Kingdom Come’: Representing Mormonism through a geopolitical frame

Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo ‘Kingdom Come’: Representing Mormonism through a geopolitical frame Ethan Yorgason a,b,*, Chiung Hwang Chen c a Department of International Cultural Studies, Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Box 1970, 55-220 Kulanui St., Laie, HI 96762, USA b Department of History, Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Box 1970, 55-220 Kulanui St., Laie, HI 96762, USA c Department of International Cultural Studies, Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Box 1940, 55-220 Kulanui St., Laie, HI 96762, USA Abstract This paper extends the reach of ‘popular geopolitics’ by exploring the geopolitical frame that American popular/news magazines use to portray a major religion in the United States: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the most prominent body known as Mormonism). It asserts that magazines often represent this type of Mormonism as a geopolitical entity, and sometimes even as a geopolitical threat. Prior to the early twentieth century, these portrayals were hegemonic, given the national government’s distrust of Mormonism. But echoes of an earlier and more virulent geopolitical discourse have persisted, long after the federal government made its peace with Mormonism. This paper defines and analyzes twentieth-century magazines’ geopolitical discourse on Mormonism, particularly in relation to Mormon spatiality. In doing so, it puts forward concepts of geopolitical optic and logic in order to more effectively distinguish between variations in geopolitical language. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Popular critical geopolitics; Mormonism; Journalism; Religion; Magazines; Framing analysis The relationship between religion and geopolitics is complex. Nation-states demand ultimate loyalty while jealously claiming and guarding territorial sovereignty. Religion, with claims of absolute truth, is always a potential, though not always an actual, competitor. Also, political * Corresponding author. Department of International Cultural Studies, Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Box 1970, 55-220 Kulanui St., Laie, HI 96762, USA. Tel.: þ1 808 675 3617; fax: þ1 808 675 3888. E-mail addresses: yorgasoe@byuh.edu (E. Yorgason), chenc@byuh.edu (C.H. Chen). 0962-6298/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.03.005 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 479 actors sometimes make geopolitical assertions in the name of religion. In fact, similar claims and rhetorical tone have long connected nationalistic and religious thinking (Agnew, 2006; Ó Tuathail, 2000). In their earliest European guises, state-building and nation-building projects utilized the only adequate contemporary political/territorial discoursedthat of religion (Dijkink, 2006: 196e197). Yet, a modern conceitdsuggesting that the Westphalian nationstate-centric order would inevitably swallow up other inter-community relationships, including those of religiondallowed scholars to undertheorize the relationship between geopolitics and religion. But, as a resurgent literature points out, we downplay that connection at our scholarly peril. This article cannot address the relationship in its breadth. Instead, through a sharply drawn case study, it offers insight on important, but overlooked linkages. Specifically, the paper uses popular critical geopolitics to explore Mormonism as a persistent object of geopolitical thinking by popular American mainstream news magazines over the past century.1 We thereby extend the agenda of popular critical geopolitics deeper into cultural politics. We argue that magazine descriptions of Mormonism produce a politics of anxiety, though often muted in form, toward presumed Mormon spatial practice, a politics that parallels geopolitical arguments about ‘threatening’ nation-states. More theoretically, the argument clarifies conceptual tools within critical geopolitics and prompts basic questions about the ubiquity of geopolitical discourse. We first situate our approach within popular critical geopolitics, introduce the Mormonismgeopolitics relationship, and describe our research design. Then, we analyze magazine coverage of Mormons. Popular critical geopolitics: theory and methodology The term has many usages and a contentious history, but in its broadest sense geopolitics means thinking and acting politically through reference to geography (Agnew, 1998; Ó Tuathail, 1996). Thinking geographically about international relations is, to quote John Agnew, a ‘‘fundamental feature of modernity’’ (Murphy, Bassin, Newman, Reuber, & Agnew, 2004: 637). Geopolitical reasoning does not apply only to statecraft; ordinary people typically use geopolitical prisms. Neither must geopolitics refer only to the international scale, with its implicit potential for organized violence, nor to ‘politics’ defined narrowly (Häkli, 1998; Sparke, 2006). The field of critical geopolitics suggests that geopolitical thinking does significant cultural and ideological work. It regards geopolitical discourse as a type of situated reasoning, looking for the complex political objectives behind appeals to geography (Ó Tuathail, 1996). Critical geopolitics analyzes how geographical assertions, assumptions, and metaphors construct relationships between political communities. It attempts to de-naturalize the common sense these geographies convey (Sharp, 2000a). Hegemonic geopolitical visions emerge from no single source, the branch of popular critical geopolitics argues, but instead from a complex interplay of agents and institutions, including the popular culture of the mass media (Sharp, 2000b). Popular culture is an important creator of the cultural narratives people use to make sense of events. The media tell us why we should care, and in doing so appeal to ‘common sense.’ They thereby help create political communities 1 Unless otherwise indicated, we refer specifically to the most prominent ‘Mormonism’: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with its social/cultural expressions. Its membership is at least 20 times larger than the membership of all other ‘Mormonisms’ (or religious bodies with loyalty to Joseph Smith’s teachings) combined. We use ‘Mormon’ and ‘LDS’ synonymously. 480 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 with the requisite inclusions and exclusions, a social function as important as conveying content (Kirby, 2000; Myers, Klak, & Koehl, 1996; Sharp, 1998, 2000a; Zelizer, 1997). Yet, the media can only converge on consensus and appeal to common sense by way of extremes: Good vs. Evil; Us vs. Them; Self vs. Other. (Jones & Clarke, 2006: 302) Hence, this article highlights the rendering of a particular group as a spatialized Other. We therein draw upon a vast literature on othering, though one that only recently has explicitly theorized sub-national spatiality. To David Jansson (2003), who thus extends Said’s (1978) orientalism thesis, the creation of an internal spatial Other requires the production of an ‘‘exalted’’ spatial identity elsewhere within the nation or, more commonly, for the nation as a whole. The internal orientalist discourse represents a subordinate section of the state in a particular (unflattering) way so as to produce a national . identity with desirable characteristics. (Jansson, 2003: 297) Such othering, contra Jansson, may not always require manifestly negative portrayals, as research on the model minority stereotype suggests (Chen, 2004). But Jansson helpfully notes that residence within the national state makes internal othering more complex than crossnation-state othering. Geopolitical discourse goes beyond spatial othering, however. A geopoliticized space is also often represented as a fundamental threat to a nation-state. We use geopolitical optic and geopolitical logic to refer, respectively, to spatial othering and production of a spatial threat. Critical geopolitics’ common terminology of codes and scripts does not effectively address the distinctions and relationships between those two elements. This article also highlights the issue of hegemony. Unlike many analyses, we do not equate mediated popular culture with fully hegemonic views, with ‘culture’ paralleling the nation-state and/or capital. We instead ask about geopolitical language in cases that do not fit the hegemonic/anti-hegemonic binary. We give the question sharp focus by extending critical geopolitical analysis beyond the nation-state or an ostensive political entity to a religion/region that currently fares better in the American political-economy than in its cultural arena (Newport, 2007). Understandably, much of critical geopolitics focuses on hegemonic/anti-hegemonic geopolitical imaginations, particularly in relation to US foreign policy. But it thereby inadequately explores other geopolitical imaginations. We recommend shifting at least slightly away from this hegemony of hegemony within critical analysis to explorations of conventionality. Mormonism and geopolitics In many cases, both historical and contemporary, religions act as geopolitical entities or religious groups closely ally with geopolitical actors. Abrahamic religions’ scriptures, including those of Mormonism, authorize a ‘geopolitical’ view toward promised versus non-promised lands, centers versus margins, expansion versus contraction, and covenant people versus Others. Many ‘traditional’ religions prioritize and politicize the land/people relationship (Grim, 2001). Adherents of large non-universalist ‘religions’ without geopolitical scriptural foundation, such as Hinduism and Confucianism, at times interpret those faiths geopolitically (Agnew, 2006). Similarly, popular imagination views several religions geopolitically. Islam may be most obvious. But Jews have long faced charges of political expansionism. Americans worried about expansive Catholic ‘popery’ during nineteenth-century nativist campaigns and John F. Kennedy’s E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 481 presidential candidacy. Some commentators read global Protestant evangelism as geopolitical imperialism; American ‘fundamentalism’ receives particular attention. China’s government and press view the networked spaces of Falun Gong as particularly threatening. Thus, Mormonism is not wholly unique. Yet, it is a significant case.2 Probably no religion in the United States has acted geopolitically more than Mormonism did in its early history. From its 1830 origin, it gathered believers to its physical communities of Zion. Due to conflict with neighbors, Mormonism’s core migrated from upstate New York, to Ohio, to Missouri, to Illinois, and finally on to Utah. Nauvoo, Illinois was nearly a city-state under Mormon control (1839e1845). Utah Mormonism had elements of a theocratic state for a time (1847e approximately 1880s), with Mormons working toward a concrete Kingdom of God (Hansen, 1967). Mormons did not typically expect to conquer militarily, but they anticipated all nations would wither in Mormonism’s spatially concentrated presence, accompanying or leading into Christ’s Second Coming. Early Mormonism thus challenged the American nation-state because it consciously viewed itself as a geopolitical alternative. Mormonism is important, perhaps even more however, because of its later altered relationship with America. The United States has historically domesticated religion without completely co-opting it (Wuthnow, 2005). Mormonism and Utah, by most scholarly accounts, were eventually tamed (Alexander, 1986; Gordon, 2002; Larson, 1971). In 1890, after intense legal, cultural, and constitutional battles, Mormons began abandoning polygamy. A less known episode was nearly as vital. In 1903, Utahns elected Mormon apostle Reed Smoot to the US Senate. Smoot’s election prompted one last campaign against Mormonism involving the federal government. Leveraging evidence of continued polygamy, Mormonism’s opponents questioned church practices in the spotlight of a senatorial hearing. In 1907, after disciplining Mormonism further, the Senate ratified Smoot’s election (Flake, 2004). The US government never thereafter seriously questioned Mormonism’s place in America, and the institutional church completed its banishment of polygamy within a few years. Gertjan Dijkink (2006) argues against analytically equating religion with geopolitics. Religion is not simply geopolitics by another name. Instead, he insists, geopolitics fuses with religion only under particular historical and socio-political conditions. Religions contain resources that can easily be mobilized as geopolitics, but these resources often lie dormant. Scholars should seek to understand the differences or gradations between dormancy and activity in religious geopolitics. Mormonism still has geopolitical resources: it theologically claims that its latter-day Zion will emerge on the American continent, it expects its Kingdom of God to triumph millennially, and it calls for highest loyalty to go to ultimate (religious) truth. Mormonism is still both strongly centralized, with a clear center of spatial gravity in Utah, and expansive, with 13 million members worldwide. Mormonism occasionally mobilizes political power, both within itself and within the broader, though still mostly US, society. Yet, the relationship between Mormonism and the nation-state clearly changed significantly. Both culturally and institutionally, Mormonism viewed and acted upon its geopolitical resources after the turn of the twentieth century quite differently than it did before (van Beek, 2005; Hansen, 1992). Mormons made peace with the nation-state system, no longer expecting territorial sovereignty. Mormons settled into American life, pushing prospects of a kingdom separate from the United States to an unspecified future when Christ reigns. In the meantime they came to regard the American nation 2 Part of a larger project on the broad Mormonism-geopolitics relationship, this article can only hint at how Mormonism itself encompasses geopolitical vision and action. 482 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 as the appropriate geopolitical actor. Mormon geopolitics were largely subsumed under and made subservient to Americandespecially western Americandgeopolitical scripts, with their mythical bases of subduing a wilderness, manifest destiny, and frontier progress (Yorgason, 2003). Research design This article analyzes popular news magazine articles about Mormonism after 1910, a year usefully dividing the antagonistic from the cooperative Mormonism/US government relationship. Magazinesdthough overshadowed in recent decades by radio, television, and the Internetdare still influential and allow for comparison over a 95-year span. We analyze popular news magazines, assuming that they approximate dominant cultural moods among informed Americans because of their concern for marketability and ‘objectivity.’ Unlike the case of popular fiction (Austin, 1998; Givens, 1997), we do not expect news magazines to traffic in the most sensationalistic stereotypes. We located magazine articles through The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which identifies 528 stories on Mormons or Mormonism between 1910 and 2005 (see Table 1). We did not formally analyze each of those articles, however. We first reduced the 528 articles through two categories of exclusion; these exclusions allowed us to focus sharply on popular news magazine coverage of the correct type of ‘Mormonism.’ Thus, one excluded category is stories on ‘Mormon’ groups other than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, since the dynamics of those groups differ significantly from those associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These excluded stories often focused either on the Missouricentered and never polygamous Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ) or on one or more Utah/western polygamous groups disaffiliated with the LDS church (an especially popular media topic during the past 20 years). The other, somewhat subjective, exclusion was stories from non-popular, non-mainstream, or non-news magazinesdbasically magazines that either topically or in readership appeal were ideologically or socially narrow. We excluded articles from The Christian Century, Humanist, Ladies’ Home Journal, and American Heritage, for example, while including those from Harper’s Weekly, Table 1 Geopolitical content in articles on Mormonism Years 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000e2005 Total Total articles on ‘Mormonism’ listed in Reader’s Guide Articles analyzed (after exclusions) Articles analyzed with geopolitical content Percent of articles analyzed having geopolitical content 47 21 48 37 46 53 47 98 71 60 33 9 31 21 28 29 19 47 18 23 20 7 10 8 12 14 10 24 9 12 61 78 32 38 42 48 53 51 50 52 528 258 126 49 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 483 Literary Digest, and Saturday Evening Post. Most included articles, however, came from clearly popular news magazines: Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, The Nation, and the like. These two exclusion processes left us with 258 articles. We carefully analyzed each of those 258 articles, looking for the presence of two types of geopolitical content: creation of spatialized otherness and depiction of spatialized threat or possible threat. About 49% of those 258 articles (126 articles) had manifestly geopolitical content, some of that content ‘thicker’ and some ‘thinner.’ We discerned thinner geopolitical content via intertextual readingsdlooking at how the articles ‘reference’ prior articles and broad stereotypes on Mormonism (cf. Del Casino & Hanna, 2000). A handful of articles categorized as without geopolitical content directly sensed and countered geopolitical stereotypes (most recently, Webster, 1996). Most articles without geopolitical elements, however, focused on narrow issues such as Mormonism’s fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, its welfare system, and its racial exclusions. Articles with geopolitical content were often broader feature stories. Three periods appear: 1910se1920s (60þ% of analyzed articles had geopolitical content, amid decreasing total attention to Mormonism); 1930se1950s (renewed attention to Mormonism, with, after an abrupt drop, steadily increasing percentages of geopolitical content); and 1960sepresent (geopolitical content stable at about 50%). Thus, geopolitics is an important frame on Mormonism, though hardly the only one. While the space below only permits reference to a few examples, the 126 articles with geopolitical content provide the basis for our central argument. We scrutinized each of these articles even more carefully than we examined the initial 258, analyzing both contextually (in relation to contemporary trends in both Mormonism and journalism), as well as intertextually. Nevertheless, our major focus is the aggregate discourse represented by the 126 articlesdthe long-term commonalities and differences between multiple texts and years: [a] representational style . [with] internal consistency, a common imagery and vocabulary (Jansson, 2003: 297). The analysis thus falls within media studies’ news framing program, a broad project that illuminates significant ‘‘organizing principles [frames] socially shared and persistent over time’’ (Reese, Gandy, & Grant, 2001: 11). Magazines’ geopolitical imagination toward Mormonism Background: the nineteenth-century geopolitical image3 The analysis below of post-1910 articles proceeds topically. Nevertheless, the nineteenthcentury geopolitical Mormon image provides necessary context. American writers initially branded founding prophet Joseph Smith as fraudulent and his followers as gullible American riff-raff. Violent episodes toward church members in the 1830se1840s American Midwest led to some LDS responses, and violence soon appeared in the image. During the church’s early Utah period (1847e1890), the popular media utilized and often exaggerated LDS plural marriage, prophetic leadership, self-defensive and sometimes secretive society, and voluntary isolation from ‘civilization’ to produce essentialized images of women and men subject to coercion and bondage. With increasing assumptions of Mormon heresy and immorality, 3 This section summarizes a broad literature, especially: Bunker and Bitton, 1983; Chen, 2004; Givens, 1997. 484 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 America’s fiction writers produced what Terryl Givens (1997: 130), drawing on Said’s famous argument, labels ‘‘orientalism in the extreme occident.’’ Geography figured heavily. Because the Mormon religion could not be situated in a distant hemisphere, authors resorted to numerous strategies to invent or exaggerate its physical remoteness. . When a novel is set in Utah, that territory comes to assume a position in a kind of mythic space, a mysterious region of darkness and secrecy . a boundary that separates America from a surreal domain of horror and evil. (133) Novelists conjured hidden domains within Utah’s wilderness keeping non-Mormons out and Mormon maidens in. After the Civil War, the federal government’s inability to fully control Utah’s polygamy and de facto theocracy gave geopolitical themes particular salience. Labeling polygamy one of the ‘twin relics of barbarism’ suggested that force might be required to fix the problem, just as with the other relicdslavery. Magazines graphics in the 1880s depicted America’s symbols (Uncle Sam, Lady Columbia, US troops, etc.) fighting LDS polygamy, theocracy, and antiAmericanism to protect America’s purity from moral and political contamination. Americans learned of Mormon space through such geopolitically loaded terms as ‘fortress,’ ‘castle,’ and ‘stronghold,’ often represented visually as the LDS Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. The fulcrum of 1910e1911 Reed Smoot’s full acceptance into the Senate in 1907 ended intense federal government concern with Mormonism. But cultural incorporation lagged. Major magazines published exposés of Mormonism in 1910 and 1911, following continued agitation by Mormonism’s opponents. We use three such exposés to represent a fulcrum in Mormon/American cultural relations. They were the last gasp of the mainstream press’s vigorous and direct geopolitical accusations. No articles thereafter equaled their geopolitical anxiety toward Mormonism. However, the articles also provide a touchstone from which to assess the subsequent geopolitical frame, since a geopolitical discourse did not fully die. McClure’s Magazine was the most circumspect. Burton Hendrick (1911) told an almost certainly contrived story of meeting an attractive, well-spoken guide at Salt Lake City’s Tabernacle who turned out to be a plural wife in one of new polygamy’s most notorious cases. The story supported Hendrick’s claim of persisting Mormon polygamy behind a shroud of secrecy and deception (449e450). Appearances in Mormon space were not to be trusted. The federal government must reassert control, it suggested. A second exposé used considerably more detail. Frank J. Cannon, former US Senator from Utah and the ex-Mormon son of a long-time LDS apostle, accused church leadership of consolidating political and economic power in Utah and the West through ties to the nation’s monopolistic barons. Appealing to fears of political contamination, Cannon concluded, The Republic must overthrow the modern Mormon Kingdom: or that Kingdom will sap the honor and power of the Republic. Both can not survive as temporal sovereignties .The Prophet of Utah is not a local despot only; he is a national enemy; and the nation must deal with him. If the nation does so, argued Cannon, appealing to ‘Western freedom’ as against ‘Oriental autocracy,’ ‘‘Utah, the Islam of the West, will depose its old sultan and rise free’’ (25: 221e222). E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 485 Alfred Henry Lewis’s (1911) series teemed with even more geopolitical reasoning. It visually depicted Mormon President Joseph F. Smith as an octopus whose tentacles reached from Salt Lake City’s temple to hoard American wealth and control fundamental institutions, such as Congress, schools, industries, and the home (March: 445). It argued Mormonism had amassed great wealth and economic power. A cartoon showed Smith sitting on his Mormon throne, served by senatorial footservants while the country’s major captains of industry pay obeisance. The Mormon temple towers over Wall Street in the background (1911, May: 831; see Fig. 1). Lewis (1911, April) elsewhere asserted that Smith controlled Senator/Apostle Smoot, who in turn managed a dozen other senators, effectively ruling over states west of the Great Plains. Fig. 1. American corporate and political interests were portrayed as bowing down to the Mormon throne in this 1911 cartoon from Cosmopolitan magazine. 486 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 LDS domination of Washington and national politics was thus imminent (cartoon from 701; see Fig. 2). Lewis spelled out the threat through racial, gender, and military language. Mormonism each day grows in money and in men. Its two thousand missionaries . are ransacking Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, for converts. . And yet you are not afraid! . Its purpose is inimical, and it must either destroy or be destroyed. It is a political menace, a commercial menace. Most of all, it is a moral menace and threatens the whiteness of American womanhood . The battle should continue until all of Mormonism and what it stands for are destroyed. Then, and not before, will this republic be safe. (1911, May: 832e833) Fig. 2. Cosmopolitan suggested that Mormonism pulled the strings that controlled American politics in this 1911 cartoon. E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 487 These three articles’ geopolitical message was that Mormonism was no longer just a foreign fortress in the remote West. Mormonism now was exceeding its native spaces, stealthily and immorally spreading within America’s social body. The articles linked Salt Lake City’s LDS temple with the US Capitol building in Washington and asserted that power moved from the former to the latter. The script depicted not an Americanization of Mormonism but a Mormon degradation of America. Geopolitical optic and logic: journalism’s post-1911 geopolitical frame Each of the 1910e1911 articles characterized the supposed Mormon space of Utah and beyond as radically different from American spaceda geopolitical optic. Each suggested that spatially concentrated Mormon power could expand beyond its boundaries and corrupt the nationdgeopolitical logic. In short, each argued that Mormonism’s spatial manifestation fundamentally threatened the American nation. A geopolitical optic and geopolitical logic often operate together; a full-fledged geopolitical frame requires both. But they are analytically distinguishable as, respectively, a way of seeing and a way of reasoning. Both the geopolitical optic and geopolitical logic persisted in magazine articles about Mormonism after 1911. Geopolitical optic Rajaram and Soguk (2006) state that a precondition of ‘the political’ is the imposition of permanence onto an unhinged and fluid spatiality. . The transformative process by which [this] spatiality comes to be pockmarked by stable political places gives us a political vocabulary or structure of recognition through which identities and encounters, and the conflicts and contradictions that emanate from them, are rendered intelligible. (367, 368) This line of reasoning would suggest that Mormonism becomes intelligible as a political entity in large measure through spatial representations and assertions of relative permanence as place. Unlike recognized regions that may face similar internal othering (Jansson, 2003), Mormonism cannot be assumed prima facie to function as place. However, journalists’ claims and assumptions helped produce and reproduce a Mormon spatiality. Through their representations, Mormonism appeared to possess a certain ownership within space. Of course journalists did not make such representations alone. They drew on widely circulated assertions. Mormonism’s assumed spatial boundaries match the so-called the Mormon culture region, a space where Mormon interests are prominent numerically and culturally. Ever since Latter-day Saints arrived in 1847 at the Great Basin, that area held heavy concentrations of Mormons. Utah was about 80% LDS until 1880. The concentration dipped rapidly by 1920 to about 55%, due especially to economically based migration of non-Mormons. Thereafter, percentages slowly rose, with Mormons typically 60e75% of Utah’s population (May, 1992). Southern Idaho and northern Arizona also have had strong LDS concentrations. This numerical majority within Mormonism’s ‘core’ remains noteworthy. Both popular and scholarly observers find distinctive cultural features typify the region. For example, Mormonism’s local hierarchy/community structureda nested scale geography of ‘wards’ and ‘stakes’dis salient even to non-Mormons there, although largely invisible to non-Mormons elsewhere. In geopolitical discourse, however, cultural distinctiveness is marked in particularly essentialized ways. 488 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 1) A different space: Hendrick’s (1911) story of an opaque Utah, concealing Mormon secrets, implied Mormon space was essentially different. A geopolitical optic renders the space under consideration internally unified and distinctive from other spaces. It becomes a marked, perhaps even exotic space (as in Orientalist portrayals); its very presence demands notice and description. It cannot fit easily into the nation-state’s unmarked spaces of ‘normal’ social relations (Kirby, 2000). Its people become Other.4 After the 1910s journalists no longer leaned on polygamy in locating LDS difference, but assertions of basic difference endured. Morris Markey (1934: 64) found Utah a ‘‘kingdom in the desert,’’ a ‘‘foreign land’’ for visitors, where secrets remained hidden. Salt Lake City was a ‘‘foreign city’’ in which ‘‘residents behave much as we behave, but they are thinking of different things’’ (emphasis added). Such usage places Mormons/Utahns apart from the American ‘we,’ bereft of ‘our’ common sense (cf. Agnew, 1998). Nearly half a century later, Time called Mormonism a kingdom apart. . Though Mormons are not as isolated as they once were in [Brigham] Young’s mountain kingdom, they nonetheless seem to exist behind an invisible barrier. (Mormonism enters, 1978: 54) Articles leading into the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 also illustrate the point. One suggested the location gave reporters greater access to the church’s ‘‘many veils. It could be Mormonism’s moment of truth.’’ (Woodward, 2001: 51). 2) Spatial homogeneity: Religious spaces may be read . not only as sacred or profane, but also as the reflections and reproductions of religious and social desires and anxieties. (Amy De Rogatis quoted in Brace, Bailey, & Harvey, 2006: 30) Representations of such spaces may, of course, be similarly revealing. Mormonism’s space is not just different, according to the geopolitical frame. It is also homogeneous, often troublingly so. Scholars note that American culture has historically vacillated on balancing collectivism and individualism (Wuthnow, 2006). Americans often regard too much communal deference, too much yielding of individuality, as dangerous. A religion expecting unusual conformity potentially transgresses American norms. Journalists conveyed spatial (and LDS cultural) homogeneity through two major themes: Mormon leaders autocratically controlled monolithic Mormons and Utah politics, and church members obeyed too uncritically. Many articles exemplify: Cannon’s (1910e1911) concern that Joseph F. Smith was consolidating political power in the West; Werner’s (1940: 191) conclusion that the Mormon ‘‘empire’’ still extracted significant obedience from its subjects; Cahn’s (1961) depiction of Utah politicians who claimed church views took precedence over their individual views; and Woodward’s (2001: 44, 46) suggestion that Utah is ‘‘still a different world,’’ where business ‘‘is usually done the Mormon way or not at all’’. Wright (2002: 42, 43) recently wrote of Mormon control of Utah space in an understated New Yorker style: in ‘‘pleasant’’ Salt Lake City, the state capitol near LDS headquarters ‘‘looks a bit captive.’’ Following Ó Tuathail (2000: 209), these portrayals ‘‘refuse[d] the complexity’’ of Mormonism and its spaces. Geopolitical discourse often reifies and naturalizes boundaries, both socialcultural and locational, presenting them as inevitabilities, rather than the repetitively articulated 4 A whole critical tradition usefully problematizes othering, but see Slezkine (2004) on benefits that can come through structural otherness. E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 489 social constructs they are (Sharp, 2000a). Such boundaries need not be locationally formalized or precisely identified (Jansson, 2003); most often journalists have Utah or some slightly larger area in mind. But, like a stereotype, a geographic frame codifies difference and assigns certain cultural, social, moral, and political characteristics to a whole space (Bonura, 1998). By doing so, it obscures complex geographies and histories (Agnew, 1998). The notion of Utah as unthinkingly homogeneous conceals more than it illuminates about the varied relationships between and among Mormons and non-Mormons there. 3) Time as space: A key way of perpetuating boundaries is mapping temporal difference onto space. Agnew (1998: 46) argues that in the geopolitical context of international relations, labels such as developing world or developed world, backward or modern, have bolstered hegemonic power structures. More generally, as with so much other metaphorical usage, ‘‘the idealization involved [is] forgotten as the metaphor has substituted for analysis.’’ Journalists used time-as-space scripts for Mormonism. These scripts reified spatial difference: Mormon space was strange or quaint, needing patient tutoring to achieve American normality. In 1911, Lewis (1911, April: 833) argued Mormonism belongs to neither this age nor this [American] people. It is the Old Serpent, and the heel of every clean American should bruise its head. Later accounts sometimes inverted the value judgment, but similarly figured Mormon space as an earlier time. In the 1960s Carmer (1962: 64) concluded that Utahns honor traditional America more than others do. Two decades later, the theme remained: If there is an America that embodies the vision that Ronald Reagan has for his countryda nation of pious, striving, self-reliant and politically conservative ‘traditional’ families . it is in Mormon country (Lindsey, 1986: 24) However, authors more commonly suggested that LDS influence caused Utah to only belatedly, and often reluctantly, move from backward tradition into vibrant modernity. This trope, particularly strong in the early twentieth century, has persisted into the twenty-first: Utah is just now (always just now!) discovering the real world. For example, Mormons were finally outgrowing their ‘‘infantilism,’’ wrote Schroeder (1916: 351). Robert Cahn (1961: 32, 33) socialized Utah’s natural environment: a ‘‘forbidding arid land of rugged mountains and vast emptiness’’ that ‘‘is still Zion,’’ a land ‘‘caught between the old and the new.’’ When Mormonism ended its racial priesthood ban in 1978, Time opined, The Mormons have a long way to go, but. new classes and cultures may yet penetrate Brigham Young’s mountain-ringed fastness. (Mormonism enters, 1978: 56) Thirteen years later the magazine suggested, After a century and a half of isolation, Utah is no longer a place that Mormons can keep to themselves. (Donnelly, 1991: 24). Geopolitical logic A geopolitical optic renders ‘Mormon space’ as essentially distinctive, homogenous, and backward. Geopolitical logic takes the argument further by warning about the geographical dynamism of Mormon spatiality. This dynamism results largely from LDS growth. Mormonism famously seeks converts from many parts of the world. During the nineteenth century, its ‘gathering’ doctrine encouraged 490 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 converts to move to the LDS Zion’s core in the American West. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, universally prescribed, physically concentrated gathering was unrealistic. Church leaders consequently asked members to ‘gather’ where they were, strengthening ‘stakes’ and ‘branches’ of Zion there. Meanwhile, strong pro-natalism produced internal growth. A Mormon ‘diaspora’ developed early in the twentieth century, with Mormons from the Intermountain West moving elsewhere for economic opportunity. Mormonism’s numbers increased throughout the twentieth century outside its core. The church reached 1 million members only in 1947, but now has about 13 million. From an 85e90% American membership prior to the 1960s, fewer than half of members now live in the United States. Growth is highest in Latin America and some Pacific Rim countries. Within the United States, a Mormon presence is found almost everywhere, with larger proportions, outside the Intermountain core, in Pacific Coast states (typically low single-digit percentages of those states’ residents). Outside of the Intermountain West, and with a few small exceptions, Mormons spread throughout states and regions rather than concentrate within particular communities, with something of a middle-class, suburban bias.5 Though ‘domesticated,’ Mormonism continued to operate politically after the 1910s; after all, America expects churches to advocate on issues of moral and institutional interest. The LDS church spoke on issues such as Sunday closing laws (for), liquor regulation (recently for, though not leading into Prohibition), gambling (against), pornography (against), abortion (mostly againstdthough with some nuance), the siting of the MX missile in Utah’s desert (against), the Equal Rights Amendment (against), and gay marriage (against). Some LDS campaigns, especially the ERA and gay marriage, were visible far outside of Utah. The church also maintains a rather proprietary interest over Salt Lake City, involving itself in many land-use disputes. Financially, the church transformed itself from near bankruptcy at the turn of the twentieth century into a rich and influential institutionda careful, but powerful investor in land and business. During the past 95 years, magazines took account of Mormonism’s growth, including its scaled-up global vision and involvement in politics and economics, often via geopolitical logic. A fully activated geopolitical frame requires a geopolitical optic, but the decisive element is geopolitical logic: a sense of threat emanating from within geopoliticized space toward people elsewhere. Culturally different power is not just located somewhere ‘out there’ but seems to be coherently concentrated and pose an actual or potential threat to (the nation’s usually unstated) ‘us.’ This geopolitical logic means that Mormonism has been something more than just a cultural/spatial Other within US popular culture. Instead imaginations toward it have in many ways paralleled geopolitical depictions of ‘threatening’ nation-states, such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which was figured as geographically expansive, culturally monolithic, religiously suspect, and politically ceaseless in its desire to corrupt the body politic of America. (Dodds, 2007: 153) 1) A threat from within: Each 1910e1911 article explicitly wrote of a Mormon threat to America. For Hendrick the root problem was persisting polygamy; for Cannon, a concentration of power. Lewis feared the whole system of Mormonism. To each, Mormon expansion signaled trouble. Later articles’ sense of threat was usually much less explicit, probably unintentional from most authors’ points of view, and expressed instead via hints. The most common script 5 This statistical discussion uses official data from the Deseret News Church Almanac series (Deseret News, Salt Lake City); see also Newman and Halvorson (2000). E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 491 combined notions that Mormonism exercised great power within a core region and that Mormonism’s geographical expansion might not be welcome. Spence (1958: 57, 58), for one example, first asserted Mormon difference. ‘‘Mormonism is not just a creed; it is a complete way of life. Mormons are different.’’ They will do whatever the church asks them to do. Even as LDS settlements spread, the church is their first loyalty. He added, Today it covers the West with sufficient vigor to be a substantial factor in the politics of several states. (63) As a Latter-day Saint, George Romney, ran for president, U.S. News & World Report similarly concluded, Mormon congregations are turning up in more and more neighborhoods across the nation. While previously confined to a few western states, Mormons had nearly tripled and (with a metaphor intimating a lack of free will among converts) ‘‘[t]oday Mormon missionaries scour the globe’’ for new members (emphasis added, Church in the news, 1966: 90). Sheler and Wagner (1992: 73) added the sociologist Rodney Stark’s much-debated assessment: Mormonism ‘‘stands on the threshold of becoming the first major faith to appear on Earth since the prophet Muhammad rode out of the desert.’’ While perhaps innocuous enough for Stark’s primary audience of scholars of religion, putting the quotation in a popular magazine opens interpretations to common American stereotypes of a conquering Islam. Because the quote comes in an article paying attention to Mormon political power, a sense of orientalized geopolitical threat lurks just below the text’s surface. More recently, The Economist called the church in Utah the ‘‘800-pound gorilla that doesn’t have to do anything to seem threatening,’’ and suggested the problem may spread as the church grows (The church, 2002: 26). Sheler (2000: 65) similarly quoted the famous American literary critic, Harold Bloom: The nation . will not always only be 2 percent Mormon. The Saints outlive the rest of us, have more children ., and convert on a grand scale, both here and abroad. . Their future is immense. Along with conveying admiration, such assessments use geographical assertions to predict that significant problems may result from Mormonism’s continued growth. The statements rhetorically resonate with the cultural and demographic/reproductive fears that contemporary ‘clash of civilizations’ proponents use to conjure both internal and external threats to ‘The West’ (Bialasiewicz, 2006). 2) Fear of contamination: the power of metaphors. The strongest geopolitical logic exhibits fear of contamination, a yearning for purity within the social space. Lewis and Cannon appealed in 1910e1911 to such fear through various metaphors (octopus, viper, kingdom, despot, etc.). Magazines retained geopolitical metaphors in subsequent decades. With varying degrees of figurativeness, journalists linked contemporary Mormonism to its presumed nineteenthcentury antecedents: kingdom, empire, theocracy, etc. Metaphors told of Mormonism exceeding its home space. Continuing Spence’s (1958: 63) quotation (from above): [Members] have now overflowed their original home to plant large concentrations in Idaho, California, Arizona, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon and . in Washington, D.C. (emphasis added) 492 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 Organic metaphors, portraying Mormonism as an organism that must feed upon other organisms to survive and grow, told of Mormon power ‘‘rooted’’ in Utah that could challenge American democracy. (This is, 1947: 73; on organic geopolitical metaphors, see Agnew, 1998). In 1980, Gottlieb and Wiley pointed to a fundamentalist outlook among some Mormons. Taking the sentiments as Mormonism’s essence, Gottlieb and Wiley’s military metaphors suggested this powerful and growing body acted as if under siegeda middle-class force, alienated, fearful, but highly organized and motivated, and ready to strike back. With fear and trepidation, the Mormons face the future poised to do battle in a land where they see ‘‘evil and crime and carnality covering the earth .’’ (152) This statement, though extreme in the post-1910 era for the sense of anxiety it promoted toward Mormonism, differs mostly in degree rather than kind from sentiments within the more common milder articles. In a manner similar to how George W. Bush has treated post-9/11 Islamist terrorism, Gottlieb and Wiley wrote with what Megoran (2006) calls a moral-metaphysical geopolitical script, reading the Mormon Other as likely not amenable to reasoned discourse. Their statement establishes and relies on sharp differences between an unstated ‘us here’ against whom Mormons constituted an expansive ‘them there.’ This implicitly defined nation consisted of socially tolerant, if not completely secular, individuals. The anxiety was that Mormon expansion would push the meanings of American space in less secular and/or less pluralistic directions (cf. Hervieu-Léger, 2002; Ivakhiv, 2006). Such metaphors point to potential boundary dissolution between Mormonism and America. They echo, if usually not fully reproduce, earlier fears of Mormon contamination. Mormonism, to use a simile, appears like a tumordwithin, but not really part of, America’s social body. Mormonism does not contribute to the health of, and could take over and destroy, that body. Many journalists regarded Mormonism as benign, but a diagnosis of malignancy was always possible. Nevertheless, this differing sense of the imminence of danger is the major distinction between America’s geopolitical portrayals of Mormonism over the past 95 years and its geopolitical portrayals of ‘threatening’ nation-states. Though exceptions exist, Mormonism was most often a threat merely in posse. The subtlety of the threatdwith Mormonism lacking a widely agreed upon political agenda, not to mention military powerddid not often lend itself to suggested responses. Still, metaphors imply interpretations about the relationship between a group’s spatial constitution and its political power. A kingdom reaching beyond its native soil differs from a religious group whose membership becomes more fully represented throughout the country. An Other defined as a people calls to mind certain management strategies: assimilation, pluralism, identity politics, etc. An expanding spatial entity as Other evokes further potential spatial strategies: containment (Sharp, 2000b), spatial borders, and even war. Magazines have not advocated extreme solutions since the early 1910s, but a relationship structured by a geopolitical frame could deteriorate faster than would one without. Containment metaphors also allow America to assign challenges and problems to ‘them there,’ rather than ‘us here,’ and perpetuate fictions of American cultural homogeneity (Carey, 2002; Ó Tuathail, 1996). Magazines’ geopolitical logic thus situates American culture as vulnerable to expansive Mormon influence, largely because that power has metaphorically been rendered visible. 3) Scale and geopolitical logic: Metaphors of containment hint at perhaps the core geopolitical anxiety: changes in Mormonism’s scale structure. Early- to mid-nineteenth century E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 493 Americans worried about Mormonism, but sometimes regarded the problem as localized elsewhere. Two instances illustrate. First, Illinois Governor Thomas Ford was reluctant and the federal government refused to mediate conflict between LDS and non-LDS during Mormonism’s late Illinois period (late 1830seearly 1840s). Second, Abraham Lincoln reportedly compared early 1860s Utah Mormonism to a log in a field (Larson, 1971: 60). That log was too wet and heavy to deal with, Lincoln suggested; better for America to simply plow around it. Both examples imply that Mormonism operated locally, with little effect on the country. Mormonism occupied, but did not threaten, space. This view did not always dominate, of course. LDS proselytizing meant that Mormonism operated more than just locally. Late-nineteenth-century political campaigns against Mormonism unsurprisingly targeted LDS missionary work in Europe. A dual-scale structure dominated nineteenth-century thought about Mormonism: locally concentrated settled membership, and international missionary work seeking individual conversion and immigration. Mormonism’s twentieth-century rescaling presented new worries, however. Mormonism was no longer confined within the western United States; its national and eventually international presence needed to be reckoned with. Geopolitical language effectively noted those changes but also perpetuated earlier anxieties. Given the dormancy of and changes in Mormonism’s most explicit geopolitical resources, that language was arguably no longer appropriate. Yet perhaps almost any rescaling process, as the product of spatial contest and uncertainty, lends itself to geopolitical anxieties. Philip Barlow (1999) gives a helpful metaphor: Mormonism’s rescaling created ‘‘shifting ground.’’ Geopolitical discourse attempts to plot, and perhaps even contain and manage, the tremors. Geopolitical ambiguity: geopolitical hints and their denial The previous sections exemplify major elements of the magazines’ geopolitical frame. We intimated that post-1910s geopolitical logic toward Mormonism was often neither direct nor explicit. The clearly negative tone of the 1910e1911 articles did not dominate subsequently. Though a few authors’ overriding purpose was to explicitly warn of Mormonism, the bulk of the 126 articles with geopolitical content followed emergent journalistic conventions by carrying a much more neutral tone. Both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ characteristics of Mormonism usually received mention. Some authors openly admired many LDS achievements. However, even a positive tone can bolster geopolitical discourse. Through more detailed analysis of a single article, this section elaborates on ambiguous geopolitical expression (see also Dittmer, 2005). This expression typically included refusal of full geopolitical accusation amid generous geopolitical hints.6 David Van Biema (1997) wrote perhaps the most important recent magazine article on Mormonism. His story employed common themes. Church members were parochial, optimistic, conservative, clannish, successful, misunderstood by outsiders, and yet traditionally American; Mormonism grew rapidly inside and outside the United States; politically powerful Mormons influenced America, while the church itself wielded significant political power; Catholics and Protestants found LDS beliefs ‘‘foreign’’; and the church garnered vast resources and operated like a wealthy multinational corporation. Van Biema used typical geopolitical terminology: 6 Ambiguity can also be read through a deconstructive method, such as in Del Casino and Hanna (2000). Such a method shows how ambiguity is produced in spite of seeming attempts at rhetorical fixity. We concentrate instead on ambiguity authors seemingly intended. 494 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 ‘‘next great global tribe’’ and ‘‘empire,’’ for example, while pointing todif not endorsingd charges that Mormonism constituted a ‘‘cult’’ and a ‘‘nation within a nation.’’ In spite of many geopolitical hints, however, the article’s nuance ensured that a geopolitical reading was not the single dominant interpretation. Van Biema carefully explicated Mormons’ view of their geopolitical destiny, observing for example that LDS kingdom-building expectations tie into indefinitely dated millennial expectations and are often subordinate to practical, materialist concerns (54e55). He suggested that in a country where religious unanimity is ever less important but material achievement remains the earthly manifestation of virtue, their creed may never face rejection again. (51) However, the graphics constitute a second narrative, calling the textual nuances into question. A two-page introductory photograph depicted a large gathering of Mormon missionaries cheering the power of the kingdom (50e51; see Fig. 3). The missionaries’ group and individual bearings channel stereotypical images of Maoist Red Guard zealotry. Their multiple flags may suggest an aspired-to incorporation, perhaps already underway, of the world into the LDS kingdom. Other graphics anticipated American geopolitical fears associated with economic growth in today’s China (The China, 2005). These included headings such as ‘‘They’re growing. and they’re rich’’ over lists of membership trends and economic wealth (54). A map showing ‘‘Where the Saints are,’’ appeared to show (arguably quite misleadingly) strong worldwide Fig. 3. This lead-in photograph to a 1997 article in Time made an argument about the geopolitical reach of Mormonism. Printed courtesy of photographer Les Stone, Polaris Images, and Time Inc. E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 495 coverage (55). And, a banner at the foot of a page implied a constant need to feed Mormonism through growth: The church needs to recruit labor to drive business growth beyond the U.S. . It’s the same problem faced by any multinational. (56e57) Van Biema’s article does not convey ‘geopolitical threat’ as directly as did the 1910s articles. We doubt he attempted to incite geopolitical fear. Yet that is not the whole issue. All the necessary geopolitical cues existed here (and in the many other similar articles) for those prone to interpret ‘threat’ (just as other signals suggested ‘non-threat’). Critical discourse analysis insists multiple readings are possible. The same discourse may produce contradictory effects (Livingstone, 2004). We do not claim that most Americans think about Mormonism geopolitically, yet some clearly read Mormonism as spatialized threat. Beyond magazines (and the Internet, where a host of bloggers warn of a Mormon world takeover), the popularity of two recent books with very different political/philosophical starting points provides evidence of that anxiety (Abanes, 2002; Bloom, 1992). Thus, following Bennett and Edelman (1985: 165e66): Political communications . are not very often completed narratives in themselves, but they are always seedbeds of stories: incitements to the imagination that reflect and reinforce social divisions. . Evocative references that permeate political . language serve as Pavlovian cues for people who have been conditioned to use language to reinforce their ideologies rather than to challenge them. Geopolitical hints preserve geopolitical frames, at least among segments of the audience, even in the absence of fully non-ambiguous geopolitical logic (Sharp, 1998). Conclusion: the implications of geopolitical discourse For more than the 95 years covered by this study, magazines have figured Mormonism with many of the same rhetorical devices used within popular American geopolitical imaginations to describe ‘threatening’ nation-states and other external threats. Mormonism has been likened to an expansive spatial entity within the American social body. Much, for example, like China from a hegemonic American point of view currently (Latham, 2001), this entity poses problems because, despite its success, it appears not to quite understand or play by normative society’s rules of loyalty, civility, and individuality. Nevertheless journalists could not associate Mormonism of the twenty and twenty-first century with actual militarism. Thus, over the past 95 years, magazines almost always figured Mormonism’s threat as a soft one. As a result, while elements paralleled geopolitical discourse elsewhere, the frame on Mormonism never fully congealed in post-1910s America into a tightly defined geopolitical meta-narrative. Instead it formed a mélange of geopolitical warning, with references that reverberated back somewhat haphazardly to a range of geopolitical worries, about both early Mormonism and America’s external threats. We thus conclude that Mormonism received repeated auditions as America’s ‘alter ego,’ but never fully won the role (cf. Sharp, 1998: 152). Mormonism as geopolitical threat supported certain cultural interests within the post-1910 American nation-state but was never hegemonic. Though it was active within popular culture, Americans never took this geopolitical discourse up in concrete, institutionalized ways within formal politics. Post-structuralist analysis reveals the slipperiness of seemingly solid binary thinking. Yet othering processes are more complex than a focus on stark binaries suggests (Jewitt, 1995). 496 E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 Attention should expand toward social divisions whose existence is regularly and openly simultaneously suggested and denied. Perhaps, we might venture, an ambiguous geopoliticized internal Other, such as Mormonism, is equally functional for American cultural identity as less ambiguously represented Others. This article does not ask whether Mormonism is geopoliticized more or less often or strongly than other religions or groups. Nor does it (neither indeed can it) fully specify the geopolitical portrayal’s impact. Still, it is tempting to suggest that this geopolitical frame is trivial.7 Mormonism apparently thrives. However, popular critical geopolitics persuades us that geopolitical stereotyping creates fundamental problems. [S]hared, borrowed, repeated and reinforced labels for, and images of places, people or events are . sources of [geopolitical] power. (Myers et al., 1996: 24) Geopolitical discourse’s reification of difference and mistrust creates barriers across groups and space. In a provocative essay on Germany’s diasporic Turkish Islamic community of Cemalettin Kaplan during the 1980s and 1990s, Werner Schiffauer (2001) found that media fear of religious fundamentalism and such fundamentalism itself dialectically produced and reinforced one another. Such a production by Mormons and American journalism is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, especially given Mormonism’s comfort vis-à-vis the nation-state.8 But it bears reminding that media anxieties can produce their objects of worry. Whatever the impacts, we end by raising two issues about practicing critical geopolitics. First, the relationships between the textual formulations scholars critique and the ‘actual,’ ‘on-the-ground’ situations are often unsatisfactorily conceptualized. This article implies that one reason to critique the geopolitical frame toward Mormonism is that the discourse diverges from the ‘reality’ of a relatively non-threatening post-nineteenth-century Mormonism. We suspect most critical geopolitical scholars similarly believe that the texts they analyze, at some level, mislead or just ‘got it wrong’ (otherwise, how to choose the texts to critique, or why even critique?). Of course some scholars argue that all we can really know is the text. But do we really believe that? Is it really the point to remain agnostic on whether ‘real’ threats exist? Would critique of geopolitical discourse toward, say, Zen Buddhism, Mormonism, or BPJ 7 Interestingly our research (formally through May 2007: Chen & Yorgason, 2007; less formally through early February 2008) shows that, beyond the rather routine perpetuation of Mormon otherness, journalists mostly avoided geopolitical language in discussing Mitt Romney’s Mormonism during his presidential campaign. Much attention focused on his Mormonism. But the predominant theme was whether people who find Mormonism’s beliefs either silly or nonChristian will vote for him. The closest to geopolitical language were a few mentions of the network of rich Mormons eager to aid Romney. Early in the campaign, some commentators also wondered whether Romney would take marching orders from the LDS prophet. Undoubtedly some of Romney’s detractors always feared that, but the charge was not heavily discussed in the last half year or so before Romney withdrew from the campaign (February 2008). Romney gave a well publicized speech on 6 December 2007 on ‘‘Faith in America’’ (Romney, 2007). While Romney’s speech deserves careful geopolitical/religious analysis in its breadth, the most significant element related to the geopolitics of Mormonism was his garden-variety advocacy of religious tolerance, a tolerance arguably still not fully extended to Mormonism. The country should offer a kind of blank space, he suggested, upon which sincere people can practice their faiths in both public and private spaces with neither denominational establishment nor disparagement. While critics charged that Romney did not extend this same freedom of expression to non-religious people, most media commentators attributed this unwillingness to Romney’s embrace of generic conservative Republican religious politics rather than to his Mormonism. 8 Though beyond the scope of this paper, Mormons have long and vigorously contested the notion that they threaten America. However, see a provocative expectationdone quite new among LDS scholarsdof increased future conflicts between Mormon political methods and American political methods (Harper, 2006: 304). E. Yorgason, C.H. Chen / Political Geography 27 (2008) 478e500 497 Hinduism be equally valid? Is there ever a point at which one usage of geopolitical language becomes more ‘appropriate’ or ‘accurate’ than another? Is prescient use of geopolitical logic in analyzing the Taliban (Rashid, 1999) the moral equivalent of crass geopolitical denunciations of the Islamic world? It seems that critical scholars often conceptually evade notions of both reality and morality and yet rely on a particular version of them practically to decide what and how to critique. This oft-unexplicated worldview seems informed by doses of hegemony theory, cultural Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism, among others. While we hold many of these scholarly inclinations, we urge scholars not to take for granted that other scholars share their situated perspective (see Smith, 2007). Reality and morality deserve more attention within critical geopolitics. This point returns us to geopolitical language used for non-fully-hegemonic ends. Assuming a reality structured by American hegemony can obscure variety in manifestations of geopolitical language; perhaps such language is ubiquitous in social life. Colin Flint (2003:100) asks about the uses to which academic geopolitical studies are put. He appropriately worries that scholars too easily serve single state ‘‘Princes.’’ But we might also ask whether critical geopolitical analysis has a role beyond questioning hegemonic politics. Or is it also useful in exploring other politically relevant discourse? We hope the present research demonstrates the latter. 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