Binding Earth and Heaven: Patriarchal Blessings in the Prophetic Development of Early Mormonism

Chapter 6: Gender Differences in Early Patriarchal Blessings

6 gender differences in early patriarchal blessings Functional theorists since Emile Durkheim have emphasized the integrative and consensual functions of ritual,1 while conflict theorists argue that rituals primarily serve a political purpose by reinforcing hierarchical structures of domination. Yet other scholars see rituals as vehicles for contesting and mobilizing resistance to established power.2 Interpretive disagreements concerning the primary social functions of ritual are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the Mormon case, for example, it is not difficult to appreciate a mixed reading of the social consequences of patriarchal blessings over time. In Mormonism’s early days most converts did not come from wealthy or socially privileged backgrounds. Their regional and national origins were, however, diversified by the far-flung recruitment efforts of Mormon missionaries. By emphasizing egalitarian themes of universal brotherhood in the Zionic community of God’s Kingdom on earth, patriarchal blessings served to integrate converts from different cultural backgrounds in a common cause and calling. At the same time, the Mormons’ radical doctrinal innovations and theocratic tendencies pitted them against orthodox Christianity and secular authority in nineteenthcentury American society. In that context, early patriarchal blessings clearly aimed to contest and mobilize a challenge to established powers. Within a short time, however, the LDS Church produced its own complex , hierarchical lay priesthood organization that prohibited women and African American males from holding ecclesiastical office. Much later, as racial and gender equality emerged as large-scale social issues in the twentieth century, it may be plausibly inferred that one latent consequence of PAGE 88 ................. 18278$ $CH6 08-30-12 08:37:13 PS gender differences in early blessings 89 patriarchal blessings was to furnish both theological justification and practical reinforcement of the exclusive priesthood authority of white Mormon males.3 This inference is compatible with I. M. Lewis’s cross-cultural analysis of ‘‘spirit possession’’ (which includes belief in visionary revelations and channeling spiritual messages from the beyond).4 Lewis proposes a distinction between ‘‘central,’’ male-dominated possession cults, which reinforce prevailing moral and political institutions, and ‘‘peripheral’’ cults that, through the ecstatic projection of evil and dangerous forces, symbolically protest the oppression of marginalized groups, especially women. While patriarchal blessings are based on the premise of divine revelation, neither in their administration nor reception do they encourage ecstatic performances or experiences in the rapturous, often frenzied modes that Lewis mostly considers. In early Mormonism, particularly during the Kirtland period, ecstatic forms of religious expression were not uncommon (especially the practice of glossolalia), and ‘‘blessing meetings’’ in that period may have been more emotionally expressive than currently is the case, now that blessings are privately bestowed.5 In any event, while not normally ecstatic, patriarchal blessings in the context of Mormon culture, both past and present, clearly constitute a primary rather than peripheral cultic form. Through the restored priesthood they are exclusively administered by male patriarchs and, while the blessings we analyzed in the last chapter not infrequently contained references to evil oppositional forces, they overwhelmingly reinforced commitment to the doctrines of the restored church. In the process of propagating and reinforcing member commitment to Mormonism’s most distinctive religious claims, were the blessings given to women substantively different from the blessings given men? In particular , did those blessings serve to reinforce women’s subservience to male dominance in a patriarchal religious culture? In what follows, we summarize nineteenth-century gender norms in American society and then formulate several hypotheses about gender differences in early LDS patriarchal blessings for statistical testing. nineteenth-century gender norms A surge of feminist studies in history and the social sciences over the past several decades has compelled new interpretations and understandings of our national history and the part that socially constructed gender PAGE 89 ................. 18278$ $CH6 08-30-12 08:37:14 PS 90 binding earth and heaven distinctions play in the process of both maintaining and changing social institutions.6 Feminist studies of women’s roles in nineteenth-century America document the progressive changes in women’s social status in the post-revolutionary United States that generated the foundations for the women’s movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the strict religious and legal subjugation of New England Puritan women to their husbands, to the somewhat more enlightened ideal of ‘‘republican motherhood’’ fostered during and after the American Revolution, and from the assumption of leadership roles in various antebellum moral crusades...