The Mormon Question, by Sarah Barringer Gordon (2002)

Mormon Polygamy and the Law Collide

Sarah Barringer Gordon’s The Mormon Question, published in 2002, is the definitive legal history of the constitutional struggle with 19th-century Mormon polygamy. From its public announcement of plural marriage in 1852 to the church’s formal abandonment of it in 1890, Americans debated what the Constitution could do about a homegrown faith whose marriages and territorial kingdom seemed to defy the republic. Gordon shows that the battle was fought everywhere at once: in sentimental antipolygamy novels, in political cartoons, in escalating acts of Congress, and finally at the Supreme Court, where Reynolds and the cases that followed stripped the church first of its defenses and then of its property. Her deepest insight is that this was a contest between two sincere constitutional visions, one exalting the monogamous household as the foundation of democracy, the other claiming religious liberty and local self-rule, and that the losing vision was defeated rather than refuted.

This book has been a massive influence on me because it is the indispensable map of the ground my thesis walks, and because it shows constitutional law being made less by reason than by fear, fiction, and votes.