Item Detail
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28012
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0
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0
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English
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The Morality of Politics : The Challenges of Mormon Tribalism
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Dead Wood and Rushing Water : Essays on Mormon Faith, Culture, and Family
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Greg Kofford Books
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119-129
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So how did Mormon voters as a group come to have such positive feelings for the Republican Party? How did Mormons come to see themselves as part of the Republican tribe? [...]
Thomas Alexander has outlined five distinct periods of Church involvement in Utah politics. During the first period, spanning from 1847 to 1891, the Church's own party "unquestionably dominated the Utah scene," sponsoring candidates and opposing gentile political involvement. As the Church moved into the twentieth century it was forced to confront the dominant American culture head on. We can think of this as a process of assimilation, as Armand Mauss has called it; as a process of reconstructing memory, as Kathleen Flake has called it; or as a process of colonization of the Mormon mind, as Richard Bushman has called it; but we know that this process involved both accommodation of American values and a reinvention of what it means to be Mormon. [From the text]