Peter Coviello, "Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · Oct 12, 2022 · 1h 4m

rom the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (U Chicago Press, 2019), by Dr. Peter Coviello offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end.

Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as…