Max Mueller

Max Perry Mueller is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has a PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University. He is a co-founder and former contributing editor of religionandpolitics.org. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among other publications. He is the author of Race and the Making of the Mormon People (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Election 2012, Politics/LawAugust 8, 2012

Making Fun of Mormonism

By Max Mueller

Planets! Tablets! Underwear! When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction.