After Happiness: Living with Faith in a Time of Crisis By Natalie Brown Greg Kofford Books, 2026
At the heart of Natalie Brown’s new book After Happiness is a trajectory that will feel familiar to many readers: After years absorbing the promise that success and happiness will come to anyone who lives the gospel, a young adult learns that personal, economic, and societal problems reveal the truth to be much more complicated. This is not to say that After Happiness is a story about disillusionment. Rather, After Happiness is a declaration that faith—and faith communities—can withstand heat and hurt and turmoil, and that reducing the gospel to a formula for success does believers a disservice.
After Happiness combines elements of multiple genres—part memoir, part theology, and part cultural criticism. Brown opens her book in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at a time of historic optimism (before the War on Terror and the Great Recession), plus personal optimism as she prepared to start college. In this era, Brown notes, “formulas for happiness that were specific to post-war America” had become a key lens through which Latter-day Saints viewed their experience of gospel living in the late twentieth century (8). Brown quotes many general conference sermons to illustrate a pattern that she identifies as “happiness formulas.” For instance, in 1995, Lynn A. Mickelsen promised Saints that “joy will come to us as we keep God’s commandments.” And in 2002 Richard G. Scott observed that “some individuals go through life consistently doing the right things”; as a result of this faithfulness, Scott claimed, “[t]hey seem happy, even enthusiastic about life” (21). The positive correlation is clear in each conference quote: Commandment keeping and gospel living bring happiness and success. Brown follows this rhetoric in Latter-day Saint discourse into the 2020s, highlighting the lasting impact of “happiness formulas” on Mormon thought.
Notably, the formulas continued to appear in conference talks even as American optimism took a hit as the twenty-first century opened. Threats to optimism came in many forms, including political turmoil (notably the September 11th terrorist attacks, wars, and partisan divisions), economic crises (especially the 2008 market crash and its aftermath), and a pandemic that endangered human health and relationships. Each of these crises, Brown argues, revealed cracks in the “prosperity gospel” mindset that had seeped into Mormon culture. Whereas Latter-day Saint rhetoric had featured “reassurances that gospel living would lead to earthly happiness . . . the loss of our collective prosperity requires us to reconsider how we understand the promises made to those who follow the gospel and the ways in which we worship as a community” (9).
To do this work of reconsidering, Brown hypothesizes about the effects of patterns in general conference sermons that imply a formulaic approach to happiness. She points out, for instance, that LDS leaders began using the phrase “plan of happiness” much more often in the late 1900s and early 2000s than they had previously (18–19). This trend accompanied promises that Latter-day Saints would find happiness and success through covenant living. As a result, Brown worries that many Church members began to self-silence, or to silence others, believing that any admission of their own unhappiness would come across as a lack of faith. In fact, in her work as a writer, Brown herself has received pushback from critics who have accused her of being too “negative” or “a complainer” because she acknowledged unpleasant experiences (44–45).1 Culturally, Latter-day Saints have assumed that “performing the signifiers of a happy life” was “evidence that one is living righteously” (41).
But Brown insists that the gospel offers something much deeper than these shallow performances of prosperity. Rich communities of faith, and strong connections to God, hinge on love rather than on happiness. And love of God and of neighbor is, as Jesus said, the crux of the gospel (Matthew 22:37–40).
The kind of love these commandments require, however, almost always shows up in pain rather than in happiness. Brown argues that Latter-day Saint theology of neighborly love is rooted in “mourn[ing] with those that mourn” (Mosiah 18:9), and she notes that rejection and persecution cut through LDS history.2 Given the theological and historical prevalence of Latter-day Saint suffering, then, Brown concludes that Church members must engage with “negative” qualities like sorrow, doubt, and fear. In perhaps the most personal chapter of After Happiness (chapter 4), Brown pairs her own doubts, pains, and losses with those of the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi, who kept faith despite family dysfunction, financial ruin, and prolonged homelessness. “Our task,” Brown reasons, “is the same one given to our fathers before us: that we keep moving forward with faith on a path that is often disappointing and yet full of solace if we are willing to give up our scripts and let God prevail” (128).
Chapter 4’s exploration of personal pain through a scriptural lens reflects one of the core strengths of After Happiness: The book blends theory and lived experience. Whenever Brown analyzes the national and global crises that challenge LDS prosperity-gospel assumptions, she anchors that analysis with illustrations from her own personal crises. In particular, Brown reflects on the ways her father’s health challenges, job loss, and early death led her to reexamine the happiness formulas she often heard at church. Additionally, her experiences starting, pausing, and restarting a PhD program (with a reluctant detour through law school) also brought her into conflict with many assumptions about her role as a devout Latter-day Saint wife and mother. As Brown explores both global and individual narratives, she highlights scriptural passages that reiterate how messy gospel living can be. “Tragedy . . . is the normal state of affairs” in the Book of Mormon, she argues (108). And if such faithful figures as Nephi and Alma and Mormon suffered despite their devotion, why would Latter-day Saints expect that living the gospel would bring nothing but peace?
Brown’s critique of Latter-day Saints’ formulaic approach to happiness is comprehensive and nuanced. For example, she analyzes restrictive assumptions about gender roles within the Church, noting that the idea that a family’s happiness depends (at least in part) on a mother not working outside the home is no longer economically feasible for many faithful families. But she also points out that “[t]he twentieth-century Mormon feminist question of whether women could or should balance career and family reads like a luxury of the past in our less prosperous times” (5). Her personal experiences further complicate things. She writes about receiving criticism from Church members for pursuing academic and professional goals while parenting (even though, she notes, many men would be praised for doing so). She also presents the brutal realities of a job market that offers little hope for humanities PhD candidates, and the challenges of trying to balance her career opportunities with those of her spouse. Working outside the home is an economic necessity, not a choice, for many Latter-day Saint women. But working outside the home can’t happen without suitable jobs on the market. It is impossible to root happiness in formulas of gender roles or career choice; there’s just too much that’s out of our control.
What a happy Latter-day Saint individual, family, and community looks like defies formulas, Brown argues, and so it is time to challenge those formulas.
Perhaps one of the best indicators that Brown is on to something with her challenge of “happiness formulas” lies in the fact that it leaves one wanting more. Personally, I wanted to see more discussion on two issues. First, in what ways were late twentieth-century LDS happiness formulas part of broader patterns in American Christianity? After all, Latter-day Saint rhetoric linking righteousness to happiness echoes that of Norman Vincent Peale—the Christian minister turned self-help guru whose dominant media presence shaped generations of American Christian thinking about morality and happiness. In fact, I looked this up: LDS Church leaders quoted Peale multiple times in general conference addresses and Ensign messages during the late 1900s.3 And the phrase “the power of positive thinking”—which was also the title of Peale’s bestselling book that claims to teach biblically-based optimism as the basis for success in life—appears in several Church publications.4 Peale is only one example of a prominent influence on American ideas about Christian happiness, but After Happiness engages very little with non-LDS sources. Brown does an excellent job analyzing how Latter-day Saint leaders shaped Mormon ideas about happiness; but who or what shaped these ideas among Latter-day Saint leaders?
Second, there is room for more discussion about the ways that Latter-day Saints outside of America experience the happiness formulas Brown dissects. In a few places throughout the book, Brown acknowledges that “many of the cultural norms that we experienced as being synonymous with living the gospel were never possible outside of the United States” (5). However, the bulk of the book is firmly grounded in American Mormonism. Of course, this grounding reflects an important reality: For most of the twentieth century, most of the prominent Latter-day Saint leaders have been Americans who spoke from their own cultural standpoints. But because After Happiness aims to complicate the cultural assumptions that have pervaded Mormon ideas about what “living the gospel” looks like, more examples from outside of the United States would be welcome.
No single book can cover everything, though, and After Happiness does the hard work of starting conversations that challenge unspoken assumptions. Brown’s analysis feels right and relevant, and is a strong foundation on which future reflections about these patterns can build.
Greer Bates Cordner is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Boston University School of Theology.
Art by Harald Slott-Møller (1864–1937).
Brown also notes this pattern more broadly, including observations about Church-sponsored social media campaigns that focus on publicly sharing happiness (#GiveThanks, #LightTheWorld), and the implicit pressure to keep negative experiences private—see pp. 64–67.
The entirety of chapter 2 explores these themes.
Two conference addresses by the same man cite Peale’s positive reviews of the Mormon exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair (especially his admiration for a film about the plan of salvation)—see Bernard P. Brockbank, “The World’s Fair: A Report,” Conference Report (October 1964): 11–13; and Bernard P. Brockbank, “Missionary Work—Our Way of Life,” Conference Report (April 1966): 16–18. Two other conference addresses, and one First Presidency message in the Ensign, focus instead on Peale’s discussions about immorality as a main cause of human and societal suffering—see N. Eldon Tanner, “Threat of Moral Decay,” Conference Report (April 1965): 18–22; David O. McKay, “Only One Standard of Morality,” Conference Report (April 1966): 105–110; and Marion G. Romney, “America’s Promise,” Ensign, September 1979.
As recently as last year, the Liahona described one young adult’s personal story as a discussion about “the power of positive thinking.” See Abby Larkins, “How Changing My Thoughts Changed My Life,” Liahona, February 2025.
This is the most beautiful, Greer. It lives me with more questions to ponder and clarifies my thinking. It's such a gift to have a reader like you.