Shadi Hamid:
So up until now we’ve had a few seasons of Zealots at the Gate, but we have not had an episode where we talk about Mormonism. And we’re going to correct that error today with our special guest, Matt Bowman. Matt is the Howard W Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He’s author of a couple books including The Mormon People: The Making of An American Faith, and that was really one of the defining books and still is on understanding Mormonism. I believe it came out when Mitt Romney was a presidential candidate, and Matt is more recently the author of another fascinating book titled Christian: The Politics of a Word in America, from Harvard University Press. So Matt, welcome, great to have you with us.
Matthew Bowman:
Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
Shadi Hamid:
And maybe just to get us started and orient ourselves a little bit, I think Mormonism is a really great case study of a religion, because it’s relatively new, 19th century. There’s a lot of talk about it in the public sphere, but often ways that are not particularly respectful, and I think people still get a pass if they say negative things about Mormonism. It’s sort of like, “Oh, Mormons are weird,” is one of the stereotypes, they’re fringe, so on and so forth. And that gets, I think to a broader set of questions about why Mormonism is perceived that way. So I’d like to hear you on that, but maybe just so we’re all on the same page, I’m curious how you would define or characterize Mormonism in a sort of brief minute or two, because I think there’s a lot of different ways to talk about Mormonism, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I’d just be curious about how you sum up what is a rich, complex tradition.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, absolutely. I will start there. Then we can go to why people tend to be suspicious of the tradition. Mormonism, that word is often used today as an umbrella term for a lot of different denominations that trace their origins back to the prophetic career of Joseph Smith, who of course is a New York farm boy who in the 1820s has a series of visions of God and Jesus Christ. He produces this work of scripture, the Book of Mormon, and claims to have restored Christ’s original church to earth. This puts Mormonism in the company of what we might call the broader Christian restoration movement, which is very powerful in the early 19th century in the United States. These were a set of Christians, mostly of Protestant descent, who believed that Christ’s original church had been lost somehow, that it had been corrupted somehow, that it needed to be restored.
And while many of them, the Disciples of Christ may be the best example, tried to restore that original church by stripping away everything that they thought had built up onto the church over the centuries, what people sometimes call the smells and bells of Roman Catholicism, and the vestments, and the clothing, and the rituals and all of that, and tried to simplify things. Joseph Smith went in the opposite direction. His restoration was about creation and building, so he created two orders of priesthood. He built temples, he created communities that practiced economic communalism. He eventually instituted the practice of polygamy and made a church that was as much a people, thus the title of my book, or a nation as a Protestant denomination. So to sum that up, Mormonism is a Christian restorationist movement, similar to in some ways other restorationist movement, but also quite distinct from them. Maybe in some ways more similar to Roman Catholicism in its emphasis on priesthood and sacrament, than to other Protestant denominations. That also gets at I think why many Protestant Americans are suspicious of Mormonism.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, maybe a nice follow-up to that, Matt would be, I wonder if you could talk about how Mormonism is in one sense a deeply American faith, how it very much goes along with sort of the whoop and the wharf of American history, and American identity, and yet also there seems to be this paradox that Shadi was talking about, the perceived strangeness of the faith as well. It seems to be a paradox for me as I look at the Mormon faith, it seems that I can remember sitting on a plane next to a member of the LDS church and he was reading the Constitution, the American Constitution, and talking about how it was the sacred document, and how much he loved America and how great America was. And there was so much about him that seemed so sort of assimilated into Americana, if you will, sort of the apple pie and baseball-ness of America, and yet also this outsider-ness to the identity as well. I wonder if you could kind of talk about that paradox, I think.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, that’s what a lot of people said about Mitt Romney, right? That he was so American, it was almost creepy. Too American in a sense. And yeah, you can think of the church in that way, and it depends of course on how we define what American is. If you think of Americana-ness as many earlier historians in the 20th century did, you would emphasize individualism, self-creation, this sort of populist sense that Joseph Smith really does embody in a lot of ways. He has virtually no formal education. He is not a minister in any sense, and yet he sort of presumes to write a new Bible. He presumes he has the authority to claim that Jesus is speaking to him and giving him direction. And then, he takes a whole lot of uneducated farmers like him, he ordains them to offices like high priest and patriarch, and he kind of tries to recreate the Bible with all of these average people.
And in that sense, that kind of egalitarianism, that suspicion of elites. That’s why a lot of historians have said Mormonism is really deeply American and even kind of Protestant in that same sense, because you see a lot of those same impulses happening in American Protestantism in the 19th century, especially in the Baptist and Methodist movements. But on the other hand, there is maybe a kind of darker side to what America is, and in some ways Mormonism echoes that as well and can come to seem to some people un-American for those reasons. The United States is also a country that has, deep at its core, this historic crime of slavery, of racism, in some ways to kind of a real hierarchy that exists, even as we deny that it exists. I mean, Mormonism has embodied that as well. It’s had a history of racial restrictions, of racism in the church and it has embraced, I think several notions that many Protestant Americans have long defined as un-American, and those are the ways in which the church looks a lot like Roman Catholicism.
That is to say it has a very, very regimented, strong priesthood hierarchy that is led today by a man who is judged by his followers to be a prophet in the same way that Moses was a prophet. That smacks of papism to a lot of Protestant Americans. There’s something kind of deeply undemocratic about that, and you saw some of these fears when Romney was running for president. There was a famous article by Damon Linker, at least famous among Mormons, in which Damon Linker made this argument that you can’t trust a Mormon to be elected to the presidency, because that Mormon would do whatever the president of his church said. That was the same thing people were saying about John F. Kennedy in 1960. Similarly, of course, the church has historically been pretty insular and pretty collective, going back to the 19th century when Joseph Smith wanted all of his followers, unlike say, Methodism or the Baptist faith, where people would just found a church wherever they happened to live, Joseph Smith wanted people to come to him.
He wanted to build cities, not just a denomination. And so, his church would gather in Ohio and Missouri, and Illinois, and whatever you got in the 19th century, a large collection of people who did not identify as Protestants gathering together in one place, that was perceived as a threat to democracy. And it sometimes was, because the church would often vote in blocks. And then of course, he institutes the practice of polygamy, which struck many people as deeply un-American and was labeled not simply as morally gross, right? But as a sign of civilizational decay. Polygamy was one chief reason why Joseph Smith was called sometimes a new Muhammad, and his faith was equated with Islam, which in the 19th century of course was almost a giving up of Anglo-American civilization.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, this point of prophecy I think is really important, and it’s also a question of sequencing, because I think that one reason, and this is a broad generalization and people might disagree, but I think one reason that Protestants and Catholics are more, in my view, more suspicious of Muslims than the other way around is because Muslims came after and we had a new prophecy, where I think we Muslims can back at Christianity and Judaism, and say they had elements of truth along the way to the final truth. And I think we see a similar dynamic in Mormonism, that it claims something fundamentally new. It claims a new prophecy. And I think for me as a Muslim, and I presume many Protestants and Catholics, the idea that there could be a new prophecy this late in the game, in the modern period, as recently as the 19th century, it’s sort of like we don’t do prophecy anymore.
That was completed many centuries ago, and I think that’s where, as you sort of alluded to Matt, where a lot of suspicion comes from, how could there possibly be an ongoing line to God? But I am curious on that point, because I have heard different things depending on who I’m talking to. How does the direct line with God work? Is it more a divine inspiration, that the Holy Spirit is moving through the president of the church or the prophet, or is it that God talks to him directly in the form of commandments and recommendations that you should do this now with your flock? Maybe just tell us a little bit more about how that works.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, that depends on which president of the church you are speaking about. For Joseph Smith, it was verbal. He would open his mouth and he would say, “Thus saith the Lord.” And then he would recite long, long passages, which were often in the voice of God or in the voice of Jesus Christ. These revelations are often in a kind of pseudo King James English. They sound like the King James Bible. If you laid them right next to the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, they wouldn’t sound terribly different. Now, after Joseph Smith dies, after he is killed in 1844, there is actually some concern in the church about what’s going to happen now, can he be replaced? Was he a unique figure? And Brigham Young, who assumes control of the LDS church after Joseph Smith’s death, had one answer to that. There were some other people who had different answers, and this is where the church fragments for the first time, and you have the development of different denominations.
And to be clear, I’ve been mostly talking about the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the biggest and best known of those. But while there are some people, a man named James String being the best example, who claimed to do the same thing that Joseph Smith did, that is to dictate revelations in the voice of God. Brigham Young initially said, “I should lead this church, because of my ecclesiastical office,” because he was the leader of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, which was the level of church leadership directly below Joseph Smith. Eventually Brigham Young does dictate a revelation, just as Joseph Smith did, and he is acclaimed by his followers as a prophet like Joseph Smith, but he was never quite comfortable with that. And since that time, the leaders of the church are every year sustained by their followers as prophets, seers and revelators. Every member of the church will raise their hand in the church’s general conference to say they believe that’s what these people are.
None have been as charismatic as Joseph Smith was in that way, none have presumed to kind of dictate in the voice of God as consistently and frequently as he does. Now, that is not to say they do not claim revelation, because they do, but often it is shoddy as you described there. That is to say they will say, “I have received the impression that God wishes me to do this, or God has revealed to me it is time to do that.” They are almost never dictating revelations in the same way that Joseph Smith did. And the reasons why I think are fascinating, and I think they have a lot to do with the church’s sense that its project of building a nation outside the United States failed ultimately, and its consequent search for acceptance and respectability within the broader American nation. There is a way I think in which, especially in the early 20th century, where that kind of vivid charismatic prophecy that Joseph Smith embraced came to be seen in the United States as something kind of vaguely disreputable, something uncivilized, uncouth and the church followed suit.
Shadi Hamid:
And just to follow up on prophecy, so are the prophets capable of error? Do they make mistakes or do they only make mistakes in politics, but not on theological matters? Because obviously that has implications for the whole Mitt Romney debate that, I mean, it would seem to me that it would be hard not to make mistakes when it comes to politics, just because of the different considerations involved. But please, I’d be curious how you would respond to that.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, there is a famous statement from Joseph Smith along these lines, where he admitted making errors at times and he said something among the lines of, to paraphrase him, “A prophet is a prophet when he’s acting as such,” and that is a phrase you will often hear in the church.
One of his successors, a man named Wilfred Woodruff, who was president of the church in 1890 at the time that the LDS church renounced the practice of polygamy, said that, “God would not allow the prophet to lead the church into destruction.” But the implication being there are many other places that might not be totally catastrophic, where a prophet might make errors. So it is generally, I think, believed in the church that the prophet is capable of error, but not when he is dictating in the voice of God, not when he is saying exactly what God wants him to say.
Now, how you distinguish between those times is the real question, and there is actually a kind of ongoing debate among members of the church about that question. For instance, in the 1850s, Brigham Young stated, and he used the term, “In my authority as prophet I state,” and then he uttered what we would today consider quite racist things. He said that Black people were the descendants of Cain, and because Black people were the descendants of Cain, they were not authorized to hold the priesthood of the church or to worship in the temples of the church. Now, the church has since repudiated those statements, and so the question has become, was Brigham Young wrong, even though he was stating this, claiming the authority of the prophet? This is an unresolved question and one that I think lends a lot of dynamism to how the church imagines itself, and how it functions.
Shadi Hamid:
Fascinating.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Dynamism is a good word for that.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, a couple of different levels, right? That’s pretty good.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It is striking, and I had never thought about it. I mean, you brought up the prophet Muhammad. It would be striking to explore some of the parallels and experience, and theology between Islam and Mormonism. Are you familiar with any formal studies or scholars working on that?
Matthew Bowman:
Yes, mostly I’m not as familiar as those on the Muslim side, but in the LDS church there have been a number of scholars who have written about this, and explored these comparisons on a number of different levels. There’s a course to practice in polygamy, but also I think the anthropological investigation of what prophecy is, both Muhammad and Joseph Smith dictate, and they dictate words that are given to them by inspiration. They both produce new works of scripture that in some ways are iterations on the Hebrew Bible. Yeah, they’re both nation builders in this sense as well. There are a lot of very interesting parallels and certainly as I mentioned, this was brought up at the time, often not to Joseph Smith’s benefit.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, and because they were both nation builders, it again raises this question of how do you distinguish between what would be called politics and religion? And even the fact that I’m using those two terms in this way is a bit of a problem, because I’m almost that they’re separate categories when in fact, as imagined or as understood by Joseph Smith or by the Prophet Muhammad, there wasn’t any kind of clear demarcation where one ends and the other begins. So I’m curious, how do Mormons view the separation between religion and politics, or the distinction between religion and politics today in a post-Joseph Smith Mormon church?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, that has been a long journey for the church. Matthew, you brought up earlier this fellow on the airplane who was talking with great reverence about the US Constitution. That goes back to Joseph Smith and actually to a revelation Joseph Smith had, in which God declares in this revelation that the Constitution was written by wise men whom God raised up to do so. And for Joseph Smith, the primary consideration here was religious freedom. That is the notion of the First Amendment. That’s something that was a great concern to him, because of course he and his church were driven out of several places they settled. And eventually after his death, the church flees to what they believe, in the Salt Lake Valley, is a place outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and they claimed they were carrying the Constitution with them. The church leader named Parley Pratt says that, “We are bearing the fire of the US Constitution with us, because it has been abandoned in the United States.”
And for quite a while in the Utah territory, there is very little difference between politics and religion. There is a church-sponsored political party called the People’s Party, in which church leaders would select candidates who people would then vote for. Brigham Young had a very alternately friendly and very hostile relationship with the federal government. When that ends, when Utah becomes a state in 1896, they do so with the implicit expectation that that political party will go away and that members of the church will enter very conventional American politics. There are folk tales of leaders of Mormon congregations dropping their hand down as they’re standing at the pew, and saying, “All those of you to my left are Democrats, all those of you to my right are Republicans, because we have to now enter US politics.” Now, the role of the president of the church and this sort of notion of prophecy in American politics has been somewhat fraught.
Fascinatingly, the president of the church during the Great Depression and the New Deal, and a World War II was a man named Heber J. Grant. He was a very conservative Democrat. He had grown up very suspicious of the federal government, as many Democrats in the late 19th century and early 20th century were, and he hated Franklin Roosevelt. And repeatedly, whenever Franklin Roosevelt ran for President, Heber J. Grant would release statements saying, “In my capacity as president of the church, I do not want you to vote for this man.” But Franklin Roosevelt won the state of Utah four times. And after that, presidents of the church have really tried to back away from what they have called partisan politics. That is they will say, “We do not endorse one candidate over another. We do not endorse one party over the other, but we will weigh in on what we consider to be moral issues.”
Now, the distinction between a moral issue and a political issue is another kind of fuzzy demarcation, but it is what the church really clings to. And in fact, since the 1960s, as like many other conservative Christian groups have, the LDS church has moved strongly toward the Republican Party. Its members have been very sympathetic to the religious right. The church has periodically issued statements, and in fact sometimes sent out high church leaders to say, “It’s okay to be a Democrat. You can be a Democrat.”
There are principles as the saying goes, and this is from a statement that the church puts out about a month before every election in the United States, the statement will state, “There are principles in accordance with the gospel in the platforms of all major political parties.”
Matthew Kaemingk:
So on that note, I wonder if we might talk just a little bit more specifically about the church’s relationship with the Republican Party in general as an evangelical Christian, of course, my community has its own fraught relationship with the Republican Party. I’m interested in hearing a little bit about your community’s fraught relationship with the Republican Party as well. I think one of the things that has grabbed my attention, and I think many other evangelicals attention in the last eight years has been a somewhat unique moment, where it seemed like the sort of sturdy Republican voters of Utah, very predictable in their sort of Republicanness, seemed to put up a bit of resistance to Donald Trump, that there was something within, and… Let me put it this way. I’m a part of sort of the never Trump evangelicals, the evangelicals who are conservative in their faith and in many political areas, but want nothing to do with Donald Trump, find him sort of morally repugnant in many ways, and have been saddened that many evangelicals went along with Donald Trump.
And then, we look over the fence in Utah and we see that at least for a time, there were these conservative Mormons who did not want to go along with Trumpism, and we were wondering to ourselves, how did they resist the temptation of make America great again, when the evangelicals seemed to not be able to? And anyways, that’s sort of what I’m wondering, but you could start, if you will, sort of, I don’t know, back in with George W. Bush and talk us through this story, but that’s behind it for me is, what’s going on over there on the other side of the fence?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, that is a great question and a great deal of interest I think within the church, as well as without. Now, I should preface all of this by saying that of course, by the best metrics that we have, Donald Trump did win Utah when he ran for president, he won it three times. A bulk of Mormons did vote for him several times. But as you say, there is maybe a larger cadre of never Trumpers in the LDS church than in the evangelical community. There are a number of high-profile Mormon politicians, like Mitt Romney, who have opposed him quite publicly and repeatedly.
And many of the leaders I think of the Utah Republican Party have been really hostile consistently to him. There are, I think a few reasons for this. The first is, I think, well, is simply demographic. That being more than most Americans, Mormons are disproportionately educated. The church is a pretty middle-class white American religion, and as you’re watching the demographics of what the Republican Party is becoming, educated middle and upper class white people are the ones who are pretty decisively moving away from the party of Donald Trump. So there are these kind of deep level of demographic trends I think that we need to acknowledge before just talking about any particulars about the church itself.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So basically you’re saying Mormons are smarter than evangelicals.
Matthew Bowman:
More school. I say humanist, I might not say smarter, because one of the, I think things that dismay me and other humanists is that Mormons tend to be pretty pragmatic about education. You have a lot of Mormon dentists out there, and a lot of Mormon… Actually, well, dentists, because as friend of mine who is a Mormon dentist said once, “A dentist is a job where you can make a lot of money, but still get home at five o’clock,” and Mormons tend to have a lot of kids, so they make those sorts of choices. But nonetheless, we’re talking about postgraduate degrees here.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So the first reason is the education level, but it seems to me there has to be something more in terms of the theology or the tradition. Yeah, tell me about that.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And this I think, goes to why many members of the LDS church moved into the Republican Party to begin with, and this is in the late ’60s and early ’70s, as with many other conservative Christian voters. LDS people embrace social conservatism. And you could see this I think, and many do, as a reaction against polygamy. In the early 20th century after the church gives up polygamy, leaders of the church really, really embraced monogamy and start preaching monogamy very thoroughly, and with great zeal and dedication. And by the 1960s then with the advent of things like the equal rights amendment, the Roe V. Wade certainly, and the kind of apocalyptic language about social conservatism that many leaders of the religious right are preaching, Mormons really do climb on board. There is a really strong historical case to be made that the equal rights amendment, which for those of your listeners who do not know, is an amendment that would have forbade the federal government to make legal distinctions in US law based on gender.
It was opposed by many advocates of the so-called traditional family on the grounds that it would eliminate the kind of complementary relationship between men and women. There’s a really good case to be made that this amendment was defeated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who organised and rallied in a number of Western states and influence many Western state legislatures to vote it down. And with that, the church really does, I think, throw in hard with the religious right. Now, of course, other members of the religious right, particularly evangelicals do go masse for Trump. And there is, I think an interesting distinction to be made here as well. Unlike many people who self-identify as evangelical since the presidential election of George W. Bush, Mormons, if you compare statistical data on this, Mormons maintain a really high level of religious practice and are really high level of abiding by religious disciplines.
Mormons go to church at very high numbers, higher than evangelicals do. Mormons marry younger than evangelicals do and are far less likely to get divorced than evangelicals do, and so on and so on and so on. I can mention also the word of wisdom, the Mormon dietary code and so on and so forth, which is to say, I think this is in some ways a product of the hierarchical, centralized nature of the LDS church. It is very, very good at disciplining its members. It is very, very good at inculcating practices within its members. It is very good at getting its members to go to church.
Evangelicalism, which is something more akin to kind of a nebulous, maybe even commercial movement than it is to a church, as George Marsden famously said, “An evangelical is someone who likes Billy Graham.” Nothing else. There is not that I think sense, a kind of clear, consistent practice discipline among evangelicals. And in fact, I’ve seen conflicting studies on this, but it has appeared to me in the past, at least in 2016 that in fact, evangelicals who said they rarely went to church were more likely to vote for Donald Trump than evangelicals who said they frequently went to church. And in so far as we might measure that degree of religious practice as perhaps a Trump vaccine of some sort, that is another, I think, place where Mormons are perhaps more inoculated.
Shadi Hamid:
I think you’re getting at this and maybe an indirect way, I mean, I guess I can put it this way, but Mormons, because they’re more morally upright, it’s harder for them to get on board with someone who is libertine in his sexual or aesthetic taste, someone like Donald Trump. It just seems Mormons in their very character, at least the practicing ones that I’ve interacted with, just seems so different temperamentally to the kind of undisciplined nature of someone like Donald Trump. So I guess they can vote for him and still a plurality do, but the personality gap just seems very striking.
Matthew Bowman:
I would venture that even the majority who do vote for him are holding their noses when they do. And this is perhaps another distinction, and I think you see this with Mitt Romney as well, right? Mitt Romney has kind of consistently seemed in the Trump era, again, just sort of square jawed, neat hair part. Romney I think really saw politics and did see politics. And I think this is true of many other LDS politicians. I’m thinking of Evan McMullin, who you might remember in 2016, mounted a kind of quixotic campaign against Trump.
I’m thinking of Becky Edwards, who is a former member of the Utah state Legislature who challenged Mike Lee in the Republican primary, based on Mike Lee’s support for Donald Trump, and nearly beat him. For these people, I think they are actually quite sincere. They may believe in social conservatism and banning abortion, and overturning Roe v. Wade and all of that stuff, but they really deeply believe that. Whereas I think for many other Trump voters, a vote for Trump is actually just a way to kind of stick it to liberals, rather than accomplishing the sort of moral agenda that the religious right laid out in the late 20th century.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It would seem along those lines, well, first of all, I think it’s important to pause that about five minutes ago we had a Mormon encouraging evangelicals to go to church more often, and I’m very happy about that. But I think along those lines of Mitt Romney and Evan, and others, there’s sort of this earnest belief in public service as a sacred duty and of an earnest belief in leaders having a sort of self-sacrificial posture. And Donald Trump’s clear overturning of that kind of model of service and leadership, there’s something countercultural about that. I think there’s got to be something to that.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, you may remember Rusty Bowers?
Matthew Kaemingk:
No.
Matthew Bowman:
This is the member of the Arizona State Legislature. In fact, I believe he was the speaker of the Arizona State House, who was a member of the LDS church, who really protested and stood against other members, and he is of course a Republican as many are. But he held the line in the Arizona State Legislature against other members of that legislature who wanted to vote to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona. And he said, “I am doing this, because I believe,” and then he referred to that revelation of Joseph Smith, that God raised up wise people to write the Constitution, and we cannot overturn that constitution.
Matthew Kaemingk:
What about culture war language within the evangelical world? You get this language of, we’re going to take the country back, we’re going to take the country back for Jesus. How does that type of take the country back or owning the libs. How does that kind of language land with conservative Mormon audiences?
Matthew Bowman:
So there is, I think in the LDS church, there are two types of Republicans, broadly speaking. The majority are I think people like Mitt Romney or Gary Herbert, the last governor of Utah, or Mike Levitt, who was governor of Utah for about 12 years, who would’ve been Mitt Romney’s chief of staff had Mitt Romney won. He was also George W. Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. These folks are, they’re conservative, I think, to be sure, but they imagine themselves in the model of a Dwight Eisenhower or a George H.W. Bush, which is to say, we are competent.
And you saw this with all of Mitt Romney’s run for office. In 2012, actually, I think Mitt Romney tried to be more of a culture warrior, and it just did not sound very convincing. But his general, I think Mitt Romney’s general affect, his impatience with Barack Obama was essentially he thought Barack Obama wasn’t competent enough and that he himself, he was a grownup, as many conservatives tend to imagine themselves. As people will sometimes say the Republican Party is the daddy party. It is the party that knows how to get things done. It’s the party that eliminates all of the nonsense and just gets down to work. That’s what most, I think, Utah Republicans think of themselves as.
Shadi Hamid:
Wow, that’s a very old vision of the Republican Party. I don’t think of those things when I think about today’s Republican Party at all.
Matthew Bowman:
Not at all. And this is, I think one reason why Mormons, Mormon Republicans tend to kind of find Donald Trump’s sort of off-putting, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Bowman:
The ideal, this is something everyone said at Barack Obama. No drama Obama, but that’s Mitt Romney too, right? No drama. I’m a businessman. I’m competent. I just want to go and run the state. Now, almost every gubernatorial election in Utah, you’ll have a Republican like that. The current governor, Spencer Cox is a Republican like that, and they’re always challenged in the primary by someone who is a flamethrower, someone who is like a Mike Lee, right? Someone who will bloviate about how the country is under attack by liberals, someone who will speak in kind of this… And there is this kind of old Mormon vernacular of the apocalypse that Mike Lee sometimes invokes, but I think those people tend to lose primaries.
We saw that again actually in a recent Utah Senate primary to replace Mitt Romney and the kind of competent, low drama Republican, John Curtis, won. Mike Lee is such an exception, because Mike Lee challenged. In 2010, he challenged one of these low drama, competent Republican sorts in the Republican primary in 2010, which was the tea party year. And Mike Lee won in something of an upset. He was not expected to win that, and he’s very much an outlier, I think in Utah politics today. If you go through in Utah’s entire congressional delegation, most of them are the sort of Republicans who keep their heads down, who do the work, who believe in civic service are conservative. But as Mike Pence once said, aren’t angry about it. Mike Lee is angry about it, and that makes him very much an outlier in LDS Republican politics.
Shadi Hamid:
And so, we’ve talked a bit about evangelicals and other Christians, and considering that you wrote a book about the word Christian, I know it’s obviously a sensitive and sometimes delicate topic as to whether Mormons are considered Christian or not. And I know that Mormons themselves can feel quite bothered when they’re not included in the broader tent of Christianity. At the same time, I think there’s something to be said for strangeness, and one theme in our podcast over the years is we want to encourage religious people to embrace strangeness, maybe not fully, but at least up to some point.
And there’s a tension there, because Mormons maybe want to be strange in some ways, but they don’t want to be strange in other ways. And I know this with Muslim sects, so let’s say the Ismailis or the Ahmadis, they want to be seen as often, most of the time as legitimately Muslim, and when they’re cast outside of the fold, that’s a problem for them in any number of ways. So why do you think there is this very live debate about, well, I think we know why, but what do you make of the debate as to whether Mormons are actually Christian or not, and where do you come down on that debate?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, my argument in the book is that this is an essentially unresolvable question, that defining Christianity is a bit like defining art or justice, which is to say there is no kind of higher controlling authority that gets to determine this. And when I think Mormons and particularly evangelicals sort of have this argument about whether or not Mormons are Christian, it often feels unresolvable, because I think the two sides don’t really understand the premises that each is coming to that debate with. So I will say from the Mormon perspective, Mormons will say simply, “We believe in Jesus Christ. We believe that he died in an atoning sacrifice for our sins. We believe we are saved and we’ll go to heaven, because of him. We believe he was resurrected and sits now with the right hand of God the Father.” And they’ll say, “Why isn’t that enough?”
That’s because I think most Mormons don’t understand the Nicene Creed and don’t talk about the Nicene Creed. And this is where it’s important to note, I think, there is only now, I think in the past maybe 20 or 30 years, in the most recent generation of Latter-day Saints, have there been Mormons who have thoroughly studied the history of Christian theology. It is important to note, I think Mormon leaders are not trained. There is no trained Mormon clergy. The current president of the church, the man who was considered a prophet was a heart surgeon before he took that job. The leaders of any given Mormon congregation are simply members of that congregation. There is no trained clergy. There’s nothing like a Protestant seminary. Mormons then don’t study Christian theology. They don’t really know how to engage with Christian theology, the vast bulk of them, which is why if you approach one of those young Mormon missionaries on the street and ask them what the Nicene Creed is, he’ll have no idea what you’re talking about most likely.
So Mormons tend to define Christianity simply in terms of their belief in Jesus Christ. Now, evangelicals will come at this from another way. They do subscribe to the Nicene Creed, as the vast majority of Christians do. And the Nicene Creed of course states that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three persons with one substance. That is they are all God. They are distinct in other ways. Mormons believe that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct beings. They are united in purpose, but not identity and not substance. So Evangelicals will tell Mormons, “You folks are essentially polytheists.”
And Mormons are very confused about why they would say that because they’re not really tracking the Nicene Creed debate. Evangelicals often will sometimes define Christian in terms of someone who was saved, someone who has had that kind of saving experience. Mormons don’t really understand that either. So I don’t think this debate can be resolved, because as I say, I don’t know that there is a higher power we can appeal to, except maybe for God. And to define what a Christian really is, to measure Mormons and Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox and other non-Nicene Christians, in which there are quite a few, like Jehovah’s witnesses against. But I do think it would help if all sides had a better knowledge of what the premises of each side is.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Matt, I’m curious as a historian, if you might contextualize this in terms of has it always been the case that Mormons have wanted to be included in the label Christian, or is it more of a newer movement to want to be seen as just another Protestant denomination?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, I think from the very beginning, Joseph Smith stated that we are actually the only true Christian Church, because we are the church that has restored the early Christian Church in Jesus Christ himself founded. So you saw actually very, very harsh language in the early years of the church, and there was a revival of that harsh language in the mid-20th century as well, in which leaders of the church stated essentially that all other Christian churches are heretical or incomplete, or corrupted, and that in fact, Latter-day Saints were the only real Christians on the face of the earth.
Now, there have been, I think we are in now a period in which Latter-day Saints have wanted to be, I think, more ecumenical about these things and have dialogueues with others, and to speak of other Christian churches as not being corrupt or heretical, but perhaps only incomplete. This is also a really delicate topic, because the LTS Church, unlike most Protestant denominations, is more like Roman Catholicism, in that the LTS Church does teach that if you wish to go to heaven after you die, to the highest levels of heaven, to dwell with God for all eternity, you must have the sacraments that the LDS Church alone is authorized to perform. And that is often difficult for Protestants who don’t tend to be sacramental in that way.
Shadi Hamid:
But my understanding, Matt, is that even without the sacraments, you can still get into secondary levels of heaven. So it’s not a requirement to be saved and to get to level two or level three still sounds pretty good, right?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah. So in Mormon soteriology, there are three levels of heaven. All human beings except for a very, very small handful, and there are various folk rationales as to what would make someone part of that very small handful, but all human beings will go to one of the three levels of heaven. The highest level, the level where God himself dwells, is reserved only for those who have had all the sacraments that the church provides, but anybody will go to some sort of level of heaven.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, well, that raises another question. As Matthew will know, I’m always intrigued by the question of incentive structures, and because we have a very strong developed conception of hell in Islam, I’m always a little bit puzzled and confused when I come across traditions, where you don’t have a strong incentive structure. Because if I was a Mormon and it’s like, or even not being a Mormon, you can still get into heaven pretty easily if almost everyone gets into heaven. What would be the incentive to practice a very strict form of religion? Because Mormonism is famously demanding. You got to take it really seriously, but if you can take it not so seriously and still get into level two or level three. So what explains the fact that Mormons are very strict in their practice, even without an incentive structure in the way you might have in other faith traditions with a more developed conception of hell?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Just as a little bit of context, Matt, you’re walking into a very old fight. So Shadi and I, one of our first bonding moments was fighting over the Christian understanding of grace. Shadi had read the book of Galatians and learned about how his sins could be washed away, and he was pretty frustrated by that, that you could-
Matthew Bowman:
Cheap grace, right?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I could still remember Shadi said, “Well, why don’t I just sin all the time and then just ask for forgiveness at the end? What’s the incentive?”
And I said, “Shadi, believe it or not, you’re not the first person to think of that.”
So yeah, to just restate Shadi’s question for you, which is what is the incentive structure for Mormons to behave so rigorously, which they clearly do as you’ve talked about, but you can essentially go to heaven essentially, by getting these sacraments. So what explains your good behavior?
Matthew Bowman:
Yes, a couple of things. Well, first, the real incentive is to get to what is called the celestial kingdom, which is the highest level of heaven with full glory, the full glory of God, and so on and so forth. The Apostle Paul in one Corinthians compares, he says there are three types of resurrected bodies compares them to the sun, the moon, the stars, right? And that is the language that Joseph Smith and members of the church after him have appropriated to describe the three levels of heaven. Would you rather be in the sun or in a star, right? Now, of course, the sun is a star, right? But we’re thinking poetically here. Second is, and I think this is really critical, and this explains I think some of Latter-day Saint adherence, and I’m going to say Latter-day Saint here, because there are other Mormon churches that don’t believe or practice what I’m about to say. This explains, I think the Latter-day Saint adherence to this idea of the family, which I think in turn explains their adherence to the religious right in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It is deeply, deeply held in the LDS church that part of what makes heaven, heaven and the highest level of heaven, the highest level of heaven, is that you’ll be bound eternally to your family, to the people who love you the most. And what your family is, is today in the church, it’s often spoken of as a father and mother, and three children. But in the past it was spoken about in more expansive ways, about your relationships, about your friends, and one of these sacraments in the church is called sealing. And this is a sacrament by which those familial relationships are made eternal and permanent. That sacrament is only efficacious in the highest levels of heaven. So people in the second and third level of heaven are in essence there, and they’re in glory, but they’re also alone. Their families may be in the highest levels of heaven.
Now, this is another, I think, topic that has developed a really fascinatingly over the history of the church. This was behind Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy, and Joseph Smith appears to have understood polygamy primarily as a vehicle by which families could be made as large as possible. So Joseph Smith himself married probably somewhere between 32, 33 and 38 women. But he consistently spoke of those marriages as not simply to the woman, but also binding him to their families as well. So he would marry actually, as also with Muhammad, he would marry the daughters of men whom he valued and wanted a familial relationship with. He would marry their sisters, he would understand himself to be sealed to these entire families. And so, you saw in polygamous Mormonism, these real kinds of vast clans of great families who all they believed would be together in the afterlife.
Now, part of the reorientation to monogamy in the 20th century was a kind of reconfiguration of the ideal family as being parents and children. But that language still persists, of do you want to be with your family forever? Do you want to be with your spouse forever? Do you want to be with your parents and with your children forever? That is why you need this sacrament of sealing.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, that’s a strong incentive. Yeah, that makes more sense. So as we start to close up here, a couple of points I wanted to raise. One is this question of whether we describe religious movements as movements, because we can talk about them as a faith tradition, as a church, as a community. The word movement is striking to me, because it suggests something, almost a kind of insurgent nature to it, something new and expansive, and something distinctly political. And I did notice that you did refer to Mormonism as a movement several times, but it also means that Mormonism is in competition, not just with other religions, but also other, “new religious movements,” which you’re also an expert on, and you’ve studied. There have been a lot of new religious movements over the past couple centuries. Mormonism is probably the most successful of the lot. What makes a new religious movement successful versus not?
Matthew Bowman:
Oh, that is a big, big sociological question, but a really fun one to grapple with. And I want to say a little bit about that language first. I think the word movement that scholars have sort of seized upon is in some ways insufficient, but it’s insufficient because all language to describe religion is insufficient. What is a religion to begin with? I think the term is one that we in the West have been using really since the Protestant Reformation, but our understanding of it has really been shaped by Christianity. And this idea, especially since the Reformation, that religions come in packages that we call churches or denominations. And as we speak in the United States of choosing a church or converting from one church to another church, we’re imagining these things as more or less different buildings on the town square, and you walk into the one you walk into.
But there are a lot of religious expressions, like Islam or Judaism, that simply don’t fit that category, right? Judaism is not a denomination the same way the Southern Baptist Convention isn’t denomination. Islam is not a denomination, although many Christians will try to say, “Well, there are two denominations in Islam, right? There’s the Sunni and the Shia, and those are basically like the Roman Catholics.”
Which is kind of nonsense, but it’s an attempt to sort of reduce religion to this essentially Christian model. So when I refer to the Mormon movement, I might mean a couple of different things. One is the fact that there is this broad tradition going back to Joseph Smith that has multiple denominations in it, of which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one, and maybe the best known and most successful. But it’s also a gesture to what Joseph Smith thought he was doing when he founded this thing. He would sometimes speak of it in denominational terms, right? It is a new church that’s in competition with the Presbyterians and the Methodists for followers, and so on and so forth. But clearly also he had something more expansive than a denomination in mind, because he wanted to found cities.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Matt, I want to press that, press Shadi’s question a little further. Just that what does make a new religious movement successful? Years ago, I dove a bit into this new and emerging field on the economics of religion, and what makes new religious movements successful. And one of the counterintuitive things that they argued was actually difficulty and high standards. It’s quite common for churches and religious movements that are struggling to say, “Well, we just need to lower our expectations. We need to be more welcoming. We need to expect less of people. We need to get rid of these stringent requirements.”
But scholars within the school of the economics of religion say, “No, actually you can grow with an intensity of religion.”
And yeah, Mormons have been kind of intense. So yeah, I want to press that question that Shadi asked, which is what makes a new religion successful seemingly, when it can be either very strange or very intense in its expectations?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, and that model you are citing? There is the famous strict church model, which is founded by some theorists of religion who come from economics. Most famously, and most recently, I think Rodney Stark, and I’m forgetting his first name, but Fink, William Fink, his co-author. And it does seem counterintuitive, but there does seem to be, I think in the contemporary US landscape, some evidence for it. Although there’s also some, I think countervailing evidence more recently that actually megachurches are doing quite well and tend to be less strict. Other possibilities though, for getting at this, and one I want to invoke is the LDS sociologist Armand Maas, who has written about this with reference to the LDS church. One of his points is that there have been times when the LDS church has been so different, and I’m going to use that word different, not strict, but so different from contemporary American culture that that has actually threatened its existence.
Most famously in the late-19th century when polygamy was flourishing and the US government was trying to stamp it out. Maas argued that in that instance, it was actually a kind of pivot back to being more like other Americans, more similar to American culture by embracing monogamy, for instance, by abandoning the Church’s own political party that it secured its survival, and allowed it to flourish and thrive. Maas argues for something less than just kind of a one-vector-strict argument than for an oscillation. Maas will say that sometimes a church will move away from being similar to the culture around it, but then it will move back to the centre and then it will move back again. And in fact, the success of the LDS church has to do with its ability to pivot into those ways, to at times become more similar to Protestantism and in other times to become more distinct from it.
And he credits actually the Church’s belief in prophecy for that ability. For instance, this practice of polygamy, which had been so embedded in the church for two generations, was a central principle of the church. In 1890, the president of the church could put out a statement and say, “God has revealed to me that if we don’t stop this, our church is going to be destroyed.” And it took about 15 years. There are some people who never accepted that, and they are now Mormon fundamentalists in their own little denominations, but the bulk of his followers agreed and stopped practicing polygamy. That kind of real dramatic pivot is really, really hard, especially for strict churches to do. But it was something that the LDS church was able to do, because of this belief in prophecy.
Shadi Hamid:
If you’re Mormon though, isn’t there an easier, more obvious explanation of Mormonism success, which is namely that it’s true? Well, and maybe this leads, it’s interesting to me that you didn’t mention it. That said, I did want to ask you something about, I’m not entirely, I’m pretty sure that you’re Mormon yourself.
Matthew Bowman:
You are correct.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. Just wanted to make sure. It’s interesting that you hadn’t mentioned your own positionality up until now, and I guess there is always a tension between being a scholar and a practitioner, and trying to create a kind of academic distance, because you want to be seen as an objective analyst in this regard. But clearly, your own faith commitments play some role in how you analyse the evolution of Mormonism over time. Feel free to take this in whatever direction you will. But I always find this fascinating how people talk about their own religions, because right now you just gave a lot of sociological reasons for Mormonism’s success, but I’m guessing that you believe it’s true.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, and I will say, I suppose I had assumed that that was a predicate for being on this podcast, that it was already assumed and known that I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, right? This particular iteration of the movement. And I think I actually though would not necessarily say that it is successful, because it is true. That is actually certainly something that was rightly believed and celebrated in the church in the late 20th century, when the church was growing incredibly quickly. Over the last 50 years of the 20th century, went from about a million members to more than 10 million members, which is really, really dramatic growth. But I think at the same time, there is an argument that’s made, I think, by some intellectuals in the church, some I might call them theologians in the church, that actually would emphasize this real paradox.
If this is in fact the one true church of Jesus Christ restored by him on the earth, why isn’t it the Roman Catholic Church? Why doesn’t it have a billion members already? Why is it still, there’s roughly as many members of the LDS church as there are Jews in the world, why is it still actually so small? And there are some contemporary theologians in the church who are arguing that in fact, maybe God never intended for the church to grow so rapidly, that this kind of obsession with size and growth, and all the rest is a product of really, frankly, of American ideas about expansion and growth, and growth being something that we invest with moral good, which may not be actually true at all, right? And in some ways I think this is an attempt to grapple with the fact that the church still does remain quite small.
Shadi Hamid:
But that’s not just an American perspective. It’s also very much a Muslim one. And I think Muslims would argue that success and expansion and growth, including territorial growth is suggestive of a deeper truth and so on. But now that I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking about it almost in reverse, that I take the point that Mormonism is still very small relative to other faith traditions, like Islam and Catholicism. It seems problematic that such a small number of people would be able to get into the first rung of heaven. I’m just thinking out loud here.
Matthew Bowman:
Sure.
Shadi Hamid:
I mean, how do you square that circle? I mean, shouldn’t the first rung of heaven be available to more people?
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, absolutely. And if we are comparing growth rates with truth, then clearly Islam is the true religion from what it was accomplished in the first couple of generations of it, right?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Come on now, knock it off. We don’t encourage Shadi on this podcast.
Matthew Bowman:
But no, to that point, and actually I think this speaks to what some of these, I think contemporary Latter-day Saint thinkers who are kind of questioning the growth paradigm, I think to some degree in response to the fact that the church has slowed in its growth, especially in the global north, as with many Christian churches over the past couple of generations. The way of thinking about it is this, Joseph Smith also established this thing that members of the church called proxy ordinances or proxy sacraments, and you may have heard of this already. The most famous one is baptism for the dead.
That is to say, people who are dead can actually be baptized. Similarly, people who are dead can in fact be sealed by proxy to their families. This is normally done by descendants. And this is what is done in the temples of the church, which you have seen if you’ve been in any big metro area and have driven around somewhat. They are these massive kind of gothic buildings that the church puts up for the purposes of doing these proxy ordinances. Now, another thing the church very much believes in is what is called agency. And this is another place in which the LDS church butts heads with Protestants. Mormons reject outright the notion of human depravity or the notion that we are depraved in some way, because of the fall.
Mormons believe that everybody is free and empowered to choose to follow God or to not follow God, as it were. And so, people have to enter into sacraments of their own free will. So there are many, many, according to LDS teaching, there are many, many, many dead spirits in the afterlife. And as sacraments are performed by proxy for them, those people are then given a choice whether or not they wish to this baptism. And if they choose it, then they are considered baptized. If they don’t, they are not. So this is the argument I think that some contemporary LDS theologians are making, is that the real function of the church is not to convert the entire world. It is to perform these proxy sacraments on behalf of the entire human race, which is a fairly massive undertaking.
Matthew Kaemingk:
All right. I wonder if, I might-
Shadi Hamid:
Depravity is one of Matthew’s favourite words, so I knew he would want to jump in.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Matthew Bowman:
I personally am actually more, I think a lot of LDS people misunderstand what is meant by it. I’m personally, I’m kind of a Lutheran Mormon in these ways. I read all of John Calvin’s institutes for my doctoral exams and was very embedded in Calvinism. So I’ve got some leanings there.
Matthew Kaemingk:
You do my Calvinist heart, my depraved Calvinist heart well. I’m working on Shadi right now, talking to him about the benefits of sin and depravity. So I wonder if I might take the honour of the last question. One of the sort of core questions that Shadi and I continue to wrestle with is the future of democratic life in America and the ability of this very diverse divided country to hold together in any sort of way. And the ways in which our, let’s be honest, our strange faiths of Islam, Mormonism, Evangelicalism, how we might actually contribute to this thing called democracy.
It is typically said that traditional religion is destructive to democracy, that having deep religious faith is going to make you a bad Democrat, in that sense. It’s going to undermine your commitment to democratic virtues and compromise and things like that. And I wonder if you might just kind of close our discussion out with just any sort of reflections you might have on your hopes for your own faith and the LDS church contributing to the future of democratic life in America as a minority faith, as a faith that is somewhat included and somewhat excluded from this American project. What kind of hope do you have for your fellow brothers and sisters in the LDS faith to play a role in maybe holding this mess that is America to together? Yeah. I wonder if you might close with some thoughts on that.
Matthew Bowman:
Yeah, absolutely. I first comment on the sort of perception about the relationship between faith and democracy there. I think an unwillingness to state that one can be kind of a passionate member of or believer in a religious tradition, and that this somehow makes someone unfit for democracy presumes a fiction. The fiction being that we are actually like John Rawls’ blank slates, right? That a human can only be a blank slate to participate in democracy. That we cannot actually approach democracy for any strong prior position. And I think that’s simply not true. And that does though make democracy harder, because it means we have to find a way to talk with people who are deeply opposed to us. And I will actually build a little bit on what I have said about this way of thinking about the LDS church as actually a minority and a permanent minority, and a permanent small minority.
And how I think for members of the church, thinking of themselves in that way makes them better participants in democracy than they might otherwise be. When Joseph Smith founded the city of Nauvoo in Illinois, which was one of these cities that he built for members of the church, he felt already burned by Protestant America. His religion had been kicked out of Missouri. The state of Missouri had issued, its governor had issued a proclamation stating all members of his church had to leave the state or be exterminated. That was the language the order used. And Smith said that in Nauvoo, people of all faiths were welcome to come and live, and run for office, and hold jobs. He specifically included Muslims in that by name and said Muslims, he said Mohammedans as he would have as a 19th-century American. But he said, “They’re welcome here and if any show up, they will be a citizen equal to us.”
And he said that I think, because he was very aware that his own faith tradition was suspect and was considered a minority, and perhaps a threatening minority. And for him, the best way to achieve this hope of a pluralist democracy, that is a democracy in which members come with strong views of their own, but abide by a set of civic regulations that help them moderate and channel those views into constructive conversation, the best way for him to achieve that would be to model it and to offer it to other people.
And this is, I think why you have seen members of the LDS church be real defenders of immigrants in the Trump era. The church has issued several statements stating that they support immigration to the United States. They consider immigrants a moral good. That has to do, I think with the Church’s own kind of deep roots in Latin America, particularly. There’s more Mormons in Latin America than there are in the United States these days. But it also has to do with the church’s own history of being kind of driven out refugee minority that flood the United States in pursuit of religious freedom. And the sense and that history, and that sense of being persecuted has hopefully made at least some members of the LDS church more sympathetic to those who are feeling persecuted today.
Shadi Hamid:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Matt. This has been absolutely fascinating and I’m really glad that we did this deep dive on all things Mormonism. So appreciate your time with us.
Matthew Bowman:
Thank you for having me.
