From its first paragraph, Charles Randall Paul's Converting the Saints strikes a different tone from other recent Mormon-authored histories of Protestant “anti-Mormonism.” Paul frames the story of Protestant proselytizing missions to Mormon Utah not as an atrocity tale but rather as a celebration of lively religious contestation by nonviolent means.
Converting the Saints continues Paul's twenty-year campaign to make religious controversy respectable again. Dissatisfied with an ecumenical movement dominated by theological liberals and seeking more to erase than interrogate differences, in 2000, Paul established the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, an organization that promotes interfaith dialogue between theologically conservative representatives of different faiths.
The introduction and conclusion to Converting the Saints lay out two philosophical arguments for this kind of engagement. First, disagreement promotes individual and community health, because people define themselves through “co-resistance as well as collaboration” (xv) and because the deepest social trust is forged by showing respect amid irreconcilable conflict. Second, terrorism and violence “proliferate in the absence of an honorable venue to contend over religion” (xvii). Proselytizing efforts, no matter how offensive, are ultimately a public good because they help establish a norm of noncoercive engagement.
Paul takes particular issue with the work of Peter Berger, who proposed that fruitful religious engagement requires that one enter the contest with no missionary motives and that one be open to the possibility of personal change. Paul rejoins that whether one is open to it or not, “the practical result of engagement is mutual change” (230). Berger's preconditions would bar from the conversation those who have the most to learn from interfaith dialogue and the most to teach. “The evidence of history as I read it demands that we disenthrall ourselves from the desire to end conflict … . We cannot wait for the apparition of unconditional respect” (xix, 230).
Paul's argument here resembles Barack Obama's 2007 commitment to negotiate with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without preconditions.” And as Paul observes in a footnote, his argument also resonates with recent critiques of college campus censorship of conservative speakers and of campus spaces kept “safe” from political debate (40, n69).
Paul explores this philosophy of lively nonviolent contestation through the medium of historical narrative. The narrative falls roughly into four sections:
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and its provocative interpretation of America as “a precarious experimental contest in the practical limits of cooperation among voluntary associations” (10). In such a society, Paul argues, the key to preserving freedom is the “dual capacity to persuade and be persuaded” (11).
Chapter 2 looks at three case studies in which the nation resolved religious conflicts through coercion: the Mormon wars, the American Civil War, and the Native American religious wars. On both sides of each of these conflicts, combatants used political, economic, and military means to advance religious values, with unsatisfactory results.
This is the weakest chapter both historically and rhetorically. Paul underestimates how politically radical, even revolutionary, the Mormons were, and he repeats some inaccurate stereotypes of Native Americans as strictly hunters who “did not attempt to build a modern economic base or to counter-proselytize” (38). More to the point, Paul insufficiently interrogates the question of whether the Protestant, Mormon, and Native American religious systems of the nineteenth century could have peacefully coexisted. Irreconcilable political and economic systems were integral to each religion, and in depoliticizing themselves, they have changed their core theologies and identities. The Protestant, Mormon, and Native American religions that peacefully coexisted in the twentieth century were different religions than those that clashed in the nineteenth, and coercion had a lot to do with affecting that change.
Chapters 3–5 introduce the reader in a general way to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant missionary movement and to the political and theological issues at stake between Mormons and Protestants.
Chapters 6–9, a series of case studies on early twentieth-century Protestant missionaries to Utah, are the meat of the book and its strongest section. Here Paul compares the missionary methods of John Danforth Nutting, William Mitchell Paden, and Franklin Spencer Spalding, who proselytized in Utah roughly contemporaneously. He writes with surprising sympathy for all three subjects, although Nutting and Paden engaged in plenty of unsympathetic behavior. The portrait of Spalding is downright touching, especially in its portrayal of the friendly relationship between Spalding and the leading Mormon intellectual B. H. Roberts. Spalding provides a powerful model for how to proselytize effectively. If I could recommend only one chapter in Converting the Saints, it would be chapter 8.
Altogether, Paul's philosophical case for an ethos of robust, nonviolent religious contestation is convincing, though it might have benefited from greater engagement with the literature on diversity and social trust. This ethos empowers him to write about his historical subjects without judgment—indeed, with sympathy—resulting in an interesting and useful narrative. As historical evidence for his philosophy of interreligious dialogue, however, his case studies are underdeveloped. The book is better read as an example of how Paul's dialogical ethos can help frame history than of how history supports his ethos of dialogue.
