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Gary Wills, a man who has written an unseemly number of books and whose thoughts regularly grace the pages of The New York Review of Books, has a beef with intellectuals: They don’t understand how important religion is to the average American. This is clearly an important point for Mr. Wills, for it is almost impossible to pick up one of his (many) books without being told that intellectuals are so many ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand lest they be confronted with the bugbear that is religiosity.
This is true – up to a point. Most intellectuals do have a quarrel with religion as it is understood and practised south of the border, so much so that they apt to dismiss it out of hand. But there is the occasional exception, the intellectual who understands American religiosity all too well: The late William McLoughlin, Nathan O. Hatch and Columbia’s Herbert Balmer come first to mind.
To that list we can now add our own Donald Harman Akenson, a professor at Queen’s University and the author of several critically acclaimed books: An Irish History of Civilization, Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, and more.
Some Family takes Akenson in yet another direction: into the esoterica of the Mormons’ beliefs and their particular fondness for genealogy. Neither is particularly obvious to the outsider, and that Akenson is able to tell the story so well and so effortlessly suggests that he is a scholar of unusual gifts.
Akenson is at his most nimble in explaining the many ways in which the Mormons have improved on the Bible. This is not a small point: Biblical inerrancy is an article of faith among conservative evangelicals, and once you accept this, you realize that Mitt Romney doesn’t have a chance in hell of making it through the Republican primaries.
Unlike the evangelicals, Mormons believe in progressive revelation, and this makes them great innovators. These innovations range from the grand to the small, the smallest (to my mind) being the rebuke (Doctrine and Covenants 132:52) issued to Emma Smith, Mormon church founder Joseph Smith’s first wife. Emma, it seems, was less than thrilled when Joseph started to bring new wives home, and needed to be reminded "to receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph …"
It was another of Smith’s revelations, dating from the late 1830s, that touched off the Mormons’ mania for genealogy. "The Saints," Smith wrote in 1840, "have the privilege of being baptized for those of their relatives who are dead, whom they believe would have embraced the Gospel, if they had been privileged with hearing it." This sent the faithful back to their family Bibles for the names and dates of their ancestors. The great genealogical treasure hunt had begun.
In 1918, the Mormons expanded their mission, trawling for names among non- Mormons and baptizing them once their exact place in the tree of life had been determined. The practice continues to this day, spurred on by the wish to save as many souls as possible.
This mission to the dead is not without its critics. Everyone, even the Mormons, can agree that things went too far when the Jews who perished in the Holocaust were posthumously baptized.
But whatever one’s personal views on the Mormons, it is impossible not to admire the energy they have brought to the task of identifying "all the people who have ever lived." To date they have two billion names on record, one billion of whom have been determined to be unique (alas, the church has more than a hundred billion to go if it is to account for every human being to have graced this weary planet).
The Mormons have amassed a lot of names – no doubt about that – but how reliable are they? It is an important question because the church’s records have become a staple for amateur genealogists, and Akenson, historian that he is, would like to see other historians make better use of them. (Akenson’s curiosity about the Mormons was piqued when he was writing about the Irish in Ontario and the local Mormons came to his rescue, providing him with copies of local land titles.) The first point is that the later the record, the likelier it is to be accurate. Non-Mormons, in other words, are the real beneficiaries of the church’s database because the entries for their ancestors tend to be based on secular records and not on entries in the proverbial family Bible.
The second point is that in this, as in any other research endeavour, you need to double-check everything. Though the Mormons have instituted an admirable double-blind system for vetting new names, slipups are inevitable, and Akenson gives a few that are absolute howlers. The most laughable by far are the attempts to find a genealogy for the Norse gods Odin and Frigg, reported as having lived in "Asgard, Asia, or Eastern Europe."
The third problem, one that need not vex amateur genealogists, is that the Mormon understanding of time is, of course, anti-evolutionary. It is based, moreover, on the weakest of foundations: James Ussher’s historical chronology. Ussher was the 17th-century archbishop of Armaghm whose life’s work was to determine the exact date of creation. One need only read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay on the subject to realize that the good archbishop was cutting corners, and once this is admitted, the whole edifice must come crashing down.
But again, these are matters that need not vex the genealogists, who are, I suspect, the real market for this excellent book. But I can also heartily recommend it to anyone who would like to know more about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, about where it came from and what it stands for and why it is adding new members even you are reading the weekend papers.
– Jessica Warner, The Globe & Mail, Saturday, 1 December 2007
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