Review
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Title: Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons
Author: Jan Shipps
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Genre: History
Year Published: 2000
Number of Pages: 400
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 0-252-02590-3
Price: $24.95(US)

Reviewed by Richley H. Crapo

Shipps is the dean of “outsider” historians of Mormonism. Once again she has delivered an intriguing book, one that is simultaneously autobiographical, historical, and methodological. It is organized around articles written since her first encounter with Mormonism 1960.

The book is made up of five parts. In the introduction to the first part, “Studies in Perception,” Shipps candidly shares information about her introduction to Mormon culture when she moved to Utah and about her growing interest in better understanding the distinctive language of Mormonism. The first two articles in this part present the results of her content analysis of media coverage of Mormonism, work which she began in 1960. These present evidence of changing portrayals of Mormonism in the national media from 1860 to the present. In these articles, Shipps demonstrated her ability to incorporate skilled social-science techniques to address an issue of historical interest. Another examines Mormon perceptions and attitudes towards non-Mormons, and the fourth looks specifically at media coverage of the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention in Salt Lake City (and the clash of religions that the media anticipated).

Part two, “History, Historiography, and Writing about Religious History,” reveals how Shipps developed her own way of writing about the Mormon past through the vehicle of five articles in which she addresses both specific topics of historical interest to the study of Mormonism and her own ideas about how they are best addressed. Part three, “Placing Religion at the Heart of Mormon History and History at the Heart of Mormonism,” offers three articles that illustrate Shipps’ “conscious effort to incorporate analyses of the impact of the religious perceptions of the human actors involved in the dramas into forthright accounts of the past” (p. 11). Here she covers early Saints’ perceptions of Mormonism as the restoration of primitive Christianity, Brigham Young’s role in leading the church during the territorial era, and the spread of Mormonism outside the Great Basin in the mid-twentieth century.

Part four, “Deciphering, Explicating, Clarifying: Exercising an Inside-Outsider’s Informal Calling,” shifts focus to the thorny problem of how Shipps developed a way of explaining the LDS belief system that would be intelligible to those who are unfamiliar with the LDS church or Mormon culture. In the two articles that make up this part of the book, she presents the essential core of Mormonism as its claim to be the divinely restored and authorized Church of Jesus Christ, a core to which have been added other, less central layers, including the gathering of Israel and the “restoration of all things” (which included, of course, such practices as temple building, baptism for the dead, and plural marriage). Autobiographically, she shares how her views on this topic evolved in response to her efforts to explain Mormon culture and history to journalists who wanted to inform their news accounts to be accurately informed by the Mormon context in which they occurred.

In part five, “How My Mind was Changed and My Understanding Amplified,” Shipps presents two articles and an introspective Epilogue in which she tackles the question of “Is Mormonism Christian?” In this, the most subjective group of essays, she simultaneously examines the various meanings embodied in the question itself, the transformations in the phenomenon of Mormonism over the decades she has studied it, and the simultaneous changes in her own understanding of how best to understand Mormonism within the broader context of Christianity.

As always, Jan Ships demonstrates the wonderful ability to provide penetrating scholarly insights in a writing style that is a joy to read and unplagued by the often impenetrable syntax of academe.