In recent years, some scholars of religion in America have critiqued traditional historiographical approaches and have called for a "retelling" of American religious history that moves away from centralized, mainstream grand narratives and focuses on neglected points of view and previously muted voices. Methodologically, this school calls for historiographical discussions centered on the themes of contact, boundary, and exchange as these issues play out in specific physical and doctrinal-ritualistic spaces. This dissertation, through its focus on the boundaries created and maintained during the nineteenth century by the Shakers and the Mormons, amplifies and complicates this critique.

This project argues that the physical and doctrinal-ritualistic boundaries were intentionally built and cultivated by the Shakers and the Mormons. These seemingly impenetrable boundaries were sites of complex self-reinforcing exchanges between the groups and American culture. By mapping this dialectic of exchange, this dissertation not only opens an important window into the workings of "marginal" religious groups, but it also makes the case that striking differences exist between such marginal groups. Clear, consistent, and significantly divergent patters of boundary maintenance emerged early in the history of each group which are here developed into specific "tension models" that detail the mode of exchange employed each group in its dealings Victorian American culture. This dissertation thus erodes any tendency toward consensus history or master narratives, even within the study of New Religious Movements, by raising questions about the heuristic usefulness of the "church-sect" model as it currently exists in the literature. The comparative approach of the dissertation brings these two tension models into conversation through the media of anthropological, sociological, and literary theories. This move seeks to correct the relative insularity of historiographical literature in the fields of Shaker and Mormon history.