Women in New Religions

Laura Vance

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479841493
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Women in New Religions offers an engaging look at women’s evolving place in the birth and development of new religious movements. It focuses on four disparate new religions—Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, The Family International, and Wicca—to illuminate their implications for gender socialization, religious leadership and participation, sexuality, and family ideals.

Religious worldviews and gender roles interact with one another in complicated ways. This is especially true within new religions, which frequently set roles for women in ways that help the movements to define their boundaries in relation to the wider society. As new religious movements emerge, they often position themselves in opposition to dominant society and concomitantly assert alternative roles for women. But these religions are not monolithic: rather than defining gender in rigid and repressive terms, new religions sometimes offer possibilities to women that are not otherwise available. Vance traces expectations for women as the religions emerge, and transformation of possibilities and responsibilities for women as they mature.

Weaving theory with examination of each movement’s origins, history, and beliefs and practices, this text contextualizes and situates ideals for women in new religions. The book offers an accessible analysis of the complex factors that influence gender ideology and its evolution in new religious movements, including the movements’ origins, charismatic leadership and routinization, theology and doctrine, and socio-historical contexts. It shows how religions shape definitions of women’s place in a way that is informed by response to social context, group boundaries, and identity.

Additional Resources

1

Mormonism

Gendering the Heavens

Origin of Mormonism

Nineteenth-century America saw the birth of numerous religions—the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910); the Oneida Community of John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886); the Bible Student movement (from which the Jehovah’s Witnesses later emerged) of Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916); the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called the Mormons; and the Seventh-day Adventists. The Mormons and the Adventists, two of the most successful religions to emerge from nineteenth-century America, at least in terms of number of adherents, were born from prophetic visions dated to the 1820s and 1840s.1 Each was led by a young, apparently unlikely prophet, had a millennial message—meaning that they expected Jesus Christ to come to earth soon—and provided female members with leadership and other opportunities denied them in the wider society at the time. The first of these to emerge, Mormonism, was born in western New York when a young man named Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844)—after being visited by God, Jesus, and an angel—translated golden plates containing a record of an ancient civilization that had once lived in the Americas into a book of scripture: the Book of Mormon. The other, Seventh-day Adventism, coalesced under the guidance of a seventeen-year-old girl of frail health—Ellen Gould Harmon White (1827–1915)—who experienced a lifetime of religious trances, visions, and dreams.

At first glance neither Joseph Smith nor Ellen White seems a likely charismatic founder of a large and long-lasting new religion. Joseph Smith was the fourth child of Joseph Smith Sr. (1771–1840) and Lucy Mack Smith (1775–1856), who by all accounts were hardscrabble farmers in Vermont and later western New York. Following their marriage in 1796, Lucy and Joseph farmed the rocky hills of Vermont, moving often, and never managing to get very far ahead of their debt. After snow fell in June 1816, they abandoned Vermont for Palmyra, New York, where they opened and operated a small shop.2 By 1818, having saved some money, the Smiths purchased one hundred acres of woodland between Palmyra and Farmington, on which they eventually began to build a wood-frame house.3 They fell behind in their payments, though, and by 1825 were forced to sell the farm and continue on as tenants on the land that they formerly owned.4

For Joseph, place was significant. As it would be for Ellen White, the locale of his childhood was critical in exposing him to religious ideas that would help set Joseph on a path to prophetic leadership. Western New York was rich with religious revival in the 1820s: the Second Great Awakening was spurred by the enthusiastic preaching of Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875); several Shaker communities and a band of followers of Jemima Wilkinson (1752–1819) could be found in western New York at the time;5 and the number of Presbyterians nearly doubled between 1816 and 1817 in the same area.6

In this context Joseph Smith received a divine visitation. There is some variation in Smith’s written accounts of his first vision.7 The version of events accepted by most Mormons as authoritative is provided in his “history” that he began dictating in the late 1830s. In it, Smith describes himself as a teenager consumed by religious questions. His mother began attending a Presbyterian meetinghouse after the family moved to Palmyra, but out of loyalty to his father, who was religious but did not attend church, Joseph also chose not to attend. Family disagreements about worship were accentuated, according to Smith’s account of his life, by contention among the churches in Palmyra.

Smith describes himself as a fourteen-year-old boy who retired to the woods near his home in the spring of 1820 to pray for religious guidance, and thereupon received a vision. “Two personages,” God the father and Jesus Christ, stood above him in the air.8 These personages were corporeal, with human-like bodies. God, gesturing to Jesus, said, “This is my beloved son. Hear him.”9 Smith was informed that no existing church was true, and that he should join none. According to his account, an angel named Moroni appeared to Joseph when he was seventeen, told him that his sins were forgiven, and informed him of records written on “plates of gold” along with an instrument to be used in their translation consisting of “two transparent stones attached like eyeglasses to a breastplate.”10 These gold plates, Joseph was told, contained the history of ancient inhabitants of the Americas and were buried near his home. The angel quoted Bible verses about the end of days, and ascended in a conduit of light until Joseph could no longer see him. Joseph’s account describes two more similar visits by Moroni that same night, and one the next morning, in which the angel repeated what he had said, and added that a great judgment was coming, and that Satan would tempt Joseph.11 When Joseph went to the Hill Cumorah and attempted to retrieve the plates after the vision, he describes himself reaching out to take the plates and being shocked; he was unable to obtain them. He was told that his desire to use the plates for his own monetary gain prevented him from being able to take them. He would have to wait.

Mormonism’s detractors—and, more recently, some Latter-day Saint (LDS) historians—have attended to Smith’s time spent searching for buried treasure around the same time that he was led to the gold plates. Court records indicate that Smith was hired to search for buried treasure in western New York, where Native American burials, containing what would have been perceived as treasure, dotted the landscape. Smith is also described in numerous historical accounts using seer stones, a practice not uncommon at a time when divining rods and dreams were also thought to lead people to things they wished to find.12

In 1825, after hearing of Joseph’s abilities, Josiah Stowell (1770–1844) hired Joseph to locate an abandoned Spanish silver mine he believed to be hidden on his land, and the following year Stowell’s neighbor swore in a warrant for Joseph’s arrest that he was a disorderly person. Under oath Joseph acknowledged having used a seer stone to locate coins and lost property.13 Joseph never found the silver mine, but he met Emma Hale (1804–1879), whose father, Isaac, helped subsidize the search on Stowell’s land. Joseph was smitten with Emma, and over objections from her father (who seems never to have fully trusted Joseph), married her in January 1827. On 22 September of the same year Joseph took Emma with him on a carriage ride to the Hill Cumorah, where he left her at the carriage and returned with a cloth-draped box in which, he told her, lay the gold plates. The contents of that box changed the lives of Emma and Joseph, as well as millions of others.

After moving to Harmony, New York, where Emma’s father provided them with a cabin, Joseph commenced a process of translating the plates with a series of scribes, including Emma as well as Martin Harris (1783–1875), a local farmer.14 When Harris’s wife, who resented her husband’s financial support of the young prophet, repeatedly questioned the enterprise, Smith reluctantly agreed to allow Harris to take 116 pages that had been translated to show his wife as evidence of the veracity of the book. The pages were lost. Smith—convinced that if he provided a new translation of the same section, an altered version of the lost pages might be presented in an attempt to prove him a fraud—was divinely admonished, and instructed to commence translation of a different part of the plates.

The stories that emerged from Smith’s translation of the plates told of a family that left the Middle East and traveled by boat to the Americas in approximately 600 BCE. The family was led by a patriarch, Lehi, and eventually split into two groups: the Nephites, descendants or associates of Lehi’s righteous sons, Nephi and Samuel; and the Lamanites, descendants of Lehi’s less-righteous sons, Laman and Lemuel.15 The translation, eventually published as the Book of Mormon, provides an account in which the two groups are often at war. It is a cyclical narrative of the groups in which, variously, the Nephites and Lamanites live according to God’s dictates, are righteous, and are consequently blessed, only to become vain and sinful in the riches of God’s abundance. There is then a fall and suffering, after which, chastened, the people repent and return to righteousness, only to see the cycle begin anew. The Book of Mormon—filled with accounts of massive battles, secret criminal gangs, a visit by Jesus to the Americas, and other epic events—provided a new book of scripture, and attracted followers to Smith after it was published in 1830.

Though the original membership of the church when it was organized on 6 April 1830 consisted of Smith’s family members and close associates, membership quickly grew. A critical component for the new religion was restoration of the priesthood, something that Smith told his followers had been lost in other religions as Christianity went astray. An angel conferred the priesthood—the “keys,” the authority to act in the name of God on earth, and the power, therefore, to perform religious rituals such as baptisms and marriages—on Smith and Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850), who would serve as second elder in the church upon its organization, and the two baptized each other on 15 May 1829.16 By the 1830s, with the priesthood conferred on virtually all men in the church, Smith sent some priesthood holders out as missionaries, a practice that has never ceased.

In 1830, as Mormons in New York faced resistance from their neighbors, Smith received a revelation telling him to relocate the church to Kirtland, Ohio. Thus began a period of religious resettlement accompanied by intense growth in members concentrated first in Kirtland and, later, Far West, Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois. As converts joined the church—soon from as far away as Europe—they were encouraged to sell their belongings and migrate to one of the burgeoning Mormon settlements. In Kirtland some Latter-day Saints began to purchase land and build businesses and farms. Most significantly, within two weeks of arriving in Kirtland, Smith declared a revelation, the Law of Consecration, which encouraged members to voluntarily deed (consecrate) their property to the church. After members gave all of their belongings to the church, leaders would return to each family what was needed, and then use the rest for maintenance of the church and for distribution to the poor within the church. In addition, each family was to turn over whatever surplus they had at the end of the year to the church’s storehouses, from which church leaders made distributions.17 In June 1831, just as he was helping to establish Kirtland, Smith and a small group of followers traveled to Independence, Missouri. Smith declared that a temple would be built there, and instructed followers to begin buying land, which they did.

Rapid growth of these Mormon settlements disquieted their neighbors. The new religion preached a soon-coming Jesus, practiced a form of religious socialism, and was growing quickly, and buying up land as it did. As more and more Mormons flocked to Mormon settlements, land prices increased and neighboring communities began to fear that if Mormons voted as a block they could dictate the outcomes of local elections. Tensions boiled over into violence as non-Mormons near various settlements burned Mormon property and robbed Mormons, following an 1838 order signed by the Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs (1796–1860) calling for Mormons to be “exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.”18

In the August 1838 election, Mormons attempted for the first time in five years to vote in the village of Gallatin, and Missourians tried to stop them. Angry words were exchanged, a fight broke out, and some Mormon men, who happened to be standing near a pile of lumber, picked up pieces and used them as weapons. The Mormons prevailed in the fight, but a warrant for Smith’s arrest was issued. In an especially tragic incident, non-Mormons attacked Mormon residents of Haun’s Mill. Under siege, most of the town’s men sought refuge in the blacksmith shop, the widely spaced logs of which provided no protection from bullets. Seventeen of those in the blacksmith shop, including some young boys and elderly men, were shot and killed.

The history of violence against the Mormons is one in which Latter-day Saints were dragged from their homes, stripped, tarred and feathered, and driven from the communities they had built through exhausting work; but it is also one in which the Mormons regrouped each time they were displaced and, even after Smith was killed in 1844 and Mormons decided to settle outside the then-contiguous states, Mormons resisted. In Nauvoo Smith formed a militia, the Nauvoo Legion, with himself as lieutenant general, as well as endorsing the founding of a secret society, the Danites, for protection. Smith even ran for president of the United States in 1844. Nonetheless, Mormon settlers were dogged by violence until Smith’s assassination that year on 27 June by a mob and the group’s subsequent retreat two years later to the valley of the Great Salt Lake.

One of the issues that inspired the antipathy of outsiders was the rumored practice of Mormon men marrying multiple women. Although publicly Smith and other church leaders adamantly denied their practice of polygamy until well after Smith’s death, historical evidence indicates that Smith was practicing polygamy by the 1830s. Though originally Smith did not tell most other church leaders of the practice, by 1837 Oliver Cowdery suspected Smith of having an affair with Fanny Alger (1816–1889), a teenage servant in his home. Smith denied having committed adultery, but never denied a relationship with Fanny.19 The historians Fawn M. Brodie and Todd Compton note that Smith’s early polygamous relationships were informal, but that they eventually became more elaborate. In Nauvoo Smith developed complex temple marriage ceremonies in which initiates were ceremonially washed, anointed with oil by someone of the same sex, and dressed in a sacred garment; swore an oath of secrecy; watched a dramatic enactment depicting the creation of the earth and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden; received their endowments; and were told their heavenly sacred names (husbands learned their wives’ names so they could call them into heaven, but a woman knew only her own), and the words and gestures they would need to know in order to be admitted to heaven.

Smith’s revelations laid out a new understanding of heaven as including three levels, or kingdoms, to which nearly everyone would be admitted. The highest of these, the Celestial Kingdom, was reserved for those who were baptized and followed the tenets of the church, including participation in temple ordinances. Moreover, Smith taught that “sealing” ordinances (religious rituals) performed by priesthood holders in temples would withstand death. Marriage did not end with death, but could last through eternity if performed in a temple. Thus men and women needed each other to attain the highest level of salvation in Mormon cosmology, and if they did so, following death men would become gods and women goddesses.

As Smith unfolded the new vision of temples, eternal ordinances, families, and divinity, he also hesitantly and selectively began to reveal his doctrine of plural marr...