By PEGGY FLETCHER STACK By PEGGY FLETCHER STACK ADVERTISING Salt Lake Tribune Matthew Bowman’s new book, “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith,” was conceived and birthed in a little under three months. The 352-page volume arrived on
By PEGGY FLETCHER STACK
Salt Lake Tribune
Matthew Bowman’s new book, “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith,” was conceived and birthed in a little under three months.
The 352-page volume arrived on shelves in late January, in time to capture the energy and interest of the so-called “Mormon moment,” with Latter-day Saint Mitt Romney in the heat of a presidential race. Since its publication, the first-time author has been a ubiquitous presence in TV, newspaper and online stories about the Utah-based faith. Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw called Bowman’s book “essential reading for anyone interested in 2012 and beyond.”
Bowman, a Mormon, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Utah and a doctorate from Georgetown University, with a dissertation on New York evangelicals. His work on evangelicalism and Mormonism has been published in Religion and American Culture, Journal of the Early Republic and The New Republic. He teaches religion at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.
The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed Bowman in Salt Lake City and via email. Excerpts:
Q: How did the book come to be?
A: On June 22, 2011, Jon Meacham (former Newsweek editor) called me. That was a bit of a surprise. He said, “I believe there’s a 50/50 chance we’ll have a Mormon president next year. I feel the time is right for an accessible, narrative history of Mormonism, and I want you to write it.” … I called him back a couple of days later and said yes. …
Q: How does your book relate to the “Mormon moment” and Mitt Romney’s campaign?
A: Romney is sort of the walking embodiment of Mormon confidence. He has faith in his own leadership abilities, faith that the right committee can address most issues, faith that problems are basically solvable. His particular optimism, competence and slight awkwardness all strike me as distinctly derived from Mormonism’s progressive heritage: It makes him both slightly out of place in contemporary American politics, but at the same time virtually the model of your average Mormon stake (division) president.
His Mormon moment, though, is hardly the first; every decade or two, it seems, Americans ponder letting Mormons become mainstream, and they usually decide in the negative.
Q: Do you think Mormonism will ever enter the mainstream? If so, why and when?
A: What it will take for Mormons to become mainstream is, simply, the church increasing tenfold. Much of the suspicion derives from how small, and therefore insular, the church appears. So many of these things were said about Catholics 100 years ago.
Catholics had to obey the pope, had “weird” rituals, wore “strange clothing” and did odd things like Lent and all this other stuff.
Then, between 1890 and 1960, Catholics became 25 percent of the American population. That mainlined them better than anything that the Catholics themselves could do.
Q: What do you hope non-Mormons will learn about the faith from reading your book?
A: I’d like non-Mormons to come away with a couple of things: First, a sense that Mormonism is in fact a very diverse movement, one with a lot of different flavors, tendencies and blends — as much as any other religion. And secondly, I’d like them to realize that Mormons themselves today wrestle with a lot of things other Americans find odd about the faith: Mormons are deeply aware of their own oddness, but also deeply confident that their oddness should not preclude them from full participation in American life.
