On September 25, 1890, the fourth Mormon prophet, Wilford Woodruff, publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elements of their belief system for national acceptance, the Mormons recreated themselves as model Americans. Mary Campbell tells the story of this remarkable religious transformation in Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. One of the church's favorite photographers, Johnson (1857 1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism's most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, shooting and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his "spicy pictures of girls." Situating these images and more within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked in concert to bring the Saints back into the nation's mainstream after the scandal of polygamy. ?Engaging, interdisciplinary, and deeply researched, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image demonstrates the profound role that pictures played in the creation of both the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the modern American nation.

Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God.
At the core of Krakauer's book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America's fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Raised in a broken family and emotionally overlooked, Sherry Gore grew up without a solid foundation, a prisoner of her own poor choices, and at times without hope. A series of terrible mistakes left her feeling wrecked and alone and a sudden tragedy threw Sherry into an emotional tailspin too powerful to escape. Sherry hangs by a thread, unable to see how she can go on living, until it happens: on a morning of no particular significance, she walks into a church and BAM the truth of Jesus' forgiving love shatters her world and cleaves her life in two: She goes to bed stunned; she wakes up a Christian. Unwilling to return to the darkness of her former life, Sherry attacks her faith head on. Soon the life Sherry Gore remakes for herself and her children as she seeks to follow the teachings of the Bible features head coverings, simple dress, and a focus on Jesus Christ. Only then does she realize, in a fit of excitement, that there are others like her. They are called Amish and Mennonite, and she realizes she has found her people. The plain choice that Sherry makes is not easy - and life still brings unexpected pain and heartache - but it changes everything for her, as she becomes one of the few people on earth to have successfully joined the Amish from the outside. She has found her place. And her story proves that one can return from the darkest depths to the purest light with the power of God.

Peter McAuslan heeded Mormon missionaries spreading the faith in his native Scotland in the mid-1840s. The uncertainty his family faced in a rapidly industrializing economy, the political turmoil erupting across Europe, the welter of competing religions-all were signs of the imminent end of time, the missionaries warned. For those who would journey to a new Zion in the American West, opportunity and spiritual redemption awaited. When McAuslan converted in 1848, he believed he had a found a faith that would give his life meaning. A few years later, McAuslan and his family left Scotland for Utah, but soon after he arrived, his doubts grew about the religious community he had joined so wholeheartedly. Historian Polly Aird tells the story of how McAuslan first embraced, then came to question, and ultimately renounced the Mormon faith and left Utah. It would be the most courageous act of his life. In Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector, Aird tells of Scottish emigrants who endured a harrowing transatlantic and transcontinental journey to join their brethren in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. But to McAuslan and others like him, the Promised Land of Salt Lake City turned out to be quite different from what was promised: droughts and plagues of locusts destroyed crops and brought on famine, and U.S. Army troops threatened on the borders. Mormon leaders responded with fiery sermons attributing their trials to divine retribution for backsliding and sin. When the leaders countenanced violence and demanded absolute obedience, Peter McAuslan decided to abandon his adopted faith. With his family, and escorted by a U.S. Army detachment for protection, he fled to California. Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector reveals the tumultuous 1850s in Utah and the West in vivid detail. Drawing on McAuslan's writings and other archival sources, Aird offers a rare interior portrait of a man in whom religious fervor warred with indignation at absolutist religious authorities and fear for the consequences of dissension. In so doing, she brings to life a dramatic but little-known period of American history.

Plain tells the story of Mary Alice Hostetter's journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Although endowed with a personality "prone toward questioning and challenging," the young Mary Alice at first wants nothing more than to be a good girl, to do her share, and-alongside her eleven siblings-to work her family's Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, farm. She feels fortunate to have been born into a religion where, as the familiar hymn states, she is "safe in the arms of Jesus." As an adolescent, that keen desire for belonging becomes focused on her worldly peers, even though she knows that Mennonites consider themselves a people apart. Eventually she leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, thinking she will finally be able to grow beyond the prohibitions of her church. Discovering and accepting her sexuality, she once again finds herself apart, on the outside of family, community, and societal norms. This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman's striving to grow within and beyond it.

Although one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains a mystery in terms of its core beliefs and theological structure. This timely book provides an important introduction to the basic history, doctrines and practices of The LDS--the "Mormon" Church. Emphasizing sacred texts and prophecies as well as the crucial Temple rituals of endowments, marriage and baptism, it is written by a non-believer, who describes Mormonism in ways that non-Mormons can understand.

Although one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains a mystery in terms of its core beliefs and theological structure. This timely book provides an important introduction to the basic history, doctrines and practices of The LDS--the "Mormon" Church. Emphasizing sacred texts and prophecies as well as the crucial Temple rituals of endowments, marriage and baptism, it is written by a non-believer, who describes Mormonism in ways that non-Mormons can understand.

When polling data showed that an overwhelming 81% of white evangelicals had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, commentators across the political spectrum were left aghast. Even for a community that had been tracking further and further right for decades, this support seemed decidedly out of step. How, after all, could an amoral, twice-divorced businessman from New York garner such devoted admiration from the most vociferous of "values voters?" That this same group had, not a century earlier, rallied national support for such progressive causes as a federal minimum wage, child labor laws, and civil rights made the Trump shift even harder to square. In The End of Empathy, John W. Compton presents a nuanced portrait of the changing values of evangelical voters over the course of the last century. To explain the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth, Compton argues that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically-championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society, for example-it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so. Citizens throughout the previous century had sought membership in churches as a means of ensuring upward mobility, but a deterioration of mainline Protestant authority that started in the 1960s led large groups of white suburbanites to shift away from the mainline Protestant churches. There to pick up the slack were larger evangelical congregations with conservative leaders who discouraged attempts by the government to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth and political authority. That shift, Compton argues, explains the larger revolution in white Protestantism that brought us to this political moment.

This book takes a look at the faith, philosophy, and way of life of the country's one remaining Shaker community. Lauber explores their spiritual and daily lives by weaving together proprietary Shaker quotations, interviews, and photographs. The result is a book that pierces many misconceptions, most notably that the Shakers and their faith are dead. Lauber places the topics of faith, community, work, and worship in the context of Shaker history and contemporary developments on the American landscape.

With over 140 million copies in print, and serving as the principal proselytizing tool of one of the world's fastest growing faiths, the Book of Mormon is undoubtedly one of the most influential religious texts produced in the western world. Written by Terryl Givens, a leading authority on Mormonism, this compact volume offers the only concise, accessible introduction to this extraordinary work.
Givens examines the Book of Mormon first and foremost in terms of the claims that its narrators make for its historical genesis, its purpose as a sacred text, and its meaning for an audience which shifts over the course of the history it unfolds. The author traces five governing themes in particular--revelation, Christ, Zion, scripture, and covenant--and analyzes the Book's central doctrines and teachings. Some of these resonate with familiar nineteenth-century religious preoccupations; others consist of radical and unexpected takes on topics from the fall of Man to Christ's mortal ministries and the meaning of atonement. Givens also provides samples of a cast of characters that number in the hundreds, and analyzes representative passages from a work that encompasses tragedy, poetry, sermons, visions, family histories and military chronicles. Finally, this introduction surveys the contested origins and production of a work held by millions to be scripture, and reviews the scholarly debates that address questions of the record's historicity.
Here then is an accessible guide to what is, by any measure, an indispensable key to understanding Mormonism. But it is also an introduction to a compelling and complex text that is too often overshadowed by the controversies that surround it.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.