Review
=======
Title: Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945
Author: Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Historical
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 340
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-19-935821-2
Price: $35.00
Reviewed by Douglas F. Christensen for The Association for Mormon Letters
I confess some insecurity about reviewing a collection of essays because if I evaluate each essay, this review becomes inordinately long. If I only mention a few, I will fail to do justice to the whole. Another challenge in evaluating each essay might be duplicating the smart synopses Patrick Q. Mason provides in the introduction. Given these constraints and at the risk of failing to do justice to the whole, I will point to some highlights in five or six of these 15 noteworthy essays in the recently published Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, Edited by Patrick O. Mason and John G. Turner.
As Mason points out in the introduction, the goal of the book is to “trace important developments and chart out fruitful lines of further inquiry” into questions not yet examined very closely (7). Mason then lists some of the provocative questions that emerge in these essays before reminding the reader that the hope for this collection was to gather new responses to contemporary trends, concerns, and movements afoot in Mormonism. We see evidence of this aspiration in the titles of the book’s four sections: I: Internationalization; II: Political Culture; III: Gender; and IV: Religious Culture. I agree with Mason’s introduction that each of these essays brings us face to face with important histories that have shaped The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, histories we might otherwise take for granted. Each of the essays is thought provoking, well researched, and appropriately dispassionate. Fortuitously, the essays build on each other, unintentionally intersect and complement each other resulting in rewarding cohesion.
In the essay “The Internationalization of Mormonism: Indications from India” Taunalyn F. Rutherford shares a great story about how S. Paul Thiruthuvadoss finds a missionary tract in 1954 which eventually leads him to an address for Church headquarters. In response to his inquiry, he receives more tracts and copies of the Book of Mormon, which he reads five times over three years. Beginning with Thiruthuvadoss’s gradual conversion, Rutherford unfolds a history of the development of the Mormon Church in India that few members living in areas with higher concentrations of Latter-day Saints would know otherwise.
In the book’s section on politics, the reciprocity between Mason’s “Ezra Taft Benson and Modern (Book of) Mormon Conservatism” and J.B. Haws’ “The Romney Lens” results in details that only some Latter-day Saints may care about (like North American ones). Nevertheless, for anyone who reads books like this one, Mason’s essay creates new levels of literacy about Benson’s scriptural point of view in the context of his American patriotism and political conservatism. I especially like how Mason historicizes Benson’s Book of Mormon advocacy in the context of his political views. According to Mason, Benson sees the Book of Mormon as a warrant for his politics, and he talked about both interdependently long before his familiar 1988 sermon “Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon.”
James Dennis LoRusso takes his title “Puritan Work Ethic on High” from a BYU professor who seems to imply that Mormonism takes the Puritan work ethic to new heights, or shifts it into high gear. This phrase might also mean that the Puritan work ethic is the philosophy of heaven–from “on high.” I cannot be sure that LoRusso intends this second meaning, but his focus on “Mormon self understanding” suggests as much. Quoting Stephen L. Richards, a depression era LDS Apostle, LoRusso underscores the link between industry and God’s will, “work and faith . . . is a cardinal point of our theological doctrine and our future state–envisioned in terms of eternal progression through constant labor . . . This doctrine of work lies at the very foundation of the capitalistic system” (111). LoRusso suggests that Latter Day Saint identity grows from the soil of hard work, but he also shows how the Church itself develops an identity as a business, and that a Church run by businessmen begins to look a lot like a business (119).
In the third section on Gender we get an essay on the double standard of chastity and modesty at the Polynesian Cultural Center, where Amanda Hendrix-Komoto untangles issues of race and sexual objectification as well as a history of double standards regarding inter-racial marriages at BYU Hawaii. Her research results in a sophisticated theoretical perspective of the rampant Orientalising at BYU Hawaii, in particular at the PCC.
Caroline Kline proposes a realignment of role definitions in her essay “Saying Goodbye to the Final Say: The Softening and Reimagining of Mormon Male Headship Ideologies.” Kline evaluates the evolution of Mormon language around leadership in the home and in marriage, noting the important shifts toward equal say in partnerships toward the late twentieth century. She carefully traces the role that conceptions of Eve play in the institutional conversation, noting that “As church leaders increasingly promoted Eve as noble, courageous, and inspired equal partner propelling humankind on its journey toward divinity, they created theological space for justifications for equal partnership marriages, even as they maintained past structures of (a progressively softening) male headship” (223-224). There were times while reading her essay where I felt that her framework on headship lends itself to the binary thinking on gender roles that she is critiquing, obfuscating the actual diversity of personality traits that actually determine who leads and who follows in relationships, irrespective of gender and also irrespective of institutional desire to frame the conversation.
The final section of the book presents four essays on aspects of religious culture of Mormonism since 1945. Matthew Bowman examines the dissonance between Mormonism and Evangelical Christians, dissonance derived from Evangelical suspicion about Mormonism as a “polygamous, not-Christian cult” (268). While Mormons react strongly to such accusations, Bowman’s version of the story begins to take on a similar logic to arguments that Mormons are not Christian. Mormons who understand that this is true insofar as Christians are construed by creedal confession, do not take the characterization personally, since Mormons see themselves as very Christian by other definitions. Bowman quotes Wesley Walters, a Presbyterian minister who sees the good in Mormonism, but at the same time sees Mormons “enmeshed in a religion so materialistic in emphasis and so lacking in reverence” (269). Bowman also cites Anthony Hoekema who describes cults by their “tendency toward perfectionism. There is among members of the cult a feeling of superior holiness.” Furthermore, Hoekema suggests that this quality of superiority hides from “cultists their own flaws” (269). As with indictments of Mormons as “not-Christians” this view of them as cultists may stem from the epistemic difference between Protestants and Mormons on the doctrine of Grace. Bowman’s essay implies that from the Evangelical point of view, Mormons will never be Christian enough until they reject doctrines like apotheosis and anthropomorphism. However, Bowman also shows that in spite of theological differences, other shared ideologies will continue to bring them together, at least in the political realm.
The essays I have not mentioned are equally stimulating and challenging. Each one warrants its own book review and critical analysis. From Kristine Haglund’s intense analysis of how women have found a voice in the contemporary LDS landscape, but must keep adapting to secure an audience for that voice, to John Turner’s comparison between Latter Day Saint openness about its history and Evangelical openness about scriptural innerancy, the reader is well paid for reading closely.
Part of my professional work includes reading lots (and marking some) of the errors I find in sentences written by college students. Please forgive me if I also notice them in published writing. I marked over a dozen errors in this book. However, deciding not to read this collection of essays because you learned that there were a few typos would be something like (though now on a much larger existential scale) deciding to have nothing to do with Mormonism because you began to discover the warts of the church and its leaders. One conceit of this collection suggests the opposite: that your faith in the church side of the LDS faith might increase, knowing that like you, or your mother, the Church has made mistakes–some of them tragic.
My general impression after reading all four sections is that it should come as a relief to those invested in Mormonism to know that like Latter-day Saints the reader knows individually, the Church is a complex, multi-dimensional organism that has always changed in response to its environment. Taken as a whole, this collection reminds us of something Gene England taught a long time ago: that the gospel gets mediated within a social system and, therefore, as England puts it, “the Church is as ‘true,’ as effective, as sure an instrument of salvation as the system of doctrines we call the gospel–and that it is so in good part because of the very flaws, human exasperations, and historical problems that give us all some anguish about the Church” (2)[1].
Turner notes in the book’s final essay that the tone scholars establish in their research determined the degree to which the LDS Church would provide support from its archives. I argue that these essays foster a tone of objective concern for the importance of the story they tell and that their attention to detail, combined with clear, intuitive prose should warrant anyone’s sincere interest to know more about Church History since the mid twentieth century.
[1] England, Eugene. Why the Church is as True as the Gospel. Bookcraft. 1986.