The Mormon Culture of Salvation

Douglas J. Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780754613305
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351885492
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

The Mormon Culture of Salvation presents a comprehensive study of Mormon cultural and religious life, offering important new theories of Mormonism - one of the fastest growing movements and thought by many to be the next world religion. Bringing social, scientific and theological perspectives to bear on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Douglas Davies draws from theology, history of religions, anthropology, sociology and psychology to present a unique example of a truly interdisciplinary analysis in religious studies. Examining the many aspects of Mormon belief, ritual, family life and history, this book presents a new interpretation of the origin of Mormonism, arguing that Mormonism is rooted in the bereavement experience of Joseph Smith, which influenced the development of temple ritual for the dead and the genealogical work of many Mormon families. Davies shows how the Mormon commitment to work for salvation relates to current Mormon belief in conversion, and to traditional Christian ideas of grace. The Mormon Culture of Salvation is an important work for Mormons and non-Mormons alike, offering fresh insights into how Mormons see the world and work for their future glory in heavenly realms. Written by a non-Mormon with over 30 years' research experience into Mormonism, this book is essential reading for those seeking insights into new interdisciplinary forms of analysis in religion, as well as all those studying or interested in Mormonism and world religions. Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion in the Department of Theology, Durham University, UK. He is the author of many books including Death, Ritual and Belief (Cassell, 1997), Mormon Identities in Transition (Cassell, 1994), Mormon Spirituality (1987), and Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies (Brill, 1984).

I

One

Introduction

Mormons describe the higher realm of salvation open to married Church members as a state of exaltation.¹ Unmarried Mormons, alongside people of goodwill from other denominations, will be granted their own ‘degree of glory’ in lower heavens, each gaining the benefit appropriate to their own endeavour. But to perceive oneself in that lower state knowing that a higher could have been achieved, might, itself, be to know damnation. These barest of bare details of a highly achievement-motivated group reflect but one aspect of a doctrinal, ritual and social complex that reaches into the depths of Mormon kinship, identity and cosmology that together constitute a culture of salvation.

The following chapters not only describe salvation as the motive force empowering Mormon spirituality throughout these human depths but also seek to interpret it in the more abstract terms of the study of religions. The whole book is an explication of Max Weber’s passing description of Mormonism as a movement ‘half-way between monastery and factory’.² Throughout their cumulative history Latter-day Saints have fashioned a distinctive way of life in a culture with salvation as the means to the end of exaltation. And central to it lies death. To say this may seem quite unexceptional since all must deal with death and most religious traditions have developed very specific ideas of salvation in relation to human mortality, indeed some psychologists even intimate that the ‘fear of death is a basis for religious belief’.³

Mortality

But to give death such a high profile in the cultural context of Mormonism is quite unusual as far as social scientific, historical and theological analyses of the movement are concerned. This may well be because many Mormons would probably say that death does not play an important part in their church activities, despite the fact that the great majority of formal religious activity, especially in Mormon temples, concerns the dead. This practical paradox can be understood in that it is the dead and not death as such that preoccupy active Latter-day Saints. For death need not only be viewed negatively as something to be feared, even though fear did become a dominant trend of western sociological interpretations in the last half of the twentieth century.⁴ Death can also become a basis of opportunity as a vehicle for carrying and expressing varied hopes, opinion, ideology or belief and as a means of generating a distinctive culture.

The hypothesis that death was a crucial factor in the emergence of Mormonism and that it continues to contribute to the movement’s continuing success is one key feature of the following chapters. They discuss Joseph Smith’s encounter with mortality and argue that this fostered his sense of destiny and helped forge his prophetic force and motivated his ritual creativity that attracted thousands whose own latent desire was also to conquer the last enemy. Their desire was granted and given opportunity to express itself in a life set on temporal and eternal achievement. These fundamental themes of death and its conquest combined in mutual resolution as the culture of salvation that took the name and form of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one that some people envisage as developing into the next major religion of the world.

To emphasize mortality in this way is not to say that death is the only significant factor in Joseph’s life, or indeed of this book, far from it. Given the cultural complexity of religious movements, one could pursue any number of interpretive paths, from the strictly philosophical to the more directly political.⁵ In so doing any single-issue explanation would be doomed to failure, given the multiple constraints of history, society and individual life. Theoretically speaking, the reductionism involved in framing such a single motive often distorts other issues, cramping evidence that could yield a more fruitful interpretation. Accordingly, while our recurrent theme of death-conquest is offered as a debating point that other scholars, especially historians with more intimate a knowledge of LDS historical material than I possess, might wish to consider, refute or refine, it is far from our sole concern, not least because our fundamental goal is to analyse the notion of salvation both in terms of its Mormon theological sense of ‘exaltation’ and in the more theoretical terms of religious studies. In particular we will show how salvation is not only focused in temple ritual but is also powerfully present in the more diffused domains of family and community life.

Core Motivation

Even so this highlighting of mortality may seem an odd introduction to Mormonism, given its lively and positive image to many both inside and beyond the Church. But, as I will argue, appearances may be deceptive, and the rise and success of Mormonism as an increasingly distinctive religious tradition can be interpreted as inextricably grounded in its conquest of death. There is something of a distinction in Mormonism between the deeply involved and dedicated family-focused, templegoing Saint and others who are recent members or who are not temple-active and whose religious life ends at the local meeting house. The nature of teaching, of public discourse and of ritual is different for each and in practice it can seem as though there is a church within the church. It is that committed nucleus, with its motivation, activity and rationale, that provides the subject matter of the following chapters.

World Religion?

It is a surprising fact that, despite Mormonism’s formal preoccupation with human destiny in afterlife rituals, sociologists and historians have largely ignored death as a background feature of Mormonism’s origin and rationale. Our attempt at redressing this imbalance will confer a twofold benefit upon Mormon studies: first by providing a focus for aspects of Mormon life that might otherwise seem quite unconnected with each other and secondly by affording a clear theoretical means of approaching the question of this group’s potential status as a world religion. For this question is not answered merely by citing membership figures: size of membership needs complementing with the more crucial elements of the power of belief and practice as they extend through a variety of cultural bases. In fact the very issue of what is meant by a world religion is far from clear within the discipline of comparative religions, as we show in the second part of this book. There we portray Mormonism as possessing the key attribute shared by other religious movements that have made the successful progression from regional sect to world faith: a belief and ritual of death-conquest. This temple-oriented activity is grounded in a family life closely related to local church institutions. It owns a distinctive attitude to truth, sacred scriptures and leaders and is framed by a distinctive view of history, time, destiny and the individual. It is propagated through a large missionary force operating in culturally diverse societies. Each chapter presents some facet of this deathconquest and contributes to a clustering of death-transcendence motifs and processes that, together, comprise the Latter-day Saint culture of salvation.

Forms of Salvation

Comparatively speaking, salvation takes a great variety of forms not only between different religions but also for different groups of adherents within a single tradition, as Max Weber persuasively demonstrated in his sociology of religion.⁶ Sometimes philosophical accounts of divine processes take precedence as they appeal to the human proclivity for meaning; sometimes the heartfelt cry for help in a pressing crisis or in the needed fertility of land or beasts lays claim to salvation. Sometimes it is the power of ecstasy or the joy of the union of love that gives salvation its depth. Van der Leeuw, in his foundation text on the phenomenology of religion, was but one scholar who provided extensive sketches of the variety of salvation embraced by religions.⁷ My earlier work on salvation related these sociological and phenomenological perspectives to anthropological concerns while generating a view of salvation that integrated rational and emotional dimensions of meaning in the construction of that kind of plausible world where the dynamics of meaning become transformed into the dynamics of salvation.⁸ One consequence of this transformational process is that one group is often able to exploit the human drive for salvation, including the conquest of death, more effectively than others and will flourish at their expense. This may be a point of fundamental significance for mission and evangelism in societies whose cultures no longer sustain adequate interpretations of both life and death, or provide methods of coping with it.

Modes of Mormonism

Coping with death, as indeed coping with life, involves that kind of collaboration that generates communities. Over time, one group comes to possess degrees of distinctiveness from other groups as they develop their own forms of life that comprise a culture: a complex term but one that embraces characteristic forms of thought, speech and action related to a common past, identity and goal. The word ‘culture’ is central to the title of this book and runs throughout the following chapters in active and passive senses. The active sense is found in the cultivation, construction and formulation of a religion of new revelations, of innovative ritual and of expectations of participation attending ordinary LDS life. The passive aspect consists in the very existence of these forms of behaviour embedded in the more concrete buildings, patterns of church organization and historical tradition that frame the contemporary life of faith. In practice the cultural growth of Mormonism and the experience of it as a cultural environment merge in personal and group life. Throughout the rest of this book it is this double sense of culture that is presupposed and assumed.

It is important to remember this because there will be times, as in Chapter Three, when we will speak of culture almost as if it were some reified and idealized blueprint. Indeed, there are aspects of Mormonism itself that foster this view, as in the idea of The Plan of Salvation’ which is an account of the destiny of deities and humanity from eternity to eternity. With such a vision it is easy to think theologically of human beings as mere actors in some sort of divine mystery play and just as easy to think social scientifically of actors playing the roles written in a script called culture. In reality things are much more open and fluid than that. Accordingly, it is wiser to see culture as the outcome of collaborative individuals, leaders and groups, as they adapt creatively to their complex environments, including religious environments. Not least important in this ‘mutualist’ approach to persons and culture as the anthropologist Michael Carrithers has utilized this essentially psychological idea is the way people make history, interpret it and remake it once more.⁹ This could not be more important for any group than for the Latter-day Saints, given that they, above almost all others, have made ‘history’ assume enormous dimensions in their discussion of faith, family and community.

For ease of analysis of Latter-day Saint culture we will take identifiable patterns of behaviour and describe them through the modes of what we will call domestic, ward and temple Mormonism. It would, of course, be perfectly possible to think of LDS life in other ways, as with those who have spoken of ‘the two churches of Mormonism’ when distinguishing between the bureaucratic central management and the ward level ‘where the most important things happen’ (Molen, 1991:25). It will be my contention that a pattern of death-conquest runs through all three and is intimately related across them. Sometimes the pattern is dramatically clear, as in the vicarious temple baptism for the dead, and sometimes it is less visible, as in the genealogical work conducted by many Mormons in their leisure time and retirement. Domestic Mormonism focuses on LDS family life in the home and through family ancestry, as explored in Chapters Two and Three. This expression resembles Colleen McDannell’s notion of ‘Domestic Christianity’ coined quite independently to demonstrate the power of the North American family on home schooling of children within a specifically Christian ethos and praxis (1995:207). Ward Mormonism embraces local church and community life and includes the missionary programme, while Temple Mormonism accounts for the place and ritual of temples in Mormon religious behaviour. All three foster the dynamic Mormon culture of salvation that is showing an increased interest in the nature of salvation in the light of current developments within its life-world as the twentieth century passes into Christianity’s third millennium. Salvation is such a lively Mormon issue that it would justify a study of its own even without our wish to learn more about the LDS movement and its potential world-religion status.

Method and Approach

In that salvation could be approached in a number of ways, it is wise, at the outset, to indicate the method adopted throughout the book, especially since my composite perspective is not easily found elsewhere. In any study of human groups it is important to be clear on the method underlying the venture and this is particularly important for religious groups because of the issues of religious belief, truth and the perspective of each scholar.

Many who belong to a religious tradition often see it as the one true or the most true expression of the way things are. This means that when people of one tradition talk about others they often do so in order to prove their own case and show how the other group is deficient in some way. In the case of Mormonism this has involved an extensive literature of hostility and criticism beginning in the earliest years of the Mormon Church in the 1830s. One aspect of this literature that is worthy of study in its own right is produced by converts who have left Mormonism for other groups, usually for Evangelical Protestant churches. Such apologetic literature includes sympathetic and highly informative material as well as the dogmatically hostile, but while it plays an important part in the life of criticism between religious devotees it has no place in this more academic study of Mormonism, except as useful information in its own right.¹⁰

This book adopts an eclectic perspective combining social scientific elements of anthropology and the sociology of religion with phenomenological and history of religions approaches to religious movements along with restricted reference to psychology. I pursue this approach in the belief that research methods in relation to the study of human groups should be appropriate to the subject of study and recognize that the arbitrary divisions between academic disciplines often hinder the emergence of the fuller picture. In particular it is important as far as it is practically possible to grasp what believers see as valuable in their faith and church life. Here I find myself in full agreement with David Martin’s objection to much technical sociological writing which ‘strains out the humanity of the actors in historical and social dramas’ reducing them to ‘sleep walkers driven by social forces and processes’ (1990:1). The same can be true for other disciplines and for excessively technical writing. So, as far as possible, the following chapters employ technical terms when they are vital to draw out dimensions that would otherwise remain hidden or obscure.

It is also important to draw attention to this issue because certain questions of method and methodology have come to be of immense significance during the 1980s and 1990s, so much so that entire literatures have come into existence concerning the question of interpreting social events, and interpreting the texts produced within particular cultural contexts. It is even possible to speak of the birth of two new academic fields, of cultural studies and of hermeneutics, emerging to cope with this current fascination. Though the more established fields of anthropology and sociology have also debated similar issues, this book will not engage in these abstract debates on social and critical theory since I consider them to be relatively fruitless in relation to gaining a degree of understanding of pragmatic phenomena such as Mormonism.¹¹ Social and critical theory are at their best when used as both the medium and the message of philosophical debate about the contemporary consciousness of intellectuals by intellectuals concerning the academic worlds in which they have their being. They are at their worst when interwoven with attempts at analysing concrete historical and social movements. This b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Dedication Page
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index