Railroading Religion

“A book that is bursting with creativity, irony, and scholarly flair, Railroading Religion is a brilliant history of the making of railroads and religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Utah. Unearthing a wealth of letters, journals, scrapbooks, promotional materials, and other sources and placing them in conversation with theorists of religion, technology, and tourism, David Walker finds a new way to tell readers about the constructed meaning of ‘religion’ in America while telling new stories about Mormons and their political and religious antagonists. This is one of the most thoughtful and original books on the history of Mormonism that I have read.”—John G. Turner, author of The Mormon Jesus

"David Walker’s Railroading Religion is a book of intricate and serious pleasures: at once a meticulous archival history of a failed municipal experiment, an ambitious and deeply imagined parsing of Mormonism in the American grain, and a venturesome, transformative effort to rethink the basic questions that animate the study of religion and the secular in modernity.”—Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

“David Walker’s ‘mainlining’ of Mormonism in relation to the development of the transcontinental railroad is creative and innovative both in how he uses historical sources and how he considers theoretical concerns relating to religion and secularism. Railroading Religion brings together Mormon history, the history of religion in the West, and—pivoting around the intriguing town of Corinne, Utah—the history of railroads and economic development in America more broadly."—Richard J. Callahan Jr., author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust

“Embracing the material turn in religious studies, Walker writes about tourist sites, trains, and beaches, among other things, as major parts of nineteenth-century religion that illustrate the complexity of the boundaries of religion as a category. Importantly, the book contributes to an understudied period of Mormonism’s American history (1860s-1890s) and brings an exciting analysis to its subject matter.”—Journal of the American Academy of Religion

“This insightful book will be useful to those interested in railroads and the development of the West as well as those interested in Mormonism.”—CHOICE

“Walker tells the story of Mormonism’s evolution during the Utah period in a new way. His approach asks scholars to reconsider long-held beliefs and theories about religion. Through compelling arguments, historical insight, and innovative storytelling, Railroading Religion is valuable for anyone interested in the history of the American West and nineteenth-century secularism.”—Nova Religio

“Historically rich and theoretically provocative, David Walker’s Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West is a welcome addition to the historiography of Mormonism and will be read with interest by scholars of new religious movements and American religion in general, as well as historians of the American West and historians of American business.”—Religion

“Railroading Religion is one of the most theoretically rich and provocatively argued books written on Mormon studies in quite some time. While the benefits for those who work on Mormonism are clear, scholars of religion will also be forced to consider dominant ideas concerning secularism and religion, not to mention modernity.”—Church History and Religious Culture

“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 call ‘tourism.’ . . . [A] shining example of how to practice a historiography of religions that incorporates, and builds upon, secularity theory’s best insights.”—Mormon Studies Review

“Because of the singular place Mormonism has occupied in the American imagination, one must ask: How applicable is Walker’s argument about the relationship between religion and modernity beyond Mormonism? My answer is: a lot.”—Journal of Religion