Haunted by History: A Review of "Peculiar People": Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth Century America

After the Saints removed to the deserts of Utah, their perceived foreignness flourished like the desert they made blossom. Under the second prophet Brigham Young, at mid-century, Smith's most radical innovations were brought out into the open. The Mormon territory was quickly defined, for Protestant Americans, by the enslavement of women in polygamy and of all Mormons under the theocratic blending of church and state that made Young President of the Church and Governor of the territory. Throughout the second half of the century, the federal government imposed ever greater restrictions on the Church and the Mormon people, culminating in the seizure of the Church's property and the disenfranchisement of its members. Facing the destruction of their religion, in 1890 the Mormons accepted their prophet's Manifesto declaring an end to their deviance from American norms: their system of plural marriage and their theocratic Kingdom. The nation rewarded the "defanged" Saints with Utah's statehood in 1896 (140). They also finally acknowledged that Mormonism was a religion—albeit a false one—and should be treated as such.

Fluhman acknowledges that, despite what scholars have dubbed the Mormons' Americanization after 1890, this rapprochement remains uneasy. Even in the 21st century, interactions between the Saints and the rest of America are "still haunted by this history" (1-2). Despite 19th-century Americans' strenuous defenses of the division between church and state, "Mormonism exposed the American fantasy that religion and politics could be easily defined and separated" (95). It's a problem that, like anti-Mormonism, persists today. Just ask the pollsters about Mitt Romney's "Mormon problem."