Item Detail
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30631
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2
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21
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English
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The Cold War and the Invention of Free Agency
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Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics
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Champaign, IL
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University of Illinois Press
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159-177
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"Before the 1950s, [Ezra Taft] Benson and [Heber J.] Grant, like many other American Christians, emphasized the importance of individual morality for the maintenance of a free society. As the Cold War matured, however, Benson traveled to Europe and the Soviet Union and was shaken by what he found there, and through several associates was exposed to the conspiratorial anti-communism of the John Birch Society, a far-right group who warned that communist agents were infiltrating the United States to bring democracy down from within. By the time he left his post in the federal government, Benson's politics had blossomed into a full-clown cosmology, a moralistic libertarianism that amplified producerism's link between liberty and morality. While producerists believed that a firm morality was the bedrock of a robust democracy, Benson came to believe that the lack of political and economic freedom could in turn degrade morality. While earlier Mormons' localism made them suspicious of government, by the 1960s Benson had concluded that government was itself a potential moral hazard."
[from author] -
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David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism
Ezra Taft Benson : A Biography
Ezra Taft Benson and Mormon Political Conflicts
Ezra Taft Benson's 1921-23 Mission to England
Ezra Taft Benson's 1946 Mission to Europe
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Mormonism in Transition : A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930
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On Wings of Faith
Religion, Politics, and Sugar : The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921
"Rising above Principle" : Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1953-61 Part 1
The Mormon Hierarchy : Extensions of Power
The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith
The Words of Joseph Smith : The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph
"This Great Thing Which Has Come to Me a Humble, Weak, Farmer Boy" : Ezra Taft Benson's 1943 Call to the Apostleship
"Weak-Kneed Republicans and Socialist Democrats" : Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1953-61, Part 2
Wrestling the Angel : The Foundations of Mormon Thought : Cosmos, God, Humanity
Young Heber J. Grant : Entrepreneur Extraordinary