At the center of Terryl Givens's The Viper on the Hearth lays a profound insight. While analyzing the political uses of anti-Mormon literature in America, Givens asserts that United States citizens employed fictional portrayals of Latter-day Saints to critique Mormon practices they deemed threatening to the nation at large. In so doing, Americans separated themselves from what they believed to be a particularly dangerous form of heresy, while simultaneously allowing themselves to assert that they remained champions of religious toleration in the abstract. By seeking to “cast . . . Mormonism in nonreligious terms,” as a “quasi-ethnic group” deemed “alien to and incompatible with fundamental American values,” Givens asserts that critics of the Latter-day Saints were given rhetorical leeway to “exorcise a threatening Other” while still appearing, in their eyes, as a nation dedicated to pluralism and acceptance.1
As an examination of how Americans self-consciously came to see Mormonism...
