I recently re-read a chapter from the recent book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows written by three faithful LDS historians who had access to practically every document there is to be had on the subject of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. For those unfamiliar with the topic, there were a number of Latter-day Saints in pioneer Utah who attacked an emigrant train as they passed through a little region called Mountain Meadows not far from Cedar City, Utah. They killed everyone in the group over the age of 7–men, women, children. The reasons for the massacre are, as always, complex: between the thousands of federal troops marching towards Utah under the belief that Utah was rebelling and the delusions of a few religious zealots, the situation was ripe for just such a war crime.

I read about the days leading leading up to the massacre when some of the plotters planned a general meeting of the Saints in the area to drum up support for attacking the emigrants. These emigrants were here to kill the Mormons! They had poisoned the water, engaged in profanity, and were tools of the Americans. And plus, they had the gun that killed Joseph Smith! (they didn’t). They claimed to have the support of the leadership, both military and ecclesiastical (local militias stood ready should invasion come). The plotters called for all to show support for the plan. These were eminent men–stake president, bishop, etc.–making these accusations. Little to the congregation’s knowledge, the leadership had already sent men to the region to stir up the local Indian population (the Paiutes) against the emigrants, in hopes that the Indians could serve as a proxy for the Mormon settlers.

“All in favor make it manifest…” And as many of us do, they raised their hands without much of a second thought…until a man from an outlying settlement named John walked in.

You might as well call him Big John. A muscular man of 200 lbs with a speech impediment (he had a way of repeating his phrases in an annoying, staccotto fashion) and a high councilman, John saw the ruckus and asked what was wrong. The leadership retold him the tale of supposed atrocities committed by the hands of these emigrants. John urged moderation and compassion–should we not treat our enemies kindly? He dared to question the politics of Utah foreign policy based on nothing more than Christian love. John persuaded the leadership to contact Brigham Young before they make any further decisions. Other members recognized John’s courage and immediately began to question the wisdom of attacking the train. The leadership promptly sent a messenger to contact Brigham about the proper course of action–what good stake president would refuse to contact the Prophet?– however, by that point, it was too late. The party sent out before the meeting started hostilities with the emigrants the next day.

We face different challenges now. Every Mormon in America I know would proudly sing “I’m Proud to Be An American” or “God Bless America.” In the 1850s, the Mormons would be the last one would have come to blows if you dared to associate them with America. Rather, they gave sermons that were uncomfortably close to Reverend Wright’s “God Curse America” speeches (though I think both modern conservatives and liberals can agree that slavery and religious persecution was quite deserving God’s cursing). But we can take one lesson on this Sept. 11th from this dark episode in Mormon history: when our government leaders make any claims about an impending threat, we shouldn’t feel as we do in church meetings: that we default to raising our hands in support. Of course, my Republican friends will wholeheartedly agree about the necessity of questioning government leaders; but not too many years ago, the Democrats were urging that we similarly question Bush’s foreign policy. And since this incident bares a somewhat closer resemblance to questions of foreign policy, I’m going with that comparison.

Hopefully all of us, because we love our people and our country as much as John Morrill, can dare to question kindly (kindly being an operative word) our political leaders’ intents in matters of both foreign and domestic affairs. And you can even question it with a stutter.

The question flies in the face of many an hour of American heritage instruction at BYU and BYU-I. Given that the horrors of slavery were enshrined in the Constitution and the horrors of war to which the American colonists allowed themselves to sink (the colonists cut off ears and fingers in just as barbaric of a fashion as any soldier in My Lai), I find little veracity in the glowing images of the Constitution. How might I–if only as a thought experiment–separate providence from the Founding? I understand that the counterfactual explodes all bounds of propriety within traditional historical scholarship. Yet I think it important that we not let American exceptionalism infect true doctrine as the Church continues to expand into countries with very different political traditions than those of America.

The primary scriptural difficulties are found in 1 Nephi 13 and D&C 101 where Nephi sees the Revolution as the “power of God.” Those who opposed it experienced the “wrath of God.” The Constitution, in the Lord’s words, was based on “just and holy principles” and was crafted by “wise men whom I have raised up.” Seems airtight, right? I might suggest, however, that prophecy is not always a comprehensive view of what could have happened but what will happen. I understand this is a theological can of worms; but I think it is safe to say that there are numerous prophecies delivered that forecast less-than-ideal events. Simply because Nephi saw the Revolution as being the power of God does not indicate divine approval of the colonists’ actions but rather approval of the principles for which they were fighting. If the colonists had been more inclined to diplomacy (as the British were through much of the era), then Nephi might have seen a very different vision. It was the colonists who drove the British moderates like Edmund Burke to the margins of Parliament. The Revolution’s outcome of an autonomous America–which was the Lord’s goal by all accounts–was not inseparably attached to the highly destructive cost of a Revolutionary War. It was an unnecessary war for a conflict that might have easily been won through less-destructive means.

As far as the “just and holy principles” of freedom from state-sponsered religion espoused by the Revolution, we can tentatively conclude that the British colonies were equally welcoming to the growth of a new religious movement as any state in the United States would be during Joseph Smith’s time. The best way to measure this is to examine the status of religious and political freedom in the British empire in the time leading up to the Restoration.

Religious Freedom

The metropole of London at the time of the earliest days of the Church was hardly an oppressive state in the area of religion. The evangelical awakening of the 1820s played a significant role in William Wilberforce’s push to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. The Church had a large branch in Manchester with 240 members. While radical sects were occasionally persecuted in mainland Britain (Ann Lee spent time in jail—in fact, her jail time would later become an important part of the Shaker narrative). While it is true that London was seeking to establish an American bishop, the establishment of a state religion (as in modern Germany where even Latter-day Saints must pay the “church tax” to the Lutheran church”) has at no time prevented the Church from growing in foreign countries. Catholicism is so prominent in Latin America that it is a de facto state religion with the priests practically serving as heelers in their communities. This has obviously not prevented church growth.

Within the colonies, there was a similar atmosphere of religious freedom. At the time of the revolution, the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania colonies were all part of a “toleration belt.” In Quaker-founded Pennsylvania, the Quakers were themselves a minority. In Richard Bushman’s award-winning book, From Puritan to Yankee, he even notes of an instance where the Crown instructed Connecticut to rescind its anti-Quaker laws (Bushman, 166). While this strong hand didn’t always work (the religious civil wars in Maryland and all that), this was certainly no worse than what America would offer them 30 years later. The Church could have used this central authority in later years as it struggled with Martin Van Buren and various Governors to ensure its freedom to practice its religion.

Political Freedom
The immigrants came to America in an effort to strengthen and expand the British empire, not to disintegrate it. They saw themselves as blights on London’s society and came to America to free Britain of them, not they from Britain. There is a radical strain among our people that, I fear, envisions Zion as a 19th-century Utah redux: always on the watch, ready with their guns, living in their bunkers. Granted, I know very few who view it in such extreme terms. But those who do offer the Church no favors as it seeks to become a global faith.

Often, proponents of this perspective appeal to the rugged individualism of the founding fathers, to the Minutemen, and to Captain Moroni in defending their vigilance. It only follows that the Revolution should be seen as a magnificent, Cosmos-Historical Event (hat tip to Hegel) that gave the Church their ability to be politically free as well as religiously free. However, the political freedom they extol so much was not more available to the American population. Indeed, at the time of the revolution (as it is almost trite to say for you colonial historians), the American colonists were wealthier, more landed than any other colonial people. Further, until the 1820s, a large percentage of white Americans were not eligible to vote. If any of these same defenders of the Revolution lived in an apartment complex, they themselves would not be allowed to vote. In fact, with its abolition of the slave trade in 1808 and the total abolition of slavery in 1832, we find a Great Britain more welcoming to the American ideals of mankind’s equality than anything we find in antebellum America.

The Benefits of the Revolution for the LDS Church

What, then, made the American Revolution even helpful to the LDS cause? (the historiography on this one is so massive that I shudder to even dare address it). Gordon Wood—in his singular work on the ideological origins of the Republic—argues that republicanism rested at the core of the revolution. To these founders, republicanism was rooted in the embrace of the common good, of personal restraint and an eschewal of opulence. Referred to by the founders as “virtue,” these qualities could exist in any government—including the British empire as it then stood. Indeed, the colonists argued, they were the true guardians of the British legacy of freedom (Wood, chpt. 2).

Even the idea of a Constitution was not terribly radical—except in one aspect: it was written (Wood, chpt. 7). The British constitution, while derived from the idea of separate limited branches of governent (the House of Lords, the House of Commons, and the Crown), existed as an organic, moldable entity in which branches could interfere with each other. It was used in a context similar to the description of one’s general demeanor, the way he carries him/herself. Therefore, the just and holy principles of the Constitution, I would argue, were the Lord’s way of ensuring that the new government allowed for the Saints to flourish in the land of promise. Had there been no revolution, he could have easily prompted reformers in the British government to follow similar just and holy principles–incidentally, just such a reformation began to take place in the post-Revolution era. Reformers such as William Cobbett maintained that British financiers had become rich contracting out the Hessian mercenaries and that the Crown had expanded the central government so radically that traditional liberties were being quelched. The Revolution revolutionzed both Great Britain and America. Notice that the scriptures appeal to ideas of justice, not a Whiggish idea of American exceptionalism.

My purpose here is not to jump on the tired bandwagon that likes to throw dirt on dead men. I like the Constitution, and I like personal property. I like not paying a Church tax—I might even be a “fan of America” on Facebook. But even assuming these things were necessary, they were already in place or on their way at the eve of the Revolution. As the Church grows to include states with high degrees of socialism, we shouldn’t expect members there to accept American exceptionalism to the degree where they accept the Revolution as providential. While we can still gush over the founders for their accomplishments., let’s keep our inner Whigs in check and remember that the war as, at best, a necessary tragedy, and at worst, a conflict that brings out the most depraved side of humankind.

For those of you over the age of 60, Cleaver was nothing short of an icon.  After serving time in prison for assault (a time during which he wrote the famed black power memoir, Soul on Ice), he would be a co-founder of the Black Panthers with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in 1966.  He called then-governor Ronald Reagan a “punk” and a “coward” for opposing his appointment at a U.C.-Berkeley to teach a sociology. Cleaver was the minister of propaganda for the Black Panthers, a time during which he would run for President on the Peace and Freedom Movement.  Shortly following his less-than-significant run, he was charged with an attempted murder in connection with a shootout in California.  He left Dodge City for Algeria, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, chummed with Timothy Leary (and put him under “arrest” for being a counterrevolutionary–basically an act of political theater), and returned to America in 1975.  He learned quickly that Marxism- Leninism was nothing like the revolutionary ideals he espoused–a realization that would be articulated in his second memoir, Soul on Fire.

Enter Mormonism.

By the late 70s, Cleaver had experimented with a number of religious groups–most notably Sun Moon’s.   Not surprisingly, his views of Mormonism were strongly colored (no pun intended) by the negative views of the Church within the Black Power movement.   Cleaver’s first “Mormon contact,” interestingly, was with Carl Loeber, an activist with the Peace and Freedom party that sponsered Cleaver’s presidential run who had joined the Church in 1970 as he renunciated the Black Power movement. Cleaver met with Elder Paul H. Dunn (then administrator for California) and would be later introduced by Loeber to Cleon Skousen during a Know Your Religion class in San Jose.   Cleaver even traveled to Salt Lake City to meet with President Ezra Taft Benson. During this time, Cleaver maintained his relationship with the Moonies, but insisted that his work was simply to be a “spiritual guerrilla” for Jesus.  He had no intention of following them. Along with Cleaver’s theological conversion came a political conversion.  He began lecturing on college campuses, promoting conservative issues and campaigning for Ronald Reagan.

Contrary to reports of Cleaver’s “sampling” tendencies, Cleaver was playing an active role in the Mormon Church at this time.  His parole would not be over until 1982, so he could not be baptized until then. His wife, Kathleen, received a scholarship to Yale and took the children with her, leaving Cleaver behind in California.  While Cleaver tried to renew the marriage, his wife was less enthusiastic.  When Cleaver was baptized in December 1983 (an ordinance performed by Loeber), his family did not attend.

Cleaver’s place in Mormonism might seem odd to the particularly progressive among us who quite understandably cringe and shudder at the Church’s past re: the priesthood ban.  Cleaver felt differently; while the Church had undeniably racist policies, he acknowledged, it was not the Mormons who propagated the system of slavery in America.  Indeed, Cleaver argued, the Mormons were among the few religious groups who, as an entity, did not. He simply found the claims that the Church was a “racist institution” to be unconvincing. Furthermore, Cleaver identified with Joseph Smith the presidential candidate and with the ideas of our literal relationship to God as children, not as creations. He appreciated how seriously Mormonism took the written scripture.

However, Cleaver had a difficult time turning around old habits.  Before Kathleen had filed divorce proceedings, Cleaver had fathered another child (he had fathered several others).  Further, he soon formulated an odd scheme to take over Treasure Island off the San Francisco coast in search of buried treasure–according to newspaper reports, he referred to himself as “Captain Cleaver” (whether he was being lighthearted or truly was out of his mind, it is hard to say).  He was pulled over in Oakland for possession of cocaine.  Cleaver maintained contact with Church officials (he later called a Mormon bishop when he found himself arrested).  He never renounced the Church, and even remarked to Newell Bringhurst that an interview they conducted moved him to return to Church more actively.  However, his activity never regained the fervor of the early 80s.

Ultimately, we might ask, why should we care?  After all, those of us who have served missions know full-well of the passing convert, the fellow who for whatever reason decided to give Mormonism a whirl.  Yet Cleaver’s prominence begs us to ask deeper questions, to find deeper answers about our susceptibility to celebrity-style Mormonism, to find “the one” who can make us feel better about our idiosyncracies, who can make us feel a part of the American discourse, even if that discourse was black militancy.  What say you all?

On that note, please know that I want to watch nothing burn unless it can keep you warm.

The Story

The story is almost larger than life–a part of Utah-stock Mormons collective conscience about sacrifice, love, the diligence of youth, etc.  The Martin Handcart company, having been rescued by Brigham’s rescue party, is stuck at the banks of the Sweetwater River (in my home state…represent).  Knowing that the river would be treacherous given their wearied state, they are on the verge of despair.  Three young, 18-year old men, Allen Huntington, George W. Grant, and David P. Kimball, volunteer to carry the weakened Saints across the river.  When Brigham Young receives word of their feat, he weeps and says that their feat has assured them of celestial glory.

The main source we use for this is Solomon Kimball’s essays in the 1914 Improvement Era.

The Reality

The reality is still heroic, but a good deal more nuanced and less martyr-based.

Number of rescuers

This is by far the greatest myth propagated about the account.  Let’s think about it: there were nearly 27 rescuers assisting the company at the Sweetwater River.  Are we to believe that two-dozen able-bodied men who had just braved the Wyoming winter stood by watching as three teenagers did all the work?  My first, second, and third inclinations would be to believe that this defies the reasonable course of events.

Solomon Kimball, the first chronicler of the event and the first source of the three-man legend, had limited access to historical materials–and therefore, can be excused to a degree.  The primary sources tell us a different story–with all of them adding a name here or there to the classic three number that Kimball put forward.   John Jacques, the first witness of the events to write a chronicle, cited two individuals w/o names (“the son of George D. Grant and the son of Heber C. Kimball”) noting that he could not remember all the names of the rescuers; if he could, he would have included them. Jacques would later note another rescuer’s name, Stephen Taylor–based solely on what he had heard. Daniel Jones, another witness, notes that there were 27 people who served in the rescue party.  Historian Chad Orton argues that 18 rescuers have been positively identified as assisting the Martin company  on the same day as the Sweetwater Crossing.   Andrew Jenson places Ira Nebeker in the party as well.  Another account places a William Binder as in one case a carrier and in another, as a ferrymaster who carried the stricken across on his raft.

The witty reason for this winnowing down to three might involve a discussion of how like to immortalize the few, not large groups or perhaps how some kind of intrigue put certain of these individuals out of favor with the power structure.  Actually, it probably comes down to little more than a slip in scholarship.  Orson Whitney named three men in his Life of Heber C. Kimball and four in History of Utah. Given that Solomon was Heber’s son, it would be reasonable to suppose that Solomon would have drawn on the Kimball biography rather than the sweeping study of Utah.

Age

Only partially incorrect.  Of the five men whom we know participated, three of them (Ira Nebeker, George Grant, and David Kimball, Solomon’s brother) were teenagers.  C. Allen Huntington was twenty-four years old and Stephen Taylor was twenty.

The impact

Quite simply they all lived to be old men, even if some of them, as one account noted, suffered rheumatism due to the rescue effort.

How many rescued?

Given the lateness of the day when they arrived and their access to wagons that could act as ferries, it is difficult to believe that any number of men physically carried the emigrants across by hand.  They arrived too late in the day to be able to carry all of them across as the legend maintains.  And we also some evidence that some of the Martin camp were capable of taking themselves across the river.  Magnanimous?  Yes.  But let’s not get carried away.

Cause of death

Medical knowledge at the time did not allow for a full diagnosis of the men’s death.  But we can say that their passing was not at all imminent after the crossing.  The youngest, George Grant, did not die until he was 32.  He served a mission after the crossing, in spite of the rheumatism he says he contracted due to his service at Sweetwater.  He died of tuberculosis in 1872.  The others died in subsequent years from causes ranging from typhoid (David Kimball) to natural causes (Stephen Taylor, 84).

Of some note is C. Allen Huntington who became the black sheep of the group.  He spent time in the Utah state penitentary for stealing horses.  According to one contemporary who spoke with him, Huntington had an enormous gash on his forehead from an argument he had with a “Greaser.”  When asked what he did in return, Huntington wouldn’t say except that “twelve of his countryman say he did the right thing.”  A little spooky, but alas…

Brigham Young’s promise

Simply put, the only evidence we have for this is Solomon Kimball’s assertion in the 1914 Improvement Era.  We know Brigham told the Saints if they just sat on their duffs, then no, of course they wouldn’t receive exaltation.  However, Kimball noted on an earlier occasion, 1908, that Young said this act alone would “immortalize them.”  The earlier statement seems far more defensible, given the legendary status this rescue has acquired among our people.

At the end of the day, the heroism is impressive…whether by three young men or twenty-some older men.   The story deserves to be as larger than life…but not larger than truth.

Background: Back in my days frolicking around in the warm of fuzz of Provo’s Never-Never Land (which, for me, is code for “Never, Never Marry” land), I immersed myself in Church history.  Fret not, my kitsch-hating friends.  This was no immersion in obnoxious trinkets that only reaffirm old narratives.  I studied the good times. The bad times.  The awkward times.  The product of my research?  A masterpiece.  An imposing edifice to reason and intellect–a Mormon version of jeopardy for my FHE group.  The Texas bombshell proved to be of particular interest to our born-in-the-wool Utah counselor (whom I admire a great deal, for the record).

The relationship between the Church and the historic Texas Republic is a fascinating one.  Even to this day (so I hear from a missionary who served in McAllen, TX), members will insist that Texas is the real “right place.”  Texas had long held a place in the imagination of abolitionists and utopians alike. The Nauvoo press teemed with laudatory articles about Sam Houston’s bravery in the face of Mexican intrigue, even as he batted back the legislature’s calls for war.

The plans to consider settlement in the Texas Republic crystallized when Lyman Wight (who would be instrumental in spreading the “real right place” myth in Texas) sent Joseph a letter saying that the local Indian tribe of Menominees wanted assistance in moving down to Texas.  Well, ole’ Wight had an idear–Brother Joseph, maybe we could use Texas as a gathering point for Saints in the South as well as jump-off point to open up missionary work in Latin America.

Joseph seized on the idea.  In a secret meeting of the Council of Fity, Joseph directed that emissaries be sent to Houston to negotiate a treaty by which they could purchase the land between the Colorado and the Nueces Valley.  The plan was to become a buffer state between the Texas Republic and Mexico.

We know that Joseph was promoting the annexation of Texas as part of his campaign speeches.  Yet we also see evidence that the Saints were truly hoping for the annexation bid to fail–Brigham Young even saw the accidental death of Secretary of State Abel Upshur as divine intervention in opening up the path.  Ambassador Lucien Woodworth left for Texas to have secret negotiations with Houston.  Unfortunately, we have almost no documentation about their meeting available to us–in Houston’s papers or elsewhere.  It was an explosive time for the Texans and if anything leaked, it could have prompted an aggressive military action from Santa Anna to prevent the Mormons’ occupation plan. We only know that Joseph had entertained the notion of using the Nauvoo legion to protect whatever new settlement he was pursuing; this, one can speculate, would have been rather attractive to Houston with a buffer of over 5,000 man.  This was theological realpolitik at its finest.

The plan obviously dissolved when Joseph was killed; after all, we have no evidence to suggest that Joseph preferred moving an entire city thousands of miles away over winning the Presidency.  However, Lyman Wight led a break-off group to the Texas region and built what was arguably the first temple west of the Mississippi in Zodiac, Texas (esp. given his continued affiliation with the Church at the time of the Nauvoo exodus).  However, by 1847, Salt Lake was calling Wight to return to Utah.  He refused and was excommunicated the next year.
So where is “the right place”?  I am perfectly fine with calling Salt Lake City the spot God wanted to build his Church from, in spite of Joseph’s attempts to make contingency plans as his city is under siege.  But perhaps some Utah die-hards will feel a little disquiet over this.

Talk amongst yourselves.

P.S. Full disclosure: the above information came largely from Michael Van Wagenen, The Texas Republic and the Mormon Kingdom of God (Bryan, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).

Case study: Porter Rockwell.  By all accounts, Porter Rockwell was a ne’er-do-well, “a strange-looking member for any church,” wrote a contemporary, even for the Mormons.  He may have been mentally retarded (which would account for Joseph’s saying that he was as innocent as a child), but he certainly would not be revered in the contemporary Church.  Yet there’s a difference between Rockwell and your average thug–he picked the right side.  Had Porter been friends with John C. Bennett rather that Joseph Smith, I am convinced that we LDS would shudder when we hear the name, Porter Rockwell.  Yet as a good acquaintance once (frighteningly) said to me: “God could use a thunder storm. Or Porter Rockwell.”  Yeah, scary.

Porter Rockwell has become our Al Capone and Jack Bauer all with a dash of boyish mischief.  His greatness only exists in our historical memory.  He was edgy, witty (in defending himself against the charges of carrying out an assassniation attempt against Lilburn Boggs: “He’s still alive, ain’t he?”).  No respectable Mormon mother would really want their daughter dating Rockwell these days. But many Mormon mothers find, “Modern-day Sampson” (the country song written in Rockwell’s honor) to be moving and inspirational.

So my question: to what degree is Rockwell representative of the Mormon vulnerability to the “bad boy” cultural strain? (a cultural strain admittedly present in the individualistic West).  What makes us vulnerable to less-than-pious images provided they are on our side?  Is it our theology (doubtful, but I could be convinced)?  Is it our 100-some years of cultural isolation that has led us to value folks who are “our guys”?

Discuss…

Incidentally, this post will say precious little of Rhodesian man, “missing links,” or opposing thumbs. I’m not a scientist. I don’t pretend to be. Believe it or not, this post is about kindness, about skepticism, indeed, even about forbearance. Most importantly, it’s about how creationists, Latter-day Saints, and Richard Dawkins might have something to learn from Charles Darwin. Much—too much to summarize—has been written on Charles Darwin’s views towards organized religion. As a young boy with parents of the British Liberal tradition (quite different from American liberalism, to be sure), Darwin’s parents were of mixed religious convictions—a common story in the love tales of the great men’s familial upbringing (JS comes to mind). His father was not affillated while his mother took young Charles to a Unitarian Church. Unwilling to rock the boat with the local Anglican church, his father allowed the children to participate in religion. Darwin was raised in a free-spirited household that was open to a variety of religious/intellectual influences.

What caused Darwin to lose faith? He never cited his evolutionary theory; indeed, during his famed Voyage on the Beagle, he still was reciting Biblical verses on points of morality, even though he had given up the Old Testament as being correct in any real sense. Later, following the publication of On the Origin of Species, he wrote to his collaborator, Asa Gray, that he could not view the world around him as being evidence of the God he had been taught: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice.” Yet, he qualified his disbelief in phrasing that resonates somewhat to the Mormon mind: “On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance” (emphasis mine). Darwin never deviated from this avowed agnosticism, though he did decry the exclusivism of the Christianity of his day: “the plain language (Mormons would argue, on the contrary, that the plainness had actually been lost to them through years of apostasy) of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” For the Mormons, this is damnable indeed.

Most importantly, his reaction to these answers were not bitter lash-backs against the religious establishment. When he moved to Downe, Kent, he became friends with the local Reverand, John (later Brodie) Innes, supported his work, and even donated monetarily to the Church. In spite of a later kerfuffle over some issues regarding pedagogy with the school, Darwin retained his friendship with the Reverand. He never rallied picketers, created his own Darwin fish, nor started propaganda campaigns to look religious folks look silly. His own son wrote just such an article denouncing all religion as absurd. Darwin urged his son if he “think[s] it new & important enough to counterbalance the evils” that his article would invite.” His work would certainly invite “the evils [of] giving pain to others.” In spite of his own lack of faith, he recognized the need for discretion in attacking the faith of others. This was no mere political move to win over the masses. He cared about causing pain, about bringing others down.

Darwin would later say, in mostly as a lament: “I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose…The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.” Incidentally, the Mormons insist that there is no first cause in the sense that there is no “first” in eternity.

For those of you who have read/seen any of Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, et. al., I would ask what resemblances you see between their crowd and Darwin. I simply see overzealous (though, in Dawkins case, brilliant) talking heads who have let the culture war’s Zeitgeist get to them. Similarly, I wonder if certain religion faculty in CES (I can think of a bombastic fireside at Ricks College back in the day) would be as comfortable as Darwin in recognizing their ignorance about “the first cause” (which the Lord has never seen fit to explain in detail).  In fact, I might think that at least some of Darwin’s questions about his Father have been answered in the afterlife (probably as taught by Henry Eyring, Sr.). But I could be wrong?

Discuss…

For example, if one is to believe in prophecy, then what is one to make of the vast numbers of prophets that existed at the time of, say, Lehi?  Prophethood was hardly monolithic–there were other prophets of the Old Testament wandering the valleys preaching the word.  But which word was binding?  The one in your vicinity?  What if you liked Jeremiah imagery more than Habbakuk’s?  Furthermore, which metaphor was more revelatory?  As long as we say that they’re all prophets (and equal ones…the minor/major distinction is an artificial one imposed by scholars), then we must reckon with whose word was “the” word.

Then, with more recent LDS history, we have the vexing questions surrounding *insert ominous voice* The Journal of Discourses.  When they say “In the Name of the Lord,” or “If the Lord’s Prophet hasn’t spoken it before, I’ll speak it now,” and so forth, how literally must we take such statements?  Did God view their words in the same we he views the words of the Conference Report?  How could he, given that the J of D only reached a limited circulation?  The conference report similarly not distributed widely on anything like the scale of our publications now.  Given such limited distribution, can we really view it as representative of doctrine?  As a former researcher at the BYU library whose duty was to formulate short abstracts of numerous pioneer diaries, I can say that one thing notably absent from these journal were the high-flung speculations that make up the meat of anti-Mormon pamphlets.  I saw one reference to Adam-God, but that was in the Abraham Smoot journal (a fascinating read, incidentally), an apostle who was privy to all manner of meandering doctrinal discussions, discussions that at most seeped into an occasional sermon. Even Brigham Young would later soften the edge on his Adam-God speculations by saying he didn’t “care a thing about it.” Furthermore, these issues (Adam-God, the conception of Jesus, etc.) never made it into the temple recommend interview.  Indeed, such speculations never made it into the endowment ceremony for any lasting period of time.  Brigham Young began to do so in 1877 but soon passed away in time for John Taylor to refine the endowment more in accordance with our modern understanding of the creation.  Whatever the Mormon leadership was saying, Mormon society stayed rather isolated from it.  To resort to anecdotal evidence, I might point to my mother who has literally not spent more than a few total months outside of the Mormon corridor.  Yet she balks at even the slightest hint of these distinctively Mormon speculations.

Is it possible that our concept of prophecy now might just be more refined and more in-tune with the will of heaven than the concept of prophecy in early church?  It’s a tad Whiggish as far as history goes–and that’ far from popular these days amongst historians.  Yet I have found that history is far too important to be entrusted to historians

Given how much individuals “prophesied” about various things, I tend to think that we simply cannot impose the traditional “foretelling” model on it.  Perhaps it was free-wheeling exhortation through which they anticipated they would eventually come to the truth, Prophecy, it seems, was more of a process than a product. While the free-wheeler in me likes the idea, the adherent in me is grateful for the bureaucracy of translation committees, general conferences, and publications, also known as Correlation. And thank heavens for that…at least when we have a class, we can ask the instructor ‘where we are in the lesson,” rather than just sit back and wait for our nauseating roller-coaster ride towards Kolob to end.

“Sunday School answers” generally do not receive very good press from many Latter-day Saints, especially those of the blogging ilk.  Instructors beg, plead with their students: “Let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?”  The typical response is either befuddled silence or a massaged version of the above.  Normally, it is explained in the context of a personal experience…after all, we note, this means we’re applying the doctrine (note the almost elixir-like aura surrounding the word apply–as though all applications were equally relevant to classroom discussion).  I mean, seriously, does that story about your dog finding a bone really tell us much about missionary work and scripture study?  And then, if one expresses frustration about the intellectual drain that such questions have on your mind, you invariably hear a response–either then or later in a Sacrament meeting talk: “Primary answers are primary answers for a reason *insert some chestnut about how they are “primary” to our faith and always reliable, so forth, so on*”  And all in the name of uplifting one another when all we’re doing is banalizing hackneyed stories and analogies…

Now, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I wrote the above as more of a gripe than a thought.  As horrific as some answers to Sunday School questions might be to even the nominally attuned gospel, perhaps our very idea of Sunday School lies at fault.  Instead of sitting there waiting to be spiritually entertained, perhaps a more helpful analytical framework rests in viewing Sunday School as collective ritual rather than a venue for data transmission.

Noted scholar on the sociology of religion, Roy A. Rappaport, argues that rituals create “the construction of orders of meaning transcending the semantic.”  The answers they give matter little in terms of data transmission; in all transparency, yes, you really do know that faith moves mountains, that your ancestors are waiting, depending on you, that a frog will be boiled alive by gradually heating up the water, and that driving the wagon too close to the canyon edge is not a marketable skill in gospel economics.  Rather, it’s the fact that they say them at all that creates the meaning.

We, gospel gadflys that we are, are probably the ones sitting in the back waiting for the next provocative comment.  Yet if we sat by thinking these things during a Zulu male maturation ceremony, we would probably feel wildly out-of-place.  Maybe many of us do already.

Treating Sunday School as a ritual rubs against our free-wheeling grain; that I’ll concede.  Sunday Schools should be like spiritual graduate seminars to us; not some old-school gathering together to measure ritualistically the cosmos or whatever it was they did at Stonehenge.  Or maybe it’s our Protestant edge that doesn’t like the idea of being in rituals in the first place.

But for me, the Mormon mystique of officially gathering together with a common vernacular, using spiritual shorthand (hat-tip to Elder Maxwell’s phrasing) to communicate a common experience, has a beautiful element of ritual that is all to easy to miss.

Invite a Dialogue editor and a full-time seminary instructor to have a conversation and you’ll know immediately what I mean (I have been worked closely and even been familially acquainted with both, so I know whereof I speak).  Richard Bushman’s biography has been spurned by some prominent individuals, yet these individuals are as moral, upstanding, and even brilliant of men in the Church.  And the intelligentsia’s faction of the Church’s broad collection often turns its nose in disdain at those misguided “white shirts” of Church administration.  All of them good, upstand men/women…yet the lingering wedge remains: “What of the historical Joseph?”  Was Joseph the solemn boy who loped around the store, according some remembrances?  Or was he the rambunctious teen who literally beat fellow workers into submission?  A philanderer?  A torn, but zealous man who had to swallow some bitter pills of revelation?

I know it’s kitsch for the super-orthodox wing of the Church to say: “It doesn’t really matter what Joseph did/said/thought/ate/sneezed; I know he’s a prophet.”  We intelligentsia bristle with frustration at such small-minded and intellectually unrespectable ideas.  At best, we grant them a little deconstructionist leeway, but inwardly, we tend to shake at our heads at them…

Yet I wonder if there is some intellectual merit to what they say.  Let’s, for a moment, set aside the Von Rankean school of historiography (historians should find out “what really happened.”)  Let’s, for an oh-so-brief moment, consider the important role symbols play throughout holy writ.  Historians have noted that Joseph acts as a Rorschach test for religious understanding.  And it might just be possible that God intended it that way.  Sure, Joseph existed.   But the attempts to capture his essence have all failed–some more respectably than others.  Even the best efforts, such as Bushman’s–don’t draw the conclusion of his prophetic status.  Rather, they leave a little spark of mystery in Joseph’s mind–a spark which has lit both the fires of mobs and the fires of faith.

Is it possible that Joseph as a person is less significant than Joseph as a symbol?  Could it be that God is more interested in historical memory than in historicity?  If we are willing to grant God a hand in the gentle crafting of an entire race of men through organic evolution–in spite of all the oppositional variables where evolution could have gone wrong (a feat to which, incidentally, even Richard Dawkins gives lip-service)– can we not also grant him a similar hand in guiding the historical memory of Joseph?

The idea is subversive, and one that might elicit scoffs from both Dialogue reader and “white shirt” alike–including me (a fellow who happened to wear a white shirt while working for a Dialogue editor).   But there’s an attractiveness to it that I cannot dismiss.

The land of Star Valley is an almost mystical one, surreal in its environs and mystical in its origin. The last of the Mormon settlements, it is nestled in the foothills of the Tetons as the one of the last outposts of the Mormon colonial experiment. Entering the valley is not unlike a drug-induced quaintness that leads one to, at once, blink to ensure he’s awake/sober and refrain from blinking lest he pass the town entirely. One might even expect to hear this music played from the rooftops of such a valley. Even now, I can hardly take a few steps in the local grocery store without meeting an old acquaintance.

Yet Star Valley has its ghosts for me, an up-and-coming academic looking to revere his heritage while sweating to earn his “street cred” of modernity and the life of the mind. The people of Star Valley—much like the early republicans of America’s founding—prided themselves on their isolation from urbanization and civilization. “Twill be here,” they might have said, “where we shall build the good society.” A tad volk-ish to be sure, but well-meaning nonetheless. This has, sadly, become code for eschewing the corrupt Democrats and for glorifying a lack of education. Guns, God, and Glory.

Historian James Gelvin has said of the Middle East that we ought not think of the region as experiencing modernization/modernity but modernities. . Modernity is not monolithic. Each nation develops the modern mystique according to its own cultural traditions and intelligentsia. Star Valley was no different.

My parents were bright individuals—my father received a graduate degree in Public Administration, and even though my mother followed the way of so many other wives who terminated their education prematurely in order to support the breadwinner, she possessed the practicality of a rural farm girl. Generally, my parents did little to question the established grooves of thinking that dominate Mormon discourse. My father built his own family room, garage—listening to country music while he did it. He might cite a philosopher here or there, but such things clearly fit within his mental department of “nice to know” kinds of things (aka expendable). My mother became skittish whenever I read websites not explicitly approved by the church. In other words, they were decent people working to raise a decent family who would be decent citizens of the Kingdom in spite of all earth and hell. Throw in a more-than-wayward sibling and suddenly, the kind of intellectual scouring that is the stuff of Mormon Matters became peripheral indeed. To them, there were more pressing matters, believe it or not, than when/where horses became extinct in America.

So how could a small-town provincial like me go from such small ideas like the power of the 454 Casull (a high-powered revolver manufactured at a local arms plant) to big intellectual skepticism? A historian would now spend the next 10 pages discussing Star Valley as a vortex of conservatism and modernism and how the environment in which I lived had a quarter of it that was predisposed to critical inquiry and how I had “tapped into” such developments. They would discuss how porous the community was, or about some book I read. With the Internet’s boom around my early teenage years, an in-born disease that forced me to stay indoors and find other things to do besides sports (aka reading), perhaps these things are true. But to quote from Benjamin Franklin (not Boyd K. Packer—sorry, Packer haters), though these assessments might be true, they are not very useful in determining the journey from provinciality to Ivory Tower Mormon-dom.

Rather, I owe it to something my father said, something he found to be inconsequential at the time but served as a guiding idea over the course of my intellectual development. And it’s controversial, so hold on to your hats. I had asked about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and whether Brigham Young was involved. He told me about the famous letter carried by Jonathan Haslam about how Brigham Young had told Isaac Haight to let the emigrants alone—a well-attested historical fact whose interpretations are much disputed the literature today. But my father touched a chord within me—he had just cited evidence. My father was not citing authorities, referencing scholarship, or anything that would win him credibility with the academic elite. As far as I am concerned, we were engaged in a spiritual activity. Yet I knew the next day he would be banging his nails and listening to his horrific country music regardless. He was helping me to keep the heart of a provincial and the mind of a scholar—all without him knowing the wiser.

So to those who feel hurt, embittered, or angry at finding out this or that historical fact and project these feelings onto a history of insularity, I want to declare within that homemade family room, a father planted the seed of intellectual Mormonism that I continue to feed to this day. Modernity was found within the walls of my own home, even as we paid tribute to what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”—tradition. For me, provinciality and intellectuality are not dichotomous virtues.

Thanks, Dad.

Charles Radford

A colorful case in point: in March 1971, East Pakistan won the majority of the seats in the National Assembly. This would center power in the ethnically distinct Bengali East Pakistan region. However, the Western military dictator, Yahya Khan would have none of it. He sent his forces to repress the Eastern Bengalis en masse, killing hundreds of thousands of East Bengalis. This would culminate in a flood of refugees to Eastern India—somewhere to the tune of 10 million. This obviously caused strains for the Indo-Pak relations. War broke out quickly—a war which the East Pakistanis won. They eventually broke off and declared themselves to be an independent Bangladesh. Around this same time, a low-level bureaucrat in Dakka, Bangladesh named Archer Blood sent a barely classified (marked with only “secret” instead of “top secret”) memo declaring the U.S. government to be “morally bankrupt” for its complacency on the issue.

Radford had access to key U.S. documents regarding U.S. policy during this war. During the famed

Jack Anderson

India-Pakistan War in 1971, Nixon notably declared the United States to be neutral. However, Nixon was privately “tilting” in their direction, a reality that Radford leaked to fellow Latter-day Saint Jack Anderson, a prominent newsman for the Washington Post through stolen documents . This was no mere geopolitical move, however; Jack Anderson would win a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the incident. Anderson would later find himself on Nixon’s enemies list and even a possible target of assassination. G. Gordon Liddy even talked to a doctor about putting LSD in his soup. Nixon’s men were also considered trying to tie Anderson and Radford together through a possible homosexual relationship. I do not take that claim at all seriously—this is Nixon after all (and my M.A. thesis is on Nixon—this is a man I know something about).

Faithful Latter-day Saints—what are we to do? Anderson was as active as they come. Radford as well. Was Radford’s actions justified given the horrific situation of genocide taking place? Anderson revealed secret documents about the powers-that-be to the world. Was he standing up for the right or failing to follow Christ’s counsel to “render unto Caesar” and Paul’s counsel to let the powers that be reign supreme until Christ comes again?

Hadyn White maintains that every history, in spite of its claims to objectivity, is constructed in literary fashion with traditional literary tropes such as villains, comic reliefs, and heroes. Indeed, White would conclude, we see our very world as a story…and therefore, the job of a historian is to point out our way of making history more than the history itself. Hence, the title of his magnum opus, Metahistory.

So who gets under our collective skin? You know…the folks who have been able to get inside our heads and poke us where it hurts? As we will find (surprise, surprise), there is no one archetype for the Mormon villain. Each of these villains represents a strand of our thought our culture that has been particularly vulnerable. We will see the Benedict Arnolds, the political activists, the heretics, and the downright scoundrels. Some have even worn a denim jumper or two in their lifetime…

Some observations are in order:

A) Some of these individuals, I guarantee, will be seen as heroes by Mormon Matters readers. However, as I’m sure these readers recognize, these heroic efforts are generally those of a dissenter…and in order for a dissenter to become famous, s/he has to tick off the powers that be in large numbers. So alas…they make the list.

B) Most of these villains have varying degrees of admirable traits. We’re talking about perception and not reality. I, for one, would gladly eat lunch with most “villains” on this list.

So behold…

10. Emma Smith

Poor sister Emma…while she is beloved as a heroine in much of the contemporary Church (of course, we all have the resident Emma-hater), Emma was not always perceived as one. In the aftermath of the Exodus from Nauvoo, Emma not only stayed behind but also kept several of Joseph’s personal belongings that Brigham believed belonged to the Church. In addition, she offered some support to Joseph III in establishing the RLDS church. Her son, David, eventually went to a mental institution in the aftermath of learning of his father’s polygamy while he served an RLDS mission to Utah–thus blackening her name even further with the Utah leadership. Brigham Young even accused her of trying poison Joseph and called her a “child of hell.” Thankfully, we can appreciate Emma for her tremendous accomplishments now.

9. Sidney Rigdon

Sidney has, quite sadly, been classified among the “crazy uncles” category of Mormon history. Yet he served for nearly ten years as the Joseph Smith’s proverbial Aaron. Despite his impressive service and considerable contribution to the Church with his Campbellite congregation, he has something on record to annoy just about every faction of the Church–from “when the prophet has spoken the thinking is done” orthodoxy to the postmodern, “scripture is inspired fiction” free-wheelers. In the months leading up to the Missouri War, he proved his capacity to inflame when giving the famous Salt Sermon–which implied that the expulsion of prominent apostates such as W.W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery would be forthcoming. He became the bete noire of the succession crisis as he attempted to convince the Latter-day Saints that Joseph Smith had appointed him to be the leader. In historical memory, Rigdon has not been painted in the darkest hues; his villainy is often viewed as delusions and nothing more–delusions that could easily be brushed off into the ash-bin of history

8. Albert Sydney Johnson

A significant figure in 19th-century American military history in his own right, it’s ironic indeed that his greatest legacy is outside scholarly circles is as a part of an anticlimactic military operation that saw no bonafide engagement of enemies: the Utah War. He led, in all, over 5,000 troops to put down a supposed rebellion of Utah against the federal government. Congress widely opposed the expedition (most notably Sam Houston), and eventually would deem it “Buchanan’s blunder.” However, Utah remained under military occupation (albeit limited) For modern Latter-day Saints, Johnson serves more as a symbol of the animosity between the pioneers and the federal government than as an actual executor

7. John D. Lee A looming figure in not only Mormon history, but in the history of the West, John D. Lee has been kicked around as the football in the hands of Mountain Meadows historians. Aside from the elephant in the room that is the MMM, John D. Lee was otherwise a hard-working LDS who contriubted significantly to his community.

Having Been depicted as everything from a loyal scapegoat and hack to a renegade, John D. Lee has borne much of the blame for the attacks. Juanita Brooks’ research demonstrated that Lee’s excommunication and execution was simply meant to relieve pressure from the federal authorities’ constant haranguing. Walker, et. al. has concluded that John D. Lee played a central role in the massacre in both planning and deed (the topic looms too large for extensive treatment in this, a rather superfluous article by comparison–see the book that needs no introduction, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, for more info). In either interpretation, Lee’s name is often one of the few names to be mentioned within popular discourse about the massacre, in spite of the dozens of Iron County militiamen participation. Lee has come to symbolize the violent streak–if there be one–within 19th-century Mormonism–the crazy uncle in the attic.

6. Fawn Brodie
Niece of President David O. McKay and husband of a famed of nuclear theorist, Bernard Brodie, who helped to craft Eisenhower-era nuclear deterrence strategy; Fawn Brodie made fame in both critical and liberal Mormon circles by publishing one of the first scholarly biographies of Joseph Smith to reach wide circulation, No Man Knows My History. Brodie was roundly denounced and excommunicated within a year of publication. Whether she deserved such denunciation or not (I’m intentionally avoiding that elephant in the room), Brodie’s name has come to symbolize the “pointy-headed intellectual” stock character for modern Mormons.  One of my contacts has informed me that when Richard Bushman presented Rough Stone Rolling to Knopf, they initially hesitated. Bushman responded that they owed him one: “After all, you published Brodie.” The argument was persuasive.

A few caveats…

A) No, C.S. Lewis fans…he did not make the list and for good reasons–primarily because his spot is being reserved a future, top-10 list that Arthur and I will co-arthur, I mean, author (*drum riff for comedic effect*).

B) I must give Howard Hughes a hat-tip…while he doesn’t make the official list (his contribution wasn’t wide-reaching enough to really lodge himself in the Mormon mind beyond esoterica), he fits well within the tradition of businessmen appreciating Mormons for their discipline and hard work. This also intersects some with the fourth

The list

4. The friendly gangster

This is more of a stock character than it is a particular individual. You’ve all heard the common returned missionary discourse from missionaries who have served in the ghetto (or in Russia). They all have a story or two about the gangster who promised them protection, about the guy with diamond-encrusted hubcaps who tells them to leave the area for their own good. One instance I heard even had a mobster in a tinted-window limousine ask the sister missionaries if anyone was bothering them. They supposedly then complain about a particularly lewd passerby who bothers them every morning. The limo drives off…they never see the man again.

So to the pious mafia and the clergy-fearing gangster, we tip our fedora hats to you.

3. Harold Bloom

A proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to literary studies (his bibliography of original monographs/novels/anthologies number thirty in total) –so he’s the kind of fellow that all the revisionists throw their critiques at. Harold Bloom has written extensively on American religious life, devoting a chapter to the Mormons. While he has little taste for much of the 20^th century Church, he called the King Follett the greatest sermon in American religious history. From Bloom we saw the fullest articulation of the “religious genius” thesis—that whatever Joseph’s oddities, he was brilliant at “religion-making.” Harold Bloom has given a prominent voice of sympathy within the unfriendly waters of literary studies, and in doing, so has given Mormonism a certain sense of literary credibility.

2. Jimmy “Ah Shucks” Stewart

The actor who needs no introduction made himself beloved amongst the Mormons for his role in the Church-produced film, Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, as an old man who has a dream of the nativity and of directing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Stewart sealed his status as honorary Mormon when he donated all of his papers and materials to the Special Collections at Brigham Young University. With these contributions added to his previous image as the “aw-shucks” actor of It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart provided Mormons the embodiment of debonair innocence that seems to characterize the ideal of Mormon masculinity. His Gentile status legitimized this image as one Mormons could believe would thrive in modern society.

And you know that most Mormon women probably would have swallowed Kolob if Stewart promised to lasso it for them…

And the winner is…

1. Thomas Kane

While sufficiently obscure to lay members of the Church, his noted title, “Friend of the Mormons,” demands that he receive the revered spot (and besides, most of our academics either formally or informally–obscurity is what we do). Thomas Kane, an attorney in Philadelphia, abolitionist, and military officer in the Civil War, first contacted Mormons while they were visting a Philadelphia conference in 1846. Kane provided essential legal counsel and lobbying efforts to the Latter-day Saints during the following decade when the federal government was rabidly hostile to them. He delivered lectures on the Mormons behalf and defended the Mormons to the hostile Eastern press. When Utah was made into a U.S. territory with the compromise of 1850, then-president Fillmore offered Kane the position of territorial governor. He suggested that Young would be a more fitting choice. When James Buchanan sent his troops with the Utah war, Kane offered to mediate. Young noted that he wanted Kane’s name to “live for all eternity.” He had “done a great work,” and would “do a greater work still.” Kane legitimized the Latter-day Saints at a time when most politicians and the public held the Mormons in low-regard indeed.

So, in honor of the broad-mindedness that is Mormon Matters, I would like to suggest a list of the top ten “Righteous Gentiles.” In orthodox Judaism, these are known as gerim toshavim, “resident aliens.” These are Gentiles who either formally or informally have associated themselves with the people of the Jews by agreeing to abide by the mitzvot or Noachian laws.

What great men/women among our people have demonstrated similar affinity for our cause, while they themselves remain outside the fray of the Mormon center?

My criteria…

A. They must be well-regarded on either the folk or elite level, and their contributions must be perceived as distinctively Mormon (even if they are not).

B. They aren’t necessary “righteous” by our standards, but their names must have currency among our people as a sympathizer (whether they were actually sympathizers or not is irrelevant)

The List–10th through 5th

10. G.K. Chesterton

A British author and Christian apologist well-renowned for his series of novels, The Father Brown Mysteries as well as his vigorous critiques of secularism and modernity, Chesterton has reached wide audiences amongst all Christians of essentially any Christian faith. Even though he was vehemently opposed to any deviation from Catholic orthodoxy and even levelled a mild critique against Mormons, I rank him #10. Chesterton has been quoted often enough by general authorities and leaders to be comparable with C.S. Lewis. Bruce C. Hafen devoted an entire talk (one of those typically well-worn talks on balancing faith and reason and so-on) to a single quotation by Chesterton. While most of his renown has come from Elder Maxwell’s extensive usage of him, Maxwell alone has made Chesterton’s name worth noting.

9. Richard Muow and co.

The president of Fuller Theological Seminary, Muosw is less known as a person and more known as a symbol. In 2004, Muow declared, at the Mormon Tabernacle, to thousands of LDS that evangelicals “have sinned against you.” He proceeded to provide a mea culpa on behalf of the Evangelical community, stating that they have spread lies and untruths about Mormons and their beliefs. His remarks set off a firestorm within the Intermountain evangelical outreach center, some suggesting that his remarks were only going to empower Mormons more in their wrong-headed beliefs that they were mainstream Christians. This, of course, only increased Muow’s cachet amongst the Utah circles as an evangelical who was finally willing to tell the truth against the roar of the masses. Such things carry tremendous pathos to the Mormons as a people.

Muow’s admission was the culmination for a golden age of Evangelical-Mormon dialogue, starting with Stephen Robinson’s collaborative work with Craig Blomberg, a Protestant scholar of the New Testament at the Denver Seminary in Colorado: How Wide the Divide?: An Evangelical and a Mormon in Conversation. In essence, Muow, Robinson, and Blomberg represented the actualization of many Mormons’ hopes—albeit fleeting— that evangelical leaders might finally acknowledge that we do share some core beliefs and that we are *gasp* indeed Christians.

8. Alexander Doniphan

Doniphan should be noted in his own right for his contributions as a military commander during the Mexican War. Indeed, he has been so noted, as the litany of schools in Missouri have been named after him. But Mormons, of course, have other reasons for the soft spot for ole’ Al in their collective conscience.

Doniphan was an attorney living in Missouri at the time of the Saints’ expulsion from Jackson county in 1833. Doniphan provided legal representation for Joseph Smith during the bazillion legal hearings he had to trudge through in the Missouri era. He refused to execute Joseph when General Lucas commanded him to do so—at risk of court martial and perhaps execution himself. As a member of the Missouri state legislature, he worked to create Caldwell County as a settlement for the Saints in the wake of the expulsion from Jackson county. While he never particularly liked Joseph Smith or his religion, Doniphan will be, for the time being, remembered as a lover of liberty and justice to the Mormon mind.

7. Klaus Baer

The Egyptologist extraordinaire who made made himself famous as the great middle-way on matters concerning the Abraham papyri. Baer instructed Hugh Nibley in Egyptian in 1959 and became attached to the Joseph Smith papyri from that point on. When some of the original papyri were discovered in 1966, Baer, as commissioned by Dialogue, provided a highly agnostic translation of the documents. While devoutly agnostic, Baer refused to jump on board with the critics in declaring Joseph Smith to be a fraud. Indeed, in one letter to the Tanners, he instructed them that similar translation difficulties can be found in the New Testament and that these difficulties cannot be used to delegitimize faith. While Baer does not quite constitute a hero for Mormon thought, he demonstrates the cool-headed scholarship that refuses to point fingers—a tendency most Mormon intellectuals appreciate even if they do not agree with.

6. Margaret Barker

A scholar of Old Testament studies who studied at University of Cambridge, Barker has written widely on monotheism amongst the Canaanites. What has made her a Blessed Gentile? Her scholarship has touched all of Mormon gurus’ soft spots: Enoch, temple theology, and questions re: the plurality of gods. Her most famous work within Mormon circles, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God wherein she argues that “the Lord” was indeed seen as a Son of God in early Israelite theology. While her work is certainly unusual in her field, that she is a Cambridge-trained scholar of Old Testament studies has helped Latter-day Saints feel an added sense of legitimacy in their intellectual claims.

5. Jan Shipps

Called “the beloved Gentile” by higher-ups within the Church and the “Jane Goodall of Mormon studies” by others, Jan Shipps almost single-handedly made the study of Mormonism into a mainstream fashion rather than just the niche studies of academics. Before Jan Shipp, few credible scholars indeed commented with any degree of favorability to the Church. Jan Shipps has provided a dominant wherein scholars can understand Mormonism without judging its veracity. It was Shipps who proposed that we stop seeking to determine whether Joseph’s visions were correct or not, but rather, she suggested we look to determine what kind of collective meaning these visions had to the people who experienced them. While Bushman has taken a similar approach, his orthodoxy in the Church has been an obstacle (albeit, one that could be overcome). Shipps has demonstrated that one can study Joseph Smith’s story and still be a sympathetic non-believer.

And if she’s really the Jane Gooddall of Mormons, maybe the Mormon creationists should re-think their position…

Orson F. Whitney explained it like this:

Perhaps the Lord needs such men on the outside of his Church, to help it along. They are among its auxiliaries, and can do more good for the cause where the Lord has placed them, than anywhere else… Hence, some are drawn into the fold and receive a testimony of Truth, while others remain unconverted…the beauties and glories of the gospel being veiled temporarily from their view, for wise purpose. The Lord will open their eyes in his own due time…God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of his great and marvelous work. The Latter Day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous for any one people…We have no quarrel with the Gentiles. They are our partners in a certain sense.

One might compare these perceptions to a person’s reaction to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity concerning the speed of light and time perception. Basically, if one travels at the speed of light, then the perception of time slows down until time essentially ceases to exist to those outside one’s frame of reference. 

We must understand that we are asking investigators to do something similar, to stop time as it were.  The church’s claims may be possible, but they seem utterly fantastic, even absurd to the uninitiated.  So when they reject it, is it possible, as President Whitney said, that some are kept from the truth not only because they know not where to find it but also because the Lord would rather have them elsewhere for the time being?

If the Pope joined the Church (as we dreamed of during our missions), there would not likely be massive LDS baptisms, but charges of scandal, of madness, of intrigue.   If Mother Theresa had become a member, could she have retained her credibility as an international humanitarian?  Could it not be the Pope, Mother Theresa and others are/were doing their parts in the vast work of temporal and spiritual salvation?  While they might be introducing incorrect doctrines, isn’t it possible that the Lord plans on getting that straightened out later?  Maybe in the meantime, he needed Mother Theresa’s humanitarianism, Martin Luther’s defiance, and Isaac Newton’s mind right where they were.

I have often noted to my acquaintances that the genius of the gospel is its ability to co-opt and integrate.  Let’s say I’ve been staring down a rather vexing personal conundrum for several years.  It’s one that has, quite honestly, taken a toll on my testimony.  Strangely enough, it has almost no relationship to the great ambiguities of our age:  not Joseph Smith, not Brigham Young, not terminal illness or the priesthood ban, not even crass local leaders or uncomfortable political positions.  But it did erode my faith just the same, and all the more because it rubs me right where it hurts.

So I’m sitting in my car tonight eating my beef baja chalupa and feeling annoyed at planet earth for no particularly good reason. I begin to listening to an old song that I heard often during a difficult period of my mission, and it struck a resonant chord with me then.  The song is not impressive by any traditional standards.  Its lyrics were cliche and well-worn. But its content appealed to the emotions of my mission.  In some ways, I felt as though I was on my mission again.  And suddenly, I felt as if I were facing the same problems I had faced on my mission, only in a different form.

The result? I stare at myself in the mirror, look myself in the eye and honestly believe that I can handle this.  My painful conundrum was suddenly recast in terms I had once known and loved.  It’s become sadly cliche to speak of how “remember” is one of the most commonly used words in scriptures.  Memory can be so personal.  Is there a place in the gospel for a recognition of both memory’s power and its vulnerability?

In the world of academia, memory is, at best, smiled condescendingly upon as an interesting element of identity-formation in some developing nation. It’s fallible and fickle, malleable and manipulatable.  It can be deconstructed and re-trained to comply with the tenets of the academy.   The popular conclusion often drawn from these realizations is essentially a nihlistic agnosticism.

Dabble in the esoteric with me for a moment. Compare memory a bit to Platonic thought.  In Plato’s Tmaneus, he spoke of a concept called khora, an utterly abstract reeptacle of sorts through which the divine virtue was transmitted into material being.  Most significantly, according to Derrida, khora must be by its very nature formless and without definition.  Timaneus tells us that if we were to look at khora, we look at like we would a dream.  Essentially (barring some serious divine intervention), no one can see khora or know its nature.  It only functions as a governing regulator between the ideal and the real.  I submit to you that in a gospel context, the memory serves a similar function–with the significant qualification that the holder of the memory can access it much fuller ways than Plato could access the khora. I would suggest that our memory and our testimony are intricately related and almost synonymous.

Where is testimony equated with memory in scripture?  Where is it not?  How often do we hear the newly-converted speak of how they suddenly “see” God’s hand working in their lives even when they didn’t recognize it?  How about where Christ tells us that the Holy Ghost will “bring all things to your remembrance”?  Must these things correspond with an empirical reality to be “true”?  I’m not suggesting that these memories are factually incorrect, but just not scientifically falsifiable.

Yet scholarship would tell me that since memory can be so manipulated, how could I ever seriously let such nostalgia influence me in any meaningful way?  If state-makers can create a common identity with monuments, marching bands, and banners, why can’t my own mind be fooling me into making sense out of an irrational situation?  Indeed, Maurice Halbwachs, the patron saint on the sociological study of collective (and by extension) individual memory, noted that collective and even individual memory derives from the social sphere.

How do we protect our memory from these polarized pollutions of both misinformation and information overload?  Perhaps we can suppose that memory, as the mind’s most fragile instrument can also be its most beautiful work of art.  Perhaps memory’s beauty, as God would have it, is as at least as much in what it ignores as what it remembers.  A perfect awareness of the thoughts, words, and actions alone of every man, woman, and child would not effectively give one a perfect understanding of one’s place in the cosmos.  Love just might.

Being a Latter-day Saint graduate student in liberal arts can make for some interestingly awkward (or awkwardly interesting) conversations. Most of my effort is spent demonstrating to them that I can read WHOLE books and speak in complete sentences, that I don’t care for the Left Behind series, that I find C.S. Lewis to be only occasionally insightful, and that I don’t believe Jesus drives a tank. And yet I am willing to believe that a prophet of God came out of the upstate New York woodwork. Their thoughts probably vacillate between, “Radically intense!” or “Shouldn’t you be fixing moonshine somewhere?” Except that I don’t drink moonshine. Always full of surprises! So then there are all of the classic accounts of awkward moments at pubs, strange looks about the reason I know Hmong (“cultural imperialist,” they mutter under their breath), and various other oddities.

So at the end of the day, I ask: “Why?” The discussions about the reasons for the Word of Wisdom rage ad nauseum. Tit-for-tats continue about why we dress modestly, go to Church on Sunday, or do anything that we do ad absurdium. Is it written in the heavens, my heart crieth out, that one glass of wine a month is worse for you than two gallons of soda a day? Yet one earns sharp talk about health habits whereas the other gets a temple recommend thrown in the batch.

My answer? Postmodernism. Image politics. Divinely-inspired PR. Perhaps it sounds a little too Karl Rove-ish for some folks’ tastes, but it is well founded in scripture and modern revelation. Elder Maxwell taught: “We will find that not only are there strategic signposts of morality, but there are also tactical standards of morality with which we must be concerned if we are to preserve our identity in the way that is most helpful to us and to our fellowmen.” He cites Sampson’s long hair; there was nothing inherently strengthening about hair. He notes Paul’s injunction to the women that they keep their heads covered; there is no theology, Jewish or Christian, that tells us anything about the goodness or evil inherent in womens’ hair. What were these images for? Tactics…and seldom are tactics a reflection of eternal principles. Sampson needed to distinguish himself from the otherwise unrighteous Phillistines. The women, feeling a sense of equality from the Pauline epistles (“Ye are all one in Christ”) felt reasonably inclined to shed a certain aspect of their gender. Paul counseled against it if only to keep them distinct from the ladies of loose morals who were also known by their refusal to wear a head-covering.

How much of what we do is dictated because we want to be “peculiar”? BYU’s honor code? The Word of Wisdom? Modesty? perhaps BYU’s honor code (what’s better looking to the press than 30,000 clean-cut, modestly-dressed 18-25 year olds)? Notice, this possibility should not be used to delegitimize the commandments. After all, Elder Maxwell continued that the “prophet would help us set the tone of tactical morality when such is needed.”

Can image politics be the latest way to articulate the message while staying in touch with the postmodern zeitgeist? What think you?

This piece will primarily examine the relationship between Mormon academics and the general populace of the Church. How should the academic react in kind to the generally conservative masses of the Church? Must they be dismissed from the discussion due to ignorance of the subject material? Should the members defer to the academic establishment, recognizing academia’s expertise in whatever issue is at question? What happens when this academic establishment becomes a “power structure” unto itself.

I hope that both the Mormon Academicus and the local steel-worker can work towards seeing eye-to-eye on the things that matter most: Jesus Christ’s divine Sonship, Joseph’s prophetic mantle and singular theological contributions , and the Church’s basic divine authority. I hope that academics can see beyond the Utah-ness of the Church and can see the transnational gospel. Indeed, I wonder, can (and should) academics be willing to sit down and break bread, even eat Jell-O with their fellow adherent who has never heard of D. Michael Quinn and cares even less about the Mountain Meadows Massacre? Secular academics often say “no,” but are we not a fellowship of the Saints that should take an interest in the activities of each other? It is certainly true that many members care little for the scholarship on the Book of Mormon (just as many Americans care little for Gordon Wood’s scholarship on the Constitution); yet do academics, in their calls for more critical thinking, similarly care for the concerns and deeply-held values about protecting the organizational and ideological integrity of the Church? And in a way beyond the traditional postmodern (and extremely condescending) response of: “Well, these things are very important to people, so we must basically humor them.” I also understand the response: “Well, we believe differently because documents X, Y, and Z” indicate it thusly, and anyone who believes otherwise is simply ill-informed.” While that approach might do for an academic symposium, I am hesitant to adopt it in this soul-changing institution that those faithful among us have experienced this Church to be. Yet nowhere in the teachings of the Prophets or the Scriptures do I see a systematic decree for us to avoid the tough issues. If Jesus Christ was willing to sit down with the publican and sinner, would he not also be willing to sit down with both scholar and sheepherder? In that spirit, might we begin to see the gospel as a ideological coalition of folks who are “trying to be like Jesus” in the fullest way rather than a monolith of suits and denim jumpers?

While I do not propose to delve into that can of worms about the difference between men and women concerning physical attractiveness, I do notice that the men in the Latter Day Saint community are no less concerned with physical attractiveness than most men…they just might describe their attractiveness in a more tamed way. From my experience, Mormons are not immune to the hormones that make the world go around. Yet the instructions we receive related to dating are remarkably (and rightfully, in my view) asexual. The cute aphorism in marriage is always to “marry your best friend.” Yet we all know that many of us had that super-tight friend of the opposite gender that we wouldn’t be caught dead marrying. We just didn’t like them “in that way.”

In my interactions with my fellows, when girls are beautiful, the first personality characteristic they are assumed to have is not spirituality. Rather, they are assumed to be “fun,” “bubbly.” And there are just as many complaints at BYU about guys going after the thin, could-find-shade-under-barbed-wire, girls as anywhere else. How often do we ask the rhetorical question of the beautiful single adults: “How is it that you are not married?” Not so with our resident “sweet spirits.” Do we tend to mentally consign them to a life of lonely competence…perhaps working as a librarian somewhere? So I wonder: Have we set up a dichotomy between “spiritual” people and “beautiful” people?

And how vulnerable are we Latter-day Saints to the impact of the media? Sure, we might dismiss them as morally bankrupt and call admiring them our “guilty pleasures,” but let’s be honest: if the most morally questionable Hollywood star were to miraculously have an Alma experience and become the best Mormon YSA in her respective ward, you can bet that s/he would bump even the most solid guy/girl down the list for dates.

For men, (and I risk being seriously contradicted here), I am going to suggest that few men (LDS or otherwise) would call Cameron Diaz, the Brittany Spears of yesteryear, or most supermodels anything less than very attractive (provided some of them lose the heroin eyes and their horrifically layered makeup). but how much would even LDS men be willing to sacrifice by way of personality if the girls they were dating looked like them?

And for women, how many women would pick a younger version of Mitt Romney over the guys they are currently dating (imagine for a moment that Mitt Romney was not going to be ridiculously wealthy)? Or having a worthy priesthood holder who looked like Michael Phelps? If media is the source and marriage is eternal, then we must sadly conclude that much of our eternal life/marriage depends on that evil empire that we denounce week after week. Should LDS men who are attracted to a slim waistline feel particularly guilty for being part of the informal institution that creates anorexia?

Or should we turn to theology for an explanation? Since Latter-day Saints view the body in definitely more positive terms than traditional Christian orthodoxy does, do we tend to place a greater emphasis on physical attractiveness? Does this explain Utah’s excellent ranking in national obesity rankings? (it ranks 45th?).

Finally, if I am correct, I wonder whether deconstructing such media images is worthwhile for the Latter-day Saint…can/should the LDS man/woman “deprogram” their preferences? I leave our friendly readers to decide.