Item Detail
-
30467
-
1
-
10
-
English
-
Mormonism in the American Political Domain
-
The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism
-
Cambridge, England
-
Oxford University Press
-
606-619
-
The relation between Mormonism and US politics must be seen through the lens of religious oppression, but also the lens of land settlement and expansion. The Latter-day Saints’ move to the unorganized Great Basin aimed to create political space in which state law could be controlled to prevent plural or celestial marriage. The proposed state of Deseret however gave way to federally controlled territory in which Congress directly regulated marriage. In response to federal coercion, Mormonism opted for a negotiated quasi-autonomy. For its part, the church could offer settlement through water development more efficiently than any other entity could. On the condition that it would give up plural marriage, the church in return got substantial de facto political control over its own state, control retained in some form through political elites until the present.
-
America's Saints : The Rise of Mormon Power
Desert between the Mountains : Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772-1869
Great Basin Kingdom : An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900
Great Basin Kingdom Revisited : Contemporary Perspectives
Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling
On Zion's Mount : Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape
Preaching to the Court House and Judging in the Temple
The Mormon Menace : Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South
The Mormon Question : Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America
The Politics of American Religious Identity : The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle