Recently, there has been a spate of work about how Mormons have been perceived in American popular culture.  Spencer Fluhman recently published A Peculiar People, which explores the role that anti-Mormonism played in defining what counted as “religion” in the United States in the nineteenth century and what was dismissed as fanaticism and lunacy. J.B. Haws will also be publishing a book on the Mormon image in the twentieth century with the same publisher next year.  Cristine Hutchinson-Jones and Megan Goodwin have both written about the public perception of Mormonism on this and other blogs.  (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Although I have used a lot of this work in my dissertation and have found their analyses of American culture to be insightful and incisive, I am still conflicted about the way that they portray critics of Mormonism.  Most of the work that has been published about perceptions of Mormonism as focused on the how Americans as a whole perceive Mormonism.  There is little attention paid to regional variation.  As a result, a lot of the contest over the meaning of Mormonism that happens within Mormon circles and within the Intermountain West is lost.  According to most analyses of public perceptions of Mormonism, most Americans now see Mormonism as naïve, overly friendly, and slightly odd.  They are people who have been duped and who believe bizarre things – in planets called Kolob, in Jews who traveled to America, and in golden plates.  As Cristine and Megan have also pointed out, there is a darker side to contemporary portrayals of Mormonism.  Mormons are seen as uniformly conservative and as blocking progress in regards to the status of women and the rights of sexual minorities.  Books like Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven have also portrayed Mormons as potentially violent and disruptive.  Although both of these portrayals are common within American culture, as a whole, the latter is much more common in my experience among those who have lived in the American West than among the American populace as a whole.

For people living in the wider United States, Mormonism is a small, minority religion that is mysterious and slightly odd.  For those within the Intermountain West, however, Mormonism is a powerful entity.  Growing up, I felt that the Mormon Church controlled not only local politics but also the tenor of my education, the standards by which my morality was judged, and discussions about religious faith.  Every year, I endured missionary week when the local seminary encouraged its students to spread the gospel to their friends.  I sat quietly as my teachers told us skipped over evolution and sex ed as inappropriate topics for discussion, and I listened as a Mormon student prayed at graduation on behalf of the entire graduating class.  My non-Mormon friends and I responded to the ever-presence of Mormonism within our lives by reading A LOT of anti-Mormon literature.  I first learned about the temple and what happened inside from Deborah Laake’s Secret Ceremonies, which I read as a junior in high school.  Likewise, my introduction to Mountain Meadows came from exmormon.org.  Whenever my Mormon friends tried to witness to me about Mormonism, I asked them about Joseph Smith’s polygamous wives, the Kinderhook plates, the Masonic meaning of the green aprons in the temple, the priesthood restriction, and about the lack of physical evidence of an Israelite civilization in the Americas.  I rolled my eyes when my friends eagerly told me about how Mayan temples were proof that Lamanites had existed and responded that the Book of Mormon contained several anachronisms including references to horses and steel.  I was insufferable and hot headed, at times.  I assumed that I knew more about Mormonism than my Mormon friends did.  My non-Mormon friends and I occasionally mocked the faith of our Mormon friends when they weren’t around.  What made our actions different than anti-Mormonism in the rest of the United States is that we didn’t think that we were attacking a small cult or ridiculing a marginalized religious group.  We saw ourselves as speaking truth to power.  For us, the Mormon Church was THE CHURCH.  All of us had Mormon family members.  All of us had experienced endless bouts of proselytizing, and all of us had been judged as slutty or less than for not living up to modesty and health standards that we hadn’t agreed to.  Our understanding inverted the power dynamic assumed by much of the literature on public perceptions of Mormonism.  We saw evangelical Christianity and Protestantism as a minority religion in danger of being snuffed out and Mormonism as the dominant force determining our lives.

The assumption that the church is all-powerful pervades a lot of anti-Mormon literature published by authors from the Intermountain West.  Although some people from the Intermountain West like Bernard DeVoto or John Fitzgerald published humane accounts of Mormonism, others like Ed Decker,* Jerald and Sandra Tanner,** and even John Krakauer*** reflect the bitterness and sense of powerless that I felt as a teenager.  Even saner accounts of Mormonism written by ex-Mormons or non-Mormons from the Intermountain West often contain the sense that the church, rather than being a marginalized community, is a powerful entity with the ability to control the political landscape.  Sonia Johnson, for example, saw herself as fighting against an opponent with enormous political and financial power.****

The writings of ex-Mormons and non-Mormons from the Intermountain West have been enormously influential in the way that Mormonism is portrayed within academia and American culture.  Krakauer’s book, for example, was a national bestseller and Decker’s film The God Makers is available in various clips and formats on You Tube.  Hits for the various versions vary from 60 or 70 views to over 14,000.  Understanding their influence on public perceptions of Mormonism ultimately requires understanding the internal dynamics of communities within the Mormon Corridor.  Although Krakauer’s book can be placed within a wider history of American depictions of Mormonism as violent, it can also been seen as part of a paranoia among non-Mormons in the American West with the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the wrongs done to non-Mormons in Utah and Idaho.  This is as important for historians studying the nineteenth century as it is for historians of the twentieth.  Ann Eliza Young, Fanny Stenhouse, and Charlotte Cobb Godbe were all former Mormons who saw themselves as critiquing a community from which they had come.  Although they often used language similar to critiques in the East Coast, it is important to understand their arguments as part of a conversation emerging within a particular community.  None of these women were originally outsiders to the Mormon community.  In fact, all of them were in one way or another related to and part of Brigham Young’s family.  Bonus points to anyone who can tell me how the Stenhouses are related to Young.  If we treat their work as simply another depiction of Mormonism, we miss out on what is truly going on.

* Ed Decker converted to Mormonism while at the University of Utah.

** Jerald and Sandra Tanner currently live in Utah. Edit: It has been pointed out to me that Jerald Tanner passed away in 2006.  Although I knew that he had passed away a few years ago, for some reason, it didn’t pop into mind as I was describing him as living in Utah.  Tanner’s death was caused by complications from Alzheimer’s.

***Although not from Utah or Idaho, Krakauer has lived in Oregon and Colorado and grew up as he puts it “among the Mormons.”  He has also been involved in efforts to provide homes to boys who are abandoned by their polygamous families.

****Sonia Johnson is from Malad, Idaho.

In the 2012 US presidential campaign candidate Mitt Romney was frequently described as a robot or robot-like. Mormons in general are sometimes compared to robots, the Borg (a cybernetic species from Star Trek), or Stepford Wives. In this post I will look at some of the context for using robots to describe people, particularly when those people are Mormon. [1]

When I said “look at” in the last sentence, I meant it in the most weasel-wordy sense I can muster: what follows isn’t so much an argument but a first-draft ingredient list for an argument to be made by future historians of representations of religions.

Romney is not the first politician to be called a robot—not even the first Massachusetts governor—nor are Mormons the only religious group so described. [2] That said, I assert that the association of Mormons and robots is “a thing” and not merely a one-off figure of speech. I haven’t counted, but I easily found multiple examples spread over years and in many contexts. [3] There appears to be a non-random phenomenon that calls for explanation.

Mormon Robots are probably not a new idea, but a reimagining of an old one—coerced conversion and dehumanization—which has been associated with Mormonism for most of its history. [4] This latest reimagining probably descends from its nineteenth-century antecedents modulated by, for examples:

• WWII German “robot bombs” [5];
• Cold-War Manchurian candidates and Chinese/Korean brainwashing;
• Margaret Singer, Edward Hunter, and the Robot Theory in the Anti-Cult Movement;
• Criminal trials with “Robot Theories,” such as for Patty Hearst, the Manson “family,” [6] and others [7]; and
• Zombie literature.

Perhaps the most significant contributors to popular discourse about anthropomorphic robots are fiction books and movies, which have, so far, kept generations ahead of actual developments in the technology. Isaac Asimov, inventor of the word “robotics,” anticipated some of the Mormon-related themes of the 2012 US Presidential election in his collection, I, Robot.

• Can a robot with different postulates (ie, religion) but superior technical ability be relied upon? (“Reason.”)
• Can a robot overcome entrenched technophobia, bigotry, and the uncanny valley (though Asimov does not call it that) and attain elected political office? (“Evidence.”)
• Is the potential takeover of humanity by robots a conspiracy or the unavoidable result of scattered, independent robots following their programming? (“The Evitable Conflict.”)

In Asimov’s Foundation-series universe, a significant portion of humanity rejects robots (eg, Caves of Steel). The technophobia could be read as a stand-in for anti-Semitism and other versions of religious prejudice. [8]

I haven’t attempted to parse it exhaustively, but it seems that robot metaphors convey five general, not-necessarily-exclusive, not-necessarily-compatible ideas. The target is:

1. Physically awkward: unable to move smoothly (as in “The Robot” dance)
2. Socially awkward: tries hard to fit in but seems emotionally fake [9]
3. Indomitable, invariable: displays machine-like perseverance, strength, or precision [10]
4. Mass-produced: looks and sounds like “all” the others in Happy Uncanny-Valley
5. Non-autonomous: unable to think or act for themselves, showing sub-human mental ability or emotional range (usually due to trauma) [11]

I have noticed versions 2-5 applied to Mormons. Romney was probably associated most prominently with #2, the socially awkward robot—though his hair seems to have garnered a fair amount of attention as the indomitable #3. I imagine that Romney’s wealth had as much to do with these characterizations as his Mormonism.

So… why robots? One reason is that robots and their ilk are popular in many contexts. Cylons, the Borg, the Terminator, droids and clones in Star Wars, Transformers, and so on, fill screens and pages. It is not unreasonable that such a wide-spread idea should spill into religious and political spaces.

In many cases, I think using a robot metaphor in an American political or religious context goes beyond simply complaining about single-issue or block voting: it impugns the humanity or American-ness of the target. With individuality widely-accepted as an essential American attribute, being “a robot” carries particularly un-American connotations for hearers across political spectrums. [12]

In some ways, the robot label allows those who favor, for example, labor unions or the military, to criticize a particular collective action without criticizing collectivism itself. _Our_ collective action is a community coming together to stand up for itself; _their_ collective action turns them into sub-human robots.

Robots might also useful for metaphors because they are simultaneously mockable and dangerous. Mormons are presented in some cases, for example, as too unsophisticated and too inauthentic (#1-3) to order (non-alcoholic) drinks at a bar and relax but sophisticated enough to subvert the political process (#4-5).

I think there is probably also an uncanny-valley reaction that makes the robot association close to instinctive: in some ways it is easier to deal psychologically with those who believe and vote differently than “we” do if “they” look and act differently and go to different universities (or don’t go at all).

For each entry I looked at the health of three ‘people’: the diarist, their companion, and anybody else. I categorized the cause (illness, injury, insect bite, etc) and ranked the degree of influence on the diarist’s work that day from 1 – no impact, to 4 – severe impact. [2] Below is a table summarizing how often the missionaries reported some type of medical incident.

The big culprits were malaria(-like fevers) and boils/abscesses. I hope to produce more detailed analyses later, but for now, my first impression is: missionary health was a big deal, at least in July.

Faculty/academic calendars are off-sync with much of the rest of the world. For me, the year starts over each May, when classes end. There’s a magical window between the end of my Spring term and the end of my childrens’ school year when I actually get some writing and the bulk of my course planning done. Our university also holds a modest faculty institute in mid-May, and although I’m usually present in body, I’m often using the time to brainstorm on my laptop about future classes and reflect on how the year went so I know what to change (or keep) for the fall. This year I’m organizing a session of advice for junior faculty on the tenure track for our summer institute. We have had a happy couple of years where new full-time faculty have arrived not in a trickle but by the dozens, and so such conversations are more needed than ever (especially given the byzantine schedule for tenure/promotion, set by our statewide faculty union contract). The session will be partly focused on the nuts and bolts of the tenure process, but also more broadly on junior faculty life/work balance and on making smart, strategic decisions about how to make best use of our limited time and resources here (we have a 4/4 load, with about $700 for professional development per faculty per year).

My advice will likely include some of the books I’ve found invaluable (especially Donald E. Hall, The Academic Self, and Kathleen F. Gabriel, Teaching Unprepared Students), as well as tools I can’t do without for streamlining routine processes, most of which have silly names (Dropbox, Gmail canned responses, Flipsnack, Slideboom, WordPress, Respondus, and Zotero). I’ve learned about most of these from being a regular reader of the ProfHacker blog. I’ve also developed a mental calendar which I thought I’d share here too. While some of this is particular to my campus community, hopefully it’s easily adapted to anyone thinking about how to organize their time as part of college faculty.

This calendar starts in May, but of course, stay ahead of any rolling deadlines: campus calendars, professional membership renewals, conference proposal submissions, grant deadlines, etc.

May & June

• Write end-of-year report to chair/dean
• Update CV
• Finish up committee work
• Summer Faculty Institute at our Center for Teaching and Learning
• Year-end self-reflection: what worked? What didn’t? What to change next year?
• Participate in yearly program assessment within the department (i.e. assess collected student work from this year)
• Make sure books are ordered for Fall
• Tentative syllabi, “back end” documents like coursebuilders and governance forms
• Academic writing projects
• Organize files; discard saved Fall semester student work

July & August

• Regenerative reading, travel, writing
• Course planning
• Refine syllabi for Fall
• Put course materials online, build out Blackboard shells
• Write binder narratives for reappointment/tenure/promotion materials
• Consider participating in transfer student advising

September

• Post office hours; connect with old/new advisees
• Check upcoming conference & journal submission deadlines
• Set goals
• Identify campus service priorities

October

• Send any new courses into governance
• Prep for the advising season
• Finalize courses and books for Spring term
• Arrange for classroom visitations if needed for your personnel action

November

• Pre-reg advising for Spring

December

• Check on courses in governance
• End-of-term reflection
• Organize files; discard saved Spring student work

January

• Winter Faculty Institute at our Center for Teaching and Learning
• Consider participating in transfer student advising
• Dedicated time for academic writing projects
• Refine syllabi; put course materials online or build out Blackboard shells
• Post office hours once classes resume

February

• Prep for advising season
• Finalize courses and books for Fall term

March

• Notify chair/Provost re: personnel action for the upcoming school year
• Arrange for classroom visitations if needed for your personnel action

April

• Pre-reg advising for Fall

This year, we will be reading Neylan McBaine’s piece from FAIR on women’s lives and the governance structure of the church.  We have paired it with Lisa Thomas Clayton’s essay on revelation from Mormon Women Have Their Say, edited by Claudia Bushman.  Although both pieces focus on contemporary issues, we have put them together in an attempt to ask questions about how we think about agency and should approach the lives of religious women in history.

We are not attempting to have a discussion about the priesthood or ordination, although such issues may certainly come up, but to think about how these discussions of contemporary women’s lives might inform our historical practice.   I also like to formally invite anyone who is interested, whether they are young or not so young, male or female, an academic or an amateur historian.  One of the things that we have hoped to have from the beginning with this group is the participation of a wide variety of people, so that we have the opportunity to engage in academic dialogue not just with other women but with the range of people we will encounter in our studies.  We are especially hoping to have a few established scholars and women there to serve as mentors and examples.

We will be meeting on Thursday, June 6^th @ House of Brews in Layton at 4:30 p.m.  We hope to see everyone there!

As we continue this month to consider images of Mormonism in popular culture, the Juvenile Instructor is pleased to host guest blogger Megan Goodwin. Megan is currently completing her PhD at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Her research interests include American religions, gender and sexuality, religious language and literature, religious alterity, and contemporary critical thought. Her dissertation, entitled “Good Fences: American Sexual Exceptionalism and Marginal Religions,” examines three captivity narratives – Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987), Michelle Smith’s Michelle Remembers (1989), and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) – as articulations of American Protestant anxieties about the challenges marginal religions pose to normative masculinity. Please join us in welcoming Megan to the Juvenile Instructor.

Elizabeth Smart-Gilmour

Elizabeth Smart made headlines this month when she advocated for human trafficking survivors at a conference hosted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Smart this year – I made her kidnapping (or rather Jon Krakauer’s treatment of Smart’s captivity in his inexorable Under the Banner of Heaven) the focal point of a national conference paper and a key element of my dissertation chapter on anti-Mormon religious intolerance.  But I missed that she’d spoken at this conference until the blogosphere erupted over her alleged condemnation of abstinence-based sex education.

During her 13 minute presentation, Smart recounted the details of her captivity and emphasized the need to teach children that they have intrinsic worth, regardless of how others might abuse or exploit them.  She further noted that “one of the questions that is most commonly asked [of her] is ‘well, why didn’t you run away?  Why didn’t you yell?  Why didn’t you scream?’”

This question immediately raised the hackles of my inner humorless feminist, who was already riled after a year of teaching Women’s and Gender Studies 101.  This question, as Smart notes, is common – an almost knee-jerk refrain when people feel survivors didn’t resist their own exploitation and abuses enough.  (The metrics of “enough” are usually a bit murky.)  This question, as I explained to my students this year, perpetuates rape culture: the popular and often unquestioned conviction that men are naturally sexually aggressive and dominant, while women are the natural targets of that sexual aggression and must resist unwanted overtures.  Or to put in simpler terms: women should try to avoid being raped, because, you know, rape happens.  

Such an attitude simultaneously exonerates sexual assailants (who are largely though not exclusively men), accepts sexual assault as an inescapable eventuality (which it currently is, for arguably 25% of American women, 10% of American men, and 50% of transgender persons), and places the onus of assault prevention on the survivors of sexual assault (who are largely though not exclusively women).  The message is “women, don’t get raped” rather than “don’t rape,” and questions about whether a survivor resisted enough or tried to escape or yelled or hid or fought back perpetuate this nonsense.  My undergraduates would know better than to ask such a question.  I cannot say the same of National Public Radio, The Washington Post, or The Christian Science Monitor.

News sites and blogs alike latched onto a passing comment Smart made about how her religious education about sex affected her mindset during captivity.  In a thirteen-minute speech about the importance of teaching children a fundamental sense of self-worth, Smart recalled that

“In school one time, I had a teacher that was talking about…well, about abstinence, and she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum.  And when you engage in sex, that’s like…that’s like getting chewed.  And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum.  And who’s going to want you after that?’  …I  thought, ‘oh my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum!’”

Confidential to women:
Don’t get chewed.

In the context of Smart’s speech, the chewed-up gum analogy was one expressing how worthless and dirty she felt after being sexually victimized.  The comment comprised 30 seconds of a 13 minute presentation.  Smart spent nearly five times as long pleading for compassion toward survivors and education of potential victims.  Her emphasis was clearly on the need to teach young people that “you have value, and you always will have value – nothing can change that.”

At no time did Smart say that her religious education or affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made her somehow particularly susceptible to sexual exploitation – though Jon Krakauer did imply as much in Banner (see 2004, pp. 44-53, particularly p. 47).  Smart rather drew on an analogy from her childhood to explain her (very common) feelings of self-loathing following sexual exploitation and abuse.  Here’s how news sites and blogs responded:

NPR lede: “Elizabeth Smart…said that abstinence lessons she learned as a child made her feel worthless after being raped by her captor.”

Christian Science Monitor lede: “Elizabeth Smart spoke about why kidnap and rape victims might not run, during a Johns Hopkins University human trafficking forum.”

Slate: “Elizabeth Smart Says Pro-Abstinence Sex Ed Harms Victims of Rape”

Religion Dispatches headline: “Traditional Mormon Sexual Purity Lesson Contributed to Captivity, Elizabeth Smart Tells University Audience” and the headline for the follow-up piece, “Did Mormon Morality Teachings Really Make it Harder for Elizabeth Smart to Run?”

And the worst of a bad bunch – the Washington Post article’s headline: “Elizabeth Smart: Mormon teaching on sex stopped me from escaping kidnappers.”

As a gender theorist, I am exhausted and infuriated by the inescapability of “why didn’t you run?” (or fight back, or scream, or, or, or).  To her credit, Smart both unapologetically answered and then rejected the premise of this question.  Smart explained that she didn’t try to escape because she was afraid for her own safety and the safety of her family.  She unabashedly defended her decisions not to fight back or to speak out even when initially questioned by police.  “I did what I felt I had to,” Smart emphasized.  She closed her presentation by insisting that we should not ask why some survivors of sexual exploitation don’t—or can’t—run, or scream, or otherwise resist their assailants.  “We don’t know why they didn’t run.  We don’t know the circumstances.  And we’re all so different.  We really don’t have a right to ask that question,” Smart admonished.

While as a gender theorist I’m frustrated with the persistence of this question—and with the poor listening skills of her popular press chroniclers—as a religious studies scholar, I’m fascinated and troubled by the impulse to locate Smart’s lack of resistance in her Mormon identity or education.  (I’m equally fascinated and troubled by the liberal impulse to locate women’s oppression in capital-R Religion rather than broad systemic inequalities, but that’s for another time.)  My current project thinks through Americans’ tendency to imagine that women are somehow especially vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation on the nation’s religious margins.  This tendency—this habit of intolerance, as Cristine HJ might say—is by no means new (see Sarah Barringer Gordon’s excellent The Mormon Question and Terryl Givens’ seminal The Viper on the Hearth) nor uniquely deployed against Mormonisms (see David Brion Davis and Lorne Dawson, among others).  Comparisons of gendered inequality and sexual exploitation of women and children among Mormonisms, Islam(s), and new religious movements are common, and authors who work on these subjects often focus on the titillating and horrific.  Indeed, we seem to assume we that we “know” what goes on in minority religious communities – tales like Elizabeth Smart’s only serve to confirm our well-founded suspicions.

But as sociologist Mary de Young notes, “sexual trauma tales can sustain the status quo by simply reiterating, without critique, the dominant cultural discourse about sex and gender” (1996, 111).  She explains:

For all their horror, [such stories] are conservative and preservative.  Their depiction of female victimization and helplessness so resoundingly resonates with dominant cultural ideologies that the stories, themselves, are pitiable yet provocative tales about the inevitability of sexual violence in the lives of females.  As hegemonic tales, they offer no solutions, map out no trajectory for social change.  They can only be listened to, not acted upon. (de Young 1996, 116)

This is to say that the question of why Elizabeth Smart didn’t run—and the popular media’s willingness to attribute that alleged failure to her religious training—matters, because it tells us something about the way Americans think about gender, sex, and minority religions.  If we are truly invested in preventing the sexual coercion and exploitation of women, we need to think harder about the questions we’re asking.

Religious intolerance does not exist in a vacuum – it capitalizes upon and exploits other systemic inequalities.  Elizabeth Smart is right to insist upon her inherent worth as a human being, regardless of her sexual “purity.”  We must not content ourselves, however, with facile and out-of-context appropriations of an activist’s words for our own agendas, no matter how admirable those agendas might be.  Rather, we should question (and resist?) those quiet inner voices making us wonder if she could have fought harder had she not been raised Mormon.

In recent years, a few organizations have been founded to help address that lack.  The Mormon Women’s History Initiative sponsors an annual breakfast at MHA, sponsors lectures on Mormon Women’s History, and maintains a database of women working on Mormon History.  Blogs such as Feminist Mormon Housewives and Zelophehad’s Daughters address contemporary issues in the church, and Claremont University has established an oral history initiative designed to record women’s experiences in the church.  Brittany and I will also be hosting a women’s history tea and discussion group again at the Mormon History Association on Thursday, June 6^th at 4:30 p.m. (Location, TBD).  We will be reading selections from Claudia Bushman’s edited volume “In Their Own Words” as well as a short article related to the theme of authority.  We will make an announcement soon about specific readings.

Most recently, Jessica Duckett Finnegan established the Mormon Women Scholars’ Network (http://mwsnetwork.org/) , which is designed to be a resource for women working in a wide variety of disciplines related to Mormon Studies.  Finnegan intends the network to include religious studies scholars and literary theorists as well as historians.  She is also posting Calls for Papers, listing conferences, and hosting a blog on Mormon women’s issues.  Eventually, the website will also include lists of resources and articles on being a female scholar within the largely male space of Mormon Studies.  Its purpose is to help connect female scholars, facilitate collaboration, and offer support for projects in Mormon Studies.

Check out the Network and e-mail Jessica at jessica@mwsnetwork.org if you would like to become involved.

1) From the MHA Program: MHA cordially invites all students and younger scholars to join us for refreshments and networking. This is a great opportunity to meet other students from around the country/world, learn about the benefits and challenges of working on Mormon history, discuss online networking, and learn more about what MHA has for you and how you can contribute to the study of Mormon history. Food and prizes will be provided. Prizes refers to a book raffle. You’ll want to register for the reception if you’re eligible!

2)Although I am among the most novice to Mormon History, I can’t remember ever seeing so many papers that I wanted to hear on one program. Many thanks to those who have put the conference together!

3) There are several JI members who are presenting their work this year. Their abstracts are presented in chronological order (when they will appear on the program) and we encourage anyone who would like to share their abstract to add it in the comments, or to share which sessions they are most excited to attend.

Amanda HK: Undressing Mahana: The Polynesian Cultural Center and the Growth of Modesty Culture in Utah and the Mormon Pacific since the 1950s

In 1951, Spencer W. Kimball delivered a speech at Brigham Young University admonishing young women not to wear immodest clothing.  He argued that backless dresses, tight sweaters, shorts, and evening gowns were evidence of unchastity – the “great demon of the day.”  Instead of adopting these immodest styles, he encouraged Mormon girls to develop a “style of their own,” which would allow them to cultivate “clean hands and a pure heart.” Kimball worried about the influence that immodest clothing styles would have on the purity of Mormon girls and encouraged them to set themselves apart from larger American culture. Decades later, clothing remains an important part of the BYU honor code. Adhering to these standards visually marks BYU students as different from their counterparts at other universities, and suggests to current and prospective BYU students and the wider Mormon community that clothing is reflective of virtue and godliness.

The rise of modesty culture within Mormonism, however, has not been uncomplicated.  In 1963, the church opened the Polynesian Cultural Center as a way to fund scholarships at what is now BYU-Hawaii.  Although students adhere to modesty codes while on campus, they are required to wear revealing costumes that showcase their bodies while working at the church-owned cultural center. This paper asks what effects of the concealing of white bodies and revealing of Polynesian ones has had on conceptions of Polynesian and white Mormons in popular culture. In order to explore this question, this paper uses archival research and an analysis of popular films and novels to trace the rise of modesty culture and its differing effects in Utah and the Mormon Pacific.  Placing these two things together not only brings into focus the complicated history of modesty culture in Hawaii and the South Pacific, it also tells about the elisions and politics of the same culture within Utah and the American West.

Jordan W.: “Polygamy and the Past: The Historical Bases of Nineteenth-Century American Social Reform”

The debate over slavery in antebellum America raised questions about history and time. Was a pre-modern practice holding back a modern nation? Or was a time-tested institution ensuring its progress? Southerners were hardly of one mind on slavery, but most agreed that the institution, legitimated through historical and biblical precedent, was divinely ordained. Most northerners failed to mount a viable response. However, abolitionists cast the South as a backward region whose anachronistic institution derailed America from progressing toward its promised potential as a modern Republic. A similar, though somewhat submerged, debate over polygamy emerged just as the discussion over slavery reached a tipping point in the 1850s and 1860s. Mormon apologists, including apostle and theologian Orson Pratt, appealed to historical and biblical precedent in defending polygamy as divinely sanctioned. Anti-polygamists, like writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, pointed to the new religion’s antedated practice as evidence that Mormonism was “a retrogression toward the ante-Christian ages.”[1]

Southerners and Mormons used historical arguments to protect their practices; they pointed to the pastness of these practices to legitimize their place in the present. Abolitionists and anti-polygamists used historical consciousness to condemn these practices; they emphasized the pastness of these practices to highlight their incongruence in modern America. While one side drew on the authority of the past, another emphasized the pastness of the past. This paper will focus on how apologists and critics of Mormonism distinctly used history to defend and critique polygamy. I will position this discussion in relation to other reform debates in an attempt to highlight the historical bases of social reform in nineteenth-century America and to explain some of the implications of those bases.

Ben P: “Liberal Religious and Social Reform in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Edward Tullidge, James Gordon Bennett, and Octavius Frothingham”

Most nineteenth century Mormons sought to keep distance between themselves and the “world,” an exceptionalism founded in their millennialist zeal and nurtured by a persecuted past. But not all members of the LDS faith were as hesitant interacting with other thinkers and co-participating with broader trends. Edward Tullidge, an English convert who quickly became a prominent figure in Mormonism’s print culture, was eager to learn from and interact with larger reform movements. As a result, his writings demonstrate the elasticity and dynamic potential of the LDS message when put into dialogue with social reform movements.

This paper will focus on Tullidge’s two-year sojourn in New York City while acting as the Church’s public voice during the late 1850s. While living in the city, he came into contact with many of the leading figures in America’s social reform movement, including newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. Bennett, along with minister Octavius Frothingham from Boston, was an early proponent of liberal religion’s potential to reform America’s culture, and Tullidge largely embraced their ideas. By examining how the enigmatic Mormon figure meshed his Mormonism with their liberal reform, I seek to shed light not only on Tullidge’s religious and political ideas, but also the broader currents of political theologies then capturing the nation’s attention.

JJohnson: “In Search of Reform: The Mountain Meadows Prosecution and Solving the Mormon Problem”

On 23 July 1875, U.S. Attorney William Carey opened the much-anticipated murder case against John D. Lee, the “butcher” of the Mountain Meadows, to a packed courtroom in Beaver, Utah, and to the larger United States via the newspapermen in attendance. A federal court tried Lee for murder in concert of action with nine others as a participant in the 1857 massacre of 120 California-bound men, women, and children from Arkansas. Finally, after eighteen years, someone would be tried for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Yet, individual accountability was not the only goal of legal action for the massacre.

From the beginning of the investigation different individuals desired multiple and at times conflicting goals. Concurrently with legal action for polygamy, federal officials saw significant opportunities to solve the Mormon problem with the Mountain Meadows prosecution. Close examination of the investigation for the massacre, the multiple grand juries that federal judges charged with addressing the massacre, and the eventual trials of John D. Lee demonstrate a variety of goals and avenues to address the Mormon problem. Individual convictions were not always considered the most advantageous option. This almost forty years of legal history demonstrates a variety of ways in which federal officials and religious crusaders attempted to reform different segments of the Mormon people and the Mormon religion in general through legal action for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This paper will specifically address efforts of the Mountain Meadows prosecution to highlight the failings of Mormon men and reform Mormon manhood.

Natalie R: “The Merry Times of My Happy Girlhood”:  Diaries and Female Mormon Adolescence, 1870s-1920s

On Saturday September 29, 1877, seventeen-year-old Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint (LDS) member Annie Wells wrote in her journal: “I know I have neglected this book awfully and I am so sorry for I do love you so. My own life written here will be such a comfort to me when I am old to sit and read of the merry times of my happy girlhood.” From the late-nineteenth century to the early-twentieth, adolescent Mormon girls used their diaries as a strategy for self-expression and self-discipline in—what scholar Jane H. Hunter refers to as— the “formalization of one kind of self.”  The act of keeping a diary was imbued with religious meaning for Mormon adolescent females during this period, as they affirmed and reacted to doctrine and church prescription in their writings. Furthermore, these diaries fit within a spectrum of autobiographical writings produced by Mormons as a method to connect living descendants and their ancestors in both the temporal and celestial worlds. Wells’ personal admonishing about her irregular writing elucidates a profound concern for her future religious self-development.

Diaries provide a window to view how girls and female adolescents expressed their religious and cultural identities as Mormons. Utilizing a variety of diaries from the 1870s to the 1920s, I analyze how wide transformations within the church and region affected young women’s personal and public religious lives.  Examining adolescent women’s experiences illuminates how they accepted and grappled with the church and region’s metamorphosis. Additionally, I explore how young women envisioned their Mormon girlhoods in comparison to the expectations set forth by the church hierarchy, the Young Woman’s Journal, and mainstream American discussions about girlhood and adolescence.

Cristine: “Monumentalizing Mormonism: Crafting a Heroic American Pioneer Past for the Latter-day Saints, 1920–1960”

The mid-twentieth century was a high point for the Mormon image in America—the first “Mormon moment.” While it often seems that the Saints and the rest of America have been engaged in competing projects to craft and control Mormonism’s public image, during this period the Saints’ accommodations to wider American norms (Mauss, 1994) intersected with broader American efforts to present a unified front against the nation’s Communist enemies. This effort included a sanitized reimagining of America’s nineteenth-century westward  expansion, transforming American pioneers of all stripes into heroic figures cooperating to bring civilization to the wild frontier. Mormon pioneer heroes often appeared in popular historical writing, like that of Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and films like Brigham Young: Frontiersman (1940) and the John Ford Western Wagon Master (1950). But another key aspect of this sweeping re-visioning of western and Mormon history was accomplished through travel and tourism encouraged by the Latter-day Saints, various national industries, and the federal government alike. The Mormons had been a tourist attraction long before their status as a national “menace” waned, as evidenced by publications like Sir Richard Burton’s travelogue The City of the Saints (1862) and Mark Twain’s reminiscences in Roughing It (1872) of his days in Salt Lake City. But their status shifted after 1920 from cultural curiosity to exemplar of American values. Increasingly, after 1920, Americans were encouraged to explore the Mormon past in the form of new national parks across the intermountain West; new (or newly refurbished) historic sites like Palmyra and Nauvoo; and dozens of monuments tracing the Mormon Trail from upstate New York to the Salt Lake Valley. This paper will explore how, between 1920 and 1960, Mormon and non-Mormon Americans cooperated to recast the nineteenth-century Mormon community as mythic Americans whose striving and suffering helped win the west.

 Nate R : “Shameful Inconsistencies”: Joseph F. Smith Encounters the British Fieldings

In April 1862, while serving an LDS mission in the British Isles, Joseph F. Smith sought out his mother’s surviving siblings in the vicinity of Preston, Lancashire, partially with the intent of reforging the bonds of kinship and partially to assess their attitude toward Mormonism. He found Mary Fielding Smith’s siblings superstitious, headstrong, and suspicious of the LDS Church and its doctrines. For his part, Joseph F. could not understand their bullishness, responding with characteristic defensiveness and leaving disappointed in his mother’s family after several days of socialization—and Bible-bashing. This paper examines and contextualizes the sentimental, frustrating, and eye-opening encounters between the young missionary and his Fielding relatives, including his uncle, James Fielding; his aunt, Martha Fielding Watson; and a cousin by marriage, Ellen Myrescough. The author argues that the combined meetings of April 23-25, 1862 proved to be a pivotal moment in Joseph F. Smith’s life, reshaping his vision of family, heritage, missionary labor, and redemption. These encounters provide essential insight into the development of Joseph F. Smith’s worldview during his formative time away from the Salt Lake Valley, especially when juxtaposed with similar meetings with the extended Smith family in 1860 in Nauvoo.

Robin: Joseph Smith Papers Project Roundtable

Robin will discuss the important insight gained after years of analysis of the Church’s earliest revelation record book titled the “Book of Commandments and Revelations.” The way the earliest members gathered and assembled the revelations reveal, in part, the treatment and reception of these sacred texts. The book’s principal scribe, John Whitmer, combined his role as scribe and historian as he created the book, already forcing the revelations into a historical narrative of the church, which paved the way for the revelations’ first publication in book form.

Brett D: “Reconstructing Mormon Youth: The Battle Over Utah’s Territorial School System and the Origins of Weekday Religious Education, 1869-1890.”

Between the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and the establishment of the Religion Class program in October of 1890, Utah’s territorial schools became a place of intense conflict.  Whereas Mormon officials had wielded significant influence over the schools and their curriculum prior to the railroad, by the early 1870s it was obvious that the government would seize control of the schools in its attempt to reconstruct and Americanize Mormonism from the youth up.  As a part of a larger national idea to construct Protestant Americanism, the government made ample use of the schools to instill American values into children and to undercut the cultural and religious ideas of non-Protestant Americans.  In their response to these challenges, Mormon officials studied and attempted a number of different political and educational answers, including theological schools, academies, and ultimately weekday religious education programs that supplemented the public schools.  As a result, these years were critical to forming the Church’s seminary and institute programs in later years.

Steve Fleming: “Christian Platonism, Early Mormonism, and the Debates over the Great Apostasy 1650-1844”

The idea that early Christianity had been corrupted by Greek philosophy was a very popular claim in Joseph Smith’s day.  Smith owned a book by one of the biggest proponents of this assertion—Johann Lorenz von Mosheim—and other early Mormons cited Mosheim when discussing Christian history.  Yet neither Smith nor other early Mormons promoted this narrative of the apostasy.  It is very likely that Smith and other early Mormon writers heard the Hellenization claim but they never asserted it themselves.

The idea that Plato corrupted early Christianity became popular among Protestants in the late seventeenth century and has continued to the present.  As a way to attack both Catholics and radicals who believed in revelation, Protestant scholars argued that the early Fathers who liked Plato had corrupted the church.  The central tenets of corrupt Platonic Christianity, Protestant scholars argued, were the eternity of matter and belief in personal revelation (and its implications for human divine potential).  Smith not only embraced both of these tenets but even used the some of the same phrases that the Protestant anti-Platonists condemned.

Despite the ubiquity of these anti-Platonic claims and Smith’s and other Mormons’ interest in the issue of the apostasy, no early Mormons said that the apostasy was caused by Greek philosophy.  Instead the Book of Mormon said that the great and abominable church removed plain and precious truths from the Bible: it was the removal not the addition of ideas that was the problem.  Unfortunately, some later Mormon scholars have embraced the Protestant anti-Platonic narrative, a move that we ought to seriously reconsider.

J Stuart: “A Tear for Zion and Two Tears for the American Nation”: Rationale for and Reaction to the 1890 Manifesto

In 1890, Wilford Woodruff stunned the Latter-day Saints by announcing to a General Conference that the LDS Church would no longer sanction polygamous marriages. Woodruff’s shift in theology and practice had far-reaching effects for the Latter-day Saints as a people. It led to the end of sustained federal prosecution for their religious practices, retention of their temples, and reason to hope for a deliverance from the dire financial state of their church. In spite of their reasons for optimism, Latter-day Saints were forced to abandon the crowning ordinance and defining behavior of their faith: plural marriage.

The lived religion of 19^th century Mormonism is best viewed through the reactions to polygamy’s formal end in 1890, when reflection on the Woodruff Manifesto elicited raw and honest reaction to their religious and familial commitments. Through careful analysis of the diaries, journals, sermons and autobiographies of Saints who lived through this period, I demonstrate how Mormons reacted to the Manifesto and how they came to grips with polygamy’s formal end. Latter-day Saint reactions to the Manifesto, as well as the reasoning they used to explain the Manifesto, will be analyzed and addressed.

Which sessions are you most excited for?

So, where do I come from? I was raised in rural America, in a family that I only realized as I got older was noteworthy for our relative religious diversity – and our general acceptance of it. We counted members of a variety of Christian denominations in the extended clan, including a number of very heterodox members of different denominations (a Methodist grandmother who argued with people in church that the Trinity wasn’t biblical, anyone?), as well as nonbelievers of several different stripes. There was disagreement, but in general we accepted that we were all doing our best and, really, none of us could be sure we had the corner on the meaning of life. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I realized that many of the people around me – most of whom were generally decent people – were not as comfortable with religious difference as much of my family seemed to be. (As I got older, I also began to see that my family members were much more tolerant of Christian diversity than they were of non-Christian religions.) Unfortunately, I witnessed some respected adults in my life making very ugly comments – which they often used their professed Christianity to justify – about other people and their religions. In my teenaged brain, this gave rise to two questions: Isn’t Christianity supposed to be about loving your neighbor? Isn’t the United States supposed to be about separation of church and state and thus acceptance of religious diversity?

Fast forward a few years, and I arrived in Boston as a student of American religious history with a primary interest in the history of Protestantism in the United States. As it happened, my arrival coincided with the breaking of the sex scandal in the Catholic Church, which started in the Boston Archdiocese and quickly radiated out across the United States. While I was and am horrified by the conduct both of priest-abusers and of the church leaders who protected them, I was also fascinated and disturbed by the imagery used not only in popular TV crime shows to “dramatize” clergy sex abuse, but also by respected mainstream media outlets in their reporting of events. The imagery – of priests skulking through darkened cloisters and wooing children into confessionals – harkened back to the salacious anti-Catholic narratives popular in the United States in the 19th century. Like these much older stories – which were marketed to American readers as true memoirs – the 21st-century discussions of very real abuse were dominated by sometimes fanciful images of monstrous men hiding their sexual debauchery behind faulty, man-made theology and in uniquely Catholic secret spaces. What was going on, here? I wondered. Hadn’t the United States gotten past this sort of thing already?

Thus during my first years in graduate school I began researching and writing about the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States. I quickly came to see that anti-Catholicism did not exist in isolation. Rather, it was one facet of a larger pattern of Protestant fear of and intolerance toward a succession of minority religious “others.” I broadened my research to include other minorities, and began to chart the patterns I saw in representations of various groups: various (false, according to the primary sources) belief in a special, exclusive connection with the divine, often including ongoing direct communication; sexual immorality; tyrannical hierarchical religious authority; community members who are blindly loyal to their religious leaders over and above the United States government.

Then I entered that special phase of a PhD student’s life when you’re supposed to take all of the knowledge you’ve gained and the interests you’ve developed and find a topic that somehow encompasses all of it – but is manageable enough in scope to write a coherent 300-400 page book on. Just as I was searching for a way to demonstrate what I had learned about religious intolerance in the United States without trying to talk about EVERY group I had engaged in my research or about the ENTIRETY of American history, I participated in a seminar in which we were assigned Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) and, as a primer on the history of Mormonism and violence, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003). Mailer’s non-fiction novel, which tells the story of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s crimes and eventual execution in 1970s Utah, showed me through its descriptions of non-Mormon responses to Mormons that anti-Mormonism was still a very real thing in late 20th-century America. Jon Krakauer’s crime drama showed me that people’s fears about the Latter-day Saints continue to be stoked by inaccurate information on Mormon beliefs and practices that are packaged as non-fiction. And my professor’s response, when I privately shared my concerns about Krakauer’s book, convinced me that even really smart people continue to accept and propagate standard narratives of intolerance. I had found my topic: representations of the Latter-day Saints in 20th-century American culture as a window onto the larger problem of ongoing religious intolerance in the United States.

And so I stumbled – a non-Mormon with hardly any Mormon acquaintance and no professors studying the Latter-day Saints in depth – into Mormon Studies. Or rather, I stumbled onto the edge of Mormon Studies, because I’m really not a scholar of Mormonism. I’m a scholar of what non-Mormons think about Mormons and imagine them to be.

Where am I going? I continue to examine popular images of the Latter-day Saints, but my objective has been and remains not just to illuminate the ongoing problem of anti-Mormonism, but rather the larger problem of ongoing religious intolerance in the United States and the common anxieties that drive the varieties of suspicion and fear that we all too often level at minority groups. To me whether I am, ever have been, or ever will be a Mormon is irrelevant. (Not to mention that the jokes that questions about my religious status evoke are generally tiresome and occasionally offensive.) I’m a citizen, a scholar, a family member, and a human being – diverse constituencies, all – who is concerned with understanding the reasons behind ongoing intolerance in the United States, somewhat naively hoping that if I can uncover those reasons it will help all of us to begin to overcome them.

The graph below shows which days of the week missionaries sang as a percentage of the times they sang per week. [2]

Unsurprisingly, the missionaries sang more on Sundays. Compared to other days, they were more likely both to have meetings and to stay at someone’s house visiting and singing rather than travelling. The differences among the other days are probably too small to draw clear conclusions, though there does seem to be a decline through the week followed by a Friday-night sociality bump.

The next graph shows missionary music throughout a composite year. [3]

There seems to be a Fall low and a Spring high, but I can’t think of any explanations. I considered the number of hours of sunlight, temperature, agricultural seasons, precipitation patterns, and each missionary’s length of time in the field, but came up empty.