Retrenchment

Retrenchment, in Saints — No Unhallowed Hand, is Brigham Young’s anti-extravagance, simplify-your-lifestyle campaign — his call for “all Saints, himself included, to retrench, or simplify their lifestyles.” Brigham lamented that well-to-do Latter-day Saints had developed “extravagant lifestyles, sometimes at the expense of their spiritual well-being,” and declared “the idle habits, the wasteful extravagance of men, are ridiculous in our community.” For him extravagance bred competitiveness, took time from spiritual development, and was “a sign of worldliness, incompatible with the cooperative spirit of Zion.”

The book frames retrenchment as part of an institutional immune response to wealth. Brigham’s “worst fear” was not persecution but prosperity — that the Saints would “get rich… forget God… wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church.” Discovering gold in California, his counterintuitive response was that digging up “chunks of gold… would ruin us.” Retrenchment, the anti-gold and anti-extravagance sermons, and the cooperative economics of the United Order are the connective tissue to Working Toward Zion, the Law of Consecration, and the Prosperity Gospel thread — economic discipline as a defense of “Seek ye first the kingdom.”

Where this appears

• Saints — No Unhallowed Hand — Brigham Young’s anti-extravagance / simplify-your-lifestyle campaign, tied to the cooperative Zion economics that follow gold-rush prosperity; an institutional immune response to wealth.