Recently, I finished John G. Turner\u2019s excellent Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. It is an eminently fair-minded biography that should prove to be the definitive account of Young\u2019s life. Personally, I came away from the biography with far greater insight into Young\u2019s spirituality and his theological contributions to Mormonism\u2014one of the many wonderful pay-offs for reading Turner\u2019s 400-page tome. I also came away from the biography with a previously held picture of Young confirmed: he was a harsh individual prone to violent hyperbole directed at his friends, as well as his enemies. And, at the height of a nearly apocalyptic conflict with the federal government in the 1850s, he condoned real violence (murder)\u2014at least after the fact\u2014against real people. [1]<\/p>\n
This portrait of Young neither surprised me nor did it trouble my religious moorings. I\u2019m a member of Community of Christ (formerly called the RLDS church), and we\u2019ve historically not been especially fond of Brother Brigham, a figure that my ancestors (unfairly) blamed for just about everything that we felt went wrong with early Mormonism (theocracy, polygamy, militarism, racism, etc.). I was already prepared to believe that Young was a complicated, problematic individual in Mormonism\u2019s history. For that reason, I greatly appreciated how Turner helped me understand Young\u2019s endearing qualities to his nineteenth-century followers.<\/p>\n
However, as I began to read online reviews of Turner\u2019s book by LDS members, I became aware of how deeply troubling his balanced, realistic portrait of Young has been for many LDS readers. It has even been troubling to a few post-LDS readers. This surprised me a bit. Consequently, I drafted an earlier version of this column in which I tried to empathetically imagine how one could embrace Brother Brigham without creating moral justification for the real violence he aided and abetted. Fortunately for any readers of this column, I decided to scrap that rather large and unwieldy project. Instead, I want to briefly address one small way that readers of Turner\u2019s biography might deal with the dissonance created by learning more of the historical Brigham.<\/p>\n
To put it a bit glibly, LDS readers who struggle with Turner\u2019s biography should read more fiction. Seriously. By this, I do not mean that LDS readers should substitute a volume from Gerald Lund\u2019s The Work and the Glory for Turner\u2019s Brigham Young. I mean that individuals should read stories where, in the space of a fictional narrative, characters confront multifaceted problems, wrestle with less than pure motives, act in ways that are not always moral, and experience a world that is not always just. Read Graham Greene, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy. For that matter, read almost any short story or novel once assigned in high school or a first-year college lit class.<\/p>\n
Why? Well, one recent psychological study showed that after a sample group read a short story, rather than an empirically-based article, they could more easily embrace ambiguity when they encountered it without jumping to snap judgments. The study\u2019s authors argue that \u201cwhile reading, the reader can stimulate the thinking styles even of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release\u2014of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one\u2019s own\u2014may produce effects of opening the mind.\u201d [2] And by \u201copening the mind,\u201d the authors meant thinking in novel, creative ways and being much more open to ambiguity rather than seeking \u201ccognitive closure.\u201d Maintaining one\u2019s comfort with a measure of ambiguity, I would argue, is a necessary skill to master when one engages with serious scholarship about the past. It certainly would help when one encounters the historical Brigham in Turner\u2019s raw and empathetic portrait. And, it could help LDS members keep Brother Brigham\u2014the figure with whom they have a religious relationship\u2014as a relative, even if he should not be a close, trusted friend.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
[1] John Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 122, 186-188, 258-259, 349-350.<\/p>\n
[2] Tom Jacobs, \u201cStudy: Reading Novels Makes Us Better Thinkers,\u201d Salon, 15 June 2013, http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2013\/06\/15\/book_nerds_make_better_decisions_partner\/<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, I finished John G. Turner\u2019s excellent Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. It is an eminently fair-minded biography that should prove to be the definitive account of Young\u2019s life. Personally, I came away from the biography with far greater insight into Young\u2019s spirituality and his theological contributions to Mormonism\u2014one of the many wonderful pay-offs for reading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":896,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,68,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brigham-young","category-fiction","category-mormonism"],"yoast_head":"\n