In the past two decades few topics have been more generative within American religious studies than the exploration of race and religion's “co-articulation,” to borrow a term from Henry Goldschmidt and Melani McAlister's trendsetting collection Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (2003). Recently – and auspiciously – several scholars have worked to extend this thematic turn into Mormon studies, and Max Perry Mueller's Race and the Making of the Mormon People marks a productive contribution to what will doubtless be an enduring conversation.

While several of Mueller's peers have offered accounts of what J. Spencer Fluhman has dubbed the “racialization” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ members in the nineteenth-century, Mueller draws readers’ attention to what we might refer to as the coin's other side, namely nineteenth-century Mormons’ elaboration of their own racial imaginaries. Mueller's text shares this task in common with W. Paul Reeve's Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (2015); however, he distinguishes his effort as “the first major study of race and Mormonism that foregrounds the experiences of nonwhite Mormons” (11). Readers might find this slightly misleading in that the book is primarily concerned with the perspectives of Mormons who took themselves to be white; however, Mueller is keen and right to remind us that said perspectives only emerged through relationships with people of color – both beyond and at the very center of the growing LDS community. In highlighting the experiences of figures like the Shoshone chief Wakara, Jane Manning James, and an early prophet who appears in the archive as “Black Pete,” Mueller propels his central argument that early Mormon race thinking was far from set or uniform, toggling instead between racially inclusive and exclusive impulses.

The Book of Mormon presented antebellum audiences with “a radical new worldview,” Mueller suggests, one that refused “race” as a “real and permanent category of human division” (8, 12). And while he may overstate its contextual radicality, Mueller provides a rich account of how early Mormonism invited Americans to imagine and to seek the dissolution of regnant racial distinctions. The community's texts – which Mueller reads with considerable inventiveness and facility – both promised and provided models for a “raceless” future that LDS members could live into and enact, one in which all peoples would be made to share in an original, unalloyed “whiteness” (20, 41–42).

While Mueller disavows a “declension” narrative, he does suggest that this initial missionary vision “contracted” considerably over time on account of forces both “external and internal” to the Church (21, 117, 17). These forces included feelings of insecurity in the face of non-Mormons’ questioning of Church members’ racial identities, dejection in the face of missionary failures among Native Americans, and the Book of Mormon's own vocabularies of peoplehood and divine favor that undergirded visions of a “racially particularistic” holy community (21). By the mid-1840s, Mueller contends, such forces had reinforced a widespread conflation of faith and phenotype within the Church. What had been an announced gospel for all was increasingly translated into a racially defined, heritable status that would determine Church policy and culture for generations to come (110, 130).

As with several studies with which Mueller is in conversation (notably Rebecca Goetz's The Baptism of Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (2012)), the book's account and chronological argument are structured by a set of tropes – namely tension, irony, and paradox – which describe the relationship between what Mueller considers the competing currents at the heart of early Mormonism's theology (e.g. 9, 21, 35). Yet a welter of recent literature invites us to question the appositeness of such an organizing paradigm. In a series of expansive works, Gil Anidjar, Sylvester Johnson, Maria Elena Martinez, Willie Jennings, and Vincent Wimbush have challenged readers to consider how putatively “inclusive” Christian missionary ambitions have been integral rather than antithetical to the production of racialized subjectivities in the Americas. These scholars have demonstrated how the Christian ambition to convert has itself functioned as an iteration of racializing domination. By their lights, the most crucial question is perhaps not whether or not early Mormons wanted people of color to be Mormons too, but how such hopes manifested in the organization of human lives. Such an emphasis encourages pressing beyond attention to ideas and attitudes relating to phenotype and toward a recognition of race as the expression of certain styles or relations of power. Mueller's contribution tracks most closely with this literature in its attention to the Church's ideologies of literacy and history (as well as the exclusions of what becomes “the archive”), yet direct engagement with the scholars listed above might have brought to the fore aspects of the “theological mechanics” of early Mormon race making – those best described in terms of colonialism and governmentality – that appear here only obliquely (12).

It is to Mueller's volume's considerable credit, however, that it leads to these concerns. The author's careful readings and impressive research provide scholars and students alike with ample grist for our analytic mills as we continue to ask what it is we speak of when we study “race” and the making of American peoples.