The Reed Smoot Hearings

The Reed Smoot Hearings
Author: Michael Harold Paulos
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1646421175

This book examines the hearings that followed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot’s 1903 election to the US Senate and the subsequent protests and petitioning efforts from mainstream Christian ministries disputing Smoot’s right to serve as a senator. Exploring how religious and political institutions adapted and shapeshifted in response to larger societal and ecclesiastical trends, The Reed Smoot Hearings offers a broader exploration of secularism during the Progressive Era and puts the Smoot hearings in context with the ongoing debate about the constitutional definition of marriage. The work adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of US political institutions and national policies. Chapters also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in effecting these institutional and national developments. The Smoot hearings stand as an important case study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America and the principles of exclusion and coercion that history is predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the nation-state for the new modern century. The Reed Smoot Hearings will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Mormon, western, American, and religious history. Publication supported, in part, by Gonzaba Medical Group. Contributors: Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Byron W. Daynes, Kathryn M. Daynes, Kathryn Smoot Egan, D. Michael Quinn

The Politics of American Religious Identity

The Politics of American Religious Identity
Author: Kathleen Flake
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2005-12-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0807863548

Between 1901 and 1907, a broad coalition of Protestant churches sought to expel newly elected Reed Smoot from the Senate, arguing that as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Smoot was a lawbreaker and therefore unfit to be a lawmaker. The resulting Senate investigative hearing featured testimony on every peculiarity of Mormonism, especially its polygamous family structure. The Smoot hearing ultimately mediated a compromise between Progressive Era Protestantism and Mormonism and resolved the nation's long-standing "Mormon Problem." On a broader scale, Kathleen Flake shows how this landmark hearing provided the occasion for the country--through its elected representatives, the daily press, citizen petitions, and social reform activism--to reconsider the scope of religious free exercise in the new century. Flake contends that the Smoot hearing was the forge in which the Latter-day Saints, the Protestants, and the Senate hammered out a model for church-state relations, shaping for a new generation of non-Protestant and non-Christian Americans what it meant to be free and religious. In addition, she discusses the Latter-day Saints' use of narrative and collective memory to retain their religious identity even as they changed to meet the nation's demands.

Mormons and Popular Culture

Mormons and Popular Culture
Author: J. Michael Hunter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 595
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313391688

Many people are unaware of how influential Mormons have been on American popular culture. This book parts the curtain and looks behind the scenes at the little-known but important influence Mormons have had on popular culture in the United States and beyond. Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon provides an unprecedented, comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture. Authored by a Mormon studies librarian and author of numerous writings regarding Mormon folklore, culture, and history, this book provides students, scholars, and interested readers with an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic that can serve as a key reference book on the topic. The work contains fascinating coverage on the most influential Mormon actors, musicians, fashion designers, writers, artists, media personalities, and athletes. Some topics—such as the Mormon influence at Disney, and how Mormon inventors have assisted in transforming American popular culture through the inventions of television, stereophonic sound, video games, and computer-generated animation—represent largely unknown information. The broad overview of Mormons and American popular culture offered can be used as a launching pad for further investigation; researchers will find the references within the book's well-documented chapters helpful.

Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power

Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power
Author: Jeffrey D. Nichols
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252027680

"The controversy waned when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began to move away from polygamy in the 1890s, but resurfaced with the rise of the anti-Mormon American Party that sponsored the Stockade prostitution district. Nichols traces the interplay of prostitution and reform through World War I, when Mormon and gentile moral codes converged at the expense of prostitutes. He also considers how polygamy and religious conflict distinguished Salt Lake City from other cities struggling to abolish prostitution in the Progressive Era."--Jacket.

Fundamentalisms and Society

Fundamentalisms and Society
Author: American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 620
Release: 1993-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780226508801

'A systematic overview of the advances made by antisecular religious movements over the past twenty-five years and show[ing] the impact these movements have had on human relations, education, women's rights, and scientific research'. - Publisher.

The Mysteries of Godliness

The Mysteries of Godliness
Author: David John Buerger
Publisher: Signature Books
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1994
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Providing a fascinating chronology of developments associated with Latter-day Saint temples and temple ordinances, this source book discusses the origins of the temple concept, comparative rituals, and changes in ceremonies. Buerger charts the abandonment of the adoption sealing which once linked unrelated families and examines the near disappearance of the second anointing, once considered the crowning ordinance of the temple.

Fundamentalisms and Society

Fundamentalisms and Society
Author: Martin E. Marty
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 606
Release: 1997-01-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780226508818

The Fundamentalism Project Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby Around the world, fundamentalist movements are profoundly affecting the way we live. Misinformation and misperception about fundamentalism exacerbate conflicts at home and abroad. Yet policymakers, journalists, students, and others have lacked any comprehensive resource on the explosive phenomenon of fundamentalism. Now the Fundamentalism Project has assembled an international team of scholars for a multivolume assessment of the history, scope, sources, character, and impact of fundamentalist movements within the world's major religious traditions. Fundamentalisms and Society shows how fundamentalist movements have influenced human relations, education, women's rights, and scientific research in over a dozen nations and within the traditions of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Drawn from the fields of anthropology, sociology, history of religion, and history of science, the contributors cover topics such as the educational structures of Hindu revivalism, women in fundamentalist Iran and Pakistan, and the creationist cosmos of Protestant fundamentalism. In a concluding essay, William H. McNeill situates contemporary fundamentalisms within a world historical context. The Fundamentalism Project, Volume 2 Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby direct the Fundamentalism Project. Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, is the senior editor of the Christian Century and the author of numerous books, including the multivolume Modern American Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Appleby, a research associate at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Church and Age Unite!” The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.