neutral point of view.

One of the books I'm working through at the moment is Mystics and Messiahs by Philip Jenkins.  Five or six years ago, I read an article Jenkins wrote for The Atlantic Monthly about global Christianity; specifically, the article looked at the different types of Christianity proliferating (and thriving) in the Global South, pointing out that the face of religion internationally is not what you might expect if you're only extrapolating off of what you can see in Europe and the US.  I was reminded of the article recently, went looking for some books by Jenkins, and came up with Mystics and Messiahs, a history of cults, sects, and fringe religious groups in the United States.  (Although it turns out I was mistaken--I checked to see if the Atlantic had the article on their website, and in the process I've figured out that I was thinking of a different article.)

I'm enjoying reading this, but I'm also finding it troubling, or maybe just slightly irritating.  One of his major arguments is that fringe religious groups attract media or government attention far out of proportion to their actual size or importance, and that the portrayals of these groups in popular culture rely more on stereotypes than reality.  Cult persecution as a mainstream exercise in moral panic, as it were.  By and large, I'm finding it a persuasive argument, but I keep having these twinges while reading, the occasional annoyance at what appears to be a blanket dismissal of all anti-cult arguments.  It's a problem of style more than content--one of the twinges came from a statement (I can't find the sentence at the moment, but I'll come back and update this when I do find it) about how some new group was subject to the same overblown accusations of trickery and confidence scams.  The way it was phrased, the clear implication was that these are empty accusations, but just a chapter or two earlier he'd spent a great deal of effort cataloging all the ways in which many of the religious sects in the early twentieth century actually were confidence scams, or at least profit machines with a light religious gloss. 

The problem I'm having is most clearly illustrated by Jenkins' description of the conflicts in the 1940s and 1950s between the US government and the United Effort Order group, based out of Short Creek.  Here's an excerpt:

"Among the main victims [of increased federal anti-cult activity] were the Mormon fundamentalists, who had resisted the church's abandonment of polygamy and maintained separate colonies in remote areas.  The major sect was the United Effort Order, which had its communal headquarters in Short Creek, on the Arizona-Utah border; it claimed some twenty-five hundred members.  Though these "cultists" were usually ignored, there were sporadic investigations and prosecutions, beginning in 1935 when welfare claims from the area exposed a system of highly unusual family structures.  The legal situation was sensitive because community girls generally married at ages much younger than had become the American norm, so sect activities were portrayed in terms of a sexual threat to children. ...

"The [anti-polygamist] movement culminated in 1953 when Arizona authorities undertook a massive sweep aimed at eliminating the main traditionalist center of Short Creek.  ...  The news media paraded the now-classic charges of cult abuses, stressing "child brides" and "white slavery," and promising to save the "numerous women who were forced into the cult's bizarre system against their will."  Ultimately, over a hundred defendents stood trial in a mass prosecution that was billed as an epic cult trial.  Still, the purge failed to eliminate the practice of polygamy, and the harrowing images of children being dragged from caring if unorthodox families created a backlash."

That backlash essentially guaranteed that the federal government would adopt a relatively hands-off policy towards the group at Short Creek, now called Colorado City, and other similar communities.  Colorado City figures promimently in Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's book about Mormon fundamentalists.  One of the stories Krakauer tells is that of Flora Jessop and her sister Ruby.

"[Flora] Jessop grew up in Colorado City as one of twenty-eight siblings in a polygamous family.  When she was fourteen she filed sexual abuse charges against the family patriarch, her fundamentalist father, but the judge presumed she was lying and dismissed the case, after which leaders of the FLDS Church confined her to the home of a relative for two years.  ...  When she was sixteen, church authorities gave her a choice: "They told me I had to either marry this guy they'd picked for me -- one of my dad's brother's sons -- or be committed to the state mental hospital," says Jessop.  She opted for the arranged marriage and then fled both the marriage and Colorado City at the first opportunity." 

Krakauer goes on to talk about Ruby Jessop, who was forced to marry at the age of fourteen, raped by her new husband, and kept locked up in an uncle's house when she was caught trying to leave Colorado City.  By the time Flora was able to convince the state child protective services to take the case seriously, Ruby was insisting (when interviewed in front of her family members) that she was happy and nothing was wrong. 

It sounds sensationalist, pairing the Jessops with Jenkins' analysis of the 1953 raids.  I know that it sounds like an appeal to emotion rather than to reasoned historical discussion, but that's almost my point.  I don't doubt Jenkins' larger argument, that the public reactions to fringe or cult groups are often based on something other than the reality of life within those groups.  Not all groups are as bad or as dangerous as they're portrayed to be.  But I think there's a balance to be struck, between deflating the moral panic and acknowledging the actual negative aspects.  The Krakauer book is a good comparison here, because one of the things it does brilliantly is shine a light on some of the darker aspects of the FLDS (and of the history of both the FLDS and the Mormon mainstream it branched off from) in a way that critiques and analyzes but pulls back just shy of outright moral condemnation.  It's almost as though Jenkins is trying so hard to not pass judgment that he steps back from acknowledging all of the relevant facts.

This is unfair, what I'm doing here.  (And not just because Krakauer, doing a mixture of journalism and history, was free of the kind of stylistic constraints that Jenkins, doing academic history, no doubt felt bound by.  Those stylistic constraints are themselves the subject of another post, someday.)  Jenkins is trying to do something very specific in his book--he's not interested in the darker aspects of the groups he's studying, except insofar as those darker aspects relate to the public perception.  And it's not a bad book at all--it's actually really interesting.  I'm picking up a lot of great information about spiritualist trends in the United States, some fascinating details about things like the Foursquare Gospel and the early theology of Nation of Islam and the context of those yoga sessions I'd heard about in William James's Cambridge.  If you look just at the point that Jenkins was trying to make, the book is a success.  It's not his fault that I sometimes want to be reading a different book, one that does a different kind of analysis.

Or is it really that unfair of me?  Look, I bring topics to the weblog when I want to discuss them.  I don't have a clean and articulate conclusion--I don't have a position paper, I just have a set of questions.  And here, the questions have to do with what the author's responsibilities are in a situation like this.  The real focus of the book is the public portrayal of cult groups, not the actual beliefs and practices of cult groups.  But I'm troubled by the way in which he seems to be ignoring (or just downplaying) certain practices that must, I would think, be relevant to a reasoned analysis of the public portrayal.  To go back to the Short Creek example: the federal government accused the Short Creek community of child sexual abuse and other kinds of "deviant" or illegal sexual practices.  Throughout the book, Jenkins talks about incident after incident where some fringe or cult group was accused, either by the government or the media, of deviant or illegal sexual practices.  In terms of his broader argument, he's pretty persuasive on the point that the accusations of sexual deviance are just part-and-parcel of the public fear of non-mainstream religious groups.  In the portrayal of the Short Creek raids, it's as though he's (implicitly) asserting that the accusation themselves are what's interesting and important, that the truth or falsity of the accusations is irrelevant. 

I think it might actually be very relevant, though--if you accuse someone of something that isn't true, then the accusation probably speaks mainly to your own situation.  If you accuse someone of something that -is- true, though, then your accusation might or might not be a reflection of your situation.  If the people at Short Creek really were engaging in the sexual abuse of children, then the fact of the accusations might be meaningless in terms of historical analysis. 

Another side of the problem: Krakauer and Jenkins are both, on some level, doing the same thing.  They're taking something that's generally accepted to be "strange" (for Krakauer, Mormon fundamentalism; for Jenkins, religious fringe groups in general) and analyzing how closely it relates to something "normal" (in both cases, mainstream religion in general).   In the case of the Krakauer book, he uses the juxtaposition to make the "normal" seem a little more strange--the courtroom chapter, with the back-and-forth as to whether self-styled fundamentalist prophet (and murderer) Ron Lafferty could be considered legally insane on the basis of his religious beliefs, has some of the most skillful analysis of the relationship between religious and secular belief that I've seen in a while.  In contrast, Jenkins is trying to use the juxtaposition to make the "strange" more normal, and while I see the value in that, I'm not sure it's always the right move.  It's one of those rhetorical moves that I think is designed to demonstrate objectivity, but it's a false objectivity--presenting everything as equally "normal" does, in fact, involve an implicit value judgement. 

Comments

[Gwenda]

Fascinating -- I'll have to hunt down that book. Was this the Atlantic article about the New Religious Movements book? Our library had that index and I checked it out right after I read that article; pretty gobsmacking the sheer number of interesting little religions and the number of followers they have. It was great reading, in the way that all encyclopedias are great reading.

[Jed]

Good post -- a bunch of food for thought here.

And yeah, please do post about the stylistic constraints at some point.

Re your last point -- "presenting everything as equally 'normal' does, in fact, involve an implicit value judgement" -- I don't want to focus *too* much on this 'cause I know it asn't your primary point, but I did want to note that it seems to me (at least usually) to be a sort of meta-value-judgment; a judgment that "objectivity" or "neutrality" or "moral relativism" is a good thing, rather than a judgment that the particular practices demonstrated are good things.

Re the Krakauer/Short Creek stuff, I wonder two things (neither of which are directly relevant to your comments):

1. What would modern reaction to fundamentalist/fringe Mormonism be like if there were no sex with girls under 18 involved? To put it another way, I wonder whether there would be a similar degree of outrage about deviance (from American culture at large) if it were polygamy only among consenting adults.

2. It might be neat if someone were to do a Nacirema-style article along the lines of the Krakauer or Jenkins books in which they discussed (for example) ancient Judaism as if it were a 20th-century American cult. (Then again, given the degree to which modern Judaism is still Othered, this might be both redundant and a bad idea.)

[Susan Marie Groppi]

Gwenda-- the article I'd originally been thinking of was "Oh, Gods!" by Toby Lester, published in February 2002, and unfortunately it looks like you need to be an Atlantic subscriber to read it online. The book you mention sounds interesting, though. Do you remember the title?

Jed-- interesting questions. It's hard to say for sure, but I'd guess that there would be a lot less outrage about the FLDS groups if not for the child sexual abuse factors. (Well, among the general public. The mainline Mormon church, as I understand it, would probably still be just as opposed, because they have a lot of theological problems with the FLDS. But I'm far from an expert on the LDS church.) It's possible that there'd just be outrage about some other angle, that the child abuse is just the first available, but I suspect that most people would be happy to... not accept it, maybe, but at least ignore it, if it really was just an arrangement between people who are old enough (and informed enough) to make free choices. But I can't say for sure.

[Mark]

The problem with the FLDS is that the child abuse and adolescent marriage aren't incidental to a few bad apples or even because of the strict social control, although the latter is a contributing factor. It's a predictable consequence of polygamy along with the expulsion of teenagers known as "the lost boys" from the community.

You have influential men competing for a limited number of available women. The competition guarantees that men who've accumulated status and wealth over time will seek a competitive advantage by marrying younger and younger women, to secure them early. Combined with an ethos that devalues education for all people, but particularly for women, and you have marriage of teenage girls to much older men. And of course, to what extent is that ethos driven by the polygamous power structure?

[Jessie]

Jed: you said that presenting everything as equally normal is "a judgment that "objectivity" or "neutrality" or "moral relativism" is a good thing, rather than a judgment that the particular practices demonstrated are good things."

Which I sort of agree with, but I'm inclined to think that objectivity isn't the same thing as moral relativism; and I also think that the effect of this presentation does tend to produce the impression that the author is passing a positive judgment. I'm thinking especially of the way journalists sometimes want to get "both sides" of a scientific argument, so on "one side" they present the consensus of almost the entire scientific world and on the "other side" they present the view of someone who's considered to be a crackpot. That's based on the journalistic idea that you cover all sides of the debate, but sometimes that doesn't make sense and the readers end up with, in essence, false information.