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Almost two decades have elapsed since I published The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). My book began by acknowledging and illustrating the "Americanization" thesis advanced by others- namely that the LDS Church and religion had spent the first half of the twentieth century in a deliberate policy of assimilation with American society and was thus following the time-honored trajectory traced by such early scholars as Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber-from a peculiar and disreputable sect toward a respectable church, increasingly comfortable with the surrounding American culture.1 My main argument, however, was that, since the midtwentieth century the Church had begun to reverse course and was trying to recover some of the distinctiveness that seemingly had been lost during assimilation. I called this reversal a process of "retrenchment," and I emphasized that it was a historic anomaly, for conventional wisdom predicted that all new religions would either be stamped out, be socially and politically quarantined, or eventually be assimilated by the dominant surrounding culture. Once on the path toward assimilation, how and why did the LDS Church resist and then reverse course?
I answered that question by drawing on recent sociological theories about new religious movements, arguing that new religions thrive not by full assimilation but by maintaining a degree of peculiarity and thus tension with the surrounding culture.2 If this tension becomes excessive, the new religion will face a "predicament of disrepute," as Mormonism did in the nineteenth century, and its survival will be jeopardized. However, if assimilation proceeds too far, the religion faces a "predicament of respectability," where its identity or "brand" does not stand for anything distinctive enough to be attractive-a condition which Mormonism approached by the middle of the twentieth century.3 Growth and prosperity depend upon finding and maintaining an optimum level of tension on a continuum between disrepute and respectability. 4 This external tension typically arises in part from a certain internal strictness and sacrifice entailed by Church membership, lest members grow complacent in assuming that the promised rewards can be had without any "cost." The costs and sacrifices imposed on members define the boundaries of the LDS way of life and therefore their very identity as "Mormons"-even as these...