There are many ways to write something as complex and texturally rich as the history of Mormonism: An academic historian might pose a question, then analyze available data to answer that question. A polemicist might pull out anecdote after anecdote, spun in malice to place the Church and its members in the worst possible light. ((Before anyone outside Keepa’s normal community blasts me for saying this, I’m not speaking here of authentic examination of negative aspects of Mormonism, or vigorous but honest debate; I reserve “polemicist” for someone who writes about Mormonism with hostility and without caring about fairness or civility. If that isn’t you, don’t take it personally. If that is you, you’re a polemicist.)) A devotional historian writing for the purpose of worship might write explicitly about God’s hand in history: “Prompted by the Spirit, Joseph wrote to …” or “Because the Lord desired to test his people, he …” Historians write with different purposes and for different audiences, and that determines the structure of what they write, as much as it does the content.

The kind of history I most often write is narrative history, meaning I tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, very often with some kind of conflict (that is, where the main character is challenged by physical conditions, or by the disapproval of friends, or by the need to get somewhere or do something). Resolving that conflict (overcoming that challenge) adds drama to the story, and means that by the end of the story something is different from how it was at the beginning.

Telling history as a story rather than presenting an analysis or proving a point is “small-n narrative,” a writing style based on narration. But writing a successful extended narrative history – two or two thousand incidents strung together to tell a broader story – requires a “big-N Narrative” as well. This Narrative provides the structure for the history and governs what characters are included and what incidents are chosen. Without such a Narrative tying the separate pieces together, what you end up with is a random collection of miscellaneous anecdotes strung together in chronological order. With such a Narrative (and, it goes without saying, with accuracy and the right selection of stories and skill in the telling), what you end up with is something that can be greater than the sum of its parts.

The “big-N Narrative” is the plot: Event A leads to event B which causes event C eventually leading to outcome D. The “big-N Narrative” helps the reader understand “what it all means.” The historian might make the Narrative explicit by frequently referring back to the announced purpose of the history (like Mormon, with his occasional “And thus we see …” explaining why he included an incident and what we’re supposed to learn from it). Or, the Narrative might be more subtle, serving as a guide to the historian and left for the reader to discover, or simply to enjoy without realizing why.

Of course the narrative historian with a guiding Narrative has to remain true to the spirit of the history she’s telling and not let the Narrative force the facts or meaning of the past. A writer could stick so closely to his Narrative of God’s guiding hand in Church history that he wrongfully creates the impression that every development was inevitable – such a Narrative denies the role of human cooperation with God, of obedience or rebellion, of the success or failure of man’s best efforts to follow God. A writer could stick so closely to his Narrative of Mormonism as a corrupt enterprise that he ignores all contradictory evidence and sees the weeds of human behavior choking out any better fruits. The Narrative guides but shouldn’t blind the historian.

The Narrative that has guided me in writing She Shall Be an Ensign – which, by the way, is progressing nicely but taking more time than I had hoped; the ambitious Mother’s Day launch has had to give way to one much later this year – is based on a metaphor drawn from the scriptures. I don’t make that Narrative explicit in the text, but it governs which specific stories I tell and shapes “what it all means” in the way I tell them.

In a comment on last Sunday’s installment of Burton Kent Farnsworth’s missionary diary, Keepa’ninny bfwebster inadvertently came very close to the guiding metaphor of my Narrative:

It strikes me (from an amateur perspective) that there was a period roughly a century long (say, 1847-1947) in which the Church and its members mostly tried to survive, shelter, adapt, and then slowly send out tendrils around the world. In most places outside of the Alberta-to-Juarez corridor, numbers were small or even tiny, and the Church was in a holding pattern at best.

His image of the Church “send[ing] out tendrils” suggests the scriptural image of the Kingdom of God as a vineyard: Isaiah refers to the “vineyard of the Lord” as the “house of Israel”; Jesus tells a parable about sending laborers into the vineyard; the Lord blesses those who work in his vineyard: “For, behold, I will bless all those who labor in my vineyard with a mighty blessing …” (D&C 21:9); although planted with olive trees rather than grapevines, Jacob’s mighty parable depicts the entire course of God’s dealings with Israel through images of planting and grafting and pruning and fruiting. It is a metaphor so common in scripture that even if the word “vineyard” doesn’t appear in my history, I believe readers will respond to the underlying structure.

She Shall Be an Ensign is arranged in three parts covering more or less equal time periods, each one considered as a phase in the development of the vineyard.

1. Planting the seed and putting down sustainable roots.

The Gospel was restored line upon line, each line of which was like a seed that needed to take root in the understanding and practice of Church members. Some took root immediately, but had trouble surviving because of surrounding conditions; some took root so firmly that it withstood all adversity, even the death of Joseph Smith; some needed the shelter of isolation – the wall around the vineyard, or the relative isolation of the Great Basin – to develop and be understood and embraced (in bfwebster’s words, “to survive, shelter, adapt”). Part I of She Shall Be an Ensign, illustrated by the lives of women, shows how the Church was established and grew, and how it became strong enough in its western wilderness to go back out into the world and survive. It addresses the beginning up to about 1890.

2. Sending out vines that went far beyond the walls of the original vineyard.

In a sense, the Church has sent out vines from the very beginning in the form of missions to Europe, briefly to the Far East, and to many parts of the Pacific. But there was a fundamental change in that effort in the 1890s: With the Manifesto, and statehood for Utah, and all the social adjustments that went along with those events, Latter-day Saints no longer had to gather to the Rocky Mountains to be able to live as Saints. The Church began to go back out into the world and establish itself permanently there. Early branches of the Church tended to be waystations funneling converts to Utah; in 1894, the Church began encouraging new members not to come to Utah, but to build the Church at home, wherever “home” was. Branches became permanent establishments, centers of strength for future growth.

The Church also “sent out tendrils” to new places, to people very different from the bulk of early Church members. Whereas most Church members had previously come from the Anglo-Saxon United States and from western Europe, the Church began sending missions to Turkey, to Japan, to South America, to Eastern Europe, in an effort to establish permanent bases among those peoples. In the Pacific, missionaries reclaimed old-time members who had become more or less lost to the Church during the hardest years of the late 19th century, when few missionaries could be sent.

The old root stock in the heart of the vineyard grew strength to support all those vines: The reorganization of the priesthood to provide service opportunities for all men; the development of the auxiliaries to serve all members; the growing expectation that every member should participate through regular Sunday and temple attendance and should have a calling in the ward; a greater distinction between what was traditional but could be practiced only in the Mormon heartland and what was essential to the Church and could be transplanted to all parts of the world ; the recognition that old principles could be implemented in new practices (the Welfare Program of the 1930s, for instance, being the 20th century adaptation of principles underlying the 19th century United Order) – all of these developments supported the thriving of the vineyard.

(Sorry … you know that the early 20th century is my favorite period, so I succumb to the temptation to go into more detail here …)

3. The vines bear fruit.

I once had a … um … a “discussion” (“dispute” is too strong) … with a colleague who insisted that the Church did not begin to become an international organization until the 1950s. Respectfully (or otherwise), I couldn’t disagree more. We built temples in Switzerland and England and New Zealand in the 1950s. This was not the beginning of a strong and permanent presence outside of the United States; it was the culmination of the process that had begun decades earlier. Those temples were built because there were enough members in those places who were faithful enough that they needed the blessings of the temple, and the Church could not withhold those blessings any longer for any reason.

The post-World War II era is the time when all earlier efforts began to bear fruit at an astonishing rate: The cooperative effort of the 1930s Welfare Program resulted in an outpouring of love and material support for Saints – and others – recovering from war around the world, most of which has never yet made it into our printed histories, and it continues as recently as the Relief Society initiative to aid refugees. Those temples, although a tiny beginning to what we have seen in recent years, were the fruits of the faith of generations. The 1978 revelation and racial acceptance was the fruit of questioning old assumptions.  Stakes in India and Mongolia, temples in Zimbabwe and Peru, are the fruits of sending out new vines to new parts of the earth.

And that fruit was not limited to places outside the United States: There is hardly, if any, a place in the United States that is not part of an organized stake, where Church members practice the gospel as fully as it is practiced anywhere. Latter-day Saint converts used to talk about moving to Utah to live “within the shadow of the temple” — the building of temples, especially numerous in the United States, is the fruit of all that went before.

This section of She Shall Be an Ensign concentrates on the stability, fruits, and continued growth – growth in a thriving gospel life as much as in numbers – of the vineyard.

What comes next?

Despite all the fine examination of various aspects of Church history in the past two generations, I don’t think anybody has really thought through the Narrative – we’re still stuck at about 1900 with the building of a commonwealth in the desert plus a scattered story or two from later history. That is, partly because it’s based on the Doctrine and Covenants, we do a pretty fair job of telling our story up through the death of Joseph Smith, and then there’s that epic crossing of the Plains, and at some point we went into Africa … but there hasn’t really been a coherent, connected narrative (or Narrative) of Church history covering the 20th century. I know some projects are in the works to correct that; whether or when they appear and how well they do the job is something for the next few years to reveal.

If some historian of 50 or 100 years in the future were to pick up my Narrative of Church history as the development of the Lord’s vineyard, how might that metaphor be continued? We need the perspective of time to be able to sense themes in the “big-N Narrative” of Church history, so these are only possibilities, dependent upon the course of history in the next few generations:

Church history need not – probably should not – be conceived as one triumphal course of progress. Although truth will prevail and the God’s purposes will be achieved in the long run, there could be stumbling blocks in the future just as there have been in the past. If the Church were to enter a period of crisis, and that crisis came from forces within the Church itself, the next metaphor might be one of pruning the vine to remove diseased or unproductive branches. If such a crisis were to come from forces outside the Church, maybe the metaphor could become one of “digging about,” to fortify the roots and shield the vine from wintry blasts.

If, on the other hand, the Church were to enter a period in the next generation of great strength and growth, then my description of the recent past as “producing fruit” might need to be modified. Maybe the fruit of the recent past will then look like mere green buds, with the ripening and gathering of the fruit coming in the next period. I have a fantasy that some young athlete from China or the Middle East or Central Asia formed a favorable impression of Mormon kindness during his or her participation in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. What if 20 or 30 years from now, that young athlete has become the seasoned leader of a nation and, through some unpredictable contact with the Church, recalls his former feelings and makes it possible for missionary work to begin in earnest in his region? There are such vast areas of the world where the gospel has only begun to penetrate – where the tendrils are too tender to notice – that there could, at some future time, be a flowering that shadows even the Church in Africa. That could require a readjustment of the overall Narrative of Church history.

And then there’s the looked-for, unknown timing of the Second Coming. If that were to occur in the next generations – I’m not predicting it soon, merely suggesting that when it comes there would be every reason to continue writing Church history – the Narrative might continue with the metaphor of the harvest, or with the metaphor of pressing the harvested fruit into wine. That will occur sometime, after all.

This post is a product of getting up at 3:00 because I couldn’t sleep. Added to that fuzziness, this is, like most Keepa posts, a first draft that could benefit from a great deal of editing and polishing and reworking. But maybe it will stir your imagination – if you were to outline the whole of Church history as if you were in a high school English class outlining the plot of a novel, what structure might you use to organize and connect the separate stories?