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14 Arrington Mormon History Lecture Given Americans’ longstanding concerns about despotism generally and their suspicions about the concentration of power among a vaguely conceived “priesthood” in particular, it is not surprising that the Mormons were so easy for other, non-Mormon peoples to Orientalize. But this is to be expected on frontiers, which are places where social identities are in flux. In America, where Orientalist identities were taking shape in the nineteenth century, the die was cast. Mormons could be conflated with Near Eastern potentates at the drop of a hat despite the fact their leaders were actually white Anglo-Americans.With this in mind, I would like to explore several distinct aspects of Mormon identity that can help us better understand how and why Mormons were— and in some case still are—so easy to Orientalize. One of the factors most structurally significant to Mormon belief and identity concerns the origins of indigenous peoples in the Americas, and it is therefore with the Native Americans that I shall begin. The Lamanites: Orientalizing Indigenous America The Mormons’ perception of time and space affected their beliefs about the Native Americans. As historian Philip Barlow noted, “Joseph Smith pre-empted Steven Spielberg by going ‘back to the future’ and then pulling it into the present.” Smith’s interpreting phenomena in light of “the ancient order of things” was closely associated with his religious beliefs and teachings. As Steven LeSueur observed, if Smith were given an “ancient manuscript,” he would interpret it as “the writings of the ancient prophet Abraham.” Similarly, Smith might interpret a human skeleton as “the skeleton of an ancient Nephite warrior,” a new place of settlement as “the Garden of Eden,” and “a pile of stones” might be “an altar built by Adam to offer sacrifice to God.”12 Note that Smith could effortlessly shift things and places between hemispheres through this process. Smith’s extemporaneous archaeological explorations, conducted as part of Zion’s Camp as early as 1834, provide a case in point. Smith’s discovery of the ancient Lehite general Zelph in what was otherwise a fairly typical Indian mound in North America’s mid-section 12. Philip L. Barlow, “Toward a Mormon Sense of Time,” Journal of Mormon History 33, no. 1, (2007): 24; see also Stephen C. LeSueur, “The Community of Christ and the Search for a Usable Past,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 22 (2002): 9. 15 "Like the Hajis of Meccah and Jerusalem" is noteworthy, for it energized and elated Smith and his followers and seemed to corroborate the Book of Mormon.13 As suggested above, Smith believed that a pivotal site of immense importance to God’s relationship to mankind—the Garden of Eden— was actually located in the American interior rather than Mesopotamia. The place is called Adam-ondi-Ahman and its location in a land between rivers on the Missouri frontier reaffirmed the Mormons’ belief that America was, and is, a special place where sacred biblical events took place. Related to the theme of this lecture, too, is the fact that the word Adam-ondi-Ahman itself has an implicit linguistic connection to Middle Eastern peoples and places—suggested by the names Adam (the biblical person) and Amman (the city in Jordan). Mormon religion infused American geography and prehistory with an Old World flavor. To Smith and his followers, the American landscape was populated by Old World peoples who had ventured to the New World almost two thousand years before Columbus. In Smith’s restless intellectual inquiry, which was inseparable from his faith, the American frontier thus became the Near East, with its Garden of Eden, altars of Abraham, and the like. At first glance, this process and its conclusions might seem to devalue America as a place inferior to the real thing, namely, the Old World where most non-Mormons believe such sites to be located. However, looked at in another light, just the opposite was true. Smith in fact dignified America in a remarkably revisionist way, for through his experiences and teachings, America was no longer on the periphery of world-class religious events but rather central to them in that it possessed the sites where these ancient events transpired. To the Mormons, the New World was important enough for Jesus himself to visit after his ascension. In this Mormon theological context, America becomes the place where God spoke to man, and, according to the Mormons, still does. This theological conflation of Old World and New World helps...

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