Using My Religion: The Use of Religion as a Legal Tool in the 19th Century Debate on Plural Marriage
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2015
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Haverford College. Department of Religion
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This thesis aims to add to the existing academic conversation on the juncture between law and religion. In this thesis, I unpack the myriad ways in which religious rhetoric was used to defend and instigate legal positions in the 19th century debate on plural marriage. The U.S. Congress and Supreme Court spent the better half of the 1800s trying to legislate against plural marriage. Their desire to create this injunction was inspired by their mores and their stance on natural law. Members of the U.S. federal government used the religious practices of the Mormon population to show that the LDS were peripheral to American and Western sensibilities. They depicted the LDS Church as violating natural law and as a distinct race. Furthermore, the U.S. government established a clear dichotomy of “us” and “them” by casting the LDS as antithetical to centrist ideas of Christianity. The Mormon population responded by using divine law and the Decalogue to show that they were not, in their minds, in violation of natural law. Additionally, the representatives of the LDS used arguments from the New Testament in an effort to construct this as a theological issue, rather than a legal one. In using claims from the Bible, the LDS representatives attempted to tie Christianity and Mormonism together.