In the 1980s and 1990s, inspired by the work of scholars like David D. Hall, Robert Orsi, and Karen McCarthy Brown, students of American religion began to drift away from the study of formal theology and toward what they called “lived religion.” Best understanding of the impact of religious belief on the lives of believers required not analysis of texts scholars and leaders might produce, but rather how those ideas manifested in the behavior, practice, and stories that members of any given tradition might embrace.
In the introduction to his Terrible Revolution, a study of apocalypticism in the Latter-day Saint variant of the Mormon tradition, Christopher Blythe argues that this method has not been sufficiently applied within Mormon studies. He may well be right. With few exceptions (like the work of Susannah Morrill, for example) work on the history of doctrine and theology tends to trot out the usual...
