Authentic Mormonism and Motivation to Action
Joseph West examines how shame and pride surrounding Mormon history shape Latter-day Saint identity and collective action, drawing on Kathleen Flake's scholarship about the church's turn-of-the-century transformation following the abandonment of polygamy. He argues that when faced with the Reed Smoot hearings, church leadership chose assimilation over resistance—publicly distancing from earlier practices and shifting the source of legitimacy from distinctive economic and family arrangements to the First Vision and continuing revelation. West suggests that this repression foreclosed the possibility of redeeming the "sins of polygamy" through internal reform, and uses the metaphor of the Salt Lake Temple's buried sandstone foundation—later replaced with granite—to suggest that contemporary movements like the Mormon Transhumanist Association may be uncovering and rebuilding Mormon identity on stronger foundations.
Joseph West is a founding member, director, and secretary of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. He is deeply involved in exploring the crossroads of Mormonism, transhumanism, and technology. ¶ West is currently a PhD student in sociology at the University of Arizona, focusing his research on religion, culture, technology, and the family. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Utah. At the Parallels and Convergences Conference held in 2009, West presented on the “New God Argument,” co-authored with Lincoln Cannon, which explores potential reconciliations between religious perspectives and scientific materialism. The argument itself stems from secular assumptions and concludes with ideas resonating with Mormon perspectives on God and other religious matters. ¶ Beyond his academic and organizational work, West is a family man, a father of two children, and is married to their mother, Jessica.
Transcript
Speaker 1
Our next speaker will be Joseph West. Joseph resides in Tucson, Arizona, where he is doing graduate work in sociology. His research focus is culturally motivated social movement mobilization. He also has research interests in social network analysis and the sociology of science. Please welcome Joseph.
Joseph West
Hi. The title of my talk is Authentic Mormonism and Motivation to Action. I’m actually not sure that’s a very good title, so maybe we can come With a, what’s that? Okay. So, yeah, maybe by the end of the talk, you can help me come up with a better title for it.
Joseph West
Okay, this is Israel Barlow, who is my great, great, great grandfather. And he Has over a hundred thousand living descendants on Earth right now. He was the individual who found the land that became Navu, Illinois, and as a result, he has a statue dedicated. to him at that kitty corner from the Navu Temple. There’s also a virgin of the statue up at the this is the place monument. And he was a bodyguard of Joseph Smith. It’s lots of cool stories to tell my kids about him. He’s the source of a great amount of honor and pride in our family to talk about our heritage.
Joseph West
This is Eliza Ann Dibble, who’s my great-great-great-grandmother. She was, her father joined the church in 1831, took a bullet, took a lead ball to the left of the navel in the Mormon-Missouri Wars, and carried it with him as a little bump on his back the rest of his life. But she, at the age of fifteen, was the housemaid in the home of this person, Orson Spencer, a very prominent Mormon theologian. And it’s a kind of a narrative that’s familiar, maybe, if we know a little bit about Joseph Smith’s history as young housemaids that are Around these men that are thinking a lot about this new theology and new ways to organize life and feel this great sense of entitlement. and she was assigned by her father and Brigham Young to be Orson Spencer’s wife at the age of 15. And that didn’t work out. She was sort of cast out of that family and ended up marrying a few years later my great-great-great-grandfather. And they had a happy relationship, luckily for her. Not the case for a lot of young women in early Mormon history.
Joseph West
And so I share these two sort of vignettes. Because this creates a lot of tension for me personally, and what I want to argue is that the The shame and honor/slash pride associated with Mormon past is deeply and profoundly consequential. In for Mormons in their orientation to action, both individual and collective action. And so the question is, how do we deal with this With this tension, and how can Mormonism be redeemed in a way that justifies its past sins?
Joseph West
And so, I kind of want to frame this as a paradox. One of the paradoxes of Mormonism. There’s a vast literature on paradoxes in Mormonism that are explored. And kind of what I want to say is that Some of these past writings about one of the famous sort of like couplets of Joseph Smith is when I just I just should have put in my notes, but when contraries are proven, truth is made manifest. And so there’s this idea that paradoxes or ideas that oppose each other can drive things forward in a way that’s beneficial.
Joseph West
And there’s a vast literature of theory and research on how culture motivates action in sociology. And for the sake of time, I’m not going to really go into a lot of that. Except to just present a metaphor about how I would suggest that paradox drives action. And that is the metaphor is like: paradoxes are like the two ends of a bowstring. And it’s the tension and and contradiction between those ends that are the condition for either music made from the bow or an arrow shot from that bow string.
Joseph West
And okay, so I want to focus on, I think that of the people who have written on paradoxes, Givens’ work is more closely related to practice, which is what I’m interested in. And so I just want to kind of talk about some of the things that he talked about, the paradoxes in Mormonism that he thinks drives Mormon cultural expression. Are some of these. The first three are I’m not really going to talk about. Authority versus radical freedom, searching versus certainty. The sacred versus the banal. And then the last one that he does talk cover a little bit about, which is kind of talking about this shame idea that’s important to me in this talk, is election versus exile. Could I actually have my water? You just bring that up.
Joseph West
Okay, so um I don’t know, really briefly. Sorry for all the text. A sociological different definition of shame, defined not in psychological terms of the experience of the individual, but just the red here. There’s all these things we can think about as shame, embarrassment, humiliation. But then just, I’m going to read the red part here. What unites all these cognates is that they involve the feeling of a threat to the social bond. That is, I use a sociological definition of shame rather than the more common psychological one. So, the threat to the social bond is what is driving this experience in individuals of a feeling of shame. And again, that’s what I’m saying is deeply consequential for Mormons given the ambivalence they feel about their past and their heritage. Okay, enough of that, enough theory. Let’s see. Okay.
Joseph West
In the face of shame, both in individual interaction and collectively, we have two options. We can assimilate. Or resist. So the shame is created by this discrepancy between an expectation and what is Experienced. And I put the picture of the Salt Lake Temple because, just like a quick story from Mormon history, is when the armies came in and they were building the Salt Lake Temple. In the face of that opposition, what Brigham Young decided to do was to bury the temple and its foundation. And that’s going to be an important metaphor later, so hang on to that.
Joseph West
Okay, so there’s been two important works that I would say deal with this. The first is a sociological work on the right, Armand Maas. The Mormons struggle with assimilation. I think that this was basically the problem that he was dealing with: how do Mormons respond when they’re basically, in their early history, forced to assimilate? And then he argues basically that there’s this sort of retrenchment period where we’re trying to recover this authentic Mormonism. And he was writing in 1994.
Joseph West
This book on the left by Kathleen Flake is what is, in my view, the single most important work to understand sort of like the present state of Mormon identity and how it came to be. This is a book about what happened at the turn of the century when they stopped practicing polygamy. There were these congressional hearings because there was a Mormon apostle that was elected as a senator. And there was this question of whether or not he could be if he was a part of a religion that practiced that did illegal practices. And so, let’s see, I want to make sure that I’m not getting lost here.
Joseph West
Okay, so yeah, so what Flake argues is that right at the turn of the century, this major shift in Mormon identity took place. and that it entailed a crisis among Mormons because the the things that they had been taught were the the sort of like source of legitimacy in their religion, which was these alternative practices, these alternative economic and family practices. Then they were sort of put aside. And not only were they put aside, they were put aside in a very public way. For example, two of the apostles sort of refused to bow to this to this denial of the practices. And then we’re basically publicly, there was a sort of like public resignation that was supposed to be proof of the church’s acquiescence to these new standards. And so, you know, the Joseph F. Smith, who was the President at the time, sort of was forced to, in a sense Put two of his closest associates under the bus and in order to kind of like basically assimilate.
Joseph West
Okay, again, in these when we talk about what the responses to shame can be. One other tiny, just like story that I think exemplifies so perfectly What this must have felt like. In 1905, they have to find a way, church leadership has to find a way to take the focus off. There’s this crisis of legitimacy, and to take the focus off of what was happening in the changes of practices. And on to something else that would provide that legitimacy.
Joseph West
And what they chose to do, that was the year of 1905, was when they dedicated the Joseph Smith Memorial. I think I have a, here it is. In Vermont, at his birth, commemorating the hundred-year anniversary of his birth. And I just love this, that at this dedication, okay, they’ve traveled across the country. In 1905, most of the leaders to participate in this dedication and to make it this new source of legitimacy where so the focus was taken off the practices that Joseph Smith set forth. And practices, which, by the way, were the reason why Brigham Young was able to rise in the succession crisis. It was his embracement of those practices that
Joseph West
Okay, so the focus had to be taken away from those practices onto something else, and they chose to do it on the first vision, the legitimacy of Joseph Smith. The uniqueness of continuing revelation. And actually, the idea of continuing revelation is one of the things that Maus talks about as this retrenchment thing, the things that’s now focused on more and more as unique about Mormonism. Okay, but that wasn’t necessarily always the case. By the late 1890s, most members didn’t even know about the first vision. It wasn’t really a thing. that was at the s the basis of legitimacy of Mormonism until this time when there was this crisis and they had to sh to shift that to something else.
Joseph West
Okay, they’re at this dedication, and the opening hymn is Praise to the Man, okay, which is a hymn about Joseph Smith. One of the lines of which the earth must atone for the blood of this man, the blood of that man. There are some other Great lines in there that as these men are sitting there thinking about what Joseph Smith meant. You know, and sort of like the pride that they felt in him and the experience, and being there to the dedication of this monument to him. And this is right in the wake of them having to, like I said, kind of like put some of their associates under the bus and deny the will of some of the people who wanted to continue those practices. And then so they sing the one praise to the man, and then the very next song comes on the program, which is the Star-Spangled Banner. So just this moment of now we turn around and we honor The government and the very institution that has forced us into this place, and just imagining the experience of that. I think is goes a long way.
Joseph West
And then that carried forward. I mean, Joseph F. Smith’s main message from during his whole leadership was about forgiveness and about and about assimilation, basically. Forgiving The people on the outside for what happened and just kind of like going with it.
Joseph West
And I guess what I want to suggest with that is that whatever chance there was to redeem What I would characterize as the sins of polygamy were lost then because they because then it was just repressed. It was just pushed away. It’s not mentioned anymore. Soon after that, in any kind of official teachings. And maybe if there had been, maybe if those practices had been allowed to continue, there would have been. internal sort of like maybe feminist mechanisms that would have allowed, that would have generated some way for us to redeem the story, you know, of Eliza Ann Dibble. And uh but that didn’t happen. It’s just repressed further um uh into the subconscious. Um
Joseph West
Okay, so I’m is this four minutes total or tell I do I want to take any questions or anything? Okay. Okay, I’m almost done. Okay, so
Joseph West
Okay, so I think that going back to the analysis of Armand Maas, I think that One thing, this was published in 1994. I think that he’s he kind of tells a pretty redeeming story about retrenchment being this return to authenticity. And I think that In 1994, there were two things missing from that analysis. One was this book by Flake, and the other was basically 20 years, in the 20 years since then of Declining growth rates, especially among educated industrial countries. And so
Joseph West
And so I think that what he describes as one of the major things that happen with retrenchment, which is this focus on The prophet, continuing revelation, having a prophet on the earth as a sort of like unique thing that allows us to draw symbolic boundaries and create a feeling of us within Mormonism. I actually think that, given the analysis of Flake, that All that really is, is just a continuation of the assimilation that began with Joseph F. Smith, because that’s when the shift went from
Joseph West
These hardcore practices that went against so much of the very nature of American cultural values. Two things there. One is monogamy. And two is capitalist economic practices, both of which Joseph Smith did not just say, oh, it’s okay if we practice something Alternative to those things. He completely turned those things on its head and said, Not only is it okay to think about alternative family arrangements, But actually, the way that I want to do it is the most righteous way to do it, and the only way that we can organize a celestial order, the celestial kingdom. Same with the economic practices.
Joseph West
And so basically, I think that there is a possibility for retrenchment, as Maus talks about, as kind of like a return to authenticity, but that it has to come in a way that we have yet to see. Okay? And so I want to just I don’t know. I actually don’t wish that I had a more clear answer about how that’s supposed to come about.
Joseph West
But I think that going back to what I had mentioned about the burying of the Salt Lake Temple, Is that well, actually, no, let me before I say that, let me read this. Oh, there’s Joseph F. Smith. I’m not going to. Okay.
Joseph West
So this is from my quote bank from I have like a whole folder on my computer of Christopher quotes I got from Christopher Bradford, but this is just one of them. But this is Or Orson F. Whitney d writing in the close to the turn of the century, right around the time of the when polygamy was stopped. Okay, I meant to actually highlight a middle part. I’ll just read the whole thing. Many of this people are perhaps preparing themselves by following after the world in its mad race for wealth and pleasure, to go down with Babylon when she crumbles and falls. But I know there is a people in the heart’s core of this people that will arise in their majesty in a day that is near at hand and push spiritual things to the front. A people who will stand up for God, fearing not man nor what man can do, but believing, as the prophet Joseph says, that all things we suffer are for our best good and that God will stand by us forever and ever.
Joseph West
So I think that what’s kind of happened is that we were forced as a people to bury the foundations of the temple that we were trying to build. And what actually happened when they dug that foundation up to continue, it was built out of sandstone. And the sandstone was actually cracked. And so that’s why the temple is now built out of granite, because they had to actually redo the whole foundation.
Joseph West
And I want to suggest that as a powerful metaphor for what is happening in movements like the MTA, and not just the MTA, in other movements. of this that are driven by this desire to return to an authentic Mormonism, but one that doesn’t apologize for even as it acknowledges some of the problematic aspects of Mormon past. So thinking about the bearing of the Salt Lake Templism metaphor, we’re now in a retrenchment period that Maus describes. we want to remember what was forgotten. This means uncovering the foundation and beginning the work of building the temple once again. But just as Brigham Young found that the sandstone cornerstones were cracked, we too see what was laid then now must be replaced in some way. And I wish I had more specifics to say about exactly how that should happen, but those are my thoughts. That’s what I got. Thank you.