Summary
Title: The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle
Author: Kathleen Flake
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807855014
Pro:
• Excellent writing style — really brings history and historical figures to life
• Explores a pivotal moment in American religious history that is unknown to most
Con:
• None
Description:
• Analysis of the Protestant challenge to seating Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle, in the U.S. Senate
• Explains how people’s view of religious freedom were challenged
• Explains how Mormons’ relations to civil government & society were fundamentally altered
Book Review
The conflict between Mormonism and America’s Protestant establishment was essentially one between a religious system followed by the majority and enforced by the law on the one side, against a much more explicitly theocratic system followed by a minority that was pursuing hegemony in the West. Who would win? Could the Mormons win the religious freedom to be theocratic, or would they have to submit their religious authority to a political system that was created by American Protestants?
These are the issues explored by Kathleen Flake in The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot. This book is about a very specific episode of American history in which many different themes and threads coalesced. Elected to the Senate from Utah, Reed Smoot (remember the Smoot-Hawley Act? Most seem to remember that from name high school, even if they don’t remember what it was. Well, he’s that Smoot), was challenged by a coalition of Protestant religious and civic organizations who saw in Reed Smoot the embodiment of all that was dangerous and evil in American society.
This might seem rather strange to most — after all, Mormons today are generally regarded as pillars of society and among the most patriotic of Americans. This was not al ways so, though. Part of Flake’s purpose is to explain how the Mormons were transformed from social outsiders to social insiders:
- “Defined by polygamous family structure, utopian communal economy, and rebellious theocratic government, nineteenth-century Mormonism seems to have little relation, except by contrast, to the twenty-first century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (L.D.S. Church).”
- “Indeed, the church’s present reputation, for good or ill, appears to be based on a reverse set of identity markers: idealization of the nuclear family, unapologetic capitalism, and patriotic republicanism.”
What was Reed Smoot’s crime? In addition to being a Mormon, he was also a Mormon Apostle — one of the twelve tasked with the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This rendered him not only suspect in terms of his theological goals, but also his political goals. People believed that the Mormons intended to take over the nation (or at least large portions of it), which made a Mormon leader like Smoot automatically suspect for being disloyal:
- “[The election of Smoot] was rebellion against the constitutional compact by which all religion had been subordinated to the state. It demonstrated that, while the Latter-day Saints wanted federal protection that disestablishment offered its minority status, they wanted also to exercise their majority rights to establish their religion in the entire mountain West and protect that establishment by placing an apostle in the Senate.”
It’s interesting how descriptive that can be of the modern Christian Right in America, the theological (and sometimes biological) descendants of those who charged Smoot with being unfit for public office based upon the above argument.
The hearings were actually more complicated than this appears. First, they didn’t simply attack Smoot because he was Mormon. Instead, they attacked him for belonging to a church that promised to eliminate polygamy while tacitly allowing it — even two of the other Apostles were polygamists. This scandalized mainstream Protestants of the era. Second, the hearings (which lasted 3 years and produced over 3,000 pages of testimony) were designed primarily as a venue for going after the Mormon Church, not Smoot himself. Smoot was merely an excuse for Protestants to do what they had longed for: take apart the Mormon Church piece by piece.
