Item Detail
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18758
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12
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0
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English
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Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Antebellum America
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Madison, WI
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The University of Wisconsin
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329
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Ph.D. diss.
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Why did antebellum Americans, confident as they were that their republic offered religious liberty on a scale unmatched in human history, heap such scorn on a religious movement that by many modern accounts was the quintessentially American religious invention of the nineteenth century? Even before the Saints deviated from American social norms in their practice of polygamy, anti-Mormons argued that Mormonism was dangerously un-American and entirely un-Christian. Early Mormonism so challenged an already vexed American religious scene that anti-Mormons typically denied the label "religion" to Mormonism entirely. Instead, they constructed the founding Mormon prophet as a fraud, his followers as unwitting or deluded dupes, Mormon theology as a thinly-veiled money making scheme, and Mormon community-building as a menacing empire-in-the-making. In opposing Mormonism as they did, anti-Mormons helped refashion American religion and its relationship to the republic: by defining Mormonism as a non-religion and linking conventional Protestant notions of what constituted a religion to the march of American "civilization," they effectively curbed the pluralistic ideals articulated at the founding, helped legitimize extra-legal violence against Mormons, and abetted government in suppressing controversial Mormon practices while simultaneously maintaining that the republic still hallowed individual religious liberty. [Author's abstract]
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