Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)

From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged–socially, sexually, even racially–by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism–an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.