The Mormon Presence In Canada

Although Mormons have been a presence in Canada for over a century and a half, their image has repeatedly altered. The Mormon Presence in Canada traces the history of Mormons in Canada and addresses contemporary issues including economics and politics, demographic and social aspects of ethnicity.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0888642121
• ISBN13: 9780888642127
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: University of Alberta Press
• Length: 382 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A Collected Work, with all its Strengths and Weaknesses

Increasingly in recent years historians of Mormonism have turned their attention to the question of the church's history outside the United States, certainly a positive development as those plowing the field begin to move beyond the hidebound story of Joseph Smith and the founding and first generation experiences of the Mormon movement to consider other aspects of the religion's history. This exploration of Mormonism in Canada was precipitated by the centennial of the settlement of Mormons in Alberta in 1887 and a symposium that was organized to review the subject. It is from this conference that the articles published in this collection were derived. While a subject of significance, until the recent centennial most historians did not investigate this subject extensively or with any real seriousness. "The Mormon Presence in Canada" is a gleaning of some of the best short research on the subject, placing emphases on the topic and serving as a partial corrective of past neglect. As a result, it is a most welcome collection of articles. Taken altogether and arranged roughly chronologically, the 17 chapters, each written by a different specialist, represent a particular aspect of Mormon history, culture, and social development in Canada during the period since the 1830s. Some narrow and others broadly interpretive, the articles in this book are far more interdisciplinary than most works of this type, another positive trend as several social sciences and arts interchange perspectives, methodologies, and interpretive models to explain various aspects of the subject. Any collected work's quality is uneven and this book is no exception. Some of the essays are more challenging than others; I found particularly rewarding and convincing Armand L. Mauss, "Mormons as Ethnics: Variable Historical and International Implications of an Appealing Concept," in which he argued that Mormons should not be considered a distinctive ethnic group. While Mauss takes only a little exception to the framework of Mormon ethnicity to explain the historical development of the religion, used so convincingly by Thomas S. O'Dea, The Mormons (1957) and Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (1985), he found that the cultural differences that set Mormonism apart from the rest of society have largely withered away in the twentieth century and the religion can no longer sustain the ethnicity claim. He commented, "during the past century there has been an obvious convergence between Mormons and their host societies in North America, so that Mormons are required to reach ever more deeply into the bag of cultural peculiarities to find traits that will help them mark their subcultural boundaries, and thus their very identity as a special people" (p. 348).Also especially challenging was Dean R. Louder's "Canadian Mormon Identity and the French Fact," which explores a genuine ethnic issue in Canada as it relates to the Mormon experience: the French/Anglo makeup of the