Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West by David Walker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West by David Walker Dana Logan David Walker, Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) Railroading Religion describes Brigham Young not only welcoming the Union and Central Pacific railroads but also giving them one hundred and thirty-two acres of land and access to cheap Mormon laborers. This description is also an argument: Mormons built the railroads and the railroads built Mormonism. The narrative of these two institutions' mutual construction reveals that the term "western religion" obscures the substantial material and discursive labor that went into making Americans think of Mormonism as western and the West as sublime. Latter-Day Saints and railroad companies worked together to build these narratives because they felt a fundamental mutual recognition as corporations that were not strictly private or public, that built economies and culture, and that wielded a vertical form of power. In the last chapters of the book, David Walker speaks to historians of religion more broadly, providing a critical case study of humans constructing the sacred. The sublimity of Mormons' geographic settlement and the train's conquering of space and time were both laborious projects undertaken by humans in unlikely partnerships. These partnerships are the subject of each chapter, beginning with the failed partnership of railroads, the United States government, and anti-Mormon settlers in Utah. Focusing on a town called Corinne [End Page 134] that was settled by anti-Mormons in chapter one, Walker uses the town as a way to describe anti-Mormon fantasies (both local and national) of Mormonism's demise through economic development. Trains would bring more Americans to Utah, and Mormons would not be able to maintain their peculiarity in the face of progress. Walker spends quite a bit of time with these anti-Mormon dreamers, not as a study of anti-Mormonism, but as a study of failed visions of progress. Initially railroads were anti-Mormon allies, but in a surprising turn Brigham Young saw the coming railroads as an opportunity for Mormon expansion. Walker builds on scholarship that grapples with Mormonism as a socio-political formation that was both theocratic and communitarian. Young saw opportunity in the extension of federal land laws in 1868–1869 (passed in anticipation of the Transcontinental Railroad), and he directed high-ranking churchmen to file preemption claims and then act as trustees and parcel out land to their fellow congregants. The Saints thus beat the railroads to land claims, developed those lands, and then gave them to the railroads in exchange for making Mormon Ogden (rather than anti-Mormon Corrine) a major hub of the Transcontinental Railroad. If Mormonism is a "western religion," we should think of that category as inherently defined by land grabs, industrial development, and resource hoarding. Walker's point here is broader: how would we reread our definitions of any religion if we asked more about how that religion related to resource control and less about symbolic invocations of sacred space? In the second half of the book, Walker describes Mormonism as a form of spectacle that defies our typical definitions of the religious other. Mormon leaders utilized the train as a vehicle for tourism, inviting outsiders to come and see their services, admire their industry, and revel in their peculiar institutions. Leading American intellectuals clamored to meet with Brigham Young, who hosted approximately 615 visitors the first year after the Transcontinental Railroad was built and 1,700 visitors in the second year. Walker is not denying the stakes of anti-Mormon vitriol in nineteenth-century United States, but he is describing how Mormons were able to use attention in a way that differentiated them from other practitioners of so-called bad religion: namely, Native Americans and Muslims. Walker shows that both church leaders and railroad agents created spaces, museums, and observation cars on the trains, which allowed tourists to view Mormons as uniquely linked to the landscape of Utah. These displays also encouraged spectators to compare Mormons with Native Americans, Muslims, and other "pagan" religionists. By encouraging tourism, Mormons asked their detractors to gaze upon their difference, compare Mormon difference...