Make Yourselves Gods

Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

Peter Coviello

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226474335, 9780226474168
• eBook ISBN: 9780226474472
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

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.
 

NOTES

PROLOGUE

1 Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 59.

2 John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 153. On the Mormons at Winter Quarters, see also Richard E. Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 1846–1852: “And Should We Die . . .” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). The Mormons had, at Winter Quarters, entered into a volatile intratribal economy. The Omaha and Otoe had had a contentious relation since the Omaha, in the earlier 1840s, fled to the area following attacks by the Dakota Sioux. By 1855 both the Omaha and Otoe would be removed from these lands to reservations located in Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

3 Brent M. Rogers, Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

4 “The Mormons,” Putnam’s Monthly 5, no. 27 (March 1855): 225–36, 234.

5 The archive of postsecular critique is extensive, and growing. Chapter 1 will provide a small critical genealogy, though here it is worth marking a few of what have been, for me, indispensable interventions: José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 52–77; Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), as well as her “The Problem of the Postsecular,” American Literary History 26, no. 1 (2014): 154–67; Amardeep Singh, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), as well as her more recent Sex and Secularism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); José Casanova, “A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 265–81; Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden, eds., Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

6 See Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). With its synoptic account of sentimentality as a fundamental grammar of the style of American liberalism proper to racial empire, The Female Complaint is, in my reading of it, a companion volume to Berlant’s subsequent Cruel Optimism, whose terms—especially in relation to the fast and slow violences of liberal self-legitimation—will be crucial for how this book thinks about secularism.

7 I borrow the phrase “the metaphysics of secularism” from Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 1–47.

8 I am quoting from the “amalgamated text” of the King Follett Discourse, as assembled by Stan Larson and included in The Essential Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 232–45, 235–36. As observed by the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers, the discourse was transcribed by several observers—Willard Richards, Wilford Woodruff, Thomas Bullock, and William Clayton among them—and these transcriptions began to be condensed, amalgamated, and published as soon as the summer of 1844. For the reader’s ease of reference, and where the texts are not so subject to multiple renditions, I will try throughout to cite from available print editions of Smith’s writings, chiefly those collected in The Essential Joseph Smith, cited internally throughout the text as EJS; in other cases, the material gathered online in the Joseph Smith Papers will be indispensable. For multiple transcriptions, and something of the history of the discourse, see “Accounts of the ‘King Follett’ Sermon,” Joseph Smith Papers, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/site/accounts-of-the-king-follett-sermon.

9 “There is no such thing as immaterial matter,” we are told in Doctrine and Covenants 131. “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes.” See The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ; The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; The Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981), 266.

10 Joseph Smith, “Account of Meeting and Discourse, 5 January 1841, as Reported by William Clayton,” Joseph Smith Papers, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/account-of-meeting-and-discourse-5-january-1841-as-reported-by-william-clayton/4; Smith, “Happiness is the Object and Design of Our Existence,” quoted in EJS, 159; Book of Mormon, Nephi 2:25.

11 Smith, “The Principle and Doctrine of Having Many Wives and Concubines,” quoted in EJS, 194, emphasis added.

12 Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Knopf, 1945), 294–95.

13 This was the germinal point of my previous work on Smith, early Mormonism, and the history of sexuality in nineteenth-century America. For a fuller elaboration of what it means to see Smith as a kind of “historian of the body,” see Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 104–28.

14 This is from Morrill’s “Utah Territory and Its Laws—Polygamy and Its License,” quoted in At Sword’s Point, Part I: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858, ed. William P. MacKinnon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 87.

15 Jack London, The Star Rover (1915; New York: Macmillan, 1963), 131.

16 See D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), as well as Quinn’s subsequent The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994); John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). My sense is that the strongest work toward something like a reconciliation of the esoteric tradition with the mainstream body of Mormon studies appears in the capacious scholarship of Terryl Givens, especially his People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), as well as The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). A bedeviling work in this matrix is Harold Bloom’s The American Religion, in which he famously treats Mormonism as both the exemplifying American faith and, as Smith initially formulated it, a restorationist religion so telepathically in tune with its Old Testament predecessors as to amount, finally, to an Americanized iteration of Jewish Gnosticism. See Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

17 I have been inspired especially, and most directly, by Givens’s parsings of Mormon heresy, in The Viper on the Hearth, and by Samuel Morris Brown’s fantastically persuasive account of Smith as a theologian not only in love with life but, as a result of this, “roaring in the face of death” (In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 12).

18 I am referring here, in o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Prologue: Winter Quarters
• AXIOMATIC
• JOY
• EXTERMINATION
• THEODICY
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index