As Presently Constituted: Mormon Studies in the Field of Religion | What Does Kashi Have to Do With Salt Lake?: Academic Comparisons, Asian Religions, and Mormonism

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Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below.

In a polemical treatise from late antiquity, Tertullian famously asked, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” The readers of this essay might ask a similar rhetorical question of “What does Kashi have to do with Salt Lake?” What could we actually learn from the comparative study of Asian religions with Mormonism? Armed with tools and theories that largely extol the particular over the general, most contemporary scholars have been shaped to be suspicious of comparisons that excise the historical and universalize the local. Comparative projects seem so very retrograde. We snicker when we hear individuals cite comparative works like The Golden Bough or theories like phenomenology as authoritative sources or methods. Those projects were so pre-postmodern, we think as we roll our eyes. Nevertheless, I argue that if academic comparisons of Mormonism and Asian religions are disciplined, modest, and pragmatic, Kashi and Salt Lake have much to do with one another.

In this necessarily brief essay, I will suggest two topics and methods in contemporary religious studies that link Asian religions and Mormonism: the first is comparative history and the second is comparative theology. By doing so, I will cover two areas in which I neither am a specialist nor have any serious interest in studying. I am simply trying to show the range of what comparisons may do or how they are employed in current scholarship. Thomas Tweed notes that a theory is useful not just for its explanatory value for other instances but also for its ability to generate accounts that challenge it.Aware of this, I welcome criticisms of my own thoughts.

When it comes to the value of academic comparisons in religious studies, Jonathan Z. Smith seems to be as valuable of a guide as any to thinking about the topic. Most religious studies scholars have encountered Smith’s corpus of works in a methods and theories course where they have read books with wonderful titles like Drudgery Divine or To Take Place: A Theory of Ritual. Even though Smith mainly analyzes western religions in late antiquity, he typically makes much larger methodological contributions that have rightly made him one of the more influential voices in religious studies over the past generation. Given my essay’s limitations, I want to merely quote a few Smithian “proof texts,” if you will, on academic comparisons—texts that I think will be good for our own intellectual “improvement.”

Firstly, Smith, quoting and extending the ideas of another anthropologist, reminds us that any comparison is never in toto. It is always aspectual.That should chasten our claims about what our comparisons can accomplish. A comparison simply highlights an aspect of two things. But for what end? Here a commonly cited proof text from Smith is helpful: he states that “a comparison is a disciplined exaggeration in the service of knowledge.”A less pithy, but equally insightful statement by Smith is that a “comparison requires the postulation of difference as the grounds of its being interesting (rather than tautological), and a methodological manipulation of difference, a playing across the ‘gap’ in the service of some useful end.”

With these “doctrines” in mind, I would like to briefly suggest how what might seem like an unlikely historical comparison can provide further insight into the dynamics of Mormonism—and in particular, insight into the writing of Mormon history by individuals engaged in “faithful history.” In the last twenty years, historiographical reflection on the writing of faithful history in Mormonism has become a topic of great interest among scholars who attend the Mormon History Association, as well as more recently historians associated with the Conference on Faith and History, a group whose core largely includes scholars who identify as evangelicals. Matthew Bowman, for instance, has compared contemporary Mormon faithful history to various strains of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant Providentialism.While I think this comparison is sound, I would like to suggest that we need to turn our eyes to the Indian subcontinent to further understand aspects of contemporary Mormon faithful history.  

Religious studies scholar Kim Knott notes that contemporary practicing Hindus have powerful motivations for understanding the origins of their religion, which many devotees describe as sanatana dharma, or the eternal tradition: one whose origin lies beyond human history. When Hindus seek to understand the origins of their religion, they often do not feel bound “by scholarly evidence and argumentation.” “They are guided first and foremost by revelation,” says Knott. “Where historical evidence can support a devotional view, it may be welcomed, but a firm religious conviction does not require such evidence in order to thrive. It depends rather on faith. For some Hindus, then, all this argument about what happened in early India is only relevant where it accords with what the scriptures tell them.” Conversely, Knott notes that “there are plenty of modern Hindus who feel strongly that scholarly theories and historical data offer important support for what they believe.”While we might note that Knott is already trying to translate a Hindu dilemma into Western Christian idioms (note her use of “faith” and “revelation” rather than the more precise and complicated terms like dharma, shruti, and smriti), we would be obtuse not to note that what Knott calls Hindu devotional history has responded to history in the academy in ways similar to the reaction of Mormon faithful history—that is, it has responded not by outright rejection, but by selective appropriation.

The difference in how this appropriation is deployed, though, adds an important element in the comparative study of Hindu devotional history and Mormon faithful history. One appropriation can be linked to nationalism (specifically, the assertion of India as a Hindu nation) and the other linked to the international expansion of a hemispheric religion (or, respectively, the late twentieth-century expansion of the LDS Church outside of North America). What we see, then, in a comparison of Mormon faithful history and Hindu devotional history should not lead us to a glib assertion of their essential sameness. Instead, it should alert us to how two groups (or more accurately, two groups within groups) with shared aspectual elements use faithful histories to construct “alternative modernities” for varied reasons to serve varied ends. 

This brief discussion suggests that we need to occasionally look beyond the local or the national in our historical projects; comparative history helps us do that, bringing subjects into conversation that would otherwise be separated by space, culture, or disciplinary interests. And the payoff is that by doing so, we can learn more about both subjects—and even about a much wider context—in the process of this study. 

If comparative projects like the one I just highlighted seek useful historical explanations, comparative theology seeks comparisons for very different ends—namely a disciplined theological understanding of one’s own tradition by studying another. The Jesuit theologian and Harvard professor Francis X. Clooney is one of the most visible advocates for comparative theology. His raft of books bears titles such as Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary and The Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Srivaisnava Hindus. In a recent synthetic work, Clooney defines comparative theology: it “marks acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular faith tradition but which, from that foundation, venture into learning from one or more other faith traditions. This learning is sought for the sake of fresh theological insights that are indebted to the newly encountered tradition/s as well as the home tradition.”Clooney’s Catholic commitment to a notion of reason connected to natural law allows him a great deal of generosity when dealing with other traditions. For instance, not long ago, Clooney blogged about his experience of reading 3 Nephi in the Book of Mormon—an exercise that he regarded as an act of learning across religious boundaries.As a member of a tradition known for its missionary work in Asia—missionary work that was inevitably part of political, social, and economic forms of imperialism—Clooney is well aware of how crossing traditions can be turned into imperialistic appropriation.Still, he is not content to simply live in a theological world that does not learn from the “Other.” And when the Other talks back to Clooney, he is intent on listening. Mormon academics may find Clooney’s project—something that confesses “multiple religious belonging, human but also divine”—as something not very congenial to a tradition that historically has demanded singular belonging.However, Clooney’s particular project is not the only way to pursue comparative theology. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye has gestured toward the possibility of what I see as Mormon comparative theology when she muses on thinking of Mormonism as an Asian religion.Comparative theology may not be for everyone, but, then, to steal a line from Grant Wacker, “neither is professional hockey.”

Whether in careful, methodologically sound historical or theological studies, comparisons inevitably are acts of translation. Early Mormonism itself elevated the concept of translation as something holy, and even routinized it as the function of an office. But whereas the goal of early Mormon translators like Joseph Smith seemed to be to escape from that “little narrow prison” of language,to recapture an ancient Adamic language, in short, to escape all limitations on the transmission of knowledge, the kind of translation to which I refer actually can only achieve . . . well . . . more translation. As anthropologist James Clifford notes, “To use comparative concepts . . . means to become aware, always belatedly, of limits, sedimented meanings, tendencies to gloss over differences. Comparative concepts—translation terms—are approximations, privileging certain ‘originals’ and made for specific audiences. Thus, the broad meanings that enable projects . . . necessarily fail as a consequence of whatever range they achieve.”Finally, then, comparative projects bring us to deeply humanistic ends—ends that acknowledge limits as much as they seek to tran scend them. Or, as Michel Foucault once stated, work on our limits “is a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.”That, for him, was enlightenment. This enlightenment is not the moksha of Kashi or the endowment of the Salt Lake temple, but it is a form of liberation worth our patient, disciplined scholarly endeavors.