Item Detail
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13284
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3
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0
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English
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In Search of the Historical Nephi : The 'Book of Mormon,' 'Evangelicalisms' and Antebellum American Popular Culture, c. 1830
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Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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Queen's University at Kingston
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Ph.D. diss.
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"In this study, it is argued that the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's first testament to the world and Mormonism's keystone scripture, consistently contradicted the Northern Evangelical platform--plank by plank. It is argued that the Book of Mormon was a religious fiction. Religious or moralistic fiction was a genre many Evangelicals objected to on the grounds that it was basically dishonest and thus not a suitable medium for moral uplift. It is clear that early Mormons were influenced by such thinking, for they assumed that the Book of Mormon was an historical document. They had to do so, in effect, to read it in good conscience. Hence, Mormonism began as a result of a literary constructive misunderstanding of sorts. The definition of Evangelicalism used in this study is only applicable to the Evangelicalisms and Revivalisms of the northern United States around 1830. A number of scholars seem to agree that most northern Evangelicals were Whigs, that they abhorred slavery and were proponents of racial equality (in principle), that Revivalism advanced the cause of women's rights and thus loathed universalism and other male-dominated societies (especially Freemasonry), and that most Evangelicals and Revivalists were postmillennialists. Whereas the Book of Mormon was critical of Jacksonian America, it was, in fact, a defense of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Republican (or Democratic) ideal. Most Evangelicals were Whigs and thus enemies of Jacksonianism. The Book of Mormon propounded a highly racist theory for the origin of non-whites, red and black, which militated against racial equality and justified slavery. A dark skin was not said to be the consequence of mere environmental factors, as Evangelical missionaries to the Indians and other philanthropists argued, but the result of a curse from God. It is argued that the Book of Mormon was a defense of the beleaguered patriarchal institution of Freemasonry, but a primitive or "apostolic" type. Indeed, the Book of Mormon defended the rights of males and all things male, castigating the evangelical woman and womanhood (not motherhood per se) in the process. Not unlike Universalist teaching, it defined Hell as a state of mind rather than a place of literal fire and brimstone, and spoke favourably of a universal resurrection, the salvation of all children who died without baptism and, most important, of purgatory. The Book of Mormon also propounded a proto-dispensationalist eschatology at odds with the Postmillennialism of the Edwardsians and the Revivalists and the Premillenialism of conservative divines. The Book of Mormon, it is argued, was a "comprehensive primitivist vision" that was "fully Northern" in the broad cultural sense. This neither wholly supports nor wholly rejects the argument that Mormons were outsiders and thus America's insiders. As pugnacious and opportunistic it was idealistic, it was a remarkable product of popular consciousness because it had something important to say "in favor of" popular America and "against" the Evangelical "righteous empire." (Abstract shortened by UMI.)