Mormonism in context of its time and culture
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SPRINGVILLE, UTAH
Mormonism in Cultural contexts was the theme of a daylong symposium June 28 in honor of Richard Lyman Bushman on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
More than two dozen scholars from varied disciplines and academic institutions discussed facets of the theme during the symposium held at the Springville Museum of Art and sponsored by the Church History Department, Mormon Historic Sites Foundation, and two organizations at BYU: The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and the Religious Studies Center.
Brother Bushman is the Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. With a career that began at BYU in 1960, he has just completed his tenure as the first Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. His numerous publications on early LDS history and specifically the life of Joseph Smith culminated in 2008 with "Rough Stone Rolling," a best-seller biography of the Prophet. Brother Bushman was honored at an evening dinner at the museum, where he received the annual Junius F. Wells Award from the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation and the Church History Department.
Summarized here are three plenary addresses given at the symposium three prominent LDS scholars: Terryl L. Givens, Philip L. Barlow and Brother Bushman himself.
Terryl L. Givens
Joseph Smith was "a prophet caught up in, and yet resisting certain developments in his contemporary cultural milieu called romanticism," said Brother Givens, professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond in Virginia and the author of several prominent books on Mormon studies, including By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion.
The Romantic Movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was characterized by an emphasis on intuition, imagination and feeling.
"I set this stage that we may have a fuller appreciation of how Joseph's religious conceptions represent a particularly prescient engagement with the shifting currents of his day," Brother Givens said.
Joseph was a child of his age in the sense that he translated the romantic paradigm of struggle into theological terms, he said.
"To characterize creation as an ongoing project is quintessentially romantic," he said, noting that Joseph announced that the Earth was organized out of portions of other globes that had been disorganized, that "this Earth is not the first of God's works and clearly would not be the last."
As filtered through Parley P. Pratt, Joseph's teaching was that that the perfected human family would "continue to organize people and redeem and perfect other systems which are now in the womb of chaos," Brother Givens observed.
"And even Deity itself becomes, in Joseph's hand, the most moved, rather than the unmoved, mover," he said, "not just in His infinite empathy, not just in His endowment of body, parts and passions, but who emerges out of a murky past in a continuing process and will yet continue to advance from glory to glory. [Astronomer William] Herschel's construction of the heavens, in other words, was an appropriate prelude and a resonant counterpart to the cosmic stories Joseph unfolded."
Joseph seemed to have a clear impulse "to embrace the full implications of a universe of freedom, progress, and limitlessness," he said, "no creeds to constrain, no authority to arbitrate, no rules and rituals to hinder. It was an impulse that animated myriads of his contemporaries."
But, Brother Givens said, "Romanticism was not long in imploding under the weight of its obsession with feeling over intellect, emotion over substance and self over community."
So how aware and concerned was Joseph Smith with these repercussions of romantic thought?
"I might argue that Joseph rooted his theology in the opposing grounds of romantic liberalism with its untrammeled freedom on the one hand and legalistic frameworks with their laws and ordinances on the other, to void the excesses of both," he said. "These imperatives go by many names. I have been referring to them as romanticism and legalism, but let us speak of them, instead, as love and law."
Philip L. Barlow
Joseph Smith inherited and prophetically discerned the fragmentation of reality itself, said Brother Barlow, the Leonard J. Arrington professor of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University.
"He came to understand through revelation, as he believed, that virtually every significant realm of human endeavor was cracked, out-of-kilter, and wanted mending," Brother Barlow said to the symposium audience.
"The fissures that he discerned included not only how society was configured in its class systems, in its economic systems, and its political and legal and gender and family systems," he said. "His vision also perceived a chasm between heaven and earth, between humans and God, between life and death."
Joseph's unique perspective "also involved a basic crack in the authority of that pillar of civilization, the Holy Bible," he said.
By Joseph Smith's time, Brother Barlow said, Biblical authority had undergone "tectonic rupture."
On the one hand, its authority had been jarred upward by Jacksonian democracy, he said, which gave ordinary men and women the attitude that they could interpret the Bible for themselves without the need of clergy "getting between them and their God."
On the other hand, the age of reason and science had undermined biblical authority, he said.
Joseph even found geology fractured and spoke of a future coming together of the lands of the earth as they were before the days of Peleg (see Genesis 10:25), Brother Barlow said.
"In this sense, then, Joseph saw reality itself as full of fault lines, breaks, shards, gaps and chasms. (This is my Humpty Dumpty thesis.) And Joseph believed neither all the king's horses nor all the kings' men, nor the worldly philosophers nor the clerics of traditional religion could put Humpty together again.
"Because of his moment in time and space, and because of the prophetic lens through which he interpreted the world, he found himself impelled to propose a remedy for the fractured state of virtually every significant aspect of existence."
Richard L. Bushman
The June 18 symposium was significant in that "it manifests where we are in the evolution of Mormon studies and is evidence, I believe, that we are living in the Golden Age of Mormon history," said the man in whose honor the symposium was held.
While some may view past eras of Mormon studies with nostalgia, such as the era of former Church historian Leonard J. Arrington, "history writing in our time is built on a much steadier foundation," Brother Bushman said, "with much better prospects for continuance."
He cited as evidence the partnership between the institutions that organized the symposium. "It means that Mormon historical scholarship is not confined to the community of scholars alone. It has an organic connection to the community: the Church, the university, and just as critical, the private foundations that support this work."
Further evidence of the "Golden Age" is the fact that "history has brought into existence a realm of independent inquiry where scholarship is no longer judged by its partisan conclusions but by its accuracy and its truth."
"For decades, Mormon history was a kind of warfare with friends and enemies of the Church lined up to do battle. There was a wrong sense that you could not do history without taking sides. Friends would not concede a single mistake on the part of the Church; enemies could not concede a single virtue."
Over the past half-century, that division has broken down, he said. "We now have a realm of independent inquiry where historians of all makes and models do history together, and the results are judged more by their accuracy than by their ideological commitment."
The present condition is what made his own book possible, he said, but also the Joseph Smith Papers Project being undertaken by the Church History Department, and the recent book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre by Richard E. Turley Jr., Ronald L. Walker and Glen M. Leonard.
