ABSTRACT
The Latter Day Saints Church's stress on authority and obedience – a clear legacy of Brigham Young's leadership – has exerted a powerful centripetal force on its membership, offering one explanation for the church's multigenerational success. In a curious twist of history, the now-liberal and always anti-polygamous Reorganized Church may have helped inspire Mormon fundamentalism, committed in large part to the preservation of the doctrine and practice of plural marriage. The sheer diversity of fundamentalist Mormonism makes it impossible to offer a systematic and coherent body of beliefs and practices that they all share. Fundamentalist Mormonism demonstrates the appeal to a small but devoted minority of absolute doctrinal certainty, together with a sense of chosenness and persecution, that marks the persistent attractiveness of fundamentalist remnants in many traditions. Beginning in the 1960s, the Mormon History Association, John Whitmer Historical Association, and other scholarly organizations provided important venues for rapprochement and dialogue between members of the two communities.
