Systematic anti-Black racism did not end with the legal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. It simply changed shape: into debt peonage, criminalization, mass incarceration, housing segregation, sexual predation, voter suppression, and discrimination of all kinds. The same holds true for systematic anti-Black racism in white American Christianity. Every denomination will have its own story in this regard, whether its congregations have been segregated by theology, by church policy, or as an uncontested correlate of segregation in everyday American life. I will focus on the Mormon story to analyze in detail how white supremacy persists in and through attempts to reform it.
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 His son writes:
President Kimball felt that his predecessors had sought the Lord’s will concerning the priesthood policy, and for whatever reason “the time had not come.” But Spencer had to ask anew. He wanted urgently “to find out firsthand what the Lord thought about it.” It was not enough just to wait until the Lord saw fit to take the initiative: the scripture admonished him to ask and to knock if he wanted to know for himself. He prayed, trying not to prejudge the answer: Should we maintain the long-standing policy, or has the time come for the change?2
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:
Aware of the promises made by the prophets and presidents of the Church who have preceded us that at some time, in God’s eternal plan, all of our brethren who are worthy may receive the priesthood, and witnessing the faithfulness of those from whom the priesthood has been withheld, we have pleaded long and earnestly in behalf of these, our faithful brethren, spending many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance.
He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple. Accordingly, all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color. Priesthood leaders are instructed to follow the policy of carefully interviewing all candidates for ordination to either the Aaronic or the Melchizedek Priesthood to ensure that they meet the established standards for worthiness.
We declare with soberness that the Lord has now made known his will for the blessing of all his children throughout the earth who will hearken to the voice of his authorized servants, and prepare themselves to receive every blessing of the gospel.3
The announcement made newspaper headlines across the United States. Many LDS Church members recall weeping when they heard about the end of the ban on the radio. I was six years old in June 1978 and have no such recollection, but the impression I have cultivated over forty years of hearing LDS people talk about the end of the ban was that just about everyone felt it had become a burden and an embarrassment, and to have it lifted was a relief.
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. When the ban ended, these rationalizations remained in circulation and new rationalizations emerged to preserve white innocence and defer the work of repair and change.
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,” so theorized by its adherents:
If the church progresses in a continuous, linear path by divine guidance, then contemporary realities and understandings replace those from the past, which will eventually be forgotten. Obsolete ideas and practices simply don’t count any more, even if they originated as divine revelations. Where discrepancies appear between the present and the past, there is no point in reminding ourselves about the past. Especially if an event in the past is embarrassing, then recalling it and dwelling on it, even if only to repudiate it, merely confuses the matter. Such negative thinking has no place in the Lord’s kingdom. If harm has resulted from earlier ways of thinking, then everyone involved should forgive everyone else and get on with constructing a better future. Apologies or ringing declarations of disavowal should not be necessary, since few peoples or individuals have histories free of offense against others, and thus few are in a position to demand apologies. With time, memories of these offenses will fade automatically, and we will all be better for it. Meanwhile, if we have not made the requisite changes, let’s not stir up useless and uncomfortable old memories.4
Mauss is of course critical of this ideology especially as it isolates Black Mormons and leaves them vulnerable to continuing racist treatment and racist remarks in LDS settings and fails to address the concerns of all Church members “disillusioned” by racism past and present. But I would present two additional problems in this approach beyond its pastoral 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 is “useless” and potentially harmful. It fosters a limited morality that prioritizes the comfort of the majority and institutional gains over truthfulness and humility.
While this approach is certainly not unique to Mormonism, within the LDS context, it does have deep historical footings. It represents the continuation of a historic Mormon rhetorical pattern used to protect unpopular LDS beliefs against outsiders that originated during the national controversy over polygamy, a practice I call “undergrounding.” The nineteenth-century Mormon “underground” was a system of social networks that harbored LDS men and women evading prosecution or persecution for polygamy or unlawful cohabitation. It developed as a result of open political conflict between Mormons and host American society over family definition. On one side of this conflict, dominant American society criminalized polygamy to mark Mormons as aliens and deprive them of the rights of citizens; in defense of polygamy, Mormon communities constructed and maintained themselves as theocracies against US rule.5 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 Mormon racism, cultivated “insider” and “outsider” narratives, and carefully managed speech to deflect public interest and defer substantial change—and how these patterns have contributed to the continuation of white supremacy in Mormonism.
* * *
Despite his hardline stances against the Equal Rights Amendment and harsh condemnations of homosexuality, Spencer W. Kimball’s leadership in ending the temple and priesthood ban made this diminutive, warm, gravelly voiced (he was a throat cancer survivor) man beloved among the Mormon people. 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, culminating in six high-profile excommunication courts in September 1993.
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 puddle. Additional illustrations within the book include anti-Black racist cartoons drawn in the tradition of nineteenth-century minstrel show imagery.) That September, 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.
The tone at LDS Church headquarters changed when Gordon B. Hinckley became LDS Church president in 1995. Hinckley, who had spent many decades in Church public relations, sought to improve the public image of the Church, in part by making himself available to the media in a way prior LDS Church presidents had not. The eighty-five-year old Hinckley presented himself with energy, optimism, and confidence. From the moment he stepped to the podium at the March 1995 press conference where his presidency was announced and opened himself to questions from journalists—something no other twentieth-century Church president had done—he appeared to invite and embrace a new kind of openness, an image he carefully pursued by retaining a New York–based public relations firm to guide LDS Church messaging from the mid-1990s onward. Hinckley did not, however, fundamentally change the patterns of nontransparency, deflection, and guardedness that had for more than a century characterized Mormonism’s management of its most sensitive issues.9
In April 1996, Hinckley agreed to a solo interview with Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes. No other LDS Church president had ever accepted such an invitation. As did Barbara Walters in 1978, 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.” A different approach might have acknowledged the shortcomings of prior Mormon leaders, the imprint of racism on American history in general and Mormon history in particular, its lasting impacts on institutions and individuals, and the moral importance of working now and in the present to do better. But for President Hinckley the focus was on establishing a new tone, a new public presence for the LDS Church. His priorities were institutional preservation and growth.
Where he did apply gentle pressure was in addressing to Wallace (and by inference the broader Mormon and non-Mormon audience) an instruction that sounded like encouragement: “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 public relations priorities of the institution took precedent over pastoral concerns for the experience of Black Mormons and the moral responsibility of white Mormons. Significantly, in his conversation with Wallace, Hinckley did not endorse any of the various rationales past LDS Church leaders had put forward as doctrine. “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.
He did not say “we were wrong.” In fact, his entire mode of presentation—tone, facial expressions, tempo—telegraphed an undisturbed sense of “rightness.” 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.
As the twentieth anniversary of the 1978 revelation approached, grassroots efforts to address the persistence of anti-Black folklore met with some interest from general authorities like Marlin Jensen, one of the few liberal-leaning members of the LDS Church hierarchy, a member of its Public Affairs committee, and executive director of the Church History Library. David Jackson, an African American convert, together with a white fellow congregant named Dennis Gladwell and LDS sociologist Armand Mauss prepared briefs for Jensen outlining the problem and proposing pathways forward, including withdrawing controversial texts like Mormon Doctrine by Bruce R. McConkie and issuing public statements by the First Presidency specifically repudiating past racist teachings. Someone close to the discussion leaked it to the Los Angeles Times, which in May 1998 ran a story reporting that “key leaders” were “debating a proposal to repudiate historic church doctrines that were used to bolster claims of black inferiority.” Within days of the Los Angeles Times story, the LDS Public Affairs department on behalf of President Hinckley and his counselors issued a categorical denial with the comment that “the 1978 official declaration continues to speak for itself.” Once again, Hinckley resorted to the time-tested LDS institutional rhetorical strategy of nontransparency: circling the wagons and defensively shutting down communications in response to perceived pressure from the outside.11
This is not to say that Hinckley made no efforts to improve Mormon-Black relations. In 1998, he spoke by invitation at the national convention of the NAACP in Salt Lake City. Under his leadership, the Church launched an ambitious project to put its volunteers and its expertise in genealogy to work digitizing the records of the Freedman’s Bank so that African American genealogists could have ready access to information about its almost five hundred thousand depositors, a task completed by 2001. Hinckley himself also sought to build a personal relationship with Pastor Cecil Murray of the Los Angeles African Methodist Episcopal (LA AME) Church and apologized personally to Murray for the Church’s role in slavery—an LA AME Church founding member named Biddy Mason had made her way to California after being enslaved in Utah by a Mormon pioneer family. His discussions with Murray culminated in a statement Hinckley made over the pulpit at the Church’s semiannual General Conference in April 2006:
I have wondered why there is so much hatred in the world. . . . Racial strife still lifts its ugly head. I am advised that even right here among us there is some of this. I cannot understand how it can be. It seemed to me that we all rejoiced in the 1978 revelation given President Kimball. I was there in the temple at the time that that happened. There was no doubt in my mind or in the minds of my associates that what was revealed was the mind and the will of the Lord. . . . Now I am told that racial slurs and denigrating remarks are sometimes heard among us. I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ.12
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.
Observant LDS people take in messages from their leadership in a culturally specific way shaped by almost two centuries of intense differentiation from the mainstream and resistance to anti-Mormonism, the high demands of belonging to a religion headed by a living prophet, the LDS use of secrecy as an element of the sacred, and a cultivated tolerance for holding to beliefs radically at odds with mainstream norms. Church members know how to rank the value and reliability of the venues through which information comes. Church members are officially discouraged from using sources not published by the LDS Church as members develop Sunday school lessons and lay sermons (“talks”) to give in Church meetings and pursue personal study. Books, scholarly journals, magazines, and web resources not produced by the Church, even those produced by LDS Church members, can be stigmatized unless they are seamlessly orthodox in their presentation. Conferences and public events not hosted by the Church were strongly criticized in a 1991 statement by the Church’s First Presidency directed specifically at “symposia,” which concluded, “There are times when public discussion of sacred or personal matters is inappropriate.” The “personal” matters, according to the statement, included Church problems and controversies. This stigma has eased considerably in some quarters with the rise of Mormon studies programs in non-LDS universities. But it is still popular belief that faculty at Church-owned Brigham Young University are not to publish in independent Mormon scholarly journals like Dialogue or appear on the program at conferences like the independent Sunstone Symposium, and scholars like myself and others who have published dissenting views on LGBTQ+ issues are not invited to speak at Brigham Young University campuses.13 The LDS Church History Library even declined permission for me to publish something so benign as archival photographs of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Mount Rushmore in this book, having required as a condition of permissions a copy of the text in which the photographs would appear.
Church members also know how to rank the value and reliability of the individual who provides the information. What is said by the prophet, especially during the sessions of General Conference, is considered of the highest truth value. The prophet is understood by observant Mormons to speak for God to the Church. Lower-ranking general authorities—especially in the Quorum of the Seventy or regional representatives—can also speak truth, but it may be inflected with personal elements that make it less defining and reliable. What is spoken by general authorities in non-LDS settings also tends to rank lower in terms of value and reliability, especially if the content diverges a bit from orthodoxy.
The exception to this ranking schema is any information that comes from high-ranking Church authorities by insider connection or word of mouth. Early experiences of violent anti-Mormonism (including mob attacks on Mormon homes, assaults, sexual assaults, and murders of Mormon leaders and missionaries) and decades of hiding out from opponents of polygamy and the federal officers and armies who did their work instilled especially in multigenerational, highly observant Mormons a strong sense of the necessity of “undergrounding.” This sense is reinforced to this day as polygamy is maintained in doctrine and polygamous sealings (marriages) effectual not during mortality but in the eternities are permitted in LDS temples despite the Church’s formal abolition of public polygamy in 1890 and the repeated disavowal of polygamy in statements by Church leaders for the 130 years since. These factors have given “insider” knowledge high status both in terms of truth and in terms of perceived significance to the survival and success of the faith. Adept Mormons come to understand that there are some beliefs others might not accept or understand, and that it is believers’ duty to quietly preserve them. This is bolstered by the value placed on secrecy in LDS temple worship, wherein the most observant members of the faith undertake rituals of personal devotion within LDS temples that they promise not to share with the uninitiated. What is said in public on many issues can be understood as a tactical concession to preserve the Church’s theocratic sovereignty. These deeply embedded schemas of information set up a strong and self-perpetuating “insider/outsider” dynamic in Mormon communication. The internet has complicated this dynamic, especially as it has created new venues for the presentation of LDS Church content that do not bear the immediate impact and revelatory status of a live prophetic statement over the pulpit at General Conference. Increased activity by the LDS Church’s Public Affairs division and seasonal discoordination between the LDS Church hierarchy and Public Affairs have also fueled speculation on which communications are tactical rather than revelatory. Progressive members hungry for change will scour press releases and internet content for any indication that feeds their hopes, while orthodox members will refuse any information that does not confirm an orthodox worldview unless it is delivered as revelation from the prophet himself.
This is the context in which some LDS Church authorities started to respond after 2000 to the problem of perpetuated anti-Black doctrinal folklore. White supremacist views of Blackness as a “curse” and the souls of Black folks as spiritually inferior had found their way into lesson manuals and ostensibly comprehensive accounts of systematic theology (like Mormon Doctrine) since the 1880s. 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.” There was no official rejection of the centuries of accumulated racist rationale. It 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. Public Affairs officials too became aware of the need for better information, especially with the dawning of the internet era as Church members could find their way to accounts of Mormon history that contradicted the official story and laid bare the Church’s efforts to control its story.
No doubt these issues were on the mind of Elder Jeffrey Holland, a former president of Brigham Young University and member of its high-ranking Quorum of the Twelve Apostles known for his sensitivity on matters of consequence to the Church’s progressives. Of all of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Holland, who holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, was regarded as the one most attuned to the complex politics of telling the truth about Mormon history. This is fully reflected in his interview with (non-LDS) filmmaker Helen Whitney, who directed PBS’s monumental, multipart documentary The Mormons (2006). Documentaries like The Mormons, the Church’s own novel public relations efforts (such as the “I’m a Mormon” campaign) after 2007, and especially Mitt Romney’s national political campaigns opened Mormons to unprecedented visibility and scrutiny. This heightened the tension around critical issues like race, as Holland’s March 2006 exchange (subsequently web-published) with Whitney reflects:
hw: I’ve talked to many blacks and many whites as well about the lingering folklore [about why blacks couldn’t have the priesthood]. These are faithful Mormons who are delighted about this revelation, and yet who feel something more should be said about the folklore and even possibly about the mysterious reasons for the ban itself, which was not a revelation; it was a practice. So, if you could, briefly address the concerns Mormons have about this folklore and what should be done.
jh: One clear-cut position is that the folklore must never be perpetuated. . . . I have to concede to my earlier colleagues. . . . They, I’m sure, in their own way, were doing the best they knew to give shape to [the policy], to give context for it, to give even history to it. All I can say is however well intended the explanations were, I think almost all of them were inadequate and/or wrong. . . . It probably would have been advantageous to say nothing, to say we just don’t know, and, [as] with many religious matters, whatever was being done was done on the basis of faith at that time. But some explanations were given and had been given for a lot of years. . . . At the very least, there should be no effort to perpetuate those efforts to explain why that doctrine existed. I think, to the extent that I know anything about it, as one of the newer and younger ones to come along, . . . we simply do not know why that practice, that policy, that doctrine was in place.
hw: What is the folklore, quite specifically?
jh: Well, some of the folklore that you must be referring to are suggestions that there were decisions made in the pre-mortal councils where someone had not been as decisive in their loyalty to a Gospel plan or the procedures on earth or what was to unfold in mortality, and that therefore that opportunity and mortality was compromised. I really don’t know a lot of the details of those, because fortunately I’ve been able to live in the period where we’re not expressing or teaching them, but I think that’s the one I grew up hearing the most, was that it was something to do with the pre-mortal councils. . . . But I think that’s the part that must never be taught until anybody knows a lot more than I know. . . . We just don’t know, in the historical context of the time, why it was practiced. . . . That’s my principal [concern], is that we don’t perpetuate explanations about things we don’t know. . . . We don’t pretend that something wasn’t taught or practice wasn’t pursued for whatever reason. But I think we can be unequivocal and we can be declarative in our current literature, in books that we reproduce, in teachings that go forward, whatever, that from this time forward, from 1978 forward, we can make sure that nothing of that is declared. That may be where we still need to make sure that we’re absolutely dutiful, that we put [a] careful eye of scrutiny on anything from earlier writings and teachings, just [to] make sure that that’s not perpetuated in the present. That’s the least, I think, of our current responsibilities on that topic.15
Here, 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. Thus, it would have been “advantageous” to the Church, he says, had no rationale been offered at any time, and no rationale should be “perpetuated” “going forward.” 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.
Perhaps the most significant fact of the interview is its tone, venue, and context. Holland’s cautious and highly modulated approach, the way he speaks to Whitney, is not the way Church leaders speak over the pulpit at General Conference in polished, declarative, affirmative, authoritative statements. His remarks sound unofficial. They do not carry the weight of revelation and change. And because Holland is the quorum’s known intellectual sympathizer and because he made these in a conversational exchange with a non-Mormon interviewer in an unofficial, non-LDS venue (especially one with an intellectual/progressive/liberal aura), his words did not reach or register with the vast majority of Church members worldwide. Only those specifically hunting for some evidence of change on this issue would have found in his words reason for hope. Nothing in his remarks, though significant in their confirmation that rationale should not be perpetuated, unsettled Mormonism’s possessive investment in rightness.
The extent to which general anti-racist sentiment as expressed by President Hinckley in April 2006 and the cautionary “perpetuate nothing” approach Elder Holland endorsed in his March 2006 interview with Helen Whitney did not disrupt the perpetuation of racist folklore within Mormon settings became clear in early 2012 during the Mitt Romney campaign for the presidency. Though candidate Romney masterfully deflected questions linking him to Mormonism and the Church disciplined its messaging to create a respectable distance from the candidate, persistent media pressure succeeded in puncturing Mormonism’s carefully managed boundary between insider and outsider narratives. 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”:
According to Mormon scriptures, the descendants of Cain, who killed his brother, Abel, “were black.” One of Cain’s descendants was Egyptus, a woman Mormons believe was the namesake of Egypt. She married Ham, whose descendants were themselves cursed and, in the view of many Mormons, barred from the priesthood by his father, Noah. 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. 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 that had no theological or scholarly merit. There were faculty members on campus like Professor Eugene England in the Department of English who had written about the racism and embarrassment of the priesthood and temple ban in ways that were both searching and scholarly. BYU Studies, the university-sponsored scholarly journal, had published as recently as 2008 Edward Kimball’s outstanding essay on the ban and its dismantling. 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 with the following statement:
The Church’s position is clear—we believe all people are God’s children and are equal in His eyes and in the Church. We do not tolerate racism in any form. For a time in the Church there was a restriction on the priesthood for male members of African descent. It is not known precisely why, how, or when this restriction began in the Church but what is clear is that it ended decades ago. Some have attempted to explain the reason for this restriction but these attempts should be viewed as speculation and opinion, not doctrine. The Church is not bound by speculation or opinions given with limited understanding. We condemn racism, including any and all past racism by individuals both inside and outside the Church.17
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; rather, “for a time in the Church there was a restriction,” though, according to the statement, no one knew “why, how, or when this restriction began.” 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. Nor did any general authorities address the issue over the pulpit, nor was a corrective amendment inserted into LDS curricula. The newsroom statement was important, but it did not enact a course correction in a way that would register broadly. Only dedicated readers of the Church’s press releases who were most hungry for signs of change were likely to notice.
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. The Church later posted a brief introductory essay for the series explaining that it had been motivated by the quantity of “information” on Mormonism newly available through digital media, including information from “questionable and often inaccurate sources,” to “publish straightforward, in-depth essays” on critical issues in the Mormon faith. The essays, it was noted, had been “approved by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve”—a critical imprimatur. The information in the essays was for the most part not new: it had been sourced with the help of historians from professional scholarship, church histories, and scripture. What was novel was the Church’s new effort to address such issues directly and officially and to provide detail revealing the humanity and complexity of Mormon history rather than holding to sweeping assertions of the timelessness of doctrine and the infallibility of LDS prophets.
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. These media habits were among the legacies of the polygamy crisis, which sharpened Mormons’ habit of self-definition by differentiation against a hostile outside “world.” 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.
Until it didn’t. 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, which gained a national profile in coverage by the New York Times and the New Republic in July 2013.18 In October 2013, President Dieter Uchtdorf, a member of the Church’s First Presidency and a leader recognized for his moderate-to-progressive sensibilities, acknowledged the “faith crisis” movement and called for greater understanding. Over the pulpit at General Conference, Uchtdorf said, “Some struggle with unanswered questions about things that have been done or said in the past. . . . To be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine.” Viewed by LDS scholars as an important concession to the fallibility of past Church leaders, Uchtdorf’s remarks were picked up by the national media.19 It was no longer feasible to manage the Mormon past through selective remembering and forgetting and careful public speech. Digital-era Mormons needed frank, accurate, complete, and accessible information about challenging issues.
The gently plainspoken, positive tone modeled by President Uchtdorf carried through the “Gospel Topics” essays and other noteworthy changes as well. Significantly, the essays moved beyond the scripture-only proof texting that dominated Church materials from the 1940s through the 2000s to reference in footnotes scholarly histories that added value and insight. The “Race and the Priesthood” essay opens by stating the Church’s theological commitment to the universal love of God and by describing how the Church’s mode of organizing congregations fostered “racial integration,” but then frankly acknowledges that the Church “from the mid-1800s until 1978” “did not ordain men of black African descent to its priesthood or allow black men or women to participate in temple endowment or sealing ordinances.” In March 2013, the Church had updated headnotes in its official scriptures to reflect the fact that Joseph Smith ordained Black men to the priesthood.20 But the essay was the first time an official LDS Church source had captured not only the historical periodicity of the ban but also the often overlooked fact that Mormon women of Black African descent had experienced exclusion as well.
The essay helpfully situates Mormonism’s specific anti-Black racist history within the broader history of racism in the United States and American Christianity, including long-standing American Christian folk doctrines rationalizing the enslavement and oppression of Black people in connection with the biblical curses on Cain and Ham. These forces influenced debates about slavery in US territories during the 1850s, including debates in Utah territory:
In two speeches delivered before the Utah territorial legislature in January and February 1852, Brigham Young announced a policy restricting men of black African descent from priesthood ordination. At the same time, President Young said that at some future day, black Church members would “have [all] the privilege and more” enjoyed by other members.
The essay remembers the persistence of Black Mormon pioneers Elijah Abel and Jane Manning James in maintaining their claim to full priesthood authority and temple access even as nineteenth-century Mormon institutions sought to deny them. It notes the innovation of the doctrinal speculation on priesthood and temple exclusion as a consequence of Black inferiority in the premortal existence and tracks limited efforts made by President David O. McKay to clarify the boundaries and edges of the Church’s policy during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Significantly, the essay identifies the faith of Black Latter-day Saints in Brazil and West Africa as the primary force that “moved Church leaders” to ask God whether it was time for black Church members to “have all the privilege” as Brigham Young promised, and recounts the revelation as an event revered and welcomed with “joy” by LDS Church members around the globe. It closes by reiterating the essence of the Church’s 2012 newsroom statement:
Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.
It was the first time LDS Church leaders had with a unified voice and in an official format rejected all rationalizations for the ban. By making these statements, the Church gave members an official resource to cite to counter persistent racist folklore that could surface at home or at church.
Scholars and activists applauded the essay and asked for more. In a special issue of the Journal of Mormon History dedicated to celebrating and extending the essay’s enterprise, Max Mueller lauded “the Church’s most frank and comprehensive effort to confront the reality of its racist past” but worried that the essay had “not reached as far as perhaps the Church intended.”21 Black LDS activists suggested that the essay be cited “regularly at LDS General Conference,” “translate[d] . . . into all the languages that the church uses to communicate with its global membership,” and “read from the pulpit in every Mormon congregation and mission in the world.”22 Historian W. Paul Reeve related to the Salt Lake Tribune that because “the pieces were not signed by LDS leaders, not prominently displayed online nor sent to bishops to be read over the pulpit to Mormon congregations,” many members had not heard of them, and some Mormons “drew upon the essay in church meetings and were met by resistance from fellow Mormons who said the essays were not official and merely [church] Public Affairs pieces.”23 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.
Others pressed for even deeper work to get at the systems of power and privilege that created and sustained the anti-Black exclusion policy. Wrote Gina Colvin in the Journal of Mormon History, “For me, the race essay was powerful and important in revising traditional narratives of black ‘premortal undeservedness’ to hold the priesthood but it didn’t go far enough to turn those same academic tools on the LDS Church in order to question ‘why’ these narratives held, and what larger discourses of white supremacy Mormon institutional racism hangs from.”24 In Colvin’s view, the story of the Church’s priesthood and temple ban was in part a story about the Church’s specific historic oppression of African American Mormons, but it was also a story about how and why Mormonism became a place where such oppressions could take hold and thrive. 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. Dismantling the possessive investment in whiteness and the possessive investment in rightness within Mormonism would take more than a retooling of historical narratives, although that was an essential and potentially impactful first step. It would take the cultivation of an entirely new approach to race that put no stock in maintaining Mormonism’s racial innocence.
That approach has yet to materialize. The Church continues to support the Genesis group and lend support to projects developed by African American Mormon community leaders like Marvin Perkins, founder of the African American Outreach Program and creator of the “Blacks in the Scriptures” website, and “Sistas in Zion” authors and speakers Tamu Smith and Zandra Vranes. The Church-owned Deseret News published perspectives from Vranes after Charlottesville, and LDS Church facilities in Washington, DC, and suburban Salt Lake City hosted “Legacy of Black Pioneers” conferences in 2018 and 2019 organized, guided, and conducted by African American Mormon authors, speakers, and activists. The Church also produced in June 2018 the “Be One” event at its massive Conference Center in Salt Lake City, featuring music, spoken word, dance, and testimony by Black African and African American LDS people as well as high-ranking Church leaders including President Russell M. Nelson. Other academic and scholarly efforts and events on African American Mormon issues and race and racism in the Church have been organized and supported by Utah Valley University and the University of Utah.
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 change must take place not only in the content of the official Mormon story but also in the way that story is absorbed and what it teaches. 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 accurate histories of its institutionalization are essential steps forward, but they do not dismantle systems of white supremacy in Mormonism.
Few historically white American churches have institutionalized anti-racist curriculum that goes beyond the normative “teaching tolerance” approach to get at the systematic, pervasive, and deadly quality of white supremacy. White American Christianity has directed its energies at other endeavors, some equally laudable, but others designed primarily to convey and affirm white racial innocence. Because of its legibly human history and the extremity of its institutionalized ban on full Black participation, Mormonism has an opportunity to show moral leadership and support model endeavors in truth telling and reconciliation. But at least two obstacles stand between Mormonism and moral leadership in this area. 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.
There is an intersection between the Church’s racial history and its opposition to LGBTQ+ equality. It has surfaced in the way the Church has used Black spokespeople and Black civil rights struggle histories in the service of its anti-gay rights agenda. During California’s Proposition 8 campaign in 2008, when the Church used religious meetings and buildings to activate tens of thousands of Mormon volunteers and donors to end same-sex civil marriage, California African American Mormons served as the Church’s public face at rallies and in the media. Black Mormon spokespeople perpetuated ugly secular homophobia and cited the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jesse Jackson ideal of a “Rainbow Coalition” in service of the cause. One Black Mormon spokesperson compared the street-level aggressions against “Yes on 8” to aggressions against Black civil rights.25 (The aggressions went both ways, as media sources attest.) After the campaign, as the national tide was turning in favor of marriage equality, in 2009, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a legal scholar and high-ranking member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered several public addresses in defense of “religious freedom” that compared pushback against “Yes on 8” demonstrators to “voter-intimidation of blacks in the South.”26 Given Mormonism’s history of anti-Black racism and opposition to the civil rights movement, using Black stories in this way did not model thoughtful, accountable moral leadership.
To be sure, the Proposition 8 campaign came before the Church produced its 2012 Bott-gate statement and made the substantial, significant changes that culminated with the 2013 “Race and the Priesthood” essay. But the pattern of using Black stories in the service of a “religious freedom” defense against welcoming gays and their children has continued beyond those watershed events. 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 Seymour Institute, named after William J. Seymour, a major figure in the history of American Pentecostalism who is credited with the beginnings of the famed Azusa Street Revivals in 1907, brings together Black clergy and theologians from a range of denominations to collaborate on conservative theological projects focusing on heterosexual marriage and normative gender roles. The institute is based at Ella Baker House in Boston and funded by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank that also funded the controversial “Regenerus Study” (2012), which alleged the insufficiency of LGBTQ+ parenting and was cited as evidence in unsuccessful legal cases against same-sex marriage. The majority African American program also featured William P. Mumma, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, known for litigation on behalf of plaintiffs seeking exemption on faith-based grounds from providing contraceptives through employer-paid health insurance. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the only major religious institution besides the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) to be represented on the program.27
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.
It is a tremendous responsibility to be one of the only white speakers on a program convened by Black leaders on issues of importance to the Black community. Respect for the hosts and host traditions obliges humility, deference, demonstrated knowledge of Black history including those who have made your own work possible, openness to feedback, acknowledgment of complexity, and recognition of white privilege—all of this in a way that does not decenter the occasion or consume energy required for the most important work at hand. To do anti-racist work in such a setting might involve acknowledging one’s situatedness in history, including past histories of discrimination, and citing Black role models and authorities by name to show respect—all of this in a way that does not oblige the Black hosts or the host tradition to offer you special recognition or exculpation. It is a matter of unburdening everyone in the room of maintaining the white racial innocence that often serves its white bearers as a shield against accountability, responsibility, vulnerability, and hard work. 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.
Elder Cook’s remarks hit many of these marks. He acknowledges the hospitality and leadership in its chosen endeavor of the Seymour Institute and cites writings by its African American directors. He also indicates respect for Martin Luther King Jr. and cites a sermon by Dr. King, as well as writings by William Wilberforce, whom he remembers as an eighteenth-century British “Christian evangelical” who advocated persistently for the end of the slave trade. Cook indicates that his fondness for Wilberforce and other figures of English history is stoked in part by the fact that the “sympathetic study and teaching of British history, as well as the history of western civilization, have been under attack for some time” and that these amount to an “attack” on “Christianity.” His remarks betray a less-than-objective view of history scholarship and a disinclination to consider the perspectives of Christians (including LDS people) and other faithful peoples around the globe who have suffered loss of life, property, well-being, and sovereignty under British colonialism. Still, it is a view shared by Cook’s African American host organization, and Cook seeks to build common ground.
On the commonly held idea that Christianity is under attack and that numerous liberal social movements put “religious freedom” on the defensive, Cook pivots to share the story of Latter-day Saint persecution. He is careful to stress that he is not making a comparison: “I wish to concur unequivocally with what Dr. Eugene Rivers and Dr. Kenneth Johnson wrote: ‘The black American experience as a function of slavery is unique and without analogue in the history of the United States. . . . While other . . . groups have experienced discrimination and hardship, none of their experiences compare with the physical and cultural brutality of slavery.’ ” He then proceeds to tell a Mormon history of persecution. At some points of the story, Elder Cook does not accurately represent what professional LDS historians have documented about the unevenness of race relations in early LDS communities, and his attribution of anti-Mormon mob violence in Missouri to the Church’s progressive stance on race omits many other more salient factors like the Church’s practice of polygamy and fears of Mormon political takeover. Cook highlights the murder of seventeen Mormon men and boys at Haun’s Mill, Missouri, and the extermination order issued by the state. He concludes this recounting by stating: “Let me say once again, I am not comparing Latter-day Saint trials with the horrendous slavery experience of African Americans. But it does allow us to see religious freedom through a somewhat similar lens”—a commitment shaped through the experience of minority persecution. He closes his address by outlining the elements of the Church’s “Fairness for All” approach, which includes protections for individual believers, religious organizations, and LGBT people alike to live without fear of discrimination and ostracism and serve the needs of their respective communities, including the rights of those who oppose homosexuality on religious grounds not to accommodate LGBT clients or members.
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 okay not to acknowledge racism in the Mormon past and present. If a high-ranking Church leader could speak so confidently to a gathering of African American clergy, certainly we were doing all right.
Except we weren’t. Just one month after Elder Cook’s remarks, a prominent extremist white supremacist blogger, who cited her LDS faith as a rationale for her racism, made national news as a planned headliner at the August 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist rally, reminding Mormons that though the ban was gone and the history was accurate, we still had a tremendous amount of work to do. As Elise Boxer, an indigenous (Dakota/Chicana) scholar of Mormonism, writes:
Mormons have accessed and claimed whiteness at various times when what we need to be doing is discussing whiteness and Mormon history and thinking about the white colonial privilege to explore issues of race, racism, and power in the Mormon Church and its history. The question is to challenge how Mormon history has been written and continues to be written by scholars in the field. If we remain so focused on Mormon religious persecution or aspects of history that interest only Mormons, we are limiting the field of Mormon studies. When we examine early Mormon history, if we move beyond religious persecution, we can then explore and talk about moments when Mormons access and reaffirm their whiteness.29
Boxer’s remarks map out a path for Mormon studies in moving beyond adjudicating Mormon persecution and its minoritarian fascinations to take stock of the way LDS people and institutions have interacted with massive modern systems like colonialism and whiteness that have benefited white lives at the expense of black and brown ones. The work, of course, would not be limited to professional scholarship. It would have to be undertaken by rank-and-file LDS people, a self-searching, a coming to see our faith through the eyes of Mormons of color, as they have experienced it—in complicated ways that give reason for humility and reason for hope alike. Nor would this work be limited to Mormonism. 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.
1.See also Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 232–241.
2.Edward L. Kimball, “Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood,” BYU Studies Quarterly 47.2 (2008): 1, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3908&=&context=byusq&=&sei-redir=1&referer=https%253A%252F%252Fscholar.google.com%252Fscholar%253Fhl%253Den%2526as_sdt%253D0%252C5%2526q%253DKimball%252Bbyu%252Bstudies#search=%22Kimball%20byu%20studies%22, last accessed February 28, 2017.
3.“Official Declaration 2,” Doctrine and Covenants, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2, last accessed February 28, 2018.
4.Armand L. Mauss, “Casting Off the Curse of Cain: The Extent and Limits of Progress since 1978,” in Black and Mormon, ed. Newell Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004), 107.
5.Daymon Smith, The Last Shall Be First and the First Shall Be Last: Discourse and Mormon History (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 30; Edwin Firmage and R. Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 137.
6.Daymon Smith argues that these practices of undergrounding were forced out with excommunication of LDS fundamentalists in the 1930s and virtually sealed out by the work of the LDS Church Correlation Committee in the middle twentieth century (369). See The Last Shall Be First and the First Shall Be Last: Discourse and Mormon History (Ph.D dissertation; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007). I would argue that correlation works in dialectical tension within and against older practices of undergrounding that index Mormon theocracy, difference, and status. See Joanna Brooks, “‘On the Underground’: What the Mormon ‘Yes on 8’ Campaign Reveals About Mormons in American Political Life,” in Mormonism and American Politics, ed. Jana Riess and Randall Balmer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
7.Boyd Petersen, “Hugh Nibley and the ‘Inmigration’ of Mormon Education” (unpublished ms., November 6, 2009).
8.Wes Andrews and Clyde Dalton, The Black Hammer: A Study of Black Power, Red Influence and White Alternatives (Oakland, CA: Desco Press, 1967). See also D. Michael Quinn, “Ezra Taft Benson and Mormon Political Conflicts,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26.2 (Summer 1992): 1–87.
9.Hinckley’s long career and profound influence on Mormon public relations is discussed throughout J. B. Haws, The Mormon Image in the American Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
10.“An Interview with Gordon B. Hinckley,” 60 Minutes, April 7, 1996, web-published January 31, 2008, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/an-interview-with-gordon-hinckley/, last accessed February 28, 2018.
11.Harris and Bringhurst, 129–130.
12.Gordon B. Hinckley, “The Need for Greater Kindness,” April 2006, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2006/04/the-need-for-greater-kindness?lang=eng, last accessed February 28, 2018.
13.The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Statement on Symposia,” November 1991, https://www.lds.org/ensign/1991/11/news-of-the-church/statement-on-symposia?lang=eng, last accessed February 28, 2018.
14.Bruce R. McConkie, “All Are Alike Unto God,” CES Religious Educators Symposium, August 18, 1978, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie_alike-unto-god-2/, last accessed February 28, 2018.
15.Helen Whitney, “Interview: Jeffrey Holland,” PBS American Experience/Frontline: The Mormons, March 4, 2006, http://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/holland.html, last accessed February 28, 2018.
16.Jason Horowitz, “The Genesis of a Church’s Stand on Race,” Washington Post, February 28, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-genesis-of-a-churchs-stand-on-race/2012/02/22/gIQAQZXyfR_story.html?utm_term=.8192b720336e, last accessed February 28, 2018.
17.The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Church Statement Regarding ‘Washington Post’ Article on Race and the Church,” February 29, 2012, https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/racial-remarks-in-washington-post-article, last accessed February 28, 2012. See also Joseph Walker, “LDS Church Condemns Past Racism Inside and Outside the Church,” February 29, 2012, https://www.deseretnews.com/article/765555339/LDS-Church-condemns-past-racism-inside-and-outside-the-church.html.
18.Laurie Goodstein, “Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt,” New York Times, July 21, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/us/some-mormons-search-the-web-and-find-doubt.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0&pagewanted=print, last accessed February 28, 2018; Isaac Chotiner, “Mormons Start Questioning Their History, Stumble on Racism,” New Republic, July 22, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/113969/mormons-history-racism-and-religion, last accessed February 28, 2018.
19.Laurie Goodstein, “A Leader’s Admission of ‘Mistakes’ Heartens Some Doubting Mormons,” New York Times, October 8, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/us/a-leaders-admission-of-mistakes-heartens-some-doubting-mormons.html, last accessed February 28, 2018.
20.Peggy Fletcher Stack, “New Mormon Scriptures Tweak Race, Polygamy References,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 19, 2013, http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=55930173&itype=CMSID, last accessed February 28, 2018.
21.Max Mueller, “Introduction: Beyond ‘Race and the Priesthood,’” Journal of Mormon History 41.3 (July 2015): 1–10, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/stable/pdf/10.5406/jmormhist.41.3.1.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A135f37910dcffd48f0c38db674408d0f, last accessed February 28, 2018.
22.Peggy Fletcher Stack, “39 Years Later, Priesthood Ban Is History, but Racism Within Mormon Ranks Isn’t, Black Members Say,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 9, 2017, http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5371962&itype=CMSID, last accessed February 28, 2018.
23.Peggy Fletcher Stack, “New Mormon Mission: How to Teach Members the Messy Part of LDS History,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 2015, http://www.sltrib.com/home/2229999-155/new-mormon-mission-how-to-teach?fullpage=, last accessed March 1, 2018.
24.Gina Colvin, Elise Boxer, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Melissa Inouye, and Janan Russell-Graham, “Roundtable Discussion: Challenging Mormon Race Scholarship,” Journal of Mormon History 41.3 (July 2015): 258–281, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/stable/pdf/10.5406/jmormhist.41.3.258.pdf, last accessed February 28, 2018.
25.“Proposition 8: Showdown,” The Economist, October 30, 2008, https://www.economist.com/node/12522924; “Proposition 8 and the School Debate,” Santa Clarita Valley Signal, October 31, 2008, http://archive.signalscv.com/archives/5472/; “A Proposition 8 Roundtable With Sonja Eddings Brown, Marvin Perkins, and Jon Stewart,” Latter-day Chino, November 2008, http://www.chinoblanco.com/2008/11/prop-8-rountable-with-sonja-eddings.html; “Marvin Perkins: We Are One,” Main Street Plaza, February 4, 2011, https://mainstreetplaza.com/2011/02/04/marvin-perkins-one/, last accessed February 28, 2018.
26.The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Apostle Says Religious Freedom Is Being Threatened,” October 13, 2009, https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/apostle-says-religious-freedom-is-being-threatened, last accessed February 28, 2018.
27.The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Apostle Quentin L. Cook Speaks on Religious Freedom at Princeton Theological Seminary,” July 26, 2017, https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/transcript-%C2%A0elder-quentin-l-cook-speaks-on-religious-freedom-at-princeton-university, last accessed February 28, 2018. See also Seymour Institute, “The Black Church and Religious Freedom in the Age of Trump,” https://www.seymourinstitute.com/summer-seminar-1.html, last accessed February 28, 2018.
28.See especially Jennifer Pierce, Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012).
29.Colvin et al., 264.