Benjamin E. Park

Last week my employer, Sam Houston State University, hosted a book talk that featured American hero John Lewis. Known for his Civil Rights activism, Lewis recently co-authored a trilogy that documented the fight for racial equality. Titled March, the series was different than your typical political memoir: it was a comic book. The trilogy has been received exceptionally well. Besides high sales numbers, they also were awarded an impressive number of awards, including the National Book Award. In fact, March was the first comic book to receive that distinction. Lewis’s co-author, Andrew Aydin, and artist, Nate Powell, rhapsodized about how comics are a medium through which we can better address younger generations. This seems like a noble goal, nowadays.

March wasn’t the only comic book I’ve encountered over the last few months. The other was Scott Hales’s The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, published by Kofford Books in two volumes. Enid arrived on the scene a couple years ago with her own website and facebook page. Even before we didn’t know who the author was—was it really a teenage girl?—the Mormon world loved Enid’s awkward encounters and bloggernacle-themed clothing. (I was won over the moment she donned a Juvenile Instructor-themed t-shirt.) I was excited when it appeared in a more permanent book form. If nothing else, it is cultural remnant of 2010s Mormonism.

I won’t spend too much time on the medium of the story, or even the story. Both of these have been covered elsewhere. There are certainly things to critique. The Enid character never demonstrates much depth, and supporting figures rarely move beyond stereotypes. The obese stereotype attached to Enid’s traumatic mother is especially unfortunate. As snapshots of various scenes, there isn’t much development. Someone looking for a deep and moving story will likely be disappointed.

But I didn’t expect Garden of Enid to supply that need. Instead, I enjoyed these volumes as humorous, if fleeting, images of the awkwardness of Mormon culture during an especially awkward moment in the tradition’s history. Frankly, to be a thinking Mormon in the twenty-first century is to be inundated with awkwardness. Enid is brave enough to ask questions, but the book is careful to demonstrate that she never gets an answer—either from her modern-day friends or her past-age prophetic interlocutors. There are few solid conclusions in these pages. And that’s a good thing.

My soon-to-be-8yo daughter, after reading through the comics, noticed the same thing. Where is the conclusion? “Sorry sweetie, there isn’t one.” Among other things, Garden of Enid sparked some great conversations, as my daughter loved to read them and then ask questions. So beside the artistic and narrative qualities of these volumes, they prove a potent cultural artifact of, well, an awkward moment in the Mormon moment.

Laurie Maffly-Kipp is one of the foremost scholars of American religious history, so it was a big win for the field of Mormon studies that she’s spent so much of her energy, especially in the last decade, dealing with the LDS past. Besides producing the Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Mormon, along with series’ edition on American Scripture (which also features Mormonism), she has published u number of important articles. A book that narrates a general overview of Mormonism and American life is forthcoming from a trade press. As president of the Mormon History Association last year, she delivered her presidential address at the 2016 annual conference in Snowbird. It is now published in the just-released issue of Journal of Mormon History, so I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite points.

In her address, “The Clock and the Compass: Mormon Culture in Motion,” Maffly-Kipp encourages historians of Mormonism to consider our organizational principles. She focuses on two metaphors that symbolize how scholars approach their subject: centripetal and centrifugal forces. A majority of Mormon histories fall in the former category, as they feature characters and ideas cycling inward toward an institutional center. That is, the gravitational pull remains the LDS Church. “It is tempting to overemphasize the centripetal tendencies of groups,” she explains, “to focus attention on how and why people come together, internalize a set of beliefs and practices, and create a distinctive sense of time and place” (15). Mormonism revolved around the gathering, after all. Such is the dominant narrative in the field.

But it doesn’t have to be. Maffly-Kipp models how historians can also highlight the centripetal forces that push Mormon culture away from the institutional Church. Such a perspective not only would capture the numerous schismatic expressions of the faith–she highlights James Brewster as just one example–but also the many historical characters who refused to be defined by institutional commitments. “Stories such as these,” she writes, “are instructive for what they suggest about the gap, for many nineteenth century Mormons, between the Church as an institution and mormonism as a religious movement” (14). This is an important point. I try to get my undergraduate students to capture this idea by reading Robert Orsi’s exquisite Madonna of 115th Street, which explores how Catholics in Progressive Era-Harlem experimented with ritualistic and liturgical practices that transcended their local diocese. That’s a story that needs more telling within the Mormon studies community.

How do we tell such stories? Most pressingly, “we need to pay close attention to the potential chaos within the first few decades of the Mormon movement” (6). Early Mormon converts lived in a world in motion, often transgressing boundaries both geographical and intellectual. They also did not march toward a teleological conclusion that birthed the Modern church. By destabilizing the institution, scholars can capture both the vast diversity of the faith’s past as well as its many unexplored roads. At every point, there were a multiplicity of options not realized.

One reason I really like this model is that it gives meaning for today. In an era where church attendance is slipping even while spirituality remains constant, we need more historical genealogy for the “spiritual but not religious” mentality. This is not something completely new. It also proves that diversity is not a modern product. These are stories that not only better capture the reality of the past, but also offer more relevance for the present.

Maffly-Kipp closes her address by admitting that, despite all all this talk of diversity and centrifugal forces, “maybe I am a gatherer, too.” In her synthetic history, she hopes “to gather…an account of human beings, flawed and sometimes feeble, as they wrestle to reconcile competing impulses, contradictions, and mistakes” (19). That’s a story we can all look forward to.

I am pasting below the news release for an amici curiae brief that I was honored to be part of. You can find the brief, and more information, here.

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A group of 19 scholars of Mormon history have filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit attacking President Trump’s ban on refugees and immigrants from six Muslim countries. The brief tells the story of government attacks on Mormon immigration in the 19th century. This history, urges the brief, shows the need for the court to carefully examine President Trump’s executive order.

During the 19th century both state and federal officials repeatedly attacked the Mormons because of their religion. During the 1880s, federal officials explicitly targeted Mormon immigrants. In some cases, Latter-day Saints were refused entry to the country, in others they were jailed by government officials at the border, and at times federal officials pressured Mormon immigrants to abandon their religion and convert to Protestantism.

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that government targeting on the basis of religion sends the pernicious message that some religious believers are “outsiders, not full members of the political community.”  The brief cautions against allowing the government to repeat past errors against today’s Muslims.

The 19 scholars, many of whom are Latter-day Saints, include some of the nation’s foremost experts on Mormon history.  Asked about signing the brief, Richard Bushman, an emeritus professor at Columbia University and author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, the definitive biography of Mormonism’s founder, said, “Most Americans have a story about ancestors who came as immigrants to the United States, many under pressure.  Mormons were among the most reviled when they came. We have to take a stand with those who flee to America as a refuge.”

Kathleen Flake, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, stated, “Even as a first instance, a Muslim ban under whatever name should alarm those who value freedom of conscience, America’s ‘first freedom.’ But certainly, we should learn from earlier Mormon bans that such discrimination has a long, unhappy cultural life.”

Pulitzer prize-winning Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s reasons are more personal.  She said, “Whenever I hear people stereotyped for their religion, I think of my Grandfather Thatcher, who was denied the right to vote when in Idaho in the 1880s, not because he had violated any law, but simply because he was a Mormon. People should be judged on their behavior, not on their identity.”

The brief was originally drafted by Nathan B. Oman, a law professor at William & Mary who studies Mormon legal history. The scholars are represented before the Ninth Circuit by Anna-Rose Mathieson and Ben Feuer of the California Appellate Law Group LLP.

For further information or comments please email mormonscholarsbrief@gmail.com and consult the Resources page.

Today I had an article that traces the intellectual(?) genealogy of Trump’s ethnic nationalism throughout American history. It appeared in Starting Points, an excellent new online journal sponsored by the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. This was especially thrilling because I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow with the institute. Here is a taste of my essay:

The very promise to “Make America Great Again” is a thinly-veiled, clarion call to an imaginary past when the American “nation” was pure—that is, controlled by a racial majority. It reflects a persistent idea that democracies can only function when composed of a racially and culturally homogenous population. And as long as the mantra of “America First” remains synonymous with a mythic and racialized petition for the “First [White] Americans,” there will remain a cultural discord as millions of citizens fight for equal justice, constitutional rights, and democratic liberties. Yet we will not be able to directly and persuasively confront this threat until we recognize its historic and central role to the country’s nationalist imagination.

You can read the whole thing here.

For those interested in the sources that I draw from, here is a quick bibliography. The numbers correlate with the essay’s paragraphs. (I.E., the first points is the footnote for the first paragraph, and so on.) Of course, much of my thinking here directly draws from my forthcoming book.

1. For this context, see, for example, “The New Nationalism,” The Economist, November 19, 2016; Christina Pazzanese, “In Europe, Nationalism Rising,” Harvard Gazette, February 27, 2017.
2. For a traditional account of the Age of Revolutions birthing a new, civic-minded form of nations, see David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
3. For the general overview of this nationalist literature, see See John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (New York: Blackwell, 1986); Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson, eds., What is a Nation? Europe 1789-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. For examples of works that argued for a more civic-based form of nationalism that took root in Britian and then, later, America, see Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
4. For the centrality of race and ethnicity to America’s founding political ideals, see Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 159-208; Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
5. Calhoun’s quote comes from Congressional Globe, 30^th Congress, 1^st Session, 98. For context, see Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
6. Literature on the nationalist imagination is voluminous. The classic overview is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991). Yet this theory has face criticism and revision on many fronts. For an overview of national imaginations in the post-revolutionary era, see Benjamin E. Park, “The Bonds of Union: Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and Defining the Nation in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 382-408. For examples of how scholars of race have revised traditional understandings of nationalism, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
7. For the concept of an “internal enemy” within the American political body, see Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). For the founding and colonization, see Guyatt, Bind Us Apart. For the FBI and civil rights, see Johnson, African American Religions, 325-376.
8. For Trump’s imperial racism, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic (January/February 2017).
9. “Our ticket, Our Motto: This is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule,” Campaign Badge Supporting Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair, Democratic candidates for the President and Vice-President of the United States, 1865, New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/62a9d0e6-4fc9-dbce-e040-e00a18064a66 (accessed March 2017). For race and reconstruction debates, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, updated ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 2014), 564-601; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 98-139. For the Civil Rights era and its reaction, see Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
10. Matthew Haag, “Steve King Says Civilization Can’t Be Restored with ‘Sombody Else’s Babies,’” New York Times, March 12, 2017. “New Gingrich: We Must Defeat ‘Left-Wing Mythology that You Can Be Multicultural and Still Be a Single Country,” Media Matters, March 22, 2017.