Volume 8, Number 1 · January 26, 1967
Burned Over Utopia
By Christopher Lasch
The Mormon Establishment
by Wallace Turner
Houghton, Mifflin, 331 pp., $6.00
The Latter-day Saints: The Mormons Yesterday and Today
by Robert Mullen
Doubleday, 303 pp., $5.95
Nauvoo: Kingdom of the Mississippi
by Robert Bruce Flanders
University of Illinois, 350 pp., $6.50
The Mormons, once a persecuted sect, have become a world religion, with temples from Norway to Chile, from Düsseldorf to Tokyo. They number 2,600,000 members, 1,600,000 of whom have been added since 1947; by 1970 they can be expected to have added 400,000 more. But when Wallace Turner, in The Mormon Establishment, writes with some alarm that 'in widening waves this religious force in American life is felt across the nation,' he loses sight of the conditions on which all this growth has been predicated. It is not as a religious force that Mormonism now makes itself felt. It makes itself felt precisely in the degree to which the Mormon influence has ceased to be distinguishable from any other vested influence. As long as the Mormons were different from their neighbors, their neighbors hounded them mercilessly. Only when they gave up the chief distinguishing features of their faith did the Latter-day Saints establish themselves as a fixture of the eccliastical scene, another tolerated minority. This is the lesson, if you like, of Mormon history.
Review, 4673 words
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