User:Hydrangeans/draft of Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism is a 2019 nonfiction book by literary scholar Peter Coviello. The book articulates an assessment of secularism in the United States through what Coviello calls a "counter history" of Mormonism, particularly focused around the Book of Mormon, the religion's central text, and its practice (and later abandonment) of religious polygamy. []

Background
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Content
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Make Yourselves Gods works within a Foucaultian perspective, while adopting some "post-Foucaultian developments that pay attention to the mutual entanglement of sexuality with race", gender studies scholar Taylor Petrey explains.

Most of Make Yourselves Gods 's treatment of biopolitics focuses on the early-nineteenth-century context of Mormonism.

Coviello characterizes Latter-day Saint polygamy as having been, in the words of reviewer Adam McLain, "about an eroticized theology of the body".

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As Heather White summarizes, Make Yourselves Gods argues that "avowing monogamy rather directly admitted this group [Latter-day Saints] back into" perceived whiteness.

Publication
The University of Chicago Press published Make Yourselves Gods in 2019, selling it for $87 (USD) in hardcover and $29 in softcover. The book is 304 pages long. It includes endnotes and an index.

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Reception
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Cultural scholar Edgar Garcia wrote that "Coviello’s storytelling is masterful" and considered the "political elucidations" of his narrative "compelling".

In 2020, Make Yourselves Gods was a finalist for the John Whitmer Historical Association's Best Book Prize.