Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence

by Joanna Brooks

If the church progresses in a continuous, linear path by divine guidance, then contemporary realities and understandings replace those from the past, which will eventually be forgotten. Obsolete ideas and practices simply don’t count any more, even if they originated as divine revelations. Where discrepancies appear between the present and the past, there is no point in reminding ourselves about the past. Especially if an event in the past is embarrassing, then recalling it and dwelling on it, even if only to repudiate it, merely confuses the matter. Such negative thinking has no place in the Lord’s kingdom. If harm has resulted from earlier ways of thinking, then everyone involved should forgive everyone else and get on with constructing a better future. Apologies or ringing declarations of disavowal should not be necessary, since few peoples or individuals have histories free of offense against others, and thus few are in a position to demand apologies. With time, memories of these offenses will fade automatically, and we will all be better for it. Meanwhile, if we have not made the requisite changes, let’s not stir up useless and uncomfortable old memories.

that “selective” “forgetting” of past wrongs is enough to resolve them; that repentance need not involve the assumption of responsibility and reconciliation, let alone restitution or reparation; and that the discomfort that comes with individual and collective soul searching is “useless” and potentially harmful. It fosters a limited morality that prioritizes the comfort of the majority and institutional gains over truthfulness and humility.

One of them has been the development of discursive strategies used by Mormons to maintain theocratic sovereignty in the face of outside pressure even after the abandonment of open polygamy. These strategies include nontransparency in public relations, cultivation of distinct “insider” and “outsider” narratives of belief and practice, and careful public speech to protect private knowledge. An ethos privileging opacity, institutional loyalty, hierarchy, and guardedness developed in LDS Church institutions (including Deseret Book and Brigham Young University) as Mormons attempted to preserve a residue of theocracy and difference even as they were assimilated into broader US society.

But Hinckley’s strategic public relations approach prioritized ease and confidence over accuracy.

A different approach might have acknowledged the shortcomings of prior Mormon leaders, the imprint of racism on American history in general and Mormon history in particular, its lasting impacts on institutions and individuals, and the moral importance of working now and in the present to do better.

Where he did apply gentle pressure was in addressing to Wallace (and by inference the broader Mormon and non-Mormon audience) an instruction that sounded like encouragement: “Don’t worry about those little flicks of history,” Hinckley said, smiling. In so doing, he made small (“little”) and insignificant (“flicks”) the problem of anti-Black racism, minimizing as a past “worry” the impact of racism on Black lives in Mormonism and beyond and indicating no responsibility on the part of white Mormons (or others with similar histories of discrimination) for their past practices or of the impact those practices had on the Mormon faith and the spiritual lives of its members.

He did not say “we were wrong.” In fact, his entire mode of presentation—tone, facial expressions, tempo—telegraphed an undisturbed sense of “rightness.”

Church members know how to rank the value and reliability of the venues through which information comes. Church members are officially discouraged from using sources not published by the LDS Church as members develop Sunday school lessons and lay sermons (“talks”) to give in Church meetings and pursue personal study.

What is said in public on many issues can be understood as a tactical concession to preserve the Church’s theocratic sovereignty.

have also fueled speculation on which communications are tactical rather than revelatory. Progressive members hungry for change will scour press releases and internet content for any indication that feeds their hopes, while orthodox members will refuse any information that does not confirm an orthodox worldview unless it is delivered as revelation from the prophet himself.

Bott taught and spoke in willed ignorance and defiance of these—not just once, to the Washington Post, but semester after semester to Brigham Young University students.

Other non-Mormon media just felt hostile because insular Mormon communities were not accustomed to the robustly interrogative quality of normal civil discourse. Mormons had our version of our story and it worked for us.

met by resistance from fellow Mormons who said the essays were not official and merely [church] Public Affairs pieces.”23 Reeve’s experience documents the reality of the split between “insider” and “outsider” narratives internalized by LDS Church members, with the implication being that the Public Affairs office as bureaucratic functionaries might generate narratives to manage outsiders’ impressions and inquiries but that these were not the same as essential truths revealed to LDS prophets and held sacred within the LDS community.

Claiming one’s own history of oppression and seeking to use shared oppression as the basis for a relationship to a community of color without taking responsibility for one’s own culpability in the oppression of that community of color is a rhetorical act scholars have called “racing for innocence.”