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Mormonism and the Radical Religious Movement in Early Colonial New England

2000; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/45226662

1554-9631

Val D. Rust,

Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

A Journal of Mormon ThoughtThere is persuasive anecdotal evidence that Stark is correct with regard to the kinship ties among the first converts of the LDS church.Most of the first converts came via family lines, including spouses, brothers and sisters, cousins, in-laws, and uncles.Richard Bushman describes the conversions in the first months after the church was organized: Five Whitmer children and three of their spouses were baptized . . .besides the parents.Eleven Smiths, six Jollys, and five Rockwells joined. . . .The most remarkable collection of kin was the offspring and relatives of Joseph Knight, Sr., and his wife Polly Peck Knight. . . .Two of Polly Knight's brothers and a sister, their spouses, and a sister-in-law . . .were baptized.Five of the Knight children, four of them with spouses, joined, plus Joseph Knight's sister, Mary Knight Slade, and five of her children.3As the church spread, other families joined the extensive webwork of relationships.Over a two-year period, no less than thirteen Young family members joined the church, and through the Youngs, the Heber C. Kimball family.These two families were distant cousins of Joseph Smith and were well aware of their relationship to each other.However, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain the further expansion of the LDS church strictly through kinship and friendship associations.Although obvious clusters of people joined the church, more is required to explain why these clusters identified themselves as Mormon even when they were quite distant from each other and had no common kinship connections.Additional explanations are also necessary to account for an increasing number of outliers or isolates who came into the church.Stark recognizes that factors other than kinship and friendship ties are often at work in the conversion process.He notes that converts usually respond to the message because it resonates with their life orientation and does not require them to reject their so-called "religious capital."Rather, conversion to a new faith is easier when that new faith "maximizes their conservation of religious capital."4Converts are drawn to religions which fit within their pre-conversion frame of reference.The kinship theory of conversion is persuasive, and I would like to push it in a direction not yet taken by scholars.I argue in this paper that an individual who is attracted to a strange religious orientation likely has a family history that corresponds in a marked way with that religious orientation.In fact, this orientation can be traced across a number of generations.The religious orientation is not necessarily directly experiential, but may have become almost archetypal in nature.In other words, personal and 3.