In Power of Godliness, Jonathan Stapley offers insight into a seldom discussed aspect of Mormonism, its sacramental ordinances and their associated doctrines or, in more specifically biblical terms, its effort to be “endowed with power from on high.” The interpretive focus of the book is on contemporary tensions regarding the Latter-Day Saints Church's (LDS) hierarchical and gendered expressions of such power or, as he puts it, “the challenge for recent Mormons . . . to understand the historical restrictions against the full participation of black people in the church and the integration of women into the contemporary framework” (33). Race plays a minor role in this discussion, however, possibly because it has not been a bar to “full participation” since 1978. The book's main subject by far is women's priestly privilege in Mormon temples and lack thereof in its other sites of worship, chapels, and homes.

The author's approach is historical and theological. In chapter 1, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ conception of its lay priesthood is described throughout as “cosmological” and, thus, creative of “a material heaven on earth” in which heterosexual marriage plays a central role. The chapter's final pages introduce the book's central historical concern: women have always officiated in temple ordinances, but during the twentieth century their ritual leadership outside the temple was circumscribed in service to the aggrandizement of male authority. The second chapter describes Mormon marital practices and accompanying theology as legitimating female priestly authority. Denominated “sealings,” marriages performed in Mormon temples create familial bonds that are retained in the afterlife. While apropos of their joining persons to one another, the term has eschatological significance: it grants a conditional guarantee of heavenly reward. According to Stapley, by investing its eschatology in family construction, which necessarily relies on women's participation, and by allowing women to perform temple rites, women necessarily have the right to participate in those orders of priesthood which govern Mormon life outside the temple.

Chapter three turns to another familial rite, the blessing and naming of children. Here we see a fine example of how Mormonism's modern origins make it a remarkably transparent and, therefore, instructive object for researching religious origins and evolution. Stapley shows how, in the church's first years, regnant cultural forms of infant baptism or “churching” were informally related to early Mormon temple practices to become “an annunciation of the child's place in the material heaven on earth” (78). Later, as these practices are subjected to administrative regulation, they morph into an “important element of Mormon manhood” (56). The heteronormativity of Mormonism's “material heaven” is briefly treated in this chapter but only in relation to its effect on male same-sex marriages. This may be because the focus of the chapter portrays infant initiation rites in relation to notions of manhood. Nevertheless, attention to the issue of female same-sex unions would have been a welcome complication to those considered, e.g., the evolving demand for a mother's participation in the rite.

Chapters four and five are focused on formal and folk healing practices, respectively. Formal practices, when done by women, are deemed a “reasonable reading” or extension of their temple activity, legitimized in the nineteenth but interdicted in the twentieth century (87). Here, too, the emphasis is on contrary impulses denominated “cosmological” and “ecclesiastical priesthood.” Multiple historical examples are given of women's healing practices and their foreclosure by administrative fiat and in conjunction with Progressive Era rationalization of Mormon administration. Stapley illustrates the gendering of Mormon power in three additional ritual practices: communion, dedication of homes and graves, and prayer. He finds that in all areas “liturgical authority that had been available to women within the church was recast as . . . exclusive to men” (101). For Stapley, this history shows a “vivid contrast between Mormonisms:” the one privileging individual expressiveness, the other bound by institutionalism and regulated by “stale handbooks” (80, 125). “Power of Godliness” is a declension narrative, admittedly designed to “complicate the facile or presentist reading” of Mormonism's past in its current gender debates (128).

Ultimately, the style of the book may cause it to fall between two audiences. General readers, not party to the internecine argument, will be less interested in whether there is a right way of doing and theologizing Mormon rites. They may be challenged also by the book's scholarly language, often idiosyncratically deployed. On the other hand, the specialist will be tested by the book's assumed level of insider knowledge and lack of method, especially with respect to ritual. Here, Mormonism's ordinances serve as deposits of meaning or as doctrinal media. Their inherent dynamism is depicted as a struggle for return to right performance to be judged by right doctrine.

Nevertheless, Stapley is right: Mormonism's authority structure and eschatology cannot be fully understood without attention to its rituals as rich sites of gendered power and its negotiation. Such a study is long overdue and usefully complicates existing literature that tends to ignore Mormon liturgy and its highly sacramental character. More broadly, the suggestive power of Stapley's argument and his expert research will reward his readers, general and academic.