At the time, I considered this practice a historical rarity in the Mormon tradition, one Latter-day Saints located in geographically peripheral regions like the American South outgrew as the institutional church shifted away from its practice of physically gathering to a central locale and congregations in these areas became more established.

And then my wife called me this morning. Work has taken her out of town to Charleston, South Carolina. She excitedly told me that she had attended a Methodist worship service. When I enquired as to the reason why, she explained that she awoke this morning unsure what her schedule would look like, and when her employer (who is well aware of our religious affiliation and activity) suggested she take the morning off to attend church, my wife took advantage. But being in an unknown place with limited transportation options (and even more limited time), my wife decided that instead of trying to locate the local Mormon meetinghouse, she would walk down the street to the United Methodist Church and sit in on their service. This is in part, I think, because I study Methodists, and my wife has heard enough of their history and theology that she felt some level of comfort (or at least an amount of intrigue). But my wife did not just attend the service as an interested observer. She worshipped with the Methodists there this morning, singing hymns, repeating aloud the Apostle’s Creed, and attentively listening to the sermon. (She did not, I should note, partake of the Lord’s Supper, nor did she donate to the collection plate being passed around (though she wanted to do the latter but carried no cash on her)).

As I reflected on her telling me of her experience, two questions emerged in my mind. First, I wondered to what extent those Latter-day Saints of yesteryear who attended other services participated. Did they partake of the Lord’s Supper at Baptist meetings? Donate funds supporting interdenominational camp meetings? And if so (or if not), what does that say about this “supplemental worship”?

The second question I considered was to what extent Latter-day Saints today do indeed supplement their Mormon worship with that of other religions. I have, on occasion, attended another denomination’s Sunday services. Sometimes this is at the invitation of a friend, and other times it has been more of a cultural act, as when Stan, Matt B., and I attended mass at a beautiful Catholic cathedral in Montreal two years ago while there for a conference. I have not, to my knowledge, ever attended with the express intent to stand in for or supplement my weekly worship in Mormon chapels. But I do know of Latter-day Saints who have done so when faced with situations similar to that of my wife today. Similarly, there are Mormons who take advantage of worship services offered during Holy Week and around Christmas at nearby Christian churches because they feel Mormonism largely ignores what they see as important days and events on the liturgical calendar. And I have still other Mormon friends who intentionally attend another service every other month or so in an effort to expose their children to a variety of religious communities and worship styles and because they fundamentally believe that truth can (and is) found in religious traditions outside their own.

But I don’t know how widespread any of this is. And while recognizing that the bloggernacle is not necessarily representative of the larger Mormon population, I’m interested in anyone’s personal stories and feelings in an effort to flesh out some of these ideas in my mind.

Call for Papers

War and Peace in Our Time:

Mormon Perspectives

A conference sponsored by the Latter-day Saint Council on Mormon Studies, and

the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame

Held at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

March 18-19, 2011

In a world pervaded with religious fervor and seemingly perpetual war, it has become essential for religious believers to consider the realities of violent conflict and the possibilities for a more peaceful world.  Adherents and scholars of the world’s largest religious bodies have had long and often contentious debates over what their sacred sources and traditions teach them about how and when, if ever, it is justifiable and even righteous to engage in violence.  While some contend that religion is inherently violent, others maintain that the core message of all religions is peaceful coexistence and compassion for one’s neighbor; meanwhile, nuanced scholarly treatments suggest that in fact “the ambivalence of the sacred” on questions of war and peace is common to all faith traditions.

As a relatively young religion, Mormonism has not yet fully grappled with the many complicated questions of peace and war in the modern world, with all of their theological, social, and political ramifications, but the time is ripe to do so.  Accordingly, this conference seeks to examine not only Mormonism’s history in relation to issues of war and peace, but also the resources within the tradition that provide a foundation for constructive discussion and dialogue about how individual Latter-day Saints and the broader church orient themselves in a world of violence.

We are soliciting papers reflecting on all aspects of Mormon perspectives on war and peace, from historical-social scientific, theological, and normative standpoints.  Professional scholars, students, and members of the community at large, both LDS and non-LDS, are welcome to submit papers and to attend the conference; all sessions will be open to the public.  The conference aims to be exploratory and deliberative, seeking to include and represent voices from across the spectrum and engage multiple perspectives in respectful dialogue.

The deadline for proposals, which should include a paper abstract of no more than 500 words and a brief CV of the presenter, is September 1, 2010.  Proposals should be submitted by e-mail to ldswarpeace@gmail.com.  Questions may be directed to one of the conference co-chairs, Richard Bushman (rlb7@columbia.edu) or Patrick Mason (pmason1@nd.edu).

While not knowing exactly what the one paying the compliment had in mind, a reasonable inference can be made. Jan Shipps, of course, is “generally regarded as the foremost non-Mormon scholar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” She has been actively involved in researching and writing about Latter Day Saints and their history for decades now, and is held in high esteem by both believing Mormons and by many in the larger academy. Richard Bushman thus praised her first book, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, as possibly being “the most brilliant book ever written” on the subject, in part because it “offer[s] a perspective that both Mormons and others can accept” (blurb on back cover). Mormons are so comfortable with her, in fact, that she has addressed not only Mormon historical societies like MHA and JWHA, but also fireside-like gatherings at LDS Stakes and Wards, speaking to Latter-day Saints not well versed in history and historiography alongside those who are. She has been the go-to person for media types writing on various aspects of Mormonism, being regularly featured in documentaries and quoted in newspaper articles.

Shipps, of course, is not alone. In recent years, others have stepped in alongside her, including Sarah Barringer Gordon and Laurie Maffly-Kipp. Still younger scholars and students of Mormonism who come from outside the Mormon faith have begun taking an active role in Mormon studies as it has expanded and matured. Which makes me wonder whether those of us with an active interest in the success of Mormon studies as a legitimate academic subfield want someone else to emerge as “the next Jan Shipps.” Shipps’s success is no doubt a result of her training and abilities as a scholar of religions. But her notoriety among Mormons, as I see it, is also a result of not only “offering a perspective that both Mormons and other can accept” but also her once unique status of being one of very, very few individuals from outside the faith tradition who offered such a perspective.

It seems to me that as Mormon studies continues to mature, one measure of its success will be in attracting a significantly larger number of researchers and commentators from outside of the Latter Day Saint tradition. The result, as I see it, would be an environment where such individuals are not anomalies. As noted, this is already becoming the case. But in order for Mormon Studies to reach its potential in this regard, it seems that two things need to happen. First, believing Latter-day Saint scholars need not feel so personally attacked when a scholar from outside the tradition offers an interpretation of Mormonism which does not implicitly reaffirm testimony and may even appear to challenge certain truth claims Mormons hold close. I would hope, for example, that John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire would be met with a more nuanced reception if it were published today. Don’t misunderstand—there are plenty of legitimate critiques of Brooke’s work from a scholarly perspective, many of which I share. But it seems to me also that some of the negative reaction the book received from Mormon historians was because its provocative thesis was too radical for believing Latter-day Saints and challenged the standard story of Latter-day Saint beginnings. It’s my own opinion that whatever the reasons for the negative reaction, it has resulted in historians of Mormonism missing out on and/or ignoring many interpretive insights Brooke suggested. Secondly, and this point is related, I think: historians of Mormonism—both those from within and without the faith tradition—need to continue working towards Mormon Studies being a field defined as something more than “gigantic and sometimes polemical“ (see the conversation, especially the comments, linked there for discussion on how to go about doing so).

They make their first appearance in the very first sentence of the first lesson (“Columbus, the Great Discoverer”):

As we look at America today, we see it owned by the white people who have filled it with cities, railroads, autos, and flying machines. But it was not like this three hundred years ago. At that time the Pilgrims had just landed among the savages, called Indians, who owned everything—the rivers, the lakes, the mountains. America had been theirs for over two thousand years. Six hundred years before Christ the Lord led their fathers to this Promised Land, under the direction of the great Prophets Lehi and Nephi. The Lord promised them, “You can have this beautiful country forever if you will serve me, but if you don’t, it will be given to the Gentiles.” After hundreds of years, the Nephites grew wicked and were cursed with a dark skin. It was in this condition that Columbus found them (p. 1).

The lesson goes onto explain that “the Lord wanted to send his True Church to the Promised Land” but was unable to because He “couldn’t send it to these savages who roamed the land in idleness.” Luckily, Nephi “saw white people coming, sailing over the many waters, coming to find the Red Men and to get things ready for the True Church.” Using 1 Nephi 13 as a guide, the manual identifies Columbus as the first of these “white people.” His arrival in the New World, the first lesson concludes, was evidence that “The Lord was making ready for Joseph Smith” (pp. 1-3).

American Indians make only a brief appearance in the second lesson (“Martin Luther”), in the form of a transition sentence in the opening paragraph. But they are again featured in the third (“How the Pilgrims Helped”). The Pilgrims are portrayed as sincere, honest, and meek devotees of Christ striving for true religion. They can do no wrong in the author’s mind; in a passage reflecting the historiographical picture of the Pilgrims then in vogue, we learn that the Pilgrims not only settled New England, but also initiated the basis of what would become American democracy and religious freedom. And no one, we are assured, was kinder to the Natives whom they encountered upon their arrival. “Every writer who tells about these noble Pilgrims, says they were ‘a religious body of freedom seekers, ruling with such reason and mercy for themselves and the Red Man, that they soon became the pattern for all future colonies’” (p. 6).

The central message of the first three lessons then (as it relates to American Indians) is that through God’s great providence and mercy, these poor, benighted, and racially-cursed souls were treated with kindness and justice by those blessed white people God led to the Promised Land. The concern, though, is not at all with the salvation of the Natives through the paternalistic care and  preaching of the European settlers (as one might expect from the author’s use of 1 Nephi 13 as a guiding text (see 1 Nephi 13:30-31)). Rather, the sole concern is with the Promised Land being prepared for the Restoration of the True Church through Joseph Smith. This is made explicitly clear in the fourth lesson (“How Washington Aided”). Readers are informed that “at Washington’s time, there remained four big things to do, getting America ready for the true church. As soon as these were done, the Lord would be ready.” So what were those “four big things”?

First: The Indians must be conquered.

Second: The rule of the French broken.

Third: America must be taken from the grip of England.

Fourth: Religious Freedom given to the Promised Land. (p. 8).

Hence Washington’s important role in this particular narrative of the Restoration’s prehistory. These “savage Indians” were no match for “the power of the Lord [resting] upon Washington,” nor were the Indians’ supposed allies, the French. “When he was nineteen, fighting with unusual courage against the French and Indians, he was chosen captain in the army.” Escaping near death because “his mission had only begun, he was saved in a marvelous manner. After many years of fighting, the Indians were driven far beyond the Hill Cumorah where Moroni hid the golden records, and where Joseph Smith was to live.” The French, meanwhile, were similarly driven from the lands “where the Kirtland and Nauvoo Temples were to be built,” as well as from “the Rocky Mountains … where fifty years later the pioneers were to come.” This was, of course, all providential, because “had the Indians or French known that the valuable Book of Mormon records were hid in one of their hills, they would have searched carefully for it. We now see these tow big events finished” (p. 8). Upon taking care of these ethnic and racial foes, Washington then proceeded to win the Revolutionary War and institute the laws necessary for the Restoration of the gospel in the United States. “Six years after Washington died,” the lesson concludes, “Joseph Smith came, getting things ready for the restoration” (p. 9).

There’s a lot that could be discussed in this material, from the antiquated notions of “advanced” European cultures systematically defeating the lesser “primitive” cultures they encountered (and being backed by Deity in their conquest, no less) to the selective reading and interpretation of scripture offered. In addition to recognizing “that the land and cultural birthright Indians once possessed in the Great Basin were taken from them” (as Elder Jensen recently encouraged Latter-day Saints to do), I think that it’s important to recognize the subsequent ways in which Latter-day Saints treated those whose land they assumed control and ownership over. In narratives of church history like the one presented above, these “savage” “Red Men” are not only poor, idle, and spiritually lost souls racially marked for their disobedience, but their “conquering” is to be recognized as a necessary precursor to the restoration of God’s true church. Thankfully, such narratives have largely disappeared from official church publications, but I’m afraid that in the minds of some (several?) Latter-day Saints, the underlying assumptions and attitudes toward Native Americans persist.

As the title of this blog suggests, we are ladies with multiple layers. We are scholars who love strappy heals, vintage dresses, and cute purses. We are also scholars who take an academic interest in women–in their history and in their place in the world today. This virtual forum is a place for us discuss the things, silly and serious, that are on our minds. It will likely focus on women’s religious history but may occasionally wander into other realms of inquiry.  We hope you’ll join the discussion and make this a pleasant place to be.

Amanda, recent Mormon Scholars Foundation Summer Seminarian and PhD student at the University of Michigan, has put up the inaugural post, an intriguing retrospective of Dialogue‘s Pink Issue. She concludes by asking:

Although there has been a lot of work done on women’s history within the L.D.S. Church, such scholarship has not permeated the general membership.  I think the interesting question is not about the fact that many young girls and women are not versed in this scholarship but is about the circumstances that have led them to be so.  Why are feminist scholars still able to tell stories about young women who approach them after lectures to say that they – at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-four – had not realized that Mormon women had been involved in the movement for women’s rights in the nineteenth century or that Eliza Snow had been so important in early Mormonism?  Why when many Mormon students are challenged about the position of women within Church do they rarely cite the existence of the Woman’s Exponent in the 1870s or the development of Mormon feminism a hundred years later in the 1970s?  Why has the influence of feminist scholarship on Mormon women been limited to a small circle of church members?

Head on over and join in the conversation, and be sure to bookmark the site and stay current on what promises to be an intelligent, thoughtful, and important contribution to the Mormon and religion blogging communities.

While we will miss Liz greatly here at the blog (and on our listserv, where she contributes not only valuable and wise suggestions but often witty banter and quips), we wish her well in her future educational and blogging pursuits. Liz informs me that she plans to take a (hopefully brief) hiatus from the virtual discussion world before returning in full force with her own blog focused more exclusively on women’s history. Luckily, she has agreed to occasionally cross-post from that blog here, and we will notify interested readers of that project as it develops.

Please join us in thanking Liz for her contributions here and in wishing here best of luck in the future.

Over at Religion Dispatches, Joanna Brooks has a two-part post asking “Who Says the Tea Party isn’t a Religious Movement?” In challenging Lou Ruprecht’s answer of “no,” Brooks notes that “for the Mormon sector of the movement (including Tea Party icon Glenn Beck), … the Tea Party taps into a powerful and distinctive complex of Mormon beliefs about the divinity of the U.S. Constitution and the last-days role of righteous souls from the Rocky Mountains in saving it from destruction.”

It seems to me that Brooks is spot-on in highlighting the religious dimensions of the Tea Party movement in the Jello Belt (that’s the Mormon Corridor in the intermountain West for those unfamiliar). And others have stepped forward to back her up, noting not only the distinctly Mormon characteristics of Tea Partiers in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona, but also the role religion plays in the minds of Tea Partiers elsewhere. Writing at the recently launched Religion in the American West blog, Brandi Denison explored the legacy bequeathed to Tea Partiers in western Colorado as a result of “the entanglement of land, religion, and capitalism in the American West.” “[T]he connections among land, Christianity as a justification for capitalism, and Christianity as site of refuge are strong and powerful ‘assemblages’” among Tea Party activists today.

While readily agreeing with those conclusions then, I’d like to take issue with the interpretation offered by Doe Daughtrey, a graduate student in Religious Studies at Arizona State whose research focuses on the intersections of Mormonism and New Age Paganism. As quoted in the second half of Brooks’s post at RD, Daughtrey suggests that

In a secularized, routinized, or demythologized Mormonism (which looks more like mainline Protestantism than the mystical tradition established by Joseph Smith), the religion is missing that distinctiveness, that tension of persecuted otherness.  Beck and the Tea Party movement reenchant the experience of being Mormon . . . or at least they reawaken the Mormon cultural memory of prophetic millennialism.

Beck, a convert to Mormonism, recalls the strident prophetic voice that distinguished Mormonism from 19th-century Protestant groups. Many Mormons have a long cultural memory of persecution. Though they may welcome their church’s modern emphasis on their similarities to other religionists, I believe there remains a longing in them for the ‘peculiar people’ identity conveyed by the divisive prophetic voice and the historical experience of conspiracy.

While I fully agree (and was indeed among the very first to argue) that Beck is tapping into Mormon folk millennialism of yesteryear, I’m afraid Daughtrey has otherwise missed the boat on this one. To begin with, Mormonism today can hardly be accurately characterized as “secularized” in any meaningful sense and looks little like mainline Protestantism. As Matt Bowman notes in a comment left on the RD post:

Contemporary Mormonism looks far more like evangelical Protestantism than mainline Protestantism, in nearly every way possible. Iannacconne’s work on strict churches is relevant here, as is the recent Pew Survey of American religions, which demonstrates that Mormons have _not_ actually ‘disenchanted’ in the way Daughtrey argues. Rather, Mormons engage in devotional practices like scripture study and prayer at rates more comparable to sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and conservative evangelicals than to mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics. Consequently, Mormons experience things like personal answers to prayers, divine healings, and other spiritual experiences at much higher rates than almost any other religion in America.

Furthermore, while Beck (and his fellow Latter-day Saint Tea Partiers) are recalling a prophetic voice from an earlier era, that voice belongs to Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Secretary of Agriculture to Dwight Eisenhower while contemporaneously serving as an LDS apostle (and later in the 1980s and 90s as Church President), and not Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. It is Benson’s unique combination of politics and religion that combines scriptural teachings concerning moral agency and the Latter-day Saint “plan of salvation” with intense fears of socialist subversion here and now that Glenn Beck has echoed time and time again. It is Benson quotes and youtube clips that dot the pages of Mormon Tea Partiers’ blogs across the internet, and it is him who so many of my conservative facebook friends in Utah quote as their status update anytime President Obama does something else with which they disagree.

But perhaps even more striking to me is Daughtrey’s claim that the Tea Party represents for Mormons a chance to “reenchant the experience of being Mormon.” Glenn Beck has done nothing to “recall the strident prophetic voice that distinguished Mormonism from 19th century Protestant groups.” And politically-far right Mormons, of course, are joining with other like-minded folks from a variety of faiths in organizing for their unique brand of activism. In fact, it seems to me that Glenn Beck has consciously (veiled references and sometimes subtle allusions to folk Mormon doctrines notwithstanding) attempted to market himself and his message as one that appeals not only to Mormons, but also to other politically conservative Christians. And it his utter success in accomplishing this—to the point of soliciting the willing assistance of David Barton on his show and managing to secure an invite to speak at Liberty University’s commencement exercises—that has confused me since the beginning. Why hasn’t Beck’s Mormonism been the divisive wedge for evangelicals and others who generally refuse Mormonism (and Mormons) a seat at the table of orthodoxy?

Albanese and Stein note that “Methodism is understudied in American religious history and therefore deserves all the new attention it can receive” (p. x). While I, as an aspiring scholar whose research focuses on early American Methodism and Methodists, welcome such statements, I wonder at what point a religion (or a topic in general) graduates from understudied to “studied” (or “overstudied”?)? In some respects, it is difficult for me to believe that Methodism can still be considered understudied at all. Following the publication of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity in 1989, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on Methodism and Methodists in 18th and 19th century America. Several important monographs on the subject—including those of Russell Richey, John Wigger, Lynn Lyerly, Christopher Owen, Dee Andrews, Christine Heyrman, and David Hempton—have vaulted Methodism into the scholarly spotlight. Methodists similarly occupy an important place in larger narratives of American religious history, from Mark Noll’s America’s God to Ann Taves’s Fits, Trances, and Visions. And within the last year, we have seen the publication of The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley and The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies. All of this, in part, is why I struggle to maintain that Methodism is, in fact, understudied. That does not mean that there isn’t research to be done—at least I hope so, otherwise I’ll need to change course halfway through my PhD program.

But I wonder about Mormonism. Is it understudied? Like Methodism, Mormonism has in the last couple of decades emerged from the corners of historians’ minds and now occupies an important place in American religious history. We’ve discussed here before Daniel Walker Howe’s observation that Mormon historiography is “gigantic and sometimes polemical.” And context is important here. Whether a certain topic is judged “understudied” by scholars probably depends a lot on who that topic is studied/understudied by. The second half of Howe’s comment is revealing here. Mormon historiography is “polemical” at least in part because so much of the research in the field has been conducted by those with an active interest in either proving or disproving the truth claims of the LDS church. There have long been, of course, faithful Latter-day Saints interested in investigating Mormon history to other ends—to reveal something about American religion or the American West, for example—and that number seems to be steadily increasing today. The last several years have also witnessed an increasing number of scholars with no LDS affiliation active in studying Mormonism. There are, as in the field of Methodist history, a number of important scholarly monographs on Mormonism, a forthcoming volume entitled Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia, and there are now Mormon Studies programs/offerings at more than one university in the United States.

But is Mormonism still understudied in some sense? If so, by whom? And when will Mormonism as a scholarly subject of study graduate to “studied”?

As a bit of background to this post, let me explain that I grew up in Texas, just outside of Dallas, and along the way acquired a taste for a pretty wide array of music: While indie rock has long been my preferred genre, I also developed a liking for hip hop, Latin American pop, classic rock, and like any self-respecting Texan, country. Only I never really liked what I saw as the commercial country of the 1990s. I liked what others derisively labeled the “twangy” stuff, and I especially liked the outlaw country music and musicians from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johhny Cash, Jessi Coulter, and Hank Williams, Jr. But my favorite was David Allan Coe.

Coe, as far as I can tell, was always something of an outsider among this group of outsiders. Not from the South (he was born and raised in Ohio), Coe’s semi-autobiographical music has always seemed like a self-conscious effort to simultaneously be part of this group of rebel musicians and to distinguish himself from them as more wild, more reckless, and more of an outlaw. He thus sang songs that emphasized his friendships with the other rebels (“Willie, Waylon, and Me”, “The Ride”, and “You Never Even Called me by My Name” all come to mind) while carefully crafting a public image that attempted to show just how radical he was and is. He spent his childhood in and out of reform schools, wrote of his supposed experiences in prison and on death row, claimed to have murdered more than one man, and boasted of being a polygamist. In spite of his rather beautiful baritone voice, Coe struggled initially to make it as a musician in Nashville, and recorded a series of X-rated albums (often under a pseudonymous name) to be sold at trucker stops to make ends meet. When he finally did make it big, he was known more as a song writer for others than he was for his own music. But he did enjoy some moderate success, and long after the rest of his rebel friends stopped making new music, Coe continued (and continues today) touring, playing in honky tonks and bars with both more traditional country musicians and younger southern rockers.

Knowing Coe’s background then, I was not surprised to come across this series of clips (warning: extremely vulgar language) on youtube a few months ago. It’s a 4-part interview of David Allan Coe on the late-night cable show Midnight Blue, hosted by Al Goldstein, pornographer and publisher of the magazine Screw. The interview itself proved less than interesting to me until I got to the very end of the first clip. Goldstein is discussing with Coe his noted ability to irritate and anger others (most notably Anita Bryant, for whom Coe wrote one his more vulgar and offensive ballads, entitled simply “F*** Anita Bryant”). At this point the conversation turned to religion of all things:

Coe: An example is, I started catching all this sh** from the Mormon church because I’m a Mormon and I’m telling people I’m Mormon and when you say you’re a Mormon they want you to think “Donny Osmond,” right? So I started getting all this bullsh**, “quit telling people you’re a Mormon, you know? So I wrote this song.

That song, embedded below, laments that “the Mormon way of life is almost gone” and positions Coe as one of the remaining real Mormons, determined by his continued practice of polygamy and (as the song’s title suggests) his belief in not only a heavenly father but also a holy (or heavenly) mother (full lyrics available here):

While the claims to be a polygamist should have tipped me off, I’d never heard anything about Coe’s supposed affiliation with Mormonism before. Digging around a bit more, I discovered that he was supposedly raised by a Mormon mother father and an Amish mother, and as an adult contacted Mormon Fundamentalists in Big Water, Utah about converting and becoming a polygamist (see Justin’s helpful comment 15). But the veracity of that claim (I haven’t tried to substantiate it yet) seems beside the point here. Coe’s claim to be a true practitioner of pure Mormonism, when viewed within the context of his carefully-crafted persona as an outlaw among outlaws, can be seen as yet another way of separating himself from the bunch.

Tisa Wenger put up a post last week reflecting on the difficulties she confronts in teaching a course on Religion in the American West, and more generally how the West complicates her current research on “the topic of religious freedom in American history.” The questions she poses are important:

My project is not limited to the West, but my concern with the West significantly transforms the shape of this work. As the United States expanded westward, how did concepts of liberty and the ideal of the free conscience shape Protestant visions of their own role in what seemed to them a divinely ordained drama? When and where did Anglo-Protestant conceptions of “freedom” tend to exclude and/or discipline other modes of religiosity? How did the peoples they encountered—Indians, Catholics, Mormons, Hispanos, Asian immigrants, and others—understand and make use of the religious freedom ideal, and how did it transform them? Were the dynamics of religious freedom different in the West, where in most areas the “mainline” Protestant denominations never established any controlling presence and competed with multiple forms of religious commitment?

More thought-provoking posts by Wenger and others are sure to follow, so if you’re interested, head on over there and participate in the discussion.