Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism

as a researcher of american religion, I learned early on in my training to utilize digital databases of historical biographical records to approximate the lived worlds of the people I study: census forms, military records, marriage and birth certificates, death indices, immigration records, church records, and other seemingly prosaic productions of population bureaucracy so engrained in modern statecraft. While I have long known of connections between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and now-privately traded companies like Ancestry.com, it was not until reading Mason Kamana Allred's Seeing Things that I better understood these resources within broader histories of Mormon visual habits that have been informed by and contribute to ways of seeing and knowing well outside the institutional church.Seeing Things is an analytically sophisticated and narratively enthralling study of the co-construction of visual media and Mormonism, spanning from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Allred's introductory assertion that “these technologies don't just disseminate Mormonism; they equally construct it” (13) is defended across six chapters that are organized around visual technologies that were adopted—or, in the case of television, invented—by the Saints and that indelibly shaped Latter-day Saint life, policy, and theology. But Allred does not examine these technologies in a vacuum. Each chapter is situated within a historical context and incorporates critical interpretive insights from scholars of media, religion, and politics.The chapters in Seeing Things are arranged in roughly chronological order, with some movement across time within each chapter, from the early nineteenth through the late twentieth century. The conclusion brings us forward into the twenty-first century and considers some of the extensions of his arguments in the visual media landscape of the digital age. Chapter 1 examines the technological landscape of the early nineteenth century, particularly the popularity of phantasmagoria and the emergence of domestic publishing, as important contexts in the developing cultural and theological worlds of early Mormonism.For Allred, these technologies were instrumental in “managing spiritual vision in an age of sophisticated deceptions” (25). Phantasmagoria utilized the magic lantern—an early type of projection technology to cast scenes from glass plates using concave mirrors onto large surfaces—to demonstrate scientific principles, tell visual stories, and delight the imagination with plays of light and shadow. In this world, “ghost seeing was the expectation,” Allred writes, rendering in spectacle the more pervasive understanding of apparitions within the social fabric of the early republic (26). Ghost stories abounded. Telling them and, vitally, reading them, mediated optical delights into “spiritual vision,” which instructed beholders not only in what to see but how to see. As the first major publishing venture of the nascent religion, Allred analyzes the Book of Mormon within this media framework, concluding that, far from incidental to the development of Joseph Smith's Church of Christ, “Mormon teachings and visionary accounts . . . promised to teach readers how to both become visionaries of their own and be led by a governing body” (43).Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of panoramas after the death of Joseph Smith. These large-scale paintings, typically arranged either in the round or as unfurling scrolls across a proscenium, “could convert Mormon visual practices into a means of cementing identity and authority around a shared image of the dead prophet, linked to a clear successor” (45). Much of the chapter is structured around the panoramas of Philo Dibble, a Mormon convert, whose inspiration to create a visual narrative of Smith's life and death were his own visions and apparitions of the martyred prophet. Allred writes that more than providing a cathartic experience for the bereaved, Dibble “would play a central role in converting the circulating visions of Smith”—his own and those of others—“into a singular and collective image” (46).These panoramas were undoubtedly cultural memory projects, but Allred pushes readers to think about them as vital to the coalescence of Smith's legacy by, in effect, containing the meaning of future visions and apparitions. Dibble was succeeded by other artists who similarly utilized panoramas to tell stories and foment collective identities, well beyond the succession crisis of the 1840s. Across these media, Allred analyzes panoramas as “a material-discursive technique of vision” (47) that were created and beheld by laypersons and yet had profound, lasting influences on the early Mormon Church.The third chapter continues to attend to the entanglement of visual and discursive technologies by analyzing photography and typewriters as “sensitive machines.” Both of these instruments dealt with “gendered visions of reproduction, agency, and automatic inscription technologies in Utah at the turn of the twentieth century” (73). Allred structures this chapter around the photographic work of Elfie Huntington and the writing of Susa Young Gates. Both women began their careers as, in Allred's terminology, amanuenses of patriarchal vision. Yet both women found opportunities within their craft to explore alternative visions while remaining faithful Saints.By the early twentieth century, Mormons began to use emerging film technologies to reflect on their history and imagine their future. The first Latter-day Saint film, One Hundred Years of Mormonism (1913), is mostly lost to time. Only a few frames survive. But those frames tell a story that builds upon earlier technologies and the spiritual sight they had cultivated. While the film rehearsed themes and techniques from previous generations, now in new technological garb, its most lasting achievement, Allred writes, was in making “Latter-day Saints modern and coded as cinematically white Americans to emphasize their national belonging” (105). Previous generations of Saints had confronted national scorn for their theological and institutional commitment to polygyny, which was decried in print and on screen not for its treatment of women but because it was seen as antithetical to modernity. Early British and American cinema frequently represented Mormons as anti-modern foils. One Hundred Years of Mormonism was an exercise in self-fashioning that confronted previous cinematic representations and adapted longstanding Mormon material-discursive techniques to rehabilitate the church's image by asserting Americanness. Indeed, the film “was meant to travel and disseminate a particular and authoritative vision of Mormonism” in the new century (132).Chapter 5 turns attention from cinema to another mechanism of modernity in the twentieth century: microfilm. According to Allred, these miniaturized reproductions “massively expanded the work for the dead” (136) by structuring “record keeping as sacred practice” (137). Indeed, not only did microfilm enable more systematized access to biographical records for the purposes of baptizing ancestors, it also facilitated divine encounters through the spiritual guidance of Elijah during record searches before they were automatized (142) and the ultimate devotional practice of “meeting God halfway” as Saints scrolled through pages and pages of data (143). In his analysis, Allred even notes parallels between microfilm and reading machines, on the one hand, and “angelic messengers and stone screens,” on the other (142). From the beginning, Mormon theology was tied to material devices that mediated spiritual sight. As the technology became more efficient, however, opportunities for spiritual encounters became more tenuous. “Quantifying individuals through automated filters made them manageable as data but also represented a potential disenchantment of the work. Sorting and searching were made more efficient—not by spiritual guidance at a reader machine, but by a new computational order” (151). The digital legacy of Mormon microfilm is, of course, evident in the large-scale digital genealogical databases that organize records from hundreds, even thousands, of church, state, and private sources. But Allred asks readers to linger with the machine so that we better understand how technologies change experiences and yield new orders of (spiritual) labor.In the final content chapter, Allred turns to the rise of broadcast television as it shaped “Saints as viewers” who were “once again taught how to look” (156). In this instance, however, there is a double meaning, as television not only taught Saints how to see but also how to fashion themselves to one another and to the world. “Television spread the vision of cameras as visions of white male American church leaders emphasis in original to be taken on and performed by members everywhere” (157). If microfilm managed the dead, television managed the living.One of the central analytical categories of this chapter is the concept of “correlation,” which served as a metric of hierarchy—attending to the proper alignment of local bodies with the centralized church—and also of cultural practice—standardizing spiritual practices in domestic orders of postwar America. Allred defines correlation as the “visionary management of space,” ensuring that official teachings were worked out to the furthest reaches of the globe through the bodies of the Saints. As in all previous Mormon technological forms, there were racial, gendered, and economic presumptions at work in television, too (167). As the church became increasingly aligned with projected ideals of Americanness in the late twentieth century, Allred contends that “television shaped domestic vision as much as governance and compliance did” (181), thus situating this modern form of visual technology not only as instrumental to church life but also to national history.There are many challenges of historical studies that traverse so much time. Allred does a fine job of panning out and zooming in, but there is only so much one can do when the breadth of study is so expansive: nearly two centuries and more than half a dozen visual technologies. Still, this book does an exemplary job of demonstrating a broad range of interlocutors in fields of history and theory, as well as a deep understanding of its many historical sources. And while attending throughout to visual technologies’ constructions of gender and to the racial and economic presumptions at work across many of these technological developments, Allred at times is left simply, if deftly, acknowledging that these are fundamental limitations to the study without being able to explore them in greater depth.For example, he brilliantly suggests that “the grand system that contained and managed the records of the dead conceptualized by male Church leaders often trickled into personal revelation of female members engaged with the technology” (148). However, the thread is dropped as quickly as it is introduced when the chapter continues to focus on the function and functionality of the machines rather than a deeper analysis of the gendered distribution of spiritual labor. These are, I fear, vapid critiques, however, because what Allred does here is done well and done effectively. Rather than lingering in one time, one place, one concept, one object, he takes us on a guided tour to demonstrate the extent to which visual technologies have continued to shape Mormon identity, theology, and culture, from their nineteenth-century beginnings through the present day.Seeing Things is essential reading to anyone with an interest in Mormon history, full stop. It is an important and compelling case for understanding how “technology is not neutral,” even in matters of spiritual life. I would also argue it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in American history, as what unfolds in this book is not only a story of technological refinement of vision but also a story of becoming “American” through the habits and policies that those technologies generate. In this way, this book is a generative counterpart to Leigh Eric Schmidt's 2000 book, Hearing Things. Schmidt's work was among the first to attend to voices, sounds, and noises as a source base for the study of American religion. Allred, in contrast, joins an already robust scholarly conversation around the importance of understanding visual media in our histories of American religion, including but not limited to the work of Sally Promey, Judith Weisenfeld, David Morgan, S. Brent Plate, Colleen McDannell, Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, Sonia Hazard, and Rachel McBride Lindsey. And yet Seeing Things contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the development of a kind of spiritual sight across themes and habits that traverse multiple visual technologies. Hardly limited to biological functions of the organ of sight, the technologies analyzed in this book grapple with life and death, history and memory, time and space, gender and race, all in pursuit of negotiating an ancient faith in a modern world.