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Summary for GCSE For Professor Richard Bushman, a Mormon historian, writing about Joseph Smith meant accepting the truth of the Book of Mormon; this shows how difficult it is to be objective about Mormonism, because it is a religion as well as an historical occurence. That is why early Mormon history was very partisan, with Mormon writers praising the faith and non-Mormons criticizing it harshly. In the 1940s and '50s, however, the ‘New Mormon History’ began to study Mormonism in the context of the American frontier story and ‘Americanisation’, seeing it as shaped by, and shaping, the American West. By contrast, in the 1980s and ‘90s, ‘conflict historians’ interpreted Mormon history as a conflict between Mormonism and mainstream America, focusing on issues like polygamy and theocratic government. Some historians have suggested that these conflicts caused a Mormon ‘retreat’ – such as when they moved West, or abandoned polygamy – in order to avoid hostility. Some historians have tried to see the origins of the Mormon faith in cultural influences such as Puritanism or folklore. Such attempts were rejected by Mormons, who saw the origin of their faith wholly in the revelation to Joseph Smith. Modern historians now see Mormon history as a conversation between the Mormons and the U.S. government. They also acknowledge the deep religious beliefs that drove Mormon actions.
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In a 2001 article Professor Richard Lyman Bushman – a Mormon himself and an expert on Mormon history – remembered how, when he told the Princeton Library curator Alfred Bush (also a Mormon) that he was writing a biography of Joseph Smith, Bush had told him “that I must address the historicity of the Book of Mormon”. This story raises the key difficulty of writing the history of Mormonism – that it is a religion, and that makes it difficult (?impossible) to write about it objectively. Bushman relates, very honestly, about another occasion, when a student asked him why he had not included in his biography of Joseph Smith the fact that Smith’s father had a drink problem ... a question Bushman tells us he found difficult to answer. And before you think you are immune to this problem, ask yourself whether – in your list of reasons the Gentiles attacked the Mormons – you included the idea “that Satan was fighting with real bullets against the Kingdom of God”, which was what every Mormon at the time believed … and yet did you not happily sign up to the need to understand "American Indian history from Indian perspectives” when you were studying the Indigenous Nations (Source A)?
HISTORICITYFor precisely that reason, for the first century-or-so, most Mormon historiography appears to us today to be, not about the history of Mormonism, but about its historicity. Early histories written by Mormons were usually little more than hagiographies which churned out an heroic narrative – literally – on faith. Meanwhile, early histories written by non-Mormons seem mainly concerned to kick lumps out of the Mormon faith – Rollen Harth's The Mormons (1900), for example, informed Atlantic Monthly readers that the ‘sect’ "stands for treason and crime sanctioned by fabricated 'revelation’”, and Bernard DeVoto, in the American Mercury (1930) declared that early Mormonism was simply a financial scam "by means of a creed too ridiculous for any widespread acceptance". Of course, not everything was so intemperate. In 1922 Mormon writer Ephraim Ericksen considered the Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life and found that their values and behaviour (good and bad) had been moulded by their difficulties. Similarly, a Roman Catholic priest, Joseph Dwyer (1941) explored the part played by Gentile opposition in Utah in persuading the Mormons to abandon polygamy and reconcile with the United States. Nevertheless, most histories before the Second World War seem to us to be openly partisan. Nowadays we tend to read these accounts only for the facts they tell us … but, in those days, that was largely how the two sides interpreted Mormon history. Each side had its own ‘history’ based on its own selection and interpretation of the facts available.
THE NEW MORMON HISTORYIn the 1940s and 1950s, there seems to have been a shift in scholarship on both sides – the so-called ‘New Mormon History’. Both Mormon and non-Mormon historians began to interpret the early history of Mormonism in terms of Turner’s ‘Frontier’ theory, seeing the Mormons as one of the communities which shaped, and was shaped by, the American West. Alice Felt Tyler (1944), for example, commented that “only the American backwoods of the 19th century” could have produced a religion like Mormonism, while William Mulder (1957) declared Mormonism “as native to the United States as Indian corn and the buffalo nickel”. Suddenly, historians were taking a sociological, cultural and environmental approach to Mormon history … which is fairly much the approach you have been using in your studies. Klaus Hansen (2004) regarded this development as the ‘Americanisation’ of Mormon history which “unquestionably reflected a changing the zeitgeist that accepted Mormons as respectable Americans”. Next, into the 1960s and ‘70s, as the Turner theory got forgotten and it became fashionable to be rebellious, some historians began to stress the revolutionary aspects of Mormonism, noting how it – particularly the secret ‘Council of Fifty’, and Mormonism’s ‘socialism’, polygamy and theocratic government – posed an alternative and real threat to the established government, religion and morality of mainstream America. Hansen labels these scholars ‘conflict historians’, because they regarded Mormonism as coming into conflict with mainstream America. The question of whether Mormonism was 'an-example-of' or 'in-conflict-with' Americanisation caused considerable debate. Laurence Moore (1986) muddied the waters of that debate when he argued that rebelliousness was a feature of being ‘American’ in the 19th century … so the Mormons’ exclusion in fact included them, and the fact that they were “a peculiar people” made them normal. Following up on the ‘conflict’ model, a number of historians – building on the earlier ideas of Ericksen (1922) and Dwyer (1941) – interpreted Mormon history from the 1847 trek, to the 1890 renunciation of polygamy, to recent accusations of ‘assimilation’ and ‘Christianisation’, as a ‘retreat’ in an attempt to avoid hostility. As part of this debate, a number of historians in the 1980s began seeking cultural origins for the Mormon faith, finding antecedents in a wide range of movements, including: New England Puritanism, the early Quakers, magic and folklore, freemasonry, restorationism, communitarianism, millenarianism and evangelicalism! Some historians in the 1990s saw Mormonism as part of an anti-capitalism kickback against the growing consumerism in the American way of life. As you might expect, trying to find a secular cause of Mormonism was a step-too-far for many Mormons. “Mormons have felt little incentive to strive for a deeper understanding in cultural and social terms when they believe Joseph Smith himself disclosed the deepest meaning of his work in religious terms” wrote Richard Bushman in his 1985 book: Joseph Smith and the beginnings of Mormonism … and he rather mocked the varying origin-theories in his article Believing History (2001).
RECENT HISTORIESMost modern historians nowadays accept that it is impossible to understand Mormon history without understanding the religious faith which motivated and sustained the Mormons, and they see the history of the period – especially the US’s constitutional conflict with the Mormons – as a “dialogue” or “negotiation”, rather than a ‘conflict’. Eric A. Eliason (1997) suggested the traditional Mormon celebration of the Mormon trek west was a ‘pioneer myth’ (see here), and suggested that Mormons’ partisanship had influenced their public interpretations of the move west (which in fact was “not a unifier at all, but an aspect of the greatest schism and the beginning of the worst era of cultural disintegration ever faced by the Mormon people”) and of their failure commemorate “their brave and resilient struggle against the United States government during the polygamy raids of the 1880s” (because the Church now renounces polygamy). On the other hand, Jan Shipps (2000) criticised historians of the American West for too often neglecting the influence and contribution of the Mormons and in 2012, whilst one book on the Book of Mormon suggested that it “might be considered the most important religious text ever to emerge from the United States”, another termed it a “book that has changed millions of lives as well as the course of American history.” .
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