Religion
and the Early Republic
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n the history of religion, few stories are more
dramatic than that of the Mormons. It has haunting biblical overtones of divine
revelations and visitations, of persecution and martyrdom, of an exodus
virtually across a continent, and of ultimate success in establishing a
religious society in an uninhabited desert. This story, however, did not take
palce in a foreign land in the distant past. It took place in the United States
during the 19th century.
The Mormon church had its beginnings in western
New York, which was a hotbed of religious fervor. Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Universalist preafchers
eagerly sought converts. Fourteen year old Joseph Smith, Jr., the son of a
migrant farmer, listened closely to the preachers, but was uncertain which way
to turn.
In the spring of 1820, Smith went into the woods
near Palmyra, N.Y., to seek divine guidance. Suddenly, he was "seized upon
by some power that entirely overcame me." According to his account, a
brilliant light revealed "two personages," who told him that the
existing churches were false and that the true church of God was about to be
reestablished on earth.
Three years later, he underwent another
supernatural experience. A spectral visitor told him of the existence of a set
of buried golden plates that contained a lost section from the Bible describing
a tribe of Israelites that had lived in America. The next morning, Smith
proceeded to unearth the golden plates. He was forbidden to reveal their
existence for four years, when he translated them into English, published the
Book of Mormon, and founded the church that would later be known as the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
His movement quickly grew. Part of Mormonism's
attraction may be that it spoke to the beliefs and yearnings of antebellum
rural New Yorkers. The folk culture of the time paid a great deal of attention
to diviners who used rods and seer stones to find water or buried treasure, to
magaical talismans and mystical visions, and to legends about Indians and
mysterious Indian mounds. Smith had an extraordinary capacity to speak to these
people, offering (as poet John Greenleaf Whittier put it) "a language of
hope and promise to weak, weary hearts, tossed and troubled, who have wandered
from sect to sect, seeking in vain for the primal manifestation of the divine
power."
Because Smith said that he had conversed with
angels and received direct revelations from the Lord, local authorities
threatened to indict him for blasphemy. He and his followers responded by
moving to Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland, where they built their first temple.
It was in Kirtland that the Mormons first experimented iwth an economy planned
and run by the church. In this community, church trustees controlled the
members' property and put members to work building a temple and other
structures.
From Kirtland, the Mormons moved to Independence,
Missouri, and then to a town in the northern part of the state. Beginning in
1832, proslavery mobs attacked the Mormons, accusing them of inciting slave
insurrections. They burned several Mormon settlements and seized Mormon farms
and houses. Smith was arrested for treason and sentenced to be shot, but
managed to escape several months later. Fifteen thousand Mormons fled Missouri
to Illinois after the governor proclaimed them enemies who "had to be
exterminated, or driven from the state."
Trouble arose again in Illinois after dissident
Mormons published a newspaper denouncing the practice of polygamy and attacking
Smith for trying to become "king or lawgiver to the church." On
Smith's orders, Mormon legionnaires destroyed the dissidents' printing press.
Authorities charged Smith with treason, but the Illinois governor gave Smith
his pledge of protection. Smith and his brother were then confined to a jail in
Carthage, Ill. Late in the afternoon of June 27, 1844, a mob of prominent
citizens, aided by jail guards, broke into Smith's cell, shot him and his
brother, and threw their bodies out of a second-story window.
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oday it is hard to believe that Mormons could
ever have been regarded as subversive, since they are known for their
abstinence from tobacco and alcohol and their stress on family and community
responsibility.
Anti-Mormonism was partly rooted in a struggle
for economic and political power. Individualistic frontier settlers feared the
Mormons, who voted as a bloc and whose trustees controlled their land.
Mormonism was also denounced as a threat to
fundamental social values. Protestant ministers attacked the Mormons for
rejecting the legitimacy of the established churches and for insisting that the
Book of Mormon was Holy Scripture, equal in importance to the Bible.
The Mormons were also accused of corrupt moral
values, especially after 1842 when rumors about polygamy began to spread.
Indeed, Mormons did practice polygamy for half a century, which was justified
theologically as an effort to reestablish the patriarchal Old Testament
family. Polygamy also served an
important social function, absorbing single or widowed women into Mormon
communities. Contrary to popular belief, polygamy was not widely practiced.
Altogether, only 10 to 20 percent of Mormon families were polygamous and nearly
two-thirds involved a man and two wives.
Today, the Mormon church is one of the
fastest-growing religious groups in the United States, and its members are
known for their piety, industriousness, sobriety, and thrift. A century ago,
anti-Mormons regarded the church as a fundamental threat to American values.
Early 19th-century American society attached enormous importance to
individualism, monogamous marriage, and private property, and the Mormons were
believed to subvert these values. But if in certain respects the Mormons
challenged the values of pre-Civil War America, their aspirations were truly
the product of their time. They sought nothing less than the establishment of
God's kingdom on earth.