Adam S. Miller introduces his essay collection Future Mormon by saying:

These essays are, I think, aimed at the future. They are aimed at my grandchildren. They practice what I would describe as a form of future tense apologetics. They mean to defend Mormonism, but not against the specifics of any past or present challenges to that faith. Rather than reacting to present tense criticisms, I see these essays as an attempt to proactively gather for future Mormons tools and resources that may be useful to them as they try, in the context of their world, to work out their own salvation.

My modest riff on his idea concerns the future of Mormon history – not the direction Mormonism itself might take in the future, but what kinds of history might Mormon historians write 50 or 100 years from now. Written history is, after all, almost as much about the present as it is about the past: the questions historians ask, the styles of history they produce, reflect the concerns and habits of their own generations. I suspect that if I were to present you with paragraphs from various Mormon histories concerning the same subject – the conflicts in Missouri, say, or the pioneer trek – and were somehow able to control for the antique wording of older writers, most readers would have no trouble distinguishing a modern history from one written 50 or 100 years ago; you might even be able to put the extracts in order of their date of publication. You might not be certain just why one piece feels older than another, but you’d recognize that one piece addressed elements that are important to you as a 21st century reader, while another piece felt old-fashioned and discussed ideas that you don’t really care about.

So what kinds of history might future Mormon historians write?

Coverage in time and space

I think that while so much of our existing historical writings emphasize the 19th century, future history will move heavily into the 20th century and far beyond the traditional path of 19th century Mormon geography.

New evidence concerning Mormonism’s origins, new ways of seeing Joseph Smith, will always be important and we will constantly re-evaluate those beginnings by asking questions that are of concern to new generations. But I think future history will move beyond those traditional events. That is in part because as we move further into the 21st century, the 20th century will begin to feel more like history and less like personal experience to the historian. We have a good grasp of the Restoration and of the Church on the frontier … but we have surprisingly little familiarity with how the Church evolved from its frontier isolation to the modern Church, one able to function, even thrive, anywhere in the world. Future historians will want to go beyond the pioneering works of Thomas G. Alexander’s Mormonism in Transition (really the only comprehensive overview of the critical early 20th century) and Greg Prince’s David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (which is limited to one man’s biography and which doesn’t even really get started until a great many key transitions had already been made).

Future historians will explore in volume-length depth the forces and people and events that these earlier treatments address in a few paragraphs or a few pages. Future historians will trace the origin of ideas and practices that to us seem relatively unimportant, but which in the life of the Church decades from now will have assumed critical importance because of future developments.

Future historians will expand the traditional narrative of Mormon history to include regions of the United States and regions throughout the world which have, until now, been overlooked or treated almost as colonial history. They will write the history of the Church in places other than New York and Ohio and Missouri and Illinois, and certainly in places other than the Intermountain West. This future history will most certainly not be the stories of missionaries in Scandinavia or Japan or Brazil or Australia, but will be the stories of the people of those places who built the Church with their own permanence, with barely a nod to the revolving cast of temporary elders from Burley or Centerville or Thatcher. Mormonism’s future historians will themselves come from these places, and they will write the history of their own people according to the patterns of their own cultures. That is, the history of the future will no longer be largely about Saints in desert communities with their cooperative irrigation and sugar beet industries; instead, future historians will write about Mormonism in the context of their own worlds. A Latter-day Saint historian who comes of age in post-Christian Europe, or post-Soviet Ukraine, or post-apartheid South Africa, will ask different critical questions concerning faith in situations today’s historians are unequipped even to recognize, much less to answer. A Latter-day Saint historian who sees the Church in action where vast oceans or jungles or ice fields dominate the imagination will find new metaphors, new expressions of the same faith, that cannot help but shape their written history.

This does not mean that history of the Saints in the Intermountain West will cease to be written – a Mormon Primary in Orem is as potentially worthy of coverage as one in Zimbabwe; preparing for a mission in Logan calls for devotion, perhaps of a different character, than preparing for a mission in Taiwan. Studying Mormonism in a region where the Saints are dominant, or at least familiar, will remain as necessary as studying it where the Church is new and unknown. It will simply not be the only or even chief focus of future Mormon history.

Documents

Historians always want to study new documents. The reputation of records which have been largely unavailable grows in importance in the historian’s mind. With the historian’s “itch” soon to be satisfied with regard to the legendary Council of Fifty Minutes, and the Book of the Law of the Lord, and other materials that are or will be a part of the Joseph Smith Papers, and with the availability of such other materials as the journals of George Q. Cannon, the future historians’ curiosity will turn inevitably to other as-yet-unstudied documents. What will those next Holy Grails be?

They might be, if historians were logical, the papers of Church presidents following Joseph Smith. Logically, we should proceed with the papers of Brigham Young, the papers of John Taylor, and so on. But while I do hope those papers are studied and histories based on them will be produced, I predict that most future historians’ thirst will jump right over those collections. Much of the Brigham Young papers are already available, so the golden glow of the unattainable has already faded from them. John Taylor’s papers with their theological content and their creation during a crucial period of our history will not satisfy historians for long: Because Taylor’s administration was so brief, and because so much of it occurred while Taylor was necessarily moving from one hiding place to another, the procedures to capture day-to-day records were rudimentary, so his papers are more fragmentary, far less extensive, than Brigham Young’s. And besides, Brigham Young’s and John Taylor’s eras were still frontier, pre-modern, a time that I think will not especially interest the next two or three generations of historians, but will remain largely unstudied in the immediate future, waiting for yet another future generation, casting about for something new to study, to rediscover them.

I think future historians will leap right past Wilford Woodruff and Lorenzo Snow, with barely a nod. The next big thing, I think, will be the administrations of Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant: JFS, because it was during his administration that so many of the transitions from frontier to modern were worked out, and HJG because his administration was so long, because he oversaw critical developments in welfare and correlation ((Correlation as an idea, that is, and not necessarily as a formally recognized program.)) and religious education – the fields from which I suspect many future historians’ questions will spring – and because, frankly, the allure of the restricted collection will be irresistible. Future historians will clamor for access to Grant’s papers, and to the papers of other individuals and departments that were created under his administration, and access will be had in one way or another.

-oOo-

I dunno how many readers will stick with me as I post this and several additional parts. I hope some of you will. The bad thing is that none of you who do read will ever know if I am right; the good thing is that you won’t know if I’m wrong, either.