Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

by Peter Coviello

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 022647433X
• ISBN13: 9780226474335
• Release Date: November 2019
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"