I found this to be a very valuable book. Terryl Givens taught me aspects of LDS history that I did not know or simply hadn't dawned on me. As a small example, in talking about building the Nauvoo temple, he mentions the extremely small population that took on the building of the Kirtland Temple. "Instead of the 100 or so members who populated the Ohio town when that temple was announced in 1832, Nauvoo in 1841 was the center of a burgeoning Illinois Mormon population in excess of some 12,000." - pg 109. Every time I think about such a small band of people taking on the building of the Kirtland Temple I get dizzy. And when I consider the amazing growth of the church in only a few years amid all the difficulties they also endured I am still amazed even though I have known the story since my childhood.
However, this isn't another telling of the history of the church. Givens examines the culture of the church and the various strains within that culture that had their roots in the revelations received by Joseph Smith, the strains of culture brought in by the various groups of immigrant converts, the impact of the various migrations due to persecution, the temporary isolation in the West, and the growing pains of becoming a global church in modernity.
This is an ambitious book that accomplishes the author's aims amazingly well. Givens admits that he has left out material on popular culture and folk expressions that deserve treatment. He also recognizes that some of the Western cultural distinctions of high culture and serious art will have less meaning to an increasing membership outside that cultural heritage.
Givens presents his material in sixteen chapters divided into three parts. Part 1 establishes the "Foundations and Paradoxes in Mormon Cultural Origins". The four chapters lay out the cultural dichotomies of authority and radical freedom, the idea of searching and certainty, the very practical (banal) aspects of everyday life that are also tied up with Mormon ideas of the sacred, and the sense of being the chosen people versus the effects on our culture from persecution, migration, and isolation.
Part 2 is "The Dancing Puritans" and covers the period from 1830-1890. The six chapters examine the idea among Mormons that the "Glory of God is Intelligence", along with architecture, music, dance, theater, literature, and the visual arts. The author's emphasis is how the seeming conflicts of the Part 1 play themselves out in the circumstances and means of expression by the artists during this period.
Part 3 is "A Moveable Zion - Pioneer Nostalgia and Beyond the American Religion" and covers the years from 1890 to the present. Givens again takes us through the way thinkers fit into and don't fit into Church culture. He also takes us through the realities of church correlation. The topics of architecture, music, dance, theater, literature, and the visual arts are examined regarding their developments. Film is also added to the chapter of theater. Givens also talks about the implications of the majority of the church not only being outside Utah and the Western states, but also outside the United States.
Since I have lived all my life in the church, but here in Michigan, I learned a great deal about the life of the Saints in the West that I did not know and it was all most interesting. However, I have also lived my life deeply involved in music (my undergraduate degree is in music theory and I have studied piano since I was a child), and I found some of Givens' analyses and conclusions a bit exasperating. Some of what he and the some of the artists in the book claim are difficulties with Church culture have more to do with the life of artist everywhere and in all places. On page 337 we read this sentence: "No wonder, as Southey noted despondently, a survey of responses to the Mormon Arts Festival revealed that `more than one-third or all patrons believed that art was basically irrelevant to the church.'' Talk about missing a glass two-thirds full!
My guess is that more than a third of the population at large sees the fine arts as irrelevant to their life in any way. Having been a classical musician all my life, I can't tell you how few people care about this music as anything more than a kind of muzak. For the life of me, I can't understand people who tell me they like to listen to Mozart to relax. How can you be listening to that music with anything but amazement and excitement is beyond me.
Yes, there are cultural aspects to the church that can be exasperating to any of us; even with a full, strong, and burning testimony. However, I found the emphasis on the exasperations of "intellectuals", academics, artists, and so forth to be quite provincial. A plumber or a farmer can be frustrated by aspects of the church as easily as a painter, writer, or a pianist. I grew up in a working class home and worked on an assembly line for a couple of years when I was very young and found that people from any background could find all kinds of things to get worked up over. Some of them were even legitimate and meaningful hurts rather than a frustration that the church won't re-fashion itself into what any given individual thinks it should or could be. I have seen people shaken to the core over the way sugar beets and potatoes were being farmed, commodities were being canned, the way the church facilities were being maintained, and the endless list goes on. The artist's problem is the same the problem everyone else has. The church is about active belief and engagement at that level. The rest, including being a "cultural Mormon", is pretty much incidental.
Not long after I began piano lessons I became a deacon and was soon called to be the pianist for priesthood meeting. Over the decades of playing in various wards and branches around the world I have learned about people and their preference for the familiar and the way "everyone" (meaning their congregation) does things. I can't tell you how many times I have been told "we don't sing that hymn here" and I always respond, "Well, now we do". But this is a people issue, not an LDS issue. It has also happened when I have played for non-LDS congregations and even for non-religious groups.
Being an artist is about making your art. You can't worry about what others think about you. You will likely have to work hard for quite awhile to bring others around to your point of view. You also can't worry about being a `great artist' because you almost certainly are not (I certainly am not). That does not mean that you shouldn't be an artist or make your art. At any level you are helping to build a base for the arts and developing the kind of environment we all need for art to flourish. If all there were in the world was, to use the clichés of this book, Beethoven and Shakespeare, there would have been no audience for them, no artisans to provide their instruments or theaters, no performers, and consequently no Beethoven of Shakespeare. If you are an artist, or lover of the arts, or even if you can only give place in heart to think about the arts, do so and we will all be more greatly blessed.
Another issue is the aspect of creating art specifically for Mormons. That can be a good thing, but it can also be limiting (not because of the subject, but because of the size of the audience). We are only twelve or thirteen million people in a world of billions. My advice is to make and participate in great art and spread it to the world. Some of it can be specifically Mormon, but why not increase your chances for success by creating for a bigger audience. This doesn't mean you have to pander or turn your back on the church or its principles. It does mean you have to be strong and spend time presenting your art and your point of view rather than passively condemning the world for not recognizing your talent.
I recommend this book to everyone interested in Mormon culture, whether you are a member or not. Of course you don't have to agree with the author on anything or everything to learn some new things and get a lot of food for thought. And that is all you can ask of a book. Well, that and larger print. To whomever chose the font size and type for this book: please provide darker and bigger type in the future. My eyes aren't as young as they used to be and I found the act of reading this book more of a chore than it needed to be. I also wish Givens had a website for the book that pointed us to images of the artworks, sound clips, and video so we could experience the arts more fully. The black and white images provided are very helpful, but an additional website would have been that much more helpful.
With a few small quibbles aside, this is a great resource and an important contribution to any of us who care about our culture. I am grateful.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
