Natalie Brown. After Happiness: Living with Faith in a Time of Crisis. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2026. 160 pp. Paperback: $18.95. ISBN: 978-1-58958-846-2.

Reviewed by Chad L. Nielsen

The cultural and theological landscape of modern Latter-day Saint thought has long been dominated by a mid-century, post-war triumphalism—a structural optimism that seamlessly fused the “Plan of Happiness” with the economic expansion and domestic ideals of suburban America. In her timely and provocatively titled volume, After Happiness: Living with Faith in a Time of Crisis, Natalie Brown argues that this formulaic, transactional model of faith is not only historically contingent but increasingly untenable in our contemporary era of systemic decay. Writing with a sharp, clear voice, Brown invites the reader to look beyond the commodified “scripts” of prosperity and instead to construct a theology capable of enduring structural collapse. The result is a concentrated, occasionally anxiety-inducing, but ultimately therapeutic recalibration of the relationship between faith, community, and existential disappointment.

Deconstructing the Mid-Century “Plan of Happiness”

The first part of After Happiness provides a sobering, realistic diagnosis of the socio-economic and political crises currently dismantling the structural scaffolding of American life. From the erosion of democratic institutions and the hyper-stratification of wealth to the post-pandemic isolation of hollowed-out civic spaces, Brown maps a landscape in which the traditional milestones of middle-class success have been rendered largely inaccessible. For Latter-day Saints, this national crisis is experienced as an institutional and cultural rupture.

Brown’s primary analytical target is the late-twentieth-century church culture that conflated obedience to gospel formulas with the guarantee of earthly happiness and domestic stability. Under her lens, the 1995 “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” is historically situated as a document that elevated a complementarian model of gender and labor that relied on the unique, fleeting economic affordances of post-war America. When these formulas are preached as eternal imperatives while the material conditions required to realize them evaporate, the result is an unacknowledged crisis of faith. Brown argues that this transactional “prosperity theology” has left members structurally ill-equipped to handle grief, neurodiversity, or financial failure, often shaming those who cannot perform the required aesthetic of domestic bliss.

Susa Young Gates and the Erasure of Plural Marriage

One of the book’s most original and sophisticated chapters utilizes a historical-literary analysis of early Latter-day Saint fiction to demonstrate how these domestic scripts were originally constructed. Brown examines Susa Young Gates’s novel John Stevens’ Courtship—originally serialized in 1895–1896 and revised for book publication in 1909. Gates wrote during the traumatic, transitional decade following the Woodruff Manifesto, when the Church was under intense federal pressure to abandon polygamy and assimilate into the mainstream American political economy. By comparing the two editions, Brown reveals a deliberate, strategic erasure. In the original serial, plural marriage is presented as the natural, divinely sanctioned resolution to the novel’s romantic conflicts. In the 1909 revision, however, Gates systematically expunged these polygamous elements, retroactively constructing a narrative of monogamous domesticity designed to prove Latter-day Saint respectability to a hostile nation. Brown uses this case study to show how Latter-day Saint culture has historically sanitized and revised its own history to survive external crises. This historical perspective is invaluable; it reminds the reader that the “traditional” gender and family norms currently treated as static, eternal doctrines were actually pragmatic, twentieth-century innovations designed to navigate a specific historical transition.

Nephi’s Off-Script Exile

To find a theological model for our current era of transition, Brown turns to the Book of Mormon, offering a provocative reinterpretation of Nephi. Traditionally presented as the untroubled archetype of unwavering obedience, Nephi is reframed by Brown as a deeply traumatized exile who must continually adapt his faith as his expectations of happiness are systematically dismantled.

Brown draws a stark contrast between Nephi and his older brothers, Laman and Lemuel. In her reading, Laman and Lemuel’s rebellion is not born of simple wickedness, but of a rigid, conservative nostalgia for the institutional security and wealth of Jerusalem. Because they fail to let their theological frameworks evolve, they remain fixated on a past that has already been destroyed, ultimately damaging their own future in the process. Nephi, conversely, exhibits the “psychological flexibility” required to go “off script.” He obeys commandments that violate his inherited ethical boundaries—most notably the slaying of Laban—and learns to find “tender mercies” and a more expansive, international covenant in the midst of a barren wilderness and a fractured family. Nephi’s resilience lies in his willingness to mourn, to accept that his descendants will fail, and to find meaning in a relationship with God that is entirely decoupled from earthly prosperity.

Conclusion

After Happiness is a courageous and essential work of cultural criticism and philosophical theology. By refusing to retreat into defensive apologetics or easy, positive platitudes, Natalie Brown has provided a mature, clear-eyed roadmap for Latter-day Saints navigating the cultural and economic ruptures of the twenty-first century. It is a book that successfully rescues the lived experience of grief, disappointment, and structural injustice from the margins of church discourse, reframing them as the very places where a genuine, non-transactional discipleship is forged. For anyone seeking a faith that is larger than the post-war American dream, After Happiness is an inspiring guide.