The Mask we Must Wear in a Racist Society: Reflections of Black Suffering in the LDS Church Through Art

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Smith ◽  
Wilding
Keyword(s):  
Lds Church

scholarly journals Not a Country or a Stereotype: Latina LDS Experiences of Ethnic Homogenization and Racial Tokenism in the American West

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 333
Author(s):  
Brittany Romanello
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Immigrant Incorporation ◽  
White Family ◽  
1.5 Generation ◽  
Cultural Heterogeneity ◽  
The Us ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Progressive Policy ◽  
The Church

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), also called Mormonism, has experienced rapid changes in its US demographics due to an influx of Latinx membership. The most recent growth in the US church body has been within Spanish-speaking congregations, and many of these congregant members are first or 1.5-generation immigrant Latinas. Using ethnographic data from 27 interviews with immigrant members living in Utah, Nevada, and California, LDS Latinas reported that while US Anglo members did seem to appreciate certain aspects of their cultural customs or practices, they also reported frequently experiencing ethnic homogenization or racial tokenization within US Church spaces and with White family members. Our findings indicate that the contemporary LDS church, despite some progressive policy implementations within its doctrinal parameters, still struggles in its ever-globalizing state to prioritize exposing White US members to the cultural heterogeneity of non-White, global LDS identities and perspectives. Latina LDS experiences and their religious adjacency to Whiteness provide a useful lens by which researchers can better understand the ways in which ethnic identity, gender, legal status, and language create both opportunities and challenges for immigrant incorporation and inclusion within US religious spaces and add to the existing body of scholarship on migration and religion.

Predictors of opposition to and support for the ordination of women: insights from the LDS Church

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan T. Cragun ◽  
Stephen M. Merino ◽  
Michael Nielsen ◽  
Brent D. Beal ◽  
Matthew Stearmer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Lds Church ◽  
Ordination Of Women

Ezra Taft Benson Meets Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-67
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Leader ◽  
Brigham Young University ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
Small Doses ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
High Ranking Official

In 1966 Ezra Taft Benson, high-ranking official of the LDS church and former U.S. secretary of agriculture, delivered a speech on the campus of LDS-owned Brigham Young University in which he summarized his encounter with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in September 1959. Benson told BYU students that Khrushchev had bragged to him, in part, “[W]e’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you'll finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We'll so weaken your economy until you'll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” This essay examines the accuracy of Benson's recital of Khrushchev’s alleged comments and concludes that Benson misstated the incident and attributed statements to Khrushchev he did not make. It also speculates why Benson misrepresented, or misremembered, the facts of the encounter.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-248
Author(s):  
David Walker
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Bear River ◽  
Chicago World's Fair

This chapter shows how LDS officials and businessmen continuously found ways to bend railroads to their benefits or reshape Mormons institutions in order to flourish in their networks, such as the irrigation display at the Chicago World’s Fair. Regardless of the failure of the Bear River Irrigation company, it was proof of Mormon fortitude through cultural and locative righteousness. The company’s resources were reorganized by Mormon businessmen, and Mormons effectively promoted the LDS Church in other venues at World’s Fair. On the other hand, railroad barons’ contracts provided uninterrupted freighting, lucrative receipts of transcontinental tourism, and friendships with Mormon businessmen who intervened on their behalf in Congress. The results of their efforts were the combined naturalizing and mainlining of Mormonism, as tourists were convinced that they could learn from the Mormons to cultivate western lands and define religion in the modern west.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 233-236
Author(s):  
Jana Riess
Keyword(s):  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Cultural Relevancy ◽  
Lgbt Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Church

This concluding chapter argues that in the next few years at least, the polarization within Mormonism will continue, in which those who remain in the LDS Church will be ardent believers but those who don't fit in will pull up stakes and leave. How the Church chooses to finesse the social shifts—specifically, those regarding marriage, gender, racial diversity, and LGBT issues—will signal which trajectory it is going to follow: will it remain steadfast and become entrenched in the role of embattled subculture, or will it lean in, accommodating its message and positioning in order to retain cultural relevancy and attractiveness? The chapter then considers the acute tension the LDS Church is experiencing between assimilation into American society and retrenchment. This ever-present pendulum between assimilation and retrenchment has ensured that Mormonism has successfully maintained its distinctive edge even while making major theological deletions that might have been unthinkable to previous generations.

Rainbow Fault Lines

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Jana Riess
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Silent Generation ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Fault Lines

This chapter details the evolving views on homosexuality within Latter-day Saints. For most younger Mormons now who are gay, acceptance is slightly more likely than it was even in the recent past. Their decision to make their sexual identity public has been aided by a more widespread acceptance of homosexuality—not only in American culture more generally, but also within the Mormon subculture. Indeed, Mormon views on homosexuality have undergone a rapid change just within the last decade. Although acceptance among Mormons has not reached majority status, it is double what it was in 2007. This movement is driven in large part by millennials; more than half of Mormon millennials say homosexuality should be accepted. By contrast, only 38 percent of the combined Boomer/Silent Generation feels homosexuality should be accepted by society—a view that is reinforced by many statements from LDS Church leaders, who are themselves of the Silent Generation or even older.

Single Mormons in a Married Church

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Jana Riess
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
The Church

This chapter focuses on the journey of many single adult Mormons, wherein the “plan of happiness” they imbibed when they were younger included a partner who never materialized for them in adulthood. Because marriage and children are so central to the Mormon concepts of happiness in this life and exaltation in the next, the absence of those relationships can be acutely painful. Many Mormon singles feel judged or shamed, or express frustration that the Church seems to be worshiping the nuclear family instead of Christ. For some, the grief has been strong enough that they're no longer active in the Mormon faith. For its part, the LDS Church has tried different approaches to meet the needs of single members, including “singles wards,” or congregations where unmarried members can worship together apart from the multigenerational wards that are the usual round of the Mormon experience. However, there are pros and cons to singles wards.

Tourists and the Making of an American Mainline

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-234
Author(s):  
David Walker
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Political Act

This chapter aims to trace railroad, tourist, and Mormon interactions beneath–and influencings of–the canopy of congressional law. It explores the recasting of federal anti-Mormon policies in light of railroading concerns and how Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s preface was a profound political act. Railroad literature played a role in mediating and marketing Utah religion and amplifying the genre of prerailroad tourism and guidebooks by focusing on the Mormons. The chapter also demonstrates how even while Congress attacked and, in time, forced concessions from the LDS Church with regard to polygamy and politics, Mormon material culture and geography were concurrently identified with Mormonism by railroads and capitalists if not also by congressmen.

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.

Institutions, the social capital structure, and multilevel marketing companies

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Jordan K. Lofthouse ◽  
Virgil Henry Storr
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Capital Structure ◽  
Homogeneous State ◽  
Multilevel Marketing ◽  
New Members ◽  
The Social ◽  
Trust And Reciprocity ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Disproportionate Number ◽  
Almost All

AbstractIn multilevel marketing companies (MLMs), member-distributors earn income from selling products and recruiting new members. Successful MLMs require a social capital structure where members can access and mobilize both strong and weak social ties. Utah has a disproportionate share of MLM companies located in the state and a disproportionate number of MLM participants. We argue that Utah's dominant religious institutions have led to the emergence of a social capital structure, making MLMs particularly viable. Utah is the most religiously homogeneous state; roughly half its population identifies as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The LDS Church's institutions foster a social capital structure where (almost all) members have access to and can leverage social capital in all its forms. LDS institutions encourage members to make meaningful social connections characterized by trust and reciprocity with other church members in local neighborhoods and across the world.

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