19th century
19th-century mormons
A01=Peter Coviello
american secularism
anti-imperialists
Author_Peter Coviello
belief
Category=NHK
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
christianity
church of jesus christ latter-day saints
citizenship
colonizers
counter-history
dissident sect
early mormon theology
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
faith
heretics
historical research
monogamy
Mormonism
orthodoxy
polygamy
protestant america
racial history
refugees
religion
religious studies
reluctant monogamists
sex-radicals
sexuality
social issues
united states
violence
zealotry
Product details
- ISBN 9780226474168
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Nov 2019
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America and Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs.
