In Frontier Religion, Konden Hansen Smith sets out to explain how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changed from a radical separatist sect in the nineteenth century to a paragon of patriotism and respectability in the twentieth. The answer, he suggests, has more to do with cultural changes in the United States than with changes in the church (237). Specifically, it's rooted in the emergence of a new, more secularized “myth of the frontier” in the late 1800s than had prevailed for most of that century.
In the mid-nineteenth century, white Mormons and white Protestants shared a view of the frontier as a place of savagery, irreligion, and threat—a place to be civilized through redemptive violence in preparation for the millennial reign of Christ. This white and Christian supremacist myth caused violent conflict between Mormons and Protestants because Protestants drew the boundaries of whiteness and Christianity so...
