‘Every nation who dwells in the land’: Latter-day Saint Internationalisation, sacralising spaces, and the Hill Cumorah Pageant

ABSTRACT

In 2018, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced the end of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a seemingly minor policy decision which, I argue, reflects major changes in how a faith which has earnestly sought to present itself as mainstream American in the twenty-first century is attempting to reconfigure itself in the twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research, I argue that the Hill Cumorah Pageant (an outdoor production on the hill) utilises discursive and spatial practices which connect a specific version of the Book of Mormon ‘Promised Land’ narrative to the US via a process of spatially anchoring the Book of Mormon landscape and establishing continuity between Nephites and the modern US. In so doing, the narrative establishes a moral geography wherein inhabitancy in the land implicitly places people under covenant to follow God’s laws. In this regard, we can think of the Hill Cumorah as space both sacred and sacralising – as sacralising space which ‘sets apart’ the US in a way which may now seem overly local for an internationalising faith.

KEYWORDS:

• Latter-day Saints
• sacred space
• moral geography
• landscape
• sacralising space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hereafter, ‘LDS,’ ‘LDS Church,’ or ‘the Church’ for brevity. While ‘the Church’ may seem too general, it is also one of the names the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asks writers to utilise if they are unable to use the full name of the Church for space reasons, as in this case. On a related note, in this paper I generally favour ‘LDS’ which is closer to the Church’s official autonym than the popular exonym ‘Mormon’ despite the latter’s predominance in academic writing.

2. Hereafter, ‘the Pageant’ for brevity.

3. For example, Neil Pitts, President of the Pageant, remarked in 2018 regarding the Pageant closing, ‘Our church has asked us to focus more on the family, and this is certainly in line with that desire’ (Cleveland 2018).

4. One notable instance is Section 101 of the LDS-edition of the Doctrine and Covenants which states that the Lord ‘established the Constitution of this land’ (101:80).

5. Of course, like Machor 1987, xiv) I ‘use the term “mainstream America” advisedly here because there may be no such beast.’

6. Although versions of the Pageant date to 1937, the current iteration was written in 1988 by LDS author Orson Scott Card (Argetsinger 2004).

7. Nor is the official stance of neutrality a recent invention. The reluctance to name a specific location dates at least to the late 1800s, when President George Q. Cannon wrote ‘the Book of Mormon is not a geographical primer. It was not written to teach geographical truths … without further information [the First Presidency and Twelve Apostles] are not prepared even to suggest [a map],’ (Cannon 1890).

8. At the same time, there is actually some ambiguity here as Moroni, when given the plates, states that he will ‘go wherever the Lord sends me’ which could still fit with the idea of two separate locations.