American Nineteenth Century History, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2013.785194
Early Mormon Patriarchy and the Paradoxes of Democratic
Religiosity in Jacksonian America
Benjamin E. Park*
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Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Following the death of Joseph Smith, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints appropriated elements from their surrounding democratic
culture, especially tensions of hierarchy and exclusion, in an attempt to
consolidate the fledging Mormon movement through a vibrant patriarchal
structure. In doing so, they echoed a powerful strain in antebellum society that
feared the cultural changes taking place and worried that unfettered democracy
led to societal instability and religious anarchy. This paper examines how early
Mormon patriarchy directly engaged several of the central tensions in American
antebellum culture: the democratization of religion, the empowerment of
common people, the extension of racial rights, and the progression of female
power. Combined, these debates emphasize how the notion of the ‘‘Kingdom of
God’’ paradoxically dominated the Mormon image in the age of ‘‘the voice of the
people,’’ and represent a part of a multivocal conversation about the meaning and
extent of American democracy in the postrevolutionary era.
Keywords: Mormonism; democracy; gender; race
In 1894, American statesman Andrew D. White interviewed Russian author Leo
Tolstoy. According to a third-hand account, Tolstoy pressed White for more
information on the ‘‘American religion.’’ White, confused by the question, responded
that there was no state religion in the United States. Tolstoy clarified that he meant
‘‘the Mormon Church’’ – a characterization due not only to Mormonism being born
on American soil, but also to the distinctly American principles it supposedly
encompassed, especially in ‘‘social and economic relations.’’1 While the veracity of the
quote is contested, the sentiment of Mormonism as the ‘‘American religion’’ has
become a standard expression, and the argument that Mormonism embodied the
egalitarian nature of democratic culture has often been presented by many American
historians. Nathan Hatch, most notably, framed Mormonism as one of the early
republic’s most significant expressions of ‘‘religious populism, reflecting the passions
of ordinary people and the charisma of democratic movement-builders.’’ While
Hatch recognized the ironies of democratic consent – that democratic allegiances are
followed by submission to hierarchical structures – Mormonism was still a
democratic religion based on the power of common people. Others have followed
*Email: [email protected]
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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B.E. Park
this trend, echoing the common assumption that Mormon theology was American –
and thus, democratic – to its core.2
Yet, if Mormonism represented the virtues of America’s democratic tradition, it
also displayed its paradoxes. Rather than merely adopting the egalitarianism of an
ideal democracy, Latter-day Saint (LDS) leaders, especially following the death of
Joseph Smith, challenged and appropriated their surrounding democratic culture. In
doing so, they echoed a powerful strain in antebellum society that feared the cultural
changes taking place, worried that unfettered democracy led to instability and
anarchy, and sought to introduce a societal structure that brought order and control.
Frustrated with the chaos associated with the voice and authority of man, Mormons
sought the unmovable voice of God and the firmness of a strict centralized authority.
While Smith’s theology and practice exemplified these tensions, his death in 1844
introduced a vacuum of authority which allowed Brigham Young and the Quorum of
the Twelve Apostles, the ecclesiastical organization that drew the largest number of
Smith’s followers, to move Mormon thought toward an even more tenuous – if, in
the end, still porous – relationship with their surrounding culture.3
Particularly, Mormonism’s leaders, in their attempt to achieve cultural stability,
introduced a social framework that drew out of, but also dissented from, a vibrant, if
often subtle, patriarchal tradition within antebellum America. The Age of Jackson
was rife with questions of patriarchy, though these questions were pushed to private
and, often, religious spheres. ‘‘As white men increasingly freed themselves from the
constraints of public patriarchy,’’ Linda Kerber has explained, they maintained a
cultural system in which the ‘‘private privileges of patriarchy’’ were perpetuated.4
Patriarchy, much more than just the modern notion of male dominance, served as a
system of order that artificially structured society in a way that bolstered stability and
limited chaos. Mormonism, then, provides an acute example of how a religion
utilized these cultural anxieties.
This paper examines how early Mormon patriarchy, especially in the years
immediately following Joseph Smith’s death, directly engaged several of the central
tensions in American antebellum culture: the democratization of religion, the
empowerment of common people, the extension of racial rights, and the progression
of female power. Mormonism’s constructed society intertwined these tensions in ways
emblematic of nineteenth-century America; combined, they emphasize how the
notion of the ‘‘Kingdom of God’’ paradoxically dominated the Mormon image in the
age of ‘‘the voice of the people,’’ and represent a part of a multivocal conversation
about the meaning and extent of American democracy in the postrevolutionary era.5
***
Mormonism was founded on an ambiguous relationship with American culture: for
Mormons, truth was located in a prophet who spoke for God; for their American
neighbors, truth emerged through the voice of the people. Most who joined the faith
in its first decade descended from the revolutionary generation and were raised in a
period of great national pride following the War of 1812. This devotion to American
society was severely tested as Mormons were forced from their communities and were
unable to secure restitution from the local – and later, federal – governments. But
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despite these conflicts, they saw themselves as patriots committed to American ideals.
Shortly after Mormons were expelled from their settlement in Independence,
Missouri, Joseph Smith penned a revelation stating that God himself ‘‘established
the constitution of this Land by the hands of wise men whom [he] raised up unto this
very purpose.’’ But if the principles of America were inspired, the individuals then
holding office – those who failed to protect or compensate the Saints – were not; just
as Christianity had fallen into apostasy and needed a restoration, so too did the
nation denigrate into a decrepit state requiring divine recovery.6
This paradoxical tension played out most poignantly in the final year of Joseph
Smith’s life. Even as he campaigned for the presidency of America’s democratic
government, he was anointed ‘‘Prophet, Priest, and King’’ of a secretive organization
titled ‘‘The Kingdom of God and His Laws.’’ Nicknamed ‘‘The Council of Fifty,’’ this
organization operated as a government-in-embryo and was prepared to govern the
world’s population during the millennium. Two years previous, Smith printed an
editorial explaining how all governments of men ‘‘have failed in all their attempts to
promote eternal power, peace and happiness.’’ Even America, ‘‘which possesses
greater resources than any other, is rent, from center to circumference, with party
strife, political intrigues, and sectional interest.’’ The only solution was to turn
government into a divine kingdom, where ordained ministers with divine sovereignty
could execute pure justice; the voice of the people could never compensate for the
voice of God.7
When the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, led by Brigham Young, took control
after Smith’s death in 1844, this theme, due to the idea’s potential to centralize
authority and validate succession claims, only strengthened. Challenged by competing Mormon schisms, Young and the other apostles sought to vindicate their
authority by demonstrating how salvation was only achieved through their
ecclesiastical dominion. To accomplish this, they focused on hierarchical authority
rather than personal liberty, and packaged it in a way that emphasized patriarchal
control. While the details of the Kingdom of God and their attachment to temple
rites were kept secret from the public prior to Joseph Smith’s death, the Twelve not
only publicized that discourse but also made it central to their succession argument.
The priesthood-holding male, standing as a representative for God, was king and
ruler of the religious sphere, and the ecclesiastical, domestic, and even eternal worlds
were to be organized around him. And by emphasizing this patriarchal strain,
Mormons tapped into a deep cultural vein that sought social order through
unquestioned authority and centralized control.8
A paradox central to America’s democratic tradition is that even during the
Jacksonian era, often championed as a period of democratic fervor, many still feared
unfettered democracy. When addressing the Constitutional Convention in 1787,
Benjamin Franklin noted that ‘‘there is a natural inclination in mankind for a kingly
government,’’ even amidst the American republic.9 But this sentiment was not limited
to elite federalists; rather, it permeated American discourse as citizens worried about
the explosion of individual-based zeal. No less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson
warned:
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The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless . . . Citizens of feudal
states are alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy; and the older and
more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look with some terror at
our turbulent freedom.10
Indeed, as Gordon Wood claimed, the ‘‘experiment of democracy’’ led many
disillusioned to imagine the ideal society closer to kingdoms than pure democracies;
the culture following the American Revolution was ‘‘torn between contradictory
monarchical and democratic tendencies.’’11 During the very decade Mormonism
experienced its first problems with American society, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that
the ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’ was the greatest threat to American culture.12
These tensions fomented during the 1840s. Antipopulist movements responding
to Jacksonian politics loudly denounced democracy’s excesses. This political
upheaval, however, was hardly limited to politics; the same angst encroached upon
every facet of American life, including religion. As Amanda Porterfield has recently
demonstrated, religious leaders ‘‘tapped into a pervasive sense of self-doubt and
mistrust of the world,’’ and religious institutions ‘‘grew as much to manage
mistrustful doubt as to relieve it.’’13 These ideological strains had immediate political
implications. In Illinois, where the Mormon city of Nauvoo was located, many
reacted strongly against the two-party system, a debate that often found the
‘‘Mormon vote’’ at its center. Mormons had experienced threats from their neighbors
consistently during their previous decade in Missouri and were thus sympathetic to
the cause of taming radical democracy.14
The cultural upheavals in which Mormons participated were also rooted in a
profound societal change that had been taking place for two centuries. Going as far
back as John Locke’s critique of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, early modern thinkers
sought to design a new framework with which to structure society. The revolt against
monarchy, the divine right of kings, and a societal chain that located every individual
within a larger social structure based on heredity rather than merit, did not dismiss
the need for some form of cultural order. While Locke, for instance, noted that the
state of nature implied ‘‘one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is
reciprocal and no one has more than another,’’ he maintained that without some
social structure those rights would remain ‘‘unstable.’’15 The construction of a stable
societal compact, then, was a driving question for Locke and his intellectual
inheritors, especially in the young American republic.
Yet while much of this thrust, especially in America, worked against a
patriarchalism based on biblical heredity and the divine right of kings, residues of
patriarchal control remained. Carole Pateman has shown that while America’s
founders argued for a social contract, drawn from Locke, that contract always
privileged certain people over others, most especially men over women. ‘‘In contract
theory,’’ she explains, ‘‘universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a popular
fiction.’’ Stripped of its lofty rhetoric, ‘‘contract always generates political right in the
forms of domination and subordination.’’16 These imaginative constructions of social
order, then, reflect both an individual’s aims and goals as well as their culture’s
anxieties that influenced them; freed from the expectation to perpetuate heredity
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hierarchies, Americans, including Mormons, were left to reconfigure their own
artificial society in its place.17
The most dramatic way in which the Twelve utilized this tension was the creation of
fictive families and kinship networks through temple rituals termed ‘‘adoption,’’ a
practice that created both literal and artificial familial dynasties upon which the larger
ecclesiastical kingdom was to be built. While Smith introduced sealing ordinances
(rituals that sacralized unions, both monogamous and polygamous, for both time and
eternity) in his final years, Brigham Young and the Twelve furthered those rites and
implemented a ceremonial fosterage in which members of the church were ‘‘adopted’’
into the sacerdotal family of a principal Mormon leader, who then served as the
spiritual ‘‘father’’ of the newly solemnized dynasty. These practices not only established
spiritual kinship but also fostered reliance upon Young and the Twelve, developing the
camaraderie and obedience necessary to centralize authority. What Smith originally
introduced as esoteric and salvific rituals for eternity, Young expanded to include a
patronage system establishing an ecclesiastical, patriarchal hierarchy in the present.18
Young drew on contemporary themes and misgivings to bolster his ecclesiastical
claims by reaffirming the central importance of ‘‘kingship.’’ Just as Horace Bushnell
labeled his contemporaries ‘‘kings and queens of homespun,’’ Young argued that a
divine kingdom was at the heart of a stable religious society.19 Even in the
democratized culture of early America, the notion of kingdoms offered comfort
and stability, and could provide a unifying body to conjoin disparate people and
cultures. Indeed, early Mormons presented their kingdom rhetoric as the only
alternative to the anarchy of radical democracy. One early leader of the Church wrote
that it was ‘‘certain the Gentile world, with all its parties, sects, denominations,
reformations, revivals of religion, societies and association, are devoted to destruction’’ – a plea similar to the many antebellum reactions against destructive pluralism.
Mormonism offered refuge from this cultural instability. And when schismatic battles
threatened Mormonism in the aftermath of Joseph Smith’s death, Young capitalized
on the stability that his authoritative claims promised.20
‘‘I will first set in order . . . the true order of the Kingdom of God,’’ Young
proclaimed merely six months after Joseph Smith’s death, ‘‘and I will shew how to
make King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and how they will be organized.’’ A key to
Mormonism’s message, Young explained, was the organizing link of familial authority
through ecclesiastical lineage, an artificial hereditary construction not too dissimilar
to divine monarchy. ‘‘That blood was in [Smith] pure and he had the sole right and
lawful power, and he was the legal heir’’ to the prophetic mantle, Young pronounced.
But this divine line was more fictive than hereditary, as authority was passed from
Smith not to his sons but to the Twelve, who now possessed the only keys that could
grant eternal salvation. This ecclesiastical linkage, which maintained a very physical
line of authority through ordination, was crucial to the patriarchal social construct
offered in response to cultural anarchy. Exaltation was not an individual affair because
it required access to the Kingdom of God that only the Twelve could grant. ‘‘There is
blood running in the veins of the family,’’ Young exclaimed to a large gathering of
saints, many of whom would soon be ‘‘adopted’’ into his ecclesiastical lineage, ‘‘and I
know who has the blood and the Priesthood to carry the keys to the world.’’21
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Young juxtaposed his authority to the chaos in the overly democratic American
republic. ‘‘This Gentile race’’ – his terminology for non-Mormons, as opposed to
those adopted into Israelite lineage through ritual – ‘‘is devilism from first to last,
they are so far from being right that they would have an infidel for a President.’’ The
cause of their anarchy, he explained, was their republican zeal. ‘‘They all cry out
Republicanism and that [it] is for the Sons to rule their Fathers, Daughters to rule
their Mothers . . . and abuse the very authority that God has ordained for their
salvation.’’ Young likely meant ‘‘republicanism’’ as a reference to American social
mobility, an idea more closely synonymous with ‘‘democratic culture’’ than a
systematic engagement with nineteenth-century political concepts. Yet by contrasting
the necessity of the Twelve’s ecclesiastical control against anarchic culture, Young
ironically echoed a salient paradox at the heart of America’s democratic culture. His
rhetoric demonstrates not only a slight discomfort with antebellum democratic
culture, but also an overt challenge to the extremes of republicanism; he yearned for
the stability of the patronage of colonial America and feared the excesses of radical
democracy. Not all were satisfied with the ‘‘social revolution’’ accompanying
American independence, and coercion remained crucial to evangelical religion.22
By the establishment of a divine patriarch at the head of church and home, then,
Young offered a pivot point from which the rest of the cosmos circled.
Young’s success in establishing this milieu is demonstrated in a letter from George
Dyke, part of the militia group the Mormon Battalion, addressed to Young:
I am now an Orphan wandering through a wicked world without a Father of promise[.]
Shall my Days be numbered & my pilgrimage ended, & I go to the silent tomb without a
Father to call me forth from the deep sleep of death? or Shall I enjoy in common with
other citizens of the common wealth of Israel enjoy the legal rights of adoption[?] . . . I
know President Young it is a great thing for an unworthy saint to ask at the hands of the
highest authority on Earth & if you think it too great a condecention for you to accept
of me in your Family, then place me if you please in the Family & under the guarding
care of [fellow apostle] Amasa Lyman.
Dyke, like many in antebellum America, was seeking security in a world filled with
upheaval. Young’s message of adoption and hierarchy offered stability. Even if Young’s
personal family were too high to grasp, a less prestigious figure like Apostle Amasa
Lyman would do.23 The Kingdom of God offered an asylum from the religious,
political, and cultural uncertainty of the American republic.
While similar sentiments could be found in Joseph Smith’s own sermons and
private teachings, nothing approached the tenacity of kingdom-centered, lineagedriven discourse that appeared during the immediate post-martyrdom period. Joseph
Smith’s fragments of temple rituals and theology intended to anoint ‘‘kings and
priests’’ and extend exaltation to worthy followers; Brigham Young and the Twelve
expanded those teachings to solidify both their succession and the fledging faith
within a tumultuous climate. They drew on the fears of segments of American society
about the excesses of democracy. Hesitant of the path upon which American culture
was embarking, Smith’s successors synthesized the prophet’s theology through a
patriarchal prism and paved the way for later Utah theocracy. In doing so, they
American Nineteenth Century History
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vocalized American hesitancy toward the cultural revolution that, while originally
promising equality and empowerment, now appeared on the brink of collapse.
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***
At the heart of Joseph Smith’s theological revolution was a redefinition of the
afterlife. Mormonism’s unique heaven – based on material possessions, exalted
corporeality, and deified humans – offers a microcosmic view of what historians have
termed ‘‘divine anthropology.’’ It also provides perhaps the most potent lens through
which to interpret the tensions surrounding Smith’s successors, as they both drew
from and reacted against their larger culture while synthesizing their founder’s
teachings; it also demonstrates the reach of their patriarchal hierarchy, as religious
patronage was extended beyond death, which had a concomitant and reaffirming
influence on contemporary practice. By developing a theological cosmos in which
ecclesiastical authority transcended death and dominated the celestial worlds,
Brigham Young filled a vacuum of power and centralized authority in the here
and the hereafter.24
Mormonism appeared at the cusp of what Colleen McDannel and Bernhard Lang
described as the ‘‘modern heaven.’’ This theological shift, most popular at the folk
level yet never officially accepted by clergy, emphasized the continuation and
fulfillment of material existence, an increase of activities in a dynamic environment,
and a focus on human love.25 The epitome of this shift was the popular novel The
Gates Ajar, which outsold every novel in the nineteenth century except Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Written by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), the narrative boldly rejected
the popular theocentric heaven for an afterlife based in familial affections, social
relations, and the Victorian home. ‘‘Would it be like [God] to suffer two souls to
grow together here,’’ exclaimed fictional Aunt Winifred, ‘‘so that the day of separation
is pain, and then wrench them apart for all eternity?’’ The answer from the
proponents of this domestic heaven was a resounding ‘‘no.’’26
Aspects of this domestic heaven were seemingly present in the teachings of Joseph
Smith, who at times appeared a proponent of eternal sentimentalism. ‘‘If I had no
expectation of seeing my mother, brother[s], and Sisters and friends again,’’ he
proclaimed in 1843, ‘‘my heart would burst in a moment and I should go down to my
grave.’’27 Yet early Mormonism’s heaven was not a representative, let alone the apex,
of Victorian domesticity; rather, Mormon emotionalism was an outgrowth of
eighteenth-century notions of sentimentality and is in part a response to trauma,
whether the general trauma of dislocation and economic turmoil or the specific
trauma of frontier violence and high mortality in their early settlements.28 But more
importantly, Smith’s emphasis on eternal relationships stretched beyond the
immediate family: through the temple rituals of polygamy and adoption, Mormonism forged larger dynastic and patriarchal societies. Heber C. Kimball wrote that
these ordinances were meant ‘‘to bring us to an organization,’’ and once this
organization was in place, ‘‘we have the Celestial Kingdom here [on earth].’’29
Follower Benjamin Johnson later remembered Smith claiming the ‘‘great mission’’ for
the Saints was to ‘‘Organize a Nucli of Heaven’’ which would remain the centerpiece
of life after the grave.30 These rituals solidified temporal relationships, celestialized
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earthly existence, and set the foundation for eternal glories. Smith was not as
interested in continuing domestic love as he was in the salvific rites of a forged
society.
Yet more than a continuation of earthly societies and activities, the Mormon
heaven in part emblemized a period of unfettered democracy and upward mobility.
The early republic’s merging of Romantic individualism and radical advancement led
to an emphasis on self-reform. Jacksonian politics only solidified this American
notion of the ‘‘self-made-man,’’ cementing an age of individual progression.31
Nothing more epitomized this spirit of progress than Joseph Smith’s formulation of
man’s potential. ‘‘You have got to learn how to make yourselves Gods,’’ he famously
proclaimed, ‘‘in order to save yourselves and be kings and priests to God, the same as
all Gods have done – by going from a small capacity to a great capacity, from a small
degree to another.’’32 Smith’s scribe William Phelps wrote that the temple empowered
individuals to progress ‘‘from heaven to eternity; and from eternity to ceaseless
progression,’’ allowing humankind to move ‘‘from system to system; from god to god,
and from one perfection to another.’’33 Apostle Parley Pratt described the Mormon
heaven as ‘‘a field where, ambition knows no check, and zeal no limits; and were the
most ardent aspirations may be more than realized.’’34 In early Mormonism, the idea
of eternal ‘‘progress’’ was as literal as it was audacious.
However, kingdom rhetoric again came to dominate the discussion, reinterpreting the Mormon heaven as a counterbalance to democratic zeal. As experienced
through temple rituals, the celestial society was based on priesthood order, and
individual mobility was limited to the ecclesiastical tree in which one was found,
making both familial relations and ecclesiastical positions as important as individual
worth. Explaining to Newel Whitney the importance of these priesthood rites, Smith
promised ‘‘honor and immortality and eternal life to all your house . . . because of
the lineage of my Preast Hood,’’ implying that ecclesiastical chains rivaled personal
merit in significance.35 Utilizing kingdom rhetoric, disciple Joseph Fielding wrote
that in order to ‘‘obtain all the Glory I can . . . a Man’s Dominion will be as God’s is,
over his own Creatures and the more numerous the greater his Dominion.’’36 While
progression was possible, it operated within the larger celestial ‘‘kingdoms’’ of the
afterlife; this patronage was based on a heavenly social order that took precedence
over individual mobility.
These comparisons to contemporary intellectual themes do more than connect
early Mormon conceptions of heaven to the larger antebellum context: they
demonstrate the malleable nature of Joseph Smith’s religious legacy, enabling
multiple – and at times, seemingly contradictory – interpretations of his theology,
emblematic of the broader democratic culture rife with irony and paradox.37
Different Mormon thinkers in the late Nauvoo period – even those amongst the
Twelve – emphasized different themes in their individual formulations. Specifically,
they utilized Smith’s inchoate teachings as well as larger cultural tensions to support
their own claims. This tension is most aptly demonstrated in the juxtaposition of
Brigham Young and Parley Pratt.
As leader of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a majority of Young’s teachings
during 1844–1847 revolved around centralizing authority and defending the Twelve’s
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succession claims. As such, he emphasized the hierarchical order of heaven as a
blueprint for patriarchal authority on earth. ‘‘[We] have taken kingly power and
grades of the priesthood,’’ he proclaimed in 1847. ‘‘Those that are adopted into my
family and take me for their counselor, if I continue faithful I will preside over them
throughout all eternity.’’ Even in the afterlife, ‘‘I will stand at their head, and Joseph
will stand at the head of this church and will be their president, prophet of God to the
people in this dispensation.’’ Though Godhood was the eventual destination of
valiant priesthood holders, it was only achieved within an ecclesiastical hierarchy of
restraint and order.38
Young spoke out against individuals who were ‘‘jealous’’ of those above them and
failed to understand their role. He warned about those ‘‘who would even try to pass
right by me and go to Joseph thinking to get between him and the Twelve.’’ These
warnings, as obvious products of the succession crisis, distinctly affected the structure
of the afterlife. ‘‘I have heard Elders say they were not dependant upon any man,’’ he
continued; this was a mistaken position, ‘‘for I consider that we are all dependent one
upon another for our exhalta-tion [sic]& that our interest is insperably [sic]
connected . . . I hold the Keys over them through which they are to receive there
exhaltation’’ [sic]. To Young, patronage and stewardship were the epitome of heaven,
where joy was to be achieved through dominions and kingdoms. ‘‘If you wish to
advance [in the afterlife],’’ he concluded, ‘‘hold up the hands of your file leader &
boast him a head.’’39 His heaven was more a defense of ecclesiastical authority and
kingly government than an appeal for uninhibited progression and democratized
exaltation.
Following Young’s lead, Apostle Orson Hyde spoke of the postmortal ‘‘kingdom
of Jesus Christ’’ as a place where individuals would be resurrected to their ordained
‘‘stations’’ according to their earthly deeds, temple endowments, and adoptive
sealings. ‘‘A man in the Priesthood,’’ he explained, ‘‘has persons sealed to him in his
kingdom subject to him in the dominions of God.’’40 In a diagram outlining ‘‘the
order and unity of the kingdom of God,’’ Hyde depicted an ecclesiastical tree where
all who ‘‘received their [temple] washings and anointings’’ entered the celestial
heaven, but only within a hierarchical kingdom based on priesthood authority.
‘‘Many are called to enjoy a celestial glory,’’ Hyde summarized, ‘‘yet few are chosen to
wear a celestial crown, or rather, to be rulers in the celestial kingdom.’’ The celestial
organization was not merely based on personal merit, but on a hierarchical system of
priesthood keys and genealogies.41
However, apostle Parley Pratt continued to emphasize Victorian sentimentality
and domesticity. ‘‘Heaven,’’ as he succinctly defined it, was ‘‘a planetary system where
there is no death, sickness, pain, want, misery, oppression, ignorance, error, doubt,
fear, sin or sorrow.’’42 In Pratt’s heavenly utopia, the family, not just the priesthood,
was at the center of resurrected humanity; even wives played a crucial, if subservient,
role. ‘‘The celestial order is designed not only to give eternal life,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but also
to establish an eternal order of [the family], founded upon the most pure and holy
principles of union and affection.’’43 In his Autobiography, Pratt enthusiastically
remembered learning from Joseph Smith the principle of eternal sealing, and that:
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the wife of my bosom might be secured to me for time and all eternity; and that the
refined sympathies and affections which endeared us to each other emanated from the
fountain of divine eternal love . . . that we might cultivate these affections, and grow
and increase in the same to all eternity.’’44
While Brigham Young taught that the label ‘‘father’’ in the celestial kingdom was
merely a symbolic term for the priesthood leader, Pratt saw the literal family unit as
central to the larger kingdom and urged saints to be sealed to their biological
families.45 Indeed, Pratt was not among those who accepted adopted families into his
own patriarchal kingdom.46
Even more than the Victorian family centrism, Pratt’s heaven symbolized the
perfection of domestic sensibilities. It was ‘‘intelligence, wisdom, goodness, love,
peace,’’ he wrote, that ‘‘eminate from the fountain of life and existance, and flow out
through all the branches of family organization both in heaven and earth.’’ Pratt
summarized the afterlife as a place where ‘‘the exalted throne of the celestial heavens
. . . to the least member of Christ’s family on the earth’’ are all a part of ‘‘a kingdom
without a jar or scism; a family of which all the members are happy.’’47 For Pratt,
eternal progression was not just about increasing dominions, but developing human
sensibility. When writing about love, he wrote that:
the very germs of these Godlike attributes . . . only need cultivating, improving,
developing, and advancing by means of a serious of progressive changes’’ in the next life,
until they finally ‘‘arrive at the fountain ‘Head,’ the standard, the climax of Divine
Humanity.48
While for Young, heaven was about kingdoms, dominions, and hierarchical structure,
Pratt understood it as the continuation and unity of human relationships, the
physicality of love, and the exaltation of earthly pleasures.
These different viewpoints were not, of course, mutually exclusive; indeed, Pratt
helped establish the symbolic kingdom that Brigham Young emphasized, and Young
at times echoed the celestial sentimentality at the heart of Parley Pratt’s vision.
However, their differing efforts to interpret, expand, and synthesize the particulars of
Joseph Smith’s larger vision exemplify the dynamic nature of early Mormonism. They
also give insight into the dynamic American culture they both drew from and reacted
against, for their ideas had an immediate context and were speaking to and accepted
by an audience with strong cultural assumptions. The idea of what the celestial
kingdom entailed was a developing concept, closely tied to broader intellectual
currents and ambiguous enough to be interpreted within differing theological
constraints. This dynamic framework allowed Mormon theology to flower in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The Mormon conceptualization of heaven
continued to draw upon cultural themes while at the same time critiquing
contemporary society, a process that remained long after the antebellum period.
More than merely maintaining eternal patronage after death, however, Mormonism’s patriarchal cosmos became increasingly racialized. Beyond centralizing
ecclesiastical control, imposing a heavenly hierachy, and, as will be discussed later,
limiting female potential, Brigham Young sought to stabilize cultural balance within
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the Church through a racial restriction tethered to the formalizing of priesthood
authority and altering the social order of earth and heaven. Joseph Smith bequeathed
a checkered legacy with African Americans that contained seeds for different
trajectories of racial inclusion or exclusion. On the one hand, he offered new
scripture with complex narratives concerning race: his Book of Mormon depicted the
unfaithful civilization obtaining a ‘‘skin of blackness’’ as a result of iniquities, and his
Book of Abraham depicted Pharoah, the King of Egypt, as a descendent from the
‘‘loins of Ham’’ and ineligible for the priesthood.49 Yet Smith was also a moderate
abolitionist and believed that if one were to ‘‘change [the blacks’] situation with the
whites . . . they would be like them.’’50 Concerning slavery, he claimed, ‘‘it makes my
blood boil within me to reflect upon the injustice, cruelty, and oppression of the
rulers of the people’’; when he ran for president in 1844, he aimed for the gradual end
of slavery by 1850.51 But most importantly, Smith ordained a number of black men to
the priesthood and demonstrated a progressive view of racial inclusion within the
Mormon cosmos prior to his death.
Brigham Young maintained racial priesthood integration for the immediate
aftermath following Smith’s death. Referring to one black priesthood leader in
Massachusetts named Walker Lewis in March 1847, Young claimed ordination has
‘‘nothing to do with the blood for [from] one blood has God made all flesh . . . we
[have] one of the best Elders an African in Lowell,’’ even adding that ‘‘we don’t care
about the color.’’52 However, this progressive policy did not last. Partly as a result of
Young’s fears of interracial marriage – one Massachusetts member soon wrote the
prophet informing him that Lewis’s son had married a ‘‘white girl’’ and asked ‘‘if this
is the order of God or tolerated in this Church [i.e.,] to ordain Negroes to the
Priesthood and allow amalgamation’’53 – and partly to squelch succession claims
proffered by a black member during the migration to Utah, Young appropriated
contemporary racial theologies to bar black men from the priesthood, limit black
members’ access to temple rights, and even, at times, sanction slavery.54 By the time
the church was established in Utah, Young’s racial policy was clear: ‘‘Any man having
one drop of the seed of Cane in him Cannot hold the priesthood & if no other
Prophet ever spake it Before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ.’’55 The
resulting policy of restriction would last for over a century.
Of course, Young’s drift from moderate egalitarianism to racial exclusion partly
resembled the trajectory of several other religious movements in early America.
Baptist and Methodist churches were especially fraught with this tension, and many
congregations eventually split at the very time Young was instilling Mormonism’s
racial policy. Though many movements in the immediate postrevolutionary period
worked toward progressive racial positions, a backlash against what many saw as the
excesses of racially egalitarian culture led many to back away from their tentatively
radical beginnings. Even as Americans started to draw from the growing science of
genetics and biology, the racial classes of Jacksonian society became further
entrenched.56 American religionists came to understand their own spiritual identity
and citizenship based on their own racial makeup, and their imagined social compact
maintained racial distinctions and hierarchies.57
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At the heart of much of this retrenchment was often the issue of miscegenation, as
the mixing of races forced many to reconsider the extent of racial equality.58 These
intersections of racial ideas and religious principles shaped spiritual worldviews as
much as they did legal precedents. For Mormons, matters of race had enormous
significance because the contours of their now-cosmological priesthood transcended
the earthly sphere and affected the heavens; a culture that was revolted by mixed-race
kinship caused problems for a theology that emphasized forging links between
families and a patriarchal kingdom based on artificial lineages.59 A desegregated
heaven was not an option, and so Mormons adopted cultural ideas of exclusion in
both priesthood ordination and sacred rituals. Even if Joseph Smith laid the
groundwork for a more open ecclesiastical corpus, his successors restricted its
parameters so as to preserve what they felt were necessary racial boundaries.
Thus, Young and his colleagues appropriated their surrounding environment and
added their own theological twist that established a foundation for priesthood
exclusion that would last long after Young’s battles over succession; their patriarchal
culture mandated a cosmos in which stability was achieved through restriction and
structure. But more importantly, this cultural evolution exemplifies a portion of the
dynamic religious response to racial integration in the Jacksonian period. The
democratic culture of antebellum America provided both the cause for angst as well
as the materials for a response to that angst. This dynamic – and at times, tenuous –
relationship formed the core of not only Mormon conceptions of heavenly and
priesthood authority, but also the thriving Mormon movement in general.
***
Few developments during the early republic better represent the paradoxes of
America’s democratic tradition than the battle over the place of women in American
society. Long after Abigail Adams urged her delegate husband to ‘‘remember the
ladies,’’ women largely maintained a subservient role in both the body politic and
religious pews. But change did occur, even if it was in complicated and uneven ways.
Because Mormon conceptions of patriarchy prove a potent example particularly
fraught with the tensions between empowerment and authority, an extended
examination offers an important glimpse into American religious democratization.
One of the central paradoxes of Joseph Smith’s prophetic career was his seemingly
conflicting message concerning women during the final years of his life – conflicts
that, in some ways, both mirrored and critiqued larger cultural issues surrounding
gender and religion. On the one hand, Smith appeared to have vested greater power
and authority in the women of the church through the organization of the female
Relief Society, principles about exaltation through eternal marriage, and the temple
ordinances introduced before the LDS temple was finished. On the other hand, Smith
also commenced the practice of polygamy – a system seemingly destined to exalt the
husband and debase the wives. This paradox was never completely solved before
Smith’s death, likely because much of his theology was elaborated in secret and Smith
was never afforded the chance to publicly and systematically combine the two strains
of his theology; but these varying tensions provided numerous trajectories of
gendered power that the Mormon tradition could follow.60
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While no other American religion at the time practiced polygamy, tensions
inherent within the practice mirrored those of its contemporary society. Historians
have long noted the complex status of women in the early republic, as well as the
irony that, while Americans were busy expanding the religious, political, and
economic rights of white men, they were at the same time engaged in a far-reaching
discursive effort to strengthen and naturalize the supposedly inherent inferiority of
women. This was especially the case in religion, with examples ranging from the strict
patriarchal system developed in the Kingdom of Mathias, the disenfranchisement of
women amongst North Baptists, the contests over women’s preaching rights in
American Methodism, the prophetic leadership of Ann Lee, or even the Moravian’s
gendering of deity as female. Throughout the antebellum period, some women
claimed authority while others were relegated to the back pews, illustrating a
profound ambivalence toward the role and standing of women.61
In March of 1842, Smith oversaw the creation of the Female Nauvoo Relief
Society, an organization of women designed primarily to help the city’s poor; this
female institution held potential to rival contemporary movements like the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union and the Female Antislavery Society in its robust activity
to challenge cultural ills. And while overtly temporal in nature, the Relief Society was
steeped in deep theological roots of empowerment that set it apart from
contemporary groups. ‘‘The Society should move according to the ancient Priesthood,’’ Smith proclaimed at one of the early meetings, and the Mormon prophet
described the women’s society as central to his efforts ‘‘to make of this Society a
kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day – as in Pauls day.’’ (Smith’s use of the gendered
‘‘priests’’ here is often balanced with his use of ‘‘priestesses’’ and ‘‘queens’’ elsewhere.)
The prophet provided the group nearly complete autonomy to ‘‘separate from all the
evils of the world.’’62 This extension and authorization of female responsibilities
promised to empower women in ways similar to the more progressive religions in
antebellum America.
At the same time, of course, Joseph Smith introduced the controversial practice of
plural marriage to a small group of confidants. But while polygamy intrinsically
promoted a strong – and to many, antiquated – sense of patriarchy rooted in the
importance of patriarchal control, the framework through which both Smith and
some of his followers understood it emphasized its potential to increase companionate marriage and similarly mirrored the surrounding domestic culture. In a letter
written to a prospective plural wife, Smith wrote how ‘‘happiness is the object and
design of our existence, and will be the end thereof if we pursue the path that leads to
it’’ – implying that polygamy was designed to bring ‘‘happiness’’ to both the husband
and the wife.63 Before Smith’s death, many other Mormons understood the sealing
covenant in a similar way. Eliza R. Snow, Mormonism’s poetess and plural wife of
Joseph Smith, wrote only months after their marriage that it implied ‘‘one eternal
wreath of fate/As holy beings join.’’64 Apostle Parley Pratt, also only months after his
introduction to polygamy, explored his feelings on celestial marriage in an essay titled
‘‘Intelligence and Affection’’: ‘‘The fact is, God made man, male and female; he
planted in their bosoms those affections which are calculated to promote their
happiness and union,’’ he wrote. Marriage – even polygamous marriage – was
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designed to be the sentimental apex for both genders. ‘‘From [the marriage] union of
affection,’’ Pratt wrote, ‘‘springs all the other relationships, social joys and affections,
diffused through every branch of human existence.’’ Pratt understood polygamy to be
a marital structure through which love could be extended to a much greater number
of people.65 Even if the women were largely silent in this discussion, save for the rare
female voice like Snow, the early understandings of Mormonism’s marital theology
pointed in varied and diverging ways.
Furthermore, plural marriage was not only understood as affectionate but also
empowering. In an 1843 revelation designed to both chastise and instruct Smith’s
reluctant wife Emma, the language was powerful in its promises to those who entered
into this unique marriage covenant:
It shall be said unto them ye Shall come forth in the first resurrection; and if it be after
the first resurrection, in the next resurrection, and shall inherit thrones, kingdoms,
principalities, and powers, dominions all heights and depths . . . Then shall they be
Gods, because they have no end, Therefore Shall they be from everlasting to everlasting,
because they continue, Then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto
them. Then Shall they be Gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject
unto them.66
The revelation’s emphasis on the plural ‘‘they’’ reaffirmed the joint nature of power
and blessings promised to both men and women. (This revelation also contained
harsh language to Smith’s wife Emma, thereby encapsulating the paradoxical and
contested terrain of Mormon female empowerment and subjugation within one
potent text.) This power was solidified in the temple ordinances Joseph Smith
introduced to followers from 1842 to 1844. While these temple rites were based on
and, according to one recent historian, ‘‘translated’’ from Masonic rituals, Smith
significantly broke Masonic tradition by allowing women into the practice. In the
temple, women were not only washed and anointed queens and priestesses, but they
performed the washing and anointing themselves. While it would be incorrect to
interpret this participation as Smith extending the all-male priesthood to women, it
does signify female inclusion in what one historian has called a ‘‘cosmological
priesthood’’ that granted significant authority through these temple rituals. The
crowning temple ordinance included husband and wife washing, anointing, and
blessing each other as kings and queens of the celestial world.67
Indeed, Joseph Smith’s final years provided a possible trajectory toward female
empowerment akin to the more radical expressions in antebellum America, like the
female divinity of the Moravians and Shakers or the female activism of Methodists.
As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the Revolution opened a space for female
participation in public practice with numerous discursive and institutional reform
projects. Women had made numerous strides in American religions during the
antebellum period, including hundreds taking up itinerant preaching, even if this
new female movement was focused more on validating their female nature than
eliminating cultural gender roles.68 Mormon women no doubt felt similarly
empowered in Nauvoo as they witnessed their role and stature within the movement
grow. Female developments were made within a religious environment that
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emphasized charisma and destabilized the ecclesiastical and doctrinal foundations of
previous generations – epitomized in the interweaving of spiritualism, a movement
that emphasized rebellion against rigid authority, with women’s rights.69 Yet at the
same time, Mormon women’s rise to power occurred within a structure that thrived
on authority, orthodoxy, and priesthood.
These cultural challenges also introduced new understandings of familial
relationships, especially the role of women within the family. Communitarian
experiments like the Shakers and Oneida Community offered a reformulated
conception of the family as the very center of their cosmology. Mormonism’s
polygamous and adoptive practices were related to these fringe movements, but they
also indicated the more mainstream trends that extended definitions of affection and
allegiance within familial relationships similar to those that took place within
transatlantic Methodism. Mormons invoked a language of romantic, ecstatic love to
express their ideas of marital theology and religious rites that echoed contemporary
conceptions of family, love, and authority. These tensions exhibited paradoxes found
at the center of democracy, relationships, and religion in antebellum America by
maintaining, on the one hand, a hierarchical ecclesiology and order and, on the other
hand, a progressive sense of equality, sentimentality, and freedom.70
But if Mormonism represented emerging female authority and empowerment, it
also mirrored the backlash against female reform, further demonstrating the
paradoxes of democratic culture. While the immediate postrevolutionary period
gave rise to more openness and liberty for women, the antebellum period also
introduced a retrenchment of female rights. Rosemary Zagarri has noted that by 1830
– the year Mormonism was founded – the politicization and empowering of women
became seen as a liability for America’s democracy, and repercussions were felt in
both political and religious spheres. While some evangelical faiths continued
promoting female empowerment, others promoted a biblical vision of restored
patriarchy. The Kingdom of Matthias, for instance, while an extreme case with
limited influence, is still symptomatic of a larger cultural backlash against assertive
women in Jacksonian America.71
When Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve took control after Joseph
Smith’s death, these cultural influences of retrenchment came to the foreground.
They centralized ecclesiastical control by debasing all potential threats to authority –
including women. As a result of several factors, Young disbanded the Relief Society at
a time when over 2000 women were actively taking part; the society would not be
reestablished until over two decades later.72 And while women still participated in
temple ordinances, the rites were administered in and understood as part of a much
more patriarchal framework. Rather than husband and wife anointing each other to
be kings and queens in the world of glory, the presiding priesthood holder would
anoint the husband as ‘‘a King and Priest unto the most High God’’ and the wife as ‘‘a
queen and Priestess unto her Husband.’’73
These rituals implied a deeper message: the loss of the woman’s theological
position within the Mormon cosmos. While Joseph Smith’s ideal heaven was based
on the sealing of a king and queen – or, more accurately, a king and queens – with
Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve the center of the kingdom was the
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honored patriarch. The plural ‘‘they’’ of Smith’s exaltation gave way to the gendered
‘‘he’’ in Mormon discourse. Even Eliza R. Snow, who previously mused on the
sentimental and egalitarian nature of Mormon marriage, took on a more malecentric tone in her poetry after her sealing to Young. For example, in an 1845 poem
honoring her brother titled ‘‘A Patriarchal Ode,’’ she penned, ‘‘Blest is the man o’er
his household presiding,’’ capturing a detachment between husband and wife that was
missing in her earlier sentimental work.74 This focus tinged much of Mormon public
discourse and understanding. After nearly five decades of polygamy, LDS author
Edward H. Anderson wrote that marriage was ‘‘one of the chief means of man’s
exaltation and glory in the world to come, whereby he may have endless increase of
eternal lives, and attain at length to the power of the Godhead’’; the implications for
women was nowhere in his consciousness.75 The man was now the center of Mormon
theology, and women were deemed subordinate.
Indeed, whereas the developing female empowerment in the last two years of
Joseph Smith’s life could be seen as an extension of antebellum America’s awakening
women’s movement, the retrenchment during Brigham Young’s tenure was rooted in
the cultural reaction to that feminist awakening. Victorian America was paradoxically
a period of growing egalitarianism and conservatism. On the one hand, some
interpreted democracy to mean the equality of gender roles, and reform movements
sought to accomplish that aim; on the other hand, male figures feared the loss of their
authority over the traditional family and worried that gender equality led to domestic
anarchy. Suffragist Sarah Grimké wrote in her famous – and infamous – Letters on the
Equality of the Sexes that men must ‘‘take their feet from off our necks, and permit us
to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.’’76 Countering
this belief, foreigner Alexis de Toqueville observed, ‘‘when the condition of society
becomes democratic . . . the power which the opinions of a father exercise over [his
family] diminishes.’’ Furthermore, the ‘‘inevitable consequence is a sort of familiar
intimacy, which renders authority less absolute and which can ill be reconciled with
the external forms of respect.’’77 Similar to the fears of Jacksonian democracy,
reactions against gendered equality pushed female rights into the private domain.
In many ways, Mormon patriarchy was, as one historian termed it, a ‘‘reactionary
movement’’ to these larger cultural tensions.78 Post-Joseph Smith Mormonism
utilized not only the antebellum backlash against feminism, but also drew from the
ideals of colonial American patriarchy, the American social order predating the
radical democratic culture of the early republic. Similar to Matthias and other
primitivist movements, Mormon leaders claimed the only pattern that could correct
America’s domestic ills was a return to Old Testament societal values. ‘‘When
parentage is established after a wholesome and righteous order, the consequence will
be felt in every social and civil organization,’’ wrote Apostle Orson Spencer. ‘‘The
family order which God established with Abraham and the Patriarchs . . . was a
transcript of a celestial pattern,’’ and must be followed to ensure stability. Patriarchy,
he continued, ‘‘is the only order practiced in the celestial heavens, and the only
peaceful, united, and prosperous order that will endure, while man-invented orders
and devices will utterly deceive and perish with the using.’’79 The American home was
to be based on the biblical order.
American Nineteenth Century History
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The result of this patriarchal focus meant a profoundly subservient role for
women in the ecclesiastical sphere. Apostle Orson Pratt, in the first public discourse
on polygamy, proclaimed, ‘‘Let no woman unite herself in marriage with any man,
unless she has fully resolved herself to submit herself wholly to his counsel, and to let
him govern as the head.’’80 Plural wife Belinda Marden Pratt explained how:
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in the Patriarchal order of family government, the wife is bound to the law of her
husband. She honors him, ‘calls him lord,’ even as Sarah obeyed and honored Abraham.
She lives for him, and to increase in his glory, his greatness, his kingdom, or family.81
The woman’s primary role was to enable her husband’s exaltation and progeny.
Brigham Young asked, ‘‘What is the glory of a woman? It is her virginity until she
gives it into the hands of the man that will be her Lord and master to all eternity.’’82
Rather than being co-dependent beings, queens alongside their kings ruling over
eternity, or even the Victorian image of husbands and wives working side by side with
equal worth in a companionate marriage, the heavenly order of domesticity was
grounded in male dominance and female subservience.
These staunch patriarchal views severely curtailed Mormon sentimentality within
marriage, even in the bedroom. ‘‘You wouldn’t plant even a squash seed in the Fall,’’
Apostle Orson Hyde preached in 1857; likewise, sexual intimacy was only meant to
accomplish the woman’s central purpose: human propagation and the expansion of
the patriarch’s kingdom. This may rob a family of the intimacy expected within
Victorian America, where a growing discourse of affection aimed to strengthen the
bonds of love within companionate marriages, but Mormons were taught that those
fancies stemmed from a false and animalistic understanding of relationships. ‘‘It is
true that goats it is said will have sexual intercourse within fifteen minutes of the
moment when the kid is born,’’ Hyde further asserted. ‘‘Monkeys also, as some
writers affirm are as debased in their practices, but most of the lower animals, may
give us a lesson.’’ Marital relations were never meant to overshadow the authority of
the presiding patriarch. ‘‘I say suppose a family, where there is no intercourse of this
[romantic] kind, only with the prospect of having children born, – That family can be
governed.’’ This model, consciously built on the ‘‘ancient model’’ – and preventing
‘‘insubordination in the wife to her husband, & in the children to their parents’’ – was
a direct challenge to the affectionate culture then spreading across America.83
Yet within this patriarchal structure, Mormon women still exemplified one of the
ironies of America’s democratic culture: even as they were forced from the public
sphere, their increased authority in the private realm and their participation in
benevolent associations highlighted their maintained influence in antebellum culture.
Catherine Brekus has noted how ‘‘Mormon women were free to make choices’’ even
as ‘‘they exercised that freedom within a religious environment that strongly
encouraged them to cultivate the supposedly ‘feminine’ values of piety, self-denial,
and obedience.’’84 The lived realities resulting from polygamous marriages often
made women the sole adult in their homestead by caring for children and property as
if they were the head of the family, which in turn provided them more social power. It
also did not necessarily curtail female ambitions, even if it took several decades before
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women could fully articulate what they saw as the positives of their system. Emmeline
B. Wells, a polygamist wife and women’s activist, wrote that polygamy ‘‘gives women
the highest opportunities for self-development, exercise of judgment, and arouses
latent faculties, making them more truly cultivated in the actual realities of life, more
independent in thought and mind, noble and unselfish.’’85
Women in Utah also took advantage of their system by increasing female
education rates, building tight-knit female communities, organizing female societies,
and becoming the second territory, behind only Wyoming, to give women the
franchise. They disintegrated the boundaries of public and private, featured women
in public debates over polygamy, and granted them the freedom to act as agents in
other areas of their lives. Helen Mar Whitney, who was sealed to Joseph Smith at the
age of 14 but grew to maturity as the plural wife of another Mormon leader in Utah,
later wrote that she ‘‘could say truly that [polygamy] had done the most towards
making me a Saint and a free woman in every sense of the word. . . . [I]t has proven
one of the greatest boons – a blessing in disguise.’’ Though likely unintentional, this
evolution of female empowerment mirrors the ironies of America’s intersections
between religion, gender, and democracy, as the slow, uneven march toward increased
equality took unexpected turns and developments.86
Such was the Mormon response to the American democratic culture that gave
birth to the women’s rights movement. The LDS leaders who succeeded Joseph Smith
both reacted to and drew from an American environment faced with new questions
on gender, and their responses mirrored the ironies of their surrounding climate.
Their authoritarian and patriarchal structure offered stability and new possibilities
for the women and men involved. It represented not only the dynamic nature of
Mormonism’s familial relationship – especially in the post-Joseph Smith period – but
also the paradoxical nature of the surrounding democratic culture.
Conclusion
By the time Brigham Young and the LDS Church settled in Utah Territory, the
transformation to theocracy was near complete, even if lived experiences remained
dynamic; several decades of isolation from the rest of the United States further
cemented their strained connection with American culture. Yet, the most important
lesson in Mormon tradition’s turn to theocracy was its ability to balance both the
utilization and rejection of their broader culture. Antebellum America was filled with
both celebrations and misgivings concerning the democratic experiment, and there
were as many who feared advancements in religious liberty, women’s empowerment,
and domestic equality, as those who celebrated it. Even in Joseph Smith’s lifetime,
Mormonism drew from each side of the tension; but in seeking to establish an
authoritative faith following the death of their founding prophet, Smith’s successors
took advantage of what was deemed the pitfalls of America’s culture, and perhaps
their embrace of these paradoxes at the heart of democratic culture only makes their
description as the ‘‘American religion’’ all the more apt.
American Nineteenth Century History
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Matthew Bowman, Rachel Cope, Terryl Givens, Matthew Grow, Amanda
Hendrix-Komoto, Robin Jensen, Christopher Jones, Patrick Mason, Michael O’Brien, Sarah
Pearsall, Jonathan Stapley, John Turner, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for numerous critiques
and suggestions. An early version of this paper was presented in a forum with the Joseph
Smith Papers Project staff, and appreciation is herein expressed to all those who provided
excellent feedback, especially Mark Ashurst-McGee, Jill Derr, and Andrew Hedges.
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Notes
1. Improvement Era (Salt Lake City), February, 1939. For the problems with the Tolstoy
account, see Fetzer, ‘‘Tolstoy and Mormonism.’’ It is likely that Yates used the Tolstoy
‘‘quotation’’ to build Mormonism’s case for ‘‘American-ness’’ in a period of reconciliation
with the American nation.
2. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, esp. 113–22. For Mormonism as
exemplifying American religion and culture, see Wood, ‘‘Evangelical America and Early
Mormonism’’; Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty; Juster, Doomsayers, 260–1; Bloom, The
American Religion.
3. For a general overview of the ‘‘succession crisis’’ following Smith’s death, see Givens and
Grow, Parley P. Pratt, 221–41; Turner, Brigham Young, 110–43.
4. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies, 12.
5. For ‘‘democracy,’’ I do not mean an abstract notion of equality and representation, but
rather, as Sean Wilentz put it, ‘‘a historical fact, rooted in a vast array of events and
experiences, that comes into being out of changing human relations between governors
and the governed.’’ Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, xviii. Marvin Hill’s Quest for
Refuge argued that early Mormonism dissented from American democratic culture and
rejected the nation’s increasingly pluralistic society; in doing so, however, he homogenized
both America’s cultural pulse as well as Mormonism’s response by depicting an abrupt
rupture. In this article, I argue that Mormonism was more of an embodiment of, rather
than dissent from, America’s democratic experience.
6. Joseph Smith, Revelation, December 16, 1833, in Revelations and Translations, Volume 1:
Manuscript Revelation Books, ed. Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Wordford, and Steven C.
Harper, vol. 1 of the Revelations and Translations series of Jesse et al., Joseph Smith Papers,
271. For the patriotic age in which Mormonism’s first converts were raised, see Haynes,
Unfinished Revolution, 24–50. For the origins of Smith’s political thought, see AshurstMcGee, ‘‘Zion Rising.’’
7. Times and Seasons (Nauvoo, IL), July 15, 1842. For the Council of Fifty, see Ehat, ‘‘Joseph
Smith and the Constitution of the Kingdom of God.’’ For early Mormon’s conception of
‘‘theodemocracy,’’ see Mason, ‘‘Theodemocracy in Nineteenth-Century Mormonism’’;
Harper, ‘‘Joseph Smith and the Politics of Revelation.’’
8. For the cultural dynamic in play when Smith’s successors interpreted his theology, see
Park, ‘‘(Re)Interpreting Early Mormon Thought.’’
9. Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Madison, Notes of Debates in The Federal Convention, 53.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘Politics,’’ in Emerson: Political Writings, 21.
11. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 124.
12. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol.1, 294. See also Abraham Lincoln, ‘‘The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,’’ in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, 14–26.
13. Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, 1–2.
14. For the political response to populism, see Formisano, For the People. For the influence of
politics on everyday life, see Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic. For the Illinois
response to the two-party system, see Leonard, ‘‘The Ironies of Partyism and
Antipartyism.’’
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15. Locke, The Two Treatises on Government, 131. For Locke’s perpetuation of a patriarchal
social order, see various essays in Hirschmann and McClure, Feminist Interpretations of
John Locke.
16. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 8. See also her essays in The Disorder of Women: Democracy,
Feminism, and Political Theory.
17. Gerda Lerner (The Creation of Patriarchy) has argued that this perpetuation of patriarchal
culture was especially the case in America, where social contracts were based on the
Abrahamic Covenant of the bible and thus restricted from women.
18. The best work on Mormon adoption rites is Stapley, ‘‘Adoptive Sealing Ritual in
Mormonism.’’
19. Horace Bushnell, ‘‘The Age of Homespun’’ (1851), quoted in Ulrich, The Age of
Homespun, 14.
20. Messenger and Advocate (Kirtland, OH), December, 1834. For Mormonism as a critique of
American pluralism, see Hill, Quest for Refuge. For the political and cultural tumult of the
period, see Eyal, The Young America Movement; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 411–45;
Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy.
21. Brigham Young, Sermon, January 8, 1845, in Turley, Selected Collections, vol. 1, 18.
22. Ibid., 9. See also Brigham Young, Sermon, May 4, 1845, in The Complete Discourses of
Brigham Young, vol. 1, 84. For the patronage of colonial America, see Bushman, King and
People in Provincial Massachusetts; Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 43–76.
For coercion in early American evangelicalism, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 98–128.
23. George Dyke to Brigham Young, August 17, 1846 (LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake
City).
24. For ‘‘divine anthropology,’’ see Brown, In Heaven.
25. McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, 183.
26. Phelps, The Gates Ajar, 75–6.
27. Joseph Smith, Sermon, April 16, 1843, in An American Prophet’s Record, 366–7.
28. For eighteenth-century sensibility, see Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution. I
appreciate Laurel Ulrich’s help in understanding Mormon sensibility.
29. Heber C. Kimball Journal, in Intimate Chronicle, 226.
30. Benjamin Johnson, quoted in Hardy, ed., Doing the Works of Abraham, 119.
31. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, esp. 194–238; Howe, Making the American Self, 107–35;
Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 195–264.
32. Joseph Smith, Sermon, in Larson, ‘‘The King Follett Discourse,’’ 201.
33. William Phelps, quoted in Van Wagoner and Walker, ‘‘The Joseph/Hyrum Smith Funeral
Sermon,’’11.
34. Parley P. Pratt, ‘‘Intelligence and Affection,’’ in An Appeal to the Inhabitants of the State of
New York, 40.
35. Joseph Smith, Revelation, July 27, 1842, in Turley, Selected Collections, vol.1, 19.
36. Joseph Fielding, Journal, in Ehat, ‘‘The Nauvoo Journal of Joseph Fielding,’’ 154.
37. For the multiple trajectories of Smith’s legacy, see Park and Jensen, ‘‘Debating Succession,
March 1846.’’
38. Brigham Young, Sermon, February 16, 1847, in Kenney, Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, vol. 2,
132–3.
39. Ibid., 130, 135, 137.
40. Orson Hyde, Sermon, May 3, 1846, in Kenney, Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, vol. 2, 45–6.
41. Millennial Star (Liverpool), January 15, 1847.
42. New York Messenger, July 12, 1845.
43. The Prophet (New York), March 1, 1845.
44. Pratt, Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt, 329.
45. The Prophet, January 18, 1845. For Young on the role of a ‘‘father,’’ see Brigham Young,
Sermon, February 16, 1847, in Kenney, Wilford Woodruff ’s Journals, vol. 4, 137–8.
46. For adoption statistics, see Stapley, ‘‘Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism.’’
American Nineteenth Century History
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
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55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
21
The Prophet, January 18, 1845.
Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology, 32.
Smith, The Book of Mormon, 73; Joseph Smith, Book of Abraham Manuscript.
Joseph Smith, Journal in Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April 1843, ed. Andrew H.
Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson, Vol. 1 of the Journals series of Jesse
et al., Joseph Smith Papers, 197, 212.
Times and Seasons (Nauvoo, IL), March 15, 1842.
Brigham Young, General Church Minutes.
William Appleby to Brigham Young, May 31, 1847, (LDS Church History Library).
The black member who challenged Brigham Young’s authority was William McCary. See
Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 84–6. For Brigham Young’s evolving racial views and
the origins of Mormonism’s racial ban, see Turner, Brigham Young, 218–28; O’Donovan,
‘‘The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis.’’
Brigham Young, Address to the Utah Territorial Government.
See Dennis, ‘‘Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, and the Metaphysics of Race.’’
See Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire. Many of Mormonism’s earliest converts
descended from a New England tradition that based religious identity on racial difference.
See Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England. For the theoretical foundations
of racial segregations in compact societies, see Mills, The Racial Contract.
See Lemire, ‘‘Miscegenation’’; Hodes, White Women, Black Men; Botham, Almighty God
Created the Races.
For early Mormonism’s cosmological priesthood, see Stapley, ‘‘Adoptive Sealing Ritual in
Mormonism,’’ 56–81.
For Joseph Smith’s introduction of polygamy, see Bushman, Joseph Smith, 437–46, 490–9;
Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy. While Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, is correct to posit an
elaborate dynastic framework for Smith’s polygamous sealings, he focuses on the limits,
and overlooks some of the empowerment potential, of these rituals.
For women in antebellum America, see Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash; Westerkamp,
Women in Early American Religion, 73–182; Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims.
Joseph Smith, Sermon, March 30, 1842, in Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book (LDS Church
History Library). For the organization of the Relief Society, see Derr et al., Women of
Covenant, 23–58.
Joseph Smith to Nancy Rigdon, 1842, in Jesse, Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 538.
Though the ‘‘happiness’’ here could be interpreted to mean eternal, rather than earthly,
satisfaction, Smith’s efforts to disintegrate all barriers between the two spheres makes the
distinction moot.
Eliza R. Snow, ‘‘The Bride’s Avowal,’’ August 13, 1842, in Derr and Davidson, The
Complete Poetry, 210.
Pratt, ‘‘Intelligence and Affection,’’ 38.
Joseph Smith, Revelation, July 10, 1843 (LDS Church History Library).
For the Mormon ‘‘translation’’ of Masonry, see Brown, In Heaven, 170–202. For the
argument that women received the priesthood, see Quinn, ‘‘Mormon Women have Had
the Priesthood since 1843.’’ For female participation in the temple, see, for example,
Bathsheba W. Smith, Testimony, in Anderson and Bergera, Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the
Anointed, 45–6. For the ‘‘cosmological priesthood,’’ see Stapley, ‘‘Adoptive Sealing Ritual in
Mormonism,’’ 56–61.
See Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 119.
See Braude, Radical Spirits.
For Shakers, the Oneida community, and the Moravians, see Foster, Religion and Sexuality;
Spencer, Jesus is Female. For transatlantic Methodism and the extension of family and
authority, see Lawrence, One Family Under God.
Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash; Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies, 3–123; Lyons,
Sex Among the Rabble, esp. 312–92; Johnson and Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias.
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22
B.E. Park
72. Derr et al. Women of Covenant, 62–3.
73. Anointing of Heber C. and Vilate Kimball, in Anderson and Bergera, eds., The Nauvoo
Endowment Companies, 376–7.
74. Eliza R. Snow, ‘‘A Patriarchal Ode,’’ in Derr and Davidson, eds., Eliza R. Snow, 310.
75. Anderson, A Brief History, 130.
76. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, 10.
77. Toqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 685–91. See also Trollope, Domestic Manners of
the Americas. For the paradoxical nature of American familial relations, see SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, esp. 109–28; Rotundo, American Manhood; McDannell,
The Christian Home in Victorian America.
78. B. Carmen Hardy, ‘‘Lords of Creation,’’ 119.
79. Hyde, Patriarchal Order, 1–2.
80. Pratt, ‘‘Celestial Marriage,’’ in The Essential Orson Pratt, 276.
81. Pratt, Defence of Polygamy, 7.
82. Brigham Young, Sermon, October 8, 1861, in Hardy, Doing the Works of Abraham, 126.
83. Orson Hyde, quoted in Hardy, Doing the Works of Abraham, 134–5, emphasis in original.
For love as a core of American marital values during the Victorian era, see Lystra,
Searching the Heart.
84. Brekus, ‘‘Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,’’ 74–75.
85. Woman’s Exponent (Salt Lake City), May 1, 1879. For female empowerment through
private associations and public societies, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women; Baker,
‘‘The Domestication of American Politics,’’ 620–47.
86. Whitney, Why We Practice Plural Marriage, 24. For women in territorial Utah, see
Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters. For the Utah Mormon theology of polygamy, see Talbot,
‘‘The Church Family in Nineteenth-Century America’’; Flake, ‘‘The Emotional and
Priestly Logic of Plural Marriage.’’ For nineteenth-century Mormon marital practices in
general, see Daynes, More Wives than One.
Notes on contributor
Benjamin E. Park, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, studies the cultural, religious,
and intellectual history of early America. His dissertation examines the local cultivation of
nationalism in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina between the Revolution and the
Nullification Crisis.
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