Most people who have ever spent much time in a Latter-day Saint congregation have at some point listened to a sacrament meeting talk or Sunday School lesson about the signs of the times. I vividly remember a high councilman rhapsodizing about “rivers of blood” flowing in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus's Second Coming—and privately wondering on more than one occasion how exactly the various prophesied plagues, pestilences, natural disasters, and wars would discriminate so carefully as to target only the wicked.“The Latter-day Saints of the nineteenth century belonged to an apocalyptic tradition,” argues historian and folklorist Christopher Blythe in his highly informative book Terrible Revolution. Most twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saints, rather less so. Blythe charts the rise and fall of Mormon apocalyptic discourse over the two-hundred-year history of the Restoration. He defines “apocalyptic” as “the belief that society was headed toward cataclysmic events that would uproot the current social order in favor of a divine order that would be established in its place” (p. 2). For the most part, these apocalyptic expectations corresponded to beliefs about the events leading up to and including the “great and dreadful day” of Christ's return (Malachi 4:5; 3 Nephi 25:5).I use the word “Mormon” intentionally here as a capacious designation that encompasses but is broader than the institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.1 Indeed, one of Blythe's signal contributions is to demonstrate convincingly that “apocalypticism was a communal project not confined to any one segment of the Mormon body” (p. 3). Joseph Smith and other members of the institutional hierarchy played a crucial role in establishing a “master narrative” of Mormon apocalypticism, but the creation of a “vernacular narrative tradition” also relied on the contributions of lay men and women, mainstream and fundamentalist, orthodox and heterodox (p. 7). Like trying to capture lightning in a bottle, apocalyptic prophecies, dreams, and visions could never be fully contained in officially approved channels.It is somewhat curious that apocalypticism—also known as millennialism or millenarianism—has received relatively scant scholarly treatment in the extensive Mormon studies literature. Apocalypticism is central to the religious tradition and has shaped the worldviews of virtually all Latter-day Saints, particularly in the nineteenth century. Indeed, other than the centrality of Jesus Christ, a belief in the coming eschaton is the only Restoration doctrine that merits inclusion in the Church's name, which Latter-day Saints believe was revealed directly from God.To date, the standard work on the subject has been Grant Underwood's 1993 book The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. Terrible Revolution should be read as a complement to and extension of Underwood's classic work rather than a replacement of it. Underwood's analysis of millenarian discourse in early Latter-day Saint periodicals and his comparison with other contemporaneous millennialist groups (particularly the Millerites) remain unsurpassed. Blythe's book extends the chronological time line (Underwood deals only with the Joseph Smith period) and expands the cast of characters and source material (Underwood focuses primarily on print sources written by male leaders). In so doing, Blythe gives us a rich and textured portrait of an apocalyptic culture expressed just as often through popular stories and excited rumors as through canonized scriptures and published discourses.Blythe might have chosen to commence his story with Joseph Smith's First Vision. In his first known written account of his theophany, Smith said the Lord declared that “mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to their ungodliness and to bring to pass that which [hath] been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Ap[o]stles behold and lo I come quickly as it [is] written of me in the cloud [clothed] in the glory of my Father.”2 Blythe begins instead with Joseph Smith's 1823 vision of the angel Moroni, who quoted several apocalyptic biblical texts over the course of the night. Either way, the author's point is well taken: apocalypticism was baked into the new religion from its inception.Readers of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies will be particularly interested in Terrible Revolution's treatment of apocalypticism in the Book of Mormon. Blythe's thesis here is clear: “The Book of Mormon is an apocalyptic text, continually drawing on themes of destruction and renewal” (p. 16). He spends several pages developing this argument, focusing first on Nephi's apocalypse in 1 Nephi 12–14. Blythe aptly acknowledges the parallels to John the Revelator's text, but notes how the Book of Mormon offers a peculiarly American apocalypse. In one of the book's stronger contextual moves, Blythe situates Nephi's apocalypse within a longer tradition in which Columbus, Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and the revolutionary generation strove to fit America into both providential history and eschatology.As other scholars have done, Blythe notes how the Book of Mormon's text offers both continuities and discontinuities with early American discourse more broadly. On the one hand, “the Book of Mormon canonizes and therefore preserves the speculation on the apocalyptic significance of America,” and it considers the role of the continent's Indigenous peoples in salvation history (p. 22). On the other hand, the new scripture offered some distinctive features of a new American apocalypticism, including the presence of the New Jerusalem on the American continent and most prominently what Jared Hickman has called the book's “Amerindian apocalypse.”3Blythe is keenly aware that the role of the Lamanites in salvation history is arguably the Book of Mormon's most distinctive contribution to the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition. He traces the work that the new scripture's Amerindian apocalypse performed among and upon the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint community, particularly in their colonization of the intermountain West. The pioneers read the American landscape and its Indigenous inhabitants through the lens of the Book of Mormon. They inscribed the book's narratives and characters onto their mountain “Deseret.” And they “understood living Natives through the undercurrents of apocalypticism” (p. 115).The widescale conversion of Native Americans did not happen like the pioneers had hoped. They celebrated the few baptisms that did occur, but those were too few and far between to make anyone believe that the Book of Mormon's prophecies were truly being fulfilled. In this respect, Blythe hints at an argument that deserves fuller examination. Although it is more complicated than some previous scholars have made it appear, it has nevertheless become a truism that the Bible far outshone the Book of Mormon in Latter-day Saint discourse for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Blythe suggests that this may be in part because the “redemption of the Lamanites” never materialized. He cites Orson Pratt, who, in 1875, criticized his fellow Saints for their Book of Mormon illiteracy, supposing that they, rather than the Lamanites, would be the principal agents of preparing the world for the Second Coming. “It is not so,” Pratt insisted. “We have got to be helpers” in the work, but the Book of Mormon makes clear that the Lamanites must take the lead (p. 170). Blythe comments: While some may have been ignorant of what the Book of Mormon said about the Indians building the New Jerusalem, this forgetting may have had more to do with the subsequent history of Mormon-Native relations in the West. The Mormons never amassed the number of Native conversions they had anticipated early on. Instead, they found interactions with indigenous peoples in the Great Basin were complicated and unpredictable. From the perspective of the late nineteenth century, Mormons likely found it hard to believe that those they saw as their unreceptive and sometimes hostile neighbors would become their messiahs. (pp. 170–71)To be clear, Terrible Revolution is not meant to be a reception history of the Book of Mormon. But Blythe might have tugged on this string a little more in the service of tracing the development of Mormon apocalypticism in the twentieth century. In particular, he might have more fully examined the role of the Amerindian apocalypse in Spencer W. Kimball's “Lamanite theology.” And then he might have considered George P. Lee's claim that the post-Kimball First Presidency essentially did what Orson Pratt had criticized in 1875—de-centering the Lamanites in redemption history and centering instead the role of the Church.4 In any case, future scholars may want to pick up on Blythe's provocative hypothesis, considering the connection between the failure to “redeem the Lamanites” and the relative de-emphasis on the Book of Mormon among the Latter-day Saints for so many decades.One of the primary themes of Terrible Revolution is the centrality of America. It is fair to debate whether the Restoration tradition is, in its essence, an “American religion,” or whether the United States’ hitherto disproportionate importance in the tradition is simply a matter of geographic and historical happenstance that will change as it becomes increasingly and authentically global. (By way of comparison, nobody thinks of Christianity as an Eastern Mediterranean religion despite its origins there, whereas Arabic language, culture, and worldviews retain their primacy in Islam.) Blythe does an outstanding job of carefully analyzing numerous statements and texts—produced by Church leaders and lay members alike—that have centered America so powerfully in the Mormon apocalyptic imagination.For contemporary American Latter-day Saints who have so generally embraced the Stars and Stripes, the anti-Americanism of mid-nineteenth-century Mormonism will always come as a shock. Blythe is hardly the first historian to document the Saints’ vitriol toward the government and citizenry of the United States in the wake of the Missouri persecutions, Joseph Smith's murder, and the forced expulsion from Nauvoo. But he expands the repertoire of the Latter-day Saints’ deep-seated alienation and shows how “the trauma of Nauvoo's final years held ramifications that lasted throughout the century” (p. 96). Apocalypticism became one of the primary grammars through which the Saints expressed their anger. Curses and calls for divine vengeance saturated mid-nineteenth-century Mormon discourse. The Latter-day Saints identified, and to some degree reveled in, the accounts they read of “war, disease, drought, famine, fires, and natural disasters” that consumed America in the 1850s and 1860s (p. 130). The nation's travails—most notably the Civil War—were nothing more than the judgments of a righteous God on a wicked and untoward generation that had literally spilled the blood of saints and prophets.But the nation survived. The world kept turning—even after 1890, which Blythe delightfully examines as the year of millennial expectations for so many (disappointed) Latter-day Saints. Indeed, the last days truly became the more amorphous latter days. Apocalyptic prophecy was increasingly out of vogue in a religion that wanted to acculturate to modernity. Others have narrated Mormonism's institutional and cultural transformations in the period from 1890 to 1930; Blythe shows how this was accomplished in and through shifts in apocalypticism. These changes were overseen by “a new generation of leaders [who] modified the more radical elements of nineteenth-century apocalypticism,” in large part “through the condemnation of prophecy that originated among the laity” (p. 181). The dreams and visions that had once been part of the grist of communal faith gradually disappeared from public rehearsal, and in a few instances, were specifically refuted by the First Presidency. “This was not the end of lay prophecy,” Blythe importantly notes, “but Mormons were increasingly inclined to be suspicious of the vernacular supernatural” (p. 194).The book's last chapter is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. After spending nearly two hundred pages on the nineteenth century, Blythe dedicates all of eight pages to apocalypticism in official Latter-day Saint discourse in the twentieth century; for this reader, it was the most unsatisfactory section of the book. The bulk of the chapter traces some of the recent currents of fundamentalist and vernacular Mormon apocalypticism. Blythe is one of the pre-eminent observers and scholars of these diverse branches of the Mormon family tree, and I could imagine an entire book-length sequel to Terrible Revolution that further develops some of the themes and characters present in this final chapter.In refocusing our gaze on the apocalyptic themes central to the Restoration tradition, Terrible Revolution is a significant addition to the Mormon studies corpus. The book's focus on the construction and development of a lay vernacular apocalyptic discourse is particularly welcome. Those who don “Keep Mormonism Weird” T-shirts will find much to love in these pages, although the objects of their affection will appear mostly in the rearview mirror. For the most part, the Latter-day Saint apocalypse has become a rather tame affair, even while history and sacred texts manifest that other apocalyptic trajectories have been and remain available within the tradition.

Before the literary scholars, theologians, philosophers, and scripture scholars who currently dominate the field of Book of Mormon studies got their hands on the Book of Mormon, the volume was largely the preserve of historians and religious studies scholars. The same impulses that gave birth to the interdisciplinary field that goes by the name of “Mormon studies” also allowed for serious study of the Book of Mormon to take place within the secular academy.1 Or perhaps it is the reverse—that once scholars began to get comfortable with the notion of taking the Book of Mormon seriously, the conditions were then ripe for the advent of the field of Mormon studies. I'm less interested here in determining whether the chicken or egg came first than in charting the contours of academic inquiry that have allowed for both Mormon studies and Book of Mormon studies to thrive in the twenty-first century. Many have pointed to the 2002 publication of Terryl Givens's landmark book By the Hand of Mormon as inaugurating this blessed new age of Book of Mormon studies. But without diminishing Givens's accomplishment or influence, here I consider a number of trends that emerged some two decades before By the Hand of Mormon was published, and then I note how those trends have played out in the current century.Beginning in the 1980s, historians and religious studies scholars developed methods of studying the Book of Mormon that did not rely on making claims for its literary readability or theological profundity, let alone ancient origins. The book's presence and influence in the modern world were simply realities to be reckoned with. This led to a profusion of scholarship not only exploring the internal complexities of the Book of Mormon but also considering the book's role in the development of the Restoration tradition, its place within American religion, and as a case study in scripturalization. By the dawn of the new millennium, it had become not only possible but advantageous in many respects for scholars to engage the Book of Mormon from a neutral, non-confessional perspective. This approach was consonant with, and indeed constitutive of, the emergent field of Mormon studies, as I defined it in the mid-2010s: In Mormon studies, Mormonism and Mormons appear as the subject or object of scholarly study, but the questions, concerns, and issues at the heart of the study are principally generated outside the community of religious believers themselves. . . . Mormon studies is more engaged with the academy than the church, more oriented to Athens than Jerusalem, so to speak. It is chiefly influenced by and in conversation with the categories, theories, paradigms, and discourse of the secular academy.2We can see these dynamics on display in multiple sites, for instance in new scholarship on race in Latter-day Saint history as well as in theoretically innovative reassessments of the documentary evidence regarding the gold plates’ materiality. In these emergent literatures, we recognize the increased maturity of the academic conversation around the Book of Mormon, as well as the intertwined nature of Mormon studies and Book of Mormon studies. While scholars from an ever-expanding range of disciplines have now begun in earnest to engage the Book of Mormon, this essay charts the decades-long contributions and continuing influence of historians and religious studies scholars in the field of Book of Mormon studies.Admittedly, it is strange to refer to Richard Bushman as “underappreciated.” Along with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Bushman was and is one of the two most prominent late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Latter-day Saint historians. Bushman's 2005 biography of Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, is required reading for even amateur students of the Restoration. Universally respected by fellow historians, adept with the media, trusted by Church leaders, and revered by a generation of scholars he has mentored, Bushman will long be remembered as a towering figure in this period of Latter-day Saint intellectual and cultural life.Yet for all the praise Bushman has rightly earned as a historian and as Joseph Smith's biographer, my sense is that he gets far less credit than he deserves as a pioneering scholar of the Book of Mormon in the mode of what would come to be known as Mormon studies. By his own account, Bushman has been engaged in a decades-long campaign to “reveal the intricacy” of the Book of Mormon.3 No doubt this stems from Bushman's personal testimony that the book is scripture, a view he has not shied away from sharing publicly. But in addition to his important work on the Book of Mormon's internal complexities, Bushman has also made significant arguments about the book's impact on the historical development and theological character of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Indeed, Bushman's work over the space of several decades anticipated much of the methodologically plural and complex analysis that now characterizes the field.Bushman devoted an entire chapter to the Book of Mormon in his 1984 monograph Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. The chapter contains a long overview of the Book of Mormon's narrative content, followed by an even longer summary and analysis of the book's many critics through the years. Bushman concludes that while detractors make some important points, their dismissals ultimately fail because they do not “do justice to the work's actual complexity.” Rather than tracing selected passages to some aspect of Joseph Smith's personality or environment, Bushman argues that scholars should seek to “understand the book on its own terms,” candidly acknowledging not only the evident resonances with early American and Smith family culture but the myriad distinctive departures as well. Turning to the Book of Mormon's impact on Joseph Smith and the early movement to which the book lent its name, Bushman asserted that “the book had far less apparent influence than one would expect.” The Book of Mormon never served as the kind of handbook for Church doctrine and practice that many contemporaneous Protestants understood the Bible (especially New Testament) to be. Most if not all the distinctive principles from the Book of Mormon that did take hold in the new Church were also articulated in separate revelations to Joseph Smith, from which they principally drew their authority. In short, one of the curiosities of the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ, according to Bushman, is that “despite the effort that went into the translation, Joseph Smith did not make the [Book of Mormon] the foundation of the church.”4Though Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism was not always cited for being one of the first to make the argument, Bushman's hypothesis—that the Book of Mormon's content had surprisingly little influence on the early development of the Restoration tradition—became the consensus view in ensuing decades. Historian Grant Underwood's classic article “Book of Mormon Usage in Early LDS Theology,” which also appeared in 1984, famously posited that in the Joseph Smith-era Church, the Bible far outshone the Book of Mormon in the Saints’ public references and teachings. Underwood's finding, that in early Latter-day Saint periodicals, “the Bible was cited nearly twenty times more frequently than the Book of Mormon,” has become something of a truism.5 Indeed, this was the view that Terryl Givens theorized and popularized some two decades later in By the Hand of Mormon, when he argued that “the history of the Book of Mormon's place in Mormonism and American religion generally has always been more connected to its status as signifier than signified, or its role as a sacred sign rather than its function as persuasive theology.”6Years earlier, however, Bushman had already nuanced the position he staked out in Beginnings. In his 1986 presidential address to the Mormon History Association, Bushman straightforwardly claimed that his prior argument, that “the Book of Mormon had peculiarly little influence on Mormonism,” was “mistaken.” To the contrary, Bushman proposed, the Book of Mormon had a demonstrably significant influence on Joseph Smith and his fellow Latter-day Saints in at least two ways. First, the book's articulation of “Lamanite theology” dramatically shaped the new religion's theology and eschatology, and the resultant first mission to the Lamanites had enormous (if in many ways unintended) consequences. Second, the Book of Mormon both confirmed and shaped Joseph Smith's self-perception and confidence not only as a prophet but also as a translator of ancient texts.7 Smith's subsequent translations—particularly of the Bible and what became known as the Book of Abraham—ultimately became some of the richest sources of distinctive Latter-day Saint theology.Bushman's view developed further over the next two decades. In his later, fuller biography of Joseph Smith, Bushman argued that the distinctly biblical character of the Book of Mormon had a dual impact on the Restoration's development. If there was a contest in the mind of Smith and other early Latter-day Saints between a Christian and magic worldview, the Book of Mormon clearly settled the question in favor of the former. The Book of Mormon's unyielding Christocentric biblicism provided doctrinal stability even as Smith's (and later Brigham Young's) theology became increasingly audacious. The Book of Mormon “anchored Mormonism in orthodox Christianity.” No matter how innovative “Nauvoo theology” and its successors would become, Bushman maintained, “the Saints never left basic Christianity behind; the Book of Mormon, their third testament, held them to the fundamentals.”8 In short, while the appearance of the Book of Mormon served as a sacred sign of God's renewed work in the last days, the content of the Book of Mormon guaranteed that the resultant new religion would in fact be Christian.Curiously, given his stature in the field, other scholars have often disregarded Bushman's arguments about the Book of Mormon—though more by way of ignoring than countering them. For instance, Bushman's takedown of environmental theories about Book of Mormon origins as insufficiently explanatory did nothing to prevent the accomplished historian Robert Remini from more or less rehashing Alexander Campbell's and Fawn Brodie's old claims in his 2002 biography of Joseph Smith in the Penguin Lives series.9 Furthermore, Underwood's and especially Givens's claims regarding the relative unimportance of the Book of Mormon's content on the Restoration's early theological development continue to hold the field, though historians such as Janiece Johnson have recently begun to complicate the consensus view.10On the other hand, in recent years, some of Bushman's views and methods have emerged as central concepts in Book of Mormon studies, even if many of the scholars who arrived at similar analytical destinations traveled on parallel disciplinary and theoretical tracks. Bushman, for instance, was one of the first to recognize that “the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text.”11 Just as Hollywood loves movies about movies, postmodern literary scholars love books about books, and the Book of Mormon's obsession with its own authorship and construction provides fertile ground for analysis. Furthermore, historical and literary analysis have each adopted the related practices of reading against the grain of a text and recovering subaltern voices from sublimation and marginalization. Bushman anticipated both of these moves in his classic essay “The Lamanite View of Book of Mormon History,” published in 1990 but written and filed away several years prior. What would it be like, Bushman asks, to “rewrite the Book of Mormon from the Lamanite perspective?” Given that the Lamanites’ history and identity is refracted, however incompletely, through an entirely Nephite lens, what scattered fragments can be recovered and reassembled in order to imagine alternative possibilities contained within the text?12 To be sure, Bushman only hinted at and gestured toward some of these interpretive possibilities that a new generation of scholars have taken up more expansively.13In sum, while this journal has done well to recover and re-examine “the past of Book of Mormon studies,” I would suggest that any stock-taking of the field is incomplete without an appreciation of the many contributions of Richard Bushman.14 Individual scholars working on the Book of Mormon would do well to revisit Bushman's many chapters and essays. In doing so, however, they may find to their chagrin—as I repeatedly have in my own field—that Bushman beat them, often by several decades, to whatever “fresh take” they thought they had.At the same time that Bushman's chapters and essays on the Book of Mormon began appearing regularly, the work of Jan Shipps and Nathan Hatch—neither scholar having any personal connection to the Restoration tradition—brought the Book of Mormon out of academic obscurity and charted new paths that would shape much of contemporary (Book of) Mormon studies. In their respective works, Shipps and Hatch helped turn the scholarly conversation toward an appreciation of the content and function of the Book of Mormon, both in terms of Latter-day Saint history and within the larger context of American religion. Hatch operated within the familiar discipline of history, whereas Shipps innovatively applied religious studies theories and methods. Their work preceded but harmonized with the development within religious studies of the notion of “scripturalization,” which understands scripture to be more of a sociological, historical, and phenomenological category than a strictly theological one.15 At least within the fields of history and religious studies, then, since the 1980s the Book of Mormon has come to be accepted as American scripture—not necessarily because scholars believe the book comes from God, but because believers have successfully constituted a religious and cultural movement predicated in large part on that claim. In a mutually constitutive process, a community scripturalizes a text that in turn sacralizes the community.The importance of Jan Shipps's 1985 book Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition can hardly be overstated. Shipps's various arguments and interventions were wide-ranging, and largely hold up nearly four decades later. Here, I will focus only on what she said about the Book of Mormon. While Shipps recognized the important ways that the Book of Mormon signified Joseph Smith's prophethood, to use Givens's language, for her, the Book of Mormon was no empty vessel. Like Bushman, she contended that the Book of Mormon functioned alongside Smith's other prophecies and the experiences of the first generation of Latter-day Saints to cement among them “a Hebrew-Christian understanding of the story of the world.” Shipps recognized that what mattered most from a historical or religious studies approach was not whether the book was actually true, or whether Joseph Smith really discovered and translated ancient golden plates under the guidance of an angel, but rather the way that those beliefs functioned in the construction of a new religious movement. In this light, Shipps argued that “as far as history is concerned, the question of whether Smith was prophet or fraud is not particularly important.”16 This was the thrust necessary to help the Book of Mormon achieve escape velocity—at least in scholarly circles—from the downward gravity of polemical debates over the volume's authorship and provenance. As Paul Gutjahr noted in his “biography” of the Book of Mormon, published in Princeton University Press's Lives of Great Religious Books series, the Book of Mormon “cannot be fully appreciated outside its close relationship to its supposed prophet and translator.” But “whether the book is a humbug or not is a moot question,” precisely because millions of people past and present have oriented their lives around the proposition that the book is the word of God.17A few years after Shipps's landmark volume appeared, early American historian Nathan Hatch wrote that “for all the recent attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to the Book of Mormon itself.” In his classic 1989 study of the rise of a populist sensibility within early American religion and culture, The Democratization of American Christianity, Hatch placed Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints alongside Methodists, Baptists, African American churches, and Christians (the restorationist-primitivist movement that many early Latter-day Saint converts, such as Sidney Rigdon and Parley Pratt, hailed from). Like Bushman and Shipps before him, Hatch argued that the content of the book simultaneously reflected and shaped the contours of the Restoration movement. Specifically, he read the Book of Mormon as “a document of profound social protest, an impassioned manifesto by a hostile outsider against the smug complacency of those in power and the reality of social distinctions based on wealth, class, and education.” No mere signifier here—the book had a distinctive theology, and it was a theology of liberation. “The Book of Mormon has its own preferential option for the poor,” Hatch concluded, “not as persons to be pitied, but as those whom God has chosen to empower.” Equipped with this vision, Smith and the Saints built a church in which prophetic and priestly authority worked in the service of social and economic equality, all within a “biblical frame of reference.”18Not everyone has been persuaded by Hatch's populist reading of the Book of Mormon.19 Nor did The Democratization of American Christianity succeed in making the Book of Mormon required reading; in his subsequent six-hundred-page tome on the history of early American theology, E. Brooks Holifield mentioned the Book of Mormon only in passing, focusing on Joseph Smith's revelations as the real source of Latter-day Saint theology.20 But the significance of Hatch's book can hardly be disputed. It was one of the first times that a highly regarded non-Latter-day Saint historian treated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on equal terms alongside other major movements as a significant shaper of American Christianity. Hatch's understanding of and arguments about the Latter-day Saint movement were predicated on his deep engagement with the content and inner logic of the Book of Mormon as a scriptural text worthy of careful analysis. More than three decades later, The Democratization of American Christianity remains a widely read classic. For many graduate students in American history, this book will be their one substantial introduction to the Restoration tradition—and at the heart of that introduction is a theology-rich Book of Mormon.If Jan Shipps and Nathan Hatch implied that the Book of Mormon's status was American scripture, religious studies scholar Laurie Maffly-Kipp—also not a Latter-day Saint—solidified the claim. In 2008, she penned the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Mormon, which pitched the book to a national and international readership as “one of the most influential—as well as controversial—religious documents in American history . . . regarded as sacred scripture by followers around the world.” In her insightful twenty-page introduction to the text, Maffly-Kipp follows Bushman and Shipps in focusing on the content of the Book of Mormon and what it has enacted in the world since its 1830 publication. Whether one reads the book “as an historical text that reveals a great deal about the desires and questions of Americans in the early national era,” or as “a sacred text whose meanings have shifted over the years to fit the needs of various religious communities,” she argues that the Book of Mormon cannot be blithely dismissed as either a hoax or an empty sign.21Two years later, Maffly-Kipp edited an “anthology of sacred writings,” again for Penguin Classics, called American Scriptures. The collection gathers lengthy excerpts from fifteen “scriptural” texts produced in the United States from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The Book of Mormon is placed alongside relatively well-known works such as Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as well as more obscure offerings such as the Shakers’ A Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book and John Ballou Newbrough's Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors. In her introduction to the anthology, Maffly-Kipp squarely takes on the questions of “scripturalization” that had by then emerged as a major conversation within the field of religious studies. “What is a scripture,” she asks, “and who gets to write one? . . . How does something become a scripture? How do various people and communities use scriptures? How do scriptures bind communities together? What makes some claims of scriptural status more persuasive than others?” Maffly-Kipp notes that one thread that connects all fifteen excerpted works is that they all interact with the text and world of the Bible, “borrow[ing] cultural authority from the Bible to stake their own claim to religious value.”22The inclusion of the Book of Mormon in American Scriptures is a mixed blessing, both for academic proponents of Book of Mormon studies and religious believers in the book's divine origins. On the one hand, it validates (and perhaps elevates) the Book of Mormon's status as “scripture” to a non-Latter-day Saint audience, a clear step up from humbug or fraud. It brings the book into the purview of religious studies discourse and analysis. But with the exception of Mary Baker Eddy's writings that have been scripturalized by Christian Scientists, none of Maffly-Kipp's other selected texts would be considered by most people (or even scholars) today to be “world scripture” on par with the Bhagavad Gita, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur'an.So whose company does the Book of Mormon keep? Is it best categorized alongside the Bible and Qur'an, or Alexander Smyth's The Occult Life of Jesus of Nazareth and Levi Dowling's The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ? Or is scripture the wrong category altogether? Is the book better put in conversation with Ethan Smith's A View of the Hebrews and Herman Melville's Moby Dick? Does the Book of Mormon belong to the followers of Joseph Smith (then and now), to nineteenth-century American history and literature, or to the world? Calling the Book of Mormon “American scripture” makes it out to be simultaneously more and less than most observers have traditionally claimed for it.Oscar Wilde said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” To be sure, studying the Book of Mormon in a secular academic setting invites complexities. But what Bushman, Shipps, Hatch, and Maffly-Kipp did, collectively, is to make the Book of Mormon a topic for religious studies scholars and American historians to talk about. Indeed, the advent and maturation of Mormon studies has come about in recent decades as scholars (Latter-day Saint and otherwise) have increasingly recognized that studying the Restoration tradition helps us understand things bigger than the tradition itself.Careful historical and theoretical consideration of the Book of Mormon have played an important role in contemporary Mormon studies. Take, for instance, two books published in the 2010s that helped their respective authors land jobs at Harvard and Princeton. In Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America, intellectual and religious historian David Holland charts the cultural and religious meanings of debates about the biblical canon in the seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century United States. He traces the “borderlands” of scriptural authority and examines a variety of statements of and challenges to the notion of a closed canon. Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon naturally enter the equation, but alongside a welter of other cases; the Latter-day Saint experience is illustrative and formative, not determinative, for Holland's arguments. That the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's revelations signified different things to different people is clear. But Holland emphasizes that the book's content made important interventions in substantive theological debates over God's sovereignty, the inscrutability of the divine will, revelation, the scriptural canon, and natural law.23In Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States, religious historian Seth Perry reconsiders the authority of the Bible not as “a timeless, abstract, inviolable truth,” but rather a “process” to which numerous individuals, communities, institutions, and texts contributed. Here, too, Mormons play an important role; in fact, the book's culminating chapter, on “scripturalization in early national America,” uses Mormonism as its case study. The Latter-day Saints scripturalized new texts, beginning with the Book of Mormon, at an astonishing pace, and in turn constituted their own self-identity through understanding these texts in relationship to the Bible. In an age of political, cultural, and religious anxieties, Smith's revelatory texts sought to provide newfound stability and gave the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints an outsized confidence about its role on the world stage and in salvation history.24 Both Holland and Perry exemplify the trend in which expert analysis of the Restoration tradition and its constituent parts (such as the Book of Mormon) are deployed in the service of answering larger questions that originate from outside the tradition.In the contemporary academy, few subjects are of greater interest than issues related to race. Though the scholarship on race in Latter-day Saint history goes back to the 1960s, scholars have brought new sophistication to their study of the topic in the past two decades, and the Book of Mormon has often played a leading (if not necessarily heroic) role. Consistent with the work of Bushman, Shipps, and Hatch, this new scholarship recognizes the Book of Mormon's role as substantial if not always decisive. Armand Mauss's 2003 book All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage was both the culmination of previous scholarship (much of which Mauss had produced) and it set the table for what would follow. He persuasively demonstrated that “the full-fledged racialist framework of modern Mormonism . . . was not the product of any particular revelation but of a social and intellectual movement among some of Mormonism's most powerful and articulate leaders.” These leaders synthesized what they found in Restoration scripture, including the Book of Mormon, along with influential racial theories of their time such as British Israelism and Anglo-Saxon triumphalism. Significantly, Mauss recognized that race has never been simply a black-and-white issue within the tradition, and this is where the Book of Mormon has been determinative. Africans and their descendants do not appear in the Book of Mormon. Instead, its eschatological view is dominated by three groups—Jews, Gentiles, and Lamanites—whom Latter-day Saints mapped onto modern-day Jews, white Euro-Americans, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (and eventually the South Pacific and even Japan). The Book of Mormon also typified the tension that has always existed in Latter-day Saint theology between universalism and favored (and unfavored) familial-ethnic-racial lineages.25 When it comes to understanding Latter-day Saint conceptions of race and lineage, Mauss demonstrated, the Book of Mormon is unavoidable.This has been the pattern ever since. Sample any of the significant scholarly works on race and the Restoration from this century, and it is almost assured that you will encounter the Book of Mormon—sometimes superficially, but usually as a text that contains multitudes and possesses real agency. Scholars have documented that the Book of Mormon's readers have always understood it to have much to say about racial origins, identities, and destinies. The book influenced generations of Latter-day Saints—of all races and nationalities—in reflecting on where and how they (and others) fit into God's plan of salvation. Indeed, some of the most interesting of this recent scholarship has considered how non-white populations around the globe have received, read, interpreted, and enacted the Book of Mormon, including its distinctive racial schema.26 The scholarship has often followed Mauss's lead in examining the internal particulars of Mormonism's complex racial legacies.27 But other works have gone more the way of Holland and Perry, using Mormonism as one case among many in thinking about race in America and beyond.28 In all of this literature on race, the Book of Mormon has emerged as an essential and complex source for two centuries of Latter-day Saint thought, practice, and identity construction.The tendency of using the Book of Mormon to illuminate larger themes is both freeing and limiting. On the one hand, it liberates the Book of Mormon from being merely the province of scholars associated with or primarily interested in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It more readily allows for comparative and contextual studies, and opens up new scholarly vistas that are not constrained by the questions and debates generated by the religious movement and its critics. On the other hand, viewing any subject through a particular lens will necessarily sharpen analytical focus in certain respects while obscuring or ignoring other angles. This is the promise and peril of any disciplinary or subject-driven study. Viewing the Book of Mormon through the respective lenses of sc

Book Review| January 01 2020 Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America Ronit Y. Stahl. Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Patrick Q. Mason Patrick Q. Mason Reviewed by Patrick Q. Mason is Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture and associate professor of religious studies and history at Utah State University. He is the author or editor of several books, most recently Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2020) 7: 126–132. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.7.2020.0126 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Patrick Q. Mason; Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2020; 7 126–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.7.2020.0126 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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In popular culture and scholarship, a consistent trope about Mormonism is that it features a propensity for violence, born of the religion's theocratic impulses and the antinomian tendencies of special revelation. Mormonism and Violence critically assesses the relationship of Mormonism and violence through a close examination of Mormon history and scripture, focusing on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Element pays special attention to violence in the Book of Mormon and the history of the movement, from the 1830s to the present.

Research Article| April 01 2019 Round Table: Saints: the Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days Steven C. Harper; Steven C. Harper STEVEN C. HARPER is a general editor for Saints, Volume 1, and editor of BYU Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lisa Olsen Tait; Lisa Olsen Tait LISA OLSEN TAIT is a historical research editor for Saints. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scott Alan Hales; Scott Alan Hales SCOTT ALAN HALES is a general editor, and the literary editor of Saints. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Linda Hoffman Kimball; Linda Hoffman Kimball LINDA HOFFMAN KIMBALL is a general reader who spoke at the round table at the Mormon History Association in Boise, Idaho, in June 2018. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Patrick Q. Mason Patrick Q. Mason PATRICK MASON, president of the Mormon History Association, is a general reviewer who spoke at the Boise, Idaho, round table. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Mormon History (2019) 45 (2): 49–67. https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.2.0049 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Steven C. Harper, Lisa Olsen Tait, Scott Alan Hales, Linda Hoffman Kimball, Patrick Q. Mason; Round Table: Saints: the Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. Journal of Mormon History 1 April 2019; 45 (2): 49–67. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.2.0049 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Mormon History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| April 01 2019 “When I Think of War I Am Sick at Heart”: Latter Day Saint Nonparticipation in World War I Patrick Q. Mason Patrick Q. Mason PATRICK Q. MASON is Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University, where he also serves as dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. This presidential lecture and article could not have been prepared without the invaluable contributions of Ken Adkins, Andrew Bolton, Dean Clark, Chase Kirkham, David Pulsipher, and Hayley Romney. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Mormon History (2019) 45 (2): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.2.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Patrick Q. Mason; “When I Think of War I Am Sick at Heart”: Latter Day Saint Nonparticipation in World War I. Journal of Mormon History 1 April 2019; 45 (2): 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.2.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Mormon History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As a religion born in the modern period, Mormonism inherited and has in many ways inhabited modern racial categories and theories. Since the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the majority of Latter-day Saints’ racial views have generally tracked with broader American society, but the religion’s distinctive theology and history also produce alternative racial rationales, discourses, and experiences unique to Mormonism. Focusing on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this chapter examines how race has been operationalized in Mormon scripture (in particular the Book of Mormon), the history of Mormonism in America, and scholarly treatments. Never simply dichromatic, Mormon considerations of race have included African Americans but also paid substantial attention to the native peoples of the Americas (North and increasingly Central and South) and Pacific Islanders.