Sesquicentennial Spectacular!

The LDS Church’s 1997 sesquicentennial events allowed the community to celebrate its pioneer heritage, while working to “pioneerify” its increasingly international community, who had no blood connections to that story. Thus the story of the pioneers was unmoored from the more literal, historical understanding of generations past. Zion, gathering, and pioneer identity were spiritualized in new ways.

“The Price We Paid”

The events surrounding Martin’s Cove show the LDS Church’s process of sanctifying sacred space and the spatial exploration of Mormon theologies of suffering. The deaths near Martin’s Cove raise the question of how a good God, one who called the chosen people to Zion, would allow those same people to die so close to their journey’s end. In the space around the site, Mormons offer a theology of suffering through the storying and ritualization of space. From the LDS perspective, that theology of suffering justifies why the Mormons should have exclusive rights to Martin’s Cove.

A Lineal Temple

The end of the twentieth century saw an emphasis on more spiritual or metaphorical interpretations of Mormon historic sites, yet that spiritual turn included an affective, experiential element as well. Thus, the late twentieth-century activities made of the Mormon Trail a museum, a playground, and a temple: a “lineal temple,” a sacred space, where members could come to experience their history and theology under the umbrella of authenticity.

Epilogue

Church lessons indicate the ways that ideas about Zion and gathering, even after having been unmoored from place in the twentieth century, continue to be concretized and pulled into the physical and embodied realm. The lesson plans demonstrate the enduring desire to touch, taste, and feel the theological concepts of gathering and Zion.

Eyes Westward

The Smithification of the American West refers to the process whereby Utah Mormons embraced and emphasized a historical narrative that proclaimed that the prophet Joseph Smith had known all along that the Mormons would wind up in Utah. It suggests not only that Brigham Young was the rightful heir to Smith’s prophetic office but also that Smith knew the landscapes of the American West intimately because he had seen them in prophetic vision.

This Is The Place!

The negotiations that took place in order to create the 1947 This Is The Place monument and secure the land on which it stands demonstrate church and state authorities’ attempts to construct place and memory in Utah. While portions of the monument confirm the narrative of the Latter-day Saints as part of God’s chosen people, other portions affirm Mormons as leaders in the civic life of Utah and the larger United States. The monument itself represents the tension and ultimate compromise between these two often competing narratives at a pivotal moment in Mormon history.

Traveling Zions

Historical spaces have become increasingly important in the lives of some church members and to the institutional church. Yet the ritual of the trek points to something new and indicates that the spatial sense of rootedness, a connection to the LDS chain of memory that feels three-dimensional in that it is rooted not just in time but in place, has taken on a different look in the twenty-first century.

Introduction

To say that what happened as the LDS Church globalized was a shift from the literal to the metaphorical is to understand only one piece of the puzzle. It is my contention that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we can see creative slippages taking place within Mormonism between the literal and metaphorical, text and object, and history and space. Rather than simply moving to more metaphorical understandings, the Mormon community has spiritualized and metaphorized and then reconcretized concepts such as gathering and Zion in the material and physical realm so that believers can continue to touch and physically engage these central theological principles.

The Sweetheart of the Riverton Stake

This chapter explores the process whereby Bodil Mortensen became a Mormon martyr, the way her story was ritualized, and the way the presence of her bodily remains (along with the remains of fourteen others) sanctified the ground at Rock Creek Hollow. Examination of the creation of Bodil the martyr illuminates the way the slippage between metaphorical and literal interpretations happens in modern-day Mormonism.

Anxious Landscapes

This final chapter continues an exploration of collective memory, turning to the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in order to examine the intersections of place and collective forgetfulness. The chapter argues that this site represents an “anxious landscape” of the American West.