Item Detail
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12211
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15
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0
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English
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The Mormon Missionary of the Nineteenth Century
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University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Ph.D. diss.
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"From 1830 to 1900, Mormon Elders performed approximately 12,400 missions, principally to the United States, Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, and the Pacific islands, baptizing thousands of converts who emigrated to the Mormon Zion and its centers in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and, of course Utah. This study is the story of the Mormon missionary, a social history taken from diaries, journals, tracts, and publications, set in a context of theology and ideology. It tracks the Elders from "call" to homecoming, and deals with finances, travel, family relations, housing, food, persecution, sickness, and death. It explores Mormon literalism and sacrificialism and the extent to which the revelations of Joseph Smith shaped the missionaries' world view, and contributed to proselytizing methodology and the Saints' conversion experience. It probes the "replication" theses of Jan Shipps and other historians of Mormonism, seeking the boundaries of Mormon belief in themselves as the literal progeny of Abraham. And it answers Richard Bushman's call to re-examine the place of the Book of Mormon in early Mormon thought. Included is an analysis of those who served between 1860 and 1894, from data comprising more than 5,600 missionaries. Variables such as place of birth, baptism year, age, priesthood, residence, mission location, and mission duration, flesh out an often surprising profile of the nineteenth century Mormon missionary. This study concludes that a two-fold "gathering" took place in the Saints' missionization program, and by so doing, modifies Shipps' paradigm. The missionaries unquestionably thought of themselves as literal Israelites, a continuation of the Hebraic scriptural and genealogical past. And Bushman was right to suggest that the Book of Mormon formed much of Mormonism's ideological backdrop. But throughout the nineteenth century, the methodology of conversion, a consistent concentration on Christian primitivism and restorationism, brought converts first to the fold of Christ, the Church of the New Testament. This was a gathering of spiritual and intellectual dimensions capable of transcending the temporal and emotional difficulties of emigrating to Zion and accepting of both its peculiar institutions and its apparent capitulation to "Gentile Christianity." The Church and the Kingdom paralleled one another. But the first, impervious to outward pressures and change because it was more a matter of the heart and mind, provided the sure foundation on which the temporal Zion could build, regardless of imperfections, delays, and modifications." [Author's abstract]
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