336: Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier: Ben Park

Is the USA a democracy, a nascent theocracy, or a mobocracy?  Perhaps it's all of those things and all at the same time.   The Nauvoo experience gives us a strong sense of the unsettled ideological, economic and religious arguments that remain unresolved in the United States.  Powder Keg is what the United States feels like in 2020, and after reading Kingdom of Nauvo that covers a short period of American religious history between 1839-1846, this book brings some of these centuries-old quandaries about America into perspective. Faith and violence are twinned in this remarkable telling of a doomed social and theocratic experiment to find a religious utopia under the leadership of the Joseph Smith.   Plodding and boring this story is not.