Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CGU Theses & Dissertations CGU Student Scholarship 2010 The oundF ations and Early Development of Mormon Mission Theory David Golding Claremont Graduate University Recommended Citation Golding, David, "The oundF ations and Early Development of Mormon Mission Theory" (2010). CGU Theses & Dissertations. Paper 4. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/4 DOI: 10.5642/cguetd/4 This Open Access Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the CGU Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in CGU Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Foundations and Early Development of Mormon Mission Theory By David Golding Presented to the Graduate Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Religion We certify that we have read this document and approve it as adequate in scope and quality for the degree of Master of Arts. Faculty Advisor, Professor Richard L. Bushman Faculty Reader, Professor Armand L. Mauss Date ii Preface After a semester of applying postcolonial critique to the study of religion, students of our graduate seminar shared their final papers in interactive presentations. When it came time for me to discuss my paper’s topic—missiology as a colonizing discourse—I was surprised by the instructor’s response. He, who had so thoroughly criticized the modern missionary movement as an apparatus for the violent colonization of indigenous peoples, had never heard of missiology nor mission-theoretical discourse. In fact, he insisted on referring to the field as “missionology,” displaying a level of inexperience with the large body of literature devoted to the topic and the ongoing debate among missiologists that involves, among many things, postcolonial critique itself.1 In effect, our class had considered mission without directing any attention to the theories that motivated and sustained the movement—all while criticizing the West for both projecting its own episteme onto others and remaining ignorant of the episte- mologies of those it subordinated. To a degree, we had installed the very thing we had made an effort to deconstruct when arguing against mission work as advanced by the West. A year later, I attended a conference devoted to interfaith dialogue and there encountered another surprise. I brought up postcolonial theory as a means for understanding the techni- cal challenges of interreligious dialogue and noticed that scholars at the table understood the theory in strictly chronological terms; they thought of the theory as post-colonial, i.e., after 1. The name for the study of mission received considerable debate as missiology developed as an aca- demic discipline in the early twentieth century. Missiology, derived from the Latin missio and the common Greek suffix -logy, won out over “missionology” as a matter of haplography and use (e.g., “sociology” rather than “socialology” and “apostology” rather than “apostolology”). The debate continues over a suitable name for the discipline, involving such candidates as “witnessology” and “martyrology,” though the majority of practitioners favor “missiology.” Jan A. B. Jongeneel, “Missio(no)logy” in Philosophy, Science, and Theology of Mission in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Missiological Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), 1:63. iii the fall of colonies and the rise of liberation movements in the twentieth century onward— not as an ongoing effort to value human differences, destabilize violent social structures, and add nuance to communication between and about cultures. Despite their commitment to the appreciation of the Other in religious discourse, these scholars remained largely unaware of the large body of literature from non-missiological avenues which legitimizes their own endeavor. These anecdotes illustrate to some measure my own navigation between parallel academic discourses. On the one hand, a body of religious studies scholars takes the contemporary issue of religious pluralism very seriously—every bit as seriously as missiologists. However, as exhibited in the encounter between different cultures, these fields operate with distinct vocabularies. Religious studies scholars seek to understand religious pluralism often in natu- ralistic and humanistic terms; missiologists have no problem acknowledging, affirming, and incorporating supernatural causes while reconciling Christian expansion with the realities of globalization. I realize that this generalizes the two lines of inquiry. Nevertheless, enough discursive gaps exist between practitioners of missiology and of religious studies that one cannot navigate either field long without recognizing that the topic of mission has a uniquely confusing character within the academy. As a result, much work remains to understand bet- ter, in mission-theoretical terms, the role of mission and missionaries in the development of American religious history. This study has grown out of a dissonance between the conclusions drawn by religious studies scholars (particularly historians of American religion) and missiologists, and I hope such tensions will receive added attention as mission, in particular, confronts the studies of religion and religious pluralism. In the thick of navigating this dissonance, I have benefited from several individuals, most iv of whom personally assisted in this study and to whom I owe thanks: Richard Bushman, Claudia Bushman, Armand Mauss, Spencer Fluhman, Reid Neilson, David Whittaker, Esther Chung-Kim, and Karen Torjesen. I appreciate these scholars’ professionalism and candor in providing feedback and direction. I am also grateful to the staff of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University and the Claremont Mormon Studies Student Association for providing exceptional assistance in research and in testing ideas. Their patience and sup- port, in large measure, made this project possible. I owe profound thanks to Charity Brooks for providing assistance at a critical moment during the final editing phase. Above all, I owe my family—most especially my wife Camille: you have guided and supported my own sense of missionary identity from the beginning and you continue to lead the way in the virtues of solidarity, loyalty, and outreach. v Contents Introduction: Missiographical Pitfalls and the Study of Mormon Mission 1 Chapter 1 Joseph Smith’s Mission Theory and the Modern Missionary Movement 22 Chapter 2 Early Developments of Mormon Mission Theory 73 Chapter 3 Reciprocal Effects and the Move to Programmatic Theory 113 Conclusion: Measuring Mission Theory in Mormonism 137 Selected Bibliography 141 vi For Kenny, Doug, Chuck, and Jerry—missionaries when few embarked 1 Introduction Missiographical Pitfalls and the Study of Mormon Mission What follows seeks to answer a fundamental question facing missiologists and historians of Mormonism: given their sustained preoccupation with converting others to Mormonism and their thriving tradition of missionary work, how do Mormons conceive of their mission? By focusing on the theoretical frame in which Mormon missionaries imagined the non- Mormon world, prepared for missionary engagement, and derived their expectations for their mission work, this study aims to illuminate the development of Mormon missionary activities and explain the processes by which Mormons fashioned for themselves a missional character. I argue that charting Mormon mission theory identifies moments where practitioners sought to resolve intra- and intercultural dissonances. The ways missionaries formed their theoreti- cal toolboxes from which they built their modes of proselytism and communication remain a crucial element for understanding American religious history, due to the spread of uniquely American values and how prominently mission figured in the greater intellectual climate. An analysis of Mormon mission theory as opposed to mission theology or ideology fills a gap in scholarly writing on mission and Mormonism which has assumed a unicity of theological development within Mormonism or that their body of ideas sprang from a coherent, prede- termined system.1 How I use “theory” as it pertains to mission and missionaries factors prominently in 1. Rex T. Price Jr. noticed in 1991 how, despite a large number of studies on the Mormon missionary subject, “no one has produced a broad ranging study dealing with the missionaries in descriptive, social, and ideological terms.” Though he intended his study to “fill that void in some degree,” Price argued that “theology best explained the world of the Mormon missionary.… Theology also best explains the rela- tion between that world and the Mormon conversion experience” [Price, “The Mormon Missionary of the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1991), viii–x]. I contend that instan- tiations of the missionary subject, which I will explain in more detail in the following paragraphs, precede the making of theology and informed the belief system to which Mormon missionaries ascribed. 2 my analysis. Traditional missiologists use “mission theory” and “missiology” interchange- ably, sometimes even conflating theology of mission with the two terms. Consequently, a debate has ensued over missiological terminology that splits based on differences in academic precommitments. In general, seminarians defend “mission theory”