Somewhat Secular Saints: Modernity, the LDS Church, and the 1918 Flu Epidemic

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s response to the 1918 flu epidemic provided an opportunity for the church to demonstrate its modern, secular character—and, by implication, its legitimacy as an American religion. By “secular,” I mean that in public, church members separated the category of religion from the category of medicine and subordinated the former to the latter. As they navigated the epidemic, Latter-day Saints strove to embody a vision of modern white American citizenry toward which they had been working since at least their arrival in the Great Basin in 1847. But even in this crucial moment, secularization was uneven. The 1918 flu epidemic, and Latter-day Saints’ responses to it, illuminate a range of ways that Latter-day Saints were modulating their religious practice and working out how to do religion “right” in a modernizing US—while not fully surrendering their identity as a distinctive religious group.