The Effect of Jewish Studies on Judaism

A friend of mine sent me a link to this older article where the inimitable Jacob Neusner, who taught Jewish Studies for years at a secular university, discusses how Jewish Studies has tended to undercut Judaism.

One very important point he makes in the essay is this:

When believing and practicing Jews decide who will teach what to whom, they take for granted that some things are more important than others. They affirm the cogency of the subject and know how things fit together. The Judaic system governs the things that are learned. To teachers and students, the classical texts convey truth. What follows? The Talmud is more important than a cookbook. The Jewish sponsors of Jewish learning derive the scale of values from the received canon and tradition.

Universities, by contrast, have no stake in according to Scripture or Midrash and Talmud a superior position in the curriculum. Learning in every topic and discipline defines its own priorities, and reason is not governed by revelation. So the curriculum is a mishmash of this and that — discrete details of a main point that does not register. Anything that is Jewish is as worthy of study as anything else that is Jewish. At my own college, the history of the bagel and the status of women in Jewish law have served equally well as topics of graduation essays.

Substitute "Mormon" for "Jewish" and "General Conference" for the "Talmud" and you probably have an apt description of Mormon Studies.

Neusner's point, of course, is one of the frustrating things about studying ancient Egyptian religion. Any inscription or text is taken as equally important with any other inscription or text. No system governs what is learned or studied and we do not know how things fit together. What is valuable and what is not? How are we to know? I have made the argument that the things that the Egyptians endlessly repeated to the point that modern scholars see them as "banal" are probably the most important things. Without an ancient Egyptian informant, that is an educated guess. One has to wonder if all the outpouring of writings of Egyptian religion is as valid as the outpouring of writings in Mormon Studies.

Why You Should Go Into Mormon Studies

According to this article if you get a degree in Religious Studies (of which Mormon Studies is a subset) you can look forward to the following:

• You might get really lucky and make $32,000 dollars a year; of course you are just as likely to earn $23,000 dollars a year (that's below the poverty level for a family of four).


• 35% of graduates will be employed in jobs that they did not even need a college degree for.


• 58% of graduates will be employed in low wage service jobs (waiting tables, janitors, maids, cashiers, etc.; on the bright side, those are honorable professions).


• It is a little unclear but it looks like only 7% of Religious Studies majors find employment in the field. You could be that one in fourteen who actually makes it (comparatively) big.


• You will be competing with over 54,000 people for that job.


• A Religious Studies major is more likely to find employment than someone in Mormon Studies.


• The faceless person who sets your insurance premiums will likely start out at at least double your salary. 

Good luck!

Mormon Studies at the 2014 AAR

The 2014 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion convenes in San Diego. What are the Mormon Studies topics that will be covered in this meeting?

Kristen Tobey of the University of Pittsburgh will discuss "Not Non-Mormons": Belonging without Believing in the LDS Church:

This paper will treat three groups that simultaneously affiliate and disaffiliate from the LDS church: New Order Mormon, StayLDS, and the Society for Humanistic Mormonism. These groups offer resources for individuals who identify culturally but (to varying degrees) not doctrinally with Mormonism; they complicate the binary model of religious affiliation versus non-affiliation, offerings options for hybrid religious identities that include elements of both. This paper will explore the dynamics of these hybrid religious identities, and the variety of discourses and practices that go into their construction and communication. Each group proclaims a slightly different position with respect to matters of belief and unbelief, but I will argue that participants, many of whom sample more than one of these groups, find them useful for the concrete practices they advise and teach as participants construct, inhabit, and communicate new, hybrid religious identities, which are more nuanced than static conceptions of the religiously unaffiliated allow.

Courtney Wilder of Midland University will discuss The Mormon Mommy Blogger: Analyzing the Writing of Contemporary LDS Women:

This paper examines the presentation of gendered activity, including mothering and depictions of women’s bodies in both image and narrative, in a wide array of Mormon mommy blogs, and argues that this genre of writing is religiously and socially significant. The blogs range from the lucrative and widely-known to the small and more private; all are written by Mormon or formerly Mormon women with children, who are depicting themselves publicly as religious women engaging in their roles as wives and mothers. The women’s depiction of and commentary about their own lives is analogous to the public and private writing of earlier eras, and it is more religiously and socially diverse than the stereotypes about Mormon mommy bloggers suggest. These bloggers offers valuable insight into the religious lives of contemporary Mormon women.

J. Spencer Fluhman of Brigham Young University will lead a panel of Ann Taves of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven C. Harper of the LDS Church History Library in a discussion of Joseph Smith’s First Vision: New Methods for the Analysis of Experience-Related Texts:

In a fresh approach to the founding story of Mormonism, two scholars (one LDS and one not) who are currently writing on early Mormonism will present the results of their collaborative analysis of each of the known sources of Joseph Smith’s first vision, including newly discovered sources, using a method that teases apart events (what ostensibly happened) and explanations (the subject’s understanding of why it happened). When aligned chronologically by event and explanation, the method provides a more rigorous basis for examining the historical development of the narrative over time, including changes in structure and content, in the context of social interactions and the role of experience narratives in the emergence of new social movements. Using this highly debated event as a case study, the presenters will demonstrate the way in which a clear distinction between the subject’s explanation of events and scholarly meta-explanations allows scholars to work toward agreement on the former and more carefully account for their differences with respect to the latter. Two respondents will then address both the case study and the broader implications of the method for the field of religious studies.

Respondents will be Kathleen Flake of the University of Virginia and Gustavo Benavides of Villanova University.

Daniel Wyche of the University of Chicago will discuss Ender as Parrhesiastes: Truth-telling as Spiritual Exercise in Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead:

In Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, we see the development of the fictional practice of ritualized mourning called “speaking for the dead,” created by the titular protagonist in the final chapter of Ender’s Game. This practice bears a certain resemblance to those ancient practices of parrhesia analyzed by Foucault in his late work. The crucial distinction being that we have a practice not of what Foucault calls “speaking the truth of oneself,” but rather of speaking the truth of the Other. This paper approaches “speaking for the dead” through the lens of Foucault’s analyses of parrhesiastic practice—and vice versa. Special attention will be paid to the relationship of the speaker to the other in both the fictional and historical cases, in order to draw out a richer analysis of the place of the necessary concepts of inter-subjectivity, empathy and difference in “practices of truth-telling” in general.

Meredith Ross of Florida State University will discuss House of Card: Ender’s Game and Speculative Fiction as Vehicle for Religio-Political Values:

Speculative fiction, through its explicit engagement with possible futures of the present world, represents a unique opportunity for writers and readers to connect present-day cultural concerns to possible futures. Speculative fiction allows authors to set characters in worlds created by misguided values present in the world of the reader, providing a platform to “break” and remake that world through critique. By examining not just the world that an author has created, but the trajectory of its creation, we can gain insight into the author’s understanding of how religion and politics interact and impact history. Using works from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game canon as a case study, this paper illustrates the capacity of speculative fiction as a vehicle for cultural values, and argues for speculative fiction's usefulness to historians of American religion.

Speculative fiction is useful to historians. Who knew?

Christopher Ashley of Union Theological Seminary will discuss The Hand of God: Secularism and Mormonism in Battlestar Galactica (2003 and 1978):

Prestige serialized television drama can depict religious characters, but its presumptive secularism usually frames their faith. One exception is the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Glen Larson’s incorporation of elements from Mormon Scripture and practice into the mythology of the 1978 original is fairly well-known and generally understood as a matter of the creator’s expression of his own faith. The 2003 series is not usually read as a personal religious statement by its creators. Its story, however, develops not only in-universe theologies and atheologies, but at least one in-universe god—considerably more religion than did Larson’s original. Moreover, that material, centered on the tropes of angelic revelation and theocratic violence, displays considerable resonance with American perceptions of Mormonism. I speculate that in the predominantly secular form of prestige television drama, religious themes will tend to emerge as revelation and genre disruption, often from NRM or other “outsider” sources.

I remember Battlestar Galactica as cheesy. I have never thought of it as "prestige television drama."

The University of Utah's Margaret Toscano will respond to Wyche, Ross, and Ashley.

Stanley Thayne of the University of North Carolina will discuss The Blood of Father Lehi: Indigeneity and the Book of Mormon:

The Book of Mormon, published in New York in 1830, purports to narrate the history and origins of Indigenous Americans. It identifies the ancestors of Indigenous American peoples as “Lamanites,” a group whom God cursed with a “skin of blackness” because of their unbelief. But it also prophesies that they will become a mighty people in the last days. This paper explores intersections between American Indian tribal-national identities and this racialized religious identity. My driving research questions include: How do American Indian individuals who convert to or affiliate with Mormonism read and interpret this text and these passages? How do they negotiate this ambiguous identity? How does it gel or conflict with Indigenous narratives? To answer these questions this paper, drawn from my dissertation, will develop contextualized ethnographic portraits focused on the textual interpretations of individuals from American Indian Mormon communities.

Will this paper discuss the understandings of Latter-day Saints who reside in Mexico, Central America or South America? Or has the author assumed a Nineteenth Century background for the Book of Mormon and assumed that the Lamanites must be the American Indians in the areas where Joseph Smith lived?

Aaron Ghiloni of Trinity College Queensland will discuss Towards a Comparative Missiology:

Given the historical influence of mission on the development of religious studies coupled with the pervasiveness religious diversity in the West, one might expect to find a plethora of comparative scholarship on missionizing tendencies. However, such research is rare. Skreslet’s 2012 textbook on the methodology of mission studies notes that “relatively few missiologists have applied themselves to the problem of comparative missiology…”(1). Furthermore, “comparative investigations of mission have not been particularly numerous and, when they appear, tend not to make reference to each other. The result…is a scattered, uncoordinated discourse related to comparative missiology, begun from multiple starting points” (2).
To fill this research gap, the author has initiated a research project on the mission concepts of atheism, the Baha’i Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Mormonism. Drawing on forthcoming systematic research into the particular concepts of each of these seven traditions, the author will speak to his research program in “comparative missiology.” Moving beyond Müller’s either/or concept of Missionary and Non-Missionary religions, the research has located four themes common to mission movements: duty and leadership, movement across borders, communication of a progressive but universalistic logic, and the adaption of truth to create communal identity.

David Golding of Claremont Graduate University will discuss From Dusting Feet to Saving Souls: Mormon Missions in Thought and Practice:

Mormon mission preceded Mormonism itself. Months before Joseph Smith made headway on the Book of Mormon translation and over a year before he organized the Church, he composed a revelation commissioning supporters to “embark in the service of God.” This paper examines the theological imperative of mission within Mormonism.
Mormon mission history reveals an ambitious and highly systematized mission enterprise often passed over in the larger Christian literature. At the heart of this mission resides an enthusiasm for historical and scriptural literalism, a uniquely Mormon riposte to the classic questions of Western religion. Its missionaries once audaciously imagined from their agrarian cabins that their missionary force would one day reach the whole world and they fashioned a complex organizational hierarchy worthy of such an aspiration. Perhaps the greatest irony of their missiology is how, in all their religious creativity and openness to rustic theology, they actually succeeded in setting themselves up for impossible ambitions. A cursory glance at the mission history of their Euro-American neighbors would certainly uncover some of these same tendencies. In zealously striving to evangelize the world “in a generation,” neighboring Protestant missionaries couldn’t help but be deprovincialized by the encounter. It remains to be seen how the recent surge in Mormon mission activity will similarly come back to shape the future Mormon worldview, but if the trends of the larger Christian context are any indication, Mormons have probably passed a point of no return. They once celebrated the isolation of their mountain home in the American West only to see it give way to their expanding vision of colonizing in the name of Zion; today’s exuberance for a more global mission effort portends another reflexive turn, this time toward humanitarian service and greater interreligious awareness.

Elisa Pulido of Claremont Graduate University will discuss Integrating Utopia: A Mormon Attempt at Nahua Assimilation in the Mexican Borderlands (1887):

This paper argues that despite the existence of sacred narratives detailing the success of an ancient, racially integrated utopia in the Book of Mormon, Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century were culturally blind to any application of their own sacred texts might have had in their bi-racial Mexican colonies in Juárez. White Mormons privileged establishing a haven for polygamists over improving race relations. Indigenous (Nahua) converts, who had relocated to the colony, grew discouraged by the rigors of settlement building in an alien geography among an alien culture, and trekked 1,000 miles back to Central Mexico.

Booker Alston of the University of Cape Town will discuss Gobo Fango: Latter-day Saint, South African Slave, or African American Hero?

Perspective and legend are two fundamental complications of writing biographies. This paper examines the legend of Gobo Fango from three different perspectives in an effort to highlight how these obstacles must be analysed by those producing definitive Mormon biographies. Jonathan Z. Smith’s theories of construction are combined with David Chidester’s practices of tracking the circulation of knowledge in order to methodologically justify the central argument that there is there is not one, but many Gobos in existence today and that only a study which investigates all of these Gobos can be considered a definitive biography of Gobo Fango.

Marie-Therese Maeder of the University of Zurich will discuss Unity in Diversity: Self-representation Strategies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Commercial Series "I Am a Mormon":

Drawn from the field of audiovisual media and religion, this paper interrogates strategies of self-representation in the series of commercials entitled "I am a Mormon". This series consist of 132 episodes between about two and four minutes in length produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2010 down to the present day. The approach is threefold, asking (1) What discourse does the series generate about Mormons and Mormonism, and how? (2) For what communication space(s), constructed and shared by all participants, from makers to audience, is the series intended? (3) What values are linked to the statements made in and by the commercials? In analyzing audio-visual self-representation strategies of the Mormon Church, the paper considers how both social actors – their conversations, appearance, and behavior, for example – and stylistic forms communicate attitudes and values. The conclusion of the paper seeks to elaborate the Mormon worldview generated in this audio-visual discourse in light of the evident tension between unity and diversity.

Michael Hamilton of Principia College will discuss School Lunches, Fundamentalist Mormons, and Community Ecology:

This paper compares the contexts around the preparation and consumption of student lunches in two schools whose pupils are drawn from plural marriage communities. Community A and Community B make implicit statements about their ecological and political values and practices through the varied ways in which they provide nourishment to students during the school day.
Community A does not serve lunch at school, sending students home to eat. While portrayed as a cost-savings, the school administrator also explained the practice as consistent with community values. I explore the historical arguments that may have contributed to the policy.
Community B operates a large cafeteria with a menu including no added sugar and many organic ingredients. I argue that the cafeteria’s operations are, in part, a response to negative public perceptions of the sect, designed to reposition it as an accepted and positive presence in the larger community.

Ann Duncan of Goucher College will discuss Childbirth as Religious Performance: Quaker and Mormon Women and Paradigms of Faith and Motherhood:

Childbirth, one of the most corporeal of human experiences, has the potential to test a woman’s strength of body and character and to testify to the miraculous power of the body. Yet, motherhood is always socially constructed. In an era when advice about pregnancy and childbirth abound, religion can serve to mediate or even complicate this social maze by giving childbirth theological importance and by empowering and directing women to discern the of proper path through the maze. Engaging with past and contemporary scholarship on the complicated relationship between motherhood and feminism as well as personal interviews, this paper examines two Christian denominations on the margins of the mainstream -- the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) – and the ways in which childbirth within these traditions represents a performance of theology, motherhood and womanhood.

 So does motherhood have a biological basis or is it always only a social construct?

Matthew Bowman of Georgetown University will discuss A Vast Infiltration: Mormons, the FBI, Religion, and Politics in Late Twentieth Century America:

The close connection between Mormons and the Federal Bureau of Investigation became a pop culture trope in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. This paper will argue that this connection was most celebrated by an oddly dissonant collection of Americans. The first were Mormons themselves, who believed that the very real presence of FBI recruiters at Brigham Young University indicated that American culture had finally accepted them. The second group, however, were artists, conspiracy theorists, and evangelicals suspicious of Mormons who used the presence of Mormons in the FBI to validate broader narratives of government conspiracy, smooth, faceless bureaucracy, and lack of accountability that became popular in post-Vietnam America. The conflict between these two narratives has relevance for the cultural between left and right as the culture wars heated up, but also illustrates the ways in which Americans talked about legitimate and illegitimate religion in the late twentieth century.

 This slate of papers is illustrative of Mormon Studies.

What is Mormon Studies? VII

Those who belong to academic organizations know that unevenness is a constant problem. Some papers are better, or more important than others. Some papers are solid and some are sloppy. Some papers make one wonder how they ever got on the program in the first place.

By featuring particular examples of questionable papers, some may feel that they have been cherry-picked for putrescence. As well as viewing the trees, one also needs to get an idea of the forest.

Here are all eighteen papers on Mormon Studies on the program for the 2011 annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, divided into general category, with the percentage that every category made of the entire program:

Comparative Religion (22%)
“‘I am a Mormon’ and ‘I am a Scientologist’: Recent Marketing Efforts in Mormonism and Scientology”
“The Personal and the Impersonal Divine in Mormonism and Bohemeanism” 
“The Enoch Figure: Pre- and Post-Joseph Smith”
“Not the End of the Story: Theological Reflections on the Mormon Afterlife” 

Race (6%)
“Jane Manning James: Reenacting and Reclaiming the ‘Black’ and ‘Mormon’ Past”

Gender (28%)
“The Mommy Wars, Mormonism, and the ‘Choices’ of American Motherhood” 
“Western Pioneer Mythos in the Negotiation of Mormon Feminism and Faith”
“Scripting, Performing, Testifying: Giving Faithful ‘Seximony’ through the Mormon Vagina Monologues”
“‘Further Light and Knowledge’: Ways of Knowing in Mormonism and the New Spirituality”
“Female Priestly Subjectivity and Dynasty in Early Mormonism”
 Sex (28%)
“Captive Bodies, Queer Religions: Scripting North American Religious Difference”
“Giving Them a Way Out: What American Muslim Women Can Do About Polygyny”
“‘I am a Daughter of My Heavenly Father’: Transsexual Mormons and Performed Gender Essentialism”
“‘That They Might Have Joy’: Towards a Posthetero­normative, Gay Mormon Hermeneutic”
“Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Problem of the Levirate Widow”

Arts (6%)
“‘For Death was That — and This — is Thee’: Stephanie Meyers, Theosis, and the Twenty-first Century Vampire Romance”

Pilgrimage (6%)
“‘When You’re Here, We’re Here’: Encounters between the Living and the Dead at Latter-day Saint Pilgrimage Sites”

Ritual (6%)
“The Cultural Logic of LDS Death-ritualization: Puzzles and Possibilities”  

As can be seen, sex and gender issues account for more than half of the program. (Rounding issues account for why the total percentage is 102%.) My survey over the past week or so has highlighted over a quarter of the presentations. This was a fairly typical year. These are fairly typical topics (although politics, which is another common topic, was not represented this year).

Mormon Studies has potential: potential for good and potential for evil. Proponents tend to downplay both the existence of the bad, and its size, extent, and pervasiveness. By portraying Mormon Studies only as good is disingenuous. I think Mormon Studies has potential to do good, but currently I find much of the work wanting in terms of academic quality, accuracy and faithfulness. The current trends are not encouraging.

What Is Mormon Studies? VI

Some might think, given the other papers profiled over the past few days, that Mormon Studies is obsessed with sex. This is not necessarily so. Here is one example:

The Cultural Logic of LDS Death-ritualization: Puzzles and Possibilities

This paper was presented at the 2011 AAR meetings. The reader might wonder what is involved in death-ritualization, so the published abstract might provide some clues:

Why didn't Mormons develop funerary rites as components of the esoteric temple ritual that emerged in the 1840s? Such rites would have been a natural development, given the temple's associations with the dead and preparation for the afterlife; and in fact, some elements of LDS practice point in this direction, most notably the custom of clothing the dead in temple robes that are otherwise never worn or displayed outside temples. Historical precedents in LDS ritual allow us to imagine temple-based funerary rites that might have been but weren't, in turn providing foils for a Geertzian reading of the cultural logic of how Mormons do and don't ritualize death. Building on a thesis by Douglas Davies, this paper argues that LDS death-ritualization is separated from the process and occasion of death itself, a fact which suggests a lack of ritual interest in dead bodies or the lived experience of dying.

So now scholars get "to imagine temple-based funerary rites that might have been but weren't." If only things were completely different than they are, they might be very different than they are. While we are at it we might imagine that these hypothetical notions constitute research. We might even imagine that they are scholarship. Does this mean that Mormon Studies is engaged in the production of fiction?

What is Mormon Studies? V

If one wants to see what Mormon Studies is like, consider the following paper from the 2011 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in San Francisco:

Scripting, Performing, Testifying: Giving Faithful "Seximony" through The Mormon Vagina Monologues

You might think that the title was deliberately provocative but the content was mild. So here is the abstract:

Abstract: In 2001, a group of Mormon women scripted what came to be known at the Mormon Vagina Monologues and presented their monologues at the annual Sunstone magazine conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Using this public forum to express extremely private experiences, the women not only critiqued the Mormon Church patriarchy, but also used essential elements of the Mormon faith — those of testimony, scripture, and personal revelation — to envision a Church more accepting of sexual differences. Using methodological approaches from Mormon studies, feminist studies of religion, and performance studies, this paper argues that the Mormon Vagina Monologues exploited an inherent ambivalence in the LDS relationship between priesthood authority and personal authority. A number of monologues are examined, including pieces dealing with sacred undergarments, female masturbation, eternal marriage and the celestial kingdom, and the personal and theological struggles of male-to-female transsexual Latter-day Saints.

Perhaps the presentation was by some nut out of the mainstream. No, Jill Peterfeso was affiliated with the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Guilford College, a job this presentation no doubt helped her secure. But surely, this presentation was given in one of the AAR's wierd sections. No, this was presented in the Mormon Studies Consultation. This is mainstream Mormon Studies.

What is Mormon Studies? IV

For those who might be tempted to think that Mormon Studies does not consider spirituality, consider the following from the 2011 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion:

"Further Light and Knowledge": Ways of Knowing in Mormonism and the New Spirituality

The title of this paper sounds very interesting. What is it about? Well the published abstract says:

This paper analyzes esoteric ways of knowing in Mormonism to illuminate how particular LDS women have synthesized, supplemented or replaced Mormonism with esoteric elements of twenty-first century New Spirituality. The New Spirituality is the current generalized spiritual milieu in the U.S.: dynamic, competitive, flexible, and hybrid—an inclusive category that can cover the wide range of non-institutional options available to Americans for spiritual self-expression as well as innovative theological trends in institutional religions. It can represent what Americans once considered to be New Age practices and ideas, such as astrology, reincarnation, channeling, and divination (the belief in and use of which are diffuse in American culture). It can also refer to what has become a revitalization of established religious traditions in America toward a progressive, more humanistic spirituality.

So the paper is looking at how some Latter-day Saint women "have synthesized, supplemented or replaced Mormonism" with things "such as astrology, reincarnation, channeling, and divination" to reach a "more humanistic spirituality."

The presentation was by Doe Daughtrey, an instructor at Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. One might think, by reading the abstract, that the presentation was made in one of the esotericism sections, but instead it was presented in the Mormon Studies Consultation.

Well, this is certainly not mainstream Mormonism, but it is mainstream Mormon Studies.

What is Mormon Studies? III

Sometimes Mormon Studies papers are not necessarily recognizable from their titles. Little in the following title hints that it is a paper about Mormon Studies:

Captive Bodies, Queer Religions: Scripting North American Religious Difference

The abstract, however, reveals that it is indeed supposed to be about Mormons:

Queering of the study of North American Religions requires taking seriously the embodied construction of religious difference. In this paper, I argue that attempts to render certain religions “bad” or unAmerican are often processes of queering specific modes of embodied religiosity. I first suggest that queering the study of North American religions requires more than simply recovering the voices of American LGBT people of faith – that we must rather mobilize critical theories of sexualities to think about religious difference in North America. Next, I consider three examples of the North American captivity narrative genre—Mormon, Neopagan, and Muslim—as articulations of American Protestant anxieties about the perceived challenges marginal religions pose to heteronormativity. Following Sedgwick, I conclude by insisting that the study of North American religions is not only incomplete, but damaged, if it fails to critically engage cultural assumptions about sex.

The paper was presented by Megan Goodwin, then a graduate student in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but now Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University.

Was this perhaps presented at some session on queer religions? No, it was presented in the North American Religions Sections. Perhaps this was done a long time ago. Well, actually, it was only two years ago, in 2011.

So the study of Mormonism "is not only incomplete, but damaged, if it fails to critically engage cultural assumptions about sex." So, according to Dr. Goodwin, this is what Mormon Studies is about.

What is Mormon Studies? II

Some topics in Mormon Studies might raise an eyebrow. This is sometimes done by perverting standard phrases used in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

"I Am a Daughter of My Heavenly Father": Transsexual Mormons and Performed Gender Essentialism

The typical reader probably wonders what in the world "performed gender essentialism" might be. (The computer's spell checker does not even recognize essentialism as an English word.) To figure this out we look at the published abstract:

Using monologues featured in the Mormon Vagina Monologues (MVM) and scripted by male-to-female transsexual Latter-day Saints, this paper offers a case study of sexual identity construction within a rigid religious system. To be Mormon and transgendered is to occupy a particularly precarious position—socially, culturally, and soteriologically. Located within conversations around Mormon studies, Judith Butler’s “gender performativity,” performance studies’ concept of the “utopian performative,” and the MVM, this paper investigates the impact that patriarchal theology has on Mormon transsexual agency: instead of rejecting the patriarchal Church that has excommunicated them, the monologists retain the Mormon’s Father God and emphasis on strict gender essentialism. In transitioning, Mormon transsexuals disobey the Church but obey God, thereby becoming “who the Lord Jesus wants me to be.” As this paper shows, the MVM’s transsexual contributors reclaim sexual subjectivity by performing testimonies—not of the Church’s truthfulness, but of gender identity and theological commitment.

This is the work of Jill Peterfeso, now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Guilford College, and was presented in the Religion and Sexuality Consultation at the 2011 annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion. It is about as standard a paper on Mormon Studies as there is.

What is Mormon Studies? I

I published something on Mormon Studies recently. Many people did not like it. They thought I was too quick to condemn something before it had a chance to produce any fruit. Those commentators obviously have not seen some of what passes for Mormon Studies at academic gatherings. So what sorts of things can one expect of Mormon Studies judging by papers on the topic at the most prestigious organization devoted to Religious Studies in North America? Here is a typical example:

"That They Might Have Joy": Toward a Postheteronormative, Gay Mormon Heremeneutic

The gobbledygook in the subtitle probably has the reader wondering what this polysyllabic effusion means. For that we look at the published abstract:

This paper looks at the question of how a viable gay Mormon hermeneutic would read, and what it would take for it to gain force in Mormon culture, based on a brief examination of the development of anti-gay sentiments in the history of the Church, provided in the context of official statements set forth in regards to the Equal Rights Amendment and the road toward acceptance of African-American men in priesthood positions. I conclude by arguing that although a change of approach to this issue is unlikely in the near future, a healthy dose of their own "civil disobedience" may be necessary for LGBTQ Mormons, their families and sympathizers, who are willing to stick with the Church, and seek for change from within it.

Coming as it did in the Gay Men and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion, it is not surprising that the abstract reads more like a political manifesto than a work of scholarship. The author, Devan Hite, a master's student in pastoral psychotherapy at the Chicago Theological Seminary, seems to view churches as mere social clubs subject to political manipulation.

This was presented in 2011, but it is nothing new for the AAR. Six years earlier at the Gay Men's Issues in Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion (which seems to be the same group) there was a paper entitled, "Why Are There So Many Gay Mormon Websites?"


You can't make this stuff up.

A Closer Look at Mormon Studies

For many years the American Academy of Religion met with the Society of Biblical Literature for their annual meetings. To the ordinary member this seemed to work very well. Then, some years ago, for some reason, the American Academy of Religion decided that it really did not want to meet with the Society of Biblical Literature anymore. Perhaps some of their members could not tolerate the Bible; who knows? It does not seem to matter now since the meetings are held jointly again. But for a number of years they were held separately.

Many academics are limited in the amount of travel that they can do. One trip to a conference a year paid for by the university seems to be standard. So professors had to choose one or the other conference to attend since they could not attend both.

When the split occurred one of my colleagues could not believe that I would chose to go to the SBL meetings rather than the AAR meetings since, according to him, AAR was the one true organization and the Society of Biblical Literature was an inferior organization. I have served for years on the program committee for one of the sections of the SBL and currently serve as the chair of the section. I disagree. None of that seemed to matter to him.

While I have attended some amazingly vapid presentations at SBL, the content, as a whole, seems to me to be more academically serious and rigorous than presentations at AAR, but perhaps I am too much an elitist snob. Over the coming days, while the AAR/SBL annual meetings are held, I will be highlighting some of the wonders of the American Academy of Religion particularly Mormon Studies. Since Mormon Studies now tends to view itself as a subset of Religious Studies, of which the AAR is the premier organization, one need look no further than the AAR to see how Mormon Studies is carried out by those in Religious Studies.

Mormon Media Studies Symposium Day 1

Today was the first day of the Mormon Media Studies Symposium. I presented at the one two years ago but have been ordered never to present again and any record of my having done so was deliberately expunged from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute which says something about the management of the Institute's actual attitude toward Mormon Studies.

I was only able to make a few of the papers. One of them was of particular interest. Rosemary Avance is not a Latter-day Saint but she is trying to follow the conversation between apologists and dissidents. As an example of apologists, she gave the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (www.fairlds.org) as an example of dissidents she gave John Dehlin. She clearly has not mastered the intricacies of the discussion (for example, she confuses certain of the players and does not seem to care about the intellectual content of the discussions), but she has been trying to figure out what is going on and has some interesting things to say.

Avance told the story of how a response to Dehlin was suppressed at the Maxwell Institute giving Dehlin's version of the story. She summarized the article that was suppressed but admitted that she had not read it or even seen it.

Avance also said in response to a question that she sees no indication that the Maxwell Institute will be continuing with apologetics after this past summer. To the contrary, she says that they got rid of their major apologetic publication and have abandoned apologetics for Mormon Studies. I am still under interdict of talking about what may or may not be going on at the Maxwell Institute, but I thought that her take as an observer who is trying to follow the discussion closely was telling.

Although I cannot say more, I will say that I think Dehlin's version of the story grossly distorts his own role as a convenient and incidental pretext to what happened. Avance in a casual aside in her presentation hit somewhat closer to the truth than the Dehlin myth. We will have to see if her observation makes it into any sort of published version of her remarks.