BONUS | JSL 2024 | Mormonism Through an African Lens (feat. Laurie Maffly-Kipp)

This bonus episode of Scholars & Saints is taken from the Tenth Annual Joseph Smith Lecture, delivered by UVA's new Director of Mormon Studies, Laurie Maffly-Kipp at the Darden Center in Rosslyn, Va on October 19, 2024. Click here for more information about Prof. Maffly-Kipp and her lecture.

Each fall, the University of Virginia's Mormon Studies Program sponsors the Joseph Smith Lecture Series: a public lecture on religion in public life, with particular emphasis on religious liberty and civic leadership. The Lecture is designed to honor the legacies of both Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Smith but is not limited to either the American or Mormon experience. If you like or learn from what you hear, we would appreciate your support of the Joseph Smith Lecture Series Endowment Fund.

Transcript

00;00;37;03 - 00;01;05;25
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
So I would like to start tonight by introducing you to a picture that has stayed in my mind ever since my visit to Ghana in 2018. All right. I love this photograph. I did not take it so I can say that I love it. It shows a group of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, dressed and ready to celebrate the birthday of the Relief Society in Ghana.

00;01;05;27 - 00;01;32;08
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Now, I want you to notice if you can. I know there's light behind you, so it might be more difficult to see, but I want you to notice their clothing. They wear traditional Ghanaian style dresses, probably sewn by themselves or their friends. That's typically you can go to to Accra, pick up a bolt of fabric from a vendor on the street and walk down the street and to a woman with a sewing machine and she'll sew up a dress for you.

00;01;32;10 - 00;02;02;13
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
So it's it's very much a sort of home style of of, dress and, seamstress abilities. These are the kind of outfits you might see on any special occasion in that region, but the images on the fabric reveal the anchoring of these women in another community. And in the history of a church founded thousands of miles away and led by a series of prophets who look very different from them, the images of prophets.

00;02;02;13 - 00;02;27;17
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
I don't know how well you can see the what the images are on the clothing, the images of profits from Joseph Smith Jr to Gordon B Hinckley, who was at the time the president, prophet, and the name of the church itself are woven into the textile. Now everyone I have shown this picture to interprets it differently. Some people remark on what they see as a kind of odd disjunction.

00;02;27;19 - 00;03;00;06
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
They think it's odd and puzzling that Ghanaian women in traditional dress would emblazoned their clothing with the faces of white American male church leaders. Others immediately judged that the clothing is a marker of the spread of Utah centered surveillance of a worldwide church. More imperialism. Another post colonial takeover of an underdeveloped nation. Still others see it as a proud expression of the indigenization of Mormon beliefs into a welcoming host culture.

00;03;00;09 - 00;03;33;13
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
They note that West African textiles bear profound historical and cultural significance. So rather than seeing this as a religious coup, this fashion represents a means of claiming the LDS church as their own and quite literally, putting their stamp on it. Now, for me, these questions about meaning boil down to one puzzle with several related parts. What does it mean to be a global church that is simultaneously one of the most American of institutions?

00;03;33;15 - 00;04;08;21
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
That is the high level piece of the puzzle. On a personal level, what does it mean for women in West Africa to join a church that is closely associated with America as a nation and for us, for the viewer? What do our interpretations of their clothing say about our assumptions regarding their own agency? I'm currently researching and writing a global history of the Mormon tradition that tackles these puzzles, and it is one that has fascinated me for the last 25 years, starting back to in Polynesia.

00;04;08;22 - 00;04;33;25
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Richard, you reminded me of this, starting with a description I came across many years ago of Louisa Pratt, an early LDS missionary to the South Pacific in the 1840s. Pratt hung pictures of Joseph and Hyrum Smith on the wall in her bedroom in a robe on a remote Polynesian island, and she described how all the people on the island came to look at them.

00;04;33;28 - 00;04;56;19
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
One evening, she noted that a man left the gathered group to look at one of the pictures, and this is her quote. He kneeled before it in order that the painting might come in range with his eyes. For a quarter of an hour he looked steadfastly upon it, I believe, without turning his eyes, unquote. Now we can't help but ask, knowing about this image.

00;04;56;19 - 00;05;22;17
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
What does this man see there? What is he looking at? What does he see? My research has taken me to Latin America, to New Zealand, to Hawaii, to Shanghai with Kathleen. Actually, one time to West Africa and to Great Britain. And I've delved into the challenges and tensions inherent in presenting a consummately American religion to communities around the world.

00;05;22;19 - 00;06;01;07
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Each of these sites provokes questions about them, about American national identity and indigeneity in the LDS church. They also offer challenges for those of us back home, believers and nonbelievers alike. Today, I want to offer a sample of this work by focusing on West Africa, currently one of the areas of fastest institutional growth. Then I'll talk about some of the larger issues raised in that encounter that offer opportunities for teaching, research, and collaborations in Mormon studies at the University of Virginia.

00;06;01;10 - 00;06;21;10
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Now, I would start by asserting that there are two dominant images of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. So stereotypes. If I ask my students, what are what are the two things you think of? I think I hear this after polygamy. I think hear the somewhere in the mix of what they say. The first is Mormons as very American.

00;06;21;12 - 00;06;47;05
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Now, there are good reasons for the prevalence of that image. The church, after all, originated in the United States and was founded by a descendant of the Puritans. Its religious leaders have asserted that the land, and indeed our nation's constitution are sacred. And more recently, people have pointed not only to the patriotism of us Mormons, but to their energetic adoption of free market capitalism.

00;06;47;07 - 00;07;16;18
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Valorization of the nuclear family and other consummately American values. I only need to point to recent books and articles that highlight this theme, and these are quite recent. My colleagues, Matthew Bowman and Benjamin Park have written books that sort of feature the idea of American very prominently. McKay Coppins recent, sort of article from The Atlantic talks about the all American, just all American safe.

00;07;16;20 - 00;07;54;19
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
In a recent Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jason Wax entitled his article Mormonism The Most American Religious other, which I think is such an interesting description, both American and other at the same time. What is showing it, for our purposes, is the intense focus of church members themselves on cultural acceptance and national assimilation, a trend that has been noted by many scholars, beginning with the Spanish-American War, when leaders urged believers to enlist in the U.S. Army, and continuing through the 1950s, a time that might be called the first Mormon moment.

00;07;54;21 - 00;08;22;04
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
With the wholesale embrace of anti-communism and the promotion of American values. But it continues today, often with a measure of disappointment when church members feel that they are still not quite accepted as compatriots. For example, when Tom Hanks criticized Mormons for being un-American in their advocacy for California's Proposition eight. Some members took it to heart. Quote, we have worked so hard to assimilate.

00;08;22;06 - 00;08;49;26
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Lamented the editorialist Whitney Johnson in the Boston Globe. Quote, we have even been able to convince ourselves that we are accepted with Romney in the national spotlight. It has become become all too clear that we aren't. This is a discovery we would have preferred not to make. Unquote. But here is the paradox. At the same moment that the LDS church was burnishing its image as an icon of American values.

00;08;49;29 - 00;09;06;15
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
It also began its rapid growth as an international church beginning in about 1960. Since the early 1990s, church leadership has carefully curated its image as a global church.

00;09;06;18 - 00;09;13;18
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
And there are legitimate reasons for calling it global as well.

00;09;13;20 - 00;09;40;05
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Out of 1.7 million members in 1960, only about 10% lived outside of the United States. By 1990, that number was just under 50%. In 1995, the LDS church announced that it had now had more members outside the US than within its borders, a statistic that it has maintained. There are now over 31,000 congregations worldwide in more than 160 countries.

00;09;40;08 - 00;10;03;20
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
So I've always been puzzled by this combination of images, this American and global combination, both of which are touted by public affairs and repeated in ads, images and performances. If the LDS church is really so American and likes that image of itself, which we must assume it does because of the institution's often defensive responsiveness to claims that they are un-American.

00;10;03;22 - 00;10;32;21
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Why foreground the global in advertising and other sources? And how does that global focus manifest itself in church ecclesiology and everyday practice? On the other hand, if the church wants to bear down on its international character, why the continued comparison? As we see in this slide to other American denominations is a global faith, but we're going to compare it to other American groups.

00;10;32;24 - 00;10;56;03
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
You can see I'm straining to see the bottom of that, but it, it compares it to other. So the Catholic Church, southern baptism by the Catholic, that means within the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, the Church of God in Christ. So the comparison still seems to be an American comparison, not a global comparison.

00;10;56;06 - 00;11;38;04
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Why not compare it to other global religions, for example? Beyond these factors, I'm intrigued by what the labels American and global signify for church members. Often they seem only to reinforce an outsider insider perspective or reliance on static geographical boundaries that run the risk of overstating the essential foreignness of non-American members. I've been to several conferences, in Mormon studies or in, at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints that have sort of a series of panels, and then they'll have 1 or 2 panels on global Mormonism, meaning everything else is about Mormonism within the United States.

00;11;38;07 - 00;12;01;17
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
And there are 1 or 2 panels that talk about Mormonism out of outside the United States, which I think tends to distance people from those experiences. Now, one of the things that's ironic for me about this is that so many members of the church themselves, as missionaries, as, businesspeople have traveled abroad and have been how can you maintain connections with other parts of the world?

00;12;01;17 - 00;12;42;17
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
That it seems interesting to me that that distinction still seems important. For one reason or another. Now, maybe it's an obvious point that the United States is also a part of the globe, and that technology and mobility have made national borders unreliable. Markers of identity. In the brief time we have tonight. I want to highlight some stories that helps tease out the complexities of Mormon identity in West Africa, particularly, as I said, Africa is now one of the fastest growing areas of LDS church growth, so it offers a particularly rich laboratory for exploring the themes that I've mentioned.

00;12;42;19 - 00;13;07;12
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Mariama Cowan was a refugee from the wars and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, and a muslim by birth. She grew up in a small village. Because education was not easy for a young woman to secure in remote areas, and her family situation was precarious. She left home at a young age and grew up in the capital city, Freetown, with extended family members.

00;13;07;15 - 00;13;30;28
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
As a result, she hardly knew her parents or knew where they were at any given time. She was entirely dependent on teachers and distant relations for housing, and she suffered beating and later sexual abuse at the hands of others. The 11 year civil war in her country further disrupted any semblance of study. Home life. Her parents and siblings died in the violence.

00;13;31;00 - 00;13;56;11
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Mariana witnessed terrible atrocities and had to flee through the bush to escape the bloodshed through a friend. She found the Kizzy First branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, and she described feeling drawn to its quiet and to the soft voice of a woman speaking from a blue book, offering promises that the spirit and the body would someday be reunited.

00;13;56;14 - 00;14;26;29
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
As she said, those were the most beautiful and liberating words I had ever heard. It seemed almost too good to be possible. The thought that my parents, brother and sister could be made whole again overwhelmed me. I felt hope, and that hope was connected to the Blue Book with Jesus Christ on the cover. And when the teacher then taught that we could, by our actions and obedience, choose to be with our families forever, I knew I had to be a part of this church, unquote.

00;14;27;01 - 00;14;58;08
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Carolyn describes the many attractions of the church, its focus on agency and individual control, its teachings on equality of the sexes and improved behavior from men toward their families. Its focus on education for women and on women attaining leadership in church callings. Soon she moved to the US to start a new life. But one story underscores the poverty, displacement and often trauma experienced by many West African church members.

00;14;58;10 - 00;15;32;11
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Their oral histories, many of which are now housed in the Church History Library and at Claremont Graduate University, tell stories of finding the LDS church as a haven and stabilizing force in a turbulent sea. The chaos is both familial with the breakup of families like Cowan's. Due to a lack of resources, but it is also spiritual chaos. Since 1980, just as the LDS church was beginning its missionary outreach in Ghana and Nigeria, the region witnessed a dramatic shift with the growth.

00;15;32;12 - 00;16;02;11
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
The new growth of charismatic churches, about 60% of the population identifies as Christian, and prior to that time, prior to 1980, the Roman Catholic Church far outpaced other denominations. The new charismatic churches tend to be entrepreneurial and often led by self-styled prophets. Many are multinational, such as the Winners Chapel. As that name implies, most are what could be called Prosperity gospel churches.

00;16;02;13 - 00;16;33;07
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Institutions that focus on financial and material achievement. As a sign of divine favor, they are busy churches, and their presence in Accra and other cities is both visually and aurally ubiquitous and that was so. The reason for this signage is that you cannot drive a block through the streets of Accra without seeing grocery stores with with Bible verses on them, but also many, many advertisements for various charismatic churches in the area.

00;16;33;13 - 00;17;03;20
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
On Sunday mornings, you hear them all. So that's the oral part of this where you hear various church services, music, preaching, being broadcast through loudspeakers all over the city. So they're busy churches, but beyond what one can see and hear. They also tend to draw attention to a realm of hectic spiritual forces, often including references to combating the witchcraft they perceive around them.

00;17;03;22 - 00;17;31;01
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Now, in contrast, those who join the LDS church describe the peace it offers. Abbey Lama, a Nigerian Mormon, explains that it is quiet and more organized in here. In other churches, people are shouting at the top of their lungs, sweating so much they need a hankie. One thing I know for sure God is not deaf, unquote. Many of their neighbors, admittedly see this lack of enthusiasm as a negative.

00;17;31;03 - 00;17;50;01
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
The absence of drums, clapping, and singing is taken as a sign that Mormons don't have the spirit. One believer described joining the church as a choice that was not to everyone's liking. For the latter day Saints. We don't shout at the top of our voices, and we do not play at the top of our voices. So they know the church.

00;17;50;04 - 00;18;19;14
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
They, meaning other people, know the church is not a spiritual church. That is why. One factor is some people say this. People, when they go to church, you don't see them. You don't hear them praying. They don't do this. They are Mormon. And for that, peace and desire for order extends into family relations, especially for women. Sharon Eubank gave an address at the Fair Mormon conference entitled this is a Woman's Church in 2014 that emphasize this point.

00;18;19;16 - 00;18;42;13
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
I'm going to tell you a story, she began. And it actually happened to Lillian DeLong, a friend of mine. She served on a Relief Society board years ago, and she was assigned to go to Ghana, and she had her husband with her, and they were in a very rural part of Ghana. So they did their training. She was there to do Relief Society training, and it is a very simple structure.

00;18;42;14 - 00;19;01;16
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
And they were in different rooms. And her husband was in priesthood and she was in Relief Society, and they did their training. After it was over, a woman came up to her in her beautiful Ghanaian church dress and she shook her hand and she kept saying, this is a woman's church. She's just crying and tears are just streaming down her face.

00;19;01;19 - 00;19;31;06
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
She kept saying, this is a woman's church. Lillian didn't really know what she was talking about, and she's smiling and saying, yeah, but the woman just kept pumping her hand and saying over and over again. This is a woman's church. And finally Lillian said, what do you mean? This is a woman's church? And the woman said, we have just been in the marvelous Relief Society that teaches us not only spiritual things, but temporal things about how to make our lives and our children and our families better.

00;19;31;09 - 00;19;43;08
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
And at the same time, your husband is in the priesthood room, and he is teaching our husbands that the culture of the church does not allow for them to beat their wives and children.

00;19;43;10 - 00;19;55;05
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Boys and men also described the order that church membership has brought to their lives. One widely circulated story concerns a group that calls themselves the Band of Brothers.

00;19;55;07 - 00;20;16;18
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
All young men who were the only members of their family that joined the LDS church. I believe this was in Botswana. Several had previously been members of other gangs of boys, a pattern that was not uncommon in their culture. In a sense, the shift to a priesthood gang allowed them to blend familiar patterns of sociality with their new face.

00;20;16;20 - 00;20;34;17
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Andre Subiaco, one of the members, put it this way. For me, the weekend is the best time of the week because I know I am going to meet up with my brothers and we are going to sing hymns to our Savior. Our lieutenant who enlisted us into his army. And the beauty of it is we are not going to die forever.

00;20;34;19 - 00;21;07;24
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
One day we will really be fighting satanic principalities side by side with Jesus Christ, so that he's combining these notions of the forces of the satanic forces in the world with his understanding of the church. The band of brothers supported one another, vowing to go on missions and to uphold church teachings. In sum, there are many ways that church membership benefits the lives of local members and the oral histories I have read and listened to focus, attention on the benefits that can accrue.

00;21;07;27 - 00;21;16;16
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
At the same time, tensions emerge from relationships that are necessarily lopsided.

00;21;16;18 - 00;21;38;04
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
In Accra, Ghana, these are pictures of two different temples. The top one in Abu, Nigeria. Put a little arrow in there so you can see which one is which. And Accra, Ghana. In Accra, Ghana is a beautiful temple with neatly manicured grounds and a gold statue of Moroni, hearkening from its spire, sits behind a wrought iron fence which is barely visible in this picture.

00;21;38;04 - 00;22;14;20
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
I think you can see it accessible only through a manned gate. The building is sited prominently near Independence Square, with its series of monuments built in 1961 to promote national unity and self-reliance after independence from British rule. More noticeable still is the contrast between the temple grounds and the poverty of surrounding neighborhoods. Approximately one quarter of the population of Ghana lives below the poverty line, and one only has to venture a block or two off the main boulevards to encounter dirt roads and open sewers.

00;22;14;22 - 00;22;46;24
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Visiting senior missionary couples and administrative staff for the Africa West area live within the temple compound and drive large American cars with tinted windows. This display of wealth in a field of poverty is a double edged sword. For some Ghanaians, the attractions of the temple rest in its images of abundance and uplift, of which I have heard membership which I have heard membership described, our members describe as a step up in the world, or the culmination of a search for greener pastures.

00;22;46;27 - 00;23;12;20
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
There is no doubt that the networking possibilities of programs like the pathways program, which affords young people the prospect of educational degrees through remote learning and the range of opportunities for travel to the US for jobs or further schooling, make a remarkable difference in the lives of members. Many members want to align themselves with the economic and educational prospects that the church offers them.

00;23;12;23 - 00;23;34;28
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
But it is also true that the display of wealth in the temple grounds, combined with its lack of access, reject an image of secrecy and elite ism, just as they do in the US, but magnified here by the economic disparities and history of colonialism. And they come in a very American package that doesn't always mesh well with local values and customs.

00;23;34;29 - 00;23;59;04
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
I found a couple of examples of advertised assignments for young single adults. And what is to me so interesting about this particular one is that it's it's unclear to me whether the idea is that once you join the church, you're supposed to start wearing Western clothing, or what the what the relationship is between the images on the left side and the images on the right side, or whether anyone can just come in.

00;23;59;04 - 00;24;30;13
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
But the the dancing and the singing is an interesting, image to project. The second one I find even more interesting, which is a YMCA dinner party with what looks like a champagne bottle and straw berries, which I did not see many strawberries in Ghana, but so it's there again. I do have a mix of images which are on the left hand kind of funny to make fun of them, but I always so moved to wondering, what are these people making of these images?

00;24;30;18 - 00;24;58;20
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
How are they understanding what they're seeing or the business seminars, which again, are very practical and very useful for a lot of people, but are also sort of, minting, members in a particular kind of mold, of sort of business. I shouldn't say that in the Darden school. This is there's nothing wrong with the business school, but it is a certain kind of mold of, sort of making making people over,

00;24;58;22 - 00;25;27;01
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
So in my interviews in Ghana, I spoke with a number of faithful church members who valued the practices of self-improvement and goal setting taught by church leaders. But nonetheless, they explained that the local leaders, who were most often Americans, simply did not understand the basic economic needs of their members. Church leadership in these region regions has in recent years turned more attention to social service, the building of water sources, farming.

00;25;27;01 - 00;25;56;05
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
There are some incredible projects that the church has been undertaking, or specific people from the church. Sometimes it's a local, a local missionary who will take up certain kinds of projects as a means of meeting the basic material needs of members. After some initial missteps, the church, meaning the leadership, is also more careful about its ward buildings not because they were ostentatious, but because they were clearly distinctive in the local religious landscape.

00;25;56;08 - 00;26;16;04
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Rather than purchasing or building new structures, they now tend to rent spaces in order to blend into the surroundings and not raise undue attention, so you can see in this picture a picture I took when I was there, a sign for a ward building in a suburb of Accra over a stands, you know, people selling stuff on the streets.

00;26;16;07 - 00;26;38;24
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
But the several the missionary pointed out to the town, oh, there's the sign. It was just always this little sign. And they were they were actually proud of the fact that we're not making a big deal of this. We're being low key about it, I think because of the realization that the, display of wealth either was dangerous or could have been dangerous or was not the image they necessarily wanted to project.

00;26;38;26 - 00;27;01;28
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Now, there are still need, I would say, for more two way communication between the Utah headquarters and local areas. This is what Marcus Nash, who was then in the presidency of the Africa West area, admitted in our conversations when I was there, when I arrived, the new two hour block had just been implemented in local wards and it was causing some very basic problems on the ground.

00;27;02;00 - 00;27;24;24
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Travel to the ward from remote areas could be expensive and time consuming. Moving to a two hour block meant instruction in the English language, which had which had been especially important to female members because many did not have access to other education, could only be undertaken either on a monthly basis, which was not nearly often enough, or on another day of the week.

00;27;24;26 - 00;27;51;24
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Both options were not optimal, since monthly language instruction is extremely inefficient, and travel during the week was restricted by work schedules and finances. So that's just one very small example of the ways that a a change in the church as large, can have effects that were not necessarily intended or, thought about for the, the, Utah level.

00;27;51;26 - 00;28;38;00
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
There are other ways that local customs and resource scarcity make living gospel culture a challenge. But still thornier is the matter of America's sacred purpose in Mormon culture, and how that close relationship plays out in non-American contexts. Church members can draw on a remarkably ambiguous conceptual legacy regarding the relationship between the United States government and sacred history. Early 19th century LDS leaders espoused a theocratic structure that likened the religious community to a kingdom, albeit one patterned on America and as well as biblical precedent, and echoed divine kingship described in the Book of Mormon, most fully realized in the fashioning of the Constitution in Nauvoo in 1844 that was prefaced with we the people of the

00;28;38;00 - 00;29;19;08
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Kingdom of God. Yet in the revelation from 1833, Joseph Smith Jr enjoined his followers to obey the constitutional law of the land in which they resided. After the granting of statehood to Utah in 1896, full incorporation into the political fabric of the United States seemed to provide a clear path forward to a thorough separation of the church from political involvement, but in practice at both local and national levels, it was impossible to remain completely impartial on all such issues, since any endorsement of a political candidate or viewpoint coming from a church leader could be interpreted as having divine mandate.

00;29;19;10 - 00;29;49;11
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Furthermore, to the extent that political issues are often social issues, such as the passage of the era in the 1970s, the church has felt compelled to express its deeply held beliefs in the public sphere, both at home and abroad. As one prominent church member put it, quote, the Lord saw the American constitutional order as providing, in a broad sense, a universal standard, unquote, one through which Mormon moral values could be expressed.

00;29;49;14 - 00;30;19;29
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
American economic and governmental might have also, in practice, been linked to the LDS church notion of Zion. It is no exaggeration to say that the Mormons focus on the primacy of individual agency, once deeply tempered by the economic collectivism of lives in 19th century Utah is now thoroughly bound up in a capitalist ethos. This is not to discount the tenacious community spirit of many members in local settings, or very much on display in its most expansive versions.

00;30;19;29 - 00;30;52;13
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Versions at general conference meetings, but economically to the LDS church as an institution, has done much to earn the moniker moniker. Mormons think the LDS church leaders are consistent defenders of free markets, free enterprise, and private control of property. So too, with the close connections of church members to the US government and national security services. Ezra Taft Benson may have been among the first church members appointed to a high governmental post, but he was far from the last.

00;30;52;15 - 00;31;19;27
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Some of the reasons are quite straightforward the missionary experience, a common feature of the training of many young latter day Saints, equips them with skills unmatched in the general US population. In 2011, the Economic Development Corporation of Utah reported that roughly one third of the workforce in the state was bilingual. That skill level has, by all reports, increased its attraction as a promising site for business development.

00;31;19;29 - 00;31;50;07
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
When the National Security Agency sought a place to house a Language analysts center, they chose Provo and cited the reputation of the Utah Workforce Facility with foreign languages for its choice. Recent growth in the IT industry along the Wasatch Front has also been attributed to the foreign language skills of Utah workers. 65% of students at the church run Brigham Young University in Provo speak one or more foreign languages, and nearly half have lived outside the U.S. for at least one year.

00;31;50;10 - 00;32;15;21
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
And this is remarkable. If you were to compare this to any other school. The school is the top U.S. producer of foreign language degrees in Arabic, Russian and Portuguese, and ranks third in the country overall. Further, it is a difference that contributes to the economic and political successes of the US based church. Now, how is this background relevant to the globalization of the of the LDS church?

00;32;15;23 - 00;32;48;16
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
At least some of the impetus behind international growth in the post-World War two years resulted from the general spread of American political and economic influence, as the nation assisted in the rebuilding of Western affiliated societies. As we have seen, members in West Africa and elsewhere were not blind to the perception of Mormon economic success. The gleam of newly built ward meeting houses, or the example set by prosperous expat church members working in corporate and governmental posts around them.

00;32;48;18 - 00;33;20;01
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
In some instances, the linkages between evangelism, individual uplift and economic mobility is made explicit. In other settings. The connection was merely implied but clearly recognized. So what does it mean to be both American and global? The phrase gospel culture attempts to capture a third way, a means of providing unity that can smooth the rough edges of relationships between the US based hierarchy and the stakes of the Tent of Zion planted around the globe.

00;33;20;03 - 00;33;57;16
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Because LDS church growth happened relatively swiftly and at a pace considerably faster than its leadership changes, finding consensus around what a global church means in Ottoman has been challenging and has raised more questions than could be discussed here. One area of concern centers around transnational religious organization. As James V's Picard suggests, the church represents a fairly straightforward, hierarchical mode of management, which retains a centralized structure in which those at the top give the orders, those at the bottom take them, unquote.

00;33;57;19 - 00;34;35;21
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
But as Picard then points out, such a model in practice does not follow the unswerving logic of an organizational chart. Religious communities, especially those separated by vast cultural differences and geographic geographical expanses, invariably display what he calls fray at the edges schisms, overt dissent, or passive rejection of official dictates. As a result, in recent years, LDS church leaders have struggled to find middle ground between thorough indigenization on the one hand, and complete standards of beliefs and practice on the other.

00;34;35;23 - 00;35;26;22
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Now, in this sense, UVA presents an ideal, ideal geographical opportunity. So let's talk about our geography here we are poised at the nexus of the long standing commitment to American democracy and religious conscience, articulated so passionately by Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., the center of U.S. political power from which national interests are forged and emanate. We are also quite a distance from Utah, which provides us, I think, a unique vantage on the global circuits through which religious ideas and values move in studying a church that is at once American and global, and in continuing to question and challenge others about the responsibilities created in that connection, we can, I hope, educate both church

00;35;26;22 - 00;35;52;02
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
members and broader public. As many of you know, I am also an outsider to the Mormon tradition, and I feel a special commitment to foster knowledge and dialog with students of religion about the many elements of Joseph Smith Jr's restoration. Some of these may be easier to see from a distance, just as Charlottesville may provide perspective on Salt Lake City.

00;35;52;05 - 00;36;12;18
Laurie Maffly-Kipp
So to West African members and nonmembers may yield wisdom for all of us about the ways that American religions are translated in remote locations and for in contexts. We all have something to learn from these lessons, and I invite you to share your own perspectives as we move forward in this project. Thank you very much.