Benjamin E. Park

Sometimes we are so inundated with information that the best work gets lost in the mix. (This is especially true now that we know many can’t tell the difference between real and fake news.) I wanted to make sure and highlight a few fantastic essays written this last week by top-notch historians that deserve more consideration than a fleeting glance. 

• Daniel T Rodgers, “What Next for Liberalism?” Democracy Journal. Rodgers, an emeritus professor at Princeton, wrote one of the best and most important intellectual histories of modern Americau. This is a very cogent, careful, and nuanced take on where the American Left can go from here. 
• Kelly J Baker, “White-Collar Supremacy,” Ney York Times. Baker is a well-known and established historian and critic, and this is a thoughtful take on the modern form of racist opposition in America. 
• Thomas J Sugrue, “Jeff Sessions Other Civil Rights Problem,” New York Times. Sugrue, who recently moved from UPenn to NYU and wrote one of the best books on Urban America, delves even deeper into Trump’s controversial (and depressing) pick for attorney general. 
• Robert G Parkinson, “Fake News? That’s a Very Old Story,” Washington Post. Parkinson wrote a phenomenal and exhaustive book on race and the Revolution earlier this year (check out Jonathan Wilson’s excellent reviewi), which in part focused on how newspaper accounts of (fake) conspiracies fueled the quest for independences. Some things never change. 
• Kathryn Lofton, “Understanding is Dangerous,” The Point Magazine. T be a religious studies scholar, Lofton says, is to study the incomprehensible. Perhaps we should use Jose tools to understand the Trump phenomenon. 
• Choose anything from the African American Intellectual History Blog. Literally, anything. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you haven’t bookmarked the site and aren’t reading it daily, fix that now. 

I’m always glad to see established academics lending their voice to current issues. It’s just too bad too many people can’t tell rigorous analysis from fringe gossip anymore. 

One of my favorite activities from my last few years has been serving as an associate editor with the Mormon Studies Review. The goal of the journal is to chart the development and progress of Mormon studies scholarship; we aim to translate the significance of these works to a broader audience. We also try to integrate scholars who are well-respected in their fields but are not known for work on Mormonism. Last week we published Volume 4, which is filled with tremendous content, if I do say so myself. You can see the whole table of contents here.

There are a number of phenomenal essays and reviews that I could highlight. I’m especially excited about the roundtable reviews of two important books in Mormon gender history: the LDS Church History Library’s The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History and the edited collection Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings. The participants for the former forum are Catherine Brekus, Susanna Morrill, and Dave Hall, and for the latter are Anthea Butler, Martha Bradley-Evans, and Taylor Petrey. Getting such a wide diversity of reviewers allowed us to look at each volume from internal, external, and methodological perspectives.

We also have a slew of smart and provocative essays. Fanella Cannell‘s essay speaks to key anthropological issues through the lens of Mormonism, and Rosalynde Welch makes sense of new trends in LDS scriptural and theological studies. I particularly love Molly Worthen‘s review essay on contemporary Mormonism and American politics. And David Hollinger, one of the deans of the American historical community, assesses the new Oxford handbook on Mormonism.

And then of course we have our standard book reviews, which exhibit broad coverage both in content and background. Reviewers include Richard Bushman, Max Mueller, Michael Pasquier, Paul Harvey, and Amy Hoyt. Don’t miss Quincy Newell’s excellent comparative review of two documentary sourcebooks on Mormonism and race, which delves into the historian’s craft.

I’m biased, but I’d wager that Mormon Studies Review remains the most established vantage point from which to trace the Mormon studies field. You can get digital access to this journal, along with all the other Maxwell Institute periodicals, for a mere $10 here.

With Volume 4 going online, that means Volume 3 is now free for all interested readers. (See here.) It includes a fantastic roundtable on lived religion, a smart theoretical exploration of the First Vision by Ann Taves and Steve Harper, a brilliant engagement with whiteness literature by Sylvester Johnson, and reviews by leading scholars like Charles Cohen, Randall Stephens, and Adam Jortner, among other material.

There are a lot of new realities and circumstances that Americans will have to address over the next four years. Far from the most important, yet still something that folks will eventually have to grapple with, is how historians’ work will reflect this new environment. By this, I’m not referring to historians of contemporary America who will have to reconsider trajectories of the past few decades in order to account for Trump’s election. (Historians of Modern American politics, race, and gender, not to mention those who study the Religious Right, have their work cut out for them.) Nor am I specifically thinking about work that will immediate context for Trump’s tenure, like the fantastic compilation of the Trump syllabus (which everyone should bookmark), less formal ruminations like Kevin Kruse’s important twitter reflections on the power and limits of the presidency, imminent issues like the excellent work coming out on foreign policy, or even the much-needed background for things like the electoral college (the slave power strikes again!). Rather, what I am talking about is how historians will choose particular topics and frame their studies in ways to give long-form meaning to the anxieties and tensions we face today.

It is a common adage that history isn’t written in a vacuum. Not only do scholars wish to prove their relevance to modern readers, but our culture shapes the type of questions we ask and answers we provide. There are a number of themes that we can point to as hallmarks of scholarship in the Age of Obama. Earlier this year at The Junto I wrote about how Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s excellent Citizen Sailors: Becoming America in an Age of Revolutions embodies our contemporary assumption of the federal body’s positive role. Steven Pincus’s recent and provocative book on how the idea of an “activist government” in the American Revolution, which I reviewed here, also fits into this trajectory. I’ve been meaning to discuss James Kloppenberg’s new (and wide-sweeping) history of democracy in America and Europe and how it is framed around the longue durée tradition of deliberate democracy—the very pragmatism that shapes Obama’s political philosophy. And of course, the mere presence of a black man in the White House provokes questions concerning multiculturalism and interracial allegiances. Indeed, there are a number of other works and themes that we could identify as representative of this particular historiographical moment.

So what will history look like in an Age of Trump? Well, I think there are current trends already en vogue that are well-equipped for the moment. Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions, which posits the nation’s founding as a period of elite triumph over those marginalized and disenfranchised, is a founding story both relevant and appropriate for our time. The same narrative holds for Michael Klarman’s new synthetic Framer’s Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, which summarizes a generation’s scholarship on how political elites drew on fears of societal unrest in order to curtail the extent of democracy’s power. Historians already have many of the tools and stories with which to construct a message for our era.

I also expect to see more work on the intersections—and often clashes—between race, ethnicity, and class. Nancy Isenberg’s book on White Trash (reviewed here) points the way to explaining how those from the lower rungs of society can at times be mobilized, manipulated, and moved to action at important moments in our political tradition. If 2016 is indeed a manifestation resurgent global nativism, as the connection between Trump and Brexit imply, then we need more scholarship that explains the lasting significance and power of this ever-present anxiety. This will likely lead to more interest in the nature and trajectory of nationalism, though rather than positing it as a political ideal it is instead seen as an ethnic assurance. New works of nationalist imaginations will have to account for its nativist tendencies.

As a historian of democracy, I’ll be looking for works on the tragic limits of democratic governance, especially as it relates to race. Two books have remained on my mind over the last few days: first, David Chappell’s history of prophetic religion and the limits of liberal philosophy during the Civil Rights movement; and second, Sylvester Johnson’s overview of African American religions since 1500. Both focus on the paradoxes of democratic participation and exclusion. I assigned both books in my grad seminar this semester, and highlighted them here and here on the blog. Simple, complacent, and overly optimistic trajectories of democratic governance and the determined march toward modernity do not square with the persistent reality of the racist expusion of black bodies from the political community. Historians would do well to return to questions raised by W. E. B Du Bois in finding meaning in today’s world. (Relatedly: if you are not already daily checking the African American Intellectual History blog then you should rectify that now. They might be the most crucial scholarly online community in coming years.)

Further, we might see more analysis demonstrates how the democratic penchant for societal oppression has always been a feature, not a bug, in our political history. Moving beyond the simplistic models of political competition between the “good” democracy and the “evil” non-democratic institutions, we must grapple with the foundational pitfalls of democratic theories in their own right. More works that incorporate sophisticated theories of democratic limitations, like recent books by Caleb McDaniel and John Burt, should cut into our rosy picture of political modernity. I could see a much more bleak interpretation of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the threats of a tyrannical majority, for instance. My current project, on the Mormon city of Nauvoo as a clash of democratic priorities, seems to adopt a new hue in Trump’s America.

These next four years will be unpredictable and disruptive, not to mention scary for large segments of the nation as new policies are enacted and other initiatives curtailed. Historians will have significant civic and educative responsibilities beyond their traditional pedagogical roles. And the resulting body of scholarship will be its own manifestation of the age.

[The image comes from BBC.]

[Today is the anniversary of the LDS Church implementing a new policy regarding same-sex marriage. You can read about the policy here, and hear about it here and here. I hope readers will forgive me if I leave the academic tone of this blog aside for a moment and offer this personal essay.]

I was ironically in Utah when it happened.

I had flown out for, of all things, a panel on Mormon apologetics. Though I only lived in Utah for three years as an undergraduate at BYU, and then for two short summers when I later returned to teach as an adjunct, the state takes up a disproportionate space within my mental geography. For starters, I met my wife in Salt Lake City and my daughter was born in Provo. Every time I’m in a plane that crests the Rocky Mountains to see the Salt Lake Valley below, I feel at home. This time was no different. Once landed, the familiar routine of seeing old friends and eating at favorite restaurants commenced. It was another reunion. 

But the mood changed rather quickly. I remember glancing at my phone around 4pm, seeing a number of friends share a link to some new policy, and assuming it was the development we all expected. I was in a meeting and couldn’t really examine the release for another hour, but I thought I could assume what the new policy entailed. Same-sex marriage had been declared legal in the United States the previous summer, and many in the Church assumed we would at some point receive an official position from leadership reacting to the new legal reality. We expected such a policy would confirm that individuals in married homosexual unions would be treated the same as individuals in unmarried homosexual relationships. Tough, but consistent. But this was something more. This was something that exceeded what anyone expected.

It wasn’t until I was at dinner with my brother later that night that the new policy’s impact dawned on me. It was an odd feeling to be in one of my favorite places with one of my favorite people while simultaneously experiencing the weight of unprecedented disappointment. In some ways, spending that day and the next with some of my faith community’s best and brightest helped alleviate the shock and pain; their mere presence reminded me of what Mormonism had to offer. But in other ways, being surrounded by these great people only highlighted the problem at hand: all of us—no matter our talents, our service, our dedication—were powerless in the face of the policy’s onslaught. I had never felt so impotent. I didn’t sleep much that night, or many to follow.

The policy shook the very foundations of my understanding of the LDS Church. As a historian, I did not foresee Mormonism’s trajectory moving so far in that particular direction. As a believer, I could not conceive of leadership implementing such an odious policy so clearly antithetical to our core principles. As a congregant, I would have never assumed that my fellow members would accept, let alone defend, a practice so fundamentally counter to the ideals that I believed bound us together. All my previous conceptions of and justifications for the Church seemed inadequate. I no longer felt like I knew the gospel that I believed, the church that I supported, and the community that I loved. I was unmoored.

A year later, I still feel at sea, unable to find dry land. The first few Sundays after November 5 were taken on a week-by-week basis. We continued, and continue, to attend Church. We still hold callings. I honestly can’t give a persuasive reason why, other than I don’t feel driven to do anything else. Yet. Still. I can’t explain our decision to stay, especially in the wake of so many others who didn’t. Especially when confronted with policies I can’t comprehend, let alone defend. I just continue to prepare my Sunday School lessons, put on a suit, tie my shoes, and attend meetings on sabbath morning.

A few weeks ago I flew to Salt Lake City for another conference. When the plane passed into the city, the mountains seemed so impenetrable and the valley so barren. I didn’t feel the same sense of belonging as I used to. I honestly don’t know if I ever will again.

There was a brief moment when it seemed Mormon voters in Utah were leading the anti-Trump charge in today’s GOP. After the leaked video of Donald Trump bragging about groping women, a number of Utah’s leading elected officials unendorsed the GOP nominee. The LDS-owned Deseret News published an editorial asking Trump to step aside. Pundits were quick to point out Trump’s “Mormon Problem” in the state. There seemed to be a perfect storm for something radical to happen, given that there was an independent candidate who was both conservative and Mormon—the perfect recipe for splitting the state’s ticket. I mused on the flexibility of the Mormon vote. Some pro-Trump figures warned of a “Mormon Mafia.” One white nationalist accused McMullin, the independent candidate, of being a closeted homosexual. Those were exciting times.

It appears that brief moment of tumult has come to an end. Recent polls in Utah show Trump once again taking a commanding lead in the state, with McMullin falling back to a distant third. The state’s quasi-toss-up status seems gone. The state’s opportunity to break from both the recent past and foreseeable future now seems a whimsical memory.

A lot of this is what pundits expected to happen, and it’s part of a larger story: given the partisan nature of today’s political culture, Clinton’s large lead was unsustainable. Eventually, Republican voters were going to come back to their party’s nominee, making it a close election. (And it doesn’t help that our nation’s #ADD mindset meant that we forgot Trump’s massive failings at the sheer hint of conspiratorial email findings; seriously, our media is no better than the dog from Up.) But the evolution of Utah’s vote also had to do with a concerted effort on the part of the state’s GOP coalition to rally support for their nominee. Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence made an important campaign stop—when was the last time a GOP presidential ticket visited Utah in late-October?—and held a rally that included emeritus General Authority Robert Oaks (formerly of one of the LDS Church’s leading councils, the Presidency of the Seventy) as well as Julie Beck, who served as the leader of the Church’s women’s organization from 2007 until 2012. And in the political realm, Jason Chaffetz showed his true colors by endorsing-but-not-endorsing the GOP nominee.

So it doesn’t seem Tuesday will be much in doubt for Republicans in Utah. But what does this episode say about Mormonism’s political tradition, something that remains consistently fascinating?

First, it shows that moral issues, on their own, are not enough to break Utah Mormons away from the GOP’s stronghold. Hopes that the Mormon body could be differentiated from the conservative Evangelical movement that have lined up behind Trump were premature. A nominee who boasts about sexual assault is not the line in the sand. The state’s flirtation with McMullin’s candidacy was enough to see that there are indeed some kernels of potential there, but they need more nurturing to actually flower into something tangible.

Second, I think it matters that no prominent LDS leader came out in support of a non-Trump option. Conversely, one of the most prominent female leaders came out in support of Trump. If nothing else, Beck’s presence at the Trump rally was a sign that you could be considered a “good Mormon” and still support a depraved candidate. Voting for Trump was no longer seen as an immoral option, which paved the way for Utah Republicans to “come home” to their party. Not only does this very limited perception of hierarchical support hold sway for many, but the lack of support in another direction left competing choices rudderless. An independent Mormon vote would require direction, organization, and mobilization, led either by ecclesiastical leaders or at least someone with enough cultural capital to drive Mormon allegiance. (And that obviously isn’t Glenn Beck.)

Third, as difficult as it is to break Mormon support to the GOP, it is near-impossible to forge Mormon support for the Democratic Party. This especially seems to be the case for Hillary Clinton, someone who appears particularly odious to a number of Utah Republicans for a variety of (rational and irrational) reasons. In an alternate universe we might have seen what would have happened in a presidential race with a Democratic candidate who could have taken advantages of Trump’s weaknesses (like Bernie Sanders), but I suppose it would have taken a lot to get Utahns to vote for a progressive ticket. Mormons require something to rally around rather than just against.

In short, the unique Mormon vote, a body which can theoretically be separated from the GOP platform, still remains fallow. Mormon voters in Utah are too entrenched in the social, cultural, and demographic foundations of the Republican mainstream to rock the boat. What is clear is it would require exceptionally radical circumstances, most likely intervention from leading Mormon figures, to create an independent bloc. And without that authoritative—even, prophetic—disruption, things fall back to the status quo.