“A Hall of Mirrors”: Two Recent Works in Mormon Studies

In his preface to Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, John Turner argues that “the field of Mormon history is a hall of mirrors, full of distorted and incomplete reflections of nearly any event” (viii). Turner’s metaphor points to the mass of textual evidence and competing claims found in the short history of the Latter-day Saints (LDS). As do most historians, Mormon Studies scholars must sift through contradictory accounts that change over time; added to that, the documents are often chock-full of angels, golden tablets, and divine revelations. And Mormon Studies scholars are not often left wanting for documentation. After all, it was on April 6, 1830, at the first meeting that organized the new church, that Joseph Smith, Jr., presented a revelation that instructed church members that “[t]here shall be a record kept among you” (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1). Contributing to the hall-of-mirrors effect is the fact that scholars of Mormonism have not always had access to the documents that they need to help clarify the story, documents that are housed in the church’s archives. New scholarship in the field of Mormon Studies has to confront the hall of mirrors with a careful historical eye and a strong theoretical approach, as it attempts to clarify the workings of this relatively new religious movement.

Turner’s Brigham Young and J. Spencer Fluhman’s “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America represent this new scholarship in the field of Mormon Studies. In researching their books, the authors enjoyed greater access to documentation than scholars in the past. As part of the growing field of Mormon Studies, these two books “avoid the parochialism and polemicism that has been endemic to Mormon history” (Turner, viii). Instead, they seek to contextualize Mormonism within the broader narratives of American history in order to better understand both histories. Using different approaches, both texts explore the dialectic of identity formation within and outside the Mormon community. Mormon identity was forged and changed over time in conversation with outsiders. Both Turner and Fluhman take that identity formation seriously and explore it through the lenses of critical race and gender studies, providing us with narratives that help us better understand the role of Mormonism in American history.

Even though Latter-day Saints make up only two percent of the population of the United States, the movement has “achieved an outsized cultural relevance” (2). Debates about Mormonism—on whether or not it is a Christian tradition, on whether it can produce a trusted president of the United States, on its revelation that prohibits hot drinks, alcohol, and tobacco—continue today, and both Turner and Fluhman investigate the role of history-telling in those debates. In his introduction, Fluhman examines the differences between discussions about Mormon history within the LDS community and within the academy. Within the LDS community, Joseph Smith’s life, “the emergence of the Book of Mormon, and the persecution of early Mormons [and] the heroism of the western trek” begin the narrative of the Mormon tradition. Then that narrative skips to “late twentieth-century international growth,” leaving gaps in the chronology that contain “elements that fit awkwardly with Mormons’ current emphasis on public relations” (6). Those gaps would include the church’s culture in the state of Utah and the formation of the reorganized church that gathered around Joseph Smith’s son in Missouri. In work that runs counter to the LDS narrative, academic historians have had an “ongoing fascination with Mormon cultural deviance”—particularly its embrace of polygamy and theocracy—that upsets the “strategic forgetting” within the LDS community but has its own bias. Both groups focus on the nineteenth century, either in “hagiographical or exoticized shades” rather than the twentieth-century narrative of assimilation. Fluhman’s text engages the tension between the two narratives and...