Mormon Studies Commons^™

Global Mormonism In Political Context, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Mormon Studies Review

In 1976 Ezra Taft Benson, a long-standing member of the Quorum of
the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
delivered a fireside address at Brigham Young University in Utah. Benson,
born in Whitney, Idaho, and raised as a farmer in the heart of
Mormon country, represented the conservative wing of his religious
community. He had also spent much of his life working for the LDS
Church and traveling throughout the world, so he had a keen understanding
of the challenges of spreading his religious message in international
contexts. His talk that evening was unequivocal: America …

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Mormon Studies Review

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Front Matter

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Mormons And Politics In New Zealand, Peter Lineham

Mormon Studies Review

In the contemporary world, the long tail of colonialism has left deep discomfort within the Protestant missionary movement. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often reflects the position of traditional Protestants, for in so many ways the Utah-based church sought to impose its very White and colonial values on its non-White and non-American converts. It did not easily evade the charge of aiding and abetting American political goals in foreign places. But if this was the intent of the Latter-day Saint missionary movement, it could be subverted by the peculiarity of particular contexts. New Zealand was such a …

Provincializing Secularism: On Protohomonationalism And Its Counterpossibilities, Tisa Wenger

Mormon Studies Review

This is a book you will want to sit with, think with, mull over, and then read over again. It was not until my second reading that I saw the double entendre of the title—Make Yourselves Gods—and how well it captures the layers of Coviello’s analysis. The phrase is first of all a quote from Joseph Smith, and it signals the expansive ambitions for divinization that early Mormons embraced with a prophetic fervor that culminated in the practice of polygamy. Despite the patriarchal order that came to define polygamy, Coviello argues, early Mormon women too reached for the embodied ecstasies—prophecy, …

Review: Darren Parry. The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History. Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2019., David W. Grua

Mormon Studies Review

Darren Parry’s The Bear River Massacre is a poignant retelling of the January 1863 killings of approximately four hundred Shoshone men, women, and children near the Bear River (Boa Ogoi), present-day southern Idaho, by Colonel Patrick E. Connor’s California Volunteers. More than a history of the event itself, though, Parry’s book presents a broad narrative of the impact of the killings on the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, of which Parry is the chairman. He includes in his narrative the conversion of many of the Shoshone survivors to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1873. Parry’s …

Review: P. Jane Hafen And Brenden W. Rensink, Eds. Essays On American Indian And Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Christen Mucher

Mormon Studies Review

The past few years in Mormon studies have seen an increase in scholarly turns to critical race, gender analytics, and, even more recently, decolonial approaches.1 Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, edited by P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) and Brenden W. Rensink, definitively adds Indigeneity to that list of critical terms. The result of a 2015 seminar at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University,the collection aims to bring together scholarship on Mormon-Indigenous relations with that on Indigenous Mormons to examine the influence of Mormonism on Indigenous peoples and identities, as well as to highlight the …

Review: Etga Ugur. Faith And Politics In The Public Sphere: The Gülen Movement And The Mormon Church. Syracuse, Ny: Syracuse University Press, 2019., Jean-François Mayer

Mormon Studies Review

When I accepted the invitation to review this book, published in a valuable series on Religion and Politics of which I had enjoyed reading several volumes, I assumed that it was a study of interactions between the Gülen movement (also known as Hizmet [service], emphasizing the social service projects for which the movement is well known) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—something that I found intriguing, since I could not conceive how such a topic might deserve a full volume. I realized my mistake as soon as I started to read it. No sensational revelations about hidden …

Review: Kim Östman. Mormonit: Historia, Oppi Ja Elämä. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2019., Titus Hjelm

Mormon Studies Review

Growing up in Finland in the 1980s, it was practically impossible to hear someone speak Finnish with an accent. In a time when immigrants were more or less nonexistent, it would have been difficult to imagine why anyone would bother learning the language spoken by five million people at the northern periphery of Europe. That is, apart from a handful of immaculately dressed and groomed American men. Although never as ubiquitous as Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on doors, the Mormon missionaries and their perfect, if accented, Finnish left a deep impression on one young person, who later became a sociologist of …

Review: Elisha Mcintyre. Religious Humor In Evangelical Christian And Mormon Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018., John-Charles Duffy

Mormon Studies Review

In 2005 Sunstone magazine published an essay I had written, “The New Missionary Discussions and the Future of Correlation.” To make it look less boring on the page, Sunstone’s editorial staff decided to illustrate the essay with cartoons related to Latter-day Saint missionary work. I was invited to propose cartoon concepts, which would then be executed by Jeanette Atwood, a cartoonist Sunstone often employed. I sat down with my husband to brainstorm. In one of our cartoon concepts, which Sunstone accepted, two missionaries are teaching the plan of salvation with the aid of a flip chart. One missionary tells the …

Review: Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister In The Gospel: The Life Of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019., Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Mormon Studies Review

In Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth Century Black Mormon, Quincy D. Newell explores the earliest years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints through a biography of Jane James, an African American convert whose devotion to the church situated her amid some of its most pivotal moments. Beginning with Jane’s birth to free parents in Connecticut in the 1820s and ending with her death in Salt Lake City in 1908, Newell documents how race and gender shaped Jane’s experiences of Mormonism, as well as how Jane’s and other Black Mormons’ …

Review: Jedediah S. Rogers And Matthew C. Godfrey, Eds. The Earth Will Appear As The Garden Of Eden: Essays On Mormon Environmental History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Camden Burd

Mormon Studies Review

The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History fits into an established trend in environmental history. Over the past decades, historians from Lynn White Jr. to Mark R. Stoll have established the religious roots of environmental change in human history.1 Like those scholars, the contributors to this collection seek to understand the complicated and interconnected relationship between theology, faith, and the natural world. Divided across three sections, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden provides a much-welcomed examination of the environmental aspects of Mormon theology, culture, and history.

Review: Candy Moulton. The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge Nor Pen Can Never Tell The Sorrow.” Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Megan Ann Stanton

Mormon Studies Review

After surviving the overland trail as a member of the Martin Handcart Company, Heber McBride asserted, “tounge nor pen can never tell the sorrow and suffering” (81). At the age of thirteen, he and his adolescent sister Janetta had tended to their ailing parents and younger siblings while moving the family’s handcart themselves. They buried their father during their journey and, together with other members of the ill-fated Martin and Willie Handcart Companies, they faced life-threatening weather and starvation. Indeed, at least one-seventh of the Willie and one-fifth of the Martin handcart migrants perished during their 1856 treks.

Review: Erik R. Seeman. Speaking With The Dead In Early America. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2019., Tricia R. Peone

Mormon Studies Review

Erik Seeman’s Speaking with the Dead in Early America traces the development of a cult of the dead among Euro-Americans in the Northeast over a period of three hundred years. This impressive study explores religious and popular views toward communication with the dead and the surprising role of those views in shaping Protestantism. Seeman seeks to explain how Protestants understood otherworldly communication prior the emergence of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1840s. The eight chapters in this volume follow chronological order from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, with some chapters focused on material objects and others on texts …

Review: Craig S. Smith, Ed. The Selected Letters Of Juanita Brooks. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Claudia L. Bushman

Mormon Studies Review

This book reproduces 222 letters of the more than nine hundred extant letters of Juanita Brooks, the fiercely honest and highly respected historian of Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The letters in this collection, written to fellow scholars and friends, date from 1941 to 1978 and trace the development of her historical projects and her interaction with many of her contemporaries. Craig S. Smith has chosen to include the letters in their entirety, rather than editing them for specific facts and quotations, arranging them chronologically in subject groups. That Brooks typed those letters, filing away …

End Matter

Mormon Studies Review

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World Enough, Tracy Fessenden

Mormon Studies Review

I value reviews that help me decide whether a book is likely to light up the classroom, so I will say it straightaway: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon will. Classroom friendliness in the humanities feels especially pressing now, as the larger share of our students set foot in our fields to fulfill distribution requirements on their way to degrees in business or STEM. If your class in American literature or history or religious studies is the one experience of your discipline that students who take it are likely to seek, a semester’s offering built around this book will …

Review: Church Historian’S Press (Church History Department, The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints). The Diaries Of Emmeline B. Wells. 2020. Https://Www.Churchhistorianspress.Org/Emmeline-B-Wells., Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Mormon Studies Review

The Church Historian’s Press has just announced publication of the diaries of Emmeline B. Wells. That is the good news. The bad news is that the current offering includes only the first six of Wells’s forty-seven diaries. Never fear. When I asked the publisher when the rest might appear, I learned that the 1890s diaries that focus on Utah statehood and women’s suffrage would be published in August to honor this year’s celebration of the Nineteenth Amendment. The press hopes to complete the entire project by 2022. In the meantime, scholars can consult the digitized versions of the original diaries, …

Review: Jake Johnson. Mormons, Musical Theater, And Belonging In America. Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 2019., Amanda Beardsley

Mormon Studies Review

Jake Johnson opens his book Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America from the relatively vulnerable subject position of his relationship to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As Johnson explains, he was a former member of both the LDS Church and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (now the Community of Christ), but no longer subscribes to either faith. This personal detail about his background may be startling, but it immediately lends a unique authorial voice and point of view to his book, which, in turn, discusses the centrality of voice and theatricality in …

Mormon Performance/Performing Mormonism: At The Intersection Of Mormon, Theatre, And Performance Studies, Megan Sanborn Jones

Mormon Studies Review

The Nauvoo Dramatic Association was founded in 1844 to respond to a growing demand for culture and entertainment in the booming young Illinois city. Organized by Joseph Smith, the company was directed by Thomas A. Lyne, a recent convert and professional actor from Philadelphia. The first offering of the society was advertised for performance in the newly dedicated Masonic Hall on April 24, 1844. All were invited to attend Pizarro, or The Death of Rolla, a “rational amusement with usefulness.”1 While the performance was postponed until April 26, 1844, due to heavy rains, the wait did not lessen the positive …

Review: Brenda R. Weber. Latter-Day Screens: Genre, Sexuality, And Mediated Mormonism. Durham, Nc: Duke University Press, 2019., Andrew Patrick Nelson

Mormon Studies Review

For a religion whose adherents make up only 2 percent of the nation’s population, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has occupied an outsized place in the American media landscape of the new millennium. Highly publicized events like the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the kidnapping of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the arrest and trial of fugitive polygamist child rapist Warren Jeffs, and the presidential campaigns of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney have repeatedly thrust the Latter-day Saint faith into the national media spotlight. So have a variety of popular entertainments with Mormons as their subject, including the hit …

Review: Will Bagley, Ed., “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877. Vol. 16 Of Kingdom In The West: The Mormons And The American Frontier. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Katrina Phillips

Mormon Studies Review

In the foreword to Will Bagley’s “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877, Floyd O’Neil highlights how integral American Indians have been in Latter-day Saint doctrine—and history. Additionally, he contends that a dearth of available Mormon-created sources has left a gap in the scholarship on the long history of the relationships between Latter-day Saints and Indians in the American West. While some encounters were “routine” or “lacking in conflict,” to quote O’Neil, contestations over resources in places such as the Utah Valley led to more violent and protracted battles that would stretch into the twenty-first century (17). “The Whites …

Review: Craig L. Foster And Marianne T. Watson. American Polygamy: A History Of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith. Charleston, Sc: The History Press, 2019., Cristina Rosetti

Mormon Studies Review

For most of the time that Mormon studies has been a field, the study of Mormonism was synonymous with the study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With its rich archival resources, the LDS Church is a goldmine for scholars interested in American religion. However, the great interest in the LDS Church often came to the detriment of other religions that trace their history to Joseph Smith’s restoration. As Mormon history became synonymous with Latter-day Saint history, other Mormon groups went unknown or were derided as less authentic expressions of Mormonism.

“Same-Sex Marriage?! What Next Polygamy?”: Mormonism In Us Political Culture, K. Mohrman

Mormon Studies Review

In his dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision

that determined marriage was a right that could not be constitutionally

denied to same-sex couples under the Free Exercise and

Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chief Justice

John Roberts queried, “if ‘[t]here is dignity in the bond between

two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to

make such profound choices,’ . . . why would there be any less dignity

in the bond between three people, who in exercising their autonomy,

seek to make the profound choice to marry?”1 In …

Margarito Bautista, Mexican Politics, And The Third Convention, Elisa Eastwood Pulido

Mormon Studies Review

In 1935, after a twenty-five-year residency in the United States, Margarito
Bautista, a well-known evangelizer of Mexican and Mexican American
Mormons on both sides of the US-Mexico border, repatriated to Mexico.
Bautista had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
in central Mexico in 1901. Of particular appeal to Bautista and his family
were Book of Mormon narratives offering an exceptional spiritual identity
to Indigenous Americans as lost members of the House of Israel and
promising them a glorious future destiny. Motivated by a desire to know
more about the religious movement he had joined, Bautista relocated …

Does Being Liberal Push Some Members Out Of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints?, Jana Riess, Benjamin Knoll

Mormon Studies Review

Conservative religionists’ political activism is pushing some Americans, particularly younger ones, out of religion altogether. Disgusted by what they see as an unholy merger between the Republican Party and the Religious Right, these people are voting with their feet—not only avoiding Republican affiliation but also wanting nothing to do with organized religion. Such is the argument, at least, of a growing number of scholars and researchers who track the intersection between religion and politics in the United States. Is this claim true? And if so, how does it play out with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day …

Review: Hayes Peter Mauro. Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation In America. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2019., Sarah Dees

Mormon Studies Review

In Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America, art historian Hayes Peter Mauro analyzes images of Native Americans and non-Natives produced within the context of evangelical Christian movements in the United States. While some of the images he examines are what we would usually define as “art”—visual works created by artists for aesthetic purposes—he considers other examples of visual culture as well, including historical and scientific illustrations, photographs, and images found in government documents, forty-six of which are reproduced in the text. These images share a common theme: they depict different categories of people—of (Native) American, European, and African descent—and …

Review: Konden Smith Hansen. Frontier Religion: Mormons And Americans, 1857–1907. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Tammy Heise

Mormon Studies Review

Through a series of thought-provoking case studies, Konden Smith Hansen breathes new life into Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous (or, perhaps more accurately, now infamous) “Frontier Thesis” as a paradigm for examining Mormonism as a distinctly American religion. This historical survey revolves around a deft historiographical argument that the Frontier Thesis functioned and, in many respects, continues to function as a religion by defining American national identity and purpose not just for Mormons but for all Americans. Hansen’s attention to Turner’s theory serves to reopen an old frontier for historians of the American West, and by uncovering traditional and innovative forms …

Multiplicity: An Editors’ Introduction, Quincy D. Newell, Benjamin E. Park

Mormon Studies Review

When J. Spencer Fluhman introduced the new Mormon Studies Review six years ago, he articulated a “guiding principle for the Review: friendship.” As Fluhman put it, “In our hope to meaningfully connect minds across space, time, and ideological and religious spectra, the Review aspires to a very Mormon ideal indeed.”1 We’d like to believe that over the last six years, the Mormon Studies Review has lived up to this aspiration, and that it has demonstrated that friendship is an excellent way to cultivate the field of critical inquiry we call Mormon studies, regardless of participants’ religious identities or institutional commitments.

Review: E. Marshall Brooks. Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy And Ex-Mormonism Among The Latter-Day Saints. New Brunswick, Nj: Rutgers University Press, 2018., Sara M. Patterson

Mormon Studies Review

In a February 1990 newsletter from the Southern California chapter of Saints Alive in Jesus/Ex-Mormons for Jesus, an anonymous author wrote: I am currently a Mormon who is searching for answers. So far, my studies have led me to have serious doubts about Mormonism, however, I am so fearful and emotionally distraught over leaving the religion that it’s sometimes difficult for me to think rationally. I have been a member for 25 years (I am now 34) and I have 4 children who are very involved in LDS activities. All my friends (most of them anyway) are members and my …