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"This Great Modern Abomination": Orthodoxy And Heresy In American Religion, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In chapter 4, Terryl Givens provides a new view not only of the Christianity of Mormons but also more specifically of the religious motivations and methods for persecuting LDS people in nineteenth-century America. Givens's chapter is especially important as an examination of one of the worst examples of systematic religious intolerance in American history. According to Givens, for Americans' self-conception as a religiously tolerant nation to remain intact, a hegemonic rhetoric needed to emerge in the public sphere that denied the religious nature of Mormonism and instead described it as a political threat or social evil. Under the cover of …