Looking for Global Mormonism

Abstract

Global Mormon studies is an emerging frontier in the field of Mormon studies. The last decade has seen a marked increase in attention to global manifestations of Mormonism as scholars work to decenter the North American LDS Church in their analyses. This shift away from the North American church is a necessary intervention in the field of Mormon studies as the vast majority of work in the field has focused on the institutional church, its North American leaders, and its North American members.Yet, scholarship examining the LDS Church outside of North America may not go far enough. As Melissa Inouye points out, many historical narratives of Mormonism outside North America have often defined and analyzed these global communities in terms of the concerns of the administrative centralized Utah church, such as missionary work, baptisms, and the formation of stakes.1 Little is known about the lived religious experiences of these members, their perspectives as they adopt and adapt the faith tradition into their own particular contexts, and their complex navigations of home culture and chosen religion.The goal of scholars of a globalized Mormonism should be to move the focus away from a strictly institutional history and toward analysis of the complex and dynamic interaction between various expressions of Mormonism. The institutional products of the LDS Church—be those manuals, priestly hierarchy, or an official devotional culture—are among those expressions; but so are the religious practices of local members in congregations around the world, the art they produce, the music they sing, and the meanings they ascribe to official guidelines. Understanding the complex web of all of these expressions of the faith will present us with a richer knowledge of what Mormonism is. In what follows, we explore some theoretical tools for seeing that web.In the summer of 2005, the Library of Congress hosted a symposium commemorating Joseph Smith's two hundredth birthday, with papers reconsidering him in the context of his time and looking to the prospects of the religious tradition he founded in the future. The British scholar Douglas Davies distinguished between “global” religions and “world” religions. For the present, Davies argued, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains in the former category, because it has not yet developed “from its original cultural source by engaging creatively with the cultures into which it expands.” A “global” religion might have adherents around the globe. A “world” religion, on the other hand, would implant itself into a variety of cultures and hence generate what Davies called “diversifying textual, symbolic, and historic traditions.” Davies has his doubts about whether the LDS Church can make such a leap, which he ascribes to the church's strong centralized leadership and its scriptural, historical, and theological connections to the American continent.2Of necessity, Davies's argument moves quickly, and hence leaves precise metrics for gauging success or failure on the table. Nonetheless, the question is among the most pressing facing not only the church but its scholars. In what follows we will explore how some theories of religion and globalization illuminate Davies's question and might shed light on productive directions for global Mormon studies.The first question is what precisely globalization is. Many scholars have pointed out that the term, particularly in popular culture, tends to have economic connotations: the rise of transnational corporations, the spread of American-style consumer capitalism, and the rise of a transnational cosmopolitan elite. Some of the classic definitions of globalization depict the process as essentially economic and tend to present other emerging trends as derivative of economic changes. For instance, columnist and author Thomas Friedman has famously posited, “No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's.”3 Though slightly tongue-in-cheek, Friedman's theory exemplifies a common aspect of economic theories of globalization, and the application of economic metrics to cultural, political, and social dynamics. As Peter Beyer puts it, “Globalization, especially in its dominant popular and media usages, is capitalism.” Sociologist George Ritzer has postulated globalization as a process of “McDonaldization,” by which he means how processes of efficiency, rationality, and speed are coming to dominate “the global flow of people, objects, places, and information.”4But at the same time, Beyer, Ritzer, and others point out that globalization is not only capitalism. Values of efficiency and rationality shape human institutions far beyond simply corporations. Beginning with Karl Marx, theorists have postulated that globalization also involves cultural change, institutional stress, and social pressures. And yet, Marx and others who have followed his theory of the struggle between workers and capitalists have tended to present globalization as a process of dualities, a struggle between assimilation and conformity, and the transformation of the local and particular into the global and universal.A fair number of studies of the Mormon tradition extrapolate this presumption into the realm of religion. Some of these are devotional; others are somewhat more critical. Many devotional histories of the LDS Church outside the United States tell a story of conformity to what Dallin H. Oaks, then an apostle, described in 2010 as the “gospel culture.” Invoking the example of African practices of “bride price” and male domination of families, Oaks said, “We appeal to our older members to put away traditions and cultural or tribal practices that lead them away from the path of growth.”5 Other devotional writers take the point further, arguing that the globalization of the Mormon tradition must mean simply the spread of a uniformity of practice shaped by the white North American church. Rendell Mabey, one of the first LDS missionaries sent to Africa after the 1978 revocation of the restrictions to full participation by Black people in the church, wrote that when he arrived in Africa, he found Africans’ knowledge of “principles of the restored gospel” to be “meager and primitive. Their church meetings in particular bore little resemblance to those which had become such a fundamental pattern in our own lives.”6Scholars whose work focuses on the globalization of Mormonism have also sometimes followed these presumptions, even if unknowingly. Such works—particularly studies of the modern LDS Church after the correlation movement enshrined some McDonaldized values in its organization—tend to take an institutional perspective and interpret the process of globalization in terms of the reproduction of institutions, emphasizing missionary work, the establishment of congregations, and policy. In such narratives cultural divergence is a challenge to be overcome, and stories tend to bend toward accommodation and assimilation. This may be either a story of triumph or of colonialism, depending upon the author's perspective; of church expansion or successful resistance to that expansion.7However, as globalization theorist Roland Robertson points out, interpreting globalization in this way neglects that, as Robertson puts it, “it is not a question of either homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both of these two tendencies have become features of life.” Rather than static tension between the universal and the particular, Robertson sees the two as “mutually implicative” and points out “ongoing, calculated attempts to combine homogeneity with heterogeneity and universalism with particularism.”8 For Robertson, neither the universal nor the particular are realistic choices: rather, globalization always already involves the creation of what he calls the “glocal”—local, unique particularities shaped by their interaction by globalization, but certainly not merely replicating it.When applied to the history of religions generally or of the Mormon tradition in particular, then, the processes of globalization cannot be interpreted as simply domination or resistance, colonialism or indigeneity. Rather, the growth of Mormonism around the world is a dynamic process, characterized by change, adaptation, and creativity rather than simply the static replication of American Mormonism.Finding the glocal in Mormonism around the world requires us to pay more attention to local expressions of the faith. While conversion and retention numbers, formations of church units, etc., in various global locations are important aspects of institutional Mormon history, they do not always reveal the rich and complicated stories of the Latter-day Saints who are working to make this tradition their own and of the various forms of Mormonisms that are taking root around the world. They might not account for the cultural costs experienced and the creative adaptations employed as individuals work to honor both chosen faith tradition and aspects of their home cultures.Several postcolonial and feminist scholars have modeled and proposed decolonizing methodologies that work to center the concerns and voices of Indigenous and marginalized people, rather than the concerns and questions of those anchored in Western power centers. These methodologies can be fruitfully applied within the field of global Mormon studies as mechanisms toward ethically examining and giving voice to individuals and communities living far from centers of power.In her foundational book, Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith recounts the way traditional research has too often been used against the interests of Indigenous peoples as Western scholars privilege their own agendas, biases, and colonial practices over the well-being and ethical treatment of those being studied. She proposes methods and methodologies that uphold the dignity of Indigenous subjects, center their understandings, and further their interests. She particularly focuses on the importance of holding up and recovering Indigenous peoples’ alternative histories and ways of knowing as an important aspect of decolonizing methodologies. She writes: “To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things.”9 To that end, she advocates for methods and projects such as conducting oral histories and tribal histories, documenting foundational community stories that reveal beliefs and values, and reframing the ways in which issues and social problems are discussed. These are methods that “facilitate the expression of marginalized voices” and ultimately further the goals of ethical Indigenous research that are “the survival of peoples, cultures, and languages, the struggle to become self-determining, the need to take back control of our own destinies.”10With these decolonizing methods and methodologies in mind, global Mormon studies scholars might embark on projects to document global Mormons’ distinct contexts, values, concerns, perspectives, and ethical priorities.11 They can lift up the ways these global Mormons frame their own identities and lay out their own visions for optimal ways of moving their communities forward. They can explore the ways their Mormon identities and theologies help and hinder their pursuit of personal and community well-being.12 For Joanna Brooks, decolonizing Mormonism entails “choosing to see the transnational Mormon story through the eyes of Indigenous members and with a willingness to identify, unsettle, and if possible redress whatever there is in our faith tradition that has compromised the well-being of Indigenous communities.”13Global scholars arising from the global communities being studied occupy a particularly powerful position, offering unique opportunities to unlock the wisdom, identities, losses, and hopes of these global Mormons and their communities. Insider researchers, as Smith calls them, have unique access to these communities and the deeply embedded and lived understanding of the contexts that shape these people's lives. Bringing their lived experience to the research table—and acknowledging and reflecting on their own positionality as they engage in this research—can add unique depths and insights to the project. Scholars from these communities can also, as Patricia Hill Collins explains, play an important role within the academy as “outsiders within” who are well positioned to enrich contemporary scholarly discourse. While she speaks particularly to the positionality of Black feminist scholars in the academy, several of her points apply to non-North American global Mormon studies scholars who are able to see where North American concerns are being centered in the research and how “aspects of reality [are] obscured by more orthodox approaches.”14 Smith also comments on the particular possibilities and challenges of insider research, noting that reflexivity is essential because scholars living in these communities “have to live with the consequences of their processes on a day-to-day basis for ever more, and so do their families and communities.”15 Ultimately, for insider scholars—and outsider scholars too—who want to engage in decolonizing methodologies, self-reflection and self-questioning are essential, even as that critical gaze is simultaneously trained on the theories, methods, and methodologies of the disciplines within which scholars are working. With these critical lenses in place, possibilities for important interventions arise, not only in the field of Mormon studies, but also the larger fields of anthropology, sociology, history, and more.In prioritizing the perspectives, experiences, values, and self-conceptions of global Latter-day Saints, opportunities to see varieties of Mormonisms emerge as local concerns and conditions interact with Salt Lake injunctions to produce new possibilities, practices, and understandings. The LDS Church's strong centralized structure certainly affects the experience of Latter-day Saints around the world and can impede some local alterations. Tension may exist between local practices and understandings and those passed on through the institutional church. However, as Mary Bednarowski theorizes, in spaces of religious tension, or “religious ambivalence,” as people feel and navigate multiple and sometimes competing loyalties, beliefs, and priorities, creative practices and understandings can be generated.16 A dynamic tension between home culture, chosen religion, family loyalties, and more can produce new practices, theologies, understandings, and identities.17 Gina Colvin gives insight into this tension, as she rejects the church's “Utah-centric cultural hubris,” while also reflecting on the ways Maori cosmology has coincided with and enriched her Mormon practice and understandings, particularly in the spiritual power she has found in dreams, symbols, and guardian ancestors.18The complicated identities and loyalties that global members often navigate are reminiscent of Gloria Anzaldua's work on Mexican American mestiza consciousness, an identity shaped through the influences of multiple cultures and worldviews. Within this hybrid identity, Anzaldua writes, the mestiza develops a “tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguities.”19 Anzaldua emphasizes the importance of the “uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness.”20 In a similar vein, Rita Abrahamsen writes of the power and possibilities of embracing a hybrid identity as formerly colonized people adapt, interpret, and transform Western cultural symbols and practices.21 Theories of plural identities, hybridity, and mestiza consciousness may prove to be productive frameworks for analyzing global Mormons, their identities, and their complex negotiations of various priorities.22 Global Mormon studies scholars are well positioned to utilize and expand upon theories of identity and agency, as well as bring forward unique theologies and practices that are formed as local wisdom and values interact with core Mormon texts and centralized church policies.The dynamic interaction between Salt Lake and global Mormonisms can also lead to a reframing of terms and understandings. Melissa Inouye proposes that as we engage in global Mormon studies, we rethink the idea of center and periphery of the church. Instead of one church center (Salt Lake) she proposes we see multiple church centers that produce different things. For example, she sees possibilities for the Global South to become the center for faith promoting miracle stories, utilized and disseminated in general conference talks and other media. Salt Lake can in turn be viewed as a center of the production of materials like manuals and handbooks. These exist in a symbiotic relationship, both sustaining the other.23 In this vein, global Mormon studies scholars might consider other ways in which global Mormon communities have the potential to act as church centers and engage in a mutual shaping of the tradition.