Epilogue

This chapter concludes the book with a survey of the history of Mormonism and race after Brigham Young’s death in 1877 to the present. For more than a century, the church worked to fortify the racial boundaries around the Mormon identity that Brigham Young erected during his tenure as president and prophet. And yet, pressures from inside as well as outside the church continually contested these boundaries. This chapter also meditates on how and why the church has recently renewed its universalism, and done so in relation to a rereading of the Book of Mormon. Yet this contemporary Mormon universalism is a new universalism. It is cast explicitly in a different shade than the white universalism that was proposed, and in some ways practiced, by the church that Joseph Smith founded in 1830.

The Book of Mormon

This chapter examines the Book of Mormon's racial theology of “white universalism.” It explores the supposed pre-Columbian history that the Book of Mormon contains, notably the origins of Native Americans as a remnant of Israelites called the “Lamanites.” It also explores the future that the Book of Mormon prophesies in which the Lamanites unify with believing “Gentiles” to become one “white and a delightsome” people and together build a New Jerusalem in America before Christ’s return. The chapter also includes an examination of the Book of Mormon prophet, “Samuel, the Lamanite.” Samuel’s case, along with other marginalized early American religious leaders like William Apess and Jerana Lee, shows that non-white Americans have a “privileged sight” onto America and America’s religious communities that fail to live up to their own ideals of inclusion and equality. The views of marginalized figures are thus essential for an accurate accounting of America’s past.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s main argument: that the three original American races, “black,” “red,” and, “white,” were constructed first in the written archive before they were read onto human bodies. It argues that because of America’s uniquely religious history, the racial construction sites of Americans of Native, African, and European descent were religious archives. The Mormon people’s relationship with race serves as a case unto itself and a case study of the larger relationship between religious writings and race. During the nineteenth century early Mormons taught a theology of “white universalism,” which held that even non-whites, whom the Bible and the Book of Mormon taught were cursed with dark skin because of their ancestors’ sin against their families, could become “white” through dedication to the restored Mormon gospel. But Mormons eventually abandoned this “white universalism,” and instead taught and practiced a theology of white supremacy.

People Building, on Paper

This chapter argues that people building in Zion was literary as well as literal. Essential to the construction of the Lamanite was also the construction of the Indian, a character of violence and depravity against which the civilized Lamanite could be drawn. As the Mormon archive grew full of elegiac celebrations of the poor Indian slave—almost always an Indian slave girl—whom the Saints claimed to have purchased into freedom and self-knowledge, Mormons also wrote about the refusal of the Indian—almost always a male Indian slaver—to accept his lessons, an act of defiance that was deemed a demonstration not of human agency but instead of savagery. Through their performances of violence against Mormons and against the Mormons’ Lamanites, these Indians proved that they were in fact Indians. And they were made to be so on paper.

“Aunt Jane” or Joseph’s Adopted Daughter?

This chapter examines the period during which the Latter-day Saints built “the City of Joseph” in Nauvoo, Illinois. During this time, in a limited manner the Mormons attempted to create a Zion that included people of African descent. Both contemporaneous and retrospective archival records from this period portray Joseph Smith Jr. as a prophet who welcomed blacks as (all but) full members of the Mormon covenantal community. Yet Joseph and other Smith family members were far from colorblind. In fact, the Smiths’ willingness to accept black Mormons like Jane Manning James was predicated on the black Mormons’ ability to overcome the legacy of spiritual inferiority of the cursed lineages into which they were born. If they remained faithful to the gospel, then their cursed bloodlines would be purified. This inward change meant that these black Saints could become equal to their white brethren and (eventually) white themselves.

Prologue

This chapter introduces three of the main figures of the book, Joseph Smith Jr., Jane Manning James, and Wakara. It also introduces how these different Mormons conceptualized their relationship with God, and their relationship with other members of the Mormon people, especially members of different races. The founder of Mormonism, Smith believed that he was divinely mandated to create a religious movement that would end all divisions within the human family, including racial divisions. The Ute chief, Wakara, and his brother Arapeen believed that they were divinely called to share the lands of Utah with white settlers, but also called to fight against Mormon efforts to destroy the Ute way of life. An early black Mormon pioneer, James believed that she was divinely called to prove her Mormonness, which would help her shed her supposed black accursedness.

People Building, on Bodies

This chapter focuses on the building up of Zion’s infrastructure and people, who were also under constructions, in Utah during Brigham Young’s tenure as leader of the church (1844–77). This people building included flesh and bone bodies of Utah’s Native populations, Utah’s small African American community, and the European converts gathering to Utah. The Mormons set out to build a Lamanite people by employing the tools of civilization, including farms, clothes, grains, schoolhouses, and the (plural) marriage bed. They sought to free the Indians from their savage natures, freedom that would allow them to covenant with their white brethren. For those Indian women and children enslaved by Indian slavers like Wakara and Arapeen, the Mormons would buy them in order to save them. As the white Mormons’ pupils, servants, adopted children, and plural wives, these freed slaves would learn to choose the right and to become their Lamanite selves.

From Gentile to Israelite

This chapter traces the racial implications of the Mormons’ forced removal in 1833 from Jackson County, Missouri, where the Mormons had hoped to build New Jerusalem. Non-Mormons in the county forced the Mormons out following accusations that the Mormons were “meddling” with black slaves and Indians in order to convert them and to foment racial violence. In exile, the Mormons’ practice of (relative) racial inclusion became more circumscribed, though one famous black convert, Elijah Abel, joined the church. Promising not to upset the nation’s racial hierarchy, early Mormon leaders focused on making white converts in America and in the first international missions to the British Isles. White Mormons also began to reexamine their own racial/genealogical identities. Through the ritual of the patriarchal blessing, Mormons discovered that most of them were not actually “gentiles,” but Israelites and natural born heirs to the sacred covenant that God made with Abraham.

Marketing the Book of Mormon to Noah’s Three Sons

This chapter traces the different ways the Book of Mormon was marketed to “red,” “white,” and “black” Americans during the first three years after the church was founded in 1830. Because Native Americans (“Lamanites”) were seen as the Book of Mormon’s true heirs and the prophesied leaders of New Jerusalem, and because most American Indians did not belong to America’s English-language based print culture, Joseph Smith sent Mormonism’s first official mission to Delaware Indians on the frontier, west of Missouri where the Mormons hoped to build their New Jerusalem. Because most were literate in English, early Mormons attempted to reach white “Gentile” Americans of European descent through newspapers and other media produced and published through their own printing operations. Though the Book of Mormon’s past or future does not include people of African descent, early Mormons did allow, and even encouraged, some free black Americans to join the church.