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“The Cast Iron-Rodders know all the answers to the unanswerable. They require that every single facet of their faith be absolutely “true;” otherwise nothing is.”–Samuel W. Taylor, Aunty-Mormon I Ain’t, Nor Ante-Mormon Neither

I have been reading my way through dozens of anti-Mormon novels published in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is something that I could not have done even ten years ago without flying all over the country and hanging out in special-collections rooms where you have to wear latex gloves and a hazmat suit to touch a book. But then Google decided to digitize that portion of the world no longer protected by copyright, and now it is as easy as watching TV.

Before I even started reading, however, I knew exactly what I would find: a half-century-long cesspool virulent anti-Mormonism in the vein of A Study in Scarlet and Riders of the Purple Sage. I knew this because of all of the smarter and better-funded scholars who have gone all over the country to read these books—people like Leonard Arrington and Terryl Givens—told me so, with extensive bibliographies and long lists documenting the cesspoolishness of pretty much everything written about Mormons up until Nephi Anderson published Added Upon.

So here’s the thing: it’s just not true. A lot of these books aren’t “anti-Mormon” at all–at least not according to any definition that I would consider rational. Some of them vigorously defend the Saints against their Missouri and Illinois persecutors. Others use Mormon characters as heroes or set interesting romantic or adventure stories against the backdrop of Mormon polygamy. And nearly all of the satirical works (Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Max Adeler, etc.) are more affectionate than inflammatory.

Of course, none of these authors believed that Joseph Smith was really a prophet, or that the Book of Mormon is an actual record of ancient people. They are not PRO-Mormon books after all. But the promiscuous use of terms like “anti-Mormon” makes it difficult to talk about the literature that really was anti-Mormon—the vicious, mean-spirited stuff that was used to raise mobs in Nauvoo and armies a generation later. By lumping this stuff in with books that simply disagree with Mormon historical and theological claims, we end up minimizing real anti-Mormonism by inflating our outrage and praising with faint damnation what we no longer have the vocabulary to condemn properly.

This same sort of thing happens in other venues too, some of them much less specialized than the obscure post-bellum American fiction that I study professionally. For example, in the past few months I have witnessed conversations, in person and online, in which the term “anti-Mormon” was used to describe 1) an op-Ed essay arguing that religious people must meet a high burden of proof when claiming the right to engage in discriminatory practices; 2) a musical that affectionately satirizes Mormon missionaries; and 3) an article on the Book of Mormon, written by a non-Mormon scholar, that fails to affirm its historicity and its prophetic provenance.

Each of these characterizations we find the tacit assumption that anything that does not adopt the LDS Church’s highly correlated agenda should be defined as “anti-Mormon” and dismissed—as other forms of prejudice are dismissed—as something beyond the pale of civilized discourse. When we call something “anti-Mormon,” we accuse a speaker or writer of bigotry, of targeting a group of people solely on the basis of their religious identity. Our culture rightly condemns those who engage in hate speech, but everybody eventually loses when we confuse irrational hatred with simple disagreement. This is why sensible people don’t compare a lot of stuff to Hitler.

Similarly, there are several really good reasons not to play the anti-Mormon card every time that somebody disagrees with the Church’s position about anything. In the first place, it is an intellectually lazy thing to do. It substitutes an adjective for an argument and avoids the responsibility of actually responding to things. Furthermore, it shrinks the possibility space of legitimate discussion by forcing everybody who interacts with Mormonism in any venue to occupy one of two absolute rhetorical categories called “pro-Mormon” and “anti-Mormon.” And then there is the fact that it makes us look like a paranoid wack jobs.

But the most important reason to avoid this particular false dichotomy is that there really is such a thing as anti-Mormonism in the world. There are people who believe that Mormonism is a destructive cult that must be opposed with physical and institutional force. There are forces that would attack the Church’s legal standing in some countries and attempt to deprive its adherents of their civil rights. There are schoolyard bullies who pick on Mormon kids for sport and then grow up to be lawyers and governors of Southern states. And there is still, in some corners of the earth, a reflexive hatred for all things Mormons that is not the same thing as a historical or theological disagreement.

Victim-status seeking through outlandish hyperbole is all kinds of fun until somebody gets hurt. But as long as there really is anti-Mormonism in the world, Latter-day Saints will do well to preserve the considerable rhetorical force of the term for things that it actually applies to. When we play the anti-Mormon card too often or too quickly, or deal it from the bottom of the deck, we debase the currency of our language and expend our outrage unwisely on things like neurotic singing missionaries and scholars whose views of the Book of Mormon do not quite match our own.