The notion of an apostasy from the primitive gospel and the original church has been a key animating feature in Mormonism since its inception and in other “religions of the book.” However, the concept of apostasy has proven to be tremendously fluid, with individual, institutional, communal, and historical meanings and applications all proliferating in religious thought throughout the ages. Fifteen faithful Mormon scholars from many scholarly backgrounds and methodologies will explore the concept of apostasy in various historical and religious contexts as we consider how to narrate apostasy in ways that remain historically authentic and cohere with Mormon theology.

The conference schedule and location information are available at the conference website.

The conference is organized by Miranda Wilcox, Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, with financial assistance from an Eliza R. Snow Faculty Grant.

—posted on behalf of the conference organizer, Miranda Wilcox.

Here is the quotation that caught my attention:

I have always considered America — a smaller version of our world — as a grand “testing ground” for the entire human population on earth. It is a testing ground where diverse peoples coexist, cooperate and create innovation. If this experiment succeeds in America, there is hope that mankind may succeed on a global scale. If it fails, mankind can expect no bright future. America exemplifies the future of mankind.

While there is a lot more to the phenomenon of America than this, I think Mr. Miyamoto is right that, (the United States of) America,* with its immigrants from everywhere, is a kind of crucible in which people from all over the world will either find constructive ways of living and working together, or not. It represents in microcosm the challenges of the world as a whole.

One limitation of America, of course, is that it is far from clear how well solutions achieved there can be brought back out into the wider world scene. Those who live in America are changed by the experience, and so what comes to work for them may not work for their relatives and countrymen back home. Equally, institutions, conditions, and habits that enable and support harmony in the U.S. may not be very portable. The very success of the American experiment to a great extend depends on and also encourages people coming and staying. To the extent that American immigrants function as representatives of their societies of origin, it is a real limitation if they tend not to go back. Hence if, as Mr. Miyamoto says, ‘what we are seeking to create is a “global civilization” for the entire world,’ then we will need some other strategies.

One such strategy may be an institution like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an institution that functions at a global level, including members from all over the world, which builds ties among them even while they continue to live in the lands and societies of their birth. One of the most effective tools uniting this multicultural church is the missionary program, which takes young men and women from around the world and sends them to live in places far from home for 1.5 to 2 years, often learning another language to do so.

There is perhaps no better way to build bonds of affection than to serve, and missionaries return expressing a love for the people they lived among that may run deeper than their love of their home community. Equally importantly, the missionary program creates a cadre of members, future leaders, who between them have intimate knowledge of loyalty to a great range of cultures and societies. Thus even while at the highest levels the church continues for now to be led predominantly by Americans (for reasons of history, economics, or whatever), these are Americans who with each passing year are more familiar with and tied to their brothers and sisters around the world. It is, of course, important also to see more and more leaders of international origin, many of whom have served international missions themselves. While missionaries go abroad to spread their faith, if we want to build a world in which we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, the knowledge and affection they bring home will be equally vital.

America is a place that provokes people to work for unity, independent of religion. A global religion provokes people to work for unity, independent of place. It will take a lot more than these two phenomena to create Mr. Miyamoto’s “bright future”, but it’s a start.

*Having grown up outside the U.S., I am very aware that the word America refers to two whole continents, including much more than the U.S.A. Since I am using Mr. Miyamoto’s article as a jumping-off point, however, I will defer to his usage for the moment and use “America” as shorthand for the United States thereof.

At the January 2012 meeting of the American Society for Church History, I’ll be on a panel called “Teaching Mormonism in a Digital Age.” In my comments I’ll be considering the impact of the “bloggernacle” on Mormon studies, specifically in regard to the current generation of graduate students. I have designed the following questionnaire to get a better handle on why people read Mormon blogs and what they get out of them. The questionnaire is for any graduate student, full or part time, LDS or non-LDS, in any academic field. The informed consent form on the first page will explain more, or you can contact me at patrick.mason@cgu.edu with any questions. Thanks for participating.

To participate in the study, follow this link to the questionnaire. The questionnaire will open in your browser as a Google Document, and is submitted automatically when you click “Submit” at the end.

The Super Committee’s lame punt is just the most recent sign of the overall trend, though: at an institutional level, we haven’t even really admitted there is a problem, let alone started repenting. What do we need to repent of? Oh, there are plenty of things seriously wrong with the way we run our economy, including many of the favorite criticisms from both the right and the left, and the economy feeds into a lot of other things that are wrong with our society.

I’ll just mention debt for now. We borrowed like mad for the past fifteen years or so, on houses, credit cards, student loans, and government programs, and called it prosperity—short-sighted materialism (among other things), masked and rationalized with convenient economic pseudo-theory. I was getting nervous about this back around 1999, but by now a lot of readers will probably grant it to me, though there are plenty of theorists and politicians who say our problem is still that we need to spend more.

So if you’ll grant me that this self-deceptive over-spending is a pernicious vice, isn’t my schadenfreude still wrong? Jesus said that those who don’t forgive are guilty of the greater sin, and one of the most important and revolutionary insights of the Restoration is that God does not rejoice, but actually weeps over the suffering of the wicked, so I should too. I’m sorry, though, it’s hard for me to see the Dow at a little over 11,000 as an unbearable affliction. This is not like a war. It’s not even a famine, let alone a flood. It is certainly not the fire from the sky that Jonah was hoping for, and it might even save some of us from a longer-lasting fire. It just might be enough of a discomfort to make us re-think our priorities, and we are long over-due for rethinking.

Instead of Jonah, let’s look at Nephi, who prayed, “O Lord, do not suffer that this people shall be destroyed by the sword; but O Lord, rather let there be a famine in the land, to stir them up in remembrance of the Lord their God, and perhaps they will repent and turn unto thee” (Helaman 11:4).

This economic sand trap is a serious problem for some folks, no question, but it is mild in comparison with a famine. Moreover, the Dow isn’t even the economy. A decent amount of wealth, at least in the abstract, is bound up in the stock market numbers, but they change too fast for us to take them seriously as wealth, full stop. More than anything, the stock market is a barometer of where we think the economy is going, and so when it goes down, it isn’t so much a problem itself as the recognition and publicizing of a problem.

So, I’m excited that we are admitting to ourselves, in an implicit, confused way, that we have a serious problem, or at least that for the reluctant there is a highly public indication that there may be one. I’ll be more excited when I see people recognizing what we need to actually change. Will we as a nation actually turn back to God? That might be a bit much to hope for, but perhaps we will at least be less enamored with our idols of gold and silver, and some of our destructive ideas. Maybe we will stop seeing the stock market as quite such an important indicator of our wealth, because we will see that our real treasures are elsewhere.

Actually, I would be happy for more of us to just do the math, and there are signs that this, at least, is happening: credit card debt went down 11% from October 2010 to October 2011! Hurray! Some of us at an individual level, at least enough to affect the average, have started to change our ways.

Rosalynde suggests that Grant Hardy’s literary analysis of the Book of Mormon is harder to separate from a discussion of its historical origins than he thinks. He shows us the complexity, coherence, and development of its various narrative voices, and in the process shows how much their distinctive, personal perspectives and interests shape the text. Hardy invites readers of the Book of Mormon to set aside questions of historicity, at least for the moment, and explore literary features like these which are interesting in their own right. Yet in Rosalynde’s view the literary character that Hardy finds ironically indicates something itself about the book’s historicity. If we attend to “the history of the narrative genre,” we see that even at the time of a relatively modern work such as Don Quixote, “the romance had not yet become the novel, the author had not yet entirely separated from the narrator, and indeed the human being had not yet become the modern subject comfortably at home in its fully-furnished mental interior.”

Hence in Rosalynde’s view, the very complexity of the narrator’s personalities, and the degree to which their voices are visible in the text, mark it as a distinctively modern book, much more modern even than Don Quixote, at least in this respect. In the comments she suggests that the Book of Mormon still need not be entirely modern in its origins; perhaps these modern characteristics enter the text through a process of interpretation as (modern) Joseph Smith tries to convey authentically ancient content. However, one must “recognize a modern context at some level,” and presumably one whose influence on the text is roughly as deep and pervasive as the influence of these complex, developed narrative voices that Hardy describes.

First I want to thank Rosalynde for such an interesting, creative, and unexpected angle on the question of Book of Mormon historicity. This is an exciting question to explore, if only because it calls out such interesting questions about the literary character of the Book of Mormon and indeed the entire history of writing. I am quite interested in both the historicity and the literary character of the Book of Mormon myself, and find it very exciting to think about how they might be related. Further, if Rosalynde’s view of the history of literature were accurate, her point would seem to carry great weight.

That said, I disagree rather thoroughly. I think Rosalynde greatly overestimates how far the sort of subjectivity and personal voice displayed in the Book of Mormon is distinctively modern. I am inclined to agree that the Pentateuch takes a very different tone than most of the Book of Mormon, as do many other portions of the Bible, and there may be a trend across history for books to be less personal in the ancient world. My impression is that the history of literature is simply less linear than Rosalynde suggests. However, if there is a trend corresponding to the emergence of modernity, it is a trend in how many books have this personal tone, not in whether there are books with a highly developed narrative subject such as we see in the Book of Mormon.

Several examples spring to mind of ancient writings in which the complexity and pathos of the author’s subjective experience come through quite vividly: Augustine’s Confessions, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and many of the Psalms, for example. Julie Smith similarly calls our attention to the rather existential Ezekiel.

Plato’s writings also develop some really stunning portraits of characters and narrators, explicitly and implicitly, especially of Socrates. The Phaedo is one of the most illustrative. In it, Socrates offers a sustained, elaborate defense of his view that the soul is eternal, but interrupts it with disarmingly frank comments on his relationships with his interlocutors, on how they may feel about what he is saying and vice versa, and about his own feelings on the subject he is discussing. The conversation itself clearly arises in response to the emotionally loaded situation in which Socrates and his friends and family find themselves. More than once Socrates directly calls into question his own motives for presenting such an argument when he is about to be executed. As author of the dialogue, Plato clearly shows a rich appreciation for human subjectivity, including the way our perceptions and judgments are often shaped by our interests and emotions, both overtly and covertly. In fact, there are times when the quintessentially modern Kierkegaard, a contemporary of Joseph Smith, is clearly and self-consciously channelling Plato.

Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, though it was written a few centuries after Moroni, is also interesting to consider on this point, as are some of the Buddhist scriptural texts and the Chinese Zhuangzi, which date from a similar period. The Buddhist texts I have read (from the Pali Canon) do not necessarily display the inner depths of an individual author as such, but they display an incredibly rich appreciation for the complexities and quirks of human subjective experience. Even in some of the more historically oriented books of the Bible, now and then we get surprisingly personal glimpses into the struggles of heroes like Gideon, Saul, Elijah, and Abraham. The writings of Paul in the New Testament were presumably written before the time of Mormon and Moroni, but display deep, sustained, and poignant introspection.

I think it is fascinating to consider how well developed the personal voices of the Book of Mormon narrators are, and what this might indicate about both the meaning and origins of the text. Rosalynde suggests, though, that the “fully-furnished mental interior[s]” of the Book of Mormon’s narrators are the sort of thing that only turns up in modern texts. It would not surprise me if something like her view of the history of literature is true within certain periods and regions. However, based on my own reading of ancient texts, especially those I’ve mentioned, at the scale relevant for evaluating the Book of Mormon, her view of history does not hold up. Some of the most complex, cohesive, subtle, and moving explorations and expressions of the individual person as subject come from the ancient world, in and around the time of the Book of Mormon.

Morning Session

Afternoon Session

A PDF version of the program is also available.

The scriptures prophesy that the gospel will go forth to fill the Earth, bringing a reign of eternal peace. While it is difficult to know exactly how to fill in the implications of images such as the lion’s lying down with the lamb, it is clear that God’s revelations are intended to provide the principles not merely for individual righteousness but for establishing an ideal society. The gospel as we discuss and practice it today provides the most essential core principles, but if we compare the word of God to a mustard seed, it is still a rather modest sprout, far from a tree yet. The basis for a just, harmonious, and prosperous society is implicit in it, but it is a long way from becoming explicit.

At the moment it seems to me that Latter-day Saints are doing a reasonably good job of explicating and concretely realizing our core principles in the context of individual and family life, and in the functioning of the Church itself. This is not to say that there is not room for improvement, but we have done a lot to articulate how principles of love, faith, service, and so forth should be put into practice in these contexts, and to embody them in ways that are realistic and effective. In fact, I think it is fair to say that, as human efforts go, we have excelled in these areas, and no areas are more vital for the long-term success of the Church. If we cannot put the gospel into effect here, our other efforts will amount to little.

However, the gospel is not only a guide for running one’s personal or family life, and running the Church. The gospel is intended to be the basis for the ideal functioning of an entire society. This means it has distinctive implications for political institutions and arrangements, economic production and consumption, education, war and peace, as well as many more particular spheres of activity that are integral to an actual society. On these issues we have only begun to tease out the resources of the gospel, and until we have drawn them out, we have only realized a small portion of its full meaning and promise.

We can see from the scriptures that this is how past prophets understood the dimensions of the gospel. Moses in the desert both revealed and crafted political and legal arrangements for Israel that reflected the core principles of faith, justice, and love that lie behind the Ten Commandments. The peoples of Nephi, Mosiah, King Benjamin, Alma, Captain Moroni, and so on similarly set up governments, laws, policies of defense and religious freedom, and so forth, that reflected in various ways their basic beliefs and commitments to God. In the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the Latter-day Saints built whole cities and societies, with all the accompanying institutions, in their own distinctive way, on the foundation of the restored gospel. Presumably they did so with varying degrees of success and correctness, but they put a lot of thought, energy, and devotion into formulating institutions and practices that reflected and supported their faith, and allowed their faithful aspirations to be translated into social reality. Yet these were only the beginnings of the full promise of the gospel.

Christian principles have played an important role in various aspects of Western political thought over the centuries, and in particular movements with real impact, particularly in early communities in what became the United States of America. However, Latter-day Saints’ understanding of God, humanity, and the relationship between the two is in many ways radically different from that operating in traditional Christianity, and surely has novel implications.

Isaiah writes that “in the last days . . . the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains . . . And he shall judge among the nations . . . nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2: 2, 4). The gospel, then, is intended to be a recipe, or the kernel of a recipe, for world peace. If we don’t currently know what sorts of institutions, national and international laws, principles and practices would allow us to build and sustain world peace, we need to get on it. We need to work out how to put the Lord’s commandment to love into practice on a global scale. We know that this practice must begin in our homes and church meetings, but we cannot treat these as though they were also the complete goal. What we do there is only a portion of a much grander process.

That said, we do not only need to extend and elaborate what we already know about the core principles of the gospel. We need to dig deeper into those core principles, to find the resources they offer for this expansive effort. In 1832 the Lord was already chastising the Saints for neglecting the message of the Book of Mormon, so recently published (D&C 84:57), and not long ago, President Ezra Taft Benson informed us that we were still under this condemnation. Terryl Givens, in By the Hand of Mormon, suggests that things have not changed nearly enough since then, either, and we continue to treat the Book of Mormon primarily as a sign that God still speaks today, without actually working as we should to understand what it is he has said. We have been promised that “unto him that receiveth [God] will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have” (2 Nephi 28:30). I worry that we Mormons for the most part fall on the “We have enough” side. What we have is so great that we do not seem sufficiently hungry for more. If we think we have all the knowledge we need (and we seem to talk and act this way a lot), we are sorely lacking in imagination and probably have not properly thought things through. The small number of dramatically new truths revealed to the church since the time of Joseph Smith suggests that we have not sufficiently appreciated and pondered the revelations he brought us, so as to deserve more.

As I see it, the processes of digging deeper into our core texts and principles, and building higher and wider to improve a whole society, even a global society, are two sides of the same coin. As a mustard seed becomes a tree, its roots must grow down just as much as its trunk and branches grow up, and these deep roots are what support and enable its loftiness. Our knowledge of the gospel must become much deeper, as well as more expansive and more richly articulate.

How can we and should we magnify our efforts and develop our resources to respond to this grand calling? I’ll say more about that as the series goes on. For now, what do you think of this view of where we need to go?

For me, one of the amazing things about the gold plates is just how powerfully they convey the transcendent value of the scriptures written on them. I am so used to the idea of the gold plates now that I don’t think much about this, but when I was a kid, it made an incredible impression to know that the Book of Mormon had been written on gold plates. The sheer value and beauty of the material of course speaks eloquently to the imagination. For a kid at least, it also silently draws on the magic of countless stories of other golden artifacts: pirate treasure, dragons’ gold, Jason’s golden fleece . . . Adding in the fact that they were hidden in a stone box in the earth, with the sword of Laban and the Liahona no less, of course just makes the gold plates completely entrancing. Nowadays I am entranced even more by the beauty of the ideas they convey, but I think the sheer intrigue of the gold plates themselves probably accounted for half of my interest in the Book of Mormon for important years of my childhood, and who knows how well I would ever have come to appreciate their contents without that initial, almost visceral fascination?

Another layer deeper one is impressed by the work that was required to produce them, the care with which they were passed down from generation to generation for centuries by the Book of Mormon peoples, and the effort that went into writing on them. All of these things of course are developed by references and discussion throughout the Book of Mormon, but they then become inseparably encompassed in the very thought or image of the gold plates. One can hardly see an image of them without knowing that they must have had this kind of history, and all the effort that went into them again conveys the great value of the record they contained. One can hardly help but want to read it! There are plenty of wonderful Bible stories, and I loved reading or hearing the stories of Jesus especially, even just when he rowed back from shore in a boat to get a bit of space from the crowd. The Bible, as a book, though, just doesn’t have a story to compete with the drama and the enthralling image of the gold plates.

This year Bushman and Givens are inviting applications from junior faculty as well as graduate students. Check out the full announcement for the 2011 Summer Seminar on Mormon Culture, and/or the BCC announcement, and fill out an application.