Sacred Texts: Mormons

Chapter IV: Church, State and Camp

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This is a first-person travel memoir, likely from the 1870s, in which an outside observer ("Gentile") visits Salt Lake City during the height of Brigham Young's leadership of the LDS Church. The narrator attends a service at the Mormon Tabernacle — describing its distinctive dome shape, renowned acoustics, massive organ and choir, and capacity crowd of twelve thousand — and hears Brigham Young preach, finding his presence commanding but his content disappointing: repetitive flattery mixed with rebuke, warning the Saints against imitating Gentile ways. The narrator's assessment of Mormon worship is sharply critical, characterizing it as "speech gone to seed" — all talk and no ceremony, the polar opposite of ritual-heavy religious traditions. The second half shifts to the political tension between the Mormon theocracy and the federal government: Governor Emery and other Washington appointees are openly hostile to Mormon loyalty and governance, and Fort Douglas sits on the hill above the city with artillery literally aimed at the Tabernacle, a fact the soldiers mention with breezy menace. The narrator concludes that while open conflict never erupted, the conditions for a small internal war existed, with Mormon militia boasts of being able to "whip these United States" countered by federal guns positioned to enforce Union authority over this remote, resistant territory. The piece is distinctive for its dual focus — sympathetic to Mormon suffering and sincerity while skeptical of their theology and political independence — and for its vivid detail of a theocratic city under de facto military occupation.

Chapter IV: Church, State and Camp

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