What You Missed at Sunstone West

This Saturday I took a trip down to Sunstone West in Cupertino California with a couple friends from a Mormon-themed message board I frequent.

Mike Reed, playing with my camera.

One of these friends, Steven, is a gentle giant. The strong, quiet type. Into anime, dungeons and dragons, and techno music. Mike Reed is a wiry, loquacious, earringed-and-goateed academic. Needless to say, they are extremely interesting people, and I very much enjoyed our excursion. Other people I enjoyed meeting and chatting with at some length included Maxine Hanks (with whom I share an interest in the overlap of Mormonism with gnosis), Mel Tungate (who shares my dismay at how LDS apologists have handled the Book of Abraham issue), and Seth Bryant (an up-and-coming Community of Christ scholar with an interest in sexuality and gender issues). As I remarked to Mike, it was great to get to hang out with people who laugh at my FARMS jokes.

My session (with Ben Clarke) was well-attended and well-received. I'll post an MP3 link when it's available.

That's me up at the front. The back of Steven's head is at the far right. (Yes, ponytail guy.)

The only presentation I took notes on was Todd Compton's talk, "Teen Marriage Age in Mormon Polygamy and in American Culture: What Was the Norm?".

Todd observed that ten of Joseph Smith's wives were in their teens at the time he married them. Todd asks, was this typical of the New England culture from which Smith and most of the Mormons came? He found that it was not. In Massachusetts, for example, the mean marriage age was 24, and only about 3-4% of women married in their teens. Only about .04% married at ages 14 or 15.

Todd also looked into marriage ages in Utah after the Mormons moved West. Most frontier states had more men than women, which increased competition for wives and drove female marriage ages down. Utah had no such imbalance, yet its marriage ages were much lower than the rest of the US, including the frontier. This is because polygamy causes a gender imbalance almost by definition: competition for wives resulted in women marrying at younger and younger ages.

Todd feels that a better apologetic for Joseph's marriage to Helen Mar Kimball than the appeal to cultural context is that the marriage was a dynastic alliance between two church leaders. It was initiated by Orson Hyde rather than Joseph himself, and Todd thinks it probable that the marriage was not consummated (though there's no evidence one way or the other for this particular marriage).

Another very interesting talk whose MP3 recording you'll want to purchase when they become available was Connell O'Donovan's "'I Would Confine Them to Their Own Species': LDS Historical Rhetoric and Praxis Regarding Marriage Between Blacks and Whites". Connell had found a very interesting record of the minutes of an 1847 meeting. Earlier the same year Brigham Young had endorsed interracial marriage, saying that we are all one blood. In this meeting, however, he decried it, suggested that it would lead to the destruction of society and humanity, and indicated that it required blood atonement. This just goes to show how very abruptly his position (and the church's position) reversed on this subject. Connell thinks part of this may be a cathartic expression of Brigham's personal frustration about the way his own marital relations were being handled by the courts: crap runs downhill, so to speak. Brigham repeated these themes on several other occasions, as well, and so did other church leaders. Despite their vehemence, the ban was enforced somewhat inconsistently. One interracial couple had something like eleven children, half of whom were initiated into the priesthood and half of whom were denied it. Connell closed by basically saying that the prophets of doom who felt sure that interracial marriage would be the end of us all have been proven mistaken. The same argument is used against same-sex marriage, and that will be proven mistaken, too. It's only a matter of time.

I also got to see the first half of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons. It is truly moving and well-put-together.

I'm already looking forward to next year!