As a wordsmith who labored over each paragraph, sentence and phrase, historian and writer Jan Shipps would be delighted to see her friends, colleagues and admirers mining their mental thesaurus for big enough words to sum her up.
Revolutionary. Renowned. Important. Trusted authority. Inside outsider. Den mother of Mormon history. Giant in the field.
Senior apostle Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the governing First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once called Shipps, who died Monday at 95, a “celebrated Mormon watcher.”
Then there is the string of firsts: First non-Latter-day Saint and first female president of the Mormon History History Association. First historian to apply principles of religious studies to the faith’s history, drawing on research techniques honed while working at the Institute for Sex Research, better known as the Kinsey Institute.
“With the folksy Southern twang of Dolly Parton, the networking skills of Bill Clinton, and the insights of [Alexis] de Tocqueville, Jan Shipps was a welcome force in Mormon history, explaining with penetrating intuition and easy comprehension to high and low Gentiles and Mormons just what Mormonism is about,” says Elbert Peck, former editor of Sunstone magazine and a lifelong friend. “A faithful Methodist, she knew Mormonism from the inside, and when she explained it to five-generation DNA Mormons, they’d say with a light of recognition, ‘Yes! that’s what I meant.’”
Rooted in religious studies, with approaches from sociology, comparative faiths and early Christian history, she made the Latter-day Saint story “sing with understanding analysis,” Peck writes in an email, “from becoming a tribal people of God in pioneer Utah to re-creating the Mormon village as the modern ward in the early 20th century, to postwar correlation changing us from being members of a family to members of an organization.”
Her impact on Mormon studies is unparalleled, says historian Benjamin Park.
“There would be no field of Mormon studies without Jan Shipps,” he says. Her own scholarly work stood out in itself. “Her book Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition’ set the terms for many that followed.”
(Photo by Mike Hoogterp) Historian Benjamin Park says "there would be no field of Mormon studies without Jan Shipps."
She was the first historian outside Latter-day Saint circles “to take the faith seriously, inaugurating a wave of academic discourse and critical investigation,” Park says. “She signaled to the wider historical community that Mormonism was worthy of study.”
More than any other person “Jan Shipps showed people who had no personal investment in Mormonism that this faith tradition was important,” adds Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman, “and worth knowing about.”
“Because she did that,” Bowman says. “I have a job.”
(Matthew Bowman) Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman says because of the work of Jan Shipps “I have a job.”
Accidental historian
Jo Ann Barnett (later changed to “Jan” to avoid confusion with other Jo Anns) did not set out to be a religious historian, especially not chronicling and analyzing Mormonism.
Far from the mountains of Utah, Jan was born Oct. 4, 1929, in Hueytown, Alabama, and within three weeks was christened in a Methodist church, according to a biography by Gordon and Gary Shepherd.
A precocious, gifted child and a proficient pianist, she graduated at 15 from high school. At 16, she enrolled at Alabama College for Women (now the University of Montevallo).
“Due to family financial difficulties, she only completed several semesters,” the Shepherds write, “initially as a music major and subsequently as a history major.”
She moved to Macon, Georgia, to teach piano lessons, where she met the lanky Anthony (Tony) Shipps, whose sly smile, mischievous eyes and big heart bewitched her. He was three years older with a college degree and the drive to be an English professor.
Their mutual attraction was palpable.
“It was love at first sight for both,” the biographers declare. The couple “eloped to marry in 1949 when Jan was just 19 and began a loving partnership that lasted 72 years until Tony’s death in 2021.”
Eventually, Tony earned a degree in library science and took his first job at Utah State University in Logan. Jan was 30 with no degree and no knowledge of the tsunami of Mormonism coming her way. But she couldn’t — and didn’t want to — dodge the waves.
The couple were drawn to Cache Valley’s neighborliness, Shipps writes in her 2000 autobiography, “Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons,” “but soon began to hear unfamiliar words, like ‘Primary,’ ‘home teaching’ and ‘inactives.’”
The future analyst was curious and intrigued.
(University of Illinois Press) Jan Shipps in 1985.
She transferred her college credits, the Shepherds write, “and enrolled in undergraduate history classes at Utah State” with the aim of earning a teaching degree “to augment family income.” Within nine months of intense study, she graduated with a history degree.
Thus began a lifelong fascination with Mormon beliefs, practices and history. Her master’s and doctorate in American history tackled Latter-day Saint subjects — as did scores of articles, which led to her groundbreaking book exploring Mormonism as a “new religious tradition.”
‘The Prophet Puzzle’
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Portraits, attributed to David Rogers, of the faith's founder, Joseph Smith, and his wife Emma.
At the time Shipps began her studies, the field was dominated by Fawn Brodie, a biographer and former Mormon whose famed book “No Man Knows My History” described church founder Joseph Smith as a “ne’er-do-well with such a vivid imagination that he came to accept his own inventions as truth.”
Brodie’s thesis seemed “intuitively wrong to me,” Shipps writes in her memoir, “not because I mistrusted Brodie’s scholarship but because her account failed to explain how so many followers, among them educated people and members of the clergy of existing religious institutions, were attracted to the movement he founded.”
Nor can the movement be explained in terms of “unmitigated villainy or mental derangement,” she writes. “For if Joseph Smith were a knave, then those who joined him were dupes; if he were a madman, those who joined him were fools.”
In “The Prophet Puzzle,” an early and influential essay, Shipps wrestled with Smith’s assertions of seeing a vision of God and Jesus and translating ancient writings on gold plates into King James English to produce the Book of Mormon. She used her training in religious studies to conclude he was a mystic.
As she delved deeper into the nature of mysticism, Shipps writes in “Sojourner,” she changed her mind about Smith. She came to realize the distinction between a mystic, whose encounter with the divine “can be communicated only indirectly and metaphorically, and a prophet, whose encounter with the divine is communicated directly and forcefully.”
The father of Mormonism fits more neatly into the “prophet” category, she concluded. “Those who heard Joseph Smith’s utterances were convinced that God spoke through him. His authority was not the amorphous charismatic aura that is so often said to surround mystics. The prophet’s charisma was more compelling because it was more focused.”
A lasting legacy
(Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jan Shipps speaks to Fulbright scholars at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City in 2010.
Shipps was not a “crypto-Latter-day Saint,” historian Philip Barlow writes in an essay. “... She seeks generally to describe and analyze Mormonism, not to criticize it, change it, or pronounce its revelations authentic or otherwise.”
Indeed, she remained devout in her own religious tradition to the end, spending the bulk of her career teaching history and religious studies at the Indiana University-Purdue University.
Barlow notes that one of Shipps’ gifts was “conjuring up striking metaphors that provide scaffolding for interpretation.”
She coined phrases such as “mountain curtain” to describe the “Mormons’ 19th-century homeland,” Barlow says, and the “doughnut hole” theory of how Western historians tended to “write around the Latter-day Saints.”
For all her scholarly endeavors, many remember Shipps as a friendly and charming aunt, of sorts, as eager to ask about your love life as your dissertation.
“She taught me to make perfect Southern biscuits, snap asparagus, and amazed my children with her ability to play a fancy bit of ragtime on the piano,” recalls Laurel Cannon Alder, who credits Shipps with helping her land a life-changing university fellowship. “Jan was an amazing blend of brilliance and practicality. She was ahead of her time as a scholar, but she also wore femininity with grace. Without question, she had as much impact on my young life as any professor, and yet I never stepped foot in her classroom.”
(Sarah Barringer Gordon) Law professor Sarah Barringer Gordon says Jan Shipps labored to find the right words in her scholarly work.
Sarah Barringer Gordon, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and frequent Shipps’ collaborator, reports that the historian “often worked through the night, wrestling with words and ideas until they conveyed her meaning perfectly.”
As co-author with Shipps on her final publication, Gordon “marveled at how she crafted elegant sentences, searching always for subtlety and precision in her writing, choosing care over flamboyant claims or arguments.”
Most of these friends and colleagues agree, no thesaurus can provide the last word on a woman whose insights came wrapped in a lovely and unforgettable Alabama accent.
Correction • April 17, 2025, 10:05 a.m.: This story has been updated to correct Jan Shipps’ birth date.
