I want to talk about the Mormons of TTL, but in explaining why they're here and how they got that way, I found myself digging way back into how I started on the ASB in the first place. So that's what this post is going to be.
I've mentioned before a couple of the books that inspired it. White's
The Middle Ground was the initial source, and Axtell's
The Invasion Within and Richter's
Before the Revolution contributed a lot to how certain states took shape. I don't think I've talked about what I was doing reading those books. A group of us were trying to create a new civics curriculum suitable for homes and schools. It was the height of the Tea Party movement and there was bad civics and bad history everywhere; so one friend got us together to Do Something About It. We decided to start by diving into U.S. colonial history with a focus on neglected areas in traditional classes. We divided up the work, and I took relations between the colonies and the Native people. I had always had some interest in the topic but never explored it in depth.
The project never got beyond this initial book club phase. We'd each read a different book, meet up the next month, share what we learned, discuss how to integrate it into a wider narrative, and choose books for next month. Lovely. Then three of the six members started having babies; the project ground to a temporary halt, which became permanent. We all still get together. Actually, while we had all known each other before then, the project sort of cemented the makeup of that particular friend group. But now we get together to see each other's kids. The only long-term result of the civics project itself is, in fact, the ASB.
Now as it happens, as my three friends' marriages were producing babies, my own was collapsing. And I had another very old friend in a different city who was going through the same thing - except his was more of a cataclysmic explosion while mine was slowly deflating. As all this was happening, he started suggesting we go on various history-based road trips, and I was happy to agree. They've gotten longer over the years and we've mostly kept up doing one a year. A lot of those trips resulted in the initial states that I developed in depth. I've mentioned Illinois, and other trips gave me Upper Connecticut, Iroquoia, Huronia, and some others. Besides specific content, the trips reinforced the idea that every place has a hidden history and a rich interaction of cultures, something that may be the main underlying thread of the setting.
I decided that the ASB would have Mormons after visiting the Kirtland Temple in Ohio. That's a fascinating site for a number of reasons. The main LDS church runs a museum/welcome center and a number of restored buildings in the village. But the temple itself belongs to a smaller LDS denomination. Both the temple and the welcome center have intro videos, which gave off very different vibes. The one in the temple came off as much more moderate and balanced, whereas the one in the welcome center felt more propagandistic. The tour in the temple itself was very much by Mormons, for Mormons, but guide and tourists came from different branches of the religion and they connected over broader spiritual themes rather than the particulars of doctrine.
Like many people, I had always found the LDS vaguely off-putting for its theocratic tendencies. Touring the Kirtland Temple helped me appreciate it as a diverse religious tradition that's deeply intertwined with American history and culture - exactly the kind of thing that the ASB is designed to showcase. My friend was less impressed. He had some seminary training and wanted to be a pastor at one point, so it was harder for him to overcome the idea of Mormons as apostates. Also, his political views are extremely anti-theocracy, more so than me; I tend to think there's always an appropriate place for religion in the public sphere, whereas he's an absolute believer in a conceptual Wall of Separation between church and state. But I found the trip very eye-opening.
So that's why the Mormons exist in this timeline, and it's also why they settled in borderlands on the Missouri River. I wanted to memorialize the culture and contributions of the group, but I also wanted to explore a world where they were a minority in every jurisdiction they settled in. A large minority, but a minority nonetheless. The state and international borders also encouraged the group to split into smaller ones, so that there is no single main LDS church today. The OTL town of Independence is called New Enoch, and it is majority Mormon. Like OTL, the town is holy to every Mormon group, who believe it to be the site of Christ's future return. Each group has a major church or shrine there.
Thinking about the early history and doctrines of the LDS, there are going to be profound differences. Like OTL, the Saints of TTL are a product of the culture that produced them. The Indians are going to figure prominently in the theology of the church, but it's going to be very different. The OTL Book of Mormon is a very exoticizing story. The Indians seem mysterious and distant. In TTL, the region where the first Mormons came from - Vermont and Yankee settlements in northern New Hampshire and New Netherland - had a large Indian and Mixed population. Many of the earliest converts were of part Yankee, part Indian ancestry, largely Wabenaki and Iroquois. So the revelations were seen as comprising a new "American" religion, but this meant one that drew on the Indian and European heritages in equal measure. To know what exactly this looks like, I have a lot more to read, including actually reading the Book of Mormon that they gave me for free at the Kirtland Temple. (My friend politely declined.)
I see the next period of history as similar to OTL. The largely New England-based early Mormons moved to Upper Connecticut in the hope of establishing their own settlements. Facing discrimination there, they moved further west. New prophecies drew many to the Missouri valley. They held their own there and mostly escaped direct persecution, but as officials (largely in Louisiana) drew borders, they tended to ignore the LDS communities, intentionally splitting them into different jurisdictions. The core of Mormon settlement was divided among Upper Louisiana, Arques, Dakota, and Mexico. Theological and succession disputes within the church led to some self-sorting, so that the communities in each of these four areas ended up going its separate way. If there was a western exodus, it was a relatively small group, and it headed up the river to Omaha territory rather than all the way to the Salt Lake.
So this post has been all over the place. But I think it's worth sharing how important this project has been in my own life, and how it all happened. Here's a photo from the Kirtland trip. Just four years ago, but I think I look really different.
Also, does anyone have any ideas regarding how might the religious/linguistic situation in the newly expanded Netherlands look like, because if nothing changes much in France, I could see French Huguenots fleeing there and proselytizing the Walloons (that could be a great idea in and out of itself).
Also
@False Dmitri, I could organize a map of the (expanded) Netherlands if that's OK.
Please do!
Lots of Huguenots went to the Netherlands in OTL, so that movement would be just as prominent in TTL, or more so. The United Provinces were probably the most tolerant place in Europe at the time and attracted lots of different groups.