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Louis Jacobs, (1920-2006), a British scholar-rabbi, became embroiled in the so-called “Jacobs Affair” in the 1960s, a controversy generally associated with his views on divine revelation. Influenced by his encounter with academic biblical scholarship, Jacobs tried to construct an apologetic account of how to maintain belief in Torah min Hashamayim— Torah from Heaven — while addressing secularist challenges to these teachings. Highlighting divisions between more conservative and liberal currents within Orthodox Judaism, Jacobs was effectively ostracised from British Orthodoxy for his efforts. Yet the challenge he sought to address has not gone away. Instead, there is growing engagement with the issue, with the internet increasingly influencing the contours and content of this debate. The questions directed at the dogmatic accounts of revelation promulgated within Orthodoxy form part of a broader challenge to religious authority. A study of Jacobs’ position, alongside some more contemporary arguments developed in a post-secular context, offers a framework for considering the varied apologetic Jewish responses that have been formulated to defend divine teachings against secularist critiques.

To explore the foundations of Mormon religious authority, this chapter introduces the idea of a Mormon prophet, demonstrates how the production of the Book of Mormon established Smith’s claim to authority, and show how his ongoing revelation created a hospitable environment to maintain his prophetic authority hierarchically within his church. This will lay the foundational concepts for how Smith developed and maintained a hierarchal role while also developing a democratic priesthood. It will also set the scene for how an inclusive populist priesthood could eventually embrace a hierarchical ecclesiology, demonstrated by Kathleen Flake’s work. The chapter will begin to define what a Mormon prophet looks like and how Joseph Smith establishes his prophethood and authority through the charismatic practices of communing with the dead and producing modern revelation and ancient scripture. It will establish that this kind a charisma founds authority and creates a space in which prophetic authority can exist charismatically without the grounding of an institution.

This chapter shows how the evolving narrative about Smith receiving the power to baptize sheds light on his authoritative role in Mormonism. Analyzing Mormon baptism is a great first example of how Smith used his prophetic voice to create religious authority, in which he connected himself to God experientially, defined the meaning of baptism through the restoration scripture of the Book of Mormon, and built an influential restoration narrative in which a heavenly figure directly conferred the authority to baptize. Smith eventually claimed that his authority derived from a direct, divine source: angels, as understood through his revelations. The angels who authorized him were not, this time, those with an ancient American past like Moroni, but rather beings taken from the familiar New Testament narrative. Within this context of restoration, baptismal authority was first tied to a narrative involving John the Baptist, from which began Smith’s reconstruction of Christ’s ancient church. The example of how Smith received the authority to baptize demonstrates how his prophetic voice began to build a distinct Mormon religious authority almost immediately. His hierarchical position was bolstered and he quickly offered his authority to lay believers, making the first step toward a democratic hierarchy.

In addition to baptism, a second foundational narrative that demonstrates Joseph Smith’s authority was the establishment of the Mormon apostleship. His translations and revelations called for major initiatives that required increasing amounts of commitment from his adherents, but with these major initiatives, the revelations also required a certain amount of malleability. Smith established certain forms of authority, such as priesthood and sacraments, through his revelations and then molded and reformed them through additional revelations to meet the evolving needs of his church. In doing this, Smith demonstrated his ability to control the narrative and shape his authority. As his theology developed and his lay ministry expanded, his prophetic leadership adapted. It was the malleability of his leadership that enabled the relationship between hierarchy and democracy to adjust and find stasis on the waves of change. To demonstrate this point, this chapter explores one of Smith’s most radical concepts of authority—namely, apostleship—in its nearly superfluous beginnings and its ultimate importance within Mormonism.

The next chapter remains in the local concentric circle of New Orleans and examines Afro-Creole Spiritualism over and against Catholicism, its religious neighbor. The members of the Cercle Harmonique pushed against Catholicism to carve out a space for their own religious identity. Yet at the same time, resonances of Catholicism echoed in the Cercle Harmonique’s practice in the form of advisement from Catholic spirits and reverberations of a few Catholic ideas. Though their practice included Catholic ideas and prominent Catholic spirits, they also received numerous anticlerical messages demonstrating their negative perspective on religious despotism, tyranny, and exploitation. The spirits and members of the Cercle Harmonique regarded the revealed knowledge of Spiritualism as a more legitimate form of religious power than Catholicism’s formal authority.

Chapter 2 solves the puzzle posed in Chapter 1 by revealing that the New Sanctuary Movement had religious targets as well as political ones, aims that required the creation of a new, interfaith immigrant rights network. In recent decades, the rise of the religious right in the U.S. increasingly associated religiosity with conservatism and nationalism, threatening the identities and public authority of religious progressives. This contentious religious context motivated some religious progressives to create an explicitly interfaith immigrant rights movement, simultaneously challenging both immigration policy and the religious right's dominance. Since recognizing New Sanctuary's religious goals, not just its political ones, better explains its emergence, this chapter introduces the concept of multi-target social movements, movements simultaneously challenging authority in multiple institutional arenas, and begins to distinguish them from other types of movements, a task continued in the remainder of the book.

Because nineteenth-century Mormons could never fully realize their separatist dream of building the Kingdom of God in North America, the history of Mormonism has involved highly complex contacts and negotiations with non-Mormons. In their attempts to convert, resist, or appease powerful outsiders, Mormons have engaged in a distinctive dialectic of secrecy and self-disclosure, of esoteric rites and strategic public relations. The result has been an extended process of controlled modernization, the evolution of a dynamic, global faith. This book focuses on a crucial aspect of that process of modernization and evolution: academic migration to the elite universities of the United States, which offered exiled and ambitious Mormons a unique, quasi-sacred cultural space of freedom and dignity. At schools like Johns Hopkins, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley, a rising, influential generation of Mormon women and men would undergo a radical transformation of consciousness and identity. Outsiders became insiders; those on the margins entered the mainstream. This revised cultural and intellectual history of Mormonism sheds light on the emergence and domestication of nineteenth-century Mormon feminism, the evolution of Mormon ethnicity, the development of Mormon intellectual life and anti-intellectualism, and the history of outsiders in American higher education.

Mormon intellectual life suffered acutely in the wake of turmoil at Brigham Young University in 1911, but less than a decade later, major changes in church leadership and educational policy would help stimulate renewal. At the same time, Mormon scholars began gravitating to new disciplines like history, sociology, and the academic study of religion. A number of these students would become scholarly authorities on the Mormon community and the Mormon past. The students' epistemology, which placed supreme value on documentary and statistical evidence, was bound eventually to clash with that of theologically conservative church authorities, who exalted the private tutorings of the spirit. J. Reuben Clark Jr., a member of the LDS First Presidency, was the most forceful critic of Mormon scholars who, in his mind, threatened to lead Mormon youth astray. His 1938 "Charted Course of the Church in Education" remains a profoundly influential statement, and warning, about the "fundamentals" of church teaching and education.