American History Hit - Mormons & The Founding of Salt Lake City

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

The Church of the Latter Day Saints is one shrouded in mystery, whispers of polygamy and is often synonymous with Salt Lake City. But where did this religion come from? And how did Mormonism make it to Utah?To find out more about the American born religion of Mormonism, Don is joined by Professor Peter Coviello from the University of Illinois. Peter is the author of Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism.Produced by Freddy Chick and Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's winter 1846. A mass of some 3,500 people is gathered on the banks of the Missouri River in what is now Nebraska. Their leader, a man named Brigham Young, has violated federal law by negotiating his own treaty with the Omaha and Oto peoples who call these lands home.

These people are migrants from their homes back east, outcasts on the long exodus west, escaping persecution by normative American society. They are held in contempt, suspect, widely vilified for their odd religious practices, among them polygamy. Two years ago, their founder, Joseph Smith, was murdered. And since then, suspicions about this strange society of Americans have only grown. But here, under the open sky, on the wide and wintry American frontier, these people, these Mormons, dream of only warmer days ahead and freedom. Hello, and welcome to another episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman, glad to know you're out there. As with so much in this mostly immigrant nation of ours,

our religious practices, and there are so many, have been, one way or another, imported from other lands and other traditions. Of course, aside from practices of indigenous peoples, Native Americans, few and far between are the spiritual movements that have originated right here in North America. Mormonism is the most notable, if not the most historically consequential. Mormonism is a Christian faith founded in 19, century western New York, which then migrated west all the way, eventually, to creating the state of Utah, where it is based today in Salt Lake City. It's a pretty wild tale, in fact. And if you're not familiar,

it's an incredible origin story. One will seek to tell in the company of Professor Peter Covello of the University of Illinois. He is author of the award-winning book, Make Yourselves Gods, Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism published in 2019. Welcome, Peter. Great to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Right in that title, there is a lot to talk about in this subject. I mean, it's an amazing subject, which like so much American history is full of some level of awareness for most, but so much cloudiness and even conspiracy. I mean, there's all kinds of levels to this story, isn't there? Yeah, absolutely. It was part of what made it exciting to start to try to write about and try to tell a

story about, yeah. Exactly. As I say there, we're going to concentrate it first on the origin tale where the sea all begins and eventually get ourselves into sort of the more nuts and bolts of the practice of the religion itself, which is so deep that I certainly didn't understand it. So, Peter, your book opens with a scene set in the winter of 1846 with the Mormons, camping alongside the Omaha's and the Autos, Native American tribes, near the Missouri River, what is now in Nebraska, and they're on their way to what will be called Utah. So why do you start with this scene? What is this pivotal moment about?

Yeah, it's an incredibly dense moment. So it's 1846. Mormonism has been around kind of a while, but in our terms, not that long 16 years since the book of Mormon was published. Since then, they've migrated from New York to Ohio to Missouri, where they were murdered in the late 1830s, moved back to Navu, Illinois, where Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet produces all these breathtaking and breathtakingly heretical from the perspective of sort of normative Protestantism revelations. He's murdered in 1844, and the Mormons realized there's no place for them in what is for them the continental United States, so they want to pick up and move west. Who are they camping with their camping with native peoples? Also, in certain respects, fellow refugees from an imperial America who's cast them out, why,

for racial deviance, for what, again, normative products in America wants to understand is like, a kind of heavishness, which is also expressed as racial deviancy, which is also expressed as like degeneracy, sexual degeneracy. What is the normative America think of native people as well? They're not monogamous like us. So in other words, Native peoples are always being racialized on the basis of their arrangements of intimate life, which look hauntingly like the Mormons

who have, of course, become polygamous in 1842. So there's all these like intense likenesses and fraught allegiances right there in 1846, which would play out over the course of the 19th century with great drama. You're using a term which is so important and integral to this story and to American history, which is the word normative Protestantism. I mean, early 19th century, the line is drawn in the sand as to what is American and what is not. That is still with us. I mean, there's still a sense that this is American and everything over that line is not and it is not normal. The Mormons

run right into that right away, obviously. But before we get into what happens as a result, Let's go back to the beginning. Sure. I mentioned at the opening, Western New York, which surprises many people, all of this Mormonism starts out there. Why Western New York and who is involved? I would say, for our purposes, Joseph Smith is the figure who's going to mostly involve and he writes the Book of Mormon in 1830.

Western New York is, of course, the burnedovers and lots of revivalist Protestantisms happening with a great deal of fervor in the 1830s, 1820s. And Joseph Smith is very much a part of that. And he writes the Book of Mormon, which would be a lot. appear in 1830. He claims to have discovered sacred plates buried in the earth, which begins you, we've already talked about native people, begins you unopposed, oh, he's concocting a kind of indigenous Christianity, a Christianity proper to the United States. So he writes this book, gathers some followers. Those followers increase and increase and increase. There's many, many, many,

many, many revivalist religions. Few of them accelerate in their growth quite as precipitately. as Mormonism does. And they have to migrate. They have to move because wherever they go, unsurprisingly, they find opposition. Peter, you're a bucking horse. I'm holding onto the reins here. Let's back up here. The Book of Mormon. What does that even mean? It's the sacred text of Mormonism in certain ways. And Justice Smith, it should be saying, it's not like a letter at men. It's not like a university scholar. It's not like he's been to Oxford or Cambridge or whatever like that. It could be described as a kind of book written by someone whose entire world was. super saturated by the presence of the Bible.

Yes. A student of mine when I was teaching this years and years ago back at a place called Bowden College, I'm teaching the Book of Mormon, you know, at a 19th century literature class. And a kid says this amazing thing, which I've never forgotten. Oh, this is like Old Testament fan fiction, which is kind of the technical term for that would be midrash in a certain way. That's true. The Book of Mormon stages an enormous ancient drama between the Lamanites and the Nephites,

which they're warring brothers. There's a sort of elaborate war played out over many generations in the Book of Mormon. So this is a record of his vision, I suppose, right? That he's been delivered as a prophet. Yes, and it's sort of like there's many amazing things about the Book of Mormon, many, many amazing and strange things about the Mormon,

one of which is that it's not written in the oracular voice of biblical omniscience. Sure, yeah, yeah. It's actually written by scribes who are always naming themselves. I'm Moroni. I'm Nephi. Like it's people telling their people's history. And it is, in essence, the history of the Nephites who are people chosen by God, but because

of who's backsliding and failures to live to God promise are annihilated. So it's kind of the story of like imperial hubris and decline. Certainly by the 1840s, that's how faithful Mormons read it. And they had no trouble identifying imperial America. It's vital to understand the context in which he's writing this. down and all of this is happening. What's called the Second Great Awakening is taking place as a pushback against the age of enlightenment, which would have been society dissoning itself from the tenets of the Bible, you know, the absolute religion of our lives. And so scientific principles

and so forth had driven people to think differently. And lots of people in America, even today, worried about the effect of that. And so the second great awakening is steering people back towards the Bible, back towards a way of life that is embracing this religious practice. And the awakening is why, you know, we call it revivalism and all sorts of things. This is when all that evangelical finds its roots we're still living with today. So Western New York, interestingly to me, because I live in New York State, was right in the center of all of that. Absolutely. Burned over region, yeah. Where does that term mean? Burned over region. I think it's because of the fire of revelation and evangelicalizing. Like, it's burned over by so many different prophets and evangelists

coming through it. Yeah. And you have the Chautauqua movement out there. This would be because this was the frontier, you know, in the 17, 1800s, this was the far frontier and dangerous world, but also where you could find people who were trying to think differently, who were, you know, sort of edgy and all the rest of it. And certainly the Mormons qualified for that. So obviously the idea was to found this movement out there and stay put and grow it from there, but they don't. They move away. Why? Yeah, they find themselves in the teeth of persecution wherever they go. You'd want to say, this is true well before they're like avowed polygamous, which is, they would be, not until the 1850s, they start practicing politically in the 1840s. It's interesting

you said that they're a kind of Christian face, which in certain ways it's true, though the enemies of Mormonism then and now, of certain kinds of evangelical Protestantisms, think of the Mormons as actually anti-Christian. Yeah. Like, rather than a para-Christianity, a sort of contra Christianity. And there is some truth to that. There are some ways of reading the theology of Mormonism as like a counter-Christianity, or rather Joseph Smith is a person who thinks of Christianity as blessed, but also mired in terrible error that are mistaking lots of things about the nature of God and the nature of persons and the nature of their interaction. And Christianity for him, in a certain way, an apostasy from what he wishes

us to understand is the real state of relation between persons and gods and the world. And that's, that's some heavy stuff, you know? So give me three reasons why Mormonism was scary to your average Christian in America in those days. It's funny, that's a great way I ask you. It's not because, like, when you're talking about the second grade awakening, like a lot of the things are, just as you say, counter-enlightment, but a lot of them are also counter-Calvinism, which has, of course, been this, like, heavily important tradition, or religious tradition, that again, you know, you just say the word Calvinism, you know, to imagine this furiously

other god, this God who's inapprehensible to his mere subjects, and his only relation to them as kind of like Moby Dicks to humankind. Like, it's kind of dislike, but it's mostly inapprehensibility. And these religions are rewriting that. And I can't think of a religion that is counter-Calvinist more vehemently than Mormonism. Interesting. So for Joseph Smith, God is not only not this forbidding other inapprehensible recessed into the heavens figure. He's approachable. Have I not equal privilege to the ancient saints, Joseph Smith says? That is to say, I'm just like the people in the Bible. God is present to me.

I'm available to his revelations. Moreover, God still talks to me all the time. God is still speaking would be the conventional way of saying it. That is to say, I and all of you are available to God's grace and revelation. Like the Old Testament time of revelation, Joseph Smith insists, is still with us. You can imagine the ways that that is unnerving because it says that all people are available to have revelations. and stuff like that, that would be one form. Yeah.

Think of how this affects people in this period of time. You have the emergence of the market economy in America. Mercantilism is happening. And there's this sense of social mobility. You know, you can make money and advance up the ladder of society. Not so much, you know, as we certainly think of it today. But that's the beginning of this sort of American ideal of self-improvement. And a religion and these developments of religion fall right in line with that.

And perhaps are even the seeds of that. because the philosophy is I have a relationship with God that's apart from the priests and apart from the hierarchy. What God has for me, I can own and possess and move forward with, right? Don, that is such a good way of framing what will become the most dramatically heretical promise of Mormonism, which is, and Joseph Smith is kind of a graphomaniac. He writes and writes and writes and writes and writes. And his revelations are very offhand. But he writes himself toward a sense that not only is God,

present in the world. Not only is God still speaking, not only is God in the flesh available to me in the flesh, you and the flesh, but that it is the fate of humankind to become gods. That God is, in fact, not this radical otherness, but like a sibling human, someone who was a person and became a God, and it is in that way exemplary to us, went by grace to grace to grace to further. And this is what Joseph Smith calls exaltation. Exaltation, he means. It's like the fate of humankind in its divinization. God loves you so much Joseph Smith's God is that he wants everything that you might love about this worldly life, pleasure, friendship, materiality, the flesh to go on eternally,

which you will have in eternally as a God yourself. So that's his famous statement that I use for the quote of the book. You have got to learn how to make yourselves gods, which takes exactly the thing you said about the sort of like self-improvement and like sacralizes it and puts it at the scale of like the heavens, you know? Right. You can see coming down the road, all the bodybuilding that's going to happen. The Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to embrace this big time.

Okay, so let's get back to historical events. How are they chased out of New York and where do they go? Oh, they go to Ohio. They're always trying to find room for themselves. What they will understand is to like be themselves and to make their own rules. Of course, there's something menacing to, again, a variety of normative Protestants about people who are walking around understanding themselves to be living in a state of direct revelation with God, who are organized around this charismatic

figure Joseph Smith. The word that we tend to use now for like religions that don't seem to us to be legitimate religion is cult. But all cult means is like it's a set of faith practices and beliefs that have not yet adhered themselves to a variety of norms. And Mormonism didn't do that. They went to Kirkland, Ohio. They built a temple there. Again, find disapproval there. And Joseph Smith is really immediately understands himself to be in the process of evangelizing, like getting more people into it and is quite successful doing that.

They eventually head further west because exactly as you say, the west is where it's happening. They go to Missouri. In this time scale of this is incredibly brief, like the Book of Mormon comes out in 1830, the governor Boggs in Missouri in 1838-ish. use an extermination order. Wow. That's 1838. That's eight years they've gotten to Missouri. An extermination? I mean... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is this the wars that we hear about, these literal wars against the Mormons? Yeah. I mean, it's important to remember, like, historians will talk about like some of the Mormon persecution complex in the 19th century,

which is totally fair enough. But one wishes to say they were also very persecuted. Yeah, right. There was a massacre at a place called Hans Mill, militias attacked Mormon settlements. They go back to Navu where Joseph Smith is murdered in Carthage, Illinois, is taking a jail and murdered there in 1844, and they're expelled from Illinois. They're an increasingly large population. They're increasingly self-governing, which is, of course, a kind of menace to a variety of local authorities. By the 1840s, there's now rumors traveling around them that they're, from the perspective of Protestant America, sex deviance. Like, they arrange their lives, not according to, like, diatic monogamy. And of course, that's hyperbolicly sensationalized so that by the 1840s, they show up in a variety.

Like, they show up in Hawthorne. This is like the kind of deviance, yeah. They're the original free lovers. I mean, as far as the American story goes, I want to circle back first of all. And let's talk about polygamy for sure in a moment. But their opinion of Native Americans is so interesting. Super complicated. Yeah.

You mentioned Lamanites. This is in the Book of Mormon itself. How did they view these tribes and these indigenous peoples? It's a naughty, naughty question. So on the one hand, here's what happens in the Book of Mormon. There's these brothers, Lehman and Nepi, and the bad brothers are the Lamanites, and they're cursed with dark skin. And it seems just like 19th century conventional racism at its most vivid. Like, oh, the villains are the dark-skinned ones. And he spins the myth of the lost tribes of Israel, coming to America and becoming the native peoples. And there's an easy way to read the Book of Mormon as just like wrought around with the most. conventional racist tropes of the 19th century. And you know, there's some truth that at the same time, the Book of Mormon is finally about the defeat of the Nephites. The supposedly righteous white children of God

because of their backsliding are annihilated. And the Lamanites are the sacred remnant, as the Mormons will say. So for the Mormons, the native peoples, who they will refer to in scriptural terms as the Lamanites, are both the carriers of the sacred remnant into the future. And they also represent, oh, these will be the people with whom the righteous will be allied, to lay waste to the imperializing Gentiles. So, of course, their relation is wrought round with like settler colonial racism,

but also with this countervailing sense of Native peoples as super important to the project of like a weirdly anti-imperial project of laying waste to the backsliding imperial nation. Was there any of the sort of lost tribe of Israel in this? Yes, totally. Okay. Like when people say like Joseph Smith digests the early 19th century and reproduces it scripturally, that's absolutely a part of what he thinks. He's thinking of that that allows him to come to the revelation that,

oh, the native peoples of North America are probably the Lamanites from this ancient sacred drama. And so his job or Mormonism's job is to Christianize these people who, were the original Judeo folks. Well, not yet, though again, complicatedly not exactly Christianize because they understand themselves as having made enemies of Protestantism. Like the Protestants refuse, refuse to think of the Mormons as properly Christian. And indeed, they think of them as like heretics as people who are deranged by the sort extravagances of belief that they keep naming religion.

That's from the perspective of normative Protestantism. So the point wouldn't be so much to make them into Protestants. The Protestants had been trying to do that with great, in fact, violence across the West for a long time. But to align with them as like fellow refugees from an imperial America. Though, of course, the Mormons will also be happy to express Imperial America when they go out West as well. Right. Was there a sense among Native peoples that this was a good thing? Like, let's welcome these people because they don't want to change us.

Well, yes and no. Like, there are certainly people who are converts, though. there's a great historian named Ned Blackhawk who's super smart about like, well, one has to read every tale of conversion and a sort of like comedy between native practices and local spiritual practices in the context of like extraordinary bloodletting. That is to say there are a lot of wars going on, intratribal wars, equestrian tribes, non-equestrian tribes, and people are trying to survive. And that means making allegiances that are forged in the fire of, like, great, great, great, great violence. So when they go west, there are certainly piute bands like Knoche, stuff like that, who will attach themselves to the Mormons as a kind of protection against like equestrian bands of youths who continue to practice of enslavement.

And the Mormons were sort of opposed to that. At the same time, by the end of the 19th century, like a lot of people, you'll know the ghost dance religion that flourished in the west in the later 19th century. And a lot of Easterners attributed it to Mormonism. Like it was a kind of revivalism. And they thought, you know who's behind this? The treacherous Mormons are behind this. Once again, because in the East, people kept saying what the Mormons are trying to do is league the native peoples against the Americans.

There you go. Man, these guys were suspicious. Yeah, they were. And there's like partial truth to that, right? Like the Mormons are on the one hand, taking the lands of Native people. on the other hand, they do wish them to align with them as against the invading armies of the East Coast, who they refer to as kind of Americans as Gentiles, you know, like the fallen people. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

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So 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder and original leader of this whole movement, has moved them out to the Midwest. He is killed by a mob along with his brother. Who takes over as leaders at that point? That is in itself like a fantastically intricate story about what happens to your faith practice when its charismatic leader is murdered. Polygamy had not been publicly announced, though it had been practiced. It's not pleasing to all Mormons.

Like part of what we could talk about that more later, but part of the drama of polygamy is Smith would announce it privately to someone and they would recoil in horror because it's such a violation. And then that horror would transform itself into a still more solidified devotion. and that drama was sort of part of the practice of devotion. Right, but not everybody was keen to continue polygamy. So there's fissures at that moment, fissures again. The person who ends up in control of the Mormon hierarchy

and the rather elaborate structure of rule in the Mormon church is Brigham Young. Oh, yes. And he's a different sort of dude than Joseph Smith. He does not have the sort of oracular charismatic authority. That's not ever going to be his strength. If he's not writing revelations about the shape of the heavens and the relation of man to God, he is devoted follower of Joseph and organizer, a systematizer. One historian calls him one of the great colonizers of his age.

Oh, interesting. He's kind of the left brain versus the right brain. I mean, dude, that's a smart way of saying it. Yeah, because what do you need when you have this religion of revelation that's unfolding and unfolding and unfolding? You need someone who's going to build structures. And man, was Brigham Young the guy to do that? Is he the decider of going to Utah, what becomes Utah?

Yes. Yeah, he takes the saints to Salt Lake. They map out territories. And the plot is like, we've been persecuted here in America. We're going to achieve our own kind of sovereignty. You can, again, see why, from the perspective of, like, the politics of the East, the Mormons and Native peoples were always being confused for one another. Oh, they both understand themselves as like strangely sovereign people, which is a threat to our law.

They both understand themselves as practitioners of a non or para-protistent or counter-proscent religiosity that also involves them in faith practices that are hard against our own. They also organize their lives, not according to diatic monogamous intimacy. In all these ways, the Mormons seem to be like adhered to native peoples. And of course, the Mormons resist that in a lot's ways. But anyway, yes, Rigab Young takes them into the west. among native peoples in Utah. They arrive in Salt Lake Valley.

It's called in 1847. Man, this has all happened very quickly. I mean, it's right? This is under 20 years. How many people are involved at this point, roughly speaking? More than a couple thousand, a handful of thousand of people. And that's a long, because of course, you lose people as you go. Sure.

But we're talking about like a wagon train of people coming across the continent. Yeah, it takes a long time several years to settle in. And of course, Brigham Young sets about immediately building. a city, making a city in the West. In a place where it's primarily, I guess, Utes, you know, there's lots of different tribes out there at that time, but this is a territory that John Wesley Powell's been snooping around and folks have been figuring out how this might work as an extension of our country, but it's not there yet. How does the federal government view the Mormons coming into this, you know, brand new territory? Yeah, that's a good question.

Well, what the Mormons really want, not stupidly, is they want statehood. They want statehood, for Utah. Why? Because statehood obviously grants, especially like we're thinking in the context of pre-civil warrior, statehood grants a kind of political autonomy, a limited sort of sovereignty in which you can like make your own laws, et cetera, et cetera. And so the federal government goes out. The thing's absolutely not. There's a variety of federal officials from D.C. who go to Utah into the U.S. territory and say they write back these horror-stricken stories that not only are they polygamous, not only have these like the houses that are run with lots of families and a polygamous phos, but their goal really is sovereignty. It's like a theocratic authority that exceeds the

secular powers of the United States. So we have a real problem here that's not only polygamy, but that there is, one describes that they're alienated from the United States and think of themselves as a separate people. And Brigham Young at the time does nothing to diminish that sense. He keeps giving these like fire-breathing sermons about how like we should have strung them up in the streets when these federal officials came to Salt Lake, this is in the mid-1850s. There's a tradition of this in America. You've got the Quakers in Pennsylvania. You got the Puritans in Massachusetts. I mean, this is already a well-trod territory, no pun intended, the sense that a religious movement should have its own state, its own territory. And it used to be

colonies, but now it's states. So he's just following in the footprints of others before. But in doing so, he's creating a state that's very different from what the United States is picturing itself as being. So now let's talk about this. So what are these strange moralities that we're dealing with in this new society they want to create? Right. Well, 1847, 1848, like a fully one-fifth of the federal army goes west. It is set to lay waste to the Mormon settlements. There's a Utah war of 1857. That's not what happens.

Mormonism survives. Part of the reason Mormonism exists in so many different places in the West is that Brigham Young, not stupid sends encampments to all over the West, California, Mexico, etc., etc., but they don't. So they're in fact afforded the chance over several decades to do a kind. kind of world building. Brigham Young's got a lot of problems all at once. He is presiding over a now avowedly polygamous devotional practice. Like the Mormons are polygamous, you know? But I have to stop you. What does that mean polygamous in a world of people who don't have any

idea what this means? What do you say? Yeah. So, yeah, I got to speak in several tongues at once. So from the perspective of Americans back east, oh my God, they're like lascivious men who are taking several wives and understanding that to be righteous, as though their Old Testament patriarchs. It's not the Old Testament. It's 1850. So there's like, like, polygamy seems like a kind of enormous sex scandal. Yeah, right. And so the idea is that there's all these like decadent, lascivious men using religion as a pretext for the satisfaction of their quite this worldly lusts. So that's the anti-Polygamous line. From the Mormon's perspective, it's a much, much, much more interesting case.

Like, polygamy is not, and this is the, for me, was an important thing to learn. Like, polychemy is not some sort of like notional addition to Joseph Smith's religious cosmology. It's not like a thing, oh, well, you know what would also be cool, polygamy. Yeah. No. It gives expression to his, the thing that we talked about earlier, that humans for Joseph Smith are embryonic gods, are people. waiting to become gods. And the thing that inheres people and gods most closely is that they all inhabit the same flesh, that God is made of the same flesh as you are as I am. And it's this

worldly, carnal, pleasurable life that vouchsafes to you, the almost inconceivable fact that you are currently now in the mortal world living in the body of a God unenlarged, which is amazing, right? And for Smith, polygamy is part of the way that you learn, rather you only only, you only, unlearn the sense of yourself as like living in a body that's fallen, that's mired and like Pauline corruption. It's like this training ground for you to come into this super denatural. It's not supposed to feel correct or right. It's supposed to feel like completely undoing.

And for Smith, that's so polygamy is a part of the drama of exaltation. By the time it gets to young, he's got to organize it. I mean, I must say I'm very naive about this. My assumption was that in a patriarchal society, this was just, you know, taking it to an extreme. Good for us. We have this idea of creating more of ourselves. So let's instate this idea of polygamy so that a man can have more than one wife and therefore proliferate himself. Yeah, absolutely correct. Just a practical notion. But you're putting it in the context of theology. Yeah, man, I think that is absolutely correct. That's absolutely clear.

That is a practical notion. Like, well, we're patriarchs like the old text. So there's a lot of readings of Mormonism that say like, oh, they're imitating the old testament. I get that. But like Joseph Smith is not really imitative. The Old Testament figures are models, but he's not in imitation of them. He's just living like them. So much of Mormonism is about overturning normative kinds of Christianity. So I'm under-convinced by the imitative model, though you're totally right, like reproduction, expansion, all that stuff is true. All that stuff is absolutely true. But it seems to me also that it's part of a sacred drama, Smith, which helps explain. why so many people would stake their lives on the practice. It's like, again, as I'll keep saying,

the Mormons are not wrong when they think, wow, the federal government of the United States wants to annihilate. Yeah. And we in fact have a model of what that looks like. We're living near native peoples who are being put on reservations, who are being annihilated, who are being cajoled into diatic monogamy at the expense of their lives. They know what that means and looks like. And, still, they're committed to, despite living in a fully patriarchal 19th century world, they're still committed to polygamy, which I think has everything to do with. It's like devotional properties. I'm fascinated by the fact that in old, old, old European times of religion,

the ticket you're getting is to heaven, you know, is salvation. Your life isn't going to improve on earth at all. In fact, the system is designed to keep it like it is, and everybody needs to be futile and all the rest of it. Now you've moved to a land of plenty, you know, this vastness of resources, etc., And along with it is education and science and all the rest of it, there's suddenly this sense of ourselves being able to get better within our own lives. And heaven is a little bit more on earth. So the Mormons are embracing this idea either falsely or quite organically, who knows, but they're taking on this

American ideal. And so the ticket you're getting is to a better life right here and now, because you are, in fact, as you say, an expression of God on earth. Tom, it's so good. It's like they're actually radicalizing that promise and saying everything glorious, about this worldly life, friendship, plenty, joyousness, living in a body, carnality, sex, pleasure, delight. God wants you to have in eternity and forever. Man, you're convincing me. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's like a real promise.

That's a real counter-Calvinism. It's not that a God who has contempt for you in your fallen mortal life. Like the Mormons in the 19th century were called the Dancing Puritans. Interesting. Joseph Smith is a rare thing, man. He's like a theologian who is in love with life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This worldly life.

And his sense is that God wants you to be inside all of the glories of this life, eternally in forever. And you've got to learn how to become like God because God was a person like you and became a God. Interesting. That's what you need to imitate. You can see why this would have attracted so many. I mean, that's the ticket so many are looking for and the justification for so much as well.

I can also see those back east Orthodox people going, oh my Lord, you know, if this takes off, We are in big trouble. So they have to broker a deal, don't they? If they're going to get their state, they have to abide by the rules. Over the course of the later 19th century, Mormonism is attacked less by sort of mob violence or by sort of federal armies than by a variety of acts of law designed to criminalize Mormonism and reduce the effective power of Mormon. They come all across the 19th century.

And they're meanwhile being produced in like a variety of discourse as like, anti-civilizational as threats, as really, and I mean this, like existential threats to the flourishing of the United States. They're hyper-racialized, hyper-racial. Like, in the book, there's a Jack London character who says, oh, we can kill them. They ain't white. They're Mormons. And that's a completely normative understanding in the 19th century. Like, why? Well, because they practice this weird religion that we can understand as both cause and effect of their sexual deviancy, their non-monogamous. And in that deviancy, they've made themselves like these anti-civilizational racial figures in 19th century America. They're called Mohammedans. They're Indian-like. They're making

themselves available for extermination. And so Brigham Young has a lot to do. And some of the work he does is like, oh, oh, oh, you think we're like a racialized population. No, you're wrong. Yes, it's true that like the Indians were non-monogamous, but unlike them, we're super patriarchal. We're hyperbolicly patriarchal. We believe in the rule of men over women and in the rule of white over black. In that way, we're more American than the Americans. Why don't you recognize that in us? Why don't you recognize us as your leading-edge colonizers?

Why don't you recognize us as more American than you are? That's a lot of the version of Mormonism that takes place in the 19th century as young sort of counteracts all the ambiguities of racial identification, of gendered possibility, in earlier Mormonism and builds it into this like solidified hierarchy. Rigam Young is nothing if not a hierarchy. But of course, this doesn't work because they're still polygamous. You know, it's so interesting when you look back at the 19th century in general. From our perspective, it seems so simplistic.

You know, there's the wagon train, the Wild West movies and so forth. It was such a difficult and crazy time of new thinking and dangerous ideas and threats all over the place, if not physical, then mental and moral. You know, all kinds of stuff was happening. And it was cropping up in politics all the time. I mean, every presidential election had to deal with yet another load of new ideas that are cropping up because of this evolving nation, right? Yeah.

And it's astonishing how, as you said very nicely, oh, there's like a medium size. By the late century, there's probably 50,000 Mormons, which is a lot of Mormons. But comparatively to however many millions of people, it's a small sect. You would be startled at not only the vehemence that the Mormons produce, which is in certain ways unstartling, like there are people who are producing an existential threat to the country, but at the use to which the Mormons are put, like presidents name them. There's dozens and dozens of congressional acts of law deploring them, criminalizing them. Like they become a lever for a variety of things like for settling what will be the proper relation of religious devotion to allegiance to the state.

What will be the proper relation of race and gender to political authority and stuff like that? and the Mormons are a vehicle for the clarification of a lot of these large-scale conceptual problems unfolding in the 19th century. I'm still unclear how they get a state. Well, a number of things happen like they're more and more escalatingly confiscatory, confiscating acts of law that are being passed criminalizing polygamy, which is decimating Mormon life. And again, I would add once more that this people understand their eternal lives, to be bound up in the sacrality.

So it's not just like we're becoming, this is a part of the devotional practice. For me, that devotional practice has everything to do with inner logics of exaltation, becoming gods. By the end of the 1880s, it becomes clear that this is just not viable. And the Mormons, of course, by now have enough money.

They have people who are sending lawyers back east. And one of their counselors says, like, listen, you are X number of people, and the nation has decided that polygamy will be exterminated. And extermination has such a heavy, right? Because the governor in Missouri is his extermination order. And so they, by 1890, Lifford Woodruff issues of proclamation, renouncing polygamy. Finally renouncing polygamy.

Was this in a smoke-filled room? I mean, this sounds like it's something that happens as a result of political decision-making. Of unbelievably high-pressure political decision-making. Sure. The understanding is essentially, if we don't do this, we will be annihilated. We will be annihilated either by militia or by acts of law that will criminalize and decimate us. Right. And what we want, what we want from the world, what we want, what could save us is the limited sovereignty of statehood.

Yes. Like if we could just be a state, we could establish our power there with sufficient clarity. We can achieve a kind of comedy with the United States, which has been both our model and our enemy over the course of the 19th century. So they renounced polygamy in 1890, brokering, brokering, brokering, in 1896, Utah becomes a state. This would have been a headline in the papers in Philadelphia. Mormons renounced polygamy. The statehood, definitely. Yeah, but I mean, in terms of like the changes they were willing to make was public knowledge and suddenly the goalposts moved. Right. Well, there's a lot of contention about that at the time. By the early 19th century, it'll be unclear whether senators can be

seated because have they really renounced polygamy or did they just say they renounce polygamy? A great Mormon historian named Kathleen Flake writes about this really beautifully. There's a lot of contention about the seriousness with which anyone should take this avowed ending of polygamy, right? And that's contentious for a long time. But it seems to me that part of what happens eventually from the perspective of Mormonism itself is it comes to understand the period from like 1830 to 1896 as the sacred drama itself. Like there's the book of Mormon. and that's fine. But the real sacred drama of Mormonism is the migration and the building of temples and the persecution and the eventual achieved comedy with the imperial United States. And they become

another religion. Yeah. And again, I totally take the point that it's a fraught assimilation. There'll always be a peculiarity about Mormonism. They will always be recognized as having been marked out in their devotional past as deviance. And that produces a lot of complicated 20th century effects. I'm sorry, you've gotten me all riled up here. The sense of it is that we've got a very high-minded theology that's really challenging and really radical. Yes. That within the century, within 50 years, ends up sort of, I don't want to say, is it dumbing itself down or at least sort of calming itself down to a point where it can be considered legal and civil and understandable and welcome. And by doing so, that must have alienated a lot of Mormons who were, I'm in this for the richer stuff, guys, not this American thing.

this will surprise you not at all. Fundamentalist Mormonism begins here. Yeah. That's so in the FLDS, fundamentalists, who are still polygamous, like, they understand, in a way, not unreasonably like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. I didn't understand polygamy as just this thing I got to do. I understood it as part of a devotional practice that was inside a theology of exultation, right? At the same time, like, I would totally grant also, like, what you've just said is really the case that the book sort of makes and it's interested in what has to happen to a set of devotional practices for them to become a part of the secular nation. But of course, like, Mormonism doesn't stop being Mormonism.

It still has at its center the promise of a God more gracious in what he gives than any sort of previous, certainly Calvinist God would. So that's also certainly the case. But just like you, I'm super interested in, like, what has to happen to an entire sacralized cosmology? Yes. To make it amenable to the second. orders of the United States, and by secular we don't mean anti-religious, we mean like that

accepts certain things as religion, certain sets of practices as religious, and certain as not certain as like zealotry or heathenism. Two men haven't even mentioned where women fit into all of this. Yeah, a lot to say about that. So in the 19th century, if you wanted to attack Mormons, one great way to do it was say like, the polygamous wives are slaves. Yeah. They're enslaved to these domineering men. And my colleague in American Larry studies, a woman named Nancy Bentley, who is so smart, says that polygamy is the servitude that sanctifies monogamy as freedom, as though, like, monogamous patriarchy was totally fine, like compared to volgamous patriarchy. And the Mormon women, as a historian named Laurel Ulrich says, are they don't really like being

figured as just vacant-minded, subservient figures. And indeed, part of what's super interested me in that early in Mormonism was like the ways that a variety of women saw in the cosmology of exaltation a pathway to power and divinization, a way to like understand themselves as capable of revelation. Part of what it seems to me happens over the course of the 19th century, certainly when Brigham Young takes over and means to systematize Mormonism, is he means to clarify the hierarchical relation between men and uses polygamy to do that. Whereas for a lot of women, it seems to me, again, in the female relief society, say, in Navu, there was a lot of like unsystematized possibility for female power.

Yeah. And divinization that was inside, inside something like polygamy. And Brigham Young sort of works to radically hierarchies Mormon's social life so that gender is not just a division, but hierarchy. where women's role is reproductive rather than like a Smith-like prophecy or something like that. And that has a lot of serious effects. One of its effects is not to alien all Mormon women, like lots of Mormon women, lots of polygamous women, found great, great possibilities for devotional practice inside polygamy,

even as others found it a scene of just great loneliness and suffering. It wasn't an absolute given that this religion would end up so conservative, was it? And that's how we think of it today. It's a Mitt Romney. We all think of that Republican ideal of Utah. I mean, whenever I give talks and stuff like that, I say, listen, my expertise ends in 1896, truthfully. But, you know, I'm a person as a scholar, what do I do?

I do American literature and queer theory. I study the history of sexuality and the racial history of sexuality. And it seems to me that the Mormons are marked in the 19th century with violence and vehemence as sexual deviance, as people who are racialized in their deviancy and have made themselves available to murder and extermination. There's a Mormon writer named LaShawn Williams who thinks this is like a traumatizing passage in Mormon life. And one effect of that is to make 20th century Mormons pretty vehement in their cutting distinctions. Like, we are not them. We will not be confused for them. We are going to commit ourselves to a family theology. And we will retrospectively

say that polygamy was only and always about reproduction. and familial life and the sanctity of family life, which is, of course, partially true, though it was also about the dancing Puritans. A man is that he might have joy. It's about the tremendous power of embodied life that was so important to Joseph's. That sort of gets annihilated as the Mormons look to produce themselves as unmarked by a history of sexual demons. You know what I mean? I hope the beauty of America is that it comes down to rising property values.

I mean, the Mormons have done very well. Yeah, they're not going anywhere. There's no more land beyond Utah. The gold rush locks up California. And so this is it. You make your stand here. And when people do that in this gigantic country, it means assimilating in some regard or for the greater good, you know, is the idea. Yeah, you discover there are certain normative codes that are not really negotiable. Certainly the Mormons discover that. And it's kind of weird, man, when you think about it, like the Mormons wanted to arrange intimate life in a particular way. They wanted intimate life not to be run along the. seem of diatic monogamy, but of polygamy. Me, that seems like, eh, oh, oh, okay. No. The state itself, and all of its amassed powers said no in thunder. No in thunder. And of course, we live in the constantly renegotiated aftermath of that, which made, you know, for me as a person who thinks about the history of sexuality, a tremendous painful irony in the Mormon church committing itself to the Anti-Gay Marriage Act in California to restore the proper definition of marriage. And you're sort of like, oh, the whole religion begins in a moment of great contestation

over the proper definition of marriage and people who are brought to the brink of their own annihilation by their willingness to contest the states narrowed definition of marriage. So those are only some of the large ironies. When Mitt finally gets to be president, it's all going to change. Watch out. Yeah. I had to ask one more thing about the relationship. with Native peoples. Did those tribes do better in the state of Utah in their reservations and their lifestyles? The do better is on such a grim and sliding scale. Put it this way. Part of the way that

before the polygamy revelation, Mormons look to show themselves as already assimilated, we don't need to give up polygamy because we're already super-Americans is in their actions as colonizers. Like, we understand ourselves as the heroic white people of this land, and we're doing God's holy work of colonizing this space for America. So it's not like the Mormons were these, like, super generous anti-racists and then became settler colonialists. They have this super fraught relation to the Native people who they think of as sort of allies in some ways as co-refugees, but they also are super normative in their understanding of themselves

as colonizers, having a supervalent right to their lands. So then of the course of the 20th century, there's a variety of practices of just as you say conversion whereby native peoples are meant to become believers. I would think it's a very layered theme because you have a group of people who have had to assimilate themselves, who have had to change the very essence of their body, you know, as a people. And then they're suddenly faced with the idea of other peoples that they want to bring under the Christian umbrella. you've just said it so perfectly also describes like the fate of a lot of Native peoples,

whose very inhabitation of the body, the ways of living out gender and sex, were the things that allowed like anthropological Americans to racialize them. Well, we've decided that patriarchal monogamy is the peak of civilization. Yeah. So while we're interested in Native peoples for their variety of spirit practices, I'm like parroting Lewis Henry Morgan and anthropologists like him, it is a shame that they've not yet achieved what we now as anthropologists in the 19th century understand is the pinnacle of civilization, which is diatic monogamy headed by a man. So native peoples, too, I mean, their assimilation is rather more violent. And you're taking them in certain ways the Mormons were spared dramatically the worst

of that kind of assimilatory violence, which part of the point of the book is to say that's a religious violence. Yeah, yeah. To make the point that you made, that there's like normative codes that make things religion. And until they are inside those normative codes, they're not religion, they're heresy, their barbarism, their backwardness, their a-civilizational ad, and they threaten the nation. We have to wrap this up, but I want to advertise your book,

Make Yourselves Gods. Mormons and the unfinished business of American secularism. The story is as interesting as the title there, and the author is to the man I will now call a friend. This is really fun to talk to you. Dod, this was just a joy. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to speak. This was a pleasure.

Peter Covellello, I never knew. 60% of what I just learned. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. I had a great time. Thanks for listening to this episode of American and history hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.