Mormonism

The clue to what Jan Shipps’s book is about is contained in her subtitle, The Story of a New Religious Tradition. What Shipps has written is not a history of Mormonism in any conventional sense but rather an imaginative book-length essay, particularly of the early history of the movement, wherein she advances the following thesis: Mormonism ought not to be dismissed as “little more than an elaborate idiosyncratic strain of the nineteenth century search for primitive Christianity” (68) nor should it be perceived as a peculiar Protestant denomination; rather, Mormonism ought to be compared to early Christianity in that it is to traditional Christianity what primitive Christianity was to the Judaism of the era, that is, a movement that started as an effort to restore an old faith and ended up becoming a new religious tradition. To substantiate this view, Shipps employs her own version of what could best be called a comparative “history of religions” approach and evidences the kind of insight that can be gained when a subject is studied, if not on its own terms, then in relatively nonreductionistic terms. In this case, that means studying Mormonism as what it obviously is, a religion.

In the first part of the book, in the chapter entitled “Prologue,” the author presents a rather straightforward account of the beginnings of the Mormon tradition in the early part of the nineteenth century with a focus on the indispensable role played by the Prophet Joseph Smith. This is followed by a chapter on the Book of Mormon entitled “In the Beginning. . . .” Here Shipps introduces the technical interpretive categories of myth and sacred time. Those who early on accepted the Book of Mormon as a Hebraic record and also a second witness for Jesus Christ participated, according to Shipps, in the formation of a new myth. The coming forth of this book, its confirmation of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling, and the collective experiences of the early members of the Church combined to form a new mythos and a new sense of time: the “new dispensation of the fulness of times” (52, 59). It is unfortunate that the author did not pay more attention in this chapter to the literary and ritual motifs found in the narrative of the Book of Mormon, since these would seem to support further her main thesis.

In the chapter entitled “History as Text,” Shipps argues that to understand properly the early Mormons as they understood themselves it is necessary to account for how they lived their newly formed myth. What we discover, she says, is that Mormons reiterated, reinterpreted, and recapitulated in actual events significant events in Israel’s past and in the history of early Christianity. The various and complex ways in which they did this, and in certain respects continue to do it today, account for why this “new religion” survived and became a new tradition. For Shipps, the key to understanding her lies in recognizing that the Book of Mormon, with its narrative ending in the fifth century of the common era, “effected a break in the very fabric of history” for the Mormons. Consequently, “the first Mormons were, then, suspended between an unusable past [the whole institutional history of Christianity from the fifth to the nineteenth century] and an uncertain future, [and of necessity] returned as it were to a primordial state.” Then, as their future unfolded, they experientially lived the sacred events of this new age: “reestablishing the covenant, gathering the Lord’s elect, separating Israel from the Gentiles, organizing the church, preaching the gospel, [and] building up the kingdom.” In other words, “they moved out of the primordial present into the future by replicating the past.” Thus “this activity allowed the Saints to recover their own past, . . . Which, despite its similarity to words and acts, places and events in the biblical stories of Israel’s history and the history of Christianity, was . . . neither Christian nor Jew” (52–53).

On the basis of these “mythic” insights, Shipps devotes the balance of the book to an interpretation of formative stages in the history of the tradition from its beginnings in 1830 to the turn of the century. In the chapters “Reformation and Restoration” and “Getting the Story Straight,” Shipps argues that what began in New York as a “restoration movement” bent on restoring primitive Christianity became in the early 1830s in Kirtland, Ohio, a radical restorationist movement (67, 87) blending aspects of ancient Israel’s united kingdom with select Christian elements. The recapitulation of the Age of the Patriarchs continued in the early 1840s in the establishment of the city-state of Nauvoo in Illinois. The crisis of 1844 precipitated by the killing of Joseph Smith resulted in a divided kingdom. Those Saints who remained in Illinois and points east returned to the earlier reformation model; those who in 1846 and 1847 made the exodus to Utah worked more than ever to build the kingdom of God, institutionalized in communitarian experiments, plural marriage, and a unified political order.

Finally, in the concluding chapters of the book entitled “In and Out of Time” and, interestingly enough, “The Millennial Vision Transformed,” Shipps sees this distinctive recapitulation of Hebrew and Christian myths coming to an end in the 1880s and 1890s when, under federal pressure, the Utah Saints were forced to abandon the chief characteristics of their united kingdom. At this point, with Zion forced to come to terms with Babylon, the Mormon “past was filled up. Complete” (63). The Saints, in other words, moved from sacred into ordinary time, a move that, on this reading, was predictable and even necessary if the movement was to continue on its way toward becoming a new religious tradition. The past, for today’s Mormons, is not recapitulated in actual events, but rather is ritually recreated, especially in their temple worship. And, of course, it follows, according to Shipps’s interpretation, that Mormons no longer live in terms of an imminent, literal millennium but in a time marked by, at best, the hope of a more elusive metaphorical millennium.

This is an important book, if not, as one excited reviewer put it, “the most brilliant book ever written on Mormonism” (from the dust-jacket blurb). In many respects, it is a first of its kind. It is virtually free of sectarian rhetoric. Its importance lies in illustrating the kind of scholarly understanding that can be achieved when something like the phenomenological approach that Shipps uses is turned toward this kind of subject. Still, such approaches have their limitations, not the least of which are the naturalistic biases common to most such endeavors, which markedly come to the fore in dealing with religious matters. So, for example, it is not surprising to find Shipps concluding that “Mormonism’s transition from cultic movement to religious tradition follows the pattern by which other traditions made the transition” (65) and for her to stress, as she repeatedly does, that the early Mormons, in living their myth, were not conscious of what they were doing, meaning, presumably, that they did not know what they were really doing, while Mormons today are conscious of the fact that they can only ritually repeat the past—with all the ominous implications for their future that this implies.

One of the tests of studies such as this ought to be, given the limited level of understanding that can be achieved in such efforts, whether or not the subjects under investigation recognize themselves and their traditions in the resulting portraits. I suspect that many Mormons who read this book may well acknowledge that Shipps has seen things about their past others may have missed, but they will still find the developed picture of themselves somewhat out of focus.