Making Mormon history
An influential religion struggles with how to tell the story of its past
Since its founding in 1830 by Joseph Smith, a young self-proclaimed prophet from upstate New York, the Mormon church has become one of the most influential religious groups in the United States. Officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), it claims nearly 7 million adherents nationwide, and even the lowest outside estimates - about 3 million American Mormons - suggest there are now more Mormons in the US than there are Congregationalists.
Mormons control politics in one state, Utah, and hold considerable clout in others, such as Arizona and Idaho. And if Mitt Romney becomes president, then the country's top Republican and one of its top Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, will both be Mormons.
With the LDS church growing in membership and power, Americans are no longer at liberty to think of Mormons as some distant sect. The institution that most Americans used to know only through the pairs of clean-cut young men knocking on our doors as missionaries now has national and international reach.
Feeding Americans' curiosity about this home-grown religion are Jon Krakauer's best-selling 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven and PBS's recent documentary The Mormons. In the realm of academia, more historians than ever are looking closely at the church. Many of those historians are themselves Mormon - including several of the talking heads on the PBS series. Many other Mormons talk freely about their religion. Harry Reid, for example, spoke candidly about his faith in a 2005 profile in The New Yorker, and Mitt Romney gave a major speech about faith last Thursday.
From this, it would be easy to believe the church is entering a new period of openness, but the church has seen moments of transparency come and go before. In fact the relationship of the Latter-day Saints hierarchy with scholars and journalists has frequently been antagonistic: The church has excommunicated historians whose writings were deemed to portray Mormon history in a negative light, and to this day church archivists closely guard many documents, keeping some entirely secret, to scholars and everyone else. One church leader gave a famous speech in which he cautioned against unvarnished truth if it imperiled people's faith.
Serious analysis of Mormonism has never been more important, but that doesn't mean it will be easy. In Romney's speech on faith last week, for example, the candidate spoke movingly about religious tolerance, and tried to highlight similarities between Mormonism and mainstream Christianity, but he said nothing substantive about Mormon theology or history. Campaigning politicians can't be expected, of course, to discuss the more uncomfortable aspects of religious history, which for the Mormons include a ban on blacks in the priesthood until 1978, and their often contentious relations with what they call their "Gentile" neighbors. It is historians and journalists who are charged with describing unpleasant realities, and how well they accomplish their task will depend in part on which the LDS church decides is more important: guarding its image or uncovering the truth.
Mormon history should be uniquely accessible. In 1829, Smith finished his "translation" of a new Christian testament, the Book of Mormon, from gold plates he claimed to have found hidden outdoors, and the following year he and his followers published the book. Persecuted for the heretical beliefs they were developing - including baptism of the dead, the nonexistence of original sin, the Book of Mormon's completion of the (insufficient) Bible, and, for a time, the need for "plural marriage," or polygamy - the group traveled from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. Along the way, the group made converts but even more enemies, and in 1844, in Carthage, Ill., an angry mob murdered Smith, shooting him repeatedly. Numerous newspaper accounts of Smith survive, as do diaries of his followers. As far as historical religious figures go, Smith is not a murky one.
What's more, Mormons have always been obsessive record-keepers and genealogists, so it would be incorrect to say that they had contempt for history. But as in many church traditions, historians of the faith were expected to support the faith. And unlike, say, many Congregationalists or Episcopalians, few Mormons attended leading secular universities, where they might have been drawn to academic history. So for much of Mormon history - from Joseph Smith's "First Vision," when God spoke to him in 1820, through his writing of the Book of Mormon, decades of persecution, the arrival of Smith's followers in Utah in 1846, the end of plural marriage in 1890, to the first decades of the 20th century - Mormons who wrote Mormon history worked in the devotional mode. They gave "the Mormon story as an account of a true church led by a true prophet versus a hostile world," writes Jan Shipps, an esteemed non-Mormon historian of Mormonism, in the September issue of The Journal of American History. Non-Mormon historians, Shipps adds, approached the same story with the opposite bias, calling Smith a con man.
In the 1940s and 50s, some Mormon historians became impatient with the piety enforced on them, and they began to publish accounts greatly at odds with the church's preferred versions. The most famous was Fawn Brodie, who in 1945 wrote "No Man Knows My History," a biography of Joseph Smith notable for its skeptical and irreverent attitude toward the founder and his supernatural claims. Her book scandalized the church, and in 1946 she was excommunicated. Brodie was from an influential Mormon family - her uncle would in 1950 become the Mormon prophet-president - and her banishment was a strong statement from the LDS hierarchy that some unspoken lines could not be crossed.
Soon, however, the church entered a new period of scholarly engagement, with Mormon historians taking greater liberties and non-Mormon historians beginning to take a fresh, less anti-Mormon look at the church, too. Beginning in the 1960s, younger scholars wrote books, rigorous and academic in their approach, that formed the heart of what came to be called the "New Mormon History." As historian Shipps notes, other factors contributed to this opening of the Mormon mind. In 1965, the Mormon History Association was founded, and the next year Dialogue, a new, independent journal of Mormon studies, began publication. The Mormon bureaucracy itself added historical and archival departments, hiring well-trained historians. And new and expanded history departments at church-affiliated schools, like BYU and Iowa's Graceland College, meant new jobs for Mormon historians with secular training.
In 1972, Utah State professor Leonard Arrington was hired to be the official LDS church historian. Arrington was a Mormon, but he had been trained at the University of North Carolina. Under Arrington, the Mormon archives were opened to more historians, and with fewer restrictions than ever before. The result was a flowering of scholarship, as both Mormon and non-Mormon historians offered frank looks at Mormon history and Mormon ancestors, in many ways picking up where Fawn Brodie left off. They wrote about skeletons in Smith's closet, such as his interest in the occult, or the Mormons' massacre of non-Mormons at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in 1857.
The New Mormon History constituted a new field of scholarly inquiry. Historians wrote dozens of well-regarded books, greatly increasing what we reliably know about LDS history. Mormon and non-Mormon historians developed close relationships, and the academic establishment began to treat Mormonism less as a bizarre cult and more as a religion. But these books and articles also worried conservatives within the church. In 1981, Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer, a leading conservative, famously cautioned: "Some things that are true are not very useful." Mormon historians who do their work "regardless of how they may injure the Church or destroy the faith of those not ready for 'advanced history,' " he said, may find themselves in "great spiritual jeopardy."
It was not empty rhetoric. A decade later, in 1993, the church excommunicated several scholars, including D. Michael Quinn, a tenured historian at Brigham Young University who had written a number of controversial works, including one about the persistence of church-sanctioned polygamy after its official ban in 1890.
"I was excommunicated from the LDS church," Quinn said recently, "and the only detailed explanation was a letter outlining publications of mine that were defined as apostasy, which is the Mormon term for what other Christians understand as heresy. I've become in Mormon culture a cautionary tale of the danger of looking too deeply at the Mormon past."
At almost the same time, one of America's greatest historians, Harvard's Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - MacArthur Foundation "genius prize" winner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and a lifelong, practicing Mormon - also felt the chill coming from Salt Lake City. In 1992, the planning committee for a women's conference at Brigham Young University proposed Ulrich as their keynote speaker. But before an invitation could be issued, the university vetoed her invitation.
In her essay "Dangerous History," Jan Shipps argues persuasively that Ulrich's invitation was blocked because of her feminist reputation. Ulrich herself holds no grudge, noting that BYU recently invited her to lecture. She feels the school, and the church that runs it, were trying to make amends. "There was a great effort at BYU to let me know, without saying so, that people were pretty embarrassed."
Today, bigger and more prominent than ever, the church is in a period of heightened confidence, and with it has come a renewed receptivity to scholarship. Mormon historians aren't as afraid of crossing their church as they would have been 10 years ago. "I do think there's more openness today than in the nineties," says Jed Woodworth, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, who assisted in the research for a recent biography of Smith by Richard Bushman, a former Columbia history professor and a Mormon patriarch. "Obviously Michael Quinn was writing then, and things were not good for him. But we're at a point when many, many Latter-day Saints want to get beneath the veneer, get a picture that isn't shiny and doesn't have a PR sheen to it."
This renewed openness, however, still has limits. The Mormon hierarchy is still far more suspicious of historians than other churches are. Access to documents considered private, sacred, or confidential is still forbidden or restricted. And one historian who has worked in the church's archives in Salt Lake City reports that even the system for viewing available documents is not scholar-friendly.
"At the church archives, I was frustrated," says Boyd Petersen, who teaches at Utah Valley State College, in Orem. "The archivist would find them for me, instead of letting me go through the boxes and see what's there. You need to have access to all the papers, you need to be able to hold them in your hand, look through everything.
"I think the church has felt like they've been burned by historians," Petersen says. "They've allowed certain people this kind of access and the books that have come out of it have been unfavorable. The Fawn Brodie book was one of the biggest wakeup calls the church has had." (He added that his intent was "not to defend" the church on its handling of Brodie.)
Other churches have closely guarded archives - the Vatican archives only allows in credentialed scholars, for example - but many Mormon historians I spoke with admitted that they do not demand openness from their hierarchy the way that Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish scholars do from theirs. When Quinn was disciplined in 1993 along with five other scholars and activists - the so-called "September Six" - objections from intellectuals in the church were muted. I mentioned to Petersen that archivists at other churches - Episcopal, say, or Unitarian - see themselves not as gatekeepers, but as helpers. They want historians to find everything they're looking for.
"That's definitely different," Petersen said. "There is a gate-keeping system in the [Mormon] church archives. I don't think there's a historian anywhere who would deny that." And he agreed that Mormon scholars are unusually timid about agitating for change. "I guess the reason we [historians] are the way we are is we've seen it worse. And there's a tendency to think if we just play nice, it will get better."
But the belief that history is subordinate to faith may be hard to shake, and for Mormons especially. As a newer religion, the LDS church is particularly susceptible to the challenges of historical muckraking. No one will ever discover if Moses truly heard God speak from a burning bush. But Joseph Smith left behind a long historical record - he wrote; his friends wrote about him; we know where he lived. Polygamy, a sensitive subject in the church, was banned in 1890, when the grandparents of many living Mormons were in plural marriages; history can seem painfully close.
Mormon spiritual cosmology can also be interpreted to require secrecy, in ways that thwart historical scholarship. This is how Jed Woodworth explained why certain documents might be kept private: "They say if there was a council, say a high church council that met privately in the 1880s, and it was closed to other church members, because they considered their meetings private, then we'll respect that.{hellip} It's about respect for the dead. I'm not defending it, but it's important to understand."
Finally, Mormons have a time-tested sense of persecution that they may not be ready to abandon. Their founding prophet was murdered. The governor of Missouri issued an extermination order in 1838, giving the OK to kill Mormons who would not leave the state. And anti-Mormon bigotry, as reflected in polls, helped occasion Mitt Romney's speech on Thursday.
It was not scholarship that got Mormons to the promised land of Utah or helped them multiply their numbers down to the present time. It was faith, they believe. Secular historians ask Mormons - ask us all - to trust that whatever the record shows is more edifying than our ignorance. In many ways, Mormons trust the secular world (it has certainly been good to Romney); the question they are asking is whether its scholarship can be trusted, too.
Mark Oppenheimer is the author of "Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture." He is also an editor of The New Haven Review.
