" James J. Strang, innocent target of religious persecution—like all his personae, this one proved to be a mask. Yet it was exactly those masks—those endless layers of ambiguity—that gave the man his charisma, "

― Miles Harvey , The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch