Can a Mormon Have Tattoos? The “I Am a Mormon Campaign” and the Politics of Online Identity

For scholars of American history, the ubiquitous "I Am A Mormon” campaign is a vast primary resource of twenty-first century of Mormons and Mormonism—perhaps comparable in value to polygamous family portraits from nineteenth-century Utah. Yet it is also a resource that is by nature ephemeral, constantly "updating" its content, and as such, constantly changing its own its self-representation. 

I propose a paper exploring the "I Am A Mormon" campaign as an important case of both institutional (top down) and individual (bottom up) representations of both Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). To be sure, "I Am A Mormon” is a sleek marketing campaign. Launched in 2011, the campaign, in part a carefully curated set of testimonies from a diverse set of Mormons, is the LDS Church's own intervention into the media landscape in which outsiders—political pundits as well as Broadway producers of the “Book of Mormon” musical—often define what Mormonism is and who the Mormon people are. In fact, the battle for first billing on a Google search for the phrase "Book of Mormon" continues to be a high-stakes contest between the LDS Public Affairs office in in Salt Lake City and advertising agents in New York. But the LDS Church also allows “everyday” Mormons to post their own "I Am a Mormon" stories. 

My paper explores the possibilities and pitfalls of the "I Am A Mormon" campaign as a primary source for scholars of American religion by investigating one case of institutional objection to one Mormon individual's "I Am A Mormon" portrait. This portrait, and the Church’s response to it, reveals a lot about both the diversity of the Mormon community and the LDS Church's wariness towards this diversity, which the campaign itself celebrates.