ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology to investigate an incident in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while also reflecting on what this analysis means for a critique of Harman. The incident was a 2018 announcement by the Church that members should reject the designation “Mormon,” even though this was the most common way to refer to the faith. Most social-science analyses evaluate this instance by either breaking down the Church into subsidiary units or seeing the Church as a symptom of larger forces. Harman, though, would privilege the whole Church as an object, and account for the incident by writing a “biography” of the Church, where various essential aspects of it were at times veiled, at times expressed. Such an approach, it argues, forestalls critical thought but would allow for “other objects,” such as the Mormon God, to also be treated as an object in the world.
