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This book seeks to instigate soul-searching—academic, institutional, and personal—on the matter of how American Christianity has contributed to white supremacy. When I use the term “white supremacy,” I refer not only to the grossest forms of racist terrorism but also to the entire system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that give white people better chances based on perceived skin color and ancestry.1
White supremacy is not just torches at Charlottesville. It is the fact that a Black woman in New York City is far more likely to die in connection with pregnancy and childbirth than a white woman—even if she has comparable access to health care, insurance, and education. It is the fact that the average Black family holds a small fraction of the wealth—assets, not income—the average white family holds, due in large part to slavery and past discrimination in education, employment, housing, and banking.
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 easy to see torches at Charlottesville and resort to our Sunday meetings to pray; it is not easy to look at our Sunday meetings and see how over time they have conditioned us to accept Black death and suffering by other peoples of color.
While American Catholics were 59% white and American Muslims were 38% white, Pew found, mainline Protestants were 86% white and Mormons were 85% white. How do we understand this pervasive racial segregation of American Christianity?
I would like us to press deeper to investigate American Christianity as a mass culture that (even when it has not appeared explicitly concerned with “race” as such) has in fact contributed essentially to the establishment and maintenance of white supremacy broadly defined: the entire system of legal, social, cultural, and economic advantage that has benefited white lives at the expense of Black and brown ones.
A simplistic version of white Protestantism has supplied US institutions with a limited moral reasoning that stands in place of and prevents the kind of collective work that would be required to consciously dismantle the legal, economic, and social infrastructure of white supremacy.
Despite focusing my own doctoral and professional research on race and religion in the United States, it has taken me many years and a lot of searching to begin to get a grip on the dynamics of white racism and white supremacy in the Mormon context.
“Race and the Priesthood.” 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.
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.
This book seeks to use the tools of historical research and critical analysis to identify how anti-Black racism took hold in Mormonism.
My goal is to understand how it was that so egregious a policy as total exclusion of Black men and women from priesthood ordination and its ritual correlates took hold. Not all white American Christian denominations had so explicit a policy, but most mainline Protestant denominations were, effectually, as exclusive of Black participation as my home faith.
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.
parallel dynamics can be found across the history of white American Christianity. There is no predominantly white American Christian denomination that is innocent of white privilege and white supremacy. At some moment in the histories of predominantly white denominations, preference for white comfort over Black lives took hold.
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 preserve its own sense of rectitude.
W. W. Phelps’s printing in the Evening and Morning Star of July 1833 a notice to “Free People of Color” who might join the Mormon movement or its settlements warning them that Missouri was a slaveholding state:7
Slaves are real estate in this and other states, and wisdom would dictate great care among the branches of the Church of Christ on this subject. So long as we have no special rule in the Church, as to people of color, let prudence guide, and while they, as well as we, are in the hands of a merciful God, we say: Shun every appearance of evil.
Two days later Phelps printed an “extra” broadside to clarify and amplify the fact that he did in fact intend the article to discourage Black conversion.
If there was a logic in these decisions, it was that Mormonism had more to gain through collaboration with whites, even if that came at the expense of Black lives, Black equality, and white integrity. This meant that from its early decades, even when the Church had no official position on slavery and emancipation and comfortably accommodated a range of individual perspectives, it created an environment of conditional welcome that put the burden on Black people like Walker Lewis of making themselves feel at home in “Zion.”
Young declared himself a “firm believer in slavery” and urged passage of “An Act in Relation to Service,” which legalized a form of slavery in Utah that would persist until at least 1862, if not longer. After some debate, the measure was signed into law on February 4, 1852.10 Historians Chris Rich, Nathaniel Ricks, Newell Bringhurst, and Matthew Harris have agreed that one significant factor in the passage of the act was regard for slaveowners and proslavery men who held positions of power in early Utah and desire to protect their interests by establishing what was at least on paper an
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Orson Hyde stated so much in the Millennial Star on February 15, 1851: We feel it to be our duty to define our position in relation to the subject of slavery. There are several in the Valley of the Salt Lake from the Southern States, who have their slaves with them.
All the slaves that are there appear to be perfectly contented and satisfied.
If there is sin in selling a slave, let the individual who sells him bear that sin, and not the Church. Wisdom and prudence dictate to us, this position, and we trust our position will henceforth be understood.11
early Utah’s slaveholders held positions of influence: Charles C. Rich was one of the Twelve Apostles; William Hooper became Utah’s representative to Congress; Abraham Smoot became mayor of Salt Lake City and Provo.
Young uses this language repeatedly in his private writings and public speeches in early 1852. His manuscript history (a record compiled by clerks from extant papers) entry for January 5, 1852, reads: The negro . . . should serve the seed of Abraham; he should not be a ruler, nor vote for men to rule over me nor my brethren. The Constitution of Deseret is silent upon this, we meant it should be so. The seed of Canaan cannot hold any office, civil or ecclesiastical. . . . The decree of God that Canaan should be a servant of servants unto his brethren (i.e. Shem and Japhet [sic]) is in full
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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.
Brigham Young envisioned a day when people might emigrate to Utah from the “Islands,” or “Japan,” or “China.” They too, Young averred, would have no understanding of government and would have to be governed by white men.20
Black lives were, to Abraham Smoot, a display of wealth.
White Mormons in key decision-making roles actively and intentionally privileged white relationships, loyalty, solidarity, and “rule” over Black lives and Black testimonies at the expense of theology, integrity, and ethics but to the benefit of institutional growth and dominion. This is the definition of white supremacy. White supremacy guided the formation of key LDS institutions—the theocratic territory of Utah, the modern correlated orders of the priesthood, even Brigham Young University, whose founding trustee and major funder bore false witness and influenced others to do the same to
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Robert Dockery Covington, the leader of the “Cotton Mission” organized by Brigham Young in 1857 to establish a cotton industry in southern Utah and an LDS bishop, recounted to fellow settlers (according to a contemporaneous record) stories of his physical and sexual abuse (including rape) of African American men, women, and children. His statue stands today in downtown Washington, Utah, and the name of Dixie College in St. George commemorates the area’s ties to the American South.37
In 1863, Brigham Young preached at the Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City that intermarriage between blacks and whites was forbidden by God on penalty of blood atonement—death.
Pratt had felt the pressure to accede to Church leadership time and time again—even in so tender a circumstance as being pressured by Joseph Smith to reject the testimony of Pratt’s wife that Smith had sought to marry her.
On the issue of anti-Black racism, Orson Pratt refused to be a “machine.” He sided with conscience, and he continued to do so, even when his exhortations failed, when he on February 5, 1852, voted against the bills for the incorporation of Fillmore and Cedar City, which prohibited Black franchise.40 Pratt’s is just one example that shows that at every decisive micropolitical moment in Mormon history it would have been possible to do differently on matters of race. But as we established the foundational institutions of our religion, white Mormons did not choose that path. Neither, really, did
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Southern States Mission President John Morgan implicitly endorsed lynching during a sermon at the Church’s main Assembly Hall on Temple Square on December 18, 1881, when he recounted witnessing an African American woman taking her purchased seat in a first-class train car in Nashville, Tennessee, displacing him and other white passengers to the second-class smoking car. Morgan described the woman’s conduct as “impudence” and proudly recalled that he had remarked to the railroad car “manager” that had an African American man attempted the same twenty-five years earlier “you would have hung him
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And the last recorded anti-Black lynching in the American West took place in the coal mining town of Price, Utah, on June 18, 1925, when a crowd estimated at 1,000 including families with children carrying picnic baskets gathered to see Robert Marshall, an African American miner and a fellow Mormon, hung from a tree.7
Terryl Givens writes, “As the church grew more bureaucratically sophisticated, populous, and geographically diffuse, the maintenance of orthodoxy through centralized correlation and control became a more urgent concern.”9
Black LDS people were not to be ordained, endowed, or sealed because they bore the “curse” of “Cainan” imposed by “the decree of the Almighty.”13
Talmage and Widtsoe avoided what James Cone characterizes as the theological issue of “black suffering,” but they also avoided any mention of the Church’s exclusionary practices. They wrote about the priesthood as though there were no exclusions at all.
behind B. H. Roberts’s Course on Theology, volume 1, part 5, lesson VIII, “The Law of the Lord in Ancient and Modern Revelation Applied to the Negro Race Problem,”
LDS lay priesthood curriculum relied on Confederate history.
Roberts concludes his references with this quote from The Color Line: “That the negro is markedly inferior to the Caucasian is proved both craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experimentation; and that the commingling of inferior with superior must lower the higher is just as certain as that the half-sum of two and six is only four” (see figure 3.3).
Talmage and Widtsoe erased the whole history of conflict on the subject of Black exclusion; B. H. Roberts attributed the erasure to the “Law of God.”
The theological system of instruction developed by Roberts played a critical role in LDS institutional history. The publication of Roberts’s Course in Theology inspired LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith to create a “Correlation Committee” that very year to develop a systematic curriculum for the Church’s priesthood quorums.
On April 18, 1908, the LDS Church publication Liahona: The Elders Journal, which was distributed to all LDS missions, published an article on “The Negro and the Priesthood” drawing out extensive rationale for the ban from the Pearl of Great Price and the Old Testament, and offering as well without scriptural basis the “more comprehensive explanation” that “negroes,” who came from the lineage of Cain and Ham and were thus forbidden from holding the priesthood, were “predestined” to this lineage as a just “deserts” for their conduct in the pre-existence.26 It also quoted remarks attributed to
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Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, a son of the recently deceased Joseph F. Smith, published another article on “The Negro and the Priesthood” in the Church’s monthly Improvement Era in April 1924. While indicating that there was no scriptural basis for the pre-existence hypothesis that “prevail[ed] to a considerable extent” among LDS people and that it was not advisable to “dwell” on “speculation” about how premortal life may have shaped “nation[al]” differences, Smith gave anti-Black segregation of the priesthood and temple its own eternal life: It is true that the negro race is barred from
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Just as B. H. Roberts claimed that the ban was in fact an expression of the “Law of God,” Joseph Fielding Smith rewrote history to suggest that the doctrine originated through revelation of the “Law of God” to Mormonism’s founders. Thus, when the Church’s First Presidency was moved to settle lingering questions about race and the priesthood with an official statement on the issue in August 17, 1949, it could declare: “The attitude of the Church with reference to the Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the
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If Christian fundamentalists had beat back the encroachments of science and history and retreated from ethical engagement with racial issues by establishing through “systematic” argument, publishing, and distributing a new orthodox consensus around biblical inerrancy, Mormonism’s conservatives in the early twentieth century made a parallel move by establishing through “systematic” argument, publishing, and institutionalizing a new orthodox consensus around the inerrancy or infallibility of Mormon prophets.
“The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray,” LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff had told the faithful assembled at the General Conference in October 1890, shortly after asking them to accept as “authoritative” the end to the public practice of polygamy. “It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty.” His statement was canonized
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institutionalization of Black exclusion from the priesthood and temple rites. Prophets said that prophets had always said so, because God himself said so, and God would not allow prophets to get it wrong. No matter how cruel or unethical anti-Black racism seemed to humans, God had his reasons, to be known in due time. And that’s how the story would stand.
The claim that the ban was the “Law of God” or the will of God as revealed to infallible prophets allowed every successive generation of leaders and rank-and-file members to claim that they were helpless to change the ban and thus innocent of anti-Black racism. Nothing could be done, we told ourselves, until God himself ordered a change.
