Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies
Patrick Q. Mason
Ph.D., History, University of Notre Dame
Patrick Mason became Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in 2011. His primary training is as an American religious historian, but he also received an MA in international peace studies, with an emphasis in religion, violence, and peacebuilding. After receiving his doctorate he taught US history and religion at the American University in Cairo before returning to Notre Dame to help direct an interdisciplinary research project on modern Catholicism, Islam, and secularism. At CGU he directs the programs in Mormon studies and Religions of North America.
Mason's first book is The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). Among his published articles are "God and the People: Theodemocracy in Nineteenth-Century Mormonism" (Journal of Church and State, Summer 2011); "Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South" (Journal of Southern History, August 2010); "The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888-1963" (Utah Historical Quarterly, Spring 2008); "Anti-Jewish Violence in the New South" (Southern Jewish History, 2005); "The Possibilities of Mormon Peacebuilding" (Dialogue, Spring 2004); and "Honor, the Unwritten Law, and Extralegal Violence: Contextualizing Parley Pratt's Murder" (forthcoming).
He is currently working on two related book projects: a volume of collected essays (co-edited with Richard Bushman and David Pulsipher) tentatively titled War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives; and a book (co-authored with David Pulsipher) exploring a distinctively Mormon theology and ethic of peace.
Upcoming Lectures
"Religion, Violence, and the State: A Mormon Argument"
(response by Robert Rees, Graduate Theological Union)
Saturday, November 19, 11:30-1:00
Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology sponsored session
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting
Hilton Union Square, San Francisco, CA
"What the 'Bloggernacle' Means for Mormon Studies"
(part of "Teaching Mormonism in the Digital Age" panel)
Saturday, January 7, 2012, 2:30-4:30
American Society for Church History, co-sponsored by Mormon History Association
Westin Chicago River North, Chicago, IL
"'A Bible! A Bible! We Have Got a Bible': Mormonism's Selective Love Affair with the King James Bible"
Date and time TBA (probably early December 2011)
Claremont Graduate University
Recent Media
Middle TN Mormons keep the faith The Tennessean
Why Do Southerners Call Mormonism a Cult? Religion Dispatches
Despite Divide, Evangelicals Could Support a Mormon NPR
On the Craig Fahle Show (podcast)
Patrick Mason on Anti-Mormonism and Mitt Romney, Research on Religion Podcast
"Active, Inactive — do Mormon labels work or Wound?" Salt Lake Tribune
Patrick Mason answers your questions, Juvenile Instructor
The Mormon Menace by Patrick Q. Mason
"It incarnates every unclean beast of lust, guile, falsehood, murder, despotism and spiritual wickedness." So wrote a prominent Southern Baptist official in 1899 of Mormonism. Rather than the "quintessential American religion," as it has been dubbed by contemporary scholars, in the late nineteenth century Mormonism was America's most vilified homegrown faith. A vast national campaign featuring politicians, church leaders, social reformers, the press, women's organizations, businessmen, and ordinary citizens sought to end the distinctive Latter-day Saint practice of plural marriage, and to extinguish the entire religion if need be.
Placing the movement against polygamy in the context of American and southern history, Mason demonstrates that anti-Mormonism was one of the earliest vehicles for reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Southerners joined with northern reformers and Republicans to endorse the use of newly expanded federal power to vanquish the perceived threat to Christian marriage and the American republic.
Anti-Mormonism was a significant intellectual, legal, religious, and cultural phenomenon, but in the South it was also violent. While southerners were concerned about distinctive Mormon beliefs and political practices, they were most alarmed at the "invasion" of Mormon missionaries in their communities and the prospect of their wives and daughters falling prey to polygamy. Moving to defend their homes and their honor against this threat, southerners turned to legislation, to religion, and, most dramatically, to vigilante violence.
The Mormon Menace provides new insights into some of the most important discussions of the late nineteenth century and of our own age, including debates over the nature and limits of religious freedom; the contest between the will of the people and the rule of law; and the role of citizens, churches, and the state in regulating and defining marriage.
Features
- Reveals anti-Mormonism as a significant cultural phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, in a region where it has not previously been studied.
- Argues that anti-Mormonism served a modest but significant function as one of the earliest forms of national reconciliation after Reconstruction, uniting southerners and northerners in a common cause.
- Provides the first sustained treatment of anti-Mormonism that incorporates all the elements of anti-Mormonism - legislative, intellectual, legal, cultural, religious, and violent, on both an elite and grassroots level.
Reviews
"Written with flair and intelligence, this book finds large themes in the activity of Mormon itinerant ministers in the late 19th-century American South and provides new and valuable insights about religion and violence, second generation Mormonism, and postbellum white culture in the American South. Patrick Mason, one of the best of the new generation of LDS scholars, uses the case study of Mormon missionaries to look at the post-Civil War American South. He takes another step in the increasing maturity of Mormon studies, as old and narrow views are replaced with mainstream methods and ideas. He gives his topic a fresh look, and the result is a valuable new view of the Mormon role in the American experience. Mormonism becomes a case study for studying the values, religion, and violence of the postbellum American South."
—Ronald Walker, author of Massacre at Mountain Meadows
"Patrick Mason tells an adventurous and violent story in this account of Mormon lynchings in the nineteenth-century South. His careful dissection of these bloody events leads us deep into the southern mentality and the contentious images of Mormonism in America. He finds the southern experience even reshaped Mormonism's view of itself. No reader will come away from this book feeling entirely comfortable."
—Richard Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Emeritus, Columbia University
"A deeply researched, clearly written analysis of an almost unknown aspect of southern and religious history. It fills an important gap in scholarship and by so doing illuminates a wide variety of interpretative issues in both fields. This perceptive and creatively conceived study should be widely read and the author applauded for realizing the significance of a hitherto neglected topic."
—John Boles, William P. Hobby Professor of History, Rice University
Journal of Southern Religion review