On Religious Subject Formation and the Limits of Liberalism: A case study of the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints.

This paper use the raids on the polygamous communities of Short Creek, Arizona (1953) and Eldorado, Texas (2008) as lenses to establish the inextricability of monogamy and democracy in both historical and contemporary American political tradition. It argues that both government interventions brought to the fore similar questions about religious behavior's acceptable limits as well as the limits of American political culture generally. This paper will examine polygamy's sordid history in the American tradition and argue that liberal feminism has offered an unsatisfying explanation for why polygamous, religious subjects are unintelligible in the American political tradition. Ultimately, the April 2008 raid requires that we revisit some of these old questions. I argue that we must transcend a liberal democratic ethos if we aim to understand polygamy's illegibility in America. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]