From The Outside Looking in

From the Outside Looking In
From the Outside

Looking In
Essays on Mormon History,
Theology, and Culture
the tanner lectures on mormon history
zEdited by
REID L. NEILSON
and
MATTHEW J. GROW
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
in certain other countries
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
© Oxford University Press 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

From the outside looking in : essays on Mormon history, theology, and culture / edited by
Reid L. Neilson and Matthew J. Grow.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–19–024465–1 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–024466–8
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mormon Church—History. 2. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints—History. I. Neilson, Reid Larkin, editor. II. Grow, Matthew J., editor.
BX8611.F76 2016
289.309—dc23
2015003406
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Scala Pro
Printed on 45# Cream 400 ppi
Printed by Sheridan, Michigan, US

For Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp (RLN) and
George M. Marsden (MJG)
Contents
Contributors ix
Editors’ Preface xv
Acknowledgments xix
General Introduction by Richard Lyman Bushman 1
PART 1: The American Religious Landscape

Introduction by Reid L. Neilson
1. Alan Taylor, The Free Seekers: Religious Culture in Upstate

New York, 1790–1835 13
2. Richard H. Brodhead, Prophets in America Circa 1830:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith 34
3. Stephen J. Stein, Historical Reflections on Mormon Futures 55
4. Catherine A. Brekus, Mormon Women and the Problem

of Historical Agency 79
5. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Mormons, Freethinkers, and the Limits

of Toleration 105
viii Contents
PART 2: The Creation of Mormon Identities

Introduction by Matthew J. Grow
6. Charles L. Cohen, The Construction of the Mormon People 135
7. Elliott West, Becoming Mormon 170
8. Randall Balmer, “Faith in the Religion of Their Fathers”:

Passing Mormonism from One Generation to the Next 188
PART 3: The Study of Western Histories

Introduction by Matthew J. Grow
9. Dell Upton, What the Mormon Cultural Landscape

Can Teach Us 213
10. William Deverell, Thoughts from the Farther West:

Mormons, California, and the Civil War 236
11. Walter Nugent, The Mormons and America’s Empires 253
12. George A. Miles, Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective 278
PART 4: The Study of Global Religions

Introduction by Reid L. Neilson
13. David B. Marshall, The Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut,

and Post-Christian Canada 301
14. Philip Jenkins, Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth

in Africa 330
15. Jehu J. Hanciles, “Would That All God’s People Were

Prophets”: Mormonism and the New Shape of Global
Christianity 353
Index 383
Contributors
Notes on Editors
Reid L. Neilson is an Assistant Church Historian and Recorder and the
managing director of the Church History Department of The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was previously an assistant professor
of church history at Brigham Young University. Neilson is the author of
Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s
Fair and Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan, 1901–1924, as well
as the editor or coeditor of two dozen anthologies and documentary his-
tory books. He serves on the editorial boards of the Joseph Smith Papers
and the Deseret Book Company.
Matthew J. Grow is director of publications at the Church History De-

partment and a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. He was pre-
viously an assistant professor of history and director of the Center for
Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. Grow is the
author of “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Re-
former; coauthor, with Terryl Givens, of Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul
of Mormonism; and coauthor, with Ronald Walker, of The Prophet and the
Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane.
Notes on Contributors
Randall Balmer, Dartmouth Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Dart-
mouth College, is a scholar of American religious history who has pub-
lished widely in both scholarly venues and in the popular press. He is the
author of more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy
Carter, The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond,
and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture
x Contributors
in America. He presented “‘Faith in the Religion of Their Fathers’: Passing

Mormonism from One Generation to the Next” at the conference of the
Mormon History Association in Kirtland, Ohio, in 2003. It was first pub-
lished in the Journal of Mormon History 30 (Spring 2004): 37–58.
Catherine A. Brekus, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Reli-

gion in America at Harvard Divinity School, is a scholar of American re-
ligious history specializing in the history of women, gender, Christianity,
and the evangelical movement. Her publications include Sarah Osborn’s
World: The Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America, American Christianities:
A History of Dominance and Diversity (with W. Clark Gilpin), The Religious
History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, and Strangers and Pil-
grims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. She presented “Mormon
Women and the Problem of Historical Agency” at the conference of the
Mormon History Association in Independence, Missouri, in 2010. It was
first published in the Journal of Mormon History 37 (Spring 2011): 59–87.
Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University and William Pres-

ton Few Professor of English, is a scholar of nineteenth-century American
literature. Before his current positions, Brodhead taught at Yale Univer-
sity and wrote or edited more than a dozen books on subjects including
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles W. Chesnutt, William
Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles W. Chesnutt, Louisa May Alcott,
Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty. Brodhead presented “Prophets in
America Circa 1830: Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith” at the conference
of the Mormon History Association in Tucson, Arizona, in 2002. It was
Richard Lyman Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of

History at Columbia University and former Howard W. Hunter Chair of
Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, is a scholar of early
American cultural and religious history. His works include Joseph Smith:
Rough Stone Rolling; The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities;
and From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut,
1690–1765.
Charles L. Cohen, E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions

and director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Re-
ligions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializes in colonial
Contributors xi
British North America, early American religious history, and the history
of the Eastern Woodlands Indians (1500–1800). His books include Gods
in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States (with Ronald Num-
bers), Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State (with Leonard V. Kaplan),
Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (with Paul S. Boyer),
and God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. He pre-
sented “The Construction of the Mormon People” at the conference of
the Mormon History Association in Killington, Vermont, in 2005. It was
William Deverell, professor of history at the University of Southern

California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California
and the West, is the author of numerous studies on the American West
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His works include To Bind Up
the Nation’s Wounds: The American West after the Civil War (forthcoming),
Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles
(with Greg Hise), and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the
Remaking of Its Mexican Past. He presented “Thoughts from the Farther
West: Mormons, California, and the Civil War” at the conference of the
Mormon History Association in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2007. It was first
published in the Journal of Mormon History 34 (Spring 2008): 1–19.
Jehu J. Hanciles, D. W. Ruth Brooks Associate Professor of World Chris-

tianity at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, is a specialist
in the history of world Christianity (notably the African experience) and
globalization. His works include Beyond Christendom: Globalization, Af-
rican Migration, and the Transformation of the West; and Euthanasia of a
Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context. He presented his
essay at the conference of the Mormon History Association in San Anto-
nio, Texas, in 2014. It was first published in the Journal of Mormon History
41 (April 2015): 35–68.
Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and co-director of

the Program on Historical Studies of Religion at Baylor University, is a
scholar of religion with particular emphasis on global Christianity, new
and emerging religious movements, and twentieth-century U.S. history.
He is the author of twenty-four books, including The Great and Holy War:
How World War I Became a Religious Crusade; The Lost History of Chris-
tianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East,
xii Contributors
Africa and Asia—and How It Died; and The Next Christendom: The Rise of
Global Christianity. He presented “Letting Go: Understanding Mormon
Growth in Africa” at the conference of the Mormon History Association
in Sacramento, California, in 2008. It was first published in the Journal of
Mormon History 35 (Spring 2009): 1–19.
David B. Marshall, an associate professor of history at the University of

Calgary, is a historian of religion in Canada. His works include numerous
articles on religious life in Canada and Secularizing the Faith: Canadian
Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1860–1940. He presented “The
Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut, and Post-Christian Canada” at the con-
ference of the Mormon History Association in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
in 2012. It was first published in the Journal of Mormon History 39 (Spring
2013): 35–77.
George A. Miles is the William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Col-
lection of Western Americana in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University. He is the author of James Swan, Cha-tic of the
Northwest Coast and coeditor of Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s
Western Past. He presented “Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective”
at the conference of the Mormon History Association in St. George, Utah,
in 2011. It was first published in the Journal of Mormon History 38 (Spring
2012): 47–66.
Walter Nugent, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, Emeritus, at

the University of Notre Dame, is a scholar of the American West and the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In addition to nearly two hundred essays,
articles, and reviews, he has published twelve books, including The Toler-
ant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism, Habits of Empire: A History of
American Expansion, Into the West: The Story of Its People, and Crossings:
The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914. He presented “The Mor-
mons and America’s Empires” at the conference of the Mormon History
Association in Springfield, Illinois, in 2009. It was first published in the
Journal of Mormon History 36 (Spring 2010): 1–28.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University

Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, is
a scholar of American religious history. He is the author of numerous
books, including Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock,
Contributors xiii
American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman; Restless

Souls: The Making of American Spirituality; and Hearing Things: Religion,
Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. He presented “Mormons, Free-
thinkers, and the Limits of Toleration” at the conference of the Mormon
History Association in Layton, Utah, in 2013. It was first published in the
Stephen J. Stein, Chancellor’s Professor, Emeritus, of Religious Studies

at Indiana University, Bloomington, has written widely on American re-
ligious history, with particular emphasis on Evangelicalism, alternative
religions, and millennialism. He edited three volumes of The Works of
Jonathan Edwards and the third volume of The Encyclopedia of Apocalypti-
cism. He is also the author of The Shaker Experience in America: A History
of the United Society of Believers and Communities of Dissent: A History of
Alternative Religions in America. He presented “Historical Reflections on
Mormon Futures” at the conference of the Mormon History Association
in Casper, Wyoming, in 2006. It was first published in the Journal of
Mormon History 33 (Spring 2007): 39–64.
Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the Uni-

versity of Virginia, has written widely on the history of early America. His
books include The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832;
The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and
Indian Allies; The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Bor-
derland of the American Revolution; and William Cooper’s Town: Power and
Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic. He presented “The Free
Seekers: Religious Culture in Upstate New York, 1790–1835” at the con-
ference of the Mormon History Association in Copenhagen, Denmark, in
2000. It was first published in the Journal of Mormon History 27 (Spring
2001): 44–66.
Dell Upton, professor of art history at the University of California, Los

Angeles, is a scholar of the history of architecture, cities, and material
culture. His works include Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces
in the New American Republic and Architecture in the United States. He
presented “What the Mormon Cultural Landscape Can Teach Us” at the
conference of the Mormon History Association in Provo, Utah, in 2004.
It was first published in the Journal of Mormon History 31 (Summer
2005): 1–29.
xiv Contributors
Elliott West, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the Univer-

sity of Arkansas, is a scholar of the social and environmental history of
the American West. His books include The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce
Story; The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado;
and Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far-Western Frontier.
He presented “Becoming Mormon” at the conference of the Mormon His-
tory Association in Cedar City, Utah, in 2001. It was first published in the
Editors’ Preface
Leonard J. Arrington, a leading scholar who would later become

Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
led the formation of the Mormon History Association (MHA) in
December 1965 at the annual meeting of the American Historical Asso-
ciation (AHA). In 1972, MHA branched off from the AHA as an inde-
pendent historical society. Two years later, its leadership team published
the first issue of the Journal of Mormon History.1 More than a decade
into the twenty-first century, the organization continues to exert a pro-
found influence on the field of Mormon studies through its conferences
and journal. As two scholars who have benefited from our affiliation
with MHA, we are grateful for the Mormon studies community it has
fostered.
Nearly fifteen years after the founding of MHA, several members met
to talk about how to raise the organization’s professional profile and schol-
arly standing. Richard Bushman, Claudia Bushman, and Jan Shipps, all
leading scholars in American religious history, recalled their brainstorm-
ing session and the germination of what would become the Tanner Lec-
ture series.
It happens that three of us were part of discussions in 1979 as to

what could be done to make the 1980 annual meeting, marking the
150th anniversary since the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, extraordinary. Jan Shipps was president that
year. Claudia and Richard Bushman were chairs of the program
committee. Other members of the program committee were Alfred
Bush, Sharon Pugsley, plus Dean and Cheryll May. Sometime
during our discussions, Richard proposed the idea of seeking fund-
ing for a lectureship that would invite an eminent scholar, whose
work has paralleled the Mormon history but has never addressed it
xvi Editors’ Preface
directly, to expand a facet of their ongoing research to include a

Mormon dimension. The president would have the privilege of
choosing the lecturer, the lecture would be given each year in a ple-
nary session of the annual meeting of the association, and the lec-
turer would be invited to spend as much time as possible at the
meeting, getting acquainted with the members and they with him
or her.
As soon as the idea was broached we all recognized its potential.
Yes, it would be a mark of maturity and sophistication. We were
quite willing, even eager, to give the membership an opportunity to
learn from and be challenged by whatever perspectives and insights
the lecturer might offer. And we welcomed the chance to raise the
awareness of the lecturer, to entice eminent scholars into thinking
more deeply about the Mormon past.
But who would fund such an expensive endeavor during the ensuing
decades? The group of Mormon historians decided to approach Obert C.
and Grace Adams Tanner, longtime Utah philanthropists, to seek a
naming gift for the proposed lecture series. With the help of Mormon
scholar Sterling McMurrin, a close friend of the Tanners, they secured the
financial endowment. For the MHA annual meeting in 1980, the group
invited two leading lights in American history, Gordon Wood and Timothy
L. Smith, to present the inaugural Tanner lectures. “It was an auspicious
beginning,” the group reminisced.2
During the first twenty years of the Tanner lectures, the following
scholars spoke at MHA’s annual meetings held in various locations:
Gordon S. Wood (Canandaigua, New York, 1980), Timothy L. Smith
(Canandaigua, New York, 1980), John F. Wilson (Rexburg, Idaho, 1981),
John G. Gager (Ogden, Utah, 1982), Martin E. Marty (Omaha, Nebraska,
1983), Edwin S. Gaustad (Provo, Utah, 1984), Langdon Gilkey (Independ-
ence, Missouri, 1985), Anne Firor Scott (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1986), John
F. C. Harrison (Oxford, England, 1987), Henry Warner Bowden (Logan,
Utah, 1988), R. Laurence Moore (Quincy, Illinois, 1989), Peter Lineham
(Laie, Hawaii, 1990), Martin Ridge (Claremont, California, 1991), Richard
T. Hughes (St. George, Utah, 1992), Nathan O. Hatch (Lamoni, Iowa,
1993), Patricia Nelson Limerick (Park City, Utah, 1994), D. W. Meinig
(Kingston, Canada, 1995), Howard R. Lamar (Snowbird, Utah, 1996),
Glenda Riley (Omaha, Nebraska, 1997), Rodney Stark (Washington, DC,
1998), and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp (Ogden, Utah, 1999).
Editors’ Preface xvii
After two decades of remarkable Tanner lectures, all of which were

printed initially in the Journal of Mormon History, several Mormon histori-
ans felt that the published essays deserved to be collected and distributed
to a wider audience. It was against this background that the officers of
MHA invited historians Dean L. May and Reid L. Neilson to edit a volume
that would make the first two decades (1980–1999) of this distinguished
body of scholarship more accessible. It was subsequently published as The
Mormon History Association’s Tanner Lectures: The First Twenty Years, and it
received laudatory reviews in many academic journals. In introducing that
anthology, the editors wrote that the MHA lecture series had benefited
both the outside scholar and the Mormon studies specialists: “The Tanner
lecturers have been genuinely impressed with the vitality of the organiza-
tion and of Mormon historical studies. . . . They provide stimulating and
important insights, the more valuable because, in looking in on Mormon
studies, they frequently bring greater breadth and offer perspectives that
insiders have difficulty accessing.”3
Another fifteen Tanner lecturers, leading scholars in their respective
fields, have shared their perspectives on Mormonism since the beginning
of the twenty-first century, for a total of more than thirty-five Tanner lec-
tures. With Mormon studies continuing to grow as an academic field, we
wanted to continue to make this distinguished body of scholarship more
accessible. So we decided to collect and reprint the most recent lectures as
follows: Alan Taylor (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2000), Elliott West (Cedar
City, Utah, 2001), Richard H. Brodhead (Tuscon, Arizona, 2002), Randall
Balmer (Kirtland, Ohio, 2003), Dell Upton (Provo, Utah, 2004), Charles
L. Cohen (Killington, Vermont, 2005), Stephen J. Stein (Casper, Wyo-
ming, 2006), William Deverell (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2007), Philip Jen-
kins (Sacramento, California, 2008), Walter Nugent (Springfield, Illinois,
2009), Catherine A. Brekus (Independence, Missouri, 2010), George A.
Miles (St. George, Utah, 2011), David B. Marshall (Calgary, Canada, 2012),
Leigh Schmidt (Layton, Utah, 2013), and Jehu J. Hanciles (San Antonio,
Texas, 2014).
The timing of the current volume also makes sense, as 2014 marked
the renaming of the Tanner Lecture series. Initially subsidized through
the generosity of the Tanner family, the donated fund has since been de-
pleted and a new naming partner was sought to continue the tradition.
In summer 2014, the MHA board announced that it had received fund-
ing from the Smith-Pettit Foundation, based in Salt Lake City, and
had approved changing the name of the lecture to the Smith-Pettit
xviii Editors’ Preface
Lecture, beginning at the organization’s 50th anniversary annual meet-

ing in 2015.4 Thus, this volume of the most recent fifteen Tanner lec-
tures represents the end of an era and the beginning of a future promise
of excellent scholarship.
As with the first volume of Tanner lectures, it seems sensible to ar-
range these fifteen lectures by theme and to order them chronologically
according to their content, rather than by the year of presentation. We
grouped the essays according to four subjects: the American religious
landscape, the creation of Mormon identities, the study of western histo-
ries, and the study of global religions. A general introduction, written by
Richard Bushman, helps tie the book’s thematic sections together. More-
over, we prepared brief introductory essays for each of the volume’s four
parts to help contextualize the essays. It has been a delight to restudy the
writings of these scholars and their insights from the outside looking in
on Mormon studies.
Acknowledgments
The individual Tanner lecturers deserve to be thanked first for their

willingness to share their perspectives on Mormonism with the larger
scholarly community. When we first pitched the idea of collecting their
essays into a single volume, they all agreed with enthusiasm. Alan Taylor,
Elliott West, Richard H. Brodhead, Randall Balmer, Dell Upton, Charles L.
Cohen, Stephen J. Stein, William Deverell, Philip Jenkins, Walter Nugent,
Catherine A. Brekus, George A. Miles, David B. Marshall, Leigh Schmidt,
and Jehu J. Hanciles were all delightful to work with through the editorial
process. They graciously consented to the reprinting of their copyrighted
work as the intellectual property owners.
In 2015, MHA celebrated its golden anniversary. The current officers
and board members of MHA have supported this publishing project, par-
ticularly president Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. We are also grateful to the lead-
ership of the Journal of Mormon History, especially editor Martha Taysom
and copy editor Lavina Fielding Anderson, for their early endorsement
and enthusiasm. All past Tanner lectures were first printed in the Journal,
so their editorial fingerprints are all over this volume’s pages. All royalties
from the first Tanner Lecture anthology were donated to the Dean L. May
Scholarship Fund at the University of Utah in honor of that late coeditor.
Similarly, we have directed that all royalties be gifted to MHA’s Student
Travel Fund to help students attend future conferences.
When May and Neilson coedited the first twenty years of the Tanner
lectures, they instinctively published the collection with the University of
Illinois Press, then the go-to printer of Mormon history books.5 “Well into
the 1990s, academic and university presses published very few books re-
lated to the study of Mormonism. With the notable exception of the Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, which dominated the field in the 1980s and
1990s, only a handful of scholarly books about Mormonism were released
each year,” religious studies observer Jana Riess noted. “That’s hardly the
case anymore as the field of Mormon studies continues to blossom. Lead-
ing the way is Oxford University Press.”6 Cynthia Read, executive editor of
xx Acknowledgments
Oxford’s growing religion catalog, is largely responsible for this sea change
in Mormon studies publishing. We are grateful to Cynthia and her edito-
rial staff and production team for their professionalism and commitment
to excellence in academic publishing. We also thank the anonymous re-
viewers of our initial proposal and manuscript.
Richard Lyman Bushman kindly wrote the insightful introduction to
this volume. He has mentored an entire generation of Mormon scholars
and is considered by many as the dean of the current “golden age” of
Mormon studies. In fact, Reid and Matt met during summer 2001 while
participating in Bushman’s Archive of Restoration Culture Fellowship pro-
gram, hosted by the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint
History at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.7 The pebbles he has
dropped in the waters of Mormon studies continue to send ever-expanding
ripples of goodness throughout the larger academic field and the lives of its
practitioners.
We are also grateful for the support of the executive leadership of the
Church History Department, including Elder Steven E. Snow, Elder James J.
Hamula, and Richard E. Turley Jr. Many thanks are to be given to editorial
assistant Mark Melville and administrative assistant Jo Lyn Curtis, who helped
compile the lectures for this volume and obtain necessary permissions.
Last, Reid dedicates this book to Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, his PhD advisor
and mentor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He first
became acquainted with her and her religious studies and historical schol-
arship by reading her 1999 Tanner Lecture on Mormonism in the Pacific.
That same year, she taught the first university course in Mormon studies
outside of Utah.8 Laurie helped make Reid’s graduate school days with
Shelly and Johnny some of the happiest and most interesting of his life in
Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Fearrington Village.
Matt dedicates the book to George M. Marsden, his PhD advisor at the
University of Notre Dame. George was an ideal mentor, giving his stu-
dents an example of exacting scholarship and persuasive writing, the
space to explore their own scholarly paths, and gentle guidance and in-
sightful criticism of their work.
Reid L. Neilson
Bountiful, Utah
Matthew J. Grow
Sandy, Utah
Acknowledgments xxi
Notes
1. For perspectives on the early history and maturity of MHA, see the following
articles: Leonard J. Arrington, “Reflections on the Founding and Purpose of the
Mormon History Association, 1965–1983,” Journal of Mormon History 10 (1983):
91–103; Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “Entre Nous: An Intimate History of
MHA,” Journal of Mormon History 12 (1985): 43–52; and Leonard J. Arrington,
Adventures of a Church Historian (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998),
58–61.
2. Dean L. May and Reid L. Neilson, eds., The Mormon History Association’s Tanner
Lectures: The First Twenty Years (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006),
ix–x.
3. May and Neilson, The Mormon History Association’s Tanner Lectures, x.
4. “Tanner Lecture Changed to Smith-Pettit Lecture,” Mormon History Association
Newsletter 49 (Summer 2014): 6.
5. Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, and James B. Allen, Mormon History
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 91, 166, 219.
6. Jana Riess, “Religion Update Fall 2013: Mormon Studies Grows Up,” Publishers
Weekly, October 4, 2013. See also Peggy Fletcher Stack, “LDS Books: Oxford
Press Finds Profits in Prophets,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 15, 2010.
7. J. B. Haws, “A Mentor and a Mentality: Richard Bushman and the Shaping of a
Generation of Mormon Historians,” presented at the 2014 Biennial Conference
on Faith and History, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, September 27,
2014. Copy of paper in editors’ possession.
8. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Looking West: Mormonism and the Pacific World,” Jour-
nal of Mormon History 26 (Spring 2000): 40–64; and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp,
“What They Learned from the Mormons,” Mormon Studies Review 2 (2015): 1–10.
From the Outside Looking In
General Introduction
By Richard Lyman Bushman
For more than thirty years now, the annual Tanner Lecture at the
Mormon History Association meetings has gauged the state of Mormon
studies. We can discover what the specialists in Mormonism are thinking
from the conference itself, from the articles in the growing number of
journals concentrating on Mormon studies, and from the stream of books
on the topic pouring forth each year. The Tanner lecturers, in contrast,
bring an outsider’s thinking to the subject. The terms of the lecture call
for someone from another field to observe Mormonism from his or her
distinctive position. The lectures open a window on what a selection of
eminent but detached modern scholars think about Mormonism.
After thirty-five years, the annual lectures continue to throw new light
on Mormon history. In part, they reflect the fertility of modern scholarship.
New topics, new approaches, new issues continue to emerge. The lecturers
pick up on the great themes of modern historiography—gender, race, iden-
tity, globalization, secularization—and locate Mormonism in these ongo-
ing investigations. Some draw on classic topics: apocalypticism, western
settlement, and childhood. But whatever the starting point, the lecturers
add the freshness of new eyes and new minds visiting a new country.
Taken together, this new work shows the complexity of Mormonism. It
does not fit conveniently into any pigeonhole. Mormonism is so many
things: a church, a society, a culture, a theology, a movement, a protest, an
ethnicity, a new world religion. The essays discover one new facet after
another, suggesting that Mormonism will remain ever rich, ever elusive,
and never completely explored.
At one time, the significance of Mormonism could be summed up in
a few sentences. In American history books, it was part of the westward
movement, led by the great colonizer Brigham Young. For historians of
American religion, Mormonism was another product of the religious
2 gener al introduction
excitement set off by the Second Great Awakening. For literary scholars,
it was an attempt to give the new American nation a founding narrative.
For the fundamentalist Christian critics of the Church, it was a cult. For
Latter-day Saints themselves, it was the restoration of the original gospel
and church of Jesus Christ.
All of these have proved fruitful for scholars, but this collection of
Tanner essays is notable for moving beyond many of the traditional in-
quiries. The categorization of Mormonism as a cult, a sect, or a c hurch—
once a central preoccupation of scholars and critics—is of little interest
to these essayists. At one time the sociologists of religion attempted to
order religions by type and then speculate on how one type evolved into
another. These preoccupations originated in the theorizing of Ernst Tro-
eltsch and Max Weber, and were carried forward into the late twentieth
century by Rodney Stark and his colleagues. Borrowing from the sociolo-
gists, evangelical fundamentalists seized upon the word cult to charac-
terize Mormonism because it denigrated the religion in the process of
categorizing it. Calling Mormonism a cult associated it with David
Koresh or Jim Jones, although the word did not have that coloration in
sociological thought. Together, the sociologists and the Christian critics
made the term cult a controversial and powerful categorization. In the
current set of essays by outside scholars, religious typology receives little
attention. Meanwhile, the polemical use of the word cult is also falling
into disuse.
On the other hand, the idea of a restoration church is also passed over.
Restoration once seemed particularly useful for scholars because it over-
lapped with Mormon self-understanding. Mormons think of Joseph Smith
as restoring the doctrines and practices of the Bible, and scholars found
this conception useful for locating Mormonism in post-Reformation
Christian history. Most of the reformers from Luther on thought of them-
selves as restorers. Alexander Campbell, Joseph Smith’s contemporary,
stood in this line. Campbell set out self-consciously to reframe Christian-
ity on strictly biblical principles. Early Mormons may have borrowed the
word restoration from Campbell via Sidney Rigdon. Although it has long
been a powerful concept in Mormon thought and in the scholarly under-
standing of post-Reformation Christianity, it scarcely surfaces in these
lectures.
Origins in general are not discussed. The beginning of the Church, the
critical time when the founding revelations were received, is referred to
only in passing in one essay. Perhaps the writers are being tactful, knowing
General Introduction 3
Mormons are sensitive about these events. The upshot is that the lecturers
focus on what Mormonism came to be rather than how it got started.
Some of the standard questions, then, appear to be in recess for the
moment. This group of scholars is more interested in the formation of
identity, the place of women, and globalization. Of the traditional ap-
proaches, only the West receives much attention in this volume. Three of
the essays (by William Deverell, Walter Nugent, and David Marshall) take
up Jan Shipps’s provocative image of Mormonism as the hole in the west-
ward movement’s doughnut, the story that has not been told. All three,
however, elevate their subject above the narrative of wagon trains, wars
with American Indians, and new settlements. Ultimately, they are inter-
ested in the problem of blending. How does Mormonism find a place not
just in the historiography of the West, but also in American culture? How
does it remain separate while becoming a part of an American whole?
This larger theme links the three western papers with the essays of
Dell Upton on the Mormon landscape and Charles Cohen on Mormonism
as a modern Israel. Upton sees the blending of distinctive Mormon ele-
ments with more conventional American pieces in the formation of the
Mormon landscape. This seems perfectly natural, but the problem is:
How are Mormons to stop from sinking out of sight in the great American
sea? Will they blend right out of sight? Cohen explains how Mormons
drew on the biblical theme of the nation of Israel to distinguish them-
selves in the American religious scene. Now in a time of assimilation, that
identity is being eroded. Are Mormons on a path to extinction? Cohen
thinks Mormonism will survive. As he puts it, “No matter how much Mor-
mons may have come to resemble the ‘foreign nations,’ they retain their
distinctive sense of peoplehood, fortified by memory, myth, and a common
story.” For all these essayists, this tension is central. Can Mormons remain
themselves while living American lives?
Regardless of whether the authors intended it, these historical essays
are an occasion for Mormons to reflect on the state of their religion now
as well as in the past. Catherine Breckus’s lecture on woman and agency
will start men as well as women thinking about what it means to be a free
agent. The formidable restrictions imposed by Mormon institutional
structures must be respected, she argues. On the other hand, “if we ex-
plain that women’s agency is not always oriented toward emancipation or
resistance, we will treat conservative as well as radical women as serious
historical actors.” The decision to sustain and perpetuate can also be an
exercise of agency.
4 gener al introduction
Perhaps inevitably, four of these essays use one of the dominant meth-
ods of modern religious studies: comparative analysis. Mormonism is
lined up with free seekers, freethinkers, millenarians, and other prophetic
voices such as Ralph Emerson and Nat Turner. The aim of this work is to
gain a perspective on how Americans have encountered the divine and the
supernatural, using Mormonism as a salient case study. American culture
is saturated with the supernatural. God and the spirits have played about
us from the start: God bringing the Puritans to New England where they
could worship as they pleased, Divine Providence guiding Washington at
Valley Forge, the Spirit of God striking down seekers at revivalist camp
meetings. Alan Taylor, Richard Brodhead, Stephen Stein, and Leigh
Schmidt bring various versions of these encounters into juxtaposition
with Mormonism.
What interests them are the shifting alliances Mormonism has formed
throughout its history. In its early years, Taylor tells us, Mormonism par-
took of the diverse spiritual gifts enjoyed by seekers of all kinds. As Joseph
Smith claimed more authority for himself and his church, these shared
sympathies faded. Brodhead sees Joseph Smith and Ralph Emerson as
kindred spirits until Smith introduced institutional authority, rituals, and
doctrines—things Emerson could not abide. The Mormons were fervent
students of the millennium, Stein points out, until the late twentieth cen-
tury, when concerns of the moment overshadowed the apocalyptic future.
The same for freethinking skeptics, Schmidt writes. In the nineteenth
century, Mormons were aligned with freethinkers in their objections to
the religious establishment. In the twentieth century, as belief versus un-
belief became the overriding division in American culture, Mormons took
their place alongside other denominations in the camp of the believers.
History has a way of reshaping and eroding religious belief, and Mor-
mons cannot escape the winds of change. Will they hold on and be recog-
nizable a century hence? This question lies behind many of the essays in
this volume. The lectures by Randall Balmer, Elliott West, and George
Miles urge us to think how the stories we tell about ourselves are one way
to adapt. West sees the stories of childhood blending with the large story of
the Restoration. Balmer gives us stories being told in letters to families.
Miles emphasizes the constant revision of stories to explain our lives under
changing conditions. This is how societies preserve themselves, he argues.
A vibrant, dynamic community inevitably generates multiple under-

standings of its past, present, and future, and Mormonism began to
General Introduction 5
discover and develop numerous stories about the past that helped
them understand their ancestors and themselves.
But the stories will work best, he warns us, if they do not depart too far
from the evidence.
The greatest challenge of the current age, we hear from Philip Jenkins
and Jehu Hanciles, is the change wrought by the global expansion of Mor-
monism. Here the Church faces diversity and disjunctures greater than
any it has ever known. The floods of converts from Latin America, Africa,
and Asia introduce traditions and habits of thought far removed from any
that Mormons have assimilated before. How will these global converts be
made welcome without requiring them to strip away their native cultures?
How much “give” is there in American Mormonism? These issues are not
in the past; they are pressing questions right now.
These essays on globalization prompt Mormons to look ahead and
project a global future for themselves. This does not imply we should turn
our backs on the past and concentrate only on the now and the world that
is coming. Mormonism’s future can be seen in its past. Adaptation to new
circumstances, borrowing from other cultures while maintaining identity,
forming alliances with other groups—these essays inform us that Mor-
monism has been doing this for nearly two centuries. The question now
is whether the Church will continue to absorb and adapt, and still hold on
to its core in the years to come.
Richard Lyman Bushman

Worcester, Massachusetts
PART 1
The American Religious

Landscape
Introduction
BY REID L. NEILSON
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides scholars with a

fruitful subject for comparative study. As the historians in this section em-
phasize, we can learn a great deal about various religious figures and move-
ments in the history of the United States through creative contrasts with
their Latter-day Saint counterparts. The founding Smith family may be
profitably contextualized in the larger seeker culture that enveloped upstate
New York after the First Great Awakening. Transcendentalists, including
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and black revolutionaries, such as Nat Turner, can
be studied in concert with Joseph Smith and other American prophets.
Mormons and Shakers, with a host of other millenarians, when grouped
together offer a penetrating portrait of American eschatology that is both
familiar and unexpected to students of religion in North America. A com-
parison of Latter-day Saints and freethinkers together with an analysis of
the place of women in American religious historiography rounds out
the mix. These are just a few of the associations and affinities that can be
teased out when scholars include the Mormon story. The American reli-
gious landscape described by the Tanner lecturers in the following essays
is more complex than many observers may presuppose.
In the anthology’s opening essay, Alan Taylor, an American historian at
the University of Virginia, explores upstate New York’s religious scene in
the decades following the American Revolution. Through the lens of lived
religion, he describes the spiritual lives and cultural forces that character-
ized free seekers, who blended and transformed old and new religious
8 the americ an religious l andsc ape
ideas and practices in their daily lives. In so doing, he helps illuminate the
spiritual longings and religious choices of the Joseph Smith family and
their neighbors, who were brought to New York as part of a larger tide of
economic relocation and settlement. Taylor explains how the Smiths were
influenced by the rise of revivalism and a seeking culture that encouraged
American Christians to break with Congregationalism and embrace the
message of itinerant preachers and others who taught that the divine could
be accessed through dreams and visions, as well as through the spiritual
gifts described in the New Testament. Taylor describes this religious milieu
as “an open-ended, fluid, porous, multivalent, and hypercompetitive dis-
course involving multiple Protestant denominations and many autono-
mous clusters of seekers.” It proved to be a fertile seedbed for the Latter-day
Saints and many other religious groups.
The Smiths and many future Latter-day Saints in the region were
seekers of truth like many of their fellow Americans after their country’s
break from Great Britain. Although this spiritual splintering made pos-
sible a variety of religious experiences and denominations, it also culti-
vated a shared sense of possibilities. These same individuals were free
to choose in the expanding religious marketplace of ideas. Taylor de-
scribes that, in the midst of these conversations, “religion was usually
lived not within any one denomination but as part of a fluid discussion
that transcended the weak sectarian boundaries.” Debate and division
were commonplace experiences among those living on the American
frontier and those participating in the Yankee diaspora during this
period of revivalism. Itinerant preachers were embraced and followed.
The laity, including a growing number of women, challenged the lead-
ers of the establishment, turning to the Bible themselves for inspiration.
So it is not surprising that a young Joseph Smith found inspiration in
James’s admonition to ask for himself and then broke with conventional
religious communities. Only later would Smith discover, when he was a
prophetic figure himself with a church, that some of his followers would
likewise choose to go in different directions, leaving the LDS fold and
family.
On the surface, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, and Joseph Smith
seem to have little in common. Emerson was a transcendentalist who es-
chewed traditional religion, Turner was a black revolutionary bent on the
emancipation of his fellow African Americans, and Smith was the Pal-
myra prophet who testified of angels and new scriptures. But, as Richard
H. Brodhead, a scholar of English literature and the president of Duke
The American Religious Landscape 9
University, points out, all three men were contemporary prophets in ante-
bellum America. Brodhead begins with the story of Turner, who began
receiving revelations on his role as a redeemer of black America and
ended up leading one of the most violent slave revolts in U.S. history.
Brodhead suggests that Smith and Turner have not been studied together,
although there are many interesting parallels between the two men. Both
claimed callings through visionary experience and both felt raised up to
lead revolutions against oppressive regimes. And although their methods
and motives may have differed in life, in death they were both labeled as
martyrs by their followers.
Of course Brodhead is not suggesting that Smith and Turner were kin-
dred spirits, but he does argue that their stories might be read and studied
in tandem. “The history of prophetism is the story of how actual men and
women have asserted themselves as bearers of prophetic privilege and of
the consequences of these self-assertions,” he explains. “A prophet is a
person singled out to enjoy special knowledge of ultimate reality and to
give others mediated access to that otherwise unavailable truth.” In addi-
tion to these two leaders, Brodhead discusses the lives and contributions
of other prophetic figures, including William Miller, Sojourner Truth, and
John Humphrey Noyes. He suggests how each of them fashioned their
prophetic identity and projected their resulting authority into the lives of
their followers. He concludes by comparing Smith and Emerson, who
were born within two years of each other. Through his discourses, Emer-
son was able “to revive a prophetic conception of selfhood and rethink it
in such a way that prophetic identity becomes virtually synonymous with
selfhood itself,” according to Brodhead. Both Emerson and Smith found
emptiness in established religion, but they took radically different routes
to reconceptualize the notion of modern-day revelation.
Stephen J. Stein, an emeritus historian of religion at Indiana University,
offers a third comparative study of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints
and their contemporary Christian counterparts. Rather than contrasting
several leaders, he addresses the related topics of eschatology and apocalyp-
ticism prevalent in U.S. religious thought. Stein discusses how various
American-grown religions have dealt with these end-of-times discussions.
“I will address the question of the relationship between the perceived his-
torical future and the prevailing vision of the eschatological future in the
Mormon experience,” he begins. “My thesis is that there has been in Mor-
monism and remains today a close relationship between reflections on the
historical future and the conceptualization of the eschatological future.” He
comes at this topic from his own related research on the Shakers and Jona-
than Edwards.
Like other Christians, as well as non-Christian groups, the Latter-day
Saints have always had one eye on the present and another on the pro-
phetic future, especially the pending Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Mor-
mons see the present as an ongoing battle between good and evil, with
greater hope for the millennial future. “Eschatology has provided Latter-day
Saints a way to cope with historical circumstances that often have been
less than ideal,” Stein writes. He then discusses the relationship between
historical and eschatological futures, which are closely related in LDS
thought. Since the days of Joseph Smith, the Saints have tried to deter-
mine when the second advent might be ushered in and how to prepare for
the anticipated events. Stein also describes how other American religious
groups have dealt with similar end-of-time questions, including Ann Lee
of the Shakers, William Miller of the Millerites, and Ellen White of the
Seventh-day Adventists.
The stories of women both in American religious histories in general,
and within the LDS story specifically, are being told with greater inclusive-
ness and meaning, according to Catherine A. Brekus, a historian of Amer-
ican religion at Harvard University. But this has not always been the case,
and there is still much progress that needs to be made to fully integrate
the female religious experience into existing narratives. More specifically,
she focuses on the place of agency in the lives of LDS women. She begins
by showing how accounts of nineteenth-century plural marriage portrayed
Utah women as historical actors without agency, doomed to the sexual
desires and whims of their patriarchal husbands. Much of the writing on
Mormon women in subsequent decades, at least by Latter-day Saints, was
designed to debunk these damning stereotypes and elevate the place of
women within the tradition. These divergent approaches resulted in ob-
servers gazing at a fractured picture of LDS women—either deluded,
downtrodden slaves or fiercely independent matriarchs.
Brekus clarifies that Mormon women were not the only females in
the past to be left out of—or caricatured in—published histories. She
calls on scholars to rethink and reimagine how they view and write about
the historical agency of all women. She argues that LDS women, like
all women, made their own choices through both following and dissent-
ing from cultural norms in avenues available to them. “Because histori-
ans have implicitly defined agency against structure, they have found it
The American Religious Landscape 11
hard to imagine women who accepted religious structures as agents,” she

writes. Brekus also laments that Mormon women have not been more
fully integrated into the larger story of American religious history and
offers several suggestions for the construction of new models of wom-
en’s agency.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, a scholar of American religious history at Wash-
ington University in St. Louis, offers the concluding Tanner Lecture of
this section by following Brodhead’s comparative model. He, too, places
LDS figures in conversation with other contemporary Americans whose
stories present interesting parallels. The Latter-day Saints and free-
thinkers in post–Civil War America seem like strange bedfellows; but,
as Schmidt points out, they both point to the “limits of toleration” on
the American religious landscape. Although the Latter-day Saints had
little to say about their secular counterparts, a number of notable free-
thinkers commented on the Latter-day Saints and their place in society.
“Mormons and freethinkers nonetheless have an intertwined story, es-
pecially in the late nineteenth century. They shared an outsider status
of particular severity in relation to Protestant America, and that mar-
ginalization joined them, in spite of their ample differences, in the su-
percharged politics surrounding religious and civil liberties,” Schmidt
argues in his essay.
Both the Mormons and freethinkers were minority voices crying in the
nineteenth-century American religious wilderness. The Latter-day Saints
and the irreligious were both targets of the Protestant Establishment
during this era. But their defensive alliance was a fragile one. Drawing on
his research on the lives of freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll, D. M. Ben-
nett, and Watson Heston, Schmidt describes how these secularists viewed
and commented on the LDS tradition. Although most freethinkers felt the
Latter-day Saints should be able to exercise their freedoms of speech and
religion, some drew the line at the practice of plural marriage, despite
their own advocacy for nontraditional coupling and defiance of traditional
marriage customs. Polygamy was a bridge too far, even for some free-
thinkers. Their own anti-Mormonism is worth revisiting because it shows
the limits of cultural dissent, even for nonbelievers in America. Today,
both the Latter-day Saints and the irreligious continue to be two of the
most misunderstood minority groups in America.
The work of these scholars opens up new vistas on the past religious
landscape and points to lands yet uncharted and unexplored for future
intrepid historians. By putting the Latter-day Saints in comparison with

their fellow American prophets, freethinkers, revolutionaries, feminists,
and millenarians, these observers tasked with looking into the LDS tradi-
tion from the outside have thrown light on the past and charted new direc-
tions for the next generation of Mormon studies scholars.
1
The Free Seekers: Religious Culture

in Upstate New York, 1790–1835
By Alan Taylor
American religious history has traditionally focused on institution

building within denominations, which emphasizes the role of leading
clergy, rather than the laity. Mormon history fits this pattern, owing to an
understandable preoccupation with Joseph Smith and his gathered com-
munity. Recently, however, many religious historians have shifted the
focus to the study of “lived religion”—by which they mean the ways that
ordinary people create their own spiritual meanings in their day-to-day
lives. One such scholar, Robert Orsi, explains, “Religion comes into being
in an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life.”
This approach finds people eclectically reworking religious idioms that
are diverse and often contested.1
In that spirit, I will reexamine the cultural landscape of upstate New
York between 1790 and 1835—the milieu from which emerged the pro-
phetic role of Joseph Smith Jr. and the early Mormon Church. I will argue
that early Mormonism emerged from the lived religion of upstate New
York: an open-ended, fluid, porous, multivalent, and hypercompetitive dis-
course involving multiple Protestant denominations and many autono-
mous clusters of seekers. The movement to the New York frontier exposed
people to a proliferation of religious itinerants expressing an extraordinary
diversity of belief. They included Baptists (both Calvinist and Freewill),
Methodists, Universalists, Quakers, Shakers, Congregationalists, Presbyte-
rians, Episcopalians, deists—and a great variety of distinctive local groups
and defiant individuals in earnest search of their own truth. Rarely did any
one group dominate a particular town.2
Although no single doctrine or denomination satisfied a majority, the
diversity and fluidity of beliefs had a paradoxical effect: it produced a
common discourse. The essence of lived religion on the settlement fron-

tier was immersion in a public and often contentious debate in which no
one group enjoyed either a majority or the coercive power of the govern-
ment. Of course, the preachers of every denomination denounced their
rivals as snares fatal to the morals, prosperity, and salvation of the people.
But despite their longing for exclusive control, every denomination had
to tolerate, however grudgingly, the right of people to choose their own
faith. Consequently, religion was usually lived not within any one denom-
ination but as part of a fluid discussion that transcended the weak sectar-
ian boundaries. In the many new towns of upstate New York, the essence
of popular religion was the opportunity for people to sample and debate
multiple variants of Protestant belief (and disbelief ). Although I will
focus on upstate New York, this culture at least characterized the entire
Yankee frontier, from Maine to Ohio—and probably the entire American
population of settlers, including those from the South and the m id-Atlantic
states. 3
Sources
The religious culture of upstate New York emerged from the accumula-
tion of four sources: first, the centrifugal legacies of the First Great Awak-
ening during the mid-eighteenth century; second, a selective migration
that concentrated the most restless seekers in new towns; third, frontier
hardships which discouraged institutional regularity; and, fourth, the cre-
ative power of dreams and visions. Of course, all four framed the social
and religious experiences of Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith Sr., and their
children. But although unique in their ultimate success, the Smiths had
plenty of company in their early, anxious years of seeking for a unitary
truth in a challenging place and time of diversity and debate.
Born in 1805 in Vermont to parents who came from Connecticut and
later relocated to western New York in 1816, Joseph Smith Jr. grew up
within the great Yankee emigration of the post-Revolutionary generation.
Between 1780 and 1820, Yankee emigrants left southern New England to
create hundreds of new settlements in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,
northern Pennsylvania, the Western Reserve of Ohio, and parts of Canada.
But above all they went to upstate New York—the region west of the
Hudson River and north of Kingston. New York’s population exploded
from 340,120 in 1790 to 1,372,812 in 1820. In 1790, when the great move-
ment was just beginning, New York ranked only fifth in population among
The Free Seekers: Religious Culture in Upstate New York, 1790–1835 15
the states, lagging behind Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and even

North Carolina. By 1820 New York had become the most populous state in
the nation. Because most of the upstate newcomers settled on new farms,
their settlement dramatically shifted the distribution of New York’s popula-
tion. Out of the state’s fifty-four counties in 1820, thirty-eight (70 percent)
had been formed after 1780. In 1785 three-fourths of New Yorkers still
lived in the Hudson Valley or along the Atlantic coast; by 1820 three-fourths
of the inhabitants dwelled in the towns created after the war in the central,
northern, and western quarters of the state.4
This Yankee diaspora came a century and a half after the great transat-
lantic migration of their Puritan ancestors from England to create a New
England. Where the Puritan migration had manifested the cultural revo-
lution wrought by the Reformation in England, the Yankee movement
realized in the new settlements the implications of the First Great Awak-
ening: a dramatic wave of religious revivals that gripped most of southern
New England during the 1740s—with a powerful echo during the 1760s.
Just as the Puritan migration disproportionately drew out of England the
folk most committed to a thorough Reformation, the Yankee movement
was dominated by people influenced by the radical implications of the
First Great Awakening.5
The most radical revivalists urged the spiritually awakened to separate
from churches that included the “unconverted”—those who could not tes-
tify to a new birth experience of divine grace. To promote separations, the
radical evangelicals championed individual choice even in defiance of all
traditional sources of authority: of official minister, county justice, and
even of fathers and husbands. But the separated did not wish to remain
isolated individuals. Instead, they promptly formed their own congrega-
tions, for the point of separation was to find tighter, purer communions.6
Although revivalism affected most of New England, only a minority
fully embraced the radicalism of separating from the official Congrega-
tional Church of their local parish. Although shaken, and often reformed,
by the awakening, the established churches in Massachusetts and Con-
necticut preserved the powerful advantage of an exclusive right to tax sup-
port. The college-educated Congregational ministry and the substantial
meetinghouses of the New England Way demanded considerable pay-
ments. The governments usually refused to accept the separations and
instead continued to demand tax payments from the Separates to support
the local official church. If they failed to pay, Separates often suffered jail
and the confiscation of some property for auctioning. From a peak of
about 100 Separate congregations in 1754, Separatism declined precipi-

tously to just 16 churches by 1775. The Separates either returned to the
Congregational establishment or found a new, congenial home among the
Calvinist Baptists, who increased their Massachusetts and Connecticut
congregations from thirteen in 1740 to fifty-three by 1770.7
After the American Revolution, the religious minorities of New Eng-
land found an outlet in emigration to the many frontier districts newly
opened to settlement. New York was especially appealing because the
state lacked a tax-supported religious establishment. On the other hand,
the majority in New England felt satisfied with orthodox Congregational-
ism. They were slower to emigrate into raw settlements that lacked an
establishment to require—and the means to finance—a college-educated
ministry and a substantial meetinghouse. Consequently, religious dissi-
dents formed a much larger proportion in the new settlements of New
York than in the old towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Indeed, by
draining dissidence to the frontier, the migration tended to strengthen
and to prolong the orthodox predominance in Massachusetts and Con-
necticut. And as that consolidation became conspicuous, the dissidents
felt even greater pressure to move beyond the reach of the Congregational
establishment.8
Frontier conditions compounded the initial advantage that selective
migration had afforded the evangelical dissidents. New settlers could not
afford to build a meetinghouse promptly and pay the ministerial salary ex-
pected by the Congregational establishment. For at least the first decade,
new settlers suffered intense labor, heavy debts, and periodic deprivation
and hardships as they struggled to make new farms in a dense forest. Dif-
ficult and expensive access to external markets over stump- and root-ridden
roads slowed the advent of prosperity. George Peck, a New York settler’s
son, recalled, “The settlements were small and widely separated, the roads
were terrible, and, of course, the people were poor.”9 The frontier hard-
ships and scant pay also discouraged the advent of college-educated minis-
ters, who could find more secure and comfortable parishes in the older,
eastern towns. And the diverse religious preferences of the scattered set-
tlers discouraged the development of a local consensus in favor of support-
ing a common church and minister.10
The frontier dispersion, poverty, and divisions favored more radical
evangelicals who relied on cheap, part-time, poorly educated, and itiner-
ant preachers who earned a spare living by combining their far-flung min-
istry with a small farm or a trade. The evangelical itinerants also made do
without a meetinghouse, gathering instead in cabins, barns, fields, and

log schoolhouses. The New England Congregationalists tried to compen-
sate by raising funds to dispatch their ministers on summer missionary
tours of the new settlements, but the missionaries found that they were
too few, too brief, and too late. The settlers had already embraced the
cheaper and more numerous and familiar ministry of the evangelical de-
nominations. Rev. Henry Chapman, a Congregational missionary, la-
mented, “The Baptists & Methodists . . . are creeping into every corner &
using every exertion to draw off people from the regular churches. They
have great influence in these new settlements & that for want of other la-
bourers in the vineyard.” Similarly, in 1806 Rev. William Graves, a Con-
gregational missionary, complained that the Baptists and Methodists had
filled the religious vacuum in the New York settlements: “By reason of
their having preaching, they draw away a great number of our people, who
in other circumstances would be likely to be with us.”11
The Congregational missionaries feared that they had arrived too late
to rescue settlers ruined by either the absence of religion or a surfeit of
the wrong kind. In 1794 Rev. Aaron Kinne toured the New York frontier
and reported, “Irregular & vicious habits are imbibed, rivetted, & become
obstinate & incurable:—or, which is but little better, they become an
object to some evangelizing Baptist, or roving Methodist. . . . There is an
awakening—many are converted & baptized—dissensions arise—they
are divided, disabled & ruined for all the purposes of religious society.”
The settlements, he concluded, “exhibit lamentable pictures of barba-
rism and confusion.”12 The legacy of the Great Awakening, selective mi-
gration, and frontier hardships all contributed to the fourth engine of
religious diversity and spontaneity: the spiritual power of dreams, vi-
sions, and inner voices. As John Wigger has shown in his recent study
of Methodism, the most fundamental issue dividing the evangelical
from the orthodox was their clashing attitudes toward latter-day mes-
sages from the divine. For the orthodox, revelation had ceased with the
apostles and rightly so. Their God could be known only through the
published scriptures and only with the help of a learned expert trained
by an orthodox college. By contrast, evangelicals mourned the apparent
silence and absence of God from their own lives. They longed to experi-
ence His power directly, physically, visually, and emotionally. The evan-
gelicals despised orthodox authority and learning for muting and hiding
that divine power, thereby consigning souls to damnation for want of
His tangible presence. By emigrating to the frontier, evangelicals left
behind the orthodox ministers who asserted their prestige against the
folk longing for the daily intervention of spiritual power in this world.
Moreover, frontier hardships produced intense mood swings between
despair and hope, an emotional dialectic that induced more vivid dreams.
Finally, the troubling competition of denominations demanded some
supernatural criteria for determining their truth claims. Many seekers
found religious guidance directly from God or an angel through the
medium of a dream or an inner voice.13
Frontier Methodists and Baptists endorsed the dreams, visions, and
voices as divine power working through human vessels. George Peck
praised the Methodist revival that occurred in his settlement (Middlefield,
New York) in 1800: “The Spirit was poured out from on high upon multi-
tudes, and men and women, old and young, dreamed dreams, saw vi-
sions, and were filled with the spirit of prophecy.” Another Methodist,
Charles Giles, insisted that the circuit riders were “endowed with super-
natural power, by which they spoke with tongues and performed mira-
cles. . . . The Spirit of God attended their ministry, and signs and wonders
followed them.”14 Such manifestations seemed to renew the apostolic age
of direct, tangible contact with the divine that people hungered for. By
moving away from the Congregational establishment, seekers believed
they had moved into contact with the awesome power of God.
Of course, such latter-day supernaturalism shocked the orthodox Con-
gregationalists who visited the settlements as occasional missionaries. In
1804, Rev. Thomas Williams complained:
Many persons in this region seem to place great dependence on

dreams. One woman told me that about a year ago she was greatly
afraid of death for many days. It seemed to be very near and was
very dreadful. One night she dreampt she saw Christ coming in the
east and she thought he was coming for her. She dreampt she went
out to meet him and desired him to let her stay longer and he took
her into his arms and she kissed him and was in his arms a good
while. The next morning she was joyful and death seemed to be at
a distance. From that time she has had a hope that she was a Chris-
tian. I think that there is reason to believe that many persons in the
new settlements have a hope without any more reason than she
has. The Baptists and Methodists are generally very hasty in con-
cluding that persons who have had some dreams or suggestions or
bodily afflictions are Christians.15
In addition to the Congregationalists, some of the more conservative Bap-

tists worried that dreams deceived as often as they revealed the divine
purpose.16
Instead of simplifying the denominational choice, the dreams and vi-
sions compounded the diversity by delivering wildly divergent messages.
Indeed, they encouraged an array of independent innovators who created
their own local sects by claiming authority direct from God, unmediated
and undiluted by any worldly authorities. These uneducated and self-
appointed preachers toured the settlements describing their divine mes-
sages to attract their own followers. One example among many is Elisha
Peck (1762–1829; no relationship to George Peck as far as I’m aware).
Born and married in Connecticut, he emigrated at age thirty-seven to
Otsego County, New York, where he bought a small farm (forty acres) and
plied his trade as a shoemaker. After experiencing the Holy Spirit in
dreams and voices, Peck broke with his Calvinist Baptist congregation in
1806. Rejecting all existing denominations, Peck simply called himself a
Christian and defied the authority of scriptural learning: “I find it better
to obey the spirit, than to obey the commandments and doctrine of men.”
He cited the Bible’s inconsistencies as proof that scribes, priests, noble-
men, and kings had corrupted the divine message, the better to deceive
and exploit the common people. To decipher the divine truths embedded
within a compromised Bible, people needed to seek out “the same spirit
which spake by the holy prophets and Jesus Christ.” Peck concluded, “In
vain do we read the scriptures over and over, unless we have this light of
life to attend us.” By heeding their dreams and visions instead of human-
made and -enforced creeds, the common people could reclaim the direct
and daily communication with God formerly enjoyed by Jesus and the
apostles.17
Of course, the various denominational clergy refused to recognize
Elisha Peck’s divine authority. Rarely united in anything, the diverse clergy
of Otsego County denounced Peck as an imposter. On the basis of a dream,
Peck announced that his death would come on October 7, 1806, unless
averted “by the fervent prayers of the faithful.” His followers prayed and
Peck lived, confirming his authority to them while outraging his better-
educated rival clergy. The Episcopalian Rev. Daniel Nash complained, “He
is absolutely too mean to be noticed by any decent Man, being a drunken
fanatic—pretends to be a Prophet sent from the Lord.”18 This rhetoric of
denunciation will sound familiar to scholars of the prophetic career of
Joseph Smith Jr.
Because these autonomous preachers usually called themselves Bap-

tists, the institutionalized Calvinist Baptists felt threatened by the contin-
uing process of religious fission. In 1799 the Calvinist Baptist Church in
Otsego Township issued a warning circular letter:
We find it necessary to be on our guard against imposters, who

swarm in this day of error and delusion, and are nuisances to soci-
ety, ravening wolves in the church of God. From such, dear breth-
ren, turn away. It is necessary for us to be on our guard, as our
country is new, our settlements young, and men of all principles
and characters are flocking into them.19
To standardize preaching and disavow innovators, the Calvinist Baptist

churches organized regional associations to certify proper elders and de-
nounce deviants. Nonetheless, novelty continued to allure lay Baptists. In
1809 the Otsego Association lamented, “The enemy pours in errors upon
us like a flood. . . . Our local situation invites his emissaries and almost
every new fangled scheme is broached in these new settlements.”20 No
Congregationalist could have better stated this alarm.
As a conduit of direct authority from God, dreams and visions could in-
spire the humble and the marginalized to defy conventional earthly authority.
Clergy of all stripes were especially dismayed when supernatural encounters
emboldened some devout women to become itinerant preachers in defiance
of St. Paul’s injunction against women speaking in the church. In 1816 the
Otsego Association had to correct an embarrassing typographical error that
had been exploited by a female seeker eager to preach: “Voted, that Elder
Ethel Peck, whose name was inserted in our Minutes last year, through mis-
take, is not by us considered as a minister in fellowship with this Associa-
tion.” Eager to claim greater respectability, the Baptists thus hurried to
reaffirm the traditional male monopoly on public preaching.21
The lived experience of Luther and Annis Peck, parents of George
Peck, illuminates the combination of awakening religion, frontier migra-
tion, early hardships, and spiritual dreams. In 1790 as young adults they
had fled from poverty in Danbury, Connecticut, to settle in Middlefield, a
new settlement in Otsego County, New York. They developed a frontier
farm, while Luther plied his trade as a blacksmith. Their Congregational
minister in Danbury had given them a parting warning:
You will meet out in the new country, these strolling Methodists.
They go about with their sanctimonious looks and languid hair,
bawling and frightening women and children. They are wolves in

sheep’s clothing, the false prophets which should come in the last
days, creeping into houses, and leading captive silly women laden
with sins and led away with diverse lusts.”22
The Pecks brought formal letters of honorable dismission and recom-

mendation to any Congregational or Presbyterian Church they could find.
But for want of an orthodox church in Middlefield, the Pecks reluctantly
attended services conducted by the Methodist itinerants who routinely vis-
ited their settlement. Just as their old minister had warned, Annis soon
warmed to their emotional services while Luther was initially repelled.
Their son George later recalled, “He turned his eyes this way and that as
the strange noises struck his ears, till he became vexed, and wished that
they would cease and let him ‘hear a little of what the preacher said.’” Ir-
ritated, Luther neglected religion, becoming “fond of lively company.” Re-
ligious authority passed to his wife and their teenage daughter Rachel,
who led daily family prayers, in which they begged for Luther’s conver-
sion. The two women also assumed a leading role in the local Methodist
class meeting. According to George Peck, a visiting uncle “saw and heard
what were to him new and wonderful things. He had never heard a woman
pray. Several of the female members of the class led in the devotions with
a propriety and a power which surprised him.”23
Luther Peck experienced an evangelical conversion in 1800 after
sudden deaths claimed three friends—one hurled from a cart, the second
crushed by a falling tree, and the third drowned by a raging river. His mirth
shattered, Peck plunged into a depression that culminated in a terrifying
dream in which his dead friends conducted him to divine judgment. Terri-
fied by his lack of preparation, Peck awoke “in an agony of remorse,” crying
out, “I am going to die, and I shall be lost.” His son recalled:
I well remember being helped down the ladder that morning [from
the loft], and being struck with the changed aspect of things. My
father, who was usually the first to salute us with kind or playful
words sat weeping and groaning in one corner, with my sisters
gathered around him, sobbing with sympathetic emotion. Mother
sat at a little distance, also weeping.24
Gripped by despair for months, Luther Peck nearly wasted away. At

last, however, he found relief by attending Methodist meetings with his
wife and daughters—which led to his ecstatic new birth as an evangelical
Christian. Thereafter, the Peck home became the general rendezvous in

Middlefield for Methodist meetings and circuit riders. Luther also re-
claimed his role as religious patriarch. As narrated by George Peck, his
parents experienced the frontier decay of orthodox authority, exposure to
new currents of evangelical belief, the competing pull of irreligious world-
liness, increased female initiative and leadership in family conversions, a
preoccupation with death as the precipitant to a spiritual crisis, the author-
ity of dreams to demand and justify a personal transformation, and the
collective validation provided by fellow seekers gathered in prayer meet-
ings. These seven elements recurred in the lives of thousands in upstate
New York—including the Smith family of Manchester.
Discourse
As a combined consequence of dreaming, frontier conditions, selective
migration, and the separatist legacies of the First Great Awakening, many
varieties of Protestant belief could be found jumbled together in the fron-
tier settlements of upstate New York. And that cacophony encouraged a
small but noisy reaction by rationalists who denounced all forms of re-
vealed religion and instead found inspiration in Thomas Paine’s notorious
book, The Age of Reason. Travelers and missionaries repeatedly marveled
at the broad range of spiritual beliefs within each township. Touring the
upper Mohawk Valley, English traveler John Harriott noted, “While a Bap-
tist minister was baptizing and making good Christians in one village, an
assemblage of Tom Paine’s men, at another village, were committing blas-
phemies too horrid to mention.”25
In addition, the religious commitment and denominational affiliation
of individuals were more fluid and unstable than we commonly assume.
Over the years, many people shifted their attendance and their member-
ships multiple times as their convictions evolved. Even some clergy changed
their minds, doctrines, and denominations—to the great delight of their
new brethren and the special fury of their old. As clerk of the Universalist
Association in central New York, Nathaniel Stacy announced with obvious
pleasure in 1815: “William Underwood, formerly a zealous Calvinistic Bap-
tist preacher, and a violent opposer of the doctrine of God’s universal grace,
became now a convert to that blessed hope, and a faithful supporter of that
cause, which he once strove to destroy.” Of course, the Calvinist Baptists
likewise trumpeted to the world every Universalist who recanted to accept
the existence of hell.26
During their frontier sojourns, the Congregational missionaries (and

their Presbyterian allies) could not avoid crossing paths and sharing audi-
ences with other preachers: Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Univer-
salists, Shakers, and various innovators. In addition, the missionaries
often had to debate rationalists who took their inspiration from Paine’s
Age of Reason rather than from the Bible. Far from operating in mutual
indifference and isolation, the diverse itinerants, missionaries, seekers,
and deists interacted routinely and vigorously in the settlements. Their
discussions and disputations were both public and private, civil and angry,
with rivals and friends, ministers and laity, believers and nonbelievers.
They debated the full range of Protestant doctrine, including whether bap-
tism ought to come automatically in infancy or by divine selection as
adults; whether it should be by immersion or sprinkling; whether the
ministry should be distinguished by learning or fervor; whether reason or
revelation best led people to know God; whether the Bible was entirely
holy, partially corrupted, or largely fallacious; whether revelation had
ended with the scriptures or continued in latter-day dreams, visions, and
tongues; whether salvation came through good works or by faith alone;
whether eternal salvation would be partial or universal; and whether
women should be permitted to pray and preach in public. Never before
had so many people engaged in such an open-ended and wide-ranging
discourse about spiritual fundamentals as on the broad and expanding
settler frontier of the early American republic.27
Because religious diversity reigned in virtually every settlement—and
because the curious of every stripe usually turned out to see and hear the
latest visitor—an itinerant or missionary ordinarily drew good crowds.
Indeed, the attendance was surprisingly large given the dispersion of the
settlers and the difficulties of frontier travel—but only rarely could a
preacher or minister find an audience confined to his own denomination.
Although Shakers were few and far between in the settlements, in 1803 two
of their preachers drew over 100 persons to a Sabbath service in Otsego
County. “I did not expect one quarter so many,” one of them marveled.
During his tour of that county in 1807, Rev. George Colton (Congregation-
alist) routinely gathered 100 people for a weekday meeting and from 150 to
300 on a Sabbath. Visiting the small town of Decatur in 1812, Rev. Joel
T. Benedict (Congregationalist) was pleasantly surprised: “The people are
principally Baptists & Methodists. They were attentive and urged me to
visit them again.” But the orthodox missionaries were less pleased when
their own people strayed to hear the competition. Rev. Thomas Williams
doubted that “the members of the Presbyterian churches ought themselves,

or ought to allow their families, to go to Baptist and Methodist meetings on
the Sabbath”—even when, as was usually the case, there was no orthodox
missionary in the vicinity.28
While touring the settlements, itinerants and missionaries sought
every opportunity to visit and converse with the people, whatever their de-
nomination (if any). Every day, a preacher or minister tried, with the assis-
tance of local hosts, to collect as many settlers as possible for a public
sermon. Between services, the clergy called at the schools to catechize
children and at private homes to pray with the adults. The itinerants un-
derstood that small conversational circles could ripple outward, prolong-
ing their influence in a settlement long after their departure. After taking
pains to cultivate leading settlers, two Shaker emissaries explained, “We
had some conversation with them and perhaps they may help to keep the
minds of people in exercise.”29
That exercise, however, worked both ways. Because literacy, biblical
knowledge, and shrewd competition characterized the Yankee settlers,
the itinerants and missionaries faced no shortage of common people
eager to match wits and piety. Women, as well as men, aggressively en-
gaged in this widespread give-and-take. Rev. Daniel Nash was delighted to
report that, when a Presbyterian missionary charged the Episcopalian
clergy with drunkenness, “a young woman of our Church was present
and handsomely asked him to prove his words and point out one Individ-
ual if he could. He was confounded, not knowing that any Episcopalian
was then there.” However, the shoe was on the other foot when two Shak-
ers publicly confronted Nash to denounce him as “a lofty, poor, blind
leader of the blind” for writing a letter deriding their denomination. They
reported, “He was started [sic] in his mind & asked who told us that he
wrote a letter. . . . He would not own it, but at last being prest too close, he
said he did not know but he might to some distant relation have men-
tioned that there was such a people.” Thereafter, Nash tried to dodge the
many rivals who “have endeavoured to engage me in disputes”—a reti-
cence that sharply curtailed his circuit and influence.30
Laypeople sought out ministers for debate, sometimes interrupting
their sermons with challenges. In 1803 Congregational minister Thomas
Williams reported, “This morning a Methodist came to ask some ques-
tions. He had lately said that he would challenge the most learned and
stoutest of the Calvinists to dispute with him and that he would pick off all
their feathers in a few minutes.” Williams also recorded that during a
sermon, “A Universalist, who appeared to be somewhat the worse for liquor,

very soon made known his sentiments.” Audiences often challenged a vis-
iting minister to preach from a particular passage of scripture thought to
contradict his doctrine—or they demanded his response to a hostile publi-
cation circulating in the neighborhood. In 1805 Rev. Nathaniel Stacy (Uni-
versalist) encountered a recently published polemic “in almost every place
where I went; it was thrown in my face by almost every saucy boy, quarrel-
some man, and petulant old woman that I met.” To turn the debate, Stacy
obtained and circulated 500 copies of a refutation published by his Univer-
salist association.31
Because so many people participated in the debate, the local influence
of a preacher or missionary hinged upon his successful performance
under close public scrutiny. In 1813 Rev. Joel T. Benedict, a Congregation-
alist, explained:
This western country is so over run with arminianism & universal-

ism, that a missionary who is not prepared to wage & defend a war
with these destroyers of souls will have but little success. . . . A Mis-
sionary who is not able or willing to attack the erroneous senti-
ments which are so prevalent in this section of country, does real
injury to the cause, as the enemies of truth appear to vindicate their
own errors & to oppose those who contend earnestly for the faith
once delivered to the saints.32
A preacher also had to confront the slanderous rumors spread by his

rivals. As the most controversial denomination, the Universalists were the
special targets of malicious invention. Rev. Nathaniel Stacy learned that
the local Baptist elders were assuring people that he had been caught play-
ing cards with fellow Universalists and had boasted, “We neither fear God,
man, nor the devil!” Determined to find the source, Stacy confronted, in
succession, a chain of Baptist elders culminating in a preacher from Mas-
sachusetts who had recently toured the New York settlements. Making a
special trip to Massachusetts, Stacy demanded and received a letter of
apology for public display upon his return home. He took such extraordi-
nary pains because he understood the ruinous power of an unchecked
rumor that became oral currency.33
The demanding discourse seemed neverending. Rev. David Higgins
“found such an engagedness in religion, that in lengthy conferences, profes-
sors & many others have shown no propensity to turn off the conversation.”
After the weary Rev. George Colton had been kept up to midnight debating
his faith by his hosts, he complained, “People think that missionaries can &
ought to talk forever.”34
Transformation
On the one hand, this world of fluid and contentious discourse offered a
bracing freedom to explore and experiment. On the other hand, the stakes
of failing to find conviction were high: eternal damnation. Consequently,
pluralism and freedom imposed a painful uncertainty and insecurity, as
seekers struggled to know and choose the truth. In his first vision, a young
Joseph Smith Jr. sought from God the answer to the most compelling
question in his culture: “Which of all these sects was right?” The answer
he got was not reassuring: “I must join none of them, for they were all
wrong.” After a few more years of spiritual testing and questioning, Smith
would conclude that he had to add to the array of religious choices—in the
hope that his truth would trump and transcend the cacophony that he
found so troubling.35
In this free but contentious discourse, many people found no sect that
was completely satisfying. Although they avidly attended sermons by the
various preachers, regularly prayed for inspiration, and pored over their
Bibles, these seekers found no lasting satisfaction in any single denomina-
tion. Historians underestimate the numbers of these free seekers pre-
cisely because they escaped the recordkeeping of the denominations.
Because we underestimate their numbers, historians assume that the un-
churched were indifferent to religion. By restoring the free seekers, we
find a more ubiquitous but more volatile popular Christianity. And we
find the people who first became Mormons, including, of course, the
Smith family. Lucy Mack Smith expressed their dilemma nicely, “If I join
some one of the different denominations, all the rest will say I am in error.
No church will admit that I am right, except the one with which I am as-
sociated.” Belatedly and grudgingly she joined the Presbyterian Church in
Palmyra, but her husband, Joseph Smith Sr., held aloof from all churches,
and the couple found more spiritual guidance in his dreams than in any
sermon. Young Joseph felt attracted to a revival until it culminated in a
sectarian competition for the converts: “for a scene of great confusion and
bad feelings ensued; priest contending against priest, and convert against
convert; so that all their good feelings . . . were entirely lost in a strife of
words and a contest about opinions.”36
Such quotations could be multiplied; for early and often, Smith and
the other early Mormons dwelled on the multiplicity and the wrangling of
denominations as signs that humanity needed a new dispensation to re-
store Christian truth and unity. As proof of that restoration, they offered
free seekers what they wanted most: tangible proofs that the Mormons
were reviving and practicing the daily presence of divine power that had
characterized apostolic times. During the early 1830s, Mormon itinerants
dwelled upon miraculous acts rather than on abstract words: on angelic
visions, sacred tongues, holy revelations, fulfilled predictions, and divine
healing. Insisting on the imminent millennium, Parley Pratt promised
believers an accelerating profusion of “miracles, signs, and wonders, rev-
elations, and manifestations of the power of God, even beyond anything
that any former generation has witnessed.” Joseph Young recalled his 1832
conversion, “Brother Brigham visited me awhile in Canada and reported
many things of interest concerning the signs and wonderful miricles
being wrought through the believers in his new faith. I was ripe for receiv-
ing something that would feed my mortal cravings. . . . I hailed it as my
spiritual jubilee.” Little cited as a text, the Book of Mormon was primarily
significant as a tangible evidence of a latter-day miracle: its recovery by
Smith with angelic assistance.37
Such appeals built Mormonism by finding and tapping into local
groups of seekers unaffiliated, or only loosely affiliated, with a denomina-
tion. Examples include the Reformed Methodists of the Midland District
of Upper Canada and the Disciples of Christ led by Sidney Rigdon in
Kirtland, Ohio. To win these groups, the Mormon missionaries had to
play by the demanding rules of the pluralist religious culture: they had to
engage in public debates with rival clergy and with hecklers in their audi-
ences; had to counter the busy work of slanderous rumor and hostile pub-
lications; and had to talk late into the night with anyone who would listen
or question. Of course, the missionaries did not always succeed in recruit-
ing local seekers. For example, in 1835 near Kingston in Upper Canada,
William McLellin and Brigham Young attended a “pray[e]r meeting at a
Mr. Sniders’ among a people who belonged to no order of religionists but
who professed to be very pious. . . . They gave good attention, but they felt
or seemed to feel as if they were sufficiently holy without any farther
preparation.”38
And when successful, the missionaries brought into the church a di-
verse and scattered set of groups that did not easily surrender their auton-
omy to a new conformity. Many wanted to practice spiritual gifts directly
rather than accept them vicariously through a prophet. Consequently,

local variation characterized Mormon belief and practice during the early
1830s. At Sackets Harbor, New York, in 1835 William McLellin reported,
“The church here are 19 in number, a little enthusiastic and did not as a
body pay any respect to the words of wisdom, . . . even the Elders seemed
to want almost every quality except Zeal and that they had abundantly—
even to the saluting with a kiss—&c.”39
A volatile foundation, many of these autonomous seekers broke away
during the late 1830s and early 1840s as Smith pressed for a gathering in
one community to enforce a greater conformity of belief and behavior.
The Prophet also demanded a more complete alienation from the rest of
Christendom by a succession of revelations introducing a new culture
meant to restore his understanding of the Old Testament Israel. He fur-
ther recast their spirituality within an eternal progression toward god-
hood. The new order included complex and distinctive rituals, ordinances,
and a hierarchy of priesthoods that combined to set the Mormons as a
people apart, alienated from the dominant Protestant culture. As Jan
Shipps has shown, during the late 1830s and early 1840s the Mormons
created “a new religious tradition.” This push for separation and tighter
control marked a fundamental reaction against the pluralism and choice
that had spawned early Mormonism but which threatened to fragment the
new tradition. As an antidote, at Nauvoo Smith sought a merger of church
and state far more complete than the Congregational establishment of
New England, which had lacked a prophet to convey divine commands.40
The Prophet gathered a disciplined community, in part by driving out
dissidents. If we focus only on the core group that clung to Joseph Smith
and Brigham Young through the travails of 1837–48 to gather in Utah, we
miss at least half of early Mormonism—the half that fissioned off into dis-
sident groups. Paul Conkin calculates that today there are “nearly fifty
Mormon or Mormon-related denominations.” Many of them, including
Community of Christ (formerly Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints), the Temple Lot Church, and the Strangites, date to the
fallout from the Nauvoo crisis of the 1840s. By seceding, the dissident
Mormons clung to the plural discourse of the settlement frontier that
Smith and Young had rejected. In sum, against very long odds, Smith and
Young succeeded in creating a remarkably persistent, dynamic, and starkly
different alternative to the multivalent religious culture of the early
republic—but not all of the early Mormons could or would complete that
dramatic and difficult transition.41
Notes
1. Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion
in America: Towards a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 1997), 3–21.
2. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of
Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1950), 3–13; David G. Hackett, The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion
and Social Order in Albany, New York, 1652–1836 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991).
3. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the
Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1990), 123–53.
4. David Paul Davenport, “The Yankee Settlement of New York, 1783–1820,” Genea-
logical Journal 17 (1988–89): 63–88; David M. Ellis, “The Rise of the Empire
State, 1790–1820,” New York History 56 (1975): 5–6; James Macauley, The Natu-
ral, Statistical, and Civil History of the State of New York . . . , 3 vols. (New York:
Gould & Banks, 1829), 1:417–418.
5. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in
Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).
6. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in
Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Tim-
othy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial
American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Barbara
E. Lacey, “Gender, Piety, and Secularization in Connecticut Religion, 1720–1775,”
Journal of Social History 24 (Summer 1991): 799–821; Harry S. Stout, The New
England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
7. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the
Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1971).
8. Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1982); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of Amer-
ican Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Congregational
Churches in Connecticut, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Missions to New
Settlements . . . (New Haven, CT: T. & S. Green, 1797, Evans #31968), 13; Timothy
Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon, 4 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 2:162–165, 321–323, 329–330;
Rev. Henry Chapman, Journal, April 12, 1808, and Rev. William Graves, Report
to the Trustees, October 30, 1806, Missionary Society of Connecticut Papers
(hereafter cited as Missionary Society), Reel 3, File 51 and Reel 4, File 103, Con-
gregational House, Hartford, CT. For holdings in this collection, see Jack T.
Erickson, Missionary Society of Connecticut Papers, 1759–1948: A Guide to the Mi-

crofilm Edition (Glen Rock, NJ: Congregational House, 1976).
9. George Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference
from 1788 to 1828 (New York: Carleton and Porter, 1860), 278–279.
10. Congregational Church in Connecticut, A Narrative of the Missions to the New
Settlements (New Haven, CT: T. & S. Green, 1794, Evans #26803), 14–15; Ashbel
Hosmer, A View of the Rise and Increase of the Churches Composing the Otsego Bap-
tist Association (Whitestown, NY: Warren Barnard, 1800, Evans #37650), 34–45.
11. Rev. Henry Chapman, Letter to Rev. Abel Flint, March 28, 1808, Reel 3, File 51,
and Rev. William Graves, Report to the Trustees, October 30, 1806, Reel 4, File
103, both in Missionary Society, Congregational House. See also Rev. Jeremiah
Day, Letter to Rev. Jonathan Edwards Jr., November 10, 1794, Reel 4, File 72, ibid.;
and Ruth H. Bloch, “Battling Infidelity, Heathenism, and Licentiousness: New
England Missions on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier, 1792–1805,” in The North-
west Ordinance: Essays on its Formulation, Provisions, and Legacy, ed. Frederick D.
Williams (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1989), 39–60.
12. Rev. Aaron Kinne, Letter to Rev. Jonathan Edwards Jr., February 13, 1794, and
Kinne, undated report, ca. 1800, both in Reel 6, File 152, Missionary Society,
Congregational House. See also Congregational Church in Connecticut, A Nar-
rative of the Missions, 14–16; and Bloch, “Battling Infidelity,” 39–60.
13. John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Chris-
tianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53–55, 104–21;
Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, 123–153; Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical
America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (1980): 363–370; Hatch,
Democratization of American Christianity, 6–9; Henry Clarke Wright, Human Life
Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (Boston,
MA: Bela Marsh, 1849), 41–43.
14. G. Peck, Early Methodism, 187; Charles Giles, Pioneer: A Narrative of the Nativity,
Experience, Travels, and Ministerial Labors of Rev. Charles Giles (New York: G. Lane
and P. P. Sandford, 1844), 60–62.
15. Rev. Thomas Williams, Journal, August 30, 1804, Reel 11, File 290, Missionary
Society, Congregational House.
16. “On the Evil Tendency of Relying on Dreams,” Connecticut Evangelical Magazine 1
(September 1801): 97; Isaac Lewis Jr., A Sermon Delivered in Sherburne, February
29th, 1804 at the Ordination of the Rev. Joshua White (Cooperstown, NY: Elihu
Phinney, 1804), 16–17; Otsego Baptist Association, Minutes, Holden at Brookfield,
. . . September 4 & 5 1811 (Utica, NY: Ira Merrell, 1811, Shaw-Shoemaker #22275), 8.
17. Elisha Peck, A Narrative of the Writer’s Experience, with a View of Ancient Light,
Speaking Forth Anew to the Reader and Undermining Priestcraft (Otsego, NY: Elihu
Phinney, 1808, Shaw-Shoemaker #15860), 3–5, 17, 20. See also Peck, A Few Re-
marks of Importance for Warning and Instruction: . . . in Which the Reader Will See
the Cruelties of Party-Professed Religion (n.p, n.d. [ca. 1810], Shaw-Shoemaker
#21008), 8–9; Peck, A Discourse Pointing Out a Just Rule Very Important to Be At-
tended To in Order to Deliver and Save the Mind from Errors, and Uniting the People
of God into One Visible Order or Church (Utica, NY: Seward and Williams, 1815,
Shaw-Shoemaker #35586), 3–7; Darius Peck, A Genealogical Account of the De-
scendants in the Male Line of William Peck (Hudson, NY: Bryan & Goeltz, 1877),
29, 429; and Otsego County Conveyances, B:465 (August 20, 1799), Otsego
County Clerk’s Office, Cooperstown, NY. Peck can be better documented than
most of the innovators because he published his ideas.
18. Otsego Herald (Cooperstown, NY), October 9, 1806; Rev. Daniel Nash, Letter to
Bishop John H. Hobart, October 14, 1808, Hobart Papers, 6:50 [papers organized
into volumes with pages], Reel 9, Protestant Episcopal Church Archives, San
Antonio, TX. For Congregational denunciations of other religious innovators,
see Rev. George Colton, Journals, 2, July 6, 1807, 6–13 September 1815, Reel 3,
File 63; Rev. Ebenezer Kingsbury, Journal, May 10–11, 1809, Reel 6, File 151; Rev.
Mark Mead, Journal, August 21, 1808, Reel 7, File 180; and Rev. Henry Chap-
man, April 15, 1808, Reel 3, File 51, all in Missionary Society, Congregational
House.
19. Quoted in Hosmer, A View of the Rise, 28–29; see also 36, 95.
20. Otsego Baptist Association, Minutes, Holden at Fairfield . . . September 6th and 7th,
1809 (Utica, NY: Seward and Williams, 1809, Shaw-Shoemaker #16927), 8.
21. Otsego Baptist Association, Minutes, Held at Richfield . . . September 4th and 5th,
1816 (Utica, NY: Walker and Dorchester, 1816, Shaw-Shoemaker #36839), 4. See
also Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America,
1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
22. G. Peck, Life and Times of Rev. George Peck, 10–25. No known relationship to other
Pecks cited in this study.
23. Ibid., 25, 28–30.
24. Ibid., 25–27.
25. John Harriott, Struggles through Life Exemplified in the Various Travels and Adven-
tures in Europe, Asia, Africa & America of Lieut. John Harriott, 2 vols. (New York:
Inskeep and Bradford, 1809, Shaw-Shoemaker #17708), 2:98. See also Cross,
Burned-Over District, 3–13, and the following items in Missionary Society, Congre-
gational House: Rev. Israel Brainer, Letter to Rev. Abel Flint, April 2, 1807, Reel
2, File 36, Rev. Thomas Williams, Journal, 25 October and 1 December 1803,
Reel 11, File 290, Rev. Henry Chapman, Journal, 1–10 April 1808, Reel 3, File 51.
26. Rev. Nathaniel Stacy, “Remarks,” Central Association of Universalists, New York,
Record Book, 1805–907, p. 35, Universalist-Unitarian Archives, Harvard Univer-
sity; see also Peck, Early Methodism, 280–83; Gerald P. Holmes, They Were Called
Christians First: A History of the Christian Churches of Hartwick (Edmeston, NY:
privately published, 1978), 15–16.
27. Nathan O. Hatch, “The Christian Movement and the Demand for a Theology of
the People,” Journal of American History 67 (December 1980): 545–567; Hatch,
Democratization of American Christianity; Jonathan Newman, Newman’s Observa-

tions, for the Use of the Pious (Otsego, NY: Elihu Phinney, 1807, Shaw-Shoemaker
#13249); Griswold, Sermon Delivered January 1st, 1811, 6–7; Lewis, Sermon Deliv-
ered in Sherburne, 5–6, 13–14.
28. Benjamin Youngs, “Journey to Otsego, &c.,” June 5, 1803, Chatham Shaker
Museum Library, Old Chatham, NY; Rev. George Colton, Journal, July 6, 1807,
Reel 3, File 63, Missionary Society, Congregational House; Rev. Joel T. Benedict,
Journal, June 9, 1812, Reel 1, File 23, ibid.; and Rev. Thomas Williams, Journal,
November 28, 1803, Reel 11, File 290, ibid. See also Rev. Jedediah Bushnell,
Report, January 26, 1801, Connecticut Evangelical Magazine 2 (September
1801): 102.
29. Benjamin Youngs, “Journey to Otsego, &c.,” June 5, 8, 1803; see also Rev. Daniel
Nash, Letter to Bishop John H. Hobart, May 21, 1803, and January 6, 1806,
Hobart Papers, 3:62 and 5:1, both Reel 8, Protestant Episcopal Church Archives;
and in Missionary Society, Congregational House: Rev. Joel T. Benedict, Journal,
21–25 April 1813, Reel 1, File 23 and Rev. Ebenezer Kingsbury, Journal, June 24–
July 13, 1808, Reel 6, File 151.
30. Benjamin Youngs, “Journey to Otsego, &c.,” September 16, 1803; Rev. Daniel
Nash, Letter to Bishop John H. Hobart, January 6, 1806, and September 29,
1807, Hobart Papers, 5:1, 100, Reels 8 and 9, Protestant Episcopal Church Ar-
chives. See also Giles, Pioneer, 130–131.
31. Rev. Thomas Williams, Journal, December 2, 1803, and September 20, 1804,
Reel 1, File 290, Missionary Society, Congregational House; and Nathaniel Stacy,
Memoirs of the Life of Nathaniel Stacy, Preacher of the Gospel of Universal Grace
(Columbus, PA: A. Vedder, 1850), 122, 174–75. See also Rev. Israel Brainerd, De-
cember 11, 1806, Reel 2, File 36, and Rev. Henry Chapman, Journal, June 10,
1808, Reel 3, File 51, both in Missionary Society, Congregational House; and Rev.
Stephen R. Smith, Historical Sketches and Incidents, Illustrative of the Establish-
ment and Progress of Universalism in the State of New York (Buffalo, NY: Steele’s
Press, 1843), 44–45.
32. Rev. Joel T. Benedict, Report, 1 September 1813, Reel 1, File 23, Missionary Soci-
ety, Congregational House.
33. Stacy, Memoirs, 148–153. See also Rev. Thomas Williams, Journal, November 14,
1804, Reel 11, File 290, Missionary Society, Congregational House; G. Peck,
Early Methodism, 371; and E. Peck, A Few Remarks, 17–20.
34. Rev. David Higgins, Letter to Rev. Nathan Strong, October 20, 1801, Reel 5,
File 121; and Rev. George Colton, Journal, September 3, 1815, Reel 3, File 63,
both in Missionary Society, Congregational House. See also, at same deposi-
tory, Rev. Israel Brainerd, Journal, December 11, 13, 1806, and March 31,
1808, Reel 2, File 36 and Rev. Mark Mead, Journal, August 23, 1808, Reel 7,
File 180.
35. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1984), 57–58; Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The
Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1989).
36. Bushman, Joseph Smith, quoting Lucy Mack Smith, 17; Joseph Sr., 39; and Joseph
Jr., 54.
37. Pratt, quoted in Nathan O. Hatch, “Mormon and Methodist: Popular Religion in
the Crucible of the Free Market,” Journal of Mormon History 20 (Spring 1994):
30; Joseph Young, quoted in Richard E. Bennett, “A Study of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints in Upper Canada, 1830–1850” (master’s thesis,
Brigham Young University, 1975), 36.
38. Jan Shipps and John W. Welch, eds., The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831–
1836 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 188. See also Bushman,
Joseph Smith, 150–55; Bennett, “A Study of the Church,” 26–41.
39. Shipps and Welch, Journals of William E. McLellin, 183.
40. Paul K. Conkin, American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 162–225; Jan Shipps, Mor-
monism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1985), 131–149.
41. Conkin, American Originals, 206–209; Roger D. Launius and Linda Thatcher,
eds., Differing Visions:Dissenters in Mormon History (Urbana, IL: University of Il-
linois Press, 1994).
2
Prophets in America Circa 1830:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner,
Joseph Smith
By Richard H. Brodhead
In Southampton Count y, Virginia, on August 21, 1831, a group of

black slaves massacred their masters and surrounding white families, kill-
ing fifty-five people in the most potent slave revolt in U.S. history. Two
months later, on October 30, the rebellion’s elusive leader, Nat Turner, was
caught; and in the days that followed, from prison, he told his story to a
lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray. Read in court, this narrative led to Turner’s
conviction and his execution on November 11. When this story was pub-
lished, as it was soon thereafter, it supplied missing antecedents for an
event that had been as enigmatic as it was horrid. This book was The Con-
fessions of Nat Turner, one of the most remarkable pieces of writing from
the 1830s America.
The genre of The Confessions of Nat Turner is prophetic autobiography.
This is the story, not of a person’s life, but of those parts of a life that gave
him a special identity as one divinely chosen for a holy work. A precocious
child, the speaker recalls that the folk culture surrounding him read his
precocity as a sign that he had the gift of second sight, causing “them to
say in my hearing, I surely would be a prophet” (306).1 Later, Turner
learned to play toward his reputation for “Divine inspiration,” acting the
prophet to this communal reception: “Having soon discovered [that] to be
great, I must appear so, . . . [I] wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my
time to fasting and prayer” (307). But at this point, what began in part as
pretense suddenly literalized itself into a new mode of experience. Turner
recalls that in early manhood he was struck by the scriptural passage:
“Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.”
Prophets in America Circa 1830: Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith 35
Then, “as I was praying one day at my plough, the spirit spoke to me,
saying ‘Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto
you.’” “What do you mean by the Spirit?” the astounded Gray asks at this
point. Turner replies, with contempt for Gray’s ignorance, “The Spirit that
spoke to the prophets in former days” (307–308).
This revelation gave Turner the conviction that he had been “ordained
for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty,” and this certainty
was reinforced when, a few years later, the experience of revelation was
renewed. In 1825, by Turner’s account, “I had a vision—and I saw white
spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the
thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams—and I heard
a voice saying, ‘Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it
come rough or come smooth, you must surely bare it’” (308–309). In this
vision, what would seem to be a fantasy or premonition of a this-worldly
race war is fused with the drama of an otherworldly biblical apocalypse, a
conflation that later revelations make ever more powerful. Turner next has
a vision in which the lights in the night sky become the hands of the cruci-
fied Christ, after which he discovers “drops of blood on the corn as though
it were dew from heaven” and bloody hieroglyphs imprinted on forest
leaves “representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens.” The
message of this fusion of observed natural and visionary spiritual realities
is clear: “It was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke
he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgement was at
hand” (309).
At this point, Turner recounts, he told his vision to a white man, Ethel-
dred T. Brantley, who was first physically afflicted and then miraculously
healed by Turner’s prophetic message. Then “the Spirit appeared to me
again, and said, as the Saviour had been baptised so should we be also—
and when the white people would not let us be baptised in the church, we
went down into the water together, in the sight of many who reviled us,
and were baptised by the Spirit—After this I rejoiced greatly, and gave
thanks to God” (310).
With no transition, Turner moves straight from this highly charged
cross-racial baptism to the vision that brings the whole series to its climax:
“And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the
Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and
Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that
I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast ap-
proaching when the first should be last and the last should be first” (310).
Informed that he is to be the agent of apocalypse, the man whose “fight

against the Serpent” will bring about history’s final, inversionary turn,
Turner learned that heavenly signs would tell him when he should “com-
mence the great work” of racial insurgency and apocalyptic violence. The
appearance of a sign, the startling solar eclipse of February 1831, instructed
Turner that the time has come when “I should arise and prepare myself,
and slay my enemies with their own weapons” (310). When he delayed, the
sign reappeared yet more insistently in August 1831. At this point, accord-
ing his narrative, Turner gathered his apostolic crew, staged a sacramental
meal, and unleashed “the work of death” (312)—the massacre for which he
was executed.
I recount The Confessions of Nat Turner at some length because, al-
though this is a work everyone has heard of, it is a book few have actually
read. But I also retell the story with the thought that an audience of
Mormon historians might recognize strange likenesses in Nat Turner’s
tale. I have never seen Joseph Smith mentioned in any study of Nat Turner,
and I have never seen Turner alluded to in the voluminous work on Joseph
Smith. It is easy to see why. Our way of conceptualizing the fields these
figures appear in has the effect of locating them in mutually insulated
categories: Turner in African-American history or the history of slavery,
Smith in Mormon studies or the history of American religion. But if we
dissolve the partly fictitious structures that separate them and draw them
into a common field, we will find startling resemblances between these
distant and unlikely doubles.
To begin, Nat Turner and Joseph Smith were near contemporaries,
Turner having been born in 1800, Smith in 1805. The visionary experi-
ences that lifted them out of historical anonymity were perhaps even more
closely contemporaneous. Turner speaks of having had his first direct en-
counter with the Spirit after he had “arrived to man’s estate” (307). If this
means when he was twenty, a not implausible guess, then Turner would
have had his inaugural vision in 1820, the same year as Joseph Smith’s
first vision of the Father and the Son. Smith’s next major manifestation,
his first visit from the Angel Moroni, took place on September 21, 1823, an
interesting numerical coincidence with Turner’s August 21. (The number
“21” is a date whose place in the horoscope may have given it occult signif-
icance for both Turner and Smith.2) After visits to the designated hill on
this same date for four consecutive years, Smith received the golden plates
on September 21, 1827, his probationary period having exactly bracketed
Turner’s 1825 vision. Smith had begun the translation of the Book of
Mormon with Martin Harris as his scribe when Nat Turner had his May
1828 revelation. Smith was at work translating the Book of Mormon from
1827 through 1829, during part of the interval between Turner’s call to
fight the Serpent and the appearance of his final sign.
As they overlap in time, these bodies of experience take uncannily
similar forms at a number of crucial points. In Joseph Smith’s narrative
of his first vision (I am using the 1838 recital published in 1842), this
experience involves an abrupt intrusion of transcendence, a moment in
which divine or supernatural realities become directly present to a natu-
ral, human consciousness. (The Methodist minister who assured Joseph
Smith that he could not have had a vision because the age of revelation
was over was Smith’s version of Turner’s skeptical Thomas Gray.) This
crossing of orders is a commonplace of vision; but in Smith’s experi-
ence, as in Turner’s narrative, vision springs from a similar prior event,
an almost magical fixation on a passage from scripture. Smith recalls
that, while in religious perplexity, he “was one day reading the Epistle of
James, First Chapter and fifth verse which reads, ‘If any of you lack
wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraid-
eth not, and it shall be given him.’”3 (The message is virtually identical to
that of Turner’s fetishized text “Seek and you shall find.”) “Never did any
passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this
did at this time to mine,” Smith concludes—and here as with Turner,
obsessional concentration on the divine word in its mediated, printed
form promotes an unmediated contact in which the Spirit appears and
speaks. Ushered into vision in this way, Smith too entered on a series of
renewals of visionary privilege during which he too was given access to
divinely encoded “caricters exactly like the ancient”4 and called by the
Spirit to be baptized. In May 1829, while Smith and his new scribe,
Oliver Cowdery, were brooding on the emptiness of sacraments in
modern times, “on a sudden, as from the midst of eternity,” in Cowdery’s
words, “the voice of the redeemer spake peace to us, while the vail was
parted and the angel of God came down clothed with glory, and delivered
the anxiously looked for message, and the keys of the gospel of repen-
tance.”5 In Smith’s narrative of this event, the angel, whom he identifies
as John the Baptist, “commanded us to go and be baptized, and gave us
directions that I should baptize Oliver Cowdery, and afterward that he
should baptize me.”6 Smith and Cowdery thus performed in the Susque-
hanna the rite that Turner and Brantley had performed in the warmer
waters of Virginia.
It goes without saying that neither The Confessions of Nat Turner nor
Smith’s account of his visions is taken at face value on all sides. Did the
Spirit speak to either of them as and when they reported? The asserted
events being inward, spiritual, and by their nature not available to those
not comparably elect, there is no knowing them other than from the
prophets’ narratives of them. These narratives were both produced a con-
siderable length of time after the incidents they describe, which raises the
possibility that they may be retrospective reelaborations of what they
record or even late inventions of episodes that never “happened” as events
at all. James B. Allen has established that Smith’s first vision was a rela-
tively late addition to Smith’s self-narrative and only later became installed
as the inaugural event of Mormon history. Recent work on Nat Turner has
questioned the extent to which “his” narrative may be the work of his en-
forced collaborator, Thomas Gray. (We do not want to forget that, as an
imprisoned slave, Turner was doubly denied the power to tell a free story.)
New scholarship has also questioned the extent to which The Confessions
may have been used as a cover story to hide the reality of a very different
kind of rebellion—a mass uprising of the angry and rebellious, not the
work of a solo prophetic leader.7
This is not the place to debate the question of these narratives’ authen-
ticity; and in any case, this question is in some crucial sense beside the
point. For whatever their degree of truth or fictionality (which, precisely,
we can never know), it is the nature of Smith’s and Turner’s stories that
they succeeded in fusing themselves with real episodes in the world. From
1831 virtually until the present day, what some have proposed to call the
Southampton Slave Revolt has been far more generally known as Nat Tur-
ner’s Rebellion; the event has been known together with and through the
published narrative, which has almost completely circumscribed its mean-
ing. In similar fashion, since the moment of its publication, the Book of
Mormon has been so thoroughly bound up with Smith’s claim to divine
powers that there has been virtually no reaction to this book that is not a
reaction to that story. In this sense at least, the prophetic narratives of Nat
Turner and Joseph Smith have become historical facts, circulating in real
history and determining responses to real historical events. Those who
thought Turner sincere in his account of his visions but deluded or de-
mented called him a fanatic, and those who suspected that he faked his
visions and hieroglyphics to fool the naive called him an impostor—
“fanatic” and “impostor” being names prophets are called by those unper-
suaded of their prophetic authority. These same names dogged the career
of Joseph Smith, which tells us that the response to Smith too was a re-
sponse to his prophetic self-assertion.
The differences between Smith and Turner are so clear as scarcely to
require mention. One was a white free man, one was a black slave; one led
a bloody uprising, one founded a church. But as I hope to have suggested,
once we begin to attend to them, the similarities in their careers become
almost uncanny—and all the more haunting because they occur across
such deep lines of social difference. How are we to understand these like-
nesses? Clearly, they are not products of direct interaction or mutual influ-
ence. Though the Book of Mormon was published in 1830 and Mormonism
received considerable press from that time on, there is no evidence that
Nat Turner heard of Joseph Smith, and the Smith narratives that I cited
appeared only after Turner’s death. Similarly, though he could scarcely
have failed to hear of the August 1831 massacre, there is no evidence that
Joseph Smith read or knew The Confessions of Nat Turner. (I do assume
that Nat Turner’s rebellion and the specter of race war that it unleashed lie
behind Smith’s December 1832 prophecy on the South Carolina Nullifica-
tion crisis: “And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up
against their masters” [Doctrine and Covenants 87:4]). As I understand it,
the ground of the likeness between these figures lies not in any relation
between them but in their common involvement in an overlooked history:
the history of prophetism in their time.
The history of prophetism is the story of how actual men and women
have asserted themselves as bearers of prophetic privilege and of the con-
sequences of these self-assertions. A prophet is a person singled out to
enjoy special knowledge of ultimate reality and to give others mediated
access to that otherwise unavailable truth. A prophet is also a man with a
mission, one whose relation to a deep truth both requires and entitles him
to enact that knowledge against the grain of worldly understandings. To
say this is not to declare that some figures actually are this rare, super-
entitled kind of self. Though religious belief will confer the status of true
prophet on some figures and deny it to others (the decision that a Jesus, or
a Muhammad, or a Joseph Smith was God’s earthly messenger lies at the
core of the choice of faiths), the history of prophetism must include every-
one who has envisioned and asserted himself on these terms. Apart from
the designations of faith, the prophet is never just something a person is
but also something a person takes himself to be and demands to be taken
as. This means that in the prehistory of any act of prophetic identification,
a person must have access to some concept of “the prophet,” an image that
circulates in the cultural repertoire of identities as one idea of what a self

can be. When people “become” prophets, they identify with some concept
of the prophetic self, project themselves into this concept, and use it to tell
themselves and others who they are.
To speak of the prophetic as a transaction (in part) between actual selves
and the concepts of selfhood they find around them is to recognize that
prophetism has been available on different terms at different times and
places. Clearly, this phenomenon has not been an American monopoly, as
China’s recent preoccupation with the Falun Gong sect and Afghanistan’s
recent experience with Mullah Omar can attest. But stretching down from
Christopher Columbus to the 1630s antinomian prophetess Anne Hutchin-
son and the Quaker prophets executed in Boston around 1660 to propheti-
cal self-asserters of more modern times—Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther
King Jr., David Koresh, the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, to name only
a few—this country has hosted an unusually lively and variegated amalgam
of prophetic traditions. The Nat Turner–Joseph Smith years form one par-
ticularly vigorous moment in this long-running history.
I began by trying to project these two prophets onto the same picture
plane. But if we were to focus them on the larger ground of American
prophetism, we would see that they form two points in a far larger display
of prophetic activity, bearing likenesses and differences not just to one an-
other but to a host of prophetic contemporaries. It has long been recog-
nized that the early Mormons lived near the New York base of Jemima
Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend, who had received her vision and
commission on the eve of the Revolutionary War. Jemima Wilkinson
shared territory with Handsome Lake, the prophet of the Seneca Nation
who delivered his own version of scripture: the Gaiwiio or Code of Hand-
some Lake. In both New York and Ohio, the Mormons lived near commu-
nities formed around the prophetic career of Mother Ann Lee—the
Shakers being a sufficiently proximate threat that Smith had a revelation
in March 1831 denouncing their prophetic lore on sexual abstinence and
the gender of the new Messiah (Doctrine and Covenants 49). After moving
to Kirtland, the Mormons could be coupled with Joseph Dylks, the self-
appointed messiah whose contemporaneous Ohio cult was confused with
Smith’s Mormons in early newspaper reports.8 Not far away, having just
returned from their Indiana base, New Harmony, to the town of Economy
in western Pennsylvania, was the Harmony Society, followers of the
prophet George Rapp. (It was Rapp who proclaimed, “I am a prophet, and
I am called to be one.”) Rapp, whose prophetic authority established a
community of goods, a belief in alchemy and magic stones, and a sense of

end-time expectation, all with clear analogies to early Mormonism, pre-
dicted that the New Age would be inaugurated on September 15, 1829, the
high season of Smith’s and Nat Turner’s prophetic activities. Having sent
letters to world rulers summoning the faithful to gather in America (Rapp,
like Smith and Ann Lee, worked to gather in the New World Zion), Rapp
drew to Economy one Bernhard Mueller, the illegitimate son of a German
baron who “had become convinced, though reluctantly, that he himself
was the reincarnated Messiah who would lead the world in the millen-
nium.” Rapp greeted Mueller, who had rechristened himself with the pro-
phetic name Count de Leon, as “the Anointed One” and presented him in
this role to his community. This event occurred on October 18, 1831, while
Smith was busy collecting his revelations and Turner was still twelve days
from his capture.9
August 1831 is when Father William Miller, eventual leader of the larg-
est millenarian movement in American history, stepped forth from shy
silence to begin his prophetic career. In June 1830 at virtually the same
spot on the New York–Vermont border, the ne’er-do-well Robert Matthews
came to the knowledge that “God was about to dissolve the institutions of
man” and that he was God’s new emissary, “Matthias”—a knowledge that
moved him, too, to baptize his wife “in the Holy Spirit.” (Either the Spirit
is particularly insistent on this point or prophetism has cultural conven-
tions.) Visiting New York in his new prophetic capacity, Matthias experi-
enced a reciprocal confirmation of prophetic identity with the former
investment banker Elijah Pearson, who had discovered himself to be the
reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. Matthias and the now subjugated
Elijah set up their prophetic community Holy Zion at Ossining, New York;
but after a criminal inquiry, Matthias fled to Ohio, among other places,
calling on the Mormons at Kirtland in 1835. Matthews, alias Matthias, was
the “Joshua, the Jewish Minister” to whom Joseph Smith gave one of his
earliest accounts of his first visions, a fact that permits us to recognize a
dimension of prophetic sharing—or more likely of prophetic competition—
in that far fuller expansion on Smith’s visionary history.10
The founder of a more enduring prophetic community than Holy
Zion, the Oneida Community in upstate New York, John Humphrey
Noyes experienced the ecstatic conviction of his perfection in New Haven
in 1832. Like Smith and like Turner (as I say: prophecy has its conven-
tions), Noyes came to his vision by a quasi-magical biblical encounter. “As
I sat brooding over my difficulties and prospects, I listlessly opened my
Bible and my eye fell upon these words: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon
thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also
that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.’
The words seemed to glow upon the page, and my spirit heard a voice
from heaven through them promising me the baptism of the Holy Spirit
and the second birth.”11 William Lloyd Garrison never formed a commu-
nity in the Oneida or Nauvoo sense, but he created a community of opin-
ion behind a radical abolitionism that, when it was first broached, seemed
almost as unthinkable as Noyes’s communalization of private property
and sexual relations. Garrison did not claim immediate experience of the
supernatural, but he clearly modeled his moral politics and indignant, ful-
minative rhetoric on the Old Testament prophets. (Thomas Wentworth
Higginson said that the typical Garrison speech or editorial sounded “like
a newly discovered chapter of Ezekiel.”12) Garrison’s The Liberator made its
debut in January 1831. Not far from Garrison’s Boston base, Ralph Waldo
Emerson began to put forth his eccentric and influential version of pro-
phetism a short time later.
This rush of prophetic activity suggests that the years around 1830
were a time when the category of the prophetic was unusually accessible
in America and when special pressures drove each so-called prophet to
this identity. Each of these self-inventions bears the marks of its specific
social origins. As is now widely recognized, in his early career Joseph
Smith fused a prophetism derived from biblical models with divination or
folk magic elements drawn from his local culture. In The Confessions, Nat
Turner brings almost unbearable intensity to a millenarianism wide-
spread across social groups at this time, but African-derived folk elements
help inflect his otherwise generic apocalypticism. Each of these figures
can also help us identify local urgencies that sought release or resolution
through prophetic assertion. Current historiography is fond of tracing the
prophetism of the 1830s to anxieties bred by this time’s rapid, dislocating
social transformations.13 This point is not unhelpful, but the exhibits just
mentioned would help identify a wider spectrum of motive forces. Turner
fuses religious fantasies with the bloody rage bred in one 1830s social situ-
ation: the harsh subordination of blacks in slavery. John Humphrey Noyes
was spared the status degradations that Turner, Smith, Robert Matthews,
and many of their fellows suffered. As I read it, Noyes was drawn to pro-
phetism by the superior pleasure it afforded: he founded a society based
on the improvement of pleasure that gave extraordinary scope to his fan-
tasies of personal prerogative.
The embrace of prophetic identity typically unleashes a flooding of the

self with a sense of authority, a sense that makes it feel compelled and
entitled to announce a new right way against the authority of worldly cus-
toms. The meaning of antebellum prophetism is thus found partly in the
careers it sponsored, but partly too in the ideas it put into social circula-
tion. The self-assertions of prophetic individuals gave what authority they
had to many of the counterethics and divergent practices of the United
States of the 1830s and 1840s: alternatives to competitive economic indi-
vidualism and private property (America’s indigenous socialisms are
mostly prophetic socialisms), alternative sexual regimes, alternative die-
tary regimes, and so on. But American antislavery is no less a product of
antebellum prophetic identification. Garrison’s powerfully seized pro-
phetic stance gave force to the view that a higher law, God’s law, required
men to break merely social laws in order to enact true righteousness. So-
journer Truth, another major antislavery orator, emerged from and drew
on a number of prophetic cultures: Truth was a follower of the prophet
Matthias, then William Miller, before she found the antislavery cause. She
had a vision on June 4, 1827.14 Both Garrison and Truth began by promot-
ing a nonviolent form of resistance; but when slavery became the object of
direct, violent physical assault, prophetism helped make violence a think-
able course. Turner’s supernatural visions required and justified a vio-
lence his ordinary ethics would have condemned. When John Brown took
up his work as a holy instrument in the antislavery cause, prophetic fanta-
sies licensed his paramilitary tactics. (We know that Brown had Nat Turner
on his mind when he first conceived the Harper’s Ferry raid.15)
But if the embrace of this identity helped authorize social forces of en-
during importance, as another of its by-products 1830s prophetism gener-
ated new versions of the prophetic itself. Emerson would be an example of
a Nat Turner/Joseph Smith contemporary who engaged this same concep-
tion but realized it on different terms. Emerson has long been recognized
as the spiritual father of American individualism, but it is less often ob-
served that Emerson defines the idea of individualism in explicitly pro-
phetic terms. In his 1838 “Divinity School Address,” Emerson went to the
Harvard Divinity School to tell the graduates that they were mispreparing
themselves for spiritual careers. The heart of his message, built up to
through a series of graceful and blandly uncontroversial paragraphs, is this:
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. . . . He saw that

God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to
take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime

emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks.
Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as
I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory
suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! . . . The un-
derstanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in
the next age: “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill
you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language and the
figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and
churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.16
Jesus’s claim to be the Christ or Messiah was never meant to be exclu-

sionary, Emerson asserts. The idea that Jesus alone was the Son of God is
a piece of retrospective mythmaking, an assertion made after the fact as
part of the institutionalization of a Christian church. Before he was made
a cult figure and his followers made subordinate to his alleged unique di-
vinity, the message of the living Jesus was just the opposite: I find God to
be in myself, and I find myself to be God—and so can you, when you are
in a state of parallel spiritual exaltation. “Would you see God, see me; or
see thee, when thou thinkest as I now think.” Once he is understood to
have announced not his exclusive but our collective potential divinity, then
Jesus invites his followers to a profoundly altered career. He invites them
not to the role of minister, holder of an official position in an institutional
church, but rather to the role of preacher-prophet: a proud enjoyer of
access to the divine who awakens others to their own comparable powers.
“Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all confor-
mity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (89).
“The Divinity School Address” proclaims that the function of the great
prophets of the past is to call me to my own prophetic career: “The divine
bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my strength. They ad-
monish me, that the gleams which flash across my mind, are not mine, but
God’s; that they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly
vision” (81–82; emphasis added). Emerson’s great 1841 essay “Self-Reliance”
expands on this message with the difference that while “The Divinity
School Address” still spoke of the opening of the self to a domain of spirit,
that domain is now fully identified with the self itself. “Nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your own mind” (261) is the central assertion of
“Self-Reliance.” “Integrity” here does not mean honesty or uprightness but
something more like “individuality,” the traits that establish a person as one
self—an integer—rather than another self. Emerson finds such integrity in

a force of personal perception unshaped by the internalized opinions of
others, a force that expresses itself spontaneously, inescapably, through the
enactment of one’s particular being. To say that “nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of your own mind” (emphasis added) is to do more than praise
this integrity as a good thing. It is to proclaim that such selfhood is the seat
of that holiness that other men have located in the divine. In Exodus, God
called to Moses from the burning bush, but in Emerson He reveals himself
in any strong display of self: “Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their
feet, for God is here within” (272).
Emerson’s work in “The Divinity School Address” and “Self-Reliance”
is to revive a prophetic conception of selfhood and rethink it in such a way
that prophetic identity becomes virtually synonymous with selfhood itself.
Personal identity is elevated in this process, made identical with the elect
selfhood previously reserved for the prophets. But in a less noticed but
more interesting development, prophecy itself is also radically diffused
through this reconceptualization, removed from the category of rarity and
made widely available and familiar. No longer the special province of a
spiritual elite, the selfhood that is in touch with the sacred is reimagined
by Emerson as something completely democratic, something open to
each of us to the extent that we have an identity or are someone. As it dis-
solves the barrier to admission to the ranks of prophethood, Emerson also
blurs the boundaries of the prophetic in a second way, broadening it to the
point where it ceases to be limited to religious experience. Since the pro-
phetic displays itself anywhere a distinctive self puts itself forth, for Emer-
son the prophetic manifests itself in every act of individuality in every
creative domain. In a verbal formula that enforces this message in “Self-
Reliance,” Emerson lists Moses as one more undifferentiated item in the
list “Moses, Plato and Milton” (259) and gives Jesus only third billing in
the list that includes Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Gali-
leo, and Newton (265).
Emerson sought no converts but he did exert a powerful influence, and
the figures he affected most deeply bear a clear prophetic cast. I am thinking
of Thoreau, our great literary witness-bearer, reviver of the prophetic mes-
sage: “I know, as you obviously do not know, the truth that you should live
by”; or Whitman, whose “Song of Myself” is both a poem and a newer tes-
tament, an annunciation of where the divine is to be found. (Guess where?
In “Myself.”) But the point of Emerson is that his message was not only
heard by those who tried to live it. Having made the prophetic a modality of
ordinary experience, Emerson created a message that could be found inspir-

ing without requiring to be “believed” in the hard sense. (No one ever called
Emerson either a fanatic or an impostor.) This version of prophecy could be
absorbed into the literature of national uplift and thence into American civic
religion (or nonreligion), that distinctive ethic in which “being oneself”
takes on the character of a personal mission and high moral obligation.
Joseph Smith too took the materials of prophetic self-conception and
realized them in a new way. Smith and Emerson were another pair of
contemporaries (Emerson was born in 1803); and from a distance, their
careers have important aspects in common. Both begin by being called
out of institutional religion. In his 1820 vision Joseph Smith goes to the
woods to try to learn which of the churches of early nineteenth-century
Protestantism is the true one, only to have it revealed that God is in no
established church. “I asked the personages who stood above me in the
light, which of all the sects was right . . . and which I should join. I was
answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and . . .
all their Creeds were an abomination in his sight.”17 Emerson had been
ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1829 but resigned his ministry in
1832, and “The Divinity School Address” is his classic statement of the
emptiness of spirit he found in the church. Institutional religion is an
empty form, Emerson maintains, because it worships or commemorates
a divine incarnation it claims happened long ago. What Emerson calls the
“assumption that the age of inspiration is passed” (88) is what Joseph
Smith encounters in the Methodist minister who rebuffs his claim to
vision: “He treated my communication not only lightly but with great con-
tempt, saying it was all of the Devil, that there was no such thing as visions
or revelations in these days, that all such things had ceased with the apos-
tles and that there would never be any more of them.”18
Over against this historiography and in massive resistance to the
weight of official truth that attends it, Smith and Emerson propel them-
selves to the identities we know by claiming that revelation is not dead,
that direct access to divinity is still available in the present, and that the
experience of spirit in other times can be lived again, here, now, by me.
Jesus “felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness
at postponing their initial revelations to the hour and the man that now
is,” Emerson writes (80). In his right worship, Jesus will provoke us to
the recognition that “God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake” (88)
and that “the gleams which flash across my mind” (82; emphasis added)
are contemporary revelation. You say that there is no longer such an
experience as “visions or revelations,” Smith tells his skeptic, but guess

what? I just had one. Though apparently the lowest of the low, “an ob-
scure boy of a little over fourteen years of age and one too who was
doomed to the necessity of obtaining a scanty maintenance by his daily
labor, . . . it was nevertheless a fact, that I had had a vision.”19
The great moves that Smith and Emerson make in common are what
might be called the presencing and the appropriation of prophecy, the
conversion of revelation from past to present tense and from the experi-
ence of others to something I can have. Smith’s difference is that he cou-
ples these moves with a powerful gesture of literalization.20 The early
church took Jesus’s sayings literally, Emerson writes, but to grasp their
truth is to recover them as figures of speech. Emerson’s strategy is to
assert that Jesus, Moses, and the prophets are important, not as real his-
torical individuals, but as images of the power that could be mine: “The
divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my strength.
They admonish me that the gleams which flash across my mind are not
mine, but God’s; they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heav-
enly vision” (81–82). Joseph Smith, at the same conceptual pass, affirms
that those who were elected to know God at firsthand are the very indi-
viduals scripture mentions (Smith saw Moses, Elijah, and John the Bap-
tist but not Socrates, Copernicus, or Galileo) and that they had just that
rare, unshared power that tradition assigns them. Smith refuses to be
imaginative about the canonical prophets, we could say—or we could say
that his imaginative act is to take them as literally, actually real. When he
then appropriates what they clearly were for himself and his present time,
the result is that he thinks himself—the living, actual Joseph Smith—a
figure in the same elect line. The Book of Mormon announces this
modern Joseph as a “choice seer” who shall be “great like unto Moses”;
and though many Americans have presented themselves as Moses fig-
ures,21 Smith asserted that he was God’s elect intermediary as the literal
truth. The result was to concentrate in his special person the privilege
Emerson had opened to all. “Verily, verily I say unto thee, No one shall be
appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church ex-
cepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., for he receiveth them even as Moses”
(Doctrine and Covenants 28:2), a revelation of September 1830 an-
nounced. When the Mormons arrived at Kirtland and a Mrs. Hubble was
spurred by Smith’s visions to have visions of her own, he let her know—or
God let her know through him—that revelations were to come only
“through him whom I have appointed unto you” and that “none else shall
be appointed unto this gift except it be through him” (Doctrine and Cov-
enants 43:1–2).22
Nat Turner’s prophetic work was holy massacre. Joseph Smith’s first
prophetic work was holy translation. Here again Smith made his special
difference through literalizing his claims. Treating divinely inspired
speech as a figure for inspired speech of any sort, Emerson dissolves the
boundary between scripture and imaginative literature such that Jesus’s
words can be called a “high chant from the poet’s lips” (80), and “Muse”
and “Holy Ghost” become interchangeable “quaint names” for “un-
bounded substance” (485). At this same conceptual point, Joseph Smith
asserts that some writing is indeed absolutely different from other writing
and that the difference is it literally was revealed by God. This strong tra-
ditionalism is the prelude to Smith’s innovative act. For when he then
claims such writing for his own present self, the consequence is to make
him the privileged bearer of this long-lost revelatory power. Smith’s claim
was that God literally spoke through him in the translation of the Book of
Mormon, his Inspired Version of the Scriptures, and the continuing rev-
elations printed in the Doctrines and Covenants, and Smith compelled
others to respond to these works on those terms. Terryl Givens has re-
minded us of the peculiar extent to which Smith fused this claim with this
writing, making it virtually impossible to “read” the Book of Mormon
except in relation to Smith’s claims to literal inspiration.23 Readers have
either accepted it as authentic scripture or rejected it as scriptural sham,
but almost no one (Fawn Brodie is one exception) has read it as a piece of
ordinary creative writing.
In Emerson, restored access to the spirit in “the hour and the man that
now is” causes the dissolution of everything institutional, returning reli-
gion from the ritual and formal to a living spiritual pulse. Smith is another
great restorationist; but in his version of prophecy, recovering unmediated
access to the Spirit leads to the reinstitution of the religious, not to its dis-
solution. The relation of each of these men to the traditional sacraments
is especially instructive here. Emerson was ordained in March 1829 but
resigned his ministry three years later over his refusal to administer the
Last Supper. In his final sermon, Emerson mounts many ingenious schol-
arly arguments against the notion that Christ actually meant later men to
repeat this ritual, but he has another argument that counts as much as
these: this ritual does not suit me. Having removed religious authority
from what is now made a mere form, Emerson resigns the office of
minister—now conceived as a purely bureaucratic role—the better to
perform this role’s “highest functions” (1140). Having founded his career
on the refusal of received rites, the last thing Emerson has in mind is the
creation of new ones. Toward the end of “The Divinity School Address” he
writes, “All attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and
forms, seem to me vain. . . . All attempts to contrive a system are as cold
as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason,—
today, pasteboard and filigree, and ending tomorrow in madness and
murder” (91).
Smith’s prophetic career also begins with renegotiation of a sacrament,
baptism playing the role that the Last Supper played for Emerson. As
usual, where Emerson worked to find a freeing figurative meaning for
“Do this in remembrance of me,” Smith’s move is to literalize this practice
back to a strong historical origin. In the May 1829 episode on the shores
of the Susquehanna, Smith and Oliver Cowdery have been anxiously
musing on the prophecy they had translated, that spiritual darkness would
cover the earth “and gross darkness the mind of the people.” This pro-
vokes the thought that contemporary sacraments are without consecrating
or redeeming power, since they lack the ground they possessed in apos-
tolic times. In Cowdery’s words, “On reflecting further, it was as easily to
be seen, that amid the great strife and noise concerning religeon [sic],
none had authority from God to administer the ordinances of the gospel[.]
For, the question might be asked, have men authority to administer in the
name of Christ, who deny revelation? when his testamony [sic] is no less
then the spirit of prophecy?”24 In this highly Emersonian passage, the
modern church, having declared that immediate contact with the Spirit is
a reality confined to a vanished age, in effect consigns its sacraments to
the category of empty customs, since it denies the ongoing relation to di-
vinity that would give men “authority from God to administer the ordi-
nances of the Gospel.”
But having contrasted modern sacraments with their full, authoritative
originals, Smith and Cowdery then see that exact original brought back to
life—here, now, in the present, in them. In Smith’s narrative:
On a certain day [we] went into the woods to pray and inquire of the
Lord respecting baptism for the remission of sins. . . . While we
were thus employed praying and calling upon the Lord, a Messen-
ger from heaven, descended in a cloud of light, and having laid his
hands upon us, he ordained us, saying unto us, “Upon you my
fellow servants in the name of the Messiah I confer the priesthood
of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministring of angels and the
gospel of repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remis-
sion of sins, and that this shall never be taken again from the earth.”
This messenger identifies himself as “John, the same that is called John
the Baptist in the New Testament.” He commanded them “to go and be
baptized, and gave us directions that I should baptize Oliver Cowdery, and
afterward, that he should baptize me.”25
Smith here embraces the sort of rite that Emerson refused to perform;
but to say that is to say the least of what is going on. To catch the force of
this episode is to realize that Smith is not just doing a baptism but claim-
ing to reinstitute the sacrament of baptism, restoring the value it had in
the days of John the Baptist by recovering the power that gave it force. In
Smith’s wonderfully presumptuous assertion, on a spring day in 1829 in
the middle of nowhere in northern Pennsylvania, God restored to actual,
living men the authority to administer in his name and restored it as an
ongoing historical presence. He restored it by reinstituting, through
Joseph Smith’s renewed prophetic authority, the sacrament of baptism
and the divinely commissioned priesthood.26
As Smith’s first vision gave him his first prophetic role as seer and
hearer of the Spirit and his 1823 vision gave him an augmented role as
deliverer of a new scripture, the May 1829 vision or self-envisioning gives
Smith his further prophetic role as church founder and institution builder.
The rite of baptism reinstituted here would be followed by other rites he
would give for those who accepted his prophetic claims—the temple en-
dowments, the baptism of the dead, and so on; and the recovery of the
Aaronic Priesthood would be followed by the panoply of administrative
roles and structures he invented: the Melchizedek Priesthood, the Quorum
of the Twelve Apostles, the Council of Seventy, and more. Emerson’s ver-
sion of prophecy dissolved religious institutions to reopen access to the
Spirit; Smith’s reinstituted them as the vehicles through which the Spirit
performs its saving work.
I have spoken of Smith’s visualizations of his prophetic self, but the
point is that they became more than that. For his way of envisioning it put
forth his prophetic authority as a real-world fact and demanded that real
others accept it on those terms. Emerson, so to speak, mentalized the pro-
phetic, taking it out of the realm of persons, places, and things and making
it available as a fiction of self-empowerment, a freely circulating, nonde-
nominational thought that individuals could entertain with intermittently
inspiring results with no continuing commitment to its truth. Smith in-

sisted that he in his actual person was the bearer of the new dispensation,
that his writings were divine revelations, that salvation was available
through the exact forms, rites, and offices that he designated—and thou-
sands of people accepted these claims as the truth. These were the con-
verts to Joseph Smith’s new church, whose numbers had reached 18,000
by the year of “The Divinity School Address.” (When Emerson there wrote,
“Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to leave all and
follow,—father and mother, house and land, wife and child?” [84], he was
not mindful of contemporary Mormon missionary activity.)
This essay began by surveying forms of prophetism in the American
1830s and the various consequences they gave rise to: slave revolts, the
ethical and rhetorical style of the radical antislavery movement, and other
countercultural ethics as well. To this list, two more consequences can be
added now. After the 1830s, by virtue of the way one person engaged the
matrix of prophetic thought, this country had in circulation a concept of
selfhood that helped structure and legitimate the ethic of American indi-
vidualism; and after 1830, by virtue of another such act, it had a new
church that gathered in and helped produce a distinctive social
community—the Mormons. Very different realities, but products of a par-
allel act: the ways two contemporaries realized the possibilities of a shared
matrix of thought.
Notes
1. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton,
Va., as Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R Gray (Baltimore, MD: Lucas and
Deaver, 1831). The page numbers in the text following quotations from The
Confessions are from the Confessions’s reprinting in Henry Irving Tragle, ed.,
The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Am-
herst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971). I offer a fuller reading of
Nat Turner’s version of prophecy in Richard H. Brodhead, “Millennium,
Prophecy, and the Energies of Social Transformation: The Case of Nat Turner,”
in Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to
Modern America, ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2002), 212–233.
2. Lance S. Owens, “Joseph Smith: America’s Hermetic Prophet,” in The Prophet
Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith, ed. Bryan Waterman (Salt Lake City,
UT: Signature Books, 1999), 164, notes the coincidence of Smith’s visions with
the autumnal equinox.
3. I am quoting the 1839 manuscript of Joseph Smith’s History of the Church in

Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Papers of Joseph Smith: Vol. 1, Autobiographical and His-
torical Writings (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1989), 271.
4. Quoted in Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That
Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28.
5. Oliver Cowdery’s 1834 manuscript “History of the Church,” in Jessee, Papers,
1:31.
6. Ibid., 1:290.
7. James B. Allen, “Joseph Smith’s ‘First Vision’ in Mormon Thought,” in The New
Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake
City, UT: Signature Books, 1992), 37–52. For a full consideration of issues of au-
thorship and authenticity in The Confessions of Nat Turner, see Eric J. Sundquist,
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 36–56. See also Brodhead, “Energies of Social
Transformation,” 219–220. Newer work adding further uncertainty to the sub-
ject is surveyed in Tony Horwitz, “Untrue Confessions,” New Yorker (December
13, 1999): 80–89.
8. On Wilkinson, see Herbert A. Wisbey Jr., Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson,
the Publick Universal Friend (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964). The
career of Handsome Lake is considered in Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and
Rebirth of the Seneca (1969; reprint, New York: Random House Vintage Books,
1972). The best source on the Shakers is Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience
in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). The Dylks cult was
described in R. H. Taneyhill, ed., The Leatherwood God: An Account of the Appear-
ance and Pretensions of Joseph C. Dylks in Eastern Ohio in 1828 (Cincinnati, OH:
Robert Clarke, 1870). Evidence of early confusion of Joseph Smith with Dylks
(and possibly also Ann Lee) can be found in “Mormonism,” Wayne Sentinel,
August 23, 1831, the final day of the Nat Turner rebellion.
9. Karl R. Arndt, “George Rapp’s Harmony Society,” in America’s Communal
Utopias, ed. Donald E. Pitzer (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997), 57–87; see esp. 57, 75–76. Arndt notes (69) that the Harmony
Society gave financial assistance to the Mormons, among other communitar-
ian movements.
10. On William Miller’s 1831 emergence, see David L. Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets:
Millerites and Religious Dissent in Upstate New York 1800–1850 (Chico, CA: Schol-
ars Press, 1985), chap. 1. The prophetic career of Robert Matthews is recon-
structed in Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story
of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994); quotations on 79. Smith’s 1835 account of the first vision to Joshua,
the Jewish Minister, is reprinted in Jessee, Papers, 1:124–127. After Joshua’s iden-
tity as Matthias was revealed, Smith eventually informed him that “his God was
the Devil” and made him leave, but his reception of Matthias was not
nambivalently hostile. Matthias had been invited to “deliver a lecture to those

u
present” even after he had “confessed that he was really Matthias” (1:128–132).
11. Original source in Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida
Community (1993; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 26.
12. Original source in Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abo-
lition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 326.
13. The strongest recent version of this argument, which is quite familiar from
Mormon historiography, is Johnson and Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias.
14. Nell Irwin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
15. The relation of Brown’s paramilitary tactics to his biblical fundamentalism and
sense of personal appointment is clear, for instance, in his fantasy of the United
League of Gileadites, a guerilla army modeled on Gideon’s army in the book of
Judges. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John
Brown, 2nd ed. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 72–75.
The role of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in planning the Harper’s Ferry raid is evident
in the June 1858 interview with John Brown and John Henrie Kagi by Richard
Hinton, in Richard Warch and Jonathan F. Fanton, eds., John Brown (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 56. In this interview, Brown correctly remem-
bers the special possibilities for the creation of terror that Nat Turner had lo-
cated in the fear of slave revolt, but he mistakenly recalled that “Nat Turner with
fifty men held a portion of Virginia for several weeks” (56), an exaggeration of
Turner’s success.
16. Joel Porte, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of
America, 1983), 80. Subsequent Emerson quotations are from this edition, cited
parenthetically in the text.
17. Jessee, Papers, 1:273.
18. Ibid., 1:273–274.
19. Ibid., 1:274.
20. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1985), esp. 67–86, has explored how Joseph Smith
moved to appropriate the status of the Chosen People through his literalizing
recapitulations of biblical marks of chosenness: the Aaronic Priesthood, the
exodus, the temple, the twelve apostles, and so on. See also Harold Bloom’s apt
remark: “Had they met in their lifetimes, the Transcendental sage and the
Mormon prophet could not have talked to one another. Smith’s visions and
prophecies were remarkably literal; the subtle Emerson, master of figurative
language, knew that all visions are metaphors, and that all prophecies are rhe-
torical.” The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 53
21. I think of Martin Luther King: “He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And
I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.” King said this in his last
sermon, delivered in Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968, on the eve of his
a ssassination. James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential

Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (1986; reprint, New York: Harp-
erCollins, 1991), 286. For an excellent discussion of King’s identification with
Moses and other biblical prophets, see Richard Lischer, The Preacher King:
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 172–194. Lischer’s understanding of the psychological and
rhetorical operation of such identification is highly relevant to the study of
Joseph Smith (as to many other prophets); but King’s deployment of this identi-
fication as a figure, not as a literally claimed identity, marks an important differ-
ence from Smith.
22. In early Mormonism the monopolization of vision by the Prophet was not
quite total, as the second of these revelations suggests. One of the less egotis-
tical prophets, Joseph Smith was willing to share the prophetic prerogative on
occasion with close associates (e.g., Oliver Cowdery and Sidney Rigdon),
though these licensing moves were offset by countermoves of containment or
subordination. Later Mormonism, Shipps (Mormonism, 137–138) explains,
allows all church members access to that degree of revelation appropriate to
their church position—a move that democratizes revelation in a somewhat
Emersonian way while also subordinating such access to the structures of
church hierarchy. But it is not envisioned that believers will have church-
founding revelations of the order of Joseph Smith’s. The way Mormons partake
of revelation in that strong or primary form is by participating in the church
the Prophet founded, the institution his vision restored in which the divine is
felt to be continuingly embodied.
23. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, esp. 72–88.
24. Jessee, Papers, 1:30.
25. Ibid., 1:290.
26. Mario S. De Pillis’s “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormon-
ism” (1966) is the classic reading of the nature and meaning of Smith’s act on
this occasion. In Quinn, New Mormon History, 13–35.
3
Historical Reflections
on Mormon Futures
By Stephen J. Stein
In this Tanner Lecture, my goal is to join a conversation that is already

underway among scholars interested in eschatology and to propose some
issues that may prove instructive for pursuit and reflection. This is not a
presentation in which I intend to say the last word on “last things.” The
interest I have in the history of “last things,” or eschatology, goes back to a
moment in graduate school when I discovered that there was an unpub-
lished manuscript on the book of Revelation in the Beinecke Library at
Yale University compiled by the eighteenth-century New England theolo-
gian Jonathan Edwards over a period of thirty-five years. When I took on
the task of transcribing and editing that manuscript, which eventually ap-
peared as Notes on the Apocalypse, I was forced to engage the exegetical
traditions that framed Edwards’s interpretation of the last book of the New
Testament.1 In doing so, I encountered a rich and diverse literature that
spanned a number of religious and scholarly topics.
Among the topics raised by the book of Revelation are (1) the history
of the interpretation of the Bible in general and of the Apocalypse of
John in particular; (2) the diverse ways that theologians and other inter-
preters have applied the visionary materials in that biblical book to
historical events before, during, and after their own lifetimes; (3) the
comparative study of apocalypticism across diverse religious traditions
of both West and East; (4) the relationship between the book of Revela-
tion and the academic subfield identified with the study and analysis of
different kinds of millennialism, a scholarly enterprise that was for a
time a growth industry; and (5) the recognition that in some broad
sense most of these topics and concerns have something to do with vi-
sions of the future.
Edwards’s reflections on the book of Revelation made me sensitive to

the fact that many other religious persons, groups, and communities in
America were also interested in or preoccupied with these same eschato-
logical topics. Often their primary religious claims rested on such judg-
ments. Frequently those claims were linked to an understanding of the
future, whether it be historical or eschatological. Recognition of that fact
was partly responsible for the growth of my interest in the Shakers, for-
mally named the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appear-
ing.2 I have been well served by a broad coalition of scholars who have
explored the history of American eschatological views, including Mormon
millennial visions.3
But I share the judgment of several working in this field who think the
time has come for the construction of a new architectonic of apocalypticism
in America. Catherine Wessinger, for example, has argued that the long-
time standard distinction between premillennialism and postmillennial-
ism has perhaps outlived its usefulness. She, in fact, brands these terms
“obscure and misleading.” Alternatively, she proposes using “catastrophic
millennialism” and “progressive millennialism” for the contrasting pessi-
mistic and optimistic views of human nature and society in the future. Both
of these millennial views assume a divine plan informing and guiding the
establishment of the millennial kingdom. Both also underscore a sense of
urgency—may I say, they sound an apocalyptic tone. Where they differ is
on the question of whether humans are able on their own to establish the
millennial reality. Wessinger also takes note of the central role that proph-
ets play in the evolution of millennial religions. They are those who, on the
basis of diverse insight or revelations, announce the impending or immi-
nent arrival of a messiah, a kingdom, or the millennium.4
My primary goal in this presentation is not to address the usefulness
of Wessinger’s categories for the study of Mormon millennialism nor am
I intent on the construction of new millennial categories. I am also not
engaging Rodney Stark’s judgments concerning the numerical future
of Mormonism.5 I do, however, believe that we need to ask new and dif-
ferent questions of eschatological traditions in America, including the
Mormon tradition. I think there is cause for historians to look anew at
the religious and historical phenomena involved with eschatology. That
is the judgment that informs my reflections today. To that end, therefore,
I will address the question of the relationship between the perceived his-
torical future and the prevailing vision of the eschatological future in the
Mormon experience. My thesis is that there has been in Mormonism and
remains today a close relationship between reflections on the historical
Historical Reflections on Mormon Futures 57
future and the conceptualization of the eschatological future. How best

to articulate that relationship in the Mormon experience is, however, one
of my concerns. A related issue is whether that relationship has fluctu-
ated significantly during the history of the Latter-day Saints, especially in
recent times.
* * *
Mormon views of the future—whether historical or eschatological—did
not arise in and do not exist in a vacuum. Humans in virtually every con-
text have been and are concerned with the future, whether it be seen as
continuous or as discontinuous with the present, whether it be conceived
as near to or far from the here and now, whether it be depicted as a time
of happiness or as a time of sorrow, and whether it be construed in secular
or religious terms.6 The broad sweep of the history of religions provides
striking evidence of this nearly universal concern for both the historical
future and the eschatological future among religious groups. Three di-
verse examples from across the centuries drawn from the work of scholars
of apocalypticism may suffice as broad background for the moment.
Anders Hultgård of Uppsala University, for example, has made the
case for “striking similarities” between the apocalypticism of the Judeo-
Christian tradition and that articulated in Persian or Iranian religious
sources, especially in Zoroastrianism. What he found similar are “primar-
ily ideas of the end and renewal of the world set in a framework of cosmic
history, often transmitted in a revelatory context and particularly actual-
ized in crisis situations.”7
Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago has documented the
continuing strength of apocalyptic traditions in Christianity during the
Middle Ages, citing examples of reformers in the Catholic Church who
employed apocalyptic models of reform for the Church. The German
abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), for example, attacked the immo-
rality of the clergy in her day and described a pessimistic future involving
persecution by the Antichrist, who was himself, according to her, born
from within the Church. All of this in Hildegard’s view, however, precedes
an ultimate final triumph for the Church.8
Islam, too, has had powerful apocalyptic movements throughout its
history. Saïd Amir Arjomand of the State University of New York has
sketched the historical development of apocalypticism in Islam, including
recurrent efforts by religious and political authorities in Islam to contain
or control apocalyptic movements. Religious authority and orderly succes-
sion in the leadership were constantly threatened in early Shi’ism by
apocalypticism, and therefore containment of apocalypticism was a recur-

rent goal of the imams. One approach to containment was “the routiniza-
tion of apocalyptic charisma” by the ruling powers.9
But apocalypticism and concern with the future were also thriving in
circumstances much closer in time and place to the world that gave birth
to the Latter-day Saints. In 1792 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Simon
Hough, a member of the Congregational Church in that locality, pub-
lished An Alarm to the World.10 In it he warned of Christ’s imminent return
and simultaneously attacked the educated clergy and the established
churches. Somewhat surprisingly, he combined his apocalyptic perspec-
tive with enthusiastic support for the young American republic.
Others in the early years of the new American nation also turned to
apocalypticism to make sense of the future. Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a
Philadelphia physician, affirmed the progressive nature of history, ex-
pressing confidence that the young nation was leading the world toward a
future of peace and righteousness.11 Evangelical disciples of Jonathan Ed-
wards were preoccupied with reflections about the future. Samuel Hop-
kins (1721–1803), in his 1793 Treatise on the Millennium, suggested that the
future golden age would include all sorts of material improvements in-
cluding labor-saving devices and new technologies for printing books.12
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), an English philosopher and scientist who
emigrated to America in 1794, registered judgments on classic apocalyp-
tic topics that bore on the future including the Antichrist, the millennium,
and the fulfillment of prophecy.13 In short, concern with the future was
widespread among the founding generation of Americans.
Perhaps I should pause momentarily in this historical discourse to state
my working definitions of the critical terminology used standardly in dis-
cussions of this topic. There are few surprises in these definitions. “Escha-
tology” is the study of the “last things,” which can be a highly diverse set of
topics, depending on one’s view of the end of the present order—if and
when there is such an end. “Apocalyptic” literally implies “disclosure” or
“revelation,” and it usually involves some view of an impending or immi-
nent end to the present order. The “future” involves everything beyond the
present moment, whether it be immediately beyond or distantly beyond.
Out of this larger world of eschatology and apocalyptic stretching back
through history has emerged a set of images and expectations that figure
regularly in the discourse. Most involve fundamental distinctions between
good and evil, saints and sinners, righteous causes and unrighteousness.
Time is divided between the past and the present, the present and the
future—then and now, now and then. Eschatology and apocalyptic invite
little ambiguity because the lines tend to be clearly drawn. Confidence and
certainty inform the judgments offered on all sides. Apocalyptic discourse
tends to convince those within the eschatological community of its valid-
ity, but rarely is it persuasive to those on the outside. The fact that it does
not persuade the outsider is confirmatory for most believers rather than
leading to doubt or uncertainty. These are among the reasons that the
comparative study of apocalyptic in different religious groups is so engag-
ing and instructive. Millennialism is but one particular way of giving voice
to eschatological or apocalyptic ideas.14
Now I turn to Mormon views of the two futures. From the time of the
founder and prophet Joseph Smith until the present moment (2006), the
official position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on
the historical and the eschatological futures appears amazingly consistent
and closely correlated. (The term “correlated” is used in more than one way
when discussing Mormon religious thought.) During much of Mormon
history, the “Latter-day” dimension of the community’s experience has
been highly significant. Or to put this another way, eschatology for the
Latter-day Saints is serious business. Eschatology is a central component
of the community’s religious and theological construction of reality. By
means of eschatological judgments, Mormons affirm their confidence in
the ultimate outcome of the present order despite what at times may appear
to be less than optimistic circumstances or prospects. Historically speak-
ing, eschatology has provided Latter-day Saints a way to cope with historical
circumstances that often have been less than ideal.
Given the close perceived relationship between the two Mormon fu-
tures, it may strike some as arbitrary on my part to distinguish between
the historical and the eschatological futures. In much of LDS literature,
the line between the two is indistinct; for many Mormons the two futures
appear almost as one. But as a person standing outside that tradition, I
would maintain that there is a proper distinction between the historical
and the eschatological futures. The historical future is in fundamental
continuity with the present moment and with the past. The historical
future will take place in the same manner as the present moment is taking
place. The present moment was the historical future five minutes ago.
The eschatological future, by contrast, for most religious groups begins at
a point when there is a divine intervention in the historical continuity, an
interruption that breaks the connection with the present and the past. The
nature of that intervention may vary from tradition to tradition, but that
there will be such an interruption in the historical process appears to be a

shared judgment by those religious groups committed to an eschatologi-
cal viewpoint.
Even though it may appear to many Mormons that the historical future
and the eschatological future are nearly one, the two have been addressed
sufficiently by Mormons in diverse ways as to allow them to be distin-
guished. Evidence within the Mormon tradition bearing on the two fu-
tures and on their relationship to one another is found in the Bible, in the
Book of Mormon, in the revelations received by the Prophet Joseph Smith
and canonized in Doctrine and Covenants (D&C), in the revelations re-
ceived by his successors in the Presidency of the Church, and in the con-
tinuing reflections and teachings of modern prophets, apostles, and
elders. The Latter-day Saints therefore possess a rich, varied, and detailed
view of these two futures.
First, I turn to the historical future. Much of the evidence from LDS
sources about the historical future treats “signs of the times” that are
very negative in nature. It is a central Mormon teaching that apostasy
and iniquity will fill the earth in the days before the Second Coming of
Christ. The Bible contains manifold passages concerning those days.
Many “antichrists,” who set themselves up as alternative “christs,” will
arise in the “last time” (1 John 2:18–19). In those days “false prophets”
and “false teachers” will pervert the “way of truth” (2 Pet. 2:1–2). Those
who remain faithful at that time will experience hatred and persecution
(Luke 21:12). In the last days, sin will abound, including what the apostle
Paul identified as “unnatural affection” (2 Tim. 3:2–3). Those times will
also be filled with “wars and rumors of war” (Matt. 24:6). The Book of
Mormon provides additional details concerning the universal apostasy
and abundant iniquity “in the last days.” The prophet Nephi described
the nations of the earth in those times as “drunken with iniquity and all
manner of abominations,” a pattern he linked with a rejection of “the
prophets” (2 Ne. 27:15).
Joseph Smith told the Church at Kirtland that “the whole earth shall be
in commotion” because of warfare “in that day” (D&C 45:26). He also
spoke of a “desolating sickness [that] shall cover the land” and of “earth-
quakes . . . in divers places” (D&C 45:31, 33). Nature will be out of control,
with storms and “tempests,” and “all things . . . in commotion”; as a result,
a paralyzing fear will strike all people (D&C 88:90–91). On another occa-
sion, Smith spoke of “a great hailstorm” destroying “the crops of the earth”
(D&C 29:16).
Brigham Young wrote of “magnificent cities . . . sinking in the earth”

and of the sea “engulphing mighty cities.”15 In 1857 Wilford Woodruff
identified as “present signs of the times” that the “Government of the
United Staes [sic] have now entered the field as our persecuters & are de-
termined in their harts to destroy us from off the Earth.”16 Much more
recently, future Apostle Bruce R. McConkie declared that in the last days
there will be “untempered strikes and labor troubles” as well as “anarchy,
rebellion, and crime” of such a sort that governments will be overthrown.17
The “violence,” he asserted, will include the “greatest war, slaughter, car-
nage, bloodshed, and desolation of all the ages.”18 Apostle LeGrand Rich-
ards said that the faithful followers of Christ in such circumstances will be
hated, afflicted, and killed.19
As recently as 2004, Apostle Dallin H. Oaks saw “signs of the Second
Coming . . . all around.” The “roots and bulwarks of civilization” are being
challenged and “attacked,” including marriage and family responsibilities.
“The good, the true, and the beautiful are being replaced by the no-good,
the ‘whatever,’ and the valueless fodder of personal whim.” Evidences of
the same, he writes, are “pornography, pagan piercing of body parts,
self-serving pleasure pursuits, dishonest behavior, revealing attire, foul
language, and degrading sexual indulgence.”20 These “signs of the times”
provide a grim prospect for the world in advance of Christ’s coming. I take
them to be part of the historical future because they are in continuity with
the present.
But the same sources that are so negative about the historical future
are also filled with countervailing positive “signs of the times.” These
same sources speak of optimistic developments in the present and in the
Mormon historical future that augur well for the accomplishment of the
divine plan. Primary among these signs is the “restoration of the gospel”
which Mormons link to the vision of the angel flying in heaven who has
the “everlasting gospel” to preach to those dwelling on the earth (Rev.
14:6–7), a gospel they identify as restored by the Prophet Joseph Smith.
This same “gospel of the kingdom” is to be preached “in all the world”
(Matt. 24:14) before the Second Coming, a positive “sign of the times” that
corresponds with the powerful and almost unprecedented missionary im-
pulse prioritized by the LDS community. The translation, publication, and
dissemination of the Book of Mormon is another historical event that pre-
cedes the Second Coming, an event foretold in the prophecy of a book that
will come forth as “a marvelous work and a wonder” (Isa. 29:11–18). An-
other positive “sign of the times” was the prophet Elijah’s appearance to
Joseph Smith in April 1836 as prophesied by Malachi (Mal. 4:4–6), a visit

seen as supporting the LDS preoccupation with marriage, family, geneal-
ogy, and family history (D&C 110:13–16).
The positive response of Lamanites to the restored gospel is likewise
seen as fulfillment of a revelation given through Joseph Smith in Kirtland
in 1831 which predicts that they will “blossom as the rose” (D&C 49:24).
That prediction has seemingly been confirmed by the conversion of sub-
stantial numbers of Lamanites in North and South America and in the
South Pacific.21 Another positive “sign of the times” which is to occur in
the historical future before Christ’s second advent is the building of a
righteous city, “which shall be called the New Jerusalem” (3 Ne. 21:23–25).
It will be erected in Jackson County, Missouri, as “a city of refuge, a place
of safety” (D&C 45:66) where the Saints will gather.22 This city will also be
called “Zion,” for “the glory of the Lord shall be there” (D&C 45:67). This
city, which has not yet been built, is referred to in the tenth Article of
Faith, which affirms “that Zion will be built upon this [the American] con-
tinent.”23 Many of these positive “signs of the times” have already occurred;
others are still in the future.
“Signs of the times” function prominently in Mormon reflections con-
cerning both the historical and the eschatological future. For many Saints,
reading “signs of the times” is one way to attempt to determine how close
or how far away the eschatological future may be. The Second Coming is
the intervention that inaugurates the eschatological future. In Mormon
thought, the time for the Second Coming is fixed but unannounced; the
moment is known by God, but not by humans. Even Joseph Smith did not
claim knowledge regarding the time of the Second Coming. Therefore to
label present “signs of the times” as “eschatological” may be a bit pre-
sumptuous, for it implies a knowledge which no human or any historian
possesses.
Mormon sources focus a great deal of attention on the Second Coming
of Christ. The key Bible passage is Acts 1:11. The context is the ascension
of Jesus which occurs from Mount Olivet outside Jerusalem. According
to Acts, the spectators at the ascension were his disciples. On that occa-
sion, two men “in white robes” (tradition reads “two angels”) said, “Men
of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was
taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw
him go into heaven.” In the Book of Mormon the prophet Alma makes a
prophetic reference to the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ
(Mosiah 18:2). The Book of Mormon also contains a non-eschatological
post-ascension visit of Christ to the Nephites in the land Bountiful

(3 Ne. 11). On that occasion Christ established his church among the resi-
dents in the New World, after which he again ascended into heaven
(3 Ne. 18:38–39).
But it is the hoped-for Second Coming that has attracted a great deal
of reflection among Latter-day Saints, beginning with Joseph Smith.
Smith’s own speculations varied with his circumstances, according to
Richard L. Bushman. On an occasion in 1833, for example, after awaken-
ing early one morning, Smith saw “stars fall from heaven,” which he
declared “a sure sign that the coming of Christ is clost [sic] at hand.”24 In
later years, however, while engaged in building Nauvoo, Smith told his
followers that “Zion and Jerusalem must both be built up before the
coming of Christ,” and only after that “shall the coming of the Son of
Man be.”25
Smith’s most interesting observation concerning the Second Coming
was triggered by the apocalyptic predictions of the adventist preacher Wil-
liam Miller in the 1840s. Smith clearly desired “to know the time of the
coming of the Son of Man,” and he prayed earnestly for that knowledge. In
response, in April 1843, he recorded that a voice said, “Joseph, my son, if
thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the
Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this
matter” (D&C 130:14–15). The ambiguities of that message created obvi-
ous eschatological uncertainties, as Smith himself was the first to ac-
knowledge. He recognized that many necessary tasks remained on the
historical timetable before the eschatological future could begin. Smith, of
course, was killed a year later.
The Second Coming is linked directly with the millennium, the thou-
sand years when Christ will reign personally on the earth. For Mormons,
Christ’s Second Coming will inaugurate the millennium; he will appear “in
the clouds of heaven, clothed with power and great glory; with all the holy
angels” (D&C 45:44). The millennium will be a time of peace, for the earth
will be renewed; evil and death will be destroyed. “In the Millennium,”
Brigham Young declared, “when the Kingdom of God is established on the
earth in power, glory and perfection, and the reign of wickedness that has
so long prevailed is subdued, the Saints of God will have the privilege of
building their temples, and of entering into them.” In these temples they
will “have revelations” and “officiate for their dead.”26 During the millen-
nium, “peace, love, and joy” will prevail.27 Only the righteous will be pres-
ent on earth.
Temple work, including the ordinance of baptism, laying on of hands,

temple marriage, and the sealing of family units, will be the primary task
of the Saints during the thousand years. Missionary work will also be fea-
tured during this time, and the results ultimately will be universal: “they
shall all know me, . . . saith the Lord” (Jer. 31:34). The earth itself will
become a “delightful garden,” transformed to the form it once had, “one
land” mass “like as it was in the days before it was divided” (D&C 133:23–
24). Peace will prevail, and the instruments of war will be transformed
into useful utensils. Death and disease will be no more (D&C 101:29).
Even animals will live together in peace. The diet of carnivorous beasts,
for example, will change to “grass and grain” (Isa. 11:6–7). One reason for
these positive developments is that Satan will be bound during the millen-
nium; he will have no power (D&C 101:28).
In Mormonism, there may be uncertainty about the timing of the
Second Coming, but that uncertainty has not reduced the glory of the sub-
sequent eschatological vision. For Mormons, the millennium is but the
opening chapter of the eschatological future. Following the thousand
years, there will be a short period when Satan will briefly rise again, tempt-
ing some to turn from the truth. But soon will follow the final great strug-
gle between the forces of Satan and the “hosts of heaven” led by the
archangel Michael. Satan and the coalition of evil will be overcome and
vanquished forever.
At that point the judgment follows, and all will be “assigned to the
kingdoms they will have prepared for by the way they have lived.”28 Those
in the highest degree of glory in the celestial kingdom will enjoy commun-
ion with Jesus Christ and with the Heavenly Father forever.29 Those who
received the gospel in the spirit world will live in the terrestrial kingdom
where Jesus will visit. Those who are resurrected after the millennium,
having suffered for their sins in hell, will be visited by the Holy Ghost in
the telestial kingdom. Only those who once knew the truth, but then
denied it and submitted to Satan, will experience “everlasting punish-
ment” (D&C 76:44), torment, and misery.30
It is clear from this perspective how pivotal the role of agency will be in
the ultimate destiny of each individual. “Agency” may be the critical escha-
tological factor for Latter-day Saints. According to Mormon thought, agency
is the ability human beings possess to choose good or evil. This ability
means that the historical human experience is a time of testing. Agency is
a critical component in the plan of redemption. It is the empowering con-
cept which places responsibility on humans for their eternal eschatological
destiny—their salvation or damnation.31 It is the responsibility of individu-

als to choose to serve the Lord (Moses 6:33), and therefore it is also because
of moral agency that all individuals will be accountable for their own acts
on the day of judgment (D&C 101:78). Because of this principle of agency,
life on earth is a time of testing to see if humans will take advantage of the
opportunities, and choose to make righteous judgments, and thereby gain
salvation.
* * *
It does not take special insight to recognize the spiritual benefits that the
eschatological vision has offered members of the LDS community
throughout Mormon history. There is also no need to rehearse in great
detail the repeated hardship, hostility, and persecution experienced by the
Saints since the days of the founder. The historical record includes tar and
featherings, whippings, physical harassment and murder, the lynching of
missionaries, physical threats by roving militia bands, personal animosity,
vigilante action, mob violence that destroyed homes and a printing press,
theft, arson, and destruction of property, ridicule directed against LDS
theological ideas, misrepresentation of Mormon social views, political
scapegoating, false accusations, and most notably, the assassinations of
Joseph and Hyrum Smith while they were in the custody of the state of
Illinois, and the invasion of Utah Territory by the U.S. Army over plural
marriage and “rebellion.” In such circumstances, the consolation and
solace derived by Mormons from the glorious prospects of the eschatolog-
ical future cannot be overstated.
That is also the primary consolatory role that eschatology has played
and continues to play in other apocalyptically minded religious communi-
ties in American history. For example, mob violence and open hostility
were also the common experience of the Shakers in the earliest decades of
that community’s history in America. On more than one occasion on her
missionary travels throughout New England, founder Ann Lee (1736–
1784) was dragged from her bed, assaulted by hostile mobs, and strip-
searched to see if she was a man, woman, or witch.32 Her followers in
subsequent decades were beaten, clubbed, and caned. During the very
years that Joseph Smith was having “the experiences that led him to be-
lieve he was a prophet,” to quote Richard Bushman,33 the Shakers through-
out the westward-expanding young nation found themselves the objects
of hatred and violence. In 1825, at a Shaker village in Kentucky, a mob of
some forty to fifty men, well-fortified by liquor and led by biological family
members, attempted to free a Shaker “sister” from her “bondage” by phys-

ical force. Armed with “clubs[,] dirks or pistols,” they broke into the Shaker
meetinghouse and began assaulting both brothers and sisters, knocking
some of them “senseless.”34 In this and similar situations at other villages,
the Believers (as the Shakers were also called) took comfort in their escha-
tological vision.
In contrast to the Latter-day Saints, members of the United Society of
Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing affirmed that the Second Coming
had already occurred. They regarded Ann Lee as the Second Coming of
Christ. Therefore Shaker eschatology might be labeled a “realized eschatol-
ogy.” The Shakers affirmed that the Second Coming was in the form of a
woman. They described God’s nature as both Father and Mother, revealed
respectively in the first appearance of Jesus the Beloved Son and the second
appearance of Ann the Beloved Daughter. The reason this truth was not
known before, they asserted, was because the “fullness of times” had not
come.35 The Shaker “fullness of times” was therefore the functional equiv-
alent of the Mormon “Second Coming.”
In the 1830s and 1840s, when Joseph Smith was guiding his young
movement through very difficult times, William Miller (1782–1849), the
Baptist lay preacher, rose to prominence on the strength of his judgment
that Christ’s return to the earth was impending. He drew elements for his
apocalyptic calculations from the book of Daniel, seizing upon the 2,300
days in Daniel 8:14 to suggest that the “cleansing” of the sanctuary men-
tioned in that verse had reference to fire that would purify the earth from
the evil rampant in his day. He calculated that Christ would return to the
earth in the year 1843.
Miller first began discussing his eschatological views openly in the
1830s. The Millerite movement became a major popular movement in
that decade and in the early 1840s. Joseph Smith, as mentioned earlier,
was himself affected by Millerism. William Miller, pressured by eager
followers, identified the specific time of Christ’s Second Coming as be-
tween March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When that year-long period
came and went, severe disappointment followed. A new chronology was
proposed, focusing on October 22, 1844. Miller reluctantly agreed to the
recalculation. When, for the second time, no advent of Christ material-
ized, “Great Disappointment” occurred along with massive ridicule.36 (In
the game of apocalyptic arithmetic, two strikes and you are out!) But
don’t underestimate how powerful the adventist eschatological vision
proved to be!
The most telling proof of the enduring strength of that vision is the power
it continued to exercise on the disappointed, including Ellen Harmon (1827–
1915), a young woman whose Methodist family had accepted the Millerite
gospel. In the year of the “Great Disappointment,” she began receiving vi-
sions. She married James White, an adventist preacher, and together they
traveled, preaching that Christ’s personal return was imminent, though
they did not set a specific date.37 The Whites joined with other adventists who
also valued highly the scriptural principle of prophecy. They reinterpreted
texts that had been central to Miller’s apocalyptic calculations, but they also
emphasized their responsibility to prepare the world for Christ’s Second
Coming.
This emerging Adventist movement under Ellen White’s direction also
adopted Sabbatarianism and a vigorous reform-minded approach to social
problems. Ellen White combined her eschatological vision with a strong
commitment to health reform, vegetarianism, educational innovation, and
missionary activity. Later in the nineteenth century when the Seventh-day
Adventists experienced hardship and pressure because of the enforcement
of Sunday legislation, they often interpreted their arrests and the fines as
signs of the approaching end. With the passage of time and their growing
institutional success, however, the imminence of Christ’s coming has fig-
ured less prominently in their theology.38 Today Seventh-day Adventists
provide significant evidence of the fact that a group once preoccupied with
the imminence of Christ’s return can display a willingness to settle in for
the long haul.
Among the most prominent and significant American religious com-
munities that have focused on apocalyptic, one must include the organiza-
tion that Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) founded. Russell was a lay
person in Pennsylvania who led local Bible study groups and then organ-
ized them into the International Bible Society Association in 1872.39 The
focus of his interests was the prophetic sections of the Bible. On the basis
of his calculations, and influenced by the adventist movement, he main-
tained that the dawn of the millennium had occurred in 1874 and that the
end of the world would occur in 1914. But Christ’s return in 1874, accord-
ing to Russell, had been spiritual, not physical. He viewed the contempo-
rary world as divided between the forces of Christ and Satan. Russell
developed a number of distinctive ideas. He was an outspoken opponent
of traditional churches as well as governments and commercial institu-
tions. His most famous statement, “Millions now living will never die,”
was a statement of the nearness of the end. Eventually this movement
under Russell’s successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869–1942), was

reorganized and renamed the Jehovah’s Witnesses.40 Down to the present,
the Witnesses have surrendered neither their apocalyptic condemnation
of the larger society nor their confidence in their own views. They have
also always been very aggressive missionizers.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are striking proof of the ambiguities pres-
ent at times among apocalyptic communities. They remain willing to
mark certain moments as apocalyptically significant; one such moment
was 1975, a “marked” year. What that meant for them was clouded in
some uncertainty. Many Witnesses thought 1975 might be the end of
human history and the beginning of the millennium, but its passage
again brought disappointment to many. Demographers estimate a major
defection occurred from the ranks of the Jehovah’s Witnesses when 1975
came and went.41 Another kind of eschatological ambiguity is evident in
the community. The Witnesses pride themselves on the cooperative con-
struction of Kingdom Halls—much as the Amish gather to raise barns.
But the fortress-like structural design of contemporary Kingdom Halls
seems in sharp tension with the belief in an imminent end to the pres-
ent order.
I cannot conclude this excursus into other American apocalyptic com-
munities without citing two other kinds of eschatologically oriented move-
ments. The first is racially defined. The Peace Mission Movement centered
on the life and activities of George Baker (1877–1965), an African American
preacher.42 By 1919 Baker was located on Long Island where he attracted
followers by serving lavish banquets. Over the next decade he became
known as Reverend Divine and as Father Divine. His movement prospered
during the Great Depression. Father Divine claimed that he was God come
to the earth to bring justice and peace. He presented himself as the fulfill-
ment of the prophecies of the book of Revelation. He called his houses of
prayer “heavens” and his followers “angels.” He provided for their needs—
both physical and psychological. They gave him their possessions—their
assets and income. The Peace Mission Movement had centers scattered
across the nation, especially in large cities. Father Divine’s movement is
further proof of the appeal of eschatology to those in situations of need and
duress.43
The second kind of religious community that has seized upon eschatol-
ogy as a way of coping with difficult circumstances many identify as “cults”
and others call “New Religious Movements.”44 The Branch Davidians, for
example, the followers of David Koresh at Ranch Apocalypse outside Waco,
Texas, were a group with deep adventist roots. They were living in expecta-
tion of the imminent return of Christ. In 1993 while engaged in an armed
standoff with federal officials, David Koresh was trying to complete his
interpretation of the seals of the book of Revelation. The fifty-one-day siege
confirmed the community in its expectations that difficult times would
precede the end. Government officials grew impatient with the standoff
and called on Koresh to stop engaging in “Bible babble,” their assessment
of eschatological discourse. Then they triggered a fiery inferno that ended
in the deaths of seventy-four, including Koresh himself.45
Eschatology has much to offer those who find themselves in conflict
situations or facing opposition and persecution. Negative and positive
“signs of the times” become confirmatory data for the believers in such
circumstances. The vision of the eschatological future provides hope for
success and ultimate vindication. The fact that such groups often link
their circumstances to sacred texts adds weight to their eschatological
hopes. Rarely do religious groups in such circumstances separate sharply
their historical circumstances from the hoped-for eschatological resolu-
tion of their problems. As in the case of the Mormon “futures,” the faithful
do not distinguish sharply between the historical and the eschatological.
Conflating the two serves their ends.
“Signs of the times” confirm the confidence of the party experiencing
duress. Hardship is thereby placed into a larger spiritual framework. The
prospect of a positive eschatological outcome comforts the faithful who
suffer in the here and now, and it identifies those responsible for the per-
secution. The eschatological vision is therefore much more than mere
metaphor for believers; it spells out the terms of the future restitution and
of the ultimate vindication.
* * *
By now it is obvious that I believe it is possible to generalize about escha-
tology in diverse religious communities. I am even willing to construct
what might be called “axioms” related to the nature and function of escha-
tology. Here are five such possible judgments.46
First, eschatology appeals to the human desire to know the future,
whether it be the immediate or the ultimate future. As a corollary, there is
simultaneously a desire on the part of individuals to be allied with the
forces of virtue, no matter how virtue is defined. That latitude allows the
interpreter to define what virtue is and how it will be reflected in the future.
Interest in the future is not restricted to individuals consumed with
religion. Other parties, too, are preoccupied with the future, whether it be
the economic, scientific, fictional, intergalactic, or whatever future. We
are all consumed with the future.
A second axiom when dealing with the nature of eschatology involves
the texts on which so much is based. Eschatological texts—for example,
the books of Revelation or Daniel—possess an amazing plasticity that in-
vites and reinforces constant reinterpretation. That is an easy case to make
when one examines the manifold different ways these texts have been ex-
plained by highly divergent religious groups, religious communities that
often regard one another as primary antagonists.
A third judgment follows from the fact that eschatological texts have
been interpreted so many different ways. One might conclude that there
ought to be a tentative quality to these interpretations. But, on the con-
trary, what I have discovered is that “confidence, urgency, and a certain
defensiveness” are characteristic of eschatological discourse and of the
interpretations of the texts on which it is based, whether they be religious
or secular.
A fourth observation relates to the world of American eschatological
reflection. It has a highly derivative character, much of it drawing on an-
cient texts and traditions that are much older than American society. The
obvious example is again the alternative ways in which the book of Reve-
lation has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and manipulated by diverse re-
ligious traditions.
There are, of course, exceptions to that generalization, and Mormon-
ism is one striking exception. That leads to a fifth judgment. Many Amer-
ican eschatological traditions also make use of “new texts” in addition to
ancient documents. Please note that I am not thereby implying that the
Book of Mormon is of recent origin rather than ancient. I leave that argu-
ment to the textual scholars. My point is that eschatological traditions can
and do make profitable use of new texts, too.
These observations about the Mormon historical and eschatological
futures and comparable views in other religious traditions lead to one
final question. This question arose for me most pointedly during the time
that I spent in Provo and Salt Lake City. I am very grateful for the conver-
sations I had at Brigham Young University as well as with LDS Church
headquarters staff and General Authorities.47 The question involves the
currency of the eschatological vision within contemporary Mormonism.
Is the LDS eschatological vision as powerful now as it has been in the
past? Or is that vision perhaps waning to some degree?
When I was in Utah, I had an opportunity to meet with scholars trained

as historians who deal with the history of the Church and with its editorial
projects. I also had an opportunity to meet with personnel involved with
the theological side of the LDS enterprise, including those responsible for
religious instruction at its universities and those who develop and corre-
late religious and curricular materials for the Church. I think I observed a
contrast in their respective judgments concerning the place of eschatology
in contemporary Mormonism.
Among the historians in the Church, there is a sense that the eschato-
logical focus of the Saints has lessened over time. They said the primary
focus is now on the Church’s contemporary agenda and on the many tasks
at hand.48 Or to put this another way, contemporary Mormons seem pre-
occupied with the success of the Church—its cultural standing, numerical
growth, public stature, regional dominance, international presence, polit-
ical influence, economic power, and general prosperity—and the tasks
which must be addressed to maintain and expand that success.49 Less at-
tention is now directed to eschatological concerns. There is textual evi-
dence of the same. Historian Dan Erickson, writing about the fading of
the “millennial aspirations” that shaped Mormon history from the time of
Joseph Smith to Wilford Woodruff, argues that, already by the end of the
nineteenth century, the delay linked to the Second Coming translated into
a changed view of the world and the future.50 Grant Underwood addressed
this same issue in the “Epilogue” to his The Millenarian World of Early
Mormonism, commenting that the discourse of even the Church’s leader-
ship reflected a diminishment of “millenarian rhetoric” after 1920. In
effect, he suggested that early in the twentieth century the “end times” no
longer attracted the attention and discussion they once did.51 In contrast,
the here and now is the current preoccupation of the LDS community. Or
as one observant historian stated in one of my meetings, the Saints in the
valleys of the Wasatch Front are prospering; they are not spending a lot of
time thinking about eschatology.
The LDS staff who write and correlate religious and curricular materi-
als and the General Authorities of the Church, by contrast, seem to be
saying something else. They continue to affirm the relevance and central-
ity of the eschatological message. Many are the statements and publica-
tions that feature eschatological themes.52 Richard D. Draper, associate
dean of Religious Education at Brigham Young University, writes in the
“Preface” to his book The Savior’s Prophecies: From the Fall of Jerusalem to
the Second Coming, “A sense of urgency has pushed me to write this book.
Not so much because I believe the Second Coming will be here tomorrow
(frankly, I believe it is a ways off ), but because the event is so great that it
will take time for us to prepare, and I share our leaders’ anxieties for us to
get started.”53 Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apos-
tles writes in the Ensign, “But while the exact timing of the Second Coming
remains in doubt, there is no question that scriptural prophecy relative to
that momentous and sacred event is being fulfilled, sometimes in remark-
able ways.”54 David J. Ridges, who has taught in the Church Educational
System for more than three decades, declares, “These last days before the
Savior’s return are indeed an exciting time to be alive.” He then quotes
Gordon B. Hinckley, who stated in 2001, “It is a marvelous age, the best of
all.” Ridges urges his readers to “appreciate and enjoy the vast blessings of
living in the last days.”55
The question I leave you with therefore is this: Is there today, in fact, less
attention to and interest in the eschatological vision among contemporary
Mormons? Perhaps the most interesting comment that I heard in Utah re-
garding this question came during one of my exchanges with the historians.
There seemed to be a shared consensus among those present that the es-
chatological vision was no longer as central as it had been in earlier times.
Several historians spoke of a strong desire on the part of many to distance
themselves from self-appointed prophets. Others underscored how the
Saints in different situations have different expectations. And then one his-
torian offered a most telling comment that perhaps epitomizes my argu-
ment concerning the religious function of eschatology. He said that he
served his mission in Zaire and that, among the Saints in that nation, escha-
tology remains a powerful contemporary religious force. His observation
reinforces my point concerning the positive spiritual function that eschatol-
ogy has played in Mormon history and in religious history generally.
Notes
1. Stephen J. Stein, ed., Apocalyptic Writings (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1977), 95–305.
2. See Stephen J. Stein, ed., Letters from a Young Shaker: William S. Byrd at Pleasant
Hill (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985); and Stein, The Shaker
Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1992).
3. See, for example, Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s
Millennial Role (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968); James West
Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); M. Darrol Bryant and Donald W.
Dayton, eds., The Coming Kingdom: Essays in American Millennialism & Eschatol-
ogy (Barrytown, NY: New Era Books, 1983); Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Mil-
lennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-
Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
1986); Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern Amer-
ican Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Grant Under-
wood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana, IL: University of Illi-
nois Press, 1993); Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of
Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Robert C. Fuller,
Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995); Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn, eds., The Year
2000: Essays on the End (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Daniel
Wojcik, The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in
America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); James H. Moorhead,
World without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things,
1880–1925 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Catherine
Wessinger, ed., Millennialism, Persecution, & Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
4. Catherine Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to
Heaven’s Gate (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000), 16–17, 27 note 9. See also
Wessinger, “Millennialism with and without the Mayhem,” in Millennium, Mes-
siahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, ed. Thomas Robbins
and Susan J. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 1997), 47–59.
5. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” Review of Religious Research 26
(September 1984): 18–27.
6. The universal human preoccupation with the future can be documented in nu-
merous ways, including searching for the concept on major databases.
7. Anders Hultgård, “Persian Apocalypticism,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypti-
cism, Vol. 1, The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. John J.
Collins (New York: Continuum, 1998), 1:30–40.
8. Bernard McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Church Reform: 1100–1500,” in The En-
cyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 2, Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture,
ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1998), 2:83–84.
9. Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Islamic Apocalypticism in the Classic Period,” in Encyclo-
pedia of Apocalypticism, 2:268–269.
10. Simon Hough, An Alarm to the World: Dedicated to All Ranks of Men; by a Pro-
fessed Friend to All Mankind—Begging They Would Prepare for Christ’s Second
Coming, Which Is Near, Even at the Doors (Stockbridge, MA: Loring Andrews,
1792). Hough was also the author of The Sign of the Present Time: or, A Short
Treatise Setting Forth What Particular Prophecies Are Now Fulfilling, in the Author’s
Judgment: Together with a Few Short Dialogues (Stockbridge, MA: Heman Wil-
lard, 1799).
11. Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., Rush Letters: Letters of Benjamin Rush (Philadelphia,
PA: American Philosophical Society, 1951), 1:466–467. See also Mark A. Noll,
America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 64–65.
12. See Samuel Hopkins, A Treatise on the Millennium: Showing from Scripture
Prophecy, That It Is Yet to Come: When It Will Come; In What It Will Consist; and
the Events Which Are First to Take Place, Introductory to It (Boston, MA: Isaiah
Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrew, 1793). On Hopkins, see Joseph A. Conforti,
Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational
Ministry, and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Grand
Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1981).
13. See Jack Fruchtman, The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley:
A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century English Republican Millennialism (Philadel-
phia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1983). On Priestley in America, see
Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work
from 1773 to 1804 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2004).
14. The history of millennialism continues to attract scholarly attention. See, for
example, Frederic J. Baugartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism
in Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); and Stephen Hunt,
ed., Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2001).
15. Brigham Young, July 15, 1860, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London, UK: LDS
Booksellers Depot, 1855–1886), 8:123.
16. Susan Staker, ed., Waiting for the World’s End: The Diaries of Wilford Woodruff
(Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1993), 199. See also Thomas G. Alexander,
Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon
Prophet (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1991), which identifies eschatolog-
ical themes in Woodruff’s life.
17. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1958), 656.
18. Ibid., 626.
19. LeGrand Richards, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret
Book, 1976 printing), 397–998.
20. Dallin H. Oaks, “Preparation for the Second Coming,” Ensign, May 2004, 4.
21. Gospel Principles (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
1997), 268.
22. On one occasion, Spencer W. Kimball expressed the judgment that the timetable
for Christ’s return was being affected by the failure of the Saints to convert
“great numbers of Lamanites” who were to be involved with the building of the
New Jerusalem and its temple in Jackson County, Missouri. Edward L. Kimball,
ed., The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball: Twelfth President of The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1982), 441–442.
23. Joseph Smith Jr. et al., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
ed. B. H. Roberts, 2nd ed. rev. (6 vols., 1902–1912; reprint, Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book, 1980 printing), 4:451. The LDS Church’s thirteen Articles of
Faith are appended to the Pearl of Great Price, one of its canonical works
along with the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doc-
trine and Covenants.
24. Richard Lyman Bushman with the assistance of Jed Woodworth, Joseph Smith:
Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 166.
25. Ibid., 415.
26. John A. Widtsoe, comp. and ed., Discourses of Brigham Young (Salt Lake City, UT:
Deseret Book, 1941), 116.
27. Gospel Principles, 282.
28. Ibid., 286.
29. On the afternoon of January 21, 1836, Joseph Smith received a vision of the ce-
lestial kingdom, its appearance, and its inhabitants, which is recorded in his
diary. See Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake
City, UT: Deseret Book, 1984), 145–147.
30. See the chapter titled “The Biggest Heaven and the Littlest Hell,” in Coke Newell,
Latter Days: A Guided Tour through Six Billion Years of Mormonism (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 225–244.
31. See “Agency,” in McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 25–27.
32. Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed
Mother, Ann Lee, and the Elders with Her; through Whom the Word of Eternal Life
Was Opened in This Day of Christ’s Second Appearing: Collected from Living Wit-
nesses, by Order of the Ministry, in Union with the Church (Hancock, MA: J. Tallcott
& J. Deming, Junre., 1816), 92–98.
33. Bushman with Woodworth, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 35.
34. See Lucy Smith, Letter to Ruth Landon, August 12, 1825; Pleasant Hill Ministry
to New Lebanon Ministry, August 1, 1826, Western Reserve Historical Society,
Cleveland, Ohio, IV A53. See also Stein, Shaker Experience, 97–98.
35. See Benjamin S. Youngs, The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing Containing
a General Statement of All Things Pertaining to the Faith and Practice of the Church
of God in This Latter-Day (Lebanon, OH: John M’Clean, 1808); and Calvin Green
and Seth Wells, Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Be-
lievers, (Commonly Called Shakers.) Comprising the Rise, Progress and Practical
Order of the Society; Together with the General Principles of Their Faith and Testi-
mony (Albany, NY: Packard & Van Benthuysen, 1823).
36. See Everett Newton Dick, William Miller and the Advent Crisis, 1831–1844 (Berrien
Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1994).
37. Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (New York:
Harper & Row, 1976); and Roy E. Graham, Ellen G. White: Co-Founder of the
Seventh-day Adventist Church (New York: P. Lang, 1985).
38. John Norton Loughborough, The Great Second Advent Movement, Its Rise and
Progress (New York: Arno Press, 1972); Edwin S. Gaustad, ed., The Rise of Advent-
ism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper
and Row, 1974); Gary Land, ed., Adventism in America: A History (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1986); and Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Repub-
lic: The Public Involvement of a Major Apocalyptic Movement (Knoxville, TN: Uni-
versity of Tennessee Press, 2001).
39. David Horowitz, Pastor Charles Taze Russell: An Early American Christian Zionist
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1986); and C. T. Russell, Pastor Russell’s Ser-
mons: A Choice Collection of His Most Important Discourses on All Phases of Chris-
tian Doctrine and Practice (USA: 1970–79).
40. William Joseph Whalen, Armageddon around the Corner: A Report on Jehovah’s
Witnesses (New York: J. Day Co., 1962); Timothy White, A People for His Name: A
History of Jehovah’s Witnesses and an Evaluation (New York: Vantage Press, 1968);
James A. Beckford, The Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975); Melvin D. Curry, Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses: The Millenarian World of the Watch Tower (New York: Garland, 1992); Je-
hovah’s Witnesses: Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible
and Tract Society of New York, 1993); M. James Penton, Apocalypse Delayed: The
Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 2d ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997);
and Andrew Holden, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious
Movement (London: Routledge, 2002).
41. For discussion and analysis of the prophetic failure associated with 1975, see
William Charles Stevenson, Year of Doom, 1975: The Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses
(London: Hutchinson, 1967); God’s Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached
(New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1973); and Penton,
Apocalypse Delayed, 91–103.
42. Biographical studies of Baker include John Hoshor, God in a Rolls Royce: The
Rise of Father Divine, Madman, Menace, or Messiah (New York: Hillman-Curl,
1936); Sara Harris, Father Divine, Holy Husband (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1953); Robert Weisbrot, Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983); and Jill Watts, God, Harlem U.S.A.: The
Father Divine Story (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
43. One of the most useful sources for the Peace Mission Movement is Father Di-
vine’s weekly and at times biweekly publication, The New Day (May 21,
1936–November 1941). Another racially defined apocalyptic movement is the
Nation of Islam. See, for example, Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam: An Ameri-
can Millenarian Movement (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988); and Clifton E.
Marsh, The Lost-Found Nation of Islam (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996).
44. The expanding literature dealing with these alternative religious groups in-
cludes David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe Jr., Strange Gods: The Great
American Cult Scare (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1981); J. Gordon Melton, En-
cyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, rev. ed. (New York: Garland Publish-
ing, 1992); Timothy Miller, ed., America’s Alternative Religions (Albany, NY:
State University of New York, 1995); Lorne L. Dawson, Comprehending Cults:
The Sociology of New Religious Movements (Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1998); James R. Lewis, ed., Odd Gods: New Religions & the Cult Controversy
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001); John A. Saliba, Understanding New
Religious Movements, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003); Ste-
phen J. Stein, Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in Amer-
ica (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Eugene V. Gallagher, The New
Religious Movements Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2004); Christopher Partridge, ed., New Religions: A Guide—New Religious
Movements, Sects and Alternative Spiritualities (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004); James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, eds., Controversial
New Religions (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Elisabeth
Arweck, Researching New Religious Movements: Responses and Redefinitions
(London: Routledge, 2006). With two exceptions, each of these volumes in-
cludes a discussion of Mormonism.
45. Carole Moore, The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions about Waco Which
Must Be Answered (Franklin, TN: Legacy Communications, 1995); Dick J. Reavis,
The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995);
James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Re-
ligious Freedom in America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995);
Stuart A. Wright, ed., Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch
Davidian Conflict (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); James D.
Faubion, The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001); and A. Anthony Hibbert, Before the Flames:
Story of David Koresh and the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists (New York: Sea-
burn Publications, 1996).
46. Stephen J. Stein, “American Millennial Visions: Towards Construction of a New
Architectonic of American Apocalypticism,” in Imagining the End: Visions of
Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America, ed. Abbas Amanat
and Magnus Bernhardsson (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2002), 187–211.
47. I thank Grant Underwood for arranging a critical series of meetings for me in
March 2006 when I visited both Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and
the LDS Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. The hospitality of all with whom
I spoke was noteworthy.
48. See the judgments of Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton concerning escha-
tology in Mormon history in The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day
Saints (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 36–37.
49. See, for example, Donald Q. Cannon and Richard O. Cowan, Unto Every Nation:
Gospel Light Reaches Every Land (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2003).
50. Dan Erickson, “As a Thief in the Night”: The Mormon Quest for Millennial Deliver-
ance (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998), 223–229.
51. Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, 141–42.
52. See, for example, Bruce R. McConkie, The Millennial Messiah: The Second
Coming of the Son of Man (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1982); Kent P. Jack-
son et al., Watch and Be Ready: Preparing for the Second Coming of the Lord (Salt
Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1994); and Daniel C. Peterson, The Last Days:
Teachings of the Modern Prophets, 2 vols. (1998; reprint Salt Lake City, UT: Aspen
Books, 2000).
53. Richard D. Draper, The Savior’s Prophecies: From the Fall of Jerusalem to the Second
Coming (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2001), 3.
54. Elder M. Russell Ballard, “When Shall These Things Be?,” Ensign, December
1996, 56.
55. David J. Ridges, 50 Signs of the Times and the Second Coming (Springville, UT:
Cedar Fort, 2004).
4
Mormon Women and the Problem

of Historical Agency
By Catherine A. Brekus
Few women in the nineteenth century were as controversial—and

as maligned—as Mormon women. Angered by polygamy, nineteenth-
century critics claimed that Mormon women were the victims of both
lecherous husbands and a despotic church. “The cornerstone of polygamy
is the degradation of woman,” Jennie Anderson Froiseth argued in 1888,
“and it can flourish only when she is regarded and treated as a slave.”
Mormon women were “deluded and downtrodden,” “broken-hearted,”
“dull, senseless, sorrowful,” “degraded,” “shameless,” “miserable,” and
“the meanest and most abject slaves.”1 In a work of fiction that advertised
itself as journalism, a critic in 1877 denounced polygamy as a “crime that
degrades woman to a level actually below the beasts of the field! A crime
that makes woman at once the slave of lustful men rich enough to pur-
chase her; the mere toy of base passion, to be cast aside the moment a
newer and more attractive face is seen.”2 The author claimed that, when
he asked a working man why he intended to join the Mormons, the man
responded, “Out there a chap can have as many wives as he wants.” And
when asked how his wife would cope, the man replied, “Oh, bother her,
I’ll teach her not to interfere with my ideas when I get her out to Salt Lake.
That’s the place, Sir, where we men can make these women folks keep
their proper places and mind their own business. Women was made to be
the servants of men, and a man ought to have just as many as he can get a
hold of.”3 Most of these critiques were written by anti-polygamy activists
and doubtless contained a strong element of fiction, but the condemna-
tions penned by women like Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s runaway
wife, were especially damaging. Ann Eliza claimed that polygamy was re-
sponsible for broken hearts and ruined lives.4
The anti-polygamy literature of the nineteenth century was so vivid, so

inflammatory, and so popular that historians have never been able to com-
pletely escape from its shadow. On one hand, historians outside of the
LDS community seem to have been influenced by the caricature of the
degraded polygamous wife; and although they have rarely articulated their
reasons for ignoring Mormon women, they seem to assume that they are
not worth studying. Neither women’s historians nor American religious
historians have seemed interested in including Mormon women in their
narratives, implicitly suggesting that they should not be considered as se-
rious historical actors who made things happen. On the other hand, schol-
ars who specialize in Mormon history have been so determined to defend
nineteenth-century LDS women against lingering stereotypes that they
have sometimes exaggerated their agency. The result is that we are left
with a fractured picture of Mormon women as either deluded, downtrod-
den slaves or fiercely independent matriarchs.
The conceptual confusion over how to imagine Mormon women raises
larger questions about the challenges of writing women’s history, espe-
cially the history of women and religion. Mormon women are an espe-
cially dramatic example of women’s absence from narratives of American
religion, but not the only one. Women’s religious history has flourished
during the past thirty years, but it has often remained on the sidelines of
both women’s history and religious history.5 This essay explores why his-
torians have found it difficult to integrate religious women into their nar-
ratives and, specifically, why the many excellent studies of Mormon women
have not had a greater impact on the way historians teach and write about
American religion. Since the answer to these questions seems to involve
the way that historians imagine historical agency, this essay examines the
problem of writing about Mormon women as agents of historical change.
Even though modern-day historians have often ignored early Mormon
women, those same early Mormon women seem to have had a robust
sense of their power to shape events—a power that they believed had
come from God. When the first generation of Mormon women wrote
memoirs about their experiences, they proudly described their contribu-
tions to the building of Zion. Ruth Page Rogers, for example, claimed that
she had convinced her family to gather with the Saints after she threat-
ened to go alone, and Mercy Rachel Fielding Thompson remembered how
she and other women had raised money to build the temple at Kirtland.
After receiving a revelation, she encouraged women “to subscribe one
Cent per Week for the purpose of buying Glass and nails for the Temple.”
Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency 81
Although she had to hide the money from mobs, she and other women
eventually raised $500.6 Other women remembered standing up to offi-
cers or mobs who had harassed them. According to Patience Delilah
Pierce Palmer, she stared “fearlessly” into the eyes of a man who held a
gun near her chest and who said, “I swore I’d kill a d—d Mormon when I
left home and now is my chance.” He left only after his captain ordered
him to lower his gun. Sarah Studevant Leavitt remembered that, when an
officer asked whether she and other women were armed, she lied to him.
As she commented with satisfaction: “It is not hard to deceive a fool.”7
Impressed by their mothers’ strength, the daughters of these female
pioneers remembered them with a mixture of affection and awe. “What a
fearless, courageous woman mother was!” exclaimed Margaret Gay Judd
Clawson. She praised her mother as a devout woman who had not only
collected warm clothing for the “brethren” during the Echo Canyon War,
but who had “sat up many nights knitting woolen stockings to protect
them from the inclemency of the weather.” Martha Cragun Cox marveled
that her mother had not been daunted even by giving birth in a wagon on
the way to Utah: “All day she suffered the jolting of the wagon under the
August sun while her pains of travail were upon her without a sign of
complaint and did not hinder the travel one hour. As the wagons rolled
into camp her delivery came.” Many other women echoed Cox’s conclu-
sion in the late nineteenth century: “It is women of that caliber that can
build a nation.”8
Despite damaging stereotypes of polygamous wives as passive and de-
graded, Mormon women insisted that their work was as valuable as
men’s—perhaps more so. “How great the responsibilities of the sisters of
the church,” wrote Belinda Marden Pratt, one of Apostle Parley P. Pratt’s
plural wives. “What a work they are accomplishing! . . . Teaching their
children. Engaged in the Relief Society! Giving of their means to the poor.
Visiting the sick. Administering comfort and consolation when needed.
Engaged in the starting of Silk Culture. Buying up wheat etc. etc. Our
labors are as great as those of the Brethren and more numurous [sic] for
the responsibility of training the young rests almost entirely with the sis-
ters.”9 In 1901 a group of women founded Daughters of Utah Pioneers to
preserve the stories and memorabilia of their foremothers as well as those
of the better-known men.10
When Mormons began to publish histories of the Church, however,
they rarely wrote about the women whose faith and work had made its ex-
istence possible. Influenced by the historical assumptions of their time,
they wrote as if male leaders had created a new religious movement virtu-
ally on their own. Apostle George A. Smith’s 1872 book The Rise, Progress
and Travels of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not men-
tion any women by name, and only a handful of women appear in B.H.
Roberts’s seven-volume edition of LDS history, History of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which includes Joseph Smith’s own chron-
icle and those of his close associates.11 This official chronicle praises sev-
eral women for their faith, including Emily Coburn, who defied her family
to become an early convert, and Lydia Knight, who had a prophetic dream
about the Prophet Joseph; but the narrative focuses mostly on influential
male converts like Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, and Parley Pratt.12
In contrast, Edward Tullidge published a tribute to LDS women in
1877, The Women of Mormondom, which praised them as “religious
empire-founders, in faith and fact.”13 But at a time when most people as-
sumed that the natural subject of history was men and their accomplish-
ments, Tullidge was an exception. Writing in 1893, Edward H. Anderson,
a Mormon journalist, historian, and member of the Young Men’s Mutual
Improvement Association general board, avoided writing about women
even when they should have been unavoidable—for example, in his dis-
cussion of celestial marriage. Explaining this doctrine, Anderson ex-
plained that Mormons saw marriage as “one of the chief means of man’s
exaltation and glory in the world to come, whereby he may have endless
increase of eternal lives, and attain at length to the power of the God-
head.”14 Douglas Davies, a British scholar of Mormonism, pointed out in
2003 that, since men “cannot fully exercise their priesthood outside mar-
riage and women cannot fully benefit from the power of the Melchizedek
priesthood unless they are married to a member of it,” the doctrine of ce-
lestial marriage makes men and women central to one another’s salva-
tion.15 But one would not know this from reading Anderson’s book.
By the early twentieth century, however, many LDS historians felt com-
pelled to include women in their narratives, even if only briefly. Besides
being influenced by the women’s suffrage movement, they seem to have
seen the political advantages of countering the stereotype of the degraded,
polygamous wife. Orson F. Whitney, a bishop, future apostle, and son of a
plural marriage, published his four-volume History of Utah in 1904, in-
cluding a section on “Women of Note” that emphasized Mormon wom-
en’s intelligence, patriotism, and character. He praised Eliza Roxcy Snow,
poet, general president of the revived Relief Society, and a plural wife of
both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, as “gifted and educated.” Whitney
also pointed out that Bathsheba Wilson Bigler Smith expressed affection
and “respect” for her husband’s other wives, reportedly saying: “We have
worked and toiled together, have had our joy in our labors, have had our
recreations and taken comfort in each other’s society. Our faith is the
same, our anticipations are the same.”16 When historian B. H. Roberts,
editor, famous second-generation missionary, theologian, and member of
the First Council of the Seventy, published his Comprehensive History of the
Church in 1930, he included idealized portraits of Vilate Murray Kimball
and Leonora Cannon Taylor (wives of Heber C. Kimball and John Taylor
respectively) as “types of the early womanhood of the church: noble-
minded, high-spirited, intelligent, courageous, independent, cheerful, but
profoundly religious and capable of great self-sacrifice under the sense of
religious duty.” He concluded emphatically: “Never was a greater mistake
made than when it has been supposed that the women of the church were
weak, and ignorant, and spiritless. Such religious movements as that
which the world knows as ‘Mormonism,’ involving as it has done self-
sacrifice, patient, heroic service, through trying years—through whole life-
times, in fact—cannot be maintained on the womanhood side of it but by
high-spirited, virtuous women.”17 Although Roberts’s glowing tribute to
women was heartfelt, it also sounded defensive and was definitely politi-
cally driven. He wanted to guarantee that no one repeated the “mistake” of
portraying Mormon women as “ignorant.” His own autobiography barely
mentions his own plural wives and children, and he strenuously argued
against including female suffrage in Utah’s Constitution.18
Roberts’s book set a pattern. Until the rise of women’s history in the
mid-1970s, most Mormon historians who wrote about women seemed to
be motivated by a desire to counter negative stereotypes of polygamy. For
example, Russell R. Rich’s 1972 book Ensign to the Nations: A History of the
Church from 1846 to the Present, which was designed to be a survey text for
undergraduate classes, only briefly refers to the Relief Society but includes
several pages on women’s defenses of polygamy. When Rich cites the tes-
timonies of Sarah Melissa Granger Kimball, Mrs. Levi Riter, Phoebe
Carter Woodruff, Harriet Cook Young, and Eliza R. Snow, he mentions
more women by name than on any other single page of his book. Rich’s
interest in female agency seemed to be limited to demonstrating that
women were not forced into plural marriages.19
Rich asked probing questions about Mormon men’s faith, but he did not
ask why so many women were attracted to the LDS Church. Like other his-
torians, he seems to have taken women’s religious devotion for granted—as
if faith has always been a natural and enduring feature of being female.
Historians have traditionally naturalized women’s piety instead of asking
questions about why we equate femininity with faith, or how women’s reli-
gious beliefs and practices have changed over time. In her history of the
Reorganized Church, for example, Inez Smith Davis rarely wrote about
women. The exception is a brief paragraph about their charitable endeavors
as members of the Daughters of Zion: “The women of the church carry on
the same church activities as have occupied the time and attention of
church women everywhere,” she wrote.20 Her description implied that his-
torians did not need to spend time analyzing something as timeless and
stable as women’s church work.
The modern field of Mormon women’s history dates from the 1970s,
when a group of female scholars including Maureen Ursenbach Beecher,
Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Claudia Lauper Bushman, and
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich began writing about LDS women, often in collab-
oration with one another. When Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah,
edited by Bushman, was published in 1976, it heralded the arrival of a
new academic interest in Mormon women’s history. The authors who
contributed to that collection wrote about topics that few before them had
found worthy of study, including the Relief Society, healing, teaching, and
midwifery.21
Since the 1970s the field of Mormon women’s history has exploded.
Hundreds of books and articles about Mormon women have been pub-
lished, including insightful biographical accounts and groundbreaking
studies of women’s economic activities, professionalization, education,
and support of suffrage.22 Scholars have also published critical editions of
Mormon women’s diaries and autobiographies that have let women speak
in their own voices. Landmark works include the diaries of midwife Patty
Bartlett Sessions and the introspective journal of the well-connected
Helen Mar Kimball Smith Whitney.23
Yet despite this impressive scholarship, Mormon women’s history has
not yet been integrated into the larger fields of either women’s history or
American religious history. In the introduction to the second edition of
Mormon Sisters, Anne Firor Scott remembered her ignorance when she
was asked to give the Tanner Lecture to the Mormon Historical Associa-
tion in 1984. “The most startling thing I learned,” she wrote, “was how
little any of us non-Mormons knew about Mormon history in general but
especially about the work being done on Mormon women. Most of my col-
leagues in the field were quite unaware that this work was going on.”24
More than twenty-five years later, the same could still be said. Few histori-
ans outside the LDS community have included Mormon women in their
narratives. For example, Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt’s textbook,
The Religious History of America, includes a few pages on Joseph Smith
and Brigham Young but nothing else, and Mary Beth Norton’s Major Prob-
lems in American Women’s History does not include any essays or docu-
ments about Mormon women.25
While Mormon women appear in the brand-new textbook Women and
the Making of America, they are confined to a three-page section on polyg-
amy and women’s suffrage. Although the authors mention Emmeline
B. Wells in the context of her relationship with suffrage leaders like Susan
B. Anthony, their brief discussion of Mormon women’s activism is over-
shadowed by a full-page extract from Jennie Anderson Froiseth’s 1882
polemic, Women of Mormonism, or The Story of Polygamy As Told by the
Victims Themselves.26 Froiseth’s work is an important document for under-
standing Mormon women’s history; but by giving it so much space, the
authors imply that Mormon women should be imagined as “victims.”
Even though they include a question at the end of the document asking
students to consider how Froiseth’s anti-polygamy stance might have in-
fluenced her depiction of plural marriage, their brief acknowledgment of
possible bias is dwarfed by the full-page description of women’s degrada-
tion. The authors could have discussed Mormon women in more depth
elsewhere, but either they decided against it or they simply overlooked
such possibilities. For example, they could have compared nineteenth-
century Mormon women’s charitable work in the Relief Society to Protes-
tant women’s participation in reform and benevolent associations.
Like historians outside of Mormon studies, many specialists in Mormon
history have also found it difficult to imagine women as central characters
in their narratives. Often their solution has been to place them in separate
chapters or sections. For example, in their 1979 one-volume history, The
Mormon Experience, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton include far
more material on women than previous historians, but they place most of
their discussion of women in separate chapters on “Mormon Sisterhood”
and “Marriage and Family Patterns.” Without intending it, they end up
portraying women as marginal to the building of the faith. In Part 1, for
example, when they discuss “the appeal of Mormonism,” they focus exclu-
sively on the experiences of male converts like Wilford Woodruff, Newel
Knight, Parley P. Pratt, and Lorenzo Snow.27 By waiting until Chapter 12 to
tell the stories of early female converts, the authors end up isolating them
from the main action of the narrative—a choice that implies that women’s
lives had little effect on the rise of Mormonism. Since Arrington was a
strong supporter of women’s history who published several articles and
books about women, this effect was clearly not what he intended; but de-
spite his admiration for historical Mormon women, he struggled to con-
nect women’s history to the larger field of Mormon history.28
Why have historians, despite their best intentions, found it difficult to
integrate Mormon women’s history into their narratives? There are sev-
eral possible explanations, including androcentrism (the assumption
that the universal human subject is male), inherited assumptions
about what counts as serious history, and top-down models of historical
change.29 Because orthodox Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ
members believe that Joseph Smith’s encounters with the divine led him
to create a new church based on the example in the New Testament,
Mormon historians seem to have been particularly attracted to models of
history that emphasize the power of prophetic leaders to create change.
And indeed, many of the most dramatic changes in both churches have
come from divine revelation: for example, the advent of polygamy for
Mormons (and its rejection by the first RLDS prophet-president, Joseph
Smith III), the acceptance of black men into the priesthood for Latter-day
Saints in 1978, and the 1984 revelation authorizing the ordination of
women for Community of Christ, the first of which occurred in 1985.
When LDS assistant Church historian Andrew Jenson published his
Church Chronology, he began by recording the names of the First Presi-
dents, the Council of Twelve Apostles, the Presiding Patriarchs, and the
First Council of Seventies.30
Historians rarely reflect on why they arrange their narratives the way
they do, or why they include some characters and not others, but the
choice to ignore women seems to be connected to their assumptions
about agency. The Oxford English Dictionary defines agency as “the faculty
of an agent or of acting; active working or operation; action, activity,” and
as “working as a means to an end; instrumentality, intermediation.” An
“agent,” also according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “one who (or
that which) acts or exerts power, as distinguished from the patient, and
also from the instrument.”31 In other words, agency is the ability to take
action—to do something—and an agent is someone or something that
has the power to make something occur.
Most scholars, however, invest far more in the word “agency” than
these simple technical definitions might suggest.32 The field of women’s
history grew in tandem with the feminist movement; and, especially in

the 1970s and 1980s, women’s historians hoped to recover the stories of
crusading female leaders who had challenged male authority. Although
historians of male leaders had never felt compelled to argue that men’s
agency was politically subversive or liberating (and in fact, their narratives
often revolved around men who had fostered war and destruction), histo-
rians of overlooked groups—including women, Native Americans, Afri-
can Americans, and Latina/os—were searching for a “usable past,” and so
they looked for evidence of individual or collective resistance to white
male hegemony. For example, African American historians inspired by
the civil rights movement focused on black protests against slavery. As a
result, “agency” today has become virtually synonymous with emancipa-
tion, liberation, and resistance. When historians write about agency, they
often imagine an individual in conflict with his or her society who self-
consciously seeks greater freedom. As Sharon Hays, a sociologist, has
pointed out, agency is often portrayed as the opposite of “structure,” the
enduring patterns of human life that are reproduced across generations.
Social structure is associated with constraint, permanency, and collectiv-
ity, while human agency is associated with individuality, change, and free-
dom.33 An agent is someone who resists the constraints of the social
structure, who challenges social norms to create something new.
Given these implicit definitions of agency as freedom, empowerment,
and intentionality, it is not surprising that the few women who appear in
American religious history textbooks tend to be pioneering female leaders
who self-consciously challenged the restrictions on their authority: white,
mainstream Protestant women like Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and Frances Willard. Because historians have implicitly defined
agency against structure, they have found it hard to imagine women who
accepted religious structures as agents. This is why there are so few Mormon
women in American religious history textbooks—or for that matter, Cath-
olic women, Orthodox Jewish women, or Fundamentalist women. The
field of women’s history still has a feminist bent, and scholars in search of
a “usable past” have rarely been interested in studying women who seem
to have accepted female subordination.
Mormon historians have been determined to change this marginaliza-
tion; and over the past thirty years, they have written scores of books and
articles about Mormon women. They have been especially interested in
recovering the stories of notable Mormon feminists like Emmeline
B. Wells, suffragist, journalist, and Relief Society general president, who
challenged the restrictions on women’s political and economic equality.34

Contrary to what many historians seem to have assumed, Mormon history
has proven to be fertile ground for feminists in search of their foremoth-
ers. Today one of the most vital fields in Mormon women’s history focuses
on suffrage.
Much of this recent scholarship has been excellent, and we need still
more studies of Mormon feminism in both the nineteenth century and
today. Yet even though Mormon women’s historians have demonstrated
why Mormon women deserve to appear alongside female worthies like
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, they have unwittingly al-
lowed other historians to set the terms of their debate. Instead of broaden-
ing the definition of female agency, they have tried to fit Mormon women’s
lives into an emancipatory paradigm by demonstrating their subjects’ en-
gagement in feminist politics. This is a laudable (and inspiring) project,
but an incomplete one. While Mormon women’s historians have made a
compelling case for why LDS women should be included in discussions of
the suffrage movement, they have not explained why historians should
care about the large numbers of ordinary women who never openly chal-
lenged male authority in the family, state, or church.
Besides privileging the stories of female leaders, historians who have
equated agency with resistance have encountered a different kind of prob-
lem. Because of their desire to dismantle lingering stereotypes of
nineteenth-century Mormon women as victims of patriarchy, they have
sometimes exaggerated women’s agency. This is especially true in recent
studies of polygamy. Ever since the nineteenth century, LDS historians
have emphasized that women were not coerced into polygamy; but since
the rise of second-wave feminism, they have portrayed this marriage prac-
tice in an increasingly positive light. Although Mormon historians always
acknowledge that women described polygamy as a “trial,” many also em-
phasize that it encouraged women to become independent and, in some
cases, to seek fulfillment outside of the home.
For example, in a path-breaking essay published in Mormon Sisters in
1976, Stephanie Smith Goodson pointed out that “polygamy developed
independent women who bore much of the financial responsibility for
their families,” adding, “Childcare problems for polygamous wives away
from home for one reason or another were virtually eliminated with the
help of other sister-wives.” Describing polygamous wives as powerful
“matriarchs,” she argued that “the advantages of polygamy often offset the
problems of the system.”35 Offering an even more positive interpretation,
Joan Iversen published an essay in 1984 claiming that polygamy led to

“intense female bonding, increased female independence, and closer
mother/child bonds.” By assaulting the ideology of exclusive romantic
love, Mormon leaders inadvertently encouraged women to carve out au-
tonomous identities for themselves apart from men.36 More recently his-
torian and cultural critic Terryl L. Givens has explained that plural marriage
“engendered great independence and resilience on the part of women nec-
essarily deprived of the presence of a constant companion.” Pointing out
the large numbers of Mormon women who attended college, he claims
that polygamy made it possible for women to become doctors or lawyers.37
Turning the interpretations of nineteenth-century critics upside down,
historians have insisted that polygamy was not necessarily degrading or
oppressive, but sometimes liberating. Polygamy could be a form of free-
dom; it could liberate women from the burdens of housekeeping and
childcare and enable them to find fulfillment outside of the home.
On one hand, it is clear that Mormon women were not forced into po-
lygamy, and in fact most insisted that they had chosen it of their own free
will. “I freely gave my assent,” testified Artimesia Beman Snow.38 By point-
ing out that polygamy encouraged women to become more independent,
historians have helped to dismantle nineteenth-century caricatures of
Mormon women as “slaves” or concubines. On the other hand, this posi-
tive interpretation of polygamy has also had the effect of minimizing or
even ignoring the structural constraints on women’s agency. Postmodern-
ists have often overstated the limits on human agency (to the point that
they have been accused of portraying humans as prisoners of language),
but they have reminded us that freedom is never absolute.39 Mormon
women were free to make choices, but they exercised that freedom within
a religious environment that strongly encouraged them to cultivate the
supposedly “feminine” values of piety, self-denial, and obedience. Accord-
ing to Mary Ellen Kimball, her husband, Heber, warned his wives that if
they did not recognize him as their “head,” they “would bring death and
destruction and misery” upon themselves.40 The power of Mormon cul-
ture was not absolute; and many women, including Emma Smith, refused
to submit to the authority of the male priesthood by accepting plural mar-
riage. Yet these women were warned that the price of dissent might be
their salvation. According to Joseph Smith’s revelation on polygamy,
Emma would be “destroyed” if she refused to obey the commandment to
accept and even facilitate her husband’s polygamy (LDS D&C 132:54).41 In
1842, when sixteen-year-old Lucy Walker hesitated to become Joseph
Smith’s plural wife, she reported his response as, “I have no flattering
words to offer. It is a command of God to you. I will give you until tomor-
row to decide this matter. If you reject this message the gate will be closed
forever against you.” Walker consented after receiving her own individual
revelation, but her choice took place within webs of power that she herself
had not spun.42
Later Mormon women made the same choice within the same limited
matrix. When Orson Pratt, himself already a polygamist, preached on
“Celestial Marriage” in 1852, he warned, “Let no woman unite herself in
marriage with any man, unless she has fully resolved herself to submit
herself wholly to his counsel, and to let him govern as the head. It is far
better for her not to be united with him in the sacred bonds of eternal
union, than to rebel against the divine order of family government, insti-
tuted for a higher salvation; for if she altogether turn therefrom, she will
receive a greater condemnation.”43 Belinda Marden Pratt (his sister-in-
law) later defended polygamy on the grounds that “in the Patriarchal
order of family government, the wife is bound to the law of her husband.
She honors him, ‘calls him lord,’ even as Sarah obeyed and honored Abra-
ham. She lives for him, and to increase his glory, his greatness, his king-
dom, or family.”44
Influenced by this emphasis on feminine difference and obedience,
most nineteenth-century Mormon women did not describe polygamy in
the emancipatory language used by modern historians. Even those who
praised polygamy for encouraging women’s independence argued that it
was a difficult and often painful discipline. According to an anonymous
author in the 1884 Woman’s Exponent, polygamy forced women “to depend
more upon their own judgment and to take more fully the charge of their
own home and affairs; this brings into requisition many latent powers in
woman’s nature, which would, under other circumstances, have lain dor-
mant, and she finds herself capable of being something more than a play-
thing, or a hot-house plant.” Yet the same author also emphasized that
polygamy taught women painful lessons about how to make “the greatest
sacrifice for the good of another.”45 Similarly, Lucy Walker Kimball de-
scribed polygamy as a “grand school” that had taught her “self-control”
and “self-denial,” and many others described it as a “trial”: it was a hard-
ship or an ordeal that taught them traditionally feminine virtues like chas-
tity, submission, and especially self-sacrifice.46 Although it was painful to
share their husbands with sister wives, women argued that their suffering
purified them and helped them prepare for their spiritual exaltation.
Most of the early Latter-day Saints had once belonged to Protestant

churches, and they seem to have absorbed common Protestant ideas
about the redemptive power of suffering. As Artimesia Beman Snow ex-
plained, “The Lord has said, He would have a tried people, that they should
come up through great tribulation, that they might be prepared to endure
His presence and glory. If I had no trials, I should not expect to be num-
bered with the People of God, and therefore not be made a partaker of his
blessings and glory.” Elizabeth Graham MacDonald claimed that her
“trials” had made her “a far better woman than I otherwise should be.”47
She understood polygamy as a form of discipline that taught her how to
subordinate herself to her husband, her family, and above all, to God.
Given the controversies surrounding polygamy, it is not surprising that
Mormon historians have struggled to find the right tone to use when writ-
ing about plural wives. Yet their difficulties suggest that they need to think
more deeply about their understanding of women’s agency. In terms of its
treatment of women, the field of Mormon history stands at a crossroads.
While previous generations of historians virtually ignored women, recent
scholars have been so determined to portray women as historical agents
that they have sometimes exaggerated their freedom to make choices about
their lives. Although there is no simple solution to this conceptual prob-
lem, one way forward is to try to craft a new model of agency—a model that
recognizes both the capacity of ordinary women to create change and the
structural constraints on their agency.
What should this model look like? I suggest seven characteristics. First,
a new definition of agency should recognize that agency includes the repro-
duction of social structures as well as the transformation of them. As Saba
Mahmood, an anthropologist of religion, has argued, scholars assume that
“human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and
not those that uphold them.”48 But even though we are interested in how
things change, we must also be attentive to continuity—how and why
things remain the same. Most of the time, people use their agency to uphold
the structures that bring meaning and stability to their lives.49 Historians
sometimes treat structures as inherently oppressive, as if we are always in-
jured or harmed by the institutions and practices that shape us, but in fact,
structures also give us a sense of security.50 Social structures may seem
permanent and unchangeable, but they do not exist independently of
human beings; they have to be reproduced by people in every generation.51
It is hard to understand the rise of the Latter-day Saints in the nine-
teenth century without paying attention to the women who sat in the pews
every Sunday, raised their children in the faith, volunteered their time and
energy to the Relief Society, and agreed to participate in plural marriages.
When Lucy Ashby Clark (1818–85) encouraged her husband to marry an-
other woman because “I believed in the plurality of wives, and I thought
my husband worthy to enter this order of the priesthood,” she helped to
perpetuate the distinctive beliefs and practices of her church.52 Neither
American religious historians in general nor Mormon historians in partic-
ular have treated ordinary female believers as “agents,” but of course they
were: They helped to reproduce their religious communities across the
generations. As sociologists Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mishe have ex-
plained, “Habitual and routinized activities are not devoid of agency.”53
Second, we should reconsider the implicit association of agency with
freedom and emancipation.54 Agency is certainly liberating on a personal
level—people who make things happen gain an expanded sense of per-
sonal power—but as we have seen, agency is not limited to challenging
social structures; it also includes reproducing them. So, for example,
women’s historians outside of the LDS community have been fascinated
by nineteenth-century women’s religious organizations like the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union and the Female Antislavery Society, but they
have written little about the Relief Society. Given the large numbers of
women who belonged to the Relief Society—more than 115,000 by 1942
when it was a voluntary dues-paying organization—this silence is perplex-
ing, but women’s historians have often found it difficult to write about
conservative women.55 Because they have implicitly equated women’s
agency with the quest for liberation, they have either ignored Mormon
women or implied that their agency was not authentic—that they were
victims of false consciousness. Ironically, historians treat apostates like
Ann Eliza Young as agents because of their decision to leave their mar-
riages and the Church, but they seem to assume that women who re-
mained Mormon could not have made a free choice. Although we must
ask hard questions about why women have acted in certain ways, there is
no doubt that the choice to reproduce structures—such as male headship
in the church and home in the case of Mormon women—is, in fact, a form
of agency.
To be clear, claiming that a woman has exerted agency is not the same
as claiming that her actions were necessarily admirable. Historians of
white men do not hesitate to acknowledge that men have often used their
agency for ill, but because women’s history began as an attempt to recover
the stories of inspiring female heroines, and perhaps because of cultural
assumptions about women’s superior morality, historians have some-

times been reluctant to write about the less appealing aspects of women’s
history: for example, women’s nativism or their involvement in racist or-
ganizations. Historians should be empathetic toward the women they
study, especially as a factor in understanding the constraints on their
choices, but they must also make carefully considered judgments about
the ways that women have used their agency.56
Third, in addition to broadening our definition of agency to include
the reproduction of social structures, we should also rethink the close as-
sociation between agency and intentionality. Ever since the Enlighten-
ment, freedom has been defined as “rational self-interest”; and in the
United States in particular, historians have been fascinated by the stories
of seemingly self-made men who triumphed over adversity to gain fame
or wealth.57 “Agency” has usually been equated with the deliberate pur-
suit of power. Yet one of the most important insights of the new social
history that emerged in the 1970s is that historical change not only comes
from the top down, but also from the bottom up. Even though agency
includes intentionality (a sense of purpose and direction), this intention-
ality can be more subtle and modest than highly visible and deliberate
campaigns to enact large-scale change. Emphasizing the collective power
of groups, social historians claim that, when large numbers of people
make similar decisions about their lives, they set events in motion that
have far-reaching consequences—sometimes unwittingly. Historical
agents are not only visionary leaders who deliberately decide to change
the world, but also ordinary people who might not be fully aware of how
their individual decisions create historical change. American religious
historians do not hesitate to describe Joseph Smith or Brigham Young as
historical agents because they purposefully tried to create something
new. But without minimizing the contributions of famous individuals,
we must also pay attention to the collective agency exercised by groups of
religious actors who seek common ends. For example, as Susanna Mor-
rill has shown, large numbers of nineteenth-century Mormon women
wrote poems, journals, articles, short stories, and letters that subtly chal-
lenged the patriarchal tone of the Church by placing women at the center
of eternal progression. Although these female writers did not intend to
create something new, their common questions and concerns led them to
create an alternate, female-centered theology.58
Fourth, a new definition of agency should also include the insight that
agency should always be seen as relational and social rather than simply
individual.59 Historians sometimes write about famous religious leaders

as if they were autonomous individuals who bent history to their will, but
in fact their leadership was dependent on the recognition of others.
Brigham Young would not be celebrated today as the “American Moses” if
not for the ordinary men and women who embraced his ideas as their
own.60 His agency was largely dependent on theirs. Remembering the con-
fusion that followed Joseph Smith’s murder, Nancy Naomi Alexander
Tracy insisted that she had no doubt about the legitimacy of Brigham
Young’s leadership. She found certitude in her perception that, when he
spoke to the assembled Mormons at Nauvoo in August 1844, “the mantle
of Joseph fell upon Brigham that day as that of Elijah did fall upon Elisha,
for it seemed that his voice, his gestures, and all were Joseph.”61 Without
her testimony (and the testimony of scores of other men and women in
Utah who testified that they saw and heard the same thing), Sidney Rigdon
might have succeeded in becoming the “guardian” of the Church.
Fifth, agency must be understood as existing on a continuum. Histori-
ans tend to write as if their subjects either have agency or they do not.
Nineteenth-century Mormon women were either proto-feminists (suffrag-
ists) or dupes of a patriarchal church who suffered from false conscious-
ness. But, of course, agency is not so clear-cut. With the horrifying exception
of those who, under torture, are utterly deprived of any capacity to act,
almost everyone has some degree of agency—some capacity, even if
limited, to make things happen. As sociologists Thomas Dietz and Tom
R. Burns explain, “All actors possess agency to some degree, and no actor
has total, unconstrained agency.”62
So, for example, several LDS women claimed that they had been mar-
ried to violent husbands before joining the Mormons. When Elizabeth
Terry Heward remembered her first husband, she lamented that he “kept
getting drunk and coming home at night and abusing me.”63 Other women
were reportedly sexually assaulted as part of the mob violence against
them in Missouri and elsewhere. Many Mormon women knew the shame
and terror of physical violation, and their lives bear testimony to the fragil-
ity of human agency. But Mormon women also converted others to the
faith, demonstrated against anti-polygamy laws, and sometimes physically
fought back against their enemies. Laura Farnsworth Owen remembered
that, when an apostate verbally attacked Brigham Young’s character in her
house, she hit him with a “long-handled slice” (a cooking tool for placing
food in the oven) and then “backed him out of the door the blood trickling
down his cheeks.”64
Mormon women did in fact have agency, and historians interested in

the rise of Mormonism in the nineteenth century have to reckon with
them as full-fledged historical actors. At the risk of stating the obvious,
though, most Mormon women did not have as much agency as Mormon
men, who had greater access to material and cultural resources, including
money, education, and the power of the priesthood. Agency is relative and
is marked by gender, racial, and class disparities.65
Sixth, we should also recognize that agency is always shaped by cul-
tural norms and structural constraints. Although all humans are born
with the capacity for agency, the way that humans use their agency is
always shaped by the multiple structures that exist at a particular his-
torical moment. As sociologist William Sewell has argued, “What kinds
of desires people can have, what intentions they form, and what sort of
creative transpositions they can carry out vary dramatically from one
social world to another depending on the nature of the particular struc-
tures that inform those social worlds.”66 What this means is that there
are limits to what we can imagine and what we can do. For example,
both Church authorities and historians have pointed out that relatively
few contemporary Latter-day Saint women have explored the possibility
of ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood, but few have asked deeper
questions about why Mormon women seem less interested in gaining
access to male leadership roles than Protestant, Jewish, or Catholic
women.
Offering a possible explanation, historian Richard Lyman Bushman
suggests that Mormon women
knew from everyday experience that women had plenty of responsi-

bility in the lay-run congregations where there were rarely enough
men and women to perform all the necessary tasks. Women
preached and prayed in church, they taught classes, and they had a
limited but consistent place in the congregational leadership coun-
cils. What Mormon women wanted, as measured by the writings in
Exponent II, was a voice. They wanted to count when decisions
were made, and they insisted that attention be paid to the peculiar
problems of young mothers, single women, abused women, and
others in need of help.
As a further explanation, Bushman adds, “Most Mormon women think of

marriage and children as the life they most desire.”67
Bushman’s description of Mormon women’s subjectivity is undoubt-

edly right: Most Mormon women have not demanded the priesthood, and
most seem to value marriage and motherhood as their most important
calling. But Bushman does not pursue his line of inquiry further to ask
how women’s desires have been shaped and molded by their religious cul-
ture. Why, for example, did women in Community of Christ seek (and
win) priesthood ordination despite their equally strong commitment to
marriage and motherhood?68
Since women’s desires do not stand outside of history (as the differ-
ences between individual women make clear), we cannot explain Mormon
women’s decisions about their lives solely in the language of personal
preference. Instead, we must also ask how their decisions have been influ-
enced by the political, economic, and religious structures that have framed
their lives. In terms of the institutional LDS Church, this means asking
questions about how women’s beliefs and practices have shaped and dis-
ciplined them into being particular kinds of selves. It seems likely, for ex-
ample, that the paucity of female characters in the Book of Mormon, the
exclusively male priesthood starting with twelve-year-old boys, and the
widely publicized excommunications of outspoken feminists have all in-
fluenced Mormon women’s subjectivities. To be clear, human agency is
not determined by structures, which would make dissent impossible. But
as sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued, agency and structure should
be understood as dialectical. Human action transforms structures, but
structures also influence human action. Or to rephrase the same point,
individuals make history, but history also makes individuals.69
Finally, we should remember that agency takes place within structures
as well as against them. Although this is not a new observation, it bears
repeating because it reminds us that women creatively appropriated LDS
history to make space for assertions of their own importance and author-
ity. Lucy Walker Kimball, for example, made sure that younger Mormons
knew that Joseph Smith frowned on men who belittled their wives. Look-
ing back, she remembered that he
often referred to the feelings that should exist between husbands

and wives, that they, his wives, should be his bosom companions,
the nearest and dearest objects on earth in every sense of the word.
He said men must beware how they treat their wives. They were
given them for a holy purpose that the myriads of spirits waiting for
tabernacles might have pure and healthy bodies. He also said many
would awake in the morning of the resurrection sadly disappointed;

for they, by transgression, would have neither wives nor children,
for they surely would be taken from them and given to those who
should prove themselves worthy. Again he said a woman should
have her choice; this was a privilege that could not be denied her.70
Similarly, Martha Cox told a story to her granddaughter about Caroline

Barnes Crosby, who “was a very hardworking woman taking much more
responsibility in her home than most women take. Her husband, thinking
to give the Prophet some light on home management said to him. ‘Brother
Joseph, my wife does much more hard work than your wife.’ Bro. Joseph
replied by telling him that if a man cannot learn in this life to appreciate a
wife and do his duty by her in properly taking care of her, he need not
expect to be given one in the hereafter.”71 Recounting a cherished memory
of Joseph Smith, Polly Angell remembered his praise in 1835 when he saw
her and other women sewing drapes and carpets for the Kirtland Temple:
“The sisters are always first and foremost in good works.”72 By telling sto-
ries like these, LDS women tried to guarantee that they would be treated
with the respect and dignity that they deserved.
The model of agency outlined in this essay does not solve all the prob-
lems that Mormon historians (and American religious historians) face
when writing about women. Yet if we can develop an understanding of
agency that moves beyond its association with freedom, liberation, and
intentionality, we will write books that deepen our understanding of how
religious change takes place. If we remember that agency is not an either/
or proposition, but a continuum, we will write books featuring a diverse
set of characters—women as well as men—as the creators of historical
change. If we view agency as relational and social, we will analyze famous
leaders like Brigham Young in the context of their relationship to the ordi-
nary men and women who made their agency possible. If we recognize
agency as collective as well as individual, we will gain insight into the way
that Mormon women have transformed American religion—sometimes
intentionally, sometimes not—by making common decisions about their
beliefs and practices. If we emphasize that agency includes the reproduc-
tion as well as the transformation of structures, we will ask questions
about why and how Mormon women have reproduced the LDS Church
across the generations. If we clarify that agency always exists in a dialecti-
cal relationship to structure, we will not only resist the temptation to exag-
gerate Mormon women’s ability to create change, but we will confront the
reality of their sacrifices in the name of their faith. And if we explain that
women’s agency is not always oriented toward emancipation or resistance,
we will treat conservative as well as radical women as serious historical
actors. My hope is that if we can rethink our assumptions about agency
and historical change, we will write new, more inclusive narratives that
show how Mormon women both made and were made by history.
Notes
1. Jennie Froiseth Anderson, ed., The Women of Mormonism, or The Story of Polyg-
amy as Told by the Victims (Detroit, MI: C.G.G. Paine, 1887), 20, 23, 26, 144,
191, 259.
2. Wesley Bradshaw, “Letter to the Publisher,” in Life, Confession and Execution of
Bishop John D. Lee, the Mormon Fiend!, ed. Ella Young Harris (Philadelphia, PA:
Old Franklin Publishing House, 1877), unpaginated prefatory material.
3. Ibid., 64.
4. Ann Eliza Young, Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage (Hartford, CT:
Dustan, Gilman, & Co., 1875).
5. On this theme, see Catherine A. Brekus, “Searching for Women in Narratives
of American Religious History,” in The Religious History of American Women,
ed. Catherine A. Brekus (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2007), 1–50.
6. Ruth Page Rogers, “Sketches and Incidents of the Life of Ruth P. Rogers,” 1887,
MS 1854, fd. 1, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, UT; Mercy Rachel
Fielding Thompson, Autobiographical Sketch, 1880, 8–9, MS 4580, LDS Church
History Library. See also Mercy Rachel Fielding Thompson, Subscriptions for the
Temple [ca. December 1843], MS 18642, LDS Church History Library.
7. William Moroni Palmer, “Sketch of the Life of Patience Delilah Pierce Palmer,”
n.d., MS 18461, LDS Church History Library; Sarah Studevant Leavitt, “History
of Sarah Studevant Leavitt,” copied from her history by Juanita Leavitt Pulsipher,
1919, 28, LDS Church History Library. See also Mary A. Phelps Rich, “Autobiog-
raphy,” in Autobiographies of Mormon Pioneer Women (Salt Lake City, UT: Pioneer
Press, 1998), 217.
8. Margaret Gay Judd Clawson, “Rambling Reminiscences, 1904–1911,” typescript,
2, MS 3712, LDS Church History Library; Martha Cragun Cox, “Biographical
Sketch of Martha Cox,” 1928–1930, 38, MS 1661, LDS Church History Library.
9. Belinda Marden Pratt, “The Autobiography and Diary of Belinda Marden Pratt,”
typescript (undated) and introduction by Taunalyn Ford Rutherford, 37, LDS
Church History Library.
10. For more information on Daughters of Utah Pioneers, see http://www.dupinter
national.org/ (accessed July 1, 2010).
11. George A. Smith, The Rise, Progress and Travels of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, Being a Series of Answers to Questions, including the Revelation on
Celestial Marriage, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Office, 1872);
Joseph Smith et al., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed.
B. H. Roberts, 7 vols., 2nd ed. rev. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1948 print-
ing); hereafter cited as History of the Church by volume and page number.
12. History of the Church, 1:87, 101.
13. Edward Tullidge, The Women of Mormondom (New York: Tullidge and Crandall,
1877), 1.
14. Edward H. Anderson, A Brief History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: George Q. Cannon and Sons Co., 1893), 130.
15. Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 212–213. It should be noted that “celestial marriage,”
though understood as plural marriage in the nineteenth century, has been re-
defined as monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, sealed by a
temple ordinance.
16. Bathsheba B. Smith, quoted in Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt
Lake City, UT: G. Q. Cannon and Sons, 1904), 4:573, 579.
17. B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1930), 5:253–254.
18. B. H. Roberts, The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts, ed. Gary James Bergera (Salt
Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1990).
19. Russell R. Rich, Ensign to the Nations: A History of the Church from 1846 to the
Present (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Publications, 1972), 330, 365,
369, 402, 591.
20. Inez Davis, The Story of the Church (Independence: Herald Publishing House,
1948), 574. She was the great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith, the granddaugh-
ter of Alexander Hale Smith, and the daughter of Vida E. Smith and Heman C.
Smith. Heman was the RLDS Church historian in the late 1800s and early
1900s.
21. Claudia L. Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (1976; rev. ed.,
Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1997).
22. For biographies of Mormon women, see Vicky Burgess-Olson, ed., Sister Saints
(Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978); Lavina Fielding Anderson, “A
‘Salt of the Earth’ Lady: Martha Cragun Cox,” in Supporting Saints: Life Stories of
Nineteenth-Century Mormons, ed. Donald Q. Cannon and David J. Whittaker
(Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1985), 101–132. On suffrage, see Carol
Cornwall Madsen, ed., Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah,
1870–1896 (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1997). On polygamy, see
Kathryn M. Daynes, More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage
System (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Sarah Barringer Gordon,
The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Jessie L.
Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City, UT: Uni-
versity of Utah Press, 1987). Other groundbreaking studies of Mormon women
include Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds., Sisters
in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Urbana, IL: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1987) and Maxine Hanks, ed., Women and Authority: Re-
emerging Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1992).
23. For examples of women’s personal writings, see Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M.
Godfrey, and Jill Mulvay Derr, eds., Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the
Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1982); Maria S.
Ellsworth, ed., Mormon Odyssey: The Story of Ida Hunt Udall, Plural Wife (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, The Per-
sonal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press,
1995); Jennifer Moulton Hansen, ed., Letters of Catharine Cottam Romney, Plural
Wife (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Carol Cornwall Madsen,
ed., In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo (Salt Lake City, UT:
Deseret Book, 1994); Donna Toland Smart, ed., Mormon Midwife: The 1846–1888
Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press,
1997); and Todd Compton and Charles M. Hatch, eds., A Widow’s Tale: The
1884–1896 Diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney (Salt Lake City, UT: University of
Utah Press, 2003). For a useful overview of scholarship on Mormon women, see
Todd Compton, “The New Mormon Women’s History,” in Excavating Mormon
Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst
and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2004),
273–302.
24. Anne Firor Scott, “Introduction,” in Bushman, Mormon Sisters: Women in Early
Utah (1997 edition), xxii.
25. Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh Eric Schmidt, The Religious History of America (New
York: HarperCollins, 2002), 177–180; Mary Beth Norton, Major Problems in
American Women’s History: Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Houghton Miff-
lin, 2007).
26. Mari Jo Buhle, Teresa Murphy, and Jane Gerhard, Women and the Making of
America (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009), 340.
27. Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the
Latter-day Saints (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 28–29.
28. Arrington’s work on women includes “Blessed Damozels: Women in Mormon
History,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (Summer 1971): 22–31;
“Women as a Force in the History of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (Winter
1970): 3–6; with Susan Arrington Madsen, Sunbonnet Sisters: True Stories of
Mormon Women and Frontier Life (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1984); with
Susan Arrington Madsen, Mothers of the Prophets (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret
Book, 1987).
29. Brekus, “Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History,”

13–23.
30. Andrew Jenson, Church Chronology, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret
News, 1899).
31. “Agency,” Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed from the University of Chi-
cago Library, July 1, 2010).
32. Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?” American Journal of
Sociology 103 (1998): 970, offer this useful definition: “The temporally con-
structed engagement by actors of different structural environments—the
temporal–relational conflicts of action—which, through the interplay of habit,
imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in
interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations”
(italics removed). William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social
Transformation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 142–143, de-
fines agency as “the actor’s capacity to reinterpret and mobilize an array of re-
sources in terms of cultural schemas other than those that initially constituted
the array.”
33. Sharon Hays, “Structure and Agency and the Sticky Problem of Culture,” Socio-
logical Theory 12 (1994): 57. Christopher Lloyd, “The Methodologies of Social
History: A Critical Survey and Defense of Structurism,” History and Theory 30
(1991): 190, defines structures as “the ensemble of rules, roles, relations, and
meanings that people are born into and which organize and are reproduced and
transformed by their thought and action.”
34. Carol Cornwall Madsen, “Emmeline B. Wells: ‘Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?’”
BYU Studies 22 (Spring 1982): 161–178.
35. Stephanie Smith Goodson, “Plural Wives,” in Bushman, Mormon Sisters (1997),
104–105.
36. Joan S. Iversen, “Feminist Implications of Mormon Polygyny,” Feminist Studies
10 (Autumn 1984): 507.
37. Terryl L. Givens, The Latter-day Saint Experience in America (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2004), 204–205.
38. Artimesia Beman Snow, quoted in Arrington and Bitton, The Mormon Experi-
ence, 201.
39. See, for example, the works of Michel Foucault, including Discipline and Punish
(New York: Vintage, 1977) and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970). For critiques of postmodernism, see Lloyd,
“The Methodologies of Social History,” 210–212; Michael L. Fitzhugh and Wil-
liam H. Leckie Jr., “Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change,” History
and Theory 40 (December 2001): 59–81; and Perez Zagorin, “History, the Refer-
ent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now,” History and Theory 38
(1999): 1–24. See also Keith Jenkins, “A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin,”
History and Theory 39 (May 2000): 181–200, and Perez Zagorin, “Rejoinder to a
Postmodernist,” History and Theory 39 (May 2000): 201–209. See also the essays
collected in Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London: Rout-
ledge, 1997).
40. Mary Ellen Kimball, Journal of Mary Ellen Kimball, Including a Sketch of Our His-
tory in This Valley (Salt Lake City, UT: Pioneer Press, 1994), 52.
41. On Emma Smith, see Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon
Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, Prophet’s Wife, “Elect Lady,” Polygamy’s Foe (New
York: Doubleday, 1984).
42. Lucy Walker Kimball, “Statement of Mrs. L. W. Kimball,” n.d., typescript, MS
3142, LDS Church History Library. After Joseph Smith’s assassination, Lucy
became one of Heber C. Kimball’s numerous plural wives.
43. Orson Pratt, “Celestial Marriage,” Sermon August 29, 1852, in The Essential
Orson Pratt, foreword by David J. Whittaker (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books,
1991), 275.
44. Belinda Marden Pratt, Defence of Polygamy, by a Lady in Utah to Her Sister in New
Hampshire (Salt Lake City, UT: n.pub., 1854), 7. On the patriarchal emphasis of
polygamy, see B. Carmon Hardy, “Lords of Creation: Polygamy, the Abrahamic
Household, and Mormon Patriarchy,” Journal of Mormon History 20 (Spring
1994): 119–152.
45. Anonymous, “A Mormon Woman’s Views,” Woman’s Exponent 13 (November 1,
1884): 81.
46. Kimball, “Statement of Mrs. L. W. Kimball.” Belinda Marden Pratt, “Autobiogra-
phy and Diary,” 30, also described polygamy as a “sacrifice.” For an account of a
woman’s suffering in polygamy, see Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother: An
Autobiography (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1969), 57–69.
47. Artimesia Beman Snow quoted in Arrington and Davis, The Mormon Experience,
201. Elizabeth Graham MacDonald, 1831–1917, Autobiography, 1875, letterpress,
40, MS 31, LDS Church History Library. For a good overview of recent scholar-
ship on polygamy, see Martha Sonntag Bradley, “Out of the Closet and into the
Fire: The New Mormon Historians’ Take On Polygamy,” in Bringhurst and An-
derson, Excavating Mormon Pasts, 303–322.
48. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5. See also Talal Asad, Gene-
alogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Bal-
timore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 15.
49. On this point, see Hays, “Structure and Agency and the Sticky Problem of Cul-
ture,” 63. According to Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency,” 975, “The past,
through habit and repetition, becomes a stabilizing influence that shapes the
flow of effort and allows us to sustain identities, meanings, and interactions
over time.”
50. Elizabeth Pritchard, “Agency without Transcendence,” Culture and Religion 7
(2006): 267. Pritchard criticizes Judith Butler’s theory of “subjectivization” in
her The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997). Pritchard argues that socialization does not always entail
antagonism or violation: “There is no warrant for supposing that making is
tantamount to subordination. There is no warrant for supposing that one is de-
prived of agency in being made or for supposing that subordination entails ‘the
deprivation of agency’” (266). See also Hays, “Structure and Agency and the
Sticky Problem of Culture,” 61.
51. Christopher Lloyd, “The Methodologies of Social History,” 191, argues that “so-
ciety is a real structure of rules, roles, relations, and meanings that has to be
produced, reproduced, and transformed by individuals while causally condition-
ing individual actions, beliefs, and intentions.” Hays, “Structure and Agency
and the Sticky Problem of Culture,” 63, describes the reproduction of structures
as “structurally reproductive agency.”
52. Lucy Ashby Clark, “A Short Sketch of My Life—Written in 1881,” Our Pioneer
Heritage, compiled by Kate B. Carter, 20 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Daughters of
Utah Pioneers, 1958–1977), 10:130.
53. Emirbayer and Mishe, “What Is Agency,” 978.
54. On this point, see Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
55. Jill Mulvay Derr, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher,
Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book,
1992), 287. As of 1971, all LDS women over the age of eighteen were automati-
cally enrolled in the Relief Society and the requirement of paying dues was
cancelled.
56. On the challenges of making judgments, see Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Toward a
Feminist Theory of Judgment,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34
(2009): 295–317.
57. On Enlightenment definitions of agency, see Emirbayer and Mishe, “What Is
Agency,” 964–965.
58. Susanna Morrill, White Roses on the Floor of Heaven: Mormon Women’s Popular
Theology, 1880–1920 (New York: Routledge, 2006); see also her “Relief Society
Birth and Death Rituals: Women at the Gates of Mortality,” Journal of Mormon
History 36 (Spring 2010): 128–160. In contrast to my argument, Thomas Dietz
and Tom R. Burns, “Human Agency and the Evolutionary Dynamics of Cul-
ture,” Acta Sociologica 35 (1992): 191–192, claim that “actions must be inten-
tional for agency to be operating.” Yet they also add, “That does not mean that all
implications of the action are understood or anticipated.”
59. William Hamilton Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transforma-
tion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 145; Neitz, “Gender and
Culture,” 392–397; Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency,” 973; Pritchard,
“Agency without Transcendence,” 280.

60. Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1985).
61. Nancy Naomi Alexander Tracy, “Autobiography,” in Autobiographies of Mormon

Pioneer Women, ed. Ogden Kraut, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Pioneer Press,
1998), 2:149.
62. Hays, “Structure and Agency and the Sticky Problem of Culture,” 64; Dietz and
Burns, “Human Agency and the Evolutionary Dynamics of Culture,” 192.
63. Elizabeth Terry Heward, autobiography and journal, 1853–1860, 8.
64. Laura Farnsworth Owen, “Autobiography,” 1868, MS 1048, LDS Church History
Library. Mary Ann Phelps Rich, “Autobiography,” in Kraut, Autobiographies of
Mormon Pioneer Women, 2:220, reports how she helped rescue her husband.
65. On agency as “relative,” see Pritchard, “Agency without Transcendence,” 278–279.
66. Sewell, Logics of History, 144. See also Dietz and Burns, “Human Agency and the
Evolutionary Dynamics of Culture,” 192.
67. Richard L. Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford
68. On women in Community of Christ, see Danny L. Jorgensen, “Sisters’ Lives,
Sisters’ Voices: Neglected Reorganized Latter Day Saint Herstories,” John Whit-
mer Historical Association Journal 17 (1997): 25–42. According to William D. Rus-
sell, whose history of the schism is in preparation, an estimated 25 percent of
RLDS members defected, either formally or informally, over the 1984 revela-
tion; but not surprisingly, women’s role in this schism was primarily accompa-
nying husbands and fathers out of the Church rather than leading a protest
movement.
69. In his theory of “structuration,” Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social
Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), argues that struc-
ture and agency constitute each other. Hays, “Structure and Agency and the
Sticky Problem of Culture,” 61, argues that “people . . . produce certain forms of
social structure at the same time social structures produce certain types of
people.”
70. Lucy Walker Kimball, “Statement of Mrs. L. W. Kimball.”
71. Martha Cragun Cox, “Stories from the Notebook of Martha Cox, grandmother of
Fern Cox Anderson,” typescript, not paginated, MS 658, LDS Church History
Library. Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration, a Church-produced film
shown at the Visitors’ Center in Temple Square (and at other visitors centers),
shows Smith speaking these lines while standing outside and beating a rug—a
choice that emphasizes his sexual egalitarianism.
72. Polly Angell, quoted in Derr, Cannon, and Ursenbach, Women of Covenant, 16.
5
Mormons, Freethinkers,
and the Limits of Toleration
By Leigh Eric Schmidt
Mormons and freethinkers seem at first blush an unlikely pairing.

What do Mormons, an avowedly religious people, have to do with free-
thinkers, a decidedly irreligious cohort? Mormons take their rise in the
flurry and bustle of the antebellum religious marketplace amid the heady
enticements of millennialism, revivalism, and prophecy; freethinkers
emerge in the skeptical currents of the Enlightenment with unsavory as-
sociations of atheism, infidelity, and libertinism. Mormons revere divine
revelation; freethinkers dismiss the very possibility. Mormons embrace a
complex metaphysical cosmology; freethinkers gravitate toward scientific
naturalism. Mormons support a male priesthood and an ecclesiastical hi-
erarchy; freethinkers take particular delight in attacking priestly power
and authority of all kinds. The list of oppositions could go on, and those
differences, not surprisingly, have led time and again to discordant rela-
tions between Mormons and freethinkers from Mark Twain to Bill Maher.
An odd couple, to be sure, Mormons and freethinkers nonetheless have
an intertwined story, especially in the late nineteenth century. They shared
an outsider status of particular severity in relation to Protestant America,
and that marginalization joined them, in spite of their ample differences,
in the supercharged politics surrounding religious and civil liberties.
However abominated Mormons were as a religious minority in the
nineteenth century, the reputation of freethinkers, atheists, and unbeliev-
ers was equally, if not more, blighted. It remained a commonplace as-
sumption of republican statecraft that a religious identity of some kind
was necessary to be a credible participant in civic and political life. No less
an architect of religious liberty and toleration than John Locke had drawn
a sharp line when it came to nonbelievers: “Those are not at all to be
tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths,
which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.”1
Similarly, one of the most popular eighteenth-century guidebooks to gen-
tlemanly manners, the Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters, had offered this
straightforward advice: “Depend upon this truth, That every man is the
worse looked upon, and the less trusted, for being thought to have no re-
ligion; . . . [A] wise Atheist (if such a thing there is) would, for his own
interest, and character in this world, pretend to some religion.”2 Even as
the Enlightenment principle of religious toleration gained traction, the
boundaries around civic engagement and social trust were still routinely
drawn in such a way as to exclude the irreligious.
That political calculus remained commonplace in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America served as an extended
commentary on the privileged role of religious association in American
public life. He found it entirely predictable, for example, when a New
York judge in 1831 declared a witness incompetent to testify because the
man reputedly did not believe in God or immortality. As Tocqueville con-
cluded, “I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their
religion—for who can search the human heart?—but I am certain that
they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institu-
tions.”3 Not surprisingly in a milieu in which Protestant Christianity and
republicanism were so intimately connected, being known as the village
atheist was an effective way of getting marked as a religious and civic
outcast. As one newspaper moralized in 1834 about “a professed atheist”
who had supposedly died in a laboratory explosion the very day he had
publicly disavowed God, “If men cannot believe, will not believe, let them
be silent.”4
The status that Mormons and freethinkers shared as religious minori-
ties with the weight of the Christian nation upon them provided a basis for
common ground. The legal machinery brought down on the Mormons
from the Reynolds decision to the Edmunds-Tucker Act to B. H. Roberts’s
exclusion from a seat in Congress was clearly more extensive than the
mechanisms ensnaring freethinkers in the same era. But there remained
some important parallels. The Comstock Act of 1873 gave new life to the
prosecution of freethinking editors—not primarily as blasphemers but as
purveyors of obscene literature. Ezra Heyward, publisher of The Word; D.
M. Bennett, founder of the Truth Seeker; Moses Harman, custodian of Lu-
cifer the Light-Bearer; Charles Chilton Moore, editor of the Blue-Grass
Blade—all went to jail through the vigilance that Comstock and company
Mormons, Freethinkers, and the Limits of Toleration 107
exercised against those they saw as licentious liberals. As with Mormons,

the religious claims of freethinkers were condemned in a bundle with
their heterodox views on marriage and sexuality.
Religious tests were another area of overlap. The Edmunds-Tucker Act
demanded of Mormons anti-polygamy oaths in the courtroom as well as
for voting and political office. Freethinkers continued to have problems
with religious tests throughout the period; several states maintained ex-
plicit constitutional bars against nonbelievers holding offices of public
trust. Avowals of belief in God and eternal rewards and punishments were
still regularly demanded in American courtrooms for jurors and wit-
nesses; sustained efforts in Massachusetts to render such theological tests
impermissible went down to legislative defeat time and again from the
1850s through the 1880s.
While American freethinkers had no celebrated political-seating cases
to match those of George Q. Cannon, B. H. Roberts, and Reed Smoot, they
watched with rapt attention as one of their most illustrious British coun-
terparts, Charles Bradlaugh, was forcibly prevented from taking his duly
elected seat in Parliament in 1880 and 1881. Like Smoot’s case, Brad-
laugh’s went on for several years before it was finally resolved in his favor.
American freethinkers did have a number of less heralded cases, though,
that had resonances with Bradlaugh’s splashier struggle. For example, one
J. W. Thorne was expelled from the North Carolina legislature in 1875 on
the grounds that he was an atheist, though it turned out he was actually a
radical Quaker committed to Reconstruction. Atheism was the chosen
tool of political exclusion. In short, the pairing of Mormons and freethink-
ers is not as peculiar as it first sounds.
In this lecture, I offer an initial mapping of the relationship between
Mormons and freethinkers in the critical era of George Edmunds and An-
thony Comstock, B. H. Roberts and Robert Ingersoll. From my research in
recent years I know much more about freethinkers and sex radicals than I
do about Mormons, so of necessity I draw up this exploratory chart with a
slanted vision. I have much more to say about how freethinkers viewed
Mormons than vice versa. In this regard, I am borrowing a page from J.
Spencer Fluhman’s new book, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and
the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. Building on the work
of Terryl L. Givens, among others, Fluhman delineates a series of anti-
Mormon representations, all of which constituted Mormons as alien and
threatening to American religious and political institutions. Much of the
action, not surprisingly, took place in the Protestant imagination: that is,
how the bounds of American Christianity were drawn to render Mormons

beyond the pale of religion itself.
The Enlightenment, though, was never far from view in anti-Mormon
discourse. Fluhman justly speaks of a “Protestant/Enlightened explana-
tory tradition” in which temperate Protestants and deistic rationalists
were in essential agreement on how to unmask a false religion. Both could
agree on the dangers of priestly imposture, the prevalence of enthusiast
delusion, and the perils of theocratic tyranny. Yet the Protestant/Enlight-
enment alliances remained awkward and unsettled: The last thing a
God-fearing Protestant wanted to be mistaken for was a secular-minded
freethinker. Fluhman tellingly observes that among the weapons Protes-
tants stockpiled in their anti-Mormon arsenal was the depiction of Mor-
monism as tantamount to atheism and unbelief. What better way to
express contempt for Joseph Smith than to link him with the radical deist
Tom Paine and mark them both down as intolerable atheists? In high-
lighting this rhetorical slippage between Mormon and atheist, Fluhman’s
work suggests that the Mormon-freethinker pairing is far from incidental.
Among the incubi haunting American Protestantism, Mormons and free-
thinkers could end up looking eerily comparable as a menace. As one
Presbyterian report intoned in 1887, “The spirit of Antichrist is abroad.
Mormonism, Secularism, Socialism, Liberalism . . . are threatening civili-
zation. Atheism is gaining ground.”5
The complexities of the Mormon-freethinker relationship, it seems ev-
ident, bear further examination. As a contribution to that inquiry, I dwell
in this lecture on three figures—orator Robert Ingersoll, editor D. M. Ben-
nett, and cartoonist Watson Heston—all leading publicists of freethinking
secularism who engaged Mormonism in direct and distinct ways.
Robert Ingersoll, without doubt the era’s most celebrated freethinker,
was no stranger to religious and legal harassment. Vexed by blasphemy
accusations, denied speaking venues, and denounced from pulpits, Inger-
soll effectively surmounted much of the opposition through the sheer elo-
quence and good humor of his oratory. While he could give spellbinding
lectures on Shakespeare or Lincoln, his notoriety was based on such offer-
ings as “Some Mistakes of Moses,” “Superstition,” and “Why I Am an Ag-
nostic.” The son of a Presbyterian minister in New York’s Burned-Over
District where Joseph Smith’s Mormonism was also rooted, Ingersoll
early abandoned his natal faith and felt only relief in this emancipation.
He liked to regale his audiences with stories of the bleak, joyless Sabbaths
of his youth and his eventual liberation from them: “When I was a boy
Sunday was considered altogether too holy to be happy in,” he related.

“Nobody said a pleasant word; nobody laughed; nobody smiled; the child
that looked the sickest was regarded as the most pious. . . . Sabbaths used
to be prisons. Every Sunday was a Bastille.” Finally, the sun would set, In-
gersoll recalled, “off would go our caps, and we would give three cheers for
liberty once more.”6
Ingersoll spoke the language of liberty so effectively that he often
wowed even those who otherwise had little sympathy with his irreligion.
At the 1887 trial of freethinking lecturer C. B. Reynolds for blasphemy in
Morristown, New Jersey, Ingersoll was at his grandiloquent best in his
address to the jury: “I deny the right of any man, of any number of men,
of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips—to make the
tongue a convict.” A Presbyterian minister, hurrying up to the infidel
lawyer afterwards, exclaimed, “I must say that was the noblest speech in
defen[s]e of liberty I ever heard! Your hand, sir; your hand.” Ingersoll be-
lieved deeply that liberal secularism held the key to sustaining and ad-
vancing civil liberties—freedoms of speech and inquiry preeminently.
“Secularism,” he remarked by way of definition, “is the religion of
humanity”—a this-worldly philosophy that would put an end to “sectarian
feuds” and “theological hatreds” by stressing education, science, and be-
nevolence. “Secularism is a religion,” Ingersoll reported optimistically,
that is without tyranny and mummery; it has “no persecutions.” Here
were civil and religious liberties so pure that they reminded Ingersoll of
“the lilies of the field.”7
Ingersoll’s liberality possessed a mixture of innocence and contradic-
tion. In a short essay entitled “The Jews,” Ingersoll remarked, “Personally,
I have either no prejudices about religion, or I have equal prejudice against
all religions.” Neither portion of that formulation was sustainable upon
even cursory examination. Ingersoll had plenty of prejudices about
religion—not least, the deistic commonplace that virtuous acts were criti-
cally important, while ritual performances were empty shows. Moreover,
his prejudices against religion were hardly equal. He may have thought
that Jews, like Christians, needed to “outgrow their own superstitions,”
but he considered Christianity far more culpable because of its bloody
record of persecution, particularly evident in its treatment of the Jewish
people. Within Christianity itself, Ingersoll had a hierarchy of prejudices
with Roman Catholics and God-in-the-Constitution evangelicals at the
bottom and with liberal Protestants slowly edging their way toward the
pinnacle of science and reason. Ingersoll’s freethinking secular principles
were hardly neutral and impartial. Religion itself was problematic, but not
all religions were equally dangerous. The closer a religion came to con-
forming to liberal secular norms the better.8
Not surprisingly, Mormons provided an especially revealing test of In-
gersoll’s principles of toleration and liberty. Ingersoll was well aware of the
persecution Mormons had endured in the United States, a history that
should logically have lifted them up in his eyes as a religious minority that
had suffered at Christian hands. Was theirs not another cause to fight in
the long struggle to protect, defend, and expand religious and civil liber-
ties? But, for Ingersoll, the Mormon stand-off never provoked that chain
of reasoning. While he decried any resort to violence—“the bayonet
plan”—to solve the Mormon problem, he never elevated the question to
the level of religious freedom and civil rights.9 In many ways, he embod-
ied Fluhman’s “Protestant/Enlightened explanatory tradition” in which
imposture loomed large as a debunking tool. When, for example, one
young woman wrote him in 1887 to suggest that Christianity’s initial
spread in the face of Roman persecution was a providential sign of its
truthfulness, Ingersoll dismissed the thought with an allusion to the
growth of Mormonism, which he described as “a horrible religion . . .
founded on the grossest and most ignorant superstition, and imposition.”
Unlike his essay criticizing Christian discrimination against Jews, Inger-
soll almost seemed disengaged from the suffering anti-Mormonism had
produced; “The Mormons call it persecution” was the phrasing he chose
in this letter. “Mormonism,” he told an interviewer in Denver in 1884,
“must be done away with by the thousand influences of civilization.”10
Ingersoll’s anti-Mormonism was, perhaps predictably, built on his un-
derstandings of marriage and middle-class family life. While his oppo-
nents were sure that he had to be a philanderer—unbelief and libertinism,
after all, went hand-in-hand in the Protestant imagination—Ingersoll
was scrupulous in his devotion to monogamy. He looked askance at the
marriage of reformers and sexual anarchists who made up the radical
wing among freethinkers and worked hard to disassociate the secularist
movement from obscene literature (a category that swept up everything
from physiology textbooks to marriage guides to pornography to rene-
gade literary works). “Civilization,” he was sure, “rests upon the family.
The good family is the unit of good government.” For Ingersoll, as much
as Protestant moralists, monogamy was “the citadel and fortress of civili-
zation.” The social fabric of the nation, though, was only the half of it;
Ingersoll was an out-and-out romantic when it came to home, family, and
childhood. “The virtues grow about the holy hearth of home—they clus-
ter, bloom, and shed their perfume round the fireside where the one man
loves the one woman,” Ingersoll rejoiced. “ Lover—husband—wife—
father—child—home!—without these sacred words, the world is but a
lair, and men and women merely beasts. . . . Take from the world the
family, the fireside, the children born of wedded love, and there is noth-
ing left.” In consecrating domesticity, Ingersoll made the home so “pure
and sacred” that anyone who threatened its sanctity was bound to be ab-
horred and abominated.11
On the question of polygamy, Ingersoll appeared, at first glance, every
bit the ally of the Protestant crusaders who were intent on extirpating it.
He wanted plural marriage “exterminated” no less than they did. In his
anti-polygamy rhetoric, Ingersoll could hold his own with the most zeal-
ous: “All the languages of the world are insufficient to express the filth of
polygamy,” Ingersoll railed. “It is the infamy of infamies. . . . It takes us
back to the barbarism of animals, and leaves the heart a den in which
crawl and hiss the slimy serpents of loathsome lust.” But, for Ingersoll,
Protestant Christianity was no answer to this barbarism, for polygamy
was without doubt a biblical practice. “Read the 31st chapter of Exodus.
Read the 21st chapter of Deuteronomy. Read the life of Abraham, of
David, of Solomon, of Jacob, and then tell me the sacred Bible does not
teach polygamy,” Ingersoll thundered in a litany worthy of his hero
Thomas Paine. “It is by the Bible,” Ingersoll charged, “that Brigham
Young justifies the practice of this beastly horror.” To Ingersoll, Mormon
polygamy was the ultimate proof of the worthlessness of Protestant scrip-
turalism. “We send our missionaries to Utah, with their Bibles, to convert
the Mormons,” he observed. “The Mormons show, by these very Bibles,
that God is on their side. Nothing remains now for the missionaries
except to get back their Bibles and come home.” Only those who had aban-
doned scriptural authority, only those who had disavowed the God of the
Bible—in short, only freethinkers like himself—could save the “civilized
home” from this peril.12
Ingersoll’s opinions on Mormonism were formed with only limited
acquaintance with Mormons themselves. Lecturing widely across the
country, he reached Utah in 1877 as part of a coast-to-coast tour that sealed
his oratorical fame. He was apparently refused space for “an Infidel lec-
ture” in Ogden in May of that year, but, in July, on his return trip from the
West Coast, he lectured with some fanfare in Salt Lake City at the federal
courthouse. He chose from his repertoire his lecture entitled “The Liberty
of Man, Woman, and Child,” which offered his idealized vision for spousal
and parent-child relationships. The anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune
thought that the lecture with “its enlightened, moral and broad views of
marriage” was a direct indictment of “the hateful system of polygamy in
this Territory.” Much of it, the paper felt, had been “prepared expressly for
the ears of Mormon women” with “a desire to lift them out of their degra-
dation.” That was highly unlikely: These were well-rehearsed orations that
Ingersoll performed from place to place; he had already given this one in
St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Denver,
among any number of other venues; nothing would suggest that his ap-
pearance in Salt Lake City gave local color to his remarks.13
The Deseret News, for its part, hardly thought Ingersoll’s lecture was
aimed at the Latter-day Saints; it found the lecture essentially unobjec-
tionable and wondered why Protestants considered Ingersoll such a “blas-
phemous infidel.” His oratorical flights on the complete liberty of thought,
the perfect equality of the sexes, and the infamy of corporal punishment
of children were reported with equanimity. “It was a fine lecture,” the
paper concluded, “and was received with frequent, long-continued and
deserved applause.” Ingersoll was a man in motion; and unlike many
other visitors among the Mormons, he issued no day-to-day commentary
on his Utah sojourn. It may not have registered with him that the “best
notice” his Salt Lake lecture received—as one freethinker in Farmington,
Utah, later a dmitted—appeared in the state’s “principal Mormon paper.”
Even with this moment of direct encounter, Ingersoll’s views about Mor-
mons sounded as if they had been fashioned entirely from afar.14
Unlike Ingersoll, freethinker D. M. Bennett proved voluble about his
visit to Utah and his reception there. As the founding editor of the Truth
Seeker, without doubt the most important freethought journal of the
period, Bennett had a capacious vision for his paper, which he launched in
Paris, Illinois, in the fall of 1873 and soon moved to New York City. The
masthead of his fifth issue (the first from Manhattan) announced his pur-
poses: “The Truth Seeker. Devoted to Science, Morals, Free Thought, Free
Discussion, Liberalism, Sexual Equality, Labor Reform, Progression, Free
Education, and What Ever Tends to Emancipate and Elevate the Human
Race.”15 Bennett’s monthly flourished, soon becoming a weekly and estab-
lishing itself as a national public forum for liberals, secularists, and free-
thinkers. The letters of solidarity poured in from cities and small towns,
from one coast to the other, as Bennett forged a readership of the reli-
giously disaffected who, while often feeling terribly outnumbered in their
particular locale, delighted in the extended company of the likeminded

that the Truth Seeker created.
Bennett was bolder than Ingersoll. He took far more risks, for exam-
ple, in jousting with Anthony Comstock as the two rose to fame and noto-
riety together in New York City in the 1870s. In clear contradistinction to
Ingersoll, Bennett happily courted obscenity charges and hurried to
defend the civil liberties of marriage reformers and sex radicals. That ap-
proach put Bennett in Comstock’s sights, and the vice crusader soon bran-
dished a warrant for the editor’s arrest in late 1877. In his society’s blotter,
Comstock charged that Bennett had published the “most horrible & ob-
scene blasphemies” and had also been circulating “indecent tracts that
purport to be Scientific.” Bennett, Comstock concluded, was “everything
vile in Blasphemy & Infidelism.”16 In this instance, Bennett’s lawyer man-
aged to get the case dismissed, but the undaunted editor refused to stop
flouting Comstock’s moral vision. The next year he took up the cause of
the president of New England’s Free-Love Association, Ezra Heywood,
whom Comstock had just succeeded in imprisoning. Bennett became the
purveyor of one of Heywood’s most infamous tracts on marriage reform
and “sexual self-government,” Cupid’s Yokes, which, among other things,
openly mocked the “lascivious fanaticism” of Comstock’s anti-vice cam-
paign. Bennett was soon arrested again, and this time he was convicted on
obscenity charges. He was sent to the state penitentiary at Albany to serve
a thirteen-month sentence.17
Prison did not have the chastening effects on Bennett it was sup-
posed to have. Instead, it focused his mind anew on the wrongs of reli-
gion, especially Christianity. At a hurried pace in that harsh prison
environment, Bennett produced two volumes on The Gods and Religions
of Ancient and Modern Times, which were issued in New York in 1880 and
ran to 1,792 pages. “The work has been written under some disadvan-
tages,” Bennett explained at the outset, “in prison and the hospital be-
longing thereto, surrounded by sick and dying men of varied nationalities,
colors, and crimes; sometimes twenty of us in a single room . . . I have
not had by me many works I would gladly have consulted.” He added for
good measure, “My imprisonment is simply a piece of religious persecu-
tion, instituted by orthodox enemies in consequence of my heterodox
opinions.” Given those punishing circumstances and Bennett’s hasty
pace of composition, the volumes were necessarily untidy and jumbled.
He ranged from the “Gods of the Hindoos” to the “Gods of the Norse-
men” to the “Gods of African Tribes” and beyond, while saving plenty of
room (two-hundred-plus pages) for a Paine-like critique of the Bible. Yet,

in all that verbiage about religions across time and space, Mormons re-
ceived only a stray mention from Bennett.18
That neglect changed when Bennett, once released from prison,
launched into his last major endeavor, a global tour, which he chronicled
in the pages of the Truth Seeker and then collected in a four-volume trave-
logue entitled The Truth Seeker around the World (1882). Given how he
viewed primitive superstitions, Bennett was hardly a dispassionate ob-
server of religious variety, but his travel-writing still contained its mo-
ments of appreciative encounter. Between his visits to Europe and China,
for example, he landed in India, and there he fell in with Madame Blavat-
sky, Henry Olcott, and their community of Theosophists, spiritualists, and
Buddhist catechists. The occult phenomena surrounding Olcott in partic-
ular captured Bennett’s curiosity. Long a sympathizer with spiritualism
against its most determined materialist opponents, Bennett now went far-
ther out on that limb. “I am ready to believe Hamlet was right,” he con-
cluded, “when he assured his friend Horatio that there was in heaven and
earth many things not dreamed of in his philosophy.” After leaving India
and his new-found spiritualist companions, Bennett made his way to
China and Japan before sailing for San Francisco to begin his eastward
trek back to New York City.19
On June 23, 1882, Bennett reached Utah, ready to add one more chap-
ter to an already highly colorful travel diary. Salt Lake City immediately
charmed him: “Everything about the holy city of the Latter Day Saints is
about as beautiful as the mind can imagine.” Darker clouds, however,
soon covered that initial impression of fine trees, good sidewalks, and sub-
lime scenery. His tour guide was James Ashman, whom Bennett identi-
fied as a Mormon-turned-freethinker and a local agent for the Truth Seeker.
Ashman’s insider-turned-outsider perspective triggered in Bennett—
himself a Methodist by birth, a Shaker by adoption, and a freethinker by
choice—a familiar narrative of hard-won emancipation. “It was a great
struggle” for Ashman, Bennett remarked, “to get out of the Mormon
church, much the same as other thousands have found it a painful experi-
ence to get out of the Methodist, the Presbyterian, the Baptist, and more
especially the Catholic church.” Bennett had quickly reoriented himself in
an Enlightenment storyline in which unbelievers won their freedom
through daring escapes from ecclesial prisons.
Bennett headed that evening to Salt Lake City’s Opera House and ac-
quainted himself with its benefactors, the Walker brothers. Once again,
he identified them as ex-Mormons who had turned, in their case, into

“Liberal Spiritualists.” Bennett now had his narrative trope, and it contin-
ued to prove serviceable the next day. After taking a buggy ride to some
nearby mineral springs, he met up with a group of freethinking compatri-
ots from Farmington, a town name he instantly recognized from his sub-
scription lists. These folks, too, he reported were “once devoted Mormons”
who have “thrown off the shackles that bound them” and become “stead-
fast Liberals.” As an ex-Shaker who had eloped with another member from
that celibate community, Bennett imagined freethinking secularism as a
fellowship of liberal refugees, a dispersed company of exiles who served as
a beacon to those who had yet to see the light. Almost as a matter of course,
he viewed both the Mormons and ex-Mormons he met through that tell-
tale lens.20
With this particular angle of vision, Bennett was unlikely to produce a
flattering travelogue about his time among the Mormons. But he was suf-
ficiently farther along the radical spectrum from Ingersoll to make his
entwined views on Mormonism and civil liberties more nuanced. For one
thing, he breathed none of Ingersoll’s fire against polygamy; indeed, he
found most of the evils Christians associated with it to be “imaginary”
and overtly defended the Mormon right to practice it. While he had his
doubts about plural marriage, he could not see any reason why Mormons
should be deprived of “the right to regulate their own social affairs.”
Mormon women positively testified about polygamy (Bennett was espe-
cially attentive to the testimony of plural wives); and Mormon men, from
all he could tell, were “model husbands.” He did not see how the legion of
Protestant reformers, given the prevalence of prostitution and marital in-
fidelity on their home turf, could claim the high ground in suppressing
polygamy: “With all that can be said of the Mormon institution,” Bennett
concluded, “there cannot be a doubt that the men and women of this ter-
ritory are at least ten times as virtuous—if sexual honesty means virtue—
as the Christian men and women who constitute the population of the
Eastern states.”
With his own pronounced antagonism toward Protestant power, Ben-
nett was particularly sympathetic to George Q. Cannon, who had, just four
months earlier, been deprived of his delegate status in Congress on the
grounds of his plural marriages. Listening to him speak on Sunday at the
Tabernacle, Bennett found Cannon right on target in arguing that “the
conscience of a Mormon” should be “as much regarded as that of any
other sort of believer.”21
Toward the end of his “Review of Mormonism,” Bennett reassured

his readers that they should not mistake his favorable comments on
plural marriage (or other aspects of Mormon society) as demonstrating a
“great partiality” toward the Latter-day Saints. That was not a likely mis-
reading: His account definitely had its affirming qualities, but his overall
tone was imperiously critical of Mormonism—just as it was of virtually
all religions except spiritualism. Still, Bennett’s self-representation as a
martyr for civil and religious liberties made his visit to Utah more reso-
nant than Ingersoll’s. Bennett stood as an embodiment of the persecu-
tion that Comstock-supporting Protestants produced when given a
chance to police the nation’s morals and its mail. As a lawyer, Ingersoll
ably defended the free speech of others, but he was not the prison-garbed
victim that Bennett personified. In the lead-up to his visit, the Truth
Seeker had run a short article entitled “Honor in Utah” in which a report
from a Gentile newspaper was placed next to one from a Mormon paper.
Both talked up the preparations being made to receive the freethinking
editor; the last line in the Mormon notice made the specific import of his
visit apparent: “Mr. Bennett is the victim of religious persecution.” Ben-
nett himself underlined those woes in the extemporized speeches he
gave during his visit, reportedly remarking at one reception—to espe-
cially impressive effect—on “the injuries and wrongs he had to suffer
from Christian persecutors.” The vindication of individual rights and the
dangers of religious intolerance—those were his calling cards. As the as-
sembled gathering saluted him in Ogden, “Hero opposer of the Chris-
tian church in its desecration of the sacred rights of our glorious
constitution, we rejoice to meet you.” Bennett’s public appearances in
Salt Lake and Ogden caused no visible consternation and occasioned
much positive notice: Mormons surely had their own reasons for wel-
coming this jailbird editor otherwise vilified for his obscenity and blas-
phemy, not least his standing witness against Protestant suppression of
religious and sexual heterodoxies.22
Bennett’s stop in Utah on his global tour certainly provided an evoca-
tive moment of Mormon-freethinker encounter, but the veteran editor’s
most important contribution always remained the Truth Seeker itself and
the ongoing forum it offered for secular liberals to think through the
Mormon question. Bennett never enforced a party line in his paper; as
much as possible, he wanted an open debate on Mormonism as on other
contentious issues of the day, and that is very much what he got. Elizur
Wright, one-time evangelical abolitionist who had ended up a freethinking
atheist, took to the pages of the Truth Seeker to address “The Mormon
Problem” in 1881. He took a harsh view much like Ingersoll’s.
Another writer, Peter Soule, made the contrasting case the same year
against what he called “Liberal Bigotry”: namely, constructions of reli-
gious liberty in secular ranks that stopped short of protecting Mormonism
and the practice of plural marriage. Mormonism “has just as good a right
to liv[e] and be protected under our Constitution,” Soule argued, “as has
any other religious sect or order. It is not for us to discriminate between
any religious orders, nor is it any of our business how many wives a man
has nor how few, or whether he has any at all.” Suddenly, though, toward
the close of his reflections Soule was caught up short by the Jewish prac-
tice of circumcision. That, he thought, was “an infringement upon the
infant’s rights” and an infliction of “unnecessary pain”; as such, the ritual
(another contributor labeled it “bodily mutilation”) was not protected
under the Constitution and should be subject to legal penalty. An articu-
late critic of liberal intolerance of Mormons, Soule all too quickly discov-
ered the limits to his own liberal principles of religious freedom. Thus the
debates rolled on from one year to the next in the pages of Bennett’s Truth
Seeker as freethinking secularists tried to figure out what a consistent view
of religious and civil liberties would look like—in relationship to Mor-
monism and much else.23
Bennett died in December 1882 at age sixty-three, a half year after his
Utah visit, but the Truth Seeker continued to flourish under his editorial
successor, E. M. Macdonald. During this second editor’s service, the paper
continued its ongoing debate about Mormonism, religious freedom, and
toleration. Macdonald himself pursued a strong civil libertarian line, fre-
quently editorializing against the anti-Mormon crusade: “The Constitu-
tion is of a straw’s weight with the Christian bigots who see in the rival
religion nothing but evil,” he charged in 1886. “The Constitution of our
country was framed to protect all alike, and throw the strong arm of the
law around all beliefs, allowing everyone to exercise and support his own
preferred religion, be it Christianity, Mormonism, or Mohammedan-
ism.”24 At the same time, though, Macdonald preserved plenty of space for
views like Ingersoll’s or Elizur Wright’s to be expressed. Suffice it to say,
the essential contours of the debate in the pages of the Truth Seeker did not
change substantially in the transition to new editorial leadership.
What did change dramatically under Macdonald’s editorship was the
visual dress of the paper. Bennett had kept the journal’s look spare—a
column-by-column wall of text with almost no pictorial adornment.
Macdonald transformed the paper’s appeal by turning the front and back
pages over to the cartoonist Watson Heston, without doubt the most im-
portant artist of the secular movement in the last two decades of the nine-
teenth century. The Boston Investigator, another literary beacon among
freethinking reformers, gushed that, since Heston’s debut in the Truth
Seeker in 1885, he had become “the artist-hero of Liberalism.” Fan letters
poured in from across the country; finally, subscribers rejoiced, freethink-
ers had the pictures to match Ingersoll’s oratory and to vie with illustrated
Bibles. One of the freethinkers from Farmington, Utah, whom Bennett
had met, gave some local specificity to that excitement when he wrote to
Macdonald in December 1886 in praise of the cartoons: They “are excellent
and full of meaning; besides, they assist in introducing the paper in this
(Mormon) community.” Thirteen years later the same man, now the proud
owner of two stand-alone volumes of Heston’s collected cartoons, wrote to
say that he was still happily “entertaining many of my Mormon callers with
these convincing pictures.” For his freethinking admirers, Heston’s art pro-
vided the chief means of visualizing a secular nation; his lifework consisted
in the prolific provision of emblems—of Enlightenment, anti-Catholicism,
women’s emancipation, anti-evangelicalism, scientific progress, intellec-
tual freedom, and strict church-state separation—designed to make liberal
secularism tangible.25
The graphic representation of Mormonism was not front and center in
Heston’s work; but given the recurrent interest that freethinking liberals
displayed in the Mormon question, he necessarily took the subject up at a
number of points in his fifteen-year run with the Truth Seeker.26 Early in
his partnership with Macdonald, in June 1886, Heston produced a car-
toon entitled “Our Janus-Faced Religion.” At its center is a two-faced Prot-
estant minister, wielding in one hand a club against John Taylor and his
multiple wives and offering in the other a laurel wreath for Solomon sur-
rounded by a sea of concubines. On the pulpit, an open Bible underlines
scriptural sanction for polygamy, while a signboard mocks “Christian con-
sistency”: “FOR THE MORMON POLYGAMIST Curses, Persecution,
Fines, Imprisonment, and Disenfranchisement. FOR SOLOMON the PO-
LYGAMIST Love, Honor, Veneration, Praise, The Subject of Sermons and
Sunday School Lessons.”
In addition to laying bare Protestant duplicity, Heston was quite
ready to turn his ire on the country’s political inconsistency over the
Mormon question. In the cartoon “More Government Hypocrisy,” Uncle
Sam holds the club of the law over the head of a Mormon and announces,
“REMEMBER, I’LL TOLERATE NO POLYGAMY!!!” Even as Uncle Sam

takes that stern line in domestic politics, he overlooks it in international
relations, making a pay-off with his other hand to a sultan with a harem.27
Exposing such religious and political inconsistencies was not necessarily
an expression of freethinking solidarity with Mormons, but it did sug-
gest that Heston thought that the Latter-day Saints had the better part of
this argument.
Heston came closer to outright solidarity when considering the shared
status Mormons and freethinkers had as ostracized religious minorities.
In one cartoon from 1895, entitled “Christian Unity—What the Religious
Bigots Would Like,” Heston pictured two malign forms of Christian
power: namely, Protestant fanaticism and Roman Catholic intolerance.
The two together, in Heston’s view, were ready to run freethinkers, Mor-
mons, spiritualists, Jews, scientists, pagans, and Muslims off the face of
the earth. In this instance, the Mormon and freethinker both flee the Cov-
enanter, whom Heston used to embody the legislative ambitions of the
National Reform Association especially.
In a second cartoon, this one from 1899, Heston again attacked Chris-
tian hypocrisy, juxtaposing the outrage of ministers over the Chinese per-
secution of Protestant missionaries with their indifference to Christian
persecution of Mormon missionaries in the American South.28 The Truth
Seeker habitually reported on incidents of violence against Mormons in
Southern states; indeed, the week before this cartoon appeared, an article
sardonically noted that Southern Methodists and Baptists in Carter
County, Kentucky, accustomed to settling their vendettas through lynch-
ings, had turned to threatening Mormon elders with the same fate.
Latter-day Saints themselves took note of these sympathetic stands:
Patrick Q. Mason, in his work on anti-Mormonism in the postbellum
South, found this particular Heston cartoon reprinted in an LDS mission-
ary magazine, Southern Star, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1899.29 It is
hard to say what the freethinking cartoonist, had he known about this ap-
propriation, would have made of it, but this much is clear: Heston had a
strong sense that religious minorities—freethinkers, Jews, Seventh-day
Adventists, and Mormons—needed to stand together against the tyranny
of Christian-nation Protestantism and the mobbish intolerance of its
enthusiasts.
Like most freethinkers, though, Heston had a hard time holding onto
any concord with any religious group for very long, no matter how much
political sense such a coalition might make. Jews, Adventists, and Mormons
might experience with freethinkers similar kinds of mistreatment and ha-

rassment; but when all was said and done, reason stood alone at the top,
elevated above all superstitions. This is evident in a trio of Heston’s car-
toons: In “A Holy Family—Superstition and Some of Her Children,” a Prot-
estant child pounds on a Mormon boy, pictured unsubtly with five girl dolls,
while the Catholic priest yanks a Jewish man by the hair. All the religious
figures, though, are placed in the same familial lineage of superstition.
Likewise, in “Who Has the Truth?—Assertions Not Assuring Arguments,”
Heston made clear that only the freethinker rose above the multitude; all
the religious claimants (including Mormons) were so many sounding trum-
pets, a cacophony of revelations that left reason unscathed and unmoved.
Finally, in “The Rising Tide of Skepticism,” Heston suggested that Mor-
mons, as much as Catholics and Protestants, would be sunk in the surging
waters of scientific rationality and unbelief.30 Heston’s cartoons themselves
appeared ambivalent and two-sided, perhaps even Janus-faced: His com-
mitment to the Enlightenment unmasking of religion undercut his free-
thinking solidarity with religious minorities over civil liberties.
It was very hard for Heston to have it both ways; and toward the end
of his career with the Truth Seeker, his confused representations of Mor-
monism came back to bite him. As the conflict over the seating of B. H.
Roberts came to a boil in late 1899, Heston joined the fray with two anti-
polygamy cartoons. In “The Situation with Roberts,” Heston had a per-
sonification of decency and womanhood stare down a prison-garbed
Roberts with his three beastly wives and declare him unfit for the halls
of Congress. The next week, Heston pictured the same three-headed
monster confronting Uncle Sam as representative Mormons Cannon
and Roberts hide, along with a Muslim sultan, in a skull-filled cave in
the background. A favorite pictorial subject for Heston had long been
the advancement of women, particularly their emancipation from their
“servitude” to religious leaders and institutions.31 Now belatedly he had
decided to take on plural marriage as another religious threat to the
progress of American womanhood. Even though the brouhaha over Ro-
berts had reactivated much of the old alarm over polygamy’s barbarity, it
still made little sense for Heston to throw himself at this point into this
crusade. The anti-polygamy campaign had been neither his cause nor
Macdonald’s.
Heston was clearly used to criticism. His chosen art was designed to
provoke controversy, and time and again his caricatures did just that. For
a while, the Truth Seeker had been banned from sale in Canada in large
measure because of the perceived sacrilege of Heston’s cartoons; and

when C. B. Reynolds was tried for blasphemy in Morristown, New Jersey,
in 1887, it was one of Heston’s images that was seen as the most offensive
part of Reynolds’s criminal pamphlet. The last person to be imprisoned in
Britain for blasphemy, J. W. Gott, endeared himself to the authorities by
(among other things) publishing special issues of his journal devoted to
Heston’s cartoons and then turning some of those caricatures into picture
postcards.
But it was not only religious and political opponents whom Heston
provoked; fellow freethinkers were also ready to pounce when they found
his cartoons mistaken or overly coarse. In the case of his anti-Roberts car-
toons, the umbrage other secular liberals took was especially intense.
Edwin C. Walker, a notoriously outspoken marriage reformer, blasted the
Truth Seeker and its cartoonist at the Manhattan Liberal Club: “The Anti-
Roberts cartoons of Watson Heston in the ‘Truth Seeker’ are a disgrace to
Liberalism, reflecting alike upon its justice and its common sense.”32
Walker was a radical in the marriage and sexuality debates of the era.
On principle he and his lover, Lillian Harman, daughter of editor Moses
Harman whose paper Lucifer the Light-Bearer was at the forefront of free-
thinking sexual reforms, had designedly chosen to cohabitate in an equal
partnership rather than participate in what they considered a coercive
marital system. For their public witness, they had been arrested, tried, and
found guilty of violating Kansas’s marriage laws in 1887; the threat of mob
violence had swirled around the couple.33
Emphasizing individual rights and personal autonomy, Walker (and
the Harmans) very much believed in getting the government out of the
business of imposing monogamy as a prescriptive social and legal institu-
tion. Unsurprisingly then, Walker thought Heston had completely mis-
judged the Roberts case. It was extremely foolish, he thought, for
freethinkers “to assist in trampling down” constitutional guarantees of
“civil and religious freedom by joining hands with the aggressive and
stronger party in an acrimonious sectarian quarrel.” Walker was incensed
that Heston would play into the hands of Protestant “majorityism” against
Roberts whom Walker considered a wholly reasonable and dignified figure
in this festering controversy. As Walker saw the case, much more was at
stake than “a battle between two systems of marriage.” “Deep down,” he
said, it was “a conflict between compulsory marriage itself and sexual free-
dom.” Freethinkers should be rallying behind Roberts; the equal rights of
minorities, including those of secularists themselves, and the promotion
of individual liberties, particularly in the domains of marriage and sexual-

ity, depended on liberals seeing Roberts’s cause as their cause too.34
Walker’s diatribe against Heston’s anti-polygamy cartoons almost
seemed reserved compared to some of the blowback Macdonald received.
An angry letter from Kansan S. R. Shepherd was a case in point: “Having
taken The Truth Seeker ever since its birth and always finding it on the
side of liberty—even defending the Adventists against the legal invasion
of their natural rights—I was surprised to see Heston allowed its use to
help the hell-spawned mob of clerical birds and . . . puritan inquisitors
who are hurling the missiles of death at that poor devil Roberts.” After
raking Heston over the coals, Shepherd arrived at his libertarian bottom-
line: “Let the people mate and unmate to suit themselves. . . . Everybody
mind their own business.” The criticism was so strong that Macdonald
issued an editorial admission that the anti-Roberts cartoons amounted to
an “aberration of Mr. Heston’s pencil.” Conceding the debate to those de-
fending Roberts, Macdonald openly distanced himself from Heston. The
cartoonist’s long and illustrious career at the Truth Seeker, more than coin-
cidentally, fizzled out over the next four months, as Macdonald unceremo-
niously looked for new artistic talent.35
* * * *
No simple lesson can be drawn from the fraught relationship between
Mormons and freethinkers in the late nineteenth century. The occasional
common ground they found was often little more than one of strategic
convenience: They had a common enemy in the Protestant establishment
and its cronies in government, and, as the saying goes, the enemy of my
enemy is my friend. Expediency, as a rule, does not make for robust and
enduring alliances. Still, freethinking liberals and Latter-day Saints often
found themselves conjoined—not only in the dark imaginations of their
opponents but on the ground with each other. Such encounters often
proved vigorous—unpredictable in the quotidian moments of civility, un-
derstanding, and recognition that they produced.
One last story, this one of Samuel Putnam, Congregational minister
turned freethinking lecturer, is suggestive of those ties. Styling himself
the “Secular Pilgrim,” Putnam roamed the country, an itinerant for liberal
enlightenment. He spent a lot of time lecturing in Utah, so much so that
he claimed to have become “part and parcel of the very soil . . . thoroughly
naturalized from head to foot.” Appearing in small Mormon settlements
as well as larger towns, Putnam calculated that he had lectured to about
twelve to fifteen thousand people in the territory over a six-week span in

1886 alone. Through these engagements he was in close contact with
both Mormons and non-Mormons. In several places, the local LDS bishop
introduced him; Putnam found himself warmly entertained even when
giving “utterance to my most radical ideas.” Typical was the following
report: “The school-house was full at Kanosh, about one hundred being
present, the majority Mormons. The lecture on ‘Universal Mental Liberty’
was well received.” At one event in Salt Lake City where he lectured on
“The Glory of Infidelity,” Putnam was struck by the ecumenism of the
audience, including both Mormons and liberals listening “good-naturedly”
to his talk: “All had an opportunity to say their say, and the varied discus-
sion was animated and most cordial.” Putnam, like other freethinkers, had
plenty of moments of bristling objection to Mormonism, but he also had
many flashes of genuine fellow-feeling. When, for example, he visited the
state penitentiary where “about fifty Mormon saints” were being held, he
denounced it as “grotesque” and “tragical.” “They are really political pris-
oners,” he concluded. Years later, on another tour, Putnam took particular
delight in a leisurely visit with one local Mormon leader, “hale and hearty
at seventy-seven years of age.” They shared, Putnam reported, “a great ad-
miration for Ingersoll.” In the late nineteenth century, neither Mormons
nor freethinking secularists found much mainstream acceptance, but
every once in a while they discovered, through their shared peculiarity, a
bridge across their own differences.36
Any common ground that Mormons and freethinkers found in the late
nineteenth century proved very hard to maintain in the next century. The
boundaries separating religious groups—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and
Mormon as well—gradually declined in significance as the fault-line be-
tween those who belonged to religious communities and those who be-
longed to none opened ever wider. The Russian Revolution, the fear of
anarchism, the Cold War, and the culture wars—each would leave its mark.
In many ways, what came to define the American religious landscape at
the most fundamental level was an alliance of the godly (to which the
Latter-day Saints would now very much belong) against the ungodly (of
which secular liberals, nonbelievers, communists, humanists, college pro-
fessors, feminists, and gay-rights activists would all be exemplars). As
Franklin Delano Roosevelt commented in a radio address in 1936 under
the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, “The very
state of the world is a summons to us to stand together. For as I see it, the
chief religious issue is not between our various faiths. It is between belief
and unbelief.” Roosevelt called upon devotees of whatever religious

tradition to “make common cause” against “irreligion.”37 Truman and
Eisenhower—not to mention Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Apos-
tle Ezra Taft Benson—would underline that same elemental division as
would the cultural warriors who came to prominence in the 1980s and
1990s. Yet, even as that God-trusting versus God-neglecting partition
became ever more pronounced, residues of the nineteenth-century order
remained: Mormons and nonbelievers both continued, as is evident in
polling data and social surveys, to face considerable bias against them, par-
ticularly as potential political candidates. Neither Latter-day Saints nor sec-
ular liberals were likely any longer to find much solidarity in that unhappy
distinction; but in the late nineteenth century there was, frequently enough,
a mutual recognition that they were bound together in an improbable yet
meaningful alliance.
Notes
1. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1990, 64
[original printing 1689]).
2. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters, 4 vols. (New York: Riving-
ton and Gaine, 1775), 1:167.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1945),
1:316–317.
4. New-Hampshire Gazette, March 25, 1834, 4. On the persisting suspicion that in-
fidels could not be trustworthy citizens, see Christopher Grasso, “The Boundar-
ies of Toleration and Tolerance: Religious Infidelity in the Early American Re-
public,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America,
ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 286–302; Albert Post, Popular Freethought in Amer-
ica, 1825–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), esp. 211–215.
5. J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Re-
ligion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Car-
olina Press, 2012), 61, 73–75; “Editorial Notes,” Truth Seeker, June 11, 1887, 377.
For an important study of anti-Mormon representations in fiction, see Terryl L.
Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a recent examination of how
southerners perceived and responded to Mormons, see Patrick Q. Mason, The
Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For the pairing of Mormons and infidel
Free-Lovers, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and
Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: Univer-

sity of North Carolina Press, 2002), 35, 37–38, 175–177.
6. Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 12 vols. (New York: Inger-
soll League, 1933), 1:377, 380.
7. Ibid., 11:56, 405–406.
8. Ibid., 11:459–460. The study of “secularism” is, by now, an academic industry all
its own. Much of that literature flows from the premise that the architects of
secular statecraft fail to recognize how their own constructions of the religious-
secular binary end up proscribing aspects of religion that do not conform to
their own liberal secular norms. Ingersoll would fit well within that critique. For
salient entry points into that discussion, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secu-
lar: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2003), and Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, eds., Comparative Secu-
larisms in a Global Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
9. Ingersoll, Works, 8:164.
10. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, ed., The Letters of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1951), 285–286.
11. Ingersoll, Works, 2:251–252, 8:164.
12. Ibid., 1:397, 7:79–80, 8:260.
13. “Col. Ingersoll,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 14, 1877, Utah Digital Newspapers (ac-
cessed June 14, 2013). Ingersoll’s 1877 tour, including his stop in Salt Lake City, is
amply documented in his papers. See Scrapbooks, microfilm reels 25–26, Robert
G. Ingersoll Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
14. “Ingersoll,” Deseret News, July 18, 1877, Utah Digital Newspapers (accessed June
14, 2013); Letter to Editor (Farmington, Utah), Truth Seeker, February 21, 1880,
124–125. On the cancelled lecture in Ogden, see “Notes and Clippings,” Truth
Seeker, May 19, 1877, 153; “Col. Bob Ingersoll,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 14, 1877.
For another instance of the Deseret News taking an affectionate view of Ingersoll,
see “Robert G. Ingersoll’s Eloquent Tribute to a Deceased Minister,” Deseret
News, September 10, 1879, 511.
15. Masthead, Truth Seeker 1 (January 1874): 1.
16. On Comstock’s charges against Bennett, see Roderick Bradford, D. M. Bennett:
The Truth Seeker (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 117.
17. E. H. Heywood, Cupid’s Yokes: Or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Love (Princeton,
MA: Co-Operative Publishing, 1877), 12, 22.
18. D. M. Bennett, The Gods and Religions of Ancient and Modern Times, 2 vols. (New
York: Scientific and Liberal Publishing House, 1880), 1:ix.
19. D. M. Bennett, The Truth Seeker around the World: A Series of Letters Written while
Making a Tour of the Globe, 4 vols. (New York: D. M. Bennett Liberal Publisher,
[1882]), 3:90–91.
20. Ibid., 4:579–582, 586. This is not to say that Bennett’s narrative was simply a
contrivance; there was, indeed, a network of freethinkers in Utah, some of
whom had organized themselves into local auxiliaries of the National Liberal
League. Many of these folks were ex-Mormons, as is evident from the letters to
the editor in the Truth Seeker by the following writers: for example, A. J. Kirby,
Truth Seeker, July 28, 1877, 556–557; Walter Walker, Truth Seeker, February 21,
1880, 124–125; Andrew Larsen, Truth Seeker, April 3, 1880, 220; R. M. Taylor,
Truth Seeker, June 24, 1882, 397; Arthur C. Everett, Truth Seeker, April 14, 1883,
236–237; Edward F. Munn, Truth Seeker, July 21, 1883, 454, and July 28, 1883,
470–471; Hector W. Haight, Truth Seeker, April 18, 1885, 251. Ronald W. Walker
has wonderfully explored the liberal and spiritualist ferment among Mormons
and ex-Mormons in nineteenth-century Utah, focusing especially on dissenters
of the 1860s and 1870s. See his Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham
Young (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
21. Bennett, Around the World, 4:587, 600–601, 611.
22. “Honor in Utah,” Truth Seeker, June 10, 1882, 365; Walker to Editor, Truth Seeker,
August 5, 1882, 493; Bennett, Around the World, 4:593. Bennett remarked on the
favorable coverage he had received from the Salt Lake Herald (a Mormon paper)
and regretted not having a copy to quote from for his travelogue (4:594–595).
See also Salt Lake Herald, June 24, 1882; Ogden Standard Examiner, June 23,
1882, Utah Digital Newspapers (accessed June 14, 2013). In his Tanner Lecture,
John F. Wilson highlighted the burning commitment within early Mormon cir-
cles to the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion and the
bitter disillusionment over governmental failure to abide by it. Bennett’s posture
meshed well with that deep-seated Mormon perspective. See John F. Wilson,
“Some Comparative Perspectives on the Early Mormon Movement and the
Church-State Question, 1830–45,” in The Mormon History Association’s Tanner
Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ed. Dean L. May and Reid L. Neilson (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 81–96. For longer historical views of the
same issue, see Kenneth David Driggs, “The Mormon Church-State Confronta-
tion in N ineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Church and State 30 (1988):
273–289, and Mauro Properzi, “LDS Understandings of Religious Freedom:
Responding to the Shifting Cultural Pendulum,” Journal of Mormon History 38
(Summer 2012): 128–147.
23. Elizur Wright, “The Mormon Problem,” Truth Seeker, March 26, 1881, 197; Peter
Soule, “Liberal Bigotry,” Truth Seeker, February 26, 1881, 134–135; John G. Hartwig,
“Religious Liberty,” Truth Seeker, January 8, 1881, 21. For another example of how
this debate kept reverberating, see J. H. Burnham, “Religious Toleration,” Truth
Seeker, January 30, 1886, 66; [E. M. Macdonald], “Religious Toleration,” Truth
Seeker, January 30, 1886, 72.
24. [E. M. Macdonald], “Persecuting the Mormons,” Truth Seeker, January 16,
1886, 40.
25. “Books and Magazines,” Boston Investigator, September 24, 1890, 6; Hector W.
Haight to Editor, Truth Seeker, January 8, 1887, 26; Hector W. Haight to Editor,
Truth Seeker, April 15, 1899, 234.
26. For an excellent survey of visual representations of Mormonism in this era, see
Gary L. Bunker and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834–1914: Car-
toons, Caricatures, and Illustrations (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press,
1983). Here I provide some freethinking variations on the well-worn, nineteenth-
century visual repertory for portraying and pigeonholing Mormons.
27. “Janus-Faced Creedalists,” Truth Seeker, June 5, 1886, 353; “More Government
Hypocrisy,” Truth Seeker, November 25, 1899, 737.
28. “Christian Unity—What the Religious Bigots Would Like,” Truth Seeker, Decem-
ber 7, 1895, 769; “An Example of Christian Consistency,” Truth Seeker, August
26, 1899, 529.
29. For the untitled report on the persecution of Mormons in Carter County and
Bell County, see Truth Seeker, August 19, 1899, 516. For the LDS use of Heston’s
cartoon, see Mason, Mormon Menace, 165–166.
30. “A Holy Family—Superstition and Some of Her Children,” Truth Seeker, Febru-
ary 1, 1890, 65; “Who Has the Truth?—Assertions Not Assuring Arguments,”
Truth Seeker, February 18, 1893, 97; “The Rising Tide of Skepticism,” Truth
Seeker, June 27, 1891, 401. More than half of Heston’s front-page cartoons were
reprinted in book form, including these three. See Watson Heston, The Free-
thinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1890), 199; Watson
Heston, Part II of The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book (New York: Truth Seeker
Co., 1898), 375, 383.
31. “The Situation with Roberts,” Truth Seeker, December 2, 1899, 753; “A Modern
Cerberus—The Beastly Thing That Confronts Uncle Sam,” Truth Seeker, De-
cember 9, 1899, 769. For one of his characteristic images of women’s eman-
cipation from religious authorities, see Heston, Freethinker’s Pictorial Text-
book, 91.
32. “In the Case of Brigham H. Roberts,” Lucifer the Light-Bearer, December 23,
1899, 394. For another account of “Mr. Walker’s wrath” over Heston’s cartoons,
see “At the Manhattan Liberal Club,” Truth Seeker, December 23, 1899, 808.
33. For a full account of the Edwin Walker–Lillian Harman relationship and the
legal battles surrounding the couple, see Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free
Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977),
81–96.
34. “In the Case of Brigham H. Roberts,” 393–394.
35. “Plural Marriage,” Truth Seeker, December 30, 1899, 826. Heston misread (or
was at odds with) the preponderant liberal mood in the debate over Roberts. See,
for example, the untitled report on Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s opposition
to the anti-Roberts crusade in Truth Seeker, February 4, 1899, 68; Moncure D.
Conway’s letter defending Roberts in George E. Macdonald, Fifty Years of
Freethought, 2 vols. (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1931), 2:189–190; and the post-
mortem of James F. Morton Jr., a rising leader in free-speech circles, “The Real
Issue in the Roberts Case,” Truth Seeker, March 17, 1900, 169. Heston defended
himself from his critics, including Shepherd, in “A Few Remarks on the
artoons Concerning Polygamy, Etc.,” Truth Seeker, January 27, 1900, 58, but
C
the tide was against him. See George B. Wheeler, “The Roberts Cartoons a Mis-
take,” Truth Seeker, February 3, 1900, 74. It should be noted that there were mul-
tiple strains in the Heston-Macdonald relationship by December 1899: Macdon-
ald complained about the cost of the cartoons and their lack of refinement, even
as he used them repeatedly as money-raisers for his publishing enterprise. The
pair’s conflicting views on Roberts played into their preexisting differences.
Heston’s cartoons were dropped from the front page in January 1900 and from
the paper entirely in April of that year. Heston moved on to other venues, includ-
ing brief stints with Etta Semple’s Freethought Ideal and C. C. Moore’s Blue-Grass
Blade. The latter provided Heston a forum to air his grievances against Macdon-
ald’s underhanded treatment of him. His career never recovered; he died penu-
rious in 1905.
36. Putnam often chronicled his speaking engagements in the pages of the Truth
Seeker. He presented the 1886 tour of Utah in multiple installments in the
“News and Notes” column: May 1, 1886, 277; May 8, 1886, 293; May 15, 1886,
309; May 22, 1886, 325; May 29, 1886, 341; June 5, 1886, 357; June 12, 1886,
372–373; June 19, 1886, 391; August 7, 1886, 501; August 14, 1886, 517. He then
lectured on Mormonism at the Manhattan Liberal Club. “The Liberal Club,”
Truth Seeker, October 30, 1886, 692. For the later meeting with the elderly
Mormon leader, see Putnam, “News and Notes,” Truth Seeker, February 16, 1895,
104. For a time he also chronicled his travels in his own newspaper. For an ac-
count of another Utah tour in that journal, see Samuel P. Putnam, “News and
Notes,” Freethought, September 8, 1888, 433–436. Moving through Calvinist or-
thodoxy and Unitarianism into atheism, Putnam became a major figure among
post-Christian liberals. He outlined his religious journey in My Religious Experi-
ence (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1891).
37. I have borrowed the Roosevelt example from Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit,
Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2012), 322. For multiple LDS examples of how the religious freedom
issue is redrawn in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a stand for “reli-
gion in general” against secularists, nonbelievers, gay-rights activists, and “radi-
cal liberals,” see Properzi, “LDS Understandings of Religious Freedom,” esp. 134–
135, 141–143, 146–147.
PART 2
The Creation of Mormon

Identities
Introduction
BY MATTHEW J. GROW
From the movement’s beginning, Latter-day Saints have sought to distin-

guish themselves from others, to create an identity as a “peculiar people,”
in the words of a Bible verse they often cited.1 The following three essays
all concern identity formation, demonstrating how the experiences of
children and teenagers in the Church’s early decades contributed to a
unique identity among them, how elite Latter-day Saints have worked to
pass on the faith to the next generation, and how Latter-day Saints’ theol-
ogy and their historical experience combined to create a powerful and
persistent identity as a people who are part of the “House of Israel” and
separate from the rest of the world. As these essays demonstrate, Mormon
history presents a compelling case study for how a religious group builds
and maintains religious identity, both for individuals and for a broader
community.
In his essay, Charles L. Cohen, a professor of history and religious stud-
ies at the University of Wisconsin, argues that Latter-day Saints’ unique
theological ideas were combined with their historical experiences in the
creation of their self-identity as a “peculiar people.” Although the process
of collective self-identity more often begins with historical experiences that
then lead to a theological or cultural definition of identity, Cohen argues
that Latter-day Saints’ identity began first with the theology.
He examines Latter-day Saints’ theological identity against the back-
drop of Jewish and Christian theology. Latter-day Saints saw themselves as
members of the House of Israel, and their theology gave importance to
130 the creation of mormon identities
three other groups who would also be gathered into the House of Israel:
Jews, Lamanites, and Gentiles. Each of these groups played important roles
in the history of salvation foretold in Latter-day Saint scripture. The Book
of Mormon describes two central groups whose forefathers immigrated to
the New World from Jerusalem—the Nephites and the L amanites—with
the Lamanites destroying the Nephites at the end of the book’s history.
Early Latter-day Saints believed that American Indians were descendants of
the Lamanites and thus the heirs of the Book of Mormon’s promise that the
Lamanites would one day become converted and reclaimed by God. In the
Mormon conception, Gentiles function as “gospel agents, bringing
the word [of God] to the Lamanites, the Nephites’ seed, and the Jews.”
The “sociological construction” of the Mormon people—how their
identity was shaped by historical experience—did not “conform exactly” to
the theological map they envisioned. Cohen writes, “Virtually all who
joined the House of Israel during the first few decades gathered from
among the Gentiles. Jews remained aloof, Lamanites indifferent or inter-
mittently hostile.” While Mormon converts came from the ranks of the
Gentiles—basically white Americans and white Europeans—most Gen-
tiles rejected the Latter-day Saints. Indeed, persecution meant the
Latter-day Saints increasingly defined themselves against the Gentiles,
who they believed had predominantly rejected the gospel message and
oppressed its deliverers. Jews remained important as a theological con-
cept, and an early Mormon apostle traveled to Palestine in 1841 to dedicate
the land for the return of the Jews, but most nineteenth-century Mormons
had very little experience with actual Jews. Finally, when speaking about
American Indians, Mormons sometimes referred to them as Lamanites
and sometimes as Indians. This “dual terminology,” Cohen writes, “re-
flects a bifurcated consciousness, the former term carrying a salvific sig-
nificance of which the latter is devoid.”
Understanding the centrality of theology to Latter-day Saints’ concep-
tualization as a people, Cohen asserts, can help solve the problem of how
historians, sociologists, and others should categorize Mormons. Are they
a culture? An ethnic group? A church? After reviewing the various ways
in which academics have categorized the Latter-day Saints, Cohen writes
that the “most satisfactory categorization of Mormons is the one they
devised for themselves. Mormons were (and are) both a peculiar people
and a people in a peculiar way.” Viewing Mormons as a people, as a “reli-
gious nation,” emphasizes that what bound Mormons together “was not
fundamentally cultural, linguistic, economic, or even ecclesiastical but
The Creation of Mormon Identities 131
theological—generated by the certainty that Saints were restoring the

House of Israel.”
The creation of an individual’s identity begins, of course, in childhood.
Drawing on his innovative work on the history of American children, El-
liott West, professor of history at the University of Arkansas, examines
Mormon children, demonstrating persuasively the importance of treating
children as serious historical subjects.2 West studies the reminiscences of
Latter-day Saints who were children from the 1830s through the 1850s,
during the most formative Mormon decades of migration and movement.
He is interested in their experiences, how they remembered their child-
hood as adults, and how they shaped their experiences into narrative
scripts. The reminiscences—some frankly brutal in their descriptions,
others peppered with humor—demonstrate that Mormon identity in the
Church’s first decades was forged amid opposition and persecution. For
children, West writes, “the choice of becoming Mormon triggered a fright-
ful predicament,” often meaning separation from extended or immediate
family, long voyages, and lack of food and shelter. A life that had once been
orderly descended into chaos, and children “were left exposed, vulnerable,
and sometimes alone,” suffering “horrific and, in some cases, irreparable”
psychological harm.
When they were adults, Latter-day Saints made sense of their child-
hood experiences by remembering how they were empowered, often
through divine intervention and miracles, amid the persecution that they
faced as they converted to the Church, were driven from Missouri and Il-
linois, made the long exodus to Utah, and founded new settlements. In
other words, West states, “These children learned that they had within
themselves what it took to gain some mastery over their lives and their
future.”
West raises questions that remain at least partially unanswered: For
a people whose identity was forged in persecution, what happens once
the persecution ends? Latter-day Saints who experienced childhood
during the Church’s early decades faced a different situation in the late
1800s—accommodation with a nation that had once rejected them.
How did individuals navigate these changes in their community and
personal identities?
In his essay, Randall Balmer, a professor of history at Dartmouth Col-
lege, likewise focuses on the creation of Mormon identity among young
people by examining the transmission of faith from one generation to the
next. Where West primarily examines the experiences of rank-and-file
Latter-day Saints, Balmer shifts the focus to the leading families, especially
the family of Brigham Young. Of course, the transmission of faith is a con-
cern of all religious communities, and Balmer places the Latter-day Saint
efforts in a broader context from the Puritans of the seventeenth century to
the evangelicals of the nineteenth century. The Mormons present a par-
ticularly intriguing case, Balmer writes, because all of the first generation
of Saints were converts. How can the zeal of the converts, he asks, become
the commitment of their children?
To answer the question, Balmer examines the relationship between
Young and his seventeen sons, particularly as viewed through correspond-
ence between Young and his sons when they were on missions or at uni-
versities in the midwestern or eastern United States. Plural marriage and
the sheer size of Young’s family presented unusual complications. Never-
theless, “despite the multiplicity of his charges,” Balmer finds, “Young
emerges from the correspondence as a caring and sensitive parent, an
impression confirmed by the sons’ responses.” Indeed, he judges Young a
success in cultivating within his sons a commitment to the faith, as the
majority of Young’s sons were devout Latter-day Saints as adults.
The reasons for Young’s success, however, went beyond individual par-
enting style. Rather, Balmer argues that the Mormons created a subcul-
ture (as have many other religious groups in U.S. history) that sought to
protect their children “from the depredations and distractions of the larger
world” and to pass on the faith. To do this, Latter-day Saints took a path
followed by other religious groups in creating educational institutions—
including the university named for Young. Unlike many other religious
groups, however, the Mormons and Young recognized that time away
from the subculture—“a time to explore the broader world apart from the
cocoon of family religious institutions and like-minded believers”—could
often cement an individual’s commitment.
The essays by West, Balmer, and Cohen all demonstrate how
nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints forged a resilient sense of themselves
as a people. Taken together, the lectures illustrate the complex dynamics of
how religious identity is created through both external factors (such as op-
position and persecution) and internal ones (such as theology). They trace
persuasively how nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints defined the bound-
aries of their community, passed on the faith to their children, and main-
tained a strong religious identity as a “peculiar people.” In his conclusion,
Cohen comments that contemporary Mormons “retain their distinctive
sense of peoplehood, fortified by memory, myth, and a ‘common story.’”
The Creation of Mormon Identities 133
Although these scholars and others have examined Mormon identity in

the nineteenth century, less scholarly attention has been given to Mormon
identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3 Extending the insights
of these scholars into the twentieth century could demonstrate how Latter-
day Saints have continued to create a strong communal identity in very
different circumstances. How has the absence of the type of active perse-
cution they experienced in the nineteenth century shaped Mormon iden-
tity? What has the globalization of the Church meant for how Mormons
define themselves and their community? Examining both the historical
continuities and disruptions in Mormon communal identity between the
early decades and more recent ones could again demonstrate not only the
Mormon case but also give insights into the challenges faced by other reli-
gious groups in creating and maintaining identity.
Notes
1. 1 Peter 2:9.
2. Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western
Frontier (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Elliott
West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Resource Guide
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). Rebecca de Schweinitz, “‘Where Noth-
ing Is Long Ago’: Childhood and Youth in the Mormon Past and Present,” Jour-
nal of Mormon History 38 (Spring 2012): 125–138.
3. For an insightful exception, see Armand Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The
Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1994).
6
The Construction of the Mormon

People
By Charles L. Cohen
“We are a peculiar people,” President Joseph Young informed a group of

“brethren and sisters” in July 1855. “Our circumstances have been trying
and vexatious all the way through.” By that date, Mormons had adopted the
phrase as an emblem. One might marvel at their audacity, given the more
invidious connotations of “peculiar.”1 The word’s basal sense of “distin-
guished in nature, character or attributes from others,” hence “particular”
or “special,” can edge towards the pejorative implications of “unusual, out-
of-the way,” thus “strange, odd, ‘queer.’” Joseph Capron insinuated this last
set of meanings when he informed Mormon-debunker Doctor Philastus
Hurlbut that Joseph Smith Sr.’s family were “really a peculiar people—fond
of the foolish and the marvelous . . . addicted to vice and the grossest im-
moralities” while pretending “to piety and holy intercourse with Almighty
God.”2 An alternate definition relating to property holding—a “peculiar”
object or person belongs “exclusively to” one or more owners—took on
equally negative connotations in antebellum discourse by being linked
with slavery, the South’s “peculiar institution,” yet even that association did
not deter Mormons from embracing the word. Speaking the day after his
colleague, Brigham Young explained that God had “introduced” plural
marriage—slavery’s “twin reli[c] of barbarism,” the Republican Party
declaimed—to raise up “a royal Priesthood, a peculiar people.”3 By denom-
inating themselves “peculiar” despite its more unflattering nuances, Mor-
mons thrust their outlandishness into contemporaries’ collective craw.
Mormons claimed scriptural warrant rather than common English
usage for so fashioning themselves. Although neither the Book of
Mormon nor the Doctrine and Covenants employs “peculiar people,” the
King James Version (KJV), whose cadences resonated in virtually every
ineteenth-century American church and parlor, uses it four times.4 The

n
first two occur during Moses’s pronouncement of the Deuteronomic law,
where Israel’s distinctiveness issues from its covenantal status as God’s
nation pledged to obey his commandments.5 Saints noticed the connec-
tion quickly; among the inaugural Mormon references to “peculiar
people,” which appeared in the early 1840s, as far as I can tell, some per-
tained exclusively to the Jews.
Visiting a London synagogue in 1841 as a missionary, Heber C. Kim-
ball, his “mind” rendered “unusually solemn” by the service, observed that
Jews “seem to be a peculiar people, and can readily be distinguished from
all other Nations.” The end point of Mormon interest in such matters was
not Jews’ standing, however, but their own; and two New Testament pas-
sages provided the material for appropriating the title. By far the more im-
portant for Mormon exegesis, Brigham Young’s defense of plural marriage
quoted above contains a truncated version of 1 Peter 2:9, which explicitly
spells out a peculiar people’s qualities: they are “a chosen generation, a
royal priesthood, an holy nation,” fit vessels to “show forth” God’s “praises.”
Although in context the biblical author addresses only churches of Gentile
Christians in Asia Minor, parsing the verse in isolation can universalize it.
As early as 1841, Brigham Young and Willard Richards laid out the
logic: God, the two apostles stated, “chose the children of Israel to be his
peculiar people,” and to them “belong the covenants and promises.” These
“blessings” descended to the “generation of Gentiles” contemporary with
Peter and thus also became available to all who “stand by faith.”6 Joseph
Smith’s first followers took these names “quite literally,” Jan Shipps has
observed, for, as inaugural Saints, “they became the very embodiment of a
chosen generation.” The epithet “peculiar people” designated Mormons
as the Lord’s covenanted folk.7
In 1870, the annotator of “Wild Bill” Hickman’s tell-all autobiography
about his murderous exploits as “Brigham’s avenging angel” swung Mor-
mons from the scaffold of their self-proclaimed specialness. Their litera-
ture “for the past forty years,” J. H. Beadle maintained, can be “compressed
to just this: ‘We are the Lord’s people, His chosen people, His peculiar
people. . . . [W]e know of a surety that our religion is right, and everybody
else[’s] wrong.’”8
In the final reckoning, though, the real significance of the phrase “pe-
culiar people” lies not in whether one prefers the Mormons’ or Beadle’s
valuation of its adjective but rather in their shared agreement about the
substantive validity of its noun. Latter-day Saints may not have actually
The Construction of the Mormon People 137
called themselves “peculiar” until the 1840s, but by then they had fleshed
out a theological concept—the “Mormon people”—more than a decade
old. I use this term heuristically, for the individuals to whom it applies
called themselves something else, most usually, “Saints.”9 The term does
not impose on the evidence, however, but rather derives from and re-
flects Mormons’ own sense of belonging to something other than a group
defined on the basis of ethnicity, cultural traits, geographical concentra-
tion, or discrete religious observances. By the “Mormon people,” I mean
that body of individuals whose collective self-representation includes
both their entering into covenant with the Lord under the new dispensa-
tion revealed by the Prophet Joseph Smith and their articulating socio-
logical boundaries that set them apart from everyone else. I invoke the
label to spotlight the dual dimensions of this identity as well as the Jewish
and Christian scriptural ruminations on the meanings of “people” that
inform it.
The Mormon people strode from the Saints’ holy books. Reinterpret-
ing (Mormons would say “restoring”) both Israel’s assertion of being God’s
people in the Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures) and the Christian commu-
nity’s appropriation of that claim in the New Testament, the Mormon
scriptures generated a powerful semantic field that kept even self-professed
Christians outside the covenant until they were grafted into the House of
Israel.10 Thus signified theologically, the Mormon people were incarnated
sociologically as Latter-day Saints gathered their church, suffered their
neighbors’ hostility, and entrenched themselves amid Deseret’s arid
beauty. The Mormon people presided over its institutional advent on April
6, 1830, when Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery ordained each other
elders of the nascent Church of Christ, and its construction had finished
by the time the temple in Salt Lake City began to rise; but by “Mormon
people” I intend something more than a religious organization and its
members. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Mormon
people in its ecclesiastical aspect, if you will, but the Church is not itself
the Mormon people. To characterize the Latter-day Saints as merely a de-
nomination among denominations fails to appreciate how they do not—
and, as importantly, how they do—fit into nineteenth-century American
history.11 Although stressing Mormons’ peculiarity, I will do so by empha-
sizing their theological deployment of the Jewish and Christian scriptural
traditions and their sociological self-definition vis-à-vis their contempo-
raries. We can fathom the construction of the Mormon people only by situ-
ating them within the intellectual and historical contexts they strove to
reshape and escape. Mormonism is too important for understanding reli-

gion in America to study hermetically.
Accepting at face value Mormons’ professions that they comprehended
a peculiar people by whatever name allows us to rethink their place in
American history. If the Saints comprised a palpably new Israel, as they
certainly thought they did, then their Zion contravened normative ante-
bellum notions about the American Revolution’s settlement of religion,
the mass of constitutional and political arrangements developed at the
federal and local levels to configure relationships between religion and the
state. The “revolutionary settlement” as it operated in the early nineteenth
century presumed that America was both a democratic republic and a
Protestant domain, a polity whose mechanisms of governance protected
liberty by implementing the “Moderate Enlightenment’s” love of checks
and balances, but many of whose citizens deemed themselves the pious
children of a deity jealous to expand their country’s borders. For some, the
United States provided a haven of religious freedom; for others, it stood as
a Christian nation in covenant with God.12
Mormons roiled the settlement’s consensus at several points. Conso-
nant with its policy of toleration, they insisted upon their right to worship
as they wished, but their practices turned out to be a sui generis variant of
Christianity whose promulgation of a triune scripture, among other oddi-
ties, ostracized them from the mainstream as surely as if each Saint had
sprouted a third eye.13 Against pronouncements that the United States
was a Christian nation, they claimed divine mandate to build a material
New Jerusalem; and when outraged adversaries frustrated their plans,
they quit Gentile America to establish a state church within a theocratic
republic—the Great Basin’s analogue to ancient Israel. Stockaded behind
the Wasatch Front, irrigated by faith and mountain streams, the Mormon
people challenged the foundations of the Revolution’s “religious settle-
ment” and insulted the sovereignty of the United States.
* * *
The identity of any self-selecting group depends on what attributes
confer membership and how rigorously insiders patrol their boundaries
against outsiders. The characteristics of the Mormon people were (and
are) defined theologically—Saints are those who enter the new and ever-
lasting covenant through baptism into God’s restored church; and the
boundaries are set sociologically primarily in relationship to three main
groups: Jews (understood by Mormons as descended from the inhabitants
of the land of Judah), Lamanites (a kindred Israelite people), and Gentiles

(all non-Israelites).
Jews and Lamanites have blood ties with a fourth group, the Kingdom
of Israel’s inhabitants, who were “scattered to and fro upon the isles of the
sea” (1 Ne. 22:4) after the Assyrians invaded. The lost tribes of Israel figure
importantly in Mormon theology; Christ will show himself to them (3 Ne.
17:4), the covenant includes them (Eth. 13:11), and they will join Zion’s
restoration in America (Articles of Faith 10). Mormons believe that many
converts, perhaps most, belong to these lost tribes, especially Ephraim.14
Nevertheless, during the mid-nineteenth century, the scattered Israelites
did not figure in establishing the Mormon people’s boundaries sociologi-
cally. Diffused among the Gentiles, they were invisible collectively and
recognizable individually only as revealed by a patriarchal blessing; hence,
they receive little attention here.15
The scriptural underpinnings of the Mormon people and the dynamics
of its boundary-formation hark back to biblical Israel. In its most pro-
foundly religious sense, “Israel” identifies the people of God whatever
their political standing of the moment.16 Tanakh employs two terms to
denote “people,” a dual usage that likened Israel to its neighbors in pos-
sessing certain national characteristics while singling it out on the basis of
its exclusive covenant with God. The first, ‘am, in its primary collective
sense designates a clan, conveying strong overtones of a “people” united
on the basis of its members’ consanguinity. ‘Am can intend “the people as
a whole” as well as civic bodies or troops of soldiers, but it assumes a spe-
cifically religious connotation in relation to the cultic assembly of the faith-
ful, one of whose names is ‘am ‘elōhîm (“the people of God”).17 The second
term, gôy (pl. gôyîm), comes closer to the modern sense of “nation,” per-
sons conjoined on the basis of racial origin, shared government, or posses-
sion of territory. The meanings of ‘am and gôy overlap in some instances
but not all. Gôy can describe both Israel and its neighbors, but Israel rec-
ognized itself as a nation possessing “unique moral, political, and reli-
gious obligations,” the only gôy in covenant with God, though, of course,
the Lord rules the other gôyîm, too.18 At the same time, gôy, unlike ‘am,
never appears in conjunction with a deific name, nor, with few incidental
exceptions, does Tanakh utilize ‘am to designate any nation save Israel.
These usages ground the possibility of conferring ‘am in the sense of
“the Lord’s covenanted people” exclusively on Israel, reserving gôy for all
other polities, whose inhabitants worship their own national deities but not
the Lord.19 The later books of Tanakh move in just this direction.
The post-exilic Priestly passages diminish Israel’s identification as a gôy,

magnifying the word’s association with the “foreign” nations, while the Deu-
teronomic literature intensifies earlier reflections that the gôyîm are not
neutral borderers but hostile heathen nations.20As the people Israel suffered
a succession of defeats culminating in their conquest and dispersion, they
came to regard their neighbors with unremitting enmity and hardened the
semantic boundaries around themselves. Hellenistic Jewish literature and
the Septuagint, the third-century B.C.E. Alexandrian translation of Tanakh,
reserved the Greek equivalents of gôy exclusively for foreign nations, now
unqualifiedly regarded with fear and loathing. Hellenistic and Rabbinic Ju-
daism drew a clear dichotomy between God’s people and the gôyîm, pagan
oppressors who were politically dangerous and morally comatose.21
The sociological and covenantal boundaries in Tanakh between Israel
and the gôyîm are relatively impermeable.22 The New Testament recognizes
the ethno-political borders between nations while transforming the dichot-
omy between Israel and the rest of the world into a trichotomy that distin-
guishes God’s covenanted people from both the Jews and the “foreign
nations.” Tanakh’s distinction between ‘am and gôy remains, rendered as,
respectively, laos and ethnos (pl. ethnē). Particularly in the Lucan writings,
laos carries the typical Greek meaning of “a crowd or group of people”; but
under the Septuagint’s influence, the word attaches to Israel,23 setting “laos
Israel” apart from the heathen multitude. Ethnos originally means a “mass”
or “host” bound together by distinctive cultural features; but it, too, takes
on a more specific sense, replicating gôy and its pejorative connotations.24
The New Testament also distinguishes between two particular peoples,
Jews and Greeks, in ways that are important for salvation history but that
do not parallel the opposition between “Israel” and the “foreign nations.”
Tanakh hardly recognizes the “Jews,” originally a political designation for
members of a tribe, a kingdom, or a Persian province. God covenanted
with “Israel,” not “the Jews.” By New Testament times, the term had
become self-referential in the Hellenized Diaspora but not in Palestine,
whose denizens presented themselves to outsiders as “Jews,” an ethnos,
while greeting each other as “Israel,”‘am ‘elōhîm.25 Christian authors, how-
ever, rejected the idea that redemptive Israel was still coterminous with
what were now inhabitants of Roman Judea, the Ioudaioi. They dissoci-
ated true Israel, those (including Jews) who accept Christ, from “Israel
after the flesh” (1 Cor. 10:18), the Ioudaioi, regarding them sometimes be-
nignly (as real or potential brethren in Christ) and other times antagonisti-
cally (as persecutors) but always through a Christian glass and never as
unique heirs of God’s promises.26 The New Testament’s use of Hellēn,

“Greek,” was a bit more straightforward. The term and its variants appear
most frequently in Acts and the Pauline Epistles. It can narrowly desig-
nate Greek Jewish Christians; but more commonly, it intends non-Jewish
Hellenized inhabitants of the Roman Mediterranean, approximating
ethnos. Paul’s formula “Jews and Greeks” is shorthand for the totality of
persons whom preachers like himself must evangelize.27
Paul’s slogan points to how the New Testament explodes the old dichot-
omy between Israel and the nations. It transfers the covenantal relationship
from the Jewish people Israel to the Christian community, which is re-
cruited from among both laos Israel and the ethnē, Ioudaioi, and Hellēnes.
This new aggregation draws from and overlaps the Jews and Greeks socio-
logically while, as followers of the risen Lord, transcending them soterio-
logically. Yet though scripture records what one might regard as the
ethnogenesis of the Christian people, it does not endow them with national
and ethnic characteristics as opulently as it does Jews and Greeks. Indeed,
it does not provide them with a single name around which such character-
istics might cluster, certainly not “Christian”—an anachronism that is,
however, nearly impossible to do without. The New Testament uses christia-
nos and its plural a bare three times, only one of which is self-referential.28
Scripture instead calls the disciples of Jesus by a variety of appellations,
such as “saints,” followers of “the way,” “saints and faithful brethren in
Christ,” or the “body of Christ, and members in particular.”29 To the extent
that Christians did comprise a laos established by their accepting the new
covenant, they did so metaphorically. Moreover, in striking contrast with the
Book of Mormon, the New Testament gestures only faintly at equating the
Christian community with “Israel.”30 Only by the end of the second century
C.E. did polemicists in the context of distinguishing the church from the
synagogue assert that Christians composed a “third race,” the original Israel
specially endowed with divine favor as opposed to Jews and Greeks.31
I have forced you to endure my vocalizing languages all of which, what-
ever their etymologies, are Greek to me in order to avoid introducing Eng-
lish terminology prematurely. The tripartite division between Christians,
Jews, and Greeks entered the world of Joseph Smith through the King
James Bible. Steeped in its idioms, Smith, as Philip Barlow has told us,
considered its style “sacred language”; and though he questioned the text’s
accuracy enough to depart from it and ultimately to retranslate it, “his
speech and thought patterns had been profoundly influenced by the
common version of the day.”32 KJV overwhelmingly translates ‘am and laos
with “people.” For gôyîm it predictably utilizes “nations,” but it also intro-
duces “Gentiles,” a word derived from the Latin gens, “nation.”
Jerome employs variations of gens throughout the Vulgate, from which
“Gentile” entered biblical English. William Tyndale’s inaugural New Testa-
ment, published in 1526, used “Gentile” to signify “any or all nations other
than Jewish,” and his diction informed the heroic age of Tudor-Jacobean
translation.33 KJV strongly conveys the trichotomy differentiating the
Christian community from all others, but while translating “Yisrâ’êl” and
“Ioudaioi” with their English cognates, it uses “Gentiles” to represent
“gôy,” “ethnos,” and, on five occasions, even Hellēnes, thereby foreground-
ing that word as the preeminent designation for “other nations.”34 Mormon
terminology elevates “Gentile(s)” to even greater prominence.
* * *
The theological construction of the Mormon people took shape against
these shifting definitions. Mormon scriptures retain the nomenclature of
Jews and Gentiles but radically reinterpret it in three ways. The first
departs from the New Testament, where Christians can preserve their
identities as Jews or Gentiles (Paul continues to relish aspects of his “Jew-
ishness”35) but can become “true Israel,” God’s people, only after accepting
Jesus as their savior. In Mormon writ, on the contrary, Jews and Gentiles
constitute categories already populated by God’s people, who do not, how-
ever, know themselves to be “true Israel”—even if they believe that they
have already accepted Christ—until they discover their real identity by
joining the Latter-day Saints. Two other formulations evoke Tanakh.
The latter-day gospel neither refers to the Christian community by name
nor takes over any of the New Testament’s euphemisms like “the way” or
“body of Christ.” Instead, it reidentifies God’s people with Israel. Indeed,
“Christian” in the singular appears in latter-day scripture only as the fore-
name of one of the eight witnesses, and in the plural merely four times
(Alma 46:13, 15, 16; 48:10). Moreover, Mormons discarded the New Testa-
ment’s figurative reconstruction for a robust proclamation that situates the
Saints in “the literal Israel of the Old Testament,” as Jan Shipps has stated,
rather than as “the symbolic Israel that came into existence in the Graeco-
Roman world of early Christendom.”36 This assertion of Israel’s tangible res-
toration instilled into Mormon self-identification a sense of comprising a
holy people in the flesh that emanates as acutely as any found in Deuteron-
omy or Isaiah. In certain uses of “people” and in titles like the “House of
Israel,” Mormon scriptures unite the ethno-political meanings of gôyîm and
ethnos with the covenantal nuances of ‘am and laos, except that the Mormons’
restored Israel embraces a far more extended people—demographically as
well as theologically—than anything Tanakh imagines.
Mormon holy writ uses “people” in various ways, although the term ul-
timately unites the covenantal and sociological meanings conveyed by sepa-
rate words in Hebrew and Greek. The general usage is strictly ethno-political,
carrying senses like “all human beings” or “a body of persons living under
a national government.”37 Roughly 15 percent of the time, “people” is paired
with the possessive “my,” and these cases divide into two equal sets. In the
first, a human being refers to his own group in national or cultural terms.
The prophet Mormon can, for instance, write about having as a ten-year-old
been instructed in “the learning of my people” (Morm. 1:2). Some of these
instances develop more salvific connotations, as when Nephi records that
his writings “should be kept for the instruction of my people, who should
possess the land, and also for other wise purposes” (1 Ne. 9:3).38 In the
second category, a divine presence—God the Father, Jesus, or a prophet
speaking under revelation—addresses an audience; and the phrase always
references a covenantal relationship: “I shall prepare, an Holy City,” God
tells Enoch in the Book of Moses, “that my people may gird up their loins”
(Moses 7:62). Such expressions invest the phrase “my people” with the
same meaning conveyed by ‘am ‘elōhîm and laos Israel, a sense intensified
by the phrase’s association with the title “House of Israel.”
Although the King James Bible uses “House of Israel” far less often
than “Children of Israel,” Mormon scriptures, beginning with the Book of
Mormon’s title page, feature it as one of the central designations for God’s
people.39 Like “Israel” in Tanakh but accoutered with distinctive doctrines
such as the gathering of the elect and the material (rather than spiritual)
realization of the New Jerusalem, the term “House of Israel” rehearses the
“covenant which the Father made with your fathers,” and which descends
from Abraham, in whose seed “all the kindreds of the earth” will be blessed
(3 Ne. 20:25).
Various texts emphasize that the Lord’s covenants have been pro-
claimed across the dispensations: They were “spoken unto the Jews, by
the mouth of his holy prophets” (2 Ne. 9:12), preached by the “twelve apos-
tles” (1 Ne. 13:24) and, according to a revelation Joseph Smith announced
in 1831, embodied in the gospel “set forth in these last days,” which has
been “sent forth to recover my people, which are of the house of Israel”
(D&C 39:11). Mormon scriptures record many instances of covenants be-
tween individuals or between individuals and God, but the central
romise—that, as God tells Nephi, “inasmuch as ye shall keep my com-

p
mandments, ye shall prosper, and shall be led to a land of promise” (1 Ne.
2:20)—recapitulates the pacts already made with Abraham and Moses.40
Smith’s revelation that the Lord has “done away” with “all old covenants”
in favor of “a new and an everlasting covenant, even that which was from
the beginning,” reestablishes an old agreement rather than inaugurating
a new one (D&C 22:1–4).41
The covenant is conditional: “O ye house of Israel whom I have spared,”
Christ promises, “how oft will I gather you as a hen gathereth her chick-
ens under her wings, if ye will repent and return unto me with full pur-
pose of heart” (3 Ne. 10:6). That conditionality has resulted in ruptures
throughout human history; the Jews broke the covenant by spurning
Christ, and the House of Israel frequently departs from its obligations. For
such transgressions, Christ assures them, “the places of your dwellings
shall become desolate” (3 Ne. 10:7). Nevertheless, the promises remain
sure. Israel will be barred from its homelands only “until the time of the
fulfilling of the covenant to your fathers,” for God mercifully “remembe-
reth the house of Israel, both roots and branches” (3 Ne. 10:7; Jac. 6:4).
The Lord’s people will be “gathered together to the lands of their inheri-
tance” (1 Ne. 22:12), and a New Jerusalem built upon that soil (Eth. 13:6).
How and when the House of Israel comes together in history is a com-
plicated matter. The covenant belongs to all of Abraham’s seed; but as
time proceeds, particular peoples rise and fall, receiving and, all too often,
breaking their covenantal promises. The seed of Nephi and his brethren,
for example, will inhabit the “land of promise” (1 Ne. 12:1); but as Nephi
knows prophetically, his own lineage will suffer extermination. In the
wake of both that genocide and the gospel’s falsification by the “abomi-
nable church” (1 Ne. 13:6) soon after the Lamb of God promulgates it, the
House of Israel can be gathered only after a “choice seer”—Joseph
Smith—shall bring them “knowledge of the covenants” (2 Ne. 3:7).
Mormon scriptures pay particular attention to three peoples from whom
Saints gather: Jews, Lamanites, and Gentiles.
The Jews’ connections to the House of Israel in Mormon scriptures
accord substantially with the New Testament’s picture, albeit with a
unique Christological emphasis. The Book of Mormon is avowedly writ-
ten to “Jew and Gentile” (title page), both potential members of God’s
people, and its pages recite Jewish history as the paradigmatic story of fall
and redemption. Jews are God’s “ancient covenant people” (2 Ne. 29:4),
the Messiah’s kin (1 Ne. 10.4) through whose “testimony” the world gains
“knowledge” of the Savior (D&C 3:16). Nevertheless, their “works of dark-

ness” have led them to reject and crucify the Messiah, for which iniquities
God has destroyed and scattered them (2 Ne. 25:2, 12–13, 9, 15). The Lord
never forgets them, however; and in the latter days, they will return to
their ancestral lands, rebuild Jerusalem, and recognize their salvation in
Christ’s wounds (1 Ne. 15:19–20; D&C 77:15, 45:51).
The Mormon scriptures emphasize Jesus’s Jewishness: Nephi foretells
that God will raise “a Savior of the world” from “among the Jews” (1 Ne.
10:4)—while reiterating Jews’ responsibility for his death. Mormon 3:21
compacts their bipolar relationship with Jesus into a single verse: they are
“the covenant people of the Lord” who “slew” Christ. Here and elsewhere,
the reminders that Jews killed God are expositorily gratuitous, since
Mormon scriptures neither rehearse Jesus’s last days nor inscribe their
own Passion narratives, but they are theologically cogent taken with the
equally strong reminders of Jews’ covenantal status, reinforcing Jews’ in-
timate if tortured ties with the Redeemer. Moreover, the statements about
deicide do not degenerate into an accusation of blood-guilt as in Matthew
27:25.42 Indeed, the Lord chastises the Gentiles for having “cursed” and
“hated” His “ancient covenant people,” promising to “return all these
things upon your own heads” (2 Ne. 29:5). Jews are the “first” covenant
people to whom the Lamb manifested himself and the “last” who shall be
grafted in (1 Ne. 13:42; Jac. 5:63; Eth. 13:12), Christological witnesses more
than ordinary historical actors. Dispersed and stateless, they do not—
unlike the Lamanites and Gentiles—threaten the Saints militarily.
In contrast with the Jews, the Lamanites have no obvious analogues in
either Tanakh or the New Testament. In Tanakh, the Ishmaelites have a
kin relationship with Israel descending from their eponymous ancestor,
Abraham’s child by Hagar, but they do not belong to ‘am ‘elōhîm and have
little intercourse with Israel other than selling Joseph to the Egyptians.
The Philistines do besiege the Israelites constantly, but no blood ties con-
nect them. The New Testament’s disinterest in particular national histo-
ries depicts opposition to the gospel as theological, philosophical, or moral
rather than as political or ethnic.
The Lamanites, however, are a “remnant of the House of Israel,” as
well as its inveterate enemies. They can “repent and come to the knowl-
edge of the truth,” as did the Anti-Nephi-Lehies (Alma 23:15–18); and in
the aftermath of Christ’s appearance in the New World, the Nephites and
Lamanites enjoy a sustained period in which “the love of God . . . did dwell
in the hearts of the people” to such a degree that they dropped all tribal
identities to become a single entity, “children of Christ, and heirs to the

kingdom of God” (4 Ne. 1:15, 17). The Book of Mormon is “written to”
them also (title page); and in modern times, Mormon prophesies, the
Gentiles will take them the gospel (Morm. 5:15). For the most part, how-
ever, the Lamanites reject efforts to convert them. Enos blames his mis-
sion’s failure on “their evil nature,” which impelled them to become a
“wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people, full of idolatry and filthi-
ness” (Enos 1:20). The Lamanites scourge the Nephites implacably
throughout the Book of Mormon, for which rebellion against their breth-
ren God darkens their skins, a curse that remains unless they repent
(Alma 3:6, 9–10, 14; 23:18). Even after the Lamanites have been “led about
by Satan,” the Lord will remember his covenant and the “prayers of the
righteous” offered for them (Morm. 5:18, 20, 21), but until they reform,
they remain “a dark, a filthy, and a loathsome people” (Morm. 5:15), cultur-
ally and racially inferior, likely to join the House of Israel only if heavily
proselytized.
Gentiles do not enjoy a covenant promise through lineage, but “as
many” of them “as will repent” can join the House of Israel (2 Ne. 30:2).
Christ is manifested to them through the Holy Ghost, a “light” (3 Ne.
15:23; 1 Ne. 21:6) whose restored gospel will dispel their “blindness” (1 Ne.
13:32). Gentiles in the Mormon scriptures enjoy a salvific role accorded
them neither by Tanakh, where the gôyîm never belong to the people of
Israel, nor the New Testament, where they help constitute the Christian
community but do not gather it. More than any other people, including
the Nephites, the Gentiles function in Mormon holy writ as gospel agents,
bringing the word to the Lamanites, the Nephites’ seed, and the Jews
(Morm. 5:15; 3 Ne. 21:5; 1 Ne. 13:39). Twice Nephi poignantly likens the
Gentiles’ activity to that of loving parents, “nursing” fathers and mothers
(2 Ne. 10:9) who “nourish” his brethren’s scattered descendants and carry
them “in their arms and upon their shoulders” (1 Ne. 22:8).
For their deeds, the Gentiles receive temporal rewards in an American
realm of milk and honey, where they will “prosper and obtain the land for
their inheritance” (1 Ne. 13:15), in the process displacing the Lamanites
(Morm. 5:19). Their conquered domain “shall be a land of liberty” with “no
kings upon it,” fortified “against all other nations” (2 Ne. 10:11–12). Never-
theless, Gentiles possess no greater virtue than any other set of human
beings; in “the last days,” Nephi prophesies, “they will be drunken with in-
iquity and all manner of abominations” (2 Ne. 27:1). Flushed with “pride,”
they forsake the gospel to “preach up unto themselves their own wisdom
and their own learning” (2 Ne. 26:20). They brutalize Nephi’s seed, laying
them “in the dust” (2 Ne. 26:15), but these depredations have a providential
cast. Like the Assyrians and Babylonians in Tanakh, the Gentiles act for the
Lord, smiting the House of Israel when it falls away. What makes them
“mighty above all unto the scattering of my people,” Jesus tells the Nephite
multitude, is “the pouring out of the Holy Ghost through me” upon them
(3 Ne. 20:27). Without such a “blessing,” they wield no such power; and in
ultimate retribution, the House of Israel will “tear” them like “a young lion”
among “sheep” (3 Ne. 21:12). Until then, though, they comprise the Saints’
greatest menace. In Joseph Smith’s day, Gentiles tore through Mormon
flocks far more readily than did Lamanites.
* * *
Once the Book of Mormon burst into print, the Mormon people began to
take sociological shape. Newly minted Saints clustered in Kirtland, Missouri,
and Nauvoo, while missionaries journeyed into “Indian country” and Great
Britain. To some degree, early Mormon recruitment followed the course an-
ticipated in scripture, targeting primarily Gentiles and Lamanites and, for
the most part, ignoring the Jews, though Orson Hyde consecrated Jerusalem
for their eventual return. With few exceptions,43 Mormons accepted the
theological cartography that dispersed Saints-to-be-gathered among the
world’s populace, but the sociological construction of the Mormon people
did not conform exactly to that map. Virtually all who joined the House of
Israel during the first few decades gathered from among the Gentiles. Jews
remained aloof, Lamanites indifferent or intermittently hostile.
Meanwhile, the mass of Gentiles proved more feral than even Nephi
could have predicted. Those facts profoundly influenced the Saints’ self-
identity. Mormons’ sense of being a people depended not only on their own
appropriation of covenantal promises but also on how they stood in relation
to the outside world. To Saints risking baptism before a crowd yelping “the
Mormons have got them,”44 relationships with Jews, Lamanites, and Gentiles
played out more messily than the theology of identity presumed. Although
the concept of the House of Israel called Mormons into a special category
from the outset, persecution and flight hardened the boundaries between
them and the “foreign nations.” By the 1850s, Mormons had defined them-
selves as a people by stressing their distinctiveness from the Gentiles.
Converts began to construct themselves as Saints by joining the House
of Israel. Ezra T. Benson heard Elder John Page preach “upon the gather-
ing of the House of Israel, which was very interesting to me.” Shortly after
Page had confuted some “college bred” Presbyterians over the location of
the Lost Tribes, Benson and his wife accepted baptism.45 Ritual events,
sermons, and patriarchal blessings articulated that identity and helped
cement Saints in it. As part of the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple’s
baptismal font in 1856, Heber C. Kimball and Jedediah M. Grant sealed
Brigham Young as “prophet seer & revelator in the church & kingdom of
God & over the House of Israel.” Responsibility for prosecuting “the great
& mighty Events which are rushing upon us with the rapidity of light-
ning,” Apostle Wilford Woodruff preached a year earlier, lies “at your
hands O ye Latter Day Saints.” Woodruff—Mormonism’s Samuel Pepys—
took those duties seriously; charged with platting the Young party’s route
one afternoon during the great trek of 1847, he confided to his voluminous
journal that “we are piloting A road for the House of Israel to travel in for
many years to come.”46
Patriarchal blessings certified an individual’s membership. During the
last days of the “City of Joseph,” John Smith, the martyred prophet’s uncle,
placed upon Norton Jacob “the Priesthood and power which was given to
the house of Israel,” telling Jacob’s wife, Emily, that her children would be
“honorable” within it and thereby “strengthen[ing]” her faith. Saints looked
forward to inheriting the land promised by God, whether the site lay near
Kanesville, Iowa, which Reuben Miller felt sure had long been designated
“the gathering place of the house of Israel,” or in Deseret, about which
Eliza Roxcy Snow, the poet laureate of early Mormonism, sang:
A choice land of old appointed

For the house of Israel’s rest;
You have found and consecrated,
Through your blessing ‘twill be blest.47
Jews played a critical role in constructing the Mormon people, func-

tioning, in Armand Mauss’s felicitous phrasing, “as a kind of ‘theological
alter ego.’”48 Mormons knew much about Jews in the history of salvation.
They were God’s ancient covenant people, the prototypic Israel, and
would have a critical millennial role even if, as Arnold Green has pointed
out, the Saints did not agree on what the sequence of events might be.49
Jews rejected Christ’s offer of the Kingdom of Heaven, however. Hence,
for centuries they have wandered the earth, taxed by Gentiles “beyond
their endurance” and persecuted “unto death.”50 “It is evident, that the
Jews did forsake the Lord, and by that means broke the covenant,” wrote
missionary and apostle David Patten.51 Such “apostacy,” versified Eliza

Roxcy Snow, stripped Jews of their “high tone/Of character, that superhu-
man stamp—/That strict, unyielding rectitude,” until
at length, their hands were purple stain’d

In the Messiah’s blood! Then, the curse
Of the eternal God, soon follow’d on!52
According to Wilford Woodruff, the Jews were not satisfied merely

“with killing Jesus Christ, but must thrust a spear into his side,” after
which they sought to cover up the resurrection by “brib[ing] the guard[s]
to say that while they were asleep his deciples [sic] stole him away.”53 Saints
also knew, however, that the Jews would return to Jerusalem. Joseph Hol-
brook received “many good ideas which has [sic] proven a blessing to me”
from his grandfather, who hoped that Holbrook “might live to see” them
restored. Snow imagined them converging “In litters and in chariots, on
mules, / On horses and upon swift footed beasts,” to “rebuild / That
fav’rite city.”54 Mormons’ valuation of the Jews took place within the super-
sessionist expectation of their ultimate conversion and readmission into
the House of Israel.55 Jews had been and would become again what Mor-
mons now were and would always be.
In contrast to their theological importance, however, Jews were socio-
logically negligible. During Mormonism’s three formative decades,
Saints had at best perfunctory acquaintance with them. Joshua Seixas’s
two-month stint in early 1836 teaching Hebrew to as many as 120 stu-
dents at Kirtland was never replicated.56 America’s Jewish population
had reached only fifteen thousand by 1840, most of it far from the
Mormon heartlands.57 Then, just as that number more than tripled in
eight years, Mormons fled into the Intermountain West, where Jews
seldom trod. Occasionally, travelers dropped in to see the “Mormon ex-
periment,” while the most frequent interactions occurred when Jewish
merchants set up shop in San Bernardino and Salt Lake City.58 Most an-
tebellum Mormons who had not lived abroad never met a Jew; conse-
quently, their characterizations can appear abstract and self-referential,
reeking of theological expectation rather than experience, as in Louisa
Barnes Pratt’s lament at leaving Nauvoo’s “beautiful temple” behind: “I
felt inclined to say as the poor Jews said of Jerusalem, ‘When I forget
thee, Oh Nauvoo, let my right hand forget her cunning, if I prefer not
thee above my chief joy.’”59
15 0 the creation of mormon identities
By most accounts, relationships between Jews and Mormons were cor-

dial, though friendship did not translate into conversions;60 a bare hand-
ful followed Alexander Neibaur’s pioneering baptism in 1838, both because
Jews themselves spurned the Mormon gospel and because certain strains
of Mormon thought suggested that such efforts would prove futile before
the last days.61 Still, millennial expectations that Jews would be regrafted
into the House of Israel coupled with their unreceptiveness to proselytiza-
tion and their inability to persecute Mormons indicated that Jews were
neither redemptively incorrigible nor politically minatory. Jews’ relatively
amicable relationships with Mormons did not force Saints to rethink their
identity.
More frequent interactions with another of the House of Israel’s line-
age people had a similarly negligible effect. Mormons did meet Lamanites
in the flesh; Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, for one, had seen them “occa-
sionally” during her youth in Nauvoo. William Clayton, clerk of the Camp
of Israel, described Kanesville, Iowa, in 1846 as “composed of Lamanites,
half breeds and a few white folks.”62 At root “Lamanite” equivalenced
“Indian.” When he was nineteen, Jacob Hamblin’s family moved to Wis-
consin Territory, an “unsettled wilderness inhabited only by a few Indians
or Lamanites”—but the words carried different associations, as John
Whitmer intimated when castigating Mormon enthusiasts’ physical exhi-
bitionism: “Some would act like an Indian in the act of scalping,” he railed,
“some would slide or scoot on the floor, with the rapidity of a serpent,
which [they] termed sailing in the boat to the Lamanites, preaching the
gospel.”63 Indians scalp; Lamanites are subjects to evangelize.
In antebellum Mormon usage, “Lamanite” tends to appear in reli-
giously charged contexts involving proselytism or sacred history. Having
migrated to Utah, Jacob Hamblin was chosen in 1854 to “till the earth,
teach the Lamanites, our brethren, how to do the same, learn their lan-
guage and preach the gospel to them.” Wilford Woodruff meditated upon
“the Lamanites in these last days” wandering about “cast down & de-
jected with nothing more than a blanket upon their naked bodies & with-
out the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ or a knowledge of there [sic]
forefathers,” but he was fortified by the thought that God had “promised”
them the “blessings of the Everlasting gospel,” which he anticipated
would come soon. Orson Pratt was similarly optimistic in foreseeing the
day “when the Lamanites will build a city called the New Jerrusalem
[sic].”64 Lamanites, as the Mormon scriptures said, were remnants of the
House of Israel.
“Indians,” by contrast, populate Mormon narratives as members of rec-

ognizable tribes—Ute, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Crow—acting in secular, not
prophetic, time.65 They can function as friends, allies, and trading part-
ners. In August 1846, Brigham Young informed a band of Omahas that
the Camp of Israel wished to winter in tribal territory and offered to have
Saints “do some work for them make them a field & fix there guns &c.” In
return, Big Elk allowed the band to stay two years, in addition offering
“young men” to “watch your cattle,” opportunities to exchange goods, and
notice of hostile Indians. Ten years later, three Arapahoes “By sign” warned
the James G. Willie Emigrating Company of a probable Sioux attack.66
More often, however, Indians conform to stereotypes: “enquir[ing]” for
whiskey, begging in an “annoysome” way, pilfering whatever they could
grab, and wantonly killing whites. As a Mormon party moved beyond
Winter Quarters in mid-June, 1847, “three naked Indians sprang up out of
the grass,” Sarah Rich recounted, “shot Brother [Jacob] Wetherby,” and
disappeared.67 Indians, Oliver Cowdery once opined, were a “rude, wild,
revengeful, warlike and barbarous race.” Mosiah Hancock called them
“duskies,” a colloquialism, like the parallel term “darkies” applied to Afri-
can American slaves, redolent with racism.68
Mormons’ dual terminology of “Lamanites” and “Indians” reflects a
bifurcated consciousness, the former term carrying a salvific significance
of which the latter is devoid. This division quarantined doctrinal expecta-
tion from grimy reality. As Will Bagley has aptly observed, “Fear of the
hidden raiders who continually threatened [Mormons’] stock soon proved
a more compelling teacher than theology.” Despite Mormons’ fervor for
converting the heathen, their efforts were at best sporadic, as Armand
Mauss has demonstrated, and the natives maddeningly refractory. “I tried
to teach the Indians the book of Mormon,” Mosiah Hancock volunteered,
“but they seemed incapable of learning any good things.”69
But if particular Indians failed to convert, scripture reminded Mormons
that Lamanites might join the House of Israel in the future. The absence
of annihilative conflict sustained that hope; although Mormons and Indi-
ans did fight each other, their broils never degenerated into the merciless
warfare that had ravaged Anglo and Native American communities for
more than two centuries. Mount Timpanogos never stood in for Hill Cu-
morah, nor the Jordan River for Sand Creek. In the mid-nineteenth-
century construction of the Mormon people, the conceptualization of the
Lamanites cum Indians segregated gospel hopes from historical disap-
pointments, preventing a lineage people’s transgressions from betraying
the possibility of their redemption. The psychological space it afforded

secured Mormons in their sense of being peculiar while keeping the socio-
logical boundary open.
Along the Gentile border, however, Mormons came to raise adaman-
tine walls. To be sure, Saints’ reminiscences of contacts with Gentiles
were not unrelievedly bleak. Farming twenty acres in Hancock County,
Illinois, William Draper lived “on good terms with my neighbors although
the most of them were gentiles.” Clarissa Wilhelm found herself in 1851
“hundreds of miles from my relatives, [my] children dying, and my hus-
band likely to die and me in a strange land among Gentiles, but I must
say,” she admitted, “they was very kind to me.”70 Saints also recognized
Gentiles’ redemptive role. During the 1830s, Mormon missionaries regu-
larly proclaimed it; and barely a month after Smith’s death, Joseph Kings-
bury received a patriarchal blessing from John Smith in Nauvoo indicating
that he would “preach to the Gentiles,” Jews, and Lamanites.71
Under persecution’s weight, however, such affirmations dwindled; if
Mormons were not well acquainted with Jews, they had rubbed elbows
with Gentiles too many times, and what they knew, they despised. Two
years after a mob pulled down his house and demolished his press in In-
dependence, W. W. Phelps wrote his wife that the generality of Gentiles
had been “more or less cursed, with harlots, whoremonger[s], adulterers,
maimed children, ungodly wretches, &C.” Small wonder, then, that the
dying Edmund Ross implored John Lowe Butler to “fetch him” so that he
would not “have to be buried among the Gentiles,” where he would lie “all
alone.” Butler complied.72 On the road to Zion, Eliza Roxcy Snow agreed
that “we’d better live in tents and smoke / Than wear the cursed Gentile
yoke,” and, like a Mormon Miriam, celebrated the Saints’ deliverance:
Tho’ we fly from vile aggression

We’ll maintain our pure profession—
Seek a peaceable possession,
Far from Gentiles and oppression.73
This torrent of aversion, disgust, and visceral hatred swept a pregnant

ambiguity into Mormons’ collective self-identity, washing away any neces-
sary congruity between its theological and sociological borders. In the face
of overwhelming Gentile antagonism, Saints collapsed the Christian tri-
chotomy situating Israel over against Jews and Gentiles, returning instead
to the older Jewish dichotomy in which Israel stood alone against the “for-
eign nations.” Mormon discourse always possessed—and still retains, as
Arnold Green has demonstrated—capacities for universalism; but in the

Mormon people’s formative years, centrifugal forces of persecution and
exodus overcame centripetal tendencies to inclusiveness, flinging the
Saints to Zion and permanently complicating the meaning of “Gentile.”74
“We have cut the Gentiles off from the Church for they have killed the
prophets,” Joseph Hovey declared in 1845; and though that statement was
theologically dubious—Hovey had no standing to void God’s covenant—it
was lexically prophetic.75
From the mid-nineteenth century on, the meaning of “Gentile” became
polysemous. The Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia of Mormon-
ism concur that “Gentile,” to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, has a spe-
cialized import “as used by Mormons: Of or pertaining to any [my emphasis]
outside the Mormon community.”76 The Encyclopedia recognizes a meaning
that “include[s] ‘not Jewish’ and ‘not Lamanite,’” but only as an extension of
the more general signification, “‘not Latter-day Saint.’”77 Jews, according to
this calculus, can be Gentiles, a reflection of the term back onto the people
who coined it in order to distinguish themselves from the “foreign nations”—
a usage that is ironic, to say the least. What the Encyclopedia points to, with-
out making the analytical distinction, is the difference between theological
and sociological definitions. “Gentile” in Mormon nomenclature can never
refer to Jews in God’s realm—their identity as His “ancient covenant people”
is unequivocal—but it can encompass them in earthly streets and shops.
This dual usage has resulted from historical circumstances that led the
Saints to emphasize their utter singularity, even over against a lineage
people. By 1860, the sociological sense of “Gentile” to designate “anyone
except a Mormon” had penetrated to the heart of the Mormon people,
where—contested continually—it nevertheless remains.78
* * *
The construction of the Mormon people, I have been arguing, involved
merging a theological conceptualization with a sociological process. The
former was relatively whole by 1830: the Saints comprised the House of
Israel, God’s covenant people who would restore Zion in America. The
latter occurred as missionaries recruited Latter-day Saints. Arguing that the
idea of the Mormon people preceded its realization on the ground reverses
the usual sequence of group identity-formation, in which individuals cobble
together a sense of commonality through sharing customs and experi-
ence.79 Mormons stand out because of the rapidity with which they came to
know themselves as a peculiar people, the specificity of the term’s meaning,
and the implications this construction has had for their history. In trying to
make sense of that past, scholars have categorized Mormons as a “culture

area,” an “ethnic group,” or a “church.” Each of these formulations provides
insights, but each is incomplete because none of them takes Mormon self-
representation into adequate account, a desirable approach because no
other antebellum movement defined itself against both religious competi-
tors and the American republic so starkly and rigorously.80 Overlooking the
intensity with which the Saints trumpeted their peculiarity, scholars have
tried to wedge a round Mormon peg into square analytic holes.
Since D. W. Meinig’s classic statement forty years ago, geographers
have found the concept of a “Mormon culture area” fruitful for under-
standing the Intermountain West. “As a group,” Meinig argued, “Mor-
mons constitute a highly self-conscious subculture whose chief bond is
religion and one which has long established its mark upon the life and
landscape of a particular area.”81 The essay precipitated a protracted debate
over the landscape’s elemental characteristics; the current consensus, ac-
cording to William Norton, accepts such attributes as the centrality of the
village layout, unusually wide streets, roadside irrigation ditches, and
buildings decorated with unique religious symbols, a panorama dotted
with the kinds of vernacular structures Dell Upton illuminated in the
2004 Tanner Lecture.82 Given Norton’s list, however, one might ask just
what exactly is “Mormon”—a religious designation—about features that
are primarily agricultural and architectural. The literature on the Mormon
culture area does not spotlight ecclesiastical edifices as the most salient
features of the built environment either quantitatively or qualitatively;
indeed, authors sometimes assume rather than demonstrate the influence
of Mormon religiosity, as if it were derivable from the landscape’s stolid
facts. Although asserting “the integrity of Mormon culture as a distinctive
pattern of life,” Meinig never quite explains how religion bound the Saints
to each other and the landscape.83
Others have posited more explicit connections: that Mormons’ identifi-
cation with Israel sponsored furious activity on the land, a sense of steward-
ship, and a conservation ethic; that a communitarian approach to resource
management contrasting with regimes developed elsewhere issued from
homogeneous values, including the doctrine of the gathering and the sa-
cralization of the Rocky Mountain region; and that the LDS hierarchy actu-
alized those values through vigorous oversight.84 These points are well
taken, but the question of what made Mormons “a highly self-conscious
subculture” in the first place remains. The concept of the Mormon “region”
or “culture area” calls attention to and explains certain features of the built
and cultivated environment, but to designate Mormons a “culture” on this

basis does not take us as far as we might wish.85
Neither does the classification of them as an “ethnic group” put for-
ward by Thomas O’Dea and Dean L. May, who assigned that category to
Mormons on the purely empirical grounds that they exhibited such shared
characteristics as communal economic regimes or suspicion of “intellec-
tual activity” for its own sake.86 Rightly rejecting this atheoretical approach,
Armand Mauss has questioned the category’s validity, citing confusion
about its meaning. So-called “soft” definitions limit themselves to identify-
ing an ethnic group on the basis of cultural characteristics alone, whereas
“hard” ones include genetic and kinship criteria. Mormons cannot have an
ethnic identity in the latter sense, Mauss contends, because their claimed
descent from Israel is scientifically unverifiable and their genetic makeup
increasingly diverse; nor will a soft application avail because “trying to set
aside a special category” for the Saints only “further” confuses “the already
fuzzy boundaries of ethnic taxonomies.” In rebuttal, Keith Parry has at-
tempted to turn the “hazy profusion” of soft definitions “to advantage,”
since “each phrasing of the concept offers a particular view of the Mormon
reality.” Shared cultural differences, the inheritability of group member-
ship through the practice of baptizing the dead, and a tendency to be “self-
segregating” make Saints’ ethnicity visible.87
Patricia Nelson Limerick likewise discerns it in a “new” worldview, pat-
tern of family organization, set of ambitions, sense of common bonds and
obligations, and definition of peoplehood laid down “by religious belief”
even before Joseph Smith’s murder, then “catalyzed” by the “move to the
Great Basin.”88 Neither Parry’s nor Limerick’s position is wholly satisfac-
tory, in my opinion, because in asserting ethnicity’s categorical impor-
tance, they overlook religion’s. Although Parry rightly criticizes O’Dea and
May for not explaining “how the ethnic and the religious are to be distin-
guished,” he fails to do so himself,89 while Limerick implies that Mormon
peoplehood came into existence by experience—what I have called its “so-
ciological incarnation”—without fully crediting its prior manifestation,
which was theological. However cogent the concept of “ethnicity” may be,
in the Saints’ case it at best muddles and at worst submerges the primacy
of the Mormon people as a religious construction.
Compared to geographers and social scientists, historians of American
religion have spent far less conscious effort slotting Mormonism into cat-
egories. Situating it within the “antebellum spiritual hothouse,”90 they
have noted how it manifested the era’s hallmark millennial, perfectionist,
and primitivist tendencies while also emphasizing some particular ele-

ment. For Sidney Ahlstrom, Mormons represented the period’s “most
powerful example of communitarian aspiration”; for Edwin Gaustad, they
gave “utopianism a good name” by “avoiding the sacrifice of a religious
vision to an economic one”; and for Grant Wacker, they “formed the larg-
est and most influential example” of a restoration movement. Echoing
Laurence Moore, Mark Noll has described them as religious “outsiders,”
though hardly the only alternative to “mainstream Protestantism.”91 Evinc-
ing terminological catholicity if not precision, these historians have tagged
Mormonism as a movement, sect, and new religion. Ahlstrom accounts it
“a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an
American subculture,” concluding that “at different times and places it is
all of these.”92 In the end, however, Mormonism’s permanence has, albeit
implicitly, earned the ultimate sobriquet: “church.” Still, nineteenth-cen-
tury Saints harbored millennial aspirations to be accomplished within a
very earthly Zion. That aspiration, its representation in the Mormon
people, and its near-fulfillment have made them something more.
To my mind the most satisfactory categorization of Mormons is the
one they devised for themselves. Mormons were (and are) both a peculiar
people and a people in a peculiar way. If accepting the Saints’ own term
seems insufficiently objective, one can substitute apt analytical approxi-
mations. “Religious nation” insinuates the primacy of theological reflec-
tion, while against the biblical background, the Hebrew locution ‘am
Mormōn rings even truer. The strong force binding Mormon nuclei was
not fundamentally cultural, linguistic, economic, or even ecclesiastical but
theological—generated by the certainty that Saints were restoring the
House of Israel. To denominate them simply a church without citing their
peoplehood misses how differently they understood themselves from
other churches; to call them a culture or an ethnic group without fore-
grounding their religious self-identity misses what made them cohere.
The rationale for designating Mormons a “religious nation” comes
into clearer focus when we recall that ‘am Yisrâ’êl, God’s chosen people,
also took political forms—including a confederation, a united kingdom,
and a divided monarchy—claiming a covenantal relationship with God
focused devotionally and spatially around a holy site.93 By gathering the
Saints into consecrated places and building temples wherever they con-
gregated, Mormons believed that they were reproducing Israel’s holy
ground; in erecting the Kingdom of God in Deseret, they sought to rein-
stantiate its state.94 To be sure, their political theology venerated the
federal Constitution and American republicanism; but as Klaus Hansen,

Marvin Hill, and others have taught us, the plan to erect a sacred polity
based on theocratic principles had a trial run in Nauvoo before emerging
fully in Utah.95 One can only wonder why, when the Saints finally built
their capital, they gave it the topographically prosaic name “Salt Lake City”
instead of the theologically correct one—“Jerusalem.” Perhaps that topo-
nym awaits the final gathering in Missouri (D&C 57:1–3).
Mormon hierarchs aimed to segregate Utah from effective federal inter-
vention as long as they could manage. No government claiming sover-
eignty from sea to shining sea could possibly have countenanced such
shenanigans, however; and once the United States could gird its loins, it
marshaled every legal, political, and moral tactic it could muster to subdue
them. In this battle between a territory and the continental republic to
which even Saints admitted it belonged, David yielded to Goliath. The
Saints’ effort to restore Israel as a polity ended with Utah’s statehood, at
which point, scholars tell us, Mormons “assimilated,” becoming good citi-
zens culturally almost indistinguishable from their neighbors.96 The round
pegs, it would seem, have been planed almost into squares. Twentieth-century
Mormons, like eighteenth-century Anglicans and nineteenth-century Con-
gregationalists, relinquished establishment status to discover that they
could thrive under the American Revolutionary “settlement of religion”
after all. In ceding plural marriage, they gained sufficient leverage to secure
the Gentiles’ toleration.
Yet no matter how much Mormons may have come to resemble the
“foreign nations,” they retain their distinctive sense of peoplehood, forti-
fied by memory, myth, and a “common story” that includes inhabiting an
autonomous Zion.97 Moreover, as long as the Saints insist upon their re-
vealed identity as the House of Israel, they will always patrol their socio-
logical boundaries. That my own Mormon students reveal themselves
only guardedly suggests their alertness to similar sentinels scouting the
border’s other side. To fit squarely into the American cultural pegboard,
Mormons will have to give up the sense of who they know themselves to
be. I do not see them doing so anytime soon.
Notes
1. Joseph Young, July 13, 1855, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: LDS Book-
sellers Depot, 1854–1886), 9:229. Scholars have noted this usage; see Robert B.
Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1965), 1; Mark P. Leone, “Mormon ‘Peculiarity’: Recapitulation of Subor-

dination,” in Persistent Peoples: Cultural Enclaves in Perspective, ed. George Pierre
Castile and Gilbert Kushner (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1981),
81; Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History (Salt Lake City, UT:
Signature Books, 1989), 102.
2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “peculiar,” A.2–4; Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Un-
vailed [sic]: or, A Faithful Account of That Singular Imposition and Delusion from
Its Rise to the Present Time . . . (Painesville, OH: printed and published by the
author, 1834), 232. The extended pejorative sense does not appear in Noah Web-
ster’s dictionary of 1828, but Capron’s usage indicates that the meaning “odd or
weird in an unacceptable way” was certainly current colloquially. See An Amer-
ican Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed., preface by Rosalie J. Slater (San
Francisco, CA: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1987; facsimile
of New York: S. Converse, 1828), s.v. “peculiar.”
3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “peculiar,” def. 1; National Party Platforms, comp.
Donald Bruce Johnson, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1978), 1:27; Brigham Young, July 14, 1855, Journal of Discourses 3:264.
4. Deut. 14:2, 26:18; Titus 2:14; 1 Pet. 2:9. More recent English translations have
dropped the phrase in these four verses; see, for instance, The New Oxford An-
notated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger
and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), which pres-
ents the New Revised Standard Version.
5. After proscribing pagan mourning rites, the prophet tells Israel that “the Lord
hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself” (Deut. 14:2); and, at the
presentation’s climax, he affirms that “the Lord hath avouched thee this day to
be his peculiar people” (Deut. 26:18)—contingent, of course, on their continu-
ing to “walk in his ways” (v. 17).
6. Joseph Smith et al., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed.
B. H. Roberts, 2nd ed., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1980), 4:256,
quotations pp. 260–261. The essay “Election and Reprobation” originated in
the Millennial Star and was reprinted twice in Times and Seasons.
7. Jan Shipps, “Signifying Sainthood, 1830–2001,” in The Collected Leonard J. Ar-
rington Mormon History Lectures (Logan, UT: Special Collections and Archives,
University Libraries, Utah State University, 2005), 166; Wilford E. Smith, “Pe-
culiar People,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan Pub-
lishing, 1992), 3:1072.
8. Bill Hickman, Brigham’s Destroying Angel: Being the Life, Confession, and Star-
tling Disclosures of the Notorious Bill Hickman, the Danite Chief of Utah (Salt Lake
City, UT: Shepard Publishing Co., 1904), 12 [original printing 1872].
9. The phrase “Mormon people” does appear in early Mormon writings, but usu-
ally as the equivalent of “Mormons,” not in the sense I develop. For one exam-
ple, see Joseph Smith Jr., Letter to Isaac Galland, March 22, 1839, in The
ersonal Writings of Joseph Smith, comp. and ed. Dean C. Jessee (Salt Lake City,
P
UT: Deseret Book, 1984), 419.
10. “Mormon scriptures” include the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants
(D&C), and Pearl of Great Price. See W. D. Davies, “Reflections on the Mormon
‘Canon,’” Harvard Theological Review 79 (1986): 44–66, but also Terryl L.
Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New
World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 191–192.
11. Cf. Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism
(Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1989), 182.
12. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976); Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in
America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
13. On Mormonism as a distinct branch or type of Christianity, see Jan Shipps,
Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1985); Paul K. Conkin, American Originals: Homemade Varieties
of Christianity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997),
162–225; Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-
Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 79–128.
14. Brian L. Smith, “Ephraim,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:461–462; William
James Mortimer, “Patriarchal Blessings,” ibid., 3:1066.
15. I am not arguing that the Ten Tribes of Israel do not matter in salvation
history—only that they did not figure much in constructing the Mormon peo-
ple’s sociological boundaries. One might note that the Book of Mormon is
“written” explicitly to Jews, Lamanites, and Gentiles, but not to the Israelites
(although, of course, their existence in the audience is presumed).
16. H. J. Zobel, “‫ ִיְׂש ָר ֵאל‬yisrā’ē‘l,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G.
Johannes Botterweck et al., trans. John T. Willis et al., 14 vols. (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1974–present), 6:397–420.
17. E. Lipiński and W. Von Soden, “‫‘ ַﬠם‬am,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testa-
ment, 11:169–170, 174–177. Other names are ‘am qādôš (“holy people”), or,
simply ha‘am (“the people”). This section owes much to the help of my col-
league Ronald Troxel.
18. Ronald E. Clements and G. Johannes Botterweck, “‫ גֹוי‬gôy,” Theological Diction-
ary of the Old Testament, 2: 427, 428; quotation on p. 431.
19. Clements and Botterweck, “‫ גֹוי‬gôy,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament,
2:427; Lipiński, “‫‘ ַﬠם‬am,” ibid., 11:177; Clements and Botterweck, “‫ גֹוי‬gôy,” ibid.,
2:429.
20. Clements and Botterweck, “‫ גֹוי‬gôy,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament,
2: 431, 432.
21. Clements and Botterweck, “‫ גֹוי‬gôy,”” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament,
2:432; G. Bertram and Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Theological Dictionary of the New
Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, transl. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–1976), 4:365–366; H. Strathmann and R. Meyer,

“λαός,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 4:32–50; John L. McKenzie,
Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1977), s.v. “Gentile,”
303; Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia,
PA: Fortress Press, 1981, 2 vols. bound together), 1:152–153, 161, 170, 194 [origi-
nal printing 1974 in 2 vols.].
22. The Book of Ruth provides a notable exception of love’s ability to conquer xeno-
phobia.
23. Cf. Acts 4:10 and 13:24.
24. Strathmann and Meyer, “λαός,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
4:51–52; Bertram and Schmidt, “ἔθνος,” ibid., 2:369–371.
25. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. “Israel,” 405; “Jew,” 437; Zobel, “‫ִִיְׂש ָרֵאל‬
yisrā’ē‘l,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 6:419; Gerhard von Rad,
Karl Georg Kuhn, and Walter Gutbrod, “’Ισραήλ,” Theological Dictionary of the
New Testament, 3:370; James D. G. Dunn, “Who Did Paul Think He Was? A
Study of Jewish-Christian Identity,” New Testament Studies 45 (1999): 187–188.
The singular form of “Jew” occurs ten times in Tanakh, only twice (Jer. 34:9;
Zech. 8:23) outside Esther, one of the latest canonical documents. The plural
appears seventy-four times in Tanakh, with forty-three instances in Esther, and
eighteen more in Ezra/Nehemiah. On the dating of the book of Esther, which
purports to come from the fifth century B.C.E. but is, on literary evidence, a
work from centuries later, most probably the Maccabean Period (167–35 B.C.E.),
see Otto Kaiser, Introduction to the Old Testament: A Presentation of Its Results and
Problems, trans. John Sturdy (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1977), 202–203.
26. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. “Israel,” 405, “Jew,” 437–438; Nils Alstrup
Dahl, “Gentiles, Christians, and Israelites in the Epistle to the Ephesians,” Har-
vard Theological Review 79 (1986): 35–38; A. T. Kraabel, “Greeks, Jews, and Lu-
therans in the Middle Half of Acts,” ibid., 147–150; Dunn, “Who Did Paul Think
He Was?,” 188–189. On Jews as brethren in Christ, see, for example, Acts 14:1,
1 Cor. 9:20; as persecutors, for example, John 5:16, 9:22.
27. Hans Windisch, “‘Éλλην,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 4:509–
513.
28. 1 Pet. 4:16. The other verses are Acts 11:26, 26:28. “Christian” was originally a
term of contempt that, as so often happens, the objects of derision eventually
embraced.
29. Bertram and Schmidt, “ἔθνος,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
2:370; McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. “Christian,” 130. There are dozens
of references to Christians as “saints”; see, for example, Rom. 1:7; Acts 9:13. For
“the Way,” see Acts 9:2, 19; 9:23; 22:4; 24:14, 22; for “saints and faithful breth-
ren,” Col. 1:2; for “body of Christ, and members in particular,” 1 Cor. 12:27.
30. Strathmann and Meyer, “λαός,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
4:54–55; McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. “Israel,” 405; von Rad, Kuhn, and
Gutbrod, “’Ισραήλ,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 3:385, 386, 387–
388. Gestures appear in quotations from Tanakh (cf. Heb. 8:8, 10) and in Gal.
6:15–16.
31. David F. Wright, “A Race Apart? Jews, Gentiles, Christians,” Bibliotheca Sacra
160 (April–June 2003): 131–141; Denise Kimber Buell, “Rethinking the Rele-
vance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” Harvard Theological Review
94 (2001): 449–476.
32. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in
American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14–73, 151–152;
quotations pp. 14, 38.
33. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Gentile,” A.I.1, B.I.1 and examples; F. F. Bruce,
History of the Bible in English, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
34. In the Old Testament, KJV translates gôy with “Gentiles” in thirty instances,
fifteen in Isaiah. In the New Testament, “Gentiles” translates éthnē ninety-
two times; Héllēnes five times (John 7:35 twice; Rom. 3:9; 1 Cor. 10:32; 12:13);
and éthnikós once (Gal. 2:14). The singular “Gentile” translates Héllēn in Rom.
2:9, 10.
35. Dunn, “Who Did Paul Think He Was?,” 192–193 and passim.
36. Shipps, Mormonism, 81. See also Melodie Moench, “Nineteenth-Century Mor-
mons: The New Israel,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (Spring
1979): 42–56, although, in light of Shipps’s argument, one might suggest that
the Saints thought they were literally restoring “Old Israel,” not a “new” one.
On the degree to which Mormons Christologize Jewish scripture, see Melodie
Moench Charles, “The Mormon Christianizing of the Old Testament,” Sunstone
5 (November 1980): 35–39.
37. For various senses, see Omni 1:22 (“all human beings”), Omni 1:14 (“a body of
persons living under a national government”), Hel. 3:9 (“a group sharing cul-
tural traits”), Hel. 1:6 (“the mass of ordinary persons as distinguished from
their rulers”), and Words of Mormon 1:12 (“subjects of a specific ruler”).
38. “My people” appears in 252 of the 1,689 different verses in the Book of Mormon,
Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price (1981 LDS edition). Of the 276
specific instances (the phrase appears twice in two dozen verses), 139 are spoken
by an individual and 137 by a divine presence. In 1 Nephi 19:3, “possess the land”
refers to God’s covenantal promise; for “other purposes,” see D&C 3:19.
39. The phrase “House of Israel” appears 146 times in KJV, 83 times in Ezekiel,
and another 20 in Jeremiah. These figures replicate the underlying Hebrew beit
Yisrâ’êl in Tanakh. It appears 126 times in Mormon scriptures (118 in the Book
of Mormon text plus twice on the title page, and 6 times in the Doctrine and
Covenants, but not in the Pearl of Great Price). Since the Book of Mormon
alone is roughly one third the size of the complete Bible (Barlow, Mormons and
the Bible, 28), a percentage not changed substantially by adding the Doctrine
and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, the Mormon usage is considerably
greater. In contrast, the KJV employs “Children of Israel” 641 times, all but 14
in the Old Testament; in comparison, the Book of Mormon has only 8 appear-
ances, the Doctrine and Covenants another 8, and the Pearl of Great Price
none. In Frank J. Johnson and Rabbi William J. Leffler, Jews and Mormons: Two
Houses of Israel (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2000), 148–149, John-
son, a Mormon high priest (ix), links “House of Israel” for modern Mormons
to the general revelation granted Smith and Oliver Cowdery at Kirtland on April
3, 1836 (D&C 110:11–12, although, as Johnson notes, v. 11 speaks only of the
“gathering of Israel,” not the “House”) and to more specific references given in
patriarchal blessings. However that may be, “House of Israel” is rife in the
Book of Mormon.
40. Daniel C. Peterson, “Covenant in the Book of Mormon,” in Covenant and Cho-
senness in Judaism and Mormonism, ed. Raphael Jospe, Truman G. Madsen, and
Seth Ward (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 33–56.
41. Frank Johnson, in Jews and Mormons, 147–148, rightly points out that Smith’s
vision of 1820, like Moses’s upon Sinai, was a theophany, and in that sense it
represents a new and distinct event.
42. Cf. Wilford Woodruff’s comment that the Jews “said if we let Jesus alone he will
come and take away our state and Nation so they crusifyed [sic] him shed his
blood and said let it be upon us and our Children,” Wilford Woodruff’s Journal,
1833–1898, typescript, ed. Scott G. Kenney, 9 vols. (Midvale, UT: Signature
Books, 1983–1985), 2:425.
43. One was Alpheus Cutler’s repudiation of the Gentiles because they had mur-
dered Joseph Smith; see Danny L. Jorgensen, “The Old Fox: Alpheus Cutler,” in
Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History, ed. Roger D. Launius and Linda
Thatcher (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 170.
44. Ezra T. Benson, “Autobiography,” Instructor 80 (1945): 102, reproduced in
Milton V. Backman Jr. in cooperation with Keith W. Perkins, Writings of Early
Latter-day Saints and Their Contemporaries: A Database Collection, Excerpts, 2nd
ed., rev. and enl. (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies
Center, 1996), available on LDS Collectors Library ’97, CD-ROM (Provo, UT:
Infobases, 1996).
45. Benson, “Autobiography,” 102.
46. Woodruff, 4:461, 373; 3:185.
47. Norton Jacob, “Autobiography,” typescript, 26, L. Tom Perry Special Collec-
tions, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, in Back-
man and Perkins, Writings; R[e]uben Miller, “Letter to Sabey [Henry Eriksen],
November 16, 1848,” family typescript, 2, in ibid.; Eliza Roxcy Snow, “Hail to
the Twelve and Pioneers,” ll. 9–12. All quotations from Snow’s work come from
materials graciously provided by Jill Mulvay Derr, then director of the Joseph
Fielding Smith Institute, who is compiling an anthology of Snow’s verse; CD in
my possession. The poem appeared originally in Millennial Star 10 (January 15,
1848): 30.
48. Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of

Race and Lineage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 166.
49. Arnold H. Green, “Jews in LDS Thought,” BYU Studies 34 (1994–1995): 140–
144, 154–155.
50. Woodruff, Woodruff’s Journal, 3:364.
51. D[avid] W. Patten, Letter “To the Saints scattered abroad,” Elders’ Journal 1 (July
1838): 40. Joseph Smith was then its editor.
52. Eliza Roxcy Snow, “The Jews—Part First,” ll. 15–17, 21–23, originally printed in
Quincy Whig 3 (July 11, 1840), n.p.
53. Woodruff, Woodruff’s Journal, 2:426.
54. Joseph Holbrook, “Autobiography,” typescript, Perry Special Collections, in
Backman and Perkins, Writings, 9–10; Eliza Roxcy Snow, “The Jews—Part
Second,” ll. 26–27, 30–31, Quincy Whig 3 (July 18, 1840): n.p.
55. Seymour Cain, “Judaism and Mormonism: Paradigm and Supersession,” Dia-
logue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 25 (Fall 1992): 57. For a modern expression
of that hope, see Johnson and Leffler, Jews and Mormons, 187–206.
56. On Seixas, see D. Kelly Ogden, “The Kirtland Hebrew School (1835–36),” in
Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint History: Ohio, ed. Milton V. Backman Jr.
(Provo, UT: BYU Department of Church History and Doctrine, 1990), 69–80.
57. Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration 1820–1880, The
Jewish People in America Series (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992), 56–59.
58. Rudolf Glanz, Jew and Mormon: Historic Group Relations and Religious Outlook
(New York: Waldron Press, 1963), 156–232; S[olomon] N[unes] Carvalho, Inci-
dents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West . . . (New York: Derby and Jackson,
1857), 205–260; I[srael] J[oseph] Benjamin, Three Years in America, 1859–1862,
transl. Charles Reznikoff, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1956), 2:223–255.
59. Louisa Barnes Pratt, “Autobiography,” in Heart Throbs of the West, comp. Kate B.
Carter, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1939–1951),
8:237, in Backman and Perkins, Writings; grammar standardized.
60. Cf. Glanz’s conclusion, Jew and Mormon, 332: “Mormonism appears as the con-
queror of old Christian-European inhibitions vis-à-vis Judaism and as the crea-
tor of a new relationship to the old Bible people and its religious world.” Cor-
roboration from a negative direction comes from Frederic Cople Jaher, A
Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in Amer-
ica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), who mentions only a
single instance of Mormon prejudice (240), which may have been brought by
British immigrants. See also Benjamin, Three Years in America, 2:224, and Sey-
mour Cain, “The Mormon Quest for the Kingdom of God,” Midstream 37
(1991): 27.
61. Glanz, Jew and Mormon, 145–155; Arnold H. Green, “A Survey of LDS Proselyt-
ing Efforts to the Jewish People,” BYU Studies 8 (Summer 1968): 429–430;
Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 169–171. On Neibaur, see D. Kelly Ogden, “Two
from Judah Ministering to Joseph,” in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint His-
tory: Illinois, ed. H. Dean Garrett (Provo, UT: BYU Department of Church His-
tory and Doctrine, 1995), 225–237, 242–247.
62. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, “Scenes and Incidents in Nauvoo,” Woman’s Expo-
nent 11 (1882–1883): 70, in Backman and Perkins, Writings; George D. Smith,
ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City, UT:
Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1995), 281.
63. Jacob Hamblin, “Autobiography,” typescript, Perry Special Collections, in Back-
man and Perkins, Writings, 2, grammar standardized; John Whitmer, “A Book
of John Whitmer Kept by Commandment,” typescript by Pauline Hancock,
Perry Special Collections, in ibid., 8.
64. Hamblin, “Autobiography,” 12; Woodruff, Woodruff’s Journal, 1:339, 4:77.
65. Utes: Mosiah Hancock, “Autobiography,” typescript comp. Amy E. Baird, Victo-
ria L. Jackson, and Laura L. Wassell, Perry Special Collections, in Backman and
Perkins, Writings, 56, grammar standardized; Shoshones: Woodruff, Woodruff’s
Journal, 4:144; Cheyennes and Crows: Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 435.
66. Friends: “Journal of Lucina Mecham Boren,” Treasures of Pioneer History, 6
(1957), 302; allies: Woodruff, Woodruff’s Journal, 4:225, 289; trading partners:
John Lowe Butler, “Autobiography of John Lowe Butler I,” typescript, in Back-
man and Perkins, Writings, 43; Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 281; the Omahas:
Woodruff, Woodruff’s Journal, 3:72; Lynne Slater Turner, comp., Emigrating
Journals of The Willie and Martin Handcart Companies and The Hunt and Hodgett
Wagon Trains (n.p.: L.S. Turner, 1996), 33.
67. Whiskey: Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 279; begging: Silas Hillman, “Autobiogra-
phy,” typescript, in Backman and Perkins, Writings, 30, grammar standardized;
thieving: Sarah Beriah Fiske Allen, “Autobiography,” typescript, Family History
and Land Records Office, LDS Visitors Center, Nauvoo, Illinois, in ibid., 7; mur-
derous: Mary A. Phelps Rich, “Autobiography of Mary A. Rich,” typescript,
Perry Special Collections, in ibid., 70.
68. Oliver Cowdery, “Letter VII to W. W. Phelps,” Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and
Advocate 1 (July 1835), 158; Hancock, “Autobiography,” 34.
69. Will Bagley, ed., The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon
Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1997), 115;
Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 52–58, 61, 64–69, and passim; Hancock, “Auto-
biography,” 47.
70. William Draper, “Autobiography of William Draper,” typescript, Perry Special
Collections, in Backman and Perkins, Writings, 20–21; Clarissa Wilhelm, “Au-
tobiography,” photograph of typescript, Perry Special Collections, in ibid., 4.
71. Whitmer, “Book of John Whitmer,” 1; D. Michael Quinn, trans., ed., “The First
Months of Mormonism: A Contemporary View by Rev. Diedrich Willers,” New
York History 54 (July 1973): 330–331; Joseph Kingsbury, “History of Joseph C.
Kingsbury,” n.p., New Mormon Studies CD-ROM: A Comprehensive Resource Li-

brary (Salt Lake City, UT: Smith Research Associates, 1998).
72. W. W. Phelps, Letter to Sally Phelps, September 9, 1835, in “Journal History of
William W. Phelps,” Archives of the Family and Church History Department,
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, on New Mormon
Studies CD-ROM; Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia: A
Compilation of Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Women in the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: A. Jenson History
Company and Deseret News, 1901–1936), 3:693; Butler, “Autobiography,” 39.
73. Eliza Roxcy Snow, “The Camp of Israel (Written on the Journey from Nauvoo
to the West),” ll. 9–10. The printed version first appeared in Millennial Star 10
(May 15, 1848): 160; its chorus (ll. 5–8) reads: “Tho’ oppression’s waves roll o’er
us, / We will praise our God and king; / We’ve a better day before us— / Of that
day we proudly sing.” The version quoted appeared in Snow’s manuscript jour-
nal and can also be found in Eliza R. Snow, Biography and Family Record of Lo-
renzo Snow, One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Co., 1884), 86. It is reprinted in Ken-
neth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey, and Jill Mulvay Derr, eds., Women’s Voices:
An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints 1830–1900 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret
Book, 1982), 152.
74. Arnold H. Green, “Gathering and Election: Israelite Descent and Universalism
in Mormon Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History 25 (1999): 195–228.
75. Joseph Grafton Hovey, “Autobiography of Joseph Grafton Hovey,” typescript,
Perry Special Collections, in Backman and Perkins, Writings, 29.
76. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Gentile,” A.I.1.b. The example cited comes from
1851, for example: “The Endowment House . . [.] and all appertaining to it is
carefully concealed from Gentile eyes and ears.”
77. Monte S. Nyman, “Gentiles,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2:541. Cf. Dean L.
May, “Mormons,” Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thern-
strom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980), 729, who
commented about Mormons’ “tendency to regard all non-Mormons as Gen-
tiles” having “diminished Mormon awareness of other ethnic groups.”
78. For a recent example of contestation, see Shipps, “Signifying Saints,” 168–169.
Seth Ward, “Appendix: A Literature Survey of Mormon-Jewish Studies,” in Cov-
enant and Chosenness in Judaism and Mormonism, ed. Jospe, Madsen, and Ward,
197, argues that, in his “classic study of Jewish-Mormon relations,” Rudolf
Glanz “carefully avoids saying ‘Jews were gentiles.’” That appraisal does not
entirely catch Glanz’s position. Glanz, Jew and Mormon, 62–63, does take pains
to disparage what he calls “the big joke of the century, that in Utah the Jew is a
Gentile,” contending that “there is little to prove” such expression. Neverthe-
less, Glanz can also say that, in “pursuit of his economic goal in American life[,
h]e thereby became a carrier of the ‘Gentile’ principle. In this case the ‘Gentiles’
acted through him and would be hurt by his being treated as a ‘Gentile’” (67).
Glanz wants to emphasize that Mormons recognized Jews as “an independent
non-Christian community” (3)—i.e., a religious or theological d istinction—but
that recognition in and of itself did not mean that Mormons could not collapse
the sociological boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Glanz himself provides
an excellent example: the Mormons’ reaction to the creation of Zion’s Coopera-
tive Mercantile Institution (188–213). Moreover, Glanz himself presents evi-
dence demonstrating that Jews themselves thought that Mormons were view-
ing them as Gentiles (210–213). See also Cain, “Mormon Quest,” 25; Annegret
Ogden, “Mormons, Gentiles & Jews: The Voice of Eveline Brooks Auerbach,
Part II,” Californians 11 (1993): 37–38, and, for a twentieth-century instance,
Hanna Bandes, “Gentile and Gentile: Mormon and Jew,” Midstream 27 (Febru-
ary 1981): 10.
79. Cf. Ethan Yorgason, “Creating Regional Identity, Moral Orders and Spatial
Contiguity: Imagined Landscapes of Mormon Americanization,” Cultural Geog-
raphies 9 (2002): 450: “The creation of moral orders depends on the human
ability to reflect on action. In a strictly originary sense, practice is ontologically
prior to moral orders.” By “moral order,” Yorgason means “a set of definitions
regarding what is proper to do and what can reasonably be expected from
others, or the sense of what people feel they owe one another as members of a
community.”
80. Cf. R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 31–36.
81. D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the
Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 55 (June 1965): 191–220, quotation p. 191; Lowell C.
Bennion, “Meinig’s ‘Mormon Culture Region’ Revisited,” Historical Geography
24 (1995): 23–24.
82. William Norton, “Mormon Identity and Landscape in the Rural Intermountain
West,” Journal of the West 37 (July 1998): 38; Dell Upton, “But Is It History?:
What the Cultural Landscape Can Teach Us,” Journal of Mormon History 32
(Summer 2005): 1–29.
83. Meinig, “Mormon Culture Region,” 192. Richard H. Jackson, one of the fore-
most students of Mormons and their physical environment, early in his career
posited that the landscape qualified as “Mormon” “because it was settled and
occupied by Mormons” but that “the value system underlying it” derived from
“American agrarianism.” Jackson, “Religion and Landscape in the Mormon
Cultural Region,” in Dimensions of Human Geography: Essays on Some Familiar
and Neglected Themes, ed. Karl W. Butzer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago,
1978), 100–127, quotation p. 126. Norton, “Mormon Identity,” 39–40 and
passim, disputes Jackson. See also Jeanne Kay and Craig J. Brown, “Mormon
Beliefs about Land and Natural Resources, 1847–1877,” Journal of Historical Ge-
ography 11 (1985): 253–267, who, while asserting the “implications” of Mormon

“religious teachings for their landscape attitudes, allocation practices, and
management” (254), also acknowledge that early Mormon villages “apparently
took their compact form from practical community concerns, such as access to
education, defense, and cooperative irrigation projects,” with the design then
reiterated by “force of habit” (258).
84. On Mormons as chosen, see Kay and Brown, “Mormon Beliefs about Land,”
255–256, 259, and passim. On communitarianism, see Jackson, “Religion and
Landscape,” 100–101, 126–127; Richard H. Jackson, “Mormon Wests: The Cre-
ation and Evolution of an American Region,” in Western Places, American Myths:
How We Think about the West, ed. Gary J. Hausladen (Reno, NV: University of
Nevada Press, 2003), 133–165, esp. 144–145; Kay and Brown, “Mormon Beliefs
about Land,” 259; Norton, “Mormon Identity,” 39. On the importance of the
hierarchy, see Norton, “Mormon Identity,” 38–42; Jackson, “Mormon Wests,”
140–142.
85. Norton, “Mormon Identity,” 39–40, speaks about “identity” in terms of ecclesi-
astical authority.
86. Thomas F. O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1957); May, “Mormons,” 720–731, quotation p. 727.
87. Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimi-
lation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 63–64, more generally
46, 60–74; Armand L. Mauss, “Mormons as Ethnics: Variable Historical and
International Implications of an Appealing Concept,” in The Mormon Presence
in Canada, ed. Brigham Y. Card, Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard
Palmer, and George K. Jarvis (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990),
332–352, quotation p. 345; Keith Parry, “Mormons as Ethnics: A Canadian Per-
spective,” ibid., 353–365, quotations pp. 357, 362.
88. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Peace Initiative: Using the Mormons to Rethink
Culture and Ethnicity in American History,” in Patricia Nelson Limerick, Some-
thing in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2000), 235–255, quotations p. 247.
89. Parry, “Mormons as Ethnics,” 356.
90. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 225–256. Butler’s treatment of Mor-
monism (242–247) emphasizes the impact of magic in creating an originally
syncretistic mix of “occult and Christian elements” (246). Noting the influence
of magic in Mormonism’s first decades is fair—see D. Michael Quinn, Early
Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books,
1987), and John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology,
1644–1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)—but as Butler points
out (see esp. pp. 67–97, 225–234), Mormons’ attraction to magic hardly made
them unique.
91. Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1972), 508; Edwin Gaustad, A Religious History of Amer-
ica, new rev. ed. (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1990), 158; Grant Wacker,
“Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Religion in American Life: A Short
History, ed. Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 213; Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United
States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 192.
92. On movement, see Noll, History of Christianity, 195, 197; and Wacker, “Religion
in Nineteenth-Century America,” 213. On sect, see Wacker, “Religion in
Nineteenth-Century America,” 220. On new religion, see Wacker, “Religion in
Nineteenth-Century America,” 223; Noll, History of Christianity, 196; and Ahl-
strom, Religious History, 508.
93. Zobel, “‫ ִיְׂש ָר ֵאל‬yisrā’ē‘l,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 6:404; von
Rad, Kuhn, and Gutbrod, “Ισραήλ,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
3:356–358.
94. W. D. Davies, “Israel, the Mormons and the Land,” in Reflections on Mormonism:
Judaeo-Christian Parallels, ed, Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Religious Studies Center, 1978), 88–91.
95. I derive this argument from my reading of Klaus J. Hansen, Quest for Empire:
The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty in Mormon History (East
Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1967); Edwin Brown Firmage
and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1988); Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in Amer-
ica, 1830–1846 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989);
Hill, Quest for Refuge; D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: The Origins of
Power and The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, UT: Sig-
nature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1994, 1997); and
David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American
West, 1847–1896, vol. 2 of Kingdom in the West Series (Spokane, WA: Arthur
H. Clark, 1998). Also pertinent is the remark about the federal government
bringing the LDS Church to its knees in Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of
the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 1,
and, more generally, Yorgason’s argument about Mormon radicalism, vii and
passim.
96. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive, passim; Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in
Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 1986); Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region.
97. For continuing evaluations of peoplehood, see, for instance: Ahlstrom, Reli-
gious History, 508; Mario S. De Pillis, “The Persistence of Mormon Community
into the 1990s,” Sunstone 15 (October 1991): 29–49; Mauss, The Angel and the
Beehive, 60–61, 73; Jeffrey S. Smith and Benjamin N. White, “Detached from
Their Homeland: The Latter-day Saints of Chihuahua, Mexico,” Journal of Cul-

tural Geography 21 (Spring/Summer 2004): 57–76. “Interview: It Finally All
Depends on God: A Conversation with Martin Marty,” Sunstone 11 (March
1987): 46–48, develops the notion that having a “common story” is important
for peoplehood. R. H. Jackson, “The Mormon Experience: The Plains as Sinai,
the Great Salt Lake as the Dead Sea, and the Great Basin as Desert-cum-
Promised Land,” Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992): 41–58, demonstrates
how Mormons have mythologized their struggles with developing the land to
reinforce their self-perceptions as God’s chosen people. See also Bigler’s com-
ment about “historical amnesia,” Forgotten Kingdom, 16.
7
Becoming Mormon
By Elliott West
In the Mormon historical drama, children have always stood close to

center stage. Joseph Smith was barely past childhood at the time of his
first vision. Throughout his life he treated the young with special re-
spect. The innocence of the child was an early, vital doctrine in Mormon
theology, and Church fathers spent considerable energy setting stan-
dards for proper childrearing.1 In the debates and ravings that swirled
around this new religion, all sides used boys and girls as arguing points
to press their cases. Critics warned that crowds of unruly teenagers and
“ragged, squalid, miserable looking children” in Mormon communities
were living forecasts of the social disaster awaiting all who embraced the
faith. Defenders answered that LDS homes were islands of security and
love—and then, when trying to shore up a flagging religious discipline,
reversed course to claim that misbehaving youngsters were proof of a
slippage of commitment.2 And while observers fought long and hard
about nearly everything else, all agreed that in one sort of production, at
least, nobody could touch the Saints. A visitor to a Mormon rancher in
1863 wrote that the man “has been very successful in raising cattle and
children. His cattle lie down peacefully in green pastures beside the still
waters, and his [children] lie down peacefully all over the house, on beds
and on the floor.”3
Given that everybody easily recognized the importance of children, it is
interesting that few if any adults at the time took the apparently radical
step of stopping a few girls and boys to ask them what their lives were like,
or how they saw their futures, or what they believed, or what they thought
about what was going on around them. And with some exceptions most
historians have ignored them as well.4
I hope to peek a little into the lives of the youngest Saints during the
Church’s earliest years. I’ll stay roughly within a quarter century, from the
Becoming Mormon 171
early 1830s and the first conversions to the faith through the 1850s and
establishment of Mormon settlements out here in Utah. Right away I have
to alert you to a problem. Remarkably few documents from the hands of
the boys and girls themselves seem to have survived. We do, however,
have scores of reminiscences and memoirs written later, often much later,
by men and women who lived through those years as children. We all
know the difficulties in using this material. As time passes, we all rear-
range our memories. We emphasize some events and details, and we take
others out. We shift things around, rephrase conversations, change the
characters. We embellish. We invent. The same was true of the men and
women who wrote down the memories I’ll show you today.
Still, rearranged or not, these memories certainly can tell us something
about what actually happened from the point of view of actors who have
been mostly ignored until now—who, we might say, have been seen but
not heard. But what I want to emphasize just as much is that we can learn
a lot, too, from the very distortions of those stories. How those men and
women altered the past—what they chose to trim and rearrange—can be
just as revealing as the unvarnished truth.
Let me explain what I mean by that. Think for a moment of your own
experience and the family tales you’ve heard from your parents and grand-
parents. You’ll probably agree that we don’t really change our memory
randomly. We revise it according to how we have come to think about our-
selves. The stories we tell of our lives are a bit like movie scripts. The in-
dividual scenes in that script are the memories we have chosen to include,
just a few from the multitude of possibilities. Those memories, the scenes
in the script, carry us to the conclusion—that is, to us as we are right now.
As in all good movies, the ending is supposed to make sense. So we go
back and trim down and spruce up our personal scripts. After choosing
the memories to include, we revise this scene or that, adding and deleting
action and dialogue, until we have a clean and understandable story about
how we’ve come to be as we are. But there’s a problem we will all recog-
nize. The end of the movie—that’s us in the here-and-now—keeps chang-
ing. Our values change. How we look at the world changes. We learn. We
evolve, usually subtly but sometimes drastically. So what do we do? We
keep revising the script. Each of us is continuously rewriting and rear-
ranging the scenes of our past, bringing some in and tossing out others,
so that they add up to a story that brings us neatly and sensibly to what is,
for the moment, the end: who we are today and how we understand
ourselves.
I hope this does not sound too psychologically highfalutin. If highfalu-

tin is what you want to be, there is in fact a fascinating new school of psy-
chological development based on this notion that we’re all continuously
revising our personal narratives.5 But I’m really only suggesting some-
thing simple and commonsensical and certainly familiar to every histo-
rian. Once we recognize this dynamic in the making of m emories—if we
pay attention to how these actors rewrote their own scripts, if we look for
patterns in what they have chosen to stress and the words and details they
use—then we can learn something about how they came to see them-
selves near the end and how they believed that their early years had given
meaning to the lives they would live out building the Church.
For what makes these memories especially important is this: The
1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were formative also for the Mormon religious and
social community. Think of the terms we might use to describe this stage
of LDS history. There was the birth of the restored faith, then youthful
trials and self-exploration, the search for identity, a turbulent adolescence,
a casting out by political and social parents, and finally a painful coming
of age and the achievement of independent character. We can use the
same language to describe the Church and the children we’ll hear today
maturing together, and I’m suggesting this morning that the parallel is
more than rhetorical. The memories of these youngest Saints are so inter-
woven with the story of the Church that I, for one, wonder whether the
two have much meaning apart from each other. And that, in turn, has
some intriguing implications I’ll mention at the end of this talk.
Those early years fall pretty neatly into three periods that I’ll look at in
turn. The first I’ll call the time of conversion, when the first Mormons dis-
covered the faith. The second period was the first gathering, when sub-
stantial numbers gravitated to Missouri and Illinois from the mid- and
late-1830s to 1846. In the last phase, the exodus—from 1846 to the late
1850s—the expelled Saints made the great trek to the West and founded
the new Zion.
In many particulars, childhood memories from the conversion period
and from all three periods are not so different from those of adults. There’s
the introduction to the faith, the excitement of new teachings, the derision
and first reprisals from nonbelievers. The differences are in the nuances
and the emphases. But when we look closely, right away they begin to tell
us something. Caroline West Larrabee was a young girl in London when
her parents converted. She recalled meetings and prayers and problems
with relatives unhappy with the family’s new life. When she was ten and
Becoming Mormon 173
her sister six, her parents sent the two of them ahead to America with an
emigrant company. “We left London in the morning,” she recalled. “I re-
member leaving Father, Mother, brother and sister. Did I cry? No, I was
going to Zion.”6 The rest of the account of the long journey to Missouri,
however, never mentions religion, or for that matter much of anything
outside one topic: food. Caroline liked shipboard meals of beef and sea
biscuit; and when she and her sister sang to the cook he would give them
sweetcakes, but on the train to Missouri, “oh, dear, how hungry we
were. . . . We bought bread . . . [but] it was like eating wind, there was noth-
ing to it.” On the steamboat, they suffered from both hunger and thirst, for
the warm river water seemed half sand. The highlight of Caroline’s trip
came when a kind couple gave her and her sister candy, crackers, and
cheese.7
Caroline first told us that her religious commitment was foremost in
her mind—something almost surely added later—but when she chose
her details she betrayed her real concern. When thrust into a frightening
and uncertain situation like hers, a girl or boy will fix on primal needs,
starting with the basics of eating. Caroline’s concern was with a full belly,
not a faithful heart, and it reminds us that conversion often brought with
it a shattering of what had been a secure life. For her it was the tempo-
rary loss of parents and siblings. For others the break was far more trau-
matic. Lawrence Mariger of Denmark was one of many who watched
their parents’ marriages splinter, in his case in 1856 when his mother
converted and his father did not. Under Danish law the father retained
the children; but while Lawrence was visiting his mother, she had him
baptized, secured false papers for him and his two siblings, and smug-
gled them out of the country with her. En route to Salt Lake City, his
mother died, leaving twelve-year-old Lawrence and the others in the care
of their new community.8
The thought of losing the protective net of kin and loved ones is called
“separation anxiety,” and it is every child’s deepest fear. We can all recall
twinges of it in our own childhoods, that moment when you thought you
had lost a parent in a store, perhaps; but for Lawrence Mariger and many
others, this nightmare was not briefly hinted at but made terribly real. In
other memories, we hear how losing faith in life’s basics left these chil-
dren with fears that, years later, were still raw and immediate. When five-
year-old Carl Nielson’s parents converted in Norway in 1860, all friends
quickly turned against the family and his father was fired. There was no
other support. Gradually the food gave out, meals were missed, and finally
the Nielsons went hungry for three days. Carl remembered a deep inner
panic as he and his mother prayed and his father left on a desperate hunt
for something for the table. The search ended with a prize that seemed
heaven-sent: a sack of bread.9
For these children the choice of becoming Mormon triggered a fright-
ful predicament. The struts that had held life together suddenly fell away;
everything tottered; power shifted instantly into the hands of others who
had nothing good on their minds when they looked down at children like
Caroline and Lawrence and Carl. It’s in this context that another theme in
these memories makes sense. As adults, these converts would look back
and recall moments when, as children, they found within themselves
what was needed to bring at least some control to their lives. Carl Nielson
wrote:
Several women came to our home, father being absent . . . , and

they began to abuse my mother for being a Mormon, until my dear
mother began to cry very bitterly at their abuse. Then little Carl got
up on a chair and with doubled fist commanded the women to leave
his mother alone and the women in astonishment at the five-year-
old boy defending his mother, left the house.10
It is almost as if we’re seeing a new person appearing—the adult Nielson

refers to himself in the third person (“little Carl,” “the five-year-old boy”)—
not literally someone new, of course, but new in the sense of Carl’s char-
acter being turned sharply in a new direction. Stories like this speak to me
of men and women years later looking back on a troubled and unsettling
time and recognizing that, out of those troubles, someone emerged, a
person strong enough to begin to regain a grip on an unraveling life. To
use a current buzzword, these are stories of empowerment, and they are
all the more intriguing because their setting is the troubled emergence as
well of a new faith and community. These young people and this young
religion are meshing together in memories of painful mutuality.
This theme runs through all three periods of the early church. It’s a
theme that rises in pitch and intensity during the gathering in Missouri
and Illinois. We see again the fears of separation, the desperation over
needful things going or gone, and the discovery of power and control, all
of it now ratcheted up several notches. Surely one of the most disturbing
documents from this time is the reminiscence of Mary Elizabeth Worth
Peoples. Mary wrote more than forty years after living in Nauvoo, at age
Becoming Mormon 175
seven, during its bombardment and occupation in 1846. Her mother—

divorced and caring for Mary, an older sister, and a younger brother—had
joined her brother in Nauvoo; but when the city fell, he had already gone
ahead to Iowa. Mary’s mother was allowed to stay the winter, but she fell
ill and, with little food, weakened rapidly. The three children awoke one
morning to find her dead:
We sent to the neighbors to tell them. They came and performed

the necessary duties and that night several young and giddy folks
came and sit [sic] up with the corpse and the next day two men came
with a wagon to take our Dear Mother away from us to bury her out
of sight. We then more fully realized (perhaps they did not bury her
at all) our condition. They would not let one of us go to see where
they laid her. No they took her away and left us alone.11
Mary’s nine-year-old sister took them to the home of a doctor for whom
she had done chores:
We was very cold and hungry. There we went in and saw the table
spread with luxury [but] not one crust did [they] give my little
brother, three years old, and myself but said they wold keep my
older sister.12
Mary was given to another family and her brother to yet another. Now
isolated from anyone he knew, “my little brother so young cried to go
home to mother and annoyed them so much they put him out of doors
one evening. . . . He went to the old vacant lonely house and stayed all
night alone, a cold frost night. The next morning [a woman] who lived a
short distance away heard him crying and went and took him in and cared
for him.”13
Soon afterward, mercifully, the children’s uncle came for them. It
would be hard to devise a waking nightmare worse than this: the grad-
ual peeling away of family, the hunger, the loss of the final protector
and denial even of knowing where to find her remains, then separation
from each other and that boy’s heartbreaking night, crying in the dark-
ness and looking for his mother in the cold, empty house. Others are
almost as painful. Benjamin Critchlow remembered a mob forcing his
family to leave their Missouri farm before harvest when he was eleven:
“The latter part of the fall . . . I remember I was hungry all the time. I
went to bed hungry, got up in the morning hungry, and was hungry all
day.” His father punched holes in a piece of tin, nailed it to a board and
rubbed green corn across it to make a little meal for small cakes, “not
half enough to satisfy . . . a hungry boy like myself. . . . It was scant
returns.”14
Yet Benjamin emphasizes that he survived these hungry times and
that he is proud that he found what he needed to make it through. More
explicitly, he and others push to the center of our attention something
else they obviously consider crucial to their story as the persecuted—
healings, miracles, and moments of divine protection. Critchlow remem-
bered several—the paralyzed made to walk, the instant curing of the
near-dead. Some godly interventions were almost comically ordinary.
William Moore Allred recalled as a boy knowing a Brother Harven whose
mouth had an unfortunate way of drawing hard to one side when he
laughed, which a pparently bothered his neighbors. After the elders ad-
ministered to him, he could immediately laugh out of the front of his
face, just like everybody else.15
Most suggestive were instances when children found that they them-
selves had what was needed to influence their world and to protect those
around them. Gathered with the Saints, this awareness of power could
take an institutional form. Young boys volunteered for militia groups and
more famously formed the “whistling and whittling brigade,” in which the
sons of Nauvoo flexed their ability to intimidate by surrounding suspected
enemies of the Church, whistling loudly and whittling on sticks with
bowie knives.16 In more intimate moments, something similar is acted
out within individual children who call up power from within. Samuel
Gifford was twelve years old during the harassment in Clay County, Mis-
souri, when Mormon families seemed utterly at the mercy of an un-
checked hostility. He and friends were hiding in a corral when a crowd
passed by on their way home from organizing a raid against Samuel’s
family and neighbors. He apologized for his thoughts—to wish harm to
anyone, even an enemy, was shameful, he wrote later—“but nevertheless
I said ‘I hope they will get drowned before they get across the river.’” The
first news of the morning, sure enough, was that the ferry had suddenly
sprung a leak in midstream and sank. Among those lost were one of the
two ringleaders. The other survived by stripping and swimming to shore
several miles downstream. His fate, however, was almost as satisfying:
“He . . . was naked and far from home and had to pass through a large
bottom of nettles that were densely thick.”17
Becoming Mormon 177
Sending your tormentor naked to a nettlefield: Now that’s a twelve-

year-old’s definition of empowerment. Variations run throughout memo-
ries of this time. It’s a universal impulse, of course, a fantasizing of power
when everyone, from a child’s eye, seems bigger and stronger and poten-
tially threatening. But two differences set these memories apart. The
threats were not potential but real; and the power to stand up to them, the
children’s first germ of self-assurance, took its particular shape around the
Mormon faith and the menace toward it.
Occasionally this emerging child’s puissance and the Church’s trials
fuse almost totally, then soar into flights of fancy. The result is what I’ll
call the LDS Tall Tale, Juvenile Division. Listen to Mosiah Hancock, born
in Kirtland. When he was three, his family moved to Far West. His dim-
mest early recollections were of a howling mob outside his house as his
brother was being born, then of fleeing their farm with only what they
could carry. He recalls his father as a man of exceptional inspired powers.
On the flight from their home, the father summoned out of thin air a new
pair of shoes for his exhausted wife. In Nauvoo he was struck in the breast
by a rifle shot fired from twenty feet away by the future apostate Francis
Higbee, but the bullet fell harmlessly to the ground and his father raised
it to heaven in thankful salute to God’s protecting hand.18
Elsewhere Mosiah makes clear that he inherited at least some of his
father’s powers. During an especially hungry stretch, some pigs were
bothering his father as he plowed. The irritated man picked up a thick
block of wood and said if they came close again he would kill them.
Mosiah retired to a thicket and prayed for exactly that. An offensive porker
approached. His father hurled the wood and dropped him dead in his
tracks. That night there was meat on the table. But the bounty was not
finished:
The rest of the shoats did not seem satisfied, so they came back
again. The same boy made another prayer [notice again the use of
the third person, a new individual emerging], and the same arm
threw the same piece of wood, another shoat died right there, and
mother skinned [it]. We were all happy as long as the meat lasted. I
always felt that God opened the way for us to get something to eat.19
To me the most remarkable passage recalls an episode when Mosiah

was eight. Joseph Smith came to his father’s carpenter shop in Nauvoo, he
writes, and told Mosiah to fetch a map. Then Smith prophesied in detail
the following twenty years of the Mormon story. He traced the move to the
Winter Quarters, the great trek to the Salt Lake Valley, the rise of a pros-
perous society, its spread north and south, and the expanding sway of
Deseret. He prophesied the nation’s political course, including the rise of
the Republican Party (by name) and the Civil War. All this he laid before
the eight-year-old Mosiah. A few years later, when the bodies of the mar-
tyred prophet and his brother were returned to Nauvoo, Mosiah tells of
his father taking him to the bodies after all mourners had left: “[He] told
me to place one hand on Joseph’s breast and to raise my other arm and
swear with hand uplifted that I would never make a compromise with any
of the sons of Hell, which vow I took with a determination to fulfill to the
very letter.”20
Mosiah Hancock retold the Nauvoo story both as a history of the Saints’
trials and as a passing of authority and divine power from father to son
and from one generation of Mormonism’s defenders to the next. From
one perspective, it is especially outrageous in tone and detail; but from
another it’s merely an exaggeration of many accounts of growing up
through those times. The authors are telling us that in Far West, Clay
County, and Nauvoo they found a direction for their lives, both in terms of
who they might become and literally in the path traced by the Prophet’s
finger across Mosiah Hancock’s map laid out beside the lathe in his fa-
ther’s carpenter shop.
That direction was westward—the exodus and regathering that forms
the third and last period of these childhood memories. Now came the final
heightening of themes of the first two—the ultimate separation, geo-
graphical and social and familial, the harshest suffering, the culminating
hostility of an army marching against Deseret. And it’s in these recollec-
tions that we see the identities crystallized among these youngest Saints.
The exodus again shattered families and unsettled to the roots these
youngsters’ earlier notions of who they were and where they belonged.
Joseph Moesser’s parents had joined the Church when he was nine; but
when his father rejected it on the eve of emigration to Winter Quarters,
his mother spirited her children across the Mississippi, all but the young-
est daughter, who finally was delivered to the mother after she cried inces-
santly for weeks and would not sleep.21 Edwin Pettit was eight when his
newly converted parents died within two weeks of one another in 1842
near Nauvoo, and he was taken in by a non-Mormon family. When his
older sister and her husband chose to join the exodus, he wanted to go
with her; but his guardian refused, so Edwin stole away to the emigrant
Becoming Mormon 179
camp, and there he fuzzed out his old identity still further to elude his
pursuers:
I borrowed a sunbonnet and a girl’s dress and joined four or five

girls in a line washing dishes when my brothers entered camp.
They passed right in back of me but did not recognize me. Then the
girls and I crossed the Des Moines River on a flatboat. . . . I had to
ride sidesaddle behind my friend on a horse. Passing strangers, I
would lower my head. Strangers would call out because they
thought I was asleep, “Hey, old man, that girl will fall off; she’s
asleep.” The old man would call back, “Mary Ann, wake up or you’ll
fall off and break your neck.”22
Disease and hunger tore at other families. Within months the ten-year-
old Alma Hale saw his mother die in childbirth, his father of malaria, and
his two sisters of scurvy, leaving him to head west from Winter Quarters
with an older brother and sister and a younger brother. Fourteen-year-old
Harrison Sperry and his three siblings also lost both parents and a brother
during that awful winter. Martin Luther Ensign’s father died there of
scurvy on his forty-eighth birthday, leaving few provisions for his widow
and six young children as they started west.23
Some remembered the overland journey for its adventure and excite-
ment, but for others it was an agony of exhaustion and short supplies, es-
pecially during the handcart disasters.24 Some of the most heart-wrenching
documents of American history are from those who made that passage as
children. Heber McBride recalled, as a thirteen-year-old, slicing strips of
rawhide from dead oxen, crisping them over a fire and drawing them
through his clenched teeth to scrape off a few charred bits. At day’s end
the wailing began: “Then was the time to hear children crying for some-
thing to eat[.] nearly all the children would cry themselves to sleep every
night[.] my 2 little Brothers would get the sack that [used to have] flour in
[it] and turn it wrong side out and suck and lick the flour off it[.] we would
break the [ox] bones and make a little soup by boiling them.”25
In this last period we see the pattern of the first two carried to horrific
extremes. These children of the exodus have cut from under them what
every child needs to count on—family, food, elemental protection. We
could not design an experience more likely to shake their understanding
of how they fit into the world and what might be trusted. The first years in
the Salt Lake Valley were not much better. “We only had bread once or
twice a week,” Joseph Moesser remembered: “[We] dug segoes and other
roots in the spring and summer, eating every particle of the ox and cow
killed, even to its hide.”26 George Washington Bean’s family subsisted on
thistle roots, greens, and thin milk. Barbara Bowen’s parents, Scottish im-
migrants, had no firearms and were reduced to running down rabbits for
their only meat. When the infant Barbara finally drew only blood from her
famished mother’s breasts, her mother traded some of their few clothes
for eggs to wean her daughter. Decades later the feel of crisis remained
vivid and raw.27 For eight-year-old Franklin Young, the turning point came
when his father returned from an unsuccessful hunt for a lost cow. “He
looked pale, and careworn, as he said, ‘Mother I must have something to eat,
or I can’t keep up much longer,’ and I believe I felt the danger of starvation,
as I never had done before nor since. . . . I prayed in my heart as I had not
prayed before. O Lord spare my Father to be a father and protector to us.”
His mother made broth from a cow’s head that had been hanging on a
post, and the slightly revived father found the lost animal the next day.28
In Franklin Young’s answered prayer we see once again, now in this
third phase, the reaching inward to discover a first touch of control, a foot-
hold beside the abyss. And as before, these memories take a particular
form—the call and response of divine intervention. Virtually every child-
hood memoir features one or two and often several immigrants and set-
tlers snatched miraculously from disaster. They come across to me as
echoes by the dozen of the famous God-sent quail to the “poor camp” in
the Mississippi River bottoms and the cricket-gobbling gulls in the Salt
Lake Valley, spoken here in the vernacular of a child’s primal fears. Marga-
ret Ballard was ten when she was searching for a lost cow one night:
I was not watching where I was going and was barefooted. All of a
sudden I began to feel I was walking on something soft. I looked
down to see what it could be and to my horror found that I was
standing in a bed of snakes, large ones and small ones. . . . I could
scarcely move; all I could think of was to pray, and in some way I
jumped out of them. The Lord blessed and cared for me.29
Margaret is showing us one case of something that appears over and

over in these reminiscences of settling in Utah: the Mormon childhood ac-
cident. What’s striking is that these accident stories are far and away most
common during the last phase, that of settlement, and especially during
the latter years, when settlements were firmly rooted and the worst dangers
Becoming Mormon 181
past. Four-year-old Aaron Johnson’s family had begun their farm when he
fell into a creek and was fished out by a passing stranger. A year later he
toppled into the same creek at the same place and was swept downstream
but miraculously was caught in an eddy. A few years later it was a wagon
filled with fertilizer that rolled over his legs, and he’d not been healed long
when he fell through the ice while skating and was nearly drowned.30
Tumbling off horses and into lakes, these children typically are saved by
apparent miracles or by God’s explicitly reaching out his protective hand.
When Horace Cummings was born in a Provo granary, he was thought to
be stillborn; but his father administered to him and he began to breathe.
Nine days later a large cat jumped on his head and clawed him badly; again
quick action saved him. This set the pattern for a misadventurous child-
hood: he was thrown from a horse, toppled off a fence, and was in a wagon
when its team bolted. The worst was when he fell from a willow tree face-
first onto a picket fence. Bedridden for weeks, he was once thought dead
but his father again administered and brought life back into his body.31
Just why accidents and divine healing should show up so often at the
end of this last phase is an interesting question. The world has always
been a chancy place for the young, of course, but unless we agree that
Mormon parents, once settled in Utah, suddenly began producing the
clumsiest children in North America, my guess is that these authors are
trying to tell us something when they shape their memories into accounts
of one near-miss after another. These memories were set after the worst
deprivations, the starvation, and full-blown calamity finally were passed.
Without pushing the point too hard, it is as if the authors are recognizing
that surviving sudden disasters through godly help was close to the very
heart of being Mormon. After all, these boys and girls grew up hearing of
the assaults and terrors in Missouri and Illinois and how youngsters their
age had done their part in facing down a hostile world. Decades later
Aaron Johnson could remember the words to songs his mother sang
about those terrible and courageous days, “The Mormons Never Tire” and
“The Noble Brave Boys of Nauvoo.”32
Now the mobbers were hundreds of miles and ten years in the past, the
starving time replaced by full fields and gardens, but the tradition of those
treacherous years was still fresh. More to the point, Mormons now had
enough history to find in their common experience the makings of a uni-
fying identity, both as a faith and as a people. That history was one of as-
saults and terrible blows of fate; their identity was nested in suffering and
deliverance.
The coming of better times, oddly, brought its own crisis—an end to
the very experiences that Mormons relied on to explain to themselves
who they were. Perhaps the children of these new circumstances were
telling us in their own way the central importance of suffering and being
saved. Perhaps they formed these stories by sifting through their past to
find their own transforming trials. Perhaps these accidents served as re-
capitulations of earlier precarious times, when the Church in so many
ways seemed always to be falling (or being pushed) out of trees and onto
fences. In telling their own survival, perhaps these men and women were
claiming a place with the Saints in Clay County and Nauvoo, the men and
women who had jumped out of their own beds of snakes and had been
snatched so often from the torrent by a watchful God.
Perhaps. What’s plenty clear is that these documents have left us a
story exceptionally important to understanding early Mormon history. It’s
a story of dual emergence. In the outward events, we see a religion and a
community taking their shape. Within the details of those events—in
what the authors choose to tell us and in how it’s all put together—we can
see another emergence. Men and women are looking back and telling us
how as children they discovered who they were and how they fit into the
world.
There’s a pattern that ties those stories together. It’s clear and relent-
less and it’s not very pretty. Children of the conversion, the gathering, and
the exodus often experienced a sudden and terrible erosion of what had
held their lives together. Families were shattered, friends turned to ene-
mies, the wherewithal of life was pulled away. Standard accounts tell of
adults who had their property seized and their social standing destroyed.
These children suffered their own dispossession. Before Mormonism,
their life had been a structure that had made their life safe and predict-
able. Because of Mormonism, that structure was torn down, and they were
left exposed, vulnerable, and sometimes alone. The psychological damage
was surely horrific and, in some cases, irreparable.
But with the tearing down, there came a building up. These children
learned that they had within themselves what it took to gain some mastery
over their lives and their future. It’s this discovery that adults consistently
push toward the front of their childhood stories. It’s this revelation that
they take great pains to describe to us, literally or metaphorically. Did
Little Carl really shake his fist and drive those women away from his weep-
ing mother? Did Mosiah Hancock truly pray those pigs to death, and Sam
Gifford wish the ferry to the bottom of the Mississippi? I don’t know. Was
Becoming Mormon 183
God acting through them to protect the Latter-day Saints? That’s, of

course, a question of faith.
But what does seem clear to me as a historian of childhood, and what
is appropriate to this gathering, is that these memories tell of the merging
of religious and individual identity for an entire generation. For these men
and women, the assaults and the tearing down of their earlier lives as chil-
dren were inseparable from the attack on their emerging church. Their
discovery of strength—that vital step in the creation of a new character—
they remembered as inextricable with saving the Saints and with ushering
in the new Zion.
Except for Civil War children of the invaded South, I cannot think of
another case of an entire American generation’s radical remaking through
massive assaults from an outside force. But there’s a big difference here.
These men and women would not spend their lives mournfully gazing
into the past, identifying with a lost cause. They would live into the future
bound intimately with a cause—an embattled new religion—that had won
its struggle to establish itself and was, in fact, increasingly successful and
secure.
That leads me to a final thought on some possible implications of what
we’ve looked at today for the study of Mormon history. Early in this talk, I
suggested that we select and shape childhood memories to form a story
we then use to remind ourselves of who we are as adults. That story rein-
forces how we respond to our adult world and to the decisions we make as
men and women. But sometimes, after settling in comfortably with a story
that moves cleanly along to who we are, all of a sudden we are asked to
break with it, to change the ending to one that just doesn’t jibe with what
has come before.
Leonard Arrington thirty years ago wrote of four identity crises of the
Mormon Church during its first eighty years. The first was in the 1830s,
with the devising of Mormonism’s fundamental program at a time of
rising persecution. The second came in the next decade with the death of
Smith and the search for new leadership. Twenty years then passed before
the third phase, when the Utah Saints were pulled out of their relative iso-
lation by the coming of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869. The fourth
phase began in 1890 as the Church wrestled through the questions that
clustered around polygamy, ultimately choosing accommodation and full
integration as a state into the union.33
In the first two crises, in the 1830s and 1840s, the Church found its
identity during conflict with the nation’s government and its dominant
culture. Then after an interval, it reformed its identity around reconcilia-

tion and union with that government and that culture. It was a dramatic
shift, and of course very much to the good, but it could not come without
the surrender of some basic doctrinal and spiritual notions of what it
meant to be Mormon.34
Now, lay over that outward history the inner story of the generation that
found it their task to negotiate that great shift. The girls and boys of the
1830s, 1840s, and 1850s had defined themselves through a story of implac-
able differences with a hostile America. Then, as they came into their au-
thority in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, their world shifted on its axis. Events
suddenly pulled them toward accommodation and reconciliation. For men
and women with identities so tightly entwined with their faith, this was
more than politics. Changing the orientation of the Church required them
to shift the very sense of who they were. They were asked, if I may call again
on our modern terms, to rewrite the scripts of their life movies, now with
an ending badly out of character with all those scenes that led up to it.
That kind of wrenching rewrite is rarely if ever done with anything
close to full success. I’m not a Mormon historian, but I wonder how, and
how well, this generation negotiated that sudden, veering shift in their per-
sonal narratives. Recalling those voices, imagining my way inside them, I
wonder about the powerful crosscurrents surely at work beneath the out-
ward reconciliation between the Church and American society. To this out-
sider, the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries look
like some of the most intriguing and deliciously complicated in this ex-
traordinary American story of the birth, childhood, and coming of age of
the Mormon Church and society.35
If nothing else, this perspective reminds us that Mormon history is
partly one of individuals learning from their past and sometimes trying
bravely to transcend it. And of course, it is also part of the history of our
common human striving, whatever our faiths, to discover meaning in our
lives as individuals and as part of something larger.
Notes
1. William G. Hartley, “Joseph Smith and Nauvoo’s Youth,” Ensign 9 (September
1979): 27–29; M. Guy Bishop, “Preparing to ‘Take the Kingdom’: Childrearing
Directives in Early Mormonism,” Journal of the Early Republic 7 (Fall 1987): 275–
290; Lyndon W. Cook, Joseph Smith and the Doctrine of Little Children (Provo, UT:
Grandin Book Co., 1987).
Becoming Mormon 185
2. Austin N. Ward, Male Life Among the Mormons; Or, the Husband in Utah, Detail-
ing Sights and Scenes Among the Mormons; with Remarks on the Moral and Social
Economy (Philadelphia, PA: J. Edwin Potter, 1863), 89; Davis Bitton, “Zion’s
Rowdies: Growing Up on the Mormon Frontier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50
(Spring 1982): 182–195.
3. John Codman, The Mormon Country: A Summer with the “Latter Day Saints”
(New York: United States Publishing Company, 1874), 67.
4. While historians have made only a limited effort to analyze and evaluate chil-
dren’s experiences and to mine them for their insights into the early history of
the Church, they have helped compile first-hand accounts of young Saints. Two
revealing collections are Susan Arrington Madsen’s Growing Up in Zion: True
Stories of Young Pioneers Building the Kingdom (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book
Company, 1996) and I Walked to Zion: True Stories of Young Pioneers on the
Mormon Trail (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company, 1994). There is also
a considerable literature on childhood and how children fit into the larger insti-
tutional themes of Mormon history in the nineteenth century. The following
represent a sampling of topics and approaches: Martha Sonntag Bradley, “‘Hide
and Seek’: Children on the Underground,” Utah Historical Quarterly 51 (Spring
1983): 133–153 and “Protect the Children: Child Labor in Utah, 1880–1920,” Utah
Historical Quarterly 59 (Winter 1991): 52–71; Carolyn J. Bauer and Sharon
P. Muir, “Visions, Saints, and Zion: Children Literature of the Mormon Move-
ment,” Phaedrus 7 (Spring 1980/Summer 1980): 30–38; William G. Hartley,
“From Men to Boys: LDS Aaronic Priesthood Offices, 1829–1996,” Journal of
Mormon History 22 (Spring 1996): 80–136, “Childhood in Gunnison, Utah,”
Utah Historical Quarterly 51 (Spring 1983): 108–132, and “Were There LDS Teen-
agers in the 1870s?,” paper in my possession; Susan Staker Oman and Carol
Cornwall Madsen, Sisters and Little Saints: One Hundred Years of Primary (Salt
Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company, 1979); Tally S. Payne, “Education on the
American Frontier: The Territory of Utah in 1870” (master’s thesis, Brigham
Young University, 2000); D. Michael Quinn, “Utah’s Educational Innovation:
LDS Religion Classes, 1890–1929,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (Fall 1975):
379–389; Wendy Lavitt, “Children’s Clothing on the Utah Frontier,” Beehive His-
tory 15 (1989): 27–32; Bruce Lott, “Becoming Mormon Men: Male Rites of Pas-
sage and the Rise of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century America” (master’s
thesis, Brigham Young University, 2000).
5. The scholar most associated with this approach to identity development is Dan
P. McAdams. See his The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the
Self (New York: William Morrow, 1993) and a volume he edited with Richard L.
Ochberg, Psychobiography and Life Narratives (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1988).
6. Caroline E. W. W. Larrabee, “Caroline,” in Our Pioneer Heritage, comp. Kate B.
Carter, 20 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1958–1977), 12:196.
7. Ibid., 196–198.
8. Lawrence Christian Mariger, Autobiography and Journal, 1879–1891, Historical
Department Archives, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City
(hereafter LDS Church Archives).
9. Iver Carl Magnus Nielson, Autobiography, ca. 1911, 2, 4, MS 8351, LDS Church
Archives.
10. Ibid., 2–3.
11. Charmaine A. Burdell, “A Young Girl’s Memory of Nauvoo: 1846–1847,” Nauvoo
Journal 7 (Spring 1995): 37.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Benjamin Chamberlain Critchlow, “Sketch of My Early Life,” ca. 1865, type-
script, MS 1662, LDS Church Archives.
15. William Moore Allred, “A Short Biographical History and Diary of William
Moore Allred, 1819–1901,” unpaginated typescript, LDS Church Archives.
16. Thurmon Dean Moody, “Nauvoo’s Whistling and Whittling Brigade,” BYU Stud-
ies 15 (Summer 1975): 480–490. For an account of a boy serving in the militia at
Nauvoo at fourteen, see George Washington Bean, Reminiscence, n.d., L. Tom
Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University,
Provo, Utah.
17. Samuel Kendall Gifford, Autobiography and Journals, 1864, 2–3, MS 8167, LDS
Church Archives, 2–3.
18. Naomi Melville Cottam, comp., “Journal of Mosiah Lyman Hancock,” in Chron-
icles of Courage, Daughters of Utah Pioneers Lesson Committee, 8 vols. (Salt
Lake City, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1990–1997): 6:185–187, 196, 206.
19. Ibid., 198.
20. Ibid., 203–205.
21. Joseph Hyrum Moesser, “Sketch of the Life of Joseph Hyrum Moesser,” type-
script, ca. 1921, MS 11395, LDS Church Archives.
22. Beverly Wessman, “Edwin Pettit,” Chronicles of Courage, 6:150–152.
23. Alma Helaman Hale, “Autobiography of Alma Helaman Hale,” typescript, 1901,
MS 965, LDS Church Archives; Harrison Sperry, “A Short History of the Life of
Harrison Sperry Sr.,” n.d., typescript, MS 722, LDS Church Archives; “Life of
Charles Sperry,” Our Pioneer Heritage, 9:441–444; Martin Luther Ensign, Auto-
biography, n.d. MS 5372, LDS Church Archives.
24. Jill Jacobsen Andros has provided a fine overview of the overland experience of
children: “Children on the Mormon Trail” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young
University, 1997), and her “Are We There Yet? The Story of Children on the
Mormon Trail,” Beehive History 22 (1996): 5–10.
25. Heber Robert McBride, Journal, Perry Special Collections, 9–15.
26. “Sketch of the Life of Joseph Hyrum Moesser,” 3–4.
27. George Washington Bean, Reminiscence, Perry Special Collections; Barbara
Gowans Bowen, “Autobiography,” Our Pioneer Heritage, 9:412–414.
Becoming Mormon 187
28. Franklin Wheeler Young, Autobiography, ca. 1915–1917, MS 1148, LDS Church
Archives, 8–9, emphasis his.
29. Myrtle Ballard Shurtliff, “Margaret McNeil Ballard,” Our Pioneer Heritage, 3:200.
30. Aaron Johnson, “Life Sketch of A. Jay,” 1926, holograph, LDS Church Ar-
chives, 1–7.
31. Horace Hall Cummings, Autobiography, n.d, typescript, LDS Church Archives.
32. Johnson, “Life Sketch of A. Jay,” 13–14.
33. Leonard J. Arrington, “Crisis in Identity: Mormon Responses in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries,” in Mormonism and American Culture, ed. Marvin S.
Hill and James B. Allen (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 168–184.
34. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1985), 115–116, sums up the situation nicely. The deci-
sion of Church leaders to reconcile with the U.S. government raised all sorts of
practical issues that had to be wrestled with, but beneath them all was some-
thing more fundamental: “The question of concern here is what happened to
Mormonism when the old order passed away.” The aspect raised at the end of
this lecture is how that question was pursued and resolved (or not) at the level of
personal identity among those who lived across the divide between the old order
and the new.
35. The events covered in the first three chapters of Thomas G. Alexander’s splen-
did history of the Church during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, when set against the questions I’ve tried to raise here, offer some obvious
starting points for such a line of investigation. See his Mormonism in Transition:
A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1986). Interestingly, as the Church accepted, and indeed fought for, polit-
ical integration with the nation around it, the crucial work of maintaining
Mormon identity as a separate and chosen people became more a matter of each
member’s perception of himself or herself. As Shipps, Mormonism, 116, puts it,
hard institutional and political boundaries now were unacceptable, so “the re-
sponsibility for boundary maintenance had to be shifted from the corporate
body to the individuals within that body.” The crisis of Mormon identity, that is,
shifted toward issues of individual identity. This shift inevitably positions the
inner conflicts and resolutions of the generation that grew out of the old order
into the new close to the center of this important historical transition.
8
“Faith in the Religion of Their

Fathers”: Passing Mormonism from
One Generation to the Next
By Randall Balmer
“If there is anything that gives joy to the hearts of the fathers in this
kingdom, it is the knowledge that their sons seize the holy principles for
which they have so long labored in the name of Jesus, and that their chil-
dren are preparing themselves by faith and good works to bear off the
kingdom triumphant and accomplish the work their fathers have com-
menced.”1 So wrote Brigham Young to his son Brigham Heber, then on a
mission in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1868. “Be prayerful to the Lord contin-
ually and humble in His hands,” Young continued, “trust in Him for His
holy Spirit and in every circumstance remember how great is the respon-
sibility placed upon you to set an example amongst Saints and strangers
worthy to be copied by all men, that the cause of God may be honored in
your life, and His name glorified by your good deeds.”2
The Generation of Faith

For people of faith in almost any religious tradition the ultimate challenge
lies in passing the faith from one generation to the next. That crisis—
especially in the children of clergy—crops up in various manifestations of
popular culture, including fiction, memoirs, and motion pictures. Some
examples might include Get Thee Behind Me: My Life as a Preacher’s Son,
by Hartzell Spence; Son of a Preacher Man, by Jay Bakker; Father and Son,
by Edmund Goss; Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It; Chaim Po-
tok’s The Chosen; and the motion picture The Apostle, with Robert Duvall.
Although the difficulty of passing the faith from one generation to the next
“Faith in the Religion of Their Fathers”: Passing Mormonism 189
represents a challenge to parents of all religious traditions, the challenge

intensifies within those traditions that demand a dramatic conversion or
extraordinary commitment. The Hasidim come to mind, as do those in
the Anabaptist tradition, Mormons, and evangelicals. Evangelical hym-
nody, for instance, especially that of the nineteenth century, fairly rever-
berates with the anguished cries of parents longing for their children’s
salvation or the contrition of wayward sons: “Come Home, Come Home,
It’s Suppertime,” or, “Tell Mother I’ll Be There.”
The challenge of transmitting the faith within Judaism and Christian-
ity has a history that extends all the way back to the book of Genesis, where
Adam and Eve witness one of their sons, Cain, commit fratricide and
suffer banishment from the fold. There is no more poignant father-son
relationship than that of David, king of Israel, and his son Absalom. In the
New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, the younger son demands his
inheritance, runs off to a far country, spends the fortune on dissolute
living, and descends into poverty; yet his father welcomes him home with
open arms, much to the consternation of the prodigal’s dutiful brother.
The story is a metaphor for God’s grace and forgiveness, but it also evokes
reminders of broken families and disappointed parents.
In America, the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England faced
the problem of spiritual succession within years of their arrival in Massa-
chusetts. For the founding generation, one of the hallmarks of the f aith—
as well as the motivation for leaving England—was the desire to establish
a pure and undefiled church, a church consisting only of those elected to
salvation and who could give testimony to their election. Toward that end,
the Puritans required any candidate for full membership in the church to
stand before the congregation and offer a narrative of his salvation and
spiritual pilgrimage. The founding generation, those who had left family
and fortune back in England for the perilous Atlantic voyage and an un-
certain plight in the New World, had little difficulty meeting this require-
ment; they were heroes, after all, for their devotion to the faith.
When it came time for the children of the founding generation to take
their place in the meetinghouse, however, they found it difficult to do so.
The reasons for this phenomenon are complex and contested among his-
torians even to this day, but the fact remains that a good number among
the second generation of Puritans simply could not—or at least would
not—conjure the requisite piety to be accepted as full members of the
congregation. The first generation’s longevity, especially as compared
with settlers in the Chesapeake, surely was a contributing factor. When
confronted with the challenge of facing down their parents and their par-
ents’ peers in the meetinghouse to offer an account of their own spiritual
pilgrimages, the second generation blinked. How could their narratives of
faith, after all, begin to compare with those of their parents? Increase
Mather, son of Richard Mather, lionized his father’s generation for “that
unparallel’d Undertaking, even to Transport themselves, their Wives and
Little ones, over the rudee Waves of the vast Ocean, into a Land which was
not sown.”3
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the entire Puritan experi-
ment of building a godly commonwealth, one that would be more or less
coterminous with a pure church, was imperiled because the second gen-
eration refused to take its rightful place as full members of the Puritan
community. The issue gathered urgency when the second generation
began having children. The Puritans believed in the baptism of infants—
the New Testament counterpart to circumcision—as a symbol of the
child’s inclusion in the covenant, but they also insisted that the child’s
parents must be full members of the congregation in order for their chil-
dren to be baptized. But if members of the second generation were only
halfway members (themselves baptized in infancy but never having at-
tained the status of full members), what was to become of the third
generation—and, by extension, of Puritanism itself?
No Puritan household, it seems, was untouched by the failure to pass
piety to the next generation. Even the grandchildren of Richard Mather, a
prominent Puritan divine, would be deprived of baptism if the rules re-
mained unchanged.4 Gathering at the old meetinghouse in Boston in
1662, the Puritan ministers decided to adopt the controversial Halfway
Covenant, a concession to the spiritual apathy of the second generation.
Under the terms of the Halfway Covenant, the children of halfway mem-
bers (those baptized as infants but not full members) could be baptized.
The compromise provoked howls of protest for years thereafter. “Are
these the folk whom from the brittish lies, / Through the stern billows of
the watry main,” Michael Wigglesworth asked in verse on behalf of the
Almighty, “I safely led so many thousand miles, / As if their journey had
been through a plain?”5 The Lord demanded—and deserved—repentance
from the Puritans for having failed to transmit the faith to succeeding
generations. That failure had given rise to fractiousness, which placed the
entire Puritan enterprise in jeopardy. “If Christians will break one from
another, and churches break one from another,” Thomas Shepard Jr.
warned in heavy-handed italics in 1672, “have we not cause to fear that
God will suffer some wild boar or beast of the forest to enter in at the breaches
and lay waste this vineyard, and turn it into a wilderness again?”6
If the Puritans of the seventeenth century had largely failed to transmit
their faith to succeeding generations, some evangelical families fared
better in the eighteenth century. The sons of William Tennent, founder of
a school of theology called the Log College, a precursor to Princeton Uni-
versity, followed their father’s footsteps into the ministry. Theodorus Jaco-
bus Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Pietist, was accused of being homosexual by
his ecclesiastical enemies in the 1720s. He married, however, and all of his
sons became ministers.
One of the storied ecclesiastical families of the nineteenth century was
the Beechers, who provide a marvelous case study of the “generation” of
faith. Lyman Beecher, a graduate of Yale, was a Congregational minister in
New England and later president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincin-
nati. Beecher had eleven children, nine by his first wife, Roxana Foote, and
two by Harriet Porter. By all accounts Beecher was a loving and demonstra-
tive father. “I never knew a man exhibit so much—all the tenderness of a
mother and the untiring activity and devotedness of a nurse—father and
friend,” one of his children wrote, “he can find the energy—the heart—to
sympathize so entirely with his family and watch over their happiness—in
fact I should grow eloquent in praise of my father’s domestic character.”7
The Beecher children attended church twice every Sunday, and their father
conducted prayer gatherings twice daily in their home. His sons were tick-
eted for Yale and careers in the ministry; and when they left for college,
Lyman prayed for them daily: “May they become good ministers of our
Lord Jesus Christ.”8
Those prayers apparently paid off, though not without exception. One
son died young, apparently a suicide. Several harbored other interests,
became indifferent, or lacked the requisite intellectual gifts. Henry Ward
Beecher, on the other hand, became a prominent preacher and a spiritual
confidant of Abraham Lincoln, although his illustrious career was be-
smirched by a trial for adultery. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, became
one of the century’s most famous novelists, the author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Catharine Beecher, the oldest child, became the nineteenth centu-
ry’s best-known apostle of female domesticity.
What Lyman Beecher sought above all was that his children have the
same religious conversion that he had experienced while a student at
Yale. The world was a perilous place, after all, and anyone who died with-
out such a spiritual transformation would be consigned to perdition. Yet
son Thomas Beecher earnestly—but unsuccessfully—sought a conver-

sion, writing to his sister that he was striving “to get light soon,” Catha-
rine struggled all of her life to attain the kind of conversion that her father
had prescribed, and even Henry’s profession of faith was marred by
doubts.9
Chastened in part by the experience with his own children, Lyman
Beecher and others in the nineteenth century sought to modify somewhat
the theology underpinning conversion. For Jonathan Edwards and the Pu-
ritans, conversion, in the Calvinist scheme, was reserved only to the elect,
those whom God had chosen for salvation. The corollary of this doctrine
was not entire passivity—Puritans believed one might take certain steps to
prepare the heart for conversion—but it left matters in the hands of God,
not the individual, and thereby gave rise to considerable anxiety.10
Contemporaneous to Joseph Smith and the birth of Mormonism,
Beecher, together with Charles Grandison Finney and Nathaniel Wil-
liam Taylor, softened the Calvinist approach by vesting the initiative for
conversion in the individual. “I have used my evangelical theology all my
lifetime,” Beecher wrote, “and relieved people without number out of the
sloughs of high Calvinism.”11 This shift in theology extended to the
entire revival enterprise. Whereas Edwards, a Calvinist, had interpreted
the revival in his Northampton, Massachusetts, congregation as a “sur-
prising work of God,” Finney famously declared that revival was “the
work of man.”12
Another New England clergyman took matters even further. Horace
Bushnell’s Christian Nurture, first published in 1847, attacked the concept
that conversion was even necessary. A child should be reared never to
know himself as anything other than a Christian, Bushnell counseled.
This approach relieved the individual of having to undergo a dramatic (or
contrived) conversion from a life of sin to a regenerated life, and it also
shifted even more emphasis to child-rearing and passing the faith to the
next generation.
Many conservative Protestants regard Christian Nurture as a milestone
in Protestant theology or (more to the point) the initial step on a slippery
slope toward theological liberalism. By emphasizing a kind of socializing
in the faith and thereby obviating the need for conversion, the disciples of
Bushnell also did away with traditional Protestant notions of human de-
pravity; if a child need only be reared to think of herself as Christian, she
really had no sinful nature that needed divine intervention or remedy. The
Christian life was shaped not by regeneration, but by morality.
Conservatives rejected such formulations, continuing to look for the

conversion of their children. Baptist theologian Augustus H. Strong, for
forty years president of Rochester Theological Seminary, mourned the
failure of his gifted son, Charles, to appropriate the faith for himself, and
Billy Sunday’s final years were given over to lamentations about the dissi-
pation of his children.13
Leaving Home and Measuring Up

The story of the early years of the Latter-day Saints provides another excel-
lent case study of the dynamics of transmitting the faith from the found-
ing generation to the second generation. The fact that all members of the
first generation of Mormonism were, by definition, converts themselves
merely sharpens the issue, for—as evangelicals can attest—there is no
greater intergenerational task than replicating the zeal of a convert. Joseph
Smith, the progenitor of Mormonism, had a relationship with his sons
truncated by his untimely death, his prophetic legacy to them complicated
by their rejection of the legitimacy of plural marriage.14
At age twenty-seven on 6 April 1860, Joseph Smith III accepted the
presidency of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
(RLDS, now Community of Christ), headquartered in Independence, Mis-
souri. His brothers, sons, and grandsons continued the Smith leadership
dynasty until 1996 when Church leadership passed for the first time to a
non-Smith, W. Grant McMurray, who was the president until 2004.15
Joseph III had three brothers who survived into adulthood: The first,
Frederick Granger William Smith, who was about two and a half years
younger, died two years after the RLDS Church was organized and hence
had little opportunity to play an active role in it. The next brother, Alexan-
der Hale Smith, about six years Joseph’s junior, worked devotedly with
Joseph III to build the RLDS Church, and served as presiding patriarch,
apostle, and counselor in the First Presidency. The third surviving brother,
David Hyrum, also labored diligently to build the RLDS Church and was
serving as a counselor in the First Presidency to his brother Joseph when
he became mentally unbalanced and had to be institutionalized. All three
of these brothers predeceased Joseph III.
Joseph III had seventeen children by three monogamous marriages.
Not all of the children survived infancy; but after his own death in 1914,
RLDS leadership passed successively to three of Joseph III’s sons. The
second RLDS Church president was Frederick Madison Smith (1915–46),
the third was Israel Alexander Smith (1946–58), and the fourth was Wil-
liam Wallace Smith (1958–78). The fifth president was Wallace’s son, Wal-
lace Bunnell Smith (1978–96), the final Smith president of the RLDS
Church/Community of Christ. Although space precludes an analysis of
each presidency, they seem to have exhibited remarkable loyalty and devo-
tion to a religious movement that was also very much a family tradition.16
The succession of Brigham Young as leader of the largest group of Mor-
mons following Smith’s death offers still another wrinkle: the challenge of
passing along the faith from father to son within not one but several house-
holds.17 The rich correspondence between this father and the seventeen
sons who grew to adulthood reveals the complicated intergenerational dy-
namics of passing along the faith within the Mormon subculture.
When his sons reached maturity, Young sent them out into the world,
believing that such forays were essential to their development. “You went
out as a child,” he wrote to Joseph Angell in 1855. “We trust you will return
a flaming Elder of salvation” (16). As the patriarch dispatched his sons to
venues beyond the Wasatch Mountains, he did so with the confidence that
he had trained them well, and he did not shy away from holding himself
up as an example. “Joseph, this has been your privilege, to grow as the
Church has grown,” Young wrote Joseph Angell in Manchester, England.
He recalled his son’s nurture: “You were dandled on the knees of a tender
mother and received the caresses of an affectionate father, and as you have
grown to years of understanding you have had continually the instruc-
tions of one who has been appointed to stand at the head of God’s king-
dom on the earth, the front of the battle” (7). To Brigham Heber, Young
wrote: “You know the truth sufficiently to be capable of teaching it” (130).
The best witness to the faith, Young believed, was that of example. “By
exhibiting your character and the principles you profess in your daily walk
and conversation,” he declared, “and by refraining from every appearance
of evil, you will not only be admired by the good and the upright, but you
will command that respect that even the most unvirtuous are willing to
accord to those who truly deserve it” (170–171).
Father’s Footsteps
Like many fathers, Young was especially anxious that his sons follow in
his footsteps, and he expressed gratitude when they chose to do so. “It
gratifies me to see my sons desire to magnify the holy priesthood,” Young
wrote to Oscar Brigham in 1867 (145). “It is a great joy to me to see my
sons bearing the holy priesthood and seeking to magnify the same among
the nations of the earth,” he wrote to John Willard, serving a mission in
Liverpool, England (106). When this same son served an earlier mission
in New York City, Young had invoked heavenly protection upon him:
“Pray continually that you will be able to do good on this mission,” he
wrote, “Glorify your Father in heaven, and you shall have power over your
enemies inwardly and outwardly and no accident shall befall you” (96).
“Be faithful in discharging the duties of your calling,” Young instructed
Brigham Jr., “and keep your heart so clean and pure that the Lord can
write His mind and will upon it” (62).
For the sons of Brigham Young, however, and for sons of clergy every-
where, following in the footsteps of their father entailed additional bur-
dens and responsibilities. “You have now entered upon a new sphere of
action,” Young counseled Brigham Heber in 1867, “the responsibilities
and cares of manhood, and especially those which pertain to the priest-
hood, are resting upon you, and much more is expected from you now
than ever before” (130). “Personally, I feel no desire to make a show,” John
Willard wrote to his father from St. Louis, “but when the eyes of many are
directed towards me and it is said, ‘there is a son of Brigham Young,’ I feel
that to look and act respectable is my duty.”18 Brigham Jr., on a mission in
England, feared that he could not measure up to the expectations of being
his father’s son, especially the expectations of other Mormons. “I have
been afraid that more is expected of me than I can do,” he wrote in 1863.
“They consider that such a father had ought to have a smart son. I can’t
help it if they are disappointed in their expectations” (34).
As is frequently the case in clerical households, the eldest son bore the
brunt of the father’s expectations. “Remember you are my oldest son, the
arc of the family,” Young wrote to Joseph Angell, then on a mission to
England, in 1854. “I want you to be faithful that you may [be] worthe of
your stashon in my Kingdom” (12). The following year, he added, “I look
upon this mission as a sort of probation—a kind of middle period be-
tween boyhood and manhood—a time which as you improve or neglect,
will make or mar your future career” (13). Young did not hesitate to prof-
fer what modern psychologists call conditional love. “As you progress in
doing good,” he told this same son, “so will my love and affection increase
for you” (15).
Brigham Young’s correspondence with his sons fairly reverberates not
only with spiritual exhortations but also with practical advice. “Experience
will teach you that the greatest success does not attend the over-studious,”
Young wrote to Willard, who had just been accepted into the U.S. Military
Academy. “A proper regard must be had to physical as well as intellectual
exercise, else the intellectual powers become impaired” (164). Young ap-
parently entertained precisely the opposite concerns about his son Joseph
Angell, then in Manchester, England. “I now wish to say to you,” he con-
cluded his letter of 31 August 1854, “proceed with your studies, and apply
your heart diligently to the study of the gospel wherein is true wisdom” (8).
Despite the multiplicity of his charges, Brigham Young emerges
from the correspondence as a caring and sensitive parent, an impres-
sion confirmed by the sons’ response: “My father met me with every
expression of love and kindness,” Brigham Young Jr. declared upon his
return to Salt Lake City.19 After receiving an encouraging letter from his
father, Willard exclaimed, “Thank God for such a father. You have satis-
fied me in every way” (202). Another time he enthused, “I esteem it the
greatest possible honor to call you father, and the greatest privilege to be
directed by your counsel” (183). Occasionally, the letters verge on the
sycophantic, as when Brigham Jr. declared that “I thank God from my
very soul that he has given me such a father. . . . If I gave the Lord suffi-
cient thanks for all his blessings poured out upon me through you,” he
continued, “it would take an eternity” (45). Willard’s affection bordered
on idolatry. “Every time I look at your picture, which I always keep
handy,” he declared in 1873, “I seem to be running over with love and
gratitude” (180). John Willard spoke about his “confidence, esteem, and
love” and “the warmest affection that burns within my heart for a be-
loved father” (121).
The Safety of the Subculture

Throughout American history various religious groups have sought to
construct subcultures as a means of keeping children from the dangers
and temptations of the larger world. The Puritans tried to make the
entire colony of Massachusetts into a subculture, but by the end of the
seventeenth century the walls had become too porous. German groups,
especially in Pennsylvania—Moravians, Schwenckfelders, and others—
enjoyed more success, abetted by the barriers of language, while the
Amish remain something of a subculture into the twenty-first century.
The largest and most successful subculture in American history emerged
after the Scopes trial of 1925, when evangelicals constructed an elabo-
rate network of i nstitutions—churches, denominations, Bible institutes,
colleges, seminaries, Bible camps, publishing houses, and missionary

societies—all intended to provide a refuge from a larger world they re-
garded as both corrupt and corrupting. The evangelical subculture flour-
ished in the middle decades of the twentieth century, offering a kind of
alternative universe quite apart from the broader society.20
The Latter-day Saints, especially Brigham Young, recognized the stra-
tegic importance of constructing a Mormon subculture along the Wasatch
Range, as witness the flourishing of Mormon institutional life, beginning
in the mid-nineteenth century. All religious subcultures acknowledge the
utility of education for keeping children in the fold. From the establish-
ment of the Dutch school in New Amsterdam and the Latin School in
Boston to the present, various religious groups in American history have
looked to education as a means for transmitting the faith from one gener-
ation to the next.
Brigham Young, who especially feared the pernicious influence of
Darwin and Huxley, also seized on this strategy. On 19 October 1876,
Young apprised Willard of plans to build an academy in Salt Lake City,
requesting that he serve as a trustee. “It will be open to the children of the
Latter-day Saints only,” Young explained. “In it the Bible, the Book of
Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and other works of the Church will
be the standard textbooks, and the preceptors will be especially enjoined
to instill into the minds of our youth a faith in the religion of their fathers”
(199). Willard, reflecting on his own childhood, thought it was a splendid
idea. “The education of our youth is a thing in which no pains should be
spared,” the West Point cadet replied. “How many times have I had occa-
sion to regret the want of proper instructions amongst even the few play-
mates of my school days at home. Amongst them there are not a few who
take a kind of pride in rejecting the religion of their parents, and believing
themselves infidels” (202).
Brigham Young also recognized, however, that life outside of the sub-
culture could be instructive to young men at a certain point in their devel-
opment, provided they retained their religious bearings. “This experience,
if properly appreciated by you, will be of great benefit to you through your
future life,” Young wrote to Oscar Brigham, then on a mission in Liver-
pool (146). To his son Ernest Irving, Brigham Young described the larger
world as “the great school of mortal experience” (153). The patriarch be-
lieved in the salutary effects of life beyond the Wasatch Mountains;
indeed, he seemed to regard it as essential to his sons’ development.
“Amongst the pleasure of my life at the present time,” he wrote in 1875,
“is the thought that so many of my sons are acquiring experimental and
practical knowledge that will fit them for lives of great usefulness” (190).
Young repeated his convictions about the benefits of forays into the larger
world outside of Mormonism to several of his sons. “You are surrounded
by influences from which you can learn lessons that will be of increasing
influence in after years,” Young wrote to Ernest Irving and Arta De
Christa, his sons by Lucy Decker Young, in England, “and by comparing
things as you meet them today with what they will be when the truth
holds the sway, you will create within you a becoming respect for the dig-
nity and honor of our sacred religion, and of the responsibilities of your
holy calling” (158). Several sons seemed to acknowledge the spiritual
value of seeing the world outside of the Mormon subculture. “I hope By
the time I get home,” John Willard wrote from New York City, “your Sun
[sic] will Be a better Boy than when he left it” (96).
Young’s sons sometimes found life apart from the Mormon subculture
lonely and alien. “My associations and intercourse here sadly lack that
feeling of confidence, of congeniality, and love, that is so marked at home,”
Willard wrote from afar in 1877. “I almost feel a barrier that is hard to de-
scribe, a kind of ostracism in my associations here, that is entirely wanting
at home” (207).
Although Young seized on the benefits of forays into the wider world,
he also recognized that the perils that lay outside of the Mormon subcul-
ture could be overwhelming. His letters are laced with warnings about
worldly “trials and temptations” (164). He enjoined Joseph Angell in Eng-
land “to wage war successfully with the powers of darkness, superstition,
priestcraft, and ignorance” (7). He cautioned another son against “the so-
ciety of the unvirtuous and the intemperate” and especially against liquor
(165). “Be faithful to your religion. Remember your covenants,” Young
abjured Brigham Heber in 1868. “Eschew all impure thoughts and feel-
ings and live humbly and prayerfully before the Lord, and that you may be
greatly blessed and prospered in the ministry and return unspotted from
the world, is the earnest prayer of your father” (135). Echoing the warnings
in Proverbs, Young counseled his sons against ungodly friends. “You will
meet with those of your companions who will try every means to induce
you to deviate from the path of virtue,” he wrote to Willard at West Point,
“but with a firm front, you can easily parry every such effort and still be
kind and courteous.” This approach, he continued, would win his son “far
greater respect” than would be the case “were you to fall in with the disso-
lute habits of the day” (168).
Young acknowledged with relief that John Willard’s letters had contained
“evidence that the sight-seeings and temptations of the lower world have not
weaned your affections from your religion and your home” (97). After re-
counting the vices he witnessed in Bologna, Brigham Jr. wrote, “Such things
as these make me disgusted with society as it exists at the present time, and
long more earnestly for the society of virtuous men and women, which are
only to be found as a community in my own loved home” (47).
Young seemed especially concerned about sexual temptation for Wil-
lard at West Point, demanding particulars about “the regulations . . . about
visitors, whether ladies have access to the cadets and under what restric-
tions, if any.” He continued his warnings. “I understand you cadets are
exceedingly popular with the fairer sex. And some of them are very, very
dangerous when so disposed,” Young wrote. “Shun such as you would the
very gates of hell! They are the enemy’s strongest tools, and should be re-
sisted as strongly. Beware of them!” (170).
Recreational sex represented one set of perils; the choice of a wife
(about which Young had some experience) was even more crucial. Young
also counseled Willard to “be aware of the risk that you run if you take
unto yourself a wife who does not believe the gospel, and whom you have
no idea will make a good Mormon, one who probably would oppose you
in faith and feeling all the days of your life and teach your children to de-
spise the religion of their father” (201).
Willard’s mother had evidently been preaching the same message, for
Willard quoted her in responding to his father: “Whenever speaking of the
subject, mother has always said, ‘Whatever you do, get a good Mormon for
a wife,’ and I have grown to regard it as a duty to make this the first essen-
tial requisite.” Besides, he added, “amongst our own girls, my experience
leads me to believe, I can suit myself just as well as elsewhere” (202).
Brigham Jr. also professed revulsion at the wiles of women. “I find that
the greatest trial the brethren have to meet,” he wrote from Milan, “is to
keep their skirts clear of women, who keep an open shop day and night. If
I ever felt sick and tired of the filth and corruption,” he added, “it is now,
and my desire increases daily to gather out the honest, that the Lord may
burn up the rotten masses” (48).
Transmitting the Faith

Brigham Young declared in 1867, “I am desirous of seeing my sons honor
the holy priesthood, and be faithful and reliable servants of God” (147).
Indeed, the Mormon leader had the satisfaction of seeing most of his sons
remain within Mormonism; at one point, for instance, five of the seven
trustees of Brigham Young Academy in Provo were his sons (199). Not all
of the transitions from adolescence to adulthood were seamless, however.
Willard seems to have suffered repeated bouts of homesickness at West
Point, and Young worried that John Willard was working too hard off in
New York City as an executive for the Utah Western Railroad.21 Some
flirted with spiritual danger, but then returned gratifyingly to the fold: “I
long for the time to come when I can prove to you and mother how much
I value your kindness and long suffering towards me,” wrote Brigham Jr.
to his father in November 1864, nine months after Brigham Sr. had or-
dained his namesake son an apostle at age twenty-seven. Thoroughly
chastened, he continued, “I realize to some extent how wild I’ve been—
and perhaps wicked in many instances—and how patiently ye both have
waited for me to change. My constant prayer is that I may never cause you
another pang of sorrow, or that you may ever have cause to blush through
any act of mine hereafter” (45).
In passing the faith to his sons, Brigham Young succeeded where
many of his contemporaries failed. Throughout history various religious
groups have devised different strategies for keeping children in the faith.
Most schemes center around education (or, less charitably, indoctrination)
and the construction of a subculture to protect children from the depreda-
tions and distractions of the larger world. Brigham Young and the Mor-
mons followed this pattern as well, but Young also recognized the value of
time away from the subculture, a time to explore the broader world apart
from the cocoon of familiar religious institutions and like-minded believ-
ers. “There is no position a young man can be placed in that is better
adapted to give him a knowledge of God and His holy Spirit than to be
sent on a mission,” Young declared in 1867 (130). Admittedly, these mis-
sionary sorties took place in relatively controlled circumstances with an
elaborate support network in the form of older, more seasoned Mormons
nearby; but the experience away from the Wasatch Range seemed to inten-
sify the appreciation of Brigham Young’s sons for the faith of their father.
“I am happy to tell you that your promises to me when I left are being
fulfilled,” Willard reported to his father in 1872. “I never enjoyed more the
spirit of our religion” (172). This strategy of sampling life outside of the
subculture, which finds its counterpart in Mormon missionary work to
the present day, helped considerably in the transmission of faith from the
founding generation to the succeeding generation.
How successful were Brigham Young’s strategies?22 As measured by

missions, priesthood positions in the Church, and espousal of plural mar-
riage, it is an impressive record. Ten of Brigham’s seventeen sons served
full-time missions for the Church: Joseph Angell, Brigham Jr., John Wil-
lard, Brigham Heber, Oscar Brigham, Morris, Arta de Christa, Don Carlos,
Lorenzo, and Feramorz.
Brigham Young apparently hoped that one of his sons by Mary Ann
Angell might become a Church president, since he ordained three of them
apostles—Brigham Jr., Joseph Angell, and John Willard—in all three cases,
before there was a corresponding vacancy in the Quorum of the Twelve
and “without the knowledge of the other general authorities.”23 Four other
sons had significant priesthood positions on the local level or worked for
the Church in some capacity.
Not all of Brigham Young’s sons were of an age to marry when federal
pressure against polygamy intensified drastically, beginning in 1882. Still,
they seem to have had limited enthusiasm for polygamy, since eleven of
the seventeen either died unmarried or married monogamously. Five ap-
parently disaffiliated from the Church, although in different degrees and
for various reasons, ranging from ill health to indifference.
In the parable of the sower, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus
seems to suggest that a “retention rate” of 25 percent—those who respond
to the gospel and bear fruit—is about average. In confronting the chal-
lenge of transmitting Mormonism from the founding generation to the
succeeding generation, Brigham Young, at least, seems to have fared even
better.
“I will acknowledge that I have much happiness in the thought of how
well my boys are doing at the present time,” Young wrote in 1876, the year
before his death (193). On the whole, the Mormon leader had every reason
to be pleased.
Appendix
Ordained apostles: Brigham Jr., age forty at his father’s death, served a mis-
sion in Great Britain (1862–63) and Mexico (1884–89), was ordained an
apostle by his father at age twenty-seven (1864), presided over the Euro-
pean Mission (1865–67, 1890–93), presided over Cache Valley and south-
ern Idaho settlements (1869); served a mission to Mexico (1884–1889);
president of the European Mission (1890–93); married six wives, fathered
thirty-one children, and was president of the Quorum of the Twelve
(1901–03). Thus, he was one step away from the presidency during the
last two years of his life.
Brigham Young ordained John Willard Young to the apostleship at age
eleven, as noted; but from 1863 on, John apparently preferred to live in
New York where he lived lavishly when he could and fended off creditors
when he could not. Although he was an assistant counselor to the First
Presidency (1864) and sustained as an assistant counselor to Brigham
Young at April 1873 general conference, he lived in Utah only briefly.
During another of John’s visits to Utah in February and March 1876,
Brigham Young promised to pay his debts (again) and promised to make
him his first counselor. John Willard accepted the offer, settled his affairs,
returned to Utah in October 1876, and was sustained as his father’s first
counselor. At this point, John Willard was only thirty-two; but when his
father died the next August, he was shifted to the more ambiguous posi-
tion of counselor to the Twelve Apostles, a newly created office. He held
this office, despite returning to New York and despite a series of censures
by the Quorum of the Twelve, until he resigned in October 1891. He re-
mained an apostle but without a calling until his death in poverty in New
York City in 1924.24 Although he actively attended church meetings, four
of his five wives, by whom he had eighteen children, had divorced him,
and the branch president made a point of warning new members not to
loan John Willard money. In a final scandal, his son, Hooper, also living in
New York, was sent to Sing Sing for possibly murdering, but certainly
trying to cover up the death of, a “disreputable woman” who died of a drug
overdose during a “tryst” with him.25
Joseph Angell Young, the second of the three sons ordained an apostle
and made assistant counselor in the First Presidency, served a mission in
England (1854–56), presided over the Sevier Stake from 1872 until his
death in 1875, and had three wives and nineteen children.
Church Service and Marriages of Other Sons: Oscar Brigham Young
(1846–1910) served a mission in England (1866–67), was on the Board of
Trustees for Brigham Young Academy (1890–1910), married twice (the
first marriage ended in divorce), and fathered thirteen children. Willard
Young (1852–1936), who received such epistolary attention from his father
during his education at West Point, had an extensive military career but
also served as president of Young University (1891–94) and Latter-day
Saint University (1906–15), both in Salt Lake City, and as head of the
Church Building Department (1919–36). Brigham Morris Young (1854–
1931) organized Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations on the
ward level, served missions in Hawaii (1873–74, 1883–84) and the central
and eastern states (1876–78), and was employed at the Salt Lake Temple
(1893–1931).
Joseph Don Carlos Young (1855–1938) was employed as Church Archi-
tect (1889–93), finishing the Salt Lake Temple; served a mission to the
Southern States (1895–97); taught at Brigham Young Academy and was a
member of its board of trustees; and constructed many Church buildings
(1900–38). He had two wives and fifteen children. Alonzo Young (1858–
1918) served on the Ensign Stake High Council in Salt Lake City (1906–
18) and was apparently active in other capacities.
Oscar Brigham (two marriages, one divorce), Brigham Heber (one
marriage, three children), Alonzo (one wife, seven children), Ernest Irving
(one wife and five children, but he died before age thirty), Arta de Christa
Young (married Apostle Erastus Snow’s daughter, five children), Willard
(one wife, six children), Alfales (one wife, four children), Phineas Howe
Young (one wife, two children), and Brigham Morris Young (married a
daughter of Apostle Lorenzo Snow, ten children). Lorenzo Dow Young
(1856–1905) served a British mission (1876–78), divorced his first wife be-
cause she attended a non-Mormon church, and had no children by his
second wife. Feramorz Little Young (1858–81) died of typhoid, unmarried,
when he was returning from a mission to Mexico (1880–81).
Disaffiliation of Five Sons: (1) Mahonri Moriancumer Young (1852–84)
never served in a Church position, but this may have been because of poor
health. He had inflammatory rheumatism and died at age thirty-two.
(2) Phineas Howe Young (1862–1903), age fifteen at his father’s death,
also had health problems and had become addicted to drugs during an
illness. Although he seldom attended meetings and died at age forty-one,
he reportedly “diligently led his family in devotion to their religion.”26
(3) Hyrum Smith Young (1851–1925), age twenty-six at his father’s death,
married into another prominent Mormon family and fathered ten chil-
dren. His obituary half-apologized, “Although not as active in Church af-
fairs as some others in the eminent family from which he sprung, he had
a[n] abiding faith in the gospel.”27 His funeral, however, was held in the
Salt Lake Eighteenth Ward with Church leaders speaking. (4) Ernest
Irving (1851–79) was called to the Salt Lake Stake High Council at age
twenty-two (1873) and served a British mission (1874–76) but was one of
the heirs who brought suit against the administrators of his father’s estate.
Since his own death followed in 1879, it is difficult to know what decisions
he would have made later in his life. (5) Alfales Young (1853–1920), age
twenty-three at his father’s death, never served in a Church position al-

though he worked for many years at the Church-owned Deseret News, mar-
ried an Episcopalian schoolteacher at St. Marks, was one of the litigants in
the suit over his father’s estate, and was excommunicated because of the
conflict.28
Notes
1. Dean C. Jessee, ed., Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons (Salt Lake City, UT:
Deseret Book, 1974), 135.
2. Ibid., 135–136.
3. Quoted in Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 85.
4. Ibid., 55. The ensuing ecclesiastical debate over the matter pitted Richard Mather
against another son, Increase. Ibid., 58–59.
5. Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy with New England,” in The Puritans
in America: A Narrative Anthology, ed. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 231.
6. Thomas Shepard Jr., “Eye-Salve,” in ibid., 257.
7. Quoted in Marie Caskey, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 15.
8. Ibid., 23.
9. Quoted in ibid., 26; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American
Domesticity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 37–42; Caskey, Char-
iot of Fire, 26.
10. There is an extensive literature on Calvinist understandings of salvation. See,
for example, Norman Petit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan
Spiritual Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).
11. Quoted in Caskey, Chariot of Fire, 26.
12. Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William B.
McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 9.
13. Grant Wacker, Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 130; Robert F. Martin, Hero of the
Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862–1935
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 122–124.
14. His youngest son, born five months after his death, for example, became men-
tally unstable as an adult and eventually died in an asylum. Although the cause
of his mental illness has not been diagnosed, a long-hypothesized cause was his
shock, during his mission to Utah, at meeting women who claimed to have been
his father’s plural wives. Valeen Tippetts Avery, From Mission to Madness: Last
Son of the Mormon Prophet (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
15. See Mary Audentia Smith Anderson, comp., Ancestry and Posterity of Joseph
Smith and Emma Hale (Independence: Herald Publishing House, 1929), 578. I
express my appreciation to Ronald E. Romig, Archivist, Community of Christ,
for supplying me with this material.
16. Given Joseph III’s youthfulness at the time of his father’s death (he was eleven),
it is obvious that an underexplored area in this paper must be the role of moth-
ers in transmitting in religious faith.
17. This peculiar circumstance lends a certain poignancy (if not humor) to Brigham
Young’s closing of his letter to Brigham Jr. and John Willard on May 21, 1867. “I
am your father,” he writes. The circumstances of plural marriage also figure into
John Willard’s letter of August 30, 1875, offering condolences to his father upon
hearing of the death of his brother: “You, dear father, have other sons, and many
to comfort you, but poor Mother so wrapt [sic] up in her children.” On yet an-
other occasion, when Brigham Young was in St. George, Utah, he wrote to John
Willard back in Salt Lake City with instructions to convey his respects “to all my
wives and children.” Jessee, Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons, 88, 112, 124.
Further quotations from this compilation appear parenthetically in the text.
John Willard Young, son of Mary Ann Angell Young, should not be confused
with Willard Young, son of Clarissa Ogden Chase Young.
18. Ibid., 101. The context of this letter suggests that John Willard may have been
using his lineage to justify his taste for expensive hotels and fine clothing.
19. Ibid., 83. Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), also characterizes Young’s relationship to his children as
affectionate.
20. On the dynamics of the evangelical subculture, see Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes
Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, 3rd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
21. Jessee, Letters of Brigham Young to His Sons, 117. When John Willard died on
February 11, 1924, he left behind a string of failed business ventures. Ibid.,
91–95.
22. I am indebted to Jeffery O. Johnson, an expert on Brigham Young’s families who
is currently researching a group biography of Brigham Young’s wives, for pro-
viding information on these sons, unless otherwise noted.
23. Todd Compton, “John Willard Young, Brigham Young, and the Development of
Presidential Succession in the LDS Church,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 35 (Winter 2002): 113. These three were John Willard Young, endowed
and ordained November 22, 1855, at age eleven; Joseph Angell Young, ordained
February 4, 1864, at age twenty-nine; and Brigham Jr., age twenty-seven, on the
same date. In the same ceremony on the same date, he also “set each of them
apart as assistant Counselors to the First Presidency.” Brigham Young Jr., State-
ment, quoted in ibid., 112. Compton notes that Andrew Jenson states that Brigham
Young Jr. was also ordained an apostle on 22 November 1855, but Compton thinks
that Jenson confused Brigham Jr.’s ordination with that of John Willard. Hall, The
Last American Puritan, 113. See Appendix for details.
24. Compton, “John Willard Young,” 121–126.
25. Compton, “John Willard Young,” 129–130.
26. Jessee, Brigham Young’s Letter to His Sons, 319.
27. Obituary, Deseret News, March 3, 1925, 4.
28. According to Leonard J. Arrington, “The Settlement of the Brigham Young
Estate, 1877–1879,” Pacific Historical Review 21 (February 1952): 16, Alfales and
Ernest Young were granted a temporary injunction staying the executors from
transferring any of Brigham Young’s properties to the Church in 1878. Within
the week, five children of Brigham Young including Alfales, but not Ernest, filed
a complaint. A year later, seven children, this time including Ernest but not Al-
fales, again sued. (The children involved in either or both actions were Alfales
Young, Hyrum S. Young, Louisa Y. Ferguson, Elizabeth Y. Ellsworth, Vilate Y.
Decker, Emeline A. Young, Ernest I. Young, Dora Young, and Marinda H. Y.
Conrad.) I appreciate Jeff Johnson’s research on this point.
PART 3
The Study of Western Histories

Introduction
BY MATTHEW J. GROW
Mormonism has traditionally been viewed as a western American religion

ensconced firmly in the Great Basin and the Mormon cultural region that
stretched across much of the West following settlement by Mormon pio-
neers. Nevertheless, most western historians have often paid relatively
little attention to Mormon history. Religious studies scholar Jan Shipps
has complained that “many, if not most, historians of the West shape the
western story like a doughnut, circling all around the Great Basin, taking
into account and telling nearly every western story except the Mormon
one.”1 The following essays all demonstrate the ways in which taking Mor-
monism seriously in the context of the American West enriches both our
understanding of the religion and of the broader dynamics in the West. In
addition, they demonstrate trends in western historiography, including
the integration of material culture and architecture, the study of the West
and the Civil War, imperialism, and print culture.
In his essay, Dell Upton, a professor of art history at the University of
California, Los Angeles, examines the cultural landscape of nineteenth-
century Utah. He provides a guide for the reader to understand his craft,
explaining the ways that historians look at material culture (the physical
objects of the past)—in his case, the vernacular or everyday architecture.
“By looking sensitively at the landscape,” he writes, “we can begin to re-
store the voices of those who are not heard in documents.”
Upton demonstrates perceptively the ways the Mormon cultural land-
scape both reflected and diverged from larger trends in nineteenth-century
America. He compares Latter-day Saints with both evangelical Protestants
and the more radical communal movements such as the Shakers and the
208 the study of western histories
Harmonists. Although elements of the Mormon–built environment re-

sembled evangelical camp meetings, Upton argues that Latter-day Saints
were more radical than evangelical Protestants, because Mormonism
“aimed not merely to revitalize the spiritual lives of believers but to reori-
ent their everyday lives in ways that few evangelicals imagined.” Neverthe-
less, they were less radical than communal societies that, more
fundamentally, “reshaped inherited cultural-landscape elements to form
new kinds of houses, new kinds of communal spaces, and new kinds of
work spaces.” By contrast, Mormons “preferred to tweak familiar vernacu-
lar forms rather than to rethink them radically.”
This was particularly true of Mormon vernacular architecture. House
types representing various ethnic and cultural influences could be found
in nineteenth-century Mormon towns, rather than the uniformity one
might expect from a society with strong communal tendencies. Upton
also debunks the belief that Mormon houses revealed the influences of a
society that embraced plural marriage; rather, the homes of polygamous
and monogamous Mormons were, in general, indistinguishable.
Nevertheless, Upton also points out distinctive features of the Mormon
landscape, especially the elements that promoted a communal ethos.
Joseph Smith’s vision of town life, as expressed in his 1833 Plat of the City
of Zion, began a long history of Latter-day Saint efforts “to offset the social
and economic individualism of the small, isolated farm.” In Smith’s view,
“Mormon settlements would combine urban cultivation with small-town
moral stability.” Distinctive religious architecture, particularly of temples,
“was meant to promote sociability, communal feeling, [and] a kind of egal-
itarianism among believers.”
For the most part, the distinctive elements in the Mormon cultural
landscape occurred through what Upton describes as a “characteristic
Mormon pattern: a novel ensemble is created by playing with, and on,
widespread vernacular architectural and settlement patterns.” He con-
cludes by suggesting that the landscape is the “product of a process of
working out—not completely, not consistently, not uniformly—what it
meant to live in Zion day by day.”
In his essay, William Deverell, professor of history at the University of
Southern California, connects two topics he believes historians of the Ameri-
can West have often ignored: religion (particularly Mormonism) and the Civil
War. Deverell first makes the case that the historiography of the American
West is much poorer for the lack of attention to these topics. He writes,
“Mormon history, while distinct, even eccentric, in obvious and less obvious
ways, is nonetheless a part of the history of the nineteenth-century West and
The Study of Western Histories 209
merits inclusion in the broader narrative.” The study of the Mormon past,
Deverell believes, “helps us understand wider currents in the streams of
American historical experience for the same period; opportunities for particu-
larly scholarly prisms or vantages are lost when Mormonism is sidestepped.”
In a similar way, western historians have given scant attention to the
central role of the Civil War in the nineteenth-century West. Not only did
disputes over the American West cause the Civil War, Deverell writes, but
the Civil War “made the modern American West”; in the decades follow-
ing the war, a newly strengthened federal government “incorporated the
West into the nation.” And when western historians have written about
the Civil War, they have often focused on the small number of battles
fought in the West while ignoring more fundamental issues, like the Utah
War of 1857–1858, when President James Buchanan sent a federal army to
the West to quell a reported Mormon rebellion and to replace Brigham
Young as governor of Utah Territory.
To demonstrate the connections between the Latter-day Saints, the
Civil War, and the West, Deverell examines an 1853 sermon by Benjamin
Morgan Palmer, a proslavery southern Presbyterian minister who de-
plored Mormon growth in the West. Palmer argued that Mormon extrem-
ism led to an “Asiatic sensibility” among converts and threatened their
Anglo-Saxon heritage. Chinese immigration to California during the Gold
Rush only heightened Palmer’s concerns about the racial future of the
West. Deverell summarizes Palmer’s concerns succinctly: “What if the
faux Asians and the real Asians met up?” Such a scenario would lead to
the end of republican government in the West. Other voices from a variety
of ideological, political, and theological perspectives likewise linked the
Mormons in the West with the rise of the Civil War.
Deverell also raises possible ways that scholars might integrate Mor-
monism into scholarship on the West after the Civil War. The care of hun-
dreds of thousands of wounded Civil War veterans shaped American
politics, state budgets, and culture for decades after the war. Indeed, Amer-
icans were “fixated on ideas about convalescence.” Deverell suggests that
the West played a central role in these ideas, and he advocates that scholars
should seek to understand the role of Utah in postwar ideas of healing and
redemption. Indeed, just as California’s parks and mountains were seen as
places of healing, so, too, was the medicinal Great Salt Lake and the hot
springs on its nineteenth-century shores. By pointing to possibilities for
future scholarship on the Latter-day Saints and the Civil War—both before
and after the conflict—Deverell suggests that scholars can better under-
stand the role of religion and the Civil War in the nineteenth-century West.
In his essay, Walter Nugent, an emeritus professor of history at the

University of Notre Dame, places Mormon history within the context of
American imperialism. Nugent argues that Americans have built three
empires in its past: “the continental empire to 1848 or 1854, the offshore
empire from the Alaska Purchase to the 1930s, and the global empire we
have erected since 1945.” Nugent examines Mormon attitudes and actions
towards the growth of each empire, arguing that, throughout their history,
Latter-day Saints have been “strongly patriotic, expansionist, pro-imperial,
Manifest-Destinarian.”
To support his case, Nugent examines public statements from Mormon
leaders, beginning with a pamphlet written to support Joseph Smith’s presi-
dential campaign in 1844 that strongly advocated American territorial ex-
pansion. The participation of a battalion of Mormon soldiers during the
Mexican-American War was intended both to help finance the Mormon
emigration westward and to display their patriotism. Once in Utah,
Latter-day Saints participated in the steps of creating the continental empire,
including displacement of Native Americans from the land. During the late
1800s and early 1900s, as U.S. Republican presidents pursued an offshore
empire, Mormon leaders and newspapers generally voiced support. Nugent
writes, “Building the offshore empire followed seamlessly from building the
continental empire. And Mormons, like other Americans, supported both.”
Nevertheless, although Mormons had generally spoken with more or
less unanimity on issues of territorial expansion and acquisition up to the
early 1900s, Nugent writes that the debates over the establishment of a
League of Nations after World War I displayed a new trend: disagreement
among Mormon leaders regarding central questions of imperialism. As
Americans built the post-war global empire after World War II, although
most Mormons supported these actions, Latter-day Saints have also felt
more liberty to express dissent and reclaim a pacifist tradition. Nugent
writes that the Latter-day Saints’ globalization since World War II has
shaped Mormon responses, although he acknowledges that more scholar-
ship is needed on this question. Has the spread of Mormonism through-
out the world tempered the support for American imperialism among
Latter-day Saints in the United States? How has the close association of
the Church with the United States both hampered in some cases and
helped in other cases its globalization?
In his essay, George A. Miles, curator of western Americana at Yale
University’s library, suggests a variety of ways in which Mormon history
can be better integrated into the history of the nineteenth-century
The Study of Western Histories 211
American West. Drawing on Jan Shipps’s metaphor, Miles writes that

such approaches can fill in the missing doughnut hole of western history.
Possible topics include the importance of print culture, particularly of re-
ligious publications, on the nineteenth-century frontier. Using the exam-
ple of Joseph E. Johnson, a Mormon newspaper editor who founded a
series of newspapers from the 1850s through the 1870s, Miles asserts that
Johnson’s triumphs and struggles are an insightful window into the lives
and work of frontier editors more broadly. Among other comparisons, he
suggests similarities between the recruitment of settlers by Texan Ste-
phen Austin and Utahn Brigham Young, between Joseph Smith and the
seventeenth-century New England minister Jonathan Edwards, between
the problems faced by Young as territorial governor with those grappled
by other governors of western territories, and between Mormon attempts
at establishing systems of communal economics with communal experi-
mentation during the 1800s and 1900s more broadly.
In addition, Miles examines the “history wars” at museums, libraries,
and archives since the 1990s, including high-profile controversies over
historical interpretation at the Smithsonian and debates over Native
American artifacts and documents. These conflicts have raised the ques-
tion of who has the right to tell the stories of the past, to present (and per-
haps control) the interpretation of events? Pointing to the vigorous and
high-stakes debates over Mormon history, Miles makes a case for the im-
portance of archival openness, of allowing access to the key documents
and histories of the Mormon past.
The essays by Upton, Deverell, Nugent, and Miles suggest ways that
future scholarship might better integrate scholarship on the Latter-day
Saints into the broader history of the American West. Their essays—which
focus primarily on the nineteenth century—demonstrate that even during
the decades of Mormon settlement and initial growth in the West, the
Latter-day Saints are underrepresented in historical scholarship. The lack
of scholarship is even more glaring for the twentieth century; hopefully,
future scholars will take up the challenge issued by Shipps—and echoed
by these essayists—of placing the study of Mormon history more central
in discussions of the West.
Note
1. Jan Shipps, Sojourner in a Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 21.
9
What the Mormon Cultural

Landscape Can Teach Us
By Dell Upton
Ever since the Latter-day Saints first arrived in the Great Basin, Mor-
mons and visitors alike have scanned the landscape for clues to this dis-
tinctive group’s lifeways and mores. With the publication of Lowry Nelson’s
classic study The Mormon Village in 1952, scholars joined the ranks of
those fascinated by the Mormon material world.1 Geographers, historians,
folklorists, and architectural historians have all turned their attention to
the buildings and cultural landscapes of the Great Basin, hoping to answer
in systematic fashion some of the questions posed informally by earlier
observers.2
Neither amateur nor professional inquirers have doubted that there is
a Mormon landscape. They make a key assumption that has characterized
Western culture for centuries: that some indelible bond links the visible,
tangible world of bodies and things and the invisible, intangible world of
thought, belief, mind, and social relationships. That assumption informed
an early visitor’s claim that the long line of gables on Brigham Young’s
Lion House “is explained upon the ground of the abundance of wives of
our modern Turk of the Valley.”3 It informs modern Utahns’ confident as-
sertions that the number of Lion House gables corresponds to the number
of Young’s wives or that the number of chimneys on an ordinary Utah
house indicates the number of wives the male resident maintained. It has
even prompted one of the most perceptive contemporary scholars of the
Mormon landscape to report that the number of doors in a Mormon house
and the number of gates in its surrounding fence revealed the number of
wives residing there.4 In fact, there was no correlation in any of these
cases, but the tenacity with which such interpretations survive testifies to
a strong popular belief in the ability of the material world to reveal
immaterial truths. Indeed, if we did not believe something like this, there
would be no point in studying artifacts. Hence, the eminent scholars of
the Mormon landscape all assume that, since Latter-day Saints are distinc-
tive, their landscape must be equally distinctive. However, the nature of
the connection and the best ways to interpret it are key points of conten-
tion that engage scholars of the material world and for which there is no
single or universally accepted answer.
Although I am neither a Mormon nor a historian of Mormonism, I
have looked at the Mormon landscape with interest off and on for twenty
years from the point of view of a scholar of the built environment. From
that perspective, I want to use this essay to explore this basic assump-
tion of artifactual studies by asking how things can serve as historical
sources. Then I will turn to the Great Basin landscape to suggest ques-
tions the landscape raises about the Mormon experience that might
repay further study.
Objects as Historical Evidence

Here it is appropriate to introduce a term that may not be familiar to
those who are not academics: material culture. It is one of three special-
ized terms—none difficult—that I will use repeatedly. Material culture, a
term derived from anthropology and archaeology, embraces the entire
human-made world. Those aspects of ourselves and our surroundings
that we shape or modify as we have learned to do from others are material
culture. These include familiar kinds of artifacts—houses, tools, cloth-
ing, cars—that we can touch and see, as well as less obvious modifica-
tions of the physical world such as those we make to our bodies. As we are
born into the world our bodies are natural objects; but when we modify
them through such learned practices as dress, embellishment ranging
from hair styles to jewelry to tattoos, speech, gesture, or posture, they are
drawn into the realm of material culture. In other societies, people do all
of these things differently from the ways that we learn to do; and within
our own society, various subgroups—defined by ethnicity, social class,
religious beliefs, gender, age, even personality—also learn to modify their
bodies somewhat differently from one another. The world of material cul-
ture is thus rich with potential clues to the values and lifeways of its
makers and users.5
Of the vast universe of material culture, I am most interested in the
subset known as the cultural landscape, my second term. The phrase was
What the Mormon Cultural Landscape Can Teach Us 215
coined by geographers to refer to the entire physical environment as

humans have shaped and furnished it.6 Everything from the smallest per-
sonal items to the buildings that contain them, to the yards that encircle
the buildings, to the fields, streets, and cities that surround the yards, all
the way up to largest human divisions—nations, perhaps—is a compo-
nent of the cultural landscape. The concept refers as much to the ways we
think about our environment as it does to the physical modifications we
make to our surroundings. When we name topographical features such as
streams, mountains, or continents, we transform them into cultural
products—landmarks of our mental universe—even though we might not
otherwise alter them in any way. Think of the constellations. Humans
didn’t make or arrange the stars; but by associating them with one another
as representations of mythological figures, we give the night sky an order
that derives entirely from our cultural imagination. Similarly, by naming
topographical features and by telling stories associating them with sacred
events, the Navajo transform the Four Corners region into a Navajo cul-
tural landscape, Dinétah, and define its relationship to Navajo history and
daily life.7 In the same vein, by naming the Great Basin Deseret and incor-
porating it into the Mormon concept of “Zion,” the early Latter-day Saints
transformed it into a distinctively Mormon space before they lifted a finger
to work it. These names helped to specify the proper attitudes toward the
land, suggested its potential and proper use, and guided Saints in working
and occupying it.8
A major portion of the cultural landscape consists of vernacular ar-
chitecture, the last of the specialized terms. Put simply, vernacular ar-
chitecture is a term of convenience applied to the kind of architecture
most common in a given time or place. It is ordinary architecture, just
as vernacular speech is the language most of us use most of the time.
Thus, vernacular architecture is a relative term. What is “vernacular”
in one place or one context is not so in another. A small one- or two-
room adobe house would be common, and therefore vernacular, in
nineteenth-century Salt Lake City, but not in twenty-first-century Salt
Lake City, where transformations of society, economy, and building
practice have left such buildings as rare survivors in a very different
landscape. Similarly, ranch houses are as common as children in the
urban peripheries of the United States. They are the vernacular archi-
tecture of twenty-first-century American suburbs, but a ranch house
built in a Tibetan village would be very exceptional—alien to the ver-
nacular architecture of that place.
As it is customarily used, the term vernacular architecture has been

applied to architecture characteristic of residents of a particular region
(such as the Great Basin), members of a particular ethnic group (such as
the distinctive architectures built by Norwegians or Basques in the Great
Basin), or practitioners of a particular craft or occupation (such as the
highly specialized structures that house textile mills, blacksmith shops, or
general stores).9 In each case, the group’s peculiar needs and values re-
quired distinctive buildings.
For the researcher, “vernacular” architecture differs from “high-style”
architecture—the Chartres Cathedrals and Empire State Buildings of the
world—principally in the relative availability of ancillary documentary or
visual information. Students of buildings such as Monticello or Versailles
can consult drawings and other design documents, photographs or other
visual images that might provide evidence of change over time, and archi-
tects,’ critics,’ clients,’ residents,’ users,’ and visitors’ comments. Students
of vernacular architecture must rely on the direct observation of many
examples with the goal of discovering patterns that might be explained by
correlation with local, national, or international populations, ideas, events,
or cultural values. Did the appearance of a certain kind of architectural
decoration, a certain way of arranging rooms, or a particular way of using
space coincide with a major economic event such as a dramatic change in
the price of some key crop or commodity, a general depression, or the in-
troduction of a new industry? Can we associate the new architectural
forms with the popularity of a new political or religious idea or the arrival
of new people in an area?
Consider the houses that survive in rural Utah built in the first half
century of Mormon occupation. Although few are exactly alike, most
share a common visual pattern. I don’t mean style in the conventional,
decorative sense, but something more general and profound: the organ-
ization of their facades in a [window-]window-door-window[-window]
pattern. The folklorist Henry Glassie calls this “bilateral tripartite sym-
metry,” meaning that we could divide each house’s front both into three
parts (window-door-window) and into two (by drawing a line down the
center).10
Western Europeans of many nations began to adopt this symmetrical
pattern in the late sixteenth century. It now organizes so much of our ma-
terial world that we scarcely notice it except when it is absent, nor do we
stop to think that it is a relatively recent innovation in our culture. So we
have made a connection based on a pattern—a very general pattern, to be
sure, but a beginning in our quest to place nineteenth-century Mormon

life in a historical and a cultural context.
At the same time, the limitations of the sources available to scholars of
the cultural landscape limit what one can say about it. Our necessary reli-
ance on patterns and correlations leaves scholars at a loss to interpret
unique attributes or artifacts. Suppose we were to find a photograph of a
classroom full of students. All are wearing white shirts except one person
who is wearing a red shirt. Is the red-shirted student the harbinger of a new
fashion or the last, clueless adherent of an outdated one? We have no way
of knowing. If several students were wearing white shirts and several red
shirts, then we could begin to look for commonalities. Are the red-shirted
students men and the white-shirted ones women? Do the two groups of
students seem to be of different ages or ethnicities? Are the students wear-
ing any other items that might offer clues to the meaning of the shirts?
Once I begin to find patterns, then I can begin to sort them into what
students of the cultural landscape, borrowing another term from archae-
ologists, call types, in the sense of “typical.” A type is a summary descrip-
tion of the most common choices people make, a way of summing up a
pattern. Technically, we define a type as a clustering of at least two inde-
pendent variables whose conjunction is significant.11 Types are defined
according to the questions the scholar asks. To return to the example of
the shirts, I might sort the shirts by color if I were interested in their aes-
thetic qualities. If my questions were about the economics of dress, I
might sort them by the costliness of their materials or the names of their
manufacturers, regardless of color. If I were interested in gender, I might
sort them by the differences I perceived between men’s and women’s
shirts. Every typology would be different, yet all would apply to the same
group of shirts.
Students of vernacular architecture sometimes type buildings by ap-
pearance, materials of construction, or structural systems, but most
commonly according to their spatial organization, or floor plans. In or-
ganizing the interiors of buildings, especially houses, builders must
balance the needs of individual occupants with those of the occupants
as a group, practical activities with social rituals and expectations, and
idiosyncratic desires with others widely shared with neighbors. For ex-
ample, in our houses today bathrooms and bedrooms rarely open di-
rectly off living rooms. Similarly, we don’t usually hold dinner parties in
our bedrooms. There is no reason not to do either of these things other
than our culturally defined notions of propriety. Eighteenth-century
Anglo-Americans did entertain and sometimes dine in their bedrooms.

But our culture teaches us that, in some often unspecified way, it would
not be “right” to do so.
Because it is extremely difficult to balance all the many practical, social,
ritual, economic, and structural demands in designing a building, build-
ers tend to seek stereotyped or standardized solutions that are acceptable,
if not perfect, and hang on to them until they become intolerable. As
Henry Glassie observed, “The skins of houses are shallow things that
people are willing to change, but people are most conservative about the
spaces they must utilize and in which they must exist.”12
The study of the cultural landscape, like any other kind of history, is
ultimately a study of people. By looking at artifacts, we ask, as traditional
historians do, about the things people knew in the past; about the ways
they made their livings, enjoyed themselves, and related to one another;
about the skills they possessed, the values they embraced, the beliefs they
professed, and the modes of reasoning that guided them. While it is true
that those of us who study material culture often lack the kinds of written
documents on which traditional historians rely, this does not mean that
there are no documents—only that there are different ones, requiring dif-
ferent (but not abstruse) skills to interpret them. This difference is our
burden, but it is also our opportunity to gain insights into the past that
might not be available from traditional kinds of historic documents. The
lack of records for many buildings and sites means that their makers and
users are probably largely mute in the written record as well. By looking
sensitively at the landscape, we can begin to restore the voices of those
who are not heard in documents.
The landscape does not tell a unitary story any more than written
documents do. Documentary historians read with a critical eye, playing
one account off against another, accepting no one at his or her word
alone. Their goal is not to discover historical Truth, for they know that
there is no such thing. Every historical actor had his or her own version
of the truth, and historians try to understand how each person’s truth
meshed with that of others. So the student of material culture must view
the landscape critically. Artifacts as much as written documents are
self-conscious creations. Just as every writer presents himself or herself
in the way that he or she wishes to be seen, so every building offers an
interpretation of its occupants’ position in society, their sense of self, and
their aspirations—an interpretation with which not all of the neighbors
might agree.
It is also important to remember that the cultural landscape we study

is not the cultural landscape of 1800 or 1900 or even of 2000, but a se-
verely edited fragment of them. It is a landscape of winners. The surviving
elements of the historic landscape tend to be the largest, the best built, the
most expensive, or those most congenial to the present. Those that were
too small, too poorly built, too unfashionable, too uncomfortable or “in-
convenient,” or even too ugly by present-day standards have been aban-
doned, demolished, or altered, even though they may originally have
comprised a major portion of the landscape.
The Folk Landscape

What, then, are some of the stories the Great Basin landscape might tell if
one turns on them the modes of thinking I have outlined, within the
limits I have suggested? In nineteenth-century Utah, “folk” or “ traditional”
vernacular houses dominated the Mormon landscape before 1890.13
These types ranged widely, from the one-room houses that have accom-
modated the majority of people in nearly every corner of world through-
out history, to double-cell houses (houses with two equal-sized rooms that
often sported two front doors), through the gamut of two-to-four-room
house types familiar throughout most of the Anglo-American United
States by the middle of the nineteenth century. In addition, one can find
folk-house types common to other European ethnic groups who converted
in large numbers to Mormonism, notably the “pair house,” which Thomas
Carter has shown to be a modernized version of a much older Scandina-
vian house type, the parstuga, of which there are also a few examples in
Utah.14
To the student of the cultural landscape who also knows something
about the historiography of early Mormonism, this range of house types
raises interesting questions. Clearly these Mormon farmers were free to
build the kinds of houses they found most comfortable, rather than having
to accept preexisting houses provided by a landlord, as most farmers in
California did during the same decades. But why did they draw on such a
variety of regional and ethnic traditions? In a village such as Spring City,
Utah, one finds several types of Scandinavian traditional houses, several
Anglo-American types, and a few popular-culture types. It is an old (but
insufficiently examined) premise of cultural-landscape studies that the
vernacular environment embodies common values. In this view, the build-
ers of a traditional community build similar houses, for example, because
they share similar ideas about domestic life and equally importantly be-
cause they want to demonstrate solidarity with their neighbors or (nega-
tively) not to stand out from them.15 Conversely, if a community is knit by
a strong, all-encompassing ethos or commonality of interests or activities,
one would expect its architecture to be relatively homogeneous. The dwell-
ing houses and other buildings of the Shakers, for example, varied little
within or among settlements, while the Rappites or Harmonists of Penn-
sylvania and Indiana issued believers standardized houses to fit the new
kinds of families they imagined. To a lesser extent, one finds the same
kind of similarity in many pre-industrial European or North American
farm villages.
Our image of early Mormonism includes a strong communitarian and,
at times, egalitarian ethos, which might lead us to expect the same kind of
uniformity in the Mormon landscape. What might it mean, then, that
there is so little unity evident in the housing of communities whose reli-
gious ideals stressed cultural and communal closeness and adherence to
a new vision of family life?16
This is an open question for students of the Mormon landscape, and
one to which there can be no simple answer. But it is important, first of
all, to frame the question properly. As archaeologist Mark Leone, one
of the most skilled interpreters of the Mormon landscape, has noted,
there is no point in asking what the cultural landscape tells us about
Mormonism—how it “reflects” Mormonism per se. The Mormon reli-
gion is amply documented in theological, historical, and even sociologi-
cal literature, so the material record is not likely to add much to the
story. Instead, we should ask how the houses and other landscape ele-
ments with which Mormons chose to build Zion facilitated or trans-
formed religious goals.17 Our question therefore becomes, What was it
like to be a Mormon in this landscape? This question requires us to
examine both the landscape elements that seemed to promote a com-
munal ethos and those that seem to contradict it.
Inventing a Mormon Landscape

From Joseph Smith’s Plat of the City of Zion (1833), which envisioned the
Saints’ living in closely settled, highly organized communities, to the open-
field farming of the early years in Utah, the various attempts at economic
centralization or redistribution, ranging from the Kirtland Safety Society
Bank to the United Order at Orderville, and the bishops’ storehouses of the
early twentieth century, one repeatedly encounters attempts to offset the

social and economic individualism of the small, isolated farm.18 These ex-
periments were not unique to Mormonism. As the example of the Shakers
and the Harmonists illustrates, it was not uncommon for newly formed
religious groups, particularly those who drew many of their followers from
the lower classes, to institute some form of egalitarian living arrangement
or communal economic order on theological or disciplinary grounds or
simply to avoid starvation. Nevertheless, the particular forms and inten-
tions of Mormon communitarianism were distinctive.
In the Plat of the City of Zion, Smith gave the plan for a closely knit
town centered around an elaborate, widely distributed priesthood and an
equally elaborate set of public buildings that would occupy central spaces
analogous to those in non-Mormon towns that accommodated churches
or civic buildings. Smith’s vision, as inscribed around the edges of the
map itself, encompassed not only religious but agricultural activities.
Farmyards were to be excluded from the individual lots (a prohibition not
followed in the towns Mormons eventually built in Utah), but the town
would be surrounded by its agricultural fields. Each lot was to contain only
one house, and each house was to be built of brick or stone and aligned to
a common twenty-five-foot setback line with a “grove” in front and gar-
dens surrounding it. Although the city of Zion was to be relatively large—
at fifteen to twenty thousand people, it would have competed in population
with many cities of the second rank throughout the United States—Smith
did not mention commercial or industrial facilities.19
The Plat of the City of Zion echoed longstanding Euro-American
ideas of “civility,” or social order, in which agriculturists were gathered
into a village setting under the eyes of centrally located religious and civic
authorities, with fields within walking distance of the town. In its key
features, the Plat of the City of Zion echoed the form and principles of
the bastides, colonial agricultural-garrison towns established by the Eng-
lish in Wales and France during the middle ages; the Laws of the Indies,
a set of programmatic instructions for colonial towns issued by Philip II
of Spain in 1579; and even William Penn’s “greene Country towne” for
his new colony of Pennsylvania. Both the bastides and the Laws of the
Indies decreed that farmers would live in villages surrounded by their
fields, but under the watchful eye of centrally located church and state
institutions, while Penn’s instructions for his town called for a row of
houses to be set back to a common line on a row of strip lots along the
Delaware River, so as to form a settlement “wch will never be burnt, and
allways be wholsome.”20 It is not that Joseph Smith imitated any of these

precedents. He probably did not know of any of them. Rather, the Plat of
the City of Zion emerged from the same deeply seated European and
American cultural assumptions about urban living that produced the
bastides, the Spanish colonial towns, Penn’s plan, and many other vari-
ants on this urban form.
At the same time, there was something about the City of Zion and its
Great Basin cousins that differed from these earlier models: a view of
town life as a positive good rather than an unfortunate necessity, as some-
thing that benefitted the residents, not merely the state or the economy. In
important respects, early Mormonism was an urban religion founded by
rural people. Mormon leaders from Joseph Smith on stressed the impor-
tance of towns as civilizing agents that offered Saints “advantages of a
social and civic character.”21 In the cover letter accompanying the Plat of
the City of Zion, Joseph Smith pointed out that, in towns, “the farmer and
his family . . . will enjoy all the advantages of schools, public lectures and
other meetings. His home will no longer be isolated, and his family denied
the benefits of society, which has been, and always will be, the great edu-
cator of the human race; but they will enjoy the same privileges of society,
and can surround their homes with the same intellectual life, the same
social refinement as will be found in the home of the merchant or banker
or professional man.”22
Urbanism and urbanity took root. According to one early visitor to Salt
Lake City, “The people here are social, gay and like every thing [they] like
parties.”23 Like other American moral leaders, though, Mormon leaders
were convinced that city life needed to be tempered by small-scale, face-to-
face institutions that would anchor townspeople in a stable moral order.
Thus, they argued that town living would allow Saints to “retain their ec-
clesiastical organizations, have regular meetings of the quorums of the
priesthood and establish and maintain Sunday schools, Improvement As-
sociations, and Relief Societies.” The goal was clear: Mormon settlements
would combine urban cultivation with small-town moral stability.24
With this in mind, one turns to a renowned feature of the Plat of the
City of Zion: the perpendicular orientation of its house lots. Joseph
Smith’s notes on the plat’s borders point out “that the lots are laid off al-
ternate in the squ[a]re, in one squ[a]re running from the south and north
to the line through the middle of the squ[a]re, and the next, the lots runs
from the east and west to the middle line . . . so that no one street will be
built on intirely [sic] through the street but one squ[a]re the houses will
stand on one street and on the next one another.”25 Many historians inter-
pret this arrangement as a device to insure householders’ privacy. Each
householder would have “physical and visual territory unimpeded by
other residences.”26
But the Prophet’s words suggest another consideration more in keep-
ing with early-nineteenth-century urban ideas: a desire that the landscape
of the City of Zion should be uniform throughout, with every street equally
important, every lot equally accessible along the street grid (and, in the
West, along irrigation canals), rather than differentiated into major and
minor streets, more and less important districts. The City of Zion would
be a sacralized version of the republican city of equal access that political
and social leaders in the East envisioned for New York, Philadelphia, and
other large American cities, a utopian version of a more widespread vision
that was itself utopian.27
Few Mormon towns followed the Plat of the City of Zion closely. Most
scholars strain to find any similarity between its ideal and the Mormon-
built environment other than the grid plan and the simple fact of living in
compact agricultural villages rather than on scattered farmsteads. In the
Great Basin, the injunction against constructing farm buildings in town
was forgotten, and each house lot became a miniature farmstead. As a
consequence, there were fewer lots to the block and the Mormon agricul-
tural village was more compact but less dense than the city of Zion would
have been. Often houses on corner lots faced the flanks of those across the
street, leading some historians to see in this an echo of the perpendicular
lots of the Plat of the City of Zion, but this “separation” is undercut by the
common practice of making exterior doors in both fronts, so that houses
in fact faced both neighbors, rather than turning away from them. This
undercuts any argument that the arrangement of houses was meant to
create a sense of privacy in the Mormon city or town. Rather, the common
town plan in Utah seems to have made it difficult to isolate oneself.28
This intimacy leads us to think of the utopian ambitions of the Mormon
town in another light. Mormonism was founded during the Second Great
Awakening in the so-called Burned-Over District of western New York
State.29 Evangelicals wanted more than intellectual or behavioral change
in their converts; they wanted to create new or reborn men and women
worthy of the restored Christian church. A principal tool was the camp
meeting, sometimes called a “protracted meeting,” held in a prepared
space carefully arranged to create an intense atmosphere of personal,
moral, and spiritual transformation over an extended period of time.30 A
camp meeting was a small version of a city, with a meeting place or taber-
nacle in a central square and lodgings—originally tents—arranged along
“streets” surrounding it. People lived together with little privacy. They
were besieged day and night, not simply by pulpit preachers, who often
sought to stimulate conversions using the “New Measures” (psychologi-
cally sophisticated rhetorical techniques that the evangelist Charles Gran-
dison Finney characterized as “right use of the constituted means”) but
also by side “exhorters” and by small groups that met for prayer and exhor-
tations that often lasted through the night in individual tents.31 The heat of
the summer, the example of others who had already been converted, and
the intense scrutiny directed toward those seekers who filled the “mourn-
ers’” or “anxious” bench (an enclosure at the front of the congregation just
beneath the pulpit) all added to the psychological pressure. The poet
Langston Hughes recalled a revival he attended in 1914 when he was
twelve at which everyone on the mourners’ bench had been saved except
him. The preacher and Hughes’s aunt pleaded, “Why don’t you come?
Why don’t you come and be saved?” and Hughes “began to be ashamed of
myself, holding everything up so long.” He decided to pretend salvation to
end the agony and “the whole room broke into a sea of shouting as they
saw me rise.”32
Like other Second Great Awakening movements, Mormonism placed
great emphasis on techniques of conversion and combined persuasive
words with carefully designed physical settings, so we might usefully com-
pare the evangelical camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening with
early Mormon sacred and everyday spaces. In the Mormon town, believers
encountered one another constantly in a variety of religious, economic,
and social settings. In the early years, both church meetings and social
gatherings often took place in boweries whose construction and purpose
recalled the “brush arbors” at the centers of early evangelical camp meet-
ings and whose form resembled the more substantial structures that con-
tinue to occupy the centers of permanently established camp meetings
down to the present.33
Where the occupants of the camp-meeting mourners’ bench were
watched by the entire congregation and sat directly under the gaze of the
preacher, for example, worshippers in the House of the Lord (1833–36) in
Kirtland, Ohio, sat under the gaze of the members of the priesthood at
both ends of the upper and lower courts. Something of the emotional in-
tensity of the camp meeting can be read in the accounts of the dedication
ceremonies of the Kirtland Temple on March 30–31, 1836, when Joseph
Smith instructed the worshippers to “tarry all night” and the congrega-
tion continued “to prophecy and speak in tongues adding shouts of Ho-
sannas to God and the Lamb with Amen and Amen.”34 From that point,
the trajectory of Mormon temple design can be read as one that empha-
sized increasing involvement on the part of worshippers, moving away
from the relatively passive congregational observation that characterizes
most Christian worship.
Mormonism, though, was much more radical than evangelical Protes-
tantism. It aimed not merely to revitalize the spiritual lives of believers but
to reorient their everyday lives in ways that few evangelicals imagined. In
that respect, it was more like the radical nineteenth-century communal
social experiments. All nineteenth-century communal societies, religious
and secular—the Shakers, the Harmonists, the Fourierists, the Oneidans—
attempted to reconstruct society by reconstructing its basic unit, the
family. All placed great reliance on material culture to effect their goals.35
Everything from clothing to bodily movement to architecture was a tool
for making new men and women and ultimately a new society.36 Mor-
mons shared this desire to reconstitute society, although they wished to do
so as a way to constitute millennial society rather than simply to await its
arrival as the Shakers did.37 They, too, looked to a reimagined family as the
building block of their new society, and they relied on material surround-
ings as a medium of transformation—but with a critical difference. Where
other communal societies radically reshaped inherited cultural-landscape
elements to form new kinds of houses, new kinds of communal spaces,
and new kinds of work spaces, the Latter-day Saints preferred to tweak fa-
miliar vernacular forms rather than to rethink them radically. When Mor-
mons began to design permanent buildings for religious rituals, for
example, their choices were based on familiar and analogous architectures
from their home regions. As many scholars have pointed out, the evolu-
tion of Mormon temples and meetinghouses reveals a gradual modifica-
tion of the familiar New England–derived forms that were carried across
upstate New York into the Western Reserve of Ohio by post-revolutionary
out-migrants. Ordinary gatherings took place in “meetinghouses” that
were only slightly different from the Calvinist meetinghouses of New Eng-
land and the Western Reserve of Ohio.38
The more exceptional temples gradually moved away from familiar
models but still created new forms by combining common religious ty-
pologies with widespread domestic imagery and ritual spaces. The first
step was to create a spatial order. The double-ended “courts” of the
Kirtland Temple multiplied the traditional pulpits of Protestant meeting

houses and added the curtains or “veils” that separated each one and that
allowed the lower hall to be subdivided into smaller rooms.39 At Nauvoo,
the interior was more drastically rethought, borrowing from Masonic
ritual spaces for a number of special-purpose rooms designed to accom-
modate the developing Mormon temple ritual, while the exterior contin-
ued to resemble a nineteenth-century New England meetinghouse. Even
the great pilastered portico at Nauvoo recalls the meetinghouse design
published in Asher Benjamin’s American Builder’s Companion, which was
based on his own Old West Church (1806) and inspired the builder of the
Unitarian meetinghouse (1816) at Bedford, Massachusetts.40 At Nauvoo,
as well, William Weeks and LDS Church leaders began to fashion a deco-
rative symbolism distinctive to Mormonism, but it was only in Utah that
Church architects Truman O. Angell Sr. and William H. Folsom finally
created a distinctive exterior form to match the temples’ interiors. In the
Salt Lake Temple, Mormon architecture is at its grandest and most dis-
tinctive. Ironically, in this final phase, Angell and Folsom adapted some of
their interior architectural language from the domestic sphere.41
So Mormon religious buildings were designed to stimulate and rein-
force a commitment to a new religious identity. The Church’s official land-
scape was meant to promote sociability, communal feeling, a kind of
egalitarianism among believers, and, in the definition of new building and
spatial types, a sense of distinctiveness. Is that what the actual (as opposed
to the ideal) landscape records? This is where we return to the question of
the “traditional” houses. Here the process of adaptation of familiar forms
seems to have been much less thorough than in explicitly religious struc-
tures, even though the reconstruction of domestic life was at least as radi-
cal as that of religious ritual.
If we were to walk through a Mormon town ignorant of the institution
of plural marriage, we would never know it had been there, despite the
persistent attempt to read polygamy in chimneys, gables, and gates.
Mormon towns were comprised of “single-family” houses of a kind that
one might find in any number of non-Mormon American and even Euro-
pean settlements. These houses were structured spatially on the assump-
tion that they would be occupied by a male head of household, his spouse,
children, and perhaps servants. However, one polygamous family might
be scattered among a number of these houses or, in the years of active fed-
eral prosecution of polygamy, among several towns and states and even
across national boundaries. Their homes would be difficult to distinguish
from those of their monogamous neighbors. And despite the official in-
junction that plural wives be provided with “equal comforts,” there were
discrepancies in the distribution of housing and other support Mormon
men provided for their various wives.42 Without access to other (usually
documentary) information about plural marriage, it would be impossible
to know this, for in the domestic realm the radicalism of the nineteenth-
century Mormon social vision never found a distinctive architectural ex-
pression or even a distinctive way of modifying standard house forms, as
theological Mormonism did in religious buildings. Thus, while official
pronouncements cannot really tell us what it meant to live as a Mormon
in a Great Basin town in the nineteenth century, the limitations of the ev-
idence of landscape that I mentioned in the first part of this paper deprive
us of easy answers from that source.
Lived Mormonism in the Great Basin Landscape

Did the Mormon landscape of the Great Basin help make new men and
women? Despite the ambiguity, this absence of systematic differences
among polygamous and monogamous houses may nevertheless be a
significant clue to answering our initial question about the ways Mor-
monism was lived in the nineteenth-century Great Basin. The French an-
thropologist Pierre Bourdieu offers a way to think about this issue. In
common with most anthropologists, Bourdieu used the concept of cul-
ture to refer to the habits of mind, ways of seeing, and predispositions to
act in certain ways that we learn from others in our society, but he also
pointed out that everyday life forces us constantly to modify these learned
habits. Although culture teaches us generally how to respond to common
life situations—how to read another person’s intent, how to think about
unexpected misfortunes, how to act when we are introduced to someone
much older or much younger than we are—it is only a general guide.
Most life situations are similar to those we have encountered before, but
none is exactly like any other one. A certain degree of improvisation is
necessary. We must make little adjustments and many little adjustments
create drift. We find that we end up doing things very differently from the
ways we began doing them.43
One of Bourdieu’s key insights was that much of culture is carried in
our muscles. He described social life as a kind of playing field in which we
develop an improvisatory “feel for the game” without having to think every
move through consciously.44 For example, in learning to play baseball, we
are taught generally how to throw a ball or to hit one or to catch one, but
every individual instance of throwing, hitting, or catching demands a
unique, specific action that will not succeed if we must stop to think about
our original instruction on every play. Rather, what we know becomes en-
coded as part of our muscle memory. Similarly, many of the most impor-
tant, most central, culturally significant aspects of our lives are carried out
without much explicit reflection, in settings that are too familiar to require
thought or to be analyzed explicitly.
This is the importance of cultural landscape: it offers cues, which we
often barely notice, about the ways we should “play the game.” Because by
definition our most mundane spaces are the ones in which we live most
of our lives, they are the most significant in shaping our actions.45 As the
archaeologist Matthew Johnson notes in his study of traditional houses in
one region of England, “Material things . . . become important through
their very ordinariness. They stand for the vast underside of cultural action,
for values and aspects of their personality and world-view which men and
women could not or would not express in words. Material things may
therefore be very important pieces of evidence, on the general principle
derived from cultural anthropology and folk-life studies that that which is
not spoken by members of a cultural group is often the most vital thing
the researcher needs to know.”46
The converse is also true: to be put into a radically new environment is
to be forced to develop new habits and reflexes, to develop a feel for a new
game, and in the process to become a new person. As we have seen, the
builders of the nineteenth-century Mormon cultural landscape blurred
the line between the familiar and the novel by tweaking the familiar rather
than by trying to invent a completely new everyday landscape as the Shak-
ers, the Oneidans, and other communitarians did. The degree to which
the Mormon-built environment could promote the development of new
men and women may have depended upon the convert’s starting point
and thus on the degree to which the Great Basin setting was novel. To
people such as James and Elizabeth Allred, who moved from Tennessee
and Kentucky, respectively, the Mormon-town experience may have
seemed new and intense. The upland South was an area of primarily
rural, scattered settlement. To live in a small, closely knit agricultural vil-
lage where nearly all the occupants shared a devotion to a newly adopted
religious creed and where authorities encouraged frequent and varied
contact with neighbors would have been very different from their accus-
tomed way of life. In the simple course of going about their daily lives,
they would always be reminded of the choice they had made—and per-
haps be made a little uncomfortable with its implications. “Cut off . . .
from the old forms of order and routine,” as historian Michael Walzer says
the seventeenth-century English Puritans were, the Allreds may have been
particularly open to new possibilities, but also a little frightened by them.
This may be one reason that they chose to include a buffering central pas-
sage in their Spring City house (ca. 1870).47
Would this have been equally true of someone such as Olaf Larsen,
who came to Ephraim, Utah, from Drammen, Norway, in 1861 and built
himself an old-fashioned Scandinavian parstuga house in 1869–70?
Larsen may have been accustomed to living in a closely settled agricultural
village where parstuga houses ran along the street cheek by jowl, a pattern
common to much of central Europe from Scandinavia to the Balkans.
For Larsen and others of similar background, however sincere they
were in their new beliefs, their everyday surroundings could not have
been as vivid a reminder of their new lives as it was for the Allreds. There
was little to force a revision of the old “feel for the game.” This hypothesis
is reinforced by a look at the Ephraim Pioneer Cemetery, the burial place
of men and women who had traveled thousands of miles to their new in-
termountain homes. The juxtaposition of Mormon beehives and tradi-
tional Christian crosses, some on the same gravestones, suggests that the
transition from the old life to the new was not as radical or as complete as
one might expect.
If setting is important in understanding the shaping of new men and
women, the act of creating the new setting is equally important. The long
process of designing, working out details, and building temples and other
landmarks of Zion was as important as finished landscape itself in shap-
ing Saints’ consciousness. We might ask whether it was a coincidence that
the beginnings of the so-called “Americanization” of Mormondom coin-
cided with the completion of the first four temples. “Americanization” is
usually attributed to political pressures to conform to mainstream Ameri-
can practices as the price of statehood for Utah.48 But we might also think
of it in terms of Walzer’s analysis of the Puritans. Fear of “declension”
from the lofty standards and fervor of their Puritan fathers haunted the
writings of English and American Calvinists after the late seventeenth
century. Walzer argues that the decline in fervor was inevitable. Puritan-
ism was a revolutionary ideology created in a period of extraordinary dis-
ruption and uncertainty. Once the revolution had accomplished its goals,
then the intense fervor and extraordinary measures required to bring it
about were no longer needed. Similarly, the Manifesto seemed to some

Mormons at the time, as it still does to historians, a time of surrender,
when Saints ceased to live in “sacred space and sacred time.”49 But Puritan
“sainthood was only a temporary role,” Walzer notes. “For men always
seek and find not some tense and demanding discipline, but some new
routine.” Nevertheless, nostalgia for original fervor led to the experience of
normalization as a “decline.”50
The Mormon pioneer landscape was first of all a vernacular landscape,
one that can be connected in all of its details—its individual buildings and
ways of ordering them spatially—to a number of widespread European and
Euro-American folk and popular currents. None is remarkable in itself, but
as an ensemble, a cultural landscape, it is distinctive. This itself is a charac-
teristic Mormon pattern: a novel ensemble is created by playing with, and
on, widespread vernacular architectural and settlement patterns.
Still, it would be a mistake to see the Mormon cultural landscape in
terms of a “tension” or “contradiction” between ideals and so-called reali-
ties. The landscape holds no unified “message” about early Mormonism.
In asking our initial question about the ways the landscape shaped living
as a Mormon, we would do better to see the landscape as the product of a
process of working out—not completely, not consistently, not uniformly—
what it meant to live in Zion day by day.
Notes
1. Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village: A Pattern and Technology of Land Settlement
(Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1952).
2. Among the most significant scholarly works on the Great Basin landscape since
Nelson’s are Donald W. Meinig’s classic article “The Mormon Culture Region:
Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (June 1965): 191–220; Austin
E. Fife, “Stone Houses of Northern Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 40 (Winter
1972): 6–23; Dolores Hayden, “Eden or Jerusalem,” Chap. 5 in her Seven Ameri-
can Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 104–147; Richard H. Jackson, “The Mormon Vil-
lage: Genesis and Antecedents of the City of Zion Plan,” BYU Studies 17 (Winter
1977): 223–240; Mark P. Leone, “Archaeology as the Science of Technology:
Mormon Town Plans and Fences,” in Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substan-
tive and Theoretical Contributions, ed. Robert L. Schuyler (Farmingdale, NY:
Baywood Publishing, 1978), 191–200 (as well as other works by Leone); Richard
V. Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a
Unique Image in the American West (New York: AMS Press, 1978); C. Mark Ham-
ilton, Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture and Town Planning (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995); and many essays by Thomas Carter, including
“Folk Design in Utah Architecture: 1849–1890,” in Utah Folk Art: A Catalog of
Material Culture, ed. Hal Cannon (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press,
1980), 34–59, and “Traditional Design in an Industrial Age: Vernacular Domes-
tic Architecture in Victorian Utah,” Journal of American Folklore 104 (Fall 1991):
419–442. For the larger context of specifically Mormon architecture in the West,
see Thomas Carter and Peter Goss, Utah’s Historic Architecture, 1847–1940: A
Guide (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1988). Dr. Carter is the pre-
eminent contemporary interpreter of the Mormon material record, and I am
indebted to him for many years of companionable fieldwork and instruction in
the Mormon landscape, as well as for criticism and advice throughout the prep-
aration of this chapter.
3. Albert Tracy, “A Deserted City” [1858], in Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts
by Contemporary Observers, ed.William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen (Lin-
coln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 302.
4. Leone, “Archaeology as the Science of Technology,” 198.
5. The most useful introductions to American material-culture studies are Jules
David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and
Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (Spring 1982): 1–20; Thomas J. Schlereth, ed.,
Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, TN: American Association for
State and Local History, ca. 1982); and James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An
Archaeology of Early American Life, rev., exp. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1996).
6. For an introduction to the cultural landscape and methods for its study, see Paul
Groth, “Frameworks for Cultural Landscape Study,” in Understanding Ordinary
Landscapes, ed.Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1997), 1–21.
7. Klara Bonsack Kelley and Harris Francis, Navajo Sacred Places (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 1–11, 41–50.
8. For Mormon attitudes toward the landscape, see Steven L. Olsen, “The Mormon
Ideology of Place: Cosmic Symbolism of the City of Zion, 1830–1845” (PhD dis-
sertation, University of Chicago, 1985).
9. Dell Upton, “Vernacular Buildings,” in Built in the U.S.A.: American Buildings
from Airports to Zoos, ed. Diane Maddex (Washington, DC: Preservation Press,
1985), 167. For an introduction to vernacular-architecture studies, see Dell
Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Ver-
nacular Architecture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986).
10. Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic
Artifacts (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 170–171.
11. James Deetz, Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press,
1967), 49–52.
12. Henry Glassie, “Eighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk

Building,” Winterthur Portfolio 7 (1972): 43.
13. For a summary of the common house types of early Utah, see Carter and Goss,
Utah’s Historic Architecture.
14. Ibid., 10–13, 18–20, 24–25. A parstuga is a house with two main rooms separated
by a narrower central space that is often divided into two parts, an entry and a
small cooking room. Sometimes the house is set with its narrow end to the
street, and an entry door in that end leads directly into the largest room. In the
pair house, the central space is enlarged to become the main room of the house.
A pair house is always set long side to the street and entered through a central
door into the main room.
15. A classic statement was made by Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (En-
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 47: “The house, the village, and the
town express the fact that societies share certain generally accepted goals and
life values. The forms of primitive and vernacular buildings are less the result of
individual desires than of the aims and desires of the unified group for an ideal
environment.”
16. While earlier scholars did believe that Mormon domestic architecture was rela-
tively homogeneous, Thomas Carter’s careful field research has documented its
homogeneity, even within individual towns. Leon S. Pitman, “A Survey of
Nineteenth-Century Folk Housing in the Mormon Culture Region” (PhD dis-
sertation, Louisiana State University, 1973); Thomas R. Carter, “Building Zion:
Folk Architecture in the Mormon Settlements of Utah’s Sanpete Valley, 1849–
1890” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1984).
17. Leone, “Archaeology as the Science of Technology,” 194–195.
18. Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-
Day Saints, 1830–1900 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966 [origi-
nal printing 1958]), 13–14, 293–349; Joel Edward Ricks, Forms and Methods of
Early Mormon Settlement in Utah and the Surrounding Region, 1847 to 1877
(Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1964), 105–114.
19. Smith’s description of the city of Zion is reproduced in Hamilton, Nineteenth-
Century Mormon Architecture and Town Planning, 15–16.
20. William Penn, “Instructions Given by Me William Penn Proprietor and Gover-
nor of Pennsylvania to My Trusty and Loving Friends, William Crispin John
Bezar and Nathaniel Allen,” September 30, 1681, in The Papers of William Penn,
ed. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 2:121. See also James E. Vance Jr., The Continu-
ing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1990), 173–205; Hannah Benner Roach, “The Planting of
Philadelphia: A Seventeenth-Century Real Estate Development,” Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography 92 (January 1968): 3–47, and (April 1968):
143–194. As Roach points out (5), Penn’s famous green country town was not the
gridded urban Philadelphia that we know, but a semi-rural township.
21. First Presidency, Letter to Fremont Stake, Utah, quoted in Leone, “Archaeology
as the Science of Technology,” 195.
22. Quoted in Jackson, “Mormon Village,” 230.
23. Sylvester Mowry, Letter to “My Dear Bicknall,” September 17, 1854, in Among the
Mormons, 274.
24. First Presidency Letter to Fremont Stake, 195; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and
Moral Order in America, 1820–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1978), 1–2, 54–64. During the years when the Plat of the City of Zion was drawn
and the first Mormon towns were created, as Boyer, Urban Masses, 2, put it:
America’s urban reformers sought to “re-creat[e] in the cities the moral order of
the village.”
25. Quoted in Jackson, “Mormon Village,” 224–225.
26. Jackson, “Mormon Village,” 234. For a similar view, see Leone, “Archaeology as
the Science of Technology,” 197.
27. Dell Upton, “Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape in the Early Repub-
lic,” in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins (Winterthur,
DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1994), 67–71. The desire for a
uniformly developed town might help to explain Joseph Smith’s annoyance
when the “hill” in Nauvoo began to develop more rapidly than the “flats” below
it. Robert Bruce Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana, IL: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1965), 188.
28. Jackson, “Mormon Village,” 234; Keith Bennett and Thomas Carter, “Houses
with Two Fronts: The Evolution of Domestic Architectural Design in a Mormon
Community,” Journal of Mormon History 15 (1989): 47–58.
29. On the connection and the divergences, see Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical
America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (October 1980): 359–386;
and Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1985), 119–120.
30. Joseph Smith’s brother William recorded the Smith family’s attendance at re-
vival meetings in Palmyra, New York, in the early 1820s. “Grace Abounding and
Religious Revival,” in Among the Mormons, 25.
31. Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 61–62; Dickson D. Bruce Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk
Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee
Press, 1974), 71–75.
32. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Hill and Wang,
1993 [original printing 1940]), 19–20.
33. Hamilton, Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture and Town Planning, 129. The
modern camp-meeting tabernacles are still called “arbors” in memory of their
improvised predecessors, just as the more permanent cabins in which partici-

pants live are still called “tents.”
34. Accounts of Joseph Smith and Edward Partridge, quoted in David John Buerger,
The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship (San Francisco,
CA: Smith Research Associates, 1994), 24–25.
35. For accounts of several of the most important efforts to transform the family, see
Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopia—The
Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 1981); and Lawrence Foster, Women, Family, and Utopia:
Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991).
36. Hayden, Seven American Utopias, 43–45, 69, 71, 81.
37. Shipps, Mormonism, 116.
38. Laurel B. Andrew, The Early Temples of the Mormons: The Architecture of the Mil-
lennial Kingdom in the American West (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1978), 41, 43–44; Elwyn C. Robison, The First Mormon Temple: Design,
Construction, and Historic Context of the Kirtland Temple (Provo, UT: Brigham
Young University Press, 1997), 16–19.
39. Robison, First Mormon Temple, 85.
40. Asher Benjamin, The American Builder’s Companion (1806; 6th ed., 1827; re-
printed New York: Dover Publications, 1969), pl. LVII, “Plan and Elevation for a
Meeting House.” For illustrations of Old West Church and the Bedford meeting-
house, see Edmund W. Sinnott, Meetinghouse and Church in Early New England
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1963), 116–117.
41. Paul L. Anderson, “William Harrison Folsom: Pioneer Architect,” Utah Histori-
cal Quarterly 43 (Summer 1975): 252–254; Andrew, Early Temples of the Mormons,
39, 41; Hamilton, Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture, 38; Robison, First
Mormon Temple, 16–19.
42. Paul Goeldner, “The Architecture of Equal Comforts,” Historic Preservation 24
(January–March 1972): 14–17; Thomas Carter, “Living the Principle: Mormon
Polygamous Housing in Nineteenth-Century Utah,” Winterthur Portfolio 35
(Winter 2000): 223–251. For an account of a widely scattered polygamous family,
see Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother (Salt Lake City, UT: Tanner Trust
Fund, University of Utah Library, 1976). Tanner often commented on the in-
equality of resources distributed to her husband’s wives.
43. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990), 52–65.
44. Ibid., 66–68.
45. Dell Upton, “Architecture in Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33 (Autumn
2002): 715–721.
46. Matthew Johnson, Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Land-
scape (London: UCL Press, 1993), xi.
47. Michael Walzer, “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” History and Theory 3

(1963–1964): 82; Thomas Carter and Julie Osborne, eds., A Way of Seeing: Dis-
covering the Art of Building in Spring City, Utah (Salt Lake City, UT: Graduate
School of Architecture, University of Utah, 1994), 14.
48. Shipps, Mormonism, 125–127.
49. Ibid., 126.
50. Walzer, “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” 87.
10
Thoughts from the Farther West:

Mormons, California, and the
Civil War
By William Deverell
Western American historians, myself included, often make two

errors in their consideration of the mid-nineteenth century. First, they
give short shrift to the history of religion, whether described through in-
stitutions, leaders, beliefs, practices, or otherwise. This may, in fact, be
especially true as regards both Mormonism and Mormons. Western his-
torians, in my view, are generally content to allow colonial or early Repub-
lic specialists pride of place, usually on Palmyra or the paramilitarized
persecutions at Far West and Nauvoo, and rarely do they—we—seem to
do much in front of our students other than briefly accompany the
Mormon faithful to the Great Basin in the 1840s or with the later hand-
cart companies. That this is part of a generalized tendency for scholars to
avoid religion in their work on the West I don’t doubt. I do think that this
situation is changing, but the change is gradual and slow. As historian
Ferenc Szasz has written, “A person who reads only recent works might
well conclude that the modern American West has evolved into a thor-
oughly secular society.”1
As historian Philip Goff has noted recently, this gap in our collective
work and understanding is fairly profound, both in terms of the deliberate
ways in which western historians seem to ignore religion and the ways in
which they ignore Mormonism save for some “greatest hits” types of reci-
tations that render a long and complex history into a few moments of
social upheaval, rupture, or triumph. “The American West,” Goff writes,
“remains a secular enigma if one mistakes the dearth of literature on reli-
gion to mean there is nothing to study.”2 And, of course, part of this blind
Thoughts from the Farther West: Mormons, California, and the Civil War 237
spot has simply to do with the fact that western historians have not been
in any particular hurry to read much of what we might call the internal
literature related to any particular faith, its followers, leaders, or institu-
tions. “Church history” is alive and well and has long been so, across de-
nominations and faiths; but the insights and findings of those who pursue
such work tend generally to sit within either increasingly dusty books or
within the imaginary, though firm, walls separating such discourse from
“mainstream” historical scholarship.
In the specific case of the Latter-day Saints, I can provide a number of
examples of these roads not taken, perhaps none more glaring than the
story of a distinguished historian of the West offering an undergraduate
western history thematic seminar several years ago that completely by-
passed LDS history, in the Great Basin and elsewhere, as it was simply
“too different” than that of the wider West. And though I would be pre-
sumptuous to suggest that my own scholarly attention upon Mormonism
has been especially focused, this kind of willful skipping over of Mormon
history strikes me as so contradictory and wrong as to merit comment.
First, Mormon history, while distinct, even eccentric, in obvious and less
obvious ways, is nonetheless a part of the history of the nineteenth-century
West and merits inclusion in the broader narrative so described. That
broader narrative would be rendered incomplete and fragmentary without
it. And second, scholarly light shining on western Mormonism helps us
understand wider currents in the streams of American historical experi-
ence for the same period; opportunities for particularly scholarly prisms
or vantages are lost when Mormonism is sidestepped. It simply does not
make sense to intellectually walk by. To do so is to drop altogether an im-
portant analytical tool with which to examine the western past.
Lest I be accused of building a straw man here, let me say that the pair-
ing of western historians and Mormonism is hardly a null set or com-
pletely empty space of teaching and research. There has, of course, been
recognition of Mormon history within wider currents of western Ameri-
can scholarship and western American geography. We know, or we should
know, for instance, of the Mormon role in the gold rush. But this is not as
widely known nor taught as it should be. A breakthrough has been the
recent publication of Kenneth Owens’s book Gold Rush Saints: California
Mormons and the Rush for Riches, part of the distinguished Kingdom in the
West series.3 The mid-century Californian and (for a time at least) Mormon
Sam Brannan is a well-known figure. Brannan appears larger than life in
most treatments that address him; this approach gives him an antiquarian
cast in the scholarship as a boisterous, ambitious, vainglorious fellow

from the rough-and-tumble gold rush era, singing the ditty “We are Going
to California” on board a ship loaded with co-religionists. There, they’d
perhaps become a pendant in a western necklace stretching at least from
Salt Lake to California, if not somewhere in the South Pacific or Pacific
Rim. Henry Bigler is here in the literature, as are other members of the
Mormon Battalion during the moment of gold’s discovery, of course, noted
by Bigler himself, with clarity and admirable economy in his 1848 diary
entry. And Mormonism is sprinkled on the named landscape of the mid-
century Far West—Mormon Meadows, gold-hunting in the sands and
streams alongside this or that Mormon Bar in the frigid Sierra waters,
Mormon Island, and the like.
These instances notwithstanding, I stand by my assertion that histori-
ans of the American West have fallen down on the job at least partly when
it comes to integrating Mormon history into wider narratives of regional,
indeed national, dimension. Intentionally bypassing religion—and in my
specific focus for this lecture, Mormonism—relates to the second research
and teaching error western historians make about the nineteenth century,
one having to do with precisely contextual dimensions of regionalism or
national import. They give but brief attention to the Civil War: whether to
its place on the horizon of the 1850s, to its enactment and execution, or to
its innumerable consequences. Occasionally lost in their internal discipli-
nary debates and beholden to weary regional frameworks of analysis or
argument, western historians can become preoccupied with trees, when
an entire forest stands before them awaiting study and analysis.
The Civil War made the modern American West. Emerging from the
conflagration with a centralized federal authority, the United States incor-
porated the West into the nation in the war’s aftermath. That process took
no more than a generation. But the American West simultaneously pro-
voked and, in a very real sense, caused the Civil War. Early nineteenth-
century questions over—and uncertainty about—territorial expansion and
the future of slavery became fighting words by the 1840s and 1850s. The
rapid escalation of sectional tension headed toward disunion can be drawn
from one western moment to another: from the 1830s and 1840s, sec-
tional turmoil surrounding expansion and warfare in Texas; through the
1846–48 brutal little war against the Republic of Mexico and subsequent
Congressional and Constitutional questions over territorial acquisitions;
on to the Compromise of 1850; thence to the killing plains of Bleeding
Kansas; and finally to James Buchanan’s embarrassing sortie in which he
threw one-third of the U.S. Army against the Mormons in 1857 in the hap-
less, ill-conceived hope that a little war in the West might unite Southern-
ers, Northerners, Republicans, and Democrats alike and, not incidentally,
take everyone’s mind off the impending crisis over the question of whether
slavery would be allowed to expand westward. Each of these arenas of
rising conflict had much to do with fundamental disagreements over the
meaning of western conquest, western territorial governance, and the
westward expansion of slavery or free labor ideology. Taken together, they
rehearsed and then very much helped to cause the Civil War.4
In part because western historians have only recently begun to insist
on it, historians of antebellum America correctly note that the Far West
played a critical role in the eventual capitulation to war. Scholars know
well the ways in which questions over the future of western territories,
before and especially following the Mexican War, provoked political and
other antagonisms on the ground and in Washington. The West helped
bring about the war in one shattering moment after another, and western
politicians proved inept to meet the challenges of sectionalism effectively.
At the very least, they were in over their heads, naive and utterly unable to
reverse the rush to the precipice that their very own region was initiating.
By the time John Brown took what he learned as an abolitionist zealot in
Kansas—namely, how to slaughter pro-slavery opponents in cold b lood—
to the East and the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, the war was a fait ac-
compli. Abraham Lincoln’s election and the South’s immediate secession
were but additional preludes, not causes, of the clash which followed so
quickly.
And with the coming of the war in the reality of the 1850s and 1860s,
western historians look for it in the wrong places. As just one example,
they ignore the Utah War, which is fundamentally tied to the coming of the
Civil War. Rather, western historians look for a skirmish here or there, a
real battle in northern New Mexico, and that is supposedly the whole story.
But it is not so. The war was everywhere—in rhetoric and politics—and
thus the impact of the war was also everywhere. Yes, there were a few Civil
War battles of importance in the West. The dramatic engagement at Glo-
rietta Pass, New Mexico, is the most famous and most important; and it
did, in fact, blunt a Confederate hope to hold a supply and territorial line
in the far Southwest, stretching north even into vocal pockets of pro-
slavery sympathies in California. But finding battlefields, digging up spent
bullets, or plotting troop movements is not the only, or even most em-
blematic, way to find the Civil War in the West. The war was fought on
battlefields of the East and South, and it was fought there because of the
ways in which northern, southern, and western politicians disagreed
about the West. As such, the war was everywhere in the West—before,
during, and after hostilities.
Scholarly blind spots such as these are curious, if only because our
nineteenth-century informants—people, laws, events—so clearly linked
religion to the West, to the coming of the war, to the future of the repub-
lic. The nineteenth century tells us, in no uncertain terms, that, for ex-
ample, Mormonism and the coming of the Civil War cataclysm are
linked. The voices from the past are loudest and angriest coming from
the stalwarts of the infant but fast-growing Republican Party which, by
the mid-1850s, thunders against the threats of the “twin relics of barba-
rism,” the danger that both might sink roots in the West, and, in so doing,
bring down the nation. Rhetoric regarding territorial laws and govern-
ance went hand in hand with behavior—Bleeding Kansas, the Utah War,
take your pick—and it is hardly more than a hop, skip, and a jump to
fratricide from there.
It is easy to find the Republicans on this historical stage. But it is im-
portant to note that they do not occupy it all by themselves. We might
think so, if we looked quickly and cursorily. But Democrats engaged in
anti-Mormon thought, word, and deed as well. One needs look only so far
as President Buchanan and the Utah War or the vehement language of
Stephen A. Douglas in the latter 1850s to see it. Douglas gets tripped up
by his own popular sovereignty insistence regarding Utah. By 1857 he is
arguing that Utah and Mormons had so violated the social compact and
spirit of republican government and principles that not only should terri-
torial status not be validated by movement towards statehood, but that the
territorial framework of Utah should be dissolved and the territory placed
entirely back in the hands of the federal government. As close examina-
tion of Douglas clearly shows, he painted himself into a corner of irony if
not outright contradiction: arguing for popular sovereignty in most, but
not all, of the American West.
Stephen A. Douglas is an interesting character, to be sure, and we
ought to pay him more attention—and not solely as Lincoln’s successful
foil in the 1858 Senatorial campaign in Illinois. Here I would refer inter-
ested readers to William MacKinnon’s terrific rumination on the naming
of Fort Douglas and the waging of the Utah War, which highlights some
of the ways in which we might learn more about Douglas, the West, the
coming of the Civil War, and Mormonism.5
And much as MacKinnon did implicitly in his essay, I would like to

stress that I do not simply mean here that we can take the Mormon issue
as a case study of rising sectional difficulties, although such an approach
yields great intellectual profit. The issues are more important, I think,
than what they offer merely in case-study fashion.
In other words, we would do well to remember just how linked were
the issues of the coming of the Civil War, and the coming of the Utah War,
in the eyes of the nation. Those links are all-but-spelled out in the lengthy
and terribly smart poem Mormoniad, published anonymously in Boston
in 1858, which bashes James Buchanan and Brigham Young equally for
their various foibles and follies, but warns of an impending cataclysm tied
directly to the twin-relics idea. “Fight on,” the author defies the rapidly
militarizing North and South, “til all your men be dead, / And Mormon
saints your widows wed!”6
Oh, that the author of Mormoniad had not chosen anonymity! We may
yet find out who wrote this remarkable political commentary, but for now,
let us turn our attention to another region for somewhat similar political
and other arguments of the period. I consider a most profitable approach
to be representative words from a Southern pulpit in the 1850s. Our
preacher is Benjamin Morgan Palmer, propagandist Presbyterian, who
would become a well-known, perhaps the best-known, religious apologist
for slavery and ordained supporter of the Confederacy and who would,
once the war broke out, preach a fiery brand of holy war to Southern troops.
But that would come later. That would be in the 1860s, given from the
vantage of his pulpit perch in New Orleans, at which time he was an
already-established fire eater. A decade earlier, in January 1853, on the day
after his thirty-fifth birthday, Palmer preached on “Mormonism” before the
Mercantile Library Association of Charleston, South Carolina.7 Palmer
started slowly, laying out his main point with an important medical meta-
phor. “One of the most striking and significant events of the present cen-
tury,” he asserted, “is the rise and spread of Mormonism.” That phenomenon,
he suggested, was a story of fabulous dimensions, infused with drama and
romance nearly beyond comprehension. Indeed, he said, “we hold our
breath in continual suspense” regarding the expectation of the next revela-
tion of Mormonism’s growth and evolution.8
To be sure, the Reverend Palmer was no fan of the new religion, a po-
sition in which he had plenty of 1850s company, North, South, East, and
West. Mormonism was, he stated flatly, a “singular delusion,” and he ex-
pressed great surprise—even disgust—that, in this modern era, halfway
through the nineteenth century, such a thing as the Mormon religion

should germinate, flower, and thrive as it so obviously had done already by
the early 1850s.
What was happening in the United States? Palmer wondered. In no
time at all, the Mormon faithful had built a far western civilization and
were now “almost knocking for admission into this family of States.” What
a development! All in, as he put it, “an empire not yet out of swaddling
clothes” and from a “religion not old enough to wear a beard.”9
Out in the Far West, in a region halfway and perfectly positioned be-
tween what Palmer considered the civilized East, or preferably the South,
and the critically important Pacific Coast region, sat the rising civilization
of Deseret, the locality, as he put it, “precisely suited” for what he called the
“manifest destiny” awaiting the Kingdom of Saints.
Through this geographical reckoning, Palmer was zeroing in on Utah,
and especially Salt Lake, and what he clearly believed to be a crisis moment
in American history. He deliberately wandered past slavery, given his pre-
dilections, and hit upon the Rocky Mountains and farther West as the ba-
rometer of stormy constitutional and cultural weather in the young United
States. There, within the embrace of the Wasatch, the Mormon communi-
ties had already begun to operate in linchpin fashion. There, “sufficiently
nigh to connect their fortunes with the States that must eventually skirt
either ocean,” history was being forged.10
It is important to remember a couple of things about this geography of
potential crisis and to let the Reverend Palmer be our guide for a moment.
Despite our twenty-first century automotive- and air-travel smugness
about the compressed nature of far western geography—Los Angeles is
but an hour and a half from Salt Lake by air—there was a presumption
that the Far West, even in its earliest days of territorial or statehood status,
was a region navigable in time and space. The railroad drove that point
home, of course, but even before the railroad’s 1869 transcontinental arri-
val, this was a common perception. So, too (and this is, of course, part of
Palmer’s concern that we would do well to note), was it thought that Utah
and the Pacific Coast, especially California, were aligned in Mormon terri-
torial ambition and desire, part of the refuge plan of the “Great Western
Measure.” Despite Brigham Young’s fears that California might prove just
too seductive a place for Saints in the Great Basin, Deseret in Utah was to
some but “eastern California” and California was, possibly, eventually but
“western Deseret.” This is not to suggest that anyone could overcome the
obstacles of distance, salt flats, or desert easily, but I do underscore the
point that things were not necessarily so far-flung nor disconnected as we

might otherwise assume.
Palmer reminds us, too (especially we western historians who have
paid too little attention), of the connective tissue between California and
Utah in the gold rush and immediate pre-gold rush era, when adventurers
such as Sam Brannan thought themselves at the end of a Mormon emi-
grant ambition that would use the Great Basin as the staging ground for
settler and faith implantations farther to the West—that, in Palmer’s anx-
ious phrasing, Utah settlements of Latter-day Saints were but “stepping
stones to the Pacific coast.” This was very much the case through the mid-
1850s, not least because Mormons helped so much in developing overland
trail routes, at least up until the Church’s 1857 call for Saints to return to
Utah. And the same was true, if to a lesser extent, after that Utah War–
inspired return to the Great Basin. As historian Kenneth Owens recently
noted in his important treatment of the California gold rush, the “Mormon
role” in that event has been unaccountably “overlooked, deliberately ig-
nored, misunderstood, or forgotten” by Mormon and non-Mormon histo-
rians alike. For the former, what Owens calls a “Zioncentric” point of view
dominated official histories; the latter tended, and tend still, to see Mor-
mons as mere curiosities in the gold fields, almost as if they’d gotten un-
accountably lost on their way to the Great Basin. Palmer’s anxiety is all
about that role and, more importantly, at least in his dark fears, the conse-
quences of it.
What is especially fascinating to me about Palmer’s ideas, his fears,
and his rhetoric is that he cast himself as the protective Unionist, lauding
the confederation of states that make up the Union as an inviolate set not
to be torn asunder by what was then brewing, or supposedly brewing, in
the Far West, either in Utah or elsewhere.
Irony of ironies: the states’ rights, slavery-praising fire eater abhors the
threat to the Union posed by Utah and the threat to the republic posed by
this possible necklace of anti-republican thought, word, and deed stretch-
ing from the tops of the Rockies to the sands of the Pacific coast. Palmer
must sheathe his own states’ rights vehemence in opposition to the most
vehement states’ rights position then being advocated in the United
States, that of Mormons in Utah.
Would, Palmer wondered aloud, the juggernaut transition from terri-
tories to states, so obviously represented by California’s recent arrival into
the embrace of the Union, save the nation from Mormonism? Would a
strong federal presence and system triumph? The irony is delicious.
But even more intriguing is what Palmer thinks is happening way out
west. As we have noted, it is not hard to find anti-Mormon opinion, vehe-
mence, and rhetoric in the 1850s, needless to say, though it is quite inter-
esting to find it so fervently expressed by a southern Democrat this early
in the decade. Stephen Douglas would eventually arrive at this position
and take his party with him, by way of his own oratory. Douglas’s vehe-
mence is especially telling, if only because the state rights popular sover-
eignty argument used by Mormons was precisely the position promulgated
by Douglas; in consequence, he is forced to backpedal rather furiously.
But that’s still several years off in the early 1850s. Douglas’s migration to
another position will not occur until after the Utah War.
What is compelling is Palmer’s idea of this necklace west from Salt
Lake and the threat it represents. It suggests a level of anxiety in the South
to which we historians have perhaps not given sufficient credence in our
discussions of the coming of the Civil War and the place and significance
of Mormonism and its growth in precisely the same historical moment.
Listen to Palmer’s fears: “We cannot cast our gaze beyond the Rocky
Mountains, and scrutinize the face of society collecting upon our extreme
western coast, without a measure of anxiety for the unfolding future,” he
confided.11 In other words, the Compromise of 1850, which seemingly
staved off war, was but a mere postponement of trouble; and Palmer knew
it, though his reasoning is not perhaps what we might expect.
What is the threat? What is the trouble? Palmer’s nothing but a bold
thinker: He suggests to his audience assembled at the Mercantile Library
that what is brewing out west is the focal point of the deepest crisis the
nation had yet had to pass through. “We cannot fail to observe the singular
coincidence that while a bold attempt is made by Anglo-Saxons them-
selves to reproduce the old civilization of Asia, and while a community has
been founded upon that basis, a strong and copious tide of really Asiatic
population has been pouring into our California territory.”12
How’s that?
Palmer’s is a complicated notion. It is fascinating. What Palmer is sug-
gesting is that Mormons and Mormonism in Utah are fostering an Asiatic
sensibility among Anglo-Saxon Saints and converts. This is actually an
old, very old, tactic by which to offend—it is at once tied to contemporary
1840s and 1850s arguments pairing Joseph Smith with Mohammed and
what the era often called American Mohammedism, and it is a much older
post-Enlightenment slur by which Asian customs and culture fare poorly
in comparison with Western ideas and ideals. And what Palmer’s saying
implicitly here, being already an apologist for slavery, is that the Asiatic
tendencies of Mormonism are undermining the racial vigor of Anglo-
Saxonism in Utah, that the natural superiority of Anglo-Saxonism is
threatened by religious extremism which is weakening racial dominance
through cultural means. For someone like Palmer, who in defense of slav-
ery must meld ideas of racial superiority—or white supremacy—with
racial noblesse oblige and paternalism, what’s happening in the West is
deeply troubling.
That is the first leg of Palmer’s argument. The second leg bespeaks an
awareness of the gold fields of California, the rising community of San
Francisco, and the presence of Chinese in both, which in early 1853 is
probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 people, almost all of
whom were men.13 That population was fast rising. And Palmer noted that
some 17,000 Chinese had, only in the recent past, left China, most of
whom were bound for California.
The argument, or really the worry, is triangulated by the geometry of
the West. What if the faux Asians and the real Asians met up? In a won-
derfully laden and even Freudian phrase in a pre-Freudian era, Palmer
wondered, “What is to be the issue of this commingling of races on this
continent? . . . We cannot be insensible to this momentous crisis which is
before us.”14
Of course, what Palmer meant and what Palmer feared was exactly
about “the issue” of commingling in a demographic and mixed-race sense.
Not only would such a process offend the sensibilities of an America
which abhorred miscegenation, but it would further the western popula-
tion boom. And if a population bridge were to be built between the Far
West and the Rocky Mountain West, and if that bridge were Asian, or in
the case of Mormondom, Asian-inflected by way of supposedly inferior
cultural traits, practices, and governance, the republic was obviously
doomed. No matter how powerful, republican institutions themselves
would not be vital or elastic enough to overcome the stress; and they would
collapse in the face of racial, cultural, and other differences.
Palmer’s linking of Sinophobia with Mormon-phobia, on essentially
racial grounds, offers us a remarkably interesting vantage point from
which to view the stresses of the period, one that offers a great deal of in-
sight to scholars and students alike.
These linked problems are addressed, in different ways, by the federal
government, which, given the pathways of history from the early 1850s
forward, might be said to have agreed with Reverend Palmer. The Utah
War of 1857–58 was an attempt to corral Mormonism within a militarized

restructuring of territorial authority and governance. And the Chinese Ex-
clusion acts of the early 1880s, spawned directly by the actions and lobby-
ing of western political officials and populations, addresses the so-called
“Chinese problem” with a crudely restrictive diplomatic cudgel.
It may be true that, having just weathered a rehearsal Civil War on its
own turf, Utah more or less sat out the real Civil War. But that hardly di-
vorces Mormonism from the debates surrounding the central traumas of
the era, as Reverend Palmer’s fearful prognostications remind us. I think
Palmer is probably playing both ends against the middle—he’s indeed
frightened of what he thinks is happening in the West, and he’s also trying
to sidestep the centrality of the slavery issue while so doing. What results
from his odd sermon is both a telling indication of the place of Mormon-
ism in sectional debates leading up to the war and an equally emphatic
declaration that race and racial difference stood at the heart of the many
linked crises of the 1850s.
There are other ways to think through these issues and this period.
Some are far more speculative than earlier points I’ve made, but I wonder
if we might find a way by which to add an additional theoretical or analyt-
ical prism to Mormon scholarship in the period before and after the Civil
War? This notion has two speculative points tied together.
One is to make an observation, one not yet backed up by much research
on my part: Antebellum America, fraught with the tensions of the coming
and very nearly inevitable war, fraught with the very specific tensions of
Mormonism and its place within the republic, is a time in which Americans
seem particularly obsessed with health and disease. The metaphors are eve-
rywhere, and it shouldn’t really surprise us that they are. Many an Ameri-
can viewed the republic as ailing, as having fallen away from the robustness
of its infancy and adolescence, threatened as it was by all manner of insults
aimed at the body politic. Southerners feared the invasion of Northerners
and northern ideas; Northerners increasingly viewed the South as a virtu-
ally cancerous threat, to the Constitution, to the West, to the future.
And metaphors of disease, contagion, and infection were indiscrimi-
nately heaped upon Mormonism and its leaders. Reverend Benjamin
Palmer, like legions of his peers, capitulated to this tendency when he looked
upon 1850s Salt Lake City, its success, and its demography, and resorted to
the language of contagion and infection to reinforce his antagonism.
Nineteenth-century Americans thought of health in ways we do not,
they thought of health perhaps more constantly than we do, and they wove
ideas about health and disease with their perceptions of landscape, coun-
tryside, and environment. Theirs was a world of humors and miasmas;
and being a pre–germ theory people, they tried to address its fearful mys-
teries in about the only ways they could, with fairly primitive medical
ideas and, more often, with descriptive language.
As nothing more than a hint of how we might think analytically of this
period, I would expect that a prism attentive to health might be a useful
method by which to examine Mormonism, the sectional crisis, the coming
of the great national, bloody trauma, and the nation’s painfully slow recov-
ery from it.
One of the points I made when I began this address had to do with the
ways in which historians of the American West pay scant attention to the
Civil War and how very close attention to western Mormonism is one
avenue by which to return to what I think is the more correct path. Let me
move toward a conclusion here by reiterating that point again, and by
taking up the postwar period in particular, inflected by ideas and ideals of
health, convalescence, and recovery.
What happens after health, the health of individuals and the health of
the body politic, is threatened? Is there recovery? Is there redemption?
Just as they were concerned about health, nineteenth-century Amer-
icans were fixated on ideas about convalescence. And of course, this
only increased in the years of the war and its aftermath, and I think had
particular resonance in, and relevance to, the West. Let me give you one
important case in point. Abraham Lincoln never came to California.
But he wanted to. Only hours before his 1865 assassination, Lincoln
spoke of visiting the Far West. Exhausted by the commander-in-chief
stresses of leading the Union through four years of indescribable fratri-
cide, the congenitally melancholy president yearned for the rejuvena-
tion and convalescence that California seemed to promise. We know
Lincoln’s longing because Schuyler Colfax, speaker of the House of
Representatives, met with Lincoln on the day of the assassination.
When he told the president that he was soon off to California, Lincoln
exclaimed, “How I would rejoice to make that trip!”15 The California
dream of astounding wealth—that profound, instantaneous transition
remarked upon by Henry Bigler in his January 1848 diary—was not
even twenty years old when Lincoln voiced this poignant wish. On that
fateful April day, Lincoln mused about that promise, especially in re-
gards to Civil War soldiers about to be released from their military ob-
ligations. He told Colfax that he would try to encourage the former
soldiers to migrate westward, where they would find work and open
space aplenty.
But that was not exactly the version of the California dream Lincoln
pondered for himself. In the afternoon of the day he died, Lincoln went for
a carriage ride with his wife. His thoughts again turned to California and
the Far West. He proposed to Mary Lincoln that they travel to the Rockies
and then go on to California. The trip would be restful and reinvigorating.
Lincoln was in an exuberant mood, Mary recalled later, so enthusiastic, in
fact, that it startled her. Assassination makes the moment all the more
ironic—Lincoln looked west for healing on the very day he was killed.
What of the West after the war, or after the wars, Utah and Civil? With
a few notable exceptions—generally works that trace Reconstruction poli-
cies in western settings—historians have too quickly jettisoned the West
from the Civil War in their teaching and research devoted to the postwar
period. And we’ve certainly done the same with the Utah War, failing, at
least until very recently, adequately to study its aftermath through the
1860s and 1870s (or beyond).
This tendency (encapsulated in the usual textbook recitation of postwar
western history through formulations such as “the Conquest of the West”
or “the Rise of the West”) is profoundly misleading. If one considers, for
example, the coming of age of a place such as Los Angeles, where I live, we
must recall how proximate the Civil War was to those journeying to south-
ern California from elsewhere in the nation. One could hardly live through
the Civil War without knowing someone or being related to someone who
was wounded or killed in the war. And I expect that this is nearly as true in
Utah, despite its resolute position on the sidelines, as a result of having only
recently gone through the Utah War. The nation, North and South, was
awash in the wounded following the war; entire chunks of state budgets,
especially in the states of the former Confederacy, were earmarked for the
treatment of the wounded, the purchase of prosthetic devices, and the like.
It would have been impossible to escape the proximity of the Civil War,
in ways personal, temporal, even geographical. The war was simply far too
great a rupture in the national fabric to be so easily pushed aside by schol-
ars a century or more later. On the contrary, I would suggest that the post–
Civil War West was explicitly tied to the waging and aftermath of the war
in ways just as critical as the antebellum West was tied to the coming of
the conflagration. We should be more attuned to the ways in which a
broken nation and its wounded people sought redemption and convales-
cence in the postwar West.
Americans, Northerners and Southerners alike, moved West in the

postwar era in part because of the Civil War—because they wanted to get
away, because they wanted to heal, physically, emotionally, or otherwise.
And most of them came on the transcontinental railroad which was, if
anything, a device by which the nation was supposed to be drawn together
after the war, a gigantic suture tying together the torn-asunder North and
South.
If the West caused the Civil War because antagonistic sections of the
Union could no longer peaceably agree about the fate of that region, what
did the West do to heal the wounds of that war? And if Mormonism was
viewed as a great threat, a contagion, within the West and the body politic
of the nation, one that demanded the surgical response called for by Ste-
phen Douglas and others, how do such analogies, allegories, and narra-
tives reflect changes in the post–Civil War and post–Utah War period?
The question was not lost on sharp observers, people, or institutions
which understood, if wishfully, that the West had a special role (if not spe-
cial obligation) in the postwar aftermath when peace ought to reign. Some
understood that soon-to-be veterans would find their way west. In early
1865, the New York Herald wrote of the restlessness and independence
of soldiers, insisting that postwar work—“the dull routine of regular
employments”—would hardly satisfy men accustomed to the nomadic ad-
venturousness of soldiering. “There are plenty of fine, strapping fellows
who would laugh at the idea of being bound down to a bench or a spade
after having enjoyed the liberty of war.” What would come of these men?
They would go west. “Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, and Utah, to say
nothing of Mexico, Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua, Lower Califor-
nia, are yearning for such settlers as those in the armies of the North and
the South. . . . They will go there, settle down, populate the country, get
rich and double the size of the Union within twenty years.”16
What happens in the West after the war? What happens to ideals of
nationhood in the calamity of Reconstruction, when North yet mistrusts
South, and South mistrusts North—how does the West become a place of
national and individual redemption? How does the West help redefine
both lives and national meaning?
And how do healing, convalescence, and redemption play out in a place
like Utah and within Mormonism writ large? How do the Church and its
leadership respond to the national need, even necessity, for lives renewed
or made anew in the West? Does Mormonism become in any degree a
spiritual or literal home for those whose lives had been shattered by the
war? And does the changing relationship between the Church and the
nation, between Brigham Young and federal officials, reflect to any degree
these larger themes of health, rejuvenation, convalescence? I do not think
we know much about these issues, and I think we should know far more.
A final query. We Californians proudly embrace our state’s remarka-
ble landscape as a keystone to our history and culture. But we’ve ignored
the ways in which California’s beautiful environments and its national
parks played critical roles in this postwar healing project. Yosemite, for
example, was hailed as a veritable outdoor hospital, established by God to
heal Americans of the psychic and physical insults of the war. Frederick
Law Olmsted himself saw the place in this light when he came directly
from the Civil War battlefields to protect it in 1864. John Muir picked
right up where Olmsted left off. Once Muir arrived in Yosemite, having
dodged the Civil War draft because he was appalled by its carnage, he
finds himself in a tabernacle—and he called it by that name—equally
restorative of body, mind, and spirit. California’s Sierra Nevadas, which
framed Yosemite, were, Muir wrote famously, “the most divinely beauti-
ful of all the mountain-chains I have seen.”17
But what of Utah’s wild spaces? Might they, too, and a late nineteenth-
century rising consciousness about their beauty and sublimity, fit into this
framework? After the war, Americans embraced the West as wide open,
quiet, filled with places of majesty and power, places less of sublime awe
than of repose and thought and convalescence. Did they—they must—
have spaces in Utah they looked upon similarly? And how did Utah pres-
ent its natural beauty and meaning to the nation? How did the Utah
environment fit into new national dialogues and processes of recovery?
I began this lecture with a scolding that western historians haven’t,
with some exceptions, pulled Mormonism into their analyses of broad
themes and historical trajectories in the West. That is changing, though I
reiterate that I think the change is gradual. What western historians need
to do is link Mormonism with wider currents of American historical schol-
arship, pull Mormonism and its social, cultural, economic, political, and
religious expressions into contextual relationship with such events as the
coming of the Civil War, with the wrenching national questions provoked
by the Compromise of 1850, and with the war’s immensely complicated
aftermath, in broad and sensitive ways reminiscent of those employed by
legal scholar Sally Gordon in her superb book on the “Mormon ques-
tion.”18 Nineteenth-century observers made these linkages and not always,
of course, in the most positive light: but we would do well to remember
that they did, and we would do well to analyze what they meant in so
doing.
And we haven’t even broached the twentieth century today. I generally
feel that western American historians, and especially California histori-
ans, are too fixated on the twentieth century when so much work remains
to be done on the nineteenth. But in the case of twentieth-century western
American Mormonism, I’m more than willing to suggest that we know
far, far too little and that thesis after thesis after thesis yet needs to be writ-
ten: scholarly works that have big arguments to make, that tackle large
questions in broad contexts.
Scholars are coming round. There is today more attention being paid
to religion, devotion, and faith by western scholars who have not been
quick to take such things into scholarly contemplation. Similarly, there is
a widening of perception by religious scholars on other currents of experi-
ence, culture, and institutions. These trends include Mormonism and the
history of Mormonism, and they are broader as well.
The changes are largely incremental. But the sheer scholarly depth
and contextual breadth of the work discussed at this conference these
past few days is itself an indication, the best indication, that these are ex-
citing times to be considering the historical interplay between region and
communities of faith. Just as there is a place and a space for insular dia-
logues about theology, belief, and practice, there is a concomitant space
for historical context and historical comparison. Sub-fields and sub-
specialties, and the often profound expertise that accompanies them, are
critical to the furtherance of knowledge. But so, too, are bigger picture
analyses, tied to the larger questions about the American experience and
American identity, about conflict and resolution, and about crisis, re-
demption, and hope.
Notes
1. Ferenc Szasz quoted in Philip Goff, “Religion and the American West,” in The
Blackwell Companion to the American West, ed. William Deverell (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004), 286–287.
2. Goff, “Religion and the American West,” 287.
3. Kenneth Owens, Gold Rush Saints: California Mormons and the Great Rush for
Riches (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2005). See also the older and still useful
study: William Glover, The Mormons in California (Los Angeles, CA: Dawson’s
Books, 1954).
4. For further discussion of these themes, see William Deverell, “Redemptive Cal-
ifornia? Re-Thinking the Post Civil War,” Rethinking History 11, no. 1 (March
2007): 61–78.
5. William P. MacKinnon, “The Utah War’s Impact: A Military Campaign’s Legacy
for Both Utah and the Nation,” Presented at the Symposium Celebrating the
140th Anniversary of Fort Douglas, Utah: “The Military in Utah; Utahns in the
Military,” October 26, 2002, Salt Lake City.
6. Anon., Mormoniad (Boston, MA: A. Williams & Co., 1858).
7. Benjamin M. Palmer, Mormonism (Charleston, SC: I. C. Morgan, 1853).
8. Ibid., 3.
9. Ibid., 4.
10. Ibid., 8.
11. Ibid., 33.
12. Ibid.
13. For a helpful demographic overview, see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensible
Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, CA: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1971), 3–10.
14. Palmer, Mormonism, 3.
15. Quoted in E. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours (Jefferson, NC: McFar-
land, 1987), 20.
16. New York Herald, February 6, 1865.
17. John Muir quoted in Tim Duane, Shaping the Sierra Nevada: Nature, Culture, and
Conflict in the Changing West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1999), 8.
18. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional
Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002).
11
The Mormons and America’s Empires

By Walter Nugent
My old friend, colleague, and predecessor in this predicament of giving

a Tanner Lecture on Mormonism, Martin Ridge, said in his 1991 Tanner
Lecture that he perceived the series to be a clever device for forcing non-
Mormon historians to think seriously about Mormon history, and, as the
series charter says, to provide context from the outside—insofar as there
is an outside. And as I look over those previous Tanner Lectures, I see only
one, really, that directly addressed the place of the Mormons in the history
of American imperialism. That was by Donald Meinig, the eminent his-
torical geographer. But he spoke twenty-four years ago, and his concern
was how the American empire, political and cultural, exerted power over
the incipient independent Mormon nation and ultimately forced assimila-
tion.1 My concern is how Mormon history fits general U.S. imperial his-
tory, or doesn’t.
To get my feet wet for this lecture, I visited Salt Lake City last October
and was kindly received by Richard E. Turley, assistant Church historian,
and his associates at the LDS Church History Library. Rick asked what I
would be talking about. I replied that I was at a very early stage, but I
thought I would start by observing that, when Brigham brought the Saints
to Utah, his main objective was not to expand the boundaries of the United
States, but something quite different—to establish the kingdom of God
on earth. However, very quickly the borders of the United States rose to
include Utah, or Deseret, and he and the people would have to come to
terms with it. And at some later point—a turning point—I needed to find
out just when—he or his successors brought the Church and the people
into conformity with the national consensus about empire-building. Such
was my working hypothesis.
Rick then talked for a few minutes. As I heard him, he was telling me
to go slowly—that Mormon history was full of ambiguities; not all of its
lines run straight. He reminded me of the Yankee and New York state ori-
gins of the first Saints; the traumas suffered in Missouri and Illinois; that
dissent as well as assent marked the early years (and later ones too). The
more I have read, the more I have realized the wisdom of his remarks.
Floyd O’Neil wrote something similar in 1978 in the Utah Historical Quar-
terly: “As with Mormon history generally, just when things seem to be
typically American the unique has a way of asserting itself and begging for
analysis. Mormonism’s stormy Midwestern experience, its New England
heritage, its scriptural base [the injunction to redeem the Lamanites, and
hence the Indian missions and farms], and its schizophrenic view of gov-
ernment in the nineteenth century combined to create its own script” pro-
duced and directed by Brigham Young.2 The more I pursued my self-taught
courses in Mormon History 101, 201, even 301, over the past several
months, the more I appreciated Rick’s and Floyd’s admonitions. The pio-
neers were refugees, escaping Midwestern persecutors; but in another
sense they were extending not only the earthly kingdom but American
culture. Joseph Smith’s “Views,” his presidential platform of 1844, is evi-
dence of that. But my working hypothesis turned out to be wrong, as we
shall see.
The Continental Empire

Let me lay out for you the outline of what I see as the overall pattern of
American empire-building. The United States has constructed three em-
pires in its history: the continental empire to 1848 or 1854, the offshore
empire from the Alaska Purchase to the 1930s, and the global empire we
have erected since 1945.3
The continental empire consisted of several successive acquisitions. In
each case, the acquisition involved three stages. First came the legal or
quasi-legal acquisition of the real estate by treaty with Britain, Spain,
France, American Indians, or Mexico. The second step was dealing with
the previous occupants—mainly Indians but also, sometimes, French,
Spanish, Mexicans, even Brits—by removal, subjugation, chasing them
off, displacement, or reconcentration. And third, the phase that took the
longest, was the actual occupation or settlement of the area by Anglo-
Americans (sometimes with African American slaves).
The early continental acquisitions were, in 1782, Trans-Appalachia; in
1803, Louisiana; and from 1810 to 1819, in chunks, Spanish Florida. The
first acquisition, Trans-Appalachia, is often overlooked because we have
The Mormons and America’s Empires 255
been accustomed since grade school to maps of the United States as it was
after the 1783 peace settlement, extending out to the Mississippi; that ter-
ritory appears small compared to its doubling in 1803 and its spread to the
Pacific by 1848. But as of 1782–83, the United States had neither con-
quered Trans-Appalachia nor settled it, and it was only by the brilliance
and stubbornness of Benjamin Franklin, America’s senior negotiator at
the Paris peace talks, that the United States gained its Mississippi River
boundary at that moment. Thereafter, settlers poured into the region; and
by 1803, Kentucky, then Tennessee, then Ohio became co-equal states in
the Union. Then came Napoleon’s decision to sell Louisiana, and Thomas
Jefferson’s decision to seize the opportunity by which the national territory
doubled. A few years later came the conquest of Spanish Florida, a compli-
cated story involving settler uprisings and filibusters in which agents of
President James Madison were involved, followed by Andrew Jackson’s
destruction of the Creeks in 1814 and his war on the Seminoles in 1818,
both full-scale ethnic cleansings.
Territorial acquisitions then stalled for about twenty-five years. Ameri-
cans in ever larger numbers accelerated their moves into Trans-Appalachia
and across the Mississippi into Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. And among
them were the first of the Saints, led by Joseph Smith, migrating from cen-
tral New York to Kirtland and to Missouri and, in the late 1830s, to Nauvoo.
Mormon history was, from then on, part of Americans’ westward expan-
sion and empire-building.
Acquisition resumed in the mid-1840s, the heyday of Manifest Des-
tiny. Texas joined the Union in 1845; Oregon came in by treaty with Brit-
ain in 1846. Simultaneously with that, Polk contrived to bring about war
with Mexico, ending in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that trans-
ferred the Southwest, including Utah, to the United States. The Gadsden
Purchase five years later was a fund-raiser for Santa Anna. With it the
continental boundaries were in place. Subjugation of the Indians and set-
tlement of the land followed over the subsequent decades into the twenti-
eth century.
Enter the Latter-day Saints and Joseph Smith’s “Views”

By this time the history of the Latter-day Saints was well begun and was
becoming affected by and intertwined with national history. Are we look-
ing at convergence, or divergence, or some of both? Contrary to my initial
hunch, considerable convergence existed at the start. I discovered that the
pioneers in Nauvoo were in a sense escaping—certainly from M issouri—

and they would soon do so from Nauvoo as well. But in another sense,
they were taking part in the general American story. Joseph Smith’s an-
nounced candidacy for U.S. president in early 1844 included the docu-
ment you are all familiar with, “General Smith’s Views of the Powers and
Policy of the Government of the United States,” dated February 7, 1844.
Here Smith laid out his platform. He favored the abolition of slavery with
compensation to owners. On territorial acquisition, he was very clear:
“Oregon belongs to this government honorably, and when we have the
red man’s consent, let the union spread from the east to the west sea. . . .
and make the wilderness blossom as the rose; and when a neighboring
realm petitioned to join the union of the sons of liberty, my voice would
be come; yea come Texas; come Mexico; come Canada; and come all the
world—let us be brethren: let us be one great family; and let there be uni-
versal peace.”4
This is no secessionist, no would-be émigré. Smith sought the presi-
dency and, most agree, quite seriously.5 He did not use the words “re-
annexation” or “re-occupation” as Democratic candidate James K. Polk
would do a few months later, but Smith did not temporize either, as Whig
candidate Henry Clay would do. Joseph Smith was clearly stating the
American expansionist position.
Polk and the Mormon Battalion

A little more than two years later, Joseph Smith was gone, and Brigham
Young had led the Saints to Iowa, heading west as best they could. And
along came another chance to prove their American bona fides and at the
same time benefit themselves: the opportunity of the Mormon Battalion.
Polk took the United States into war with Mexico by falsely claiming the
Nueces Strip6 to be part of Texas, which it never was, and then sending an
army under Zachary Taylor there, provoking almost certain resistance by
Mexico. That happened in April 1846. Then, on May 11, Polk asked Con-
gress to declare war and provide troops on the claim that “American blood
has been shed on the American soil.”7 Polk also hoped to channel Mormon
migration without seeming to do so, and Brigham used the situation to
benefit the Church. Klaus Hansen and Michael Scott Van Wagenen relate
how, in March 1844, Joseph Smith and the Council of Fifty sent Lucien
Woodworth to negotiate with Sam Houston about the possibility of the
Saints’ emigrating to the Nueces Strip. Oregon was no longer attractive
because so many Missourians were moving there, and California was still
Mexican. After Smith was killed, Brigham Young realized that moving to
the Nueces Strip would not avoid Gentile interference, but ensure it.
Hence, he dropped the idea and made the Rockies his target.8
In his diary entry for January 31, 1846, Polk recorded that Senator
James Semple of Illinois talked with him about “the intended emigration
of the Mormons of Illinois to Oregon.” Polk piously told Semple “that as
President of the U.S. I possessed no power to prevent or check their emi-
gration; that the right of emigration or expatriation was one which any
citizen possessed. I told him I could not interfere with them on the ground
of their religious faith, however absurd it might be considered to be; that
if I could interfere with the Mormons, I could with the Baptists, or any
other religious sect; & that by the constitution any citizen had a right to
adopt his own religious faith.”9 By the time the war began in May, Polk
suspected that any Mormon migration would head not for Oregon but
California.10 In early June, he ordered Stephen Watts Kearney to lead
troops to California, conquering Santa Fe on the way. Kearney, Polk wrote
on June 2, “was also authorized to receive into service as volunteers a few
hundred of the Mormons who are now on their way to California, with a
view to conciliate them, attach them to our country, & prevent them from
taking part against us.”11
Since the first weeks of his administration in March 1845, and proba-
bly earlier, Polk’s unannounced agenda was acquiring Alta California for
the United States. With war declared against Mexico, all that remained
was to send an army to California to execute the takeover. The extent to
which Polk feared that the British might capture it first has been long
argued. I think it was a baseless fear. Had Britain so intended, it could
easily have done so with its more powerful naval forces in the eastern
Pacific. But it made no such move. Polk worried nonetheless; and when
he received a letter dated June 1 from Jesse C. Little, appointed in early
1846 as the Church’s eastern representative, hinting that the Saints
might support the British, Polk decided to try to co-opt them.12 On June
3, Polk met with former Postmaster General Amos Kendall and Little,
originally of Petersborough, New Hampshire. According to Polk’s diary,
they discussed
. . . a large body of mormon emigrants who are now on their way

from Na[u]voo & other parts of the U.S. to California, and to learn
the policy of the Government towards them. . . . Mr. Little said that
they were Americans in all their feelings, & friends of the U.S. I told
Mr. Little that we were at War with Mexico, and asked him if 500 or
more of the mormons now on their way to California would be will-
ing on their arrival in that country to volunteer and enter the U.S.
army in that war, under the command of a U.S. Officer. He said he
had no doubt they would willingly do so. . . . I did not deem it pru-
dent to tell him of the projected expedition into California under
the command of Col. Kearney. . . . The mormons, if taken into the
service, will constitute not more than ¼ of Col. Kearney’s com-
mand, and the main object of taking them into service would be to
conciliate them, and prevent them from assuming a hostile attitude
towards the U.S. after their arrival in California. It was with the
view to prevent this singular sect from becoming hostile to the U.S.
that I held the conference with Mr. Little, and with the same view I
am to see him again to-morrow.13
Polk talked with Kendall again on June 5, and told him that “if the mor-
mons reached the country [California] I did not desire to have them the
only U.S. forces in the country”—hence the limit of 500 volunteers. “The
citizens now settled in California at Sutter’s settlement and elsewhere,”
wrote Polk, “had learned that a large body of mormons were emigrating to
that country and were alarmed at it, and that this alarm would be increased
if the first organized troops of the U.S. that entered the country were
mormons.”14
The rest of the story is well known. As Polk’s biographer, Charles
G. Sellers, put it, “The impoverished exiles, anxious for the government’s
favor and military pay, hastened to supply them”—the 500 volunteers.15 By
all reports they proved reliable. They behaved themselves better than the
run of troops. They augmented the U.S. forces in California though they
arrived after the fighting had ended. Many of them returned eastward to
meet the Saints just arriving in Utah. According to Leonard J. Arrington,
their cooperation netted the Saints $50,000. About a year later, an edito-
rial in the Millennial Star praised the battalion for its “extraordinary skill,
intrepidity, and power of endurance . . . in accomplishing great and rapid
marches through deserts and mountains, and unbridged rivers,” all of
which were “appreciated by the United States.” The editorial also revealed
that the bond between the Mormons and the United States and its war
effort was not only patriotic but theological: “Those who are acquainted
with the prophesies and history of the Book of Mormon must be aware
that the American continent is to be the scene of great events,—and those

events are near at hand.”16
Exiles and refugees the Mormon pioneers may have been, but I find no
evidence that they were in any sense opposed to U.S. expansion. They
cheered on the American victory over Mexico and the taking of the South-
west. Prophecy was being fulfilled. Joseph Smith had written early in 1844
that the inclusion of Texas and Oregon, Mexico and Canada, indeed the
world, was desirable; American values were universal and good; Washing-
ton had been “great” and “illustrious,” Franklin “that golden patriot.”17 No
separatism here; quite the contrary.
The State of Deseret and Utah Territory

Yet—and here ambiguity appears again—the abortive effort to create the
State of Deseret can be seen as a political effort to create the kingdom of
God on earth, surely part of the United States yet operating independently
as far as possible. Brigham Young and his followers of course had to settle
for territorial status in 1850 and the cords of control from the outside
which that status inevitably entailed. For the next forty years—until Wil-
ford Woodruff’s Manifesto, and forty-six years until statehood—an uneasy
tension persisted in U.S.-Mormon relations. Still, the sovereignty of the
United States over Utah and the Southwest was never in doubt; the Saints’
citizenship in the American republic was never in doubt; kingdom theol-
ogy continued as an underpinning of the Saints’ acceptance and support
of American expansion. With the creation of the Utah Territory, the first
step in the imperial process—the acquisition and official recognition of
the political entity—was in place, if not entirely in the way that Brigham
Young and the other Saints wanted it to be.
The Indians of Utah

The second step in the imperial process, that of dealing with the original
inhabitants, was already under way by 1850. As elsewhere in the West, it
would continue into the twentieth century. The move to Utah made
Indian-Mormon contacts immediate, but on their arrival the Saints did
not ask the red men’s permission. The chosen place was fortunate for
them, by luck or design, because it placed the pioneers in something ap-
proximating a neutral zone, with the home turf of the Utes to their south
and of the Shoshonis to their north. This location gave the newcomers
breathing space until enough of them were present to outnumber the
local Indians. Brigham Young estimated the Indian population of the
region at 12,000 in 1847 (others put it higher), while the census estimate
of white population in 1850 was 11,000. Then, as usually happened on
American settlement frontiers, Indian numbers fell while whites rapidly
increased—officially to 40,000 by 1860, but likely more.18
The Indians were widely dispersed and often at odds with each other,
while the Saints were concentrated and united. However many the Utah
Indians were, they were divided into four main tribes (Utes, Shoshonis,
Paiutes, and Gosiutes), mostly subdivided into small bands. In no way did
they match the tight social organization of the whites. The Indian fall-off
in numbers had the usual causes: white occupation of grazing lands;
plowing up some of the best hunting ground to grow crops; actual violent
skirmishes; and above all, contagious diseases which killed, crippled, or
sterilized non-immune Indians.19
Brigham Young was no Andrew Jackson, who scorched the earth and
ethnically cleansed as he marauded through the Southeast. No parallel is
exact, and once more the Mormon encounter with the local Indians both
fit the usual pattern and differed from it. The early years were rough for all
sides. Young warned in 1849 against getting chummy with Indians: “If
you would have dominion over them, for their good . . . you must not treat
them as your equals. . . . If they are your equals, you cannot raise them up
to you.”20 Matters worsened, and in February 1850 he so feared that the
Saints might be wiped out that, briefly, he ordered all-out combat. As
Howard Christy summed it up, “The best land was to be taken up as fast
as possible without payment, the Indians were to be strictly excluded, and
stealing by Indians was often to bring swift punishment.”21 But this policy
also worked poorly, and in November 1850 the First Presidency asked
John Bernhisel, its representative in Washington, to persuade the govern-
ment to move the Indians outside the newly established territory, “be-
cause they are doing no good here to themselves or any body else”22 and to
“extinguish Indian title,” in the legalese of the day.
Removal happened, though not until (chiefly) 1856 and again in 1861
when several groups from Utah and Colorado were taken to a new reser-
vation in the high Uintah Valley. By 1856 the situation of the Utes, the
Paiutes, and worst of all the Gosiutes had sunk to the point of starvation.
Brigham’s announcement in 1851 that it was cheaper to feed them than to
fight them again set him apart from Indian killers like Jackson, but it did
not mean an easy time for the Indians. Their literal dying-out in south-
western Utah, where they competed unsuccessfully with Mormons and
silver miners, is well told by W. Paul Reeve in his recent book. There the
complexity, as well as the inexorability, of the Indians’ disappearance be-
comes clear.23
In all these respects the Mormons’ encounter with the Indians of Utah
closely fit the usual and, in our eyes, disastrous (for the Indians) frontier
experience. How the encounter varied from the frontier norm resulted
from Mormon scripture and theology. Therein, the Indians were Laman-
ites, fallen but redeemable. Young declared in September 1850: “Do we
wish the Indians any evil? No we would do them good, for they are human
beings, though most awfully degraded.”24 The solution, beginning in
1850, was to create Indian farms and missions. Even intermarriage was
encouraged, at least in some times and places. The Saints shared the pre-
vailing American belief that land belonged to those who made the best use
of it, which meant farming, certainly not hunting and gathering. The In-
dians did not agree and were dismissed as shiftless. The farms and mis-
sions persisted for some time; but as Howard Christy writes, “The effort
largely miscarried. The farms were small, ill equipped, ill maintained, and
sparsely attended, and, one by one, most were abandoned only a short
time after they were established. . . . Honorable intent notwithstanding,
the Mormon Indian farm program was doomed to fail.”25
And so stage two of the empire-building process took place in Utah as
it did nearly everywhere else, with the Indian population shrinking and
consigned to reservations. Those reservations, before long, were subject
to severalty when the Dawes Act kicked in after 1887.
The Settlement Process

The third stage of creating the continental empire, the settlement or occu-
pation of the land by whites of European stock, of course happened con-
temporaneously with the subjugation of the Indians. And then it kept on
happening in the second and third generation, from about 1860 to 1900.26
Into the Snake River Valley, into Colorado, southwestward to St. George
and (early on) to San Bernardino, up into Alberta and down into Mexico,
as well as thoroughly covering nearly every part of Utah where settlements
could sustain themselves, went the Latter-day Saints. As a settlement proc-
ess, as part of the creation of the continental empire, the job was irrevers-
ibly completed by around 1890.
The Offshore Empire

But history did not stop in 1890—neither developments within Mormon-
ism, nor in its relations to the U.S. government, nor the continuation of
American empire-building. The latter had already begun a new offshore
phase that had started almost immediately after the continental empire
was in place. The call of Manifest Destiny began to ring across the Pacific
and, in a few years, around the Caribbean. It crossed party lines, switching
from the Democracy of Jefferson, Jackson, and Polk to the new Republi-
can Party of William H. Seward, James G. Blaine, and, soon, William
McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Although the offshore empire seldom
involved settlement as the continental empire did, it meant acquiring new
territories and dealing with the people living in them.
In 1857, serious discussions began with Czarist Russia about buying
Russian America. As we know, that was a dangerous and difficult year for
the Saints in Utah. Washington was sending an army, and it was bearing
down on them. Brigham Young laid out a defensive policy that included,
potentially, leveling Salt Lake City and the other settlements. The Utah
War and the Saints’ situation has been vividly described most recently in
the Walker-Turley-Leonard book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows.27
The Archive of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs contains two
reports from Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian envoy to Washington, to
Prince Alexsandr Mikhailovich Gorchakov, the Foreign Minister, dated
November 13, 1857, in the Western calendar. Stoeckl had just met with
President James Buchanan to discuss Russian America. The first report
concerned clashes between American fur traders and the Russians, which
had been going on for years. The second concerned rumors of Mormons
migrating to Russian America from the United States. Stoeckl asked the
president about these rumors. According to Nikolay Bolkhovitinov, the
Russian historian who found these reports, “Buchanan remarked ‘with a
smile’: ‘How to settle this question is your worry; as for us, we would be
very happy to get rid of them.’” Stoeckl observed that, if the rumor were
true, Russia would either have to fight them off or give them some terri-
tory. The report mentioned “a very improbable number of them.”28 The
total LDS membership approached 80,000 by then,29 and the logistics of
moving them—how? marching everybody to the Pacific Coast, filling a
mighty (and nonexistent) fleet with them, and off-loading them in
Alaska?—would have been utterly impossible. But the fear of any such in-
vasion helped persuade Czar Alexander II to consider selling. In this
backhanded way, the Saints may have been instruments of American

expansion.
The Civil War put the Alaska sale on hold. But Secretary of State Seward
revived it with famous success as soon as peace broke out. The result was
the cleanest deal, in my view, of any U.S. territorial acquisition: clear title
(unlike Louisiana), no double-crossing your allies (as in 1782 of France and
Spain), no filibusters (as in Spanish Florida), only cash for land. The United
States wanted to buy, the Czar for his own reasons wanted to sell, and the
only problem was to jockey around for an agreed-upon price, a goal achieved
in the spring of 1867. No more was heard of making it a new home for the
Mormons, although the low esteem in which Alaska was held in some
quarters surfaced in the early 1870s in the form of proposals to make it a
prison colony, an “American Botany Bay.”30 This did not happen either; nor
did much else happen in Alaska until the gold rushes of the late 1890s.
From this point to the turn of the century, there was a surprising con-
gruence of Mormon attitudes toward the succession of offshore acquisi-
tions. The Deseret News approvingly announced on April 3, 1867, the
signing of the U.S.-Russian Alaska purchase treaty and, two weeks later,
rejoiced in the Senate’s ratification.31
The United States made no significant expansionist moves during the
depression-ridden 1870s, but it did begin dallying with Samoa and Hawaii.
(Mormon missionaries had been laboring in both places for twenty
years.)32 In 1899, when American Samoa was definitively carved out, the
Deseret News raised no objection to the United States’ permanent pres-
ence; and a missionary to Samoa, William O. Lee, reported favorably in
the Improvement Era on how things were going there.33 In the same issue,
the Improvement Era ran a carefully argued essay by J. M. Tanner, presi-
dent of the “Agricultural College” in Logan, considering the question of
Philippine annexation and whether the Constitution applied to such “ter-
ritories.” He left the impression that, while the occupations of Cuba and
the Philippines raised many questions and were not unmixed blessings,
the United States had little alternative but to annex them. It should also,
however, reform its colonial civil service to govern “these unfortunate
races” well, using Germany and England as administrative models. “Wise
administration and just government will do much to transform them
from the ignorant and barbarous condition in which they now exist into
more enlightened and progressive peoples,” Tanner wrote.34
On Hawaii, the Deseret News was decidedly expansionist. It was entirely
supportive of the 1893 coup d’état by the white planter and financial elite,
the haoles, who overthrew the native monarchy of Queen Liliuokalani. A

year later, the paper came out for U.S. annexation; and in the summer of
1898, when annexation was achieved, it reported that the announcement
made the Hawaiian people “simply wild with enthusiasm”—although, in
fact, more than 90 percent of Hawaiians signed petitions of protest.35 An
article in the Improvement Era at about that time, by Benjamin Cluff Jr., the
president of Brigham Young University (BYU), while outlining both sides,
favored the haole side, and the editor reiterated Joseph Smith’s 1844 words
in favor of territorial annexation.36
Thus, the Mormon community probably, and the Deseret News consist-
ently, supported each territorial acquisition to 1898. The run-up to the war
with Spain over Cuba in 1898 was couched in terms of liberating the
Cubans from Spanish oppression and atrocities, not territorial acquisi-
tion. Yet it’s worth noting that the Church leadership, the newspaper, and
Utah’s two U.S. Senators favored going to war. Apostle Brigham Young Jr.
publicly opposed it as did a few other leaders in the weeks before Congress
declared war. But President Wilford Woodruff and First Counselor George
Q. Cannon summoned Young and “chastised” (D. Michael Quinn’s word)
him for his position. He said no more about it and that, Quinn argues, was
the end of “selective pacifism” which dated to Brigham Sr.’s day. Indeed,
Quinn sees this episode as the end of the conflation in Mormon scripture
of “the warlike Jehovah and the pacifistic Christ” and the resulting historic
ambivalence about war and peace. Henceforth, he concludes, Mormons
followed the secular authority.37
Very soon the Spanish-American War had begun and ended in Cuba
and Puerto Rico. (It would rage on for four more years in the Philippines.)
The Deseret News, from 1899 on, condemned the Filipino “insurrection-
ists,” favored U.S. annexation of the Philippines and of Puerto Rico, and
supported the Platt Amendment, which made Cuba a protectorate of the
United States through control of its finance, public order, and foreign af-
fairs. It grandly stated that Cuba “owes its very existence to the magnanim-
ity of the United States.” In 1906 the News averred that the Platt Amendment
“will prove the salvation of the country.”38
A theory and philosophy of empire, specifically an American empire, is
embedded in a Deseret Evening News editorial of March 26, 1900. The
United States
should bring those people [the Filipinos] to see and recognize the
superiority of civilization, and to give them an opportunity to adopt
it. . . . The light is not to be hidden under the table. Superior gifts
and graces bring with them responsibilities toward others who are
less favored. This is the principle of expansion. It does not mean
that a stronger nation has the right to oppress the weaker states, as
European mother countries too often have done by their colonial
policy of robbery. It is a duty first of all—the duty of extending light,
knowledge, freedom and happiness wherever their influence goes.
And this is clearly the duty of this country to all the late Spanish
colonies. Providence itself has entrusted them to the care of the
American Republic.39
Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, or Albert Beveridge could not

have said it better.
The newspaper, at the conclusion of the war against the Filipinos, did
recognize and condemn the American atrocities involved, but made it
clear that it was in no way attacking the U.S. Army or government. How-
ever, as late as 1911, touting American contributions to the P hilippines—
sewerage, schools, reduction of smallpox, etc.—it denounced foolish
Filipinos and American anti-imperialists who were calling for self-rule.
The Filipinos, said the News, would not be ready for that step for “perhaps
two generations. . . . Anarchy would surely come were independence
granted.”40
Similarly, the Deseret Evening News supported further U.S.
empire-building in the Caribbean. Announcing the American-supported
coup of Panamanians against Colombia in November 1903 and the subse-
quent treaty presenting the Canal Zone to the United States, the newspa-
per foresaw a “glorious era” coming in Panama, wherein the United
States, its “big brother,” would ensure its prosperity.41 When the United
States made Nicaragua a protectorate in 1909 under the Roosevelt “police
power” corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the News hoped that we Ameri-
cans would use the occasion to help the Nicaraguans to elect “a good,
humane government, as has been done in Cuba.”42 In 1917, when the
United States bought the Danish West Indies, which then became the
U.S. Virgin Islands, the Deseret News not only approved the purchase be-
cause it protected the newly opened Panama Canal—the Wilson Adminis-
tration’s main justification—it also exulted that with the acquisition of St.
Croix, American possessions extended across more than 180 degrees of
the earth’s surface. Like Britain, the sun would never set on U.S. “terri-
tory.” Thus, an American standing on St. Croix “and looking toward the
east, may proudly feel that the rays of the same sun that kiss at its rising
the folds of Old Glory at the reveille drumbeat, are also saluting at the
same moment in Balabac [the westernmost island in the Philippines] the
lowering of the ensign at the retreat parade.”43
In all of its unremitting praise of imperial expansion, the newspaper
made almost no mention of the violence and repression that marked the
Philippine-American war of 1898–1902, or the landings of the Marines
and civil authorities in Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic,
Panama, and Haiti. Rather, the picture presented was utterly antiseptic. It
was as if no downside accompanied what the paper saw as the ongoing
triumph of civilization over barbarism and ignorance.
Only once did it even hint at the embryo of a later non-violent, proto-
pacifist position, and did so only by a remarkable rewriting of nineteenth-
century history. An editorial in late 1916 described James K. Polk as “a
thorough pacifist”—the Polk who nearly blustered his way into a war with
Britain over Oregon, and who engineered the outbreak of the war with
Mexico for the purpose of conquering New Mexico and California. The
editorial also found James Madison to be pacifistic, despite his declaration
of war on Britain in 1812, and further praised Andrew Jackson for avoiding
foreign war—which he did while he was president while simultaneously
ignoring the vicious campaigns he had earlier led against the Creeks and
the Seminoles, against Britain (recall the executions of Ambrister and Ar-
buthnot), and against Spain (which he explicitly and vehemently hated).44
I can only explain this version of history as an extreme expression of
American exceptionalism and self-exculpation. In short, by the time the
United States entered World War I, the Deseret News, and, one suspects,
the wider Mormon community, was thoroughly in sync with the “large
policy” of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other Republican
imperialists and would favor the equally aggressive, if less belligerently
phrased, “idealism” of Woodrow Wilson.
I am persuaded by the scholarship of Jan Shipps, Kathleen Flake, Klaus
Hansen, and others that, between 1890 and 1908 or so, Mormonism in
the Great Basin changed enormously—as a reaction to the appalling
Edmunds-Tucker Act, the Manifesto of Wilford Woodruff, the exigencies
attendant upon statehood, and the battle over the seating of Reed Smoot in
the U.S. Senate. The strong tensions of the nineteenth century between
Mormon millennialism and American ways greatly eased, with acceptance
of the idea that the millennial emergence of the kingdom of God on earth
was to come later rather than sooner.45 As Hansen wrote, the years from
1890 to 1920 saw a “cumulative and irreversible change in the character of

Mormon Life.”46 There is now a substantial literature on this shift during
the twenty years from the late 1880s to 1908. On the matter of Mormon
agreement with the expansionism of the United States and the acquisition
of the offshore empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean, I have to say that
I do not see a gap wide enough to slide a piece of paper through, between
the Republican “large policy” and, at a minimum, the editorials of the Des-
eret News and statements by Church leaders that I have come across. Nor
am I aware of any significant Mormon anti-imperialist thought or action at
that time. Perhaps I’ve missed it, but if so, others have too; I do not find
that anti-imperialism—in the period of the “new manifest destiny” be-
tween 1898 and World War I—has surfaced in the secondary literature.
If I’m correct in this observation—that pro-imperialism was the major-
ity view—then Mormons paralleled other Americans in yet another way:
on the continuity of the imperialist habit. It was long thought that U.S.
imperialism exploded out of nowhere in 1898, set off by the sinking of the
U.S.S. Maine, and that it soon gave way to Wilsonian idealism. Not so.
There was no clean break in American empire-building from Benjamin
Franklin’s adamancy in 1782 about the Mississippi River as the western
boundary all the way through to the Platt Amendment and the protector-
ate policy of the early twentieth century. Building the offshore empire fol-
lowed seamlessly from building the continental empire. And Mormons,
like other Americans, supported both.
Agreeing to Disagree, from 1919 Onward

For the first time, however, Mormons very soon started arguing with each
other about foreign policy and empire-building. It is as if the internal
changes of 1890–1908, having been made and got through, permitted dis-
agreement where, earlier, a solid front was essential. True enough, each
U.S. war from the Mexican onward produced “ambiguities” in Mormon
thought regarding the justice of war-making versus pacifism.47 But not
until the end of World War I did disagreements at the highest levels of the
Church become public. The specific issue was whether the United States
should join the League of Nations. During the war, Mormons rich and
poor became avid buyers of Liberty Bonds and strong supporters of the
American cause against German “aggression”; there were no “slackers” in
Utah, Mormon or Gentile.48 As for the league, the majority of Utahns,
along with Americans elsewhere, supported it.
But the Church leadership splintered, as James B. Allen and others

have pointed out. Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, son of Joseph F. Smith
who was Church president from 1901 to 1918 and who would himself
become president in 1970, opposed the league, as did David O. McKay,
who became president in 1951, and longtime Republican Senator Reed
Smoot. But George F. Richards, who was also, like these three men, an
apostle, believed that President Wilson had been “raised up” and that
the league idea was “inspired of God.” (Reed Smoot could not have
agreed less.) Finally, Heber J. Grant, who succeeded Joseph F. Smith as
Church president in 1918, “fully and openly” backed Woodrow Wilson
and the league, as did George H. Brimhall, president of BYU. All of
them, however, as Allen pointed out, shared theological common
ground: “The belief that God had inspired the founding fathers and was
guiding the destiny of the country was a basic assumption on both
sides,” as was the traditional idea that the U.S. Constitution was di-
vinely inspired.49
During the interwar years, three Latter-day Saints held very prominent
positions in the federal government. Through the 1920s, Senator Smoot
and J. Reuben Clark Jr. at the State Department figured prominently in
foreign affairs, though as ardent isolationists they should perhaps be
called empire-reducers, not empire-builders. (The third, Marriner Eccles,
came along in the 1930s and was arguably the most powerful of all, but
his activities were in banking and finance, not foreign policy.50) As a newly
elected senator, Smoot had fought for four years (1903–07) to keep his
Senate seat, but with the help of Theodore Roosevelt and others, he sur-
vived and became a hyper-orthodox Republican. Clark, an international
lawyer, became Undersecretary of State in the late months of the Coolidge
Administration and etched his name indelibly in American diplomatic
history as author of the “Clark Memorandum” revoking the Roosevelt
Corollary of 1904, a self-awarded license to take over errant Caribbean
republics.51
The memorandum has almost universally been seen as an essential
step toward Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin
America, which in intention, if not always in action, temporarily, though
not forever, withdrew the United States from its previous imperialism in
Latin America. Gene Sessions has argued that President Hoover would
probably have renounced intervention anyway and that the memorandum
served chiefly to help pass the Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928 renouncing
war as an instrument of national policy.52 But throughout the hemisphere
it signaled a new day, even though that day was yet to come. (The Marines
stayed in Nicaragua until 1933 and Haiti until 1934.)
Clark was no Wilsonian nor a Rooseveltian liberal. He was, rather, a
deep-dyed isolationist, and he remained so as the United States entered
World War II, ultimately used the atomic bomb, and created the United
Nations afterward. Clark opposed all three measures. He had left public
office in 1933 for a position in Heber J. Grant’s First Presidency, and
Smoot was defeated for reelection in 1932 after serving thirty years in the
U.S. Senate as one of its most powerful members. Both were patriots, and
both were high-ranking Mormons, beyond any question. Both may be
called right-wing Republicans, in the context of the interwar period and
beyond. As such, during the 1930s, the leadership was to the right of the
rank and file, as the 1936 election showed when the First Presidency
openly supported Alf Landon but the state, 69 percent Mormon, voted 69
percent for Roosevelt.53
After 1945 the empire-building of the United States took a new turn:
nonterritorial, but militarily and economically imperial, in the role of chief
opponent of Soviet and Chinese Communism, chief rebuilder of Europe,
and ultimately, after 1991, the world’s sole superpower. In the process it
launched wars of “containment” in Korea and Vietnam. Mormons reacted
to this new imperialism not monolithically, but in a range of ways.
As Claudia Bushman wrote, citing Armand Mauss, “By 1950 or so,
Mormons had entered mainstream America with an unrivaled patriotism,
living the American Dream.”54 By the 1960s, however, when the so-called
“counter-culture” emerged, when the two Kennedys and Martin Luther
King were assassinated, and when campus protests erupted, Mormons by
contrast looked to the Right. As Jan Shipps observed in Sojourner in the
Promised Land, “They became ‘more American than the Americans.’”55
The response of Mormons to the U.S.’s post-1945 wars revealed divisions
reminiscent of the 1919–20 fight over the League of Nations. David
O. McKay, who became Church president in 1951, saw the Korean conflict
as part of the good fight against the spread of communism; but Reuben
Clark, whom McKay retained as counselor in the First Presidency, found
it unconstitutional.56
The reaction to the Vietnam War was divided and deep. It occasioned a
real soul-searching into Mormon theology regarding war. Was the Vietnam
conflict, as one author put it, a “just war” or “just a war”? Controversy on
this question appeared in a number of places; to me, the best elaboration
was in Dialogue in 1967, when Eugene England, a former Air Force officer
who had become an English professor, based his opposition to the war on
Mormon scriptures and theology while, in the same issue, also using
sacred documents and ideas, anthropologist John L. Sorenson argued that
it was indeed a “just war.”57 Again, as they had done in 1919, committed
Mormons could take opposing positions on foreign policy issues, includ-
ing empire-building, grounding those positions in citations from the Book
of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. As Ray Hillam wrote in 1985,
“Generally, the only position they [leaders and members] consistently
assume is opposition to war and coercion as means of resolving interna-
tional disputes.”58
In May of 1981 the First Presidency issued one of its very rare (at least
in recent times) statements on a policy issue when it denounced the pro-
posed MX system and the whole idea of nuclear proliferation. The state-
ment may have been colored by NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) concerns,
but quite independently of that, it proclaimed that “it would be ‘ironic’ to
base these weapons of mass destruction in the same general area where
the Church carries forth ‘the gospel of peace to the peoples of the earth.’”59
I leave for another day the very recent military incursions into Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the existence today of over 700 military bases around
the world—evidence of the global empire. Here I note only that the inter-
nationalization of the Church in recent decades has made a simple
spread-eagle American patriotism quite problematic, as if it weren’t al-
ready. As I’ve tried to show, the LDS posture on territorial acquisitions and
wars was never “my country right or wrong,” but rather more nuanced,
especially after World War I. As Canadian Marc Schindler wrote in Dia-
logue in 2004, “The traditional nationalism, or ardent patriotism shown
by U.S. Latter-day Saints, will continue unabated. But they are also free to
form stances which oppose wars undertaken by the United States on the
grounds that they are not necessarily ‘virtuous’ wars. Members must
make those decisions as individuals, but both sides will have sufficient
religious iconography and texts upon which to build their cases.”60
Conclusion
To conclude very briefly: My original hypothesis was that, at the time of
the migration to Utah, the Saints were fleeing the United States, not ex-
tending it, and that only at some later time did Mormons adopt and assim-
ilate to the general culture as regards empire-building, whether continental
or offshore. The question was where and when that shift took place. I was
wrong; from the time of the Mormon Battalion, or even earlier in Joseph
Smith’s “Views” on Oregon and Texas, there never was a wide separation
between Mormon and general American ideas of empire. I find that, as far
as I can trace Mormons’ positions on the matter, they were strongly patri-
otic, expansionist, pro-imperial, Manifest-Destinarian, from the start,
and—as a group, not unanimously—have not stopped. They have es-
poused a politically conservative kind of Americanism—which in external
relations means expansionist and assertive—since Joseph Smith wrote
his “Views.” The majority still do, though dissenters in substantial num-
bers and even in high places have surfaced since 1919 and especially over
Vietnam and the more aggressive assertions of global imperialism since
then. What is relatively new, since 1919 or perhaps the 1960s, is that there
is now expressed a critical Americanism, a “left” point of view, a pacifism
that is theologically and scripturally grounded. It appears to me that the
transformations of 1890–1920 permitted this development.
However, it should also be recognized that, in its apostolic era,
roughly before 1890, it was not the American empire but the Mormons’
kingdom of God on earth that they were creating and fostering. The
practical result may have been roughly the same, but the theology was
unique. Perhaps it is fair to say that the United States has always been,
in some sense, a millennial project itself and that the existence of a spe-
cific kind of millennialism within it or beside it meant natural congru-
ence, even if not immediately. By 1919 it was possible for Mormons,
high and low, from General Authorities to the rank-and-file, to espouse
varying or opposing positions on U.S. foreign policy yet to do so all
within the Mormon framework. It just took a little time to find the flexi-
bility within that framework.
Notes
1. D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Nation and the American Empire,” in The Mormon
History Association’s Tanner Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ed. Dean L. May and
Reid L. Neilson (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 126–137. Meinig
placed the Mormon culture area in the wider western context in “American
Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 62 (June 1972): 159–184. An interesting overview is G.
Homer Durham, “A Political Interpretation of Mormon History,” Pacific Histori-
cal Review 13 (June 1944): 136–150.
2. Floyd O’Neil and Stanford J. Layton, “Of Pride and Politics: Brigham Young as
Indian Superintendent,” Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978): 237.
3. For detail and documentation, see Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of
American Expansion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
4. For analysis, see Richard D. Poll, “Joseph Smith and the Presidency, 1844,”
Martin B. Hickman, “The Political Legacy of Joseph Smith,” and the text of
Smith’s “Views,” in Dialogue:A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (Autumn 1968):
17–38.
5. Leland Hargrave Creer, The Founding of an Empire: The Exploration and Coloni-
zation of Utah, 1776–1856 (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1947), 207–209; Klaus
J. Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty
in Mormon History (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1967),
75; Dale Morgan, “The State of Deseret,” Utah Historical Quarterly 8 (1940):
esp. 70–149; Grant Underwood, “Early Mormon Perceptions of Contemporary
America: 1830–1846,” BYU Studies 26 (Summer 1986), 49–61, is a cultural ap-
proach. For kingdom theology, see George W. Pace, “Kingdom of God: In
Heaven, on Earth,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New
York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 2:790–791.
6. The Nueces Strip is the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande rivers. The
Nueces empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi. From there, the Strip
runs south along the Gulf Coast for about 150 miles. It runs westward more than
200 miles to the sources of the Nueces River.
7. Walter Nugent, “The American Habit of Empire, and the Cases of Polk and
Bush,” Western Historical Quarterly 38 (Spring 2007): 5–24; Nugent, Habits of
Empire, chap. 7.
8. Hansen, Quest for Empire, 82–88; Michael Scott Van Wagenen, The Texas Repub-
lic and the Mormon Kingdom of God (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University
Press, 2002), 23–40.
9. James K. Polk, The Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, ed.
Milo M. Quaife, 4 vols. (Chicago, IL: McClurg, 1910), 1:205–206.
10. Why he thought California was the Mormons’ target is unclear. He may have
learned about the group of Mormons, headed by Samuel Brannan, who sailed
from New York on February 4, 1846, and who landed at Yerba Buena (San Fran-
cisco Bay) on July 31. But his Diary specifically speaks of Mormons migrating
overland, “from Nauvoo and other parts of the U. S. to California.” Polk’s hidden
agenda—of acquiring California with its Pacific harbors—likely made him fear-
ful that the British, possibly with Mormon support, might beat him to it. That
the Mormons might be heading for the Great Basin apparently never occurred
to him.
11. Polk, Diary, 1:444.
12. David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives
(Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2000), 20–22, citing Little’s letter to
Polk of June 1, 1846, and referring to “Little’s coercive tactics.” Polk, however,
was almost never coercible; in the run-up to and conduct of the Mexican War
and the negotiations with Britain over Oregon, he was the coercer except in the
sole instance when Lord Aberdeen, the British foreign secretary, mentioned
sending “thirty sail of the line” if war broke out over Oregon, and Polk about-
faced. For details, see Nugent, Habits of Empire, chap. 6.
13. Polk, Diary, 1:445–446. Kendall had been Postmaster General under Jackson
and Van Buren (1835–1840) and remained a force in Democratic politics. Polk
usually wrote Mormons in lowercase, as “mormons.”
14. Ibid., 1:449–450.
15. Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk: Continentalist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1966), 426. Helpful on the Mormon Battalion are Norma Baldwin
Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846–1848 (Logan, UT:
Utah State University Press, 1996); Hamilton Gardner, ed., “Report of Lieut.
Col. P. St. George Cooke of His March from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to San Diego,
Upper California,” Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (January 1954): 15–40; Daniel
Tyler, A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War, 1846–1847
(Chicago, IL: Rio Grande Press, 1964 [original printing 1881]); Richard O.
Cowan, “The Mormon Battalion and the Gadsden Purchase,” BYU Studies 37
(1997–98): 48–64.
16. “Editorial,” Millennial Star 9 (June 15, 1847): 187.
17. Smith, “Views,” 29.
18. This is the figure for Utah Territory in the 1860 U.S. Census. U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols.
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series A195, 1:35.
19. Helpful on Mormons and the Utah Indians are James B. Allen and Ted J.
Warner, “The Goshute Indians in Pioneer Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 39
(Spring 1971): 162–177; Juanita Brooks, “Indian Relations on the Mormon Fron-
tier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 12 (January–April 1944): 1–48; Floyd A. O’Neil,
“The Utes, Southern Paiutes, and Goshutes,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen
Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City, UT: Utah State Historical Society, 1976), 27–49.
20. Quoted in Howard A. Christy, “Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian
Relations in Utah, 1847–1852,” Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978): 223
note 27.
21. Ibid., 227.
22. Brigham Young, quoted in Eugene E. Campbell, Establishing Zion: The Mormon
Church in the American West, 1847–1869 (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books,
1988), chap. 6, p. 6; see also chap. 7.
23. W. Paul Reeve, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and
Southern Paiutes (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), esp. chap. 7.
See also Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the
Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp.
chap. 3, “Western Expansion and the Politics of Federalism: Indians, Mormons,
and Territorial Statehood, 1878–1887.”
24. Campbell, Establishing Zion, chap. 6, p. 7.

25. Howard Christy, “Indian Farms,” in Historical Atlas of Mormonism, ed. S. Kent
Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson (New York: Simon & Schus-
ter, 1994), 112–113.
26. Lynn A. Rosenvall, “Expansion outside the Wasatch Front,” in ibid., 96–97.
27. The 1857 “Utah War” has been described often. See, for example, Ronald W.
Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Mead-
ows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32–73. Relevant documents for
the most crucial period may be found in William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s
Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, OK:
Arthur H. Clark Company, an imprint of the University of Oklahoma Press,
2008) in The Arthur H. Clark Company’s series KINGDOM IN THE WEST:
THE MORMONS AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER; Leonard J. Arrington,
Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 300; Newell
G. Bringhurst, Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier (Boston,
MA: Little, Brown, 1986), 136–142; Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict
1850–1859 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 1–6, 168–175, 200–
203. Aspects of Mormon relations with the United States in this period are vis-
ited in, inter alia, J. Keith Melville, Conflict and Compromise: The Mormons in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Politics (Provo, UT: Brigham Young Univer-
sity Printing Service for the Political Science Department, 1974); Richard D.
Poll, “The Mormon Question Enters National Politics, 1850–1856,” Utah Histor-
ical Quarterly 25, (April 1957): 117–131; Wayne K. Hinton, “Millard Fillmore,
Utah’s Friend in the White House,” Utah Historical Quarterly 48 (Spring 1980):
112–128; George U. Hubbard, “Abraham Lincoln as Seen by the Mormons,” Utah
Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1963): 91–108.
28. Nikolay N. Bolkovitinov, “The Crimean War and the Emergence of Proposals for
the Sale of Russian America, 1853–1861,” Pacific Historical Review 59 (February
1990): 36–37. The complete text of Stoeckl’s report is in Arkhiv vneshney poli-
tiki Rossi [Archive of the Foreign Policy of Russia], f. Glavny arkhiv 1–9, 1857–
1868, d. 4, fos. 21–26, 36 note 52. See also Gene A. Sessions and Stephen W.
Stathis, “The Mormon Invasion of Russian America: Dynamics of a Potent
Myth,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (Winter 1977): 22–35.
29. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1985), 164, states that in 1860 “total LDS Church member-
ship was reported at 80,000.” This figure includes Mormons everywhere, not
only in Utah.
30. Ted C. Hinckley, “Alaska as an American Botany Bay,” Pacific Historical Review
42 (February 1973): 1–19.
31. Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (chronologi-
cal scrapbook of typed entries and newspaper clippings, 1830—present), April 3,
1867, LDS Church History Library, 15 E. North Temple Street, Salt Lake City. I
also cite other references from the Deseret News and the Deseret Evening News as
they appear in the Journal History. Regarding the Deseret News and its role in the
Church in this period, see Monte Burr McLaws, Spokesman for the Kingdom:
Early Mormon Journalism and the Deseret News, 1830–1898 (Provo, UT: Brigham
Young University Press, 1977).
32. “Journal of John Stillman Woodbury, 1825–1877,” holograph in the Huntington
Library, San Marino, California, typescript “copied by the Brigham Young Uni-
versity Library, 1945–1946.” Great-grandson Max Woodbury graciously provided
me with a copy of the typescript. See also Paul Bailey, Hawaii’s Royal Prime Min-
ister: The Life & Times of Walter Murray Gibson (New York: Hastings House,
1980); Gwynn Barrett, “Walter Murray Gibson: The Shepherd Saint of Lanai
Revisited,” Utah Historical Quarterly 40 (Spring 1972): 142–162.
33. William. O. Lee, “Political Samoa,” Improvement Era 2 (April 1899): 435ff.
34. J. M. Tanner, “Territorial Expansion,” Improvement Era 2 (April 1899): 432.
35. Nugent, Habits of Empire, 263; Journal History, February 3, 1893; March 31,
1894; July 11, 27, 1898.
36. Benjamin Cluff Jr., “The Hawaiian Islands and Annexation,” Improvement Era 1
(April 1898): 435–446, 455.
37. D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War: An
End to Selective Pacifism,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (August 1974): 343, 362.
38. Journal History, October 1, 1906.
39. Ibid., March 26, 1900.
40. Ibid., November 7, 1911.
41. Ibid., November 13, 28, 1903.
42. Ibid., November 19, 1909.
43. Ibid., January 23, 1917.
44. Ibid., October 10, 1916.
45. In addition to the books cited in the next footnote, for nineteenth-century ten-
sions, see David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the
American West, 1847–1896 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1998), esp. 15–18,
35–36, 45–48, 363–368.
46. Shipps, Mormonism; Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity:
The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004); Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American
Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 206; Ethan R. Yor-
gason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana: University of Il-
linois Press, 2003). On the run-up to statehood, see Howard R.Lamar, “State-
hood for Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (Fall 1971): 307–302; Gustive O.
Larson, The “Americanization” of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Hunting-
ton Library, 1971), esp. chap. 1, “The Political Kingdom of God,” and 256–257
on “The Manifesto”; E. Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for
Utah Statehood (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Lyman,
“Statehood, Political Allegiance, and Utah’s First U.S. Senate Seats: Prizes for
the National Parties and Local Factions,” Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (Fall
1995): 341–356; Jan Shipps, “Utah Comes of Age Politically: A Study of the
State’s Politics in the Early Years of the Twentieth Century,” Utah Historical
Quarterly 35 (Spring 1967): 91–111.
47. A useful, well-documented survey of anti-war sentiment (which is not, however,
the same as anti-imperialism) is Robert Jeffrey Stott, “Mormonism and War: An
Interpretative Analysis of Selected Mormon Thought regarding Seven Ameri-
can Wars” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1974).
48. Marcia Black and Robert S. McPherson, “Soldiers, Savers, Slackers, and Spies:
Southeastern Utah’s Response to World War I,” Utah Historical Quarterly 63
(Winter 1995): 8, 14, 17.
49. James B. Allen, “Personal Faith and Public Policy: Some Timely Observations
on the League of Nations Controversy in Utah,” BYU Studies 14 (Autumn 1973):
82, 90. Also helpful on Smoot is Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics
(Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1990): 240–241: “For Smoot, America
was a religious concept. The Constitution was an inspired document.” But he
opposed the league. For Smoot’s voting record, see Thomas G. Alexander, “Reed
Smoot, the L.D.S. Church and Progressive Legislation, 1903–1933,” Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 7 (Spring 1972): 47–56. See also A. F. Cardon, “Sen-
ator Reed Smoot and the Mexican Revolutions,” Utah Historical Quarterly 31
(Spring 1963): 151–161. On the Mormon concept of the U.S. Constitution as di-
vinely inspired, see R. Collin Mangrum, “Mormonism, Philosophical Liberal-
ism, and the Constitution,” BYU Studies 27 (Summer 1987): 119–137; Noel B.
Reynolds, “The Doctrine of an Inspired Constitution,” BYU Studies 16 (Spring
1976): 315–340.
50. See Leonard J. Arrington, “Marriner Stoddard Eccles,” in Utah History Encyclo-
pedia, ed. Allan Kent Powell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 152;
Dean L. May, From New Deal to New Economics: The Liberal Response to the Reces-
sion of 1937 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981).
51. See Frank W. Fox, J. Reuben Clark: The Public Years (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 1980), esp. chap. 26, “Undersecretary,” 503–521. Wide cover-
age of Clark’s life and thought appears in BYU Studies 13 (Spring 1973) [entire
issue], titled “J. Reuben Clark, Jr., Diplomat and Statesman.” This issue was
published as a book, edited by Ray C. Hillam, Charles D. Tate Jr., and Laura
Wadley, under the same title (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press,
1973). Also useful is D. Michael Quinn, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben
Clark (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2002).
52. Gene A. Sessions, “The Clark Memorandum Myth,” The Americas 34 (July 1977):
40–58.
53. Brian Q. Cannon, “Mormons and the New Deal: The 1936 Presidential Election
in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Winter 1999): 4–22; Frank H. Jonas and
Garth N. Jones, “Utah Presidential Elections, 1896–1952,” Utah Historical Quar-

terly 24 (October 1956): 289–307.
54. Claudia L. Bushman, Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern
America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 183.
55. Ibid., 185; Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mor-
mons (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 100.
56. Ray C. Hillam and David M. Andrews, “Mormons and Foreign Policy,” BYU
Studies 25 (Winter 1985): 63.
57. Eugene England, “The Tragedy of Vietnam and the Responsibility of Mormons,”
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 2 (Winter 1967): 71–91; John L. Soren-
son, “Vietnam: Just a War, or a Just War?,” ibid., 91–100. See also Ronald W.
Walker, “Sheaves, Bucklers and the State: Mormon Leaders Respond to the Di-
lemmas of War,” Sunstone 7 (July–August 1982): 43–56.
58. Hillam and Andrews, “Mormons and Foreign Policy,” 67.
59. Steven A. Hildreth, “The First Presidency Statement on MX in Perspective,”
BYU Studies 22 (Spring 1982): 223.
60. Marc A. Schindler, “The Ideology of Empire: A View from America’s Attic,” Dia-
logue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37 (Spring 2004): 72.
12
Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s

Perspective
By George A. Miles
It is impossible to be a curator of a collection devoted to the history of

the American West and not be impressed, intimidated, and overwhelmed
by the Mormon commitment to recording and preserving history. The
office of the Church Historian was created a century before the federal
government created the National Archives. Under the direction of Rich-
ard E. Turley, the LDS Church History Library is becoming an interna-
tional agency with an agenda and a scale of operations that have not been
seen since the heyday of the Spanish Council of the Indies. There is not
a Western Americana curator, rare book dealer, or scholar who does not
marvel at the work of Dale Morgan, the original force behind the Mormon
bibliography project executed by Chad Flake and Larry Draper.1 The work
of bibliographers like Peter Crawley, David J. Whittaker, James B. Allen,
Ronald W. Walker, Ronald Davis, Richard Saunders, Lynn Jacobs, Ste-
phen Shields, and Susan L. Fales2 sits in every serious collection of West-
ern Americana. Librarians Greg Thompson, Dean Larson, and Alfred
Bush have long been recognized as leaders in our field. Nor should I ne-
glect the prominent role of Mormons in the antiquarian book trade, from
the legendary Zion Bookstore, now operating as Sam Weller’s Bookstore,
to Curt Bench, Rick Grunder, Ken Sanders, Michael Vinson, and the in-
imitable Peter Crawley, whose knowledge of early Mormon printing is
beyond description. I am humbled to trespass on their territory and hope
that they will forgive my impertinence.3 Much of what I have to say in this
essay will be speculative, intended to stimulate your historical imagina-
tion. I hope that you will respond creatively and freely to the ideas that I
propose today, that you will challenge me and contribute additional in-
sights.
Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective 279
I spent many weeks seeking a way to frame my essay when a note from
Patricia Lyn Scott reminded me that the meeting in which I would deliver
my Tanner Lecture was to be in St. George. Pat’s note stirred in my
memory a recollection of one of my first major acquisitions of Mormon
Americana for Yale: the purchase from Peter Crawley of a set of issues of
the first newspaper printed in St. George, Our Dixie Times, written, edited,
published, and printed by Joseph E. Johnson beginning in January 1868.
In May that year, Johnson changed the name of the paper to The Rio Virgin
Times to avoid having readers associate the paper with the rebellious states
of the former Confederacy and to make certain that people were aware
that St. George was near water. The twenty-seven issues of Our Dixie
Times and The Rio Virgin Times at Yale enjoy a distinguished provenance.
Multiple copies were signed by either George A. Smith or Wilford Wood-
ruff. It had been years since I examined the paper, but the occasion seemed
right for me to reacquaint myself with it.
Editor Johnson’s running commentary on the newspaper’s impor-
tance to the community and the need for local residents to support it by
subscribing in advance fascinated me. I gather that newsstand sales
were an unreliable way to fund a newspaper in those days. Johnson’s
column usually appeared on the second page of the four-page, single
sheet that comprised a typical issue. I followed with pleasure Johnson’s
observations until Yale’s run of the newspaper ended in July 1869. Dig-
ging into the online newspaper files that the Library of Congress makes
available, I learned that the paper’s final issue was published on Novem-
ber 24, 1869.4
I wondered what had become of Johnson. Yale’s library catalog quickly
revealed that the demise of The Rio Virgin Times did not discourage him.
In May 1870, he began a new, more specialized periodical in St. George,
The Utah Pomologist. As with his earlier paper, Yale’s copy of the Pomolo-
gist appears to have belonged at one time to George A. Smith, whose sig-
nature appears on multiple copies. In March 1872, Johnson renamed the
paper The Utah Pomologist and Gardener, which he published through
1875. Unlike the general-purpose Rio Virgin Times, the Pomologist focused
principally on agriculture, gardening advice, and advertisements. It sought
to help St. George bloom.
My search also led to a small pamphlet printed in St. George some
years later in 1882 by C. E. Johnson, Joseph E. Johnson’s son. The title of
the pamphlet runs on as so many nineteenth-century titles do: Jottings by
the Way: A Collection of Rustic Rhyme by George W. Johnson with a Brief
Autobiography Containing Also Selections from the Writings of Other Mem-

bers of the Family.5 In addition to the “rustic rhymes” and autobiography,
contributed by George Johnson, the pamphlet includes brief notes about
the life of his brother Joseph, the newspaper editor, and about a third
brother, Benjamin F. Johnson, best known in Mormon circles for his ac-
count of early polygamy in Nauvoo where he was a confidant of Joseph
Smith’s and facilitated Smith’s plural marriage to his sister. A short “family
history” (which covers only a single generation) appears on the final page.
The poetry was decidedly rustic, but the biographical content began to fill
in my knowledge of Joseph Johnson’s life.
Born in Pomfret, New York, in 1817, he moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in
1832, and was baptized as a Latter-day Saint in 1833. He is described as
having been among the Saints who accompanied Hyrum and Joseph
Smith to the Carthage Jail. What caught my attention, however, was the
suggestion that, after the Saints were driven from Nauvoo, Joseph became
a town-site promoter, general goods merchant, and newspaper publisher
in numerous towns throughout the Missouri River Valley. I knew that
Orson Hyde had published a Whig paper, The Frontier Guardian, in Kanes-
ville, Iowa (the original name for the settlement that became Council
Bluffs), but I was unaware that Johnson had edited and later published
The Western Bugle, a Democratic Party paper established by his brother-in-
law Almon W. Babbitt in Council Bluffs in late April or early May of 1852.
The paper became The Council Bluffs Bugle in April 1854. At some point in
1856, Johnson sold the Bugle to Lysander W. Babbitt6, after which he
moved to found a new town, Crescent, north of Council Bluffs on the Mis-
souri River where he thought the transcontinental railroad bridge might
be constructed. He lost that bet; but while he lived in Crescent City, he
founded The Crescent City Oracle in 1857. As he had in Council Bluffs and
would later in St. George, Johnson urged all residents to subscribe to his
paper, for its success would be essential to the long-term growth and pros-
perity of the new town. On April 15, 1859, after two years in which he
published 104 issues of the Oracle, Johnson announced that the paper
would suspend publication, at least until he could collect for unpaid sub-
scriptions and other debts owed to the paper.
The woes of a frontier editor don’t seem to have diminished Johnson’s
journalistic enthusiasm. In April 1860, in Wood River, Nebraska, he
founded The Huntsman’s Echo. The Echo appears to have run for thirty-four
issues published through the summer of 1861. In 1863, Johnson was off to
Spring Lake Villa, Utah, to publish The Farmer’s Oracle, an agricultural
newspaper that resembled the Utah Pomologist. The Oracle lasted for six-
teen months.
As I followed Johnson’s peripatetic career, I found it challenging to dis-
tinguish his Mormon identity and characteristics from his traits as a fron-
tier editor. Years ago Jan Shipps observed that Western historians had so
written around Utah and the Mormon community that Utah resembled
the “hole” in a Western history doughnut.7 Johnson’s career offers a story
that breaches the walls of the hole. His engagement with print culture, in
and out of Utah, sometimes in direct service to the Church and to the
Mormon community but at other times in service to his personal aspira-
tions as a town-site speculator, resembles that of dozens if not hundreds
of other newspaper printers and publishers who sought to establish them-
selves throughout the American West. His story reminds us that as prom-
inent as books, pamphlets, and newspapers were for the early Church, the
Mormon engagement with print culture was part of a much broader trend
in nineteenth-century America. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young used
the press in new but not unique ways. For all the distinctively Mormon
aspects of the founding of St. George there was, in the role of Our Dixie
Times and The Rio Virgin Times, a link to the stories of Gentile communi-
ties throughout the West.
Jan Shipps’s observation about the narrow focus of Western historians
implies that not only has Mormon history been neglected, but that West-
ern history in general has gaps (and opportunities) to address. Given
Joseph Johnson’s story, might there be other ways to integrate the history
of early Mormonism in the broader history of nineteenth-century America
so as to develop fresh comparative insights that illuminate not only the
experience of the Saints, but of Americans in general?
Several additional examples concerning print culture reveal patterns
that cross Mormon and Gentile boundaries. Early leaders of the Church
made extensive use of the press to publicize doctrinal development and to
create a common, shared understanding of Mormon religious and social
thought. The translation of the Book of Mormon into dozens of vernacular
languages echoes the long-standing Protestant emphasis on making scrip-
ture available for immediate, personal consultation. The extensive collec-
tions of the Yale Divinity Library’s collection of missionary publications
reveal wonderful similarities in topics and themes with Beinecke Library’s
collection of LDS tracts published in Wales, England, Scandinavia, and
India. While American Protestant missionaries did not proselytize in
Europe, both Mormon and mainline American churches established local
printing operations to sustain their missions. Whether it was the Riggs

family in Minnesota, the Judds and Binghams in Hawaii, or Parley Pratt
in Britain, it often seems that to be an American missionary in the nine-
teenth century was to be a printer. Similarly, the importance and abun-
dance of theological, ecclesiastical, and devotional works in the output of
the Mormon press resembles the pattern of frontier press operations
throughout antebellum America. Alongside newspapers, religious job
printing made up an extraordinary percentage of rural and small-town
American printing throughout the 1830s and 1840s.
Like Stephen Austin in Texas, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young used
the press to communicate to their colonists breaking news about political
and social developments and to support the legal and economic infra-
structure of their new settlements. Although their production was sepa-
rated by more than twenty years and thirteen hundred miles, there are
remarkable similarities between Austin’s famous broadside, To the Settlers
in Austins Settlement, issued in 1823 to alert prospective immigrants to
Texas about the terms of colonization he had confirmed during a nine-
month trip to Mexico, and Brigham Young’s General Epistle from the Coun-
cil of the Twelve Apostles to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Abroad, Dispersed throughout the Earth and his Second General Epistle of the
Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from the Great
Salt Lake Valley, to the Saints Scattered throughout the Earth, printed to alert
the Saints about what was being accomplished at Salt Lake City.8 Austin
and Young worked tirelessly to produce printed codes of law for their nas-
cent communities. In Austin’s case it was the Translation of the Laws,
Orders, and Contracts on Colonization, from January, 1821, Up to This Time,
in Virtue of Which Col. Stephen F. Austin Has Introduced and Settled Foreign
Emigrants in Texas. . . .9 For Young it was The Constitution of the State of
Deseret, with the Journal of the Convention Which Formed It, and the Proceed-
ings of the Legislature Consequent Thereon.10 It is worth noting that, while
Austin and Young always spoke of themselves as Americans, they imag-
ined they were leaving the United States. Both were preparing their fol-
lowers to adopt new political identities. While other Western communities
might have been less concerned about political reformation, territorial
governors throughout the West frequently lamented the lack of a printing
press to provide the basis for orderly and efficient government.
A final example of the similar roles that print culture played across the
Mormon-Gentile divide requires expanding our frame of reference to
cross the Atlantic. The controversial literature about Mormons that
exploded in the 1840s bears eerie resemblances to Yale’s collection of

highly charged polemics defending or attacking the Oxford or Tractarian
movement of the 1830s and early 1840s in Great Britain. While John
Henry Newman’s dissatisfaction with liberal Protestantism took a very dif-
ferent shape than that of Joseph Smith, the conduct of the controversies
suggests opportunities to explore not only the sociology of religious con-
flict in the Anglo-American world of the early nineteenth century, but also
the ways in which the development of steam printing in the 1820s contrib-
uted to and shaped not only early Mormonism, but numerous social, eco-
nomic, and religious movements across the Anglo-American world.11
Considering Yale’s collection of Mormon books and manuscripts in
the context of its other collections generates a variety of questions extend-
ing beyond the role of print culture. Perhaps the most far-fetched and ro-
mantic notion to present is that there are intriguing similarities in the
lives (if not the theological ideas) of Joseph Smith, the most original Amer-
ican religious thinker of the nineteenth century, and Jonathan Edwards,
the most powerful religious mind of eighteenth-century America. They
were rural religious figures who clashed harshly with the established
urban religious leaders of their times. Extraordinarily charismatic, they
frequently alienated close associates. Both found themselves forced to re-
treat to the frontier to practice and develop their spiritual insights. The
parallel efforts of the Church Historian’s Office to publish the Joseph Smith
Papers and of the Yale University Press to publish The Works of Jonathan
Edwards ought to enable comparative study of two giants of American re-
ligious thought.12
Less extreme is the suggestion that abundant insights could be gleaned
by comparing Mormon concepts of socio-economic organization and social
justice to such antebellum utopian communities as Brook Farm; Clermont
Phalanx; Utopia, Ohio; Harmony; the Hopedale Community; and Icaria,
whose stories are documented at Yale in a collection assembled by the
scholar A. J. MacDonald.13 Alternatively, one might compare the Mormon
experience in Salt Lake City to later nineteenth- and early t wentieth-century
California communes such as Llano del Rio, Kaweah Colony, Pisgah
Grande, Ojai, and Holy City, whose histories were documented by Paul
Kagan.14 A bit more far-fetched and perhaps a source of scandal for con-
temporary Church leaders would be a consideration of the similarities and
contrasts between the effort of nineteenth-century Saints to make the
desert bloom and the communal efforts of the rural counter-culture in the
1960s and 1970s at such places as Libre in Colorado’s Huerfano Valley. I
suggest this comparison to remind us just how outlandish was Brigham

Young’s proposal to establish Deseret. The Mormon success story often
blinds us to how contingent and challenging that process was. If the com-
parison intrigues you, I highly recommend Roberta Price’s Huerfano: A
Memoir of Life in the Counterculture and her photo book, Across the Great
Divide: A Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture.15
That Mormon Utah prospered far beyond any other reform commun-
ity in American history was due not only to the power of religious convic-
tion and social integration, but also to the ability of the early Church to
develop an effective political culture that recruited new residents, inte-
grated them into the community, and provided ways to navigate through
rough times with the federal government. Yale’s collection of papers of
frontier governors such as John White Geary in Bleeding Kansas in the
1850s, Andrew J. Faulk in Dakota Territory in the 1860s, and John Green
Brady of Alaska in the first decade of the twentieth century reveal that they
faced many of the same challenges and day-to-day decisions as Governor
Young. A comparison of annexation and reconstruction in Texas to Utah’s
history during the same quarter century might reveal links between south-
ern and western experiences at the hands of an energetic and expansive
federal government that emerged during the Civil War.
Let me offer a final example of the ways in which the Mormon docu-
mentary record resonates with broader themes in the literature of the
American West. In Utah, as throughout the West, the maturation of settle-
ment sparked an outpouring of memorial literature. Autobiographies,
memoirs, county histories, and town histories reflected the historical
self-consciousness of people who were proud of what they (or their ances-
tors) had accomplished. The practice of keeping a personal journal may
have been more formally encouraged among the Saints, and it may be a
more persistent contemporary practice among Mormons than among
Gentiles, but it has never been a unique practice. All sorts of westerners of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries delighted in writing
about how they and their communities had come to be.
As I suggested earlier, my goal in contextualizing the materials and expe-
riences of Mormon history has been to break down the isolation that Jan
Shipps described years ago and to suggest that, in many ways, the “hole” re-
sembled the communities that enveloped it. But it is dangerous and mislead-
ing to carry this exercise too far, for as much as we might, after the passage of
a century, detect ways that Mormons and Gentiles of the nineteenth century
confronted similar issues, employed similar technologies, and resembled
each other in memorial practices, we must remember that, in the nineteenth

century, both the Saints and the Gentiles regarded the Saints as a distinctive
people. Early Mormons chose their identity; they were not born to it. They
embraced what set them apart. Gentiles, even those who identified admira-
ble traits among the Mormons, rarely identified with them.
Indeed the historical distinctions and divisions are more than binary,
for after the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith the Mormon community
was never unitary. The James Jesse Strang Papers at Yale reflect one of the
schisms that rent Mormon identity. Yale’s holdings of Strangite, Morrisite,
Brewsterite, and RLDS materials reveal the power of relatively small dis-
agreements in shaping religious and social identities. Out of multiple
identities arose unique records, unique experiences, and distinctive sto-
ries about the past, about what mattered in the past, about which events
were (or were not) significant, and about what those events meant—then
and now.
As historians grapple with the stories of distinctive communities, we
must recognize that our attempts to speak and write about the past are
inevitably selective. We cannot relive or recapitulate the total experience of
even one ancestor, much less villages of them. Consequently, all of our
history, no matter how scrupulous and accurate, is incomplete. This in-
completeness means that different stories about the past can often coexist
peacefully. They contribute variety without raising contradictions, fill in
otherwise blank spaces on our historical canvas, and lead us to celebrate
the way historical diversity enriches our understanding of humanity.
But we do not live solitary lives, and when we share space (historically
as well as personally) our accounts of the past do not always complement
each other. As George Jones and Tammy Wynette sang:
We always wanted a big two-story house,

Back when we lived in that little two-room shack . . .
Now we live (yes we live) in a two-story house,
Whoa, what splendor!
But there’s no love about.
I’ve got my story,
And I’ve got mine, too.
How sad it is, we now live, in a two-story house.16
Our roaming newspaperman Joseph E. Johnson recorded his own two-

story encounter in the pages of the Crescent City Oracle. After Johnson sold
The Council Bluffs Bugle to Lysander W. Babbitt, he and Babbitt fell into an
increasingly acrimonious dispute. Although it is difficult to isolate the ori-
gins of the disagreement, Johnson’s acidic but cryptic comments in The
Oracle indicate that it had political dimensions (accusations concerning
who was responsible for Democratic setbacks in a recent election), eco-
nomic aspects (arguments concerning the future prospects of each pa-
per’s hometown), and a personal component concerning the terms by
which Johnson sold The Bugle. Whether the dispute arose from innocent,
honest misunderstandings or from malicious, self-conscious misrepre-
sentations by one or the other man, two competing stories soon e merged—
each story claiming to be accurate and authentic. The conflict was not
academic. Each man recognized that his reputation for honesty and integ-
rity was at stake and that the outcome of their dispute could determine
whether they would thrive and prosper or suffer social disgrace. It was, at
its heart, an affair of honor. While there is no evidence that the argument
escalated to a gunfight, nineteenth-century Americans dueled over less.
Johnson never reported whether the dispute was resolved. Perhaps the
men reconciled, deciding that it was an innocent misunderstanding about
which they could henceforth share the same story, or perhaps Johnson’s
frequent relocations rendered the dispute moot.17
Historiographic disputes are usually just academic tempests, but some-
times they have dramatic social consequences and stir deep emotions. In
March 1991, as the quincentennial of Columbus’s first voyage to America
loomed, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, under the leadership of
senior curator William H. Truettner, opened The West as America: Reinter-
preting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920. In creating the exhibit, the curators
did not try to change which images of the frontier we should contemplate;
they exhibited the same paintings that have been displayed and studied for
nearly a century. They insisted, however, that we consider the paintings in
new ways. They raised explicit questions about the way iconic images en-
coded ideological perspectives alongside historic details; they encouraged
viewers to acknowledge the ways that art and artists shaped the “facts” they
recorded to tell particular stories about the frontier. Many people who vis-
ited the exhibition as well as some influential academics were dismayed by
the interpretation presented by the Smithsonian’s staff—ironically con-
firming the exhibit’s contention that art is not neutral. A major thread in
conversations about the exhibit was whether the “elite” curators of the
Smithsonian had the right to reframe long-held views about the history of
American art, about American history, and about American society.
Four years later another branch of the Smithsonian, The Air and Space
Museum, found itself in a similar controversy. Its staff proposed to ex-
plore the decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan through an exhibit
that would display the recently refurbished Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber
that delivered the first atomic bomb. Building on a half-century of docu-
mentation and historical research, curators proposed that the decision to
drop the bomb was shaped not only by a desire to save the lives of Ameri-
can servicemen but also to address concerns about Russian involvement
in a prolonged Asian conflict. Many veterans and their families perceived
the exhibit as negating their service and ignoring their voices. Under ex-
treme political pressure, the Smithsonian reorganized the exhibit multi-
ple times, not satisfying anyone. The incident has become a staple of
public history curricula across the country as an example of the challenges
we face living in a multi-story house.18
Books may provide a better means, or perhaps a lower-profile means,
of addressing the challenge of conflicting and competing stories about
the American past. In Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the
Violence of History, Karl Jacoby explores the ways in which Anglo-
American memories and histories of the Camp Grant Massacre ren-
dered silent the perspectives of Mexican-American, Tohono O’odham,
and Apache communities, all of which were intimately involved in the
incident.19 Jacoby was less interested in resolving factual disputes about
the m assacre—for there are relatively few—than in presenting how
each community involved at Camp Grant came to be there and how
each community came to understand what transpired there. He dem-
onstrates how the facts of the event came together in different ways for
each community, how they placed the same fact in different contexts,
and how they interpreted differently the meaning of the same fact. One
of Jacoby’s remarkable accomplishments in his beautifully written book
is to honor the integrity of each historical tradition without ignoring
the horrific violence of the massacre.
If museums have been battered by history wars over the last twenty
years, libraries and archives have not escaped the issue of who gets to tell
stories about the past. Native American scholars and community activists
have rightly drawn attention to the ways in which European and American
accounts of the frontier demonized and trivialized Indian communities
across the continent. Special collection librarians have been challenged
not only to more fully document both sides of the frontier, but also to draw
on the insights and wisdom of Indian peoples to understand the meaning
and significance of documents regarding their communities. In 2006 a

group of nineteen archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians, and
anthropologists gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona, to consider whether they
could agree upon best professional practices “for culturally responsive
care and use of American Indian archival material held by non-tribal orga-
nizations.” They composed a six-thousand word document, Protocols for
Native American Archival Materials, which was released by the First Archi-
vist Circle in April 2007. The protocols urged professionals to reconsider
long-standing archival practices and to adopt new approaches to providing
access to what the group described as “culturally sensitive” materials.
Their proposals included “rethinking public accessibility and use of some
materials.” The authors of the protocols observed:
Native American communities have had extensive first-hand expe-

rience with the ways that information resources held in distant in-
stitutions can impact their quality of life, their practice of religion,
and their future as a people—sometimes with disastrous conse-
quences, sometimes to their benefit. Libraries and archives must
recognize that Native American communities have primary rights
for all culturally sensitive materials that are culturally affiliated with
them. These rights apply to issues of collection, preservation,
access, and use of or restrictions to these materials.20
Although carefully written and cautiously phrased, the protocols pro-

pose that Native American communities be allowed to determine who
may or may not consult “Native American archival materials” no matter
where those records are preserved.
Relations among individual Native Americans; Native American com-
munities; Native American governments; individual archivists, librarians,
and scholars; archives; research libraries; and academic institutions are
complex. As the authors of the protocols suggest, they present abundant
opportunity for misunderstanding and conflict as well as collaboration
and mutual learning. Individuals, community associations, and govern-
ments must improve communication across cultural, community, institu-
tional, and political boundaries. Archivists and librarians who collect or
care for materials that document Native American history and culture
have a responsibility to educate themselves about the issues surrounding
the origin and use of their collections. Just as we recognize the authority
of nation states throughout the world to control the export of their cultural
patrimony we must recognize the ongoing right of individual Native

Americans, their communities, and their governments to exercise author-
ity over themselves, their property, and their records. An uneven distribu-
tion of resources often makes it difficult if not impossible for Native
Americans to consult important collections about their personal, com-
munity, and cultural history.
The protocols seriously address challenging issues, but they are often
vague and fail to define adequately what constitutes “American Indian ar-
chival material.” The term appears throughout the report but is never de-
fined. While most observers would agree that the records of Native
American tribal governments ought to be covered, should the term also
apply to the records of non-governmental pan-Indian cultural organiza-
tions, or the personal papers of a Native American author, or the letters of
a missionary who worked among Native Americans? Should the term en-
compass photographs taken of Native American diplomats when they vis-
ited Washington or the diaries of a white trader reminiscing about his
experiences with Indian customers? What of motion picture and sound
recordings made by non-academic scholars in the early twentieth century
or recordings of conversations among political activists promoting Indian
rights in the late twentieth century? Such rhetorical questions are not
meant to draw a line but to suggest the breadth and ambiguity of the term
as it appears in the protocols.
Of greater concern, the authors of the protocols elevate sensitivity to
community values above free inquiry. Aware that stories told about Indi-
ans have had detrimental effects on the lives of generations of Native
Americans and concerned about the ability of Native Americans to deter-
mine what shall be said about them in the future, the authors propose that
Native American communities decide when and how individual scholars
may consult materials concerning them. The protocols accurately point
out that archivists and librarians in the United States routinely restrict
access to certain kinds of materials but do not acknowledge that virtually
all such restrictions are in place for limited periods of time and that few if
any of those restrictions provide selective access. Most restrictions close
material to all prospective users until the restriction expires. American
archivists and librarians would resist the open-ended, selective restriction
policy the protocols endorse if they were proposed by religious, political,
cultural, or business figures. It seems unlikely that they would allow Eu-
ropean governments to monitor and approve access to books or papers the
governments deemed vital to their national security. Neither would they
allow a religious organization to restrict access to the unpublished mem-

oirs of dissident members or permit a corporation to regulate access to the
personal papers of a former employee. In each scenario, there might be
specific considerations for a library or archive to question the suitability of
its holding material. Perhaps the federal government has enacted legisla-
tion that classifies certain foreign documents. Perhaps an employee stole
corporate property in the form of product designs. In each case, the library
or archive would consider clearly defined principles of property law to ex-
plore whether it had a legitimate right to hold the material in question. It
would not grant to a third party broad rights to review who could or could
not consult it.
In recent years the libraries at Cornell, Yale, and the University of Illi-
nois as well as professional organizations such as the International Fed-
eration of Library Associations, the American Library Association, the
Association of College and Research Libraries, the Canadian Association
of Research Libraries, and the Japan Library Association have addressed
the issues raised when libraries are asked to destroy or remove from their
collections material that individuals or communities regard as malicious,
slanderous, or misleading.21 Individually and collectively their statements
assert that libraries and archives cannot assume responsibility for moni-
toring or restricting the stories that are told about our past without endan-
gering free inquiry and free expression. Recognizing that our knowledge
will always be incomplete, research librarians and archivists seek to docu-
ment the full range of human activity and expression so that all of us can,
now and in the future, contemplate, explore, assess, and critique human-
ity’s failures as well as its successes.
Throughout its history, the Mormon community has experienced the
consequences of intemperate, misleading, or ignorant stories about it. In
the quarter-century after the Church was founded, those stories contrib-
uted to multiple assaults on Mormon settlements, to the deaths of Mor-
mons, and to the massive destruction of their property. Anti-Mormon
polemics and the events they engendered constricted Mormon opportuni-
ties to define themselves spiritually and politically. Even as the Church
splintered in the wake of Joseph Smith’s death, antagonistic stories en-
couraged each Mormon community to close ranks and to develop a
unique counter-narrative that drew believers together in a cohesive com-
munity. The Mormon commitment to history and to heritage is a reflec-
tion of the importance and vitality of their shared understanding of their
origin and evolution.
In the latter twentieth century, as Utah flourished and The Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints became an international religious com-
munity, the need to define a single counter-narrative began to fade. A vi-
brant, dynamic community inevitably generates multiple understandings
of its past, present, and future, and Mormons began to discover and de-
velop numerous stories about the past that helped them understand their
ancestors and themselves. Not surprisingly, many of these newer stories
clash with Gentile perspectives. A greater challenge for the community is
that some of the new stories clash with each other and with traditional
Mormon narratives of their past. Some new explanations of the past will
fail because they do not marshal sufficient evidence, but it will be impos-
sible to disprove or to reconcile all of the new stories. Mormons clearly live
in a multi-story house.
The ferment of contemporary Mormon intellectual life presents chal-
lenges and opportunities to libraries and archives in and out of Utah. No
archive, no matter how extensive its collections, can stop the emergence of
new narratives that address sensitive issues. Restrictions and secrecy only
provoke curiosity. They frequently diminish the accuracy and richness of
new explanations of the past, but they rarely stop determined investiga-
tors. To preserve documents without providing equitable access to them is
to attempt to hide from history—an effort that inevitably fails.
Our documentary heritage is rich and deep. Joseph Johnson and his
colleagues in the early Church have much to teach us if we are prepared to
explore the messy, confusing tracks they have left in libraries and archives
throughout the United States. That we will discover different tales ought
not to dismay us. That our knowledge is and will be incomplete and im-
perfect reminds us that we can always improve our understanding of the
past if we are prepared to examine it with fresh eyes.
Notes
1. Chad J. Flake and Larry W. Draper, eds., A Mormon Bibliography, 1830–1930:
Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Broadsides Relating to the First Century of Mor-
monism, Introduction by Dale L. Morgan, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (Provo, UT: BYU
Religious Studies Center, 2004). The first edition was published by the Univer-
sity of Utah Press in 1978.
2. Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church, 2 vols. (Provo,
UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1997, 2005); James B. Allen, Ronald W.
Walker, and David J. Whittaker, Studies in Mormon History, 1830–1997: An Indexed
Bibliography (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Ronald D. Dennis,

Welsh Mormon Writings from 1844 to 1862: A Historical Bibliography (Provo, UT:
BYU Religious Studies Center, 1988); Richard L. Saunders, Printing in Deseret:
Mormons, Economy, Politics & Utah’s Incunabula, 1849–1851: A History and Descrip-
tive Bibliography (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2000); L. R. Jacobs,
Mormon Non-English Scriptures, Hymnals, & Periodicals, 1830–1986: A Descriptive
Bibliography (Ithaca, NY: L. R. Jacobs, 1986); Steven L. Shields, The Latter Day
Saint Churches: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987);
Susan L. Fales and Chad J. Flake, Mormons and Mormonism in U.S. Government
Documents: A Bibliography (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1989).
See also Rick Grunder, Mormon Parallels: A Preliminary Bibliography of Materials
Offered for Sale 1981–1987 (Ithaca, NY: Rick Grunder Books, 1987).
3. I also want to thank my mentors in Mormon history and Mormon literature:
William P. MacKinnon, Howard Lamar, Thomas G. Alexander, Charles S. Peter-
son, D. Michael Quinn, Jan Shipps, and Terry Tempest Williams. If this essay
contains anything of value, it will be due to their guidance. Any gaffes, of com-
mission or omission, are my responsibility.
4. Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058009/
holdings/ (accessed September 5, 2011).
5. George Washington Johnson, Jottings by the Way: A Collection of Rustic Rhyme by
George W. Johnson, Containing Also Selections from the Writings of Other Members
of the Family (St. George, UT: Printed by C. E. Johnson, 1882).
6. Lysander W. Babbitt was unrelated to Almon W. Babbitt. A Methodist, Lysander
ran the Bugle until 1870.
7. Jan Shipps, “Gentiles, Mormons, and the History of the American West,” in her
Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana, IL: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2000), 21.
8. Stephen Austin, To the Settlers in Austins Settlement (San Antonio de Bexar: As-
bridge, Printer, 1823); General Epistle from the Council of the Twelve Apostles to the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Abroad, Dispersed throughout the Earth
(St. Louis, MO: 1848); Second General Epistle of the Presidency of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from the Great Salt Lake Valley, to the Saints Scat-
tered throughout the Earth (Salt Lake City, UT: B. H. Young, Printer, 1849).
9. Stephen Austin, Translation of the Laws, Orders, and Contracts . . . (San Filipe de
Austin: Printed by Godwin B. Cotten, November, 1829).
10. Brigham Young, The Constitution of the State of Deseret . . . (Kanesville, IA: Pub-
lished by Orson Hyde, 1849).
11. See Lawrence N. Crumb, The Oxford Movement and Its Leaders: A Bibliography of
Secondary and Lesser Primary Sources, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2009). For a recent reconsideration of Newman’s life, see Frank M. Turner, John
Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
12. The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2009–)
also available online at http://josephsmithpapers.org; The Works of Jonathan Ed-
wards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–). See also “The Jonathan
Edwards Center at Yale,” http://edwards.yale.edu.
13. For a detailed description of the MacDonald Collection, see http://hdl.handle.
net/10079/fa/beinecke.macdon (accessed September 5, 2011).
14. For detailed finding aids for two collections created by Paul Kagan, see http://
hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.utopia and http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/
beinecke.kaganphotos.
15. Roberta Price, Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004) and her Across the Great Divide: A
Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture (Albuquerque, NM: University of New
Mexico Press, 2010).
16. “Two-Story House,” words and music by Glen D. Tubb, David Lindsey, and
Tammy Wynette, 1980.
17. The dispute can be followed in the pages of the Crescent City Oracle beginning
in August 1857.
18. For background on the Smithsonian controversies, see Edward T. Linenthal and
Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the
American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), and David Lowenthal,
Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York:
The Free Press, 1996).
19. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
(New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

20. Northern Arizona University, http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html
(accessed September 5, 2011).
21. Prepared by International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) / Freedom
of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) and approved by
The Executive Board of IFLA,“IFLA Statement on Libraries and Intellectual Free-
dom,” March 25, 1999, The Hague, Netherlands, http://www.ifla.org/publica-
tions/ifla-statement-on-libraries-and-intellectual-freedom [URL updated May 6,
2015]; American Library Association, “Library Bill of Rights,” http://www.ala.org/
ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/index.cfm; American Library Associa-
tion, “Freedom to Read Statement,” http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/
statementspols/freedomreadstatement [URL updated May 6, 2015]; Association
of College and Research Libraries, “Intellectual Freedom Principles for Aca-
demic Libraries: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights,” adopted by ACRL
Intellectual Freedom Committee, June 28, 1999, http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/
divs/acrl/publications/whitepapers/intellectual.cfm; Canadian Association of
Research Libraries, “Statement on Freedom of Expression in Research Libraries,”
adopted in June 1986, http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/faife/statements/carlstat.
pdf [URL updated May 6, 2015]; Japan Library Association, “A Statement on
I ntellectual Freedom in Libraries,” adopted by the Annual General Conference of

the Japan Library Association on May 30, 1979, http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/
faife/statements/jlastat.pdf [URL updated May 6, 2015]; Cornell University Li-
brary, “Policy on Returning or Destroying Materials on Request,” http://www.
library.cornell.edu/colldev/returningordestroying.html; University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, “Policy on Request for Removal of Materials from the Col-
lection or from General Circulation Due to Allegations of Dubious Scholarship,”
http://www.library.illinois.edu/administration/collections/policies/Request_
for_Removal_of_Materials.pdf; Yale University Library “Policy on Requests for
Destruction, Return, or Removal of Materials from the Collection or Circulation,”
http://www.library.yale.edu/CDCpublic/policies (all sites accessed September
5, 2011).
PART 4
The Study of Global Religions

Introduction
BY REID L. NEILSON
Historically speaking, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a

young religion, one that was founded within the last two centuries. But
owing to its emphasis on missionary work and large families of its mem-
bers, it continues to grow well beyond its American roots. For the past
several decades, many historians, sociologists, and scholars of religion
have looked to the Latter-day Saint faith as a helpful case study on how and
why new religious movements grow in the modern age. More recently,
however, observers have questioned whether the Mormon faith will be
able to continue its past growth trajectories and how well suited the
Church is for the challenges of globalization. The three essays in this sec-
tion depart from the triumphal narrative that characterized scholarship on
the rise of the Church in past academic circles and offer cautionary tales
to the study of global religions.
Viewed by some scholarly observers as the “quintessential” American
religion, the LDS story has struggled to become part of the larger conversa-
tion on global religions beyond the United States. This is true even in the
larger North American narrative of religion, argues David B. Marshall, a
Canadian historian at the University of Calgary. Drawing on the doughnut
metaphor of scholar Jan Shipps, who popularized the notion that historians
leave out the Mormon story, or create a doughnut hole, when they narrate
the past of the American West, he argues that the same phenomenon is at
play when historians write about the social and religious history of neigh-
boring Canada. “Despite overriding concern with regionalism, multicultur-
alism, and ethnicity in Canadian historiography, the history of the Mormons
has not attracted much attention,” he laments. “The landscape of Mormon
296 the study of global religions
historiography in Canada is virtually barren.” LDS characters and activities

are largely absent from the printed pages of Canada’s past. But Marshall
also points out that this missing gap goes both ways: “The Canadian
Mormon story is also absent in the recent literature on the rise of The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a world or global religion.”
Both groups, it would appear, are talking past the other, neither making
meaningful reference to historical contributions flowing both ways.
To help bridge this gap, Marshall offers his audience a helpful overview
of Canadian Mormon history beginning with the LDS-led colonization of
Alberta during the late nineteenth century. Like other Christian churches
in Canada during the late twentieth century, the Church was affected neg-
atively by the rise of secularization in Canada. Moreover, the increasing
influx of immigrants from non-Christian countries further transformed
Canadian society and made it less Christian, particularly in its public
spaces. “Canada has become a profoundly secular society,” Marshall
argues, with reference to recent judicial and legislative activities. “For the
Mormon faith, the deeply secular, highly diverse and very unsettled reli-
gious landscape in Canada seems like a very uncertain climate indeed,” he
concludes with some pessimism. The land that once provided refuge for
LDS colonists, many of whom were seeking religious freedom to practice
plural marriage, has become less hospitable to religious seekers.
Although North America’s Canadian provinces provide an interesting
case study of the interplay between religiosity and secularization, the Af-
rican continent is the backdrop in the final two essays. Philip Jenkins, a
professor of history at Baylor University, provocatively titled his Tanner
Lecture “Letting Go,” a call for Mormon leaders to loosen the reins of
institutional control of its African congregations and to embrace encul-
turation and localization. He begins by asserting that the growth of
churches can only be understood within a comparative framework. Jen-
kins challenges those who would extol Mormon expansion in black
Africa. “What struck me forcibly was how much weaker LDS growth has
historically been on that continent when compared to other churches,”
he admits. “This fact seemed doubly mysterious when I list the features
of the Mormon message that should, by rights, have exercised immense
appeal in an African setting. It has not. Furthermore, it shows no signs
of doing so.” For Jenkins, the Church offers an intriguing view into the
study of global religions, especially why some churches succeed while
others struggle in Africa.
The Study of Global Religions 297
Jenkins starts his larger analysis by describing the African religious

landscape and relatively recent rise of Christianity there. The picture he
paints is startling: “By most measures, Africa should within thirty years
contain more Christians than any other continent. When we factor in the
peoples of the African diaspora, dwellers around the shores of the Black
Atlantic, the African preponderance in Christianity will be even more
striking.” The Latter-day Saints, like other Christian denominations, have
risen with the same upward tide sweeping across historically non-
Christian Africa, especially since the 1960s. Jenkins then alerts his audi-
ence to twelve “mega-trends” in Africa, including the rise of indigenous,
spontaneous Christian culture; the spread of American styles of market-
ing and promotion; the continuing power of poverty and the rise of the
prosperity gospel; and the thorny issues of indigenization and encultura-
tion for western religious traditions. He then makes a convincing case for
how these cultural trajectories are affecting all Christian groups in Africa,
including the Mormons.
He argues that the Latter-day Saints should be prospering in the Afri-
can religious marketplace, given their belief in prophets, spiritual gifts
(especially healing), reality of angels and the miraculous, and temple
work for deceased ancestors, because these are all doctrines and practices
attractive to most Africans. “Why is the Latter-day Saint tradition not
sweeping the continent?” Jenkins asks his audience. In addition to their
late start (1978) as a result of previous racial restrictions on priesthood
authority, he attempts to answer his own question by arguing that their
comparatively disappointing growth is the result of LDS leaders’ unwill-
ingness to localize their worship practices and fully embrace African cul-
ture. Only by localizing and moving toward enculturation will the Church
truly grow and enjoy its spiritual birthright among the Africans, Jenkins
concludes.
Last, Jehu J. Hanciles, a professor of world Christianity at Emory Uni-
versity, echoes and amplifies many of the themes and concerns of Jen-
kins’s earlier Tanner Lecture, but expands his critique of global Mormonism
beyond the borders of Africa. He begins with a spirited discussion and
description of the global transformation of Christianity and asserts that
Christianity, more than any other religious tradition, is undergoing glob-
alization at an accelerating pace. Hanciles describes this transformation
as “the re-emergence of Christianity as a non-Western religion,” because
more and more Christians are living beyond the traditional boundaries of
the Western world, specifically in North America and western Europe. By
2025, observers anticipate that more than half of all Christians will live in
Africa and Latin America. “This historic shift in global Christianity’s dem-
ographic center of gravity has profound implications for virtually every
major segment of the world Christian movement,” including the LDS tra-
dition, he suggests.
Becoming a truly global faith requires much more of a religious tra-
dition than merely having members in many nations. “Successful glob-
alization requires at least two defining attributes: localization and
multidirectional (reciprocal) transformation,” Hanciles argues. Going
global for any organization means, paradoxically, going local at the
same time. Religions must adapt to local likes, native needs, and pop-
ular preferences to truly globalize in the twenty-first century, he con-
tinues. Moreover, “global integration and deepening interconnectedness
among the world’s peoples means that cultural diffusion or impact
flows in multiple directions and involves modes of exchange. Sustained
cross-cultural movement invariably generates change on both sides
of the encounter, often unpredictably,” he writes. Again, those Chris-
tian movements that have enjoyed and encouraged multidirectional
cultural give-and-take and transformations are those that are truly
global.
Having laid out his criteria for true globalization of religions and orga-
nizations, Hanciles spends the balance of his essay assessing how well the
LDS faith meets these twin requirements. Adding his voice to Jenkins’s
earlier critique of Mormon growth, Hanciles describes the Church’s spread
as “an odd mixture of remarkable success and self-imposed underachieve-
ment.” Although it was able to secure early footholds in North America,
western Europe, and the Pacific Isles, the Church failed to expand into
Latin America and Africa until the second half of the twentieth century.
He reminds his audience that it would not be until after 1960 that Church
leaders would form the first stake in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. By the
early twenty-first century, the LDS tradition is beginning to look more
global in its demographic complexion and worldwide reach—at least
on the surface. But here is where the similarities stop: According to Han-
ciles, the Church remains very “American” in its corporate practices, pro-
grams, and personality. It has not localized nearly as much as other major
strands of Christianity and it lacks enculturation, or true globalization.
It is not yet a localized faith beyond North America. In addition, the
The Study of Global Religions 299
multidirectional transformations that mark global faiths seem to be lim-

ited among the Latter-day Saints. In summary, the global transformations
that mark much of Christianity in the modern age still need to occur
within the Church for it to become a truly global religious tradition, ac-
cording to Hanciles.
In their studies of the Church as a global religion, Marshall, Jenkins,
and Hanciles all examine past narratives of LDS growth and debate how
well suited the American religion is to become a truly transnational faith.
As globalization continues to make the world a smaller place, these au-
thors all seem to suggest that it will be interesting to see how LDS leaders
balance their desire to become global with their congregations’ needs to
operate locally. This is just as true in Calgary, Canada, as it is in Cape
Town, South Africa.
13
The Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut,

and Post-Christian Canada
By David B. Marshall
As an historian of Canada who specializes in religion and popular cul-

ture, I could not resist the metaphor of the doughnut when I came across
it in Jan Shipps’s essay, “Gentiles, Mormons, and the History of the Amer-
ican West.” In alluding to the doughnut, and especially the hole in the
middle surrounded by the calorie-rich dough around it, she was highlight-
ing her concern about the absence of scholarship about the Mormons in
the historiography of the American West. It seemed particularly puzzling
since the story of the Mormons had a rich historiography of its own.
Shipps’s intention in using the metaphor was “to raise neglect of the
Mormon West to consciousness and suggest some reasons why many, if
not most, historians of the West shape the western story like a doughnut,
circling all around the Great Basin, taking into account and telling nearly
every western story except the Mormon one.”1
In essence I am echoing this observation and applying it to Canadian
historiography. Shipps’s metaphor of the doughnut is also appropriate, if
not more so, to Mormonism in the historiography of the Canadian West
and of the history of religion in Canada. Despite overriding concern with
regionalism, multiculturalism, and ethnicity in Canadian historiography,
the history of the Mormons has not attracted much attention. This asser-
tion may be a little surprising when one thinks of the superb collection of
articles from the 1987 conference at the University of Alberta published in
The Mormon Presence in Canada (1990). But this volume has had minimal
influence on Canadian historiography. The landscape of Mormon histori-
ography in Canada is virtually barren.
Rarely is the Mormon story integrated into the overall narrative or anal-
ysis of Canadian history. John Herd Thompson’s recent survey Forging the
Prairie West (1998) contained only one paragraph on the settlement of the
Mormons in southern Alberta. Thompson integrated the Mormon story
with that of other religious minorities, such as the Mennonites, Hutterites,
and Doukhobors, who had been persecuted in their homelands and ar-
rived in the Canadian West in the late nineteenth century.2 So long as they
did not challenge Canadian norms, the Canadian government accommo-
dated these minorities since they were viewed as successful agricultural-
ists and desirable settlers. The Mormons integrated into Canadian society
with minimal difficulty or controversy, since the question of polygamy was
quickly settled.3 This rapid integration and quiescent lifestyle perhaps ac-
counts for the lack of historiographical interest. The Mormon story in
southern Alberta did not provide an opportunity to investigate the limits of
Canadian tolerance for an ethno-religious minority, as in the case for
Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Mennonites; and so Latter-day Saints have all
but disappeared from the historical literature.4
From the perspective of religious history, the omission of the Mormon
story is even more startling. The best example is Benjamin Smillie’s Vi-
sions of a New Jerusalem, a collection of essays on the religious settlement
of the prairie west. The editor “wanted to focus on the optimism of some
of the pioneer Protestant groups who came to the prairie with the hope of
building a new society, a New Jerusalem.”5 He argues that the Canadian
West was settled by religious groups fleeing religious persecution and
seeking to build the “Kingdom of God” in virgin territory. But he con-
sciously dismissed the Mormons. His criteria were that the representative
groups must be from the “First Nations” or the “main Judeo-Christian
tradition.” Whatever one thinks of the thorny question of whether the
Mormons should be considered part of the Judeo-Christian tradition or
not, it is still difficult to fathom a group that would be better suited to the
quest of building a New Jerusalem on virgin Canadian territory than the
Mormons.6
Discussion of the Mormons in the historiography of religion in Canada
is sporadic at best. If referenced at all, it is usually included in a list of new
religious movements to indicate the growing diversity of the Canadian reli-
gious landscape.7 In a recent survey that seeks to be inclusive of all reli-
gions, Mormonism is briefly featured in a concluding chapter on “alternative
religions” that also includes sections on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian
Scientists, Pentecostals, and New Age religious movements such as Yoga
and Hare Krishna. The author briefly discusses the beginnings of the
Mormon faith and its controversial doctrines and practices. It concludes
The Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut, and Post-Christian Canada 303
with a comment that “at the end of the twentieth century the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is deeply rooted in the United States and
Utah, in particular.”8 This entry is accompanied by a photograph of the
Cardston Alberta Temple. The implication seems to be that Mormonism is
an American faith, not an integral part of the Canadian religious landscape.
The more recent The Religions of Canadians (2012) is strikingly similar but
even shorter with Mormons being relegated to an “afterword.”9
This lamentable story is no better in the recent innovative scholarship
on the borderlands of the Canadian-American West. Unlike the concept of
“boundary,” which separates or divides, the concept of “borderlands” indi-
cates an area divided by a national border but where people mingle and
interact. The emphasis is on the cross-border relationships.10 The value of
this borderlands perspective for Mormon studies in Canada was antici-
pated by Dean Louder in The Mormon Presence in Canada: “For decades,
Alberta Saints have watched their children seek educational and marriage
opportunities at church institutions in the United States only to remain
afterward as Americans. Canadian Mormons who wish to affirm a sepa-
rate national identity face a special set of circumstances and a challenge
greater than that of their fellow Canadians.” For the Saints of Alberta, “the
international boundary was essentially nonexistent and hence ‘oft-
crossed.’”11 Scholarship on the borderlands between Alberta and Montana
(and, by extension, Idaho and Utah) fails to mention the Mormons, even
though the initial migration to southern Alberta, and then the continuing
relationship with the Great Basin Kingdom, is a perfect example of what
these historians mean by borderlands.12
Only very recently has the Mormon experience in Canada caught the
eye of Canadian social historians. Sarah Carter provides a sensitive analy-
sis of Mormon marriage practices in southern Alberta in her The Impor-
tance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western
Canada to 1915. Her primary concern, however, is with how the Canadian
government imposed a Canadian or respectable Victorian definition of
marriage on the indigenous peoples of western Canada. Nevertheless, she
demonstrates that both the Native and Latter-day Saints’ unique marriage
customs and family structures were outlawed by the Canadian state.13 In
Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies,
Frances Swyripa is concerned with the founding stories or mythology of
the different people who settled the Canadian prairie before 1914. These
stories, she suggests, are persistent and play a central role in defining a
sense of identity for the various ethnic groups in western Canada. The
story of the Mormon trek to the Cardston area by a few families fleeing the
anti-polygamy forces of the American government holds a powerful place
in the imaginations of Canadian Latter-day Saints, she contends.14
This metaphor of the doughnut can be pushed further. The Canadian
Mormon story is also absent in the recent literature on the rise of The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a world or global religion. For
instance, in the special 1996 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought, dedicated to the expansion of LDS Church activity around the
world, there was not an article about Canada although the issue included
articles about other British dominions or settler colonies, such as Australia
and New Zealand. If Canada is considered at all in this literature, it is as
part of North America, suggesting that the Canadian experience is similar
to—or, indeed, is a part of—that of the United States.15 In this regard, schol-
ars are following the classic work of historical geographer D. W. Meinig,
who considered the Cardston area of southern Alberta a refugee area or a
satellite sphere of the Great Basin Kingdom–based Mormon culture
region.16 As Dean Louder concluded twenty years ago, “Mormon scholars
have yet to discover Canada.”17 This omission endures today. The promis-
ing beginnings represented in the contributions to The Mormon Presence in
Canada have, for the most part, lain dormant.
There are no studies indicating how the Mormons in Canada inte-
grated and assimilated while struggling to maintain their “peculiar” iden-
tity.18 Indeed, it is not known whether the Saints in Canada were under the
same assimilating pressures as they faced in the United States. Has Can-
ada’s sense of being a multi-cultural society made a difference? Has the
different context of Canadian society somehow created a different Mormon
society in Canada? Here we can see the problem with talking about a
doughnut hole. Where does it lead? You end up with nothing or nowhere,
so to speak, with little, if anything, to talk about. I am reduced to asking a
series of questions without being able to provide much in the way of an-
swers or analysis. But what I can do is outline the context of Canadian re-
ligious history since 1945. There are some striking parallels with events
and trends in the religious history of the United States, but the story is still
a different one.
The Canadian Religious Landscape since 1945

The story of the Latter-day Saints in post-Second World War Canada is one
of significant growth. To use Richard Bennett’s apt phrase, the LDS
Church in Canada has developed from a “struggling seed” in its early days
in the Cardston region to what is now a “branching maple” with temples
in major cities across Canada.19 The Cardston Temple, dedicated in 1923,
remained the only Mormon temple in Canada until 1990, when the To-
ronto Temple was dedicated. Following that, temples were dedicated in
Halifax, Regina, and Edmonton in 1999 and in Montreal in 2000. Shortly
after this flurry of temple construction, the Vancouver Temple was dedi-
cated in 2010, followed by Calgary’s in 2012. The Winnipeg Temple is
scheduled for completion in 2015 or 2016.20
This same diffusion of Latter-day Saints beyond Alberta’s border is also
demonstrated by the proliferation of LDS stakes. The first, in Cardston,
was created in 1895, followed by the Raymond Stake (1903), the Calgary
Stake (1921), and the Lethbridge Stake (1951). The first stake outside of
Alberta, the Toronto Stake, was formed in 1960. Since then, the number
of stakes has proliferated, demonstrating the growth and dispersal of Mor-
mons throughout Canada after World War II. While there were eight
stakes in 1960, there were ten by 1970, twenty-six in 1980, thirty-four in
1990, forty-four in 2000, and forty-seven in 2010, reflecting a slight
trailing-off in the growth rate in recent years.
These statistics cannot be debated like those of the numbers of Latter-
day Saints. There are always charges of overreporting with respect to
Church statistics, and there are certain structural problems with how the
census gathers religious data, leading to underrepresentation of smaller
religious groups in particular. But no matter what statistics one draws
upon, a few trends are clear.21 Since the Second World War, the growth of
the LDS Church in Canada has been impressive. Those claiming they
were Latter-day Saints surged by 30 percent in the 1940s to over 32,000,
by 52 percent in the 1950s to just over 50,000, by 33 percent in the 1960s
to 66,000, and by 23 percent in the 1970s to 88,000. Growth trailed off in
the 1980s; still those identifying themselves as Latter-day Saints in 1991
had grown by over 13 percent to 100,765. In the 1990s, however, growth
almost halted.22 According to the census, the number of Canadians claim-
ing to be Latter-day Saints in 2001 was 101,895, an increase of a mere
1.2 percent.
Despite this disheartening trend, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints in Canada is very successful in maintaining its converts. Partic-
ipation rates, in the form of weekly attendance at church, marriage in the
temple, and ordination, are in the 40–50 percent range, a figure much
higher than the participation rates for most of the major churches in
Canada.23 Growth may have slowed, but these numbers are not slipping
into absolute decline as they are for another uniquely American religion
in Canada, the Pentecostals.24
It is in this context of growth that I am going to take up the work of
Rodney Stark, a sociologist who has had an immense influence on Mormon
studies. But I am not going to comment on his stunning predictions con-
cerning the potential future growth of the Mormon faith. Instead, I want
to explore his arguments with regard to the growth of new religions and
the issue of secularization. Stark argued that the greatest potential for
Mormon growth in Canada was among those who responded on the
census form that they had “no religion.” In places where church attend-
ance was low and where the conventional churches were faltering, Stark
saw opportunities for successful missionary work for the LDS Church. In
Canada, he recommended that missionaries be sent to the unchurched
boomtowns of the West.25
According to census data, “no religion” is one of the fastest growing
“faiths” in Canada.26 In 2001, almost 4.8 million people, representing just
over 16 percent of the population, claimed “no religion.”27 This figure rep-
resents startling growth from 1961, when under 1 percent of the popula-
tion claimed they had “no religion.” By 1971, more than 4.3 percent
indicated that they had “no religion.” The period of takeoff for this cate-
gory was the tumultuous 1960s.28 Indeed, the very fact that the census
thought it necessary to include this option indicated that attitudes were
fundamentally shifting. If nothing else, it was becoming respectable for
people to claim they had no religious affiliation.
Perhaps even more stunning is that “no religion” stands third, after
Roman Catholic (12.7 million) and all the major Protestant faiths and
churches (8.6 million). In terms of individual churches, “no religion” is
the second-largest church in Canada, significantly outpacing the historic
United Church of Canada (2.8 million), Anglican Church (2.2 million),
Baptist Church (0.7 million), Lutheran Church (0.6 million), and the
once-powerful Presbyterian Church (0.4 million).29 Stark is correct in
pointing out that western Canada in particular has large numbers of “no
religion” citizens. In British Columbia, for instance, “no religion” is far
and away the most populous religious category; just over 35 percent claim
no religious affiliation.30
Many people who claim they have no religious affiliation identify them-
selves as “spiritual but not religious.”31 The distinction between “religious”
and “spiritual” is crucial to the monumental religious change of the
post-1945 period. Being religious is associated with going to church and

accepting its authority, along with that of clergy, with respect to creeds,
worship practices, and moral teachings. “Religious” is increasingly associ-
ated with the “public realm of membership in religious institutions, partic-
ipation in formal ritual and adherence to official denominational doctrine.”
It has negative connotations that are associated with things authoritarian,
bureaucratic, and tired.32
Being spiritual is a dissent against church-based religion, a post-
modern religiosity. Churches are regarded as a barrier to true spiritual de-
velopment, for they impede spiritual inquiry and stultify new insights. For
the spiritually inclined, the location of religious authority rests within each
individual. They select or choose whatever beliefs and rituals they find
consistent with their individual ideals, moral code, spiritual needs, and
sense of the world. In denying the validity of church as a center of spiritual
life, they reject churches as legalistic, bureaucratic, and conventional—
empty of spiritual meaning and life. In this post-modernist age, “spiritual”
is associated with the private realm of religious thought and experience—
something that is genuine, positive, and fulfilling.33 The old Canada of
dedicated church-going and life-long denominational affiliation that
grounded a deep sense of personal and family identity is a category of
self-identification of ever-diminishing importance.34
The decline of the mainstream Protestant churches in Canada has
been nothing short of catastrophic. The five Protestant churches that have
been historically dominant—the Anglican Church, United Church of
Canada, Presbyterian Church, Baptist Church, and Lutherans—made
up 95 percent of the Protestant population prior to 1945. Very few Canadi-
ans belonged to smaller evangelical, charismatic, or restoration churches.
This situation remained stable until the late 1950s and early 1960s when
the proportion of the historic mainstream church affiliation began to trail
off. Over 2.5 million Canadians reported themselves as Anglican in 1971;
by 2001, that number had dropped to just over 2.0 million. Similarly, over
1 million Anglicans, according to its own records, were active members in
the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. But by 2001 only 640,000 were active Anglican
members. Similar figures exist for the United Church of Canada, both in
terms of total members and in terms of active members. From 1971, the
historic mainstream in Canada began to experience absolute, not just rela-
tive, decline. Only the Baptists enjoyed growth over these decades.35
Where did these people go? Some, no doubt, were swept up in the
evangelical revival of the recent decades. But the number of conservative
evangelicals in contemporary Canada amounted to approximately 10 per-

cent of the population in 1961 and peaked at just over 17 percent in 1991.
This significant growth does not compensate for the decline of the his-
toric mainstream. In many cases, the ranks of those claiming they have
“no religion” have come from Canada’s historic mainstream churches.36
Many people still claim religious affiliation with the historic churches
for reasons of identity or tradition, but they, too, harbor many of the atti-
tudes of those who claim “no religion.” It may be that the characteristics
attributed to many in the “no religion” category also apply to many who
do not attend regularly but who still claim denominational affiliation.
Recent surveys of Canadian attitudes toward religion estimate that 40
percent of Canadians consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.”
As this figure is much greater than the “no religion” claimants in the
census, it must include many people who still maintain some degree of
church affiliation.
The rise of those claiming they have no religion and the precipitous
decline of the mainstream Protestant churches is only the tip of the ice-
berg of religious change in post-1945 Canada. Many who still declare their
attachment to a certain church or denomination attend only sporadically.
Regular churchgoing in Canada has plummeted since the 1960s. Gallup
polls suggest that while 67 percent of adult Canadians reported attending
church regularly in 1947, a decade later in 1957, that percentage had
sagged to 53. This dramatic decline has persisted—down to 31 percent in
1975 and 23 percent in 1991. Only recently has this figure leveled off, but
perhaps it can be argued that church attendance in Canada cannot decline
much more.37
Of course, church attendance is a rather blunt instrument to measure
the religiosity of a society, for it captures only one aspect of people’s reli-
gious lives. Nevertheless, a more sensitive index of religion results in sim-
ilar findings. This index takes into account five factors: (1) religious
affiliation, (2) frequency of church attendance, (3) frequency of private re-
ligious practice, including prayer, meditation, or reading sacred texts,
(4) importance of religion to one’s life, and (5) belief in certain key doc-
trines such as the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, and the efficacy
of prayer. Based on these criteria, 40 percent of Canadians have a low
degree of religiosity, 31 percent have a moderate degree of religiosity, and
only 29 percent have a high degree of religiosity. This has confirmed the
dramatic decline of churchgoing though, at the same time, making it clear
that many Canadians still practice religion privately.38
Equally important in Canada’s changing religious landscape is the

growing number and visibility of non-Christian religions. In 1951 Catho-
lics amounted to 45 percent of the population and Protestants 52 percent,
for a total Christian population of an overwhelming 97 percent. Changes
in Canadian immigration policy ending discrimination based on race or
ethnicity led to a rise of non-Christian immigrants arriving in Canada in
increasing numbers after 1960. Indeed a profound shift in Canadian im-
migrant patterns has occurred. The primary source of immigration to
Canada is not only the countries of Christian Europe but also those of
non-Christian Asia and the Middle East.39 By 1991, the total Protestant
population had fallen to 36 percent, while the Catholic population re-
mained steady at 45 percent, reflecting that the majority of immigrants
from European countries after 1945 came from Catholic countries such as
Italy, Poland, and Portugal.
The total Christian population had fallen to 81 percent by 1991, which
is still dominant but not nearly as overwhelming as a generation ago. A
growing number of Canadians affiliate with one of the other major world
religions, such as Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Sikh.40 The growth
of these faiths in Canada is consistent with the changing immigration pat-
tern toward people from Asia and the Middle East. While the percentage
of immigrants of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Sikh background was neg-
ligible before 1961, it reached 18 percent of immigrants for the census
decade 1971–81 and 24 percent between 1981 and 1991. Over the next
decade, just over 15 percent of immigrants to Canada were Muslims, and
another 15 percent were Buddhists, Hindus, or Sikhs. Between 1981 and
1991, the number of Canadians identifying with one of these n on-Christian
world religions rose by 144 percent, with the largest increase among the
Buddhists (215 percent), Muslims (158 percent), Hindus (126 percent),
and Sikhs (118 percent). The overall number of Canadians professing to
be Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Sikh is still modest. But if current immi-
gration patterns persist, these religions will continue to outpace the
growth of Christianity in Canada and become an ever-increasing propor-
tion of the country.41
This rise of world or eastern religions in Canada can be overplayed, for
the percentage of the major non-Christian religions in Canada is still quite
small. Non-Christian religions—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh,
Confucianism, and other Chinese religions—amount to less than 10 per-
cent of the population.42 According to some commentators, it is prema-
ture to drive the final nails into the coffin of Christianity in Canada.43
There are strong vestiges of Christian heritage in the faith of those people
who are “spiritual but not religious”; and therefore, even this substantial
proportion of people is not necessarily an indicator of the end of Christi-
anity in Canada. Nevertheless, it is difficult to exaggerate the demise of the
historic mainstream churches. The United Anglican, Baptist, Presbyte-
rian, and Catholic churches have lost considerable clout in Canadian soci-
ety and have retreated from their earlier roles in public education, health
care, social services, and the law.
These changes in Canada’s religious landscape have prompted one
American historian of religion to ask “What Happened to Christian
Canada?”44 This question presumes Christianity’s demise and the emer-
gence of a secular or post-Christian society. Certainly if one defines secu-
larization as the decline or marginalization of religion in the public
sphere, then Canada has become a profoundly secular society since at
least 1960.45
Canada: A Secular or Post-Christian Society

To understand the full extent of the changes in the Canadian religious
landscape it is necessary to look beyond immigration and the religious
affiliation of Canadians. Also driving the change toward a more secular
direction are the ways in which Canadian society has responded to greater
religious diversity. Constitutional change in the form of the landmark
1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms was prompted by recognition of
Canada’s diverse religious character. The charter has moved Canada fur-
ther in a secular direction and away from some of its early Christian roots.
In particular, court decisions based on the Charter have had a profound
impact on moving religion out of the public square.
Deeply rooted in Canadian history lies a certain uneasiness with re-
spect to the divisive impact of religion in public life. This uneasiness led
to the separation of church and state in the 1840s and 1850s when political
battles over the status and privileges of the established Church of England
were considered too fractious. This determination to separate church
from state was perhaps best seen in the development of a vigorously non-
denominational public school system. But a more general apprehension
about mixing religion with politics in Canada also surfaced early in its
history as a result of numerous disputes between Protestants and Catho-
lics. In recognition that the basic diversity of Canada necessitated impor-
tant compromises, one Father of Confederation, Georges Étienne Cartier,
stated that Canada had to be a “political nationality” rather than a nation

based on religion, language, or ethnicity.46
The wisdom of Cartier’s observation was quickly seen as numerous
Protestant-Catholic conflicts erupted over questions of minority rights
with respect to religion, primarily, and also language. The most notable of
these conflicts involved the mixed Native- and French-speaking Catholic
Metis people, leading to the Red River Uprising of 1870 and the North
West Rebellion of 1885. Both events tore the national fabric asunder along
religious lines, therefore exposing the folly of mixing politics with religion
in Canadian society.
During World War II, many Canadians embraced the idea of defining
and codifying fundamental human rights as articulated in the Atlantic
Charter and institutionalized by the newly created United Nations’ Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights. The more vociferous exponents of
civil rights in Canada pointed to Canada’s multi-cultural character and
religious diversity as reasons for making such a document necessary in
Canada. The internment of the Japanese and subsequent confiscation of
their West Coast property, deeply rooted in racism as well as the fears of
Japanese militarism during World War II, was dramatic evidence of such
a need.47 The treatment of religious minorities, such as the Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses, was further evidence that the rights revolution had to be extended
to religious minorities. In Quebec, Jehovah’s Witnesses were forbidden to
hold any kind of assembly, due to their aggressive and anti-Catholic mis-
sionary zeal; and in Ontario, Jehovah’s Witness children were taken from
families because they refused to salute the flag and sing the national
anthem at school.48
The struggle for a charter for rights and freedoms in Canada is long
and complicated, but the impetus for constitutional reform in the political
arena came, in large measure, from Pierre Elliott Trudeau.49 For Trudeau,
Canada’s growing multi-cultural character and episodes of mistreating re-
ligious and ethnic minorities confirmed the necessity of having rights and
freedoms defined and guaranteed in a written charter. He reasoned that
they could then be guaranteed by the courts, which are not subject to the
whims of public opinion as are politicians.
This debate over civil and human rights in Canada emerged in a
period when the state was beginning to remove itself from some of its
Christian underpinnings. Before becoming prime minister in 1968,
Trudeau served as minister of justice. In that capacity, he seized upon
the question of individual rights with respect to sexual orientation,
reproduction, and divorce. In 1967, legislation created “no-fault divorce”

and removed homosexuality and contraception from the Criminal Code.
In taking this step, Trudeau was indicating that these things were not
necessarily “sinful” but were, instead, a matter of individual conscience.
He stated, “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the
nation.”50 In effect, he was separating matters long regarded as matters
of Christian morality from their religious foundation and separating the
state from some of its Christian moorings.
Trudeau’s determination to separate church from state persisted in his
fight for a charter of rights and freedoms. The constitutional proposals
Trudeau brought forward beginning in the early 1970s did not contain any
reference to God. During the protracted and sometimes fierce debates
over Trudeau’s constitutional proposals in the early 1980s, lobbying for
inclusion of a reference to God finally moved Trudeau to suggest privately
to the Liberal caucus that he did not think “God gives a damn whether he
was in the constitution or not.”51 Trudeau’s commitment to the complete
separation of church and state and his understanding that constitutions
should be secular were not the result of a secular worldview. In fact—
although this was not appreciated during his lifetime—Trudeau remained
a devout Catholic throughout his life. He was a liberal, and perhaps post-
modern Christian, insisting that religion should be relegated to the pri-
vate sphere.52 Religion was too divisive and when it impinged on public
policy, it often trampled upon people’s freedom, according to Trudeau.
Not surprisingly, the conservative evangelical churches, along with the
Catholic Church, expressed dismay about the lack of reference to God in
such an important national document.53 The preamble of the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms opens with the phrase, “Whereas Canada
is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the
rule of law. . . .” It suggests that Trudeau had relented, but his opponents
enjoyed only a pyrrhic victory, for what mattered was not the language in
the preamble but how the courts interpreted the charter’s provisions, es-
pecially Sections 2 and 15.
Section 2(a) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms states, “Everyone
has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and
religion.” And this freedom of religion, under Section 1, is “subject only to
such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified
in a free and democratic society.” Section 15 guarantees that “every individ-
ual is equal before the law and under the law and has the right to the equal
protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in
particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin,

colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”54
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms opened a new chapter in Cana-
dian history. It did not take long for cases to reach the Supreme Court of
Canada that required interpretation of the religious freedom and equality
clauses. In certain cases, people challenged long-standing legislation,
such as the Lord’s Day Act—legislation dating from the early twentieth
century that was designed to protect the sanctity of Sunday from unneces-
sary commercial enterprise, amusement, and entertainment.55 Other chal-
lenged practices were religious exercises and instruction in schools. Some
of the basic laws and practices of Canadian society with respect to the role
of religion would now be tested through the prism of the freedom and
equality sections of the new document, which is considered to be part of
the Canadian constitution and, for most Canadians, by far the most im-
portant part.
One of the first cases considered by the Supreme Court of Canada
under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms dealt with Canada’s Lord’s Day
Act. In rendering the court’s decision, Chief Justice Brian Dickson out-
lined one of the new cardinal principles of Canadian society under the
charter: “The essence of the concept of freedom of religion is the right to
entertain such religious beliefs as a person chooses, the right to declare
religious beliefs openly and without fear of hindrance or reprisal, and the
right to manifest belief by worship and practice or by teaching and dis-
semination.” Dickson argued that the Lord’s Day Act “works a form of co-
ercion inimical to the Charter” because it “takes religious values rooted in
Christian morality and, using the force of the State, translates them into a
positive law binding on believers and non-believers alike.” Thus, in one of
its first major decisions regarding religion, one of the legislative corner-
stones of the country’s Christian heritage, the Lord’s Day Act, was removed
and the informal ties between church and state in Canada were sepa-
rated.56 Dickson was suggesting that the charter’s guarantee of religious
freedom liberated people from the shackles of church-imposed and state-
sanctioned religion. Here was a constitutional sanction for the exodus
from the church that was underway in Canadian society.
The secular revolution that was implicit in Dickson’s ruling was chal-
lenged by Mr. Justice Belzil’s dissenting opinion in the preceding 1985
decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal. He had argued that the Lord’s Day
Act did not compel observation of the Lord’s Day by either Christians or
non-Christians. “With the Lord’s Day eliminated, will not all reference in
the statutes to Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving be next? . . . Such an

interpretation would make the Charter an instrument for the repression of
the majority at the instance of every dissident and result in an amorphous,
rootless, and godless nation contrary to the recognition of the supremacy
of God declared in the preamble.”57
In 1990, another landmark decision seemed to confirm this fear. The
Supreme Court ruled on religious holidays in the schools—an issue that
is still heated in Canadian society. In 1990, the Islamic Schools Federa-
tion of Ontario along with a Muslim student challenged the Ottawa Board
of Education’s refusal to recognize Islamic holidays in schools. They
sought reciprocity with other religions, whose holidays served as the basis
for breaks in the school calendar on such Christian holy days as Christ-
mas, Good Friday, and Easter. The applicants sought “reasonable accom-
modation” in those schools where the number of students of the Islamic
faith justified some recognition of Islamic holy days as school holidays.
When the board refused to consider this request, the complainants inter-
preted it as a denial of religious freedom and equality. In the court’s ruling,
Chief Justice Dickson made an important distinction between the origin
and purpose of school holidays. While he recognized that holidays such as
Christmas and Easter were historically celebrated for religious reasons, he
argued that those religious reasons have been seriously diminished. The
main purpose of these holidays, he suggested, was the “perceived need of
people to have days away from work or school in common with family,
friends and other members of the community.” According to Dickson,
these holidays were now primarily secular in nature.58
Religious holidays no longer form the basis of school holidays in the
school calendar. The overlapping of school breaks and religious holidays
is merely incidental or at most a matter of well-established practice that
cannot be changed without disrupting the annual rhythms of family life in
Canada.59 The Supreme Court’s decision acknowledged and further has-
tened the increasingly secular character of Canadian society.
The secular implications of these decisions that are designed to accom-
modate religious diversity in Canadian society are perhaps most visible at
Christmas, which has become a very contentious holiday. Although fewer
Canadians attach a strong religious purpose to Christmas, they still cher-
ish the Christmas season as a time to renew family ties and strengthen
commitments to peace, goodwill, and charity. Veneration for the rituals of
Christmas is as much, if not more, nostalgic than religious. This nostalgia
is powerful, and there is great discontent whenever Christmas traditions
are tampered with. When town councils ban nativity scenes in public
buildings or public squares and when schools ban Christmas decorations
and the annual Christmas concert in favor of secular winter festivities
there is an outcry and a keen sense of loss.60
Schools as much as churches inculcate values; and therefore, what is
taught and practiced in schools is a matter of abiding interest. Many of the
charter-based challenges regarding religion in Canadian society, there-
fore, emanated from what was occurring in schools. Two cases in particu-
lar shifted the place of religion in Canadian schools in a far-reaching
fashion. In Sudbury, Ontario, as in many other districts, students regu-
larly recited the Lord’s Prayer as part of the opening exercises for the
school day, but a child could be exempted if the parents wished. Neverthe-
less, a group of parents challenged the constitutionality of reciting the
Lord’s Prayer in the schools on the grounds that it violated the Charter’s
guarantee of freedom of religion. The justices of the Supreme Court of
Ontario Court of Appeal, drawing on Chief Justice Dickson’s previous rul-
ings, found that such religious exercises imposed pressure on students
and their parents to conform to the religious practices of the majority.
Second, they argued that if parents did seek an exemption for their child,
this infringed on their religious freedom by requiring them to make a
public declaration with regard to their faith.61
These same principles were applied in another court challenge relat-
ing to religious instruction in the classroom. In Elgin County, Ontario,
religious instruction was exclusively Christian and taught by members
of the local Bible study club. Teaching only Christianity, the courts ruled,
was a form of coercion and placed a direct burden on religious minori-
ties and nonbelievers, even if there was a provision of an exemption al-
lowing students to leave the classroom if they did not want to receive
religious instruction.62 In these cases, the courts removed religion from
the public square to insure that there was true religious freedom and no
coercion.
Not surprisingly, other religious minorities tested the secular orienta-
tion of public schools in Canada. A group of devout parents from a variety
of Christian and non-Christian faiths—Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian
Reformed, and Mennonite—contended that the secular program of study
in the public school system was not religiously neutral; and as a conse-
quence, it was coercive and undermined the religious values they wished
to be instilled in their children. These parents claimed that a secular
school system violated their firm desire to educate their children with a
foundation in religious values and sought the opportunity to establish al-

ternative religious schools within the public system.63 In their view, having
to pay money to send their children to school, while other parents did not,
was a violation of the equality rights outlined in the charter.
However, their request for state funding for faith-based schools was
rejected. Since the public school system was secular, the courts ruled that
no one religion was favored and teaching lacked any religious indoctrina-
tion.64 The courts did not overrule the right of parents to send their chil-
dren to faith-based schools but firmly ruled against public funding for
such schools.
These early Supreme Court decisions created a framework for the
emergence of a “closed secular society,” where religion is banished from
the public square largely because it is regarded as inherently divisive in a
multi-cultural society. The most notable incident demonstrating this
closed secular society occurred in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack
on the United States. Three days later, a memorial service was held on
Parliament Hill, the largest public vigil in Canadian history. No religious
content whatsoever was included in the service. Although leaders from all
faiths were present and participated, the vigil had no prayers or readings
from scripture. Many Canadians complained to their members of parlia-
ment about the lack of a religious element. In defending the decision that
religious leaders had no official role at the vigil service, Prime Minister
Jean Chretien told his caucus that keeping church and state or religion
and politics separate was the “best decision he made after September 11.”65
In the interest of being inclusive and not offending anyone, religion must
be completely removed from the public square, he urged. The result is
that religion risks either disappearing or being reduced to a vague spiritu-
ality for all believers.
This incident exposed the increasingly troubling question of how far
Christians in Canada should accommodate the new reality of religious di-
versity. This issue gets to the heart of the troubling question of the elusive
Canadian identity. For many, the weakness of mainstream Christianity
and the historic churches in Canada becomes most evident in these public
debates. Certainly it seems as though the forces of secularization are pre-
vailing, at least over those of the historic mainstream Christian churches
in Canada.
To understand these recent events, we need to review another set of
rulings made by the Supreme Court of Canada involving religious minori-
ties, specifically Jews and Seventh-day Adventists, with respect to time off
for religious observances or holidays. The court established a distinction

between direct and indirect discrimination. Direct discrimination in-
volved refusal to hire someone, for example, based on a particular matter
of identity such as race, gender, or religion. Indirect discrimination in-
volved the imposition of rules or norms that applied to all but nevertheless
had a restrictive impact on those for whom such norms or practices did
not apply. Such rules were discriminatory and therefore accommodation
had to be found. In the case of Jews and Seventh-day Adventists, accom-
modation had to be found for their understanding of the Sabbath. The
contours of “reasonable accommodation” were initially tested with respect
to one of the central symbols of the Canadian nation, the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police. Consistent with the country’s multicultural identity in
1990, the federal government amended the regulation on officers’ uni-
forms so that male Sikh officers could wear turbans. Officials thought that
such accommodation would help to integrate a significant minority into
the norms and institutions of Canadian society without having to sacrifice
their religious principles or practices. Efforts by retired RCMP officers to
have this legislation overthrown by the courts failed.
Nowhere in Canada have these issues been more hotly debated than in
Quebec, which is always most vulnerable and sensitive to questions of
identity, especially in relation to matters of language and religion.66 The
practice of “reasonable accommodation” became a matter of protracted
controversy in Quebec and exposed the folly of assuming that religion can
be confined exclusively to the private sphere. Canadians deal with many
daily matters regarding people’s personal religious faith because religious
beliefs often have public manifestations in terms of ritualized perfor-
mances, behavior, and dress. In March 2006, the Supreme Court of
Canada ruled that Gurbaj Singh Multani, a Sikh student in Montreal,
should be permitted to wear his kirpan, a ceremonial dagger, to school.
Following this ruling, the Quebec Human Rights Commission ruled that
requests by Muslim students for prayer rooms on college and university
campuses had to be accommodated.
These matters of private religious belief and practice were transformed
into public matters that potentially threatened the social order and raised
questions about Quebec’s identity. There were many other similar inci-
dents, and it seemed that a clear pattern of accommodation for minority
religious rights was emerging. Many feared that Quebec’s Catholic herit-
age was being undermined and that the minority was beginning to dictate
social and religious practices.
Although many of the incidents were minor, they became a cause célè-
bre in Quebec society. This growing disquiet over “reasonable accommo-
dation” erupted in January of 2007 in Herouxville, Quebec, a village of
about 1,300 with only a few people of minority background. Causing a stir
in Quebec and a scandal in other parts of Canada, the village issued a town
charter outlining its standards so that immigrants would be able “to inte-
grate socially more easily.” Many of the standards openly challenged the
“reasonable accommodation” that had been worked out between minori-
ties and various institutions in Quebec. The underlying message was that
it was time to stop letting minorities impose their beliefs and practices on
Quebec society. Moreover, the tone was sarcastic and condescending, indi-
cating an attitude that was potentially dangerously intolerant. Not surpris-
ingly, some of the most pointed commentary related to schools and public
celebrations. The town charter made it clear that the onus was on the mi-
nority group to make alterations, not on Quebec society to make “reason-
able accommodation.”67 The charter represented a clear challenge to the
“reasonable accommodation” made at the request of religious minorities
in Quebec, such as Orthodox Jews, Sikhs, and Muslims.
Quebec’s politicians embraced this angry and distrustful mood erupt-
ing, especially during the 2007 provincial election. “Reasonable accom-
modation” became a burning issue. Premier Jean Charest articulated the
fears and concerns of many in Quebec when he stated during the cam-
paign that Quebec has certain values fundamental to its identity “includ-
ing the equality of women and men; the primacy of French; and the
separation between the state and religion.”68 The implication seemed to
be that the character of Quebec society was at risk.
In the meantime, similar issues regarding the accommodation of reli-
gious minorities were erupting in the adjoining province of Ontario. Also
in 2007, the Conservative leader in Ontario, John Tory, caused a stir by
announcing his support for funding faith-based schools in Ontario, pro-
vided they followed the standards and curriculum set down by the Ontario
Ministry of Education. Tory was signaling that he intended to introduce
state funding for Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, and evangelical Christian
schools.69 Tory’s declared policy caused a storm of protest and was soundly
repudiated during the 2007 Ontario provincial election. The Conservative
Party saw its preelection lead in the polls quickly evaporate. Tory lost his
seat and had to relinquish his leadership. Most voters agreed with the Lib-
eral leader and Premier Dalton McGuinty that such a policy would threaten
social cohesion because the public sphere had to be free of religion for the
province’s diverse religious communities to live together harmoniously.

Those opposing the proposal were convinced that funding faith-based
schools would promote religious intolerance.70
In the aftermath of Quebec’s emotional election campaign, Premier
Charest appointed a commission to investigate “accommodation practices
related to cultural differences.”71 He appointed as chairs Gerard Bouchard,
a sociologist, and Charles Taylor, a McGill University philosopher and lead-
ing thinker on questions related to modernity, multiculturalism, and secu-
larization.72 One of their first observations was the terrible misunderstanding
about the incidents of accommodation that were causing so much contro-
versy in Quebec. For the most part, events were viewed through religious
stereotypes, a bias that led to what the commissioners regarded as further
misunderstanding, deeper distrust, and prejudicial behavior.
In making this observation, Bouchard and Taylor boldly laid the ground-
work for challenging the idea of a “closed secular society” that was embed-
ded in many Supreme Court decisions. The commissioners argued that
“cultural and, in particular, religious differences need not be confined to the
private domain. To the contrary, they must be freely displayed in public life.
The principle underlying this choice is that it is healthiest to display one’s
differences and become familiar with those of the Other than to gloss over
and marginalize them, which can lead to fragmentation favourable to the
formation of stereotypes and fundamentalisms. Moreover, how can we
benefit fully from cultural diversity if it is partly banned from public
space?”73 Insistence on keeping religion out of the public square in the in-
terests of social harmony had the ironic outcome of impeding open com-
munication about religion, which in turn fostered ignorance and mistrust.
Bouchard and Taylor were influenced by some of the monumental
changes that have occurred in Quebec over the last thirty or forty years.
Arguably, few societies have secularized as rapidly or as aggressively as
Quebec during the past two generations. Sectors of Quebec society that
had long been the responsibility of the Catholic Church, such as educa-
tion, social welfare, and health care, were taken over by the state during
the 1960s. Accompanying this secularization has been a dramatic drop of
Quebecois attending mass, entering the priesthood (for men), or joining
a religious order. In 1997 a nonconfessional education system was ad-
opted. Catholic and Protestant denominational teaching was replaced by
a more general ethics and religious culture program, in which students
learned about all religions in a comparative context rather than being
exposed to—and indeed proselytized about—only one faith. This new
program represents “open secularism,” in which public institutions are

open to the importance of the spiritual dimension in people’s lives. The
contrasting “closed secular” system would have banished religion.74
A great deal is at stake in whether Canada opts for an open or closed
form of secularism in navigating the challenges of a highly diversified so-
ciety. If Canada chooses closed secularism, it will banish religion to the
private sphere, excluding it from public discourse. This continuation
along the path of secularization will also have the effect of banishing
devout people whose religion is expressed in highly ritualized or symbolic
practices. They will exist on the margins of society or in cloisters of their
own faith. Such isolation of certain religious groups only increases the
risks of religious conflict in Canadian society. Choosing open secularism,
in contrast, offers a chance for an abatement in the tide of secularization
in Canada with the effect that Canadians will become more confident
about expressing and living their faith to the fullest.
These controversies over reasonable accommodation helped to crystal-
lize questions that had been simmering in Canadian society over the past
decades. Questions about multiculturalism and minority rights had hit a
collective nerve. There was a widespread sense of unease about the frag-
mentation of society into segregated religious and ethnic ghettos—a sense
that, whatever the Canadian identity was, it was being seriously compro-
mised by too many or too far-reaching accommodations to ethno-religious
minorities. In addition to wondering about how much accommodation
Canada should extend to newcomers, many were posing a related ques-
tion ever more frequently and in ever-more urgent tones: How much
should Canada ask of its immigrants? The issue of reasonable accommo-
dation had become a question of identity. What kind of society do Canadi-
ans want to live in? Where religion is concerned, the primary issue is not
whether people from religious or ethnic minorities should be allowed to
wear their turbans, kippas, hijabs, ceremonial swords, or other outward
signs of religious identity. Instead the fundamental question is whether
people from other cultural and religious backgrounds will embrace Cana-
dian values, such as those outlined and enshrined in the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms.75
The Latter-day Saints in Contemporary Canada

Where do the Latter-day Saints fit into this landscape of religious life in
Canada? Of course, it is difficult to know, for literature on the Mormon
faith in Canada is not well developed. However, there are some striking
similarities between the outlook of the contemporary “religious nones”
and the foundations of the Mormon faith. A cornerstone of Joseph Smith’s
beliefs and determination to create a newly restored church came during
the First Vision when he was told that all the churches and “all their creeds
were an abomination” (JS—H 1:19). Smith understood the First Vision to
be a message encouraging him to avoid the corruption of the churches
around him, for they had fallen into apostasy that was both doctrinal and
moral.76
A similar view is held today by many seeking a more enlightened spir-
itual life outside the churches. The LDS lack of professional clergy—and,
hence, reliance on lay leadership for worship services, spiritual practice,
and pastoral care—makes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
seem remarkably appealing to the anti-authoritarian outlook of those with
no religious affiliation. As one commentator has suggested, Mormonism
“is all but creedless and stands completely without exegesis.”77 Further-
more, the Mormon faith has demonstrated remarkable flexibility through-
out its history, its ability to renegotiate plural marriage and millennialism,
to cite just two examples, allowing it to remain a vibrant faith.
While these flexible characteristics may be a magnet for some people,
other aspects of the Church are probably less attractive to those convinced
that true spirituality can be discovered only outside the authority and dis-
cipline of an institutional setting. The standardization imposed on
Mormon worship and activities makes the LDS Church much like many
traditional churches. As Jan Shipps has suggested, this “standardization”
seems corporate and the Church “almost a franchise religion.”78 Thus, its
flexibility and heritage of protest and reform are counterbalanced by its
emphasis on authority and standardization, making it a difficult choice for
many. For those seeking a more individualistic spiritual life, they venerate
few things more than their freedom and decisively reject authoritarianism
that robs them of that very freedom. In short, as attractive as the LDS
Church may be, it also presents real barriers and demands that many
will find difficult and unacceptable. Contrary to Rodney Stark’s hopeful
observation, those cast adrift from the church of their parents and
grandparents—and the increasing number who consider themselves spir-
itual but not religious—are not necessarily fertile soil for LDS activity.79
We get a glimpse of why some Canadians have been attracted to The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through personal testimony
and anecdotal evidence. Ten years ago, Peter Emberly, a professor of
philosophy and political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, set out

to understand the growing number of Canadians who were on a “spiritual
journey.” He understood that these Canadians were looking to “drink
from the waters of a living faith” but they were not returning to the
churches and temples of their parents and grandparents. To study this
“divine hunger,” Emberly went on a quest of his own. In Cardston, Al-
berta, Emberly spent time with a baby-boomer convert to the LDS Church.
He discovered that the Mormon faith appealed to those who were looking
to restore the traditions and values they thought had been lost in modern
society and the mainstream churches. They were deeply troubled by the
endless choice, lack of authority and direction, moral laxity, and empty
materialism that had characterized their lives throughout the 1960s and
beyond.80 These converts were seeking “to transform reality by turning
back the clock to an imagined time of purity.”81
But a nostalgic quest for a golden age does not fully account for the
appeal of Mormonism. Its strength also rests in the stability and certainty
it offers at a time when many churches seem to have lost their way and
when Canadians are feeling challenged by the growing diversity of reli-
gious life that now defines their nation. The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints provides a comforting sense of religious community, as-
surance of belief, moral certainty, and family values, which are compelling
qualities for those seeking a secure haven in a turbulent, uncertain, and
morally vacillating world.82
Some commentators suggest that the new contemporary spirituality is
tantamount to another Great Awakening in the United States or a revital-
ization of religion in Canada.83 Religion is not disappearing, they argue; it
is moving elsewhere, toward new churches, including the Latter-day
Saints, and religious movements that are “better adapted to the new cul-
tural and social situation.”84
But real peril exists for any church or religious movement with a strong
attachment to its scripture, religious teachings, and worship practices.
This new spirituality, especially as practiced by those with “no religion,”
may be a very weak foundation for the continued strength of religious
faith in contemporary society. For many claiming they are spiritual but not
religious, God is a vague power or, in a final reduction, merely one’s own
conscience. The Bible or other sacred texts such as the Book of Mormon
are considered a collection of ethical guidelines or moral tales. Miracles
are regarded as myths or metaphors, not as historical episodes. Christ is
an exemplary teacher or prophet, not divine.85 Within the new spirituality
lies the possibility for the secularization or undermining of religion itself

and, as a result, the further secularization of society.
There must be clear limits to the flexibility or adaptations that any
church or faith makes to the demands of contemporary society and cul-
ture. Certain doctrines and practices “constitute the absolute, minimal,
unchangeable core of the restored gospel” of the Mormon faith.86 How
much flexibility can there be without sacrificing this core? How much lat-
itude can exist within the Church to ensure that it remains a vibrant and
authentic church in a secular and highly diverse society such as Canada?
To paraphrase Armand Mauss, which ideas and customs are, in fact, es-
sential to the Mormon faith and which are cultural or national constructs
that are open to interpretation or alteration?87 For the Mormon faith, the
deeply secular, highly diverse and very unsettled religious landscape in
Canada seems like a very uncertain climate indeed.
Notes
1. Jan Shipps, Sojourner in a Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 21.
2. John Herd Thompson, Forging the Prairie West (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 68. The exception to this observation is Lowry Nelson, “Settlement
of the Mormons in Alberta,” in Group Settlements [of ] Ethnic Communities in
Western Canada, ed. Carl A. Dawson (Toronto: Macmillan, 1936), 175–272.
3. See Howard Palmer, “Polygamy and Progress: The Reaction to Mormons in
Canada, 1887–1923,” in The Mormon Presence in Canada, ed. Brigham Y. Card,
Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K. Jarvis
(Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1990), 108–135; Jesse L. Embry, “Exiles
for the Principle: LDS Polygamy in Canada,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 18 (Fall 1985): 108–116; John C. Lehr, “Polygamy, Patrimony, and Proph-
ecy: The Mormon Colonization of Cardston,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 21 (Winter 1988): 114–121; Dan Erickson, “Alberta Polygamists?: The
Canadian Climate and Response to the Introduction of Mormonism’s ‘Peculiar
Institution,’” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 86 (Fall 1995): 155–164.
4. See, for example, William Janzen, Limits on Liberty: The Experience of Mennonite,
Hutterite, and Doukhobor Communities in Canada (Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press, 1990).
5. Benjamin Smillie, Visions of a New Jerusalem: Religious Settlement on the Prairies
(Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest Publishers, 1983), ix, 11.
6. See, for example, Donald Godfrey and Brigham Card, eds., The Diaries of Charles
Ora Card: The Canadian Years, 1886–1903 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah
Press, 1993), 96–97.
7. See, for example, John S. Moir, The Church in the British Era (Toronto: McGraw
Hill Ryerson, 1972), 121, 188; John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion
in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 73,
115; Terence Murphy and Roberto Perin, eds., A Concise History of Christianity in
Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 139.
8. Robert Choquette, Canada’s Religions (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press,
2004), 413–415.
9. Jamie Scott, ed., The Religions of Canadians (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2012), 388, 394, 401.
10. Betsy Jameson, “Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through the Minefields,” Pacific
Historical Review 75 (February 2006): 5.
11. Dean Louder, “Canadian Mormon Identity and the French Fact,” in Card et al.,
The Mormon Presence in Canada, 302, 312. Works that explore the porous
Canadian-American border in Mormon history include Lynn Rosenvall, “The
Transfer of Mormon Culture to Alberta,” American Review of Canadian Studies 12
(Summer 1982): 51–63, and Jesse L. Embry, “Transplanted Utah: Mormon Com-
munities in Alberta,” Oral History Forum/D’histoire Orale 18 (1988): 65–78.
12. Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender and the Making of the
Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005);
Frances W. Kaye, Goodlands: A Meditation and History of the Great Plains (Ed-
monton, Alberta: Athabasca University Press, 2011).
13. Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation-Building
in Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008).
14. Frances Swyripa, Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian
Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010).
15. Lowell C. Bennion and Lawrence Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Ex-
pansion, 1950–2020,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (Spring 1996):
8–32.
16. D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the
Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of Amer-
ican Geographers 55 (June 1965): 191–220.
17. Louder, “Canadian Mormon Identity and the French Fact,” 312.
18. See Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with As-
similation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Matthew Bowman,
The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random
House, 2012). For a notable exception, at least in terms of politics, see David
Elton, “Political Behavior of Mormons in Canada,” in Card et al., The Mormon
Presence in Canada, 260–278.
19. Richard Bennett, “Canada: From Struggling Seed, the Church Has Risen to
Branching Maple,” Ensign 18 (September 1988): 30–37.
20. John Longhurst, “Local Mormons Tremendously Excited about New Temple,”
Winnipeg Free Press, October 13, 2012, J6.
21. LDS statistics show a growth rate similar to the Canada census statistics but sug-
gest that the number of Latter-day Saints in Canada in 2011 is about 180,000.
22. Explaining the recent struggles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints is difficult. See, for example, Ryan Cragun and Ronald Lawson, “The Sec-
ular Transition: The Worldwide Growth of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and
Seventh-day Adventists,” Sociology of Religion 71 (Fall 2010): 349–373.
23. Rick Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism,” Nova
Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 10 (August 2006):
52–68.
24. See Michael Wilkinson, ed., Canadian Pentecostalism: Transition and Transforma-
tion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 3–12.
25. Rodney Stark, “Modernization, Secularization, and Mormon Growth,” in The
Rise of Mormonism, ed. Reid L. Neilson (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), 101–102.
26. “No religion” is not equivalent to atheism or agnosticism. Rather it indicates no
particular religious affiliation or specific church membership. See J. Woodard,
“The Era of the Generic Christian,” Calgary Herald, May 9, 2004, B7; and Ste-
phen Gauer, “Losing Our Religion: Meet the Nones,” Toronto Globe and Mail,
February 19, 2005, F6.
27. See Statistics Canada, 2001 Census: Analysis Series Religions in Canada, May 2003,
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/
rel/canada.cfm#rc (accessed May 16, 2012). Not all those reporting “no religion”
were refugees from Canada’s historic churches. Immigration was also a factor.
Many born in China or Hong Kong, for example, reported “no religion.”
28. For an account of religious change in the 1960s, see Gary Miedema, For Cana-
da’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in
the 1960s (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).
29. In 1925, the United Church of Canada was formed, an organic union of the Meth-
odist, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches in Canada. Church union was
very controversial among the Presbyterians, approximately one-third of whom
refused to enter the union. See N. Keith Clifford, The Resistance to Church Union
in Canada, 1904–1939 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985).
30. For religious life in post-1945 British Columbia, see Tina Block, “‘Families That
Pray Together, Stay Together’: Religion, Gender, and Family in Postwar British
Columbia,” BC Studies 145 (Spring 2005): 31–54, and her “Religion, Irreligion,
and the Difference Place Makes: The Case of the Postwar Pacific Northwest,”
Histoire Sociale/Social History 43 (May 2010): 1–30.
31. Trisha Elliott, “I’m Not Religious, I’m Spiritual,” United Church Observer,
June 2009.
32. Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–6.
33. Ibid.
34. Reginald Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It
Matters (Lethbridge, Alberta: Project Canada, 2011), 125.
35. For a detailed study, see Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s
Five Largest Protestant Denominations Faring? A Look at the 2001 Census,”
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 40 (2011): 511–534.
36. See the calculations in Clarke and Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s Five Largest
Denominations Faring?,” 525–526. On the differences in evangelicalism in
Canada and the United States, see Samuel Reamer, Evangelicals and the Conti-
nental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United
States (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).
37. For studies of churchgoing and attendance in Canada, see Warren Clark, “Pat-
terns of Religious Attendance,” Canadian Social Trends 59 (Winter 2000): 23–
27; and Warren Clark, “Pockets of Belief: Religious Attendance Patterns in
Canada,” Canadian Social Trends 68 (Spring 2003): 2–5.
38. Warren Clark and Grant Schellenberg, “Who’s Religious?” Canadian Social
Trends 81 (Summer 2006): 2–9, and Michael Valpy and Joe Friesen, “Canada
Marching Away from Religion to Secularization,” Toronto Globe and Mail, De-
cember 10, 2010.
39. Valerie Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration
Policy (Toronto: Dundurn, 2007).
40. See Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, eds., Religion and Ethnicity in Canada (To-
ronto: Pearson Canada, 2005) and Jamie Scott, ed., The Religions of Canadians
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
41. See A. Belanger and E. Caron Malenfant, Population Projections of Visible Minor-
ity Groups, Canada, Provinces and Regions, 2001–2017 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada,
2005), www.statcan.ca.
42. I have not included Jews in this analysis, for their story is strikingly different.
See Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2008).
43. Lori Beaman, “The Myth of Pluralism, Diversity, and Vigor: The Constitutional
Privilege of Protestantism in the United States and Canada,” Journal for the Sci-
entific Study of Religion 42 (2003): 311–325; Peter Beyer, “The Future of Non-
Christian Religions in Canada: Patterns of Religious Identification among
Recent Immigrants and Their Second Generations, 1981–2001,” Studies in Reli-
gion/Sciences Religieuses 34 (2005): 165–196.
44. Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?,” Church History 75 (June
2006): 245–273.
45. There is furious debate about the genesis of secularization in Canadian society.
I argue for the late nineteenth century in Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Prot-
estant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992). Rejecting this view are Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A
Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada,
1900–1940 (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). They

suggest a more recent timeframe in Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840–
1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2011), 179–200.
46. Speech before the Canadian Legislative Assembly, February 7, 1865, quoted in
P. B. Waite, ed., The Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada, 1865 (Mont-
real, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 28–29.
47. W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward
Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1978); Patricia Roy, J. L. Granatstein, Masako Iino, and Hiroko Takamura,
Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese during the Second World War (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990).
48. William Kaplan, State and Salvation: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Fight for
Civil Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
49. For this background, see Christopher MacLennan, Toward the Charter: Canadi-
ans and the Demand for a National Bill of Rights, 1929–1960 (Montreal, Quebec:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), and George Egerton, “Entering the Age
of Human Rights: Religion, Politics and Canadian Liberalism, 1945–50,” Cana-
dian Historical Review 85 (2004): 451–480.
50. Toronto Globe and Mail, December 22, 1967, 1; CBC Television News, December
21, 1967.
51. Quoted in George Egerton, “Trudeau, God, and the Canadian Constitution: Re-
ligion, Human Rights and Government Authority in the Making of the 1982
Constitution,” in Rethinking Church, State and Modernity, ed. David Lyon and
Marguerite van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 106.
52. On Trudeau’s abiding Catholic faith, see John English, Richard Gwyn, and Whit-
ney Lackenbauer, eds., The Hidden Pierre Trudeau: The Faith behind the Politics
(Ottawa: Novalis Press, 2004).
53. Egerton, “Trudeau, God and the Canadian Constitution,” 104.
54. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I Sections 1–34 of the Constitu-
tion Act 1982.
55. Paul Laverdure, Sunday in Canada: The Rise and Fall of the Lord’s Day (Yorkton,
Saskatchewan: Gravelbooks, 2004).
56. R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd., 1985 CanLII 69 (SCC), [1985] 1 SCR 295, http://
canlii.ca/t/1fv2b (accessed August 13, 2012).
57. “Reasons for Judgment of the Honourable Mr. Justice Belzil,” R v. Big M Drug
Mart Limited 1983 ABCA 1968, 23–24.
58. R. v. Edwards Books and Art Ltd., 1986 CanLII 12 (SCC), [1986] 2 SCR 713.
59. Greg Dickinson and W. Rod Dolmage, “Education, Religion, and the Courts in
Ontario,” Canadian Journal of Education 21 (1996): 363–383.
60. For the past twenty years, newspaper articles and editorials at Christmastime
have raised questions about Christmas celebrations in the public square. See,
for example, Dakshana Bascaramurty and Joe Friesen, “Canadian Schools Strug-
gle with What to Do about Christmas,” Toronto Globe and Mail, December 16,
2011.
61. Zylberberg v. Sudbury Board of Education, 1988 CanLII 189 (ON CA).
62. Canadian Civil Liberties Association v. Ontario (Minister of Education) 1990, 71
O.R. (2d) 341 (C.A.).
63. The separate Catholic school system in Ontario is deeply rooted in Canadian
history. See Lois Sweet, God in the Classroom: The Controversial Issue of Religion
in Canada’s Schools (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997).
64. Bal v. Ontario (A.G.) 1994 21 O.R. (3d) 681 (Ontario Court—General Division).
65. Jane Taber, “PM Likes to Keep Church and State Well Separated,” [Toronto] Na-
tional Post, May 2, 2002, A6.
66. For the historical background to Quebec history and nationalism, see Susan
Mann Trofimenkoff, Dream of Nation: Social and Intellectual History of Quebec
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1982); and Peter Gossage and J. I. Little, An Illustrated His-
tory of Quebec: Tradition and Modernity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2012).
67. Herouxville Town Charter, April 16, 2010, http://herouxville-quebec.blogspot.
ca/2007/03/about-beautiful-herouxville-quebec.html (accessed August 12, 2012).
68. “Charest Enters the Fray,” Montreal Gazette, February 9, 2007, 1.
69. It is difficult to summarize the schools’ situation in Canada as differences exist
depending on the province. For example, British Columbia provides partial gov-
ernment funding for faith-based schools—Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, and evangeli-
cal Christian—so that they can promote their own religious, cultural and peda-
gogical views in the classroom. “Faith-Based Schools,” Vancouver Sun, September
22, 2007.
70. See David Seljak et al., “Secularization and the Separation of Church and State
in Canada,” Canadian Diversity 6 (2008): 14–15. Countering this “conventional
wisdom” are Frances Kroeker and Stephen Norris in “An Unwarranted Fear of
Religious Schooling,” Canadian Journal of Education 30 (2007): 269–290.
71. “Let the Debate Begin,” Montreal Gazette, August 15, 2007, 1.
72. Charles Taylor’s publications include The Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); and Sources of the Self: The Making of
the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
73. Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, “Building the Future: A Time for
Reconciliation” (Quebec City: Commission de consultation sur les pratiques
d’accommodement reliées aux differences culturelles, 2008), 120.
74. Ibid., 140–141. For scholarly assessments of the report, see Howard Adelman
and Pierre Anctil, eds., Religion, Culture and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-
Taylor Report (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Kyle Conway,
“Quebec’s Bill 94: What’s ‘Reasonable’? What’s ‘Accommodation’? And What’s
the Meaning of the Muslim Veil?,” American Review of Canadian Studies 42 (June
2012): 195–209.
75. Margaret Wente, “Immigration and Identity: A Taste of Things to Come,” To-
ronto Globe and Mail, October 11, 2007.
76. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2005), 40.
77. Mark Leone, Roots of Modern Mormonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979), 181, 187–189, 190.
78. Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land, 272.
79. See Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 8–15.
80. Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
81. Peter Emberly, Divine Hunger: Canadians on a Spiritual Walkabout (Toronto:
Harper Collins, 2002), 65.
82. Ibid., 60.
83. For the positive spin on contemporary spirituality, see Fuller, Spiritual But Not
Religious; Cox, The Future of Faith; and Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Reli-
gion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York:
Harper Collins, 2012). For Canada, see Reginald Bibby, Restless Gods: The Ren-
aissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddard Publishing, 2002), and Regi-
nald Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It
Matters (Lethbridge, Alberta: Project Canada, 2011).
84. Stark, “Modernization, Secularization, and Mormon Growth,” 101–102.
85. Those seeing latent secularizing forces in post-modernist spirituality include
Thomas Reeves, The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity (New
York: Free Press, 1996) and more recently Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We
Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012). For Britain, see Steve
Bruce, Secularization (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–48,
113, 117, 197.
86. Armand Mauss, “Mormonism in the Twenty-First Century: Marketing for Mira-
cles,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (Spring 1996): 245.
87. Ibid.
14
Letting Go: Understanding Mormon

Growth in Africa
By Philip Jenkins
Through much of American history, the story of religious life has

largely been undertaken by members of the denominations themselves:
Lutherans studied Lutherans, Quakers studied Quakers, and Mormons
researched Mormons. The virtue of this approach is that the scholars in-
volved are usually passionately committed to their subject matter, and the
need to write for equally knowledgeable believers means that they are
forced to maintain the highest possible standards. Even if you wanted to,
you couldn’t get much that was slipshod or overtly biased past a group like
this! The resulting research provides massive resources for other scholars.
Yet denominational history does have some limitations and some areas
of weakness. Normally, it is much better on reporting founding and growth
than on failure or decline. Whatever the tradition, everyone has read about
the birth and rise of particular churches; rarely do we hear about their
contraction or even death, although such events do occur. More seriously,
focusing on one religious tradition means that we sometimes miss the
broader picture, so that we can describe events in one tradition as if they
happened in isolation, while they were really occurring much more widely.
This willingness to see across denominations was the incomparable
achievement of Sidney Ahlstrom’s 1973 Religious History of the American
People.1 After Ahlstrom, religious historians realized that when they talked
about trends within their own tradition, they had to ask a simple question:
compared to what? And the answers were sometimes sobering.
When I was asked to deliver this lecture on global perspectives, my
thoughts naturally turned to the story of Mormonism in Africa, which
over the past century has been the scene of staggering growth by most
Christian denominations. And Africa will certainly reshape the LDS
Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth in Africa 331
Church. I would guess that, over the next quarter century, the African
share of the LDS Church worldwide would grow from the present figure
of around 2 percent to perhaps 15 percent, and quite likely more. Yet when
I explored this story, I encountered a mystery. What struck me forcibly was
how much weaker LDS growth has historically been on that continent
when compared to other churches, and this fact seemed doubly mysteri-
ous when I list the features of the Mormon message that should, by rights,
have exercised immense appeal in an African setting. It has not. Further-
more, it shows no signs of doing so.
From the point of view of historical methodology, this study suggests
the critical need for a comparative perspective. Many churches speak
proudly of their growth and achievements, which might be cited as “amaz-
ing,” “extraordinary,” even “miraculous.” But such terms can only be used
in a relative sense. When Church X speaks of its “amazing” growth, that
statement can be accepted only if its growth is vastly higher than that of
most or all of its neighbors. And as I will show, in comparative perspec-
tive, the LDS tradition has not been particularly successful in Africa.
Please understand that, when I say this, I am neither criticizing Church
efforts nor am I failing to recognize the important achievements in some
areas. But I believe we do have here something of a puzzle that demands
explanation, and the answers might shed light on African religion gener-
ally, and on the Mormon endeavor in particular. The Mormon experience
in Africa represents an important case-study in why Western-derived
churches succeed or fail in the African context.
Christian Growth in Africa

Perhaps the most important aspect of Christian history over the past cen-
tury or so has been the explosive growth of churches in the global South,
and especially in Africa. During the twentieth century, the number of
Christians on that continent grew from 10 million to 360 million, repre-
senting an increase from 10 percent of the population to 46 percent. Just
since 1965, the Christian population of Africa has risen from around a
quarter of the continental total to about 46 percent, stunning growth for
so short a period. To quote the World Christian Encyclopedia, “The present
net increase on that continent is 8.4 million new Christians a year (23,000
a day) of which 1.5 million are net new converts (converts minus defec-
tions or apostasies).”2 By most measures, Africa should within thirty years
contain more Christians than any other continent. When we factor in the
peoples of the African diaspora, dwellers around the shores of the Black
Atlantic, the African preponderance in Christianity will be even more
striking.
Although Christianity has gained popularity in Africa, demographic
factors have also been critical. Africa’s population grew from 133 million in
1900 to 221 million in 1950 and to 770 million by 2000. By 2050 the
figure might reach 1.8 billion. Put another way, Africans represented 8.7
percent of humanity in 1950 but will be almost 20 percent by 2050.
This rising tide has lifted all boats in the sense that most denomina-
tions have expanded rapidly, particularly since the 1960s. Catholic growth
has been particularly dramatic in former French and Belgian territories.
As recently as 1955, the Catholic Church claimed a mere 16 million adher-
ents in the whole of Africa, but the growing availability of air travel permit-
ted missionaries access to whole areas of the continent that had earlier
been beyond reach. Africa’s Catholic population grew to 55 million in 1978
and is around 140 million today. John Allen puts the expansion in per-
spective: “Africa in the twentieth century went from a Catholic population
of 1.9 million in 1900 to 130 million in 2000, a growth rate of 6,708 per-
cent, the most rapid expansion of Catholicism in a single continent in two
thousand years of church history.” Today, Africans account for one eighth
of the world’s Catholics; and by 2025, the 230 million African Catholics
will represent one sixth of all members of that Church worldwide.3
But most denominations could tell similar stories. If we think only of
European-founded churches, then just between 2001 and 2003, member-
ship of African Lutheran churches grew by an enviable 9 percent. The
most amazing example of such Lutheran growth must be the Ethiopian
Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, formed in 1959 with twenty thousand
members. It grew to over a million members by 1991, topped four million
by 2003, and continues to boom. As a Lutheran Church report notes, in a
surprisingly matter-of-fact tone, the EECMY “has experienced a 15 percent
per year growth rate for many years.”4 May I repeat that: 15 percent per
year. Even the Eastern Orthodox churches, which have not enjoyed great
missionary successes in modern times, have created a faithful presence in
Uganda and Kenya. Missions in Africa are rather like gardening in Flor-
ida: plant some seeds and stand back quickly.
Commonly, we find that Euro-American churches transplanted
churches, which then sank local roots and developed along their own
lines. Ethiopia’s Meserete Kristos Church has become one of the largest
national denominations within the global Mennonite faith, with around
120,000 baptized members. It has grown largely by adopting worship

styles and a commitment to healing that would surprise most North
American Mennonites, yet the results have been impressive. Canadian
visitors were recently delighted to hear that the church was reporting
growth of 10.6 percent for the previous year but were bemused by the
apologetic tone in which local officials made this report: “Ten-point-six
percent! We are embarrassed about that. It means we are already stagnant.
The assembly will not be happy to hear that. It should be 30 percent.”5
Such are the expectations of contemporary African Christianity.
Growth in the global South has radically transformed the balance of
membership in many denominations, which suddenly find themselves
facing a heavy preponderance of numbers outside Europe and North
America. For some denominations, such as Catholics, Anglicans, and Lu-
therans, the African growth creates a new ecclesiastical world. The largest
country within the Anglican Communion—notionally the Church “of
England”—is now Nigeria, with Uganda and Kenya rising fast.6
African Megatrends
Before proceeding, it would be helpful to list the major directions in
modern African religious history—or what we might call the megatrends,
borrowing the term coined by John Naisbitt in the 1980s. Some of these
should portend very well indeed for the LDS tradition, others much less
so. I stress that I am not listing these trends in order of importance
(Table 14.1).
The first fact or megatrend is the end of primary conversion. The cen-
tral fact of African religious history during the twentieth century—perhaps
of African history—was the conversion of about half the continental pop-
ulation from animism or primal religions to Christianity and Islam; about
40 percent to Christianity and 10 percent to Islam. In most cases, that
means that Christian denominations are preaching to peoples who al-
ready know the basics of Christianity. Christianity is now definitively, ir-
revocably, part of the African cultural landscape.
Second, this process is now so far advanced that all major churches
have moved substantially towards indigenization, to replacing white colo-
nial leaders with native African peoples. This trend is now so well estab-
lished that it is no longer a live issue and has not been since the 1970s.
Third, following from these two trends, all churches have accepted de-
grees of enculturation: the absorption of African customs and worship
Table 14.1 Megatrends in African Christianity
1) The end of primary conversion

2) Indigenization
3) Enculturation
4) The rise of indigenous, spontaneous Christian culture
5) An extreme buyers’ market in religion
6) The spread of American styles of marketing and promotion
7) Pentecostalization and the culture of spectacle
8) Denominational border-crossing
9) The presence of Islam
10) The continuing power of poverty and the rise of the prosperity gospel
11) The weakness of states
12) The churches as both detonators and beneficiaries of radical social
change
styles. Today, the question is not whether to do this, but how far accommo-
dation should go. Should churches, for instance, permit polygamy or
animal sacrifices?
Although some churches have tried to impose enculturation from the
top down, resulting in some rather artificial inventions, Africans them-
selves have thoroughly absorbed Christianity into their cultures. The
fourth megatrend would therefore be the massive upsurge of indigenous,
spontaneous Christian culture, in the form of oral culture above all—in
vernacular hymns and music but also in the visual arts.
The fifth trend arises from the mass appeal of Christianity and Chris-
tian culture, and that is the emergence of an intense interest in religious
issues and the development of an extreme buyers’ market in religion. Re-
ligious bodies know that millions of consumers are out there but that a
vast number of competitors serve these consumers, who can easily redi-
rect their business to any one of a number of competitors.
In order to serve this bustling market, suppliers often turn to American
styles of marketing and promotion. Let us call this trend number six. It
might initially sound as if I am contradicting the second trend a bove—of
indigenization—but I am speaking of the appropriation of styles, rather
than the imposition of outside control.
Seventh, and closely related, I would stress the Pentecostalization of
African religion, both in the sense of the spread of U.S.-founded Pentecos-
tal denominations and also of the imitation of their styles by native-founded
bodies. A major aspect of this trend has been the growth of a culture of
spectacle in African Christianity, with the pivotal role of great revival move-
ments and gatherings highly reminiscent of the revivals on the American
frontier from the 1790s onwards. Most successful churches are charis-
matic in their lively and open worship style and their openness to super-
natural experience. In Tanzania, charismatic services are marked by
“rapturous singing and rhythmic hand-clapping, with . . . prayers for heal-
ing and miraculous signs.” Harvey Cox speaks of the “free wheeling, Spirit-
filled” worship style of the independent churches.7
I have stressed the power of religious styles that cross denominations.
Thus, while denominations flourish in African Christianity, the differ-
ences separating them are quite different from what might be expected in
the American or European territories that were their birthplace. Let us
therefore list denominational border-crossing as our next megatrend.
Contributing mightily to this trend across much of Africa is the pres-
ence of Islam as a powerful competitor and, in some areas, an active
danger. In a society like Nigeria, the issue is not whether one is an Angli-
can or a Catholic or a Mormon, but whether one is a Muslim or a Chris-
tian. Trend number nine, then, is the fact of Islam, especially as it tends to
undermine denominational loyalties.
Finally, let me offer three forces that contribute to continuing Chris-
tian growth, but which also pose real challenges to certain styles of wor-
ship and church polity.
Megatrend number ten: the continuing power of poverty. Despite all
the economic growth and progress around the world since the 1960s,
Africa remains stubbornly immune, as endemic poverty is reinforced by
disease, warfare, and public corruption. Nor is serious change on the ho-
rizon, especially given the present global downturn. This poverty may
attract people to otherworldly solutions and especially to forms of reli-
gion that promise salvation in the other world and in this one. Above all,
this desperate need places healing of mind and body front and center in
the Christian message. Churches succeed if they are known to heal; if
they don’t heal, they don’t grow. Another striking element of recent Afri-
can religion has been the upsurge of churches teaching the prosperity
gospel; and however much they may dislike it, all churches have to try to
compete.
Eleventh is the weakness of states. Churches must provide many of the
functions and services that, in the West, would normally be presumed to
be the preserve of government. Also, churches cannot avoid political
involvement and must often become the voices of public sentiment and
outrage, at whatever danger to themselves.
The twelfth and final megatrend is the churches as both detonators
and beneficiaries of radical social change, especially as change affects
women. Whether or not churches offer women full ordination, women
are the key activists, usually the most important lay leaders and influential
converts.
Prophecies, Angels, and Temples

Now let us think of some of these trends as they might apply to Mormon-
ism, especially in the sense of the Holy Spirit and the charismatic. Regard-
less of the Euro-American models from which they begin, the kinds of
Christianity that have succeeded most consistently are those that remain
open to continuing prophecy and visionary experience and that offer the
promise of healing. Indeed, much of the continent’s religious history in-
volves the struggle between the prophetic impulse and the institutional
church.
Throughout Africa, a common prophetic pattern has recurred fre-
quently since the late nineteenth century. An individual is enthusiastically
converted through one of the mission churches, from which he or, com-
monly, she is gradually estranged. The division might arise over issues of
church practice, usually the integration of native practices. The individual
receives what is taken as a special revelation from God, commonly in a
trance or vision, and the message is usually attributed to an angel. The
prophet then begins to preach independently, and the result might well be
a new independent church. Particularly where the movement originates
from a founder’s revelation, such churches place a heavy premium on vi-
sions, charismatic gifts, and angelic communications. Repeatedly, we find
attempts to restore the splendors of primitive Christianity, supposedly lost
or suppressed by mainstream religious institutions. And such prophets
have founded many churches across the continent.
Just to cite a specific example, to which I shall return, in the Yoruba
lands of Nigeria, the dreadful influenza epidemic of 1918 led to the foun-
dation of the faith-healing churches known as Aladura (the Owners of
Prayer). From the 1920s onward, the Aladura movement spawned many
offshoots, usually under the leadership of some new charismatic leader or
prophet. Examples are the Cherubim and Seraphim Society, Christ Apos-
tolic Church, and the Church of the Lord, Aladura. In some cases, the new
bodies saw the divine messages received in trances and dreams as equal
to the inspired word of the Bible.
Particularly from the mid-twentieth century, institutional churches
themselves recognized the urgent need to absorb such practices, to ac-
commodate to a society in which prophecies, visions, and trances are
the fundamental currency of religious experience. This accommodation
particularly involves spiritual healing; and from the earliest days of the
European missions, the promise of healing was at the heart of Christian
successes. Prospective converts were excited by biblical accounts of
healing miracles, stories that the missionaries themselves were already
treating with some embarrassment. Fundamentally minded Europeans
had no doubts about the reality of biblically recorded cures in apostolic
times but questioned whether miracles continued into the modern age.
Their converts, though, were quite willing to accept modern miracles.
In Africa, the explosion of healing movements and new prophets in the
first quarter of the century coincided with a dreadful series of epidem-
ics, and the religious upsurge of those years was in part a quest for
bodily health. Much of African Christianity today is a healing religion
par excellence, with a strong belief in the objective existence of evil
and (commonly) a willingness to accept the reality of demons and the
diabolical.
Today, rising African churches stand or fall by their success in heal-
ing. I like to quote a preacher in one West African organization, the
Mosama Disco Christo Church, who explains the obvious fact: “We are
all here in this church because we have found healing here. But for this
church, the great majority of us here assembled would not be alive today.
That is the reason why we are here.”8 Not just within the independent
and prophetic churches, elaborate rituals have formed around healing
and exorcism, commonly involving anointing. In Tanzania, some of the
most active healing work in recent years has occurred within the Lu-
theran Church, under the auspices of a bishop who himself claimed pro-
phetic powers.
I would add another characteristic that runs across churches and tradi-
tions, namely a deep interest in the Old Testament world that seems so
akin to African realities. Reading stories of the Hebrew patriarchs, modern
Christians recognize a world characterized by such themes as nomadism,
polygamy, blood sacrifice, and the presence of genuine paganism. In the
West, churches must sometimes struggle to convince the faithful that the
Old Testament has spiritual relevance and is not just a collection of
ancient folk-tales. In Africa, by contrast, the challenge is to get people to

believe that the New Testament really has superseded the Old and that
Christians are not, in fact, called to live according to the ancient Hebrew
laws and ritual codes.
One aspect of this awareness is that many African Christians are fasci-
nated by the emphasis placed on the temple throughout the Old Testa-
ment. This absorption fits with older ideas about sacred places with strict
taboos forbidding a profane presence. But some independent churches,
including Mosama Disco Christo Church, have tried to reestablish the
temple on strict Old Testament lines, complete with a Holy of Holies into
which the priest can enter only once a year. More significantly, such Old
Testament images profoundly shape the ancient Christianity of Ethiopia,
supposedly the home of the Ark of the Covenant. Using Old Testament
passages about the temple and the priesthood, many independent
churches preach and practice tithing.9
Let me also add one characteristic of African Christianity that causes
major problems for most churches, namely the devotion to ancestors
that is so fundamental to African cultures. Some churches taught that
ancestors who died without knowing Christ were damned, a very hard
teaching for most new Christians. Only recently have churches come to
terms with this dilemma, by incorporating references to the ancestors
into their liturgies. If only there was a Western church that cared suffi-
ciently about these bygone generations—one that might even baptize for
the dead!
The Mormon Context

Churches succeed in Africa to the extent that they offer certain things; and
if they do not offer them directly, then congregations will act as if they are,
in fact, part of the original message. Booming churches are open to proph-
ecy, angelic messages, and visionary experience; they place healing at the
center of their mission; they accept the continuing relevance of the an-
cient Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, with all the accompanying stories
of kings and holy leaders; they know and care about temples; and they care
passionately about the spiritual fate of their ancestors. And by this point,
you might well be asking the obvious question: Why is the Latter-day Saint
tradition not sweeping the continent?
Let me say something that might sound startling: In an African context,
and specifically in a West African context, Mormonism looks absolutely
mainstream. Missionaries need face none of the difficulties that they

might encounter in the West, of having to introduce outsiders to a strange
and surprising thought-world. In West Africa, of course Christians speak of
prophets and angels. Think of names like the Cherubim and Seraphim
Society! Mormonism appears very much like a customary, familiar inde-
pendent prophetic church, though with the oddity that it is backed by
Western influence and organization. In such a context, believers are not
even slightly surprised to hear that the church is headed by living prophets
and apostles. So are most of the local denominations. Hearing the Mormon
message, Emmanuel Abu Kissi responded, “In Ghana there are many
prophets, so the idea of a prophet wasn’t new to me.”10
To take a specific example, a few years ago, Glenn Pace delivered an
address in which he looked forward to the erection of a new African
temple. After declaring the spiritual effects of this move on the living,
he continued, “Think of the thousands of years some of your ancestors
have been waiting to have their temple work done. I can assure you,
there are those on the other side of the veil who are more excited than
we are.”11 These words resonate with Mormons but sound very strange
indeed to most Euro-Americans, whether they think of themselves as
Christian or secular. But they make instant, intuitive sense to any West
African, whether or not that person has the slightest acquaintance with
LDS traditions. Mormonism should be as at home in Africa as a fish in
water.
And that very familiarity brings us back to our original mystery. Ob-
viously, all these elements fit more naturally into the LDS thought-
world than into the customary framework of other denominations,
whether we are looking at Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Menno-
nites, or Anglicans; yet all those traditions have enjoyed much greater
success than Mormonism. In raw quantitative terms, the Mormon ex-
perience in Africa has actually been disappointing. After a great deal of
activity and investment, Mormons remain a very marginal presence:
official figures suggest that Africa presently is home to just 270,000
LDS members, a little over 2 percent of the global total.12 I should say
that Community of Christ does significantly better, with over 12 per-
cent of its members in Africa, some 25,000 believers. Moreover,
Zambian-born Bunda C. Chibwe is a member of that church’s Council
of Twelve Apostles.13 Putting the two traditions together, Mormon-
derived churches account for just 0.08 percent of Africa’s total Chris-
tian population.
The Mormon Story

Before trying to explain this phenomenon, let us recap the story of
Mormon missions in Africa. Naturally enough, given the state of Euro-
pean expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, South Africa was an early
missionary target. In 1853, three pioneer missionaries arrived here (Jesse
Haven, William Holmes Walker, and Leonard I. Smith), but missions
faded away between 1865 and 1903 because the Church was so heavily
identified with the English language and culture. Sporadic efforts re-
sumed in South Africa after the Boer War of 1899–1902, but they were
slow to sink roots, and not until 1970 was the first stake organized, in Jo-
hannesburg. An Afrikaans translation of the Book of Mormon appeared in
1972. Since that point, South Africa has enjoyed steady growth, particu-
larly in Johannesburg, but also in the Anglo communities of Cape Town
and Durban. The Johannesburg Temple site was dedicated in 1982.14
Outside South Africa, expansion was slow and was largely confined to
the white territories within the South African sphere of influence, chiefly
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South-West Africa (now Namibia). These
areas accounted for most of the 3,400 individuals who attended the first
area conference held in Johannesburg in 1972—a figure that accounted
for almost half the LDS members in the whole of Africa at that point. Only
in the past quarter century has the Church experienced serious growth
outside the South and, more particularly, outside the white communities.
If circumstances had been different, Mormons would have benefited
from the post-1960 boom in Christian growth, but the critical problem
they faced, of course, was the exclusion of blacks from the priesthood.
Only with the 1978 revelation ending that policy could expansion grow in
black Africa and could the LDS Church resume what should have been a
natural African pattern of growth.
LDS historians themselves have pointed with justifiable pride to the
early stages of affiliation among black Africans who at that point could not
formally seek the priesthood. This is an amazing story of spontaneous dis-
covery and devotion, which has been lovingly recorded by missionaries like
Rendell N. Mabey and Mormon historians like E. Dale LeBaron. A sizable
oral history archive now exists.15 From the 1950s, isolated groups and indi-
viduals began to hear about the LDS Church, from magazines like the
Reader’s Digest, from odd pieces of literature they picked up, or even—as in
Ghana—from copies of the Book of Mormon.16 They sought out more in-
formation, bombarding Church authorities with requests for literature.
According to Dale LeBaron, “What began as a comparative trickle of re-

quests in the early 1950’s became a flood by the 1960’s. More letters request-
ing Church literature were received from Nigeria and Ghana than from all
the rest of the world combined. The Church responded by sending litera-
ture, but the demand was so great that some Africans even established LDS
bookstores. . . . In the 1960’s there were over sixty congregations in Nigeria
and Ghana, with more than 16,000 participants, none of whom were bap-
tized.”17 Without approval, they began to give themselves titles like “The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nigeria Branch,” and incorpo-
rated under such names. This was an ominous practice in some ways, as
they were preempting names that could not properly be used by authorized
representatives of the Church. By the 1960s, there were dozens of self-
declared pastors, many of whom were unaware of each other’s existence.
To understand what these individuals found in the Church, we could,
if we chose, look to ideas of the miraculous, of God sending forth his mes-
sage as a preparation for the arrival of the gospel. I am not here to chal-
lenge or undermine the miraculous. But I can also point to other, secular
reasons for the very fertile field awaiting Mormon messengers. Let me, for
instance, take the words of preacher Joseph William Billy Johnson, who
first found the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants in 1964. He
reported, “One morning, at about five o’clock, I got up and prepared for
the day’s work. When I knelt to pray, I felt transmitted away. I saw the
heavens open, and for the first time I saw angels singing praises to God
and blowing trumpets. In the course of this experience I heard my name
called three times. . . . And then, ‘If you will take up my work as I will com-
mand you, I will bless you and bless your land.’ I replied, ‘Lord, with thy
help I will do whatever you will command me.’”18
LeBaron continues:
Brother Johnson reported that he was strengthened and taught

by dreams and visions, including instructions from the Prophet
Joseph Smith and President Brigham Young. . . . On another occa-
sion, when he was very discouraged his deceased brother appeared
to him in a dream, and said: “‘Don’t worry, you have chosen the
only true church on earth and I am now investigating your church.’
I was surprised. I never knew that the church extended to another
world. . . . It was my brother who enlightened me about baptism for
the dead and brought it to my knowledge. Most of my relatives
appeared to me in dreams [saying,] ‘Reverend Johnson, do you

know you have a work to do for us? Our great grandsons and daugh-
ters will be in your church soon. See that we are baptized.’ . . . I
learned these doctrines before the missionaries arrived. Nothing
they taught us seemed strange. They simply confirmed what we had
heard.”19
Perhaps Brother Johnson was receiving a divine message; but virtually

nothing of what he reports would actually have surprised most West Afri-
can Christians of that era or anyone who had come into contact with the
familiar world of the independent churches. Nor would any African have
been taken aback by his subsequent vision of “numerous dead people, sev-
eral of them calling me by name and referring to me as their great-great-
grandson. They mentioned names to me and said that I should tell the
names to my mother.”20
By the 1970s, some thousands belonged to Latter-day Saints groups,
commonly with few connections to the global church; and the unex-
ploited potential for growth is demonstrated by the real boom in mem-
bership after 1978. The Book of Mormon was available in Zulu by 1978,
and during the 1980s it became available in the major languages of Nige-
ria, Ghana, Kenya, and Madagascar. To quote Dale LeBaron again, “Flood-
gates were now open for the gospel to go to Africa and to African
ancestors”—and I would particularly stress these final words. He contin-
ues, “By 1988, just one decade after the revelation of 1978, mission presi-
dents estimated more than 17,000 black members of the Church in
Africa—a figure strikingly close to the 16,865 membership in 1840, ten
years after the organization of the Church in America.”21 In 1987, Alexan-
der B. Morrison proclaimed “the dawning of a new day in Africa,” al-
though stressing that “the gleaning and gathering of the children of God
in Africa is just beginning.”22
Nigeria itself has been quite a success story. Although interested groups
were forming during the 1950s, serious missionary work did not begin
until after 1978. The country had 10,000 recorded members by 1987,
30,000 by 1997; and the figure today approaches 80,000. That annual rate
approaches the magical 15 percent discussed earlier. The first wholly black
African stake dates from 1988, in Aba in Nigeria, which in 2005 would
become the setting for a temple. Ghana was another center of expansion
today, despite a temporary suppression of Church activities in 1989–90.
The country today has the third-largest LDS population, following Nigeria
Table 14.2 Largest LDS Communities in Africa
Nation LDS Members 2007
Nigeria 79,000
South Africa 45,000
Ghana 33,000
Democratic Rep. Congo 18,000
Zimbabwe 16,000
Côte d’Ivoire 11,300
Kenya 8,000
Sierra Leone 7,000
Cape Verde 6,500
Liberia 4,500
Madagascar 4,000
Mozambique 4,000
Republic of Congo 4,000
Uganda 4,000
Zambia 2,000
Source: LDS Newsroom Statistical Information.
and South Africa; and in 2004, Accra became home to Africa’s second LDS
temple. As Joseph Johnson happily declared, “Now we can start doing the
temple work for those of our ancestors.”23 Today, Church statistics claim
about 140,000 Mormons for West Africa, the lands from Nigeria to Sierra
Leone (Table 14.2).
Much of the story of African Mormonism is thus very recent indeed;
and to put it in context, little of it traces back before the Clinton era and the
Internet. From the mid-1980s, we find isolated pockets of believers grad-
ually expanding and organizing. Some were Americans serving in those
nations through the Peace Corps or charitable organizations. In several
countries, though, the first known Church members were converted and
baptized while in Europe and continued their activities after returning to
their home countries. This was the story, for instance, in Côte d’Ivoire,
Zambia, Uganda, Angola, and Madagascar. Organizational changes fol-
lowed upon this growth. As late as 1990, the whole of Africa was admin-
istered from England, and only in that year was an Africa area office
created in Johannesburg. A new area followed in 1998, the so-called Africa
West, based in Accra.
These figures are impressive, and Mormons can probably look forward
to a rich harvest in Africa. If only because of the rapid demographic growth
across Africa and the steadying birth rates in Latin America, the African
share of LDS membership will assuredly grow rapidly, probably much
more rapidly than most expect. I have already suggested that Africans will
make up an ever-increasing share of overall Church membership. It would
not be unrealistic to expect two or three million members within another
quarter century.
Why Has the Church Not Grown More?

And at that point, you may be asking why I am discussing the African sit-
uation in terms of weak growth or marginal status: Are those figures not
significant?24 Of course they are, but there are still problems, and even the
growth rates we are describing are still nothing exceptional by modern
African standards. Recall the rates of the real super-achievers, the 12 or 15
percent per year—not per decade! Despite the apparent attractions of the
Church’s message, it is not succeeding any more obviously than other de-
nominations that would seem to suffer from serious disadvantages, such
as the highly liturgical Orthodox churches of eastern Africa. Despite what
might appear to be vast structural and ideological advantages, Mormon-
ism is doing nowhere near as well as Pentecostal churches such as the
Assemblies of God, not to mention cases like the Mennonite and Lutheran
churches I described earlier. Based on the standard of many other
churches, it simply is not true to describe Mormon growth in Africa as
spectacular, amazing, or in any of the other standard superlatives. A bal-
anced comment would place Mormon growth as moderate at best and
limited to some small areas. I see no likelihood that Mormons will ac-
count for as much as 1 percent of the continental population, at least in the
next century. Quite possibly, even as LDS membership in Africa grows in
absolute numbers, it will actually decline as a proportion of overall conti-
nental population.
And those comments assume that Church statistics are accurately
measuring LDS membership, which they are probably not, because they
fail to take account of dropouts and defections. Although I do not have
hard statistics of my own, my impression from anecdotal accounts in
many parts of Africa is that the Church has a high dropout rate, far larger
than that of other denominations, and that a great many reported mem-
bers remain in the Church for just two or three years before passing on to
other groups.25 Why, then, does Africa have 270,000 reported Mormons
and not, say, eight or ten million? And why does Africa have just three
temples, compared to fifteen in South America, and eighteen in Mexico
and Central America?
Some factors are less important than they may initially seem. For ex-
ample, churches like the Anglicans and Catholics benefited from the Eu-
ropean colonial presence in Africa, which allowed them to establish a
network of institutions as a basis for later growth. With the possible excep-
tion of Liberia, Americans had no such presence. On the other hand, the
colonial legacy could be a mixed blessing, in associating the churches with
colonial oppression. And other American churches had no difficulty in
extending their influence. In South Africa, the very important Zion Chris-
tian Church—some five million strong—takes its name not from Zion in
Jerusalem, but from Zion City, Illinois, home of J. A. Dowie’s nineteenth-
century healing movement, a kind of proto-Pentecostalism.
Obviously, the pre-1978 exclusion of blacks from priesthood was a crit-
ical fact, not least in hindering mission efforts into black Africa, but that is
by no means the only issue. After all, at various points in their history,
many of the old mission churches had deplorable reputations for segrega-
tion and bigotry, which they managed to overcome. Missionaries were
famous for their “verandah Christianity,” meaning that native converts
were allowed onto the verandah of a white home, but never inside. And in
the LDS experience, too, recent growth in Nigeria and West Africa sug-
gests that this heritage might be overcome. Let us not forget that most of
black Africa is a young society, in which the median age is around sixteen,
so that the memory of priesthood exclusion affects only the grandparents
of prospective converts today. Thus, this defunct policy need not be a crip-
pling or lasting grievance.26
Starting Late
Mormon missions thus started later than other denominations, and that
might be more damaging than simply forcing them to play catch-up. In
fact, it remains to be seen whether the late start might have permanent
effects in preventing Mormons from acquiring the kind of basis they ac-
quired elsewhere, above all in Central America.
I would suggest that the main problems facing LDS expansion have less
to do with the specific matter of exclusion than of other megatrends identi-
fied above. For one thing, the relatively late start of LDS e xpansion—from
the late 1970s onwards—meant that the missions still have white faces,
decades after other traditions have become thoroughly Africanized. Unlike
Catholics, Anglicans, and others, Mormons never created the deep institu-
tional structure that would allow them to survive against the overwhelming
pressures from independent, prophetic, and Pentecostal churches. All
churches have faced daunting competition from spectacular revivalism,
from Pentecostalism, from prosperity preachers; even Muslims have been
so alarmed by these rivals that some daring innovators have tried to adopt
Pentecostal styles and rhetoric into their own Islamic message. At best, in
these circumstances, Mormons could only aim for quite different social
niches.
Critically too, the other churches largely made their original converts
from non-Christian populations, from pagans or animists, so that most
Christians today are the second- or third-generation Christian descendants
of animists. That fact has several consequences. For one thing, in the belief
systems of most churches, the significance of conversion from paganism
to Christianity is infinitely greater than that of conversion from one de-
nomination to another. The memory of primary conversion thus creates a
family loyalty to the particular denomination that saved one’s family from
the fires of damnation. This memory, together with the denominational
culture that now has several generations behind it, is what keeps most
members of older-established churches within the fold, however many in-
dividuals might be tempted to the revivals and prosperity churches. Newer
churches lack this advantage, especially if they are drawing their converts
from existing Christian communities. Reading the autobiographical ac-
counts in the collection All Are Alike unto God, it soon becomes apparent
that most of the key individuals were former members of mainstream
Christian denominations, usually of the second or third generation. Joseph
Johnson’s father was a Catholic; Emmanuel Abu Kissi’s family was Presby-
terian, and so was that of Nigerian pioneer David William Eka.
Meeting Africa
Mormons also face other significant disadvantages in terms of accommo-
dating to African cultures and worship styles. As I have said, the message
they present could well be music to the ears of mass audiences in Africa,
but that message is clothed in unmistakably American guise.
One early clash involved the issue of polygamy in African lands where
the custom was legal. What should the LDS Church do? Should it revive
its older teachings to accommodate the practice, as some independent

congregations did? President Hinckley was very firm, declaring that the
practice “is now against the law of God. Even in countries where civil or
religious law allows polygamy, the church teaches that marriages must be
monogamous and does not accept into its membership those practicing
plural marriage.”27
Thus far, the LDS Church was closely reflecting the mainstream of
Christian denominations, but in other regards, its strictness went much
further. At least since the 1960s, most Euro-American denominations
have given up trying to regulate the conduct of worship services in African
churches, with the result that local customs flourish. The music and
hymns are local, to the extent that Africa today is probably living through
a golden age of Christian hymn-writing, of course in native languages.
Liturgies are thoroughly acculturated, and congregations conduct them-
selves in familiar African style, with a great deal of dancing, swaying, and
physical movement, together with responsorial cries and prayers. And all
this behavior takes place in thoroughly African buildings.
The Mormon experience has been quite different and has involved
strikingly few concessions to local tastes or customs. The best visual
symbol of the refusal to “go native” is the physical appearance of the
churches and temples themselves, which would not be out of place in
Sacramento.28 Looking at these pictures, an LDS audience would feel jus-
tifiable pride in the creation of a beautiful structure anywhere in the world,
of the universality and confidence of the message, and the sense that Afri-
can members were not being short-changed with anything less than
American believers. But as an exercise, just think of how such buildings
look within this landscape, where they contrast so sharply with those of
other denominations and stand so markedly aloof from local traditions.
Within the churches, congregations follow a restrained American-style
worship service, except, of course, that texts and services are in local lan-
guages. This worship style is a manifestation of the powerful principle of
correlation, which aims to ensure conformity of texts and materials to
agreed models. But as the Ostlings remark, “Why must each and every
women’s auxiliary lesson be the same for every nation, written and vetted
in Salt Lake City?”29 While hymns are welcomed, they are not native com-
positions, but local translations of “Redeemer of Israel.” And the music
must be pianos, not drums.
The cultural clash surfaces repeatedly. In one LDS magazine, an author
reviews Glenn Pace’s Safe Journey. He describes the spontaneous—and
truly moving—formation of LDS groups in West Africa in the 1970s:

“Without priesthood authority and direction, these churches had omis-
sions and errors. In some there were hallelujahs, drumbeats, and the
passing of collection plates. Yet what was clear, as Elder Pace reiterates in
his book, the message of the gospel is universal.”30 An African church
without hallelujahs and drumbeats would be a strange place indeed. LeB-
aron further compares the state of the LDS Church in Africa today with
that of the LDS Church in America in the mid-nineteenth century, and
some of the parallels are quite convincing. He specifically cites as a paral-
lel: “Culture And Tradition Vs. Restoration And Revelation. One of the great
challenges for Joseph Smith (and Brigham Young also often spoke of it)
was to counter the strange beliefs and practices which converts brought
with them. Likewise, the first missionaries to Africa ‘untaught’ many
traditions—crucifixes and other adornments in the meeting houses,

‘drumming and dancing,’ ‘rolling,’ and the collection plate. These prac-
tices, somewhat common to many of the churches in Africa, ceased after
the people were baptized and the church was organized among them.”31
Joseph Johnson ordered his people “No more dancing and no more clap-
ping, since our brothers in America don’t do it.”32
In the broad context of religious development in Africa, the LDS
Church is extraordinarily unusual and probably unique; I can’t think of a
competitor. It is one of the very last churches of Western origin that still
enforces Euro-American norms so strictly and that refuses to make any
accommodation to local customs. Missionaries have resolutely refused to
draw on the historical lessons offered by any other church.
Rendell Mabey makes one comment that I find suggestive. While he is
tempted to see the African churches becoming fully autonomous, he is
very cautious: “The need for an organized mission in those lands was im-
mense, perhaps greater than anywhere else in the world. All that marvel-
ous growth potential needed a methodical cultivation lest it run wild.”33 Of
course, most churches have seen the growth run wild, and the results have
been staggering. LDS missionaries are reluctant to permit the develop-
ment of local traditions in music or worship style. But for most observers
of African religion, this approach would represent a classic example of
over-control of the kind that most churches weaned themselves from a
half-century before. “Letting go” has proved a very difficult process.
In part, the resistance to wholesale enculturation represents a deliber-
ate Church policy, developed in reaction to some perceived missteps in
evangelistic efforts in South and Central America. The rapid expansion of
temples in the Americas symbolizes the swift numerical growth in recent

decades, but there are concerns about the shallowness of some conver-
sions and the high attrition rate of converts. In contrast, missions in Africa
are more specifically aimed at developing deeper roots, focused especially
on centers of strength, which can serve as bases for later expansion. Any
or all of these approaches are quite defensible, but they do leave the LDS
Church holding on to a very unusual stance.
Across Denominations
Compared with virtually all other churches, the LDS Church in Africa
seems highly resistant to native cultures. The African encounter also
raises powerful questions about the relationship of Mormonism to other
Christian churches. As I mentioned earlier, most prospective converts
now come from Christian backgrounds, and often from very powerful
native Christian traditions, which over the past century have spawned a
huge arsenal of customs and traditions, hymns and tales. These Christian
manifestations pass freely among sects and denominations, from Angli-
cans to Pentecostals, Lutherans to Catholics; but they seem to meet an
impasse when they reach the door of the LDS Church.
I raise a sensitive issue here, namely the relationship between the
Latter-day Saints and other churches. In 1984, for example, pioneering
missionary Rendell Mabey celebrated the first baptisms of black Africans
a few years previously with the words, “The Doors of the Gospel had
opened upon the Dark Continent, and the light was pouring forth.”34 For
most Christian Africans, of course, the light of the gospel had already
been present for a good number of years. I am not here to discuss the the-
ology of which gospel; but in the African context, the LDS Church is asso-
ciated with a strict sectarianism that makes cooperation difficult and
which runs contrary to powerful trends within African religion.
In the next fifty years, the face of Mormonism will, literally, become
darker, as more and more of the members come from the global South and
especially from Africa. But that change will be far more than merely an
ethnic shift, as those new members will be raising questions quite differ-
ent from those affecting other regions. The LDS experience in Africa raises
to an acute degree issues and dilemmas that to some extent arise in most
parts of the world outside North America, but a central question comes to
mind: What is the relationship between the LDS Church and other Chris-
tian denominations? African Mormons, after all, will come from a society
in which, by dint of being neither Muslim nor animist, they represent part
of the much larger Christian spectrum, as assuredly as Catholics or Luther-
ans or Pentecostals. To put it in the most elemental terms, when a Nigerian
mob stops a car and demands whether the driver is a Christian or a Muslim,
that is not exactly the time to explain the differences separating the LDS
tradition from other denominations: The correct answer is “Christian.”
This fact alone must diminish differences with other Christians and drive
believers toward cooperation and harmonization.
Finally, I return to the question of enculturation, of accepting styles of
worship and devotion that seem alien within one cultural setting, but
which are natural or even obligatory within another. As the LDS Church
becomes truly global, it will increasingly face the same pressures that have
transformed virtually every other Christian body. And once that happens,
it may well be that the Church’s message will reach far beyond its present
bounds.
Notes
1. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
2. David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Ency-
clopedia, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. The following
account is drawn generally from Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
3. John L. Allen, “Global South Will Shape the Future Catholic Church,” National
Catholic Reporter, October 7, 2005.
4. http://www.lutheranworld.org/News/LWI/EN/1404.EN.html; http://www.elca.
org/countrypackets/ethiopia/church.html (accessed April 2007).
5. Byron Rempel-Burkholder, “Ethiopian Church Strives to Keep Spiritual Fires Alive,”
http://www.mennoworld.org/archived/2004/10/18/ethiopian-church-strives-keep-
spiritual-fires-aliv/ [URL updated May 11, 2015].
6. Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
7. Harvey Cox, quoted in Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 68.
8. Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, 98.
9. Ibid., 50.
10. E. Dale LeBaron, ed., All Are Alike unto God (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1990),
31. See also Emmanuel Abu Kissi, Walking in the Sand: A History of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University
Press, 2004); E. Dale LeBaron, “Emmanuel Abu Kissi: A Gospel Pioneer in
Ghana,” in Pioneers in Every Land, ed. Bruce A. Van Orden, D. Brent Smith, and
Everett Smith Jr. (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1997), 210–220.
11. Glenn L. Pace, Safe Journey: An African Adventure (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret
Book, 2003), 143.
12. According to Elder Sheldon F. Child, quoted in Carrie A. Moore, “LDS Marking
30-Year Milestone,” Deseret News, June 7, 2008, B1, B3, “more than 270,000”
Africans have been baptized since 1978, “and the estimate of black membership
worldwide is pegged at about 1 million.” He also listed 46 stakes, 19 missions,
41 districts, 336 wards, 466 branches, three temples, and two missionary train-
ing centers (in Ghana and South Africa). I recognize (see later discussion) that
the Church began missionary work in South Africa in 1853; but since the mis-
sionary effort was essentially restricted only to that country and only to its white
residents before 1978, I have not tried to count pre-1978 members.
13. Matthew Bolton’s Apostle of the Poor: The Life and Work of Missionary and Hu-
manitarian, Charles D. Neff (Independence: John Whitmer Books, 2005), tells
about this apostle’s significant contribution to the Reorganized Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints’ successful focus on dealing with proselytizing in
Third World areas, including tackling the historically (and politically) difficult
problem of polygamous converts.
14. For Mormon history in Africa, see, for instance, Rendell N. Mabey and Gordon
T. Allred, Brother to Brother: The Story of the Latter-day Saint Missionaries Who
Took the Gospel to Black Africa (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1984); Alexander B.
Morrison, The Dawning of a Brighter Day: The Church in Black Africa (Salt Lake
City, UT: Deseret Book, 1990); Rendell N. Mabey, An African Legacy: A Story of
the Dawning of the Gospel in Black Africa by One Who Was There in the Beginning
(Salt Lake City, UT: R. N. Mabey, 1998).
15. From the extensive work of E. Dale LeBaron, see for instance his “Mormonism
in Black Africa” in Mormon Identities in Transition, ed. David J. Davies (London:
Cassell, 1996), 80–86; LeBaron, ed., All Are Alike unto God; E. Dale LeBaron,
David J. Whittaker, and Bryan D. Dixon, eds., African Oral History Project: Inter-
views by E. Dale LeBaron (Handlist for Special Collections and Manuscripts De-
partment, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 1996).
16. James B. Allen, “Would-Be Saints: West Africa before the 1978 Priesthood Rev-
elation,” Journal of Mormon History 17 (1991): 207–47; Marjorie Wall Folsom,
Golden Harvest in Ghana: Gospel Beginnings in West Africa (Bountiful, Utah: Ho-
rizon, 1989).
17. E. Dale LeBaron, “The Inspiring Story of the Gospel Going to Black Africa,”
Ricks College Devotional, April 3, 2001, http://www.byui.edu/Presentations/
Transcripts/Devotionals/2001_04_03_LeBaron.htm (accessed April 2007); E.
Dale LeBaron, “African Converts without Baptism: A Unique and Inspiring
Chapter in Church History,” in Telling the Story of Mormon History: Proceedings of
the 2002 Symposium of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint
istory at Brigham Young University, ed.William G. Hartley (Provo, UT: Joseph

H
Fielding Institute for Latter-day Saint History, 2004); see also http://speeches.
byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=1779 (accessed April 2007).
18. Joseph William Billy Johnson quoted in E. Dale LeBaron, “We Felt the Spirit of
the Pioneers,” http://www.byub.org/africa/testimony1.asp (accessed April
2007); see also LeBaron, All Are Alike unto God, 13–23.
19. LeBaron, “The Inspiring Story of the Gospel Going to Black Africa”; empha-
sis mine.
20. Joseph William Billy Johnson, quoted in LeBaron, All Are Alike unto God, 16.
21. E. Dale LeBaron, “Restoration and Africa,” http://www.byub.org/africa/parallel.
asp (accessed April 2007).
22. Alexander B. Morrison, “The Dawning of a New Day in Africa,” Ensign, Novem-
ber 1987, 25–26.
23. Pace, Safe Journey, 91.
24. See, for instance, Mabey, “Introduction,” An African Legacy, vi: “with the gospel
message spreading at such an amazing rate. . . .”
25. For a useful compendium of statistical data, especially comparing LDS prosely-
tizing success to other denominations, see David G. Stewart, The Law of the
Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work (Henderson, NV: Cumo-
rah Foundation, 2007). He notes, “LDS growth trends have been widely over-
stated. Annual LDS growth has progressively declined from over 5 percent in the
late 1980s to less than 3 percent from 2000 to 2005” and estimates interna-
tional retention rates as “barely one in four” (16). See Henri Gooren’s review,
Journal of Mormon History 35 (Winter 2009): 229.
26. Jenkins, Next Christendom, chap. 3.
27. Gordon B. Hinckley, quoted in O. Kendall White Jr. and Daryl White, “Polygamy
and Mormon Identity,” Journal of American Culture 28 (2005): 165–177.
28. Aba Nigeria Temple and Accra Ghana Temple, Temples of The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints. See, for instance, http://www.ldschurchtemples.
com/aba/; http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/accra/.
29. Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America, 2nd ed. (San Fran-
cisco, CA: Harper One, 2007), 380.
30. See the critical account of LDS Church policies toward enculturation in “Out of
Africa,” http://www.reachouttrust.org/articles/lds/ldsafrica.htm (accessed April
2007); this article also quotes the review of the Pace book in Meridian.
31. LeBaron, All Are Alike unto God, 7.
32. Ibid., 22.
33. Mabey, An African Legacy, 158.
34. Mabey and Allred, Brother to Brother, 47.
15
“Would That All God’s People Were

Prophets”: Mormonism and the New
Shape of Global Christianity
By Jehu J. Hanciles
Introduction: The Global Transformation of Christianity

We live in a decidedly religious world. By 2010, 84 percent of the world’s
population was religiously affiliated, with a projected rise to 90 percent by
2020.1 Furthermore, all the major religions are “taking advantage of the
opportunities provided by globalization to transform their messages and
reach a new global audience.”2 In fact, the global religious landscape mir-
rors critical changes associated with wider processes of globalization, in-
cluding the largely uninhibited flow of ideas, large-scale migrations, and
diaspora networks, as well as shifts in demographic representation that
tend to pluralize centers of power.3 In essence, globalization is not only
helping to make our world more religious but it is also transforming the
nature of religion.
No other world faith exemplifies these worldwide transformations
more acutely than Christianity.4 Christianity’s rate of expansion over the
last one hundred years exceeds any other period in its two-thousand-year
history. Significantly, the vast majority of this recent growth, in terms of
adherents and churches, has taken place in areas of the globe in which
Christian presence was statistically insignificant at the beginning of the
previous century.5 Not only are Christians now present in each of the
world’s 239 countries but the phenomenal expansion of the faith outside
previous heartlands also means that we are witnessing “the greatest ever
proliferation of converted cultures and consequently of Christian life-
styles.”6 Equally noteworthy, Christians are the most evenly dispersed on
the planet of any major religious group. It is reported that “roughly equal
numbers of Christians” live in Europe (26 percent), Latin America and the
Caribbean (24 percent), and sub-Saharan Africa (24 percent).7
This finding confirms one of the most momentous religious transfor-
mations of our time: namely, the re-emergence of Christianity as a non-
Western religion. In 1900, less than one-fifth (18 percent) of the world’s
Christians resided outside Europe or North America; by 2000 more than
60 percent of all Christians resided outside the West, and Christianity
continues to decline in its previous heartlands at a dramatic rate. The 26
percent of Christians now living in Europe reflects a massive decline from
66 percent in 1910. In 1900, over 71 percent of the world’s evangelicals
(admittedly a rather fluid category) lived in just two countries—the United
States and the United Kingdom.8 By 2010, 75 percent of evangelicals lived
outside the West.9 If current trends continue, Africa and Latin America
will together account for half the Christians in the world by 2025. Tremen-
dous gains in Asia, where Christianity is reportedly growing at twice the
rate of the overall population (though it accounted for only 8.2 percent of
the overall population in 2010), is also part of the new picture.10 Such is
the upsurge in conversions to Christianity in China that some speculate
that more Christians may be attending worship in that country than in the
United States.11
This historic shift in global Christianity’s demographic center of grav-
ity has profound implications for virtually every major segment of the
world Christian movement, Protestant or Roman Catholic. Twenty-first-
century Christianity is predominantly non-white; and, by 2050, perhaps
only about one-fifth of the world’s Christians will be white Caucasians.
Already, at least half of all Anglicans and more than a third of Mennonites
are African, while Latin America accounts for some 40 percent of all
Roman Catholics worldwide.12 Indeed, more Christians worldwide speak
Spanish than any other language; and this by a wide margin.13 The new
global Christianity is also marked by an immense diversity of expressions,
theological understanding, forms of worship, spiritual dynamism, biblical
interpretation, and responses to critical issues of the day—all of which
raise important questions about ecclesial identity, theological priorities,
and power differentials within global Christian movements. Commenting
on twenty-first-century Catholicism, for instance, John Allen insists that
“the global South, perhaps especially Africa and the Philippines, will play
increasingly important roles in setting the global agenda”; that “as Roman
Catholicism in the future speaks with an African and Hispanic accent, it
will also speak in tongues [i.e., become more prominently charismatic].”14
“Would That All God’s People Were Prophets”: Mormonism 355
The point at issue is that the globalization of Christianity has engen-

dered major transformations within all major denominations and move-
ments of the faith. Mormonism is no exception. As President Dieter
Uchtdorf notes: “The Church as a whole, worldwide, is becoming more
diverse in terms of national, racial, cultural, and linguistic characteristics
of its members.”15 But the reality is more easily described than analyzed.
In the early 1980s, the rapid growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) over the previous 150 years convinced
American sociologist Rodney Stark that the world was witnessing the “rise
of a new world faith,” comparable in his view to other major world reli-
gions.16 This assessment was further reinforced when Stark discovered
almost two decades later that Mormon membership had increased sub-
stantially faster than his “most optimistic projection.”17 Stark’s depiction
of Mormonism as possibly “the first major faith to appear on earth since
the Prophet Mohammed rode out of the desert” is clearly intended to pay
homage to the LDS Church’s distinctiveness and historical importance.
But it is burdened by analytical and theological problems. He essentially
treats Mormonism not as a restoration movement within the Christian
tradition, which is how the movement understands itself,18 but as distinct
from Christianity and analogous to Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. What-
ever the merits of the theoretical framework, to equate Joseph Smith (the
founder of Mormonism) with Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses is theologi-
cally unsound.
Stark’s analysis also strongly implies that worldwide numerical pres-
ence is, in and of itself, sufficient basis for a movement to be designated a
“world religion.” Exactly what constitutes a world religion remains a vexed
question. Yet to apply the label to a movement based on the estimation
that it “has sustained the most rapid growth of any new religion in Amer-
ican history” or will “soon achieve a worldwide following compared to . . .
the other dominant world faiths” seems facile.19 It also ignores the nature
and dynamics of globalization. Assessing Mormonism in relation to pro-
cesses of globalization subjects the rise of the movement to a more robust
analytical framework that renders numerical accession only one of a
number of key considerations. How or when the movement becomes glo-
balized requires attentiveness to complex questions pertaining to cultural
adaptation, translatability of its core message and vision, diversity of
forms, and the shaping of identity outside its original context, as well as
the nature and inclusiveness of its outreach. These issues inform the as-
sessment which follows.
Briefing the Globalization of Religion

The term “globalization” continues to excite considerable debate, much of
it focused on its economic dimensions. For those who accept it, however,
the phenomenon has real human meaning and significance. Basically, the
concept captures the increasing convergence or deepening interconnect-
edness among the world’s inhabitants and literally implies that the people
of the world “are [being] unified into a single society.”20 One of the earliest
definitions holds that it portends “the intensification of worldwide social
relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings
are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”21 The
extraordinary developments and technological breakthroughs that have at-
tended contemporary globalization often foster the impression that the
phenomenon is recent. But most analysts now agree that what is called
globalization today has deep historical roots—which is to say that the cur-
rent phase is simply the latest in a long-term historical trend. How far
back the phenomenon can be dated is much debated, but there is some
recognition that processes of globalization have been unfolding for thou-
sands of years, linked to enduring elements of human existence on the
planet, among which is migration.22
Economic forms of globalization command the most attention. Thus,
it is often overlooked that globalization is not a single process but a com-
posite of simultaneous and interrelated processes (economic, cultural, po-
litical, etc.). For all the preoccupation with economic globalization, the
cultural dimensions of globalization arguably represent the most perva-
sive and (in terms of contemporary experience) the most unprecedented
dimension of the phenomenon.23 Admittedly, no dimension of globaliza-
tion is entirely separate and self-sustained. Critical elements of the eco-
nomic and political are deeply entangled with, and inseparable from,
cultural forms. But cultural forms are arguably the oldest and most ubiq-
uitous in the human experience.24
Put simply, cultural globalization “refers to the growth in the ex-
change of cultural practices between nations and peoples.”25 It encom-
passes the quantum leaps in technologies of mass communication and
travel that mark the unprecedented interconnectedness of the present
era but also finds powerful expression in the rise of world religions.26
The presence of a mosque, a church, or a temple in the remotest cor-
ners of the planet is no longer unexpected.27 But the globalization of any
particular faith or religious movement involves much more than the
worldwide dispersion of preachers, sacred objects and buildings, or

growing numbers of converts. The mere presence of cultural goods,
products, or foreign agents in distant parts of the world does not consti-
tute cultural globalization.28 Successful globalization requires at least
two defining attributes: localization and multidirectional (reciprocal)
transformation.
Localization
The central paradox of globalization is that it is unfeasible without locali-
zation. Any movement, product, or experience that is global depends on
local adaptation. For instance, sales of its cellphones among the world’s
Muslims increased dramatically when electronic giant LG produced a
phone that “rings five times a day on the prayer hours and has a compass
that points to Mecca.”29 To be globalized is to have a capacity to respond to
the immense varieties and variations of human need that are contextually
defined and localized. Visitors at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta can
sample over 100 Coca-Cola beverages from around the world. The com-
pany claims to have 500 beverage brands that are sold in more than 200
countries.30 It has been hugely successful globally because it caters to local
tastes. In effect, the face of the global is in the local. Successful globaliza-
tion is unattainable without local resonance and the process often rein-
forces local preference.
Christianity is the most globalized faith in the world today because it
is the ultimate local religion.31 The principle of translation at the heart of
the gospel requires that the peoples and nations of the world hear God
speaking to them in their particular languages and idioms. Contrary to
popular assumptions, argues Lamin Sanneh (historian of missions and
world Christianity), this dynamic privileges the cultural heritage of the
proselyte over that of the missionary agent.32 Moreover, as the gospel pen-
etrates new cultures and directly engages (or transforms) new realities
and thought forms, our understanding of its power and potential is also
expanded.33
This is not to ignore the fact that the translation of the gospel into the
various cultures of the world puts those who respond to its claims out of
step with the surrounding society and its values. But in terms of a capacity
for response and transformation, no single culture has an advantage over
any other; and no matter how many the prophets, God’s Spirit is not ex-
hausted nor is divine power diminished (Num. 11:24–29).
Multidirectional Transformation
One of the most pervasive myths about contemporary globalization propa-
gates the view that it is a managed, one-directional, Western-dominated
process with fixed or predetermined outcomes. Undoubtedly, there are
dominant actors and elements within processes of globalization, some of
which are exploitative and destructive. From a historical perspective also,
globalization has often been a very bloody and violent process. But global
integration and deepening interconnectedness among the world’s peoples
means that cultural diffusion or impact flows in multiple directions and
involves modes of exchange. Sustained cross-cultural movement invaria-
bly generates change on both sides of the encounter, often unpredictably.
Thus, for instance, many foreign missionaries who set out to change lives
often find that the encounter with other societies and cultures changes
their own lives. Far from being a managed process with fixed or predeter-
mined outcomes, globalization has fostered a multipolar world in which
“center” and “margin” are often rendered fluid categories. The same pat-
terns of interdependence and interpenetration that enhance the reach of
dominant actors also tend to augment the potency of resistance, while ef-
forts at cultural domination often strengthen ethnic consciousness within
oppressed groups.
Here, too, Christianity provides a cardinal example. Renowned missi-
ologist Andrew Walls argues that the globalization of Christianity over
time has involved successive cross-cultural penetration and “serial expan-
sion” such that, rather than having a fixed, dominant center, the global
spread of the faith has produced “a principal presence in different parts of
the world at different times”—or successive centers. From a historical per-
spective, therefore, “each new point on the Christian circumference [has
been] . . . a new potential Christian center.”34 This also means that mis-
sionary mobilization over time has been multidirectional and that no par-
ticular expression of the faith in time or place can claim to be normative.
As Walls puts it, “The representations of Christ by any one segment of
human society are partial and impaired” so that “all the representations
are needed for the realization of the full stature of Christ.”35
This understanding of the globalization of religion (or culture) goes
beyond the numerical expansion paradigm. Like virtually every other major
Christian tradition, Mormonism finds itself in a radically changed global
religious landscape with major implications for its life and future. How this
is so is a matter of considerable complexity that requires attentiveness to
the history of the movement, including the traditions and doctrinal convic-
tions that have informed the LDS approach to universal expansion. The
rest of this presentation provides two main assessments: first, an examina-
tion of how the Mormon experience confirms and/or contradicts wider
transformations in global Christianity; and second, an evaluation of Mor-
monism as a global faith based on the twin principles of localization and
multidirectional expansion.
The Making of Global Mormonism

From its very beginning, the restoration movement (now labeled Mor-
monism) was marked by a vision of worldwide expansion. In his oft-cited
1834 statement regarding the destiny of the Latter-day Saints, founder
Joseph Smith (1805–44) declared, “This Church will fill North and South
America—it will fill the world.”36 And in his challenge to the Quorum of
Twelve almost a decade later in 1843, he instructed them, “Don’t let a
single corner of the earth go without a mission.”37 A full assessment of
how the aspirations and determination inspired by this global vision
played out in the life of the movement requires some sense of both the
American and the global context in which Mormonism emerged.
Mormonism emerged in an earlier age of globalization marked by mo-
mentous breakthroughs in scientific invention and human endeavor that
produced unprecedented interaction and exchange among the world’s
peoples. More than any other development, aggressive European coloniza-
tion fostered the penetration of the vast interior landmasses of Africa and
Asia, producing immense intercultural exchange. Additionally, the inven-
tion of the telegraph and the telephone revolutionized communications;
the introduction of the railways transformed land transportation; and the
invention of the steamship ushered in a new era of ocean travel.38 All these
nineteenth-century developments impacted Mormon growth and vision
of expansion: The Mormon Pacific mission (inaugurated in 1843) followed
in the wake of colonialism;39 the telegraph reached Utah in 1861;40 the
transcontinental railroad in the United States (a technological feat com-
pleted in 1869) integrated the nation’s dispersed societies like never
before, facilitating expansive Mormon movement;41 and the introduction
of steamships contributed to the migration of some 100,000 European
Mormons in the nineteenth century.42
Global interconnectedness and exchange intensified further in the
early twentieth century, reflecting the impact of major innovations in
communications technologies such as the radio and the mass production

of print media. Indeed, the term “world” was now increasingly used (and
misused) to describe key international events and developments—as in
“world missionary conference,” “world wars” and even “world series.” As
one 1910 report put it, “The whole world has become one neighbor-
hood . . . [where] the nations and races are acting and reacting upon each
other with increasing directness, constancy, and power.”43
Proselytizing Policy and Practice

Yet from a global perspective, the spread of Mormonism in the first 150
years of its existence was an odd mixture of remarkable success and
self-imposed underachievement. The Church quickly established major
footholds in England and the Pacific. Indeed, as Stark points out, “For a
period beginning in the late 1840s, there were more Mormons in the Brit-
ish Isles than in the United States, despite large-scale Mormon immigra-
tion from Britain.”44 Also, the Mormon Pacific mission—the first mission
to non-European peoples outside North America—met with such long-
term success that “the highest national percentages of Church member-
ship today are found in the Pacific Islands.”45 On the whole, LDS
membership more than tripled in the first half of the twentieth century
(from 283,000 in 1900 to 1 million by 1947) and grew by 100 percent in
the two decades thereafter.
But until the end of the Second World War, Mormon outreach was pri-
marily directed toward European peoples around the world; and the LDS
Church remained largely confined to Europe and North America. The first
language into which the Book of Mormon was translated was Danish.46 By
the end of the nineteenth century, Mormonism had made very limited
gains outside North America, England, and the Pacific Islands.
After considerable reluctance, imparted by the belief that blacks “were
inherently unfit for conversion to the true faith,” Mormon missions were
established in Cape Coast (South Africa) in 1852; but the proselyting effort
focused exclusively on the white European population.47 Mormon mis-
sionaries first arrived in Mexico in 1875 but made few converts among
the indigenous population, although a Spanish edition of the Book of
Mormon was published in 1886.48 An LDS mission to Japan commenced
in 1901 and achieved perhaps over 170 baptisms in twenty-three years
before insurmountable challenges—including deteriorating U.S.-Japan
relations and rising Japanese nationalism—forced its closure in 1924.49
The LDS mission in South America commenced in 1925 but, in keeping

with an Anglo-centered vision, was directed solely to German immigrants
in Argentina.50
Well into the twentieth century, the face of Mormonism remained ra-
cially distinctive and its presence geographically concentrated. In 1950,
partly due to the doctrine of gathering,51 92 percent of Mormons lived in
the United States.52 As late as 1960, when Mormons worldwide numbered
close to 2 million members (organized in 319 stakes), not a single stake
had been organized in Africa, Latin America, or Asia. Under the presi-
dency of David O. McKay (1951–70), the LDS Church made noteworthy
strides toward becoming a worldwide organization.53 But in 1980, Mor-
monism could hardly be described as a globalized religious movement.
Effects of the Priesthood Ban

This failing is largely explained by the complex LDS teaching on gathering
and election which promoted a deeply racialized view of the world and as-
serted that certain tribes or nations were to be favored above others to re-
ceive the “restored Gospel.”54 This doctrine shaped the supreme focus of
LDS missionary endeavor on European nations or Anglo-Saxon peoples.55
But, most significantly, it gave rise to the “priesthood ban.” Implemented
in 1852 and endorsed as Church policy thereafter, this ban prohibited men
of black African descent/ancestry who became baptized members of the
Church from ordination to the priesthood.56 The fact that ordination was
a privilege conferred on practically all other Mormon men underscored
the pernicious nature of the policy.57
The policy further imposed restrictions on access to the temple. The
proclamation of the ban under Brigham Young (1801–77) almost certainly
reflects the deep racial divisions of American society at the time. It effec-
tively elevated racism into a religious principle and enshrined racial segre-
gation in the living witness of a Christian movement.
Indubitably, the priesthood ban was a major factor in the limited glob-
alization of the LDS Church in the first century and a half of its existence.
Stark persuasively demonstrates the inimical effect of the ban by compar-
ing the rise of the LDS Church to that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—a
movement that shares striking similarities with Mormonism.58 A startling
picture emerges. Apart from a brief loss of momentum in the 1970s
caused by a failed prophecy of the Second Coming, the growth of Jeho-
vah’s Witnesses has consistently outpaced that of the LDS Church in
numbers and global spread.59 Mormonism is much older (by almost a

hundred years), but Jehovah’s Witnesses are now at least as large as the
Mormons, if not larger.60 Most importantly, Jehovah’s Witnesses are a far
more globalized religious movement. By 1994, 81 percent of Jehovah’s
Witnesses resided outside the United States, and the movement was
growing more rapidly outside the West. Only about half of Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses’ “publishers” were located in the Americas in 2013, compared to
over 80 percent of Mormons.
The Lifting of the Priesthood Ban and Aftermath

The lifting of the priesthood ban in June 1978 by Church President Spen-
cer W. Kimball (1973–1985), as a result of revelation, represents a decisive
moment in the history of Mormonism. But, as historians know all too
well, momentous events in human affairs that appear with dramatic sud-
denness typically reflect the long-term impact of latent forces and wider
developments. Mormon sociologist Armand Mauss has argued quite con-
vincingly that major trends in the 1960s and 1970s were already acting to
limit the impact and implications of the priesthood ban and prepare the
way for the new revelation.61 Most important for our discussion, the lifting
of the ban opened the way for Mormonism to become a truly global phe-
nomenon, not just a movement with adherents in different countries.
The impact was immediate. After 1978, Mormon missionary initia-
tives in previously neglected parts of the non-Western world grew expo-
nentially. In the two-year period of 1978–80, foreign LDS congregations
grew by 32 percent compared to 10 percent in the United States.62 By
1995, LDS Church membership worldwide had more than doubled to
9.4 million (from 4 million in 1979).63 In 1996, Mormons living in the
United States became a minority within the LDS Church for the first time.
By the turn of the century, with tremendous gains in Africa, the Carib-
bean, and South America, Mormonism had begun to look more and more
like the rest of global Christianity. The percentage of Mormons in Latin
America rose from 2 percent in 1960 to 36 percent by 2000.64 In 2012,
more than 71 percent of Mormons outside the United States lived in Latin
America.65 Although its Mormon population is smaller than any other
region, Africa has emerged as “the most rapidly growing region of the
world.”66 By 2020, according to official estimates, “Africa is likely to have
more members than Europe, and Latin America more members than the
United States.”67 In Europe, in particular, Mormon growth looks less and
less promising in the face of aggressive secularism and growing public

animus to public proselytizing.68 In short, as it more closely mirrors global
Christianity, Mormonism is becoming decreasingly white or Anglo-Saxon
and increasingly brown and black in its demographic profile.
Mormonism and the Limitations of Globalization

The overall pattern of Mormon growth is steady rather than exponential.
At the moment of writing, the Church’s official website reports a total
membership of just over 15 million.69 This figure is projected to rise to
26 million in 204070—a little above Stark’s “low” estimate of 22.4 million
but nowhere close to his “high” estimate of 54 million.71 In truth, ques-
tions remain about how LDS membership is calculated and whether such
calculations account for low retention in many parts of the world. Even so,
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is obviously not standing
still. And, on the face of things, Mormonism looks and acts very much like
a globalized faith confident of its prospects. I would suggest, however,
based on the rubric of cultural globalization I outlined earlier, that the
global expansion of Mormonism is marked by major limitations that re-
quire serious attention.
Localization
Undoubtedly, the movement has made tremendous strides in penetrating
the varieties of cultures around the world. The Book of Mormon is fully
translated into seventy-seven languages.72 From the 1980s, temple con-
struction has increased worldwide, in the Pacific, Asia, Europe, Africa,
and South America;73 and these new temples are purposefully “of varying
sizes and designs [to meet] the needs of a worldwide church,” including
facilities for “presenting the endowment in multiple languages.”74 New
stakes have also been created in diverse parts of the world, to serve a grow-
ing membership and to cater for local communities.75 The LDS Church
has also internationalized the welfare program that forms part of its mas-
sive humanitarian enterprise. Family gardens, bishops’ storehouses, and
home storage centers have been established in increasing numbers of
countries in Africa, Asia, and South America.76 It is particularly notewor-
thy that the food in home storage centers is packaged locally and deter-
mined by local tastes and conditions.77 All these developments and more
reflect a movement that takes its worldwide presence very seriously and
maintains an enviable tradition of volunteerism as an integral part of its

organizational ethos.
But Mormonism remains a predominantly “American” phenomenon,
with more than 82 percent of its members located in the Americas (North,
Central, and South). Even more important, the LDS Church lags behind
virtually every other major branch of Christianity in the critical area of en-
culturation (or cultural adaptation) of practices and institutional life in
non-Western societies. This discrepancy is deeply ironic, given that the
global spread of Mormonism owes much to the fact that core aspects of its
belief system resonate with the religious traditions or instincts of indige-
nous cultures around the world. These elements include the centrality of
revelation, dreams, and visions; the strong emphasis on the family unit;
the role of prophets, angels, and temples in religious life; and attentive-
ness to ancestorship.
As Philip Jenkins affirmed in his 2009 Tanner Lecture, Africa pro-
vides a conspicuous example of how this strong religious affinity is belied
by a striking failure of enculturation.78 Mormonism in Africa dates to the
1850s; but for almost a century it remained a predominantly white phe-
nomenon confined to the country of South Africa. The embrace of Mor-
monism by West Africans who, independently of each other, learned of
the LDS faith and established Mormon congregations—ahead of any
Mormon missionary or authority—remains one of the most remarkable
chapters in the annals of Mormonism.79 The spontaneous establishment
and formation of the LDS Church in West Africa through indigenous ini-
tiatives not only attests to the universal appeal of the Mormon message
but also confirms its deep resonance with the African religious heritage.
Yet, as Jenkins contends, “In raw quantitative terms the Mormon experi-
ence in Africa has actually been disappointing.”80 Though Africans will
make up an “ever-increasing share” of the LDS Church, Mormons will
quite likely decline as a proportion of the continent’s overall population.81
Mormonism’s rapid but ultimately relatively modest gains in Africa
compared to other traditions is highlighted by even the most cursory com-
parison with Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 2012, there were a total of 351,452
LDS members in Africa (about 2.4 percent of Mormons worldwide) com-
pared to 1,363,384 “publishers” recorded by Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2013
(17 percent of the global total).82 Clearly, there are complex reasons for this
disparity. But Jenkins argues that the most important is the LDS Church’s
lack of accommodation to African cultures and worship styles. He explains:
“At least since the 1960s, most Euro-American denominations have given
up trying to regulate the conduct of worship services in African churches,

with the result that local customs flourish.” Already manifest in the early
twentieth century, African ingenuity and innovativeness in all areas of
Christian life (from worship and liturgy to social activism) is now in full
bloom. In sharp contrast, “the Mormon [African] experience has . . . in-
volved strikingly few concessions to local tastes or customs.”83
Africa, it must be noted, is home to the fastest growing Christian pop-
ulation and already accounts for 23.6 percent of the world total—up from
1.4 percent in 1900.84 An inbuilt or programmatic resistance to encultura-
tion puts Mormonism out of step with other major Christian traditions
that are flourishing on the African continent and, indeed, with the African
Christian experience itself. The centralized control of form and content
that marks Mormonism means that the Church takes on a decidedly
American image in non-Western contexts at the expense of local creativity
and rootedness. To some extent, this pattern reflects the strong power dif-
ferential between Utah and indigenous communities worldwide. It also
denotes inherent limitations in Mormonism’s capacity to globalize.
From the Middle East to Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, local needs and
priorities vary greatly and require strategic adaptation. The alternative may
well be diminished capacity to flourish or even survive in the long run.85
Global Mormonism, like global Christianity, is confronted by a new future
in which the face of the movement is increasingly non-Western. This
means, among other things, that non-Western experiences, voices, ques-
tions, and priorities will significantly impact its mission, viability, and
prospects. This development inevitably raises questions of doctrinal fidel-
ity. But faithfulness to core doctrine need not come at the expense of au-
thentic representation or diversity of expression. As an interesting case in
point, when spoken (or orally translated) in Cantonese, the word “Mormon”
means “devil’s door.”86 Overcoming this simple linguistic handicap calls
for proactive cultural translation that prioritizes local meaning construc-
tion in the establishment of Asian Mormonism.
Multidirectional Transformation
The global expansion of Mormonism has been accompanied by genuine
efforts to increase the capacity of Mormon communities in other coun-
tries throughout the world; in an effort, as one publication put it, to end
“the ‘colonial’ dependence on Utah” that marked the previous century.87
Missionary training centers have been established in different regions of
the world, and new missions have expanded in non-Western contexts.88

According to one report, over 2,600 Brazilians were serving as missionar-
ies in 2001, some thirty of them in Japan.89 Also, the LDS Seminary and
Institute of Religion program is fully internationalized and established in
eighty-two countries.90 Enrollment outside North America accounts for
almost 50 percent of the total; and course materials have been translated
into fifty-eight languages.91
These are noteworthy internationalization efforts; but while they miti-
gate “colonial dependence on Utah,” they are not free from its imprimatur.
They do not reflect organic or spontaneous initiatives, triggered by contex-
tual factors, with a capacity to foment change in the wider system. The
clearest example, to date, of multidirectional transformation of global
Mormonism is the lifting of the priesthood ban in 1978. At first glance the
revelation (and official pronouncement) that worthy men of all races are
eligible to receive the priesthood bears all the hallmarks of unidirectional
change—it came from the very top, literally! But it is also undeniable that
particular developments and experiences outside the U.S. context, specifi-
cally in Brazil and Africa, had a critical bearing on producing this
outcome.92
In Brazil, LDS missionary efforts shifted from German-speaking im-
migrants to the indigenous Portuguese-speaking population in the late
1930s. The latter had a massive African constituent and extensive racial
mixing; and once the Church made converts, the priesthood ban created
tremendous social problems.93 The temple restriction had a divisive impact
on families and households, and the challenges surrounding proof of line-
age severely hindered the growth of the LDS Church. In 1978, the comple-
tion of the São Paulo temple—the first in Latin America—intensified the
problems involving the implementation of the priesthood ban and temple
restriction. The new temple was expected to serve over 200,000 Latter-day
Saints in South America, many of whom had contributed sacrificially for
the erection of a building to which they were denied access.94 It is also
noteworthy that for more than twenty years, before his call to the Presi-
dency, Spencer W. Kimball frequently visited South America as ecclesiasti-
cal administrator and apostle. Thus, long before he received the new
revelation lifting the priesthood ban, his intimate knowledge of the Church
in Brazil had provided Kimball with a keen sense of the troubling issues
the Church’s racial policy raised in the South American context.
As noted above, for close to a century, Mormonism in Africa was
mainly confined to the white population in South Africa due to the
entrenched view that blacks “were inherently unfit for conversion to the
true faith.”95 The spread of Mormonism among black Africans from the
1950s derived its initial impetus, not from any Mormon missionary, but
from several West Africans who learned of the LDS faith from tracts and
other publications (the earliest incident dates to 1946) and wrote letters to
Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.96 Nigerian Adewole Ogunmokun
of Port Harcourt, for instance, learned of the Mormon Church through an
article in the April 1958 copy of Reader’s Digest given to him by an Ameri-
can acquaintance. Others testified to revelatory dreams and visions of the
LDS Church.97
Confounded by the requests and inquiries from black Africans, Church
leaders in Utah agonizingly procrastinated. The requested literature was
finally sent from Utah in 1959. By 1963, when the decision was made to
officially commence missionary work in West Africa, scores of unauthor-
ized Mormon churches with thousands of members had already been es-
tablished in Nigeria and Ghana.98 But the unprecedented decision to
officially organize LDS branches “in areas where new members could not
function in the priesthood” triggered complex international developments
that intensified pressure for a change in the Church’s policy.99
The decided pressures exerted on the LDS Church’s racial policies by
developments in Brazil and West Africa signify what I have termed multi-
directional transformation. This phenomenon is not simply a matter of
reverse impact; it incorporates elements of reciprocity. If non-Western re-
alities contributed to a historic policy change, the policy change in turn
had profound effect on the growth of Mormonism in non-Western con-
texts. This dynamic is likely to become more common as Mormonism
becomes more globalized. At the very least, in a new global context, the
tensions between diversity and uniqueness of identity must be constantly
negotiated. Mormonism is not a democracy; but the gap between repre-
sentativeness and controlling authority must be constantly attended to in
order to safeguard the integrity of a globalized LDS Church.
Attending to Global Mormonism in the Church

and Academy
In my estimation, the rich possibilities of multidirectional transformation
are evident in at least two areas (one of which speaks directly to the work
of this association): namely, global migrations and academic production.
Global Migrations and the LDS Church

In the three decades spanning 1979 to 2009, the number of international
migrants in the world (people living outside their country of birth) more
than doubled—from just under 100 million to 214 million.100 The vast
majority of these international migrants come from the non-Western
world, and the main destination countries include the European nations
that had been the main source of international migrants in previous cen-
turies. U.N. data confirm that up to 60 percent are to be found in devel-
oped countries. Europe and North America are home to more than half (or
56 percent).101 With over 40 million international migrants, the United
States has the highest of any country—more than the next four (Russian
Federation, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Canada) combined.
Recent data also indicate that Christians constitute nearly half (49 per-
cent) of this international migrant movement.102 This finding is consist-
ent with the fact that a good proportion of international migrants now
come from the new heartlands of Christianity in the non-Western world.
In Europe and America (the two top destinations of international mi-
grants), the high proportion of Christians among the world’s international
migrants is conspicuously absent from the heated immigration debates.
In both contexts, the public discourse on immigration focuses almost ex-
clusively on Muslim immigrants and illegal immigration, respectively. It
is little known that 43 percent of immigrants who originate from outside
the European Union are Christian—compared to 30 percent who are
Muslim.103 In the case of the United States, some 75 percent of these new
immigrants are estimated to be Christian—the highest proportion of any
developed country.104 To put it in crude numerical terms, as many as 30
million Christians have potentially been added to the American popula-
tion in the last few decades.
These developments are transforming the American Christian land-
scape in significant ways,105 notably in the “de-Europeanizing” of Amer-
ican Christianity106—a trend that will undoubtedly accelerate as the
non-white segment of the American population burgeons further. By
2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, non-Hispanic whites will
cease to be a majority, accounting for only 46 percent of the American
population. While there will be no single majority group in the country
as a whole, the majority of Americans will identify themselves as His-
panic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific
Islander.107
This unprecedented cultural shift in the wider population has major

implications for American denominations. For a start, the most dynamic
and fastest growing churches in the United States today are either linked
to immigrant communities (which tend to be self-consciously evangelis-
tic) or incorporate a wide range of racial and cultural groups in their struc-
tures. Some American denominations have been more alive to the new
possibilities than others. In the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Con-
vention (SBC), for instance, ethnic minorities grew from 4 percent of its
membership (in 1990) to 20 percent in 2008.108 Of the 1,458 SBC congre-
gations planted in 2007, half were non-white (i.e., formed by African
Americans and other ethnicities). Former SBC President Paige Patterson
pointedly declared that “the future of the Southern Baptist Convention has
to be a multiracial, multiethnic future, or quite frankly, it has no future.”109
Hardly any denomination in America can claim exemption to this progno-
sis. In a similar vein, Lovett H. Weems Jr. of the United Methodist Church
(UMC)—a church whose United States membership is over 90 percent
white—asserts that “there is no future for the United Methodist Church
in the United States unless it can demonstrate that it can reach more
people, younger people, and more diverse people.”110
The LDS Church in America enjoys steady growth, in part because the
Mormon tradition of large families means that LDS membership tends to
grow faster than the population as a whole.111 But it has ample reasons to
heed dire warnings about the fate of American denominations that remain
out of step with wider demographic shifts. Whites account for 86 percent
of American Mormons compared to 46 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses.112
Only 3 percent of Mormons are black, nearly all of them converts. Hispan-
ics account for 7 percent of all members. The low Hispanic representation
is particularly striking given the fact that 76 percent of American Mor-
mons live in the West where American Hispanics are heavily concen-
trated. Moreover, Mexico—the source country of about a third of America’s
immigrants—has the most Mormons (1.2 million) and the most Mormon
temples (twelve) of any country outside the United States.113 It is hardly
likely that Mexican Mormons are the only Mexican Christians not moving!
Mormonism sits at the center of a vast global web of networks and inter-
connected ministries, reinforced by the thousands of American Mormons
(mainly youths) called to serve as missionaries in countries worldwide for
up to two years—which, incidentally, makes them de facto international
migrants. But there is scant evidence that missionary initiatives flow in the
opposite direction, in part, no doubt, because the Mormon model privileges
American capacity and inhibits spontaneous movement. This pattern pro-

vides further indications that the Church’s structures and outlook are
marked by one-directional movement and influence, a highly detrimental
characteristic in an age when international migration and unprecedented
transnationalism have placed Christian migrant communities at the heart
of extensive missionary efforts that traverse the globe and often generate a
dynamic loop of exchange between immigrant churches in the West and
communities in the homeland.
At home, Mormonism finds itself in the midst of significant demo-
graphic shifts in American society. Its demographic profile (and anecdotal
evidence) suggests that it fails to attract, accommodate, or retain ethnic
minority groups. As such, the fastest growing segments of the American
population are woefully underrepresented in the LDS Church. At a time
when a massive influx of non-white immigrants is transforming many
American churches and denominations, it is intriguing that a movement
with a history of migration and significant global presence appears to be
home to relatively few immigrants; only 7 percent of American Mormons
are foreign-born.114 This broad portrait is clearly at odds with the Mormon
vision of a multiracial, multicultural, universal family. But it is difficult to
imagine a scenario where this picture could change without studious ef-
forts to implement initiatives that facilitate multidirectional transforma-
tion or to create structures that reflect the multiple flows of Christian
missions in the contemporary experience.
Academic Production: Minding the Mormon

History Association
The reshaping of global Christianity has huge implications for Western
theological education, including the need to incorporate global perspec-
tives and fully account for new realities that require new models or con-
ceptual tools. This task remains daunting for most theological programs
and is made even more challenging by the near hegemonic dominance of
Western intellectual traditions and academic production. The need for at-
tentiveness to non-Western models and perspectives has never been
greater; but the structures of economic globalization mean that “theologi-
cal research and publications from Europe are present in African theolog-
ical libraries, but theological research from Africa to a great extent is
absent from African theological libraries.”115 Moreover, as Joel Carpenter
(director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity) attests,
“The ideas and research of Asians and Africans are still treated mainly as
the exotic raw materials with which the Northern intellectual aristocrats
can furnish their ivory towers.”116 It is not uncommon in academic life for
recognition (even celebration) of the new shape of world Christianity to
coexist with obliviousness of its profound implications for theological ed-
ucation or with insufficient awareness that exclusive dependence on West-
ern voices, models, and constructs significantly blunts our capacity to ask
the right questions, to understand new realities, or to tell the whole story.117
Addressing these academic inequities calls for rigorous effort on
both sides at building what Carpenter terms “just and reconciling rela-
tionships.”118 It also calls for candid acknowledgment that no segment of
humanity has all the insights and no particular heritage can tell the full
story. In this regard, the Mormon Historical Association (MHA) has
much work to do.
In my research for this presentation, I was quite struck by the dearth of
non-Western voices—or non-American reflections for that matter—in the
copious publications I waded through. A quick perusal of MHA’s journal
publications (facilitated by online accessibility) confirms that the huge
task of historical interpretation remains firmly in Western hands and that
the discourse wholly flows in one direction. The inescapable conclusion is
that Mormon voices in North America control the flow of ideas and almost
exclusively shape the LDS Church’s narrative.
Thankfully, this state of affairs has not gone unnoticed. In his intro-
duction to Global Mormonism in the 21st Century (2008), Reid Neilson
frankly admits that “coming to terms with the lack of histories written by
local members [around the world] was perhaps the most disheartening
part of the project.”119 This lament is an emphatic acknowledgment that
the absence of indigenous voices (or non-Western perspectives) signifi-
cantly undermines the effort to tell the story of global Mormonism. It be-
hooves the MHA to address this need as a matter of priority and academic
integrity, taking care to distinguish between strategic and symbolic action.
In a truly global conversation, for instance, scholars of Mormonism may
find it much more accurate to refer to Mormon “identities” (plural) as they
consider the degree to which Mormonism in different parts of the world
is partially fashioned from the materials of indigenous culture and shaped
by indigenous instincts or filters.
At least three major undertakings require consideration. First is the need
for rigorous efforts to build a more culturally diverse membership. This as-
sociation brings together some of the best minds in the LDS Church but it
is no poster child of cultural diversity! Second is a strong and sustained em-

phasis on internationalization that seeks active academic collaboration and
partnership between Western and non-Western scholars in conferences,
book publications, and research projects. Linguistic barriers are often the
bane of such efforts; but surely, the LDS Church’s huge language resources
would make a difference. Third is a willingness to evaluate existing curri-
cula with a view to promoting the development of academic programs and
courses that inculcate global perspectives—that is, to incorporate voices,
texts, experiences, and perspectives from different parts of the world.
Any one of these objectives represents a significant long-term chal-
lenge. Taken together they amount to a formidable undertaking. Progress
of any kind calls for determined but dexterous leadership. But there is
room for bridled optimism. Efforts to grapple with the research and study
of the history of Christianity from a global perspective are well underway
with rich and fascinating results.120 The way forward may be daunting, but
the need is no less compelling. Navigating the new and exciting frontiers
of the world Christian movement, including global Mormonism, calls for
multiple lenses and the critical embrace of a multiplicity of voices and
experiences. It also warrants the recognition that, in a body, where mem-
bers “speak approximately 170 different languages as their first language,”
only God knows all His prophets.
Notes
1. The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the
World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010 (Washington, DC: Pew Research
Center, 2012), 9; Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020 (Washington, DC:
Center for the Study of Global Christianity, 2013), 6.
2. Scott M. Thomas, “A Globalized God,” Foreign Affairs 89 (November/December
2010): 94.
3. For a brief analysis, see ibid., 93–101.
4. Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–
2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 8–9; Global Religious Di-
versity: Half of the Most Religiously Diverse Countries Are in Asia-Pacific Region
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014); The Global Religious Landscape;
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, From Times Square to Timbuktu: The Post-
Christian West Meets the Non-Western Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerd-
mans, 2013), 7–27.
5. “World Christianity, 1910–2010,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research
34 (January 2010): 32.
6. Andrew F. Walls, “Scholarship, Mission and Globalisation: Some Reflections

on the Christian Scholarly Vocation in Africa,” Journal of African Christian
Thought 9 (December 2006): 35.
7. The Global Religious Landscape, 10.
8. Patrick J. Johnstone, The Future of the Global Church: History, Trends, and Pos-
sibilities (Colorado Springs, CO: Biblica, 2011), 145.
9. Granberg-Michaelson, From Times Square to Timbuktu, 10. A century earlier, in
1910, Europe and North America had accounted for some 90 percent of the total.
10. Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020, 7.
11. For more on this and the rise of Christianity in Asia, see Granberg-Michaelson,
From Times Square to Timbuktu, 8–9. Johnstone, The Future of the Global Church,
145, also estimates that the evangelical population in China “will probably have
far surpassed that of the U.S. by 2050.”
12. Less well known is the fact that, in the twentieth century, Africa registered the
fastest growth of Catholicism of any continent since the beginning of Christi-
anity. John L. Allen, “Global South Will Shape the Future Catholic Church,”
National Catholic Reporter, October 7, 2005.
13. Todd M. Johnson and Sun Young Chung, “Christianity’s Center of Gravity, AD
33–2100,” in Atlas of Global Christianity, 51.
14. Allen, “Global South Will Shape the Future Catholic Church,” 20.
15. Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “The Church in a Cross-Cultural World,” in Global Mormon-
ism in the 21st Century, ed. Reid Larkin Neilson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University, 2008), 301.
16. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” Review of Religious Research 26
(September 1984): 18–27.
17. Rodney Stark, “Extracting Social Scientific Models from Mormon History,”
Journal of Mormon History 25 (1999): 176. His previous assessment was based
on patterns of Mormon growth in the three decades leading up to 1980. Actual
Mormon membership in 1997, for instance, was 10,070,000, exceeding Stark’s
highest estimate of 9,241,000 by over 700,000.
18. This is not to ignore the complex and long-debated issue of the relationship
between the LDS Church and the Christian tradition. As Knowlton puts it,
“Mormonism claims to be a restoration of the lost early Christianity, while
mainstream Christian groups claim a direct historical relationship to early
Christianity through tradition.” David Clark Knowlton, “Mormonism as a
World Religion,” in Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. W. Paul Reeve
and Ardis E. Parshall (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 360.
19. Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” 18, 19.
20. Peter N. Stearns, Globalization in World History (New York: Routledge, 2009),
Themes in World History, Kindle edition, location 120.
21. Anthony Giddens, The Consequence of Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 64.
22. Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and War-
riors Shaped Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007),
Kindle edition; Manfred B. Steger, ed., Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Kindle edition, vol. 86; David
Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Trans-
formations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 87, 89ff., 327–331.
23. See Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton, Global Transformations, 327.
24. Ibid.
25. Adam Lent, “Globalisation,” Fabian Global Forum, 2002, http://www.
editiondesign.com/fgf/knowledge/article007.html (accessed December 2010).
26. Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton, Global Transformations, 333. See also
Caroline Plüss, “Migration and the Globalization of Religion,” in The Oxford
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. by Peter B. Clarke (New York: Oxford
27. Chanda, Bound Together, 112–113.
28. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), 83.
29. “Global Enterprise,” Newsweek, December 20, 2004, E6.
30. Coca-Cola webpage, http://www.worldofcoca-cola.com/coca-cola-facts/coca-
cola-beverages-and-products/ (accessed April 10, 2014).
31. Dana Robert, “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945,” Interna-
tional Bulletin of Missionary Research 24 (April 2000): 56.
32. Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture
(New York: Orbis Books, 1989), 25, 31.
33. Cf. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in
the Transmission of Faith (New York: Orbis Books, 1996), 29.
34. Ibid., 22.
35. Walls, “Scholarship, Mission and Globalisation,” 35.
36. Joseph Smith, quoted in Robert S. Wood, “‘A Babe upon Its Mother’s Lap’:
Church Development in a Developing World,” in Global Mormonism in the 21st
Century, 66.
37. “Instructions to Twelve Apostles at Nauvoo, Ill. on April 19, 1843,” Book of
Abraham Project, http://www.boap.org/LDS/Parallel/1843/19Apr43.html (ac-
cessed September 2013).
38. The first ocean-going steamship crossed the Atlantic in 1827 in twenty-
eight days.
39. For more, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Looking West: Mormonism and the Pa-
cific World,” Journal of Mormon History 26 (2000): 41–63; see also Davis Bitton
and Thomas G. Alexander, Historical Dictionary of Mormonism, 3rd ed. (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 168.
40. Bitton and Alexander, Historical Dictionary of Mormonism, xvii.
41. The stagecoach journey from San Francisco to New York that had taken six
months and cost $1,000 was reduced to five days and a price of $150. It also
contributed to the founding of new towns and the creation of time zones.
42. Bitton and Alexander, Historical Dictionary of Mormonism, 67.
43. World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1—Carrying the Gospel
to All the Non-Christian World (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1910),
344, 345.
44. Stark, “Extracting Social Scientific Models from Mormon History,” 182. In
2007, Britain had more stakes (284) than the rest of Europe combined. Held,
McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton, Global Transformations, 67–68.
45. In particular, the population in the Pacific island nations of Tonga and Samoa
are 45 and 31 percent Mormon, respectively, the highest of any country in the
world. Samuel M. Otterstrom, “Membership Distribution, 1850–Present,” in
Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, ed. Brandon Plewe, S.
Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson (Provo, UT: BYU
Press, 2012), 174.
46. Keith K. Hilbig, “The Prophet’s Impact on Europe, Then and Now,” in Global
Mormonism in the 21st Century, 59.
47. Newell G. Bringhurst, “Mormonism in Black Africa: Changing Attitudes and
Practices 1830–1981,” Sunstone 6 (May/June 1981), 16–17. Blacks who joined the
LDS Church formed a segregated group and official policy discouraged their
migration to Utah.
48. Nestor Curbelo, The History of the Mormons in Argentina, 1st English ed. (Salt
Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2009), 13–15. By 1900 the Mormon colonies
in northern Mexico mainly comprised polygamous Anglo-Mormon families
(numbering some 5,000) who had crossed the border in the wake of the anti-
bigamy act of 1862 prohibiting polygamy in the United States, which was
strongly intensified by the Edmunds Act (1882) and the even more stringent
Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887). Ibid., 13–16; Bitton and Alexander, Historical Dic-
tionary of Mormonism, xvii, 36ff. A group of LDS missionaries arrived in Chile
in 1851 but the effort was abortive and produced no converts, partly due to the
language barrier and the country’s staunch Roman Catholicism. Curbelo, The
History of the Mormons in Argentina, 3–9.
49. Mormon missions resumed after World War II. See John P. Hoffmann, Japa-
nese Saints: Mormons in the Land of the Rising Sun (New York: Lexington Books,
2007), 13–35.
50. Curbelo, The History of the Mormons in Argentina, 31–55.
51. The call for converts to “gather” to Zion and join the main body of Saints
emerged early in the movement and perhaps reflects the tradition of persecu-
tion and migration that attended its emergence. The doctrine also draws some-
what from the eschatological gathering of Israel alluded to in scripture. The
emphasis on a place, however, meant that Utah took on the aspect of Zion and
was the main focus of gathering until the 1890s. Fred E. Woods, “Gathering to
Zion, 1840–1890,” in Mapping Mormonism, 104; “Gathering of Israel,” in
Robert L. Millet, Camille Fronk Olson, Andrew C. Skinner, and Brent L. Top,
LDS Beliefs: A Doctrinal Reference (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2011),
Kindle edition; Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” 20.
52. Plewe, Brown, Cannon, and Jackson, eds., “The Church in 1950,” in Mapping
Mormonism, 156.
53. Gregory A. Prince, “David O. McKay, 1880–1970,” in Mapping Mormonism, 158.
54. For details on this fascinating but troubling topic, see, among others, Arnold
H. Green, “Gathering and Election: Israelite Descent and Universalism in
Mormon Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History 25 (1999): 195–228; Lester E.
Bush, “Writing ‘Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview (1973)’:
Context and Reflections, 1998,” Journal of Mormon History 25 (1999): 229–271;
Bringhurst, “Mormonism in Black Africa,” 15–21; Armand L. Mauss, “Mormon-
ism and the Negro: Faith, Folklore, and Civil Rights,” Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought 2 (1967): 19–40; Armand L. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pha-
raoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban against Blacks in the
Mormon Church,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14 (1981): 10–45;
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Newsroom, “Race and the
Priesthood,” posted December 2013, https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-
priesthood (accessed May 23, 2014).
55. In the last half of the nineteenth century (1850–1900) close to 5,000 missionar-
ies were sent to Europe—more than half of whom worked in Britain. Hilbig,
“The Prophet’s Impact on Europe, Then and Now,” 60.
56. There is no evidence that Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS Church, ever
denied the priesthood to blacks. On the contrary, Smith not only opposed slav-
ery but a number of black men were ordained to the priesthood during his
lifetime. Although the ban was considered to have authoritative status from
about 1845 to 1978, its origin is today perceived as lacking revelatory status for
at least two reasons: doctrinal authority for the practice is lacking and a strong
case can be made that it was a product of the deep racism in American society
that sanctioned racial segregation and black inferiority or servitude. For an au-
thoritative review, see Mauss, “Mormonism and the Negro,” 19–40; Bush,
“Writing ‘Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview’ (1973),’”
229–271. See also the introduction to “Official Declaration 2,” Doctrine and
Covenants, giving what is now the official position: “During Joseph Smith’s
lifetime, a few black male members of the Church were ordained to the priest-
hood. Early in its history, Church leaders stopped conferring the priesthood on
black males of African descent. Church records offer no clear insights into the
origins of this practice. Church leaders believed that a revelation from God was
needed to alter this practice and prayerfully sought guidance. . . . The [1978]
revelation removed all restrictions with regard to race that once applied to the
priesthood.” https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od?lang=eng (ac-

cessed June 2014).
57. Fijian and Australian aborigines were determined not to be of African ancestry
and were excluded from the ban. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse,”
12ff; Mauss, “Mormonism and the Negro,” 21ff.
58. Among these, a self-supporting lay leadership (neither has paid clergy), a highly
motivated volunteer ethos, emphasis on large families, adherence to strict
moral codes, strong statistical mindedness, a history of achieving their most
significant missionary gains in societies where Christians are dominant, and a
model whereby the LDS Church as a whole putatively functions as a full-fledged
missionary organization. For the comparative assessment, see Rodney Stark,
“Why the Jehovah’s Witnesses Grow So Rapidly: A Theoretical Application,”
Journal of Contemporary Religion 12 (May 1997): 133–157.
59. Ibid., 139. Both movements place great emphasis on statistical accounting of
their membership, although critics (and disgruntled former members) often
question the veracity of these records. It is relevant to note, however, that Jeho-
vah’s Witnesses only count members who maintain high levels of missionary
commitment and Church participation—known as “active publishers.” Stark
contends that for accurate comparisons with other groups the number of “pub-
lishers” must be at least doubled. Ibid., 137ff., 140.
60. By 2012 there were 14.4 million Mormons worldwide, compared to 7,965,954
Jehovah’s Witnesses publishers—or close to 16 million adherents—in 2013.
Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society
of New York, 2014), 44; Deseret News Church Almanac (Salt Lake City, UT: Des-
eret News, 2012).
61. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse,” 10–29.
62. Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” 23.
63. Membership through conversion rose dramatically—from 39 percent in 1950
to 59 percent in 1970 and 80 percent in 1998. See Global Mormonism Project,
http://globalmormonism.byu.edu/?page_id=899 (accessed June 2, 2014). By
2012 there were almost 14.5 million Latter-day Saints in the world, up from 5
million in 1982.
64. Ibid.
65. Otterstrom, “Membership Distribution, 1850–Present,” 174.
66. Ibid., 174.
67. Samuel M. Otterstrom and Brandon S. Plewe, “The Future of the Church,
2010–2040,” in Mapping Mormonism, 203.
68. W. Cole Durham, “The Impact of Secularization on Proselytism in Europe: A
Minority Religion Perspective,” in Global Mormonism in the 21st Century, 114–
133; Otterstrom and Plewe, “The Future of the Church, 2010–2040,” 203.
69. LDS Church Newsroom, “Facts and Statistics,” http://www.mormonnewsroom.
org/facts-and-statistics/ (accessed July 9, 2014).
70. Otterstrom and Plewe, “The Future of the Church, 2010–2040,” 203. Stark,
“Extracting Social Scientific Models from Mormon History,” 178.
71. Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” 23–24; Stark, “Extracting Social Scien-
tific Models from Mormon History,” 176f.
72. Bitton and Alexander, Historical Dictionary of Mormonism, 21.
73. The African temples include Johannesburg (1985), Accra (2004), and Aba, Ni-
geria (2005). Ibid., 2.
74. Richard O. Cowan, “Temples, 1836–Present,” in Mapping Mormonism, 182.
75. By 2011, there were more than 2,900 stakes worldwide. Richard O. Cowan,
“Stakes, 1910–Present,” in ibid., 184.
76. A. Terry Oakes, “Economic Salvation for Our Brothers and Sisters,” in Global
Mormonism in the 21st Century, 164–174.
77. Ibid., 172.
78. Philip Jenkins, “Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth in Africa,” Jour-
nal of Mormon History 35 (Spring 2009): 1–25.
79. For more on the role of African pioneers, see E. Dale LeBaron, “Revelation on
the Priesthood: The Dawning of a New Day in Africa,” in Doctrines for Exalta-
tion, ed. Susan Easton Black (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1989), 129–132;
Bringhurst, “Mormonism in Black Africa,” 15–21; James B. Allen, “Would-Be
Saints: West Africa before the 1978 Priesthood Revelation,” Journal of Mormon
History 17 (1991): 207–247.
80. Jenkins, “Letting Go,” 12.
81. Ibid., 18.
82. Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 46. As noted above, these percentages conceiva-
bly translate into well over 2.5 million African adherents.
83. Jenkins, “Letting Go,” 21–22.
84. Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian
Population (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2011), 9.
85. For an interesting examination of this point, see James A. Toronto, “Challenges
to Establishing the Church in the Middle East,” in Global Mormonism in the 21st
Century, 134–145.
86. Caroline Plüs, “Chinese Participation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints (Mormons) in Hong Kong,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 14
(1999): 73.
87. Plewe, Brown, Cannon, and Jackson, eds., “The Church in 2012,” in Mapping
Mormonism, 172.
88. David F. Boone, “Missionary Work, 1900–Present,” in Mapping Mormon-
ism, 180.
89. Joe J. Christensen, “The Globalization of the Church Educational System,” in
Global Mormonism in the 21st Century, 195f.
90. Ibid., 197.
91. Ibid., 197.
92. See, in particular, Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse,” 10–45; Greg-
ory A. Prince, “David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the Foundation for the
1978 Revelation,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35 (Spring 2002):
145–153.
93. Mark L. Grover, “The Mormon Priesthood Revelation and the São Paulo, Brazil
Temple,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Spring 1990): 39–53; see
also Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse,” 13f.
94. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse,” 25; Curbelo, The History of the
Mormons in Argentina, 172.
95. Bringhurst, “Mormonism in Black Africa,” 16.
96. LeBaron, “Revelation on the Priesthood,” 129–132; Bringhurst, “Mormonism in
Black Africa,” 15–21; Allen, “Would-Be Saints,” 207–247.
97. LeBaron, “Revelation on the Priesthood,” 130; Bringhurst, “Mormonism in
Black Africa,” 214f., 240.
98. Allen, “Would-Be Saints,” 234f., 239f., 245. In Nigeria, men and women walked
great distances on foot—sometimes as far as twenty-five miles—to see and
hear the Mormon missionaries from Utah. Ibid., 221.
99. Ibid., 216.
100. Costanza Giovannelli, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision
(New York: United Nations, 2009). If they all lived in the same place, that place
would be the world’s fifth-largest country.
101. International Migration 2009: Wall Chart (New York: United Nations, 2009).
102. Phillip Connor and Catherine Tucker, “Religion and Migration around the
Globe: Introducing the Global Religion and Migration Database,” International
Migration Review 45 (2011): 994. Muslims constitute the second largest reli-
gious group of migrants (27 percent).
103. Faith on the Move: The Religious Affiliation of International Migrants (Washing-
ton, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012), 54. See also Joanne Appleton, “Beyond
the Stereotypes: The Realities of Migration in Europe Today,” Vista 10 (2012),
http://europeanmission.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/vista-issue-10-jul-2012.
pdf (accessed January 2013). When the entire foreign-born population is
counted (regardless of origin) the percentage of Christians is much higher: 56
percent of all immigrants in the European Union identify themselves as Chris-
tian, more than twice the number who say they are Muslim (27 percent). An
earlier (2003) study found that almost half (48.5 percent) of the estimated 24
million migrants in the European Union were Christian or “belonged to Chris-
tian churches.” Darrell Jackson and Alessia Passarelli, Mapping Migration:
Mapping Churches’ Response (Brussels, Belgium: World Council of Churches,
2008), 29.
104. Connor and Tucker, “Religion and Migration around the Globe,” 11f.
105. For a more extensive discussion, see Jehu J. Hanciles, Beyond Christendom:
Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 229–249, 276–302; also Granberg-Michaelson, From

Times Square to Timbuktu, 79–95.
106. Cf. Fenggang Yang and Helen Ebaugh, “Transformations in New Immigrant
Religions and Their Global Implications,” American Sociological Review 66
(April 2001), 271; R. Stephen Warner, “Coming to America,” Christian Century,
February 10, 2004, 23; Helen R. Ebaugh and Janet S. Chafetz, Religion and the
New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (New
York: AltaMira Press, 2000), 14.
107. Michael Cooper, “Census Officials, Citing Increasing Diversity, Say U.S. Will
Be a ‘Plurality Nation,’” New York Times, December 12, 2012, http://www.
nytimes.com/2012/12/13/us/us-will-have-no-ethnic-majority-census-finds.
html?_r=0 (accessed March 2013).
108. Matthew Soerens and Jenny Hwang, Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compas-
sion, and Truth in the Immigration Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books,
2009), Kindle editon, locations 1797–1800.
109. Ibid., Kindle locations 1799–1800.
110. Barbara Dunlap-Berg, “UMC Membership Reaches 12 Million Worldwide,” Church
Exclusive (2012), http://churchexecutive.com/archives/umc-membership-reaches-
12-million-worldwide (accessed April 2013).
111. Otterstrom and Plewe, “The Future of the Church, 2010–2040,” 203. Stark,
“The Rise of a New World Faith,” 22, even suggested that Mormon “fertility is
sufficiently high to offset both mortality and defection.”
112. A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S. (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center,
2009), 5.
113. Plewe, Brown, Cannon, and Jackson, eds., “The Church in 2012,” 172. It is,
however, fair to add that Mexico is among the most Catholic countries in Latin
America and that more Mexicans described themselves as Catholic (74 percent)
than any other Hispanic group. See Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transfor-
mation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2007), 14.
114. A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S., 5. By contrast, the majority of self-identified
Jehovah’s Witnesses in America are non-Hispanic white—i.e., mainly Africans,
Latinos, and Asians.
115. Dietrich Warner, “Theological Education in the Changing Context of World
Christianity—an Unfinished Agenda,” in Board of the Foundation for Theological
Education for South East Asia (Philadelphia: FTESEA, 2010).
116. Joel Carpenter, “The Christian Scholar in an Age of World Christianity,” in
Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual
Community, ed. Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Academic, 2006), 81.
117. Andrew Walls’s examination of the specific implications for church (or Chris-
tian) history makes for compelling reading. See Andrew F. Walls, “Eusebius
Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History,” International Bulletin
of Missionary Research 24 (July 2000): 105–111. For my own modest contribu-

tions, see Jehu J. Hanciles, “New Wine in Old Wineskins: Critical Reflections
on Writing and Teaching a Global Christian History,” Missiology: An Interna-
tional Review 35 (July 2006): 361–382; and “The Future of Missiology as a Dis-
cipline: A View from the Non-Western World,” Missiology: An International
Review 42 (April 1, 2014): 121–138.
118. Carpenter, “The Christian Scholar in an Age of World Christianity,” 81.
119. Reid L. Neilson, “Introduction: A Recommissioning of Latter-day Saint Histo-
rians,” in Global Mormonism in the 21st Century, xiv.
120. See, among others, Wilbert R. Shenk, Enlarging the Story: Perspectives on Writ-
ing World Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002); Dana L.
Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Clouds of Wit-
nesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books,
2011); Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden
Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died (New
York: HarperOne, 2008).
Index
Note: The locators followed by the letter ‘n’ refer to notes.
Aberdeen, Lord (British foreign late start of Mormonism in, 343,

secretary), 273n12 345–46
abolition of slavery. See slavery and mainstream nature of Mormonism
abolition of slavery in, 338–39
Abu Kissi, Emmanuel, 339, 346 marginal presence of Mormonism in,
academic world 339, 344–50, 351n12, 364–65
apocalyptic future and historical megatrends in religious history of,
future, categories for studying, 333–36
56 Old Testament resonance and
Canada, failure to study Mormons in, interest in temple, 337–38
301–4 plural marriage in, 334, 346–47
freethinkers and modern academic priesthood ban and, 340, 345, 366–67
theory on secularism, 125n8 prophetic and visionary experience
globalization of Mormonism and in, 336–38
academic production, 370–72 relationships between Christian
museums, libraries, and archives, denominations in, 349–50
historical interpretation at, 211, theological research from, 370–71
286–91 African Americans. See also priesthood
Africa, 296–97, 330–50. See also ban; slavery and abolition of
specific countries slavery; Turner, Nat
ancestors, devotion to, 338, 342, 343 American Indians associated with, 151
Christian growth in, 331–33 Nation of Islam, as apocalyptic
enculturation of cultures and worship movement, 76n43
styles in, 336–38, 346–49, 350, Peace Mission Movement and
365 George Baker, 68
eschatology in, 72 agency. See also women and agency
healing and religion in, 336–37 admirability of actions and, 92–93
history of Mormonism in, 340–44, in apocalyptic and historical future,
366–67 64–65
384 Index
agency (continued) Mormon relationships with and

cultural and structural constraints attitudes toward, 148–50
on, 95–96 Navajo cultural landscape, 215
defined, 101n32 positive response to Mormon
degrees of, 94–95 proselytization viewed as sign of
as historical concept, 86–87 end times, 62, 74–75n22
intentionality of actions and, 93 American individualism, 43
new model for, 91–97 American Library Association, 290
relationality and sociality of, 93–94 American religious landscape, 1–2, 7–12
structure and, 95–97 freethinkers, 4, 7, 11, 105–24 (See also
within as well as against structures, freethinkers)
96–97 future, concerns about and interest
Ahlstrom, Sidney, 156 in, 4, 7, 9–10, 55–72 (See also
Religious History of the American apocalyptic future and historical
People, 330 future)
Aladura movement in Africa, 336 prophets and prophecy, 4, 7, 8–9,
Alaska Purchase, 254, 262–63 34–51 (See also prophets and
Alberta, Canada, 261, 296, 301–5, 322 prophecy)
Alexander, Thomas G., 187n35 in Upstate New York, 4, 7–8, 13–28
Alexander II (czar), 262, 263 (See also Upstate New York
Allen, James B., 38, 268, 278 (1790–1835), religious culture in)
Allen, John, 332, 354 women’s agency and, 3, 7, 10–11,
Allred, Elizabeth, 228–29 79–98 (See also women and
Allred, James, 228–29 agency)
Allred, William Moore, 176 American revolution’s religious
‘am, 139, 140, 143, 156 settlement and Mormon
Ambrister and Arbuthnot, executions identity, 138, 157
of, 266 American Samoa (See also Samoa)
American founding narrative, Mormon population of,
Mormonism attempting to U.S. acquisition of, 263
provide, 2 American territorial expansion, 210–11,
American Indians. See also specific tribes 253–71
American territorial expansion and, Alaska Purchase and offshore
255, 259–61, 266 empire, 254, 262–67
in Canada, 311 ambiguities of Mormon history and,
as descendants of Lamanites, 130, 253–54, 267
261 American Indians and, 255, 259–61,
dual terminology of Lamanites and 266
Indians, 148–50 continental empire, 254–61
Handsome Lake, as prophet, 40 global empire, globalization, and
historical artifacts and documents, 20th-century wars, 210–11, 254,
debates over, 211, 287–90 267–70
Index 385
Mormon Battalion in Mexican- Peace Mission Movement and, 68

American War, 210, 256–59 plasticity of eschatological texts and
Mormon disagreement over, 266, their interpretation, 70
267–68, 269–70 in previous historical apocalyptic
overall pattern or outline of, 254–55 traditions, 57–58
settlement and occupation of land, 261 prophets in 1830s America and, 41,
J. Smith on, 210, 254, 255–56, 264 42, 56
State of Deseret and Utah Territory, Revelation (biblical book), topics
259 raised by, 55
Anabaptists, 189 C. T. Russell and Jehovah’s Witnesses
ancestors, African devotion to, 338, on, 67–68
342, 343 scholarly categories for studying,
Anderson, Edward H., 82 56
Angell, Polly, 97 Second Coming of Christ in, 62–64,
Angell, Truman O., Sr., 226 66
Anglicans. See Episcopalians/ Seventh-day Adventists on, 67
Anglicans Shaker view of, 56, 65–66
Angola, Mormonism in, 343 spiritual benefits of eschatological
Anthony, Susan B., 85, 88 vision, 65–66
anxious bench, 224 Nat Turner and, 35–36, 42
Apache, 287 The Apostle (film), 188
apocalyptic future and historical Arapahoe (American Indians), 151
future, 4, 7, 9–10, 55–72 Arbuthnot and Ambrister, executions
agency, critical role of, 64–65 of, 266
changes in Mormonism between archives, museums, and libraries,
1890 and 1908 and, 266 historical interpretation at, 211,
in contemporary Mormonism, 70–72 286–91
definitions pertinent to, 58–59 Arjomand, Saïd Amir, 57
final judgment, 64 Arndt, Karl R., 52n9
in historical Mormonism, 59–65 Arrington, Leonard J., xv, 100n28, 183,
human desire to know future and 205n19, 206n28, 258
be allied with forces of virtue, The Mormon Experience (with Davis
69–70 Bitton), 85
interest of American religious groups Articles of Faith, 62, 75n23
in, 56, 58 Ashman, James, 114
Millennium, 63–64 Asia. See also specific countries
Millerites on, 63, 66–67 Christianity in, 354
for New Religious Movements in missions to, 360
modern era, 68–69 theological research from, 371
opposition and difficult times, “Asiatic sensibility” attributed to
eschatology as way of dealing Mormons, 209, 244–46
with, 65–66, 68–69 Assemblies of God, 344
386 Index
Association of College and Research Beecher, Henry Ward, 191, 192

Libraries, 290 Beecher, Lyman, 191–92
atheism, 19th-century attitudes toward, Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach, 84
105–6 Beecher, Thomas, 192
Austin, Stephen, 211, 282 Belzil, R. P., 313–14
To the Settlers in Austins Settlement, Bench, Curt, 278
282 Benedict, Joel T., 23, 25
Translation of the Laws, Orders, and Benjamin, Asher, American Builder’s
Contracts on Colonization, 282 Companion, 226
Australian aborigines, excluded from Bennett, D. M., 11, 106, 108, 112–17,
priesthood ban, 377n57 125–26n20
The Gods and Religions of Ancient and
Babbitt, Almon W., 280 Modern Times, 113
Babbitt, Lysander W., 280, 286 The Truth Seeker Around the World,
Bagley, Will, 151 114
Baker, George (Father/Reverend Bennett, Richard, 304–5
Divine), 68 Benson, Ezra Taft, 124, 147–48
Bakker, Jay, Son of a Preacher Man, 188 Bernhisel, John, 260
Ballard, M. Russell, 72 Beveridge, Albert, 265
Ballard, Margaret, 180 Bible. See also Israel, Mormon
Balmer, Randall, ix–x, xvii, 4–5, 131–32 identification with biblical
baptism nation of
of the dead, 50, 338 Africa, Old Testament resonance in,
prophetic identity and, 35, 37, 41, 42, 337–38
49–50 freethinkers on, 111, 118
Puritans and Halfway Covenant, 190 generational transmission of faith
Baptists crises in, 189
in Canada, 306, 307 on historical future, 60
Congregational Separatists and, 16 James, Epistle of, 8, 37
dreams and visions in Upstate New “peculiar people,” Mormon
York, responses to, 19, 20 identification as (Deuteronomy
ethnic minorities as, 369 14:2 and 26:18), 129, 130, 132,
freethinkers and, 114, 119 135–38, 153, 156, 158n5
in Upstate New York, 13, 17, 18, 19, plural marriage in, 118
20, 22, 23, 24, 25 on Second Coming of Christ, 62
Barlow, Philip, 141 theological definition of peoples in,
bastides, 221 138–42
Beadle, J. H., 136 Big Elk (Omaha), 151
Bean, George Washington, 180, Bigler, Henry, 238, 247
186n16 bilateral tripartite symmetry in
Beecher, Catharine, 87 vernacular architecture, 216
Beecher, Catherine, 191, 192 bishops’ storehouses, 220
Index 387
Bitton, Davis, and Leonard J. Brady, John Green, 284

Arrington, The Mormon Branch Davidians and David Koresh, 2,
Experience, 85 40, 68–69
black men as priests, ban on/acceptance Brannan, Sam, 237–38, 243, 272n10
of. See priesthood ban Brantley, Etheldred T., 35
blacks. See Africa; African Americans Brazil, Mormonism in, 366
Blaine, James G., 262 Brekus, Catherine A., x, xvii, 3, 10–11,
Blavatsky, Madame, 114 79
Bleeding Kansas, 238, 239, 240, 284 Brewsterites, 285
blessings, patriarchal, 139, 148, 152, Brigham Young Academy, Provo
162n39 (Utah), 200
Bloom, Harold, 53n20 Brigham Young University (BYU),
Blue-Grass Blade, 106 264, 268
Boer War, 340 Brimhall, George H., 268
Bolkhovitinov, Nikolay, 262 Britain
Bolton, Matthew, 351n13 California during Mexican-American
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 255 War and, 257, 272n10
Book of Mormon Oregon, U.S. acquisition of, 255,
on apocalyptic and historical futures, 273n12
60, 70 Oxford/Tractarian movement
female characters, paucity of, 96 compared to Mormonism, 283
foreign policy issues and, 270 Brodhead, Richard H., x, xvii, 4, 8–9,
intended audience of, 159n15 11, 34
origin narrative of, 27, 38 Brook Farm, 283
as precedent to Second Coming, 61 Brown, Craig J., 166–67n83
publication (in 1830), 39 Brown, John, 43, 53n15, 239
on Second Coming of Christ, 62–63 brush arbors, 224, 233–34n33
Smith placed in biblical prophetic Buchanan, James, 238–39, 240, 241,
by, 47 262
theological definition of peoples in, Buddhism, 309, 355
142–47 Buhl, Mari Jo, Teresa Murphy, and Jane
translation of, 36–37, 48 Gerhard, Women and the Making
vernacular translations of, 281, 340, of America, 85
342, 360, 363 Burns, Tom R., 94, 103n58
borderlands perspective on Mormon Bush, Alfred, 278
studies in Canada, 303 Bushman, Claudia Lauper, xv–xvi, 269
The Boston Investigator, 118 Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah
Bouchard, Gerard, 319 (ed.), 84
Bourdieu, Pierre, 227 Bushman, Richard Lyman, x, xv–xvi,
Bowden, Henry Warden, xvi xviii, 63, 65, 95–96
Bowen, Barbara, 180 Bushnell, Horace, Christian Nurture,
Bradlaugh, Charles, 107 192
388 Index
Butler, John Lowe, 152 Canadian Constitution, 310, 311, 312,

Butler, Jon, 167n90 313, 315
Butler, Judith, 102–3n50 Cannon, George Q., 107, 115, 120, 264
Cape Verde, Mormonism in, 343
Calgary (Canada) temple, 305 Capron, Joseph, 135, 158n2
California Card, Brigham Y., et al., The Mormon
Chinese immigration to, 209, Presence in Canada, 301, 303, 304
244–46 Cardston, Alberta (Canada), and
connections between Utah and, Cardston temple, 303, 305, 322
242–43 Caribbean. See Latin America and
health and convalescence, association Caribbean; specific countries and
with, 247–50 geographic locations
Mormon migration to, 257–58, Carpenter, Joel, 370–71
272n10 Carter, Sarah, The Importance of Being
U.S. acquisition of, 257, 266 Monogamous, 303
utopian communities in, 283 Carter, Thomas, 219, 232n16
Camp Grant Massacre, 287 Cartier, Georges Étienne, 310–11
camp meetings, 223–24, 233–34n33 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism
Camp of Israel, 150, 151 celestial marriage
Campbell, Alexander, 2 defined, 99n15
Canada, 295–96, 301–23 women’s agency and, 82
borderlands perspective on Mormon Chapman, Henry, 17
studies in, 303 Charest, Jean, 318, 319
Charter of Rights and Freedoms Cherubim and Seraphim Society
(1982), 310, 312–14, 315 (Africa), 336–37, 339
Constitution, 310, 311, 312, 313, 315 Chesterfield, Earl of, Letters, 106
contemporary LDS church in, 320–23 Chibwe, Bunda C., 339
plural marriage in, 303 Child, Sheldon F., 351n12
reasonable accommodation of children, Mormon. See Mormon
religion in, 315–20 children
religious landscape since 1945, Chile, Mormons in, 375n48
304–6 China, Christianity in, 354, 373n11
scholarly failure to study Mormons Chinese Exclusion Acts, 246
in, 301–4 Chinese immigration to California,
as secular or post-Christian, 296, 209, 244–46
310–20 chosen people, Mormons as. See Israel,
J. Smith on American acquisition of, Mormon identification with
256, 259 biblical nation of
Western, religious, and social history Chretien, Jean, 316
of, 301–4 Christ. See Jesus
Canadian Association of Research Christ Apostolic Church (Africa),
Libraries, 290 336–37
Index 389
Christian Scientists, 302 Colton, George, 23, 26

Christy, Howard, 261 Columbus, Christopher, 40, 286
Church of England. See Episcopalians/ communal societies, Mormons
Anglicans compared to, 283–84. See
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day also specific communities, e.g.
Saints. See Mormonism Harmony Society
Church of the Lord, Aladura (Africa), communism, Mormon opposition to,
336–37 269
circumcision, practice of, 117 Community of Christ (formerly
Civil War, Mormonism, and American Reorganized Church of Jesus
West, 208–10, 236–51 Christ of Latter Day Saints)
Chinese immigration to U.S., in Africa, 339
Mormons compared to, 209, division of Mormon community and,
244–46 285
contemporary links made between, led by sons of J. Smith, 193–94
209 origins of, 28
health, disease, and convalescence, in Third World areas, 351n13
American concern with, 209–10, women’s agency and, 86, 96, 104n68
246–50 comparative analysis, 4, 7, 331
Mormoniad (anonymous poem, Compromise of 1850, 238, 244
1858), 241 Compton, Todd, 205–6n23
B. M. Palmer on, 209, 241–46 Comstock, Anthony, 107, 113
postwar Western history, 248–50 Comstock Act (1873), 106–7
scholarly tendency of Western Confucianism, in Canada, 309
historians to ignore religion and Congo, Democratic Republic of,
Civil War, 236–40 Mormonism in, 343
J. Smith’s prophecy of Civil War, 178 Congo, Republic of, Mormonism in,
Utah War and, 238–39, 240–41, 243, 343
245–46, 248 Congregationalism
Clark, J. Reuben, Jr., and Clark American Christians separating
Memorandum, 268–69 from, 8, 15–16
Clark, Lucy Ashby, 92 Beecher family, generational
Clawson, Margaret Gay Judd, 81 transmission of faith by, 191–92
Clay, Henry, 256 dreams and visions, responses to,
Clay County (Missouri), 178, 182 18
Clayton, William, 150 frontier settlements and, 16, 17,
Clermont Phalanx, 283 20–21
Cluff, Benjamin, Jr., 264 United Church of Canada and,
Coburn, Emily, 82 325n29
Cohen, Charles L., x–xi, xvii, 3, 129–31, in Upstate New York, 13, 20–21,
132, 135 23–24, 24–25, 26–28
Colfax, Schuyler, 247 Conkin, Paul, 28
390 Index
Conrad, Marinda H. Y. (daughter of B. cultural landscape, Mormon. See

Young), 206n28 Mormon cultural landscape
Constitutions. See also U.S. Cummings, Horace, 181
Constitution Cutler, Alpheus, 162n43
Canadian Constitution, 310, 311, 312,
313, 315 Danish West Indies (later U.S. Virgin
The Constitution of the State of Deseret Islands), 265
(B. Young), 282 Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 81
state constitutional bars against Daughters of Zion, 84
nonbelievers, 107 David and Absalom, 189
Utah Constitution, female suffrage Davies, Douglas, 82
in, 83 Davis, Inez Smith, 84, 99n20
convalescence. See health, disease, and Dawes Act, 261
convalescence dead, baptism of, 50, 338
Coolidge, Calvin, 268 Decatur (New York), 23
Copernicus, Nikolaus, 45, 47 Decker, Vilate Y. (daughter of B.
Côte d’Ivoire, Mormonism in, 343 Young), 206n28
Council Bluffs (formerly Kanesville, deists and deism, 13, 23, 108, 109
Iowa), 148, 150, 280 Democratic Party, 240, 262, 280
The Council Bluffs Bugle, 280, 286 Democratic Republic of Congo,
counter-culture and Mormons, 269, Mormonism in, 343
284 Derr, Jill Mulvay, 84
Cowdery, Oliver Deseret, 148, 156, 178, 215, 242, 259,
on American Indians, 151 282, 284
institution of church and ordination Deseret Evening News, 264–65
as elder, 137 The Deseret News, 112, 204, 263–64,
prophecy and, 37, 49–50, 54n22 265–66, 267
in B. H. Roberts’ History, 82 Deverell, William, xi, xvii, 3, 208–10,
Cox, Caroline, 97 211, 236
Cox, Harvey, 335 Dialogue, 269–70, 304
Cox, Martha Cragun, 81 Dickson, Brian, 313, 314, 315
Crawley, Peter, 278, 279 Dietz, Thomas, 94, 103n58
Creek Indians, Jackson’s destruction Disciples of Christ, 27
of, 255, 266 disease. See health, disease, and
The Crescent City Oracle, 280, 285–86 convalescence
Crescent/Crescent City (Iowa), 280 dissident Mormon-related groups, 28
Critchlow, Benjamin, 175–76 Divine, Father/Reverend (George
Crosby, Caroline Barnes, 97 Baker), 68
Cuba, U.S. occupation of, 263, 264, 266 Doctrine and Covenants
cult, Mormonism interpreted as, 2 on apocalyptic and historical future,
cultural and structural constraints on 60, 62, 63, 64
agency, 95–96 foreign policy issues and, 270
Index 391
Dominican Republic, U.S. Marines in, Ellsworth, Elizabeth Y. (daughter of B.

266 Young), 206n28
Douglas, Stephen A., 240, 244 Emberley, Peter, 321–22
Doukhobors, 302 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 8–9,
Dowie, J. A., 345 43–51
Draper, Larry, 278 broadening and democratizing
Draper, Richard D., The Savior’s prophetic identity, 43–45
Prophecies: From the Fall of compared to Joseph Smith, 46–50,
Jerusalem to the Second Coming, 53n20
71–72 “Divinity School Address,” 43–45,
Draper, William, 152 50, 51
dreams, visions, and signs individualism in America and, 43
in Africa, 336–38 influence of, 45–46
First Vision of Joseph Smith, 321 mentalization of prophetic claims by,
of Mrs. Hubble, 47–48 47–48, 50–51
of Joseph Smith, 37–38, 47, 49–50, on sacraments and ministry, 48–49
75n29, 170, 321 “Self-Reliance,” 44–45
of Nat Turner, 34–38 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 92, 101n32,
in Upstate New York, 14, 17–20, 23 102n49
Duvall, Robert, 188 England. See Britain
Dylks, Joseph, 40 England, Eugene, 269–70
Enlightenment
Eastern Orthodox Church in Africa, agency, defining, 93
332, 339, 344 Asian culture and, 244
Eccles, Mariner, 268 freethinking and, 105, 106, 108, 110,
Echo Canyon War, 81 114, 118, 120
Economy (Penn.), 40, 41 religious toleration as principle of,
Edmonton (Canada) temple, 305 106
Edmunds, George, 107 revolutionary settlement of religion
Edmunds Act (1882), 375n48 and, 138
Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887), 106, 107, Ensign, Martin Luther, 179
266, 375n48 Ephraim (Utah), 229
education and subcultural Ephraim Pioneer Cemetery, 229
construction, 196–97, 200 Episcopalians/Anglicans
Edwards, Jonathan, 58, 192, 211, 283 in Africa, 333, 345, 346, 349
Notes on the Apocalypse, 55, 56 in Canada, 306, 307
EECMY (Ethiopian Evangelical Church globalization of, 354
Mekane Yesus), 332 in Upstate New York, 13, 19, 23, 24
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 124 Alfales Young marrying into, 204
Eka, David William, 346 Erickson, Dan, 71
election. See gathering and election eschatological future. See apocalyptic
Elijah (biblical prophet), 41, 47, 61–62 future and historical future
392 Index
Ethiopia Fijians, excluded from priesthood ban,

ancient Christianity and Old 377n57
Testament in, 338 Finney, Charles Grandison, 192, 224
Meserete Kristos Church in, 332–33 First Amendment, early Mormon
Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane commitment to, 126n22
Yesus (EECMY), 332 First Great Awakening, Upstate New
ethnic group, Mormons classified as, York’s legacy from, 7, 14–16,
155 17, 22
ethnic/racial issues. See African Flake, Chad, 278
Americans; globalization of Flake, Kathleen, 266
Mormonism; priesthood ban Fluhman, J. Spencer, “A Peculiar
evangelicals People”: Anti-Mormonism and the
in Africa, 332 Making of Religion in Nineteenth-
in Canada, 307–8, 312, 318, 328n69 Century America, 107–8, 110
in China, 373n11 folk landscape, 219–20
cult, characterization of Mormonism Folsom, William H., 226
as, 2 Foote, Roxana, 191
on eschatological and historical Fourierists, 225
futures, 58 Franklin, Benjamin, 255, 259, 267
freethinking and, 109, 116, 118 Free Love Association, 113
generational transmission of faith by, freedom, religious. See religious
189, 191, 192, 193, 196–97 toleration and religious freedom
global percentages of, 354 freethinkers, 4, 7, 11, 105–24
identity formation and, 132 D. M. Bennett, in Utah, 11, 106, 108,
Mormon cultural landscape and, 112–17, 125–26n20
207–8, 223, 224, 225 on Bible, 111
in Upstate New York, 15–17, 21–22 differences from and commonalities
with Mormons, 105–7, 123–24
faith, generational transmission of. See W. Heston’s cartoons, 11, 108, 118–22,
generational transmission of faith 127–28n35
Fales, Susan L., 278 R. Ingersoll’s engagement with
Falun Gong, 40 Mormonism, 11, 107, 108–12
Far West (Missouri), 177, 178 linked to Mormons in 19th-century
The Farmer’s Oracle, 280–81 Protestant imagination, 107–8, 122
Farmington (Utah), 112, 115, 118 E. M. Macdonald’s editorial practices,
Faulk, Andrew J., 284 117–18, 120, 122
female agency. See women and agency modern academic theory on
Female Antislavery Society, 92 secularism and, 125n8
Female Relief Society. See Relief on plural marriage, 11, 110–12, 115,
Society 118–22, 127–28n35
Ferguson, Louisa Y. (daughter of B. S. Putnam’s lectures in Utah, 122–23,
Young), 206n28 128n36
Index 393
rationalists, in Upstate New York, plural marriage and, 201,

22, 23 205n17
religious toleration and, 110, 116, 117, by Puritans, evangelicals, and
119 Congregationalists in America,
C. B. Reynolds, and Reynolds 189–93
decision, 106, 109, 121 safety of subculture and exposure to
Freethought Ideal, 128n35 outside world, 196–200
Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus, 191 J. Smith, descendants of, 193–94
Froiseth, Jennie Anderson, 79 B. Young, descendants of, 132, 188,
Women of Mormonism, or The Story of 194–96, 197–204
Polygamy As Told by the Victims Gentiles, 130, 142, 146–47, 152–53,
Themselves, 85 284–85
The Frontier Guardian, 280 geography. See Mormon cultural
future. See apocalyptic future and landscape
historical future Gerhard, Jane, Mari Jo Buhl, and
Teresa Murphy, Women and the
Gadsden purchase, 255 Making of America, 85
Gager, John G., xvi Ghana
Gaiwiio or Code of Handsome Lake, importance of prophecy in, 339
40 Mormonism in, 341, 342–43, 351n12,
Galileo, Galilei, 45, 47 367
Garrison, William Lloyd, 42, 43 Giddens, Anthony, 104
gathering and election Gifford, Samuel, 176, 182
globalization of Mormonism and, gifts of the Spirit. See also dreams,
361, 375–76n51 visions, and signs; prophets and
as prophetic activity in 1830s prophecy
America, 41 direct practice of, 27–28
Gaustad, Edwin S., xvi, 156 lay desire to experience, 23
The Religious History of America (with Gileadites, 53n15
L. Schmidt), 85 Giles, Charles, 18
Geary, John White, 284 Gilkey, Langdon, xvi
“General Smith’s Views of the Powers Givens, Terryl L., 89, 107
and Policy of the Government of Glanz, Rudolf, 163–64n61, 165–66n78
the United States,” 254, 256, 271 Glassie, Henry, 216, 218
generational transmission of faith, 4–5, globalization of Mormonism, 5,
131–32, 188–204 295–99, 353–72. See also
as common problem in religious Africa; Asia; Canada; Latin
traditions, 188–89 America and Caribbean;
conversion, expectations regarding, localization; multidirectional
192–93 transformation; specific countries
M. Hancock’s childhood memories and geographic locations
and, 177–78 academic production and, 370–72
394 Index
globalization (continued) Halfway Covenant, 190

American territorial expansion and, Halifax (Canada) temple, 305
210–11, 254, 267–70 Hamblin, Jacob, 150
Christianity, global transformation Hanciles, Jehu J., xi, xvii, 5, 297–99,
of, 353–55 353
concept of globalization, 356–59 Hancock, Mosiah, 151, 177–78, 182
history of, 359–63 Handsome Lake, 40
identity formation and, 133 Hansen, Klaus, 157, 256, 266–67
international migration and racial/ Harman, Lilian, 121
ethnic representation, 368–70 Harman, Moses, 106, 121
limitations on, 363–67 Harmon, Ellen, 67
priesthood ban and, 361–63, 366–67 Harmony Society, 40–41, 52n9, 208,
relationships between Christian 220, 221, 225, 283
denominations and, 349–50 Harper’s Ferry, 43, 53n15, 239
standardization of worship affecting, Harriott, John, 22
321, 347–49, 365 Harris, Martin, 37
Goff, Philip, 236 Harrison, John F., xvi
golden plates, 36 Harven, Bro., 176
Goodson, Stephanie Smith, 88 Hasidim, 189
Gorchakov, Prince Alexsandr Hatch, Nathan O., xvi
Mikhailovich, 262 Haven, Jesse, 340
Gordon, Sally, 250 Hawaii, American acquisition of,
Gosiutes (American Indians), 260 263–64
Goss, Edmund, Father and Son, 188 Hays, Sharon, 87
Gott, J. W., 121 health, disease, and convalescence
gôyim, 139–40 in Africa, 336–37
Grant, Heber J., 268, 269 American concern with, 209–10,
Grant, Jedediah M., 148 246–50
Graves, William, 17 mental instability of youngest son of
Gray, Thomas Ruffin, 34, 37, 38 J. Smith, 204n14
Great Basin, landscape of. See Mormon Heston, Watson, 11, 108, 118–22,
cultural landscape 127–28n35
Great Britain. See Britain Heward, Elizabeth Terry, 94
Great Depression, 68 Heyward, Ezra, 106, 113
the Great Disappointment, 66–67 Cupid’s Yokes, 113
Green, Arnold, 148, 153 Hickman, “Wild Bill,” 136
Grow, Matthew J., ix, 129, 207 Higbee, Francis, 177
Grunder, Rick, 278 Higgins, David, 25–26
Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 255 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 42,
127n35
Haiti, U.S. Marines in, 266, 269 Hildegard of Bingen, 57
Hale, Alma, 179 Hill, Marvin, 157
Index 395
Hillam, Ray, 270 of modern Mormons, 133

Hinckley, Gordon B., 72, 347 of Mormon children, 4, 131, 170–84
Hinduism, in Canada, 309, 315 (See also Mormon children)
Hinton, Richard, 53n15 non-Mormon and Mormon culture,
historical future. See apocalyptic future distinctiveness of, 284–85
and historical future opposition and difficulty affecting,
Holbrook, Joseph, 149 130, 147, 152–53
Holy City (California), 283 “peculiar people,” Mormon
Hoover, Herbert, 268 identification as (Deuteronomy
Hopedale Community, 283 14:2 and 26:18), 129, 130, 132,
Hopkins, Samuel, Treatise on the 135–38, 153, 156, 158n5
Millennium, 58 political integration of Mormons and,
Hough, Simon 157, 183–84, 187nn34–35
An Alarm to the World, 58 stories and storytelling, importance
The Sign of the Present Time, 73–74n10 of, 4–5
Houston, Sam, 256 imperialism, American. See American
Hovey, Joseph, 153 territorial expansion
Hubble, Mrs., visions of, 47–48 Improvement Era, 263, 264
Hughes, Langston, 224 India, D. M. Bennett in, 114
Hughes, Richard T., xvi Indians. See American Indians
Hultgård, Anders, 57 individualism, American, 43
The Huntsman’s Echo, 280 influenza epidemic of 1918, 336
Hutchinson, Anne, 40 Ingersoll, Robert
Hutterites, 302 D. M. Bennett compared, 113, 115, 116
Hyde, Orson, 147, 280 as freethinker, 11, 107, 108–12
modern study of secularism and, 125n8
Icaria, 283 S. Putnam on, 123
identity formation, 3, 129–33 E. Wright compared, 117
biblical Israel, identification with, 3, International Bible Society Association, 67
129–31 (See also Israel, Mormon International Federation of Library
identification with biblical Associations, 290
nation of ) Islam
as cultural landscape, 154–55, in Africa, 335, 346, 350
166–67n83 apocalypticism in, 57–58, 76n43
as ethnic group, 155 in Canada, 309, 314, 315, 317, 318
four crises of Mormon church in its international migration and, 379n102
first 80 years and, 183–84 Mormonism analogized to, 244, 355
generational transmission of faith Israel, Mormon identification with
and, 4–5, 131–32, 188–204 (See biblical nation of, 3, 129–31,
also generational transmission 135–57
of faith) American revolution’s religious
globalization of church and, 133 settlement and, 138, 157
396 Index
Israel, Mormon (continued) globalization of Mormonism

biblical definition of peoples, 138–42 compared, 361–62
division of peoples into Jews, origins of, 67–68
Lamanites, and Gentiles, 144–47 racial/ethnic makeup of, 369
(See also American Indians; Jews statistical counting of membership
and Judaism) by, 377n59
events and practices articulating, Jenkins, Philip, xi–xii, xvii, 5, 296–97,
147–48 298, 299, 330, 364–65
lost tribes, 139, 148, 159n15 Jenson, Andrew, 205–6n23
merging of theological Church Chronology, 86
conceptualization with Jerome (St.), 142
sociological process, 137, 142, Jesus
153–57 Jews as killers of, 149
in Mormon scriptures, 142–47 prophetism and, 39, 43–45, 46, 47,
opposition affecting, 130, 147, 152–53 48
“peculiar people,” Mormon religious plurality in Upstate New
identification as (Deuteronomy York and, 19
14:2 and 26:18), 129, 130, 132, Second Coming of, 62–64, 66
135–38, 153, 156, 158n5 Jews and Judaism. See also Israel,
relationships with other groups and, Mormon identification with
147–53 biblical nation of
Iverson, Joan, 89 in Canada, 309, 316–17, 318
circumcision, practice of, 117
Jackson, Andrew, 255, 260, 262, 264 freethinkers on, 109, 110, 117, 119,
Jackson, Richard H., 166–67nn83–84, 120, 123
169n97 Hasidim, 189
Jackson Co. (Missouri), 62, 75n22, 147 Mormon relationships with and
Jacob, Norton and Emily, 148 attitudes toward, 148–50,
Jacobs, Lynn, 278 163n60, 165–66n78
Jacoby, Karl, Shadows at Dawn, 287 in Mormon scripture, 144–45
Jaher, Frederic Cople, 163n60 Mormonism analogized to, 355
James, Epistle of, 8, 37 as “peculiar people,” 136
James G. Willie Emigrating Company, as theological people in Bible,
151 138–42
Japan, LDS missions to, 360, 366 Johannesburg (South Africa) and
Japan Library Association, 290 Johannesburg temple, 340, 343
Jefferson, Thomas, 255, 262 John the Baptist, 37, 47, 50
Jehovah’s Witnesses Johnson, Aaron, 181
in Africa, 364 Johnson, Benjamin F., 280
on apocalyptic and historic futures, 68 Johnson, C. E., 279
in Canada, 302, 311 Johnson, George, Jottings by the Way,
compared to Mormonism, 377nn58–60 279–80
Index 397
Johnson, Joseph E., 211, 279–81, Kimball, Spencer W., 74–75n22, 362,
285–86, 291 366
Johnson, Joseph William Billy, 341–42, Kimball, Vilate Murray, 83
343, 346 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 40, 53–54n21,
Johnson, Matthew, 228 269
Jones, George, 285 King James Bible, 141–42, 143
Jones, Jim, 2 Kingdom Halls (Jehovah’s Witnesses),
Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the 68
Restoration (film), 104n71 Kingsbury, Joseph, 152
Joshua, the Jewish Minister (Robert Kingston (Upper Canada), 27
Matthews/Matthias), 41, 42, 43, Kinne, Aaron, 17
52–53n10 Kirtland (Ohio)
Journal of Mormon History, xv, xvii American territorial expansion and
journalism of Mormons in American migration to, 255
West, 211, 278–82. See also apocalyptic future and historical
specific publications future in, 60, 62
Judaism. See Israel, Mormon identification of Mormons with Israel
identification with biblical and, 147, 149
nation of; Jews and Judaism J. E. Johnson in, 280
judicial service, religious tests prophets and prophecy, 40, 41, 47
excluding people from, 106, 107 religious culture of Upstate New York
and, 27
Kaczynski, Theodore, 40 Kirtland Safety Society Bank, 220
Kagi, John Henrie, 53n15 Kirtland temple, 80, 97, 224–25, 226
Kanesville (later Council Bluffs, Iowa), Knight, Lydia, 82
148, 150, 280 Knight, Newell, 85
Kaweah Colony (California), 283 Knowlton, David Clark, 373n18
Kay, Jeanne, 166n83 Korean War, 269
Kearney, Stephen Watts, 257, 258 Koresh, David, and Branch Davidians,
Kellogg-Briand Treaty, 268 2, 40, 68–69
Kendall, Amos, 257, 258, 273n13
Kennedy, John F., 269 Lamanites, 130, 139, 145–46, 150–52,
Kennedy, Robert, 269 261. See also American Indians
Kanosh (Utah), 123 Lamar, Howard R., xvi
Kenya Landon, Alf, 269
Anglicanism in, 333 landscape. See Mormon cultural
Eastern Orthodox Church in, 332 landscape
Mormonism in, 342, 343 Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati
Kimball, Heber C., 83, 89, 136, 148 (Ohio), 191
Kimball, Lucy Walker, 90, 96–97 laos, 140–42, 143
Kimball, Mary Ellen, 89 Larrabee, Caroline West, 172–73, 174
Kimball, Sarah Melissa Granger, 83 Larsen, Olaf, 229
398 Index
Larson, Dean, 278 lived religion, 13–14

Latin America and Caribbean. See also Llano del Rio (California), 283
specific countries and geographic Lloyd, Christopher, 101n33, 103n51
locations localization
early 20th-century American foreign as attribute of globalization, 357
policy on, 268–69 as limitation on globalization of
missions to, 361 Mormonism, 363–65
percentage and distribution of Locke, John, 105–6
Christians in, 354 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 265, 266
priesthood ban and, 362, 366 Log College (precursor to Princeton
Latter-day Saints (LDS). See University), 191
Mormonism Lord’s Day Act (Canada), 313–14
Laws of the Indies, 221 lost tribes of Israel, 139, 148, 159n15
LDS (Latter-day Saints). See Louder, Dean, 303, 304
Mormonism Louisiana Purchase, 254, 255, 263
League of Nations, 210, 267–68, 269 Lucifer the Light-Bearer, 106, 121
Leavitt, Sarah Studevant, 81 Luther, Martin, 2, 45
LeBaron, E. Dale, 340–42 Lutherans
All Are Alike Unto God (ed.), 346 in Africa, 332, 333, 339, 349, 350
Lee, Mother Ann, 10, 40, 41, 65, 66 in Canada, 306, 307
Lee, William O., 263
Leon, Bernhard Mueller, Count de, 41 Mabey, Rendell N., 340, 348, 349
Leonard, Glen M., Massacre at MacDonald, A. J., 283
Mountain Meadows (with R. W. Macdonald, E. M., 117–18, 120, 122
Walker and R. E. Turley), 262 MacDonald, Elizabeth Graham, 91
Leone, Mark, 220 Maclean, Norman, A River Runs
liberal secularism. See freethinkers Through It, 188
The Liberator, 42 Madagascar, Mormonism in, 342, 343
Liberia, Mormonism in, 343 Madison, James, 255, 266
Liberty Bonds, 267 Madsen, Carol Cornwall, 84
libraries, museums, and archives, Maffly-Kipp, Laurie E., xvi
historical interpretation at, 211, magic, 167n90
286–91 Maher, Bill, 105
Libre (Colorado), 283 Mahmood, Saba, 91
Lienham, Peter, xvi U.S.S. Maine, 267
Liliuokalani (queen of Hawaii), 264 Manhattan Liberal Club, 121
Limerick, Patricia Nelson, xvi, 155 Manifest Destiny, 255, 262, 271
Lincoln, Abraham, 191, 239, 247–48 Mariger, Lawrence, 173, 174
Lincoln, Mary, 248 “marked” years, 68
Lion House, gables of, 213 marriage. See also celestial marriage;
Lischer, Richard, 54n21 plural marriage
Little, Jesse C., 257–58, 272n12 B. Young and sons on, 199
Index 399
Marshall, David B., xii, xvii, 3, 295–96, United Church of Canada and,
299, 301 325n29
Marty, Martin E., xvi, 169n97 United Methodist Church, ethnic
material culture, as historical evidence, minorities in, 369
214–19 Upper Canada, Reformed Methodists
Mather, Increase, 190 in, 27
Mather, Richard, 190, 204n4 in Upstate New York, 13, 17, 18, 20–21,
Matthews, Robert (Matthias/Joshua, 21–22, 23, 24
the Jewish Minister), 41, 42, 43, Metis people (Canada), 311
52–53n10 Mexican-American War
Mauss, Armand, 148, 151, 155, 269, 362 American territorial expansion and,
May, Dean L., xvii, 155, 165n77 255
McBride, Heber, 179 Civil War, Mormons, and Western
McConkie, Bruce R., 61 history, links between, 238, 239
McGinn, Bernard, 57 Mormon Battalion in, 210, 256–59
McGuinty, Dalton, 318 Nueces Strip, 256–57, 272n6
McKay, David O., 268, 269, 361 Polk’s engineering of, 266
McKinley, William, 262 Mexico
McKinnon, William, 240–41 Mormons in, 369, 375n48
McLellin, William, 27, 28 J. Smith on American acquisition of,
McMurray, W. Grant, 193 256, 259
McMurrin, Sterling, xvi MHA (Mormon History Association),
medical issues. See health, disease, and xv–xviii, 370
convalescence Middlefield (New York), 20
Medieval Christian apocalypticism, 57 Miles, George A., xii, xvii, 4, 211, 278
Meinig, Donald W., xvi, 154, 253, 304 Millennial Star, 258–59
Melchizedek Priesthood, 50, 82, 95 Millennium, 63–64. See also
memorial literature in American West, apocalyptic future and historical
284 future
Mennonites, 302, 315, 332–33, 339, 354 Miller, Reuben, 148
Mercantile Library Association of Miller, William, and Millerites, 9, 10,
Charleston (South Carolina), 41, 43, 63, 66–67
241 Milton, John, 45
Meserete Kristos Church (Ethiopia), Mische, Ann, 92, 101n32, 102n49
332–33 missions. See proselytization
Messiah. See also Jesus Moesser, Joseph, 178, 180
Emerson on, 44 Monroe Doctrine, 265
Mueller (Count de Leon) as, 41 Montreal (Canada) temple, 305
Shakers on, 40 Moore, Charles Chilton, 106, 128n35
Methodists and Methodism Moore, R. Laurence, xvi, 156
on end of age of revelation, 37 Moravians, 196
freethinkers and, 114, 119 Morgan, Dale, 278
400 Index
Mormon children, 4, 131, 170–84. See temple design, 224–26, 229

also generational transmission urbanism, embrace of, 222
of faith vernacular architecture, 208, 215–16,
accident stories and better times, 217–19, 226–27, 228–30
180–82 Mormon History Association (MHA),
(re)construction of narrative and xv–xviii, 370–71
memories of, 171–72, 183–84 Mormoniad (anonymous poem, 1858),
empowerment, sense of, 176–78, 180, 241
182–83 Mormonism
on healings, miracles, and divine in American religious landscape, 1–2,
protection, 176, 177, 180–81, 7–12 (See also American religious
182–83 landscape)
importance in Mormon life, 170 commitment to recording and
merging of religious and individual preserving history, 278
identity for, 183 comparative analysis applied to, 4,
separation anxiety, hardship, and 7, 331
loss of security experienced by, crises and changes in, 183–84, 266–67
172–76, 178–81, 182 disagreement and disunity after
in Western exodus, 178–81 deaths of J. and H. Smith,
“whistling and whittling brigade,” 176 285–86
Mormon cultural landscape, 3, 207–8, dissident groups, 28
213–30 formation of identities for, 3, 129–33
assumptions of, 213–14 (See also identity formation)
compared to evangelicals and as global religion, 5, 295–99,
communal movements, 207–8 353–72 (See also globalization of
definition of cultural landscape, Mormonism)
214–15 museums, libraries, and archives,
egalitarian/communitarian ethos, 219 historical interpretation at, 211,
family, reimagination of, 225 286–91
folk landscape, 219–20 origins of, 2–3, 26–28
health and disease, American “peculiar people,” Mormon
concern with, 246, 247 identification as (Deuteronomy
identity formation as, 154–55, 14:2 and 26:18), 129, 130, 132,
166–67n83 135–38, 153, 156, 158n5, 304
invention of, 220–27 relationships between Christian
lived Mormonism in, 227–30 denominations and, 349–50,
material culture, as historical 373n18
evidence, 214–19 separatism, development of, 28
parstuga houses in, 219, 229, 232n14 standardization of worship, 321,
Plat of City of Zion (1833), 208, 220, 347–49, 365
221–23, 233n24 stories and storytelling, importance
plural marriage and, 226–27 of, 4–5
Index 401
survival of, 3, 5 American territorial expansion and

in Western histories, 1, 3, 207–11 (See emigration from, 256
also Western histories) American territorial expansion and
women and agency, 3, 7, 10–11, 79–98 migration to, 255
(See also women and agency) apocalyptic future and historic future
Moroni (angelic visitor), 36 in, 63
Morrill, Susanna, 93 female agency in, 94
Morrisites, 285 Israel, Mormon identification with
Mosama Disco Christo Church, 338 biblical nation of, 147, 150, 157
Moses (biblical prophet), 45, 46 lopsided development of, 233n27
mourners’ bench, 224 Mormon children in, 174–75, 177–78,
Mozambique, Mormonism in, 343 182
Mueller, Bernhard (Count de Leon), 41 religious landscape of Upstate New
Muhammad, Elijah, 40 York and, 28
Muir, John, 250 Nauvoo temple, 226
Mullah Omar, 40 Navajo cultural landscape, 215
Multani, Gurbaj Singh, 317 Neibaur, Alexander, 150
multidirectional transformation Neilson, Reid L., ix, xvii, 7, 295
as attribute of globalization, 358–59 Global Mormonism in the 21st Century,
as limitation on globalization of 371
Mormonism, 365–67 Nelson, Lowry, The Mormon Village, 213
Murphy, Teresa, Mari Jo Buhl, and Jane Nephi (prophet), 60, 143–44, 146–47
Gerhard, Women and the Making Nephites, 63, 130, 145–46, 147
of America, 85 New Age religious movements, 302
museums, libraries, and archives, New England. See also
historical interpretation at, 211, Congregationalism
286–91 Puritans in, 4, 15, 132, 189–92,
Muslims. See Islam 229–30
Upstate New York, emigration to, 14–15
Nagel Institute for the Study of World New Harmony (Ind.), 40
Christianity, 370–71 “New Measures,” 224
Naisbitt, John, 333 New York Herald, 249
Namibia, 340 Newman, John Henry, 283
Napoleon Bonaparte, 255 Newton, Isaac, 45
Nash, Daniel, 19, 24 Nicaragua, as U.S. protectorate, 265,
Nation of Islam, 76n43 266, 269
National Conference of Christians and Nielson, Carl, 173–74, 182
Jews, 123 Nigeria
National Reform Association, 119 Anglicanism in, 333
Native Americans. See American Islam and Christianity in, 335
Indians Mormonism in, 341, 342, 343, 345,
Nauvoo (Ill.) 367, 379n98
402 Index
9/11, 316 freethinker’s commonalities with

“no religion,” as census category, 306–8, Mormons, 106–7
321–23 identity formation and, 130, 147,
Noll, Mark, 156 152–53
North West Rebellion (1885, Canada), southern response to Mormons, 119
311 women facing, 81, 94
Northern Arizona University, Protocols Oregon
for Native American Archival Missourian and Mormon migration
Materials, 288–90 to, 256–57
Norton, Mary Beth, Major Problems in J. Smith on U.S. acquisition of, 256,
American Women’s History, 85 259
Norton, William, 154 U.S. acquisition of, 255, 273n12
Noyes, John Humphrey, 9, 41–42 Orsi, Robert, 13
nuclear weapons Orthodox Church in Africa, 332, 339,
Mormon denunciation of, 270 344
Smithsonian Institution, Air and Ossining (New York), 41
Space Museum, Enola Gay Ostling, Richard N. and Joan K., 347
exhibit, 287 Otsego Co. and Township (New York),
Nueces Strip, 256–57, 272n6 19–20, 23
Nugent, Walter, xii, xvii, 3, 210–11, 253 Our Dixie Times, 279, 281
Owen, Laura Farnsworth, 95
Oaks, Dallin H., 61 Owens, Kenneth, Gold Rush Saints:
O’Dea, Thomas, 155 California Mormons and the
Ogden (Utah), 111, 116 Rush for Riches, 237–38, 243
Ogunmokun, Adewole, 367 Oxford/Tractarian movement
Ojai (California), 283 compared to Mormonism, 283
Olcott, Henry, 114
Old West Church (Boston), 226 Pace, Glenn, 339
Olmsted, Frederick Law, 250 Safe Journey, 347–48
Omaha (American Indians), 151 Pacific Mission, 263–64, 359, 360,
Oneida Community, 41–42, 225, 228 375n45
O’Neil, Floyd, 254 pacifism, Mormon, 264, 266
open-field farming, 220 Page, John, 147–48
opposition and difficulty. See also Paine, Thomas, 108
religious toleration and religious The Age of Reason, 22, 23
freedom Paiutes (American Indians), 260
antagonistic representations, Palmer, Benjamin Morgan, 209,
Mormon response to, 290–91 241–46
children’s experience of (See Mormon Palmer, Patience Delilah Pierce, 81
children) Panama Canal Zone, 265, 266
eschatology as way of dealing with, Parry, Keith, 155
65–66, 68–69 parstuga houses, 219, 229, 232n14
Index 403
patriarchal blessings, 139, 148, 152, as celestial marriage in 19th century,

162n39 99n15
Patten, David, 149 Edmunds-Tucker Act, anti-polygamy
Patterson, Paige, 369 oaths required by, 107
Paul (St.), on Jews and Greeks, 141, 142 freethinkers on, 11, 110–12, 115,
Peace Mission Movement, 68 118–22, 127–28n35
Pearl of Great Price, Articles of Faith generational transmission of faith
in, 75n23 and, 201, 205n17
Pearson, Elijah, 41 identity crisis on Mormon church
Peck, Annis, 20–22 and, 183
Peck, Elisha, 19 modern studies of, 88–91
Peck, Ethel, 20 in Mormon church histories, 82–83
Peck, George, 16, 18, 19, 20–22 Mormon cultural landscape and,
Peck, Luther, 20–22 226–27
Peck, Rachel, 21 “peculiar people,” Mormon
“peculiar institution,” slavery as, 135 identification as, 135
“peculiar people,” Mormon rejected by sons of J. Smith, 193
identification as (Deuteronomy revelation on, 89
142 and 26:18), 129, 130, 132, RLDS rejection of, 86
135–38, 153, 156, 158n5, 304 politics. See also American territorial
Penn, William, town planning of, expansion; U.S. Constitution;
221–22, 232–33n20 specific political parties
Pentecostalism foreign policy in 20th century,
in Africa, 334–35, 344, 346, 349, 350 Mormon views on, 268–70
in Canada, 302, 306 integration of Mormons into, 157,
Peoples, Mary Elizabeth Worth, 174–75 183–84, 187nn34–35
Pettit, Edwin, 178–79 presidential campaign of J. Smith
Phelps, W. W., 152 (1844), 210, 254, 255–56
Philippines religious tests excluding people from
Roman Catholicism in, 354 political office, 106, 107
U.S. occupation of, 263, 264–65, 266 Polk, James K., 255, 256–59, 262, 266,
Pisgah Grande (California), 283 272n10, 272–73n12
Plato, 45 polygamy. See plural marriage
Platt Amendment, 264, 267 Porter, Harriet, 191
plural marriage. See also under specific Potok, Chaim, The Chosen, 188
individuals Pratt, Belinda Marden, 81, 90, 102n46
in Africa, 334, 346–47 Pratt, Louisa Barnes, 149
anti-polygamy literature of 19th Pratt, Orson, 90, 150
century, 79–80, 85 Pratt, Parley P., 27, 81, 82, 85, 282
attitudes of Mormon women toward, Presbyterians
89–91, 92 in Africa, 346
in Canada, 303 in Canada, 306, 307
404 Index
Presbyterians (continued) Mormon history prophesied by J.

freethinkers and, 108, 109, 114 Smith, 177–78, 259
United Church of Canada and, sharing/competition, 40, 41
325n29 Southwest Prophecy, 259
in Upstate New York, 13, 21, 23, 24, in Upstate New York religious
26 culture, 13, 18, 19, 21, 28
presidential campaign of J. Smith proselytization
(1844), 210, 254, 255–56 in Africa, 340–44
Price, Roberta, Huerfano and Across the American Indians’ positive response
Great Divide, 284 viewed as sign of end times, 62
priesthood ban generational transmission of faith
African Mormonism and, 340, 345, and, 200, 201
366–67 globalization of Mormonism and,
Fijians and Australian aborigines 359, 360–61
excluded from, 377n57 of Jews, Gentiles, and Lamanites, 147,
globalization of Mormonism and, 150, 151, 152
361–63, 366–67 in millennial future, 64
origins of, 376n56 missionary publications, 281–82
revelation lifting, 86, 340, 362, multidirectional transformation as
376–77n56 limitation on globalization of
J. Smith, ordination of black men Mormonism, 365–67
during life of, 376n56 Pacific Mission, 263–64, 359, 360,
under B. Young, 361 375n45
Priestley, Joseph, 58 in pluralist religious cultures, 27
print culture of Mormons in American publishing culture of Mormons in
West, 211, 278–82. See also American West, 211, 278–82.
specific publications See also specific publications
Pritchard, Elizabeth, 102–3n50 Puerto Rico, American occupation of,
prophets and prophecy, 4, 7, 8–9, 264
34–51. See also specific persons Puritans, 4, 15, 132, 189–92, 229–30
act of prophetic identification, Putnam, Samuel, 122–23, 128n36
39–40 Pythagoras, 45
in Africa, 336–38
alternatives provided by, 43 Quakers, 13, 40, 107, 330
in America in 1830s, 40–43 Quebec (Canada), religious
antislavery movement and, 43 accommodation in, 317–19
defined, 39 Quinn, D. Michael, 264
literalization of prophetic claims by
Smith, 47–48, 50–51 racial/ethnic issues. See African
mentalization of prophetic claims by Americans; globalization of
Emerson, 47–48, 50–51 Mormonism; priesthood ban
Millennium and, 41, 42, 56 Rapoport, Amos, 232n15
Index 405
Rapp, George, 40–41 Republican Party, 135, 178, 240, 262,

Rappites, 220 267, 268
rationalists, in Upstate New York, 22, restoration church, Mormonism
23 interpreted as, 2
Reader’s Digest, 367 Revelation (biblical book), use of, 55, 70
reasonable accommodation of religion, revelations
in Canada, 315–20 priesthood ban lifted by, 86, 340,
Red River Uprising (1870, Canada), 311 362, 376–77n56
Reeve, W. Paul, 261 of Joseph Smith Jr.
reforming communities, Mormons on apocalyptic and historical
compared to, 283–84. See futures, 59
also specific communities, e.g. on conversion of American
Harmony Society Indians, 62
Regina (Canada) temple, 305 exclusivity of, 47–48, 54n22
Relief Society God speaking through, 47–48
automatic enrollment in, 103n55 on plural marriage, 89
early Mormon women and, 81 Shaker prophecy denounced, 40
in modern Mormon and women’s of M. R. F. Thompson, and women’s
history, 84, 85, 92 contribution to building of
in Mormon church history, 83 Kirtland temple, 59
E. R. Snow as general president of, of L. Walker, and plural marriage,
82 90
religious testing, 107 Revolutionary War, religious
religious toleration and religious settlement, and Mormon
freedom identity, 138, 157
American revolution’s religious Reynolds, C. B., and Reynolds decision,
settlement and Mormon identity, 106, 109, 121
138, 157 Rich, Russell R., Ensign to the Nations,
atheism, 19th-century attitudes 83
toward, 105–6 Rich, Sarah, 151
as Enlightenment principle, 106 Richards, George F., 268
First Amendment, early Mormon Richards, LeGrand, 61
commitment to, 126n22 Richards, Willard, 136
freethinkers and, 110, 116, 117, 119 Ridge, Martin, xvi, 253
migration rights of citizens and, 257 Ridges, David J., 72
recasting of, in 20th century, 123–24, Rigdon, Sidney, 2, 27, 54n22, 82, 94
128n37 Riley, Glenda, xvi
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of The Rio Virgin Times, 279, 281
Latter Day Saints (RLDS). See Riter, Mrs. Levi, 83
Community of Christ RLDS (Reorganized Church of Jesus
Republic of Congo, Mormonism in, 343 Christ of Latter Day Saints). See
Republic of Texas. See Texas Community of Christ
406 Index
Roberts, B. H., 106, 107, 120, 121–22, generational transmission of faith

127–28n35 and, 196
Comprehensive History of the Church, health and disease, American
83 concern with, 246
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Israelites, Mormon identification
Latter-day Saints, 82 with, 149, 157
Rochester Theological Seminary, 193 utopian communities compared,
Rogers, Ruth Page, 80 283–84
Roman Catholicism Salt Lake City temple, 148
in Africa, 332, 333, 339, 345, 346, 349, Salt Lake Herald, 126n22
350, 373n12 Salt Lake Tribune, 112
in Canada, 306, 309, 310–11, 312, 317, Sam Weller’s Bookstore (formerly Zion
319 Bookstore), 278
freethinkers on, 109, 114, 118, 119, 120 Samoa
globalization of, 354 American acquisition of, 263
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 123–24, Mormon population of, 375n45
268, 269 San Bernardino (Calif.), 149, 261
Roosevelt, Theodore, 262, 265, 266, Sanders, Ken, 278
268 Sanneh, Lamin, 357
Ross, Edmund, 152 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 255
Rush, Benjamin, 58 Sao Paulo (Brazil) temple, 366
Russell, Charles Taze, 67–68 Saunders, Richard, 278
Russell, William D., 104n68 SBC (Southern Baptist Convention),
Russia, negotiation of Alaska Purchase ethnic minorities in, 369
with, 262–63 Schindler, Marc, 270
Rutherford, Joseph Franklin, 68 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, xii–xiii, xvii, 4,
11, 105
Sabbatarianism, 67 The Religious History of America (with
Sackets Harbor (New York), 28 Edwin Gaustad), 85
sacraments. See also Baptism scholarly world. See academic world
Emerson on, 48–49 Schwenckenfelders, 196
Joseph Smith on, 37, 49–50 Scopes trial (1925), 197
sacrifice and suffering, as female Scott, Ann Firor, xvi, 84
virtue, 90–91 Scott, Jamie, ed., The Religions of
St. Croix, U.S. acquisition of, 265–66 Canadians, 303
St. George (Utah), 205n17, 261, 279, Scott, Patricia Lyn, 279
280, 281 Scriptures. See Bible; Book of Mormon;
Salt Lake City (Utah) Doctrine and Covenants; Pearl
cultural landscape of, 222 of Great Price
freethinkers in, 111–12, 114–15, 123 Second Coming, 62–64, 66. See also
General Epistle and Second General apocalyptic future and historical
Epistle (B. Young) on, 282 future
Index 407
Second Great Awakening, 1–2, 223–24 on new religious tradition created by

secularism. See also freethinkers Mormons, 28
in Canada, 296, 310–20 on reconciliation of Mormons with
Seixas, Joshua, 149 U.S. government, 187n34
selective pacifism, 264 Sojourner in the Promised Land, 269
Sellers, Charles G., 258 on standardization of Mormon
Seminole wars (1818), 255, 266 worship, 321
Semple, Etta, 128n35 Tanner Lectures and, xv–xvi
Semple, James, 257 on Western history, 207, 211, 281
Separatism, 8, 15–16, 28 Shoshonis (American Indians), 260
September 11, 2001, 316 Sierra Leone, Mormonism in, 343
Sessions, Gene, 268 signs. See dreams, visions, and signs
Sessions, Patty Bartlett, 84 Sikhism, in Canada, 309, 315, 317, 318
Seventh-day Adventists Sioux (American Indians), 151
on apocalyptic and historic futures, slavery and abolition of slavery. See also
10, 67 Turner, Nat
in Canada, 316–17 B. M. Palmer, pro-slavery views of,
freethinkers and, 119–20, 122 209, 241–46
Seward, William H., 262, 263 “peculiar institution,” slavery as, 135
sexual temptation, B. Young and sons presidential platform (1844) of J.
on, 199 Smith on, 256
Shakers prophecy and, 43
D. M. Bennett and, 114, 115 J. Smith’s opposition to slavery, 256,
cultural landscape of, 207, 220, 221, 376n56
225, 228 Smillie, Benjamin, Visions of a New
eschatology of, 7, 10, 56, 66 Jerusalem, 302
family, reconstruction of, 225 Smith, Alexander Hale (son of J.
opposition faced by, 65–66 Smith), 99n20, 193
prophecy of, 40 Smith, Bathsheba Wilson Bigler (sister-
Smith revelation denouncing, 40 in-law of Joseph Smith), 83
in Upstate New York, 13, 23 Smith, David Hyrum (son of J. Smith),
Shepard, Thomas, Jr., 190–91 193, 204n14
Shields, Stephen, 278 Smith, Emma (wife of Joseph Smith), 89
Shipps, Jan Smith, Frederick Granger William (son
on American territorial expansion, of J. Smith), 193
266 Smith, Frederick Madison (grandson of
doughnut metaphor of, 3, 207, 211, J. Smith), 193
281, 295, 301 Smith, George A. (cousin of J. Smith),
Israel, on Mormon identification 279
with, 53n20, 136, 142 The Rise, Progress and Travels of the
on LDS membership numbers in Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
1860, 274n29 day Saints, 82
408 Index
Smith, Heman C., 99n20 Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses,

Smith, Hyrum (brother of Joseph analogized to, 244, 355
Smith), assassination of, 65, Nauvoo, development of, 233n27
178, 285 T. Paine and atheism, linked to, 108
Smith, Israel Alexander (grandson of “peculiar people,” Mormon
J. Smith), 194 identification as (Deuteronomy
Smith, John (uncle of Joseph Smith), 14:2 and 26:18), 135
148, 152 Plat of City of Zion (1833), 208, 220,
Smith, Joseph, III (son of J. Smith), 86, 221–23, 233n24
193, 205n16 plural marriages of, 82, 89–90,
Smith, Joseph, Jr. See also under 204n14, 280
revelations presidential campaign of 1844, 210,
agency of, 94 254, 255–56
on American territorial expansion, print culture, use of, 281, 282
256, 259, 264 prophesying Mormon history,
assassination of, 65, 94, 152, 162n43, 177–78, 259
178, 183, 285 restoration of gospel attributed to, 61
authenticity issues, 38–39 as restorationist, 2
biblical language profoundly rhetoric of orthodox denunciation
influencing, 141 and, 19
black men ordained during life of, on sacraments, 37, 49–50
376n56 on Second Coming of Christ, 63
children and, 170 on sectarian competition, 26
dreams and visions of, 37–38, 47, slavery, opposition to, 256, 376n56
49–50, 75n29, 170, 321 Nat Turner compared, 36–37 (See also
J. Edwards compared, 211, 283 Turner, Nat)
Elijah appearing to, 62 Upstate New York, family roots in, 7,
Emerson compared, 46–50, 53n20 8, 14, 108
(See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo) “Views of the Powers and Policy of
First Vision, 321 the Government of the United
on globalization of Mormonism, 359 States,” 254, 256, 271
on historical/eschatological future, on women and wives, 96–97
60, 62 Smith, Joseph, Sr. (father of Joseph
institutional advent of Mormons and Smith Jr.), 14, 26
ordination as elder, 137 Smith, Joseph F., 268
literalization of prophetic claims of, Smith, Joseph Fielding, 268
47–48, 50–51 Smith, Leonard I., 340
Robert Matthews (Matthias/Joshua, Smith, Lucy Mack (mother of Joseph
the Jewish Minister) and, 41, Smith Jr.), 14, 26
52–53n10 Smith, Timothy L., xvi
mental instability of youngest son, 193, Smith, Vida E., 99n20
204n14 Smith, Wallace Bunnell (great-
Millerites and, 63, 66 grandson of J. Smith), 194
Index 409
Smith, William Wallace (grandson of J. St. George (Utah), 205n17, 261, 279,
Smith), 194 280, 281
Smith-Pettit Foundation and Lecture Stacy, Nathaniel, 22, 25
series, xvii–xviii standardization of Mormon worship,
Smithsonian Institution, 211, 286–87 321, 347–49, 365
Air and Space Museum, Enola Gay Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 88
exhibit, 287 Stark, Rodney, xvi, 2, 306, 321, 355,
American Art Museum, The West as 360, 361, 363, 373n17
America, 286 state constitutional bars against
Smoot, Reed, 107, 266, 268, 269, nonbelievers, 107
276n49 Stein, Stephen J., xiii, xvii, 4, 9–10,
Snow, Artimesia Beman, 89, 91 55
Snow, Eliza Roxcy, 82, 83, 148, 149, Stewart, David G., 352n25
152, 165n73 Stoeckl, Edouard de, 262
Snow, Erastus, 203 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 87
Snow, Lorenzo, 85, 203 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 191
social structures and human agency, Strang, James Jesse, 285
91–92 Strangites, 28, 285
Socrates, 45, 47 Strong, Augustus H., 193
solar eclipse (February 1831), 36 Strong, Charles, 193
Sorenson, John L., 270 structure and agency, 95–97
Soule, Peter, 117 subcultural world, construction of, 132,
South Africa 154, 196–98, 200
Mormonism in, 340, 343, 351n12, 364 suffering and sacrifice, as female
Zion Christian Church in, 345 virtue, 90–91
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Sunday, Billy, 193
ethnic minorities in, 369 Swyripa, Frances, Storied Landscapes,
Southern Star, 119 303–4
Southwest Prophecy, 259 Szasz, Ferenc, 236
Spanish Florida, American acquisition
of, 254, 255, 263 Tanner, Grace Adams, xvi
Spanish-American War, 264–65 Tanner, J. M., 263
Spence, Hartzell, Get Thee Behind Me: Tanner, Obert C., xvi
My Life as a Preacher’s Son, Tanner Lecture series, xv–xviii, 1, 2,
188 84
Sperry, Harrison, 179 Tanzania, charismatic services in, 335
“spiritual but not religious,” people Taylor, Alan, xiii, xvii, 4, 7–8, 13
identifying as, 306–8, 321–23 Taylor, Charles, 319
spiritual gifts. See gifts of the Spirit Taylor, John, 83, 118
spiritualism and theosophy, 114 Taylor, Leonora Cannon, 83
Spring City (Utah), 219, 229 Taylor, Nathaniel William, 192
Spring Lake Villa (Utah), 280 Taylor, Zachary, 256
St. Croix, U.S. acquisition of, 265–66 Temple Lot Church, 28
410 Index
temples. See also specific locations Truettner, William H., 286

African Christian interest in, 338 Truman, Harry, 124
design of, 224–26, 229, 347 Truth, Sojourner, 9, 43
global rates of construction, 363 Truth Seeker, 106, 112–13, 114, 116–20,
Tennent, William, 191 122
territorial expansion, American. See Tullidge, Edward, The Women of
American territorial expansion Mormondom, 82
Texas Turley, Richard E., Jr., 253–54, 278
S. Austin, publications of, 282 Massacre at Mountain Meadows
J. Smith on American acquisition of, (with R. W. Walker and G. M.
256, 259 Leonard), 262
negotiations for Mormon move to, Turner, Nat, 4, 8–9, 34–40
256–57 antislavery movement and
Nueces Strip, 256–57, 272n6 prophetism, 43
theosophy and spiritualism, 114 authenticity issues, 38–39
Thompson, Greg, 278 Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and,
Thompson, John Herd, Forging the 43, 53n15
Prairie West, 301–2 compared to Joseph Smith, 36–37
Thompson, Mercy Rachel Fielding, 80 The Confessions of Nat Turner, 34, 36,
Thoreau, Henry David, 45 38, 39, 42
Thorne, J. W., 107 in context of 1830s American
Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in prophetic experience, 40, 41
America, 106 fusion of religious fantasy and hatred
Tohono O’odham (American Indians), of slavery in, 42
287 millennarianism of, 35–36, 42
toleration, religious. See religious receipt of visions and signs by, 34–38
toleration and religious freedom slave revolt led by, 34, 36
Tonga, Mormon population of, 359, Joseph Smith’s awareness of, 39
360, 376n45 Twain, Mark, 105
Toronto (Canada) temple, 305 Tyndale, William, New Testament
Tory, John, 318 translation of, 142
Tractarian/Oxford movement
compared to Mormonism, 283 Uchtdorf, Dieter, 355
Tracy, Nancy Naomi Alexander, 94 Uganda
Trans-Appalachia, American Anglicanism in, 333
acquisition of, 254–55, 263, 267 Eastern Orthodox Church in, 332
Transcendentalism, 7, 8. See also Mormonism in, 343
Emerson, Ralph Waldo Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 84
transmission of faith, generational. See Underwood, Grant, The Millenarian
generational transmission of faith World of Early Mormonism, 71
Troeltsch, Ernst, 2 Underwood, William, 22
Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 311–12 Union Pacific Railroad, 183
Index 411
Unitarian Meeting House, Bedford, frontier culture affecting, 14, 16–18

Mass., 226 R. Ingersoll’s roots in, 108
Unitarians, 46, 128n36, 226 lay involvement in, 24–25, 27–28
United Church of Canada, 306, 307, lived religion, commonality of, 13–14
325n29 migration and settlement patterns,
United Kingdom. See Britain 14–16
United Methodist Church, ethnic Mormon cultural landscape and, 223
minorities in, 369 origins of Mormonism in, 26–28
United Nations Universal Declaration Peck family experience of, 16, 18, 19,
of Human Rights, 311 20–22
United Order at Orderville, 220 prophets and prophecy, 13, 18, 19,
United Society of Believers in Christ’s 21, 28
Second Appearing. See Shakers Joseph Smith family and, 7, 8, 14, 26
United States. See entries at American spiritual uncertainty and insecurity
U.S. Constitution. See also religious of, 26–27
toleration and religious freedom Upton, Dell, xiii, xvii, 3, 154, 207–8,
American territorial expansion and, 211, 213
238, 263 urbanism, Mormon embrace of, 222
Civil War and, 242, 246 U.S. Virgin Islands, 265
as divinely inspired, 268, 276n49 U.S.S. Maine, 267
freethinkers on, 116, 117, 121 Utah
Korean War viewed as American Indians of, 259–61
unconstitutional, 269 statehood and territorial status, 157,
in Mormon political theology, 157 183, 259, 266
Universal Declaration of Human as Zion, 375–76n51
Rights, 311 Utah Constitution, female suffrage
universalism, Mormon capacity for, 153 in, 83
Universalists, 13, 22, 23, 25 The Utah Pomologist, 279, 281
Upper Canada, Reformed Methodists The Utah Pomologist and Gardener, 279
of, 27 Utah War
Upstate New York (1790–1835), religious American territorial expansion and,
culture in, 4, 7–8, 13–28 262
American territorial expansion and Civil War and Western history
migration from, 255 influenced by, 238–39, 240–41,
diversity and fluidity of discourse, 243, 245–46, 248
22–28 Utah Western Railroad, 200
dreamers and visionaries, 14, 17–20, 23 Utes (American Indians), 260
family of Joseph Smith and, 7, 8, 14, Utopia (Ohio), 283
108 utopian communities, Mormons
female agency in, 20–22, 24 compared to, 283–84. See
First Great Awakening, legacy from, also specific communities, e.g.
7, 14–16, 17, 22 Harmony Society
412 Index
Van Wagenen, Michael Scott, 256 Civil War and, 208–10, 236–51 (See
Vancouver (Canada) temple, 305 also Civil War, Mormonism, and
vernacular architecture in Mormon American West)
cultural landscape, 208, 215–16, commitment of Mormons to
217–19, 226–27, 228–30 recording and preserving
Vietnam War, 269–70 history, 278
“Views of the Powers and Policy of federal-territorial relationships in,
the Government of the United 284
States” (J. Smith), 254, 256, 271 memorial literature in, 284
Vinson, Michael, 278 Mormon cultural landscape, 3,
Virgin Islands, U.S., 265 207–8, 213–30 (See also Mormon
visions. See dreams, visions, and cultural landscape)
signs museums, libraries, and archives,
Vulgate, 142 historical interpretation at, 211,
286–91
Wacker, Grant, 156 print culture of Mormons and, 211,
Walker, Edwin C., 121–22 278–82
Walker, Holmes, 340 religious history, tendency to ignore,
Walker, Lucy, 89–90 236–38
Walker, Ronald W., 126n20, 278 utopian communities, Mormons
Massacre at Mountain Meadows (with compared to, 283–84
R. E. Turley and G. M. Leonard), Wetherby, Jacob, 151
262 Whigs, 256, 280
Walker Brothers (of Salt Lake City “whistling and whittling brigade,” 176
Opera House), 114–15 White, Ellen, 10
Walls, Andrew, 358 White, James, 67
Walzer, Michael, 229–30 Whitman, Walt, “Song of Myself,” 45
War of 1812, 266 Whitmer, John, 150
Ward, Seth, 165n78 Whitney, Helen Mar Kimball Smith,
Washington, George, 259 84, 150
Weber, Max, 2 Whitney, Orson F., History of Utah,
Weeks, William, 226 82–83
Weems, Lovett H., Jr., 369 Whittaker, David J., 278
Wells, Emmeline B., 85, 87–88 Wigger, John, 17
Wessinger, Catherine, 56 Wigglesworth, Michael, 190
West, Elliott, xiv, xvii, 4, 131, 170 Wilhelm, Clarissa, 152
The Western Bugle, 280 Wilkinson, Jemima, 40
Western histories, 1, 3, 207–11 Willard, Frances, 87
American territorial expansion, Williams, Thomas, 18, 23–24, 24–25
210–11, 253–71 (See also Wilson, John F., xvi, 126n22
American territorial expansion) Wilson, Woodrow, 265, 266, 267, 268
of Canada, 301–2 Winnipeg (Canada) temple, 305
Index 413
Winter Quarters, 178, 179 Manifesto of, 259, 266

Woman’s Christian Temperance St. George newspapers signed by,
Union, 92 279
Woman’s Exponent, 90 Woodworth, Lucien, 256
women and agency, 3, 7, 10–11, 79–98. The Word, 106
See also plural marriage; Relief World Christian Encyclopedia, 331
Society World War I, 267
in Africa, 336 Wright, Elizur, 116
emancipatory paradigm, histories of Wynette, Tammy, 285
women outside, 87–91, 92–93,
96–97 Yorgason, Ethan, 166n79, 168n95
feminism and, 87–88 Yoruba, 336
first generation of Mormon women, Young, Alfales (son of B. Young),
memoirs of, 80–81 203–4, 206n28
freethinkers and women’s Young, Alonzo (son of B. Young), 203
emancipation, 118, 120 Young, Ann Eliza (plural wife of B.
historical concept of agency, 86–87 Young), 79, 92
Melchizedek Priesthood, 82, 95 Young, Arta de Christa (son of B.
in modern Mormon and women’s Young), 198, 201, 203
history, 84–86 Young, Brigham
in Mormon church histories, 81–84 agency and leadership of, 93,
new model for, 91–97 94, 97
religious devotion to Mormonism, American Indians and, 151, 260–61
82, 83–84 on California, 242
suffering and sacrifice, as female The Constitution of the State of Deseret,
virtue, 90–91 282
suffrage movement, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88 conversion of brother Joseph and, 27
traditional view of Mormon women General Epistle and Second General
as downtrodden, 79–80 Epistle, 282
in Upstate New York, 20–22, 24 generational transmission of faith
Wood, Gordon, xvi in family of, 132, 188, 194–96,
Wood River (Nebraska), 280 197–204
Woodruff, Phoebe Carter, 83 heirs bringing suit against
Woodruff, Wilford administrators of estate, 203,
American territorial expansion and, 204, 206n28
259, 264, 266 on historical future, 61
on apocalyptic and historical futures, Israel, Mormon identification with
61, 71 biblical nation of, 135, 136
Israel, Mormon identification with, Mormon Battalion in Mexican-
148, 149, 150 American War and, 256–57
male converts, Mormon histories in Mormoniad (anonymous poem,
focusing on, 85 1858), 241
414 Index
Young, Brigham (continued) Young, Joseph (brother of B. Young), 27

plural marriage and, 79, 82, 111, 132, Young, Joseph Angell (son of B.
135, 136, 205n17 Young), 135, 195–96, 198,
priesthood ban under, 361 201–2, 205n23
print culture, use of, 281, 282 Young, Joseph Don Carlos (son of B.
recruitment of settlers by, 211 Young), 201, 203
sealed as prophet, seer, and revelator Young, Lorenzo Dow (son of B. Young),
at dedication of Salt Lake 201, 203
Temple, 148 Young, Lucy Decker (plural wife of B.
State of Deseret and Utah Territory, Young), 198
211, 259 Young, Mahonri Moriancumer (son of
in Upper Canada, 27 B. Young), 203
westward movement and, 1 Young, Mary Ann Angell (wife of B.
Young, Brigham, Jr. (son of B. Young) Young), 201, 205n17
generational transmission of faith Young, Oscar Brigham (son of B.
to, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201–2, Young), 194, 197, 201, 202, 203
205n17, 205–6n23 Young, Phineas Howe (son of B.
opposition to Spanish-American War Young), 203
by, 264 Young, Willard (son of B. Young), 196,
Young, Brigham Heber (son of B. 198–200, 202–3, 205n17
Young), 188, 195, 201 Young Men’s Mutual Improvement
Young, Brigham Morris (son of B. Association, 82
Young), 195, 201, 202–3
Young, Clarissa Ogden Chase (plural Zaire, eschatology in, 72
wife of B. Young), 205n17 Zambia, Mormonism in, 343
Young, Dora (daughter of B. Young), Zimbabwe, Mormonism in, 340, 343
206n28 Zion
Young, Emmeline A. (daughter of B. apocalyptic future, as sign of, 62, 63,
Young), 206n28 74–75n22
Young, Ernest Irving (son of B. Young), cultural landscape and, 215
197–98, 203, 206n28 Israel, Mormon identification with
Young, Feramorz Little (son of B. biblical nation of, 138
Young), 201, 203 Plat of City of Zion (1833), 208, 220,
Young, Franklin, 180 221–23, 233n24
Young, Harriet Cook, 83 prophets in 1830s America and, 41
Young, Hooper (grandson of B. Young), Utah as, 375–76n51
202 women’s contribution to building
Young, Hyrum Smith (son of B. of, 80
Young), 203, 206n28 Zion Bookstore (now Sam Weller’s
Young, John Willard (son of B. Young), Bookstore), 278
195–96, 198–202, 205nn17–18, Zion Christian Church, South Africa, 345
205–6n23 Zoroastrian apocalypticism, 57

From The Outside Looking in - Essays On Mormon History, Theology, and Culture - The Tanner Lectures On Mormon History PDF

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

From The Outside Looking in - Essays On Mormon History, Theology, and Culture - The Tanner Lectures On Mormon History PDF

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

From the Outside

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2016

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset in Scala Pro

Printed on 45# Cream 400 ppi

Printed by Sheridan, Michigan, US

General Introduction by Richard Lyman Bushman  1

PART 1: The American Religious Landscape

1. Alan Taylor, The Free Seekers: Religious Culture in Upstate

2. Richard H. Brodhead, Prophets in America Circa 1830:

3. Stephen J. Stein, Historical Reflections on Mormon Futures  55

4. Catherine A. Brekus, Mormon Women and the Problem

5. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Mormons, Freethinkers, and the Limits

PART 2: The Creation of Mormon Identities

6. Charles L. Cohen, The Construction of the Mormon People  135

7. Elliott West, Becoming Mormon  170

8. Randall Balmer, “Faith in the Religion of Their Fathers”:

PART 3: The Study of Western Histories

9. Dell Upton, What the Mormon Cultural Landscape

10. William Deverell, Thoughts from the Farther West:

11. Walter Nugent, The Mormons and America’s Empires  253

12. George A. Miles, Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective  278

PART 4: The Study of Global Religions

13. David B. Marshall, The Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut,

14. Philip Jenkins, Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth

15. Jehu J. Hanciles, “Would That All God’s People Were

Matthew J. Grow is director of publications at the Church History De-

in America. He presented “‘Faith in the Religion of Their Fathers’: Passing

Catherine A. Brekus, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Reli-

Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University and William Pres-

Richard Lyman Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of

Charles L. Cohen, E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions

William Deverell, professor of history at the University of Southern

Jehu J. Hanciles, D. W. Ruth Brooks Associate Professor of World Chris-

Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and co-director of

David B. Marshall, an associate professor of history at the University of

Walter Nugent, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History, Emeritus, at

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University

American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman; Restless

Stephen J. Stein, Chancellor’s Professor, Emeritus, of Religious Studies

Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the Uni-

Dell Upton, professor of art history at the University of California, Los

Elliott West, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the Univer-

Leonard J. Arrington, a leading scholar who would later become

It happens that three of us were part of discussions in 1979 as to

directly, to expand a facet of their ongoing research to include a

After two decades of remarkable Tanner lectures, all of which were

Lecture, beginning at the organization’s 50th anniversary annual meet-

The individual Tanner lecturers deserve to be thanked first for their

A vibrant, dynamic community inevitably generates multiple under-

Richard Lyman Bushman

The American Religious

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides scholars with a

hard to imagine women who accepted religious structures as agents,” she

intrepid historians. By putting the Latter-day Saints in comparison with

The Free Seekers: Religious Culture

American religious history has traditionally focused on institution

common discourse. The essence of lived religion on the settlement fron-

the states, lagging behind Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and even

about 100 Separate congregations in 1754, Separatism declined precipi-

General Introduction by Richard Lyman Bushman 1

3. Stephen J. Stein, Historical Reflections on Mormon Futures 55

6. Charles L. Cohen, The Construction of the Mormon People 135

7. Elliott West, Becoming Mormon 170

11. Walter Nugent, The Mormons and America’s Empires 253

12. George A. Miles, Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective 278

Erickson, Missionary Society of Connecticut Papers, 1759–1948: A Guide to the Mi-

nambivalently hostile. Matthias had been invited to “deliver a lecture to those

a ssassination. James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential