Terryl Givens took anti-Mormonism seriously in Viper on the Hearth. This is a point so obvious that it seems self-evident now. He viewed anti-Mormonism not just as an expression of underlying economic grievances, political jealousies, or social abnormalities, but argued instead that American Protestants disliked Mormonism for the very reasons they said they did not like them. American Protestants found the Mormon belief in a God that continued to reveal Himself into modern times heretical and the Mormon posture of exclusivity filled with hatred and vitriol. The problem, according to Givens, was that nineteenth-century American Protestants had no simple way to respond to these criticisms. Protestant practice and theology overlapped with many Mormon beliefs, so Christian commentators faced a dilemma. If they criticized Mormonism on these overlapping grounds, they might unintendedly undermine the basis of Christianity itself.American Protestants resolved this predicament, according to Givens, by portraying Mormonism as distinctively un-American. Drawing on postcolonial theory, he demonstrated the ways lurid descriptions of Mormonism became a technique for American Protestants to assert power over Mormonism. American Protestants devalued Mormonism as different from them and as something different than a religion.One of the major legacies of Viper on the Hearth was demonstrating the usefulness of labeling heretical ideas. Anti-Mormonism had cultural power. Givens described how religion worked to create a sense of American identity. Spencer Fluhman seized on Givens's ideas to demonstrate an irredeemable tension between Mormonism and Protestants. In his analysis of how Protestants saw Mormonism as an imposter religion, a deluded faith, and a fanatical belief system, Fluhman argued Mormonism gave Protestants a tactic to define the very meaning of religion itself. He believed depicting Mormonism as something other than a legitimate faith allowed Protestants to deny the privileges of religious tolerance to Mormonism.1Joseph Smith and his followers enraged antebellum evangelicals not just because of their differences, but because of their similarities. What I have argued in my forthcoming manuscript on the relationship between antebellum evangelicalism and Mormonism is that the rise of an anti-Mormon impulse within evangelicalism suggests something significant about evangelicalism, Mormon studies, and religious intolerance. Highlighting the affinities between evangelical criticisms of Mormonism and the internal disagreements within evangelicalism itself uncovers the unintended ways anti-Mormonism shaped the beliefs and practices of evangelicalism.Antebellum anti-Mormon criticisms may have seemed like a kitchen-sink of religious prejudice with the aim of tarring a religious revival, but evangelicals knew these charges all too well. They fought bitterly amongst themselves on all of these same issues, disagreeing with each other over the same complaints they levelled against Mormonism. Most of these charges of religious intolerance surrounded the revivals of the Second Great Awakening where evangelicals critical of revivalism blamed their coreligionists with aiding and abetting the rise of Mormonism itself. Anti-Mormonism became a tool for some antebellum evangelicals to define the boundaries and limits of evangelical identity.This story of how Mormonism made evangelicalism began in western New York in the late 1820s as religious innovation and revival swept the American landscape. Antebellum evangelicals developed a formulaic set of criticisms in these earliest years of encounter. They criticized Mormonism by comparing it to the followers of faith based on rival revelations, to the adherents of enthusiastic religious movements, to dabblers in occult practices, and to the members of discredited civic groups. They also attacked the character of Joseph Smith and his family. The first evangelical criticisms of Mormons highlighted the ways these critics believed the followers of Joseph Smith created and confused religious truth. At the same time, within their own ranks, evangelicals had similar struggles with coreligionists who manipulated the Bible to suit their own agenda. Evangelicals additionally feared the emotional displays of Mormonism because they believed the worship services of Latter-day Saints had no basis in reality. These malevolent descriptions of early Mormon worship services mirrored critical depictions of evangelical revivals sweeping across antebellum America.The evangelical group that felt most under assault in these earliest years of encounter was the restorationist Stone-Campbell movement that coalesced under the leadership of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell. Both shared a founding impulse to restore Christianity to its earliest forms and impulses. Attacks from other evangelical groups that conflated the Stone-Campbell movement and Mormonism led the leaders of the Stone-Campbell movement to distance themselves from Mormonism. Leaders of the movement used anti-Mormonism to further an internecine religious agenda of excising members who supported a more radical spiritist agenda.The antebellum evangelical criticisms of Mormonism expanded over the course of the 1830s and 1840s to encompass economic and scriptural concerns. Mormonism sinfully mixed God and mammon in divergent ways, according to antebellum evangelicals. Antebellum evangelicals described Joseph Smith as lazy and poor, as well as a person who used his personal charisma to enrich himself and turn religion into big business. When antebellum evangelicals found out about Mormonism's establishment of a communitarian economic system, they saw it as bad economic policy and a sin against God. At the same time antebellum evangelicals accused Mormonism of manipulating a modern economic system and embracing a premodern economic sensibility, similar anxieties about economics existed within the evangelical movement. A growing group of evangelicals had become anxious that some of their coreligionists used faith as a profit-making enterprise, while others argued that evangelicalism enabled individuals and businesses to go beyond the limits of a moral economic system. Apprehension about the economic developments of their own coreligionists led individuals both in opposition to and supportive of the “Benevolent Empire” to use anti-Mormonism to negotiate understandings of the relationship between God and money.Coinciding with these economic charges, antebellum evangelicals built on older concerns and developed new criticisms concerning Mormonism's scriptural practices. As antebellum evangelicals continued to charge that the Book of Mormon was false, they also became obsessed with determining the true author of Mormonism's holy writ. These accusations about the inaccurate and inauthentic nature of the Book of Mormon mirrored evangelical concerns about the historical nature of their own Bible. An increasing awareness that the Bible was a product of the past, in combination with the belief that any person could read and interpret the Bible for themselves, led some evangelicals to place the blame for the rise of new religious movements, like Mormonism, on the theological creativity of the Second Great Awakening.The powerful and creative uses of anti-Mormonism coalesced around the founding of the Mormons’ Nauvoo in the late 1830s and 1840s. Antebellum evangelicals charged Mormonism at Nauvoo with engaging in a radical spiritism, a militant ethos, and a destructive exclusivity. They found it laughable that the followers of Joseph Smith actually believed God spoke to and interacted with them on a regular basis. Antebellum evangelicalism experienced the same set of concerns over the role of spiritism within their own movement, most significantly over the role of revivalism. Some of those evangelicals most concerned about the progress of revivalism within their own movement blamed their coreligionists for the rise of Mormonism through their emphasis on the role of private judgment within religion, creating false impressions about the role of the Holy Spirit, and the spreading of confusion.Evangelicals concerned about revivalism saw the lack of organized religious structures at camp meetings leading directly to the rise and spread of Mormonism because it led individuals to make judgments about religion for themselves. The United States was particularly susceptible to the rise of Mormonism because, according to the English Episcopalian Henry Caswall, the lack of “authorized expositors” or a “consistent scheme of doctrine” encouraged people to believe what they wanted. While Caswall would not have identified himself with other antebellum evangelicals, he authored several popular writings on revivalism and participated in some revivals. He believed the lack of consistent teachers allowed “numerous wild forms of religion” to hold “extensive sway.” These developments led to the “powers of rational influence” breaking down in “the minds of the enormous masses of the population,” making it “easy” for Joseph Smith to “persuade them that the Spirit was abundantly poured out upon them” when the Mormon prophet and “his accomplices succeeded in working up their hearers.”2In addition to encouraging people to trust their feelings in religious matters, other evangelicals concerned about the radical spiritism of revivalism concluded revivals could create false impressions about the activities of the Holy Spirit. The Presbyterian Jonathan Turner placed much of the blame on this account on the leaders of the Cane Ridge revival. Like many other religious impostures throughout history, he charged that its organizers had made “bodily agitation and sympathetic convulsions” the “clearest signs” of the Holy Spirit. Joseph Smith had done the same, according to Turner. People would be unable to distinguish the true voice of God and have too much confidence in their own salvation. Turner saw these events taking place at Cane Ridge and then with “the Mormons, at Kirtland, Ohio,” where they received “wonderful manifestations of Divine favor.”3Too much focus on emotion and the workings of the Holy Spirit also enabled the rise of Mormonism, according to these antirevival evangelicals, because it sowed confusion. Turner wrote how the revivalism of the Cane Ridge revivals and Mormonism both constituted an “outrage upon the common sense of mankind.” This aspect of Mormonism that blurred true religion could be found “in all ages and all churches,” in both “Kentucky, or at Nauvoo.” Both worked “up their hearers, by one stratagem or another, to their most excitement, and then . . . [inform] them that the Spirit is poured out upon them.” Antebellum evangelicals who used these techniques should not be surprised because Turner charged that Joseph Smith merely perfected what had come before him.4These same evangelicals concerned about the radical spiritist qualities of revivalism believed the martial ethos of camp meetings had led to the rise of Mormonism through the use of violence and fostering of sympathy for the followers of Joseph Smith. Jonathan Turner denounced the aggressive “military authority” evangelicalism and Mormonism both used to make and maintain converts. He compared Mormonism to the ecstatic forms of revivalism found at the Cane Ridge revivals. Both groups, according to Turner, relied on intimidation to make their arguments “and the halter” to silence “all objections.”5Antirevival evangelicals finally concluded that the sectarian fanaticism within their own movement was not only like the feelings of exclusivity amongst Mormonism, but that this righteous attitude had furthered the very rise of Mormonism. The Second Great Awakening had led to an efflorescence of religious joining and unjoining. It also furthered significant infighting within antebellum evangelicalism over what constituted true religion. The sectarianism of evangelicalism had led directly to the rise of Mormonism, according to antirevival evangelicals, because it furthered irrational attitudes of hostility, fostered fertile ground for the emergence of religious rivals, led individuals to argue over minor matters of faith, and resulted in blind belief.Sectarian fanaticism encouraged unreasonable infighting within both evangelicalism and Mormonism. David Reese, the Methodist social critic and physician, lumped many of his coreligionists together with Mormonism as examples of “ultra-sectarianism.” Both groups practiced a “bitterness and censoriousness, with which some religionists anathematize all other sects but their own.” This process led to a spirit of “heresy-hunting,” where individuals in both groups spent all their time hunting errors within other religious groups. This was all done to the detriment of the search for religious truth or reaching the lost.6These antirevival evangelicals further blamed their coreligionists for acting with a sinful bigotry. The Methodist James M'Chesney agreed, arguing that sectarian fanatics “can never bear contradictions—their path must not be crossed by any one . . . they make a show of uncontrovertible light.” Both Mormonism and some of these sectarian-inclined evangelicals saw themselves as the “high favourites of heaven.” They each wanted to get rid of their opponents. This kind of zealous patrolling of denominational boundaries “perfected” itself within Mormonism, according to M'Chesney because both sectarian evangelicals and the followers of Joseph Smith displayed “an entire want of Charity—want of patient love . . . in every feature.”7This sectarian attitude further encouraged Mormonism to see themselves as an exclusive group through an ignoring of the Bible or too much focus on narrow matters of scripture. Reese described both sectarian forms of evangelicalism and Mormonism as practitioners of selective religiosity. They drew boundaries where none existed. Turner similarly believed sectarian fanaticism had convinced many evangelical converts that the substance of Christianity was in the “outward forms and metaphysical distinctions about which the sects are most inclined to wrangle.” Sectarianism, in his logic, created space for Mormonism by confounding the God-given reason Christians could use to understand the Bible. Instead, he worried, nothing would be left, but a “fog of commingled truths and sophism, amid which there is neither darkness nor light.”8The criticisms of some evangelicals for operating with a sectarian peer pressure led these antirevival evangelicals to see hyperbiblicism leading to a blind belief in false faiths. Turner charged nothing was “more childish, and more truly contemptible, than either to believe or disbelieve any religious system, merely because our associates, or those around us do,” but he found that “it is probable that Christianity itself is frequently received, at least nominally, and almost uniformly rejected, on this ground, and on this ground alone.” He wrote that even “the valorous sticklers for orthodoxy, among twenty belligerent sects, each read the ‘dictums’ of their favorite Joe Smiths, and believe them for precisely the same reason.” These orthodox “chime in with the ruling spirit of their daydreams of sectarian supremacy,” according to Turner. He hoped evangelicals could do better, but if they could not “receive and interpret the Scriptures on better grounds than these, we had better pack off to Nauvoo” and become like the Mormons.9That fear of becoming like Mormonism drove much of the anti-Mormon prejudice of antebellum evangelicalism. While they did describe Mormonism in melodramatic and sensational terms, they also focused on their similarities. As Givens wrote, “some Mormon heresies can make a claim to having once been (or to still being) Christian orthodoxies.”10 Taking those affinities seriously reveals the need for more in-depth treatment of anti-Mormonism and the need for understanding the power of its cultural influence.