Article Review: Tammy Heise, “Marking Mormon Difference: How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the ‘Mormon Menace’” (Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 25:1)
Friday, September 13th, 2013
Tammy Heise, “Marking Mormon Difference: How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the ‘Mormon Menace’,” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 25:1 (Spring 2013), 82–97.
In her article “Marking Mormon Difference: How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the ‘Mormon Menace’,” Tammy Heise argues that inaccurate perceptions of Muslims played a key role in shaping and sustaining the narrative of “slavery and defilement” that Protestant American writers put forward about the Latter-day Saints throughout the 19th century (82). Her argument is premised on the compelling suggestion that 19th-century anti-Mormon literature drew heavily on popular anti-Muslim images then circulating in American culture. In particular, she argues, anti-Mormon writers used images of Turkish sultans wielding absolute power over their political realms and their private harems to convey the message that Mormon leaders exercised anti-republican forms of political and spiritual control over their followers and immoral sexual control over their female followers in particular. Although Heise’s claims are tantalizingly suggestive, unfortunately she does not do more in this article than hint at rich possibilities for future exploration of this subject.
Heise examines a number of anti-Mormon sources from the period, but despite her assertion that “anti-Mormon writers drew on a rich body of polemic literature describing the sexual immorality and political tyranny of the Muslim world” (83, emphasis mine), she does not engage directly with anti-Islamic sources. What were these sources? Books, newspapers, periodicals? Were whole articles and/or books dedicated to describing the Muslim Menace, or were images of Islam largely restricted to passing references in writing dedicated to other subjects (like the Latter-day Saints)? A side-by-side comparison of images of Muslims and orientalized representations of Mormons would have allowed her to draw out the similarities and differences between the two, and might have highlighted the specific anxieties about “foreign” religions that these images expressed. One golden opportunity for such comparison is the work of Richard Francis Burton, the famed British explorer whose Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah (1855) and The City of the Saints (1862) – describing his travel to the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City – were popular with both British and American readers in the mid-19th century.1 Without this context it is difficult to gauge the relative importance of the images that Heise describes in the anti-Mormon literature she examines.
Heise claims that anti-Mormon literature “relied largely on anti-Muslim caricatures” to convey the Saints’ enslavement and defilement both of individual female bodies and their “violation of the social body through […] treachery and authoritarianism” (82). But this assertion that anti-Muslim imagery carried greater weight in the popular imagination than the tropes circulating in anti-Catholic tales – which were written about a religious minority that, unlike Islam, had a substantial and constantly increasing presence within the US – calls for more support. It is difficult to imagine that representations of a distant minority like Muslims could have had a more significant impact on American Protestant readers than such wildly popular anti-Catholic tales as the fictive 1836 “memoir” of Maria Monk’s captivity in a French Canadian Roman Catholic convent in Montreal.2 The tale – which clearly served as a model for the later “memoir” of the fictional escaped-Mormon Maria Ward – featured all of the major characteristics that Heise identifies as influential in representations of Mormons as Muslims: despotic rulers who mixed religion with government; false religion; the captivity and defilement of female bodies. And it was a best-seller. Heise needed to do more here to demonstrate what – other than the public practice in Muslim communities of what Protestant Americans firmly believed they knew Roman Catholics were doing in secret (87) – distinguished the use in this period of the Muslim image from the use of popular representations of any other non-Protestant religion, and Roman Catholics in particular.
It is not possible, based on the evidence Heise explores here, to see whether and how images of Islam reinforced 19th-century representations of Mormons differently than did writers’ frequent comparisons of the Saints to the Roman Catholic community. Given Heise’s acknowledgment that Islam was by no means the only religious or ethnic other whose image was invoked in the 19th-century project of othering the Latter-day Saints, her examination of images of Muslims within anti-Mormon writing calls for some comparison (p. 94, n. 2). How frequently did images of Muslims appear in anti-Mormon writing, and how did the number and length of those appearances compare to images of other minority groups? While Heise seems to indicate that images of Muslims served different purposes, in the anti-Mormon writing of this period, than did images of Roman Catholics, she does not clearly show how the images of these groups were deployed differently or describe the varying anxieties expressed by images of each.3
I hope that this article is the beginning, for Heise, of a larger examination of the use of the Muslim image in 19th-century anti-Mormon literature – and, further, of the broader uses to which representations of Islam were put in American culture in this period. Heise’s observations here merely scratch the surface of what promises to be a much richer subject.
Cristine Hutchison-Jones earned her PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of religion in the United States with a focus on religious intolerance and representations of minorities. Her dissertation, “Reviling and Revering the Mormons: Defining American Values, 1890-2008,” explored images of the Mormons in American news, fiction and non-fiction writing, and television and film. She is the author of “Center and Periphery: Mormons and American Culture” in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
 While Burton himself was British, Heise indicates by her inclusion in the article of the British film Trapped by the Mormons (1922) that she is willing to consider sources that were consumed but not produced by Americans.
 For more discussion of the importance of Monk’s memoir in particular and 19th-century convent tales in general in the American imagination, see Veil of Fear, edited and with an introduction by Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Purdue University Press, 1999). The book attributed to book was quickly followed by a number of new editions that featured additions designed to confirm Monk’s assertions, including supposed plans of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery in Montreal.
 A number of secondary sources compare anti-Mormon literature to other writings of intolerance in the 19th century. J. Spencer Fluhman’s “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) examined the use of the Muslim image throughout the 19th century, but particularly in the middle of the century when the Saints were first building their kingdom in the West. Terryl L. Givens’ The Viper on the Hearth, which Heise references several times, deeply examined the orientalization of Mormons as a central aspect of the 19th-century American project of redefining Mormons as a foreign body within the nation’s borders [see, for example, “‘They Ain’t Whites…They’re Mormons’: Fictive Responses to the Anxiety of Seduction” in Givens, Viper updated edition (OUP, 2012), esp. 141–149]. Givens also analyzed the relationship between anti-Mormon and anti-Catholic tales, and both he and Jenny Franchot, whose Roads to Rome (University of California, 1994) Heise also cites, look further back to the relationship of American anti-Catholic narratives to early Indian captivity narratives. Heise does not engage these aspects of either Givens’ or Franchot’s work.