I’ve been reading lately, finishing a book called Turning the Tables about a handbell ensemble named Campanile and then going right to Latter-day Eloquence, in which I recently read Rachel Meibos Helps’s chapter about “Emmeline B. Wells’s Rhetoric of Religious Camouflage.” I’ve reflected on some of the similarities between the handbell community and Latter-day Saints before, but the juxtaposition of those two drove home one commonality in particular: the quest for respectability, legitimacy, and acceptance.

 

Latter-day Saints

On the Latter-day Saint front, Helps’s chapter focused on a presentation of Emmeline B. Wells at the World’s Columbian Exposition (the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893). That event has been seen as a turning point for the Church’s national image and modernization. The fifty or so years before then, the Church had driven its reputation among WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) Americans into the ground with theocracy, polygamy, and communitarian economic experiments, resulting in media and novels that used violent, lecherous, and not-quite-White Mormons as common stock villains and repeated efforts to bring the Latter-day Saints to heel through force via a military invasion and decades of legal attacks, ostensibly on polygamy. The 1890 Manifesto (Official Declaration 1) had helped alleviate the legal pressure by making the official policy change to abandon polygamy, but a cultural stigma against Latter-day Saints remained.

At the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Church made a multivalent effort at a public recalibration of its image. The Salt Lake City Tabernacle Choir was well-received and was awarded second place in the Eisteddfod (a Welsh choral competition).^[1] The Church also used the Utah exhibit at the World’s Fair to retool its image by portraying its members as pioneers who contributed to and revered American expansion.^[2] At the same time, women of the Church participated in events, giving speeches and networking, strengthening their relationship with groups like the National Council of Women and the International Council of Women.^[3] B. H. Roberts tried to make headway in discussing the history and theology of the Church at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, but was snubbed.

Emmeline B. Wells took a subtle approach to building respectability through offering examples of Latter-day Saint women poets and poetry. Helps observed, “Wells’s speech was part of her overall strategy to show that Latter-day Saint women could assimilate. She frames their writings as part of the greater women’s literary work in the Western United States. The effect was subtle; her overt purpose was to promote Utah women poets to an audience beyond Utah.” Countering negative stereotypes of Latter-day Saint women “as destitute, uneducated, constrained by their husbands, and more dedicated to their religion than their country,” Wells supplemented the speech with additional publications that constituted “an extensive defense of Latter-day Saint women as Christians who could serve others.”  By simply speaking “of Latter-day Saint women poets as if they had always been part of communities of Western women,” she focused on building a reputation of commonality and culture within the United States. Helps concluded by observing, “Such rhetorical efforts at commonality and societal assimilation remain a stable feature of Latter-day Saint identity negotiation into the twenty-first century.”^[4]

Despite Roberts’s rejection, the Church’s efforts at the fair were somewhat successful in improving its public image. The presentation of the Tabernacle Choir as a group of clean, healthy, and artistic Americans bolstered the public image of the Church. At the same time, the women strengthened their networking, and territorial representations did move the needle on Latter-day Saints being accepted as pioneering western Americans.

The Church has continued to work at earning and maintaining respectability among WASP Americans, which can be seen in the intense focus on saying we believe in Jesus Christ through adding the subtitle of the Book of Mormon, the structuring of Church signs and missionary nametags to feature the name of Jesus Christ, frequent statements about our belief in Jesus in general conference, the deemphasis of Moroni statues on temples and the terms “Mormon” and “LDS” as descriptors of the Church and its members, and the multitude of statues of Jesus now located at Temple Square.^[5] As the recent incident with the list of religions in the U.S. Military snubbing Latter-day Saints by not listing them as a Christian faith indicates, efforts have not been as successful as Church leaders would like, but the subsequent efforts of the government to step away from making theological decisions about who is or is not Christian in response to lobbying of Utah are a testament to the fact that progress has been made.

If the Latter-day Saint quest for respectability is shaped by the shadows of theology and history, a remarkably similar struggle plays out in a realm defined by bronze and baggage: the world of English handbells.

 

Handbells

English handbells have undergone repeated reinvention of their use and image. They were originally a practice instrument for change ringing of the tower bells, but developed into a form of entertainment at pubs and competitions in England, while being incorporated into traveling performance troupes in the United States and Australia as a novelty act.^[6] When those uses waned in importance, an American with training in change ringing named Margaret Nichols Shurcliff revitalized interest in handbells during the 1920s by incorporating them into a Boston Christmas celebration that drew national attention, sparking a movement of amateur hobbyists playing simple music on handbells.^[7] In the early 1950s, two Presbyterian Churches decided to incorporate handbells in their worship services, which sparked a new movement towards using handbells in Protestant churches. This has been the dominant use of English handbells in the United States ever since (with schools a distant second). Beginning in the 1980s, however, elite, secular community ensembles began to flourish, which have gradually been growing in importance and prominence in the handbell community ever since, with the Raleigh Ringers, Sonos, and Campanile being a few notable examples.

The series of historical transitions that the handbell tradition has undergone over the last few centuries and the amateur nature of many of its practitioners have resulted in skepticism about the instrument’s respectability in the professional music community. As Bob Avant, a handbell director in Texas, wrote, “Through no fault of our own but embedded in our history and development, we battle perception and acceptance of our art. … Our historical perceptions are: ‘church based’, ‘amateur’, ‘novelty’, and ‘Christmas season based.’ It is no wonder that we struggle to gain acceptance as year-round ‘real musicians’ who are equal to all the well-established professional performance idioms!”^[8] Just like Latter-day Saints have struggled to shed the public image of being heretics, polygamists, and fanatical dupes blindly following authoritarian leaders, no matter how mainstream its humanitarian or Christ-centered messaging becomes, handbells struggle to shed a public perception that pigeonholes them as amateur Church and Christmas music.

While many of the church handbell ensembles were and remain amateur endeavors of varying quality, the growth in the number of church groups in the 1950s and 1960s introduced an influx of professional, classically trained musicians. These professionals began to push for greater musicality in performances after observing the negative reactions of many professional musicians to how handbells were played at the time. This was where the thirst for respectability in the handbell community really began to emerge. The community handbell ensembles of the 1980s and 1990s continued to push towards a higher level of performance that could earn acceptance among professional musicians, while also trying to gain a larger public audience through playing music that appealed to more people.

The Turning the Tables book is a memoir about the experiences of one of the more groundbreaking secular ensembles, Campanile. While they weren’t interested in respectability among Classical musicians (they saw themselves as jazz musicians and mavericks), they worked hard for acceptance as a mainstream music performance group. They quickly became frustrated at the extent to which stereotypes limited their reception: “To anyone outside the small bell community, we were still just a bell group. We could play ‘Play That Funky Music White Boy’ stark naked, and people would still think they heard ‘Jingle Bells.’ No matter what our repertoire, they walked away mumbling ‘wasn’t that pretty Christmas music!’”^[9] Thus, they concluded “that the very existence of bells in our hands limited how people would see us. … The instrument itself prevented audiences from accepting our music as music.” They asked themselves a series of questions as a result that guided their future endeavors: “How would we overcome this? How would we move our audiences away from seeing us as a quaint bell choir, and experience us as they would any other musical group?”^[10]

In response to these questions, they made many different choices to shift these perceptions. They incorporated additional instruments like drums, piano, and woodwinds to become a musical performance group that used handbells. They also intentionally dressed like rock stars, incorporated dance into their routine, and did their best to minimize the presence of handbell tables on stage. In addition, they used rhetorical and rebranding techniques that they hoped would evoke a different response.

They were initially named the L.A. Bells, but realized, “Handbells came with too much baggage. The minute audiences hear that there will be a bell group, their minds would immediately think Jingle Bells and we’d be sunk.” They decided, “We needed something classy, erudite; maybe even something European sounding. We finally decided on ‘Campanile,’ an Italian word meaning Bell Tower. It fit the criteria perfectly.”^[11] They also refused to allow people to refer to them as a handbell choir, even though the term was the most common term used for a handbell ensemble: “The kinds of performing opportunities we were chasing were never going to hire a ‘choir’ of any kind, bells or otherwise. So it made no sense for us to be one.” Instead, they preferred terms like “Musical Percussion Theater.” In addition, they fought against using the term “ringers” to denote the people who play the handbells in favor of “handbell musicians” to emphasize that people who play handbells are musicians performing on a specific type of instrument.^[12]

This is very similar to the rhetorical and rebranding-focused shift away from using “Mormon” or “LDS” to emphasize the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ focus on Jesus Christ and shed some of the historical baggage that the term “Mormon” carries. (Though I still feel like it was a missed opportunity when they didn’t rebrand BYU as The University of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Located Forty Miles South of Temple Square For School, Home, and Church. It just rolls off the tongue so nicely and aligns better with the naming conventions the Church seems to like.)

In Campanile’s case, they felt they were only marginally successful in this effort. Even at the time the group disbanded in 2006 after twenty years of work, they still found that if “you ask a booking agent if they have seen handbells and they would say, ‘oh handbells. How sweet. We have those at our church.’ We’d never even get a chance to make our pitch to them, show them our video, or simply give them a card. They couldn’t conceive of handbells in any other context, and they thought that nobody would pay a dime to go see them.”^[13] Based on their experience, it is unlikely that a group whose foundational identity is handbell performance will achieve mainstream acceptance. It may be that rock bands, like OK Go, who incorporate handbells after gaining a following as a band, are closer to achieving this goal.

While Campanile is unique in many aspects, their thirst for acceptance as musicians is shared by many handbell musicians, who take different approaches, including an approach of mimicry to be seen as high-brow artists. Sonos, for example, is a California-based group that was founded in 1990 and focuses on classical music. Their founding director, James Meredith, explained that their foremost goal is “to expand the public’s awareness of what handbells are capable of” through high-quality performances of complex music. That includes a corollary of “letting composers know what’s possible,” to draw the attention of contemporary composers from outside of the handbell community.^[14] In selecting repertoire, Meredith has focused on transcriptions of classical music to show that handbells can perform well-respected music.^[15] Mirroring the efforts of Latter-day Saints like Emmeline Wells to portray Latter-day Saints as culturally sophisticated Americans, handbell musicians in Sonos portray themselves as classical instrumental musicians to gain respectability and acceptance in the classical music community.

There are also related efforts to gain legitimacy through academic publications. Alex Guebert’s 2014 thesis, for example, was “an affirmation of the handbell ensemble as a viable instrument for the arena of new music.” He explained the history of handbells and described a standard handbell ensemble before giving a detailed analysis of the sonic possibilities of the instrument. He concluded, “Composers have perhaps underestimated the handbell ensemble’s usefulness for new music composition; the ensemble’s versatility of color, texture, and visual interest has the potential to astonish audiences. … Composers should avail themselves of the many opportunities this unique instrument presents.”^[16]

Dr. Christian Nathaniel Guebert greatly expanded on his brother’s effort in his 2020 dissertation, providing a more thoroughgoing analysis of the sounds a handbell could make, along with an example of the type of composition he envisioned. He wrote, “The final aim of this study is to use these data to advocate for the handbell ensemble to be reconsidered as a viable medium of expression for contemporary composers rather than as a symbol of things amateur, educational, and publisher-driven.” It is a fantastic and in-depth analysis, and it includes a series of useful propositions for handbell ensembles to better integrate into the classical music community and “encourage a broader and more creative approach to the ensemble and its genre.” And at one point, he briefly wades into the topic of terminology for handbell ensembles:

Is the handbell ensemble the same thing as a handbell “choir?” To this day, most amateur handbell musicians themselves do not distinguish between the two words and tend to use “choir” as a simpler way to explain the group. But “choir” suggests multiple performers on the same part, and this is not the case with a single handbell or handchime group. “Choir” is also a term that does less to promote professionalism.

Christian Guebert’s contribution to academic literature was designed to increase the acceptance and respectability of handbells in the music community, much as Alex Guebert had in his graduate work before him and ensembles like Sonos and Campanile had through their performance styles and presentation.^[17] The long-term impact of their work remains to be seen.

 

Conclusion

Ultimately, the quest for respectability is a never-ending negotiation between how a community sees itself and how the world insists on framing it. Leaders among both Latter-day Saints and handbell musicians have proven remarkably creative in this fight—utilizing calculated shifts in language, academic advocacy, high-art repertoire, and public-facing diplomacy to rewrite their narratives.

But as both groups’ modest success demonstrates, public identity is sticky. Over a century after Emmeline B. Wells stood at the World’s Fair, and decades after the first professional handbell ensembles tried to shed the shadow of its use as an amateur liturgical instrument, the historical ghosts linger. Yet, this shared struggle reveals something resilient about subcultural life. Movements that care deeply about their craft—whether theological or musical—will always keep pushing against the edges of acceptance. Labels may change, and terminology will keep evolving, but the desire to be heard on one’s own terms remains a defining trait of both traditions.

 

Footnotes:

^[1] See Reid Neilson, Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael Hicks, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (University of Illinois Press, 2015), 38–45; Chad L. Nielsen, “Ringing for the Restoration: The Bells at Temple Square and the Expansion of the Tabernacle Choir Brand, 2005–2025,” Journal of Mormon History (2026) 52 (3): 106–143. https://doi.org/10.5406/24736031.52.3.05.

^[2] Brent M. Rogers, Buffalo Bill and the Mormons (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), 120; and Nathan Rees, “The Public Image: How the World Learned to See Mormonism, from Cartoons to World’s Fairs,” in Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader, edited by Amanda Beardsley and Mason Kamana Allred (Oxford University Press, 2024), 152–158; Jennifer Champoux, C. C. A. Christensen: A Mormon Visionary (University of Illinois Press, 2026), 86–89.

^[3] John Sillito, B. H. Roberts: A Life in the Public Arena (Signature Books, 2021), 191–192.

^[4] Rachel Meibos Helps, “‘Western Women Authors and Journalists’: Emmeline B. Wells’s Rhetoric of Religious Camouflage (1893),” in Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, eds. Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards (University of Illinois Press, 2026), 113–119.

^[5] I understand that surveys taken while they were deciding how to renovate Temple Square indicated that people knew that Latter-day Saints had a thing for seagulls, but they weren’t sure if they were Christian.

^[6] See Peter Fawcett, Ringing for Gold: Hand-bell Ringing, the Living Tradition The annals and development of hand-bell tune, edited by Philip Bedford (Leicester: Donald A. and Philip Bedford, Handbell Music Publishers, 2012); Anne Doggett and Gwyn Gillard, See How They Ring! Traveling Bellringers on the Australasian Popular Stage (BHS Publishing, 2011); William Butler, Musical Handbells: A Comprehensive History of the Bells and their Founders (Chichester: Phillimore & Co. LTD., 2000).

^[7] Margaret Homer Nichols Shurcliff, Lively Days: Some Memoirs of Margaret Homer Shurcliff (Taipei, Taiwan: Literature House, Ltd., 1965), 64–86.

^[8] Bob Avant, Advancing Towards Excellence in Handbell Ensembles, or “Let’s Be Frank” (Independently published, 2024), 62–63.

^[9] Roger Bowerman and Rima Greer, Turning the Tables: Exploring the Collaborative Creative Process (Above the Line Publishing, 2024), 28.

^[10] Bowerman and Greer, Turning the Tables, 35.

^[11] Bowerman and Greer, Turning the Tables, 17–18.

^[12] Bowerman and Greer, Turning the Tables, 83, 92. The name of the guild was changed after Campanile disbanded and due to a broader agreement with this idea in the handbell community rather than the direct efforts of Campanile.

^[13] Bowerman and Greer, Turning the Tables, 89.

^[14] Handbell Musicians of America, “Community Groups ThanksRinging 2025 – Full,” YouTube, November 24, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCJ17ZzdRfc.

^[15] Bowerman and Greer, Turning the Tables, 65.

^[16] Alexander M. Guebert, “The Modern Handbell Ensemble as an Asset to New Music: Expanding Opportunities in Extended Technique” (Master’s Thesis, Concordia University, Irvine, CA, 2014), 2, 24.

^[17] Christian Nathaniel Guebert, “Timbral Use of the Handbell Ensemble: Background, Analysis, and Strategies” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2020), 4, 46–47, 138–145.