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Mormonism is often described as the quintessentially American religion, one that is highly centralized around its leadership and demographic presence in Utah. But given a dramatic increase in non-U.S. membership since 1960 in both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ, new questions about these movements come to the fore: How are these Restoration traditions lived and experienced in other parts of the world? How do church members outside the United States understand their relationship to a sacralized American past and an administrative hierarchy in Salt Lake City? And how has the relatively recent explosion of membership outside of the United States begun to shift the faith’s institutional, political, and cultural dynamics within those traditions? Most importantly, how do church members from different localities and cultures relate to each other, forming a global community? Or do they?

This volume focuses on Asia, a region that includes more than half the world's population, but where Restoration traditions specifically and Christianity broadly are minority faiths. It uses a combination of focused case studies and theoretical analysis to highlight broader trends and themes that those studies suggest about the meaning of a globalized faith in the twenty-first century. The first section of this book lays out ways of thinking about Mormonism’s global presence in terms of the nation-state, and the essays explore where and how Restoration traditions as institutional actors have made their way into new political and social contexts. The second section studies the tensions created by the encounters of LDS norms with preexisting cultural and political values in local settings. These essays burrow more deeply into political and religious realities and explore the variations in Mormon cultural assumptions about politics and society, as well as the relationship between local congregants and the Mormon administrative center. The final section presents fine-grained
studies that focus attention on one of the central features of LDS lived religion: the role of gender and the family in the religious community. In each case, divine dictates necessarily bump up against traditional societal norms that converts must navigate.

Contributors: John-Charles Duffy, Stacilee Ford, Taunalyn Ford, Conan Grames, David J. Howlett, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Keisha Lai, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Matthew Martinich, Meagan Rainock, Shinji Takagi, Pierre Vendassi

This volume is the first to examine at length and in detail the impact of the missionary experience on American cultural, political, and religious history.

This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways. Missions provided many Americans with their first significant exposure to non-Western cultures and religions. They helped to establish a variety of new academic disciplines in home universities—linguistics, anthropology, and comparative religion among them. Missionary women helped redefine gender roles in North America, and missions have vitalized tiny local churches as well as entire denominations, causing them to rethink their roles and priorities, both here and abroad. In fact, missionaries have helped define our own national identity by influencing our foreign, trade, military, and immigration policies over the last two centuries.

Topics in the collection range from John Saillant's essay on the missions of free African Americans to Liberia in the 19th century to Grant Wacker's essay on the eventual disillusionment of noted writer Pearl S. Buck. Kathryn T. Long’s essay on the “Auca martyrs” offers a sobering case study of the missionary establishment's power to, in tandem with the evangelical and secular press, create and record the stories of our time. William L. Svelmoe documents the improbable friendship between fundamentalist Bible translator William Cameron Townsend and Mexico’s secular socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas. And Anne Blue Wills details the ways many American groups—black, Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon—sought to convert one another, stead-
fastly envisioning “others” as every bit as “heathen” as those in far-off lands.

The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home is an insightful, provocative collection that will stimulate much discussion and debate. It is valuable for academic libraries and seminaries, scholars of religious history and American studies, missionary groups, cultural historians and ethnographers, and political scientists.