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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Other Protestant & Nonconformist Churches > General
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The Reason
(Paperback)
Keziah Clottey
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The South has been the standard focus of Reconstruction, but
reconstruction following the Civil War was not a distinctly
Southern experience. In the post-Civil War West, American Indians
also experienced reconstruction through removal to reservations and
assimilation to Christianity, and Latter-day Saints-Mormons-saw
government actions to force the end of polygamy under threat of
disestablishing the church. These efforts to bring nonconformist
Mormons into the American mainstream figure in the more familiar
scheme of the federal government's reconstruction-aimed at
rebellious white Southerners and uncontrolled American Indians. In
this volume, more than a dozen contributors look anew at the scope
of the reconstruction narrative and offer a unique perspective on
the history of the Latter-day Saints. Marshaled by editors Clyde A.
Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, these writers explore why the
federal government wanted to reconstruct Latter-day Saints, when
such efforts began, and how the initiatives compare with what
happened with white Southerners and American Indians. Other
contributions examine the effect of the government's policies on
Mormon identity and sense of history. Why, for example, do
Latter-day Saints not have a Lost Cause? Do they share a resentment
with American Indians over the loss of sovereignty? And were
nineteenth-century Mormons considered to be on the "wrong" side of
a religious line, but not a "race line"? The authors consider these
and other vital questions and topics here. Together, and in
dialogue with one another, their work suggests a new way of
understanding the regional, racial, and religious dynamics of
reconstruction-and, within this framework, a new way of thinking
about the creation of a Mormon historical identity.
Will Mormonism be the next world faith, one that will rival
Catholicism, Islam, and other major religions in terms of numbers
and global appeal? This was the question Rodney Stark addressed in
his much-discussed and much-debated article, "The Rise of a New
World Faith" (1984), one of several essays on Mormonism included in
this new collection. Examining the religion's growing appeal,
Rodney Stark concluded that Mormons could number 267 million
members by 2080. In what would become known as "the Stark
argument," Stark suggested that the Mormon Church offered
contemporary sociologists and historians of religion an opportunity
to observe a rare event: the birth of a new world religion.
In the years following that article, Stark has become one of the
foremost scholars of Mormonism and the sociology of religion. This
new work, the first to collect his influential writings on the
Mormon Church, includes previously published essays, revised and
rewritten for this volume. His work sheds light on both the growth
of Mormonism and on how and why certain religions continue to grow
while others fade away.
Stark examines the reasons behind the spread of Mormonism,
exploring such factors as cultural continuity with the faiths from
which it seeks converts, a volunteer missionary force, and birth
rates. He explains why a demanding faith like Mormonism has such
broad appeal in today's world and considers the importance of
social networks in finding new converts. Stark's work also presents
groundbreaking perspectives on larger issues in the study of
religion, including the nature of revelation and the reasons for
religious growth in an age of modernization and secularization.
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