Beginning in March 1935, Orlean Kingston documented her rigorous fasts, and her visionary experiences that revealed the proper diet for the Kingdom of God. The result was a strict dietary regiment that shaped the faith founded by her brother. This article reframes the Davis County Cooperative’s fast not as the product of male revelation, but the embodiment of a woman’s religious life. Her diaries reveal a woman who’s embodied devotion often confused her small religious community, and who’s belief in a perfected body raises contemporary questions about religious women’s pathologized faith. Had Orlean been a Mormon man, she might have been a prophet. Nevertheless, her largely invisible and ultimately broken body is the foundation for one of the DCCS’ most controversial marks of the Kingston devotional body

The public conversation over the FLDS differed widely from the public's perception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as suburban and clad in Woollen Mills. Even if individual members of the Church were not wealthy, they appeared capable of owning a single-family home and untouched by the optics of poverty. This middle-class presentation was not always the case for Mormon fundamentalism. From the earliest years of the movement, members struggled with financial hardship and a lack of both governmental and religious assistance to meet the needs of their doctrinally-obligated growing families. They did not meet the expectation for what it meant to be Mormon, and they certainly did not meet the expectation for what it meant to be a “correct” or “good” religion in America. In short, they were “bad” because they were poor.

1978 was a decisive year for Mormons of all denominations. On June 8, 1978, President Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation, most often referred to as Official Declaration 2, that the Mormon Priesthood would be given to all worthy men regardless of race. This revelation ended generations of withholding priesthood and temple ordinances from Black members of the Church. For most members of the LDS Church, Official Declaration 2 was revelatory and a long-awaited answer to prayer. However, many Latter-day Saints were angry about the end of theologically-justified religious segregation despite this end’s widespread approval. Many left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in light of the declaration. This article reframes the persistence of the priesthood and temple restrictions in Mormon fundamentalism not as a continuation of early LDS teachings but as a form of white backlash in response to the Black civil rights movement and integration in LDS worship.

The doctrine of Heavenly Mother has long been invoked by Mormon women to posit an expanded view of gender in Mormon cosmology and offer women a tangible representation of their eternal future. At the same time, the lack of worship or veneration of a divine feminine in Mormonism, raises the question of whether the doctrine has the potential to influence the temporal state of Mormon women. Within the fundamentalist context, this is not necessarily the case. The doctrine affording women the possibility of eternal representation and its entanglement with plural marriage is an active component of women’s religious lives. This article seeks to include Mormon fundamentalist women in the conversation on Heavenly Mother and demonstrate the way plural communities utilize the story of Heavenly Mother as a potential avenue for women’s authority, while affirming the divine feminine as inextricably linked to polygamy.

Beginning in 1929, Lorin C. Woolley, the leader of the Mormon fundamentalist movement, began constructing a theology of deity that centered Joseph Smith as one of the gods. Through the theological innovation of the men who followed Woolley’s priesthood lineage, Smith was placed within his own speculative framework on exaltation and eventually became synonymous with the Holy Ghost. This article traces the history of Woolleyite Mormon fundamentalist doctrine on the Holy Ghost as a discursive practice that made use of Mormon theology of embodiment to understand the role of Smith after his martyrdom. This theological trajectory helps illuminate the continued presence of the late martyr in the lives of many Mormons who believe in his continued work on the other side of the veil.

In July 1939, frustrated by the revival of excommunications against polygamist Mormons in southern Utah, Joseph W. Musser wrote a scathing condemnation against the disciplinary practice in Truth magazine. “The dreaded disease, ‘Hysteria Excommunicatus’, has again broken out in some of the wards and stakes in Zion. At first, appearing in a mild and apparently non-contagious form, the ailment has gradually increased in virulence and seems now to be highly contagious,” he wrote of the rampant persecution of the people led. The ailment Musser referred to was the systemic removal of polygamist Mormons from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the 1930s. However, more than removal from their faith, the southern Utah loyalty oaths and excommunications became the source of fundamentalist Mormon identity.

Prophets are interested in both the physical and spiritual health of their followers. In moments where Prophets act as both doctors and leaders in their religious communities, these individuals become doubly interested in the health of their adherents. Within these instances, regulation on sexuality became more than medical stipulations, but religious indictments to strengthen both individual adherence to the laws of God and communal identity within the group. The history of the Law of Purity demonstrates the ways in which medical and prophetic teachings were intertwined by Mormon leaders on the subject of sexuality in the 20th century and continue into the present.