Mormon Wrestling: A Genealogy

This talk explores the lives and careers of “Brother Jonathan, The Battling Preacher” and “Don Leo Jonathan, The Mormon Giant” — two professional wrestlers with Mormon gimmicks, with careers spanning 1930 to 1980 — as a way of understanding the commingled history of religion and popular culture in America. Their careers are as good a metric for the life of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 20th century as any other that we have. Perhaps even better, they demonstrate how religion and wrestling work together—how they shape and reflect each other — in the modern world.

Sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and the School of Arts & Sciences.