Professor Peter Coviello

We live in these – in unfallen bodies and it's incredibly hard to believe that.

You need a discipline of practice.

That for him is plural marriage.

Anyway, he has that revelation.

They don't publicize it for a while, not surprisingly because it makes people furious.

But of course –

Already, scandal surrounds them.

They're accused of many things, but particularly being accused of being perverts.

People whose pretend devotions have led them into perversity.

And that accusation, of course, allows people like Lil Burn Boggs to say, what we should probably do is exterminate.

So it's the world is like we are in a state of revelation in the present tense.

That revelation didn't end in the days of the Bible.

It exists now in the present tense.

God speaks as much in the present tense.

Now, of course, like that particular version of counter-Protestant devotion has other analogs like

The Mormons don't have to look around them very far to see what it looks like to be a kind of belief practice askance that of normative American Protestants.

That's how native peoples were persecuted explicitly.

as heathens, as people whose backwards counterparts and beliefs made them, again, fit for extermination.

So the Mormons feel this very complex identification with native peoples who appear in the Book of Mormon as Lamanites and stuff like that.

So it's a super fraught identification because they also want to identify as white people with all the powers of empire belonging to them as well.