Professor Peter Coviello

Throughout the 19th century, the federal government kept saying the Mormons are secretly in league with the native people to murder the Americans.

Jeez.

And in some ways, they were.

Yeah.

But again, in ways they were totally willing to also murder Native peoples themselves, to take land themselves.

It's hard to over-describe the fraughtness of Mormon-Native relation in the West in the 19th century.

That's a great question.

In certain ways, the first thing I'll say is I'm ill-equipped to answer it because my scholarly address to the Mormons ends at literally the moment they renounce polygamy.

That's the part of the Mormon trajectory that I'm most interested in, though I think you can see from the Mormon side, it's not entirely unfair to say what had been a vigorously counter-Protestant

something that understood itself as improving what they would read as the apostasy of American Christianity, becomes in essence another subset of American Christianity, another kind of belief that seems more tolerable, that is better able to sit at the table of American para-Christianities, which it simply had not been before renouncing polygamy.

That, of course, makes the Mormons a different kind of

player on the national stage.

And if you're me, it's a striking transformation, like a people who really were willing to stake their lives on their opposition to the imperial United States.

become like avatars of good citizenship.

And Harold Bloom will call them the American religion.

And what's also sort of puzzling is that the Mormons sort of stop living as though they live inside sacred time, or

Rather, they treat the 19th century itself, the moment from 1830 to 1890, as their sacred history.

But what that does, there are many effects of that.

So there's lots of celebrations about the sacred history of the Mormons.

But it installs statehood and national belonging as a kind of telos.