In mid-October 2016, as the nation was mired in a contentious presidential election, Mormons grabbed headlines for a short time. Polls in the generally conservative state of Utah revealed a hesitancy to get behind the controversial GOP nominee. Utah's Mormons were heralded—briefly albeit—as the last vestige of Christian morality, as tutors to the Religious Right. The anticipated Mormon rebellion, however, fizzled on Election Day as Utah went solidly Republican. Moreover, when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, dubbed “America's Choir” by Ronald Reagan, accepted an invitation to sing at the presidential inauguration, irony abounded for some critics. The image of the mostly white choir stirred imaginations of “what America would look like if white American culture had been hermetically sealed in 1949,” one commentator lamented (Miles Raymer, “Donald Trump Deserves This Inauguration Lineup,” Esquire, January 4, 2017, http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/news/a52050/jackie-evancho-donald-trump-inauguration-performers/).
The path to becoming quintessential white Americans and allies of Christian conservatives—even if now “too white” as historian Paul Reeve suggests—was hard-earned for Mormons (247). As Reeve's highly-anticipated and excellent Religion of a Different Color makes clear, Mormons in the nineteenth century found themselves caught up in the messy politics of race and religious difference. Reeve's book refreshingly moves the discussion of Mormons and race beyond a black/white binary to include other common discursive tropes used to label Mormons as racial outcasts. The structure of Reeve's book displays the multicultural orientation of his analysis. Organized around cartoonist C. J. Rudd's 1904 depiction of the “Mormon Elder-Berry” in Life magazine, each chapter is inspired by a member of Elder Berry's vast and diverse family—the white immigrant, the Indian daughter, the “black pickaninny girl,” and the “oriental child.” The American imagination moved inconsistently and unsystematically between these images of Mormon offspring, placing Mormons within a complex racial schema that marked them as a new race entirely.
Reeve's account of Mormon racialization leans on whiteness studies by Matthew Frye Jacobson and David Roediger, but innovates by injecting religion into a scholarly framework that has traditionally been about immigration and labor. The “Mormon body,” he argues, functioned as “a key battleground in the conflict between church and state” and drove public discourse in postbellum America (3). While other studies, like Sarah Barringer Gordon's well-regarded The Mormon Question (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), focus on the legacy of the antipolygamy legislative battle against the Mormons in the last half of the nineteenth century, Reeve nuances these accounts by highlighting how a myriad of racial identities—red, black, and yellow—moved public discourse against the Mormons and propped up a racial culture where whiteness, fractured and fluid, trended away from a monolithic construct. Mormons were predominantly of northern European heritage, but looks were deceiving to a Protestant majority who read race according to their own morality and politics and could imagine real physical differences to justify racial and religious discrimination.
Reeve's book, however, sheds light on another development linked inextricably with Mormon racialization. Mormons were not apt to accept relegation to the margins of American acceptability, and fought to remake their image into one wholly white using their own scripture and theology and racial arguments appropriated from the very Protestant culture that despised them. Reeve rehashes well-known sources on the temple and priesthood ban against blacks, but adds new details, with the assistance of Pitman shorthand expert LaJean Carruth on the origins of a “one-drop” policy incorrectly linked to Mormon prophet Brigham Young's development of the ban. Evidence in support of a one-drop standard came from future Mormon president Wilford Woodruff, who inserted one-drop language into a personal transcription of an 1852 speech by Young. The tragedy of a one-drop rule came full circle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was used by church leaders to deny black Mormons Jane Manning James and Elijah Abel access to the faith's most sacred rituals. The episode points to the pitfalls of collective institutional memory and a “historical forgetfulness,” which purged James and Abel from the Mormon past and ensured that the movement's “priesthood was white, temples were white, and the Mormon future would be white too” (209).
Reeve should be commended for his persuasive collection of sources, including journals, political cartoons, government documents, novels, and Protestant tracts. Occasionally lost within his use of these sources are the ways in which Mormon women pushed back against accusations of racial decline and sexual deviancy. Reeve gives a balanced account of how Mormon polygamy provoked gendered attacks on Mormon men and women. Eastern commentators focused extensively on the oppressiveness of a budding patriarchy in Utah, which inspired parallels to Southern slavery and put Mormon women in fellowship with sexually exploited black female slaves in the South. Elite Mormon women, however, were central to the institutional defense of plural marriage and the reassertion of a white identity, a point the author left mostly undeveloped. Yet, Reeve does capture nicely the politics of family, citizenship, and sexual purity that were, ironically, central to both the development of Mormonism's temple and priesthood ban and polemical accounts of the Mormon body.
Religion of a Different Color should replace more aged scholarship as the authoritative work on race and Mormonism. From the Mormon experience, scholars of American religion can learn the painful ways in which whiteness and religion colored a discourse of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Reeve's framework also nuances the social construction of race by demonstrating how Mormons performed race—alleged degenerate behavior produced a distinctive Mormon race in the American mind. A sequel to Reeve's impressive book, one that narrates the Mormon people's complete reversal into whiteness in the twentieth century, still needs to be written. Such a study invites questions about how whiteness, for a global, twenty-first-century faith, moved transnationally to shape or contest a cohesive Mormon identity abroad. The “contest over the Mormon body” continues, as Reeve suggests briefly in an epilogue, and future scholarship should engage how Mormons—including their choir—perform and embody whiteness and American citizenship today (247).
