This project considers questions of religious othering in the contemporary United States through the lens of popular post-religious narratives. These narratives salaciously depict mistreated women in order to demarcate certain religions as deviant; authors and pundits then use t…
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As more and more millennials disaffiliate from fundamental religions, a sense of confusion and loss, feelings of isolation, and even a lingering sense of betrayal seem to follow. The process of disaffiliation is an under researched area within the psychology of religion. The pre…
Employing interdisciplinary literatures on migration, kinship, race, place, and religion, this dissertation explores the literal and metaphorical establishment of a city called Zion in a zone of migration between Peru and Utah. Zion, in its Mormon instantiation, is central to th…
Utah consistently ranks poorly in measures of gender equity in the United States. For example, 30% of women in Utah County, Utah begin a college education, but do not finish their degree. Of interest, Utah County also has a high density of members of the Church of Jesus Christ o…
This project interrogates the weaponization of heteronormative marriage in processes of state formation and in relation to practices of polygamy. This dissertation explores how gender and race have been used at the service of the white settler-colonial state via the criminalizat…
Joseph Smith published his first known recorded history in the preface to the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. In it, he recounted the loss of the earliest portions of the book’s manuscript due to theft in a scheme the future prophet believed was concocted by the devil. Smith…
This paper examines the intersections of faith, patriarchy, feminism, and institutional failure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Members of the faith believe the paternal structure of the organization is God's plan. The paper focuses on home, church, and the p…
Wingfield S. Watson (1828–1922) was a fiercely loyal apologist for the Mormon prophet James J. Strang, a successor to Joseph Smith. In the aftermath of the succession crisis that followed Smith’s unexpected death, Strang attracted hundreds of converts to his theocratic commune o…
This study qualitatively examined the experiences of transgender individuals who also identify as active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (N=10). Researchers took an interpretive phenomenological approach to elicit factors which allow trans Mormon folks…
Religious education involves learning about religion and the possibility of having religious experiences. Although measuring religious knowledge can be fairly straightforward, assessing whether students are having religious experiences can be more difficult. The purpose of this …
The question of women’s agency in gender-traditional religions has been the subject of much scholarly attention over the past four decades, but little research has been done focusing specifically on Latter-day Saint women and their identities and roles within the structure and p…