Mormonism.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormons, initially seemed just another odd outcropping on the sacred topography of the period. By the Civil War it was clearly much more—to some, a true faith; to others, a powerful delusion. The growth of the church, alarming to non- Mormons, meant that it could not be easily dismissed, and Mormonism became an integral chapter in Western religious history. Opponents railed at the church's sanction of polygamy and at its union of religion and politics: the former defiled the Christian family while the latter sullied the ideals of the American republican experiment. Yet the American religious establishment realized that, somehow, Mormonism spoke to the unmet yearnings of thousands; it ran both with and against the grain of religion in the antebellum age

Origins.

For Mormons the spiritual beginnings of...