Between the Sacred and the Silly
A new essay collection captures the endearing quirkiness of Mormon Zion
Ryan Davis’s new book, Dispatches from Mormon Zion, is a thoughtful and warm collection of essays that help the reader understand aspects of the modern Mormon experience, specifically through entertaining and insightful stories that occur in and around the uniquely Mormon city of Provo.
In the preface, Davis explains the connecting thread between essays. He writes that “the essays in this book are trying to get at a cluster of questions: What is Mormon Zion like? What kind of experiences does it make possible? If you encounter another person in the way where you just get what’s happening to them, and they somehow intuit what you’re feeling as well, what happens next?”
Davis also helpfully establishes expectations in his introductory essay “Millennial Imaginings,” when he says that he wants to “avoid either the triumphalism of lazy religiosity or the empirical confidence of armchair sociology.” Ryan Davis knows he is not simply a disconnected observer, someone who can pull on the thread of Mormon culture willy-nilly and see where it leads. He has skin in the game, and is, to paraphrase Rilke, living out his questions. This is a mix of roles that the author proves comfortable inhabiting, and, as someone who is fortunate enough to have interacted with Ryan personally, I can attest that his persona on the page matches who he is in the real world.
Beyond establishing expectations, the author also uses “Millennial Imaginings” to puzzle through Mormon generosity. Davis posits that, at least in part, such generosity rests on the assumption that our diverging beliefs will ultimately converge. If the end goal is Zion, then adversaries who share that aim will be less likely to adopt a scorched-earth method of conflict engagement. There is a flavor of common sense to that observation, but it is clearly and thoughtfully articulated, and such observations (sprinkled generously throughout the book) help those in the Mormon community (and those interested in it) “look under the hood” and figure out why certain cultural approaches and attitudes exist.
Such Mormon-specific observations can then lead to broader applications—which is where I believe Ryan Davis wants the reader to go. Publishing a book about unity and about intuiting what another person is going through is an implicit call to pay attention to a place where the contemporary cankers of distrust and cynicism have proven less infectious. To be sure, there are limits to such generosity in the Mormon community, and the legacy of discriminatory church policies towards Blacks, Native Americans, women, LGBTQ populations, and other groups continues to do harm, but the point is that some people are trying to see each other generously. This isn’t just a book about Mormons, but a book about all of us, and what qualities and structures lead us to step away from instinctual suspicion (which I tend to have—Provo didn’t cure me, sadly) to a more trusting stance that seems often to lead to automatic reciprocation.
Through his stories and wry observations, the author also manages to capture the surreal quality of Provo. It’s as if the city itself is caught between the sacred and the silly—and there are as many opportunities to wince as there are to smile. But if you don’t take yourself too seriously, and if you observe with compassion—and Ryan proves himself adept at both—you can leave yourself open to transcendent moments. The way he describes the young couple in matching outfits taking engagement pictures, the words of encouragement from passersby on the Provo River trail, the story of the mysterious and still-unsolved penny-tapping all paint a picture of Provo that both matches and redeems my own personal experiences there.
One aspect of Mormon Zion that is implicitly yet consistently shown throughout the book is the vibrant world of Mormonism’s intellectual capital. I don’t mean for this to be a fawning description of what might be more bloodlessly called an agglomeration economy. As Mormon faculty gather in high densities, they naturally form deep friendships with students, fellow congregants, and colleagues, and these encounters in turn spawn new perspectives and innovative intellectual approaches. Provo isn’t completely unique, but it is unusual in American society, as it is both deeply religious and highly educated. And Mormonism’s social practices seem to anchor the school’s intellectual life to the earthy reality of life as it is commonly lived.
Provo has its own approach to Mormonism that would, at least to some degree, make it distinctive from Santaquin’s, American Fork’s, or Nampa’s. In some sense it is the last functioning Mormon gathering place. As the concept of Zion has become increasingly spiritualized, Provo proves the exception. A gathering place for Mormon students across the Mormon Belt and beyond, BYU is the place where students and faculty discover and rediscover Mormonism and co-create its contemporary flavor. The task of squaring early Mormonism’s radical thought and genuine populist Americanism, even frontier Transcendentalism, with a more corporate and correlated modern version is left to BYU faculty and staff as currents of rationalism and cosmopolitanism compel campus leaders to address the very questions that BYU students descend on Provo with, as if in their suitcases.
Here, Mormonism’s public intellectuals are just that, and seem by default public-oriented, engaging with the same mundane issues of congregational life as everyone else. Here is, to some degree, a crucial difference between a community-oriented university and a prestige-oriented one. Instead of withdrawing from the community to an increasingly distinguished ivory tower, far removed from the average lived experience, BYU faculty and staff are participants in their own congregations. Rationalism and theorizing are embodied and other-focused.
Ryan Davis’s accounts of fly-fishing with Terryl Givens and George Handley at Strawberry Reservoir, or of dining with Charles Inouye’s family, are important sites of theological and cultural analysis just as much as participating in a Pie-oneer Day bake-off or being followed by a young child on a scooter while fishing the lower Provo River. Thoughtful analysis of Mormon Zion can help observers and participants sympathize with it more, but as Ryan Davis describes throughout the essays, the real magic happens in the living of it.
Dispatches from Mormon Zion, Ryan Davis, Eerdmans Publishing Co.
205 pages, $22.99
In other Utah news
Mike Lee re-inserts language in reconciliation bill to sell millions of acres of public land across the West. (Deseret News)
Could Utah be the next battleground state? (RadioWest)
MAGA intensifies its assault on public lands. (The Land Desk)
University of Utah student is being held at a Colorado detention facility. (Salt Lake Tribune)
A favorite Salt Lake County farm is set to be annexed into Salt Lake City. (Salt Lake Tribune)