Sojourner in the Promised Land

Forty Years among the Mormons

JAN SHIPPS. Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xiii; 400 pp. Notes, index. $34.95.

For more than four decades Jan Shipps, now professor emerita at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, has been the most reliable source for non-Mormons about Mormonism. Whenever journalists or academics go searching for an explanation of Latter-day Saint theology or try to deconstruct the latest pronouncement coming out of Salt Lake City or understand some cultural or political development in Utah, we call Jan for the inside scoop because she knows the ins and outs, the nooks and crannies, of Mormondom. Chances are very good that she knows the principals as well, and she can leaven her explanation with some pithy aside that provides invaluable insight into one of the most fascinating—and confounding—movements in all of American religious history.

On the face of it, Jan Shipps is an unlikely insider to the machinations of Mormonism. She is devoutly and resolutely Methodist, not Mormon, and she has the unprepossessing demeanor of somebody’s favorite aunt or grandmother, rather than the attitude of a single-minded and relentless sleuth that one might expect from someone who has gained so much inside information about the workings of the Latter-day Saints. But looks can be deceiving, of course, and those who underestimate Shipps do so at their own peril. Her modus operandi is more Columbo than James Bond, but she is an excellent historian, as Sojourner in the Promised Land demonstrates.

This delightful book contains some of her best work over the past forty years, but it also offers occasional, usually offhand, insight into the author’s remarkable life (including where she acquired her storied driving skills). Jo Ann Barnett was born and reared in Alabama and took the nickname Jan as a sixteen-year-old when she entered the Alabama College for Women (now Montebello University) in 1946 because so many other students were named Jo Ann (we learn this from a footnote). Her first exposure to Mormonism came when she and her husband, Tony Shipps, moved from Detroit to Logan, Utah, where he became a librarian at Utah State University. Jan’s curiosity was so piqued by this alien people—she thought of Logan as a “twilight zone”—that she determined to study the Latter-day Saints further, earning her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1965. That same year the Mormon History Association was formed by a distinguished group of Mormon scholars and “at least one prominent non-Mormon historian,” Shipps (3).

Thus was launched a remarkable career, the tracings of which appear in this collection. Shipps tries to account for why Mormons have been so conspicuously absent from histories of the American West, and she recalls, almost wistfully, the days of Camelot when the Church opened its archives to scholars, both Mormons and non-Mormons, under the stewardship of Leonard Arrington. One of her best essays, “From Satyr to Saint,” based on prodigious research, shows how the public perception of Mormonism evolved from that of a dangerous cult into a kind of paragon of American goodness and righteousness. By the 1960s, she concludes, “it seemed to many of the nation’s citizens that Mormons were exemplary figures. As the mountain curtain turned into a scrim, observers were able to see that the Saints were truly saints; and the satyrs were in the world outside” (73).

Shipps records beautifully how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints refashioned itself from an enclave into a worldwide entity, noting that, in the nomenclature of the church, she herself started out as a Gentile historian and, “without changing my religious status in the slightest, I became a non-Mormon historian who studies Latter-day Saints” (40). This new openness on the part of the church—including, not incidentally, the decision to ordain men of color—transformed what it means to be a Mormon “from peoplehood to church membership” (41), and this transformation should ensure that Mormons will find their place in the historiography of the American West.

Shipps predicts, however, that such inclusion will come at a cost. As the media gain a fuller understanding of the Latter-day Saints, as it sets aside the two-dimensional caricatures of the past, the church will come under more scrutiny. The 1993 excommunications of the September Six or Brigham Young University’s treatment of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the author suggests, provide a case in point. If the church leadership expected that these actions would be treated simply as an internal matter, they were mistaken. The press took notice, as did the academy.

Sojourner in the Promised Land is full of insights on the Latter-day Saints, on religious studies, and on the writing of religious history. These observations are useful to historians generally, but they have particular application to writing Mormon history. Shipps recognizes that insiders—in any tradition—have an advantage, “for they speak the language and can recognize nuances easily missed by scholars unfamiliar with a denominational idiom,” but any worthwhile account “requires insiders to become ‘outside-insiders,’ who know their denominations intimately but are willing to develop the ability to see them from the disinterested perspective of the outside” (187). An insider, she believes, needs “somehow to bracket and suspend judgment about a faith community’s truth claims” in order to write responsibly: “A willing suspension of belief (or disbelief) makes it less likely that what a historian writes will be confused with efforts at faith promotion or exposé” (188).

It is precisely this approach that has characterized Jan Shipps’s own work throughout the decades, and this is what makes it so valuable. Shipps has been willing to bracket Mormon truth claims and to suspend her own belief—or disbelief—without being either congratulatory or censorious. The result has been a fascinating “inside-outsider” look at Mormonism. Through books, articles, interviews, and conversation, she has translated the theology, culture, and mores of the Latter-day Saints to those of us outside the movement, but she has also held up a mirror to Mormons so they have a better understanding of themselves.

As Shipps is quick to point out, her pilgrimage among the Mormons has transformed her, even though she remains a Methodist (much to the confusion and the consternation of some church leaders). But she in turn has also, almost single-handedly, transformed the entire field of Mormon studies, adding new legitimacy to the field, encouraging younger scholars, and admonishing Mormons themselves to greater care in their scholarly pursuits.

About the author(s)

Randall Balmer is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. During the 2001–2002 academic year he is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale.

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Print ISSN: 2837-0031
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