Jan Shipps, Methodist Who Brought Credibility to Mormon Studies, Dies at 95
She brought intellectual rigor and a detached perspective to a field that had been dominated by supportive insiders
By Chris Kornelis May 30, 2025 Wall Street Journal
Jan Shipps in 2007. She was sometimes called the ‘den mother of Mormon history.’ Photo: Chris Detrick/Salt Lake Tribune
Jan Shipps showed up unannounced one day in 1971 at the office of a history professor in Indianapolis. When he asked how he could help her, she blurted out: “You can give me a job. I’m tired of sex and I want to get back to history.”
Specifically, she wanted to get back to teaching history. And studying Mormons.
Shipps had moved around the country several times while her husband pursued his academic career, but by the early 1970s, her own career had stalled. She hadn’t been able to find a teaching post in Indiana, and was stuck in an unfulfilling position at the Institute for Sex Research, now known as the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.
The professor was impressed and found a place for her in the history department he was setting up at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.
Shipps, who died April 14 at the age of 95, spent nearly 40 years at the university (which split into two in 2024), where she became a professor of history and religious studies and was known as one of the most important historians of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its people, sometimes called the “den mother of Mormon history.” A non-Mormon, she was something of an anomaly when she approached the topic in the 1960s, when the small field was dominated by scholars who were members of the church and supported its narrative.
Shipps took a more analytical approach, observing the religion dispassionately, from a distance. She didn’t concern herself with whether what members of the church believed was true. She explored the history of the religion, its people and its culture, and its role in U.S. history—particularly its Westward expansion. Gordon Shepherd, co-author of the book “Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait,” said the analysis and intellectual rigor she brought to her breakthrough 1985 book, “Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition,” caught the attention of historians outside the faith and helped legitimize Mormonism as a field worthy of study.
Philip Barlow, a longtime friend and colleague, and a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, said that Shipps approached Mormonism with such “insight and with such fairness and generosity and patience to let it seep in and really understand it in intuitive ways,” that her approach became influential in the broader, burgeoning field of religious studies.
Jacks and gentiles
Born JoAnn Barnett in 1929, in Hueytown, Ala., Shipps stumbled into her life’s work in 1960, when the family moved to Logan, Utah, where her husband, Anthony, had a post at Utah State University. Shipps immediately noticed that she was different than her neighbors. She was a Methodist, smoked cigarettes and drank coffee—black, “the only real kind of coffee,” she would later say.
By contrast, her neighbors avoided nicotine and caffeine and worshiped in a temple. They had a name for people like her who were outside the church (gentiles) and those members who didn’t follow all the rules (Jack Mormons). They were only in Logan for a year, but Shipps was fascinated.
“It was very clear that there was an almost ethnic character to being Mormon,” she told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1994. “That was intriguing to me, and so I just kept worrying away at it until I figured it out.”
Shipps finished her bachelor’s degree at Utah State and went on to receive a Ph.D. in history at the University of Colorado. Her dissertation: “The Mormons in Politics: The First Hundred Years.”
Barlow said Shipps’s husband, Anthony, was a “gentle and generous man,” but had a view of marriage that wasn’t uncommon in the early 1960s. When she was offered a fellowship for a doctoral program, Barlow said she asked her husband for permission to accept it. He gave his consent on the condition that it didn’t interfere with her having dinner ready on time. Barlow said the couple went to bed together, but that Shipps would then get up in the middle of the night to study while she pursued her Ph.D.
The ‘non-Mormon’ expert
Barlow says one of Shipps’s talents was her ability to explain Mormonism to different audience—academics, the press, and even Mormons themselves—in ways they could understand. After the release of her book, “Mormonism,” she became a go-to resource for the media when the church was in the news—such as during Mitt Romney’s run for the president.
Shipps gave up cigarettes, but stuck with coffee and her Methodist faith.
“My position is that Mormonism is a legitimate way to be religious,” said in the 1994 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune. “It’s just not my way.”
