Religious Political Violence in Early 19th Century America

Nineteenth-century anti-Mormon expulsions in Missouri and anti-Catholic nativist violence in eastern cities constitute an overlooked but formative strand of American religious political violence. Contrary to Rapoport’s emphasis on apocalyptic or millenarian motivations, these campaigns were rooted in struggles over local political power and communal identity. Lax or partisan policing, sensationalist party-aligned newspapers, and a narrow definition of who counted as a legitimate “American” created permissive environments in which majority Protestant mobs wielded violence to disenfranchise, intimidate, and—in the Mormon case—physically expel religious minorities. The Mormon and Catholic experiences of the early 19th century have differences as well as similarities, in part shaped by Catholics’ nationwide dispersion versus the geographically concentrated Mormon community. The comparison demonstrates that American religious violence often advanced mainstream, not fringe, political agendas and that it blurred into ethnic and racial animus. Drawing these lessons forward, future scholarship and policy related to religious terrorism should focus less on spectacular terrorist acts and more on the structural drivers such as partisan media environments and poor policing that can contribute to conflict today.