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“Fast from that Which is Not Perfect”: Food Abstinence and Fasting Cures in the Kingdom of God

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15549399.56.2.03

1554-9631

Cristina Rosetti,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Content warning: This article contains references to disordered eating and bodily harm.Beginning in March 1935, Orlean Kingston documented her rigorous fasts and visionary experiences that revealed the proper diet for the kingdom of God.1 In her first entry on the subject, she wrote, “We fasted every other day. I grew very weak. One night after fasting all day I was in such misery from hunger and weakness I could not sleep nor rest. I prayed twice for strength, spiritual strength when it seemed as though 2 [Clyde Gustafson] came home from 1’s [Elden Kingston] place with a bowl of food appearing something like candy.”2 A dark spirit struck her as she ate the food, and a painful sound buzzed through her ears. “I fought and prayed to be delivered,” she wrote. “It seemed like it would choke me. It left as quickly as it came. I thanked my Heavenly Father for the deliverance and the spiritual food he had allowed me to eat. I slept till morning still feeling as though I had eaten a meal.”3 From the day of this revelation onward, Orlean developed a fasting regimen that became a common practice in her religious community.In her work on American Christianity and diet, R. Marie Griffith has argued that food abstinence is one of the most “enduring and elastic devotions aimed at bodily discipline.”4 Food abstinence was historically a method of bodily discipline that transformed the body into a vessel more capable of spiritual insight. This was the case for Orlean, whose diary entries reveal a lifelong interest in food abstinence for its spiritual and health benefits. Orlean Kingston never hid her poverty, a possible material explanation for her intense interest in food and proper nutrition. However, she never mentioned this as the direct cause of her fasts. Her primary concern for the body was rooted in her faith and revelatory experiences. Bodily and spiritual well-being were intimately connected, and her food preferences, or lack thereof, stemmed from divine encounters.In the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS), the small Mormon group incorporated in 1941 by Orlean's brother, Elden Kingston, food abstinence became most controversially associated with a forty-two-day fast. During his tenure as the leader of the group, John Ortell Kingston, “Brother Ortell” as followers faithfully called him, planned frequent forty-two-day fasts and instructed his followers to do the same. Charts and outlines of the regimen instruct to fast one week dry (no water), one week with water, two weeks on grape juice alone, and thirty days (at least) on raw food. Those who participated tracked their physical and spiritual “goals” for their fast along with the outcomes. Written instruction and testimony of the fast credited male leaders of the community with the revelation for the fast and the spiritual strength they received from participation: “Brother Elden talked about fasting in the first of the Order. He likened our bodies to a blacksmith shop. When things come in to be fixed we are working on something else so we put the things in the corner instead of fixing it.”5 John Ortell Kingston fasted for an extended period at least once a year. Other accounts include the groups’ patriarch, Charles W. Kingston, who cited the fast as the reason for his long life.6 Always present in the accounts was the testimony of priesthood leaders who received temporal, physical, and spiritual knowledge to better lead the faithful. Notably absent are the experiences of women.7This article reframes the DCCS's fast not as the product of male revelation but as the embodiment of a woman's religious life. While Orlean is mostly invisible in the historical record outside of devotional literature, she produced a discernible impact on the community. Like women mystics who came before her, Orlean was both celebrated and chastised for her devotional food abstinence and subsequent visions.8 The sister of the DCCS's founder, Orlean spent years fasting, receiving subsequent visions, and documenting dreams associated with food abstinence. Through the later years of her life, Orlean painstakingly experimented with what she believed was the ideal diet for communion with the divine, a more complete Word of Wisdom. Her diaries reveal a woman whose embodied devotion often confused her small religious community and whose belief in a perfected body raises contemporary questions about religious women's pathologized faith. Had Orlean been a Mormon man, she might have been a prophet. Nevertheless, her largely invisible and ultimately broken body is the foundation for one of the DCCS's most controversial marks of the Kingston devotional body.Orlean Harriet Kingston Gustafson was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 28, 1933, a year after her husband was excommunicated for teaching and practicing polygamy after the Second Manifesto. She was twenty-one and charged with “apostasy from the teaching as set forth by the present authorities of the Church and insubordination to church ruling.”9 Although she was not permitted to speak during the proceeding, she left resolved in her mission to always follow the teachings of Joseph Smith. Like others at the time, Orlean was not deterred by the hearing and continued religious engagement with Mormonism. On the night of her excommunication, she met Joseph Smith in a vision. He offered Orlean the distinct impression that “all we had to do was follow Brother Joseph but to get to the same place he was we would have to die like he did.”10 Smith spoke to Orlean and other people in the dream about the required sacrifice and dedication of Mormonism. After receiving his comments, she met Smith at the edge of a body of water, got in a boat, and crossed to the other side. Smith, Orlean believed, remained her guide outside the church he founded.By the time of Orlean's disciplinary hearing, excommunications of polygamous families were increasingly common. Charles W. Kingston, Orlean's father, was one of the individuals excommunicated for practicing polygamy. Kingston was a homesteader in Idaho Falls who “had been watching conditions in the L.D.S. Church and saw that all was not well.”11 According to Orlean's account of the events, her father believed that the Church had “apostatized and broken the everlasting covenant” when they announced the end of polygamy, a principle Orlean believed was a fundamental element of her faith.12 Kingston was not alone, and soon he became one of the many polygamous Mormons who came into communication with Charles Zitting, John W. Woolley, and Lorin C. Woolley, men who eventually led the earliest iteration of the Mormon fundamentalists movement.13 Through the recollections and publications of these men, as well as extensive time spent studying Church history, Kingston became convinced of the centrality of plural marriage and the authenticity of John Taylor's 1886 revelation. He further believed he was among the men called to perpetuate plural marriage into the Millennium. He affirmed this during both his meeting with his temple president, Elder George F. Richards, and later at his disciplinary hearing. His comments sealed his fate in the Church.Shortly after the disciplinary hearing that ended his Church membership, Kingston received a vision of God the Father, who appeared to him clothed in a plain dark suit. The vision was a watershed moment for Kingston and a moment that shaped the community's attire of plain coveralls for successive generations. Kingston recalled, “Strength and power flowed from him through my right arm into my body. He began to talk to me and the words were powerful and sweet. Such words I had never heard so powerfully expressed before, and I wondered who this powerful stranger could be. He made it known to me that my action before the High Council was approved.”14 Like other men excommunicated in the 1920s and 1930s for the practice of polygamy, removal from the institutional Church did not necessarily mean the end of his Mormon identity. Rather, his excommunication from the LDS Church was the catalyst for his longstanding involvement in the fundamentalist movement.15Kingston's vision came at a difficult time. Most notably, his Idaho Falls homestead failed and forced him into industrial labor in the railroad industry. The precarious financial situation led him to southern Utah, where he met J. Leslie Broadbent, the leader of the Mormon fundamentalist movement, to inquire about participation in the consecration effort that sought to revive nineteenth-century Mormon communitarianism.16 Despite the Kingston family's interest, Broadbent turned them away.17 In her later recollections of this experience, Orlean penned a diary entry about the Broadbent ordeal, centering the spiritual elements of the refusal: If a smaller key is turned by using it under the wrong direction how much greater and quicker would the priesthood be taken away if used under wrong direction and how much harder to repent and receive it again. Look how easy the L.D.S. Church lost it and the Broadbent faction in S.L.18 This is why it is so important to always keep the spirit of the Lord and be able to distinguish between the two spirits no matter how close the evil one is able to come and appear as the spirit of the Lord. The evil one has a duplicate for everything that the Lord has and we must be able to judge between so we will not be deceived.19In Orlean's telling, the priesthood guides the faithful in the right direction. The right direction for Orlean's family was toward a unique priesthood claim, not the extant Mormon groups. There is little contemporary information about why the United Order in southern Utah denied the Kingston family.20 One current member of the DCCS explained that, while the family sought participation in Broadbent's organization, Elden Kingston simultaneously claimed priesthood authority that countered Broadbent, leading to mutual disinterest. Contemporary recollections from descendants of both groups corroborate Orlean's inclination that the denial was a matter of contested authority.The denial by Broadbent did not deter Kingston from his consecration mission. As happened to many polygamous Mormons, internal and external economic conflict devastated the Kingston family. The Great Depression created economic difficulty that caused particular hardship among large families.21 This hardship was among the initial catalysts for the early fundamentalist movement's interest in reviving Joseph Smith's vision for Zion.22 Internally, polygamous Mormons who sought to retain the practice of polygamy were excommunicated from the LDS Church and did not qualify for the Church's new welfare program.23 A lack of national and institutional support made polygamous people particularly vulnerable when the nation struggled. Cooperative living was the solution.24Charles Kingston was the first in his family to receive a visitation by God. However, it was not until his son Elden began receiving revelations while seeking guidance for his consecration effort that an organization formed around the family.25 As recorded in “The Sacred Things of the Order,” a short document that provides a brief history of the visitation, Elden Kingston took his scriptures and blanket up a mountain near his home to pray in an act that amounted to the “greatest striving that had ever taken place between God and man.”26 During this meeting, Kingston was overcome by the spirit of God and recorded, “I got an enduring testimony that this order that he started is in deed the Kingdom of God that he would establish on the Earth and his second coming.”27 As Kingston prayed on the mountain, a divine personage met him in the silence. “Sometime during the night he was awakened by someone standing at his side. He was lieing on the ground. There was a light radiation from this Heavenly Being. This being had him read in the 42nd Chapter of Isiah, the first 8 verses.”28 Through this revelation, Elden became assured of his position as the rightful man called to lead God's people through the world's end.According to accounts of this event from the group he founded, the personage charged Elden to organize the kingdom of God.29 The outcome was the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS), first organized in 1935. The organization formally registered with the state of Utah in 1941. The stated purpose was the promotion of “the economic welfare of the membership,” who could “increase their talents and abilities by utilizing their united funds and efforts for the purchase, distribution and production of commodities and the performance of sources in their interest in the most economical way.”30 In fulfilling this mission, the Cooperative believed they could establish lasting peace and abolish bloodshed. In her account of a Bible class led by Elden the year after the formation of DCCS, Orlean explained the timeline of the formation in terms of biblical prophecy: 1935 marks the time when the seed was sown. 1936 marks the time when it is up above the earth and can be seen. It took one year for the seed to germinate.360 = time+720 = times±180 = half a time1260 years of darkness1830 Church started–1260 time, times and half a time570 A.D. When the gospel left the earth570+1290 2nd date in Daniel, time of darkness 1860570+1260 first date in Daniel1820 when Church commenced1860–183030 years difference in dates in Daniel1335 blessed is he who comes at this date.1335+ 5701905 When Michael stood up and began to plow the ground.1936 is date on the great pyramid. It says “even the angels in heaven will not know this date. It was revealed to Brother 1 after this work commenced in 1935.1936 —It had grown till people of world noticed it. 1905+ 30 years difference in dates in Daniel1935 The date the Kingdom of God started in the earth.31A new dispensation began when the personage bestowed authority on Elden, amounting to something that positioned itself as more of a re-Restoration than simply another of many movements.32Over time, the emerging group reimagined Elden Kingston as the prophesied figure who would “set in order the house of God” and the one who held the priesthood authority necessary to seal plural families after the Second Manifesto.33 On Elden's twenty-sixth birthday, Orlean recorded an account of a young man who went to the mountains and undertook a period of striving, a term Orlean used as shorthand for extended prayer and fasting. During this period, “He was shown that Brother 1 would become the one mighty and strong and would work under the direction of the prophet Joseph Smith. . . . He was also shown that as soon as he was prepared he would be called to go on a mission to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God. We hope that many more such men soon come into the order for in this day the Lord will gather his elect from all over the earth.”34 As the man with the sealing keys and full claim to authority, Elden established a strict hierarchical leadership system based on obedience to priesthood.35Later doctrinal development based on Elden's visions that shaped the trajectory of the new faith only furthered the Cooperative's divergence from other Mormon fundamentalist groups, especially the Woolley group. Most notably, Elden claimed a direct lineage to Jesus Christ, which afforded him unquestionable standing in the group.36 His apparent genetics was not a new argument among Mormon leaders and afforded him “unlimited health” according to faithful members of the group.37 The health claim, however, did not always materialize. In 1948, Elden was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following year and was succeeded by John Ortell Kingston (Ortell Kingston, or “Brother Ortell”), who married Orlean's daughter, making his first wife his niece. With this marriage, Ortell initiated a history of close family marriages intended to “perfect his own bloodline.”38Interrogation of Kingston bodily practice often begins and ends with the allegations of incest that stemmed from Ortell's marriages and eugenic experimentation.39 However, in the quest toward physical and spiritual perfection, regulations regarding the body were not only sexual. Fasting and dietary restrictions became a hallmark of the DCCS and associated with the creation of Kingston embodiment. The body became the site of DCCS religious production and identity through these religious practices. Explaining the importance of “green drink,” a thick comfrey concoction consumed by members of the group, one former member explained, “I remember hearing sermons from Ortell and other people about how sacred and important green drink was. . . . It really became entangled with your spirituality and strength of faith.”40 Like green drink, fasting and dietary restriction, even to the point of death, became markers of the most righteous.Fasting became part of Mormon practice in 1832 when Joseph Smith received a revelation for the Saints to “continue in fasting and prayer from this time forth.”41 The Latter-day Saint body strengthened through fasting, and the mind became “more active” to better focus on spiritual things.42 From the earliest years of the faith, the physical and spiritual were intimately connected, most exemplified by Smith's teaching on a material deity. The faith collapsed any divides between the carnal and spiritual that remained among the Protestants around them and created a religion marked by embodiment.43 As part of the early fasting practice, Latter-day Saints instituted a fast day, one Sunday per month designated for food abstinence and collecting an additional offering for the poor. On these days, Latter-day Saints gathered to offer “worshipful, inspirational accounts of God's blessings in their lives,” strengthened by their weakened bodies.44Like others in the nineteenth century, Mormons “blended their own sense of spiritual discipline with material concerns about health and longevity.”45 In addition to his teachings on fasting, Joseph Smith received a revelation in 1833 that shaped contemporary Mormon beliefs about diet and health. The revelation, known as the Word of Wisdom, outlined a system of health based on moderation and an emphasis on grain and seasonal produce. According to R. Marie Griffith, Mormon dietary restrictions and fasting became the “most lasting and, at least until very recently, most vigorous model of regular Christian fasting in the Anglo-American world.”46 Currently, most members of the LDS Church interpret the revelation as a restriction on alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Outside the LDS Church, the Mormon health code expanded in some groups that added insights based on continuing revelation.47 These expansions included increased attention to fasting.While a member of the LDS Church, Orlean followed the Word of Wisdom and favored fasting as a spiritual and physical discipline. However, her practices around food changed in 1935 when she recorded a revelation she received that outlined a more complete Word of Wisdom based on foods that were most and least beneficial to the body and soul. The revelation was not an isolated instance. For the rest of her life, Orlean received visions, revelations, and dreams that offered her direct spiritual encounters to guide her life. These experiences were, at times, so powerful that they influenced the group beyond her immediate family. Orlean's diaries do not provide much information about the development of her interest in fasting. However, early dreams and revelations on the subject corresponded with the loss of her child, Elaine, who died at seven and a half months of age.48 In these early years, her food abstinence and interest in health correlated with a desire to have more children, “Last night I dreamed that for 9 months I ate soaked wheat mixed with whole wheat flour with milk on for breakfast. Some raw vegetables for dinner and fresh fruit for supper. At the end of this time my fourth baby was born. She came within 15 minutes of the first warning without any pain. It seemed like it was easy to eat this way.”49 While a fourth baby did not arrive as revealed in her dream, a concern for the body, future posterity, and the spiritual benefits of a correct diet remained a lasting part of her religious life.Central to Orlean's transcribed revelations were strict fasts and a raw diet of foods in their “natural” state. She gave particular attention to avoiding salt and honey and promoted mono meals, using “only one food for each meal.”50 Her spiritual insight into food ultimately led to detailed instruction on a complete Word of Wisdom diet that would sustain the well and heal the sick. By preparing food with “singleness of heart,” Orlean learned that her fasts would “be made perfect.”51 In this way, food preparation and combination became a spiritual science that nurtured a fit body to accommodate a fit soul. In 1940, she outlined the complete Word of Wisdom diet as follows: The food combinations are:Don't mix fruits and starches together.Don't mix starch and protein together.Don't eat of any one food until you are full.Leave the table hungryThis brings us back to the following combinations. 1 starchy vegetable and 2 or more non starchy vegetables, protein and non starch and fruit,Wheat for breakfast.Vegetables for dinner (starch with non starch)Fruit for supper.Don't mix two starchy foods such as bread and potatoes or winter carrots and potatoes or rice and potatoes etc. or rice and bread.52In addition to the above restrictions, Orlean learned that God called people to eat at least half of their food in an “unrefined” state. This excluded bread and milk, foods that frequently appeared in her diaries. By following this outline, the individual could receive the “added strength even strength promised in the word of wisdom . . . as the scriptures tells us and we will have health.”53While Orlean did not hold the priesthood, her revelations on food and health were not only for her. The corporeal nature of her visions demonstrates the complex way women's spiritual insight acts within Mormonism. Through revelation, she learned that the health code she received would become the model Word of Wisdom for the entire kingdom of God. In one dream, she saw herself eating foods that were not compliant with her revealed diet. As she ate bread and sweets, she saw her brother Elden, who spoke to her in words of affirmation, “It seems hard sometimes to be the only one in the order to be eating this way (meaning the raw foods) and sometimes I start craving other food so hard I go and take some.”54 In response to her difficulty, Elden assured her, “When Our Heavenly Father sends an innumerable company of angels to join the church of the first born down to work in the fields with us then you'll have plenty of company in your eating.”55 She saw everyone rejoice in eating according to her diet. With time, she learned through revelation, “Knowledge of health is coming to this people and I am reminded of a prophecy that says, ‘The day will come when it will be a sin to be sick because of the laws of health that everyone will know.’”56 Orlean was not formally a “prophet” or holder of priesthood keys, but her prophecy included everyone.Orlean held authority through her influence on the people around her. One such woman was “Sister Beecie,” a member of the DCCS whom Orlean described as a “very spiritual woman and servant for all.” She confirmed Orlean's revelatory instruction through her dreams.57 Orlean explained, “Sister Beecie dreamed: When secondary foods such as milk, eggs, butter and cheese are eaten then those cells have to change it and in so doing many of them die. But when live food such as fruits are eaten raw, then these cells multiply very fast[.] Secondary foods are not included in the word of wisdom on this account.”58 Although referenced as sick in several of Orlean's recollections, Sister Beecie learned about the diet given through revelation and developed an interest in the promised spiritual insights.Orlean's dietary restrictions did not convince everyone. For some, the diet raised more questions than answers. Early in her devotional practice, leaders in the DCCS grew concerned and encouraged her to eat more than small quantities of raw foods. In one instance, her brother and spiritual leader Elden approached her and instructed her to “eat everything.”59 This confused Orlean, who believed she “learned by the spirit” to avoid foods that were counter to her revealed Word of Wisdom.”60 Elden's concern is unsurprising and mirrors religious men in history who sought to modify women's devotional practice out of concern for “weaker” bodies’ participation in strict ascetic practice.61 This concern, at times, was internalized by women, who then cautioned others about the practices that initiated their religious experience. Similarly, Orlean often encouraged other women in the community to eat as they wished and not follow her ascetic practice. By the time Elden confronted Orlean, she had been on her strict diet for two years. Out of obedience to her priesthood leader, she began to eat as Elden suggested.Orlean's obedience was short-lived. The night Elden approached her, she received a revelation explaining her leadership's concern. From her dream, she learned that the problem was not necessarily her diet. The problem was the confusion it caused among her coreligionists. This revelation materialized in the growing discord in the community over her diet. In one instance, she upset her mother, who felt “the children were starving because they desired to eat as I [Orlean] did.”62 In response to the disagreement with her mother, Orlean took to prayer and received a vision that instructed her against confusion and making people feel bad for their food preferences. In the dream, she saw her mother, who explained, “You sure made me feel bad when the children didn't eat. It sure hurt me.”63 She sought her mother's forgiveness and, like she did when confronted by her brother and priesthood leader, began to eat more than raw food. Like her obedience to Elden, this was similarly short-lived.Considering Orlean's continued fasting, Elden tried a second approach. Six years after she began following her Word of Wisdom, he attempted to explain that all foods are acceptable so long as they are consumed in limited quantities.64 Limited food became an obsession for Orlean, a woman preoccupied with food. Today, some argue that this new preoccupation led to her early death. Her dreams confirmed Elden's instruction. “I see now the meaning is that we can eat of every kind of food if we use mainly the word of wisdom foods and eat awful light on the others (secondary foods and meats). In other words he [Elden] was anxious that I be awful careful, be careful and eat light of those that are not so good for us. Concentrated foods are to be eaten sparingly according to their concentration. Natural foods can be eaten at all times.”65 In this instance, her revelation coincided with her spiritual leadership. Over time, she ate less food.Despite her interest in Elden's opinion about diet and belief in his role as the priesthood authority on earth, her revelations eventually came into conflict with his instruction. In these moments, she cast aside her leader's spiritual insight in favor of her own. “In other words if I receive light and truth and don't follow it and continue on in my old way then this light would go to my condemnation. Before I would be sinning in ignorance but now know of my sins for, we are to make our bodies as tabernacles of cleanliness where the spirit of the Lord will delight to dwell.”66 Based on her diaries, food and health was the only area of her life where she chose to counter her leader's revelation with her own.Like Catherine of Siena and early women mystics who used rigorous food deprivation as a source of spiritual insight and subsequently justified their food abstinence by spiritual revelation, Orlean became increasingly convinced that her abstinence was not purely spiritual. In some instances, she went so far as to liken incorrect food consumption to suicide.67 As she learned from her dreams, fasting was a medicine that healed the sick and strengthened the well. One evening, after an intense day of work, she had three glasses of milk, one at the home of a DCCS leader.68 After she arrived home, she began to worry that she had not done the right thing by consuming milk. She went to sleep but awoke with a severe illness. A dream of a Fourth of July parade accompanied her illness. She had the impression that, unlike the others in the dream, she was not supposed to be in the parade. It was fine for the others to participate but not for her. If she participated, she would become gravely ill. The interpretation followed: “Thinking about this dream I got up and I felt well again except that my head still ached. I prayed and told the Lord I understood and would try and do right. I knew that I had done wrong by taking the milk. . . . I knew that I had done wrong by taking the milk.”69 Despite her leader's warning to avoid a restrictive diet, Orlean was not supposed to eat everything. Confusion among other community members was not a concern for her. She was not like the others.Despite her leader's concern, Orlean increasingly relied on her revelations to guide her food intake, cutting her food consumption to about twelve ounces of food per meal.70 Despite the weakness and pain that stemmed from her diet and long workdays, which she acknowledged, she believed her body was “renewing itself” through her fasting and diets.71 She explained, “This key is the key to the word of wisdom. It has been given to me, now I can take it and use it and receive health. . . . Thank you Father in heaven that you have seen fit to bestow upon me this wonderful knowledge and help me to put aside the worldly things that I may gain the health and strength and hidden treasures of knowledge w