Anti-Mormonism and the Question of Religious Authenticity in Antebellum America

Abstract

When antebellum anti-Mormons took up their pens to thwart the Mormon “menace,” they not only rehearsed various critiques of Mormonism, they participated in a larger conversation about the place of religion in the nation and the ways citizens might separate “real” religion from the religiously inauthentic. While Protestants of the period assumed “objective” descriptions of various religious groups might calm a vexed post-disestablishment religious scene, their incorporation of a long-standing polemical strategy that sought to expose religious impostors illuminated an array of conflicting attachments and various cultural tensions that attended the new republic’s “free market” in churches.