David’s recent post, coupled with a review of a new book by John Turner over at Religion in American History, has caused me to reflect on the place of Mormonism in larger narratives of American history. Recent historians of the Jacksonian Era have taken different approaches to the subject of Mormonism. Charles Sellers, in his 1991 The Market Revolution, spent nearly nine pages of his chapter on “God and Mammon” explaining and interpreting early Mormonism. Though his interpretation that “this patriarchal utopia arose from male panic [in which] the manhood of a generation of young fathers was threatened by inability to meet traditional family obligations” seems problematic and insufficient in explaining Mormonism, and in spite of careless mistakes in his discussion of the Book of Mormon (he repeatedly calls the Lamanites the “Amanites”), it remains significant that Sellers spent 1/3 of the chapter on religion on Mormonism.1
Sean Wilentz, in his more recent The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (winner of the 2005 Bancroft Prize and Pulitzer Prize Finalist), spends only one paragraph of the 800-page book on the Mormons. He offers little-to-no interpretation of the movement, simply noting that Mormonism was one of the most successful and “by far the most daring . . . of the spiritual enthusiasms that swept through the Yankee Northeast in the 1820s and 1830s,” and that Mormons in Utah practiced polygamy.2
At first, it might seem easy to explain the strikingly different takes on Mormonism in each of the books by looking at each author’s interpretive framework. Whereas Sellers sees “the Market” as the driving force of all aspects of American society during this era (a framework which popular religion fits easily into), Wilentz seeks to reassert “the importance of political events, ideas, and leaders to democracy’s rise” in contrast to “the importance of religion” (among other things) in the grand narrative of antebellum history.3 However, John Turner noted his pleasant surprise at “the amount of scholarship on evangelicalism and other religious movements that Wilentz digested and incorporated into his synthesis of the Early Republic.”4
I have yet to read Daniel Walker Howe’s new book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (part of the award-winning Oxford History of the United States series), but it appears that Howe spends some time discussing millennial belief of the era, using the Millerites and Mormons as two prominent examples. The new book has also received praise from religious historians Mark Noll and Paul Harvey, so my hopes are high that religion (and Mormonism) will be addressed at some length.
All of this leads to the question: how significant is Mormon history to the larger narrative of American history? Is Wilentz right in granting Mormonism just one paragraph in a 800-page book on antebellum American history? Or is Sellers (and possibly Howe) more accurate in devoting more time to Mormonism’s place in American history?
1 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 217-226.
2 Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 634-635.
3 Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, xx.
4 John Turner, “Wilentz, God, and What Hath God Wrought, Part II,” at Religion in American History, October 29, 2007.