The Angel and the Beehive: THE MORMON STRUGGLE WITH ASSIMILATION PDF
Preview The Angel and the Beehive: THE MORMON STRUGGLE WITH ASSIMILATION
The Angel and the Beehive The Angel and the Beehive The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation A R M A N D L. M A U S S University of Illinois Press Urbana and Chicago ©1994 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Manufactured in the United States of America C 6 5 4 3 2 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mauss, Armand L. The angel and the beehive : the Mormon struggle with assimilation / Armand L. Mauss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-252-02071-5 / ISBN 978-0-252-02071-1 1. Mormons—Cultural assimilation—United States. 2. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—United States—History. 3. Mormon Church—United States—History. I. Title. BX8643.C84M38 1994 289.3’0973—dc20 93-11328 CIP To my mother, Ethel Louise Lind, who taught me to love learning for its own sake & to my father, Vinal Grant Mams, for whom new ideas, however challenging, were more to be welcomed than feared Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Part 1 The Mormons as a Religious Movement 1. The Mormon Movement in Metaphor and Theory 3 Part 2 The Mormons as an Assimilated American Subculture 2. Mormons as a Case Study in Assimilation 21 3. Mormon Religious Beliefs at Midcentury 33 4. Mormon Social and Political Beliefs at Midcentury 46 5. Midcentury Mormon Peculiarity and Its Prospects 60 Part 3 Coping with Assimilation and Respectability 6. The Official Response to Assimilation 77 7. The Retrenchment Motif: Two Case Studies 102 8. The Grass-Roots Response to Official Retrenchment 123 9. Modern Mormon Religiosity and Its Consequences 141 10. Mormon Fundamentalism: The Institutional Matrix 157 Contents Vlll 11. Expressions of Folk Fundamentalism 177 12. The Angel and the Beehive: Present and Future 196 Appendix: Survey Methods and Measurements 215 References 229 Index 251 Preface History suggests that the overwhelming majority of religious movements fail to survive even one generation, to say nothing of enduring across the centuries. A religious movement that survives for nearly two centuries then, as has Mormonism, may offer the scholarly investigator some clues about what makes for the success and survival of some movements but not others. Not that there is any lack of literature on the religious move ments of history, including those which have arisen in North America, although, as Rodney Stark (1987) has pointed out, scholars have tended to give more attention to explaining (or explaining away) the failed religious movements than to understanding the durability of the successful ones. For the Mormon movement too, we have seen the emergence of a rich historical literature, especially during the past two or three decades. Yet most of that literature has emphasized the first century of Mormonism over the more recent period and historical description over sociological analysis. We have not seen much application of theoretical frameworks from social science that might explain either the development of the Mor mon movement itself or how well that development fits with theories about the evolution of new religious movements.1 Implicit in much of the extant literature is the theory (such as it is) that the unpopular Mormon movement, having failed in a desperate nineteenth-century struggle for religious and political autonomy, finally achieved success and respectability in North America by abandoning its most offensive practices and deliberately pursuing a policy of assimilation with the surrounding American culture. Such a perspective is, of course, accurate enough in the main, and it certainly accords well with the clas X Preface sical Weber-Troeltsch predictions about the assimilation of new religious movements as they are transformed from “sects” to “churches.” Yet there is much more to the story. Mormons in the United States largely achieved respectability as a church by midcentury, but the assimi lation of the Mormon movement has not continued apace as traditional theories have predicted. In many ways the past few decades have witnessed an increasing reaction of the Mormons against their own successful as similation, as though trying to recover some of the cultural tension and special identity associated with their earlier “sect-like” history. It is this retrenchment mode among Mormons of more recent decades that is the main theme of the present book. It is important to emphasize, however, that this work is not intended as a systematic modern history of Mormons or Mormonism, but rather as an application of theoretical ideas in an effort to help interpret general historical developments. Many of these developments have already been identified and documented by historians, though here they will be aug mented considerably by primary data and evidence original to this spe cific study. I have set out these theoretical ideas in part 1 of this book. Chapter 1 offers the reader a general overview and demonstrates the links between these ideas and some more general and abstract concepts in the sociology of religion. Part 2 focuses on the “Americanization” of the Mormons in North America. Chapter 2 reviews briefly the well-known history of that assimi lation process. Chapters 3 and 4 draw upon original survey data to dem onstrate just how fully assimilated Mormons had become by the middle of the twentieth century, not only in secular, civil matters but even in most religious beliefs and practices. Chapter 5 considers to what extent, and in what ways, Mormons ought still to be regarded as a people apart, a “pecu liar people.” Are Mormons really a kind of “ethnic group” (like the Jews), as some observers think, or have they already become too highly assimi lated for such a designation? Part 3 considers the Mormons’ reactions to their own successful assimi lation. The erosion of Mormon peculiarity, or distinctiveness, during the first half of this century has left a certain feeling of uneasiness or “blurred identity” among the Mormons. The church leaders have reacted to this feeling with various forms of retrenchment, in effect trying to call the Mormons back to their heritage as a truly distinctive people with a unique message. At the grass-roots level, the reaction has not been so clearly
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