A (Very Brief) History of How American Evangelicals Have Approached Mormonism

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This essay is based on two chapters in the forthcoming 40 Questions About Mormonism.

Since its inception, the LDS Church has contrasted itself against the Christianity from which it flowed. Joseph Smith lamented the faith in his day as irredeemably fractured, “entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.” He became convinced that “there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ,” later clarifying that this criticism came from God in a vision. Since the apostolic era, a complete loss of authority and authenticity had thrust Christianity into the throes of great apostasy. Its redemption could only come by a great restoration led by Smith, who donned a prophet’s mantle, brought forth new scripture, and gathered a Zionist community.

Smith’s message was shocking to those who viewed the LDS Church as a heretical wildfire that must be extinguished. From the 1820s to 1890s, Christians generally approached Mormonism as foolishness to avoid, a fraudulent religion to expose, and a foreign culture to oppose.

(For these points, I riff off J. Spencer Fluhman’s insightful observation that Christians “first found Mormonism to be a fake religion, then an alien or foreign religion, and finally a merely false one.”)

Mormonism As Foolishness to Avoid

Skeptics rolled their eyes when word spread in Smith’s hometown that he had discovered ancient artifacts. “Jo[seph] Smith told the story,” recalled Lorenzo Saunders, “but he told so many stories, it was a hard thing to get the fact in any way or shape.” Smith had garnered a reputation for scrying, the act of using enchanted objects to see beyond the physical realm. Neighbors employed his services on expeditions to retrieve lost possessions or locate buried treasure. So, when he claimed to have discovered some valuable relics via his seer stone, Smith was dismissed for spinning fanciful tales.

But in mid-nineteenth-century rural New York, magic was not so easily doubted or dismissed. People held enchanted worldviews living in the frontier of a mysterious new land. One man remembered Smith relaying his story to mixed reactions. Some folks “did not believe a word they heard,” casting it aside as foolishness, but Smith captured the imagination of others who “[rubbed] their eyes in wonder.”

His story became especially intriguing when considering its religious elements, like angelic encounters, newly discovered scripture, the restoration of Christianity. As Smith’s movement gained momentum, skeptics cautioned potential converts to steer clear of what they saw as foolishness. They may have dismissed his stories, but his religious claims concerned them. Christians pleaded with potential converts to stay away from the Book of Mormon that Smith published and the church he founded, both in 1830. But when that didn’t work, they employed less sophisticated techniques like banging together kettles and tin pans to drive off LDS missionaries at public speaking engagements.

Still, Smith continued to win converts. Convinced that Smith was a charlatan, his opponents took to subverting and suppressing his fledgling movement. Mormonism graduated in their minds from foolishness to avoid to a fake religion to expose.

Mormonism As A Fake Religion to Expose

In 1831, restorationist preacher Alexander Campbell remarked how “every age of the world has produced impostors and delusions.” For his age, it was Mormonism. Campbell and other Protestants viewed Joseph Smith as simply one more example of the many charlatans throughout history. He was nothing more than a confidence man, and the Book of Mormon was his con. To them, the “Golden Bible” was a knockoff, a hodgepodge of material imported from sermons, Scripture, and Shakespeare.

At first, critics attributed Smith’s success to the gullibility of the naïve. But when LDS Church membership rolls began to swell with rational and educated people, they changed their tune. Campbell himself watched as Sidney Rigdon, a pastor in Campbell’s church, left for Mormonism and took his entire flock with him. Campbell and others reasoned that people were being deceived, so the antidote to conversion was exposing Smith as the con man he was.

Few worked harder to “expose” Mormonism than newspaperman Eber Dudley Howe. When Smith’s church relocated its headquarters to Howe’s hometown in northern Ohio, he took advantage of his proximity to warn potential converts away in a series of articles. Howe encouraged his readers to do as the Ephesians did: test false apostles and reject them by their failures (Rev. 2:2). But his focus turned to exposing Mormonism after his wife, Sophia, expressed interest in joining the LDS Church. By 1834, she had converted, and that same year, Howe published Mormonism Unvailed, the first exposé of Mormonism, and arguably the most influential to date.

The book featured affidavits calling into question the history and character of Smith. It also promoted a theory that the Book of Mormon was largely plagiarized from an unpublished romance novel. Countless works after Mormonism Unvailed drew inspiration from it whether in name or content, including Exposure of Mormonism (1838), Mormonism Unmasked, Showed to be an Impious Imposture (1840), Abominations of Mormonism Exposed (1852), Mormonism Unveiled (1877), and Mormonism Exposed (1908).

These works all follow familiar patterns of painting Joseph Smith as an imposter, the Book of Mormon as a fraud, and the church as a cartel of dubious financial dealings, secret rituals, heresies, and polygamy. The mission of anti-Mormon sleuths was simple: to bring to light all these strange, esoteric, and immoral elements of Mormonism to the public. Smith’s following would dwindle into obscurity if people could only know the truth.

Yet, no matter how hard they tried, the magnetism of Mormonism continued to pull people toward it. When exposing Mormonism failed to hamper its growth, Christians resorted to social oppression and violent persecution.

Mormonism As A Foreign Culture to Oppose

As LDS membership grew, so did Smith’s power and influence. Americans from all backgrounds grew anxious over the communal nature of Mormon gathering places in Kirtland, Ohio; Independence, Missouri; and Nauvoo, Illinois. Smith’s consolidated power over his church, and his growing political influence, culminated in an 1844 candidacy for president. Christians across denominational boundaries willingly set aside their differences to oppose a common enemy. “[This] was common among all the sects,” said Smith: “all united to persecute me.”

He was right. While both Latter-day Saints and Christians shared varying levels of responsibility for the conflict between their communities, in 1844, some Christians were consumed by anger and violence. Members of the ecumenical mob that murdered Smith included self-professed Christians like Thomas C. Sharp, son of a Methodist preacher, and Levi Williams, a Baptist minister.

By the mid-1850s, most Latter-day Saints fled to the Great Basin under Brigham Young’s leadership. They sought isolation, wishing to be left alone; however, Americans feared the coming of a future Mormon state that would create an imbalance of power between Salt Lake City and Washington. As a result, Mormonism became less of a fake religion to expose than a foreign culture to oppose.

In the 1860s, Samuel Clemens—more commonly known as Mark Twain—met Brigham Young while traveling through the American West. Clemens expected to encounter an “ignorant savage” who would confirm all his anti-Mormon prejudices, but instead he found himself enjoying the company of a kind, “dignified, self-possessed old gentleman.” Still, Clemens’s opinion of the prophet-president was mainly negative. For Clemens, Young was the undisputed head of religious fanaticism, seated in Salt Lake City, “the capital of the only absolute monarch in America” and home to the prophet’s polygamous “harem.”

Many non-Mormons shared Clemens’s cynical esteem for Young in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Americans recognized the Mormons’ vital role in colonizing the west. Manifest destiny (so-called) would have been far more challenging without Mormon forts, outposts, and settlements to support U.S. efforts in wresting away indigenous people from their land. On the other hand, however, Americans feared a Mormon-majority west. They suspected Latter-day Saints of wanting to build a community isolated from broader society, one that might even break away from the nation altogether.

Their concern was not unfounded. In 1844, shortly before his death, Joseph Smith organized a secret council that plotted the formation of a theocratic republic somewhere in the west. Latter-day Saints had lost confidence in the government to protect them from anti-Mormon violence, especially after their forced expulsion from Missouri in 1838. If the U.S. and its Constitution could not guarantee their safety and religious freedom, then Latter-day Saints would form their own nation and laws. But the separatist plans perished with Smith, even though the public continued to suspect Mormon separatism. After Brigham Young submitted a proposal to create the thirty-first State of Deseret in 1849, Congress rejected it as too ambitious, if not too suspicious.

Over the years, political tension and conflict between Latter-day Saints and others only exacerbated the “Mormon Question,” or what was to be done about growing Mormon influence and power. The public latched onto two concerns. The first was hierarchy. They argued that Brigham Young was a despot who ruled unchallenged over his desert fiefdom. The Church hierarchy was wholly un-American. Republicanism and democracy ought to reign unchallenged from San Francisco to Washington, not despotism and theocracy. They pressed for any legal action possible to curb the influence of the LDS hierarchy.

Polygamy was the second issue. In 1852, LDS leadership officially acknowledged the practice, although select men, including Joseph Smith, had engaged in plural marriage much earlier. By the mid-1850s, Brigham Young had married approximately four dozen women. Christian activists worked tirelessly to keep polygamy at the forefront of the public’s perception of Mormonism. Their efforts influenced a series of legal maneuvers from Washington that prevented Utah’s admission into the Union until 1896, six years after the LDS Church officially forbade plural marriage.

Many people drew on nineteenth-century orientalist caricatures to frame Mormon Utah as a foreign ‘despotic’ and ‘harem-filled’ Turkish empire in their own backyard. But in the decades that followed Utah’s statehood, a period of “accommodation gradually brought [Mormonism] and the American public to terms,” explained historian Jan Shipps. Those terms, however, were not accepted by all, especially Christians “who continued to charge that Mormonism is a Christian heresy.”

For them, Mormonism was no longer a foreign culture to oppress, but had become a false religion to resist.

Mormonism As A False Religion to Evangelize

In the years following the U.S. Civil War, Americans looked westward for the future of their re-unified nation. Generous land grants and the discovery of precious metals made the allure of western migration nearly impossible to resist for pioneering emigrants. Christians leveraged this growth for missionary activity. Eastern churches commissioned and supported missionaries to preach among unchurched mining communities, indigenous American tribes, and Hispanic Catholics.

Latter-day Saints, however, were not thought of as proper objects of evangelism, at least not initially. The LDS Church dominated Utah Territory; its members could be found everywhere, and its influence felt in nearly every crevasse of politics. The separation of church and state was almost nonexistent. Challenging a de facto religious state was a tall order for a supposedly domestic mission field. Besides, the Great Basin was too remote, and, after the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, the public media vilified LDS leaders as bloodthirsty theocrats who led a flock of barbarous serfs, so the mission was considered too dangerous.

It took two decades after Latter-day Saints began settling the west for missionaries to receive calls to Mormon lands. Interestingly, these calls were not predominantly issued from Christian settlers looking for pastors, nor from missionaries who felt compelled to evangelize the Mormons. Instead, it was U.S. federal officials stationed in the Salt Lake valley, like Colonel Patrick Connor, the commanding officer of Camp Douglas (adjacent to Salt Lake City). In 1864, he wrote eastern Protestants to complain that “while the Several denominations of the church Send their missionaries to the ‘uttermost parts of the earth,’ it has never been Seriously thought that here [Salt Lake City] is to be found the grandest field for Missionary labor.”

His voice was heard. That same year, Congregationalist minister Norman McLeod was appointed as chaplain to Connor’s camp. McLeod’s efforts led to many firsts for Protestants in Utah: the first non-Mormon church service in the first non-Mormon church building with the first Protestant Sunday school. Within a decade, nearly every major denomination in the United States was represented in Utah: Roman Catholics (1866), Episcopalians (1867), Presbyterians (1869), Methodists (1871), and Baptists (1871), all of whom reported to their national network of churches on the need for evangelization in Utah.

By the 1870s, Protestants (especially evangelicals) became convinced of a missional need among the Mormons. They looked at LDS leaders as immoral tyrants and Mormons as hostages of a devilish power. After touring Utah, Jonathan Blanchard, the first president of Wheaton College, declared it an evangelical duty to liberate the Great Basin from the “modern Saracens of Salt Lake.” Utah was likened to the “heathen” nations abroad, devoid of Christian conscience, overrun by wickedness, and in desperate need of the gospel.

It wasn’t Mormonism’s doctrinal deviations from orthodoxy that first spurred Christians toward missions among the Mormons; rather, it was their peculiar practices, especially plural marriage. Polygamy, not polytheism, was the greater threat. True, Christians felt compelled to preach doctrine unadulterated by Mormon dogma, but they were more burdened for the plural wives, whom they viewed as hostages in spurious and abusive marriages.

A twofold strategy developed among evangelical missionaries: to sermonize and serve the Mormons. Male clergy employed tried-and-true practices, like riding preaching circuits to supply empty pulpits among the few scattered congregations, while also attempting to stir revivals and preach to Latter-day Saints in public spaces. Women took a quieter approach. They established modern schools and mercy ministries with the hope of converting children and the former wives of polygamous men. Wealthy churches back east supported the missionaries, spurred to give by reports of oppression from polygamous wives who wanted out of their plural marriages but felt too embarrassed and trapped to leave.

Both male and female missionaries found their work extremely difficult. Most Latter-day Saints were once Protestant themselves—or, at the very least, were descendants of Protestants—so convincing them to return to their former religion was a monumental task. Moreover, Latter-day Saints harbored resentment toward Protestantism, which they viewed as irredeemably fractured, spiritually powerless, and one of the mechanisms that expelled them from their eastern settlements. Mormons were a “peculiar people,” and Protestants played a significant role in making them so. When missionaries spoke, Latter-day Saints listened politely but largely remained loyal to their religious community. As one Mormon remarked about a Baptist missionary, “he is neither mistreated nor openly ostracized—he just does not belong.”

Moreover, the old methods of evangelism, which worked so well in the eastern U.S., failed in the Mormon west. In 1871, Methodists held a revival in Salt Lake City. Thousands of Latter-day Saints attended for a few days, and yet, in the end, only a single convert joined the tiny Wesleyan community. And evangelical women were shocked to encounter Mormon women who not only preferred polygamy but viewed it as a sacred duty that was, in a salvific sense, more moral than monogamy. Not all polygamous women wanted out. And not all Mormon parents were comfortable enrolling their children in Protestant schools, despite their high quality and low cost.

Still, missionaries continued receiving support and persisting in their work. In addition to evangelism, churches expected their missionaries to promote grassroots opposition to the LDS Church, which Protestants viewed as a threat to American democracy and Christianity. So when missionaries were not busy preaching and teaching, they called for political resistance against Mormon bids for Utah’s statehood until the LDS Church abandoned plural marriage. Their efforts paid off. In 1890, LDS officials stayed the practice of polygamy, and evangelicals celebrated their influential role in the change.

But this victory was costly for missionaries in Utah. The end of polygamy was also the end of evangelical interest in its anti-polygamy crusade, and as interest waned, so did missionary funding. Two years later, the economic crisis of the Panic of 1893 further restricted missionary support in Utah. Then, in 1896, Utah gained statehood and built state schools that eventually edged out private Protestant schools. Protestants were faced with a choice to abandon or reinforce their mission among the Mormons.

Mormonism: From Menace to Moral Counterfeit

For some Protestants, the answer seemed obvious: leave the Mormons alone. In the early twentieth century, liberal theology reshaped missionary concerns within American Protestantism. Pressing social issues, like poverty and alcoholism, led some to question why resources were allocated to convert industrious, teetotaling Mormons. Besides, millions more souls in foreign lands were bereft of the gospel. Weren’t denominational resources better spent overseas? With the Mormons’ abandonment of polygamy came an abandonment of the mission to Mormons.

But with the rise of fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy, evangelicals retained a sense of missional duty to Latter-day Saints, even as missionary support diminished. In 1922, one Baptist periodical bemoaned that Utah was a “land of neglected evangelization,” echoing the same sentiment expressed by Colonel Connor over fifty years earlier. Other evangelicals shared the sentiment, renewing their vision of Utah as a foreign mission field in the nation’s backyard.

Yet, unlike previous generations, evangelicals were now more concerned about Mormon heterodoxy than with its controversial practices. Perhaps this is because in the face of secularization both groups increasingly recognized their common moral convictions, such as traditional family values, individualism, and American exceptionalism. Despite these rallying points, evangelicals continued to view Mormonism as a threat to orthodoxy. So an obvious question needed an answer: How could Latter-day Saints be such morally upstanding people while holding such heretical doctrines? And how might evangelicals justify evangelizing a people who, on the surface, looked so familiar to themselves?

The answer soon percolated: Mormonism was a counterfeit to Christianity. Enough of the true faith was present to compel Latter-day Saints toward Christian morality; however, Mormonism was bankrupt when it comes to salvific power, like all monetary counterfeits. It looks like salvation but lacks the power to save. This counterfeit theme is seen consistently in influential evangelical literature from the essay on Mormonism in The Fundamentals (1910) to Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults (1965), echoes of which are heard to this day.

Thus, throughout the twentieth century, the Christian approach to Mormonism took on a new and complicated form. Liberal Protestants grew more affirming of Mormonism, which Latter-day Saints welcomed; however, their relationship was stifled by the LDS Church’s conservative stance on social and political issues. And while evangelicals found themselves increasingly aligned with Latter-day Saint social conservativism, they remained adamant that Mormonism was an unorthodox expression of Christianity.

The print edition will, naturally, include citations.

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