I start with work, the labor I must do to live. I should like to be good at my job. I don’t have any particular desire to be at the very top of my profession. Academic stardom looks like rather too brass a ring to devote all of one’s energy on the greasy pole to achieve. I would like, however, to teach my students well. I would like to write things that help people to think better, to say a few somethings that will still be worth saying and reading a generation or two hence. To the extent that I have other intellectual ambitions, I would like to be remembered as one of the people who helped to push along Mormonism intellectually, a person who treated the Restoration with charity and respect and learned something from it, perhaps something that had not been learned before.

I would like to be a good husband and father. I want to teach my children how to be good and productive people. I want them to be kind, virtuous, intelligent, and hard working. I want to give them the foundations of a faith that will carry them through an eventful life. I want to play with them and enjoy the company of my little ones before time, in its brutality, carries them inevitably away from me. I want to make my wife happy, to serve her. I want more of those moments when she lights up at the sight of me without being aware that she glows. I want to be the means for her to be happy, productive, and content. I want to share TV shows and companionable reading together. I want to tend a garden with her and enjoy the fruits of our harvest. I want to hold her when she cries and be the person who makes her smile in the midst of her anger or frustration.

I have respect for the forms. I don’t need or even want my life to be some work that I author ex nihilio. Rather, I want to be rooted in a tradition and a people. Hence, I want to live a virtuous Mormon life not simply as an act of fidelity to God but as an act of filial piety to the people that have reared me. I’ve no particular ecclesiastical ambitions and I don’t enjoy being in charge or going to meetings. I would, however, like to serve diligently where I am called, and find ways of bringing some light or aid into the lives of those with whom I worship. I should like to keep my covenants, and follow God in the way that my fathers followed him. I always want “Come, Come, Ye Saints” and “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning” to reach down to some deep core of my identity, a core to with which I am reconciled and at peace.

I should like to feel the presence of God. I would like to pray so that at times I approach the throne of grace. I always want to experience the marvelous and excessive beauty of the world as a gift from a loving Father in Heaven. I want to be aware of the place in which I live, to know how the water drains off the land, to feel the rhythms of trees and birds and seasons, to feel the immediacy of God’s creation. I want to read scripture and poetry and let the language permeate my soul to some deep place before logic and analysis. Maybe, once before I die, I want write a poem that says a true thing, beautifully. I want to run and run and run, to float on my legs over the land and feel my body tired but strong and healthy.

When I die, I do not want to be lonely. I want to be surrounded by people I love – whether they are on this side of the veil or the other. I want to leave behind words and memories that will live on in this world when I am gone. I want to be happy to have run the course that I ran, to feel that I pushed through to the end of the race to which I was set. I want to be laid in a garden spot, some piece of land to which I am not a stranger. I want to be clothed in the robes of the holy priesthood in the casket, and I want my son or my grandson to bless the land by the authority of that priesthood to be protected to the hour of the first resurrection.

That, it seems to me, would be a good life.

Jews do well among conservative Christians and among liberal secularists. The reason for this is that while there is an anti-semitic strand in Christianity, there is also a philo-semitic strand that continues to see Jews as God’s chosen people in some sense and gives Jews a starring role in various eschatological dramas. Among conservative Evangelicals, for example, this shows up as Zionism from afar in the form of support for the State of Israel. Hence, conservative Christians — or some significant chunk of them — have theological reasons for happy thoughts about Jews. Secular liberals like Jews because there are a lot of liberal Jews. Hence, Jews are in the odd position of getting love for theological reasons from the right and love for political reasons from the left.

Mormons are in precisely the opposite position. Among conservative Christians — especially Evangelicals — there are strong theological reasons for disliking Mormons. (The theological reasons are coupled here with demographic competition for converts.) Secular liberals, on the other hand, dislike Mormons because they are political conservatives. Hence, Mormons garner hostility on the left for political reasons. There is not off setting love from the religious right, however. Hence, Jews are in the odd social position of being loved on both sides, and Mormons are in the odd social position of being disliked on both sides.

The summer seminars led by Professor Bushman beginning in 1997 pursued the theme of “Joseph Smith and His Times.” Participants were asked to connect the Mormon prophet to the religions, philosophies, and cultural formations of his period. More recently the seminars have posed the same question for Mormonism as a whole. How is Mormon thought to be situated in its broad cultural environment?

For the conference, participants are invited to make comparisons to large cultural systems such as democracy, capitalism, evangelism, or science, or to specific thinkers and movements. The aim is to highlight aspects of Mormon thought or praxis that emerge more sharply when juxtaposed against other cultural formations or intellectual perspectives.

Brief analytical reflections of about twenty minutes duration will be most suitable for the conference format. Friends and students of Professor Bushman are invited to submit.

Send a short (1-2 pp) abstract of the proposed paper, along with a short (1 p) C.V., to Spencer Fluhman at fluhman@gmail.com by November 1, 2010.

All the talk of pioneers, of course, is just a polite way of saying Mormons in public, and the point that it makes is correct: The Mormon pioneers in Utah were squatters.  There is a certain amount of tetchiness on this point in the comments at the DN site, but there isn’t any serious debate about this.  Granted, after the ceding of northern Mexico to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican-American war, Mormon immigration to Utah didn’t necessarily involve illegally crossing an international boarder (although there was some of that later in the 19th century), but the settlements up and down the Mormon corridor were settled by people who did not possess legal title to the land that they occupied.  Indeed, the editorial understates this, implying that after 1869 when the territorial land office was set up in Utah everything was entirely legal.  Not so.  It actually took a decade or two to sort out legal title to all of the settled land in Utah.

The editorial also understates the way in which the Mormon pioneers status as squatters effected their attitudes toward the law.  Mormons were hostile to federal authority for much of the 19th century.  Most of this had to do with polygamy and theocracy, but it would be a mistake — I think — to underestimate the impact of property law on events.  Some pretty solid modern scholarship has demonstrated that the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri (as opposed to the earlier expulsion from Jackson County) was orchestrated in part by a group of local non-Mormon elites who manipulated public sentiment against the Mormons as a way of getting their property.  At the very least, these elites profited mightily by snapping up Mormon “preemption rights” thereby reaping the economic benefits of Mormon improvements.  Thus, during the Utah period Mormons were in part suspicious of federal authority because they feared — not without cause as past experience showed — that formal land law could be used by enemies to confiscate their de facto property.  The result was a healthy dollop of contempt by Mormons for federal legal power and even — I believe — a certain amount of extra-legal violence (read “law breaking”) against claim jumpers, real and perceived.

There is another strand of thinking at work in the DN editorial, a strand associated with the work of Peruvian political activist Hernando De Soto and the Nobel Prize winning economist Douglas North.  Both of these thinkers have looked at the way in which informal and illegal activity can be formalized and brought within the legal domain.  Hence, North has argued that the origins of the rule of law in the Anglo-American tradition can be found in the formalization of land title in medieval England.  De Soto has argued that one of the chief impediments to economic prosperity in the developing world is the way in which the poor are excluded from the formal legal system.  In effect, they must exist as squatters.

Hence, this article is implicitly doing more than simply calling for immigration reform.  It is in effect arguing that the shadowy, informal, illegal labor market inhabited by undocumented immigrants is akin to the shadowy, informal, illegal system of land holding that Mormon pioneers (and medieval lords and peasants, the inhabitants of Brazilian slums) inhabited.  Just as the formalization of property rights in land allowed for economic flourishing, the formalization of property rights in labor — if you will — will allow for economic flourishing.

Aside from the merits of the argument, the DN editorial raises an interesting question: Is this a “Mormon” editorial?  Yes and no.  The example of Mormon pioneers serves two functions.  First it illustrates a point.  Second — and far more importantly — it appeals to a Mormon audience, inviting them to associate immigrants with pioneer forbearers.  In part this is simply a rhetorical move.  But in part it represents a peculiarly Mormon challenge to the claims of national identity to primary allegiance.  The idea is that if immigrants are like Mormon pioneers they have some claim to the regard of American Mormons in the face of any objection that they are not like Americans.  It is an appeal over the head of national identity to tribal and religious identity.  On the other hand, the arguments — especially the implicit appeal to De Soto and North — are not themselves peculiarly Mormon.  What we get is thus a marriage of Mormon stories and imagery to a-Mormon ideas, along with a subtle subliminal appeal to Mormonism’s most potentially radical political idea, namely the way in which it compromises allegiance to the nation state.

The Deseret News shouldn’t really exist.  I can’t think of any city in the U.S. of comparable size to Salt Lake that supports two major daily newspapers.  The DN is gambling that they can carve out a niche for themselves with — among other things — a stronger and more unique editorial voice, one that emanates from their “values.”  In this context, I don’t think that  values is simply a code word for “Mormonism” or “conservatism,” although at times it is both of those things.  Rather, I think it is an attempt to find a voice that combines an engagement with public ideas with some voice and ideas rooted in a Mormon milieu.  The possibility of such a voice is the final issue lurking within this editorial.

All in all there is quite a bit more going on here than one normally gets from the editorial page of a struggling regional daily.

For those who are going to be in Virginia next week, Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia is going to be hosing a conference on September 10th entitled “Embracing the Law A scholarly conference on Doctrine and Covenants 42.”  The conferences is being sponsored by the Richard L. Evans Chair for Religious Understanding at BYU, the Mormon Theology Seminar, and Southern Virginia University.  Details below:

September 10, 2010 • Free Admission

Session 1

9:00 – 10:45 a.m., Stonemetz Conference Room Jeremiah John, Southern Virginia University

Law and Church in Section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants

Nate Oman, William and Mary Law School “I Give Unto You My Law”: Section 42 as a Legal Text and the Paradoxes of Divine Law

Discussant: President Rodney K. Smith, Southern Virginia University

Session 2

1:30 – 3:00 p.m., Main Hall 337

Russell Fox, Friends University “Thou Wilt Remember the Poor”: Liberation Theology and a Radical Interpretation of “The Laws of the Church of Christ”

Robert Couch, Willamette University Consecration and the End of the Poor

Discussant: TBA

Session 3

3:30 – 5:15 p.m., Main Hall Ballroom

Karen Spencer, independent scholar “To Teach or Not to Teach”: Three Possible Interpretations of D&C 42:12-14

Kristine Haglund, editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought “The Beauty of the Work of Thine Own Hands”: On the Possibility of an Aesthetic for Zion

Joe Spencer, University of New Mexico “Remnants of Revelation”: On the Canonical Reading of D&C 42

Discussant: Scott Dransfield, Southern Virginia University

Today I would also like to speak about handcart pioneers.  In 1855 and 1856 Mormons across Scandinavia and the British Isles began gathering together their possessions and making their way to North America.  They were converts to the church.  They had heard the missionaries preach the gospel and the message of the Restoration.  They had been touched by the Holy Spirit and had been baptized.  They wanted to gather with the Saints.  They were looking for a better life for themselves and their families in America, but beyond that they wanted to gather to Zion and assist in the building up of the kingdom of God.  Many of them had scrimpted and saved for many years to have enough money to make the journey.

They traveled by ship and rail until the railroad ended in Iowa City, Iowa.  These Saints were poor and by the time they arrived in Iowa their money had all but given out.  Furthermore, the church was poor.  It lacked the resources to subsidize the purchase of the wagons and ox teams that were usually necessary to cross the interior of the continent.  So at the behest of church leaders these Saints built handcarts and resolved to walk the 1000 miles to Utah, pulling their possessions behind them.  The first handcart companies to set out left in late spring and early summer.  It was a long and exhausting pull, but they arrived safely in the Salt Lake Valley.

The last two companies, however, were delayed and they didn’t leave Iowa City until early July.  It was mid to late August by the time they arrived in Winter Quarters near present day Florence, Nebraska.

There they met Levi Savage.  Levi Savage was a remarkable man.  He had joined the church and gathered with his family to Nauvoo.  There he was a close friend of the Prophet Joseph Smith and after Joseph’s murder he went west with the Saints.  In 1846, Brigham Young asked him to join the Mormon Battalion, a unit in the U.S. Army, in order to raise money for the rest of the Saints.  Levi Savage joined and walked from Florence, Nebraska all the way to San Diego, California.  From there he walked north to San Francisco.  From San Francisco he walked across the Sierra Nevadas to rejoin the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley.  Brigham Young gave him a few years to catch his breath, and then called him on a mission to Siam, in present day Thailand.  It would be difficult to imagine a more remote place for a nineteenth-century American.  So Levi Savage walked to San Francisco, and then took a ship to Calcutta, India.  From there he struggled to make it to Siam, but he was unable to get there due to a civil war.  Civil wars were the sort of thing that could finally stop Levi Savage.  He did, however, make his way to Rangoon, Burma in present day Myanmar and preached the Gospel there.  At the conclusion of his mission he boarded a ship sailing west around the Cape of Good Hope to Boston and from thence he made his way to Winter Quarters.

Hence, when Levi Savage met up with the Willie Handcart Company he had literally walked or sailed around the entire globe at the behest of church leaders to build up the kingdom of God.  He was an experienced frontiersman, someone who knew what was involved in crossing the interior of North America.  He begged and pleaded with the European immigrants not to set out so late in the summer.  He knew that setting out so late was terribly risky.  They could be caught in early winter storms on the high plains hundreds of miles from their destination.

Levi Savage was much more experienced that the leader of the handcart company, James Willie.  Willie seems to have felt threatened by Levi Savage’s expertise and his strong opinions.  His ego and pride seem to have gotten involved, and he overruled Savage, insisting that the company would leave immediately.  At this point, Levi Savage got up and gave a remarkable speech.  He said:

What I have said [about the risks of setting out so late] I know to be true; but seeing you are to go forward, I will go with you, will help all I can, will work with you, will rest with you, and if necessary, will die with you. May God in his mercy bless and preserve us.

Why did Levi Savage go with the handcart pioneers?  He didn’t have to.  He didn’t know these people and had never met them before.  Their leaders had treated him badly.  But they were his people.  Their God was his God. (Ruth 1:16) They were not strangers or foreigners, but fellow citizens in the household of God.  (Eph. 2:19) Levi Savage had been baptized and had made covenants that he would bear one another’s burdens that they may be light, would mourn with those that mourn and comfort that that stand in need of comfort. (Mos. 18:8-9)  And he knew that the emigrants would need someone to bear their burdens, to mourn with them, to comfort them.

Levi Savage, of course, was absolutely right.  The handcart companies were caught in an early blizzard high on plains of Wyoming more than 500 miles from their destination.  They were unable to move forward, and the members of the company began to die of exhaustion, starvation, exposure, and hypothermia.

Brigham Young learned of the late-departing handcart companies in early October.  It was General Conference, and the Saints were assembled on Temple Square.  Brigham got up and said:

I will now give this people the subject and the text of the Elders who may speak to-day and during the conference. It is this. On the 5th day of October, 1856, many of our brethren and sisters are on the plains with handcarts, and probably many are now seven hundred miles from this place, and they must be brought here, we must send assistance to them. The text will be, ‘to get them here.’ I want the brethren who may speak to understand that their text is the people on the plains. And the subject matter for this community is to send for them and bring them in before winter sets in.

That is my religion; that is the dictation of the Holy Ghost that I possess. It is to save the people. This is the salvation I am now seeking for. . .

I shall call upon the Bishops this day. I shall not wait until tomorrow, nor until the next day, for 60 good mule teams and 112 or 115 wagons. I do not want to send oxen. I want good horses and mules. They are in this Territory, and we must have them. . . .

I will tell you all that your faith, religion, and profession of religion, will never save one soul of you in the Celestial Kingdom of our God, unless you carry out just such principles as I am now teaching you. Go and bring in those people now on the plains.

Brothers and sisters, suffering seems to be a major part of mortality.  Sometimes we suffer because of our own pride and foolishness, like Captain Willie.  Sometimes we suffer because of the sin of others.  And sometimes we just suffer.  Bad things happen to good people, and the Lord doesn’t really explain why.  He is very clear, however, on what we are supposed to do.

The Savior told a story about a man on the road to Jericho who fell in among thieves.  (Luke 10:30-37) They beat him, took all of his possessions, and left him for dead in the dirt on the road.  A Levite came along.  The Levite was a good person.  He was keeping all of the rules.  He no doubt had on a white shirt and tie.  But he walked by, leaving the beaten man in the dust.  Then along came a Samaritan.  I imagine that he was a bit scruffy.  He wasn’t as good a member of the church as he could be.  He wasn’t keeping all of the rules like he should.  But he stopped.  He bounded up the man’s wounds, picked him up, and carried him to an inn, and promised the innkeeper that he would pay for whatever was necessary to heal the man.

Brothers and sisters, we are surrounded by people who are suffering and who face challenges.  There are people in our families, in our ward, and in our community who are trapped in the snows high on the plains of Wyoming, who are lying in dust on the road to Jericho.  Our job is to go and bring in the people on the plains, to pick them up and carry them to an inn. This is our religion; that is the dictation of the Holy Ghost to us. It is to save the people. This is the salvation that we should seek.  I pray that we may do so, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Mormons of a certain bent (a bent that often leads to the bloggernacle) are prone to debate how one should relate to the institutional church and how one ought to think about trying to change it.  On one side are those who are concerned about institutional failings and wish to find better avenues for reform and better ways of protecting those who might be subject to abuse.  On the other side are those who seem to take a more passive or fatalistic stance toward the church.

It seems to me that what is at issue here is less one’s conduct than one’s emotional and intellectual stance.  In other words, I suspect that there is relatively little in terms of conduct that would differ between folks here.  We’re all interested in remaining faithful, contributing, serving, etc.  I suspect that none of us is likely to go along with some great evil perpetrated by the church (such evils being — in my opinion — mainly hypothetical intellectual playthings rather than regular aspects of lived experience). We can all think of changes that we would welcome and that we would be willing to act to bring about.  The difference, it seems to me, lies in the presence or absence of a particular kind of angst and how we interpret it.

I can’t help but notice the many places in which those calling for reform in the church invoke analogies to democratic liberalism.  There is a desire for participatory self-government, a fear of institutional suppression of rights or other kinds of abuse, a desire for an ever more egalitarian, universal, and inclusive kind of discussion.  Seen in these terms “fatalism” looks like an abdication of political responsibility, a failure to behave as virtuous citizens ought.  It seems to me that the spiritual angst here is a spiritual angst that is filtered through a set of political ideas, ideas that we would do well to treat with some skepticism.  Indeed, one of the intellectual virtues of a being involved in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and amodern (I say amodern because I haven’t figured out if the church is pre-modern or post-modern) way of life is that it gives one the resources to be skeptical about the democratic liberal universe.  Without the benefit of being embedded in such a way of life, democratic liberalism encloses us so fully as to become invisible.

Now my point here is not the glib, “the church is not a democracy” — although that is true and something worth thinking on.  Rather, my point is that I would prefer that my spiritual reactions to the church are expressed in an idiom native to the gospel and I fear that at times democratic liberalism is so firmly implanted in our intellectual and spiritual DNA that we denigrate legitimate spiritual stances that cannot be expressed in the idiom of virtuous citizenship.  I am not fatalistic, if by fatalistic one means to suggest an unbecoming abdication of agency.  I am hopeful and I am pragmatic.  In some sense this means that I am passive because I don’t believe that I can and necessarily should work dramatic changes in the community.  My pragmatism makes me extremely open to the notion of tinkering and playing around with new ideas and new practices.  In this sense I am entirely sympathetic to creating more and better modes of dialogue between members and leaders and the like, as I suspect that such things could prove useful to the kingdom.  My hope, however, is to be a tool in God’s hand, and this means that at times — often? — I am entirely content to do the best that I can and leave the rest in his hands.

I suppose that a big part of what makes me uncomfortable with spiritual reactions rooted in democratic liberalism is that embedded in such reactions is a notion of sovereignty in which we the people are vested with ultimate authority.  Hence, we worry about abuse and illegitimate authority and locate such problems in a tyrannizing other that is something separate from and threatening to ourselves.  Likewise, we see virtue within democratic liberalism as the proper assertion of self-sovereignty and we condemn fatalism as a failure to insist on sovereignty that ought to be insisted upon.  We see the man standing before the tank in Tiennamen Square and rightly regard it as an act of extreme heroism, one in which the legitimate authority of democratic self-ownership asserted itself against the illegitimate authority of force and tyranny.  We want to be like that.  We worry that we are not.  We worry that we are embedded in institutions that are more like the tank and less like the student.  This is the spirituality, if you will, of modern democratic liberalism.  It is a great, good, and noble thing.

The problem, however, is that in the end, we are not self-sovereign.  We do not own ourselves.  We were bought with a price and sovereignty lies elsewhere.  Our emotional and spiritual reactions must make sense of this fact and I suspect that it means in some sense the proper stance toward the church and kingdom will necessarily seem perverse and at times even pernicious from the perspective of democratic liberalism.

According to Orson Pratt, who presumably talked with Joseph about it, the Prophet did not receive revelations word for word.  Rather, he received impressions and ideas which he then clothed with words.  Even this model, I think, is too simple.  It still assumes a simple linear process where God implants an idea in Joseph’s mind and Joseph then writes it down.  I think that the process of composition was quite a bit messier and heterogenous than that.  Consider a couple of revealing incidents.  In 1829, for example, as Joseph and Oliver made their plans for the founding of a new church Oliver produced a text that was to serve as a kind of constitution for the church.  In the end, the text was not used, the forerunner of section 20 taking its place.  The text is written in the first person with the Lord speaking.  On the other hand, large portions of the text are copied from the ecclesialogical materials in Moroni in the Book of Mormon.  I think that the best way of seeing this revelation is as a text that Oliver composed in the first person in the Lord’s voice using previous scriptural texts.  The text was never used, but there isn’t evidence that Joseph objected to the way it was produced or regarded Oliver as doing something different than what he was doing.

Another revealing incident involves the compiling of the revelations for the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants.  A committee was formed to review the revelations and decide which were to be included and which were not.  Although I can’t cite particulars because my books are in my office, the committee seems to have been passing on whether or not the revelation texts produced by Joseph Smith were in fact inspired.  Interestingly, this was not seen as an all or nothing proposition.  Some were, some less so.  During this process one of the Twelve — William McLellin, if memory serves — insisted that he could write better revelations.  Joseph challenged him to do so, and everyone agreed that he failed.  What is interesting about the event is that the competition between McLellin and Joseph seems to have been in part a literary pissing match, McLellin objecting to some of the awkwardness of the language.  Joseph’s reaction suggests, I think, that he felt his literary acumen as much as his prophetic gifts were being challenged.  In other words, he saw himself as in some way the author of the revelations and saw McLellin’s challenge a s personal sleight.  The presence of the committee, sifting and judging the texts that Joseph produced, suggests that they also understood the revelations as in some sense being authored by Joseph, with their purpose being to judge by the spirit which of these texts was sufficiently inspired to acquire authoritative status.

In terms of genre the Doctrine and Covenants is extremely heterogenous.  Sometimes we have texts where God speaks in the first person.  Sometimes we have texts in which Joseph speaks in the first person describing some theophany or other event.  Sometimes we have snippets of Joseph’s sermons.  Sometimes we have press releases.  There is even variation in how the texts where God speaks in the first person were produced.

For example, section 121, 122, and 123 are all taken from a much longer letter written by Joseph in Liberty Jail to the saints scatter across Missouri and Illinois.  Section 122 is entirely in the first person with the Lord speaking.  Section 123 is entirely in the first person with Joseph and his associates speaking to the church.  Section 121 consists of a dialogue between Joseph and the Lord, with verses 1-6 being Joseph’s question to the Lord and the remainder of the section being Joseph’s answer.  When the original letter is read in its entirety, it is far from clear that Joseph is presenting its contents as a revelation — a “commandment” in the terminology of early Mormonism.  That is, he is not saying, “Here is the text of a new revelation.”  Rather it is a public letter.  The dialogue between Joseph and the Lord in section 121 (and continued in section 122) can be read, I think, as a literary conceit.  That is, Joseph is apostrophizing the Lord in his letter and then recording what he thinks would be the Lord’s answer.  After the fact, this literary aria is then recast as revelation and scripture.

I don’t think that there is anything wrong with any of this.  I don’t think that it undermines the Doctrine and Covenants’ claim to be scripture.  It does, I think, raise a couple of issues.  First, I think that it narrows the gap between both personal revelation and prophetic revelation as well as between inspired literary composition and revelatory composition.  Mind you, I don’t think that it collapses these distinctions.  It just narrows them.  As a historical matter, the it seems that at best only some of the texts in the Doctrine and Covenants acquired their scriptural status based on some unique “revelatory” means of production.  Others seem to have been judged after the fact as sufficiently inspired or inspiring to be included in the canon.

Second, it potentially raises questions about how to read the texts.  I am partial to extremely close reading of scriptural texts.  I like to puzzle through the significance of word order, phrases, sentence structure, and the like.  I think, however, that a dictation model of revelation cannot ultimately be defended.  This means that the justification for such close readings must rest on something other than a kind of Qua’ranic awe before the unmediated word of God.

Finally, it raises questions of authority.  This cuts in two directions.  On one hand, this may be troubling for some, as the strong presence of a Joseph as author within the texts seems to make them less divine and less trustworthy.  On the other hand, for those who are genuinely troubled by certain passages of the Doctrine and Covenants, being able to distance God from the troubling texts may be a relief.  Trying to figure out how to negotiate the authority of the text without falling into disappointed fundamentalism on one hand, and on the other a kind of facile religious liberalism that re-interprets the texts into nothing more than a recapitulation of contemporary mores is tricky to say the least.

I am skeptical.

Cooperation and trust, are, it seems to me key to the idea of Zion.  If the Lord’s people are of one heart and one mind they must be able to rely on one another and work well together.  Levels of trust and cooperation, of course, are not uniformly distributed across places, times, and cultures.  Robert Putnam, the contemporary guru of social capital theory, famously made his academic name contrasting the high-trust, high-cooperation society in northern Italy with the low-trust, low-cooperation society in southern Italy.

One of the big differences between northern and southern Italy is that the north is commercial and urban while the south is agrarian and rural.  This is not accidental.  As it turns out hunters and traders – stereotypes of heartless, acquisitive individualism aside – have higher levels of trust and cooperation than do that darling of progressive agrarian Zion theorists: the family farmer.  This actually makes a good deal of sense.  Hunting a whale takes a great deal of cooperation compared to say, plowing, planting, and harvesting a field of wheat.  Likewise, a self-sufficient nineteenth-century American farm family was far less dependent on trust and relationships with others than was, say, a clan of medieval Jewish merchants.

Indeed, for all his intellectual debts to the Southern agrarians, Arrington’s tale of Mormon co-operation in the nineteenth century centers around a peculiar accident of agriculture in the Great Basin: the irrigation ditch.  Farming in the Mormon corridor was only possible through complex and capital intensive cooperation of the kind most often associated with manufacturing rather than agriculture.  It is striking that in the more hospitable climate of Missouri and Illinois, Mormon communitarianism focused not on agriculture, but on city building.  Indeed, Joseph Smith recognized the centrifugal, individualistic pressure of agriculture.  The Plat of the City of Zion explicitly combated such tendencies by pushing Latter-day Saints off of their farms and into towns, although to be sure Joseph envisioned that the ultimate economic base of the Jackson County Zion was to be agriculture.

Berry and Nibley, in particular, are fond a presenting a kind of Manichean vision of economic life in which commerce and entrepreneurship are little more than rhetorical cover for rapacious charlatans.  There is, I think, something deeply and genuinely agrarian in this hostility and suspicion.  Ironically, the hostility and suspicion are also an example of the precisely the kind of attitudes that make agrarianism an imperfect fit at best with the idea of Zion.