A surface reading of the polemical rhetoric and clashing theological claims of Mormonism and Evangelicalism has led many observers to conclude that these were two diametrically opposed and conflictual religious movements. There are some good reasons for this, as the groups competed for converts, wrangled over revelation and doctrine, and became distinct in their sociological instantiation and communal structures. Nathaniel Wiewora’s new book, however, refines and complicates this picture in intriguing ways. In it, Wiewora proffers the argument that, historically, the two groups shared many common features and that, from the Evangelical side, the critique, condemnation, and backhandedly envious praise of Mormonism were actually integral to the internal contestation and adjudication of Evangelical identity and boundaries. The Evangelical relationship to Mormonism existed “in contradictory ways from the earliest encounter” (177), and there was a clear sociological and dialectical interplay of self-definition and other-condemnation.

To make the argument, Wiewora’s book focuses on the interaction between these two communities during the broadly Second Great Awakening period. The book provides a textured reading of a wide array of published print sources from across the Evangelical landscape that comment on burgeoning Mormonism. It begins with helpful background on the earliest patterns of Evangelical reaction to Joseph Smith’s activities and the publication of the Book of Mormon. Then comes an illuminating comparison between the Evangelical subgroup that seems to share the most similar contour of “restorationism” with Mormonism (i.e., the attempt to repristinate the earliest Christian community behind historical accretion): the Stone–Campbell Movement. Here, Sidney Rigdon (1793–1876), who moved directly from prominent positions between the two, was an emblematic transitional figure. There’s also a deft reading of Alexander Campbell’s key, subtly entitled, 1832 text, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon…, showing Campbell working out the priorities and boundaries of his own movement in this compendium of anti-Mormon polemic.

Wiewora’s book then assembles and catalogues the key thematic critiques that Evangelicals attempted to advance: 1. about Mormonism’s disastrous communalistic economic practices, yet also voracious accumulation of wealth in relationship to Evangelical self-anxieties about their own massive mobilization of mammon; 2. about Mormonism’s unruly avenues for revelation and interpretation of scripture in relationship to growing Evangelical anxieties about their own community’s interpretive pluralism of the Bible; 3. about Mormonism’s insularity and fanaticism in relationship to their own community’s eccentricities; and 4. about Mormonism’s positive achievements of institution building and mission not being sufficiently imitated or superseded by Evangelicals. The architectonic of the book is built compellingly by, clearly, first outlining the nature of Evangelical anti-Mormon claims/rhetoric and then by showing how, structurally, each of those main points was also directed at the internal Evangelical community, betraying anxieties about how Mormon religious culture unveiled some unstable or ambiguous aspect of Evangelicalism itself. Wiewora’s argument is well-situated within the secondary scholarship of religious history on early Mormonism and Evangelicalism – though the use of landmarks of broader American historical scholarship could have been augmented.

The argument will be plausible and intuitive to those who have long noted some seemingly isomorphic religious phenomenology between nineteenth-century Mormons and Evangelicals, as well as noted their common historical milieu in the swirling social vortex of the “Burned-Over District” of Western New York, the Erie Canal region, and the trans-Appalachian frontier. But Wiweora identifies, elaborates, and clarifies more than any previous scholarship the specific connections between the anti-Mormon posturing of Evangelicals and their own internal fracas. Most incisively, he notes how anti-Mormonism became crucial for policing the perceived limits, excesses, dangers, and eccentricities of the revivalist tradition itself; for re-shaping Evangelicalism more in conformity with mainstream American culture; and for generating energy toward the construction of the Evangelical “benevolent empire.”

The book is focused and disciplined, both chronologically and thematically. The Epilogue briefly gestures toward how this pattern of Evangelical difference/similarity with Mormonism continues to structure Evangelical life up through the turn of the 2000s, which could be an area for further unfolding of this research. Specifically, for example, I suspect Wiewora’s framework could hermeneutically benefit a revisiting of the social dynamics of the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign. There was also a limited gesture toward the larger theoretical concerns about how to understand religious antagonism, conflict, and intolerance that, Wiewora suggests, does not always emerge merely out of distance and difference, but sometimes out of too acutely perceived similarities, the anxiety fueled by an uncomfortable proximity, and the existential pang of seeing too much of the self in the other.

On that theoretical note, Wiewora is clear that he was primarily focusing in his historical methodology on the religious uses that Evangelicals made of their anti-Mormon rhetoric, mostly avoiding the adjudication of competing substantive claims. However, at one point he does state that most Evangelical anti-Mormon claims were “very rarely true” or, at best, exaggerated and misleading (4), and there were a few times when he entered directly into the rhetorical contestation he was documenting with historical data (for one example, 87–91). Clearly, the interaction between different worldview groups in American history has been full of catastrophizing, hyperbole, conspiracy theory, outright fabrications, and the like. There might have been a missed opportunity here for Wiewora to think about, and implement more extensively, a historical epistemology for “conspiracy,” as gnarly as that question is. While it is true that conspiracies, exaggerations, and fabrications can have their own historical momentum and social effects regardless of their truth content, and those effects can be viable objects of historical inquiry just as much as the accurate descriptions, we also need to think more rigorously about when it is the case that the historical evaluation of such conspiratorial or hyperbolic rhetoric does depend on their degree of accuracy, or where the boundaries of substantive disagreement lie beneath such rhetoric.

Untangling those knots is challenging, but at times also crucial to making appropriate historical judgments. Nevertheless, that Wiewora did not fully wade into those theoretical waters does not diminish the value of this wonderful study on its own terms, which will be of interest to any nineteenth-century US specialists, Evangelical and Mormon religious historians, and anyone who seeks to understand the enduring role of both Evangelicalism and Mormonism in American life.