Battle Hymn of the Republic

Battle Hymn of the Republic is the signature song through which the book introduces the public sound and image of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir beside the Salt Lake Temple, it evokes religious pageantry and communal belonging, while the surrounding narrative complicates that reassuring image by placing it alongside Dan Lafferty’s use of Mormon scripture to justify murder.

The Choir’s Signature Song

In the book’s opening portrait of Mormon life, 325 voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir fill the tabernacle next to the Salt Lake Temple with the song’s robust, haunting chords. The choir is described as an emblem of Mormonism to much of the world, and the song is identified as its trademark. Its religious language and public, ceremonial performance make it more than background music: it helps introduce a faith whose institutional center stands beside Temple Square, a spiritual and temporal nexus for the church.

A Sound at the Hill Cumorah Pageant

The song’s appearance belongs to a broader account of Mormon religious spectacle at the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Each July, thousands of Saints gather beneath the hill for the outdoor production, and as dusk settles, the Utah Symphony Orchestra and Mormon Tabernacle Choir send harmonies across the field from concert loudspeakers. The book does not identify those pageant harmonies as this particular song, but the scene extends the choir’s role as a shared public sound around which worship, performance, and gathering converge.

The pageant is promoted as an invitation to nonmembers, yet more than 95 percent of its audience already belongs to the church. For most attendees, it functions as a communal celebration of faith: families arrive early, share food, and wait together for the performance. In this setting, the choir’s music belongs to an occasion that renews group identity as much as it presents a religious story to outsiders.

Public Image and Uneasy Contrast

The song helps establish an image of Mormons as chaste, optimistic, outgoing, and dutiful. The book sets that composed, uplifting public sound against Dan Lafferty’s appeal to Mormon scripture in defense of murder. The contrast is deliberately unsettling: a familiar religious emblem cannot, by itself, explain or contain the violence carried out in the name of faith.

That tension also matters to the church’s distinction between its mainstream institution and Mormon Fundamentalism. The book notes that LDS authorities rejected any identification of Dan’s actions with their church, while describing his beliefs as a fundamentalist form of religion. Against this dispute, Battle Hymn of the Republic functions as a recognizable emblem of mainstream Mormon public identity—not as evidence that the song or its singers endorse the violence set beside it.