My dissertation explores the relationship of religious conviction to political belief by analyzing the polemical texts associated with ecclesiastical conflicts in Methodism, Roman Catholicism, and Mormonism in the United States from 1784 through the 1840s. From its founding in 1784 to its bifurcation over the question of slavery in 1844, the Methodist Episcopal Church suffered from repeated internal conflicts over the proper structure of authority in a denomination whose homiletic mission stressed a personal experience of salvation. Also in 1784, Roman Catholicism began to develop an American hierarchy with the appointment of John Carroll as Superior of the Mission to the United States. Over the next six decades, American Catholics participated in a series of battles over the meaning of papal authority and the right of lay trustees to choose the pastors for their own congregations. Mormonism, first organized in 1830, endured battles over the limits of prophetic authority that indirectly led to the 1844 assassination of its leader, Joseph Smith. As they sought public support for their respective camps, participants in these struggles invoked political language, conflating the ungodly with the anti-republican and informing the spectrum of meanings associated with terms like “tyranny,” “democracy,” and “liberty.”