Fair enough. It’s been amply demonstrated by now that Beck is largely ignorant of the deep, deep roots that the phrase “social justice” has in the soil of Christian theology. To cite merely one example: In 1891 the landmark papal encyclical Rerum Novarum argued the phrase demanded “some opportune remedy . . . for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” [1] But the Catholics did more than merely say it would be nice to relieve the squalor of the poor – they rooted the call to do so in a theology of natural rights; an anthropology which insisted that humanity’s true worth lay not in possessions and earthly success, but in moral virtue gained through the metaphysical encounter with Christ in his Atonement; and the conviction that humanity bound together by the mystical bonds of the Church was a single body rather than a collection of individuals. These ways of defining “social justice” are not historical or legal or economic but theological. They imagine human society as first the kingdom of God, and only secondarily a community based on democracy or capitalism or whatnot. And theology is not Glenn Beck’s native tongue.

To cite another: Martin Luther King, Jr, an underrated theologian, argues in his book Stride Toward Freedom that “no historian or sociologist could understand” the meetings that led to the Montgomery bus boycott. This was because, King argued, “history is guided by spirit, not matter.” The imperatives which guided the civil rights movement were to him not simply political; rather, the political manifestations of the Movement were the outworking of God’s grace in human history. The transformation of America from a segregated to a desegregated society was not a political activity but a religious one, and it happened not because of the political but the religious imagination of the African American community.[2]

Beck’s great failure, then, is his insistence on reading religion through the lens of his politics, or perhaps his confidence that the two are so perfectly blended that the seams are invisible and the language of one blends effortlessly into that of the other. This is the mark of a man too at ease in the world. His demand that Christians whose churches subscribe to “social justice” should abandon their denominations indicates that Glenn Beck’s cosmos seems entirely framed by his conspiratorial politics, and that he may, perhaps, have trouble thinking outside the box.

But this is the sort of gotcha that’s quite easy to play. One could, without much trouble, find Beck’s scarlet letters emblazoned on the dress of virtually every Christian denomination in America (including his own). And of course in a larger sense it’s generally easy to catch Beck dabbling in inconsistency, hyperbole, and all sorts of related fallacies. This is, though, where we come to the second failure of imagination.

Jim Wallis’s response to Beck consists, more or less, of ‘nuh-uh.’ And that’s a fatal slip. He insists that “social, economic, and racial justice are at the heart of the gospel,” which is nice, and may even be true. But that’s a thesis statement, not a conclusion, an argument, not evidence. This is, unfortunately, typical of Wallis, who frequently uses religious words like “Biblical” and “grace” while talking about contemporary politics. He argues quite frequently that Jesus commanded us to care for the poor, so if we are to be Christians, we must therefore pursue the planks of what appears to be a fairly typical Democratic political platform. Wallis favors penalizing big banks, promoting grassroots poverty relief programs, immigration reform to benefit poor immigrants, campaign finance laws and so on. This is fine, as far as it goes. But it does not actually go very far.

Wallis, and other advocates for something called the “religious left” seem to be trapped in much the same paradigm that Beck is – that is, they tend to use religious language within an already existing economic and political paradigm. Their religious imagination is structured by contemporary American politics; religion matters to them to the extent that it translates into political positions. This guy is not only a pretty good example of one who wields religious language as a weapon in ongoing partisan warfare; he cites a lone, paltry, out of context verse in Isaiah to justify his pro-choice policies – showing mad prooftexting skills that any fundamentalist would be proud of. The frequently vacuous Sally Quinn, and more, the entire Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” website which Quinn helps to edit, stand as a shining monument to this failure of imagination. “Religion” for whoever it is that maintains the front page of On Faith, is primarily “Whatever religious people are doing vis-a-vis the controversial political issue of the day.” “Religion” for Sally Quinn means “Whatever religious activity or language I can muster to lend gravitas and impressive-sounding Biblical language to my left-wing politics and vague and sentimental sense of cultural inclusivity.” Witness, for instance, her poorly-thought-out recommendation that the Obamas become Episcopalian in order to better promote Sally Quinn’s cultural politics.

This is catastrophically depressing. The savagely brilliant religious imaginations that Martin Luther King, or Walter Rauschenbusch, or Dorothy Day mobilized behind social reform worked because of their comprehensiveness. They began with a vision of the world in part inspired by but not bound to the contexts they found themselves in. And the social reforms they advocated for were not merely an end in themselves, or to satisfy our basic human impulse toward charity, or to pursue greater egalitarianism as a self-contained good. Rather, their calls for social reform were bound inexorably into the most basic and primal aims of Christianity – to, through the atoning acts of Christ, attain for humanity salvation. Their theologies of social transformation were based upon their imagination of the Kingdom of God. They were radical, then, in the best sense, not merely political. They knew that the world that Christ calls us to is not the world we live in; that the things Christ asks of us cannot be fully embodied in the tools of politics. One does not get that same sense of the incarnation of Christ in the politics of Jim Wallis. And that, because, like those of Beck, they are simply politics.

So, I feel an incessant, nagging suspicion that perhaps Beck’s salvo is a justified one. This is not to endorse his somewhat staggering ignorance, bluster, and paranoia; indeed, Beck suffers acutely from the same problem he diagnoses; he believes God is on his side rather than engaging in that constant struggle that should afflict every Christian – worrying that he is on God’s. It is, though, to point out that as in every age, idolatry may be the most pervasive sin of our own.

______________________
[1] Rerum Novarum, section 3.
[2] Martin Luther King, Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story (New York: Harper, 1958) 64, 92.

Mitch Horowitz has written an often gleefully fascinating book. Horowitz is editor in chief of the Tarcher imprint of Penguin Books, which publishes volumes on topics like the Mayan apocalypse, interpreting your own dreams, “energy medicine,” the “Human Potential Movement,” the investing secrets of King Solomon, and other such esoterica. He built a career writing for such classic publications as The Fortean Times, each issue a veritable encyclopedia of frogs falling from the sky, crop circles, and cryptozoology. The journal is named for Charles Fort, the World War I era prophet who wrote vast compendia of strange phenomena with titles like Lo! and The Book of the Damned, and is generally credited with coming up with the idea of alien abduction, coining the term ‘teleportation,’ and, crucially, suggesting that there are vast untapped powers available to the human mind–powers that can make you rich, find your keys, and let you see into the future.

In this volume, Horowitz argues that Charles Fort is not, in fact, a crank but rather that Fort had his finger on the American zeitgeist. Horowitz makes his case thus: “Whether the occult changed America, or the other way around, certainly this much is clear: The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded perhaps more than any other movement in history to the inner needs and search of the individual. At work and at church, on television and in bookstores, there was no avoiding it: occult America had prevailed.” (258)

Horowitz believes that what he calls the “occult” was a radically optimistic movement in America, built around a very American exaltation of “an unlikely ethic of social progress and individual betterment” (3). It flourished outside the folds of the churches, driven forward by the eccentricities, genius, and spiritual hunger of individuals as diverse as the dentist’s wife Mary Baker Eddy, the cobbler’s son Andrew Jackson Davis, and the druggist Frank B. Robinson–self-made prophets with followings of thousands all. And it was this very confidence in the potential of the average American to access and understand esoteric spiritual knowledge and to use it for individual betterment and empowerment which makes the occult, according to Horowitz, America’s true religion.

Befitting such an argument, the bulk of Horowitz’s book consists of mini-biographies of figures like the ones above. The great Depression-era psychic, theologian, medium, and healer Edgar Cayce gets his own chapter, which emphasizes the coherent structure of Cayce’s mystic thought and argues: “If there was an inner, or occult, philosophy behind the world’s historic faiths, Cayce had come as close as any modern person to defining it” (235). Similar homage is paid to Manly Hall, the eccentric genius who sat for most of his twenties in the New York Public Library’s Reading Room, composing a vast work reconciling virtually every genre of esoteric thought; to Timothy Drew, the North Carolinian who renamed himself Noble Drew Ali and invented “Moorish Science”; and the magician Paul Foster Case, whose 1909 encounter with a mysterious person calling himself the “Master of Wisdom” propelled him into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and eventually into developing a systematic theory of the Tarot.

Yet, despite the tantalizing promises of the dust jacket that Horowitz will explore the “supernatural passions that marked the career of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith,” he uses a cursory three-page recapitulation of D. Michael Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (2nd edition, Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998) primarily as a springboard into a subject that seems to interest him more: Masonry.

This sort of frenetic leap from oddball to oddball embodies the basic weaknesses of Horowitz’s book. First, it is weirdly organized. Awareness that Horowitz seems to have intended a chronological approach only gradually emerges after the reader has been spun through two opening chapters which leap from person to person and movement to movement with only the barest thread of argument or transition tying them together. The first chapter after the introduction is entitled “The Psychic Highway,” referring to the Burned-Over District of antebellum upstate New York. In considering this location, Horowitz in the span of thirty pages deals with, in order, the Shakers, the mysterious “Dark Day” in 1780 when the sun failed to rise, various Indian mythologies, the Millerites, the Mormons, Masonry, the resurrected Quaker prophetess Jemima Wilkinson, Mesmerism, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the great Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis. One’s head spins, and Horowitz’s book seems so bursting with facts and besotted with the obscure and quirky that it threatens to come apart at the seams.

The second chapter is not much better. Fuzzily titled “Mystic Americans,” it begins with the late nineteenth century, vaguely Hindu Theosophical movement, leaps back in time to Transcendentalism and the occult traditions of Europe, touches on Mary Todd Lincoln’s enjoyment of séances, and concludes with the psychic proclivities of the late nineteenth-century feminist Victoria Woodhull. Parsing a coherent argument or narrative thread out of such a patchwork is difficult.

Fortunately, Horowitz then calms down and most of the following chapters have a great deal more focus, though his propensity toward narrating the lives of such fascinating figures as Henry Wallace (Theosophist and Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president for one term) or William Fuld (the stodgy Presbyterian who made the Ouija board into a board game), rather than drawing out evidence to support his argument continually threatens to dismember the book into a collection of anecdotes.

This tendency also illustrates Horowitz’s second great weakness. One gets the sneaking sense that “occult” means anything Horowitz finds novel, interesting, or appropriately weird. At one point, he defines it as that which “deals with the inner aspect of religion; the mystical doorways of realization and the secret ways of knowing. Classical occultism regards itself as an initiatory spiritual tradition” (8). This is, though charmingly mystical itself, not a terribly precise definition. Indeed, monastic Roman Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism might well qualify. Elsewhere, occultism emerges as that which deals with the spiritual or hidden world and how it affects the present and material. That definition is clearer, sort of. However, such obscurity allows Horowitz to place Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy in the same pages with the Maharishi Maresh Yogi, which is an achievement not to be sneezed at.

MATTHEW BOWMAN is a graduate student in American religious history at Georgetown University, the assistant editor of Dialogue: a journal of Mormon Thought, and author of several articles on Mormon and evangelical history.

Max Perry Mueller is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Harvard University, focusing on nineteenth century Mormonism and African American religious history. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.) and Carleton College. His current research project involves early black Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake. He is excited to find interlocutors on all things Mormon, especially issues of race in the Restored Church (to which, quoting Booker T. Washington following his own 1913 visit to Utah, he has “not yet converted”).

One of Max Weber’s more evocative phrases is the “disenchantment of the world.” I like it because it does not refer only to the numbing birth of bloodless bureaucracy, to humans in increasingly rationalized aggregate, but also to us as individuals of mind and creativity. The lucid organization of the world as a place human comprehension might master changed our vision, our psyche, and our imagination. The Enlightenment was thus a revolution of the aesthetic and the numinous as much as of knowledge and epistemology.

I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to history, by which I mean not only the sort of narratives and analyses of the past that humans accept as authoritative, but the extent to which we ascribe existential meaning and use to them. We today expect history to be constructed according to a certain set of principles, ways of running the wiring and cranking the engine that we learned from the Enlightenment. But here, I want to float the notion that history may not be a car in the first place.

Jonathan Edwards, who still somehow manages to be underestimated, spent much of 1739 writing a thirty part sermon series (why don’t we have these?) that eventually, when gathered together with his notes, crossreferences, and plans for expansion became his unfinished masterpiece, A history of the work of Redemption. [1] Edwards was distressed that many of his contemporaries seemed to understand history as a series of causes springing from human effects; as the temporal manifestation of human decision making – and, for many of these interlocutors, destined toward progress as humans learned the lessons of the past, cultivated the virtues of their predecessors, and avoided their faults. The space of history was thus the space where human beings worked out their own possibilities. As David Hume, for instance, wrote, history should “distinguish exactly what is owing to chance and what proceeds from causes,” and that once this was known, “a state which should apply itself to the encouragement of the one would be more assured of success than one which should cultivate the other.”[2] Edward Gibbon exemplified this form of history, assailing Christianity itself for smothering the humanist virtues of Rome. Further, he built his work on his determination “to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals.” [3]

Gibbon’s confidence that better sources inevitably led to better truth, because they would provide greater insight into human motivation, would have seemed to Edwards to miss the point entirely; the New England divine subscribed instead to Augustine’s explanation for the rise and fall of the Empire – that human discipline, failures, and successes were at best proximate illustrations of the will of God, made manifest in the material. [4] Events themselves were of less import than that to which they gestured; the accuracy of their reproduction in historical narrative secondary to the eternal meaning of which they were particular avatars. Instead of locating the key turning points in history around economic or political developments, the sorts of facts that could be documented in primary sources, the Work identified instead “special seasons of mercy,” consisting of revivals, times of conversion, and other religious events, as the pivots that drove redemption history forward. [5] Later, the great Lutheran thinker Paul Tillich would provide a modified version of this notion, presenting history divided between the quantitative mundane time of humanity and the qualitative moments of kairos, when the eternal ruptured into the temporal. [6]

But rather than Tillich’s compromise, the centerpiece of Edwards’s argument in his great work was that theology and history were inseparable; that there was no moment in time in which God’s guiding force was absent. He described the Work as a new way of thinking about God; a “body of divinity . . . thrown into the form of a history.”[7] The historical realm existed because God had elected to work out the redemption of mankind in temporal space; therefore, history was to be understood as the projection of God’s will in the form of time, a sort of divine drama that illustrated God’s mercy for human comprehension. It was inevitably teleological, and thus the sort of causality that Gibbon and others located in human agency was not only trivial, but theologically problematic.

II

Leopold von Ranke, the German often cited as the patron of the modern historical method, the man who famously declared that if all the evidence were assembled, the past could be perfectly known, also believed that such a perfect record would reveal undimmed the face of God in history. But unlike Edwards, who was perhaps the best Calvinist in American religion, Ranke was a Hegelian. Edwards believed that God’s hand in history overwhelmed human agency; Ranke believed that the progress of human history itself manifested the immanent divine will.[8] Edwards believed that the variety of history practiced by Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, and other Enlightenment historians, with its emphasis upon sources and human agency, obscured rather than dimmed our understanding, because it could shine no light upon the cosmic forces that made up actual reality and transcended the paltry progressions of human history. Ranke, though he embraced a metaphysics of the past, rooted his history firmly in the agency of humanity.

But the Americans who adopted Ranke’s exhaustive methods in the late nineteenth century, his stress upon sources, footnotes, and original sources, discarded his broader historical theory in favor of his emphasis upon human action. They stressed that the sources revealed nothing but themselves.[9] They were Baconians, building from particulars to generalities, relying upon empirical sources only, and, more than anything, shunning a priori hypotheses about transcendent forces of any kind. They called themselves scientists, believing that keeping an open mind and assembling sufficient evidence would eventually lead to comprehensive and definitive results. While many historians embraced arguments that placed their own civilization at the end of a long road of historical development, they shunned Edwards’s “superstitious” convictions about how history worked, reliant upon seemingly a priori assumptions and non-verifiable evidence to demonstrate that God, chaotically, intervened in the orderly progression of cause and effect. And while no serious historian today is as optimistic as Ranke, believing that sufficient evidence can create perfect knowledge of the past, nor as confident as his “scientific” successors in the possibility of definitive results, their methods linger.

The tension between empirical history and divine agency played out most dramatically in the Roman Catholic church at the end of the nineteenth century, when a group of thinkers called the Catholic Modernists, most prominently Albert Loisy and George Tyrrell, argued that dogma – the core principles of the faith, that authoritative knowledge of God granted through revelation rather than human reason – was subject to the influence of history; that it might evolve over time, and different ages taught different things based upon their circumstance. [10] This seemed to strike to the heart of orthodox belief in the sovereignty of God over history, giving human agency power over the divine’s ability to reveal itself and subordinating sacred history to the scientific history of Ranke’s American disciples. Pius X silenced the Modernists in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, which asserted that “God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject.” [11] The divine could not be located through the references, citations, and primary sources of the Enlightenment.

III

The modern historical profession descends from Gibbon and Ranke; it is a method of knowing, and more, a language, equipped to communicate particular things. Gibbon on one hand, and Pius X on the other, drew lines circumscribing what it is capable of describing, and continue to stare suspiciously over the barricades at each other. We can see this in salvos each side flings at the other.

Those who seek to do professional history sometimes sneer at evangelicals convinced that dispensationalist readings of the Bible reveal God’s intentions for human futures, or at Mormon apostles who declare about their own faith’s past that “some things that are true are not very useful,” and express bafflement at historians’ desire to “publish something new” instead of simply acknowledging God’s hand in the world. [12] To a historian raised to treasure scraps of primary sources this is heresy, but it expresses no sentiment Jonathan Edwards would not have approved of, and there is no shortage of academic admirers who will defend ardently the complexity and power of that man’s mind. But of course, he is safely dead, and we can therefore pretend his peculiar readings of history bear no claim upon us beyond their curiosity.

On the other hand, of course, we might say that the popes and apostles are defending a form of history that does not, according to modern standards, hold up. It fails to meet the empirical measure of truth which many of us (looking at you, Dawkins) have come to identify that completely with truth itself, but on a more serious level it denies the basic notions of the human condition that underlie modern history. If we have learned anything from the past that historians give us it is that human choices matter, and to surrender our claim over our own fates – for modern academic history is nothing if it is not a resounding assertion of human agency – is to turn our backs on our own nobility. It is to deny that we have anything to teach ourselves, to say that our mistakes and our triumphs are equally meaningless. And of course, Edwards would, with iron nerve, assent to that. But for us it is harder.

I am soon to be a professional historian, and that because I find meaning in it. And that is precisely it; our responsibility is to understand not only the past, but to recognize the variant powers different ways of telling about it, different categories of understanding it, hold over human minds. Religious historians particularly must recognize that the vast part of humanity does not live in the clean and sterile time of modern historical method; rather, the bulk of humanity today and in the past live in what some critics call with derision “faith-promoting history.” The sacred intrudes in their world, God is present to them, and cause and effect does not work in ways that history as we write it has room to hold. If we are to tell their stories, we must understand the cycles of their time.

That is, there was for Edwards a Calvinist way of history, centered upon God’s sovereignty and imagining this world as a stage on which the drama of redemption is enacted. There was for Pius X a Catholic way of history, in which the eternal divine and the human meet in the traditions of the Church. And when Dallin Oaks or Boyd Packer speak of the past in terms that make historians recoil – the infamous true but not useful formulation – they may be enunciating a Mormon way of history.

So. How might professional historians assimilate these notions? For the past three decades, Edwards’s descendents – George Marsden and Mark Noll, among others – have been writing evangelical history – that is, both history of evangelicalism and history with evangelical characteristics. Though they have abandoned Edwards’s fatalism, his aesthetic and mood persists; their work is suspicious of human pride, doubtful about human ability to understand God, and skeptical of certainty of any form in their tradition; their narrative, though they do not use these words, is the tragic and even sinful corruption of religious humility. [13] More boldly, Robert Orsi is the most prominent Catholic historian calling for a reconsideration of the presence of the sacred in human life, wondering “what words or categories of interpretation are there for phenomena” like Marian apparitions, answered prayers, or divine appearance – things which, demonstrably, vast swaths of humanity believe influence their decisions and behavior. For Orsi, the point here is relationship; listening; influence; presence. [14] What Mormon historians should find in these examples is nothing so petty as proof, one way or the other – for indeed, as Leo knew (and Orsi too) the language of modern history is useful for many things, but documentation of the supernatural is not one of them. To live in both worlds is to live with constructive tension, to recognize that the tools of the one cannot fully grasp the other. But that tension is, and must be, always one of dynamic engagement. History is an ongoing conversation, not a definitive proclamation; this is what the scientific disciplines of Ranke failed to grasp. And as Mormons began to think about what our own ways of history might be like, the demand that sacred history makes upon the secular should force our own historians into dialogue.

_____________________
1) Much of what I have to say about Edwards particularly has been influenced by Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton, 2003)
2) David Hume, “Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences,” in Essays: moral political and iterary (London: Longmans, 1898) 174, 176.
3) Gibbon, History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (NY Macmillan 1914) xlvi.
4) For Augustine’s arguments, see City of God IV:33.
5) A History of the work of Redemption. John Wilson.,ed (New Haven: Yale, 1989) 143.
6) Paul Tillich A history of Christian thought (Harper 1968) 1
7) Jonathan Edwards, Work, 62.
8 ) See, for instance, Ranke, The Theory and Practice of history, trans, George Iggers (Indianapolis: University of Indiana, 1973) 119.
9) On this transition, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the objectivity question and the American historical profession (NY: Cambridge, 1988) 33-35.
10)John Henry Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) eloquently reconciled historicism with the unfolding of “doctrine” – systematic organization of knowledge about God – but dogma was a different issue entirely.
11) Pascendi dominici gregis, XLIX.
12) Boyd K. Packer, “The mantle is far, far greater than the intellect,” BYU Studies 21:3, 5.
13) For more on this see my long ago blog post here.
14) Robert Orsi, “Abundant history: Marian apparitions as alternative modernity,” Historically Speaking September/October 2008, 13; see also his Between Heaven and Earth: the religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them (Princeton: Princeton, 2004) 5-6.

I had a previous student, now a 3rd year law student, contact me to see if I had suggestions for her. She’s writing a paper on polygamy and feminism in Islam, and is looking for anything that would be parallel in America. I can send her to the usual suspects for 19th century LDS polygamy–Sarah Barringer Gordon, others?–but I wonder if you know whether there is contemporary theory I might point her to. I just assume that FLDS folks don’t consider themselves feminist or write/speak from that perspective, but maybe that’s a misconception?

I must say, the historiography here for the nineteenth century is pretty well grounded, though there is of course much more to be done, we’ve got at least some work to fall back on. I pointed this reader toward Battle for the Ballot, and Madsen’s book on Emmeline Wells. But the twentieth century remains a vast undiscovered country. Jessie Embry’s done a bit of work on contemporary polygamy, and I suspect that more relevant information may come from sociology or religious studies, rather than history.

The facts are these: A few days back, Roman Polanski, the auteur who created Repulsion, Chinatown, and Rosemary’s Baby – some of the finest works of the sixties and seventies, the golden age of film – was detained when he arrived at the Swiss border. He had planned to attend a film festival in Zurich, where he would receive a lifetime achievement award and assorted other plaudits and means of adulation from his colleagues. Instead he may end up extradited to the sort of California jail where they put movie folk. This is because thirty-two years ago in Los Angeles Polanski drugged and raped a thirteen year old girl. He served slightly more than a month in a California state prison for psychiatric observation and agreed to a relatively lenient plea bargain, but fled the United States for his native Poland and then France when his judge, after perhaps inappropriately consulting with the prosecutors, gave indications that he might throw the bargain out.

There has been a great deal of horrified forehead slapping and moralistic beard tugging not only about Polanski and his sins, but also about the weird fact that a lot of people seem to feel not only that he should be let off the hook, but, additionally, that this position is manifestly self-evident and should seem reasonable to all human beings. The ranks here include (unfortunately for those of us who are not fans of generalizations about Hollywood), well, some of Hollywood, including not only known flakes like Woody Allen and Whoopi Goldberg, but otherwise seemingly thoughtful and interesting people like Martin Scorsese – who has fascinating things to say about the influence of Catholicism on his work – and Tilda Swinton.[1] It also includes apparently the French intelligentsia (which again does not help with the anti-broad brush campaign).

I am not here to praise the campaign to exonerate Polanski, but neither am I interested in closing ranks with the forehead slappers. Rather, I’m interested in reading this whole ugly little ball of wax not as further evidence that America/Hollywood is provincial/louche but rather as a cultural debate about evil and human nature. What is it, exactly, in the metaphysical anthropology of Debra Winger (whose charming turn in Forget Paris you may remember) that has her so formidably convinced that Polanski deserves release? [2] What is fascinating about her is not what she says; it’s what inspires her to say what she says. It’s what she believes about Roman Polanski’s soul, and why. And conversely, how is it that her desire to see Polanski freed and – pivotally – start making movies again is so utterly incomprehensible to so many of the rest of us? The fundamental point here is that people – even Roman Polanski – are complicated, so I’m not interested in dismissing great swaths of humanity as morally vagrant. Rather, I want to frame this theologically. [3]

II.

One of the great strengths of the best traditional Christian theology is its ability to assimilate and express paradox in a meaningful way, most particularly the balance of divine and mortal in the person of Christ. The separate propositions that Christ is fully mortal and that Christ is fully divine: each communicate particular knowledge about Jesus, but the dynamic tension generated in the paradox of asserting that both are true gestures to deeper meanings about the relationship between God and humanity.

A more useful tension for the purposes of talking about Roman Polanski, however, is the one embedded in ourselves. That is, as Paul said, desparingly,

I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:18-19) [4]

It’s the horrifyingly simple truth that we don’t understand ourselves. We can’t explain why we do far too much of what we actually do. We barely glimpse the far horizons of our own motivations. And the hideous paradox here is as Paul recognizes; we all perform evil deeds knowing the good, and indeed, even worse, knowing the very nature of evil and embracing it anyway, in a ghastly, grinning nihilism.

Here is Augustine, despairing to God over his theft of a pear:

Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error — not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself. (Confessions, 2.4.9)

And this means, that, as Paul and Augustine and Calvin and Luther all recognized, there is something of our nature beyond our mastery, and even our knowledge. CS Lewis calls it being ‘bent;’ a weak fissure that runs through our souls, our wills, and our minds. [5] Augustine calls it concupiscence, seeing it even in the selfish grasping of a child. He also calls it original sin. Sin alienates us not only from God, not only from our fellow humans, but from ourselves; sin is that part of us that we have barely a nodding relationship with. If we controlled it – really controlled it; if law and law’s predicates were of themselves enough – we would none of us do evil. But we do, and so they’re not. And that’s also why law can never be a perfect predictor of the morality of an action. And why – apologies to Elder Oaks – law can never be a perfect metaphor for religion. (For more on that, see footnote 3.)

The paradox, though, lies in Luther’s phrase: “simul iustus, et peccator;” the believer is simultaneously justified and a sinner; simultaneously righteous before God and a fallen human. Or, as Reinhold Niebuhr slightly tweaked the notion, man is simultaneously the imago dei and the creature; simultaneously fallen, but capable of imagining transcendence, imperfect, but capable of imagining perfection. [6] Even in ourselves.

III.

Polanski. The great fault, I would argue, in the metaphysical anthropology of Debra Winger and company is their inability to grasp this paradox. They see Polanski the artist; a master of emotional nuance, the man whose camera rested with grace and care on Faye Dunaway’s pain in Chinatown, who showed almost palpable sympathy for the families wrenched apart in the Holocaust in The Pianist. This man – the man whom Adrien Brody, upon becoming the youngest winner of the Best Actor Oscar under Polanski’s guidance, called “gifted” and time spent with him “a huge gift,” whom Sigourney Weaver called “very sweet and very strong.” This man could not be a rapist; rapists are evil, and the Polanski they know is good.

And so do we all, says Niebuhr, sin. The individual “overestimates the completeness of his knowledge and even more the self-sufficiency of his existence.” [7] We convince ourselves that life can be absolute; that rapists and other bad people are the easily identifiable Other, not those we know, and not those we love, and certainly not ourselves. And, indeed, those who conflate the magnificence of Polanski’s art with the special condition of his soul are dancing on the brink of idolatry.

But on the flip side, there’s a caution here for the rest of us as well; those of us who see in Polanski the sinner that we are not, those of us who equate religion with law and judge juridical faultlessness to be unblemished righteousness. Polanski’s demons rage inside each one of us, and to shrink so far from the stench of their breath that we can imagine they have a hold only upon him is to put ourselves in danger of dividing our own souls they way Polanski’s defenders divide his. To invoke what may seem a final paradox, the first of Luther’s 95 theses commands us: “The whole life of the believer should be repentance.” Amen.

———-
1. Patrick Goldstein, however, helpfully points out that the real Hollywood powers – studio chiefs and producers, the Spielbergs, the James Camerons, the Grazers – are not touching this one.

2. Winger, who chaired the film festival Polanski was toodling off to in Switzerland, had this to say: “We came to honor Roman Polanski as a great artist, but under these sudden and arcane circumstances, we can only think of him today as a human being . . . we await his release, and his next masterwork.”

3. The question of whether Roman Polanski is an evil man is separate from, but related to, the issue of whether Polanski should be extradited, face a new sentencing, have an new trial, and so on. If he did not ultimately sever it, Martin Luther rendered the relationship between law and righteousness tenuous at best, maintaining that God alone ruled over the soul, and that “where temporal power presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it encroaches upon God’s government and only misleads and destroys.” Rather, Luther proposed his doctrine of two governments: “the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people; and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and the wicked so that they are obliged to keep the peace outwardly.” [i] Protestantism’s pessimism about the human condition combined with its doctrines of grace has left the West with a notion of the law as utilitarian: it exists mainly to prevent us from doing destructive things to each other.[ii] It does not act as God’s policeman or seek to promote virtue; when it tries to do these things it promptly and sometimes spectacularly crashes into ditches.

This argument was sufficiently novel that Thomas Jefferson picked it up, and it’s remained fairly influential in American legal circles, so far as this humble historian of American religion can tell. Legal positivism made the distinction explicit, separating the law consciously from metaphysical claims about good and evil; legal realism, an enormously influential if diffuse and often confusing movement, maintains that the law has more to do with the practical predilections of the people involved in any given legal situation than it does with abstract theoretical or philosophical notions. Thus: what is illegal and what is theologically evil are, and should be, two different things.

i. “Secular Authority,” in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther, Selections (New York: Doubleday, 1961) 370.

ii. For more on this, particularly among the Calvinists, the nerds among you might enjoy John Witte’s The Reformation of Rights: law, religion and human rights in early modern Calvinism. (New York: Cambridge, 2008). Calvin basically adopted Luther’s two kingdoms model, and drew a distinction between “biblical principles” and “biblical laws.” Earthly governments should seek to emulate the first, but could not hope to enforce the second.

4. I spoke about these verses at greater length in the opening section of this post.

5. That’s in Out of the Silent Planet.

6. The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:150-159; also 164: “Implicit in the human situation of freedom and man’s capacity to transcend himself and his world is his inability to construct a world of meaning without finding a source and key to the structure of meaning which transcends the world beyond his own capacity to transcend it.”

7. Nature and Destiny, 1:138.

Call for Papers for SHEAR 2010

Rochester, New York

“Contested Terrain and the Early Republic,” the 32nd annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, will be hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology, July 22-25, 2010. The Program Committee invites proposals for sessions and papers exploring all aspects of the history and culture of the early American republic, together with its northern and southern borderlands and international connections, c. 1776-1860. Proposals that reflect the application of new methodologies or perspectives, or that explore new approaches to teaching and to public history are welcome. Given the conference’s location, we particularly encourage papers and panels that address such themes as the emergence of markets and communications; Native American history; Canada and the Great Lakes region; the 1812 War; religious awakenings; slavery, abolition, the underground railroad, and reform movements; women’s rights; urbanization; consumption; visual culture and the origins of photography. We welcome participants from outside the traditional boundaries of the field.

The Program Committee will consider proposals for individual papers and for full sessions; panels with no more than two papers and two commentators are preferred. We also welcome workshops with pre-circulated papers, or sessions in which panelists assess the state of debate on a topic. Each proposal should include a brief abstract of the session, together with a one-page abstract of each paper and a short C.V. for each participant, including the chair and commentator(s). It should also specify any special requirements, such as audio-visual equipment, outlets, or facilities for disability. Any scholar interested in acting as a session chair or commentator should submit a short C.V. Please note that all program participants will be required to register for the conference. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2009.

Please send submissions to the Program Committee Chair:

Christopher Clark

Department of History

University of Connecticut

Wood Hall, 241 Glenbrook Road, U-2103

Storrs, CT 06269-2103, U. S. A.

c.clark@uconn.edu

It is a mark of the fascination that Joseph Smith inspires in students of religion and religious history (the present author not excepted) to the present day that, despite the plentitude of biographies, specialized studies, movies, hymns, visual art and all the rest that his life has evoked even only in the past sixty years, this volume is still welcome. And perhaps, given that admission, it will not seem harsh criticism to say that the book seems both utterly necessary and yet, in both the whole and in some of its parts, insufficient – not so much to its particular scholarly goals, but to the larger task of apprehending the man. The haunting cover art, a portrait of Smith entitled “Monday, 24 June 1844, 4:15 AM; Beyond the Events,” (a title incorrectly rendered on the back cover of the paperback edition) by the Italian LDS artist Pino Drago, captures the enigma. Smith, rendered in the naïve style, seems simultaneously flat and, perhaps because of that, otherworldly; his hands are powerful, his clothing unnaturally stiff, his face half in and half out of shadow. And his eyes are unreadable.

As with Mormonism in total, academics have generally used historians’ tools to grapple with Smith’s life. And, as editors Neilson and Givens argue – a point Laurie Maffly-Kipp later unpacks with great vigor and clarity in an essay that itself might have served as a good introduction to the collection – too often this strategy has led to a conceptual dead end: “the difficulty of moving beyond the question . . . whether Smith was a prophet or a fraud.” (7) And indeed, much of the work on Smith’s career since Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1946) can be characterized as a war over Smith’s trustworthiness, as scholars skeptical of Smith’s claims have striven for epiphenomenal ways to account for him only to find themselves vigorously rebutted by believing historians. Maffly-Kipp suggests that this problem is perhaps a case of improperly reviving a question that St. Augustine resolved centuries ago when he confronted the Donatists; in a sacramental religion like the one Smith established, exactly how relevant are the personality flaws of the founder? But Maffly-Kipp here sidesteps another issue, and one that suggests the pile of combative monographs could, potentially, rise upward without end. That is, quite simply, the historian’s tools do not equip her to render the verdict. As Robert Orsi has recently noted, the modern discipline of history is premised upon knowledge that footnotes can replicate; what Orsi calls “abundant events,” such as Catholic visions of Mary, overflow such categories, and history (and historians) are too often incapable of dealing with them.[1]

The solution Neilson and Givens propose is to multiply the number of tools in the scholar’s chest. This is wise, and useful. The volume should, one hopes, introduce many historians of Mormonism to a wide variety of other disciplines that will not only enrich their everyday work, but may also indicate new frameworks to approach the seemingly eternal conundrum of Joseph Smith. Included in this collection are essays by literary critics like Richard Dilworth Rust, Givens, and Richard R. Brodhead, students of religious studies like Catherine Albanese, Douglas Davies, Neilson, and Maffly-Kipp, specialists in the Hebrew Bible like Margaret Barker and Kevin Christensen, and Richard Mouw, an evangelical theologian, in addition to historians James Allen, David Whittaker, Richard Bushman, and Klaus Hansen.

Many of these essays are enlightening, and offer the reader a Joseph Smith colored in surprising ways by the shadows of new contexts. The essays Maffly-Kipp and Brodhead provide are already classics, and both, interestingly enough, re-direct us away from Smith himself. To what extent, they ask, can we collapse Mormonism into the seemingly unique ideas and experience of a single man? Maffly-Kipp notes that perhaps Mormonism should be understood not as the faith Joseph created, but as the diversity of experience that followed in his wake. Reid Nielson’s essay on the Mormon encounter with Asia in the nineteenth century, though primarily focused upon the American side of things, offers a tantalizing glimpse of the fruits of such labor. Similarly Brodhead and Wayne Hudson, in another essay, propose readings of Smith that contextualize him in religious ways, as a prophet among prophets, an exemplar of a type. Mormon historians are used, by now, to thinking of Joseph Smith as an American; scholars since Brodie have credited him with the expansive optimism and rough-hewn can-do-ness of the early nineteenth century. The contributions of Catherine Albanese, Klaus Hansen and James Allen indicate that despite the how well trod the path is, there is still more to be gained from such a strategy. Tired as comparisons to Jacksonian egalitarianism might be, rooting Smith in other historical contexts – antebellum constitutional politics, in the case of Allen, and folk culture, in the case of Albanese – still provides us with useful insight. However, as the insights Brodhead and Hudson show, arguments from other disciplines (perhaps because, curiously, most of the great historians of Mormonism until the past decade or two have not been historians of religion) that describe Smith’s religious experience as something other than blazingly unique are still somewhat unfamiliar.[2] Douglas Davies’s essay, relying most particularly upon the theology of Paul Tillich, and that of Richard Mouw, who examines Joseph Smith in dialogue with the evangelical tradition, illustrate usefully the ways such contextualization reveals both the continuities and the divergences of Mormonism’s relationship with the Christian tradition.

All of these essays, and others – Kevin Christensen’s application of the Old Testament analysis of Margaret Barker, giving us a Joseph Smith who reinvented (or, the two would have us believe, revived) Biblical tradition; Terryl Givens’s thoughtful and useful essay positioning Smith as a romantic in the school of no one so much as William Blake, one for whom the process, rather than the result, of religion making was all; Richard Dilworth Rust’s comparison of Smith and Herman Melville, which might be read as an interesting application of Givens’s theory – grandly illustrate the editors’ success at their stated goal: to show, via a “variety of interpretive strategies” that there is much still to be learned about Joseph Smith, and new paths are only beginning to open. (7) The combatants in the old historical wars over his honesty would do well to pay attention.

But despite these frequent observations – by both these scholars and others, such as Bushman – that Smith himself is hardly the total story of Mormonism, scholars (again, perhaps fascinated) frequently have an inclination to paint Mormonism as a heroic and largely theological narrative, an intellectual and religious achievement flooded in every cranny by Smith’s inimitable brilliance. This tendency appears at times in this volume when authors like Givens, who emphasizes – perhaps overly so – Smith’s labors “to free himself from the burdens of theological convention, intellectual decorum, and – perhaps most especially – the phobia of trespassing across sacred boundaries.” (107) In one stroke, Smith here is separated from two thousand years of complex and diverse Christian thought, a wild and overgrown field in which one might struggle to find any consistent “convention.” Hansen offers a similar paean, separating the “Joseph of history” from “Joseph the prophet.” (33) Mormonism as a whole, Hansen posits, offered a set of values and ideas which struggled with evangelicalism for the soul of Americans. When he turns to Smith himself, however, Hansen cites Harold Bloom to label the man as simply a genius, someone whose accomplishments are not reducible to explanation. Both of these arguments, interestingly enough, use the implicit metaphor of the artist – Hansen draws upon Bloom’s poetics, while Givens presents us with a Smith drinking deep of the same cultural mood as Wordsworth and Whitman. The mystery of prophetic genius seems almost Byronic.

But Hansen’s strategy also brings to mind, perhaps, the work of theologians like Martin Kahler, who discuss the division between the “Jesus of history,” whom diligent research might learn about, and the “Christ of faith,” whose power can only be encountered through religious experience. [3] And it is here that we seem to run into the same problem all over again – how much closer have we gotten to the mind and heart of Joseph Smith himself? I do not wish to minimize the value of this collection – it is, in a word, groundbreaking, and I suspect it will be cited as an inspiration for future interdisciplinary studies for years to come. The new strategies these essays offer – of literary criticism and religious studies, wider historical contextualization and philosophical theology – have gotten us closer to what Joseph did and how he did it, and to a deeper understanding of who his contemporaries understood him to be.

But these strategies avoid the questions of truth and inspiration that historians have been beating against for decades. Richard Bushman, in his own thoughtful essay, takes precisely this tack – it is his intention, he states up front, to examine the function of Joseph Smith, not to “explore questions about the sources of Smith’s lasting influence.” (94) This is, perhaps, the best academics can do. But the nagging question still remains, because those sources – the possibilities of visionary experience that Smith experienced, and, as importantly, imparted to followers like Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and others – lie exactly at the heart of who Joseph Smith was. In another context, the eminent theorist of religion Jonathan Z. Smith warned us that if students of religion hid behind words like “demonic” and “crazy” instead of seeking to understand the religious creation of Jim Jones, they might as well abdicate their claim to understanding religion at all. [4] It may be that, as Orsi laments, the critical apparatus given to scholars in the humanities is insufficient to apprehend Joseph Smith, and we must continue to use words like “genius” to describe his puzzle. But, one hopes, the sort of work this volume offers may eventually bring us a sword capable of cutting through the Giordian knot Joseph presents to us.

————-
[1] Robert Orsi, “Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity,” Historically Speaking (September/October 2008) 12-16.
[2] Most such work to date has compared Joseph’s early visions to evangelical conversion experiences; see Richard Bushman Joseph Smith: rough stone rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) 38-40.
[3] Martin Kahler, The So-Called Jesus of History and the Biblical Christ, Carl Bratten, trans. (1892; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964)
[4] Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Devil in Mr Jones,” Imagining Religion: from Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982) 102-120.

(And already, you know this will be long.)

In the context of the Reformation, “piety” is usually used to refer to the introspective, mystical, “heart religion” that emerged most profoundly among German Protestants in the seventeenth century, but also among the English Puritans. The Germans Jakob Boehme and Philip Spener, the Puritan Lewis Bayly, and the Anglican William Law are the important writers here. The two traditions, of course, were not independent; John Wesley owned books by all four of these folks. And he did not only read them; he _used_ them. These writers were not theologians, but pastors. Their works were devotional manuals. They contained not theory, but instruction on how to pray, to read scripture, to meditate; how, in short, to cultivate a personal relationship with God. About twenty years ago, Charles Hambrick-Stowe borrowed Bayly’s title and wrote a book called _The Practice of Piety_, detailing the elaborate patterns of devotion, of worship, of method by which Puritans sought to know their Father, and since, historians have used the term “piety” to describe these devotions. This is not pure theology, but a way of life; not doctrine, but the way to embrace of a loving God, and to feel that embrace returned.

And of course, conversion is the the birth of that relationship.

“Conversion” is a notoriously sticky word, even if we limit it to the religious, and within that, Christian, and within that, Reformed Protestant tradition. The Biblical Hebrew and Greek so translated generally mean something like “turn,” or “return.” In much of Christian theology, it has then not only to do with believing something, but also with, simply, being. Conversion is a change of mind, but also of spirit, a reorganization of the relational networks that we understand ourselves to be in, and even a reformation of our inclinations – those things that our instinct and desires foist upon us. It is a conscious, but also unconscious change. As St Augustine realized, to be converted was not merely to believe in God; rather, it was a series of steps that first began with exposure to knowledge of God, but was followed, by necessity, by knowledge of the self. The second was much more difficult than the first; we can accept God only in the abstract, but to know ourselves in the light of that knowledge is to know of our own fallen and incomplete state, to be aware how much we depend upon the Creator. Evangelicals call this often devastating movement conviction of sin. But, paradoxically, to be convicted is to be freed, to know of your weakness is to plead for God’s grace, and for Augustine, to find that he was no longer ruled by the concupiscence, or desire to sin, that had afflicted him before. Conversion brought him both awareness of sin’s foreignness, but also the spiritual strength to confront it. (Though to what degree remains a matter of debate.)

A sidenote: This is key. It is paramount to understand that ’sin’ as St Paul and other great theologians speak of it, is not wrong action but rather that state of being which prods us to engage in wrong action. Conversion is a transformation of that state. Behaviors themselves, therefore, are secondary expressions, not primary causes. As St Paul asks, wondering why he wrongs others knowing that it’s not what God would have him do:

For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:18-20)

Conversion, then, is a regeneration of this corrupted nature. It is perhaps not its eradication (for Paul, of course, still struggles; a thorn rests in his flesh) but the gift of a new nature that saves from this bondage, and is derived of Christ.

You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. 10But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. (Romans 8:9-10)

So: two questions, drawn from these above paragraphs. 1)what is conversion for the Mormons? and 2)how is it gained?

Eventually we’ll make it to Parley Pratt. Promise.

II.

The archetypical model of the convert is of course Paul, whom God threw stricken to the dirt of the Damascus road. This overpowering religious experience translated his motivations, sense of morality, and even identity in the twinkling of an eye. Many Christians still privilege, or at least value, this sort of charismatic experience. The revivals of the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, among many Calvinist evangelicals and holiness Christians in the nineteenth, and in the spiritual eruptions of Pentecostalism in the twentieth all celebrated conversion as, to use Jonathan Edwards’s language, an outpouring of the grace of the Holy Spirit; or, in the dialect of modern Pentecostalism, the latter rain. Notice the words here; conversion and awakening are not sought or earned or gained. Rather, they come. Here is the echo of Calvinist sovereignty theology and the rigor of Puritan piety. It was conversion as an event unwilled by humans, and instead inflicted, as was Paul’s, by God. Critically, this sort of conversion changes our natures. It makes us something we are incapable of becoming on our own. It is not about acting in a new way, or believing something new – those are incidental effects of a much deeper reorientation of the soul.

These Christians craved such events, but believed they were not theirs to choose; their piety was rigorous, but also, to a certain extent, quietist. They believed in human depravity, and thus that salvation would come only and entirely through a gracious act of God, unearned. They prayed for revival, but ultimately placed their fate in the hands of the Spirit. They did know, however, the channels God had ordained for such experience; as Paul taught, “faith comes through hearing.” (Romans 10:17) God interacted with the world through the Word – the command of creation, the Incarnation of Christ, and the text of scripture. This was why the Bible was a book different from any other; it was why preaching replaced the Mass as the center of the liturgy.

And these convictions invented their piety. “Methodism,” like “Mormonism,” was originally a term of derision, for Wesley and his followers strove to rigorously, or even methodically, pattern their lives following the Word – the hours of their days were marked off by Scripture study, by prayer, and by worship. They desired nothing more than the possibility of a transcendent encounter with the Word, for it was to encounter the saving event embodied in Christ, and it was, if God so chose, to be reborn a Christian, a new person, elected to salvation, and birthed in the Holy Spirit. Conversion changed the Puritans’ natures as it did those of Augustine.

But in the ecstacies of the First Great Awakening lay the seeds of an alternative interpretation of conversion, that flavored not only by Methodist Arminianism (ultimately, the belief that the human will could play a role in its salvation), but by the developing contours of American psychology. The revivalist Charles Finney, who seized the pole position among American evangelicals in the 1830s, believed that human beings were fallen, but also that they were not incapable of accepting the mercy God held out to them. God held out personal regeneration to us; we had only to overcome our sinful natures enough take it. And we could know the truth upon hearing it; this was Common Sense theology. Depravity merely meant that we could not truly choose to do so unless our spirits were sufficiently pummeled. Thus, borrowing from the emotional techniques of the Methodists, Finney reconceived of the conversion event as an emotional choice that people had to be persuaded to make, under duress, if necessary. He thus stared at them with his creepy eyes, exhorted them to weep, called the converted to walk down the aisles and was willing to keep his listeners praying for spiritual manifestation in his tabernacles until late at night, all of which created a sufficiently emotional atmosphere that would invite the Holy Spirit to aid his listeners to the natural reticence of the sinner. This was piety as theatrical technique. (Kathryn Teresa Long’s The Revival of 1857-58 is an interesting study of the wrestling between advocates of these two notions of conversion.)

Finney, and many others influenced by Methodist theology, also amplified the effects of conversion, and ultimately developed a notion of “perfectionism” from a concept called “sanctification” that Wesley had toyed with. That is, as Finney and some of Wesley’s more radical followers eventually concluded, a convert could become so aligned with the Holy Spirit as to eradicate any trace of the sinner’s nature. This could be lost, but also gained. Some Calvinists bought into this were more hesitant, and preferred to speak of “covering” or “subduing” the sinful nature rather than destroying it. Such people were never the majority of American Protestants (and eventually became the parents of today’s Pentecostals) but we see in them perhaps the most dramatic confidence in what conversion could make of a sinner.

Many contemporary evangelicals still concieve of themselves as Finney-ites; Billy Graham and his children are the most famous. But a third conception of conversion Mormons might find relevant emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. The Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell was among those who found Finney’s spin on the conversion-as-immediate-experience distasteful. Rather, Bushnell insisted that if Christians began bringing their children up correctly, they need never know that they were unsaved. Conversion, for Bushnell, was not an event but a process, a gradual weaning away from the selfishness of the natural man toward the faithfulness of the Christian. Thus, piety became domesticated, transformed from the rigorous religious practices of the Puritans toward the moral niceties of the Victorian class. Like Finney, he believed conversion was within human capabilities – that is, conversion is a process we can initiate. Unlike Finney, Bushnell actually minimizes the divine role at all. For Bushnell, Christians did not become such through the abrupt intervention of the Holy Spirit, but through, simply, acting as though they were Christians all along, bathing their lives in God’s grace, line upon line.

III.
Now, which of these models seems most particularly Mormon? This is a more complicated question than it might seem. Mormons tend not to speak of “conversion” as a sort of divine intervention that changes our natures. Conversion, for Mormons, is not the immediate transformation of the fallen soul, but the choice we are all capable of making, given the evidence of the spiritual experience. The Bible Dictionary defines it as the “conscious acceptance of the will of God,” citing Acts 3:19.* Our wills work in tandem with the Holy Spirit; faith is the result of seeking spiritual experience, which experience in turn produces increased confidence in the Spirit, which in turn produces increased spiritual experience. The Preach my Gospel missionary manual speaks of “the witness of the Spirit,” quoting Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve: “”When individuals feel the Spirit working with them, or when they see the evidence of the Lord’s love and mercy in their lives, they are edified and strengthened spiritually, and their faith in him increases.” (93) In this, Mormons would side with Finney against Edwards, though they might find his methods distasteful, preferring the decorum and optimism about human capability that Bushnell offers. And as in Bushnell, there’s little sense of the radical regeneration of a depraved human soul in Mormon language about conversion.

And this is where Parley Pratt might help. Here is what Mormons would generally call his conversion experience.

I opened [the Book of Mormon] with eagerness, and read its title page. I then read the testimony of the several witnesses in relation to the manner of its being found and translated. After this, I commenced its comments by course. I read all day; eating was a burden, I had no desire for food; sleep was a burden when the night came, for I preferred reading to sleep.

As I read, the spirit of the Lord was upon me, and I knew and comprehended the book was true, as plainly and manifestly as a man comprehends and knows he exists. My joy was now full, as it were, and I rejoiced sufficiently to more than pay me for all the sorrows, sacrifices, and toils of my life.

Parley’s is a paradigmatic Mormon conversion experience. It is how things are supposed to work, based, of course, on the claim of the text itself (Moroni 10, of course) and the way Mormons have applied it since; Pratt’s is the model missionaries are taught to pursue with potential converts. As Preach My Gospel instructs, “Reading, pondering, and praying about the Book of Mormon are critical for an enduring conversion,” and “The honest seeker of truth will soon come to feel that the Book of Mormon is the word of God.” (38) But, in light of the way too many words I just wrote, I want to make some observations about what precisely Mormon conversion is.

First, Pratt’s conversion would have sounded entirely typical to an evangelical of the early nineteenth century. It was an encounter with the word as the Word; scripture as the medium of God’s grace. Many evangelicals treated – and still treat – the Bible as a tool of devotion in the same ways Mormons treat the Book of Mormon; studying it, praying about it, speaking of it as a miracle and evidence of God’s benevolence. And finding it a revelation of God.

What might startle Pratt’s evangelical contemporaries was that his experience was less an encounter with the Christ of the Atonement than it is the acquisition of knowledge about the truth of the book itself. He does not report that his experience assured him of his salvation, but rather that it convinced him of a particular metaphysical truth. His conversion was, then, _not_ of a type that evangelicals like Edwards or Finney presented; for them, Parley’s truck would have lurched to a stop halfway. This was not a regeneration, but rather, a coming to knowledge. Parley had learned of the true nature of God’s cosmos, but his own soul had not been reborn. This forces us to reconceive, perhaps, what conversion exactly is to Mormons, and how we talk to evangelical Protestants about it.

All Christians believe that conversion is a process, really; the difference is what parts of that process one compresses and what parts one speeds up. For evangelicals, the moment between the conviction of sin and the reception of grace can be but a breath; the lifelong struggle is the progression toward sanctification. For Mormons, as Pratt demonstrates, conviction has always already occurred; all human beings have what Mormons call the light of Christ, or what Methodists call prevenient grace, setting in them a hunger for the truth. The moment of contact, therefore, is not the plunge into despair followed by the glory of relief that the evangelical conversion is, but rather, a sense of homecoming, and a call to the new life that this knowledge brings. This, more than anything, illustrates the full extent to which Mormons repudiated from the very beginning the depravity of humankind.

Finally (at last), I want to point out one more interesting fact about Mormon piety. In 1737 Jonathan Edwards wrote A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, a work which, along with his later The Life of David Brainard, laid the patterns of evangelical piety – how conversion looked when it happened to people. Pratt’s narrative, along, of course, with Joseph Smith’s own narrative of his search for knowledge of the divine, gave Mormons their own models. And unlike Edwards’s work, which closely tracked the Reformed theology as it manifested itself in the lives of the believers of Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith and Pratt provided in their lives not doctrine, but stories which their followers imitated. Mormon piety, I would argue, is about modeling, and imitation, replication of the behavior experiences of preceding generations in hopes of gaining similar results. It’s why works like Lucy Mack Smith’s history of her son, the Autobiography, and the countless life chronicles that spew forth from the pen of Sheri Dew sell at Deseret Book; it’s why we already had three or four Mormon produced biographies of Joseph Smith before Fawn Brodie first walked into Church Archives; heck, it’s why Joseph’s own autobiography is canonized. The Mormons are not seeking cheap inspiration here; they’re reading how Parley and Joseph and Gordon B. Hinckley and Neal Maxwell were converted to understand how they themselves can be also.

——
*This does not strike me as the most definitive citation; the verse reads ” Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.” But then, that’s how everybody uses Scripture.

Brittany has an MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester (U.K.) and BA in Humanities from BYU. She takes special interest in nineteenth-century life writings (diaries, autobiographies, correspondence) and Utah women’s history. Brittany is currently editing the life writings of Ruth May Fox, which will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2010. She works at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City and likes to do fun stuff–especially if it involves the outdoors, travel, literature, and being with friends and fam. And Red Robin hamburgers.