Showing all posts in History

In Books, History

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

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

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).

Read More

In History

Mormons Defending Confederate Statues

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

A few decades ago, I served a mission in the American South. This meant that I got to have lots of conversations with Christians who thought Mormonism was wrong from the get-go simply because we have extra scriptures in addition to the Bible. The Bible itself says you can’t add to or take away, they would say, so that’s all there can be. A point I sometimes tried to make in response was that even accepting all the books in the Bible as inspired does not require you to believe that they are the only inspired books. In other words, I was trying to separate the writers of the Bible from the compilers of the Bible, to point out that the compilers may not have had access to every inspired book, or they may have even made mistakes in leaving some books out.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Needless to say, this argument never made much headway with anyone I talked to. I remembered it recently, though, because the distinction between writers and later compilers seems parallel to a distinction that is relevant to the current debate in the United States about whether we should tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers and politicians. When people make arguments against removing these monuments because “you’re erasing history,” it seems to me that they’re missing the distinction between the historical figures who are portrayed by the monuments and the later politicians and private groups who chose to honor them. Just as the compilation of the Bible was done years (centuries) after the writing, and by different groups of people, Confederate statues were commissioned years later, by people other than those portrayed. To tear down a statue of a Confederate figure is not to pretend they didn’t exist. It is to say that we do not want to honor what they fought for. It is not erasing the history of their existence. It is disagreeing with the later groups who decided that what the Confederate figures had done was of good report.

Read More

In Church Life, Church Policy, History

A Mormon Voyage

Author Mike CPosted on 9 Comments

In his brief history of India’s geography, Land of the Seven Rivers, Sanjeev Sanyal describes how India’s maritime prowess fell into decline beginning at the end of the twelfth century.

Indian merchants had once been explorers and risk-takers who criss-crossed the oceans in their stitched ships. They could be found in large numbers in ports from the Persian Gulf to China…Suddenly…they almost all disappeared.

What happened? Read More

In History, Obedience, Questions, Truth

Oh, Say What is Truth

Author Mike CPosted on 39 Comments

“You can’t handle the truth!”

This famous retort by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men seems to me to echo the conscious or subconscious thoughts of some of our leaders when addressing difficult issues, such as the priesthood and temple ban for blacks of African descent, the multiple first vision accounts of Joseph Smith, or the sexist, racist, or homophobic statements of past or current leaders. Read More

In Church Policy, Doctrine, Equality, History, Priesthood, Revelation

How to Disavow the Priesthood Ban

Author Mike CPosted on 19 Comments

For many years the Priesthood ban has been a matter of embarrassment and consternation to many Mormons. It makes us seem close-minded and exclusionary as a church, and seems to contradict many of our scriptures and core teachings–God not being a respecter of persons, all are alike unto God, etc. We struggle to explain it to our non-Mormon friends, and sometimes wish that it had just never happened. And to add insult to injury, we’ve had to endure many folk-theories justifying the ban, theories that are non-doctrinal and even offensive at times. So, it has finally come time to fully disavow the ban, once and for all.

Well, it turns out that a recent internet post inspired me to propose a forthright and direct disavowal that does not ignore the messy and painful history behind the ban. I realize my disavowal is imperfect, but here goes:

Read More

In History, Presiding, Theology

History and Faith

Author LynnettePosted on 38 Comments

A couple of recent discussions have gotten me thinking about the relationship between history and faith. Not every person takes the same approach to navigating the challenges posed by historical problems, of course, and I respect that there are a variety of ways of conceptualizing the interplay betwen the two. What I can’t quite make sense of, however, is the idea that they can be completely separated, that one can talk about faith without reference to history or dismiss history as being irrelevant to faith. (In other words, the “if you have a testimony, then history doesn’t matter” line of thought.) Read More

In History

Bored by Church History

Author EvePosted on 4 Comments

There. I said it.

The flaw is in me, not in the discipline of history, which I just don’t have much of a mind for. Kiskilili and Elbereth–who study very different aspects of it in very different ways–both have a much better intuitive sense of history than I do, and Lynnette earned a couple of degrees in it before finding her calling in theology. Me, I’d rather wander around in the abstractions of philosophy than have to deal with the tedium of what actually happened. Read More