Mormons and domestic change
Last week was a throwback to the 19th century when Mormon polygamy was the center of American news coverage. As part of a series of essays written to better explain the more difficult aspects of their history, and in response to the digital age posing significant problems for the retention of young adults, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published a handful of documents on their complicated history of plural marriage. Catching the significance of these developments, these essays have in turn been covered by a host of national media sources. Everyone loves a story of sexual scandal, especially when it relates to a religious institution and hints at scholarly censorship.
Details concerning Mormon polygamy are shocking not only because of how foreign they seem to today’s acceptable sexual mores, but also because of how foreign they seem to the LDS Church’s contemporary image. After officially renouncing plural unions at the turn of the twentieth century, Mormons were swift and convincing in their adoption of conservative American cultural values in a move that was, in part, an earnest attempt to assimilate with a national society from whom they were previously scorned. Indeed, they were so successful in embracing mid-20th century domestic values that much of American Mormon culture remains reminiscent of Leave it to Beaver while the rest of the nation has moved on to Modern Family.
Yet the contemporary images of both American and Mormon domestic life mask the malleable and robust traditions from whence they both came. Indeed, Mormonism’s origins were very much rooted in a social movement that protested mainstream notions of the family itself. The decades that followed the inauguration of religious freedom witnessed an awakening of spiritual foment as democratic culture transformed religious and secular life. While much of this zeal resulted in the evangelical Protestant mainstream that dominated much of American culture for the following century, particularly innovated expressions of religious experimentation were formulated on society’s peripheries that embodied the period’s cultural revolution. Upset with what they believed to be stagnant and unfulfilling morals associated with the Victorian image of the home, a number of upstart sects cultivated new ways to instill religious reform into domestic life.
