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Loading... "A Peculiar People": Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (2012)by J. Spencer Fluhman
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Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, it does not specify what counts as a religion. From its founding in the 1830s, Mormonism, a homegrown American faith, drew thousands of converts but far more critics. In ""A Peculiar People"", J. Spencer Fluhman offers a comprehensive history of anti-Mormon thought and the associated passionate debates about religious authenticity in nineteenth-century America. He argues that understanding anti-Mormonism provides critical insight into the American psyche because Mormonism became a potent symbol around which ideas abo No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)289.309Religions Christian denominations Other Christian sects Mormonism Biography And HistoryLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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But this wasn't really a book about juicy religious controversies. It was really a case study of how society evolves in its views of religion. Many early Mormon critics thought this new church was just a fraud, a scheme for power. Then more and more critics recognized the sincerity of the Mormons, but that having such different practices they didn't qualify as a religion. Then there were those who granted that it was a religion, but was too fanatical and took religion too far. Then it was permitted among world religions, if still incorrect in its doctrine and a heresy of Christianity. In each of these stages, society wasn't just permitting more ground to Mormonism, but was also reflecting changes in how it defined the concept of religion itself. Religion could be an inner belief, and not just outer practices and observances. Sometimes those changes of viewpoint were actually in response to society's encounters with Mormonism, since Mormonism repeatedly made waves and challenged American society (from the Book of Mormon, to the conflicts in Missouri, to the politicking for Mormon refuge, to the conflicts in Illinois and murder of the prophet, to the exodus to Utah, to the escalations over polygamy, to the question of political control in the West, to Utah statehood and the admission of Mormons in Congress). I wish I had better grasped the details of these evolutionary changes in society's views, and whether this was unique to Mormonism or resembled the eventual accommodation of other new religions. But some parts of the book got a little too technical and dry for me. Maybe listening to the audio book wasn't the best way to digest the details.
Interestingly, this book addressed how Mormons were not classified as white by so many thinkers in their day, because of their polygamy, their frontier homeland, and their foreign doctrines. This predates Paul Reeve's groundbreaking book on this subject from 2015. ( )