The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle - Couverture souple

Flake, Kathleen

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0807855014 ISBN 13 : 9780807855010

Editeur : The University of North Carolina Press, 2004

Synopsis

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. The 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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date d'édition: 2004
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0807855014
• ISBN 13: 9780807855010
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 254
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible