Sunday 31 March 2013

‘In Time and Eternity’: Symbols in Mormon History

I developed an interest in integrating symbolic anthropology and history when I first read Keith Thomas’s brilliant Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), a book that intellectually and theoretically blew me away and which has had an immense influence on my subsequent intellectual life, in my Folklore and Religion seminar with Roger Janelli at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the early 1980s. This interest continued in my work on ideology, on Quakerism, and here on Mormon symbology.

The origins of this paper lay in a paper I wrote for a seminar on the sociology of ethnicity with Carol Ward and a paper I wrote for my sociology of religion seminar with Larry Young at Brigham Young University in the early 2000s, the first a paper that tried to look comparatively at the symbol systems of Quakerism, Mennonitism, and Mormonism dynamically, the second a paper that tried to delineate, in historical terms, the Mormon symbol system and its dynamics. The first paper sadly no longer exists because of computer issues (the bane of the post ac, after computer, world) though parts of it have found their way into this paper. The second constitutes the framework of this essay.

This paper was originally intended to be the final chapter in my dissertation which argued for a cultural approach to Mormonism. Given History’s wariness of theory and interdisciplinarity, my dissertation had both in spades, however, I was forced to change my dissertation topic from a more theoretically oriented one to the intellectual history of Mormon Studies. Despite this, elements of this paper did make it into my dissertation on the history of Mormon Studies. My intention of this paper was to take the story of Mormonism from its early post-manifesto period, the period I concentrated on, to today and show that, contrary to some academic and intellectual opinion, the Mormon symbol system, while it did change as a result of the manifesto that ended polygamy and the simultaneous decline of Mormon theocracy, of Mormon Zionism, did not change as much as some scholars of Mormonism maintained.

I updated some of the demographics and the bibliography and corrected the infelicities of writing in it in the early 2000s. I apologise for the footnotes in this paper. When I transposed this paper from MSWorks into MSWord--damn you Microsoft--I lost large chunks of my footnotes and had to reconstruct them as best as I could. I haven’t been able to reconstitute the page references because of the time involved. Despite this I hope you won’t damn me and my paper to academic purgatory. Enjoy.


Ideology or ways of seeing are expressed in symbols and rituals and constitute, at least in part, the meaning system of any social group, any group with a common sense of identity. Given this symbols and rituals are crucial to an understanding of any social and cultural group and they are critical to an understanding of countercultural or subcultural social and cultural movements like Mormonism, the focus of this paper. While the group symbols which constitute subcultural and countercultural identities are sensitive to and are impacted by what’s going on in the broader mainstream worlds, the mainstream political, economic, cultural, geographic, and demographic worlds which surrounding them and in which they are embedded, subcultural and countercultural meaning systems, once established, are generally able to adapt to and reconstitute these broader changes within internal meaning systems often in relatively “traditional” ways as this paper hopes to show. Subcultural and countercultural meaning systems are, after all, the filters through which groups view and respond to the impact and influence broader and more mainstream phenomena have on them after all.

The literal beginnings of Mormonism and its symbol or meaning system can be traced to a spring day in 1820 when a young man of fifteen went into the woods near his home in Palmyra, New York, and asked God which of the existing churches were true. According to Joseph Smith, each religious group he came into contact with claimed to be God's true and only Church. Smith reasoned that not all of these “sects” could be equally true since they preached different and clearly inconsistent doctrines. So he decided to ask God which specific church was the true one. To Smith's amazement, God and Christ answered his query. None of the existing churches, he was told, were the one and only True Church of Christ. Such a church did not exist. [1]

It would be through Joseph Smith, or so the faith history story goes, that God would restore the One True Church Smith sought. Smith would be given a book of sacred scripture of a remnant of a “lost tribe of Israel” who had immigrated to the “New World” by the angel Moroni. Over the next several years he would “translate” the Book of Mormon and publish it in 1830, the same year that the Church of Christ was officially incorporated. [2]

It was also during these early years that the Church would begin to engage in intense proselytizing campaigns. Eventually, these would lead to an important mass conversion of a group of Campbellite Christians (including Sidney Rigdon) in Kirtland, Ohio in 1830. This mass conversion more than doubled the size of the nascent Church and Mormons would now begin to “gather for a little season” to that eastern Ohio town and build its first temple. [3]

The “gathering” was a crucial component of the important “Zion” symbol complex of early Mormonism which included “Zion”, the “new Jerusalem”, the “gathering”, the “law of adoption”, the “covenant” the “promised land”, temples, and apocalyptic rhetoric. It was to “Zion” that God's people (the “pure in heart”) “gathered” to build the Temple and prepare for “the day of tribulation and desolation sent forth against the wicked”. [4]

This apocalyptic or end time rhetoric and imagery was also important in early Mormonism and was intimately connected to “the gathering” and to the “voice of warning”. The Mormon version of the millennium, which differed in significant ways from those of its Christian cousins, came complete with signs and tribulations, the “devouring of the “Great and Abominable Church”, the “gathering” of the “righteous to God” and “eternal life” in a new “earthly paradise”, and the departing of the “cursed” to “everlasting fire”. Mormon missionaries were sent out unto the world to warn others of the coming “end times” and to urge them to repent and join God’s true church. [5]

In 1830 Smith received a revelation (Doctrine and Covenants 29:7-8) which revealed that the “new Jerusalem” to which the “Saints” were to “gather” was to be built at a location near the Missouri River. In 1831 Independence, Missouri was “appointed and consecrated” by God for the “gathering of Saints”. “Saints” began to “gather” in the “new Jerusalem” buying as much land as they could. Divine communication between God and the “Mormon Prophet” continued as revelations were received enunciating church organization and church doctrine. Proselytisation continued apace. However, Mormon economic and political communalism, doctrinal novelties, and dealings some would perceive as shady led to tense relations between the growing Latter-day Saint communities in Kirtland and Independence and their neighbors. It would be this continuing tension between Mormons and “Gentiles” that would provide the broader context for so much of LDS history and structure some of its dynamics. Eventually the violence would become so fierce that it would drive the Saints from both Kirtland and Independence to Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. [6]

The “gathered” Saints learned that they were, through the “Aaronic” and “Melchizedek” Priesthoods, the “sons of Moses and Aaron and the seed of Abraham”. By virtue of their membership in the restored Church they had been adopted into the “new and everlasting covenant” and had become the people of God. They would play a major role in turning Jews, both the Old World and New World varieties, to Christ, and would thus be instrumental in the end time “gathering” of New World and Old World Jews to the New and Old Zion’s. [7]

Mormons were the new Israel, in more ways than one. In the slightly revised “gathering” and apocalyptic scenario of Doctrine and Covenants 101 (1833), God revealed, in a passage that recalls the warnings that the prophets of Ancient Israel spoke to Israel's rulers and people, that he had allowed the persecutions in Missouri because of the “transgressions” of the Saints. Only when the Saints were chastened, God revealed, would he remember his people, show mercy, and redeem “Zion” by pouring out his (apocalyptic) “indignation” on the nations. [8]

Doctrine and Covenants 101 also reveals Smith's attitude toward the American Constitution and the role it played in the restoration of the primitive church. In this “revelation” God “reveals” that he “established” the Constitution of the United States through “the hands of wise men who [he] had raised up”. He used these men to redeem America through the “shedding of blood” establishing a land of liberty which was the only place where the restoration of the one True Church was possible. [9]

After the Saints fled persecution in Missouri and Ohio they “gathered” to a “stake” of “Zion” in Illinois, Nauvoo, where they established themselves in what was to all intents and purposes their own autonomous kingdom. Proselytization continued as the “Twelve Apostles” were sent to administer the conversion of the world to the new faith. In this the Twelve experienced some success for at its zenith fully one-quarter of Nauvoo’s residents were British converts to the church who had been “gathered” to the Mormon Kingdom on the Mississippi. [10]

It was in Nauvoo that the most distinctive of Mormon doctrines and practices were introduced. Smith received revelations on the doctrine of baptism for the dead, the Relief Society, new temple rituals, the doctrine of plural marriage, and, in his famous King Follett Discourse, introduced the doctrine of eternal progression. He announced that he would run for President of the United States, crowned himself King of city, and established the Council of Fifty to govern the coming millennial kingdom. All of this caused dissension within the growing Mormon community and exacerbated the already tense relationship between the “Saints” and their “Gentile” neighbours. [11]

Smith’s doctrine of deity Smith was particularly important for it impacted virtually every aspect of Mormon symbology. This doctrine was anti-trinitarian, polytheistic, and materialistic. [12] It was also evolutionary in that to achieve godhood one needed to follow the doctrines and precepts set out in the revelations given to the Church and take the advice of church authorities, the doctrinal justification for church authority power in everyday Mormon life. [13]

Plural marriage was central to this “eternal progression” from spirit-child to godhood because families were eternal “beyond the veil”. The more wives you had, the more children, and hence the more power you potentially had. Plural marriage accelerated “eternal progression”, the process to godhood. It fulfilled the promise of numerous progeny made by God to Abraham and reunited family members around the Patriarch-God in the afterlife.

Smith believed that in the afterlife the whole process began anew as the Patriarch-God and his wife or wives (Mothers in Heaven) gave birth to spirit children. These spirit children, in turn, cycled through the life stages from pre-fleshly existence to godhood and worshipped as God the one who had given them life. [14]

All of these doctrines came together and were expressed in the “endowment” and “sealing” rituals and ceremonies Mormon men and women performed in the Temple. “Endowments” in which individual Mormons were washed and anointed in oil were of a couple of types, the endowment of “power from on high” mentioned in Doctrine and Covenants 109, which prepares disciples for their missions on earth, prevents them from being overcome by evils, and enables them to secure the “fulness” of the “blessings” prepared for the Church, and “endowments” for the “baptism of the dead” which began in the Nauvoo period though they may have earlier precedents. In Nauvoo this first endowment created both a temporal and a spiritual elite within the Mormon community which met in secret quorums made up of the anointed. A second endowment in which the “fulness of the priesthood” was bestowed on these secret few provided these elites with even greater status in the Mormon community. They now had the opportunity to become Kings and Queens and gods of the celestial kingdom (Doctrine and Covenants 124). [15]

“Sealings”, on the other hand, had to do with proper priesthood power. This power allows one to perform certain activities on earth and have that recognized in heaven. Marriage, including plural marriages, for instance, could be and were sealed in the Temple in Nauvoo. Like the endowments “the Principle” created an elite within the Mormon community since those who “practice” “the Principle” were the same elites who constituted a secret quorum of the endowed. [16]

The importance Latter-day Saint leaders and members alike placed on these rituals Saints is foregrounded by the fact that even after their prophet’s death they continued work on the Temple and performed “endowment” and “sealing” ceremonies before they began their trek westward to the Great Basin. Both sealings and endowments, particularly the endowment of the baptism for the dead, created an extended family network among Latter-Day Saints and particularly among Mormon elites in both this world and the presumed next one. These regularly recurring ritual enactments gave to Saints a strong sense of identity through covenantal bonding that was Judaic in its sense of choseness and tribalness. [17]

Tension between Mormons and Gentiles and within the community of Saints reached a fever point in June of 1844 and resulted in the assassination of the “Mormon prophet” on 27 June. Left without their leader the majority of Saints would reorganize under the leadership of the “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles” and it’s “President” Brigham Young. After completing the Temple in Nauvoo and performing their “sealing rituals”, these Mormon Israelites (the “Camp of Israel”) would begin their “exodus” to the American West in 1846 in search of a safe sanctuary from persecution. They would reach “the place” as Brigham Young was reputed to have said, the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1847, and begin building the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret. The Saints tried to make this “desert bloom” through irrigation projects, colonization temple building, farming, industrial work, and the establishment of cooperative institutions. Young also made a reinvented notion of Mormon apocalypticism bloom, one which delayed the end times and transferred it to a new geographical sacred space, Deseret. [18]

In “Deseret” missionary work would continue apace as more and more “consent” Saints were “gathered” to this “stake of Zion”, this sanctuary in the heart of the Great Basin Desert. They came by boat, by wagon train, by handcart, and by railroad. They began to spread out across the territory and the region in a kind of Mormon manifest destiny into present-day Idaho, Arizona, and California building what they and their leaders hope would a widespread Mormon Kingdom in the West. [19]

The Mormon exodus westward, however, did not bring an end to tensions between Mormons and their neighbors, however. In 1850, as a result of the Mexican War, Utah became a part of the United States and was granted territorial status. Mormons tried to obtain statehood but LDS political and economic control of the territory (“Zionism”) and the official announcement of the practice of polygamy in 1852 made for difficult relations between the Church and the United States government. Federal attempts to end both Mormon Zionism and polygamy and to establish its control of Utah Territory resulted in the Utah War of 1857. While the practice of polygamy and the Mormon dominance of the territory were not ended, the United States did finally, and with some difficulty, manage to establish its hegemony in Utah. [20]

In Utah the Church continued to dominate the politics, the economics, and the daily life of the territory. By 1852 it felt so comfortable in this position that it officially announce the practice of “the Principle” of polygamy. Both its political dominance of the territory and its practice of plural marriage came in for condemnation and attacks from both the federal government and a number of reform minded interest groups who saw plural marriage along with slavery as a “barbaric” practice.

The cold and hot war over Mormon polygamy and theocracy was traumatic. Both Jan Shipps and D. Michael Quinn have argued that the demise of Mormon theocracy and plural marriage associated with the manifesto is the critical moment in Mormon symbolic history and Mormon history in general. Quinn, in fact, has likened it to the roles Western and especially American political, economic, and cultural imperialism have played in the Third World arguing that with the issuance of the manifesto by President Wilford Woodruff which ended the practice of “the Principle” Mormons became a colonized people who began to think, look, and act like exaggerated versions of the very people who colonized them. But was it as significant a transformation in the Mormon meaning system as both Quinn and Shipps seem to think? [21] In the wake of the “Manifesto” the Mormon Church was integrated into American politics, the American economy, and into American political culture. Putting “United Orders”, Mormon communalism, into practice would now be difficult if not impossible while building the Mormon “Zion” in “Deseret became extremely difficult if again not impossible. [22]

While these symbolic changes were traumatic they were not the sea changes that Quinn and Shipps seem to imply. Symbolic changes did take place but by and large changes in Mormonism were more demographic and institutional than cultural. Perhaps the most striking change in the Church was its growth. Between the years 1890 and 2004 the Church grew from 205,000 members in 1890 to 268,000 in 1900, 1.6 million in 1960, and to over 8 million today, ceasing, in the process, to be an American regional religion while becoming an international one. [23] This growth inevitably made the Church more bureaucratic and necessitated greater routinization in the name of greater efficiency. However, “Correlation”, as these changes were officially called, has come with a price. The campaign against polygamists has been expanded to encompass “dissident” intellectuals and political “extremists” while women's groups like the Relief Society lost their autonomy as were brought even more fully under the control of an aged and aging male hierarchy. And, of course, the internationalization of the Church brought with it its own set of problems as a peculiarly American institution which sanctified both the geography of the United States as well as its Constitution tried to adapt to new realities. [24]

Ideologically and symbolically, however, post-manifesto Mormonism remains, in many respects, similar to pre-manifesto Mormonism. Yes changes have occurred in Mormon symbology and ritual. The “gathering to Zion” has, as I mentioned earlier taken on a somewhat different color. Between 1849 and 1930 over 103,000 plus mostly European Saints “gathered to Zion” while in 1930 one out of every two Mormons lived in Utah (an additional 30% lived in the American West). By 1960 only 10% lived in Utah (40% in the West). [25] Polygamy is now practiced only by those few Mormon Fundamentalists and anyone who practices “the Principle” or who becomes an ideological fellow traveler with these groups risk punishment or even excommunication if caught. [26] As Shepherd and Shepherd note in their study of the changing rhetoric of General Conference discourses or speeches references to and emphasis on plural marriage, the Kingdom of God (a measure of Mormon apocalypticism), and persecution (a measure of Mormon distinctiveness) declined over the years and were replaced by an increasing emphasis on family, the “Word of Wisdom”, and “Jesus”. [27]

The “Word of Wisdom” has, as Gordon and Gary Shepherd note, became particularly important in the post-manifesto period. [28] What had been unenforced counsel in Smith’s time now became an important defining maker in post-manifesto Mormon identity. Instead of urging Latter-day Saints to move to the Mormon Culture Region, though many still come of their own volition if only to attend BYU, the church no longer urged them not to drink caffeinated and alcoholic beverages but urged them instead to work to build “Stakes of Zion” wherever there are enough Saints to constitute a “stake” or a Church region. And increases in the number of “stakes” there were. “Stakes” of “Zion” can be found all across the North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia though Mormon density in the culture region remains high. Today, few “mainstream” Saints speak of building “Zion” in Independence, Missouri. The hope that one day Saints will “gather” to this Midwestern “Zion” and build a temple among its broad avenues may still exist in the hearts and minds of some Mormon leaders and some Mormon intellectuals (and especially in its sectarian groups), but it is no longer one of the central impulses embodied in Mormon lives. [29]

Despite these changes, however, “Eternal Progression” remains as central to post-manifesto Mormon symbology and ritual as it was to pre-manifesto Mormon symbology and ritual. Yes it has been somewhat revised but this revised version of “eternal progression” did not appear out of nowhere.

“Eternal progression” is, as I mentioned earlier, the life cycle that all human beings go through either partially or fully. This life cycle consists of pre-existence, earthly existence, death, resurrection, judgment, and finally immortality (in one of three degrees of nearness to God—the “celestial”, “terrestrial”, and “telestial”). “Gathering to Zion” and practicing “the Principle” were simply two important life cycle choices “worthy Saints” made along the path to the “Celestial Kingdom” in the early days of the faith. Today these aren't as important and have been given revised meaning. [30]

In contemporary official LDS ideology all human beings are literally the children of God. Humans were created in his spiritual, yet material, image. In order for “Heavenly Father's” children to become like him and to take part in the gift of procreation they must take on a physical body and become residents of earth. Once on earth humans have the choice of either following the plan of our “Father in Heaven” or of not doing so. Those who do decide to continue on the path of “eternal progression” “covenant”, or promise to abide by certain “laws” and to perform specific “ordinances”. In this attempt they are, of course, helped by “Jesus Christ”, “the One True Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints” (i.e., Church Authorities), and the “Holy Ghost”.

Those “worthy” Saints who abide by the laws and ordinances are, upon death, judged by “Jesus”. With “resurrection” the physical bodies that had separated from their spiritual bodies at death, are reunited. Those who are most worthy gain “exaltation” or “Godhood” and reside nearest to “Heavenly Father” in the “Celestial Kingdom”. Those “worthy” Mormons who were not married in the Temple reside in the “Celestial Kingdom” but at a greater distance from “Heavenly Father” than do the “exalted”. [31]

The dependent symbols of “eternal progression” are themselves often quite complex. One of these, “the Christ-like life”, for example, encompasses several dependent symbols itself: “perfecting the Saints”, i.e., the willingness to receive divine guidance (from the “proper authorities” of the “One True Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”), performing the “gospel ordinances” (“baptism”, “set prayers”, “priesthood”, “sacrament”, and “temple”), “fellowship[ing] with other church members”, “serving others”; “sharing the gospel with others”; i.e., accepting responsibility for sharing the Gospel with others via missionary work, testimony, and so on, “redeeming the dead”, i.e., performing genealogical or family history research, and “performing ordinances for the dead” in the Temple.

“Temple Ordinances” are an important aspect of leading the “Christ-like life”. Within the sacred space and time of the Temple, “worthy”, “Christ-like” Saints receive “ordinances” for themselves and perform them for others. The “endowment ordinance” reveals God's plan of “eternal progression” to the initiate. “Pre-existence”, “creation”, “the fall”, “Christ's atonement”, and the “Gospel” are ritually presented in dramaturgical fashion. “Sealing ordinances” allow the “worthy” to bind their marriages and their families together for “time and eternity”. They also allow one to perform “ordinances for the dead”. [32]

“The Gospel” involves “believing in Jesus”, recognizing him as the literal “Son of God”, “repenting of sins”, seeking to become more “Christ-like”, and being “baptized in his name”, thereby promising to keep his “commandments”.
The dependent symbol or sign “Jesus Christ”, has given humankind the opportunity to continue along the “path of exaltation”. “Heavenly Father” sent his literal son “Jesus” to fulfill his “divine plan”, the plan allowing all his children to become like him. It was he who overcame “the Fall” of Adam and Eve through his “atonement” and his “sacrifice”. By his “perfect example he has removed all obstacles from the path of “eternal progression” and has thereby allowed Saints the opportunity to return to live with “Our Father in Heaven” in the “Celestial Kingdom”.

The “commandments” the “worthy” are to keep include the “divine law of chastity”, whereby believers agree to have sexual relations only with our spouse, the “divine law of procreation”, by which Saints agree to share in the creation of life, after all, wasn't the first commandment “be fruitful and multiply”, and the “divine law of health”, the “Word of Wisdom” (Doctrine and Covenants 89), by which Mormons agree to abstain from harmful foods, drinks, and intoxicants.

In order to help us keep his “commandments”, “Jesus” has conferred upon the worthy the “Holy Ghost”. When Mormons receive the “ordinance” of “baptism” they not only re-enact the “death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus”, but they also shed their old sinful lives of replacing them with new lives grounded on “repentance”.

With baptism Saints also receive the gift of the “Holy Ghost”. The “Holy Ghost” helps believers to keep the “commandments”, “cleanses and sanctifies” Saints, and keeps them on the road to “eternal progression”. Lastly, it “testifies” to believers that “Jesus is the Son of God” and that “Joseph Smith is and was the Prophet of God”.

The testimony of the “Holy Ghost concerning Joseph Smith points to another dependent symbol, that of “the One True Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”. Mormons believe that their Church is the only church with the “restored gospel”. For them the existence and testimony of The Holy Bible, the Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and “continuing revelation” through the “Living Prophet” are proof of it. For Mormons, the Mormon Church is the “vehicle” through which the “children of Heavenly Father” achieve “eternal life”. It alone vouchsafes the “ordinances”, “commandments”, “practices”, and “knowledge” one must do, keep, and obtain if one is to become “like Heavenly Father”.

Clearly symbols like “Jesus Christ”, “the Gospel”, and the “commandments” are dependent upon the key Mormon symbol of “eternal progression”. It is “Jesus” who allows us to find our way along the path of “eternal progression”. It is “the Gospel” which shows us, in part, what we need to do to traverse this road, and it is the “commandments” which specify how this is done. Without the key symbol of the life cycle, these secondary symbols would have no meaning in and of themselves. [33]

The Mormon symbol system, a system of signs or meaning units that stand for something other than themselves, is, in sum, a system of communication. It communicates to Mormons (and potentially to “Gentiles” living or dead) the means by which one can progress through life from pre-existence to an exalted “eternal life”. In that progression one has the possibility (if one has made the right choices) of becoming like God and thereby populating a new world.

The key symbol of “eternal progression” and its various dependent symbols are also a logically interrelated and integrated whole. Each sign or word-ideology unit within the symbol system has meaning on two levels. We have to look at a key symbol in relationship to other signs within the system itself (“Aaronic priesthood”, for example, has meaning via its differentiation from “Melchizedek priesthood”), and secondly, we have to look at it in relationship to similar signifiers from other religious meaning systems in Mormonism's environment. “Jesus Christ” and “the Christ-like life”, for instance, mean something entirely different in Mormon contexts than what they do in Catholic and Protestant symbolic traditions. The words may be the same but the meanings (signifieds) are different. [34]

As I said earlier the Mormon symbol system is an integrated one. Each meaning unit within the symbol system is integrated and intertwined with every other in, as was noted before, an extraordinarily systematic and dense way (exactly what one would expect in a rationalized and routinized authoritarian system). Each dependent symbol is integrated into the key symbol of eternal progression. For instance, the dependent symbol, “continuing revelation”, and its dependent symbol, “the One True Church”, are integral aspects of the process of “eternal progression”. Part of this life cycle is, for instance, following the directives and “ordinances” vouchsafed by the Mormon Church because these are the products of divine revelation. The system is, in other words, a tautologous one in which each symbol within the system gives credence to every other one. It is system of ever broadening concentric symbols, a system in which there are symbols within symbols within symbols within symbols and meanings within meanings within meanings within meanings.

One of the most interesting aspects of Mormon symbology concerns Latter-day Saints conceptualizations of sacred and profane. Social scientists have often noted that this distinction is generally fundamental to symbol-ritual domains cross culturally. Victor Turner, for instance, has suggested that the rituals of modern industrial society are underlain by a sacred/profane dichotomy in which leisure has been codified as sacred relative to the mundane, profane categorization of work. Since so much of LDS symbology, especially its dominant symbol of “eternal progression”, has to do with progressing through this world while recognizing that one is not of this world, the passing of the worthy Saint and/or his family through the life cycle in this world gives a certain sanctity to the world. [35]

There is not a clear marking off of the world as evil as in the Swiss-Anabaptist symbol system. Nor is there a marking off of sacred places and times in a hard and fast way. While “home”, “family”, “ward” and “Temple”, are points marked by sacredness, the processural aspect of the life cycle marks even everyday life as part of this sacred traversal toward godhood. The daily life of the worthy Saint, his or her actions and thoughts in the world, are sacred almost as much as are ward and Temple spaces and the “ordinances” performed within these.

Questions, of course, can be raised about my delineation of the “eternal progression” life cycle as the key or core symbol in the Mormon symbolic complex (what would academia be without controversy?). I am convinced, however, from my exploration of official literature and through the historical and fieldwork explorations and interviews I conducted that the delineation of this symbol as the core one within Mormonism is accurate. In interviews several informants have emphasized the importance of “eternal progression” to understanding what they do and why they do it. This is particularly true for Mormons in the state of Utah where Mormons comprise approximately seventy percent of the population and the Mormon Church is the dominant actor in political, economic, social, and cultural life. [36]

While it is clear that Mormon culture is multivocal and that meanings are negotiated in that culture, the authoritarian nature of Mormonism limits multivocality and negotiation, particularly on the official level. Still individual Saints do give nuances to Mormon doctrines over time and within geographical space. Informal interviews I have conducted as well as my intuition make me think that those who have converted to the LDS from other Christian groups are more likely to bring the ideological baggage from their pre-Mormon days with them. Many tend to interpret “Jesus in more traditional “Christian” fashion, as one aspect of the Godhead who came to earth to die for the sins of humankind and in the process made it possible for men and women to gain “eternal life” not through a process of “eternal progression” toward godhood but by believing in him and trying, however imperfectly, to follow his “example”. Some Mormon feminists “violate” hierarchical counsel by praying collectively to “Mother in Heaven” and giving nuances to the meaning she has for them that the male hierarchs wouldn't. Still, such multivocality is an anomaly particularly in the Mormon Culture Region where the ideological control of the hierarchy is strongest. [37]

Sherry Ortner has distinguished two kinds of symbols, summarizing and elaborating symbols, symbols which respectively sum up and make ideas and feelings comprehensible. The Mormon symbolic complex and its key symbol, the notion of “eternal progression”, is both a summarizing and elaborating one, but it goes beyond this. “Eternal progression”, for instance, represents what Mormon culture means to most Mormons. Through embodiment via experience and memory it gives definition to the idea that there are certain practices of which one must partake in order to progress to “exaltation”, and “eternal life” with “Heavenly Father”. [38]

Embodiment of symbols and ideology occurs in a variety of ways. Our experiences are sedimented in our memories, in our nervous systems, and in our minds. Our experiences throughout “childhood”, “adolescence”, and “adulthood”, our interactions with our environments, our interactions with parents, relatives, friends, the media, authority figures, important institutions like schools and religious gathering places, become part of us and motivate us both consciously or unconsciously to act and think in certain ways. [39]

The “reality” of this embodiment of symbols can be seen in Mormon lives, particularly in the Mormon culture region. Official Mormonism places great attendance on church attendance and church activities. In 1890 the territory of Utah had a church attendance rate of 61.2%, second only to New Mexico (68.9%). Recent data has similarly found that Mormon Church attendance in the United States (including that outside the Mormon culture region) is significantly higher than that for “Gentiles”. In the 1980s Rodney Stark and William Simms Bainbridge found that Utah had the highest rates of church attendance of any state in the US (836 per 1000) and that three of the top ten American cities in church attendance rates were in Utah (Provo (number 1 at 966 attendees per 1000), Ogden (number 9 at 820 per 1000), and Salt Lake City (number 10 at 808 per 1000). [40]

Additionally, official Mormonism places immense ideological emphasis on marriage and childbirth, both crucial components of “eternal progression”. In Utah (and beyond) LDS marriage rates and birth rates, particularly for regular church attendees (often used, if problematically, by sociologists as a measure of religiosity) are higher than those of “Gentiles”. 97% of Saints over 30 have married while 81% of Catholics, 87% of Protestants, and 83% of Jews have. Mormons also tend to marry early. 74% of LDS women and 49% of LDS men are married by age 21. This is considerably higher than the figures for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish men. Mormons have lower percentages of interfaith marriage than do non-Mormons. Mormon intermarriage rates in the Mormon culture region are a low 5%. Mormon divorce rates are higher than those of Catholics and Jews: 14% for men, 19% for women compared to 11% for Catholics and 10% for Jews have divorced. However, divorce rates for Mormons married in the temple are 6%. Remarriage rates for Mormons are 67% for men and 57% for women married in the temple and 71% for men and 55% for women married outside the temple. Finally, marriage rates for Mormons in the Mormon culture region are higher than those outside of the culture region, divorce rates are lower, and remarriage rates are higher than those outside of the culture region. [41]

Mormon fertility rates are higher than those of other religious groups. More than 50% of LDS women have three or more children compared to 37% of Protestant women and 36% of Catholic women. 20% of LDS women have five or more children compared with 2% of Jewish women. Fertility rates for Saints married in the Temple (the ideal) are even higher as are fertility rates for Mormon women in the Mormon culture region: Utah women had a birthrate of 22% per 1000 women. Utah’s number of live births per 1000 for women age 15-44 was 41% higher than the national average. [42]

Mormon ideas about sex, gender roles, and alcohol and cigarette use also foreground the important role Mormon culture and ideology plays in shaping Mormon attitudes. In 1990 Utah had the lowest number of unwed mothers and out of wedlock pregnancies in the United States: 17% compared to the national average of 33%. In 1970 it was 4%. 58% of Mormons say that pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, and homosexuality are wrong. 34% of Protestants and 25% of Catholics say they are wrong. When you look only at homosexuality, 90% of Mormons said homosexuality was wrong. 75% of Catholics thought it was wrong. 22% of Mormons said that a pre-school child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works compared to 16% of Catholics and 13% of Protestants. In 1990 Utah had the lowest rates of teen pregnancy and the lowest abortion rates in the United States. Less than 29% of Mormons favored abortion in cases where money or desire was an issue compared to 33% of Catholics. 7.3% of Utahns smoke compared to 14% of LDS nationally, 38% of Catholics, 36% of Protestants, and 28% of Jews. The national average is 17%. Finally 28% of LDS drink alcohol compared to 65% of Protestants, 85% of Catholics, and 86% of Jews. [43]

These demographic characteristics clearly show that the closer Saints are to Mormon power centers, the more their life cycle choices reflect those promoted by official LDS doctrine. This points to the fact that the central pivot around which all Mormon symbology and ideology moves, whether primitive or contemporary is “proper authority”.

It is, as I implied earlier, these “proper authorities” who guide each Saint along the path of “eternal progression” by virtue of their charisma, their ties to the divine and their reception of “continuing revelation”. In the past the authorities urged Saints to “gather to Zion” and to practice “the Principle”. Today they urge male Saints to become priesthood holders. They make sure Saints have access to Mormon history and doctrine through wards, through seminaries and through Institutes of Religion which serve as institutions of enculturation and socialization for Mormons even outside the Mormon Culture Region. They urge Saints to go on missions. They urge Saints to get married and have lots of children. They urge Saints to be active in ward meetings and other church activities (be this scouting or athletic activities in wards). They counsel Saints about the evils of the world. They excommunicate “unworthy” Saints in a “paternalistic” spirit when necessary. They urge Saints to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. It is, in other words, through the embodiment of Mormon symbols and the embodiment of notions of “proper authority” that Saints become Saints. [44]

Mormonism has its own language (e.g., “eternal progression”, “Heavenly Father”, “Prophet, seer and revelator”, “anti-Mormons”, “family home evening”, “the MTC”, and “weird returning missionaries”), its own institutions (e.g., “wards”, “stakes”, “Temples”,” ZCMI” (sadly now deceased), the “First Presidency”, festivals in Manti and Palmyra, Deseret Books, Deseret Industries, the Church Welfare System, “seminaries”, and “institutes” which provide education to Saints all around the world), and its own cultural forms (e.g., garments, revelations, the “Word of Wisdom”, folklore, literature, humor, music, poetry, cosmology). These are embodied in individual Mormon lives as each Saint moves through the life cycle.

Each Mormon Family is supposed to get together for conversation (often on LDS subjects) and films every Monday evening. At BYU an equal number of males and females from a BYU ward are formed into family home evening groups. One of the things BYU family home meetings do is pair off males and females for possible future marriage. “The MTC” is the “Missionary Training Center” in Provo. Those going on missions, at home and abroad, are trained in languages, cultures, Mormonism, strategies for evangelizing, and fashion tips at the sprawling complex north of the BYU campus (which I visited). While one doesn't have to go on a “mission” to be a “worthy Saint” it is becoming more typical for college age Saints to do so (Almost fifty percent of LDS males do so; the percentages are less for women and may reflect their subordinate role in Mormon culture). This distinct language, this distinctive culture, and these singular institutions make Mormonism, Mormonism, and Mormons, Mormons. [45]

This identity is replicated constantly in Mormon lives and is expressed in the sacrifices, investments, and commitments individual Mormons make to Mormon ideology, Mormon rituals and ceremonies, and Mormon institutions in their everyday lives. These ideologies, rituals and ceremonies, and institutions link Mormons to one another in both time and eternity. It is to this cultural and social embodiment and the ideologies and commitments that they entail that we need to look if we are fully to understand how identities are formed regardless of whether they are totemic, tribal, racial, national, religious, or whatever form identities take. The study of Mormon culture and its embodiment and institutionalization is just one means through which we can explore the symbolic or cultural construction and embodiment of identity through culture and ideology. And at least one of the things such a study shows is that while Mormons may be Americans their culture is a far more complex than a simply generic American one. They are a genuine American counterculture if not a genuine American subculture. [46]

End Notes
1. There are numerous works on LDS history and culture. I have been helped immensely by a number of them. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (NYC: Macmillan, 1992) edited by Daniel Ludlow is an indispensable source of LDS history, culture, doctrine, and demographics. Other useful sources on Mormonism include Whitney Cross, The Burned Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1950), James Allen and Glen Leonard; The Story of the Latter-day Saints (SLC: Deseret, second edition 1992), Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton; The Mormon Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, second edition 1992), Lyndon Cook and Donald Cannon; A New Light Breaks Through: Essays in Mormon History (SLC: Hawkes Publishing, 1980), Klaus Hansen; Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Jan Shipps; Mormonism: The Study of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), Shipps; Sojourner in the Promised Land, Richard Bushman; Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), Dean L. May; “Mormons” in Stephen Thernstrom (editor), Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1980), Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons and the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), Foster; Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), Dan Vogel; Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism (SLC: Signature, 1988), Marie Cornwall, Tim Heaton, and Lawrence Young; Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd; A Kingdom Transformed: Themes in the Development of Mormonism (SLC: University of Utah Press, 1984). On LDS symbols and rituals see David John Buerger; The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship (SLC: Signature, 1994), and Jerald and Sandra Tanner; Evolution of the Mormon Temple Ceremony (SLC: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1990). For excellent discussions of Mormon identity see Moore; Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1987), Patricia Nelson Limerick; The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (NYC: Norton, 1987), and Douglas Davies “Mormon History, Identity, and Faith Community” in Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman; History and Ethnicity: ASA Monograph 27 (London: Routledge, 1989). An excellent collection of primary documents can be found in William Mulder and A.R. Mortensen (eds.); Among the Mormons: Historical Accounts by Contemporary Observers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958). A standard documentary collection is Joseph Smith; History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, edited by James Mulholland, Robert Thompson, William Phelps, Willard Richards, George Smith, and B.H. Roberts, seven volumes, (SLC: Deseret, second edition, 1951) (hereafter DHC). Mormon scriptures include the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price all published by the church and all essential for an understanding of Mormon history. On the first vision see Milton Backman; Joseph Smith's First Vision (SLC: Bookcraft, second edition 1980), Richard Howard; “Joseph Smith's First Vision: the RLDS Tradition”, Journal of Mormon History, 7 (1980), pp. 31-42, James Allen; “Emergence of a Fundamental: The Expanding Role of Joseph Smith's First Vision in Mormon Religious Thought” in Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980), pp. 43-67, Dean Jessee; “The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision”, BYU Studies, 9:3 (Spring 1969), pp. 275-294, Marvin Hill; “A Note on Joseph Smith's First Vision and its Import in the Shaping of Early Mormonism”, Dialogue 12:1 (Spring 1979), pp. 90–99, and Hill; “The First Vision Controversy: A Critique and Reconciliation”, Dialogue 15:2 (Summer 1982), pp. 31–46. For contemporary texts on the first vision see Joseph Smith; The Papers of Joseph Smith (hereafter cited as Papers 1); Volume 1; edited by Dean Jessee (SLC: Deseret, 1989), Smith; The Papers of Joseph Smith; Volume 2 (hereafter cited as Papers 2); edited by Dean Jessee (SLC: Deseret, 1992), and Milton Backman; Eyewitness Accounts of the Restoration (Orem, UT.: Grandin, 1983). This last is a harmony of the various accounts. Primary sources for the first vision include the “1832 Autobiography and History”, the “1839 History of the Church”, and the “Wentworth Letter”. Another version of the first vision is contained in an account written by Joseph's scribe, Warren Cowdery, in the “Kirtland Diary, 1835”. The official version is contained in the Pearl of Great Price and in the DHC, Volume 1.

2. Dan Vogel; Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon (SLC: Signature, 1986). On the Book of Mormon see Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe (eds); American Apocalypse: Essays on the Book of Mormon (SLC: Signature, 2002), Brent Metcalfe (ed.); New Perspectives on the Book of Mormon (SLC: Signature, 1993), Terry Givens; By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Created a New Religion (NYC: Oxford University Press, 2002), and B.H. Roberts; Studies in the Book of Mormon, edited by Brigham Madsen and Sterling McMurrin (SLC: Signature, 1992).

3. Doctrine and Covenants 51:16 (1831), 82:13 (1832), 94:1 (1833) (where Kirtland is referred to as a “stake” of “Zion”).

4. Ether 13:3, 3 Nephi 22 (both 1830), Doctrine and Covenants 97:16, 21 (1833), 10l: 18 (1833), “Articles of Faith” verse 10. The “Articles of Faith” can be found in the Pearl of Great Price. The “Articles of Faith” were Smith's response to a Chicago reporter in answer to his query about the nature of Mormon doctrine. On “the gathering” to “Zion” see William Mulder; Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press) and P.E.M. Taylor; Expectations Westward: The Mormons and their British Converts in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965). In a letter from “Brigham Young to Amasa Lyman et.al. and Saints in the British Empire” the “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” demanded that all Saints “gather to Zion” “at the earliest possible opportunity”. The letter can be found in the “Brigham Young Notebooks” at the LDS Church Archives in SLC.

5. Richard Hughes and Allen; Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Doctrine and Covenants 29 (1830) and 101(1833). On contemporary accounts of Mormon apocalypticism see Parley Pratt; “The Millennium” and “Letter to the Queen” in Pratt; The Writings of Parley Parker Pratt, edited by Parker Pratt Robertson (Salem, UT: Pioneer Press, 1837), and Key to the Science of Theology (Salem, UT.: Pioneer Press, 1855. Pratt's work are amongst the earliest published explications and defenses of Mormon doctrine, On Mormon apocalypticism see Grant Underwood; The Millennial World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1999) and Hughes and Leonard; Illusions of Innocence. Early Mormon documents, such as the aptly named Mormon newspaper the Millennial Star, are full of stories concerning the signs of the times be these earthquakes, floods, epidemics, railroad accidents, or steamship explosions. Such stories were regarded as signs of the end times.

6. On Kirtland and the bank scandal see Milton J. Backman, Jr.; The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio 1830-1838 (SLC: Deseret, 1983). For contemporary accounts of Mormon life in Kirtland see Fred Collier (ed.); Kirtland Council Minute Book (SLC: Collier Publishers, n.d). On “Saint”-”Gentile” conflict see Stephen C. LeSueur; The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), and BYU Studies 13:1, 14:4, and 26:2. For contemporary accounts of Mormon life in Missouri see Donald Cannon and Lyndon Cook (eds.); Far West Record: Minutes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1844 (SLC: Deseret, 1983). For contemporary accounts of Gentiler Mormon tensions in Missouri see Clark Johnson (ed.); Mormon Redress Petitions: Documents of the 1833-1838 Missouri Conflict (Provo, UT. BYU Religious Studies Center, 1992) and Vinson Knight's letter to William Cooper, 3 February 1835, Typescript, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU. On Mormon communalism see Leonard Arrington, Feramorz Fox, and Dean May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1992).

7. Doctrine and Covenants 84 (1832) and 3 Nephi 20 and Ether 13.

8. Revision, at least theoretically, isn't a problem for Mormonism since Mormonism is a historical and processural religion. Revelations not only “restored” the True Church both doctrinally and organizationally, but dealt with particular situations at particular moments in time. Smith, on occasion, addressed specific questions to God and got specific answers. Doctrine and Covenants 101, to take one example, was a response to persecution in Missouri.

9. Also see 2 Nephi 1.

10. Doctrine and Covenants 124:2 (1841). On the Nauvoo period in LDS History Robert Flanders; Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), Roger Launius and John Halwas (eds.); The Kingdom on the Mississippi Revisited (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), David and Della Miller; Nauvoo: The City of Joseph (SLC: Peregrine Smith, 1974), Richard and Jeni Holzapfeel; Women of Nauvoo (SLC: Bookcraft, 1992), BYU Studies 15:4 (Summer 1975). 18:2 (Winter 1978), 19:3 (Spring 1979), and 31:1 (Winter 1991), the special issue of Dialogue on Nauvoo: 5:1 (Spring 1970), and John Bennett's sensationalistic expose History of the Saints (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1842). Nauvoo, putatively from the Hebrew word for beautiful—Smith studied Hebrew in Kirtland—was the name Smith gave to the city that had once been known as Commerce. Under the Saints it grew into the largest or second largest city in Illinois (depending on who you read). The Illinois legislature granted a great degree of autonomy to the Saints in Nauvoo apparently salivating over the block votes they might provide to those running for electoral office. They not only governed the community but maintained their own militia.

11. D. Michael Quinn; “The Council of Fifty and its Members”, BYU Studies 20 (Winter 1980), pp. 163-197 and Klaus Hansen; Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty in Mormon History (East Lansing, MI.: Michigan State University Press, 1967). The first hand accounts of Smith's Nauvoo teachings are conveniently collected in Lyndon Cook and Andrew Ehat (eds.); The Words of Joseph Smith (Orem, UT.: Grandin, 1991). The King Follett Discourse was recorded by Willard Richards, Wilford Woodruff, Thomas Bullock, and William Clayton in their journals and diaries. These are reprinted in the Cook and Ehat compilation noted above. A version of it was also printed in the Mormon newspaper Times and Seasons 5 (15) August 1844. The King Follett discourse reveals a lot about Smith. It points up his intelligence, his creativity, his ever expanding mind (his study of Hebrew and German, for instance), his certainty of his own authority (expressed, in part, in his jibes at Alexander Campbell), the importance he placed on the Bible, and his style of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics (almost Talmudic), something also evident in many revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants which are also talmudic like commentaries on biblical texts. The King Follett discourse justifies baptisms for the dead, asserts that intelligence is self-existent, argues for religious toleration, asserts the possibility of human perfection, and argues that God was once a man and that men can become Gods (eternal progression). On doctrinal developments in Nauvoo, including the doctrines of “eternal progression” and “celestial marriage” see Cook and Ehat (eds.); Words of Joseph Smith and Thomas Alexander; “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology”, Sunstone 10:5 (May 1985), pp. 24-33. The revelations can be found in Doctrine and Covenants sections 124 through 134. Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (NYC: Simon and Schuster, 1992) is also a brilliant (if flawed) analysis of Smith's thought. Bloom is one of the few “Gentile” analysts who understand the creative genius that Smith clearly was. Controversy has raged over how novel the doctrines that become apparent in Nauvoo were. Marvin Hill in “The Shaping of the Mormon Mind in New England and New York, BYU Studies; 9:3 (Spring 1969), pp. 351-372, argues that the doctrines that became explicit in the Nauvoo period were present, sometimes in incipient form, in the New York Church and in the Puritan mentality that early Mormon leaders shared given their New England backgrounds. Mario DePillis, on the other hand, draws on Frederick Jackson Turner in his “The Social Sources of Early Mormonism”, Church History 37 (March 1968), pp. 50-79, to argue that Mormonism's novel doctrines that come to fruition in Nauvoo, were the products of the rural frontier of New York and Ohio.

12. DHC, Volume 6, pp. 473-479 and 302-317.

13. Doctrine and Covenants 28:7 (1830) specifies that the “authorities” had been given “the keys to the mysteries”. The polytheism inherent in Smith's doctrine of deity led Brigham Young and others, perhaps even Joseph, to speculate about whether “Adam” was the god of this planet (the Adam God doctrine). “Anti-Mormons” today make much of this “heresy” in their struggle against Mormonism. On the Adam-God doctrine see David Buerger; “The Adam-God Doctrine” Dialogue 15 (Spring 1982), pp. 14-58.

14. “Eternal salvation” inscribes identity construction and reconstruction into the very pattern of a Mormon's life. It provides a pattern of socialization, enculturation, and social control that is related to the specific life choices one makes at specific points in one's life. These life cycle choices are tied to the Church hierarchy via the belief that it is the hierarchy alone which knows the correct choices that “worthy Saints” must make in order to reach the “Celestial Kingdom”. On plural marriage see Carmon Hardy; Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), Kathleen Daynes; More Wives than One: The Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), and Doctrine and Covenants section 132. Ironically the Book of Mormon had condemned plural marriage (Jacob 1:15, 2:24), and Bennett's History of the Saints. There are a number of contemporary first hand accounts of polygamy in Nauvoo. Bennett’s book is an expose of the “scandals”, particularly the scandal of plural marriage, occurring in Mormon Nauvoo. While a prominent Mormon Bennett engaged in plural marriage without the permission of authorities. He turned to writing exposes of the faith after his excommunication. Phoebe W. Carter Woodruff's (first wife of the fourth Mormon “Prophet, seer, and revelator, Wilford Woodruff) “Biography” (Woodruff; “Biography” in Edward Tullidge; The Women of Mormondom (NYC: Tullidge and Drandall, 1877)) shows the process through which many Mormon women came to grips with “the Principle”. Woodruff writes that at first she was troubled by the idea. As she came to believe that the doctrine originated as a revelation from God (through Smith), however, she made her peace with it.

15. On the temple and temple ceremonies see Buerger; The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, Colleen McDanell; “Mormon Garments, Sacred Clothing, and the Body” in McDannell; Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1995), Paul Conkin; American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), Jerald and Sandra Tanner; Evolution of the Mormon Temple Ceremony, and, for a first hand contemporary account of temple rituals, William Clayton; An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton, edited by George Smith (SLC: Signature, 1991). As studies make clear the temple ceremonies and modern “temple endowments” differ somewhat from earlier ones. Current temple ceremonies are, for one thing, much shorter.

16. D. Michael Quinn; The Mormon Hierarchy: The Origins of Power (SLC: Signature, 1994).

17. Colleen McDanell; “Mormon Garments, Sacred Clothing, and the Body” in McDannell; Material Christianity.

18.For Brigham Young’s version of the millennium see his sermon in Journal of Discourses XII (SLC: Deseret, 1903).

19. Brigham Young; Manuscript History of Brigham Young, edited by William Harwell (SLC: Collier Publishing, 1997), and Fred Collier (ed.); Unpublished Revelations, two volumes (SLC: Collier Publishing, 1981, 1993). On Deseret as a “stake of Zion” see Doctrine and Covenants 136 especially verse 10. Robert Wiebe in his Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2002). Wiebe argues that Mormons violated all of the basic principles governing early nineteenth century American ethnic behavior. Instead of separating American and ethnic identities and possibly acting on both, Mormons had a totalistic identity grounded in notions of the church as family. Instead of celebrating American democracy, Mormons were theocratic, authoritarian, obedient to proper authority, and sought to establish a nation of their own. This Mormon Kingdom (Deseret) was to stretch across what is today all of Utah and parts of Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, and California. Wiebe's analysis while insightful is also problematic. Most importantly it fails to explore the ambiguous love/hate relationship the Mormons had with the United States. Mormons did conceive of the US as a sacred land. Smith received a revelation from God which stated that the US Constitution was divinely inspired and had prepared the way for the “restoration”. However, he also received revelations which damned the United States and predicted that apocalyptic destruction would come upon it and be replaced by a Mormon kingdom ruled from “Zion” (as did later LDS “Prophets”). As I noted earlier, this apocalyptic rhetoric declined in the wake of the “war” between the Mormons and the US, a “war” “won” by the Americans.

20. Edward Leo Lyman; Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Statehood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). On the Utah War see Norman Furniss; The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859 (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1960). It's worth noting that the federal attacks on Mormonism were amongst the first instances where the federal military apparatus was used against someone other than “savage” First Peoples. The notion that slavery and polygamy were “barbaric” probably aided the feds and others in rationalizing their actions and receiving public backing for them. For presidential speeches on the evils of Mormon polygamy see Ulysses S. Grant; “Annual Message to the Congress of the United States” (4 December 1871) in James Richardson (ed.); A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1709-1908 (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1909), Rutherford B. Hayes; “Annual Message to the Congress of the United States” (2 December 1879) in Richardson (ed.); A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1709-1908, James A. Garfield; “Inaugural Address” (March 1881) in Richardson (ed.); A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1709-1908, Chester A. Arthur; “Annual Message to the Congress of the United States” (1 December 1884) in Richardson (ed.); A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1709-1908, and Grover Cleveland; “Annual Message to the Congress of the United States” (8 December 1885) in Richardson (ed.); A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1709-1908.

21. Shipps and Quinn offered their views on the great transformation at a Sunstone Conference. I heard a taped copy of this symposium.

22. Alexander; Mormonism in Transition

23. For information on Church membership see Tim Heaton; “Vital Statistics” in Ludlow (ed.); Encyclopedia, pp. 1518-1537.

24. Lavina Fielding Anderson; “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology”, Dialogue 26 (Spring 1993), pp. 7-64 and issues of the journal Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance. The Mormon Alliance is a group of dissident intellectuals who monitor Church “disciplining” or “abuse” (depending on your point of view) of Church members. Lavina Fielding Anderson was one of the Mormon intellectuals (“The Six”) excommunicated by ward excommunication courts in the mid-1990s. Many Mormon intellectuals believe that the campaign against dissidents is led by the Church hierarchy in Salt Lake. The General Authorities deny any involvement in ward disciplining and excommunications.

25. Heaton; “Vital Statistics” in Ludlow (ed.); Encyclopedia.

26. D. Michael Quinn; “Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism” in Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 240-293.. I understand that those who attend BYU have to affirm that they have never had anything to do with Fundamentalist during their yearly bishop interviews.

27. Shepherd and Shepherd; A Kingdom Transformed. General Conference is held twice a year in April and October in SLC. Church leaders give speeches at these conferences on a variety of church related issues.

28. Shepherd and Shepherd; A Kingdom Transformed.

29. Shepherd and Shepherd; A Kingdom Transformed. Though polygamy and the gathering have declined in contemporary Mormon rhetoric it is important to remember that they have not disappeared. On this see Kendall White; Mormon Neo-orthodoxy: A Crisis Theology (SLC: Signature, 1987), Shepherd and Shepherd; A Kingdom Transformed, Buerger; The Mysteries of Godliness, and Tanner and Tanner; Evolution of the Mormon Temple Ceremony.
While Mormons made peace with America after 1890 this doesn't mean that the tension between “Mormons” and “Gentiles” has disappeared. Sociologist Armand Mauss argues that tension between the two remains and that these can be summarized by reference to the angel (Mormon distinctiveness) and the beehive (Mormon “assimilation”). Mauss; The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Mauss’s discussion, of course, draws on and critiques dominant social science and historical models of secularization. The most prominent sociologist of secularization, British sociologist Bryan Wilson, maintains that the Western world has experienced a decline in religion and a simultaneous rise in secularism over the last century. He sees this decline in evolutionary terms. As the West has experienced the varying forces of modernity (e.g., industrialization, professionalization, bureaucratization, and privatization) religious explanations of the place of humankind in both nature and the universe have been replaced by secular or naturalistic understandings in their stead. As this decline is a phenomenon of a specific geographical location, the Western world, the part of the earth that has supposedly experienced the greatest degree of modernization, this decline is also geographical in nature (though it is seen as spreading to other parts of the globe). These geographic-evolutionary notions of assimilation and secularization have been challenged by scholars who point to these two phenomena, religion and secularization, as behavioral patterns rather than as evolutionary opposites in decline and ascent. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan argued that ethnic culture had been transformed in the American environment but that this didn't mean that ethnic groups had become less identifiable. The fall of communism in Europe in the latter part of the twentieth century and the reassertion of ethnicity, nationalism, and ethnic and nationalist violence likewise shows that reports of ethnicity's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Jeffrey Haddon and Anson Shupe, Roger Finke, Rodney Stark, and Samuel Heilman have shown that religion in the United States is more cyclical than evolutionary. While there has been a decline in mainstream religious faiths in the United States, there has also been a corresponding rise in evangelical, Orthodox Jewish, and new religious faiths. So clearly there have been changes in Mormonism over the years the question remains, however, as to whether these changes are measures of “assimilation” or whether they are indicators of the sacralization of symbolic changes. I tend to take the latter position as this essay indicates.
For discussions which assert that modernity and secularism were and are the main forces impacting religious cultures see the various volumes of the Fundamentalism Project including Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.); Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.); Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.) Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militancy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Martin E. Marty, and R. Scott Appleby (eds.); Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.); Fundamentalisms Comprehended (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Will Herberg; Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), Bryan Wilson; Religion in Secular Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), Phillip Hammond (ed.); The Sacred in a Secular Age (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), and Larry Shiner "The Concept of Secularization in Empirical Research" in William Newman (ed.); The Social Meanings of Religion: An Integrated Anthology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1974). For discussions of the impact of modernity and secularism on specific religious communities see James Davidson Hunter; American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), Leo Driedger and Leland Harder (eds.); Anabaptist-Mennonite Identities in Ferment (Elkhart, IN.: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1990), Calvin Redekop (ed.); Mennonite Identity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1988), Beulah Hostetler; American Mennonites and Protestant Movements: A Community Paradigm (Scottdale, PA.: Herald, 1987), Donald Kraybill and Carl Bowman; On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Donald Kraybill; The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, revised edition, 2001), John Hostetler; Amish Society, (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, fourth edition, 1992), Steve Nolt; A History of the Amish (Intercourse, PA.: Good Books., 1992), Paton Yoder; Tradition and Transition: Amish Mennonites and Old Order Amish, 1800-1900 (Scottdale, PA.: Herald, 1991), John Hostetler; Hutterite Society, (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, second edition, 1997), Donald Kraybill and Marc Olshan (eds); The Amish Struggle with Modernity (Hannover, NH.: University Press of New England, 1994), and Thomas Hamm; The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800-1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). For critiques of the secularist hypothesis see Jeffrey Haddon and Anson Shupe; Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered (NYC: Paragon House, 1992), Roger Finke and Rodney Stark; The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), Jenna Weissman Joselit; The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 180-1950 (NYC: Hill and Wang, 1994), Steven Cohen; American Modernity and Jewish Identity (London: Tavistock, 1983), Samuel Heilman; Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Heilman; Synagogue Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Heilman; People of the Book: Drama, Fellowship, and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987).
One could also raise questions about the similar linear logic underlying analyses in other topical areas as well. The notion that immigrants moved to settler societies like the United States and assimilated to the broader culture of the United States by the second generation is based on similar linear assumptions to that which underlies notions of secularization. "Assimilation" does not mean that identity distinctives disappear. Ethic identity markers are generally simply transformed and remain as one identity marker among many others. In this context even the left traditions of Jews can be interpreted as "secularized" and sanctified variants of the biblical prophetic tradition with its condemnation of wealth and power.

30. My reading of contemporary Mormon symbology is also based on official documents of the Church used for instructional purposes. These include Come unto Christ through Temple Ordinances and Covenants (1987), the Melchizedek Priesthood Leadership Handbook (1990), the Stake Mission Handbook (1988), the Sunday School Handbook (1990), the Primary Handbook (1985), the Young Women Handbook (1989), the Relief Society Handbook (1988), and the Uniform System for Teaching the Gospel which includes Flipcharts, Instructions for the Discussions, The Plan of Our Heavenly Father, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, The Restoration, Eternal Progression, Living a Christlike Life, Membership in the Kingdom (all 1986) all of which are part of the missionary training packet, Missionary Guide (1988) and Missionary Handbook (1990). All of these are published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and published Salt Lake. I am also drawing on fieldwork, fieldnotes, and interviews undertaken in Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah between 1990 and 1993. Much of what follows is based on these documents and my fieldwork. My reading of contemporary Mormon symbology is also based on official documents of the Church. These include Come unto Christ through Temple Ordinances and Covenants (1987), the Melchizedek Priesthood Leadership Handbook (1990), the Stake Mission Handbook (1988), the Sunday School Handbook (1990), the Primary Handbook (1985), the Young Women Handbook (1989), the Relief Society Handbook (1988), and the Uniform System for Teaching the Gospel which includes Flipcharts, Instructions for the Discussions, The Plan of Our Heavenly Father, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, The Restoration, Eternal Progression, Living a Christlike Life, Membership in the Kingdom (all 1986) all of which are part of the missionary training packet, Missionary Guide (1988) and Missionary Handbook (1990). All of these are published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and published Salt Lake. I am also drawing on fieldwork, fieldnotes, and interviews undertaken in Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah between 1990 and 1993. Much of what follows is based on these documents and my fieldwork.
While those who only partially traverse the path of “eternal progression” are offered immortality, at least potentially, these individuals can only progress to the two heavenly domains farthest from God, the “Heavenly Father”, the “terrestrial” and the “telestial”. The former realm consists of honorable individuals who are not Mormons. The latter is populated by the “wicked of the world”. Even here further progression toward “exaltation”, nearness to “Heavenly Father” is possible, however. “Worthy Saints” are able to perform rituals on behalf of the dead in the Temple thus allowing them the opportunity to become members of the church. Mormon doctrine maintains that several sons of God rebelled against “Heavenly Father” in the pre-existent spirit realm. As a result of their actions they were cast out of Heaven and became the forces of evil on earth. These personages, including Satan, have no chance to obtain a physical body and continue on the road to exaltation. With the “Last Judgment” they will be locked into a world of total darkness.

31. While those who only partially traverse the path of “eternal progression” are offered immortality, at least potentially, these individuals can only progress to the two heavenly domains farthest from the “Heavenly Father”— the “terrestrial” and the “telestial”. The former realm consists of honorable individuals who are not Mormons. The latter is populated by the “wicked of the world”. Even here further progression toward “exaltation”, nearness to “Heavenly Father” is possible, however. “Worthy Saints” are able to perform rituals on behalf of the dead in the Temple thus allowing them the opportunity to become members of the church. Mormon doctrine maintains that several sons of God rebelled against “Heavenly Father” in the pre-existent spirit realm. As a result of their actions they were cast out of Heaven and became the forces of evil on earth. These personages, including Satan, have no chance to obtain a physical body and continue on the road to exaltation. With the “Last Judgment” they will be locked into a world of total darkness.

32. On Temple rituals see Buerger; Mysteries of Godliness, and Tanner and Tanner; Evolution of the Mormon Temple Ceremony. Interestingly, the rituals performed in Mormon temples, though they are sacred rites of passage, are not marked by a communitas stage with a beginning and an end that Victor Turner sees as a universal aspect of the ritual process. Rather in the Temple dramaturgy and ritual, one continues to learn about eternal progression and to undertake ordinances that will further one's progress toward exaltation. Unlike other rites of passage which mark off one's previous status from one's post-ritual status, temple rituals replicate and reinforce the important aspects of one's worthy status. If one is in a betwixt/between state in Mormonism, it is on which is constant and which sanctifies the acts of “worthy Saints” in the process. On this see Victor Turner; From Ritual to Theatre (NYC: PAJ Press, 1982).

33. Shepherd and Shepherd; A Kingdom Transformed. The addition of a subtitle to the Church's official 1981 edition of The Book of Mormon, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ” is indicative of this increasing emphasis, if for no other reason than evangelical. For an analysis of the transformation of Mormon symbols from more collectivist to individualist, see Shipps; Mormonism and Alexander; Mormonism in Transition.

34. Roland Barthes; Mythologies (NYC: Hill and Wang, 1972).

35. Emile Durkheim; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (NYC: Free Press, 1969).

36. According to Thomas K. Martin, Tim Heaton, and Steven J. Bahr; Utah in Demographic Perspective: Regional and National Contrasts (SLC: Signature, 1986) Utah has the highest regional (Rocky Mountain area) and national levels of fertility in every category and variable considered (p. 47).

37. This multivocality, of course, is, in part, a product of variations between official versus popular or non-official interpretations of Mormonism and negotiations between these. The former refer to the ideologies and practices of the religious elite and part are part of the enculturation and socialization aspect of any organized religion. The latter refers to individual Church members who evidence non-official readings of church symbols and doctrine. Of course, there are internal and external limitations placed on hermeneutic variability. There are always social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological boundaries in any social and cultural environment. For a collection of essays that attempts to explore the negotiations between hierarchs or intellectuals and laity in religious groups see David Hall (ed.); Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997). On cultural negotiation also see Hall; “Narrating Puritanism” in Harry Stout and D.G. Hart; New Directions in American Religious History (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 51-75. On the non-official Mormon feminism which characterizes some Mormon intellectual elites see Maxine Hanks (ed.); Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism (SLC: Signature, 1992).

38. On key, core, or dominant symbols see Sherry Ortner; “On Key Symbols”; American Anthropologist, 75:5, October 1973, 1338-1346; Ruth Benedict; The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1967), the various essays of Clifford Geertz; The Interpretation of Culture (NYC: Basic, 1973), Victor Turner; “Symbols in African Ritual”; Science, vol. 179, no. 4078 (March 1973), Victor Turner; The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), Turner; From Ritual to Theatre, Marshall Sahlins; Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), David Schneider; American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), Aileen Kelly; “In the Promised Land”, New York Review of Books, 29 November 2001, Jeffrey Alexander (ed.); Durkheimian Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Richard Mulch and Neil Smelser (eds.); Theory of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and Donald Kraybill and Carl Bowman; On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

39. Victor Turner; From Theatre to Anthropology, Gene Halton; “The Cultic Roots of Culture” in Richard Munch and Neal Smelser (eds.); Theory of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 29-63, Pierre Bourdieu; Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), and James Clifford; The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Personally, I am more sympathetic to Alexander's de Saussurean brand of unmotivated cultural sociology that Halton's motivated Peircean pragmatism. That said I do find Halton's discussion of the embodiment of culture more compelling that Bourdieu's as the latter underplays conscious culture. I also admire Halton’s emphasis on human creativity.

40. D. Michael Quinn; “Religion in the American West” in William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (eds.); Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (NYC: Norton, 1992), pp. 145-166 and Rodney Stark and William Simms Bainbridge; The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Utah is about 72% LDS. 27% of Idahoans are LDS. Stark and Bainbridge "Religious Regionalism" in The Future of Religion, pp. 68-96, especially pp. 70, 71, 73-78, found in 1980 that 72.2% of Utahns belonged to a church, mostly the Mormon Church, second only to Rhode Island (75.5%).

41. James Duke (ed.); Latter-Day Saint Social Life (Provo, UT.: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1998), Tim Heaton, Kristen Goodman, and Thomas Holman; “In Search of a Peculiar People: are Mormon Families Really Different” in Cornwall, Heaton, and Young (eds.); Contemporary Mormonism, pp. 87-117, Tim Heaton and Kristen Goodman, “Religion and Family Formation,” Review of Religious Research 26 (1985), pp. 343-359, Martin, Heaton, and Bahr; Utah in Demographic Perspective, Utah Governors Office of Planning and Budget; Utah Demographics Understood: Where We Are, Where We’re We’ve Been, and Where We’re Going (SLC: State of Utah), David Steward; “News About Mormons and Mormonism and the LDS Church” Mormon News 24 April 2001, Statistical Abstract of Utah, 1990 (SLC: University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research, 1990), Utah State Data Center; Utah Data Guide: A Newsletter for Data Users (SLC: Utah Offfice of Planning and Budget, various).

42. Duke (ed.); Latter-Day Saint Social Life, Tim Heaton, Kristen Goodman, and Thomas Holman; “In Search of a Peculiar People: are Mormon Families Really Different” in Cornwall, Heaton, and Young (eds.); Contemporary Mormonism, pp. 87-117, Tim Heaton and Kristen Goodman, “Religion and Family Formation,” Review of Religious Research 26 (1985), pp. 343-359, Heaton “Vital Statistics” in Ludlow (ed.); Encyclopedia, Thornton; “Religion and Fertility: The Case of Mormonism”, Martin, Heaton, and Bahr; Utah in Demographic Perspective, Utah Governors Office of Planning and Budget; Utah Demographics Understood, Steward; “News About Mormons and Mormonism and the LDS Church”, Statistical Abstract of Utah, 1990 (SLC: University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research, 1990), Utah State Data Center; Utah Data Guide.

43. Heaton, and Bahr; Utah in Demographic Perspective, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990, Utah Governors Office of Planning and Budget; Utah Demographics Understood, and Thomas Alexander; “The Emergence of a Republican Majority in Utah, 1970-1992” in Richard Lowitt (ed.); Politics in the Postwar American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), pp. 260-267. Alexander argues that Utah’s swing to the right parallels that of other Western states, though the Great Depression and its liberalizing effect on Utah electoral patterns may be the exception rather than the rule. While this may be accurate he proceeds to point out how “peculiar” Utah is on a number of demographic and political criteria. In other words, Alexander makes clear the critical role Mormon ideology has played in making Mormons a “peculiar people”.

44. On Institutes of Religion see Stanley Peterson; “Institutes of Religion” in Ludlow; Encyclopedia, pp. 684-685. On seminaries see Joe J. Christensen; “Seminaries” in Ludlow; Encyclopedia, pp. 1295-1296.

45. More and more “going on a mission” is being seen by LDS youth as a necessary life cycle choice (unofficial or popular Mormonism). I suspect that the number of Mormons in the culture region going on missions is higher than the numbers from outside the culture region going on missions though I don’t have the statistics to back this up. Again, this is likely emblematic of the fact that the power of the Mormon hierarchy is greater in the culture region than outside of it. “Weird returning missionaries” is a term LDS culture region women use to refer to extremely devoted LDS males returning from their mission. Cultural semantics are important. Jacobsen and Bahr found that there were high rates of church attendance among LDS youth (over 60%). Undoubtedly part of this is a result of the effort the church leaders have made to make it possible for Mormon youth to attend “seminaries” in their pre-college years and “Institutes of Religion” (or BYU, BYU-Hawaii, or BYU-Idaho) in their college years. In “seminaries” and “institutes” students learn about Mormon history, Mormon scriptures, and Mormon doctrine. They have become, especially for those in the Mormon culture region, one important point in a Saint's life cycle. On garments see McDannell; “Mormon Garments, Sacred Clothing, and the Body” in McDannell; Material Christianity. On Mormon folklore see Austin and Alta Fife; Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), William Wilson;“The Study of Mormon Folklore: An Uncertain Mirror for Truth,” Dialogue, 22(4), 1989, pp. 95–110, Hector Lee; The Three Nephites: Substance and Significance of Legend in Folklore (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1949). On Mormon music see Michael Hicks; Mormonism and Music: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). One Mormon composer wrote an oratorio based on texts from the Book of Mormon. On Mormons and science see Robert Paul; Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). On Mormon literature see Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson; Tender is the Garden: Essays in Mormon Literature (SLC: Signature, 1996). While much Mormon fiction and poetry is written for the Mormon market, particularly in the Mormon Culture Region, some Mormon writers, like Orson Scott Card, one of the most prominent science fiction writers today, have found a market in wider American culture. Needless to say, Card’s science fiction books are liberally peppered with references to Mormon history and culture. The television SF series Battlestar Galacta was created by a Mormon and is full of references to Mormon ideology (for example, twelve tribes, twelve leaders, a group of people in search of a sacred homeland). On LDS humor see the writings and cartoons of Bob Kirby, Pat Bagley, and Calvin Grondahl amongst them, who write and draw primarily for the LDS market. There is a famous cartoon by Bagley (I think it's Bagley) which is indicative of how you have to know Mormon culture before you can get the Mormon humor. The cartoon is in three panels. The first panel consists of a Mormon elder looking at a coke machine. In the second panel he “lays his hands” on the machine and says “heal”. In the third panel the soda machine has been healed and now contains only decaffeinated Cola. The “Word of Wisdom” prohibits the drinking of caffeinated cola. There are no caffeinated beverages on the BYU campus.

46. Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Commitment and Community (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1972)) argues that commitment to communes can be seen in individual expressions of sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification, and transcendence. Donald Kraybill (The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, revised edition, 2001)) stresses decisive leadership, comprehensive socialization, controlled interaction with outsiders, social sanctions, and symbolization of core values. Finke and Stark; The Churching of America, stress the role membership requirements play in religious groups. They suggest that in a pluralistic environment the more a church requires of its members, the greater its growth. Most of these factors are present in Mormon culture and many Mennonite, Amish, Hutterite, Quaker, and evangelical communities and cultures. Asking more of its members, by the way, has not led to growth in Anabaptist and Quaker communities. Being countercultural may be hazardous to group growth.

Cult: The Little Word that Could, or How to Demonize in One Easy Lesson

I have long had an interest in the sociology of religion and the typologies sociology developed to help it understand religion, an interest that goes back to the 1970s, and I have long had an interest in intellectual polemics and apologetics, including academic polemics and apologetics and the role ideology plays in intellectual academic and polemics. This paper, written in 1998, attempted to bring together, rather like Robert Oppenheimer was able to bring together his obsessions with New Mexico and nuclear physics in the Manhattan Project, my interest in sociological typologies of religion and the ideological underpinnings of the sociology of religion specifically and intellectual and academic culture generally. This essay was originally intended to be the first chapter in my dissertation on Mormonism (part of it did end up in my dissertation). As is clear from this essay my interest in Mormonism was less in Mormonism per se than on cultural ideas about Mormonism, on social theory, and on the sociology of social movements. In this it reflects my long-standing interest in the sociology of knowledge and how we, including we academics, socially and culturally construct our identities, socially and culturally construct our communities, socially and culturally construct our realities and how we, while we are doing this, simultaneously construct our holy and our demonic. I have corrected, or tried to correct misspellings and writing infelicities, and have updated the bibliography. Enjoy.

Today few words evoke such fear and loathing in human hearts and minds as the term “cult”. In eighteenth and nineteenth century America, “Indian” and “Negro” did. In the nineteenth century, “immigrant”, Catholic, and Mormon did. In the early part of the twentieth century, “Red”, “Jew”, and “Negro” did. In the latter part of the twentieth century, “Commie” did. Today “terrorist” does. However, few of these other terms (at least for the moment) have had the staying power that “cult” has. [1]

“Cult”, from the French “culte” and Latin “cultus”, originally referred to “worship”, “care”, and “adoration”. With the triumph of Christianity under Theodosius and its ascendancy to state religion in the Roman Empire and, later in most of Christendom, however, “cult” along with the term “sect” took on negative connotations. “Sects” and “cults” were regarded as heretical and unorthodox by the powers that were. And these powers that were generally had the ability to make their definitions stick. [2]

The persecution of religious groups has a long history in Europe and North America. From the Middle Ages to today many Europeans accused Jews of killing their God and ascribed to them all sorts of perversions from drinking the blood of Christian children to involvement in a political and economic conspiracy to take over the world. During the Middle Ages Christians sought to cleanse “infidel” Muslims from the Holy Land and by the thirteenth century the infamous Inquisition, which sought to cleanse Christianity itself of heresy was in full swing. In the fifteenth century “orthodox” Catholics burned Jan Hus at the stake as a “heretic” and fought wars with his followers. In the sixteenth century both Catholics and Lutherans (who, like the Catholics, held to a belief that church and the state should be one) tortured, mutilated, and killed thousands of Anabaptist “heretics” while Catholic Frenchmen fought and massacred Protestant Frenchmen (Huguenots), Frenchwomen, and French children in a pogrom in Paris that. It was also at this time that the “heretic” Father Miguel Serveto de Villanova (1511-1553) was burned at the stake in Jean Calvin's Protestant theocratic kingdom on the shores of Lake Geneva for his unorthodox views on God and original sin. In the seventeenth century Protestants who themselves sought religious freedom persecuted, tortured, and executed “unorthodox” Quakers in both the Old World and the New. [3]

In nineteenth century America anti-Catholicism, anti-Masonism, anti-Mormonism, and anti-Shakerism were rampant and sometimes brutal and deadly. Catholic monasteries were burned by anti-Catholic crowds in several American cities while a substantial literature accusing Catholics of all sorts of sexual perversions was not uncommon. [4]

Shakers were accused of being a dangerous group that deceptively lured the naïve into a dangerous and unhealthful faith. They were accused of breaking up families, of holding members against their will, of duping converts out of their financial resources, and of elevating Mother Ann Lee to the statue of Christ. Their leaders were said to have abused their authority and to have gained personally from their use of the community’s assets. Critics filed lawsuits against them and occasionally mobbed and beat them. Many attribute Shaker leader “Mother” Ann Lee's early death to the beatings and stonings she endured at the hands of anti-Shaker mobs. [5]

The Oneida Community was harassed by opponents throughout their existence. In Putney, New Hampshire, where the movement began, Noyes and his followers faced protests and possible arrest for “adultery”. Before he could be arrested, Noyes fled to New York. When he and his Putney followers took up residence in the Mansion House at Oneida, New York they faced harassment from their broader and, to a lesser extent, their immediate community. Oneida’s sexual practices were the target of Anthony Comstock's state law aimed at their “immoral works”. And they were the targets of an obscenity bill he convinced the federal government to pass which, among other things, forbade the dissemination of literature dealing with birth control, something widely practiced at Oneida and something which the group evangelized about through their newspapers and books many of which passed through the mail. Oneida was also the target of Professor John Mears of Hamilton College who wrote and preached against the “systematic concubinage” taking place at the community’s Mansion House both of which he classed with evil and uncivilized polygamy. Eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists joined Mears adding their voices to his calls for an end to Oneida “debaucheries”. [6]

Mormons were accused of group think, self-righteousness, abuse, incest, biological devolution, and deviant sexual practices. Members and leaders were attacked, beaten, and tarred and feathered. This Anti-Mormon violence eventually resulted in the assassination of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith by an angry mob in Carthage, Illinois. But this wasn’t the end of it. Even after the Saints immigrated to the valleys of what would become Utah they were hounded by opponents and the American state for their practice of polygamy and their mixing of Church and State. [7]

In the twentieth century Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs) were persecuted and attacked on a number of occasions for their “anti-Americanism” during a nativist campaign led by the American Legion. There were 3000 acts of mob violence against JW men, women, and children in forty-five US states, sometimes while law enforcement stood by and watched, doing nothing. In Canada the group was banned by Parliament. Witnesses were beaten, mobbed, and persecuted by the police while JW children were expelled from school for refusing to salute the flag and sing the national anthem. In Nazi Germany Witnesses’ faced persecution from the state for their anti-nationalist activities. Many ended up in concentration camps. [8] In the 1990s Branch Davidians were immolated by the American federal government at their compound near Waco, Texas because they were a “cult”. In the twenty first century Scientologists in Germany and France and a number of Christian and non-Christian groups in Russia are second class citizens with little right to religious freedom. [9]

To try to combat ideological notions of religion grounded in ideas about “orthodoxy” and “heresy” and their very real physical and psychological consequences, sociologists have expended a great deal of time and effort to construct “value-free” definitions of these terms. Weber used “sect” as a term for groups that accepted only religiously qualified individuals into its membership. Troeltsch distinguished between “church”, “sect”, and “mysticism” seeing the first as a conservative institution accommodated to the world and part of the social order, “sect” as an exclusive group in tension with the social order which aspires to perfection and direct fellowship among its members, and “mysticism” as a radical movement uninterested in engaging the world and characterized by spontaneity, iconoclasm, and idealism. Niebuhr followed Troeltsch adding to his categories “denomination”, an institution which has accommodated to the world and which is powerful enough to dominate the social order if it so chooses. Finally Howard Becker added the term “cult”, a loose association of persons characterized by a private and eclectic religiosity, to this typological smorgasbord. [10]

As is so often the case in academia, however, increasing definitional specificity combined with a measure of “objectivity” was hardly the end of the debate about what “church”, “sect”, and “cult” meant. In fact, definitional specificity and attempts at dispassionate analysis seem to have exacerbated the very issue they sought to quiet. The so-called “cult” explosion in the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, led to further debate on just what all of these terms meant, particularly of the term “cult”.

Probably, the most influential recent attempt at clarification of what “church”, “denomination”, “sect”, and “cult” mean has been that of Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge. Stark and Bainbridge saw “churches” as organizations which dominate society (Lutheranism in Sweden, for instance), “denominations” as organizations which accommodate to society (Methodism, for instance), and “sects” as schisms within churches or denominations which attempt to purify the movement and restore it to its “original” form (Conservative Mennonitism, for instance). They delineated three types of “cults”: audience “cults” which were diffuse and little organized (“New Age Movements” such as astrology, for example), client “cults” which were largely therapeutic and magical (est, for instance), and “cult” movements which consisted of full fledged organizations and were evangelical in nature (the Unification Church and Mormonism, for example). “Cults”, for them, were either new (Mormonism) or transplanted religious groups or movements (American forms of Hinduism, and American forms of Buddhism) which were in a tense relationship with the broader social and religious environment in their new milieu (even more than “sects”). [11]

Other scholars dismissed such an “ahistorical” and “typological” approach to “cult” altogether by urging analysts to take a more historical approach to such groups. Roy Wallis, suggested that “cults” were proto-religions. For him all religions, at one time were, “cults”. Over time they routinize and bureaucratize becoming “churches” (Roman and Orthodox Christianity in Europe), “denominations” (Methodists), or established “sects” (the Mennonite Church). [12]

Sociology has not been the only academic discipline interested in divining a neutral and objective definition of “cult”. Psychiatrist Marc Gallanter has advocated a social psychological approach to cults which draws on systems theory and sociobiology. Gallanter asserts that “charismatic cults” are, in most cases, adaptive responses to social pressures and psychiatric disorder. They are, he writes, tight knit social communities, often ideologically distinct from and isolated from the broader social environment, which they regard with suspicion, defensiveness, and paranoia. They are characterized by strong mutual support networks, a strong set of shared beliefs, a strong set of behavioral norms, a strong sense of commitment to fellow members, an emphasis on joint group activities, and a strong uniform routine for group members. They make tough demands on community members and tend to reward uniformity and conformity and punish alienation. Members who fall from the “faith” and are recalcitrant are often scapegoated and become deviant symbols for the community to look down to (shades of Emile Durkheim). [13]

“Cults”, Gallanter writes, tend to emerge at times in which the values of society are felt to be inadequate for addressing major social issues. Charismatic leaders are reputed to be able to offer solutions to these problems and are “marketed” to potential converts on this basis. Converts to “charismatic cults” are generally looking for someone or some thing to help them solve their problems. Individuals who are unhappy due to situational problems, chronic distress, and who have limited ties to family and friends, often find the atmosphere of acceptance and support in these communities a solution to their problems. Conversion is usually an emotional experience for converts offering them a release from this neurotic distress replacing it with a feeling of well-being. They are thus adaptive in psychological terms and Gallanter argues that converts to the “Divine Light Mission” and the “Unification Church” experienced a decline in neurotic disorder symptoms. [14]

As time goes by, notes Gallanter, the initial zealous phase in the life of charismatic cults declines. With this they then can now move in several potential directions. They can bureaucratize in the process transferring the original charismatic qualities of the leader to the group's leadership hierarchy. They can assimilate into broader society or move into direct conflict with the surrounding society by emphasizing their ideological differences from “mainstream” society promoting their isolation from it. This last alternative can lead to violence. In such situations marginal groups, on occasion, will migrate in order to avoid violent conflict with that broader society (a la English Quakers and European Anabaptists). [15]

Not everyone was happy with the typological cottage industry that has so typified sociological and social psychological discussions of “church”, “sect”, and “cult”. James Beckford argues, for instance, that the church”/”denomination”/”sect”/”cult” typology has made religion into something singularly distinct from other ostensibly similar organizational forms. He urges analysts to view religion as just another organizational type and analyze it as such. [16]

Moreover, the very concepts of “church”, “denomination”, “sect”, and “cult” are, as several commentators note, inherently ambiguous and fluid. To take one example, Mormonism, as Stark and Bainbridge recognize, is a “church” in the Mormon Culture Region because it dominates the social and cultural landscape of that region, a “denomination in Missouri, where the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (today the Community of Christ) formed, a “cult” in the minds of many nineteenth century and contemporary “mainstream” Christians, and is finally a “sect” when we are speaking of the many fundamentalist Mormon groups trying to restore “original” Mormonism in the Mormon Culture Region and beyond. Religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom was so confused by Latter-day Saints that he admitted that he thought Mormonism could rightly be labeled a people, a denomination, a church, a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, and an American subculture all at the same time. But can a single group be all of these at once? And if it can, does this mean that the terms are too broad to have any precise meaning and hence are of little use? [17]

Despite all their best efforts to de-demonize terms like “sect” and “cult” historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of “sects” and “cults” has largely been characterized by a sometimes overt and sometimes underlying normative conception of these terms. Utilizing the language of “hard” medical, psychiatric, and communication “science”, some analysts have seen “sects” and “cults” as the charismatic products of confidence men and women and, more recently, as abusive to humans and hence dangerous to their health. Historian G.R. Elton, for instance, describes sixteenth century Anabaptism in his once standard synthesis on the Reformation as a “violent phenomenon born out of irrational and psychologically unbalanced dreams resting on a denial of reason and the elevation of the belief in direct inspiration which enables men to do as they please”. [18] Norman Cohn characterizes mediaeval Christian apocalyptic groups as part of the lunatic fringe of Europe. But he doesn’t stop there. For Cohn, modern day Leninism was part and parcel of the same lunatic fringe, a lunatic fringe that invariably led to Terror, mass murder, and genocide. [19]

This psychological, psychiatric, or medical model has not only been applied to Mediaeval and Reformation Christian groups, it has been applied to religious revivalism for at least a century. As Leigh Eric Schmidt notes many analysts of American religious revivals have often seen these and the behaviors they produce in abnormal psychological terms and played these behaviors up or down depending upon their ideological bias. William Warren Sweet, for instance, downplayed the “emotional excesses” of the camp meetings and was “dubious” about the behaviors associated with them, just what you’d expect from an upstanding “civilized” Methodist of the twentieth century. Evolutionary psychologist Frederick Morgan Davenport saw them as the nervous remnants of “uncivilized” and “primitive” religion while John Berecz connected revivalist behaviors to those associated with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorders pointing up the naturalistic bias underlying his approach to religious behavior and ideology. [20]

Pyschological and psychiatric explanations have long been applied to the study of a number of new religious movements including Mormonism. Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History argues that Smith was a manipulative megalomaniac who was increasingly unable to distinguish fantasy from reality and whose sexual excesses played a major part in destroying him. Anne Felt Tyler sees Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith as a con man. Louis Kern perceives the Mormon practice of “the Principle” of polygamy as simply Joseph Smith’s personal response to the familial and sexual ambiguity of early nineteenth century. Lawrence Foster speculates that Smith may have been a manic-depressive. Charles Sellers portrays Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith as a fraud, a shyster, and a trickster, and suggests that LDS theology, with its characteristic patriarchalism, resulted from a kind of “male panic” caused by the economic dislocations in family structure that were again brought about by the transformations wrought by the Erie Canal. [21]

Probably the most popular, influential, and visible book utilizing this approach to explore a number of recent social and religious groups, however, has been Snapping, a book co-authored by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. [22] Conway and Siegelman trace what they call an “epidemic of sudden personality change” in the United States, to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Americans, they write, disillusioned with the increasingly meaningless affluence of a technocratic, organizational society, and over stimulated by the information overload of the mass production, mass consumption and mass media society of the modern world, began to look to eastern philosophies, therapeutic techniques, and the new movements, eastern philosophies, therapeutic techniques, (est, the Unification Church, Scientology), and drugs popular during this period to provide meaning in their lives. These new authoritarian movements (and they do paint all “cults” with this broad totalitarian brush), along with new Christian “cults” like I Found It, The Way, and the Children of God, likewise interested in “converts”, turned to personality changing techniques, mind or thought control, and the marketing strategies of American advertisers in order to maintain membership and grow. These methods caused consumers minds to “snap”, caused them, in other words, to have a traumatic experience (often seen as higher state of consciousness, a mystical breakthrough, enlightenment, etc., by the snapee) and subsequently to have a break in their continuity of awareness (a breakdown in information processing in the brain of the person “snapped”). [23]

“Snapping”, claim Conway and Siegelman, was and is behind the growth in “cult” membership. It was also behind the devotion of “the Family” to Charles Manson, the transformation of David Berkowitz into “Son of Sam” and the metamorphosis of Patty Hearst into “Tanya”, revolutionary soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army (“sects” meet “cults” meet serial killers meet “terrorists”). [24]

According to Conway and Siegelman, “snapping” results in detachment, a lack of emotion, hallucinations, a vulnerability to suggestion, and the transformation of life habits, family relationships, beliefs, and values of the snapee. “Snapping” leads to self-destructive and often, in extreme circumstances, criminal behavior. To maintain control of those who have “snapped”, groups or individuals manipulating the snapee use sleep deprivation, food deprivation, threats, lies, manipulations, a sense of false caring, ideologies which assert that the convert will find happiness and fulfillment in their new “family”, and they play on convert fears. Conway and Siegelman emphasize that those who have “snapped” can be “cured” through “deprogramming”, a technique used to “recover” the original personality of the snapee, or, though not as quickly or successfully, through psychiatric care and, if the occasion demands it, mental health hospital care and medication. [25]

Running along a track parallel to this “value-free” social science and the ostensibly positivist medical-psychiatric science of the mind was one that was not so value neutral and which drew extensively on the medical-psychiatric model. Evangelical sociologist Ronald Enroth, taking a perspective very similar to Conway and Siegelman, argues that “extremist” “cults” (the mindbending mercenaries of misery which, unlike Conway and Siegelman, Enroth distinguishes from non-extremist cults though he doesn't quite say why) are characterized by authoritarianism, members who hail from the upper and middle classes, and the use of thought control techniques (like Conway and Siegelman, Enroth draws on Robert Lifton’s research on Chinese brain washing techniques during the Korean War here). “Extremist cults” (which Enroth, unlike Conway and Siegelman, notes are not novel), he writes, force members to cut ties with family and friends, give up their possessions to the group, forge new identities, and replace their old “families” with their new “cult” family. “Extremist cults” utilize group pressure, sleep and food deprivation, isolation, sensory bombardment, manichean ideologies, and fear to keep and maintain “believers”. They demand a great deal of their “followers”. [26]

In good reformist social science fashion Enroth urges concerned citizens and the state to reunite families and free the fettered minds of “cult” captives. Also, being the good evangelical Christian he appears to be, Enroth refers to “extremist cults” as “spiritual counterfeits” and “demonic conspiracies” out to “subvert “the true gospel of Jesus Christ” For Enroth, Satan seems to the founder of such unwholesome extremist groups. [27]

Not surprisingly, devotees of these various approaches to “cults” rarely (if ever) seem to talk to one another. Sociologists are aware of some of the analyses that come out of the other camps and often refer to the religious and medical-psychological devotees as “anti-cultists”. Those in the religious camp refer to sociologists who disagree with them as “cult apologists” and borrow heavily from the medical-psychology camp because the conclusions they reach are easily assimilated into and consistent with conservative Christian claims about evil “cults”. The medical-psychological camp often seek support from the religious camp, while generally ignoring what is going on in the sociological camp, except when they want to criticize its practitioners. It's all rather like a cross between a culture war, a turf battle, and groups of monads orbiting around each other all the while being unable to talk to one another (a la a famous New Yorker illustration illustrating in human form Leibniz’s theory of monads). To put it another way, the “languages” these groups speak, while they intersect at certain points (they all use the term “cult” for instance), are, by and large, so different that communication between them is difficult and consensus is virtually impossible. Perhaps this is a consequence of a social and cultural setting which has compartmentalized disciplines into specialized knowledges and discourses and a segmented labor knowledge market that is highly specialized. This might not be such a problem if all of these camps propagated and evangelized rather innocuous views and if they all had a limited relationship to power, the legal apparatus, and the mass media. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. [28]

All of these approaches to “cults”, in fact, have impacted and influenced broader communities. Sociological approaches have long influenced historical and sociological analyses of new and old religious groups. Conway and Siegelman have had an impact on the anti-cult movement, the mental health community, and the media. The DSM III, for instance, the manual used by psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists in the 1980s to diagnose mental illness, ascribed “atypical dissociative disorder” to “cults” and proposed treatments to “cure” this “disorder. Enroth’s approach harmonizes well with an evangelical community that sees itself as normative and anything unlike it as a form of religious or secular heresy. [29]

While no one could or should mistake this Evangelical “cult” analysis as “value-free” social research unless, of course, one is already a believing Evangelical, [30] Sociologists and social psychologists do want readers to take their discourse for “value-free” social scientific analysis. And one must admit that compared with the language coming out of the religious camp it is “neutral” and “objective”. It is also relatively harmless representing, as it does, the intellectual and academic mania for typologising and categorising. While categorization reflects the power of the knowledge class to categorize, it is a power, at least in this case, which is relatively harmless and often quite humane. It has led many sociologists to strongly promote the civil, religious, and human rights of “cults” and “cult” members in a variety of settings [31]. Still, many in the sociological camp do nevertheless share an explicit or implicit view that “cults” are “abnormal” in a historical and social sense. Deprivation and status anxiety theories, with their assumptions that social stresses lead directly to social pathologies assume the existence a “normal” and “functional” social system against which “cult” movements are contrasted and assumed to be “dysfunctional”. This terminology, borrowed to some extent from biological science by a whole host of analysts ranging from Social Darwinists to Functionalists like Talcott Parsons, is confusing and may be both theoretically problematic. Other theories delineate (if largely on a statistical and historical basis) a group of “mainstream denominations” and counterpoint these to “alternative” or “marginal” “cults” and “sects” that likewise hover in the nether regions of American society and culture (and which they and others sometimes romanticize) and are often in tension with it. While it may be possible to construct a notion of “normal” (means, modes, medians) and “deviant” (outliers) from statistical data, we must simultaneously explore the social and cultural construction of both the notion of “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” over time and across space (in “humanist”, “qualitative” and “statistical” social scientific discourses). [32]

Unfortunately, it has probably been the former with their organic and biological metaphors which have been the most influential in historical and sociological analyses. For example, the Brodie, Tyler, Kern, and Sellers portraits of Joseph Smith noted earlier seem more caricature and stereotype than flesh and blood historical analysis of Mormonism and its founder. In fact, these analyses are so caricatured and stereotyped that they seem to be simply modern versions of the polemics associated with the anti-Mormon cottage industry that arose almost simultaneously with Mormonism in the 1830s. By assuming that Mormon religious experiences are patently ludicrous and that the Mormon Prophet was a neurotic, calculating fraud and a swindler Brodie, Tyler, Kern, and Sellers are simply unable to approach Mormonism and Joseph Smith with a measure of sympathy and neutrality and thereby grasp the deeply held religious motivations of believers. And even if one does assume that those “bumpkins” who became Mormons were hoodwinked by the master swindler Joseph Smith and his partners in crime, one needs to describe the process by which this massive con game succeeded and how it created new identities for its members in the process. Unfortunately, none of these commentators do this. In the end the mainstream/outsider categorizations Brodie, Tyler, Kern, and Sellers work in and the marginalizations they lead to raise questions about whether religious stereotypes and caricatures based on underlying assumptions about rationality and common sense are far more common in the groves of academe than they should be. [33]

In fact, the questionable use of evidence, questions about whether any evidence is being used at all, and the tendency toward reductionism and fetishisation are common complaints about and common problems in psychohistorical and psychobiographical analyses of religious movements. Lawrence Foster admits that his speculation that Smith may have been manic depressive is tenuous. What little documentary evidence he found to back up his conclusions—and much of this comes from anti-Mormon texts—is, in the final analysis, a taking over of anti-Mormon rhetoric which attempted to undermine Mormonism by asserting that their leader was mentally unstable. A similar problem undermines one recent book on the American New Left of the 1960's and foregrounds the ideological bias that is often at the heart of psychohistory and psychobiography. In that book Rothman and Lichter go so far to assert that the average 1960s New Leftist was a self-hating, sexually inadequate narcissist with a declining ego who was motivated by irrational power drives. As was the case with Erik Erikson's psychobiography of Luther and R.G.L. Waite's psychobiography of Hitler, Rothman’s and Lichter's book has been quite controversial and criticized, amongst other things, for engaging in speculation that goes beyond the available evidence. Such speculations, of course, often tell us more about the analysts and their assumptions than they do about the supposed subjects of analysis. [34]

Richard Anderson's approach with its developmental emphasis and its assertions that one can discern in the Book of Mormon the various egos and alter egos that Smith knowingly and unknowingly wrote into that document, would, on the surface, seem resistant to many of the criticisms leveled at the psychohistories since it avoids the discourse of sociopathology which is too often characteristic of scholarly attempts to deconstruct Mormon mass psychology. However, his analysis raises the same questions problematic psychohistories do, namely that of the use of sources as well as the issue of the role broader cultural and historical forces and contexts play in the construction of individual minds. In terms of sources, the only evidence Anderson can offer in support of his thesis, and the psychological assumptions which underlie it, is the very text he claims that is the product of Smith's mind, the Book of Mormon. Given this one invariably wonders whether this reconstructed mind is more that of the books academic interpreter than the presumed author of the text. After all, Smith wasn’t the only one who said he saw the golden plates from which the Book of Mormon was “translated”. Eight others claimed to have been shown the Golden Plates. Mormonism was a social and cultural movement and the Book of Mormon may disclose its cultural contexts more than it reveals the projection of one powerless American mind from early nineteenth century that Anderson claims. [35]

It is not only psychohistory and psychobiography that gets mired in the muck of ideological bias and questions of what is “normal” and what is “abnormal”. The medical/psychiatric model Conway and Siegelman base their analysis on has similar problems as well. Conway and Siegelman, like Parsons and others before and after them, are clearly borrowing metaphors from biological science which are functional in nature and applying them to social and cultural life. This might not be so dangerous if it weren't for the fact that, on occasion, classifications grounded in such ideological forms become part of the academic-public “curative” discourse and practice of psychiatry as I noted earlier. [36]

Conway and Siegelman would almost certainly agree with the DSM III classification of “cults” noted above and take satisfaction that the psychological and psychiatric community they once criticized for inactivity in the war against “cults” had finally taken a stand and seen the light (if only for a short season). “Cults” and therapeutic groups are, they claim, abnormal because behaviors associated with them (detachment, a lack of emotion, hallucinations, a vulnerability to suggestion, and the transformation of life habits, family relationships, beliefs, and values) are, abnormal, unhealthy, and physically and mentally dangerous. [37]

All of this raises a host of questions. While specific individuals do experience mental illness (whatever the etiology—biological, social, cultural, the product of an interaction between the individual human organism and its broader social and cultural environments) is it possible to describe societies or social groups as “abnormal”, “insane”, “mentally ill”, “pathological”, “neurotic”? While some social groups and social movements, and their leaders, do manipulate members what society and organization doesn't?

In the end I find the Conway and Siegelman book a frustrating one. On the one hand, there is much to admire in the book. It is grounded in a conception of experience, communication, information processing, and personality construction that is attentive to historical change and cross-cultural variation. It recognizes that history, culture, and social forces are a major component of personality construction and it recognizes that personalities can change over time. Additionally, it points to specific methods a number of social and cultural groups and even nation-states use to manipulate their members or their citizens.

On the other hand, their conception of communication and information processing is far too naively positivist, far too inattentive to multivocality, and far too inattentive to the variety historical, social, and cultural factors which have influenced the construction of human personalities. Despite the fact that Conway and Siegelman recognize that cultures and hence personalities vary cross-culturally, and that historical circumstances within cultures lead to variation, they remain wedded to a normative notion of communication, information processing, and personality within cultures that distinguishes “normal” or healthy personalities from “abnormal” or unhealthy ones. For them a healthy personality expresses itself in involvement, emotional display, invulnerability to suggestion, and consistent life habits, family relationships, beliefs, and values (the opposite of the characteristics they ascribe to abnormal personalities). [38]

While Conway and Siegelman note that the unhealthy personality characteristics of “cult” members were products of changes in American social and cultural life in the 1960s and 1970s (though they do point to important changes in the 1920s through 1960s that prepared the ground for “cults”), one is not sure whether fundamental characteristics like those noted above, change as society changes. For example can one argue that as changes in society and culture occur, new personalities arise which are adaptive in new social circumstances? Even if we accept a functionalist notion that a core of positive personality characteristics remain static over time in one particular culture formation, and that one can delineate positive and negative personalities in the first place (a big, and ultimately fallacious assumption) within specific cultural groups, the question arises as to whether “cult” or therapeutic groups are themselves functional in a subcultural or countercultural kind of way. [39]

The interviews Conway and Siegelman conducted indicate over and over again that “cults” and therapeutic groups do offer positive and functional psychological comfort or healing to those who joined them, something Galanter points out as I noted earlier. “Lawrence” and “Cathy Gordon” spoke of how they were “seeing the world in its proper perspective” when they became members of the Unification Church. “Jean Turner” spoke of how Transcendental Meditation relieved her from stress and how her first encounter group experience was a pleasant one. [40]

It is these interviews that point to another major problem with the book. The interviews conducted by Conway and Sieglman are drawn almost exclusively from individuals who were once in a cult and who have now been reborn and see their ex-”cult” and ex-therapeutic group life in negative hues or who are long term anti-cultists. They are, in other words, strongly biased. The former “cult” or therapy group members they interviewed are dissidents who have been “deprogrammed” (or would it be more accurate to say newly programmed?) or “cured” and who now see “cults” and therapy groups in a negative light. “Anti-cultists” are well, “anti-cultists (for whatever reason). They simply don't like “cults” or therapy groups. Constructing an analysis of “cult” and therapeutic groups on the shaky sand of the “testimony” of dissident former members or “anti-cultists” is as problematic as constructing a history of the United States from interviews with “anti-Americans” or a history of the Soviet Union from interviews with Soviet dissidents, anti-Bolshevik Russian aristocrats, or American “anti-commies”. This is an inherent bias that can only be counteracted by interviewing and studying members who remain in the groups under study and remain satisfied with the groups under investigation. [41]

Unfortunately, Conway and Siegelman do not undertake such interviews or analysis because (and this undermines their claims of being scientific and objective) they (in good deductive fashion) assume that “cult” members are suffering from information disease and personality disorders. The problem with this deductive position is that those who have studied “cults” from the inside have found that “cults” are not all that successful at conversion. Ninety percent of those who attend Unification Church seminars (the same seminars that Conway and Siegelman claim cause individuals to “snap”) did not join the movement. Nor are they all that successful at retaining members: the Unification Church has a large turnover rate and a core membership of around ten thousand souls. It is difficult to think of a group with such “success” rates as a nefarious conspiracy to take over the world through mind control techniques. One can only wonder whether Conway and Siegelman are exaggerating the threat of “cults” and therapeutic groups to the American Way of Life for personal reasons or even manufacturing the threat. [42]

Conway and Siegelman are rather quick to uncritically accept the credibility of “cult” dissidents and “anti-cult” activists and to use their “testimonials” to construct a melodramatic narrative in which good dissident ex-”cult” members and critical “anti-cultists” square off against evil “cult” leaders and their mindless minions for control of the world. (Conway and Siegelman play the role of academic “prophets” warning the world of an impending mental apocalypse). And they do this very effectively through the use of a rhetorical/demagogic strategy that counterpoints stories of heartbroken parents (who simply want to help their (adult) children return to a “normal” state) and the heroic deprogrammers who help them, against the shadowy, conspiracy ridden world of “cult” and therapeutic groups that threaten our way of life and which seeks to conquer America and the world through devious mind “snapping” means. In this tale “cults” and therapeutic groups have become the equivalent of what “commies” were to Joseph McCarthy and what Jews have often been to the Christian Church. [43]

What makes this “cult”/”commie” connection even more tangible is the fact that Conway and Siegelman are drawing on, transforming, and extending cold war fears of “evil godless commie” totalitarianism and brainwashing. Conway and Siegelman see “cults”, therapeutic groups, and Madison Avenue advertising firms as manipulative mind bending groups who are using lies, misrepresentation, false affection, the promise of fulfillment, discussion, and debate (just as those “evil godless” Communist Chinese did to American POWs during the Korean War) to take over the world. The narrative themes underlying Conway's and Siegelman's analysis are the spitting image of what they accuse cults of, namely, using manipulation to gain control of human hearts and minds. [44]

And then there is the issue of the language Conway and Siegelman use to describe these “cults”. Too often our “objective” scientists refer to these groups as “strange” and “bizarre”. For instance, in their discussion of types of “information disease” Conway and Siegelman refer to Hare Krishnas as having “strange appearance and practices”. Apparently, for Conway and Siegelman they are “strange” because they wear clothing that has an Indian origin. In other words, Conway and Siegelman universalize the “American Way” of fashion and judge other styles as “normal” or “strange” by that standard (are they in need of the noted twelve step fetishisers anonymous program?). Krishnas are “strange” because they do not wear what “normal” red, white, and blue Americans do. [45]

Finally, Conway and Siegelman's analysis is hurt because of its limited attentiveness to specific social and historical contexts of “cult” action (a phenomenon due, in large part, to their uncritical acceptance of “cult” dissident and “anti-cult” discourse). They miss the fact that “cults” are not a phenomena peculiar to 1960s and 70s America and Western Europe. As Wallis points out, as we noted earlier, what are now “mainstream religions” were once “cults”. Christianity was a “new religious movement”. Mormonism began as an “alternative religious movement”. Islam was once a “fringe religious movement”. The Baha'i Faith was once a “cult”. Each of these social groups experienced a historical trajectory in which they moved from a “charismatic” period with a “charismatic” leader to a point at which they became a rational bureaucratic institution complete with a routinized belief system [46].

Moreover, “cults” are constantly arising in both North America and Western Europe. The nineteenth century saw the rise of Spiritualism, Theosophy, “New Thought”, and a flowering of Eastern religions and philosophies among the intellectual elite of Western Europe and North America (does this mean that mass society and culture with its information overload is not the culprit? Or has mind overload been going on for longer than Conway and Siegelman realize). It is in their analysis of the Peoples Temple, however, where this selective historical amnesia really becomes particularly evident. [47]

Conway and Siegelman see the Peoples Temple as a scheme devised by founder and leader Jim Jones to create a socialist utopia all the while masquerading in the guise of a more palatable Christian fundamentalism. For them Jones is a scam artist whose “snapping” abilities were limited making it necessary for him to resort to verbal and physical violence and isolation in order to run his scam (the standard tools of classic brainwashing). [48]

Their story is a sad moral tale of unsung heroes and unheard prophets warning the public and the US government of the dangers of Jim Jones and the church he had founded. The problem with this scenario is that it ignores certain important aspects of Peoples Temple history. While vocal ex-members did play critical roles in the drama, the roles they played were not always positive. They lobbied the media (who know a potentially sensationalist story when they see one) and government officials at several levels to look into the finances and life style of the Temple. In fact, one of the sources Conway and Siegelman relied on, Grace Stoen, was fighting a legal battle with Jones over custody of her son, John and had a personal and ideological interest in having others look into the affairs of the group and of seeing them in a particular light. [49]

These attacks on Jones and his parishioners were not isolated incidents. Since his days in Indianapolis, Jones and his members had been subject to racist and political attack. Jones was strongly anti-racist, integrationist, and leftist (and he was sympathetic to communism—not necessarily the thing to be in Indiana at that, or really any other, time in the Hoosier state). The religious community he established reflected these beliefs. It was integrationist, anti-racist, and leftist in rhetoric and practice. Because of this the church drew (often unwanted) attention. It was, in sum, quite controversial.

Because it stirred up controversy Jones and his followers fled Indiana for the more “liberal” golden shores of Northern California in 1965. In California they involved themselves in social activism and politics. They ran a “human services” ministry of “care” homes for juveniles and the elderly, they supported the political candidacy of left-liberal George Moscone, and were instrumental in his electoral victory. They were also communal.

These activities brought them to the attention of both the media and the state and federal governments. The 1960s and 1970s was a time when a number of federal and state agencies spied on and often had plants within groups on the left. There were rumors that the Temple itself was under investigation for tax evasion as early as 1975. Then in 1977 American Indian Movement activist and Temple friend Dennis Banks learned that the U.S Treasury was investigating (at the instigation of reporter George Klineman) the Temple's tax situation. Faced with what they felt was a governmental threat, the Peoples Temple began migrating (a tried and true method of a number of oppositional social movements like the Anabaptists and Quakers) to land they had purchased in Guyana. [50]

After the migration Jonestown's increasingly more organized opponents continued to feed information to the media and federal government investigators. Those who had left their children with the Peoples Temple when they defected began turning to the courts in order to try to regain custody of their young. When state investigations and court actions stalled, the “Organized Relatives” began turning to political pressure and public relations campaigns. They urged the embassy in Guyana to check on evidence of mass starvation and torture and imprisonment. The agency found no mass starvation or no torture.

But that didn’t stop the relatives groups. Eventually, they began to pin all their hopes on what Leo Ryan, a San Mateo congressman who had long been sympathetic to the “anti-cult” movement, might do for them. Ryan had asked Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to investigate Jonestown in December 1977. The State Department refused saying that the situation did not warrant any action. So in November of 1978 Ryan, a freelance reporter, an NBC camera crew, and several “Concerned Relatives” went to Jonestown as part of a congressional delegation. As is well known, that trip ended in tragedy. In the end, Ryan, reporter Don Harris, and defector Patricia Parks lay dead from Temple attacks, while 912 members of the Peoples Temple committed mass suicide by drinking a kind of kool-aid cocktail. [51]

There is no doubt that Jones became more and more paranoid as time went on. Perhaps, given the opposition to his church he had good cause to be paranoid, however. There is no doubt that some of Jones's methods and actions were “abusive”. In the end, one can't help but wonder what Temple history would have been like if they had not been in almost constant conflict with those less liberal around them, media, the federal government, and oppositional groups of dissidents and “anti-cultists”.

Of course, sociological typology and aberrant individual or social psychology have not been the only way commentators have tried to uncover the collective psychology of social groups. Some have attempted to focus on broader cultural contexts in order to delineate the national characters or the collective psychological spirit of an age in a particular social and cultural group. Drawing on Turner's frontier thesis and de Tocqueville's observations and arguments in Democracy in America, David Potter argues that the character of white Americans has been dominated by an egalitarianism which, combined with American abundance, gave rise to both individualism and idealism, materialism and conformity. Potter asserts that equality meant different things to different people. For some it meant that all Americans had an equal opportunity for success. For others it meant an equality expressed in the idea of the dignity of humankind. To assume the former opportunity egalitarians had to explain away the influence wealth had in the United States and the differences in influence that resulted from these wealth differences. Those who assumed the latter had to play up an egalitarianism in which no one could or should see himself or herself as superior to any other American. This second thread thus downplayed class and status differences in American society and culture and gave rise to two strains of American egalitarianism: a utopian strain which idealistically predicted that in America everyone could achieve a high material standard of living and a conformism strain which emphasized that to question the opinion of others was to assert that you were more intelligent and hence better than those you questioned. [52]

Edward Pessen offers a rather different portrait of American national character in the Jackson Era. Drawing on the writings of foreign travelers to the United States in the early nineteenth century, Pessen paints a picture of Jackson Era in which white Americans are hospitable, friendly, open, cordial, generous, benevolent, impolite, curious, humorless, dull, cold (especially in New England), cruel (their treatment of slaves and First Peoples), racist, unsympathetic to poor people, violent (especially in the South and on the frontier), selfish, full of self doubts, thin skinned, boastful, ethnocentric, ripe with regional ethnocentrisms and hatreds, complainers, practical, clever but not profound, conversationally ungifted, interested in the latest scandals, given to believing the worst, conformists who followed the majority opinion, joiners, migratory, restless, inveterate slouches, inveterate spitters, excessive drinkers, gamblers, inveterate speculators, gluttons, unrefined, egalitarian believing that each person was as good as any other, hypocrites, prudish, materialistic, displayers of their wealth, snobs, opportunists, amoral, shrewd, social climbers, disrespectful of tradition, disrespectful of the law, disrespectful of learning and intellectual accomplishment, and contemptuous of life. Pessen recognizes the contradictory nature of this portrayal and suggests that this was primarily the result of variations in wealth and locality (urban versus rural and New England versus the South versus the West). Drawing on Tocqueville's Democracy in America, he asserts that the egalitarian and democratic rhetoric of Americans, a rhetoric sometimes overemphasized by foreign observers, drew attention away from the fact that Americans were a breed of bigoted, cruel, vain, boastful, self-possessed, anti-intellectual, and hypocritical yet pragmatic materialistic conformers. [53]

As Alex Inkeles points out, national character studies are often too general and too broad in their focus. In this instance as in others, both Potter's and Pessen's delineation of national characteristics are so broad as to raise questions about their usefulness in delineating the collective characteristics of any era. Questions can also be raised about whether white regional subcultural and countercultural groups in Jacksonian America shared the same national characteristics as those of mainstream American society. Did Mormons and the Oneida Community, for instance, share the same collective personality with urban Irish workers, urban elites, Presbyterians in rural New York, “men on the make”, white Southern plantation owners, and Tammany Hall elected officials? Additionally they raise the question of why the frontier, if it was the crucible of American democracy, gave rise to egalitarian ideologies, like those of the Oneida Community, and anti-democratic ideologies like those of the frontier Mormons. Finally, if we assume that the frontier is irrelevant to American character, national character studies which paint in broad strokes raise the question of why both Mormons and the Oneida Community instituted sexual and marriage practices so opposed to the “prudish” character of American society Pessen notes? [54]

Here, as in earlier psychobiographies, the question of the utilization of sources, particularly in the case of Pessen, becomes an issue. Are foreign the travel accounts which specify American personality characteristics really neutral sources from which to derive white American character? Pessen admits that some are problematic but argues that those he used share a degree of analytical and interpretive “objectivity”? The question remains, however, how Pessen made such a determination.

To try to overcome the questions surrounding the broad character of much national personality analysis some analysts have focused on specific aspects of Jacksonian character or Jacksonian social psychology. Michael Rogin and Ronald Takaki, drawing extensively on the former, have used psychoanalytic concepts to argue that the hatred of First Peoples so common to the era was grounded in an infantile disorder. White Americans, they argue, saw First Peoples as an ever-migrating childlike and backward people of the “uncivilized” and “uncultivated” forest (they saw themselves, of course, as civilizers). White Antebellum White Americans, they claim, projected or grafted their own savagery onto Native Americans and, in the process, managed to blame the victim (First Peoples) as well as the march of history, for their own genocide. One wonders whether psychoanalytic theory is really necessary for an understanding of white “Indian hatred” in this case when a cultural explanation would suffice just as well if not better. In other words, one person’s emphasis on the role cultural ethnocentrism played in the genocide of First Peoples is better than another person's emphasis on psychoanalytic projection. [55]

Most psychoanalytically or psychologically oriented analyses point up a fundamental problem with psychological and psychoanalytic theorizing—its tendency to fetishise and then universalize the western mind and its “disabilities” or “abnormalities”. The culture and personality school prominent during and after the Second World War tried to confront these issues head on. They sought to relate personality traits and the symbolic aspects of culture to the specifics of parent-child relationships. Their tendency to emphasize and universalize the impact of different swaddling techniques or toilet training methods leaves much to be desired, however. Nancy Chodorow's not uncontroversial and unproblematic updating of this approach which uses a developmental model to link gender differences to childhood enculturation and socialization is, at least to me, a more compelling model since it is less reductive and more historically and culturally sensitive. [56]

In her essay on the ritualistic culture of nineteenth century white middle class women, Smith-Rosenberg argues that we need to leave psychoanalytic and psychological conceptions of “normality” and “abnormality” behind and concentrate instead on cultural norms and cultural options. Marvin Meyers, and John William Ward, try to do just this by isolating and analyzing what they believe to be the dominant cultural forms and ideological structures they say characterized Jacksonian America. Ward argues that Jackson symbolized, for white Americans at the time, the heroic but brutal anti-intellectual self-made man who, with the help of divine providence, willed his way to transcendence of the natural order of things and, in the process, made manifest America's destiny. Marvin Meyers, on the other hand, sees Jacksonians as paradoxical, as both primitivists who wanted to restore America to its Jeffersonian gentlemen farmers, and, at the same time, as utopians who hoped to bring about a laissez-faire paradise. Again, issues of generality, consistency, and sources become paramount in analyzing these interpretations. [57]

In the end all of this makes one wonder whether we should jettison terms like “church”, “denomination”, “sect”, and “cult” as they are used by historians, sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the media today, notions of social and cultural “normality” and “abnormality”, and social psychological conceptions of national or group character and concentrate instead on the history and culture of social groups and social movements. Processes related to group origins, including sectarianisation, are indeed important—both Jim Jones and Joseph Smith, for instance, were attempting to recover the spirit and doctrines of the primitive church and, as Lawrence Friedman has shown one can approach the figures in the abolition movement in upstate New York in a historically and culturally sensitive way and discover, in the process, how the collective characters of groups or cells which sprung up around William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur Tappan, and Gerritt Smith were the products, in part, of interactions between these cells and the tensions between community and individualism in their ideologies and practices within them. [58] Regardless of how much weight we give to psychologies, individual or collective, however, it is important, nevertheless, to also be critically attentive to academic labeling and categorization (particularly those that filter out into the mass media, governmental circles and popular consciousness). After all, academic labeling and categorization can be hazardous to the collective health of “marginal” social groups, just ask the Mormons who were attacked again and again for their “un-Christian” and “un-American” character. And just ask the Branch Davidians who were labeled a dysfunctional “cult” and whose leader, David Koresh, was called a “con-man” by the “anti-cult experts” on whom the FBI primarily relied. [59]

End Notes
1. Michael Rogin; Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), James Aho; This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), Richard Drinnon; Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hatred and Empire Building (NYC: Schocken, 1980), Thomas Gossett; Race: The History of an Idea in America (NYC: Schocken, 1965), David Bennett; The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement (NYC: Vintage, revised and updated edition, 1995), John Higham; Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (NYC: Vintage, 1963), Dale Knobel; “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (NYC: Twayne, 1996), Richard Hofstadter; The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1965), Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab; The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (NYC: Harper and Row, 1970), Roger Daniels; The Politics of Prejudice (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1962), William Preston; Aliens and Dissenters: American Suppression of Radicals 1903-1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1985), Robert Goldstein; Political Repression in Modern American: From 1870 to 1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1991), Daniel Bell (ed.); The Radical Right (Garden City, NY.: Anchor, 1964) Catherine McNichol Stock; Rural Radicals: From Bacon's Rebellion to the Oklahoma City Bombing (NYC: Penguin, 1996), Patricia Cayo Sexton; The War on Labor and the Left: Understanding America's Unique Conservativism (Boulder, CO.:Westview, 1991), Richard Gid Powers; Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, Conn., 1995), Robert Murray; Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 1955), Ellen Schrecker; Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (NYC: Little, Brown, 1998), Betty Dobratz and Stephanie Shanks-Meile; The White Separatist Movement in the United States: White Power, White Pride (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University, Mary., revised edition, 2000), Roy Billington; The Protestant Crusade: A Study in the Origins of American Nativism, 1800-1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1952), Donald Kinzer; An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), David Brion Davis; “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature”, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960), pp. 205-224, and Nancy Cott; Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 128-131. Fear and paranoia hasn’t only been a monopoly of “the radical right”. On left paranoia see Richard Ellis; The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). On the construction of deviance see S. Cohen; Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge, third edition, 2002), Cohen (ed.); Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), Howard Becker; Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (NYC: Free Press, 1963), Becker; The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance (NYC: Free Press, 1964), Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts; Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1978), Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.); Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 1975), S Cohen and J. Young (eds.); The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems, and the Mass Media (London: Constable, 1973).

2. On the meanings associated with the term “cult” see Stephen Stein; Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in America (NYC: Oxford, 2003), p. 4-5. Parallel to this was another use of the term “cult”. Popular movements which centered on local holy persons or sacred places were often referred to by the term “cult”. While officials in the Catholic Church viewed these in somewhat negative terms they often had to accommodate themselves to the “cult” because of its popularity. On this see Victor and Edith Turner; Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (NYC: Columbia University Press, 1978).

3. Norman Davies; Europe: A History (NYC: Harper and Row, revised edition, 1998), pp. 419, 488, 493, 506, 594. On the tendency for human groups to persecute those different from themselves see Aho; This Thing of Darkness. On European and American anti-Semitism see Gavin Langmuir; History, Religion, and Anti-Semitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), George Mosse; Toward the Final Solution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), and Frederic Cople Jaher; A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1994). Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots is a melodrama which tells two tales: the story of a religious war and a narrative of a doomed love between a Huguenot man and a Catholic woman. On the construction of “others” and the persecution of them in Christendom see Linda Woodhead; An Introduction to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 135ff. and R.I. Moore; The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). On the execution of Quaker women in Boston see Mark Noll; A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 65. Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)) argues that the inquisition was not as active and malevolent as previously supposed.

4. On anti-Catholicism and Anti-masonry in the U.S. see Davis; “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion". On American anti-Catholicism see Billington; The Protestant Crusade.

5. Stephen Stein; Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in America (NYC: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 56. On Anti-Shaker discourse see Elizabeth A. DeWolfe; Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary Marshall Dyer’s Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867 (NYC: Palgrave, 2002). Dyer’s own critiques of Shakerism include Shakerism Exposed (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth Press, n.d [ca. 1852]), A Brief Statement of the Sufferings of Mary Dyer Occasioned By the Society Called Shakers (Concord, NH: Joseph Spear, 1818), A Portraiture of Shakerism… (Concord, NH: Printed for the Author [by Sylvester Goss], 1822), and Reply to the Shakers (Concord, [NH]: Printed for the Author, 1824).

6. For John Mears criticisms of Oneida (and the Mormons) see his “Utah and the Oneida Community”, The Independent 31 (1879), p. 1584. Mears’ anti-Oneida activities were reported in the New York Times, 15 February 1879, p. 1. On anti-Oneida activities generally see Maren Lockwood Carden; Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation (NYC: Harper and Row, 1969) pp. 101, 103 and Cott; Public Vows, pp. 124, 128.

7. On Anti-Mormonism see Davis Bitton; “Antimormonism: Periodization, Strategies, Motivation”; 1985, unpublished paper in author's possession, William O. Nelson; “Anti-Mormon Publications”; in Ludlow (ed.); Encyclopedia of Mormonism (NYC: Macmillan, 1992), Leonard Arrington and Jon Haupt; “The Missouri and Illinois Mormons in Ante-Bellum Fiction”, Dialogue 5:1 (1970), Arrington and Haupt; “Intolerable Zion: Images of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century Fiction”, Western Humanities Review 22 (Summer 1968) pp. 37-50, Arrington and Rebecca Cornwall Foster; “Perpetuation of a Myth: Mormon Danites in Western Novels, 1840-90”, BYU Studies 23:2 (Spring 1983), Gary Bunker and Davis Bitton; The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834-1914 (SLC: University of Utah Press, 1983), Terryl Givens; The Viper in the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1997), Jan Shipps; “From Gentile to Non-Mormon: Mormon Perceptions of the Other” in Shipps; Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 124-142, Jan Shipps; “From Satyr to Saint: American Perception of the Mormons, 1860-1960” in Shipps; Sojourner in the Promised Land, pp. 51-97, and Shipps; “Surveying the Mormon Image Since 1960” in Shipps; Sojourner in the Promised Land, pp. 98-123. Criticisms of Mormonism are numerous and sundry and include E.D. Howe; Mormonism Unvailed (SLC: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1834), John C. Bennett; The History of the Saints, or, An Expose of Joe Smith and Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), Ed Decker; The God Makers: The Mormon Quest for Godhood (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1984), which was also produced as a film. There are also scholarly condemnations of Mormonism. For these see John Heinerman and Anson Shupe; The Mormon Corporate Empire (Boston: Beacon, 1985), Massimo Introvigne; “The Devil Makers: Contemporary Evangelical Fundamentalism Anti-Mormonism”, Dialogue 27:1, pp. 153-169, and Anson Shupe; The Darker Side of Virtue: Corruption, Scandal and the Mormon Empire (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991).

8. On the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses see Shawn Francis Peters; Judging Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), William Kaplan; State and Salvation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), Acts of Jehovah's Witnesses in Modern Times: 1975 Yearbook (Brooklyn: Watchtower, 1975), and American Civil Liberties Union; The Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses (NYC: ACLU, 1941).

9. Philip Jenkins; Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (NYC: Oxford University Press, 2000), Timothy Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions (Albany: SUNY Press, NY, 1995), James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher; Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Stuart Wright (ed); Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

10. Thomas Robbins; Cults, Charisma, and the Sociology of New Religious Movements (London: Sage, 1988), Meredith McGuire; Religion: The Social Context (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth, third edition, 1992), pp. 134-172, Max Weber; Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1930), pp. 144-154, Ernst Troeltsch; The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1960), pp. 461-465, H. Richard Niebuhr; The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Cleveland, OH.: Meridian, 1929), pp. 17-21, Howard Becker; Through Values to Social Interpretation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), pp. 627-628, and Becker; Systematic Sociology on the Basis of the Beziehungslehre and Gebildelehre of Leopold Van Wiese (NYC: Wiley, 1932). Niebuhr saw class, nationalism, region, and ethnicity as the social forces that divided Christianity.

11. Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge; The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revivals, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 19-37.

12. Roy Wallis; “The Cult and Its Transformation” in Wallis (ed.); Sectarianism: Analysis of Religious and non-Religious Sects, (NYC: Wiley), pp. 35-49. Wallis is following Max Weber.

13. Marc Gallanter; Cults, Faith Healing, and Coercion (NYC: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1999), pp. 6, 15-33, 34-59.

14. Gallanter; Cults, Faith Healing, and Coercion, pp. 2, 5, 9, 31-32, 65, 81-88.

15. Gallanter; Cults, Faith Healing, and Coercion, pp. 92-109. Gallanter is again drawing on Weber here.

16. James Beckford; “Explaining Religious Movements”, International Social Science Journal, 29:2 (1977), pp. 135-249. One can argue that the terms developed to study religion can be used to study other organizational forms a la Weber.

17. Stark and Bainbridge: The Future of Religion, pp. 65, 193-194, 198, 200, 204, 247, 256, especially p. 245 and Sydney Ahlstrom; The Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1972) p. 509.

18. G.R. Elton; Reformation Europe 1517-1559 (London: Fontana, 1963), pp 86-103 especially p. 103. Given that Anabaptism was, at least according to Elton, a movement of the poor Elton’s characterization of Anabaptism as part of the loony fringe raises not only the issue of religious-ideological bias but also the issue of class bias.

19. Norman Cohn; The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (NYC: Oxford, revised and expanded edition, 1970).

20. Leigh Eric Schmidt; “Preface to the New Edition” in Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, second edition, 2001), William Warren Sweet; Revivalism in America: Its Origin, Growth, and Decline (NYC: Scribner’s, 1944), pp. 124 and 132, Frederick Morgan Davenport; Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals: A Study in Mental and Social Evolution (NYC: Macmillan, 1916), p. 10, and John Berecz; Understanding Tourette Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Related Problems (NYC: Springer, 1992), p. 187. For an excellent intellectual history of religious experience and intellectual and academic attempts to explain religious experience see Ann Taves; Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Religious Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). For an excellent intellectual history of the suspicion of the role hearing played in religious experience and belief see Leigh Eric Schmidt; Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

21. Fawn Brodie; No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (NYC: Knopf, second edition, 1971), pp. 412-413, 418-421, Anne Felt Tyler; Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944), pp. 86-107, Louis Kern; An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), Lawrence Foster; “The Psychology of Religious Genius: Joseph Smith and the Origins of New Religious Movements”, in Bryan Waterman (ed.); The Prophet Puzzle (SLC: Signature, 1999), pp. 183-208, Charles Sellers; The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846 (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 217-225. Sellers’ psychological assessment of Smith is probably influenced by the work of Fawn Brodie. For excellent critiques of Sellers see Howe; “Charles Sellers, the Market Revolution, and the Shaping of American Identity in Whig-Jacksonian America”, pp. 54-74 in Mark Noll (ed.); God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860 (NYC: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Carwardine; “Charles Sellers’ “Antinomians” and “Arminians”: Methodists and the Market Revolution”, pp. 75-98 in Noll (ed.); God and Mammon.

22. The importance of Conway and Siegelman and their work in this debate can be seen in Conway and their appearances on Good Morning America, the Today show, The Tonight Show, Prime Time Live, 20/20, 48 Hours, NBC Nightly News, CNN Late Edition, Larry King Live, and more than 300 radio and television programs in the U.S., Canada and Europe. They have lectured at more than 40 colleges and universities, where their books have long been required texts, and addressed numerous professional associations, mainline religious denominations, and civic organizations. Articles by or about them have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, People, Playboy, Science Digest and Yahoo! Internet Life, and have been cited in publications as varied as Time, Forbes, Psychology Today, New Society, Ladies Home Journal, GQ, and Connoisseur, and in United Press International, Reuters, and Voice of America dispatches, in the translation of their works into other languages. In November 2005, the Italian edition of Conway and Siegelman’s book, L’Eroe Oscuro dell’Età dell’Informazione (Codice Edizioni), premiered at the Genoa Science Festival. A French edition of the book, Héros pathétique de l’âge de l’information, will be published in 2012. In May 2006, L’Eroe Oscuro won a Menzione d’Onore in the Premio Letterario Serono, the only international book award for works that “interlace between science and literature”.

23. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman; Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change (NYC: Delta, expanded edition, 1979), pp. 53-58. Interestingly, Conway's and Siegelman's notion of personality change parallels Turner's notion of liminality.

24. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, p. 12.

25. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 63-78, 151-182, 251-252. There have been a number of portrayals of “cults” in recent American popular culture. Fox's King of the Hill (the episode “Fun with Jane and Jane”, 21 April 2002) nicely portrays the “snapping” thesis in an episode where LuAnne goes to college and joins a sorority which turns out to be a “cult”. The Simpson’s also did a “cult” episode. The tragedy at “Jonestown” was the subject of a television mini-series (Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, 15 April 1980, CBS). There have also been other popular culture takes on “cults” in the literary and television worlds. Gore Vidal's Messiah and Frank Herbert's Dune series to name just a few. Vidal's book sees the rise of one new religion as associated with hypnosis, media manipulation by Madison Avenue business types, mind control, cold war fear, terror, authoritarianism, and the manipulation of history. Vidal's fictional tale picks out many of the same factors to which later non-fictional writers would make reference in later years.

26. Ronald Enroth; Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cult (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Zondervan, 1977) and Enroth; “Cults and Evangelicals: Labeling and Lumping”, Cultic Studies Journal, 2:2 (1985), 321-325.

27. Enroth; Youth, Brainwashing, and the Extremist Cult (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Zondervan, 1977) and Enroth; “Cults and Evangelicals”. Needless to say, evangelicals include Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and even Catholicism in the “cult” category. On this see Sean McCloud; Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 47-49.

28. For a social and cultural analyses of the “Anti-cult” movement see Anson Shupe and David Bromley; The New Vigilantes: Deprogrammers, Anti-Cultists, and the New Religions (Beverly Hills, CA.: Sage, 1980) and Shupe and Bromley; “The Evolution of Modern American Anticult Ideology: A Case Study in Frame Extension” in Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions, pp. 411-416.

29. American Psychiatric Association; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (Washington, DC: APA, 1980). The American Psychiatric Association (APA) once labeled homosexuality deviant and curable as well. Some, mostly Evangelical, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists maintain that it still is. American Psychiatric Association; DSM II (Washington, DC: APA, 1968), p. 44. See Ronald Bayer; Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1981), and Edward Shorter; A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (NYC: Wiley, 1997). 30. For an excursion into the utopian/dystopian mental world of Evangelical cult inquisitors see Bob Larson; Larson's New Book of Cults (Wheaton, IL.: Tyndale, 1989), Walter Martin; Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis, MN.: Bethany House,) and the web site associated with the Apologetics Index. The Apologetics Index is encyclopedic and contains articles on various “cults” as well as “cult apologists” like David Bromley, Anson Shupe, J. Gordon Melton, and Evangelical Irving Hexham. One of the leading “anti-cult” groups, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) was, along with one of its deprogrammers, Rick Ross, sued for kidnapping a “cult” member, found guilty, and declared bankruptcy to avoid paying the judgment. Its website (irony of ironies) has been taken over by an anti-anti-”cult” group that, according to one “anti-cult” website, has ties to a Scientologist.

31. Michel Foucault; The Order of Things (NYC: Pantheon, 1970), Foucault; The Archaeology of Knowledge (NYC: Pantheon, 1972), Foucault; Discipline and Punish; Pantheon: NYC, 1975, Foucault; History of Sexuality, I (NYC: Pantheon, 1979), Foucault; Madness and Civilization (NYC: Pantheon, 1967), Christopher Simpson (ed.); Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences (NYC: New Press, 1998). Noam Chomsky, Ira Katznelson, R.C. Lewontin, David Montgomery, Laura Nader, Richard Ohmann, Ray Siever, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Howard Zinn (eds); The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Post-Cold War World (NYC: New Press, 1997), Sigmund Diamond; Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1992), Ellen Schrecker; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1986), Robin Blackburn (ed.); Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory (London: Fontana, 1973), Shupe and Bromley; The New Vigilantes, Bromley and James Richardson; The Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal, and Historical Perspectives (NYC: Mellen, 1983. James C. Scott's, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1998) explores the (for Scott mildly) dystopian modern world that social engineering “expertise” has created and how these ideologies have impacted architecture, agriculture, politics, economics, culture, mass housing, and mass murder.

32. For an excellent discussion of the social and cultural construction of the American religious “mainstream” and “fringe” (note the binarism here) see Sean McCloud; Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

33. Fawn Brodie; No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Knopf, second edition, 1971), Anne Felt Tyler; Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), Louis Kern; An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991).

34. Foster; “The Psychology of Religious Genius: Joseph Smith and the Origins of New Religious Movements”, in Waterman (ed.); The Prophet Puzzle, pp. 183-208, Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter; Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1992), Erik Erikson; Young Man Luther (NYC: Norton, 1958) and R.G.L. Waite's The Psychopathic God—Adolf Hitler (NYC: NAL, 1977). Lewis Feuer in his The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (NYC: Basic, 1969) argues that student movements, in general, are kinds of oedipal revolts against teachers and the authority they represent, a not very surprising argument from a university professor and “authority” figure caught up in the ferment of the sixties. For one among many critiques of psychohistory and psychobiography see Gertrude Himmelfarb's review of psychobiographies of Burke and Mill; "Case Studies in Psychohistory" in Himmelfarb; The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Interpretations (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 107-120.

35. Anderson; Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon (SLC: Signature, 1999), pp. xvii-xl and 1-14 and “The Testimony of the Three Witnesses, and The Testimony of the Eight Witnesses” in the Book of Mormon. These statements were originally found in the back of the 1830 edition. In modern editions they can be found in the front of the book.

36. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 13, 152, 225.

37. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 83-87, 109-133, 152. The most recent edition of the DSM seems to have eliminated “cults” from among its “disordered” category. This is just another instance of how even academic disciplines and medical practices are politicized if not inherently political.

38. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, p. 252.

39. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 55-61.

40. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 29-35 (the Gordon’s), and 20-25 (Jean Turner)

41. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 62-78 (deprogrammer Ted Patrick).

42. The data on the Unification Church is from Eileen Barker; The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) and Barker; “The Unification Church” in Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions, pp. 223-229. Other scholars of alternative religion have found similar things. William Bainbridge's Endtime Family (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002) found that members of the Children of God mirror the demographics of the societies in which they live.

43. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 62-78. Philip Jenkins also makes the “commie”, “cult”, “brainwashing” connection in his Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (NYC: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 188-189.

44. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 55-58 and Abbot Gleason; Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1995) particularly his chapter on brainwashing. The Manchurian Candidate in both book form by Richard Condon (1959) and film form directed by John Frankenheimer (1962) is an interesting take on the issues of communism and brainwashing.

45. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, pp. 17, 28, 137, 220, 247-251.

46. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, Wallis; The Cult and it's Transformation, Davies; Europe, Ahlstrom; The Religious History of the American People, R.T. Handy; A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1979), Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions.

47. For an excellent reader on alternative religions in America see Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions.

48. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping pp. 227-252. My analyses draws heavily on John R. Hall; “Peoples Temple”, in Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions, pp. 303-311. Also see Hall’s expanded history of Jonestown, Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction, NJ., 1987).

49. Conway and Siegelman; Snapping, p. 231. There is some question as to whether John was Jones's and Grace Stoen's son, or the son of Grace and her husband Tim. Grace Stoen had defected from the Temple in July 1976 leaving Tim and John behind. In the fall of 1976 Tim Stoen signed a power-of-attorney form giving Jones and others the right to “exercise all powers and rights that I [Tim] might do in connection with the said minor.” It seems clear that Jones, who was bisexual and who did have sexual relations with a number of his members, regarded John as his son. Hall; “Peoples Temple” in Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions, pp 307-308.

50. As far as I know, the US government still refuses to release information they collected on the Peoples Temple. If and when they do, this could provide us with a fuller understanding of the role the federal government played in the tragedy of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown. Kleinman was a journalist who began writing exposes on the Peoples Temple for the magazine New West in the late mid- to late 1970s. These were fueled, in part, by information provided by defectors and by political opponents of Moscone. Jones had been to British Guyana and Brasil exploring the possibilities of migration there as early as 1964. The Peoples Temple is not the only “cult” to be investigated by the American state or federal government (usually at the instigation of “anti-cultists”). In the 1970s the Attorney General of the state of New York and New York's Charity Fraud Bureau investigated the Children of God (the Family). The Vermont Senate investigated “cults” in general. The leader of the Unification Church, Sun Myung Moon, was investigated and jailed for tax evasion (ironically against the urgings of many “mainline” religious groups). On these and other “cult” investigations by government entities see Jenkins; Mystics and Messiahs, pp 202 ff.

51. It really wasn't a congressional delegation since it didn't meet the criteria for a delegation defined by the Congress. On this see Hall; “Peoples Temple” in Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions, p. 308.

52. David M. Potter, “The Quest for the National Character”, (1962), in: History and Society: Essays of David M. Potter, edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 228-255, Frederick Jackson Turner; The Frontier in American History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1920), Alexis de Tocqueville; Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, translated by Gerald Bevan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003).

53. Pessen; Jacksonian America, pp. 4-32, and Tocqueville; Democracy in America.

54. Alex Inkeles; “National Character and Modern Political Systems” in Hsu (ed.); Psychological Anthropology (Cambridge: Schenkman Books, 1972), pp. 202-240 and Pessen; Jacksonian America, pp. 4-32.

55. Michael Rogin; “Liberal Society and the Indian Question” in Rogin; Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 134-168 and Ronald Takaki; Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1990). Takaki draws extensively on Rogin. Also see Thomas Gossett; Race: The History of an Idea in America (NYC: Schocken, 1963) and Robert Berkhofer; The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (NYC: Vintage, 1978).

56. Nancy Chodorow; The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Chodorow; “Family Structure and Feminine Personality” in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.); Women, Culture, and Society (Palo Alto, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 43-68. There is no doubt that our “childhood” and “adult” experiences impact and influence our lives though there is a question as to how useful psychoanalytic perspectives are in helping us understand these processes. What is equally clear is that any exploration of how a particular individuals have been impacted by their parents, their family, their friends, their acquaintances, and the social and cultural factors that surround them must be sensitive to historical and cross-cultural variation in parent-child interactions, how our interpretations of these interactions change over time, and we must avoid biological reductionism. On the comparative turn among a few social and cultural psychologists see Clifford Geertz; “Imbalancing Act: Jerome Bruner’s Cultural Psychology” in Geertz; Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 187-202. I would argue, by the way, that some of the best theoretical and empirical work in social psychology came some years back in the writings of Lev Vygotsky, Erving Goffman, and Jerome Bruner.

57. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg; “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-century America”, Signs, 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 1-29, John William Ward; Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1955), Marvin Meyers; The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, revised edition, 1960).

58. Lawrence Friedman; Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism 1830-1850 (NYC: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

59. On the hazards of academic and media categorizations to group health see the essays in Miller (ed.); America's Alternative Religions and critical studies of what happened to the Branch Davidians, Tabor and Gallagher; Why Waco and Wright (ed.); Armageddon in Waco.