In sifting through the thoughts that might be relevant to bring to this conversation, it quickly became clear that I wouldn’t be able to form any kind of comprehensive, useful model, or to get the satisfaction that comes with being able to see something as a whole. The differences that Matt articulated in the last post of the series run deep, and seem to impose considerable gulfs between all kinds of people that might try to talk about religion: we occupy largely different worlds. I also came to realize that the blog post is not terribly well suited to interdisciplinary analysis! All I can do here, I think, is try to illuminate a point of contact between the three broad categories we have been discussing – secularism, religion, and education.

Taylor and Matt have explored the three broad topics of this series in a sort of cognitive dimension. Respectively, they have introduced discussion about underappreciated or misunderstood aims and merits of religious education and about the disparate conceptions of religion that often make dialogue about it challenging. I’d like to take a more spatial and atmospheric approach to the topic(s). Most of what I understand about religious education and the secular conceptions prevalent in the Academy is closely tied to the environments where much of the action takes place. Discourse along these lines can (and should, I think) take place generally between groups and people, but often the University seems to be the most visible and determinative arena.

Perhaps the most conflicted places in the academic realm are the Schools of Divinity that exist at many long-established Universities in the United States and elsewhere. Often Divinity Schools (and other religious spaces) are located at the heart of academic campuses; sometimes, though (as at Harvard), these schools have been exiled to the periphery. Unlike many of the chapels that are now more memorial and ceremonial than sacred space, some divinity schools are still struggling forward, trying to reorder and reconstruct themselves in the face of radical reconceptualizations of religion. Although some continue to maintain a traditional theological orientation (and slowly diminish), most have forsaken their theological anchors and embraced the academic study of religion. These now offer degrees that are grounded in a more secular, academic paradigm which conceives religion as a dimension of culture. While some schools continue to offer degrees in ministry, they now are in the wings.

In many ways, the Divinity School here at the University of Chicago epitomizes the evolution of the Divinity School. [1] In others it is relatively unique. Religion has had a special emphasis here from the beginning, when the first University president, William Rainey Harper proclaimed: “We will do religion” – a vague but forceful promise. Despite the fact that the Divinity School was among those that absorbed rigorous, independent academic inquiry from early on, it has stayed relatively close to its initial commission, unlike some other, older schools (in the US) whose original commitment to religion was even more emphatic. Much of this probably has to do with the prominence of scholars of religion that have worked at Chicago, including the likes of William Warren Sweet, Sidney Mead, Mircea Eliade, Martin Marty, Jonathan Z. Smith, David Tracy, and Martha Nussbaum. These scholars have preserved something of the sense of dignity that once widely attended the study of religion. Moreover, even as the School has extended its scope to include all the religions of the world, it has somehow not totally lost track of the beauty and vitality and promise of each.

Interestingly, my experience has also borne out the claim made by the Dean of the School when I arrived: he contended that students in the School enjoyed an “extraordinarily rich” relationship to the broader University. “To be enrolled in this School,” he averred, is to  “be enrolled in this University.” In general, I’ve found that he was right about scholars of religion being able to engage in genuine dialogue with students and faculty across other disciplines. Although religion finds more respect in some domains than others, it generally retains a certain measure of regard. To me this seriousness is the enabling condition that allows for genuine and continuing exploration of religion…an exploration that must respect the viability and humanity of belief. It prompts the question of whether it is possible to take religion seriously without giving quarter to those who believe in it, and if so, how long this seriousness can endure.

Steven Pinker’s comments about religion are understandable but silly. His objection to the presence of religion at Harvard is that religion is fundamentally unrelated to intellectual inquiry, and that the University as a category is not in the business of fostering belief. He may be correct about this, but his conclusions don’t follow. The mode of operation of Universities may now always be intellectual inquiry, but the subjects of that inquiry certainly are not, and yet they remain consummately human. To cut out religion because it strikes one as unviable would be to commit an act of terrific arrogance and to lop off a pulsing (if arational) part of the human experience. Scholars like Pinker embody the attitude that would potentially undermine the study of religion as a practicable enterprise, both for believers seeking a better understanding of how they are embedded in the world, or for scholars who attempt to study religion as a rich and unique dimension of culture. Secularism in the sense of trivialization of religion is hostile to religion in all its forms.

Maybe some of the modern Divinity Schools, far from being the embarrassments they can seem, help demonstrate what religious study should be like. By their heritage and the solemnity that lingers in their architecture and permeates their goings on, perhaps they support the study of religion in ways that are unavailable to modern Departments of Religion. Clearly, though, these environments are happy accidents of history. The key issue that lies before scholars of religion is how to build and preserve such a space and atmosphere with materials at hand today.

Blogs have given occasion to a whole new set of conversations about religion in public life. They represent a tremendous opportunity for publication, discussion, cross-fertilization, and critique of a kind never seen before. In principle, at least, the Internet offers an opportunity to break down old barriers and engender new communities. While the promise is vast, the actuality is only what those taking part happen to make of it.

This report surveys nearly 100 of the most influential blogs that contribute to an online discussion about religion in the public sphere and the academy. It places this religion blogosphere in the context of the blogosphere as a whole, maps out its contours, and presents the voices of some of the bloggers themselves.

Alas, by some oversight the Juvenile Instructor was not among the 100 “most influential blogs” surveyed, but what might the survey imply for the presence of Mormonism in online presentation and dialogue? How does the digital engagement of Mormonism and Mormon history line up with that of that other aspects of religion, from Catholic gossip to church-state activism? Interested parties can investigate here.

Much of Shipps’ genius in Mormonism lay in her steady application of the insights of theorists, which she freely acknowledged. The work of Mircea Eliade, in particular, helped facilitate her treatment of Mormonism from the inside out. His meditations on the social psychology of religion informed her empathetic efforts to understand how the story of Mormonism could be so compelling.

In particular, Eliade’s insights into different appreciations of time in his crucial work The Sacred and The Profane gave Shipps clues about how Mormon history functioned. Eliade argued that with respect to religious belief, time did not function in the “homogenous, empty” way that it typically does in modern thought. Instead, he contended that religious belief could induce a sense of time in which temporal extensions into the past and present collapsed, and certain sacred events were brought into close association with one another. Sometimes this sense was so strong that believers could actually be “present” at these events. “Sacred” time was a concentrated variety, which retained everything “sacred” and eliminated everything “profane.” With this model, Shipps was able to look at world history through Mormonism and to see what was privileged, what was occluded, and ultimately what was said about the origins, the means, and the ends of human experience. In Eliade’s language, she was able to sense how Mormonism delineated between seasons of the world, both “sacred” and “profane.”

Here Shipps wedded Eliade’s insights to the emerging work of Hayden White on the textuality of history. If Eliade showed her how to access the Mormon mind through its collective psychology, White demonstrated how she could engage it through its historical record. Newly conscious that history was very much a construct, Shipps followed the implications of Eliadean theory into the particulars of Mormon history, regarding it as a flexible “text” that could bear analysis. She examined, for instance – in a way that has become commonplace – how the location for Joseph Smith’s First Vision shifted as Mormonism tinkered with its self-explanation. She acknowledged the forces at work behind this, but also pointed out that such a change could be misleading, that for instance it could obscure the “dynamism of the developmental process by which Mormonism’s theological system evolved.”[1] The adjustment tended to collapse time, she noticed, illuminating sacred moments, but leaving little account of interim periods where Mormonism developed, evolved, and unfolded.

Shipps would also identify this phenomenon in larger tracts of the Mormon story. She observed that authorized accounts of Mormon history contrasted periods of murky apostasy with others of blazing light. The result, she said, trying to characterize Mormon history broadly, was that Mormonism had “no recent past at all.” Such an account “left the Saints with an enormous 1,400 to 1,800-year lacuna in their religious history.”[2] In line with her Eliadean approach to history, this period seemed left out because it was “profane.”

In general, popular understandings among Mormons of unenlightened periods in world history seem to bear out Shipps observations. Most common historical narratives leap ahead dramatically after the ministry of the biblical Apostles. A few pause briefly to engage some the “preparatory” developments along the way, but many come to land only in 1830 in upstate New York, blocking out much time and much of the world. It is worth noting that this trajectory coincides with a roughly similar one that historians had long embraced about decline and “darkness” in the middle ages – a view that is only now being reconsidered. In any case, for Mormons, emphasis on the special events of certain periods leads to a remembering of those and a forgetting of others.

Perhaps it is worth asking, though – as Shipps did – what the implications of this version of history are. What are the consequences of cordoning off a period of time – along with its inhabitants – as “profane” or secondary? What injury does this do, if any, to the story? To their story? What richer ones might be told? In a theological sense, what might this practice imply about the worth of souls? The nature of God? Presently, how might this conception influence relations with adherents to other faiths – those with radically different economies of the sacred and profane? How might we be, as Elder Dallin H. Oaks has suggested in this context, “wiser if we could restore the knowledge of some important things that have been distorted, ignored, or forgotten”?[3]

[2] Ibid., 51.

[3] Dallin H. Oaks, “Apostasy and Restoration,” Ensign (May 1995), 84.

Part of the impetus for this informal post was a conversation I had with my grandfather – Douglas Tobler, retired professor of European History – a few months ago, not long after the passing of Bob Matthews. He reminded me then that he and Bob used to carpool from Lindon to work together at BYU. He related a conversation that they once had during their commute about Mormon conceptions of grace, and the reasons why grace has seen so little  emphasis (especially in comparison with, say, born-again evangelicalism).

To me, his account of their conversation raised questions that extend even beyond that important issue, questions that concern how Mormonism has acquired its present theological “shape.” In making their observations about LDS conceptions of grace, these scholars observed that Mormonism was not purely a response, but also a supplement to mainstream Christianity. While it often critiqued particulars of traditional Christianity, it embraced the theology generally and took much of it for granted. Mormonism may have clarified the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, but was largely an elaboration upon that Christian foundation.

The significance of this lies in the fact that as Mormonism developed in a climate of some Christian consensus, there was little need for it to integrate the established essentials of Christianity into itself. Mormonism was built upon an established understanding, the Spirit of the Age, a common Christian sense. Rather than reiterating what was widely known about Christianity, then, Mormonism sought to trace the implications of the Christian Gospel forward, treating the traditional Christian gospel as the engine of something larger. Naturally enough, then, the mainstays of Biblical Christianity went unemphasized in Mormonism. Much that was foundational and widely believed was not formally incorporated into Mormonism; instead it exerted an influence from its prominent place outside, in the public mind.

I’d like to try and trace two examples of this pattern, and I’ll stick to them to keep this short(er), but I’d like to hear about others.

First (to return to the subject of the discussion during the car ride), I’d like to look at the doctrine of grace. I’m not plugged in too well to developments in Mormon theology, but I do know generally that there has been something of a call for a return to grace among Latter-day Saints. For a while now people have expressed surprise (I think rightly) about how little play grace has gotten and gets in Mormon discourse. How could such a foundational element of “Christianity” be so neglected? I think the answer lies at least partly in the mold into which Mormonism was originally cast. There was, of course, an abundant emphasis on grace in both Puritanism and the evangelicalism that replaced it: it was a thoroughly embedded value. Those who came into Mormonism, then, came with an appreciation of grace preprogrammed. And it was against a stark backdrop of grace that works and ordinances were restored. But since there was no reason for Mormonism to restate the obvious, grace remained relatively uninscribed (unwritten, unrepresented) in Mormon discourse, even if it was written on the fleshy tables of Mormon hearts.

Now fast forward. Mormonism has become a standalone establishment. Many of those who participate in it now come from inside it, and many know only what has been said, thought, and written there. Despite teachings about grace in the Book of Mormon, it has had little institutional emphasis, and hearts that contained it formerly have long since gone. The result is something of a strange lacuna in a doctrine that is fundamental to – indeed, thoroughly undergirds – the faith. As it has matured, Mormonism has developed a common sense of its own, and the senses once common among nineteenth century Christians have disappeared.

The other example (and Bob Matthews could tell us a great deal about this, were he still here) is the Bible. It is clear that the Holy Bible played a critical role in early Mormonism, from its role in Joseph Smith’s First Vision to its prompting of revelations, to the subtle significance of its retranslation, and so on. General opinion is that it had much more theological influence in the early church than the Book of Mormon, although there are some calling this into question. As with grace, the original Latter-day Saints arrived on the scene with Biblical Christianity emblazoned on their minds. They were living, after all, in what it usually seen as a “biblical nation” [1]. The Good Book certainly needed no reiteration.

But the Biblical minds among Latter-day Saints are fewer now, and the purchase of the Bible seems diminished.  The deep subconscious sway the Bible once had is fading. In reading the title page of the Book of Mormon the other day I was struck by the subtitle added in 1982: “Another Testament of Jesus Christ.” “Another” implies a precedent, a preexisting “other,” and yet – with the emphasis that the Book of Mormon has received – many Mormons today seem to have lost that initial order of precedence, or reversed it. The Bible’s unspoken centrality is edging toward invisibility, and with it goes the first and fullest account of Christ. The scenes and imagery of the Bible are fainter; presumably, they don’t inform readings of the Book of Mormon or conceptions of Mormon doctrines as vividly as they once did.

How else has Mormonism leaned on other Christian conceptions? What might some of these conceptions be? How has this process affected Mormonism’s subsequent theological “shape”?

Also, these examples stimulate thought, perhaps, about what is not emphasized or written at the present. What do we take for granted and central now that will become foreign and peripheral to subsequent generations? Now that conditions have changed and the pendulum has swung from the nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries, will Latter-day Saints have to reassert elements like grace or the Bible, which were once so much common sense?

A small part of Davis’ purpose (and a central component of the course in general) is to understand how the practice and ideology of slavery became integrated to Christianity, and to understand the way it influenced both the development of Christian theology and the course of Christian practice. Although Davis’ work does not have a particularly religious orientation (he seems, here at least, to focus on the secular social), his work is comprehensive enough to give a summary overview of slavery in Christian thought.

It was as a paradigmatic summary that I found Davis’ discussion of racism and its Christian iterations most interesting. Although it runs against other scholarly opinions and his own previous work, Davis gives great emphasis to the role of the “Curse of Ham” as unquestionably central in the way that racism was taken up into Christianity. (His argument is quite similar to that recently made here at the JI by David G.). Davis does not expend too much energy unpacking the text itself (which has been done exhaustively elsewhere; here seems dependent on secondary literature) or in demonstrating the way that it influenced Christian thought. He does not, for instance, show how the passage or other influences enabled racism to be taken up into Christianity.

Davis does, however, as part of his summary of racism in American Christianity, identify one group that he seems to regard as quintessentially invested in racist discourse: Brigham Young and the Mormons. As a result, Mormonism is situated rhetorically (and perhaps unconsciously), near the forefront of religious anti-black racism in the United States. Given as a solitary example, Mormonism appears to assume a position of prominence and high visibility.

Davis’ rendering, so far as I have been able to see, is representative of general narratives of American racism, which often use Mormonism in this way, typically seizing on popular (that is, widely recognized) statements made by Brigham Young or Joseph Smith to highlight the inroads that racism had made into Christianity. While the focused treatments of American religion, anti-black racism, and the Curse of Ham I have seen do not give Mormonism much play, for some reason broad-brush narratives like Davis’ not only include but highlight it. [2] It seems that for historians writing synthetically about racism and/or slavery, Mormonism is conceived in a uniform, normative way as representing the upper limits of Christian racism. The currency of this idea was demonstrated for me when my instructor, Curtis J. Evans, who published his The Burden of Black Religion with OUP recently and has no interest in Mormon history, invoked Mormonism in this way. [3] In fact, as one of his recommendations for research in the course, he suggested that Mormon anti-black racism might taken up.

Of course, Mormonism and racism have been thoroughly discussed in a number of inflammatory contexts. My interest here is not really to revisit those, but rather to investigate specifically whether Mormonism is fairly represented (in this respect) in broader, mainstream American social and cultural history. Does Mormonism deserve a singular or leading place in discussions of Christian anti-black racism in America? Is it fair to use Mormonism, as Davis and other modern historians seem to do (consciously or unconsciously), to epitomize or symbolize such racism? Might modern concerns with race influence retrospective conceptions of race in earlier eras of Mormonism?

[1] David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), see esp. 69-70.

[2] The works on the “Curse of Ham” and religious anti-black racism that I consulted include: David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Alan Davies, Infected Chrstianity: A Study of Modern Racism (Kingston, AB: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Stephen  R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[3] Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Who are the Nephites? This question hovers over our many different encounters with the Book of Mormon, whether through personal study, group discussion, or scholarly analysis. We search and mine their record and histories for spiritual truths and gospel principles, but we still know very little about a significant civilization that lasted over 1000 years. In the words of Moroni, we speak as if they were present, but we know that they are not.

Some scholars have tried to expand our understanding of the Nephite civilization by grounding them in ancient Near Eastern and Old Testament history. Whether by highlighting Hebraic poetry forms or identifying implicit references to Old Testament rituals and practices, they have teased out internal evidences from text in order to reaffirm the Nephites’ historical existence. Still, these studies reveal very little about who the Nephites actually were: their worldview, their culture, their general way of life.

To suggest one way we might write a “history” of the Nephites, I want to approach the issue of Old Testament roots in the Book of Mormon from a different angle. Rather than “proving” the Book of Mormon’s validity with the Old Testament, I want to explore what the Old Testament actually meant for the Book of Mormon people. The Nephites’ and Lamanites’ relationship with their Jewish heritage is never quite as static as we might assume. Tracing Judaism’s role through the book’s progression reveals how the Book of Mormon civilization steadily moved from a Jewish to a Nephite-centered self identity. It also demonstrates how Christ’s American ministry called them back from their ethno-centrism to a realization of their role as a branch in the larger House of Israel.

Throughout the Book of Mormon’s opening books, the Nephite prophets constantly reaffirm their people’s Judaic heritage, reminding them that they are an extension of the House of Israel. Nephi, for example, refers to the story of Moses a number of times as a template of faith to inspire his brothers and himself (see 1 Ne 4:2, 1 Ne. 17). When he describes his sweeping revelations of the Earth’s present and future, he places the Earth’s population into the two camps of “Jews” and “Gentiles.” He even applies Isaiah’s teachings about the Jews directly to his people, describing the Nephites as “a remnant of the house of Israel, a branch who have been broken off” (1 Ne. 19:24). Similarly, Jacob dedicates a significant portion of his writing to defending why the Nephites should keep the Law of Moses (see Jacob 45-6). He uses the Allegory of the Olive Trees to help his people understand their place in the broad shifts of human–and Jewish–history. As Jerusalem lingers in the Nephites’s collective memory, Nephi and Jacob remind their people that they are still part of their forefather’s religious tradition, and that they have a great history and future running through them.[1]

As time passes, however, there is a marked shift in how Nephite prophets discuss their people’s past and identity. Rather than heavily emphasizing their Jewish heritage, leaders like Alma and Helaman begin to draw on the histories of Nephi, Lehi, and the people of Alma the Elder to establish themselves as Nephites. Their Exodus story is no longer that of Moses and the Red Sea, but of Alma and the Waters of Mormon (see Alma 5:6) or of Nephi and the vast waters he crossed. Likewise, their prophetic instruction becomes much more focused on the specific, contemporary challenges that the Nephites face rather than sweeping revelations that narrate the Israelites’ past and future. To recover the Zoramites, Alma and Amulek do not prophecy about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon unto the Gentiles, but challenges their listeners to exercise faith, to pray mightily, be charitable, etc. (Alma 32-34).[2] As a spiritual analogy, Alma turns as readily to the Liahona as he does to brazen serpent of Moses (see Alma 37, Alma 33:19).[3]

This is not to assume, of course, that later Nephite prophets had completely forgotten their Judaic roots or cared nothing for the House of Israel broadly. Many Old Testament prophets are still referenced to after the Words of Mormon (e.g., Abinadi’s preaching, Alma 33, Alma 34:7, Hel. 8). Yet the purpose of these references are distinct from how Nephi or Jacob would comment on Isaiah, for example. While Nephi applied Isaiah’s words to his people in order to identify them as a branch of the House of Israel, later Nephite prophets turn to Old Testament writers as witnesses of doctrine and of Christ or draw on their teachings for everyday righteous living, like how to pray (see Alma 33). They are not drawing analogizing the OT’s emphasis on Israel with their own people, and they’re certainly not quoting Isaiah (for which Jesus will chastise them–more on that in a minute).[4]

That Nephi is intimately concerned with his people’s Judaic identity isn’t remarkably original, and that the Nephites would generally begin to lose sight of their roots in Jerusalem isn’t terribly surprising, either. What is most fascinating about this general shift is how it helps us reinterpret Christ’s visit to the Nephites. While his arrival in Bountiful is significant in so many ways (it establishes the Book of Mormon as another testament of Christ, it prepares the Nephites for the higher Christian law, etc.), we might forget that his mission was largely focused on recovering scattered Israel–not quite geographically, but spiritually. The Nephites were not only “lost” because they had separated themselves from Jerusalem, but because they had forgotten their role in the House of Israel, and their Shepherd had arrived to return them to the fold.

This restoration of an Old Testament identity might strike us as odd when we read passages of Christ declaring that “the law [of Moses] in me is fulfilled; for I have come to fulfil the law; therefore it hath an end” (3 Ne. 15:5). Surely Christ’s new law, and his end of animal sacrifices, only cemented the Nephites shift from their Judaic heritage to a New World identity? Rather, Christ reiterates, “I do not destroy the prophets…the covenant which I have made with my people is not all fulfilled” (3 Ne. 15: 6, 8). Even as he provides instruction for New Testament ordinances like the sacrament, Christ reminds his Nephite followers of their true heritage: “Ye are the children of the prophets; and ye are of the house of Israel [The last Book of Mormon prophet to use that term was Jacob]; and ye are of the covenant which the Father made with your fathers” (3 Ne. 20:25). He also prophesies about the ways in which their writings will help convert the Gentiles (first time the word has been used since 2 Nephi). He also quotes Isaiah extensively, commanding them to “Search these things diligently…for surely he spake as touching all things concerning my people which are the house of Israel” (3 Ne. 22:1-2). Christ’s connection with Jerusalem and his revival of Old Testament teachings bind the Nephites with the Israelite world that they had left behind and generally forgotten. His instructions and presence reassert their position as a lost but crucial branch in the House of Israel, even as he directs them to a more fully Christian society.

I’ll end with a concluding thought: how might tracing the shifts in Nephite identity reflect our own conceptions of own Mormon heritage? I think we conceptualize our identity in many different ways, whether as restoration of the New Testament church or as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy or as a faith built by the sacrifices of our pioneer ancestors. I’m particularly interested in how the opening lesson in Preach My Gospel about dispensations moves us from being a restoration of Christ’s New Testament church to a restoration of the true church of humanity’s history, linking Adam with Moses with Christ with Joseph Smith. Might we, like Alma and Aaron and Ammon, be reaching back to our earliest ancestor to help maximize the feeling of inclusion within a newly global religion? In any case, I’m anxious to see how we continue to reinterpret our heritage, our roots, and our future.

[2] While passing years will distance any people from its heritage, I believe part of this shift is due to the Nephite’s missionary efforts during this period. While Ammon, Alma, and the rest are trying to reach the hearts of the Lamanites and the Zoramites, the predominant Old Testament figure of the Book of Alma is not Moses but in fact Adam. This paramount symbol of universal humanity would be far more relatable to a crowd still bitter about their departure from Jerusalem, and this shift in seminal persona is marked by a demphasis in preaching about “tribal” themes, like the Israelite restoration and the Nephite’s mission to the Gentiles, and an upswing in “universal” topics like the resurrection, faith, and personal conversion.

[3] And unlike Lehi, they no longer name their children after Old Testament figures like Jacob and Joseph, but after their “first parents who came out of the Land of Jerusalem,” Nephi and Lehi (see Hel. 5:6).

[4] To understand this reshaping of Nephite heritage from a different perspective, note how major anti-Christ figures throughout the Book of Mormon often situate themselves in direct opposition to Old Testament practices, prophecies, or to Jerusalem altogether. From Sherem (who claims that Jacob has led the Nephites to “keep not the law of Moses” and “pervert the right way of God”) to Korihor (“I do not teach this people to bind down under the foolish ordinances and performances which are laid down by ancient priests”) to the people right before Christ’s coming (who, with classic American enthno-centrism, can’t believe that Christ wouldn’t “show himself unto us as well as unto them who shall be at Jerusalem…a land which is far distant, a land which we know not”), the most wicked of the Book of Mormon are consistently reviling against or undermining the Law of Moses itself and the very land and heritage that they come from.

Ben’s previous post was an effort to highlight the “personal agenda” behind Parley Pratt’s writing of his Autobiography. He outlined two chief forces behind its production: Parley’s desires (conscious or not) to relive and revive his preeminent influence in the Church, and to give a revisionist account of its history more favorable and forgiving to himself. To those two well-reasoned general motives, I would like to add a third fundamental impetus – one that was relatively unique to Parley as an individual.

When approaching Parley’s writings, especially his curious Autobiography, it is important to recognize that he saw himself as part of the literary world. From the time that he published his first collection of poems and hymns in 1835, Parley was consciously embarked in a literary career. As a child he had clamored for “a book! a book!” at every moment of leisure; as an adult he converted his enthusiasm for literary consumption into literary practice.[1] His writings suggest that he was both conscious and fond of the elevated tradition in which he was participating. He realized that in writing he was contributing both intellectually and artistically to the public sphere. He took up his pen in earnest.

If we attempted to associate Parley with a literary movement, he would come down squarely in the Romantic camp. Before turning to religious themes (which obscure his Romantic tendencies), his poetry was sentimental, introspective, and interested in nature and the sublime. In 1836 on his way to preach in Canada he stopped to behold Niagara Falls. Later in prison, he would recall the memory of this impressive visit to write his “The Falls of Niagara” (reprinted in the Autobiography). At the time, the Falls were a touchstone for Romantic culture – a “gateway to transcendence on the grandest scale imaginable,” or, in Parley’s words “a lively emblem of eternity.”[2] They became a symbol of the great scale and awesomeness of the American landscape. Scores of Romantics such as Margaret Fuller made the same pilgrimage Parley did, and versified similar epiphanies. While different literary trends began forming in Victorian Britain, Romanticism lingered in America.

In the microculture of Mormonism, Parley’s literary efforts flourished. Mormonism gave him a ready set of themes with which he could write and experiment. Using these, he ventured – in literary fashion – through a variety of genres, from poetry, hymnody, and essay to drama, satire, polemics, history, theological treatise…and finally to autobiography. Although much or most of what Parley wrote was didactic, he did not see the orientation of these writings as preventing them from being his own “literary” works and part of an independent corpus. He claimed both their authorship and the prestige of their publication, carefully ensuring that he obtained a copyright for each.

In addition to topics and themes, Mormonism provided Parley with a ready and supportive audience and a public to represent. Having elevated himself to a degree of education through study, Parley joined the ranks of a small Mormon intellectual elite. In a concentrated Mormon society, as in the larger general one, literary activity brought regard and social standing, and Parley eagerly embraced his position as a microcultural leader. He shared this standing with a few other lettered Saints, including his brother Orson, William W. Phelps, and eventually Eliza R. Snow. In his mind, this social position probably blended with his ecclesiastical office as an Apostle. His authority was at once literary/intellectual and ecclesiastical.

If, as Ben suggested, Pratt employed the Autobiography as a tool for renewing and remaking himself as part of the Mormon past, he may have been inspired by his literary counterparts. Autobiography as a distinct genre was a new development of the late eighteenth century. It became established (particularly in Britain) as the Romantic emphasis on individualism drove the reading public to call for more personal details about their leading figures. In fact, it has been observed that the rise of biography and autobiography is “one of the most significant features of the literary culture that defines the Romantic movement.”[3] Literary notables (like Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) used popular interest to their advantage by producing autobiographical accounts of themselves intended to enlarge their public stature and mythologize their pasts. Moreover, Romantic writers were particularly afflicted with the longing to immortalize themselves both in print and in the public memory.[4] This particular use of the genre was in some ways different from the way that autobiography had been used previously in Britain and the way it was being used in contemporary America. In these other contexts, autobiography was typically used for social commentary and criticism, not public relations.[5]

Recognizing that Parley regarded himself as part of the literary tradition and as a public intellectual helps us understand that his decision to compose an autobiography grew (at least partially) out of this sense of self. Parley’s conception of the Autobiography – quite unusual in America at the time – seems related to contemporary trends of self-making in Romantic literature. As a self-styled literatus, Pratt would have seen such a project as quite becoming. After all, an autobiography was the natural capstone to a Romantic writer’s life.

Although aesthetics and empathy, not faithfulness to history, are the driving forces behind this production, it is compelling, even to the historical mind. And it’s especially significant for its intended lay LDS audience.

In any case, if you’re in Provo in the next week, it’s worthwhile. More information available at http://newplayproject.org/season/2009/fading-flower/.

If to some it seems presumptuous to call Joseph Smith a prophet, it will probably seem downright asinine to suggest that he was a poet too. And yet that’s the proposition I’d like to put forward in this post. The typical narrative renders Joseph as the unlearned ploughboy that he was, who could, as Emma assures us, hardly write a well-worded letter. But anyone who’s looked at how Joseph actually spoke and wrote (including anyone who’s followed along at all in the Gospel Doctrine course recently) knows that he used language in some interesting ways, ways that for some reason we do not often see language being used nowadays in the Church.

In reviewing his “teachings” and statements in the past year or two, it’s seemed to me that Joseph Smith’s language – both his words and manner of expression – is sometimes fundamentally unlike that of most subsequent Church leaders. It is lively, vivid, explorative, unconstrained, unregulated. He does not subscribe to an established code of language; rather, he often uses the language he has at hand in unprecedented, unconventional (sometimes ostensibly incorrect) ways. Where subsequent leaders have since relied on and standardized the linguistic concepts he laid down, he first had to make/articulate them.

Joseph, it seems, was not beholden to extant forms of language any more than residual forms of religion. He used language to circle round ideas, coming nearer to them and striving to sketch them more clearly with each new iteration. Like Emerson he was not interested in a “foolish consistency” of speech and was willing to use “words as hard as cannonballs” though they might contradict what he had said before. Like Samuel Clemens he would have had no respect for a man who only knew one way to spell a word – or one way to articulate an idea. Rather it seems he delighted in using the full arsenal of what language he had to expose the many facets of his truth. He recognized that no one expression would suffice, and acknowledged – in a way remarkable for his time – the “pliability” of words and language [1]. As a result, his expressions were continually innovative and plural, coming at a central point of meaning from a variety of angles. From the Wentworth Letter comes a passage that seems to typify this practice:

The Father of our spirits [provided] a sacrifice for his creatures, a plan of redemption, a power of atonement, a scheme of salvation, having as its great objects the bringing of men back into the prescence of the King of heaven, crowning them in the celestial glory, and making them heirs with the Son to that inheritance which is incorruptible, undefiled, and which fadeth not away [2].

Where the grammar of our doctrine today is often reductive, Joseph’s seems almost multiplicative. It registers that the grandeur of God’s plan cannot not be delimited in a single effort or by static symbols. For Joseph, Christ’s actions would be only partially grasped through the label of ‘Atonement’; today ‘Atonement’ seems often seems beyond question as a sufficient term. We hold ‘testimony’ forward as an inclusive tag for personal religious conviction, but it seems unlikely that Joseph would have been satisfied with it. Probably he would have ranged about until he found another that cut against the grain of convention and became richly suggestive. Certainly all this contributes to the challenge of pinning Joseph down as a theologian.

The question, of course, is even if this is true, what does it have to do with poetry? Some of the most lyrical moments of the revelations or his own observations, may have approached the poetic, but Joseph’s writing cannot be classed as poetic under any usual system. While considering this tendency of Joseph Smith to introduce new relations between words and ideas that I encountered Percy Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry. The essay was a piece of early literary theory (written in 1821) patterned after Philip Sidney’s 16^th century work of the same title and intended to show the enduring virtues of poetry for a modernizing world. In speaking of poetry, though, Shelley does not refer simply to literary form: he means the broader functions of language in human life.

According to Shelley, a poet is not primarily an aesthetician: he is a revelator. (The idea, of course, is not unique to Shelley.) The calling of a poet, not unlike a prophet, is to facilitate access to the hidden realms of the world through the use of language. In fact, Shelley suggests that poets have a prophetic pedigree, since they “were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets.” Not merely writers, poets are “the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and [their] teachers.” Thus the category of “poetry” is much broader than we might expect. According to Shelley, it performs the following functions:

[Poetry] awakens and enlarges the mind…by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects as if they were not familiar; it reproduces (recreates) all that it represents;

The language of poets “marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes or thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts”;

and perhaps most poignantly:

[Poetry] purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures us from the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration [3].

Despite the ambiguity we as modern readers find in Shelley’s 19^th century prose and our awareness that his insights must be now be reevaluated with more sophisticated theories (structuralism, deconstructionism, etc.), we gather from these statements that he sees poetry as the renewal/revivification/revelation of the surrounding world through uses of language. Through the administration of language – by making new connections between words, ideas, and hidden truths – the poet discloses new and exciting ‘religious’ knowledge.

However else Joseph functioned as a prophet, such a project does not seem to me all that far removed from his activities with language. He thought of words as media that could be discarded, appropriated and reapplied. His revelations (new ‘combinations’ or ‘relations’ of thought) needed new configurations of language to clothe them and to underscore their power.

On the other hand, in the modern church, there seems to be little of this innovation. Some of the reasons for this are understandable. For a theology to be coherent and durable, it must necessarily retain some kind of core terminology where terms like ‘Atonement,’ ‘first principles and ordinances,’ etc., play a part. With the expansion of Church, a need for standardization is legitimate, and managing the language of the ‘gospel’ presents a significant challenge in one language, let alone many. Beyond this, most of us feel a certain allegiance to the language of scripture. Finally, when Church leaders license variety they are always in danger of propagating “another gospel.”

Still, I can’t help feeling that in our dialogue in the Church we could use a bit more poetry; a little less leaning on conventional words and phraseology and a little more of the immersion in meaning that Joseph demonstrated. Dead language – cant – is the nemesis of every poet and prophet. To the extent that the familiar language “blunts” our perceptions of the invisible world, perhaps we ought to lay it down and make something new.

_______

[1] Bushman gives Joseph’s thoughts on language a glance in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005), 173-174. Givens also relates Joseph to theories of language in By the Hand of Mormon (Oxford: OUP, 2002). See especially pages 80-89 and 209-214.

[2] “Wentworth Letter” quoted in Teaching of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, 52.

[3] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 837-850.

This post is loosely a continuation of my previous one (regarding Mormonism and Anglo-American cultural conflict); both are part of an effort to examine the dialogic relationship between early Mormonism and larger elements of early American culture.

The primary impetus for this post was my recent reading in Daniel Walker Howe’s “What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848,” where Howe makes a claim that Mormons of that period “embraced a particularly extreme version of American exceptionalism.”[1] The claim is striking to me because it seems to casually (and perhaps uncritically) connect Mormon attitudes to the much larger and longer tradition of American claims to divine favor.

For me, Howe’s claim raised some intriguing new questions. Mormonism, like many other religious traditions, certainly contains an exceptional element, which over time has given it both strength and trouble. But was and is this exceptionalism related to the American variety? Was early Mormonism somehow tied, as Howe suggests, to that sense of Providential sanction surrounding the great American political experiment or earlier theocratic projects? Is Mormon theology tied to American nationalism? In a modern environment where American exceptionalism is becoming ever more frowned-upon, and where the LDS Church is going global and yet is still often regarded as an arm of corporate or imperial America, these questions seem worth asking.

By almost all accounts, American exceptionalism originated in American Puritan theology. John Winthrop’s oft-cited vision of a “city upon a hill,” is perhaps its exact point of genesis, although that prophecy owed much of its power to the Biblical experiences of Israel. In this sense, American exceptionalism was simply an appropriation of earlier Biblical themes. In any case, the Puritans fully expected to set up the Kingdom of God, and their confidence in themselves as equal to the task has colored America’s sense of self ever since, though in ways that are hard to track. Basically, we might say that the convictions about the elect/millennial role of America that seemed so literal to the Puritans gradually moved to the realm of metaphor in American religion (with some exceptions). The explicit references to America as God’s new Israel were softened. The ideas also gravitated to politics, creating the liminal realm of “civil religion,” which vaguely blended religion and politics and rested, at bottom, on the old exceptionalist myths. From this position, American exceptionalism has exerted an incredible amount of influence on a wide range of activities in American history.[2]

However, Mormonism, Howe might say, went against this quiet diffusion after some two hundred years and defied it. Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon apparently reconnected it to its literal, prophetic, religious roots. The cultural question, then, is if Mormonism – seen as an “afterclap” of Puritanism (for this very reason?) by Mark Twain and Emerson, and acknowledged a kind of “reenactment” of Puritanism by Terryl Givens – really shares much of Puritan thinking about America.[3]

I think it clear that it does – the Book of Mormon of course presents the American continent as a promised land reserved as a place of inheritance for God’s faithful. America is the site of the New Jerusalem and the place of gathering preparatory to the Second Coming of Christ. Like the Puritans, Mormonism applies Biblical prophecy to itself, consciously designating itself a new Israel. Clearly it foregrounds America in many of its texts and doctrines.

If Mormonism does partake of American exceptionalism– and it seems evident that it does (at least of the type the Puritans articulated) – this invites us to ask a thornier question: How tied is Mormon theology to other forms of American exceptionalism that have become American nationalism? Does Mormonism inherently have a political commitment? This is a loaded question which draws on the a whole range of anxieties: those that attend our postcolonial age, those that surround the separation of Church and State, and those which inform the expanding politics of a global Church.

It seems to me (I’m sliding into speculation about the present…) that while Mormonism acknowledges that America has an exceptional place in global history, the significance of that exception – despite Church members who conflate their theology with civil religion – is quite small. While Mormons may have a long tradition of exceptionalism (Givens traces it back to the apostasy rhetoric of the First Vision), and even of participation in American exceptionalism, their theology has a surprisingly limited commitment to America as a political entity. And it is political imagination, according to Benedict Anderson, that is at the heart of nations and nationalism.[4]

Two brief notes, one historical, one doctrinal, that I think bear upon this point. First, I cannot overlook Brigham Young’s willingness to leave the United States of America in order to find a place of refuge from persecution. This would have been unthinkable if Mormon theology was significantly anchored to the American Republic.

Second, while the Book of Mormon does emphasize the Americas as an insuperable land of promise, it also recounts the consequences of people who polluted it and were swept off. Readers of the Book of Mormon do not come away from this account with a sense of superiority or egotism, but rather with an awareness that its God is truly no respecter of persons. The commitment here is to geographical, not ethnic, America.

 I’d appreciate your insights to other doctrinal or historical points that might be relevant here.

[2] Deborah Madsen contends that this discourse “permeates every period of American history, and is the single most powerful agent in a series of arguments that have been fought down the centuries in defining America and Americans.” See her American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998), 1.

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, as qtd. in Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Emerson was parroting Mark Twain to vague effect.

[4] Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).