Abstract
This 15-essay book reproduces lectures given in the endowed Tanner Lecture series initiated by leading Mormon thinkers. Walter Nugent described this as ‘a clever device for forcing non-Mormon historians to think seriously about Mormon history’ (p. 253). This has resulted in a wide variety of essays organized into four sections, viz., The American Religious Landscape, The Creation of Mormon Identities, The Study of Western Histories and the Study of Global Religions. Here I comment on but a few of hundreds of interesting issues raised by the swathes of historical description and analysis filling the 400 pages.
L. E. Schmidt’s ‘Mormons, Freethinkers, and the Limits of Toleration’ notes how these two perspectives found occasional common ground, not least against the ‘common enemy of the Protestant establishment’ in nineteenth-century America (p. 122). C. H. Cohen ponders emergent Mormon identities against those of Jews and Gentiles as part of understanding the place of covenants within Mormon thought, despite the fact that at the time of Mormon emergence in the 1820–30s ‘Jews were sociologically negligible’ in the Americas (p. 149). Elliott West’s exploration of children’s memories grown out of the earliest decades of Mormon life does not forget their emotions, not least of fear, or of one girl’s concern being more ‘with a full belly, not a faithful heart’ (p. 173). I much enjoyed Dell Upton’s ‘What the Mormon Cultural Landscape Can Teach Us’, for its grasp of how ‘the Church’s official landscape was meant to promote sociability’ and even ‘reorient’ converts’ ‘everyday lives’, even though some migrant Saints might wish to build their home after their Norwegian birthplace (pp. 224–9). His mention of the small Utah township of Ephraim reminded me of arriving there, almost randomly, on a festive day when many were in their Scandinavian heritage costumes: the welcome was delightful. That personal vignette has its more formal representation in George A. Miles’s account of ‘Mormon Stories: A Librarian’s Perspective’, which is an apt reminder of the almost genetic-culture of Mormons, at individual, family and Church level, to tell their stories, write them, turn them into testimonies and evangelize by linking all into the great salvation-history of God’s design, the LDS Plan of Salvation. This is why, perhaps, until recent decades it was often said that history functioned as theology for Latter-Day Saints. Younger and growing generations of formally trained Mormon scholars are, however, bringing formal theological qualifications to bear upon Mormon thought, and their work will, in due course, be highly germane for the realities underlying the topics that end the book, focused on such themes as D. B. Marshall on Mormons and ‘Post-Christian Canada’, Philip Jenkins on ‘Growth in Africa’ and J. J. Hanciles and the ‘New Shape of Global Christianity’. From the Outside Looking In is an accurate title that will open windows for historically minded non-LDS readers.