American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defined the practices of Mormonism--America’s fastest-growing religion? Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America is an interdisciplinary study of voice, popular music, and American religion that analyzes the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between two of America’s most iconic institutions, Mormonism and American musical theater. This book argues that Mormonism and early American ... More

American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defined the practices of Mormonism--America’s fastest-growing religion? Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America is an interdisciplinary study of voice, popular music, and American religion that analyzes the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between two of America’s most iconic institutions, Mormonism and American musical theater. This book argues that Mormonism and early American musical theater were cut from the same ideological cloth--formed in the early nineteenth century out of Jacksonian principles of self-fashioning, white supremacy, and broader understandings of the democratic principles of vicariousness. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common ideological platform, using musicals not only to practice a theology of voice but also to transition from outlier polygamist sect to become by the mid-twentieth century emblems of white, middle-class respectability in America. In an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness. Looking outward from the shared ideological roots of Mormonism and musical theater, this book offers a compelling study of how the ways Americans sound determine the paths of their belonging.