Ben Park’s American Zion and different trajectories the Church could have taken

I recently read Benjamin E. Park’s new history of the Church (in the US mostly), American Zion. It was such a great read! Of course as a Mormon who’s attended church for decades and has even read a little academic Mormon history, I was familiar with a lot of the events in broad strokes, but Ben (I’m acquainted with him, so I’m going to call him that) brought in all kinds of interesting context and information about periods of time especially where my knowledge was really thin. And I was also especially interested to read how he thought about events in the last couple of decades, when I’ve been blogging about Mormon stuff and at least generally following the trends of what’s going on in and around the Church.

Here’s an example of broader context Ben brought in that I found interesting. When the Church went to the state of Ohio in 1836 to ask for a banking charter, it was a time of a lot of pressure on banks in general because Andrew Jackson had successfully defunded the national bank. People everywhere were scrambling to work out how to handle financing issues. The state granted zero banking charters during that legislative session. So it wasn’t just that they were out to get the Mormons. It was that it was a difficult time and they were caught up in a difficult situation that made hard times for a lot of people. I love reading this kind of context because I feel like so much of my knowledge of Church history and secular history more broadly (both of which are admittedly pretty thin) are in silos in my head, and it really opens up my understanding when a historian like Ben connects the appropriate dots to make the Mormon experience make more sense in the context of the US (or the world).

Jumping from the 19th century to the 21st, like I said, I was interested to see how Ben would handle the past few decades, with Mitt Romney and the Mormon Moment and issues like the exclusion policy and Ordain Women. I was impressed with how much ground he covered, especially given that I understand from his “author meets critics” session at MHA that his publisher said he was really pressed for space, and he couldn’t add so much as a page perhaps without bumping the book up to another price category. I wanted to see which if any of the blogs on the Bloggernacle he might mention, and I thought his decision to bring up fMh made sense, given its crucial role in serving as an organizing platform that other movements built on. And I was also thrilled that he quoted Kiskilili’s awesome post where she introduced the idea of chicken patriarchy!

One aspect of the book that I found especially intriguing was the question of what different trajectories the Church might have taken at different crucial choice points in the past. Again, at the MHA session, someone asked Ben if he had had this framework in mind while writing the book. He said that yes, this had been kind of a motivating framework for thinking about particular periods. I don’t recall if this is a particular one that was brought up in the session or if I talked to someone else about it, but one that really stood out was the rise of J. Reuben Clark in the Church hierarchy. Ben writes how Clark was kind of on the fringes of the Church as a young man, maybe inactive for a time if I understand it right, and didn’t ever serve in local leadership, like as a bishop or branch president. But his career really took off: he was a lawyer and a diplomat, and was serving as US ambassador to Mexico when Heber J. Grant asked him to accept a call into the First Presidency. Clark was on the fence about accepting, and actually wrote letters both accepting and declining the call, sent them both, and told Grant to pick which one he wanted. When he ended up being called, then, he became a leading figure in the Church’s push back against turn-of-the-century progressivism that some leading figures in the Church like Emmeline B. Wells, longtime editor of the Woman’s Exponent and later Relief Society general president had been proponents of. It’s interesting to wonder whether the Church would have taken quite such a conservative turn without Clark serving as counselor in multiple First Presidencies, especially when the presidents were unwell. What might have happened if he had only sent the declining version of his letter? Might the Church have moved more toward mainline Protestant denominations and away from the scriptural literalism and distrust of science that many GAs ended up embracing?

This question got me to wondering about other points in Church history where a relatively small change might have led to a different trajectory in the long run. One obvious one is on the question of post-Manifesto polygamy. Like Steve Taysom said in his biography of Joseph F. Smith (see my last post), “The Manifesto, and the subsequent scaling back of plural marriage, had certainly achieved the desired end when Utah attained its statehood in 1896, but it remained for [Joseph F. Smith] to decide if the church really meant it.” There were clearly a lot of plural marriages still being authorized and solemnized after the Manifesto. What if Joseph F. Smith and subsequent leaders had just continued this kind of on the down low, indefinitely? If I remember right from Ben’s book, it wasn’t until the time of J. Reuben Clark in the 1930s that the Church finally put its foot down and people who were still practicing polygamy were told they weren’t welcome and were excommunicated, and the Mormon fundamentalist groups that continue to today were really formed as separate entities. But what if that had never happened? Would the federal government have tried to aggressively stamp polygamy out again, or would they have thrown up their hands and turn a blind eye? Would the Church have become small and fringe like polygamous Mormon groups are today if it had continued with polygamy? Or would it have succeeded in hanging onto both polygamy and growth, and maybe move polygamy back out in the open again?

Another interesting what if point is the early death of Harold B. Lee, after only 18 months as Church president, in 1973. Spencer W. Kimball ended the priesthood/temple ban in 1978. David O. McKay, with lots of pushing from Hugh B. Brown, seems like he was at least thinking about it in the 1960s. But would Lee have ended the ban as soon as Kimball did? My sense of him is that he was more of a hardliner. What if Kimball had never made the top spot, and Lee had been succeeded by Ezra Taft Benson? It seems unlikely to me that he would have pushed to rescind the ban, given that he had famously said in general conference in the 1960s that civil rights protestors were unwitting tools of communists. Maybe Gordon B. Hinckley would have ended the ban in 1995 rather than releasing the Family Proclamation, as the Church fought the previous culture war battle rather than the current or upcoming one in gay marriage. But would the ongoing ban have limited the Church’s growth between 1978 and 1995, years when in actuality it experienced some of its highest growth rates? I’m guessing it might have, and that the Church would be a lot smaller today.

I’ve gotten pretty far afield from Ben’s book with my wild speculations. Feel free to correct me in the comments if I’ve gotten things wrong, or if you’re willing to share your own speculations. And go get American Zion and read it. It’s an excellent and enjoyable book!