In Winter Quarters, far from prying Protestant eyes, the Mormons practiced polygamy more openly. Young began gathering his wives together, urging those who had stayed behind to join him for the trek west. Some did. They experienced the benefits of sisterhood, which was some consolation for the trials of polygamy—the basis of which, Young made clear, was absolute patriarchy. The husband, he said, is “the head & God of the woman.” Rejecting Victorian notions of female purity, he declared a woman to be “the [dirtiest] creature .... dirtier than a man.” Nor did women have any authority in the domestic sphere, as Victorian ideology decreed. Only Young or his representatives could authorize marriages. It was men over women, and Young over all.

For Young as for Smith, the goal of all humanity was “eternal fellowship and familial glory.” Mormon communalism contrasted with Protestant individualism. “If men are not saved together,” Young said, “they cannot be saved at all.” In January 1847, in Winter Quarters, Young announced his only revelation that would be canonized by the church: he identified the Mormons with the people of Israel, and reaffirmed the authority of the Twelve to lead the Exodus. The announcement was celebrated with music and dancing. “Whoever goes to hell I’ll warrant you won’t here [hear] fiddling or have dancing,” he said. “All music is in heaven, and all enjoyment is of the Lord.” Young sacralized the ordinary—farming, fencebuilding, dancing—yet feared what would happen if he allowed his people to “act the nigger night after night.”

When the emigrants arrived in the Promised Land in July 1847, Young made it official: “this is the place,” he said. Of course the cursed descendants of the Lamanites, the Ute and Paiute Indians, were already there. But Young was sure they would provide little obstacle to his vision—a theocratic and largely autonomous kingdom. Not all the Apostles were at ease with his autocratic rule, but Young insisted that he was the only “oracle” of revelation. He managed to get himself unanimously re-elected First President by the Twelve at a meeting when his opponents were absent. Again he chose Kimball and Richards as counselors. When the election results were announced, the gathered Mormons shouted hosanna, and violins played “God Save the King.” Young’s theocratic sovereignty was confirmed.

Things became more complicated in 1850, when Utah became a territory and President Millard Fillmore appointed some non-Mormon officials and judges. Young rejected their authority, and in 1852 went public with plural marriage, which he defended on grounds of popular sovereignty and states’ rights—the same grounds the federal government was using to decide the question of slavery in the territories. He also reasserted the doctrine’s centrality to Smith’s theological system. Without plural marriage, Young was certain, “there is not a man [who] can be a God.”

Back on Earth there were conflicts with the local Indians. Young was not averse to military action, but more commonly he resorted to the maxim that it was cheaper to feed them than to fight them. As for making theological sense of African Americans, Mormons depended on the curses of Cain and Ham (which did not specify dark skin as the consequence of God’s wrath, but were widely interpreted to do so). The Book of Mormon makes the “seed of Cain” black, and the Book of Abraham excluded descendants of Ham from the priesthood. Though Smith had embraced a few black priests in the early days, the drift from racial egalitarianism to racial exclusion was characteristic of most American denominations at the time.

WITHIN A FEW YEARS after the great migration, Young’s fear of cooling ardor helped to launch the “Mormon reformation.” The need for re-dedicated fervor was intensified by a series of natural scourges: drought, crickets, and grasshoppers created a constant emergency atmosphere. The Reformation included a home missionary program to monitor morals and “lop off ... rotten branches” from the tree of faith. Young himself, concerned about lukewarm commitments to plural marriage, prodded more people into it. During this same period, Young preached the doctrine of blood atonement: some sins, he announced, can be paid for only by the blood of the sinner, offered by the sinner himself or taken by another. Possible candidates included adulterers, murderers, and blasphemers against the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of blood atonement led to at least one castration (of a local bully) and to the assassination of several apostates. Young later mused that as a result of the doctrine there had been “quite a number killed, and, I believe, many more ought to have been.” As Turner concludes, “Young, who had feared for his life while on the margins of Illinois society, created a climate in which men and women on the margins of Mormon society lived in a similar state of fear.” Extra-legal justice accompanied the effort to revive spiritual intensity.

In early 1857, Mormon leaders presented a memorial to the incoming President James Buchanan, warning that if the federal government continued to send “office seekers and corrupt demagogues” to Utah, the citizens would drive them away. Buchanan dispatched federal troops to the territory. Anticipating Armageddon, Young encouraged the Paiutes and other Indians to attack Gentile wagon trains and to prepare to fight the U.S. Army. The Mormons themselves would also prepare for a fight. They quickly found one when they encountered a wagon train en route from Arkansas at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. The Mormons, Turner writes, “shot, stabbed, and slashed the throats of emigrants who pled for their lives,” including women and children. Young sent a message to try to stop the killing, but it arrived too late. He had sanctioned the climate of righteous anger, combined with fear and millennial expectation, that had led to mass murder. And the men who did it remained in Young’s favor. No wonder that many observers, Mormon and Gentile, began to think that Young had condoned the slaughter.

Meanwhile the U.S. Army was advancing. Finally the troops stopped sixty miles north of Salt Lake for the winter. Spring brought relief and resolution. Buchanan promised a continued military campaign against Mormon resistance, but offered to pardon all who would submit themselves to the authority of the federal government. There would be no trials for treason, but also no guarantees of what federal judges would do in future. Young accepted the inevitable, concealing his failure with bluster. The army marched through Salt Lake City and built Camp Floyd forty miles away. It was the beginning of the end of theocratic government in Utah.

YET YOUNG continued to circle the wagons. He rededicated the Mormons to collective enterprise and economic self-sufficiency, urging the cultivation of tobacco and cotton and other cash crops. But the Saints remained economically dependent on the army that they despised. Mormon merchants needed customers with money. Meanwhile Congress was on the march. In 1862, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act declared polygamy unlawful and limited church holdings to $50,000. Within a few years, the coming of the transcontinental railroad ended the isolation of Zion.

By that time the Saints were experiencing their own internal tensions. It was the old story told in the jeremiad: grasping merchants, even Mormon merchants, overlooking their obligation to the community. “They will get sorrow,” Young predicted, “most of them will be damned.” (He foretold damnation often, for a self-proclaimed believer in “the contraction of hell.”) He tried local railroad start-ups, Mormon-owned, to co-opt the impact of the transcontinentals. He also started Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution in 1868, one of the rare successful Mormon efforts at co-operative merchandising.

In 1874, Young launched the United Order movement, his final attempt to revive communalism. Resources were pooled through the revived principle of consecration, but private property was not abolished. Individuals received cash returns based on their contributions and labor. The only settlement that abolished private property was Orderville, a community of poor folks in southern Utah that achieved, according to the novelist Wallace Stegner, a rare “communism of goods.” But most Mormons were no more willing to commit to consecration in the 1870s than they had been decades earlier. Nor was Young himself willing to consecrate his own substantial holdings, which included a textile factory in Provo and more than ten thousand acres of farmland.

Suffering from arthritis, digestive disorders, and urological problems, Young in decline still epitomized the melding of body and soul at the core of nineteenth-century Mormonism. Months before his death, he lubricated his catheter with consecrated oil, and recommended the practice to others. For Young, the sacred and the profane were forever joined.

V.

SINCE YOUNG’S DEATH in 1877, the story of the Mormons in America has in many ways recalled the pattern familiar to historians of other American religions. The lowering of the emotional temperature, the reining in of ranters, the growing preoccupation with efficient organization—all these developments led toward greater absorption in that vast bland civil religion known as the American Way of Life.

Still, there were major obstacles to assimilation. One was Mormon hierarchy, which to many Protestants was all too reminiscent of Roman Catholicism. But what really stuck in the Christian craw was polygamy. In 1882, Congress strengthened the Morrill Act by passing the Edmunds Act, which made “unlawful cohabitation” a crime and denied polygamists the right to hold office, vote, or serve on a jury. Soon after it passed, federal marshals poured into Utah in pursuit of polygamists. Mormon leaders fled Salt Lake City and went into hiding in various settlements throughout the state. The marshals tracked them down. More than a thousand men were arrested, convicted, and fined or imprisoned. Then, in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, the federal government took dead aim at the Mormon church itself, abolishing its incorporation and expropriating all its property except chapels and cemeteries. That same year John Taylor, Young’s successor as president of the church, died in hiding in a hamlet north of Salt Lake City.

Wilford Woodruff, who succeeded Taylor, saw the hopelessness of the situation. In 1890, he persuaded the Quorum of the Twelve to approve what became known as the Manifesto. It was neither a new revelation nor a renunciation of the doctrine of polygamy. It was merely a statement that the Mormon president intended to abide by the federal laws and would urge his fellow church members to do likewise. The end of sanctioned polygamy marked a decisive moment in Mormon history.

The dream of Zion was dead, at least in the form that Smith and Young had envisioned it. Now it was time for the organization men to take charge of the church, and it could not have been a more propitious moment. Utah became a state in 1896, the year that William McKinley’s election ushered in the reign of corporate capitalism in America. For the next six years, an unprecedented wave of mergers created the behemoths that would dominate the American economy throughout much of the twentieth century. Mormons, having shed their lascivious reputation, were poised to thrive in the new era, as the self-help ethic was re-shaped to suit the new corporate ethos of managerial expertise and “team play.” In the 1850s, Brigham Young was routinely depicted in the press as a tyrant surrounded by a slavish harem; but by 1930 the Mormon President Heber Grant showed up on the cover of Time, extolled for his business acumen and his church’s prudential morality. The Mormons, it appeared, had at last achieved respectability.

Part of this transformation involved theological change. The key move was the re-definition of celestial marriage, a phrase that Smith had used as synonym for polygamy. In 1899, the British convert James Talmage’s Articles of Faith provided theological justification for the view that celestial marriage was celestial not because it was plural but because it was eternal. Several decades later Grant made Talmage’s view official doctrine, stating that “celestial marriage ... and polygamous marriage are not synonymous terms.” Instead “monogamous marriages celebrated in our temples are celestial marriages.” Armed with this doctrine, Mormons became as passionate in their defense of monogamy as they had once been of polygamy. The renewed emphasis on baptism of the dead, coupled with the disavowal of polygamy, re-figured the Mormon idea of community. “The bonds that polygamy had created across space would now reach with renewed vigor across time,” Bowman writes.

Talmage and two other theologians, John Widtsoe and B.H. Roberts, began a progressive reconstruction of Mormon thought that aligned it with dominant trends in liberal Protestantism, even while they preserved continuity with Smith’s revelations. Their synthesis, Bowman says, “remains the Mormonism believed by most Latter-day Saints today.” Religion and science were one. God was subject to the laws of the universe and owed his divinity to his capacity to understand and to manipulate them. He was not a creator who made something from nothing; he was “a great craftsman, organizing previously inchoate matter.” Nothing he did was mysterious; everything was subject to rational investigation.

While the theologians brought God down to Earth, they also raised man up to heaven. Humans shared God’s uncreated, eternal nature and they would one day share his glory through a process of “eternal progression”—“the refinement of the soul’s capacity to participate in divinity through the exercise of Christ-like virtues.” As they did for most Christians, “Christ-like virtues” came to resemble the dominant values of the moment. For Mormons as for their fellow Americans in the early twentieth century, this meant that the key to salvation became the cultivation of a disciplined character, committed to mastering the world through knowledge.

THIS THEOLOGY was ideally suited to the managerial ethos of early twentieth-century America. It was the moment when efficiency and uplift were twinned. Perhaps their most successful union surfaced in the Prohibition movement, which succeeded by 1919 in banning alcohol consumption from sea to shining sea. Managers hailed the prospect of a sober, punctual work force; moralists hailed the triumph of social discipline over sodden chaos. Mormons knew an opportunity to seize legitimacy when they saw one. In 1921, Heber Grant announced that adherence to Joseph Smith’s Word of Wisdom (abstention from alcohol and caffeine) would be required of any Mormon seeking a “temple recommend”—the permission to participate in temple rituals. Up until that time, the Word of Wisdom had been interpreted as non-binding health advice. Grant, like a good managerial progressive, made it a prerequisite for full membership in the church. Ever since, the Mormons’ abstemious habits have reinforced their ethic of disciplined achievement.

As Mormons rose in respectability, their church became less tolerant of ecstatic revelations. Speaking in tongues was an especially embarrassing hangover from the primitive church. During the 1920s, the First Presidency announced that the gifts of miraculous healing and divine revelation were restricted to the ordained priesthood. Democratic spontaneity was yielding to bureaucratic regulation. By the mid–twentieth century, an increasingly ambitious missionary program created new organizational challenges. In 1960, the Apostle Harold Lee was put in charge of the Correlation Committee. His model was the American corporation, then at the height of its Fordist moment, and his watchwords were simplification and standardization. The correlation movement strengthened the institutional church, eliminated the remnants of charismatic spirituality, and reinforced the emphasis on correct behavior over theological innovation.

During and after the 1970s, countercultural ferment provoked conservative retrenchment—though the maverick President Spencer Kimball did come up with a theological breakthrough. In 1978, after two years of fasting and prayer, he announced with relief and joy that he had received a revelation: black men could now be ordained into the priesthood. Mormons had been uncomfortable with their church’s position for decades, but the leadership had dug in its heels: a fundamental departure from scripture could only be justified by a revelation from God. Kimball had the courage to imagine (or experience) one.

But despite Spencer Kimball, the Udall family, and a handful of others, most Mormons joined in the Republican Kulturkampf that dominated the last third of the twentieth century—spearheaded by an awkward alliance of religious and economic fundamentalists. Indeed, the alliance was probably less awkward for Mormons than for Christians. Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party.

Recent poll results confirm the merger of Mormonism and Republicanism. As Lee Trepanier and Lynita Newswander report in LDS in the USA, 65 percent of Mormons identify with or lean toward the Republican Party—15 percent higher than Evangelical Christians and 30 percent higher than the general population. Moreover, they write, “56 percent of Mormons prefer smaller government (compared with 43 percent of the general population), 49 percent of Mormons believe the government should do more for the needy (compared with 62 percent of the general population), and 54 percent of Mormons think the government should do more to protect morality (compared with 40 percent of the general population).” These figures confirm Mormon ties to the Republican Party, but they also reflect a worldview that may not travel overseas too well. The Mormon Moment is characterized by a vigorous missionary movement and a flurry of temple-building in foreign lands, but as Bowman reports, retention rates are low—hovering around 25 percent in Latin America, for example. Part of this stems from the resolute Americanism of the Mormons, their unwillingness to adjust to local customs or tastes. It may be that their faith is peculiarly American in more ways than one.

Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the Mormons’ appeal, especially if they encourage the curious to explore the implications of Mormon beliefs. Terryl Givens has done that with extraordinary care in People of Paradox. The paradoxes in question involve the co-existence of apparent opposites: individualism and authoritarianism, epistemological certainty and endless questing, the exaltation of the mundane and the humbling of the sacred. In every case, the paradox seems to satisfy believers’ contradictory longings—to choose freely and to fit in, to be confident in one’s knowledge but hungry for more, to find the exalted in the familiar and the familiar in the exalted. Older religions might well envy the capaciousness of the Mormon appeal.

BUT THERE IS a price to be paid, as Givens acknowledges with exceptional candor. He observes that “the moment of conversion for Mormons is not generally seen as the recognition of one’s sinful nature and transformation to a state of grace, but the moment of one’s coming into possession of the truths that pertain to external realities.... There seems in Mormonism an emphasis on certainty, rather than faith.” This sure knowledge is accompanied by an imperative to acquire more, but it is all external; there is no inner life at all. “Joseph’s crowned Saints are ... Faustian strivers endlessly seeking to shape themselves into progressively better beings, fashioning worlds and creating endless posterity, eternally working to impose order and form on an infinitely malleable cosmos,” Givens writes. This “dauntingly eternal process of self-transformation” recalls the inner struggle of religious doubters in other traditions—except that there is no inner struggle, no introspection. Small wonder that Mormons measure commitment to their church with labels such as “active” and “inactive” rather than “devout” or lapsed.” To be sure, certainty is a big payoff. But this is a religion with few opportunities for contemplation, few sanctions for stillness.

The collapse of man into God and God into man exacts a comparable cost: the abolition of mystery and transcendence. From Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy in 1917 down to the present, religious scholars have emphasized the mysterium tremendum at the heart of the Jewish and Christian traditions—the miraculous suspension of natural law, the bush that burns but is not consumed. What Otto called the sense of the numinous depends on a certain distance between humanity and divinity (even if that distance is sometimes bridged by intercessory prayer or sacraments). But as Givens writes, “if God is shorn of ineffability and transcendence, or is construed in human terms, how does one find the reverential awe that moves one to true worshipfulness? If Jesus is our ‘big brother,’ how can he be our Lord and God?” More broadly, “in a universe devoid of transcendence and sacred distance ... how can wonder flourish?”

The question leads us back to Weber, who viewed the transformation of the Protestant Ethic into the Spirit of Capitalism as part of the larger disenchantment of the world—the great loss of wonder. Modern capitalism, he argued, required that the world be perceived as inert matter, manipulable into commodities by technicians. A God who makes the world by organizing matter does indeed seem the ideal deity for this economic system. The Mormon Ethic merges easily with the Spirit of Capitalism.

OR AT LEAST with a Spirit of Capitalism. What Weber’s argument left out was the huge irrational dimension of economic life under capitalism—the fantasies and fears, the dreams of overnight wealth and magical self-transformation, that pervade the popular imagination even as rational managers seek to maximize productivity and workers slog diligently. Magic and money are twinned, in our time as they were in the time of the treasure digger Joseph Smith. As the form of money grows more evanescent, evaporating from gold coins into numbers on a screen, its mysterious powers multiply—its power to compel fascination and reverence, to replicate itself indefinitely or disappear without a trace. Money remains enchanting. The magicians of money, the investment bankers and hedge fund managers who claim to have harnessed it to their ends, are as spellbound by its aura as the people who sweep their offices. (Maybe more so.) Indeed, it is possible to see the entire structure of capitalist rationality—the acres of statistics, the mountains of research—as a vast effort to contain the chaotic irrationality at the heart of the money economy. That effort has been more successful at some historical moments than at others. Perhaps the high point of the containment project was the Fordist moment of the mid-twentieth century—the era of generalized prosperity through mass production, of lumbering corporate hierarchies and organization men. This was the closest American society has come to the full realization of the Weberian Spirit of Capitalism.

The Mormons fit into this epoch nicely, though sometimes eccentrically. I once knew a woman who grew up in that era, whose father had converted from Catholicism to Mormonism: he packed the whole family off to the Utah desert and set them to work making bricks, as he had seen the ancient Israelites do in The Ten Commandments. True to their theology, the Mormons have always been about making things, from clay or stone or steel.

This attachment to the material—along with financial discipline—was how they contained their own fascination for the mysterious power of money. They avoided speculation, disdained debt, paid in cash. That was what it meant to aspire to Godhood. One of the most remarkable aspirants during the Fordist moment was George Romney, the Mormon head of American Motors, who organized matter with extraordinary success: he manufactured a compact car, a good one. He served three terms as governor of Michigan and ran for president. It would be hard to imagine a better embodiment of the Mormon Ethic—disciplined achiever, loyal family man, conscientious public servant.

BUT WHAT HAPPENED when money became detached from materiality, as it did (once again) during the last third of the twentieth century? Could Mormons become detached, too? It is tempting to see the Mormon presence at the Harvard Business School as a symptom of disengagement from material production, since business schools are temples of immaterial capital—sites of enchantment for Mormons and Gentiles alike. They are one of the places where young managers learn to press apparently rational methods into the service of money mania. As Clayton Christensen’s work demonstrates, it doesn’t matter what you make as long as you can sell it. The product is nothing, the method is everything.

But a stronger sign of Mormon detachment from making things is the career of George Romney’s son Mitt, who has outdistanced his father politically and (one suspects) financially. A faithful Mormon like his father, Mitt came of age at a post-Fordist moment—the go-go 1980s, when manufacturing had lost its allure and the magic of speculative capitalism was reasserting itself. As deregulation encouraged the formation of private equity firms, Mitt and his partners at Bain Capital occupied the cutting edge of financial innovation. They helped to pioneer the deployment of leveraged buyouts, manipulating other companies’ debts (which Bain itself had created) to make quick profits for themselves. They manufactured nothing, except money. A photograph taken at the time of the company’s founding shows Mitt and his partners posing with their product. Some of them, including Romney, are displaying banknotes; others are stuffing them into their mouths. This is not a picture of disciplined achievement or the productive organization of matter. It is a picture of men in the grip of a money-fetish.

Romney presents himself as the quintessential CEO, the turnaround guy, the expert at re-organizing failed companies. But in fact he is merely another magician of money. He built his career by using the methods he learned at the Harvard Business School to conjure something from nothing—or less than nothing, as he loaded previously solvent companies with debt and stripped them of their assets (including, of course, their labor force). He may use the rhetoric of productivity to reconcile his faith with his economic practice, but the rest of us have reason to fear that we are back in Joseph Smith’s world of confidence men—of smiling scoundrels, earnest frauds, and Nauvoo bogus.

Jackson Lears, Board of Governors professor of history at Rutgers, is editor of Raritan and is the author, most recently, of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (HarperCollins). This article appeared in the November 8, 2012 issue of the magazine.