A Travelogue Nonpareil | Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons

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“Mormonism, unlike other modern religions, is a faith cast in the form of history,” argues historian Jan Shipps in this outstanding collection of articles and essays (p. 165). Implicitly, the volume presents an argument for the central and vital role of the historian in reaching an understanding of the nature of the LDS experience in its entirety. Shipps’s work is a model for historians: she asks interesting and important questions; she thinks through them clearly and carefully; she con ducts research in all available and ap propriate sources; and she presents her findings in language that is a pleasure to read. 

This book is a major contribution to Mormon historiography; it will be of particular interest to those who seek not for “just the facts,” but for large conceptual and interpretive frame works. Shipps’s writing is focused not only on events and trends within Mormon history, but also on how that history can best be explained and how it can be elucidated by perspectives developed in religious studies and sociology. The book is divided into five sections, each based on a different conceptual approach to writing religious history. Fourteen of the eighteen articles and essays in the book have been published previously, though they are here revised and expanded. As all but one of these appeared outside of the familiar circle of Mormon-related journals, the contents of this book will be new to many, if not most, non-specialists. 

The good, big questions Shipps asks of Mormon history are the kind only those with both an awareness of broader contexts and close familiarity with the details are prepared to posit. These include: Why have the Mor mons been neglected by historians of the American West? How have Mormons’ and non-Mormons’ views of each other changed over time? How has the notion of the “gathering of the Saints” changed and developed in the twentieth century? What is at the heart of recent tensions between church authorities and some within the LDS intellectual community? 

Shipps is fascinated with the Mormon transition from “peoplehood to church membership” (p. 30). This process, which Shipps places in the half-century following World War II, includes a weakening of Mormon “ethnicity,” an ascribed cultural identity that was a product of the Saints’ rich nineteenth-century experience. Regardless of their geographic or national origin, Mormons gathered in the Great Basin kingdom as a communally-oriented people; they “had to ‘choose to be chosen'” and work to build Zion in the tops of the mountains, separate from the rest of frontier America. “The end result,” Shipps writes, “was the creation of a group that took on ethnic characteristics nearly as distinctive and important as the ethnic characteristics of Chicanos, Asians, and Native American groups” (p. 35). 

By the end of the twentieth century, however, LDS Church members were spread throughout the world, and Mormon distinctiveness—its otherness—was in serious decline, Shipps explains. Performance of temple cere monies and possession of the Book of Mormon still make them stand out, but in most other ways Mormons today appear little different from members of other Christian denominations. The vigorous, tribal nature of Mormon cultural life prior to the 1970s, with its busy ward chapels and independent auxiliaries, has been replaced by a correlated, strictly hierarchical church with a consolidated meeting schedule. Mormon ethnicity, though weakened, is still extant today in Mormon areas of the American West, but elsewhere, “what was once Mormon ethnicity has turned into distinctive practice, which is a very different thing” (p. 37). 

Shipps refuses to interpret religious activity as an epiphenomenon, that is, as a reflection of other social or political issues within a community. Such approaches “do not recount and explicate what happened in a manner that makes their histories meaningful for members of faith communities” (p. 171). This approach produces a particularly insightful essay on Brigham Young, whose primary achievement, Shipps argues, was the “making of Saints.” The Mormon leader “created a cohesive, self-conscious body of Latter-day Saints whose primary identity was Mormon and whose understanding of Mormonism paralleled his own” (p. 249). 

Shipps’s years of immersion in the Mormon historical sources and decades of association with LDS church members has made her what she calls an “in side-outsider.” Like serious, dedicated historians of a foreign people, she has learned the language of Mormons and has an understanding and empathy toward the Saints that is rare among non-Mormon scholars. LDS readers unfamiliar with Shipps’s work will be surprised at how familiar Mormons and Mormonism seem in her analyses, even when she is writing for a non-Mormon audience. This is clearly evident in an essay on Joseph Smith and the development of Mormon theology in which Shipps describes an accumulation of layers of doctrine and practice: the initial restoration was followed by a “Hebraic overlay” (literal gathering, building of a temple at Kirtland, separate lesser and greater priesthoods, declarations of lineage, keys granted to Joseph and others), followed by the culminating “fulness of the Gospel” (patriarchal order of marriage, proxy bap tism, doctrines of eternal progression and tiered heavens). This final layer of teachings “located human life between pre- and post-existence states and placed the ordinances of the temple. . . at the very core of Mormonism.” These doctrines were combined with “the merged gospels of Jesus Christ and Abraham” to form the Mormon plan of salvation (pp. 294-96). 

Many readers will also find fascinating the autobiographical material found in several of the chapters and section introductions. Shipps describes her first encounter with Mormons in Cache County, Utah, in 1960, the high lights of her graduate training in history, and her subsequent experiences as a professional sojourner in the realm of LDS history. (She is currently professor emerita of history and religious studies at Indiana University—Purdue University, Indianapolis.) Most of the autobiographical sections comprise intellectual, not spiritual or emotional autobiography. An exception is a moving description of how she came to understand the LDS concept of proxy ordinances while taking communion in her own Methodist church in Indiana shortly after the excommunication of personal friend Lavina Fielding Anderson and several others in September 1993. 

Shipps does not dwell long on where Mormonism is headed—indeed, that is not the task of the historian—though she does think the LDS Church will continue in its programs the current intensification of emphasis on Christ over discussion of events in Mormon history. Her analysis of con temporary Mormonism is not free of missteps, however. She writes of a growing rhetorical shift toward the use of the terms “Mormon Christian” and Mormon Christianity” by Church members. Shipps vastly overestimates the spread of this usage, which implies a theological ecumenism foreign to most members of the Church. Shipps is of course fully aware of the need within Mormonism to be separate from other forms of Christianity—a theme central to her 1985 path-breaking work, Mormonism: The Story of A New Religious Tradition. The difficulty is that it is unclear how the current emphasis on Christ within the LDS church will affect the relationship between Mormons and other Christians. Shipps is certainly correct that the expanding church is now in a transition phase. She may yet prove prescient that “unless the matter of LDS identity is somehow solved in the new multinational situation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has little hope of maintaining itself apart from other forms of Christianity” (p. 272). 

Many would ask: why would a non-Mormon historian spend her whole career studying the Mormons? This book is filled with such penetrating and unending curiosity that the only answer can be “She just finds them fascinating.” May Shipps stay as a permanent resident in the land of Mormon history and keep writing about it for a long time to come. 

Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons, by Jan Shipps. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 400 pp.