Samuel Brown begins his new monograph with a sigh-inducing, pedestrian line: “Death has presided over life for all of human history” (3). The remainder of his work, though, is remarkable. Brown, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine, provides the most original and insightful reinterpretation of Joseph Smith and early Mormonism to emerge in the last twenty years. Rather than retread familiar routes, Brown contextualizes early Mormonism within what he calls the nineteenth-century culture of “holy dying” and explains Smith's seemingly fragmented theology and sacraments through this illuminating prism. In the process, Brown not only reveals an aspect of early Mormonism that has been largely overlooked by other historians, he also highlights a part of antebellum American culture little studied—its frequent, sustained, and normalized ritual confrontations with death in the era before the funerary industry. Additionally, Brown unveils an early Mormon theological system more eclectic in its origins, more systematically coherent, and more literal in its idiosyncratic biblical exegesis than most scholars had previously imagined.

Brown's focus on the conquest of death is not simply an account of Mormonism's quest for salvation. It is more particularly a focus on early Mormonism's negotiations of “when and under what circumstances life ends, how much of earthly experience will persist, and what constitutes preparation for death” (8). Brown's study of these negotiations transforms how historians can understand Joseph Smith and early Mormonism: the Book of Mormon becomes a grave artifact and Smith's seerhood translates into a vocation to break death's silence. Joseph Smith's later theological innovations come into a new focus, too. By the time of Smith's death, the Mormon prophet “had revealed a polyvalent family system [polygamy and ritual adoption], a utopian communitarianism grounded in mystical traditions about Enoch, a temple liturgy that taught his followers how to negotiate the afterlife and promised them postmortal divinity, and a scandalously anthropomorphic God whom all humans could call Father” (8). All of these seemingly disparate theological innovations found coherence in Smith's attempts to address the problems posed by the culture of holy dying—how one could be reassured of her eternal destiny, how one could know that earthly connections endured, and how one prepared for her own death and hoped for assumption of immortality.

Central to Smith's project was the creation of what Brown calls the “heaven family,” a radical rejection of the monogamous Victorian family. In the heaven family, Mormons were bound together through sacramental links that stretched across time, as ancestors were connected through baptism for the dead, and space, as new, complex families were created through the sealings of ritual adoption and plural marriage. All of this sacramental welding could be comprehended within Smith's revision of “the Great Chain of Being,” what Brown calls the Mormon “Chain of Belonging.” Whereas Renaissance musings on the Great Chain of Being had various static orders of species, heavenly and earthly, from God down to archangels and humans, Smith erased these traditional ontological distinctions and recast them all as variations in eternal glory, not substance or species, within one grand family that was “dynamic, able to embrace the possibility of progress” (222). Humans were simply Gods in embryonic form, lower on the chain than the God of this world who had also once been human. This, according to Brown, was a stunningly literalized imitatio Christi, not a merger into Christ's metaphorical body, but a “merger into the [literal] family of Christ” (8). Through the sacraments of Smith's emerging temple cultus, the Mormon prophet assured his followers that the power of death would be vanquished by their entry into a heaven family, one connected to unending hierarchies of evolving immortal beings.

As noted, Brown insightfully contextualizes polygamy within Smith's quest to conquer death in a Mormon Chain of Belonging. However, I found myself wondering if he too casually discarded Smith's other motivations for the new sacramental marriage system. He writes that “critics have tended to see Smith's dual wives [wives married to other men who Smith then married himself] as evidence of the Prophet's overwhelming libido and/or his appetite for power” (242). In contrast, Brown argues that Smith was actually trying to make a point—that the sacramental heaven family prevailed over all other families—by taking dual wives. A synthesis of these two arguments seems more accurate to me: Smith's personal sexuality (a dominating intimacy) became inextricably entwined with his larger sacramental system (an eternal, hierarchical intimacy) not bound by prevailing moral conventions. In a related vein, Brown helpfully frames polygamous marriage as Smith's sacramental solution to the exigencies of bereavement and widowhood. However, Brown never addresses how this system was also a conservative assertion of patriarchy by ritually powerful men. Ironically enough, Brown does not adequately analyze the asymmetrical power relationships created by Smith's Chain of Belonging, and, in effect, flattens them.

This minor criticism should not dissuade readers from engaging Brown's erudite reading of Smith's sacramental system. The gains from reading Brown's work accrue with every page. Unlike other historians who have attempted to place Smith's Mormonism as the successor to one overarching intellectual tradition, Brown wisely shows early Mormonism's fragmentary appropriations from many traditions. Brown's Mormons were neither simply hermetic magi nor highly eccentric Methodists, neither just millenarian doomsayers nor primarily revolutionary Masons. Instead, Brown's Mormons were bricoleurs, using whatever intellectual systems and practices that were at hand. This corrective alone makes Brown's work worth reading.

Samuel Brown does not possess a Ph.D. in a humanities subject, that union card that grants most of us serious critical consideration by our peers. Yet, Brown's surprising mastery of both Mormon primary sources and the latest scholarship in American religious history makes up for that lack of credentialing. Very few professionally trained Mormon studies scholars could duplicate or surpass the level of insight and historical contextualization evidenced in his work. I certainly could not. Without exaggeration, In Heaven as it is On Earth is now essential reading for any scholar seeking to understand early Mormonism. To borrow a Mormon phrase, Brown's book is a marvelous work and a wonder.