Mormon Wrestling: A Genealogy – Documentary Screening with Filmmaker David Walker

A sneak preview of David Walker’s documentary film, Mormon Wrestling: A Genealogy.  

David Walker is the J. F. Rowny Chair in Religion and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on the intersections of religion, settlement policy, technology, and popular culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Walker was a UVA Mormon Studies Library Research Fellow in 2023. Using the David O. McKay diaries available in our Prince Collection, Walker studied the relationship of the former Church president to Mormon wrestler Jonathan Delaun Heaton, one of the main characters of his documentary. This primary source helped Walker better explore how the LDS Church and Mormon professional wrestlers and their fans negotiated their identities, especially as the church and wrestling became global institutions in the twentieth century.

Film Summary:

Mormon Wrestling: A Genealogy offers a cultural history of religion and professional wrestling in the twentieth century. Focusing on the lives and careers of Don Leo Heaton (who wrestled as “Don Leo Jonathan, The Mormon Giant”) and his father, Jonathan Delaun Heaton (who wrestled as “Brother Jonathan, The Mormon Missionary”), the film pays special attention to the ways in which they presented as “heels” (villains) or “faces” (heroes) in auditoriums throughout North America and abroad, and to the ways in which such representations proved usable (or not) to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints writ large. By demonstrating how different religious personae “played out” in different times and different places, the film maps a particular parallelism between professional wrestling and the Church itself, as both moved from predominantly regional, mainly western circuits to national- and global stature. “Latter-day Wrestling” narrates the face-turn of the Church in twentieth-century American popular culture.