making-mormonism

[making-mormonism]

For some additional context, fast days were relatively common holidays in colonial New England (New Hampshire abolished their annual fast day in 1991, replacing it with MLK Day), observed whenever the state legislature thought it proper to fast, often to repent for sins that had caused a natural disaster, to bless a harvest, or to mourn dead after a war.

Mormons had been instructed to fast on the first Thursday of each month as early as the late 1830s; the tradition reportedly started when JS was petitioned by the poor in Kirtland to encourage more charity work and food aid.

Members were to bring any foodstuffs they would use to prepare meals that Thursday, or equivalent cash—now called a fast offering—to the local tithing office or storehouse, whence it would be delivered to the poor free of charge. In the days before tithe barns and local bishoprics, offerings were generally given to a select community leader (often a deacon or a priest, before these positions were reserved for children in the late 1800s) at their private home, to the presiding elder or the missionaries of an outlying branch, or to the bishop of the local ward in later Nauvoo.

Fast offering was usually accompanied by a fast meeting around 2 p.m., an unprogrammed prayer and testimony service held by neighbours or friends at a private home, local tabernacle, public square, or the temples in Kirtland and Nauvoo (local meetinghouses were rarely constructed in most denominations until the late 1800s). Members were encouraged to think of the fast day as a second Sabbath; businesses were generally, though not necessarily, closed for the day.

While setting the fast day on a Thursday worked well in the insular agricultural Mormon communities of the Midwest and the early Rockies, in outlying Gentile-dominated settlements (and especially in industrializing Britain, where most members were employed in the mines and mills of Wales and Lancashire), where Mormon workers had to request their Gentile bosses give them unpaid days off once a month, it was unsustainable. Mission leaders in Britain gave Saints the permission to fast on the first Sunday of the month sporadically as early as the 1860s; as Rocky Mountain society industrialized and adopted the six-day workweek at the tail end of the 1800s, it became unsustainable there too.

On the first Thursday of November 1896, at the end of the apostles’ fast meeting at the Salt Lake Temple, a request from the British mission was read by Joseph F. Smith to the effect that fast meetings be held on Sundays church-wide, which was pretty readily accepted: the point of fast days after all was the fast, not the day. A circular was sent out to that effect in December, requesting that wards begin to fold fast and sacrament meetings on the first Sunday of the month, so soon as was convenient.

Nevertheless, the actual change took a bit. Mormons in northern Utah were still accustomed to travel to the Salt Lake Tabernacle to take the sacrament, listen to lectures and talks, and occasionally partake in a communal feast on the first Sunday of the month, and while attendance was declining as more and more wards began conducting sacrament services in their own meetinghouses, abrupt change would have been unpopular. Many wards had also set apart Thursday afternoons for weekly ward business meetings anyways: if members were already going to meet, why change?

Wards with high numbers of British or working-class Saints were generally the fastest to change, with George Q. Cannon officiating a local ward’s first Fast Sunday in February 1897 (after having attended the apostles’ Fast Thursday three days prior; their January 1897 Fast Thursday had even been a sacrament meeting, reflecting a time when Mormons still took sacrament sporadically). On the other hand, in some country wards and in the Mexican colonies, Thursday fast meetings were held as late as the 1940s, though most wards changed to Sundays as early efforts towards correlation were rolled out in 19-aughts.

The history of fast meetings in other Latter Day Saint denominations is less well documents. Organized, regular fast meetings broke down as Church organization in the Midwest did in the 1840s and 1850s, though fasting before the sacrament service (usually on the first Sunday of the month) was common enough in the Reorganized Church by the end of the 1800s. While this is uncommon today, the RLDS/CoC has also observed Easter, and in turn Lent, since the 1870s, in line with other Mainline Protestants who had begun to take the holiday more seriously after the Civil War. (The LDS Church, as well as most of the major minor Latter Day Saint denominations, does not observe Easter, though the holiday has seen greater emphasis in the past few years under Nelson.)

Interestingly, fasting is not discussed at all in the Strangite Book of the Law of the Lord, which instead commands communal feasting on Sabbaths, days of thanksgiving and memorial, and for the firstfruits harvest. Other Latter Day Saint denominations will occasionally declare an extraordinary day for prayer and fasting (the Bickertonites, for example, had one in early 2020), though none, so far as I am aware, do so regularly.

According to my LDS Temple Calendar, today is the 128th anniversary of when fasting occurred regularly on the first Sunday of the month. So happy first Sunday fast Sunday day!

[making-mormonism]

The Institution

In the version of the first vision that is most frequently quoted by church members, I find the question posed by the 14 year old, soon to be prophet, rather telling.

He does not ask a personal question, such "how can I be a better disciple of Jesus Christ?" Or even more biblical "what lack I yet?"

Nor does he ask a more general question like "how can I help people more fully come unto Christ?"

The question he poses is an institutional one: "Which of all the sects was right, that I may know which to join." (JS History 1:18)

It should be noted that this account was not drafted until 1838, and is likely not a perfect recounting of events but rather a recounting with a purpose. If you are trying to convince people that a church is the one true church of God, the question that initiated the vision had better be about churches.

I think, however, this institutional focus looms large in our church, exacerbated by correlation efforts in the latter half of the 20th century. In many ways, the church has survived and thrived off its institutional design.

As I see it, the church has two aspects that constantly create tension: the centralized institution (think church headquarters) and the local congregation (think your ward or branch). Historically, the church has oscillated between different approaches: at times highly centralized, others more localized. In the modern church, it has struck a rather successful balance between the two, and landed in what I like to call the "franchise model".

My mother likes to say she loves that church is the same no matter where she attends. And generally that's true--she knows she can share her testimony on the first Sunday of the month, she knows what class to attend for second hour, and she knows when to sit, stand, sing, and say amen.

In truth the structure of the church on this tightrope between the top down approach of the centralized church and the bottom up approach of the localized church is a marvel. The average member feels empowered at the local level while supported by a larger framework maintained by a centralized group. Local leaders are volunteers (sort of), so less likely to be swayed to corruption, while the central leadership is full time with the capacity to address sweeping and large issues.

But these two structures pull against each other too. Local congregations can veer too far from the comfort of Central planning and can have their autonomy reduced (see women on the stand in California). Central leadership can implement policy that is difficult to enforce at the local level that will just kind of be forgotten (see the countless examples of leadership roulette).

Central leadership's goal is to maintain the institution and keep the train on the tracks, where the local congregation's goal is to foster community. And between the two is the estuary of middle-management who are trying support both at the same time (a confusing and thankless task if there ever was one).

These goals can be tricky to support and are often contradictory but can be advantageous to the church as a whole.

You've probably seen this in action. If someone in your ward mistreats you and you offer this as reason for no longer attending, you are often reminded that the church is more than the local community, it is a global Church run by God and you shouldn't abandon it because of a less than stellar ward environment. Similarly, if Central Leadership proposes a policy that marginalizes you or othes, the defense is to remember how great a community of saints exists and how much you are loved.

This makes it difficult to criticize, advocate or create positive change in the church. While grassroots movements can work, it is important to see how both sides of the church work and in what ways they are interconnected and how they are separate. A movement solely focused on improving the community does not change damaging centralized policy or teachings, likewise even perfect policy will not create the desired effect if the local community is hostile or otherwise unable to implement it.

From the very beginning of the LDS tradition there has been an eye towards institutionalism. Much more can and needs to be said regarding how Christ fits into the institution, but this post is already too long to tackle that. So, I'll leave it here for now.

[making-mormonism]

Some relevant paragraphs from the essays in Grant Hardy’s new Oxford Annotated BoM:

Coming at a time when many citizens of the United States were trying to imagine what their national destiny might be, the Book of Mormon taught that America, no less than the Holy Land, had a key role to play in God’s plans for humankind, particularly in the last days leading up to the Millennium. According to the new scripture, European settlers were only the most recent immigrants to be led by God to the New World, and they had a chance to avoid the tragic fates of the Jaredites and the Nephites who had preceded them. As Mormon prophesied, addressing his readers directly:

We can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them. … And this [the Book of Mormon] cometh unto you, O ye Gentiles, that ye may know the decrees of God—that ye may repent … that ye may not bring down the fulness of the wrath of God upon you as the inhabitants of the land have hitherto done. (Ether 2.9, 11)

This ominous warning of recurring destruction reflects the book’s premillennial temperament, which stood in contrast to competing ideas of American progress. The land was especially blessed, but the inhabitants could come and go in typological reenactments orchestrated by God. Thus the American experiment from Columbus to the Puritans to the Revolution (all alluded to in 1 Ne 13.10–19), which came at the expense of indigenous peoples, was not necessarily bound to succeed. The Book of Mormon evinces considerable anxiety about the precariousness of freedom, morality, and Providential favor as it illustrates the dangers of pride, rebelliousness, false religion, and corrupt government, along with class and ethnic divisions.

White Americans were meant to identify with the “Gentiles” in the Book of Mormon (as in 1 Ne 13–14), while Native Americans were to see themselves as the descendants of the Lamanites. The relationship was to be proselytizing with the assistance of European settlers to indigenous peoples rather than conquest, with Indians eventually being restored to a position of prominence. Unrepentant, disbelieving Gentiles, however, would be scourged by latter-day Lamanites (3 Ne 20–21)—a threat that seemed to envision a resurgence of the sort of tribal alliance that Tecumseh had put together before his death in 1813. Early Latter-day Saints believed that these events were imminent and would take place within the territory of the United States, though uncertainties in prophetic chronology and geography left open the possibility of later fulfillments across North and South America.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the ancient inhabitants of the New World were described more in biblical terms than in nineteenth-century Indian stereotypes. The Book of Mormon mentions in passing the “Great Spirit” (eighteen references, all in Alma 18–19; 22), mound-building (Alma 16.11), and burying weapons (not explicitly identified as hatchets or tomahawks [Alma 24]), but Lamanites are never described as red men, and there are no references to wigwams, moccasins, blankets, feathers, or canoes, all of which appear in the “Book of Pukei” (an 1830 parody of the Book of Mormon), Oliver Cowdery’s 1831 address to the Delaware Indians, and an 1835 LDS hymn. Nephite relations with the Lamanites roughly paralleled those of white settlers to Native Americans in scenes of missionizing and warfare, but the ethnic boundaries were more porous in the Book of Mormon, with Nephites becoming Lamanites and vice versa, and a surprising reversal of spiritual roles in the generation before Jesus’s visitation. In the Mormon scripture, the Nephites were generally more civilized and blessed than the Lamanites, yet the book’s prophecies foretold a time when American Indians would enjoy divine favor as covenant Israel, while European immigrants would be guests on land that God had given to the indigenous peoples as their perpetual inheritance. That is to say, white settlers would gain salvation and a share of that inheritance only if they were adopted into the covenant that God had made with the Lamanites and their native descendants.

(p. 789–90)

For what it’s worth, I don’t necessarily agree with Hardy’s reading. I think the adoption of Gentiles into the Lamanite covenant as discussed in the BoM should be understood as a kind of trans-racial adoption, wherein Gentiles become not just part of the Kingdom of God in America alongside and underneath the Lamanites, but are made indistinguishable members of the One People Israel in America, mirroring JS’s thoughts on Gentile Christians and their not-necessarily-supersessionist relationship with Jews, but also the ways in which white settlers adopted American Indian names, imagery, children, and practices as they—especially on the Western frontier (consider someone like Davy Crockett, or any number of other settlers who “went savage,” many of whom were storied in JS’s day, or even the Mormons, who were themselves regularly targeted by Gentiles for becoming too much alike the Indians [see W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (OUP, 2015) for more on this])—came to understand themselves as emphatically American, firmly attached to the American continent, rather than as temporarily removed Europeans.

I should also note that “and build a power independent of the US government in those regions, along "theodemocratic" lines” is a bit ahistorical/presentist here. JS’s original intent was almost certainly to redeem the whole of the American people and the US government along with them; he didn’t really turn towards his more nationalistic understanding of the Mormons as a separate covenantal people group who deserve religious autonomy within the US government until the Missouri period (1837–1841), and given his presidential election campaign in 1844 he doesn’t seem to have ever truly given up the idea in the way that Brigham Young had in the aftermath of the Martyrdom. Theodemocracy as we think of it today also wasn’t developed until much later on. While there are inklings in the BoM of a state ruled by godly judges who listen to the “voice of the people” after the abdication of Mosiah II, the book also speaks just as highly of a more traditional theocratic monarchy under Benjamin and the Mosiahs. Outside of the text, it’s not until the Missouri and Nauvoo (1841–1844) periods when JS really moves beyond more traditional notions of a theoretical kingdom of God represented on Earth by a church whose members vote on church matters (found in any contemporary congregationalist or synodal church) to one where the Kingdom of God shall be made manifest on Earth as a liberal state “where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness[, a]nd where liberty, free trade, and sailor’s rights, and the protection of life and property shall be maintained inviolate, for the benefit of ALL” [Times and Seasons 5:510 (Apr 15, 1844). Also important to note that this system, as spoken of by JS and WW Phelps here, is strongly predicated on exaltation, a concept which is theologically absent from the BoM], and only later still under the heights of Young’s presidency in the 1860s and 1870s that the term reaches our modern understanding of it, where the Church maintains significant control over large-scale civil institutions through the control and devotion of rank-and-file members. (Though, of course, we can—and probably should—read the Nauvoo period as a precedent to this, and certainly anti-Mormon activists from the surrounding area did. We should also, for what it’s worth, consider these developments within the context of American popular anti-Catholicism, which targeted the Mormons under similar anti-popery and anti-clerical messaging.)

other future plot points:

- Founderism (Protestantism + American Civic Religion with canonized myth-historic Founding Fathers) has a religious schism between the Founderist pope (based in Disneystadt) and the Founderist antipope (based in the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid).

- the State Pantheon’s prophecy regarding the next Contingent, a figure capable of embodying the Contradictions of the Material (in the same ballpark as the Innocents from Disco Elysium). Most of the cast will attempt to claim that they are the Contingent at one point or another.

- The governors of the American League’s constituent states being like “can you believe people elected a vtuber? what an embarrassment” as if they aren’t all just as embarrassing.

- whirlwind romance B-plot where Liam becomes Jacob’s newest maidboy and Sunny recruits him to discreetly keep an eye on Jacob because she doesn’t trust him not to leave confidential information lying around. When asked why she doesn’t just hire some traditional opsec agents, she replies “because that would be boring.”

- Orbital fabricators exist in space but they’re mostly an excuse to dodge earth-based labor laws.

- there’s this guy who claims to be an ancient Jaredite who has conquered a large portion of former Iowa and claims that it’s the ‘Narrow Neck of Land’ from the Book of Mormon and he’s being revenge-funded by Marcus Aurelius Bezos in order to cause headaches for Sunny. There’s an actual plot here trust me

[making-mormonism]

There actually isn’t much scholarly written on the dearth of holidays in the Mormon tradition, but an almost conscious lack of holidays has actually (and sadly, imho; I strongly endorse this post) been a part of the Latter Day Saint movement since its earliest days. The word “Easter��� doesn’t even appear in the entirety of the Joseph Smith Papers, and Christmas is treated primarily as a secular occasion for a community feast, rather than what might be expected in a purportedly Christ-centric holiday.

I’m still doing research for a much longer essay on this topic, but the gist is that holidays—specific days devoted exclusively to religious activity—simply weren’t all that important in the early United States, especially in the Northeast where the Latter Day Saint movement was fostered.

On the one hand, this is because the Revolutionary United States was notably secular. A significant number of the Revolutionary generation were deists or universalists, or even atheists, without any particular religious affiliation (and even if they were affiliated, church attendance was at an all-time low), and thus no particular inclination to celebrate religious holidays. On the other hand, the more devoutly religious among early Americans—Quakers, Reformed Baptists, and Pietists especially—found the idea of cordoning off religious activities to specific days to be anathema to the very idea of living a godly life, one where every day should be a holy day.

Joseph Smith seems to have taken this latter stance as well. It’s not he didn’t give sermons on Christmas and Easter—he did, and regularly. The King Follett discourse, for example, where JS explained exaltation in depth for the first time, was given on Easter Sunday 1844, seemingly by accident. It’s instead that JS was giving sermons upwards of four or five times a week, and so the 25th of December or the 7th of April, or even Sundays, weren’t especially important to him, no more or less deserving a talk or a testimony meeting than any other day.

(This is also why Sacrament meetings weren’t held regularly on Sundays until the late 1850s—in the Nauvoo period and earlier, bread and wine/vinegar/water could be administered on any day the community felt worthy enough to take it.)

Early Mormons likewise, having grown up in culture largely without holidays, saw no particular reason to push for special devotion on any particular day, and thus, a holidayless tradition was born.

Of course, things are a bit different now. Holidays are an important part of religious identity and community building, and Mormons should have like forty of them, just for fun. If every day is a holiday, none of them are. Might I also recommend that you make the way you celebrate each holiday meaningfully distinct, to help you remember why that day in particular is important, and so that you have a different reason to look forward to each one. I think we should crowdsource this.

But like, why don't Mormons have special holidays. We celebrate Christmas & Easter, along with everyone else. Other than that, nope

We have so much that separates us, so why not embrace it. We can celebrate:

March 26- First Vision Day

April 6- Church Restoration Day (it usually matches with Conference, which is probably the closest, so nevermind)

May 15- Priesthood Restoration Day

June 27- The Martyrdom (a Day of Mourning)

July 24- Pioneer Day (it's a Utah State Holiday, sure. But does it really reach that far past Utah)

September 23- Gold Plates Day

Dec 23- Joseph Smith's Birthday

And almost definitely more

I mean, sometimes some Wards will do things to celebrate them (like how my Ward had a Priesthood Campout that one time). But the fact we, as a whole, don't have a chance to collectively celebrate our History makes me kinda sad. And if we made these Holidays official, we can take them off work, and spend time with our families (which is what this whole Church is all about: being with family, forever)

(I'm also in favor of celebrating holidays in Wider Christianity, like Advent & Ash Wednesday. But this is a Mormon Specific Post)

[making-mormonism]

I think I get where you’re coming from, but I also think this is a misreading of the situation, especially as it exists today.

To start with statues and the like, Mormons are actually rather aniconic. While artistic depictions of religious scenes are certainly not banned (and indeed films and paintings have always been important instructional tools in the Church in lieu of anything like an official catechism), not only do images and objects play virtually no role in Mormon worship, but Mormons even avoid devotional items like crosses and prayer beads, which even many Protestants would feel goes a bit too far. Church meetinghouses are almost all, in a word, austere: sure there are various paintings scattered around the hallways and offices (the works of John Scott, Harry Anderson, and Del Parson are especially popular), but the walls are all whitewashed and the wood panelling plain, and the chapels themselves are required to be devoid of almost any decoration whatsoever, save maybe an American flag in the corner.

Only in temples does art play an actually important role in ritual, and even then, the murals painted onto the walls of ordinance rooms and the films shown in them are far more atmospheric, symbolic, and instructional than anything particularly akin to the iconodulia of Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Same with the bull statues that hold up the Brazen Sea fonts (where Mormons perform baptisms by proxy for the dead), and the sun-, moon-, and starstones that decorate temple doors and pilasters. The only other statue that plays a key role in the Church is the Angel Moroni blowing his trumpet, which in lieu of the cross has long been the main symbol of the Church on steeples and gravestones, but even then I think conceptualizing the Angel Moroni as an icon is misunderstanding its role. (I guess there’s also beehives? Choose the Right rings? Nothing particularly iconophilic though, I don’t think, at least no more so than Stars of David or WWJD bracelets are. Though I will come back to this.)

The Christus statue was only adopted in the early 1960s, at a time when the Church was desperately attempting to leave behind its associations with weirdness and paganism and join the American Protestant milieu of the Fourth Great Awakening, and was chosen specifically and explicitly as an outward-facing symbol—in order to project an image of Christianity towards non-Members (again, in lieu of the cross, which Mormons don’t use)—not an inward-facing one for Mormon devotion. In turn, the Christus has always only ever been erected in places intended for non-Members to learn about the Church, like temple Visitors Centers and the occasional Mormon Pavilion at a World’s Fair (most notably in 1964), and is never (so far as I have ever heard) present in temples or meetinghouses themselves.

The Christus was actually only adopted as the symbol of the wider Church in 2020, as part of President Nelson’s efforts to roll back Monson-era “I’m a Mormon” pride and again emphasize the Church’s fundamentally Christian nature to outsiders (this is the same reason the Church’s website is now churchofjesuschrist.org instead of the much more useful lds.org). I think there is something to be said about “Mormon leaders were drawn to Protestant art made in a Neoclassical style”, but I think that something is less “Mormons are drawn to Catholic imagery in particular” and is instead more “American conservatives like the aesthetics of Ancient Rome”.

I also wouldn’t read too much into the role of the Quorum of the Twelve in selecting the President; that’s more a byproduct of the largest body of the post-Martyrdom Church gaining its legitimacy by uniting around the Quorum and its president Brigham Young than anything particular to JS’s visions for the future of the Church. (Though I can’t seem to find the other post this is referencing where you make the “Americanized remake” argument, so I don’t know if you’re arguing that it’s just an interesting parallel or if it was actively intended.) For what it’s worth, it’s actually more likely that JS had intended for the presidency to be passed down through the male line to his son Joseph Smith III, with the Quorum or his brother Hyrum acting as a regent until JS3’s majority (the practice adopted by the RLDS when they reorganized after the collapse of the Strangite Church), or had otherwise intended for revealed candidates to stand in semi-democratic elections held by the Mormon people (possibly mediated by an electoral college like the successors of the Council of Fifty).

I also think it’s important to note that the Mormon Restoration of prophecy predates the First Vatican Council—where papal ex cathedra declarations were rendered infallible��by some fifty years, and that Mormons have always framed prophecy and revelation in terms of the Old Testament nevi’im, whereas papal infallibility is more like how you can’t appeal a Supreme Court decision. (Check out D&C 28:2-3 (1830), where, after another early Mormon named Hiram Page claimed to have received a revelation about the true location of Zion and the proper organization of the Church, JS sets him straight and establishes himself as the sole prophet of the Church by likening his relationship to God and Oliver Cowdery to that of Moses to God and Aaron.)

I do think there is a useful comparison here though, which I think you’re getting at: where the young Catholic Church adopted the administrative trappings of the Roman State, organizing itself into ecclesiastical dioceses and prefectures parallel to the civil ones and turning its Holy Orders into a kind of progressive cursus honorum justified through popular acclamation and imperial-papal consent, so too did the young Church of Christ look to the United States with its presidents and committees and councils and quorums and appointments confirmed by common consent. It’s no coincidence that the smallest unit of the LDS Church shares its name with the local electoral wards they were once coterminous with in Ohio and Illinois.

That said, I also think most of the organizational parallels between the LDS Church and the Catholic Church are simply down to the Catholic Church being, like, the prototypical hierarchical organization. The Watch Tower Society railed against Catholic organizational hierarchy in its early years, and yet as the Jehovah’s Witnesses movement began to grow and spread across the country, they too started to create bodies that paralleled their Catholic counterparts, with a president selected by a central all-male and infallible Governing Body overseeing branches which oversee local congregations.

Plus, the actual meat on the Mormon hierarchical skeleton is very different from basically any other Christian organization, let alone the Catholic one. Sure there are deacons and elders and priests and bishops, but any Pauline organization would have those, while they most certainly are not liable to organize them into a Levitical Order and a Holy Priesthood after the Order of the Son of God, or to create parallel women’s and youth organizations like the Relief Society and Young Men’s and Young Women’s. And while LDS bishops do provide pastoral care (at least to some degree) to congregants, I think to equivocate them with a Catholic priest or even a Protestant pastor is missing important parts of the Mormon experience. Sure bishops may “preside” over sacrament meetings, but they play virtually no role in the actual rituals: they don’t lead a Mass (a kind of liturgy which doesn’t exist in the LDS tradition), they don’t consecrate or distribute Communion (which is instead done by deacons, teachers, and priests, most of whom have been teenagers since the late 1800s), they don’t even give sermons! (It seems to be relatively unknown outside of the Church that the most part of an LDS Sunday service consists of two or three “talks” given by laymen to the congregation. While the bishopric does choose who gets invited to speak and usually gives them a fairly broad topic to speak about, the bishopric has little to no oversight over their actual contents. The only exception is talks given to the whole Church during General Conference, which are vetted for doctrinal accuracy by the Apostles first.)

Anyways, on to relics.

Basically, in line with what @hybridzizi said, relics in the Catholic sense play no role whatsoever in the LDS Church today, and their role historically has been rather marginal—certainly nothing akin to the well-developed cult of the saints in early Christianity. Mormons don’t make pilgrimages to see relics (or if they do, they do so out of historical curiosity, rather than religious obligation), and they don’t build or consecrate reliquaries, temples, churches, or altars (insofar as altars even exist in the LDS tradition) to house them. And certainly today they don’t believe that relics have any particular miraculous powers to heal or encourage saintly intercession on their behalf, and they wouldn’t give a relic any kind of special devotion outside of its historical and spiritual significance as a symbol of their faith. I can totally imagine a Mormon bringing their pioneer ancestor’s shoe to a sacrament meeting and talking about how, when they look at the shoe, they remember the importance of perseverance and self-sacrifice and think about the faith their ancestor must have had to follow the Church to Utah and how that all strengthens their own Testimony that the Church is True, but they wouldn’t, like, kiss it or use it as a vehicle for prayer. It’s just a shoe. A special one, sure, but not a sacred one.

What you’re seeing instead in Murder Among the Mormons (I haven’t seen this either, but I’m well familiar with Hofmann and the Church politics surrounding his work) is an episode in the Church’s long quest for legitimacy. While it might help strengthen their Testimony in some way, Mormon laymen don’t actually particularly care if the Church gets its hands on some old papyrus or some Smith family heirloom. But for the Brighamite Church in Salt Lake City, every old artefact, every heirloom, every plot of land and historic building site in Independence and Adam-ondi-Ahman and Nauvoo, anything that belongs to the CoC or the Fundamentalists or the Bickertonites and not to them is a chip in their claim to be the One True Heir of Joseph Smith. The Church rarely even displays these items when they get them: they just store them with the Church History Department or the Presiding Bishopric in some vault in SLC, or maybe give them to a Church museum or BYU if they’re particularly interesting—certainly not the kind of behaviour you’d expect in a relic-oriented church.

There is, however, a historical example of this quest for legitimacy that I think is more similar to what you’re thinking of with the relics comparison. JS had a way of making the world around early Mormons feel magical, of making their faith in him and his work come alive, and one of the ways he did this was by regaling Mormons with the tales associated with the artefacts he collected, the accoutrements he carried, and the many places they travelled to.

Sticks, staffs, and stones were conduits for divine revelation, tools for discerning meaning in the mystical world. Those little bits of papyrus touring the US with Michael Chandler in 1835 weren’t just random scrolls, they were written by the very hand of the patriarchs Abraham and Joseph, and revealed hitherto unknown secrets about the nature of God and Creation! Chandler’s mummies weren’t just random mummies, they were the Pharaoh Onitas and his family, they were the daughters who saved baby Moses from the river, they were the royal entourage of Joseph himself! When the Zion’s Camp military expedition set off to reclaim some land that had been taken from some Mormon settlers in Missouri in 1834, that land became a prophesied holy site, the location of one of the future capitals of God’s millennial kingdom on Earth, and JS became like Moses and Joshua, a prophet ready to conquer the Promised Land with outstretched hand. And when on the way they passed by a Hopewell mound in western Illinois, it wasn’t just an ancient Indian burial ground, it was the tomb of the mighty white Lamanite warrior Zelph, who bravely served under the prophet Onondagus and fought a great battle against the infidels, against all odds, to defend what he knew to be True.

Stories like these abound in early Mormonism, and while again I feel that the comparison with Catholic saints’ relics is missing some important differences (as well as some important context about the role of ritual objects and folk magic across early American Protestantism), the objects they were attached to were certainly highly significant to early Mormons. It’s no coincidence that one of the first things James Strang did, in a bid to bolster his legitimacy in the post-Martyrdom Church, was to discover a set of brass plates containing the veritable Record of Rajah Manchou of Vorito. And when recent Mormon converts Wilbur Fugate and Robert Wiley wanted to play a prank on their local congregation in Kinderhook, to “prove the prophecy by way of a joke,” the proof they turned to was, fittingly, “discovering” and exhibiting in the town hall a collection of small copper plates, only to find that they were of interest to none other than JS himself.

Probably the most properly relic-like of these early objects were the coffin canes, a set of walking sticks made from the bloodstained oak coffins that were used to move JS and Hyrum from the Carthage Jail to their first burial plots and distributed among several early Mormon leaders and Smith family and friends. Some accounts even have their ivory knobs filled with locks of JS’s hair, or their handles made from the refashioned glass of the clear coffins JS and Hyrum were stored in until they were buried permanently. Brigham Young used his coffin cane for the rest of his life, and likened it to JS’s own serpent staff and the rod of Aaron as a symbol of his rightful authority and succession as leader of the Church. Many Mormons even believed, beyond their role as symbols of the Martyrdom and conduits for revelation (and in classic reliquary fashion), that the canes had the ability to heal ailments at a touch, and they remained in use as thaumaturgical instruments until as late the presidency of Wilford Woodruff (r. 1889–1898).

While likely few were converted by encountering these relics and artefacts alone, as holy objects they made Mormonism feel real. They were the faith made physical. They connected Mormons and their Scriptures to the land they lived on, made prophecy and history visible in their everyday lives, made them feel the blood of Abraham and Manasseh flowing through their veins.

And they also just kind of stopped happening?

Brigham Young, for all he modelled himself after JS, never found any plates or notable artefacts in Utah (in fact, he believed himself to not be a “natural seer”, and didn’t believe he was capable of using seer stones and translating as Smith had), and despite his cane he never took any great pains to work Mormon reverence towards JS and himself into a material cult. Because while the Martyrdom may have given Mormons the impetus and the materials to make relics of JS, the Exodus changed Mormonism. While Utah Mormons were of course still interested in Egyptians and the ancient history of the Americas (indeed, some Mormons were convinced of the prophecies of the Paiute leader Wovoka as late as 1892), and likewise in the life and works of Joseph Smith, the journey to the Far West had separated them from all but a few of their remains, and the trials of travel and building Zion shifted the spiritual focus of the Saints away from holy relics and seer stones and towards what I think can best be understood as a kind of national commitment to the righteous cause of the Mormon people. (That’s not to say that nationalism, especially of the American variety, isn’t in some way inherently religious, but the distinction I think matters when discussing the ideological and ritual implications of devotional objects like these.)

Even as early as the Mormon Reformation, a religious revival movement in the mid-1850s, you didn’t see an explosion of relics or pilgrimages to holy sites or even visions or speaking in tongues in Mormon communities, as might have been expected just ten or fifteen years earlier. The faith of people was instead evident in their perseverance and frugality, and was displayed not through dulia or the maintenance of the cult of Joseph Smith, but through impassioned personal speeches at Thursday fast meetings, through repeated rebaptism for the remission of the sins of yourself and all your ancestors, and through a with-all-your-heart-soul-mind-and-strength kind of commitment to building up the economic and demographic strength and unity of the people of Zion.

Save a short period in the 1880s and 1890s when the LDS Church happily testifies against the RLDS Church in the Kirtland Temple Suits and the Temple Lot Case (the LDS Church, then being disincorporated by the Federal Government and having its own property put under federal management by the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887, was really in no place to claim legal legitimacy for itself), it’s only really after the 1950s, in a period when the LDS Church is finally starting to gain the political and cultural respect as an All-American Christian Institution™ that it had long craved (and a period when the Church finally had the economic resources and nationwide political connections to mobilize towards those ends—Deseret Ranches in Florida, for example, was only founded in 1949), that you see the Church move to collect relics and holy sites again, in a bid to materially delegitimize the other heirs of the Latter Day Saint movement. To some extent this was easy, as a lot of these movements were moribund, had had their property appropriated by the government or bought by private owners, or were going through crises of faith of their own as the Fourth Great Awakening wracked the old religious status quo. LDS businessman Wilford Wood had actually started buying back historic properties for the Church as early as 1937, though his goal of purchasing the Nauvoo temple lot was only completed in 1962, and his propositions to buy the Independence Temple Lot were all rejected out of hand by the RLDS and Hendrickites.

The RLDS Church, for what it’s worth, also sought to secure its legitimacy in this period, finally completing its Temple Lot Auditorium in 1958 and beginning its plans to preserve and rededicate the Kirtland Temple in 1952, not to mention its keen defence of Smith family real and personal property in Nauvoo and its unwillingness to work with Dean Jessee’s LDS-sponsored project to collect and transcribe JS’s personal papers in the 1970s. (This is indeed why the Joseph Smith Papers are only being collected and published now, after a trial run on the JST in 1997 showed that the two Churches could work together in good faith.)

To finish this up, I think there’s also something to be said for this being part of a general postwar trend towards historical preservation and collection, and part of a boom in the entire historical profession. Outside of the battle for material legitimacy, historians, archivists, and other academics throughout the Latter Day Saint movement would spend the period coordinating and organizing with each other to produce some of the earliest proper scholarship on Mormon history and culture (many other American Christian groups had begun to do so in the midst of the Third Great Awakening, the relationship of the Latter Day Saint movement to which is another essay entirely). The Mormon History Association was founded in 1965 and its journal in 1974, the CoC-aligned John Whitmer Historical Association was founded in 1972, the Association for Mormon Letters in 1976. Even the now-defunct FARMS, bastion of Mormon pseudohistorical apologetics, was first organized only in 1979.

It’s no coincidence that Hofmann, with his ready-made media sensations, appears only a year later.

I think that’s enough of that. For those interested in further reading on Mormon visual and material culture and its history, I think two very good starting points are D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Revised and Expanded ed., Signature Books, 1998), and especially Terry L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (Oxford UP, 2007).

Can you explain the Mormonism/Catholicism comparison? I think I missed that one, and I never want to miss a chance to shit on the church of LDS

Key part in the post is the “Americanized remake” part but when I watched Murder Among the Mormons I was struck at how Mormons have a culture about relics and finding obscure paraphernalia relating to important figures so they can bring it to the church and this kind of veneration of relics is something you hardly ever see in other post-Reformation sects of Christianity

Plus the whole structured centralized hierarchy with the Americanized part being adding some nods towards republicanism. Like the spiritual head is picked in an election amongst senior clergyman who always elect one of their own and this spiritual head has the ability to say things and claim they came directly from God (granted papal infallibility hasn’t yet been used for a sudden 180 in teachings but it potentially can be used that way). Mormons call their guy “president” rather than using titles which come from the Roman Empire but this reflects the wider political context of the state they emerged in.

Also there’s an old stereotype of Catholics always having large families that is kinda outdated now in the US but that’s def an overlap