Item Detail
-
30903
-
4
-
19
-
English
-
Marking Mormon Difference : How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the 'Mormon Menace'
-
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture
-
Spring 2013
-
25
-
1
-
Toronto, Canada
-
University of Toronto Press
-
82-97
-
This article argues that inaccurate perceptions of Muslim and Mormon sexual and political deviance merged to help fuel a sustained anti-Mormon campaign in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The inflammatory rhetoric of slavery and defilement that anti-Mormon writers deployed to equate the violation of the individual female body in plural marriage with the violation of the social body through Mormon treachery and authoritarianism relied largely on anti-Muslim caricatures for both its venom and its meaning. Only when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraced a model of the church that fit within the framework of American denominationalism did the Mormon menace begin to recede and anti-Muslim vitriol begin to fade from anti-Mormon discourse. This article further contends that the political compromise that allowed Mormonism to survive—indeed, to flourish within the United States—helped demonstrate the boundaries of religious and political freedom not just for Mormons but for all Americans. In this context, the evolution of polemic literature served to mark significant cultural change.
-
Boadicea, the Mormon Wife : Life-Scenes in Utah
Commercial Propaganda in the Silent Film : A Case Study of A Mormon Maid (1917)
Exiles in a Land of Liberty : Mormons in America, 1830-1846
Female Life Among the Mormons ; A Narrative of Many Years' Personal Experience
Intolerable Zion : The Image of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century American Literature
Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling
Mormonism : The Story of a New Religious Tradition
Mormonism Unvailed : Or, a Faithful Account of That Singular Imposition and Delusion From Its Rise to the Present Time
'Regeneration - Now and Evermore!' Mormon Polygamy and the Physical Rehabilitation of Humankind
Some Themes of Counter-Subversion : An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature
The History of the Saints : Or, An Expose of Joe Smith and Mormonism
The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834-1914 : Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations
The Mormon Question : Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America
The Mormon Revival of Polygamy
The Politics of American Religious Identity : The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle
The Prophets, or Mormonism Unveiled
The Viper on the Hearth : Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy
The Whore of Babylon and the Abomination of Abominations : Nineteenth-Century Catholic and Mormon Mutual Perceptions and Religious Identity
Utah and the Mormons : The History, Government, Doctrines, Customs, and Prospects of the Latter-day Saints