Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy

"Colleen McDannell is one of the most eminent American religious historians and she’s written about Catholicism and material religious culture. In this book, she casts her eyes on Mormon women in the wake of polygamy, from 1890 to today. This is a fascinating book, with a very wide scope that looks at all these different lived realities of Mormon women, from Mormon women who were living during the Progressive Era and saw their church as a vehicle for social change, to women using social media in the 2010s and the advent of Mormon mommy-blogging and influencer culture. She also has a chapter on Mormon women in the international context. So, while my list of books is very American-centric, which reflects my own interest as an American historian, Colleen McDannell also points to the possibilities of placing Mormonism on a global scale, and seeing what happens when we make these comparisons between Mormon women living in Utah and Mormon women living in Ghana. That’s the $10,000 question. In general, the practice has officially ended within the mainstream church. If you practise polygamy, you are excommunicated from the faith. However, the doctrine is still there. There’s still a revelation found in the Doctrine & Covenants from Joseph Smith that’s still a part of the scriptural canon that outlines polygamy as an eternal doctrine, and you have lots of men, including the current president of the church who, when their first wives pass away, get sealed to a second wife and the doctrine implies that they’re sealed to both women for eternity. So that anxiety is still there. It’s going to be there until there’s a more direct confrontation. But the practice is generally changing. You’ll find most Mormon women, at least in America where I study, are more scared of the doctrine than they are pining for it to come back. The ghost of polygamy haunts Mormon America, even if it does not have as firm a bodily form as it has in the past. This is a debate that lots of people get really animated about. In the Mormons’ minds, they see themselves as 100% Christian . They emphasize that it is the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Jesus Christ always has the bigger font than all the other words in the title, and they call the Book of Mormon ‘another testament of Jesus Christ’. You saw this anxiety recently, where the President of the LDS Church came out and said, ‘We don’t want to be called “Mormons” anymore because that downplays our connection to Christianity.’ Of course, you’re going to have lots of evangelicals who say that if you’re going to be accepted as a Christian you need to accept specific doctrines, especially the Trinity, or the Bible as the sole repository of scriptural truth. So it comes down to who you’re granting the authority to define what Christian is. From my perspective as a scholar, it’s problematic to allow one partisan group to define what Christianity is. Evangelicals want to define what Christianity is because they have a stake in that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There is a great book that I was tempted to include on my list by John Turner. It’s a biography of the Mormon Jesus , and it looks at all the Mormon Christological conceptions and shows how Mormon beliefs fit into a much broader scope of world Christianity—something that evangelicals have sometimes tried to pretend doesn’t exist. I would argue that Mormons are theologically a lot closer to mainstream Christianity than some Christians would admit. Also, culturally and socially, Mormons are very much in tune with what we would call evangelical culture. They’re politically and socially conservative. In their voting patterns American Mormons are much in line with evangelical voting patterns. Their beliefs on morality, on issues like abortion, and modesty—those are very much in line with what we would see as evangelical."