Make Yourselves Gods

Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America and Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs.

"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."--Molly McGarry, University of California, Riverside "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."--Nancy A. Bentley, University of Pennsylvania "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."--Joan Wallach Scott, author of Sex and Secularism