Historians long have agreed that the conditions of life in the turmoil of postrevolutionary America, both in the commercialfarming districts of the Burned-over District and in the hardscrabble midwestern frontier, explain the emergence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this interpretation, the appeal of a message of prophecy, restoration, and eventually divinization stemmed from the uniquely disordered conditions of the early-nineteenth-century frontier and of a rapidly democratizing society. People found refuge from a disordered world in the authoritative pronouncements of the prophet Joseph Smith.

Certainly, Mormonism was fundamentally shaped by the environment in which it emerged, and the particular circumstances of time and place must be kept clearly in view.