In 1839, a woman named Mary Spencer heard a Mormon missionary named Joseph Fielding preach near her home in Waddington, in the Ribble Valley district north of Preston on the west coast of Great Britain. Spencer embraced the new religion, and though her husband Richard did not share her interest, he was preternaturally supportive. When Mary decided to raise those of her ten children still at home in the church, he agreed. When Mary decided that she wanted her family to move to Liverpool to further her involvement in the church, Richard worked to get them there. And when Mary embraced the doctrine of the “gathering,” which called for converts to join the main body of the church at Nauvoo, Illinois, Richard consented to the move. He also walked fifteen miles to the farm of his son, George, to inform the young man that the family would be leaving Great Britain. George, who seems to have known little about his mother's new faith, was stunned. He quite possibly heard nothing about his family for decades until his nephew, Richard Henry Spencer, now a Mormon missionary proselyting in his family's old country, found the old man in 1901.

This is one of many such stories in Matthew Lyman Rasmussen's new book, which is the product of prodigious research and tells stories like those of the Spencers in graceful and arresting prose. Rasmussen has written the definitive volume on Mormonism in the British Isles and, what is more, has gone beyond simple historical narrative to tell a story with some degree of theoretical rigor. This is not only a history of Mormonism in what Rasmussen calls its “British Zion” but also a useful study of the ways in which new religious movements cope as they breach new and unfamiliar societies.

The story of the Spencers encapsulates many of Rasmussen's arguments. He believes that Mormonism had a fraught relationship with the British Isles. The doctrine of the gathering privileged the United States for early Mormons, particularly when church leaders like Joseph Smith identified specific American sites as the location of Zion and then imagined an ideal and holy community to be built on American ground. Great Britain, by contrast, was often labeled “Babylon” or “a place of corruption, pollution and depravity” (8). Thousands of British subjects like Mary Spencer joined the new church, and many of them departed their native soil.

And yet, Rasmussen finds tension within this neat dichotomy. Like the Spencers, many of these British emigres found their families torn apart by both conversion and migration. They did not leave all ties behind. Some clung to the early Mormon missionaries' habit of calling England, which provided their labor with great fruit, “blessed” and either returned to their homeland, like Richard Henry Spencer, or did not leave in the first place. This tension was eventually resolved when Mormon leaders responded to the growth of their faith with a reconceptualization of what the gathering meant. By the early twentieth century, the doctrine “no longer required that Israel be gathered to the same geographical destination, or that Zion's boundaries be restricted to the members in the Intermountain West” (38). Instead, Mormon leaders began encouraging their followers to build Zion wherever they found themselves.

This reconceptualization could not have come soon enough for British Mormons. Where there had once been thousands of converts, by the 1890s fewer than 1,000 remained. The second half of Rasmussen's book is a welcome addition to a growing corpus of work on twentieth-century Mormonism, a field that remains largely under studied. Rasmussen works to show how Mormons sought to build a non-American version of their faith. He emphasizes the role of missionaries, often those like Richard Henry Spencer who had roots in the country they returned to, and the importance of infrastructure that earlier Mormons, fixated on moving across the Atlantic Ocean, had largely neglected. In the twentieth century, British Mormons erected chapels, drew on family connections to invigorate social networks, and, as Rasmussen puts it, gradually converted Babylon into Zion.

This recapitulation does not do justice to many of the nooks and crannies of Rasmussen's argument; he has things to say about the evolution of British anti-Mormonism, about the social theory of conversion, and about the ritual creation of sacred space. Indeed, for a relatively brief book, he covers a great deal of ground, and I felt at points that I would have liked him to scale back on some of these side journeys and focus on developing context for the story he has to tell. In the opening of the book, Rasmussen makes a case for focusing on “endogenous” factors and in particular the doctrine of the gathering as the paramount factor influencing the course of Mormonism in Great Britain. This is a fair argument, and he takes the time to justify it. But the narrowness of scope here leaves his argument at times more barren than it needs to be. For instance, he blames the decline of Mormonism in late nineteenth-century Britain both on the emigration which decimated the religion's ranks but also on “a pervading indifference toward religion” in the country which he does little to document or link to the generally negative public image of Mormonism in both Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century (91). Rasmussen tends toward favorable representation of his subjects, only mentioning the intense controversy over polygamy briefly pages later, and focusing his discussion of hostility toward Mormonism on tactics rather than content. This misses an opportunity to discuss the debate over the cultural place of the faith in Victorian Britain, a topic Rasmussen does little with.

These hesitations aside, Rasmussen's work is packed with detail, nuanced in its interpretations, and theoretically sophisticated. It is an important and worthwhile contribution to the study of international Mormonism.