The list of J. Spencer Fluhman's exhaustive research fills sixty pages of endnotes and bibliography, but A Peculiar People is less a monograph filled with archival discoveries than a reflective essay about the meaning of a storehouse of nineteenth-century polemics relatively well-known to scholars who work the field. The energy that nineteenth-century Americans spent trying to deny the Church of Latter-day Saints a “legitimate” place in American experience was surely excessive when measured against any threat that the group posed to national well being. Clearly the hysteria is attributable to a nervous national fear that unbridled democracy had spawned dangerously unstable “enthusiasms,” Mormonism being an especially troubling example. The founding generation thought they had settled questions about religion. Fifty years later many of them were not even sure what religion was. Fluhman defines his study as “less a history of the Latter-day Saints than . . . a history of the idea of religion in nineteenth-century America” (10).

The problem was “unwieldy diversity,” and it was a problem that already in the first twenty years after the adoption of the Constitution troubled both Federalist ministers who had opposed religious disestablishment and their foes, the Jeffersonian Republicans who had championed it. Even without the tumultuous Methodist and Baptist revivals that toppled the numerical dominance of America's oldest churches, Anabaptists, Shakers, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, and Perfectionists of various stripes rose one after another to make many Protestant leaders question what exactly they had to abide in the name of free religious practice. By mid-century Roman Catholicism and Mormonism had become, judging by the amount of unfriendly print material aimed at them, focal points for the alarm over the spread of foreign or otherwise perverse spiritual contaminants. There was little to be done about Catholics with centuries of history of their side other than engage them in a never-ending battle over schools, but if Protestants could prove to their own satisfaction that upstart Mormonism was not even a religion, they could ignore the First Amendment and combat them with campaigns of armed extermination, first in Missouri and Illinois and then on a national scale when Mormons in Utah became part of a territory wrested from Mexico.

To demonstrate that Mormonism was not a religion elicited an arsenal of rhetorical strategies that Fluhman analyzes with acumen. Joseph Smith was a “fake,” a “religious impostor” who bore many comparisons to Muhammad, another great “confidence man” of world religious history. His church had no theology but only a phony book filled with rubbish that had to be “exposed,” unveiled,” and “unmasked.” The followers Smith attracted were victims of “delusion,” their obsession either the result or the cause of insanity. Other gambits included treating Mormonism as a recrudescence of superstitious magical practices or as a political movement opposed to republican traditions. By the end of the century, these protracted efforts to deny Mormonism religious status had largely foundered, but hostility to the Church continued because of polygamy (the Supreme court legitimated the ground for persecution by distinguishing religious belief from religious practice) and a fear that Mormons had constructed on American soil a Papal-like empire that out-Vaticaned the Vatican, and with an Islamic harem to boot.

Fluhman shrewdly notes that winning status as a religion, even a false one, was a step up from fakery and opened the door for Supreme Court justice William Douglas to declare in 1944 that “the law knows no heresy.” Unlike many European states where the concept of religious liberty permits governments to exercise strong regulatory power over “cults” deemed dangerous to public interest, almost anything claiming to be religion routinely gets a free pass in the United States with Constitutional protection and tax exemption. The decade of the 1890s was a watershed of sorts, allowing statehood for Utah once the Mormon Church renounced polygamy, divested itself of much of its property, and carefully divided the Latter-day Saints into Republicans and Democrats. But something else happened at the Chicago Columbia Exposition of 1893 and the ballyhooed World's Parliament of Religion held under its auspices. The Parliament did not open its welcoming spiritual horizons to include The Church of Latter-day Saints, but the territory of Utah set up its own pavilion among the exhibitions organized by the various states. Fluhman notes that this display of Utah's mining and agricultural achievements was much admired and created an alternative path for Mormon legitimacy based not on religion but on secular achievements. With Utah deemed worthy of statehood, formerly despised Mormons now had to figure out how to handle the “problem” of acceptance. Could Latter-day Saints, as Fluhman asks, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries “fuse those parts of their tradition that resonate with conventional Christianity and those that mark them as a distinctive faith community” (6)?

Mormon power in state and national politics still poses issues for a Church that has not had much use for ecumenical initiatives and that even at this late date sets scholars to arguing about whether to call it some kind of Christianity or classify it as a separate world religion. On the question of how “Latter-day Saints have positioned themselves in various ways over time” (1) in response to anti-Mormon polemics Fluhman offers suggestive but limited reflections. His short book that focused on anti-Mormon rhetoric in the nineteenth century does not say much about Mormonism's occasional “Gentile” supporters or the way Latter-day Saints shaped their own public relations campaigns. Despite a progressive softening of the once popular concept that gave Mormons a distinct ethnicity, Latter-day Saints remain “peculiar.” For their detractors, who range from Protestant evangelicals to outspoken atheists, Mormons are a separatist community who recite the Pledge of Allegiance but who balk at a straight answer to the question of whether they are fully invested in the American motto “one nation under God.”