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Mormonism and history


The Mormon religion is predicated on what are said to be historical events such as the First Vision of Joseph Smith and the historicity of the Book of Mormon, which describes a detailed pre-Columbian history of the Americas. President Joseph Fielding Smith, the tenth LDS prophet, declared that "Mormonism, as it is called, must stand or fall on the story of Joseph Smith. He was either a prophet of God, divinely called, properly appointed and commissioned, or he was one of the biggest frauds this world has ever seen. There is no middle ground." As Jan Shipps has written, "Mormonism, unlike other modern religions, is a faith cast in the form of history," and until after World War II, Mormons did not critically examine the historical underpinnings of their faith; any "profane" investigation of the Church's history was perceived "as trespassing on forbidden ground."

Although traditional Christianity is likewise a history religion, few primary sources survive from two or three millennia ago, and biblical places such as Jerusalem, Jericho, and Bethlehem, are acknowledged to exist by scholars of every religious persuasion. Likewise, the Assyrian and Babylonian empires mentioned in the Bible are treated in all histories of the ancient Near East. By contrast, locations of Book of Mormon places are disputed even by Mormons, and the existence of those places is not acknowledged by any non-Mormon scholars. Martin Marty, a Lutheran scholar of American religion, has observed that LDS beginnings are so recent "that there is no place to hide....There is little protection for Mormon sacredness."

As Richard and Joan Ostling have written, "Mormons remember." There has been an official church historian since the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and "Mormon youths and their sisters are exhorted to keep journals as part of their religious commitment. Missionaries are reminded by their superiors that the journals represent a part of their sacred duties." The pioneer era is an especially fertile field for faith-promoting history. As Wallace Stegner has written, the "tradition of the pioneer that is strong all through the West is a cult in Utah." Mormons "tell and retell their stories of pioneer privations and persecutions." Mormon young people are often given the opportunity to pull a handcart through a patch of desert; Mormon children are early taught the miracle of the gulls, the story of seagulls that supposedly saved the crops of the earliest Utah pioneers from an invasion of crickets in 1848.


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