The Politics of American Religious Identity

The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle
1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5501-0
Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 442 g

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. T he 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Über Autor(innen)

Kathleen Flake practiced law for fifteen years and is now assistant professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.