In 1879, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the Free Exercise Clause for the first time, holding in Reynolds v. United States that Congress could punish Mormon polygamy. Historians have interpreted Reynolds and the massive wave of anti-polygamy legislation and litigation that it midwifed as an extension of Reconstruction into the American West. This Article offers a new historical interpretation, one that places the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds within an international context of Great Power imperialism and American international expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. It does this by recovering the lost theory of religious freedom that the Mormons offered in Reynolds, a theory grounded in the natural law tradition. It then shows how the Court rejected this theory by using British imperial law to interpret the scope of the first amendment. Unraveling the work done by these international analogies reveals how the legal debates in Reynolds reached back to natural law theorists of the seventeenth-century such as Hugo Grotius and forward to fin de siècle imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt. By analogizing the federal government to the British Raj, Reynolds provided a framework for national politicians in the 1880s to employ the supposedly discredited tactics of Reconstruction against the Mormons. Embedded in imperialist analogies, Reynolds and its progeny thus formed a prelude to the constitutional battles over American imperialism in the wake of the Spanish-American War. These constitutional debates reached their dénouement in The Insular Cases, where Reynolds and its progeny appeared not as Free Exercise cases but as precedents on the scope of American imperial power. This Article thus remaps key events in late nineteenth-century constitutional history, showing how the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds must be understood as part of America’s engagement with Great Power imperialism and the ideologies that sustained it.

I was lucky enough to read a slightly-earlier version of the paper, and Nate’s argument is both provocative and convincing. Nate builds on Sally Gordon’s research that situates Reynolds within the context of what immediately proceeded it (abolitionism and Reconstruction) by exploring how the decision handed down in the case “also drew on international narratives, using analogies to British imperial law to interpret the scope of the first amendment” (p. 4). As part of this budding imperialist reasoning, Mormons, along with Catholics, Jews, and Italians, were racialized as something other than white. As Nate notes, though, “The logic of Mormon racial identity, however, was slightly different. According to the standard racial logic, behavior resulted from racial identity. … For Mormons, however, the logic moved in the opposite direction. A new race arose precisely because of the unnatural behaviors of the Latter-day Saints” (p. 22). Nate’s exploration of the legal implications of the racialization of Mormons dovetails nicely with Paul Reeve’s current research (as well as JI’s own Ed Jeter). Collectively, these scholars are taking Mormon history in new, exciting, and important directions.

So take the time to download the article and give it a read.

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* In addition to being a well-known bloggernacle veteran, Nate is currently Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School, Associate Professor at William & Mary Law School, Mormon legal historian, and all-around thoughtful guy (as well as my home teaching companion).

The article is well worth the read, but it is only a summary of their larger analysis published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. In that fuller treatment, Schultz and Harvey spend some time discussing Mormon history and historiography. They explain that “examinations of America’s religious pluralism have paved the way for increased focus on two outsider religions, Judaism and Mormonism, our second historiographical trend.” I think their analysis is fair, both in its recognition of important developments in recent Mormon historiography (they rightfully, if a bit too generally, credit Bushman with demonstrating “how scholars who happen to have ‘Mormon DNA’ can speak to a larger audience of historians and the general public”) as well as in its nuanced critiques (they suggest that Mormon historiography has only “moved partially away from provinciality” in the recent past (emphasis mine)).

I thought JI readers would be interested in what they had to say, though, so I am including the relevant portion below. I’ll add my own reaction that the very recognition of the state of Mormon historiography by scholars from outside the tradition who do not research Mormon history is both significant and (for those of us with a vested interested in the matter) encouraging.

These examinations of America’s religious pluralism have paved the way for increased focus on two outsider religions, Judaism and Mormonism, our second historiographical trend. In recent work, Mormon historiography has moved partially away from provinciality, focusing instead on placing Mormonism within the boundaries of mainstream culture. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is, after all, the fourth largest church in the country today. But there is a reason for the provinciality of some Mormon history: Mormons have emerged only recently from the confines of the Rocky Mountains to play a significant role in the life of twentieth-century American politics and culture. Nevertheless, stellar works of Mormon history, notably Richard Lyman Bushman’s new biography of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), show how scholars who happen to have “Mormon DNA” can speak to a larger audience of historians and the general public. A recent dialogue in the Journal of American History between Bushman and Jan Shipps, the foremost non-Mormon interpreter of LDS history, gives further evidence of Mormon history’s (and historians’) movement out of the margins, even if not quite to the mainstream. In this case, religion (by definition) is everywhere, and the serious scholarly engagement with it (largely thanks to Bushman and other talented Mormon historians) has become central to historiographical dialogue. This work not only illuminates the period of Mormonism’s founding, but it also shows how Mormonism was both a foil for mainstream Protestantism (in, say, forcing it to define its boundaries on plural marriage) and, recently, as a key player in the Religious Right, helping to fund such causes as the anti-gay marriage movement in California.

In the introduction, Clark argues that figures like Noble are often overlooked by historians “because most chronicles of early members of the LDS Church focus on those who became important figures—church presidents, their counselors, and other major figures—rather than those who worked in the trenches.” These “‘regular’ members” constitute a group Clark affectionately labels “the many foot soldiers of [the] church” (p. ix-x). Yet it appears from the details of Noble’s life provided in the biography that his life as a Latter-day Saint was anything but regular. Noble traveled to Missouri as part of Zion’s camp, was a member of the original Quorum of Seventy, was initiated into the Anointed Quorum, served in the Nauvoo Legion, and was privy to the secretive discussions and practice of polygamy in the early 1840s, officiating at Joseph Smith’s 1841 plural marriage to Noble’s sister-in law Louisa Beman. Following Smith’s death, Noble traveled west with Brigham Young, overseeing a company of fifty individuals on the trek to Utah. Once there, he remained a confidant and trusted friend of other church presidents, including John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff (he spoke at Taylor’s funeral), and participated in plural marriage himself. His ecclesiastical responsibilities included service as a bishop (five separate times), a missionary, a seventy, and a patriarch. Because of his role in officiating at what was then believed to be Joseph Smith’s first plural marriage in 1841, Noble was among the group of Latter-day Saints called upon to testify at the 1892 court case between the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Church of Christ (Temple Lot) that determined the rightful owner of a plot of land in Missouri that Joseph Smith dedicated for the construction of a temple, and in the minds of the many participants, the true successor of Joseph Smith’s church.

While Clark deserves credit for crafting from scant primary sources a readable sketch of his ancestor’s life and bringing to the attention of historians Noble’s involvement in so many important episodes in nineteenth century Mormon history, I think he’s missed the mark in lumping Noble together with the general rank-and-file membership of the Church. It seems to me that, instead, figures like Noble represents a lower echelon of leaders that carried out important tasks and participated to varying degrees in shaping Mormonism but for various reasons never attained the status of prophets, apostles, and other notable leaders.

Martha Sonntag Bradley seems to agree, noting in a blurb on the back cover of the book that “Noble comes from the second tier of church leaders and his life story illuminates many events in Mormon history from this unique perspective.” While reading, I was reminded of James Henry Martineau, whose journals the Religious Studies Center at BYU recently published. While Noble and Martineau converted to Mormonism at different times and in different places, they share much in common. Each regularly rubbed shoulders with the highest-ranking church leaders and each was present at numerous important ecclesiastical, political, and cultural events in Latter-day Saint history. Curiously, Noel Carmack, who is working with Charles Hatch on another edition of Martineau’s journals, concluded in a recent review of the RSC’s version that “Martineau’s extraordinary life” qualifies him “as a third-echelon Latter-day Saint settler, surveyor, engineer, chronicler, and patriarch.”[1]

I’m not quite sure what makes an individual part of the second or third or fourth or fifth tier of Mormon church leaders, and am not too interested in debating where different historical figures fall in the framework. But I do have a couple of reflections on such designations. First, I wonder whether Clark’s labeling of Noble and other second-tier ecclesiastical leaders as “regular members” who “worked in the trenches” only serves the further obscure the actual rank-and-file membership—those women and men who lived their lives quietly, whose names perhaps never show up in minutes of leadership meetings, and who weren’t on a first-name basis with apostles and prophets. Those figures, it seems to me, have much to tell us about Mormonism as it was lived and experienced at different times and in various locales.

This is not to suggest, of course, that figures like Noble and Martineau do not deserve attention. In fact, many important questions deserve to be asked of their own experiences. I’m interested, for example, in knowing what function (if any) these persons served in mediating Mormonism as it was taught and understood at leadership levels and how it was received and practiced on a local level in homes and individual lives. What else might lower-tier church leaders reveal about the Mormon experience?

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[1] Noel A. Carmack, “Review of An Uncommon Common Pioneer: The Journals of James Henry Martineau, 1828-1918,” Journal of Mormon History 35:4 (2009): 274.

What follows is my transcription of the portion of the interview that focuses on Balmer’s discussion of his course on Mormonism. I’ve made every effort to transcribe accurately what is said. I’ve inserted ellipses (…) to indicate both natural breaks in speech and to gloss over other commentary in an effort to highlight only the portion of the conversation relevant to Mormonism. If you have a few minutes, I encourage you to listen to the entire interview. It’s quite insightful, I think.

Because of the informal nature of the interview, let me stress that Balmer’s comments should be taken for what they are—casual reflections on Mormon history. I am much less interested in debating whether, as he suggests at one point, the priesthood ban can be traced back to Joseph Smith, and much more interested in Balmer’s suggestion that Mormonism’s “quintessential American[ness]” is demonstrated not only in its American origins and the sacred significance Mormons attach to the American continent’s history but also in the religion’s ability to constantly “reinvent” itself. Anyway, enjoy.

Randall Stephens: Are there any classes right now … that you’ve taught that … are sort of new ideas where you’ve fused things together?

Randall Balmer: Well, I’m doing a new course on Mormonism. I did it at Dartmouth a couple of years ago, but it is the first time I’ve done it here as a lecture course. And that’s a lot of fun. That really grew out of [a] decades-long fascination with Mormonism, trying to figure it out, and I still don’t have it all figured out, but I find it endlessly fascinating. And the students seem to like that. …

RS: Well, the [class on] Mormonism would be fun.

RB: Mormonism is a lot of fun. It really is. And I learn so much myself. … I’ve learned more this semester [than when] I taught the course previously.

RS: Is there one gem like that that you have in mind of something that you’ve learned?

RB: About Mormonism?

RS: Yeah.

RB: Oh goodness, Mormonism. I’m always learning something about Mormonism. I guess, just to speak generally, what’s so striking to me about Mormonism is that it’s a quintessential American religion, in that, throughout its history … it certainly has American roots, there’s no question about that. Well, I mean, even if you take the Book of Mormon at face value, you have the American genesis of the Book of Mormon. But also, [Mormonism is] very American in the sense that Mormons are always reinventing themselves, and refashioning themselves, so that they fit … more effectively into the American context. The constant process of reinvention is fascinating. I mean, just one example—a fairly prominent example over the last several decades—is the revelation that comes to Spencer Kimball, the president of the church in 1978 to ordain men of color for the first time. Now that’s a … radical departure from the beliefs that we can trace back to Joseph Smith. But it set in motion, this massive growth of Mormonism, not only here in this country, but more particularly in the rest of the world. And that’s just one example of adaptation to cultural circumstances. The Woodruff Manifesto in 1890 that comes suddenly that you know, does away with polygamy—well, that opens the way to statehood but also what was the way to a kind of legitimacy for the Mormons within American society, and in the eyes of the American government that has led to the situation today, more than a century later, where Mormonism is kind of synonymous with patriotism and everything that is all-American. Whereas in the nineteenth century, as you well know, Mormons were utterly persecuted by the government.

RS: Yeah, it does seem for Mormon historians it’s fascinating to recapture that adversarial, or … the conflict in those early years.

RB: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. … I mean, to kind of drop all pretense of objectivity … you look at Mormonism. You look at issues like the Book of Abraham, the Spalding Manuscript, and so forth, and you say, “How in the world did they pull this off? But, just to look at how they pulled it off is just fascinating. A fascinating story.

We wanted to take the time, though, to re-introduce ourselves and catch up anyone interested on our current activities, favorite JI posts, etc. So, without further ado:

David Grua

Started blogging at JI: October 2007
Current School (and degree sought): Texas Christian University (PhD, History)
Favorite JI post: Joel’s Identifying with Romney? My Historiographical Rant Against Mormon Ethnicity
Research Interests: racial ideologies and Mormonism (curse of Canaan); Native Americans; American West; civil rights; Mormonism and political ideologies; collective memory and identity.

Christopher Jones

Started blogging at JI: October 2007
Current School: The College of William & Mary (PhD, History)
Favorite JI post: Matt’s musings on Parley Pratt’s conversion and the patterns of Mormon piety
Research Interests: Evangelicalism in the early Republic; Methodist schismatics; lived religion; the relationship between religion, race, and nationalism.

Jared Tamez

Started blogging at JI: October 2007
Current School (and degree sought): University of Utah (MA, History); but where I’ll be this time next year is up in the air : )
Favorite JI post: David’s BYU Religion Made Me Puke
Research Interests: I am researching the LDS Church in Mexico. I am interested in the history of the Church in Latin America as well as in South Texas.  I am currently editing the diaries of Anthony W. Ivins.

Stanley Thayne

Started blogging at JI: in the beginning…
Current School: UNC-Chapel Hill (PhD, Religious Studies)
Favorite JI post: Edje’s bug stuff (see here, here, here, and here).
Research Interests: metaphysical-theosophical stuff; moorish science; American scripture; religion in the American West; death; B. H. Roberts; Edith Peshak; polygamists and utopians in southern Utah; the all-seeing eye of the omnipotent Jehovah.

Ben Park

Started blogging at JI: October 2007
Current School (and degree sought): University of Edinburgh (MSc, Theology in History)
Favorite JI post: Recently? Ryan T’s Parley Pratt and the Literary Impulse
Research Interests: 18th and 19th Century Transatlantic Thought, Theology, Intellectual History, American Romanticism.

Steve Taysom

Started blogging at JI: January 2008
Current School: Cleveland State University (Assistant Professor, Religious Studies)
Favorite JI post: Jared’s post on the Provo Temple renovation
Research Interests: Religion and memory, the role of narrative in religious boundary formation, Shakers, Mormons, ritual studies, demonology and devil figures in comparative religious perspective.

Jordan Watkins

Started blogging at JI: February 2008
Current School (and degree sought): University of Nevada, Las Vegas (PhD, History)
Research Interests: 19th Century U.S. Religious History; American West.

Joel Miyasaki

Started blogging at JI: March 2008
Current School (and degree sought): University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PhD, History)
Favorite JI post: David’s Through Missourian Eyes: Remembering the Mormon War in Missouri
Research Interests: Mormon Historicity, Race and Ethnicity, U.S. Empire, Asian American History.

Matt Bowman

Started blogging at JI: April 2008
Current School (and degree sought): “G’Town, as well call it” (That’s Georgetown University for the uninitiated; PhD, History)
Favorite JI post: [Guest blogger David] Howlett’s typology of Community of Christ historians
Research Interests: Theology, particularly Protestant; the evangelical movement; Protestant fundamentalism and liberalism; Mormon ephemeralia.

Ed Jeter

Started blogging at JI: June 2008
Current School (and degree sought): Sam Houston State University (MA, History); High School Math instructor, Sanabil Private School, Janabiya, Bahrain.
Research Interests: Identity construction, particularly involving groups not physiognomically distinct from surrounding population; document analysis; 1890s; Colonial/Imperial/Postcolonial-ism.

Brett Dowdle

Started blogging at JI: August 2008
Current School (and degree sought): Brigham Young University (MA, History)
Research Interests: history of Mormon education; U.S. Progressive Era history.

Elizabeth Pinborough

Started blogging at JI: September 2008
Current School (and degree sought): Yale Divinity School (MA, Religion and the Arts)
Favorite JI post: Stan; also, Ryan T.’s Joseph Smith and Poetry-Prophecy
Research Interests: medieval bestiaries and manuscript illumination, aesthetics, play-writing, spiritual autobiography.
Loves: Shakers.

Ryan Tobler

Started blogging at JI: February 2009
Current School (and degree sought): University of Chicago (MA, Religious Studies)
Favorite JI post: Christopher’s Making Sense of Doctrine and Covenants 39-40; or why it matters that James Covill was a Methodist and not a Baptist
Research Interests: 18th/19th Century Transatlantic Religion/Culture; New England intellectual culture; Secularization; ‘Liberal’ Christianity.

Steve Fleming

Started blogging at JI: June 2009
Current School (and degree sought): University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD, Religious Studies)
Favorite JI post: Edje’s Blue Beard
Research Interests:Where Mormonism comes from; or, the persistence of popular medieval religiosity.

So that’s us. We’d like to invite you to (re)introduce yourselves to us, now. We appreciate the engaging discussion readers have elicited in the comments and continue to enjoy the friendships this venture has created. So please share with us who you are, how long you’ve been reading, and your favorite post (if you have one). We’d also like to invite you to recommend how we might improve the blog in the coming year, including features (book reviews, roundtable discussions, etc.) you’d like to see more of.

Thanks for reading.[2]

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[1] We hope we’ve also matured a bit, too, though that seems unlikely. We certainly have no plans at the moment to drop the Juvenile from our blog’s title, as our namesake did years ago.

[2] Again, out special thanks goes to Jonathan Stapley, who designed the blog’s current layout and maintains the site. We would not be where we are today without his assistance.

All of this is well and good, it seems. I love historical research. I love thinking outside the box about new interpretations of persons and events that lead to increased understanding of a world (in many ways) dead and gone. But it is also easy, as a historian, to lose sight of the fact that those figures you study were and are individuals who generally led their lives without the slightest clue that I would someday sift through their manuscript letters and personal diaries to study their successes and failures, and situate them in some larger context in order to decipher how society functioned in their day.

I was reminded of historical figures’ humanity this morning. I am spending today and tomorrow researching at the United Methodist Archives Center in Madison, NJ. I spent the morning carefully reading through the manuscript letters and notes of Ezekiel Cooper, an early Methodist itinerant preacher, book agent, and abolitionist. Relating Cooper’s activities to larger issues in Methodist history is relatively easy—he rubbed shoulders with Francis Asbury, printed various publications for the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was well-known in the late 18th and 19th centuries in the Philadelphia area. But today I caught a glimpse into the personal—indeed, very personal—life of Reverend Cooper.

Tucked in between large pages of copied letters penned in his rather beautiful handwriting, I found a small sheet of paper, about 3×5 inches. One on side were copied questions and answers on the authority of scripture pulled from the Methodist Book of Discipline. I quickly discarded the paper, placing it face down on top of the other manuscript sheets I had already viewed. It was then I noticed a short note on the other side of the paper. Its message was short and simple:

In

Memory of Rich^<d>ard Cooper, Jun^r (son of Rich^d

Cooper, Esq^r) who departed this life Mar. 20^th 1803 aged

18 years

He promis’d fair to be a scientific man,

His morals and his judgment both were good

Alass! how quick his father’s hopes are gone (or lost)

“Rich^d Cooper, Esq^r” was Ezekiel Cooper’s brother, and a respected judge in Pennsylvania. It is not clear what caused his son’s relatively young death. But the letter is revealing in its raw simplicity. That it was intended for Ezekiel’s private pondering and not public rehearsal seems clear to me. It expresses no states hope or assurance of a heavenly reward for young Richard, as was typical of obituaries published throughout Methodist periodicals in early years; which is not to say, of course, that no such hope existed in Cooper’s heart and mind. It probably did. But in this moment of unguarded meditation, when Cooper put to paper his own thoughts on his nephew’s death and his brother’s heartbreak, he revealed something that does not show up in those periodicals (or even in his personal correspondence). He revealed that he was human, prone to suffering, aware of his family’s pains, and sensitive to the frailty of life.

There is a lesson in this, I think. And Mormon converts, missionaries, and members from yesteryear are no different from Methodist itinerants in this regard. People not only lived, worked, succeeded, and failed. They also felt. They felt pain, joy, happiness, and sorrow. Unfortunately, the surviving historical record does not always leave behind such expressions of meditation and feeling. But when it does, it should remind us of the humanity of all those we study.

Reilly’s piece explores not only the influence of Skousen, but also Ezra Taft Benson on Beck and also considers the implications Beck’s Mormonism and controversial but ever-growing popularity might have for Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations:

During the 2008 campaign, Romney wooed Christian conservatives by arguing that the doctrinal particulars of his faith weren’t important. What mattered instead, Romney claimed, was that he had faith — that he wasn’t a godless secularist. “While differences in theology exist between the churches in America,” Romney said in his December 2007 speech on faith, “we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it’s usually a sound rule to focus on the latter.”

But as Beck’s example shows, shared moral conviction can mask radically different ideas about important subjects. If the press starts examining Beck’s Mormon influences in detail, they just might follow suit with Romney.

The article includes interesting (and sometimes competing) takes on the subject by the go-to non-Mormon expert on Mormonism, Jan Shipps, noted historian Mike Quinn, Times and Seasons blogger Rory Swenson, and yours truly (and yes, that’s part of the reason the article is receiving more than just a link on the sidebar).

But Reilly’s bringing up Romney again raises one important question: Is the bloggernacle ready for another slew of posts over the next few years devoted to Romney?

I recently finished reading Robert Orsi’s 1985 classic, The Madonna of 115th Street, for a readings course on religion, immigration, and transnationalism. Throughout it, I considered some of the possibilities such an approach to Mormonism might yield. What follows is a review of the book (for those who haven’t read it), and then some of my meandering thoughts on how a similar approach might be useful in studying various aspects of the Mormon experience. I apologize for the length of this post, and encourage any so inclined to simply skim (or skip, if you’re already familiar with Orsi’s book) the post and skip to the final few paragraphs dealing with Mormonism.

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As indicated by the book’s title, The Madonna of 115^th Street is a study of the religious lives of Italian immigrants in Harlem from 1880-1950. The author’s narrative takes place around the annual festa of the Madonna del Carmine that took place over the course of several days each year in Italian Harlem. The book explores what scholars now collectively call “lived religion”—what Orsi described as “religion of the streets”—by which he attempts to both describe the mechanics of the rituals and actions of the immigrants and to discern the values, morals, and sensibilities such actions reveal. While the author is less concerned with articulating a succinct and argumentative thesis than he is with uncovering the religiosity of Italian immigrants, he nevertheless argues for the centrality of religion (however broadly defined) in shaping and giving voice to the complex and sometime contradictory lives of those immigrants. In their devotion to la Madonna, they acted out multiple facets of their day-to-day experiences and their larger cultural values that shaped Italian-American Catholic identity.

Drawing upon extant church records, the oral interviews conducted by Leonard Covello in the 1920s and 1930s, and his own fieldwork among current and former residents of Italian Harlem, Orsi argues that what he terms the domus—that is, the culture of family transported from southern Italy to New York City was central to the community’s identity. Encompassing a wide range of gender roles and generational expectations defined for the immigrants what it meant to be Italian. It also defined for them what it meant to be Catholic. Orsi’s subjects are less concerned with Jesus, the Bible, and the Rosary than they are with maintaining conventional morals, values, and familial structures, prompting Orsi to argue that “in some way the Italian home and family, what I have been calling the domus, is the religion of Italian Americans” (p. 77). Efforts to maintain the purity of familial loyalty and structure were central to inter-generational identity among the immigrants as well. Even disagreements between first and second generation Italian-Americans “took place within the well-maintained confines of the domus” (p. 112), and as often as not, concerns over the disintegration of the domus were exaggerated, though sincere.

The devotion to the Madonna of 115^th Street, especially in the yearly worship and celebration of the festa, highlighted the centrality of the domus. In the process of ritual, the Madonna “emerges in a complex manner as the summation and universalization of the community’s inherited tradition and moral wisdom” (p. 188). In the processional through the streets and into the church building, participants reenacted their (or their family’s) journey to America, they laid claim to a place in the nation’s history, and affirmed the importance of the domus in reaction to the Americanization they so feared. All of this ultimately gave voice to what Orsi labels “the theology of the streets”—that is, a uniquely Italian-American expression of Catholicism that was almost anti-clerical yet was still “strongly shaped by a Catholic sensibility” (p. 220). The theology of the streets found no expression in written texts, but rather in the lives of its collective authors, whose actions spoke to the suffering and sacrifice they had endured, and to their hopes and prayers that the Holy Mother would intervene on their behalf.

Orsi is especially sensitive to the gendered nature of their worship. Women, men, girls, and boys each had specific roles within the domus, and their annual devotions to the Madonna reaffirmed those roles. Women were “the hidden center of the domus-centered society” (p .131); they were, Orsi argues, the ultimate authority and power within the domus yet had to appear powerless in order to maintain the myth of patriarchal rule demanded by the domus.

Orsi’s account goes beyond a mere religious ethnography, though, and speaks to larger issues. It reveals the tensions between different enclaves of ethnic Catholics. The Irish Catholics looked down on the Italian’s odd and infrequent expressions of religiosity and resented the papal approval that lent credence to devotion to the Virgin of Italian Harlem. That intervention also hints at transnational connections—the papal approval denotes a favored relationship between Rome and the Italian immigrants in New York City. But even before that, the Madonna, the author explains, arrived with the immigrants in their new home. Furthermore, in seeking to recreate the domus they imagined existed uncontested in Italy, the immigrants shaped future generation’s notion of what it meant to be Italian.

So what does Orsi’s fine work suggest about potential avenues of research on Mormonism? Very broadly speaking, increased attention to lived religion among Mormons, at various times and in various places, might be fruitful. Matt and I discussed this a bit in our “revisiting” review of Tom Alexander’s Mormonism in Transition, noting that a better understanding of the everyday religious lives of Mormons might alter our understanding of Mormonism in that era. Jared’s research on Mormons in South Texas (which employ the same oral interview approach that shaped Orsi’s research) also speaks to this issue, I think.

Additionally, such research might yield interesting insights into Mormon theology as well. One of the real strengths of Orsi’s book is that it finds theology in the lived religion of the Italian immigrants, and thus expands beyond written texts and oral traditions in determining religious belief. It’s often noted that Mormonism has no theology, and in it’s place has a history. While such a notion is a gross oversimplification (Mormonism, it seems to me, has multiple histories and multiple theologies), there is no doubt that narratives of history have significantly shaped Mormonism’s identity and its belief system. What Orsi proposes is that a theology (or theologies) can be derived from the everyday lives and religious rituals of a people. Such seems to be the case in Jared’s research (or is at least hinted at), where he notes that Latter-day Saints in San Benito, Texas have long been without a chapel of their own, which has led them to identify with Moses as wanderers in a wilderness. Teasing out how such experiences (and beliefs) affect their understanding of and relationship with deity seems like a logical next step that holds potentially intriguing insights.

Finally, the domus that gave shape to Italian immigrants’ lives and understandings of God highlights an obvious parallel to Mormonism. While the culture of family embraced by immigrants in Harlem is certainly not the same as that championed by Mormons of Salt Lake City or Provo, the very notion that the culture surrounding family, complete with assigned and understood gender roles and generational norms, is central to the groups’ religion is, I think, as true of Mormonism as it is of these Italian immigrants. Mormons value the family as “the fundamental unit of society” and protect it against potential threats, both real and imagined. They bear testimony to the importance of that family culture, and use it to shape their understanding of God, the coming eternities, and their everyday lives.

I’m interested in any other thoughts people have on the subject.