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

by Joanna Brooks

Holland ever so carefully walks the line, navigating the enormous pressure not to appear to undercut any previous LDS Church leader: “I have to concede to my earlier colleagues.” He does not say that the ban itself was wrong, but he does observe that the various rationales offered for the ban were “inadequate” and “wrong.” Holland had access to clear historical expositions by independent LDS historians of how the ban came into being. Still, he insists that “we just don’t know” how or why it came into being.

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.

On February 28, 2012, the Washington Post ran a Romney-related story exploring Mormonism’s history with African Americans, including the history of the priesthood and temple ban and the activism of Black Mormons. Brigham Young University religion professor Randy Bott was interviewed in his office in the “Joseph Smith Building” on the Brigham Young University campus to explain “a possible theological underpinning of the ban”:

Bott points to the Mormon holy text the Book of Abraham as suggesting that all of the descendants of Ham and Egyptus were thus black and barred from the priesthood. . . .

“God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott, the BYU theologian.

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 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.

When news of Bott’s remarks broke, the LDS Church responded immediately

It was the first time since the end of the ban thirty-four years earlier that the Church had officially acknowledged and denounced the racist folklore the ban had engendered. It was also the first time the Church had acknowledged the historical periodicity of the ban: the “restriction” had not been given by God from time immemorial, as prior statements since 1949 had indicated;

Clearly, the “we don’t know” approach to the issue articulated by Jeffrey Holland in 2006 had gained 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.

Perhaps it was the embarrassment of 2012’s Randy Bott debacle. Perhaps it was the intense media attention engendered by the Romney campaign and the “Mormon moment.” Perhaps it was the Church’s extraordinary rates of growth in some African nations. Perhaps it was faithful LDS Church members—Black and white—pressing for a clearer renunciation of the racist past. No one knows exactly what moved LDS Church leadership to publish beginning in 2013 a series of unattributed “Gospel Topics” essays on Mormonism’s most complicated historical subjects, including a two-thousand-word essay on “Race and the Priesthood” that materialized silently on the LDS Church’s website in December.

Certainly, one of the factors in the development of the “Gospel Topics” essays was the digital-era LDS “faith crisis” phenomenon. The advent of digital media challenged the LDS Church’s ability to define truth, manage insider and outsider narratives, and control an official story on Mormon history or doctrine. Before the rise of digital, aside from the highly educated and committed patrons of Mormonism’s independent presses and periodicals like Dialogue, rank-and-file Church members relied almost entirely on LDS Church–approved lesson manuals, carefully vetted Church-published materials sold at Church-owned Deseret Books, and media channels owned by the Church’s subsidiary Bonneville Communications. Information from other sources was viewed by many members as inherently suspect.

In truth, some non-Mormon media about Mormons was hostile, especially literature developed by evangelical Christian anti-Mormon ministries specifically to exploit sensitive and controversial elements of the faith and its history. 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.

Especially after the rise of Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s, every Mormon home gained search engine–driven, one-click access to a range of perspectives—from avowedly anti-Mormon and ex-Mormon to faithful but critical progressives to “TBM: true-believing Mormon” apologists—on the most sensitive and controversial issues in Mormon life, from the origins and historicity of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith’s polygamy (which had been largely excised from official church curriculum) to gender and racial inequality. Church members who had as nineteen- and twenty-year-old boys knocked on doors in impoverished neighborhoods around the world asking others to make enormous sacrifices to join and support the LDS Church on the strength of their testimonies in the literal truth of Mormon scriptures and the infallibility of Mormon leaders found themselves middle-aged men alone late at night peering into a computer screen at a far more complicated story. Podcasts like “Mormon Stories” and “Mormon Expression” gained tens of thousands of listeners as they provided new venues for LDS people who had once harbored their questions and doubts privately. The far-reaching impact of Web 2.0 among Mormon extended kinship networks only accelerated the growth of the Mormon “faith crisis” community,

It was the first time LDS Church leaders had with a unified voice and in an official format rejected all rationalizations for the ban.

The work of identifying the mechanisms through which white supremacy infiltrated and dominated sacred spaces, the means by which it worked, would have to be done as well if there was to be hope not just of abolishing specific prejudices and harmful folk doctrines but of developing in their place entirely new habits of humility and accountability on race.

That approach has yet to materialize.

But scholarship on anti-racism and ending white supremacy teaches us that if substantial lasting change is to take place, it must take place not only in the hearts of the Black Mormons who live the lasting impacts of the ban and exert enormous energy supporting each other and educating non-Black LDS Church members but also in the minds and hearts of all LDS people and in the institutional infrastructure of the LDS Church.

The official shift from a categorical defense of the ban as the will of God from time immemorial to an acknowledgment that the ban was a policy put in place by Brigham Young (under the influence of white American racism) represents an enormous step forward in the telling of the Mormon story. 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. Abolishing legal slavery and publishing accurate histories of anti-Black racism were essential steps forward, but they did not dismantle systems of white supremacy in the United States. Abolishing the ban and publishing acc...

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.

In July 2017, Elder Quentin Cook, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered an address to a gathering of Black clergy members and theologians at the Seymour Institute Seminar on Religious Freedom hosted at Princeton Theological Seminary.

The institute’s description characterized the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency as “a pause in the agenda that pitted liberal politics against people of faith and threatened our religious freedom. This presents an opening for Christians to advance the cause of Jesus. In contrast to a culture that has been increasingly hostile to the gospel, there is now an opportunity to present religious freedom in its true, life-giving light.” The conference organizers sought opportunity to “rebrand religious freedom.”

Although Elder Cook opened his remarks by stating that the LDS Church does not engage in partisan politics, his participation in the event indicated that the Church had prioritized deep coalition-building work with conservative think tanks and their religious affiliates.

Among the privileges of whiteness are exemption from racial discomfort and the feeling of being wrong. My experiences as a white scholar studying and writing about race and as a white university administrator working with faculty-related diversity programs—the many times when I have made mistakes as well as times I have learned and done better—have taught me that forgoing these privileges and one’s presumption of innocence is necessary to attempting to work in solidarity with African American people.

Nowhere in the address does Cook mention the Church’s own century-long ban on Black equality. Nowhere does he acknowledge the Church’s own efforts to exclude Blacks from its programs and universities, nor efforts to exclude Blacks from full and equal participation in civic life endorsed by LDS Church leaders. He completely avoids the subject of Mormon anti-Black racism, though its anti-Black racism is the second thing after polygamy most African Americans associate with the LDS faith tradition. Claiming one’s own history of oppression and seeking to use shared oppression as the basis for a relationship to a community of color without taking responsibility for one’s own culpability in the oppression of that community of color is a rhetorical act scholars have called “racing for innocence.”28 It uses a history of persecution to excuse, distract, and step around the hard work of setting relationships right, addressing uncomfortable histories, and seeking reconciliation. By utilizing Mormon rhetorical habits of undergrounding, including nontransparency about LDS history and managing insider and outsider narratives through careful speech, Cook preserves white racial innocence and with it white supremacy, and he enlists his conservative Black hosts in a silent agreement to preserve white innocence as well. Moreover, his remarks signal to Cook’s secondary audience—the many LDS readers who would read them because they were subsequently published on the Church’s website—that it was...

Every predominantly white American Christianity has its own work to do in assessing how anti-Black racism has structured its history and how even when their facades have been dismantled, those structures persist into the present.

In this book, I have tried to identify and analyze the elements of this scaffolding in my own religious community—that is, the things the Mormon people have done and continue to do that perpetuate anti-Black white supremacy: • Prioritizing relationships among whites in the Mormon community over responsibilities to the well-being of fellow Mormons who are Black • Actively excluding Blacks from religious and political power, thus discouraging a Black presence in Mormonism and rendering Black experience abstract and unknowable • Abandoning factual versions of Mormon history in favor of correlated narratives presenting Black exclusion as the will of God from time immemorial revealed to infallible Mormon prophets • Entering into silent agreements within the membership and with the American public to coaffirm the innocence and moral goodness of the white majority • Repressing internal critique and dissent • Using rhetorical evasion and duplicity to manage the legacy of Mormon anti-Black racism without taking responsibility for it These contribute not only to what scholars call a possessive investment in whiteness but also to a possessive investment in rightness that supports white racial innocence, the privilege that allows whites to feel morally superior while avoiding grappling with the profound moral questions of race and racism.

The choice to maintain one’s place in a power structure that rewards silence and solidarity with other whites at the expense of truth is a choice to support white supremacy. Other ways that white Mormons have allowed the “possessive investment in rightness” to block productive conversation around race include correcting people of color who present information, experience, or perspective in forums ranging from Sunday meetings to Facebook; holding to literal interpretations of Old Testament, Book of Mormon, and Pearl of Great Price scriptures on skin color and “racial identities”; and holding to uninformed and unnuanced celebration of LDS historical figures who openly espoused racist sentiments, held slaves, or opposed Black emancipation and equality, including Abraham Smoot, Eliza R. Snow, J. Reuben Clark, Ezra Taft Benson, and others. Underrepresentation of people of color in leadership roles also makes it impossible, Smith writes, to “move beyond the profound distortions brought on by the warp of privilege.”4

With major buildings at Brigham Young University named after Smoot (administration building) and Joseph F. Smith (College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences), who also obscured the truth to secure Black priesthood exclusion, as well as other LDS Church leaders like J. Reuben Clark (law school), Harold B. Lee (library), David O. McKay (College of Education), and George Albert Smith (fieldhouse), who are on record as advocates of anti-Black racial segregation, and Ezra Taft Benson (chemistry building) and Ernest Wilkinson (student center), who opposed the civil rights movement or sought to evade responsibility for institutional segregation, LDS Church–owned institutions like Brigham Young University have an opportunity to enter into a national conversation about history, institutionalized racism, privilege, accountability, responsibility, and restitution. Several leading American universities including Brown, Georgetown, and Harvard have undertaken productive scrutiny of their institutions’ formative historical intersections with slavery and white supremacy, and Brigham Young University has the opportunity to join their company.

For movement from the middle to take shape around issues of racism, white LDS people will have to choose to see the possessive investment in whiteness and the possessive investment in rightness as corrosive to the tradition.

But perhaps the greatest work ahead is the dismantling of prophetic infallibility as an alibi for the Church’s reversals on issues of critical importance. The possessive investment in rightness that was developed to shore up Mormonism’s possessive investment in whiteness also served to manage its contradictory positions on issues like polygamy.

First, it has served as a tool for managing and transitioning from the incoherence and instability of early Mormon belief and practice to its modern institutional correlation. Second, it has helped Mormonism manage ongoing contradictions in its scripture, prophetic statements, and actions. Third, it has helped Mormonism maintain its internal differentiation, its coherence, its “optimum tension” (as Armand Mauss put it) with the white mainstream, while yet accessing white mainstream advantages.6

Because I love my faith community and believe we can do better, I offer our experience to others as a witness and a warning.