Mormon studies

A revised and updated version of this essay appears in the book "Envisioning Scripture: Joseph Smith's Revelations in Their Early American Contexts" (2022), edited by Colby Townsend.
This copy posted on Academia is not the final printed version, but an uncorrected proof.

Jews and Mormons have pasts as racialized Others. Although they appear dissimilar, both groups have been inscribed historically as non-White. Both groups responded to these inscriptions by attempting to achieve Whiteness, making numerous and radical concessions to U.S. American culture. As a result, both groups became "liminally White." We argue that such liminal status demonstrates the fissures in Whiteness and provides creative new grounds for critiquing Whiteness as a rhetorical construct.

This article analyzes the "conversion" of Anthony Uzodimma Obinna, an Igbo schoolteacher from the town of Aboh Mbaise in Imo State, and his extended family to Mormonism in southeastern Nigeria between the 1960s and the 1980s, from a historical perspective. I argue that the transition of Anthony Obinna and his family away from Catholicism to Mormonism can be explained by both the elective affinities that existed between Mormonism and indigenous Igbo culture, and socio-economic factors as well. This article bases its conclusions on a close reading of oral histories, personal papers, and correspondence housed at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

By the early 19th century increased optical deceptions, like the phantasmagoria shows that could conjure up ghostly illusions, challenged biological and spiritual vision in novel ways. Ghosts also circulated with unprecedented ubiquity in printed stories of spectral appearances, from Gothic literature to spiritual visions. Within this constellation of developments Joseph Smith’s turn to print media to disseminate his own spectacular vision(s) should be understood as a cultural project to train vision and render it reproducible. The turn to publishing visionary accounts and instructions on avoiding deception coupled late romantic thought with modern practices of observing for early Mormons who were unsure if they could trust their eyes. Through a media archaeological approach to the religion’s initial reading network, this article argues that early Mormon texts taught readers how to properly see, discern, and become vigilant observers as a spiritual and modern necessity.

Mormon religiosity is deeply marked both by a culture of secrecy and also by a culture that obliquely indexes secret religious material as a means of communication. This secrecy, though, can at times be an engine of disbelief, a process which has been exacerbated by the internet. Because of high levels of social integration in the community, Mormon disbelief can have high social costs. Some Mormons, however, have retained a ‘testimony’ by using the concept of transhumanism as a way to re- negotiate what ‘belief’ in Mormonism means. However, in part due to the very culture of secrecy that can fuel doubt, and also in part due to the technical codes that transhumanism as a community often relies on, this very shift can itself be difficult for Mormon non-transhumanists to discern.

This study offers a theoretical perspective on the role of social media in the transition home for returning missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (lds/Mormon). Despite a long tradition of strict lds institutional norms aimed at sheltering full-time church missionaries from outside media influences, missionaries are today increasingly encouraged to use social media sites in their proselytizing efforts. Through qualitative, in-depth interviews with recently returned lds missionaries , this study explores the role Facebook plays in facilitating the maintenance of mission relationships after missionaries have returned home, something interview-ees said helps them retain the sense of religious commitment and identity developed through missionary service. Interview findings also complicate the potential benefits of social media use, providing evidence for the argument that returning lds missionaries are often caught between media technology, personal media preferences, institutional authority, and popular culture. These individuals seem to occupy a doubly liminal position between full-time proselytizing and life at home, between a historical religious tradition of missionary media isolation and an emerging institutional embrace of social media—all of which results in what might best be described as an uncanny experience.

Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato's Republic with a flippant "if. .. poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, " Western poets have largely been on the defensive, mounting countless defenses of their vocation across the centuries (with Percy Shelley's defiant "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" being perhaps the most notorious). However, plenty of other poets have in turn questioned why they should ever want to enter Plato's Republic in the first place which, after all, enthusiastically endorses censorship, openly denigrates democracy as being but one step from anarchy, and defended slavery and eugenics. As such, there has also arisen a long and storied history of the poet as intentional outsider, one in self-imposed exile from the repressions of the Republic. Such has been the position of contemporary American poets; such was anciently called by St. Augustine "the Church Invisible." One such modern poet is Elizabeth Willis, who has engaged with the Church Invisible long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the rest of us to out of necessity.

Susan Staker, editor
Paperback / 494 pages / 0-941214-92-3 / $26.95

The Diaries of Wilford WoodruffFrom Connecticut, where Wilford Woodruff was born in 1807, to San Francisco, where he was befriended by the cosmopolitan Bohemian Club before dying in 1898, Woodruff’s life was unpredictable. The same man who consulted scientific texts for the cultivation of fruit trees for his personal garden was equally known for his apocalyptic vision on a Navajo mesa in Arizona in 1880. The man who balanced his ledger with penny-accuracy modeled buckskin temple robes to friends on his birthday and accepted from Brigham Young, as a birthday gift, one of Young’s daughters as a wife.

Woodruff became president of the Mormon church while hiding from federal marshals. Convinced that non-Mormons, or “gentiles,” would be smitten by the calamities promised in the Bible, he bided his time in exile until Mormonism prevailed. However, as the Parousia was delayed, he eventually decided to compromise with the United States.

To complement the exhaustive ten-volume Wilford Woodruff diary series and index published by Signature Books as a limited edition, Susan Staker has condensed the highlights of Woodruff’s revealing personal narrative into one readable volume, along with prefatory information, annotation, and appendices.

Women’s participation in traditional religions is often explained in terms of their victimization and/or their opportunities for empowerment. This paper seeks to use Mormon women as a framework in order to explore some of the consequences of this phenomenon and to advocate for the creation of multiple, complex spaces where traditional religious women may be understood beyond the paradigm of victim/empowerment. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the LDS or Mormons, maintains a cosmology that is based upon highly differentiated gendered practices. A belief in a female deity, Mother in Heaven, and a related belief that all pious Mormon men and women have the ability to become gods and goddesses in a post-mortal existence are central to
the Mormon gendered cosmology. Despite these beliefs, Mormon women generally resist feminism because they perceive feminism to be at odds with motherhood and family. Ironically, their belief in a female divine and their potential divinity strengthens their commitment to interdependence
through maternal practices and kinship.

During the period from 1890 to 1920, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) perceived a crisis in the lives of their boys. That sense of crisis in the lives of boys lay at the surface of an even deeper cultural upheaval taking place within Mormondom. Tensions with religious outsiders and the U. S. government over the practice of polygamy had led to a standoff in the late 1880s. If the Saints wanted to continue to practice their religion and maintain ownership of church property (including the temple that stood at the center of their worship), they had to give up polygamy, the religious practice that distinguished them from others and marked them as obedient followers of an ancient marital pattern that they believed was ordained of God. It was during this transitional period that members and authorities of the LDS Church sought to gain respectability in American culture by emphasizing the moral and value systems they shared with their middle-class Protestant contemporaries while simultaneously maintaining their distinctiveness.

Mormonism in Guatemala is being locally reinvented. Cultural translation can be observed through a variety of avenues. One particular example is a public assertion by a Guatemalan Mormon of an ethnic difference with Euro-American Mormons. This claim is examined with insights from anthropological literature on ethnicity. Comparable avowals of ethnic distinction by Native American Mormons are highlighted. A second avenue of cultural translation can be seen in Guatemalan interpretations of the Book of Mormon and the Popol Vuh in the context of Guatemalan nationalism. A third avenue can be seen in recent assertions of a Mormon ethnicity by scholars in the United States that are analyzed in relation to ethnic distinctions affirmed in Guatemala to suggest that rapid growth is reshaping Mormonism at its center as well as at the periphery. The emerging international gospel is increasingly lived locally by individuals trying to make sense out of a globally interconnected world. In the next century claims of an ethnic Mormon identity will continue to be made by those uncomfortable with the changing character of Mormonism; but they will be countered by an uneasy attachment to an international gospel adapted to a variety of local cultures.

When writing is viewed simply as a source of enlightenment it conceals a network of possibly exploitative social relations. In the case of Mormonism, writing both conceals and shapes social relations. The Book of Mormon was presented by Joseph Smith as a history of the American Indians, a bridge between the historical Judeo-Christian tradition and a people not originally part of that written history. Although the author of this new scripture proclaimed that God was impartial, the text masked disparate power relations between American Indians and European colonizers. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints challenged the revelatory monopoly that the Protestant Reformation had assigned to the Bible and attached eternal significance to the written word. It thus reified the practice of writing, which has since shaped Mormon practice and belief through the production of new scriptures, extensive record keeping, and an emphasis on correlated instructional materials and genealogical production of salvation. In the past few years Mormon scholars, including feminists, have used the written word to challenge and limit the power and authority of male church leaders. In so doing they have offended those general authorities who claim to represent the God of the record keepers. The writings of scholars, like those of church leaders, also disguise contested social relations hidden within the written word. This contest over the written word is itself shaped by the reification or fetishization of writing as an administrative and an enlightening device of both humans and gods.

The Book of Mormon, first published by Joseph Smith, Jr. in 1830 in Palmyra, New York, draws upon colonial and antebellum biblical hermeneutics and nineteenth century myths of the origin and fate of an ancient American civilization of Mound Builders to construct a textual image of people of Hebrew descent called Lamanites. The author casts Lamanites as the antithesis of civilized, Christianized, white Nephites and employs legends of a Semitic patriarchal seed and a Hamitic curse of a dark skin to naturalize the authority of white men. The text formulates a model of conversion that conflates religious with economic, political, social, and biological transformation. Mormons of European heritage drew upon the portrait of Lamanites from this sacred text to target American Indians for conversion, adoption, and assimilation while justifying the usurpation of Native American lands. Rather than facilitating the disappearance of Lamanites, Mormon evangelization fostered the emergence of a new and dynamic Lamanite identity. American Indian converts to Mormonism in the United States, Mexico, and beyond have adopted, contested, and creatively reconstructed Lamanite status in ways that often defied Mormon attempts to turn them white. Meanwhile, Mormon scholars have struggled with archaeological, historical, and biological evidence contradicting claims of a Hebrew origin of American Indians and offered new images of Lamanites that narrowed the geographical range of the Book of Mormon from a hemispheric view to more limited geographies in places like Central America. Recent development of DNA research into American Indian origins has undermined claims of Hebrew ancestry for American Indians in Central America and beyond. Some Mormon scholars are now claiming the Hebrews of the Book of Mormon left no genetic descendants while others are entertaining the possibility that the scripture may be inspired fiction.

This article documents one strain of Mormon thought concerning the Woman of Endor narrative in 1 Samuel 28, in which the woman was interpreted as a prophetess enabled to raise the dead through her spiritual gifts. Church leaders eventually condemned this narrative because of its similarities with Spiritualist exegesis and American Christianity's use of the narrative to condemn Spiritualism as necromancy. Through establishing an orthodox reading of the passage, leaders strengthened the boundaries separating the two faiths – boundaries that many Spiritualists had argued were at best blurry and overlapping.

This study examines the interactions between an imported religious health code and local medicinal concepts among members of a Latter-day Saints congregation in Antigua, Guatemala. It challenges David Martin's assertion that if any of the rapidly growing religious groups originating in North America is engaged in the (North) Americanization of Latins, then the Mormons would be that group. Based upon ethnographic interviews with active and inactive converts to Mormonism, the data suggest that Guatemalan interpretations of the LDS health code are influenced by both local concepts of hot/cold medicine and North American interpretations promoted by missionaries and church leaders. These findings indicate that conversion is always two-sided and that one should expect to find variation among religious practitioners from separate cultures even within a single multinational religious body.

Other Mormon Histories, narratives in which formerly passive objects of history become active subjects, draw attention to the power relationships in the production of Mormon history. The Book of Mormon and traditional Mormon history imagine and then subjugate American Indians as Lamanites in a story of Christian triumphalism. Nahua authors, Margarito Bautista Valencia and Agricol Lozano Herrera, adopt the label of a Lamanite other and then domesticate Mormonism through narratives of Mexican peculiarity. Bautista's domestication of Mormon theology and his deployments of a Lamanite identity in the 1930s provoked hostility from Church leaders but that of Lozano fifty years later did not. Bautista's writings threatened power relations within the LDS Church because the other not only became a self, but the original subject also became a stigmatized object. Lozano did not stimatize Anglo-Americans in the same manner as Bautista. He moved them from subjects of their own accounts to romanticized objects of his account. While romanticizing Anglo-Americans Lozano internalized negative characterizations of Lamanites and used this imagery to warn Mexicans to avoid strident challenges to the Church hierarchy.

*Best Book Award* (2020) Mormon History Association

*Starred Review* at Publisher's Weekly: "combines meticulous research with illuminating insight in this landmark work on gender and sexuality in Mormon thought.... Information-packed, with a forceful thesis and jargon-free prose, this is an important contribution to Mormon studies as well as a convincing consideration of the ways religions construct and maintain frameworks. Any academic studying the intersection of religious practice and progressive social change will want to pick this up."

*Starred review* at Library Journal: “ Petrey’s work...is a brilliant exception to studies of sexuality, gender, and religion that too often focus on a narrow subject and don’t speak to broader concerns of larger issues in history and society....Petrey writes beautifully, offering readers across a wide variety of academic fields, including religious studies and the history of sexuality, an elegant intellectual text that will please casual readers as well. Highly recommended.”

Taylor G. Petrey’s trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about Latter-day Saints (LDS) teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself.
As Petrey details, LDS leaders have embraced the idea of fixed identities representing a natural and divine order, but their teachings also acknowledge that sexual difference is persistently contingent and unstable. While queer theorists have built an ethics and politics based on celebrating such sexual fluidity, LDS leaders view it as a source of anxiety and a tool for the shaping of a heterosexual social order. Through public preaching and teaching, the deployment of psychological approaches to “cure” homosexuality, and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders hoped to manage sexuality and faith for those who have strayed from heteronormativity.

"Indeed, Tabernacles of Clay is a model for how scholars can use a singular tradition to tell a much larger lesson. Petrey convincingly argues that Mormonism demonstrates “the queer contours of modern notions of gender and sexuality as persistently marked by ambiguity, fluidity, contradiction, and paradox” (223). Despite how rigid contemporary debates are, and despite how cemented modern Mormonism’s gender rhetoric appears to be, history is always more flexible and complicated than typically allowed." Ben Park https://benjaminepark.com/2020/05/20/the-circuitous-history-of-mormonisms-gender-essentialism/

"A path-breaking work of religion and gender and sexuality, Tabernacles of Clay sets the agenda for a new generation of scholars interested in the recent Latter-day Saint past." Chris Babbits https://newbooksnetwork.com/taylor-petrey-tabernacles-of-clay-sexuality-and-gender-in-modern-mormonism-unc-press-2020/

Genetic research into Native American and Polynesian origins has provoked controversy within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Book of Mormon claims that the principal ancestors of the American Indians came from the ancient Middle East, an historical assertion now repudiated by mtDNA evidence. Mormon interpretations of the scripture led to the popular belief that Polynesians, likewise, descended from ancient Israelite populations. This belief is now also undermined by genetic research. Protests erupted when the LDS Church initiated and then aborted an effort to excommunicate Thomas Murphy. Protestors objected to racism within LDS Family Services and questioned practices that subverted paternal rights of Native Americans.

In 1830–1831, low-status Mormon converts in Kirtland, Ohio ecstatically acted out Book of Mormon promises concerning the “Lamanites,” or American Indians. Some of these performances depicted classic missionary fantasies. Actors climbed atop stumps and fences to harangue imaginary Indian audiences in what they believed were authentic native languages revealed through the gift of tongues. They then guided imaginary converts into the waters of baptism. Other performances dramatized standard white fears of Indian cruelty and violence. Actors tomahawked, scalped, and disemboweled invisible foes in an epitome of the imminent apocalyptic fate of unconverted white Americans. The performances anticipated a renewed American nation in which charismatic power would ameliorate differences of gender, race, and class, but they also followed a well-worn colonial pattern of cultural appropriation, racial stereotype, and missionary paternalism.

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is an intense interest in creating "speculative fiction", including speculative fiction about outer space. This article ties this interest to a broader tradition of "speculative religion" by discussing the Mormon Transhumanist Association. An interest in outer space is linked to nineteenth and twentieth-century speculation by Mormon intellectuals and Church leaders regarding "Abrahamic Astronomy". The article suggests that there is a Mormon view of the future as informed by a fractal or recursive past that social science in general, and anthropology in particular, could use in "thinking the future". The volume is hardcover, and its dimensions are a standard picture-book nine and a half inches by eleven. Its cover displays a comic-book-style drawing of a brown-skinned woman in white robes. Her hands are outstretched towards the viewer, and they ripple with white and yellow energy. She is standing in the middle of an Edenic-looking copse of ferns and palm trees, and just slightly behind her, there are what looks like alien hybrids of a hedgehog and a fur-covered penguin. Except for a single black eye in the middle of their foreheads, these creatures are otherwise faceless ciphers. Behind her is a strange stone temple, carved in the shape of either three robed, multiple-eyed figures, or possibly of a single figure with three heads. Behind that grey spire is a skyline of tropical mountains, set against a peach-colored alien sky; this sky is made complete by a single large planet or moon looming in the background (See Figure 1). Opening the book up, we see that the action in this book is set on a planet that was visited three thousand years ago by an alien messiah; this messiah had died and been resurrected on some other planet, only to then make an appearance on this world as well. That alien messiah prophesized the coming of immigrants from other solar systems. In the following millennia, different waves of alien refugees from numerous other star systems arrived on this planet. All of the worlds these refugees heralded from were planets that had been visited by this messiah at roughly the same time three millennia ago. On each planet where the messiah appeared, he took the form of whatever was the sentient lifeforms he preached to. The one exception is a planet named "Earth". This planet also had contributed refugees to this strange settler world; on Earth, though, apparently, the messiah did not visit the planet in passing, but lived, died, and was resurrected there. After this short history lesson, the rest of the book is a mix of comic-book style illustrations with word balloons, and on the other large illustrations accompanied by long passages of texts. These comic pages and narratives tell the story of a team of unlikely looking superheroes who defend all these settlers on this alien world. In addition to the woman on the cover (her name is Liahona, and she holds "the Powers Of The Priest"), there is: a living skeleton with seer-stones for eyes; a scythe-wielding six-eyed blue-skinned warrior who wears a prairie dress; and a living stone capstone (a "sunstone") who, when not serving as the team's medic, plays in a ska band with his husband. There is also a white man in a grey business suit, who goes by the name "The Good Bishop." They battle a team of evil

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) affirms the existence of a divine woman, a Heavenly Mother as a companion to a Heavenly Father. Feminist philosophers of religion have argued for the importance of a divine feminine as a challenge to patriarchal religion, yet the Heavenly Mother tradition has not created an egalitarian religion in Mormonism. Mormon feminists have charged that relative silence about this teaching is a primary cause of this discrepancy. This paper explores the performative dynamics of speech and silence and their relationship to presence and absence in a feminist analysis of power.

As historians engage with literary texts, they should ask a few important questions. What is the text that I am using in my research? What is the manuscript tradition from which the manuscript or text evolved? How does that evolution inform the specific period I am studying? Did it evolve orally or in written form? And are there variations that have been handed down through time and through tradition that may provide greater context or clarity to my research? Implicit in these questions is an interest in authenticity and accuracy. As literary texts evolve and are shared over time, there are multiple factors that may lead a text away from its earliest forms, such as when a narrative is orally transmitted over multiple generations and then recorded in writing or when a manuscript is repeatedly copied by hand and errors are introduced into the text. The attempt to ascertain the earliest forms of a text is known as textual criticism. This branch of scholarship started in earnest at the beginning of the European Renaissance from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and led to the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this article I will argue that scholars of Mormon history have not yet taken advantage of the historical insights that textual criticism has to offer, as a means of persuading the academic community to embrace this important methodology.

The colonists living in the new United States after the American War for Independence were faced with the problem of forming new identities once they could no longer recognize themselves, collectively or individually, as subjects of Great Britain. After the French Revolution American politicians began to weed out the more radical political elements of the newly formed United States, particularly by painting one of the revolution’s biggest defenders, Thomas Paine, as unworthy of the attention he received during the American War for Independence, and fear ran throughout the states that an anarchic revolution like the French Revolution could bring the downfall of the nation. State, local, and regional organizations sprang up to fight Jacobinism, the legendary secret group of murderers and anarchists that fought against the French government.
This distressing situation gave rise to new literature that sought to describe the “real” origins and background of Jacobinism in the War in Heaven and in Eden, and a new movement against Jacobinism was established. Fears about the organization of secret societies did not wane in the decades after the French Revolution, but worsened in the last half of the 1820s when a Freemason, William Morgan, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in connection to an exposé of Masonry he had written. Most Americans assumed that Freemasons had abducted and murdered Morgan in order to keep their oaths and rites secret.
One influential early American who was influenced by this socio-historical context was Joseph Smith, Jr., the founding prophet of Mormonism. Smith interpreted the Eden narrative in light of the movement against secret societies, and literary motifs common to anti-Jacobin literature during the period provided language and interpretive strategies for understanding the Eden narrative that would influence how Smith produced his new scripture. Only a few months after the publication of the Book of Mormon Smith edited the version of Eden found there into the text of the Bible itself and made the biblical narrative conform to the version found in the Book of Mormon through his own revisions and additions.

2021 Best Book Award, John Whitmer Historical Association.
Finalist for Best Book in "Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies" by the American Academy of Religion.
Finalist for Best Book in Religious Non-Fiction, the Association for Mormon Letters.

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-46965-566-6

Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Pick for the Week of May 25, 2020: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/83347-pw-picks-books-of-the-week-may-25-2020.html

Roundtable Reviews by Dr. Elizabeth Fenton, Dr. Brian Hauglid, and Dr. Michael Austin, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought:  https://www.dialoguejournal.com/2020/05/dialogue-roundtable-william-l-davis-visions-in-a-seer-stone-joseph-smith-and-the-making-of-the-book-of-mormon/

The Association for Mormon Letters, review by Andrew Hamilton: http://associationmormonletters.org/blog/reviews/current-reviews/davis-visions-in-a-seer-stone-joseph-smith-and-the-making-of-the-book-of-mormon-reviewed-by-andrew-hamilton/

The University of North Carolina Press (2020).
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469655666/visions-in-a-seer-stone/ 

In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America.

Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith’s process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.

About the Dissertation:  I wrote this thesis during what might best be described as "the information gathering stage" for my research on nineteenth-century oral culture and Joseph Smith's rhetorical skills.  It represents a portion of the work that I am still pursuing and developing for a book manuscript.

The history of Mormonism in Mexico reached a new landmark early in 1997 when Colonia Industrial, a United Order community founded by Margarito Bautista Valencia, achieved, its fiftieth successful year. Second, third, and fourth generations of Mexican Mormons in Colonia Industrial celebrated through sermons and activities that remind them of their legacy. Colonia Industrial, a small, unimposing, exclusive colony of Mexican Mormons, lies in the municipio of Ozumba at the base of Popocatepetl, an active volcano in the central valley of Mexico. While the growth of the LDS church in Mexico (claimed 720,000 members in 1995) dwarfs the small offshoot in Colonia Industrial, these Mexican Mormons' tenacious adherence to the socioeconomic principles of the United Order and plural marriage is a tribute to the testimony and fervor of their founder, Margarito Bautista Valencia.

Common understandings of the Book of Mormon in communities of the Latter-day Saint restoration face a fundamental challenge from emerging biogenetic research. Mormon folklore about skin color, patriarchal seed, and Native American origins naturalizes the power and authority of white men; yet, it is undermined by twentieth century discoveries in the biological sciences. Is the Book of Mormon’s assumption that skin color reflects sinfulness consistent with biogenetic understandings of human physical variation? Are Biblical and Book of Mormon images of a patriarchal seed transmitted from fathers to sons consistent with modern understandings of biogenetic procreation? Is an Israelite heritage of Nephites and Lamanites reflected in the genes and biology of American Indians? No, skin color does not reflect sin. A mother’s contribution of half her children’s chromosomes is not accurately represented in scriptural models of human procreation as akin to seminal seeds planted in nurturing soil. DNA research into Native American origins points to a Northeast Asian rather than a Middle Eastern ancestry. Each of these common assumptions reflects common 19th century concepts that should now be relegated to the status of “mistakes of men.”

Many Latter-day Saints would be uncomfortable with the presence of an essay on their tradition in a book on religion and secrecy. While I suspect the vast majority of my co-religionists (more on that below) would be fine with the sort of study I present here, they would likely not be startled but annoyed at the word "secrecy" used to describe their religious practice. Latter-day Saints are well aware of the potentially negative connotations of a "secret" and instead describe those rituals, teachings, and experiences that should only be shared with the utmost care and only in the right contexts as sacred. In contrast to a "secret" where the goal is to conceal it from others, Latter-day Saints reason that they want to share the sacred with all but must only do so when individuals are properly prepared to understand sacred things. In this chapter, I look at how the "sacred" has been discussed and implemented in regards to Latter-day Saint ritual, how esotericism defines interactions with outsiders, and informs Latter-day Saint iden tity and practice. I begin with a section examining approaches to the study of Latter-day Saint esotericism before moving into the next section on the foundations of an esoteric logic in the Book of Mormon, the tradition's unique book of scripture. The third and fourth sections include a dis cussion of public descriptions of the temple liturgy and then an examination of how these rites were introduced historically, as well as the controversy on their connections with Freemasonry. The fifth and sixth section examines the impact of Latter-day Saint esotericism on outsiders and insiders respectively. The fifth section looks at how preventing access to temples attracted controversy and as a result Americans turned to expose to educate them the alleged contents of their ceremonies. Ultimately, the final section examines how esotericism shapes Latter-day Saint behavior. A note for the non-expert: The Latter Day Saint tradition (notice "Latter Day Saint" does not include a hyphen in this instance, representing a more expansive body) includes dozens of denominations with their origins in the Church of Christ, later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This new church presented itself as a restoration of primi tive Christianity and was founded around the belief that God had called a modern prophet, Joseph Smith. After Smith's 1844 assassination, the church was divided in different segments with the vast majority of the faith siding with the leadership claims of Brigham Young. This essay examines only this largest segment of the overarching tradition with its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Reviewed by Kathleen Flake A long-awaited publication, The Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844-January 1846 does not disappoint. It comprises contemporaneous notes, most of them verbatim, of deliberations by a religious council charged with devising a millennial government for the Mormon faithful and the non-Mormon righteous. Minutes gives a uniquely intimate view of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' efforts to account for religious diversity in its idealized kingdom of God to be organized in preparation for Christ's return. Council members became demoralized by the death of founder Joseph Smith, and the record quickly turns into an account of the Council's efforts to respond to, survive, and escape the dangers and betrayals within and without the church between 1844 and 1846. As documentation of Mormonism's practical and principled abandonment of the United States, it is unparalleled. First convened by Smith three months before his death, the Council of Fifty was a governing body composed of many Mormon leaders and very few nonmembers. It was given the formal title of "The Kingdom

Ten years ago, my article “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” was published in Dialogue.1 I did not know what to expect when it made its way into the world, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece  and  has  been  accessed  tens  of  thousands  of  times.2  The  public  discussion  about  my  ideas  was  both  critical  and  appreciative.  In  the  wake of the article, my own research and thinking have also developed. When I first approached this topic, I expected that my interest would be limited to a single contribution. However, in the ensuing decade I now count several articles, a book, and a substantial edited volume on Mormonism, sexuality, gender in my research portfolio. My fascination with this question has endured.