Item Detail
-
11881
-
1
-
0
-
English
-
Sacred Space and the Persistence of Identity : The Evolution and Meaning of an American Religious Utopia
-
University of Wisconsin at Madison
-
Ph.D. diss.
-
"Joseph Smith, founder of the Restoration Church in 1830, conceived of Zion, an earthly kingdom of God to be located in Independence, Missouri, as the raison d'etre for his movement. Hence, Independence became sacred to the Restoration Movement, especially a small portion of land (the "Temple Lot"), which was consecrated by Smith to be a temple site. Smith envisioned Zion as a physical city where the church would find refuge during the momentarily expected apocalypse. However, in 1833 the church was driven out of Independence, eventually settling in Nauvoo, Illinois. When the Nauvoo community collapsed in 1846, the Restoration Movement splintered into two main branches: the LDS (Mormon) church formed from the group that went to Utah, and the RLDS church formed from those who stayed in the Midwest. The RLDS church continued to hold to Independence as the sacred location of Zion. However, the characteristics of Zion evolved from the premodern Zionic state at Nauvoo, through the early twentieth century modern corporate Zion, to the postmodern, decentralized, heterotopic Zion of the past two decades. Throughout this evolution, the dominant physical component of Zion in the imagination of the RLDS church has been a central temple, located in the folk mythology of the church precisely on the "Temple Lot." Recently the postmodern church has completed the construction of a Temple, divested of apocalyptic context and imbued with the symbolism of the postmodern heterotopia, on land adjacent to the "Temple Lot." It reflects the continued hold that the sacred space of Independence has on church members. The related beliefs of Zion and the Temple has provided the foundation for RLDS identity throughout its history, although recently traditionalists, who found the postmodern Zion a violation of sacred geography, have left the church and established independent congregations. The RLDS church continues to find identity in the heterotopic Zion and its symbol, the Temple, although that identity is not entirely free of images of a traditional Zion. The viability of the RLDS church depends on how successfully they are able to break with traditional Zionic models and develop a futurist identity." [Author's abstract]