126 - Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

Mormonism: The Story of a
New Religious Tradition
By Jan Shipps
Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1985. 212 pp. $14.50.

This is a remarkable book on Latter-Day Saint history, not the least because its author is a non-Mormon and, indeed, is only a recently arrived Mormon-watcher. (Beginning her study of the LDS movement in the early 1960s, she has served as both vice-president and president of the Mormon History Association.) More importantly, this book takes Mormon historiography itself as the focus of investigation, rather than some simple chronology of events occurring in the life of the Utah Church. Thus, if one is looking for a primer or straightforward overview of the history of Mormondom, a book such as Arrington's and Bitton's excellent The Mormon Experience will be more useful. But for those who wish to take one step further back and reach down to the epistemological bedrock of how the LDS Church's early experiences should be interpreted, this slim volume will prove invaluable.

Most of the seven chapters focus on the first formative decades of the LDS Church's development and how sympathetic (but not apologetic)

128 - Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

outsiders might best make sense of the conflicts and organizational strategies that emerged. The author shows a surprisingly acute sociological sense of the pressures confronting an embryonic, persecuted social movement (a sense not always shown toward historical materials by sociologists themselves). Recent work by linguists Lakoff and Johnson, on the sociolinguistic functions of metaphors and the role they can play in creating "sacred space and time" for religious adherents, is integrated with a critical (though not cynical) attention to the basic available sources of early Mormon history. Shipps' main point-that Mormonism is a separate religious tradition flowing out of Judaism and Christianity (thanks to a unique reinterpretation of each) much as Christianity evolved into being a world religion (instead of being just a Jewish sect) through its own reinterpretation of Judaism-is repeatedly stated and supported throughout the book. Given the fact that, numerically speaking, Mormonism is the fastest growing religious group in both North and South America, and possibly in the world, Shipps' thesis has profound implications. However, I am not convinced that this "radical reinterpretation" is how rank-and-file members conceive of their faith, anymore than I am convinced that, as Shipps implies in her final chapter, Mormon millennialism (and the membership's sense of living daily in "sacred time and space") has become thoroughly mellowed and compartmentalized away into religious rites alone. Dealing as she does with the subject of a sociology of knowledge about historical interpretations, her generalizations to the empirical level of what many individual Mormons actually believe must remain more hypothetical than she has stated them.

Because Shipps is more interested in dealing with Mormon theology from the historical perspective of how orthodoxy came into being than in an exhaustive list of such orthodoxies, many Mormon religious beliefs are not examined. For example, toward the end of the last chapter the "eternal progression" of individual souls toward godhead seems to be hastily introduced, almost as an afterthought. Such a brief mentioning will likely arouse, but not satisfy, LDS readers' interests.

There is much grist here for other historians to carry along once they leave the "simple chronology" approach. For example, Shipps' account of the recent "clamp down" by LDS Church officials on their own historians is too brief and deserves a good deal of soul-searching and commentary by LDS historians.

However, this is an important book on Mormon history. It demonstrates the value of integrating various social science perspectives into the process of constructing history. Hopefully, Mormon historians themselves will attempt (and not be discouraged from attempting) similar analyses.

Anson Shupe
Center for Social Research
The University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, Texas