{"product_id":"9780807863541","title":"The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle","description":"Between 1901 and 1907, a broad coalition of Protestant churches sought to expel newly elected Reed Smoot from the Senate, arguing that as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Smoot was a lawbreaker and therefore unfit to be a lawmaker. The resulting Senate investigative hearing featured testimony on every peculiarity of Mormonism, especially its polygamous family structure. The Smoot hearing ultimately mediated a compromise between Progressive Era Protestantism and Mormonism and resolved the nation's long-standing \"Mormon Problem.\" On a broader scale, Kathleen Flake shows how this landmark hearing provided the occasion for the country--through its elected representatives, the daily press, citizen petitions, and social reform activism--to reconsider the scope of religious free exercise in the new century.\u003cbr\u003eFlake contends that the Smoot hearing was the forge in which the Latter-day Saints, the Protestants, and the Senate hammered out a model for church-state relations, shaping for a new generation of non-Protestant and non-Christian Americans what it meant to be free and religious. In addition, she discusses the Latter-day Saints' use of narrative and collective memory to retain their religious identity even as they changed to meet the nation's demands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"The University of North Carolina Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47079137837296,"sku":"9780807863541","price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780807863541_p0.jpg?v=1763727598","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780807863541","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}