Make Yourselves Gods

"The story of nineteenth-century Mormonism told in Make Yourselves Gods is one of dynamism and violence, but also the wild beauty and imaginative power. Peter Coviello follows the Mormons from the period of their earliest emergence as a dissident sect-widely despised as self-governing religious zealots and sex-radicals-to safely enfranchised subjects of the United States. During their exodus to the West, Mormons saw themselves as having less in common with white Protestants than with Native tribes, fellow-refugees from imperial America who also enjoyed social arrangements unstructured by monogamy. They were cast out from Protestant America, defined socially and sexually by their extravagances of belief. in other words, by bad religion. When the Mormons at last renounced polygamy at the end of the nineteenth century-thereby attaining statehood for Utah and becoming enfranchised U.S. subjects-they fell under the protection secularism's "toleration" but also found themselves paying, Coviello argues, the complex wages of racial and sexual normativity. Coviello is the first to tell the story of Mormonism across these several registers, synthesizing archival research with the conceptual tools queer theory, political theology, and Native Studies. The result is a new framework for imagining heterodoxy, citizenship, and sex in secularizing nineteenth-century America"--