shortly after warren jeffs's arrest and subsequent prosecution, American media bombarded audiences with countless stories of Fundamentalist crime. Screens and papers carried stories about trafficking, violence, and, of course, polygamy. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) became a spectacle of impropriety and abuse. As this happened, people became familiar with accounts of nonviolent crime within the community. Food stamp fraud emerged as a concerning offense associated with the religion, and the mugshot of Lyle Jeffs, brother to prophet Warren, appeared alongside headlines that carefully outlined his involvement in criminal deception. Of the fraud and subsequent arrest, US attorney general John Huber explained, “We're not out to punish people of faith, people with sincere religiously held belief. . . . We're out to punish fraudsters.”1 While the state and federal government clarified that Lyle Jeffs was responsible and restitution would come from him, and not the faithful of the community, many members of the church found themselves at the receiving end of internet commentary that raised renewed questions around the controversial religion and whether their beliefs were sincerely held enough.2“Maybe crack down on the welfare fraud instead of legalizing polygamy, which is really just pedophelia [sic], anyway,” one person commented on social media, writing the views of many who read stories of welfare fraud with great concern.3 Another questioned, “Is it true polygamist[s] live off state assistance and that's how they get the housing compounds paid for free from the government[?]” They continued, “I would propose marry one woman and not have 50 kids you can't support. I know[,] weird concept.”4 These sentiments became part of the broader conversation over polygamy's place in the American marriage system, some arguing that polygamy was acceptable so long as it involved consenting adults who could support their family without government assistance. A sincerely held religious belief had an economic component. Others circulated stories of how Mormon Fundamentalists used their doctrine to justify fraudulent behavior, “bleeding the beast” as restitution for the government's ban on polygamy.5 Soon, fraudulent activity in the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) and Latter Day Church of Christ (Davis County Cooperative Society) found its way into the news. Economic misconduct and religious misconduct became deeply enmeshed in questions around correct Mormon practice.The public conversation over the FLDS differed widely from the public's perception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as suburban and clad in Woollen Mills. Even if individual members of the LDS Church were not wealthy, they appeared capable of owning single-family homes and untouched by the optics of poverty. This middle-class presentation was not always the case for Mormon Fundamentalism, however. From the earliest years of the movement, members struggled with financial hardship and a lack of both governmental and religious assistance to meet the needs of their doctrinally obligated growing families. They did not meet the expectation for what it meant to be Mormon, and they certainly did not meet the expectation for what it meant to be a “correct” or “good” religion in America. In short, they were “bad,” at least in part, because they were poor. Mormonism's shift toward acceptability in the United States’ religious marketplace required a shift in both perception and economic reality. Concurrently, the minority Fundamentalist communities left behind reflected the religious differences that act as markers for “correct” religious public engagement and participation.Among other things, Mormons became modern by adopting the spirit of capitalism associated with America's most prominent religion. Mormons who positioned themselves as opposed to modernity and found themselves outside the classed perception that came to be associated with modern Mormonism were left out of both Mormonism and Mormon studies. Class difference is one of the many under-theorized markers of religious difference and what constitutes “good religion.” To be sure, the FLDS institution committed welfare fraud at a high level. But underneath the criminal allegations and prosecutions lurked a marker of religious difference that remains uninterrogated. The FLDS did religion wrong and breached American expectations for religion by worshipping Jesus without an economic return.When Joseph Smith first penned his vision of Zion, as revealed by God, it included a people united in their efforts toward righteousness and promised there would be “no poor among them” (Moses 7:18).6 Communitarian ideals abounded, but this vision never came to fruition. After Smith's death, under the presidency of Brigham Young, the church's vision for Zion shifted. As David Walker demonstrates, contrary to anti-Mormon dissenters who believed the influx of industry in the West was the end of Mormonism, Young introduced a capitalist fervor that ultimately shaped the church's future. Under Young, Mormonism transformed into a “‘public good’ of and for the industrializing West.”7 Before this time, in the nation's mind, “Mormons were inauthentically or insufficiently religious insofar as their ‘religion’ consisted of barbarous theocracy, violence, resource monopoly, and polygamy.”8 Presented with industrialization, Mormonism rose to the challenge and became part of American religion. This was not without reservation. Brigham Young expressed notable concern over the mines but sought to adapt modes of industrialization in ways that mimicked a Zion ideal. This often occurred alongside dissenting groups who favored capitalist innovation, such as The Church of Zion (Godbeites).9 Scholars have written about the multiple ways that Mormonism became part of American secularism, including the end to plural marriage and participation in both racial segregation and integration. Industry and capitalism were simply mountains climbed in the Mormon trek toward the secular.Mormon participation in American economic ideals continued into the twentieth century, as the church's spiritual and temporal realities became increasingly connected.10 The Great Depression began around the same time. Beyond Mormonism, this period gravely affected individual religiosity, and many institutions found that “economic catastrophe brooked little spiritual exceptionalism.”11 As banks collapsed, farms closed, and businesses failed, people across the United States became or remained poor. In Utah, unemployment rose to 35.9% and, by 1932, almost one-third of the state received aid from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.12 With this reality looming in the background, the LDS Church sought to respond and, in doing so, reinforce their position as an American religion.The LDS Church's welfare program, built in response to the New Deal, was marketed as “the better, more American, more constitutional way out of the Depression.”13 The program paralleled the governmental system, and anticipated a potential impact of social programming that church leaders felt warranted their concern.14 During the church's October 1933 General Conference, Heber J. Grant addressed the faithful: “I believe that there is a growing disposition among the people to try to get something from the government of the United States with little hope of ever paying it back,” he warned. “I think this is all wrong.”15 The concern was “dole mentality” and a shift away from individual self-reliance.16 Mirroring the growing trend in American Protestantism, economic certainty became equated with righteousness.17Righteousness as a path toward economic certainty was not enough for many Latter-day Saints. Some looked at statements by leaders with increased skepticism. In his reflection on general conference, Joseph Musser, a future Fundamentalist leader, wrote, “The hackneyed cry of ‘pay your tithing and be blessed,’ has lost its glamour among a people left by their shepherds to drift and roam in the wilderness, crying for relief and all the time going deeper into bondage.”18 The church's emphasis on individual economic mobility seemed nothing more than a distant hope, and cooperation with an American ideal contradictory to the nineteenth-century faith. Among many things that raised questions concerning the early Fundamentalist movement was whether one could be Mormon and believe in the economic ideals of the nation, now upheld by Latter-day Saint prophets as God's truth.From the church's perspective, rightfully, the New Deal was American. As Latter-day Saints viewed involvement in American politics as an opportunity for both integration and expansion of their own influence, Fundamentalists viewed economic participation as a capitulation to the government and nothing more.19 Following the Depression and World War II, the LDS Church capitalized on federal programs and modern business practices to become one of the wealthiest religious organizations in the nation and a fully American faith.The same was not true for other Mormons, including Joseph W. Musser, a Mormon man who continued his polygamous marriages after the institutional church's end to the practice. “Overdrawn at bank. Sweating blood, but not discouraged,” wrote Musser of his precarious financial position.20 In stark contrast to the picture of modern Mormonism frequently found in histories of the LDS Church, his poverty exacerbated by his three marriages and multiple children, the early leader of the Mormon Fundamentalist movement was poor. His financial struggles were mirrored by those of other early members of the movement who were similarly excommunicated from their faith at the height of the Depression.In response to their financial precarity, the fledgling faith turned to history and sought to recreate the United Order, the early Mormon communitarian program based on the Law of Consecration. The United Order was born in financial scarcity and has operated under those conditions ever since. About three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, Short Creek emerged as a “refuge for the Saints” who sought isolation from both their previous religious institution and the state.21 While rich in history, tradition, and culture, the community built on the Arizona Strip was poor in the material wealth that marked correct participation in American religion.Today, Short Creek mirrors Appalachia, as author Denis Covington described it. Speaking of the way the culture became “harder and more durable” through poverty's refining fire and the fuller's soap of middle-class disdain, he wrote, “We're as peculiar a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our culture is under assault has forced us to become even more peculiar than we were before.”22 He continued, “It started when people came down from the hills to discover they were surrounded by a hostile and spiritually dead culture. All along their border with the modern world. . . . They threw up defenses. When their own resources failed, they called down the Holy Ghost. They put their hands in fire. They drank poison. They took up serpents.”23Polygamous Mormons never handled serpents. But the emergence of the Mormon Fundamentalist movement happened alongside the growth of snake handling in Appalachia, both reflecting alternate versions of modernity that were distinct from the religions they felt too closely resembled the world around them. Like Appalachia, Short Creek was forged in fire in the context of a church and nation that discarded anything that refused to comport with American social ideals. Latter-day Saints became American by embracing American capitalism. The reality of the broader American economic system meant that polygamous Saints’ class status was inadaptable. They remained mostly poor, a spectacle of polygamy and poverty, and not participants in the ideal of American religion. They are proud of their refusal to yield to American corporate interests or kowtow to the Protestant-secular's expectations for how “good” religions should operate.From the perspective of the wider public, the LDS Church became fully American in part because there appeared to be no poor among them. Scholarship on the LDS Church similarly mirrored this perception. Save for an article in the Salt Lake Tribune that described a small branch for Latter-day Saints experiencing homelessness, poverty and class remain largely absent in current popular discourse and the broader field.24 Class is often collapsed into discussions of race and depictions of poverty are read through a racial lens.25 To be poor in America was to be not White—or not White enough.26When class interrogation does emerge, it focuses on the wealth of the LDS Church and critiques of the institution's corporate status. In May 2018, MormonLeaks released information connecting the church to thirty-two billion dollars in US corporate investments.27 This research found stock holdings connected to domain names registered to Intellectual Reserve, Inc., the organization that holds the church's intellectual property. Well before MormonLeaks’ revelations, D. Michael Quinn had argued that corporate stocks acted to bridge the gap between the institutional church and the leadership of the church that owned many of the involved businesses.28 Histories on David O. McKay and modernity argued for a similar framing of Mormonism as a venture that appears deeply American.29American economic enterprise touched every facet of life for the average Latter-day Saint in the Salt Lake Valley. To paint the picture of the extent of this involvement, Quinn's work gave readers a thorough overview of businesses that were intertwined with the LDS Church between 1907 and 1932. On a typical day, this person woke up to a bowl of cereal produced by Utah Cereal Food Company that they ate while reading the Deseret News before hopping on a streetcar powered by Utah Light and Traction Company to get to work at Gold Chain Mining. In this example, the average Mormon touched numerous companies that Latter-day Saint General Authorities served as officers or directors. The boundary between temporal and spiritual wealth for Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley was thin—if it existed at all. While the LDS Church and its members received funds from the New Deal, GI Bill, and other initiatives, the bootstrap ideal of movement out of economic depression without the aid of government programs infused with the sacred became modern Latter-day Saint Mormonism. The “average” Latter-day Saint portrayed by Quinn was every Mormon.Of course, this was not every Mormon. Even in places of worship, the economic disparity between Mormon groups is manifest. Across the Intermountain West, Fundamentalist Mormons meet in double-wide trailers converted into temples and prepare canned goods for the community's consecration program, a manifestation the continuance of early Mormon communitarianism. Both images of other modern Mormonisms stand in contrast to the hotel-like style of Latter-day Saint temples and real estate development in downtown Salt Lake City. In the field of Mormon studies, questions that involve social intersections are inseparable from questions about representation. When we write about modern Mormonism, we write about a Mormonism that became modern and ourselves assume the Latter-day Saint narrative as normative across the restoration.In Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, Peter Coviello subtly suggests that the academic field of Mormon studies was part of the secularizing shift that made nineteenth-century Mormons already secular.30 Secularization took hold over time and in many ways, including the sanitization of polygamy. But it also happened in the assumption that questions about class received satisfactory answers. For many reasons, Fundamentalist Mormons are a response to the way Mormon studies tells history. They are not correctly religious or correctly American. This is not just because of their controversial marriage practices or allegations and prosecutions about abuse. I suggest it is because of the more challenging reality that they do not meet the class expectations of “good” American religion.
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Open Access
Jan 2, 2023
Eva Nilsson 