The fraught intersections between Mormonism and race has much to teach about how Americans racialized religion and how religious belief came to terms with race. Max Perry Mueller's Race and the Making of the Mormon People enters this scholarly conversation and returns the historiography to its roots, an internal analysis of race making at work among the Mormons.
Mueller's central claim is that race making for Mormons was as much a literary project as it was a literal project. As such, he mines what he terms “the Mormon archive,” a collection of written works on race and Mormonism—including the Book of Mormon and other LDS scriptural canon, patriarchal blessings, letters, autobiographies, sermons, speeches, newspaper articles, photographs, line drawings, and markings on a page. Supplementing this broad and varied selection of writings are tangible sources that reveal a collective memory at work among the Latter-day Saints. The criteria for inclusion in Mueller's archive are unclear and its analytical application is slippery at times.
To explore the meanings of his sources, Mueller offers “intertextual readings” (19) as his methodology. His focus is on the Mormon construction of “red,” “white,” and “black” in the nineteenth century, with a brief epilogue that carries the story to 2013. He concludes that Mormon notions of race were always aspirational and focused on whiteness. Even though early Mormons made efforts at universal outreach, including the ordination of black and Native American men to the lay priesthood and black and Native American women in its redemptive vison, whiteness was too powerful an impulse imbedded within the Mormon scriptural canon and the Mormon zeitgeist to resist.
Mueller's methodology offers provocative interpretations of sources that range from the familiar to the nearly forgotten. He analyzes, for example, the Book of Mormon, the foundational scripture of Mormonism, as a text that he argues purveys “a (white) universal gospel” message. Even though the book includes a message of global redemption centered on Jesus Christ, for Mueller its aspirational racial redemption based on whiteness wins out. Mueller's intent here is to approach the Mormon scripture as a text and as “a historical phenomenon . . . from the perspective of its early believers” (23). Instead, he offers a twenty-first century reading from the vantage point of a scholar. His analysis floats above any specific time or place and does not engage a reception history of the text or tease out how Mormons in the nineteenth century understood the book's racialized passages. Mueller maintains that unspecified “readers” of the Book of Mormon “often understood” the racial curse in the Book of Mormon as a stand in for a racial curse on “dark-skinned people of African descent” (34). He suggests that even though “there are no people of African descent in the Book of Mormon” its “biblical-sounding curses led many readers to apply standard antebellum biblical hermeneutics to the text” (85). The only source he offers to substantiate this is an article from Bible scholar Obery Hendricks aimed at Mitt Romney in 2012 and published in the Huffington Post. Moreover, he inserts a discussion of Cain and Ham into his analysis even though the Book of Mormon does not mention Ham and only references Cain twice in connection with murder and “secret combinations,” not racial curses. Brigham Young, in fact, never drew upon the Book of Mormon as a justification for Mormonism's racial priesthood ban; his only source was the Bible. Mueller's analysis here confuses more than it clarifies.
Mueller more successfully unpacks the fraught relationship between Mormons and Ute Chief Walkara. Among his sources, he highlights a little known 1851 letter to Brigham Young written in Walkara's hand. Even though the Walkara letter is illegible, Mueller draws upon other secondary and primary sources to provide an assessment of the growing tension between Mormon settlers and the Ute bands of the Great Basin at the time Walkara wrote to Young. That tension erupted in war after the Mormons attempted to cut off and refashion a slave trade that predated their arrival into the Salt Lake Valley. It was a complex knot of evolving power dynamics that swirled around very real moral dilemmas and in Mueller's analysis no one escapes in innocence from the sometimes-violent encounters that ensued.
Sometimes Mueller relies too heavily on secondary sources to arrive at his conclusions. For Brigham Young's speeches on race, slavery, and priesthood to the 1852 Utah Territorial legislature, for example, Mueller's telling conflates the timeline and draws upon different and sometimes conflicting sources for the same speech. He suggests that Brigham Young introduced a “one drop” racial policy in January 1852 in a speech to the territorial legislature. Mueller cites historian Lester Bush's 1973 journal article as his source. Bush, in turn, cited Mormon apostle and legislator Wilford Woodruff's inadequate summation of Young's sentiments. The Pitman shorthand and transcribed versions of the same speech clarify that Young gave the speech in February, not January, and that Young did not institute a “one drop” policy.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Mueller concludes that Mormon leaders “believed that black and Mormon were mutually exclusive identities” (218) and that not until 2013 did the church officially repudiate this view. The lack of nuance here ignores the consistent presence of black Mormons in the church from the founding of the faith in 1830 to the present. Rather than recover and explore the depth of their religious lives, Mueller obscures their commitment to a faith that failed to equally commit to them.
In the end Mueller brings together a unique collection of sources for analysis. With that collection, he enters an ongoing and conversation about Mormonism and race. In the process, he raises questions about the sometimes-troubled intersections between religion and the making of race in American history.
