Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

From 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 Godsoffers 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 heretics, se...