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

by Joanna Brooks

But we ourselves did a great deal to carry out the anti-Black essence of the ban and extend it far beyond priesthood ordination and temple worship. Once institutionalized in the marrow of LDS doctrine and practice, anti-Black segregation practices radiated out into civil society in geographical areas where Mormons were concentrated.

In the 1940s and 1950s, LDS Church leaders including J. Reuben Clark advocated for the racial segregation of Utah hospital blood banks so that white LDS people would not have their blood “mixed” through transfusions from black donors and lose eligibility for pries...

George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark, and Mark E. Peterson encouraged local LDS leaders to join and support ordinances and organizations that would prevent Black citizens from moving ...

At the LDS Church’s April 1965 General Conference, Apostle Ezra Taft Benson (who became LDS Church president in 1987) encouraged members worldwide to oppose the civil rights movement: “President David O. McKay has called communism the greatest threat to the Church—and it is certainly the greatest threat this country has ever faced. What are you doing to fight it? . . . I [have] warned how the communists were using the Civil Rights movement to promote revolution and eventual takeover o...

Converts of African descent who persisted had their baptismal certificates marked with a “B” for Black, “C” for Cain, “N” for Negro, or similar, a practice that persisted into the 1970s.31

In the 1950s, high-ranking LDS Church leaders Mark E. Petersen and Bruce R. McConkie delivered remarks and published as authoritative “doctrine” anti-Black speculative theology supporting segregation, opposing interracial marriage, and claiming that African Americans were cursed by God and that white supremacy was God’s will. Their words were, in Petersen’s case, circulated in typescript among Brigham Young University religion faculty through the 1960s, and in McConkie’s case remained in print with only minor revisions in the book Mormon Doctrine until 2010.

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.

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 religiosity has served as a technology for the production of white racial innocence.

Black freedom was never a regional struggle, but it was easy for white majorities in the north and west to imagine so, and thus to exculpate themselves from moral responsibility. These silent white Christian majorities contributed mightily to the perpetuation of white supremacy.

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.

As protests from university sports teams refusing to play Church-owned Brigham Young University teams mounted through late 1968, “the Mormon priesthood position came to be portrayed more frequently” in the press as “an affront” to a national consensus that had shifted in favor of “civil equality,” writes media scholar J. B. Haws.19

Just weeks after Flournoy announced his boycott, on December 2, the choir auditioned and admitted an African American soprano named Marilyn Yuille, who performed immediately, on December 4. By January 1970, according to the New York Times, the choir had admitted two Black sopranos—Yuille and Wynetta Martin—and was considering a male tenor.21 But it would be eight years more before the Church rescinded its ban on Black ordination to the priesthood and Black access to sacred temple rites, a position that grew more strained and divergent from national consensus each year.

In November 1969, following protests by African American athletes at the University of Texas El Paso and University of Wyoming, Stanford University suspended its athletic contests with Brigham Young University to protest racial segregation. On December 15, the Church issued an internal statement to clarify what it portrayed as “confusion” over its views on “the Negro both in society and in the Church.”

LDS Church President David O. McKay: “The seeming discrimination by the Church toward the Negro is not something which originated with man; but goes back into the beginning with God.”23

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

distinction between the Church’s anti-Black policy and general racial “prejudice” was also a commonplace of LDS rhetoric, including the Church’s formal 1969 statement on the ban.

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.

Mormonism has observed the fortieth anniversary of the ban with no official apology from the Church for its errors and a suffocating stasis around anti-Black racism among orthodox believers, most of whom still refuse to acknowledge that we were wrong.

Governor Romney

His outspoken stance earned him private pushback from high-ranking Church leaders, in particular, a member of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles named Delbert Stapely, who in January 1964 had written a personal letter to Romney conveying concern on the part of several others unnamed that his public support for civil rights was not aligned with the teachings of Joseph Smith and warning him that activism on Black human and civil rights causes had, in several recorded instances, led to untimely death for the activist.1

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. Because information and publication in the Mormon movement has been from the 1950s to the 2000s largely managed by the institutional LDS Church, and because the Church itself does not have a professional clergy or professional theological schooling that can support reasoned discussion and conflict, these statements have never been a part of any LDS curriculum or canon. As a lifelong member of the LDS Church and a scholar of race and gender, I was not even aware of them until I researched this book.

On June 20, 1947,

Historian Fawn Brodie was excommunicated after her publication of No Man Knows My History (1945), a frank, scholarly quality biography of Joseph Smith Jr.

President Smith and his counselors, David O. McKay and J. Reuben Clark, responded on July 17: The basic element of your ideas and concepts seems to be that all God’s children stand in equal positions before Him in all things. Your knowledge of the Gospel will indicate to you that this is contrary to the very fundamentals of God’s dealings with Israel dating from the time of His promise to Abraham regarding Abraham’s seed and their position vis-a-vis God Himself. Indeed, some of God’s children were assigned to superior positions before the world was formed. We are aware that some Higher Critics do not accept this, but the Church does.

President Smith and his counselors

They continue to assert Mormonism’s distinctive doctrine, established in books of scripture such as the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price and reaffirmed in 1918 in a later-canonized revelation to LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith, that souls were created in a premortal sphere and developed a body of experience pertinent to their embodied lives on earth: Your position seems to lose sight of the revelations of the Lord touching the preexistence of our spirits, the rebellion in heaven, and the doctrines that our birth into this life and the advantages under which we may be born, have a relationship in the life heretofore. Even as they correct Nelson for “los[ing] sight” of this revealed doctrine, Smith, Clark, and McKay “lose sight” of and misstate LDS Church history pertaining to Black ordination: From the days of the Prophet Joseph even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by any of the Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel. They close by reasserting the Church’s opposition to interracial marriage as a matter not only of social “normalcy” but also of “Church doctrine”: Furthermore, your ideas, as we understand them, appear to contemplate the intermarriage of the Negro and White races, a concept which has heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people from the ancient patriarchs till now. God’s rule for Israel, His Chosen People, has been endogenous. Modern Israel has bee...

Figure 5.1. LDS Church First Presidency letter to Lowry Nelson, July 17, 1947. Courtesy of Marriott Special Collections Library, University of Utah.

Figure 5.2. LDS Church President George Albert Smith to Lowry Nelson, November 12, 1947. Image courtesy Marriott Special Collections Library, University of Utah.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, founded in 1966 by a cohort of Stanford University graduate students. The journal’s mission was (and continues to be) to “bring [the Mormon] faith into dialogue with the larger stream of world religious thought and with human experience as a whole and to foster artistic and scholarly achievement based on their cultural heritage.”

Until the death of Jane Manning James in 1908, Church leaders had been held accountable by the living presence of Black pioneers who knew the Church’s true history on race and stood as living emblems of it, even as that history was erased in institutionally produced, “correlated,” orthodox, official histories and curricula.

Scout troop leader. Byron welcomed local non-Mormon African American youth into the troop but was deeply upset when in 1973 local leaders told him that the African American boys were not permitted to assume leadership roles in the troop due to the Church’s priesthood-temple ban,

the Church had released a statement in 1969 claiming that “Joseph Smith and all succeeding presidents of the Church have taught that Negroes, while spirit children of a common Father, and the progeny of our earthly parents Adam and Eve, were not yet to receive the priesthood, for reasons which we believe are known to God, but which He has not made fully known to man”—

Elder Spencer W. Kimball. Kimball had fostered and championed a number of initiatives designed to serve indigenous Mormons on the principle that they were the direct descendants of the “Lamanite” peoples in the Book of Mormon, that the Book of Mormon was their heritage and legacy as a “lost tribe” of the “House of Israel,” and that their latter-day “blossoming” had been prophesied. In addition to placement, these programs included congregations and conferences for so-called modern Lamanites, and numerous programs to recruit and support American Indian students at Brigham Young University. “In the 1970s,” writes John-Charles Duffy, “BYU boasted that it spent more, per student, on American Indian education than on any other undergraduate program and spent more on Indian scholarships than all other colleges and universities in the United States combined; this commitment was explained as an expression of the Church’s mission to the descendants of Book of Mormon peoples.”35

Kimball, in addition to sponsoring programmatic supports for 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.

Apostle Boyd K. Packer, who was notorious for his irascibility and intransigence.

The best account we have of how the LDS Church’s priesthood ban came to an end on June 8, 1978, comes from Edward Kimball, son of LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball, the prophet to whom the change was revealed. Writing in BYU Studies in 2008, Kimball provides an intimate account of his father’s decade-long struggle with the issue, including fascinating details like the fact that his father compiled a binder of clippings and independent scholarly writings on the subject—details that give those of us in Mormon studies and Mormonism’s independent sector reason for hope. Among the other factors that led President Kimball to earnestly pursue the question of change, according to his son, were shifting views in favor of racial equality in American society, growing interest in the Church in Africa, the enormous challenge of applying a strict anti-Black priesthood ban in places like Brazil, and President Kimball’s own humble temperament.1

The answer came on June 1, 1978, and was announced on June 8 in a letter from President Kimball and his two first counselors in the Church Presidency to Church leaders worldwide:

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.

Sociologist Armand Mauss writes about the Church’s limited progress on racial reconciliation since 1978. He characterizes institutional Mormonism’s postban approach to anti-Black racism as “an organizational posture of benign and selective forgetfulness,”

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

After his death in 1985, Kimball was succeeded by Ezra Taft Benson, an arch-conservative, staunch anti-Communist, and former secretary of agriculture under US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose major prophetic initiatives included renewing the Church’s focus on the Book of Mormon and recalling Mormon women to forgo career development and pursue their role as “Mothers in Zion.” His leadership also coincided with increased repression of Mormon feminists and intellectuals,

Benson delivered an address at a meeting at the Mormon Tabernacle lambasting the civil rights movement as a tool of “Communist deception,” and repeated this assertion again over the pulpit at the October 1967 General Conference. LDS Church–owned Deseret Book published the talk in its entirety in booklet form in 1968. Benson had also seriously entertained the prospect of becoming George Wallace’s presidential running mate in 1968. For his administration, addressing the lasting legacies of the priesthood and temple ban was not an administrative priority.

In April 1996, Hinckley agreed to a solo interview with Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Wallace asked about the Church’s anti-Black racism. Hinckley leaned forward, smiled, and maintained steady eye contact and an apparently untroubled disposition: mw: From 1830 to 1978 . . . gh: Mmm hmm. mw: Blacks could not become priests in the Mormon Church, right? gh: That’s correct. mw: Why? gh: Because . . . the leaders of the church at that time . . . interpreted that doctrine that way. mw: Church policy had it that blacks had the mark of Cain. Brigham Young said, “Cain slew his brother and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.” gh: It’s behind us. . . . Look, that’s behind us. Don’t worry about those little flicks of history. mw: Skeptics will suggest, “Well, look, if we’re going to expand, we can’t keep the blacks out.” gh: Pure speculation.10 Hinckley did not present LDS Church history accurately: Black men were, in fact, ordained to the priesthood through the 1840s and held priesthood authority through the end of the nineteenth century. But Hinckley’s strategic public relations approach prioritized ease and confidence over accuracy. It is not easy to address a complicated historical issue effectively in soundbites; Hinckley opted to contain and manage it. “It’s behind us,” he said, then took a breath, leaned in, and reasserted himself. “Look, that’s behind us.”

“Don’t worry about those little flicks of history,” Hinckley said, smiling. In so doing, he made small (“little”) and insignificant (“flicks”) the problem of anti-Black racism, minimizing as a past “worry” the impact of racism on Black lives in Mormonism and beyond and indicating no responsibility on the part of white Mormons (or others with similar histories of discrimination) for their past practices or of the impact those practices had on the Mormon faith and the spiritual lives of its members.

“The leaders of the Church at that time interpreted the doctrine in that way,” he stated, again seeking to contain racism in a past historical moment. But this means that Hinckley opted not to openly reject past rationales or past interpretations as flawed, incorrect, or harmful. This is especially significant given that these rationales remained in print in books like Mormon Doctrine and on the shelves of Church-owned bookstores like Deseret Book for sale to the faithful.

scholars like myself and others who have published dissenting views on LGBTQ+ issues are not invited to speak at Brigham Young University campuses.13

High-ranking Church leaders had openly opposed the civil rights movement over the pulpit at General Conference. Cautions against interracial marriage had found their way into administrative handbooks and Church curricula for youth. When the Church lifted the anti-Black priesthood and temple ban, Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, one of the most vocal proponents of anti-Black doctrinal speculation, said “forget everything that I have said. . . . We spoke with a limited understanding” at a June 1978 address at Brigham Young University.14 But McConkie’s statement was never canonized. The prophet never said so much over the pulpit at General Conference. Nowhere in the Church’s vast curriculum of lesson manuals and publications did the First Presidency say, “We were, collectively, wrong.”