The Mormons are coming

To their respective followers, Mohammed and Joseph Smith are not the inventors of new denominations but restorers of the original, uncorrupted monotheistic tradition of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Even the language of the two faiths' central tenets is strikingly similar. In reciting the Shahadah, or principal declaration of faith, Muslims may say: "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His Messenger," or "I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God." One of the most frequent forms of "testimony" in a Mormon meetinghouse comes when a worshiper rises to declare: "I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God." Both religions make claims to absolute and universal truth, and those declarations are meant to reflect knowledge rather than belief in the ordinary theological sense, which may be tinged with doubt. In answering the oft-asked question, "Are Mormons Christian?" one might ask, only half facetiously, whether Muslims are Christian too.

Givens doesn't go anywhere near that far, but he's a rigorous and fair-minded scholar who handles some of the touchiest topics in Mormon history with grace and dexterity. As he admits, the question of whether Latter-day Saints can be considered Christians does not yield a universally acceptable or historically obvious answer, no matter what Mormons may claim. You might say that the answer depends on who is asking the question, and when. Throughout their church's relatively brief history, Mormons have been torn between a desire to separate themselves from other Christians and other Americans and a desire to assimilate and be accepted. The "dynamic tension" that Givens detects between these poles runs like an electrical current through all the other paradoxes and contradictions that he believes define Mormon culture.

If the assimilationist ethic is ascendant in Mormonism at the moment, with Mitt Romney apparently trying to sell himself to evangelical Christian conservatives as a slightly eccentric fellow traveler, the separatist tendency remains imprinted in the faith's cultural and theological DNA. At the very beginning of Smith's prophetic career, when he was a 14-year-old boy in the woods of western New York state, Jesus Christ personally appeared to him and instructed him to steer clear of all existing Christian churches, saying that "all their creeds were an abomination" in his sight.

Toward the other end of his short life, which ended with his "martyrdom" at the hands of an Illinois lynch mob in 1844, Smith began to formulate the most infamous theological ideas in Mormonism. These are many and various (they include the covenant of "celestial plural marriage," for example), but for sheer heresy nothing outdoes Smith's pronouncement that God did not create man from nothing, since God and man are eternal and coexistent spiritual entities. God is himself a perfected form of man, Smith taught; in fact, God used to be human, and after long ages of exaltation in the afterlife, men can become gods. As Givens observes, "It would be hard to conceive an idea ... more outrageous to Christian dogma, and more hostile to the very cosmology underlying a conventionally theistic universe."

Smith's theological vision, Givens notes, violates the traditional Judeo-Christian distinction between everyday experience and the sacred or transcendent sphere. If God, angels and human beings "are all of one species, one race, one great family," in the words of early Mormon philosopher Parley P. Pratt -- and if these entities appeared numerous times, in tangible, physical form, to a backwoods boy in 19th-century America -- then "the sacred distance at the heart of Western religious experience comes near to collapsing."

This particular sacrilege against conventional dogma is both the source of Mormonism's unique appeal and what makes it such a threat to older, more established denominations: If miracles and divine visitations came routinely to the Hebrews of the Old Testament, Smith demanded, why shouldn't they come to us? In recent decades, many evangelical Protestants and some Roman Catholics have warmed to the possibility of modern-day miracles and personal communication with the deity (over and above inherently private and subjective religious experiences, like visions and prayer). To some Mormons, this is evidence that their restored gospel is working its magic.

One of the central paradoxes of the Latter-day Saint movement, then, is that Mormons want to belong to a larger Christian fellowship when it's socially and politically convenient to do so, while hewing to a set of beliefs most Christians find outrageous and following a prophet who has told them they are the only true Christians. Givens quotes architectural historian Paul Lawrence Anderson on the peculiar design qualities of Mormon churches, which reflected "a delicate balancing act [of] wanting to be different, but not different enough to be marginalized."

Another of Givens' conundrums is that Mormons belong to the most hierarchical and authoritarian church this side of the Vatican, yet one that also has "fanatically individualistic" qualities; every Mormon, after all, is "vouchsafed the right to personal, literal, dialogic revelation with God." Mormons employ an epistemological certainty that may sound like the language of evangelical Protestantism -- "I know Joseph Smith is a prophet of God" -- but Smith's theology offers no "born again" moment of certain salvation. Exaltation and godlike perfection lie eons in the future, at the end of a long and difficult road of spiritual and intellectual learning.

Behind all those apparent contradictions, Givens discerns an overarching view of the universe as "essentially, as well as existentially, paradoxical," in the words of Mormon essayist Eugene England. No better example can be cited than the testimony of Nephi in the Book of Mormon, the purportedly ancient scripture that Smith claimed to have received from the angel Moroni in 1827, on a set of gold plates he apparently translated into pseudo-King James English by talking into his hat. Virtually alone among Abrahamic theologies, Mormon scripture interprets the fall of Adam and Eve as a providential act: "If Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden ... And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin."

Givens observes that in one stroke Smith cut through a problem that has troubled Talmudic and biblical scholars since the dawn of the Judeo-Christian tradition: Why did an all-knowing and all-powerful God allow his children to fall from grace? At the same time, in doing so Smith launched a morally simplistic, eternally optimistic theological tradition without much room for anxiety, tragedy or doubt. Mormonism has no need for the poetry of Milton or the philosophy of Augustine.

Givens is primarily concerned with how the paradoxes he finds in Mormon history and the development of Mormon thought have played out in the cultural realm, meaning both the anthropological and literary-artistic senses of that term. "People of Paradox" is aimed at an educated general readership, both Mormon and otherwise, but if you need to know more about the fantastical and violent story of Mormon origins, the lightning-rod figures of Smith and his successor Brigham Young, and the ordeals that led the Latter-day Saints from New York to Ohio, Missouri, Illinois and finally the shores of the Great Salt Lake, you're better off starting elsewhere. (Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton's "The Mormon Experience" is the standard work by LDS authors, while Richard and Jean Ostling's "Mormon America: The Power and the Promise" is the best book by outsiders. "No Man Knows My History," by ex-Mormon Fawn Brodie, remains unmatched among biographies of Joseph Smith.)

While the book's discussions of the piecemeal development of Mormon literature and art are fascinating -- I'm mildly curious about the novels of Levi Peterson and the films of Richard Dutcher, and there are several interesting Mormon poets -- his real heavy lifting comes in tackling the history of Mormon intellectual life. One of Givens' principal goals, I suspect, is to convince his readers that even when Mormonism was an all-white, Utah-based movement, it was always more diverse, complicated and internally divided than most outsiders realize.

Next page: "We can fake it, but we're always speaking a foreign language"