Book Review: Mormonism and American Politics

Mormonism and American Politics. Edited by Randall Balmer and Jana Riess. 264 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. $30.

Reviewed by Brenna Keegan

Mormonism and American Politics begins with the simple claim, “The story of Mormonism in America is inextricably tied to politics” (ix). Thirteen insightful case studies, written by some of the top Mormon studies scholars, persuasively argue the truth of this statement. Randall Balmer and Jana Riess’ edited volume moves beyond the familiar story of Mormons as political outsiders and gives voice to diverse political discourses.  Structured chronologically, Mormonism and American Politics is bookended by Joseph Smith’s 1844 campaign for president and an analysis of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The pages within highlight the protean history of Mormon isolation and participation in national politics and American exceptionalism, the politics of polygamy, Mormon race relations, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ stalwart participation in the twentieth-century Republican Party.

The volume offers concise examples of Mormonism’s distinct and extensive participation in American politics. It complicates a narrative of gradual assimilation and the increasingly common project of comparing Mormon history with that of American Catholicism. One of the most compelling chapters, “On the ‘Underground’: What the Mormon ‘Yes on 8’ Campaign Reveals About the Future of Mormons in American Political Life,” by Joanna Brooks, highlights the internal conflicts of supporting anti-LGBT legislation and the distinctive theological stance of Mormon support for California’s Proposition 8.

Although Mormon women may not have historically played a strong public role in American politics, their absence from the volume is apparent. A strong chapter by Jana Riess looks at the nineteenth-century Cult of True Womanhood and Protestant women’s protest against Congressman-elect and polygamist B. H. Roberts, but Claudia L. Bushman’s “Mormon Women Talk Politics,” is an odd amalgamation of songs and personal reflection, with little scholarly analysis.

As one might expect, Mormonism and American Politics spends a substantial amount of time considering the legacy and influence of George and Mitt Romney. “Like Father, Unlike Son: The Governor’s Romney, the Kennedy Paradigm, and the Mormon Question” by Randall Balmer and “Mitt, Mormonism and the Media: An Unfamiliar Faith Takes the Stage in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election” by Peggy Fletcher Stack, add depth and breadth to the debate.

Of particular interest to this blog is the volume’s treatment of Mormonism not solely, or even primarily, as a religious anomaly of the American West, but an active participant in national politics and history. As Philip Barlow rightly notes, “The religion’s infancy was harbored in the nation’s adolescence; both took form together” (109). Well-researched, with short and concise chapters from a distinguished team of scholars, Mormonism and American Politics does not offer a definitive history, but begins the conversation in stride.

Call for Papers:

Race, Gender, and Power on the Mormon Borderlands

Announcement published by Dee Garceau on Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Date: October 15, 2015

Subject Fields:

African American History / Studies, Canadian History / Studies, Native American History / Studies, U.S. - Mexico Borderlands, Women's & Gender History / Studies

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Race, Gender, and Power in the Mormon Borderlands

Mormon history lies at the borders between subaltern and dominant cultures. On the one hand, due to their unusual family structure and theocratic government, Mormons were a persecuted minority for the better part of the nineteenth century. On the other, Mormons played a significant role as colonizers of the North American West, extending their reach to the borderlands of Mexico, Canada, and the Pacific Islands. There Mormon colonists intermarried with Native Americans, Mexicans, Hawaiians and Samoans, even as they placed exclusions on interracial sexual relations and marriage. During the nineteenth century, Mormons also discouraged Native peoples’ polygamous practices while encouraging plural marriage for white women. And for the better part of the twentieth century, Mormon religious doctrine subordinated persons of color within church hierarchy. African-American men, for example, could not hold the priesthood until 1978. Historically, then, Mormons have navigated multiple borders-- between colonizer and colonized, between white and Other, and between minority and imperial identities. This limnal position calls for further investigation. We propose an anthology of essays about race, gender, and power in the Mormon borderlands.

Over the past thirty years, historians of Mormon women have expanded our understanding of gender and power in Mormon society. However, most of these studies focus on white Mormon women, while Mormon women of color have remained largely invisible. This volume seeks not simply to make visible the lived experiences of Mormon women of color, but more importantly, to explore gender and race in the Mormon borderlands. Taken together, these essays will address how Mormon women and men navigated the complications of minority and colonizer status, interracial marriage and doctrinal race hierarchies, patriarchy and female agency, vigilante violence and religious responsibility, and plural identities. These metaphoric borders were brought into play on the geographic and cultural borders of the United States. Specifically, this volume will encompass the continental U.S. West, the borderlands of Canada and Mexico, and Pacific Rim islands such as Samoa and Hawaii, from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. A focus on intersectionality in the borderlands promises to open new directions for Mormon history in concert with recent trends in western history. 

The anthology will be co-edited by Dee Garceau, Rhodes College, garceau@rhodes.edu, Andrea Radke-Moss, Brigham Young University-Rexburg, radkea@byui.edu, and Sujey Vega, Arizona State University, sujeyvega@asu.edu . Please feel free to contact us with any questions you have. 

Please send your article abstract or manuscript as an email attachment by October 15, 2015 to Dee Garceau garceau@rhodes.edu , phone: 901-484-1837.

Contact Email: garceau@rhodes.edu

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.

Mormon Handcarts: A Symbol that Perseveres

by Jennifer Polopolus-Meredith

Pioneer Day in Salt Lake City, Utah is important. It includes fun filled activities such as fireworks, parades, and a rodeo. A state holiday, Pioneer Day commemorates the passage of Mormons into Salt Lake Valley where they would settle permanently. It is the culmination of the long dangerous trek to find the sacred place for their Zion. Proud of their pioneer past, the remembrance of the trek to Utah has shaped Mormon identity as it has come to embody and promote values important to their community. Within the mythos of the journey to Salt Lake valley, travel by handcarts has become central to the story. 

It is easy to understand the attachment and romanticizing by modern Mormons to those who trekked by handcart. It provides a heroic image of faithful pioneers walking over a thousand miles from Iowa City to Salt Lake through rough terrain pulling their possessions behind. Barely 3000 traveled by handcart, less than 10% of the total migration. Despite the low percentage, those who went by handcart have become the symbol of the journey. Handcart pioneers symbolize the courage, perseverance and dedication of Mormons to their faith and each other. Mostly the poor traveled by foot as covered wagon proved to expensive, but they chose the arduous path rather than stay behind. Faith in God’s plan for them as a community gave them courage and perseverance to cross the dangerous West.

Add to the story of courage elements of tragedy, heroics, and sacrifice and the symbol grows in strength. While mostly poor Mormons pulled handcarts, some voluntarily relinquished the comparative comforts of a covered wagon to walk. Francis Webster and his wife Betsy heeded the call from Brigham Young to help finance other Mormons by traveling with handcarts and donating the savings to the Perpetual Immigration Fund (PIF). In turn, PIF offered loans to less fortunate Mormons so they could also migrate. The Websters declined easier passage because their faith commanded sacrifice for their community. They wanted to help their fellow Mormons to build a stronger society. Modern Mormons also value sacrifice as they sacrifice time and money by paying tithes, volunteering in the church and community and participating in missions that spread the Mormon faith and ethos.

Unfortunately, over 200 died walking to Salt Lake Valley. Leaving late in the season and being caught in early blizzards led to some Mormons freezing, sickness, and starvation. While the deaths may have been avoidable, the tragedy adds to the significance of the handcarts. The early blizzard trapping the handcart companies demonstrates the pioneers at the mercy of the environment. It confirms the danger of the trek West and the courage and sacrifice of those who undertook the journey, especially on foot. Without that element of danger and loss the trek would lose some of its impact. Mormons might have built a myth of God’s protection if all had come through unscathed, but the tragedies highlight the willing sacrifice and depth of faith as people continued to travel by handcart after the events. Even setbacks could not shake their faith in the rightness of their plans.

From the tragic stories of death also come the tales of heroics by Mormons. Mormons searched for those lost in the early blizzards and carrying everyone from the Martin Handcart Company across Sweetwater. Mormons also donated food and other provisions and opened their homes to the handcart pioneers. The story of the rescue at Sweetwater has reached mythic proportions with three Mormons supposedly carrying everyone from the company safely across the river. While not entirely historically accurate, as Chad M. Orton has shown, Mormons did launch heroic rescue efforts to save their imperiled pioneers. Today, Mormons continue to help those endangered and less fortunate with their welfare system and humanitarian aid. While God did not prevent all tragedy, the story takes on a mythical note that only three men saved the whole company. They must have had help from God to carry and protect everyone. In this sense, the tragedy seems proof that God led their journey and watched over their people.

The handcart trek has become the dominant narrative of the pioneer trek to Salt Lake Valley. It has the elements of tragedy, heroics and sacrifice that create an exciting meaningful narrative. It also portrays the important values of sacrifice, hard work, and the centrality of community essential to the Mormon ethos. This is evident in the popularity of handcart treks taken by youth groups and entire wards. Mormons can follow in their ancestor’s footsteps, literally, by renting handcarts and pulling them for a weekend over part of the trail. They learn the history while feeling first hand the hardship and perseverance of their ancestors. Some wards go all out and make their own clothes, walk for ten hours a day, and try to authenticate as closely as possible the experience. They find out first hand, the sacrifice, perseverance, and hard work of their ancestors. Others take a less strict path and dress in modern clothing, and have more of a camping experience using tents and not walking as long. However, they still learn the history and the experience strengthens the bonds of community in the wards and also the youth groups. Fittingly, the handcart has become the symbol of the Mormon migration to Salt Lake Valley.

New Resource from Jared Farmer!

We received this note from Jared Farmer the other day about a promising online resource

Dear fellow followers of Mormon (and/or Utah) history,

Please excuse the impersonal nature of this note. I simply want to call your attention to a newly launched website that serves as the permanent home for my two (!) free e-books:

• Mormons in the Media, 1830–2012 (revised edition, now in iBooks format as well as PDF)
• The Image of Mormons: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Students

jaredfarmer.net/e-books/

Cordially, Jared

These look to be promising resources. If anyone would like to review them for our blog, please contact us!

“Religion in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains” Conference

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver is delighted to host a one-day conference on “Religion in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains”, to be held Saturday, June 22 at the University of Denver, with the support of an AAR Regional Development Grant. It begins with welcoming remarks at 8:45, panel I 9:00-10:30, panel II 11:00-12:30, lunch 12:30-1:45, panel 3 2:00-3:30, coffee break 4:00-5:30, and keynote speech at 7:00. 

This conference brings together scholars from nine universities and colleges around the United States to examine religious identity and practice (including secular and spiritual approaches) around the region, past and present. It is intended to help highlight and bring greater interest to issues of religious identity and practice in the states of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, and to provide an opportunity for faculty, researchers, and graduate students to connect with and learn from colleagues. The conference is envisioned as a catalyst for more sustained efforts at regional community building, including future conferences and workshops.

Conference structure

The conference consists of four panels of paper presentations, arranged thematically, highlighting recent research on 20th-century Protestantism in South Dakota, the development of the “Mormon Migration” website, the rise of non-denominationalism in Colorado and the United States, Judaism in early 20th-century Utah, indigenous studies and religious subjectivity, Muslim women in Colorado, Denver-area black churches as agents of change, and Colorado’s influence on Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, among other topics. Dr. Bonnie Clark, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Denver, will deliver the keynote talk, “Follow the Request of the Stone: Spirituality and Gardening in Internment Camps”, about her work on the World War II Japanese-American internment camp of Amache.

Registration and Attendance

There is no cost to attend the conference and registration, while encouraged, is not required. To register, please email Professor Andrea L Stanton: andrea.stanton@du.edu. Lunch and coffee will be provided to presenters and attendees.

Conference Website and Contact Information

For more information about the conference, please visit our website: www.religionintherockiesconference.wordpress.com or email andrea.stanton@du.edu. For more information about Dr. Clark and her work, please visit: http://religionintherockiesconference.wordpress.com/keynote/.

Polygamy and Gay Marriage: A Reflection on “Non-Traditional” Marriage

by Konden Smith 

This past week, the Supreme Court has heard two historic cases concerning gay marriage, furthering the intensity of it as a national debate. Jeff Wilson has recently noted that it was in the American West that we see the “earliest religious recognitions of same-sex partnerships.” Interestingly, it was also in the West that we see the first significant argument against traditional marriage (that of “one man and one woman”) as the only viable alternative for American citizens. This fight came from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka. Mormons) as they pled for the country to tolerate their practice of plural marriage. Although the church today has taken a strong public stand against gay marriage, this early Mormon struggle for non-traditional marriage offers an important (if not ironic) contribution to the discussion.

Throughout the nineteenth century, prominent Americans looked to Mormonism and its open practice of non-traditional marriage as a national embarrassment and a direct threat to the integrity of the divinely established institution of the family, and as such, was a direct threat to the nation itself. “I must only beg,” spoke historian Philip Schaff to his German audience in 1854, “in the name of my adopted fatherland, that you will not judge America in any way by this irregular growth.” Just a few years later, American Colonel Patrick Connor argued for the “annihilation of this whole people [of Mormonism].” “If the present rebellion [Civil War] is a punishment for any national sin, I believe it is for permitting this unholy, blasphemous, and unnatural institution to exist almost in the heart of the nation[.]” 

Considered “unnatural,” polygamy was thought to encourage sexual promiscuity and cause birth deformities. The first legal test for Mormons came in the Supreme Court case Reynold’s vs. US (1878). In citing religious liberty, the Mormons claimed that the state had no right to criminalize non-traditional marriages. The Court explained however that the founding fathers “never intended” for religious freedom to hurt innocent women and children through unorthodox marriage, and as such, the government had the right “to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.” Establishing it to be the function of government to encourage “religion” and “morality,” the Court criminalized polygamy. Therefore, in order to protect the ideal family, the government ensured the breakup of non-traditional ones. 

At the height of anti-polygamy agitation, Mormon leaders wrote an official protest, complaining that the 1882 Edmunds law, which helped define marriage as between one man and one woman, as oppressive and severe. President Grover Cleveland, upon receiving a copy of this protest, remarked, “I wish you out there could be like the rest of us.” Mormon leaders publicly shot back: “We are inconsiderately asked to rend our family relations and throw away our ideas of human freedom, political equality and the rights of man, and ‘to become like them.’” They then challenged, “Be like them for what?” “It means that E pluribus unum is a fiction; it means that we tamper with and violate the grand palladium of human liberty, the Constitution of the United States and substitute expediency, anarchy, fanaticism, intolerance and religious bigotry for those glorious fundamental principles of liberty, equality, brotherhood, human freedom and the rights of man.” The Church was emphatic: “We cannot do it….We cannot and will not lay aside our fealty to the nation at the bidding of political demagogues, religious fanatics or intolerant despots.” 

As part of this protest in support of unorthodox marriage, Mormon leaders arranged for U.S. flags on government buildings throughout Salt Lake City to be hung at half mast on Independence Day. With widespread national outrage, the Mormon leaders defended the half mast: “A condition of affairs exists in this Territory which, when understood, every lover of human rights must condemn; and in behalf of ourselves, in behalf of our wives and children, in behalf of the Constitution of the United States, and in behalf of the principles of human rights and liberty in this land and throughout the world, we enter our solemn protest against such iniquitous acts as are being perpetrated here.” According to the Court, however, few crimes were “more pernicious to the best interests of society,” and to not punish them “would be to shock the moral judgment of the community.” The theme was established: marriage between “one man and one woman” was divinely ordained, and any unconventional form of marriage was an affront toward God and a threat against peace and social order. 

Mormon leaders rejected such campaigns as an attempt by the US government to enforce, from the “pulpit of our nation,” a particular sexual and theological “orthodoxy.” Men had the right of forming family bonds and worshiping God according to their conscience, “despite the Supreme Court decisions, despite the action of Congress, despite the expressions of pulpit and press.” This was more than a battle over religious liberty, but instead, “we are fighting the battles of religious liberty for the entire people; it might be said, for the entire world.” Mormons fought for the freedom to establish their own family bonds, however immoral others imagined it to be. Even after Mormons officially ended polygamy, efforts arose to constitutionally define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” Mormons charged that such efforts came from “sectarian ministers of the nation” and were “unjust and uncalled for.” 

In looking at these early contests, there are many parallels between gay and plural marriage. For both, opposition comes largely from theological concerns rather than empirical evidence. For early Mormon leaders, at stake were not just their families, but principles of liberty to determine those relationships according to their own conscience and their own sense of divine morality. Importantly, it was not a national departure from “Christian marriage” that caused Mormon leaders to threaten God’s wrath on the nation, but rather the imposing of a majoritarian familial morality on the rest of the nation. 

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.

Casual Friday

So, in case you didn't notice, December 21, 2012--apparently the last day on one of the Mayan calendars--has come and gone with no apocalypse. At least, not one that I (or anyone I know of) noticed. The world, it seems, has not yet come to an end. But when it does, I know one place where the people will be well prepared.

I stumbled onto Rockland Ranch several years ago when I was driving around the dirt roads near Canyonlands National Park in southern Utah. The first time I saw it I just snapped a few pictures and wondered what it was all about. The second time, about a year later, I decided to stop. The man who began the project--which has now become a small community--was away at the time, visiting Salt Lake City, but I talked to one of the people who lived there. He described himself as an Independent Mormon Fundamentalist. He had recently left another community was living there with his family.

The community consists of several rooms blasted into the side of this massive sandstone formation. There is an orchard, water tanks, solar paneling, power generators and fuel reserves. Everything you'd need to carry on in the desert for a good long while after civilization collapses when it eventually does, on some future doomsday.

posted by Stan Thayne

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).