The making of the modern Mormon: Politics, discourse, and power in the Mormon Church, 1945-1954

This dissertation investigates the early cold war origins of politico-economic conservatism among modern U.S. Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). It essentially argues that Mormonism experienced a political Right turn in the aftermath of the Second World War, as conditions proved favorable at the dawn of the cold war. The primary mechanism through which this ideological shift occurred was influential religious discourse.;Mid-century Mormon culture allowed for church authorities to impact member politics. Authoritarian expectations of rank-and-file conformity suggested a likelihood for believers to adopt the views voiced in official Latter-day Saint literature. The authoritative political rhetoric, expressed by a business-oriented Mormon hierarchy running a corporate church, pushed a largely conservative agenda prior to and during World War II. Although the national crises of a Great Depression and American involvement in a world war caused lay Mormons to temporarily resist the politics of their leaders, the end of these problems brought significant political change to Mormonism. Pervasive anticommunist sentiment at the dawn of the cold war, coupled with postwar U.S. economic success, provided the opportunity for the Mormon hierarchy to vigorously reassert their political conservatism. In this period, as the modern American conservative movement began to take shape, Latter-day Saints heard free-market capitalism and militant anticommunism preached with regularity from ecclesiastical platforms. The use of institutional discourse to shape rank-and-file political attitudes relied on rhetorical maneuvering that also included a remaking of Mormon and American history. These historical rewrites helped ensure historical memory would appropriately reinforce the leadership's early cold war conservative message Latter-day Saint voting statistics appear to corroborate the likelihood of a correlation between the discursive tactics of the conservative Mormon hierarchy and the political conformity of the membership in the second half of the twentieth century.