Item Detail
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12101
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4
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0
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English
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A Welded Link : Family Imagery in Mormonism and American Culture
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University of California, Santa Barbara
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Ph.D. diss.
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"This dissertation examines images of the family in Mormonism, the role they have played in symbolizing Mormon group identity, and their role in the process of adapting Mormonism to American culture. With Revolutionary communitas beginning to dim, early Nineteenth-century American culture gave rise to several social phenomena, all reflecting a concern for strengthening community. A large number of communitarian groups and millenial experiments worked to evolve new forms of community, while popular moralists writing for middle-class audiences called for renewed devotion to the nuclear family as the means for holding society together. Early Mormonism understood itself primarily as the nucleus of a millenial kingdom preparing for Christ's imminent return. This growing kingdom, not the glorification of the nuclear family, was the center of social concern for early Mormons. Soon, however, concern for the religious significance of marriages within the new community at Kirtland began to elicit new doctrines about family relationships. At Nauvoo, Joseph Smith taught that through vicarious rituals of baptism and adoption in behalf of dead ancestors the whole human family could be organized into a great chain with Father Adam at its head. Following Smith's death and in the move to the Great Basin, these new doctrines of adoption were used to "seal" church members to church leaders, helping to work against schism within the kingdom. In Utah, especially after the Civil War, struggles with the Federal government kept attention focused on the boundaries around the whole kingdom rather than upon individual families. Finally forced to relinquish not only polygamy but the political and economic aspects of its total community, Mormonism began to develop, around the beginning of the 20th Century, an increased emphasis on the image of the family. Content analysis of Mormon speeches from the 19th and 20th Centuries is used to document this shift. In the 20th Century, Mormon teaching promotes an alliance between church and family which works toward the strengths of a total religious community without the drawbacks of geographic separation. This study treats Mormonism as a case study in the problems of boundary definition for mediating structures like church, state and family in the context of American pluralism." [Author's abstract]