There was only one paper read each hour, giving the presenters enough time both to build a substantial argument and to make it understandable for nonspecialists. After each presentation, there was time for questions that led to interesting extensions of the original topic or insightful connections to other papers. Hearing every paper read made it possible for papers to build on or respond to each other, allowing a real conversation to emerge.

The audience was easily two or three times as large as any group that I have presented to at any academic conference (averaging around 60 people by my occasional rough counts), and they the audience was both engaged with and generally well informed about the topic. That was also what made the experience so intimidating. The people in the auditorium cared, and you didn’t know what direction their questions were coming from. This audience is, I think, part of what gives the field of Mormon Studies the energy it has today. At the same time, the increasing professionalization of the field was on display; all of the presenters had doctorates or were in doctoral programs. I’m glad to see contributions from scholars with academic training in theology and Mormon history, but it’s also one reason that I won’t be making frequent forays into Mormon Studies. I can tell when I’m straying outside my area of expertise. I don’t mind blogging as an interested observer, but I was skating on thin ice for most of my presentation.

While the presenters took many different approaches, each paper was clearly connected to other presentations and to the conference’s topic. The presenters had put some serious thought into the question of what the narratives of historical apostasy mean to Mormonism, and a few of the presenters mentioned that they had spent more time and gone through more drafts than they typically do for academic conference papers. One sign of the quality of the conference is how it made clear certain questions that might still be addressed. For example: What was Hugh Nibley’s view of apostasy? How did early Catholic converts to Mormonism view the apostasy? How did Mormon views of apostasy change between the late Nauvoo period and the end of the nineteenth century? One of the best things about the conference was how the presentations and following dialogues managed to discuss Mormon topics with sophistication and without defensiveness in any direction: The participants were faithful Mormons and active and accomplished members of their own scholarly communities and they weren’t embarrassed about it. It was, in short, the kind of event that could only happen at BYU.

For some participants, ‘apostasy’ is a concept that does more harm than good for Mormonism today; for others – at least for me – the apostasy is an essential part of our belief system. But the presentations were so compelling that when I disagreed with some point, I had to ask myself if perhaps I was the one who most needed to rethink the issue. In one way or another, all the participants agreed that there were problems with the binary, black and white view of other times and other people that superficial apostasy narratives too often lead to.

I especially liked the presentations that sought more accurate comparisons with other belief systems. We might find points of real agreement or disagreement, but first we have to understand people and ideas in their own context before we can make that judgment, even with things that are often cited as evidence of apostasy. Spencer Young addressed the theology and practice of indulgences, Lincoln Blumell looked at the Nicene Creed, and I tried to do something similar with lesser known figures of the Reformation. One of my favorite papers was Matthew Grey’s, which contrasted the often superficial Mormon views of intertestamental Judaism with the complicated historical reality. After several papers in which James E. Talmage and B. H. Roberts figured as the most influential voices of a Mormon view of the Middle Ages that became increasingly out of step with scholarship as the twentieth century progressed, Matthew Bowman asked the audience to reconsider Talmage and Roberts in the context of their own time and of the genre of confessional history that they were writing. If we can find room for a more nuanced understanding of other religious traditions, then we can also find room for our own.

Another theme of several papers, including those of several JI bloggers, asked the audience to rethink origins. While the Documentary Hypothesis has presented a challenge to traditional readings of scriptural authorship and harmony, Cory Crawford suggested that the unharmonized compilation of competing narratives found in the Old Testament, and the creative tension that results, might provide a model for discussing the apostasy. Taylor Petrey’s examination of early Christianity called into question the notion that original purity and unity is replaced by contaminated variety; what one finds instead is an original complexity followed by increasing anxiety over unity. He suggested hybridity and the performance of identity as approaches for further inquiry. Ariel Bybee Laughton took just such an approach to the question of Arianism as a heretical identity that was forced upon people of various, and not particularly Arian, beliefs in the late fourth century to achieve sociopolitical ends. After comparing the construction of ‘non-Christian’ in contemporary anti-Mormon discourse, she provocatively asked whether Mormons would be better off performing the orthodox or the heretical roles. Steve Fleming and Christopher Jones’s joint presentation looked at the changing nature of apostasy discourse among early Mormon converts, which was initially more particularly directed at Protestant churches than at Catholicism, with the exception of a frequent affinity towards Methodism.

The beginning and ending papers of each day provided five “bookends” that aimed for overarching synthesis, including Miranda Wilcox’s comparison of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and LDS apostasy narratives, and Eric Dursteler’s revisiting of his seminal article on the apostasy in LDS discourse. John Young asked the audience to take the long view of Mormon teaching, exemplified by the Mormon understanding of the atonement that is the heritage primarily of medieval Christianity; we can expand our understanding of our own faith by understanding other and earlier traditions. David Peck examined how Mormonism can easily fit in the framework of religious pluralism found in the Koran, and how Mormonism has had the potential for an equally charitable treatment of other faiths since the time of Joseph Smith; whether this potential is realized is yet to be seen. Terryl Givens’s concluding remarks centered on how the entire drama of the Restoration is contained within the Enoch account in Moses 6. I found Givens’s point particularly insightful that Mormonism was not just another restorationist movement in that it did not attempt to regain a simple original Christianity by stripping away accretions. Instead it offered a vast expansion in order to bring back what had come first. Once published, Terryl Givens’s remarks could easily become an instant classic.

In other words: This is how a conference is supposed to work.

•  A list of 57 lost books, from the Book of the Wars of the Lord (Num. 21:14) to Paul’s epistle to the Laodiceans (Col. 4:16).
• References to lost biblical books in the apocrypha, patristic literature, and Catholic authorities, from the lost 204 books of Esdras (4 Esdras 14:44) to an attestation from the Jesuit Benedict Pereira (1535-1610) that the Bible was missing books it earlier had.
• A tu quoque list of citations from Protestant authorities that admit to defects in the Bible, including from Calvin and Luther.
• The fourth section argues that the Bible is not complete because the correct interpretation and understanding of the Bible depends on the Holy Spirit, which is not contained in the text but is instead external to it. Without the Spirit, the words of the Bible are nothing. (This argument over the location of meaning, extended to the interpretation of all texts, continues to the present day.)
• The fifth section finally argues that the incompleteness of the Bible necessarily leads to the rejection of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, as those who believe only what is in the Bible must therefore reject its interpretation by the Spirit.

Uber’s Disputation anticipates by two centuries the appearance of lost biblical books in Mormon discourse, providing an example of a Latter-day conversation that continues medieval and early modern dialogues. My impression is that we typically borrowed the Protestant side of confessional polemics, but in this case we seem to have adopted something closer to the Catholic argument. For Mormons, the lost books are usually cited as evidence that continued revelation is necessary, although they are also cited as a sign of apostasy in Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages, to which Johannes Uber would no doubt have taken great exception.

Not many people would choose that kind of life today. Or, rather, it’s a life that we can scarcely imagine, let alone choose.  His mother, as a young girl, watched the U.S. Army escorting the Shoshone onto a reservation. When my grandfather was born, Russia and Austria were ruled by Romanovs and Habsburgs. He began herding sheep, summer and fall, at the age of twelve. Some people leave home for college; he went away to Ricks and stayed only a quarter, just enough time to discover that he was a better sheep herder than college student, and time enough to meet my grandmother. Other men of his generation went away to war, but he was excused from service because sheep herding was a strategically important industry. As stake Sunday School superintendant, he visited the Kelly branch just north of Jackson; its remaining structures are known today as Mormon Row, an iconic monument to a moment in the settlement of the West that is not quite so far past as one might think at first glance. As the Teton Valley water master, my grandfather oversaw the local irrigation system for many years, while also serving unofficially as the dowser for anyone who wanted their well to hit water at a reasonable depth. For all his interest in news of the wider world – at the time of his death, he had been a regular subscriber to the Post-Register for seventy-eight years running – nearly all his life was bounded by the hills and mountains that he could see from his front porch, and he was subject to all the stresses and hardship entailed by life on a family-owned ranch.

As I said, it’s not how many of us would choose to live. But there are worse ways to finish your life, I think, than in a house you built and lived in for seventy years that drew water from a well you dug on the spot you witched with a willow rod, surrounded by gardens bearing the flowers and vegetables you planted and land that your sons and grandsons still work and hills whose every slope you’ve ridden and streams whose whole length you’ve fished with your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There are no good deaths, but there may be none better.

When I started reading Times and Seasons in 2004, some of the posts I enjoyed the most addressed the intellectual aspects of Mormonism and the cultural issues of Mormon grad students and academics. These posts were the trigger for my first realization: I was a Mormon…and a scholar…which made me – ack! – a Mormon scholar. Not a bad thing to be, but not anything I had ever planned on.

Sometime that fall, while I was in the middle of a crosswalk on Calhoun Street in Charleston on the way to teach class, it occurred to me for the first time that my career was not an accident. A year earlier, I would have claimed that it was all due to a bug in some high school scheduling software in 1982. A glitch put my older brother into a class he hadn’t wanted (he had tried to sign up for French), but scheduling complications kept him from switching classes, and I continued in his footsteps. A foreign mission followed, and then a bachelor’s degree, then grad school and a Ph.D., all because (I would have told you with a straight face) I didn’t know when to stop. I had thought I would figure out my career plans during my mission or in college, but I never did (I told myself), so I ended up with a Ph.D. in the humanities instead. It’s not a very convincing story, I admit, but I believed it for nearly a decade.

That day in Charleston, it finally occurred to me that most missionaries do not check out Stefan Sonderegger’s Grundzüge deutscher Sprachgeschichte for language study, or Einar Haugen’s Die skandinavischen Sprachen, or Thomas Mann’s Sämtliche Erzählungen. I am a bit slow on the uptake. Only then did I understand that the choices I had made as a missionary, in response to my deepest interests and the environment that my mission put me in, had put me on a path that had brought me to where I was at that moment.

I went back and checked my journal. Here’s what I wrote on day ten in the MTC: “I want to be a professor.” On the last day of my mission, my mission president advised me to get a Ph.D. in something. Then I boarded a plane in Düsseldorf and flew home, still believing that I had failed to figure out my career plans, and that I had never received any guidance about them during my a mission.

The third thing that I recognized in 2004 and early 2005, as another round of job applications was meeting with no more success than earlier ones, was this: I was not in some transitional phase while I waited for my career to start. This – the heavy teaching load for a modest salary in a position that came with an expiration date – this was my career, and I had better make the most of it while it lasted. If I only had nine or six or three more months as a full-time academic, I was going to start off at the top of my list of professional goals and work down as far as I could before the clock ran out.

These were the thoughts at the back of my mind in early 2005 when a professor I had come to know while doing doctoral research abroad wrote to me and encouraged me to apply for a postdoctoral research fellowship. All I had to do was come up with a topic that would convince the fellowship selection committee.

I decided I couldn’t flee from who I was, and recognized instead that I was being offered the rare opportunity to work on a book that only I could write. I had written a dissertation on a fifteenth-century printed book, so early printing became one element of the proposal. I had earlier written a master’s thesis about Hildegard of Bingen, and I was still interested in what kind of communicative expectations and demands were raised by listening to a prophet’s voice – which was, not coincidentally, something I did semi-annually. And so the idea of looking into prophetic texts in the context of early print was born. When I first started working on the proposal, I had no idea if there would be anything to write about. I had no idea yet that the earliest vernacular printed book was the Sibyl’s Prophecy, or that there were over a thousand relevant editions from the first century of printing.

Nate Oman once wrote, somewhere on this blog or in an e-mail, that the maturing of Mormonism as an intellectual tradition would involve using Mormonism to critique other fields on inquiry, rather than making it only the object of inquiry. I did not write that kind of a book. It’s just another academic monograph with no relevance for Mormon studies. Even the book’s working definition of prophecy is very general rather than specifically Mormon. There are no hidden messages for Mormons in the audience. It’s simply a book written by a Mormon thinking Mormon thoughts and inspired by the events in a Mormon life, a book that was made possible in no small part by a not inconsiderable number of kind and helpful Mormons. Thank you.

Publicly expressing gratitude is a useful step in the development of personal beliefs because it is accessible to everyone. In comparison, figuring out one’s relationship with deity, or with a scriptural text, or with the process of sin and repentance and atonement, is hard. Just what do we mean when we say that a church is true, or that a book is true? For many people, figuring out how to ground statements like that in their own experience and cognitive constructs is not simple. Expressing gratitude, on the other hand, is a way that most people can begin connecting their lived experience to a religious framework using the formulas and institutions of the Mormon community. Statements of belief that aren’t yet fully anchored in personal religious conviction can often feel hollow, cute at best, and cynical at worst. By contrast, even a young child’s expression of thanks can be authentic.

The ‘thanktimony’ is in any case preferable to its alternative, which is, in many cases, nothing at all. A moment of gratitude can help avert some of the worst excesses of self-centered unawareness. You know the type: ‘“What has the church ever done for me?” asked BYU graduate Jedediah Blogs. “After all those summers doing dull work in my Stake President’s law office, I lost all interest in becoming a lawyer.”’ Whatever path one’s belief may take as an adult, a couple decades’ worth of friendly unrelated adults looking out for one’s welfare shouldn’t be taken for granted.

It is true that some people will stand up in testimony meeting and say how grateful they are that their kids are all active returned missionaries who have married in the temple – and that is how it should be. The only other options are for people to give thanks for something besides that which they are most thankful for, or to force them into silence. That surely can’t be the way for a community to function.

Expressing gratitude lets us contemplate our own lives and recognize what others have done for us, or the advantages we enjoy by accident of birth. Gratitude helps us understand that we are not the heroes in this film: bad things happen to good people in ways that we can rarely help and almost never understand. The commandment to acknowledge God’s hand in all things doesn’t permit us to wait until we’ve got the moral calculus of the universe figured out. We have to be grateful, right here and right now, for whatever it is we have. And that, I think, is worth a moment of our time during Sunday meeting.

For the BYU campuses, the results are about what you would expect from a private university with a national constituency but located in a large western state with a modest population. The largest contingents come from Utah, California, and other western states, with significant representation from the eastern U.S. as well. If you take a minute to compare BYU to other universities, you will find that the BYU student body has a geographic diversity in line with what you would find at other private national universities, which is significantly higher than most state universities. (There are undoubtedly similar statistics for racial, economic, and international geographic diversity, which this particular widget does not reflect. For what it is worth, the students who self-select for my classes at BYU-Idaho are about as diverse as the students I have previously taught at state universities, except for the fact that, you know, they’re all Mormons.)

There are a few surprises. While the larger states of the Midwest, Northeast, and South contribute BYU students in significant numbers, there is a band of states in the middle of the country, from North Dakota through Kansas to Louisiana, which relatively few BYU students call home. BYU-Idaho has become less Idahoan, with the Idaho contingent dropping from 30% to 20% of the freshman class over the last 15 years. BYU, on the other hand, has become more Utahan, from a recent low of 23% of freshmen in 1998 increasing to 32% in 2010, while the Californian contingent has declined. It will be interesting to see if the recent financial difficulties and tuition increases in the California public university systems will result in more Californians attending BYU.

1. Although the authors write that there is “considerable evidence” that Joseph Smith taught about a Mother in Heaven (71), the evidence is quite weak, consisting of writings made by others in late 1844 or 1845 (including Eliza Snow’s “O my Father”) months after Joseph Smith’s death, and conversations remembered several decades after the fact (see Derr 98–100). This is not what we usually think of as strong evidence that Joseph Smith taught something.

The lack of strong evidence tying a doctrine of a Mother in Heaven to Joseph Smith isn’t of overriding importance, however. A doctrine’s validity doesn’t depend on its origin with Joseph Smith, as Mormon belief accepts the need for continuing revelation. The doctrine of a Heavenly Mother also fits well with and can be seen as an outgrown of other theological innovations of Joseph Smith on the nature of God and marriage.

2. My second criticism is that the authors lump together two different statements about Heavenly Mother, dismissing one and spending considerable effort arguing against the second. The first is the folk doctrinal explanation that God has not revealed anything concerning Heavenly Mother because he would not want her name profaned. This is something I have heard before, and I suspect it’s an active part of Mormon folk discourse. Paulsen and Pulido cite its appearance in print and its mention at a BYU women’s conference (73–75).

As this seems like a fairly well attested and widespread idea, I think it deserves to be treated seriously as a part of Mormon discourse about Heavenly Mother, as it is no less based on speculation and analogy than any of the other statements about her. While it lacks the backing of an apostolic luminary, it’s not clear to me that something published in a Deseret Book publication in the 1990s by the managing director of the church’s Priesthood Department (Paulsen and Pulido 86 n. 8) is less significant today than a statement made by a general auxiliary leader in the 1890s, or how either of them stacks up against the democratic process of doctrine-making represented by folklore.

The authors never engage with the folkloric explanation of the lack of revealed knowledge concerning a Mother in Heaven but instead conflate it with a second and much different statement, namely that any discussion of Heavenly Mother is inappropriate. Paulsen and Pulido spend considerable effort tilting at this belief, which I hadn’t heard before, and their evidence for its popularity is fairly weak: they cite a work of fiction and an informal Internet survey (75). Or, rather, they cite a 2004 article that refers to a 2002 conference paper by Doe Daughtrey that mentions her informal survey of beliefnet.com readers, which gathered about 40 comments (Toscano 15, 22 n. 10). Neither Paulsen and Pulido nor Toscano provide a link to the original survey, and a quick search of beliefnet.com didn’t find it, so it may no longer be extant. (If anyone can find it, a link in the comments would be appreciated.) I don’t think a comment thread from 2002 can be taken as a representative sample of Mormon beliefs in any case. Moreover, does this non-doctrine differ in kind or only in degree from a reluctance to engage in excessive speculation? “Church leaders may well caution an individual to be respectful of and to avoid teaching unorthodox views about Heavenly Mother,” Paulsen and Pulido write in the conclusion (85).

The citation of statements by authorities both past and present about Heavenly Mother does demonstrate that Mormon leaders have not imposed strict injunction to silence, however, which undermines some criticisms of Mormonism to that effect (75).

3. The use of art and fiction to illustrate Mormon discourse on Mother in Heaven isn’t out of place. Paulsen and Pulido provide several examples of Mormon art and Mormon leadership engaged in dialogue with each other, beginning with Eliza Snow and continuing to the present.

The dialogue over “O my Father,” incidentally, includes both Wilford Woodruff calling the hymn a revelation, and Joseph F. Smith insisting that Eliza Snow had brought only poetic inspiration to one of Joseph Smith’s teachings, with each statement taking opposite views of the possibility of women receiving revelation for the church (see Derr 98–99).

4. “Nothing has been authoritatively revealed about Heavenly Mother,” the authors write, summarizing Gordon B. Hinckley (73). The reader needs to keep this firmly in mind when reading the various statements that Paulsen and Pulido have collected, all of which are the result of speculation and reasoning by analogy. To say that one knows something about a Mother in Heaven, including asserting her existence, requires some interrogation of what we mean by knowledge in the context of Mormonism. When Paulsen and Pulido write, “In addition to her participation in creation, Heavenly Mother helped the Father direct the plan of salvation” (80), this has to be understood as a transition between various speculations to the effect of the former and the latter, rather than an assertion of established doctrine.

5. The authors provide some truly eye-opening quotations of expansive statements concerning a Mother in Heaven. These are mostly restricted to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, a time period where we are accustomed to find public speculation among church authorities.

The most expansive statements also met with opposition, which shows where the limits of Mormon discourse on Mother in Heaven lie. George Q. Cannon spoke sharply and emphatically against deifying Heavenly Mother or making her an object of worship (Paulsen and Pulido 78). The most recent direct statement about Mother in Heaven is that of Gordon B. Hinckley from 1991, which arose in reaction to reports of members praying to Heavenly Mother, to which he gave an unequivocal rebuke. “However, in light of the instruction we have received from the Lord Himself, I regard it as inappropriate for anyone in the Church to pray to our Mother in Heaven…I suppose those…who use this expression and who try to further its use are well-meaning, but they are misguided” (Hinckley 100). Liturgical freestylers are not going to find much support in this article.

6. What Paulsen and Pulido are illustrating is less what we know about Heavenly Mother, but rather the functionalizing of Heavenly Mother in Mormon discourse. It seems to me that Heavenly Mother is made to serve just a handful of rhetorical functions. Against feminist critics since the late 19th century, the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother permits Mormons to claim a deification of womanhood found in few other religions (although less uniquely today than a century ago). Heavenly Mother also provides a way to project frequently feminized ideals of nurturing into the celestial plane. In addition, Heavenly Mother gives the ideal of companionate marriage between equal partners a heavenly equivalent and offers a useful rejoinder to critics of marriage as an institution of patriarchal domination. A Heavenly Mother also provides justification for the unique emphasis on family life and marriage as the highest of all sacraments in Mormon belief. In fraught discussions of women’s roles in the church and in Mormon culture, Heavenly Mother functions as a guarantor that current asymmetries are divinely appointed or will be made right in the hereafter. It would be interesting to look at how discussion of a Mother in Heaven reflects debates about gender relations on earth.

7. Paulsen and Pulido don’t give any examples of discourse about Heavenly Mother in the context of polygamy. Why didn’t these two doctrines intersect in the nineteenth century? Was there some kind of tension between them? That might be an interesting question to explore.

8. As Paulsen and Pulido point out, the Heavenly Father/Heavenly Mother binary pair creates an interesting and unresolved tension with Trinitarian formulations of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (79). Further analysis might usefully compare this tension in Mormon thought with high Maryology in Roman Catholicism.

9. In the final analysis, Paulsen and Pulido convincingly demonstrate that belief in the existence of a Mother in Heaven has been widespread among Mormon laity and leadership since the middle of the nineteenth century.

An additional question one might ask about knowledge concerning a Mother in Heaven is to what extent that knowledge is theological, and to what extent it is social. Beyond any theological propositions with which the proposed existence or qualities of a Mother in Heaven agree or conflict, belief is a matter of community. To what degree would one do violence to Mormon community bonds by denying the existence of a Heavenly Mother? Certainly there would be costs, as Heavenly Mother has come to play an important role in Mormon rhetoric concerning marriage and family, and in the beliefs of many Mormons. One hesitates to reject a doctrine that sat well with Gordon B. Hinckley, or one that can be found in the Proclamation on the Family.

Yet a Protestant-minded Mormon could probably reject the doctrine and do less damage to community ties than other kinds of doubts would, such as rejecting nineteenth-century polygamy as a mistake, or reducing the Book of Mormon to inspired fiction; there are members of the Mormon community who do both of these. Heavenly Mother is ultimately a doctrine based on speculation and analogy that lacks a foundation in scripture or in Joseph Smith’s recorded teachings or in revelation to any modern prophet. At the moment, Heavenly Mother appears to have bright prospects for the future, but not all doctrines born of nineteenth-century speculation have had a continued existence into modern Mormonism. If the tension between parental and traditional Trinitarian models of the Godhead became unsustainable, which would win out in the end?

* * *

If I’ve misread Paulsen and Pulido, please point this out in your comments; I’m not grasping for validation here. But I do insist that you treat one another respectfully, and that you save pointless insults for some other occasion.

Sources cited

Derr, Jill Mulvay. “The Significance of ‘O My Father’ in the Personal Journey of Eliza R. Snow.” BYU Studies 36.1 (1996): 84–126.

Hinckley, Gordon B. “Daughters of God.” Ensign Nov. 1991.

Paulsen, David L., and Martin Pulido. “‘A Mother There’: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven.” BYU Studies 50.1 (2011): 70-97.

Toscano, Margaret Merrill. “Is There a Place for Heavenly Mother in Mormon Theology?: An Investigation into Discourses of Power.” Sunstone 133 (2004): 14-22.

The Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession reminds attendees that refraining from using perfume, cologne, and other scented products will help ensure the comfort of everyone at the convention.

The MLA is an organization that knows something about holding meetings involving people with many different needs and backgrounds. Are allergies and other adverse reactions to perfume and cologne something we need to worry about in LDS meetings? I’ve never heard of this issue coming up, but it’s something that would be easy for people who aren’t affected to overlook or discount. Do we need to let go of our Obsession, change our Chanel, and stop using common scents so that a fellow ward member will be able to attend church?

Except in Mormon discourse. For us, the Middle Ages is largely limited to a “Great Apostasy” that is virtually interchangeable with the “Dark Ages” narrative: the common (but largely mistaken) notion that the Middle Ages were 1000 years of disease, violence, barbarous ignorance, popish corruption and feudal oppression (think: orcs with crude iron weapons shuffling towards the hamlets of Gondor), an ugly blot on the timeline between Rome and the Renaissance . While the Dark Ages narrative is quite common in society at large – see the wholly incorrect designation of violent jihad as ‘medieval Islam,’ or calls for an ‘Islamic Reformation’ – the Middle Ages are invoked in several other ways as well, including for sacral warfare (the Crusades), national origin (Charlemagne and Alfred the Great), rustic pastoral idyll (Hobbiton) and cultural, scientific, spiritual, and artistic union (the Cathedral).

These narratives are largely absent from Mormon discourse (which we’ll define here as “something you are likely to hear in General Conference, read in the New Era, or hear during Sunday meetings”). At the same time, these narratives are too useful to Americans to disappear entirely, or to be simply overwhelmed by the Dark Ages/Great Apostasy narrative. Where have the Mormon Middle Ages gone?

The functions of these narratives have, I think, been displaced from the Middle Ages to other times and places. Such as:

The Book of Mormon. If you want to see a good example of an oppressed band of Christians beset on all sides by heathen invaders who are divinely sent to admonish Christians to unity and faithfulness, you can read any number of medieval chronicles or epics, such als Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm. Or you can read Alma. For embodying sacral warfare, Charlemagne’s paladins have nothing on Helaman’s stripling warriors. Moroni’s Title of Liberty would not be at all out of place in the legends of Charlemagne’s foundation of the chivalric code in binding his knights by oath to defend their religion, their land, and their people. Thanks in no small part to the iconic images of Arnold Freiberg, the Book of Mormon occupies a thoroughly medieval part of our imaginations.

Nauvoo, Far West, the Mormon Trail, and early Utah. The Mormon past and current Mormon discourse have a surplus of Golden Ages where life was (supposed to be) simpler, the political direction of society was still married to its spiritual direction, pioneer children sang as they walked, and Mormon communities had a tabernacle for dancing, concerts, and worship. The Middle Ages get re-enacted today in passion plays, pilgrimages, and Renaissance fairs; Mormons have pageants, Nauvoo, and handcart treks. The European landscape is dotted with medieval ruins as monuments to a lost age in much the same way that the American west bears the remains of pioneer structures (and where ruins of either kind are lacking, they can be constructed from scratch).

The Present. What the Middle Ages offered to their Romantic admirers was a sublime artistic authenticity, above all in the cathedrals that united architecture, sculpture, painting, and music. Although the austerity of our chapels would pass inspection in Calvin’s Genevan, Mormon temples embrace the union of art and spirituality. The ways that monasticism is and has been depicted and deployed – ranging from spiritual idealization to artistic awakening to sexual objectification to vilification – maps fairly neatly onto discussions of the Mormon missionary experience, for good or ill.

Most Americans populate their imagined Middle Ages with dwarven architecture, elven wisdom, orcish oppression, and horse-borne warriors of Rohan. But for Mormons, all but the orcs have left Middle Earth, headed West in covered wagons.

To answer that question, I could have selected from a few different ways to bring the conversation to a sudden and awkward conclusion:

1. “In fact, the prohibition on caffeine is a folk doctrine (despite occasional statements by General Authorities to the contrary) that has entered the popular imagination, owing to what is an authoritative injunction against the consumption of coffee (including decaf) and tea (black and green, but not herbal). I believe the history of this teaching has been traced in a Dialogue article. Could I send you the bibliography?”

2. “While caffeinated drinks such as coffee and tea are proscribed, during my two-year missionary service I often accepted caffeinated cola drinks from generous people after I had declined their offers of wine, beer, and coffee. Would you like to know more about the missionary program of the church?”

3. “Oh, well, I sometimes still have caffeine. I know this might make me seem not so uptight as most Mormons, but sometimes I like to let it hang out a little.”

Instead, I opted for:

4. “I have only known life without caffeine.”

This proved to be a nice way to keep a pleasant and productive conversation from crashing to a halt. The main drawback of this response was that it wasn’t true. At that moment, I had a suitcase back in my room stuffed with some high-percentage chocolate containing appreciable amounts of caffeine.

(Kalamazoo has an Aldi, a discount grocery chain based in Germany that is a reliable source of excellent German chocolate at bargain prices, and we hadn’t seen one since moving west almost a year ago. So the day I arrived, I undertook a pilgrimage of two miles on foot to the store – but I felt as if I should have been on my knees, confessing along the way: ‘Yea, I have sinned the sin of ALBERTSONS against thee; lo, my heart hath gone after the strange idols of WALMART…’ I am now returning with a suitcase full of relics for my family. Aldi also had Nürnberger Bratwurst for sale, which I couldn’t cook and consume on the spot or bring back with me; sometimes relics cannot replace the real presence. Twice a store employee asked me how I was doing and I said ‘fine,’ when in fact I was having a quasi-religious experience. But I digress.)

For the truth of the matter is that neither I nor the person I was talking with were interested in moralized nutritional chemistry or in measuring my Mormonism by the microgram. Instead I wanted to indicate, simply and painlessly, that I happily self-identify as a Mormon, including with respect to the current boundary-markers of Mormonism. I sacrificed the smaller point to the cause of expressing a larger truth.

But I still feel uneasy about shaving corners off of complete accuracy, so if that person is ever curious if I have actually avoided all forms of caffeine, they can google me and find the truth, although the truth might make them flee.