Review
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Title: Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion
Author: Matthew Lyman Rasmussen
Publisher: The University of Utah Press
Genre: LDS History – International
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 286
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 9781607814870
Price: $39.95 USD
Reviewed by Les Blake for the Association for Mormon Letters
The year is 1963. A toe-headed, rain soaked pre-adolescent boy wears a heavy knit overcoat and mud soaked galoshes. His hair is matted from the weather and he walks through a dark puddle on a building site in Liverpool, England where efforts are underway by local saints to construct a chapel – the first in Liverpool’s century plus Mormon history built specifically for the purpose of Latter Day Saint worship. The older brethren of the branch stand in the crisp air discussing the gravity of their mutual task. The British church has been through a lot, to say the least. Plucked from the ledge, pulled from the brink, now shot in the arm, and revived to consciousness with a peculiar smelling salt—pick a metaphor. At any rate, it’s newly alive, breathing in a way the English church hasn’t for a century. The boy bends, grasps the handles of a wheelbarrow and lifts, glancing to his left at a man raising a camera. The boy’s eyes are drawn at the edges and he smiles as the cameraman snaps the shutter.
This image, this boy, stares at me from the dust jacket of Matthew Lyman Rasmussen’s excellent new book, *Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion.* Rasmussen has produced an exhaustively researched history of the English North West, adding crucial perspective to the Americentric narratives in CES textbooks. Before opening this history my awareness of British Mormonism was limited to two storylines: the legendary Heber C. Kimball mission to England (just how legendary I did not know), and the ill-fated 1856 Willie and Martin handcart treks. I figured I had a handle, more or less, on what was at stake for the church. Both narratives, I thought, were solely meant to serve the American Zion project at crucial times, in crucial ways. But my interest had never truly rested on England, and the long aftermath unspooling there in the decades that followed.
Rasmussen puts real faces on British Mormonism’s beautiful, difficult history, a history that includes stories of saints making decisions of deep faith and inspiring outcomes, alongside others yielding meager returns. Familial and communal fallout in the face of the initial gathering efforts is fascinating in this regard. Contemporary saints are generally quick to reverence the courage it takes for someone to convert to the faith. I suspect it is less common for them to sit long with the discomforting consequences that often arose from such decisions. In the chapter “The Gathering” Rasmussen states that although “it was common for select members of a family to join the church together or within a few years of one another, rarely did an entire family unit convert en masse. Thus conversion divided families spiritually and emigration separated them literally and, in many cases, permanently. This is an uncomfortable reality for a church that prizes the enduring nature of family relationships.”
Rasmussen artfully traverses the shifting directives coming from the American church. Individuals were excommunicated for not gathering to the Salt Lake Valley. Then, mere decades later, others were deemed unfaithful if they *did* gather to the valley, instead of growing the church locally in England. The story that connects the two is fascinating, as the changing needs of the fledgling frontier church couldn’t accommodate for the doctrines/desires it had itself instilled in the faithful saints abroad. Deep at its core, this book is not just religious history. It is a survival story.
Organizationally, the book’s chapters play upon one another but could likewise function easily as a stand-alone essay for a scholarly journal. Rasmussen devotes ample time to cycles of growth and decline, with concomitant social, industrial, and doctrinal pressures that make each cycle unique. One chapter is devoted to “Opponents, Apostates, and Dissenters.” Readers are sure to be fascinated with tales of uniquely British anti-Mormonism, complete with a turncoat villain, William Jarman, the “escaped elder” whose lecherous speeches drew wide public audience and newspaper commentary. The *Advertiser* wrote that Jarman’s patrons were composed of “a large percentage of gaping saucer-eyed lads, who sat for an hour drinking in crapulous beastliness and odiferous anecdotes…” Let that sink in. Crapulous. If that word alone doesn’t make you want to find out who this Jarman character was, and about the anti-Mormon riots he inspired, then you don’t like language. And I’m not sure British Mormon history is your spot of tea.
The central tension of the book revolves around early church directives to build a centralized American Zion, only to later change course to globalize the doctrine. The British saints were caught squarely in this tension, perhaps more than any gathering group in LDS history. For the British saints to see their untempled, native country as Zion, after so much migration to the American west, was a tall order. How it came to be realized is the subject of one of my favorite sections of the book — Chapter 7: “A Home for the Saints.” How was the British membership to thrive without adequate worship accommodations?
In terms of *domus ecclesiae*, “the house of an assembled group of worshipers,” Rasmussen acknowledges that the early saints had no scriptural directive and were largely flying blind. “[Joseph] Smith never directed his followers to build any structures other than homes and temples. Chapel building was simply not part of the early program. Even when church membership in Nauvoo surpassed ten thousand, the prophet was reluctant to direct building resources toward anything other than the temple.”
There are so many interesting pieces of the chapel puzzle: the Ormerods and infant death, temperance halls in Preston, a midnight mob at Durham house, the importance of indoor fonts, and at long last the purpose-built chapels that began to rise over one hundred years after Heber C. Kimball rolled through the Upper Ribble Valley – pulling, ultimately, a wake of thousands in tow.
Rasmussen juxtaposes two stories to show how utterly demanding the building program was. In the case of Burnley branch the saints were simply unable to thrive while carrying the load. Albert Pickup, of Burnley branch, said it “decimated the branch” and “the displacement, really, was very killing.” Rasmussen honors Pickup’s sharp, candid narrative, while also relating the sacrifices of the Manchester Stake’s debt relief program, which, though enormously taxing, led to “shared religious euphoria.” Without trying to unweave the tension inherent in each of these narratives Rasmussen bends them to serve the overall thesis of his work, noting that “the saints’ involvement in chapel construction diverted their attention away from the enticing Salt Lake Valley and fixed it firmly upon their own communities…The chief lesson learned from the building program was that Zion and Britain were not just compatible, but synonymous.”
Rasmussen is an eloquent, gifted writer while surveying the context of his subject matter. The first chapter is a seventeen-page non-narrative scope and justification of the study, which I found to be a slightly challenging entry into the book. Though, to be certain, it is very informative, his voice is at its best when he breathes life into the personal stories of English saints who would otherwise have been largely, if not completely, forgotten. This he does amply throughout the remainder of the book.
In conclusion, I want to return to the wet haired boy in thick clothes staring at me from the book’s dust jacket. Throughout my study, I wondered distantly, who is he? An early leader of a British congregation perhaps? Someone important no doubt. When will I meet this saint? When will his storyline appear? In truth, his picture isn’t displayed nearly until the book’s conclusion. And whose face, as it turns out, graces the cover? Apparently we do not know. The photo appears courtesy of the LDS Church History Library, captioned, “Here a young member totes a wheelbarrow on the building site of the Liverpool chapel in 1963.”
As his anonymity settled powerfully upon me, I felt a great deal of emotion toward him and toward a small area of the world I’ve never visited, and may not ever. Meeting him at last with his ruddy coat, and mysterious focused smile, bore in me an appreciation for those British members whose uniquely Mormon lives are likewise anonymous, and beautiful, and full of history we may never know or truly understand. Rasmussen, to both his and their credit, has produced a mighty regional history of international Mormonism that is both gift and tribute to the English saints who can now sing Zion’s song in the land they called home, rather than some place foreign and strange.
*Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion* should rightly act as a standard for other aspiring historians seeking to resurrect Mormonism’s international story.