Two Queries

I’m surfacing from a very busy semester to ask two things:

–when did the term “FLDS” develop? I have my ideas and some initial research but if anyone has insight on that, I’d be grateful for input.

–who’s going to be at AAR/SBL in San Franciso this weekend and would there be interest in organizing an informal JI meetup?

This is my first time at AAR – I’m looking forward to it. I will be speaking in a panel sponsored by the History of Christianity Section on Monday morning on the state of the field of fundamentalism (Session A21-104), and among other things I’m musing about the emergence of the FLDS wing of Mormonism’s house–or at least the emergence of CALLING it that, and about what that might say about the changing meanings for the term “fundamentalism.” My fellow panelists are Matthew Sutton, David Harrington Watt, Randall Stephens, and Mary Beth Mathews.

FYI, the Mormon Studies Consultation panel will be on Saturday morning at 9, with Colleen McDannell at the helm, on “Mormon Women and Modernity” (Session A19-130). It sounds like it angles towards sociology rather than history, but should be interesting to attend. The contributors and papers:

Ann Duncan (Goucher College) “The Mommy Wars, Mormonism and the ‘Choices’ of American Motherhood”
Jennifer Meredith (U of U) “Western Pioneer Mythos in the Negotiation of Mormon Feminism and Faith”
Jill Peterfeso (U North Carolina) “Scripting, Performing, Testifying: Giving Faithful ‘Seximony’ Through the Mormon Vagina Monologues”
Doe Daughtry (Arizona State) “‘Further Light and Knowledge’: Ways of Knowing in Mormonism and the New Spirituality”

Respondant is R. Marie Griffith from Harvard, and James M.McLachlan and Grant Underwood will be on hand for the business meeting.

Are other JI contributors, readers & fans going to be attending AAR? Maybe we could all have a breakfast or lunch together at some point over the weekend.

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…

Teaching Mormonism in the U.S. Survey

We’ve spent quite a bit of time at JI over the years considering how Mormonism fits into larger narratives of U.S. history, and I was finally able to put some of those discussions and recommendations to use this semester while teaching the first half of the U.S. History survey (U.S. History to 1877) to a group of 35 students, most of whom are from the mid-Atlantic and upper South and have very little personal experience or interaction with Mormons or Mormonism.

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Review: Charles R. Harrell, “This is my Doctrine”: the development of Mormon theology (Kofford, 2011)

Before I dive into the substance of this review, it’s worth pointing out, I think, a few of the things which are going on beneath its surface. The first is me once again trying to work out the relationship between trained academic scholars and autodidact scholars, and to assess their ongoing discussion about the proper form and the structure of scholarship. This is a popular topic at the JI, which reflects more generally the state of Mormon studies. Many of the points I make below have to do with my judgment of the ways this book holds up as an academic work. A book of this scope and ambition would normally, in an academic setting be a synthesis, weaving together a vast array of work into a single whole by a scholar familiar with the field. But its author is neither a trained theologian nor a trained historian – and, of course, that wide array of secondary literature on the history of Mormon theology simply does not exist. This my mean that we should take its ambitions somewhat differently than we might otherwise. Furthermore – and second – while the work itself certainly has academic aspirations, it also reads in many places as prescriptive as well as descriptive – that is, this is a work of Mormon theology as much as it is a history of Mormon thought. Harrell thinks certain ways of believing are more useful than others, and he seeks to convince us of the fact. This is not bad; indeed, I think Mormonism needs more theology, not less, and I am delighted with Harrell’s contribution to that discussion. But again, it complicates how one might engage with the book as a work of scholarship: how should it be read? Those caveats noted, the review.

Additionally, this essay will appear in a slightly altered form in an upcoming issue of Dialogue. Subscribe!

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Introducing Ordinary Mormons to Academic Mormon History

Recently, I’ve been think about how ordinary members use church history in their everyday lives. In my limited experience, few members read much church history, especially if it wasn’t published by Deseret Books. I realize this isn’t news to anyone reading this blog, as we’ve discussed in several of Ben’s recent posts why many church members resist more academically-oriented literature if it challenges accepted oral traditions, is seen as unaccessible due to academic prose and/or jargon, among other reasons. But I’ve wondered what more we could be doing to encourage ward members to see the benefits of incorporating more academic history into their busy schedules.

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Call for Applicants: BYU’s Church History and Doctrine Department Seeks Two New Hires

The Church History and Doctrine Department at BYU’s School of Religious Education seeks applicants for two new faculty positions. The first will teach world religions—a booming topic at BYU, I hear—and the second will focus on the more traditional curriculum of the department, preferably with a PhD in history.

Applications for these positions are to be completed online, and are found through this link.

Prospectus 3.3: Sources

Here I basically place the work of Quinn, Brooke, and Owens within the context of Christian Platonism that I described in my earlier posts (3.1 and 3.2).  It’s not an in-depth discussion of the sources, but more of an overview.

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Introducing Mormonism…to Non-Mormon Students

With Romney drawing increased attention to Mormonism in American life, I’ve wondered how much to bring Mormon history into my US history survey courses. I’m currently teaching the first half, and he’s come up a couple of times when discussing religious tests for the presidency (I first mention JFK’s Catholicism, which most of my students have heard about, and then I ask which contemporary candidate is having problems with his religion, and at least a few students are aware of opposition to Romney’s Mormonism).

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Avoiding Intellectual Paralysis, Part II: Craig Harline’s Conversions, and Historical Relevancy

[Part I on the importance of narrative is found here. Also, see Blair’s review of Harline’s book at BCC yesterday, which gives an excellent overview of the book’s narrative(s).]

Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University and noted Reformation scholar, has long been noted as a skilled author whose prose and approach reach a much broader audience than is typical for academic books. Whether it’s a Reformation archbishop, a seventeenth century nun, or a comprehensive history of Sunday, Harline is widely respected for making historical stories accessible for general readers.

But while finishing his book on conversion in seventeenth-century Europe—focusing on a family whose father was a Protestant minister, whose son was a convert to Catholicism, and how they balanced these tough issues of tolerance—Harline considered ways to make the book more relevant to contemporary readers. He narrates how he came to this conclusion in the epilogue to the book: during a chance meeting with some family friends at a local restaurant, he learned about their college-age daughter’s recent choices and the grief and disappointment it brought to their close-knit family. Trying to bring comfort to the troubled parents, Harline shared the story and lessons of his current book-in-progress. Satisfied with the (albeit limited) relief that this brought, he felt justified in his desire to use his book “to show explicitly how the distant past could possibly have meaning in the present, and vice versa.” History, he concluded, was too often seen as “something mostly suitable for school, or hobbyists, something to be discussed recreationally..rather than as something that might inform present experience” (269-272). Hoping to reverse this trend, and hoping to better reach people an audience like his friends with the wayward child, Harline re-envisioned the overall framework and methodology of what is now published as Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America (Yale UP, 2011).

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Guest Post: Research Survey of Mormons (UK & Irish)

 David M. Morris received his PhD from Southampton University (supervised at Chichester) in History and Sociology of Religion.  His PhD focused on British Mormons in the 19C and the socio-demographic backgrounds of LDS in Staffordshire between 1840 and 1870.  Morris is also the General Editor of the International Journal of Mormon Studies as well as a co-founder of EMSA.  He is currently researching UK/IRISH Mormons in the modern era.

I am currently undertaking a sociological study concerning members of the BRITISH & IRISH LDS Church, OR those who were PREVIOUSLY affiliated or expatriates. The survey has 33 questions in 9 sections. Would you please mind participating. All information gathered is anonymous and can not be used to identify either an individual or an IP address. The survey is found here:

Furthermore, we are pleased to announce the publication of the fourth issue of the International Journal of Mormon Studies. This is a peer reviewed journal and indexed by EBSCO. The current issue and past issues may be found here. Note that in contrast to many academic journals, IJMS articles may be downloaded for free. We do this in order to make this work available to readers around the world.

Please consider submitting your own work for publication.