Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

Why this matters here

Jan Shipps’s Mormonism analyzes Latter-day Saint history as a new religious tradition with its own internal grammar, including succession and restorationist frames that persist beyond Joseph Smith’s person. When Interpretation No Longer Matters uses that insistence on taking internal categories seriously—tests, opposition, gathering—without reducing the tradition to fraud or outsiders to bigots. Shipps supplies religious-history method; the book asks what happens when legitimacy rests on a prior prophetic grant rather than shared public reasons.