Mormon folklore is a body of expressive culture unique to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and other sects of Mormonism. Mormon folklore includes tales, oral history, popular beliefs, customs, music, jokes, and material culture traditions. In folklore studies, Mormons can be seen as a regional group, since the core group of Mormon settlers in Utah had a common religion and had to modify their surroundings for survival. This historical regional area includes Utah, Southeastern Idaho, parts of Wyoming and eastern Nevada, and a few towns in eastern Arizona, southern Alberta, northwestern New Mexico, southern Colorado, and northern Chihuahua, Mexico.
Verbal lore for Mormons includes stories that missionaries tell each other to encourage adherence to mission rules. Members tell stories about Mormon pioneers, The Three Nephites, and unseen benevolent spirits to bolster their faith. In pioneer times, folk songs alternately praised and punished prominent leaders like Brigham Young.
Common customs for Mormons include reciting conversion narratives, which is especially common during fast and testimony meeting. Married members also commonly tell how they were inspired to choose their spouse, and some women with children recount that a vision of a future child inspired them to have more children. In the Mormon regional area, creative date invitations are a common way for teenagers to ask each other out. Pioneer Day is a state holiday in Utah, where members patriotically celebrate their religious predecessors.
Pioneer handicrafts were inspired by the many cultures that came together in Utah. Handicrafts were initially a necessity, and pioneers developed techniques to adapt their skills to the materials on hand. Later, the Relief Society promoted handicrafts as improving mental health. Along with quilting and needlework, pioneers also made hair jewelry, human hair wreaths, and silk thread. Towns in the Mormon regional area have a unique combination of features, including unpainted barns, irrigation ditches, wooden moveable hay derricks, and Lombardy poplars as wind breaks. Tombstones in this area commonly depict clasped hands or a Mormon temple. Mormon fundamentalists have different folklore from Latter-day Saints. They draw on their shared heritage of experience in government raids to unify them, and enjoy folk dancing.
Research into Mormon folklore Alta S. and Austin E. Fife are the founders of research into Mormon folklore, a discipline that has expanded greatly since the couple's initial work in the 1930s. Although previous and contemporary scholars had briefly addressed the issue, the Fifes expanded the field, both through their collection, now known as the Fife Folklore Archive, held at the Merrill-Cazier Library on the Utah State University campus in Logan, Utah. Their book on Mormon folklore, Saints of Sage and Saddle, was published in 1956. This book, according to folklorist Jill Terry Rudy, "remains the most complete book-length treatment of Mormon folklore". Folklorist William A. Wilson also specialized in Mormon folklore, and helped establish the way Mormon folklore is organized in archives.
Verbal lore
Missionary lore Missionaries have their own set of folklore. According to folklorist William A. Wilson, missionaries tell stories for four main purposes: to build a sense of comradeship, to cope with the pressures of missionary life, to encourage missionaries to keep mission rules, and to assure themselves of future victory.
They commonly tell stories about how new missionaries, or "greenies", are initiated into the existing missionary group through pranks, even if these pranks never occurred. Learning missionary slang also helps new missionaries feel like part of the missionary community. Missionaries often tell stories in which some missionaries try to escape mission life but are discovered. One common "unauthorized trip story" tells how two missionaries write their weekly reports in advance, entrust them to their landlady, and embark on a sightseeing tour, only to be caught when their landlady sends the reports all at once. Another common story tells of a missionary who decides to break mission rules and participate in a sports tournament, only to be discovered by their mission president when their picture appears in the news. These stories focus on trickster heroes who fail and embody the group's childish fantasies, acting as "an approved steam-valve for the group". In some stories that encourage obedience, a missionary disobeys the rules and suffers disastrous consequences. Other stories tell of missionaries miraculously saved from danger. Missionaries also tell stories about getting the best of a hostile world, even if it causes other people to suffer. Missionaries in such stories shake the dust from their feet after leaving a city that was unresponsive to their message. After performing this ritual, the city is destroyed through a natural disaster, war, or economic depression. Stories where people insult missionaries, only to come to an untimely end, are common.
On scriptural themes Mormon folk beliefs on scriptural topics include: that Cain, the killer of Abel, is still alive and wanders the earth as punishment for killing Abel, wearing no clothing but being covered by hair, and that apostle David W. Patten encountered him once,Letter by Abraham O. Smoot, quoted in: and that reported sightings of Bigfoot can be explained by this story that Jesus was born on 6 AprilJeffrey R. Chadwick, "Dating the Birth of Christ", BYU Studies 49:4 (2010).John P. Pratt, "Passover—Was It Symbolic of His Coming?", Ensign, January 1994.James E. Talmage, "Chapter 8: The Babe of Bethlehem", Jesus the Christ (2006 ed., Salt Lake City, Utah: LDS Church). which was later the date that Joseph Smith founded the Church of Christ (the predecessor of the modern LDS Church) in 1830. modern encounters and assistance from one or more of "The Three Nephites", three Nephite disciples chosen by Jesus in the Book of Mormon, who were blessed by Jesus to "never taste of death; but ye shall live to behold all the doings of the Father unto the children of men".
Folk narratives
Mormons tell stories about early church members, The Three Nephites, and spirits of dead people. Mormons often retell stories about how early members of the church endured persecution and hardships in order to inspire other members. Stories about plural wives often tell of the women's plight in having to share a husband, or the opposite, the convenient companionship of her sister wives. J. Golden Kimball was a member of the Seventy and a folk hero known for swearing and undermining authority; stories told about him are often humorous. Stories about Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Eliza Snow, and other founders have a near-mythic status.
The Three Nephites are three Nephite disciples chosen by Jesus in the Book of Mormon to never die. In modern Three Nephites stories, one or more of these men appear to give assistance to those in need and then mysteriously disappear. The assistance ranges from providing childcare to fixing a car. According to William Wilson, Three Nephites stories "reflect and reinforce church programs and, by endowing them with mystical values, place them beyond criticism or questioning."
Many Mormons engage in genealogy research in order to perform baptisms for the dead. One common folk narrative is for a researcher to have lost hope of finding more information, only to miraculously find it in a book or cemetery. There are also many stories of spirits helping church members to perform their temple work for the dead or conveying their gratitude somehow.
Folk beliefs regarding LDS Church history include the following: that the writings of the early Church Fathers conform better with Mormonism than with modern ChristianityMichael T. Griffith (1996). One Lord, One Faith: Writings of the Early Christian Fathers as Evidences of the Restoration (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon) that in 1739 a Roman Catholic monk predicted that within 100 years an angel would be sent by God to restore the lost gospel to the earth and that the true church would be established in "a valley that lies towards a great lake", for Mormons the angel was Angel Moroni, the "lost gospel" was the Book of Mormon which Joseph Smith (who lived in the 1800s) translated from the Golden plates that Moroni gave him, the "true church" was the LDS Church founded by Smith with its location matching up with the LDS Church's modern headquarters in Utah where the "valley" is the Salt Lake Valley and the "lake" is the Great Salt LakeJacob Spori, "True and False Theosophy", Juvenile Instructor, 28:672–74 (1893-11-01).Paul B. Pixton, "'Play It Again, Sam': The Remarkable 'Prophesy' of Samuel Lutz, Alias Christophilus Gratianus, Reconsidered" , BYU Studies, 25:3 (1985) pp 27–46. the miracle of the gulls, in which the crops of early Mormon settlers in Utah Territory were saved from destruction by a vast flock of seagulls that ate swarms of Mormon crickets that were devouring the cropsWilliam G. Hartley, "Mormons, Crickets, and Gulls, A New Look at an Old Story", in D. Michael Quinn (ed.) (1992). The New Mormon History (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books). that when speaking to the Latter Day Saints after the death of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young took on the appearance, voice, and mannerisms of Smith and that this was a sign from God that Young was to be Smith's successorLynne Watkins Jorgensen, "The Mantle of the Prophet Joseph Passes to Brother Brigham: One Hundred Twenty-one Testimonies of a Collective Spiritual Witness", in John W. Welch (ed.) (2005). Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844 (Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah: BYU Press and Deseret Book) pp. 373–480. that Māori prophets or chieftains, including Paora Te Potangaroa and Tāwhiao, predicted the coming of Mormon missionaries to New ZealandMatthew Cowley, ""Maori Chief Predicts Coming of L.D.S. Missionaries", Improvement Era 53:696–98, 754–56 (September 1950), reprinted in Matthew Cowley (1954, Glen L. Rudd ed.). Matthew Cowley Speaks: Discourses of Elder Matthew Cowley of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book) p. 200–05.Grant Underwood, "Mormonism and the Shaping of Maori Religious Identity", in Grant Underwood (ed.) (2000). Voyages of Faith: Explorations in Mormon Pacific History (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University) pp. 107–26.R. Lanier Britsch, "Maori Traditions and the Mormon Church," New Era, June 1981, p. 38. that various theories explain reasons for the priesthood ban on black people holding the priesthood before the 1978 Revelation on Priesthood, even when these reasons are repudiated by current LDS Church leaders and scholarsSterling M. McMurrin affidavit, March 6, 1979. See David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Greg Prince and William Robert Wright. Quoted by Genesis Group that the curse of Cain or the curse of Ham justified the racial restriction policy that they were neutral in the War in HeavenStewart, John J. Mormonism and the Negro Salt Lake City, Utah: 1960, Bookmark (This book discusses and then dismisses this belief). that it was done in order to protect them from the lowest rung of hell, since one of few damnable sins is to abuse the exercise of the priesthood
Predictions
The following are examples of predictions or prophecies that are part of Mormon folklore: that the day will come that the United States Constitution will "hang by a thread" and that members of the church will be central in rescuing it and the United States from destruction.Harold B. Lee, Conference Report, April 1942, p. 87.Joseph Fielding Smith, Conference Report, April 1950, p. 159.Ezra Taft Benson, Conference Report, April 1963, p. 113. (See also: White Horse Prophecy) that God will restore the Adamic language.