Railroading Religion

David Walker'sRailroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West tells the riveting story of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints won the battle not only to define what the railroad would mean in Utah but also to locate the junction and stations that would have a definitive impact on development near the Great Salt Lake. Through well-executed bureaucratic maneuvers, Brigham Young and other church leaders secured the construction of a railroad infrastructure that they calculated would best serve church interests.Then, in subsequent years, a diverse array of Mormons engaged with the resulting tourist development—from guidebooks to bathing grounds to theaters—thus putting Mormonism into secular discourse in a way that was as much to the future advantage of the church as not. Walker offers Utahn rail tourism as a case study in secularism in the making. Neither the modernizing force of the railroad nor the exoticizing discourses of “atrocity tourism”—travelers with Orientalist theories of religion ogling Mormon polygamy—necessarily worked to the disadvantage of Latter-day Saint leadership, Walker shows. Instead, secularism had to be laboriously, inefficiently made, one guidebook or journal entry or congressional decision after another. Mormons and anti-Mormons engaged in this making together, and the results were often ironic and unpredictable—and never tidy.Walker tells us in the first half of his book that even as the Central Pacific company constructed track from the west and the Union Pacific constructed from the east in the 1860s, each racing the other to lay more track (and claim more adjoining land) than the other company, another multi-front competition of legal and bureaucratic positioning took place between the LDS Church leadership and the boosters of the town of Corinne, a would-be Gentile stronghold on the Great Salt Lake's shores. The questions of where the railroads would join, and what stations would be located near the junction, were being decided in real time, in a complex negotiation among Congress, the companies, and local centers of power, even as track was laid. Corinne wanted to be the junction, but so did Salt Lake City. Future revenues from tourism and industry, railroad labor contracts, and sheer prestige as the capital of the west all hung in the balance.The result was that the LDS Church outmaneuvered boosters for Corinne. This outcome was ironic in the eyes of those who subscribed to what Walker calls the “death-knell thesis,” the idea that anti-modern institutions must inevitably yield before the onslaught of technological modernity. The victory was not unalloyed, however; Brigham Young would have preferred a southerly route for the railroad, whereas the track bent north around the lake instead. Nonetheless, the fact that the junction was ultimately in Latter-day Saint–controlled Ogden was a triumph for Young. While the reasons for Young's success were complicated, they came down to the fact that the LDS Church was a more sophisticated bureaucratic organization than any other in the region, and to the fact that its leaders successfully engaged in secular discourse, at once inviting and parrying charges of Mormon anti-modernity, along multiple fronts. Even in internecine conflicts around the relationship between religion and industry, such as the Godbeite controversy, the subject of Walker's third chapter, the factions of the church, including the dissenters known as Godbeites, were arguing among themselves about what place modernizing forces of industry would have within Mormonism. That they would have some place was obvious to those in the debate.In the second part of Railroading Religion, Walker shows how the existence of the railroad opened up an opportunity to cater to visitors to the area. Again, Corinne's boosters had high hopes: they sought to make themselves a Gentile outpost from which atrocity-tourism expeditions into Salt Lake City could be outfitted. But the LDS Church was more successful at attracting these very tourists. For example, Corinne residents proposed a steamboat service for travel across the lake to Salt Lake City, wagering that Gentiles would rather avoid a Mormon branch line of the train. But the opposite turned out to be true: many visitors saw the branch line itself as an attraction. Or, in another example, Brigham Young devoted substantial time to meeting with important travelers. Those travelers jumped at the chance to converse with the leader they imagined using Orientalist tropes. Young, on the other hand, viewed these meetings as an opportunity to debate with contemporary thought leaders. By engaging with tourists who came to exoticize him, Young reasoned, he seeded a more nuanced conception of Mormonism into the east.Walker's book is full of the surprises his meticulous attention to a vast archive has yielded. His sources include documents from LDS Church archives; newspapers hailing from Utah, the East, and even one published on board the train lines; congressional proceedings; tourist scrapbooks; settler journals; local museum collections; and county records across the West, among others. Some of the most immediately arresting discoveries are photographs, including images of a Mormon exposition car, and of the opulent Salt Lake theater with sets onstage for a play, Lightning Express, that looks (from its backdrop showing a steam engine) to be about the technological sublime.Walker consistently shows that not only does the history of this period not conform to any simple narrative of the forces of Protestant secularity arrayed against Mormon barbarism, but indeed any historical actor who based future predictions (and bets) on this story tended to get outflanked by someone who did not (most often, Brigham Young). 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 called “tourism.”Ultimately, Walker presents the Utah railroad as a case for secularity studies. Just as Corinne's boosters told themselves that the railroad must be the death-knell to Mormonism, scholars were once convinced that when railroads confronted the formerly credulous nineteenth century with the irresistible force of the technological sublime, anti-modern religions would fall. Walker shows, on the contrary, that Mormon leaders did not simply get bowled over by secular discourse; rather, they incorporated it and changed it. There were no foregone conclusions about whether it would be to the advantage or to the disadvantage of the LDS Church to bring a railroad through Utah.The second, and equally important, phase of Walker's theoretical argument is that the technology of the railroad is not irrelevant to religious history just because the death-knell thesis is wrong. On the contrary, Walker finds both “the stuff of religious studies” and “ordinary Americans’ . . . theories of religion” in the corporate struggles of the railway lines (7). To write religious history is, for Walker, to write the history of the railroad, across the range of archival sources already mentioned. That range of sources is itself a tacit argument. The railroad, in Walker's hands, is not best understood as a sublime technological fact, even if understanding the discourse of the sublime is part of his aim here. Instead, as he pithily puts it, “the technological sublime was a corporate project” (27).I am tempted to say, though here I am on more speculative ground, that the Foucauldian sublime is a target of critique here, too. That probably-overdrawn term is my own. And yet it might serve as a shorthand for a certain tendency, in less nuanced readings of Michel Foucault's work, to imagine discourse as a perfectly functioning, totalizing matrix from within which there are not only no exits, but there are not even any glitches. Walker shows us the thoroughly glitchy, ironic workings of discourse. (For that matter, so did Foucault—but this is not always how his theses are remembered.) Walker is certainly influenced by Foucault, and beyond that, is a deep reader of Foucault's own precursor, Max Weber. Moreover, he is well influenced, in that he has not forgotten the more or less constant appearance of irony, novelty, and ironic reversal in Foucault's work.When Walker turns, in the conclusion, to Weber, in a reflection I hope we will one day see drawn out at greater length in another venue, he makes a striking critique of The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism.1 Walker comments, “There is less fault in Weber's supposed prophecies about the disappearance or alteration of religion in modernity than there is in his assumptions about the ‘rationality’—efficiency, scientificity, singularity—of bureaucracy itself” (247). This is a brilliant observation that is amply earned by Walker's archival research showing bureaucracy to be, on the contrary, redundant, contingent, wishful, and even fantastical. Nor, as Walker also points out, is there any reason to think that where efficient bureaucracy is achieved, it must be railroads, rather than religions, that achieve it. Walker's book provides a shining example of how to practice a historiography of religions that incorporates, and builds upon, secularity theory's best insights

Ancient history · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies