The Deseret News took a cheap shot at a Latter-day Saint Historian. Here’s what it got wrong.

By December 16, 2020

Writing in the Deseret News this morning, my BYU colleague Hal Boyd offered his personal assessment of journalist McKay Coppins’s feature on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ history and the author’s own experience of the faith in The Atlantic. In evaluating the piece, Boyd reduces features on Latter-day Saints and Mormon history to three genres: “non-Latter-day Saint journalist[s] who look at the faith warily,” “pieces written by former or lapsed members of the church who revisit their past faith with equal parts exoticism and redemptive nostalgia,” and a third group he classifies as “active church members [who] examine their faith.” Boyd accuses this last group of “tak[ing] special pains to demonstrate just how objective they are in a well-intentioned but ultimately gauche bid to convince readers that they’re playing it straight,” or what Boyd dismissively calls “performative objectivity.” Straining to find examples, he points to two pieces: a 2005 Newsweek article and, curiously, our own Benjamin Park’s 2020 book, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier.

If it seems strange to include a book about Latter-day Saint history written by an academically-trained historian in an article about journalistic assessments of Mormonism, that’s because it is. Such an inclusion betrays an unfortunate misunderstanding of historical scholarship. And make no mistake — though Ben’s book is written for an audience beyond his academic peers, it is still very much historical scholarship, representing years of archival research, rounds of editing and peer review, and a commitment to not just telling a story, but making a historical argument.

Where Boyd sees “a gauche bid” at “performative objectivity,” other readers will (rightfully) see that very commitment on full display. The Kingdom of Nauvoo aims not only to tell a fascinating story but to demonstrate what the Mormon sojourn in Nauvoo tells us about early America, writ large. And whereas journalists from all of the camps proposed by Boyd have largely agreed that Mormonism is, as the title of Coppins’s piece puts it, “the most American religion,” Park’s argument is more subtle and interesting: Joseph Smith and his followers, he agrees, are best understood as a product of their time and place — the early nineteenth century American republic, a place of religious revivals, rapid change, and a faith in the future of the American experiment. But they also represented a distinct challenge to that republic and to that civic-minded optimism. More significantly — and this is Park’s real contribution — Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo were an affront to “the foundations of American democracy” (9).

Frustrated with the failure of local and national governments to protect their rights as American citizens from mob rule, Saints took matters into their own hands. Park describes in detail the Mormon formation of a local militia, the organization and activity of both ecclesiastical and civil courts, the provocative city charter drawn up for Nauvoo, and the bloc voting that continually frustrated non-Mormon politicians. Most radically of all, Joseph Smith and a group of his most trusted followers began making plans during this time for a theocratic government that would triumph over the failed democracy of the United States (along with all other world governments).

All of this took place against the backdrop of rapid revelation and change within the Latter-day Saint community. Smith and others began taking plural wives, challenging American conceptions of the Christian family and provoking dissent from otherwise committed followers. If this seems sensationalistic, it’s because the subject matter is sensational. It makes for gripping reading. That’s not Park trying to “play it straight” to appease non-Mormon readers; it’s him offering a close reading of the historical sources. As a historian does.

Some may quibble with Park’s conclusions. That’s good and fine. But the sources on which those conclusions are based are listed in 31 pages of detailed endnotes citing each document and archive by name, along with each earlier scholarly interpretation Park’s book builds on and revises. If the Deseret News, or any other outlet, wants to critique the book, it should start by assessing the book on its own aims — its reading of sources and its interpretation of them. That is how history works.

Article filed under Miscellaneous


Comments

  1. Thanks Chris. Boyd’s one sentence dissertation deserved a good rhetorical slap in the face.

    Comment by wvs — December 16, 2020 @ 10:53 am

  2. Thank you, Christopher. Have we (in this case, the Latter-day Saints) reached a limit in our ability to consider new records, new methodologies, new ideas, no matter how well considered and documented? This one-sentence sniff, paired with the morbidly condescending “review” from which it seems to have been drawn, feels very much like the ’70s, when historians’ discoveries and well laid out new narratives — now familiar and embraced, appearing in Gospel Topics essays and in _Saints_ — were scorned, their authors’ faith disparaged as a sham.

    It’s bizarre to have to speak for the quality of _Kingdom of Nauvoo_ and against non-specific, undocumented, sour-sounding dismissals like this one, but here we are.

    Comment by Ardis — December 16, 2020 @ 12:10 pm

  3. Well done. Those, like Hal Boyd, who have never demonstrated a scintilla of objectivity in their writings (and who are paid to espouse their employer’s views), should really avoid assessing the objectivity of others.

    Comment by Hans Mensch — December 16, 2020 @ 12:12 pm

  4. Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier is well worth defending. It sharpened my view of the rise of the LDS church in the broader context of U.S. history. Cheap shots are undignified and fail to improve anything. Thanks for your post.

    Comment by Reinhard Lindner — December 16, 2020 @ 12:49 pm

  5. Thanks, Chris. All professional historians, informed lay persons, and interested amateurs, LDS or not, are very grateful to Ben for his performance objectivity.

    Comment by Melvin Johnson — December 16, 2020 @ 1:57 pm

  6. Good points and an important rebuttal. I particularly like the Deseret News-y headline!

    Comment by warno — December 17, 2020 @ 9:28 am

  7. Really? I thought Elise Soukup’s piece was great, being lumped with that is hardly a cheap shot.

    Comment by jpv — December 27, 2020 @ 12:30 pm

  8. Thanks for this post. I now will most definitely purchase Ben’s book. I was think about it, but now I am convinced I must read it.

    Comment by KSS — January 5, 2021 @ 11:00 am


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