The Mormon Experience:
Williams, Peter W.
Out-Americaning the Americans TIE MORNON EXPEUENCE: A HISTORY OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS Leonard J. Arlington and Davis Bitton Alfred A. Knopf, $15, 404 pp. Peter W. Williams MORMONS are hard to...
...True, Joseph Smith's remarkable revelations are difficult to verify historically (but they are equally difficult to disprove...
...A few years ago, I was sitting on my front porch on a very hot July afternoon, and spotted two young men with short hair, narrow black ties, and white shirts with long sleeves rolled down and buttoned...
...The authors of this new and comprehensive history of the Mormon experience in America are both practicing Latter-Day Saints, and are concerned not so much with refuting as with qualifying this stereotyped "Gentile" picture of Mormonism...
...Jack-Mormons" such as the Udalls are rule-proving exceptions...
...REVIEWERS ISIDORE SILVER teaches Constitutional Law and History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City...
...Commonweal: 94...
...teaches literature at Boston College...
...The Mormon Experience is for the most part balanced and scholarly, yet easily accessible to the general reader...
...Mormons, in short, have built a culture on out-Americaning the Americans and out-Protestanting the Protestants...
...Peter W. Williams MORMONS are hard to think about...
...THOMAS LeCLAlR teaches in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati...
...Mormons are bad to think for other reasons as well...
...But, strangely enough, they were not really Evangelical, and were most likely emissaries from the state-Kingdom, of Salt Lake City which seems as remote in its way as its alien neighbors, Las Vegas and Reno...
...To a large degree, Arlington and Bitton succeed in these aims...
...True, Mormons have often (but not always) been anti-intellectual...
...Their chapter on "Mormon Sisterhood," for example, is obviously a result of the challenge of contemporary feminism to historiography , and their discussion of the roles of Mormon women draws on new sources to challenge successfully the stereotype of the eternally quiescent female Saint...
...Here was American middle-class Evangelical culture—what Martin Marty has called "Reader's Digest religion" — apotheosized...
...Arrington and Bitton have the advantages of being judicious insiders, practicing historians, and writers whose perspectives are informed by the issues of our own day...
...Whichever way one turns for information, though, the Commonweal reader will find some acquaintance with the Mormon experience relevant as a case study in the growth of a "popular" religion, often highly unpopular with the general public, which has emerged to "respectable" status and in which the conflict between authoritarianism and obscurantism and more progressive standpoints recently developing sounds awfully familiar...
...For Mormons, the answer would seem to be "none of the above...
...It suffers as well as benefits from its joint authorship, however, in that the narrative often strays into the specialties of one author or the other— the parts on economic and agronomic developments tend to read like catalogues—and the two final chapters, with intriguing titles' like "Group Personality," tend toward incoherent hodgepodges having little to do with their titles' promises...
...As Will Herberg pointed out some years ago, Americans generally think of themselves and of others in terms of their membership, active or otherwise, in the Protestant, Catholic or Jewish communities...
...On the other hand, the insights and information which O'Dea, a sympathetic 15 February 1980: 93 Catholic sociologist, managed to provide in often more coherent form keeps his work fresh and accessible...
...FATHER J. A. APPLEYARD, s.J...
...In short, what we have here is an attempt by a team of quite liberal "insider" historians to present a sympathetic yet critical picture of Mormon life and history intended to modify the views both of the hostile outsider and the overly credulous initiate...
...Especially if our exposure to Mormonism comes at second-hand, most of us probably associate the Latter-Day Saints, as they are more properly called, with materialist theology, a simplistic moralism, an implausible supernatural Commonweal: 92 history, and, perhaps most vividly, a highly unattractive version of right-wing politics...
...PETER W. WILLIAMS teaches religion and American Studies at Miami University in Ohio...
...They are, in short, "bad to think" since they elude easy classification and, until recent changes in the world's connotation, were often lumped together with Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses as "cults...
...I knew what was coming, and was glad that an impending appointment was there to save me from the earnest felt-board lecture and testimonial which loomed ahead...
...His book Popular Religion in America was recently published by Prentice-Hall...
...True, Mormons have often (but not always) been anti-feminist (not to mention polygamous...
...True, Mormons have aften (but not always) identified with "conservative" political social and economic positions...
...Recently when a colleague called me and asked whether Mormons were Protestant or not, I had to hedge...
...Were I asked to recommend one book on Mormonism for the general reader, I would hesitate between The Mormon Experience and the late Thomas F. O'Dea's The Mormons (1957...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 3
