Revelatory economics: Discerning prudence and realizing theosis in Latter-day Saint southern Alberta
Date
2026
Authors
Campbell, C. William
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Abstract
This dissertation examines how Latter-day Saints in southern Alberta use revelation as an epistemological technique for discerning prudence in social-material matters. Drawing on long-term participant observation with Latter-day Saints in Cardston, Alberta, Canada, I show that revelation functions not only as a spiritual experience but as a structured knowledge practice for deciding what to do in matters as diverse as household finance, welfare, entrepreneurship, and municipal policy. Revelation is not an alternative to rational calculation but a technique for bringing together rational calculation, scripture, affect, and social obligations (among other things) in the pursuit of discerning prudence.
I argue that the best way to understand how and why Latter-day Saints subject economic decisions to revelation is as a way of cultivating what I call divine-human capital, the capacities that constitute a person’s latent characteristics as divine beings in potentia. In Latter-day Saint theology, humans are already the same kind of being as God, distinguished only by degree. Exaltation names the gradual realization of this inherent divinity and is a form of human theosis. Within this continuous human-divine framework, discernment through revelation becomes a means of developing attributes such as obedience, contextual judgement, and covenantal alignment, capacities understood as both inherently human and, when fully realized, constitutive of exaltation. By cultivating these attributes through the practiced deployment of revelation in even mundane moments of economic discernment, each decision becomes part of the incremental realization of theosis. The revelatory technique therefore both expresses an inherent subjectivity and increments the individual towards a fuller realization of that subjectivity.
Out of this analysis of revelation in LDS economic life I develop a broader analytic. Revelatory economics describes economic epistemological practices that both disclose and cultivate a subjectivity. Rather than treating decisions about work, care, or finance as merely instrumental, the analytic reveals how people use techniques of discernment that draw on an understanding of who they already take themselves to be and to become that person more fully. In this framework, economic reasoning is simultaneously epistemological and ontological, a way of knowing what is prudent and of shaping the self toward a desired form.
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Latter-day Saints, personal revelation, anthropology of economics, religion and economy, lived religion, anthropology of Christianity, anthropology of Mormonism, Mormonism, Alberta, ethnography