The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints [Paperback]

This book is not as deep or involved as B.H. Roberts seven volume history of the LDS church and its' people. It is a book that casts itself as an introductory one volume history of what is today called Mormon history. I am a Mormon. I have read histories of the LDS church that deal with the subject in a very negative and also positive ways. This book is well balanced and honest in its presentation of the subject. I read this book in order to better understand how all of the pieces of Mormon history fit together. I found what I was looking for. This book does not go into detail about the minutiae of Mormon history, nor does it make assumptions in order to drive a point home. The authors deal with historical research and nothing else.

This book is not a history of the Mormon faith, it is a history of the Mormon church and the Mormon people. It does not attempt to convert, but rather to explain. The book is not trying to define what Mormon's believe, but rather who they are, and what the have done.

Arrington and Bitton offer the reader a single volume history of the Mormon Church based on historical, rather than missionary principals. Both authors make no secret of their LDS affiliations; but for the uncommited reader this is an advantage, rather than a drawback, since their "bias" is stated and can thus be taken into account. As a non-mormon, I can confidently recommend this book as an excellent introduction to the subject, both to the general reader and the serious student of Religious Studies. In multi-faith Birmingham England I would have no compunction in recommending this book as the one for any of my students interested in the subject. Pity its not available in England.

I eagerly awaited publication of this general history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when it first appeared in 1979, and was not disappointed. I recently reread "The Mormon Experience" because I realized that 25 years had now passed since it first appeared and I wanted to see how well it has faired over the years. Let me report that it has indeed stood the test of time very well. Taking a roughly chronological approach, with individual topical chapters, authors Arrington and Bitton, both lifelong members of the Latter-day Saint Church, produced a masterpiece. Their task was straightforward, but most difficult, to produce a readable one-volume history of the church that was honest, legitimate, and responsive to the needs of both believing churchmembers and nonmembers.

This book appeared during a time of encouragement and inescapable excitement about Mormon history. Leonard J. Arrington, then LDS Church Historian, was modernizing the LDS archives and sponsoring varied and far-reaching research of which this book was a notable contribution. There was a fleeting esprit de corps within the community of scholars working in the field, and much of significance resulted from far-reaching historical efforts. Indeed, Davis Bitton, one of Arrington's associates in the LDS Historical Department and co-author of this book, designated the decade between 1972 and 1982 a golden age, "a brief period of excitement and optimism--that someone has likened to Camelot" (Davis Bitton, "Ten Years in Camelot: A Personal Memoir," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 16 (Autumn 1983): 9-20, quote from p. 9).

We did not realize it at the time, but "The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints" was very nearly the last official attempt to record the history of the Mormon Church in an honest and unblemished manner. In 1981 Mormon Apostle Boyd K. Packer threw down a gauntlet to historians of the Church that they should exclusively show "the hand of the Lord in every hour and every moment of the Church from its beginning till now" (Boyd K. Packer, "'The Mantle is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect'," Brigham Young University Studies 21 Summer 1981): 261-78, quote from p. 262). With such a perspective, church-mandated interpretations of the Mormon past are not easily overcome. Soon Arrington was quietly replaced as official LDS Church Historian and he and most of his associates in the Church Historical Department were transferred to Brigham Young University.

What Arrington and Bitton produced here was exceptional. In 16 chapters divided into three parts-"The Early Church," "The Kingdom in the West," and "The Modern Church"-they range broadly over the history of the movement from its origins by Joseph Smith to its growing pains after World War II as it became a world religion. They based their work on the explosion of historical research that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, offering reinterpretations of early Mormonism, the middle period of frontier Utah with its characteristic plural marriage patterns, and the twentieth century church.

"The Mormon Experience" deals candidly with difficult aspects of the church's creation mythology. This includes such issues as the discovery of multiple accounts of the "First Vision" that seemingly contradict each other. Arrington and Bitton summarize the problems and reconciliation of the various accounts in a way that would be acceptable to most Mormons: "If the later version was different, this was not a result of inventing an experience out of whole cloth, as an unscrupulous person might readily have done, but rather of reexamining an earlier experience and seeing it in a different light" (p. 8). It deals equally successfully with Joseph Smith's militarism and Mormon plural marriage in the Great Basin. In the modern era Arrington and Bitton explore the exceptionally important issue of priesthood for Blacks, which was offered by the Mormon leadership for the first time only in 1978. In every case, the authors successfully tread the tightrope between divergent positions on these issues and offer interpretations legitimate both to believers and those outside the church.

This was no small accomplishment and both authors should be commended for their honesty and forthrightness. "The Mormon Experience" is as classic work. It is an unbiased, well-written, interesting, and informed work written by two masters of Mormon history. What more could anyone ask?