Salvation and Solvency: The Socio-Economic Policies of Early Mormonism

This monograph tracks the development of the socio-economic stance of early Mormonism, an American Millenarian Restorationist movement, through the first fourteen years of the church’s existence, from its incorporation in the spring of 1830 in New York, through Ohio and Missouri and Illinois, up to the lynching of its prophet Joseph Smith Jr in the summer of 1844. Mormonism used a new revelation, the Book of Mormon, and a new apostolically inspired church organization to connect American antiquities to covenant-theological salvation history. The innovative religious strategy was coupled with a conservative socio-economic stance that was supportive of technological innovation. This analysis of the early Mormon church uses case studies focused on socio-economic problems, such as wealth distribution, the financing of publication projects, land trade and banking, and caring for the poor. In order to correct for the agentive overtones of standard Mormon historiography, both in its supportive and in its detractive stance, the explanatory models of social time from Fernand Braudel’s classic work on the Mediterranean are transferred to and applied in the nineteenth-century American context.