Railroading Religion - by David Walker (Paperback)

About the Book

"Walker tracks how 'knowledge' about Mormon life was generated among settlers, railroad agents, travelers, boosters, and bureaucrats from Sacramento to Salt Lake to Washington D.C. and stops between. How ordinary Americans articulated and advanced their own theories about Mormondom, Walker argues, accomplished nothing less than the rise of religion as a category of both the popular and scholarly imagination. As it happened, the burgeoning of railroad-related alliances and businesses stimulated LDS Church officials to mobilize in ways that ironically yielded increasingly dynamic and expansive religious institutions. Rather than eradicating or diminishing Mormonism western railroads and their boosters helped to establish it as a normative American religion"--

Book Synopsis

Railroads, tourism, and government bureaucracy combined to create modern religion in the American West, argues David Walker in this innovative study of Mormonism's ascendency in the railroad era. The center of his story is Corinne, Utah--an end-of-the-track, hell-on-wheels railroad town founded by anti-Mormon businessmen. In the disputes over this town's frontier survival, Walker discovers intense efforts by a variety of theological, political, and economic interest groups to challenge or secure Mormonism's standing in the West. Though Corinne's founders hoped to leverage industrial capital to overthrow Mormon theocracy, the town became the site of a very different dream.

Economic and political victory in the West required the production of knowledge about different religious groups settling in its lands. As ordinary Americans advanced their own theories about Mormondom, they contributed to the rise of religion itself as a category of popular and scholarly imagination. At the same time, new and advantageous railroad-related alliances catalyzed LDS Church officials to build increasingly dynamic religious institutions. Through scrupulous research and wide-ranging theoretical engagement, Walker shows that western railroads did not eradicate or diminish Mormon power. To the contrary, railroad promoters helped establish Mormonism as a normative American religion.

Review Quotes

"Railroading Religion is one of the most theoretically rich and provocatively argued books written on Mormon studies in quite some time. While the benefits for those who work on Mormonism are clear, scholars of religion will also be forced to consider dominant ideas concerning secularism and religion, not to mention modernity."--Church History and Religious Culture

"A book that is bursting with creativity, irony, and scholarly flair, Railroading Religion is a brilliant history of the making of railroads and religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Utah. Unearthing a wealth of letters, journals, scrapbooks, promotional materials, and other sources and placing them in conversation with theorists of religion, technology, and tourism, David Walker finds a new way to tell readers about the constructed meaning of 'religion' in America while telling new stories about Mormons and their political and religious antagonists. This is one of the most thoughtful and original books on the history of Mormonism that I have read."--John G. Turner, author of The Mormon Jesus

"Because of the singular place Mormonism has occupied in the American imagination, one must ask: How applicable is Walker's argument about the relationship between religion and modernity beyond Mormonism? My answer is: a lot."--Journal of Religion

"David Walker's Railroading Religion is a book of intricate and serious pleasures: at once a meticulous archival history of a failed municipal experiment, an ambitious and deeply imagined parsing of Mormonism in the American grain, and a venturesome, transformative effort to rethink the basic questions that animate the study of religion and the secular in modernity."--Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

"David Walker's 'mainlining' of Mormonism in relation to the development of the transcontinental railroad is creative and innovative both in how he uses historical sources and how he considers theoretical concerns relating to religion and secularism. Railroading Religion brings together Mormon history, the history of religion in the West, and--pivoting around the intriguing town of Corinne, Utah--the history of railroads and economic development in America more broadly."--Richard J. Callahan Jr., author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust

"Embracing the material turn in religious studies, Walker writes about tourist sites, trains, and beaches, among other things, as major parts of nineteenth-century religion that illustrate the complexity of the boundaries of religion as a category. Importantly, the book contributes to an understudied period of Mormonism's American history (1860s-1890s) and brings an exciting analysis to its subject matter."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"Historically rich and theoretically provocative, David Walker's Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West is a welcome addition to the historiography of Mormonism and will be read with interest by scholars of new religious movements and American religion in general, as well as historians of the American West and historians of American business."--Religion

"This insightful book will be useful to those interested in railroads and the development of the West as well as those interested in Mormonism."--CHOICE

"Walker tells the story of Mormonism's evolution during the Utah period in a new way. His approach asks scholars to reconsider long-held beliefs and theories about religion. Through compelling arguments, historical insight, and innovative storytelling, Railroading Religion is valuable for anyone interested in the history of the American West and nineteenth-century secularism."--Nova Religio

"Walker's great strength as a historian is in taking us through the fascinating texture of these struggles for power so that we remember how much institutional life, labor, and bureaucracy goes into making a form of transportation called a 'railroad, ' or even a practice call 'tourism.' . . . [A] shining example of how to practice a historiography of religions that incorporates, and builds upon, secularity theory's best insights."--Mormon Studies Review