This is a timely and provocative account of Mormon struggles to negotiate their place within the racialised American landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book reveals that Mormon racialising ideologies and practices occurred within their broader effort to achieve the benefits of whiteness for themselves and signify their assimilation into the American racial mainstream in light of their repeated exclusion from it.

Reeve structures his analysis thematically according to Mormon relationships with other racialised populations. He begins with an account of the flexible and fracturing boundaries of whiteness in the nineteenth century that enabled phenotypically white and native-born Mormons to be cast as un-American and a new race apart. In this period, anxieties abounded regarding Mormon religious ideologies and social practices of racial inclusiveness, polygamy and rumoured proclivities toward miscegenation. Reeve demonstrates how the Anglo-Protestant mainstream engaged prevailing tropes of native savagery, black slavery and sexual excess, and oriental backwardness to further racialise Mormons and deny them full inclusion in American social and political life. As part of this process, Mormon bodies were marked as different and degenerate, a physical regression from the white ideal and a threat to the progress of Western civilisation.

Simultaneously, Reeve argues, Mormons departed from a previously avowed universalism to differentiate themselves from other racialised populations. They articulated distinct theological positions for Native Americans and African Americans based on their potential for redemption, enacted race-based priesthood and temple restrictions against blacks, and engaged in orientalism. These efforts to distance themselves from other races morally, socially and spiritually did not always take place evenly, but ultimately Mormons achieved their goal. Ironically, by the end of the transition, Mormons found themselves again on the wrong side of whiteness as national public opinion shifted during the civil rights era.

This study is a welcome contribution to a number of fields. It serves as an important supplement to historical accounts of Mormon political, economic and social exclusion by addressing the simultaneous racialisation of the Mormon body as an additional component of their discrimination. It also offers a new perspective through which to consider the operation of ideologies of whiteness as part of a larger story of the limits of Americanisation. That narrative has often been analysed through the lens of ethnic immigrant populations; this text, however, offers an instructive alternative to this standard account. Students of American religious history will also find much to learn from this study as it joins the growing body of literature that serves to blur distinctions between religious and racial othering and reveals the complex interplay between religion and race in American history. The text masterfully demonstrates the flexible, socially constructed nature of race, and underscores that its mutable character has been part of the source of its social power. The book enhances our understanding of the ways in which religious identities and practices have been a constitutive element of the various racial litmus tests that have been employed to limit full participation in American society.