Jan Shipps, a pioneering scholar of Mormonism and my emerita colleague at Indiana University Indianapolis, died this week at age 95. Her 1985 book, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, put the subject on the radar of non-Mormon historians and made her a household name in Latter-day Saint intellectual circles.
Shipps was not a Latter-day Saint herself. A lifelong United Methodist who earned a Ph.D. in history with a dissertation on Mormons in politics, she became bilingual in Mormonism and her native Protestantism.
In 2011, when I first inaugurated a course on “Mormonism and American Culture,” I was surprised to learn that Jan had never taught such a class because she was always busy filling other curricular needs in history and religious studies. But even though she was in her 80s and retired in Bloomington, Indiana, she drove up to Indianapolis to guest lecture in my seminar.
In later years, after Jan was unable to travel, my students continued to engage her work in print. She was a prolific essayist whose Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons collects her articles on many subjects.
My favorite is her “Is Mormonism Christian? Reflections on a Complicated Question.” In it she recounts how people frequently asked her this question and she typically turned the question back on the questioner. Often the questioner had a preconceived answer, as when evangelical Protestants would insist that Mormonism is not Christian because it violates the principle of sola scriptura (scripture alone) by adding new revelations to the Bible.
The question became so familiar that it began to conjure for Shipps an imagined scene from the Broadway-inspired Dead End Kids film series in which a surly youth is asked, “What’s your name, kid?” and he responds, “Who wants ta know?” or “What’s it to ya?”
Shipps wrote:
The same principle holds for religion. Names matter. They matter a lot. For that reason, whenever people I do not know ask me if Mormonism is Christian, a little computer inside my head starts sorting out possibilities. Who wants to know? What’s it to ’em? Or to put it another way, is there a hidden agenda?
Shipps’s own answer, first proposed in her 1985 book, is that Mormonism is Christian but with a big difference (the Book of Mormon and the rest of the LDS canon). Mormonism is a form of “corporate Christianity” related to traditional Christianity in much the same way that early Christianity was related to Judaism.
But in the later essay, she also stressed that the issue of whether Mormonism is Christian is finally a normative question that can only be settled by believers. On this score, Mormons tended to be as exclusionary as their evangelical Protestant brethren: both sides felt they had discovered the only authentic way to be Christian.
Shipps recognized that some of her readers would be unsatisfied with her answer that what counts as Christianity is what a believer regards as such. Yet, she continued, “in the absence of a single source of authority whose nature is universally respected, humanity has to struggle along with provisional rules and standards.” In other words, “definitive answers to normative questions are not forthcoming in the sort of pluralistic situation in which the contemporary world finds itself.”
Jan Shipps embraced the world’s messy pluralism. Her years of immersion in Mormonism convinced her that there was more than one legitimate way to be Christian. That she was herself a Methodist believer, she said, deepened her appreciation for Latter-day Saint believers.
My own experience as a non-Mormon teaching about Mormonism has been similar. The more I’ve learned to speak Mormon and other religious languages, the more I’ve concluded that no tradition has an absolute monopoly on the truth. Put positively, the expressive riches of the world’s traditions are inexhaustible, like the plural universes imagined in the LDS scriptures. “Worlds without number have I created,” says the Lord (Moses 1:33).
As a person of faith, Shipps trusted that everything would become clear in the next life. In the interim, she said, we see through a glass darkly.
The thickets of LDS doctrine and practice can be daunting, especially for outsiders. I thank Shipps for leading the way. Her career is enduring proof of the value of sojourning in a non-native land.
Rest eternal grant to her, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon her.
© 2025 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Jan Shipps, “Is Mormonism Christian? Reflections on a Complicated Question,” in Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 334-57 (quotations and references from 336-338, 341, 342, 355-56). On Shipps’s life, see the front-page obituary by Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Mormon Studies Loses a Giant—a Methodist Historian Who Knew LDS Church Inside and Out,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 16, 2025; and Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019).