When Sarah Barringer Gordon went on a radio talk show late last year to discuss her new book on 19th-century Mormon polygamy, she found that the host's understanding of how academic research works was a bit askew. "Clearly," he said, "you timed your book for the Olympics."
Ms. Gordon, a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, laughs in recounting the story. It's almost as if she had been in the Winter Games herself: the scholar as bobsledder, racing down a mountain of long-forgotten novels, pamphlets, and Supreme Court decisions -- crossing the finish line with her monograph just in time to reach the spotlight.
The weeks leading up to the Olympics saw a brief spike in media attention to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has its headquarters in Salt Lake City. (The term "Mormon" is commonly applied to the 11 million LDS members worldwide, as well as to adherents of numerous smaller denominations tracing their history back to the revelations of Joseph Smith.) Press reports typically emphasized the church's vast wealth, its decisive role in Utah politics, and its robust missionary efforts. And journalists looking for a non-Mormon appreciation of the faith's blend of cosmic vision and worldly success could always cite Harold Bloom, a reliable brand name for esoterica.
What few noted was that Mr. Bloom's chapter on Mormonism in The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (Simon and Schuster, 1992) owed a great deal to a body of scholarship often called "the new Mormon history." That label has become anachronistic: It now covers two generations of research, going back at least to the founding of the Journal of Mormon History, in 1974. The field of Mormon studies displays an abundance of energy, attracting not just specialists in American studies or religious history, but social scientists and cultural theorists as well.
In part, the surge of scholarly interest is a response to the church's remarkable growth: A religion with fewer than 5 million adherents in 1980 now claims a membership of 11 million. Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington at Seattle, argues that the worldwide Mormon population will reach 60 million by the end of the 21st century even if conversion and birth rates fall off considerably. Scholars often cite his suggestion that Mormonism might prove "the first major faith to appear on earth since the prophet Muhammad rode out of the desert."
Speculation about the church's future is by no means as large or as controversial a part of the field as research into Mormonism's past. Within the Mormon History Association, with some 1,100 members, relations between LDS academics and nonbelievers are, for the most part, collegial; scholars of diverse backgrounds edit the journal. But when conflict does erupt, it can be intense, with the fiercest polemics being exchanged among Mormon scholars themselves. Everyone remembers the autumn of 1993, when five Mormon intellectuals were excommunicated and a sixth censured by the church.
Traditionalists and dissidents alike "have produced a range of scholarship that is truly stunning," says Ms. Gordon, an Episcopalian, of her Mormon colleagues. "They are faced with the challenge of bringing professionalism to the study of a religion that is very much defined by its history." This makes Mormon studies an exceptionally passionate field, in which faith wrestles with scholarship, sometimes as violently as Jacob did with the angel.
Present at the Creation
The relationship between Mormonism and academe is as old as the church itself -- if not, paradoxically, even older. In 1830, a small group published The Book of Mormon, a work narrating what it proclaimed to be the history of ancient Jewish settlements in America and their visitation by Jesus following the crucifixion. The book had been dictated by Joseph Smith, an upstate New York farm boy of limited education, who reportedly "translated" the record, with divine help, from gold plates he had unearthed following a series of visions. Witnesses signed an affidavit that they, too, had beheld the gold plates. Not long after the Book of Mormon was printed, they formed a church to spread the word.
Two years earlier, Martin Harris, one of Smith's supporters, had contacted Charles Anthon, a professor of ancient languages at Columbia University. Anthon examined a sheet of paper containing a set of markings that Smith had transcribed from the gold plates. Just what happened next remains in dispute. Harris reported that Anthon had declared the translation excellent -- and that the professor had prepared a written statement to that effect, but tore it up when he heard about Smith's claims about the markings' supernatural origins. According to Anthon's own account, his first impression of the "hieroglyphics" was that they were bogus, and that Harris was being deceived by a charlatan. (Mormon adherents argued that Anthon was simply afraid to acknowledge his original enthusiasm.)
Undeterred by the lack of a scholarly imprimatur, the new faith spread, though not without resistance. Non-Mormons were suspicious of the church's unusual theology and vaguely communistic living arrangements. The growing cohort of believers moved steadily westward, in search of a safe haven – a quest that became more urgent after Smith was lynched in 1844. By the 1850s, they had established a settlement in the frontier territory of Utah, drawing converts from around the United States and abroad. Having reached the promised land, Brigham Young -- who had acceded to the position of living prophet -- revealed that spiritually worthy men could marry as many women as they could support.
Under great pressure from the federal government, the church withdrew its sanction of polygamy in 1890. By the time Utah became a state, in 1896, the church leadership embodied secular as well as religious authority. LDS institutions combined the features of a bank, a welfare state, and an educational system; and because most Utah citizens were church members, representative democracy effectively meant theocracy by other means.
Writing in the American Journal of Sociology in 1954, one scholar described turn-of-the-century Mormons as an "incipient nationality." But the centripetal forces of cultural distinctiveness and relative isolation were matched by the steady integration of Utah into the American economy. By World War II, the Mormons had become, in effect, just another church on the American scene -- albeit one with an extremely colorful past. And in the 1960s -- with a growing cohort of Mormon scholars beginning to work in non-Mormon institutions -- the stage was set for a complex reckoning with that history.
A New Dialogue
In 1966, a small circle of LDS graduate students at Stanford University published the first issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. The previous year had seen the founding of the Mormon History Association, which over the next few years grew from 80 members to almost 1,000. The civil-rights movement was inspiring debate within the church over doctrines concerning African-Americans (who would become full members only in 1978). And in 1967, troubling questions were raised by the discovery of a long-lost Egyptian papyrus that had been owned by Joseph Smith, which the prophet had declared contained the text of The Book of Abraham, another work of Mormon scripture. The manuscript, however, proved to be an ancient Egyptian funeral document, rather than a lost writing by the Hebrew patriarch.
The research and debate appearing in Dialogue sometimes troubled the hierarchy, which did not see matters of doctrine or scriptural authority as open to question. But the emerging group of Mormon intellectuals was arguably obeying an early injunction by Smith to maintain a chronicle of the faith's development. The official Church Historian's Office had been largely inactive since the early 1930s.
The 'Arrington Spring'
When the church established a new historical department, in 1972, the director was Leonard J. Arrington, whose Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints (Harvard University Press, 1958) had won lavish praise from non-Mormon historians, economists, and sociologists. He encouraged use of the LDS archives by professional researchers (Mormon and otherwise), while working to provide historical works -- such as an edition of Brigham Young's letters to his sons -- to nonacademic church members as well.
But by the late 1970s, church leaders concerned about unauthorized interpretations of church history started limiting access to Mormon records. "Some authorities apparently preferred that we have no history except that kept by public-relations writers," Mr. Arrington later put it. He relinquished his position as church historian in 1982 and is now a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University. Many scholars refer to the "Arrington spring" with a sense that things will probably never again be as open as they were from 1972 to 1978.
Tension between the traditionalists (who champion "faith building" narratives of the past) and the revisionists (who bring a variety of secular methodologies and concerns to their scholarship) has become the status quo of Mormon intellectual life. Besides Dialogue, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, the "liberal" camp includes publications like the Mormon feminist journal Exponent II and Sunstone, a cultural magazine that sponsors an annual conference drawing many LDS academics. More-orthodox scholars publish in BYU Studies and the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. In Salt Lake City, the Signature Press publishes an extensive catalog of critical and historical volumes by revisionist scholars -- which are dissected in review-essays (many of them nearly book-length) by traditionalist scholars associated with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies at BYU. Being a Mormon scholar means knowing that your work will have a very alert audience.
Wild, Wild West
While outsiders find it easy to sympathize with LDS academics who question authority, Ms. Gordon, the Pennsylvania historian, says she can appreciate the concerns of conservative scholars. Some, like Jan Shipps, a Methodist professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, have won the respect of all camps. But "in a country that has been defined in some periods by very vigorous anti-Mormonism," she says, "it's easy to understand the reactions of faithful people to questions that might lead to embarrassing answers." Ms. Gordon's research is a case in point: The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) focuses on the problems raised by the early practice of plural marriage. "By definition, the topic is sensitive," she says. "But I've been deeply influenced by a number of Mormon scholars and have no desire to be needlessly offensive to people I respect."
Social historians have done extensive research on life in polygamous families in the Utah Territory. Ms. Gordon's work examines not the institution of plural marriage itself, but the controversy over it that raged in the late 19th century. Anti-Mormons expressed outrage at the practice as "blasphemous," but she argues that the stakes of the debate went well beyond religion.
"The claim of anti-Mormons was that polygamy was a form of tyranny that could not coexist with democracy," Ms. Gordon says. She cites a genre of anti-polygamist novels by authors who borrowed the rhetoric and imagery of the abolitionist movement, explicitly comparing Mormon households to slave pens. To Victorian-era sensibilities, which treated the monogamous domestic sphere as a cornerstone of civilization itself, the practices of Mormon patriarchs on the wild frontier seemed barbaric. And the Mormon leaders' defense of the right to practice the tenets of their faith sometimes borrowed anti-abolitionist rhetoric. Ms. Gordon quotes one LDS author from the 1850s: "Ours is a domestic relation, and can no more be interfered with than slavery in the Southern states."
"I'm not interested in rooting around in people's diaries to find out if polygamists beat their wives at night," the historian says. "But I am interested in knowing what sorts of political currency claims of violence had in the struggle to make the world safe for monogamy." The debates had repercussions well beyond Utah. "This was a genuine conflict that played itself out on the political and legal as well as the religious and cultural stages. It made a huge difference in our understanding of the Constitution and in determining what kind of society was fit to take its place among 'the sisterhood of states,' as people referred to it."
Ms. Gordon challenges the tendency of outsiders to regard Mormon studies as an exotic or narrow field, of concern to historians of the old West or religion, perhaps, but otherwise marginal: "We just can't understand American history without understanding the vital role this faith, and debates over it, have played."
Arguing Scripture
One set of debates may continue long after the rest have been exhausted: how to understand the origins of Mormonism itself. For believers, the case is simple: Joseph Smith was granted access to sacred records and the power to translate them, and the result is a true and accurate history of ancient America. (The Smithsonian Institution receives enough inquiries into the matter to have prepared a form letter denying claims that its archaeologists have ever "used the Book of Mormon in any way as a scientific guide.") For anti-Mormons, too, the matter is clear: Smith was a charlatan, a psychotic, or some combination thereof.
Cultural historians have offered a more nuanced appraisal. They find in Smith's prophetic writings a sort of intellectual time capsule, containing a complex array of political and religious concerns debated in the Northeast throughout the 1820s, and embodying the American desire to see the continent as a place intimately connected to the history of the Bible. But even that judgment is controversial. After all, approaching a text as a rich and fascinating document is one thing. Dealing with its claims to be canonical scripture, hand-delivered by an angel, is quite another.
A Book Read 'Round the World
In By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford University Press, April), Terryl L. Givens undertakes a scholarly analysis not of the Book of Mormon, but of a long series of arguments and claims made about its origins and implications. Mr. Givens, a professor of English at the University of Richmond, notes that some 100 million copies of Smith's "Revelation" have been published, in 94 languages; there is a secondary literature of 6,000 titles analyzing, interpreting, and polemicizing against the work. Whatever its place in the wider universe, it has undeniably emerged as a book of global significance.
A Mormon himself, Mr. Givens may represent a new phase of scholarship on the faith. While Mormon studies has always been dominated by historians, his training is in comparative literature. "The recent surge of cultural studies has made it possible to bring literary scholarship to bear on historical questions and vice versa," he says. "I'm doing that with the Book of Mormon."
With his citations from the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin and his keen sense of hermeneutic difficulties, Mr. Givens is planted firmly within the traditions of professionalized cultural scholarship -- and he occasionally expresses embarrassment at the efforts of amateur Mormon archaeologists to demonstrate the Book's historicity ("heading off to Central America," he remarks, "with shovels, scriptures, and safari hats"). But that doesn't mean he is continuing the work of revisionist Mormon scholarship. His work is traditionalist -- with a theoretical edge.
Some scholars, Mormon and non-Mormon alike, have tended to bracket off the story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates, or its claims that Native Americans are descended from a Hebrew tribe that the Book of Mormon calls the "Lamanites" -- arguing that the scripture's significance is ultimately spiritual, not historical. Likewise, many Jews and Christians would emphasize that the meaning they find in the Bible does not oblige them to read it as a reliable guide to, say, astronomy or Egyptian history.
"But one cannot approach the Book of Mormon in the same way as the Bible," Mr. Givens argues. "The story of its coming forth is much more a part of the dynamics of the faith than is true of the Bible." While liberal Mormons -- and well-meaning non-Mormons -- might prefer to ignore the matter, there is ultimately no getting around it: Did the witnesses actually see and hold golden plates, covered with mysterious writing? And if they did, were the artifacts authentic? "When we talk about the 'truth value' of the Book of Mormon, that is really much more a question of its origins than its content," he says.
In reconstructing almost two centuries of scholarship and polemic concerning the church's founding scripture, Mr. Givens emphasizes a simple but difficult point: Any interpretation of Mormon history must implicitly answer the question of whether Joseph Smith was a prophet or a fraud. It is a stark problem, which Mr. Givens elaborates in a subtle and dispassionate way. And while such a concern may trouble contemporary scholars, revisionist and traditionalist and all points in between, it would not have surprised Charles Anthon, the celebrated professor of ancient languages, who first considered the matter in his office at Columbia University in 1828.
A DECADE OF SCHOLARSHIP ON MORMONISM
Adventures of a Church Historian, by Leonard J. Arrington (University of Illinois Press, 1998)
The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, by Armand L. Mauss (University of Illinois Press, 1994)
Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives, edited by David L. Bigler and Will Bagley (Utah State University Press, 2000)
By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, by Terryl L. Givens (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Chiasmus Bibliography, edited by John W. Welch and Daniel B. McKinlay (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1999)
Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, edited by Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young (University of Illinois Press, 1994)
Cultures in Conflict: A Documentary History of the Mormon War in Illinois, by John E. Hallwas and Roger D. Launius (Utah State University Press, 1999)
Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, edited by Arnold K. Garr, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard O. Cowan (Deseret Book Company, 2000)
Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912-1999, by Jorge Iber (Texas A&M University Press, 2000)
Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon, by Robert D. Anderson (Signature Books, 1999)
LDS Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Donald W. Parry and Dana M. Pike (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1997)
Mormon History, by Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, and James B. Allen (University of Illinois Press, 2001)
The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, by Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion, edited by Eric A. Eliason (University of Illinois Press, 2001)
New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology, edited by Brent Lee Metcalfe (Signature Books, 1993)
The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement, edited by Francis J. Beckwith, Carl Mosser and Paul Owen (Zondervan, 2002)
The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, edited by D. Michael Quinn (Signature Books, 1992)
The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, by John L. Brooke (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Same-Sex Dynamics Among 19th Century Americans: A Mormon Example, by D. Michael Quinn (University of Illinois Press, 2001)
Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons, by Jan Shipps (University of Illinois Press, 2000)
The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Dissociated Mind, by William D. Morain (American Psychiatric Press, 1998)
The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, by Terryl L. Givens (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Voyages of Faith: Explorations in Mormon Pacific History, edited by Grant Underwood (Brigham Young University Press, 2000)
Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young, by Ronald W. Walker (University of Illinois Press, 1998)