Mormonism as an American Religion

Mormonism as an American Religion is presented as a faith whose American origins and ambitions are inseparable from the communities it creates: shared worship and mutual loyalty sit alongside sharp divisions between the chosen and the rejected. The same history can be told as a record of sensational doctrines and conflict, or as one of family life, practical virtue, and belonging. Neither account alone captures how Mormon belief has worked as both theology and social identity.

An American sacred history

The Book of Mormon locates much of its sacred history in the Americas. In its narrative, Jesus Christ visits people in the New World after his resurrection, and Joseph Smith receives the golden plates from Moroni. The book also places the Garden of Eden in America and anticipates Christ’s return in that same part of the world. The result is more than a new account of scripture: America itself becomes central to a sacred story, a promised setting for divine history and future fulfillment.

That story carries a stark moral map. The Book of Mormon presents humanity as divided between two churches, one belonging to the Lamb of God and the other to the devil. The division is not merely doctrinal; it identifies who belongs to the righteous community and who stands outside it. In the early Mormon settlement of Jackson County, Missouri, Saints understood themselves as God’s chosen people with a divine claim to Zion. Their arrival, land purchases, commerce among themselves, and coordinated voting intensified local suspicion. Religious certainty thus entered a contested social landscape, where the Saints’ sense of sacred inheritance and their neighbors’ fears reinforced one another.

The belief that every person could choose between the Lord and wickedness did not, in the account given here, entail equal sympathy for every choice. Those who knowingly rejected the Saints’ religious claims were regarded as undeserving of mercy. This is one way the book connects an apparently personal decision of faith to collective boundaries: free choice could be affirmed while the consequences assigned to choosing wrongly remained severe.

Community, ritual, and authority

The Hill Cumorah Pageant shows how religious belonging is renewed through gathering as well as belief. More than ten thousand people assemble for the summer production, but over 95 percent of those attending are already members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The pageant is promoted as a spectacular invitation to outsiders, yet it functions chiefly as a communal celebration at a place identified with the faith’s beginnings. Families arrive early, share food, and wait together; prayer and the performance then turn that gathering into a public expression of shared testimony. Its appeal lies not only in what the story represents, but in the experience of assembling to affirm it together.

Other forms of collective practice bind community to authority and memory. After Joseph Smith’s death and the acquittal of those tried for his murder, Brigham Young directed church authorities to introduce an Oath of Vengeance into the temple endowment. Participants pledged to pray for redress and to teach that commitment to later generations. The oath remained part of the ritual until 1927, when its disclosure to the non-Mormon press provoked public and political outcry. In this instance, religious memory was not confined to recollection: it was given a recurring ceremonial form and transmitted across generations.

The migration west also deepened collective loyalty. The hardships of the journey from Nauvoo, together with earlier violence in Missouri and Illinois, left survivors more devoted to the Church and closely bonded to one another. The account describes adversity as having filtered out doubters and strengthened unconditional loyalty to Brigham Young. Such cohesion could sustain a displaced community, while also making obedience to its leader a defining measure of belonging.

Revelation and competing claims

Personal revelation is described as a foundation of the religion: Joseph Smith encouraged adherents to seek direct communication from God. Yet the book also depicts revelation as something that could be discussed and authorized within a group. When John Taylor shared a revelation affirming plural marriage, he called trusted followers together, bound those present to defend the principle, and authorized a smaller group to perform and perpetuate such marriages. The episode joins private divine authority to a communal structure that could preserve a contested practice beyond the reach of official policy.

The same tension appears in the Lafferty brothers’ discussions of government and religion. Dan Lafferty used scripture to argue that government had no rightful authority to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers. His self-directed study led him toward Mormon fundamentalism and the conviction that the mainstream Church had abandoned plural marriage under federal pressure. In a later account of his beliefs, he continued to divide humanity into children of God and children of the devil, treating this distinction as fixed. The book presents such certainty as one expression of the broader power of religious identity to mark moral insiders and outsiders, not as a belief shared by all Latter-day Saints.

Psychiatrist Noel Gardner distinguished Ron Lafferty’s religious claims from psychosis by pointing to the group context in which revelations were evaluated. He testified that Ron was not psychotic, while also describing symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. The distinction matters to the book’s account: shared religious practice and mental illness are not treated as interchangeable explanations, even as the narrative examines how convictions can operate within a small circle of like-minded believers.

Growth and the pressure of mainstreaming

The Church’s reach provides another measure of Mormonism’s American character. The book notes that more than sixty thousand missionaries were serving around the world at a given time and recounts sociologist Rodney Stark’s projections of substantial future membership growth. Harold Bloom likewise imagined a movement with ambitions to convert the nation and the world. These are reported forecasts and assessments, not settled outcomes, but they emphasize how expansion became part of the faith’s public vision.

At the same time, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is described as a powerful institution increasingly shaped by business and public relations. Its revenues were estimated at more than six billion dollars, and it had become Utah’s largest employer. The book argues that, after nearly a century of moving toward the familiar patterns of middle America, a deliberate return to plural marriage seems difficult to imagine. The shift is consequential: institutional stability and public acceptance have accompanied distance from some of Joseph Smith’s most controversial teachings.

That very distance creates an irony. As the mainstream Church becomes less peculiar, communities such as Colorado City and Bountiful may attract members who want to recover the founding prophet’s more demanding vision. Fundamentalism is therefore portrayed not simply as an external opponent of the mainstream Church, but as a recurring possibility within its own expanding membership. Mormonism’s movement into American respectability does not erase its older promises of chosenness, revelation, and a transformed sacred order; for some believers, those promises are precisely what mainstreaming leaves them seeking.