Mormons are not the only religious group to be largely constrained by these two modes of popular representation, with religion as a whole and those groups that are identified as particularly controversial receiving similar treatments.⁴ Many outsiders are intrigued to learn of the experiences of former members coming out of such faith traditions as Hasidic Judaism, the Amish, Pentecostal and Evangelical Christianity, new religious movements like Scientology, and of course, Mormonism. The larger explosion of religious true crime pieces has advanced the tendency to depict Mormons as accessories to, victims of, or perpetrators of crime within the popular consciousness. I suggest that, despite the gains Mormonism has made toward increased assimilation in the last century, especially typified by the “Mormon moment” of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign as the Republican nominee, the faith tradition has yet to be granted a level of diverse representation that is not primarily reduced to instances of religious extremism or criminal activity, or to the stories of the religiously disaffected.

The place of Mormonism within popular media has rarely broken away from sentiments of open disdain or apathetic curiosity. Since its initial foray into the contested religious frontier of Jacksonian America, Mormonism was immediately met with suspicion, if not open hostility, on account of the tenor of its theological heterodoxies, its grandiose political ambitions, its flaunting of Victorian sexual ethics, and the rapidity with which its numbers transgressed social and national borders. Experiencing levels of persecution and systematic disenfranchisement matched by only a few other religious groups in United States history, early Mormons found themselves pushed outside of the Union’s borders just as they claimed belonging in the American spirit through their sufferings, marginalization, and flight for survival. It is in this sense that Latter-day Saints have lived and continue to live a double life in the American consciousness, one that has been externally reinforced, internally challenged, and carefully negotiated throughout the community’s contested development.

I’ve known and felt this double identity on a deep personal basis. Though raised within a regular Latter-day Saint household by parents coming from multigenerational Mormon families, my mother transitioned out of Mormonism when I was 12 and found a spiritual home within a local nondenominational Evangelical church. As a teenager, I became consciously aware of the differentiated space I occupied because of my Latter-day Saint identity. My quiet participation in Evangelical worship and Bible studies was welcomed, as long as I didn’t interject my Mormonism. It was clear to me that I was perceived as representing the “religious other” in ways that other traditions did not. Whereas Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism were extended degrees of fellowship on the basis of representing “historical” or “traditional” Christianity, and the religious families of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism were distinctly “non-Christian” faiths, Mormonism represented something else entirely. Positing an open canon not limited to the Bible, living prophets and ongoing revelations, privileging orthopraxy over orthodoxy, and rejecting Christian trinitarianism and classical theism alike—all while explicitly insisting on its valid claim to Christian faith and identity—Mormonism was dangerous insofar as it blurred the lines of “familiar” and “other” to an uncomfortable and heretical extent. In the eyes of the Evangelical congregations in which I participated, I may have been more “Christian” than an atheist, Jew, or Hindu, but I was not so Christian as to merit a legitimate claim to the identity itself.

A comparable dynamic can be mapped onto the American religious landscape: this double identity, where Mormonism’s quintessential “American-ness” has been widely recognized—representing a homegrown American religious tradition—while being consistently situated outside or on the periphery of the American mainstream.⁵ Consequently, throughout its history, Mormonism has been excluded from the mainstream and denied forms of access and inclusion on social, political, religious, economic, and, occasionally, racial lines. Where Mormonism has made—at times considerable—strides in these categories, such gains have required a stance of measured assimilation, if not obeisance, to what Robert P. Jones has described as “White Christian America.”⁶ These moves toward assimilation required Mormonism to play within the bounds of “good religion” established by the normative Protestant powers-that-be, which have so shaped the essence and scope of religion within the American historical consciousness. Put differently, though Mormonism may be considered by some to be “the most American religion,”⁷ it has simultaneously persisted in being the most American “religious other.”

Mormonism’s general assimilation within the bounds of “good” or (with respect to Mormonism) “acceptable” religion has been accomplished through shifts in posturing and practice along social, political, economic, racial, and theological fronts.⁸ In its early practice of religious polygyny, also referred to as plural marriage, the very lines of what constituted religion and its legal privileges were arrayed against the Latter-day Saints by a vexed US government oppositional lobby, which sought to stamp out the practice altogether. In 1879 the Supreme Court ruled that a federal prohibition of polygamy did not violate the free exercise clause with respect to religion. Mormons, institutionally, communally, and individually, faced near-absolute disenfranchisement, seizure of assets, criminal charges, and imprisonment in its wake—my ancestors among them. By 1890, the faith issued a public manifesto rescinding the practice, though it continued to quietly live on in some circles for several decades to follow. In the twentieth century, Latter-day Saints not only doubled down on their commitment to lived monogamy, they often felt vexed by the significantly smaller numbers of their fundamentalist counterparts—deemed as apostate by the LDS Church—who continued to practice plural marriage, even in the face of serious social marginalization and legal persecution. By joining in the rejection and persecution of polygamists, the survival of mainstream Latter-day Saints was assured. The contemporary LDS Church has similarly played an outsized role in its advocacy and support for heterosexual “traditional” marriage in the American political sphere.

On political and economic grounds, Mormons of the nineteenth century had to forgo their aspirations to have an expressly “theodemocratic” Mormon state, an experiment that bucked the separation of church and state so avidly valued in the American mind, both then and now. Under sustained pressure from the federal government, Brigham Young gave up his ambitions of being the head of the Kingdom of Deseret in the Rocky Mountains, becoming governor of the Utah territory instead. Likewise, the various economic communitarian enterprises found replacement in a robust American capitalist materialism. After decades of debt, poverty, and financial loss accumulated through the consequences of active persecution, the LDS Church today distinguishes itself through a level of asset possession and financial wealth essentially unrivaled by most comparable religious groups.⁹ In this sense, the purchase of security and power has been a tangible transaction for the Mormon community.

Combined, these major moves toward assimilation on the grounds of politics and economics were haunted by another, more pernicious transition in the American mind: that of Mormonism’s racial relationship to the category of whiteness. Though the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith, espoused abolitionist sympathies, ordained Black males to the Mormon priesthood, and envisioned a theological outlook with a sentiment of “black and white, bond and free, male and female . . . all are alike unto God,”¹⁰ the Mormon faith later found itself vulnerable to popular religious and social beliefs regarding race, absorbed through its external environs and reified through particular interpretations of its scripture. While Mormons placed increasing levels of restriction on Black members of the faith from 1852 on, barring Black men and women from temple attendance and/or priesthood ordination, they continued to be excluded from the category of whiteness themselves in ways comparable to Catholics, Irish, Jews, and others who found themselves at the short end of the American racial hierarchy. This struggle for whiteness expressed another way in which Mormons were systematically and popularly othered in the American mind.¹¹ They sought the social and political privileges associated with whiteness by contrasting and defining themselves, culturally, religiously, and socially, against blackness.¹²

Despite these moves toward greater assimilation, Mormonism has never been able to shake its sense of otherness, an otherness it has internally claimed through its self-conception of being a “peculiar people.” In negotiating this status, Mormonism has had to set aside or downplay some of the more radical qualities in its theological repertoire and historical past. This inequitable exchange has been particularly regrettable in the case of American Mormonism’s courting of the Christian political right, leading to a Mormon receiving the formal nomination of the same party that once established its party platform against “the twin relics of barbarism”—slavery and polygamy.¹³ Over a decade later, Romney became the first sitting senator to vote to impeach a president of the same party—a vote he specifically linked, implicitly and explicitly, to the values instilled in him by his Mormon faith. The Utah senator’s metamorphosis from the face of the Republican Party to one of its foremost pariahs in the Age of Trump demonstrates the fickle grounds upon which Mormons have sought the party’s good graces.

Following the “Mormon moment” of the 2010s, a slew of high-profile media treatments of the faith have come out, with 2022 being especially notable for its treatments of Mormonism on the big screen. Attending the red carpet premiere for Hulu/FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven, I was reminded of the otherness of my own Mormon experience, just as it spoke to the historical otherness that has characterized Mormonism’s popular image. External critics and commentators have reinforced this sense of otherness by casting the tradition as an alternative Islam within American history, an angle that Jon Krakauer essentially took in his 2003 book, not long after the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11. Krakauer’s thesis wasn’t a subtle one: Americans need not look beyond our shores for examples of encroaching religious extremism; it is in our own backyards in the form of America’s homegrown religious tradition of Mormonism. Black’s rendition of Banner, while invoking many of the same fears, does so inevitably through the lens of the dangers of religious nationalism, conspiratorial radicalization, and misogyny, which have been amplified through an increasingly emboldened far right in recent years. The normative and damaging forms of patriarchy he displays from the background of his nascent faith have been met with ample support from many inside and outside the Mormon tradition, who themselves relate to its depictions. Banner’s angle of religious disaffection and a crisis of faith have likewise resonated with many, an understandable reception given the explosive success of religious exit narratives within popular media.

Joining Banner, recent high-profile treatments of Mormonism include Netflix’s Murder among the Mormons (2021), a documentary covering a series of forgeries and bombings in 1980s Salt Lake City; Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022), a docuseries riding the coattails of Banner in its interrogation of Mormon fundamentalism and analysis of the rise of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leader Warren Jeffs; and Sins of Our Mother (2022), a docuseries covering the disappearance and murders of the children of Lori Vallow, as well as her descent into a kind of personal apocalyptic extremism. Hulu likewise offers more than just Banner, as far as religious exit narratives are concerned, having released the aptly named Mormon No More (2022), which follows the religious journeys of multiple Mormon women who fall in love with one another, come to embrace their lesbian orientation, and ultimately part ways with the faith. Another major release to explore the varied experiences of LGBTQ+ Mormons in recent years is found in HBOMax’s 2018 documentary Believer, told through the sympathetic lens of Dan Reynolds, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons. While all of these stories and treatments of some of the varieties of Mormonism (if largely those varieties marked by extremism, criminality, and the existential challenges presented to individual Mormon convictions) deserve to be told in their own right, their collective predominance in defining and characterizing the popular perception of Mormonism is worth scrutinizing, especially when it comes to the forthcoming movie production Sinner V. Saints, which is set to cover the 1970s case of the “manacled Mormon”—referring to the kidnap and repeated rape of a Mormon missionary by British ex-beauty pageant queen Joyce McKinney. With Maisie Williams and Freddie Highmore as co-stars, this production is set to tell the story of this traumatic event through the highly questionable medium of a comedy, a creative choice which undoubtedly falls flat in a post–#MeToo era. Again, in virtually all of these treatments, Mormons are depicted as either victims, criminals, or disaffected former believers—stories which fail to capture the immensity and true plurality of the lived religious experience across the Mormon world.

Jaxon Washburn is pursuing an MTS degree at Harvard Divinity School. His research focuses include Armenian religious history and Mormon studies.