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The Evolution of Mormon Culture in Eastern Arizona
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 40, 1972, No. 2
The Evolution of Mormon Culture in Eastern Arizona
BY MARK P. LEONE
NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA Was full of Utopian groups. Most were religious like the Shakers, Mennonites, and Hutterites; some were secular like the Pullman community in Chicago. All of these groups shared the goal of removing or freeing a population from mainline American culture. They all sought to set up an environment where their group could lead an independent, autonomous, self-sustaining existence.
As a Utopian group seeking to remove its population from the iniquities of the larger world, Mormonism was no different in this characteristic from several dozen similar movements, both religious and secular.
All Utopian efforts in the nineteenth century were to one degree or another communal. The original experiments tried by Joseph Smith, Jr., involved the complete sharing of property. The idea was soon abandoned and replaced with tithing, or more literally the common pooling of a tenth of one's yearly income. In the mid-1870s the United Order was founded as an attempt to create completely autonomous communities throughout the Great Basin. Their history is an illuminating footnote to the Mormonism of the period and is of consequence here because Mormon colonial activity in Arizona began during this period and was heavily influenced by the principles operating in the United Order idea.
All nineteenth-century Mormon settlement in the Great Basin was organized around the notion of self-sufficiency within a framework of cooperation. The adaptive strategy used by the Mormons as well as by most other Utopian groups was internal completeness which was to lead to independence from the rest of the world. The level at which internal completeness, or self-sufficiency defined economically, was to be realized for the Mormons varied several times within the nineteenth century. At one point all Mormondom was to be one huge cooperative enterprise. As that became unworkable, an effort at making every subdivision of the kingdom self-reliant prevailed. Even under this idea the unit that was to be self-sufficient varied. If the Mormon settlements on the Little Colorado River are examined, the unit to become self-sufficient seems at first to be relative to the beholder. Church leaders in Salt Lake City thought and dealt with the Little Colorado area as a single entity. It was a colony of the Mormon Church and as such, even though it was internally differentiated, was viewed as a whole and as a piece for several decades. The highest levels of local church administration within the Little Colorado area itself shared the view of Salt Lake City in seeing the region as a whole. Later, as administrative subdivisions were spread over the area, the view of stake leaders tended to be circumscribed by the limits of their administrative units. Parallel cases of narrowing vision of what unit was to be self-sustaining are found for the leaders of towns or wards, and also at the level of the single farming family. The autonomy or selfsufficiency to be achieved in economic matters varied with the perspective of the individual, and that perspective was governed by his position on the scale of leadership and responsibility. After the initial period of settlement, there was no clear policy on what the level of cooperation and, on the reverse, autonomy should be.
The initial settlements on the Little Colorado were founded under the United Order of Enoch. They lasted from 1876 to about 1885. Their effective life was about five or six years, and they did feature the communal holding of property. There was unified leadership and constant direction from Salt Lake City headquarters. But after their rapid passing, the church was more concerned with fostering a viable colony than with setting out precise rules for cooperative and autonomous behavior. As a result, variability in perspectives on the appropriate level of autonomy came into being.
There is little doubt that Mormon communalism in its moderated form is one of the keys to understanding how the Mormons brought off the successful settlement of the Great Basin. The individualistic, profitmaking ethos that characterized much of the settlement of the American West was not as efficient an adaptive strategy as the communal one, when applied to the Great Basin. The Little Colorado area of Arizona had seen such efforts fail or barely survive before the successful arrival of the Mormons. And during the course of their own working adjustment to the area, several other non-cooperative, capitalist ventures were elaborate failures.
The whole adaptive strategy of the Mormons was inward-looking. It is important to see that such a strategy can emphasize local autonomy as well as cooperative efforts at survival. These are two tendencies that are more likely to be contradictory and conflicting than complementary. Even though the Mormon cooperative effort succeeded in planting and sustaining a viable population in eastern Arizona, it was not successful until it counterbalanced serious trends toward fission among these same communities. Two factors will illustrate the trend toward internal isolation among the towns composing the Arizona Mormon colony. The first is the high rate of town endogamy. The second is the great homogeneity in crops grown in all the towns.
Throughout the whole period of 1876 to 1900, the rate of intermarriage within the Mormon towns was eighty percent. That is, eight out of every ten marriages in any one town were between residents of that town. Only twenty percent of the time did a town resident take a spouse from another community. That was the pattern in Arizona and in Utah as well. Such a pattern of social relations certainly was not calculated to bind a region together through marriage and family ties. In fact, in Utah, community endogamy led to the emergence of genetic pathologies.
Joseph E. Spencer has found "evidence which suggests that inbreeding was beginning to produce undesirable results in some villages, notably in Springdale."
In addition to the isolation of towns through an inbred kinship network, the economic pattern whereby all towns raised the same crops fostered separation. This was another tendency that cooperative efforts had to counterbalance. Tithing records for Snowflake, Taylor, St. Joseph (Joseph City), Woodruff, Pinedale, and Show Low for the years 1885 to 1896 show all these towns raising the same products. Hay, grain, livestock, and vegetables with some dairy products were produced by every town. There were very few products centered in specialized locales and as a result little economic basis to foster trade between the towns.
How, in spite of all this, was unity and cooperation achieved? Both the pattern of intensive in-marrying and the duplication of farm products had aspects to them that worked to tie the region together. Inmarrying was tied to economics and served as a pipeline to aid from relatives in the world outside a town during hard times, and the similarity in farm products guaranteed that any town needing aid was sure to find basic subsistence products within easy reach. The first part of this article is concerned with the means used by the Little Colorado communities to counteract their own economic and social isolation. Patterns of marriage exchange and the system of ecological interdependence are examined as ties unifying these towns. The initial question has two factors: patterns of marriage exchange, or the reciprocal circulation of women, and economic autonomy. The question is to what extent the economic autonomy of the towns produced community endogamy (marriage within the community). Further, in the twentieth century what is the relationship between the breakup of economic isolation in these towns and a changed rate of exogamy (marriage outside the community)? The second part of this study is concerned with the absorption of these towns into the national economy and how nineteenth-century Mormonism has adjusted in them to become a fully successful twentieth-century religion. As a whole the paper attempts to show Mormonism's changing relationship to the economic and social circumstances of its population from 1880 to 1965.
UNIFYING FACTORS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
If individual communities were economically self-sufficient — or even if they so conceived of themselves in the face of reality — then what tied them together to preserve regional unity? This should include not just unity at a transcendant doctrinal level but at the level of practical cooperation as well. Consider the circulation of marriageable women among these communities. There was and is no marriage rule among Mormons prescribing exogamy or endogamy, except that a Mormon should always marry a Mormon. Therefore, one assumes that the pattern of marriage ties is free to conform to other pressures. The question then becomes, does the economic independence of a community produce community endogamy, or does regional religious unity produce community exogamy? Data from both historic and more recent cases follow.
In order to measure patterns of marriage exchange within and among the communities of eastern Arizona, patterns of endogamy and, by contrast, exogamy were examined from 1879 to 1965. The data were obtained from marriage licenses in the county courthouse records at St. Johns and Holbrook, Arizona. Of course, even the initial period of settlement reflects more than Mormon patterns. It includes the Mexican- American population as well as small, less well-defined segments. Nevertheless the Mormons are by far the major segment of the population and the focus here.
For the area covered by Navajo and Apache counties, the rate of exogamy averaged twenty percent from 1879 to 1900, and the contrasting rate of endogamy was eighty percent. These data are especially interesting since many of the Mormon families migrating into Arizona from Utah moved several times before settling in one town permanently. This trend is contradicted by the highest social stratum of the Little Colorado area. The families of bishops, stake leaders, and the few who had wealth tended to form within themselves an endogamous elite who married out of their own towns, thus accounting for part of the twenty percent rate of exogamy. This latter observation has been corroborated in interviews with several living members of these same families.
In the twentieth century, the average rate of out-marrying for the same set of communities is forty percent. The peaks in exogamy — that is, single people migrating in from outside and then marrying, or one member of a couple going outside his natal community for his spouse — are closely correlated with peaks of abnormal economic activity in the twentieth century. During normal times in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economic base of the area was stable enough to permit the community the self-sufficiency that was the explicit Mormon ideal. During prosperity and depression, i.e., departures from the norm, the area could not remain self-contained. In both cases the departure was due to strong pressure for aid either to be given to or extracted from the world outside the community. When the towns were well off, individuals migrated to them, often marrying local people. When the towns were poorly off, people in them sought to stabilize their individual conditions by bringing to the town a spouse with family ties in an area that was better off. When generalized, this means that endogamy is a function of economic stability and exogamy is a function of economic instability. Economic instability usually implies crisis, but not always. From 1902 to 1908, the highest rate of exogamy ever experienced in the area was recorded. This was a period of rapid and unusual economic growth. Railroading combined with the success of the sheep-raising industry to make the area productive. In addition, this was also the period of highest rainfall for the area in the twentieth century, and agriculture proliferated as an economic base. Exogamy again reached highs in the Depression and in the 1950s. During these two periods of economic crisis, one of the means for stabilizing an individual's economic base was to seek a spouse in a community other than one's own. By extending the bonds of kinship and kin-based obligations, guarantees against localized disaster were maintained. Family ties, family influence, ties of friendship, and the rapid exchange of knowledge that such ties facilitate enable an individual to insure for himself a wider range of options in times of economic crisis than he would otherwise have.
In summary, then, patterns of marriage alliance expressed as exogamous and endogamous relationships seem to be tied to economic conditions. From an impressionistic reading of the economic data available, it seems clear that for the whole of the period from 1879 to 1965, marriage patterns are correlated with economic factors. In the 1960s, for example, there has been a drop in the rate of exogamy from forty percent to thirty-five percent to complement the increased stability of the economy of the local communities. In the nineteenth century, economic stability was equated with the self-sufficiency of communities; however, economic stability since World War II has come about through connections with the national economy. Nevertheless, regardless of the source of economic strength, fluctuation in community exogamy reflects the degree of dependence on the outside world.
The obvious contradiction to community in-marrying is the series of marriage bonds between the most powerful families in the area in the nineteenth century. Intermarrying between the families which produced bishops and other hierarchs had distinct economic advantages for the area. Since bishops controlled and managed the tithing storehouses, the water control systems, the system of civil justice, as well as almost all aspects of intercommunity exchange, tying the entire network together with marriage alliances guaranteed more secure links between the men who governed the area. Such ties produced a sociological canopy over the whole area insuring cooperation, immediate access to all conLmunities, and greater personal security for those families with the greatest capital invested.
The data from the Little Colorado towns suggest that neither the faithful nor the hierarchy of the church seems to have felt that widespread intermarrying between Mormon towns was necessary either to facilitate economic ties or to maintain Mormon cultural and religious homogeneity. In the nineteenth century, exogamy seems to have been a specialized tool for unifying the managerial elite but not a tool for linking Mormons to each other for general cooperation and unity. Instead, exogamy would seem to be a trustworthy reflection of the rate of economic stability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would be easy to overemphasize the positive function of exogamy in the Mormon towns. But insofar as the function is clear, it seems to have been to pull in wealth and security from beyond the limits of the town during difficult periods and to equalize wealth with others during prosperous times.
Although the church relied minimally on kinship ties between towns to sustain unity among its east-central Arizona communities, a large number of other means were employed. Many of these were economic institutions having religious overtones. Even though these towns tried to be economically independent of each other, none was self-sufficient. In the initial period of settlement, machinery, cattle, and other forms of capital were supplied from Utah. But after that, the principal means of supplying needed goods and produce to local Mormon communities took the form of tithing exchange within the church in Arizona. Along the Little Colorado there was, given the circumstances of a technologically primitive agricultural economy, a set of environmental circumstances that permitted each of the Mormon towns to raise essentially the same combination of plants and animals. But the proportions raised within the range of plants and animals varied widely from town to town as the Snowflake Stake Funds for 1882-1901 reveal. Some areas were better suited to some crops than to others. That kind of variation compromised self-sufficiency and made some exchange necessary. The vagaries of the climate also produced variation in crop success from town to town and from one year to the next in any one town. That also necessitated exchange. All of this was accomplished in good part through the tithing system, and almost wholly under the aegis of the church.
Ecological variation was of several kinds. Some towns were better suited to producing some items than others. That circumstance was naturally reinforced even under primitive cooperative and market conditions. Within a town, resources varied from family to family thus creating another level of variation. Even though most families attempted to produce their basic foodstuffs on their own farm, crops obviously varied. A third level of ecological variation was introduced through annual fluctuations in temperature and rainfall. The arid Southwest presents a mosaic of climatic variability at any one time during a growing season in almost any of its locales. It was possible that within a year and especially over a period of years the agricultural products at one place would be noticeably inconsistent. These three levels of ecological variation, from town to town, from family to family in a town, and from year to year at any one farm, had to be dealt with successfully by any agrarian economy in the Southwest. The strategy used by Mormons to equalize the ecological imbalance natural to agriculture in this region was to tie the variation and its redistribution to religion.
The religious device for balancing this variation was tithing. Ideally every individual paid one-tenth of his annual income into the ward. Tithing was almost always in kind or in labor until after the turn-of-thecentury. Each ward had a tithing house which was in fact a system of barns, pens, and root cellars. In charge of this storage complex was a tithing agent — in the Little Colorado communities usually the bishop — whose chief function was to get rid of the produce and stock by trading it off, preferably turning it into cash. The ward tithing houses and agents served as a community-wide network of redistribution. The tithing house was open to anyone in or out of the community. The house handled local surplus as well as needed produce traded in from other towns.
Interviews reveal that, as in Utah, Arizona tithing offices served as general stores. Other stores existed, but tithing offices were open to all and would willingly trade or sell produce. Since tithing might be done on a weekly or monthly basis and often involved perishable kind, it was logical that the community receive the produce back as fast as possible. The Snowflake Stake Funds 1882-1901 reveal that very little tithing in kind went for welfare; so it would seem that the community was using the tithing office as a local trading center. Although ward and stake records are not without ambiguity on this point, it seems safe to conclude that ecological variation in a town — some people having too much of one item and others trading for it with some other item they had a surplus of — was easily handled on a daily basis by the tithing houses.
Between towns, differing natural environments naturally produced differing quantities of produce. Those were traded off between towns in normal times using the tithing houses as intermediaries. In addition, climatic variation and the unpredictable pattern of natural disasters created an ever-present need for the redistribution of stored surpluses. Tithing surpluses could be shipped from one town to another in case of a disaster like a dam washout at Joseph City or Woodruff. They could be used to pay off church debts as occurred when tithing herds from southern Utah and the Joseph City area were allocated to purchase St. Johns. More generally the surpluses in ward tithing houses and at the central administrative center in Snowflake were put at the disposal of communities in the entire area. These surpluses could be traded for or shipped to any crisis point.
The quarterly stake conferences served to advertise a season's particular strengths and needs on a town by town basis. The Snowflake Stake Conference Minutes for 1886 reveal, for example, that Erastus (Concho) was reported by its bishop to have a surplus of grain, while other officials reported that their towns lacked the same but had other strengths. Not only did the tithing system reallocate scarce resources, but tied to the conference system there was a guarantee that reallocation was based on accurate knowledge of existing resources.
Quarterly stake conferences — two of which took place during the most important times of the agricultural cycle, planting and harvest — served as regulators for the agrarian system. In the spring the region's disparities could be compensated for by rearranging the proportions of crops planted, and in the fall the region's entire needs could be collectively and accurately assessed and its surpluses redistributed, traded off in kind, or simply sold off to areas where shortage was most acute. Much of the actual parceling out of surpluses may not have occurred directly under the aegis of the church, but the church acted as communications network, fixer of uniform prices, and often as redistributive agent to the bulk of the economic system.
Tithing houses represented more than temporary storage. From interviews it is clear that individuals maintained large stores of grains when it was possible, and tithing accounts also reveal fair quantities always on hand in the tithing houses. Given that any one town might experience a rapid fluctuation of its yields from one year to the next, both the individual's store and the town's tithing reserve served as insurance. One might also tithe more than one-tenth in a prosperous year and draw against the extra in subsequent periods of need. Here the church played ecological banker with its prescriptions and foresight, and as it interpreted these activities in the realm of ultimate concerns, it played divine banker as well.
Intermediary between ward storehouses and those in need of their surpluses were a series of trading companies, foremost among which was the Arizona Cooperative Mercantile Institution. The ACMI was a church-financed and -run trading company functioning as importing agent but, more importantly here, also as wholesaler and redistributor to the Little Colorado communities. The ACMI bought local surpluses and provided the storage facilities for them. It was credit-granting, would deal in kind, and would use time and labor as a medium for exchange when necessary. Modeled after the Utah version — Zion's Cooperative kind of monolithic decision-making body that enabled the Mormon communities as a cooperative. The shares were usually held by the most wealthy in a town, almost invariably the families in ecclesiastical authority, and it was capitalized jointly by them.
When surpluses were still small, the route of exchange ran from tithing house to tithing house, every house being open to all in a town and to all surrounding towns. Ward tithing records from Joseph City, for example, indicate that bishops from surrounding towns had credit in the Joseph City tithing house. Bishops seem to have had call on the surpluses of neighboring towns, and certainly the stake presidency had such authority. It is, however, quite unclear how frequently actual tithing exchange occurred between towns. Usually surpluses went from individual to tithing house, to the ACMI, and to the public. In addition, the ACMI was a market for surpluses produced by individuals, as well as for a town's tithing surplus. Interviewees in their nineties have corroborated both the fact that individuals used the tithing houses as stores for daily purchases and the fact that tithing surpluses were sold to the ACMI.
Most of what a community produced it consumed itself. A total of ten percent of its overall produce would have represented most of its unconsumed surplus. What was not stored was sold back to the community or area towns for cash. Tithing expressed as cash was sent to church headquarters in Salt Lake City. It is hard to calculate what fraction of money sent to Salt Lake City returned to the villages, but much did. In the form of loans, equipment, and outright gifts, a major part of tithing was returned as a type of security otherwise unavailable to independent farming towns. Put in a very broad way, the church in Salt Lake City served as banker against hard times. And it never seems to have failed.
The Snowflake Stake financial records show that in 1886 over twothirds of the total tithing from the stake was locally dispersed and never reached Salt Lake City. This figure, a not inconsequential one when expressed in dollars and cents, shows both the heavy reliance the whole of the Little Colorado placed on tithing exchange and redistribution and also how important it was to the church to maintain these villages to its service. Local redistribution of tithing was done with the full knowledge of church administrators in Salt Lake City. Tithing was spent largely to pay laborers in kind who spent time on public works projects.
On the Little Colorado during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a picture emerges of ecological variability tamed, exchanged, and equalized by the sanctions and personnel of the unifying church. To be sure, the church and its institutions were not called into existence by ecological circumstances in nineteenth-century Utah and Arizona. Rather, the church seems to have been a key factor permitting one of the most successful, longest-lived adaptations in this semiarid area.
Cooperation and integration within and among the Little Colorado towns were strengthened by other economic factors in addition to ecological variation. Water control and irrigation works were carried out by individual towns, but the planning and engineering usually took place at a regional level. Since all the communities suffered similar natural disasters, an umbrella of common endurance and continued effort acted to transform a technological effort to a shared symbolic activity.
Water sharing and land allotment within towns were handled by a central authority — the bishop and his administrators — with the backing of the town. Limited amounts of water and arable land had to be equalized on one hand, and used efficiently on the other. A cooperative and centralized administration was achieved through the use of the lay clergy. Most communal economic activities were handled through the town's clergy-hierarchy which included most of the male population. The harmony needed to secure such a system was guaranteed through the sacred sanctions members of an ideologically homogeneous town could bring against each other. To Mormons, all aspects of life had religious significance and hence there was a common understanding about all ranges of behavior. The efficiency produced by eliminating controversy in day-to-day life created the most prosperous towns along the Little Colorado.
The community storehouses that provided for both surplus and relief were handled by a lay clergy as were irrigation and land management. Women handled many bureaucratic functions including the management of welfare which was channeled through the tithing office. The entire system was managed by a hierarchically arranged lay clergy, headed at the local level by a bishop and a stake president. The pyramid, of course, was topped by the Mormon president-prophet in Salt Lake City. All power was ultimately legitimized through his approval, but decisions had real effect because of a series of participatory decisions going down to the most local level. Until the turn-of-the-century, Utah and northern Arizona were in effect managed by a federal theocracy. Participation in a single ideology facilitated what economic exchange was necessary among the towns. The church served as an efficient vehicle for economic redistribution and for creating the social organization that staffed and reinforced the economic system. The church leadership was wise enough to see that adaptation in a marginal ecological zone involved almost continual crisis. Its success was built on mediating the crises.
The towns the Mormons set up in the Great Basin had a built-in tendency to become autonomous economic units. Few actually became autonomous, and most were tied together through a wide variety of social and economic practices fostered by a unified religious network. The strategy of adaptation used by Mormons in the nineteenth century emphasized independence and self-sufficiency through cooperation. So far this paper has been concerned with the role of cooperative institutions in counterbalancing the trends to complete independence. It is those institutions that guaranteed the success of the network of towns on the Little Colorado River, and it is those institutions that permitted the Mormons to succeed with their ideal of withdrawing from mainline America to concentrate solely on themselves. This argument assumes that local ecological adjustment required some centralizing agencies over these scattered communities. Over much of the Southwest similar natural circumstances forced different cultures into similar adjustments. These adjustments included scattered communities, the linking together of unevenly distributed natural resources, widely varying agricultural products, water management complex enough to require central direction, and a primitive technology. This was true within the church's domain and without. In east-central Arizona few systems produced as prosperous and long-lived communities as did the Mormon Church. That institution's umbrella seems to be the factor that distinguished mere survival from healthy success in the communities of the upper Little Colorado drainage. Clearly, the non-Mormon parts of the Southwest provide a comparative laboratory, and when that laboratory is closely examined — as it cannot be here -— the decision will tend toward the cooperative institutions of the church as a key factor in survival, if not to ideological determinism.
ADJUSTMENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Ideally, Zion and its constituent communities were to be removed and independent from the rest of the United States. As Leonard J. Arrington so plainly shows, the United States spent a large part of the late nineteenth century destroying that independence. The Great Basin was brought fully into the economic domain of the Union until, with the Depression, the Second World War, and the succeeding periods of prosperity, Mormondom became in every way a part of the national entity.
Community autonomy on the Little Colorado ended well before 1900. The rate of community exogamy alone doubled between 1900 and 1965, averaging forty percent in the twentieth century, thereby implying increased community interdependence. Although exogamy has continually risen in the twentieth century, the extensions and demands of American culture have forced more than the kind of social interdependence between communities that could be measured by changes in exogamous relationships. The interdependent links of the American economy which envelop the eastern Arizona towns certainly do not necessitate the kind of monolithic decision-making body that enabled the Mormon communities of the upper Little Colorado to endure in the late nineteenth century. Instead, what is needed is an organization capable of permitting individuals to cope with problems derived from too much specialization, too much progress leading to too little success, and an increasingly unpredictable future. How can an organization cope with the diffuse possibilities open to an American? Diversity in goals, priorities, and ultimate concerns within our population produces divergent expectations that could threaten the unity of Mormondom on the Little Colorado. For an individual, having many possibilities to aim life toward produces insecurity. If an institution sponsored diffuse aims for its adherents, it would produce fission in its population and weaken itself. The church faces these and all the similar problems of American culture. To be sure, it faces moderated versions of these problems, and often it does not face them in urban centers. All of that makes a difference, but it does not change the general nature of the problems. The church's unique difference is that it seems to be coping with them successfully. It is endlessly observed that Mormonism is one of the fastest growing churches in Christendom for its size. The church's ability to maintain its membership in the east-central Arizona communities is clear. It does not seem to have alienated its youth. Given what we know of what's happening in modern American culture, all of this is at the very least remarkable. How has it happened? This section presents some hypotheses that come as a result of field work in the communities of east-central Arizona. They are hunches; yet an impressive amount of data gives them credibility.
The role of the church has shifted from that of centralized provider for a group of fledgling communities to that of decentralized definer of roles people are to fulfill. Originally, the church controlled internal competition and maximized efficiency in its hard-pressed communities by using a series of techniques. Two of these are the calling and the patriarchal blessing. It was and continues to be a function of the hierarchy to select men from the community best qualified for required tasks. Rather than relying on volunteers and needlessly wasting talent, the church hierarchy called a man to a specific task. The more localized the job, the more localized the authority to call, thus maximizing knowledge of qualifications and needs.
Patriarchal blessings are fairly detailed statements of a prophetic sort made by an individual known for his wisdom to an individual usually in his teens. They are a nineteenth-century custom carried to the present. At one level, the blessing provides solace and security, but at another it creates expectations in an individual that coincide with the needs and circumstances of his own community. Since individuals regard their blessings as personalized statements about their own futures, and since the blessings have a status not unlike revelation, their potency as organizational devices is not small. Coupled with an individual's being called to perform a certain task by his neighbor-superiors, the blessing and calling efficiently divided labor in society and eliminated needless competition. The function of these devices has been both to forestall anxiety and to control interpersonal competition in the best Utopian tradition.
From the 1920s and 1930s to today, the church's role-defining activity has shifted from creating precisely defined tasks with explicit expectations of performance to imprecise role definition coupled with intense and diffuse participation. Today members of the church are trained to play roles not to perform tasks.
The average ward numbers about six hundred members. To the casual observer, there are as many posts, duties, and functions in a ward as there are people. The casual observer is not really wrong. Since the church has tried to affect the total life of an individual, it logically follows that all of its members are continually engaged in church-related activities. The average Mormon in east-central Arizona is in daily contact with his church. He and his neighbor do the church's business, and aspects of that business still affect much of a day's activities. No Mormon is too young or too old to be involved, and literally the ward is regarded as a family. Members throughout the church call one another "brother" and "sister," and at the local level the term accurately reflects ties between people that are as affective as consanguineal relationships are thought to be in the rest of American culture.
All age-grades among men and to a less extent among women are organized to perform specific activities: administering the sacrament, directing the complex welfare operations, sponsoring the local missionary effort, singing, sewing, preaching, teaching, and so on and on. Within an age-grade all activities circulate. Most members preach at one time or another. Men are expected to serve missions in their early adulthood, and any man can be chosen to be a bishop. Participation is intense because an individual is "called" to perform a task by his bishop and is almost always engaged with one task or another. The tasks vary as he grows older. They also change radically, making his training diffuse.
Special tasks are ultimately not as important in an individual's progress as is his adaptability, malleability, and versatility. A man is an organizer, fund raiser, speaker, dependable performer, innovator, amuser, or faithful servant before he is butcher, banker, or bureaucrat in or out of the church.
At the present, there is a very strong emphasis on the means used to achieve, but not on the ends one should reach for. Further, the chief value seems to be service. Service as a primary objective was formerly thought of as a means to a set of goals rather closely defined by the church and community. There is a tendency now — more implicit than explicit — to identify service as the greatest good. And it is not appropriate to expect uniform answers to the question, Service to what? For that is the point. The individual not only supplies the answer for himself, but, in fact, he has been taught to do so all along by his revolving, role-fulfilling activities within the church.
In matters of ultimate concern, the faithful seem to be permitted very wide latitude for self-definition. There is a strong emphasis on a man's ability to fill out the faith's message for himself. To this end, it is noteworthy that the church has almost no exegetical tradition. There are the sacred texts to which you go as your own interpreter. The church has often been called anti-intellectual. There are several bases for the claim, but among them are a deliberate attempt to prevent the growth of an exegetical tradition and a distinct disinterest in fostering a professional approach to its own history. In the absence of such a series of authoritative texts, the membership must do the job itself, thereby permitting a large range of variation in interpretation concerning the answers to questions of ultimate concern. Undoubtedly the church officials in Salt Lake City know that wide latitude in doctrinal matters exists. And although it is probably disapproved because it contradicts Mormon literalism, no aspect of the church effectively proscribes doctrinal plurality. At the local level where every man, woman, and child attends Sunday school throughout his entire life, people may not be consciously aware that when doctrinal problems arise, more time is spent asking each other's opinion than in consulting the sacred texts. Opinion is a remarkably flexible and variable trait, one which when combined with the ambiguous texts lends the most marvelous dynamism to doctrine.
This recent tradition of intense participation and low definition coincides perfectly with the rapid flux the local economic base is subject ot, and it is a means of coping with the potential clash of traidtional community values and those imposed by surrounding modern American culture. The Key seems to be ideological decentralization. The church has evolved a do-it-yourself ideology which permits maximum behavioral flexibility given the demands of local circumstances. One of the most interesting citations in support of this is the role of excommunication in the church. The most frequent causes for excommunication today are adultery, polygamy, and similar, remarkably worldly deeds, while excommunication for tampering with doctrine, promoting heresy, or schism is becoming more rare. Since dogma exists only in an underemphasized and vague form, denying it hardly merits excommunication. Regularity in practical and behavioral affairs as opposed to cognitive and ideological matters concerns the church. It is almost as though someone took Thomas Jefferson seriously when he proclaimed, "I am a sect myself." The only real difference is he knew it, and the church's faithful do not.
The historical evolution of the Mormon Church has proceeded along lines that are apparently diffuse. In the latter nineteenth century in eastcentral Arizona, it was both theocrat and economic planner, installing communities which were to be models of autonomy, all the while creating ideals of self-reliance and independence. In the modern situation, the church has disappeared as theocrat, espousing only the most general and transcendental values. The power of ultimate direction no longer lies in the hands of a man who as prophet has the key to reality but is in the process of devolving into the hands of individual church members.
There has been a complete switch in relationship between church and faithful; where the church formerly did the revealing and the faithful the reacting, the faithful now do the defining and the church reacts by institutionalizing the means to preserve plurality of participation and definition. In east-central Arizona, the church seems to be producing modern men; the case in the rest of the world is less certain. As a product both of the frontier in its broadest sense and of Utopian communalism, the church has always been ambiguous about independence and self-reliance. As an institution, it sought independence as God's dictate, and its members were to be self-reliant but under the church's aegis. That day has passed, and now the church prepares an individual for economic adaptability and ideological independence within American culture.
Editors Deseret
News:
That no misunderstanding or conflict of opinion may arise, among those who contemplate moving to the settlements in Arizona, it has been deemed expedient to call attention to the following notice as published a short time since in the
NEWS.
"All persons who contemplate moving to the settlements on the Little Colorado river and its tributaries, in the Territory of Arizona, should take along with them sufficient flour and other supplies to sustain them until crops can be raised. The grain raised in those settlements during the past year is becoming scarce, in consequence of so many going to that country last fall and this winter, and depending on the settlers for their bread. Flour cannot be procured for anything but money, and must be hauled from 250 to 350 miles. ..."
{Deseret Evening News, March 20, 1880.)
Respectfully,
L. JOHN NUTTALL
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