This is the second volume on Mormonism John G. Turner has produced, and like his biography of Brigham Young, it engages a generally familiar subject. But also as before, Turner's thoughtfulness and thoroughness tilt this thing we thought we knew such that it casts new light not merely on Mormonism but, as the best books on the topic do, questions of religion in America more generally.
Turner's Young biography was not simply about Young, who is normally depicted as a rustic colonizer whose administrative acumen and harsh pragmatism turned his followers from a persecuted remnant, clinging to life on the Illinois frontier, into effective settlers of the American West. Rather, Turner focused on Young's private life, using him to illustrate the hectic landscapes of nineteenth-century American religiosity and the ways in which the vivid spirituality of a new religious movement sustained a traumatic and violent life in the often brutal West. In this book, Turner delves into a topic just as contentious (though more among practitioners than students of American Christianity) as Young: Mormonism's ideas about Jesus.
Turner wants to accomplish several things with this book. At the most obvious level, he uses the figure of Jesus to explore the evolution of Mormon spirituality and devotion. He spends far more time on the nineteenth and early twentieth century than he does on more contemporary Mormonism; this is understandable, given his prior area of expertise, but it also illuminates the same issue which animated the Young biography: how a new religious movement institutionalizes. He is interested in a wide range of devotional expression. Turner explores Mormon art, texts, hymnody, and, perhaps most fascinatingly, the invocations of Jesus in ritual worship, including the solemnization of plural marriages and other salvific ordinances which set Mormonism apart from the American Protestantism from which it sprung.
Turner spends little time on the formal theology of Mormon Christology; he devotes relatively brief space, for instance, to Jesus the Christ, the Mormon apostle James Talmage's dense 1915 synthesis and arguably the most important work of Mormon theology ever written. This is something of a shame, because Mormon intellectual history is ripe for further work. But Turner has other goals in mind. His book echoes Stephen Prothero's American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrer Strauss Giroux, 2003) more than it does another recent book about Jesus in America, Richard Wightman Fox's Jesus in America: A History (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). Like Prothero, he scans the Mormon landscape for novels, films, and paintings that offer depictions of Jesus for excavation, spending more time with these things than with the sermons and theological tracts that Fox uses to explore ideas about human nature, atonement, and the relationship between God and humanity. Turner spends time on the margins, snaring the modern fundamentalist Ogden Kraut and children's songbooks in the same net as Talmage and Joseph Smith.
At a deeper level, though, Turner also wants to explicate why arguments about the nature of Jesus pack such weight in American culture. Using Robert Orsi's definition of religion as a series of relationships between the divine and the human, Turner seeks to demonstrate the omnipresence of Jesus within Mormonism, arguing that the power of Jesus as a symbol has given Mormons license to pursue both difference and similarity with other groups in American culture. Thus, the many similarities of Jesus's words in the Book of Mormon to those he utters in the King James Bible, gave the book legitimacy, while the equally numerous tweaks, expansions, and alterations the book makes to the King James version of Jesus's sermons serve to justify Mormon restorationism.
Similarly, his final chapter, which explores the intersections between contemporary Mormon art and issues of race, is a fascinating work of cultural history. Engaging with Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey's The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Turner seeks to demonstrate how Jesus has become a flashpoint for Mormonism's troubled racial past: as with his appearance in the Book of Mormon, Mormons have often used depictions of Jesus as white to justify a theological racial hierarchy that subordinated African Americans and Native Americans. Mormons’ belief that God and Jesus each possess a divine body, and their conviction that Jesus visited ancient America, has made their racial readings of the divine particularly devastating. Turner explores Joseph Smith's early visions, statues at Mormon temples, and a particularly idiosyncratic Mormon reading of certain reports about the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl which called him “white,” which took the legend as proof of the Book of Mormon's historicity. But while white American Mormons tend still to depict Jesus as a strong and masculine servant, a firm-jawed, tall, white man caring for the poor and dandling children on his knee, non-American Mormons have sometimes begun depicting a non-white savior. This rift may portend future changes in the faith.
Indeed, Turner's attention to non-American Mormons is illustrative of one of his great strengths: his unwavering focus on context—historical, intellectual, and geographical. He draws parallels between Mormon notions about Jesus that seem idiosyncratic to contemporary American Christians and, in turn, ancient Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other variants of the faith, and thus shows how Mormons are merely one more illustration that Christianity in total is not now, and has never been, a single orthodox monolith. “Christianity” for Turner is not defined by doctrinal homogeneity, but through ideological competition. Therefore Turner closes with the assertion that the Mormon Jesus is both “utterly Christian and distinctively Mormon”—a neat formulation which sidesteps the apologetic debates that often bog down discussion of the topic (294). His book is as much a study of Mormonism as it is of the Mormon Jesus, and, through that lens, a study of the argument over what it means to be “Christian” anyway.
