Item Detail
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17442
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5
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0
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English
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From Above and Below : The Mormon Embrace of Revolution, 1840--1940
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Temple University
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Scholars have traced Mormonism's 19th century revolutionary nationalism, but the leadership's response to the revolutions of other peoples has received little attention. The Mormon hierarchy believed that Christ's return represented the millenarian "revolution from above" that would catapult them to global leadership. Driven west, the Revolutions of 1848 opened another narrative. Revolts "from below" would overthrow the privileged classes and dignify the masses. Revolution weakened traditional loyalties and destroyed the religious, political, and social monopolies that inhibited missionary work. To expresses their millennialism, Mormon leaders integrated the language and symbols pioneered by secular revolutionaries. This dissertation argues that revolution sustained the Mormon view of history. God was omniscient. He projected his power in the medium of time through the agency of man. World events became a source of canon. If revolution was possible, ran the logic, then it was God's will to pursue it. Revolution often endowed Mormon scriptural interpretations with new meaning. Mormon acceptance of revolution shows their millennial theology as a progressive discourse. The dialectical movement of history would produce global conditions imagined in French democratic totalitarianism: universal property, brotherhood, personal fulfillment, and endowments of knowledge and responsibilities that citizenship in the earthly kingdom conveyed. Mormons, like revolutionary utopians, condoned force. The object was to shape society into what it could become. After 1890 assimilation with normative values accelerated, but the Mormon script resisted total Americanization. Anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist undercurrents continued to inform Mormon views of the external world. The Mexican Revolution and political coups in South America in 1930-1931 let Latter-day Saint leaders explore the global implications of their message for 50 years beyond the abandonment of polygamy and the political kingdom of God. The crises of the 1930s collapsed Mormon faith in progress toward a rational world illuminated with spiritual understanding. Furthermore, socioreligious radicalism lost relevance in an institutionalized Church. That leading Mormon leaders ratified efforts in post revolutionary Mexico and the Soviet Union suggests their internal uneasiness with incorporation and their yearning for utopia." [Author's abstract]
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