What s New in Mormon History: A Response to Jan Shipps

Transcription

1 What s New in Mormon History: A Response to Jan Shipps Richard Lyman Bushman No one is better qualified to comment on the state of Mormon history than Jan Shipps. Not only has she been an observer of the Mormon historiographical scene for half a century; she has been one of the most vigorous and influential participants. Her Mormonism broke new ground in the conceptualization of the Mormon past. I meant it when I said for the dust jacket: This may be the most brilliant book ever written on Mormonism. She is to be believed when she says Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling stands squarely in the tradition of the new Mormon history. 1 Shipps did not have the space to say more about the book s place in the other major current in Mormon intellectual life: apologetics. She knows full well the major role played by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (farms, now absorbed into the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship) at Brigham Young University, whose mission is to demonstrate the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon and to defend the faith wherever it is attacked. Like farms, the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (fair), an independent organization comprising zealous amateurs and professional academics, sponsors conferences, runs a Web site, and tries to answer virtually every criticism of Mormon claims. 2 In addition to these insitutionalized operations, scores of Mormon writers and thinkers collect evidence in support of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. Situating Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling in the Mormon apologetic tradition may serve to round out Shipps s illuminating analysis of the book s location in the new Mormon history. One might expect Mormon apologetics to be closely linked to the new Mormon history: both focus on the history of Joseph Smith. Mormon apologists seek to authenticate the miraculous beginnings of Mormonism; the new Mormon history recounts that story along with everything else that happened in Mormonism over the century and threequarters of its existence. As has been frequently observed, Mormonism is less a set of doctrines than a collection of stories. Apologetics and history writing necessarily overlap. In reality, however, the two developed in quite different environments with quite different outcomes. In her opening sentence, Shipps describes the cultural circumstance from which the new Mormon history emerged. It came about just as Mormonism itself was moving in from the margins to find a place on the American religious landscape as Richard Lyman Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University. Readers may contact Bushman at rlb7@columbia.edu. 1 Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, 1985); Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York, 2005). 2 Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, f a i r: Defending Mormonism, September 2007 The Journal of American History 517

2 518 The Journal of American History September 2007 a respectable belief system and an upstanding faith community. 3 The new Mormon historians could put aside their defensiveness and write for both Mormon and general audiences, she is postulating, because they no longer had to be on guard. Amiable relations between Mormon and non-mormon historians developed just as Mormons of all kinds were leaving their enclaves in the Great Basin and finding places in non-mormon neighborhoods around the country. Mormons got along perfectly well with their new neighbors, and Mormon historians made peace with their fellow historians. It was as unsuitable for them to do battle with other historians as it was for Mormons to fight with the people next door. The new Mormon history was a peace mission, expressing a desire for intellectual commerce with a nation that had once seemed like a wall of enmity to Utah Mormons. Mormon apologists, however, did not see the world that way. They would disagree with Shipps s phrase a respectable belief system in her one-sentence hypothesis about the new Mormon history. Mormonism did become an upstanding faith community ; in the mid-twentieth century the national press openly admired Mormons for their welfare system, their strong families, and their youth programs. 4 A half century after the cessation of plural marriage, Mormons looked like ideal Americans. But basic Mormon beliefs never won that kind of respect. Joseph Smith s angels, golden plates, and history of ancient America always had an exotic flavor. The Mormon doctrine that God was once a man, plural marriage, and the temple ceremonies went to extremes that most Americans could not accept. The attacks on the miraculous parts of Joseph Smith s history never moderated. Mormons existed in a divided world: loved for their social virtues, despised (as the apologists believed) for their beliefs. The apologists still feel that they are living in a hostile world. The church has real enemies, they firmly believe, and war has to be waged. Not all of the apologists write pugnaciously, but they all write defensively. If not exactly at war with an enemy, they are certainly engaged in debate. And they are not entirely off the mark. A furious controversy over Mormon beliefs goes on continuously, largely fueled by lapsed Mormons justifying their departure from the faith and trying to save hapless church members from their errors, joined by outsiders of various sorts, especially evangelicals shocked by Mormon heresies. Young Mormons, waylaid by such critics, leave the church in disillusionment with their own history, making the battle deadly serious for the apologists. The apologists zealously propound rational arguments to counter the critics of Joseph Smith and accumulate piles of evidence to demonstrate the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Every educated Mormon knows of these battles and watches their progress with interest. 5 Although seeing themselves as collaborators in the cause of Mormon history, apologists and new Mormon historians occasionally snipe at one another. The apologists wonder why the historians do not spring to the defense of the faith when Joseph Smith comes under attack. The apologists want to war with the critics; the historians ask them out to 3 Jan Shipps, Richard Lyman Bushman, the Story of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, and the New Mormon History, Journal of American History, 94 (Sept. 2007), Thomas F. O Dea, The Mormons (Chicago, 1957), Critical essays are collected in Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed., New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology (Salt Lake City, 1993); and Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe, eds., American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, 2002). Examples of the huge apologetic literature include the classic defense of the faith: Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon: Course of Study for the Melchizedek Priesthood Quorums of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1957; Salt Lake City, 1964); and Noel B. Reynolds, ed., Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins (Provo, 1997).

3 A Response to Jan Shipps 519 lunch. At Mormon History Association meetings you can hear a critic vehemently attack Joseph Smith in one session while in the next room a presenter lauds Smith s character and achievements. The apologists insist that the historians fail to understand what is at stake. The historians for their part question the apologists polemical writing and special pleading. They think the apologists repel readers with their bellicose style and unwillingness to yield points. Though assembled on the same campus at Brigham Young University and acknowledging each other as brothers and sisters in the gospel, they live in different worlds. I find it interesting that the new Mormon historians have not written much about Joseph Smith s early life. That was when the big miracles took place the angel, the gold plates, the translation. Survey books by new Morman historians summarize the stories as a sympathetic non-mormon historian might, recording what Joseph Smith claimed happened but not passing judgment. 6 To avoid the strain between keeping the peace with non-mormons and showing their colors as believers, the new Mormon historians bypass the early history. None of the new Mormon historians wrote a biography of Joseph Smith until I undertook the task. Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism was the first book to give a detailed account of the early history from the new Mormon history perspective addressing a general as well as a Mormon audience. I got around the problem of the miracles by announcing my intention to tell the story from the participants perspective. How can a description of Joseph Smith s revelations accommodate a Mormon s perception of events and still make sense to a general audience? My method has been to relate events as the participants themselves experienced them, using their own words where possible. Insofar as the revelations were a reality to them, I have treated them as real in this narrative. General readers will surely be left with questions about the meaning of these experiences, but at least they will have an understanding of how early Mormons perceived the world. 7 That stance permitted me to tell the whole story for Mormons while still leaving space for general readers. Judging from miscellaneous comments, I think non-mormon historians went along with that strategy. I will confess I became something more than a neutral observer at one point in the book. When I came to write about the Book of Mormon, I turned into an apologist. I could not resist countering the arguments of critics about the nineteenthcentury sources of the Book of Mormon. I thought most of the presumed explanations were unconvincing and said so, rebutting many of the chief critical arguments point by point. That put the Book of Mormon outside of history, making it a bit of a mystery. I did not explicitly say the book had to be inspired, but the implication was certainly there. The apologists loved that chapter. Four chapters of Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism were carried over to Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. The chapter on the Book of Mormon was not among them. In the new book, instead of writing a defense of the Book of Mormon, I wrote an explication. 8 Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism was originally intended for a series on church history, sponsored by the church historian, and published by a church 6 See, for example, James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, 1976), Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, 1984), 3. 8 Ibid., 9 113,143 77; Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 9 83,

4 520 The Journal of American History September 2007 press. I could not help but have Mormons in mind as I wrote. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling was slated for publication by Alfred A. Knopf. I was much more aware of writing for a general audience, so the intramural debates between apologists and critics of Mormonism seemed less relevant. General readers, I thought, would want to get a taste of these controversies but not to become mired in them. They would be more interested, I presumed, in what the Book of Mormon meant to Joseph Smith and to his readers than in the apologists attempts to defend the book. My aim was to situate the book in its American environment not to identify its sources, but to explain its interaction with American culture. In this more recent version, the Book of Mormon appears as a deep critique of American culture, including its religious culture. Though Mormons themselves do not see it this way, I found the book thundering no to the state of the world in Joseph Smith s time. It condemned social inequalities, moral abominations, rejection of revelations and miracles, disrespect for Israel (including the Jews), subjection of the Indians, and the abuse of the continent by interloping European migrants. The apologists were less satisfied with my second rendition of the Book of Mormon. It lacked an argument, some thought. The historians, including non-mormon historians, preferred it. It helps them, I gather, to find a place for a complex text that in many ways stands outside history. One colleague, perplexed by how to teach the Book of Mormon in an American history course, once asked: What books would you assign before and after reading the Book of Mormon? How is it to be situated? In the current chapter on the book, I may not have solved the problem, but at least I addressed the issue. As to Joseph Smith s miracle stories, I essentially adopted the same tactic as in Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism: I told the story as the participants experienced it. In two paragraphs that I labored over more than any others in the book, I tried to explain why my narrative assumes that the gold plates existed. I first described the difficulty of finding an alternate explanation when the people closest to Smith all believed he had the plates. On the one hand, his wife, his scribes, the people Smith lived with all left accounts of the plates on the table, the plates under the bed, the plates wrapped in linen cloth. All this is in the record. The manufacture of the plates by a charlatan fabricating a hoax, on the other hand, cannot be documented. Since the people who knew Joseph best treat the plates as fact, a skeptical analysis lacks evidence. The skeptical historian has to make up a story with no factual support. I was unwilling to do that. Then I went on to say why readers would benefit from my empathic approach: Incredible as the plates were, hunting for deception can be a distraction. It throws us off the track of Joseph Smith the Prophet. In devising a story of a charlatan, we lose sight of the unprepossessing rural visionary who became a religious leader admired by thousands. What is most interesting about Joseph Smith is that people believed him. To understand the emergence of Joseph the Prophet, we must follow the stories told by family and friends who believed they were witnessing a miracle. From their accounts issues the Joseph Smith who has a place in history. 9 I am not at all sure that historians will follow me here. Many will prefer Fawn McKay Brodie s account in No Man Knows My History. 10 She portrayed Joseph Smith as a pious fraud who became a prophet despite perpetrating a hoax with the Book of Mormon. 9 Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Fawn McKay Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (New York, 1945).

5 A Response to Jan Shipps 521 That does not work for me. In Brodie s narrative, Mormon believers inevitably become simpleminded dupes. If Smith was a charlatan, everyone who followed him was deluded including myself and all my Mormon friends. Making Joseph Smith an impostor may accord with our modern view of what is possible and impossible no gold plates or angels, please but it does not explain why he succeeded. Why did people then and now believe him? To understand their belief you have to get inside his world, in my opinion, and think of him as his followers did. I recognize that in writing about Joseph Smith in a balanced, sensible voice I may perplex readers. They will naturally ask: How can an educated, scholarly person believe Smith s stories? The seeming disjuncture is, however, an aspect of contemporary cultural diversity. The man who pumps our gas may pray to Mecca five times a day and believe that Gabriel carried Muhammad to Jerusalem in the night. The shoe salesman may think Christ will come again and take his saints into heaven. Lots of people believe Jesus was resurrected two days after dying on the cross. We have to make conversation, neighborly or scholarly, with people who harbor beliefs we do not countenance. It is more difficult for scholars with their severe convictions about rationality to converse with people they think are beyond the pale, but the social realities of our time require it. As more and more historians work to situate Mormonism in American history, Mormons like me want to join the discussion. We will write better if we are less defensive, more open to criticism, more exploratory and venturous, but even with our inhibitions and parochialisms, we should come to the table with our Mormonism intact. It would be a mistake, in my judgment, for Mormon historians to check their beliefs at the door when they write. We do not want to homogenize the interpretation of Mormon history. We will never recover Mormonism s complexity by pursuing only one approach. The subject calls for inquiry from many angles. Historical knowledge will be best served if Mormon historians tell the story in their own way, writing from the perspective of their faith.