Marvin S. Hill on Mormons handling Pluralism

This post captures impressions and reading notes from Marvin S. Hill's study Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism, Salt Lake City (Signature Books), 1989.

• [p.xii] Hill notes that "The Latter-day Saints saw the maelstrom of competing faiths and social institutions as evidence of social upheaval and found confirmation in the rioting and violence that characterized Jacksonian America."
• [p.xiii] Hill notes the limited sense in which the BoM through its heroes, the Nephites, espoused religious freedom as a general freedom: "Thus the Nephite concept of freedom fell far short of the religious freedom being advanced in the United States in 1830. Reminiscent in some ways of the beliefs of early Massachusetts Bay Puritans, Nephites wanted freedom mainly to preserve their own true religion but were reluctant to allow others the might to oppose it."
• [p.xv] Hill works out how non-mainstream the Mormon orientation was: "Mormons with their ideal of a society in which the godly ruled over a unified, religious people stood in sharp contrast [to the Jeffersonian ideals of freedom of religion, RCK]. Ideally, the Mormon “kingdom” was an all-inclusive community with social, economic, religious, and political aspects."

(to be continued)