Rewriting the history of the American West sometimes puts a historian into the midst of a battlefield - but there is no topic that can beat Mormon history in its power to prove that how we interpret history matters - even to people who may never set foot in a college classroom.
So proclaimed Patricia Nelson Limerick in the major address of the annual Mormon History Association meetings held in Park City. Limerick, a University of Colorado history professor, delivered the prestigious Tanner Lecture, made possible by O.C. and Grace Tanner to enable a non-Mormon scholar to study Mormon history and culture for one year and then present the results to Mormon scholars.Limerick, author of "The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West," is only the second woman to be so honored.
Limerick pronounced Mormon history to be "compelling and distinctive," yet complained that historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that the frontier created a "uniquely self-reliant, individualistic American pioneer," left Mormonism out of his study. That was because Mormons, "with their tightly knit social bonds and communitarian behavior," failed to support his argument.
Likewise, noted Western historian Ray Billington left the Mormons out of his popular book, "America's Frontier Heritage."
"The Mormons would not fit the Frontier Thesis, and so Turner and Billington stuck by the Frontier Thesis and dismissed the Mormons," Limerick said. In her opinion, it would have been "a much wiser choice to stick by the Mormons and dismiss the Frontier Thesis."
Limerick has a personal stake in seeing Mormon history treated fairly. Her father was a Mormon, born and raised in Brigham City, and her mother was a Congregationalist raised in Salt Lake City. Although her father left both Utah and the LDS Church before she was born, her youth was heavily sprinkled with Utah-flavored anecdotes.
Such is the root of her conviction that Mormonism produced an unmistakable ethnicity. Limerick suggested that even in the earliest days of Mormon history, "the conditions were close to ideal for the creation of a community in which religious belief laid the foundations for a new world view, a new pattern of family organization, a new set of ambitions, a new combination of common bonds and obligations, a new definition of a separate peoplehood - all the components, in other words, of what we now call ethnicity."
Persecution and the migration to Utah, she said, provided a capstone. "Framed in a forceful and compelling analogy to the persecution and exodus of the Israelites, the Mormon move to Deseret catalyzed the sense of a separate peoplehood. As a shared memory, full of the literal and direct testing of the spirit, the exodus was exactly the kind of event that would stay with a people forever, the kind of story that would bind even later converts to a loyalty to the special identity that comes with a special history."
Limerick said the years of comparative isolation in early Utah, southern Idaho and northern Arizona assisted the group identity to become more clearly defined, with "charactertistic patterns of Mormon entertainment - dance, music and theater - taking hold."
Limerick noted that in the past 30 years, the LDS Church has grown enormously and grown internationally. With that growth, "the idea of a Zion or a promised land" has played "a much diminished role in Mormon consciousness, when so many Mormons live so far from Utah. Moreover, many Mormons in the last few decades have ended up living in places where they are by no means a majority, and where much of their life is spent in the company of people who cannot - except, perhaps, by their indifference - reinforce any notion of Mormon identity."
Such is the future challenge for Mormons, she said, to maintain their ethnicity in the face of "considerable anxiety and tension." Despite the threat to ethnicity provided by Mormon growth, the 20th century has seen "a remarkable and impressive flowering of Mormon literature." Limerick enthusiastically detailed the plethora of Mormon novelists, short story writers, poets and essayists - concluding that in their work "a clear cultural identity thrives."
In Limerick's opinion, therefore, the "obituaries for Mormon ethnicity are decidedly premature," and writing about it is "writing close to the human soul."
Although she admitted that "ethnicity is a curious thing to celebrate," she is convinced that everyone needs a sense of who they are. "We live in a world too big to be devoted to the entire globe. We have to say these are my people - this is where I belong."
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Additional Information
"Framed in a forceful and compelling analogy to the persecution and exodus of the Israelites, the Mormon move to Deseret catalyzed the sense of a separate peoplehood. As a shared memory, full of the literal and direct testing of the spirit, the exodus was exactly the kind of event that would stay with a people forever. . . "
-- Patricia Nelson Limerick