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

by Joanna Brooks

Kimball’s announcement did not renounce or apologize for past practice or call for collective repentance. It declared, simply, that “the long-promised day” of equal access to priesthood and temple ordinances had finally come. Systems of ideas, beliefs, and practices privileging white over black that had sustained the ban for more than a hundred years were not eradicated by President Kimball’s announcement. From the 1830s onward systematic racism had become deeply embedded in a host of legal, economic, social, political, and religious practices among the Mormon people and in LDS institutions like Brigham Young University and Deseret Book. An entire genre of doctrinal speculation justifying the ban as the consequence of spiritual deficiencies in the premortal souls of Black folks manifest through their mortal incarnation as dark-skinned descendants of Cain and Ham had not only been spread by word of mouth among LDS people but also effectively canonized in works of systematic theology like

Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine (1958), a book that remained in print until 2010.

failures. First, this approach is not simply passive “forgetfulness”; it constitutes an active erasure and rewriting of uncomfortable aspects of Mormon history and endangers historical memory. Because this erasure is “selective” and pertains only to matters that might “embarrass” the Church, it cannot be considered benign. It continues key practices of white supremacy in Mormonism by excluding Black testimony, insisting on prophetic infallibility, repressing dissent, and fostering silent agreements among Mormons and between Mormons and the public to co-construct and preserve white innocence. Second, by modeling this approach to complex moral problems, the Church signals to members 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

“useless” and potentially harmful. It fosters a limited morality that prioritizes the comfort of the majority and institutional gains over truthfulness and humility.

This nineteenth-century open conflict has exerted profound and lasting consequences on the way Mormons have

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 ...

Benson had a long history of extreme social conservatism—both religious and secular. In 1967, he had contributed a foreword (previously published by the segregationist Billy James Hargis in his Christian Crusade magazine) to the white supremacist tract The Black Hammer: A Study of Black Power, Red Influence, and White Alternatives,8 a work that continues to be used by adherents of the Christian identity movement today. (Its cover featured a violently racist cartooning of a Black man’s head, inset within a sickle and hammer, decapitated and dripping blood into a puddl...

The public relations priorities of the institution took precedent over pastoral concerns for the experience of Black Mormons and the moral responsibility of white Mormons.

Nothing in his remarks unsettled the possessive investment in rightness that institutionalized Mormonism’s possessive investment in whiteness. It left the entire infrastructure of anti-Black Mormon racism intact, maintaining rhetorical strategies of containment and deflection that had been used continuously by LDS Church leaders to maintain resistance to outside pressure for change. While his style of presentation may have differed from his predecessors’, in his strategic deflection and evasion Hinckley worked deep in the tradition of LDS Church institutional rhetoric and thus communicated a sense of continuity and conservatism to LDS Church members.

Black Mormon leaders received the statement with rejoicing. Because it was given during a sacred occasion, over the pulpit, by the “prophet, seer, and revelator” of the Church, it carried inarguable authority. It would encourage and support rank-and-file Church members seeking to uproot racism in their midst. But it framed racism as an individual moral problem. It did nothing to repudiate the Church’s own collective historical practice of anti-Black discrimination,

nor the system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that had sustained it for so long.

was possible—indeed, probable—to grow up in LDS settings after 1978 and receive as gospel truth from one’s parents and teachers the full complement of anti-Black folk doctrine. And this folk doctrine continued to shape the way many white LDS people conducted themselves in the Church and in the world. Well-placed Black Mormon leaders like the heads of the Church’s Genesis group were in a

position to convey the continuing impact of Mormonism’s accumulated racist folk doctrine to general authorities who had the ears to hear.

He recommends it be taken on faith that previous LDS Church leaders acted “on the basis of faith” to institutionalize anti-Black segregation. The problem, unfortunately, is that the primary faith that undergirded the institutionalization of the anti-Black priesthood and temple ban was the faith shared by white Church leaders in the secular ideology of white supremacy, the priority of relationships among white people, and the infallibility of an all-white LDS Church leadership.

“God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott, the BYU theologian. He quotes Mormon scripture that states that the Lord gives to people “all that he seeth fit.” Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood. “What is discrimination?” Bott asks. “I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?” Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth—although not in the afterlife—protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. “You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.”16

Bott was no extremist. A tenured faculty member at the flagship Church-sponsored university, Bott taught classes enrolling several hundred students each semester, from whom he received sterling evaluations. He taught courses designed to prepare prospective missionaries for service. His tenured position at Brigham Young University gave him access and authority to shape the views of tens of thousands of future LDS Church lay leaders and members, as did his service as a lay clerical leader. He used this authority to perpetuate speculation and racist folklore

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. None of his colleagues in the Brigham Young University Religion Department exercised the essential scholarly responsibility of peer review to hold Professor Bott accountable.

support among high-ranking Church leaders. But those who studied LDS history did in fact know that the ban began sometime between 1847 and 1852, that it originated with Brigham Young and was institutionalized over the course of one hundred years following, and that revelation had nothing to do with it. This much the Church’s newsroom statement did not convey. Nor did any general authorities address the issue over the pulpit, nor was a corrective amendment inserted into LDS curricula.

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.

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.

The larger lessons of what this shift suggests about the Mormon practice of continuing revelation, the infallibility of LDS Church leaders, the “rightness” of the LDS Church, and what collective repentance might look like have scarcely been considered. Moreover, an even fuller historical narrative of the ban would extend beyond its introduction by Brigham Young to consider the role that generations of white LDS Church leaders and members played in institutionalizing and sustaining the ban. Some LDS people bore false witness about Church history; opposed truths told by Black coreligionists; subscribed to the ugliest secular forms of white supremacy; imported them into Church manuals, lessons, and talks as doctrine; and used sacred spaces to hold forth against full civil equality for African Americans in the United States. These too are historical facts and are part of the Mormon story, and these too bear consequences for the souls of Mormons, white, Black, and brown.

First, the still embedded culture of “undergrounding” mitigates against a truth-telling and reconciliation approach. Second, there is the problem of priorities and resources. The Church has chosen not to invest the force of its moral energies in anti-racism. It has invested deeply in various political campaigns to oppose civil equality for LGBTQ+ people and, when the national campaign against gay marriage failed, in efforts to claim “religious freedom” protections for Mormonism’s refusal (somewhat modified in April 2019) to welcome same-sex couples and their children. This fight and the political blowback it has entailed have reactivated the deeply embedded habits of “undergrounding” developed by Mormons during the polygamy crisis. Like many human beings, Mormons retrench under pressure.