Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226474335)

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.


Author: Peter Coviello
ISBN-10: 022647433X
ISBN-13: 9780226474335
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/14/2019
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d