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

by Joanna Brooks

participated in American public life. 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.6 The private-public split resulted in a form of self-consciousness described by one Mormon studies scholar as a “divided sense of self” and related habits of double-coding in public speech, especially in situations where LDS people perceive a threat to their way of being.7 Mormons sometimes joke about this practice as “lying for the Lord,” but the fact that it has been used in campaigns to oppose women’s rights and LGBTQ+ civil rights and that it is useful as well to the perpetuation of white supremacy makes it important to think critically about “undergrounding.” In this chapter, I will show through rhetorical analysis how LDS Church institutions have wrestled with these communicative patterns—defensive postures of nontransparency in regard to the history of ...