New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century St. George | Larry M. Logue, A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah

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A Sermon in the Desert should be taken seriously by those interested in early St. George and in the workings of polygamy and family life in a small nineteenth-century Utah community. It offers to local history students and writers of new methods a look at issues and an alternative to the traditional chronological or topical narrative approach to community studies.

Larry Logue argues that community studies can improve theory making by generating new theories and effectively applying older theories within the manageable scope of a community framework. In using his study of St. George to examine theories about past American life and the Latter day Saints, Logue sets out to look at five issues: (1) parents’ roles in marriage making; (2) the marginality of plural marriage; (3) the role of theology in the lives of St. George residents; (4) the relationship between theology and family behavior; and (5) the tension between nineteenth-century American culture and the nineteenth century Latter-day Saint anti-American separatism. Included in all of these issues is “the central project… to explain as fully as possible the people who lived for a time in southwestern Utah and produced records that we can examine” (xi). 

Logue sets for himself a monumental, perhaps impossible, undertaking, and it is understandable why in a book of less than 120 pages of text and appendices he is not able to provide a thorough examination of the stated issues. In the attempt, however, he does extend Mormon scholarship a significant distance. His chapter two, “Mor monism and the Worldview,” is alone worth the price of the book. Here Logue explores the relationship between official and popular religion. The brief sketches of official pronouncements and individual beliefs about such issues as sin, the devil, death, the spirit world, resurrection, relationship to God, trials and suffering, con tact with non-Mormons, persecutions, and attitudes on public and private family life indicate that “the people of St. George applying their free will to their beliefs as well as to their actions, made their world view a mosaic of official doctrine and popular emendations. Residents accepted the church’s familial model for social relations, but they saved space for individual action and resisted when the church encroached on that space” (p. 35).

With this interesting introduction to belief and behavior, the rest of the book concentrates on polygamy and family life in St. George. Perhaps most readers will be attracted to the book for its treatment of the perennially popular subject. They will not be disappointed. Logue’s conclusions about polygamy and family life in Utah’s Dixie, especially compared with other contemporary areas in England, Italy, and Belgium, shed meaningful light on nineteenth-century life. 

Instead of relying on traditional census schedules to determine the extent of polygamy, Logue extends his data set to family group sheets and published genealogies, thereby identifying 446 marriages and 2,405 individuals in St. George before the 1880 census. Logue’s method ology, explained in detail (in Appendix B), will interest those applying similar demographic methodologies and demonstrates the author’s thoroughness in con structing his data set. Those deeply interested will want to compare Logue’s methodology with that of geographer Lowell “Ben” Bennion, whose 1984 Journal of Mormon History article, “The Incidence of Mormon Polygamy in 1880: ‘Dixie’ Versus Davis Stake,” reaches essentially the same conclusion as this study about the rate of polygamy in St. George using spatial rather than the period analysis. Logue proposes that polygamy in St. George was much more common than previously supposed. Though 14 percent of St. George families were probably not eligible to participate in polygamy because of their relative inactivity in the Church, still “almost two-fifths of all husbands’ time, nearly three-quarters of all woman years, and well over half of all child-years were spent in polygamy before 1880” (p. 63)

An unexpected discovery is that, for St. George at least, plural marriages had about the same total fertility rate as monogamous marriages. While Church members may have differed with Church authorities on some points, large families were agreed both in official pronouncements and public practice. “Fertile marriages met the duty of Mormons to embody spirits waiting for their mortal experience and at the same time accumulate treasure for their parents’ own after life, since heavenly exaltation depended in part on a large progeny” (p. 87).

Perhaps the most original contribution of A Sermon in the Desert is its examination of mortality. Children suffered a significantly high mortality rate, with just over 70 percent living to age five. The most dangerous time for children was after the first year, when they were weaned from breast milk. In contrast, the death rate for men was much closer to twentieth-century standards. The author suggests several factors that account for this: the St. George climate hindered infectious diseases in adults; adherence to the Word of Wisdom seemed to produce better health and fewer fatal accidents; and women, in time of food shortages, saw that their husbands were fed even if they had to do without. Women suffered a much higher death rate than men, one-fourth of the deaths occurring in child birth. Tuberculosis and malaria also claimed a greater number of women than men. Still, if women were more susceptible to death than men, they were only part of a worldwide pattern. They did not see themselves as victims; in their Mormon view, they were sacrificing for the kingdom and would gain a just reward. 

A Sermon in the Desert is an analytical history based on careful study of nineteenth-century diaries and journals. It is also one of the first book-length attempts to apply current quantification methods to the study of the Mormon past. Readers who expect the book to read like the familiar accounts of Utah’s Dixie by Nels Anderson, A. Karl Larson, and Juanita Brooks will be surprised by its unique style. But though Logue may not have the narrative style of the past generation of historians, he writes with respect, admiration, and clarity. We are fortunate that this pioneering examination of a Mormon community using quantification methods, in contrast to so many other attempts at quantification history, is done so well. Larry Logue has written a book that should excite the professional history community, yet that may be enjoyed by the lay community as well. Such a feat, especially where quantification methodologies are applied, is an all too rare accomplishment in today’s world of historical scholarship. 

A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah by Larry M. Logue (Champaign, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1988), 165 pp., $19.95.