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

by Joanna Brooks

Racism is not a character flaw or extremist conduct; racism is the centuries-old construct that marked people with dark skin as available for exploitation—for advantage-taking of their lands, labor, bodies, cultures, and so forth.

policy. It is the fact that minoritized people must do additional spiritual and emotional work every day to safeguard their wholeness and the wholeness of their children.

And it is the fact that these and so many other systematic inequities persist while white people sit in church and call it good.

it is not easy to look at our Sunday meetings and see how over time they have conditioned us to accept Black death and su...

we need to evolve our discussion of the role American Christianity has played in securing and sustaining racial privilege more broadly.

Progressive leaders and scholars of white American Christianity like Jim Wallis and Jennifer Harvey have urged white Christians to recognize racism as a national

not only “reconciliation” but also “reparation.”6 My goal is to move the conversation yet another step by exploring how the predominantly white venues and denominations through which we have pursued the sacred and hope to pursue mercy and justice have themselves contributed—if unknowingly—to white supremacy.

Consequently, how American churches teach their adherents about sin—through instruction and through ritual—exerts tremendous influence on our individual and collective capacities for moral reasoning and problem solving.

I am particularly interested in white American Christianity as a technology for the production of what scholars describe as “racial innocence.” The option to believe that one is “innocent”—morally exempt—of systematic and pervasive anti-Black racism is a privilege cultivated among, by, and for the benefit of American whites.

. There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.7

It has sown into our imaginations a deep association of

whiteness—as color, as symbol, as identity—with innocence and blackness with guilt. It has engaged Americans in performances and rituals designed to convey a sense of absolution or transcendence without moral responsibility. White American Christianity has also advanced one of the constituting mechanisms of whiteness by creating spaces that do not require white people to name their whiteness and acknowledge their privilege.

Indeed, as critical race theorists have shown, the Protestantism-influenced formulation of moral wrong as individual “sin” requiring remedy provided the framework for the US Supreme Court’s deliberation of cases involving school desegregation and affirmative action remedies to past wrongs. Unfortunately, this simplistic, incidental view of sin is totally insufficient and inappropriate, not only to capturing the systematic and collective dimensions of racism but also to the fullness of Christian theology as well. A more robust Christian conceptualization of sin would hold that it is a deadly but structuring condition of mortality, just as racism is a deadly but structuring condition of life in the United States. This more robust view of racism as sin would require individuals and institutions to conduct a moral accounting not only of their own conscious acts of harm or injustice but also of the way they have participated in and benefited from the entire system of harm and injustice that has meant death and suffering to others.

As legal scholar Thomas Ross asks, “What white person is ‘innocent,’ if innocence is defined as the absence of advantage at the expense of others?”

White American Christian churches have provided spaces where without acknowledging white racism white people can take refuge and experience belonging in shared white identity, build relationships and develop intimacies with people like themselves, cultivate opportunities from these relationships, and do so in the name of God. They have offered rites, performances, and salvific formulas that in exchange for a specific individual performance of piety (typically defined by heteronormatively married sexual monogamy, polite manners, and deference to authority) promise moral exculpation from the wrongs of history.

They have also through the auspices of missionary work sustained white supremacy by directing the energies of well-meaning white people into efforts to “save” darker-skinned peoples, whether by evangelism or by charity, without recognizing their own role in creating global inequities and conditions of deprivation. And in its construction of “morality” as a matter of being “good,” white American Protestantism has played a role in the maintenance of white supremacy and structural racism by appealing to what Barbara Applebaum identifies as “white desires for moral goodness and innocence.”

A more robust form of morality might recenter, Applebaum suggests, around values of uncertainty, carefulness, reflection, humility, openness to criticality, willingness to defer validation, listening, tolerance for discomfort, and gratitude for experiences that r...

American studies and religious studies can and I hope will take up this work of understanding how mainstream American Christian traditions have contributed to the maintenance of white supremacy.

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.

Research on the Black Church leaves little question that the Black Church was the product of American racialization and racism. Does it not reinscribe narratives of ahistoricity and white innocence to assume that white churches are not to a great extent the same?

First, I had to develop an understanding of racism not just as an individual character flaw but as a system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that divides people and gives some people better life chances—opportunities to live a happy, healthy life—based on their skin color and ancestry. I had to realize that individuals are born into these systems, absorb them, learn to operate within them, and make choices over time that will build them or dismantle them. My initial education in this took about a decade; it continues every day.

The core ideas of this essay have never been presented in essential venues like the Church’s worldwide semiannual General Conference, and no institutional effort has been made to address let alone dismantle persistent structures of white privilege and complicity that initiated and sustained the ban.

problem of anti-Black racism as a system that degraded the faith and its adherents has not been systematically addressed.

wrong. 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. Most white Mormons have believed and hoped that by looking forward and doing better, the ban and its legacy would take care of themselves.

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.

But what this theory of change did not account for was the way that the institutional preference for silence (or near silence) on difficult issues like white racism created a context that placed the burden on members of color for raising consciousness and making themselves feel at home in sometimes discouraging spiritual environments. 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 ...

making with white supremacist or “alt-right” partisans combined with the affordances of digital media created opportunities for extremist white supremacis...

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.

I want to state at the outset that I recognize that Mormonism’s handling of race, gender, and sexuality are deeply intertwined and that there are also histories specific to Mormonism’s indigenous communities and non-Black communities of color. This book focuses on the history of anti-Black racism in Mormonism because the LDS Church’s specifically anti-Black segregation of its priesthood and temple rites from the 1850s through the 1970s constitutes a specific archive through which we can begin to understand these interlocked systems in greater depth and detail.

the relationship between center and margin is never arbitrary, and when we recenter our focus on the margins, as bell hooks has shown, we revolutionize our understanding of the whole.26

In the absence of a defining commitment to racial equity and solidarity, white people in early Mormonism preferred relationships with other whites over the lives and well-being of fellow Mormons or prospective Mormons who happened to be Black. • As Mormonism institutionalized in church and state, whites extended their preferential relationships with each other to formally exclude Blacks from religious and political power, thus discouraging a Black presence in Mormonism and rendering Black experience abstract and unimportant. • As the church consolidated its theology and history in print, institutional histories abandoned facts in favor of coordinated storytelling that presented Black exclusion as the will of God from time

immemorial revealed to infallible Mormon prophets. • In the service of normalization, assimilation, and growth, LDS Church members entered into silent agreements among themselves and with the American public to coaffirm the innocence and moral goodness of the white majority. • To maintain control over the narrative, the institutional LDS Church and Mormon culture repressed internal critique and dissent. • In place of critical self-examination, the LDS Church has used multiculturalism, rhetorical evasion, and duplicity to manage the legacy of Mormon anti-Black racism without taking responsibility for it.

Systematic theologies, catechisms, study materials, devotionals, and other religious texts generated out of these contexts by white American Christian theologians demonstrate—with few exceptions—a moral indifference to the specific problem of Black death and suffering benefiting whites as a collective moral liability.

White American Christians did risk and give their lives for Black emancipatory struggles, but these were acts of individual conscience, often carried out in extra-institutional spaces.

What institutional concessions and adjustments have come have been largely symbolic or occasional—the passing of resolutions, the promotion of people of color to visible

leadership positions, multicultural theming—and have focused on enabling the institution to preserv...

Harvey argues persuasively that a substantial commitment to righting the wrongs of white supremacy at the expense of Black lives would entail reparations. And reparations have not come.27

Rather, my goal is to assess how systems of inequality take shape through everyday conduct and choices, policies, laws, and theologies, so that we have a better sense of how to dismantle them. No one individually opts into the system of racial privilege that structures everyday life in the United States. But it is up to each of us who want to dismantle racism to begin the work of choosing out.

Any room where white-identified people cultivate preference for one another over the unsettling and discomforting presence of the “stranger” or the darker-skinned “neighbor” is a room where white supremacy is being forged.

At no time in its founding decades had Mormonism established a clear theological or social commitment to inclusion and equality. The early Mormon movement (1830–1845) emerged solidly from within the context of mainstream American Protestantism in its disposition on matters of race.

Early statements and actions by Church leaders on matters of race reflect an incoherence and instability inflected less by Christian ethics than by licentious theological speculation and pragmatic adaptation to sometimes hostile political contexts.6 Under pressure from their host communities in the border and frontier states, early Mormon settlements did not throw in with the cause of Black emancipation.

citizenship. But it reflects the fact that the LDS Church had in the 1830s no specific commitment—“no special rule”—to the welfare of Black converts, slave or free.

language—“they, as well as we, are in the hands of a merciful God”—indicates that the writer assumed that the readers of the Evening and Morning Star were not African American but white and would see African Americans as a differentiated group.

In the matter of slavery and emancipation, the message was clear: Black Mormons could not count on white Mormons in Missouri to bear their burdens.

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.

“Young was not simply negatively situating blacks within Mormon theology,” Paul Reeve explains, “he was attempting to situate whites more positively within American society.”14

Young’s own writing reveals that it was his goal as territorial governor and LDS Church president to use territorial laws and LDS Church policies to build a domain where white men would “rule.” I use this word deliberately, as did Brigham Young.

Records from this day are the first contemporary document of a theologically rationalized ban on full participation by Black Africans and African Americans. Young

declared that African Americans were descendants of Cain and thus bearers of a curse that prohibited them from holding the priesthood. Further, he stated that any who intermarried with African Americans would bear the same curse and that it would be a blessing to them to be killed. Finally, he outlined principles for establishing the “Church” as the “kingdom of God on the earth,” returning again and again to the ideal of white “rule” as he had in his January 5 journal entry:

Therefore I will not consent for one moment to have an african dictate me or any Bren. with regard to Church or State Government. I may vary in my veiwes from others, and they may think I am foolish in the things I have spoken, and think that they know more than I do, but I know I know more than they do. If the Affricans cannot bear rule in the Church of God, what business have they to bear rule in the State and Government affairs of this Territory or any others? . . . If we suffer the Devil to rule over us we shall not accomplish any good. I want the Lord to rule, and be our Governor and dictater, and we are the boys to execute. . . . Consequently I will not consent for a moment to have the Children of Cain rule me nor my Bren. No, it is not right. . . . No man can vote for me or my Bren. in this Territory who has not the privilege of acting in Church affairs.