The Mormon need to identify with scripture
likening the scriptures to ourselves as an argument for the importance of women's Book of Mormon retellings
I’ve been doing a bit of background reading for scholarly work I’m doing on women’s retellings of Book of Mormon narrative. In this post, I look at additional research on 19th-century Biblical interpretation, how Latter-day Saints (LDS) are more likely to identify with characters in scripture as they interpret it, and why this is important for retellings of the Book of Mormon.
In some ways, I’m continuing my ideas from my thesis, which discussed how women in the 1910s expressed their ideas about what the afterlife is like in speculative short stories—a safe place for theological experimentation. I’m excited to find out that I missed some important existing research when I wrote my thesis! Amy Easton-Flake has published multiple articles on the ways women used poetry and Biblical references in the Women’s Exponent. More than any other denomination, LDS readers apply scriptures to themselves. Easton-Flake, in summarizing her research on LDS scriptural interpretation, wrote:
Like their Protestant contemporaries, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also compared themselves to individuals in the Bible as a way to make sense of their experiences and to establish authority—although the extent to which they did this was greater than most.1
Easton-Flake quoted Phil Barlow, who had found the same thing:
The Mormon identification with biblical peoples, events, and prophecies was experientially more all-encompassing than that of any other major group during the nineteenth century, and probably of the preceding and succeeding centuries as well.2
Why is this relevant to Book of Mormon retellings by women? There’s an argument that (many) women read the Bible differently than men do. In her introduction to Feminist Biblical interpretation, Harvard divinity professor Elisabeth Fiorenza explains how the differences in the roles of men and women in the Bible changes how readers interpret the text:
When men identify with a male in power such as Moses, David, or Jesus, the female characters in a story are the means by which the male reader is bonded with the male author. When we examine how a female character functions as such a “means of bonding” or as the “glue” that holds things together, then we can see that the wo/man character is often introduced in order to enhance the authority and power of the male protagonist.3
If a woman is looking for her role in scripture, almost all of her examples are as a supporting role to the men in the story. The men receive visions, do God’s will, start wars, and sire progeny. The women get married, trick men into doing what they/God want, and also help men do God’s will (the authors of the text are, additionally, assumed to be male). LDS women ignored the trickster aspect of Old Testament women and looked for advice on what a woman should be like.4 This is one reason why Biblical interpretations of Eve were so important in the 19th century. They had important political implications, like if women should be allowed to vote (surprisingly, Christina Rossetti was against it?5). LDS women in the 19th century used scriptures from the Bible to show how men and women were equal, and they argued passionately for women’s suffrage.6
Women aren’t as prominent in the Book of Mormon as they are in the Bible.
When a woman retells a Book of Mormon story which centers a woman’s experience, it tells me several things: 1) this woman noticed the lack of women’s stories in the Book of Mormon, 2) she wanted a story that speaks to her contemporary concerns (so she wrote one) and 3) she was interested in expressing her religious ideas and wasn’t overly concerned with whether or not she could be a religious authority. She focused on topics that were important to her, and they were usually topics with political implications, like how men should treat women, choice in romantic partner, and what the ideal woman is like. More on that in my next post!
Easton-Flake, Amy. “Nineteenth-Century Biblical Interpretation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” In The Bible and the Latter-Day Saint Tradition, edited by Taylor G. Petrey, Cory Crawford, and Eric A. Eliason. University of Utah Press, 2023, 189.
Barlow, Philip L. Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-Day Saints in American Religion. Oxford University Press, 2013, 109.
Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler. Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Orbis Books, 2015, 155. I’m aware that this quote is taking a bit of an gender-essentialist position, which I resent. I can identify with any character that a man can! And yet, I feel different towards women characters than I do towards men characters. And if the LDS Church is going to say it’s important that men and women are different, we should accept that many people will read gender as an important characteristic of Biblical narrative. Fiorenza tries to acknowledge this essentialism with the term “wo/man,” with a 90s-era slash to draw attention to how being a woman is a social construct.
Easton-Flake, “Nineteenth-Century Biblical Interpretation,” 33-34.
Taylor, Marion Ann, and Heather E. Weir, eds. Let Her Speak for Herself: Nineteenth-Century Women Writing on Women in Genesis. Baylor University Press, 2006, 65-68. The poem, entitled “A Helpmeet for Him” starts “Woman was made for man’s delight.” Delightful.
Easton-Flake, Amy. “Mormon Women and Scripture in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender, edited by Taylor Petrey and Amy Hoyt. Routledge, 2022, 107. “…writers [in the Women’s Exponent] turned to [the scriptures] often for examples of the Lord's regard for woman, her contributions to building God’s kingdom, and her equality with man.”
“More than any other denomination, LDS readers apply scriptures to themselves.”
Really? I’d like to see the evidence for that. I’m not saying it isn’t right, I just want to know that those making this claim have actually looked into what other religion’s customs are.
If we’re looking at fiction, for example, there is really a lot of re-tellings and adaptations of biblical stories — perhaps the most successful example from the 19th century is, of course, Ben Hur, by former civil war general Lew Wallace. Many many others exist, and many existed before any LDS author started writing scriptural adaptations. I suspect that the LDS impetus to write similar stories drew on their popularity.
I also should point out, in thinking about how women wrote Book of Mormon adaptations, that women didn’t seem to write about existing female characters in the scriptures, but instead made up their own characters. In fact, for example, the only story I’ve found about Abish before the 1970s was written by a man.
Important research. It is a fascinating idea that Mormons identify (over identify?) with scriptural stories and characters more than most.