Anti-Mormonism and the Question of Religious Authenticity in Antebellum America

When antebellum anti-Mormons took up their pens to thwart the Mormon “menace, ” they not only rehearsed various critiques of Mormonism, they participated in a larger conversation about the place of religion in the nation and the ways citizens might separate “real ” religion from the religiously inauthentic. While Protestants of the period assumed “objective ” descriptions of various religious groups might calm a vexed post-disestablishment religious scene, their incorporation of a long-standing polemical strategy that sought to expose religious impostors illuminated an array of conflicting attachments and various cultural tensions that attended the new republic’s “free market ” in churches