How Mormons went mainstream

Everything is coming up Mormon…or at least it feels that way. From reality TV drama to cookies to sodas to how we think about femininity, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is at the forefront of culture in the US. For a religion that only 2 percent of Americans follow, Mormonism is sure punching above its weight.

McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a member of the Mormon church, said mainstream acceptance was kind of the hope all along. “From the very beginning, the kind of fledgling religious movement that became known as the Mormons was subjected to a constant barrage of state sanctioned persecution,” he said. “The early Mormons actually were constantly fleeing from one state to another, trying to find a place where they could set up shop and worship, and they were always driven out of wherever they had landed. Over the course of several years in the early 19th century, they were driven from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and Missouri. Actually, the governor issued what was called an extermination order that demanded that Mormons be removed from the state or killed.” 

So how did Mormonism evolve to have such cultural influence? And how is that influence shaping the faith? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

You write in this piece back in 2020 that Mormonism is kind of the most American religion. What makes Mormonism uniquely tied to the American story compared to other religious traditions?

Well, it’s one of the largest global religions that was founded in America. Also, theologically, the church has always been wrapped up in the American project. From early on, church leaders taught that America was a promised land that had been prepared to be the place where God could restore his church to the earth. Many of the ideas in Mormon theology are also drawn from the sacred American texts. Mormons actually are taught that the founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution — are divinely inspired, that America is a special place that God has set apart. There are deeper ideas in the theology, like agency and free will, that you can connect to foundational American ideas like pluralism and democracy. 

I found this document that was written by Mormon pioneers who, as they were leaving the United States, wrote about themselves as almost a Noah’s arc of American ideals. They were gathering all of the best of America’s aspirational commitment to religious freedom, to democracy, to liberty. And they were going to bring it to this new civilization that they were setting up in the desert. But they always believed that at some point America would accept them back and they would play an important role in revitalizing and strengthening the country where their religious movement was founded.

When did we start to see the church try to assimilate into mainstream America?

It was around the 20th century that Latter-Day Saints started to think more deliberately about how they could be initiated into American life. And certainly by the middle of the 20th century, the church was making a pretty concerted effort to be accepted as part of mainstream American society. You saw Latter-Day Saints joining the military and intelligence agencies in very large numbers. That’s partly because a lot of them speak foreign languages from their mission service and because they live relatively clean lives that makes them attractive recruits to places like the CIA and FBI.

You also saw a lot of the church’s messaging trying to portray it as kind of an all-American church. Mormons had big families. They were traditionally arranged where the men worked, the women stayed at home, they had lots of kids. They were very active in civic organizations like the Boy Scouts of America. I don’t want to say that this was all PR. I think a lot of it was genuinely rooted in the things that they believed were important about American civic life and family life and religious life. But also there was a distinct desire to prove to America that they were worthy of being considered American. The church disavowed polygamy and discontinued the practice, and that was kind of the beginning of the mainstreaming of Mormonism. Utah became an official state, and from that point on the church was on this march of assimilation, trying to be accepted as a respectable and positive force in American religious life.

It also adopted some mainstream ideas that did not age well. Can you talk about that a little bit?

I think most notably the church’s position on race. In the early years of the church, Joseph Smith was at times an outspoken abolitionist. He actually ran for president on this long-shot protest bid on a platform that included a proposal that would buy the freedom of every enslaved person in America and abolish prisons. There were elements of early Mormonism that were actually pretty progressive and radical for their time. Joseph Smith was eventually killed by an anti-Mormon mob. He was replaced by Brigham Young, who was this kind of gruff leader who led the church into Utah and established their desert Zion out there. He took the church in a different position on racial issues. 

Under Brigham Young, and for many, many years after up until 1978, Black men were not allowed to hold the priesthood. Black families were not allowed to participate in certain temple ordinances in the church. The way I’ve heard it from scholars who study this period of the church’s history, the church became really fixated on the idea of securing its place at the top of America’s racial hierarchy, rather than trying to kind of fight against the idea of a racial hierarchy.

“In that quest for assimilation, you can become sort of single-mindedly focused on performing your Americanness at the expense of what makes your belief system and your worldview distinctive.”

I should mention this is partly rooted in the fact that for a while in the 19th century, Mormons actually were treated as a different race. There are fascinating medical journal reports that were written at the time where doctors or people would go to Mormon communities and observe them and come back and write about how Mormons are clearly a distinctive race, defined by their thick, protuberant lips and sunken yellow visage. It’s kind of classic quack racial science from the 19th century. Mormons really internalized this idea that white America doesn’t see us as part of them. I think that there was a deliberate effort by some church leaders to really perform their whiteness to be accepted into white America.

Of course, the church eventually lifted the priesthood ban for Black men in the late 1970s, but that has continued to hang over the church as this shadow. Even as the church exploded in growth in West Africa, and many Black members have joined the church, there is this ongoing reckoning with the church’s racial history and it remains a really difficult chapter.

Are there any fears inside the church that assimilation may be too much in the current American culture? I was raised in church and one of the things I was raised with was, “Even if you’re in the world, you’re not supposed to be of the world.” 

It’s an ongoing conversation in the church. We got the same rhetoric that we should be in the world, but not of the world. I remember one of the big defining talks given by a Latter-Day Saints prophet early in the 21st century was by Gordon B. Hinckley, who was the president of the church. He said that we are a peculiar people and that we should be a peculiar people. We should be apart from the culture in some ways, even as we try to participate in American life. And I do think that there is a question now about whether that assimilation has gone too far.

I remember five years ago when I wrote this story about the church entering its third century. And the thing that I worried about was that Mormonism would drift into radical right-wing politics like much of the religious right. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints used to be the most reliably Republican religious group in America, and in the Trump era has actually become a little bit less reliable. There’s a growing number of independents. Younger Mormon voters are rejecting the Trump-era GOP.

And so I’m not so concerned about Mormonism being radicalized. I’m actually more concerned about it becoming so obsessed with assimilation, so obsessed with approval from mainstream American society that it kind of loses sight of what it actually is because in that quest for assimilation, you can become sort of single-mindedly focused on performing your Americanness at the expense of what makes your belief system and your worldview distinctive. And there’s a part of me that wants to keep Mormonism weird. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing that the kind of pop cultural symbol of our church, which used to be the kind of dorky young kid with the white shirts and ties and black name tags, is now beautiful women on reality shows.

I think it is interesting that women are the face now.

I actually think that is really interesting and exciting, and it’s nothing against those women at all. It is just that I think there is a little bit of discomfort in some quarters of the church that Mormonism will come to be seen as all these sort of pop cultural indicators. The reality shows, the weird soda cocktails that everybody drinks, and then not actually be identified by their religious beliefs. I think some church leaders are grappling with what that means for them going forward.