Dave's Mormon Inquiry

The LDS Missionary Program

The LDS missionary program as we know it came of age under David O. McKay. It is the subject of Chapter 10 in the recent award-winning biography David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (U of U Press, 2005). For example, prior to 1960 the minimum age for young men to serve missions was 21 and for young women it was 23; in that year it was dropped to 19 and 21, respectively. That alone boosted the number of serving missionaries by approximately 40%. I'll summarize a few more interesting facts and issues, such as the "quantity versus quality" issue which first came to the fore in the McKay era. All of my discussion until my closing "My Comments" paragraph is summarized from Chapter 10 of the book.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Intrepid Bloggernauts are on the road to Casper for the MHA meetings. Or maybe it's actually a clever new reality show — Survivor: Wyoming. I sense a real opportunity for MHA to boost their attendance next year. Oh, and they gave some awards when the contestants finally arrived.

BYU Pardons Dead Students

BYU has informed five students who participated in last month's on-campus die-in that they will be put on various forms of probation but not kicked out of school, according to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune. A nice review of this rather controversial April 11 event at BYU is found in this earlier story in the Deseret News. I think it's a nice ending for all concerned: the BYU students got to make their statement yet stay in school (as long as they keep out of trouble henceforth and forever); BYU looks suitably tough on "moral truth decay" (can you name that line?) but not especially mean to its students; and Soulforce gets to point the mocking finger of liberal scorn at BYU (their lengthy motto: "Freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious & political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance."). So everyone is happy now.

Gideon the Polygamist

Sometimes you latch onto a concept or idea, and suddenly it starts popping up everywhere. So there I was, enduring to the end of an uninspiring lesson on Judges, when look what pops up in the short bio of Gideon, heroic Israelite patriot and judge from the tribe of Manasseh:

[Gideon] went back home to live. He had seventy sons of his own, for he had many wives. His concubine, who lived in Shechem, also bore him a son, whom he named Abimilech. Gideon son of Joash died at a good old age and was buried in the tomb of his father Joash. (Judges 8:29-32, NIV)

Wives, a concubine, and living to a good old age. How patriarchal.

Messing With Texas

You've got to hand it to these FLDS folks: when they set their mind to it, they can do some nice construction work. And out in the middle of nowhere Texas, no less. The LA Times just ran a story giving the latest, entitled Dispatch from Eldorado, Texas (from the Topix feed). The surprise is that they're actually getting along pretty well with the locals. They don't say much to the Texans, but, reading between the lines, the story makes it clear the FLDS are actually getting along fairly nicely.

Utah Court Affirms Bigamy Conviction

As if on cue for this week's theme of polygamy, the Utah State Supreme Court delivered a polygamy opinion this week, State v. Holm, 2006 UT 31, filed May 16. (Hat tip: this interesting post at Right Coast.) The Court affirmed the bigamy conviction of an FLDS adherent from Hildale, Utah. Anyone interested in LDS history will find the three opinions (there was a concurrence and a dissenting opinion) interesting reading. Should Reynolds ever be taken up by the US Supreme Court, this Utah case will provide a starting point for their analysis.

Plural Marriages, 1890-1904

As this week's online essay, go read D. Michael Quinn's "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904," Dialogue, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1985):9-105. The link is to the copy of the article at Dialogue's archive reader, which I don't find particularly easy to use, but at least it's all online and it's free. Can't really argue with that, can you? A little subtraction will tell you the article is 96 pages long, which sounds imposing. But half of that is footnotes and the article itself is not difficult reading. It's not like 96 pages of RSR. After I finish the article myself I might come back and add a longer discussion to this post. Until then, here's an excerpt (from p. 15 of the article) explaining why it so tough to really get a handle on the LDS doctrine and practice of plural marriage:

The 1890-1904 period is only the middle section in a complex history of plural marriage among the Latter-day Sainst from 1830 to the present. Understanding this history is complicated by illegality of plural marriage, by the resulting secrecy connected with its practice, by the fact that polygamy has been the center of a sectarian battleground throughout Mormonism's history, and finally by the problem of the meaning and application of "truth" in Mormon theology and practice as they relate to plural marriage.

Solemn Covenant

Just finished Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (U. of Illinois Press, 1992) by B. Carmon Hardy. Like every story, the story of Mormon polygamy has a beginning, middle, and end. This book gives the definitive account of the end of official polygamy as practiced in the LDS Church, and the end is at least as interesting as the beginning. But for modern Latter-day Saints, it is, in many ways, a painful tale. In fact, most of you are probably better off simply not reading this book. Just stick with the "Wilford Woodruff got a revelation in 1890 that ended the practice of polygamy" story (what I'll call the "Manifesto Myth") and get on with your life. Here are three reasons you probably shouldn't read this book.

Sunstone West, Part 2

I'm going to touch briefly — one paragraph each — on the four sessions I didn't cover in Part 1. The topics were: biographies of Joseph Smith; the HBO series "Big Love"; the mainstreaming of Mormon Studies; and Mormon women in the Bloggernacle.

Sunstone West, Part 1

I attended the 2006 Sunstone West Symposium at Clarmont last month and attended six sessions. It was worth every penny, although with several of the sessions offering concurrent presentations, you are guaranteed to leave mildly frustrated about the speakers you missed. In this post I will summarize two of the morning sessions I heard. I'll get to the other presentations in later posts. [Click here for the full program.]

The Laundry List

In celebration of a fine post last week at T&S which reprinted the entire text of an excellent 1990 Armand Mauss essay, "Alternate Voices: The Calling and its Implications," I'm declaring this Alternate Voices Week here at DMI. I'll start off with something from the current Spring 2006 Dialogue: "Mormon Laundry List," by Julianna Gardner Berry. It's a short two-page note registering dissatisfaction with the increasing tendency of Sacrament Meeting talks to be extended exercises in finger-wagging, with the inevitable admonishments drawn from a short but reliable list (the "Mormon laundry list") of proper LDS behaviors: read the scriptures, pay your tithing, go to your meetings, do your home teaching, pay your tithing, pray more, etc. The author's plea was for more education and edification in talks at church. That, or you can just bring a good book and tune out the speaker at the pulpit. I've been reading the David O. McKay bio in church lately.

I made some related comments in a post last year, Mormon Exhorters. Here's a quote from the last paragraph:

Getting a little tired of being exhorted at for 60 minutes every Sunday? Have you ever found yourself (gasp!) thinking that maybe having a trained minister to preach a proper sermon wouldn't be so bad? Think how things would change if every Mormon sacrament meeting speaker had to take a 10-hour basic lay speaker course before inflicting themselves on the congregation.

The Man Who Would Be King

I recently finished an advance copy of "God Has Made Us a Kingdom": James Strang and the Midwest Mormons (Signature, 2006) by Vickie Cleverley Speek, a former journalist. Her book retells the improbable story of Jesse James Strang, a relatively recent convert to Mormonism who put forth a claim to be Joseph Smith's successor following his death in 1844. While it seems odd to modern Mormons, some Mormons of that day took Strang's claim seriously, and he gathered hundreds of scattered post-Nauvoo Mormons to him, first in Wisconsin, then later on Beaver Island in the remote northern waters of Lake Michigan. His death at the hands of an assassin (who was immediately given refuge in a US warship docked at Beaver Island) cut short his "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" (commonly known as the Strangites). What are we to make of this strange episode in LDS history?

Your First LDS History Book

What was the first good LDS history book you read? The first book that made you sit up and say, "Hmm, never heard that before," or maybe just "Okay, now I see how it all fits together." My first eye-opener was Klaus Hansen's Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God & the Council of Fifty in Mormon History. (With a title like that, it had to be good.) I checked it out from the BYU Library, as I recall (it was in with the regular books, not the Locked Case or Special Collections). It covered Joseph's formation of the Council of Fifty as a governing body for the temporal "kingdom" or society of the Saints (and any friendly neighbors who were also part of that society), including his ordination as king to direct that political entity. I recall that Hansen did note that some of the members of the Council were not LDS, which was an unexpected detail. For more details and references on the Council of Fifty (and some criticism of its treatment in Hansen's book), see J. Stapley's excellent BCC post, Theodemocracy.

So, what was the first really interesting LDS history book you read?

Just the Facts, Ma'am

For this week's online essay, go read Historiography, a short essay at the Concordia University Department of History's website. It's a nice follow-up to my earlier post Faithful History, and I'll use it to bring out a couple of the points touched on in that post by Richard L. Bushman.

Faithful History

The ongoing debate over the proper approach to writing LDS history can almost be pared down to a debate over the definition of the term "faithful history." Here are four sources for understanding this debate: (1) Richard L. Bushman's 1969 essay entitled "Faithful History," in Dialogue 4 (Winter 1969):11-28; (2) a 1992 Signature book, Faithful History, which includes Bushman's 1969 essay as well as fifteen others by various authors representing the entire specturm of LDS scholarly opinion on the subject (here's the book's Table of Contents); (3) a 1981 speech by Elder Boyd K. Packer to CES instructors, entitled "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater that the Intellect," published in BYU Studies 21 (Summer 1981):259-78; and (4) a historian's response to Packer's talk, D. Michael Quinn's "On Being a Mormon Historian" (included in the Signature book), a rather personal essay detailing Quinn's experience navigating the tricky waters of LDS historiography as a history professor at BYU. In the balance of this post I'll give a few comments on each of these four sources.