Community of Christ: Developing an Independent Message

For much of its history, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as Community of Christ, struggled to articulate its core message.1 Its leaders and members knew what they were not: they were not members of their rival sect headquartered in Utah. They rejected the spectacle that followed from adherence to Brigham Young and his successors. As a result, much of the early RLDS Church message focused specifically on disassociating from the peculiarities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Mormon image, writ large. Theirs was a defensive posturing designed to prove to themselves and to non-Mormon Americans that the RLDS Church did not belong within the specters of LDS spectacle. However, such strategies also fostered an awareness of being seen, and an attention to others’ opinions of them. Even as RLDS Church members rejected the LDS Church's message, they retained the knowledge that they were observed and judged by the rest of the Mormon movement, American Protestantism, and the world.The RLDS Church emerged in 1851 from the religious questions posed by leaders of local congregations in Wisconsin. Although early RLDS Church members were not perfectly unified on all points of theology, they held fast to two main tenets: belief in lineal succession, associating church leadership with the Smith family, and opposition to polygamy.2 Their distaste for plural marriage coincided with an intellectual distance from other theological innovations associated with Nauvoo in the early 1840s, including sealing rituals. As Alma Blair argued, the church operated as a sort of “moderate Mormonism.” During the mid-nineteenth century, it brought together members of the Mormon movement hailing from multiple sects and independent congregations. To make the denomination's creed palatable to such a wide swath of members, RLDS Church president Joseph Smith III and the membership developed “a middle ground of doctrine, beliefs, and structure.”3 In addition, early RLDS Church members’ views can partly be explained through Philip Barlow's acknowledgment that most of the Reorganization's founders had not lived in Nauvoo during Joseph Smith Jr.’s lifetime. In Barlow's interpretation, the founders’ geographic distance may have facilitated their ideological division with Joseph Smith Jr.’s final theological developments.4The RLDS Church's moderate nature also may have stemmed from members’ awareness of their geographic proximity to non-Mormons. Barlow argued that the American Midwest might have caused a tempering effect on the Reorganization throughout its history. The church's members did not gather to Utah Territory or otherwise create physical distance between themselves and other American population centers. Instead, members were surrounded by non-Mormon neighbors. Simply living in religiously plural locations, Barlow suggested, required that RLDS Church members remain attentive to how non-Mormons perceived them. Barlow also observed that the regional culture of the Midwest may have influenced the RLDS Church as well, for the church's moderation could be “a reflection of their Midwestern culture as much as it is the historical circumstances of their theology.”5 In other words, many members could have felt pressure to blend into other Americans’ expectations rather than to stand out.Despite the RLDS Church's moderate nature, members’ vehement opposition to polygamy led to evangelistic conflicts with their nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint rivals. Early in his presidency, Joseph Smith III sent missionaries to Utah to challenge Latter-day Saint orthodoxy. Two of the missionaries who visited Utah were Joseph III's brothers, and sons of Joseph Smith Jr.: Alexander Hale Smith and David Hyrum Smith. In 1869, the Smith brothers’ cousin Joseph F. Smith not only attended their lectures but also spoke in opposition to their message. T. B. H. Stenhouse, a Godbeite and critic of Brigham Young, argued that the cousins’ debates offered a “curious spectacle” to Utahans who watched the sons of Joseph Jr. and Hyrum argue over whether their fathers had practiced polygamy.6 As Brooke LeFevre has argued, RLDS Church missionaries’ efforts contributed to a short-lived hope among non-Mormons that the Reorganization would supplant its Utahan rival.7Although RLDS Church members’ efforts to distance themselves from the LDS Church eased over the course of the twentieth century, the institutional relationship remains a complex one. Many of the more public (and well-documented) interactions between RLDS and LDS people have occurred among historians—people working together at historic sites, conducting research at archives, or attending conferences. Richard Howard and William Russell have commented positively about their interactions with LDS people.8 In his assessment of the Kirtland Temple as a shared sacred site, David Howlett demonstrated the temple's role in fostering conflict, disagreement, and alliance between the RLDS and LDS Churches and among their laity. The parallel pilgrimages taken by RLDS and LDS tourists are, Howlett suggested, illustrations of the challenges inherent in American religious pluralism. The temple functioned as a contested space in which members of both churches sought common ground while processing their disagreements with one another.9 (The recent transfer of the Kirtland Temple and other properties from Community of Christ to the LDS Church and public discussions surrounding the event emphasize just how tangled the relationship between the two churches continues to be.10) Nonetheless, Howlett noted elsewhere that the RLDS Church continued to differentiate itself from the LDS Church through prolonged insistence that the Reorganization was “not Mormon.”11The RLDS Church's scriptural history also demonstrates members’ awareness of the opinions of both non-Mormons and LDS people. In his assessment of sectional variations in editions of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Spencer explained that many members of the nineteenth-century RLDS Church were regularly exposed to criticism of the text. The Reorganization did not publish its own edition of the Book of Mormon until 1874. Between 1858 and 1874, most RLDS ministers opted to use a non-LDS edition of the text that presented the Spaulding thesis in its opening pages before inviting readers to draw their own conclusions. At the very least, the edition fostered awareness of some non-Mormons’ interpretations of the sacred text nearly from the sect's beginning.12 However, theologian Anthony Chvala-Smith maintained that RLDS readers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied on proof-texting rather than any forms of higher criticism when using sacred texts to argue that theirs was the one true church. Alternate methods of interpreting scripture did not emerge until later, he argued.13The Reorganization took its sharpest turn in the mid-twentieth century when, in conversation with American Protestants, leaders began incorporating liberal theological ideas into their doctrine. These changes were seismic enough to warrant comparison to the Second Vatican Council. Although many individuals have made this comment, Mark Scherer credited Carl Bangs, a Methodist professor of historical theology at the St. Paul School of Theology, for being the first to do so.14 Scholars have identified two primary causes for the theological shifts within the Reorganization: exposure to the importance of religious pluralism in international missionary work and access to Protestant theological instruction.RLDS missionary work in Asia made both evangelists and leaders more aware of the ways that potential converts and non-Mormon missionaries viewed their denomination. As Richard Howard and Matthew Bolton separately explained, Charles D. Neff's experiences in the mission field prompted him to request that the First Presidency and his fellow apostles identify the core messages of their doctrine. According to Bolton, Neff's efforts led him and fellow missionaries to realize that the RLDS Church was deeply American. They struggled to identify appropriate ways to persuade potential Japanese converts to care about the histories of Mormon schism. Neff's awareness of converts’ viewpoints changed his understanding of the strengths of RLDS theology. Further, Bolton argued that RLDS Church missionaries became more open to ecumenicism as they developed relationships with other American Protestants active in the mission field.15 Neff's questions ultimately led to what Howard identified as “the primal watershed for the RLDS Church in the last half of the twentieth century”: the drafting of a “Statement on Objectives,” presented to the RLDS membership at World Conference in April 1966. The statement's five goals included plans to “clarify the theology of the church” and “interpret the Zionic concept for our day in world terms.”16 David Howlett's analysis of RLDS Church missionary efforts demonstrates the consequences of such goals. As he explained, the Council of Twelve Apostles in 1967 approved the baptisms of polygynous Sora people living in Orissa (now Odisha), India. A majority of the church membership accepted this policy in 1972. In other words, the RLDS Church adopted a cultural pluralism in its missionary program that was strong enough to override members’ historical distaste for polygamous practice.17 Such cultural pluralism was one result of the church's shift toward liberal theology.This shift had been made possible by a local theological school in Kansas City, Missouri. The St. Paul School of Theology was established in 1958 and authorized by the Methodist General Conference. It was coeducational and provided training in pastoral ministry. Some RLDS Church leaders and staff, including Department of Religious Education employees, immediately enrolled part-time at church expense. At least fourteen eventually earned master of divinity or doctor of ministry degrees, but numerous other RLDS Church employees took a year of courses at the school through the 1980s. Some employees’ spouses also audited courses. In Pat Spillman's composite of interviews with fellow alumni, the school's instructors “encourage[d] the RLDS to seek ways of integrating knowledge gained at St. Paul with the RLDS belief structure.” Liberal theological ideas began appearing in the RLDS Church's publications during the 1960s.18The RLDS Church's Joint Council similarly held private conversations with historians and faculty that challenged them to consider alternate interpretations of their truth claims. In the mid-1960s, members of the Joint Council—which consisted of the First Presidency, Council of Twelve Apostles, and Presiding Bishopric—initiated a series of confidential seminars akin to Joseph Smith Jr.’s School of the Prophets. These seminars addressed broad questions, including the history of Christianity writ large and the history of Mormonism. RLDS Church leaders consulted with available experts, including historians and RLDS Church members Richard Howard and Robert Flanders. Four Protestant faculty from St. Paul also took part, acting “as consultants and teachers.”19 The seminars’ content included an acknowledgment that historians could not identify a single true, original church.20 Richard Howard later explained that this seminar reshaped the thinking of “those who had tended to treat Latter Day Saintism as having ‘dropped out of heaven,’ untainted by human character or values.”21 Leaders continued these conversations both through additional seminars and individual tutoring. In anticipation of becoming the next president of the RLDS Church, Wallace B. Smith underwent an intensive, private course of instruction provided by St. Paul faculty for two years. His training contributed to the private circulation of papers prepared by the First Presidency. In “The Identity of the Church,” published in 1979, the First Presidency asserted that no single church had the authority to represent God.22 The RLDS Church's institutional identity was in flux.Although the educational opportunities of this Protestant school certainly influenced the trajectory of the RLDS Church, the extent of its role is open to debate. After interviewing church leaders, Spillman argued that St. Paul contributed to the Reorganization's theological shift toward liberal theology, but that it did not cause such changes. Instead, the changes had been underway already.23 However, St. Paul's influence extended not only to the Joint Council but also to leaders who collaborated with the laity in conversations about their roles in the church. For example, David Howlett and Nancy Ross found that students at St. Paul facilitated feminist lay members’ meetings with faculty. As a result, RLDS feminists developed “counterpublics” that supported their social connections with like-minded Protestants while they developed their critique of the publics they stood critical of: namely, both American and RLDS culture. Such counterpublics illustrated an internal process of being seen even as members sought to assess patriarchal aspects of their denomination. In a companion study, the authors and Kennedy DeVries also noted that RLDS women attended consciousness-raising groups at the school. Attendees included both lay members and Marjorie Troeh, who from 1970 oversaw the RLDS Church's General Council of Women. Similar consciousness-raising groups were also established among faculty and students at the RLDS Church–affiliated Graceland College (now Graceland University) in Lamoni, Iowa.24The RLDS Church's mid-century liberalizing trend reached members’ attention in fits and starts. Anthony Chvala-Smith pointed to the publication of Harold Schneebeck's The Body of Christ, which provided for RLDS readers’ study prior to a 1968 reunion event, as a critical moment of debate within the church. Schneebeck wrote the book after completing an internship with the RLDS Department of Religious Education while on a break from attendance at the Union Theological Seminary. He commented on the variability and contingency of Jesus Christ's leadership and the church that he created for his fellow RLDS readers. As Chvala-Smith explained, the book demonstrated strong influence from mainline Protestantism and “contested the church's traditional self-understanding” at every turn. In other words, Schneebeck drew from his studies of Protestantism to provide a reinterpretation of RLDS theology for church members. Through Body of Christ and a companion text published the following year, RLDS members read church-sanctioned “critiques of a century of tradition and experience.”25Not all RLDS Church members were satisfied with the church's evolution. From the 1960s, some members voiced their concerns about articles published in the Saints’ Herald and changes to the church school curriculum that St. Paul alumni had authored. Bill Russell characterized these members as “fundamentalists,” whom he differentiated from the “ecumenists” who embraced the church's liberalization. The fundamentalists’ concerns escalated throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including in response to the church's acceptance of Doctrine and Covenants 156 at the 1984 World Conference. Russell argued that this revelation, which made the ordination of women possible, became “a convenient symbol” of the divide between fundamentalists and ecumenists. Ultimately, tens of thousands of these fundamentalists withdrew from the RLDS Church.26 As the RLDS Church drew closer to the liberal theology of some American Protestant denominations, it ruptured the unity that previous generations of members enjoyed. Pat Spillman acknowledged that fundamentalist members’ concerns were deeply intertwined with questions about the church's broader relationship to Mormonism. Fundamentalists were troubled by “the very respectability the church has earned” as it increasingly aligned with American Protestantism.27The RLDS Church continued to break with its prior traditions during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Major innovations included the discontinuation of selecting prophet-presidents from the Smith family line, first through the ordination of historian W. Grant McMurray in 1996 and then Stephen M. Veazey in 2005. In addition, the church membership selected a new name. Such a process had been considered before—some members opposed both the “Reorganized” and “Latter Day Saints” portions of the denomination's name—but it was not until 1994 that a proposal for “Community of Christ” began gaining traction. The church membership accepted the name change in 2001. And, in 2010, after years of effort, Community of Christ gained admission into the National Council of Churches of Christ.28Community of Christ's attention to the spectacle of its Mormon origins never stopped. Bill Russell joked that some critics of the church's liberalization have asked, “‘Why don't you all just go join the Methodist Church?’” For Russell, the question ignored the continued relevance of Community of Christ's origins: “What could be more challenging and worthwhile than to develop a Christ-centered theology of peace, making use of elements of our Mormon tradition?”29 The body of Community of Christ continues to resolve the challenges it faced as a historical institution that once sought distance from the spectacle of Mormonism. Indeed, its members remain cognizant of their evolving relationship with other Mormon denominations, American Protestantism, and the world.