has been a throw-back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when stories Mormon polygamy filled the American imagination, not to mention the newspapers. The New York Times featured the recent LDS Church-produced essays on plural marriage as an A1, top-fold story that proceeded to set the media ablaze. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s Last Word had a nice segment that included Richard Bushman as well as the author of the original NYT story, Laurie Goodstein. Other coverage was found at PBS, The Guardian, and from the always-reliable Jana Reiss. One of the most perceptive takes, I thought, was Joanna Brooks’s. I could link to a dozen other pieces, some good and some not-so-good, but you have a google machine.

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Esotericism in the Internet Age: Or How Do We Teach Our Secrets Now?

The idea of esoteric truth, or higher truths only taught to the spiritually or ritually prepared, can be found in many traditions.  It has a long history in Christianity and Jesus himself declared to his apostles, “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand”  (Luke 8:10).  Paul in particular referred to higher teachings: in 1 Corinthians 2 he declared, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified … Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory … But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”  And in the next chapter Paul declared, “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.”

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When Did You First Hear about Joseph Smith’s Polygamy (And Other Difficult Issues)?

I first read about JS’s polygamy in sixth grade when I read the World Book Encyclopedia entry on JS, which said he had like 30 wives.  That seemed novel to me, though since I had heard about the church practicing polygamy I had some context.  What was even more novel, I remember, was that that entry was the first time I had ever read anything on JS that wasn’t devotional.  The article wasn’t particularly negative as I recall, but I remember the distinct realization that there was another way of looking at the church’s history than what I was taught in church.  And I wasn’t really sure what to make of that.  And I didn’t discuss it with my parents or anybody else since it seemed a little awkward and at that age I sort of wanted to avoid awkward discussions with my parents.  But it left the distinct impression that there may be some unsettling issues in church history, that there were a number of viewpoints on those issues, and that I didn’t have all the answers.  As I look back, I actually think that realization served me well.

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