Mormonism Today
America’s Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power.
by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley.
Putnam. 278 pp. $16.95.
Mormonism was founded in the 19th century by Joseph Smith, a visionary who, beginning in the 1820’s, elaborated a body of teachings that departed radically from sectarian Christianity. He taught that revelation is continuous; his followers compiled his visions as new scripture and published the Book of Mormon, a history of pre-Columbian Christians in America. He taught that property should be held under common ownership; his followers built cities and joined in a utopian experiment called the United Order. He taught that God is a physical person and that humans, as God’s offspring, can some day attain godhood as part of the celestial family; his followers built temples in which to perform ritual baptisms for the dead and marriages for eternity.
Smith was anathema to traditional Christianity, and at odds with the prevailing individualism of the frontier, but he was also an expression of the millenarian and communitarian religious ferment of the period. His church, attacked in the courts and driven by violence from New York to Ohio, to Missouri, and then to Illinois, nevertheless grew from its original six members. After Smith was killed by a mob in 1844, about 10,000 of his followers fled to Nebraska under the organizational scheme of Brigham Young, who was more of a practical manager than a visionary.
From Nebraska, Young led the migration to the Great Salt Lake Basin, where he laid out and established a city and then sent out parties to colonize a corridor from the Snake River in Idaho to San Bernardino, California. He continued Smith’s experiments, establishing communitarian enterprises and a variety of cooperative industries and advocating “celestial marriage” among select church members. Polygamy and theocracy brought the church into conflict with the federal government, first in the Utah War of 1857 and then in the national anti-polygamy statutes.
Federal marshals drove Young’s successors into hiding, seized church property, and disenfranchised church members in a campaign aimed ostensibly against polygamy but meant in fact to destroy the system of Mormon economic and political cooperation. To save the institution, the church president issued the Manifesto of 1890 abolishing polygamy, disbanded the Mormon People’s party, and asked New York financiers for bail-out loans.
This “Great Accommodation,” as it is called, brought to an end the personalistic demi-nation built by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The anti-polygamy crusade had weakened the institution and left a leadership concerned more with survival than with experimentation. As the institutional structure began to recover, the church adopted turn-of-the-century management styles and took on many of the characteristics of other religious denominations and voluntary social organizations. During World War I, for example, the Women’s Relief Society came to resemble ladies’ service auxiliaries.
In the 20’s and 30’s, this recovery was hindered by a protracted economic decline in the Great Basin region. Like other establishment Americans, the top leaders, or General Authorities, opposed the programs of the New Deal. Mormon voters, however, strongly supported Roosevelt; in Utah, church members set up their own welfare program. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Mormons in effect seceded from the Utah church to form a separate national church. The institution’s response to these challenges—absorbing the welfare ideas to create the well-known Mormon welfare system and excommunicating the errant Mexicans to force a reconciliation—reasserted the power of the church and of the General Authorities as successors to Smith and Young.
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By the 1950’s, the church had established itself as a mainstream American institution, known for its fair-haired president, David O. McKay, and its Tabernacle Choir broadcasts. From a rebuilt economic base, the newly assertive institution expanded a missionary effort that had been on hold since the Utah War one hundred years earlier. Two decades and a lot of free spending later, church membership reached almost three million.
During the 60’s, Mormon religious and intellectual leaders initiated two movements that overhauled the institution. The first, called Correlation, was an attempt to reemphasize family structure and traditional roles, in response to the social instability of the period. At the same time, the bureaucracy was streamlined and centralized, and current management principles were systematically applied to church organization: financial holdings were restructured along corporate lines, holding companies were created, and modern accounting procedures imposed.
The Correlation movement brought the church to its greatest institutional strength since the Great Accommodation. The second movement encouraged the application to church history and culture of open intellectual inquiry and objective research methods. The archives were made accessible, professional historians were appointed, and an independent Mormon press appeared and expanded from a few intellectual journals into a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. One unexpected effect of both these movements was to bring into relief the church’s racial inequities; in 1978, the priesthood was opened to blacks.
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Which brings us at last to America’s Saints, a study that opens with the church’s 150th anniversary conference in 1980. What Gottlieb and Wiley describe is a church in crisis, a crisis brought on, they believe, by the financial strain of rapid growth, by an aging leadership, by damaging ties to Latin American dictators, by a dated insistence on sexual taboos, and by the divisive campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, one of whose manifestations was the sensation-causing excommunication of Sonia Johnson in 1980.
The authors interpret Mormonism as a once-radical experiment in political, economic, and social communitarianism that was interrupted by the Great Accommodation. Developments since then, in their view, reflect the leadership’s continuing drift away from these admirable beginnings. So the reaction to the abortive Mexican secession encouraged a flag-waving Americanism, still in evidence today. The church’s long-term response to the polygamy raids has been to outdo its critics by conforming to a Victorian sexual code that forces women into a dependent role and rejects homosexuals. The bottom-line mentality introduced during the 60’s has led to the destruction of historic Mormon buildings and to alliances with shady deal-makers, and has produced a worship of entrepreneurialism that has turned Utah into the nation’s scam capital. Finally, they write, the church’s involvement in politics amounts to a compulsion to intervene outside the affairs of religion, in an area where the church’s efforts are often inept and sometimes illegal.
Gottlieb and Wiley do, in fact, expose some underhanded, unethical, and illegal Mormon activities. Church members have used tax-exempt property to raise funds, distribute literature, and get votes for political causes. Mormons organized to defeat the ERA have failed to register as lobbyists and have encouraged other church members to conceal their church affiliation when writing to their representatives. Members have been urged from the pulpit to pack local caucuses and state meetings in Utah and Nevada and to vote as directed by strategically placed leaders. The names of General Authorities have been connected with fraudulent sales schemes using missionary-style techniques. Mormon lawyers have represented Indian tribes in the sale of tribal lands while simultaneously representing the parties who were benefiting from the sale.
Such activities, with or without official church sanction, are of course reprehensible. But some of Gottlieb and Wiley’s other charges rest on flimsy ground, or end up telling more about their own general attitudes than about the activities of Mormons. Their accusation that the church has not preserved historic architecture, for example, can be supported in some cases but not in others. They are probably right that the church breeds some paternalism and racism, but they fail to show that Mormons are any worse than other Americans in this regard. Their charge of jingoism seems to reflect a mentality that worships nationalism abroad (they do fault the—church for being out of touch with nationalist movements in Latin America) but finds it embarrassing at home. They treat the church’s participation in the political process as if the principle of separation of church and state required the Mormon church to be silent or neutral on political issues.
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America’s Saints is an exposé, but of what? Almost all the spiciest tidbits reveal the foolishness of individuals who happen to be Mormons, but what does this prove? For example, a General Authority is quoted as saying that only men hold the priesthood because without it they “would probably be eaten by the female, as in the case of the black widow spider.” And a regional authority on Latin America is caught saying that the Argentine desparecidos and the Chileans executed under Pinochet “deserved it.” This sort of thing may be shocking, but it hardly serves to indict anyone but the person speaking—unless all Mormons are viewed as mindless followers.
This, no doubt, is the impression Gottlieb and Wiley mean to foster. But again and again the voices of thoughtful and reasonably independent Mormons come through their own reporting in America’s Saints. Gottlieb and Wiley, however, are less interested in these voices than they are in the Mormon elites; most of the sources they list in their bibliography are either employed in the church bureaucracy and education system or can be found on the mastheads and contents pages of the independent Mormon periodicals. (Among these, not surprisingly, Gottlieb and Wiley side with the liberals against the conservatives.) So the crisis of Mormonism in America’s Saints is not unlike the “crisis” among bureaucrats and the press in Washington, especially just before a change in administrations. Things look gloomy because jobs are at stake; the masses who voted for the opponent are considered mindless; rumors “swirl”; and conspiracy theories abound.
Gottlieb and Wiley are simply wrong to extrapolate from institutional and elite history to the broader church and its membership; Mormonism encompasses far more than the tight circle interviewed in America’s Saints. Mormons still believe in continuous revelation and the potential godhood of humanity. Institutional setbacks may have changed the circumstances and applications of these beliefs, but the Mormon religious experience has not been “interrupted,” as Gottlieb and Wiley suggest, nor is the church in crisis. Although misdeeds merit exposing, the Mormon church deserves a fairer and more comprehensive analysis than they provide, not only because it is rich and powerful but because Mormonism—the complex array, from churches to splinter groups, fundamentalists to intellectuals—remains a separate and distinctly American religious movement, as different from Christianity as Christianity is from Judaism.
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