Prologue: Winter Quarters
Part One: Axiomatic
1 Introduction: What We Talk about When We Talk about Secularism
Part Two: Joy
2 Endless Felicity: The Radiant Body of Early Mormon Theology
3 Gods in Subjection: Women, Polygamy, and the Eternity of Sex
Part Three: Extermination
4 The Polygamist’s Complexion; or, The Book of Mormon Goes West
5 Wards and Sovereigns: Deviance and Dominion in the Biopolitics of Secularism
Part Four: Theodicy
6 Conclusion: Protohomonationalism
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Joan Wallach Scott, author of Sex and Secularism
“From a reviled set of bad beliefs and practices, Mormonism became a good white American religion by the end of the nineteenth century by redirecting the carnal life of the spirit to the reproduction of the domestic nuclear family. Make Yourselves Gods is at once a revisionist history of Mormonism and a critical engagement with theories of secularism, told with shining clarity in breathless, gorgeous prose.”
Nancy A. Bentley, University of Pennsylvania
“Full of splendid insight and erudition, Make Yourselves Gods explores the ‘imaginative wildness’ of early Mormon thought in tandem with the orthodoxies of secularism that attempted to suppress and discipline this distinctive cosmology, providing an unprecedented way of thinking about how religion and ‘bad belief’ are vital to American biopolitics.”
Molly McGarry, University of California, Riverside
“Coviello writes a genealogy of foreclosed intimacies and vexed affiliations, a tale of queer worlds lost or at least winnowed by the wages of U.S. whiteness, citizenship, and territorial recognition. An indispensable intervention in ‘postsecular critique,’ this book contains multitudes.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://www.press.uchicago.edu