The blood of Abraham: Mormon redemptive physicality andAmerican idioms of kinship

Abstract

For Latter‐day Saints, blood is one important idiom of kinship, and ofChristian worship, but not in the ways one might expect. This paper asks how the logic of the resurrected and ‘perfected’ body inhabits both registers, beginning with the surprisingly ‘bloodless’LDSSacrament Service. I then explore the paths by which Latter‐day Saints navigate meanings of blood kinship in tension, especially attribution to the ‘Abrahamic lineages’. I argue, in agreement with Armand Mauss, that contemporary Mormonism has largely shed racist readings of ‘blood’, but suggest that both lineage and cognatic kinship as mystery remain salient through a ‘reduplicative logic’ which collapses physical inheritance, agency, and revelation. This illuminates both similarities to and differences from conservativeAmerican Protestant positions, including understandings of the life of the unborn foetus and the rights and wrongs of stem cell research.