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Was Mormonism basically the thing the American West had to define itself against?
Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2026 5:21 pm
by 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.
Re: Was Mormonism basically the thing the American West had to define itself against?
Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2026 5:27 pm
by Everybody Wang Chung
The Before wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2026 5:21 pm
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....
Re: Was Mormonism basically the thing the American West had to define itself against?
Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2026 9:13 pm
by Kishkumen
So polygamy and theocracy are mere literary tropes? Not real historical aspects of 19th-century Mormonism?
Re: Was Mormonism basically the thing the American West had to define itself against?
Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2026 10:21 pm
by The Before
Kishkumen wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2026 9:13 pm
So polygamy and theocracy are mere literary tropes? Not real historical aspects of 19th-century Mormonism?
No, not
mere tropes. They were real historical features. My point is that literature and popular culture can take real features like polygamy and theocratic governance and make them do extra symbolic work. They become shorthand for “Mormon difference” or “un-American-ness,” often in ways that flatten complexity. So I’m less interested in whether polygamy existed than in what writers made polygamy mean.