LDS President Russell Nelson is reshaping Mormonism amid perpetual culture wars, historian says

Historian Benjamin Park says discussions of gender, race, and sexuality have been part of the faith since Kirtland.

No one will be surprised to learn that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been shaped by the culture wars of the 21st century. In 2008, for example, it devoted significant efforts to defeating same-sex marriage, only to reverse that political stance in 2022. It has endorsed racial inequality for decades, with then-prophet Ezra Taft Benson equating the civil rights movement as dangerous and antagonistic. – American Communism. But in the last few years she has donated millions of dollars to the United Negro College Fund.

So, yes, contemporary Mormonism has been profoundly shaped by the culture wars, and has carefully negotiated its place in the US mainstream.

But historian Benjamin Park says this is nothing new. In fact, it has been a major theme since the beginning in the 1830s.

“Even during the first year of organizing the church, all these questions about gender and race come to the forefront,” Park, author of the new one-volume history “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism,” said in an article. Zoom interview. Emma Smith, the Prophet's first wife, “was demanding change and space within society during months of church organizing. The revelation that Latter-day Saints now know as D&C 25 came in response to her plea for the status of women.”

In this revelation, Emma is advised not to complain and to be a source of comfort and assistance to her husband. She was also directed to “explain the scriptures” and create a hymnbook for the fledgling church.

A place for the marginalized

That was not the end of the early discussions. One of the first Latter-day Saint converts in Kirtland, Ohio, was Laura Hubble, who called herself a prophetess and aimed to lead others by the power of revelation. The other was “Black Pete,” a former enslaved man who converted to Christianity and participated in enthusiastic and charismatic worship practices in Kirtland. How much power can these two marginalized figures have in the exciting new religious movement?

Not much, Park said. Faced with the question of how much equality it would give to women and people of color, “the answer in both cases was a dominant white, patriarchal space.” Thus Laura Hubble and Black Pete ended up leaving the faith, and the answers to Emma Smith's questions emphasized the gender binary of men in charge and women in the pews.

Despite these traditional outcomes, power struggles and marginalization continued. “American Zion,” in particular, recounts how the polygamist wars of the 19th century exploited questions about sex and family — with the result that 20th-century Latter-day Saints ended up becoming the exact kind of monogamists they were vocal about . Hated decades ago.

As an accomplished historian, Park is keenly aware of the dangers of “presentism,” where the debates of the historian's era are read back into history. But that is not what is happening, even though tensions around race, gender and sexuality are the defining feature of our times. The fact that such discussions have been woven into Mormonism from the beginning is part of what makes the religion “a compelling story for people, even for people outside the faith,” he said. “People think it can tell us something about the society we live in now.”

The response to “American Zion” so far seems to confirm this. Park had just completed a five-week writing tour to receptive audiences, and most early reviews were positive. The New Yorker noted that the book portrays the church “as both marginalized and marginalized,” which reflects the tensions Park explores.

Russell Nelson goal

This push-pull dynamic has extended into the present. The final pages of Park's book cover the first five years of Russell M. Nelson, describing the 99-year-old leader as the religion's “first post-pioneer prophet.”

“He seems more likely than any other previous religious leader to strip away what he sees as unnecessary cultural attachments. “At other points, I have described him as a venture capitalist and market strategist who isolates Mormonism down to its most basic fundamentals,” Park said. “I think a lot of what he does is The culmination of what the Church has been moving toward over the past century. It's this American assimilation or Christian assimilation, while maintaining what they think is their main distinction. These differences are rooted in concerns centered around the traditional family. Nelson, more than anyone else, emphasized not only the diminution of the traditional nuclear family, but that the gospel was centered around that family. That's why we're waiving an hour of our worship services so you can go home and be with your family.

Park noted that Nelson has chosen to intervene on some culture war issues, such as LGBTQ rights, while moving forward with “other assimilation efforts like what he did with the NAACP.” At the same time, it “reaffirms prophetic authority” to an extraordinary degree. The challenge the Church always faces is “to be Christian and unique at the same time.”

While researching this part of the book, Park discovered what he believed to be his “method [Nelson’s] “Madness” – a common theme underpinning the flurry of activity that has marked his tenure as president. “It is almost like a capital exchange in which we will give up our Mormon name, our pageant pageant pageants, and our temple murals. But in return, we will commit to our nuclear family, our temple worship, and our prophetic priestly authority.”

He said that both entrenchment and assimilation occur at the same time. “And although it may seem paradoxical that these things exist simultaneously, in fact they feed off of each other, and one justifies or validates the other.”

It has been this way for nearly 200 years.

(The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of Religion News Service.)