Item Detail
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13345
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0
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0
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English
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Without Mittens : Religious Atrocity Narratives of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century America
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Buffalo, New York
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State University of New York at Buffalo
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Ph.D. diss.
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"This dissertation examines the three significant American groups of what sociologists David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr. have identified as the atrocity tale. The atrocity tale (narrative) is a first-person narrative purporting to reveal the inside story of a culturally unpopular religion. This research explores the atrocity narrative's power to define our understanding of alternative religions, recurrently in terms of interrelated issues of the nation of America and of gender. Anti-Catholic narratives of the nineteenth century, including the infamous Awful Disclosures (1836), appeared from the 1830s to the 1910s. Issues of how these narratives were widely produced and distributed, as well as of their readership, are central to approaching the texts themselves. The earliest anti-Catholic narratives deal with issues of justice, which are germane to national issues of self-identity, whereas later narratives are concerned with marriage and conversion to Protestant Christianity. At the turn of the century, some anti-Catholic narratives were reprinted as propaganda by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Mormon (anti-polygamy) narratives appeared from the 1850s to past the turn of the century. These narratives represent polygamy's problem of both endorsing and denying ideals of marriage and the domestic, as well as the popular interpretation of the Mormons themselves as a threat to America. Anti-cult narratives were published in the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly concerned with the Unificatian Church. The narratives reveal prevalent cultural assumptions about the role and significance of the nuclear family, especially appropriate parental response to adult children who joined alternative religions; deprogramming (forcible faithbreaking) was one problematic development to counter supposed brainwashing by "cults." Though anti-cult narratives describe appropriate socialization of the narrator back into the dominant culture, vestiges of ambiguity sometimes surface, suggesting unresolved conflict concerning that socialization. The conclusion examines government documentation in which atrocity narratives are partially offered as the basis for the government's actions against the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993. The conclusion also suggests that atrocity narratives largely define our perceptions of culturally alternative religions, often effacing the possibility of other kinds of narratives, especially the potentially dissonant ones of individuals within those religions." [Author's abstract]