Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West

by David Walker

Overview

Railroads, tourism, and government bureaucracy combined to create modern religion in the American West, argues David Walker in this innovative study of Mormonism's ascendency in the railroad era. The center of his story is Corinne, Utah—an end-of-the-track, hell-on-wheels railroad town founded by anti-Mormon businessmen. In the disputes over this town's frontier survival, Walker discovers intense efforts by a variety of theological, political, and economic interest groups to challenge or secure Mormonism's standing in the West. Though Corinne's founders hoped to leverage industrial capital to overthrow Mormon theocracy, the town became the site of a very different dream.

Economic and political victory in the West required the production of knowledge about different religious groups settling in its lands. As ordinary Americans advanced their own theories about Mormondom, they contributed to the rise of religion itself as a category of popular and scholarly imagination. At the same time, new and advantageous railroad-related alliances catalyzed LDS Church officials to build increasingly dynamic religious institutions. Through scrupulous research and wide-ranging theoretical engagement, Walker shows that western railroads did not eradicate or diminish Mormon power. To the contrary, railroad promoters helped establish Mormonism as a normative American religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469653204
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/30/2019
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	680,517
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David Walker is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A book that is bursting with creativity, irony, and scholarly flair, Railroading Religion is a brilliant history of the making of railroads and religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Utah. Unearthing a wealth of letters, journals, scrapbooks, promotional materials, and other sources and placing them in conversation with theorists of religion, technology, and tourism, David Walker finds a new way to tell readers about the constructed meaning of 'religion' in America while telling new stories about Mormons and their political and religious antagonists. This is one of the most thoughtful and original books on the history of Mormonism that I have read."—John G. Turner, author of The Mormon Jesus

David Walker's Railroading Religion is a book of intricate and serious pleasures: at once a meticulous archival history of a failed municipal experiment, an ambitious and deeply imagined parsing of Mormonism in the American grain, and a venturesome, transformative effort to rethink the basic questions that animate the study of religion and the secular in modernity."—Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

David Walker's 'mainlining' of Mormonism in relation to the development of the transcontinental railroad is creative and innovative both in how he uses historical sources and how he considers theoretical concerns relating to religion and secularism. Railroading Religion brings together Mormon history, the history of religion in the West, and—pivoting around the intriguing town of Corinne, Utah—the history of railroads and economic development in America more broadly."– Richard J. Callahan Jr., author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust

Editorial Reviews

This insightful book will be useful to those interested in railroads and the development of the West as well as those interested in Mormonism.—CHOICE

Embracing the material turn in religious studies, Walker writes about tourist sites, trains, and beaches, among other things, as major parts of nineteenth-century religion that illustrate the complexity of the boundaries of religion as a category. Importantly, the book contributes to an understudied period of Mormonism's American history (1860s-1890s) and brings an exciting analysis to its subject matter.—Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Railroading Religion is one of the most theoretically rich and provocatively argued books written on Mormon studies in quite some time. While the benefits for those who work on Mormonism are clear, scholars of religion will also be forced to consider dominant ideas concerning secularism and religion, not to mention modernity.—Church History and Religious Culture

A fascinating book ... historically rich and theoretically provocative ... a wonderfully concrete and well-documented example of the social construction of sacred space.—Religion

Walker tells the story of Mormonism's evolution during the Utah period in a new way. His approach asks scholars to reconsider long-held beliefs and theories about religion. Through compelling arguments, historical insight, and innovative storytelling, Railroading Religion is valuable for anyone interested in the history of the American West and nineteenth-century secularism.—Nova Religio

Walker's book provides a shining example of how to practice a historiography of religions that incorporates, and builds upon, secularity theory's best insights." – Mormon Studies Review

Walker models scholarship that delves into the archives of a particular church and treats the archive of secularism and technology as coequal historical subjects. Church history, we find, is also railroad history."—American Religion

From the Publisher