Mormons, Part II: A Letter to Atatürk

James Ryan, University of Pennsylvania

Eighteen years after Yorgo Boşo Effendi managed to steer the Ottoman parliament onto the subject of Mormonism as a way of debating the fairness of polygamy and US immigration policy, the spectre of Mormonism seems to have, at least faintly, burst into the consciousness of the Prime Ministry office of the Turkish Republic.

Perusing through various files in the Prime Ministry’s Republican Archives in Ankara that concern propaganda in the 1920s, I came across a file description that stuck out rather conspicuously. Amidst numerous files from the Prime Minister’s office on which Russian newspapers were to be banned and which religious pamphlets should be rounded up was a file titled “Christian Propaganda from the American State of Missouri sent to Atatürk” [“Amerika’nın Misouri eyaletinden Atatürk’e gönderilen Hrıstıyanlık propagandası”]. It contains the below letter in facsimile and in translation into Turkish (old script) sent in 1928 by an especially zealous Mormon minister in Independence, Mo. The Ottoman Empire had long viewed Christian missionaries, particularly Americans, with suspicion, and surely many in the Prime Ministry office still held that view. But Mormon efforts to evangelize in Turkey - as well as Turkish concern about them - seems to have been decidedly more rare than efforts by mainline protestants.

I am no expert in the religious history of the United States, so I won’t try to explain certain lines of this author’s C.V. which include, apparently, “the third messenger of the quorum of three archangels presiding over this, the last of the seven dispensations of human history…” It is difficult at present to discern much information about the author of the letter, but it is probably safe to say this was not representative of Mormon evangelical, or diplomatic, policy from the period. However, it does raise some amusing questions about the nature of the early Turkish Republic, and the Republican Archives themselves.

The first thing to note is that despite the rapturously condescending tone of the letter, Mustafa Kemal would surely have been pleased with the manner in which he was addressed as “Chief Executive of the Nation of Turkey, Continent of Europe” or as it was translated in Turkish, “Avrupa kıtasında bulunan Türk milletinin ıcra reisine.” One thinks that the national leader himself could not have thought up an epithet more appropriate to Kemalist ideology than that. And, while it may seem like an amusingly pompous title, it is truly humble when compared with the imperial epithets of his predecessors, the Ottomans.

That aside, the main question this document raises is, why? As in, why didn’t this document end up in the Prime Ministry dustbin as opposed to lovingly translated, digitized and made available to all in the Prime Ministry Archives in 2015? The early republican state was of course very concerned with propaganda emanating from abroad, especially from their frenemies to the north, the USSR. As mentioned above, the attention paid to this letter might have something to do with the history of suspicion the Ottoman state had toward Christian propaganda generally, if not Mormonism specifically. Indeed, at the very end of the Ottoman-language summary, the translator notes, "The included letter contains nothing of importance. However, such meaning as could be extracted has been written. The writing is disorganized." Clearly, the young Turkish state didn't quite know what to make of this letter, but translated it anyway because of course one could never be too sure.

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