The Mormons are coming

This is clearly true. Although Mormons are closely associated with conservative Republican politics today, there's a long tradition of liberal, environmental and even feminist activism within the church. The late Arizona congressman Morris Udall and his brother, Stewart, a pioneering environmentalist who served as secretary of the interior under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, might be the most famous Mormon lefties, but they aren't alone. Utah was the second U.S. state or territory to permit women to vote (a year after neighboring Wyoming); perverse as it might seem to contemporary sensibilities, many women in polygamous 19th-century marriages also spoke up for women's rights.

Unlike most evangelical Protestants, Mormons embraced music, dance and theater as vital forms of community expression. The Salt Lake Theatre was completed before the great Mormon Temple was, and the traveling theaters known as "road shows" continued to roam rural Utah as late as the 1980s. The Mormon mania for social dances -- the "dancingest denomination in the country," once wrote Time magazine -- has bled into international ballroom competitions, where LDS-owned Brigham Young University has won numerous awards. From its modest parochial beginnings, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has risen to global prominence in classical and pop-classical music.

More substantively, Mormonism has always valued higher education, even in periods when evangelical Christians viewed it with suspicion. Utah residents have exceptionally high levels of educational achievement, and Givens claims that educated Mormons don't tend to fall away from faith to the degree other religious people do when they attend college. Furthermore, Mormons are not creationists, and the LDS church has never seen itself as hostile to modern science. Smith never proposed a literal reading of Genesis and specifically rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo, so the geological discovery that Earth is immensely old posed Mormons no difficulties. Darwinian evolution was more problematic, given the semi-divine nature of humanity in Smith's teachings, but Mormons have cautiously agreed that evolution might apply to other species.

As 19th-century explorers began to report discoveries of massive temples and cities hidden in the Mesoamerican jungle, Mormons seized upon the nascent science of archaeology, which promised to confirm the Book of Mormon's accounts of ancient American civilizations founded by itinerant Israelites. By its 1879 edition, the Book of Mormon came with extensive footnotes, correlating its place names with New World sites. The church actually sponsored an expedition in 1900 to search along the Magdalena River in Colombia for the site of Zarahemla, great city of the Nephites in Smith's received scripture.

Zarahemla was not found, and by the 1920s those geographical footnotes were gone. Givens performs a delicate balancing act in approaching the question of Book of Mormon scholarship and church historian B.H. Roberts, whom he views as almost a tragic hero of Mormon intellectual life. Roberts apparently never lost faith in the church and its teachings, but he was among the first Mormons to understand that neither archaeology nor any other science was likely to corroborate the far-flung, trans-historical narrative of the Book of Mormon.

Givens cites Roberts' "willingness to rigorously and honestly investigate" Book of Mormon anachronisms (such as the mention of horses, silk, steel and many other plants, animals and artifacts not found in pre-Columbian America), and to explore the possibility that it might have been plagiarized, as examples of the kind of intellectual independence too rarely found within the LDS church. Later, he criticizes a group of BYU-affiliated scholars whose goal is to prove the Book of Mormon's authenticity, noting that they are evading secular academic standards and "assuming rather than bracketing the supernatural dimensions of Mormon origins."

It seems clear that Givens is situating himself in this debate. If the question posed by his history is how far Mormons can engage with the gentile world while retaining their distinctiveness, his career would seem to be a case in point. Givens is both an active Mormon and a credentialed academic (he teaches literature and religion at the University of Richmond), and in "People of Paradox" he brackets the supernatural dimension rather than assuming it, as professional standards dictate. He never discusses his own religious faith in the book, and probably non-Mormons could read it without picking up the clear LDS signals. (It took me a while to notice that Givens almost always refers to Joseph Smith by first name, which is close to a dead giveaway.)

Even the fact that I feel the need to bring this up testifies to the still-awkward status of Mormons in American life. No one would be perturbed to discover that leading works on the history of Judaism were written by Jewish scholars like Hayim Ben-Sasson or Raymond Scheindlin; it would be surprising if they weren't. And I doubt anyone finds it strange that many of the leading figures in Catholic history, like Richard McBrien and Gerald O'Collins, are Jesuit priests. Why should Mormon history be different?

Well, because Mormon history is different, that's why. Judaism and Catholicism have long traditions of internal debate and intellectual engagement with the world, and within those faiths there is tremendous diversity of belief. Religious Jews and Catholics may believe various things that seem unlikely to outsiders, but they are not required to believe "in a set of scriptures of origin so implausible as to preclude serious engagement" by mainstream scholars, as Givens himself puts it. Mormonism may not stand or fall on a young-earth creation or on evolution, but it does stand or fall on the question of whether a 22-year-old man in Palmyra, N.Y., was given a gold-plated book of ancient scripture by an angel named Moroni and then -- let me say this one more time -- translated it with his face inside his hat.

Fortunately for the future of Mormonism, 180 years is just long enough that the same mythical scrim that protects the empty tomb of Jesus from debunkers has begun to descend over Joseph Smith. One might say that the "sacred distance" between man and God that Smith collapsed has pretty well been restored; with the sole exception of the 1978 proclamation admitting blacks to the priesthood, no Mormon prophet has announced a direct revelation in many years. While there is little or no historical, linguistic, genetic or archaeological evidence to support the Book of Mormon, neither the stories it spins nor the story of its discovery can be disproven at this point.

Givens argues that this paradoxical faith and its tormented history have now produced a distinctive ethnic culture that is buoyant and optimistic, but also oddly cloistered; that is both communitarian and fiercely individualistic; that can seem ultra-American at one moment and anti-American the next. People who grew up in Mormon society and remain committed to it, according to science-fiction author Orson Scott Card (probably the Mormon writer best known outside the LDS world), "are only nominally members of the American community. We can fake it, but we're always speaking a foreign language." That's pretty much how I saw those casserole-baking Mormon moms in our town; they were awfully nice to me, but they and I clearly did not belong to the same nation.

These days Mormonism really does speak foreign languages and has transcended the "American community"; there are close to a million Mexican Mormons, and almost as many in Brazil. (The kingdom of Tonga is 32 percent LDS, making it the most Mormon nation in the world.) Meanwhile, Salt Lake City, settled by Brigham Young and his dozens of wives on a promise of avoiding "trade or commerce with the gentile world," has a non-Mormon majority and a left-wing, secular mayor. Whether the cultural traits Givens describes can survive Mormonism's potential transformation into a world religion is an open question, but a lot more people are going to end up living next to Mormons in the years ahead. They don't usually bite.

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