Race and the Making of the Mormon People

Abstract

The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this book argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three “original” American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, this book threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. The Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God’s design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. This book also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.

Not a Country or a Stereotype: Latina LDS Experiences of Ethnic Homogenization and Racial Tokenism in the American West

“…Overall, Latinas reported a strong preference for worship or socialization within pan-ethnic Spanish-speaking congregations, stating that Latinx wards provided a space for differentiating ideas of how gendered cultural and religious practices can be embodied and performed. Along with more agnostic Anglo-Americans who are unaffiliated with religious groups, immigrant groups are changing American religion by breathing new life into US congregations (Mueller 2017;Nabhan-Warren 2014;Marti 2015). These findings are affirmed by other bodies of scholarly research, which show that immigrants also have the power to change and influence US religious communities (Lawson 1998;Chafetz and Ebaugh 2000;Yang and Ebaugh 2001).…”

“…Modern interpretations suggested that Latin Americans and Indigenous descendants were of 'Lamanite' heritage, whereas groups like Pasifika or Polynesian communities were spiritually adopted into Nephite lineages (Aikau 2012). Religious Studies professor Max Perry Mueller (2017) discussed in his book Race and the Making of the Mormon People how the LDS leadership attempted to dually prove the Church's social and spiritual exceptionalism as the one true religious community but fell far from racial and ethnic universalism and inclusion. Many authority figures began teaching that pre-mortal sins or association with particular tribal lineages cursed other races (Mueller 2017).…”

“…Religious Studies professor Max Perry Mueller (2017) discussed in his book Race and the Making of the Mormon People how the LDS leadership attempted to dually prove the Church's social and spiritual exceptionalism as the one true religious community but fell far from racial and ethnic universalism and inclusion. Many authority figures began teaching that pre-mortal sins or association with particular tribal lineages cursed other races (Mueller 2017). Around the time my parents were born, in the early 1960s, it was common in US church spaces to hear race and racial hierarchies discussed as a natural consequence of pre-mortal decision-making rather than a colonial social construct.…”

On Earth as it is in heaven: A study of nineteenth‐century religious communal experiments in the United States

“…Mormon Studies scholars including Matthew Grow, John Turner, and Matthew Bowman are leading this new direction in LDS scholarship (Bowman, ; Grow & Neilson, ; Turner, ). In recent years, scholars have also moved toward exploring issues of race and gender within LDS history, particularly the often‐overlooked involvement of women and African Americans in the church (Cope, Easton‐Flake, Tait, & Erekson, ; Mueller, ; Newell, ; Reeder & Holbrook, ; Reeve, ). In general, the scholarship on the “big three” communities continues to evolve to incorporate broader trends in scholarship that focus on the history of capitalism, gender, and race in U.S. history.…”

Disentangling binaries and the rise of Lamanite studies

“…Reeve () adds a fascinating backdrop of external pressures that sought to strip Mormons of their own whiteness and likely contributed to the early Saints' efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans. In the face of such marginalization, Max Muller's Race and the Making of the Mormon People () argues that Native and African American Mormons found ways to define themselves within the Anglo Mormon power dynamic even as they were written out of (or misrepresented in) the larger narrative. That broader trend of erasure in the theology spawned similar trends in archival content, historical texts, and even popular lore.…”