The Politics of American Religious Identity

Between 1901 and 1907 a broad coalition of Protestant churches sought to expel newly elected Reed Smoot from the Senate arguing that as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Smoot was a lawbreaker and therefore unfit to be a lawmaker. The resulting Senate investigative hearing featured testimony on every peculiarity of Mormonism especially its polygamous family structure. The Smoot hearing ultimately mediated a compromise between Progressive Era Protestantism and Mormonism and resolved the nation’s long-standing “Mormon Problem.” On a broader scale Kathleen Flake shows how this landmark hearing provided the occasion for the country — through its elected representatives the daily press citizen petitions and social reform activism — to reconsider the scope of religious free exercise in the new century.<br/>Flake contends that the Smoot hearing was the forge in which the Latter-day Saints the Protestants and the Senate hammered out a model for church-state relations shaping for a new generation of non-Protestant and non-Christian Americans what it meant to be free and religious. In addition she discusses the Latter-day Saints' use of narrative and collective memory to retain their religious identity even as they changed to meet the nation’s demands.