Item Detail
-
13396
-
5
-
0
-
English
-
Becoming a People : The Beliefs and Practices of the Early Mormons, 1830-1845
-
University of Utah
-
Ph.D. diss.
-
"Cultural historians debate the antecedents of Mormonism in arguments based on fundamentally different definitions of Mormonism. Basing his definition on Smith's revelations and the Utah Mormons' interpretation of those revelations, David Brion Davis concluded that Mormons did not know the meaning of individualism, always voted the way their leaders dictated, and, like early Puritans, constructed a society that welded religion, politics and economics. Countering histories that give Mormonism a Puritan antecedent, John L. Brooke argued Mormonism has its roots in the strands of alchemical and hermetical traditions woven in the larger sectarian tradition of the Radical Reformation of the seventeenth century. The problem with identifying Mormonism as a cultural remnant of either Puritan beliefs or Christian hermeticism is the difficulty inherent in any attempt to pin down ideas--an idea does not have an existence separate and independent of people. Mormonism was continually defined and redefined by the men and women who considered themselves Mormon. After listening to the voices of the early Mormons, rather than looking to past centuries or to the late nineteenth-century Utah church, I have described what being Mormon meant to the men and women who joined during the 1830s and the process by which they created their distinct Mormon identity. I have identified cultural strands of greater influence than those with explicit hermetic or Puritan genealogies: these are (1) the Pentecostal tradition that defined divine manifestations as angelic ministrations, visions and prophetic dreams, speaking in tongues, healings, and exorcisms; (2) a belief that religious authority came through personal experience with God rather than ecclesiastical ordination; (3) the tendency of American men to use the fraternal form when organizing themselves; (4) popular notions of racial inheritance; and (5) a commitment to shoring up a declining patriarchy--all very common strands of nineteenth-century American culture from which early Mormons fashioned a belief system and a church. The price of becoming a people was high, though. The same cultural strands which forged unity also facilitated the eventual containment, especially among the Utah Mormons, of the unbridled spiritual enthusiasm which first attracted the early Mormons to each other." [Author's abstract]