The Books of My Life: The Disappointed

I was a student of radical religious oriented social movements in New England and the Burned Over District of upstate New York and north eastern Ohio for many years. I was, in particular, a student of Mormonism, the group I ended up writing my dissertation on, and, if much less intensely, the Shakers and the Oneida Community.

My interest was not in these sects, denominations, or new religious movements, or even in religion per se. It was in the role ideology and meaning played and plays in the social and cultural construction of identity and community in new social and cultural movements. The study of new sects or new religious movements, the study of new meaning systems in other words, in 19th century America, seemed as good a place as any to explore the role ideology played in the social and cultural construction of identity and religion. It also seemed a great place to explore how meaning systems, like social movements in general, routinise and institutionalise over time becoming, in the process, less charismatic and more bureaucratic in form.

Given my interest in the new sects and new religious movements of 19th century New England and especially New York it was probably only a matter of time before I would get around to reading about another one of the many sects that arose in New England, New York, and the Midwest, Adventistism or Milleritism. The edited collection The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarians in the 19th Century, edited by Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, second edition 1993), is a fascinating and enlightening collection of essays focusing on what we might call Primitive Adventism or Millerism from the 1810s to the 1860s. David Rowe's essay explores Primitive Adventist demographics showing, in the process, that the notion that millenarianism is the religion of the economically distressed is problematic when applied to nineteenth century Millerism. Wayne Judd's essay focuses on the father of Primitive Adventism, William Miller, the man who mathematically calculated when Jesus would come again in the 19th century. David Arthur's essay focuses on Primitive Adventism's Saint Paul, the evangelist, publicist, publisher, and spreading the word innovator, Joshua Himes. Louis Billington's essay explores the success of Adventist evangelists in Great Britain. Eric Anderson's essay explores Primitive Adventist hermeneutics of the apocalypse and its rereadings of earlier Adventist calculations relating to the end times. Ronald and Janet Numbers's essay explores the link between Milleritism and madness, something many contemporaries accused Primitive Adventists of bringing about. By looking at archival records from asylums in New England, upstate New York, and the Midwest, Numbers and Numbers find a more complex picture of the relationship between madness and Millerite millenialism than previously offered by apologists and polemicists. Ruth Alden Doan's essay focuses on the similarities between Primitive Adventism and mainstream evangelicalism. Mainstream evangelicalism was, Doan argues, modernising and liberalising at the time that Adventism arose and flourished and, as a result, modernising and liberalising evanglicalism emphasised the differences, particularly when it came to the millennium, between the two evanglical groups in order to establish clear boundary markers between the two movements. Michael Barkun's essay explores another somewhat similar process of boundary demarcation, in this case the one made by John Humphry Noyes's, the founder of the Oneida Community, to mark off his Oneida Perfectionist community from the Primitive Adventists so that Oneida Perfectionists would not be accused, as Primitive Adventists were accused of, of being mad. Lawrence Foster explores the similarities and differences between Millerism and Shakerism and focuses on one--there were more--Primitive Adventist who joined a Shaker community in Ohio after the great disappointment of 1843 and 1844, the disappointment that arose among Millerites after Jesus did not come again. Jonathan Butler's essay explores the transformation from boundless Primitive Adventism to consolidating Seventh Day Adventism, or, to use Weber's terminology, from charismatic sect to bureaucratic denomination.

Given my interest in Mormonism it should not be surprising that I tended to fixate on the similarities and differences between Mormons and Millerites as I read The Disappointed. The similarities first. Both social movements were apocalyptic and believed that Jesus was coming again soon. Both social movements were utopian in that they believed the kingdom of god would be established on earth. Both social movements were primitivist in that they sought to restore the true apostolic church to the world again. Both social movements were hybrid Hebraic/Christian restoration movements. Both social movements believed in continuing revelation and a god that acted in history. Both movements harvested the mission field of Great Britain relatively successfully. Both religious social movements had dietary reform aspects. Both social movements were attacked and "persecuted" by the vigilante mobs that were common in 19th century and 20th century America. The victimisation and martyrdom members and leaders of both social movements felt played an important role in the social and cultural construction of Primitive Mormonism and Primitive Adventism and Primitive Mormon and Primitive Adventist identities. As for differences both social movements differed in their conception of the second advent of Christ, the organisation of their apostolic churches, their visions of a utopian future, their Hebraic emphases, their emphasis on continuing revelation, and their dietary restrictions, pointing up the need to explore the role culture plays in social and cultural movements and the difference different culture brings to social and cultural movements.

I very much enjoyed my sojourn through The Disappointed. I recommend it to anyone interested in American history, particularly US 19th century history, meaning systems in general and the social and cultural construction of new meaning systems, in apocalypticism, in social movements, in theoretical approaches to social movements, and in American culture in general. After all, with respect to this last, one of the important building blocks of American culture has been religious and more specifically Protestant culture and ideology.

The Books of My Life: Joseph Smith (Bushman)

The name Richard Bushman really takes me back. Once upon a time I was in graduate school. In one seminar I took with Professor Barker-Benfield on some subject, probably history and gender since B-B fancied himself a specialist in that area, we students were supposed to read Bushman's recently published book The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). I already knew some of Bushman's work. I had read his From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, 1980) earlier and found its argument on the transformation of Puritanism interesting and its utlisation of economic and cultural theory to make the argument about the transformation of Puritan identity even more interesting.

In the seminar I quickly learned that B-B was not a fan of Bushman or his work. As I recall, B-B found Bushman's work too middle class, elite class wanna be. As someone born in England class, you see, was never very far from B-B's mind. I don't know whether B-B disliked Bushman for reasons other than class and class wannabeism: the fact that Bushman won a Bancroft Prize and he never did, the fact that Bushman held a distinguished professorship at a prestigious American research university that was a member of the elite Association of American Universities and he didn't, the fact that Bushman took a more social and cultural approach to psychology than his mentor Donald Meyer--whose work I find too reductionism--or the fact that Bushman was a Mormon believer and he was neither. What I do remember is that I thought B-B misinterpreted Bushman's book on American refinement. He saw it as a paean to the middle class and the civilising process. I, on the other hand, thought, still think, and stated in class, that the real heroes of the book were the dirt poor Smith family, the family of Mormon "prophet, seer, and revelator" Joseph Smith Junior. I still think B-B let his ideology get in the way of a valid analysis of Bushman's book. That, of course, has been and continues to be far too common occurence in intellectual and academic circles past and present.

Another thing I remember about B-B's graduate class was that there was a remarkably ignorant and moronic statement made in the class by one of the other graduate students in the seminar. The student, who will remain nameless because I have simply forgotten virtually everything about her, remarked, during one of our classroom discussions, that she found the Mormon sense of persecution irrelevant. I had and still have a number of problems with such a remarkable, not in a good way, jeremiad. First, such etic statements do not take culture seriously while culture, as social theory and social scientific analysis shows and has shown for a century at least, is important if not central to an understanding humans and human groups and, as a consequence, must be taken seriously, very seriously. As Max Weber and Clifford Geertz realised some time ago, you have to, in order to understand human groups and human social movements, go native. You have to go emic, in other words, to grasp the meanings that often motivate and underlie human actions. That this rather obvious methodology hasn't been understood and put into academic practise by one if not more academic wanna bes, not to mention many academics, tells you something about the dismal theoretical and methodological state of the discipline of history. This statement also ignores the fact that the persecution of Mormons was real, very real. Mormons were persecuted, discriminated against, faced mob violence, and even possible "extermination" in Missouri and Illinois. Such a statement ignores the fact that real violence against "others", such as the real violence aimed at Jews and others during the Holocaust, to chose one example, has had and continues to have an immense impact on human individuals and groups particularly on a cultural and ideological level. Just look at the continuing importance of the memory of the Shoah in contemporary Israel and the Jewish community worldwide and the use of the "holocaust" by some in the Jewish community in Israel and the US as a political weapon that Foucault would have found fascinating. The ignorance, moronicity, and  arrogance at the heart of such a dismissive statement shows that stupidity and anti-intellectualism are sadly not the monopoly of the populist masses but can also be found in the contemporary academy.

So why did all this spring to mind? Because I recently decided to take another spin through Richard Bushman's biography of the charismatic and patrimonial (in Weberian terms) founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) tries to walk the thin line between believing history and empirically grounded social scientific analysis if not entirely successfully. When push comes to shove, Bushman generally errs in the direction of a faithful interpretation of Smith's behaviour and actions and early Mormon history making Bushman's book more meaningful and valuable to the Mormon true believer than to the dispassionate social scientific analyst who seeks to understand Smith and early or primitive Mormonism in its broader cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic contexts better. Additionally, Bushman's book has a failing far too typical of so much historical work and historical biography of the past and the present; it sometimes becomes an exercise in kitchen sink trivial pursuit.

So what did I, a "gentile", a non-Mormon who spent the 1990s and the early and mid 2000s engaged in the study of Mormonism, learn and relearn from Bushman's biography of Smith. I learned that in what was still pretty much a traditional world, honour, something that was central to the traditional culture of honour at the time and in the past in traditional communities, mattered. Smith was embedded in a world of honour and honour mattered to him. Smith wanted to be respected and accepted in a world where gentility was a sign of status. He wanted others to recognise him as a gentlemen, if a "rough" gentleman. I relearned that Smith, was born into a family that had difficulty escaping poverty in a world that was changing thanks to the spread of merchant capitalism, sought financial security. I relearned that attacks on Smith and on Mormons generally were part and parcel of the vigilante violence that was far too common in 19th century America as attacks on Masonry, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormonism show. Needless to say, these vigilante attacks by "true Americans" on "others", whether for political, economic, or cultural reasons, continued into the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, making the study of American ethnocentrism and xenophobia a central part of any dispassionate and critical study of the United States. I relearned that Smith thought of himself as Abraham, as Isaac, as Jacob, as Moses, as the prophets, and as Jesus, and that he saw the Mormons as a figurative Israel made literally into the new Israel. Mormonism, after all, was and is a fascinating mixture of, as Smith perceived them, Tanakh Hebraicism and New Testament Christianity. I relearned that culture, particularly Smith's interpretation of the Bible filtered through the economic, political, and cultural present, was central to the construction of Mormonism and the creation of Mormons.

Given that Bushman's book tries to put the Mormon prophet and Primitive Mormonism into its ancient environment--a context that is problematic for those of us who are not believers--and its 19th century economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ones, I can only recommend Bushman's biography to the Mormon faithful. It is likely to be and remain the standard work on the subject for 21st century believing intellectual Mormons for some time. I was, by the way, very annoyed by one aspect of the book. Bushman's footnotes cite only the last name of an author and a partial title of an author. This becomes a painful experience when one is looking for the footnote references in the bibliography where there are, for example, nine authors with the last name Anderson. Given this my award for the most difficult citation apparatus to manoeuvre through I have ever experienced goes to, moment of silence, Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith.

What a pity that Marvin Hill wasn't able to pursue his biography of Smith...