One of the harbingers of the Mormon studies field's development has been the increasing number of scholars who have turned their attention to the faith in order to explain broader academic issues. The most recent contribution to this growing trend comes from Peter Coviello—literature scholar and author of a handful of well-received books—whose Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism was published in the University of Chicago Press's “Class 200” series. This series, edited by Kathryn Lofton and John Modern, prides itself on being interdisciplinary, innovative, and provocative. Make Yourselves Gods is no exception.
Though early Mormons make up the subject of Coviello's study, the true object of his focus is “secularism,” a potent word pregnant with many interpretations. Coviello tries to show how Mormonism's sexual and racial history demonstrates the limits of traditional theoretical literature on the subject. His aim, as he puts it, is to provide a new discourse on secularism, primarily one that shows how it has been a system of control and a variety of orthodoxy that punishes nonconformists. The root of antagonism against early Mormons, he reports, was due to their refusal to accept traditional religious boundaries demanded by the age—they refused to be a “good religion”—and were therefore pounded into submission until they did. The LDS Church could only achieve true assimilation, in other words, once they became secular. While much of this chronological story is familiar to those who study Mormonism, Coviello casts a new lens on the narrative by drawing from political theology, Native studies, and queer critique. The result is a theoretically-dense argument that bounces between decades and themes as it addresses a larger literature of secularism studies, even if it is not always rooted in exhaustive research.
Coviello begins his work with an extended overview of how historians have come to define the “secular,” culminating in a profound and convincing summary: “secularism” has, in many cases, come to serve the role of a theodicy for western culture and as the justification for colonization, misogyny, and racism—all in the defense of the liberal, and liberated, self. This is a very useful chapter, and I'd recommend it for graduate courses seeking to introduce students to a broad and sometimes confusing field. Coviello then turns his attention to the Mormons, first with their sexual deviancy and then to their racial appropriation. If sex (via polygamy) drove Mormonism's early critique of secular culture, their embrace of white imperialism (via oppression of Natives and subjugation of African Americans) enabled their assimilation into it. The conclusion highlights how Mormonism's integration into America's secular empire is therefore not an unvarnished victory, but also a tragic tale of accepting and expanding repressive systems and morals.
Coviello also takes aim at Mormon studies scholars, and critiques previous historians for creating what he calls a “secular redemption” narrative, positing early Mormons as far more secular—that is, far more an embodiment of the liberal, secular self—than is warranted. Historians are anxious, Coviello claims, to make Mormons “reluctant” polygamists, “illogical” racists, or “hesitant” theocrats, depicting their radical ideas and actions as aberrations to otherwise common characters enmeshed in their surrounding contexts (205). Coviello, rather, urges scholars to fully capture the radical nature of Joseph Smith's “genius” imagination, a true and anti-secular departure from the status quo. Make Yourselves Gods, then, is at its heart a declension narrative. It begins with what Coviello calls the “wild beauty and extravagant imaginative power” of early Mormonism, and closes with the faith embracing the “biopolitics” of traditional biography and racial supremacy (4). Though Coviello is insistent when he says that Young did not create the new oppressive order, his tale still reads like the traditional contrast of Joseph Smith the imaginative genius and Brigham Young the pragmatic tyrant; Smith the anti-secular, Young the proto-. This framing, however, can easily overstate the change that took place over Mormonism's first century, and it at times presents the two patriarchal leaders in portraits that are little more than one-dimensional.
There are portions of the book that exhibit innovative interventions. This includes his discussion on polygamy, in which he drew from queer theory to demonstrate the unexplored contours of Mormonism's most controversial marital practice. Coviello persuasively emphasizes what it meant for Mormons to challenge the sexual status quo and highlights the deviancy of Mormon sexual practices as seen from its broader Victorian context. Most especially, Coviello convincingly posits that scholars have failed to capture the “carnality” of Joseph Smith's embodied theology, in which humans take corporeal form in order to experience joy, both in this life and the next (75–76). How does polygamy play into Smith's quasi-obsession with pleasure? These are important questions.
But even here, Coviello's theoretical structure might take him a step too far. At issue is the fact that the women who participated in polygamy consistently and nearly univocally described their experiences in non-carnal terms. Coviello acknowledges this problem but attempts to deflect by explaining that their reminiscences were written decades later, and that their justifications in fact represent their embracing the secular discourse of monogamy (thus making them “reluctant” polygamists). But besides overlooking earlier accounts, I fear that this interpretive approach results in silencing these women's voices, an ironic and unfortunate extension of the patriarchal system itself.
Yet these types of quibbles are expected when dealing with a book so provocative. Make Yourselves Gods is one of the most theoretically rich accounts of Mormonism yet written, and is bound to prompt numerous discussions in the field of religion and secularism in the decades to come.
