Exiles in a Land of Liberty : Mormonism's Conflict with American Culture, 1830-1846
Washington University
1985
Ph.D. diss.
"This dissertation seeks to reinterpret early Mormonism's relationship with American culture. The concept of "classical republicanism" as delineated by such historians as J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood has been used as a starting point in this endeavor. Mormonism originated in 1830 as a religious protest against the massive disorder of antebellum America. While converts shared the same commitment to classical republicanism as other citizens, they recoiled from the nation's new emphasis on religious pluralism, libertarianism, and market capitalism. Church members found these innovations menacing, and drew upon their New England heritage to create a religion-based communal republicanism to find surcease from their anxieties. Unfortunately, even as these new doctrines brought relief to individual converts, they frightened many Americans into opposition to the church. Violence between Mormons and non-Mormons erupted soon after the church's founding and hastened or forced its removal from four states before driving it beyond the territorial limits of the United States to the Great Salt Basin in 1846. Anti-Mormonism began with the limited perception of the Saints as fools and confidence men, but gradually evolved into a more sophisticated interpretation that made church members into anti-republican subversives, bent on imposing a theocratic tyranny upon America. The Mormons, by contrast, judged the hostility against them to be a symptom of the anarchy destroying the Republic. In reality, both the Saints and their enemies held remarkably similar basic principles, but drew such radically different conclusions from them that they became bitter antagonists." [Author's abstract]