Latter-day Studies

Our guest today is Jan Shipps, a historian who has been called "that celebrated Mormon watcher" by an LDS official. In preparing the announcement for today's colloquy, I made the odd mistake of describing Ms. Shipps as a sociologist. For the record, she isn't one. But the mistake inadvertantly points to her interesting role as what sociologists call a "participant observer" in Mormon culture--or an "insider-outsider," as she describes herself in Sojournor in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (University of Illinois Press, 2000). Anyone reading around in the field of Mormon studies soon learns that people who can agree on nothing else nonetheless share great respect for the work of Jan Shipps.

We've had a number of interesting questions come in already, and welcome more.

Only very gifted musicians could move back into music after such a hiatus. As I was not very gifted, I changed my major to history and started taking the courses then offered in the USU history department. Whatever the ostensible topic, all seemed to be about Mormonism. My sociology course also dealt with Mormonism, as did the most of the education courses that I took in order to earn a teaching certificate. The subject of my practice teaching turned out to be Utah history--which was, of course, about Mormonism.

Before I had completed the 1960-61 academic year, I had learned enough about the history of the Latter-day Saints to know that there was much more to learn. There were no courses on Mormonism at the University of Colorado where I did my graduate work, but I wrote my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation on the Mormons in Politics.

If I had subsequently found a different academic position, it is likely that I might well have shifted my attention to some other historical subject. But I became a member of the resident faculty of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis just as its School of Liberal Arts was beginning a new program in Religious Studies. On the basis of my graduate work and some articles on Mormon history that I had published, I was offered a joint appointment in history and religious studies. I accepted the offer, even though my being required to teach religious studies courses demanded some pretty intense "on- the- job training."

All the study of the various dimensions of religion that I did made a tremendous difference in my approach to the study of Mormonism. Whereas I had approached the Latter-day Saints and their church as a social, economic and political movement in my graduate work, in the 1970s I started to look at Mormonism from the perspective of religion. The questions I asked were not the obvious questions often asked by someone who is not a Mormon. Those are things like:

C "is Mormonism true?"
C "was Joseph Smith really a prophet?"
C "is the Book of Mormon what it claims to be?"

Instead, I started to investigate what believing that Mormonism is true meant in the lives of individuals and congregations. I wanted to know something about the impact believing that Joseph Smith was a prophet had on behavior of individuals and goups. Gradually I came to realize that if someone believes that the Book of Mormon is precisely what it claims to be that person is a Mormon, whether or not they are members of the Church. This put me on my way to interpreting Mormonism as a new religious tradition.

What is particularly compelling to me is my continuing satisfaction with how Mormonism functions as a case study of how religion works and how it changes across time. By studying Mormonism I am able to comprehend more about other religions, including my own.

Ms. Dulany is my editor. But I am by no means the only person who recognizes the importance of her contributions to this field. During the final year of his life, Leonard Arrington presented the Grace Fort Arrington Award to her as a person who had made one of the most signal contributions to Mormon Studies in recent memory. When her name was announced, she received a standing ovation from the assembled membership of the Mormon History Association, the only such standing ovation I have ever seen that association give in all my years participating in every one of its annual meetings except the ones that have been held overseas.

What this means is that those who study and write about any religion must take their own feelings and their individual position vis a vis the legitimacy of the fundamental faith claims of the religion into account. BUt they also must take into account the feelings and positions of those who produced the documents and other resources that are used as the basis for scholarly interpretations. If these are represented fairly, scholarly investigation can go forward without being unnecessarily apologetic or "critical."

I expect it would be helpful in considering this question to substitute Islam for Mormonism in the way the query is posed. Given the current climate in which anything Muslim is suspicious in the minds of many, it is good to ask whether any scholarly investigation of Islam could avoid those tow subjective poles.

Likewise, in the 1950s and 1960s, having a close academic colleague--a member of your academic department or a fellow graduate student--who was a Mormon was at least not very likely. Today more and more Latter-day Saints are becoming members of college and university faculties and more and more Latter-day Saints are applying to and being admitted to graduate schools. As this happens, the opinions and prejudices against Mormons within the academic community is likely to diminish -- a lot.

Note that the academic community has been through this before as first Roman Catholics and then Jews were accepted on an equal footing into academic communities that once were virtually filled with white Anglo-Saxon males. I did not live through those two assimilations, but I certainly lived through the gradual acceptance of female and black scholars into full standing in the academic community. It can happen with a group that is considered an outsider group and it will probably happen to Latter-day Saints.

As is well-known, the LDS Church has a huge missionary cadre in the field at any given time. Just now it numbers 60,000. Each year since 1960, conversion has been more important than natural increase in explaining yearly additions to the membership of the church. But it is likely that natural increase will soon start to catch up with conversion as the means by which the membership of the LDS Church expands. When that happens, growth will become Mormonism's normal condition.

It is crucial to take into account in any discussion of church growth the large numbers of people who join the LDS Church and then just drift away. This is a common occurrence in any church whose membership increases, sometimes exponentially, by conversion. Converts come and they go. The children of LDS parents are more likely to stay in the church for substantial portions of their lives.

There can be no doubt, however, that the gender issue has been especially complicated in Mormon history. Contrary to what non-Mormons thought about the practice of polygamy-- Saints called it plural marriage--this marriage system gave women on the frontier much more independence than other American women had at the time. Plural wives often had to support themselves and their own children either because their husbands had more families to take care of that it was possible for them to manage or else because the church called on the men who were likely to have plural wives to serve as domestic leaders or as missionaries. This meant that their wives had to take advantage of any employment opportunity that came to hand.

The best study of plural marriage now available is More Wives than One by Kathyn Daynes, published last year by the University of Illinois Press. These women were on their own. One result of this is that the Mormon "sisters" were allowed to perform certain religious functions that would later be restricted to members of the priesthood (who were always male). They were able to perform blessings on their own children (laying their hands on their heads) as the male priesthood does today. Also, they performed the healing ritual (using consecrated oil) when they cared for other female members as well as the children of the community.

The peculiar political climate in which Mormonism had to make its way in the 19th century meant that LDS church leaders needed to show the world that Mormon women were independent, that they were not kept in harems, and so on. This led the territory of Utah which was controlled by Latter-day Saints to join Wyoming and other Western territories in making women's suffrage a reality long before women's suffrage came to other parts of the United States.

After the LDS Church was forced to relinquish the practice of plural marriage, things started to change. Utah was allowed to enter the Union. But equally important, the LDS Church itself began to regularize its doctrinal and ritual practices and to canonize its scripture. As this happened, the former fluidity that had marked the movement started to disappear and gender roles were clarified. (This issue is addressed in the chapter on Mormon Women and History in my most recent book.)

The first of these (the central faith story) is a skeleton in the Mormon closet in the same way that the resurrection of Jesus was/is, as the Apostle Paul said, "a stumbling-block to the Jews and folly to the Greeks." As is argued cogently in Terryl Givens new book (discussed in the recent Chronicle article), this central story (including how the Book of Mormon made its way into the world) continues to critically important to Mormonism even as it makes its way across the world and into modernity. The way today's Latter-day Saints "make peace" with this part of their past resembles the way all Christians must make peace with a past that includes the story of a man who was once dead who is now alive.

The principle of continuing revelation made it possible for the Saints to dispense with the other two "skeletons," (polygamy and the so-called "Negro doctrine") as they moved forward into a changed situation in which Mormonism became a part of modern culture. The fact that these two parts of Momronism were changed through revelation makes it possible for President Gordon B. Hinckley to turn away pointed questions about the Saints' past by saying "That was then; this is now." However much that bothers the journalists who are frustrated by the church president's answer, what President Hinckley is describing is a process that is reasonably common to all religious traditions.

The real skeleton in the Mormon closet is the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which was not commanded by revelation or any reasonable interpretation of LDS doctrine. The best any modern Latter-day Saint can manage with that is to apologize, apologize, and apologize.

What is interesting to me is this discrepancy in the importance of the lack of actual signatures in the witness list.

Orthodoxy is not a requirement that is just "on the books" as is were. This has been made obvious in several high profile instances of the dismissal of faculty members--some with "continuing status" (BYU's version of tenure)--for failing to measure up on one of these count. Equally important is the care exhibiting by the governing boards of these institutions which are made up of "General Authorities" of the LDS Church and "Sisters" who are a part of the church's female leadership cadre. Not only is it necessary to have their approval to hire a new member of the faculty. The board must give its approval before a potential faculty member given enough serious consideration to be interviewed on campus.

But most Latter-day Saint college students are educated in non-Mormon institutions of higher learning rather than on one of the campuses of Brigham Young University. In order to provide the sort of historical and intellectual training that will prepare them to defend their faith, the LDS Church maintains "Institutes" that are headed by members of the "Church Educational System" staff. Ordinarily trained in the College of Religious Education at BYU, CES staffmembers are, on the whole, more orthodox in behavior and intellectually conservative than members of the faculty at BYU.

Two other things are of importance in preparing Latter-day Saints students to defend their faith. Of tremendous significance is the preparation that young members of the church receive as they get ready to go on their two-year missions. Missionary Training Centers present the intellectual and spiritual content of the faith in concentrated form as potential missionaries are readied to carry the gospel to the world. When these missionaries return from their missions to complete their education, they are equipped to share their knowledge with other college and university students. But most Mormon students do not reach college without a firm grounding the church's doctrine and history. The reason is that LDS students in high school throughout the United States, at least, spend their high school years attending "seminary" classes in the early morning where they study history and doctrine before their high school classes begin.

Whether at BYU or in seminary or institute classes, a set curriculum is followed that is designed to provide students with knowledge about the history and doctrine of the faith. The versions of church history and doctrine offered in these "correlated" classes is not presented in a manner that makes their credibility a matter of debate.

I think what you call the "continuing superficiality" of the academy's picture of Mormonism is due, first of all, to the fact that few academics appreciate Mormonism's internal complexity and its richness as a theological tradition in its own right. But there is something else that is equally important. This is that Mormonism is changing so rapidly that scholars are always behind the curve, writing about this tradition as a political movement, a social movement, a culture, an ethnicity, and so on. It is all those, but it is much more. It is a religious tradition. Very few scholars, either Latter-day Saint or non-Mormon scholars, have approached the subject from this perspective.

From the personal standpoint, I will add that I floundered around for years trying to get a handle on this extraordinary movement. I failed to do so until I started to use a religious studies approach that allowed me to consider all the various dimensions of Mormonism together. I've been using this approach ever since I published Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition in 1985.

Females get encouragement to go on to college and even to graduate school not because they are expected to the primary breadwinners in their households--in fact this is discouraged--but because life is uncertain and there may come a time when they will need to earn a living for themselves and their children. Moreover, or so it seems to me, many Mormon leaders seem convinced that educated women are a blessing to their families since they will be able to help their children to grow up to be better people and better Latter-day Saints.

The church's general position on homosexuality is, no doubt, directed connected to the LDS understanding that a primary purpose of the human condition is the formation of family units in which children (who before their births were spirit children awaiting mortality) may be reared. Since a homosexual family-like unit could never retain its integrity "through time and eternity," during which it could give birth to spirit children, the formation of such units is not only discouraged but actively opposed.

In this church, you often hear it said that a woman "shares" the priesthood with her spouse. In practice, this sharing is reflected in earthly life. I once did a careful omparison of the Mormon "Proclamation on the Family" and the 250 word amendment about proper male-female relationships that was added to the Southern Baptist "Faith and Message" (which is as close as Southern Baptist get to official doctrine) when the Southern Baptist Convention met in Salt Lake City. I was somewhat surprised to discover that the Mormon statement was less "patriarchal" than the Baptist statement. LDS fathers are to provide the necessities of life and protection for their wives and children while the primary responsibility a Mormon mother has is to nurture her children. But her relationship is somewhat different than the Baptist relationship. A Baptist wife is to be her husband's "helper" while a Mormon husbands and wives are to help one another as "equal partners."

If, in fact, "eternal progression" ever carries an LDS eternal family to the point of presiding over its own planet, as is part of your question," it seems likely to me that this "equal partner" relationship would extend to that point in eternal time. But who am I to know? I am a Methodist, not a Mormon.

I had a fellowship to do Mormon study in the Church Archives in the summer of 1973, and I can testify to the fact that an awful lot of the of the LDS historical record was made available to scholars as long as scholars could make an argument that the records were needed for the work they were pursuing. But by no means were all records open. Anything in the First Presidency's Vault was not open. Neither were Patriarchal blessings and many financial records.

Several things happened to change this, the story of which is told in Leonard Arrington's Adventures of a Church Historian (also published by the University of Illinois Press). Yes, some Mormon leaders were uncomfortable with interpretations of their history that seemed to insert the Mormon story into the ongoingness of history allowing its special revelatory character appear to be getting lost.

But there was more. Even Leonard Arrington himself became cognizant that the record never speaks for itself. All documentary evidence is subject to interpretation. There were scholars who were anxious to tell the story from the other side.

The tightening of access came when more conservative leaders wanted to restrict the record to scholars who would use the materials "responsibily." I do not think the current church leadership is likely to reopen the sources as widely as was the case in the early 1970s.

As for what you must avoid during interviews, first of all do not smoke. If you are a smoker, make sure that the smell of tobacco is not on your breath or your clothes. In the social parts of the interviews, having a glass of wine will be expected of non-Mormons. But be careful to be moderate about alcohol consumption. The Word of Wisdom still reigns supreme in Mormon land. If you have a family, it would probably help if you talk about them. Although this is counter-intuitive in the academic interview process for faculty positions, it seems to me that is it would not be out of place in interviews for any college presidency. Certainly it would not be out of place in the sort of college you describe.

I may be a "favored outsider" because my interpretive framework comes more directly from Religious Studies than an understanding of history that sees the importance of power as more important that most anything else. But I would never say that there is not room for all different interpretations of Mormonism.

Surely correlation has led to a change in materials prepared by the church. They must all go through the correlation blender to be checked for orthodoxy and that means that those who prepare them are less likely to take chances than the were in the days when the materials came through church auxiliaries and not through a centralized system. One result is that they seem to be more bland than was once the case.

I have wondered whether this distancing of the church from this doctrine might be connected to the way the doctrine is being used by conservative Protestants to argue that Mormonism is not Christian. As you probably know, this is one of the cornerstones of the "not Christian" argument. But I don't know whether my hunch is anywhere close to correct.

As was made clear in the materials prepared for the press during the Olympics, the church wants everyone to know that it is Christian--but Christian with a difference. As a consequence, there is lots of emphasis on the importance of the temple in Mormon worship practice, which is also something that is sometimes used as a way of making the "not-Christian" argument.

So I can't explain the effort to downplay eternal progression. Another controversial doctrine is the "Mother in Heaven" doctrine that the Saints reach by logic rather than direct revelation. This is also being radically de-emphasized.

But I think there are two crucially important things to keep in mind when you ae considering the growth of the LDS Church. The first is this difference in growth through conversion as opposed to natural increase. That makes a difference in different parts of the world. The other is the rate of retention. Just as is the case with many conservative forms of Protestantism, Mormonism has a fairly high level of converts who "fall away."

As to why Mormonism might be more appealing outside the US, some argue that there is still a very great connection between Mormonism and being American, which means that the appeal in nations with a less than sufficient standard of living might be attacted to the LDS Church because it appears to offer the opportunity of moving up the economic ladder. It is hard to assess whether this is the case.

But I think that the connection between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the United States is probably being weakened as the church grows stonger in more and more areas of the areas of the world.