2022 Best Anthology Book Award, John Whitmer Historical Association
“This remarkable volume deepens our understanding of this watershed moment, not only for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also for the nation during the Progressive Era.”
—Randall Balmer, Dartmouth University
“The Reed Smoot Hearings is an important addition to the ongoing reassessment of Mormon history in the twentieth century, providing much needed detail surrounding a signal event in that history.”
—Nova Religio
“This volume of vividly imagined, deeply researched essays on the Reed Smoot hearings is a boon to scholars, students, and lay readers with interests in the Latter-day Saints, the politics of marriage and intimate relationships, the permutations of the church-state compact, the uneven advance of religious pluralism, and the dawn of an American secular age.”
—Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University
“A welcome contribution to our understanding of the jarring shifts the Church was making in the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly as it offers windows into the Smoot family and other spaces where the Church’s religious evolution has often been understudied.”
—Journal of Church and State
“Paulos and Smith Hansen’s book has several merits, especially that of keeping at the forefront a pivotal chapter in Latter-day Saint and US religious history.”
—Mormon Studies Review
“This new collection of essays, edited by two Smoot experts, adds many details and contexts to this important episode. Though the introduction rightly notes that none of the chapters radically challenge existing literature—and, indeed, mostly “build[s] on” the work of previous scholars like Kathleen Flake (16)—there is plenty provocative detail.“
—Benjamin Park, Church History
“This is an interesting collection of essays that illuminate a very important period in Latter-day Saint history. The general reader will find much to amuse, as well as educate, and the scholar will find in it not only much of interest but also opportunities for further research. The relative brevity of these essays makes the volume of use in undergraduate courses in Latter-day Saint and US political history.”
—Kathleen Flake, Dialogue
“A book on Mormon and American relations during the Progressive Era has the feeling of coming into the middle of a movie...The essays in the collection address how the hearings affected American church-state relations as well as individual lives and careers.“
—Journal of American History
Book Synopsis
The outcome of the Smoot hearings in 1907, which resulted in Senator-apostle Reed Smoot’s favor, not only indicated an expansion of American religious pluralism in American society, but also displayed the continued and complex religious nature of America’s budding secularized nation-state. This olive branch of inclusion however should not be interpreted as a blanket acceptance of religious difference, but instead an uncompromising declaration that religion that deviated too far from Protestant norms would not be tolerated. Indeed, Mormonism’s acceptance by way of this American experiment of religious liberty required dramatic changes in Mormon teachings and practices, as well as the sacrifice of its more uncompromising leadership.
The Smoot hearings stand as an important case-study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America, and the principles of exclusion and coercion such was often predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the state for the new modern century. Simultaneously, this episode highlights the awkwardness of these shifts within Mormonism as it re-defined itself as part of this new modern-secular progressive era.
The scholarship in this volume adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of American political institutions and national policies. Beyond this, individual essays also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in impacting these institutional and national developments.
Contributors: Byron W. Daynes and Kathryn M. Daynes, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Kathryn Smoot Egan, Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, D. Michael Quinn
First Featured book of the week, Church History. Originally tweeted by Church History (@ASChurchHistory) on August 30, 2021.