Cannell, “The Blood of Abraham”
Abstract: For Latter-day Saints, blood is one important idiom of kinship, and of Christian worship, but not in the ways one might expect. This paper asks how the logic of the resurrected and âperfectedâ body inhabits both registers, beginning with the surprisingly âbloodlessâ LDS Sacrament Service. I then explore the paths by which Latter-day Saints navigate meanings of blood kinship in tension, especially attribution to the âAbrahamic lineagesâ. I argue, in agreement with Armand Mauss, that contemporary Mormonism has largely shed racist readings of âbloodâ, but suggest that both lineage and cognatic kinship as mystery remain salient through a âreduplicative logicâ which collapses physical inheritance, agency, and revelation. This illuminates both similarities to and differences from conservative American Protestant positions, including understandings of the life of the unborn fetus and the rights and wrongs of stem cell research.