Matthew Bowman - The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith

Copyright 2012 by Matthew Bowman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: The Family: A Proclamation to the World, by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

CW McMaster Family Group: Excerpt from Reverently, Quietly by Clara McMaster. Reprinted by permission of CW McMaster Family Group, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Phyllis R. Oakes: Excerpt from I Am a Child of God by Naomi W. Randall, by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Phyllis R. Oakes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bowman, Matthew Burton.
The Mormon people : the making of an American faith / by Matthew Bowman.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64491-0
1. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsHistory. I. Title.
BX8611.B695 2012
289.309dc23 2011040659

www.atrandom.com

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover Photograph: Blaine Harrington III/Corbis

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F rom 1820 to 1830, Joseph Smith, Jr., the young son of a farmer living in Manchester Township in rural upstate New York, experienced a series of remarkable visionary experiences. In April of the latter year, at age twenty-five, he organized a new religion. This frontier faith has come to be formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is colloquially called Mormonism, named for the Book of Mormon, a new work of scripture Joseph Smith claimed to have translated by the gift and power of God from golden plates an angel gave him. Driven at swords point from Kirtland, Ohio, in 1838, from Far West, Missouri, in 1839, and from Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846, the Mormons fled angry dissenters, hostile mobs, and the stern power of state and federal governments to the Great Basin, where in 1847 they began to build their own society and hoped to practice their faith in peace. Forty years later, determined to stamp out the Mormons de facto theocracy, their economic communalism, and their practice of polygamy, Congress sent federal marshals to Salt Lake City. After half a decade of struggle, the Mormons capitulated and Utah became a state.

Something curious happened over the next century. The Mormons, once radical utopians, social revolutionaries, and, in the eyes of many Protestant Americans, determined heretics, found a way to become fully American as well. In the twentieth century the Mormons embraced patriotism, the Protestant work ethic, and the mores and respectability of the American middle class. By the 1960s and 1970s, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir routinely sang at presidential inaugurations and Mormons were rising in the ranks of American business, government, and arts. To them, this was no compromise; rather, they had found a way to integrate their theology with their nation.

But to many other Americans, Mormonism remains a faith on the fringe. The cheerful and successful Mormons in the American public eye still believe, after all, that Joseph Smith conversed with God and received revelation from the hands of angels. Today, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Mormonism looms large in presidential politics and pop culture, and seems poised to undergo the most intense examination it has faced in a century or more. This book is intended as an introduction to the faith of presidential contender Mitt Romney and bestselling author Stephenie Meyer, the faith of basketball star Jimmer Fredette and businessman Stephen Covey. The story of Mormonism is not merely the story of these believers and their ancestors, but the story of America itself. Mormonism has been called the most American of all religions, and this is true in a deeply paradoxical way. While Mormonisms struggles with the nation throw into sharp relief what Americans believe about themselves, its aspirations and ideals no less reflect the dreams of the republic itself.

I n the late summer of 1830, a twenty-three-year-old farmer left his home in northern Ohio bound for upstate New York, where he had been born. He had sold his farm and was determined to make a new living as an evangelical preacher. His name was Parley Pratt, and he had always been interested in religion. One August night he slept at the home of an old Baptist who gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon, a puzzling new scripture that had been published earlier that very year in the nearby village of Palmyra. Pratt devoured the six hundred pages of the book in two days, finding in it, as he said later, the fulness of the gospel of a crucified and risen Redeemer.

The next day he walked ten miles to Palmyra in search of the man who had produced the book, a farmers son named Joseph Smith only two years older than Parley himself. He did not find Joseph, who was in Pennsylvania with his wifes family. Instead, he found a new church of a few dozen members called the Church of Christ flourishing under the guidance of Josephs brother Hyrum and his friend Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher who had served as scribe during the translation of the Book of Mormon. They told Pratt that their faith was based on far more than the book alone. God had chosen this time and this place, upstate New York in the wake of the American Revolution, to restore to earth the true church of Jesus Christ, whose priestly authority had been lost to humanity for more than a millennium. Parley Pratt believed every word, and Cowdery baptized him and ordained him an elder.

Only a few days after Pratt himself read the Book of Mormonand without meeting Joseph SmithPratt left Palmyra as a missionary for the new religion with a bag full of copies of the new work of scripture. Before his death in May 1857, Parley Pratt would travel to Canada, England, the Pacific Islands, and Chile, convert thousands, write books, tracts, and hymns in celebration of the new faith, claim by ordination the mantle of an apostle of Jesus Christ, suffer arrest and escape from prison in Missouri, abandon the United States to join the Mormon Zion in the Salt Lake Valley, and marry eleven more wivesthe last of whom had an angry ex-husband who stabbed Pratt to death on a farm in Arkansas. Despite his dreams of the pulpit, this was hardly the life that Pratt had imagined for himself when he sold his farm in Ohio.