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This chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book, the most important being the need to reconsider the way historians study the priesthood in the United States. It also suggests new avenues of research into the lived religion of the Roman Catholic clergy in many historical contexts.

This chapter looks at some developments in the study of the religion of ancient Israel itself and its impact on the modern study of Israelite religious beliefs. Israel and Judah were two of the small nation-states which occupied a particular part of the territory which is called Syria-Palestine. What has come down to us in the Old Testament represents a kind of official version of religion. Priesthood and religious beliefs were the most significant divisions in Israelite society though priesthood in Israel never established itself as a sacred caste. Besides the priest, the king claimed to be the vital intermediary between the god and the community. According to the books of Kings it is clear that the king was the effective head of state and no mere figurehead and his control extended to the area of religious practice.

To explore the foundations of Mormon religious authority, this chapter introduces the idea of a Mormon prophet, demonstrates how the production of the Book of Mormon established Smith’s claim to authority, and show how his ongoing revelation created a hospitable environment to maintain his prophetic authority hierarchically within his church. This will lay the foundational concepts for how Smith developed and maintained a hierarchal role while also developing a democratic priesthood. It will also set the scene for how an inclusive populist priesthood could eventually embrace a hierarchical ecclesiology, demonstrated by Kathleen Flake’s work. The chapter will begin to define what a Mormon prophet looks like and how Joseph Smith establishes his prophethood and authority through the charismatic practices of communing with the dead and producing modern revelation and ancient scripture. It will establish that this kind a charisma founds authority and creates a space in which prophetic authority can exist charismatically without the grounding of an institution.

The third foundational narrative that secured Joseph Smith’s religious authority surrounds the founding of his church, the Church of Christ. It marked Smith’s prophetic voice extending beyond his personal charisma into the institutional realm of an enduring religion. Scholars have observed that Mormonism is a kind of test case for Max Weber’s theory of the routinization of charisma since at Mormonism’s founding the religion was heavily tied to Joseph Smith’s prophetic power, and such movements do not often survive the death of their founders. Weber insists that charismatic authority can easily falter in its fragile state and that such leaders rarely form long-lasting organizations. Yet Mormonism did not fade after Smith’s death in 1844. In fact, Smith was obsessed with organization from the point that he merged his charismatic prophethood with the bureaucracy of church governance in a form of hierarchical democracy. A sustainable and manageable priesthood hierarchy was not possible until he grounded his tradition within an official church where ordinations could be performed and ordinances carried out with the legitimating force of the institution. The church would form its own ecclesiastical structure that was maintained through Smith’s prophetic voice and periodically reevaluated with changes in geography, demographics, and politics. The long-lasting priesthood order led to a new phase in Mormonism and religious authority in the antebellum United States. This chapter charts early Mormonism’s development into an institutional state, beginning with the 1829 charismatic revelations for the design of the church and ending with the 1830 establishment of the church and the official ordination of Joseph Smith as its prophet. The chapter traces the trajectory of how Smith’s voice maintained its singular value while securing an institutional status within a church, how he democratized his gifts through the priesthood while monopolizing his own prophetic authority.

This chapter charts the emergence of Mormon priesthood through Smith’s restoration scripture and describes the institutional priesthood that defined Smith as the president of the high priesthood and ultimate appellate judge within a structure that came to include both a higher and a lower priesthood. The chapter explores Smith’s narrative of authority extending back in time before the garden of Eden and forward in time to Joseph Smith in the last dispensation. With the power of his prophetic voice, Smith recast the Bible and added the book of Moses, the Book of Mormon, and his own revelations to the revelatory foundation of his church. The chapter further charts the emergence of the term priesthood in Mormonism when Joseph Smith began to connect the Bible with his new restoration scripture that marked a genealogy of priesthood back to Adam. Through this lineage of power, Smith defined an authority traced from patriarch to patriarch, preceding hundreds of years of Catholic succession. Smith became the fountainhead of all things Mormon, distributing and sustaining all authority and power in a well-organized religious system.

This chapter explores Joseph Smith’s overarching narrative of priestly power by identifying a continuous chain of authority back to Adam in Mormon scripture. A crucial component of that chain was the idea of administrative keys that link priestly authority among the New Testament apostles with priestly authority in Joseph Smith’s church. The chapter focuses on how an emerging narrative about Peter, James, and John determined Mormon administration and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This apostolic narrative enabled Joseph Smith to empower the Mormon clergy with authority without compromising his unique position within the church as its president and prophet. On the one hand, Smith centralized power in himself, like a monarch over the kingdom of God. He alone held all of the keys of full church administration. On the other hand, he empowered regional parallel sites of authority of priests and high priests by distributing some keys freely to others, who also distributed them regionally. The chapter further explores the notion of the Mormon kingdom of God and how the apostolic mythos about Peter, James, and John enabled and maintained a long-lasting Mormon hierarchy. The chapter explores the mythos historically as an evolving narrative, to demonstrate how it came to represent the foundations of Mormon authority.

This chapter problematises common assumptions about East/West and Islam/West divisions relating to religion, society and the state. It examines the concrete positions and functions of religion and religious institutions in public life in the historical practices and political thinking of Byzantine, medieval and early modern European, Abbasid and Ottoman societies. It devotes a special study to the historical realities of Muslim jurisprudence. This chapter proposes to treat secularism as a complex and objective political, social and cultural dynamic allied to global processes of modernisation, rather than a checklist of stable features which can be judged exist or to be absent in any given society. It proposes that the common idea that some societies are by nature receptive to secularism while others are not, is irrelevant to the issues that arise in concrete studies of secularism, and that secularism is never complete or unalloyed.

By tracing the development of liturgies and rituals, and attempting to ascertain the work they accomplish, the Mormon universe with its complex priesthoods, authorities, and powers becomes comprehensible. After brief summaries of the individual chapters in the volume, this introduction overviews the liturgical terrain from Joseph Smith’s earliest revelations to the present.