Review: David T. Smith. Religious Persecution and Political Order in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Authors

Charles McCrary

Keywords

religious persecution, state actors, Mormons, Jehovah's witnesses, David T. Smith

Abstract

In this careful comparative study, David T. Smith develops a useful framework for analyzing US state actors’ reactions to and participation in religious persecution. To set up the problem, Smith identifies three interlocking puzzles: (1) the United States has always valued religious tolerance and has had legal frameworks preventing persecution; and (2) these protections have worked, in large part; but (3) when state agents have persecuted religious groups or encouraged or at least allowed for their persecution, it has been against those we might not expect, namely Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Derived from these puzzles are two basic questions that drive the study: how do state actors decide when to allow persecution and when to prevent it? And, more specifically, why, in the case of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, did they allow and even join in the persecution? To answer the former question, Smith lays out a simple but valuable thesis. For the latter he uses interdisciplinary methods to craft detailed and compelling analyses of specific historical moments. In this way, the book alternates between the wide-scale and the narrow, shifting its scope from a very broad argument about political order to thorough qualitative and quantitative data and back again.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

McCrary, Charles (2019) "Review: David T. Smith. Religious Persecution and Political Order in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 27.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol6/iss1/27