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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Other Protestant & Nonconformist Churches > General
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.
More than three hundred Latter-day Saint settlements were founded
by LDS Church President Brigham Young. Colonization-often outside
of Utah-continued under the next three LDS Church presidents,
fueled by Utah's overpopulation relative to its arable, productive
land. In this book, John Gary Maxwell takes a detailed look at the
Bighorn Basin colonization of 1900-1901, placing it in the
political and socioeconomic climate of the time while examining
whether the move to this out-of-the-way frontier was motivated in
part by the desire to practice polygamy unnoticed. The LDS Church
officially abandoned polygamy in 1890, but evidence that the
practice was still tolerated (if not officially sanctioned) by the
church circulated widely, resulting in intense investigations by
the U.S. Senate. In 1896 Abraham Owen Woodruff, a rising star in
LDS leadership and an ardent believer in polygamy, was appointed to
head the LDS Colonization Company. Maxwell explores whether under
Woodruff's leadership the Bighorn Basin colony was intended as a
means to insure the secret survival of polygamy and if his untimely
death in 1904, together with the excommunication of two equally
dedicated proponents of polygamy-Apostles John Whitaker Taylor and
Matthias Foss Cowley-led to its collapse. Maxwell also details how
Mormon settlers in Wyoming struggled with finance, irrigation, and
farming and how they brought the same violence to indigenous
peoples over land and other rights as did non-Mormons. The 1900
Bighorn Basin colonization provides an early twentieth-century
example of a Mormon syndicate operating at the intersection of
religious conformity, polygamy, nepotism, kinship, corporate
business ventures, wealth, and high priesthood status. Maxwell
offers evidence that although in many ways the Bighorn Basin
colonization failed, Owen Woodruff's prophecy remains unbroken: "No
year will ever pass, from now until the coming of the Savior, when
children will not be born in plural marriage.
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