The Triple Package (32 page)

“our role in history is actually unique”
:
Martin Buber, “Hebrew Humanism,” in
Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), pp. 240, 250.

“foundational ambiguity”
:
Michael Chabon, “Chosen, but Not Special,”
New York Times
, June 6, 2010.

“perverse sacralization”
:
Peter Novick,
The Holocaust in American Life
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 280.

“two sides of the same coin”
:
Office of the Chief Rabbi, “Faith Lectures: Jewish Identity: The Concept of a Chosen People,” May 8, 2001, http://oldweb.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=454.

“extravagant” Jewish overrepresentation
:
Charles Murray, “Jewish Genius,”
Commentary
, April 2007, p. 29.

70 percent of Israeli Jews
:
Nir Hasson, “Survey: Record Number of Israeli Jews Believe in God,”
Haaretz
, Jan. 27, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/survey-record-number-of-israeli-jews-believe-in-god-1.409386; Harris Interactive, The Harris Poll No. 59, Oct. 15, 2003, p. 2, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-While-Most-Americans-Believe-in-God-Only-36-pct-A-2003-10.pdf.

locate this exceptionality
:
See, e.g., Raphael Patai,
The Jewish Mind
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), pp. 8–9, 324, 339; Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem, How to Solve It,” p. 74.

“it was up to you to invent your specialness”
:
S. Leyla Gürkan,
The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation
(London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 124 (quoting Philip Roth); Charles E. Silberman,
A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today
(New York: Summit Books, 1985), pp. 80–1.

“a psychology without content”
:
Michael P. Kramer, “The Conversion of the Jews and Other Narratives of Self-Definition: Notes Towards the Writing of Jewish American Literary History; Or, Adventures in Hebrew School,” in Emily Miller Budick, ed.,
Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 191.

“Israel”
 . . . “Zion” . . . “New Jerusalem” . . . exodus:
Matthew Bowman,
The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith
(New York: Random House, 2012), p. 94; Claudia L. Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), pp. 15–16, 18; Terryl L. Givens,
People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. xii, xvi.

had their Moses
:
Leonard J. Arrington,
Brigham Young: American Moses
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).

“extermination order”
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 62.

“a religious genius”
:
See, e.g., Harold Bloom,
The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 82; Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 24.

America’s providential place in the world
:
see Givens,
People of Paradox
, p. xvi (“Mormons have long identified their faith with America’s providential role in history”).

Garden of Eden
:
On Smith’s “sacralization” of the American continent, see Bowman,
The Mormon People
, pp. xv–xvi, 26–7, 32–8; Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, pp. 24–5.

“The whole of America is Zion”
:
Richard Lyman Bushman,
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 519; see also pp. 94–7.

“confident amateurism”
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People,
p. xv.

rejected, ostracized
:
See Givens,
People of Paradox
, pp. xiii, xvi (describing Mormonism’s “history of persecution and alienation from the American mainstream”).

crossed the country in their covered wagons
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People,
pp. 98–100; George W. Givens,
The Language of the Mormon Pioneers
(Springville, UT: Bonneville Books, 2003), p. 215; see also Arrington,
Brigham Young
, chap. 9.

“quintessentially American religion”
:
Givens,
People of Paradox
, p. 59; see also Bowman,
The Mormon People,
p. xv. (“quintessential American faith”).

only strengthened Mormons’ belief in their divine election
:
Jan Shipps,
Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 125 (“living in the kingdom in the nineteenth century was the sign of citizenship in God’s elect nation”).

“Great Apostasy”
 . . . true church:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 3; Givens,
People of Paradox
, pp. xiii, xvi; Jon Krakauer,
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 5, 69.

end-of-days
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. xviii (“Mormons believe that their church has been given . . . the mandate to prepare the earth for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ”). For a fascinating take on the Mormon end-of-days mentality, see Joanna Brooks,
The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith
(New York: Free Press, 2012), pp. 30–1, 35.

divine communications and revelations
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 33; Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, pp. 3, 18; Richard Lyman Bushman,
Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 27–31.

“priesthood”
:
See Bowman,
The Mormon People
, pp. 46, 140–1; Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 30 (“The priesthood is divided between the lower or Aaronic Priesthood for those twelve to eighteen and the upper or Melchizedek Priesthood for men nineteen and up”).

“power of God”
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 46.

“missions”
:
Ibid., pp. 188–90; Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 4.

temples
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, pp. 2, 75. Temples are closed not only to non-Mormons, but also to Mormons who do not live by LDS Church teachings. “To enter a temple, members must have been baptized and confirmed and must be privately interviewed in searching discussions by two levels of ecclesiastical authority every two years.” Ibid., p. 79.

Although some Christians argue
:
Ibid., pp. 3, 23.

Mormonism departs on key theological points
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, pp. 165–7.

“free from the original sin that degraded mankind”
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
pp. x, 19, 242.

God is a corporeal, essentially man-like person
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, pp. 166–7, 230; Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
pp. 19, 23; see also Givens,
People of Paradox
, p. xv (“With God an exalted man” and “man a God in embryo,” Smith collapsed the conventional Christian dualism); Blake T. Ostler, “Worshipworthiness and the Mormon Concept of God,”
Religious Studies
33, no. 3 (1997), pp. 315, 319–20.

“it is no robbery to be equal to God”
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 167.

“godhood of their own”
:
Ibid., p. 230; Ostler, “Worshipworthiness and the Mormon Concept of God,” p. 320.

families as divinely ordained units
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 126; Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
pp. 42–3; Givens,
People of Paradox
, p. 57; Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling,
Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
(New York: HarperOne, 2007), p. 338; Brooks,
The Book of Mormon Girl
, p. 136.

early Mormon theology seems to have made the number of wives
:
In the 1850s, Brigham Young and the apostle Orson Pratt “declared that the procreative power that marriage legitimized persisted into the eternities, where glory was measured in the number of relations.” Bowman,
The Mormon People
, pp. 125–6.

between twenty-seven and fifty-five wives
:
Bloom,
American Religion
, pp. 108.

Smith had perhaps thirty
:
Bowman,
The Mormon People
, p. 82; see also Bloom,
American Religion
, p. 108.

renounced polygamy
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
p. xi; Ostling and Ostling,
Mormon America
, p. xxiv; Shipps,
Mormonism,
p. 125.

abstemiousness, strong families, and clean-cut children
:
Tim B. Heaton, Kristen L. Goodman, and Thomas B. Holman, “In Search of a Peculiar People: Are Mormon Families Really Different?,” in Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young, eds.,
Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 87, 113 (data confirm that “[m]ore so than the average American” “Mormonism is a family-focused religion and that its members adhere to traditional family values”); see also Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
p. 184 (noting that in the 1960s the “shift back to some aspects of old-style Mormonism took place against the cultural change of the Civil Rights Movement, an expansion of tolerance, a general loosening of traditional morality, and substance abuse”); Ostling and Ostling,
Mormon America
, p. xxiv (“More than anyone on the street, [the Mormon] might seem honest, reliable, hardworking, and earnest—all the Boy Scout virtues. His children are obedient, his family close-knit”).

“an island of morality in a sea of moral decay”
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism,
p. 35.

I am a child of God
:
Children’s Songbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2002), pp. 2–3.

“For nearly six thousand years”
:
Ezra Taft Benson, “In His Steps,” Mar. 4, 1979, www.speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=89; Thomas S. Monson, “Dare to Stand Alone,” October 2011, http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2011/10/dare-to-stand-alone?lang=eng.

“I don’t know about you”
:
Pepe Billete, “I’m Not a Latino, I’m Not a Hispanic, I’m a Cuban American!”
Miami New Times
, July 6, 2012, http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/cultist/2012/07/im_not_a_latino_im_not_a_hispa.php.

the post provoked outrage
:
Pepe Billete, “I’m Not a Latino, I’m Not a Hispanic, I’m a Cuban American! (Part Dos),”
Miami New Times
, July 13, 2012, http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/cultist/2012/07/pepe_billete_im_not_a_latino_i.php (“Last week I managed to upset a pretty big segment of Miami’s non-Cuban Spanish speaking population”).

“Cubans are a different breed”
:
Interview with José Pico, director and president, JPL Investments Corp., in Miami, Fla. (conducted by Eileen Zelek on Jan. 6, 2012) (on file with authors); see also María Cristina García,
Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 84 (many Cuban Exiles saw themselves as “martyrs” and resisted the label “immigrant” because “
Immigrant
implies a choice” and they “believed that they had no choice; they had been pushed out of their country. . . . Preserving
cubanidad
became . . . a political responsibility”); Miguel Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
(Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 31 (quoting one Exile as saying, “We didn’t come here looking for a better life. We already had a good life in Cuba, but our lives were stopped because of the political situation”).

“unique and privileged position in the world”
:
Guillermo J. Grenier and Lisandro Pérez,
The Legacy of Exile:
Cubans in the United States
(Boston: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 33.

“most Spanish”
 . . . most similar to the United States:
Ibid. pp. 29–31 (inner quotation marks omitted). For a detailed discussion of early Cuban “proto-nationalists,” including those who envisioned a “white Cuba” peopled by “superior beings,” see Richard Gott,
Cuba: A New History
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 54–7.

“Looking the teacher straight in the eye”
:
Carlos Eire,
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
(New York: The Free Press, 2003), pp. 24–5.

The Exiles
:
Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
, pp. 31–4, 45–6; García,
Havana USA
, pp. xi, 13–4.

“the
crème de la crème
of Cuban society”
:
Eire,
Waiting for Snow in Havana
, p. 27.

Murillo
 . . . slaves:
Ibid., pp. 13–4.