Marking Mormon Difference: How Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the “Mormon Menace”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article argues that inaccurate perceptions of Muslim and Mormon sexual and political deviance merged to help fuel a sustained anti-Mormon campaign in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The inflammatory rhetoric of slavery and defilement that anti-Mormon writers deployed to equate the violation of the individual female body in plural marriage with the violation of the social body through Mormon treachery and authoritarianism relied largely on anti-Muslim caricatures for both its venom and its meaning. Only when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraced a model of the church that fit within the framework of American denominationalism did the Mormon menace begin to recede and anti-Muslim vitriol begin to fade from anti-Mormon discourse. This article further contends that the political compromise that allowed Mormonism to survive—indeed, to flourish within the United States—helped demonstrate the boundaries of religious and political freedom not just for Mormons but for all Americans. In this context, the evolution of polemic literature served to mark significant cultural change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".