Stephen Betts: Mormonism, the Environment, and Modernity

PhD student Stephen Betts worked at a science fiction library in New Mexico as a freshman in college; he reflected that his experience in this library and as an avid reader of science fiction was likely his original entry point into thinking about religion and how people configure meaning in their lives. Betts is finishing his second year in the American Religions sub-field with a concentration in Mormon Studies. His research is similarly situated in the western United States, and the literary influence remains evident. Betts’ dissertation project involves examining late 19th and early 20th century Mormonism in Utah; he is specifically looking at how believers and the religion adapted to modernity and secularism. 
    
Betts is situating his research on Mormonism in a metaphor of religious vitality through the Great Salt Lake. He explained: “Early Mormons settled in this desert with very few natural resources, and the closest body of water was the largest inland salt sea in North America.” Despite this difficult terrain, 19th century Mormons established thriving, lasting settlements within the Salt Lake Valley and beyond. At the same time, the religion grew during a secular age when many people claimed religions could not flourish. Betts wants to use this environmental metaphor of the Great Salt Lake to understand the dynamics at play between Mormonism and modernity. 

The lake is evaporating, and this detail is meaningful to Betts. The mining practices of the past 40 years have polluted the lake with heavy metals and have directly contributed its decreasing levels of water. He detailed why this environmental data is intriguing: “there are these tensions between the way Latter-day Saints exploit land through modern, industrial practices, and on the other hand how they simultaneously sacralize land. You would think that [sacralizing land] would prevent them from exploiting it, but it actually doesn’t.” Betts said that it is common to use a classic Christian rhetoric of “stewardship” of the land, but that in practice this can turn into radical, capitalistic exploitation of resources. An investigation into this tension could illuminate his questions on Mormonism’s adaptability and how Mormon thought functions. 

Always keen to know how people arrive at the decision to undertake graduate study, I asked Betts what influenced him most. He told me that serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a revealing experience in terms of seeing Mormonism as an object of study for the first time. Betts grew up in New Mexico in a religiously plural community, with some Mormon friends, but many of other faiths as well. He served a mission—after a couple years at two different colleges—in southeastern Idaho, where virtually everyone he encountered was either Mormon or formerly Mormon. Reflecting on all the people he spoke to, both disaffected and active members, he said “I learned a lot about Mormonism that I didn’t know, and I wanted to think more about that and understand the reasons why people want to be religious. I wanted to know what religion is doing and how it works.”

After his mission, Betts decided to study at Brigham Young University and chose to pursue his degree in New Testament and Greek—which he had begun learning prior to his mission and wanted to continue. Betts also earned a master’s degree from BYU in linguistics. He admitted that linguistics was not a good fit for him, in terms of academic disciplines, and he found himself spending a lot of time at the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship studying and thinking about bigger-picture questions related to religion and Mormonism. He realized, through this experience, that a PhD was worth pursuing. 

In addition to coursework, preparing for his comprehensive exams, and designing a dissertation, Betts also has a robust side project, a podcast he created with UVA Mormon Studies called Scholars and Saints. Betts has released over a dozen episodes during the first year of the podcast, the format of which is a conversational interview with Mormon Studies scholars on topics like “19th century Black Mormons” or “The Three Nephites.” Scholars and Saints was a Covid-19 pandemic creation, developed in the summer of 2020 by Betts and Kathleen Flake. Betts taught himself the technical skills needed and supplemented his education with a graduate podcasting workshop hosted by the National Humanities Center. Covid-19 has forced flexibility into higher education, and Scholars and Saints is one example of the many creative pivots undertaken by UVA Religious Studies graduate students, who have broadened their skill sets, adapted their research, and pioneered new pedagogies during the pandemic.