Smooth Stone Rolling: A Reflection on American Zion: A New History of Mormonism in America

first, cards on the table.1 I am not Mormon and at age eighty-one not likely to become one. That said, for many years I eagerly participated in the Evangelical-Mormon Dialogue, co-sponsored by Fuller Theological Seminary and Brigham Young University. As a Wesleyan Methodist, I saw how much I had (and still have) to learn from my Mormon colleagues about avenues of Christian theology and practice I knew little about. Many of those colleagues became dear friends.2More cards on the table. I am not a specialist in Mormon history either. That said, I spent most of my working life teaching American Christian history to college, seminary, and doctoral students at Duke University. My specializations, such as they were, moved in other directions. But my teaching and research marauded into Mormon studies often enough to enable me to judge a good book on the subject when I see one. Or, in this case, a brilliant book. This judgment is not mine alone. The American Society of Church History awarded American Zion: A New History of Mormonism the Philip Schaff Prize for the best book on the history of Christianity by a North American scholar published in the previous year (2024).Since everyone sees the world through filtered glasses, I must confess that I too see the Mormon world through filtered glasses. Two memorable experiences provide part of those filters. What follows is anecdotal and partly tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect the stories run close enough to common experience that no one will call them atypical. They helped structure how I read American Zion.In the first experience—autumn 2003—I was teaching a doctoral seminar at Duke University. One of the joys of teaching at Duke was that the University of North Carolina (UNC) was only eight miles away. A doctoral candidate at UNC, Reid Neilson (who is now an assistant academic vice president at Brigham Young University), was moonlighting in my course. Early on, I told the class that my wife would be undergoing open-heart surgery the following week, meaning I would miss class. When I got home that evening, I saw a warm casserole sitting on my porch. The tag said, “We will be praying for you. Love Reid and Shelly Neilson.” When I phoned Reid to thank him, I admitted I barely knew him. He chuckled and said, simply, “That's what we do.” By which he meant “we Mormons.”Experience two. Many years ago—too many to count—I attended an American religion book discussion at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. The volume du jour explored the spread of American evangelicalism. Soon it became clear that the boundaries of that movement were sprawling and amorphous. George Marsden, the “dean” of evangelical historians and an evangelical himself, was present. With a wink, he quipped that he had considered resigning from the tradition, but he did not know where to send the letter. Kathleen Flake, a Latter-day Saint historian sitting near George—later a distinguished scholar of that tradition at the University of Virginia—followed up with a one-liner that brought the house down: “I do know where to send the letter.”The import of these two experiences is easy to sum up. The casserole story reaffirms that Mormons walk the walk. Sociologist William Martin once wrote that for many Americans, Billy Graham represented their “best selves.” For many non-Mormons, Latter-day Saints represented Americans’ best selves. Agree or disagree with their decisions in the polling booth, the image of being a Mormon carries a parallel image of basic decency, doing the right thing when no one is looking.The import of the second experience is this. If Mormons are measured by pervasive values of order, reliability, probity, hard work, and honest patriotism, they most surely qualify for a medal. More important, the incident betokens the kind of measured resolve that enabled Mormons to move into the parched world of the Great Salt Lake Basin in the 1840s—before diesel-fueled farming—and make a go of it.Enter Mormon Studies Review and their unexpected but gratifying invitation to write an extended review essay on Benjamin Park's newest book, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism in America. My first instinct was that Richard Lyman Bushman or Laurie Maffly-Kipp, scholars with a polymathic command of the subject, should be the ones to do it. But my sporting sense prevailed. Later on I will express one or two reservations about American Zion, but they are minor and should be read in light of my profound admiration for Park's work.Park tells a riveting story. The book is lucidly written, untouched by academic posturing, and mercifully free of religious studies jargon. His research into primary, secondary, and even tertiary (social scientific) sources is exhaustive. Mormonism is a “deep hole,” he tells us, and so it is. One reason for digging even deeper is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has opened many new sources in the past two decades. New sources have invited new questions, and new questions have invited new paradigms. This dynamic openness has encouraged Park to stress the role of contingency in Mormon history. Nothing was predetermined; every choice could have been otherwise.Park has a gift for crafting memorable lines. At one point, he tells us, Saints “viewed America as a rotting carcass of moral decay and political failure” (89). He also has a gift for spotting memorable lines in his primary sources. We learn, for example, that one of President Abraham Lincoln's visitors found him “awkwardly built” with a frame “heightened by his want of flesh” (116). Ordinary folk often possessed a special eloquence, which Park honors: “Another young plural wife, Eliza Partridge Lyman, believed the only thing that prevented her from freezing was there not being enough ‘room in the wagon for the frost to get in’” (90). Park strides where most historians fear to tread, freely outlining his subjects’ most arresting personal features. Descriptors like “narrow face,” “unflinching gaze,” “fiery red hair,” “quick wit,” “gregarious smile,” “penetrating blue eyes”—turn deadly academic prose into a work of art.Not the least of the book's virtues is Park's own steady stream of wit and LOL one-liners. And his sense of humor about what data to include. Here's my favorite: “One camp in 1848 included over 2,000 people as well as 2,012 oxen, 983 cows, 904 chickens, 654 sheep, 334 cattle, 237 pigs, 134 dogs, 131 horses, 54 cats, 44 mules, 11 doves, 10 geese, 5 beehives, 5 ducks, 3 goats, and, not to be overlooked, 1 squirrel” (93–94).American Zion offers a comprehensive history of the LDS Church from its beginnings to the present. I say the book is comprehensive because its chronological scope runs from Joseph Smith Sr.’s family's luckless exploits in the 1810s to the temple-building surge of the 2020s. Its social scope ranges from leader-elites to ordinary worshippers. Its demographic scope stretches from elderly White males to young Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and LGBTQ folks. Its religious scope runs from revered prophets, earnest believers, and sweaty zealots to apostates, theocrats, and fundamentalist polygamists.Comprehensiveness does not, however, include more than a dash of references to the international story. Park is aware of the church's imposing presence outside the United States. The Book of Mormon has been translated into 115 languages. The majority of the church's 17.5 million members live outside North America, and seventy-four thousand earnest missionaries serve around the world. But given the book's heft—512 pages—and the complexity of its story, the focus on the American narrative alone seems well taken. And the proverbial letter to resign still goes to Salt Lake City. Even so, readers need to remember that the American story is, in some ways, less than half of the whole.The guiding question behind American Zion is disarmingly simple. How did American culture influence the Mormon witness? And what about the reverse? How did the Mormon witness influence American culture?Park's answer lies in the tensions built into assimilation. The Mormon narrative is a narrative of resistance to assimilation until 1890, the beginning of the end of polygamy, and then the embrace of assimilation from the 1890s to the present. Park does not put it this way, but by my reading, post–World War I believers increasingly assimilated into traditional positions on key questions of public life. After World War II, they increasingly assimilated into Republican or Republican-adjacent voting blocs.Over the span of Mormon history—that is both before and after the assimilation watershed—partisans rarely, if ever, displayed uniformity, let alone tranquility, about the trigger issues of the time. The kind of culture war tensions that flare up today—BYU inviting Vice President Dick Cheney to be commencement speaker, for example—marked earlier generations too. The particularities were different, of course, but the underlying pressures to split or fragment were similar.What were the limits of pluralism? Two examples loom. Mormons’ determined embrace of polygamy for some fifty years—and determined is the key word here—forced the courts to define, and the constabulary to enforce, the boundaries of religious liberty not for Mormons alone but for everyone.The same with theocracy. Where did the power of church leaders end? Was democracy ever an instrument of oppression rather than one of popular will? And what was the prescribed role of God, if any, in all of this? The court-enforced answers to these questions about the acceptable limits of theocracy affected not just Mormons but everyone.In many ways, the melding of Latter-day Saint and broader American ideals has generated noble results. The underlying premise of fundamental human equality, especially in God's eyes, marches tall. The staggering amount of humanitarian aid channeled through the Relief Society and other Latter-day Saint charity funds mirrors the Red Cross, Feeding America, and World Vision.That said, if Mormons have exemplified Americans’ best selves—what Americans wish they were—they also have exemplified the betrayal of those best selves. Park does not varnish this part of the story. Blacks’ tortured quest for equality after the Civil War looks pretty much the same inside the church as outside. Or worse, actually, since they were excluded from the priesthood and all of the temple ordinances until 1978, on revealed principle. However, in 2013, the church unequivocally renounced the racist rhetoric and ideology of its past, even as it continues to wrestle with those legacies.Park addresses the twisting narrative of other historically marginalized groups—LGBTQ and Latinos—but pays special attention to Native Americans (whom he respectfully identifies by tribal or Indigenous nation names whenever possible). But this story is particularly complicated because Mormon theology has traditionally associated Native Americans with the ancient dark-skinned Lamanites. By this reckoning, over time, most Lamanites became lighter and lighter due, in Latter-day Saint theology, to their obedience to God's commands. Others reckoned that descriptions of their skin pigment, as described in the Book of Mormon, were merely figurative language. However parsed, these are hard words for any modern historian to process. Park tries to make the best of it with brutal honesty tempered by empathy.For me, the book's most arresting and creative part is Park's rendering of the Mormon story as a story of dawning historical consciousness. This is my term, not his, but I use it because I think it captures, in three short words, a long process of development. Becoming aware of themselves as a distinct religious movement with a distinct history was a challenge worth thinking about, writing about, and even fighting about.And so it is that Park starts his book not with the church's actual history but with something else: the steps the church took to create and responsibly curate the primary materials that fed their historical consciousness. He devotes the opening paragraph to the jaw-dropping statistics that enumerate the denomination's archival and literary holdings.From the outset, Mormons understood they had to take measures to preserve their past. God's people did not dither. At the organizing meeting of the Church of Christ (as the church was initially named) in 1830, God told Joseph Smith to make a “record” affirming himself as a seer and a prophet. Smith gave that task to his friend and amanuensis John Whitmer. It is worth noting that the history Whitmer was preserving was not a disinterested peek at the past but rather a history with a purpose.The release of a memoir by Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph's mother, in 1853, formed another step in creating the faith's historical consciousness. By then, Brigham Young was in charge, and he did not like it, possibly because it threatened his authority. Young ordered all copies destroyed.Enter a celebratory history by Joseph Fielding Smith, grandson of Hyrum Smith, who had been murdered along with his brother Joseph in 1844. The volume, published in 1922, bore the muscular title Essentials in Church History: A History of the Church from the Birth of Joseph Smith until the Present Time.In 1972, Leonard J. Arrington joined the LDS History Division with a PhD in US econometric history from the University of North Carolina. Arrington said that the work of the History Division stood on two legs, one for readers inside the tradition and one for readers outside. Four years after Arrington's arrival, Latter-day Saints used sources made available through the division to publish The Story of the Latter-day Saints, the first attempt by Latter-day Saint historians to write a history to Saint readers and the It a that and not first historian in the division with Arrington the proverbial and made strides opening to He helped a age that to be as in his of a more to the church's history for the Mormon Arrington was let go as church but the Church History Division in its new academic home at Brigham Young year be an was run for the president of the United States. The Book of Mormon had just opened for a long run on in with no The a Mormon just after years and the public for Latter-day Saint in and the data the that after two years of and Mormons had assimilated into I will step outside my Latter-day Saint focus and to the of historical historical a the that they possessed a history—that they a historical in the American religious the Mormon story not It see both as of a surge of creative me this by a of dawning of themselves as a distinct religious movement with a historical the zealots were so up in the of in that they of they to or for to at a time. a however, they to sense a need to what and by so it was that in a took a at it with a book The He the to the His was to who to by that the did not in that the was to it One of the most memorable and most in all of American for that church to did not the and about the movement was by who was in in or by William J. who was in in A years another who was to the with hard How to It Was in the published in for the majority of it was not who the What we see is their history to about with a primary volume by a from an As the title did not historically like other and but from like a more of the process is well represented by the and work of the a distinguished history at in a home in New by a and a of American and all published by or By the we get to which at and the was more than story of the of historical is to Latter-day story in both an experience at the beginning of their which they as and in time. both that it would be good to a of that partly to it in and partly to make that the right people told the story in the right both to the of with the of the were for and the were were on the or the and there was no was not and was not people who with were not but were both that their movement was at a and in a which must be as least a of that and the best of my if any, actual members of tradition associated with the other in or were too and too to knew that some Mormons and in but they wrote it as the work of the who in up However, that of personal their parallel of historical all the more to what it tells about more I have two reservations about Park's book. The first to something he the second to something he right to the I think Park the of Mormons’ the of their which is but its He tells right at the that this tradition most for the book, which Park this of the new would the most religion in American a is that we could also make a for other if we the like have spread around the world. They Americans to to They also Americans to the of and other words, to with fed up with the of on the have John to If Christian gave it also gave the of all American the of Christian still in the behind were less but they Americans to the of their to the and, important, the to especially in of all it was World War in at fifty to million on who was their influence was the in the of in all every they had a a but they did a John influence the church to the into the we see White not in the but right to the president of the United is not Latter-day Saints have a presence in American life since the they the is to remember the but that other have on the a question about something Park does not He that when write the history of a religious tradition that on it is not to take a And he The he is to say he is to his some And to his he does let his for And he also his readers when the of when they confess that I for be every historian has a right to the boundaries of the questions they do and do not want to write about. But for as as Park is, like to know what he about the the there any that a historian them in a public Or not them if their in this question partly because Park himself opened the and partly because other distinguished scholars of Latter-day Saint Richard and and and this of And Joseph Smith himself had as good a on it as Park all is not that by is made Smith was to the of religious but the of that I close this essay by a to on the Zion When the Martin in one said, told the with his The that is less a to than a life to seems to be the of it. The of Park's is worth the of the book. I students to end an essay with a But in this case, I do than to readers with Park a word for all of is an attempt to in a world of in a of in a of in an age of a to the of and as if the were and could be