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Show identification and display of distinctive traits and qualities that bind the group together while at the same time marking it off as different. Shipps notes that "without boundaries to set them apart, without 'gentiles' to stand over and against, a chosen people cannot exist; their very identity depends on their perception of specialness; and that specialness, in turn, depends on their being separated in some way from that part of the population that is not special. 118 In developing her concept of Mormon "specialness," Shipps makes two points that are crucial for arriving at an understanding of Latter-day Saint housing practices. First, during the nineteenth century the boundaries separating Mormons from the outside world were corporately established and maintained. The church rather than the individual was responsible · for differentiating Mormons from non-Mormons. Second, individual Saints gained entrance into this special, corporate community experientially rather than behaviorally. Converts were transformed into Saints, not by the conforming forces of town life, but through the experience itself of living in a manifest Zion. In proclaiming themselves the restoration of Christ's primitive church to earth in the "Last Days," the Mormons severed their ties with "Babylon" and thereafter attempted to remain politically, economically, and socially "unspotted" by the Gentile world. 9 The Mormon "restoration" was more than the metaphorical announcment that the New Testament apostolic church had returned; it was, rather, the literal "restoration of all things"--the gathering of Israel, the ten tribes, the church with a prophet and apostolic priesthood, Solomon's temple, and perhaps most significantly for the purposes of setting the Mormons apart from other primitivist sects, the ancient patriarchal order of 296 |
