Was Mormonism basically the thing the American West had to define itself against?

[The Before]

I’ve been thinking about the way Mormonism appears in older Western writing, and it seems like Mormons often function less as actual people than as a kind of symbolic “other” against which the supposedly normal American West defines itself.

You get polygamy, secrecy, theocracy, sexual deviance, strange religious authority, etc., while the surrounding culture gets to present itself as individualistic (ruggedly so), democratic, masculine, and properly American.

So I’m wondering whether the “Mormon problem” in Western literature was ever really about Mormonism at all. Maybe Mormonism was just a convenient boundary marker: this is what the West is not.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I’ve been thinking about the way Mormonism appears in older Western writing, and it seems like Mormons often function less as actual people than as a kind of symbolic “other” against which the supposedly normal American West defines itself.

You get polygamy, secrecy, theocracy, sexual deviance, strange religious authority, etc., while the surrounding culture gets to present itself as individualistic (ruggedly so), democratic, masculine, and properly American.

So I’m wondering whether the “Mormon problem” in Western literature was ever really about Mormonism at all. Maybe Mormonism was just a convenient boundary marker: this is what the West is not.

Good grief, Nolan....

[Kishkumen]

So polygamy and theocracy are mere literary tropes? Not real historical aspects of 19th-century Mormonism?