The Religious Micropolitics of White Over Black

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-54
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Critical Moments

White supremacy gains power through millions upon millions of micropolitical decisions that people who believe they are “white” make every day. The idea that being “white” was good and valuable took shape over time as people who believed they were “white” preferred one another’s interests over the interests of those who were non-“white” and so began to consolidate group power. This chapter introduces the micropolitics of white supremacy—the day-to-day choices and interactions through which whiteness assumes value. It investigates critical moments in nineteenth-century Mormon history when LDS Church leaders chose to privilege the interests of whites over the lives and concerns of African Americans, setting into place the micropolitical foundations for a fully institutionalized white supremacy.

The Persistence of White Supremacy Beyond Desegregation

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-198
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Voter Suppression

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. This chapter examines how structures of everyday white supremacy persisted in everyday Mormonism beyond the end of the priesthood and temple ban, especially through rhetorical strategies on the part of LDS Church leaders that evaded historical facts or dismissed history as insignificant and demonstrated no commitment to responsibility, reconciliation, or reparations.

Testimonial Incapacity and Criminal Defendants in the South

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-129
Author(s):  
Pippa Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Felon Disenfranchisement ◽  
Criminal Convictions ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Courtroom Testimony

highlights the tensions between the demands of modern law and white supremacy by studying the rights of convicted criminals in court. Many southern states, for racial and partisan ends, used criminal convictions to strip convicts of their right to testify on their own behalf in court. While states in the rest of the country had revoked such limitations on courtroom testimony by the late nineteenth century, southern states maintained them. They served as an extension of Jim Crow laws, used to deny African Americans full citizenship, much as felon disenfranchisement laws did.

The Power of Godliness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Male Baby ◽  
Ritual Healing ◽  
Transatlantic Exchange ◽  
Public Demonstration ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Church ◽  
Over Time

The Power of Godliness explores Mormon liturgical history to elucidate Mormon cosmology and lived religion. Mormons use rituals, patterns of worship, and conceptions of priesthood to order their lives and the universe. What Mormons have meant by “priesthood” has evolved over time and in relation to ecclesiology, authority, gender, and race. For much of the nineteenth century, Mormons conceptualized their family relationships formalized through sealing rituals over their temple altars, as a priesthood and materialized heaven. This heavenly structure was eternal, and consequently church leaders struggled to fairly manage its construction. Ultimately, church leaders changed their emphasis from a gender-inclusive priesthood of heaven to a priesthood on earth that is discursively male. Baby blessings demonstrate this shift: from serving as an important delimiter of communal salvation among Mormons in the faith’s earliest years, they grew into an annunciation of the heaven created in temples and then became an important public demonstration of a priestly fatherhood. Mormon authority is further explored in the analysis of female ritual healing and in association with the creation of formal “ordinances” of the church. Last, Christian folk practice that has often been denigrated as “magic,” such as the use of seer stones, among Mormons is contextualized as part of a transatlantic exchange of ideas and peoples. Mormons integrated folk practitioners who believed in an open heaven by channeling their impulses through the formal liturgy of the church and organizing them through the priesthood bureaucracy.

Rural Radicals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine McNicol Stock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Oklahoma City ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rural America ◽  
Rural People ◽  
General Audience ◽  
Long Line ◽  
The Right ◽  
Over Time

This book originally appeared in the wake of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Written for a general audience, it asks where these “angry, white, rural men” came from and how their movements and grievances both stayed the same and changed over time. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols acted in a long line of rural protesters on the left and the right—including the nineteenth century Populists--- who crusaded against big government, big business, and big banks. At the same time, and with little sense of contradiction, rural people also used violence to suppress the political voices of African Americans, Mormons, Chinese and many other marginalized people. In the new preface, Catherine McNicol Stock provides an update and overview of the increasingly conservative face of rural America. While populism in many historical eras meant hope and progress, for many today it means hate and a desire to turn back the clock on American history.

scholarly journals Tar & Feathers: Agnotology, Dissent, and Queer Mormon Polygamy

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Nerida Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

In 2014 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) updated their official website to include information about the polygamy/polyandry practiced by Joseph Smith, their founder and prophet, and his many wives. The admission by the LDS Church reconciles the tension between information that had become readily available online since the 1990s and church-sanctioned narratives that obscured Smith’s polygamy while concurrently focusing on the polygyny of Brigham Young, Smith’s successor. This paper entwines queer theory with Robert Proctor’s concept of agnotology—a term used to describe the epistemology of ignorance, to consider dissent from two interrelated perspectives: 1) how dissent from feminists and historians within the LDS Church challenged (mis)constructions of Mormon history, and; 2) how the Mormon practice of polygamy in the late nineteenth century dissented from Western sexual mores that conflated monogamy with Whiteness, democracy and social progression in the newly formed American Republic.

The Prophetess of Endor: Reception of 1 Samuel 28 in Nineteenth Century Mormon History

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Gifts ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
The Dead ◽  
1 Samuel

AbstractThis article documents one strain of Mormon thought concerning the Woman of Endor narrative in 1 Samuel 28, in which the woman was interpreted as a prophetess enabled to raise the dead through her spiritual gifts. Church leaders eventually condemned this narrative because of its similarities with Spiritualist exegesis and American Christianity’s use of the narrative to condemn Spiritualism as necromancy. Through establishing an orthodox reading of the passage, leaders strengthened the boundaries separating the two faiths – boundaries that many Spiritualists had argued were at best blurry and overlapping.

Priesthood Ordination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Power And Authority

Early Mormons used the Book of Mormon as the basis for their ecclesiology and understanding of the open heaven. Church leaders edited, harmonized, and published Joseph Smith’s revelation texts, expanding understandings of ecclesiastical priesthood office. Joseph Smith then revealed the Nauvoo Temple liturgy, with its cosmology that equated heaven, kinship, and priesthood. This cosmological priesthood was materialized through sealings at the temple altar and was the context for expansive teachings incorporating women into priesthood. This cosmology was also the basis for polygamy, temple adoption, and restrictions on the participation of black men and women in the church. This framework gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to a new priesthood cosmology introduced by Joseph F. Smith based on male ecclesiastical office. As church leaders expanded the meaning of priesthood to comprise the entire power and authority of God, they struggled to integrate women into church cosmology.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Over Time

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.

Natives, Religion, and Race in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.

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