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The logic of the court allows each petitioner to present themselves as individuals outside of history, not as citizens whose standing obtains and takes shape in relation to fellow citizens with a shared history. Adopting a more responsible notion of innocence may also have prevented the court from barring even limited legal remedies like affirmative action on the grounds that they harm white “innocents” who bear no direct responsibility for racism,
A simplistic version of white Protestantism has supplied US institutions with a limited moral reasoning that stands in place of and prevents the kind of collective work that would be required to consciously dismantle the legal, economic, and social infrastructure of white supremacy.
(typically defined by heteronormatively married sexual monogamy, polite manners, and deference to authority) promise moral exculpation from the wrongs of history.
Why not theologians? Shouldn’t they be the first to attack this evil?
I hope that others working in different domains of white American Christian tradition will ask how rituals like confession, baptism, and worship produce public spectacles of innocence and redemption, construct moral responsibility, and promise a way out of the deeply complex and coimbricated histories of racialization and discrimination.
Reference Pillars of the Earth
To this day, church-attending Mormons report that they continue to hear from their fellow congregants in Sunday meetings that African Americans were the accursed descendants of Cain whose spirits due to their lack of spiritual mettle in a premortal existence were destined to come to earth with a “curse” of Black skin. One can make this claim in many Mormon Sunday schools without fearing an adverse comment.
Like most difficult subjects in Mormon history and practice, the anti-Black priesthood and temple ban has been managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth telling, determined silence, and opportunistic redirection.
We told ourselves that new, more cosmopolitan (albeit white) Church leaders would endorse tolerance, love, and compassion; newly sensitized Church media would begin to feature images of Mormonism’s growing diversity; and old doctrinal folklore would fade out with the passing generations. The past did not have to be reckoned with, undone, or confronted. It could simply be outlived if we turned our faces toward Zion.
It freed white Mormons of responsibility for self-education, searching reflection, and personal and institutional change. Most distressingly, it allowed openly racist white Mormons to feel comfortable if not emboldened in Mormon religious contexts.
This extremism is not representative of mainstream American Mormonism, but it does reflect the extent to which mainstream American Mormonism is a comfortable habitat for white supremacy—from its everyday expressions in white privilege to the extremist expressions of figures like Stewart.
when predominantly white Mormon communities found themselves under pressure, at key decision-making nodes, they would elect, as had W. W. Phelps in Independence, to choose their relationships with other whites in positions of power over loyalty to or solidarity with Black people.
The Church, on this point, assumes not the responsibility to direct. The laws of the land recognize slavery, we do not wish to oppose the laws of the country. If there is sin in selling a slave, let the individual who sells him bear that sin, and not the Church.
All ye philanthropists who struggle to Correct the evils of society! You’ve neither rule or plummet. Here are men Cloth’d with the everlasting Priesthood: men Full of the Holy Ghost, and authoriz’d To ‘stablish righteousness—to plant the seed Of pure religion, and restore again A perfect form of government to earth.
Just like Wilcoxs playing church
discernment, and rightness have been among the most powerful forms of social capital in Mormonism, and Coltrin arranged his recollections to claim all three for himself.
White Mormons in key decision-making roles actively and intentionally privileged
white relationships, loyalty, solidarity, and “rule” over Black lives and Black testimonies at the expense of theology, integrity, and ethics but to the benefit of institutional growth and dominion. This is the definition of white supremacy.
When a predominantly white religious community casts its lots, chooses whiteness, and designates its Black scapegoats, history shows that it attributes these outcomes to the will of God—just as Aaron did in Leviticus. White Christians begin to tell ourselves that although Black suffering is regrettable, it is inevitable: “The poor will always be with us,” or so God himself ordained.
Not having Jane Manning James in the front row to look them in the eyes meant that the LDS Church leaders who took the stand at major events in the Mormon Tabernacle could tell the Mormon story as they wished, freed from the constraints of historical accountability.
“Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
How B. H. Roberts came to espouse a view of American history according to the Confederacy and its white supremacist intellectuals is not entirely clear but may stem from his service as the leadership of the Southern States Mission in the 1880s or from his activity as a populist Democrat in national political circles.
LDS lay priesthood curriculum relied on Confederate history.
If Christian fundamentalists had beat back the encroachments of science and history and retreated from ethical engagement with racial issues by establishing through “systematic” argument, publishing, and distributing a new orthodox consensus around biblical inerrancy, Mormonism’s conservatives in the
early twentieth century made a parallel move by establishing through “systematic” argument, publishing, and institutionalizing a new orthodox consensus around the inerrancy or infallibility of Mormon prophets.
whether the end of polygamy was a survival tactic or truly the will of God.
In the 1940s and 1950s, LDS Church leaders including J. Reuben Clark advocated for the racial segregation of Utah hospital blood banks so that white LDS people would not have their blood “mixed” through transfusions from black donors and lose eligibility for priesthood, a practice that held in some areas in Utah through the 1970s.
Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark, and Mark E. Peterson encouraged local LDS leaders to join and support ordinances and organizations that would prevent Black citizens from moving into white neighborhoods in Utah and California.
Brazilians of European descent, Church leaders in Brazil developed “circulars” directing missionaries to screen potential converts for Black African lineage by scrutinizing phenotypic features—hair, skin, features—at the door when tracting and to avoid teaching potential converts of African descent. The missionary lessons as delivered in Brazil also included a special “dialogue” scripted to detect African lineage and to teach converts that “Negroes” were not eligible for priesthood. Converts of African descent who persisted had their baptismal certificates marked with a “B” for Black, “C” for
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McConkie’s case remained in print with only minor revisions in the book Mormon Doctrine until 2010.
the Mormon movement developed not only a possessive investment in whiteness but also a possessive investment in rightness that it used to insulate itself against dissent from within the Church and pressure from without. No matter the cost to its own integrity or dignity, the Church and its members would do as God wanted, and had always wanted, and as prophets had always taught—or so we were led to believe. The possessive investment in rightness that emerged from Mormonism’s possessive investment in whiteness uses prophetic infallibility to excuse, cover for, and render innocent the white
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investment in whiteness but also a possessive investment in rightness that it used to insulate itself against dissent from within the Church and pressure from without. No matter the cost to its own integrity or dignity, the Church and its members would do as God wanted, and had always wanted, and as prophets had always taught—or so we were led to believe. The possessive investment in rightness that emerged from Mormonism’s possessive investment in whiteness uses prophetic infallibility to excuse, cover for, and render innocent the white supremacist choices of Mormon individuals and
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Many mainstream white churches maintained silent agreements to “overlook” such issues or to embrace religious figures who harbored unethical views on race. Good Christians, after all, were expected not to bring contention or division into the house of God.
This embrace entailed a silent agreement between white Mormon performers and their white audiences. This chapter focuses on this silent agreement between Mormon performing acts and white American audiences: how it worked, why it mattered, and how it enabled white Mormons to continue uncritically in their anti-Black religious beliefs and practices. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Osmonds enacted a spectacle of innocence that normalized anti-Black racism as an unremarkable element of a “wholesome” morality. Their performances engaged audiences in a silent agreement to “forget” racism and to
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choir’s religious character served elementally in this bestowal of innocence by gesturing toward a transcendence of racial issues that cost whites nothing and left segregation and white supremacy completely intact.
“If a church can make blacks second-class Christians, then it’s easy to justify making them second-class citizens.”
“We believe the Negro, as well as those of other races, should have his full Constitutional privileges as a member of society,” the statement continued, “and we hope that members of the Church everywhere will do their part as citizens to see that these rights are held inviolate.” But it carved out a separate domain under constitutional law for “matters of faith, conscience, and theology.”
The fullest criticism came from the weekly magazine Christian Century, which called the Church’s separation of civil and religious equality an unacceptable “moral dualism”
Walter’s lead-in—“if I don’t ask it people will wonder why I didn’t”—suggests something had shifted in the long-standing silent agreement of mutually affirmed innocence between overtly religious Mormon performers and the white American public, enough at least that it felt to Walters that her professional credibility could be impacted if she didn’t ask the question.
highly observant and politically conservative Mormons like the Osmonds would have considered public expression of dissent evidence of impiety.
“I don’t know why but that’s the way the Lord wants it,” reiterates his commitment to the orthodox Mormon view of prophetic leadership as inerrant, as God’s own foregone conclusion.
experience reflects the ongoing struggle within the Mormon movement between those who sustain the inerrancy of Church leaders by keeping silence around elements of Mormonism that have been morally objectionable and those who believe that Mormonism’s better angels require us to keep seeking and naming and repairing our own shortcomings as a people.
white Christian churches develop means for managing and disciplining adherents who do take on anti-Black racism in a serious and discomfiting way.
But with his own Church Romney had struck a silent agreement: he would conduct himself as he felt his principles demanded in the realm of politics, and he would allow them to conduct Church business as they saw fit. Maintaining public silence on discriminatory Church policies while working assiduously to advance desegregation and anti-discrimination in the public sphere was Romney’s way of striking a tenuous balance between honoring his conscience and honoring religious vows he had made to “consecrate” his time and resources to the Church and sustain its leaders.
Because information and publication in the Mormon movement has been from the 1950s to the 2000s largely managed by the institutional LDS Church, and because the Church itself does not have a professional clergy or professional theological schooling that can support reasoned discussion and conflict, these statements have never been a part of any LDS curriculum or canon.
restored to modern Mormon memory a far more nuanced and complicated historical picture and in so doing challenged the silent compact between the Church and its members not to betray racial innocence or foster critique.
“Stewart, I cannot believe it! You wouldn’t presume to command your God nor to make a demand of a Prophet of God!” and characterized the letter as a “sincere but ill-advised effort in behalf of the welfare of a minority.”
Their respective approaches reflect a significant difference in the two men’s theories of change in the Mormon movement. Romney subscribed to the silent agreement that he would not openly express opposition to the Church’s anti-Black segregation and sustain not only its leadership but also its assertion of innocence.
as a sharply differentiated religious minority that maintains a strong boundary against “the world,” orthodox Mormonism is highly allergic to external scrutiny and pressure, even more so in light of historic persecutions and common mockeries of LDS people. Pressure from the outside may in fact engender retrenchment.
but white Church members themselves who were morally hobbled by their complicity and duplicity.
To go along with the silent agreement not to challenge Church leaders on their racism was to surrender even further Mormonism’s founding impulses of truth seeking and radical differentiation in the service of twentieth-century white hierarchical institutional security.
“We do not have the priesthood for self-aggrandizement or to be used to oppress anyone. There is no priesthood of God that authorizes any one man to oppress another or to intrude upon his rights in any way.”
