Professor Peter Coviello

Make yourselves gods.

Make yourselves gods.

I mean, you can see the gorgeousness of the vision.

He is willing to imagine a far more expansively loving kind of God, certainly, than any

calvinist god god is not only this not this like radically other occasionally malevolent figure god is rather a sibling human got you a person that that that you are god and persons are different in degree but not in kind oh wow no wonder it's controversial this would really really ruffle the feathers of a lot of puritans yeah

Nauvoo.

Nauvoo.

It's on the edge of Illinois.

Yeah, it's a river town on the edge of Illinois, which is their sort of own town.

And that's where the grandest theological speculation that Smith will produce really happens.

It's a scene of super intense theological foment.

It's where Smith comes to the revelation that one of the key components of exaltation, of the idea that humans can exalt themselves into gods, is polygamy, is plural patriarchal marriage.

Right.

And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of different ways of reading that.

Is it a restoration of Old Testament beliefs?

Is it a hyper-patriarchalization of a world that's becoming more industrial and more gender-equitable in the 19th century?

You can make those things stick.

For me, in my reading of Mormonism, it's really just an essential part of what Smith understands as the theology of Mormonism.

That is to say...

The world is unfallen.