CHAPTER 1

The Mormon Missionary Impulseand the Negotiation of Identity

Even if politically imbalanced, conversion encounters are alwaystwo-sided, and the social and intellectual dynamics of each campaffect the outcome.

—Robert W. Hefner, 1993

Several story lines are intertwined in this book. At the most abstractlevel, one story illustrates the power of religious ideas and human behavioron each other, indeed on the operational definition of reality itself. It is anoft-told story, but this version shows how the followers of the nineteenth-centuryAmerican prophet Joseph Smith created a spiritual and ideologicalworld within which they encountered and attempted to convert various peoples.In the process, these ideas and the ongoing reconsiderations of theirmeaning changed both the Mormons and their converts. Another story lineimplicates religious ideas in the creation of racial prejudice and invidious ethnicdistinctions. This, too, is an old story, but the Mormon version is muchmore complex than most, and it reveals some profound unintended consequences.Still a third story explores the construction and reconstruction ofvarious peoples' identities. Ethnic, religious, and even family identities arenot created in a vacuum but are the products of negotiations across timebetween peoples—often peoples of unequal power, sometimes mutuallyhostile peoples. The identities at stake here are not only that of the Mormonsthemselves but also those of certain other peoples with special definitions intraditional Mormon religious teachings.

I ardently hope that the facts, figures, and details in this book will notobscure these underlying stories that I am trying to tell. They are importantstories, quite apart from the academic trappings that occasionally encumberthem here. Stories about human beings and their institutions always involvethe discovery of paradoxes and contradictions. One of the contradictionsin the Mormon case is found in the juxtaposition of two generalhistorical realities: Mormonism has traditionally taught particularistic doctrinesfavoring some ethnic groups over others, yet the church has always hadan extensive proselyting program with a focus intended for all peoples everywhere.These two tendencies have remained in dialectical tension throughoutMormon history, and each has affected and modified the other. Most observersseem to have noticed only the impact of the first on the second—thatis, how (until recently) traditional doctrines have channeled Mormon missionaryefforts toward some societies (those in northwestern Europe, LatinAmerica, Polynesia, or the North American aboriginal peoples) and away fromothers (for example, societies with large populations of blacks).

While these two general tendencies are, of course, always acting on eachother, this book gives more attention than most to the impact of the secondon the first—namely, the universalistic missionary program's impact on traditionaldoctrines. This is the reciprocal relationship between ideas and behaviorto which I referred at the beginning: If religious doctrines and otherideas are expressions of the cultural settings from which they emerge, theyalso reflect back on those cultures—though perhaps only selectively—toinfluence the religious, social, and political behavior of the people. In thisstory line, the reader will see the overarching intellectual presence of MaxWeber, whose extensive works on the connections between religious ideologyand behavior have influenced a century of scholarship. In the chaptersto follow, there is more than one illustration of Weber's underlying themeof the reciprocal influences of ideas and experience in human history.

Of special interest here is the account of the development of religious ideasin response to proselyting experience—the unintended consequences, inparticular, of the ambitious Mormon missionary program, which graduallytransformed the Latter-day Saints from a "peculiar people," preoccupied withinvidious divine distinctions among lineages, into a worldwide movementembracing all humankind as "Abraham's children." The moral and spiritualconcomitant of this ideological transformation was the refinement of theLatter-day Saints' own understanding of universal kinship in the gospel ofJesus Christ. We are thus presented with the inspiring irony that a modern,universalistic vision of the spiritual potential in all peoples should emergefrom the parochial nineteenth-century Mormons' vision of themselves as achosen lineage.

Although not well known to non-Mormons, traditional Latter-day Saint(LDS) doctrine defined most of today's Mormons as literal descendants ofone of the ancient twelve tribes of Israel, primarily the tribe of Ephraim. Thisdesignation was part of an implied arrangement of various contemporarypeoples, by divine plan, into ancient lineages from most favored to least favored.Descendants of Ephraim stood at the top, as most favored, while descendantsof Cain were least favored, having been singled out for a specialcurse that prevented them from holding the priesthood until very recenttimes. American Indian peoples, as descendants of both Manasseh andEphraim, stood near the top in favored status, as did the Jews (descendantsof Judah), who provided the lineage for the Messiah himself. Descendantsof the remaining Israelite tribes, some of whom are scattered...