Building the city of God: Community & cooperation among the Mormons

What a tremendous book! Arrington & Co. present a warts and all portrayal of the United Order through all of its phases in LDS history. Dealing frankly with its failures and the causes for those failures, the authors manage to still uphold the principles of the system as inspired, and the failures as necessary stepping stones in the continuing movement among Latter-day Saints to provide social welfare. As someone who does not enjoy or appreciate economics much, I struggled a bit, but the last two chapters, where the link between all of the tremendous efforts put into the United Orders paid off with the Church Welfare System, brought it all together. The end result was actually quite moving. Books like this a his biography of Brigham Young serve to remind why Leonard Arrington was and still is the model faithful LDS historians should aspire to.

I'm glad this book finally made it back into publication. The Mormon community needs to have access to this thoughtful documentation. That the LDS church adopted and then gave up polygamy is well known. The adoption and subsequent abandonment of the United Order is less well publicized. Growing up in Utah, the local myth was that the saints weren't worthy and that it would eventually return when we had finally become a true Zion people. It seems there is more to it than that. What is missing from this book is what made me give it 4 rather than 5 stars. There needed to be a final chapter entitled "Lessons Learned" that could summarize and draw some practical lessons from the experiences described. Why did some succeed and some fail? We know from the excellent documentation some of the descriptive characteristics, but no general principles emerge. The United Order was a grand experiment -- or rather a series of experiments. To simple document what happened and then walk away is insufficient. In part, it is because the system was disavowed -- almost as if those sections of the Doctrine and Covenants hadn't ever been written that called for being one in temporal things -- and therefore became a dark part of history, no one was interested in learning about it. This book should have addressed the issue. We