“The Woman’s Movement Has Discovered a New Enemy—the Mormon Church”

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-70
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Organization For Women ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
The Church

This chapter talks about the woman's movement that considered the Mormon church as a new enemy because of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It illustrates the Church of Latter-day Saints of Jesus Christ's sudden and successful political mobilization against the ERA ratification that caught the country by surprise. It examines how ERA proponents reacted to and interacted with the Mormon church during the ERA ratification process, which elucidates the power of the church's political influence in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The chapter discusses how the Mormon church's successful mobilization pushed ERA supporters, specifically the National Organization for Women (NOW), to wholly reconceptualize parts of their own mobilization. It recounts the clear success of the anti-ERA Mormon counterforce due to their ability to reach people on the local level.

The Culture of Obedience and the Politics of Stealth: Mormon Mobilization Against ERA and Same-Sex Marriage

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ellen Gordon ◽  
William L. Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
Communications Networks ◽  
Spontaneous Action ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church

AbstractPolitical mobilization by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was more widespread and important than most studies of the episode have acknowledged. Several decades later, the Church is again organized and active in opposing legal recognition of same-sex marriage. In this article, we explore why and how the Latter-Day Saints mobilized on these two issues. We argue that their mobilization can be understood through classic social movement theory, even though the Church is not an economic-based interest group. Furthermore, the Mormons' approach in fighting the ERA — drawing on centralized authority, tapping into established volunteer and communications networks, effectively channeling money and personnel to where they are most needed, and engaging in stealth politics (obscuring the centralized nature of apparently spontaneous action) — is echoed in the fight against same-sex marriage, even though the times and technology have somewhat changed the mobilization dynamic.

Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of “Gathering”

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Phillips ◽  
Ryan Cragun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Attendance ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Attendance Rates ◽  
Intermountain West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Member Retention ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
The Church

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the LDS, or Mormon church—has dominated the state of Utah both culturally and politically since joining the Union in 1896. Scholars note that LDS majorities in Utah and other parts of the Intermountain West foster a religious subculture that has promoted higher levels of Mormon church attendance and member retention than in other parts of the nation. However, after rising throughout most of the twentieth century, the percentage of Utah's population belonging to the church began declining in 1989. Some sources assert Utah is now less Mormon than at any time in the state's history. This article examines the degree to which this decline has affected LDS church activity and retention in Utah and adjacent environs. We find evidence suggesting church attendance rates may be falling, and clear evidence that rates of apostasy among Mormons have risen over the past decade.

The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Eastwood Pulido
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
The Third ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The World ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
Spiritual Conquest ◽  
The Church ◽  
The U.S

A spiritual biography, this book chronicles the journey of Margarito Bautista (1878–1961) from Mormonism to the Third Convention, a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) splinter group he fomented in 1935–1936, to Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalén, a polygamist utopia Bautista founded in 1947. It argues that Bautista embraced Mormon belief in indigenous exceptionalism in 1901 and rapidly rose through the ranks of Mormon priesthood until convinced that the Mormon hierarchy was not invested in the development of native American peoples, as promoted in the Church’s canon. This realization resulted in tensions over indigenous self-governance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) and Bautista’s 1937 excommunication. The book contextualizes Bautista’s thought with a chapter on the spiritual conquest of Mexico in 1513 and another on the arrival of Mormons in Mexico. In addition to accounts of Bautista’s congregation-building on both sides of the U.S. border, this volume includes an examination of Bautista’s magnum opus, a 564-page tome hybridizing Aztec history and Book of Mormon narratives, and his prophetic plan for the recovery of indigenous authority in the Americas. Bautista’s excommunication catapulted him into his final spiritual career, that of a utopian founder. In the establishment of his colony, Bautista found a religious home, free from Euro-American oversight, where he implemented his prophetic plan for Mexico’s redemption. His plan included obedience to early Mormonism’s most stringent practices, polygamy and communalism. Bautista nonetheless hoped his community would provide a model for Mexicans willing to prepare the world for Christ’s millennial reign.

A Snake in the Sugar

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-164
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
American West ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Beet Sugar ◽  
Political Dominance ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
The Church

This chapter talks about the remarkable partnership and political alliance between the Mormon Church and the Sugar Trust that was intended for the domination of the beet sugar business of America. It mentions Judson Welliver, an essayist for Hampton's Magazine, who wrote the most startling revelation of the power of Mormonism and of the business intrigue and political inside workings of the Sugar Trust. The chapter looks into Welliver's article that outlines how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a dangerous political power. It describes the Mormon church's influence that forced senators from Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and Nevada to uphold the sugar tariff. It describes the suspicion on how the Latter-day Saints had used beet sugar to gain complete economic and political dominance over the American West through the mechanism of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company.

scholarly journals Future-Day Saints: Abrahamic Astronomy, Anthropological Futures, and Speculative Religion

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 612
Author(s):  
Jon Bialecki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Church

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is an intense interest in creating “speculative fiction”, including speculative fiction about outer space. This article ties this interest to a broader tradition of “speculative religion” by discussing the Mormon Transhumanist Association. An interest in outer space is linked to nineteenth and twentieth-century speculation by Mormon intellectuals and Church leaders regarding “Abrahamic Astronomy”. The article suggests that there is a Mormon view of the future as informed by a fractal or recursive past that social science in general, and anthropology in particular, could use in “thinking the future”.

Voice Interrupted

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-168
Author(s):  
Jake Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
The Church

This chapter places the 2011 Broadway sensation Book of Mormon within the context of Correlation. The musical Book of Mormon demonstrates that interrupting ancient mythologies with current popular mythologies may help strengthen people facing unimaginable hardships, and that the singular message of American fundamentalism--one built upon obedience and narrow views of piety--will ultimately fail. Book of Mormon, along with other musical satires emerging in recent years from within Mormonism, represent musical theater affronts to the Mormon Church that have become more prominent in the last decades of the twentieth century as the Church removes dissenting members, including those espousing feminist or intellectual ideologies seemingly at odds with current Church policies. This chapter situates the concept of excommunication within musicologist Nina Eidsheim’s vibrational theory and Levinas’s ethics of communication, and suggests that Mormonism can be a powerful vehicle for improving lives if it returns to its original principle where multiple voices are seen as an asset, not a liability.

Baby Blessing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Church Members ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
Church Elders ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

The baby blessings performed by Mormon church elders were among the very first rituals adopted by the church. While Joseph Smith revealed no explicit details of this ritual beyond its necessity, church members began to perform it on the eighth day of the child’s life and in many cases associated it with naming the child. Baby blessings functioned in the early Zion period to delineate citizenship in the salvific community. After the fall of the temporal Zion and the rise of the Nauvoo Temple cosmology, baby blessings functioned to annunciate the sealed position of the child in the priesthood of heaven. After the arrival in the Great Basin, two concurrent practices emerged: the blessing of children at home by family members and the blessing at church by ecclesiastical leaders. In the twentieth century, church leaders focused exclusively on blessings at church, recasting them as the solemn duty of priesthood-holding fathers.

Tour Guiding, 1959–2012

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Howlett
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Community Of Christ ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Tour Guiding ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Church

This chapter argues that the evolution of tour guiding at the Kirtland Temple reflects select and crucial changes within the Community of Christ/Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints denomination over the course of the late twentieth century. Specifically, tour performances offer a window into the historical memories that the church deemed important, show how it desired itself to be known by the wider world, and reflect how the denomination interacted with its competitors and changing allies. The Kirtland Temple tours tell as much about the Community of Christ's general leftward turn in the late twentieth century as they reveal about changing academic knowledge of the Kirtland Temple's past. Indeed, guides constantly were correcting or changing tour content to reflect new understandings of the history and the meaning of the temple.

Making a Spectacle of the Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie J. Dow
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
National Organization For Women ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Masses

This chapter focuses on the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970. By this time, women's liberation seemed poised for its triumphal moment in the media spotlight. The House of Representatives had passed the Equal Rights Amendment a few weeks earlier, and all three networks had produced stories that linked this outcome to the movement's momentum. The strike seemed to confirm that momentum: involving tens of thousands of women in the United States and abroad, it was the subject of more national print and broadcast attention than any other feminist event that year. Despite the strike's inclusion of an array of liberal and radical feminist groups, it was an instance of media activism conceived and controlled by the National Organization for Women (NOW), and it put the organization's media pragmatism on full display. Confounding NOW's careful planning, the reports on the strike took an essentially liberal action and presented it as a radical one. Featuring almost no discussion of the three carefully chosen issues—abortion, equal pay, and child care—that the event was designed to dramatize, the network reports instead presented a narrative of feminist deviance, visually depicting the masses of women protestors as an entertaining spectacle.

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