In 1860, world traveler and adventurer Sir Richard Burton visited Salt Lake City to find out for himself whether the widespread rumors were true—that a vicious, violent, and vile cult had taken over the Utah Territory. “Going among the Mormons!” one acquaintance warned him, “they are shooting and cutting one another in all directions; how do you expect to escape?” What Burton found during his twenty-four day visit, however, ran quite contrary to the numerous popular portrayals filled with venom and vitriol. To be sure, like any good anthropologist of the day, he viewed the Latter-day Saints an exotic and alien people, but he was generally sympathetic to Brigham Young with his many wives, the communitarianism of the young movement, and their many distinctive beliefs and secretive practices. “But there is in Mormondom, as in all other exclusive faiths,” he wrote in City of the Saints, “whether Jewish, Hindoo, or other, an inner life which I cannot flatter myself or deceive the reader with the idea of my having penetrated.” No “Gentile,” no matter how unprejudiced, “can expect to see any thing but the superficies.” Implicitly hinting at the insider-outsider dilemma that has always plagued the modern study of human groups and institutions, Burton suggests that Mormonism has at least two faces: one that is put on display for the non-member and one that is only accessible to the initiated. Thus, while he might be able to provide a fair, even-handed, and accurate account of his own interactions and observations regarding its public face, he doesn’t think that it’s possible for an outsider to unveil the private face of the Latter-day Saints. Discerning and articulating the inner core of the community would thus remain beyond his reach.
A little over a hundred years later, historian Sydney Ahlstrom responded similarly in his prize-winning book A Religious History of the American People (1972). He stopped short of trying to pin Mormonism down, because, as he puts it, “The exact significance of this great story persistently escapes definition.” In other words, the “categories normally invoked to explain denominations were rendered practically useless.” Ahlstrom then makes this rather provocative claim, “One cannot even be sure if the object of our consideration is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.” The fact that so many sociologists and astute observers have viewed Mormonism in such a wide variety of ways—a ‘native ethnic minority’ (Thomas O’Dea and Dean May), a ‘subculture’ (Armand Mauss), a ‘global tribe’ (Joel Kotkin), ‘a religion that became a people’ (Harold Bloom and Martin Marty), a mysterious cult, and a world religion—suggests that Mormonism, like the category of religion itself, requires extremely careful consideration and patient observation in order to do justice to its variety and complexity. Simply put, it demands an examination from multiple vantage points.
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