REVIEWS

Substantial, Important, and Brilliant

Mormonism: The Story of a New Reli- sociology of religion by Peter Berger and gious Tradition by Jan Shipps (Urbana: others. University of Illinois Press, 1985). xvii + The book consists of seven chapters. 212 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, In the first, she tells the pre-1830 story of and index. the Smith family and the culture in which Reviewed by Thomas G. Alexander, they lived. In this chapter, like Richard professor of history and director of the Bushman in his recently published Joseph Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Smith and the Beginnings of , at Brigham Young University. she places the experiences with magic in the context of contemporary vernacular said that this book culture and shows that it was actually an "may be the most brilliant book ever writ- attractive force. ten on Mormonism, in the sense of shed- In Chapter 2, she places the Book of ding new light on virtually every aspect of Mormon and Joseph's revelations in the Mormon history and in offering a perspec- context of early nineteenth century biblical tive that both and others can culture. She argues that these attracted accept." (Jacket.) He may well be right. people and that those who accepted the Without a doubt, Jan Shipps has emerged message moved from profane time into as the most knowledgeable non-Mormon sacred time as they participated in the crea- scholar in the field of . tion of "the dispensation of the fulness of This should not be interpreted as a back- times." handed compliment, since her knowledge In Chapters 3 and 4, she interprets the of the Mormon past eclipses that of virtu- events of early Church history using as a ally all lay Church members and is equal model a four stage recapitulation of the to that of scholars from the Mormon com- experience of biblical peoples as a means munity. Moreover, her command of the of understanding early Mormonism, which interpretative literature of religious studies she believes was a radical is surpassed by no one within the field of movement. whom I am aware. Chapter 5 looks at the Latter-day In Mormonism she has attempted to Saints' attempts to write about their past. do two things. First, she has tried as faith- Using the problems in the publication of fully as possible, to understand the experi- 's history as a model, she ences of actors in the Mormon past as they also makes explicit comparisons with the understood themselves. Then she has used recent attempts to control the publication the comparative approach to interpret those of Church history. experiences in the light of the religious Chapter 6 shows how it is possible to studies literature, particularly the works by learn the facts of the Mormon past without John Gager and others that consider the really understanding their meaning. Using origins of the Christian Church, the literary a comparitive model from the Jewish ex- criticism of Northrop Frye, and others, perience in Israel, she argues that people studies of religious experience by Mircea living in sacred time may behave differ- Eliade, and others, and examinations of the ently than those in profane time and that, 186 DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT while by comparing specific behavioral she asks." (Hansen, "Jan Shipps and the norms they may appear less religious, they Mormon Tradition," Journal of Mormon are, in fact, religious in a different way. History 11 [1984]: 144.) The final chapter interprets the trans- In a sense, Hansen, on the left, has formation of the Church around the turn joined forces with critics of the New Mor- of the century into an institution in which mon History on the right who insist that members can live in profane time and still history which accepts the Latter-day Saints retain a sense of continuity with their nine- on their own terms and then proceeds to teenth century predecessors. interpret these people using models drawn The original insights in this book are from historical works on context, religious not found in her retelling of the story of studies, and the social behavioral science the Mormon past. The story has been told are misguided because they do not try to before. Her contribution comes in the selec- resolve questions of faith. That Richard tion of evidence to play against the extra- Bushman, a believing Mormon scholar, and Mormon literature. In doing so, she argues Jan Shipps, a believing Methodist, could a number of significant points. Among "both write the same kind of history" them are the theses that it is unperceptive (Hansen, p. 137), ought to be perceived to dismiss Mormonism "as little more than as a compliment rather than as an occa- an elaborate idiosyncratic strain of the sion for irony. This is because both Bush- nineteenth-century search for primitive man and Shipps have sought to under- Christianity" (p. 68), or to perceive twen- stand the Mormon people and interpret tieth century Mormonism as "an idiosyn- them to a late twentieth century audience cratic Protestant denomination" (p. 117). rather than engage in sectarian controversy. Rather, she argues, drawing on a cate- It is this, as both Marvin Hill and Larry gorization shared both by Fawn Brodie and Foster have observed, that has characterized believing Mormons (though in different the most important recent work in Mor- ways) that in comparison with Judaism mon studies. and contemporary Christianity, the Church While I applaud Shipp's method and can best be viewed as a new religious believe that her interpretations on a num- tradition. ber of points are right, I think she is wrong In my view, the most important con- on a number of matters. For example, I tributions in the book are her comparative am impressed with her views that people discussions of the concepts of time and in the midst of creating a new religious space. Some preliminary work has been tradition lived in sacred time, in the at- done on these topics in the Mormon con- tempts to control the story of the Church's text by scholars like Robert Flanders and past, and in the emphasis on continuity Adele McCollom, but no one has previ- during the period of change after 1900. ously invested the time and energy in ex- Nevertheless, in interpreting the nineteenth plicating the importance of these ideas for century Mormon understanding of what understanding nineteenth- and twentieth- they were doing, I believe that Melodie century Mormonism. Moench Charles is right and Shipps is In reviewing Shipps's work, I find my- wrong. Charles argues that nineteenth cen- self in fundamental disagreement with tury Mormons saw the Old Testament aspects of Klaus Hansen's pre-publication through the eyes of Paul and the authors review. While Hansen calls her work "a of the synoptic gospels, rather than divid- stunning tour de force," he is critical of ing Old and New Testament traditions as what he rightly perceives as "her histori- Shipps believes. While the patriarchal cist approach," since it "allows her to dis- office and blessings may seem to be an miss epithets such as fraud or delusion as anomaly in this interpretation, a careful utterly irrelevant to the kind of questions reading of Doctrine and Covenants 124,