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

by Joanna Brooks

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