"A Peculiar People": Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America by J. Spencer Fluhman (review)

The world needs more books like Fluhman's deft account of nineteenth-century anti-Mormon literature and the fascinating American dialogues about religion that anti-Mormonism produced. Interdisciplinarity and historicity thrive simultaneously in "A Peculiar People," and Fluhman's marvelously succinct book as much elevates him as a historian of synoptic breadth as it uplifts his subject.

"A Peculiar People" is, indeed, the quintessential history book. It almost wallows in its sources, and with little wonder, since they are fascinating by any measure. Davis, in his classic 1960 article comparing mainly antebellum anti-Masonic, anti-Mormon, and anti-Catholic propaganda, discovered the thematic angle that Fluhman explores.¹ Extending his analysis to the end of the nineteenth century, specifically to Utah's admission as a state in 1896, Fluhman bores deeply into anti-Mormonism. A dozen nineteenth-century periodical illustrations vividly convey the gap between Mormon self-presentation and anti-Mormon vitriol. But words said even more, and Fluhman examines them nimbly.

Fluhman emphasizes five themes in the quickly exploding anti-Mormon fusillade—imposter, delusion, fanaticism, barbarism, and heresy. David Reese's Humbugs of New York: Being a Remonstrance against Popular Delusion; Whether in Science, Philosophy, or Religion (New York, 1838) described Joseph Smith as the worst of the state's several religious frauds, more dangerous than New York City's Prophet Matthias, Fanny Wright, animal magnetism, or phrenology because Smith seemed so successful. Reese predicted that Smith's "'inquity shall wind up its history in pollution, infamy, and blood'" (21). In an allied vein, Fluhman quotes New York Congressman Caleb Lyon on Mormonism's descent to barbarism: "'Point me to a nation where polygamy is practiced, and I will point you to heathens and barbarians'" (108).

Fluhman's most important argument is a simple, elegant one, namely, that anti-Mormonism not only brought forth bigotry but thrust up agitatedly fascinating notions about religion. Concerned to establish Smith's prophetic illegitimacy, for example, anti-Mormon advocates felt obliged to describe the difference between true and false religion by way of judging true and false prophets. In doing so, Fluhman argues, anti-Mormon propagandists often drew on history, especially Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric but also eighteenth-century Enlightenment arguments against "religion generally," now employed against religious imposters like Smith, even as they had to account for the new conditions that promoted many religions and religious troubles in America (27).

Mormon President Wilford Woodruff's 1890 Manifesto ending polygamy extended the effort in an opposite direction. The Protestant historians Henry K. Carroll and Leonard W. Bacon struggled to place a tamed Mormonism within the panoply of American religion. The reason was not hard to find. As Fluhman observes, "Mormonism had been so thoroughly exoticized between 1850 and 1890 that few knew how to treat a more mundane version of the faith" (138).

"A Peculiar People"—sophisticated and wonderfully mature—is as notable for its contribution to understanding the concept of religion in nineteenth-century America as it is for its contribution to the narrative histories of both Mormonism and American religion broadly conceived.