THE CHURCH: Non-Mormons, Ex-Mormons, and the Perceptions of Mormonism

Note: I have tamed my views considerably since high school. Not living in Southeastern Idaho for a while has helped.  Anyone who would like to critique my rash, abrasive high school self should remember their own foibles first and that I was acting from a place of pain and alienation.  I?m also not saying that Ed Decker or Fanny Stenhouse is correct in their depiction of Mormonism ? just that we need to take their geographic location seriously.

Recently, there has been a spate of work about how Mormons have been perceived in American popular culture.  Spencer Fluhman recently published A Peculiar People, which explores the role that anti-Mormonism played in defining what counted as ?religion? in the United States in the nineteenth century and what was dismissed as fanaticism and lunacy. J.B. Haws will also be publishing a book on the Mormon image in the twentieth century with the same publisher next year.  Cristine Hutchinson-Jones and Megan Goodwin have both written about the public perception of Mormonism on this and other blogs.  (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Although I have used a lot of this work in my dissertation

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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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Southwestern States Mission: July Sick Days

One of the reasons I started the Southwestern States Mission series was to motivate myself to analyze missionary health. I had been putting it off for a while and have continued to do so because it?s a big, daunting topic. It?s time to bite the bullet. I?ve started coding diary entries for health status by month. [1] Below is a summary of my first-draft results for July 1900 and 1901. I have included only the five travelling missionaries.

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It’s May, Happy New Year! Or, How I Spend My Summer Vacation

Sorry this post isn’t very Mormon-y, but it’s part of my occasional postings that try to make academia’s processes more transparent, especially to benefit prospective & junior faculty. So this public service announcement brought to you by the merrie month of May, hopefully it’s timely advice to someone out there.

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Mormon Women’s History Tea and Discussion Group – Announcement

A year and a half ago, Brittany Chapman and I discussed the need for a space where young female scholars of Mormonism could gain the academic skills necessary to engage in discussion about Mormon women?s history.  Although we both felt comfortable with our ability to conduct research in primary sources, write interesting narratives about those who had lived in the past, and to connect our histories to larger historiographies, we felt woefully unprepared to engage with feminist and gender theory.  The Mormon Women?s History Tea and Discussion Group was born out of a desire to create a space where young female scholars could gain the tools necessary to participate in academic discourse.  As a result, we initially planned to pair an academic article on some issue of feminist theory or women?s history with a piece written on Mormonism and have a discussion about the intersections between the two.

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Don’t Stand So Close to Me: On Not Hearing Elizabeth Smart

Please note: This post has been corrected. In earlier versions, the second and third paragraph were inadvertently transposed.

As we continue this month to consider images of Mormonism in popular culture, the Juvenile Instructor is pleased to host guest blogger Megan Goodwin. Megan is currently completing her PhD at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Her research interests include American religions, gender and sexuality, religious language and literature, religious alterity, and contemporary critical thought. Her dissertation, entitled “Good Fences: American Sexual Exceptionalism and Marginal Religions,” examines three captivity narratives – Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987), Michelle Smith’s Michelle Remembers (1989), and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) – as articulations of American Protestant anxieties about the challenges marginal religions pose to normative masculinity. Please join us in welcoming Megan to the Juvenile Instructor.

Elizabeth Smart-Gilmour

Elizabeth Smart made headlines this month when she advocated for human trafficking survivors at a conference hosted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Smart this year – I made her kidnapping (or rather Jon Krakauer’s treatment of Smart’s captivity in his inexorable Under the Banner of Heaven) the focal point of a national conference paper and a key element of my dissertation chapter on anti-Mormon religious intolerance.  But I missed that she’d spoken at this conference until the blogosphere erupted over her alleged condemnation of abstinence-based sex education.

During her 13 minute presentation, Smart recounted the details of her captivity and emphasized the need to teach children that they have intrinsic worth, regardless of how others might abuse or exploit them.  She further noted that “one of the questions that is most commonly asked [of her] is ‘well, why didn’t you run away?  Why didn’t you yell?  Why didn’t you scream?’”

This question immediately raised the hackles of my inner humorless feminist, who was already riled after a year of teaching Women’s and Gender Studies 101.  This question, as Smart notes, is common – an almost knee-jerk refrain when people feel survivors didn’t resist their own exploitation and abuses enough. (The metrics of “enough” are usually a bit murky.) This question, as I explained to my students this year, perpetuates rape culture: the popular and often unquestioned conviction that men are naturally sexually aggressive and dominant, while women are the natural targets of that sexual aggression and must resist unwanted overtures.  Or to put in simpler terms: women should try to avoid being raped, because, you know, rape happens.

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New Mormon Women’s History Resource: Mormon Women Scholars’ Network

One of the things that still disappoints every time that I look for scholarship on Mormon women or attend the Mormon History Association is how little work has been done on women?s issues beyond Nauvoo-era polygamy and how few women actively work and publish in Mormon History.   Although Mormon Enigma was published 30 years ago, it remains the best work on Mormon women?s history.  Its standing power is at once a testament to its power as a book and to the fact that little work has been done about women?s lives within the Mormon Church since the 1980s.

In recent years, a few organizations have been founded to help address that lack. 

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MHA Reminder and Selected Abstracts

In a mere 23 days, the Mormon History Association’s meetings will convene in Layton, Utah. As you might imagine, we at JI are very excited to hear from the best and brightest in Mormon History. There are a few events/items worth mentioning:

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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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Southwestern States Mission: Music through the Year

In the past few months I?ve posted on the hymnbook, Mormon hymnody, and the general role of singing in the Southwestern States Mission. Today I will look at when in the week and when in the year traveling missionaries sang. [1]