Further Light and Knowledge

Hey all. I have started my mormon studies course, and there will be a blog where I will post thoughts from time to time and where students will complete writing assignments about the readings and topics of the course. I have closed the blog so that only students can comment, but I thought that some folks here might enjoy having an ongoing conversation. If you go to the blog, the weekly readings are laid out in one of the tabs. We will be focusing on Mormonism, but comparing it throughout the semester to other religious ideas and responses to the American political sphere.

I have posted a reflection from yesterday's introductory class, and student posts will begin on Friday.

http://rels162s12.wordpress.com/

Again, please don't comment on the blog itself, but comment here on FLAK.

Oh, and I have at least two LDS students in the class. Could get ugly.

Cheers

Reading the Bushman text Building the Kingdom of God for class, I have to say I'm disappointed. I expected better from Oxford UP. The Bushmans have written a small text that hits some high points, glosses over some hard stuff, and outright ignores some of the major issues. No discussion of Joseph Smith's wives or marrying 14 year old girls, for example; or the multiple versions of Smith's stories; or the eye witness accounts of him looking into hats; nothing about the Book of Abraham; nothing about the Kinderhook incident; maintains the myth that none of the witnesses recanted; etc. But they do talk about the treasure hunting, which I was glad about. I have to figure out how I deal with such massive deficiencies in class. Of course some of the stuff (e.g., polygamy) we will spend a couple weeks on; but the founding myth, Monday's class is it. Ugh.

I'll be following this - I'm really interested to see how it goes, particularly how the Mormon students respond. Good luck!

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'Curiosity is not a sin' Albus Dumbledore.

I too am following the blog for some of the same reason as Evie, though I have equally enjoyed reading your initial posts, cumom.

Admittedly, I don't know the criterion established for the posts that are made. I do find it interesting that the two students who have posted seem to be writing from a myopic point of view ... I wonder if these are the two Mormon students in your class? They seem to be posting as though they take the Mormon position at face value, rather than looking at the information objectively. But that might must be my own bias in how I tend to approach these kinds of assignments.

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"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." - Thomas Edison

I agree with jbsaxman - I don't want to quote anything your students have written in case that causes issues for you with google searches, but the stuff about the Extermination Order was very one-sided; it seemed to me that it hadn't even occurred to the student to consider that there might be a contextual framework re. the Extermination Order. For your student it was: Mormons = good; Boggs = bad.

(I'm not defending Boggs, what he did was awful, but this student's piece lacks historical context)

_________________
'Curiosity is not a sin' Albus Dumbledore.

Oh, no. I completely agree. I'm actually partly to blame, given that I assigned them a reading from a small history of Mormonism written by the Bushmans. I figured it would give them the basic outline of the history and we could build on it from there. The woman who wrote the Extermination Order post is a Mormon; the other woman is not. However, I did not expect the class to buy it hook, line, and sinker. I'm trying to decide whether I should intervene on the blog, or wait until Monday to rip the book to shreds. I expected seniors to have better critical reading skills.

Admittedly, I haven't read the syllabus for the course, but I wonder if there's room in the classroom setting to thoroughly present the opposing facts. For instance, the Extermination Order didn't just come over night. It was a result of years of MIssourians feeling threatened by the actions of the Mormon populous, more specifically the Danite sub-group. Haun's Mill, for example, as tragic as it was, was not an event that occurred out of the blue. It was a retaliation for theft of goods and animals that the Danite-group had been committing for months prior to the event.

Also, I think an important concept to learn in regards to the "revival camp" type mentality of the early 1800's to the idea that early to mid-19th century Americans were incredibly superstitious and had a very magical perception of the world. It is one reason why individuals such as the Smith family were able to make a living off of divination like they were. It's also the reason why the Smith family had developed such a negative reputation around the area.

Another fascinating piece of history regarding TSCC is the fact that there were so many different versions of the First Vision story. Tying into the magical world view at the time, it is note-worthy, IMO, that each change to the officially canonized version of the First Vision came at a time when Joseph Smith was losing favor among the Mormon populous. Each version became slightly more fantastic when he retold it, adding the mystical element that allowed himself to establish more 'divine' credibility.

Of course, I realize that you know all of this, Cumom. I'm more just expressing some of what my responses would be if I were commenting on the blog.

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"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." - Thomas Edison

Thanks Jake. If you click on teh "Readings" link at the top of the blog, you'll see the topics and readings list for the course. You'll notice that many things we will be discussing in depth as the semester progresses, so I'm not worried in the long run about students having an apologist view of Mormonism. I know that they are going to get historical depth, etc., as we go. However, for Monday, I'm concerned that they develop their skills at reading history critically and asking critical questions as they read.

I think what I'm going to do is choose five issues that are glossed over or left out of the book they read, and explicate them at length. Right now, I think this is what I'll do: 1) J. Smith and the treasure hunting (we'll do his polygamy/polyandry later this semester) or the Book of Abraham (which the Bushmans ignore completely); 2) Brigham Young and Mountain Meadows; 3) Word of Wisdom becoming a commandment in the 1930s; 4) Ezra Benson and the Civil Rights movement; and 5) Correlation, including the Relief Society losing autonomy under Harold B. Lee.

Then I will ask the students to discuss what it means that the Bushmans left these details out. I will use the whole reading as a dual purpose experience both to learn the broad outlines of Mormon history *and* to consider the politics of writing religious history.

Also jbsaxman, I think the points you raise are important ones. For my students, it's going to be about parsing the relationship between apologia, truth-telling, scholarly history, and propaganda.

But for us who lived through this, I think it leaves us with some important questions.

What are the things the Bushmans leave out of their narrative, and why are those the things they leave out?

What kind of mythology is created (or reproduced) in the narrative they have published?

Why would Oxford University Press publish such a piece of bad history?

One of my students just posted a very provocative comment on the blog post that cited the secularist magazine. He posed the question as to whether or not the history even matters (he's a nonbeliever, by the way). He argues that the more sanguine question is the experiences that founders and adherents have that lead them to form a new religion in the first place, and that their truth claims are secondary. [Of course, I'm paraphrasing and upping the level of his comment to make it more coherent.]

For me as a former Mormon, I think my biggest problem with that student's argument (which is common in religious studies, by the way, which values the idea of the individual adherent above all else, a kind of psychological approach to the study of religion) is the fact that the church makes unequivocal claims to TRUTH above all. Why would a church that prides itself on church need to hide and mythologize its own history? I know I'm talking to the choir here, just venting a bit.

Aren't you both right? The experiences that founders and adherents had that led them to form a new religion are definitely important, but those are part of the truth claims in the first place. They're perhaps not per se "religious" truth claims in the traditional sense, i.e., "jesus died for your sins", but "I saw god and jesus" is not only a truth claim, but an alleged historical fact, as well as an experience that purportedly lead JS to form a new religion.

Maybe because the mormon church is modern and has an actual written history that can be examined and analyzed is the reason these issues become intertwined.

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He never said it would be worth it; He only said it would be easy.

Oh to be a fly on the wall in your class today. Tell us how it goes

_________________
'Curiosity is not a sin' Albus Dumbledore.

It went very well. I framed the issue as an inherent problem with religious history, the conflict between the adherents' experience of the religion vs. the empirical history. I divided religious history into three broad categories for them:

1) Myth (-ologization)
2) Apologia
3) Academic/Scholarly/Empirical History

We talked about the functions and methods of each one, which was a fun conversation. Then I had them categorize the Bushman text and give their reasons for why they would put it in the category they chose.

Then I gave them five examples of things that were left out of the Bushman text and had them talk about the impact of these historical facts on both apologia and myth. The five things I did were a) the Book of Abraham; b) the Danites & Haun's Mill (thanks for the idea, Jake!); c) Brigham Young's knowledge of Mountain Meadows and the scapegoating of John D. Lee; d) Heber J. Grant and the Word of Wisdom in 1933; and e) the dissolution and "consolidation" of the Relief Society under the Priesthood between 1968-1972.

The second half of class, I asked the students to give examples of the how Mormonism and politics collided and coincided and conflicted. This discussion was to get them prepared to think about the ways that religion conflicts with democratic civil society.

I was also in the odd position of defending the Mormons today. One student compared them to a breeding swarm taking over missouri, and I had to remind the class that waves of migrants and immigrants have been causing conflict for hundreds of hears in north america, and so they had to think carefully about which migrants they defended and which they were happy to see get "chased out" and how you could possible decide?

Thank you for sharing this with us cumom. I appreciate the explanations of certain sociological concepts related to religion and I look forward to reading further comments from you about this in the context of mormon history.

I've started reading the blog and find it quite interesting. A friend of mine (a Jesuit professor of philosophy) taught his classes that religion was any organized system of thought that tried to answer a majority of seven questions:

1. How did it start?
2. How does it end?
3. What happens when I die?
4. Why is there death?
5. Why is there suffering?
6. Why is there injustice?
7. What does it mean?

I found his approach a little rough, but the more I tried to apply it, the better it seems to fit!

The first two are obviously cosmology and could be answered with myth (creation myths and eschatology) or science (cosmology). So by themselves they cannot define religion, although they are a major part of many religions.

The third question is the "Problem of Mortality" which can be answered with varying degrees of myth, biology, or philosophy. Again while a major part of most religions, by itself it does not constitute a religion.

Numbers four, five, and six are often collectively refered to as the objections to the proof of the existence of God. If you posit an all-wise, all-powerful God, you have to be able to explain these counterarguments.

The last gets to the bedrock of meaning.

The genius of this answer is that like a lot of Jesuit argumentation, it appears ironclade while giving plenty of real wriggleroom!

Jamie

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"Now I troll back to my little cave where we no talk about things we no understand..." Malfalda

"Ummmm. Roadkill."

For those interested, these are my (very sparse) lecture-discussion notes for today. This is the day where we begin to think about the relationship between cosmology, soteriology, and political behavior by spelling out as clearly as possible the mormon cosmology. Feel free to comment, ask questions, kvetch, whatever.


RELS162 S12—Week 3
Ormsbee

Mormon Cosmology, Soteriology, and Ritual

Goals & Agenda
• to understand the deep relationship between a religious world view and they way religious adherents act in the world (belief and practice)
• to develop an theoretical understanding of what a cosmology is and how it functions
• to begin to create an understanding of Mormon cosmology and soteriology in order to understand how mormons perceive the “profane” or secular world
• to begin to theorize how Mormons and other religious groups might act politically

Theory of Cosmologies:
theory in the technical sense of the word
When we look at religious belief and practice around the world, what patterns do we find? Where does religious cosmology come from? How does it shape individual (and group) feelings and experiences and (most importantly) behavior?

cosmology: explanation of the origin and nature of the cosmos
scientific explanations (Big Bang, physics, chemistry, Evolution, etc.)

[Bellah argues that elements of B-cognition can be found among scientists, that as humans, we must give meaning and significance, even to the “objective” facts of science.]

from Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
(builds off of Emile Durkheim’s notion of Sacred and Profane)

Sacred
• The Cosmos
REAL, certainty
• The World (TRUTH); the Known, OUR order
• (potentially) violent defense of "our order" through cosmogony
• Center/Middle
axis mundi
access to or conduit to the Sacred
kinds of middles (city, mountain, building, etc.
religious behavior as a sign of the middle-ness of a space
Sacred Space (already sacralized)

Threshold/Liminality

Profane
• undefined, homogenous, relative, unknown, foreign, chaos: UNREAL; the Unworld
• profane world must be sacralized in order to be made intelligible
• Sacralization of space:
hierophany or theophony
signs also work
evocation (ritual & sacrifice)
always an act of cosmogony (origin or beginning)—through repetition of the creation, the space becomes sacralized
• desecration: when the sacred becomes profane again

Upshot:
Religious people experience a bifurcated world, one that is more real than the other, more true and through which they experience “transcendence” or B-cognition. They perceive the world through that bifurcated lens and act in the physical, empirical everyday world according to that bifurcated view.

Question: So what are religious people doing in politics, then?

The History of Mormon Cosmology
Two Caveats:
1) Mormon cosmology and soteriology developed over time, and has been hotly debated and contested throughout the history of Mormonism. We are sort of artificially entering into an ongoing cultural emergence. If you have questions about specific times and influences and histories, let me know and I’ll try to give you the historical frame of the development.
2) In 1968, under Joseph F. Smith, the church began a program that has come to be known as “correlation,” which sought to tightly control the information and doctrine that Mormons were exposed to, that Missionaries taught, and that could be said over the pulpit at meetings. This has resulted in a flattening of doctrine and among everyday mormons an ignorance of the history of their beliefs and of the specifics of their beliefs. For example, the belief in “eternal progression” is glossed over in such a way that the president of the church in the late 1990s, Gordon B. Hinkley, said that “He doesn’t know that we teach that” to a direct question on the Larry King show.

Key Historical points:
1) Joseph Smith developed Mormon cosmology and soteriology gradually over nearly 15 years
2) Mormonism began as a relatively standard Christian sect and evolved into a radically different cosmology and soteriology as Smith created a pastiche of Protestantism, magic & treasure-digging (hermeticism), charismatic Christianity, restorationaism (e.g., Disciples of Christ), American mythology (the Book of Mormon), sexual experimentation, Swedenborgianism, Free Masonry, and very likely Kabbalah.
3) Smith created a series of new rituals (combining biblical references to washings and anointings with Free Masonry) that included washings and anointings, endowment, sealings (celestial marriage), and Second Anointing. This included the blending of the sacred and the profane in The Council of Fifty and in Smith’s run for the U.S. Presidency.
4) A system of temple building was envisioned in the early 1830s for Davis county Missouri, transferred to Kirtland, and fully realized in Nauvoo. The meaning of and use of those structures evolved over time.
5) The “Mormon Exodus” had a powerful sociological impact on the cohesion of Mormonism as an ethno-religion
Brigham Young both molded and continued Smith’s theological and soteriological innovations, especially with regards to Adam-God theory and blood atonement; and in his gradual cobbling together of an official temple ritual, codified and standardized.
6) Whereas Smith represents a charismatic beginning and the “religious genius” behind Mormonism, Young made it into a lasting ethno-religion (or alternative religion) through his exertions of power in Utah Territory and his creation of a clear and rigid hierarchy.

Mormon Cosmology, Theology, and Soteriology: The Basics

Nature of Godhood:
Godhood is a stage of development, which is an eternal process of “progression” from one state to another.
“As man is, god once was; as God is, man may become.” [paraphrase from King Follet Discourse, probably Kabbalistic]

human life, then, is a necessary stage on the way to godhood

in the early church, heterosexual marriage and polygamy were intimately tied to this notion; today, polygamy is less important, but still present

Progress (“Plan of Salvation” or “Eternal Progression”)
Intelligence
Spirit (begotten)
mortal life (embodiment)
resurrection
salvation vs. exaltation
degrees of glory (Swedenborg)
telestial
terrestrial
celestial (with three degrees within)

Theology
Elohim, Jehovah, and Heavenly Mother(s)
Adam/Michael (God?)
Jehovah/Jesus (not the same in Young’s theology)

Soteriology
role of Jesus, nature of sin, & theodicy
["that they may learn by their experience"]
["ascend to highest mountain tops, descend into the deepest abyss"]

Priesthood
Aaronic & Melkezidek
Offices
corresponds to degrees of glory

Ritual
Temples (axis mundi)
ritual purification and callings
reenactment of cosmogony
enactment of eternal progression
enactment through the stages of Priesthood
enactment through the degrees of glory

Discussion:
Given what we know about how Cosmologies & Soteriologies divide the world into Sacred and Profane, what kind of world is created by Mormonism? How is the world seen? How does this world view impact behavior and practice in the everyday world? How might this impact mormonism and political activity?