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

by Joanna Brooks

But perhaps the most pernicious and far-reaching impact of the institutionalization of the priesthood ban through a systematic, “correlated” theology that erased historical memory was that it intensified the Church’s commitment to prophetic infallibility. To manage the theological incoherence of an anti-Black stance on ordination and temple ordinances with Christian ethics, 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 supremacist choices of Mormon individuals and institutions.

White American churches 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, deference to authority) promise moral exculpation from the wrongs of history.2

how white American churches across the country communicated to the people in the pews that they could be good, moral, and redeemed without seriously confronting America’s brutality toward African Americans, past and present.

White American audiences openly embraced the most visible public emissaries of an officially racially segregated faith.

This and similar televised visual depictions of Mormonism in the 1960s, Jan Shipps has observed, positioned LDS people against the Left or the emerging counterculture, with the claim that Mormons were “more American than the Americans” a common refrain.10

marchers. It seems remarkable that an all-white choir from an officially segregated religion took and held center stage to perform

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” at this contested moment in American life—even more so when one notes that Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos, who gave the closing prayer at the inauguration, joined King and the Selma marchers on March 15.

The nature of a silent agreement is that its terms are never spoken aloud. For this reason, there is no extant evidence to document why President Johnson gave the choir a “pass” on its racial politics in a historic moment suspended between the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, a moment when the president was engaged in one-to-one conversations about mounting tensions in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. It seems plausible that the inaugural committee either did not recognize what it meant to invite a ra...

Or it may be that Johnson and his committee actually embraced the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performance as a chance for white citizens to indulge what Robin Bernstein would call a “holy obliviousness.” The choir held a space at the center of national politics where both they and the public could by silent agreement co-construct and indulge in a spectacle of racial innocence.

From its origins as a tribute to the radical abolitionism of John Brown through its transition by the hand of Julia Ward Howe in 1861 into an anthem for Union troops, “Battle Hymn” had by the 1950s detached from its earliest anti-racist origins and been reappropriated as a hymn of Cold War conservative nationalism.

the choir offered a patriotism defined by willed obliviousness to contemporary political struggles, especially to the thorny moral responsibility entailed in institutional racism. The 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.

candidate George Wallace’s campaign trail visit to the Mormon Tabernacle on October 12, 1968. Candidates for the presidency from major political parties customarily spoke at the Tabernacle. Wallace’s American Independent Party bid drew substantial support in Utah, including the endorsement of high-ranking LDS Church official and former secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson. He appeared before what the New York Times described as “an overflow crowd of more than 10,000,” which contrasted sharply with the decidedly smaller and less enthusiastic reception Wallace received elsewhere in the American West. Wallace was pleased with his reception. Speaking at the historic Tabernacle, the geographical center of religious Mormonism, Wallace told the crowd, “This is a high point of our travels. . . . We are alike—we see the dangers that confront the American people today.”17 Karl Rove, who grew up in Utah and attended the event, remembered:

Wallace was angry, belligerent, and nasty, and even to my untrained ears, a pure demagogue. A protester heckled, and the Alabama governor taunted him back, saying that if the protester lay down in front of Wallace’s limousine, it would be the last one he’d lie down for. The crowd screamed in agreement.18

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” and criticized its official rationales as an “incredibly primitive reassertion of obscurantist doctrine concerning race” and a reflection of contemporary Mormons’ enthrallment to “the literalist white supremacy” of past Mormon leaders.

While the Church took modest internal steps to address its own racial issues, including organizing an official fellowship group for African American Mormons, it also undertook a new public relations effort focused on promoting

the LDS Church as a champion of “families.” The Church’s emphasis on families derived in large part from a unique theology that held that family bonds were to persist in the afterlife.

Osmond’s answer to Walters’s question exemplifies legal-rhetorical tactics of white innocence such as “originalism” and “helplessness” identified by legal scholar Thomas Ross that allowed whites to disclaim responsibility for racism by characterizing it as the will of an original power—whether the authors of the US Constitution or God themself.

Their 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.

Church. Infallibility kills: it kills the bodies of those marked expendable, it kills relationships with those who dissent, and it kills the souls who suffocate on their own ignorance and privilege. It kills courage, it kills hope, it kills faith, and it kills the kind of historical memory that helps a religious community understand itself and find its next steps toward holiness.

A thousand painstaking calculations must have factored into his choices, as they do for every Mormon who finds him/her/theirself at odds for reasons of conscience with the institutional LDS Church. It matters in this calculus whether you are white, Black, or brown; male or female; straight or LGBTQ; rich or poor; married or not; highly observant or less so. It matters whether you have a current volunteer position in the Church and what that position is—whether one of greater or lesser responsibility. It matters who the local leaders are who are charged with assessing your personal worthiness. It matters whether your ancestors came across the plains as pioneers and where Brigham Young sent them after they did—Idaho, Arizona, southern Utah, Mexico; whether they practiced polygamy; and how closely they maintained their ties with the elite networks of families who have constituted the majority of the Church’s leadership. It matters where

you work, for whom, and how LDS social networks influence your customer base. And it matters how you express your dissent: written or oral; public or private; book, newspaper, or television; time, place, and manner; down to the tone of your voice and your vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation—it matters. All of these and more factor into the complex calculus of conscientious dissent in the contemporary Mormon movement, especially inasmuch as Mormonism has sought to hold on to the modicum of social acceptance it gained in the mid-twentieth century.

Those who remained with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints entered in what Mormon historians Linda Thatcher and Roger Launius have characterized as a “contract”: “the assumption that personal feelings must bow below that of the church, that no disagreement be allowed to harm the church.” Those who tested the limits of this contract tended, according to Thatcher and Launius, to have some footing or standing in the secular world, to believe that they stood for an “honest minority” opinion, or to feel that the affordances of belonging were no longer worth the costs of submission. Given the political, economic, and social dimensions of Mormon community life, these affordances can include access to education, employment, and marriage as well as continuity of family and community relations. The costs of breaking the contract in a way

that leads to excommunication and shunning could be stark, especially in pre-assimilation Mormon communities. Consequently, dissent was stigmatized in the twentieth-century LDS Church, preventing, according to Thatcher and Launius, the development of healthy tolerance for “social conflict.”3

There were always believers who found within faith another way of seeing and being. Their stories matter because they rescue our hearts and minds from the suffocating pretenses of inevitability and infallibility and inspire us to

think otherwise. This chapter seeks to reconstruct and make available a lost archive of conscientious objection by white Mormons to the Church’s anti-Black segregation and discrimination.

book. They constitute an archive of unorthodox lay theologies that broaden our ways of being Mormon to include models of persistent, unapologetic objection to anti-Black racism that refuse racial innocence.

documents.) But they also encourage us to reflect critically on how the ability to protest racism and stay in good standing in the church is conditioned by privilege,

and they vest those of us who do experience privileged identities within Mormonism and other predominantly white Christian faiths with a responsibility to leverage that privilege as meaningfully as possible.

The attitude of the Church in regard to the Negro makes me very sad. Your letter is the first intimate I have had that there was a fixed doctrine on this point. I had always known that certain statements had been made by authorities regarding the status of the Negro, but I had never assumed that they constituted an irrevocable doctrine. I hope no final word has been said on this matter. I must say that I have never been able to accept the idea, and never shall. I do not believe that God is a racist. But if the church has taken an irrevocable stand, I would dislike to see it enter Cuba or any other island where different races live and establish missionary work. The white and colored people get along much better in the Caribbean and most of Latin American than they do in the United States. Prejudice exists, there is no doubt, and the whites in many ways manifest their feelings of superiority, but there is much less of it than one finds in USA, especially in our South. For us to go into a situation like that and preach a doctrine of “white supremacy” would, it seems to me, be a tragic disservice. I am speaking frankly, because I feel very keenly on this question. If world brotherhood and the universal God idea mean anything, it seems to me they mean equality of races. I fail to see how Mormonism or any other religion claiming to be more than

a provincial church can take any other point of view, and there cannot be world peace until the pernicious doctrine of the superiority of one race and the inferiority of others is rooted out. This is my belief.

Because I think our system of religious organization could serve the rural Cuban people as perhaps no other system could, I am sad to have to write you and say, for what my opinion is worth, that it would be better for the Cubans if we did not enter their island—unless we are willing to revise our racial theory. To teach them the pernicious doctrine of segregation and inequalities among races where it does not exist, or to lend religious sanction to it where it has raised its ugly head would, it seems to me, be tragic. It seems to me we just fought a war over such ideas. I repeat, my frankness or bluntness, as you will, is born of a fervent desire to see the causes of war rooted out of the hearts of men. What limited study I have been able to give the subject leads me to the conclusion that ethnocentrism, and the smugness and intolerance which accompany it, is one of the first evils to be attacked if we are to achieve the goal of peace.

As I told Heber, there is no doubt in my mind that our Church could perform a great service in Cuba, particularly in the rural areas, but it would be far better that we not go in at all, than to go in and promote racial distinction.

Nelson’s letter to Smith reflects the deference to hierarchy—“perhaps I am out of order”—expected of an observant Latter-day Saint. But he

also boldly claims for himself a place within the Protestant tradition of the priesthood of all believers, that is, the idea that every believer has the right to study and interpret the sacred texts of the tradition and develop their own understanding.

We feel very sure that you understand well the doctrines of the Church. They are either true or not true. Our testimony is that they are true. Under these circumstances we may not permit ourselves to be too much impressed by the reasonings of men however well-founded they may seem to be. We should like to say this to you in all kindness and in all sincerity that you are too fine a man to permit yourself to be led off from the principles of the Gospel by worldly-learning. You have too much of a potentiality for doing good and we therefore prayerfully hope that you can reorient your thinking and bring it in line with the revealed word of God.

Church-owned Deseret News about missionaries in South Africa who conducted an aggressive and invasive genealogical screening of a local woman on her deathbed to ascertain whether or not she could be eligible for posthumous temple rites.

and many other like-minded LDS people nationwide—developed private archives of clippings and other documents relating to the issue and attempted to hammer out a strategy for effecting change.15 In the 1960s and 1970s, Nelson was sought

For making his arguments public, Fitzgerald was excommunicated in late 1972.16 And yet Lowry Nelson was not excommunicated. It may be that by presenting his case and

the threat of excommunication in writing, so clearly, so publicly, in a national venue published outside the Mormon corridor and beyond its domain of territorial knowledge, he gained a kind of immunity from repression, inasmuch as the Church remained invested in not fulfilling its detractors’ worst charges of authoritarianism.

Even as the institutional LDS Church from its 1949 statement onward held the counterfactual position that the ban originated with God himself as revealed to the Church’s founders, Dialogue supported historical scholarship that 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.

Udall reflected critically on how his wartime experiences impacted his faith: “I find it difficult to be in full fellowship within the Mormon Church,” he admitted, citing the fact that “too many members find it easy to be simultaneously devout Mormons and devout anti-Semites, lovers of their fellow men in public and Negrophobes in private.”

Although he was considered and, in all likelihood, considered himself a “Jack Mormon”—that is, a nonobservant, nonorthodox Mormon whose ties to the faith are more historical, cultural, and affectional than devotional—Udall took personal responsibility for the priesthood and temple ban. He relayed to LDS Church leadership the embarrassment and conflict the Church’s stance created for its progressive members. He also corresponded with his brother, now congressman Mo Udall, to express consternation over egregiously racist public remarks made by LDS Church leaders, including octogenarian LDS Church President Joseph Fielding Smith. Moreover, he developed a personal archive of writings by scholars and rank-and-file Church members that challenged the consensus view of the ban as divinely inspired. After sharing his concerns with Church leaders in writing, he published an open letter to LDS Church President David O. McKay in Dialogue: A Journal

This issue must be resolved—and resolved not by pious moralistic platitudes but by clear and explicit pronouncements and decisions that come to grips with the imperious truths of the contemporary world. It must be resolved not because we desire to conform, or because we want to atone for an affront to a whole race. It must be resolved because we are wrong and it is past the time when we should have seen the right. A failure to act here is sure to demean our faith, damage the minds and morals of our youth, and undermine the integrity of our Christian ethic.

Importantly, it was founded in an understanding that those who lost the most by anti-Black segregation in the LDS Church were not excluded Black people but white Church members themselves who were morally hobbled by their complicity and duplicity.

As a working-class, nonelite Mormon, Marchant was more expendable, and violating the silent agreement through direct action cost him deeply. He lost access to family, employment, and the social networks that held Mormon life in Salt Lake City together. His story demonstrates the critical role social and class privilege has played and continues to play in Mormon dissent.

indigenous participation in the Church, had also directed that Book of Mormon passages connecting moral decline among the Lamanites with dark skin and redemption with whiteness be revised in 1981.

It is getting to the point where every Gentile that is baptized is told and taught that he is literal seed of Ephraim unless he is a Jew, Indian or Black. This type of teaching encourages an attitude of superior race, white supremacy, racist attitude, pride, arrogance, love of power, and no sense of obligation to the poor, needy and afflicted. . . . You have come very close to denying that the Book of Mormon is about Lamanites. You have cut out Indian or Lamanite programs and are attempting to cut them out of the Book of Mormon. You are trying to discredit or downplay the role of Lamanites in these last days and downplay their role and importance in the building of the New Jerusalem. . . . You are Loving the Indians and other Lamanites at a distance and have no sense of responsibility to them because you displaced them and set yourself up as Ephrai[g]m more superior to the Lamanites and thus you are telling the Lamanites that you are No. 1 and they are second class. You are trying to take their place in their divine roles and assignments.

You are slowly causing a silent subtle scriptural and spiritual slaughter of the Indians and other Lamanites. While physical extermination may have been one of Federal government’s policies long ago but your current scriptural and spiritual extermination of Indians and other Lamanites is the greater sin and great shall be your condemnation for this. . . . In short, you are betraying and turning your backs on the very people on whom your own salvation hangs.

Those who attempted direct action in words and deeds like Byron Marchant found themselves put outside of the Church and all the affordances of belonging. People of color who attempted direct action in the 1970s and 1980s found themselves most vulnerable of all. If the maintenance of racial innocence demanded a human scapegoat, that role would be assigned to George P. Lee and other people of color who could not silently abide white supremacy in their places of worship and thus lost access to the opportunities, experiences, and sense of safety and community that Mormonism promised.