Reviewed by Louis Midgley Anti-Mormonism and the Newfangled
Countercult Culture The current manifestations of sectarian
anti-Mormonism are in large measure part of a malady long
present on American soil. The modern sectarian countercult
movement, whose dimensions and disposition I will examine in
this essay, is but one more episode in a series of
manifestations of religious bigotry. Hostility to those with
different interpretations of the Bible or with different
understandings of divinity has a long and undistinguished
history in America—it has never entirely abated. Of course, the
Saints remember that anti-Mormon sentiments, often followed by
violent deeds, began with the initial efforts of Joseph Smith to
relate his encounters with angelic messengers, and such
opposition has subsequently accompanied the efforts of the
Saints to build the Kingdom of God. The restoration of the
gospel of Jesus Christ was thus set in a matrix of sectarian
hostility to the very idea that God could make available through
a proph