Review
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Title: Sins of Christendom: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Evangelicalism
Author: Nathaniel Wiewora
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 221
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-252-08778-3
Price: $30
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Sins of Christendom: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Evangelicalism by Nathaniel Wiewora is an engaging work of scholarship that offers a new angle on and approach to anti-Mormonism, revealing much about antebellum evangelicalism and how it came to look like it does. Wiewora’s book is not interested in analyzing the veracity of anti-Mormon claims, but rather, exploring what those claims reveal about the evangelicals trafficking in them.
Wiewora writes in the introduction:
“What evangelicals assumed and said about Mormonism was very rarely true. Rather than adjudicating the veracity of anti-Mormon charges, reading this religious intolerance in dialogue with the history of antebellum evangelicalism demonstrates how evangelicals used anti-Mormonism for their own religious purposes.” (4)
For Wiewora, what is interesting about the anti-Mormonism of antebellum evangelicalism is what it was used for in internal evangelical debates. I find this approach refreshing and rich with possibilities for broader application. Wiewora weaves together a wide array of sources and material to draw out what the internal evangelical debates were that various anti-Mormon claims are responding to. Typically this is done with enough context that I was able to follow along, even with relatively limited exposure to knowledge about antebellum evangelicalism.
The specifics that Wiewora draws attention to are quite interesting, drawing out tensions surrounding ideas of restoration, what it means to be a ‘biblical’ faith, spiritual gifts, communitarianism, wealth, and more. Often these debates centered on revivalism and the fitness, or lack thereof, of a revival sensibility within evangelicalism. Wiewora also talks about anti-Mormonism surrounding the Book of Mormon and ties that to anxieties about the culturally contingent nature of the Bible. He notes that:
“While evangelicals were not the only group attacking Mormonism’s scriptural practices, the intense dislike they had toward Mormonism resonated not just because the Book of Mormon was so different but because it raised many of the same challenges that had come to surround evangelicals’ sacred scriptures.” (100-01)
The Book of Mormon’s existence raised many of the same questions that evangelicals were grappling with in terms of the Bible. This meant that critics of the Book of Mormon were able to explore those questions in a different context, essentially arguing for a particular school of thought about the Bible, but via concerns with The Book of Mormon. (It was also quite interesting to read the specific critiques and find that for the most part they are the same criticisms of the Book of Mormon offered in polemical debates surrounding it today!)
Sins of Christendom may be occasionally frustrating for Mormon readers who want Wiewora to explicitly correct some of the perceived falsehoods of the anti-Mormon rhetoric he analyzes. However, since he is not interested in litigating these polemics, but instead in discussing what the claims reveal about evangelicalism, this decision makes sense. The book is rich in exploring this, making the book primarily about evangelicalism and how it was made in the antebellum period.
The epilogue summarizes Wiewora’s work by saying that evangelical anti-Mormonism failed in terms of destroying Mormonism. However, he argues that “Religious intolerance worked instead by changing evangelical beliefs and practices” (177). The commitment to anti-Mormon polemics transformed evangelicalism itself. Fruitful analysis of all sorts of oppositional discourse could follow this approach, exploring how groups form their identity through what they oppose (and that often this opposition is tied to fears of proximity, not just fear of what is different).
Wiewora concludes the book with a sobering observation:
“The successes of anti-Mormon polemics showed evangelicals that grievance and fear were the keys to power. Religious intolerance does not always arise out of difference….but intolerance remained too great to treat this new group like brothers or sisters in Christ. The hatred and resentment religious intolerance unleased sowed division that would contribute to the unmaking of America itself.” (184)
Another book is probably necessary to fully explore these last claims, but they are certainly provocative.
Nathaniel Wiewora’s Sins of Christendom: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Evangelicalism is an illuminating exploration of how anti-Mormonism shaped antebellum evangelicalism. The book offers a valuable framework for a range of future scholarship, modeling an approach that I hope to see replicated elsewhere. The book will be of greatest interest to scholars of 19th-century American religion, those interested in new approaches to engaging with anti-Mormon rhetoric, and folks intrigued by exploring some origins of the relationship between Mormonism and evangelicalism.