Mormons and the New York Times

by John-Charles Duffy

On July 21, the New York Times ran a front-page story about Mormons grappling with doubt as a result of discovering uncomfortable aspects of their religion’s history through online sources. The story was built around the experience of Hans Mattsson, a Swede who served in church leadership at the regional level but has now gone public with his skepticism. Other Mormons quoted in the story include well known scholars Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens, both of whom could be described as intellectually sophisticated, moderately orthodox Mormons—the Mormon equivalent of a Mark Noll, maybe, for those who know the evangelical Protestant world. In the article, Bushman and Givens refer to their own efforts to help their coreligionists come to terms with jarring aspects of the faith’s history by discussing these more frankly than has been (or is still) customarily the case in church publications. The story also cites a study conducted by a Mormon doctoral candidate John Dehlin of over three thousand doubting Mormons; Dehlin is also the founder of a podcast, Mormon Stories, that provides a forum for discussing controversial questions in Mormon history and teaching.

The appearance of this story on the front page of the NYT intrigues me. The story was not news to me: I move in or around Mormon circles where these discussions are occurring. I’m not too surprised that NYT religion reporter Laurie Goodstein would find these developments worth writing about. Mormons have been in the news quite a bit over the past few years (they’re “trending,” I believe the young people say these days?), and I can identify various angles of potential reader interest in the story Goodstein has put together. I am wondering, though: What does it mean that this story start on the front page of the NYT? Why did editors think the story was that important or potentially attractive to readers?

Let me tender three hypotheses—“interpretations,” as we call them in the humanities. I’ll save the one with the strongest “religion in the American west” bent for last.

Hypothesis 1. This story isn’t just about Mormons, it’s about modernization. In other words, this story is about a particular instance of a broader phenomenon: modern advances eroding the plausibility of traditional religious claims. The story ran under the headline “Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt”—a headline which struck me as giving more prominence to the Internet than the story itself did. So from the get-go, we are being invited to read this as a story about what happens when religious beliefs collide with modern media. Charles Dickens had a quip about how incredible it is for Mormons to preach angels in the age of railways. The NYT has updated that sense of incongruity to: How can Mormons—alternatively, plug in the traditionalist religion of your choice—go on believing what they do in the age of the Internet? With difficulty, according to this story. And the trend, at least as painted in the NYT, is for the religious to painfully adapt.

This way of reading the story could dovetail with another media narrative I’ve been noticing more often lately—a narrative postulating the resurgence of liberal versions of traditional religions (Christianity is usually what’s being discussed), especially among millennials, the latest model of “the modern generation.” I have been surprised to keep encountering this narrative, because I’d become so accustomed to the narrative that “conservative religions are the ones that are growing,” coupled with the narrative that “young people are becoming seekers or nones.” Perhaps I’ve been reading more Rodney Stark than was good for me. At any rate, the NYT story on the Mormon doubters could be read as a distinctively Mormon iteration of the metanarrative that “people today want a more liberal version of their religion,” namely, a version more appropriate to the modern Web-surfing age.

Hypothesis 2. This story culturally marginalizes Mormons by reminding readers of an elite newspaper how incredible their beliefs are. This reading of the NYT story is influenced by my perception—which I have documented elsewhere—that quite a bit of scholarly and journalistic discourse about Mormonism since the 1980s has “exoticized” the religion—this after a period at mid-twentieth century when Mormons enjoyed media representations that painted them as model Americans. A lot of talk about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism during the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns likewise had this function, because exoticizing Mormonism served the interests of various political players who wanted to alienate voters from Romney.

In the musical The Book of Mormon, we’re given a humorous send-up of exotic Mormon beliefs, in the song “I Believe”: I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America. I believe that God lives on a planet called Kolob. I believe that God’s plan involves me getting my own planet, and that Jesus has his own planet as well. The NYT story focuses on a different set of Mormon claims, but the subtext is much the same: Who could possibly believe this? Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon while peeping at a rock in the bottom of a hat? He was commanded by God to marry 14-year-old girls? God wanted Mormons to exclude black men from priesthood ordination? No wonder Mormons are grappling with doubt. Readers are meant to be sympathetic, I presume. Simultaneously, though, the story reminds readers that despite Mormons’ social conservatism, despite their presence in mainstream arenas such as business and government, their tradition makes claims that belong on the fringe. Don’t lose sight of that, dear reader, especially the next time you see Mormons running for high political office or professing to defend traditional values.

Hypothesis 3. With this story, an eastern establishment is—still—trying to mold Mormonism according to its own lights. The “still” in that last sentence points back to the nineteenth century, when Protestant reformers, determined to civilize the trans-Mississippi west, used eastern newspapers to rally citizens and lawmakers in the fight against Mormon polygamy and theocracy. Mormons had to be made to embrace proper American values, and they were quite literally denied citizenship (voting rights, statehood) until they did. In their crusade, reformers publicized Mormon or former Mormon voices that represented the appropriate values: the voices of polygamous wives, for example, who had seen the light and left.

This is the most suspicious of my suspicious readings—i.e., I’m hedging my bets—but it looks to me like something a little similar might be happening in this NYT story. Work with me here. We have here an article on the front page of one of the elite of the elite eastern newspapers. (They would probably prefer that I drop the qualifying “one of.”) This article provides a platform for various unofficial Mormon voices who represent a slightly more progressive approach to this religion. An approach that says: We need to be less defensively dismissive of criticism. We need to acknowledge fallibility and wrongdoing on the part of our past leadership. We need to stop being so literal-minded in the way we invest our scriptures with authority. We need, in effect, to be Mormon in a different way. We need to reform Mormonism.

It’s never put that bluntly in the NYT article. But that’s the resonance I pick up as my reading of this article crosses sound waves with the echo of eastern reform-minded journalism about Mormonism from the nineteenth century. Look! the editors of today’s NYT are saying to their readers—a more progressive kind of Mormonism! Mormons are starting to see the light! And that, evidently, for the editors of this elite eastern newspaper, qualifies as front-page news.

Researching Judaism in the West

by Shari Rabin

Over the last few years the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley has acquired the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life from the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Included in this collection is the Western Jewish Americana Collection, which I spent a month with last summer as part of my dissertation research on the importance of geographic mobility in nineteenth century American Judaism. In addition to being a beautiful research facility in a moderate climate with easy access to great food and really strong single origin coffee, working at the Bancroft was an exciting opportunity to research in a major archive with broad holdings in western history.

Jewish materials tend to be held in separate archives, most notably the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Such archival divisions beget historiographical ones, however, and I hope that the presence of Jewish materials in the Bancroft, where those with interests outside of Jewish history can easily access them, will help bring Judaism into more studies of religion in the American West.

While there are sources in German, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew, some come with translations and there are plenty of fascinating materials in English. A few highlights from the collection:

The most compelling and robust congregational collection is that of Congregation Sherith Israel, one of the two oldest Jewish congregations in San Francisco. In addition to the congregation’s constitution, minutes, and marriage records, particularly fascinating is its documentation of the contentious relationship between the congregation and its clergy. For instance the collection includes a paper war over animosities with Rabbi Aron J. Messing in 1872 – he was accused of financial misdeeds, misrepresenting his English abilities, and “using during his address from the pulpit profane and indecorous language…to attack the Board of Trustees personally” – followed by a stack of applications from the ensuing search for a new rabbi.

Clerical-congregational acrimony flowed both ways. In 1855 San Francisco’s cantankerous Rabbi Julius Eckman wrote a letter to Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who had been the daguerrotypist on John C. Fremont’s Fifth Expedition. Exasperated with the indifference and bad behavior of his congregants, he noted as an example the “strange mode gaining countenance here of celebrating Wedding banquets.” Receptions were being held – and announced in the synagogue – at the non-kosher Shepherds Brewery Saloon “without grace, without a blessing.” Furthermore, “the room was crowded, people got in spirit[, and] four ladies fell headlong to the ground in the room.”

Of the Collection’s various personal memoirs, of particular interest to American religious historians is Florence Prag Kahn’s 1904 account of living in Utah as a young bride in the late 1860s. In “My Life Among the Mormons” she describes life in Salt Lake City and socializing with Brigham Young, recounting: “Did they ever try to convert us? No. One day Brigham asked us, 'Are you Jews by birth and race, or converts to Judaism?' By birth, race, faith, conviction, was the reply. 'Then you can never become Mormons; no true Jew can be converted to Mormonism.'"

Cantankerous congregants, badly behaved clergy, non-normative religious practice, interreligious encounter: these are not just Jewish stories, but are classic themes of western religious history. If you are conducting research at the Bancroft, consider taking a look, and including some Jewish stories as you document the excitement, challenges, and eclectic forms of Western religious life.

haunting landscapes; or, to love a mountain and feel guilty about it: some thoughts on homelands and diasporas

by stan thayne

I grew up loving mountains. If you have read Jared Farmer’s book On Zion’s Mount, then you will understand why, in particular, I loved a mountain called Timpanogos, which stands at the northern end of Utah Valley. But my love was not exclusive to Timp. I also loved Cascade to the East and Lone Peak further north and Nebo to the South; King’s Peak, Baldy, Haydn’s Peak and all the granite moraines that form the Uinta Mountains; Devil’s Castle, Twin Peaks, Mount Superior, and the Pfeiferhorn in the Wasatch range. And things just got better as you moved north: the Sawtooths, the Wind Rivers, and the Tetons in Idaho and Wyoming, and Beartooths and Absarokas in Montana. And beyond those were the Canadian Rockies and the Chugach and Brooks Range of Alaska—the mountains I dreamed of.

But I felt a little guilty loving mountains so much. I knew enough of Mormon history to understand that, if things had gone as planned, I would not have grown up in the mountains, in the West. I would have grown up in Missouri, in Zion, where there are no mountains—or nothing that I, as a westerner, would have recognized as such. I knew that I was supposed to be in exile, in diaspora, and I felt that at least a part of me should lament that fact. I was supposed to be longing for the return, the long-awaited day when the Saints would go marching back with songs of joy to build Zion in Jackson County. But I sort of secretly hoped it would not occur in my life time—or at least not until I was very old and had gotten my fill. I would miss the mountains, the skiing, the trout streams, the backpacking and rock climbing and simply gazing up at them. I knew that I should be weeping by the rivers of Babylon, but instead I was fishing in them. And I was loving it.

I am not the only one to feel the ambivalence of that attachment. The Saints were not long in the Salt Lake Valley before they began referring to it in their hymns as their mountain home, their “lovely Deseret” (a Mormon word), and, even , their Zion in the mountains—even as many of them still longed to return to build Zion in Missouri and anticipated doing so in their own lifetime. There is an ambivalence in that longing that I think many of the Saints share. Our attachments to the mountains are haunted by the anticipation of another desertion of those places we have learned to love (even if we have not always cared for them as we should) and a return to a place many of us have never been (or may not care to go, for good). The Saints carried the memory of Missouri with them to the Great Basin and, for some at least, that memory has been a little unsettling. Would the return be the ending of diaspora, a re-gathering to the homeland? Or another exile? Or both?

Perhaps this ambivalent multi-valence is simply the inevitable result of people in motion over land—people who tell stories and who story the landscapes they inhabit. Those stories displace and replace, subsume, appropriate, and re-invent, co-exist, conflict, and harmonize with the stories that formed the landscapes that preceded them—and will proceed them—leaving the West a palimpsest of all who have moved across it—in exile or diaspora, to settle, unsettle, and be unsettled from the lands they shaped with their stories as well as their actions. I hope that Jared Farmer has only gotten us started in peeling back the layers of those stories upon stories upon stories that haunt the mountains and lakes and valleys and streams of the region we call the West—a region haunted by all the places people bring with them, and which haunts in turn all the places they go.

And now I find myself in exile again. Not in Zion, in Missouri, and not in the West, but in graduate school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the American Southeast. It is a very nice place and I have nothing to complain of. I have learned to love it. But it took me a while to grow accustomed to the absence behind and above the trees. I still confess a little longing—intense at times—for some elevation and for big open spaces. But I also feel I have come to understand my relationship to the West, to the lands I grew up in, in new ways.  Zora Neale Hurston put it well in reference to her study of African American folk culture in the American South.  Adapting her words to my circumstances: “When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of [the North American West]…But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment.” That in itself is a little unsettling. But hopefully Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he said that only so far as we are unsettled is there any hope for us. And so I remain in diaspora, peeling back the layers of the landscapes that haunt me, dreaming, at times, of return.

My Dinner with Jon (Huntsman)

by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Last week the electioneering ebbed, Democrats heaved sighs of relief, and Republicans began their tortured explanations of the outcome of the presidential race.  Bloggers of things Mormon began to air their own anxieties about the future:  what would Mitt Romney’s loss mean for Mormon studies? 

More important, and at the risk of driving this academic-narcissism-in-the-guise-of-soul-searching into the ground, is what it might mean for the study of religion in the American West.  Enough about Mormon Studies . . . what about us?

Without wading too far into the numbers, it seems quite evident that the evangelical distaste for a Mormon candidate—and more pointedly, the southern evangelical distaste—was vastly overinflated.  Yes, Romney won Utah and Idaho and Arizona, but look at that solid Mormon South!  Equally important is the fact that, even with large numbers of Mormons on the West Coast, he didn’t stand a chance there.  So was his problem a regional thing, a religious thing, or some of both?

Years ago sociologist Armand Mauss used survey data to suggest that there are profound differences in the outlooks and attitudes of LDS who live west of Utah (he was looking at California in particular).  I was reminded of this, and of the complexities of regional and religious identities, when I met Governor Jon Huntsman recently.

Huntsman came to the university where I work to deliver the Weil Lecture on American Citizenship, a series that has brought in a wide variety of illustrious figures of many political persuasions beginning with William Howard Taft in 1915.  I was asked to attend a dinner in Huntsman’s honor and to introduce him before he spoke, an invitation at which I jumped.  I’ve been curious for a long time about his background and his relationship to the Mormon tradition.  He is a descendent of Mormon pioneer stock who served a mission, but who now seems actively to resist the urgings of the press to gauge his level of piety.  Unlike other Republican candidates during the primary season who fell over one another to express their sincere love of Jesus, Huntsman consistently demurred when provoked to discuss his faith.  He and his wife have two adopted young daughters, one from China and one from India, and they are raising them as Buddhist and Hindu, respectively.  What’s up with that?

This might well be my chance to figure it all out, I thought. 

The details, as it turned out, are far more interesting that I had thought.  Gov. Huntsman, you see, is a California Mormon.  In fact, he and I were born one month and about 20 miles apart in the Bay Area.  One of his grandfathers was the mayor of my hometown, and ran the local hardware store there.  When he was an infant Huntsman’s parents moved to southern California, where the young Jon was raised.  We had a lovely conversation about these early connections.

I mentioned to him, by the way, that I also studied Mormons.  But that really didn’t seem to interest him. When queried from the audience by a campus minister about how he understood the appropriate place of religious faith in the political world, Huntsman talked of ecumenism, tolerance, and celebration of difference.  Nary a word about deep personal faith, even of the very private sort.

[As an aside, he wowed the packed audience of young students (many budding business majors).  They cheered his statements about collaboration across political boundaries, about the corrosive role of money in elections, and about the necessity for the U.S. to negotiate with international partners rather than trying to bully them into submission.  He talked with particular passion about the importance of China, a subject about which, as a former U.S. Ambassador and a fluent speaker of Mandarin, he knows a great deal.

I have to say, he impressed me, too.  My jaw clenched a bit when he talked about a limited federal government.  But there was no getting around his centrist politics, his belief in the reality of climate change, and his apparent openness to dialogue.  I suspect that many of us there saw, for the first time in a long while, a way to move forward through partisanship to a shared future.  One colleague of mine even asked him the glaringly obvious question:  why does he remain a Republican when his own club seems to have revoked his membership card?]

Political questions notwithstanding, I was initially frustrated by my failure to gain much traction on his religious self-understanding.  Yet as I thought more about it later, I realized that he, in fact, was like many of the Mormons—and Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Buddhists—that I had grown up with in California in the 1960s and 1970s.  We put a premium on toleration (although we didn’t call it that—in fact, we didn’t call it anything), in part because we had to in order to find common ground as friends and neighbors.  We lived in a region with longstanding communities of Japanese, Chinese, South Asians, Irish and Italian Catholics, and other migrants to the mobile society of the post-World War II coastal industries.  We had no established majority of one particular religious group, and that diversity made a difference in how we thought about religion itself.  It’s hard to describe or to capture, but we wore our religion differently there—certainly, it was different from what I’ve encountered in the Northeast and the South.

From a distance, too, I think that form of religiosity can look a lot like Sheilaism, to use Robert Bellah’s characterization of “do it yourself” faith.  Or, when pressed by journalists for a statement or a faith stance, it can look like indifference.  Pollsters, with their targeted questions framed in other contexts, might well call these people “nones.”  For me, at least, and those I grew up with, it was not any of these things.  We had commitments to religious institutions—sometimes to several, and that was okay.  We may well have family members, as I do, who are Jungian Catholics, born again evangelicals, secular humanists, Buddhists, and mainline Protestants. 

We speak a different religious language as a result.  And that’s the language I heard Jon Huntsman speaking (when he wasn’t breaking into Mandarin).  I’m not saying it is the wave of the future; indeed, his dismal showing among Republicans would suggest otherwise.  It’s not Mormon in the Utah style, but neither is it a turning away from that faith. And it may reflect a particular era of California’s history that has now been overtaken by the western Southerners that Darren Dochuk so engagingly describes. 

But it should prompt us to search for more nuanced ways of thinking about western religiosity, ways that don’t bind us solely to denominational or confessional frameworks.  Let’s get busy constructing some new paradigms that capture cultural affiliations outside those already designated as “religion.”  It’s the “all or nothing” framework, one encouraged rhetorically by those who would like to corner the market on faith as a branding mechanism, that stops us from recognizing the very commonalities that may well be our salvation.

Review of Anne Hyde's award-winning new book

Reviewed by David Grua

Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860, by Anne F. Hyde. History of the American West Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. xiii-xv, 628 pp.

The great project of turning the West into part of the United States, initiated in 1803 and begun   in earnest in the 1840s, had made little progress in many places. Much remained flexible and contingent about life on its complex border into the second half of the nineteenth century. Residents of the West seemed quite ambivalent about nationality, easily claiming new citizenship when it served personal or business needs. During a time when no one knew which nation or empire would finally impose control, effective trade was the sole source of power. And it continued to be a world defined by personal connections. (30)

So argues Anne Hyde, Professor of History at Colorado College, in Empires, Nations, and Families, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize earlier this year. Although the first word in her title is “empires,” the Spanish, French, and British empires play only a small role in her work. Empires certainly claimed title to much of the land that would become the western United States, but Hyde contends that empires, and later nations (Mexico and even the United States), exercised very little actual control west of the Mississippi prior to the 1860s. Power rested instead in the hands of indigenous nations and Euro-American fur traders who successfully tapped into Native kin networks via marriage and ceremonial gift-giving. As Hyde suggests in the excerpt above, empires and nations came and went, while elite fur trading families and Native nations maintained control in the region.

Hyde’s focus on families, rather than empires and nations, allows her to bring in a host of new actors who would normally not appear in syntheses, most notably women and children. While keeping one finger on the evolving political and military chronologies that form the backbone of narrative histories, Hyde keeps nine fingers, figuratively speaking, on families in various subregions of the emerging West—the Pacific Northwest, California, the Southwest, Texas, the Central Plains, and the Great Lakes. What she finds is a mixed-race world, with Euro-American men married to indigenous and Mexican women who provided the essential contacts for their husbands to create their trading networks. Their mixed-race children lived comfortably within the worlds of their mothers—dominated by powerful Native nations such as the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Navajos. Some mixed-race children also functioned well in the worlds of their fathers, although many faced discrimination among Europeans and Euroamericans. It was not until the United States conquered northern Mexico in the late 1840s that this fur trade economy that had created relative equality among various peoples began to unravel, although it would take decades for the United States to impose full sovereignty in the region.

Relatively speaking, religion is absent from Hyde’s text, as she prefers to analyze trade networks rather than religious ties. Certainly, she mentions Catholic and Protestant missionaries, but few receive extended treatment. On multiple occasions, she states in passing how religious ordinances such as baptisms and marriages tied families together across racial and ethnic divides, but rarely does she take the opportunity to further explore these ideas. The exception in Empires, Nations, and Families is Mormonism. The Latter-day Saints were latecomers in Hyde’s story, only making an appearance when the fur trade and its accompanying world was on the decline, soon to be replaced by a settler society that had no need for harmony among Euro-Americans and Natives.

In a provocative interpretive shift, Hyde chooses to portray Mormons, not as encroaching settlers displacing and replacing the indigenous peoples of the Great Basin, but as an Indian-like people who interrupted rather than reinforced the broader colonial processes of American settlement:

 One surprising native group was the Mormons or Latter-day Saints, who replaced the Osages in   terms of public worry and press attention on the Missouri frontier. Like the Osages, they were small in number but effective in getting the attention of imperial or national officialdom. Taking the analogy further, like many Native nations, the Mormons traveled in family groups, did business almost exclusively with their kin, and took great pleasure in refusing to do things the “American way.” Maybe a better comparison is to see the Mormons as more like the Comanches. Similar in numbers, eventually arranged across a forbidding piece of isolated desert landscape, they controlled trade and travel in the region using kinship connections, price controls, and fear.

 Mormons and Indians disrupted Anglo-American assumptions about how settlement should  occur and who should benefit from it. Unlike Native societies, however, Mormonism developed out of the heart of Anglo-American culture and religion and operated as a sort of shadow critique, which is why it upset people so much. In the same year that young Mariano Vallejo and his family fled the coast of California because of rumored French pirates landing in Monterrey, another family left New England for upstate New York [i.e., the Smith family]. Less romantic than pirates, but equally infamous and misunderstood, the Mormon religion that would come out of this move to the eastern edge of the western frontier would prove even more unsettling. (358)

After making this initial comparison, however, Hyde does not fully develop her Mormon/Indian thesis as the text progresses, although the assumption remains implicit throughout.

She devotes four subsections in two chapters to Mormonism, which is better than average for western history surveys. In her chapter on the U.S.-Mexican War, Hyde dedicates ten pages to a discussion of Mormon origins through the Latter-day Saint sojourn in Winter Quarters (in present-day Nebraska) in the mid-1840s (359-69). Although sound overall, this section contains multiple minor errors and head-scratching assertions, that makes the reader wonder how closely she read her sources.[1] For example, she claims that at the age of 12, Smith was apprenticed out to a newspaper printer. There is no evidence for this that I am aware of, and it is unclear where the idea came from (359). She makes no mention of Smith's First Vision (traditionally dated at 1820), preferring to start her account of Smith's visions with the appearance of the angel Moroni in 1823 (359). Hyde asserts that Smith reburied the Book of Mormon plates, per Moroni’s instructions. Again, this runs contrary to all available documentary evidence, which has Smith giving the plates to Moroni, thereby removing them to a heavenly sphere (360). She omits mention of the importance of the Book of Mormon in shaping early Mormon understandings of Indians as descendants of the Lamanites, a puzzling omission given her emphasis on Native peoples. In addition, she misses the significance of the Book of Mormon in causing early Mormons to settle in Missouri in an attempt to build what the text calls Zion or the New Jerusalem (360). She claims that polygamy was a primary source of anti-Mormon violence in Missouri in the 1830s. While Smith had taken a few plural wives by the time the Mormons were expelled from the state in 1838-39, polygamy was little-known outside of inner church circles and there is little to no evidence that anti-Mormons cited Smith's marital situation(s) as a reason for their opposition (361). In addition, Hyde asserts that Smith openly practiced polygamy in Nauvoo, Illinois, whereas in actuality the Mormon Prophet strenuously sought to hide the practice and publicly denied it (364, 365). Examples could be multiplied. The best that can be said here is that Hyde is in good company, as most surveys that treat Mormons make similar errors. Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is a notable exception [2].

The most compelling element of this section is Hyde’s use of Mary Haskins Parker (Richards) to explore how a literate Mormon woman experienced Mormonism, after her 1840s conversion in England and migration to Nauvoo. Hyde traces Parker’s marriage to Samuel Richards and her husband’s dedication to building the temple even though the Latter-day Saints would soon leave Nauvoo. In the temple, the couple would receive “the rites that. . .stood at the heart of Mormon religion” (366). Hyde then discusses the couple’s preparations to depart the city, while Samuel prepared to leave his wife for a mission, a hardship that prepared Mary for the difficulties that awaited at Winter Quarters.

Later in the chapter, Hyde discusses the Mormon Battalion, the all-Mormon military unit of the U.S.-Mexican War (388-92). The Battalion impacted Mary because her brother-in-law, Joseph Richards—who was supposed to help her on the trail—“voluntarily” enlisted and died before returning to his family. By narrating much of this section from the perspective of a Mormon woman, Hyde successfully integrates Mormons into her family-centered approach that runs through the entire work.

Mormons return to Hyde’s analysis in a later chapter on the United States’ struggles to impose its authority on the new territories. She devotes ten pages to 1850s Utah (452-62), in the context of other crises in the territorial system in Gold Rush California and Bleeding Kansas. This section contained fewer noticeable errors, perhaps reflecting Hyde’s background as a western historian who has doubtless taught on the subject. Here she resumes the the story of the recently-arrived Richards family and their efforts to establish a home in Utah territory. Hyde describes Mormon communalism, tithing, and other practices [3]. In addition, she explores the Richards family’s experience with plural marriage, as Samuel took six additional wives in the 1850s. Hyde then describes the growing conflict with federal officials over land, Indian policy, and polygamy. Only here does Hyde mention the Latter-day Saints’ distinctive beliefs regarding Indians as Lamanites, who as the Battle Axes of the Lord would help the Mormons destroy Gentile [i.e., non-Mormon] America, and Young’s instructions for missionaries to intermarry with the Natives. She concludes the section with a discussion of the Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Her interpretation of the murders is closer to that of mid-twentieth century Mormon historian Juanita Brooks, who argued that the killings resulted from the fear and paranoia of local leaders, rather than as premeditated plot devised by Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, a hypothesis advocated most recently by Will Bagley. Hyde follows both Brooks and Bagley in arguing that Young's hyper-vitriolic rhetoric created an atmosphere that made the massacre possible and that Young was complicit in covering up the murders and protecting the murderers.[4]

Later in the chapter, Hyde returns to Mountain Meadows (484-88) in a section on Western violence that also includes the 1862 Dakota War and the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. Only here does she cite Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard's Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy (Oxford, 2008), which was written by three practicing Mormon historians, supported by a small army of LDS scholars at the church's archives. Hyde takes issue with Walker, Turley, and Leonard's argument that, aside from one fateful week in September 1857, the Mormon perpetrators at Mountain Meadows were upstanding citizens and ordinary pioneers, using the claim to make a broader argument about the tendency among white settlers (and their descendants) to simultaneously employ violence while claiming innocence:

A nation of squatters who used violence to establish rights and to dispossess other people needs to recognize itself in these actions. Anglo-American settlers, however laudable their individual intentions, chose to settle on land owned by others and demanded that the U.S. government use all of its power to remove them, making these ‘ordinary nineteenth-century frontiersmen’ into killers. [The conflicts discussed here] compel us to consider them as logical productions of the culture that housed them: the world Euro-Americans worked so very hard to situate in the North American West. (484-85)

Although Hyde describes the concept of “blood atonement” and other doctrines preached by Mormon leaders in the 1850s that provided a context for the killings, Hyde does not conclude that the violence was a product of Mormon culture. Rather, the massacre was “an episode that could be described as collateral damage when the federal government tried to impose its will on the wayward Mormons” (485).

Hyde’s extensive treatment of Mormonism—although flawed in places—is laudable and noteworthy. As in the work as a whole, Hyde’s attention to Mary Richards and her family expands the number of actors in important ways. Comparing Mormons to Indians presents an intriguing interpretive move, although she does not fully develop this angle. Consulting recent works by Paul Reeve and Jared Farmer would have likely helped to clarify the Latter-day Saints’ complex relationships with Indians and other Anglo-Americans.[5] Overall, Hyde’s Empires, Nations, and Families is a fantastic work that will make a lasting contribution to the historiography of the American West and will provide new ways for religious scholars to situate Mormonism in the history of the West.

________

[1] Her sources for this section include Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 2^nd Ed. (New York: Knopf, 1971), Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Knopf, 1979), Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), and Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005).

[2] See David W. Grua, “Mormonism in Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought,” Dialogue:  Journal of Mormon Thought 42, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 177-82.

[3] Hyde relies here on Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

[4]  Here she relies primarily on Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), Eugene E. Campbell, Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the American West, 1847-1869 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988), David L. Bigler, The Forgotten Kingdom: Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 1998), Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword's Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War, 2 vols. (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2008), and David Bigler and Will Bagley, eds., Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2008).

[5] W. Paul Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Jared Farmer, On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Book of the Month

Reid Neilson. Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Review by Konden R. Smith

Back in January, Laurie Maffly-Kipp brought up the question regarding Mormonism’s status as a “western” religious tradition. Rather than answering this question, she turned the question around by asking why such labels have been so important and used in the first place. In short, what was at stake in its usage? I think an important answer to this question comes from the Mormon presence at the Chicago World’s Fair (aka. Columbian Exposition) of 1893, covered in Reid Neilson's Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 World’s Fair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). At this fair, Utah’s non-Mormon Governor Caleb West re-introduced Mormons as loyal patriots and archetypal developers of the American West. “These pioneers of Utah blazed the way for the westward course of empire, and at the time of their first entrance into the valley of the Great Salt Lake planted the flag of the union on foreign soil.” In part due to West’s successful repositioning of Mormonism under this “western” banner, Americans began, for the first time in American history, to re-imagine Mormons as acceptably American. Recognizing this new and unprecedented national interest in Mormonism, Mormon leaders introduced themselves as “pioneers” rather than “prophets,” and their talking points were buffalos, women’s suffrage and pioneering rather than the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith or religious persecution. Defining Mormonism as a “western” religion was thus a pivotal moment in Mormon history and the history of American religious pluralism.

The argument behind Exhibiting Mormonism was straightforward: to demonstrate how Mormonism went from a narrow “missionary-minded people to a twentieth-century evangelistic and public relations juggernaut” (7). Although Neilson’s focus was largely on Mormonism’s public relations conversion and subsequent change in policy and attitude toward the outside world, Neilson recognized a broader significance of the international event and the correlated Mormon response. It was, he explains, “a larger story of the church’s accommodation and assimilation into the larger American religious mainstream,” and as such opens itself up for comparative studies of American minority relations and transformation (207). Importantly, the hinge in this pivot was in Mormonism being redefined as “western,” and thereby “American.”  

By way of organization, Neilson charts Mormonism’s response to American culture in three parts. (1) 1830-46: The founding period where Mormons sought to convert, not befriend the nation and world. (2) 1847-1890: The pioneer period that was marked as largely non-violent, with the exceptions of the Utah War, 1857-58, and the three decade long “cold war” surrounding the question of Mormon politics, economy and sexuality. Public relations during this period were not important and Mormon provocations were common. (3) 1890-today: Exceptionally strong focus on public relations and education (16-17). As Neilson demonstrates, this last phase did not really take off with the surrender of polygamy in 1890, but more importantly the World’s Fair three years later.

Neilson clarifies that Mormons did not simply “attend” the fair. Their presence was rather complicated, being celebrated and cheered in one section and then rejected and insulted in another. In the chapter that outlines this acceptance, Neilson provides an overview of the size and complexities of the fair itself. In an exhibition of “Utah Territory,” Mormons displayed their “western” identity to the nation. Over two million visitors toured the Utah building, having a dramatic impact on how non-Mormons saw Mormons and how Mormons sought to present themselves. As part of this new “western” presentation, Utah was represented by way of mineral deposits and mummies, rather than Mormons and polygamy.

Perhaps most profound to the question of Mormonism’s entrance into Americana is Nielson’s chapter on Mormon women at the fair, as it was them who led this early “Mormon moment.” Whatever success Mormon leaders found at the fair, Mormon women had already “woven themselves into the larger fabric of domestic and international feminism,” and, as such, found themselves well received (102). With much less foresight, male leaders initially resisted representation at the fair and remained outside and detached from ecumenical associations, such as the Evangelical Alliance. With a desire to be part of the national female suffrage movement, Mormon women early on recognized the value of national inclusion. Ironically, popular portrayals of Mormon women were that of being slow, stupid, and mere erotic tools of Mormon male masters. Participation at the World’s Congress of Representative Women was thus not only a watershed moment for the American feminist movement, but as Neilson demonstrates, allowed Mormon feminism to merge with that of the national. The Mormon female Relief Society and the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA) stood side-by-side at the fair with the National Council of Women of the United States (NCW) (104).     

Beyond the Mormon female presence at the fair, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at the Welsh Eisteddfod, an international musical competition associated with the fair, proved the magical element for healing Mormon-American relations. Welsh Americans looked to such an event as a way to demonstrate their retention of Welsh culture and musical influence within America. For Welsh Mormon immigrants, such as Mormon Tabernacle Choir conductor Evan Stephens, the choral competition represented a similar opportunity to display Welsh civilization and Americanism as filtered through the Mormon machine. Though being redefined as “western,” Mormon sophistication emerged, in part, outside the US. In an attempt to be more warmly welcomed as “Americans,” Mormons from various nationalities heartily embraced this new “western” national identity, however Danish, Welsh, or English they were. The result of this appropriation was a resounding success, as Neilson put it, “thanks in large measure to the Tabernacle Choir, the Chicago World’s Fair seemed to mark a new dawn for the public image of the church, at least as a cultural institution,…” (144).

But as Neilson explains in a later chapter, not all was well for Mormonism at the fair. Though it was true that Mormon leaders at first saw little importance with the fair, Mormon orator and leader Brigham H. Roberts was the exception. In what amounted to a story of excellent drama, Roberts convinced leaders of the Parliament of Religions to bring him on as a speaker. Parliament organizers finally agreed, but following a speech on Islam that defended the practice of polygamy, the polygamous Roberts found his speech sidelined and he left the parliament resentful and bitter. But Roberts had friends, most importantly a Roman Catholic parliament official who defended Mormonism and decried its exclusion as ignorance and prejudice.  

Being largely descriptive rather than analytic, Exhibiting Religion proves an important contribution to the study of the American West. Beyond this, it is an important contribution to Mormon Studies and its larger patterns of religious accommodation, boundary maintenance and identity formation more generally. My only real criticism of Neilson’s work is that it lacks analysis in any broad way. The focus is on Mormonism and its entrance into the American heart and its consequent conversion to PR. But Neilson’s stated goal was not to bring in this national and even international religious, political, economic, and cultural context. Instead Neilson leaves intact the larger implications of this dynamic encounter of Mormonism at the fair for future scholars to dissect and elaborate on. Indeed, this is Neilson’s true contribution.  

To return to the original question regarding what was at stake in being “western,” Mormonism found that a more positive relationship to the nation depended upon this new distinction. Whatever was meant by the term, it seems clear that it signified “American.” As such, instead of speaking on Mormon themes, such as the Book of Mormon, temples, and religious freedom, Mormon men and women spoke instead of settlement building and on pioneering rather than prophets and saints. In this case, “western” represented an identity that Mormons, though perhaps not Mormonism, could fit into. As Neilson put it, “the church was eventually integrated into Americana in spite of, not because of, its religious contributions” (178).

As Neilson reminds us, Mormonism’s effective PR campaign did not begin with the “Mormon moment” in 2011-2012, but rather the World’s Fair of 1893. Recognizing this early history we learn a bit about what was at stake in being defined “western” as well as the enthusiasm Americans held in its celebration. Mormonism’s success in PR has little to do with the nation beginning to appreciate religious difference, but rather because Mormons allowed them to forget their religious difference by blinding them with being “western.” In asking why presidential contender Mitt Romney rarely speaks of his faith in public, we can recognize that it likely has something to do with his recognition that America may not be ready for a “Mormon” in the Whitehouse, however much they have come to accept the idea of a president who happens to be Mormon.         

Mormon History Association meeting recap

By Stan Thayne

This past weekend (June 28-July 1) the Mormon History Association held its annual meeting in Calgary, Alberta, Canada--a city that was getting all ramped up for their annual Calgary Stampede: a week of cowboy and cowgirl hats, boots, getup and rodeos that I unfortunately missed. (There were hay bales in the lobby of our hotel in preparation.) The conference's Canada setting broadened the perspective of Mormonism as, whatever else it is (see Laurie Maffly-Kipp's post), a movement of the North American West. Several sessions were focused on the church in Canada, where Mormonism has had a significant presence, particularly in southern Alberta, since at least 1895 when Charles Ora Card (whom one presenter referred to as a Canadian Brigham Young) led a group of Mormon settlers to Canada to escape the persecution of U.S. federal officials over the practice of polygamy. Though the mainline LDS Church has abandoned that practice, including those in Alberta, there is still a significant presence of "fundamentalist" Mormons in Alberta who have kept "the principle," as they refer to it, alive--a practice which is causing a lot of current controversy in Canadian courts, which was also the subject of some sessions. It is difficult to summarize the wide array of topics covered, particularly when I was only able to make it to a few sessions, but topics included the history of Mormons in high school basketball in Alberta, the mounted police and Mormonism, Mormon charisma, farming, and sugar factories in Canada, women's history, magic and the supernatural, the Cardston (Alberta) Temple, the growth of the church in Canada and a host of other topics. And topics were not limited to Canadian focused issues but ranged into the Pacific Basin, Asia, and Africa.

The Tanner Lecture (a plenary keynote session) was delivered by David B. Marshall, associate professor of History at the University of Calgary. In the talk he referred to what historian of Mormonism Jan Shipps has dubbed the "doughnut" phenomenon--the tendency of Western historians to write around Mormonism, leaving a void in the middle of the story. He suggested that the same is true of Mormonism in Canada--it is a story that remains to be written. But what he could do is provide some context for the story. He did so by addressing a secularization thesis of sorts, detailing the decline of religiosity in Canada since the 1960s. Accordring to census data, "no religion" is the third largest religious affiliation (or non-affiliation) in Canada--and it is the leading category in British Columbia--behind Catholicism (#2) and Protestantism (#1), which is in sharp decline, particularly in the mainline denominations. Mormonism has enjoyed steady if modest growth in Canada despite this decline and religious "turmoil"--though it is most concentrated in southern Alberta and remains less than 2% of the population in other parts of Canada. He accounted for the decline in religion in Canada to a number of demographic shifts and also to the influence of a document known as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms--a sort of Canadian Bill of Rights passed in the aftermath of WWII . This document, he suggested, led to further secularization of Canadian public institutions, most significantly schools. This aggresive separation of church and state, he suggested, was not only opposed by many Canadian Christians but also caused difficulties for non-Christian immigrants to Canada. He shared a number of anecdotes to demonstrate this and concluded with the results of a Parliament commissioned study into the issue--conducted by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor--that concluded that an open rather than a closed secular model that seeks to instruct the public about religions (rather than separate them from it completely through ostensible neutrality) is the best solution to the problem. This, Marshall suggested, is the only hope for Canada's multicultural future. And as a student and hopefully future instructor in Religious Studies, I have to agree with at least that part of Marshall's comments!

Trying to Make Sense of Mormonism in the Media

by James B. Bennett

I have read with alternating fits of bemusement and dismay the sudden surge of articles about Mormonism over the past few weeks. Perhaps the revelation that Romney, like many Mormons, actually tithes (as opposed to most Christian's tendency to considering tithing only aspirational, at best) has increased people's interest in where that money is going. The media proliferation has become too great to keep a handle on, let alone summarize, so let me highlight one concentrated set that appeared over the course of several days in The New York Times.

The onslaught occurred during the last week of January, kicking off with two articles in the one issue! The first was a puzzling review of Matthew Bowman's The Mormon People, which criticized Bowman for accomplishing what he set out to do. The reviewer lamented the absence of titillating side shows and lurid details, wanting more of HBO's "Big Love" (never mind that "Big Love" wasn't about these Mormons!) and wanting to know if Mormonism is a cult (don't get me started on such uncritical use of the word "cult"—this guy needs to take an intro religion class!).

That same day, the feature story in the food section examined the expanding tastes of Mormon cuisine. Turns out that Mormons actually like to cook and eat foods other than cream of whatever casserole and Jell-O salad. (For those casting about for research/dissertation topics, how about the evolution of denominational cuisine in America?)

The January 25th double-header was followed the next day with an Op-Ed by David Reynolds, which was a call for religious tolerance that depicted Mormonism as just another branch of Protestantism emerging in the nineteenth century religious marketplace, albeit a highly successful one.

Finally, a mere four days later, the Times published an online round table in which our own Laurie Maffly-Kipp was one of the five contributors. While Laurie and the other American Religious Historian, Jana Riess, provided some context and critical perspective on American views of Mormonism, the remaining contributors proffered typical ad hominem attacks about a backward looking, conservative, misogynist church, suggesting a vote for Romney was a vote for the LDS Church to advance those views.

But what of Religion in the American West? On the surface, very little. As John-Charles Duffy points out in his recent post, Mormonism has long posed a challenge for scholars of religion in the American West as we seek to differentiate, as John-Charles explains, between religion in the American west and religion that happens to take place in the west.

Fortuitously, the same day that The New York Times published Laurie's roundtable piece she also contributed to this blog a very helpful reminder that Mormonism has never been a religion of the West (or even America) in the exclusive way we generally depict it. This corrective exemplifies the way that attention to religion in the West can contribute to our conversation about religion more broadly, even if one of its consequences is to diffuse claims about western distinctiveness.

And this completes the circle: Laurie's framing of the tension between Mormonism as Western or not (and even American and not) seems a helpful way to understand the slew of articles in The New York Times. Geography becomes a metaphor for the various and often conflicting views of Mormonism appearing almost daily in the media. At one extreme are those, such as the review of Bowman's book, as well as several of the round-table pieces, which want to emphasize Mormonism as peculiar, sensational and/or dangerous--something that is (or ought to be) confined Utah. At the other pole is something like Reynolds' Op-Ed, identifying Mormons as just another branch of Protestantism. Mormons are typical, even exemplary, in the Americanness of their beliefs and practices. Perhaps the most nuanced of the lot was the article on Mormon cuisine, which at least seemed to allow for change! And like good food, the truth lies somewhere between the two poles, with a touch of both the familiar and the exotic. But, as Laurie's post also suggests, the more significant questions is not where it is located (geographically or metaphorically), but rather what is at stake in the various possibilities? The challenges of understanding Mormonism are not a new problem in the media. But the ways those challenges are framed relative to the West as both geographic and ideological space might help us begin untangling the knot.

"Twilight": Sign of Mormon Integration?

 by Susanna Morrill

 

The release of the latest “Twilight” movie got me thinking about this pop cultural phenomenon. This series, set in the Pacific Northwest and written by Stephenie Meyer, a resident of the Southwest, demonstrates that Mormonism, a church sometimes perceived as a clannish Western kingdom, has become integrated into U.S. culture in a way never seen before. More than the existence of two viable Mormon presidential candidates,  Meyer’s success demonstrates this integration. It shows that this religious subculture has produced an author who can translate Mormon ideas into the language of mainstream popular culture. The “Twilight” story and characters have become part of the American vernacular. Meyer makes Mormon theology compelling for non-Mormons.

Meyer’s series—Mormon in so many ways—has caught the imagination of American girls and women (and probably more boys and men than would admit it). Diehard fans, or “Twihards,” snap up “Twilight”-related merchandise and mercilessly hunt down Meyer and the stars of the “Twilight” movies. The love triangle between human Bella, vampire Edward, and werewolf Jacob is appealing to a young female audience. 

The love story plays out in chaste fashion that adheres to Mormon beliefs about purity before marriage and fidelity within marriage. This adds tension to the story, as critics have pointed out (see here and here),  and probably makes the love story even more attractive to a younger female audience.

But I think that Jana Riess and others  have got it right when they point out that the most obvious Mormon theme in the series is the idea of free will and the ability to change oneself and become better. Meyer herself identifies free will as the central Mormon theme of the work, even as she claims that she unselfconsciously put these themes into the series (see this interview and this article).   This is a theme hidden in plain sight amidst, and within, Bella and Edward’s passionate expressions of love and suppressed desire and this theme, I would argue, contributes mightily to the series’ popularity. 

Meyer’s exploration of free will taps into and resonates with the postmillennial perfectionism that overtook American Protestants during the Second Great Awakening. Of course—and here’s the connection—Joseph Smith channeled a portion of this upsurge into his new Mormon church. But abolitionists also rode this upsurge as they argued for the end of slavery. For Social Gospelers, this was the foundation of their work to aid and protect the poor, the laborer, and the immigrant. Later Civil Rights leaders used it in a powerful combination with African American Protestant critiques of racism to push for equality. Religious people felt that they could and should make the world a better place: They should make the country a Kingdom of God on earth and create the millennial age that would end with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Once let loose, postmillennial perfectionism took on a life of its own within U.S. popular culture and discourses. It mixed with ideas of American exceptionalism to produce Manifest Destiny, impelling people in a relentless march toward and over the Pacific. Or we can see it in the series of world’s fair cities that dotted the U.S. starting in 1876 in Philadelphia and culminating, most famously, in Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Attendees marveled at the White City in Chicago, seeing it as simultaneously a vision of heaven on earth and a concrete example of the perfected city of the future. Disney parks are distant echoes of these moments of temporary enchantment—millennial cities in a world that no longer believes in the possibility of future heavenly perfection on earth, but, instead, opts for a moment of retreat to an idealized vision of a trouble-free childhood. And politicians tap into this strain of optimistic, perfectionist exceptionalism to deliver their message to as wide as possible an audience by employing a lingua franca of American cultural religious concepts. Obama’s 2008 slogan, “Yes, we can!”, can, perhaps, be read as a secularized, postmillennial cheer abbreviated for an age of sound bites.
   
Meyer’s “vegetarian vampires” live in a constant state of mindful self-control of their appetite; against their bloodthirsty nature, they feed on wild animals rather than humans. In this moment of excruciating tension and victory of will, Meyer speaks simultaneously to Mormon and non-Mormon American readers. She expresses the central Mormon idea of free will, the belief that humans can become better morally, ethically, religiously. General Conference talks (like this one and this one) are chock-full of admonitions to utilize this free will and become more like one’s heavenly parents.  But Meyer also speaks to Americans—Mormon and non-Mormon alike—who resonate with perfectionist ideas that are all around them. Her story may be especially compelling to this audience that lives in a postmillennial bath of images and assumptions about the possibility of perfection and, simultaneously, within a steady stream of discourse from experts who urge them that human will is a result of chemicals and genes.  Meyer’s world of willed goodness speaks with great clarity and power out of this contradictory jumble of authoritative messages. Whether Meyer consciously or unselfconsciously centered her books around the idea of free will, she is able to translate this and other Mormon themes seamlessly and compellingly to a non-Mormon audience who do not know or care if these ideas originate in her Mormon faith.

This summer in the Olympic Peninsula, I found a powerful testament to Meyer’s ability to write compelling romance full of Mormon ideas. Forks, Washington, is the real town in which Meyer set her fictional story. Never having visited the town, she selected it because it is so rainy —a great place for her vampires, who sparkle in the sun, to hide their identities. Meyer’s choice has revived this old lumbering town, one of many Northwest towns hit hard by shifts in federal land-use policy. This past August, I stayed there a night during my annual trip to the Olympic Peninsula with a college friend.

We visited three of the “Twilight”-themed stores (Twilight Central, Dazzled by Twilight, and Native to Twilight) and noticed “Twilight”- related food items on the menus of the local restaurants, as well as “Twilight”-related advertisements even at the local pharmacy.

There are a number of “Twilight” tours that fans can take to visit places described in the book. The owner of one of these tours was happy to talk to us about the effects of the series on the town. He was excited that tourism had skyrocketed and that the annual tax revenue had increased substantially. But, mostly, he seemed to enjoy hanging out with visitors who were intent on having a lot fun. I found this same sense of fun and excitement in the young woman who greeted me at the Forks Visitor’s Center the next day. She told me that “Twilight” had saved the town. Tourism was its new economic base. She showed me a chart that tracked the annual number of visitors to the center. In 2006 when “Twilight” was just beginning to break big, there were 6386 visitors, in 2010, almost 73,000. 

 

More visually arresting, she showed me maps of the U.S. and the world on which visitors had placed pins to designate their home cities. The U.S. and Europe had disappeared into a sea of multi-colored pins.

All this drove home for me Meyer’s cultural relevance in a way that mere descriptions of the revived town could not.  Meyer’s success has helped to turn around a declining timber town, born from the optimism of nineteenth-century Go-West Manifest Destiny. In the American public discourse, these ideas seem to live, die, and be re-born again and again in new and changing forms. If Meyer’s success is any indication, Mormons now seem to be actively contributing to this cycle of birth and re-birth. I wonder if a subculture that produces such a nimble translator can be considered a subculture any longer—or for much longer.