The conference schedule is available at https://sites.google.com/site/mormonconceptionsofapostasy/.

The notion of an apostasy from the primitive gospel and the original church has been a key animating feature in Mormonism since its inception and in other “religions of the book.” Apostasy as a concept, however, has proven to be tremendously fluid, with individual, institutional, communal, and historical meanings and applications all proliferating in religious thought throughout the ages. Fifteen faithful Mormon scholars from many scholarly backgrounds and methodologies, will explore the concept of apostasy in various historical and religious contexts as we consider how to narrate apostasy in ways that remain historically authentic and cohere with Mormon theology. Proceedings will be published by Greg Kofford Press in the series Perspectives on Mormon Theology.

This conference is organized by Miranda Wilcox, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, with financial assistance from an Eliza R. Snow Faculty Grant.

There was surprise among the researchers and advisory board (including myself), and no doubt among the General Authorities when it turned out that 77% of Mormons in America attend church every week, because it is received common knowledge among most who care about such things that the actual rate of attendance (and tithepaying &etc) is nowhere near this high.

This likely tells us not that the survey’s incorrect – though it’s sparked a new front in the building war over who owns the term “Mormon.” Rather, it tells us that people who call themselves “Mormon” attend church at pretty high rates, or say they do. And it tells us that, perhaps, Mormons who don’t go to church much might not call themselves “Mormon.” The dynamics of semi-/in-/or (sigh) less- activity are murky and fascinating, and the results of this survey seem to indicate that the inactive engaged Mormons (those who care about the church even though they don’t go) are probably vastly outnumbered by the inactive disengaged.

That said, a few interesting tidbits that David Campbell and I discussed in the conference call this morning.

Culture
+Mormons seem remarkably ambivalent about their place in America. Nearly half say that Mormons face discrimination in America. Fewer than that a third believe that Americans think Mormonism is mainstream. But more than half think America is ready for a Mormon president. Lots of aspirational Romney voters out there.

This, though, gets at something I sense running through the entire survey: Mormons are not yet ready to surrender their insularity, their sense of being a peculiar people, their powerful community. Nearly six in ten Mormons say that all or most of their friends are also Mormon. To some extent, Mormons value being different. We’ll see this again when we talk about helping the poor.

+Also, 90% of Mormons like their lives.

Politics

+77% of Mormons identify as sympathetic to the Republican party. However, on one major hot-button issue – immigration – Mormons are way more moderate than nearly every other conservative religious group.

+Additionally, Mormon conservatism is a wine of relatively recent vintage: unlike nearly every other group in America, younger Mormons identify as more conservative than older Mormons.

+Despite all this more Mormons believe that gay people face discrimination in America than who think Mormons face discrimination in America.

+75% of Mormons say they want a smaller government with fewer services, but . . .

Religion

+ 73% of Mormons said that helping the poor is essential to being a good Mormon. This is more than the number of Mormons who believe that obeying the Word of Wisdom, having Family Home Evening, or not watching R-rated movies. It’s close to the number that believe that you have to think Joseph Smith saw God. So Mormons may not be big on the welfare state, but they do believe in helping the poor. This likely reflects the Welfare Program.

+Finally, going on a mission makes you like other religions more. It’s true. Look it up.

Additionally, this essay will appear in a slightly altered form in an upcoming issue of Dialogue. Subscribe!

This is a wide-ranging and detailed book, consisting of an extensive examination of a wide variety of topics in Mormon theology from the time of scripture to the present. Harrell announces his methodology in the first chapter: “Theology: A Divine-Human Enterprise.” He wants to examine “how LDS doctrines taught today were understood in early Mormonism and even earlier Biblical times” (12). His overall argument is that Mormon doctrine changes. This may seem a rather unexceptional point, but Harrell’s work is methodical, exhaustive, and not infrequently, impressive simply for its scope.

But though his effort is to be respected, one at times gets the sense that Harrell may have attempted to do too much. The book has the sort of carefully wooden structure of a work struggling to wrap its arms around the entirety of a hugely sprawling and messy subject. It is organized by topic–some obvious, like “Atonement,” some fuzzier, like “The Gospel Plan,” which includes within it everything from ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood to the notion of making one’s calling and election sure. Harrell chops each topic up into chronological subcategories: the Old Testament, the New Testament, American Protestantism at the time of early Mormonism, “early Mormonism” (into which Harrell categorizes the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants), “Nauvoo Mormonism” (in which Harrell includes the Book of Abraham), and “present day Mormonism.” In each subcategory Harrell discusses whatever teachings or material is relevant to the topic. In some cases, this commentary is extensive; in others, Harrell restricts himself to a sentence or two, saying, for instance, “There are no prophecies in the New Testament that can be reasonably construed as references to Joseph Smith,” followed by a scant handful of sentences about a few passages that enthusiastic Mormons have understood as references to Smith (13).

The book is probably most useful as a reference tool, a handy encyclopedia for quickly assessing the key notions about, say, “Satan” or “the fall and nature of humanity,” or “the preexistence” in the Kirtland period or contemporary Mormonism. Harrell’s citations will be useful for other scholars seeking to get a quick sense of the primary sources, and his thumbnail sketches–all the space, likely, which such an expansive effort allowed–raise a number of questions they might pursue.

But the book unfortunately suffers from a title that’s doubly a misnomer. Perhaps unintentionally, Harrell’s premises raise interesting questions about what “doctrine” may be. He does not sketch out epistemological issues with any great depth; but his very premise–that people Mormons regard as authorities believed different things at different times–carries with it theological implications about the nature of doctrine and belief that he never quite explores fully. Harrell is largely content to disrupt what we think we know rather than sketching out a new way of understanding Mormonism. Secondly, though the book claims to illustrate the “development” of ideas the firm lines of Harrell’s structure inhibit the natural growth of that sort of argument and complicate its status as a true work of history. Harrell seems overwhelmed by his own ambitions.

So the question follows: What precisely does Harrell understand himself to be doing: theology or history? Harrell’s first chapter, “Theology: A Divine-Human Enterprise” makes explicit a theological argument for how we should best understand Mormonism. He argues, basically, that all theology can be broken down along an axis whose poles he labels “liberal” and “conservative.” According to Harrell, conservatives believe in scriptural inerrancy and prophetic infallibility and hence believe that all doctrine is “uniform:” pristine, eternal, and, most of all, taught unchangingly from the mouths and pens of God’s representatives from Adam and Moses on down to Neil L. Andersen. On the other hand, liberals can still be “faithful” but may see evidence of “cultural conditioning” or “inconsistencies” in these sources of authority and hence are more comfortable with ambiguity (3-4).

To make this case, Harrell relies very heavily on an odd assortment of writers. Each paragraph seems to introduce a new name, always introduced as “Protestant scholar” or “LDS theologian” or “Catholic thinker,” a tic which grows slightly annoying and only emphasizes the extent to which Harrell appears more or less ignorant of the history of theology. He seems to see little amiss in citing a contemporary Anglican and a medieval Catholic and a nineteenth-century Protestant evangelical to make the same point. This is, oddly enough, a scholarly version of the prooftexting Harrell decries in his “conservatives.”

In that first chapter, for instance, he leaps from the analytic Mormon theologian Blake Ostler to the radical Catholic Hans Kung to the Protestant scholar and founder of “canonical criticism,” Brevard Childs, to (blink) Benjamin Warfield, the late nineteenth-century Princeton professor who did the intellectual spadework behind the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. All of them are described as advocates of the “creative coparticipation” [4] of God and humans in scripture. This may be true to a very superficial extent, but the vast and yawning gulfs between, say, Ostler and Warfield on the question illustrate how facile Harrell’s simple dichotomy is.

Further, if Harrell does understand himself to be making theological arguments, his approach seems strange, particularly when he deals with scripture. His analysis of the Bible is entirely dependent upon the historical-critical method, which seeks to interpret these texts as historical documents reflecting the interests and preoccupations of their presumed authors. Such a reading concludes, for instance, that “Christians since New Testament times have traditionally held that Isaiah 53 is a direct reference to Christ’s suffering. Scholars, however, are less sanguine.” (278) Isaiah 53 is one of the prophet’s “servant songs,” a poem describing a figure who suffers pain and abuse but who is nonetheless a chosen messenger of God. While Christians see prophecy in this figure, historical-critical scholars prefer to read in it and the other servant songs allegories representative of Israelite culture around the time of the Exile: Isaiah himself, for instance, or the nation of Israel itself suffering under foreign invasion. Thus, Harrell argues that it would be anachronistic to the author of that particular section of Isaiah to connect such suffering to Christ’s atonement for sin.

This is an entirely respectable scholarly argument and one on which Harrell cites “Jesuit professor of Christology Gerard O’Collins” and “Anglican theologian N.T. Wright.” They are undoubtedly learned and pious men; but critically, the argument in question is not theological. The biblical text seen through the lens of historical critical scholarship is not necessarily the same text–nor even relevant–to the biblical text seen through the lens of theology. It is thus unclear what sort of relevance Harrell believes his recapitulation of the work of scholars of the higher criticism on topics like priesthood and atonement in the Bible should have to Mormon theology. Put another way, I am unclear as to what Harrell would like us to do: Simply acknowledge that “Gee, what Isaiah seems to say about the Messiah sure isn’t what Samuel Hopkins or Joseph Smith or Harold B. Lee thought he said”? This conclusion would require a radical revision of the ways Mormons use their canon, and it’s not clear that Mormons should, in fact, be reading scripture in the same ways that critical scholars do. Had Harrell read more of Brevard Childs (or Walter Brueggemann, another scholar whom he cites, or say, Hans Frei) the difference between historical critical work on scripture and theological work that takes historical criticism into account, like Childs’s own canonical criticism, might have been better developed here and a greater sense of thematic continuity preserved.

But perhaps Harrell does not understand himself to be doing theology but simply intellectual history, tracing the arc of thought on such diverse topics as “priesthood” and “Jesus Christ” and “the creation” and “salvation for the dead” and a dozen and a half others from the Hebrew scriptures to contemporary Mormonism. Put that way, such a summary seems magnificently ponderous; and indeed, perhaps the only thing Harrell can be faulted for here is biting off more than he can chew.

With such a massive task, an author could go either of two ways: first, he or she could make a work heavily thematic, arguing something specific about the nature of theological change, or using, as many systematic theologies do, a particular idea or concept as a governing structure. Second, he or she could avoid such broad arguments and focus instead on particulars, leaving out any number of examples and producing a work that reads like a reference book or encyclopedia rather than a monograph. This is the route that Harrell has taken; and I believe, unfortunately, it’s the weaker of the two choices.

He claims in his title to be studying the “development” of Mormon theology, but there’s very little sense of continuity, evolution, or change over time in any of his treatments. Little connection is drawn between his periods; indeed, Harrell tends to emphasize contrast rather than continuity. While it is quite clear that Mormon doctrine (if Harrell’s examination of the Bible can be called “Mormon doctrine”) has changed over time, we are not given any real reasons why, or what such change might tell us about Mormonism in total. And because the book covers such a vast expanse of time and theme, Harrell by necessity cannot spend more than a few hundred words in any given section. The reader might spend seven or eight minutes examining the four paragraphs that cover the concept of “foreordination” in the Bible and the eight that cover it in nineteenth-century American Christianity, including Mormonism, and be left with the vague sense that there must have been more to it than this. And indeed, there is.

Harrell’s book is representative of a long stream of works in Mormon theology: deep attention here is paid to the familiar voices: Joseph Smith, Orson and Parley Pratt, James E. Talmage, and Bruce R. McConkie. Mormonism is contextualized in a rather oversimplified early nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. The language of theology is used haphazardly by authors as well as by those Mormon thinkers they study. There is little effort to systematize Mormon doctrine, or to relate its changes to deeper developments in Mormon culture, American culture, or to the context of American Christianity more generally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This value of this sort of work should not be downplayed, and I want to stress that I believe Harrell’s work will be useful in any number of ways to scholars of the future. But Mormon historiography is changing, and Harrell’s work is a monumental for reasons other than those which now seem most pressing.

For those of us who are interested in Mormon history, particularly in graduate school or the early years of our academic careers, the question of how to position oneself is always a vexed one. I was one who very consciously did NOT want to write a “Mormon dissertation.” That’s why I chose a comparative topic: violence against religious minority groups in the postbellum South. Mormons were one of these groups, but at the time of my dissertation proposal I thought they would represent only a minor aspect of the study. I was as surprised as anyone when they turned out to be the best part of the story, and got twice the coverage in the dissertation and eventually became the centerpiece of my book.

Shortly after finishing my dissertation, I was contacted by an editor at a very good university press—in fact, my original “first choice” press—who asked me to submit my manuscript. I was thrilled, but told her that I hadn’t even touched it. She assured me it would be fine, and encouraged me to submit it as-is, which I naïvely did. It was promptly rejected, with one reviewer being rather scornful in his/her judgment. Getting the reviews, and being dropped by the press like a rock, was probably the most depressing day of my professional career. Moral of the story: never submit an unrevised dissertation to a publisher. I knew better, but was flattered by the invitation.

The only glimmer of light was that even the most negative review said that the Mormon material was original, and good. So despite some advice otherwise, I decided to focus my book on anti-Mormonism in the postbellum South. I spent another summer doing intense archival work. Then I rewrote the whole thing from scratch (though obviously incorporating some of the original dissertation). It was something of a gamble, because I was losing the comparative aspect and potentially branding myself as “just” a Mormon historian. But the more the manuscript developed, the more I was convinced it did in fact make a significant contribution—not only to Mormon history, but also to southern history and American history. Oxford UP had just published Massacre at Mountain Meadows, with considerable success, so I figured if there was ever a time to submit another manuscript on Mormonism and violence, it was then. Never underestimate the power of good timing.

In my early years on the job market I did my best to position myself broadly. This was partly tactical but it was always sincere – from the moment I stepped foot in graduate school, and still today, I consider myself an American historian in general, and an American religious historian in particular, with a special interest in Mormonism. Of course, my new position will give me tremendous opportunities to pursue Mormon studies, and I will take full advantage of it, but I wouldn’t have been offered the position at Claremont unless I had bona fides as a scholar of American religion more generally. It’s tough to tell, pre-Claremont, how potential employers viewed the Mormon scholarship on my CV. It obviously didn’t prevent me from getting two good jobs (at the American University in Cairo and back at Notre Dame). But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some search committees, or at least individual members of search committees, saw my work in Mormon history and held it against me. On the flip side, others might have been intrigued. I made sure that any Mormon scholarship I did was outweighed by other things, and so I think my CV, if looked at objectively, is one of a scholar who is interested in the broader story of religious minorities in America, though with a special interest in Mormonism.

It’s too early to tell how my book has been received by scholars of southern history; academic reviews take months and usually up to 2-3 years to come in. Frankly, I’ll be disappointed if the book is ignored completely, as I wrote the book with southern historians as one of my key audiences. I have gotten some good informal feedback from colleagues in American religious history. One bit of validation was getting my article, “Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South,” published in the Journal of Southern History (August 2010). It distills some of the main arguments of the book specifically for southern historians, and was enthusiastically accepted by the journal’s editor (and a leading southern historian), John Boles, who also graciously wrote one of the blurbs for the back cover of the book. I’m convinced that this needs to be one of the futures of Mormon studies – reaching out to and being published in the premier journals of various non-Mormon, and even non-religious, subfields. The fact is that it’s mostly Mormons who read Mormon-themed books, no matter the press, but getting into a “secular” journal guarantees (or at least suggests) a somewhat wider readership.

Now that I have the freedom to do even more work on Mormonism, I’ve got a couple of projects in the hopper, although they are both still in infancy. One is a book on Mormonism and peace, coming out of an article I published in Dialogue several years ago and building on the really outstanding conference we just held at Claremont on the topic. Another project, which will be years in the making, is a full biography of Ezra Taft Benson. Why Benson? For one, I want to push Mormon studies more into the 20th century. Even more, Benson is not only a pivotal figure for late-twentieth-century Mormonism but also a key player in the ideological and organizational origins of modern American conservatism. Although I’d love to have the book out by the Republican primaries next spring, don’t expect to see anything soon—I’m just now starting to read up on the topic. (I’ll just cross my fingers that we have Mormon presidential candidates again in 2016.)

What do I envision for the Claremont Mormon Studies program? I’m fortunate to be building on a strong foundation laid by Richard Bushman, with assists from Claudia Bushman and Armand Mauss. I plan to maintain the current emphases on Mormon theology (as well as history) and women’s history. But I also want to use the program there to push Mormon studies into the twentieth century, as well as paying more attention to international Mormonism, especially given southern California’s strong connections to both Latin America and Asia. Claremont has a new MA program in religion and politics, so I could foresee that becoming an area of strength, particularly as I get further into my Benson research. For instance, I could easily imagine putting on a conference next spring on religion and American presidential politics, with Mormonism either at center stage or occupying a significant supporting role. The wide range of interests among the many graduate students at Claremont who are interested in Mormon studies will be one of the primary determinants of what I hope is a vast array of topics we cover in the classroom, in conferences, and beyond.

Which brings me to the question of the Hunter Chair’s relationship to the institutional church. Officially, there is no relationship. The Howard W. Hunter Foundation has no formal connection to the Church; it is made up of Latter-day Saints from around southern California acting as individuals, and is organizationally and financially independent from the Church. It was clear from the beginning that in order for the university to sponsor the endowed chair, the person filling the position would have complete academic freedom and not be beholden to the Church or even the foundation. However, the members of the foundation are faithful Saints who care about the Church as well as advancing Mormon studies at Claremont. Their investment in this endeavor is a significant trust that I do not take lightly. Without wanting to sound naïve, I am confident—or at least hopeful—that there will not be any significant difficulty in navigating my overlapping identities as a faithful Latter-day Saint and as a serious, credible, even critical scholar. Although not without some trepidation, I welcome the visibility that will come with the Hunter Chair: I am one who believes that scholars should generally be more (not less) engaged as public intellectuals, though always taking care to speak cautiously and responsibly. Nevertheless, the role of the scholar—no matter his/her personal temperament or relationship to the Church—is not to tell the Church what it should or should not do, but rather to provide thoughtful, informed, and considered analysis. Thankfully, I believe we are in an era in which significant portions of the Church hierarchy, and certainly the Church History Department, understand the valuable role that highly trained and independent scholars can have in helping us all better understand the Mormon experience (historical and contemporary) in all its richness and complexity.

Finally, a word on Mormonism and Catholicism, given my lengthy tenure here at Notre Dame, first as a grad student and now faculty. To some degree, it’s hard for me to say how much I have been formed by the Catholic character of Notre Dame, precisely because I’m still swimming in it. One of the things that I deeply admire about this place is its ability to be big-C Catholic and small-c catholic at the same time—that is, committed to both the particular identity of the Church as well as a universal, cosmopolitan outlook in line with the highest values of the academy. This is not always an easy paradox to live out, but in my mind it is a highly fruitful one. Perhaps this is my greatest takeaway, that the tension between particularism and universalism can be a productive one. Going with President Hinckley’s appropriation of an older mistranslation, hopefully we can forge an identity that is at once big-M Mormon and small-m “more good.” Furthermore, while I appreciate all the theological and historical work that has been done on Mormonism and evangelicalism in the past couple of decades, it’s time we shed our inherited anti-popery and start looking seriously at our Catholic counterparts as well.

After all, in the coming years Notre Dame football will be winning national championships while BYU is still hoping to get into a real conference. And I’ll be in southern California enthusiastically cheering against USC no matter who they play.

Patrick Mason is currently Research Associate Professor at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and Associate Director for Research of a multi-year research initiative called “Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.” In the fall he will assume his new duties as Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.

His new book is The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has also published articles on topics including the history of Utah state legislation against interracial marriage, anti-Jewish violence in the South, the role of religion in the African American protest tradition, the possibilities of Mormon peacebuilding, and most recently on theodemocracy in 19th-century Mormonism.

However, I think that time vindicates John Brooke; even if his particular conclusions should still be debated, important aspects of his    methodology remain.     I’ve invited two people with good reason to have informed opinions to offer there herewith.

The JI’s own Steve Fleming, whose dissertation will be perhaps the first major work to really engage with Brooke’s ideas:

Refiner’s Fire did several important things, the first of which was to push Mormon origins beyond Smith’s immediate environment into a more extensive past.  Smith, Brooke argued, drew on coherent traditions, rather than simply throwing together a hodgepodge of ideas and practices born of the American frontier.  Brooke’s task was an ambitious one, linking Mormonism back to radical sectarians and “hermeticists” of earlier centuries by attempting to show how such ideas found their way to Joseph Smith.  This all proved to be challenging but Brooke pointed the way to further research.  Such research, unfortunately has been limited likely due to the fact that most Americanists don’t operated in the broad scope that Brooke suggests and also because most Mormon scholars didn’t like the concept to begin with.

In terms of impact, all I can say is that Refiner’s Fire had a major impact on me and that my dissertation plans to be an expansion upon Brooke’s work.  Thus I will argue that Brooke was right about the context he chose for Mormonism and that while the term “hermeticism” needs to be adjusted somewhat, it goes a long way in correctly locating Mormonism in the broader history of Christianity.

Mark Ashurst-McGee, author of an awesome thesis on Joseph Smith and folk magic, and editor of the Joseph Smith Papers Project:

I remember first seeing Refiner’s Fire on the way to MHA in Park City in May 1994. I drove up with my buddy Bryan Waterman, who was working at Sunstone and had a pre-publication copy. I read the abstract, with its claim: “This study presents the first extended analysis of Mormon theology to have been written against the backdrop of religion and popular culture in the early modern North Atlantic world, a context that permits the most coherent analysis of Mormon origins.” And I remember thinking to myself, “Who is this guy?”

I was fascinated with the topic and had read Quinn through twice by this time, so I eagerly waded in as soon as the book was published. I read with great interest, and found much of value. Like many others, however, I felt that his central thesis was simply incorrect. Moreover, I found many of his arguments strained beyond credulity. I felt his attempt to trace hermetic influence in Mormonism through the vehicle of speculative freemasonry was about as helpful as tracing the influence of Catholicism in Mormonism through the vehicle of Protestantism. Of course, Steve Fleming is currently doing just that, and in ways that I find promising.

John L. Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire drew particularly heavy fire for its (mis)use of the Bible. Quinn’s main objection to The Refiner’s Fire was that many of the Hermetic parallels Brooke found in Mormonism and Hermeticism were more immediately available to Joseph Smith in the Bible.[1] The same charge was leveled by Mormon sholars Philip L. Barlow, Davis Bitton, William J. Hamblin, Daniel C. Peterson, and George L. Mitton, and Catholic scholar Massimo Introvigne. Barlow termed this problem a “master defect” and chided Brooke for his “inadequate command of the Bible.” Hamblin, Peterson, and Mitton expressed their indecision as to whether they should charge Brooke with biblical illiteracy or conscious supression of Bible parallels.[2]

I agreed generally with this and especially so in a few cases. But these reviewers hadn’t read the book quite as carefully as they could have. In fact, Brooke had explicitly addressed this very issue in a handful of cases scattered throughout the work. He argued that Hermeticism influenced the way in which Joseph Smith read the Bible.[3] Several years earlier, in The Mormon Experience, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton had noted early Mormon missionaries’ selective biblicism and the interests driving their selectivism. Even Philip Barlow, in his book Mormons and the Bible, emphasized the importance of early American biblicism as well as the sacred text itself.[4] Notably, a review of The Refiner’s Fire by Grant Underwood—who has written on the need to study the ways in which early Mormons understood the Bible and LDS scriptures—did not critize Brooke on this particular point.[5] Joseph’s use of the Bible differed markedly from that of the mainstream Christians in his day. They spoke little of the rods of Aaron and Moses, the Urim and Thummim, or the gift of prophecy. John L. Brooke had not entirely ignored the Bible as a source of doctrine, but had explored what a background in hermetic magic may have brought to reading it.[6]

Although Joseph read the Bible through a magical lense, this lense wasn’t really hermetic nor was it any other strain of esoterica. To his reading of the Bible, Joseph brought his background in dowsing, scrying, treasure seeking, and other folk practices. He knew nothing of the high-browed philosophies of the hermeticists. Ronald W. Walker noted in 1986 that waterwitches and treasure dowsers identified their forked branches as the staffs of Moses and Aaron.[7] This is the style of biblicism that influenced Joseph Smith’s study of the good book.

Massimo Intorvigne once described magic with an analogy to a three-story palace. On the top floor you have the court magi—the John Dee types steeped in numerology and high esoterica—on the ground floor you have the “low-brow” world of folk magic, and on the middle floor you have some people doing something in the middle. Smith was basically living on the ground floor.

Of course these three floors never existed in complete isolation one from another. There were stairways connecting them. Quinn tried to bring the more esoteric high-magic into Smith’s life via Luman Walters as an “occult mentor” (chapter 4). Here I will mention again the work that Steve Fleming is doing. He seems to be figuring some significant connections between the folk belief of ordinary people and elite magic. I think Fleming will be the one to put Brooke’s project through the refiner’s fire and get out some real gold.

Matt again.  Both these guys are offering us useful takes on Brooke – what he did, what he didn’t do, and what is now possible because of him.   I’d summarize his contributions as follows:

1) He took Mormon thought seriously, and gave it the respect of proposing a real, sustained, and extraordinarily convoluted intellectual pedigree.   Mormonism’s no longer a cult, a religious expression of Jacksonian democracy, or a compensator for people who happened to be dirt poor in northeastern Ohio in the 1830s.   It’s a bona fide intellectual tradition, with a profound and deep theology.

2) He’s among the first scholars to place Mormonism solidly in the context of the Atlantic world.   It’s cliche to label Mormonism an – or perhaps, the – American religion.  This is true in some ways and wildly oversimplified in others.  The British shadow over early Mormonism, particularly, is terribly underrated: the British Isles produced a solid chunk of early Mormonism’s members, a fair proportion of its intellectual and ecclesiastical leadership throughout the nineteenth century, and served as the site of publication for a good number of the most important early Mormon tracts.  And yet we act as though we don’t really need to know much about British religious history to understand Mormonism.  Brooke’s a useful wakeup call here.

3) Finally, in the tradition of Carlo Ginzburg’s the Cheese and the Worms, the work of Natalie Zemon Davis, Brooke’s trying hard to get at what it was actually like to practice religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: real religion, the messy bricolage of our daily lives.   Lived religion, practice, the blurred boundaries between superstition and faith are all things historians need to take more seriously.

[2] Philip L. Barlow, “Decoding Mormonism,” Christian Century, 17 January 1996, 52-55; Philip L. Barlow, “Decoding Mormonism,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 16 (1996): 123-31; Davis Bitton, BYU Studies 34, no. 4 (1994): 182-92; William J. Hamblin, Daniel C. Peterson, and George L. Mitton, “Mormon in the Fiery Furnace: Or, Loftes Tryk Goes to Cambridge,” The Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6, no. 2 (1994): 3-58; William J. Hamblin, Daniel C. Peterson, and George L. Mitton, in BYU Studies 34, no. 4 (1994-95): 167-81; Massimo Introvigne, presentation given in a session of Mormons as Americans, a symposium co-sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation and Boston University’s American and New England Studies Program, Boston, November 1995; audiocasette recording in Mormonism and the Occult Connection (Salt Lake City: Sunstone Foundation, 1995),1995NE-3, side A. See also Jan Shipp’s introductory essay to The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831–1836, ed. Jan Shipps and John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, BYU Studies; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3.

[3] Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire, 160-61, 197-98, 200, 205, 208, 212, 260. See also p. 133 on Asael Smith’s use of the Bible.

[4] Arrington and Bitton, The Mormon Experience, 30; Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[5] Grant Underwood, “The Earliest Reference Guides to the Book of Mormon: Windows into the Past,” Journal of Mormon History 12 (1985): 69-89; Underwood, Review of The Refiner’s Fire, by Brooke, Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1996): 323-4.

[6] Consider Brooke’s comments in Mormonism in American Historiography, side B.

[7] Walker, “The Persisting Idea of American Treasure Hunting,” BYU Studies 24, no. 4 (fall 1984): 441.

The author of Holy Scripture is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal.   That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it.    Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For as the Apostle says (Hebrews 10:1) the Old Law is a figure of the New Law, and Dionysius says [Coel. Hier. i] “the New Law itself is a figure of future glory.” Again, in the New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type of what we ought to do. Therefore, so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense.

- Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologica 1.1.10.

Like Walt Whitman, and Holy Scripture properly understood, Jimmer Fredette contains multitudes.  One of the more tiring aspects of the Internet age is how dense webs of signification have become: there no longer may simply be a thing-in-itself, but now there must be thing-in-the-world wherein thing is understood entirely through references to other thing. Thus, thing is the new George Bush or the British Nicki Minaj or the Jewish Thomas Mann. This is followed by thing-advocacy wherein thing is understood through its ineluctable contributions to the zeitgeist and its status as avatar of Our Endless and Futile Quest for Love/The Moral Degeneracy of [the Right/the Left/the Hipster/the SUV Owner/Contemporary American Foreign Policy]/Nostalgia for A Childhood that Never Was are unfolded, followed by thing-backlash wherein thing is subjected to withering scorn of the sort that’s fifty-five percent contrariness and forty-five percent relentless nitpicking, followed by a thing-backlash-backlash, followed by a column in Slate that, like this one, pretends to stand above the fray and in a faux-ironic voice details the rise and fall of the Holga camera, 2009-2011.

The tidal waves of interpretation here are incessant and pulsing, an ignorant and predictable long withdrawing roar.  They are, that is, prooftexting – constructing thing to fit our already preconceived notions of the way the world works, the pruning and excerpting of it to fit the blind and regularized patterns of understanding that our corporate masters (or somebody) have foisted upon us. Rather than interpretation of Jimmer Fredette in his totality, we has been subjected to the relentless and ludicrous tyranny of comparison, a strategy which seems to tell us everything but in fact tells us nothing, because endless equivocation with Ben Gordon, JJ Redick, Dan Dickau, and Allen Iverson do naught but perpetuate the ring of endless referentiality.

That is, Mormons see Jimmer as a Mormon who happens to be a dynamic point guard; current great scorer Kevin Durant sees him as the next great scorer; the legions of folks who compare him to Allen Iverson see a short guy, those who compare him to Jim Paxson (of all people) see a white guy.  Jimmer Fredette has not been allowed to reorient our moral universes in the means which his potential offers, because we have read him to confirm what we already know instead of allowing his strangeness to disrupt our lives. Of what use is it comparing Jimmer to Iverson when we don’t really know who Iverson is either?   We applaud both men for scoring with ease, but we don’t ask why we assume field goals are important in the first place.

This is why we still need Thomas Aquinas: to rightly divide the truth of Jimmer Fredette, to impose order and interpretation upon our interpretations. What we really need is not more analysis of Jimmer qua Jimmer, but more analysis of the uses we put him to.  That is, we need to rigorously examine the modes of meaning which Jimmer presents to us to ensure that he is organizing our moral universe correctly.

There are senses of Jimmer Fredette both literal and spiritual; one of the first, which is the tangible reality of the man, and three of the latter, which build meaning upon his actuality.  They are not mutually exclusive; indeed, Jimmer Fredette is able to signify multiple things which construct and support each other: this is the richness which those who prooftext Jimmer neglect.

The Literal Sense.  Fact: Jimmer Fredette, who plays point guard for the BYU Cougars, stands six foot two and weighs 195 pounds. He currently averages 27.6 points a game, first in the NCAA.   He does this while making 47.3 percent of his shots, including 41.3 percent of his three-pointers.  As a point guard, he is expected to have a lot of assists; he currently averages 4.3 a game, good for around ninetieth in the NCAA.    Fact: last year, Jimmer Fredette averaged 22.1 points a game, with percentages of 45.8 and 44.0 and 4.7 assists.  By several metrics he is a less efficient player this year than last.   Fact: Last year, it was widely assumed Jimmer would be taken late in the first or early in the second round of the NBA draft, which is where players who are generally considered flawed, with unproven potential, or otherwise a gamble usually go.

If one were to examine only the numbers, Jimmer Fredette largely seems the same player this year as he was last year.  Yet suddenly he has moved up the draft boards.   Why is this?    A literal reading seems insufficient to explain the resonance Jimmer has attained.  Jimmer may be a better basketball player than he was in 2010, but he is also a more ambiguous, and hence more powerful, metaphysical force.  He has gathered symbolic meaning to himself. We see here the spiritual senses at work. His name, for instance, has become a verb and a participle adjective, which fact has inspired enthusiastic, if not entirely cohesive, ruminating on the part of noted Deseret News sports curmudgeon Dick Harmon about what a funny name “Jimmer” is and mildly alarming, if weirdly cheery, facebook bombing of dissenters – particularly, the sort which seems to confirm her protest that Jimmer-time has come to resemble the quasi-religious iteration of Maoism particularly popular in the seventies.

Clearly, there are forces beyond the reach of the quantitative at work here.

The Moral Sense. This is where things grow interesting. Jesus freed the woman taken in adultery to remind us all to embrace humility.   Jimmer, on the other hand, takes nearly a third of his team’s shots.  In addition to the man’s gaudy scoring, this, perhaps, is a less than flattering reason for the comparison to noted ballhog Allen Iverson.*

The cultivation – or perhaps, the weary acceptance – of such a Jimmer-centric strategy on the part of coach Dave Rose may seem unremarkable.  When one has such a primal basketball force as Jimmer – who is better at putting the basketball in the hoop than most of us will be at anything, ever – in one’s corner, then one must unleash the proverbial kraken, especially when it’s against the Utah Utes.  Right?

And yet, morally speaking, the rise of Jimmer Fredette obliterates everything Mormon basketball has stood for for nearly a hundred years.   Strictly speaking, as I have discussed further elsewhere, the object of basketball among early twentieth century Latter-day Saints was nothing so vulgar as to showcase individual greatness, or even to achieve its overrated cousin, winning.  Rather, the goal of basketball was to imprint in young men’s minds the importance of individual sacrifice to the exaltation of the common good; the rigorous discipline of learning to run plays rather than cultivating individual skills, the soul-building virtues of numbing physical labor, and the benefits of hanging around heavily supervised church buildings rather than disreputable alleys.

Jimmer Fredette teaches us none of these things, but particularly not the first;** indeed, Jimmer has gained fame and celebration for precisely the opposite: putting the adequate but undistinguished second through twelfth men of the Cougar team on his back and hauling them toward what may be a respectable showing in the NCAA tournament.  He is remaking Mormon basketball in the image of a secular age.   But is it worth the price of a soul?

The Allegorical Sense. In which the Old Covenant illustrates the New; in which the manna sent from heaven to the children of Israel gestures to the Bread of Life born in Bethlehem.   Here is where Jimmer Fredette is redeemed, with an assist from ESPN anchor John Buccigross.   Jimmer has become an event, a term of art, and a metaphysical force precisely because of his individual brilliance; his basketball skills exemplify those which define basketball to the contemporary digital media.  Jimmer has become part of the revolution remaking basketball from moral task to popular entertainment, from active discipline to passive observation.  The crowd-sourcing of Jimmer at BYU reflects this adulation.  Jimmer has brought Mormon basketball to ESPN SportsCenter through discarding what is Mormon about it, and Mormons seem absolutely fine with this.

And yet.  In another sense, Jimmer Fredette reflects the transformation of Mormonism itself; the Old Covenant given way to the New.  He is a Mormon of the mormon.org age; a Mormon defined less by rigorous conformity and personal self-discipline than by the ability to project a wholesome diversity; to reflect back to pluralistic America the things which it values most edited to a PG rating.

This is the Mormonism evident since the mid-1990s, when the presidency of the sunny, warm, and media-savvy Gordon B. Hinckley – a Mormonism which urged its members to be good neighbors, which downplayed Mormon difference and invited converts to add its light to their own – began to replace the retrenchment Mormonism of Bruce R. McConkie, the Mormonism suspicious of American culture in the sixties and seventies, the Mormonism which emphasized food storage and its own doctrinal distinctiveness.   Retrenchment Mormonism created its own culture in the form of road shows and  oddities like the Mormon Rap; contemporary Mormonism seeks to colonize the cultural landscapes around it.

All this new benevolent pluralism needed  was a crossover star, and where Mitt Romney failed, Jimmer Fredette seems to have succeeded.  Gordon B. Hinckley could have asked for nothing more than John Buccigross taking three essential steps: First, chuckling in admiration over Jimmer’s well-earned basketball stardom, Buccigross salutes Jimmer for the fact that his particular basketball talents admirably fit the required parameters to be anointed by SportsCenter: be visually pleasing; make dunks or three pointers, or better, both; perform remarkable individual physical feats; most of all, win.  With Jimmer thus inducted into the official ESPN Pantheon of Acceptable Sports Stars Buccigross then asks the question that closes the circle and makes Jimmer into the avatar of modern Mormonism: “How old were you when you made that decision, and why did you choose to be a Mormon?”

The Anagogical Sense. In which the text illustrates the coming heavenly kingdom; in which Ezra’s rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem gestures to the imminent creation of the Kingdom of God.  Here is where Jimmer Fredette has become the future.   Some historians have claimed that the path to John F. Kennedy’s triumph over Richard Nixon began with Knute Rockne’s improbable transformation of Notre Dame from sleepy parochial college in Nowhere, Indiana to nationally feared football powerhouse.   This is not to say (heavens) anything so crassly predictive as that Jimmer Fredette is the herald of President Romney.***   It is, however, to say that Jimmer Fredette embodies the Mormonism of the Millennial generation; that his remaking of the basketball of the Mormon corridor in the image of American cable sports is the final twist of the knife in the weak and fluttering heart of retrenchment Mormonism, and the inauguration of a new age of cultural integration.

For far more than his shadowy archetypes David Archuleta and Brooke Wright (who mostly produced the sort of music that people with cultural affinity toward Mormonism already listened to) Jimmer has shown people like Ron Artest, John wall, and Kevin Durant, precisely the sort of tall black Nas fans for whom Mormonism holds absolutely zero interest or appeal, that they may yet have things in common with somebody who believes that Heber J. Grant was a prophet of God.  And while this may mark the end of a particular age, it also seems to inaugurate the coming of a new variety of Mormonism.

____
*Same caveat may even apply: that is, the young man’s teammates are largely useless.  To which I might respond, remember when Jackson Emery was supposed to be good?
**Though a case can be made for the third, because he used to play pickup at the local prisons in upstate New York.
***Or more likely, if slightly later, President Huntsman.  He’s the Mormon Kennedy; Romney’s the Mormon Al Smith.  Think about it.

Evangelical Christendom, published out of London, was the official journal of the World Evangelical Alliance, organized in Britain in 1846 to coordinate and promote evangelical mission work around the globe.  (An American affiliate was organized in New York City in  1847.) The journal was annual, but also comprehensive; routinely hundreds of pages long, containing book reviews, conference reports, missionary dispatches from around the globe, and a section entitled “Foreign Intelligencer,” made up of dispatches from countries around the world on the state of evangelical religion.   “Mormonism in New York and Utah” is one of these.

MORMONISM IN NEW YORK AND UTAH

It is announced in the New York that a Mormon temple is to be erected that city. It is to be a house of reception for the multitudes of Mormon emigrants who must pass through New York on their way to Salt Lake City. The entire cost of the building will be about half a million dollars, and a committee is already on the ground drafting plans. The proportions of this enterprise indicate the extent of the missionary operations of the Mormons. Their efforts to proselyte the poor and ignorant are indefatigable and are supported by necessary funds from the overflowing treasury in Salt Lake City. It is said that Brigham Young is sending out 2,000 missionaries or agents this year and that the immigration into Utah territory will be unprecedented. The number of Mormons in New York and Brooklyn is increasing, says the New York Observer. In order to escape the penalty of the laws against polygamy they do not legally marry their wives but “live in a state of concubinage amenable to no law.” But they all look forward eagerly to removing to the Mormon capital in Utah.

The Latter Day Church is fascinating in part because of how skillfully Matthew Philip Gill engages in prophetic mimesis, replicating the experiences and language of Joseph Smith to create himself as Smith’s heir, calling to repentance the failed church of Salt Lake City and promising a re-invigorated version of Mormon spirituality – one which both invokes Joseph Smith’s charisma anew, but which also rewrites the sacred history of Mormonism in ways that follow the cultural accommodations the LDS church has made.   Gill’s movement is neither sectarian – which seeks to heighten tension with Western culture – nor a church movement – one which seeks to lessen that tension.  Rather, scholars like Armand Mauss and Thomas O’Dea have observed that the LDS Church itself seems to combine both of these impulses, oscillating back and forth along a spectrum of resistance, tension, and accommodation.  Just so, the Latter Day Church of Christ itself seeks to heighten both resistance and accommodation – rejecting, for instance, evidence that Joseph Smith ever practiced polygamy and embracing whole-heartedly the LDS church’s sentimental emphasis upon the family, but also heightening the sort of radical spiritual claims which have become routinized in American Mormonism.   Gill, after all, has had visionary experiences of all the figures Joseph Smith claimed to have encountered, adding a resurrected Joseph himself into the bargain.   As his father (and first counselor) asks derisively of the LDS Church, “We have again an era of prophets.  Proper prophets.  Not people who are just put into position and over time get to be a prophet . . . Where’s the revelation in that?”    And such is a new church born.

The abstract is as follows:

5) Following that, let’s get into the meat of the work somewhat.   Your work seems to understand Mormons and Shakers as two manifestations of a larger theoretical argument; these groups use similar strategies of space and embodiment and reformation to draw boundaries between themselves and the world.  You spend little time on the quest that many historians of Mormonism embark on: the search for influence, for parallels or context, for the cross-fertilization of ideas between Joseph Smith and Lee/Swedenborg/Ethan Hunt/Thomas Dick/Abraham Lincoln/etc.   Is this a fair characterization of how you conceive of the project?   If so, would you ascribe the difference to your training in religious studies, rather than in history?

I would agree in general with that characterization, although I think that “context” is key to the project—at least in terms of contextualizing the Mormons and Shakers in space and time and culture. Beyond that though, you are correct. I have no interest in searching for the possible roots of Mormon or Shaker thought except in a very few instances where I note that one or the other group may be borrowing or expanding upon ideas already extant (the Shaker view of the body as evil, for example).  I am not interested in the debates that always ensue when dealing with the origins of religious thought.  I prefer to let others hash those things out. I’m not sure I agree with the idea that, in order for a work to be recognizably historical, it needs to try and answer the types of questions that you mention. I tend to think of this book as basically a work of history to which a variety of interdisciplinary tools from literary studies, philosophy, anthropology and sociology have been applied.  Because religious studies is, by definition, inter-disciplinary, I am sure that I was more open to a variety of theoretical avenues than I would have been otherwise. I think, though, that most “history” written by academics today is also much more interdisciplinary than some historians would care to admit.  Also, your question emphasizes the similarity of the Shaker and Mormon models of tension, but I think the real key to the book is to understand the differences—to see that “high-tension” groups display marked diversity when it comes to the types of tension that they cultivate.

6) Many of the questions from our readers focused on these sorts of questions: how the Mormons and the Shakers understood each other, what parallels or mutual influence exist in notions of the divine feminine or spiritual manifestation; what role D&C 49 played in how Mormons understood Shakers, and whether there is a Shaker equivalent to that passage.  Would you care to address these?

This is actually a fairly easy question to answer. Anyone who has read section 49 of the D&C knows just about all there is to know about the interaction between Shaker s and Mormons in the nineteenth century. I have found very little in the Shaker documents to suggest that they had much of an opinion at all about Mormons.  The Mormon view is simply that Ann Lee was a false messiah and that her teachings were likewise false.  Mormon –Shaker interaction was minimal, in large part because the Shakers generally eschewed active proselytizing and so were not in competition with Mormons for potential converts. It does not seem that either group played a role in the mental universe of the other. They did not spend much time thinking of each other as allies or enemies—it seems that others filled those roles instead. A potentially interesting project could be found in attempting to account for why this general silence prevails, but I did not deal with it in the book.  On the question of parallels and the divine feminine, there is also precious little there to use. For the Shakers, gender was ultimately mutable because God was an androgynous being that was neither male nor female but which could, and did, instantiate itself as both. The Mormon view of the “Heavenly Mother” is quite a different idea and it emerges from a very different theological matrix that involved more than one self-contained divine figure with (apparently) immutable gender characteristics.

7) Let’s look closer at your argument.   One thing we’ve talked about a bit on this blog is the issue of periodization (here and here).  It’s been common for most scholars, following Jan Shipps, to break Mormon history at the broadest into two halves, pre- and post- 1890.  Before 1890, the Saints lived in a sacred world, marked by their attempts at isolation both spatially (in Nauvoo or Utah) and culturally (through the embrace of distinctive religious beliefs and practices, particularly polygamy).   After 1890, according to Shipps, the Saints abandoned these collective boundaries and instead sought distinctiveness in personal codes of behavior, typified by increased emphasis on things like temple worship and the Word of Wisdom.   Your work offers an alternative interpretation, and a different way of thinking about early Mormon periodization.   How do you differ from Shipps, and what do you think about the traditional ways of dating Mormon history?

The most important thing to understand about any schema of periodization is that it is an artificial construct imposed by the historian, rather than a natural division rising from the sources. Once that is understood, it becomes possible to play with a wide range of periodization schemas in order to draw out or emphasize certain trends or motifs that one finds in the archival traces with which we work.  Jan Shipps makes a convincing case for her division of Mormon history into pre- and post-1890 segments. I have tried to argue that other divisions are also possible and that these new ways of dividing up our stories of the Mormon past act as helpful heuristic devices by adding new angles of vision. For example, I take the theme of physical boundaries and I develop chronological segments tailored to that theme. I don’t think that periodization schemas in general are mutually exclusive. My discussion here probably betrays my affinity for post-modern theory, especially when it comes to notions of narrative. I have found in traditional Mormon historiography a driving positivist impulse that leaves me a bit cold. There is a sense in which the past has been seen as a jigsaw puzzle, with the historian acting as the hobbyist who is digging up the missing pieces from the archives. This model holds that if only we can find all of the pieces, we can recreate an accurate and uniform picture of the past. I reject that view for a wide variety of reasons, and I think that most historians working on Mormon topics today would not accept my description as accurately reflecting their views. Nevertheless, this ideological underpinning is evident, for example, in book reviews produced by certain segments of the Mormon studies community. Any book or article that seeks primarily to interpret, rather than “discover” and report data, tends to be viewed as suspect from some old guard and well-respected (and gated) neighborhoods of the Mormon studies community. My sense is that this is changing, and it is none too soon.
Following up on your answer to 5, one of the interesting arcs of this narrative is the way in which Mormon strategies of boundary maintenance seem more flexible and adaptable than that of the Shakers.  Your discussion of celibacy and polygamy illustrates this nicely; while Shaker celibacy was “stable” and universal, it also led to stagnation and decline.  Polygamy, on the other hand, forced Mormons into a nearly constant state of crisis management.   Indeed, Mormons seemed to thrive on crisis so much that they occasionally generated them, as you argue about the Mormon Reformation.  Do you think you’ve identified some patterns here about the success or failure of New Religious Movements?

I’m fairly circumspect about attempting to apply the patterns I found with Mormons and Shakers to NRMs as a group. In fact, I think one of the main subtexts of the book is that these religious traditions that are often thought of as sharing a taxonomical neighborhood by virtue of being in high tension with society is not nearly nuanced enough. So the last thing I really want to do is claim some sort of broadly applicable model or to claim that “successful” groups tend to do one thing while those that fail do something else. The different historical contexts of each group preclude such conclusions, in my opinion.  However, I hope that the book leads scholars of religion to ask more questions about how groups all along the spectrum of tension continually evaluate that tension.

And do you think this pattern of crisis management applies to Mormonism after 1890?

I have not studied the issue closely enough to make an argument either way. So much changed with regard to Mormon ambivalence about the place of Mormnonism and the individual Mormon in American culture in the early decades of the twentieth century that I think one must bring a different mindset to the study of Mormonism in that period. I don’t know how to think about tension in the later era because I have not examined the sources with that in mind, but it is clearly a very different paradigm at work. However, should someone have an interest in answering that question in a comprehensive way, I think the obvious place to start would be the 1978 revelation. But I will leave that for someone else to sort out.
9) Finally, are there any questions which you wish people would be asking about this book?  What do you think is most interesting or important about it?

This is a difficult question to answer. I have been pleasantly surprised by the things people have taken away from the book and the questions that I get—as far away as from Bulgaria!—things that I didn’t even think would turn out to be important. The Bulgarian question, for example, came from a priest/professor who is working on a book about Montanism, and he found my methodology and arguments sparked new avenues approach in his own work. And, I suppose, that is how I would answer the second part of the question: my fondest hopes for the book are that it opens new vistas for scholars in a broad range of disciplines while simultaneously helping those already familiar with one or both of these traditions to see them in a new light.