The dates that bookend Konden Smith Hansen's title are intriguing. They defy the standard periodization that often guides the telling of Mormon history. In its structure and ambition, this book is a commendable effort at resolving complaints scholars of Mormon studies have been voicing for years now about the subject's tendency to attract inward-looking denominational history. Smith Hansen wants to give us a sweeping story less about Mormonism than about the transformation of American society. In four case studies—the Utah War of 1857, the late nineteenth-century polygamy prosecutions, the World's Fair of 1893, and the debates over the Mormon apostle Reed Smoot's seating in the U.S. Senate—he seeks to demonstrate how Mormonism sat near the heart of a vast tidal shift in American culture and politics.

While Smith Hansen argues that both Mormonism and the Protestant Americans who despised it in the 1850s changed a great deal over the next half century, one of the signal and most useful arguments of this book is that the gap yawning between those two groups was not so wide as is sometimes supposed. This point is a useful corrective to studies that may romanticize Mormon difference and hence weaken the value of comparison and context. Mormons and Protestant Americans shared a devotion to “frontier religion,” which Smith Hansen describes as a messianic belief that the ragged edge of civilization called for the construction of a kingdom of God—though each envisioned it differently. After a series of confrontations, the two found themselves in a rapidly modernizing and, as Smith Hansen would have it, secularizing America. This process fractured the Protestant establishment and forced Mormonism to adapt in order to survive. So says Smith Hansen: “The secularized form of Americanism Mormonism successfully adopted and adapted itself to . . . simply did not exist in 1857 when the two groups nearly came to blows” (235–236).

Some of Smith Hansen's sharpest arguments come in his descriptions of the Mormons’ self-presentation in the late nineteenth century. Smith Hansen draws on the work of Reid Neilson to point out the stark dichotomy in the ways the Mormons were treated at the 1893 World's Fair: though they were one of the few religions denied participation in the World's Parliament of Religions meeting in conjunction with the fair, the Utah pavilion was given a privileged place at the exposition, and Mormon leaders orchestrated a presentation of the Mormon pioneers as individualist icons rather than sectarian refugees. Ten years later, Mormon leaders like Smoot again made such an appeal to gain sympathy from the notoriously frontier-friendly president Theodore Roosevelt. These are keen observations. Smith Hansen uses them to argue that the fair in particular was a “secular back door by which the church entered the stage of national legitimacy” (173).

The notion of “frontier religion” is useful, though Smith Hansen paints it with perhaps too large a brush, leaping from the Puritans to Tocqueville to Turner with ease. Indeed, Smith Hansen can use theory, particularly that of “the secular,” rather loosely, and as the book continues it is sometimes difficult to parse exactly how such terms are supposed to serve his argument. Smith Hansen uses the term “secular” in various ways, citing Christian Smith and Charles Taylor. Generally, it seems Smith Hansen means the fading influence of religious institutions. Sometimes it seems as if he is arguing this shift produced new “secular” versions of older traditions, as when he argues the progressive era saw the “coevolution of Mormonism and Protestants into more secular or privatized forms of faith” (234). I think there is something to this, and that in comparing the Protestant and Mormon traditions, Smith Hansen is pointing us in interesting directions.

But on the other hand, sometimes Smith Hansen writes as though late nineteenth-century America saw a stark juxtaposition between the “religious” and the “secular” in which the latter supplanted the former. Take for instance his extended argument that “Protestant influence had been significantly weakened in American politics by 1903 by secularism and the growth of the progressive movement” (200). I do not know that these three were so distinct as this, or that Protestantism and progressivism were at such odds, even if Smith Hansen is merely speaking of institutional Protestantism. He himself complicates the point later by rightly observing that “progressivism, then, was not separate from . . . Protestant religion, but integral to it” (216).

Thus, when Smith Hansen argues Mormonism “directly engaged with American secularism by renouncing plural marriage,” he means that Mormonism abandoned its attempt to reorder American social and public life (167). And indeed, if we define the “secular” as the boundaries placed around what is judged legitimately religious in any given society, it is a fair point. But Smith Hansen's juxtaposition of the term with Protestantism as well as Mormonism muddies the fact that the accomplishments of the “secular” with respect to Mormonism were those most Protestants wanted all along, and the version of secularism he is talking about was deeply shaped by Protestant assumptions.

As it happens, though, the book does not need theory of the secular in the first place. Smith Hansen's argument that rhetoric about the frontier can bind how we understand the Mormon experience from the 1850s to the twentieth century together in ways that illustrate its accommodation to American public life is valuable alone. It points us to a theme underrepresented in Mormon studies generally and is useful for comparison; indeed, I wish Smith Hansen followed some of his own points about the relationship between the frontier and religion further. The notion that the frontier marked out and shaped what Americans understood to be first Christian and then modern, and that their manipulation of the concept revealed a contest over those terms, is exciting. Smith Hansen and his book deserve commendation for that.