Category: LDS Church History

What do I mean by “transitional Mormonism”? (Part 1 is here if you missed it.) I take the idea from the title of Thomas Alexander’s award-winning book Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930, now in a 3rd edition. Alexander was a BYU professor, and wrote this as part of a commissioned 16-volume history of the Church that did not come to fruition. This time period was a particularly tumultuous one both for the LDS Church and America, with major intellectual, social, scientific, and technological changes. Among other things, the “modernism crisis” with Darwinism/evolution, “higher criticism,” and the rediscovery of the ancient near east  led to the creation of fundamentalism (an intellectual response to the crisis) as well as Pentecostalism (a spiritual response.)

The LDS Church existed in the same environment, and many major changes to policy, doctrinal understanding, and LDS culture happened during this period Alexander chronicles. These changes discomfitted many LDS, who reacted in a variety of ways including both intellectual and actual schisms. For those not well acquainted with LDS history, I would characterize this period as the bridge between “Joseph Smith’s church” and the “modern church.”

What are these discomfitting changes? To pick a few major ones Alexander covers well and hold my interest

1. The ending of (mainstream) lived polygamy
2. The beginning of geneaological research and the associated centrality of the temple. That is, until this time, it seems the importance of learning about your ancestors and doing their temple work and sealing was not understood; consequently, most Mormons (including Apostles) were endowed, married, and then didn’t have any theological motivation to return. Once Wilford Woodruff put an end to the idea of “adoption” and emphasized geneaology, the need to attend to proxy ordinances greatly increased.
3. The codification/standardizing of the Word of Wisdom and its elevation to a temple recommend question. Among others, see Mike Ash “Up in Smoke” and Edward L. Kimball, “The History of LDS Temple Admission Standards”
4. Doctrinal regulation/centralization 

I suspect Mormonism has now entered a similar transitionary period as the one Alexander describes from 100 years ago. Certainly, Mormonism is always changing in some way or another so in a later post I’ll explain why I think we’re into another major transitionary period and why. I’ll also describe a parallel transition that I suspect is informing LDS leadership. In the meantime, check out Alexander’s book.

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George Cattermole, “The Scribe.” Public domain.

I wrote the last post while traveling and have just started a new and busy semester, and so didn’t respond at all to the thirty-odd comments there. I’ll address them and some related issues, instead, in a multi-part series. I’ll get into what I mean by “transitional Mormonism” in the next post, but it’s nothing to do with “faith journeys,” “stages of faith” or anything like that. 
Peter Enns is both an Evangelical who holds the Bible in very high regard and a Harvard PhD in Hebrew Bible. He has been featured in the Maxwell Institute podcast and spoken at BYU along with James Kugel and Candida Moss (now in print here). I frequently steer Latter-day Saints to his books. Back in November, I linked to a forthcoming book cowritten by a Bible scholar and a geneticist, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Enns has now offered a brief review over at Biologos, an excellent site for science/religion issues. Although it doesn’t all apply to the Mormon worldview (e.g. the issue of every human sinning “in Adam,” or “original sin”), the whole thing is worth reading. I want to highlight one of his comments.

Any discussion of the “historical Adam” cannot proceed one step forward without taking into account the story of Adam in its ancient context. I don’t mean to suggest this is easy as pie. There is a lot to work through, and room for some variation in points of view. But the conversation cannot go on as if we’ve learned nothing in the last 150 years about antiquity and the function that origins stories played in ancient societies. Placing Adam in his ancient context immediately and significantly affects how Genesis is brought into the discussion over evolution. (My italics)

I completely agree, but want to take this in a different direction. Mormons place very high authority on tradition, and rightly so given the LDS principles of priesthood authority, revelation, etc. But we are a young Church with underdeveloped mechanisms for weighing, balancing, and adjudicating statements within that tradition. While not perfectly analogous, there is no LDS equivalent of, say, the Islamic science of weighing and judging traditions about Mohammed (hadith) or the Catholic degrees of authoritative statements. Instead we play General Authority poker.

There is a common assumption that statements made by Church leaders represent both a revelatory position (vertical, with the divine) and representative position (horizontal, that all General Authorities hold the same view). At times, something calls this into question: conflict of various kinds, both perceived and real, which exists much more than most people realize. Whether conflict between contemporaneous General Authorities (like Brigham Young vs. Orson Pratt), historical (like Bruce R. McConkie vs. Brigham Young), conflict or differing views between scripture and General Authorities, or within scripture itself (see here), or conflict between (particular readings of) scripture and well-established human knowledge (e.g. Young earth creationists vs. lots of geology, biology, etc.) Such conflicts suddenly call into question common absolutist assumptions about the nature of Church leadership (eternally unified, monolithic, consistent, and purely divine, for all practical purposes) and can undermine faith, if unexpected.

There are plenty of General Authority statements indicating that these common assumptions are wrong. To take two examples, B.H. Roberts bluntly said that

Constant, never-varying inspiration is not a factor in the administration of the affairs even of the Church; not even good men, no, not though they be prophets or other high officials of the Church, are at all times and in all things inspired of God. Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1907), 1:525

That notorious liberal softy Elder Bruce R. McConkie similarly said that

With all their inspiration and greatness, prophets are yet mortal men with imperfections common to mankind in general. They have their opinions and prejudices and are left to work out their problems without inspiration in many instances. Mormon Doctrine, 547.

If, as I said above, LDS Church leaders are not merely offering human views, neither (according to McConkie, Roberts, and many others) are they somehow divinely cleaved and cleansed from their own minds, culture, knowledge, “their own opinions and prejudices” in McConkie’s terms. My suspicion is that this is not an on/off switch, not a clear “acting as prophet/not acting as prophet” binary as it is sometimes characterized, but a constant divine/human mixture that fluctuates for a variety of reasons. I believe that all revelation is inflected with humanity to some degree; it must be so, or God could not communicate with us, e.g. D&C 1:24. (But that’s another post, one I’ve probably already written.)

Here’s an example I think most will find non-threatening, regarding changes in garments in the early 1900s.

Although there was opposition to such changes among some Latter-day Saints, Elder Richards [an Apostle and Salt Lake City  Temple President] had learned some months earlier that such changes were both appropriate and normal. Some older members of the Church informed him that Emma Smith and Eliza R. Snow made the original temple clothing for the Prophet Joseph Smith. The reason they used strings on the garment was simply because they were too poor to buy [page] buttons. It was not necessarily God’s will that strings be used instead of buttons. The old-style collar was included because the seamstresses did not know how to finish the top of the garment and decided to do it with a collar. Dale C. Mouritsen, A Symbol of New Directions: George Franklin Richards and the Mormon Church, 1861-1950 (BYU Dissertation, 1982), 211-212. My italics.

In other words, people assumed that the received tradition (about the temple!) was fully prophetic and divinely ordained. The reality is that this aspect of the received tradition was dictated by human choice and historical circumstances. Addressing BYU professors, Elder McConkie once said that “Certain things which are commonly said and commonly taught in the Church [that is, “tradition”] either are not true, or, are in the realm of pure speculation.” Yes, he had a particular topic in mind, but that’s irrelevant to my purposes here. Suffice to say, he recognized that Church tradition includes aspects that, while popular, do not have much real grounding.

Returning to Genesis, evolution, and Enns, “the conversation cannot go on as if we’ve learned nothing in the last 150 years.“ When Mormons discuss various social, economic, religious, or scriptural issues, we tend to cite General Authority views, often from the relatively distant past. Can we legitimately cite those traditions as if they were pure expressions of divine knowledge intended for all time? (I think I’ve demonstrated above that it’s dangerous to assume that uncritically.) Or should we understand them as being influenced to some degree by the context and situations of the speaker as well as “their opinions and prejudices”?

Let me get very specific. Our knowledge of biology, biochemistry, genetics, evolution, and human origins, the topic of the book Enns is reviewing, have exploded in ways unimaginable in the early 1900s and even mid-1900s. (The timeline of this knowledge-production is quite interesting to study but secondary to my purpose here. Perhaps I’ll post a book list later.) The Church’s statement from over one hundred years ago was “that which is demonstrated, we accept with joy.”  Can we simply cite these and other such statements opposed to evolution as if they were purely divine and context-free declarations, and put the issue to bed? Or rather, are we obliged both to acknowledge them and their concordant authority and wrestle with what has been demonstrated and well-established in the last decades? Has the state of “demonstration” changed in the last hundred-plus years?

As a believing and orthodox Latter-day Saint, I take seriously the injunctions to study my scriptures and the words of the prophets, both living and dead. Indeed, it is precisely because I take it seriously that I study closely our religious tradition and have become aware of (as I mention above) the variety of views and opinions, sometimes even on central doctrinal issues, within scripture and LDS history. One of my old BYU professors quipped that “when it comes to church history and doctrine, you can have it all, or you can have it consistent, but you can’t have both.”

True indeed.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.