C. William Campbell

Topic

Revelatory Economics: Discerning Prudence and Realizing Theosis in Latter-day Saint Southern Alberta

Department of Anthropology

Date & location

• Friday, January 16, 2026
• 10:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B007

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Department of Anthropology, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Paul Bramadat, Department of History, UVic (Outside Member)
• Dr. Reuben Rose-Redwood, Department of Geography, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Hillary Kaell, Department of Anthropology and School of Religious Studies, McGill University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Athena Madan, Department of Sociology, UVic

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Latter-day Saints in southern Alberta discern prudence in economic life through revelation. 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 calculation, scripture, affect, and social considerations (among other things) into relation.

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 realized in their maximalized form, contribute to the conditions of possibility for 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 discernment as a practice that both discloses and cultivates subjectivity. Rather than treating decisions about work, care, or finance as merely instrumental, it highlights how people use techniques of discernment to draw on an aspirational sense 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.