Christians, Cultists, Cobelligerents: Mormon-Evangelical Relations in the Era of the New Religious Right

Team Members/Contributors

John-Charles Duffy University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

My dissertation examines relations between evangelicals and Mormons in the United States, focusing principally on the period after the 1970s, when these two groups became potential allies (together with Catholics and other religious conservatives) in the New Religious Right. I seek to explain why some evangelicals at the end of the twentieth century pursued rapprochement with Mormons, and why other evangelicals opposed those initiatives, in terms of tensions produced by Mormons' and evangelicals' attempts to reposition themselves in a polarized American cultural landscape. Learning to share the same cultural terrain as "cobelligerents" against secularism and moral relativism has required Mormons to become more like evangelicals in certain respects, and evangelicals more like Mormons. The process has led to conflict, both interreligious and internal; but it has also led to influential political cooperation around hot-button issues as well as surprising, controversial ecumenical gestures.

This project is primarily an intellectual history, since it is primarily a history of texts. Theology, sermons, missionary and apologetic literature, political argument, journalism, fiction, popular psychology, biblical scholarship, and historiography are among the arenas in which evangelicals and Mormons have negotiated their relationship. I also draw on methods of cultural history to analyze media representations and artifacts of popular culture. My project's theoretical frames extend or refine sociological work by Robert Wuthnow, James Hunter, Armand Mauss, and Christian Smith. The dissertation clarifies the means and constraints of religious influence in American public life today and challenges a common framework for thinking about pluralism, showing that Christian conservatives, often presumed to be anti-pluralist, are in fact developing their own forms of constructive, appreciative engagement with certain religious others.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  "Conservative Pluralists: The Cultural Poliltics of Mormon-Evangelical Dialogue in the United States at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" 2011 Dissertation John-Charles Duffy